196: Make Peace or Die. Service, Leadership, and Nightmares. W/ Charles Daly.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:15 - Charles U. Daly 3:37:29 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 4:40:53 - How to stay on THE PATH. 4:00:19 - Closing Gratitude. 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 196 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:14Jocko Willink?

  In November, MacArthur ordered a drive all the way up to the Yalu River, which divides North Korea and China. He made the infamous promise that his victorious troops would be home for Christmas. All the dailies were happy to hear this news. At this point, I was still at Quantico and it looked as though the war would end before my classmates and I deployed.

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  Then, on November 26th, the Chinese launched an immense surprise attack routing all UN forces from coast to coast and trapping the US Marines at the chosen reservoir, outnumbering them by upwards of four to one.

• 0:57Jocko Willink?

  The action that followed became known as the Frozen Chosen. The Marines held their positions with very little support, totally cut off from the unprotected supply lines that MacArthur had stretched thin behind them.

• 1:12Jocko Willink?

  They fought in near Arctic conditions. Their canned rations froze, their limbs froze, men froze to death.

• 1:21Jocko Willink?

  The enemy used artillery to soften the Marine positions and then come at them with human wave attacks.

• 1:28Jocko Willink?

  The strategy was to charge the Americans, usually at night, when they were without air support.

• 1:35Jocko Willink?

  In some instances, frozen enemy dead were stacked in front of Marine fighting positions and used as sandbags.

• 1:45Jocko Willink?

  Needless to say, any Marine who survived chosen became legend.

• 1:51Jocko Willink?

  It borders on absurd to think that I, a 23-year-old lieutenant with a degree from Yale, would soon be giving orders to men who had fought their way out of that cold hell.

• 2:04Jocko Willink?

  One such man I would go on to command was Gunther Doss, a German immigrant, who was one of just sixteen men in a rifle company of two hundred plus to walk out of Chosin. For his actions, including faking his own death as Chinese soldiers disarmed him and probed the wound in his head, Doss was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart. As summarized in the following excerpt from his Silver Star citation, Private First Class Doss held his fire to prevent a premature disclosure of his position while the intense small arms grenade, automatic weapons and machine gun barrage continued.

• 2:47Jocko Willink?

  The fire continued with deadly accuracy, killing several and dispersing the others. With his weapon inoperative as the foe persisted in the onslaught, Private First Class Doss hurled hand grenades to account for two more hostile soldiers as the bullets from an automatic weapon sprayed his position, wounding him and killing a Marine riflemen nearby. Fighting unconsciousness as the enemy moved closer, he feigned death as they felt the bullet hole in the top of his helmet, examined his bloodstained face and hands, and removed his weapon and cartridge belt. After seven agonizing hours during which he remained perfectly still while the enemy,

• 3:31Jocko Willink?

  still believing him to be dead, occupied his foxhole, he surveyed the situation and made contact with an adjacent Marine unit after a friendly counterattack finally forced them to withdraw. After training, each Marine is assigned an MOS, or Military Occupational Specialty. The MOS for Infantry Officer is O3O1. After Chosin, we at the Marine Corps Basic School took to calling it O3O Shit. By year's end, 1950, the situation in Korea was so grim that Truman was seriously considering

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  removing all US forces from the peninsula. By New Year's, 1951, the second wave of the Chinese offensive had pushed the UN coalition south of the 38th parallel, forcing them to surrender Seoul for the second time.

• 4:30Jocko Willink?

  The first special Marine Corps basic class graduated around the time the division broke out at Chosen. It was one of the Corps' finest hours, but for us, it was a stark reminder that the war was just getting started.

• 4:46Jocko Willink?

  We had to fill out requests for next duty assignments. Most of us would be given orders to Korea, but most made their first choice something other than infantry.

• 4:59Jocko Willink?

  Only five lieutenants in my training company requested to lead a rifle platoon, and I was one of them.

• 5:16Jocko Willink?

  Only five lieutenants in my training company requested to lead a rifle platoon, and I was one of them. Think about that for a minute.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  We're talking about a company of officers in the United States Marine Corps.

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  And that right there was an excerpt from a manuscript of a book, which is called Make Peace or Die: A Life of Service, Leadership, and Nightmares. The book is written by Charles U. Daly, and it is a distinct honor to actually be sitting here with Mr. Daly today to discuss his book, his incredible life, and the amazing lessons he has from it all. Mr. Daly, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Thank you. We're your own record.

• 6:18Jocko Willink?

  And you, how long have you been working on this book for?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  In my heart, a long time. The, uh, I wanted to, uh, record.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  I'm not even sure why, other than I thought that I am now very old and I wanted to leave something behind for my family, my sons who raised from sixty-seven to twenty-four. Um, and I have an idea of what life was like. Uh, and, and truthfully, set that down. And they can read on it, use the toilet paper, whatever they want to do it. But I did not expect to make a commercial venture out of it. I felt that would have been trading on the bodies I left behind.

• 7:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, the, uh, truth certainly comes out in this book. It's, uh, it's, uh, super frank and straightforward and it's, it's a great read. And I appreciate your son, Charlie, sending it to me and linking all this up. Um, yeah, it's, it's good. Um, and, and it's, it lays out your life. And I'd like to go back to the book right now and go to the beginning, the beginning of the book and the beginning of your story. It starts off like this, "Mine is not your typical Irish immigrant story. For one thing, my dad had use of a private airplane when I was growing up. A bulky Ford Tri-Motor with silver skin and loud engines that scared the hell out of

• 8:01Jocko Willink?

  me. The plane and a private rail car were perks of my father's work as a top US executive for Shell Oil. Our family came to America on a boat, but it was an ocean liner and we traveled first class." Definitely not your typical immigrant story, huh?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  No, I screwed it up later on, but it was, it was, uh, not the sort of person who could be flunked out of Ellis Island.

• 8:30Jocko Willink?

  The um, very interesting story on your, on your heritage. And going back to the book again, it says in 1892, my father was born in Ningpo, China. The son of Dr. Charles Cathrop de Berg Daly. Did I say that right?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Close.

• 8:48Jocko Willink?

  Close enough, probably as close as I could do it. Uh, who set up a clinic in Ningpo several year, following several ver- voyages to China, China as a ship's doctor. It seems he found the human suffering in that ancient kingdom too hard to ignore. And so he stayed and married an Irish nurse with similar ideals. Perhaps my grandfather's response to this cry for help explains something about my own life. My tendency to spring into action when someone is suffering a wrong, even on the other side of the world. Even if it's not my fight. This habit of leaping into action when the bugle blows has been a mixed blessing for me. As it well may have been for him.

• 9:30Jocko Willink?

  And there was all kinds of turmoil going on in China at the time. And so they actually sent, sent your father back to be educated at the Turnbridge School. And then he went on to Cambridge. Where he graduated in 1914 and anyone that knows anything about history knows that that's not a good year to be graduating from college in, in Britain.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, a large number of them at age 17 or thereabouts, uh, went off to war. And they, at that time, uh, they had little knowledge of war. Uh, there's a wonderful book, Diary of a Fox Hunting Man, followed by Diary of an Infantry Officer. And he was a gentleman and he went to war with, uh, his groom for his horse and his horse. And that was before they met machinery on this.

• 10:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's we've we've covered multiple books, first person accounts on on this podcast, talking about the absolute horror of World War I and and the horror of the machine gun versus versus the tactics that they had at the time. The and it's actually unbelievable. When you read the stories about World War I, it's unbelievable that it happened. It's unbelievable that it happened for a week, never mind a month, never mind years, where you'd say, okay, hey, your battalion just went over the over the top. No one came back and in 15 minutes, our battalion is going to go and 15 minutes after

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  that, another battalion is going to go. It's it's it's crazy to think about that kind of human sacrifice and and that.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Well, the geniuses who did that weren't the ones who went over the top and who walked and walked ahead, they fell or hung up on the barbed wire and they had no concept. They had a little bit of experience in the Boer War and a few other souvenir hunts, but no concept what they were doing to a generation on both sides of the trenches.

• 11:55Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, I keep a photo of my father taken during the First World War. In it, my dad stands in his officer uniform with binoculars and a walking stick. Beside him, my mother's 19 year old brother Charlie, a lieutenant, leans on his rifle in a confident pose, half smiling behind his pipe. They are flanked by a few others. One is wearing a German army helmet with the spike on top, a war trophy. What war does to men can be detected in the difference between their expressions. My dad has the proverbial thousand yard stare. The corners of his eyes around his spectacles and his brows show resignation and an exhausted readiness. The men under

• 12:37Jocko Willink?

  his command have a similar look. Charlie, on the other hand, has the fresh face of a replacement, a gentleman for whom war is still a great adventure.

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  Charlie has only been on the front for less than a week.

• 12:52Jocko Willink?

  He would be blown to pieces shortly after this photo was taken. My dad handed this photo down to me and scribbled the names of the men under it with KIA or WIA beside each name, marking them all killed or wounded.

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  I thought of cropping the photo to make it a family shot, and I'm glad I didn't. Those other guys had already been cropped out.

• 13:19Jocko Willink?

  Shortly after my own war, I asked Dad, "When do the bad memories fade?"

• 13:25Jocko Willink?

  "It will take a long time," he said, "but finally they will fade."

• 13:30Speaker 01

  They don't.

• 13:34Jocko Willink?

  No, they don't. And we're gonna get to your war in a bit.

• 13:43Jocko Willink?

  Your dad's war, staying with the book, Dad had gone to the front in the 4th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, having applied for a commission on the day the war broke out. He was named a captain following a perfunctory officer's training course. While his sons went to war, my grandfather managed two hospitals in Ireland that handled the overflow of wounded. In 1917, he was awarded an Order of the British Empire for this work. My uncle, Lieutenant Arthur Charles de Berg Daily, another Charlie, was killed in action on the 9th of September 1916, after having seen action and survived in the Somme. He was 19 years old.

• 14:27Jocko Willink?

  In his last letter home, he wrote, "We attacked Ginchi tomorrow. In case of accidents, I played the game two days ago and will, please God, tomorrow." What does that mean, "played the game two days ago"? That means he'd already probably seen some combat?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Probably went out, at least on a patrol, or the attack, general attack, I didn't like it, but it come back. But the night patrols are regular, and then they go, some genius in the back said, "We wanted to probe the enemy line." How you probe the enemy line, cutting our way through barbed wire, and they're just waiting?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  That's a tough way to probe them.

• 15:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's...

• 15:13Speaker 01

  At the patrols, I was very, later on in my life...

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Patrols are difficult enough without people waiting with a certain knowledge that you're coming, and as soon as you start messing around with the barbed wire, they know exactly who you are, and then they don't waste a whole lot of ammunition, but it doesn't take much running through a machine gun to clean out some probes. So then when they didn't come back, the genius figure, hey, there must be somebody in those trenches. It's not, I can't grasp it, how that mentality went and how pompous those fucking generals were.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  I'm not fond of generals.

• 16:02Jocko Willink?

  The next morning, he is said to have led his men over the top and was hit in the ear with a bit of shrapnel. He took cover in a shell crater to assess the wound and regain his composure. According to the official report, he stood up, made it four or five yards toward the enemy wire before being hit in the head with machine gun fire.

• 16:23Jocko Willink?

  Due to a cruel administrative error, my family would receive word that he had been wounded. Then they were told that the report was an error and that he was fine, and finally they learned the truth, or at least a polite version of the truth.

• 16:39Jocko Willink?

  So there's two uncles right there, Charlie and Charlie, and they've both been killed. And now we get to your dad. Dad was wounded at Richbourg-Lavoie.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Your French is about as good as mine.

• 16:56Jocko Willink?

  On 9 May 1915, in the left thigh and the right hand. While convalescing in Dublin, he played a role in putting down the 1916 Easter Rising that I'm glad I don't know too much about. Shortly after his return to the front as a major in June 1916, he was sent home again with appendicitis and spent the rest of the war training bombers in the art of grenade throwing. For his wounds, he was given a lump sum or blood money, as he called it, which he spent on a motorcycle. He putted around Ireland on the bike for several months, visiting the families of young officers who had been killed while serving under his command in the fusiliers.

• 17:36Jocko Willink?

  He eased painful memories by describing deaths courageous and quick. Even in cases where the truth was pathetic and grotesque.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Thus, he didn't mean to, but he promoted the concept that war isn't what it is. I don't know, he felt guilty about that. He felt more like trying to explain the unexplainable to the families whom he knew exactly what had happened to their sons. And so he lied. I did that once, and we can discuss it later on. Okay, this was to write a letter of condolence.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  And that letter returned, said, "You were his officer. I'm just curious to know why you're alive, you lived, and he didn't." I think it was that sort of feeling. You just can't convey the truth, but you want to, so you know.

• 18:59Jocko Willink?

  Your dad's continuing to travel around, and he ends up in one spot in Banden where he met the parents and sister of Charles Seeley King, the man beside him in the photo, who, like his own brother Charles, had been killed while attempting to lead an Irish platoon across barbed wire in the front on German lines. Lieutenant King's surviving sister, Violet, became my mother. Violet Seeley King impressed my father with her independence. She reacted to her brother's death by leaving County Cork for the first time in her life to volunteer as a V A D. What's a V A D?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Volunteer aid, I don't know.

• 19:46Jocko Willink?

  Something, but basically it's nurses going close to the front lines.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Not, she didn't qualify as a nurse, she just...

• 19:55Speaker 01

  In the tent hospitals as close as you can, took care of someone who got wounded and you're gone. So you're gonna bullshit them and clean out their guts and see all mental parts of males that she'd never seen. So it was a shock, I'm sure to her. On the other hand, the death of her brother was a greater shock.

• 20:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you say in here, Violet left behind a life of lunches, lawn games, picnics, tennis, bridge and ping pong. I assumed she'd never seen a nude male, let alone one with vital parts missing or maimed. Mum never spoke about her service, but when it came to my, but when it came my turn to go to war, she had no illusions about what her son would experience. Later she told me she had very little hope of seeing me again.

• 20:58Jocko Willink?

  So, and I, I always have to make this disclaimer when I read through these books. I'm obviously skipping giant chunks. I'm not just reading the whole book.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Good.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  No, you're not. It's, it was a powerful expression and, and just reading these parts make me happy to know that some people will.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  No bits and pieces of the truth.

• 21:33Jocko Willink?

  After the war, your dad ended up getting a job. And here we go to the book. Dad got a job at the offices of the Royal Dutch Shell, which is now just Shell today, where he found a row on row of desks filled with other survivors of a decimated generation. Discussing this gloomy scene with, with a bored interviewer, he learned there was one unwanted job open, peddling Shell oil products in rural India. He seized at the chance. And so he, he gets this opportunity to go to India and working for Shell Oil. He was based in a place called Malabar. And then there was this, this event that took place called the Mopla.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Mopla Rebellion.

• 22:17Jocko Willink?

  The Mopla Rebellion. And quick description of it here Europeans were brutally murdered and then the Moplas Moplas how do you say it?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Moplas.

• 22:27Jocko Willink?

  The Moplas turned upon their turned upon their Hindu neighbors they burned villages sacked temples outraged women massacred and attempted wholesale forcible conversion of Hindus to Islam. Now your dad at the time although a civilian dad lent assistance to that military force drawing upon his wartime experience to defend the British Hindu lives and property from the Islamic rebels by organizing a little convoy of open cars and bicycles to rescue an even smaller group under siege in the village. The local English language the paper the pioneer describes the battle in its September nineteen twen- nineteenth nineteen twenty-one edition. An ex-officer's gallantry and this is talking about your dad after a fierce assault on

• 23:11Jocko Willink?

  the part of some hundreds of rebels the troops withdrew. Lieutenant McDonnell having been wounded to command the next party sent forward Captain McEnroy called upon Mr. Daly an ex-officer Mr. Daly went forward with a platoon carrying out the task in very gallant fashion.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  A platoon or something four or five guys they owned it and tried to maintain disciplines with minimal force.

• 23:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah I mean that's that's like you couldn't you couldn't make that up here's your dad former uh former former infantry guy and this rebellion happens and he steps up and leads this little team and they they basically they survived the horrible situation.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  They didn't they didn't want to die and they had the automatic weapon.

• 24:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah that makes a big difference. You you got in here one of the rebels got close enough to swing a handmade sword at my dad. He gave me that he gave that weapon to me and I used it as a fire poker and a garden tool until it broke on a stone one day in the nineteen sixties.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  True.

• 24:21Jocko Willink?

  Amid all this stuff going on he actually wrote and proposed to your mom Violet.

• 24:28Jocko Willink?

  And she got on a boat and went down there and they were married on

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Weeks, weeks and weeks on an air-conditioned vessel.

• 24:39Jocko Willink?

  Just

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Through the Red Sea and so on.

• 24:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, you gotta point that out because not too many people know what it's like to be at sea. These days.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've fortunately or unfortunately done multiple deployments around the world. And air conditioning even on a modern Navy ship isn't always there.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Right there.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  I took my space available, I took my young family on on one and right after the election. Two and I wanted to get away from the weaving spiders and so on, so I found a space. Two cabins on a on troop ship headed to Hamburg from Brooklyn. So I got on there and I thought, and I stimulated wife and said, this is one hell of a deal, so let's go celebrate. We were just going under the, I didn't know if I was on a bridge, maybe I'd been there, but, but she said, you can't get a drink on a troop ship. Oh, Jesus Christ, 14 days later, I get to Hamburg, boy, I was really thirsty, but it was free, but anyway.

• 25:47Jocko Willink?

  Your, your dad, he because he had, he had behaved and performed in that manner, he kind of got some recognition for that. And ended up getting, getting taken care of and then was going back to the book, thanks to dad's well-known heroics. In the uprising and an earthquake in Japan that killed a number of shell executives, he soon found himself fast-tracked to the highest levels of the company. First cleaning up the mess in Japan and then on to a senior position in America that included a private plane and a railcar.

• 26:20Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy, a private plane and a railcar, that's like. And you remember that?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  I heard the plane, geez, it was noisy, very, very, it's a tin airplane with big three engines, one end up in the nose and then the other. And I don't remember the railcar other than I guess I assumed that's the way people travel, that's how idiot I was.

• 26:47Jocko Willink?

  So you're now in, you guys are in St. Louis. And.

• 26:55Jocko Willink?

  When you were saying until the war in 1939, you guys used to go back and forth to Ireland.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 27:02Jocko Willink?

  And you were, this is how you describe yourself. I was a brat with a run the first class and my own private steward.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  I do, I do, I do remember that.

• 27:13Jocko Willink?

  I can't imagine. So how old were you when that was going on?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  I was born in 27 and I was 36, up until the war started. The war, we call it until 39.

• 27:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  And then the war.

• 27:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, I can't imagine, you know, I have four kids, three daughters and one son. And, and just how crazy they are. I can't imagine putting them in charge of any adult when they're seven years old would just be absolutely crazy.

• 27:42Jocko Willink?

  And this is interesting, for reasons unknown to me, the good times at Shell ended in the 1930s. So he left St. Louis for a modest life since golden parachutes were not known in those days. So something happened. You don't even really know what happened?

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the depression happened.

• 27:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  And then beyond, well, beyond that, though, it was, I'm not sure. I don't know.

• 28:04Jocko Willink?

