360: If You Ever Caught A Fighter Pilot In A Defensive Mood, You'd Have Him Licked Before You Started Shooting. With Navy Fighter Pilot Tom Kopel

Tom Kopel. Navy Fighter Pilot. 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 360 with Dave Berke and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Dave.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  The Secretary of the Navy takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Commendation Medal to Lieutenant Thomas Kopel for services set forth in the following citation. "For heroic achievement as a pilot of jet aircraft while attached to Fighter Squadron 142 embarked in USS Constellation. On 14 January 1970, Lieutenant Kopel flew the wing aircraft of a two-plane attack mission in Southeast Asia. Despite heavy anti-aircraft fire in the area, he placed all of his bombs on target resulting in five enemy trucks destroyed and many secondary explosions and many enemy casualties.

• 0:52Jocko Willink?

  His professional determination in spite of heavy anti-aircraft fire and adverse weather conditions resulted in a substantial damage to the enemy's logistics efforts. Lieutenant Kopel's superb airmanship, courage, and devotion to duty reflected great credit upon himself and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. The combat distinguishing device is authorized." For the Secretary, M.F. Weisner, Vice Admiral, United States Navy.

• 1:28Jocko Willink?

  And that is a citation that represents the types of missions that were flown by Navy fighters day after day, night after night, week after week, month after month, year after year. Those were the type of missions that resulted in

• 1:50Jocko Willink?

  solid battle damage to the enemy, but also resulted in 532 aircraft lost in combat, 401 aviators killed, 64 missing, 179 captured, who became prisoners of war.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  75 of those aircrafts that were shot down were F-4 Phantoms.

• 2:19Jocko Willink?

  These missions were flown by pilots who took incredible risks to get the job done. And eventually pilots that rewrote the book on air-to-air combat and laid the foundation for how fighter pilots are trained to this very day. And it's an honor to have one of these pilots here with us tonight. That pilot in fact is from the opening award citation, Tom Kopel. Tom, thanks for coming down. I appreciate you coming out here. I want to know, we got Dave.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  He's to keep me honest.

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  Well, he's always, he's always excited. The few times I've had some pilots on without having Dave on, he's not happy about it. So we got him here and I guess let's, let's just kind of start from the beginning and how you grew up and where you came from. So you were, you were born in, in Queens, is that right?

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, Jamaica Hospital, U hospital in Queens. But we lived just over the city line in a new development that the house was built and my parents moved in with a brand new baby.

• 3:29Jocko Willink?

  And this was 19 what?

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Forty-one.

• 3:32Jocko Willink?

  So you're pre-war.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and my dad was not drafted because of me. He was an insurance underwriter in the financial district of insurance district of downtown, downtown Manhattan, Nassau Street and those places down there. And a nice guy, I have to say.

• 3:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's good. How, how much, you know, so you're born in 1941. Probably, I'm assuming before the war started, before Pearl Harbor?

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I was, yeah, August and Pearl Harbor was in December.

• 4:07Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Do you, so as you're growing up, is there any part of World War II that you remember?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  I remember my mother telling me that the war in Japan was over. I don't remember her telling me that the war in Europe was over.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  On the other hand, since I was four years old and had a brand-new sister, they sort of left me alone and I would go down to the corner, believe it or not, and what was then, I guess it probably still is Hillside Avenue, and I used to see lowboy trucks with Grumman. I assume they were F-6 fighters with the wings removed. They put the fuselage and then the wings on the side. I think the engines and the propellers were on them, but obviously they were on their way to South Pacific. And you ask your mother, "What the heck is that?" And, you know, she would say, "Oh, they're going to war," and stuff like that. So I

• 5:06Speaker 02

  assume that was 1944. I was three years old, sitting on the curb, and that's the first I ever remember of any of that. But they told me that both Grumman and Republic were out in the island at that time. I guess it was, you know, farms.

• 5:21Jocko Willink?

  Did that leave an impression on you, seeing the fighters? I mean, first of all, I don't remember anything until I was about 17, I think. So you remembering stuff at three is pretty impressive. But did you think, oh, these are warplanes going to war? Did that make any sense to you?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. Oh, yes. But I never expected that I would be a guy who would fly them or anything like that. And the other thing I remember about flying machines was not combat or war or anything like that was the fact that Idlewild that became JFK when they expanded it, the airport was seeing the DC-7Bs coming in from Europe in bad weather. They used the east-west runway and streaming fire out of the back of the, off the top of the wings. And how the heck is that? So I finally, in my grown-up days,

• 6:18Speaker 02

  talked to a guy who was a retired naval aviator, P3, so he's semi. I said, "Dennis, why didn't you want to be a carrier guy?" "Many engines, Tom." "Oh, sorry about that." But at any rate, he was a flight engineer on DC-7Bs. And he said, "That's because a flight engineer goes full rich." Flames roaring out the back and especially in foggy weather when they're, you know.

• 6:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so that's what you'd be saying.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wanted to do that. That's really hot stuff, you know, but, but, and, well, and jumping ahead, I guess. But why did I want to go with, I wanted to, my father said, I graduated from college. My dad said, what are you gonna do? And I said, I don't know. He said, why don't you see if one of the services will teach you how to fly? I said, don't take guys like me. He said, they sure do.

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, before you get to college, what was growing up like? So did you grow up there just outside the city?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I was just a kid.

• 7:26Jocko Willink?

  A four-year-old kid down on the corner of Hillside Avenue by yourself, which is cool.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that was different time, I think, or something like, maybe there were as many monsters around then as there are now, but nobody talked about or acted that way. And as soon as I got a bike, you know.

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  Then it was really on.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I was never there.

• 7:47Jocko Willink?

  Were you, how'd you do in school? Did you like school?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Terrible. I hated school. I hated school. I was a, my wife loves to tease me that I was such a terrible little monster that the, one of the classrooms that I was in in grade school had a, it was at the, two classrooms at the end of the hallway and then a connecting room between the two. She put me in the connecting room with a door that opened so I could see the blackboard, but I was in the room with the door open about ten inches wide.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  What, you're just a hyperactive kid?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  I, I think so, and bored with all of that. I could read before. I was, I could read when I was four. So my, they were always buying me books. So, stuff like that.

• 8:34Jocko Willink?

  So you were smart but bored?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  I guess. I don't know.

• 8:37Jocko Willink?

  What about sports? Were you into sports at all?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I was the big, biggest kid and played, touched football in high school, which got, I'm sorry, in grade school, seventh and eighth grade, and it gets a little rough. At least it did then. So, but I never got hurt or anything like that. And then when I got to high school, I played, played football and played first team.

• 9:03Jocko Willink?

  What year did you graduate high school?

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Fifty-nine.

• 9:07Jocko Willink?

  So you grew up in like the iconic

• 9:09Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 9:10Jocko Willink?

  50s. When you see those movies or you just?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  I think it's awful.

• 9:14Jocko Willink?

  Why is it awful?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  The clothes that they wear and the nostalgia, the cars, we real, I do today are death traps. But they bring huge money, these cars in the 50s.

• 9:27Jocko Willink?

  Did you, which one did you have? You must have had one. Did you have one? I guess maybe not in the city.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  No, it's not the city. It was real suburbs, wooden houses on little bitty, little bitty lots.

• 9:39Jocko Willink?

  So did you have a car?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Uh, no. I, you know what? I never owned a car until, uh, I was in flying school in Big Spring, yeah, Big Spring, Texas. Uh, never had a need of one. Got around. Back in the 50s, early 60s, you stick out your thumb, you got a ride. Um, people were different then, somehow or other. I don't really understand how that is. But I went all over the eastern half of the United States with my thumb. I went everywhere. And never worried about getting back or anything like that. But on one time, the worst time I ever had doing that was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in western Pennsylvania. I was there for 12 hours.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  And 12.

• 10:27Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  No one would pick me up. I have no idea why. And maybe I'd look scally or something. I don't know.

• 10:35Jocko Willink?

  I don't think I would have been a great hitchhiker if it comes down to looking scally. I would definitely have some issues. So you're growing up in the iconic 50s. How do those movies miss the mark, hit the mark? I mean, how are they?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  The 50s movies?

• 10:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't, frankly, I don't remember. Um, I don't remember what movies you might be talking about.

• 10:58Jocko Willink?

  What about Elvis? Do you remember?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  I thought it was awful.

• 11:02Jocko Willink?

  You thought Elvis was awful?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  I personally did. I guess my sisters thought otherwise, three younger sisters. But I thought that was the dumbest thing I ever heard of. So that's, well, I thought.

• 11:13Jocko Willink?

  So what were you listening to?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  I have to admit classical music.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  My, a minor story, my wife, when, before we were married, somehow or other I introduced her to the fact that I listened mostly to classical music. And she went home, she tells me now, or actually after we were married, said, "This guy is a little bit weird."

• 11:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, suspect for sure.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  "He listens to classical music."

• 11:47Speaker 02

  I don't know. Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade that everybody knows. I was really intrigued by that, so, so I listened to classical music and still do it today, so whatever.

• 12:00Jocko Willink?

  So the rock and roll thing was not your scene?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Not until the California, the British Invasion and California, and that was altogether different.

• 12:09Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we'll get there. So you, you graduate from high school 1959, so you lived through the Korean War as well?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  I remember it well. I remember being in Boy Scout camp when they announced the armistice had just been signed that morning, or whenever it was. That was a big deal, everybody cheered.

• 12:32Jocko Willink?

  But you still didn't get the, the impression that that was something that you might do one day?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  No, no, there was no military tradition in the family at all, except for a grand uncle, maximum nice guy, who was a graduate of the same college as Donald Trump graduated, still exists, at New York State Military Academy, I think it's called, but he graduated in 1936 or something like that, and he was part of the last Combat Cavalry Regiment and the United States Army.

• 13:12Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  And I was disbanded, I think in nineteen thirty-nine as the storm clouds were gathering and they disbanded that unit. But that was, that was officers with real swords and two horses each and all the rest of everything else about that. But that was a combat unit, not a display unit. It was the last one. He wound up in Iceland for the duration of the war, deriding the whole experience. But I only realized in my grown-up days that if Hitler had won the Battle of Britain, Iceland was next. And they probably, no doubt, knew that, but they all...

• 13:55Speaker 02

  I went to a reunion with him at one point and they all derided their experience there and so forth. But they would have been the first to be killed in the first super German raid, no doubt, on Iceland to flatten the place.

• 14:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we used to get a similar thing in the SEAL teams where you'd get... Some platoons would be going over to Iraq or Afghanistan. And some other platoons would be going to like Guam or some, somewhere where there's no war going on. And of course, all the guys that are, get sent to Guam are just angry that they can't be in Iraq or Afghanistan. And meanwhile, the guys in Iraq or Afghanistan are freezing or sweating to death or to get shot at or whatever.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, they use real bullets here and stuff like that.

• 14:41Jocko Willink?

  But that's what, you know, that's what people join the SEAL teams for.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:45Jocko Willink?

  And apparently the horse cavalry as well.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was for real, swords and the whole deal with, with those guys. And he was a wonderful man, wonderful man. When sisters were born, I got farmed out with him twice in the summertime. And he worked in Lower New York State, Binghamton and Elmira, those places around there. And he had grand aunts who had a truncated farm there and...

• 15:18Speaker 02

  He farmed me out with them.

• 15:20Jocko Willink?

  You were just slave labor.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  And I had fun, I had kid fun, uh, being kid with cornfields and ponds and stuff like that all over the place there.

• 15:32Jocko Willink?

  And then where'd you end up, so where'd you end up going to college?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  I went to Albright College in Reading, PA, uh, commuter for me, very small college at that time, eight hundred and fifty students at that time, and now it's about twelve or thirteen hundred, maybe a little bit more than that. But, uh, wonderful teachers there, absolutely wonderful, especially the men, but one notable woman, uh, who, uh, was a pacifist of all things, but she was absolutely a wonderful woman and, uh.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  What made, what, how come she left such a big impression on you?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Because she was so straight, I'd never met a woman quite like that, she was straightforward and thoughtful and aggressive, uh, I like a woman who is my wife.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Tells you what's on her mind immediately, and she was that way, I guess, so.

• 16:29Jocko Willink?

  And she was a professor there?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was.

• 16:31Jocko Willink?

  What was she teaching?

• 16:31Speaker 02

  English, uh, English and speech, and, uh, you got to be, you got, she changed you, uh, with her professional abilities and so forth, and I remember sitting there arguing with her silently, uh, no, uh, a ten minute lecture about using the atomic bomb in Japan, she was opposed to that, and, um, I don't think she had read notably or widely enough about all that, and, uh, I had at that point, and, uh, was opposed to that, but still, I, I thought she was really great, uh, point of view, uh, sort of thing, and.

• 17:16Jocko Willink?

  What, what were you studying?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  I was a, um, econ major, not business, economics, and minor in history.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  And had some fabulous teachers there. A guy named Wilbur Gingrich, who was a genuinely world famous Greek scholar and biblical scholar. Couple of other guys that nobody ever heard of, but wonderful men. And a crazy guy who taught, loved to teach European and Russian history. And I took him for Russian. And they said, "Don't take him, for God's sakes. You've got a D out of that and he'll blither you and you can't write fast enough."

• 18:07Speaker 02

  And his class, his name was, no, Gingrich was the biblical scholar and Greek scholar. Can you believe it? His name escapes me. But at any rate, Kissler. And they said, "You'll get a D out of his class because you can't write fast enough." And stuff like that. But he was something. He smoked continuously. And always had the window open and the butts went out the window and he'd torch up another one. But he was, he was really something.

• 18:42Jocko Willink?

  What'd you get in the class?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  B. All of six in the class.

• 18:47Jocko Willink?

  So at some point you, you got more into school than you were when you were in grammar school or whatever?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, because we had smart people, just smarter than I was. And how would you put it? My parents weren't really educated, if you will. My mother had a college degree from NYU, but I think she skated as much as she could. And my dad, they kicked him out of grade school. Yeah, out of school when he was, after 10th grade, I think, because he was done. They did that at that time, in the twenties. So both of them wanted me to be educated and so forth. So it was, it was interesting to be in the company of genuinely educated people.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  And I didn't catch fire at first, but by the time I was a junior, I understood that this is really an experience you can get.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Interesting things out of these people. By the time I was a senior, I didn't want to leave because you get to talk as a grown up with these grown ups who listen to you and then tell you things you had never conceived of before and stuff like that. So I had a good time in college until they kicked me out.

• 20:05Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you start looking at the military as a legitimate option for you?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Ah, not until I was about to graduate and back in the good old days, my dad worked, he was a New Yorker, New Yorker, New Yorker, but he got a job in Reading, Pennsylvania. And it was a shock to all of us. I didn't want to leave the school I was in. I was going to Pro Tools.

• 20:31Jocko Willink?

  So this is back in high school?

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. I was two years into Shamana High School on Long Island, which is by entrance exams and tuition and I liked it there. I was doing a little bit better, a little bit better, but I didn't want to leave. And he came home and said he'd been offered a job in Reading, Pennsylvania. Where is that? We were New Yorkers and New Yorkers. I can do the accent too. And of course, when you get to Pennsylvania, the kids make endless fun of you because of your accent and stuff. But at any rate, where was I in this?

• 21:09Jocko Willink?

  We're just trying to figure out, at what point did you think the military might be an option?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  I could go downtown Reading and go up the fire tower staircase and plop in the chair in my dad's office. And he said, so what are you gonna do? You're gonna graduate here. And I said, I don't know. He said, have you considered maybe the government would teach you how to fly in one of the services? And I, ah, they don't take guys like me. He said, they surely do. You're a 2020s and good shape, nothing wrong with you. So I applied to the Navy guy and he, he was an embarrassment.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Overweight, feet up on the desk, um, didn't seem to care about anything. I filled out all his paperwork and he never got back to me. Went to the Air Force guy and he was close to his, uh, his quota probably.

• 22:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  And he drove me around.

• 22:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  To, you have to go here and fill out these, I'll, I'll help you fill out the form and so. So I did that and the Air Force took me. So, but, uh, the, uh, uh, what was the question?

• 22:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, that, uh, that was the question. The question was, how did you first get?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  So my dad, my dad said, see if you can learn how to fly and he didn't know how to fly.

• 22:33Jocko Willink?

  So did they have like a contract that made you a pilot? Was that part of the enlistment process?

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Um, they, they, when they said, we like everything you do. Now you have to fill out a, um, a preference sheet and you can put whatever you like in there. We suggest this list of stuff over here and then you make them one, two and three choices. And I said, well, I, I want to be a pilot and cause that's what I'm doing this whole thing for. He said, well, most people put in navigator for second and then something like, I don't know, auxiliary aviation or something like that. And I said, well, that's not why I'm here. So I put pilot, pilot, pilot, one, two, three.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Funny thing too, the B-52 squatter and I was later in, was a guy from my college class. And I said, Denny, what are you doing here as a navigator? He said, well, they told me put pilot first, navigator second and. I said, you don't wear glasses or anything. He said, well, that's what they took me as. I said, well, I didn't want to rub it in, so I just let it alone.

• 23:45Jocko Willink?

  So what was your indoctrination to the Air Force then?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  I went to their OCS in, uh, in, uh, San Antonio, it's not at Lackland, it's, I think they call it the Medina Base, it's nearby. And went through that, that's three months.

• 24:04Jocko Willink?

  Was it, was it a shock to your system, were you wondering why the hell you did this?

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Well, I was fortunate, there were several enlisted, previous enlisted guys there and I, I thought, they know the ropes, do whatever they do, so, that's what I did and I, and then they said, if you play a musical instrument, put your name on this list, and I said, oh, don't, guy told me, don't volunteer for anything, before I came in, so, I found out, the, the, the guy was running this thing, he loves to have live music for any parades that he has, and if you can play a musical, get your name on it, I did, so there were.

• 24:46Jocko Willink?

  What instrument did you play?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  I played the trumpet and cornet, I can play baritone, I can play alto horn, or French horn, or any of those, but I dropped that, you know, for a long time, midlife, I'm back into it now. Anyway, you got out of everything, you straightened up your, your, your digs and your bed and whatnot, and when, the Saturday morning inspection happened, we had rehearsal, and that was, they, if you will, all knew that, so.

• 25:21Jocko Willink?

  So this is nineteen what, nineteen sixty-three?

• 25:23Speaker 02

  No, no, sixty-five, January sixty-five, because, see, I graduated, I graduated in August, because I was having too much fun, that by that point in, in college, I found this, you ought to take that professor's history course, he's really interesting, and you should take comparative economic systems, because you should do that, and I didn't have enough credits, I had two, if you needed a hundred and fifty, I had a hundred and seventy-five, but you don't have enough in your major or in your minor, you had, you took that course and you got a good grade and, at any rate, so I wound up graduating in August, but, um, I had to get into that, oh yeah.

• 26:06Jocko Willink?

  So it's nineteen sixty-five, so, you're starting to hear about Vietnam, you guys must be talking about Vietnam?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  No, no, because that happened in January of sixty.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Five.

• 26:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  In the summer of sixty-four, I worked through college at a small summer stock playhouse 'cause I was in the drama club in college and you meet this guy and meet that guy and so forth and all very legitimate, if you will, good people, not these sorts of flaky, dumb people that you might think of when you think of theater sort of people, you know. And I had a mentor by this point, a guy from New York who was old enough to be my father, and he said, "When you graduate, what are you gonna do?" And I said, "Well, I don't know. I have this paperwork in to go to the Air Force to fly and, and stuff."

