37: Vietnam Vet Navy SEAL Roger Hayden, War Stories

0:00:00 - Opening / Intro to Roger Hayden, Navy SEAL Vietnam Vet. 0:06:26 - Upbringing 0:08:29 - Into the Navy 0:10:13 - UDT 0:18:28 - 9th Infantry Situations 0:36:23 - Showing up at SEAL Team 1 0:41:26 - Back to Vietnam 0:48:19 - Blue on Blue Situation 0:52:44 - Leadership Take-Aways 0:55:20 - Canal Opp in '69 0:59:41 - After the Vietnam War 1:06:54 - Closing 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.

• 0:01Jocko Willink?

  The names and the stories in this episode have been omitted to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

• 0:09Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 37 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:19Jocko Willink?

  And with us tonight, I am honored to have retired Chief Warrant Officer Roger Hayden here with us tonight as a guest. Now, unless you are in the SEAL Teams or you were in the SEAL Teams, then you likely don't know who Roger Hayden is. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and guarantee you don't know who Roger Hayden is. There's no book, there's no movie, there's no social media, there's no one to Google.

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  And I've talked before about how there's three types of guys in the SEAL Teams. The guys that built the reputation that the SEAL Teams has, the guys that maintain the reputation of the SEAL Teams, and then there's the guys that live off the reputation of the SEAL Teams. And usually those guys didn't contribute much to it in the first place. But let there be no doubt Roger Hayden is without question, without question, one of the people, one of the men responsible for building the reputation of the SEAL Teams. He did the massive heavy

• 1:36Jocko Willink?

  lifting and laid down the foundation of everything that the SEAL Teams are in the jungles of Vietnam. And he passed on lessons of combat written in blood that we carry to this day.

• 1:55Jocko Willink?

  One of the guys here Roger Hayden that truly forged the attitude. That makes the SEAL teams. What the SEAL teams are. And I'm going to tell you quickly how I first heard of Roger. So I was back, I was a new guy at SEAL Team One, so it's 1991. And back then, no one, SEALs weren't that popular yet. And the old SEAL, UDT SEAL reunions were not that big of a deal. They were, they were just kind of a small little gig down at, down at like the Lions Club or something in National City. Real low key, but the only guys, none of the, none of the younger SEALs went to him. It was all Vietnam SEALs, maybe a couple of World War II guys.

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  And I was down there, I was with my, my running mate. At the time, my, my, my good friend who was at SEAL Team One, who I've gone through buzz with, guy by the name of Chris. And we were just sitting around talking to some old Vietnam guys. And we were getting pretty fired up, you know, it's kind of, there's, you know, once you pay the $10 fee to get into this gig, there's free beer. So we, we were a few beers deep, you might say, and we're listening to stories. And again, we were new guys, this is 1991, we didn't, never been in combat. So we were there to try and learn and. About the history and learn about the guys and finally. Me being young and dumb and pretty well buzzed.

• 3:22Jocko Willink?

  I asked these two Vietnam guys that we were sitting there talking to. I said. Hey. Who was the most badass murdering motherfucker in SEAL in Vietnam?

• 3:35Jocko Willink?

  And both these guys looked at me and said. Roger Hayden.

• 3:41Jocko Willink?

  And I remembered that name. And.

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  When I actually met you for the first time, you were, I'd met you a couple of times, but then when I actually worked with you for the first time, you were a lane grader on a, on a platoon full mission profile. And that's actually the first time I learned, truly understood the, the concept of cover and move, which is a basic tactic which guys didn't know. No one had taught it to me. This was my second platoon. I'd already been through a workup. I had the idea in my head, but hearing you say it, the way you described it, I said it clicked in my head and I never forgot it. And I actually wrote about it in the book. Extreme Ownership is what I taught to all the SEALs that when I was putting through training, that's what I taught them. One of those fundamental tactics. And so

• 4:28Jocko Willink?

  that's kind of my, my introduction to Roger Hayden. So Roger, I know you've actually literally never done an interview before. And I want to thank you for coming on. It's, it's a true honor to have you on the podcast. So welcome.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, Roger Hayden here. Thanks Jaco. Really appreciate it. And you're one of my heroes too. Different environment, different times that you kicked ass and took names to. The, um, I wasn't, I was, uh, just one of the boys in the, uh, in SEAL Team One when I got there and deployed a couple of times with them. And, uh, our environment was the jungle and we got pretty good in it and, uh, went out and hunted the bad guys. Nobody else in Vietnam, as far as I know, Army, Marines, or any of them would go out at night. They would usually hold up in a base camp or somewhere like that. Well, we figured nine times when they move around, that's when we're going to move around and see if we can find these guys and take them out. And that's what we did.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  It isn't, um, one guy. It's a team effort. Everybody works hard. I had some great, great buddies of mine that were, uh, I mean, my gun partner was a stoner guy and I was a 60 guy between the two of us. He shot a thousand rounds a minute and I had a five, five, I mean a seven six two, my 60, it, uh, worked out well. Last platoon I was in, we carried four 60s and five stoners.

• 5:57Jocko Willink?

  Good Lord.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  And if you didn't carry a stoner or a 60, you carried a 16 with a 203 on it or XM148 for back in the day guys.

• 6:06Jocko Willink?

  Say those numbers again of how many guys were carrying sixties and stoners?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Four of us were carrying sixties and five guys carried stoners out of a fourteen man platoon. That's what we operated in.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  So for those of you civilians out there that are listening, that's a lot of firepower. That's, that's the way you bring the thunder. And so where, where'd you grow up though? Before you got in the teams, where'd you grow up?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Uh, basically my roots and what I look at, my dad was a carpenter. So we moved quite a bit around, but there was a place called Ronan Montana by the Flathead Lake in Montana where you have the Mission Range and a real, real brief area. I grew up green breaking horses and stuff like that and uh, building tree houses and just uh, working on my grandpa's farm and my uncle's ranch and stuff like that. So that's kind of where I grew up at. I lived a while in Phoenix, Arizona and stuff like that. And um, it says here in the next thing, sports. So I played football outside linebacker. I boxed for two years in high school and I swam.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  My dad built, worked on the tram in Palm Springs and when he was there, I went to Palm Springs High School. So I got on the water polo team there.

• 7:18Jocko Willink?

  So that's, that's how you got a little comfortable in the water?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 7:21Jocko Willink?

  So, so at what point, what year was it when you actually decided you were going to join the Navy?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  It was nineteen sixty-five.

• 7:32Jocko Willink?

  And did you know, already know about the SEAL teams? Well, no.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Nope. Nobody knew about them. My dad, uh, like you said, he was a carpenter, but he was in um, UDT three. And it was at, swam on the Incheon Harbor in Vietnam, but I didn't, I'm not Vietnam Korea, but I didn't know anything about it because he never talked about it.

• 7:53Jocko Willink?

  So your dad was a frog man?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I mean, that's, I knew guys that knew him, older, older guys. I mean, when I was a young guy, like you said, you were, you're talking to, you know. So anyway, but he never said much about it, but uh, when I was a kid, you know, I watched the Bridge of the River Kwai. And uh, the guns in Neverland. And I also seen the Marines hitting beaches and the Rangers getting wiped out. And I went, okay, if you're gonna fight, you wanna get in something that you think you're gonna come back with. So that's why I became a frogman. And uh, we didn't go through BUDs. It was UDTRA underwater demolition training. So.

• 8:29Jocko Willink?

  And then you got, so you joined the Navy, did uh, and you went, did you go straight to, straight to underwater demolition?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  No, no, back in the day, they wanted you to have an A school.

• 8:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  So I got a boot camp in sixty-five, went to North Island in Coronado for about seven months, waiting for my radium in school. And was lucky enough to go to twenty-two weeks of radium in school. And then went from there to USS Paul Revere for about four months and then went to uh, training. And I started training January sixth, nineteen sixty-seven.

• 9:03Jocko Willink?

  And how big was your class when you showed up to that?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  There was about, I don't know, two hundred of us, maybe, maybe a hundred and fifty.

• 9:11Jocko Willink?

