364: You Only Fail if You Quit, With Record Breaking Fighter Pilot, Dick Rutan

Retired United States Air Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force officer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_Intercept_Officer and fighter pilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighter_pilot, test pilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_pilot, and record-breaking aviator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviator who in 1986 piloted the Voyager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Voyager aircraft on the first non-stop, non-refueled around-the-world flight with co-pilot Jeana Yeager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeana_Yeager. He was born in Loma Linda, California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loma_Linda,_California, where he gained an interest in flying at a young age. He is the older brother of famed aerospace designer Burt Rutan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Rutan, whose many earlier original designs Dick piloted on class record-breaking flights, including Voyager. 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 364 with Dave Berke and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Dave.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  The Misties who volunteered were among the most talented, hardworking, courageous group of men I have ever encountered. To a man, they were remarkable pilots. They worked long hours, days on end, to get the program started. During the early missions, we were consumed with establishing procedures, deciding on tactics, constructing our maps, testing varied equipment and aircraft configurations, and learning the area. It was really hunt and peck, trial by fire. We decided on three-cycle missions, using two in-flight refuelings.

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  We were looking for road traffic, storage areas, and SAMs, which were beginning to move into the lower parts of the pack. Those early Misty missions were really hairy as we experimented with how to survive in a dense AAA environment while marking targets and directing strikes. Though faxing was not a new concept, the US Air Force had employed fax since World War II. Fast faxing was new, and we were truly plowing new ground. We had to learn to operate and survive in a very dense threat environment while operating for extended periods at low altitude. Dicey stuff.

• 1:28Jocko Willink?

  Our loss rate during the first six months was 42%, a steep, expensive, and tragic learning curve. I cannot emphasize too strongly the courage of the first group of men who raised their hands. They were going where no jet pilot had ever been before, to do dangerous things no one had ever done.

• 1:55Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book, a book called Misty, which is, the book is made up of a bunch of first-person accounts of Misty pilots in Vietnam. And that particular account was from a man named Bud Day, who was the founder and the first commanding officer of the Misty Squadron, which he commanded for about two months before he was shot down. He was captured by the communists. He actually escaped his initial captivity, but he was shot and recaptured. And then he was sent to the Hanoi Hilton where he spent five years and seven months as a POW.

• 2:42Jocko Willink?

  Upon his release, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for his personal bravery and his leadership in the face of extreme enemy pressure.

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  But even while he was in captivity, the rest of the squadron, the Misty pilots, they continued on. They flew the F-100 Super Sabre, which is known as the HUN.

• 3:10Jocko Willink?

  There were 157 pilots that served as Misty Fast Facts. And FACS stands for Forward Air Controller. They were around from 1967 to 1970.

• 3:24Jocko Willink?

  And as Forward Air Controllers, that meant they did that from the sky. They were marking targets and directing other aircraft to take out those targets. And it was a very dangerous job, especially because the Misty pilots did a bulk of their flying in North Vietnam, where they were exposed to the most intense of the enemy air defenses.

• 3:47Jocko Willink?

  And of those 157 pilots, 34 were shot down, two were shot down twice, 23 were recovered, four were captured by the enemy, seven were killed in action.

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  But they were able to accomplish their mission. They were able to get bombs on target, destroy critical enemy nodes and deliver close air support to troops on the ground.

• 4:19Jocko Willink?

  And it's an honor to have one of those pilots with us here tonight to discuss his experiences and his lessons learned. His name is Dick Rutan. He served 20 years in the Air Force. And in addition to his combat experience, he was a test pilot, a record-setting pilot. He piloted the first plane around the world with no stopping and no refueling. He's also an author. He wrote a book called Voyager and another book called The Next Five Minutes.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  And it's an honor, like I said, to have him here tonight, Dick Rutan. Dick, thank you so much for joining us.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Well, it's great to be here. I'm a great fan.

• 5:03Jocko Willink?

  It's a... Man, when you think about this new mission that you guys picked up and what it's like to learn when your learning curve is your learning in combat. That's a, that's a rough thing to get into.

• 5:21Jocko Willink?

  A rough way to try and figure things out.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Well, trial by fire. That's why it's called the, initially it was called the Voyager or the, uh, the Misty Experits. The Misty Experiment. There we go. Anyway, there's a, there's a thing on PBS that's very popular now about that that was made up.

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, about the Misty pilots?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Well, it's called Misty, The Misty, uh, The Misty Experiment. It's on PBS.

• 5:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, well, I haven't seen that one yet, but I'll definitely check that one out because it's... Anytime you're exploring new ground like that and you're doing it in a combat situation, that's a scary thing to do. And you guys were definitely doing it.

• 6:08Jocko Willink?

  So let's, before we get into that, let's, let's start at the beginning and about kind of where you came from in the beginning. And I'm going to go to your, so your book, you've written two books. This one's called The Next Five Minutes, Embracing the Impossible. And you say in this book, "My father, Dr. George A. Rutan, always said he had an inkling that my life would involve adventure. Even as a baby in diapers, I was exploring our farm in rural Oregon. I wanted to see and touch and explore it all. Looking back, I realize that our parents gave their children the precious gift of freedom to explore the world and experience life. They never held us back from doing anything, even if some thought it risky or dangerous.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  My dad, lovingly called Pop, was a product of the Great Depression and a World War II Navy veteran. He took advantage of his VA benefits and put himself through dental school, then moved his family to Dinuba. Am I saying that right?

• 7:03Speaker 02

  That's right, Dinuba.

• 7:04Jocko Willink?

  Dinuba, a small agricultural heartland town, 35 miles southeast of Fresno, California. It was the perfect place to grow up, to fly Cessnas and Piper Cubs, to ride motorcycles, and to throw toilet paper out of an airplane over the high school during a Friday night football game. While riding my BSA motorcycle, I was often chased out of town by local cops, but usually found a way to ditch them by riding through neighborhood vineyards. I knew they couldn't catch me, although many tried. I enjoyed the thrill of this cat and mouse game, even when the officers would caution my parents about my unruliness." So there's a little glimpse into your, into your childhood. Sounds like you were a handful.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  No, it's great. Dinuba was an absolute fantastic place to grow up. Had the freedom, a lot of agriculture, and...

• 7:56Speaker 02

  That's when we learned how to fly little airplanes and it would be buzzing and throwing toilet paper out like they said.

• 8:04Jocko Willink?

  So what did your dad do in the Navy?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Dad got in at the very end of the war. In fact, he should have been exempt and he called up and there was a mistake someplace and they gave him a draft notice. He says, "Hey, I'm married and I have a family and I should be exempt." And they thought, "Well, yeah, you're right." But he says, "You know something, my country's at war. God damn it, I'm gonna go." And he did.

• 8:37Jocko Willink?

  And so what did he do in the Navy?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  He was, I think, he was a corpsman there and a farragut. In fact, that's up where we live right now on Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, by Lake Ponderay and there's a big, huge naval base up there. And that's where he spent the end of the war. He never made it into a ship or into combat or anything.

• 9:03Jocko Willink?

  And then he used his GI Bill to pay for dental school and became a dentist?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  That's right. Like many of those vets, they took advantage of that and I think it was probably one of the best investments our country ever made.

• 9:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then, you know, you've already talked to me, we're like two paragraphs into the beginning of the book and you're already talking about flying Cessnas. What was your first experience in a plane?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Well, it was right after World War II. I was just a little kid. I can't remember exactly when I was, but my mother, when Dad was going through dental school, we didn't have any money and for some reason, Mom took me out to a place called Fleabob there in Riverside. It's a little grass field and she bought an airplane ride for this little kid.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  And to this day, I can remember almost every detail of that experience. We went out there and we're gonna fly and that was a pretty neat thing. At that time, that airport was just a grass field someplace. And it was in a Piper, it's a J5 Piper Cub and the backseat was a little wider. And then that means that two people could sit there. Okay, well, they put mom and I in the back and when I sat down, I couldn't see out. You know, the windows were too high. And I said, there's no fine way that I'm gonna sit in this hole in this experience. So I stood up and grabbed onto the pilot's seat. And, you know, it was an old airplane.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  And I can still remember the stuffing and I can still remember what it smelled like. And I remember that the tires had no tread. And somebody came out and hand propped the airplane and got it going. And we accelerated in the big thrill of lifting off and seeing an entire new world that I had never experienced even existed. And for that 15 minutes that we flew over Riverside, and I still remember the famous Mission Inn. And had no idea that later on that I was gonna be honored with a set of wings in the Flyers Wall. But anyway, I looked down and it was so amazing.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  And it would, what I saw that day would change my life forever. Mom would say, her two sons, they had aviation fuel instead of blood. And they were not issued birth certificates, they were issued flight plans. And so, from that moment on, it was an extreme, I guess, abnormal fascination for aviation. And unfortunately, maybe at the expense of a more rounded character development. And I knew a lot about airplanes, everything. As I flew over, you could identify which one they were.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  And I knew what kind of motor engines they had and so forth. But the other things to make a rounded experience for growing up, I knew absolutely jack squat about any of that.

• 12:14Jocko Willink?

  So as you're growing up, so you definitely want to be a pilot?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 12:19Jocko Willink?

  Did you want to be a military pilot?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Uh, yes. Uh, to go back a little, to go back a little bit more. Uh, I grew up in the dawn of the victory of World War II. And this time I became fascinated with aviation. And then, and I was really fascinated about combat. And I found it very intriguing. And as I learned more about those guys that flew out of the 8th Air Force in East Anglia, in England. And those long missions in B-17s and B-24s. And I learned about the loss rates. You know, one group would come back and 600 beds would be empty. Who are these people that did that? When three fourths of them were casualties.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  And I thought, how in the hell? You know, it's one thing to go and do that once. But if you're the only one that comes back from your whole squadron with wounded onboard, how in the love of whatever do you get back in another airplane and do that again? I was fascinated. Who the hell are these people? And then you had to ask the question again. You know, I kind of wanted to be a warrior.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  I always thought it was the ultimate in human competition. Is where the pinnacle is where each other would compete for the ultimate prize, and that's your life.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And I was fascinated. How can I, could I do something like that? And I had to find out, one way or another.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  I had a learning experience, a learning problem. It was diagnosed just a few years ago, actually. When I was trying to write this book. And I was telling people how I read and how I process things, but it was a dysle- dysle- dyslexia. I forget what that is. Dyslectic. And I always had a hard time at school.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  But that fascination for whatever the warrior's life was, I don't know. I had to find out for myself. Now, every young warrior grows up and pretty soon he's a warrior and the time goes by and it becomes the age to be a warrior. Okay, I'm a young guy and I'm in the thing right now, this is warrior. And then you walk outside and look around and think, well, what war am I gonna fight? And it's a small window of opportunity, actually. And I looked around, frick, it was Vietnam. But I still had to find out. And that was something that was kind of gnawing in my back all that time. I couldn't wait to do that.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  I had to find out if little Dicky Rutan can do that. And, you know, our parents gave us some really important things. One of them was freedom. There's a world out there, I gave you life, you can make of it what you want. And I remember, well, my mom would take me to air shows. And this was in Merced, California, and I was a little kid. And I'll never forget that. I was walking up there and there was an RF-84, a reconnaissance, F-84 jet. Smelled like a jet, kerosene. And I remember looking in the windows, the camera windows, and they had scantily clad females in there and I thought, wow, this is really cool.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  And then I saw that pilot standing there and he looked really cool. Man, he had his G-suit on, his flight suit on, he had his wings and he was a pilot, man. And he was a flyer, he could go and fly that airplane. And I stood there and looked up at him and my mother, what she said right then was really important, kind of a turning place in my life. And my mom looked at me and she says, Dick, would you like to do that? I says, oh, God, would I ever. But then I said something to the fact that I don't think that I could ever achieve that.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  And she grabbed me by the neck, the nap, and she said in no uncertain terms, looked at me and she says, "If you want to do that, you can, and don't you ever say that you can't do something like that." And that was the motivation. Like she says, "You can do, if you can dream it, you can do it, and the only way to fail is if you quit." And to achieve all those things that you dream about, all you have to do is manage the motivation. And so on that day, in that Castle Air Force Base, in front of that F-84, she instilled the fact that I could really do that.

• 17:04Jocko Willink?

  Now, was she able to take that focus and get it towards your grades in school? Because according to your book...

• 17:10Speaker 02

  No, I always had problems in school.

• 17:12Jocko Willink?

  And you just, and that was driven somewhat by your dyslexia?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  It was by dyslexia, and nobody could, uh, nobody could identify it, or nobody could evaluate what the hell was Bert, was Dicky having a problem in school? In fact, my dad, uh, right after grade school, right after high school, he sent me down to a university, I think in Southern California, for an aptitude test. Hey, is this, you know, who is this kid? Is he, what's his aptitude is? Is he a college type and whatever? And I went down and took the test, and Pop came back and says, uh, "It scored very, very low in, well, like in English, is an example, uh, communication skills, but I, I was very

• 17:59Speaker 02

  extremely high in mechanical, uh, very high mechanical aptitude." And so then I wasn't going to be a college guy, obviously. And, uh, not to jump ahead too much, but I went in the Air Force right out of high school. And as I was going through advancement and so forth, to be a lieutenant colonel, I had to have a college degree. So, in that time, they had a bootstrap program. We're talking about motivation again, the bootstrap program. So here I am, I'm gonna be a lieutenant colonel. I got about eighteen years in the service, and they sent me off

• 18:38Speaker 02

  to Clean, Killen, Clean, Texas, the American Technological University, and for about a semester or whatever it was, three, four, five months. And I went out there by myself, and in a little apartment. Now, here this older guy, you know, he's been through Vietnam, and we've been through the Cold War, and setting nuclear alert and stuff. And I'm looking around at all these kids out here, drinking and raising hell and chasing girls. And I wasn't doing any of that. And it dawned on me, and I says, "Hey, you know, you did have problems with this." And I thought, "This is college, you know, jeez. I'm always scared

• 19:22Speaker 02

  of college. I wonder how I'll do." And then I thought what the motivation was. I got a family and two kids. I need to get promoted. And if I don't, I'm gonna give up retirement and all those other benefits and stuff. And the humility of coming back and failing this thing. And so, I figured out a way. I got a briefcase, and I put a tape recorder in it. And I sat down in that seat, right in front of that professor. And I didn't have anything else. I wasn't drinking, and I wasn't chasing girls or anything. So, every word that he had, I wrote notes, you know, detailed notes of this thing. And here this dyslexic

• 20:02Speaker 02

  kid, that had a problem in any kind of academic situation. He graduated with a BS degree.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  On the dean's list and a 4-0 average. Holy man, that is. And it's just, and it's just the motivation. See, you can accomplish anything if you can, all you have to do is manage the motivation. If you keep yourself motivated or motivate those around you. It's example of the world flight project. I kept thinking, and we had some horrible times, you know, challenges, the five and a half years with no money, having to build this big, huge airplane ourselves by hand. The flight test, dangerous as hell, I don't know how I ever survived that thing in this frail little airplane that was gonna go 29,000 miles. Wow.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  And, and when things were falling apart and I wanted to give up, about motivation again, I would go out in a special place in this little, crummy little airport, Mojave, abandoned, semi abandoned military field in Mojave, California, in the high desert, next to Edwards Air Force Base. And I have a special place that I would sit down in the hangar, by the hangar, looking the ramp and looking out over the desert. And, and it's some, you know, just insurmountable problem, difficulties. And I'd close my eyes and I would try to imagine what it would feel like to land at

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Edwards Air Force Base, having accomplished aviation's last milestone. And I'd close my eyes and let that feeling permeate to my psychic. And I'd realize, this is the last, you know, the last milestone in aviation, the unrefu world flight. And I'd think, and I'd allow, after thinking about that, I'd let it settle into my psychic and thought, you know, that'd feel pretty good.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  I'd feel pretty good. And for five and a half years, when I was really down and dejected, I'd sit out there and close my eyes and try to visualize that. And then that was manage, manage the motivation. And I found that that's really a key thing. And I try to tell people about that. If you can dream it, you can do it. But just manage the motivation and you can accomplish anything.

• 22:31Jocko Willink?

  Now, as you're growing up, you also, you've got your brother Bert, right?

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Right, brother Bert.

• 22:37Jocko Willink?

  And it sounds like you two are thick as thieves in everything that you're doing, right?

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Well, not really. We were five years apart. So therefore, we were never in the same school at the same time. I was gone, went to a high school and, and being five years apart, I was gone a year and before he even started. So, we weren't really all that close, I guess, in some ways.

• 23:00Jocko Willink?

  I guess it seems like you became close later.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, we were brothers. He was, you know, I was the guy that was riding motorcycles and getting chased by the cops and stuff. And buzzing around Friday night high school games and being the long-haired Elvis Presley haircut with dirty Levi's hanging on the last, the last hair on my ass and so forth. And, you know, he was the one that was more studious. I think that, that the education thing, the two brothers, he got a lot of, he got a lot of what I needed to go to school. Of course, I took away from him some of the mechanical part of it and so forth.

• 23:42Jocko Willink?

  And that's what, so you're growing up in the 50s, because you're born in what, 30, 38?

• 23:47Speaker 02

  38, right.

• 23:48Jocko Willink?

  So you're growing up in the 50s, this is in California, in the 50s, Elvis, motorcycles, Levi's jeans, like you had the whole thing going on right out of a movie.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  American Graffiti.

• 24:00Jocko Willink?

  That's it.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  If you remember that movie, I mean, I thought that they had done American Graffiti in my little town. Because all those characters, I knew every one of them. I went to school with them.

• 24:12Jocko Willink?

  Now, you also mentioned in the book that you were scared of heights.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:16Jocko Willink?

  What was that all about?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Well, phobia.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Well, I call it, it's Ed's phobia, I think. I was really, really, and my brother and I both have Ed's phobia. If you get, I couldn't ride in glass elevators. Or I couldn't look off a tall building, or look over a cliff. And I didn't realize, you know, just later on during the Voyager project, is that, I always thought that phobias were just sissy things. You know, so what, you're scared of heights? Not heights, but you're scared of, of, what, spiders? Or scared of being in a tight place? And I just thought that was, that was a sissy thing.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  But it was, but the fear of heights, it, it became a debilitating phobia. That I'd go over next to a cliff or something, and become cold and clammy, uncontrolled shaking, extreme heart rates, inability to, and the ragged edge of being panicked. And so, I've had that all my life, I guess. I just, how do you cure to that? Stay the hell away from high places, don't look off big cliffs and stuff. And I thought everybody had that. You know, you're supposed to be afraid of being high, for crying out loud. So I just thought that was normal.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Until, that particular thing happened during the stress of our Voyager project. And there was a lot of stress, mental stress and stuff, for that. You know, no money, trying to do it with volunteers, people, volunteers would not show up, they'd only do half of it, and it was very stressful. Especially with no money. And the thing is, to hell with it, we're gonna do it anyway. It's just, it's a neat thing. So I took up, took off in my Long Easy that I built. One of the first models that my brother designed, called Long Easy.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  And I took off one day, and I did the first turn out of traffic, and it hit me. That debilitating phobia happened to me in flight. I never had any problem in flight, just looking over the edge of a cliff. And it hit me. It hit me so bad. Cold and clammy, heart rate, inability to do almost anything.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  And it skidded the airplane around and finally damn near crashed on the runway trying to get back. And taxied in and then sitting there by myself and the heart rate would slow down. I could kind of relax a little bit. And then I thought, holy crap, Dick, you're right in the middle of the Voyager project. This is your project. You're going to be the commander. You're going to be the guy, you're going to be the guy that lands at Edwards Air Force Base and taxied up for the whole world, having accomplished this great milestone achievement. And I can't fly. I'm screwed. What the hell am I going to do?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  I knew right away that I could never tell anybody about that. You know, who in the hell would ever fly with me again? And rightfully so, I wouldn't blame them. I said, this guy, for some unknown reason, could have a debilitating phobia. I mean, that's a grounding thing. And it so happened, and it was in Las Vegas, it was in the Hilton Hotel, and I was sitting at the bar, that some real strange things happened, fortuitous. What happened?

• 28:05Jocko Willink?

  At the bars in Vegas?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Well, it was in a bar, but that wasn't the point. I remember, for some reason, I sat down next to some guy and we struck up a conversation. And I found out that he ran, he runs a clinic for fear of flight. You know, people have that, passengers, and people come in and they go through a program about trying to overcome fear of flight. I said, what? Boy, I needed to know about this. And so as it turned out, he was very forthcoming. And I would ask questions, you know, the details of the program and how you do that. What is, I mean, how do you cure people of this thing, for crying out loud?

• 28:51Speaker 02

  And he was very forthcoming. And boy, old Dick, he was taking detailed memory notes of everything that happened. Then I realized, Dick, you can never tell anybody about that. In fact, I don't think anybody ever knew until they read my book.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  And I did it. It was a self, it was a self-help, a self-cure thing. And it was really incredible. And at the end of my self, my self-taught clinic, I have no fear of flights, no fear of heights, any place. I thought, wait a minute, you're supposed to have a little bit of fear because if you fall, you could get hurt really bad.

• 29:31Jocko Willink?

  What was the crux of getting through that?

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Well,

• 29:36Jocko Willink?

  Because just so for context for everybody that doesn't know the whole story, I mean, when you're working on the Voyager flight, when you had this, so you've been, you've been scared of heights your whole life, but you'd also been a pilot your whole life at this point. You'd flown in Vietnam, you'd parachuted, you'd done a bunch of things that had to do with heights. But then for some reason, in the middle of this effort to go and fly around the world in the Voyager aircraft, you're getting another little aircraft, which by the way, I look at your, your brother's little aircrafts that he built and they're like little one-seaters. They look like you could, they look like a little model airplane that I used to build, right? So maybe that's what you were scared of. But you get up on this flight and all of a sudden you get this, this height panic.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, see, when this thing, the panic happened, I've already been through my civilian thing. And I was a flight instructor and I went in the air force and went through pilot training, went through combat, set nuclear alert, all those things have already been done before I finally did my 20 years in one microsecond, by the way. And we could talk about what was going on then. So anyway, I got out at 20 years in a microsecond and then joined my brother and then we did the round the world thing. So I had, I had flown a lot and none of that phobia or scariness or anything ever manifests itself in flight. You know, I could, you know, I'm a fighter pilot for crying out loud. We do air shows.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  And I just felt right at home and there was never any situation until that one particular thing, under a lot of stress, that it finally crawled out of my psyche and hit me really bad and I had to cure myself of it.

• 31:13Jocko Willink?