  But you went from living this kind of first-class lifestyle to just being a normal, the normal lifestyle?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Well, to a substantial extent, he became, he was an adventurous guy and he, he started, became a wildcat for oil in Michigan. There ain't no oil in Michigan. But, so we started a water softening company and, and peddled that and so on. And then when the war came out, he wanted to go back to war and he was, by that time, was a little too old for that sort of thing. So they, he got a job with the British in the US in an embassy there, in Washington, in charge of land lease, which is a con job that

• 28:54Speaker 01

  FDR created because he wanted to get in the war. He believed firmly he had to stop Hitler and so on. And he, so the land lease part was some imaginary leases on some property in Bahamas or somewhere. He gave them, he gave the English, I think 50 rusty old destroyers. But they were vital in fighting the U-boats in the North Atlantic. So he felt he was doing something.

• 29:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cuz cuz he actually, as soon as the war kicked off in Europe, he tried to join the British Army.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:27Jocko Willink?

  And they wouldn't take him.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  It's the same in the British Army or Irish regiments or whatever you have in the Irish. Unfortunately, they're paramount in the in warfare.

• 29:39Jocko Willink?

  And you guys were living in Bethesda at this time or around the DC Maryland area?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, just in the edge of it.

• 29:46Jocko Willink?

  So now you say this, I will never forget one drive into Washington on a particularly balmy winter Sunday. As we were cruising down Constitution Avenue in our old Ford, my father pointed out all the civil servants rushing into the Navy Department Building. And he says, look at the way the Americans work, even on a Sunday. We got back home, we turned on the radio and we learned out, learned what all the commotion was about. It was Sunday, December 7th, 1941. The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor.

• 30:18Jocko Willink?

  And now you know where in the war, you got your dad. Um, at this point, he goes to a doctor. He goes to the doctor cuz he's getting dizzy. And, you know, having some spells of dizziness and whatnot. So you say, listening outside a half-opened door.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Well, I got a hell of a deal. It was in, um. He decided to go to a doctor and Johns Hopkins is a good hospital in Baltimore. And, uh, so he asked me, you wanna go for a drive? And I really worshipped him. He said everything was big and all that stuff. So, uh. And we went to the hospital and I listened to this conversation, uh. Between the, uh, the doctor and my dad. I could hear through the half-opened door.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  And, uh. I could hear him say something to my dad about, um. Uh. You won't have any more, you got a problem, we don't know much about it, but it's multiple sclerosis or. I'm not sure he even remembered the name or I didn't remember it. And, uh, you wouldn't be doing any much more golf or, or, uh.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Having trouble walking, increasing trouble walking unless you cut out alcohol and the sense of, I used to have evening cocktails with my mother and other limitations they had to live then on. And so I remember he has words, "Would you like me to live in a vacuum too? Goodbye, doctor." And I came out and said, "Dad, you just said to me, let's go home."

• 31:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, you say it here, he says, "Let's get home in time for me to have a martini with mom."

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 32:03Jocko Willink?

  So he let the doctor know that his, what the doctor was saying, no alcohol, no smoking, no more golf and all this stuff. And he said, "Okay, guess what? We're gonna go have a martini with mom." Now, in the spring of 1945, you joined the Navy. And, and you said, "For my parents, this is probably confirmation of our fall from gentility. Their only son was going to war as an enlisted guy." The war's still going on when you joined, 1945?

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Yes, but they heard the Japs gave up, not necessarily because of me, the Navy had already given up on me.

• 32:48Jocko Willink?

  So you go to boot camp, you go to firefighting school. You, you got this part in here, which I have to read. It says, "To get out of compulsory Sunday church services, I said I was Jewish."

• 33:02Speaker 01

  I just said I was a Jew.

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  "For this, I was assigned punitive cleaning duties. Whether this was because of anti-Semitism in the Navy, or because the Navy doesn't like liars, or both, I will never know."

• 33:21Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  I got to sleep in.

• 33:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then you you had a you all it also says all recruits were compelled to box. My sparring partner was a brute who had had fun beating the living crap out of me. I was saved by Ira Cohn, a genuine Jew who offered to switch sparring partners with me and proceeded to salvage he beat the guy who'd been doing a job on me. And then you get this break, which is my big break was the V five program, which had been set up to train naval aviators. This included a full ride at university and commissioned as an officer because only gentlemen could fly for the Navy. So they have this program out there to become a pilot and you actually.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable that he felt it went advertised throughout the fleet by order. And those who got through to sent to.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Get a degree and learn to get a degree before you can fly an airplane to to America for America.

• 34:21Jocko Willink?

  And you you you end up getting selected for the program. And and this is this is classic. So here we go. I was college bound, but I didn't know which college, nor did I care. Those of us who had passed the test were assembled from our various East Coast stations. At muster, role was called.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Daily Davis, Loftus and Monroe. I can remember very well. I don't have to read it.

• 34:44Jocko Willink?

  Daily Davis, Loftus and Monroe to New Haven, Connecticut, going to Yale University.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  We didn't know we were going to New Haven, but anyway.

• 34:51Jocko Willink?

  And then and then the others with the last team, last names N through Z were sent to Schenectady, New York and the Union College.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:58Jocko Willink?

  So by by by your alphabetical order, you get sent to Yale.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  A brilliant man.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  That's called Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood, I guess. I don't know.

• 35:10Jocko Willink?

  And then you get to Yale and it was pretty challenging. And you you talk about that.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  We had to wear uniforms at all times and guard college gates with empty rifles. But just it's clear that we weren't the normal quality of Yale men who wore white shoes and ties and so on. And I remember the high school girls at Navy High School used to go by our stand, not at attention, but the best you could.

• 35:45Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, the war had ended. And then you say, after my freshman year at Yale, the aviation cadet program was dissolved. I could stay on at Yale, but I had to sign a seven year enlistment. No way. I wouldn't sign. So I was sent to Norfolk, still a Seaman Second Class, to guard a gangplank.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  How have you seen it in my career?

• 36:08Jocko Willink?

  Fortunately, the peacetime Navy didn't need me for long. I received an honorable discharge on August 21st, 1946. To my stunned delight, I found that I still had that I still had some more American generosity coming my way. Thanks to the GI Bill, I was entitled to a year for having enlisted and one day of college for every day I had served, including my time in uniform at Yale. This was just enough time to compete, complete my studies and earn a college degree. To top off this bonanza of good fortune, Yale welcomed me back in September as a regular student in regular clothes, free to study whatever I wanted. I chose international relations. So there you go. That's a that's classic.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  No airplanes.

• 36:50Jocko Willink?

  You can't make that up.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Well, I would have if I if it was necessary, I didn't have to.

• 36:58Jocko Willink?

  The summer of 1947, I took a road trip. My elder sister at my elder sister Joan's suggestion, I dropped in on her in-laws in Chicago. They took me to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin for a weekend at their cottage. We went to the Belfry Summer Playhouse. Belfry Summer Playhouse to see another part of the forest, name of the play. I was stunned by one of the performances and stayed by one of the performers and stayed at the lake for three days, trying without success to Bed the Star by the name Mary Larmouth. Larmouth. So you see this girl and then you go back to Yale.

• 37:38Jocko Willink?

  You say I was bored despite good friends and touch football games and you couldn't get Mary out of your mind. Mary ended up moving to New York and you'd go visit her from New Haven.

• 37:49Jocko Willink?

  And then here we go. At some point, I got to thinking that all this was one hell of a deal for an immigrant. I couldn't get over the idea that I owed my country everything and I was possessed by restless and romantic feeling that I ought to pay my country back through further service.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  What a dope.

• 38:06Jocko Willink?

  I heard of my, I heard of a Marine Corps program, which would make me a commissioned officer if I spent the summer between my junior and senior years getting paid to train in a platoon leaders class in Quantico, Virginia. My sister Joan's husband, John, had been a World War II Marine in the Pacific. He was like an older brother to me and I had a lot of respect for the Marines in general because of the qualities I saw in John that were almost non-existent among my classmates. Marines know what I'm talking about. That is the few, the proud stuff that has led many good men to early deaths and others to disillusionment and boredom in a branch of service affectionately nicknamed the suck. A brotherhood in any case. And then after a six-week summer camp, you were a Marine officer. I was commissioned a second lieutenant

• 38:51Jocko Willink?

  in the peacetime Marine Corps. Dad didn't have much to say about my commission because he didn't have a crystal ball. As a Marine reservist, my standby orders read something like, only to be called upon in case of national emergency. So you become a Marine. Instead of attending graduation, Mary and I got married on a Saturday and both went to work on Monday. Mary worked at a department store and I got a job unloading millions of gallons of industrial molasses from deep water tankers at a pier in Baltimore for a British company. Mary and I were earning enough to buy a little Ford and rent a little house on the bay with a pump well for drinking water and an oil heater. Eventually, the oil leaked into the well, which was okay because

• 39:35Jocko Willink?

  it floated as long as the water level didn't get too low. When it did, we started getting greasy showers. We were so unbelievably happy. So you kind of scrounged together a nice little life at this point?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Very good. Very good. I was just, I felt good. The, I don't know if you get in there that the job was like, but, but it was a.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  I was running a one man, a two man terminal. And the industrial glass is collected from around the country and then collected there and then pumped on the, on the ships. And there were just two of us. And so the other guy had retired, head guy, and left one, my one man staff. So I went, saw the one man staff, big fat black guy. And we worked a lot. He was smarter than I was about this business by far. He would have been, except he's got the skin problem. So he worked for some years. And then he used to, uh, we got along fine.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  I noticed, after the first week or so, I noticed he took a break once or twice a day. And I didn't give a damn what he did, but he was, it was an easy job and unloading railroad cars and one thing or another. But he just disappeared. So I don't say to him, Nelson, tell him about this. I don't care what you do. But I'm kind of, I'm just curious. He said, I have to, I have to go to the toilet. And it was a big combination of a big industrial pump and off on the side was a toilet. I said, Chris, Nelson, we got a toilet here. He said, that's for white folks. I said, you'd be shitting me. He said, no.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  He said, that's been that way all the years, you've been here? Yeah. I said, well, that's just plain bullshit. Just forget that, okay? And so he said, all right. But I noticed when tank trucks came in to load, to unload the glasses and so on, that he was never, never near that toilet. This is Baltimore, Maryland, nineteen forty nine, nineteen forty nine. It's ridiculous. It was ridiculous. It is ridiculous now with some of the things we do, but that, that really bit.

• 42:06Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you're living that life, you're, like I said, you're pretty, pretty happy at that point, and then going to the book on June 25th, 1950, we got our national emergency. At dawn that morning, the Korean People's Army surged over the 38th parallel into the south. This action was immediately condemned by an emergency session of the UN Security Council, a vote from which the Soviets abstained. On June 30th, five days after the North's invasion of the South began, Truman sent American troops to support the South Koreans. On July 7th, the UN passed Resolution 84 requesting

• 42:47Jocko Willink?

  member nations to join a police action on the Korean Peninsula. Sixteen nations joined in, including ones with modest armies like Ethiopia and Turkey. General MacArthur, who had been serving as a de facto emperor of Japan since the war's end, was given command of UN forces. Unfortunately for South Koreans, MacArthur's army of occupation were not the same men who won the Second World War. Many were drunk and fat from half a decade of soft living as occupiers. They were beaten back almost off the peninsula by Kim Il-sung's peasant fighters, making their last stand outside the port of Pusan. The outcome looked

• 43:26Jocko Willink?

  bleak. On the 15th of September, MacArthur executed an act of military genius when he ordered the Marines, under his command, to make an amphibious landing at the port of Incheon, near Seoul. Mary and I knew little of Korean history, neither of us knew or cared about America's blundered diplomacy and intelligence failures that had left Korea in a national security blind spot. But Mary's attention skyrocketed when I reminded her of my standby orders and speculated that this skirmish seemed to qualify as a national emergency. My call to duty came shortly after Truman decided to commit troops to the UN's response to North Korea's assault. I went down to our local post office, where a Navy corpsman

• 44:06Jocko Willink?

  was giving the Marine physicals. I've always had low blood pressure. When the doc double-checked it, he wanted to turn me away. I had already taken leave from guarding millions of gallons of molasses and had gotten excited about going to war. I told him I'd rewrite back, went and ran up and down a few flights of stairs, and returned to somewhat breathless for a re-exam. The corpsman said something to the effect of, "Hey pal, if you're dumb enough to go, I'm dumb enough to send you."

• 44:33Jocko Willink?

  Up until that point, my military training consisted of PLC, which is the platoon leaders course, that summer camp at Quantico in 1948. Before deploying to Korea, I would receive additional training.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Excuse me, the PLC, platoon leaders class, the rest of the Marine Corps could see the little bars with silver bars and mistake them for a captain, and sometimes they'd salute us. That really bit. So, they said, "The platoon leaders class PLC, prick's last chance." And that stuck with us. The prick's last chance graduated.

• 45:11Jocko Willink?

  Before deploying to Korea, I would receive additional training in the first ever class of the special basic school. Now, today, it's just called the basic school. Is it special basic school because it was shortened for Korea?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  We were the first one. It was a creation. I think it had a much more extensive process prior to this souvenir hunt, and so that they... I won't say in any way a meat grinder, but it was fast. And it was created as first special basic. Today, the basic class goes to... well, a basic class would say six months, another year, or whatever, before your commission. But they needed new talents, and they need them right now.

• 45:52Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, we had just 11 weeks at the basic school. Obviously, we came away woefully underprepared for what lay ahead. On chilly autumn nights, when training didn't have me fumbling around that land navigation courses in the dark woods, I would sit by the fire or lie in bed with Mary and talk dreams about the arrival of our baby. Unspoken was the consolation that I was leaving her with child in the event that my absence became permanent. Those weeks at the basic school were consumed by seasoned Marines vainly trying to teach second lieutenant daily to read maps and lead riflemen. Not that I was going to need any of the skills I was learning. It looked as though the war would be over before we got our platoons. Then on Thanksgiving 1950, the Chinese launched their surprise

• 46:36Jocko Willink?

  attack at Chosin, and our brother Marines found themselves doomed.

• 46:44Jocko Willink?

  And that's where I started this whole podcast off, but then you get my orders. Were to report to Camp Pendleton near San Diego, California before shipping out across the Pacific. I said goodbye to my parents in Bethesda. My dad gave me a forty-five caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, recalling that he had founded a personal weapon. Recalling that he had found a personal weapon to be of comfort. Years later, my son Charlie was reading Tim O'Brien's Vietnam stories, The Things They Carried. He asked me if there was anything I carried in the war for good luck. I told him, "Yeah, a pistol." I still keep that pistol on my desk unloaded. Dad kissed me goodbye and hugged me. I can't recall him doing that, doing either ever before.

• 47:27Jocko Willink?

  The family's war history must have been on his mind as it was on mine. All through my deployment, my mother would garden nervously and dig holes in the yard like graves.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  I don't know what her motive was, but she just kept digging. I don't, I, maybe that's what was in her mind, I don't know, but she did do a lot of digging.

• 47:51Jocko Willink?

  I'm sure she was trying to keep her brain occupied.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  It could be.

• 47:56Jocko Willink?

  Mary and I planned to drive Westerner nineteen forty-nine Ford, but Mary was having trouble riding while pregnant, so she followed by train. After moving to what would have been a dream house in any other circumstance, just off the beach in Carlsbad. Angus and I, it's one of your buddies, Angus and I drove north to Camp Pendleton to check in. I explained to the weathered sergeant on duty that we had just arrived and gave the young wives a bit and asked for an added week's leave. And then he tells you the boat leaves Diego on Wednesday. Angus and I decided to break news separately and gently to our beauties. The moment I walked in the door, Mary looked at my face and started to cry. Angus's bride heard the news through the bathroom door, seated on the toilet. She screamed.

• 48:41Jocko Willink?

  So you, you think you're gonna get, yeah, can we get an extra week's leave? And they're like, "No, the boat leaves on Wednesday."

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. We'd rented that nice little house too.

• 48:53Jocko Willink?

  At muster on Monday, I was given responsible for responsibility for thirty or so Marines in the fifth replacement draft. The draft's mission was to bring the depleted Marine forces on the Korean Peninsula back up to strength for a counteroffensive. As I inspected their weapons and gear, the platoon sergeant advised me that many of these boys were virgins and suggested we rectify that before heading out. That night, we crossed into the U. We crossed the US Mexico border and found a brothel called El Serape, where I negotiated a group rate using my best college Spanish.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  A free discount.

• 49:27Jocko Willink?

  And some gestures to explain to the ladies, it wouldn't take these lads long. Not only was I the officer in charge of these guys, but at twenty-three, I was older than most than almost all of them. This was not lost on our host, who called the Marines niños, boys. On our way out, the ladies gathered to bid us farewell, offering streamers in faint tears. Years later, I was at a hotel bar in Veracruz, Mexico. I kept getting looks from one of the barmen. Finally, he shouted out El Serape.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  The opposite side of Mexico, I've been Veracruz, elegant hotel on the harbor rebuilding that shipping port. And my wife was with me in this hotel. And then the long bar. And I still I can't even remember what a lot of things people look like and so on. But I had been in Mexico and not down there. So the guy is mixing a drink or whatever the bartenders do. And he just, Bill Serape. He'd been in the other establishment. And Mary said, What's that about? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. Anyway.

• 50:43Jocko Willink?

  Of course, you know nothing about that. Dockside Wednesday morning, I bought $10,000 worth of short term life insurance from an enterprising Aetna Life salesman, supplementing the government's policy of the same amount. I would be taking over a platoon where most, if not all of my predecessors, had been killed or wounded. If I thought about it, I was fucked. But I didn't think about it.

• 51:08Jocko Willink?

  So now you get on a ship. We made a stop in Yosuka, Yokosuka?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:13Jocko Willink?

  Yokosuka, Japan, for two days picking up supplies and ammunition. We had a chance to call home. There was a long line to use phones. It was crowded. And I couldn't hear well. In a room full of Marines, I shouted into the receiver to Mary, "You bet your sweet ass I love you." The Marines off the ship had managed to get drunk and in trouble before the rest of us could even get down the gangplank.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Before she met me, she was the daughter of a Canadian minister. So it was kind of a slow learning process for both of us.

• 51:44Jocko Willink?

  So the first Marines off the ship managed to get drunk and in trouble before the rest of us could even get down the gangplank. We were ordered to remain on the base, officers included. Eager to experience the finer points of Japanese culture, I assembled a squad of like-minded Marines, lined them up in formation, and marched them to the main gate sternly, bringing the ranks to a halt. I advised the sentry that we were under orders to move into town and round up our misbehaving comrades. Outside the gate, I told the men to scatter, have fun, fuck their brains out, drink themselves stupid, but don't get arrested and do not miss the ship. I was showered with words of gratitude and promises to return on time.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  He did.

• 52:30Jocko Willink?

  Pete McCloskey, and this is the first introduction of Pete McCloskey. Am I saying that name right?

• 52:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 52:37Jocko Willink?

  Pete McCloskey and I met on the troop ship and had made it ashore earlier. I found him a geisha house infested with officers based in Japan. At one point, a Navy officer came from another-

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Just correcting, he had made it earlier.

• 52:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so he was already there, and then you showed up? At one point, a Navy officer came from another room and pompously ordered us to quiet down.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  It's a geisha house.

• 53:00Jocko Willink?

  When he returned to his party-

• 53:01Speaker 01

  They're paper walls.

• 53:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I threw an empty bottle through the paper screen wall, apparently striking someone. We heard a yell, then sirens. Pete and I clambered through the skylight and spent the night bivouacked on the roof.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Two gentlemen, two officers of the United States Marines.

• 53:21Jocko Willink?

  The finer points of Japan. In the morning, everyone made it back to the ship somehow. However, just before departure, six officers were ordered to stay in Japan. One was the future evangelist and presidential candidate, Pat Robertson. Pat got his daddy, then United States Senator Willie, or A. Willie Robertson, to have him pulled off the ship because Pat was probably having second thoughts about dying for his country. The other five lieutenants were beards pulled to cover for Pat's preferential treatment.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Disgusting.

