505: Lessons in Blood. General Greg Knight on Ramadi and Leadership

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe 00:00 – Intro Symbolism and sacrifice behind the 228th Brigade Combat Team memorial. 00:12 – Early Life & Coast Guard Knight’s unconventional path into military service and lessons in structure. 00:25 – Joining the Guard Transition from law enforcement to Army Guard officer and active duty. 00:55 – Ramadi Deployment Preparing for and arriving in one of Iraq’s most dangerous cities. 01:30 – Hard Lessons Learned Complacency, casualties, and the importance of humility in leadership. 02:12 - How to Stay on The Path. 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 505 with Dave Berke and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Dave.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  The 228 Brigade Combat Team Memorial is made of iron, symbolizing iron soldiers from the Iron Brigade. Additionally, it represents the history of Pennsylvania's iron and steel industry. Iron is also the most abundant element in blood, symbolizing the bloodshed by fallen warriors.

• 0:32Jocko Willink?

  The obelisk stands 21 feet tall, echoing the 21-gun salute. The damaged steel represents the unique war, the living fight, and the fallen. Acting like armor, steel plates cover all four sides of the pedestal and hold the names of the fallen. Keystone's made from different elements rest above the plates. One is polished steel, and when one sees their reflection, it represents the fallen warrior inside all of us. Another is ballistic glass that has been shattered to represent the conflict in which we were engaged. One

• 1:16Jocko Willink?

  is stained red wood to represent the blood we have shed. Another is marble to represent the strength and resolve and steady purpose of the 228 Brigade Combat Team.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  Inside the obelisk, dog tags for each fallen comrade are suspended from chains. From the base of the structure, a light shines skyward onto the tags and through the obelisk cap. The cap is made of shattered vehicle glass and acts as a window to which their souls will shine for eternity. As wind passes through the structure, the dog tags move. A wind chime, suspended below them, creating a subtle sound like the quiet whispers of the fallen as they continue to speak to us. Along with honoring our fallen warriors, this memorial

• 2:15Jocko Willink?

  is a reminder that our country is the beacon of liberty.

• 2:22Jocko Willink?

  Which shines throughout the world. And those right there are words from a plaque describing the stunning 228 Brigade Combat Team Fallen Warrior Memorial Statue, which is at the Pennsylvania National Guard Military Museum, located in Anvil, Pennsylvania. And the statue was originally built and erected on the ground in Ramadi, April 16th, 2006, by soldiers from the unit. So it was designed by soldiers from the unit, it was built from soldiers from the unit. And just a couple of weeks after my task unit had arrived in Ramadi, they put this incredible memorial up.

• 3:04Jocko Willink?

  And by that time, the battle hardened units of the 228 were nearing the end of their long and arduous deployment. They had suffered significant casualties, they'd have over 500 wounded in action, almost 100 killed in action.

• 3:21Jocko Willink?

  And a lot of times, people find this interesting, that the 228, who was on the ground, fighting for months and months and months, was a National Guard unit. Made up primarily of reservist soldiers from units all around the country, including Pennsylvania, Utah, Michigan, Indiana, Georgia, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Vermont.

• 3:48Jocko Willink?

  And I have had the honor of having the commander of that brigade, General John Gronski, on the podcast twice, episode 235 and 302. And tonight, we have another member of that unit here with us. General Greg Knight, served with Vermont's 1st Battalion, 172nd Armored Regiment, a National Guard unit that was attached to the 228 in Ramadi.

• 4:17Jocko Willink?

  And he had a non-traditional route of ending up there and he learned many lessons along the way and many lessons since. Obviously, he did something right because he is sitting here as a general and it's an honor to have him with us to share some of those experiences and some lessons learned. General Knight, thanks for joining us.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Much appreciated. Honored and privileged to be here.

• 4:37Jocko Willink?

  And it's good we have Dave Berke with us as well. I know that you guys spent some time in the, in the TAC, in the Tactical Operations Center there in Ramadi together. That's how you two know each other and I'm sure we'll get into some of that. But, uh, let's get a little bit of your background before we get into this. Where'd you grow up? Where'd you come from?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Uh, born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia. Army brat. My dad was retired combat engineer. I was actually born at DeWitt Army Hospital at Fort Belvoir. So, pretty conventional upbringing. We never owned a home, lived in an apartment complex. So dad retired from the army and then he became the head maintenance engineer and ran the complex.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  And that was down in Virginia?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  In Virginia.

• 5:12Jocko Willink?

  And what about your mom?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  So mom was originally from Germany. Um, quick vignette about mom. She, uh, was in, born and raised in Wittenberg, Lutherstot, home of Martin Luther. And at age seventeen, was a kindergarten teacher in Germany. Towards the end of the war, she was conscripted and placed on a flak battery, uh, running the cameras to try to record the altitude of the bomber stream. At the end of the war, uh, she and her girlfriend needed to get out of there because it was Russian zone. Uh, there was no Berlin Wall, but there was barbed wire and Russian sentries, conscripts probably. And she ended up packing all their earthly belongings and they went to the checkpoint. And if you got the red stamp, you went back

• 5:55Speaker 02

  to the east. If you got the blue stamp, you continued on into the US or British zone. So they went there and they got the red stamp. Nope. Yet, back you go. Well, they're devastated. So they went back to the local village and they're in tears and the women brought them in, waited till that night, took bread dough and erased the red stamp. And then when the sentries changed shift, they went out there with Schnapps and got the sentries hammered. And then mom and her girlfriend went out and got the blue stamp.

• 6:23Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  So, I mean, the moral of the story is, you know, were it not for Schnapps, I wouldn't be here. But, yeah. But she was an amazing, amazing woman, having lived through that.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  hindsight, I probably should have spent more time learning about it.

• 6:36Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Uh, but as a kid ignorant, didn't pay any attention to it.

• 6:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What could your mom possibly know, right?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:42Jocko Willink?

  She possibly teach you, of course, you're fifteen, you know, everything.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, uh, pretty, pretty phenomenal. But yeah, it wasn't all roses on both of them.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  And then what about your dad? What was your dad's job in the army?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Combat engineer.

• 6:52Jocko Willink?

  And then what was he in World War Two?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Nope, nope. He was, uh, in fact, it was during latter part, well, beginning of Vietnam. Um, and it was actually again, fortuitous. Um, he had gotten transferred, I think to Fort Belvoir. And his unit was then mobilized, um, and then sent to, uh, Vietnam. And they had a horrific casualty rate. Um, but again, just pure luck that he ended up getting assigned to be, I think, an instructor at the NCO Academy as opposed to going to Vietnam, or he went to light ship, uh, in, in, uh, Panama, something like that. But yeah.

• 7:26Jocko Willink?

  And so then you're growing up, you're living in a, were you living in the apartment complex with the, with your, that where your dad was the maintenance officer of?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. We lived there. It was a good, it was a great place to live. I had lots of friends. Um, I was never a big fan of school. Like many of us, um, it was tough. My, my folks, they're alcoholic and, uh, yeah, we had domestic abuse and verbal abuse, all the things. Being a product of the seventies, nobody took it as serious as we do now. Um, so my brother and I came out of it mostly normal. So I look back at that and just like you learn, just like being in leadership, you learn, I'm not going to be like that.

• 8:02Jocko Willink?

  So as you're going through high school, what, what do you, are you playing sports? What are you interested in?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Partying.

• 8:09Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  I didn't, uh, I did an intermural sports. I, I didn't do any, any JV or varsity sports. And I was talking to somebody about this the other day. I didn't really fit. I was just some scrawny, long haired kid. I wasn't a freak. I didn't smoke a lot of weed. I wasn't a jock. I wasn't a geek. I would, I didn't, wasn't a preppy. That was a big time. Then, then it was all, you know, khakis and Izod shirts and everybody listened to Little Feet.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  But I look back, I didn't really fit anywhere. Um, and I'd got a job. At, I think I was a sixteen and I worked at, uh, what was then the Beacon Butcher. So I worked at a butcher shop, um, breaking down hanging beef, hindquarters, sides, pork sides, all of that stuff, you know, great trade to go into, but I had no plan.

• 8:52Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. I was about to ask you what your plan was. You just answered my question.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  There was no plan.

• 8:56Jocko Willink?

  What about the military? Your dad was in the army? Were you not, you know, thinking at least I could go do that?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Well, it was, you know, interesting. I, I, I had looked at it and then my dad said, uh, hell no, you're not joining any army that I was a part of because it's not the army that I was a part of. It had changed. It was post, you know, post Vietnam. It was tough. My neighbor, Alex Warden, was in the Coast Guard, like right next door apartment. And I wasn't going anywhere. Um, I had my sixty-seven Mercury. I was the only guy with a license, only guy with a job. All my high school friends were staying, hanging out, drinking beer. And, uh, he got me one day. He says, why don't you just join the Coast Guard? And I did. And that was the beginning of, of where we are now. Just being in the military was the smartest thing I could have done. I would tell anybody. I mean, it's, I, I just, I don't know.

• 9:44Jocko Willink?

  What'd he tell you about the Coast Guard?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know. It was, it was just.

• 9:48Jocko Willink?

  Three hots and a cop. You're like, sounds good to me.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm good. Get me out of here, you know? Um, but I remember going to basic training at Cape May, New Jersey, and I ju- I thrived on it. Uh, I thrived on the, on the order, the, the structure, the discipline. Um, didn't have that at home. It was just different. Um, it was like putting on that pair of running shoes that you should have bought years ago. It's like, oh my God, this is awesome. Because it wasn't hard. Do what you're told. There's instructions for everything. It's the military. Um, so that was, uh, the beginning of, to me, a just a incredible opportunity.

• 10:21Jocko Willink?

  And what was your job in the Coast Guard?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  So I was a yeoman, a personnelist. Um, I did that. Uh, I was in the Coast Guard, honor guard first. I can date myself. I feel like it was Reagan's second inauguration.

• 10:30Jocko Willink?

  Dang, okay.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, on the drill team, um, the silent drill team. It was, it was a, a blast, running around the Military District of Washington, you know, doing drill team performances in Bristol, Rhode Island, Newport, um, Grand Haven, Michigan. It was just a great time to be a young dumb kid, you know, spinning a nineteen oh three Springfield with a bayonet could possibly go wrong. Um, and, and then I went down to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and I struck, and what the Navy has, you strike for a rating. You don't have to go to school. Yeah. So you get OJT, you take the service wide exam. Congratulations, you're a third-class petty officer. When I got out as a yeoman second class, my last job in the Coast Guard, my last year was driving for the commandant, went back up to DC.

• 11:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Which was fascinating. You, I got kind of a glimpse of the big picture, but here I am in E5, you know, what do I know about national level politics and, you know, there for the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

• 11:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Got to go to Alaska with the commandant.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  But I, I just, I loved being in the Coast Guard.

• 11:26Jocko Willink?

  So what made you decide to get out?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  So.

• 11:29Jocko Willink?

  How many years did you do, six?

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Six.

• 11:30Jocko Willink?

  Six years?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had, uh.

• 11:32Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's a pretty good chunk of time. You know, you're kind of like moving through your career a little bit.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, um, hindsight being what it is, I'd have been retired 25 years ago if I'd have stayed in the Coast Guard, been a retired Master Chief someplace, you know, Master Chief Yeoman, um, drinking coffee at the Chiefs Club, but, uh, that didn't happen. So, uh, my ex-wife and I came up to, uh, Vermont, um, I got a job as a Burlington Police Officer, uh, went into Vermont Law Enforcement, I stayed in the Guard, which was, I, I had enough common sense to keep my foot in the door. So I was in the Air Guard for seven years as a security forces defender, I was a Burlington cop for four years, and then I went over to the Department of Liquor Control, uh, to be a liquor investigator. So real popular with the college kids.

• 12:14Jocko Willink?

  What are you doing as a liquor investigator?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  A lot of it's compliance, um, licensing, you, you're basically doing background checks on corporations, you're doing the licensing program, cause in Vermont, we're a control state, you have to have a liquor license, um, in order to do business, whether you're doing it as a restaurant, or what we used to call a cabaret, or, or as a store, convenience store, my job was to license them. And then you're checking for compliance, um, over service, um, underage drinking, you know, and there's all kinds of.

• 12:43Jocko Willink?

  What years is this?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Would have been eighty-nine to, so ninety-three.

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so this wasn't like the, this wasn't the drunk driving, you know?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:51Jocko Willink?

  When, when people were starting to really push against drunk driving.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that wasn't, uh, that wasn't all the thing it is now.

• 12:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like I, I think, uh, I know guys that got pulled over for drunk driving in like the fifties and sixties, and it was like, you know, hey, be careful. The rest of the drive home, you know, that's what the cops would tell them. Like, you're looking a little drunk. Yeah, I'm sorry. Well, be careful on your drive home.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so. And there was some catalysts for that changing and it was, I thought it happened in Vermont, but it was one of those kids were underage, partying and they were driving. And the, the law enforcement officer didn't do the right thing, which was detain the kids, call the parents at least, let them go. And then they were killed later, you know, rollover crash. And then, of course, you do the math. It's like, wait a minute, you had hands on these kids and let them go. So that kind of changed the dynamic.

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  And you in the Air National Guard this whole time? So tell me a little bit about the Air National Guard. Is it the same thing as the National Guard, but it's like Air Force instead of Army?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Correct. Yep. So the National Guard is both air guard and army guard. All of us have different missions. We're fortunate, we flew the F-16 for 33 years. I was security forces defender. So you're out on the flight line, you're doing the law enforcement activity on the base, base security, ground-based air defense is what we used to call it. So I did that for seven years. It's a small state. I was still an E5 and you're waiting for somebody to die or retire. Cause when people, retention's great in the guard and folks would stay for a very long time. And our air guard is, they're fantastic. Love working with the folks I was there, that I worked with there. But I knew that I had aspirations

• 14:26Speaker 02

  at one point to go to officer candidate school. I had just enough college. I didn't have a degree yet. And it was the late Brigadier General Mike Heston. He died of pancreatic cancer after three tours in Afghanistan. He was a state trooper. I knew him from law enforcement. He was also the OCS company commander for the, for the, for the army guard. So we're having coffee after shift one night and he says, hey, man, why don't you go, he's from Rhode Island, NIDA. Why don't you, why don't you go to OCS? I'm like, Mike, I'm 34 years old, man. I'm like a late bloomer here. You gotta be commissioned before your 35th birthday. And he said, don't worry about it. I'll get a waiver. And he did. So I went over from the air guard to the army guard. So that would have been in February, March,

• 15:07Speaker 02

  April, May, June. So four months later, I'm standing tall at Fort Carson, Colorado with what we call fast track accelerated OCS, run by the guard.

• 15:17Jocko Willink?

  And you're thirty-four years old when you go to become a second lieutenant?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there was, I get off the bus with all the other candidates and there was some terrain feature of a captain. I mean, back to this guy's neck looked like a pack of hot dogs. He was giant. Former NCO, had been to war. I think he was actually in Lebanon for some of that, some of the horrific actions. But mister, talk about somebody beating up your backside with a flashlight. That was an eye opener. They don't do that in your gardens. Like, why are you yelling at me? But it was, I've done a lot of different schools, we all have, but it was probably, I would consider it a capstone experience in my career. That was really the, truly the opening of the door of opportunity. And it was because of Heston, and I accursed him for nine weeks. Because it was, it wasn't Bud's, don't get

• 16:07Speaker 02

  me wrong. But it was hard. It was hard enough.

• 16:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and plus, you know, I went through Bud's when I was eighteen. And when you're eighteen, I mean, you're, you don't really care about anything, you know. But as a grown thirty-five-year-old man, you know, where somebody keeps yelling and screaming at you, I'm sure that was a little bit tougher to deal with.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a smoke session. It was, you double timed everywhere. And in the end, when I flew home, we did seven weeks at Fort Carson for phase one and two, which was condensed. And then phase three was at Fort Lewis, Washington at the time. I had to go to the exchange to buy clothes to fly home because I lost twenty-two pounds. You got your three squares. That's it. It's calories in, calories out. And way more calories out. Because, I mean, you get smoked to the point of failure. I mean, we'd screw up the PT formation. And then Captain Shuto, who was one of our attack officers, would come out. And guys like a triathlete, you know, two percent body fat. Hey, we're gonna do the side straddle hop.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  We're like, yay, four-count exercise, right? We're doing a hundred. So Jocko, you're a fit man. Have you ever jumped up and down four hundred frickin' times? And then go for a five-mile run?