  So what did you do to cure yourself, though?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, you have to get all the symptoms going, I mean, real quick. And so I was in, you know, there's some of these hotels that have an atrium inside and you come out of your room and you're looking inside the hotel and they're, you know, you look over the edge and it's really a long ways down there. And you go up to the edge and you get all the symptoms going, all of them. And it took all the willpower I could, almost drag myself, grab the edge and pull myself up and look at it. And the more that I'd look down, the more, the more this phobia would just explode into my psyche. Heart rate, breath, skin cold and clammy and uncontrolled shaking.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  And the first thing you do with this, you get all the symptoms going. And then you identify one part of your body and you concentrate on it totally, on that particular thing. And I chose my right elbow, because it was shaking. And I'd concentrate as much as I can and I finally, after maybe, no kidding, after 20 minutes, I could get that one elbow to stop, to stop shaking. And I says, oh, that's really cool. I says, well, I'm gonna try the left elbow. So as soon as I would go to work on the other elbow, the first one would start again. Then you'd have to go back and do that.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  But that was, that was a procedure that you would get one, you would slow down one arm and then you were able to, to control it while you went to the other arm, or the right leg, or the right calf, or one part of it. And so you go through this procedure, you drag yourself up there and, and this phobia would just explode on you. Everything was going. Then you go down, right elbow, left elbow, right knee, left knee, until you got them all calm. And if you concentrate on it, you can keep them quiet. But as soon as you would try to do something else, boom, they'd explode again. But what I'm getting at is, is you go through this procedure.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  And you can finally start to control everything. And then your skin isn't cold and clammy anymore. And you feel relaxed. But the problem was, I can control my breathing. I can decide when to take a breath or not. But what do you do about this damn thing in my chest that's going like mad? Really high, really high heart rates. And then there was this thing called biofeedback. And they talk about how you go with biofeedback to be able to control your heart rate. And then pretty soon, I could go up and if the tins would happen, I'd go right over left over left and just calm everything down.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  And then eventually, eventually, I had no symptoms whatsoever. Not even a normal fear of heights on the edge.

• 34:10Jocko Willink?

  Got it solved.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  And then, but then you think, hey, there's this thing back in the corner of Dick's Psychic someplace, this gremlin could crawl out again. That's why I could never tell anybody about that.

• 34:28Jocko Willink?

  You gotta keep that one quiet, especially the insurance people.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Especially the insurance or the FAA and my medical. Because I knew that that was a grounding, a big time grounding item for the FAA.

• 34:42Jocko Willink?

  So let's get back, I want to get back to sort of how you got into flying in the first place. I'm going to go back to the book here. And again, look, the book is awesome. So many, so many details inside the book. Just go get the book. I'm going to read some highlights from it. But there's plenty more highlights that we're not going to read. But just to kind of talk through the story a little bit, you say this, "Throughout my childhood, I struggled with academics, a struggle that was almost debilitating. Regardless of how hard I might try, it seemed I was doomed for failure. I was held back a year in elementary school, but nothing improved. By the time I reached high school, Pop decided to have a battery of tests run to help me clarify my strengths and weaknesses. It was determined I had exceptional high mechanical aptitude, but skills in other areas suggested I was not college material."

• 35:27Jocko Willink?

  Decades later would pass before it was discovered I suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia. What I did know was I had a gift and a passion for flying and aspired to make my mark doing something in that field. Fresh out of high school, I could hardly wait for the opportunity to fly high in the stratosphere and make those white vapor contrails. So I signed up for the United States Air Force Aviation Cadet Program. After taking all the tests and going through the rigorous physical and written exams, I was told I was qualified. I was not qualified to be a pilot, even though I was already a civilian, commercial pilot, but they had a special program for me. I could become a navigator.

• 36:05Jocko Willink?

  I couldn't believe it. I was fully physically qualified. I had fighter pilots' eyes, but did not score the best in academics. I suspected I'd... that that had everything to do with their decision to reject my application for pilot training. I complained to my Air Force Recruiting Sergeant. He told me all I had to do was, when I got to pre-flight at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, was tell them about my civilian pilot status and they would change me right over to pilot training. That was the first... that was one of the first lies told to me in my new way of life away from home. It all seemed so simple, and I signed the dotted line. This is the first time I'd ever been away from my mom, my family, and the safety of my sheltered life. I stepped off the bus in my low-hanging Levi's and long, greased-up

• 36:48Jocko Willink?

  Elvis haircut. I soon discovered I would lose my cool hair and during the next two weeks would only be allowed to mutter "yes sir" or "no sir." This one shit-hot civilian pilot was now off to nav school. It nearly broke my heart, along with my spirit. The cadets assigned to pilot training were issued brand-new shiny helmets, while I was issued three large books of celestial sight reduction tables.

• 37:12Jocko Willink?

  So that's your introduction. You get... you get, uh, this assignment to be a navigator. You go to nav class. You end up as a backseater, as a RIO, a radar intercept officer. You get stationed in Oregon. From Oregon, uh, you get stationed up in Iceland. And then when you get to Iceland, you... you apply for pilot training again, and you get accepted. And when you get accepted for that, you get assigned to an air transport squadron, uh, which is flying in and out of Vietnam, which now the Vietnam War is kinda getting... kinda getting started. Or starting to escalate, I should say.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, what happened?

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had no interest in navigating big cargo airplanes back and forth. So then I went into the fighters, you know, I was flying fighters, but in the backseat as a radar intercept officer. And then I applied for pilot training. For some reason, if I fly in the backseat long enough, according to the Air Force, I got a lot smarter. So then I was smart enough that I could go to pilot training. So while I was waiting to go to pilot training, I was assigned to C-124s cargo, big old, they called it big old shaky. And while I was waiting to go to pilot training, I was actually flying as a navigator now in this big, huge cargo airplane.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  This is in, you know, right in the middle of Vietnam War, back and forth to Saigon. And as it turned out, those hours that I spent at 8,000 feet in a C-124 waiting to go to pilot training gave me some incredible understanding of what I was going to face later on in life to fly this Voyager around the world. And as it turned out, having had that nav experience, that may have been, that may have been critical to the success of the flight around the world in the Voyager. So I don't know, maybe, maybe fate goes around and it comes back around again. Who can tell?

• 39:22Jocko Willink?

  So, but you do end up, finally, like you said, you got a lot smarter as you, as you flew around in the back of the airplanes. You got a lot smarter, you got accepted for pilot training, and you say this in the book, "Before I knew it, pilot training 67D was ready to begin, and my time as a navigator came to an end. I was off, off to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, right on the Rio Grande River, west of San Antonio. Although I didn't appreciate it at the time, my experience as a navigator over vast stretches of open ocean and training with radar would prove to be a vital factor in the successful completion of Voyager's flight years later. Because of my academic challenges, I knew I had to work clever, work hard, and maintain my motivation to be successful in pilot training.

• 40:04Jocko Willink?

  I would sneak a tape recorder into class by concealing it in my briefcase. I made it a point to sit from center row so I could capture every word of each lecture. With the help of these taped lectures, I arduously wrote impeccable notes to study from and aced every test." I graduated number one in my pilot training class. Granted, I had a huge head start with more flying time logged than many of the instructors. But I never told anyone I was a civilian pilot. I was a civilian instructor pilot. I let them believe I was just that good.

• 40:35Jocko Willink?

  Upon graduation, I was awarded my dream. The F-100 Super Sabre, affectionately known as the HUN. Out of 360 graduates, there were only two F-100s offered. With that, I was off to real life and death combat in Vietnam. So you kept it a secret that you were a civilian pilot? How many hours did you have?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Well, see, I wanted to go to the Air Force pilot training. And I can go back to that day that I stood there and at March Air Force Base, looking up at that fighter pilot. You know, he was a god from a different place. And here, after all those, the interim years, I was going to be able to do that. Now, I always made a joke that I always thought if you want to be a real Air Force fighter pilot, you had to go to Luke Air Force Base and you had to, you had to train in the HUN. It was a difficult airplane to fly. It had some really strange things about the airplane. But that was more of a challenge. I says, if you want to be a real fighter pilot, you gotta go through Luke Guttery School, getting the F-100.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  And so I talked about that during my pilot training days. You know, I was bragging, I said, I'm gonna get an F-100. And I says, bullshit Route 10. I says, they haven't given an undergraduate pilot training, right out of training, to go directly to fly this really weird airplane. I says, that's all right. I says, all I have to have is one, because I'm gonna graduate out of 360 pilots in five different bases. I was number one. Well, you're talking about a heads up. I had to bite my, bite my tongue a lot because I was a, you know, I was a civilian flight instructor. But I had been wanting to go to pilot training all my life. I wanted to go to that training.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  And, and I didn't want anybody given any shortcuts or bragging about, hey, I'm already a pilot. And the old, old habit is, it says, that's a lollipop that I've been wanting to lick for a long time. And I want to look, and I want to lick every darn bit of that.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Now, it came to the point when you graduate, the class standings, and this is kind of more or less a metaphor, that they have all the assignments written on the, on the blackboard. And then there's a curtain. And they come up and they say, okay, who's number one in the class? And they open up the curtain and there's all the, all the assignments.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  And I looked up there and much to my shock, there was two F-100s. Now, I'd been bragging about it. Everybody says, ah, bullshit, there's no way. But it opened up. They were surprised. But the most surprised person in that whole room was me. I had no idea that it would be there. And I walked up just like, yeah, I knew it all the time. BS, I didn't know it. Squat all the time. And of course, then we went to gunnery school and from there on to Vietnam.

• 43:39Jocko Willink?

  So when you were coming through as a pilot, a civilian pilot instructor, like how many hours of flying did you have?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Well, uh, this, this is a guess. I probably had a couple thousand hours.

• 43:51Jocko Willink?

  So Dave Berke, how much of an advantage is that? Going through pilot training when you have a couple thousand hours worth of flight?

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Well, it was a flight instructor thing too. See, I was, I sold it on the day, I sold it on the day that it was 16, my 16th birthday. Uh, my mom drove me out and I sold it in a little Cessna 140. And then I, uh, uh, she took me down to the DMV and I did my driver's test and then I could drive my mom home for the first time. So I was, so I was a pilot before. And then your 17th birthday, the day that you needed to be, to be a private pilot, that I could carry passengers and so forth. And then at 18 years old, uh, it could be a commercial pilot. And, um, flight instructor.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  So Dave, what's the assessment? You have 2,000 hours worth of pilot time and you're going through pilot training.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  That's definitely gonna help. But in Dick's defense, that can, that can cut both ways. And when I was in flight school, the kids, now, nobody, nobody hid it. You couldn't hide it, I think, when I was going through. If you had flight time, everybody knew it. Some of the best students had experience, but some of the worst students were the ones that had experience too. So I think you, you obviously had to keep that to yourself and, and you have to not reveal your bad habits or your habits that you have brought as an aviator and you gotta pretend like it's all new. So having flight experience mostly helps, but it's, I saw kids struggle a lot because they didn't want to learn a new way of doing it. So a few guys that had flight time, uh, didn't get through the program particularly because they were unwilling to adapt to a new way of doing it. It sounds like you didn't have that problem.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Dave, you're exactly right because, and I had to be very careful of that. But it wasn't the fact that I was, uh, I was gonna be, uh, like the civilians do it better or something. But I was just, I noticed that I was just amazed about how different things were. It's all proceduralized. Uh, like in military pilot training, uh, you'd, to enter the pattern is exactly like, there's a bridge you'd have to overfly and then there was a, there was a, uh, how farmer's pump house on his thing and then you turn downwind and it was all proceduralized. You know, brace, talk, trim, turn, very regimented, see? Very regimented. And it was amazing, I thought, you know, if somebody, if that farmer goes out there

• 46:15Speaker 02

  and tears down that pump house, none of these guys could get back. But it's just a procedure. And, but that's, that's the way it was. But the thing was that I, I'd sit there, I remembered as a, as a little kid, sitting there in Dinuba, picking grapes or something and looking up and see those contrails, a single contrail, so high that I could not see what was making them. And I looked up at that thing and never forget, I says, damn, that's, I gotta, it was nothing else I gotta do. I mean, the desire to be at the pointy end of that contrail, uh, was overwhelming.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Here again, the motivation.

• 46:54Jocko Willink?

  And there it was, two savers up for grabs and you got one of them.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  I got one.

• 47:00Jocko Willink?

  Um, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit in the book here. You say, "My assignment to Vietnam as a combat fighter pilot was typical. After completing advanced gunnery school at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona, the this newly minted jet fighter pilot attended Air Force Survival School at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. It was February, dead of winter. I would be stationed in the jungle tropics but was being trained to survive in waist-deep snow. On our ride to Vietnam, we made a short stop at Clark Air Force Base in hot and sticky Philippines where we received specific jungle survival training. This environment was definitely more representative of what we would have to face in the jungles of Vietnam. Instead of having to build a shelter in the snow, we learned how to catch, kill, and eat boa constrictors.

• 47:45Jocko Willink?

  Arriving in Vietnam, I had to burn Bama Ride from Saigon in a C-130 flying 300 miles north to Phuket, where the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing was located. In August of 1967, I was assigned the 416th Squadron as a newbie fighter pilot to get checked out in combat. In South Vietnam, most of the action was air to ground in support of the troops, in support of the ground troops. Being a newbie, I was always the tail-end Charlie at the end of the four-ship formation. We would check in with the forward air controller, a guy in a little Cessna, and he would fire a smoke rocket into the jungle. We would hit his smoke with our four 500-pound Mark 82 bombs and then return to base. I seldom saw any ground fire coming my way."

• 48:33Jocko Willink?

  So that's kind of your introduction. You get over there, you're doing these missions.

• 48:39Jocko Willink?

  And then this happens. You say, "Finally, the day I'd been anticipating my entire life arrived. How would I react to being shot at directly? My target this day was a bunker complex and the goal was to drop napalm into the tunnels. I flew at low altitude, assumed a shallow dive angle, and snuggled up close to the enemy tunnels to hit the target. As I rolled in just off to the, to the right of my bunker target, a 50 caliber AAA opened up, firing bright tracers. The tracer stream was aimed directly at me and they were close. Someone down there was trying to kill me specifically."

• 49:15Jocko Willink?

  This is the moment that would define me as a warrior or as a coward.

• 49:20Jocko Willink?

  In 1803, President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on the three-year Corps of Discovery to open up the West. Upon their return, Captain Meriwether Lewis told the President, "The greatest exhilaration a man can feel is being shot at and missed." As that long stream of tracers zipped past my canopy, my first thought was not to turn away or hide between my knees, or to cry for my mother. It was exactly the opposite. My first reaction was, "The audacity of that son of a bitch to shoot at me!" Generally, the next thing you do will get you killed. Resetting the sight from the bombs

• 50:00Jocko Willink?

  to guns, I rolled hard right and headed in to destroy that bastard. Observing this, my flight lead screamed, "Rutan, get the hell out of here there!" I argued, "But sir, he shot at me!" He repeated, "Rutan, get the hell out of there," and probably saved my foolish amateur ass. Captain Lewis was right. The exhilaration was overwhelming and extremely addictive. At last, I had found my answer to how those World War II bomber crews could go out again and again. I too could do it. I was a combat warrior. I loved it. I welcomed it. I needed more, much more. As my combat career progressed, I was described

• 50:41Jocko Willink?

  by some as aggressive among the aggressive. I had not come to Vietnam to drop bombs on the top of trees. As with most hot-shot fighter pilots, I came to kick some ass, win, and then go home.

• 51:01Jocko Willink?

  That's a pretty good introduction to combat.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  It sure was. But then it answered a lot of questions. But it also generated something else. I don't know if I talked about that, about I call the, uh, there's an adrenaline gland that most people have. And I call it a combat gland. And I think it's right here on the right side of my neck someplace. And what happens, it's only active if somebody shoots at you.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  And then it gets active and what it pumps into your psyche, into your system is the most, well, it's extremely addictive and euphoric, addictive and euphoric. And it's like an addiction, a drug addiction. Well, maybe it is a metaphor again, but you need to have more and more. And then I found out about Misty, by kind of by accident, that that was part of the, I think that's the only mistake I made in the book. It's the 35th tech fighter wing. It's actually a 37th, but whatever. But anyway, there was this little detachment, a very small, a very small group of people

• 52:14Speaker 02

  in a very highly classified area and doing some really shit on stuff. And I thought, that's what I came here for.

• 52:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you, you write about here, about the, about the Misty's, the Misty, the Misty's flew the two-seat jet trainer version of the F-100. Each plane carried two fighter pilots, one in the front was the mission commander and the one in the back was the forward air controller. To keep each honest, those roles alternated. They flew low and fast over the panhandle of North Vietnam, Vietnam and Laos. Single fighters armed with only a few hundred rounds for the 20 millimeter cannons and 14 white smoke marking rockets. To be able to see them through the camouflage, they had to get right down in amongst them. So the loss rate was high. The first Misty commander, Major Bud Day, who we heard from already today, was shot

• 53:05Jocko Willink?

  down early in the operation and spent more than six years as a POW. With air refueling support from the KC-135 tankers over the Gulf of Tonkin, Misty missions were long, four to six hours and laced with plenty of action. Owing to high risks, the Misty unit was composed of only volunteers and each tour of duty was short, only 120 days. A high percentage of those who did more than one tour were shot down.

• 53:34Jocko Willink?

  Each Misty sortie was assigned flights of F-105 Thunderchiefs or F-4 Phantom fighter bombers. If they had a really hot target, they could scramble gunfighters off the alert pad at Da Nang to come north and work with them. Most high-value targets in the north were well-defended with intense AAA. Once a target was determined, the Misties orbited just out of gun range and waited for the fighter bombers to join. It took a few minutes in the orbit to brief everyone on the target, and that gave the gunners plenty of time to pump up adrenaline and exercise their trigger fingers. The Misty had to mark the target with a white smoke rocket and was the first one down the chute. The gunners knew the drill as well. As the Misties rolled in, inverted,

• 54:17Jocko Willink?

  and pulled the nose down toward the target, every gun would open up. Within seconds, as tracers flashed by their canopies, they lined up to fire the smoke-marking rocket.

• 54:28Jocko Willink?

  It was always one hell of a rush, a real E-ticket ride. Now, this was more like it. This was real combat. This was what I came to Vietnam to do. I had to become a Misty. How did I do it? First of all, Misties are volunteer. Okay, volunteers. Okay, okay. So I volunteer. So in January of 1968, my life changed dramatically. I was a Misty and on my way to the action in North Vietnam. No more making toothpicks out of jungle trees or upsetting monkey colonies. My new world revolved around heavy AAA flak, truck parks, burning oil-fuel dumps, storage bunkers, and stopping the flow of war material along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

• 55:13Jocko Willink?

  This was what I was here for.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  God, I loved it.

• 55:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so you only had 120, the standard tour was 120 days.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  120 days in Misty, right?

• 55:30Jocko Willink?

  And you're going out on these operations. What's the chances, you're going out on a Misty operation, what's the chances you're going to receive enemy fire?

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Every time.

• 55:39Jocko Willink?

  100%.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  100%. The misty day, well, we could only do three misty missions in a row, three of them. And then you were totally spent, beat.

• 55:51Jocko Willink?

  When you say in a row, you mean three days in a row?

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Three days in a row, three.

• 55:54Jocko Willink?

  And these are four to six hours apiece?

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Four to six hours. However, you'd wake up, you'd wake up three or four hours ahead of time because you had a long intelligence briefing. What was going on up there? What were the other misties reporting? Truck parks, barge traffic, burning trucks, whatever. We needed to be really up to speed before you went up there and took over. So, there was a long, there was a long, a long intelligence briefing. And then you go out to the airplane, it's still dark. And you get in the F-100, and you taxi out, and usually in Vietnam, it's kind of semi-foggy,

• 56:38Speaker 02

  maybe a little drizzle, kind of an eerie thing. And just before dawn, at Phuket, every morning, a lone F-100 would light his afterburner and off into the murk, to North Vietnam. And every morning, I'd hear that lone F-100 take off and wonder, you know, what his day was going to be like. And you'd go up, we had our own tanker. Because if you're low and fast in a jet, you're burning fuel. And since you have your own tanker off the coast, it's just you, then you could do multiple refuelings, and you could still fly your mission.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  But it was kind of a, kind of an eerie solemn thing. I remember going through the chow hall, in the Vietnam Combat Chow Hall. You've experienced that too, powdered eggs and greasy bacon and some, some, some stuff in the morning chow hall. And maybe you would drink it a little bit before the night, the night before, and you're really not feeling all that good. And normally, you wouldn't want to, you wouldn't want to eat it. I'd look at that and I'd skip it, you know? But I stand there and I look at that food.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  And I think about how terrible it is. And then someday, a little voice would come to you and say, "Dick, you better eat this because this may be the last meal you're gonna have for a long time." And then with that in mind, you sit down there and you whoop it down and gag it down as much as you can. But then, you know, it's about a 20-minute flight. You go up and you reach on with your tanker just off the coast of North Vietnam. And about 20,000 feet, you take on your load of fuel. And then, this experience between the time that combat started, as you back off of your tanker and you make that turn, and you start descending at 20,000 feet, you're gonna penetrate

• 58:42Speaker 02

  North Vietnamese airspace and you're gonna try to do it at a different place each time, not for the routine. But it was very solemn. The air was generally very smooth, the most serene thing you could ever see. And pretty soon, the coast of Vietnam, which is normally kind of farmland, rice paddies and things, most peaceful thing you've ever seen. And as you descended at 20,000 feet to hit the coast at that low altitude where our mission was, you check your visor, put your visor down, your chin strap on, make doubly sure that all the seat ejection safety pins are pulled out and in your pocket. And then all of your emitters are tied up because you don't want to have a transponder on or a beacon on.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  And then you set up for the rockets and the mil setting, and then you arm the guns. And then you sit there for a handful of minutes. And you think, "God, I wonder what the next six hours of my life is gonna be like." And it's kind of an awesome, quiet, solitude feeling. And then you got it pumped up to 550 knots. And then, all of a sudden, now, this is kind of, the light level was really low.

• 59:54Jocko Willink?

  Because you go early in the morning?

• 59:56Speaker 02

  It's just on, we just want to penetrate at dawn. And we're gonna be there till noon. But that first time, you have this eerie feeling, like, you know, what is the next six hours of my life's gonna be like? And then, all of a sudden, all that changes because the very first gunner on the shoreline sees you. And every bloody tracer that he fires, you can see it really easy. And then, there's a lot of guns on the coastline. And they know the drill when Missy's coming. Because we're up there every day. And then the whole skies is full of the most beautiful air fireworks show you've ever seen.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  This massive, massive display of tracers. And then you try to find maybe a, they call it, I've heard it called the terror in the curtain to make your way, to make your way in, Bonn. But then, but the very first time, that that first guy opens up at you with the tracers, that little gland in my shoulder I was telling you about, huh! It's on, it is pumping. And then it's frickin' combat, baby. And we're gonna be there in mortal combat with my fellow men for the next six hours. And I'll tell you what, this guy loved every damn second of it. It was a big challenge, you know?