• 53:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I don't go into it too much, but that comes back to bite him.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  It did come back to bite him. Later on in the book, we discussed the virtuous guy, now a wonderful preacher, presidential candidate, and so on. Just how the virtuous guy who said he was a combat Marine, he wasn't. Just how he got gonorrhea, but it was some miracle. They called it unspecified drip.

• 54:24Jocko Willink?

  Is that something like the immaculate conception to get gonorrhea without any contact?

• 54:30Speaker 01

  I don't know what the first case, but Robinson's was. It was truly, I mean, any faint idea that had entered his head that he had some duty to those Marines and so on just escaped him. As I say in the book, we called him out for exactly what he was. And when he was running for president and he sued McCloskey and said, "I'll break you."

• 55:11Speaker 01

  What do you call those things when they have testimony or whatever, court reports, of course, the suit in every state and will break you. And so it goes on quite a bit in the book about about that and the depth of the rot inside that guy.

• 55:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, you guys proceed. You land at Pohang, a port on the east coast of Korea. From Pohang, we were driven up into the hills in the back of trucks. The road was rough. The benches hard and cold. Nobody spoke. I thought about Marion, felt alone. It could be that this was the most frightening, one of my most frightening memories of the war, because the men to my left and my right were still strangers and we had not yet encountered the action that would bond us and give us the courage to get through much darker nights. At one piss stop, we heard that we had already lost some guys from another convoy, not slain in some glorious fight, but squashed by their vehicle when it skidded off the rutted road and rolled down the steep hillside.

• 56:11Jocko Willink?

  We reached First Division, First Origins Fifth Marine Regiment at the front. Not a lot of trenches, just some high hills, narrow valleys, and a small river with enemy lurking in the long night. Pete McCloskey and I were assigned to Charlie Company, First Battalion. The motto of the motto of First Battalion, Fifth Marines is make peace or die. For those of us who had just arrived in Korea, the latter seemed much more unlike, the latter seemed much more likely. It was February 16th, 1951. Before the Corps could give me a rifle platoon to command, I was designated the battalion supply officer. A lieutenant would have to be killed, wounded, or, least likely of all, rotated home before

• 56:54Jocko Willink?

  I got to a platoon. And so you're you're working as a supply officer for a while and you're you go through some stories, you're you're a little bit brash, I would say, a little bit rebellious. You know, there's some of the chiggy bearers who are these these Koreans that work, basically hauling gear and and you befriended some of them.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Well, I was their commanding officer because they, the supply officers had 50 chiggy bearers and they were, they'd carry supplies up and then help carry wounded down and they were. They were, uh, because they're small, um, they were ill-fed because they weren't given the rations they were promised. They had homemade shoes in many cases. They were very brave and, and I felt, I must say responsible for them, I suppose I felt that, but I felt we could, as these people could kill for us.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  And, you know, they'd just, they say, they'd pay them and want, you'd pay them by the barrel because the money was totally worthless. So, you could, I mean, our rations in those days used to include, when they're brought to us or they're carried up or whatever, in a ration you'd get, say, three Lucky Strike cigarettes, something like that. I don't happen to smoke, it seems as though they're in heaven. But they weren't, and I got the corpsman to look at them and, and they're very, uh, not pragmatic, but Machiavellian to keep them in good condition, going to carry their bodies, so it might as well help their feet.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  And I felt very close to them and I used to, I can do it now, my knees aren't so, I could squat for an hour or two easily, just as they do, and just, uh, find out what the corpsman to do and I, most of the time didn't have an interpreter, but I felt more and more close. And then the fucking colonel said, "You can't just squat down with a bunch of gooks." And he was not my favorite guy and I just ignored that. And I felt that they were, they were, uh, they weren't part of me, but certainly they were part of the Charlie Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marines when I got there, or the whole battalion.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  And, so, they didn't wear helmets, so I didn't wear a helmet. So then, another officer came from regiment and the prick, a major, he lifts and he just said, I think I rubbed my head in there or not, said, "Mr. Day, will you don't stop, wear, don't stop wearing your helmet, I'm trying to free you out of the battalion." "Oh shit, you're gonna send me home, you're fucking terrifying me." So, uh, but, anyway, it was, it was a, but...

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  That job exposed a lot of disgust to the performance of the Italian commander, who did not eat last. The lack of effort in trying to get decent supplies. I got a trailer and a jeep and stole some from the army, but that's not stealing something. They're sitting in the fat asses. These are reserve places. I'm not beloved in the army, but anyway. So it was okay. But it wasn't what I wanted to do. And then I had a chance to, in a volleyball game.

• 1:00:49Jocko Willink?

  A volleyball game?

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  The Colonel organized the headquarters group with the battalions. McCloskey did the battalion by then, so he put me on the side of the line of firsts. And this Colonel was much worse, I was sitting there, much worse than you can imagine. If I was calling down fire to protect the headquarters rather than worry about who's on the ridge who happened to be Marines. So I just replayed volleyball and I, in theory, missed the ball and hit him as hard as I could

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  but in his face through the net. And so then, pretty soon I got a battalion.

• 1:01:47Jocko Willink?

  Like I said, you were brash.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Well, if there was a duty call, I really, really, really wanted to hurt him because I really felt it was definitely important that he get out of there.

• 1:02:03Jocko Willink?

  And, and, well, you say in here, "My misbehavior in contempt for pointless rules and petty authority figures was indicative of an age-old fact of war." Quote, "Good soldiers who excel at shirt starching and personal grooming are seldom the guys you want in combat." Marines have a slur for these scrubbed, disciplined, rear-echelon types. We call them pogs, persons other than grunts. One early morning, I saw this distinction boil over and nearly turn deadly. Four of my chiggies, including the widower, were carrying a gut-shot North Korean who had been hit during a minor skirmish the night before and had been found aimlessly crawling on the hill. The bearers set the stretcher down beside the road, waiting for someone to collect

• 1:02:47Jocko Willink?

  the prisoner for interrogation if he didn't die first. A clean-shaven truck driver, who'd just finished hauling supplies up from the rear, had noticed that the wounded man had used what little strength he had left to struggle onto his side to take a piss. The truck driver waited for the trickle to start, then put a toe of his boot on the guy's shoulder to make him roll back and piss on himself. He laughed as the urine went all over the wounded man and seeped into his gut wound. Behind me, I heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle being racked. A Marine, possibly on the edge of reason from his last hill, aimed his weapon at the sadistic driver. "No!" I shouted. I shared the rifleman's disgust, but I couldn't let him throw his life away by committing

• 1:03:32Jocko Willink?

  murder.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  I'm just talking about one of the, one of the chiggy bearers you touched on there. Um, what can you talk about?

• 1:03:42Jocko Willink?

  The widower?

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he had, um, he had come to me and with an interpreter and said he wanted to get a pass to go back to see his death and his family. So, and I happened to have noticed him before because he was a little older than some and carrying a full loads and so on, and so.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  I said, boy, that's, in a group that size, there have to be line crossers who are just watching what we're doing and so on. So, nobody, once they came to us, the only way they die is if they're dead. I mean, to get out is if they're dead. At least the time I was there, you don't, nobody goes anywhere else, no matter what.

• 1:04:27Jocko Willink?

  Wait, these are the cheeky bears? No one goes anywhere else?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Well, they can't. There's been a X number of them. Say, one, play none, play two, or, uh, we're no, we're, we're spying on us, really, um, or so we're told, and probably rightly. So, uh, I gave him the, I think I wrote the book, it's by Prof. Zedem, I said that he's been good and so on. He's, he's going between where we are now and Won Ju. And, uh, then if, uh, if he's presented this after, uh, I gave him a week or whatever it was after such, such a date, or out of direct line between the two, kill him.

• 1:05:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  And I signed it with Labor Office of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marines, and sent him on his way.

• 1:05:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, here's the note that you wrote. So, this guy wants to go on leave and you send him with this note. This man is a stretcher bearer for Charlie Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marines. He has saved Marine lives. He is returning to Won Ju on emergency leave. If he is found anywhere off the line between Inji and Won Ju, or if he presents this pass after the date on the reserve, reverse side, kill him. Signed, Second Lieutenant Charles U. Daly, CO, Korean Labor Battalion, Fifth Marines. Now, how did you translate this to him so that he knew that he had this, so that he understood what that meant?

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't. I just gave him the pass and, uh, I didn't want him to be worrying about it, but, but I didn't want to...

• 1:06:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  No, I was responsible for doing it. I'm not some Marines who get killed, but, and whatever. So, uh, he, uh, fortunately, we didn't change our position on Inji, because he, uh, he had no place to go then, but that's, but he showed up. So, I felt good about it. And if I hadn't, if I hadn't felt good about it, I guess I would have felt good about it because someone killed the prick, because he was, in fact, a line crosser. But I don't think he was.

• 1:06:35Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, in mid-March I was up for promotion. That meant I had orders to report to the rear for a physical fitness test. I was excited for my first shower in a month, but mostly I wanted to know how Second Lieutenant Kerry Coward was doing. Am I saying that right, Coward? Yes, C-O-W-A-R-T. Yep. About a week earlier, trying to do the right thing, leading from the front, he had run ahead of his mortar section to observe where their rounds were landing. He was spotted by an enemy patrol and was sprayed with bullets from a burp gun, a toy-sized machi- submachine gun so named for spitting out bullets so fast they slur together into a burping sound. Considering how badly he was hit, I couldn't understand why our doctors would keep him in a tent hospital instead of sending him rearward to more sophisticated facilities.

• 1:07:18Jocko Willink?

  As soon as I reached headquarters, I asked about him and orderly checked the list.

• 1:07:24Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Coward died last night. Fuck. Coward was dead. And I got to take a shower.

• 1:07:32Jocko Willink?

  I felt sick.

• 1:07:36Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, I got under the hot, hot shower. Another naked guy, an older, wizened little fellow, entered and began his shower. He must have noticed my grimy gear. "It's quiet up there these days," he said. I tensed up, muttering something like, "Is that right?" All I could think about was Coward. I added that it was so nice to be back here in the rear with all the deep-thinking, big-picture geniuses. Unperturbed, he gave me his forecast. "Gooks will be pouring down any, any night now." About then, a man came in whom I recognized as Colonel Seeley, a regiment biggie who had visited the battalion and whose name I remembered as it was the same as my mother's maiden name.

• 1:08:19Jocko Willink?

  He nodded to the man I had just mouthed off to and said, "Hello, sir," in honest reverence for the man, as much the rank even in a state of undress. I realized the runt was none other than General Chesty, was none other than General Louis B. Chesty Puller, recipient of more real medals than a dozen other generals, a veteran of World War I, the Banana Wars, and World War II, hero of Guadalcanal and the Chosen Reservoir. I left that tent so fast, I still, I was still lathered up with soap while scrambling into my new uniform. I grabbed my weapons and made myself scarce. After passing my physical, I returned to the battalion a First Lieutenant.

• 1:09:02Jocko Willink?

  There you go. You had a little conversation with Chesty Puller in the shower.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Later on, he came by to inspect the lines. He was that kind of a general. He made some comment about, "He's not going to recognize me." And he said, "Pretty good line," or something like that. And I knew he had me by the balls, but I needed to squeeze. But what he referred to there, I might be for a minute to discuss, that he was right about that assault. He was wrong about the magnitude of it. And unbeknownst to Marine Intelligence or these useless generals, Almond and MacArthur and so on, because they're gone by then. But

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  anyway, it was a massive, massive accumulation of forces, what, 700,000 or there, about far more than before. And they moved at night. And they had, this is a whole, I don't see, I can tell you why we got some. And it assembled that force. And they had, later on, and quite recently, even in Marine Corps histories didn't have it, there's a professor of Korean, North America, I'm American speaking, Korean professor in Virginia, who someone got hold of the post-divorce, the war on, with the post-battle things, who quite recently got

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  hold of them. And they were the conversations between Mao and his generals. And he had decided that the only way to stop this, or bring a stalemate about, or whatever, was have massive, massive attack. And so he accumulated these troops. So the problem was, and he knew it, that they needed some additional training. They were taken from China and so on, and they were exhausted and semi-trained. But it could be done. And they had not accumulated enough, could not carry enough. They had to carry it because of US Air, carry much

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  of the equipment. So they had very small amounts of ammunition, like 20 rounds per pan or something like that, but a lot of them. And had limited amount of food. So they had, from the time they launched that.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  To the time they'd be out of ammunition and food was seven days. So, and this is that the Chinese knew that. But they said if we did it with enough force and could swamp the UN, at least we'd get a stand by and end this thing. And so that was unbeknownst to the US. But the generals also said they were so afraid of another amphibious landing that they sped their attack up from, it should have been late May to the end of April. And so, and I knew obviously none of that.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  And secondly, kind of first they had run around loose. But it's just later on that I was intrigued by that and by the ferocity of this. And you know, as usual, we did our little circle around ourselves and defended ourselves. And the second army division disappeared and the Republican Army are okay. Division on the other side disappeared, so there we were. That one sounds serious, but not impossible. But the, so that was a background thing. I think that we did stick that in the manuscript belatedly. But anyway, that's just back for your own information. And the casualties were far higher than the Marine casualties than they were the children by the time we finished waiting through this mess. But anyway, that's that.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  And that's go on, but I'm sorry to interrupt that.

• 1:12:57Jocko Willink?

  No, that's, that's, that's all good. It's, it's always interesting to hear the, the enemy's, the enemy's thoughts. And you know, one of the quotes that you've got in here is their, their, their strategy was to divide, encircle and annihilate. That's what they were trying to do.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  That's my whole theory.

• 1:13:15Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, that's obviously very aggressive.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  No, I gotta sit down and relax. I should, I gotta listen instead of talking.

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  I would rather you talk and I'll listen. How's that sound?

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  Not good.

• 1:13:30Jocko Willink?

  Once the Chinese had routed our allies and surrounded us, they planned to get so close to us that we'd be unable to call for air support or artillery without hitting our own men, thus negating our biggest technological advantage. And that's something that, you know, if you're going against a force that has air control and artillery, you get as close as you can. We call it hugging, hugging the enemy. They want to get so close to us that we can't call for fire. That's very important. Sometimes our pilots would drop ordnance on friendlies by accident with terrifying and horrible results. To lessen the chance of this, the Marines would put one of their pilots on the ground with each Marine infantry battalion. We called our guy, we always called our guys ace. Very unhappy. And the Marine Corps still does that.

• 1:14:15Jocko Willink?

  That's good. We had Marine Corps pilot with us on the Battle of Ramadi, you know, and he was running a little team of Marines. I'm glad to hear that. It's outstanding that they do that. If I would have known, I would have called a mace, but I didn't know that. If I had have known that you guys always called a mace, we would have called the good deal Dave Brick, I would have called a mace. Pilots must have hated it when it was their turn, but we like to know that at least they had personal stake in not firebombing Marines. Pilots could strafe the hill with wing mounted machine guns and bless the men they hit with a quick death, but their most effective weapon was napalm, the famous jellied gasoline designed in a lab at Harvard University in 1942 that sticks

• 1:14:57Jocko Willink?

  to human skin and burns up to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Napalm kills by burning as well as hypothermia and asphyxiation as it sucks up all the breathable air around its flames. This makes it particularly effective against caves, foxholes, and bunkers. Anyone who isn't barbecued dies from lack of oxygen. It flows downhill into trenches and holes, so there's nowhere to take cover. I don't have words to describe the screams and the stench, except to say that I've never heard or smelled anything so awful. Napalm has stuck to my memory and is still burning after all these years. My dreams are disfigured by it.

• 1:15:40Jocko Willink?

  One day in the last week of April, we went through some ground that had been held by the North Koreans. Due to the prior use of napalm, we encountered no resistance. The dead were burned black. One Marine put an unspoke cigarette in a charred mouth with still white teeth of a corpse suspended in the agony of immolation. This gag was good for morale. As the hardened platoon passed by, they cracked jokes. "You want a light, buddy? Be careful with those cigarettes, they'll make you cough. That last puff must have been a ballbuster. Is that filtered or unfiltered?"

• 1:16:15Jocko Willink?

  I laughed too.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Might as well.

• 1:16:21Jocko Willink?

  The war provided no shortage of grim reality checks to one's patriotic pretensions. During the retreat, my friend Jim Abels was accidentally shot in the back by one of his own men who failed to put his weapon on safe. The trigger snagged on something while they climbed into a tank, onto a tank for a ride. Jim fell off the tank and onto the road. I ran over to him just in time to hear him gasp a final word. A cliche of war movies and novels that happens to be something dying men really say. Shit.

• 1:16:54Jocko Willink?

  Abels had loved his home state of Texas. Leading patrols, his first three checkpoints would be Tango Echo X-Ray, followed by Alpha Sierra. I would learn that Abels had worked for O.C. Fisher, a useless congressman from Texas 21st District. A dozen years later, while I was working in Kennedy's West Wing, I paid a visit to Fisher's office. No sooner could I mention Abels than this blowhard sounded off in a loud drawl about how he knew Abels died gloriously for keeping us safe from the communists.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  He assembled his staff and said that?

• 1:17:30Jocko Willink?

  He assembled his entire staff in his office and prompted me to regale them about Abels' patriotic and heroic end. By then, I had lied to Gold Star mothers and wives about the circumstances of their beloved's deaths. I had let them think that it had been great or purposeful, or that their boys hadn't suffered or gone out screaming. But I told this group, "That's not what happened." Jim died because another Marine's safety was off, and it was fucking tragic and awful, and his last words were, "Shit."

• 1:18:03Jocko Willink?

  Looking back, I know I shouldn't have used those bitter words, but I loved Jim and I didn't know how to handle the way this slob was talking about him.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  I know how to handle it, I didn't do it, I don't know why I did it.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  So I didn't do Jim any good?

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 1:18:32Jocko Willink?

  You, eventually you get transferred out of Charlie Company's supply to become the mortar section leader of Charlie Company, supporting the rifle platoons with 60 millimeter rounds lobbed with limited accuracy and effectiveness from portable mortar tubes.

• 1:18:50Jocko Willink?

  In his History of the Korean War, the late David Halberstam describes the situation that spring 1951. "The war had settled into an unbearable, unwinnable battle. It had reached the point where there were no more victories, only death. It may have seemed unbearable, but both sides bore it."

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:10Jocko Willink?

  "War is all about bearing the unbearable. Oftentimes discomfort, whether from the cold or rain or lack of hot food, is what breaks a man when heaped upon with the many other stresses and fears of combat." One reason they stopped executing men who broke down on the line after World War I was that psychologists came to understand that given enough time in the shit, the psychiatric casualty rate will reach 100% in any unit.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Do you believe that?

• 1:19:40Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do too.

• 1:19:42Jocko Willink?

  I mean, there's a limitation to what people can take. I guess, I guess, no, you know why I would say I wouldn't believe it is because the only way you wouldn't believe is there's some people will die before they reach that point.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:55Jocko Willink?

  But that's the only thing that will keep it from reaching 100%.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  They won't ever get it, but no longer important, no longer a statistic of that thing. That's true.

• 1:20:07Jocko Willink?

  Our company commander, Spike Schenning,

• 1:20:11Jocko Willink?

  was a very careful man who always insisted on neatly packed knapsacks, clean, dry shaves, the burial of every rationed can or cigarette, but he never shouted, but a look from Spike was enough. A grimace from him was like a form of corporal punishment. His only non-regulation gear was a carved walking stick that underscored his walk-in-the-park attitude toward danger. Spike was a Mustang Marine who had started as a boot and worked, or rather fought, his way up to become a commissioned officer.