• 17:14Jocko Willink?

  Yes, unfortunately, I have.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course, yeah. But, my god. So, yeah, no secret. Yeah, I probably should go back. But, yeah, I lost twenty-two pounds. But that was really a...

• 17:25Speaker 02

  It was very well done.

• 17:26Jocko Willink?

  And are you starting to think, you know, what are you thinking about your job, your future as an army officer? Are you starting to think maybe that's a something you want to lean more into?

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Well, I will tell you this. So I liked being a cop. I always loved the idea of being a cop, but it was never quite what I thought it was going to be. Whether in uniform or working as a liquor investigator. It was a great job. Don't get me wrong. I mean, made my own hours. You're working every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night to do bar checks and things like that. But it's never like it's on TV. You ain't solving anything in 20 minutes. Right? It's just, it's compliance and it would, look, it's a great job. But man, I love going to drill weekends. I became an armor officer. I went to the armor officer basic course for 17 weeks at Fort Knox. I love being on tanks, man. I just, most fun you can have your clothes on.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  You guys talked about it in the books, you know, you're calling in main gun Mike to do your work.

• 18:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Help you guys out.

• 18:22Jocko Willink?

  Bless them.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So to me, I don't know. I just loved being.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  I loved going to drill weekend. And then I had the opportunity in June of 2000, interviewed for a support platoon leader job. I knew Jack about logistics, but it's a job. It's AGR. I could be, I could be in the guard full time. So I applied and was just incredibly fortunate to get picked up to be active guard in reserve.

• 18:48Jocko Willink?

  So if someone's listening right now and they, you know, I get a lot of questions like this. I get a lot of guys that are 28 years old. They got a kid on the way. They're married. They got a good job. And they, but they never served and they feel bad about it. They want to, they want to scratch that itch for lack of a better way of saying it. And I always tell them, you know, going to the reserves, going to the National Guard. When someone's, that guy right now, 28 year old guy, what is that, what does that look like for him? When someone joins?

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Join the guard. It's not hard.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Truth in lending, right? So you, we've all heard the adage, well, one week in a month, two weeks a year. Okay, well, that's kinda true. You gotta get your training out of the way first. So you can do 10 weeks of basic training and then your advanced individual training is however long it is. Intel, you wanna be an Intel specialist, could be up to a year, 10 months, something like that. Air Guard, very technical career fields there. They're Air Force specialty codes. Some schools are longer than others, but you can do both. Every state has different benefits. It is a time commitment. I'm not gonna tell anybody it's not. It's not convenient. It does add some stress to your family, cuz you're not gonna be home. Some of the times, we do get deployed, obviously. All part of the job.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  So for me, there's plenty of incentives, there's plenty of reasons, plenty of benefits. But if you don't start with service, then there's no point in joining. Cuz it's gonna take time, it's gonna be a commitment on your part. To me, the payoff is at the end. Worked out for me, but I know a lot, a number of folks that started part-time and have a similar experience to me, and they, they love the Guard. We've got great retention rates. But when you look at the educational benefits, the TRICARE, the dental, life insurance, all of those things, if you're, you're going into a critical specialty, you, my granddaughter, who I swore in just a couple of months ago, passes the ASVAB and goes into weapons with

• 20:49Speaker 02

  the 158th Fighter Wing, my Air Guard, and she got a $50,000 bonus. Damn. And my wife is like, what, what are we doing wrong here? I mean, there were no bonuses when I joined. But that's out there. But you're gonna earn it. I mean, we're not just giving that stuff away. So that's why we haven't talked to anybody. Come see us. That's probably the most important thing. I think we need to do a better job. As a guard telling our story because there's a story out there that's simply not being told or not being heard, one or the other. And that's why I think it's important. And thank you again for having me here. I think there's a story to be told.

• 21:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, one of the best kept secrets, I was saying this before we hit record, is that you can be a National Guard Special Forces soldier. So you can go to all the training to be a Green Beret and be in the National Guard. So you can, you know, carry on with your normal career if you have one, or you can, you know, whatever you want to do on the, on the civilian side. And you can be an actual Green Beret. The SEAL Teams doesn't have anything like that. You can't, you have to be active duty in the SEAL Teams. And you're probably going to spend, you know, eight years before you, there is a reserves, there are reserve SEAL Teams, but you have to be in the Navy active duty for a bunch of years prior to that. So the fact that you can just be a National Guard Green Beret is outstanding. It's very cool.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Well, and that's the other part of this, Jocko, the, the other element of the best kept secret. You know, I talked to a lot of young folks. I mean, I'll look, I'll also, I'll also do it to a farmer. But hey, man, let's, let's talk about the guard, you know, what are you doing working at coffee shop or whatever? And I will always ask the question. And you're not tied to a given state if you join the guard. Let's say your career takes you to California and you're in the Vermont Guard. Well, that's a simple paperwork drill. Recruiter's handle is called interstate transfer.

• 22:34Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  And then you go to, and similarly, we can do a reserve component transfer. Let's say you, you pick up, you, you go to Q course, you become 18 series. You love it so much, you want to go active duty. Okay, then go active duty. I think the only thing you owe the guard, I think, I think is still true, was a year. Post-training, you owe us a year. After that, you can go active duty if, if you want. Uh, paperwork drill, we don't, I don't get in the way of that. That's opportunity for, for young folks.

• 23:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Awesome. Awesome stuff. So you end up getting selected for active guard reserve.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:06Jocko Willink?

  And so when you're active guard reserve, that means you're full-time. You don't have a civilian job anymore.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 23:11Jocko Willink?

  This is what you're doing.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:13Jocko Willink?

  And you did that, what, in the supply department?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  So I was an armor officer.

• 23:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  And we will go into branch immaterial position. So I'll support platoon leaders, a lieutenant. And then I became an armor, armor company commander. Um, that's your part-time job. So my unit was in Ennisburg, Vermont, northwestern Vermont. But full-time I was, had become, I think, the assistant S3, assistant operations officer. And then, you know, you kind of progress and it's, it's like any other military organization. You're going to do a little bit of personnelist, you're going to do logistician work. You'll pick up your key developmental assignments, your company commands, your battalion admin officer work, things like that, that are kind of the things that you need to hit to move to the next level. And you can continue, by the way, I mentioned that time commitment, your professional military education doesn't stop.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  You gotta do your captain's career course. You gotta do your intermediate, intermediate level education. You gotta do the advanced operations course and then you want, if you want, you be competitive for, for senior service college.

• 24:09Jocko Willink?

  Chuck, Dave, what about air national guard pilots? Is that a thing?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely a thing.

• 24:14Jocko Willink?

  And what's the deal with that?

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I'd say the description that you had and their version of that is almost the same. You've got guys that are AGRs, full-time reservists, you've got guys that are part-time, uh, that are full-time airline pilots, full-time other professions, but the version of what you just described, my experience with the air national guard is, I don't know if identical is the right word, but very, very similar. I'm sure there are some other commitments on, you know, being current and things like that if you're an actual pilot, but the air guard integrates with the active duty units that I was a part of and they're all part of the same team. It's pretty awesome.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty seamless.

• 24:49Jocko Willink?

  So we mentioned that when you're part of the national guard, you may deploy. Where are you and what's happening, uh, on September 11th?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  So I was standing on the front slope of an M1 Abrams outside my armory at a recruiting event for the local high school. Um, and then my readiness NCO came out, Sergeant Wayne Pudva, he came out and he said, hey, a plane just flew into the world trade center. And I'm thinking, well, you're talking like a Cessna, what do you mean? He goes, no, no, like an airliner. And I, everybody in that armory knew. We knew the world's going to be different after that. We, it had changed. Forever.

• 25:27Jocko Willink?

  And how long did it take? So now you're watching the wars. What does it look like as you guys are getting spun up to be activated?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are lots of fits and starts, a lot rumored innuendo. You know, you've probably experienced the same thing on the teams. It's like, hey, we're going here. I know you're not. Well, we're gonna go here. No, no, we're not. It was, we're gonna backfill the 11th ACR at Fort Irwin. No, we're not. We're gonna go to the border of Syria. No, that didn't happen. You're gonna go to Ramadi and you get a warning order about a year out. Then you get your notification of sourcing, meaning they turn on the money for your training and equipment.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  And that becomes really real. And I remember when they said, you're gonna go to Ramadi with Second Brigade, 28th Division. And shame on me, I probably sold us short. I'm like, they're not gonna, that's like the most kinetic environment on the planet right now. That, they're not gonna send, no way. That's bullshit. They're not sending us there. Oh, no, they did. And I, I, I do, if I had a regret, I, I think that's probably a guardism. We do sell ourselves short sometimes. We were, we were good. They, our, our folks were just phenomenal.

• 26:35Jocko Willink?

  What was the training like getting ready to go over there? So you guys, they, they spin you guys up, everyone goes on active duty. How, how far prior to deployment, were you all now like, hey, we're, this is where our job is every day?

• 26:47Speaker 02

  So it was January of 05, we went to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. We were an 18-month mobilization with a year deployment. Five months at Camp Shelby. Hindsight, it wasn't, they weren't ready. I don't think. They had 44 ranges, 11 of them were, were actually running. One crew serve range and we're trying to push a brigade through. So the, the knife fight trying to get to trigger time for your, your gun crews was horrific.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  NTC was hard. It was validating. I was there. I was, I always go in the advance. I gotta know.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  So I'm the assistant S3, so I would go in the advance and you're, you're in the logistics support area, drawing vehicles, getting things set up. Two weeks in the box, which mostly sucked.

• 27:37Jocko Willink?

  You guys bring your own vehicles and stuff out there for that?

• 27:40Speaker 02

  I'm trying to, some of the stuff I think we would draw from their, their material, their, their mates. Because you're signing for stuff. A lot of our stuff was probably already on the boat heading to Kuwait, heading to Camp Buring. What I'll tell you about my perspective at NTC, again, we're learning how to run a talk and there's no handbook on how to run a talk. Every unit does it differently. But it was, what I would tell you about Camp Shelby, could have been better. What it did is it helped us build relationships with our higher headquarters, with my colleagues at the brigade. And it was really important because that really smoothed things out when we got to Ramadi. We did a warfighter exercise, you

• 28:23Speaker 02

  know, we got the OCs there, we were all validated. Went to NTC. One, to me, a shortcoming of NTC, there was, and again, my perspective at the time, it was a gotcha game. So I'm in the, I'm in the talk. I'm the battlefield manager, right, on the S3 air. I didn't know how to do an air tasking order. And my OC, my OCT is sitting there, taking notes and talking into the collar mic. So I'd go over and, hey, man, how am I doing? You know, anything, any pointers? And he says, oh, you're good. Well, no, it wasn't good. But there was no, no give and take. There was no mentoring, right? That was just the construct at the time. And it was actually, I don't remember her name, but she was a Kiowa pilot.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  And she came in and sat me down. She goes, hey, man, do you know how to do an air tasking order? Because you've got scouts out and I want to help you. And I'm like, nope. Probably the most important thing I learned at NTC was how to do an air tasking order. She was great. And I just learned so much from that 10-minute conversation. Then she took the time to come in and say, man, let me help sort you out here. That was huge. But then overseas, we went.

• 29:30Jocko Willink?

  How did you guys, like, what was the morale of the troops? You guys know you're going to Ramadi. You know how bad Ramadi is. What's, what's the, like, what's the, in the minds of the troops as you're heading out there?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  I think there was some trepidation that's inherent with any, anything of that. It's the first time we'd ever been. You don't know what you're going into. Probably a little overwhelming that this is actually gonna happen. I remember going to Camp Buring and, which is, you know, I'm pretty convinced that if you look at the solar system, it's the sun, Kuwait, and then Earth. It's a wretched place. But I'll never forget my experience getting on that CH-46. We had to see 130 from Kuwait to Takotam Air Base. Corps screwed into the middle of the night, get off the plane, plane never turns off, and they're out of there. And then a few nights later, you're on the CH-46, again, middle of the night, and I'm watching the

• 30:26Speaker 02

  crew chief. And there was like seven on one side, I don't know these people, different units, they were just getting on the plane, you got, you're going to Ramadi. So we're facing each other. And I'm watching the crew chief in that, in that semi-darkness, and he looks at the pile of duffel bags, kicks two of them off, puts up the ramp, says, "Let's go." That's how you gauge weight, I guess. But that was, and I'll tell you, Jocko, there's things, for any of us, the things that stand out in your mind. I remember him, I could see the glow on his face from the MBGs. And he sat down and he charged a 50. I'm like, this is real. And then when we landed in the pitch black at Ramadi, and there was some Sergeant First Class there with a flatbed waiting for us, helicopter takes off, he

• 31:09Speaker 02

  says, "Welcome to Ramadi. If we get incoming, don't worry about it. It's usually pretty inaccurate." I don't think, usually. Thanks. Right.

• 31:18Jocko Willink?

  And you guys get there in June, June of 2005?

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:23Jocko Willink?

  Is that when you're showing up? And this is right around the same time when, you know, AMZ was declaring that Ramadi was gonna be the, you know, the capital of the caliphate and whatnot.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:33Jocko Willink?

  So it's, it's on.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  It's game on. Yeah, they laid low. I got there early. I went on the advance, two weeks early to facilitate the Riptoe with, with the outgoing unit. So I went into their talk, and it was me and Doc Stevens was our PA. And we walked in, and they had in their foyer, there's an old field artillery, or old air defense base. So it's all concrete structures, you know, 22-inch thick walls. I remember walking into their talk.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  And on the wall were sixteen, I put the photos with the American flag in case of your death, sixteen of them. And I remember saying to Doc Stevens, I'm like, holy shit, sixteen. I mean, that's a tough tour. And he was so matter of fact, he said, oh, we'll lose sixteen. And I'm like, how do you figure? How do you know? He goes, I just think we'll lose sixteen. How he knew that, I don't know. But that was, was the end result. We lost sixteen.

• 32:36Jocko Willink?

  So what was your, what was your job? You, you, explain, explain to a normal person or a civilian what your job is over there?

• 32:42Speaker 02

  So I was a battle captain. So you're a liaison, probably most importantly with adjacent units with higher headquarters. You're a battlefield manager. You're, you're making sure that you and your NCOs, your RTOs are tracking the battle. You're tracking it digitally. You're tracking it on a map. Cause you have to have visibility on where units are all the time. Because if you're gonna call in air, if you're gonna call in indirect fire, you gotta know where your folks are. But it was down to, you do a trip ticket, it was battle roster, number, blood type, weapons, nomenclature. You'd have their, their concept of operations, their con op. So you knew where they're going, when they're gonna come back. Normally you communicate through the CP, their company command post, which was

• 33:23Speaker 02

  usually an E4, E5 on the radio. And if you had troops in contact, my job was to clear the air. I would usually bypass the company CP. I'd go to the platoon or company net. So I could talk to the leader on the ground, who's actually in the firefight, whoever go hit by an IED, whatever it is. And then the adjacent unit coordination thing, in particular with higher headquarters is, is pretty critical because they could give you things, a phone call away, like Chip would do. He was always a phone call away for us. Field artillery, mortars, QRF with the Marines. I think they had labs at Blue Diamond. But

• 34:04Speaker 02

  that was pretty important. Building relationships, I think was critical for us. Even with 269 armor to the east.