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  You kind of hide your trucks and stuff and your war materials to kill our soldiers in the south, and we're gonna frickin' find it. And I'm gonna round up some F-4s and some F-105s that come down there and bomb it and take you out. And if any of you guys even have the thought of one of your classic Russian gun sights, six position in a circle, they're all classic Soviet with 37 and 57 millimeter. And then there's the other one, the 50 cal and the, what is it, 14 zip guns. And then there's always the, everybody has an AK-47. And when you fly by, especially in the mornings, all the little villages, they all look like

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  sparklers and they're all shooting, but they're shooting, you know, we're pulling a lot of G, jinking really hard, so they can't ever, they can't ever aim at us. And every once in a while, we'd pick up a small arms round. Very rarely. But then it's the big stuff that would, you know, blow your whole airplane apart. And then it was fights on.

• 1:02:23Jocko Willink?

  So are you waiting for the, for the fighter bombers to show up before you ingress?

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  Uh, usually there's an air order of battle for the day, a frag they call it. And we were assigned, like the, like the other misties, there were some other targets that were identified that we need to go up and make strikes on that area. And then, just before the day started, they were assigned, your assignment, 105s, a flight of F-105s.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Or F4s, called the gunfighters with the F4s out of Da Nang. They were assigned to us. They'd show up and we'd rendezvous and I already have the target and I'd go down and find it, identify it. And then we'd brief them. You know, the altitude, the escape routes, what the winds were, altimeter setting.

• 1:03:14Jocko Willink?

  And that's a brief that you're doing on station?

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, when we finally joined up with them.

• 1:03:19Jocko Willink?

  So would you have to, in order to find the target, would you have to go down?

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:24Jocko Willink?

  And look?

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  Right. And that was the big problem. That was mainly why we had a forward air control in North Vietnam. Because the guys, the guys that would come up there, they're not up there all the time and they're high altitude. And a lot of times, I find that, this is really unfortunate, that they would go and drop bombs on villages and stuff. Especially at night. They'd see a little village and they'd bomb the villages. And they'd say, in the morning misty, they'd come up and the controllers would say, hey, they had a, I said, the guys were up here last night and we killed 40 trucks on Brown Route. And we'd go over there and there wouldn't be any trucks on Brown Route, but there was a village over here burning. Well, we put an end to all that.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  So that, I think that we directed the airstrikes against legitimate military targets on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And that was good. And sometime they identified it and they wouldn't have fighters. So they would identify it and then they would brief us the next morning and we'd go up there and find it. Now, if you're up there almost every day for six hours, you get to know that place like the back of your hand. Especially the gun sights. The gun sights accuracy, it varied dramatically. In fact, there was a guy in Laos, he was on an edge of a real rugged karst and he's a 50 caliber. We called him the kid on the karst.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  And every morning we'd come up and wake him up and as we'd orbit him, he would shoot exactly 180 degrees.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  And he was the worst shot in the world. And I'd always looked at, how do you get all that ammo up there on this steep cliff? And why in the world, why in the world would he lead us like 180 degrees around the circle? And when I'd have a new Misty pilot, I'd say, "Hey, I want to show you what a 50 caliber looks like." And so we'd fly up there and the kid on the car seat would fire and wouldn't even come any close and so forth. But every once in a while, some of these gun crews are really good. They would get us, normally you could see most of the gun sights. And if you could see them, then you could avoid them, or you could not maneuver in such a way.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  And we'd name, we'd give them names and stuff. But basically, if the guy was really good, and his camouflage, you know, this is a major Soviet-style gun sight. If they were well camouflaged, and we came by and I had my belly up looking at something else, and they would fire. And the tracer would come, those big 57 caliber, 37 caliber things, you know, as big as a beer can, would come by with that, with that red tracer, come by really close. And sometimes you could actually hear the shockwaves, you know, like a, like a baseball bat around your airplane.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  Then they know that they were really close. And if they were really close and very clever and well camouflaged, we fricking had to go back and kill them. At least I did. And one thing, the thing about combat, if somebody is trying to kill you, and like the bombers in World War II, they just have to sit up there and take it. They couldn't retaliate against it. And I thought, that was really horrible. But the Misty had the ability that if you were good and you came really close to me, fucker, we're gonna come back and take you out. And so I'd roll back, roll back and there'd be a ring around the gun sight that'd be slowly drifting away. And then I'd pull up just out of their range and I'd think, and they knew what the drill was gonna be after that.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  Because I'd either go out and get some tankers, but I'd come back. And we scramble the gunfighters out of Da Nang, or we have a flight of F-105s we could rob from the guys going downtown Hanoi or something. I says, "Hey, I got a target for you. It's an extremely aggressive, accurate gun sight and I want to take them out, I want you to take them out for me."

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Quiet.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  Sometimes the misty would try to, try to describe where the gun sight was. By talking them into it, so I didn't have to mark them. I says, "Okay, guys, you see the Gulf of Tonkin out there? Yeah, we see that. It's a big river called the Kranke River. Okay, follow it up until it has a dogleg beam, you see that? Says, "Okay, right at that place, and you try to talk them, a little road and right off there, there's a field." And if, and if I tell them, sometimes I could talk them into like a truck storage area or something and they could get that. But if I'm trying to, to talk them into it verbally, into a gun sight, they almost never can see it. They say, "Okay, Misty, this is your target, you frickin' mark them, man."

• 1:08:23Jocko Willink?

  Now what, you have to go to what altitude to get a mark on a, on a gun sight?

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Well, we knew what the range of them, of them was and we'd just climb out of the range. Of the thirty, fifty-seven was a little higher, thirty-seven was a little lower. And it was really interesting, cause these, these, the shells, they'd be six position and they'd all open up and a long stream of tracers. And they, they'd float up and they'd get slower and slower and slower, and finally the tracer would go out. And then you couldn't see them anymore, but then they would start down, I guess, and then they would all self-destruct, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, little puffs of smoke. And we try to stay above that.

• 1:09:03Jocko Willink?

  And that's what, 4,500 feet or something like that?

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, 4,000 to 5,000 feet, if memory serves me right.

• 1:09:09Jocko Willink?

  And so you're doing your best to fly above that range?

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:13Jocko Willink?

  When you go to mark a target, do you have to go into that range, or can you mark it from outside that range?

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:18Jocko Willink?

  You gotta get in there?

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  They know what the drill is. And it's up to you to put that white phosphorus smoking, uh, right, marking rocket right on top of them. And what you want to do is find out what the drift is, so you put the marking rocket just upwind. And when the white phosphorus goes off, it blooms up and hopefully it'll drift over, drift over the gun, so when my first fighter down the chute, he has a better chance because they can't see him now. And then he can come in and drop his bombs. But it was, you know, as a kid, for the first time, you climb up on a high dive at a swimming

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  pool, and you walk out, and all of a sudden, this 15-foot, looks like 15 miles, and you look up, what the hell am I doing here? And it takes all the courage you have to walk out on the edge of the board and jump off for the first time. And everybody's experienced something like that. It comes up, finally, the misty's circling them, and they shot, and they missed the misty. Now, they know what the drill is. And they know that if, the first thing they do, if misty marks them, they're dead. And so all their concentration is, is to knock the misty out of the sky. And they're all waiting for you. And sometimes you'd have to wait because the fighters weren't available then, and

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  they, uh, they'd have to go out and refuel or whatever. So you circle on them, and they know what the drill is, and soon as misty's, soon as his wings roll up, pass vertical, and soon as they're past vertical and the nose starts down, every damn gunner knows that they gotta kill, they gotta kill the misty. Because if they get marked, they're fucked.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  Now, there's a handful of seconds because there's a thing called lead. If you're flying along, we could always jake and they would have a hard time tracking us and give us the right lead to hit us. But there's about four or five seconds where there's no lead requirement. Because all I have to do is aim right at the missile because he's coming down to shoot right at you. There's no lead requirements or anything. And there's that handful of seconds.

• 1:11:38Jocko Willink?

  So that's when you've got your nose at the target and you've got to keep it there for four or five seconds to get your rocket off?

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's an overwhelming urge to just throw the rocket down there and get away. But then you keep thinking, this is important because how I mark it, how accurately, if I can use the smoke to blind them, I owe that to the fighters that are coming up there too. And so it takes a lot of willpower. And the nose finally comes down and then they're all shooting, then it's all coming up your way. And to roll out, pull it down, put the pepper just below the target, and then let it ease up and make sure there's no yaw involved in the airplane and you're not a lot of G. Because if you're flying in G, the angle of attack will change, your marking, and it's all that.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  But it's that handful of seconds that it takes. You think, you know, just don't throw this thing out there. It's like an eternity. And you pull it up and then you stabilize it and then pickle. And one smoke rocket comes out. Now, the bad thing is the escape route. And once you fired fairly low, at maybe a 30 or 40 degree dive angle.

• 1:12:57Jocko Willink?

  And what altitude are you at when you fire?

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  Fifteen hundred feet.

• 1:13:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh. Okay, so.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Maybe two thousand, fifteen hundred.

• 1:13:09Jocko Willink?

  You're well within range.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Okay, now, the worst thing you want to do is you fire the, fire the, then you pull off straight ahead over the target. You don't want to do that. So, once you fire, you roll the airplane about a hundred and thirty degrees to the right, and then you pull down into the ground. And, and what you want to get is a, is a tracking solution that they have to, uh, use some type of skill to be able to hit you, uh, tracking. Now, they've only had this one chance, where they don't have to do any, all they gotta do is aim, they don't have to lead you. So, you pull to the right and down, and roll wings level. Now, you're coming out pretty low, uh, but there's no way they can track you, because now there's

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  a big angular velocity and stuff, and you're pulling up. And when you come back around, you want to look at your smoke, and it's either hit my smoke, or, uh, generally, the fighters, uh, three or four fighters that are orbiting, there is absolutely no frickin' idea, no confusion, because that whole thing, the muzzle flashes, just, they almost light up the world. And then, then it's payback time. And the missy pulls back up, and, uh, you say, you know, hit my smoke. And then you pull up around, and then lead rolls in. And now, they all concentrate on lead coming, because he's gotta do the same thing, coming down the chute. Of course, he can drop his bombs a lot higher.

• 1:14:35Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, can't he drop from?

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe six, six or eight thousand, or something like that.

• 1:14:40Jocko Willink?

  So, is he out of their range, of their weapons?

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Uh, no. By the time they pull out, they're probably down within their, their lethal range, for sure. And now, if, if you're flying around, and you see the guy roll in, there's no, there's no way you can tell, because of the angular velocities and stuff, uh, the angles off, when he rolls in and drops his bombs. Now, and his stick of bombs come off, and he pulls off, and then you see him, the bombs fall, and then you see these, the gun sight, the muzzle flashes, um, going up at him, and they see them.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  And you see them down there shooting like mad and then you watch the bombs come and they'd see the gun sights and the bombs come. And then the gratification you get when it hits them dead center. And all of a sudden the most conflagration of dirt and then nails the gun sights. And then there's the guns are laying over and all the bunkers are gone and stuff. Sometimes, sometimes they miss. So what we would do, when they would roll in, then I would then I would pull up in the opposite direction and make a fake pass at them. And that was to draw fire away from number two and he's coming down to shoot and then we just do a crossing maneuver.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  And you may be able to do the same thing for three coming down, to try to try to draw some other fire. And it's a handful of minutes that is pretty exciting.

• 1:16:12Jocko Willink?

  And in a four to six hour mission, how many, how many targets would you go after?

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  It varied a lot depending on the weather sometimes. It's usually a pretty, it's usually a pretty, pretty high workload. If you're not, if you're, you've had your assigned targets, sometimes all they want to do is drop bombs on a, on a road to do a road cut to, on the side of a cliff and try to close the, try to close the roads. They did a lot of that, thinking they were going to close down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We'd go down there in the afternoons, we'd put in a bunch of strikes and actually have a roadslide on a cliff. And I thought, boy, that shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail for a while. We'd come back at dawn the next morning and the road is fixed.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  It didn't slow them down at all. The other thing that was really fun is that, is that the Navy went out and they mined some of the rivers, like the Quaykew River up there.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  And they were magnetic mines. And when they were, like when a boat comes by, it would trigger magnet, you know, the magnetism of it, and then it would blow up. Well, these mines would sit up there and they'd get more and more and more sensitive. And this was just fun, I guess. And so the first guy down the river, first guy in that morning, we come real low, right down the river, going real fast. And almost invariably, we could trigger off some of those mines behind us, you know, just to go up and screw with them sometimes.

• 1:17:49Jocko Willink?

  Good overview of what you guys were doing up here. I got, again, you profile some of these missions in here. Here's one of them where there's a down pilot. You say, "Down in the jungle is one of our own, a fellow fighter pilot, a warrior. He was still free and talking on his survival radio." So this guy got shot down and you hear him talking. "Our creed was that if you are free and talking, we will never give up on your rescue. The rescue force that morning suffered numerous delays and mismanagement. Before helicopters could be deployed into North Vietnam, permission had to be required from some kid in LBJ's White House.

• 1:18:31Jocko Willink?

  It seemed the permission giver was asleep and no one wanted to wake him, which caused extensive delays at a time when every second was critical. Frustrations abounded for those on the rescue team. I had flown seven and a half hours the day before and would invest another seven and a half hours before this day was over. With nerves ready to snap, this disjointed rescue effort continued, and it was already close to noon. My relief, Wells Jackson, Misty 21, had just arrived. As he was being briefed, a call came from search and rescue headquarters in Saigon, canceling our rescue and instructing us to pull out all forces."

• 1:19:11Jocko Willink?

  I was incensed with this turn of events, but the orders had originated from those much higher on the chain of command than I, a lowly captain. Then it hit me, since I was the only one who could talk directly to Jack, the down pilot, it was gonna be my job to tell him we were giving up and abandoning him to the North Vietnamese for certain torture, imprisonment, and possible death. I was infuriated. What were they thinking? We were American fighting men and we never give up. Enraged, I demanded to know who gave the order to pull out. Turns out it was a general in Saigon who thought it was too risky and had issued the order to withdraw.

• 1:19:53Jocko Willink?

  I thought since that general made the decision to quit, that general should be the one to tell Scotch Zero Three that he was to be abandoned. Sleep deprived and furious, I ignored any sense of military rank protocol and demanded the general tell me the exact words to use when informing Jack that further rescue attempts were being aborted. While we waited for the exact words, I finished briefing my relief, Misty Two One, and with a heavy heart, left the area knowing we were about to fail one of our own. Back at home base in Phu Cat, it was now close to sunset.

• 1:20:34Jocko Willink?

  I sat slouched in the O Club disillusioned that my commanders could violate our most sacred creed, "If you are free and talking, we never give up." Alone and heartbroken, my only company a couple of empty beer bottles, I contemplated my commitment to these high-risk missions. It was then that Wells Jackson, Misty Two One, burst through the door with a big smile on his face. I had to wonder what the hell he was so happy about. "Hey, Rutan, they got Scotch out." I could not believe my ears and blurted, "What?" Jackson continued, "Yep, Scotch was rescued." Seems the general could not come up with the exact words to tell a fellow warrior he was about to be abandoned.

• 1:21:19Jocko Willink?

  Perhaps the general began to realize how such a decision could compromise the long-term morale of all of us who fought and died on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  That particular mission, when they got him out. See, before that morning, well, actually, the day before, we're up there and there was a flight of F-105s, not under our control, but I could hear him talking, that Scotts 03, the number three guy in that force ship of F-105s, they were calling, calling, and there was no answer. So I flew over to the area that they were working, and just by a fluke, by glints, by maybe just a second, I spotted the orange and white canopy in the top of the jungle. And as I flew up, pulled up, to come back around, it disappeared.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  And however, I memorized, memorized that spot before I took my eyes off of it again. So I pulled up and I called and called, there was no answer. And so then I pulled up and I did a dive bomb pass, where I could talk to him overhead, diving right straight at him, at that point. And I called Scotts, and he came back, and he could hear me, and he could talk. Now, there was just a handful of seconds that we could exchange, exchange information. "Where are you? I mean, are you okay?" He said, "No, I have a, I have a..." I called, he said, "I have a broken back and I can't move. Come and get me." Now, the sun was just going down, and there wasn't enough time to generate a rescue force.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  And so Steve Amador, another fellow, we'd already done a six-and-a-half-hour mission. And we put Scotts asleep that night, and told him, "We'll be back at dawn to get you." And we went back to Da Nang and landed and tried to organize a rescue force that morning. And then, we took off, about three hours of sleep, we took off. And just right at dawn the next morning, I came across that thing with my afterburner going, and called him, and there was no answer. So I pulled up, back around, and I dove at that spot. And then I could ask a question, he can give me the answer, and then we'd pull off and we'd go away. So that's how we were going to communicate with him.

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  Okay, this was dawn, this faithful day. It was long and disjointed rescue. In fact, they'd shot up two helicopters. The helicopter would come in and hover, and they found him that night. They located him, and they set up a flak trap, because they knew we were coming back. And every time that one of the helicopters would come into a hover, Jolly Green and HH3, Air Force helicopter, they would shoot, and shoot them up pretty bad. And they did that to two of them, and they got away. There was an A1 Skyraider that was also working the rescue that morning, and he got shot down, and he, for some reason, he tried to dead-stick it into the Ben-Hi River, and

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  he was killed. So we lost two helicopters, and we had one A1 shot down, and the pilot was killed. The whole morning was disjointed, because they had B-52 strikes coming in, and they pulled off our rescue forces numerous times to let these big bombers. You know, here these guys are 30,000 feet, they dropped their bombs before they even go feet dry, and to try to, you know, hit some targets that were near where we were working. So we got pulled off back and forth. So finally, the Jollies, the Jolly Greens were trying to come across the border into

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  North Vietnam, and they couldn't get approval. And I said something that was, that was probably not very, I said, I said something that wasn't very complimentary about these guys that wouldn't come in and get my guy. Which turned out, then I learned about the fact they couldn't because of some snot-nosed kid in LBJ's White House that had to approve it, and nobody wanted to wake him up. And boy, then the frustration level was just really high. You know, there's targets that we'd have, but when, when you're out there and you're trying to find and rescue one of your own, then, then that's totally different. Your motivation's different.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  I kept thinking, "God, it could be me down there." You know.

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  And so, there was a guy named Don Ingan in an HH-3. Now, this is after the time that I says, you know, I briefed him, and then I says, "Tell me the exact words." You know, if he's gonna, if he made a decision to leave this guy to die, well then, damn it, let him tell me the words. You made the decision, you come up with the words to tell him, then it dawned on me, hey, I'm the only guy that can talk to him. I'm gonna have to tell him. Then I thought, screw him, I'm not gonna come up with my words, let the general's words. And then I left with a heavy heart, like we said.

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  And as it turned out, Wells came up and they, the general changed his mind. And only this time, when Ingan came in and hovered, they put, the guy's name was, the PJ, had been in country three days, I think. He was a two-sripper PJ that he was gonna be down on the ground. And, you know, he was there just long enough to hear all the horror stories about being on the ground in North Vietnam. And then, he came into a hover, and he dropped the PJ down through the jungle to try to find Scott Zero Three.

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  And I guess he roamed around, and it's all in tape, it's an incredible tape. And Wells Jackson is talking about a gun sight over there that's trying to lob 37-millimeter into the rescue area. And in Wells' backseat, he has a photographer that went along with him that day, and the guy was six hours, and he was throwing up continuously. And over the interphone, you could hear the kid throwing up. But he came into a hover, anyway, Callie, Sergeant Erwin Callie, yeah.

• 1:28:00Jocko Willink?

  That's the PJ?

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  It's the PJ, it's on the ground. And he finally found, he roamed around and found him. And then, now he had to vector the Jolly Green or, now it's all very quiet, there's no ground fire or anything. And he says, "Forward, forward, forward." He says, "Okay, that's good, drop the, drop the penetrator." It's a long cable with a special, you know what it is, a penetrator device, kinda like a bullet that can go down through the jungle. And it goes down, and it's our, or Airman Tally puts the Scott 03 on the penetrator. And then, everything's quiet, you know, the guy's sitting there in a nice hover, Ingun.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  Ingun is a Coast Guard Exchange Pilot, United Air Force Pilot, Coast Guard Pilot. And they said, "Okay." And then, Tally on the ground, has a little radio, and he says, "Okay, I got him, you know, pull me up." And then there's a handful of seconds, and you can just imagine, he's sitting there in a hover, and the cable's coming up, oh so slowly. And I don't know how high it was, it may have been thirty, forty, maybe fifty feet in the sky. And then they activated the trap. Now, they knew this time that the Jolly wasn't going anyplace. He was, he was hooked, you know. The other guys weren't hooked, they'd just get away.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  But they knew that the Jolly, they had the choice of either cutting the cable and leaving. And Ingun said later, he says, "God, how could you sit there, under that withering fire?" And he says, "There was no way I would ever leave one, my PJ, on the ground." God, I mean, that was just his mindset. What an incredible person. And this cable come up, and Tally would squeeze the mic button on his little radio, and he's been screaming, "Ground fire, ground fire, take it out, take it out, ground..." And in the background, you can hear intense automatic weapons fire. And Tally told it later, he looked up at the, at the Jolly, and it was being, from all different directions, being shot to crap.

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  I mean, the windshield was being blown out, there was hydraulic fluid leaking, one of the landing gear had just plopped out, and there was punchers of fuel pouring down, and pieces falling down off the airplane.

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  And later on, I asked Talia, I says, I says, what a great thing, you know, to save the helicopter, you know, you'd sacrifice yourself to do that. And he looked at me, you know, typical warrior, this kid. He looked at me, he says, oh, no, no, sir, it wasn't that at all. He says, I looked up, and I didn't want the damn thing falling on me. Anyway, Engen, he was awarded the Air Force Cross, but it should have been a Medal of Honor. And even today, I'm still trying to work that out, especially since I found out the entire Vietnam War, that all the contributions that the Marines, I'm sorry, not the Marines, but the Coast Guard, this guy was a Coast Guard exchange pilot. That

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  whole war, and all the participation by the Coast Guard in that war, there was not one Medal of Honor winner. And I thought, that's really a shame. And even today, I'm signing the write letters and, and trying to get that thing upgraded, because I think it would be important that, that the contribution of the Coast Guard should be recognized by one of their heroes, and Engen to do that. Anyway, they, they got him above the jungle canopy, and then he translated away, and it was just a few miles. And he just crossed the Ben Hai River, there was a medevac there called the Rock Pile. And they landed, and that, I don't think that Jolly ever flew again. It was shot up so bad.