• 27:06Speaker 02

  And he said, "They're looking for a guy like you at a theater in Baltimore that I am going to," he said. "Should I mention you to them?" And I went, "Well, okay." So he called me in about a week or so and he said, "They want fifteen minutes of drama and fifteen minutes of comedy. If you can do that, they wanna talk to you." So I went to a woman in the, in the summer stock company, Grace Chapman, wonderful woman, and I said, "Can you help me?" And she did. I said, "Oh, I'm gonna do it like this," and she, "No, no, no. We're gonna do it this way," and so forth.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  So rehearsed it with her, have to memorize everything, of course, did all that and went down to Baltimore, stood up on the stage, lights.

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  And they got what, a few people are watching you to judge you?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  The two bosses.

• 28:02Jocko Willink?

  The two bosses. And they're thinking of giving you some kind of a role, or?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  No, they, they, they had a program there where you actually worked as it were in the, in the union deal. The Actors Union is called Actors Equity. You work as a local jobber, and it's called.

• 28:21Jocko Willink?

  This is doing, doing what? What's your job?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Well, when they've got you, they've got you by the short hairs, as they say, and you, you will get roles, maybe a minor, maybe you're just a walk-on for this one and maybe something serious. I got one very nice role out of it. I was the... Elder Sun in Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, notable European communist.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  But a good director there for that. John Marley, the guy who a lot of people, he was a workhorse Hollywood movie actor. He was the guy in bed with a horse during the first Godfather film. That was John Marley, and a nice man as well. Anyway.

• 29:18Jocko Willink?

  So wait, so this was in the summertime you were doing this?

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Summer stock in a barn, believe it or not, in Pennsylvania. And then Jerry Richards was a New York guy, old enough to be my dad, said he was going to this equity company in Baltimore, relatively new, called Center Stage. It's still active today. And was I interested? Did you have another thing in mind? And I went back and I said to my mother in passing, I was thinking about this. She said, do what you have to do, all right? So I hitchhiked once again.

• 29:54Jocko Willink?

  To Baltimore.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  To Baltimore.

• 29:56Jocko Willink?

  And how long did you stay in Baltimore for?

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Only until I got a big fat envelope in the mail from DOD. And it said, we will teach you to fly if you want to. And of course, the draft was there. And I had already called the draft board and I said, where am I? And they said, we can't tell you by the law, but I'll tell you this, you're close to the front of the drawer. I remember that very well. And I thought, I gotta do something about this. I wonder what to do about this. And I went to a fellow guy who was in the same position I was in the company. And I said, I don't know what to do. And he said, do what I did. Tell them you like boys, not girls.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  I said, that's not true. He said, it's not true with me either, but it got me right. They go, go sit on the bench over there. And they ask you, do you really like boys rather than girls? And he said, I just said, that's right, I do. And that was the end of that. And I got off, I thought, oh, boy. That may be good advice some ways, but I thought somewhere down the road, somebody's gonna drag that out forty years from now and so forth. I didn't want to do that. And lo and behold, I get this big fat envelope in the mail. I go to Jerry Richards, my mentor. And I said, what should I do? And he said, uh, he was a combat veteran of World War II. Uh, a dog faced soldier, had funny stories to tell about being on a line of march, hot,

• 31:27Speaker 02

  sweaty, and an Italian farmer going by with a wooden tank on a little wagon pulled by a horse. And the second lieutenant or whoever he was said, stay away from that tank. We all knew it was full of wine. Or grape juice, anyway. And he said, we got two thirds of the line through there. And somebody went, boom, boom, boom! And that was it, everything collapsed. Anyway, super nice guy and whatnot. I went to Jerry and I said, what should I do about this? And he said, well, you always come back to this, but you're never getting another chance to do that.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  So, so I signed on the dotted line and I went to, went into the Air Force, like the second of January nineteen seventy-five.

• 32:18Jocko Willink?

  Nineteen sixty-five.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Sixty, yeah.

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  You said seventy-five.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Pardon, that's right. Sixty-five.

• 32:24Jocko Willink?

  So, so, yeah, so that early part of Vietnam, because I always think in the way the news kind of worked, it was the Battle of the Idrang Valley in nineteen sixty-five where really hit the news and there was casualties and it seemed like the escalation really kind of started.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:39Jocko Willink?

  Um, so you get done with the, the officer candidate school and then is it you get, you get your slot to flight school?

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Right. And that was at Webb Air Force Base in West Texas, at Big Spring, Texas.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Pretty much of a barren place, just east of the big, big oil fields. But there were plenty of oil wells around where I was, around Big Spring. But the big oil fields around Midland and Odessa, Texas. Permian Basin, it's called. And there had been at least one crash at Big Spring, Texas. They made a very big deal, and rightly so. The guy was confused about stars and oil fields. Every drilling, not their drilling rig, but every pumping deal has its own light bulb on it. And he got confused and rolled over. Jeez.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so really a shame. But I learned to fly there and then went to the... How was flight school?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  It was tough for me at first because I didn't know a wing from a tail, an aileron from an elevator, anything. And about half those guys had private licenses, at least half of them had private licenses. And a couple of them had commercial multi-engines. They're just walking through the thing. But I was slow to get going, but when I got into the second half, which was the T-38 at that time, I did very well. But it's like a baseball, trying, a baseball player trying to bring his average up, second half of the season.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  So your grade point average is, was a problem for me. And I wound up getting a B-52 assignment. My roommates got C-130s, which was a very desirable deal if you didn't want to get shot at. Turned out to be very foolish. And because you, in a C-130, you got shot at in Vietnam War. And one of my roommates got Air Defense Command F-104, which was considered to be creme de la creme until I got assigned to the F-4.

• 35:10Jocko Willink?

  But first you had to do your B-52 time.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Right, the G model in Rome, New York, wonderful place, wonderful people there. I liked everything about it except sitting alert. Awful.

• 35:22Jocko Willink?

  So this is now, what, 1966 or so?

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 35:26Jocko Willink?

  And you're assigned to the B-52 squadron in Rome, New York?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, very heavily decorated squadron from World War II. Can you remember the number 488 or something like that? Eighth Air Force.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  I had a first guy they put me with was a

• 35:48Speaker 02

  guy of shorter stature and I think he had a problem about that. And I was six feet tall and whatnot and all the way down to him saying, I said to him, "That's not so." He said, "It is so and you shut up because I'm a major and you're just a goddamn first lieutenant." Whoa, okay. But at any rate, he fired me, so to speak, basically. He didn't want to fly with me anymore because I was I may have made better landings than he did because the next guy I got was a family man and we got along like brothers and it was great.

• 36:21Jocko Willink?

  So the one lead pilot or whatever, is it called the lead pilot, the major?

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:26Jocko Willink?

  He didn't like flying with you?

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, he didn't like your attitude or something?

• 36:30Speaker 02

  And he didn't like my attitude either.

• 36:32Jocko Willink?

  So he got rid of you?

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:34Jocko Willink?

  But then you just moved to another guy?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, they gave me another guy. You don't have any choice about it, but we got along like, just had fun every day.

• 36:43Jocko Willink?

  And what's the deal with sitting alert?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Well, they did it two different ways. At Rome, New York, where I was, they had eight airplanes on alert at any one time. All the airplanes that I was on had two hound dog standoff missiles with thermonuclear weapons in them there. The Mark 28 at that time, I don't think it's classified anymore, but the highest yield on those, single warhead per and there was a bit of a pop on there.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  And then four thermonuclear weapons in the Bombay and then four quail decoy missiles in the Bombay. And the targets for the ones I was on, well, I was on a mission, it was downtown Moscow, believe it or not, and land in Turkey. I think all of the ones I was on were land in Turkey because you were out of fuel. By then you refueled south of Iceland and then went in and then turned straight south and landed on pretty much on an abandoned airfield in central Turkey.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  And you were instructed to get fuel by jerrycan. This is silly and we knew it. The jerrycan was not enough. You had eight J-57s and a P-52 and H model had modified J-57s that were fan jet engines. But it was silly, you'd never get enough fuel to refuel the thing to fly it anywhere.

• 38:34Jocko Willink?

  So I mean, was that just because once you flew over Moscow and dropped nuclear weapons, it wouldn't really matter where you were getting, what was the?

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Pretty much because you were assuming that the world would be a conflagration and be pretty much of a mess at that point. You would, truly a thermonuclear war would have finished by that time, I guess. And everything would be, it would be an awful, awful mess.

• 39:00Jocko Willink?

  And are you sitting, like, are the, are the weapons loaded on the aircraft, just sitting there stage?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely, positively with an armed guard on every airplane, walking around underneath every airplane 24 hours a day.

• 39:14Jocko Willink?

  Was there any events that would heighten your readiness?

• 39:18Speaker 02

  They would have practice alerts that could happen at any time. The, uh...

• 39:27Speaker 02

  The SAC World Strategic Air Command, worldwide, would call on alert and every SAC base on the planet, even in obscure places, would do what they were told to do. And they basically had three commands. One, to man the airplanes and start them, stay in place. Second, start the airplanes and taxi down the runway, just motivate the flying machines. And third would be a real launch. Actually, there were two kinds of launches.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Launch to a holding point, short of total commitment. Or, four, total commitment from minute one. So, obviously, the third and fourth never happened with me. They would, the alert was at Rome, New York, at Griffiths Air Force Base, where I was. And wonderful people there, too. It was seven days. You had seven days on, and the rules were, half your time on alert you had free. But it didn't really work out that way, because you didn't get away from the base until,

• 40:50Speaker 02

  in this case, Thursday, you had 12 o'clock or something like that, and you lost half the day. And then they would schedule you for a flight, maybe Monday night at 8:00 PM. So, Monday was sort of gone, because you had to sleep, because you were going to fly for 12 hours. You took off at 8:00 PM, you're going to land at 8 o'clock Tuesday morning. All those missions, those training missions, were eight hours. And but I didn't training missions are sort of fun and interesting. I spent a lot of time with my hands in my lap, but nevertheless, they're interesting. And you went all over

• 41:34Speaker 02

  the United States, all over the United States, doing those things. And a lot of them were at low level, because that's what you would do in the case of a nuclear war.

• 41:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's a low level attack?

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. The B-52s were all assigned low altitude.

• 41:54Jocko Willink?

  Like how low?

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Two hundred feet.

• 41:57Jocko Willink?

  That's good underneath radar?

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. As low as you want to go is what I was told. I said, how? I said, this is a poker deck route, and it's published at 400 feet. How low are we talking about here if we have actually do have a war? As low as you want to go. I said, one point, that you have charts that were accurate, accurate, and classified, obviously. But I said to one of the guys who worked in the vault, you had to do target study while you were on alert. And I said, you show telephone poles here. Here I am, the copilot, looking

• 42:41Speaker 02

  for the next turn. Can I count those telephone poles? Yes, you can. Whoa, they were all done by U2 or by satellite. I think the satellites were just starting at that time. So I said, so it would be the 28th telephone pole. I can turn left to 030. Yep. Anyway, so you, what was the question? Where the heck were we?

• 43:09Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's just, it's very interesting to hear, like, sort of what your status was as a pilot. And I actually asked you what level of alert, what's the highest level of alert you are? Because obviously, you missed the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 43:24Jocko Willink?

  Because I'm sure that would have been a very high alert. Maybe they even, do you think they got airborne for that?

• 43:29Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't remember ever asking anybody. I don't, but I don't think that. That happened. No.

• 43:37Jocko Willink?

  And that had to be a little bit of a strange uh uh weight on your shoulders to think about. Uh especially with your background with your English teacher that didn't like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:52Jocko Willink?

  And here you are with a mission tasking that if you get this mission. You're gonna fly and annihilate, you know, basically the world.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Well, I have a little bit of a funny story about about.

• 44:03Jocko Willink?

  Let's let's hear it. Let's hear how that turns into a funny story. I like that.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  In the G and the H, we had the gunner up front and the gun, the guns that were in the tail.

• 44:12Jocko Willink?

  So these are the G and H models of the B fifty two.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Right. And up to that, the gunner rode in the tail. And uh if he were to bail out, he would jettison his turret, which weighed something like two thousand pounds, everything, his ammunition and his and his fifty calibers and uh everything short of the seat. He sat on a chemical toilet back there, incidentally, but then he would bail out. He did not have an injection seat. He just it was right in front of his toes and he'd just step forward or lean forward and out he went with a conventional parachute. Anyway, um the uh the gunner and the G and the H models up front.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  And the cockpit arrangement is different in the G and the H than it was in the earlier up to the F model, B fifty two. The G's no longer exist. They they went with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. The G's got their pictures of them getting their wings cut off that they took airborne pictures of all that, so. Comply with the Russians.

• 45:22Jocko Willink?

  The Soviets.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. But at any rate, the G and the H internally are the same and they have and the the ECM officer and the gunner ride facing backwards. And uh uh now, now I was gonna, oh yeah. So on your charts, when you do your first day of alert target study, it's the same charts every time. The gunners, he's sitting all across the table and I said, what, oh, you have L P B N, that means something and.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  E three five, that means something, across the route of flight. And I said, LPBO. It's in the same lettering stencil, same ink, same everything. I said, what's LPBO? He said, last point of bailout. I said, that's over Finland. He said, exactly right. I'm not going to anybody's nuclear war. I'm leaving. I'm over Finland. I'm taking the seat pack with me, with the 22 rifle, the sleeping bag and everything. I'm out of here. But it never happened. So he was, he was a E six enlisted guy and nice family man and everything else.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  But he said, I'm not going to nuclear war. You're nuts.

• 46:46Jocko Willink?

  So how long did you do this job for?

• 46:48Speaker 02

  A year. Well, including the rag, if you will, in Merced, California, a year and a half. But then I got the big fat envelope that said, here is your inter-service transfer. If you want to do this, you can do this.

• 47:05Jocko Willink?

  And that's what you had applied for?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:07Jocko Willink?

  And why did you try and do an inter-service transfer to the Navy?

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Because I didn't want, two, two sides to that. And there's popping your peas again there. I didn't want to sit alert anymore. I didn't like riding around with my hands in my lap. And going way back, I had this idea in the back of my head. My first cross-country in the T-37 out of Webb Air Force Base. We stopped somewhere, I can't remember. And there were two Navy guys there wearing golf shirts underneath their flight suits. And through the open door, there were two A4s parked out there.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  And they said something like USS Independence or USS, who knows, Forrest Gump. I thought, isn't that hot stuff? These guys can go to sea with those things and go, I don't know, anywhere they want. That's hot. And then I saw the back of a proceedings magazine.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Proceedings used to be magazine sized, then it became smaller format. But it showed an A4 looking over the A4 shoulder, like the wingman or something like that. Looking over, and he's on short final for a carrier. And I thought, that's hot shit.

• 48:34Jocko Willink?

  So that did it. And was it hard to put in that inter-service transfer? Was it pretty straightforward?

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Well, they bounced it back at me. So, oh no, format's wrong, has to be this way and that way, and have to do that. And I said, fine. Well, what do you want us to do? I said, well, you tell me it's wrong. I did it according to what was in the publications library. You do it. I said, well, I guess we have to. And they did. And then I signed everything a second time, and then away it went.

• 49:04Jocko Willink?

  And you got straight into the pilot pipeline?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Well, no, I was, you know, when you're a military officer, you are an officer of the United States. You're not an Air Force officer, or a Navy officer, or even an officer of the, there's a land survey and mapping service. They have military uniforms. You are an officer of the United States. So it isn't like you change services. You change uniforms, and you change terminology, and you change verbiage, and the name of your

• 49:45Speaker 02

  grade changes from first lieutenant to lieutenant junior grade. But they can put you anywhere they want. You can be a SEAL who's a lieutenant commander, and they can say, guess what? We want you in the embassy in Tunisia, and it's only gonna be six months. But you'll be wearing civilian clothes, and you'll be responsible for thus and so and so and so. And I can do that, because remember, you're appointed by the President of the United States. You're going to serve in that capacity. But, so that's what happens with an inter-service

• 50:23Speaker 02

  transfer. And I was told that when they, you make the transfer, it's basically a long table meeting of Senior service. I have a doc who wants to come over to the Air Force and you have a junior lieutenant who wants to go Navy. I'll swap you for those two. Okay, that's fine. Let me do that. And so forth and so forth. And that's the way it's done, but every six months or something like that. And it probably goes on right now. I don't know.

• 50:56Jocko Willink?

  But you ended up with the pilot slot somehow?

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I had orders to King, to, uh, Kingsville, Corpus Christi, and wound up standing in a guy's office, nice guy, with lieutenant commander, view of the parking ramp with S2s, stoofs parked behind him, piston engine, anti-submarine airplanes. It's a training facility for them. And a couple of lieutenant commanders standing over here and me standing right here in front of his desk. And he said, what are we gonna do with you? I said, I don't know. I just have these orders. He said, you flew jets? I said, yeah. He said, well, then we send you to Kingsville. What should we do with him? What happens if

• 51:43Speaker 02

  he can't get aboard? I thought, I will get aboard.

• 51:46Jocko Willink?

  So what's Kingsville?

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Uh, Kingsville, two advanced training bases. I think there, is Beeville still active?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Beeville's closed, still Kingsville.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Kingsville is bigger than ever. And the Navy advanced. At that time, there were F9s there. And I went over to Kingsville, I introduced myself and dropped my orders on the table and so to speak. And all very nice. And looked out the window and they had these ancient airplanes, F9s, cream war vintage. Oh, boy. What ancient equipment here. There was more fun to fly than you can imagine. You put the power up all the way and leave it there. And it's like your brother's MG with the little four-cylinder engine in it was so much fun to drive, underpowered, same way. Fun, fun, fun to fly. It was truly

• 52:42Speaker 02

  a flying airplane with a...

• 52:46Speaker 02

  With a wing, airfoil wing and everything else. You fly the, get into the Phantom and you find, no, this is a machine.

• 52:54Jocko Willink?

  Now, now, now at this point, you're hearing about Vietnam. Vietnam's now is nineteen, what, nineteen sixty-seven?

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:00Jocko Willink?

  So now you know what?

• 53:03Speaker 02

  You're in the pipeline.

• 53:04Jocko Willink?

  Your goal is to be a fighter pilot. You know that that pipeline ends up in Vietnam.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So your detailer calls you on the hall phone in the BOQ. And I was, I think I was a lieutenant by this point. Maybe not. Senior lieutenant, junior grade, and you may have two rooms. And, um, and private bath. And, and you were in Kingsville in those? I was, yeah. Big, solid BOQs, very nice and whatnot. But when you took a shower, the, the water was so bad, the groundwater. It smelled like ancient sauerkraut. Remember that? It was awful. At any rate, um, uh, where were we?

• 53:48Jocko Willink?

  So at what point do you get assigned to go to the, the rag for F4?

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Well, your detailer calls you on the hall phone of all things. And you'll put Tom Kopel on, he's in room B7. The guy comes, hey, Tommy, you got a phone call. It's my detailer again. He said, Tom, we really want you in the A6. That's just for you. Same as the B52. You have experience with offsets and everything else. It's gonna be perfect. I said, I don't want that, Bob. You know that. Call me back next. A series of phone calls. The last one was the same thing. Tom, you're perfect for the A6. By now you probably looked around, talked around about it. That's a heck of an airplane. Yeah, I know, Bob. I still want to fly the F4.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  Okay. Let me, let me think about it. And about a week later, guy called me and said, you have orders in, up there at admin. Big spring at that, I'm sorry. Uh, Kingsville at that time was nowhere land. And I did not have a car. I said, it's up at the other end of the main drag, the parallel hangar area.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  I said, oh, first of all, I said, Fred, what do my orders say? Oh, look at them. It's none of my business. Oh. Gentlemen, don't read each other's mail. So I walk up there and here I had F4 at the Merhor.