  How many guys made it?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  There were about thirty of us that made it, which was pretty good. And it was colder than shit. I, I don't know how you guys did when you went through training, Jaco, but we made a pact that we weren't gonna let anybody quit. And we did everything we could to make that happen. So. And some guys did make it through that we shouldn't have.

• 9:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's one of the, that's one of the things I've talked about with Leif is, you see that, and I was never instructor at BUDs. But eventually you say, no, you don't wanna help people through. If they're not gonna make it through on their own, you don't want them, you know? You gotta get guys that are gonna get through it on their own.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know what I mean?

• 9:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  We got close and we just figured, you know, screw this, you know?

• 9:51Jocko Willink?

  I had a guy was a, that was a previous fleet guy and he had been to BUDs before and I, I became friends with him. He was a second class, mature guy. And I thought, yeah, this guy, I'm gonna kinda, kinda follow his lead a little bit, you know?

• 10:03Jocko Willink?

  Second night of hell week, he quit. I was just, I was laughing. I'm like, here's a mature guy, twenty seven years old, you know, I was a kid and he's quitting. Ridiculous. So then you, but when you got done with the initial UDT RA, you went to, uh, you checked into UDT, right?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, UDT twelve was really funny because, um, me and a good friend of mine up in Flagstaff is where I joined in. We decided we're gonna be Marines, you know, so and his dad, Guadalcanal, you name it. Uncle's DI, he's a Marine, but he talked me into it too. So we went up to join the Marines. Well, that office was closed and right across the hallway was the Navy recruiter and there was a boatmate of the line, you know, leaning against the, the door and he goes, what are you boys doing? Well, we're gonna join Marines, you know, and which, you know, it's all good. And he goes, uh, asked the other guy, well, what's your parents' background, everything? Marines, Marines, Marines. So he knew what he was gonna, he said, how about you? Well, my dad

• 11:05Speaker 02

  was, uh, in the Navy, a chief and da, da, da. He says, come here, son. So my buddy went off to be a Marine. I went in the Navy. That close.

• 11:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. I think we all have a story like that.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  I know, really close, though.

• 11:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I had a buddy, Bruce, we were, we were, we saw like some, some ship pulled in and we saw guys in Marine uniforms and we were like, let's go join, let's just go join. That's how effective that recruiting tool is.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:32Jocko Willink?

  Luckily, I lived a longer.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  It wasn't open, you know, but the Marine, the Navy office is open, so recruiting office.

• 11:40Jocko Willink?

  And so you showed up at UDT and then what was the schedule there? I mean, the Vietnam War was already on. So now it's like, is it nineteen sixty six now?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  No, I didn't got, got one into UDT sixty seven. I graduated from training, uh, single mile nineteen sixty seven and that's when I went over to UDT twelve. Yeah, the war had been on. And then we had heard a little bit about SEAL Team, but it still didn't, nobody knew much about it. Cause we're, everybody I graduated with, East Coast and West Coast, you went to a UDT team first. Then you did a trip with UDT, then you came back and got in SEAL Team.

• 12:15Jocko Willink?

  And how was that? How was that first trip with UDT?

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Oh, it was great. I did a nine month trip and we had different depths that you went to in, uh, in Vietnam. Like, uh, first thing we did is go to Da Nang. Place called Camp Tensha and we worked up at Fubai Wei, Quang Tri, Dung Hau, all over the northern part of, um, South Vietnam, doing demo work, different things, you know what I mean? And then we left that det and went on the USS Daeshenko and we did about a hundred and ten miles of beach recon.

• 12:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  And then from there, we went, uh, we, some of us went down to a det in the, uh...

• 12:54Jocko Willink?

  Were those hydrographic recon stations or were they just, were you looking at the beach?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, they were perpendicular.

• 12:58Jocko Willink?

  Old school perpendicular?

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Yep, you're right in parallel, not perpendicular, but most of them were parallel. We didn't do any perpendiculars, that's your combat op, you know what I mean?

• 13:06Jocko Willink?

  So, so for those of you that don't know, the, the original job, one of the original jobs that UDT was to find out how deep the water is off of a beach, so, uh...

• 13:15Speaker 02

  And obstacles and everything.

• 13:17Jocko Willink?

  And, and if there's any obstacles there that could trip up a boat that's coming in. And so you said you did a hundred and ten miles of that?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, three months.

• 13:26Jocko Willink?

  That's, and so you, basically you have to swim with a lead line, so you have a cord with a, with a piece of lead on the bottom of it, and you've got different markings on it to tell you how deep, how long it is, and you sit there and you, you swim along and you...

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Every, every twenty-five meters, and you have a beach party on the beach, and it has a swimmer line going out, and we had it hooked to an IBS in case we got hit or something, that IBS could turn and get us out of there, we all grab onto the... Of course, it was only a nine and a half horsepower engine, so you didn't go out very fast if you had it.

• 13:58Jocko Willink?

  You'd be able to swim faster than that.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  But every twenty-five meters, you'd take soundings, soundings, soundings, when you got back to the Daeshenko, then the cartographer, which I was lucky enough to be one, you'd do up a hydrographic chart.

• 14:09Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Uh, when I got to UDT twelve, um, you know, you're pretty regimented, and I'll call it buds, it was UDT, but you're pretty regimented buds. When we got there, our platoons weren't even formed up and you were kind of lost at sea, you know, I mean, nobody's really telling you what you have to do, you're not in a platoon yet, and it was kind of... Kind of floating, you know what I mean?

• 14:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  We went up and did uh, um, lifeguard stuff for the Marines when they did landings up by Pendleton and stuff like that. It wasn't really a lot to do. You know, we're going, Jesus, you know, played volleyball a lot and stuff, you know, ran around your UDTs and coral boots and you know. So, uh, then we started forming up and uh, how UDT worked is that you'd, they'd be home for nine months and then the whole team would deploy and relieve the team that was out there. Like we relieved UDT 11 and 11 would come back. Nine months later, they would come out and relieve us. So it was nine month deployments and almost port and starboard. He didn't have like a year and a half, two years of workup. It was about nine months.

• 15:15Jocko Willink?

  Nine months home with a workup in there. Was the workup, wh- what did you do during the workup?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Oh, we did everything. We did recons, we did demolition raids, we did uh, river recons. We uh, just.

• 15:29Jocko Willink?

  How many guys were in the UDT platoon?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Eighteen or twenty, maybe it might've been twenty. It was quite a bit because you got the swimmer line, beach party and all that other stuff. You know what I mean?

• 15:41Jocko Willink?

  That's why we did the old BART platoons. We always tried to get a couple extra guys because we needed him to cover more beach.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Same deal, yeah. And uh, everything you did on, and we'd do uh, just, it was just a lot, you know what I mean? Uh, and it was a lot of physical work too, you know what I mean? Everything. UDT actually, when we went through training, I think we did about fifty times more swimming than the guys doing BUDs now because that's where we were. We were frogmen, you know, so.

• 16:09Jocko Willink?

  And that's a lot. If you're more swimming than we did in BUDs, that's a lot of swimming. I'm, I'm glad I went through BUDs instead of that.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Well, the surf out there in, in January is pretty cold.

• 16:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's no doubt. And when you were there, you were telling me before about some of the, kind of hooking on to some of the conventional units or some of their operations that they did with uh, I think it was the Ninth Infantry.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we were down in the delta. And we were doing river recons. And I think we're the only ones that ever did it with this. They called them the darts and it would look like a jet ski. But you laid on it and you guided it with your feet. It had a three hundred and fifty five degree camera up on top and a fathometer on the bottom of it. And it had a piece of aluminum out like this, of course, so you wouldn't get hit with the props and stuff. And the handles were on the right and left, you know what I'm saying? And they went up to about thirty knots. What they would do is take two of us either by chopper or something, drop us in a canal. And we'd come down that canal, then we got back, we'd do a chart of that canal.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  And that would let the ninth infantry in their riverine boats. Know if they could go up there and do a landing or not. Not that's one of the things we did. Of course, you only went down the river. Maybe once or twice and you didn't go down it anymore. That was stupid.

• 17:30Jocko Willink?

  Would you care for, would you carry like a sidearm when you're on that?

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had a forty five in the front of the cover there and that's what we had. We had a black jacket on, a helmet, UDTs and guided with our feet.