• 1:31:45Jocko Willink?

  Man. We've got another situation in the book. And in this one, you're flying, and there's another plane, another Sabre that's on fire. And there's a, there's a general, you don't know this at the time, but there's actually a general in the, in the front seat.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a, it's another RF4C, you know, same thing that Lee was flying, except that was a reconnaissance work. It was a recce version of the, of the Phantom.

• 1:32:25Jocko Willink?

  And so this guy, their, their call sign is, is Strobe 10. And so you're flying next to him, you see that they're on fire. And you, you tell them, "Hey, you're, you're on fire." And going to the book here, it says, "Strobe 1-0 acknowledged our call that he was on fire and stated, 'We're bailing out.'" "This should have been a standard ejection." "They were flying at 10,000 feet, straight and level, at an ideal speed of about 230 knots. Everything was set for routine ejection and water rescue." Which is interesting that you're talking about a routine ejection and water rescue. That, that shows your mentality. "I had never seen an object, an ejection up close.

• 1:33:06Jocko Willink?

  The notoriously complicated F-4 Martin Baker seat, known as the backbreaker, would be something to witness. I eased the old Hun to route formation about 30 feet out on his left wing and waited for what seemed an eternity. Nothing happened. Almost two minutes dragged by before the rear seat finally ejected. Later on, I asked the backseater what had taken so long. They knew they were on fire. He said that they had taken out the checklist and reviewed the ejection procedures. The general did not want to eject. They argued about the position of the command ejection handle in the rear cockpit. The major, upholding his duties, wanted it in the command eject position, where the guy in the back ejects the front seat pilot.

• 1:33:52Jocko Willink?

  However, the general insisted that it be left in the off position, thereby making each seat a single initiated ejection. The major reluctantly sat up straight, grabbed the yellow handle between his legs and pulled, giving the general, leaving the general to his fate. From my vantage point, the rear cockpit ejection was textbook, and I remember it vividly. The aft canopy opened and separated cleanly, clearing the tail by at least 20 feet. The seat started up the rails. As the bottom of the seat cleared the cockpit, the rocket motor ignited, burned for 1.2 seconds, and the seat went straight up, very stable. When the rocket stopped, the small drogue parachute released, and the seat rotated backward 90 degrees as it cleared the tail.

• 1:34:34Jocko Willink?

  Looking over my right shoulder, I could see the main C9 parachute canopy had also deployed. As it started to open, the seat separated from the backseat pilot and kept right on going. With the canopy fully open, the pilot swung back underneath. I thought the whole thing was neat as hell, until I looked back at the stricken aircraft. What I was about to witness was chilling. It would leave an indelible imprint, which remains surreal and unforgettable to this day. I was horrified to see the front cockpit totally engulfed in fire."

• 1:35:03Jocko Willink?

  I saw an occasional flash from a white helmet that was barely visible through the smoke and flames. The general was sitting, straight up as before, but motionless. He seemed oblivious to his circumstances. Huge flames that resembled giant blowtorches streamed from the rubber pedal, rudder pedal area at his feet, through the cockpit, around him, and out through the now-open rear cockpit. The fire had filled the Phantom's interior and produced a dense black smoke trail that obscured the tail. Strangely, the aircraft flew on. Terrified, I thought the general must not be aware of the fire, so I began to holler over the radio. "Strobe 1-0, bail out, bail out."

• 1:35:46Jocko Willink?

  I continued to scream desperately, but the general just sat there doing nothing. The wings remained level and the aircraft now began a shallow descent. "My god," I screamed, "why doesn't he eject? How can he just sit there? What the hell is wrong?" Then I figured it out, maybe he couldn't hear me. I was too far away, thirty feet, so I drove the Hun right up next to the burning cockpit and screamed again. "Strobe 1-0, bail out, bail out." Then Harland yelled, "Oh my god, look at it burn." Frustrated and half in shock at what had just transpired not ten feet from us, we moved in closer. So close, the air pressure between the two aircraft caused the fiery Phantom to roll up into a right bank. As I pulled back, the F4 turned ninety degrees, rolled back wings, level and pointed itself

• 1:36:31Jocko Willink?

  directly at the beach in a slightly steeper descent. By then, we could no longer see the general's white helmet, only a blackened charred canopy. The paint on the entire nose was burned and blistered. There were a couple of small explosions in the nose area that blew some of the panels loose and sent other pieces flying off the plane. The entire front end was a charcoal-colored mass. The orange and yellow flames subsided, their dense smoke streaming backward over the fuselage. For some unfathomable reason, I continued to call Strobe 1-0, begging him to get out, even though it was obviously futile. We stayed close on his wing, and at five hundred feet, the old Phantom gave one last

• 1:37:14Jocko Willink?

  gasp, pitched up a little, then dove straight into the beach and exploded. I just couldn't let go. Harland screamed, "God damn it, Dick, pull up." I know Harlan Stern Direction was the wake up call that saved us. I might very well have crashed right beside Strobe. I pulled up hard, barely missing some small trees behind the beach, pulling off to the left, and in a choking voice, I told Waterboy, "Strobe 1-0 just impacted on the beach." Moments later, Waterboy asked whether there was any chance of survival. My plaintive reply was, "Negative survival. Negative survival."

• 1:38:01Jocko Willink?

  Now, there's a, you have to kind of go and debrief this situation, and there was a tape. There's a tape of this whole thing?

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  There was.

• 1:38:11Jocko Willink?

  And there's something that you talk about in here, there's something that you edited out of the tape. Was it some words between you and the general? What was it?

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  Let me, let me back up a second. That was, remember the Nixon, he had an 18-minute gap? I had an 18-second gap.

• 1:38:34Speaker 02

  First of all, these were, these were extremely high-risk missions that these guys flew, the recce missions. They were at 500 feet, and they were straight and level. And they would come up, and we would check in, and they had their certain coordinates for departure and their routes and stuff. And the misty, they would check in with us, and then we would help them identify it. Sometimes they needed some help identifying stuff. And so I would stay up above these guys and watch them, watch them with their, you know, their photo run, straight and level, just getting shot up like mad. Flying straight and level up there, it's almost a kiss of death.

• 1:39:13Jocko Willink?

  At 500 feet.

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, you just never want to do that up there, to fly straight and level. I would never fly straight and level. The misty's had four or five G's on us all the time, drinking like mad. So nobody could really predict where we were going to be. That's the only thing that we could survive at all. But the one thing that I did know is that these were extremely high-risk missions in into North Vietnam by the reconnaissance guys, and they were flown by lieutenants and captains, just like me. The company grade, or the field grade, and would never be a general officer.

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  So, I had just come off the tanker heading into North Vietnam and I heard the call that we were taking a hit just north of Caeson, I think, and we're coming out feet wet, to get feet wet. And so I says, "Wow, okay, well, I'm just coming out and they're coming, they're coming out and we're coming back in." So I joined up with them. Now, my perception was that I was talking to the front seater. And the front seater was a captain, just like me, right? I had no idea it was a dental officer. I had no idea that I was talking to a CNI major, the major that's supposed to take care of this general, in the backseat.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  So my conversations, my perception was that I was talking to a fellow captain that was sitting in the front cockpit, and that wasn't the case. So we joined up with him and looked him over, he looked pretty good. And we had to get real close up underneath him, we could see there was a little bit of fire going on up in the camera bay. Nothing, nothing bad. They were complaining about losing, I think they lost their utility hydraulic system, and it was getting really hot. But that was all. And I think that the general was up in the North Vietnam where he bloody well shouldn't have been, but it was his last mission, it was his champagne flight, he was going to

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  go home, and he wanted, they told me that he could get an extra air medal if he flew into North Vietnam, which he wasn't supposed to. So this general, Bob Warley, fighter pilot, a good, really a good guy, he wanted to go up there on his last mission and bring back some good information, good photography and stuff. And so, all of a sudden, well, we joined up with him, he was about, I don't know, 10 miles, feet wet, heading south towards Da Nang. And we saw the little fire, and I was having a conversation with a fellow captain, not knowing that it was a general.

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  And, uh, so we told them that they were on fire, or had a fire up in the nose. And we pulled off, like I said, like you've read in the book, into route formation, right on his wing. And they took a lot longer than I thought to go ahead, and I found out later that they were arguing about, now the general was sitting, I don't think the general really knew that there was, that there was anything really bad enough that they should, that they should eject. That's why the argument was. And I, I'm sure that he says, "Okay, I'm gonna get rid of this guy in the back and I'm gonna fly this airplane back and save it because, you know, if I lose the airplane and they find out I was screwing around in North Vietnam, they're gonna really frown at me."

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  And I think that was his motivation, uh, to get rid of the guy in the back and then he could be the hero and fly the airplane back, which wasn't the case. The problem on the F-4 Phantom was you can't get rid of the canopy. It has a pneumatic plunger that has to push the leading edge up, or else the wind, the normal wind speed clamps, clamps it down. You just can't unlock it because it won't go anyplace. You have to have these plungers. And I think when they got hit in the nose, that plunger was damaged. And so he didn't know it at the time, but the only way he could live was to get the airplane back because his injection system, without the canopy gone, you can't eject through it. It's one of the Martin Baker things.

• 1:43:24Speaker 02

  So that was in his, that was in his mind. So when they finally decided to go ahead and eject, uh, the fire hit him and he wasn't, I'm sure he wasn't ready for that. Now, my conversation the whole time was with that guy in the white helmet in that fire. That's, that was the conversation we had. Had no idea that the guy I was talking to was hanging in a parachute a couple miles behind us. Uh, so that was my mindset. But I often thought about what I was saying, what I was seeing, and what my reaction to that was.

• 1:44:03Speaker 02

  It says, "Why did I, why did I say, 'Well, maybe he can't hear me.'" You know how absurd this is. "Hey, hey, Dick, hey, I didn't notice this fire, that the whole cockpit was on fire. I'm sure glad you told me about that." Now, I'm just gonna go ahead and eject. "Hey, appreciate you telling me that I'm fricking on fire and the cockpit's full." So, you're sitting there and you gotta do something. I just... And so I called him, you know, strobe one, "Bail out, bail out," screaming at him to bail out. And then I says, "Well, maybe he can't hear me." I mean, how stupid is that? What do you mean? That in between thirty feet, that he can hear me on a UHF radio that'll transmit for hundreds of miles?

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just absurd. That, you know, the psychology of that and what hit you all of a sudden. And then I drove in so hard that I, the air pressure turned him. Otherwise, he would've, he would've crashed in the, you know, in the Gulf of Tonka. And this way, he crashed right on the beach. And not wanting to let go. And almost crashing right beside him. You know, we pulled up, and the water boy was the controlling agency, the one that controls us in and out of the pack and BDA and organizes fighter strikes and stuff. That was our controller. And then, all of a sudden, since he blew up...

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  Now, I'd seen a lot of airplanes crash. And it wasn't unusual to see another airplane, you know, a combat loss. I'd seen those before. And it was always like, "Okay, well, okay, another one, another combat loss, we'll ride it off, and the war goes on." But as we were pulling up off to the left, they wanted to know if survival, and I said, "Negative survival." And then, all of a sudden, there was a whole bunch of interest in this crash site. They wanted security up there, and they wanted to get medevacs, and they're gonna deploy a whole bunch of stuff. And I, "What the hell is going on? That's not strange. Airplane crashes, combat loss, war goes on."

• 1:46:13Speaker 02

  So we went back, went back and found the, uh, the backseater hanging in the parachute. Only this time, the wind was really strong in the Gulf of Tonka and then it was really rough. Now, we're down in South Vietnam, south of the border. So the sandpan that was coming out, was coming out from the south. And it was a motorized sandpan and it was really rough and he was bouncing.

• 1:46:38Jocko Willink?

  So this is now a race between...

• 1:46:41Speaker 02

  Well, the guy's hanging in the parachute. And, um, see normally, uh, you can get killed on somebody out there screwing around if they didn't know what to do. Now, everybody's trained, the jolly comes in, they know what to do, how to take care of the parachute, you know, all those issues you need to get, to get you out of the water into a rescue craft. Uh, and then there's certain training, Dave, you've been through all that many times too. So, all of a sudden, we see this, this motorized junk and we looked, we look at it and it's, uh, what's a sandpan, not a junk. Motorized and he's booking it, he's going, and he can see the guy hanging in the parachute and he's going out there. So we go by and it has the South Vietnamese flag on it.

• 1:47:25Speaker 02

  That doesn't mean, in that war, that doesn't mean square root of fox rot alpha what the flag is. And so, Harland that I talk about, he was in the front seat, he was my student that day and I was the instructor in the back during this whole thing. And so I look at him and I says, "Well, we can't let that guy get back to the pilot." And I said, "Okay, well, go ahead and, go ahead and kill him." And so Harland armed a gun and he came back, as we're turning on final, I'm thinking, you know, maybe he is a South Vietnamese and why don't we just scare him? So we did a little pass by and he just kept going.

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  And, uh, so I says, "Okay, well, he's got the message and now we'll just go ahead and shoot him." And as we turned final the second time, I had second thoughts and I says, "Well, Harland, why don't we put some 20 millimeter right across his bow?"

• 1:48:24Speaker 02

  Okay, so Harland did. He rolled in and he put a stick of, you know, run a strafe across his bow. Now it was really neat. He was going up, this strafe went right in front of him and then he goes whoop, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then he beat feet back to the store and then the Jolly Green finally came and rescued him after that. Now, we flew back to Foo Cat. No, I went about another three-hour mission that day and I didn't get back until noon. And so we pulled into Foo Cat and I noticed that there was every Colonel in the whole base was there to meet us. And I told Harland,

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  I says, "Hey," I says, "I don't know what we did, but it must have been a major fuck-up." And I couldn't remember that I'd done anything really bad, but what were these damn Colonels here for? And so we opened the canopy and the first Colonel up the stairs says, "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be in Saigon. You're supposed to be in Saigon. Where do you land? You were not supposed to land here. Is this all mad at me?" And then I told Harland over the interphone, I says, "Harland, I don't know what it is, but it's worse than what I thought." And then the guy finally found out that, that realized, he says, "Oh, you don't know who was on that airplane, do you?"

• 1:49:45Speaker 02

  "No, recce guy, fellow captain?" You know, I said, "That's really a shame. But shit, I've seen a lot of stuff." And he says, "Oh, my God. You didn't know that it was General Warley in that airplane? Now everything all made sense." And he says, and I says, "Oh, yeah. By the way, I got it all on tape." Because when he hollered "Mayday," I started the little tape recorder that we jerry-rigged. We bought it at the hardware store and I jerry-rigged a plug that whatever I went into my headset that I could record it on little cassettes. That was just kind of my idea.

• 1:50:25Speaker 02

  And so I handed it to him and the Colonel took it, says, "You got it all on tape." Wow, and he was holding it, and he was holding it, and then he didn't know what to do with it, so he gave it back to me, thank goodness. And he says, "Go get a Class B uniform on, there's gonna be a T-39 scat back to bring you down, there's some generals that wanna talk to you down in Saigon." Holy frick. The last thing in the world that this little up-country pogue pilot wanted to do was hang around with four-star generals.

• 1:50:51Jocko Willink?

  How many generals had you talked to at this point in your deployment to Vietnam?

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  I'm a general, shoot, I'm a little pogue captaincy. So anyway, the T-39 come up and picked us up, and on our way down to Saigon, I thought, you know, I had to listen to this tape, and so I played it. And there was something in there that was extremely inappropriate.

• 1:51:14Jocko Willink?

  Just language-wise?

• 1:51:17Speaker 02

  No, Harlan is dead, and I'll take that what I said to the grave.

• 1:51:22Jocko Willink?

  Fair enough.

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  And so I re-recorded it over it, and it was exactly eighteen seconds long, just like Nixon's eighteen-minute tape. And it's a damn good thing, too, that I took that out of there, because every one of those damn generals wanted his own personal, private briefing. And so I had to play it over and over and over again, and I'm thinking, "God, I'm sure glad that I erased that." But it was a shame, too. Along with that, there was his, he had two daughters, General Warley, good guy, fighter pilot. And they called me some years later, and they wanted to go down, and they wanted to

• 1:52:08Speaker 02

  go to Vietnam where their father had died. And nobody could tell them where it was, the exact location. But I thought, these two ladies, they need to go to an exact spot out there to build a memorial and have closure right where their dad died. Now, I tried to drag it out of my memory and describe exactly, you know, turn left here, and there's a little town called Phuket, and you go to the beach, and you turn left, and you go a hundred yards, and that's where he crashed. Well, as it turned out, it was a hundred yards the other direction. But it didn't matter, because they went there, and they sent me a picture of a memorial, and they were hugging each other, and it was kind of a closure, it was a nice thing for them.

• 1:52:55Jocko Willink?

  Now you got another, another thing that you write about in the book. You write about your friend Howie, Howard K. Williams. What, what happened with him and what was this, this mystery phone call that you got? Can you talk us through that?

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. The Misty's, we were, we were kind of a unique group. We were doing some highly classified stuff. And we were separated from most of the in-country fighter pilots that flew those, toothpick, monkey deaf, making monkeys deaf missions in South Vietnam. And, and sometimes we'd fly those missions and there was troops in contact and there was a lot going on. And we'd go in there, roll in, drop my bombs and leave. And I'd think, hey, there's a combat down there, you know, I wanted to be part of it. What happened? I mean, who's in combat? I want to know the details of that. And I just didn't want to climb, you know, fly back my airplane not knowing about it.

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  That's why I wanted to go to Misty. And I found out about Misty and I says, hey, I want to go there and it's a volunteer thing. And the guy says, no, one of the requirements is you have to be a flight lead. And, and I says, okay, well, I want to go to Misty. I kept bugging my commander, the squadron commander. And he said, no, damn it, Rutan, you're a, you know, a newbie pilot here and you'll be six or eight months, four to six months before you can even think about checking out as a flight lead. So I kept bugging him and bugging him and bugging him. And he finally just got pissed off and he says, okay, goddammit. I'll give you a flight lead check, which I was no more qualified or, or experienced or anything.

• 1:54:38Speaker 02

  And so I went out and I didn't do a very good job as a flight lead. In fact, I think I got hit on that. An in-country, yeah, an in-country hit, which was very rare, getting hit from in-country. The biggest thing they have would maybe be a 50 caliber and it hit it in the gun bay.

• 1:55:00Speaker 02

  And as an example, I screw it up. I mean, here's a target, right? We're gonna go in, I've got a flight of four. And the wind is blowing. So what does I do? Little Dick trying to be a flight lead. He chooses, you know, there's three targets down there, as an example. And so what I do, I try, I go and attack the target that's upwind. So if it's upwind, there's a bunch of smoke, and the smoke drifts over all the other ones that they have to hit. You know, a classy newbie screw up. And so the commander says, "God damn it, Dick, if you want to go to Misty, then you can go. Get the hell out of here, I don't want to see you again."

• 1:55:41Speaker 02

  And so then I enjoyed this, these classified guys that had, we had our own air-conditioned little trailers out in our own little contolment area. And that's the tip of the end of the spear, and that's where the action was, and that's where Dickie wanted to be. Boy, I was so, so happy and enthralled with that. That's why I stayed to do a second tour, to do actually a hundred missions in Misty. So then I went up and what I saw in the North Vietnam and the areas that we were, it was a different world. And there was a lot of, a lot of ground fire and a lot of, a lot of targets that had been

• 1:56:25Speaker 02

  hit. And we went back 35 years later. I went back with five guys that I flew combat with. And I wanted to go back to that area, we call it the Route Packs. And North Vietnam is often in about six different areas. You know, two of them the Navy has, and then there's the ones up around Hanoi, and we were one of the ones down in the southern Panhandle, just above the DMC, it's called Route Pack One.

• 1:56:58Speaker 02

  So, that was our primary area that we flew in all the time. And, I don't know, where was I going with that?

• 1:57:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, I was trying to get to what happened with Howie.

• 1:57:16Speaker 02

  Oh, with Howie. Okay, this is, now Howie was our, I'm sorry, getting old and grayberry. Howie was the top gun at our gun school. He was really good. He was a fighter pilot's fighter pilot, man. I had a cute little blonde wife, couple of little kids. He was a cool guy. Anyway, during gunnery school, he had an engine failure. And he ejected in gunnery school. And when he got back, he says, "Well, you know, how did it go?" Everybody says, "Well, why ejected? You know, what happened?" Everybody wants to know. And he says, "Well, the only thing that happened," he says, "It jarred my," he came back and he says, "His glasses were ajar. His sunglasses were ajar."

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  That's his only issue. And so now I'm up in Misty.

• 1:58:05Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like as cool as it gets, huh?

• 1:58:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, as cool as it gets. So, it's just, "Howie, you gotta come up to Misty. And this is where the action is." Now, he didn't want to go. And then I was so excited about what we were doing, and he's our top gun guy. And I don't think he was as, had the adrenaline or that little combat gland as bad as I did. And he finally acquiesced, and he joined Misty. And on his first checkout ride, he got, basically, he got killed. Him and Brian Williams, two Williams, Howard Williams and Brian Williams.

• 1:58:51Speaker 02

  They were in an area called Chapon, the very hot area up in Laos. And sure enough, they got hit on fire. And Brian says the fire was burning from the engine compartment almost all the way into the back cockpit. And they said... He says, "Okay, we're gonna have to get out." So they headed up a remote area in the jungle to eject. And he says, and Brian says, "Okay, I'm gonna go." And Howard says, "Okay, I'm right behind you." That's the last words he ever said.

• 1:59:29Speaker 02

  And Brian, and I was up there flying, another missile sortie, and I heard this and went tearing over there. And the Jolly Grain was real close and they picked him up, picked up Brian, but nobody heard. And I was really upset. I says, "Well, where's Howard? Did you see a parachute?" You know, and he didn't see anything. And I was kinda beefed about that, but it was Howard. He was my best friend.

• 1:59:55Speaker 02

  And now he's down.

• 1:59:58Speaker 02

  And never heard, never heard from him again, but they, I did locate the wreck site.

• 2:00:06Speaker 02

  Dense jungle. They didn't think there was any human beings anywhere near the place.

• 2:00:11Speaker 02

  But he went down and he was, there's a little ridge and you can see where the airplane clipped the jungle that was burning and went down into the canyon. And you can see the wreckage. And so, every day I would go up there and real slow, almost kill myself, trying to go real slow and look down in there to see if I could see anything, but it was just, you know, a wreck site.

• 2:00:36Speaker 02

  Didn't hear a thing, so I thought, "God, I gotta go up there and on the ground and see my best buddy."