• 1:20:41Jocko Willink?

  A veteran of Tarawa and Iwo Jima, he was a badass if there ever was one. Normally Spike was not reckless, but he had one unfortunate habit. He would not bend under actual or potential fire. There's a combat photographer's photo taken on that beautiful spring morning showing Spike standing upright, leaning casualty against the remains of a small tree that had been stunted by previous exchange of fire. He set an unfortunate example for those around to do likewise, breaking two of the most basic rules of movement in a war zone. Don't stand on a ridgeline, don't silhouette yourself. My mortar section was dug in nearby. I got up from my hole to join the group on the ridge.

• 1:21:24Jocko Willink?

  Spike had just ordered the platoon leader who'd been relieved to take over my mortar platoon section and gave me, and give me, uh, command of the platoon. Trying to make the change without hurting a good man. So, I didn't cover this part, but he was basically firing this platoon commander and he's gonna put you into that platoon.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Jocko Willink?

  And he's trying to make the change without hurting a good man or flattering me. Spike said this switch was not a big deal, merely an exchange that would give each of us civilians a chance to learn yet another Marine job. As ordered, I left the group and headed towards second platoon's position in relative safety below the crest of the ridge. I had moved no more than fifteen or twenty yards when a shell exploded on the ridge line. An enemy spotter must have found it an irresistible target. Everyone on the ridge had been hit. Half of my predecessor's clothes had been blown off. He was riddled with shrapnel and destined to wake up in a hospital to begin a long stay. Spike was still on his feet, but he had no helmet and had a nasty wound with lots of bloods, but no brains showing. Years later, Spike would get hit again, this time in Vietnam.

• 1:22:26Jocko Willink?

  I asked him what happened. The same fucking thing. I was standing on a hill out in the open and they blew me up.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  There was something.

• 1:22:34Jocko Willink?

  Others were stunned, but less seriously wounded. When a Marine in charge goes down, the maps are passed on to the next in line. Spike looked at his executive officer and mumbled, "You know where the maps are." Then he went down, dazed and drifting in and out. Our company got a new commander, and I got a rifle platoon. So that's how you, that's how you, that's your taking over your rifle platoon. And that's the scenario right there.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:01Jocko Willink?

  We were talking a little bit about...

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  We have a memory, I have it on my desk now. I have a hammerhead, someone threw at me a while ago and I disarmed it. And also a railroad spike that was silver plated, or it looked to be silver plated, full size. And that, what are, that's Spike Shenning, they call Spike. And some of the men who served in some reunion, someone came up with that.

• 1:23:32Jocko Willink?

  I like that he called you guys civilians.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  He said, he said, I didn't like it at all. He said, uh, he says, "You university boys, you civilians are ruining my profession." And he just felt somehow he could mold us to be of something, have some sort of value compared with, with those Marines he had really grown up with.

• 1:24:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the old breed.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  He was, yeah, he was, he didn't get to be old, but he did. And he ended up his days going to disaster parts in the world on behalf of the, of the Med Cross. He's a good guy.

• 1:24:16Jocko Willink?

  Amazing. You're talking to...

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  And we weren't as bad as he thought we were.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  I'm sure he still thought it.

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  Really setting the high standard, you know.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Very, that's the idea, well, Steve experienced that sort of thing.

• 1:24:31Jocko Willink?

  You were going back to the book, "Night was a tender time. The enemy moved on hills around us using bugles to communicate, relay messages and drive the point home that we were awful and totally surrounded. The enemy were very good at moving silently, sometimes able to enter a fighting hole undetected. One night, they snatched a guy from Pete's platoon right out of his two-man hole. His partner awoke to find him gone, never to be heard from or accounted for."

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  I'll just insert then on that text, just say that the pistol I had, I wore, that my dad gave me. But after that incident, I cut away the leather part between that and the trigger. So I figured if I got awakened at night, at least I could fire through the holster. I didn't really want to be hold on to somebody's gifts.

• 1:25:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:25Jocko Willink?

  And here you talk about something else. "Other than dark, I had one great fear: landmines. More specifically, I feared one particular wound they tend to inflict. There's an anti-personnel mine known as a bouncing Betty, which shoots a light charge up from the ground around a waist height before detonating. It's designed to wound and maim, not to kill. From a tactical point of view, it's as brilliant as it is evil, because a wounded man takes a whole fire team out of action while they work to stabilize and move him. Walking through my first minefield, I kept one hand deep in my pocket, subtly clutching my brains.

• 1:26:05Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes when a guy loses his hand in combat, it's because he was using it to cover something of even more value to him."

• 1:26:15Jocko Willink?

  You continue on, "Sometimes the enemy flowed around us chasing bits and pieces of retreating US and Korean Army units. When they did attack our positions directly, they suffered tremendous losses. In the morning after an assault, there were piles of bodies in front of our lines which were counted for the sake of those in the rear who equated body counts with winning. Hundred and fifty-two one morning, a hundred and seventy-something the other. Our losses were few during such attacks, but so were our numbers."

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  I have some photographs of that, uh, one morning of that nature, taken by some attached combat photographer or whatever. And it's unbelievable numbers of them. I thought people would lie about numbers so that the Colonel or the generals would think, "Well, whatever heroic guys they are." But when you see several hundred, uh, in front of you, really from the advent of the machine gun, um, and our ability to make these interlocking bands of fire, and you see the result of it, it really is true, it's a slaughter.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  It didn't bother me one tiny bit, not nearly as much as an individual dead, um, North Korean or Chinese. It's just, there's such a mass that you can't quite grasp what, uh, what it's like. So, so what sticks in my head much more than that is an individual, uh, who I've gone far away as you and kill.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  And that didn't make a fucking bit of difference to the two, three hundred, um, except it does, because you can't, your mind isn't capable of, my mind anyway, is not capable of grasping that sort of a thing you don't even see in a, in a cattle slaughterhouse, uh, or individually. What can you do?

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  But you know better than that, I'm about the same thing, it's just, and I hope that that's a human trait, that at least somehow something reaches into you, sticks with you what you've done.

• 1:28:21Jocko Willink?

  I believe it is.

• 1:28:25Jocko Willink?

  You continue on here. Around May 15th, we received replacements. Newcomers usually didn't last long and their losses were less painful if we didn't get to know them. Before going out on one patrol, I noticed that one of the greenest replacements was nervous, was so nervous that he was shaking. Against standard operating procedures and the obvious wishes of my platoon sergeant and squad leaders, I ordered that the kid, who looked about 12, stay behind to guard the packs. The patrol went out and it was without incident. However, when we returned from our walk, the new kid was gone. McCloskey came over to tell me what happened. After we left, the kid had gone down to shoot the shit with a fellow replacement from Pete's platoon. The kid sat on a landmine.

• 1:29:04Jocko Willink?

  We sent the kid, we sent the dead lads back packed to the rear, where sensitive articles such as condoms would be removed before whatever personal items it may have contained were sent home to his next of kin. He was so new that not one of us could recall his name. Pete and his platoon sergeant profusely thanked me. The boy had cleared a mind for us without even nicking anyone else.

• 1:29:33Jocko Willink?

  Later that month, when a fresh batch of replacements hiked past our position on their way to the company command post, I turned my back to avoid even looking at them. But one in particular noticed my averted eyes. It's a fine thing to travel thousands of miles to find someone who won't even say hello. Douglas Dacey, is that right, Dacey? Dacey. Douglas Dacey, a buddy from PLC, stepped out of their ranks. I recognized his Texas drawl. Dacey was a veteran of World War II, the son of a Lebanese immigrant who had sent all his boys to war by way of thanking America for its generosity. Dacey was also the heir to a small fortune and had used his privilege to get into the fighting rather than avoid it.

• 1:30:13Jocko Willink?

  His father, his place in the infantry was secured as a favor to his father by another than Lyndon Baines Johnson. During his first week in Korea, Dacey was lightly wounded by shrapnel. He didn't report the wound because he was afraid he'd get a Purple Heart and if he got another after that, he might be sent home. While Dacey was still at Quantico, he looked after Marion DC. When he got deployed, he told her, "I'm going to look after Chuck."

• 1:30:39Jocko Willink?

  Dacey's men came to call him the Undertaker because more than once he crawled forward under fire to drag a dead Marine back to our lines. I would name my second son after Douglas. He went on to serve our government in secret ways, became an economics professor and eventually retired to a ranch in Kyle, Texas where he and his twin brother raise cows. They can't bring themselves to slaughter them. An old age, an old age home for cows. You can't kill them once, once you've named them, Dacey told me.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  That's what I say about him, just the, he, we know very well, not uncommon, I suppose, that he finished his Marine career by signing over to the CIA and it was just way, an economics professor didn't go to the place where he went. So when, when the things got worse, he's a little guy, you know, with, he looks like a fucking Lebanese immigrant, whatever they look like. But anyway, he said, Jesus nowadays, we know what you're doing, but now you get the ultimate way to serve your country, we're just, you know, you look like a fucking Arab, we'll dress you in a bed sheet, drop you, and you get in among and really do a great job for your pals at the CIA.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  He said, what makes you think things like, he didn't have a droll, he had a shit kid accent, not really. You don't makes you think things like that about me, I'm a professor. Anyway, he was a beauty. He's in a nut house now, not that, he's the last days of, of what do you call it, Alzheimer's. And, but he's, he doesn't know about it, and he was, he's a good guy. He is a good guy right now.

• 1:32:17Jocko Willink?

  So that same group of replacements, and, and this, this happens, a runner followed Dacey and the replacements up a hill with a telegram for me. Please pass to Lieutenant Charles U. Daly, oh, five, oh, four, one, eight. Son, Michael, weighing five pounds, twelve and three quarters ounces, born Saturday, nineteen May, at two, zero, six, PM. A black haired Mick. Mary and Michael both fine, love Mary. I folded up the telegram and put it in my wallet and thought it'd be nice to have if I make it. Now that note belongs to Michael's first daughter, my first grandchild, Shanae. So that's how you get notified that you had your first kid.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  I know you have three daughters, so I should be careful. But I didn't put it in there, but the, uh, McCloskey's had the other platoon, first platoon. And, um, I didn't know, he said, you know, one of my guys said, "We had a son." Because his was his daughter, and he said, "That's terrible."

• 1:33:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I have three daughters and a son, yes.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  I knew that when you said that. I'm taking my life in my hands, and I'm sure as hell I can talk to your wife about it.

• 1:33:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, we'll leave it at that.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:40Jocko Willink?

  And this is good. Uh, every, every year on my birthday, so now we're going into a, a, another section of the book. Every year on my birthday, May 29th, Pete gives me a call and tells me, "You should have died today." Sometimes he adds, "You miserable son of a bitch." I dredge up some old comeback, and we reminisce about what happened that day in 1951. My citation puts it like this. "The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star to First Lieutenant Charles U. Daley, United States Marine Corps, for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity as a, as leader of a rifle platoon of Company C, First Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division, in action against enemy aggressor forces in Korea on 29 May 1951.

• 1:34:25Jocko Willink?

  Assigned the mission of driving a strong enemy force from well-maintained, from well-entrenched positions on a high knob north of Inje.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Inje?

• 1:34:34Jocko Willink?

  Inje, First Lieutenant Daley boldly led his men up a narrow spine, completely devoid of cover and concealment, and carried out a successful assault against the hostile strong points in the face of fierce automatic weapons and small arms fire, killing many of the enemy and forcing the remainder to retreat in disorder. Quickly reorganizing his unit, he pursued fleeting hostile troops and overran an enemy regimental command post, capturing many valuable documents and prisoners. By his marked courage, skilled leadership, and unswerving devotion to duty, First Lieutenant Daley served to inspire all who observed him and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service."

• 1:35:18Jocko Willink?

  And that's your citation.

• 1:35:22Jocko Willink?

  But you add, "Those words omit the part of the day that I would go on reliving. The guilt over what I did and what I didn't do.

• 1:35:32Jocko Willink?

  And the feeling that the bravest thing I did, that all of us did, was just keep moving uphill toward gunfire.

• 1:35:41Jocko Willink?

  My citation leaves out two war crimes I committed, crimes for which I was only punished with horrible memories. There's no mention of the men on both sides who died or sustained awful wounds from my red and white and blue ribbon with a star dangling from it.

• 1:36:01Jocko Willink?

  And the words leave out just how hard it is to get young men to fire accurately or at all, so that they kill other young men.

• 1:36:12Jocko Willink?

  "May 29th was a beautiful morning after a chilly tense night. I turned 24, probably my last birthday."

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Possibly.

• 1:36:21Jocko Willink?

  "It was, my platoons turned to lead the company into what we had been told was an area held by a formidable North Korean regiment. Our objective was to take an exceptionally rugged hill. There was a cliff just west of the top and a steep exposed slope to the east. Our only way up was a narrow spine with all cover and concealment long since blasted away. General Thomas concluded that enemy resistance in these hills, such as this one, around what was called the Kansas Line, would be broken not by air power, but by their marine riflemen."

• 1:36:59Jocko Willink?

  To which you respond in the book, "Roger that."

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  That's so corny. Can you take that out of there? I said, "No shit," or something like that.

• 1:37:09Jocko Willink?

  I thought it was one of the, uh, Roger that's with, that's sarcastic Roger, like Roger that.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's all right. Maybe that's what it was. Don't be serious about it.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Read you, read you, like a Boy Scout. Which I got thrown out of the fucking Boy Scouts. That's another subject.

• 1:37:30Jocko Willink?

  At first let I can remember thinking that we were facing a great defensive position. Several of the platoon must have had the same thought and knew it was going to be a long day because I had company when I stepped off the trail to take a piss after we dropped packs and were getting ready to move up and out.

• 1:37:46Jocko Willink?

  The air was tense. Even the chattiest Marines were silent. The smokers silently smoked up a storm. I wondered if the North Koreans could smell Lucky Strikes on our men as we could sometimes smell garlic on theirs. With two words you don't hear very often in modern combat, I gave the order, "Fix bayonets."

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  Covering manly.

• 1:38:12Jocko Willink?

  I mean, that's a, that's a serious statement if you're making, going up with machine guns and you're still fixing bayonets.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  We didn't, we weren't sure anywhere was up there, but just in case, I don't, I did it for, anyway, it's ridiculous, but I did it for a solid purpose, really.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  Which goes on, explains why I'll tell you.

• 1:38:34Jocko Willink?

  That didn't help anyone's peace of mind.

• 1:38:37Jocko Willink?

  But I liked bayonets for the scare factor. I knew that frightening the enemy was a good way to keep young men from getting killed on both sides. Fear is tactically useful. Warner, the new company commander, who is even greener than me, offered to call in an airstrike if we got into trouble. I declined, pointing out that strikes had recently been put under Army Command and we were running late and with the habit of, and were running late and with the habit of hastily dumping their loads on friends and foe alike. Any delay in air or artillery would leave us exposed under fire. The only course of action was to get in and among the enemy so their support, mortars, guns, and heavy weapons would have to be lifted.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  I just wanted to insert into that text that people maybe read was that delay was caused by a general armored.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Ahmin, I think, who commanded the UN forces at that time. And he was an army general and he just thought that the marine system, conducted by the Marines and the Navy, of close air support and directly on an ad hoc basis, the ace on the ground could see what's going on, or we could endure what's going on, and we had to be able to order right away. No way. He issued an order that all requests for close air goes through the army headquarters. It's a built-in certain delay.

• 1:40:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's centralized command and doesn't work.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's precisely the right to say because it was an immensely effective, life-saving, to our selfish point of view, tactic that he destroyed. He didn't delay it, he destroyed it. It is impossible to do this. Anyway.

• 1:40:30Jocko Willink?

  Well, going back, so now you go back and you say, "My duty was to keep the men moving and firing. I talked with my platoon sergeant, whose advice was essential, because were a major firefight to take place, it would be my first. We agreed that if we came under fire, the lead squad would charge directly up the spine, second squad would fire everything they had at the ridge to the west of the hill, and third squad would continue the charge led by the first squad. The machine gun section attached to the platoon would follow and set up on the hilltop as soon as it was secure to fend off any counterattack. We just received reports that elsewhere, a North Korean had played dead, just like Dozy at Chosen."

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  Dozy, yeah.

• 1:41:12Jocko Willink?

  Dozy at Chosen, and had shot a couple Marines in the back after they walked past. I wanted to make sure that if it didn't happen, that didn't happen to any of us, so I passed the word, "If they don't stink, stick 'em."

• 1:41:24Jocko Willink?

  At zero eight hundred, we began slowly climbing up the ridge, single file on a narrow trail. There were small pines and some saplings blown leafless by the earlier shelling. To delay our advance, limbs were piled on the path, forming poor man's barbed wire. No birds sang. I was walking close behind the first squad when we came to a small knoll at the base of a much larger hill that loomed above. Billy Bell, an experienced rifleman from Arizona, got ready to toss a grenade over the crest of the knoll, just in case there was an ambush waiting there. Not wanting to alert the enemy to our advance and afraid of seeming trigger happy in a situation where there might be no enemy, I knocked my wedding ring against the stock of my carbine to get Bell's attention and signaled no hand grenade.

• 1:42:13Jocko Willink?

  He put the grenade back in his pocket and resumed leading our first team over the crest of the hill in a crouched walk. In an instant, Bell and two other Marines went down under a shower of enemy grenades and bullets. The rest of the squad rolled off the rise and those of us who weren't shocked into inaction began shooting.

• 1:42:35Jocko Willink?

  Fire, fire. Shoot, goddammit. Fire. Bell is down. Grenade. Shit, I'm hit. Corpsman, help. Keep going. Fire, fire, fire. Kill those cocksuckers. They're bailing out. I'm out of ammo. Use your fucking bayonet. Keep going. Stick 'em. Fire, goddammit. Fire.

• 1:42:54Jocko Willink?

  I figured the louder we were, the more we'd give the impression that we were a huge force ready to kill anyone standing between us and the Yalu River. The sound of two dozen or so riflemen firing all at once is impressive. Daisy would recall, it sounded like World War II up there. I let loose all the rounds in my carbine, aiming uphill at no particular target. I reversed my magazine and loaded a second that I had taped to it for faster reloading and resumed firing, adding to the din. An unlucky North Korean popped up in front of me from a hole. His throat and jaw blew apart with the squeeze of my trigger finger. A shout from my radioman, "The captain wants you. He's telling us to drop back and

• 1:43:35Jocko Willink?

  wait for artillery. Tell him to go fuck himself." There were so many grenades being tossed down the hill at us that I thought we were under mortar fire.

• 1:43:47Jocko Willink?

  We reached the top of the main hill. There were many enemy dead, wounded, and surrendering. I was wild with frustration because my caution on the knoll had been costly. With a few riflemen, I kept running over to the far side of the hill in pursuit of some fleeing enemy. We were surrounded, we were astounded to find our charge had been, had put us among a bunch of North Korean officers with maps still in their hands as though they'd been in a routine review of their position. Unbelievable. Another unarmed enemy officer crawled out of a command bunker and started berating his comrades, apparently upset that they were surrendering to this handful of exhausted Marines. One version of what happened next appears in a chapter about me in Pete's book,

• 1:44:29Jocko Willink?

  The Taking of Hill 610. Daley personally pushed the captured and surly Korean commander off a thousand-foot cliff.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  That's a crime.

• 1:44:39Jocko Willink?