• 55:19Jocko Willink?

  And the F4, what year did the F4 come out? What year was that?

• 55:22Speaker 02

  I think the first prototype flew in 58. Is that right?

• 55:27Speaker 01

  That sounds about right. Just, just real quick.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  All right.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  So you're, you go through all airport training, you're a B-52 guy. And then you CQ in the F9?

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  What was that like?

• 55:40Speaker 01

  I mean, they're worried that you can't even get aboard, right?

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what was that like?

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Well, I guess my FCLP was okay. And when I first, first time out, FCLP, I think, this is Paul Army, I can do this and so forth. And the guy comes back and he says, well, you were this and you were this and you were. I thought, that's amazing. How do you know that? And so forth. That's LSOs. They grade you accurately. And their club, Dave knows this.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  I was in LSO.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. They, it's hard to get into their club. And, and you can't really dispute what they tell you. And after every SC landing, he's in your ready room saying, well, you started out high. And so forth and so forth.

• 56:30Jocko Willink?

  So you guys have now both thrown, I, I was wondering if I missed something, but the term get aboard. What does this mean? Expand on it.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  There are guys, I guess, who's just say, you crazy? I'm not gonna do that. I thought, I didn't realize you had to do that. Or I guess that's what happens. Or they're just, what in, it used to be called, the guy's a plumber and he can't do it.

• 56:53Jocko Willink?

  So get aboard means you actually qualify in the aircraft?

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, get aboard is just a language for can you land on the ship?

• 57:00Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  And

• 57:00Jocko Willink?

  God, okay.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Most people can.

• 57:02Jocko Willink?

  I didn't, that's what I was missing.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's hard. It's just, it's, it's the phrase of, hey, is this guy gonna be able to get aboard? Meaning can he land his plane on the boat?

• 57:10Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  What happens, I think, every now and then is you got guys go through the whole pipeline. Carrier calls is the last thing you do in training.

• 57:16Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Traditionally, and you can be great at all these things, but if you can't get aboard, you're no good to the Navy.

• 57:22Jocko Willink?

  That's right.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Because we land on boats, uh, and so

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Well, you're either sending you to P3s or

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and fighters, exactly, so.

• 57:29Jocko Willink?

  So is that what happens? You get sent to P3s?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  You get, I mean, now you get sent to, you know, P3s, you go to, um, helicopters. If you can't get aboard in a jet, they're gonna send you to some other non-tactical platform. That's true.

• 57:42Jocko Willink?

  I've been talking about this lately. It seems like, um, there's certain skill sets of people. Some people just can't get through like, uh, like for instance, when I was going through SEAL training. I, I, I would say about one out of every hundred guys, they're, they're just, they're just not gonna be able to shoot a pistol well. And they might actually not make it through the training because they can't shoot a pistol. They might be an athlete, they might be great at everything, they might be smart, they can't shoot a pistol. Uh, close quarters combat, there's a bunch of strict little things that you have to follow. And some people, I think that number's about four out of every hundred. This is in, in, in basic SEAL training or SEAL qualification training that they're just not gonna get it. They're just, there's not bad people. They do a lot of other things well, but they just can't do that thing.

• 58:26Jocko Willink?

  And it sounds like occasionally, someone that can fly a plane, someone that can land it on the airfield, someone that can do the turns they need to do in the sky, someone that understands the dynamics of it, but they can't get aboard, they can't land on that aircraft carrier.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:39Jocko Willink?

  And then it doesn't matter.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, it does matter because, um, uh, you were, you were a Top Gun guy, but I was a, uh, an instructor at Meridian at the end of my career. And I don't remember exactly how or what that the guy said to me in a friendly, collegial way. If, you know, if your students can't cut it, it's not their fault, it's your fault. Because if this guy is not The sort of guy we want for tailhook, we'll find a place for him. And he'll be valuable to the Navy. So, and the Air Force is the other way around. It's always felt to me like they were trying to get rid of you.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  They were always rotten to you, except for one guy who wound up being a, I think I put this in my list of stuff, he wound up being a four-star general in NATO and Europe. But he, I, maybe it was personal self-esteem or self-confidence or something like that. He was very quiet and struck in T-38s and at Air Force Advanced, very laid back. He'd say, "Tom, come left a little bit more." Or, "Tom, let me show you." And he did. And that was in his last, and he wouldn't talk to me for 10 minutes and stuff like that. But not because he didn't want to, just let you go until you made him, "No, no, no, let me show you something." And stuff like that.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  But at any rate, they always acted like they wanted to get rid of you worse in the Navy. If the kid doesn't make it, he's been qualified by us in 16 different ways. If he, if he quits or wants to quit, it's your fault, not his. And so, we'll find a place for him. Helos, and they have two guys there and stuff like that. So, where the heck were we?

• 1:00:36Jocko Willink?

  So then, so then you do get your orders. You get your F-4 orders. And I guess I kicked this whole tangent off just by, the F-4 at the time was just like the ultimate beast.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  The monster, yeah. That's what I always called it. And then, I went to Miramar and I remembered this like it was yesterday. Check in, do all that. Going to find a place in the BOQ, forget it. I said, "No chance, Tom." So I had to go find a place to live, off-base, and whatnot. But, at any rate, VF-121 was the F-4 rag at that time, and was the eastward end of the runway there. And a couple of steps, going through a narrow gate that was always open, and an F-4, looking at, you're looking at the tail, up the pipes of this thing, and I thought, "Oh, my God,

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  I forgot how things, this is a monster, I forgot." And they had Marines working on them, because they were going to Da Nang or Chulai, to get shot, full of holes, and eventually abandoned, over there. And they took the radars out and put lead noses in them, at that place, and basically went over the whole thing. And they had Marines, Marines mechs, working on them there. But I thought, "Oh, my God, look at that thing." And so, that's the thing. And then I walked to the end of the hangar, and there were two F-4s taking the runway.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  VF-121, at that time, was at that end, the east end of the runway, and 99% of the time, Miramar took off to the west. And two F-4s rolled out on the runway. It was night and early morning, low coastal clouds and fog, just like here. This is at Miramar. And they ran up, and then they rolled, and they firewalled, and they went to burner, and then they disappeared into the mist. I thought, "Oh, my God, I am in over my head." But, you learn to do it. And get good at it. I got pretty good at it. Although, you know, there's a thing about LSOs.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Since you're here.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  So, the LSO is the grader, basically? Yeah, that's the landing signal officer, you grade every landing, that's right. Okay.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  And you have to call Meatball in State, for every landing, VFR, IFR, or anything else. And he's the guy, when you look up, and they say, "One peak is worth 10,000 scans," scanning your panel.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Instrument flying is something that's hard to understand if you haven't done it. You cannot make a mistake, or you're going to be killed and wreck the airplane. No mistakes allowed in I- genuine IFR, and especially carrier IFR. But he's the guy who says to you, you say, "2400 Clara", and he says to you, "That means I don't see the meatball", and really you don't, can't see the deck either. And he says to you, "You're looking great babe, keep it coming."

• 1:03:59Jocko Willink?

  And you just have to trust what he's saying?

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:02Jocko Willink?

  Cause you can't see visually because of fog or whatever?

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  Well, one second later, or maybe a half second later, you see the deck, and then you're aboard. He'll say that to you at a half mile. The radar controller says, "Half mile, call a ball or execute a wave off", and you take a second peek, and nothing there. You see a white glow from the deck. But if you're on centerline and on glide slope, you're gonna be okay.

• 1:04:31Jocko Willink?

  And he's tracking that via radar? Or he's, cause he can't see you either, right?

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, what they, the ship does, it's different now, I think, but it's essentially sort of the same. You have a, the F4 had a radar reflector on the nose gear, and the ship's track while scan radar would lock on to that receiver. Otherwise, it might lock on to the wingtip. And that will keep you on, if you're flying accurately, the way you're supposed to. Everything will be, when you break out, you'll be on centerline on glide slope with a center meatball. And basically, don't, don't, with a fuel, in black oil ship, Constellation was a black, I don't know, in America before, they were both black oil ships.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  They have a stacked gas problem, but actually with a nuclear powered carrier, you have the burble that comes around the wind coming around the island. I'm told you can feel that too, but with a fossil powered ship, you had a lot of burble. So you're hitting turbulence basically as you're coming to land? Yeah, a tenth of a mile from touchdown. Yeah. One time I had my mask loose and you could smell it. My mask wasn't tied on. What was it, do you remember your first carrier landing? Yeah. How'd it go? I thought that was pretty great. That's all I remember.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  I remember being on the catapult though, on, it was Randolph with hydraulic cats. It was one of the only ships left with hydraulic cats. They'd all been converted to steam. When they, when they put the angled deck on them, these old Essex and Yorktown class ships, they put steam catapults in them, but they put, some of them, they put hydraulic cats and Randolph was still, it was a wonderful, clean, well-run ship, I thought. And the captain was very friendly to me because I was an oddball. I was a coming across air force officer. He had been told, "Come on up on the bridge, will you?" It was very nice. At any rate, um, sitting there, getting ready to get on the hydraulic cats on Randolph,

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  I remember thinking to myself, "I don't have to be doing this." I remember thinking, "If I say, 'I don't want to do this,' they'll stop right now. I must be crazy." And I did it, boom. Was that your first cat launch? Yeah. And they told you over and over again, "These are hydraulic cats." Bob said, "Your pal and instructor," he said, "Now, make sure you're all the way back. Make sure you got your elbow locked because it's a hell of a bang and you get on your

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  first 15, 20 feet, you get 80% of your acceleration right up front and then you sort of just trundle down the rest of the way." So I was ready, boy. All the way back in the seat, head back and elbow locked. I didn't think about my knees. When that thing went off, my knees were up here somewhere.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  But the F9, I think the FAA 18 is the same way. You can take the shot, hands off, and then grab the stick as soon as you're out over the water. And so, I still had my hand on the pole, but I had to get my knees back down on the puddles.

• 1:08:06Jocko Willink?

  Is the hydraulic harder to launch than the steam? Because the steam is more gradual buildup or something?

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, the steam is smoother and it's a continuous flow. And I guess the new electric cats are that way as well. They're supposed to be even better, I guess. I don't know how they would be, but I guess they would be.

• 1:08:24Jocko Willink?

  Now, this is the time like Dan Peterson, you guys are working like almost getting in this air-to-air combat where you're training at a level that really you hadn't trained before at. Or the pilots hadn't been training this way, where we're going hard against each other all the time?

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Uh, yes and no. In that, that was the beginning of the... I said in my, talking to Dave via email, I said, "My only claim to fame here, being unusual, if you will, is the fact that I was there when what became Top Gun started. I was there." Sam Leeds, who's in Dan Peterson's book, came into various ready rooms. And VF-121 had about three or four of them. I can't even remember because they took the whole hangar. And they came in there and said, "We're gonna do the..." Oh, a lot of F4s and some F8s too. Were getting shot down by MiG-17s mostly.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  But RA5Cs were getting shot down by MiG-21s because they... MiG-21, RA5C would be cruising at, say, 600 knots, taking pictures or going to his next spot to take pictures. And the MiG-21 would come downhill from 30, 35,000 at 1.2, 1.4, or something like that, and launch a Soviet, what was the B model they had stolen from us, a Sidewinder, and shoot down the RA5C. That was the big deal. Don't let your RA5C... I was lots of times. If you're the escort of the RA5C, don't let him get...

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  You have to keep looking back and up there and be prepared to turn into him for a head-on with a Sparrow. But at any rate, um, what was the question?

• 1:10:16Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm just trying to gather that eventually what I want to know is how well prepared you were when you went on deployment.

• 1:10:26Jocko Willink?

  From a pilot, so like I was in the SEAL teams. We would shoot so many rounds through our guns. We would do so many immediate ax drills. We would do so many, uh, drills and so much training that by the time we went overseas, I felt really good. Yeah. I felt really good. And I, I'm trying to figure out where you guys would feel the first time you get on your first combat mission.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Well, there's nothing quite like getting shot at the first time. You do remember that.

• 1:10:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  But I remember the time they, they had some sort of an exercise where you flew down the coast and back up again and maybe went up as high as Hanoi and, and or more the seaport that Haiphong at the mouth of the river up there and back and got aboard and came aboard. Big exercise. I remember looking out over northern part of South Vietnam and over into Laos and all that red, I thought, holy smoke, that's for real. It's only every one and every six, but you're not quite ready for that. And the first time you actually see it going by, uh, it makes you an older man immediately, I think. So, um, wherever we.

• 1:11:40Jocko Willink?

  So you're, but you're training to get ready to get over there. Are you dog fighting or you?

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah. One on ones. That's what you did in your training. You left Miramar and went out over the water and the standard deal was the, your flight leader, you're the wingman. He kisses you off. You both turn 30 degrees away and you proceed until one guy turns in. You can turn in immediately or you can wait. If you're the younger guy, you wait until the older guy finally turns in because he can't see you anymore. You can barely see him and you know his eyeballs are not as good as yours, but you turn in and make a head on. And then you can see his wings flash and he sees your wings flash and make a head on pass, but that's not the way it is in combat.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  When you get into a combat situation.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  Well statistically, it doesn't matter whether it's World War I, Korea, or the Vietnam War. The guys who got shot down, the guys who didn't see it coming. It's like ninety-nine percent of them. One guy got shot down, let's say. He said, "Yeah, he got it on me and he pulled inside and he unloaded and he got me." But that's the exception. And moreover, ninety-five percent of the airplanes shot down in Vietnam

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  were with AAA, not with SAMs. Everybody, "Oh, SAMs this and SAMs that." But no, when you're vulnerable and relatively close to the ground, that's when they got you. Especially when you could see it going by, you were in the envelope, if you will.

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  And that's just like a matter of chance, in a way.

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  That's right. Well, better tactics. There are better tactics and poor tactics. And I think I wrote in, is that my monograph there? A guy said to me way back,

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  "You know, in Kingsville, I teach you to let it roll off on a wing, let the nose fall, acquire the target, adjust a little bit, and now you're watching the altimeter and so forth." I said, "This is baloney. I want to hit the target. I want to put them right in the hole there." "Pull down, up, invert, pull down." Some ROs think you're crazy the first time they're in the back when you do this. "Pull down as steep as possible." "Well, more than thirty degrees? You betcha. How about sixty or seventy degrees? The steeper you are, the safer you are, the faster you are, the better you are." And then, I think I wrote in here-

• 1:14:25Jocko Willink?

  Is there any compromise when you go to, when you go to come out of that dive and turn the airplane back up towards the sky?

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Not really, because they've been through all that at Pax River. See, the flight test in the book, the manual that you have, either the NATOPS manual, what's the Flight Manual for Pilots, or the Tactics Manual, has all these tables in there, and you can say, if I get out, and let's say, I have 80 degrees angle of bank, dive, and I get out at 6,000 feet, I'll still be well clear. I have 1,500 feet to clear if I pull 6 and 1/2 Gs to get out. If I pull 7, I'm even better off. But you lose power

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  when you do that. I'm sorry, you lose airspeed when you do that. So you pull the Gs, you're safe. A lot of guys would not do that, though.

• 1:15:22Jocko Willink?

  But you would, did you train this way before going to Vietnam? Did you know that the high angle attack was better?

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:15:30Jocko Willink?

  Or you figured it out when you got there?

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  No, I figured it out in Arizona.

• 1:15:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Going over there to those targets that they have. I guess in the East Coast, they have them all over the place, too, rural places. It's a huge plowed area, plowed in a circle, and you got, they have two towers, wooden towers, on 12 o'clock and 3 o'clock, and they talk to each other, and they tell you where your hit was on the, and a white thing in the center, and they tell you, you're bombing. But a guy told me, if you want to be safe, be steeper, be faster. I said, that's for me. And then I saw this picture, sort of

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  famous, and you've probably seen it, of an airplane diving on a Japanese aircraft carrier at Midway, and the guy is 89 degrees. I thought, that is for me, that's why I'm going to do it. So roll inverted, pulling your nose down, then you get your dive right there. Because your nose wants to come up, the faster you go. In an airplane, whether it's a Piper Cub or an F4 or an FA18, your nose wants to rise as you build air, airspeed is just aerodynamics. So get the nose down there right now, and then you can do whatever you want. The F4, you could pull powered idle at 500, and it would hold 500. I don't know what they do

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  in FA18s, but anyway, pull the powered idle at 500, almost no matter what your dive angle was.

• 1:17:06Jocko Willink?

  What does that mean, pull power to idle at 500? What does that mean?

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Just pull the throttles all the way back to idle and it would hold 500 knots.

• 1:17:15Jocko Willink?

  Got it. So you wouldn't increase your speed to some?

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Right. I don't know why. It's just they discovered it, no doubt, after they were actually flying the airplane. But if you go 550, it'll hold that. So a lot of guys would say 500 is fast enough for me. I've got to pull out of this. But I said, Bonney, look on the charts. You can get out easy. They wouldn't do it. But I said, steeper's better. So the guy in the back says, you know, we were 560 knots tonight. Yeah, fine. I like that. I never got any holes. I got scared a couple of times. Well, yeah, got warned. I had a load go off right there that gave me, you have your

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  picture taken with an old style flashbulb in spots and it gave me spots in front of my eyes. It was that close, but no holes. I never did. I know guys who came back with a hole about as big as a 45 caliber bullet in the bottom of the airplane, but not me. We had leadership in the squadron I was in that I kept going back to reading your book about how this guy operated, Ruel Gardner, the way he operated.

• 1:18:35Jocko Willink?

  He was a former underwater demolition team guy.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Right. And

• 1:18:40Jocko Willink?

  And so how did he operate?

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  He was very laid back, very quiet about everything. And we get after him about sharks, for instance. And nah, he says sharks don't bother you, but barracudas sometimes do. They're curious and they'll come right up to you and wonder what the heck you're doing and what you are. At any rate, that sort of thing. And he was the guy who would do the classic Navy routine, if you will. Tom, can you help me with this? As opposed to, Tom, get that done. Rather, can you help me with this?

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  It's funny, in leadership terms, if you say to a guy, "Can you help me with this?" He may not really want to do it, but the way you phrase it makes you want to help him. If he says, "Do that or else," and you don't want to do it, pisses you off.

• 1:19:41Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  It's your style, but it's effective. In leadership terms, very effective to use the old Navy way of doing things like that. I don't know how the Marine Corps operates, but I had a pal who got killed in Vietnam, who's told me, "I will be a Marine general." He got killed, being aggressive, I think, based upon what I heard about what happened with him, but at any rate, I just wondered how the Marine Corps operates when the guy doesn't want to really do that, but he would if you had just asked him, as opposed to

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  saying, "Do it or else."

• 1:20:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, having worked with all kinds of leaders in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, the good leaders in all those organizations are the type that say, "Hey, I need some help with this. Hey, what do you think? How do you think we should back..."

• 1:20:42Speaker 02

  I think that's...

• 1:20:43Jocko Willink?