• 34:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the amount of coordination that it took to. When you, when you take a step back and look at the battle map of Ramadi and, you know, all these different adjacent units everywhere and, you know, the, the enemy knows where those seams are. They try and operate within those seams. They do their best to, you know, cause confusion and chaos out there. But yeah, it was, it's like the ultimate leadership and management, you know, like actual management of all these different people out there and getting them to not kill each other, you know? And, you know, I know we were talking about the book Extreme Ownership in the opening chapter of them talking about the blue on

• 34:53Jocko Willink?

  blue that, that we had and just how, you know, that was, I, I always tell people, there was like a blue on blue a week that got reported, not necessarily a casualty, but someone would say, oh yeah, we were over here and we were getting shot at. We were in this building. We were getting shot at. It ended up being this unit or yeah. Hey, hey, did you guys have over there? Yeah, we had guys over there. Yeah, that was us. That, that happened like once a week that it got reported. How often it didn't get reported? Where it's just like, you know, some platoon sergeant was talking to another platoon sergeant, hey, stop shooting over here. That's us in that building. That, that was probably almost every day.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Yep. We had that in our area of operations. We had Jazira, just north of the Euphrates, as Zangora to the west and to Meme. All very different, urban to rural. You were there, you, you've seen it. But we also owned the MSR. We had our eight OPs out there. We had tanks or Bradleys on the overpasses. And then we had roving patrols and then we had other OPs that were off the shoulder of the road. And it was not infrequently. And I don't recall a single time where a Marine Corps or Army unit convoy that would run at night and they would never, we had billboards. This is Sabre Country. Go to this push and talk to us and let us know you're here. And I'm seeing, okay, I'm looking at the blue

• 36:16Speaker 02

  forest tracker. Who the hell's, who's this? And why are they driving westbound in the eastbound lane? Right? They're going to outsmart the bad guy. Well, IEDs everywhere, pal. You can try. We had a couple of, of very close.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Caught a near miss, um, collisions because our guys are out there roving. Um, or you had a patrol out and here comes this convoy bombing through with some second lieutenant in charge, uh, didn't tell anybody. And that's, that's bad.

• 36:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's real bad.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  And then they shot at our Humvees. I got pictures somewhere, you know, um, seven, six, two rounds embedded in the ballistic windshield.

• 36:51Jocko Willink?

  That's another way that I explain to people how, how, how hard it is. So if you're an American soldier and you shoot at a Humvee, like there is no more distinct vehicle pattern, you know, the, the recognition of a Humvee, that is a very obvious can be, but Humvees would get shot by Americans.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Tanks, same.

• 37:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, tanks as well.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't realize the insurgents had M1s, but thanks for that. Yeah.

• 37:19Jocko Willink?

  So that, you know, when you're an 18 year old kid and you're, you know, you're out on patrol or you're in a, in a static position and you're scared and vehicle rolls up, like you don't have time to think, or you don't take the time to think, or you weren't told that someone's going to be there, or no one gives you a heads up, like they pull the trigger. So it is very, very difficult job that you had. Sitting there trying to coordinate all this stuff.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  It was complex. I look back at it. I mean, you, you didn't kind of, and me and the, we had, there were only two of us at the beginning for the first six months. So you're doing 12 hour shifts, which is, that's a long time to be switched on. I'm not telling you anything, but that's just tough mentally.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  And then we had a third battle captain that got added, uh, the last half of the deployment, which was immensely helpful. But then you're still doing a longer shift because I'm going to work with the plans guy. Um, you know, we're, we're planning operations, battalion level ops at times. Um, I think one of the most important things is actually I met, I don't know who it was, a SEAL lieutenant came in. This was at the latter half. Um, I'm not sure when, when you guys got there, probably that spring.

• 38:25Jocko Willink?

  We got there in April. Yeah. This was like just before you guys went home.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  So a, a SEAL lieutenant comes in with two petty officers, first class. And, uh, I, I was floored because having been there for that long and nobody ever came in and said, hey, how can we help you? It was usually, hey, can you get us this? Hey, we need a ride. We need your brads. We need, you know, that was the Army SF guys. Um, I'll tell you about that one later, but.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  I was like, gentlemen, how can I help you? And lieutenant said, well, actually, how can we help you? And I'm pretty sure it was Chris Kyle that said, we want in bed with your snipers. So, and I kind of validated that. I didn't put two and two together. I don't know SEALs. I don't know how you guys were operating. I'm just an army guy doing my thing. Finally, after the fact, we were certainly fortunate to have you there because of the work you were doing. But I sent Sergeant Carroll out. You mentioned Kentucky. Delta Company, first of one four ninth infantry. Probably the most professional infantry company and command team that I'd ever had the privilege of working with. I was Captain Cole at the time. I remember his first name. He later died of leukemia. Was a major.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  But he sent Sergeant Carroll over and I sent Sergeant Carroll out with your snipers. And I don't see him for three days. And he comes back in, and this was out of Mike Charlie one. And he said, you know, he comes in, he's dirty. He's got three days growth of beer. I'm like, Sergeant Carroll, how'd it go? He says, sir, I can't carry that man's water. I said, what are you talking about? He said, I've never seen nothing like it. So I watched him in abandoned tire warehouse, standing on a stack of tires, shooting through a loophole with a 300 wind mag, clipping dudes at a thousand meters. I'm like, wow, that's wow. That's impressive. It wasn't until I got home and there was a documentary on Chris Kyle.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  And I was sitting on the couch next to my wife and I'm like, honey, I think that's that guy. And she's like, what are you talking about? I said, that's, that's him. I met him and that one, I gave her the, what does she know? But I gave her the whole story. But just having you guys, I will tell you this. By far, the most professional special operations unit I ever had the privilege of working with. I can't say that for all of them.

• 40:45Jocko Willink?

  I certainly appreciate that. It was an honor to be able to be there and help you guys out. I remember, you know, one of the, I think, one of the best moments in my career, actually, was we had put, the 38 had suffered a massive IED up in Firecracker. And they had told us about it, and we said, well, we'll put snipers up there. And that was one of the earliest sniper operations we did. We put guys out up there, right around Firecracker. And the first time I met General Gronski, as I'm walking into the talk, they're reporting that the SEALs up by Firecracker just shot a couple guys that were in place in an IED. And he looked at me, he said, are those your guys?

• 41:29Jocko Willink?

  And I said, yes, sir, they are. And he said, have a seat. And we, you know, and I said, what, you know, what can we do to help you out? We're here. And he, you know, then he immediately went, hey, we need guys out in the Lob District. And, but it was just a great way to, you know, I didn't lead with my mouth.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:44Jocko Willink?

  I led with the actions of my guys that were out there making it happen. So that was very helpful for building that relationship out of the gate.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yep. It was just tremendous. And like, like I said, I'm not throwing stones at anybody. We were big on sharing information, right? And, and if I'm on the intel feed, because we had a very small S2 shop. So I would be on the intel feed, and you're, you're developing things. I would see things as a battle captain. I could apply some perspective, some dimension to, hey, this is what I think is. And some of it was pretty cheesy. It's like the watermelon is planted. Gee, what could that be? But as an example, one instance, it was, I got the intel feed that the, the martyrs are, are prepared for the assault. And I was able to figure out that, holy shit, they're going to attack Blue Diamond. And there's only one way to get to Blue Diamond, and that's from the east.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  So I got ahold of Chris Wilson, was the first 109th Platoon Leader, one of the platoon leaders. Bravo Company, first 109th. And he took his Bradley platoon, and he stayed off route duster, so he went cross-country. And his, you know, driver stops, and they're scanning, and the gunner punches him in the leg and says, hey, sir, get on the site extension. There's some guy over here, he's all hodged up, and he's carrying an AK. So he gets on, he's, okay, well, clearly that's a bad guy. And he, I'm paraphrasing, light him up. Which is not a textbook on fire command, by the way. So that was like kicking a hornet's nest. And normally you say intel for, you know, 200 brothers are preparing to the assault and you're

• 43:16Speaker 02

  doing Iraqi mass, like, that's like 12 guys. You know, there was a lot of them. And it was one of those moments where luck actually has, has a role to play here. I called Pat Moore, my colleague at Brigade, I'm like, man, what do you got in the air? And they had a Super Cobra and a Huey Gunship. And I, it was, and there are no textbooks, no textbook solutions in Ramadi, because if something didn't work, you had to figure it out. So Chris could not talk with, with the Apache pilot or the Super Cobra pilot, but I could. Just weird. So I talked to the guys, where are you guys? Hey, north of Duster by 500 meters, east of Blue Diamond by a click, whatever it was. Got it, out.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  And yeah, it was a good day. Chris came in afterwards, you know, his eyes were like saucers, like I'd never seen anything like that. Like, well, good on you, thanks for doing it. But again, it's about relationships. Being able to call somebody and knowing immediately that you've got something that can help me, it's fantastic.

• 44:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like you said, you got to figure out how to make stuff work. You know, we went on, we learned so much from, from you guys. And I know you, you know, we were again talking about extreme ownership, but just the, you know, Leif going out on patrol with the Marines, completely overloaded, you know, he had a ton of grenades, just too heavy, you know? And, and he's like, you know, well, like the Marines, the three guys were like, hey, this is, this is what you need to do. Hey, here's how, they gave us so much information and even, you know, with what routes were good, you know, working with you guys that had been there for, what, 12 months at that point or 11 months, the amount of information and, and knowledge that you shared with us to make sure that we understood what was happening was just a total team effort.

• 45:02Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, yeah. If you don't do that, I, I can't even fathom what it looks like. I can't even imagine the kind of friction that you could, if you, if you add additional friction onto that battlefield, it's just going to be a nightmare.

• 45:19Jocko Willink?

  What was the, talk a little bit about when you're calling air in, because it was pretty hard, it was pretty hard to drop bombs.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:28Jocko Willink?

  In Ramadi. What did it take to drop a bomb, Dave?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Well, that's an interesting question, because, you know, on paper, it just required the ROE. But as everybody here knows, and I'm sure most people at the time knew, like, there was a lot of resistance to using bombs, especially in the city, for the fear of the collateral damage. That was somewhat unspoken and unwritten, and what we had to do was prove that we could mitigate the risk to civilians. And really, the Marine Battalion before us, that was up north before 38, was 37, had worked really hard to try to convince that we could do it with low collateral damage. And, uh, once we proved that, your, your, your team was the first team that really let us do that in earnest. And that kind of opened the gates, was, hey, we could, things like Hellfires, really cool

• 46:16Speaker 01

  weapon off a rotary wing, very precise, hits a window in a building, and really doesn't do much more damage. You know, the people across the street are pretty safe, relatively. So, once we figured out how to do that, you know, the ROE is never different, it was just demonstrating that we could follow the ROE and not have the second and third order effects that were unintended. Once they got the confidence that we were able to do more, but on paper, the rules had always been the rules, the ROE was the ROE, it didn't really change.

• 46:40Jocko Willink?

  You know, you mentioned those, uh, 16 pictures that you saw hanging on the wall when you showed up. How long was it before you guys, your battalion, took its first casualty? What do you remember about that?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  August 23rd, I was on shift. Mass Sergeant Chris Chapin was one of our embedded trainers, so we had him, I don't remember if it was 317 or 117, but he had come in, given us the con op for the day, he was out there working with the Iraqi units, and, um, like, he was into me, and this was before the constitutional referendum. And, uh, Mass Sergeant Chapin was happy in his work, um, good soldier, he came in and talked to me about it, he told me he was happy, he felt like he was making a difference. And their mission that day was to go out and do some patrolling, but to hang posters encouraging Iraqis to vote in their own constitutional referendum.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  And 20 minutes later, he was dead, um, shot by a sniper.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  And it, you know, I just, I was talking to somebody else in Vermont. I'm doing some series on the radio there because 20 years later, nobody's telling this, this story. But you, how do you, you've lost guys. I mean, there are no words for it. And then you, you suppress it because you can't freeze up. You've got to be that calm voice in the radio. And I think you referred to it in one of your books. You can't be emotional, push the resource when you can. And I think we all had a naive hope that, hey, let's get him to the aid station and the docs can save him. And it wasn't going to happen. And then it's just like a punch in the gut.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  But they watched us, the insurgents, they, they watched us. They patterned us. They, they took their time. They got nothing else to do. They watched us for two months. Got there June and July.

• 48:36Jocko Willink?

  So this is 05, so this is a couple of months after, after you arrived. And meanwhile, you, you must have had, I know I had this feeling, which was guys are getting wounded or killed every day, you know?

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:47Jocko Willink?

  And so when you're, for, for my SEAL task unit, it's like every, I don't know how, like we had guys, there would be some element of SEALs in the field very often, you know, very, very, because we had, when we first got there, we had five different elements. We were broken up. So, you know, this, this five guys would be going out. These six guys would be going out. These four guys would be going out. There was almost, I wouldn't say almost always, but there was oftentimes, there was someone in the field. So the feeling that, you know, you, you keep playing the game and eventually your number's going to come up. And so for you as a battle captain, you're tracking not just your battalion, but you're tracking an entire brigade worth of people.

• 49:27Jocko Willink?

  You're seeing these casualties happen. And for me, I felt like at some point, the numbers are going to come up.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  You know it's coming. And that's kind of that.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  There's always a stress there. You're hoping for the best. You hope it doesn't happen. But you know it's coming. You can feel the tension building. And they were, you know, if I look at, and I'm not sure that folks who, if you look back at Ramadi, if you look at the scale of the stuff we're talking about here, in the course of that year, our battalion was hit by over 350 IEDs. Scott Mathewson, now Lieutenant Colonel, was Staff Sergeant Mathewson at the time, infantry soldier, really good at his job. He and his crew were hit by 20 IEDs. He's the only guy I've ever seen direct commission infantry, because he was

• 50:20Speaker 02

  phenomenal. The insurgents hated him. Oh, they hated him. He came, they called him the, he's a big, he's a big guy. And they called him the fat man. And he'd go around and he'd pick up gray list and blacklist guys. Very clever. And boy, they didn't like him. And they issued, he came into the talk one day after a debrief and he's like, Captain Knight, they issued a bounty, they put a bounty on me. It's like 20,000 dinar. I'm like, Scotty, it's like 12 bucks, man. What are you worried about? You're gonna be fine. But yeah, but it was, it was ugly. September was worse. September was bad. Yep.

• 50:58Jocko Willink?

  What was the morale like for the troops?

• 51:00Speaker 02

  I think for the most part, guys just, they buckled down, did their job. It was hard. And, and you know, I think what probably humbles me the most is knowing what's out there. And knowing that, look, I got it good, man. I'm in a hard structure. I'm on the radio, living through your actions. I pushed the resources when I could. I'm tracking the battle. I get you the help. But every day, that, every day, they put on their gear and they went out and they did their job. No hesitation, not that they would display.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Those are just phenomenal people. Where do we find people like that? That to me is probably the most humbling aspect of this is even having losses, knowing the IED threats there and how clever, I mean the pressure plate IEDs, they're building them into curbs, they're putting them on donkeys, they're putting them in vehicles. They're everywhere and knowing that, guys still going out and doing the job. It's just phenomenal people.

• 52:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I always complain about the fact that that vehicle graveyard with, I don't know, 75 or 100 freaking wrecked Humvees and tanks and Brad's and allegedly mine resistant vehicles. That vehicle graveyard was on the right-hand side as you rolled out of base. Very stark reminder of what you were getting into.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 52:20Jocko Willink?

  What was the, as the, like the arc of the deployment? Did you get into, you know, in the middle of deployment where you're kind of in a, in a, in a pattern mentally where it's just like you're going through every day just making it happen?

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Yep. So they came, and it was almost disconcerting. It became so efficient, I guess. In fact, it was our scouts, it was Jim Armstrong at the time and Max Rooney was his platoon sergeant. They were on Route Jones heading south, the westernmost route, north-south route in Teme.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  And they were southbound in the northbound lane and a,

• 53:00Speaker 02

  a Caprice came out, a VB IED, T-boned Humvee detonated. There's gore, it went sprayed everywhere. The dude's eyeball was in the grill.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  The insurgent's heart hit the gun shield and was laying on the roof. And I get the call, "Yeah, just got hit. Hey Saber, I just got hit by a VB IED." Yep, Roger that. Any WIAKIA? Negative. We're going RTB, swap out vehicles. Roger that. That's about the extent of the conversation. They come back, they go in through Trooper Gate, or Ogden Gate. And these young kids, the triple deuce, you know, fine young kids from Utah. And they stopped, of course, the Humvees covered with gore and the guy's heart and Rooney. Rooney gets out and starts interrogating the heart. This is, I mean, it's dark humor.

• 53:56Jocko Willink?

  Dark humor.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. His heart was in it. So it's awful. But, and they basically swapped vehicles and back to work they went. And so it was actually Bunky Moore called me from Brigade. He goes, are you kidding me right now? He said 45 minutes from start to finish. You guys had a VBID and that's it. And I said, that's it. That's part of the battle rhythm. And you just, when you had your, when you got your battle drills down.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  My job was simply to facilitate the information. But our guys were good, man. They were, they were good at what they did.

• 54:27Jocko Willink?

  What did the, the elections took place in like December of oh five? What strategically, what did that look like to you?