  That's the legend, and a prime example of how the truth gets warped by memory and the intense emotions of combat and its aftermath. Here's the facts. I knew we had to shut this guy up before he got his men to realize that we were overextended, low on ammo, outnumbered, and vulnerable. My carbine was empty, so I couldn't have shot him even if I wanted to, which I did not. I figured he'd be less noisy with his clothes off, so I threatened the officer with my bayonet and motioned for him and his men to strip, which some of them proceeded to do. I have a picture of the three of them, hands upraised, two clad in undershirts, and one in longer underwear held together by a string that came undone, revealing his limp dick. You can see their ribs. They looked dazed and frightened.

• 1:45:24Jocko Willink?

  All prisoners except the loud officer were tense but silent. Without warning, their leader turned, dashed over the cliff's edge, and may have been shot in the back

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  That's the problem.

• 1:45:35Jocko Willink?

  by an alert rifleman who still had some rounds in his weapon. In any case, the major could run, but he could not fly.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  That's a smart-ass remark. And I regret it. I don't, he didn't have to get killed. Anyway.

• 1:45:51Jocko Willink?

  He didn't have what?

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  He didn't have to get killed.

• 1:45:54Jocko Willink?

  It sounded like, it sounds, it sounds like he killed himself.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  No, he didn't. Anyway. That's just... That's mostly the truth, but it's... Anyway.

• 1:46:07Jocko Willink?

  Was he running, was he making a move?

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was making a move and, and I mean, we were outnumbered, we had these goddamn geniuses on their side there and it's just, um, I don't think my cabin was empty, anyway. It's just a mess. So, until Pete tried to protect me and...

• 1:46:43Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know what I got.

• 1:46:49Jocko Willink?

  So...

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  At least you guys didn't mean to me.

• 1:46:59Jocko Willink?

  At this point, all other firing had stopped except for picking up the pieces, this fight was over. The pieces included Billy Bell's right arm blown off of the shoulder. He was leaning against a tree, holding a compress, calm and pale. "I hope you're left-handed," I said, not knowing what else to express, not knowing how else to express my concern without upsetting him. He responded, "I am now lieutenant." Elsewhere on the hill, we lost Lieutenant Buckman, who on numerous occasions onboard the troop ship had said, "I'm going to die in Korea." There were screams coming from a badly wounded North Korean laying close by. His dying was getting louder and louder.

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  He's dying if it was that, and that's, yeah, it seems so.

• 1:47:47Jocko Willink?

  And I could see how much that sound was bugging the platoon. A young corporal brought it up, brought up the decent thing to do. "Lieutenant Daley, you want me to do him a favor? Do it." A shot, then silence. "I knew then and I know now that shooting a prisoner or ordering such a killing is a war crime regardless of the victim's condition. My only punishment has been the unending knowledge of my guilt."

• 1:48:19Jocko Willink?

  I know that I shouldn't have ordered it. I know that if it had to be done, I should have done it with my own revolver and protected my fellow marine from that memory.

• 1:48:29Jocko Willink?

  I hear that shot right now.

• 1:48:49Jocko Willink?

  You continue on. After the murder, came the next grim task.

• 1:48:54Jocko Willink?

  Searching the pockets of enemy corpses for papers to send back to intelligence officers. One enemy had half of his head missing. Daisy came up to see how I was doing. I pointed to the corpse and said, "That guy's lucky his head wasn't blown off completely." "Yeah, that might have killed him." "In one pocket, I found a picture of what must have been a man's wife and the newborn baby he'd never see."

• 1:49:18Jocko Willink?

  "Hey Lieutenant." "Don't feel so bad," said David Ivins.

• 1:49:23Jocko Willink?

  A talented machine gunner who could see I was upset. At least he got to see a picture of his baby. I wondered if I would be so lucky.

• 1:49:32Jocko Willink?

  I pocketed the three-stripe shoulderboard of an officer I killed in the first moments of the battle. Daisy kept an unexploded hand grenade that must have been thrown by a North Korean too frantic to pull the pin. Douglas disarmed it, and when we met again back in the States, he gave it to me. I've used it as a paperweight ever since. The Chiggy bearers arrived with ammunition, water, rations, and our packs from the bottom of the hill. We sat and hydrated among the dead and wounded. Those who could eat, ate cold, tinned rations for lunch. Everyone's favorite was the canned fruit cocktail. Some men would eat the fruit cocktail first in case they got wounded or otherwise they, or otherwise had their meal interrupted. They would have at least enjoyed the best course.

• 1:50:19Jocko Willink?

  I wrote a page or two about the day to my dad. I wanted him to know I had fought well.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  That's ridiculous. That's the same fucking thing they did in World War I.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  This is a fun game we play.

• 1:50:34Jocko Willink?

  I mean, these are obviously, you're going through these, the, these situations over there. And you're 23 years old at this time, maybe 24?

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  That day.

• 1:50:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you, you turned 24 that day?

• 1:50:49Speaker 01

  That was, that was probably talking about you.

• 1:50:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  Is that right? Yeah.

• 1:51:01Jocko Willink?

  You, you know, I don't know if I've covered it well enough, but it seemed like with, with a lot of the things that you wrote, you didn't really think you were gonna make it through this situation.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Not really. I didn't, on the other hand, in the midst of this situation, that,

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  you can't stand around on this halfway up a hill, there's so many rats, and so I already committed myself to that, and I just, it is not easy to have, it sounds tr- to have these guys fire, I mean, they're firing, they're not firing, they're firing range, and just qualifying to be a rifleman or something like that. They're fighting to kill and, and get through all this stuff. And the only way to do it is, is keep going and keep firing. And as Daisy said, it sounded like World War II, but I mean, I think that, that there wasn't much choice in, in that. And then just later on, when, when I see these goddamn executives come out of their holes,

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  they got me cranked up as far as not stopping. And,

• 1:52:13Jocko Willink?

  The, um,

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  I don't know what I thought.

• 1:52:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, even beyond this one day, when you read the whole section, again, obviously, I'm jumping through huge pieces of this, but I don't think I, I mean, it, it doesn't seem like you thought you were gonna live through this war. You know, it seemed like, I mean, that situation, you were, you were doing what you had to do. I mean, you, you know, you're not thinking, you're not thinking like long-term thoughts when you're charging up a hill towards a machine gun. You're just doing what you gotta do to survive. But the other parts of it where you're, many times you say, look, I didn't think I was gonna see my kid. I didn't think I was, and even when you say you wrote a page or two to your dad about what you did that day, cuz you wanted your dad to know, hey, you know, I did my duty.

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  You know, all of this, that's about the hidden part. In World War I, one of the Charlie said, you know, I played the game yesterday. It's a fucking game, but it, but it, and so it was a different expression. But somehow he wanted, I mean, I love my dad and I want him to be proud of me. And I had no illusions about what sort of shape the body might come back in, and that or this, what, I don't know, it's crazy that I have respect for him, I'm killing some people. It's ridiculous.

• 1:53:34Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, there was another hill a couple of days later that we occupied with no resistance. David, David Ivens, you say Ivens?

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  Ivens, I-V-E-N-S.

• 1:53:45Jocko Willink?

  David Ivens was setting up his machine gun a couple of feet above where I was sitting safely below the crest of the hill. We laughed about how easy the hill had been taken compared to May 29th. Easy except...

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  He was cleaning his, actually, in the book, he was just cleaning parts of his machine, just messing around, there was nothing going on.

• 1:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Easy except a faulty radio left me out of touch. McCloskey had sensed my problem and dispatched his own radio man, Rocky Bruder, up the hill to establish comms. Rocky paused to catch his breath just short of my position, winded and sweaty from his radio-laden climb. "Get up here," I said, "I've gotta check in with the CP right now." Rocky grunted, moved the last few feet, and started to hand me the mic connected by a short wire to the radio on his back.

• 1:54:31Jocko Willink?

  Somewhere from behind, a burst of machine gun fire smacked into us. First one blast, then the distant gunner adjusted his aim, one click over, then one up before firing a second burst. The first volley to my right hit Rocky in the back. The next, high into my left, made Ivan's head explode. Ivan's head explode. Rocky mumbled, "Corman," in his last instant of life. I could hear the call, "Gunner down, second gunner up." Keeping the whole war moving smoothly. I believed then and I believe now that that lethal fire had come from our own distant guns. I should have known that might happen. I'd been so anxious to reestablish

• 1:55:17Jocko Willink?

  radio contact because of how quickly we had taken the hill. I didn't want our gunners to be, to mistake our movement near the crest of the hill for enemy defenders not realizing there weren't any defenders. Brain matter and blood were splattered all over me. In the coming days, every time I encountered water in streams and rain and canteens, I would try and wash the stains off.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  I drank the water in the canteens, so that's inaccurate.

• 1:55:46Jocko Willink?

  This is a, you know, this is something that when, when I wrote my first book called Extreme Ownership, it opens up, the first chapter is about a fratricide, a blue on blue situation that I was in charge of. And there was a friendly Iraqi soldier that was killed. One of my guys was wounded. There were several other friendly Iraqi soldiers that were wounded. It was, it was a total nightmare. And when that happened to me, I mean, that was very early on in my second deployment to Iraq and the, the fighting in Ramadi was such that there was mayhem and confusion and when you get in these situations, these,

• 1:56:30Jocko Willink?

  these fratricides, these, what we called blue on blue, they can happen. And, and I made it my mission to try and teach the next generation of SEALs how to prevent these things from happening. But when it happened, it was so. You know, we hadn't been in combat for a really long time in America. And so, we didn't have guys that understood the battlefield and understood how easily these things could happen. Now, luckily for me, or, I don't know if it's, yeah, luckily for me, there was, there was a guy that was in the SEAL teams who had been a platoon commander in Way City in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. And, and he came and visited us right after this had happened, and he said, "Hey,

• 1:57:14Jocko Willink?

  the, the, I think he told me, you know, a third of the casualties in Way City were friendly fire." He's like, "This is what happens." He goes, "It's horrible." Here's, you know, and, and I looked at it like, "Okay, here's the things that we're gonna do to prevent it from happening." But, it's one of those things that it's very hard, I think, for civilians to understand how, how easily these things can unfold. And this is a classic example. You got supporting fire elements that are looking at this hill that you guys are taking, and you guys take it so quickly that by the time you get to the top, these guys that are whatever, 800 meters away, or 1,000 meters away, they see movement on this hilltop, they think they're helping you, but they're actually engaging your men.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. And I think that there, in, in one of those, um, recent battles in the Near East, that there was an NFL football player who was, who was killed, and right away, they gave him a Silver Star and everything. The garden was wonderful. And, we'd have been okay to leave that alone, but the fact came out that he was shot by his own man, by, totally by error.

• 1:58:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was, it was a...

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  And the fact remains that he wanted to go and do something for his country, put the football down, put the other helmet on, and, and, uh, his, uh, his own killed him. But that's, you start telling the, uh, the people at home who knew him, or, and others who knew of him, or others who didn't know it at all, um, that, uh, it was heroic, "Well, you better off giving the fucking Silver Star and let it go."

• 1:58:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a Pat Tillman and again, this is the horrible situation. You know, it's a horrible situation. It's dark, you're maneuvering through enemy territory. You're expecting to get contacted and you know, if you're not paying attention, this is why there's such a heavy burden on leadership. Because it's a leadership that has to try and track these things and keep and make sense of what's going on in the battlefield. And if a millisecond goes by and you lose that control, which which happens, you've got to set yourselves up so you prevent this sort of situations. And it's, it's a nightmare. And this is one of the, in my opinion, is the, one of the worst things in war is friendly fire.

• 1:59:31Jocko Willink?

  Because there's, it's absolutely, you know, trying to explain this is so hard because people don't understand how confusing and complex these things are as they unfold.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  As they unfold or flow apart or whatever. It's not a systematic thing. It's nothing you team, it's a quantum.

• 1:59:54Jocko Willink?

  When, going back to the book, when Pete came up the hill and saw me splattered with blood and brains, he tried to call me beautiful day, isn't it? On the day I got my Silver Star, elsewhere on the slope, Pete and his platoon approached an enemy position and were pelted with grenades. PFC Wit L. Moorhead kicked the grenades off the ridge one by one. Attempting to dispose of one grenade, in this way, he slipped. Rather than take cover, Morland shouted for his buddies to get down and then rolled on the grenade, absorbing the blast with his body and probably saving the lives of Pete and others nearby.

• 2:00:32Jocko Willink?

  For his courage and selflessness, Morland was posthably, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

• 2:00:39Jocko Willink?

  But the recognition of Morland's action goes beyond the authority of what Congress and the President. In John 15 13, it is written that greater love hath no man than this, that a man laid down his life for his friends.

• 2:00:55Jocko Willink?

  I recall those words because they are etched on a plaque beside a stained glass window in the Church of Ireland in Bandon honoring those from the town who were lost in the Great War. My Uncle Charlie, for whom I'm named, appears on the list of the dead, and my mother's name is honored among the list of survivors for her services as a nurse's aide. If Pete and I have a hard time talking about the facts of war to anyone but each other, it's not just because we share indelibly graphic memories like the image of what a grenade does to a human body, but because we have experienced that kind of love. I don't know if the Gospel's author had ever been in combat zone, but I've heard these words put a similar way by people who have.

• 2:01:48Jocko Willink?

  You continue on with sort of exposing some of the dark humor that comes out, and what it does to people. Going back to the book here, "War changes the meaning of 'normal' in ways big and small." There's a joke about a Marine who comes home to his parents and says, "Pass the fucking butter at the dinner table." One June day, having rotated off the line, we watched an American tank approach a shallow river. You could sense the driver trying to decide whether to take the muddy bypass or stay on the road. Either could have been mined. We speculated and made mock bets. The tank took a detour. Kaboom! A man flew out of the open hatch, now legless.

• 2:02:32Jocko Willink?

  One of our riflemen yelled with excitement, "I win."

• 2:02:51Jocko Willink?

  My career as a platoon leader ended early on the morning of June 12th, 1951. I spent the night of June 11th, my second wedding anniversary with my platoon manning a lonely outpost ahead of our lines just north of the town of Injay. Why am I saying that wrong?

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  Inji.

• 2:03:06Jocko Willink?

  Inji.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

  I don't remember, that's the way we pronounce it, God knows how they pronounce it.

• 2:03:11Jocko Willink?

  Sergeant Murphy and I laid up in an abandoned enemy bunker. An attack on our position could have doomed us, but it didn't come. I felt good, even though I still had little, little hope of living to hold my son. A picture of him Mary had sent had arrived in a letter enclosed with a melted Heath bar. That made me feel lucky. What happened next was lucky, depending on how you look at it. It's how I got home to Michael and Mary. Having seen his face suddenly gave me more to lose. Dying was going to be hard. At first light, I told Sergeant Murphy I was going out of the bunker to check our perimeter. He advised me not to go, saying he'd already done it a couple hours before. But I was restless and anxious about the strain of a 50% watch with no sergeants.

• 2:03:54Jocko Willink?

  All but Murphy had been killed, wounded, or rotated. I was going to tell the guys that they could get some rest. I was getting up from my hands and knees after crawling out of the bunker when I sensed that I had company. I rose up just as a bullet ripped across the front of my jacket and whacked into my left arm. Corman, lieutenant's down. I grabbed my arm above the wound, wound and waited for the corpsman. There was no sign of a real attack. An unseen sniper had spotted an easy target. The corpsman cut away my sleeve, revealing bones sticking through a red and pink mess. The arm was dangling below the elbow. I told him just to cut it off. "Not me," he said, tightening down the tourniquet. I got on the radio to tell Company HQ what had happened. It was then that I learned the whole morning it was a mess.

• 2:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Third platoon's leader had been hit with shrapnel from a mortar round. The battalion's new executive officer, Jack Jones, the real leader who kept the colonel somewhat in check, had a chunk of his right hand blown off by a booby trap hidden in a poor man's barbed wire. Pete had been hit in the leg while helping out one of his wounded. So Charlie Company had no platoon leaders and the battalion had an unfettered idiot in command. Meaning your battalion commander.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:05:07Jocko Willink?

  By now I was getting sore because the numbing impact of the bullet and the subsequent surge of adrenaline had worn off. Because of our isolated position, I decided to make my own way back to our lines rather than rob our platoon of riflemen carrying me off.

• 2:05:21Jocko Willink?

  I couldn't do that if I was stoned on morphine, so there would be no pain relief until I made it to our lines. I started to hike from the outpost to the battalion HQ.

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  That sounds very pious, but I had no idea that morphine would do any good or not. I just knew I had to get my ass out of there and not take four Marines or even one walker with me.

• 2:05:42Jocko Willink?

  I started to hike down from the outpost to the battalion HQ where I would be flown to a field hospital. In Korea, hospitals were just coming into use. Helicopters were just coming into use and were too tiny and fragile to risk ahead of the lines to pick up those who got hit on outpost or patrol. In every war since, improvements in helicopter capabilities translate to save lives and limbs. Now they can land much closer to the action and deliver wounded men to advanced medical care within minutes. On my way to the little bird, I had to walk through a shallow creek. I wasn't feeling great, but I felt worse when two rounds from a distant rifleman struck the water near me. I turned toward the ridge where the shots had come from and gave the shooter the finger with my good arm. I don't know what, if anything, that means in Korea, but the shooting stopped and he let me go.

• 2:06:29Jocko Willink?

  At the shelter of the command post, I saw a stretcher with McCloskey on it. He was all set to go farther to the rear and have his fairly minor wound treated, get laid, and return to duty. He took one look at me, rolled off the stretcher, stood up, said a quick goodbye, and limped back up the valley to take over one of the remaining platoons. His own wound could wait. I sat down and got my first morphine shot of the day.

• 2:06:56Jocko Willink?

  A tiny helicopter whirled in, the kind with a bubble canopy you may know from the opening credits of the TV show MASH, The Bell Forty-Seven. As I was being helped into the passenger seat, I noticed a bumper sticker on the cockpit's windshield: "Join the Marines."

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  Funny guy.

• 2:07:17Jocko Willink?

  Gotta keep that sense of humor, I guess.

• 2:07:18Speaker 01

  Geez, he got the guy strapped in those baskets and some died some way. But a guy scooting along at fifteen hundred feet and you can't hear him yell because the thing is so noisy, but he's still landing the guy's on his side, some job.

• 2:07:37Jocko Willink?

  We took off in a cloud of dust, which must have been tough on the men in the baskets. We were about ten or fif- within about ten or fifteen minutes, we sat down near one end of a big brown tent. This was a battalion aid station, a field hospital staffed with Navy doctors, the Corps answers, the Corps's answer to an Army MASH. Unlike MASH, the TV show, which fictionalized this aspect of the Korean War, there was no laughter in this tent, no cute nurses, no fun, just young men suffering in silence, each waiting for his stretcher to be lifted up and placed on a pair of wooden sawhorses of the sort used by carpenters to bring wood up to a convenient height for cutting. Each bloody stretcher became it, became its own operating table. Between each set of stretchers stood

• 2:08:19Jocko Willink?

  dungaree clad surgeons working under gas lamps dangling from the ceiling, besides bottles of blood, plasma, and IV fluid. General anesthesia was rarely used. Speed was vital. The mission was to stabilize patients who had the best chances for more advanced treatment elsewhere and comfort the ones who weren't going to make it. Aid station doctors referred to their duty as meatball surgery. Outside the tent, I waited to be seen. I heard one Marine next to me die. He didn't groan, just gasped and stopped breathing. The worst sound I heard that day was the clang of shrapnel being dropped onto the stainless steel table beside the unlucky lieutenant stretcher who had been shot in the family jewels. The shrapnel had been removed from

• 2:09:03Jocko Willink?

  his groin. "Keep that for me," he said. "I'll give it to my wife and we'll push it around in a baby carriage."