• 2:00:44Speaker 02

  So I made, I made an arrangement out of Nakon Fanam in KP. They have, have a radar site up there and they fly helicopters that they put the Road Watch teams, you know, you guys. You're, you're vintage. They go up there and the snake eaters like tacos. It's the classic snake eater and they put these guys in to watch the roads and stuff and report back and forth. And they insert them and then they try to take them out and stuff.

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  So I contacted him and I says, "Hey, can I get a ride in just, you know, on your way in, drop me off at the rec site and then when you're gonna leave, an hour or two, then come back and pick me up and bring me back. And then I will know what happened to Howard because if I see an ejection seat or something there, then I will know whether he's dead or not." And so I had set that all up, ready to go. And I'm walking around bumping into myself too because I'm the summary courts officer, so you have to, you know, familiar with summary courts because if somebody gets killed, somebody is designated as the, is the guy that has to take care of his personal thing and pay all his bills and pack all of his stuff up

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  and write the letter to his wife and stuff. So that was my duty for that, that I didn't like. And I'm all set, ready to go. Go over to NKP and they're gonna take me into the rec site. I get this phone call and it says, he says, I'm a, I think he said he was a major. "I'm a major, but I can't tell you my name." He says, "I know what you're gonna do tomorrow." Exact words. He says, "Don't do it, it's been taken care of." And he said, "Do you understand that?" I says, "Yeah, he's been, don't do it, he's been taken care of. I understand that." And then before I could ask any more questions, he was gone.

• 2:02:42Speaker 02

  So I didn't go. Now, there was eighteen, fifteen to eighteen years later that I found out that, that they knew that Howard was dead, where they actually killed him. In Laos, they killed everybody. If you went down in Laos, the policy was that they killed you. Every single one of them. There was no captured. In North, in North Vietnam, you're a valuable asset. Now, if you bail out of North Vietnam, the civilians would kill you if they got to you first. But in fact, I got another story about another F-105 pilot that I saw being decapitated with machetes right in front of my eyes. But the thing about Howard...

• 2:03:30Speaker 02

  It was thirty-five years later, they found out what really happened. That he was found on the ground, and two stories. One of them went up there and they took his dog tags. One guy said he was dead, he had a broken leg, and he was at the foot of a tree. But I know what happened. He was, Howard broke his leg, and he was there, and they went up and killed him. And took his dog tags away from him. And then he told the farmer to bury him. And that they didn't bury him deep enough. And he was exhumed by a large jungle animal. And that's all they found of him eighteen years later, when we finally buried him in Arlington. What his remains were.

• 2:04:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, what was the F-105 pilot that you saw get beheaded?

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  There was, it was in the coastal plain, now. The coastal plain was flat, right up to the edge of the ocean. And it was all farmers, you know, rice paddies and farmlands, and very sparsely populated and stuff. And we were on a misty mission one day, and I looked, and coming right underneath me was this thing that was on fire. And I didn't know that the 105 guy was even there. And it was a big shock. The guy was burning like mad. And so I pulled up, and I could see he was trying to make a turn towards the water. At fairly low altitude. Maybe three or four thousand feet, or lower. And I wasn't talking to him or anything, but I'd more or less joined up with him, kind

• 2:05:04Speaker 02

  of high, to watch him. Now, I knew, realized the thing was on fire, burning like mad, this F-105 Thunder Chief. And he was trying to turn to get to the water. And, you know, it was kind of like a rooting section. That's two misties in the airplane, you know, come on, hang in there, you're gonna make it, you're almost there, you're almost there. And then there was a big explosion in the airplane, and it rolled upside down. And the pilot ejected.

• 2:05:30Speaker 02

  And he was high enough that he got a good shoot. And then the airplane, the 105, went over. And when he finally hit the ground, it looked like, I don't know, ten cans of napalm. And they're the biggest fireball I've ever seen. And so then, now he's fairly low altitude, he's hanging in a parachute. So I came around to circle him, and you could kinda see, you could see the shadow that the parachute had made, and you could tell kinda how high he was. And so I timed it, so I came around, based the final, and I came by, you know, within, I don't know, dragging the wing and a wingtip, and the, you know, I mean, really low. Twenty feet, maybe, right by him.

• 2:06:15Speaker 02

  Now, this is he landed in the rice paddy, he took his helmet off, he was taking his helmet off, and he waved at me as I went by. And it was so close that I could recognize his face. And then I noticed that there's a whole bunch of other gunners that were just shooting like mad. And so we pulled up higher, back around, and then, it was the strangest thing, I could see him in the rice paddy, and there was a perfect circle, a black circle around him. And it was, it was all kinda collapsing on his, on his point. That's his black circle. And that was the black pajamas, everybody had this black silk pajamas, everybody that would wear, that they wore up there. And then he started running, and this thing collapsed into a kind of a heart.

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  And in my next pass, I came around really low, again. And the farmers, the farmers were on him, and they all had machetes, and they were chopping him up. And I pulled up, and then you have really mixed emotions, because I had the ability to kill every one of those people. You know, my 20 millimeter, I could kill every one of those farmers. But then you don't know if the fighter pilot was, was alive or not. Probably wasn't. But, you know, there's no way you could take any risk. And then you pull up, you have really a heavy heart. Holy crap. You know, a pretty emotional thing.

• 2:07:44Speaker 02

  There was also another rescue. There was another shoot down that was, I don't know, maybe a number of weeks different. Here again, it was another F-105 pilot and a wingman. And he had his wingman and he got shot down. And I went tearing up there and found his parachute canopy on the top of a ridge. It was right off the Quanki, there was a Quanki River, south fork of the Quanki River, and there's a little village down there. And it was a very steep slope that went up to the top of this ridge. And as I came over, came over, I looked at it and I could see his parachute.

• 2:08:28Speaker 02

  And so he came around now, his wingman is with him and we're talking. And I made a really a bad decision. I really screwed up and I still feel really bad about it today that I made a mistake that I shouldn't have. And that is, I should have sent him to get fuel from our tanker right then. But the thing is that I could see the people in the village and they were starting up the hill. And so we took turns trying to put some strafe, it wouldn't strafe in the people, but I was putting strafe between the people and the pilot, and I couldn't see his parachute anymore. And he never came up on voice either. And so we were both doing that.

• 2:09:12Speaker 02

  Instead of sending him out to get fuel or leaving him there to keep the, well, we got the rescue going and I could have went out and got fuel. But all of a sudden, we were really involved in keeping, you know, the people away from them so we could set up a rescue. I realized, I should have done this to start with, a major amateur screw up on my part. I still feel bad about it today, is that I didn't check and see how much fuel we had. You know, what's your fuel state? And we both ran out of fuel at the same time. So both of us had to leave. And go out to the tanker. And when we came back, there was no voice, anything.

• 2:09:56Speaker 02

  And the 105 pilot, later on, I've tried to find out who these pilots were, and the guy that was on the top of the ridge, I found that he had died. He never made it back as a prisoner of war. But the guy that was in the rice paddie did. And I don't have their names right now, and it's not important. But anyway, I was wrong about that. And I found out later that the guy got killed. He did get chopped up by the farmers. And the guy on the top of the ridge, he got captured and, you know, he made it through prisoner of war. And I found out about it when they finally got released in 1973, I think it was.

• 2:10:44Jocko Willink?

  So, as you're doing this, and again, there's incredible detailed stories in the book and about these missions that you're doing. I'm gonna fast forward a little bit to, well, I guess it's a pretty notable mission for you. You were basically doing a test of a theory of bringing guys up that you worked directly with. Is that right?

• 2:11:15Speaker 02

  One of our biggest problems is target accuracy. And, you know, I'd hang it out and find a really great target. I'd find a barge, I'd find a storage area. And we have a flight of, I don't know, maybe it was a coincidence, but my perception was that the F4s could barely hit the ground, much less my target. And it was not unusual that we'd put a flight of F4s in on the target. And my BDA was that there was no ordnance hit within 10,000 meters of my target, no visible damage.

• 2:11:56Speaker 02

  It was very frustrating. You have a beautiful target and they come in and they couldn't hit anywhere near it. Sometimes, sometimes they get so frustrated, I'd go down and the misties would do this. They weren't supposed to. We had our hard deck that we're supposed to, and I'd get so frustrated, I'd go down and the trucks that they couldn't hit, I'd go down and take out a couple of them with my, with my two 20 millimeter cannons. And after giving them that BDA, I says, and just before they'd leave frequency, I'd pull up and say, "Hey, I got an addition to your, to your BDA." Now, we couldn't claim it for ourselves, we'd all get fired. But it's war, and damn it, those trucks are carrying bullets, they're gonna carrier,

• 2:12:40Speaker 02

  kill our kids in the south. You know, it's worth taking a risk, I thought. And I said, "By the way, I want to revise your BDA, you got two trucks killed." Didn't make any sense.

• 2:12:55Jocko Willink?

  But the, but the, so this new idea was to bring up guys that you, with different aircraft, that were, you thought would have a better chance of hitting targets?

• 2:13:05Speaker 02

  Okay, now, we were frustrated about the ability to hit the targets. And that was a big ongoing frustration. We'd find it, mark it accurately, and nobody could hit it. Pretty fat. A side note happened once, and I don't know why, there was a flight of Navy A4s off the Kitty Hawk. The Nomads. And I never worked the Navy because, you know, I don't know what the Navy was doing in an Air Force area, but there they were. And I had a, what I looked like was a storage area, had bunkers and stuff, looked like there's fuel or ammo, storage area, pretty good target.

• 2:13:46Speaker 02

  And so, wow, A4s would come up and Nomad would check in. And, you know, they'd all sound differently, the Navy would sound different than the Air Force guys. So I said, "Okay, I got a bunker, storage area," and I described the target to them. And I says, "Okay, you know, green them up, warm them up, guys, get ready to go, because I'm gonna, I'm into mark." So I pulled up, went around, put a nice mark in the target. And I said, "Okay, hit my smoke." And I waited and waited and waited, and finally, the smoke, excuse me, started to dissipate and go, "What?" And I ask them... And I ask him, I says, "Hey, a nomad, is there any problem? Do you see my smoke?" He says, "Oh, yeah, I saw your smoke, Misty.

• 2:14:31Speaker 02

  But I was waiting for it to get the hell out of the way so I could see what the target was." I says, "I'd never heard of that before." I mean, this is really strange. Air Force guys don't do that. They just wanna come up there and piss off their bombs and get their counters and go home early. Some of them. And, and he says, "Oh, Misty, I see what you're looking at. Wow." Now, he took over. You know, normally the forward air controller, we control the strikes and stuff. He says, "Oh, I know what it is." He says, "Oh, okay." And he described it to the other, his three, his flight. And he says, "Okay, two, you put your target, your bombs there, and three, and so forth." And he controlled the whole thing.

• 2:15:13Speaker 02

  And I'm sitting back and thinks, "Wow, this is really cool." And they did hit an ammo thing, and it burned for a couple of days. And I took some pictures of it and wrote a nice letter to the, to the Navy, for God's sake. And they invited us to the Kitty Hawk. And we went out there and spent three days in combat operations off Yankee Station, just because of, we wrote him a nice letter. It was really interesting, these nomads. Another thing I found, the Navy has a camaraderie between attack pilots and, and fighter pilots. And it's big camaraderie. And they were, you know, hanging out with them for a while.

• 2:15:56Speaker 02

  And they, one of them was having an argument about something, and he says, "He says, "Ah, Jake, goddamn it." And he says, "You're talking like a fighter pilot." The guy says, "Take that back." You know, and they're really arguing. I said, "Wait a minute, I'm a fighter pilot? You know, what's wrong with that?" But it was really a cool experience that we had with them. So, anyway, what we wanted to do this day is that... Now, there's guys that draw bombs in South Vietnam. They're working troops in contact. And you just don't piss bombs off around like we do up in North Vietnam. It has to be very accurate because it's troops in contact and there's other friendlies on the ground and the foreigner controllers in the south make great, you know, they go

• 2:16:40Speaker 02

  to great lengths that we don't go and bomb our own people. And so now, these guys could really hit targets. And so it's my buddy Chuck Shaheen, in fact, we were kind of high school buddies in some way. We come from the same area around Dinuba and we should chase the same girls and so forth. So, anyway, Chuck had finished up his first tour. He might have had, I don't know, maybe sixty, sixty sorties. And I was working on one hundred and eighteen, oh, one hundred and five, I guess, missed emissions. And I had about five more to go before I was in my normal rotation.

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  I says, "Hey Chuck, this is your champagne flight. Hey, how about two, you know, I'll go with you in your backseat, you know, and I'll, it'll be your champagne flight and there'll be a little article in the Orange Cove Register that says, 'Two hometown boys complete combat tour and, you know, whatever, a little blurb in some little podunk newspaper.'" I thought that's all it was gonna be. So I had this, this is gonna be a test. And so Chuck and I were gonna go up there and find a target. Now, these are in-country guys, they hadn't been up to North Vietnam. And so I said, "Now, we gotta find a real safe target for these guys."

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  You know, there's some areas that you don't take newbies into, really, it's some intense area. And so we're looking around for kind of a benign area. And the best we could come up with is some goddamn truck parked beside a karsh wall up there by a little river and a little road. And this truck wasn't camouflaged or anything. That should have been a clue right away. So finally, we looked around and he says, "Well, this is about the best we can do." But now, this is a test. These guys, the in-country guys, and they sent up some fighter weapons guys. The guy's been through the top, Air Force's Top Gun School. Fighter weapons, Nellis, we call them patch wearers, guys with their patch that they've been through the wider, the Top Gun School.

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  The guy's really good. So there were three of them. Then he come up and we briefed him. And I guess they could see the truck. And the guy says, "Okay, leads in." And he rolls in. He missed as bad as the F-4s did. He pulled off, missed the damn truck. He says, "Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to reset my altimeter." Well, bullshit. This is okay, too. And he had some other excuse, that his mill, his site didn't work right, and he missed. So the long and the short of it is, he three expert patch wearers for bombing accuracy. You know, the first guys should have taken that truck out.

• 2:19:30Speaker 02

  You know, they could drop it right in the guy in the truck's glove box if they wanted to. What the hell's going on? So all of them, all of them missed. Now, right then, our test was over. And I should have stopped it, right?

• 2:19:45Jocko Willink?

  You should have stopped it.

• 2:19:48Speaker 02

  But however, that damn truck was still sitting down there.

• 2:19:51Jocko Willink?

  And that's when, I'm gonna take this to the book. You say, "We couldn't bear to fail. Three passes, same results, and no 20mm hits on the truck. Chuck decided the misty fact should give it a shot." Someone should have reminded us that when the 20mm guns are beyond 3,500-foot slant range, the bullets just tumble and are rendered worthless. Until now, we had all flown above 4,500-foot hard deck, unwilling to deny ourselves this stupid truck. That seemed to be just sitting there taunting us. Chuck went in. If the patch wearers couldn't do it, we would. However, we were, we were the forward air controller, not the fighter bomber. And what we were about to do was in direct violation of standard protocol.

• 2:20:35Jocko Willink?

  I checked the altitude indicator. The three degree dive angle put us flat and right next, right on top of the road. The karst cliff was now a blur, close and right next to me. We were low enough that I could even see the pebbles on the road. This was a no kidding, low angle Luke gun school strafe pass. Chuck had the throttle in full burner, burner real steady as only Chuck can fly. In the weeds now, he opened fire and put a long concentrated burst of 20 millimeter cannon right on target. I could not see the truck from the backseat, but was certain he plastered it. Great. We got some BDA. The test was successful. The champagne sweet, even though the details were going to be fudged a bit.

• 2:21:19Jocko Willink?

  Fudged hell, in reality, this mission was a total failure. What happened in the next two seconds would nullify everything we had done. Chuck came off the trigger and started a hard climb. As the high G came on, there was a loud bang under my right seat. It sounded as if Pete Rose had hit the bottom of the fuselage with a baseball bat on a home run swing. There was a whoosh as my rear view mirror was filled with fire. When we pulled up, I could see the fires glow on the cliff wall. Looking around, I determined there were no good options for an ejection. I'm afraid it's Hanoi Hilton. Here we come. The drop tanks had gone dry and Chuck called for a heads up. As we were going to clean the wing and jettison the external fuel tanks, pylons and rocket pods.

• 2:22:03Jocko Willink?

  As we pulled up, the other F-100s joined us and reported we were torching and confirmed it wasn't an internal fire. Chuck pulled it out of burner and the angry red fire in the mirror changed to a white vapor. The after burner flame had ignited the fuel stream and without it, the fire choked itself out. The fire was out, but we were hemorrhaging fuel at a, at a prodigious rate. There was talk about turning off generators, transfer pumps, looking for a tanker, et cetera, but no practical solution presented itself. As we looked ahead at the coast coming up in the distance and watched the fuel gauge rapidly unwind, it was painful, obvious the gauge would read empty before we reached, long before we reached the water.

• 2:22:47Jocko Willink?

  All we could do now was re-flight the, relight the afterburner and use the remaining fuel for speed before it completely gushed out, hoping we could still make it to the safety of the Gulf of Tonkin. The guys on our wing looked closely to see if the fuel was running inside the fuselage where it might blow us out of the sky upon relighting the afterburner. They let us know it didn't look like it, but there was no way to know for sure. Fighter pilots like to fly close. For some reason, it seems the closer you get, the more help you can lend to stricken comrade. As we looked down at the small farms of the coastal plain, knowing farmers were waiting with machetes in hand, this decision became a no-brainer.

• 2:23:30Jocko Willink?

  Chuck calmly called, "Okay, we're gonna relight the burner." We had never seen two wingmen go from close fingertip to high forward spread root formation so quickly. Those guys got away from you. Chuck mumbled something about candy asses and if those patchwares had hit the damn truck, we wouldn't be in this fix. He pushed the throttle outboard and relit the burner. The white vapor stream in my mirror again turned red with fire. The wingman said, "No sweat, it's only torching." Wow, some torch. It was only seven, it was over 700 feet long. We were accelerating in a slight calm climb, low on fuel, with wings clean and going like stink. I think we may have gone supersonic.

• 2:24:14Jocko Willink?

  Chuck's decision to relight the burner was a good one and it looked like we might make it to the water. Pilots seem to prioritize things. Only after returning to Fu Kat did I remember hearing a loud rattlesnake sound in the headset and noticed something on the glare shield. Our threat warning system was showing a SAM missile. It was going wild. Surface-to-air missile launch flight panel was lit up like a Christmas tree. We were four F4s flying straight and level to the coast, a perfect target, but no one in our formation gave this warning more than a passing glance. Normally, we would have called SAM, SAM, and broken for the deck. Afterward, the patchware lead told me, "Yes, I do remember that. I just reached up and turned it off." For some reason, the enemy did not launch the SAMs.

• 2:24:58Jocko Willink?

  They probably thought we were going to die in the fire, so why waste a missile? I believe most warriors during times, during the intense heat of combat, resign themselves to the likelihood that survival is improbable. As I sat there watching the torrent of fire behind us, the unwinding fuel gauge and that distant coast growing nearer, deep in my psyche, a small glimmer of hope emerged. Maybe we can make it. We might actually get out of this alive, not dead, and not as POWs. Halfway to the safety of the water, I made a promise to myself that if we could make it to the coast and eject and get rescued, I would not be coming up here anymore.

• 2:25:40Jocko Willink?

  This was my 105th misty sortie, almost twice that of a normal misty tour. No one could ever say I was a coward or a quitter. My next action had to be done perfectly. I had often visualized what it would be like to eject on that violent rocket seat, riding it up and out. I had studied and trained for each of the procedures. I even joined a skydiving club and completed 50 sport parachute jumps. I couldn't have been better prepared. I'd always been paranoid about my personal parachute and made it clear that no one else was to touch it, ever. I would meticulously adjust the straps to my frame. Since I had practical experience in skydiving, I was well acquainted with the agony to the groin area and the twins that resulted from an ill-fitting harness.

• 2:26:24Jocko Willink?

  A perfect fit was critical and was always on my mind. Prior to my ejection, I considered a few things, but not in any sequence. I remembered running out of fuel. Chuck had the Hun in full afterburner and we both watched the fuel gauge unwind to zero. I always wondered how accurate those gauges were and was about to find out. As the needle passed empty, the engine quit. This was not a sudden flame out, but reminded me of a pilot slowly pulling the throttle back to idle. However, the RPM did not stop at idle but continued to unwind. I recalled that there were a lot of towering cumulus clouds off the coast. Chuck and I searched for an area to eject and as soon as we spotted a break in the

• 2:27:07Jocko Willink?

  clouds, we knew it was time. The HC-130 Hercules search and rescue plane, Crown 6, had just popped into view, which was comforting. During the course of this entire catastrophic mission, my cassette recorder had been running, but I neglected to remove the tape and put it in my pocket prior to ejection. Bummer.

• 2:27:26Jocko Willink?

  As soon as we made it to the Gulf, I experienced an odd sense of calm. I realized this would be my final combat mission. This was the first time I truly believed I would make it out of the war alive. I was going home to see my family. All I had to do now was simply eject and get rescued. I had complete faith in my equipment. The weather was good and the Gulf, glass smooth and inviting, was welcoming me. Yes, this was going to be a piece of cake. We had the ideal speed and altitude necessary for a successful ejection. I said, "Well Chuck, it's time to go." I reminded Chuck about the half-second delay on his seat. He responded, "No, if you go first, there's no delay." I began to argue, but thought better of it.

• 2:28:10Jocko Willink?

  "Okay, now, visor down, straps tight, elbows in, head back hard on the headrest." I closed my eyes, lifted the seat handles, and, while squeezing both triggers, wondered what the next five minutes of my life would be like. I wanted to avoid being anywhere near the Hun's point of impact. My rocket seat fired and the e-ticket ride up the rails was slow, smooth, and wonderful. It worked. Once clear, I kicked the seat away from me and my chute opened with a jerk. Looking around, I saw three F-100s, Crown 6, and a couple of F-4s that had joined the orbit. I looked around for Chuck but didn't spot him or our crippled Hun. I could only assume Chuck had waited a while and ejected inside a cloud.

• 2:28:55Jocko Willink?

  I retrieved the survival radio, turned it on, and expected to hear my chute locator beeper, but heard nothing. I had made two emergency ejections in my lifetime and the chute beepers failed on both. I tried to call but couldn't work the damn thing with my helmet on, so I put the radio away.

• 2:29:11Jocko Willink?

  The next item was the four-line parachute cut. Sure enough, the Conical C9 chute canopy would oscillate side to side as air spilled out one side than the other. I loved skydiving and was eager to test the four-line cut. Cutting four of the 28 lines would allow air to escape in a controlled manner and stabilize the canopy. I grabbed my government-issued hookblade knife and reached for the two shroud lines on my right and cut them. Next, I grabbed the two left, hooked the knife around the shroud lines, cutting those two clean. But to my horror, there was another cut. I had accidentally cut into one of the four suspension risers.