• 17:44Jocko Willink?

  Would you do it at night or in the daytime?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  A daytime.

• 17:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh damn.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  And then, you know, with that three hundred and fifty degree camera across canals coming into pagodas. Anything that was a known thing you could find on a map would take a picture of as we went down. You tried to stay at the same speed all the way down because otherwise your chart wouldn't be good, you know? But we couldn't, we only did that and we couldn't do it too much. So, I mean, just the different rivers and different canals and stuff. So we got bored, so we started going out with the ninth infantry on those river boats. To be their demolition guys, blow up bunkers. And sometimes they'd put log dams across the river, we'd blow those up and stuff. And we took some heavies on that, doing that, so.

• 18:29Jocko Willink?

  Luke, so what kind of situations did you get in when you're riding up with the ninth infantry?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Well, we got caught in ambush one time. They usually had about seven, about five, six, seven boats. They had a boat in the front called an Alpha Boat. It looked like your old monitor in the Civil War. And then they had like the landing craft. They had those with bar armor on the side and then they had the fifties up on top and back. They had that all built up and they had bar armor. So that if a B forty rocket punched in, they had real thick styrofoam so that it would just be channeled into one area if they hit them from the sides. Then they had thirties, two thirties on each side, each one of the landing craft type of boats that they put the troops in. And right in the middle of that was what they call a monitor.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  And you've seen that, that was, that's over on Sisum Field. That's a great big boat. And then at the back, they had another Alpha boat. And then all the ones in between.

• 19:26Jocko Willink?

  So who was the, was, what are those Navy boats or were they Army boats?

• 19:29Speaker 02

  No, they're Navy. Those Navy guys doing it. I wouldn't have that job for anything in the world. So anyway, we was going up and a group had won it before us, dropped their people off and they came right by us as soon as we got by them. Uh, they opened up on us and it was a bad day. We had thirty killed and seventy wounded Americans, yeah. And like the Alpha boat ahead of us, everybody but one guy was killed on it. And that boat was floating by and still had the American flag flying. And there's one guy on the back on that thirty still shooting.

• 20:00Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  I mean, it was, you know, it still almost cracks me up when I, not cracks me up, it tears me up when I think about that, but it was just, that's the American fighting guy. You know, that's the way we are.

• 20:11Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  And I give those riverboat guys all the credit in the world on those tangle boats because they're just sitting targets, you know? And then after we got hit, of course, uh, we all got, we, we were in the fourth boat back and we heard number one boats hit. That was the Alpha boat. Number two boats hit. Number three boats hit. We were number four boat. There were three of us shooting T guys in that boat and I remember looking over at a guy named, he going, we're fucked. Excuse me, I shouldn't have said it. Anyway, then we got hit, blew us all down and stuff and I, one of my buddies, I had about fifty-three pieces wrapped around him, so I crawled over to him and hit him with morphine. Got up and the Navy guy got blown off his thirty, you know, so I was shooting that until I ran out of rounds and shit.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Well, the other guy, um, no, that was, I got hit. The other guy saw, go messed up, so he goes over and didn't see my pin through his collar, so he hits him with another shot of morphine. He, he lived though. And then me and, we got, we just started shooting over the sides and stuff and the Army guys wouldn't get up and shoot, they were handing us up weapons to shoot.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Blowing them and giving them to us and we were up there hammering down, you know.

• 21:23Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes you gotta frogman up.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Then the Cobras came in, in Army Cobras and hosed everything down real good.

• 21:30Jocko Willink?

  So were they, were they doing like an actual landing? That's what the purpose was? And they were gonna get a beach foothold and work an area for a while?

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Work, make a sweep through there and don't ask me why the Marines weren't doing it. Why they had the ninth, I tell you why the Marines weren't doing it. Was they were holding the DMZ up in the north.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  They should, Marines, that's their job. But the ninth infantry did a good job. They're good troops. You know what I mean?

• 21:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, you, I know you haven't listened to this, this podcast much, but I know you have, you have read the book that, that Leif and I wrote. And you, you know that I have nothing but, uh, nothing but the most utter highest respect for the Marines and the Army. Units that we work with were just phenomenal and the, the sacrifices that they made and the bravery they showed on the battlefield was unbelievable on a daily basis. So I know it's definitely something.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  You, you think about this now, think of the training that we went through. Just for UDT to start with, and then I came back, we went through SEAL teams. So you get all the, what you guys call SQT. We called it CADW back in the day. And then you go over again, you've already had your feet in the gun. Now you figure these Army guys go through basic training. And a lot of them head right over to Vietnam, you know what I mean? And they could be in Shaw Valley, anywhere. And where, where the crap really hit the, hit the brick, can you imagine that? We had the training, we were volunteers. We volunteered for what we were gonna do. We weren't just saying, here you go. We knew exactly where we were gonna go and we wanted to go. You know what I mean?

• 23:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, I absolutely know what you mean. You know, another weird thing about Vietnam and I've, I've talked a lot about Vietnam, books from Vietnam, guys that were in Vietnam here. And you know, the fact that these guys would rotate out, you'd be in the middle of a deployment. You just, you know, guys were just rotating out all the time, you know, it wasn't like what you just described, which you did in the SEAL teams and in UDT. And what we still do in the SEAL teams now is you get with your guys, you go through a workup with those guys together as a team. Then you go on deployment together as a team and you come home together as a team. And the army guys, they would just, yeah, they're just filling in the holes and the guy would go home and another guy would take his place. So you never work with this, you know, you could have a guy on a patrol with you, two or three guys you've never worked with before and you're going out on patrol with them. So it's, uh,

• 23:44Jocko Willink?

  I don't like that system. I like the way we do it.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Reminds me of Forrest Gump, you know, that was a pretty good little thing, you know.

• 23:50Jocko Willink?

  What happened there?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  No, the new guys that came into the platoon and, you know.

• 23:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, we was checking in.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Everybody's already been there already and they're just coming in. They hadn't worked up with these guys, nothing. They were just showing up, you know, popping in.

• 24:04Jocko Willink?

  We, we actually did take a couple of guys in, when I was in Ramadi, we took a couple of guys that just showed up, new guys. And we just had to slowly, you know, we'd put them on watch for a while.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Did you have people that were taken out? That's why they came in?

• 24:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they were just guys that were filling in. We did, we lost guys, but they were just guys that

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:20Jocko Willink?

  They, they got sent to SEAL Team Three from SQT. And when they got there, there's no one there. So they brought them over on deployment. Couple of guys, it was like two or three guys and we just, you know, okay, here's, we, we made them work in the compound for a while and then maybe bring them out. They'd be a turret gunner on an op and maybe eventually get, let them do a little bit more.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Work them in, yeah, that's perfect. That's the way you should do it, so.

• 24:41Jocko Willink?

  And so, any other, any other memories?

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Key stuff, yeah. So another time we were, we used to be on the front boat, the Alpha boat. Because they were the first ones that saw the log dams or had blow up bunkers and shit. And we had about a big stack of C4 in the back, you know, the average action shit, you know, and all of a sudden the whole boat shook like this. We got a B40 rocket right in one of the, um, exhaust tubes and we started sinking. So we, they did the coxswain, ran it to shore and everything and we were shooting back and everything, but the fucking boat was sinking. And if that had been about another eight inches higher, it'd hit all that C4, you know. But we landed and then, uh,

• 25:28Speaker 02

  we swam off and got out in the river in this other, they called it a zipple boat. It was like the troop carrier boat, but it was all napalm or not napalm, whatever they got in flamethors, you know.

• 25:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Flamethor boat.

• 25:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  This thing just went on the beach, you know, and we went and climbed up on that. We got out of there.

• 25:47Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Us and the crewman. That was, that was another moment of excitement.