• 2:09:12Speaker 01

  I've heard he's a young man. He's a bowman, he's very proud of the way he looked. He had a strap here and a holster here. He'd gone to a lot of movies, but he was good. He handled this as well as you can. But you know, I have a photograph of, from the military, I don't know, Charlie has it, I think, of the military inside of that tent. And there were half a dozen of these, the stretcher, and then between every two, there was the doctors operating on metal tables. And it's an amazing picture because it's just, you don't really comprehend just how

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  it went through and the conditions in which they operated. Meatball surgery, probably not a bad expression, but they were really, it was in and out, and it seemed to me just, it was mechanical fast it was, so I was quite nervous at that time. By that time, I didn't want to go home with the wife, the Canadian pacifist, and so on. And I tried not to go home lopsided. I'd be pretty greedy, I was happy to be alive, but the, so I really kept saying, I mean, leave it and so on, and I, anyway, so it went on.

• 2:10:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the dead Marine, this is you, going back to the book, "The dead Marine was still uncovered when two corpsmen carried my stretcher inside and placed it on the sawhorses. At some of the stations, a corpsman or nurse would work on a foot or leg while a surgeon tended to a chest or head wound on the same man. I didn't notice much in the way of surgical gloves or hand washing between jobs. I noticed no stench, perhaps because I stunk. 'How are you doing?' a surgeon asked. He loosened the field dressing resulting in what seemed like a gush of blood. 'Doc, I can't go home lopsided. You're not going to cut it off, are you?' By now, I was hoping to keep the arm.

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 2:11:05Jocko Willink?

  'Not right now. We can wait for it to fall off.' Then he surprised me by gently touching my face with his bloody finger. That touch made my eyes water. So I turned to my head.

• 2:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Tears returned to my eyes remembering that touch in that moment of tenderness.

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  It was amazing. It was meatball surgery and so on. He was a human being doing those things. Pretty good. Quite good. I don't know. Pretty.

• 2:11:44Jocko Willink?

  I woke aboard the USS Haven in the late afternoon of what had been a very long day.

• 2:11:51Jocko Willink?

  That same night on the ship after being washed, I was wheeled into a cabin where I rested in a bed between white sheets for the first time since February. I'd been bleeding continuously all day, so I felt weak.

• 2:12:03Jocko Willink?

  Like a figment of my morphine injections, Jack Jones appeared in my cabin. The doctors had just finished clipping away shredded bits of his hand. The final wound of five he had received since he had enlisted at age seventeen in the last war.

• 2:12:16Jocko Willink?

  The next morning, June thirteenth, we were flown to a former Japanese military hospital in Yokosuka for further patching up. We took a short walk outside the gate where we found a little bar. Jack was a Mormon and didn't drink, but he watched me put back a few. The barman recognized us as Marines. He spoke English and told us he was on Iwo Jima. "You were on Iwo," Jack said. "How come I didn't kill you?" Matter of fact, without a hint of resentment or prejudice.

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  Remarkable.

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  What's that?

• 2:12:47Speaker 01

  He's remarkable. He must have been on leave or something.

• 2:12:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt. To survive Iwo. Meanwhile, at home, my father had been listed as my next of kin because I didn't want to shock Mary in the event I was killed in action or wounded. That turned out to be a terrible idea. My mother went to Mary's apartment waving the telegram. "Good news. Chuck's been wounded."

• 2:13:10Jocko Willink?

  Mum must have been thinking of her dead brother and brother-in-law, along with so many others in the meat grinder of Flanders in the Somme. In the Great War, survivable wounds were good news to families back in Blighty in Ireland. But my pacifist wife didn't see it that way. She was horrified, angry, and terribly worried. Yeah, that's actually the name of this chapter is "Good News Chuck's Been Wounded." You gotta have a certain mentality to see your...

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, to understand. But Mary never understood that. And it just... That really did it.

• 2:13:45Jocko Willink?

  From Japan, where I received slightly smaller cast, we were flown from Guam and then to Hawaii. So you guys get to Hawaii and they, they had done a, they had done a, uh, they would take your, they would take your pants from you to make sure you don't go out on liberty.

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, when we were on, on the hospital, I mean, on the hospital plane, they, um, have their tears and bunks and they, they put, they take your pants and then they put a blanket on and double fold it over you because they had experienced before with Marines getting as far as Hawaii and so on.

• 2:14:23Jocko Willink?

  Well, you guys, you guys were made, managed to get a hold of some pants.

• 2:14:27Speaker 01

  Well, we both hit it there, nervous on board because Jack had been through this before and he said, he said, you know, that we're not gonna do any harm, look at us, but he said, just get us some clothes. And, and he even knew the gate that he could get through as he'd been through there, another wall. So that's how we got downtown.

• 2:14:47Jocko Willink?

  So you guys get, get, you do your thing. Um, now you get back on base and now you get this, this, you know, hot-headed officer, and we're going back to the book, a red-faced army officer gave us a lecture and this is him basically yelling at you for, for leaving base. This base is no different from the front line. You are AWOL and there will be consequences. I will personally see to it that you are kept in this hospital until you rot.

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  That's exactly what he said.

• 2:15:14Jocko Willink?

  The next day, a Marine general visited to pin Purple Hearts to our hospital gowns and deliver a few words about valor. All of us admire your courage. You must be looking forward to getting home. Oh, no, sir, one of the groups spoke up. We've been promised to stay here until we rot. What?

• 2:15:31Speaker 01

  You tell that to a Marine general, whoa.

• 2:15:33Jocko Willink?

  He made sure we were out on the next flight. From Hawaii, we were flown to hospital and hospital in Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for several days. From there to another hospital in San Antonio where we underwent more repairs and celebrated the 4th of July in hospital beds. Distant fireworks were terrifying for a blinded Marine who awoke back in Korea, but without his sight, his rifle or his buddies.

• 2:15:57Jocko Willink?

  Finally, we thumped down at Andrews Air Force Base, a few miles from the Naval Hospital, and my parents' home in Bethesda, loaded in stretchers stacked three high. My wound was still seeping, and my latest cast stank. The plane's big side hatch opened in to the bright sunshine. As I was helped to my turn at the top of the steep stairs, I could see a little crowd standing on the tarmac. There was Mary cradling a title bundle, a tiny bundle, Michael. Clouding my bright shirt like I had been on vacation, I eased my way down the stairs and gave her the best hug I could manage with my cast pressed against Michael in her arms. "Be careful," warned the Navy nurse who walked me down the stairs. "There's plenty more where he came from," I replied.

• 2:16:40Jocko Willink?

  We laughed, we cried. I had orders to report for surgery, maybe even amputation. None of that mattered. I only needed one arm to hold my baby boy. My joy in that moment was tempered by the sight of my brothers being unloaded on stretchers without families to hold. One of my fellow Marines from the troop ship, of my fellow Marines from the troop ship,

• 2:17:13Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Abels, Baumgart, Buckman, Cowart, Finch, Gudlock, McVeigh, Monday, Musser, Ohansian, did I get that one right?

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  Monday, M-U-N-D-A-Y.

• 2:17:32Jocko Willink?

  And then Muser, Ohansian, and Smith were killed in action. Many left wives and babies. Each widow got $10,000 life insurance payoff plus a small pension. Not much, but a lot more than was received by the Chinese and North Korean widows we created.

• 2:17:52Jocko Willink?

  Jack Jones and Billy Bell became teachers, as did several others. After spending years in hospitals battling near a near fatal wound, another of our group, Dick McGee, became a priest. After his wounding in Vietnam, Spike Schinning joined the Red Cross, supervising disaster relief efforts in sort of difficult places where he always felt at home. Besides the grenade on my desk, I have a silver spiked rail, a silver plated railroad spike to remember him by.

• 2:18:20Speaker 01

  There are peace, sorry.

• 2:18:22Jocko Willink?

  The other amateur lieutenants, under his tutelage, all have one. Twenty-nine thousand, two hundred and seventy-two Marines were killed or wounded in three years of fighting in Korea, all part of the American total of one hundred and three thousand, two hundred and eighty-four casualties.

• 2:18:38Speaker 01

  Big percentage.

• 2:18:40Jocko Willink?

  These numbers are minor when compared with the death, wounding, and disappearance of three million North and South Korean civilians, one point five million North Koreans and Chinese soldiers, and eight hundred and forty-five thousand South Korean military casualties.

• 2:19:04Jocko Willink?

  You say this, "People talk about the forgotten war as if future generations of students and textbook authors didn't do their job." But the fact is, no one was thinking about Korea even when we were in it. Nineteen fifty-one is the year "I Love Lucy" premiered, and "The Catcher in the Rye" was published. There was a new Chevy on the market. You go into this story here, "Mary and I went to stay at the Tidewater Inn in beautiful southern Virginia. In the bar at the inn, some locals noticed my sling and cast and assumed I was the local gentleman they'd heard about, who'd had a boating accident recently. I had to ask them to repeat the question because I couldn't imagine pleasure boating mishaps any more than they could picture the circumstances of my wound.

• 2:19:47Jocko Willink?

  Before dinner, the house played Dixie, and everybody stood for it. I sat and breathed hard, despite Mary holding my trembling right hand. I felt completely alone. I thought about Cower, and Abels, Rocky, and Ivans, along with, and longed to be with them, if not joining their ranks in death, at least to be back in the dirt, cracking sick jokes, and feeling like my work mattered."

• 2:20:11Speaker 01

  I didn't want to die.

• 2:20:15Jocko Willink?

  Too often that feeling would return for a very long time. It's only recently, looking back with perspective, that comes from a lifetime on dwelling on the personal cost of "the game," as my uncle called it, that I would no longer wish to be back there with them, but wish they could be here with me instead.

• 2:20:35Speaker 01

  I'm beginning to grow up.

• 2:20:41Jocko Willink?

  You start doing your, uh, therapy on your arm. The Navy doctors were able to fuse two bones in my forearms, the radius and the ulna, into one, resulting in an arm that can no longer pronate. Progress was slow. Finger exercises were frustrating. For a while, I was motivated by relief, knowing that I could keep the limb. The bullet damaged the ulnar nerve, leaving me with a permanent funny bone feeling and an arm that's sensitive and somewhat painful from the elbow down. Since then, I've worn my watch on my right wrist, protecting the arm and holding it close in front of me like it's in a sling, has twisted my spine over time, but today I use a walking stick when I feel like I'm listing too far over.

• 2:21:22Jocko Willink?

  One brilliant thing the Navy hospitals do is put you in contact and close quarters with your fellow wounded, many of whom are maimed in ways that make you thankful for your own condition.

• 2:21:32Speaker 01

  The one thing the doctors blew in fixing my arm was, once it was, it was, uh, gonna stay attached, um, I blew it, I guess. They explained to me the situation, as you just described it there, but they said that, uh, you'll always have to, uh, the arm will permanently be, uh, as you're shaking your hands like this, or turn it over so the palm is up. Now, I could've gotten rich if I just left that goddamn thing that way. And right now, I talk to you, you could give me, what, a bunch of chicken shit from Hawaii, you wouldn't give me a nickel. And, um, I worked my ass off the rest of my life and I had it right there in my hand.

• 2:22:10Jocko Willink?

  So they gave you a choice, you could either be...

• 2:22:11Speaker 01

  Either one or the other. You can't do it, you gotta merge the bones, you have one bone now, and you can't go flopping around.

• 2:22:18Jocko Willink?

  Huh, that's...

• 2:22:19Speaker 01

  So there's a blown chance.

• 2:22:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:21Speaker 01

  Geez, now I'm paying, I'm 892 and I'm paying tuition to a kid going to, uh, law school.

• 2:22:28Jocko Willink?

  You've been too busy trying to make money to give it out.

• 2:22:32Speaker 01

  Well, I would've had plenty. How would you like to stand the gate of Penn State law like this and say for my son, if somebody puts a quarter, I'm waiting for real money, I blew it.

• 2:22:48Jocko Willink?

  On May 31st, 1952, Lieutenant Charzou Daily was discharged from the United States, was retired from the United States Marine Corps, as confirmed by these excerpts from the Commandant's letter. "Your disability is permanently related at 40%. I regret that the physical condition, conditions necessitate your separation from the active list and wish you many years of happiness and prosperity."

• 2:23:10Jocko Willink?

  And then Pacific Molasses made good on their promise, they kept their job for you.

• 2:23:15Speaker 01

  That's what I wrote about Nelson, I think, and Nelson Parker.

• 2:23:18Jocko Willink?

  And that was one of the things that made you, well, they took care of him too in the end.

• 2:23:22Speaker 01

  Well, they did, because first of all, they're a very decent company, and so, except on the end, but, but he told me that, that when he first got the job, he didn't tell, he lied about his age, he was young, he wasn't young, but no one's gonna hire a fat old black man, so he, he said he was much younger than the fact he was. So then, when the end of the line came, that came to get social security, no way, because he's 10 years or 15 years younger than he said he was. And this is after I left. And, but the company went to bat for him, slayed around, so it's an element of corporate decency I haven't forgotten.

• 2:24:08Speaker 01

  But he had to do that to get a goddamn job, you know? And still didn't get the rights to use the toilet, but he got the job.

• 2:24:17Jocko Willink?

  The, um, so you get, you get stationed in California for a while, then you go to, then you go to Mexico.

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:26Jocko Willink?

  You get stationed down in Veracruz, Mexico, and...

• 2:24:28Speaker 01

  Hell set up at a minute down there.

• 2:24:30Jocko Willink?

  What's that?

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  Hell set up and returned to the hole.

• 2:24:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, there you go. And then, at the end of the day, Pacific Molasses was a corporate job and it started getting boring. Mary tried to join me, but she didn't like life south of the border, the water made her sick. In Mexico City, she had a miscarriage. By the time you were approaching 30, I had gotten, by the time I was approaching 30, I had more or less gotten over the astonishment that I hadn't died at 23 in Korea.

• 2:24:57Jocko Willink?

  I sensed it was time to do something with this second chance at life and selling syrup wasn't it.

• 2:25:05Jocko Willink?

  When I tendered my resignation, my bosses in England were certain I was going over to the competition. I told Ferguson I would never do that. After all, he and the company had done for me, for Nelson Parker and for others. Not content to take me at my word, the higher ups at Pacific instructed Jim to pay me a thousand dollars a month for a year to simply stay out of Mexico.

• 2:25:23Jocko Willink?

  I told Ferguson that that was generous but unnecessary. He insisted, saying if I didn't take the money, it would confirm London's fear that I would defect to a competitor.

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  That'd be perfect.

• 2:25:33Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Now, I had two boys, one good arm, a marine disability pension, and my stay out of Mexico money. I had a variety of experience for my age and no financial worries. So like many young men in such a position, I decided to become a writer.

• 2:25:49Jocko Willink?

  You end up going to Columbia School of Journalism.

• 2:25:51Speaker 01

  You're a writer. Don't be laughing at me.

• 2:25:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess so. That's what they say.

• 2:25:57Jocko Willink?

  And then, so you go to Columbia School of Journalism, and then you start this American Political Science, or American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship. Is that how you ended up getting kind of involved in politics?

• 2:26:09Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. What happened was, I go there to exchange some of that book, but I decided to go to Journalism School, right? Big deal. So it was a big deal. But so I drove to Columbia Journal and the school was on 116th and Broadway in New York. And so I parked and went in. And I didn't know any other place other than top school. And for nine months, you get a master's degree. It's a ticket for me to get a newspaper job or something. So I wanted to get it. So then I go to in and I ask him, but I'd like to go. Tell me about how to

• 2:26:50Speaker 01

  do it. He said, well, the classes start in September, but he told you this is August, or late August, early September. But he said you could apply for the year. Not possibly get in this one. You do it in the next year. So let me explain something to you. I'm double parked on Broadway, in the car, with my wife and two babies. I gotta get in before I go to school. So the guy actually, he was laughing at you, but he let me in. So it was a hell of a deal, so then I had enough of a ticket there.

• 2:27:26Jocko Willink?

  So you said yes?

• 2:27:27Speaker 01

  Yes. I'm a real con artist, you know. I didn't have to do that even. So, uh, he let me in, and Lauren and Shaw, they got out of that after nine months. And I worked at Knights of the Newspaper in White Plains, New York. And they had this fellowship for American Political Science Association Fellowship. And a guy, Eddie Williams, I knew was in previous class, a black guy. But he said, "I can get you in that, it's a good deal." He said, "You're paid, I don't know how much the fellowship is, but they pay you to spend a half of the next congressional term with a member of the House and half of it on a member of the Senate."

• 2:28:11Speaker 01

  And he told me it helped him and helped me too, so if I got it. So I got it. And, uh, and I, all I knew about Kennedy was, uh, his father thought Hitler was gonna win the war, so fuck him. So I didn't know this young senator at all. But anyway, uh, the first one to choose is on the House side. And this young guy, Stu Udall, from Arizona, said, uh, they were paid $21,000 a year themselves. So the idea of having some free talent, but in theory, you know, the newspaper is good.

• 2:28:51Speaker 01

  So he said, uh, that, uh, um, he'd give me a desk in his office. And he'd explain to me everything we ran on, let me share everything we wanted to do, and so on. So I grabbed it. And then he was... He talked about Kennedy, he said, "Why don't you go over there, young guy, and he's gonna run for president, gonna run for president." And I said, "I used to," I told him what I thought, "family." And he said, "I thought too, but this guy is special, so you ought to think about that one." So then I went over there and worked on the other side. That's how I got into politics.

• 2:29:23Jocko Willink?

  And then, so that's how it started?

• 2:29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:26Jocko Willink?

  And how long were you with Kennedy before the, was that while he was running for president?

• 2:29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you, when you showed up, he was already running for president?

• 2:29:35Speaker 01

  That's right, but he still had room to have another semi-silented player. And so then I got involved, when that fellowship ran out, I got involved, I think it was called the Democratic Study Group, because the Democrats are so conservative, they were really run by a lot of the Southern Democrats. So there's a little separate group, the UN's, UN-funded, just telling you more than you need to know, but it got me into politics and knowing those particular members. So then I did that until the election, election day, I'd look around, and people were trying to put other people's names on memos so they looked brilliant and so on. So I said, "The hell with that." So that's when I got off, got on a troop ship and went away.

• 2:30:20Jocko Willink?

  So after the, after the election, you said, "All right, I'm done with this."

• 2:30:23Speaker 01

  Goodbye.

• 2:30:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You, you said you were, in the book, you said you were, "I was a Johnny come lately and a Protestant."

• 2:30:30Speaker 01

  You're right. I'm talking about the political top. And they, but so anyway, that, I go back and I got, stayed six months out there writing, and then went to California, started working on, with the university, Stanford University there, writing pretty close, and proposal, grant proposals, and so, and the phone rings, and so.

• 2:30:54Jocko Willink?

  And who was, this is Larry, how, what was your connection to Larry O'Brien?

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  He ran the, he was a top aide.

• 2:31:02Speaker 01

  On the political side for running congressional relations. So he is the president in the White House.

• 2:31:08Jocko Willink?

  But how did you know him?

• 2:31:09Speaker 01

  I knew him only vaguely, vaguely, because I just knew him when I was around there as an intern.

• 2:31:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:31:15Speaker 01

  But that was well above my thing. So, anyway.

• 2:31:17Jocko Willink?

  But he, he somehow decided that he was, because he's the guy that called you and said, hey, we need you out here?

• 2:31:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:23Jocko Willink?

  He just remembered you? You seemed like a good guy?