  And across the board, and then you take this into the civilian sector as well, the ones that bark orders and yell at people and say, "You need to do this right now because I'm ordering you to do it." They're not ever considered to be good leaders.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  But that's by and large the Air Force style. No exaggeration. Maybe my experience in the Air Force wasn't broad enough, but by and large, that's what they do there.

• 1:21:08Jocko Willink?

  What, bark orders?

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  And I think maybe the... Having read his autobiography, you know, he didn't write it himself really, really, but Ferris Lemaire, talking about the way he operated in England in World War II, "Do it or else." Well, wait a minute.

• 1:21:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, there's a whole, there's a whole thing to talk about there, you know, this idea of the authoritarian people, certain people have an authoritarian mindset. They're attracted to the authoritarian mindset. And the, when they look at the military, when they're 10 years old, or 17 years old, or 20 years old, they look at the military. And they're, they're very excited about it because they think, oh, there's a place where if I have rank. People have to respect me, they have to listen to me. And so the military actually attracts these type of people. And most of the time. They, they, they kind of become not the best leaders and they usually don't make it very far because they piss people off and, and whatever.

• 1:22:11Jocko Willink?

  Occasionally you'll have someone that gets put in the right circumstances and despite the fact that they're a tyrannical leader. They're still able to advance and, you know, Curtis LeMay is probably a good example of that, you know, here he was. In charge of bombing Europe and he puts together plans like, hey, this is what we're doing. And it was an extreme situation. And it ended up working and then he gets, you know, his, his.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  They made him a hero.

• 1:22:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  In his autobiography, he says that I had no choice but to, to begin to ascertain that we had to do it that way or else we wouldn't do it at all.

• 1:22:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so it can happen, but even, I mean, like I said, I've worked with Air Force, I've worked with Navy, I've worked with the Marine Corps, obviously I've worked with the Navy and the, and the good leaders and all of them are not tyrannical at all. Now, are there situations that you can get into where it's like, hey, we got it, this is what we're doing? Occasionally that happens. But it doesn't really happen a lot and, yeah. Now, I'm also thinking with your old job. In the Air Force where you're, you know, you've got, there's no room for any error because you're dealing with nuclear weapons. That probably.

• 1:23:20Jocko Willink?

  That probably emphasized that type of leadership more than, because the other thing about authoritarian mindset is they don't do well in combat situations oftentimes because they have a very structured mind. They have a very predetermined way of thinking, so they get thrown something that they didn't expect and they just fall apart.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Jocko Willink?

  You know, the person that's great in garrison, that's great at keeping everyone, great at doing inspections, great at keeping everyone in the proper uniform. They get into combat where all of a sudden the enemy gets a vote and there's things happen they didn't expect and people are getting shot and a lot of times those people don't do well in combat scenarios.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Well, there's something about that, this occurs to me right now, is that on Constellation for that 10-month, 9-month cruise, I never heard of that happening. And you had two squadrons of A7s, two squadrons of F4s, one squadron of A6s, a detachment of RA5Cs and Combat Helo Squadron from Japan, Squadron, whatever they were. Two, I think there were two armored, heavy-duty helicopters and the guys who stood by the machine gun. I never heard of anything like that.

• 1:24:33Jocko Willink?

  Anything like what?

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Anybody screwing up or refusing or being unable to or anything like that. And they were using real bullets and stuff there every night.

• 1:24:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, it's an interesting thing too about the Navy in general is that the Navy in its nature, when, you know, from its, from the past, you know, if you were my, if you were a commander in my fleet and I was going to send you and your ship somewhere, I wasn't going to be able to talk to you again.

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah, except with flags and only till you go over the horizon.

• 1:25:07Jocko Willink?

  Right, and then it was like up to you.

• 1:25:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Jocko Willink?

  And so we had to, we had to exercise a decentralized command more than anybody else. And that really, when you, when you really pull the thread on the SEAL teams. That becomes very clear that that's one of the reasons why the SEAL teams has a reputation for being very adaptable and figuring things out.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:28Jocko Willink?

  Because we wouldn't get support all the time and we had to, you know, it just being in the Navy, you, you, you had to figure things out.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Jocko Willink?

  The other things, the other thing is, in the Navy, historically, if you're on a ship, you can't surrender.

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:43Jocko Willink?

  You, you, you can't surrender. You, you have to just fight until your ship goes down. There's no quitting.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:48Jocko Willink?

  Because you'll die. So you end up with that attitude embedded as well in the mindset. But, but the, and I think, you know, there's a lot of that with, with pilots as well, is, hey, look, I'm gonna do what makes sense for me and my aircraft to make sure that I stay alive. And you have to make those decisions for yourself, and so it's on you.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Well, when I was in Thailand, um, to my shock, uh, flying with FACS, Air Force FACS, I never told them I was a previous Air Force. I, I thought that's too controversial, I'm not gonna get into that. I just let it go. And, uh, they see these guys, Air Force guys, doing thirty-degree dives. And I thought, that's crazy. It has to be at least forty-five, at least sixty. And of course, what I did was as steep as you could get. The hell with it, I'm not gonna get shot down here and so forth. But thirty-degree dives, and I think they all did that. And they had the same charts that Navy had.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  Um, so, and the Air Force is known for charts, but maybe theirs were even better, or more complete, or larger than what we had. But you couldn't hit the ground. Yeah, I mean, dive in sixty-degree dive in the middle of the night, are you nuts? You can't hit the ground. What happens if they got a tower up there? Well, you're still, you're gonna be a thousand feet clear of that. So, if you use a six-thousand-foot release and a five-hundred-and-fifty-degree dive, a five-hundred-and-fifty not dive and five-hundred-and-not-releasing sixty or eighty-degree dive, you're not gonna hit the ground. Don't worry about it. You won't do it. It can't. You won't.

• 1:27:35Jocko Willink?

  And what are you pulling, seven Gs at the bottom of that?

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  Six and a half is what we usually did, I think. Uh, if you look down while you're doing it, the needle's just doing that, just above six.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  You could, you would look down from time to time at that. If you're pulling out, you're not, not nothing else to look at anyway.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a number you're saying as I, as I listen to you talk about it. It is a little surprising that you wouldn't do a steeper dive, especially in that, in that airplane, because you're also more accurate. You know where that bomb's gonna go.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  And to be quite honest, like, six and a half Gs is not that hard if you get used to it, and if it keeps you from, from, from.

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  It becomes ordinary.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not that big of a deal. Any pilot could get used to that. I think the biggest problem is people don't like doing that stuff at night.

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  And that to me is, it's, it's interesting that more people didn't have the same logic that you had, which is steeper is better. And I just do the math. I got a minute altitude to recover from, and if I pull back on the stick, I can survive six and a half Gs, no factor, and I'll pull out, I'll be fine.

• 1:28:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the engineering knowledge is right there on the paper. You could see it, but.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  A thirty degree dive seems, I, I, I didn't even know that was even something that you were doing. That's a shallow, it's just, it's especially in a place like that where ground fire, not, not, not the trip, not the Sams, although I know Sams were always considerate, but, but AAA, like, a thirty degree airplane's a big giant airplane. There's just a lot of airplane to see at thirty degrees, where at sixty degrees or seventy degrees, there's a very little amount of airplane to see. And I would think that's the math game you would be playing is a smaller platform, the better.

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  I got one better than that. I was with this OV ten guy, riding in the back with the binoculars, and these two F fours showed up, and they made about three runs from the same direction, thirty degree dives, one after the other.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  Are you nuts?

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  You always come in from over there. And one then that you made one dive from over there, you, over here for your second, we used to drop pairs, and we have six five hundred pound bombs, and make three runs with pairs.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  But never the from the same direction, never. And when the lead goes in over here, turn a little around the circle and come in from the other side, because that means he's got to turn the gun all the way around over there, because he was shooting at him. The thing is, there's another thing about the first guy in, in the movies, John Wayne is the first guy in, it's not a big deal. They're still getting the gun turned around and he's off the target by then.

• 1:30:03Jocko Willink?

  It's dash four. Dash two, dash three, dash four, the one that take it, huh?

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:30:10Jocko Willink?

  So, so you feel like you were pretty good prepared for that deployment? You were out bombing, you were doing these steep things, getting ready to deploy?

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was getting better at that, and I didn't get good at it until we were over there and, and, and, you know, they, they don't emphasize, they don't talk about the fact that there's a lot of flak and you will see it going by. They don't tell you that. Because maybe they're afraid of somebody saying, not, not for me, I got a bad cold and I think I got a permanent cold and maybe I do a lot better, ah, in Iceland than doing this. So I don't, I don't know, but, uh, the other thing about that being prepared was the, the

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  advent, I said to David, the, the only, my real claim to fame here, because I'm pretty ordinary, actually, was the fact that I was there when Sam Leeds walked around VF-121 and said, we're going to start this thing and maybe you might want to be part of it because we don't want to have any more F4 shot down by MiG-17s, not so much 21s, but MiG-17s.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  What, what did they call it? Was it called the Advanced Gunnery School? Do you remember what it was called?

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  No, they called it Navy Advanced Fighter Weapons School.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  Or it could, I think initially they said it might be called something like that. It was all very loose and I think they had okay for somebody on the Admiral's staff in, in North Ireland, but it was very loose and they said,

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  If you volunteer, um, you'll fly extra time and maybe you don't want to do it because it's gonna be at six o'clock in the morning. And if you don't fly, you have to be here at six o'clock, at four, four thirty in the morning to man up and run the airplanes out and make sure everything on the airplane, systems, engines and whatnot work. And the radar works because you're gonna have a, a experienced, good guy in your back seat just for this morning exercise. So that when we put two, four airplanes out on the parking ramp, they all work and all the radars work. So, uh, be ready for that. You will be here at four thirty, five o'clock in the morning and you won't fly.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  Ooh, a lot of guys say, forget that. So, did you do it? I did it, yeah. And, uh, it was, it was, and you, you will fly ACM, Air Combat Maneuver, uh, with our instructors and so forth. One of my claims to fame is Sam, flying with Sam Leeds in a, in an A4. They had, at that point, they had several generations of A4s and they had two-seat A4s and I think a couple of single seats. They had a much bigger engine in them. They had, for the, uh, instrument rag at Miramar, they had a couple with the big engines in them.

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  And that's when they flew, at imitating the MiG seventeen. Don't get close to this guy, he'll eat you alive, which is true. And that's, Duke Cunningham should have been shot down. He should have been shot down a couple of times. He's very lucky, just lucky. But at any rate, doing the wrong thing with Sam Leeds isn't my bragging point. One of the few ones I, he came in on me trying to suck me into a what's called a scissors. It's two airplanes who do this, one trying to be slower than the other guy. And I rolled over the top on him and went to burner. And I was standing there upside down above him in burner.

• 1:34:05Speaker 02

  And he said, I can still in my mind's, I see him looking up at me and he said to me, I can't believe you're doing this, which was the wrong thing to do. That would be a last, last resort with a MiG 17 because if you screw it up, he's gonna, he's gonna kill you.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  You were in a Phantom and he was in an A4?

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I was standing upside down on my tail in Max Burner to do that. And Sam was a maximum nice guy. Dan Peterson is a little bit removed, a little bit standoffish sort of guy, not a bad guy or anything like that, but a little bit standoff, but Sam Leeds was an how the hell are you sort of guy. At any rate, he said to me, I can't believe you're doing that. Aviation and the stick and rudder stuff.

• 1:35:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so now you're deployed to Vietnam. Do you just load on the aircraft carrier? You're on the USS Constellation?

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  No, you go on a mini cruise for Monday through Friday, what it's supposed to be or was, for a month, for four weeks. And, well, before you, they let you near the ship, you have pure care qual, that's all you do. And we went to the east coast to do that, the bunch I was with. And it was winter time, poopy suits back in those days, rubber immersion suits. Did you ever wear one?

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. Good times.

• 1:35:42Jocko Willink?

  What is this, in case you're ejected in the water?

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  The water's below a certain temperature, you die super fast, so you gotta wear those immersion suit in case you eject into the ocean. So it's just a big rubber suit that sucks. I'm not gonna complain about it in front of a SEAL. It's not cool.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  No, it's the water and air temperature, less than a certain number. And they're not supposed to leak, but everybody, you know, power shoot riggers and people like that, and say, "Don't worry, they all leak." And the other thing is getting into this thing. The zipper goes from here to down here somewhere. So how do you get your head through there? Basically, shoulders up, get somebody to help you, and pull it up over your head, and then he lets go, and it takes your ears off, so to speak, and pulling down, because it makes a tight seal around your neck. And above your neck, I guess you have no protection from the seawater either, but I don't know.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  And then around the wrists, so your hands are gonna get ice cold. The problem is you, in that, maybe you know this, in cold water like that, North Atlantic and whatnot, you stop breathing. You can't breathe. You're fully conscious, but your diaphragm cools down, and it won't work for you. So you're going to drown, because you, now your swimming ability is falling, and the, your diaphragm just will not make, get oxygen for you. So you, you're done.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  But at any rate, my first traps in the F4, wearing a booby suit. Off Norfolk in March or February, I can't remember. Not that it matters.

• 1:37:33Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then you, then you board the carrier? And you guys say hello on the carrier?

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, once you get, they give you, well, they did. I don't know how they do it now, but in the F4, they gave you about four day traps. One, your initial, in my case, I flew aboard. If you fly aboard, you walk off. But your initial day trap, and then next day, maybe two, maybe one, and so forth, getting you used to the whole idea. And after you have about four, five, or six, I can't remember what it was, then you get your first night, which is thrilling.

• 1:38:13Speaker 02

  Nick Far? Nick so?

• 1:38:16Jocko Willink?

  What's Nick Far?

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  German.

• 1:38:19Jocko Willink?

  What does it mean?

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  Not so.

• 1:38:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  You're just being facetious.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  He's a German, isn't he?

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Burke, Burke. Anyway, um, I, I got my first night, I, they shot me off the bow of America CV A66. And I thought, holy smoke, it's being shot into a cave. And I can't fly this crazy thing. Calm down, Tom. So, and you go up and around and get on the downwind. And don't look at the ship, they told you. Do not look over at the ship. It will give you a case of vertigo or spatial disorientation. Do not look at the ship.

• 1:38:58Jocko Willink?

  What, just look at your instruments?

• 1:38:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it was an overcast night and whatnot, so, a high overcast. I could see the ship in the corner of my eye over here, driving on the downwind. Driving on the downwind, I see it, I took a look.

• 1:39:17Jocko Willink?

  That's what they told you, don't look at the ship?

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  Don't look at the ship. I did. I can tell you.

• 1:39:21Jocko Willink?

  Well, I don't understand. Why, why does it freak you out?

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  I have no idea, but it does.

• 1:39:25Jocko Willink?

  They told you, Dave?

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that when, like, so, it's just a spatial thing. You look out, there's no, like, what he's talking about, there's no horizon. You have no sense of where flat or level or the sky and the water meet. And so if you look over, which we all do, because you'll find the downwind, if you look to your left, the ship is there. You cannot not look. And, um, the lights disorient you is to, when you see lights, lights should either be up, up or down, so it creates disorientation, which you can recover from by looking at instruments, but the, don't look at the ship, everybody's told the same thing.

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  There's no line between the blackness that is the water, the blackness that is behind the ship, and the blackness that is over the ship. The ship is just sort of floating.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  Floating in air.

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  In black space somewhere, somehow or other.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  I'm getting dizzy just thinking about it.

• 1:40:12Jocko Willink?

  Do you ever get used to landing on the carrier?

• 1:40:15Speaker 02

  Well, that's part, this second part of this thing. So I, I got aboard and went below. And there's a lieutenant commander, nice guy from Miramar, who was there getting re-upped to go to sea. And he's, and I, I went to the wardroom on Constellation, the main wardroom was the second deck. So I went down there and I got my coffee and I got my donut or whatever it was. And he said, "Pretty dark out there." And I said...

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  I had no idea. I thought I would know, but uh, he said, well, you'll get used to it in the daytime. It gets to be fun in the daytime, which is true, but nobody ever likes it at night.

• 1:40:58Speaker 02

  Which is true. Dave confirmed?

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  One hundred percent.

• 1:41:03Jocko Willink?

  Daytime can be fun, nighttime not so much.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  That's right. That's a hundred percent true.

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  Full moon is pretty easy? No, it's worse because you got shadows and you'd make a turn and the moon is there and it puts a light across your cockpit and it travels across and it gives you a mild case of spatial disorientation. You don't want that. Black is better. And then you're just on the gauges and that's an end of it until the guy says, three quarters of a mile, call a ball. And assuming you're on centerline on Clyde's globe at that point, it's basically you've just got to wait it out. But that's how I got in trouble. So, which is in those notes. Are you looking at my notes?

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  Different, different notes, but it comes from the same thing.

• 1:41:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  What got you in trouble? I'm, I'm interested, just.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  Lower your nose in close. Come down one wire. Not good. Well, what's, what happened? Well, you bolter. What's that mean? I'm sorry, no wire. You don't get a wire and the lights come on and you're off the angle. Okay, you're coming into land.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  Stay too high.

• 1:42:11Speaker 02

  You, you miss. It can happen. You can be innocent and the wires are staggered. They're not the same space so that if you have a hook skip, you can even hook skip two wires. It has happened. And off the angle you go and rats. What'd you call it? What's the verb for it? Bolter. Bolter? B-O-L-T-E-R. That means that you missed the wire. Yeah. And the LSO, he's very helpful. You know what he says? Bolter, bolter, bolter. Yeah, thanks a lot.

• 1:42:41Jocko Willink?

  And so as soon as you, as soon as you miss, you have to floor.

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, when you touch down, you go to full power.

• 1:42:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's regardless. Okay.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, basic engine. And from time to time, on the F4, anyway, the engines would be slightly misrigged and one of them would go to min burner and ship would go ape shit and telling, oh, no, you've got to do yelling at you, come out of burner and things like that. Didn't mean anything.

• 1:43:06Jocko Willink?

  So you have the boulder, boulder, then what happens?

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 1:43:10Jocko Willink?

  He said he got you into trouble?

• 1:43:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess the ship is on the same, their radar facility, the CCI, is on the same frequency and they hear the LSO say, boulder, boulder, and they'll say, uh, two and two, uh, continue straight ahead to 500 feet, turn left, heading, plus and so, which would be a crosswind, and then you do that and climb and maintain 1,200 feet or 1,000 feet or whatever it is and turn left to plus and so, and then you're on the downwind. And then they will, you have more planes coming in, coming down from the holding chute, if you will, and they'll squeeze you in in the middle there. So, or they'll take you

• 1:43:52Speaker 02

  way down till one guy is early and one guy is a little, you push over from those altitude at an exact, you're supposed to, to the second timing from the, uh, from the stack. And some guys are a little bit early, guys a little bit late.

• 1:44:10Jocko Willink?

  So they can squeeze you in.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  And they squeeze you in, uh, in there and, uh, and then you get aboard the second time, we, we hope. But at any rate, uh, why, how do you boulder? Uh, if you hook skip or you're high and laying long. So I got in trouble because I boltered and, uh, just I'm not going to do this two nights in a row. And it's almost unconscious, lower nose in close.

• 1:44:36Jocko Willink?

  What? That's a move that you make to try and make sure you're not high?

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  Comes down like a safe.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  And they also call it taxi one wire. In that you land before, or you're hooked as well before the one wire and you taxi into the one wire.