• 2:29:53Jocko Willink?

  I slowly turned to survey the damage and saw the nylon web riser was cut ninety percent of the way through. Had I cut it completely, the chute would have collapsed and I would have streamed into the Gulf. My heart was in my throat. My God, fly a hundred and fifty-five Misty missions and die by my own hand. I think Jonesy, the first Misty to fly a hundred missions, did the same thing on his final mission, Bailout. Do not give fighter pilots knives. Much later, someone in the parachute shop got smart and took away the knives from the flailing fighter pilots and replaced them with a four-line release system that required no cutting. Hanging in the chute, I took one last look at North Vietnam, remembering all that had happened to me during the past eight months.

• 2:30:35Jocko Willink?

  As the realization that I would not be returning took hold, I was flooding flooded with an unanticipated sense of relief. I remembered to deploy my raft in my survival kit, but was so shaken from the knife and parachute episode that I had forgotten to activate my underarm life preservers until just before hitting the water. Without them, the weight of the survival gear would have pulled me straight to the bottom of the Gulf, sinking me like a brick. I barely had time to inflate one side as my feet hit the warm, clear water. With no wind, my chute settled right on top of me. What a mess. I struggled to untangle myself, pulled the raft over, and boarded. I attempted to relax and enjoy the quiet solitude as a new member of the exclusive

• 2:31:18Jocko Willink?

  Gulf of Tonkin Yacht Club. It was amazing how clear the water was and how good survival smelled. As I, as I read, as I read these, uh, these ejection stories, I'm always surprised that you, you guys like have time to think about it and set it up, kind of. I always, in my mind, I always pictured ejections, you know, you get hit and you have a second and you just pull it and you go. And, and you guys are sitting there thinking like, okay, well, looks like we're far enough. We got it a good altitude. You have time to think about it.

• 2:31:58Speaker 02

  On this particular engine, there was, uh, there was a lot of time. So that, you know, that we talk about, about the warrior ethic. A real warrior, if he worries about making it home, he's not worth a shit as a warrior. He might as well just stay home. And if you're gonna go up and do warrior-type things, you have to accept the realization that you're probably not gonna make it. And once you do that, then you can become an effective warrior.

• 2:32:29Jocko Willink?

  You can focus on the job.

• 2:32:30Speaker 02

  That's right, and on fire burning out there, and I thought maybe I was gonna make it. For the first time, I thought, because I had this premonition about, uh, about being captured. In fact, uh, I used to go down into our intelligence section where they could get a lot of classified information, and I was surprised about how much they knew about the prisoner of war status. Even the interrogators and their name and the new guy village and what was gonna happen to you. And those rope torchers and stuff. Uh, I was very, very familiar with that. And it was, it was like a premonition. And when we got hit and pulled off, I thought, this is it, man.

• 2:33:15Speaker 02

  What do they call him, the rat or something? I says, well, I think I'm gonna be able to meet the rat now. And then all of a sudden, that full transition that they, we may make it to the water.

• 2:33:26Speaker 02

  And then for the first time, I thought, I'm gonna make it. And since I'd done two tours, almost two tours, nobody would give me any problem. I says, man, I found everything that I needed, everything I wanted to know about, you know, maybe it's a selfish thing. Could I be one of those warriors? Could I be one of those guys that flew those missions over Nazi Germany when three out of four of them died? Uh, did I have the, did I have the courage? Could I really do that? And I found out. And, you know, having that information to me, subconsciously from my own personal psyche, was really important. And I learned a lot of other things, too.

• 2:34:11Speaker 02

  I made a survey of some fellow fighter pilots, and it says,

• 2:34:17Speaker 02

  The thing is, what happened when you first started to be shot at? The very first reaction, the very first time? And we talked about it in the book a little bit. The first reaction was the audacity. Not that I'm scared, not I'm gonna drink away and duck down between my knees or whatever. It was the audacity of that son of a bitch that shot at me. That's the first reaction. And maybe that's, I don't know, maybe a rite of passage into being a warrior.

• 2:34:50Jocko Willink?

  So what was the survey?

• 2:34:52Speaker 02

  Oh, it was the survey that I... They were just mainly fellow fighter pilots. And I tried to ask some of the people that were... That had ground combat, like you did, Jaco. What was their reaction? But I wasn't able to really... That was an informal thing. I just wanted to know, was I unique? Or was this very, very typical of what happened when you first get shot? And I found that it's probably fairly typical. That there wasn't any of the guys that I knew about, that I flew with when they first got shot. Did the duck down and scream for my mother or whatever?

• 2:35:37Speaker 02

  Is this the audacity? And then, if you survive that, you're a warrior. And I would like to think that maybe that was a pretty common thing, too. On all aspects of mortal combat with your fellow men.

• 2:35:56Jocko Willink?

  So that was your last combat operation in Vietnam. So what happened after that? I mean, after that, do they give you an option and say, alright, you can head home now?

• 2:36:09Speaker 02

  Well, I still had my one-year tour. And I was... I only had about... I don't know, a week or 10 days. Now, the misties, if you're involved in something like that, nobody gave us any crap about our illegal hats or illegal mustaches or...

• 2:36:26Jocko Willink?

  I saw a picture of your mustache.

• 2:36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, or any goddamn thing.

• 2:36:28Jocko Willink?

  It looked pretty illegal.

• 2:36:29Speaker 02

  Any goddamn thing we wanted to do. You know, there was always some spit and polish Colonel that would come up and give us and give us a bunch of crap about things that are not really germane to a combat operation in the jungles of frickin Vietnam. I like sign in my shoes or something like that. And it says, "Okay, Colonel, why don't you..." It says, "I'm scheduled for Misty 1-1 in the morning. Why don't you take my mission for me and I'll stay home and clean my shoes?" "That's okay, cool it." So, basically, if you're in, if you are in an environment where you're probably not gonna make it anyway, that was your mindset. We did a bunch of other stuff.

• 2:37:10Speaker 02

  We acquired our own DC-3, a whole DC-3, and we'd, and we'd go back and forth to Hong Kong anytime we wanted to. Or, we're supposed to have a, one R&R where you meet your wife in Hawaii. The guys that were married, we'd go to Hawaii. Well, we'd go and forge papers. Or, one of them was, we'd go down to the personnel or, I don't know, the admin office, and they have these forms. And one of the forms was a, for emergency leave. And so, we got a real one, and we looked at it, and somebody had a typewriter, and so we could copy that, that form. Nobody ever checked on it. I mean, it was, it was an authorized form.

• 2:37:55Speaker 02

  And so, in my example, you know, we made up authorization, some Colonel's name, and it would always have fun, like, he could sign his name with the left hand or the right hand, you know? I mean, it looked official, but it was phony as hell, because we just made them up. And, it was one of those, and I went down to the cargo area there at Fucat, and I handed this, and within 24 hours, I was back in the sack with my wife in Sacramento.

• 2:38:26Jocko Willink?

  This was after you got shot down?

• 2:38:27Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 2:38:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that was just normal?

• 2:38:29Speaker 02

  It was during the, during the eight months that I was there.

• 2:38:31Jocko Willink?

  You just took this emergency leave?

• 2:38:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'd go to Hong Kong if we wanted to, you know, nobody messed with us at all. The only thing that we couldn't forge was pay.

• 2:38:41Jocko Willink?

  You're probably lucky you couldn't.

• 2:38:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but anything else...

• 2:38:44Jocko Willink?

  Otherwise, you would have probably been, they probably would have caught that one.

• 2:38:47Speaker 02

  No, they would have caught that one, and that wouldn't have been right anyway. But, but as far as anything else, we'd go and do whatever the hell we wanted to. And, and not only that, the Misty's were known for, uh, oh, I gotta give you something too. It's our calling card.

• 2:39:03Speaker 02

  We could do whatever we want to. So I went down and I spent seven days at home, which is totally illegal. You're not even supposed to go home at all. But my emergency leave papers worked just fine.

• 2:39:14Speaker 02

  And so at Travis Air Force Base, where my wife and my one daughter was there,

• 2:39:21Speaker 02

  I went back and I gave them my emergency leave orders. And the dispatcher there at the military transport or mat terminal, he says, "Okay, you and your wife, uh, go back and have a nice steak dinner at the club and a bottle of wine and come back here at, uh, ten o'clock and, uh, you'll be on your way. We got a flight going out for you." And so I did, and like I said, less than twenty-four hours, I think in twenty hours, I was back in Fucat. I thought, you know, I could, I could almost commute to this thing.

• 2:39:53Speaker 02

  So it was, uh, it was really a devil make error. You know, you just, we're Misty's, we do all this stuff, and nobody's gonna fuck with us. On the ground or in the air. Now, I'll show you my calling card.

• 2:40:10Speaker 02

  You'll get a kick out of this.

• 2:40:21Speaker 02

  It's uh, two sides. I think you could look at that and maybe read it.

• 2:40:25Jocko Willink?

  So side one says, get fact by a super fac. Cause they were the super savers. They called them super facts. Get fact by a super fac. Call Misty for appointment, contact Hillsborough or Cricket. What are those? What's Hillsborough?

• 2:40:42Speaker 02

  Those are airborne command, airborne, uh, air traffic control for the want of another word.

• 2:40:49Jocko Willink?

  Easy terms. Flak free areas optional at extra cost specializing in SAMs, trucks, supply areas and rest caps.

• 2:41:00Jocko Willink?

  Then on the other side, it says, do not make rapid movements. This man is a trained professional killer hired by your government to seek out and destroy enemies of the state. He has nerves of twisted blue steel and must be handled very carefully. When done so, he becomes very docile. You are advised to give him the love and care he needs so badly. Signed, US Department of Defense.

• 2:41:25Speaker 02

  You can keep that.

• 2:41:27Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding.

• 2:41:31Jocko Willink?

  So what happened? So now the war's over for you.

• 2:41:34Speaker 02

  The war's over for me and then I got sent directly to another war, an important war. A war that if we'd lost, we'd lose our flight. And that was the Cold War.

• 2:41:48Speaker 02

  And then right out of the jungles of Vietnam, I found myself sitting in the same F-100 with a one megaton thermal nuclear hydrogen bomb on the centerline pylon, sitting in a bunker with a target someplace on the other side of the Iron Curtain for four years.

• 2:42:05Jocko Willink?

  And were you stationed in England at this time?

• 2:42:08Speaker 02

  Stationed in England.

• 2:42:09Jocko Willink?

  So how long, uh, what's your schedule like?

• 2:42:12Speaker 02

  Well, schedule, it was a three, it was a three month rotation. You spent a month at home, you know, family and training and, and then we spent a month at Wheelas in North Africa doing gunnery training. You know, dropping bombs and whatever. And then you spend another, then in the third month, you're in a bunker someplace.

• 2:42:34Jocko Willink?

  Just waiting to make the flight.

• 2:42:35Speaker 02

  Right on, right next to the Iron Curtain with a target on the other side someplace, like in Turkey or in Italy. So that was the three, uh, the 90 day or this 30 day rotation.

• 2:42:50Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever get, uh, spun up? What was the closest you came to launching? Did you ever get the, the, the call like, oh, it's go time?

• 2:42:58Speaker 02

  Well, if you can imagine, there's 12 of us. 12, we call them Victor alert. 12 airplanes hot cocked with this crypto code released from the president to be able to arm that weapon and, and deliver it. As you can imagine, nuclear weapons are very closely controlled and rightfully so, I would say. And, uh, I would sit on alert. And I look up at that horn, that klaxon. And I thought, if that son of a bitch goes off. The thing is that they're, they didn't mess around with that.

• 2:43:42Speaker 02

  It was either all out go or not go. There wasn't any in between.

• 2:43:46Jocko Willink?

  There was no drill or anything like this?

• 2:43:48Speaker 02

  No, there was no, well, we'll drop a bomb and scare you or something like that. There wasn't any of that commitment. And the whole thing was coordinated from NATO to nuclear artillery right next to the FIBA or right next to the Iron Curtain. And then us were rolling stuff back and then the B-52s, you know, they would come in for deeper penetration. And it was all go. And if they, I looked up there at that horn went off, I thought, fuck. You know, there's no way to get back either. You know, it's all bullshit that you can come back, but what am I going to come back to?

• 2:44:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And you knew, you know that, right? I mean, you know, if you launch on that thing, it's, that's the end of the world.

• 2:44:24Speaker 02

  Like when we were in England, sitting in the word, we were a nuclear delivery thing. We had 12 active, uh, lines, 12 there in England when we were home for that 30 days.

• 2:44:36Speaker 02

  And you know that if this thing started, that that's a primary target. And there's probably only 12 guys, if this thing ever kicked off, there's gonna be 12 individuals at Lake and Heath Air Base that are gonna be alive. Everybody else is gonna be dying. So you take off with an armed thermonuclear weapon. And then you review your mirror, everything that you know and love, your family, your friends, everything disappears in a nuclear cloud. And you often wonder, I got that son of a bitch. It's in my centerline pylon and I'm really pissed off. So we thought, well, we'd go upwind and bail out over some Norwegian fjord and climb

• 2:45:19Speaker 02

  in a cave and wait till all the radiation went away, or whatever you can visualize or something like that. However, I lost more comrades in the Cold War than I did in the Vietnam War.

• 2:45:31Jocko Willink?

  From accidents, training accidents? Or from what?

• 2:45:37Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of it was highly classified. The Gary Powers thing, the reconnaissance that the RB-47s did. And there was a lot of other clandestine things that even today, they know nothing about. Now, there's a lot of memorials. This is one thing, it's my pet peeve right now, is that there's Korea, all the wars, everybody has a monument there on the Mall. And there's no monument about the Cold War. And, of course, there wasn't any battle line, and there wasn't any casualty report and stuff, it's all classified and stuff. And we won that damn thing. We really did, we won it.

• 2:46:19Speaker 02

  And I can only say that I got shot down twice, once in the Cold War, the one that mattered, and then the Vietnam War.

• 2:46:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cuz you had another ejection.

• 2:46:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:46:29Jocko Willink?

  What happened on that ejection?

• 2:46:34Speaker 02

  Well, the saying was, you know, a lot of-

• 2:46:37Jocko Willink?

  And what happens if you have a nuclear weapon on your aircraft and you eject? Or you wouldn't, would you never fly with a nuke, a live nuke?

• 2:46:44Speaker 02

  No, they would never, I don't, uh, the Tactical Air Command, the Strategic Air Command, B-52 chrome domes, I think they did fly with, uh, with fully armed nukes, ready to go. And I think they quit that after they dropped a couple of them inadvertently. Anyway, that was an embarrassing thing. During my time, we never flew them. We flew with the dummies and we'd go out and drop them on the range, uh, you know, to see the accuracy. But if you're dropping a really powerful bomb, the only thing we would do, we'd ride

• 2:47:21Speaker 02

  on the side of the bomb in grease pencil, something like, um, I don't know who the, who the Soviet premiers were, whatever. Cause there was one, one thing, you'd come at 500 knots right on the deck at 50 feet and you'd pickle it off and then you'd try to keep going and getting away as far as you can. And he put the thing on the side and it said, well, he says, well, Uncle Ho, wasn't Uncle Ho, what the hell was it, whatever the Soviet thing was. He says, you got three choices. You can either run for 37 seconds or you can dig for 37 seconds. And the third choice is you can do any combination of either one you want.

• 2:48:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of sick, sick humor, I guess.

• 2:48:11Jocko Willink?

  So what was it, how'd you eject again?

• 2:48:13Speaker 02

  Well, I was on a test hop. Actually in England, I got kind of tired of going out to what we call the Marsh Gunnerie Range and dropping little BDU 33 blue bombs, practicing. And I wanted something of the little, cause I was a maintenance guy, I had an A and P license and I liked maintenance. And so I was gonna go over and do the Chief of Quality Control Flight Test Maintenance Officer, which is really a neat job. Cause we got to fly the airplanes without the pylons and without the drop tanks and they were clean and they were really a lot of fun to fly. And the missions were short and very demanding.

• 2:48:55Speaker 02

  And one problem, one thing, if you're a wing commander and you want to get fired, those, we call them Victor lines, Victor alert lines. And whether they're in commission or not is very important. And if the wing commander wants to get fired, he's all he has to do is drop one of those lines because of maintenance or some other thing. Because when they check in every morning down at whatever headquarters, all of his nukes are ready to go and the pilots are briefed. And then all of a sudden, there wasn't, now, the weather in England was really dogshit a lot of times. And we're supposed to have VFR 500 and 5,000 overcast and 5 miles visibility.

• 2:49:38Speaker 02

  But it came up that there was a lot of, a lot of maintenance and the airplanes were coming out of maintenance and they were backed up because they couldn't get flight tests. And so it came to the point one day that we were going to lose one of those nuke lines. Bad thing. Ooh, that was really bad. And so, so although, you know, in England, I think it was, I think it was like 600 foot overcast and drizzle and maybe 2 or 3 miles visibility. And the vice wing commander, Colonel Hurd, he come to me and he says, "Hey, Dick, I know the weather's really bad, but goddamn, we need this, we need this thing to replace it, you know, or we're going to lose one of the Victor lines."

• 2:50:18Speaker 02

  And of course, hell, I'm a combat guy, said I can do anything, say, "Go get them." And so, so I taxi out and light the burner, go down the runway, pull the nose up. Now, it's really a fun, fun thing because you can run in full afterburner. A full afterburner climb with an airplane without all the ordinance on it, boy, it's really, it's really a sparky little airplane. And it's an afterburner climb to 40,000 feet. And I break out on top over the North Sea at about 42,000 feet. I can see. So we have weather from 40,000 feet all the way to 600 feet home. And one of the tests is the negative G check.

• 2:51:01Speaker 02

  And that's where you, some guys roll inverted, I'd just pull up and then push it over to negative G and all this stuff floats up. And in the F-100, the canopy was designed in such an area, now there's always dirt and crud and screwdrivers and nuts and bolts and crap, and it all ends up right over your head. But just behind your head, and when you come back to positive G, that it all falls, and it falls, they gather all in very cleverly, the way the physics of the airplane is, and it goes right down the back of your neck. Happens every time. So I always had a collection of screwdrivers and wrenches and stuff I found in the cockpit,

• 2:51:43Speaker 02

  and I'd put it on the board and say, anybody, any mechanic up there that would like to get it, they can, you know, they can come and claim their wrench, of course, nobody ever claimed it and stuff. So I did one, I did one of those, and when I came back to positive G, I felt a horrible clunk. I mean, a major clunk, just like the engine was loose or something. And I thought, God, what the hell is that? And so this time, I dove it, got a lot more speed, pulled the nose up really heavy, and really jammed the stick forward. And sure enough, there was another big shift of weight, it seems like, right behind me. Only this time, when I came back to positive G, the 42 PSI, normal operating position of

• 2:52:25Speaker 02

  the oil pressure went from there to zero. In a bat of an eye, clunk. And so now, I had this big, huge clunk, like the engine was loose, and I thought, well, maybe it pulled a wire loose, because the engine was running fine, that it had zero oil pressure. Another thing, too, if, usually, if you have a broken oil line, you know, the, it'll, the oil pressure will just kind of, kind of bounce around a little bit and slowly decay, but, but to go to absolute zero in a spring, at the bat of an eye, just bang, zero, and that's not normal.

• 2:53:09Speaker 02

  And of course, you want to think it's, you want to think it's not real serious. Because where you are, and you finally think, I'm out over the North Sea. There's weather all the way to five, six hundred feet at home. And I says, okay. So I practiced. See, I have to call Mayday. Okay, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. It's ringed up two one, that's callsign. Ringed up two one, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, where I am and what my problem is. So I practiced a couple of times, so I could get my really cool Chuck Yeager voice. And it took a while, too. Because the first time I tried it in my headset, it didn't sound very good.

• 2:53:52Speaker 02

  So I only got it really cool. And one of the procedures is, if you have zero oil pressure, you don't want to jockey the engine back and forth, right? You want to set the power. And that means it'll, it'll run longer. So I knew that I needed about eighty-three percent on final approach. And an extra twenty knots to get level, because the F-100 did not have a zero-zero seat. I think it was, but you had to get level. If you were descending, you had no chance of making it. Okay, and that extra twenty knots would get you level. Okay, half flaps, eighty-three percent, and start down into the Merc.

• 2:54:32Speaker 02

  And they had to vector me around a little bit for identification back in those days. Anyway, it took an extended period of time. And I was telling them, I finally got on the GCA controller. And I says, look, give me transmission brakes, you know? Tell me you're on glide path, turn left, whatever the dialogue is. But give me transmission brakes, so in case something happens, you know, then I can call you. And of course, the GCA controllers, they, when they started giving the instructions, they just clamped down on the, on the transmitter. And so therefore, nobody heard anything at home when I was on final approach. Anyway, kind of got a short practice. And I was really proud of myself. I finally intercepted glide path.

• 2:55:17Speaker 02

  I lowered the nose, lowered the nose, the half flaps, had to gear down. Hey, eighty-three percent was perfect. I never jockeyed the engine at all. This is really cool. And I'm coming down in there, giving me the dialogue about left and right on glide path and so forth.

• 2:55:33Speaker 02

  And I just started to break out. I couldn't see the runway, but I could start to see down, you know, a little bit. And, uh, and I was thinking about, well, I'm rolling out of the runway and how am I gonna write this thing up and so forth. So then there was a grinding noise. The intensity grew more and more. And, and then it was, it grew louder and louder and louder and then all, then there was a huge explosion as the compressor stalls. And when a compressor stalls, then it shoots fire out both ends of the airplane. So there's this grinding and this huge bang and fire shooting out in the front and dirt comes up in your face.

• 2:56:16Speaker 02

  And now I'm looking for that, I call it the small corner of time. There's a small corner of time from here, just a couple of seconds, that corner of time, I can survive. And if I'm outside of that, the ejection won't work. That mean I'll hit the ground before. And so to use every bit of that, that extra 20 knots that you have onboard to level off and eject and maybe that, that the parachute will open in time. And so I did. And I leveled off. But then I looked down and there was a little town called Brandon, right on the final approach. And I could see that, I could see the town right in front of me.

• 2:56:58Speaker 02

  And I knew that if I banked the airplane, that it would probably just bank and then ride itself and still go into the town. So this happened in just a couple of seconds. I'm slowing down, coming back on the stick to slow down to get in that small corner of time. And I trim it, got the left trim going and reached out with my left hand and grabbed the handle and pull it up. Whoops. And pull it up and it blew the canopy off and then immediately squeezed both triggers. And knowing where that jet is gonna be in a handful of time, that is the most wonderful, smoothest experience you'll ever have, is that ride up and out of that thing. But the time compression is really interesting because as it, as the airplane was going up,

• 2:57:43Speaker 02

  was going up the rails, I thought, there's gonna be an accident aboard. And they're gonna go through all the paperwork and I'm gonna have to remember what I did for the last three days, what I drank, and I'm thinking about all that stuff, going up the ejection rails. And then I thought, my god, I had to put the Colonel's name on there, and it's Herd, Colonel Herd, is it H-E-R-D, or, you know, I misspelled it. And I thought, god, everybody in the whole world is gonna see that thing, and on this paper that, you know, the flight plan or the clearance thing, and I misspelled the guy's name, how horrible. That's all going through your mind, see, it's still going up the rails.