• 2:31:25Speaker 01

  He didn't really remember me, but the, uh, I can tell you the slight alter of titles I found. But, so the phone call rings, the phone rings and I'm in the shower in, um,

• 2:31:41Speaker 01

  in, in Stanford in Palo Alto, California. And Chris, and Mary says, uh, some guy says the White House is calling. Uh, I said, that'll be McCloskey. Hang, hang up on the prick, will you? So, uh, so she got the number. And so I went and finished my shower and so on and, and I took care of that. She said, here, it just says, would you please call four, two, two, four, five, six, one, four, one, four. That's the White House number. So, geez, some, he's a real con or something's going on. So, uh, I returned the call and they said they wanted me to work there. So, um, I decided to take a chance and I got a free flight, if space available,

• 2:32:24Speaker 01

  from Palo Alto to Tennessee, Memphis. And took a bus up and, um, rented a room with time enough behind. And I get down to the northwest gate of the White House where all the officers are. And I'm not expecting, I said, fuck him, McCloskey, I'm gonna kill him. But he said, no, try the, try the northwest gate. That's a, a gate right into the White House. Over there. Yeah, we're expecting you, says the guy. So, uh, they throw me up to, uh... I go in there, I go up to Larry O'Brien, I hadn't known him at all well. And he's in a big office with four other guys, they're his staff, I mean, this is his office. And he's smoking a cigar, what the hell he's doing.

• 2:33:05Speaker 01

  And he said, "We need someone to work the liberals and House members on the side, the south side, on the House side of the Congress. And you know them because of the fellowship and so on and so on." And then he said, "Let me introduce you to them." So he said, "Here's what they're doing. Here's Claude Esatelli, he's the inside guy, taking mechanics, how well Bill is doing. And Mike Matatos, who is my contact, the President's contact with the Senate. And Henry Hall Wilson, we call him Lass's Mouth, because he's involved with the southern members. And Dick Donahue, who worries about the bosses, Daley and Green, big city bosses.

• 2:33:49Speaker 01

  And then Dick interrupts and says, "And that leaves all those intellectual cocksuckers, they're yours." So, pretty fast start, but that's what they thought of liberal Democrats. So they hired me, and I got to know, I knew some of them slightly through the fellowship, but then I got to know them close.

• 2:34:05Jocko Willink?

  And that's how it started?

• 2:34:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:34:09Jocko Willink?

  I like this one section in here, you're working there, and you say this. "My young ego would get another challenge when I ran into General David M. Shoup, 22nd Commandant of the Marine Corps, on his way to a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I introduced myself as the only Marine on Kennedy's staff. 'Good,' he said, 'and what have you done for your country lately?'"

• 2:34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was a tough Iowa, blue-eyed, Iowa, tough, tough guy, beautiful guy.

• 2:34:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a pretty, that's a pretty aggressive statement right there.

• 2:34:40Jocko Willink?

  Here's, here's another kind of interesting section. "One morning I dropped into Donahue's office, when he was finishing up a phone call. Here's what I heard on his, on his end. 'I don't care who told you that. That's bullshit. Hey, do what you want. End of conversation.'" Dick cradled the phone, turned to me, and said, just because he's the President, doesn't mean everyone around him is supposed to kiss his ass.

• 2:35:02Speaker 01

  Well, he'd worked as a volunteer for, he was a small-town lawyer in Stockton, California. He'd worked around Kennedy for, since 1956, never took a dime. But then he came down to the White House and, um...

• 2:35:16Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of Bay of Pigs in Cuba, here we go back to the book. Meanwhile, there had been rumors of a Soviet buildup in Cuba, but these had been dismissed as GOP scare tactics unbeknownst to me in a dark room at the CIA's National Photo Interpretation Center, located in a nondescript building at Fifth and K in Washington. My brother-in-law, John Hicks, the man who had inspired me to join the Marines and had gone from the Corps to the CIA, was analyzing film from an American spy plane that clearly showed missiles 90 miles from our coast. The photos indicated that at least six canvas-covered missile trailers, 75 vehicles, eight small tents and buildings under construction, in other words, a launch site at or near operational

• 2:36:01Jocko Willink?

  stage. Another image showed several more missiles. John later told me that upon realizing what he was looking at, he proceeded to smoke half a dozen cigarettes before the analysis was sent to the White House. My sister Joan never knew any of this. She preferred not to ask her husband about his work, fearful she'd talk after a couple martinis. So, we got the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding. On the 22nd, I listened to the President's speech on the eve of a possible nuclear holocaust. Like every parent in America, I thought of my family. Looking back, it's comforting to know that the man with his finger on the button had the same worries as the President's many hours of secretly-recorded tapes indicate.

• 2:36:44Jocko Willink?

  Unlike some of the hawks advising him or their piece at any price counterparts, Kennedy had a personal experience of war that put military intervention in human terms. In a wartime letter he wrote to his father, "People get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers that thousands of dead sounds like drops in a bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the 10 I saw on PT-109, they should measure their words with great, great care." By contrast, General Curtis LeMay, who advised the President and his ex-com in those tense days in October, had only known war from that great distance that the President spoke of.

• 2:37:29Jocko Willink?

  As a commander of bombers, LeMay had been removed by altitude from the realities of violence. LeMay told the President, "We don't have any choice but military action," and that he wanted to do more than take out missiles, saying that the success of an airstrike was a guarantee.

• 2:37:45Jocko Willink?

  In my war, I was grateful for the air support that protected Marines on the ground, but I never forgot that those pilots and generals who sent them would never have to see or smell the bodies they barbecued on the ground as we did. The South Koreans had a nickname for US infantrymen, for US Marine infantry. They called us ghost thieves because we were so fearsome that we stole the ghosts of the men we killed. They couldn't know how true this is. Those ghosts are still inside me. They will never leave me. Bombs away LeMay, as he was known, was perverse about his antiseptic brand of killing. He bragged about firebombing civilians in Japan during World War II. During the Korean War, he spoke of deleting cities and later complained to all who would

• 2:38:28Jocko Willink?

  listen that the war could have been won cleanly and quickly if he'd been allowed to firebomb the major cities in China. He spoke of war in terms of cost-benefit analysis and embraced nukes as the next big thing in killing, something like a microwave oven of murder, the newest, quickest, and oh-so-space-age way of getting it done. There's no bottom to my content for men, for this man and those like him. When I draw my last breath, the woman and the child in the photograph belonging to the North Korean I killed will be right there with the faces of my own children and the women I married. It can't be, it can't possibly be the same for a bombardier for whom taking life means traveling to a set of coordinates while seating in a cockpit, pushing a button and turning for home.

• 2:39:12Jocko Willink?

  Or nowadays, from a computer, screening Colorado, guiding a drone strike.

• 2:39:16Speaker 01

  I had an occasion later on when McCluskey was in the Congress, and the war was, that particular war was ended. McCluskey, by urging, put in a bill to forgive the, those persons who, for peaceful reasons, including going to Canada, opposed the Vietnam War. So... Pete finally, he was against that, but then we argued back and forth. I'm his friend, he's a congressman. So, he said, "All right, I'm gonna put in a bill to forgive them,

• 2:39:55Speaker 01

  provided they do a year's public service in penance." "What do you think of that?" And he's very proud. I said, "What I think of that is great, as long as you put in the bill, every B-52 pilot has to also serve a year of penance." So, he said, "You son of a bitch." So, he filed the bill without the restriction on the first front, so he didn't have to face the second one. Oh, and I have a framed copy of the bill, and it said, from across, it said, "You win, you son of a bitch," and he filed the bill and it passed.

• 2:40:37Jocko Willink?

  Well, we're talking about Kennedy, and I'm sure everyone knows where this is going. Friday, November 22nd, 1963 was slow for President Kennedy's congressional relations staff. Most members had completed their Tuesday to Thursday work week, and were in their districts chasing little white balls, or engaged in other vertical and horizontal endeavors. My boss, Larry O'Brien, was in Texas with President Kennedy, unlikely to call our four-man team for head counsel reports on congressional requests, demands, threats, and promises. Ahead of me was a weekend with my wife, Mary, sons Michael and Douglas, and one spaniel, chugging along the chilly shores of the Chesapeake in our seven-horsepower wooden outboard. Lunch in the White House mess was quiet. As I took my seat, a Filipino

• 2:41:19Jocko Willink?

  steward set down my oblong silver napkin ring engraved with my name, two anchors in the words "White House Mess." This was Washington's most exclusive eatery, for privacy and tradition as run by the Navy. The mess was reserved for select members of the president's senior White House staff, and there are no guests permitted at the round table in the corner where I was seated. Just after 1:30 PM, Jack McNally strode in. My first thought was that he must be delighted to be carrying some message from the executive office building that would gain him entry to the mess and perhaps wreck the weekend with tasks for one or other or another of us. His usual smile was absent. "The president's been shot," he whispered to us. "What? No. How bad?" "I don't know."

• 2:42:03Jocko Willink?

  I ran up two flights of stairs to my office, two flights of stairs to my office, and turned on the TV. One of the millions of sets turned to the news from Dallas. I called Mary. She just heard the first news bulletin. "They've killed him," she said. "No, they haven't. I got shot. I'm not dead." I hung up the phone and went down to the press office. Paul Southwick had stepped into the press slot. He didn't know any more than the AP's first bulletin. Bulletin, Dallas, November 22, AP. "President Kennedy was shot just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas." Sporadic updates followed. Then the clacking of the news wire delivered, "The end of our world." Bulletin, Dallas, November 22, AP. "Two priests stepped out of Parkland Hospital's

• 2:42:48Jocko Willink?

  emergency ward today and said that President Kennedy died of his bullet wounds." I went back upstairs and sat until dark, calling home, ignoring messages, half-watching the television chronicling the president's final flight to the Capitol. Not the new president, not LBJ, the president. On the Sunday after the assassination, 300,000 people lined Pennsylvania Avenue to watch six white horses pull a cassion bearing the president's flag-draped casket from the White House to the Capitol Rotunda where he would lie in state. It was the same cassion that had carried FDR and the Unknown Soldier.

• 2:43:30Jocko Willink?

  There's a haunting photograph of the first family following the casket up the Capitol steps. In the photo, the widow Jacqueline is looking directly at the camera. A black mantilla on her head, a wisp of hair between her eyes. She is shouldering the despair of the whole country with the same poise that defined her public image as First Lady. Beside her, JFK Jr. is bounding up the stairs with his tongue out, too young to fathom what has happened, you hope.

• 2:43:58Jocko Willink?

  Caroline's white gloved hand is holding her mother's in black, a little girl facing the unimaginable and unfair duty of publicly mourning her dad. In the foreground of this tableau of grief is the back of Kenny O'Donnell's head. He's looking off to the side, out of the frame, at the box containing our president. Kenny had been in the car behind Kennedy's in Dallas and blessed himself when he saw a chunk of the president's brain blown out of his skull. Opposite Kenny, I am standing on a step, facing the camera just over Jackie's shoulder, with my hand over my heart, watching the first family climbing the stairs.

• 2:44:39Jocko Willink?

  Just a few feet from the family of the slain president, I had observed a job that started with what I had assumed was a prank phone call less than a thousand days earlier. A closer look at the man on the step with his hand on his heart will reveal some clues to where I came from. In an age of slick side parts, my hair is cropped short, the mark of a Marine who didn't know what to do with the freedom to grow it out. I wear a tiny lapel pin, the red, white, and blue vertical stripes of the Silver Star, which I had received 12 years earlier for my actions as a rifle platoon leader on the other side of the world. Behind the sad eyes, taking in the first family, I am carrying my persistent anguish over the things I did to earn that medal.

• 2:45:24Jocko Willink?

  I remain baffled that I'm even alive in my 30s. It seems as unlikely as our president being dead at 46. In the coming months, I stayed on staff with President Johnson. I tried to console Mary and the boys. I pushed papers around my desk in an office that had lost its former feeling of purpose. I remembered what it had been like not wanting my time in the White House to end. As I planned what I was going to do next, I would watch the clock every afternoon, something I had never done while the president was alive. My last day couldn't come soon enough.

• 2:46:08Jocko Willink?

  In his inaugural address, President Kennedy had challenged my generation to ask, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Walking away from the White House, I asked myself the hardest question yet: "What can I do for my country now?"

• 2:46:32Jocko Willink?

  So, I mean, obviously, this is just a radical change in the working environment, to say the least, and you make that pretty clear.

• 2:46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the, um...

• 2:46:46Speaker 01

  I think that Johnson, unlike the situation when FDR died,

• 2:46:56Speaker 01

  he, um, FDR fired everybody in the staff right away. But that's understandable. I mean, Truman did. Truman had never been allowed in the White House when he was vice president, never, not once. So, uh, there was, he was treated as contempt in Missouri, Paul, and so on. It turned out to be quite a good man. But he didn't need any more, didn't need that staff anymore, didn't want any of them. Johnson, on the other hand, to his credit, uh, realized he walked into a tragic situation, and some idea, some degree of stability was important. And what his own personal views were, I don't know, but the, uh... But I think they were genuine, that he felt retaining the, um, staff,

• 2:47:41Speaker 01

  particularly people like the congressional staff, was, was very important to try to ease into whoever, where the future lies. And, uh, that, I think that was important. Now, he, he did it his way, which was, um, embrace us, uh, but still treat the rest of the staff as he'd always treated them. Uh, he would curse them, and, and, uh, they were devoted to him. He realized he was very, had been a wonderful, wonderfully effective, uh, senate leader and so on. But they were what they were in his mind.

• 2:48:21Speaker 01

  And so that he, he paid extraordinary efforts to, uh, to keep the staff intact. And with the exception of Kenny O'Donnell, who was, he can't handle it. But he very soon... Well, he just was his own man there. He stayed there and, you know, the president called a meeting of his whole staff right after he got the job, within a week after that. And someone, so we assembled as required, requested or whatever, someone said, or so he said, "Where's Kenny?" He said, "He's at another meeting." I mean, it's a way, he should have had his ass fired, but that's, you know, Kenny was Kenny, one tough cookie, so anyway.

• 2:49:06Jocko Willink?

  You know, I should have asked you this before, because everyone, you know, you hear about JFK and a sort of mythical level of leadership and charisma. I mean, what was it like being around him?

• 2:49:22Speaker 01

  Someone who was a great leader with charisma. I mean, that's a shallow way to put it, but also I can recite instances where he was intensely human.

• 2:49:34Speaker 01

  Where, as evidenced by his handling of LeMay, LeMay's thing to him in that meeting about the Cuban Missile thing. LeMay was saying, you know, "You can't be a coward." He really was a grossly insulting thing and he just managed that.

• 2:49:53Jocko Willink?

  Didn't let his ego get involved at all, wouldn't play with this guy's games, LeMay?

• 2:49:59Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I could see a guy like LeMay, the way you described him, "Okay, I'm gonna make JFK." Like, you can't be weak here, you know, trying to hit him from that angle.

• 2:50:07Speaker 01

  He's almost telling him exactly what you're saying, you.

• 2:50:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:10Speaker 01

  And that, you know, "You can't live with this." I mean, the next thing to an open threat. And the records of that now indicate Kennedy said exactly what that amounted to. And he said, "What did you say?" And so Obama LeMay says somewhat differently.

• 2:50:34Jocko Willink?

  Good guy. Yeah, that's in the book. I didn't quite capture that. We might need to clean that one up a little bit. But yeah, yeah, that's...

• 2:50:43Speaker 01

  And I think that there are instances of very human things. One, he, I put it to him, a guy, a member of Congress died in a plane crash in the usual trend of campaigning, foggy weather. The guy had held a seat in Congress, had been Republican since 1928. He was the one, the Golden Gate Bridge runs up to Oregon. And he, he won a seat in Congress because he was devoted to the coastline there, protecting the coast, et cetera, et cetera. So he got in. So then he was campaigning, bang. So then, the only way he could hold that seat would be if his wife held it, Brandon held it.

• 2:51:25Speaker 01

  And the problem was that it had been turned down. She, Clem always felt very poorly, automatically, some passionate older widow. She was against it, and she was very much aware of that. She had very young children, et cetera, et cetera. So I tried to peddle her the idea, this is the only way, we hold that seat if we run. So then in due course, I was talking with Kenny or Larry, I forget which, Kenny I think, but I said, "The only way it's gonna work, if at all, is if the President calls her." And he said, "Why don't you go and tell him?" So I recited to the President exactly the situation.

• 2:52:07Speaker 01

  He's a wonderfully, wonderful man, and he got a, he was given a house in Rock Creek Park, a humble stone house, because he loved Rock Creek Park so much. And he's a huge, decent guy, but he just doesn't want to do it. So I went and recited all that to the President. And, including other P's and major, and he's the only one. And I said, "There's little kids and so on." He said, "There goes that seat." He would not make a call. He thought, he just couldn't do it. And he wasn't, for failure, just, he wouldn't do it. There's a lot inside him, it's pretty damn good.

• 2:52:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, you eventually have had enough of working for LBJ. And again, you know, jumping through huge swaths of this.

• 2:53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Christine found a few. I started making notes about Johnson because I thought he was really cuckoo. And that's the wrong word, but he was so upset by never having served in the military. And he used to drive me bullshit. And I didn't wear that silver star in those days very often. We were discussing some bill and he was being his bully boy stuff. That word, I knew it was a C in that day. So I wore mine. And you could tell he knew I knew he was a fake. It was a fake medal, really a fake medal. It's in the book. I got it. But that wasn't all of it. It was just, I started keeping track of him.

• 2:53:44Speaker 01

  And I never made any notes when I worked in the White House before. But I had done, started doing that. And then I put that away. And I used to write four or six cards to myself each day. Most days, not each day. About individuals attending meetings. It's very sensitive stuff. So I decided to hell with it. So then I started scribbling this thing. And then one day, this nosy Christine comes in. She's got a box. She said, "This is what I found in the basement." I had put those away. I thought I'd thrown them away. She found them and she started reading to Charlie and to myself. She said, "Jesus." So that's where we are on that project.

• 2:54:28Jocko Willink?

  Your next move, so your next move after LBJ is in the midst of figuring out where I'll go next. I got an unexpected visit from Edward H. Levi, Provost of the University of Chicago.

• 2:54:40Speaker 01

  Levi, yeah.

• 2:54:41Jocko Willink?

  Who is one of those intellectual cocksuckers I'd been assigned to as a new hire in the West Wing a lifetime ago.

• 2:54:47Speaker 01

  He's a gentle guy. He never used the word shit if he had a mouthful, as they say. He's just a terrific leader and he really, during the times of scandal, he was so good at balance handling student uprising and so on, without getting the Chicago police in a vital difference to what alternatives might have been.

• 2:55:10Jocko Willink?

  And so, he offers you a job, though, at the university?

• 2:55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, Vice President, yeah, so I barely got out of there. And I just, through that, he became Attorney General because he just handled the whole thing so well.

• 2:55:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there was, this is, this is what, like, 1964?

• 2:55:30Speaker 01

  Four.

• 2:55:31Jocko Willink?

  1964, the campuses are starting to get riled up and all that, that's what you're dealing with?

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this, this one was, he didn't hire me for that, a little before that, it was right after the death and so on, or if it didn't soon they'd get out of there. But he handled the Chicago police very well, he did a lot of stuff of that nature, and I started up political science thing. His problem was that the, ever Chicago view is a bed of communism, far out, and so on, so I started bringing congressmen in, like Rostenkowski or these other rough guys who weren't involved at the university, but that changed a lot there, and it was interesting, exciting.

• 2:56:20Jocko Willink?

  And eventually, you end up working for Bobby Kennedy's campaign.

• 2:56:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the deal was with Levy, he's a pretty Machiavellian guy, and he wanted me.

• 2:56:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you, this is going back to the book, on the Kennedy, on the Bobby Kennedy campaign, when I flew to Los Angeles, early June 1968, I was full of hope, Bobby made us all hopeful again.