• 54:33Speaker 02

  So, again, a humbling experience to see the sheer volume of people that voted.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  I wish we had that in America. I don't, I mean, they were lined up down the MSR. Our job was, we provided security for the polling places. Didn't have that big a turnout for the constitutional referendum, but for the actual election. My recollection was that there was a tremendous turnout.

• 54:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it seemed like there was kind of a positive ground swell. You know, you see all these people with the ink on their fingers and all that stuff. It seemed like progress was being made.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:10Jocko Willink?

  It certainly seemed that way.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Yep. And that to me, again, just my perspective, that was kind of the beginning of the Ramadi awakening. That was when we started doing like police recruiting at the glass factory, which one of them ended horribly tragically with a suicide bomber. But you could see it turning. And then it was outside looking in.

• 55:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's actually a good point. You know, I'm sure the enemy saw it turning as well. And that's why you end up with a big attack like that at the glass factory, January 5th. That was 2006, January 5th, a massive attack because they see what's happening. They see progress being made. And they do this devastating attack. There's like.

• 55:56Jocko Willink?

  Twenty plus Iraqis killed. Of course.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  Lost Colonel McLaughlin there.

• 56:00Jocko Willink?

  McLaughlin, who's, what they call him, the shake of shakes and everybody loved that guy.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:05Jocko Willink?

  Marine Corps Sergeant Adam Cam was killed and then my buddy Braxton McCoy got wounded bad. But again, one of those things where you're taking two steps forward and there's a step back, maybe two steps, maybe even three steps back.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 56:19Jocko Willink?

  On that one.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  So I was listening to the Academy of Leadership and Leaf brought up that very thing at OP-293 on Route Michigan. We had set up that checkpoint and I was in the talk and it was one, it's an incredibly helpless feeling. I know what's happening. I know what's going on. We've seen it before. It was a complex attack. It was a small arms fire and then it was multiple mortar rounds to suppress everybody inside that compound. And then they rammed the dump truck full of explosives, ammonium nitrate, fuel oil, artillery rounds. I think they'd armored the cab.

• 56:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they usually did.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  But it was Joe Proctor from Indiana stood his ground and Brian Latimer, Marine Corps, I think he'd been in, he might've been in Ramadi 72 hours.

• 57:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  And engaged that vehicle because it was penetrating into the compound and the Iraqi soldiers, brave soldiers pulled that Humvee up, armored Humvee and tried to stop it from coming in, but just the mass of the vehicle.

• 57:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Again, it's like the enemy's watching because that was a, I think there was the military transition team, the oncoming guy and the outgoing guy.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 57:27Jocko Willink?

  So they're, you know, they're getting ready to help the Iraqis take control and help them step up and the enemy did not like that.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 57:35Jocko Willink?

  And hit with those massive, massive, complex attacks, which were not rare in Ramadi. It wasn't rare. It was like this only happened occasionally. And in fact, later on, they were doing those complex attacks, but they'd do four or five of them throughout the city all at once.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Which they were coordinated.

• 57:50Jocko Willink?

  Devastating. Yeah.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Coordinated via cellphone. I mean, and it was, again, I never sold those, I never sold the insurgent short.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  They were tactically and technically proficient. They were well armed. We had one and it was the stupidest place. I looked hindsight being what it is, we had that OP, OP3 was on the MSR and then down below that on the old bridge, low water bridge was our OP. There's no worse place to put it's, it's indefensible. And I don't know why looking back should have thought, why move it? You don't need it. It's a redundant route. But we left it there. And there was a complex attack on that one. We had a number of guys wounded. Part of that was made more complex by some complacency. But don't pay attention for a few minutes. Watch what happens.

• 58:40Jocko Willink?

  And then as, as the deployments, like you're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel for deployment, what did that feel like? Did, did you start to get more paranoid? I know one thing I did on two deploy, I only did two deployments to Iraq, but I never told my guys like, hey, this is the last mission tonight. I wouldn't tell them that. I would just be like, keep working, keep working, keep working. And then one day I'd say, remember last night? Yeah, that was the last one. Like, that's it. We're done. Because I always felt like, jinx, you know, superstitious, you know, you send the guy out on the last op and you, you know, everyone's got that in their head. I didn't want them thinking that way. What did it feel like for you as you were going through the deployment?

• 59:19Speaker 02

  I think you're, personally, I think the level of paranoia would go up a little bit because you're, you're, you don't, nobody wants to be the last person killed. Nobody wants to be that close to the end of getting the hell out of the place. But you know it's coming because you're doing awards ceremonies and you're, you're taking care of our soldiers and making sure that all the evaluations that you're closing out stuff. And then you've got the incoming units. And this was, and again, I probably mentioned it upfront, we were, we were pre surge. So we had started, we did it in Jazeera with what we called OP Forsaken, kind of the see his hold clear rebuild that you talk about. We didn't have the personnel and resources to do it large scale. So first, God bless, first AD, they

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  came in and did the right thing. I mean, that was the only way to do it. We, there was no way we were going to as a brigade, or as a battalion, go into southern Ramadi. No way. We, we made one run at that. It might have been with three eight. They didn't get very far. I think they'd hit a double digit IEDs before they'd gone a couple of kilometers.

• 1:00:24Jocko Willink?

  That was one of the main briefing points that I got when I showed up. I think it was somebody from three eight was like, yeah, we went down route. It was Route Sunset. We hit thirteen IEDs in five hundred meters. It's like, okay, so.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah. And so there was some discussion towards the end of our tour. It's like, hey, we're gonna make a push into Springfield, Southern Muddy Railroad Station, whatever. Yeah, no, we're not. That that doesn't end well. We don't have the resources or personnel to do it. And to what end? Right? You're not gonna hold it. You're not gonna build up, you know, a cop Falcon or anything. You're not gonna do that. But you know what's coming.

• 1:00:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. What you guys just strategically, what we saw was you had gotten control of the outskirts of the city, you know, the MSR is going in and out, set up good checkpoints along the way, mitigated as much, you know, traffic going in and out of the city. That's sort of like what I felt was was happening when we showed up there and paid an extreme price to make that stuff happen. So but as you're as you're starting to think about going home now, it's like, okay, here's what we're gonna turn over. How was the turnover?

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  So Leif talked about it in dichotomy of leadership, and he was talking specifically about some of the, I'd call it arrogance, probably, kind of a dismissive, oh, those guard guys. So the bandits, that was not the case, because they, I think, had come from Taliel. And I remember one of them was Sergeant First Class Thompson. I don't remember the other one's name. But they sat down on either side of me. It's okay, man, give it to give all of it. How do you do business? How do you run your battle drills? How do you track your IEDs? How do you run your trip? I mean, this is, it was just sharing best practices. Here's what we found worked. I went around to two other units because I was kind of doing the round robin towards the end there. One was a Blue Diamond, the

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  other one, they'd taken our A.O. with three battalions and divvied it up.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  And I just, I'll never forget it. I went and I told him, listen, man, if you're on an OP and you haven't seen the dirt, don't drive on it. Don't ever go, don't go east of Route Jones after dark. Whatever you do, right? And whatever, a few other pointers. And I remember going back in the next morning and asking this young captain how it going. He goes, well, we lost this lieutenant last night and his gunner. Hit a pressure plate, flipped the Humvee, pinned the gunner. Scott Mathews actually stripped off his body armor, crawled into that Humvee to try to get the gunner out unsuccessfully. Lieutenant was simply gone. It went off under him. And I, where were they? Oh, we were by the marketplace

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  in Teme. And what would what even say to that? I told you so? Well, that seems wrong. Damn, dude. What else happened last night? Oh, we came off of OP four and, you know, a tank hit an IED. What were you doing coming off the OP? Well, they just came off and did a combat turn, you know, to check the surrounding area. Well, it was ammonium nitrate fuel on a freon can, cracked the hull, probably blew out the final drive. I don't know. One thing I never want to hear again in my life is we got this. That's like the most arrogant dismissive thing. Yeah, we got this. You don't have anything. I've been here for a year. I know a little bit about Ramadi at this juncture. When you're doing the RIP

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  with my units, you might want to pay attention, man. But yeah, that whole, I don't know. I saw a couple of examples of that and was kind of disheartening. And that's why I brought it up. I'm not going to throw stones. You all did amazing work. Our Army SF did fantastic things. It's just flow of communication between your team and us was vastly different than it was from, from our Army colleagues. I'd get a call on the DNVT, the digital non-secure voice telephone, and he was like, hey, man, it's Steve. Yeah, what's up, Steve? Yeah, we're gonna go up Route Fiat. We're gonna grab a guy. I'm like, I wouldn't do that. Oh, what do you mean? Well, Steve, it's a raised canal road. They will blow you up.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  There's one way in and one way out. No, no, we're good. We got Bradleys. Oh, we got, we got strikers. Yeah. Okay. So I called then Lieutenant Beams, my QRF guy, said, get the 88 ready, get two tanks ready. And they went up Route Fiat. I watched them on the Blue Force tracker. I didn't hear anything for half an hour. And then I get a phone call. Hey, uh, yeah, Steve. Yeah, listen, we're mired pretty good up there.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  So now I'm gonna jeopardize my folks and put them at risk to come get you out because you know better than I did. Yeah, that stings a little bit. If you just listen, we could have helped you, man. We could have worked out, I don't know, an air assault. If the guy's that bad, go get him. But don't drive there.

• 1:05:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's terrible. It's, um, gotta put your ego in check, man. You really do. Like, when you roll up to a new AO and, man, you guys been there for a year. It's like, I'll tell you what I'll do is I'll get out my notebook and take notes on what you're gonna tell me. That seems to be the, the best possible course of action.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  But you know, it's a guardism, right? Cause what folks in the guard and reserve both. We bring things to the fight that active duty doesn't. If I look at all the folks that we brought in, master carpenters, master electricians, law enforcement officers, schoolteachers, attorneys.

• 1:05:48Jocko Willink?

  Cops.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Cops.

• 1:05:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Generator mechanics, Jocko. I think we had Sergeant Lavalley, the only qualified generator mechanic. So you can wait for a couple of weeks to get KBR to come in, or.

• 1:06:01Jocko Willink?

  Sergeant Lavalley.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  The SEALs called me and said, hey, man, we got a platoon coming in. Can we borrow Sergeant Lavalley? Absolutely. And went over, he got the generator fixed. That's a guard thing.

• 1:06:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  We don't wait, man. We get things done.

• 1:06:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  These are tough stories to listen to right now because I am there either next to you, next to your guys, or in the talk at those, or on site for every one of those stories. Like, literally every one of those stories. I can tell you the name of that lieutenant. I probably won't just on this podcast, but I know his name. I know his wife's name because I looked at the SGLI paperwork the next day with that battalion commander. Those are tough, tough days. It just, I'm thinking about Jocko's SEALs a little bit because I probably had six weeks on you guys. I'm late, I'm late February, you're mid, early to mid-April, something like that. So, not a ton of time, a little bit of time, but not a ton. But I showed up and you guys had been there, I mean, a long time. And as a Marine, I'm really attached to the Army.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  As Anglica, that's my job, is to be an Army liaison for the Marine Corps. So I wasn't really close to the Marine Corps on the north side, which was 37 and then 38. I was close to you guys. And. Your Guardsman taught me how to fight in Ramadi. I showed up to relieve an Anglico unit and I spent maybe, we might have had a 36 hour turnover. We just did not have a long rip. They were leaving. And so I probably got a day and a half of the Anglico rip in place with them. So I didn't, not, no criticism of them, but I just didn't have much time to learn from them. I did maybe one mission, left seat, right seat with the Anglico FAC I was replacing. I got with you guys and right away, all your frontline leaders, your platoon commanders, your in-place leaders.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  I mean, they taught me how to fight in Ramadi. I didn't know what I was doing. The only advantage I probably had when it comes to like arrogance and complacency is I had none of that because I was completely paranoid about being there as a fighter pilot on the ground. So I did not roll in with anything like, the phrase "we got this" never came out of my mouth. Not, not because I was like enlightened. I was literally just, I don't know what I'm doing. And if you can accept, if you can tell yourself you don't know what you're doing and say it to another person, "Hey, I don't know what I'm doing," it is such a liberating thing because then the other guy's like, "Oh, cool. Here's what we, here's what we did." And so I had this, this memory of getting there and this vision of, "I'm going to sit in the, in the COC as the salt lead. I got 13 guys. I'll send a couple out on patrols."

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  And when I realized the, the platoons that were doing the operations, you didn't have enough help from the airplanes. And to me, that was just mind blowing because I had Hornets and Harriers and Cobras and Hueys and I had full influence and control of them. I understood an ATO because I was a fighter pilot. And I realized very quickly, we could have used 10 Anglico teams. Like easily put them to work, 10 Anglico teams. And I learned all these things from you guys. And when the SEALs showed up, to be totally honest with you, like in my mind, I had never, I'd never interacted with a SEAL. So everything I thought that I knew about SEALs was like either from a movie or from a secondhand story, or that these are big, tough guys that were probably pretty complacent.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  And so when the SEAL team showed up, I didn't know who they were.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  They want to do a mission with your guys and me. And I'm like, we'll see about that. I'm going to roll into the SEAL platoon or the SEAL task unit space and I'm going to watch them brief because I'm pretty sure they're going to roll in with the attitude of we got it. So I took myself and put myself in the very first mission with task unit bruiser, not knowing what to expect, but pretty sure that they were going to be like that. And you'd said it, they're the most professional SEALs you'd ever seen or special operations you've ever seen. I walk into that brief, I'm at the Top Gun standard. I know exactly how brief should be. I've been in Ramadi for not quite two months, but enough time to see what's going on. And Jocko's SEALs were, it was the most professional, articulate, cogent, well-coordinated brief I had ever seen from a ground unit, period. It was remarkable.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  And very quickly, my, you know, thoughts of what they were like was completely evaporated, which these are just, these are professionals that just want to take their capability, which none of us had, and contribute. And I have this really cool spot where I was the linchpin between your aging out at your year. We had a little bit, we had some time, two months together. And I got to take a lot of what I learned from you and help with Leif's platoon of, hey, this is how I did it with these guys. And there's this little link between my Anglico team and all the guardsmen that are there, the 5,000 guardsmen, and then the 1180 that came in. I sat right in the middle of that. And for me, it is such a huge honor to be so closely connected to all the things you did and sacrificed and learned.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  I was really the vehicle to help pass some of that on to Jocko's team who got there really as you guys were leaving. And then you made a comment about 137, the Bandits, and you described them extremely well. They're phenomenal. Just unbelievable. Colonel Tedesco, just that whole crew. Two-gun Tedesco. I was just so, so lucky to be in the middle of that. And to hear the stories of the contrast between the professionalism of Jocko's SEALs rolling in with a ton of capability and a ton of ability, with all sorts of humility, no arrogance, no presumption.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  And then you told some of those stories and I watched those as well and those are heartbreaking stories, being in the talk with some of those and being on site for some of those. So anyway, just my little narrative of getting sit between your guys and your guys and what that experience like for me was unreal.

• 1:11:34Jocko Willink?

  No, we definitely took advantage of that. I mean, it was real obvious that you had in those two months, learned a lot and we were definitely all on board for that. And, um, and you know, I was kind of saying this before, before we hit record, but I wrote the foreword to Dave's new book. Uh, Dave's got a book coming out and one of the things is, you know, I met this Marine. He was, you know, how can we support you? And we said, how can we support you? So it was like great out of the gate, like no drama whatsoever, no friction of any kind. And at that time, you know, I thought I didn't even know what kind of pilot he was. I might've, I might've asked you, I don't know, but I didn't really, quite frankly, I didn't really care, but I didn't really, you know, I wasn't concerned about it. You know, it's like, oh, I can help you with your, with your air to ground. And I said, well, cool. If you can do that, then I can take my SEAL J-Tax and they can just do what a SEAL is supposed to

• 1:12:19Jocko Willink?

  do and not have to worry about air to ground, which you're probably better at anyways. And then later I found out that, you know, he's a, you know, Top Gun, Top Gun instructor, Top Gun senior instructor.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  He's okay.

• 1:12:30Jocko Willink?

  You know, the whole nine yards. But at the time, I didn't really know that. Here's the other funny thing, and I didn't find this out until later. I was like, probably six months ago, I said, Dave, when you got to Ramadi, like when you got put in your Anglico unit, how, when was the last time you had shot an M4? You know, cause he'd been in a F-18 for frigging 10 years. And so now he's over here, he hadn't shot an M4, like, what was the deal?