• 25:51Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's, it's just to go off of what you just said too, and With the training that you get in special operations, SEAL teams, whatever, Rangers, SF. Is you know, a lot of times we in special operations get a lot of praise for doing what we do and that's great and everything, but like what you're talking about being in a conventional unit, it's the same thing over in Iraq and Afghanistan, being a conventional guy, it's no joke. I mean, it's in many cases, they're doing a much more dangerous job. I mean, even you know, a logistics job, something like that where they're exposing themselves on a regular basis. So anybody out there that's a civilian that thinks that the conventional guys aren't doing, you know, aren't taking as many risks as the special operations guys, I'm telling you right now, they absolutely

• 26:35Jocko Willink?

  are. They absolutely are. And of course, there's things that that all special ops guys do that uh step it up as well, but everybody, everybody pays a price and everybody takes a lot of risk when they go over there. And it sounds like it was the same thing when you had the ninth infantry rolling up the river.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, those guys were good. They did their jobs and if I seem to say anything derogatory, I apologize.

• 26:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no, you didn't. You didn't at all. You didn't know. I'm just pointing out a lot of times, again, people, I'm, I'm sitting here thinking, I'm thinking exactly what you just said. Here you are, you're UDT, you've been through all this training and you, you know, when that boat starts sinking, you're like, hey, I'm gonna jump on the swim. There's regular army guys there. They're, they're thinking, they haven't had the training that you had, and yet they're still in the same, almost the same exact situation.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Exactly. So one other thing in UDT, we're doing a beach recon, and I was a cartographer, so I'm up in front with another guy and I'm have this big, huge piece of Plexiglas. I'm doing all the back shore information on, but I'm ahead of them. We're putting in the stakes so the guys behind us can hit every 25 meters and do their soundings and stuff. Well, we didn't, usually we had ARVEN, which are your South Vietnamese Army, or we had Marines that would do screening for us. You know, when we were doing the beach recon, we couldn't get either one of them. So we had two of our own guys doing it. So they were walking, going behind. It was all, um, a lot of sand dunes and stuff like

• 28:02Speaker 02

  that on the beach, you know, and trees, little forests and stuff. Well, we almost walked right into this, um, L-shaped ambush that they had set up for us, except the two guys back here. They had a spire hole back here so that when we fell back from the ambush, if any of us were still living, these guys would get us, right? They hit these guys. So it made them open up, which made them open up earlier than we leapfrogged down and got out of there. But that was, uh, that was a few moments of excitement too. And that's when I got back to the USS Dyshenko and I went, you know, screw this, uh, naked warrior shit. Get me a six, you know, camming me up and let me go out and hunt these guys at night. I don't like running down the beach in UDTs and, you know, my coral boots shooting

• 28:47Speaker 02

  an M79, keeping heads down and shit. You know what I mean?

• 28:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  It was, uh, but I was just UDT then, so I didn't talk too much about it, you know? I wasn't SEAL.

• 28:56Jocko Willink?

  So you get back from that deployment?

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Every month when I was on that deployment, me and a guy named, we'd put in a chit to go to SEAL team and they'd just chew our asses out. You ain't going anywhere until we get back, you know? All right. So we'd wait a month and put another chit in. Well, when we got back, boom, we went right to, uh, um, um, Cadre. Go and checked into SEAL team one and then went into, uh, Cadre.

• 29:23Jocko Willink?

  And the cadre training was, was what we call now SQT, SQT, STT, SIT?

• 29:28Speaker 02

  All your IEDs, all that stuff. And actually on the Alamo River and a few other places, they had it set up to be exactly like it would be in Vietnam with watch, little watch towers. And they had a whole, um, uh, village that was in amongst all the shit that's on the side of the Alamo River and stuff. It was really good training. Yeah. And then we'd do, they'd ambush us, we'd ambush them, they'd come down in, um, you know, sampanes we had there and stuff like that. And just like on a, you know, when you do an ambush on a river, you always want to try to do it at a curve. And hit them. That way the sand pans after you hit them and stuff will flow into the bank. Not keep on going down the river and you can't get nothing out of them.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Just all kinds of little tricks and what they did, our cadre that ran us through the, our cadre instructors were guys that had just gotten back and they pulled them out of platoon to do that for about six months before they went back into another platoon. So we were getting continuous guys right out of the field in Vietnam, which is real good. In different areas too. The triple ganapeshia, your mangrove stuff and you know, rice patties and all that stuff.

• 30:40Jocko Willink?

  Where would you do a bulk of the training?

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Oh, out on an island. And then we'd go up to Quimaca for map and compass and stuff. And then a bunch of us went through what they called SEAL advanced training, which is for your PREW program, which was five months long. And that was all trade craft, medical and stuff like that. And really, really good. Got really honed in more even on the IEDs and stuff like that. And booby trap trails, intel trails, all kinds of stuff.

• 31:10Jocko Willink?

  It's interesting as you talk about that, how much of that stuff, you know, carried on to you. When I showed up at SEAL Team One, you know, we did all, we did booby trap trails. You know, there was no war, there hadn't been a war going on for 20 years when I got there. You know, in the Gulf War, but we still did booby trap trails. We did point man courses. We did the medical stuff. We did river ambushes. I mean, it's, it's, it's awesome that that. And there was no, it wasn't really written down anywhere.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  And you should have had two weeks of advanced demo and kitchen table demo.

• 31:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, because we set all that up in SEAL Team One. I know what you had. Should have still been going.

• 31:44Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome that it lasted that long, you know, with no, because the weird thing about SEAL Team is we didn't used to have anything written down. I mean, there was barely anything written down. And so all that, all that knowledge was passed word of mouth from guy to guy to guy. And that's, I think we've corrected that now where we capture more of the stuff.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Pretty much, yeah. But you know.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  You ever want to fight Rangers? Get the Ranger handbook.

• 32:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  That's the only thing I had against that a little bit. It still should stay in-house, it should be rolled down, but you know what I'm saying?

• 32:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  I don't, you know, I can give you a Ranger handbook and you can find out exactly how those guys are gonna fight, what their methods are, everything.

• 32:25Jocko Willink?

  And another thing I've talked about on here is when you have doctrine, and you get tasked with something that's not in the doctrine, you get confused, you don't know what to do. That's one of the, that's one of the reasons I think SEAL teams have been very successful in the recent past, and even in the, even in the longer past is because we didn't have a book to look at, we had to figure out how to do it. And so no matter what the mission is, we always had a fresh look at it and.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  We adapt, we're unorthodox, we adapt.

• 32:48Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, our guys, if you had pulled a platoon right out of Vietnam and put them in, Ramadi or somewhere, would have been lost at sea because we didn't have the training for the urban type of warfare.

• 33:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I know you wouldn't have been lost at sea, I know you would. Cause it's the same, principles are the same, the same principles that you guys taught me was the same thing we did over there.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Would have figured it out.

• 33:12Jocko Willink?

  Cover, move, take the high ground.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, we would have figured it out, but you know, we didn't have over watches and stuff like that. When it's pitch dark at night and you're working your way through real quiet, not making a lot of noise. Everything you do is for, you know, being, being silent or just like you guys never had to do things like if you hit a real taunt line, the point scout did, well, he'd step over it, grab the guy behind him, bring his hand down, show him where that wire was. And he'd step over the wire, he'd put his leg over it, grab the guy behind him, and that's how we got across until we got everybody across and got a head count thing, we'd move on.

• 33:50Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  That's just booby trap stuff, you know what I mean? We, that, that's just, and you did it and you couldn't see, it was pitch black. That's why you grabbed the guy's hand, showed him where it was. And if it's a tight one. You don't cut it. If it's all loose and stuff, then yeah, cut it.

• 34:05Jocko Willink?

  So how would the, what the point, how'd the point man see that?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, they what they called, we used, um, you take a, a, a twig, a long stick.

• 34:14Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you put the string on it?

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Real, no, no string on it, but just like a fishing pole. And you'd run that up and down like that when we moved and you'd feel it, you can feel it just like you would if you got a trout or a bite. And then you work your hand down, you reach over there and feel and see what that is, you know?

• 34:29Jocko Willink?