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  And thank heavens we're aboard and that's enough for this for tonight and so forth. So, out of the next, say, ten nights, I got, well, at the end, let's say I got six come down in close. So, Rule Gardner came to me and he said, Tom, in the passageway too, that's another thing, laid back in the passageway, Tom, I don't want you to fly tomorrow and you're not on the schedule because I don't like this, and I don't want to make Pamela a widow.

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  Oh, we had been married about fourteen months at that point. So, he said, I want you to think about it. This is not a punishment, but I want you to think about lower nose in close and so forth. Fly them, he bolted touchdown. That was the end of it.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  But that's the way he was. Leadership again, very laid back. I don't want you to fly, rather than, almost indicating, if you wanted to fly badly enough, go to the schedules office and tell them to put yourself back on the schedule. But, no, he didn't do any of that, just.

• 1:46:07Jocko Willink?

  So you bolter, bolter one time?

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  No, like four out of six the week before, and that's why he did that.

• 1:46:16Jocko Willink?

  Got it. So once it got in your head.

• 1:46:19Speaker 02

  And it's almost unconscious. I think Dave can vouch for that. You do it without really thinking about it.

• 1:46:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:28Speaker 02

  You don't say, I'm gonna, as soon as I get past the ramp, I'm gonna lower the nose. It's a bad habit that you don't know why you do it and you do. So after you sit down for twenty-four hours and think. That is dangerous, that is stupid, and you've seen pictures, flight deck pictures of Laura. I was like, I'm not gonna do that anymore.

• 1:46:50Jocko Willink?

  Is it a case of overcompensation, Dave? Like subconscious overcompensation that you put, you get over the ramp and you crank it down a little bit because you want to be early because you don't want to be long?

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  I think that feeling, the first time you bolter at night is a really awful feeling because all you want to do is land. Like you just, you would trade anything you have just to be on that flight deck. And so you do all this work. Tom was talking about the timing down to the second. There's a lot of work to get you to three quarters of a mile. It's a lot of work from the stack down to the end of the runway, or end of the ship. And typically, when you bolter, it's because in the last probably three seconds of a however long

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  Or less than that.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, or two seconds, you make one little error in the last two seconds and it pushes you past the wires by five feet. And then you're back in the air again and you, you don't want to be there. And so I think in your mind, you say, when I get in close, and the term is called in close to at the ramp, it's the last three or four seconds of flying, I am not going to add power. He mentioned something earlier about something called the burble, which is a real thing. And the wind that goes over the flight deck, especially in a conventional carrier that has to make its own wind, meaning it has to run the engines to get speed, you have to have 30 knots of wind over the flight deck. That burble, the way the wind goes over the flight deck and right at the end of the runway, it curves down towards the water, will literally pull your airplane down, just a couple of feet.

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  But if you add the burble for three or four feet, it's going to pull you down.

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  And it destroys part of your lift as well.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And then that psychological piece of I am not going to go high, that six or seven foot difference will put your plane in the back of the ship and, and literally blow it up. That's the videos he's talking about. And I think the combination of those two creates a really, really dangerous combination of the psychology you talked about and the actual aerodynamics of it. And I would say Just a high majority, if not almost all of the mishaps around the ship, aren't really because of mechanical or engine problems, it's because of that scenario. And the LSOs probably went to the CO and said, hey, you gotta talk to this guy because he's gonna, he's gonna kill himself. And that's when the skipper, you know, and, and I'm obviously putting words in his mouth based on common experience. I didn't talk about it specifically, but it sounds like I'm hitting close to the mark of that feeling.

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what happens. It's all very laid back too, as a matter of fact, the LSOs. He earlier that night said to you, Tom, this is your third, uh, bolt, uh, lower nose in close in a row. This is not good. You gotta work on this. And then four hours later, he came to me in the passageway and said, we're not gonna do this. We gotta change.

• 1:49:26Jocko Willink?

  Dave, how, how many times did you bolter, bolter?

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  I, I probably, so on my first cruise, I had no bolters. On my second cruise, I had one bolter.

• 1:49:37Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  In training, um, when you're talking about CQ, uh, night CQ, I, I, I bet I had at least one, if not two bolters at night.

• 1:49:48Jocko Willink?

  What's night CQ?

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  No, I'm sorry, night carrier qualifications.

• 1:49:51Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  The night.

• 1:49:53Speaker 02

  Before you deploy.

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  Before you deploy. So the night CQ, I, I, I had probably a, a relatively small handful. Once you're on, you know, like on cruise and underway, it's not, it doesn't happen all that often, but, um, the thing that's crazy is probably some of the worst flying you'll ever do is off the coast of California, because it's overcast at 800 feet all the time, even though it's beautiful Southern California weather. So it's pitch black underneath that overcast, even if there is a full moon, because there's a big cloud layer there and, uh, the, the, the Pacific Ocean likes to move around, the, the ship moves around and it sucks. It's awful. Um, he flew a much harder plane to get aboard the ship than I ever did.

• 1:50:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's scary too. You're talking about, you might've had four of these in your career and you had four of them in six flights. That's enough to freak someone out for sure.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  I don't know. Yeah, the F-4 was an ancient airplane in a manner of speaking and the F/A-18 is a different breed of cat completely. Yeah. And I was told the F/A-18 is actually a fun airplane, easy airplane to fly and then you have, then you have to work to get really good at it, but that's something else. The F-4, first time I flew the F-4 with my instructor in the back cockpit, we went back, take off and go out over the Pacific, off Miramar and headed north and he said, "You can level off here at 15,000," or more or less, it didn't matter. And I tried to level off and I thought, "I can't even fly this thing straight and level it." But the F-4 was designed to

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  be an unstable platform and then they put three axial axis stabilizing devices in there. And the early models had a single switch and then they put three separate switches for pitch roll and yaw. And a lot of guys, I, at the end, I would, I'd turn the roll off. Most, most guys did total roll. But at any rate, it was an unstable airplane. So if you touch the stick a little bit, it'll do that. You touch the stick, it turns off the stabilizing system. When you touch the stick, there are micro switches in the base of the physical hand grip. And as soon as you touch it a little bit, it turns off the roll stab. Oh, okay.

• 1:52:07Speaker 02

  You pull back just a little bit, it turns off the, just a little bit. So, actually, before you fly the airplane, they want you to get familiar with the cockpit and so forth. They say to you, "Realize that this system is there and if it's quiet, you can hear the micro switches click." And you can, but you've just got to touch them. Click it, click it. Very faint, but they're in there and it turns off the roll stab. So, here you are, your first time out with this thing. And you touch it a little bit and it turns off the micro stab, the stabilization in pitch and it does one of these and because you go the other way and it keeps it off and so

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  forth and then you push it a little bit this way and it turns that off too and then you go back and so forth. There it only turns it off for half a second or something like that, but if you hit it again.

• 1:53:00Jocko Willink?

  If you overcrack the other side now it's just off.

• 1:53:02Speaker 02

  And so forth and so forth and so forth, yeah. So, but the F-18 is a modern airplane. The F-4 was just an airplane that they, Mr. McDonald said, "I want a monster and I wanted to do this, that and the other thing." And if you have a problem with it won't do that, add a system to do that. And they did and they kept on doing that and that's what you got. You got a hell of an airplane. But my favorite quote about the F-4 was a Marine in one of the, one of the books, I, as you might suspect, I have airplane books and whatnot, and he said, "I flew the F-4 for three years and it never killed me."

• 1:53:47Jocko Willink?

  So you're, so now you get to Vietnam. What's your mission? What are you guys doing?

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  Ho Chi Minh Trail, Ho Chi Minh Trail, Ho Chi Minh Trail, Latin bar cap. It was Abomac Poi's in the north and the only things we're going up there were RA-5Cs to look at whatever changes they made probably in the, mostly in the airfields and also looking for SAM sites. So you, being a first cruise guy, you were not gonna fly that escort until you did it. I think that's a Navy tradition. You can't do it until you do it. So for the

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  first three or four months of that cruise, I didn't fly any Iraqi fighter escort up there. And then basically what happens is, and everybody I think is familiar with this, Fred's sick, Tom, can you do this? Yeah, I can do that. So then you're the escort for the fighter, for the RA-5C and then you're on the regular schedule for that after that. But that was the best flying I ever did in my life, that keeping with him.

• 1:55:04Jocko Willink?

  So what was the, what would one of those mission profiles look like?

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  Well, um, launch and point towards North Vietnam, the coast. And they, they were always looking around, so half the time they would see you on radar. And you, you have receivers and they're, the F-18 probably has better ones, far better ones than we had. And you see them doo, doo, doo, doo, looking at you as they, as the sweep goes by. And depressurize the cockpit and, and give yourself a little spacing on the RA-5C. And he has promised that he will not go closer than 1,000 feet to the undercast.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  He will be above 4,000 feet of the, I'm sorry, the overcast. He won't be, he won't get that close to the undercast. He will be 4,000, 5,000 feet above the undercast. He won't go faster, he won't use burner, and about four other things. And then when you get into it, he does everything that he says he wouldn't do because he's shedding in his pants too. Because they're looking at you. Once you're in there, they're looking at you with about three different, you can hear the different tones, different kinds of radars. So what are they doing? What's the RA-5C doing? Taking pictures. He's a- And you're just protecting him?

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  Right, because the MiG-21s shot down a lot of RA-5Cs. And what they would do is they figured maybe they're gonna do it today. And they put one or two MiG-21s at very high altitude, let's say above 35,000, because they'd get more speed out of it. A MiG-21 would go 1.8 downhill, easy. So they would wait until the RA-5C turned away from where their loiter is up here. And he's down at 2,000 feet taking pictures. And then come downhill behind him. So your job was to stay away from him and always be looking back there.

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  This side too, because you never know, but always back here. And so would stay away from him. What people in the-

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  And the Youtubes and things like that called Thatch Weave. Mr. Commander Thatch invented that in 1944 or something like that. And it's absolutely, Air Force, they always right with each other. It's just useless and a waste of fuel. We always stay one mile minimum, mile and a quarter is a little better. So you can come back and so forth. So watch out for MiG-21. I wanted to be head on with a MiG-21 because with the F-4 system. Well, before that, off the coast of California, nobody ever told me you could do this.

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  But I wondered against F-8s, I put the pepper, 35mm pepper down the intake of an F-8. And guess what happened? Rawrr. Then the sidewinder growl, which means it sees heat. Looking, just looking down the intake. So I wanted to do that with a MiG-21. But I never got the chance. And I said to Jimmy, I said, when, my best friend, I said, so that you can claim we got him with a, with a Sparrow. We won't know which because as soon as that sidewinder leaves, I'm going to flip to, because you got the pepper on it, I'm going to flip to radar and pull the trigger a second time.

• 1:58:47Speaker 02

  So, and I said, when that MiG sees, maybe the sidewinder won't guide, maybe it'll miss him by 30 feet and the kill radius is only 25 and stuff like that. But when he sees that Sparrow coming at him, that monster, he's going to shit in his pants. So, anyway, how to get into this?

• 1:59:09Jocko Willink?

  Well, I was just asking you what that mission profile was like.

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so at any rate, you, you follow him around basically at high speed. And he always said he wasn't even going to use burner. And he had the same engines you have in the J-79.

• 1:59:23Speaker 02

  Would put out ordinarily, put out a smoke trail. We got a mod in the F4, Layton and the crews that would stop that and they're in a fuel additive, but and they had to put piping in to do that. But at any rate, you look over at him and he's not smoking. That means he's in min burner to get rid of the smoke. As soon as you did that, the smoke went away. So and you look down and the max low altitude speed on the F4 indicated airspeed was I think like 740. And you you look at the indicated airspeed and he's not in burner. We're doing

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  790 indicated relatively close to the ground. We're smoking along here. And then you come back and they know what you've been doing, although it's combat situation, you're not gonna, nobody ever complains. But I have a picture of an F4 coming aboard and it's big dents in all three tanks because you've been up there. If not at the mock, really close to it, the dynamic pressure dents the fronts of the tanks. And maybe they don't do that anymore. Maybe put some sort of a reinforcement on the front end of the tanks. But those tanks were not reinforced in the noses and they were all dented from stuff, doing stuff like that.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  This story is so cool for me because that's like just classic naval aviation. What I always loved about flying with the Navy and the Marine Corps was he's talking about that forward, that missile he was talking about in training, like the book says you can only shoot the missile from the back of an airplane. That's the rule and that's how it works. And they tell you. And the coolest thing about flying with the guys in the Navy, they're like, I don't care what the book says. I'm gonna go try this.

• 2:01:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:01:11Speaker 01

  See if it works.

• 2:01:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  This missile, which is on paper and designed to only shoot the back of a jet because the engines in the back, that's where all the heat is. These guys figured out, I could shoot this thing, we'd call it forward quarter in the nose. And the best part about that is if you launched this at a MiG, I guarantee you, he would do exactly what you described because nobody else would do that.

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  Because the book says you can't do it. So I just like, I like listening to your stories of, I don't care what the book says, I'm gonna try this and see if it works. And that F8, that big giant intake probably replicated a MiG 21's.

• 2:01:38Jocko Willink?

  Big nose with that big giant engine right in the front of the airplane.

• 2:01:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:01:41Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty cool thinking. I like that.

• 2:01:43Speaker 02

  And he had a thirty-seven millimeter gun too in both those airplanes and you better not shit your pants too soon because he's gonna be firing that thing on a head-on, no matter which one it is, at you. Now you got a piece of bulletproof glass in the front of you and in the older airplanes, the F-4 you did. So it shouldn't hit you in the face, I guess, but he's liable to ruin your radar, which could be a problem, if he gets close to you with that head-on. But as soon as you pull that trigger, he's gonna, he never saw anything like that in his life. And he's been told that the F-4 has to get behind you, so don't worry about it. And that's what I always, and I said, Jimmy, you gonna be able to, we

• 2:02:27Speaker 02

  got that MiG with a Sparrow, because that's the radar operator's missile, is the Sparrow.

• 2:02:38Jocko Willink?

  And so what was it that made those recon missions so fun for you? Just that you're up there hauling ass around?

• 2:02:45Speaker 02

  Well, this goes back to something I put in that deal. I heard Chappy James say it the first time, and I think it's common, but don't get in the airplane, strap it on to you. Chappy James was quite a guy, and I talked to him once, once. But you know who he was?

• 2:03:04Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:03:05Speaker 02

  No. He was a black guy who was number two to Robin Oles in Thailand. And Robin Oles got all the publicity and all this. And Chappy James was the quiet guy who kept his place and so forth. But they made him a four-star general. He was, the night I talked to him, he was a speaker at a dinner, and he had the place in the palm of his hand. And then you figure, he's probably winding up about now. And he said, you've been such a great audience, I'm gonna sing a song for you. And I thought, oh, the poor man, he's gonna ruin everything. He had it made here, and now he's gonna make a fool of himself.

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  He sang Old Man River like Metropolitan Opera. He was really, really something. So and then he talked with the troops after everything was done. He was, strap it on, don't, so that was.

• 2:04:01Speaker 02

  First time and I I've felt that way, truly felt that way, fly like the airplane's attached to you, the other way around. Because when he, you want to stay a mile or a mile and a quarter beam, what happens if he turns into you? Well, you go high and you come up here this way and watch him going around the bend. And then you can go to the, because you're coming downhill, you're going to gain energy. So you can go to the outside if you figure his next turn will be into you again. Well, then you can go up without adding power because as you go, no, that's wrong. But if he turns into you, you can go high.

• 2:04:43Jocko Willink?

  Would you fly with the same guy all the time?

• 2:04:45Speaker 02

  In the backseat?

• 2:04:46Jocko Willink?

  No, the, the, the plane that you were covering for.

• 2:04:50Speaker 02

  No, you didn't even know his name.

• 2:04:51Jocko Willink?

  No kidding?

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they were all, because they are, they lost a lot of young guys flying the RA5C early in its career. They switched to mostly senior guys with a lot of hours and a lot of traps. They would lose them at, at the ramp. So they, those guys were, maybe they were all commanders, which is too old to be just an airplane driver on a, on a carrier. But because of the difficulty of getting the monster, that monster aboard, heavy, their, their launch weight was a little over eighty thousand on, on that thing.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  And their standard launch weight that has come to pass more or less is around sixty thousand. So twenty thousand pounds heavier off, off, or getting aboard. So they had senior guys doing that. I think there was one guy who was a lieutenant commander. But anyway, flying with him, flying.

• 2:06:02Speaker 02

  I discovered I could fly like a bird because the um at that point in your training or in your experience level you get you start to get that good at it and I thought holy smoke I'm doing this this way even though at that point I had thousand hours of total flying maybe more than that flying experience but it was something of a revelation to be able to fly where you wanted to go and not be limited by what the machine would do especially with the F four when you have all that power and especially when you're about halfway through your fuel load you have a lot more power because you your weight

• 2:06:46Speaker 02

  is is gone.

• 2:06:48Jocko Willink?

  How long did the fuel last? How long did you have?

• 2:06:50Speaker 02

  Well, the cycle on constellation in combat zone was uh uh two uh two two and a half. It was they called it a two hour cycle but you wound up flying two and a half hours because they would launch everybody and then they would recover you so I think they launched every two hours I think that's how it worked you know I I never thought of it quite this way but at any my traps on combat zone were always about two point six.

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  Did you guys get gas?

• 2:07:23Speaker 02

  Only from time to time.

• 2:07:26Speaker 01

  That's a long time.

• 2:07:27Speaker 02

  Yeah and the F four fuel gobbler and you were always always slow sweating fuel always sweating fuel.

• 2:07:35Speaker 01

  The cycle time they measure the cycle time when he's talking about on an aircraft carrier in the cycle time is launch to launch so if it's two hours that means a launch happens and two hours later the launch happens what's bad about that is if you're on a two hour cycle when you launch you'll be the first one to go in your Phantom and then two hours later the next launch goes you have to wait for all those airplanes to get launched before you recover so that two hours is two hours from takeoff to takeoff you have to wait for everybody else on the next launch to take off before you can land so that two becomes two and a half and thirty minutes an extra thirty minutes is a lot of time to manage your gas that's.

• 2:08:12Speaker 02

  You burn a hundred pounds a minute.

• 2:08:14Speaker 01

  Yeah that's a lot.

• 2:08:15Jocko Willink?

  A hundred pounds a minute?

• 2:08:16Speaker 02

  Yeah that's six thousand pounds.

• 2:08:19Speaker 01

  Six thousand pounds an hour yeah.

• 2:08:21Jocko Willink?

  How about hitting the Ho Chi Minh Trail, doing those bombing runs?

• 2:08:26Speaker 02

  Well, you always had a, well, what you do is, no, your flight leader, I was always a wingman. Your flight leader would call, I think it was a piston engine Lockheed Constellation that was out over the water south. And he would ask you what you were and what your ordinance was and he'd come back and say, "Your FAC is going to be camera two-two and he is currently at this and so of the thus-and-so Tac An and he will meet you at the thus-and-so and thus-and-so of that Tac An and which would be somewhere in northern Laos. And he'll be there in 12 minutes.

• 2:09:12Speaker 02

  He's on route right now. So you would go there and, excuse me, and you'd go there and we'll wait a couple of minutes because if you called him up early, he'd say, "I'm going as fast as I can." And so, so anyway, then he'd call you up and say, "I'm in your area now. Here's what we're going to do." And he had what they called logs. They were pieces of wood that were four inches square and about two feet long and had holes drilled longitudinally in there. And they had Willie Pete inside and he had a way, and maybe they had a fuse or something,

• 2:09:55Speaker 02

  I don't remember, that light that and he would fly over the spot where, more or less where he wanted you to go and he would drop it out, a trap door that he had in the bottom of the airplane. Is this true?