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  12 years.

• 1:12:57Jocko Willink?

  He hadn't shot an M4 in 12 years.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Is an M16 A2 at the basics.

• 1:13:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So when he says he was not thinking he knew, you know, he, he had, you know, an open mind to learn from the boys on the ground. Yeah. Well, that'll, that'll clue you in when you're like, wait a second. Charging handle? Wait, what's the, what's the need action control on this weapon right here? So that was pretty, pretty awesome relationships across the board. And that was really critical. And we tried to milk as much as we could out of, out of your guys on the ground of like just gathering intel, telling us what, down to what gear, what routes, how to, how to run the roads. Like everything we just wanted to absorb what you guys had learned. And you know, you get, without question, the turnover we got from you guys and guys from three eight, there's no doubt we, we saved our lives.

• 1:13:46Jocko Willink?

  Literally no doubt about it. There was roads that we were going to go on missions on where your, your guys were like, hey, do not go down that road. We're like, hey, Roger that. Not like, well, maybe, or well, what if? No, it was like, your guys say, do not go down that road. We're like, got it. We will not go down that road. And we watched other people go down those roads and get, get blown up, take casualties. So, uh, we really appreciated what the lessons that you learned. I know the lessons were learned, you know, in blood and you saved us blood from those lessons. And we won't forget that.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Glad to be a part of it. I, I just wish, uh, looking back that I,

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  I didn't know what to ask for. I don't know if any of us, here's what you got. I had no idea, I knew what an ANGLOCO was. I didn't know we could have one.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Didn't know we had options of riverine units, Navy armor. And, and again, you know, sometimes it's just luck. If you go back to, um, American Sniper, the, the, the search of the white apartments. So mostly accurate depiction. I actually planned that operation old school. I planned that on my bunk after I got off shift. It was us, first of one 10th, first of one 25th, our Iraqi units. We probably dragged in a couple of marine units, our E T Ts.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  But the catalyst, a part of it was I'm walking through the chow hall in Ramadi. And I see a guy in a, in a Navy flight suit and I'm like, The Navy doing here? What are you flying? It was the prowler, the A6B. And I'm like, really? Mind if I sit down? So he was the, is it the Electronic Warfare Officer? There might be another term for it. That's it. But, yeah, he was the EWO. And I said, okay, so tell me about this, this aircraft, and what does it do? And he goes, well, if you want us, we'll come work for you. And you let me know what you want, we'll figure it out, we'll put on the right pods. And was preceding that battalion level op, battalion plus level operation. I want to jam cell phones. Surprising ideas.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  I want to jam sat phones. And they flew over that mission for the duration of whatever it was, five or six hours it took to search those apartments. It was just having the curiosity to sit down and ask the guy, what are you doing here, Navy? You know?

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  But little chance meetings like that, I had a, I had a, somebody called me on the DMV, he's a Master Sergeant, Air Force Master Sergeant. And he goes, hey, Captain Knight, you guys want to use J-Stars? I'm like, what? I said, you're a theater asset. And he goes, yeah, well, nobody's using us. And you guys are probably the busiest battalion in the AO. How can we help you, man? And this became the catalyst for what we did in Mike Charlie 1.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  I said, well, I know 269 armor is getting messed with because they're bringing ordinance across from that dip in the Euphrates. So he said, tell me, tell me what you want. And they flew it that night, and by my shift start that next morning, I had everything they had recorded. And it showed boat traffic, as I thought, you know, a dozen different things coming across, bringing ordinance over to north central Ramadi. I'm like, really? And then we sent the scouts out with Gunny Burkhardt and the OD team, Massart and Tacus was there or not. But I think it was the second largest cache site that anybody had found in theater. I mean, it was, it took them a week to excavate it.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  And that was all because one curious Master Sergeant called me and said, hey, man, can we help? Again, come back to your point, can we help? How do we help you? I didn't even know I had, I'm a battalion, why would I use J-Stars?

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  But just a lesson learned, man. Know what you got out there and reach out and ask the question, because if you don't ask the question, the answer's always going to be no.

• 1:17:48Jocko Willink?

  As you're, so now you're getting the turnover. What was your last day like there? I mean, was it like the final getting on the bird to fly home?

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  We, I, I think all of us were just happy to get out of there and there, there are, we've all been on lots of helicopters, been on lots of aircraft. That was a flight I will never forget. Middle of the night, getting in a Chinook and we took off and we flew right down the Euphrates. And the pilot drops the ramp and I could see the full moon shining off the windscreen of the Chinook behind us. And it was, you know, just flipped off Ramadi and said, yeah, see ya.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, that was memorable. But I remember all of us were sitting there, we're all keyed up. It's like, may just get the birds here. Let's go. Cause you're, you're, you're sitting at the, at the, at the LZ, you're waiting. You're just a big fat mortar target. Cause we got mortared and rocketed over 260 times in a year that was acquired by the radar. You know, the small caliber stuff that came in under the radar fan, you don't know.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a memorable evening. Yep.

• 1:18:56Jocko Willink?

  And then how was it getting home?

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  Kind of anticlimactic. It was disconcerting at some level because it's Vermont and I think, I remember getting home and everything was just so normal. And it's like, oh, hey Greg, welcome back. How was it? Like, you think I went to the fricking beach? How was it? I was pretty high strung. Nothing, I didn't do anything like you guys, I wasn't kinetic, but when you're living it vicariously on the radio. To me, that brings its own level of stress, right? You have to eat it. You can't get excited. You, you, you have to, you know, do the call for fire. You've got to be the calming voice, send out the QRFs, send out the medevac, whatever you're gonna do.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  But I got home and I remember thinking, dude, this is just wrong, man. You, you folks don't even know. You're still going to Walmart. You're doing your Costco thing and everything's just so normal.

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  It's not. And, and I would tell anybody this, Jocko, nobody comes back the same. And, and we, I personally have made it a point in particular in my role now.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  Go get help, man. It's okay to not be okay, right? Not to sound cliched, but I wasn't. I was, and I'll give him credit, Doc, Colonel Coffin, at the time, he was our, the guard state psychiatrist. And he came down to Camp Shelby, and we were there, and, you know, they were accidentally, man. Literally, you're blowing your nose, a week later, it's brown. You're wiping your skin, it's brown. You know, you're hacking up all kinds of crap.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  And Colonel Coffin, he brought us in and he did a, he loved soldiers, man. He did kind of a group, several group debriefs. Nobody's saying anything, man. We're not talking. Because I'm not gonna spill my guts in front of my RTOs. They were there with me. That's what it was. But he told all of us, he said, "Look, man, keep track of yourselves. Five or six months. If it's gonna manifest, it'll be in five or six months. And here are the things that you're gonna look for." And man, I was textbook. I was angry, short-tempered. I didn't have tolerance for bullshit. What I thought was stupid, because you go from a kinetic environment into you're back to garrison, back to the usual. You know, "Hey, your cyclic inventory is late."

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  Okay, you know, "Oh, God, no, not that." But my kids saw it, my wife saw it, colleagues saw it, and I went to the vet center. I got my head checked. I just don't think there's any shame in it. Well, go get fixed. It's really not that hard.

• 1:21:44Jocko Willink?

  What'd they tell you when you went to the center, when the vet center? Like, what are they talking to you about?

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  So, people understand, I think everybody's got vet centers in their different states, run by the VA. But it is, it's not anonymous. It is confidential. And I don't think it goes into the VA system unless they prescribe you on meds.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  But the vet center to me was, my counselor for the first two years of going there was a two-tour, 25th ID Vietnam vet.

• 1:22:10Jocko Willink?

  That's right.

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  And so I'm like, okay, well, I'm pretty humbled now, because I can only imagine what you saw, and here you are, taking care of guys like me.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  But it was interesting, because I would see, some of my folks would be there, and I'm sitting in the waiting room, and they're like, "Oh, hey, sir, what are you doing here?" Same thing you're doing, man. No secret. I'm not right, and I'm gonna get right. I wasn't what I was. I'm gonna get back some semblance of that.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  But I've messaged that to anybody who will listen to me. Just go get it done, man. And it's always, oh, well, you know, it's gonna, it'll ruin your career. Really? Is that right?

• 1:22:48Jocko Willink?

  Apparently not. And that has to be, you know, very difficult. You guys come back and you have soldiers that are gonna go back to their civilian jobs.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:22:57Jocko Willink?

  How, like, how do you keep them on track? Like, I mean, I had active duty freaking SEALs. That literally worked for me. That I had a hard time keeping out of trouble. I can't imagine when it was like, you know, you got some guy that goes back to work at his, you know, job as a plumber or teacher, whatever. How does that work?

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  So, that's the tough thing, Jocko.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  The guard is, is, there's some continuity there because you see folks. Oftentimes, we've got guys that have been in the same unit for, for decades. Working with each other. The, the challenge is you're only seeing them one weekend a month, two weeks a year, normally. Outside of deployment, so you go from having a habitual literally combat relationship with them. And then you get home and that ends. So now you're trying to help somebody when you really only see them about 7% of their life. And, but, what's more concerning for me, and I, and I, again, I message this, unless

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  you know, if, unless somebody is following us on social media, unless somebody is paying attention. If, if you're a veteran and you get out, we don't track you. We lose track of you. Unless you're using the, like, in our case, Vermont Veterans Affairs. Most, most states have a Veterans Affairs within their military department.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  They will track how many veterans there are in the state. I don't know if they're enrolled in VA healthcare system. I don't know their specific experience. I can't make them go do anything. But I can at least get the word out, but the problem is I can't reach out direct to them. So I've, I've really, in my role in, in this job, I've really leveraged the media. Public affairs, social media.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  But I, I talk about it. I don't, I don't make it any secret. You know, it, it's, if we're serious about doing something with PTSD, adjustment disorder, and certainly suicide. Well, somebody needs to help me share this story. We work with our congressional delegation.

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  Senator Welch, in particular, getting the PACT Act passed into law, and they actually accelerated it. And what did that do? So, it provides more resources sooner to veterans, and it's incorporated, kind of spins off of the exposure to burn pits, open air hazards. But they can enroll and register, and I just don't know if we can reach veterans, because you think about it, somebody separates from the service, and in 10 years, they end up with some aberrant form of cancer. Are they putting two and two together? I can give you a dozen names off the top of my head. It was pancreatic cancer, here in Vermont and Pennsylvania.

• 1:25:41Speaker 02

  Pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, metastasized colon cancer, metastasized prostate cancer, two instances of glioblastoma. Way before anything like that should be happening to anybody. But I don't know, are they in the VA healthcare system? So I tell anybody who's listening, if you're a veteran, whatever your issues are, validate it, man, because we didn't break you. The Army did. Or the service, right? And our VA, we're fortunate in Vermont, our VA is great, probably not true in every state. But man, you've got to take care of yourself. And what happens if folks aren't leveraging the VA? If they're not getting a service-connected disability because they were exposed to burn pits?

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Or what other types of, I mean, how much stuff did we eat or drink in Ramadi? Right? You go to the pallet, and I'm sure that's all PVA-free water bottles out there in the pallet in the sun. Oh, sure. And that talcum powder fine dust, you know, I mean, but man, go, get yourself taken care of. Because if you don't, you're leaving benefits on the table. Right? You're leaving benefits, potentially for your family, Tricare for Life, for instance. Talk to

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  Somebody the other day about this, if you are a temporarily 100% disabled vet, your dependents can't access the VA's dependent education benefit. If you're 100% permanently disabled, you have access and your kids will get, I forget what the amount of 12 or 1500 dollars a month to go to college. Well, how many folks linger in a permanent or a temporary status, get no benefits? And I've seen it happen twice. Two good friends of mine, Mike Heston was being one of them, and his wife June is, she pretty sharp, she figured it out, and worked with Senator Leahy to get his status permanent because he was dying of pancreatic cancer.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  So now his kids at least had access for the, to that program. But how long do these folks, if you've got a terminal condition that's quote unquote stabilized, I'm not quoting chapter and verse here, until it's permanent, you get no benefits for your kids? Well, who's in a hurry to help you get to permanent? There's a huge backlog. But again, you go to these places and you're exposed to pretty horrible things. I think it's okay for them to give those benefits to your kids, especially if you have a terminal condition like pancreatic cancer, brain cancer. Both of these gentlemen, they fought it for two years, could have been two years of their kids getting benefits. So that's the kind of stuff you do with the, in this job at the national level, you're advocating for change.

• 1:28:24Jocko Willink?

  Before you got there, to this job that you're in currently, and so you get home, what's the next, what's the next job for you?

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  So I went, got home, I was six months at my old unit and then went down to the southern part of the state and become a battalion AO admin officer. And then in 2008, they moved me to the recruiting battalion command, which was a great job.

• 1:28:48Jocko Willink?

  Where were you doing that?

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  Right at Camp Johnson, right at the head, state headquarters.

• 1:28:52Jocko Willink?

  And then when you're in charge of recruiting, because I, I see recruiters at wrestling tournaments, I go to a lot of, my kids all wrestled, so I would see a lot of recruiters at the wrestling tournaments. Where do you go to recruit kids?

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  So we have a challenge getting into schools.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  I don't know if that's a Vermont specific thing. It might be. I think we're getting better.

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  There's some reluctance to get my recruiters in the school.

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  That's weird because I will say a lot of people that I've had on the podcast, when you ask, when I ask them like, oh, how'd you end up in the military? They will literally say, yeah, some guy was in the chow hall or in the, what do they call it? Chow hall? Cafeteria. And he was handing out pamphlets for the Marine Corps, for the Army. And I said, oh, it looks cool. It's better than what I'm doing right now.

• 1:29:36Speaker 02

  Yep. So it's not universal. I meant in all fairness, I think there are some schools, like the tech centers are great. They know that a lot of the work, the hands-on work you do in the guard, crosswalks into civilian sector, diesel mechanic, hydraulics, avionics technician, airframe, power plant.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  All of that stuff, we train you and then you can get a job in the civilian sector.

• 1:29:56Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  Great stuff. Let me tell you the narrative. I think we're working to change it. I talk to a lot of kids about joining the guard. I go to Norwich University, our senior military college. They have a future leader camp that they do every summer. They did three of them this year. Probably the largest one they've ever done, but these are groups between 75 and 100 kids. These are all rising seniors with aspirations to go to Norwich University. So this is their, their experience. I talked to my recruit sustainment program soldiers. They are either just back from basic training in AIT or getting ready to go. So, but I asked the question, so hey, did you talk to your school counselor before you decided to join the guard or have aspirations to go in the military?

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  And a number of them did, and the theme hasn't changed much. So what'd they tell you? Oh, you can do better. It's dangerous. That's a really bad idea.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  My favorite one was, why would you throw your life away?

• 1:30:53Jocko Willink?

  Good lord.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  So I about came off the, yeah, I come off the ledge on that one, but I was like, okay. And the other one, just a few weeks ago, I went down and I, because I speak to these kids about the guard and here's my experience and here's what happens when you join the guard or the military. I joined as an E1 with no college and fast forward and here I am with no college debt. I'm not the sharpest tack in the box, but I can figure that out. And one of the young ladies who wants to be a future leader, who wants to go to Norwich University, guidance counselor said, you're an idiot.

• 1:31:23Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  So, I don't say it's universal. I'm not pointing the finger at all educators. But I'll tell you, you need to get yourself educated to understand the opportunities that come with service to the military.

• 1:31:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt about. That's the worst advice I've heard in a long time.

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  Yep, I would agree.

• 1:31:40Jocko Willink?

  That's another very common theme. In fact, I'd go so far as if it's like 90% of the common theme of people that come on this podcast and talk to me. The military is what, you know, squared their entire life away, you know? They were knuckleheads and they joined the military. Okay, take the knucklehead energy and put it into something positive. Next thing you know, they're doing great things.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:31:58Jocko Willink?

  So for a counselor to sit there and tell that to a young man or young woman, that's ridiculous.

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  And if you, if you, if you back out a little bit and, and open the aperture, if somebody ever put it in perspective, right? And, and I, I do this at different times. Go to the National Guard Association meeting or whatever, and, and we'll do a, an evening event sponsored by the New England States. And it's, if you've ever been to National Guard Association, it's, it's a party. But I do, it's just a holler back, right? They make a mistake and they give me the microphone. One of two things is gonna happen, right? I'm gonna do the holler back. I'm gonna sing Friends in No Places, cuz you can't screw it up.