  Like a ninja. Yeah. You, you know what the other, the other interesting thing that when you started talking about SEAL Team and going out at nighttime? And how that was all unorthodox and people weren't doing it is the opposite of when, when we were in Ramadi. We started going out in the daytime. And, and the reason we started going out in the day, there was a bunch of reasons why we started going out in the daytime, but one of the main reasons was the enemy knew that we owned the night. We had night vision, we had, you know, we, we owned the night and so they didn't want to go out at night. Until they went out daytime, that's when they planted their IDs, that's when they killed people, that's what, and so we

• 35:07Jocko Willink?

  went out in the daytime, cause that's where the bad guys were out.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Well, you know, daytime in Vietnam too, you'd see guys sleeping hammocks and shit, we'd wrap them up because you knew they were, they'd been out at night doing shit. So we wanted to talk to them. You know, just like, uh, rules of engagement and shit. When we got, uh, my last platoon, we stopped in Saigon. And went to MAC4V and our LT got his orders, you know, and his orders were pacify the Vinlong Province.

• 35:34Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  That was his orders, pacify the Vinlong Province, Roger that. And that's where we went off and did it, you know? No rules of engagement, nothing, just pacify it. And then it was like, okay.

• 35:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  And we didn't work for the army, Navy, Marines or anybody. We were our own entity. So if you'd been the LT over there, Jocko, you'd have had, you'd have had the con. Matter of fact, they uh, we're at Dong Tam, they had a naval base here and then the big army base here at Dong Tam. They had us stay on the Vietnamese Navy base in between them because the Navy didn't really want us on their base. Plus their boats are right down there in the wharf, so it worked out perfect, you know what I mean? And we'd go to the Army to, you know, to test our weapons and shit like that. Yeah, and they were doing that all the time. So it wasn't like, you know, I mean, it wasn't anything unusual, you know what I mean?

• 36:25Jocko Willink?

  So, so going back now, you get back from your first deployment with UDT, you go to the SEAL Team, you show up, you're going through the training. What was the, what was the, you kind of talked to me a little bit about this before, but how were you getting treated? Cause you got, you got wounded on your first deployment as a UDT guy, right? So here you are, you're a combat veteran, you've been in the shit, you've been wounded.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  We called it a Viet Cong achievement.

• 36:49Jocko Willink?

  So, so you show up at SEAL Team One, you're kind of like, hey, I'm a, I'm an experienced veteran. I've been through the shit.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  And didn't mean shit.

• 36:56Jocko Willink?

  And they just, the guys there, how'd they treat you?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, alright, just the same. I mean, I'd had a trip with UDT, but just about everybody that went into SEAL Team came out of UDT, eleven or twelve into SEAL Team, you know what I mean? Back in the day before they started bringing them right into SEAL Team, the new guys, you know? So it wasn't any different. There were guys there, you just had to learn. I mean, I didn't, you know, when I was in UDT, I'll tell you, I wish, I really wanted to go, like when we were at Dong Tam, that was during the sixty-seven, sixty-eight tent. And we got a call that the East Coast Platoon in Mito, which wasn't too far away from Dong Tam, was being overrun. Luckily, they were up in a tall building, so they, they held out real good. They were the tallest building and they had a fifty-seven

• 37:44Speaker 02

  recoilless and you could hear the VC coming up the stairways, they'd throw grenades down and shit like that. And they needed some help and there were about seventeen of us down on that dart patrol on the USS Bennoah, right by Dong Tam. And we begged our lieutenant, goddamn let us go in there. We'd have been fucking killed. Our heart was there, but we didn't have the I I I D. Training, immediate reaction, you know, I mean, none of that shit. I mean, we'd have been. It it would have been stupid. So Odish, our lieutenants had known. We hated him, you know. Then I got back and went to Cadre or S Q T and did all that stuff and then deployed. Next time I saw John Odish, I hugged him. I said, you are one smart son of a bitch, dude.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Our heart was there, you know, to be, but U D T, you just weren't trained to operate on land. You didn't have the the pre-rescute skills that you learn in S Q T and stuff, you know what I mean?

• 38:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  And you get you get more of that even in BUDS now than we ever got because we were trained to be a frogman. That was it. I mean, our last op we did at San Comette Island was we swimmers scouted in by Birdshit Rock. And I can tell you this, you know, I'm talking about. They gave us forty pounds of demo haversack. We went twenty six miles down to the other end of the island, blew up a target and come twenty six miles back and attacked the camp. Guys, as we were patrolling, they'd ambush us and they'd pick out guys that'd been killed. Pretty soon we'd all fall down. They'd go, God damn it. We'll tell you who we shot. Then they get to go back to camp and defend it when we came back and attacked it. But it was still just a demo raid, you know what I mean? It wasn't anything, uh,

• 39:27Speaker 02

  patrolling, real good patrolling tactics and all that stuff that you learn, you know what I mean? Uh, I mean, like I went out with the Australian S A S in Newie Det and did a um, a week out in the field. Oh, was it a week or was it two?

• 39:42Jocko Willink?

  Was this when you're at Team One or at?

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, Team One, uh, my second platoon. Two of us, we had the Aussies come down and work with us and they loved it. Then we went up to Newie Det, me and the sixty guy, we went up and went out with them. We did a ten day patrol with them, resupply and all that stuff. They never talked. Said one word, that whole patrol is all hand and arm signals.

• 40:05Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  And they would, they would get in an L U P at night, everybody with their feet out and you'd be laying on your pack, have your weapon right next to you, pull what they call the silk yep, and you'd go to sleep. Well, we didn't sleep for about two nights because that's when we usually went out and worked, then we started to. Cause the way they figured it, it was in a real noisy area and somebody in that circle would be awake. And if we got sprung or something, then you have three hundred and sixty degree firepower and we'd get out of there. But they were the best I've ever seen I've been to. I went to Army Ranger School, Raider Herb School, and everything in that one ten day patrol, the Australians, I learned more about reconnaissance than I did anywhere, anywhere.

• 40:48Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, we used to have guys from the SAS come to, come to team one, as a matter of fact.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, they did. We had that program for a long time, but there were, the last guy we had there was an officer and he wasn't worth a shit. But some of the sergeants we had.

• 41:01Jocko Willink?

  The, the guys that, that were there when I showed up were, were really squared away guys that definitely had their field craft down.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Oh, they're so good on field. That's what I was trying to say, field craft. In U D T, you just didn't have the field craft to be out in the jungle looking for people and shit, you know? That's why in U D T thirteen, some of the guys got killed and stuff down trails and shit like that. They didn't, you know what I mean? Got to kind of have your shit together a little bit.

• 41:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So, so you go, you go through the cadre training, you check into your platoon, and it's time to go on deployment. You, are you flying, where are you flying out of, flying out of North Island?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we fly out of North Island and my first platoon, we flew into, um, Cameron Bay and then took choppers down to a place called New Nam Can, which is the very southern part of South Vietnam, right by a place they called the U Min Forest.

• 41:55Jocko Willink?

  And then you do some turnover ops with the guy, with the other platoons that were there? No turnover ops?

• 41:59Speaker 02

  We didn't, we didn't at that time. Matter of fact, most of our ops were dartboard ops. You ever heard of those?

• 42:05Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  That's where you put a map behind you and you choose one of the guys in the platoon, you throw a dart behind you, wherever that dart hits is where you're going to go into. Cause we didn't have intel, we didn't have shit. We were pretty isolated. We're, we're in a Vietnamese base camp in, in B F Egypt, you know what I mean? So that's, that's how we went out.

• 42:24Jocko Willink?

  Is it what you do, do in like a, do in helicopter insert or a, or a river insert?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  All river, and actually out of, uh, New Nam Can where we were, we'd take sand pans out because we didn't even have any MST support or anything. The guys down at Sea Flow did, which is a ways away from us. Our other squad was there. And finally, they pulled us out of New Nam Can because we weren't, we were doing stuff, but it wasn't.

• 42:50Jocko Willink?

  Wasn't effective strategically?

• 42:52Speaker 02

  So they brought us down to Sea Flow, then we started getting some good ops down there.

• 42:56Jocko Willink?

  And then what were those ops like?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  We still did riverine ops, like we went down to a place called Square Bay and, uh, because we heard there was a prisoner of war camp and stayed down there for about three days, watching this trails, seeing if we could see him moving and stuff like that. We'd do ambushes, we'd get intel from our Navy Nilo, which still wasn't that good. Oh, one of the things in sixty-nine, that was first platoons in sixty-nine was, uh, we landed at New Nam Can, got our stuff off the old forty-six that landed us there and put it in the bunker. And then this little loach came in and landed. Do you know?