• 2:58:21Speaker 02

  And then the parachute opens, and, you know, you can feel it, as the canopy starts to open, all the, not the shroud line, yeah, the right, not the risers, but the shroud lines are all in there in their bundle, and you can feel them coming off your back, see. And then it opened. And then it was, then it's opened, and it happened so quick, I looked straight between my legs, expecting to look down right into the cockpit, of course, that was ridiculous. And I looked around and off my left shoulder, I could see the airplane, an airplane's flying along, and now I'm low enough, I can see the runway.

• 2:59:01Speaker 02

  And for all the work, the airplane was gonna frickin' land on the runway. I thought, boy, they're gonna, boy, they're gonna get, I'm gonna get frowned at for this, you know, jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, and it lands on the runway, and hey, didn't it? And then, the next thing I know, I'm in the trees. Parachute comes down through the trees. If you're gonna bail out, pine trees are very nice, kinda smaller pines, because, you know, they're interlaced and you come down through them and they bend just right. And by the time I got to the surface, I ended up stopping about an inch or two above the beautiful pine floor.

• 2:59:43Speaker 02

  And then with another shake, then the parachute canopy came down, you know, around my... Okay, now I'm right out of Vietnam, see, and I've ejected. And you're in the E and E training for a whole year, I've been training for escape and evasion, hide the parachute, you know, get the radio, get that damn beeper off, which didn't work this time either, the parachute beeper. And I gotta get the radio out, but in England, we don't have the double radios and stuff. And so, right over there, there was a guy, an English guy in a coat and tie, he was out trimming the Queen's forest. And his eyes were about big as saucers, and he's looking, you know, eyes open. Of course, I come down and wear nuclear alert, and I have a gold visor on.

• 3:00:27Speaker 02

  So here, this guy comes crashing down through the trees. And he said he heard the explosion, he heard the seat come down, and the canopy come down. And then this guy, spacecraft with the golden helmet, come down right in front of him, basically. And he's starting to back away. I said, "No, no, I need your help. I need your help." And, yeah, come on, then I took the helmet off, and then I thought, "God, I gotta call somebody, you know, my radios are normally in my vest in Vietnam." But now they're in the damn seat kit, one radio in the seat kit. So the only way to get to it is to pull that handle on your seat kit that you sit on. It's got your raft and survival gear and stuff in there.

• 3:01:12Speaker 02

  So I pull the handle, and a CO2 cartridge comes off, and this yellow raft, you know, emerges, and making all this goddamn noise, right in front of this guy, and he turns around and starts running away.

• 3:01:25Jocko Willink?

  Where'd the plane hit?

• 3:01:30Speaker 02

  The airplane, the airplane came, and it started a very left turn, and it just missed the town. It hit right beside Brandon, right across the road. It didn't hurt anybody, but it, you know, the typical fireball and stuff that comes down. And as I was pulling back, I says, "It just blew, and I'm getting out." Now, nobody heard me. Now, the Colonel that was coming back from across country, he heard me. He's the only one that heard my call. And so, anyway, I took the helmet off, and I ran and got him. I says, "Hey, hey, I need your help," and I brought him back. And, uh, what the hell? Oh, yeah, then I got down to the kit and opened it up and found the radio and opened

• 3:02:15Speaker 02

  it up and turned it on. And I called, uh, I made a radio call. And for the time that it blew up, it was only about ninety-three seconds, that whole time that happened. Okay. Now, I got a really good drinking buddy, and he is the, uh, the airfield, he's the airfield, uh, uh, support helicopter, and it's a, it's called Pedro. And Pedro is HH forty-three and has intermission rotors, and their whole mission is to, uh, they have the spudnik that hangs, it's a, you know, it's a big ball, firefighting and stuff. It's about as big as this table. It's this, this is fear.

• 3:02:59Speaker 02

  And the fire, and this whole thing is set up so the firefighters in their, in their, uh, aluminum suits, and there's a big fireball and burning, and the pilot's inside, they gotta go rescue him. So the rotor whirrs, pushes it away, and they take this spudnik with their firefighting thing, and they fight their way through the flames, and they get in the cockpit, and they, and they pull the pilot out. That's their whole thing.

• 3:03:25Speaker 02

  And so, now, I didn't know about this, but, uh, nobody heard me say that I was getting out. And the end of the runway, the mobile controller, his name was Jeffco, yeah. In fact, he was a prisoner of war.

• 3:03:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he was, I could be wrong about that. But anyway, he said he's the mobile controller, and so he starts screaming on the radio. He says, "Get out there quick. No shoot, no shoot. There is no shoot. I didn't see a shoot. Get out there quick." And he's screaming at the Pedro, and so the guy lifts off and he's, and he's in the helicopter, and he's heading for the fireball out there. It's going out.

• 3:04:05Speaker 02

  And he, and he keeps saying, now, the only thing that he saw was a landing light came out of the weather and crashed into a big fireball.

• 3:04:13Speaker 02

  So I saw the guy, my buddy in the Pedro helicopter, he's, he's out there, he's going, and the guy's screaming at him, "Get out there quick," and so he's going fast. And for some reason, he thought he could get there quicker if he pickled off that spudnik that he's hanging below it, so he pickled it off, see? And it crashed halfway to the wreck site. And so, so he's coming around, he's circling the wreck site, so all you see is a big, you know, typical crash site with debris and fireball and stuff. And he's thinking, "Aw shit, you know, that's Rutan out there, my best friend, it's really terrible."

• 3:04:54Speaker 02

  And then, he gets out there, in a minute and 93 seconds or something, I call him on the radio. I says, "Hey, I'm down, come and get me. Come and get me." And so now, his first thought, he's circling this fireball. And he thinks that I'm in there, right? Calling for help. And I call him, and I says, "Get your ass out here and get me." And then, his whole thing, his whole training, everything he's trained up for, was that spudnik thing, and there's the fire, and a classic situation, and they're gonna land and push the fire out of the way, but he pickled it off, and it's not there. Oops. And he's heart sick, he says, "My god, I've screwed up, now Rutan's gonna burn

• 3:05:36Speaker 02

  alive down there, and I could've saved him, that's really bad." And then he thinks, and then he, then he starts to realize, "Wait a minute, there's no fucking way that that, that somebody can be alive in that thing down there." And so he calls, and he says, he says, and he called my name, he says, "Dick, is that you?" I says, "Yeah, get your ass out here and get me." You know, thinking of Vietnam, I need to get rescued really quick. And then, and it's really interesting, this plaintive voice that he said... He says, "Where are you?" He says, "I bailed out about a mile short." He says, "You bailed out? You ejected?"

• 3:06:19Speaker 02

  And then you can understand the metamorphosis of emotion that he's going through. God, from the guy that's burning down there and I just jettisoned my firefighting equipment and now he's burning and he's calling me and I can't get to him. And then the adulation of feeling, "Oh, he bailed out," and he's, "Okay." And I says, "Yeah, get your ass out here and get me." And so then he did come out and get me. Of course, here you bailed out, see. And so there's the officers' club and you gotta tell the story about everything. And my squadron commander, Jake Engel, he comes up and he says, "Hey, he says, "Tell me, I've got a couple of questions." He says, "What were the indications?

• 3:07:02Speaker 02

  You know, did the, you know, what, uh, we have a panel full of a lot of faults and a big master caution light comes on and he says, "Oh, which one of those lights came on?" I thought, "Fuck, you kidding me?" The only thing I saw was a big red master caution light that was accentuated and confirmed by the fact that there was a grinding noise and fire shot out the front. And then that's all I remember, Jake. And then I kept thinking about seeing that airplane flying off. You know, there's a big pole sticking out of the canopy and I could see it and I could see the runway now and that horrible feeling. And so I couldn't sleep that night.

• 3:07:45Speaker 02

  So about 3 o'clock in the morning, I called maintenance control. I says, "Hey, uh, you guys got the engine yet?" And he says, "Yeah, they just brought it in and it's in hangar so-and-so. It's on a dolly, you know, you can go and look at it if you want to." In a jet engines, it usually crushes part of the intake or the, you know, the compressor blades that spin. As they're spinning, they can tell what the RPM was that they crush and then they're bent back and they can have a pretty good idea of what the power of the engine was. And so it was really eerie. And I got in the car and I went down there to mission control. There's nobody on the field. It was kind of drizzly, you know?

• 3:08:29Speaker 02

  And there's, there's the hangar. So I drive up, open the door. And sure enough, I look over there and there's the engine. It's on an engine stand. And, excuse me, the top of the fuselage is still there and then the tail is all burnt and whatever. So I walk over there, up to the engine by the side, see. And, and I know, and I know they can tell the power on the engine by the bent blades. And there's the, the face of it. All you do is walk around, walk around and look at that. So I stopped there for a little bit. And USAFII have a horrible accident rate for some, for some reason.

• 3:09:14Speaker 02

  A lot of accidents and stuff. Our old F-100 engine was, it had problems with it. And so I thought, boy, they were gonna hang me for this. You know, the first thing they do on an accident rate is they blame the pilots. It's pilot error, everything. And I took a deep breath and I thought, I'm gonna walk around and look at the front of this engine on the intake and then I'll know. And that may be the end of my flying, you know, my career. I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. So I went around and looked at the face of the engine. And the blades, it crushed the intake into a kind of a D section. So all the blades were straight.

• 3:09:59Speaker 02

  And the ones that were, which crushed the, the blades, they weren't rotating like that. They were crushed straight in like that.

• 3:10:07Jocko Willink?

  Zero power.

• 3:10:08Speaker 02

  Zero RPM, zero RPM at impact. And I thought, God, you know, maybe there was something wrong with the engine. And with that, I went back and had a good night's sleep.

• 3:10:22Jocko Willink?

  So you end up, I mean, you know, doing other jobs in the, in the air force. Like you already talked about, you went and he had to go and get your degree since you didn't have a college degree.

• 3:10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:35Jocko Willink?

  Eventually, you, you retire from the air force. And then what, what, after you retired from the air force, and I guess even as you, even before you retired for the air force, you were kind of doing some stuff with your brother. You were starting this kind of crazy test pilot. You were flying these little homemade planes that your brother was making.

• 3:10:53Speaker 02

  I flew a couple of those before I retired. But then the retirement thing was, had a big problem with the air force at this time. And it was in the seventies and the military, at least the air force was permeated with drugs. All kinds of drug problems and stuff. And so Hosmer, the wing commander says, hey, Dick, go down and take over the field maintenance thing. You're a maintenance guy and I'll make you squadron commander of a maintenance squadron. So I got 420 maintenance people.

• 3:11:34Speaker 02

  And we do engine overhauls and brake overhauls and stuff, not crew chief stuff, but just kind of field maintenance thing. And it was permeated with drugs. A lot of drugs with the people.

• 3:11:49Speaker 02

  And I never was a smoker. And I knew that smoking was bad for everybody, for anybody. And

• 3:12:01Speaker 02

  and it was, it was, it was one guy, we're an anti-smoking scene. Maybe that was kind of unique because everything was built around cigarettes and alcohol, the social environment. There was one guy, his name was Al Munch, and he was smoking all the time. And we're at the, in the club and they were talking and arguing.

• 3:12:18Speaker 02

  Typical Friday night BS. And I says, Al, look at that. I says, look at the cigarettes. You know, it's got you. He said, nah, I could give it up anytime. We have a big argument, you know. I said, I'll tell you what. I said, here's, here's five, 10, here's a $10 bill. I put it down on the cabinet. He says, you can't go 20 minutes without a cigarette.

• 3:12:41Jocko Willink?

  Ah, yeah.

• 3:12:45Speaker 02

  And so, and I knew he couldn't, because it's addicted addicts. Anyway, he was a big addict for nicotine. And it wasn't more than six or eight minutes later that he came back. He had a whole lung full of smoke and he blew it in my face. And he took the five dollar bill and he threw it on the ground. So anyway, I had a maintenance squatter. And I said, there's gonna be no smoking in my orderly room, or any of the buildings. Well, that didn't go over too well with a lot of people. And another thing, I had a third of my, a third of my troops were female. Female maintenance people, really good.

• 3:13:24Speaker 02

  And, uh, but they would lock them up in the WAF, the WAF barracks at night. And they had, you know, some big WAF sergeant would control the- What's a WAF? Uh, Women in the Air Force. Okay. Yeah, that's right, Women in the Air Force. Anyway, there was a big sergeant that would control all these women, and they'd lock them up at night. And my, my other squatter, and he had all the crew chiefs, and they would sneak in and play with my, play with my WAF, you know. Get in trouble, and he'd get caught, playing with them inside, sneaking in. And, uh, so the, the JAG, and I had court martial authority. And we were doing a lot of drug stuff.

• 3:14:07Speaker 02

  People really hung out on drugs, even had a couple of general court marshals. Guys trying to torch the building and sabotage my car and attack me with Kung-Fu darts. It was just really a mess. And a lot of marijuana. So, uh, uh, and I says, look, I want, I says, why in the world were you, you gonna lock up a third of my troops, females, and all the guys, they can run around downtown and raise hell, but they have to stay in the WAF barracks? I said, that's, I says, look, I'm the commander, they're my people, and I want them all in my barracks.

• 3:14:47Speaker 02

  And they would say, Colonel Rutan, do you have any idea what would happen if we put females in the barracks? I says, yeah, I know exactly what would happen. In about ten days, it would sort itself out and we'd be back to normal. And they could have all the rights and liberties that all the guys have. You know, I'll put one corner downstairs, it'd be the WAF. Oh, no, man, they wouldn't gotta do that at all.

• 3:15:13Speaker 02

  Well, the no smoking thing in trying to lock, unlock my wife at night. Then I was throwing kids out of the air force for doing drugs. Boy, there's some horrible stuff that was happening to these kids. But then what would bother me is I'd go, I'd go to the commander's reception sometime. You know, one commander, he'd have the other officers into his, and I'd look out in the back at these receptions and the wives would be out there toking, you know, they'd be smoking marijuana. And I thought, I'm throwing kids out of the air force for what the wives are doing back there. And I looked around at the whole scene.

• 3:15:57Speaker 02

  Now, I had a great combat record. I had all my military training, commanding staff done, all those things. I was on my way to be chief of staff. And I thought, you know, it happened just like that. I turned around and I went over to this orderly room or whatever the thing was, CBPO. And I says, I'm going home. And I had 20 years and a microsecond, just enough for the retirement.

• 3:16:35Speaker 02

  And that was another area of something that I just wasn't ready for, the politics of that. So then I went out and got ahold of my brother and we flew around the world.

• 3:16:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that, that, uh, that story is, uh, you know, a crazy story of, you know, as you're going through this thing, as you're, as you, uh, you know, get together the money. And speaking of cigarettes, you know, you, at one point you get a tobacco company that's going to sponsor the whole thing. You won't take their money. Uh, so you scrap this thing together, you know, you were talking earlier about the Voyager aircraft itself. And this is cool because I remember it, Dave remembers it, Dave probably remembers it better than I did because he was a little, uh, aircraft addict like you were. Me, I just thought it was cool. But the whole thing weighed like, you know, 500 pounds or something like this and. And you guys took this thing, you fly this thing around the world. You got incredible

• 3:17:34Jocko Willink?

  details of that inside this book, you know, sleep deprivation, it's not what nine days it took you to do this. You get done with that, you do, you run for congress out here in California. You got all kinds of stuff in this book. You, you set a bunch of records. Tried to go around the world again in a balloon. That was interesting.

• 3:17:58Speaker 02

  Well, I thought, you know, here I am, successful around the world in an airplane. After you do something like that, you're looking for, you know, what else can I do? What else is out there? Has anybody gone around the world in a balloon nonstop?

• 3:18:12Jocko Willink?

  You end up saved by a parachute again.

• 3:18:14Speaker 02

  Yep, that's right. It bailed out of that thing. Only this time it was fully funded. So I got Baron Hilton and Pepsi sponsors. They got a million and a half dollars and built this pressurized capsule that was pressurized. I could stay in the stratosphere, even sit on the moon. Closed loop life support system, the radios. We launched out of Albuquerque about, well, we had about a three hour delay on the launch, which saved our lives, really. And they launched this Baron Hilton, cut the thing and sirens and patriotic music and

• 3:18:52Speaker 02

  we launched off. We're on our way around the world. Anyway, at 30,000 feet, to do a design screw up by the manufacturer, the balloon wouldn't vent. So as it started to heat and expand, it wouldn't vent. So it actually ruptured the balloon, the helium envelope blew the whole bottom of it out. Of course, biggest, a lot of big explosion, but it's enough to bounce us off the floor when that thing let go. And now we're coming down. And we launched out to fly around the world and didn't even get out of the county. That's an opportunity for character development.

• 3:19:39Speaker 02

  I ended up in a Choya cactus patch. Guy says, "Well, what are you gonna do next?" I says, "Well, this is the first day of our second attempt."

• 3:19:50Speaker 02

  And anyway, since there's only one first, nobody gives a crap about who does anything second. A guy, a Swiss watch company.

• 3:20:02Speaker 02

  God, don't want to say the wrong... I think it was Breitling. The Breitling orbiter. They took off in an incredible flight, the Temmin Jones, Pertron Picard, neat guy. And I sat there and watched them. And I even made the comment in public that it was all... it's very nice to be in competition with those who have absolutely no chance of success.

• 3:20:28Speaker 02

  Whoops.

• 3:20:31Speaker 02

  So, I don't know. Co-pilot, he was not totally honest with me about parachutes.

• 3:20:39Speaker 02

  And, uh... Now, real strong winds on the ground, like 40 mile an hour winds in a parachute. And if you don't do everything exactly right, you're gonna get hurt really bad. And unfortunately, he wasn't truthful with me about his parachute experience, and so...

• 3:20:59Speaker 02

  Uh, he jumped out first and got a good chute, but without knowing how to handle a high-wing landing. Parachutes are neat, they'll save you life in flight, but they'll kill you on the ground. Like being drug across a desert.

• 3:21:13Speaker 02

  And I ended up...

• 3:21:16Speaker 02

  I landed really... you know, it's... you know, it's hard to step off your car at 40 miles an hour. Your feet hit and it really flips you around. Anyway, he didn't know anything about that. He landed backwards and he got some severe injuries. And I landed properly, going backwards, and my helmet hit the ground so hard I thought it was gonna break. And by the time I got both of those things jettisoned, I was in a Choya cactus patch. You know, the jumping cactus, little needle herbs and stuff.

• 3:21:49Speaker 02

  And I was looking through my... you know, looking through the cactus in my face at our million-dollar balloon.

• 3:22:00Speaker 02

  Of course, it would hit and knock off some of the propane tanks and go back up again. It'd hit again and it'd discharge different stuff and finally hit a power line in Texas. And it burned to the ground.

• 3:22:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, that one burned to ground. I mean, but you had already made it as the first person around the world without stopping or refueling with the Voyager, which is an awesome story inside this book. And you know, you've talked a little bit about it on the podcast, but to get the full story, the book lays it out, all kinds of issues you overcame. Just, just, just, just an incredible story. And, you know, one of the many reasons you were inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame.

• 3:22:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:22:48Jocko Willink?

  And, I mean, the stories in the book, they're just incredible. If, if you're listening, definitely just, just order this book. And, you know, I, we've been talking for a pretty long time now. I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to take up, you know, forever. But, but Dave, what do you got? You got any questions?

• 3:23:12Speaker 01

  I've got all sorts of questions, but I mostly've just enjoyed listening. I'm, you know, we're three and a half hours into this almost, and I'm just, just captivated hearing the stories. And I, I routinely get to say this because I get to sit off, you over here off to the side when, when Jaco does these podcasts, and I just get to watch people have these conversations. But the aviation conversations are, are unique and they're special to me because I could picture a lot of the things you're talking about. I can picture the way you're describing them. But unrelated to that, I've been sitting here thinking this whole time about a saying that, and I think it's, it's some phrase that says, "Don't meet your heroes," something like that, which I think is like a, some

• 3:23:55Speaker 01

  catchphrase that says like, "Well, don't meet your heroes because when you meet them, you're going to be disappointed because you've created this image you've had of them in your mind." Well, I've gotten to meet several of my heroes and never once, never once have I been disappointed. But what's unique about this for me, sir, is that All the other people I've ever met, I can only read about them in books and hear about the things that they've done. But I know you because I got to see what you did. I was old enough and we were modern enough that what you did in that airplane in 1986, and I can vividly remember the three loops you did over Mojave when you landed and getting, I can picture that as a teenager, already captivated by airplanes.

• 3:24:40Speaker 01

  So to get to sit here with you, knowing who you are, not from books, but from actually seeing it happen live and in person, this is just an absolute remarkable day for me. So I can't thank you enough for letting me be part of this. This has been, this has been awesome. I am honored to have met one of my heroes today.

• 3:24:57Speaker 02

  Well, thank you very much. This, uh, my brother come up and he says with the advent and availability of, uh, it reminds me of an opportunity I had to meet the king, the now king of England. But anyway.

• 3:25:18Jocko Willink?

  Well, what happened when you met the king of England?

• 3:25:20Speaker 02

  Well, I called him, "Hey Chuck," and I didn't go over too well. As a fellow fighter pilot, I didn't know how to bow, Americans don't bow out of royalty in any case, I'm an American. "Hey Chuck," well, anyway. The Bert said that with the availability of carbon fiber, he thinks it's possible to build an airplane light enough that'll carry enough fuel to go around the world. Now, the airplane took off, these are round numbers, 10,000 pounds, 3.6 tons of aviation gas, 3.6 tons.

• 3:25:57Speaker 02

  The carbon fiber structure weighed 926 pounds and a wingspan bigger than a Boeing 737 and a cockpit half the size of one of the restrooms on a 737. But all of that, that 926 pounds had occurred, 3.6 tons of fuel, two engines, avionics, radios, two hardy soles, little food and water, and, uh, and launch off. It's one of those things that you get on a train one day and you realize the train's going off a cliff and it's too late, you can't get off.