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  It's the bar anthem, but I ask the question. It's a rhetorical question. Hey, listen, man, when you have a pandemic, who do you call? National Guard. When you have wildfires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, who do you call? National Guard. If you have an insurrection at the nation's capital, who do you call? We moved 25,000 National Guard members in about a week to the nation's capital after January 6th. There's no other organization on the planet that can do that. None. We did it. So it's, it's, who do you call? It's the Guard. So it's like, we're like Flexio, man. We're just good for everything.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:33:15Jocko Willink?

  Slap some National Guard on that thing.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  That's right. So I think doing it at the nation's capital right now, that's a whole other conversation, but that's what folks need to understand about the Guard. We have a dual mission. We, we have our domestic response mission. You know, we did flooding in Vermont two years consecutive. I had soldiers with their LMTVs that saved 19 Vermonters and their pets. And they were working with Swiftwater, with Swiftwater rescue teams. And facilitated the rescue of a hundred, I don't know, a couple hundred more.

• 1:33:45Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  That's your guard. And to your point, and then we get that done. Hey, good work. And we go back to worker school and.

• 1:33:52Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Yep. They're your neighbors, man.

• 1:33:54Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:33:55Speaker 02

  And then sometimes we go to war. Sometimes we do okay.

• 1:34:00Jocko Willink?

  How was it War College you went to after that recruiting tour?

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:34:03Jocko Willink?

  How'd you end up going to war? And you went to Naval War College?

• 1:34:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:34:06Jocko Willink?

  Was that your choice? Was that the one you wanted to go to?

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Not really.

• 1:34:10Jocko Willink?

  How'd you end up there?

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  So I, I had made oh five Lieutenant Colonel, and I was like, I had never thought that was gonna happen. No way. I'm, I'm good, man. So I kinda saw the writing on the wall, and I, I started my Masters of Education at, at Post University. And it was probably two weeks after that, it was the late Brigadier General Mike Heston called me, my Rhode Island colleague. Nader, you're gonna apply for War College. He was the Deputy Adjutant General at the time, and I'm like, Hey, sir, I just started a Masters. You're not hearing me. You're gonna apply for War College. You're gonna put Naval War College on your forty one eighty seven. Resident is your first choice. Glad you did that, sir. So I did. Just completely, again, lucky. Got selected.

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  One of my colleagues, he couldn't do the resident course. He would have been first in the queue for resident. He had just gotten back from deployment, and he's, I can't leave my work again. For another year. So I backed into it. Probably one of the most phenomenal, probably the most phenomenal education experience I've ever had.

• 1:35:14Jocko Willink?

  Some high praise. What'd you learn?

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  I, I just, well, it was, it was a really great setup, grand trimesters. It was Joint Military Operations, National Strategic Decision Making, and then Policy.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  What was it? Policy? Strategy and Policy, S and P.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  The, the professors were phenomenal. But what was?

• 1:35:36Speaker 02

  Truly humbling for me is to be around that talent, that brainpower. All services, every letter agency was represented. We had international students. It validated to me, America, it validated what it was to be a part of something like that. It really kinda reset things. It was hard.

• 1:35:57Jocko Willink?

  What year was this?

• 1:35:58Speaker 02

  Fifteen, fifteen to sixteen. It was hard. I got a B, which was, you know, pretty good.

• 1:36:04Jocko Willink?

  We'll take it.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And actually, I got dinged on an exam. And I was mad. Because you know when you do good work. And you know when you do good enough. Well, I knew, I had crushed this. This is a 24-hour exam, right? You get it eight in the morning and you will turn it in by eight the next morning. So, I mean, I crushed this thing. And it was something that was like on the Iran nuclear deal, or something like that. Something fairly complex. I thought, okay, I got this. I got the placemat. I got the rubric. I'm gonna crush this thing. And I thought I did. And I got an 82. I'm like, what? I was mad. So I called the professor and he goes like, well, you can appeal it. I can't change your grade. He says, you're probably right. But you have to go to the dean. I knew that was gonna. So I did. So

• 1:36:49Speaker 02

  I went to the dean. I think I got an 84. So I called Heston, who was a Naval War College graduate. I'm like, hey, sir, this is BS. This is, this is, I was mad. Good nighter. Listen to me. I graduated second. From the bottom. He said, don't worry about it. Your job is to just get the diploma. Don't worry about it. Get the degree. Don't worry about it. He was right.

• 1:37:16Jocko Willink?

  Did they have any rationale behind you getting an 82 or then an 84?

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  It was a matter of, everything you wrote was third person, except for this paper. And this paper was first person. This was your opinion. And you had to support your opinion. Here's what I'm gonna tell you. I tell you, here's what I told you. Very basic, right? But this is why. I thought my, I thought my argument was sound. Like, I nailed this, man. I went by the rubric. This ain't hard. Yeah. Somebody had a different opinion. Yeah.

• 1:37:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh, what came after that?

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  So went back to work, became the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, which was a great job. Because you're helping soldiers and retirees. You're doing a lot of You know, in the weeds, policy work. But you're, you're, you're taking care of soldiers and veterans and retirees, helping them get their pay sorted out, help them get their, their medical stuff sorted out. All the, all the personal issues, personnel issues that you're going to be dealing with. That was very comfortable for me. I really loved that job. And then again, Heston calls me downstairs. He says, hey, uh, called me down the hall, gonna move you to HRO. I didn't want to be the HRO. You're not hearing me. You're gonna be the HRO.

• 1:38:30Speaker 02

  I didn't want to be the HRO. It's a shitty job. I didn't want to, it's awful. Nothing good happens with HRO because it's technicians, it's AGRs, it's managed level of resources, it's budget, it's bonuses, it's incentives. And he told me, he said, and again, he, we've all had this person. You've been this person for somebody, as have you, Chip. He had a vision for me that I didn't have for myself. And he said, you need, this is a joint billet. You need to learn the blue side. Like, fine, Roger that, sir. Still, I didn't have any idea what he wanted to do. So you have somebody like that pushing you into the job that you don't want. Somebody pushing you into a job that's probably gonna make you struggle a little bit. But you learn.

• 1:39:15Speaker 02

  So, and he did. And it was because of him and then I had some other senior leaders that were mentors pushing me to do more. Cause they always saw something in me that I probably didn't see in myself. I saw yourself short. But it was Heston. Heston's the reason I'm in this job.

• 1:39:32Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then how did that come about?

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  So I was the HRO and he called me down. And I thought I'd screwed something up, right? I was waiting for the ass chewing. And I, I came in and he closed the door and at this point, he was ailing. Pretty badly from pancreatic cancer. He had lost a lot of weight. He was probably my size and he'd lost 70 pounds. And in Vermont, if you're going to become the adjutant general, it is done by legislative election. It's the only state that does that. Everybody else is appointed by the governor.

• 1:40:01Jocko Willink?

  Which is unique. So this job means you're the senior guy, the senior military guy for National Guard, Air National Guard and National Guard.

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  Army Guard in Vermont.

• 1:40:08Jocko Willink?

  Both. And so this is very strange. So you're going to this position, which the entire military, you get promoted through the ranks. Every, the entire military, the entire US military, you get promoted through the ranks. But this one job for the Vermont National Guard to be in charge of all that, you get elected. Okay.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  I am now a politician.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  It's awful. That being said, there's some uniqueness about it.

• 1:40:36Jocko Willink?

  I think it's kind of good because, let's face it, climbing those ranks through the military channel, you, you have to do certain things that may or may not be honorable to move up the chain of command. And so for you to kind of, it's like an opportunity to take an outsider or someone that didn't, maybe, isn't the perfect candidate from the military side that's got some other aspects to him that'd be beneficial.

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  Yep. It's a, it's, it's very Vermont. It's kind of a colloquialism. At the time, I didn't appreciate the process. Because I mean, I'd lost 14 pounds. I wanted to vomit every day because it's stressful, man. I was active guard and reserve, so I had to get a, an exception to policy from then Secretary Esper. And the response from their attorneys was, yep, well Colonel Knight may be a candidate, but he may not campaign. But what, violation of the Hatch Act, right? Okay. So we had to send him, my Jags, send a note back saying, hey, this is how Vermont does this. He has to be able to engage with legislators. So what they settled on was, okay, he may speak with legislators, but only him. No lobbying,

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  no campaign committees, no social media, just Colonel Knight speaking with legislators. So I took a day of leave every time I had coffee with a legislator, anytime I met with a committee, anytime I, anytime I met with a caucus. What's interesting about the way we do things is, and what I like about it now, hindsight being what it is, our soldiers and airmen have a voice in this. So if somebody's running, you all have senators and representatives, and you can email, you can call and say, listen, this is who I want to be the next senior leader of our guard. I've worked with this person, whether me, whoever it is, is running for office. I don't think it had, mine wasn't contentious. I got along great with the other candidates. There were three other folks running, which was fine.

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  That was collegial, but some of the sniping from the sidelines was not. Night's gonna ruin the air guard. Do I even know you? I haven't even met you. How do you know me?

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  Pretty horrific, but it was all Heston's fault.

• 1:42:43Speaker 02

  You know, he called me down to his office and he was ailing and he said, yeah, you know, obviously I was gonna run. Just a wonderful man, most loyal friend you could ask for. I knew him for 30 years. And he said, obviously I can't. I need you to run. And I about fell out of the chair. I'm like, oh, hey, sir, what? That's not on my, that's not on my to-do list, man. That is not even a thing. I'm good. I'm gonna get my high three. I never thought I'd get here.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  And he said, understand, you'll be fine. And that's, he would always say that, you'll be fine. Whether it was pushing me to go to OCS, whether it was making me whatever job, G1, War College, you'll be fine. Don't worry about it.

• 1:43:19Speaker 02

  So, love the guy. God rest his soul, cause he, he's one of those folks and, and

• 1:43:24Jocko Willink?

  And he's having the last laugh right now, watching you do this every day.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  Yes, he is. And there's still more good days and bad. I mean, it's, it's when you really grasp the, the scope and scale of the job and the things you can impact. Helping veterans, getting legislation passed. That helps veterans. That's kind of a big deal. Cause it's, it's a unique thing. This is for all, all adjutants general in most cases, we all kind of straddle that that, that civil relationship, cause we work with our governors, we work with our legislatures, but we also work with the congressional delegation. So, at this juncture, even as an elected official, and we've all heard this, you've certainly heard it. Well, you know, the military is apolitical. You're not. Not even close, man.

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  You're non-partisan, cause if I go to the state house a lot, and I will testify to committees, I will talk, I don't care what your political stripes are. If you can help my guard, if you can help my soldiers and airmen, oh man, we're gonna get along great. And that's always been my pitch. So that's a uniqueness. It's a unique thing about, and I have to be close to them because they elected the adjutant general. How could you not? Smartest thing I could have done was six years ago, if you look back at that, we were not in a good spot. We had some challenges. It was ugly when I got the job. I mean, you talk about, you'll pardon the expression, being handed a bag of shit. It wasn't the fault of the previous adjutant general. There were some things behind the scenes that had not

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  been addressed because he simply didn't know. And they all percolated up and I'm like, oh, boy, this is not good. So you start rebuilding. First thing I did, 2019, I asked for an organizational assessment. So it was Office of Complex Investigations and the JAG team came up from National Guard Bureau. And that I know of, I was the only adjutant general to ask. They had done several in the past, but it was a governor asking. And if the governor's asking, you ain't got a job. Yeah, it's gonna be a problem. You just got shit canned. Probably the smartest thing I could have done. So I talked to Brigadier General Chris Raffano, who was Guard Bureau's JAG. And I called him, I said, how do I get one of these things? And he said, well, you sure you want to do this? You know it's releasable to the public. I'm like, that's the problem.

• 1:45:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. I got it. We need to do this. So we did it. And it was painful. Hard to read. Hundred and thirteen pages of, oh, that was painful. I didn't get quite what I wanted. I would have liked to have had specifics, but I got enough themes out of what we had put in there. Here's what I'm looking for. Hazing, bullying, sexual harassment, sexual assault, maltreatment of others, all of the things that we can't abide. I got enough themes to start putting some things in place. So when I got the report, I sent it to the governor, sent it to my folks, the Guard, sent it to legislature, and then I released it to the public. And then it was.

• 1:46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, sky is falling, catastrophizing, good old boy network. We were getting raked over the coals, but I had to do it.

• 1:46:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's how you get things fixed, right? You gotta say, here's our problems.

• 1:46:28Speaker 02

  And it was actually, Dave Baldwin, he's former adjutant general here in California. He actually texted me, goes, because I sent it to every other tag, every other adjutant general, hey, man, this ain't just Vermont, you all got similar problems. And I was getting responses like, well, yeah, we got some problems, but not like that. And I'm like, really? Really? Yeah, you're getting, you're getting insulated here. But Dave, Dave, good friend of mine, he's since retired, but he called, he sent me a text, goes, probably the bravest thing I've ever seen. You just put it out there, man. Can't get any worse. So.

• 1:47:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's one of, you know, you, you wrote a paper about leadership when you were at the War College, the paper was called, Good or Effective Leadership? Is there a difference? And here's a quote from that, that I really liked when I read that paper. It says, quote, "There is a difference between effective and good leadership. One can be effective probably throughout an entire career without ever becoming a truly good leader. Alternatively, I find it difficult to characterize someone as a good leader who isn't effective. In the military, assigning personnel to leadership positions presumes ability and results in rank commensurate with the position. Those who best exemplify the traits of a good leader do not necessarily receive these assignments. Fitness reports may capture their being effective, but are they good leaders?

• 1:47:43Jocko Willink?

  There is a time for directive or transactional leadership where the nature of the mission or situation does not allow for inclusiveness in decision making. I believe those times are limited. The period interceding is where leaders should strive to not only be effective leaders, but good ones, learning from their subordinates and placing the agenda of the organization above their own. This is what delineates good from affective, good from effective organizational leadership. By good leaders cultivating the respective subordinates through listening, asking for advice, mentoring, and keeping them informed when making decisions, we may find and develop those good future leaders we are looking for." I was speaking with a company the other day, and, you know, that idea that you have in

• 1:48:26Jocko Willink?

  there, like, the idea that occasionally you gotta say, hey, this, this is what we're doing. Hey, everyone, this is what we're doing.

• 1:48:34Jocko Willink?

  A lot of leaders think that that should be the majority of the time. You know, they think it should be 99% of the time. You know, this, when you say times are limited, for me, it's like, there's such a small number of times where I actually have to say, hey, everyone, lock it up. I'm making the call. This is what we're doing. The amount of times that you should have to do that as a leader should be so, so few. It's ridiculous, but in a lot of people's heads, that should be the norm. The norm is everyone shut up, listen to me. And that should not be the norm. And as a matter of fact, if that's what the norm is, you're making all kinds of mistakes as a leader. Because if my team isn't making things happen without me telling them what to do, I'm doing all kinds of things wrong.

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  Fact. So, there's been this, this recent resurgence of, of mission command. And I, I hear senior leaders throwing it around and I'm like, okay, do you actually know what it means? Because you're saying it. And I don't recall them off the top of my head, but there are seven tenets of mission command. But first and foremost, for me, Knight's version is its trust. And I've expressed this to my subordinate commanders, to my assistant adjutant general. It's simply assume risk on their behalf. If it's prudent.

• 1:49:46Speaker 02

  But trust them. Give them, give them the guidance. I mean, Patton said it, right? Don't tell your soldiers how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their ingenuity. Go back to Specialist Beddett and Ramadi coming up with the Pope last.

• 1:49:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, brief us on that one real quick.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  So, the insurgents.

• 1:50:04Jocko Willink?

  Because I don't know how many people were alive today.

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:07Jocko Willink?

  Because of him.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  Yep. So, we get hit by a lot of IEDs. And at the time, it was a line of sight. They would use the, the base station with the long range cordless telephone. And then they get up and run. And while you cannot run the 50s, our, our gunners are clipping these guys.

• 1:50:25Speaker 02

  Which was upsetting to the insurgents. So, they started, and of course, as you noted, I think in one, in one of your books, the, the old style turret, the gunner's head's exposed. So, you're protected on three sides unless your head's up. And, and the gunner's head has to be up because you're checking shot holes for IEDs. You're looking for threats.