• 43:33Jocko Willink?

  No, I don't. I don't. I know his name, but I don't know him.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  He was a prue guy in that province that we were in down there. So he came in and told us, yeah, if you guys need anything, just let us know. And as soon as that loach left, we got mortared for about an hour and a half. So we told him never to come there again because they knew what that loach was. He was a prue, you know, and that was a prue guy. Now, he was a great guy. But, uh, yeah, and he was a prue, had long hair, you know, bearded, you know?

• 44:02Jocko Willink?

  And so the platoon setup was, you had an OIC, an AOIC, a platoon chief and an LPL, kind of like what you'd run, well, what we'd ran in.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  We had two squads. The, uh, LPL and just like what you guys did, Team One, exactly, yeah. And then we broke it down, you know what I mean? You had your, like, uh, I was with the AOIC and the last platoon I was in was with, uh, was with, uh, was my AOIC.

• 44:30Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:32Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 44:33Speaker 02

  That was, uh, when was that? Eighty-nine?

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 44:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  But he was a-

• 44:39Jocko Willink?

  It must've been fun.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was a great guy.

• 44:42Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  But I'm just saying, he was, he was the AOIC. He was the OIC.

• 44:46Jocko Willink?

  Roger that.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  We had the, uh, LPO would work with him, then I would, you know, have, uh, have the, you know, the kind of guy, I was a senior chief then.

• 44:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  I don't know if you knew any of those guys.

• 45:04Jocko Willink?

  I know all those guys, yeah, yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  They were all in my platoon.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  It was my radio one, worst radio one I ever had in my life, you know?

• 45:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I can imagine.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, I went to radio school, like I told you, right? Guess he never carried a radio on the team.

• 45:18Jocko Willink?

  Really? You never carried a radio?

• 45:19Speaker 02

  No, I was a sixty gunner.

• 45:21Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Until I made LPO, then I went to the M fourteen. I liked the seven six two round.

• 45:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the, uh, that's kind of the standard. When I, when I went through SKT, they, they told us, if you're not carrying a, an M fourteen, you're, you're wrong.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah, that's a great weapon. It's accurate, it's perfect, I loved it.

• 45:39Jocko Willink?

  And guys, even, a bunch of guys in Ramadi carried the M fourteen as well.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:43Jocko Willink?

  Cause they're shooting, you know, you're shooting at vehicles, you're shooting through buildings, you're shooting, and they put the, the, uh, ARAP rounds in there, and just-

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 45:50Jocko Willink?

  That way you got some, you can, you can dig through some stuff.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did six months deployment, and I did three deployments. I did, um, nineteen sixty-nine, I was in, uh, Kilo platoon, and then came back from that, then actually got out for a year and a half, because I was married, and my wife talked me into getting out, so I did. And worked for the phone company as a cable spicer. Hated everybody and everything. We lived in Coronado, so I'd go down to the trade winds, and all my buddies would tell me what great trips they're having and stuff, and I just went, yeah.

• 46:24Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 46:25Speaker 02

  That was, um,

• 46:29Speaker 02

  let's see, seventy seventy-one, that was when I got back in sixty-nine.

• 46:33Jocko Willink?

  So when you got back in sixty-nine, you got out for a year and a half?

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Well, about a year, maybe not quite a year and a half, but I went back in and got in another platoon, luckily, and went to Vietnam again, seventy seventy-one, and I had-

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Guys like that and that, but that was a great platoon.

• 46:50Jocko Willink?

  And what was that, what was that, now were you, you in LPO that platoon?

• 46:53Speaker 02

  No, I was still psych.

• 46:54Jocko Willink?

  You're a sixty gunner getting after it?

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, exactly.

• 46:59Jocko Willink?

  And what was that, was there any difference between that first SEAL deployment to Vietnam?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wasn't real happy with the first deployment because we just didn't do a lot. I mean, it was okay. We did some stuff, but it wasn't my idea of what it should be, you know, as a SEAL. You know what I'm saying?

• 47:15Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  And then it was better when I got down to sea float, but it's still, you know what I mean? But that second platoon, that's the one that kept me in the Navy. You know, they were just, uh, you know, we're band of brothers, you know, and we were so close. It was unbelievable. I mean, I love those guys.

• 47:30Jocko Willink?

  And, and the, the difference in what you did, was it the missions that you got tasked with?

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:35Jocko Willink?

  Is it the way that the, that the platoon commander kind of set things up so that he had a better vision of what, what to do and what to get after?

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I was in my second platoon. That guy was just unbelievable. I mean, he was just a really, really good, our first platoon, it was.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  And he was kind of nuts. We didn't like him. Like one time we're all cleaning our weapons on sea float and everything. And what we used to, when it come back from up is grab a line. Then you jump in the water and let it wash all the mud off you. Well, he grabbed the line and jumped in and we had music real loud and cleaning our weapons and shit. Well, the line wasn't tied off, right? So he just started going down the river, but they saw him in the watchtower and said, man overboard and went and got him.

• 48:23Jocko Willink?

  You know, something that, something that we talk about on here and some I've experienced is, is having blue on blue situations take place. And it's, it's really hard for people to understand how it happens. But I know that you had, you had one of those happen. You, you want to kind of give a quick debrief on that?

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're about ready to go home. We had a new platoon come in. They wanted to do a break and I'll not mention any names of the officers, but they want to do a hammer and emble of which you just don't do with a brand new platoon. And we'd been there, you know, we had our stuff together pretty well in that area. But what it was, was we were supposed to push these bad guys, the VC, into these guys that were in a tree line. And they inserted us at the wrong place to start with, so when we started working our way in, we kinda came up to this tree line where it ended, a rice paddy, and then there was another tree line. I, I couldn't give you the, it was a halfway decent ways away, you know what I'm saying? But we had three Kit Carson Scouts with us.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Kit Carson Scouts were North Vietnamese that had, um, gave, uh, turned over to the South Vietnamese, and they put them in camps. And they called them, uh, uh, chuihoi camps, basically. And what we would do is we'd go to these camps, and we would get these guys that knew our area that we're working in, and threw in an interpreter and stuff, we'd brief them and everything, and they'd come and work with us. And they'd work with us for on a couple of ops till they became kinda trusted agents. And they were pretty good, most of them were, uh, not North Vietnamese, but VC that were good fighters, you know? And then we, they lived with us the whole nine yards, we paid them.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  We had money from, uh, Nav4B, they gave us a lot of money to pay these guys and stuff. So they weren't doing it just for free, you know? Cause they needed money for their families, and I don't know, the atrocities that happened to their families is one of the reasons they chuihoid and came to our, uh, to the South Vietnamese side. Anyway, we had three of those guys coming out in front of us, black pajamas, AK-47s, looked just like VC, you know? So the brand new platoon saw three guys coming out of the tree line that were VC, so they opened up on them, killed two of them and wounded the other one. We swung off to the left and laid down, and they were shooting the 60s and Stoners at

• 50:47Speaker 02

  us, but shit was just falling on their heads because they were shooting high, like new guys generally do before you. And it was pretty new, brand new guys in that platoon, you know, they weren't experienced and shit, normally you'd walk them in, whatever, you know? So we're yelling the radio, ceasefire, ceasefire, and we had, uh, our officer that was with us got up on his knees to shoot back at them and got shot through the heart. Then we finally got him to stop, and then we got him out of there. He was dead though, he shot right through the heart.

• 51:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  That was a blue and blue thing, that was pretty bad.

• 51:18Jocko Willink?

  And that was right before you went home?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the confusion that happens out there.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  It was called a break in op, you know, and like I say, the new, the new platoon had about two guys, I think they're LPO, can't remember his name, and then was with me on that beach where we got shot, he was also in my training class, he was the uh, either the OAC or AOC on that. But most of the rest of them were all brand new guys, you know what I mean? Good training and everything, but you know, this is their first, oh, goddamn, we're in a firefight, you know what I mean?

• 51:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, anytime you get the opportunity to, to slowly work into the combat situations, you know, do a smaller patrol, do an easier patrol.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  That's what we normally did.