• 2:10:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:06Speaker 02

  And then he would go drop a second one and he said, "Do you have my, my two markers?" And you'd say, "Yeah, okay." He said, "Now, they are northeast and southwest. So remember they're northeast, they're not north and south, they're northeast and southwest and what you want is on a triangle pointed to the north, but..."

• 2:10:30Speaker 02

  To the northeast and sort of and there's a crossroads there. Can you see the crossroads? And sometimes you could on a moonlight night. He said, okay, now not the crosswalk, but this is what I, this is really. That's what you're doing, yeah. And you say, I drop another one, but we don't want to alert them because the trucks are all parked right now. But there's a grove of heavy trees. Can you see those? No, you can't. I would always turn my lights out after get off the ship and, and yeah. How would you put it? Comfortable for a couple of minutes. I'd turn everything off because I had a good, best RO in the back. And, and of course you can hear, there's something's amiss in the airplane.

• 2:11:12Speaker 02

  What's that ticking? What's that thumping? Whatever. The engines don't sound right. You can hear all that, even with your helmet on. So I figured, and warning light panels for galore. So I figured, turn it out. The human eye takes, you probably know this. Yeah, twenty minutes, half an hour. Yeah, half an hour. The same length of time it takes the sun to set. So after half an hour, you can see everything on the ground. And the fax talking about that grove of trees, yeah, I can see what you're talking about. I can see where that, those roads are. I only started doing that after about two or three months because initially you don't know what you're doing.

• 2:11:52Speaker 02

  Turn the, turn the lights out and, and turn the panel lights all the way down. The warning panels, they, they, any warning lights, low fuel or anything like that, that, that's, doesn't turn down as you might figure. So I figured, and with a good guy in the back, um, he'll let me know. So at any rate. And then you're almost like, almost daylight when you, your eyes get truly acclimated. You see everything on the ground, even if there's just the least little, no moon, but just stars. You can see stuff on the ground. So at any rate, that's. Were you always running day, uh, nighttime missions? Ninety nine, ninety five, ninety nine percent. What would, what would cause a daytime mission?

• 2:12:35Speaker 02

  Uh, new on Yankee station. The first day, maybe day, two days, day, days. But then after that, all nights. And you'd be on Yankee station for. Thirty-one, thirty-two days. Well, what's Yankee Station? What's that? That was in northern Gulf of Tonkin. Northern Gulf. Initially, they had a second carrier they called Dixie Station off of South Vietnam, but then they stopped that. And they would have two carriers in, uh, up north on, excuse me, on Yankee Station. But anyway, you turn the lights out and you could see everything at night. And the guy says, can you see the dark, the trees?

• 2:13:16Speaker 02

  And Skipper wouldn't be able to see him because he's got older eyeballs than me. And he didn't turn his lights out or turn them out completely. That's what I would do. He had a good RO too. And he stole my good RO. When his RO got taken by the Admiral to be part of his staff, then he took my RO. And then I had a teenager who didn't know what he was doing. He was right out of the Naval Academy. Anyway, um, so he'd give you those coordinates. And he'd say, see, can you see the trees that are, is just south of where that intersection is? And you'd say, yeah, anywhere in those trees because it's full of trucks there and so forth.

• 2:14:01Speaker 02

  Sometimes you would get there and they would have, you'd see headlights, but rarely, rarely. And as soon as they really hear you, they would run back to the truck and turn the lights off or turn the engines off, I guess. At any rate, and then you'd do that. But see, that thing there that you read early on, that was, that was, you know, when Lyndon Johnson had his bombing paws in North Vietnam, the North Vietnamese took all the guns that used to be in North Vietnam and put them over in Laos to guard the Ho Chi Minh Trail over there. So, um, uh, where was I? The guns and so forth and, um...

• 2:14:48Jocko Willink?

  Well, how often were you running into, uh, like, you know, you mentioned the, the, the anti-aircraft, the flak that you're flying by, the surface-to-air missiles, how, how often did you run into that? Was that every mission?

• 2:15:00Speaker 02

  Every time, every time. But they were cool about that, you see, they, you'd get there.

• 2:15:06Jocko Willink?

  Who was cool about that?

• 2:15:07Speaker 02

  The gunners on the ground.

• 2:15:09Jocko Willink?

  The enemy gunners?

• 2:15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:10Jocko Willink?

  In what way?

• 2:15:11Speaker 02

  Well, they'd know you were there, because they could hear you, and, uh, and, uh, in your orbiting, what I would do immediately, as soon as we get there, I'd separate an altitude, I'd go a thousand higher on whoever, it was usually rural Gardner, but I'd go a thousand higher, and I'd cut across and turn, and he, every naval aviator is a, is a left-hand turn expert. They all turn left. In fact, I, one time I met a guy in Philadelphia who had the same dog as I did, and I started talking with him, and, and then I saw him a second or the third time, and he said, "What'd you do before you did the ad business?" He said, "I was a naval aviator." I said, "Son of a gun, so was I, how about that?" So at any rate, I, in my office,

• 2:15:55Speaker 02

  it was street level, I had a old IBM computer, and I had the Microsoft Flight Simulator early on, a version of that on that computer. I said, "You, come inside and look at this thing." I, anyway, took it off, made it take off, and I turned right, and he said, "What the hell kind of a naval aviator are you?" And Ed Sims, I can't remember, anyway, it doesn't matter, Sims, nice guy, nice guy. At any rate, I would turn, I, I would orbit to the right, and I knew that he was gonna roll in from 18, I would roll in anywhere at the top of the, of the quadrant, uh, of the, of the compass.

• 2:16:42Jocko Willink?

  So what what made what the what the gunners do cool? You said the gunners were cool.

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  Well, they you they you make yourself present because you're making all that noise right over here, over the crossroads, and they know, the gunners will know as the trucks are over there, and they know that, and they know that you know that, because they can hear the fact flying around, too. So they would wait until you roll in, until you commit. The problem is, they had to get a handle on you when you start down, because they also know, I presume that they knew, that you're going to pull powered idle, and your engines get very quiet as soon as you do that. So they, if they didn't have a bead on you at that point, I'm convinced, too, that they used a simple auditory way to track you.

• 2:17:31Speaker 02

  I think my idea is that if you took a bunch of paper towel tubes and put tape around them and put a microphone behind them, and then you put that on the mount of a gun, we had a gun that the barrel got overheated and it warped, so we got this gun mount over here, we don't use it. Put that auditory search finder thing on the gun, because then as soon as I turn it over there and I can, I got headphones on and I can hear, there he is. Oh, and I lost them. No, I got them back again. But the point here is that the azimuth and elevation on that auditory device, if you

• 2:18:14Speaker 02

  have a simple system, you can, all the five guys have fifty-seven millimeter or even eighty-five millimeter pieces around here, they can know, they know where you are, because they can read what he is tracking you in an auditory fashion. So they wouldn't open up sometimes until you release, pull, and add power. And as soon as you did that, yeah, there's shit going by from the back, and...

• 2:18:47Speaker 02

  Most of it, right there. Cause they had time to know where you were and they could hear you in orbit and now this guy was over here and suddenly he got silent. That means he's in the dive. So that means he's gonna be over here. And Chuck turned their guns around. Moreover, the guy with the auditory, half a dozen paper towel tubes taped together, he can hear you, even if you got your engines at idle, I think. That's my private theory. I don't know if that's true or not. But anyway, that's when they would open up on you. And yes, every night, no question, every night, anytime you were there, they would, they would blast away at you. And

• 2:19:30Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys lose any aircraft while you were on deployment?

• 2:19:34Speaker 02

  Not my squadron, no. The ship lost, I don't know, four or five, maybe more. A7s. No A6s. A6 guys, I think, were pretty cagey. A7 drivers, they all tended to be, seemed to me, younger guys. In the wardroom, sitting there, the guy said, "Man, I had a hell of a time tonight. I was mixing it up with these guys. They had a 57mm in a cave on the side of a hill. I don't know how they got it up there, but I made, I came back around and gave them another load of 20mm." I go, "Really?" I said, "You know?" He's sitting that far across the wardroom table. I said, "Do you realize what the aim point is?" "Oh, it's

• 2:20:17Speaker 02

  the airplane." I said, "No, no, no. The aim point's right between your eyes. You're nuts. Put a 500-pound bomb into that hole. If you're any good as a bomber, you can do that. Put a bomb into his cave. That's the end of that gun." "No, it's more fun. I went around a third time." And I said, "You're crazy. He's gonna shoot you down. You're gonna feel really stupid. You throw away your weapons, what you do when you get shot down. You have a responsibility to..." In your book, you talk about

• 2:20:49Speaker 02

  Things that are worth it and things are not worth it. And I'll tell anybody who's willing to, including my old skipper or somebody like that. I said, "I have favorite switch position down by your left knee in the F4." And all. It does all the bombs.

• 2:21:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:21:07Speaker 02

  Not the missiles, the missiles stay, but the bombs. You have singles, pairs, doubles, cluster.

• 2:21:13Jocko Willink?

  All.

• 2:21:15Speaker 02

  And then all. Flip, all. This is bad here tonight, I don't want to be here. I'll be back tomorrow, but for tonight, all. See if you can eat this load. And there's only six of them, for heaven's sakes.

• 2:21:30Jocko Willink?

  What, six 500-pounders?

• 2:21:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. That was our standard bomb load, six 500-pounders.

• 2:21:37Jocko Willink?

  As the deployment went on, and you're going out facing this every night, night after night, is it every night? You're flying every night?

• 2:21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And when you were in the Gulf, you flew every night.

• 2:21:48Jocko Willink?

  How's this wearing on you mentally?

• 2:21:50Speaker 02

  Not bad. I think at that age, you're in your late twenties, I was in my late twenties, no, not a big deal, except that air conditioning on some ships was not very good, and Constellation was one of them, the flight deck of it, or the O3 level.

• 2:22:08Jocko Willink?

  Leave it to a Navy guy, man, that air conditioning pisses us off all the time on a ship.

• 2:22:13Speaker 02

  Well, how about if you just had good ventilation, you know? You have 85-degree air outside, put 85-degree air in this room.

• 2:22:22Jocko Willink?

  Be nice.

• 2:22:24Speaker 02

  You know, and my stateroom was on the O3 level, the O4 level's of flight deck. So there are places in the ship where the air conditioning really did work beautifully. But we had, we got visited by ABC or CBS News or something like that. And they were on a Hancock, which was in the Gulf at the same time, at that time. And one of these guys said to me, "Boy, we could see this ship on the horizon." And you say, "This ship is nice, Hancock, but next week, we're going down to get aboard the big guy. Air conditioning doesn't work here, and the food's not real good."

• 2:23:05Speaker 02

  Better on a Hancock than every way. I say, well, fortunes of war, I guess.

• 2:23:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I had a guy on the podcast named Dean Ladd, who's a Marine in World War II, and he went into a bunch of different islands. But he was talking, he's going into Tarawa. And I'm like, were you nervous going in? He said, no, it's the other guys that are going to get wounded and killed.

• 2:23:26Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:23:27Jocko Willink?

  He ended up getting gut shot in Tarawa and was lucky, a couple of his Marines disobeyed the order just to keep going. And they grabbed him and threw him back on a ship. So I think that's the common, the common mental state of the young man in combat.

• 2:23:41Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:23:41Jocko Willink?

  I really feel sorry for the other guys. They're going to have trouble out here and get wounded and killed.

• 2:23:46Speaker 02

  My favorite professor in college, University of Chicago PhD, that's a big deal in econ. Was a tail gunner in B-17s in World War II. And I used to play chess with him and I said to him, what was it like? He said, you always figured the other guy's gonna get it. That's the same thing I just said.

• 2:24:07Jocko Willink?

  That's a pretty impressive statement for a tail gunner, B-17 in World War II.

• 2:24:11Speaker 02

  He was a teenager. And he said, you know, always, fortunes of war, you figure the other guy's gonna, or you can always jump out, you know.

• 2:24:23Speaker 02

  That would be the worst of it that you had to bail out.

• 2:24:26Jocko Willink?

  Any other highlights from that deployment?

• 2:24:30Speaker 02

  Well, Skipper said to me, we want to send somebody over to Thailand. And since you have Air Force experience, would you like to do it? Oh, yeah, why not?

• 2:24:43Jocko Willink?

  And this is to be a forward air controller or something?

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  No, just to make some judgments and come back and relate what, how they do things over there. And how the facts work and stuff like that. So I said, okay. And so they took me over in a COD. And we did not get shot at in broad daylight. COD went out in daylight and we didn't get shot at crossing or anything out into Ubahn is where I went. Where Robin Oles was when he made his five kills and stuff like that. And initially, hard to get to first base there. I said, it was like in the movies.

• 2:25:25Speaker 02

  The COD pulled out onto the grass and the crewman opened the back door and I hopped out. They had shut down the starboard engine and. Door slammed, starboard engines started up, taxied away, I was standing there with my suitcase on the grass. This is just like a goofy movie from France in World War II or something, anyway. So, I got a guy, a trooper walking down the tarmac somewhere, and I said, "Where's base operations?" "Down the street, but you don't want to go there." "Why?" "Because, ah, we're not allowed to be here, we're guests." "Oh, where do I go?"

• 2:26:09Speaker 02

  "Building 386, it's on the second street over, and it has 386 on the outside, and I'm making this part up, but it's about in the essence of it. That's the operations you want." So, I went, I didn't have a place to sleep or anything, my little suitcase, so I went there. And I got a Marine, no, Air Force trooper, big guy, big guy with a sidearm, at a little lectern inside the door. Basically, he says, "Who the hell are you?" I'm in a Navy uniform and whatnot. And he said, "Not without whatever he needed." Alright.

• 2:26:50Speaker 02

  So, that night I went to the club, and I meet a guy, an Air Force major, and he said, "Well, we can take care of you, we'll get past that, don't worry about it." And he took care of everything, and stuff like that. But their Air Force operations were officially just a guest, and they were just unofficially the air, the tarmac loaded with F-4s and C-130s. So, I got to fly with a guy who flew the OV-10, which is a heck of a fun airplane to fly, man, oh, man, I'd swap ends in a second with that thing, I mean, this way, and that sort of thing. Tons of power, two turboprop engines, and designed for the Marines, so you could put

• 2:27:33Speaker 02

  one and a couple of guys in the back, and I open the hatch in the back, and the Marines can parachute out into middle of nowhere, and stuff like that. And a good panel in the back, I made an instrument approach with that guy, and he said, "That's really something off that terrible panel back there." I said, "Yeah, well, you make about a hundred passes at the ship at night, and it's not a big deal anymore." I flew with him, uh, maybe twice. And I flew with the C-130 gunship, a C-130, uh, forward air controller. Only at night for him though, cause he's a big target, I guess.

• 2:28:14Speaker 02

  Um, but we had flown off of that guy, but we didn't know what kind of airplane he had. And, uh, let's see, the OV-10 and two times with the C-130. He was only there a week. Um, and, uh, and then back out to the ship. Uh, they, they, C-130, no, C-47 had about eight or 10 marine troopers who were there on R and R at Yubon, Thailand. They had been downtown and they all looked at.

• 2:28:57Speaker 02

  Had a big night last night. I don't know where they wound up going, but they dropped me off at Hoi. It was right after the Battle of Hoi. They destroyed everything and they, and, and right next to the runway, they, well, a mat runway. And when we landed on that mat runway, they're shooting at us cause it goes rattle, rattle, rattle. And I thought, my God, there's something. But that's all, it was just a plank runway. And then the army was there and I thought, boy, sandbags and logs and mud and oh, hang heaven, I have no part of the army. And anyway, they sent the COD in there and the COD, uh, picked me up and took me out to the ship. So that was the end of that.

• 2:29:41Speaker 02

  But that was, uh, that was quite an experience. Um, those C-130 guys, they had Cohones. Um, they, they've sacked their parachutes back over here and they have a pile back there. Really? What do you do if you get hit? Because in my mind, you get hit, you might take the whole wing off or the end of it. And then it starts to tumble and you're not going to have time to put on a parachute. But they did, I think they lost more C-130s than they ever admitted to over there. Because well, the one I was on, the gunship. He's at 3,000 feet and the 37 millimeter gets to 37, to 30,000 feet.

• 2:30:26Speaker 02

  And a burst went off in front of the nose and I hit the deck behind the, and they have a flight deck on that airplane. I was on the floor and as we flew through the smoke. And they said, "What was that?" I said, "For heaven's sake, it went off right..." "Yeah, but it falls away. Don't worry about it. Alright." But we flew through the smoke. I saw the smoke go over the windshield, you know. And I got to fly the C-130 a little bit, just steer it around, you know, not a big deal. But anyway, that's what I did in Thailand. Then I came back to ship and the guy said, "What about this and what about that?" And that's when I saw those F-4s making multiple passes from the same direction.

• 2:31:07Jocko Willink?

  At 30 degrees.

• 2:31:08Speaker 02

  At 30 degrees angle dive and not just the same direction, but both airplanes from the same direction. So, maybe you're losing airplanes and I, I think I know why. No talking them out of it. I think if you are encouraged to think that 60-degree angle dive is dangerous, you'll believe it. But it's not. It's safer. It's a better way to go. And when I saw that picture, I don't know if I said this now. There's a famous picture taken during the Battle of Midway and that guy is virtually 89 degrees

• 2:31:50Speaker 02

  all above a Japanese carrier. So that's the way to do it, I thought. Besides, you've got to get the barrel all the way up there. Maybe you can't do that.

• 2:32:01Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with that deployment, head back to the States. Now it's what, 1970?

• 2:32:10Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:32:11Jocko Willink?

  And you're coming back to America now. Now you've got the protests and all this stuff going on. Was that, are you seeing that? Are you aware of that? What's, how's that impacting you?

• 2:32:22Speaker 02

  Very much so. And I think you just get used to it. The thing that you wouldn't get used to if you were a newly married guy, and that was me and a lot of other guys too, that they would call up your house and say, tell you that, tell your little wife that you had been killed that night. This is stateside, before you went to sea. Very evil, that's evil. And then, of course, we had a couple of bad accidents. There was a Navy cod, I think an old one, with a bunch of guys on board that crashed on St. Clemente before we sailed. And that was very bad, and it made my wife very squirrely.

• 2:33:06Speaker 02

  My young wife. There's a funny thing, there's a funny one here. I went to the East Coast, and I flew out to the East Coast, so then I have to ride back. So we're on a DC-4, C-40, 51, or god knows what, a four-engine, unpressurized Navy transport. And we get to Houston, and the guy says, "Ah, we'll be here overnight because the we, the wheels and so on, the third engine or something is not right. And so, be prepared, we'll have it, it'll be ready by morning."

• 2:33:47Speaker 02

  So at any rate, we were supposed to be back at Miramar by 6:00 PM, more or less. I sent her, called her or something, from the East Coast, from Norfolk. So she calls the duty officer, and the white-haired sailor, who's on duty too, he answers the phone. And she says, "Mrs. Kopel, is my husband gonna be there tonight with his ETA?" And he says, "Oh, no, the airplane went down in Houston." Jeez.