• 1:50:45Speaker 02

  They started packing those IEDs with ball bearings and screws and nails, anything they can get their hands on. And I've got pictures I know of, at least on my shift, I know of five instances where I've got photos where the, the, Bedditt, our specialist, had welded the spare ballistic windshield to three sides of the turret and he put angle irons on the corner. So snipers couldn't shoot through the gap. But I've got pictures of, of those, you know, shrapnel, nail screws embedded where the gunner's head would have been. That would have been a nightmare to have a Humvee disabled and their crew captured. And the next thing you know, they're getting their heads, you know, cut off on, on Al Jazeera,

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  whatever. But that, that soldier, what he did, translated to not just our battalion. It went to the brigade, it went to the MEF, it went to your team. And I tell my basic leader corps students this, man, don't, don't let your rank dictate your contribution to the organization. That, that guy's a specialist, an E4, part of that specialist mafia. And he had an idea. And he implemented.

• 1:51:53Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And the idea was just to catch everyone up, like, was to take these, these extra pieces of bulletproof glass and formulate, we ended up, what do you, Pope glass, because you look like you're in the Pope mobile, which was after the assassination attempt on the Pope, they surrounded him with bulletproof glass. And so the turret gunner, instead of being totally exposed, it was like, okay, now we got some protection for this guy. And like you said, it spread throughout the whole AO.

• 1:52:17Speaker 02

  Yep. And then, your point is valid. How many lives did, did this, the actions of this one E4? He just had an idea. Didn't ask for permission. And he just did it. And, and now, I, I mean, I can tell you how many lives he saved in our battalion that I know of, but how many across the theater? Hard to say.

• 1:52:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:38Speaker 02

  All that from a good idea that nobody told him to do. As an E4, that's just phenomenal to me. Yeah.

• 1:52:45Jocko Willink?

  And that's what you're looking for, you know, now that you're, now that you're in charge. This is what you're trying to implement, this is what you're trying to inspire throughout your organization. How do you do that?

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, exemplify it.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  Seek innovation, give them, if they have the idea, man, run with it. I think as an army, certainly as a guard, and this is, I call it the GWOT hangover.

• 1:53:09Speaker 02

  We kind of spoon fed training. You will do X and you took away the latitude of the command teams. They don't have any creativity, you know, how you train is how you train. Are you meeting the standard and go forth and meet the standard? But it became very, very cookie cutter. And we had a team that would actually go around and then make sure of that. But we saw that at Camp Shelby.

• 1:53:34Speaker 02

  But let people lead, man, get out of their way. It's really not that hard. Have some trust that they're going to do the right thing. And if it's time for a tune up, okay, then you do a tune up. And you think I haven't been scuffed up? You think I haven't, you got my ass handed to me on a number of occasions, you know, by one of those senior leaders? Like, you know, hey, come here, Jack Ash, like, oh, great. You take the ass chewing like a champ and learn from it and drive on.

• 1:54:00Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, all the stuff that you've identified in extreme ownership. It's valid, man. I mean, I'm not telling you anything. But it's, I learned that probably in Ramadi, I was, again, being the voice on the radio. I would go out enough to, to maintain situational awareness, but very dynamic and fluid. I mean, come on, man, it was such a dynamic environment. If, if a patrol leader is telling me I ain't going there. I'm not making them go there. That's, that's your call. You're the guy on the ground. If somebody gets in a firefight and this is early on and Jeff, you'd mentioned ROE.

• 1:54:39Speaker 02

  I think we were timid for the first couple of months to pull the trigger. Cause it was just like this, this is odd. I'm about to take somebody's life. Very simply, if you articulate hostile intent, then you're justified in your action. But I'd get a phone call, they request permission to engage. I'm like, dude, I ain't there, man. Don't ask me. You're gonna come in and give me the debrief and I'll write it up for you, but you're the one making that decision, not me.

• 1:55:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And by the time they get that call back, yeah, your approval, that person's gone, you know?

• 1:55:13Speaker 02

  No, the only time, um, this was actually the first time, uh, first battalion, 172nd Armor fired a main gun round in anger. Uh, it was actually OP Jones was getting mortared right at the confluence or the intersection of Route Jones and, uh, Michigan. And mortar rounds are impacting and they're jockeying the tank around so it doesn't get hit. Um, and they're scanning and they see, uh, probably, I don't know, a click down the road up on the roof, three insurgents, one with binos, one on the cell phone, and the other guy's doing whatever he's doing.

• 1:55:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  And, you know, I got the call. It was actually Tom Combs, who's now retired first sergeant, uh, works out at the range for us. He says, "May request permission to engage." I'm like, "Weapons free, man." You see what I, you see, I don't, you can articulate it. Um, and the next thing I heard, cause it's just outside of Camp Ramadi was the, you know, the, that crack. And then, then I called, they went to BDA and he goes, uh, "Yeah, they're gone." But that's the closest I ever came to pulling a trigger. Like, "Weapons free, man. I don't know what to tell you." You just gotta have faith that, that your, your folks are gonna do the right thing. Yeah.

• 1:56:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's a, you know, that's why you train them. That's why you gotta make sure to understand why they're doing what they're doing, what the strategic goal is. You know, was a huge thing with me was, you know, you know, we had the, I don't know what it was. Nine slide ROE brief and I would tell my guys, you, you, you have to make sure that the person you're going to kill is bad. Like if we go out, you go out in Ramada, you kill an Imam or you kill a teacher or you know, whatever. It's like, it's going to be a nightmare. Uh, it's going to be, first of all, it's going to be terrible for all of us. They're going to be at the gate tomorrow morning protesting. It's going to be a huge strategic downturn for us impact. So we have to make sure the people we're killing are bad. And how do

• 1:57:05Jocko Willink?

  you do that? Well, guess what? It fits right in with the rules of engagement. I'm reasonably assured that this person is about to commit a hostile act towards us. Yes, that's a bad guy. So you have to trust them because you know, what's a sniper? See a guy for half a second, four seconds, three seconds. You know, it's like they have to be able to make that call.

• 1:57:23Speaker 02

  Correct. And who am I to second guess that? You don't have time. You don't have the luxury of time. You see it. You know it, what it, you know it for what it is. Do what you have to do, man. You come tell me about it later.

• 1:57:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know, that's the thing with leadership is just allowing the guys on the front lines to make things happen and they'll make things happen, you know?

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  Well, that's exactly right. And I think that Jocko, there, there are so many vignettes in this conversation and in listening to your books. Um, it brings back things and some of them are at some level tragic, but in a dark humor kind of way, they're, they make me laugh because they're so odd, inappropriate perhaps, but odd. And we had sent our snipers out. Um, and I got another story about our, our section leader, uh, but one of our soldiers was up in a hide, um, third floor of an apartment building and, um, overlooking a shot hole. And that was, you know, the technique you'd drive by and you'd, you know, drop it out

• 1:58:24Speaker 02

  of a car, either cut the bottom out of the trunk and drop it, or, or in this case, uh, Blue Opal pulls up and the insurgent gets out of the back of the Opal with two, what turned out to be 130 millimeter rounds. And he drops and goes to drop it in the shot hole and our sniper takes the shot. So guy staggers and he falls back into the opole and they take off. And half an hour later was a Marine Corps ECP, which was just in our, just into our AO. On the bridge across the dam before you went into, into Ramadi from Tamim. And some Lance Corporal called, called the talk. Oh, they rolled the guy out. So, hey, hey, sir, did your sniper shoot a guy? I'm like, yeah, about a half hour ago.

• 1:59:10Speaker 02

  And this young Lance Corporal, he's like, yeah, um, they, they shot his junk off. I'm like, uh, excuse me? Well, yeah, sir, you know, like, like his package. I'm like, are you shitting me? And so I, I sent our sniper and his guys went out and they, and they, you know, positively ID'd the guy. And it was my RTO specialist in North Carolina. He's like, damn, sir, that's like controlling tomorrow's insurgents today. So, so, yeah, um, stuff like that. But there's an element here, and again, it's a, it's a guardism. I talked about it a little before of what both the guard and reserve, you've got folks that have jobs outside the military.

• 1:59:55Speaker 02

  And I would tell my basic leader course students, I have the good fortune to be able to talk to, it's our entry level NCO course that we run, one of them in Vermont. And we're talking to these young soldiers, E4s and E5s and, you know, there's so much experience in the room, even at a relatively young age. And you mentioned earlier, you mentioned some, I think folks are actually joining a little bit later in life, mid twenties. So they've got some life experience and I've talked to these kids and they've got, um, I mean, I've, I've had young soldiers, thoracic surgeons assistant, nurses. I, I've got in my air guard, I have a doctor who works building bombs for the F-35. Cause that's what he wants to do.

• 2:00:37Speaker 02

  So we're in Ramadi and our sniper section leader comes in, one of our staff sergeants, and he was from West Virginia.

• 2:00:46Speaker 02

  And he talked like this. And I'm thinking, okay, you're a mid-grade NCO sniper from West Virginia. In my presumption, you gotta be working, you gotta be a tradesman or something, right? A farmer, you gotta work in the trades, masonry, electrician, whatever. And he'd come in for the debrief and I'd always ask him, I called him Huckleberry because he's from West Virginia. Huckleberry, how'd it go? And he'd say, you know, sir, there weren't no killing, but it weren't for lack of trying.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  And now sometimes they were successful. They got one of the more prolific bomb makers one night putting in, he was in placing a pressure plate IED, but we're there about six months. And he came in for a debrief and Huckleberry, what do you do in West Virginia? He says, oh, I'm a financial manager for GE Capital Management. I got a staff of 45 in Charlestown, West Virginia. And I'm thinking, God, who's a Huckleberry now, right? This guy, probably making mid-six figures. He wanted to be a sniper.

• 2:01:46Speaker 02

  That's the guard, man. We've got that.

• 2:01:50Speaker 02

  And that opportunity is out there for anybody who wants to pursue it. You gotta, you gotta show up.

• 2:01:54Jocko Willink?

  What was the deal with the strike we just did on Iran?

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  So, little known secret, it is one air force, it is one army, right? Folks don't understand, the National Guard is the primary combat reserve of the army and the air force. The army is 40%. Army National Guard's 40% of the army. And I think the air force, we are probably 50 or more percent of air mobility command capability, the Gray Tails, the C-17, C-5, C-130, those are guard. We are about, I think, 30% of the fighter fleet, something like that.

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  But that raid on Iran, Midnight Hammer? Yeah, 50% guard.

• 2:02:37Speaker 02

  Pilots in command, 50% guard. The guys loading the bombs on those aircraft, guard.

• 2:02:43Speaker 02

  And they went back to work. I mean, these folks, and they're, like you said, Chip, they're probably flying commercial airliners. They take a few days off and put the hammer to Iran and then go back to work. Hey, what'd you do this weekend? Eh, you know, not much.

• 2:02:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, thirty-six hours, right? Thirty-six hour evolution?

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:03:03Jocko Willink?

  That's epic, epic. Uh, does that get us up to speed?

• 2:03:07Speaker 02

  I think so. Um, I would tell you that there's so much opportunity out there, uh, in the military, folks would just give it a chance. The guard in particular, you can, you made the point earlier. You can do both. You can have a dual career track. You can be in the military, do all the things you want to do through the guard, through the reserves, and have a civilian career.

• 2:03:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  And derive benefit from both.

• 2:03:31Jocko Willink?

  And the best way to go about it is just going down to the recruiter?

• 2:03:35Speaker 02

  Come see us. We're not a secret anymore, Jocko. I mean, I, I think we've been a best kept secret for just too, way too long. If you've got the desire, come ask questions, man. We're, we're transparent. We're not going to stick you in the neck with a tranquilizer dart and take you to enlistments. I mean, it's, come see us, man. It, it's really, it's your guard, it's your neighbor. It's somebody that you know who's probably in the guard.

• 2:03:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's, it's like, it's just a lower level of commitment for a young guy. Like, when I, when I enlisted in the Navy, to get the program that I wanted, which would give me the opportunity to go to BUDS, it was a six-year commitment. I was seventeen, like, six years is a long time.

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  Yes, it is.

• 2:04:10Jocko Willink?

  So, but this is like, oh, you'll be back, you know, at the end of the summer, or you'll be back, you know, it's like, like, it's a much lower level commitment, and you still get a taste of it. And if you like the taste of it, there's all kinds of opportunities. If you don't, cool, you carry on and you can get out in four years or six years or whatever, but you're, you know, you haven't been in, gone the entire time. So I think it's a great iterative step on how to figure out what you want to do with your life. And, you know, I mentioned that some people come ask me questions when they're twenty-eight, twenty-nine. But if you're seventeen years old, eighteen years old, why not make some money? Why not get some benefits? Why not get some money for school? Why go into debt, you know, trying to pay for college? Why not learn a trade that you can put to work out there immediately? Like, there's so many benefits, and you get to do the military thing.

• 2:04:54Jocko Willink?

  You get to know what it's like, cause, you know... You know, when people ask me, well, I want to go to college. I want to join the military. I want to do this. I want to go in the military. The, all the other things in life are going to be there. The military, like you're, you're, you're a rare breed to get it done, get OCS done at 35. You know, get it done while you're young. Get it done because it does disappear and there is an age limit and you will get to a point where there'll be too many other things in your life, whether it's family, whether it's work commitments, whatever. Get it done while you're young. Go in there, get the experience. You will have a, a mutual respect with everybody that you meet that served. And what a noble thing. There's, you know, everybody in, in America goes, oh, you're in the military? Thank you.

• 2:05:38Jocko Willink?

  Like that's, that's what you're going to get and that's what you deserve. So if you got the opportunity, go down, see your recruiter and I'm going to tell you, like, like you and me, best thing I ever did was sign that piece of paper and, and get my, get on track. Get told, hey, this is what you got to do to be successful. The civilian world doesn't have that. Hey, you know what you need to do to be successful in the civilian world? There's a bunch of different paths you could take. There's confusing. It's, it's chaos. There's, you, you, you win some, you lose some. No, in the military, you do this thing. You're going to get your paycheck. You're going to get promoted. You're going to, you're going to be on track. You're going to have a good life. So go down there and check it out.

• 2:06:16Speaker 02

  Come see us. I'm telling you, we're doing, um,

• 2:06:20Speaker 02

  this coming weekend, September 7th, that's our real weekend. And on Sunday, we're going to do an open house, both air and army. F-35s are kind of sexy. So we're doing it over at the air guard. Um, so last time we did this was I think three years ago and, um, we had like 6,000 people.

• 2:06:37Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 2:06:38Speaker 02

  Go to our base and we ran out of parking. It was, yeah, we could have done better. We did, we, we figured out the parking this time, we think.

• 2:06:45Speaker 02

  But what that shows me that there's at least a curiosity about who we are.

• 2:06:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:49Speaker 02

  Uh, and that's, that's what I would tell anybody, you know, come see us, learn about the guard, um, and what comes with it. Not convenient. I ain't going to lie to anybody, but man, the opportunity is there if you want to take them.

• 2:07:00Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Yep. Uh, people can find the guard, uh, Instagram and Twitter, X, VT National Guard. So that's Vermont National Guard, VT National Guard, Facebook Vermont National Guard and the internet is VT dot public dot NG dot mil.

• 2:07:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:07:17Jocko Willink?

  So that's where we can find you guys. Um, Dave, any, any other questions, comments from you?

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  As soon as I got to Ramadi, the first thing I did was sign over custody of all the Anglico gear. I was the senior Anglico guy. I signed over all the gear. You know, the radios, the weapons, everything. They lay everything out on this big, huge thing on the ground and we just signed for it, turn over custody. And part of that custody was three Humvees. I had three Humvees for the three teams. And I'm there, I don't know, 72 hours, I sign over custody of these Humvees, and I don't know who or where, I have no idea, but somebody's like, hey, if you drive these Humvees down to this, there's like a warehouse, a couple of streets up on Camp Ramadi, they'll put bulletproof glass for your turret gunner. And I kind of look over at like Corporal Speller, one of the drivers, and he's like,

• 2:08:08Speaker 01

  okay. And I'm like, go, I didn't even like, just go try to find this thing. It was like a kind of like a word of mouth. And he goes and he comes back like a couple hours later and he's like, all right, the first truck's done, we'll get the other two done. I'm like, oh, Roger that. No idea what it is. And that saved my turret gunner's life. And that's a, a function of my experience is if I want to give credit to who taught me how to fight in a war, it was the, it was the guardsmen that were on the ground in Ramadi for almost a year when I got there, that had all that loss, all those casualties, but all those lessons learned, and they just freely handed them over to me. And I thank God it listened.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  But that is my connection to you and to your guardsmen was everything you had endured, you gave to me. And I maybe helped a little bit with, with Jago's guys and ultimately trying to pass it on. But that's my recollection of, of your men and, and the people involved in that was trying to help me out. And they did. And I didn't piece it all together now until you're telling that story about the Pope glass, but that was what you guys were doing. And it was awesome. And I was the beneficiary of that. So I'm happy to be here and I wanted to say thanks.