• 52:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Did not candle override your officers that you got, you know, take them out in the daytime. That was a daytime op, by the way, but usually it's just to kind of get them oriented to the environment, what they're gonna be in, and, and then we all had these, uh, I don't know if we had one in sixty nine, but seventy, seventy one, we had these barn dance files. And every op we went on, we'd put a synopsis in this barn dance, so if you were going, going in that same area, he could pull out that barn dance file and read it and see what the guys had seen there, NME, what the terrain was like, uh, on and on, you know what I mean? It was, it was pretty good, real good. And almost every platoon had those from previous platoons all the way up to you, so you can kind of get an idea of what you're going into, if you didn't have intel on that area.

• 52:47Jocko Willink?

  What are some of the leadership, you talked about your second platoon being super tight, super close. What were some of the leadership characteristics that you saw from the platoon chief and the, and the platoon commander that, that as you look back, you, you recognize that those were really good traits that really brought everyone together?

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Well, was our chief, he made senior chief, and he'd been over about three times. And it was just very easygoing, but very sharp, and he understood things really well. Our LPO was Gary Smith, Chief J Smith. And he had been a crew advisor in that province. So as far as getting intel on all of our other sides, it was perfect. And then, um,

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I won't say much about him, but LT, he was outstanding. He went on almost every op. In fact, one time, he'd burn his hand with a smoke grenade. We're still gonna go out, and he was gonna go out with us. He just had his hand wrapped up and shit. So, he was over at the officers' club on the Navy side eating. And the officers were saying, "Your hand's all bandaged up and shit. You're still going out?" He says, "Yeah, if they get by my guys, I'm dead anyway." But he was really good. He had his stuff together. He was just savvy. Just had his head on his shoulders, figured out things, quick thinker, you know what I mean?

• 54:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  And it was just innate. He was just good.

• 54:14Jocko Willink?

  And how about, I mean, you know, we always, obviously here now, veterans get treated great now. I mean, from the Afghan War and the Iraq War, we get treated really great by, for the most part, by America and by the public. We get treated really well. Compared to what you guys had to deal with in Vietnam. Well, how much of that did you see when you'd come home? Was it, I mean, Coronado is a pretty pro-Navy town. I mean, in San Diego, it's a pretty pro-Navy town. Was it the same way back then? Was it relatively pro-Navy? Or did you see some of the hippies and whatnot coming in?

• 54:47Speaker 02

  They had some demonstrations sometimes, you know what I mean? Like downtown San Diego, but not much. And we basically just hung out here in San Diego or to other bars that we knew. We'd fly out on North Island, fly in. And North Island wasn't like we're flying into San Francisco or something. So, we didn't get hit with that real heavily, you know what I mean? And if we did have issues at a bar somewhere, we usually escorted away pretty quick, you know? So, it wasn't really a problem. We didn't really, our guys here,

• 55:21Speaker 02

  the East Coast guys, I don't know, but our guys here, we didn't really have a thing. I'll tell you an op, though. In 69, we were going up this one canal, and we used to...

• 55:35Speaker 02

  PBRs couldn't get up it. So we had to take a Boston waiter up it with a twin sixties in the front and one guy would sit and steer the steer it, you know. We'd take a squad up there, maybe five guys, you know. And whatever squad didn't have the opt tonight, they got to be the driver and the gunner. Which I got to be the driver once and I wasn't happy. I covered myself with flak jackets. I mean, who's anybody gonna shoot at?

• 56:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  So we were going up real slow up this thing and all kinds of filament lines and stuff like that that were cutting ourselves through because it was low tide. Luckily, it wasn't high tide. You know what I mean? So we got up there and and put the guys in and we came back out and the PBR said, put the boats into a bank, right? So we're sitting there on the PBR, me and my buddy that was the gunner, another SEAL. And all of a sudden, across this river, we heard just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. It was a sandpan. So we're gonna go after that son of a bitch. But one guy driving, one guy in the sixty, we needed a guy with that could see too. You know what I mean? Because you, you know. So we asked one of the PBR guys, you know, who wants to go with us?

• 56:45Speaker 02

  And this whole time, we'd been with him, and goddamn, we'd love to go out with you guys. The only guy on that boat that volunteered was the guy that was married.

• 56:54Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  The rest of them wouldn't do it. So we jumped the sandpan, went after the other one, hosed him down. They hit the bank and then there was blood trails going into the, killed one of them. He was laying in the boat and the other guy had gotten out and ran. And he could see blood spots, you know, falling in. Well, we didn't go after him. We're not that stupid, you know? Nighttime, you know, he's probably dying. Yeah, I'll take these fucker guys out with me. So anyway, we brought the the sandpan back and goddamn, we had whole big thing of intel and weapons and all kinds of shit. And the other guys, then we went up and got the other guys, brought them out. They didn't do a thing, you know? It's pretty neat.

• 57:33Jocko Willink?

  That's sketchy.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:34Jocko Willink?

  I can't, I can't imagine the, the, that you guys would just go by these filament wires and step over these tripwires and just continue on your mission. That's sketchy.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  You have to.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  That's what you, you know, that's what we did. Anyway, so I wasn't on this op, but it was and a couple of other guys from the other squad went down to Square Bay and we'd gotten this intel that the sandpan, pretty good sized one, um, almost like a junk would go up the river at nighttime, up the main river where sea flow was up by that way, you know. So George and those guys were down there, they were again, we're in a Boston waiter, they had a couple of, um, law rockets with them and stuff like that, you know, so they figured, well, shit, we haven't really, it's been a dry hole here with that goddamn, um, the junk when it comes by, you know. So they go out after the

• 58:30Speaker 02

  junk and they could hear it and then see the silhouette of it, you know. So they got real close to it and fires a, fires a, a law rocket and hit, hit the stern, not the exact rudder and everything, then popped a flare so they could shoot and everything. Well, after they popped their flare, about fifteen other flares popped and it wasn't their, us. So behind them was all this little flotilla sandpans and shit. And so they took off and were shooting back with their Stoner and sixty and stuff like that. Finally, they called and then a couple of PBRs came down and saved them. That was a pretty good op.

• 59:08Jocko Willink?

  Um, that's, that's just so, uh, that's one of the major differences, you know, with us having night vision now. The whole way that you guys had to utilize illumination and we did, we did utilize illumination from time to time. We, we actually, uh, on big, big operations, sometimes we'd have the army firing, the army artillery would be firing illumination in certain situations, but generally we weren't doing that.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and ambushes, we always fired a flare up, you know, to get good vision. You have what we had, then we got out of there, you know what I mean? Put a claymores out and claymores behind us, you and me, everything sat waiting for dudes to come down the river and then we'd hit them, you know.

• 59:44Jocko Willink?

  And then, so you get, you get back from, from your second tour in Vietnam and is that the war ended, right? I mean, this is pretty much, that was it.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  In fact, uh, platoon that was at Ben Luck, which was forty miles away from us, they were only over there for three months and they came back too. So we were the last full deployed, deployed, deployed platoon in Vietnam. That was November platoon.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  Was our chief, like you said.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  Just a bunch of great guys in that platoon.

• 1:00:16Jocko Willink?

  And, and, I mean, at that time, there was a couple hundred guys at SEAL Team One?

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  I think there was about, maybe it had boosted up real high, so there might have been 250, 300. I think there was only about 150 when I got in there. I don't know if the big push had started yet to build more guys up. It wasn't a lot. You knew everybody. I mean, it was a pretty tight, tight group.

• 1:00:41Jocko Willink?

  And one guy, one guy that we both know, he, he told me when he checked into SEAL Team One back then, he was like, taking a shower after PT and like every guy was shot up. Like you could just see what, every guy was, you know, you could see scars in their arm, leg, wounded. Did you, did you, were a lot of guys staying in at that time? Were a lot of guys doing a couple of platoons?

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  I think after the, no, most of the guys stayed in. That's what we did. That's what we loved. And then after the war, yeah, we had a pretty good, uh, exodus of people getting out.

• 1:01:11Jocko Willink?

  And when they getting out because?