• 2:34:18Speaker 02

  So, now wait, it gets better than that. She figured she was a widow, what to do about this. The next morning, coming up the side of the building, are two guys with gold braid on their sleeves. She said, "Well, this is it. Steal myself, they're gonna tell me what happened." I walk in the door.

• 2:34:43Speaker 02

  Anyway, funny story, and she still likes to tell it to her friends from time to time.

• 2:34:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. So, there is, there's this 1970, you come home, there's obviously a lot of division in America.

• 2:34:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:34:59Jocko Willink?

  And, and what do you end up doing when you get back?

• 2:35:02Speaker 02

  Well, the, the, re-asked Tom if he wants to stay or go, and I said, "My father-in-law offered me a job, so I'm gonna go." And, uh, I had too many dead friends by that point, too, and I said, "I think I'll just get out." And I said, "Well, we're gonna send you to be an ACM instructor at Kingsville." And I said, "I don't wanna go back to West, to Texas, I don't like that place." He said, "Well, we could send you to Meridian, but it's only, you know, basic instruction." I said, "That's for me." 'Cause a pal had told me that he got plowed back at Meridian, and it's a really nice place, nice people there and everything. So I said, "Let me go to Meridian."

• 2:35:46Speaker 02

  And so they put me in Meridian, and I was an instructor there for my last, something like, 14 months. And I had good students and mediocres and instruct, and students and so forth. I wonder what happened to the best of them. I have never been, I typed his name into Google and, no, no one, you know, knows. I had Marines, bloody old Marines, as one guy, I was his instructor, and then his pal, I flew with him a couple of times, they were recon Marines, which is, uh, is Navy SEAL level stuff. And I foolishly said to one of them at one, this is really foolish, this is naive.

• 2:36:25Speaker 02

  I said, "You get heloed into northern Laos, and, uh, you get dropped off in the jungle, and you know you're gonna be there for at least a week, with plenty of ammunition. Really, what do you do?" He said, "Well, we hunt for the North Vietnamese, they, they train up there, and they're in the jungle, and they're easy to find because they smoke so much ganja that you can smell them if they're upwind from you." "Oh, really? So what do you do then?" He said, "Well, you move, move around, so you are, in fact, downwind, and then you get close enough to them, and you set up, and, uh, with your weapons and whatnot, and, um, you wait till dawn, so they, till they start walking around."

• 2:37:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, then what do you do? Oh, well, we'll kill them all. Oh, excuse me. I was a little naive there.

• 2:37:20Speaker 02

  But these are the, anyway. And the guy who was my student, I wonder what a, a nice guy, both of them nice guys.

• 2:37:32Speaker 02

  He would say to me, Tom, we were first name basis, even ring captain at that point. Tom, Tom, Tom, how do you do, how do you do a barrel roll attack? See that guy over there? Make a barrel roll attack on that guy. Rich, I'm not supposed to do that, you know that. Hmm, come on.

• 2:37:52Speaker 02

  Make a big rolling thing on, on the student flying, the students never look around.

• 2:38:00Speaker 02

  He's flying over there. Make a big mock. Wow, let me try it. Go away over here. He try, that's angry. Or, the other thing with him, you fly in the back cockpit, you, you, you have them set, all fighter planes or Navy trainers have rear view mirrors. If you need rear view mirrors in a fighter plane, you're wasting your time. You are long gone.

• 2:38:28Speaker 02

  When I came back, or let's say half, from halfway through the cruise, you become a nutcase in the cockpit, at least I did. I want to know everything that's on the horizon, three sixty. That's the only way to genuinely be certain you're going to survive this thing and, and stuff like that. So you become a minor nutcase, looking around, looking around, and so forth. And to which a young guy would say, how the hell you fly the airplane if you're spending that much time? Well, you do, you get skilled at it, it's just time that you get better and better at doing it. But I would have them turn their mirrors so I could see their, this much of their face.

• 2:39:10Speaker 02

  Everything else is oxygen mask, helmet and oxygen mask. But I wanna see this part of their, I wanna see where they're looking. I don't want you to see you, Mr. Wilson, looking at the panel. I want you looking outside. Mr. Wilson, you're down in the panel again. I want you outside the cockpit here. Well, Mr. Kopel, I have trouble flying level. I said, I'd rather see you bumping around in a little off altitude than getting shot down later because it's that important and so forth. So with Rich Freeman, I would, like all of them, I'd have him, so I'd see him trying to fly level and make, Mr. Uh, Rich, I want you to make a thirty degree angle, turn and roll out at two seven. Okay. And he's doing a little bit of this.

• 2:39:54Speaker 02

  And he starts to get red in here. It's a Marine getting angry and not good thing. I said, Rich, don't get upset. Remember I told you? You wanna hold the stick with two fingers and trim off the pressure. Move it and then trim off the pressure. Two fingers, that's all you need. I really do it that way. Okay, what try again? No, come back, three six. Okay. Comes back and he's getting redder. I said, Rich, doon, can you feel it in the airframe? Yeah, what is it? I said, doon, that's me back here, pounding on the pole.

• 2:40:35Speaker 02

  He's got it in the vice grip with white knuckles and his elbow in here, trying to fly this thing light. Rich, it doesn't work that way. But, anyway. You gotta relax, I guess. Uh, I don't know. I don't know. I think when you come back and they're shooting at you and you get bored at night in bad weather, you're soaking wet and you're tired, you know? Do you burn more calories? I think so. There was a study done. Before the Vietnam War, they did it with A4s, and I bet you David knows about this.

• 2:41:17Speaker 02

  They, they asked these A4 guys to, oh, no, it was during, at the beginning of the Vietnam War, that's how it would work. They put, they had a recorder that, um, put a pen mark on a, on a disc of paper. And then they wired these guys with sweat and, and lung function and heart function and so forth. And they found out that, well, that's what they figured. You go in and feet dry and everything comes up. And you get in the target area, comes up even higher. Get off the target area, comes down a little bit. Get feet wet, comes way down.

• 2:42:01Speaker 02

  And it was way up here in the target area. And then you talk to the ship and it goes up here. That much higher. Higher than the target area. Right. Because in the, at the ship, everything is right here. Whereas in the target area, it's fortunes of war. It's good tactics, but to a certain extent, it's out of your hands. So you do your best. But if you're gonna smack the ramp or do somethings bad like that, it's, it's right there in your hands. And those A4s.

• 2:42:43Speaker 02

  So yeah, you, you will burn more calories than your tired guy. And then you stand around the ready room and smoke cigarettes. When did you quit smoking? You know, I'm right after that, I quit smoking.

• 2:43:02Jocko Willink?

  How was your transition into the civilian life?

• 2:43:06Speaker 02

  Difficult because you are used to a guy who says that, he does that. In civilian world, it's not that way. Guy says, can you loan me fifty bucks until next Wednesday in the Navy? He comes looking for you. In civilian world, you gotta go looking for him.

• 2:43:30Speaker 02

  Hey Eddie, give me my fifty bucks. Oh, I'll give you half of it. It's all I have, I say, okay. So, yeah, he was a little bit rocky. And I went in business for myself because my wife thought that might be a good idea for us. And the antique Persian rug business of all things. So, I wound up making friends with a lot of Persian guys. Most of them Jews. Couple of them I still know to this day. Call them up saying, how the heck are you? Couple of Muslim guys. All nice people.

• 2:44:07Speaker 02

  You had to be because you were sort of all in that, like in the Navy, you're all in this mess together. So, you, I figured in that business, I had it. Because you have retail customers talk to you and say, I've been looking for a less and so type. Do you know what that is? Oh, yes. I need it eighteen feet, but no longer than nineteen. And I need it thus and so wide. I don't want any wear, but I want more of this color and so. Can you do that? As soon as I leave, you get on the phone, call Mohammed and you call Hakim and you call that guy. I'm saying, I have what you want.

• 2:44:51Speaker 02

  And he will give it to you on your signature if your credit is good. I figured, I called a guy one time and he said, I don't have it, but I know who does have it. He's an old Armenian guy and he's really crotchety and he shouldn't be in business anymore. But he's got some nice choice stuff. This is in New York, Twenty-Eighth Street, Thirty-First Street, in that neighborhood, Fifth Avenue.

• 2:45:20Speaker 02

  I said, "I need this and that and this and that and this and that." Yes, yes. I said, "My credit." I said, "You don't know me, but I have..." "Call those and so and call him and you could call him." "I don't have to do that." "Really? Why?" "I know who you are." "I could have it on my signature." "I drove away one time with eighty thousand in wholesale value in back of my truck and I figured that was a mistake. No signature. They know who I am." "But nice people, a lot of, a lot of nice people. Not like what you read in the paper." Did you miss the Navy? Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:03Speaker 02

  A lot of pals and stuff like that. But you have to get away from that. You can't live in the past, you know? You gotta keep going. So, we had a lot of, a lot of... I keep saying this, but I had a lot of fun doing that too. So, and down to my wife, I bought a piece for several thousand and I came back, like maybe two days later, and I said, "Where's the those and so?" She said, "I sold it."

• 2:46:36Speaker 02

  She said, "I said, 'I hope you got more than fifty-six-hundred dollars for it.'" She said, "I got seventy-five."

• 2:46:46Speaker 02

  Is that what one of those rugs cost? How much one of those rugs cost? It depends on what it is. It depends on its age. It depends on its condition. You have to deal with somebody that you know is utterly trustworthy because Henry Kissinger got fleeced on a trip to Tehran and he knew it after it was all over. Well, what happened to him? I don't know exactly what the thing was, but he admitted to the fact that all he did was take that load of stuff that I bought and send it to a dealer somewhere to get rid of it. Because it was junk and he paid a bunch of money for it? It was very embarrassing, yeah. And then you ended up with the, with, in the bakery business, right? Bread-making business, is that where you're at now? Yeah.

• 2:47:30Speaker 02

  Well, this is, this is Jaco saying, "When you're in the middle of the woods, start walking." And the guy says, "Which direction?" And Jaco says, "Doesn't matter." Yeah, start walking. "But I knew how to do that." So, Pamela said, "Why don't you make some bread and..." Pamela's brother is in, believe it or not, in the exotic mushroom business. And they have a outdoor farmer's market, it was a common in Pennsylvania, on Sunday afternoons. And give them to Joe and see if he can sell them. He sold them all. I'm doing it by hand. And so, same thing again next week and so forth. He comes back and says, Fred says you ought to take a table here, your stuff is good enough.

• 2:48:13Speaker 02

  I said, holy smoke, but I can't only do so much by hand. So I had a guy that I did business, rug business with. Antique rug, if you find anything like that, Tom, call me. Oh, you do, and so forth. So I was coming, I used, I had to buy all the time, whatever you could. So I used to go to a lot of outdoor country auctions, more, more country than anything else. And they had rugs from the 30s. And I'd drive to Altoona, as I did in this case, with, with my truck, Chevy van, no windows. And I buy the rugs for fifteen hundred dollars, because there's certain, human psychology,

• 2:48:57Speaker 02

  certain price levels in which a retail customer, knowing that you could pay more, but I won't do that because I don't want surprises and stuff like that. So you know you're gonna get them for fifteen hundred dollars if you drive, because you talk to the auctioneer and he tells you more or less what it is. He thinks he knows and stuff like, so he drives to Altoona, you look at it and say, yeah, I, I can get six thousand for this. I won't pay more than, have to pay more than fifteen hundred dollars, and you do that. So I came back from Altoona that day to this guy's place, and he's in a secondhand equipment business. Secondhand commercial equipment, ovens and mixers and things like that. They go, they go on forever.

• 2:49:40Speaker 02

  And he said, you, you bake bread once in a while? And I didn't, I didn't buy anything that day, and I had money in my pocket, cash in my pocket. He said, he said, I got a couple of nice ovens over here. I said, I'm not interested. He said, look at them, they're diner size, they're not the full size. You got to find exactly the right guy, probably a diner, but he already has. I'll sell them to you for nine hundred dollars.

• 2:50:12Speaker 02

  I don't want them. He said, I can slide them right onto your truck. And he didn't know I had money in my pocket either.

• 2:50:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he did.

• 2:50:22Speaker 02

  Maybe. So he, and finally I said, okay. So then I had to install them myself on a, we live in an old Pennsylvania Dutch, I call them a Pennsylvania German soft brick drafty. And they have matching porches on both sides. And this porch is enclosed, so I put them on that porch and had, heavy, you know, they weigh, I don't know, thousand a piece, I guess. Jacks and everything, and blocks and getting it up and sliding it over. And I installed both of them, but I didn't do very much until my sister-in-law actually said, you need to put bread with Joe at the Skipak farmer's market on Sunday. So then one thing led to another, led to another.

• 2:51:08Speaker 02

  And then I went to this nice guy at Kimberton Whole Foods, who was, at the time, he had one store, and he was on the floor himself.

• 2:51:17Speaker 02

  And I said, uh, do you think you can sell these? He said, probably not, because, uh, La Bus just bailed out of here. But you can put it on their shelves if you want. Came back next day, and there was six of them. Sold. I said, can I put more? Of course. So one thing led to another. He has about, maybe he has eight stores now. And I'm in five, four.

• 2:51:40Jocko Willink?

  So you're making bread every day?

• 2:51:42Speaker 02

  I work, no, I work Tuesday, uh, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And I deliver on Wednesday what we, I made on Tuesday, Tuesday night, and sliced Wednesday morning to deliver that. Then I work Thursday, uh, and deliver that on Friday. And then I'm off Saturday, Sunday, Monday. But I got another racket going.

• 2:52:05Jocko Willink?

  What's the other racket?

• 2:52:06Speaker 02

  When I ran for Congress. I don't know if you know I did this.

• 2:52:10Jocko Willink?

  I did know that, yeah. It was in your notes.

• 2:52:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I was supposed to lose and it was in the gentleman's agreement. You want a guy who can lose gracefully and I said, that's exactly right. I said, okay. But I thought to myself, this guy, this congressman, he drinks a lot and he may get hit by a truck or have the classic too much alcohol heart attack or something like that. This is only chance I'll ever get. So I did, I think I put it in there. I did ring ten thousand doorbells. I really did. It gets to be fun after a while. You meet new people and moreover, they ask you questions privately that you hadn't quite thought through and after you fumble around with that, you say, I won't fumble around

• 2:52:57Speaker 02

  with that a second time and turns out in the next two days later, a guy asks you the same question.

• 2:53:02Jocko Willink?

  And you're ready.

• 2:53:02Speaker 02

  You're ready for it. So after that, and he spent ten times what I spent. A US congressman, I was told, will do anything to stay in office, anything. So at any rate, he spent ten times what I had to spend. I had thirty-five thousand dollars to spend. He spent three fifty. But anyway, and he wouldn't debate me either. He finally went to this silly thing on, he was in DC because he couldn't quite return, which is baloney. He was from the county north of where we live, but at any rate. What was I gonna say about?

• 2:53:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, it had to do with your racket that you're running, your other racket.

• 2:53:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I was a, I was a stockbroker at that point because of my, when I had my subdural hematoma, they cut a hole in your head, take a piece out of your head because it slipped and fallen about the, what I call it in there, you're John Glenn. John Glenn fully recovered and so have I, but a lot of people don't. I think too, it's a matter of wanting to and deciding to recover because you, with my case, my right side didn't, it was on my left side and it's true, my left side didn't work right or worked a little bit, but not real well and I couldn't walk right and stuff

• 2:54:31Speaker 02

  like that. Anyway, so at any rate, I.

• 2:54:37Speaker 02

  How'd you get the registrar? I am the Pennsylvania registrar for births and deaths in Ole Township, 06 Township, and for several surrounding townships. If you die, you need a will. And to have a will, you need an executor who distributes. But you have to prove, have somebody prove that this guy is dead, not just gone to South America, and so forth. So you make certified copies of his death certificate, issued generally by the hospital or the coroner. And that way, your executor, or the man or woman's executor,

• 2:55:20Speaker 02

  can probate the will and so forth and all that. So at any rate, a year after, maybe 10 months after I lost the election, I get to talk to a guy named Bob Asher, who was a little bit of a character and well-known in Pennsylvania politics because he took the heat and went to jail for something he didn't do. But probably to protect a Pennsylvania senator or maybe one of the governors, I don't know. But he took the heat and everybody agrees that Bob Denver did anything. But he owns a candy company called Asher Candies. It's well-known, chocolates in eastern Pennsylvania. And there he was at this affair. So I went up to him and I said, "Bob, you owe me one."

• 2:56:05Speaker 02

  He said, "Get out of here." I said, "You know who I am. I know who you are." I said, "I rang 10,000 doorbells." "Yeah, I heard about that." I said, "He had to spend 350,000 to beat me." "Yeah." Bob, we both know what that means. He would've spent 35,000 against the guy in Fayette County. He would've spent 58,000 at the guy in Pittsburgh. He would've spent... Hundred and two thousand in the guy in the Harrisburg race, he spent it all to beat me. Yeah, so what? Bob, you owe me one.

• 2:56:47Speaker 02

  A week later, the local guy that I knew very well who holds political office called me up and he said, "How'd you like to be register of wills?" What in the hell is that?

• 2:57:02Speaker 02

  So I said, "Yeah, that's right." "How much does it pay?" "Well, you won't make much. You can make thirty-five thousand doing it. You can."

• 2:57:12Speaker 02

  "At any rate, uh, they're trying to get rid of the Pennsylvania registrar." "And now I'm just sticking on because I figured that right down to the last day." "So at any rate, that's how that happened." "So, I was a stockbroker and if you start late in life to be a stockbroker, you don't have much of an account." "And, um, and stuff." "And I got to be a certain age and I said to my wife, 'This is, this is not cutting. I gotta do something else.'" "And right after that, my sister-in-law came to me and she's a German national. You wouldn't know it. She has zero accent." "She said, 'You sell bread that's good enough to sell in Germany. You need to do this.'" "I was still doing it by hand and one thing led to another there."

• 2:57:56Speaker 02

  "So that's what I do now and it, I'll tell you what, keeps you in shape. You're not gonna get fat doing this unless you want to."

• 2:58:04Jocko Willink?

  I suppose you gotta make sure you don't get too much of your own product, though.

• 2:58:07Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 2:58:08Jocko Willink?

  Just like the drug dealers.

• 2:58:10Speaker 02

  No, no, no. And I said to people, "People in stores say, 'Oh, I don't eat much bread.'" "I said, 'It's not the bread, it's what you put on it. Too much mayonnaise or too much strawberry jam.'" "It's what you do with it, not, not the, the stuff."

• 2:58:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, uh, what's the name? So what's, where can people get your bread?

• 2:58:28Speaker 02

  Um, you got a shipment of it.

• 2:58:30Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I got, I know, but I'm not gonna be going to the grocery market very often in Pennsylvania.

• 2:58:35Speaker 02

  The Olly Baker.

• 2:58:36Jocko Willink?

  The Olly Baker.

• 2:58:37Speaker 02

  O-L-E-Y, yeah. That's an Indian name for the valley in which... We live, the Indian name for it was Olinka. And that got shortened by the locals at that time, way back. Benjamin Franklin did not like to come up to that county. He said, there are too damn many Germans up there. I don't like to go up there. He was a good horseman in his middle age. We all see Ben Franklin as a big fat old guy.