• 2:09:18Speaker 02

  Well, we appreciate having you. And again, I wish I'd have learned about you six months prior. We could have done some good work together.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 2:09:25Jocko Willink?

  General, any, sir, any, any, any final thoughts?

• 2:09:28Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, actually, I've been thinking about this and I found some things. And since we were there at the same time and for both of you, and I've got one.

• 2:09:38Speaker 02

  Got one for Leaf as well. Leaf was talking in a dichotomy of leadership about the BBIAD at OP-293 where Brian Litendra and Joe Proctor were killed. They got that bad guy. They went and they found him. And I remember listening in the car saying, and he was describing the incident, I'm like, I'll be damned. So I've got something for him if you see him or if you can mail it to him. But I found some, if any of you have one, if you don't, that's just wrong. These are our Task Force Sabre coins. Very few left. They are vintage. So, Operation Iraqi Fidam 0507, 1st Battalion, 172nd Armor, but it

• 2:10:21Speaker 02

  has all of our units represented on the back. Mississippi, California, Kuwait, Iraq, that's where we were. What do we give you that one?

• 2:10:29Speaker 03

  Outstanding.

• 2:10:30Speaker 02

  And then Jeff, obviously, we've got one for Leaf as well.

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  Sir.

• 2:10:34Speaker 02

  And also to give you my coin, which is a small thing, token of appreciation. One, thanks for having me on. There's a story to tell and I just appreciate the opportunity of being able to tell it. Appreciate your service and what you continue to do for us, for veterans, and for both of you. You're just phenomenal. But on the front of the coin is a symbol of office for the Adjutant General. In the back of the coin, it has our 06 commands represented, and it's presented for excellence. But the top of the coin is the first part of the order issued by General John Sedgwick, who was a commander of the 6th US Corps leading up to the Battle of Gettysburg. The Corps was in Marshfield, Maryland, 37 miles away

• 2:11:19Speaker 02

  from the Gettysburg Battlefield. And the scouts came in and told General Sedgwick, there's a big one coming, you gotta move the Corps, which meant a 37-mile forced march. And it was then that General Sedgwick, knowing Vermont's reputation for hard marching and never running from a fight, issued the order, put the Vermonters ahead and keep the column well closed. So, thank you both for being a part of it. It matters. Part of the story. Keep telling it, man. Sincerely appreciate it.

• 2:11:48Speaker 03

  Outstanding. Yeah.

• 2:11:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, outstanding stuff. General Knight, sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for sharing your stories, you know, these lessons learned. Most important, thanks for your service, you know, not only the Coast Guard, which thanks for your service in the Coast Guard, but the service of you and your guys, the 1172 Ramadi, that you guys set conditions for us. You guys taught us how to fight. And you made incredible, incredible sacrifices

• 2:12:19Jocko Willink?

  to achieve victory in that city. And we'll never forget you guys, what your battalion and what the brigade did. Thank you.

• 2:12:26Speaker 01

  Much appreciated, Jocko. God bless.

• 2:12:28Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir.

• 2:12:31Jocko Willink?

  And with that, General Greg Knight has left the building.

• 2:12:36Jocko Willink?

  Echo is back, joining us. Dave was in the, in the seat for that one. Pretty awesome to link up with him again, huh? Yeah, that was awesome. Man, it's, um,

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  you think about, you know, we, we spent another probably hour on either side of the podcast, just reminiscing and stuff and you know, you think about all the, the service and sacrifice from those guys, it's just

• 2:12:59Jocko Willink?

  heroic, heroic group of people. So, pretty awesome to have General Knight on here to talk through some of that and just bring back a lot of memories. So, definitely appreciate General Knight showing up here. Um, yeah. And if you want to support what we're doing here, and you want to support yourself too, at the same time, check out Jocko Fuel.

• 2:13:23Jocko Willink?

  What's, what's up with the creatine right now, Dave Berke?

• 2:13:25Speaker 01

  I have, I have, um, I've learned the the cognitive benefits of creatine,

• 2:13:33Speaker 01

  which I did not fully understand, but

• 2:13:35Jocko Willink?

  How did you recognize him? Or what made you recognize it?

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  I didn't know that he was contributing to that. I was always under the impression like

• 2:13:42Jocko Willink?

  We're getting smarter?

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  No, what I was saying was I always thought creatine was really just like a recovery for, for lifting and all the physical benefits of it. But as I've gotten more education on that, the, the point behind is my, my wife is a full-time creatine user now. So we have both converted to the daily Jocko creatine. But it's more than just like, hey, you know, we're working out, we're recovering faster. There's a cognitive benefit to it that's undeniable and kind of in her world of, you know, health and wellness and things like that, like we're total users of that.

• 2:14:10Jocko Willink?

  How many grams a day are you doing?

• 2:14:12Speaker 01

  I am varying between five and 10.

• 2:14:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:14:15Speaker 01

  She's five straight up. I'm like seven and a half trending towards 10.

• 2:14:19Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, where you at? Full 10?

• 2:14:21Speaker 03

  10.

• 2:14:21Jocko Willink?

  Morning, night?

• 2:14:22Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:14:23Jocko Willink?

  Two in the morning?

• 2:14:26Speaker 03

  Creatine, hydrate, water, morning.

• 2:14:29Jocko Willink?

  That's the, that's the, that's the system you got going on. Well, whatever you need for that stuff, check out jockofuel.com and you get that stuff. Good for you. Really good for you. Also, it's available now at Hy-Vee, which is awesome, and a bunch of other places around the country. So jockofuel.com, get your protein, get your energy drinks. I'm on my second energy drink of the day and I'm feeling very good about that one.

• 2:14:53Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 2:14:54Jocko Willink?

  Also, originusa.com. It's where you can get American-made products. We're just up at camp.

• 2:15:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:15:00Jocko Willink?

  Jiu-Jitsu camp.

• 2:15:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:02Jocko Willink?

  And it was cool because they have a store there and you just walk in and you're surrounded by freedom. Surrounded by freedom.

• 2:15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:10Jocko Willink?

  Everything made in America, jeans, boots, these, just everything. And what's, it's, when you get to hold stuff, this is, this is a hard thing for an online clothing store, online clothing company, which we are, is you, you don't get to hold it, right? You look at a picture, you look at a bunch of different pictures, 360 spin view, different models, but you're like, all this stuff, but you're still like, well, how would it actually fit me? You know what I mean? But when you go into the store, you're like, oh, this stuff is awesome. It's just awesome stuff. Originusa.com. And we got, like, if you do buy something, you need to return it, it's no factor. It's real easy. Print out the shipping label. It's like, we, we got that stuff done to a science too.

• 2:15:53Jocko Willink?

  And it's all made 100% in America. So check out originusa.com, as they say.

• 2:16:00Speaker 03

  It's true. Also, jocko store.com, we're representing Dave Berke. Good deal, Dave, representing the independents. That was a hot commodity when it came out.

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  I got both.

• 2:16:10Speaker 03

  Very happy to see that you have that.

• 2:16:12Jocko Willink?

  But you got the version, version five?

• 2:16:14Speaker 03

  Oh, the discipline equals freedom. Yep. 005. I learned that from you, by the way, the three digits.

• 2:16:19Jocko Willink?

  Just like in anticipation of hundreds of versions over the coming decades.

• 2:16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, you never know. But yes, yeah, those are five, five colors or four colors, by the way. Or what do they call them? Colorways.

• 2:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, come on.

• 2:16:32Speaker 03

  Come on the colorway, bruh. Colorway, I just learned that too, but. Um, the two that are, uh, what do you call they're like not as obvious, but really good when you put it on.

• 2:16:41Jocko Willink?

  What is it?

• 2:16:41Speaker 03

  The white on white and the black on black called blacked out and in the clear.

• 2:16:48Jocko Willink?

  Bro, in the clear is a great expression. It's a great expression. That was one of my, my platoon chief when I was at seven, he would just be like, oh, he said that in the clear.

• 2:17:01Jocko Willink?

  Classic stuff.

• 2:17:02Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. But yeah, those are good. Also shirt locker, subscription scenario, new design every month. Yeah, yeah. There's some good ones coming up. I got a Halloween one coming. I gotta put it this way. If you like metal.

• 2:17:19Jocko Willink?

  As in the music.

• 2:17:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, you know, what have you. Maybe keep, yeah, yeah, you know, keep your eye. But anyway, yeah, go jocko store.com. If you want to click on the shirt locker, you can kind of check it out. See what it's all about. Um, but it's on there. And then, yeah, a lot of discipline equals freedom. Good. Oh, there's a new good shirt coming out too, by the way. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:37Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 2:17:38Speaker 03

  Version three point O.

• 2:17:40Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:17:43Jocko Willink?

  Books, Dave Berke sitting here. I'm sitting here looking at you. This is the galley copy of your book, the galley, meaning it's like a pre advanced readers edition.

• 2:17:54Jocko Willink?

  Goes on sale October 21st.

• 2:17:59Jocko Willink?

  You ready for it to come out?

• 2:18:00Speaker 03

  I'm ready.

• 2:18:00Jocko Willink?

  You ready for it to rock? I wrote the foreword to it. It's probably the best part of the book is my foreword.

• 2:18:08Jocko Willink?

  Somebody pointed out that on the cover, you've got what two F 18s, an F 22 and an F 35.

• 2:18:14Speaker 03

  And an F 16.

• 2:18:18Speaker 03

  Got to get them all.

• 2:18:19Jocko Willink?

  Damn dude.

• 2:18:21Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you to write it?

• 2:18:23Speaker 03

  It took a long time to write it.

• 2:18:25Jocko Willink?

  Is it, do you count the iterations that you sent me in the beginning where I was like, bro, what even is this?

• 2:18:30Speaker 03

  Yes. Without those iterations, this book doesn't get written.

• 2:18:33Jocko Willink?

  So it's so cool. I, I like, you know, one thing that's cool about computers, we have the very first attempted chapter of extreme ownership, the first version of extreme ownership. So bad. It's so bad. When you read it, you're just like, you know, not, not the concepts obviously are good, but the, the writing, you're just terrible. So it was, it's, it was awesome to watch you go through iterative, iterative, iterative, it's just getting better, better, better. And now you're pretty stoked.

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  The Ford is good enough to buy the whole book. Yeah, but I am stoked that it's done and I'm excited for it to get out there.

• 2:19:08Jocko Willink?

  Now, what's cool about it for me is like, you know, you and I spend a lot of time, obviously, talking about our shared experience on the battlefield, but not as much time talking about everything else you did in your career. You were only with me for six months. So you have, what, a 24 year career? And then obviously, everything we do at Ash, I'm kind of abreast of, but yeah, hearing some of your lessons learned from the rest of your career. It was pretty awesome, especially.

• 2:19:37Jocko Willink?

  What was the the chapter where they're just like, hey, Dave Berke, you know, you're you're you could be the greatest lieutenant?

• 2:19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's the? The the line is Lieutenant Burke would be one of the best lieutenants in the platoon if he didn't already think that he was. Which was my platoon commander, my very first first six months of being an officer in the Marine Corps is the basic school. You get something called peer evaluations. It's what your what your peers think of you. And I went into that like ranked eighth out of 250 in my company. And I'm like, I'm one of the best in the company.

• 2:20:13Jocko Willink?

  So you went in ranked eighth in terms of performance, military inspections, tactical stuff.

• 2:20:19Speaker 01

  They grade you on?

• 2:20:20Jocko Willink?

  Number eight out of 250?

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they grade you on physical fitness, leadership and military skills. I was ranked number eight.

• 2:20:26Jocko Willink?

  How'd the peer review go?

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  The peer review did not go that well. It was, that's the line is like, hey, this is what they think of you. They think you'd be one of the best lieutenants if you didn't already think that you was. That was that was the chapter on humility. And thank God I learned it then and not never or 10 years later. So.

• 2:20:44Jocko Willink?

  What's scary is how, I'm guessing, and according to the book, how completely unaware you were of that.

• 2:20:50Speaker 01

  I was 100% sure I was going to be showered with praise because I was top of my class. Why wouldn't I? And I was very confident that the people that that didn't think I was awesome, they were the problem.

• 2:21:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they were just turrets, of course. Yeah, that's one of the scariest things about. But the one of the scariest things about being a human being is that things can be happening around you that you're not aware of and you don't recognize that it's happening. And that is just absolutely terrible because let's face it, if somebody slaps you in the head and says, hey dude, your, your ego is too big, you can go, oh damn, I didn't know that. But when you're just going through life, just thinking everything is great and you don't even realize what people think of you, the lack of awareness is terrible. So there's one of the many lessons in that book. The other thing that's cool, I mean, for me is the, how you're relating some of the, some

• 2:21:45Jocko Willink?

  of the flying stuff to leadership and decision making is just, it's just an awesome book. So the need to lead, October 21st, just order it right now, get a first edition. Let's face it, you don't want a second edition. We, you know, are you going to sign second editions?

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  Only if required, only that first edition gets signed.

• 2:22:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you have to, you have to, if you bring a second edition to me, you got to apologize. Hey, I'm sorry, it's a second edition, but actually the funny thing is they only made, I think they made like 10 or 12,000 copies, true first editions of Extreme Ownership. So you don't have to apologize, I'll sign your book, but uh, because we should have made more. So there you go. Check out the book, Need to Lead, I've written a bunch of books too about leadership, put in some kids books as well. Uh, Ashlon Front, speaking of leadership, we have a leadership consulting company called Ashlon Front, go to ashlonfront.com. Whatever you need inside your organization to help you get squared away, we will help you. And we also have an online training academy, check out extremeownership.com for that information. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their

• 2:22:49Jocko Willink?

  families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom. She's got an incredible organization. She helps out so many of our veterans. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also check out HeroesAndHorses.org and finally Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. And listen, some of you might've been thinking today, I might want to go in the National Guard. I think that's a good call. If I look back at my life, going in the National Guard would have been awesome. So you, like I said, a lot of people hit me up with the, "Hey, I really never served, but I want to serve." Go serve. Go be in the National Guard. For the Vermont National

• 2:23:30Jocko Willink?

  Guard, you can check out Twitter and Instagram, VT National Guard, @VTNationalGuard, Facebook, Vermont National Guard, internet VT-public-ng-mil.

• 2:23:43Jocko Willink?

  And then for us, I'm at Jocko Willink, Echo's at Echo Charles, Dave's at David R. Burke, on the various social activities. And also, you can check out Jaco.com. Once again, thanks to General Greg Knight for joining us. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned. Most important, thank you for your service in Ramadi and for your continued service today in the Vermont National Guard. And thanks to all our service members in every branch with a specific salute to our National Guard soldiers. And to be even more specific, those soldiers of the 1172 and the entire 228 Brigade Combat Team, thank you all for your incredible service

• 2:24:23Jocko Willink?

  and sacrifice in Ramadi, Iraq, 2005, 2006. We'll never forget what you guys did. And we thank you for your service and your sacrifice. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all of the first responders. Thank you for your service, keeping us safe on the home front. And everyone else out there, let's remember some powerful advice from General Knight. Quote, "There is a difference between effective and good leadership. Leaders strive to not only be effective leaders, but good ones. Learning from subordinates. Learning from subordinates. Imagine that. And placing the agenda of the organization

• 2:25:05Jocko Willink?

  above their own. By good leaders cultivating the respect of subordinates through listening, asking for advice, mentoring, and keeping them informed when making decisions, we may find and develop those good future leaders we are looking for." End quote. So there you go. Listen to your people. And that's all we've got for tonight. Till next time. This is Dave and Echo and Jocko. Out.