• 3:26:36Speaker 02

  You know, five and a half years, I've told everybody, "Hey, we're gonna fly around the world. Help us out." Had no money. Volunteers. Begged and borrowed a quarter million dollars with a carbon fiber. Half a million dollars with avionics and radars, back in those old days with no GPS and so forth. A mission control system and set that whole thing up. And I describe it in the book, the first part of the next five minutes. And I named the book because how many times in my life have I sat in a cockpit and wondered what the next five minutes of my life was gonna be like? And there have been a number of places. And we haven't even talked about some of the flight test stuff that we did with Burt's

• 3:27:19Speaker 02

  airplanes. But the book starts with trying to put the thing in perspective. What did it feel like? When I first started going out and giving my talks, my wife, and I met her after the flight. She listened to a couple of my lectures, and I'm kind of a technical person. And I think it's important that my audience knows how many fuel tanks we had and how we sequenced them and how the L over D and all of that other stuff. And finally, she come up to me and she says, "Dick," she says, "nobody gives a frick about how many fuel tanks." I said, "Why don't you tell them what it felt like?" And so I changed the whole tenor of the book. And it wasn't, the book's not written for aviation, as you can tell.

• 3:28:04Speaker 02

  It was written for, to try to talk about challenges and motivation and some of the emotional challenge that we had along the way. And tried to set that up. And the book starts with, I'm sitting in the end of the runway at Edwards Air Force Base that morning. We had roughly 25% more fuel than we'd ever had onboard before, much less flight-tested it.

• 3:28:34Speaker 02

  The airplane was, of course, there wasn't much to it, so it's pretty flexible and it could bend. And I'm sitting there thinking, because the two and a half years of flight tests and the sixty-nine flights, we had some horrible emergencies. Many, many May days, the propeller blade came off and it ripped the engine off. It was just hanging in the bottom of the cowling. And flight control problems. It ran into some rain and almost, one of the airfoils on the airplane didn't like rain and we found out about it the hard way and we just barely flew out of the rain in time to save. I mean, there was numerous stories about that, it's in the book.

• 3:29:18Speaker 02

  But try to, to try to, to set up the situation that I'm sitting at the end of the runway. What am I thinking about? What's gonna happen? Trying to remember some of the stuff that's happened ahead of the time. And, another thing, it's, you know, people are really interested in interpersonal relationships. I met, I met, I separated from my first wife and later on I met another girl. Her name is Gina, Gina Jaeger. And we had a big and romantic thing and about the time we met, Bert says, "Hey, how about doing this around the world thing?" I said, "Wow, okay." Bert, you design it and Gina and I will fly this thing around the world.

• 3:30:03Speaker 02

  They were off on this five-year odyssey, this romantic odyssey. And it was really good. I mean, some of the most interesting times in my life. But then, for some reason, she decided to, well, she got out of, she got out of the bed and went into the other bedroom. And I didn't have enough time to replace her. And there was a whole bunch of pressure going on, so all of a sudden we're, we're have this romance ended. And we weren't even talking to each other, and now we gotta go and fly around the world together. And the fact is that it takes two pilots to do that.

• 3:30:45Speaker 02

  You know, you take turns, but she couldn't fly the airplane. Uh, she didn't wanna learn how to operate in any of the systems. I kept saying, "Damn it. I can't do this thing by myself. I need to have another pilot. You need to learn this," but you wouldn't. And I says, "If you don't learn how to run and set up the nav systems and all the other complicated things about this airplane, I'm gonna replace you with an actual pilot." And she looked at me and says, "You either take me or I'll burn the airplane." So my choices were two, and one of them would've been in jail. And so when we, the two of us climbed into that airplane that day, that morning, at Edwards

• 3:31:28Speaker 02

  Air Force Base, uh, I had no idea how we were gonna do this.

• 3:31:33Jocko Willink?

  What did you think your percentage of chance of a success was?

• 3:31:38Speaker 02

  Well, none. I was, it was all set up. It was to go. Uh, I didn't have enough time to fix any of these things. Uh, the weatherman come up one day and he says, "You know, we've been working really hard on this thing to get all the systems, the mission control, the weather, the communication systems, worldwide, all this stuff had to be set up." And it says, "I'd," and the weather was terrible. And, uh, we had missed the weather window. And it was in December and it was outside of the weather window, and the weather guy, Len Snellman, comes up and he says, "Hey, Dick." He says, "Well, we missed the weather window. We have to wait till next year." And I says, "I said, all of this stuff that were borrowed, all these, all these big, huge

• 3:32:23Speaker 02

  computers and communication system were all borrowed. And I didn't know if I could get the, uh, the, all that equipment back in a year and all the people back in a year." And I looked at him and I says, "Len," I says, "the airplane's not ready yet. It's close." He says, "When the airplane is finally ready, I'm gonna walk outside." It's a metaphor. "So I'm gonna walk outside, and if it's raining, I'll wait. And if it's not raining, then I'm gonna go." I says, "You go back in your weather thing, and you find me a way around the world outside of the weather window." And next day, he comes back and says, "Hey, Dick, I think I found you a way, except for one thing. Can't get you across Africa."

• 3:33:06Speaker 02

  And the map, look at the world map, big white map saying, "Africa is only this bit." "Don't worry about that when we get there, profound, as you see in the book."

• 3:33:22Speaker 02

  So, anyway, I wanted, I wanted to rest. When the airplane is finally ready, and all the people sign off, not metaphorically, they say that it's ready, the engines, the systems, everything is ready to go. You know, the refueling, bowzers are ready at Edwards Air Force Base, the press has been notified.

• 3:33:42Speaker 02

  And I thought, "When that's done, Gina and I, we can go up in the Sierras and just rest." Needed to have some rest, you know, just to be ready.

• 3:33:55Speaker 02

  And when it was finally ready, the next morning, we had a weather briefing that was either go or no-go at 10 o'clock. And I walked into the weather briefing, and Lynn Snellman, the weather guy, comes in, and he was smiling, and I thought, "Oh, shoot." And he's telling me, but during the briefing, I realized that he, that the weather is perfect for departure, except for Africa.

• 3:34:20Speaker 02

  And I thought, "God, I would just, you know, just one day off. I could just go and get my head clear. One day is all I wanted, but there wasn't." And it's just like, it's just like General Eisenhower, when it was on D-Day, they all looked at him and said, he had to say go or no-go. And I says, "Okay, let's go." And in 10 seconds, I was alone in the room, everybody had left. You know, it's all choreographed, where the engine starts, take it over there, set it up at Edwards Air Force Base, the fuel bowzers. And we had the last, the last supper with the family.

• 3:34:59Speaker 02

  Then I thought that here I am, I should have the VIP quarters. The VIP quarters out there at Edwards, then I didn't check on it, I trusted somebody else to do that. Well, they didn't, they didn't know anything about it. And so I ended up in a real old barracks, kind of a, just one step up from an open bay barracks. And in those things, they have central heating and the ducks whistle and they make a lot of noise. And this, I go in this room and it's bare. And it's an old military bed with, you know, the steel thing on it. And it's just terrible thing. And I thought, I thought, God. Now, I asked the driver, I says, well, hey, there's the VIP quarters over there.

• 3:35:44Speaker 02

  You know, here I am, gonna fly around the world, at least, somebody, he says, he didn't even know anything about that. God, okay. So I'm laying in there and listen to that and first, you know, it's a wake up in a handful of hours. And I'm laying there and it's hot and I'm trying to get some sleep and all of a sudden there's a knock on the door. I thought, knocking on the door, who in the hell is this? So I'm really pissed, I get up, open the door and our flight surgeon, Dr. George Julin is there. He's our flight guy for all of our medical stuff. And I said, George, what are you doing?

• 3:36:28Speaker 02

  And he says, oh, Dick, I forgot. And he had a little box, you know, like the children's milk cartons, you know, they're, you open them up and stuff. He says, I want a urine sample when you wake up. And here's the box that I want it, want you to do it. And I thought, George, you woke me up. You woke me up to give me a box to piss in?

• 3:36:55Speaker 02

  And then I was really pissed. I was so keyed up about that, I don't think I slept. And finally the wake-up time called and we went out and called and boarded the airplane with no sleep per se and a co-pilot that wasn't talking to me and didn't know how to do, run any of the systems. And we took off having no idea how in the hell I was gonna do this. And we thought about all the stuff we'd gone through in the last five and a half years. And then it was time and I thought, you know, Dick, you're probably gonna be dead in the next five minutes. What you really ought to do right now is shut the

• 3:37:36Speaker 02

  engine down and open the little canopy and get out and walk out in the desert. At least you'll be alive tomorrow. And then I thought, wait a minute. I asked all these people all these years to come and help me. And a lot of them sacrificed, quite a bit. Some of them even lost their jobs to come and help. Had I done that, they would have had every right to chase me down and commit premature euthanasia for some damn coward that totally deserved it. So I said, there's no way out. There's no way. So that morning, trepidation. I pushed both the throttles wide open, released a little tiny brake, like a foot on a nose wheel

• 3:38:17Speaker 02

  or something, foot on a skateboard, because brakes are really heavy. So we didn't take any brakes. And that thing lumbered down the runway. And it accelerated. Yeah, there was an acceleration checkpoint. And I asked, I put more fuel on board the airplane than what the designer wanted. And he was really mad about that. But I was worried about running out of fuel. I always had this nightmare that I'd run out of fuel 100 miles short. Hell of a record, but we still failed on first around the world.

• 3:38:56Speaker 02

  So he put up some flag markers down the runway and he says, Dick, you need to have this specific airspeed as you cross each one of the markers. And because you don't have really have wheel brakes on the airplane and to be able to stop before you run out in Edwards Dry Lake, you need to have these target airspeeds as you cross them. Well, he didn't know it, but Dick was really tired. He had been at this thing five and a half years and all this emotional things with my girlfriend, plus all the other things that we had to deal with. The only thing I wanted, I just wanted this frickin' thing over with and I didn't care if I was on fire. I wasn't gonna quit. So I had to give him a blood oath to my brother, okay, I'll do that.

• 3:39:41Speaker 02

  Promise, promise, no one full will. There's no frickin' way I'm gonna quit. I want it over with. I just, you get to that point. And so, we started accelerating as the flag markers came by, we were starting to kind, you know, one knot low, two knots, three knots, and at midfield, the last marker, we needed eighty-six knots. Yeah, a hundred knot for takeoff, eighty-six knots. And I was four knots low. So I keyed the mic button, it says we're four knots low at midfield. And nobody said anything. I think everybody knew there was no frickin' way I was gonna quit.

• 3:40:25Speaker 02

  Besides that, the airspeed indicator's over here, see? And here's, here's sixty-five. It only had to go a little bit farther to a hundred. A little bit more. Just a little bit more. That's, this is all I have to, and I looked down at the end of the runway, still a mile and a, a mile and a half away. I said, shoot, there's no problem. Not knowing that the faster you go, the more rapid you consume the runway. And, uh, so we hit our, our rotation speed, then I gave it three more knots from mom. And the wingtips were dragging on the runway.

• 3:41:01Speaker 02

  And I reached up and grabbed that control stick and says, "Well, Dick, if you've never been smooth in any time of your life, you better be smooth now, because this is the big one." And I reached down there and started pulling back on the stick and the canard lifted and the boom tank started coming up and I could see the wings come up slowly, slowly, slowly. And I swear to God, they were going to touch over my head. And with ninety-five percent of that world's longest runway, it lifted off. And, actually, I have the video, if you want to look at it, or see it, or include it. But the wings came up real slow, and it lifted off, and it flew in ground effect, and it finally got to a hundred knots. And if it got to a hundred knots, we had enough power

• 3:41:44Speaker 02

  to climb. And so we shook off the wingtips, which were damaged, lost three foot of wingspan. And they were talking about aborting. I says, "There ain't no fine why I'm going to quit." They're just not going to quit, under any circumstances. I don't care what's wrong with the airplane. It could be on fire. And so we turned and put W in the compass. And metaphorically, I held W in the compass for nine bloody days, and looked up without turning around, and there was Edwards Air Force Base ahead of us. I guess the world is round. It's still amazing to me that normally if you fly a long ways to get home, you got to turn and

• 3:42:27Speaker 02

  come back. But if you just keep going in the same direction and you get home, you know, it's still, it's still strange. You know, I guess maybe the world is round, but I know one thing. It's a bloody long ways around the world. The world is twenty-five thousand miles at the equator, or just under that. The Voyager actually flew twenty-six thousand, three hundred and fifty-eight statute miles, unrefueled. We got home with one-half of one percent of our takeoff fuel. So we just barely made it back. But that morning, it was beautiful in the LA basin, at the high desert. Tens of thousands of people came

• 3:43:09Speaker 02

  out, and cars were lined up all the way back into Lancaster, and a lot of people.

• 3:43:20Speaker 02

  And somebody says, "Hey Dick, if you orbit for 20 minutes more, you'll have an even nine days." And I always thought, "Well, that would sound better." And so, we orbited around and flew over the crowd and said things like, "Hey Dick, what time is it?" I says, "Well, it's Miller time. You only go around once." That was the beer at the time. Another one says, "Dick, what are you gonna do now?" I says, "I'm going to Disneyland." And Eisner was the head of Disney at that time, and his wife said that that was the first time that that thing had ever been said in public.

• 3:43:59Speaker 02

  And then I said after that, knowing that I invented that, or whatever, that I guess Joe Namath or some football player that won the Super Bowl, and he says, "What are you gonna do now, Joe?" Or whatever his name was. "Well, I'm going to Disneyland." Well, they probably paid him $50,000 to do that. Didn't pay me anything. But that day, I went out and we put the landing gear down, and it was gonna land in the Dry Lake. I mean, we were so light then, I could've landed on my briefcase. But it was gonna land at Edwards Air Force Base in the famous Murdock Dry Lake. So we came around, and nothing I was worried about is on the Dry Lake, there's no death

• 3:44:43Speaker 02

  perception. And I had basically been awake for nine days. I sat in the seat for three, three nights. Four days, three nights. Going into the fourth night, it says, "Even Dick, you can't do this. You gotta get some sleep." But I couldn't put her in the seat, because when we're heavy, if the autopilot kicked off, the airplane would self-destruct in 15 seconds, and I couldn't get to the controls. So we had to wait till we burned off enough fuel that it would dampen itself out. So we came around and touched down a good buddy, Mike Melville. He counted it down to five, four, three, one touchdown.

• 3:45:24Speaker 02

  On aviation's hallowed ground, you know, where Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield chase the demons in the sky. And what an honor to be able to land in that place. And taxied up to the crowd.

• 3:45:37Speaker 02

  And shut off those engines that had run for solid for nine days. And I looked around at everybody and I set my head back a little bit and I closed my eyes. And it felt every bit as good as I had imagined it for the last five and a half years. And the airplane hangs in the National Air and Space Museum in the mall. I think they're doing some renovation, but it hung there. You know, it's a tribute to a couple of things, to the freedom that we have in our country.

• 3:46:20Speaker 02

  And also that if you can, like mom says, if you can dream it, you can do it. And the only way to fail is if you quit and manage the motivation. And in the book there, when President Reagan and Nancy presented to us the Citizens Medal, just a couple of days after the flight, there in Crystal City in Los Angeles, there was some speeches given, you know, Bert and I said something and Gina said something and the President said something. But we got to meet them and get acquainted with them about who they were. And when we first met in the ante room before we went on stage to accept the medals, we

• 3:47:05Speaker 02

  started talking and we were nervous, we're going to meet the President, see? And as we sit there and started to talk a little bit, where we were, we reversed positions subconsciously. And I realized they're as nervous as we were. But this is the President. And we got invited to Washington and had dinner a couple of times, an estate dinner, sitting at the same table with Ronald Reagan, what an honor that was. And he is every bit... And in the book, I found the transcripts of the words that we're saying and I read them today, I says, "I said that extemporaneously?" But it turned out really well.

• 3:47:49Speaker 02

  Especially, it's all done because, like we talked during that presentation with the President about freedom, how precious that is.

• 3:48:01Jocko Willink?

  Well, no doubt about that. And the book definitely spells that out. And just the whole story is incredible. Your story is incredible. I want to close out with something that you write in the book. Something you write in the book about your best friend Howard K. Williams. As we talked about earlier, who you call Howie. Again, he was shot down in Vietnam. There was a lot of unknowns about what had actually happened to him. He had that mystery phone call. And it wasn't until 1992 when his remains were recovered by the POW MIA Resolution Task Force.

• 3:48:44Jocko Willink?

  And as you mentioned earlier, you attended the service. And you wrote about that in the book.

• 3:48:55Jocko Willink?

  You say, "Howie's Military Funeral at Arlington National Cemetery Was An Impressive Ceremony With Full Military Honors, Befitting A Fallen Hero. The POW MIA name bracelets worn by his friends and family were ceremoniously added to the grave. As I turned to leave the gravesite, I saw Howard's son. He was only four or five when I had last seen him at Luke, but at this moment, I couldn't believe my eyes. He was the spitting image of his father. My buddy would have been so proud of his boy. Future visits to Washington DC would always find me at the Vietnam War Memorial.

• 3:49:39Jocko Willink?

  That symbolic black granite wall contains more than 58,000 names of fellow warriors killed and missing in action.

• 3:49:49Jocko Willink?

  I run my fingers over the name of one of America's best and one of my very best friends, Howard K. Williams. Each time I stand before his engraved name, I swear I see his reflection smiling back at me from within the dark granite surface."

• 3:50:08Jocko Willink?

  I continue to miss him. And for all these years, I have wondered what really happened. I recall the camaraderie and fellowship of the fledgling fighter pilots off to test their skills in mankind's epitome of human competition, deadly combat. And I thank them, especially Howie, for their sacrifice that allows me to live a full life. So, sir. Thank you.

• 3:50:48Jocko Willink?

  Thanks to you and all your comrades that served and sacrificed for our freedom.

• 3:50:54Speaker 02

  Well, thank you. Look at it as a fellow warrior. There, just one thing. There's an individual, his name is Jeremiah Denton, and he spent many years as a prisoner war of the North Vietnamese. And when they picked him up and he got off the airplane at Clark Air Force Base after enduring all of that, they asked him, there was a microphone set up, and if he wanted to say a few words. And he gets off the airplane, he looks around for his first two or three steps on free soil.

• 3:51:37Speaker 02

  He walked up to the microphone and he said something to me so profound that it epitomizes fellow warriors. And now I'm gonna say it, but I'm gonna choke up because I can't, I try to imagine what he had gone through and the words that he spoke that morning at Clark. And what he said was, "I consider it an honor to have had the privilege of serving my country under difficult circumstances." And I think, God, as long as there's that kind of people that look back on that whole

• 3:52:18Speaker 02

  thing as an honor to serve his country, and I think as long as there are those people, our flag will still be free.

• 3:52:33Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir.

• 3:52:36Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir, indeed.

• 3:52:39Jocko Willink?

  And I don't think I can say anything else beyond that, other than, thank you.

• 3:52:44Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jaco. It's an honor to be here.

• 3:52:46Jocko Willink?

  Thank you. And with that, Dick Rutan has left the building also. Dave Berke left the building. He's escorting.

• 3:52:59Jocko Willink?

  He's escorting Dick Rutan back to the hotel. They're probably gonna sit and talk about flying for a while.

• 3:53:09Jocko Willink?

  So

• 3:53:11Jocko Willink?

  just incredible story, obviously. Read the book. Get the book. The next five minutes. It's called.

• 3:53:20Jocko Willink?

  It's just incredible to be able to sit here with a guy like that and hear these stories. Just rolling in to North Vietnam, tracers everywhere.

• 3:53:32Jocko Willink?

  Locking, locking eyes with those enemy fighters trying to kill you and doing that day after day after day after day after day after day after day.

• 3:53:47Jocko Willink?

  That's the American fighting spirit. So thanks for listening. If you want to support the podcast, go to JacoFuel.com. We make the best, cleanest, most effective

• 3:54:00Jocko Willink?

  supplements to put inside your body. So go to JacoFuel.com and get some of that. If you have a Wawa near you, you have a vitamin shop, Military Commissaries, Hanafords, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wakefern, Shop Right, Circle K, HEB, of course, down in Tejas, Murphy's down in the southwest, and Meyer, Meyer in the Midwest. Get, go get Jaco Fuel. It's a great way to support the podcast, what we're doing here. And it's a great way to support yourself. Don't forget about OriginUSA.com. Go get your hunt gear, jujitsu gear, rash guards, gis, t-shirts, boots, Delta jeans.

• 3:54:41Jocko Willink?

  Get yourself some Delta jeans from OriginUSA.com. The, you can also get stuff from Jaco's store, JacoStore.com. Got all kinds of stuff to get, I guess. Get a bunch, get yourself a bunch of cool stuff from JacoStore.com.

• 3:54:58Jocko Willink?

  And you guys know the rest, man. Subscribe to the podcast. Check out jocko underground.com. We got the YouTube channel. We got psychological warfare, a bunch of books. Again, the book, the important book for today is the next five minutes by Dick Rutan. Just an awesome book, an awesome read. You know about Jocko Publishing. We got a bunch of books. Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. I've written a bunch of books. You can check those out as well. Kids books, Way the Warrior Kid One, Two, and Three. Get some of that. Echelon Front. Look, these principles that we talk about, about combat, they also apply to everyday life, to business. And we talk about those and we teach those at Echelon Front, echelonfront.com for details. Come to one of our live events. So that these lessons get

• 3:55:41Jocko Willink?

  shared, they get passed on. We also have the online training academy at extremeownership.com where you can learn this stuff online. You don't need to go somewhere to get this information. And also, if you want to help service members, active and retired,

• 3:56:01Jocko Willink?

  you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Don't forget about Heroes and Horses.org. You got Micah up in the wilderness, helping people find themselves. Yep. Dave Berke's on Twitter. He's on the Gram. He's on Facebook, at Dave R Burke. I'm there too, at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Dick Rutan for joining us.

• 3:56:36Jocko Willink?

  For sharing his lessons learned, sharing these incredible experiences. And thanks to him and to all the other military aviators that rule the sky and give us dominance.

• 3:56:53Jocko Willink?

  And they pay a heavy price for it. And thanks to the rest of our military personnel who also pay the price every day to keep us safe and protect our way of life in this great nation. And the same goes to the police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all first responders. You all keep us safe here at home and we thank you for that. And to everyone else out there today, you heard what Dick Rutan said. And he talks about in the book, he talks about what his mother would tell him. And at one point in the book, we didn't cover today,

• 3:57:33Jocko Willink?

  he talks about sometimes when he was facing a seemingly insurmountable problem or challenge, he would run, he would go and run to clear his mind. He'd do it for physical fitness, but he did it to clear his mind, to gain perspective. And sometimes, he says in the book, he would chant that cadence that he spoke of, that he learned from his mom, which is, you only fail if you quit. And that is the truth. So, go out there, don't quit, and keep getting after it. And until next time, this is Jaco, out.