• 2:59:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:59:05Speaker 02

  Fat old man, but he was an expert, expert horseman. And people did not like to travel with him. I read an account of him going to York, PA, which is west of Harrisburg. They didn't like that with him because he would take off overland to basically explore the landscape and whatnot. And they were all afraid he was going to either fall off or get killed by the locals, the Indians. So they thought, then we're gonna have to go look for him and find him. And some of the folks out there don't like us very much. And so forth. So people did not like to go traveling with him. But he was an expert in overland horseman. But we all see him as the fat old guy.

• 2:59:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the, that's the image you got stuck with at some point.

• 2:59:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:59:54Jocko Willink?

  I know you, you know, you wrap up your, your bio that you sent to Dave and it says, 2022, still having fun.

• 3:00:01Speaker 02

  Heck, yeah.

• 3:00:02Jocko Willink?

  So that's pretty awesome. I don't know, did we miss anything? Get us up to date?

• 3:00:09Speaker 02

  There's one thing I thought about on going by now, now it escapes me. Same marriage, married to the same woman. This is during the political campaign, they would ask you, I said, still married to the same woman?

• 3:00:23Speaker 02

  Since age 27. So I got married a little bit late.

• 3:00:29Jocko Willink?

  And it was your daughter that brought you here?

• 3:00:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:31Jocko Willink?

  And then linked us up. I think she linked us up on social media.

• 3:00:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was my elder daughter, Genevieve. And she wanted to come with me, but she is in a job that she doesn't like and she's intensely searching. So the other daughter said, I'll take him out. And she had not actually said, she said, if you go, I'll buy my own ticket. Oh, good. So then I said to you, "I will not travel alone. I will travel with my wife." "Oh, okay." So then Pamela said, "I don't wanna go. We have a ancient puppet dog here and she's gonna die." I said, "Well, we oughta euthanize her. I can't do that."

• 3:01:14Speaker 02

  That's the pragmatic solution, apparently. So younger daughter said, "I'll go with him." So she is here today in San Diego. And elder daughter is angry. But I said, "Jenny, what you're doing is more important." And she's working it. She got into the medical world, most specifically into transplants. And she said, "If Jaco says anything to you, ask him if he is a organ donor."

• 3:01:49Speaker 02

  Of course, he should be. Everybody should be. I am. Yeah. So I'll tell her that. But at any rate. She's gonna know. Apparently, everyone's gonna know now. I said, "The thing about Jenny, the thing that people want is something you can do that most people can't." You can keep six balls in the air at the same time, so to speak. That's why these guys in the transplant business love you so much. Because they could say, "Oh, I don't know about that. Ask Jenny." And she had the answer. Or, "This computer thing is screwed up and it's off a thing and it won't work." And say, "Call Jenny and she can do that." And she does. There you go. So the younger daughter, they have their... She and her husband have their own business, so it's easily done for them.

• 3:02:34Speaker 02

  Although they're very serious and they do well. So that's the whole thing there. There's something else. Dave, what do you got?

• 3:02:43Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I got a lot.

• 3:02:45Speaker 02

  Oh!

• 3:02:46Speaker 01

  But I know we're kinda running... I've been taking a lot of notes. I just, I'm remarking at how many similarities there are and I just started writing things down. I was stationed at Meridian. I was stationed at Kingsville. I was in LSO. I have about forty traps in the Connie early in my career.

• 3:03:05Speaker 02

  How about that?

• 3:03:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I did the spin rides in the T2 and I knew you were a spin instructor. I know that well.

• 3:03:12Speaker 02

  It's fun. It's a great, I said in there at one of those things, I said, it's a great carnival ride.

• 3:03:16Speaker 01

  It's a good.

• 3:03:16Speaker 02

  But so many guys would not do it. And I used to say, the student didn't know who I was. I'll, I'll be doing your spin hop today. You're terrified. Well, no, Mr. Kopel, but I thought that, I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. How many guys have even punched out on spin hops? Oh, I don't know. No one. It's a carnival ride and so forth. And Fred didn't want to, I, that gives me the, I don't like to do that. I'll do them. I'll do them for you. So I would do a lot of the spin hops in Meridian. It's a carnival ride. Not much instruction goes on that day, except for the rote. All right, Mr. Smith, we establish the direction of rotation and

• 3:04:00Speaker 02

  we will positively neutralize the controls and then apply full opposite rudder and when the rotation stops, we will put stick full forward and so forth. Yeah, that's all you do. And then, okay, fine. We got that. Now we're going to climb back up. You have to do it again? Yeah, we're going to do it again, too.

• 3:04:21Speaker 01

  I remember it well. Some of the best rides ever.

• 3:04:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:27Speaker 01

  Um, my time with the Air Force and then you kind of conclude with a couple of things that I just couldn't help make the connection to. Living on the O3 level in the state room underneath the catapults. And then, God forbid, I am on a podcast where I don't have to say something nice about Navy SEALs.

• 3:04:46Speaker 01

  But you worked for a frogman and got to see what, what, what, what real good leadership looked like.

• 3:04:53Speaker 02

  But you know what? He, let's talk about leadership just a second. He was not well thought of, mostly by the younger guys who are ROs in the fleet squadron I was in. He never does anything and he'd talk and they would say not nice things about him. I don't think any of the front seat guys said that.

• 3:05:11Speaker 01

  What a surprise.

• 3:05:12Speaker 02

  But, but the, the backseat guys, they're all young and the lieutenant junior grades, all of them solid. And most of them retired as commanders. I don't know what the heck they got him to do to stay in the Navy that long, but at any rate, they didn't like him because they couldn't understand what he was doing. I think the front seat guys all really understood what was going on there.

• 3:05:35Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's a real strong connection between pilots and SEALs. I got to learn that firsthand working with Jaco, but you did it at a time, you did it at a time where you didn't have the machines that we had. I mean, you flew an airplane that I guarantee you was infinitely harder than it was for me. But it occurred to me that the, the legacy that I got to live under, the 35 years of history, was written about people like you. And when I got in, when I got in the Navy, the Marine Corps, how we flew fighters and the way we taught people to fly fighters was already embedded. And that all started with your generation, so.

• 3:06:12Speaker 02

  Well, you know, that's what I was thinking about in that, Dan Pedersen and, and the book. That wasn't called Top Gun until maybe, I don't know, three, four, five years later, somebody said Top, but the F-4 didn't have a gun. And I don't, and, and all your newspaper guys, they all say, well, had to have a gun and they finally did the F-4E and had a gun in it, finally. No. The missile was a better weapon every time, every time. It had to be within 3,000 feet to do anything with a 20 millimeter gun. I shot the gun at Kingsville. We all did. I was bad at it too. I don't know, they, they put your colored paint on your, and, and then they examined

• 3:06:56Speaker 02

  the banner and said, there are no greens on here. What happened to you, Tom? Embarrassing, you know, I'm an older guy, I'm supposed to have old in there. But at any rate, uh, I don't, I utterly disagree with that business about if any sort of a fighter plane, you had to have a gun, a baloney. Now, early on, sparrows didn't work because white hat sailors would drop them and chuck them up into the bottom of the airplane and they, they didn't test them to see, make sure this is working and things like that. And then the aviators didn't turn the panel on and to see if the missiles, they called it tuning, that the missiles would tune and things like that.

• 3:07:38Speaker 02

  And then if one didn't tune, you could flip past that to go to the number two and so forth and fire that one, forget about the first. But then you could do one more thing that came out during Top Gun that nobody during advanced fighter weapons. If you went to bore sight, tell the guy in back cockpit, go to bore sight, the antenna goes where the, the pepper is through the 35 mil gun sight is looking, they're both looking at the same place. And that's what I was gonna do with the 21. Go bore sight, pull the trigger and, and you'd get a sparrow, which is a monster missile, weighs 500 pounds, sparrow.

• 3:08:20Speaker 02

  The ones we had anyway, the E models weighed 500 pounds. But anyway, it wasn't called fighter weapons school back then. Oh yeah, so the thing you read in Dan Peterson's book, who remains a nice guy, but I would say this to him in a, in a clear way, most of the airplanes shot down in World War I, in World War II, in Korean War, in the Vietnam War, never saw the guy that shot them down. They never saw the missile that shot them down. I know, I knew, guys who came out feet wet, out of North Vietnam.

• 3:09:04Speaker 02

  And saw the missile go by. The B model missiles, the missile the Russians had, they stole it from us and shipped it through Burley and on commercial freight. And it didn't guide that well, at least the Russian version of it didn't. It had a big seeker head on it and it didn't narrow its sight. But I talked with guys who said, "I saw the missile go by and I had no idea." Holy smoke! Most guys who got shot down, and I heard this early in the cruise, not until I was out there and you get fully realized that they used real bullets here and stuff.

• 3:09:49Speaker 02

  Most, ninety-five percent of the airplanes that got shot down, get shot down and they never saw the whatever did it to them. They never saw it. One time, we were in Laos, somewhere, it doesn't matter where, waiting for the Fak. And he's at fourteen and I'm at fifteen. He's in a port orbit and I'm in a starboard orbit. We're just waiting quietly. And here comes an F-4. You can tell because it has, at the wing roots and the leading edge of it, have two flashing white lights. That's an F-4. And he comes flying by and he gets about where we are.

• 3:10:34Speaker 02

  That's where there are guns on the ground because that's where there are truck parked and that's where the Fak is gonna meet us. And those gunners can hear us up overhead. But here comes this guy over the horizon. An F-4. At this guy, probably fifty-seven at least, maybe eighty-five millimeter.

• 3:10:57Speaker 02

  And he's still got his lights on bright and flash. And he disappeared over the horizon. Bright and flash. Did you go get close to him? Not that close because they were shooting at him. But I went close enough, I could see. That is an Air Force F4. It's not some Navy guy who's lost or something. It's Air Force F4. And he never knew it. Oblivious to everything with his lights on bright and flash. It's a true story. So my point here is that Top Gun is, or what they call now Top Gun, is very interesting. If you go one on one, you both start from here. You turn and hit and start with a head on pass and so forth.

• 3:11:40Speaker 02

  One guy is better than the other and he gets behind the other. But that's not what happens. What happens is the guy that you were picking your nose for some reason or other, and a MiG 21 showed up, or a MiG 26, or God knows what it is. And he shot you down from three miles astern. Because you were picking your nose. You've got to be a wild man in that cockpit if you don't want to get shot down. You've got to know everything that's going on. 360 degrees all the time. So you turn into a crazy man. And you fly with a new RO. He said, "You're really nuts." "Yeah, I'm still here too."

• 3:12:20Speaker 02

  So at any rate, I beg your pardon, I interrupted.

• 3:12:22Jocko Willink?

  Not at all. That's probably a great place to wrap it up right there.

• 3:12:26Speaker 02

  All right.

• 3:12:27Jocko Willink?

  That's a great attitude to have. Thank you so much for coming out here.

• 3:12:32Speaker 02

  It was fun.

• 3:12:35Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for sharing your experiences. Lessons learned. And of course, most important, thank you for your service.

• 3:12:42Speaker 02

  Oh, baloney.

• 3:12:43Jocko Willink?

  Thank you for your service in the Air Force and your service in the Navy. And most of all, thank you for your service to our great nation.

• 3:12:51Speaker 02

  Amen.

• 3:12:52Jocko Willink?

  Thank you, sir. And with that, Tom Kopel has left the building. Pretty awesome to hear from a dude that, as you were telling me before we hit record, Dave, in the middle of Vietnam War, just volunteers to go and fly, you know, F4 Phantoms. That's the pipeline, too. So, pretty amazing to hear these guys. I thought it was actually pretty interesting about the nuclear war stuff, too.

• 3:13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:13:26Jocko Willink?

  You know, like, what, what, what are you thinking? What you, you know, I was in the SEAL Teams, and I was like, hey, we might do a mission. In the 90s, like, hey, we might do a mission. Michael, you know, kill a terrorist. This dude's like, hey, we might go and end humanity.

• 3:13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:13:44Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's a...

• 3:13:45Speaker 01

  I remember when I first started flying airplanes, what you really want to do is you actually want to, you want to do something. You want to drop a bomb, you want to get in a fight. That's what you want to do. And there's a double edge to that, because you know, like, well, I mean, we don't want to go to war. It's not a good thing. But if you do, you like, you want to get the call. The only thing you're ever going to do when you're, you know, Strategic Air Command with nuclear weapons and a B-52, you get that call, like, that's a different psychology about what your job is, you know. And I could see someone like him getting pretty restless, doing stripper alert all day, knowing it's kind of unlikely. And if it did work out, like, what are you actually doing there? That's, that's not a scenario you want to be in, no matter what, so.

• 3:14:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Crazy. But anyways, thanks for listening. If you want to support the podcast, you want to support yourself, get yourself some Jaco Fuel, JacoFuel.com. You can get these, these drinks we're drinking right here. Get yourself some afterburner orange, the tasty flavor. Mulk, going ham on the mulk. We got, we got ready to drink mulk now. People are kind of going crazy with that stuff. I'll tell you what's, what, what's, what I find, look, just like every other freaking American, the convenience of just cracking one of those open and drinking it. Look, how much effort is it for me to get out my,

• 3:15:10Jocko Willink?

  get out my milk, get out my shaker, put my mulk in there, shake it, you know, that has to take me at least. Three minutes. Or I got that little ready to drink hitter, just ready to, you know, take some. The other thing I find about it is you can just do, you, it's so effortless that you can just open one up. Like I have, I have a part of my fridge where I have one of each kind of opened where I'll just go like, take a sip, take maybe two or three sips, you know, just during the day, just a flyby.

• 3:15:43Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Molk, all the joint stuff, you know what, you know what it is. Um, you can get it, jockofuel.com, you can get it at the Wawa, get the drinks at Wawa, get it at Vitamin Shop. Go get some support, Origin USA. I saw Cam Haynes today posted, Cam is teaching Tulsi Gabbard how to shoot a bow. And they're wearing Origin Hunt, man, how legit is that? Pretty awesome. So check out originusa.com, we're making stuff in America. Jeans.

• 3:16:17Jocko Willink?

  Jiu Jitsu gi's, boots, t-shirts, rash guards, all a hundred percent made in America.

• 3:16:25Jocko Willink?

  So get some of that. We got a store. Echo called it Jocko Store. It's jocko store.com. Get t-shirts, what are you wearing? Oh, that's a legit one. So Dave, right now, if you're not on YouTube, Dave's wearing the Sea Wolves t-shirts, 1966 to 1972. The only aviation unit ever commissioned and decommissioned in a combat zone. We've had some Sea Wolves on the podcast, there's a t-shirt to represent the Sea Wolves. You can get that at jocko store.com. We also got rash guards and hats and beanies and all that kind of stuff. Get the shirt locker.

• 3:17:06Jocko Willink?

  Shirt lockers. It's a little opportunity for us to express kind of,

• 3:17:15Jocko Willink?

  let's say some deep layers to the podcast. And it's a subscription thing, get a shirt a month and they're cool. We got this podcast, subscribe to it, Jaco Underground. We're doing Underground Podcast, which is also a platform that we have that we control. Cause if you're not in control of a platform, you should be nervous that they could kick you off that platform. So I was nervous about that. Now, look, I'm not trying to get kicked off. I don't think I'm going to get kicked off. We're not getting crazy over here, but there are certain things I've said that have been demonetized.

• 3:17:55Jocko Willink?

  So who knows when they're going to say, yeah, you can't say that anymore. So we have our own platform, Jaco Underground.com. Check that out. YouTube channel.

• 3:18:06Jocko Willink?

  Jocko Podcast is the YouTube channel. Origin USA also has a YouTube channel. We've got Psychological Warfare. We've got Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer, got a bunch of books. Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. Final Spin, the audiobook of Final Spin, Dave and I did like a Q and A from Final Spin. At the, so after the book, you can do the Q and A, you can listen to that Q and A. Pretty cool. The background of where it came from. I can tell you where it's going, that thing's making moves. I'll leave it at that for now, because it's hard to get these things done. But anyways, written a bunch of books.

• 3:18:45Jocko Willink?

  Warrior Kid books.

• 3:18:48Jocko Willink?

  Just, I have a gym, Victory MMA and Fitness, and just about every day a parent will come up to me and say, "Thank you for those books. That got my kid to focus in school, got my kid here to start training Jiu-Jitsu, got my kid to stop eating junk." So check out those books for your kids. Way of the Warrior Kid series. Mikey and the Dragons, Hackworth, About Face, Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy of Leadership, all these books. You know, I've written them. Get them if you want them. Echelon Front, what's Echelon Front, Dave Berke?

• 3:19:20Speaker 01

  Echelon Front is our leadership consultancy where we, you, me, Leif and the whole team get to actually in-person, live, talk about every single leadership principle you've been talking about on this podcast and in the book. We get to do it with companies and people all the time. It's It's awesome.

• 3:19:37Jocko Willink?

  And what about the academy?

• 3:19:39Speaker 01

  Oh, the academy. The Extreme Ownership Academy. It turns out that meeting people live and in person isn't always the most convenient way to do it. And bringing people off the line or bringing people into a conference room or a classroom every single day is not a great way to train. We want to keep people working. But the academy takes basically everything we teach, puts it online, so you can get to it whenever and however you want to. And it's an awesome additional resource. It's basically be able to hit that leadership gym every day, whenever it's convenient for you. So we got the academy.

• 3:20:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just like jujitsu, there's moves you gotta learn. There's moves you've got to learn about leadership. And just like jujitsu, you can't just look at a move and hear it one time and be like, oh, cool, I'll throw this uma plata on somebody now. This is not going to work. You gotta, you gotta fully understand it. You gotta see it from different angles. You gotta try it yourself. And that's what the, that's what the academy is. Extremeownership.com. If you want to get in on that. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families. You want to help Gold Star families. Uh, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization, does incredible stuff. Does incredible stuff, takes service members.

• 3:20:49Jocko Willink?

  This is one of the, one of the things that she does. She takes service members who have significant health issues and she gets them treatment. It's a multifaceted treatment. One of the big treatments is hyperbaric chambers. You're going in, right in the I O two. She sets this up for like thirty or forty-five days, all expenses paid. So, and we've seen the results of this is just outstanding. So if you want to donate or you want to support that, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. And also don't forget about Micah Fink, who's taken vets up into the wilderness

• 3:21:26Jocko Willink?

  to heal through adversity. Which is pretty awesome. Heroesandhorses.org. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, on Graham, on the Facebook. Dave is at David R Burke. I'm at Jocko Willink. Watch out for the algorithm. Uh, thanks once again to Tom Kopel for making the trip out, for sharing those experiences. And lessons learned from your life. Pretty neat to hear this stuff, first person.

• 3:22:00Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for your service. Thanks for coming out. And thanks to all our military personnel. With a special recognition today to those of you that help us own the skies. The pilots, the navigators, the air crews, the maintenance and mechanics on the ground, and the thousands of support people that make our domination of the air possible. Thank you for what you all do. And thanks as well to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. Thanks for what you do here on the home front to keep us safe.

• 3:22:42Jocko Willink?

  And I want to close this out with another quote. A quote from Captain David McCambe, United States Navy. 34 air victories in World War II, the most of any US Navy pilot ever. And he said this, quote, "Aggressiveness was a fundamental to success in air-to-air combat, and if you ever caught a fighter pilot in a defensive mood, you had him licked before you started shooting." End quote. So there you go. That just doesn't apply to air-to-air combat. It applies to everything.

• 3:23:26Jocko Willink?

  That's how you win. So get out there, be aggressive, make things happen, and of course, keep getting after it. And until next time, this is Dave and Jaco, out.