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  There was nothing to do, yeah. That's, that's what they were doing. That was their, you know, there was nothing else. I mean, what are you gonna do, you know? And I stayed in because I just liked the guys. I liked what we did, you know, and, uh, like when I was over at Bud's, I come back in 70, 71, and then I went over to Bud's as an instructor. And I got bored doing that. So there was this guy called, uh,

• 1:01:37Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you, I would not want to be a, a student when you are bored as a Bud's instructor.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  No, I was, I was a nice guy there. But anyway, so, um, Buddy Dahl was in UDT. He's a little bitty guy from Colorado. And he was a rodeo rider, right? So he talks me into going out to this place called Burton's, which is out by, um, it wasn't Lakeside, it was, uh, Lemon Valley.

• 1:02:00Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Or?

• 1:02:02Jocko Willink?

  Lemon Grove?

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Lemon Grove, yeah. And there was a place called Burton's out there and it was just all bulls, but they were dinks. They weren't real, you're rodeo bulls, you know? So I went out there and hell, I liked it and never got bucked off there. So I went rodeo and went IRA then PRCA.

• 1:02:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  And actually thought about getting out of the Navy to ride rodeo because I loved it. But then I got bored because rodeo's, bulls are, I rode bulls. They were the last of the. Event, right?

• 1:02:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  So I started writing bareback and saddle bronc too. But the um, I got stepped on. Well, I got twenty two stitches in my left side of my face, fourteen in the back of my head. Had both my shoulders dislocated.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  What else? Got gored and then I got stepped on and had five busted ribs and punctured lungs. So I figured, okay, that's enough.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  So I quit doing that and just aiding the teams, you know?

• 1:02:58Jocko Willink?

  The teams are safer than rodeo.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that was over, over a year and a half, almost two years. So it wasn't bad.

• 1:03:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And what about, what about guys? I mean, how were guys doing as far as handling what they'd seen and coming back? And all of a sudden they're in Main Street?

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Dude, we didn't have that problem. I mean, I'm telling you, the guys that were crazy were crazy before they went over.

• 1:03:21Jocko Willink?

  I often say that.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  They weren't, uh, I mean, I know all my buddies. In fact, Thursday, this Thursday night, we'll have that E D T Vietnam, U D T C O get together on Thursday night. Talk to those guys. You don't, you don't see anybody going, you know, I've got to go to the hospital. I'm mentally ill and not that I know of. I tell you, there may, maybe it did happen, but the only guy I know that really got affected was he was with that one platoon. I can't think of the name, but uh, and they were taking apart a mortar and the mortar blew up. And he had just left to have a cigarette. And all of his buddies got killed by that mortar and stuff, including a guy named who was just a superb guy. And he wasn't quite the same after that. And I can understand that.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  I mean, that, you know what I mean? But uh, just being the firefights and shit like that and stuff that happened. Nobody, uh, you know, we just, it was the way it was, you know?

• 1:04:15Jocko Willink?

  And even when you, even when you got out for the first, so, so then you did, you did thirty years.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Jocko Willink?

  In the Navy. And uh, you know, that was another funny thing. When you, when I talked about earlier, when you, when you graded our, you lane graded me for the first time. I don't know how old you were. It was nineteen ninety three, maybe ninety.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  What platoon were you in?

• 1:04:34Jocko Willink?

  I was in a, a Alpha Platoon at Team One with uh,

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was a good off.

• 1:04:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, but you were, I don't know how old you were in that time period, but you know, for, from my perspective, you were like a hundred and seventy years old, right?

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:52Jocko Willink?

  And I'm thinking to myself, hey, this guy's still this is this Roger Aiden. And you were like putting on your wetsuit. Okay, put on the wetsuit. I guess he's gonna get in the water, gets in the water, swim in, do the recon.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  I swim in with him, do the recon and then I swim back out.

• 1:05:04Jocko Willink?

  Swim back out, you know, yes, that was.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  That's what you have to do. If you're gonna do OREs, you gotta do them right. You don't go point A to point B, otherwise you don't see everything, you know? And that's what I liked. I was a warrant then, but that's what I liked my last three or four years, three years, I think, in the, in the teams as I did ORE. So you still got to have your feet on the ground with the boys, you know? You couldn't be in a platoon, we'd suck, but that's what it was, you know?

• 1:05:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's nothing, there's nothing better than, there's nothing better than the, than the platoon life. Now, I, I know that, I know that you're short on time and I, and I, I rushed this and I'm glad we were able to get a little bit done. And I think maybe after, after this one, and we get to listen to it and, and I'll probably end up with a bunch more questions. I know people that are listening to this, a bunch of team guys listen to this, they're, they, they actually, a bunch of team guys sent me a bunch of questions. I didn't get to any of them.

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were, yeah, I know it's, I'm sorry and.

• 1:06:01Jocko Willink?

  No, it's all good.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  It's just things that pop up in your head when you talk about them, you know, I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, I was a UD, I was a frogman first and then a SEAL, you know? So there was a, that was probably one of the best appointments I ever had. That was great. And Philippines is great and we were so glad to leave the Philippines and go back to Adap just to get out of there for a while or we would have died, you know?

• 1:06:22Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, I will definitely get you back on here. And, and like I said, next time I'll, I'll, I'll get some questions from the team guys that, that they asked me to ask you and, and go through some of those. But. Thanks for coming on. I know, like I said, I know you've never, never been out in the public eye before, and that's just the epitome of a quiet professional that, that we were all raised on. And I appreciate it. Like I said, you're a hero of mine. You're a hero of the SEAL teams, and you're really a hero to everybody in this, in this country. And if anybody out there wants to continue this conversation, you can, you can get Echo Charles

• 1:07:05Jocko Willink?

  and I on the social media. Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jocko Willink. We're on all the different social media, Twitter, Instagram, and the Facebook. If you want to support the podcast, Echo Charles, how can they do it?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  If you want some supplements, the kind that work, obviously, Onnit has the best ones. So you go to Onnit.com/Jaco, you get 10% off. Boom. That's one way. Also, before you do your Amazon shopping, of course, go to one of the websites, right? Jaco Store or JacoPodcast.com. Click through the Amazon link there before you do your shopping. Or to make that part easier, we have this, the Trooper Tool. It's just this little extension thing you can put on your browser. You get that on any of the websites as well. You just click on it. It's called the Jaco Store Trooper Tool Chrome Extension. Just click

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  on that, confirm. It's on there. It'll automatically do it for you. So you don't have to remember. It's good. Also, if you like the shirts that we have, boom, that's the one. Discipline Equals Freedom is a good one. But yeah, get some of those. That's how you can support.

• 1:08:22Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. And you can get the book that Leif Babin and I wrote, that actually Roger did the security clearance on.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  I just reviewed it for a for your thing, you know what I mean?

• 1:08:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  No big thing. But one thing I will say, you know, and I don't think I'm a hero. I just went over and then did my job, had a lot of fun, and it was with the great guys. You know, that's about it.

• 1:08:50Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's one of the things that makes you a hero and thanks. Thanks for coming on the show and also if you don't know, we're having a little little conference out here in San Diego, California, October 20th and 21st. It's not going to be for everybody, but if you want to get in the game, if you want to do something that's going to be intense, to focus, you want to talk about leadership, we're going to talk about getting better at what we do. Come on out, the muster, October 20th and 21st. Roger, thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks for everything you did serving this country in Vietnam and spending the rest of your life supporting the SEAL teams dedicated to our country.

• 1:09:34Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, Roger is kind of an unknown veteran. And I would like to take a moment to thank all the Vietnam veterans that fought with courage and with honor in a hard war, in an unpopular war. And not only fought for freedom against the evils of communism, but also established and passed on lessons learned for the current generation of warfighters. We owe all of you a great debt of gratitude for what you did for us and for the United States of America.

• 1:10:19Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there, thanks for listening. Thanks for spreading the word. And as you go through life, remember the sacrifice of these veterans that fought and sacrificed for us. So that we can live

• 1:10:38Jocko Willink?

  with the sacred freedom to go out into the world and get after it.

• 1:10:46Jocko Willink?

  So until next time, this is Echo and Jaco and this true hero.

• 1:10:55Jocko Willink?

  Warrant Officer, Chief Warrant Officer, SEAL. Retired Roger Hayden. Out.