• 2:56:44Jocko Willink?

  By June Pierre was working on Bobby's campaign after having already lost his own race. He invited us out for what we hoped would be a victory party following a California primary. We checked into the Ambassador Hotel. We wandered around the sprawl of the hotel, napped awhile in the room and watched the early projections which looked encouraging. The polls closed. I called Bobby's room. It looks like you're a winner. You should give the mayor a call. The mayor being Daley. Yep. It's getting late in Chicago. Tell him, tell him and tell Rostenkowski. Rostenkowski. Rostenkowski that California's Herbert's, Hubert's end of the line. Hubert Humphrey. Kenny's at the Mayflower. I'll give him a call. It's very close. What if I don't win? Without California, you're dead anyways. So why not make the call? Okay, see you later.

• 2:57:29Jocko Willink?

  Mary and I went downstairs to wait outside the crowded ballroom where Bobby delivered his speech. Maybe he decided not to place the call because he didn't have time before his speech. Maybe he was unsure. Maybe he wanted Kenny to first push Rostenkowski, the mayor's main man in Chicago, for support. Maybe he wanted to call the mayor himself in the morning. How many maybes that night? Maybe if not through the kitchen. He closed his speech with a rallying cry. So my thanks to all of you and on to Chicago and let's win there. The senator from New York ducked the crowd by exiting through the kitchen. The night split open with rapid and unmistakable pop, pop, pop of a small caliber weapon. I

• 2:58:10Jocko Willink?

  ran towards the shots. I would learn later that Mary had gone upstairs and sat with the TV switched off. She knew. Paul Schrade? Schrade. Schrade, Bobby's pal from the United Auto Workers, was on the floor bleeding from a head wound, eyes open, looking dead. Just beyond Bobby was on his back with a crowd surging around him. Some of us tried to make a protective ring to give him air. I looked down at Bobby lying on his back. He was motionless. His mouth slightly open. There was almost no blood except on the back of one hand. No visible entry or exit wounds. His eyes had that stare that I'd seen before, but never from anyone who survived.

• 2:58:52Jocko Willink?

  I saw Jim Ables. I saw Rocky. Rocky had mumbled Corman. Ables had said, "Oh shit."

• 2:58:58Speaker 01

  Just shit.

• 2:59:00Jocko Willink?

  I shouted to Fred Dutton, who was inside the barrier, "Somebody loosen his tie." I remember hoping for a miracle, but I knew head wounds and miracles don't mix. And here you are on the, uh, on the funeral train. It was hot onboard the funeral train. We ran out of ice somewhere in New Jersey on the way to the Capitol by way of Delaware and Maryland, so we drank our whiskeys neat.

• 2:59:30Speaker 01

  As we passed through New Jersey, I don't know if it's in there or not, we, uh, the crowd, in fact, one person was killed right along both sides of the track and they eventually stopped other, other trains and we were doing a very slow pace and I looked across the crowd, really, narrow crowd, not mobs at all, but right along the track. And off in the distance, I saw some, uh, people playing golf, Fort Worth playing golf. I said to Kenny, "We're in New Jersey." I said to Kenny, "Look at those sons of bitches still playing golf." Kenny said, "Don't worry about it. This is New Jersey," he said. "Whether they know it or not, they all voted for Kennedy." So, uh, took some heart there and went back to the whiskey.

• 3:00:13Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you continue on describing this. "We moved through backyards, dirty embankments, discarded railroad ties, bottles and trash, and a corridor of humanity beside the tracks on porches, balconies and rooftops. They made signs of prayer. They saluted. They waved." The economist John Kenneth Gelbreith remembers, "If you were burying Ronald Reagan, you would obviously want to do it with an airplane. But if you're going to bury Robert Kennedy, his people live along the railway tracks." In the last car with the family, friends and coffin, I heard Ethel say to her son, Wave back, Joe.

• 3:00:48Speaker 01

  In that book, I had a piece of Frank Mankiewicz, the press secretary to Bobby. And he described the funeral train. And he said, the crowd in the train, he analyzed it, he said, the, I can't verbatim, but roughly, it says, the Protestants, they're gloomy, the Jews rending their clothes apart, the Irish drank a lot of whiskey, till the ice ran out, and then drank, continued drinking without ice.

• 3:01:33Speaker 01

  And it was a good little piece. And he, above all, he was one who later on announced Bobby's death into the crowd, he was in a hospital. But for him to write that and analyze that crowd, it was terrific. And you get on that half-assed train.

• 3:01:49Jocko Willink?

  This is another good political story that you got in here. In 1967, Pete ran for Congress against former child actress Shirley Temple in the Republican primary for special election following the death of Arthur J. Younger. By then, the Vietnam War was on, and Pete aimed to be the first Republican congressman to oppose the war. Between this unpopular stance and his opponent's celebrity, everyone assumed his was a lost cause. Things weren't looking good, so I was recruited to fly out from Chicago to deliver word to Pete that he was going to lose and should stop wasting his contributors' donations for a certain loss. Pete, and this is you talking, Pete, they're saying 85% of people in this district know who Temple is.

• 3:02:31Jocko Willink?

  Not even 85% of them knew who Jesus Christ is. He said Burger, and that was his nickname for you from your middle name. If 85% of the people know anything about her, that bitch is dead.

• 3:02:45Jocko Willink?

  Things started to look up when his opponent, Little Miss Miracle, the star of the Depression, accused of him of being soft on communism. That got the attention of a few old Marines. She was talking about the recipient of a Navy Cross. I brought this issue to the attention of David Shoup, the former Commandant of the Marine Corps, whom I knew from the West Wing, where he had asked me, "What have you done for your country lately?" He was appalled by the child actress's accusation. At my suggestion, he sent a telegram endorsing Pete, saying that when elected, Pete would serve the people of the 11th District of California with the same grace and courage that he had served his country in Korea.

• 3:03:23Speaker 01

  That letter appeared the day before the election.

• 3:03:26Jocko Willink?

  That last-minute piece was printed in the Palo Alto paper. Pete won his election, a victory that became known as the sinking of the good ship Lollipop.

• 3:03:36Speaker 01

  It was a heartbreaker.

• 3:03:38Jocko Willink?

  And Pete had saved the Marine Reserve through the 1950s and early 60s. He would make Lieutenant Colonel by the time Vietnam was on, but they didn't need any aged Reserve Lieutenant Colonels, much less one who was anti-war. So he was out. But Pete wasn't one to stay away from war, especially one he wanted to shut down for a change. He put together a privately funded trip, so he's gonna go to Vietnam. And then I told Pete I had a strong hunch there'd be an accident over there. A jeep would roll over, a chopper would go down, something taking the peace-knuck Republican from California permanently out of the debate. So I told him, "I'm coming with you." Pete went to Vietnam in 1968 between Christmas and his swearing-in as a congressman. I tagged along on a second trip in 1971. By then, anti-war sentiment had grown, following Nixon's bombing

• 3:04:22Jocko Willink?

  and the invasion of neutral Cambodia. Yet the Republican Party line was still pro-war.

• 3:04:30Jocko Willink?

  And then, so you guys go to Vietnam. It was a disturbing trip, to put it mildly. We were lied to constantly. When Pete met the American Ambassador Sullivan, he got a chance to tell him, "I think you're a liar." We went to My Lai, where Lieutenant Calley had carried out his infamous massacre three years prior. The survivors were less than welcoming. I was nervous and became acutely so when I noticed that Dominus, who's Dominus?

• 3:04:55Speaker 01

  He's a live photographer.

• 3:04:57Jocko Willink?

  He'd wandered off. That was a real no-no, because the area was unsafe and it just didn't feel right. I found him behind a hut where the man who had covered numerous wars and had privately, had privately gone to weep, overcome by all his eyes had seen.

• 3:05:14Jocko Willink?

  Wandering around one of our bases, I went into a big ton, a big tent, housing a bar of sorts. The place was full of Marines and had an atmosphere of tension I knew well. I started chatting with a pilot. I told him I was a busted out platoon leader, traveling with a fellow Korean War vet, and trying to see what was going on over here. He shouted to no one in particular, "Hey, watch out, this is one of those guys they warned us about." "Well, fuck you," I said. "No, hey, relax, pal, you wanna know what I do? I fly the ARVEN, which is the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, our allies, officers home overnight and fly them back in the morning." "You leave the enlisted guys?" I asked him. I tried to imagine a world in which Pete and I got to chopper off the battlefield every night

• 3:05:56Jocko Willink?

  with other gentlemen officers, leaving the enlisted swine to fend for themselves and hope they're still there when we punch in again in the morning. "What the fuck?"

• 3:06:07Jocko Willink?

  "That's all right, that, that's right," he said. "Anyone who thinks we can win this war is out of his fucking mind."

• 3:06:14Speaker 01

  That pilot, and the other pilots there, wore arms and legs, quick-release tourniquets so that, and they sat on a piece of armor plate, so that if they were shot down, lost a limb or, or a limb or one or another, they could just yank that tourniquet and it would apply. So that was a kind of, explaining their conduct here on that squad tent. And, and you look at them, and you don't, you know very well that the tourniquets are there for. You have to, how disgusted, disgusted they must have felt, doing their own thing, which is not fun.

• 3:06:56Speaker 01

  But to bail out on, say you did that to your crew, plane on that, it's absurd. And we, we ate that shit for all those years and wasted all those bodies. Man, not bodies, Marines, not just Marines.

• 3:07:14Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 3:07:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:17Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 3:07:18Jocko Willink?

  You move forward.

• 3:07:19Speaker 01

  Good.

• 3:07:20Jocko Willink?

  Since Korea, Mary, the peaceful, your wife, Mary, the peaceful Canadian, had lost whatever enthusiasm she had for her husband's violent adoptive home. JFK's murder confirmed her low opinion and Bobby was the last straw. Chicago wasn't the place to be in the doldrums that followed. And so we sought refuge in Ireland. We found Bantry, a year-round market town on the shores of an immense gorgeous bay, open to the gales and waves of the North Atlantic. So you guys find a house for sale. You end up buying that house out there. And um, kind of ended up spending a decent amount of time over in Ireland.

• 3:07:56Speaker 01

  Three months a year.

• 3:07:58Jocko Willink?

  During the academic season?

• 3:08:00Speaker 01

  I didn't take any jobs without that, the three months from that point on.

• 3:08:07Jocko Willink?

  And then the, the uh, University of Chicago, you kind of wrap up your job there.

• 3:08:15Speaker 01

  Five years.

• 3:08:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then uh, then you get a call, then you get another phone call. You get, you get a lot of interesting phone calls. Here this phone call comes in. Chuck Daly, this is Derek Bach. You may have heard that I was recently made president at Harvard. I'm calling you, I'm calling to ask, have you ever thought of working here? Not in my sickest fucking moment, is your response. Really, why not? Because I don't think Harvard cares about anything but Harvard. Well, um, he was looking to hire you and because of your boredom and restlessness, it made you an easy mark is what you say. So you go, end up going to work there.

• 3:08:54Speaker 01

  I don't know if I do it for five years, five to the day, I quit. He said, he said, what do you want to be at the other five years? I said, I know exactly what I'm going to be five years, what I am today, I'm a fucking man. Five years and I'm gone and I was gone to the day.

• 3:09:10Jocko Willink?

  Once at a tailgate for a Harvard Yale football game, I was asked about my allegiance as a Yale graduate working for Harvard. I was quoted saying something like this. You'd have more fun getting a girl in a hotel room and watching Ohio State on television.

• 3:09:23Speaker 01

  That's true. Unfortunately, the Crimson ran that.

• 3:09:30Jocko Willink?

  Said unfortunately they ran it?

• 3:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:09:32Jocko Willink?

  No, that's, that's, that's awesome. Uh. When I left Harvard after my fifth year, I was given a rocking chair embossed with a Harvard logo, my name and title and the years of my service and an inscription in Irish which translates to, "He left as he came, his own man." In 1977, I've been living off, living in Key West in Ireland, taking some time off. I was invited by Jack Anderson to go to Chicago to discuss a job opening as president of the Joyce Foundation, a fully funded grant-making charitable organization. So this is your next gig. You say this, "At the Joyce Foundation, I broke my own rule about not staying in any job longer than five years. I once told a nonprofit trade publication, 'Any foundation president who stays longer than 10 years ought to be shot.'

• 3:10:17Jocko Willink?

  The interviewer called me on this. What about you?" And you responded, "I have been shot."

• 3:10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw that limo off to some time.

• 3:10:31Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, "Through the 1980s, I was dividing my time between the Joyce Foundation and the American Ireland Fund. It was as close to retirement as I was comfortable with and my schedule made it possible to spend more time in Bantry. By then, Michael and Betsy Claffey bought a home house in, I'm not even gonna try this.

• 3:10:51Speaker 01

  Kilcaran.

• 3:10:51Jocko Willink?

  Kilcaran, over a treacherous mountain road from us. We had dinners and long sunlit summer nights looking out on the water. Then our world changed. Mary found a lump in her breast. Cancer. She had it treated. It came back and spread. By 1987, it was clear that further treatment was hopeless. We celebrated my 60th birthday at our Cape House, where a local builder, Scott Svensson, who knew the situation, had built a deck for her to watch the sunset from, working quickly, ignoring the local building laws.

• 3:11:31Jocko Willink?

  Mary wanted to die in Ireland. We went to Bantry while she was still well enough to travel. I did my best with cooking and cleaning, but I couldn't carry her because of my arm. A local doctor made house calls and confirmed what we already knew. No hope.

• 3:11:48Jocko Willink?

  We spent our last moments together in bed. She was thirsty but couldn't swallow. I wet her lips to ease the dryness.

• 3:11:58Jocko Willink?

  Can I have a patty? She asked, slaying for whiskey. I went to the kitchen, poured the whiskey, and brought the glasses to bed, drank some, and bent over to let the last few drops dribble from my kiss into her mouth.

• 3:12:17Jocko Willink?

  June 16th, 1987. Early light glinted off the water. Hungry hill across the bay was purple in the calm palette of dawn. Our little inboard cabin cruiser, the Titanic II, tugged at its mooring.

• 3:12:34Jocko Willink?

  In the bedroom, Mary was asleep and breathing very slowly. I lay beside her. Her breathing got slower and slower.

• 3:12:44Jocko Willink?

  Her breathing stopped.

• 3:12:47Jocko Willink?

  I kissed her. I didn't want to leave her. The doctor came. The nurse came.

• 3:12:57Jocko Willink?

  And then the hearse.

• 3:13:00Jocko Willink?

  Then I was alone.

• 3:13:03Jocko Willink?

  Toward the evening, the tide was out.

• 3:13:07Jocko Willink?

  I went down to the beach. My pistol was an ocean away. Fuck it. I begged God to finish the job. That I was still here was the only thing crueler than her being gone.

• 3:13:21Jocko Willink?

  I knelt in the wet sand and prayed as hard as I ever prayed. For Mary's life. One of the few times I've ever prayed. Please, God, give me cancer.

• 3:13:36Speaker 01

  You never listen to me, my God.

• 3:13:48Jocko Willink?

  How long, how long had you two been together for?

• 3:13:51Speaker 01

  Thirty years.

• 3:13:57Jocko Willink?

  A few months after the funeral, Dick called me and asked me what my plan was. He told me that he had a job opening for me in the event I was interested in doing something besides looking after donkeys, killing rats, and feeling sorry for myself. He told me it was a federal government job at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library. A nod from an old pal wouldn't suffice, but my service in medals and prior federal employment, including my time in Kennedy's own West Wing, would make me well qualified.

• 3:14:28Jocko Willink?

  I got the job, flew to Boston, and at age sixty, started a whole new career.

• 3:14:37Jocko Willink?

  Seems like a good... Who's that? That was Dick who?

• 3:14:41Speaker 01

  Donnie who.

• 3:14:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay. It's like a good friend to call you out and get you on a new mission.

• 3:14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was good. He came to the funeral. So, he's got eleven kids. He's the one I worked with in the White House. He called his wife a careless Protestant. Anyway, he was there and he said... And we had a... I didn't go to church, but Protestant church that had the funeral had a congregation of probably twenty or I don't know how many. But it was so poor, in a beautiful little building downtown. The roof needed repairs, so Dick observed that when he came out for the funeral. And the Catholic church is up on top of the hill, and in those days, still a huge number of

• 3:15:33Speaker 01

  persons go to church. They all went to Catholic church. So Dick said that is pretty separate. Dick, you won't believe me, but the Catholic church takes church gate collections for worthy causes. They had a special church gate collection for...

• 3:15:52Speaker 01

  For money to send down the hill to repair the Catholic, the Protestant church. Dick says, "No way." I said, "Yeah, they did." So, um, and not long after the funeral letter came, the preacher down below called me and said, "I've got a letter I want to show you." Got the letter from Dunhu, and it said, "Here's a check for, I think it was fifteen hundred dollars to, uh, help fix the, uh, help fix your roof, but not for what goes on under, underneath it." And it's vintage Dunhu. Anyway, it's...

• 3:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Uh, once you're back, now you're, you're, you're doing the library thing and, and this is, now you had met Christine before in the past work.

• 3:16:40Speaker 01

  Tip O'Neill's a friend of mine. She worked twelve years for the Appointment Secretary to, uh, to Tip, Speaker of the House and so on. She was in charge of the Title IX, there's a women's issues thing, and she's just, she was extraordinary. She's a very, very difficult person because, I don't know who you were, you couldn't get to see her unless, uh... You know, I, I listened to once, they had, that is usually criminal, she probably usually, they sort of filmed her out. Wasn't that out of a news story? The Italian ambassador, or whoever that was, wanted to see Tip. She said, "Let me check." She's, she's... And by the time I found out she used to get an appointment for two years from next winter or something like that,

• 3:17:25Speaker 01

  she, she was impossible.

• 3:17:28Jocko Willink?

  Well, since, since Mary had died and now you were back, you had Christine, and I'm going back to the book. Around New Year's, I took Christine to dinner at a French restaurant on the Cape to say goodbye. I didn't know how to get over losing Mary. She needed to move on. For a couple of months, we didn't talk. That was devastating to both of us. She loved me for a decade, knowing it would never be possible to be together. Now that it was possible, I was too broken. Finally, I realized I couldn't live without Christine. On the dock of my Cape Cod house, I asked her to marry me. We went for a seafood lunch to celebrate. We set a date for Columbus Day in the fall. There was just one issue. She was a Catholic and I'm, at least in theory, a Protestant. The first hurdle was visiting her parents on Presentation Road in Brighton.

• 3:18:13Speaker 01

  Sixteen, sixteen Presentation Road.

• 3:18:16Jocko Willink?

  She told me that I would be the first Protestant to step foot on their porch.

• 3:18:20Speaker 01

  The house their mother was born in.

• 3:18:22Jocko Willink?

  Not even the mailman, I asked. You think a Protestant could get a job as a mailman in this neighborhood? She responded. With her parents very warm blessing, we just had the church to worry about. Per Catholic law, I had to sign some papers saying I'd raise our children in the church. That was okay, but on top of that, the priest wanted me to go to an adult version of Sunday School. That wasn't gonna happen. Fortunately, I had an answer. I knew Father Richard McHugh in Korea, where he had been a Marine Lieutenant. He had been blown up by a landmine. We saw each other again as guests of Bethesda Naval Hospital. When I left the hospital, I was, he was still undergoing treatment. After the Navy put him back together, McHugh had a spiritual awakening and had become a Navy Chaplain

• 3:19:05Jocko Willink?

  and went on to serve in Vietnam. I knew he had retired.

• 3:19:08Speaker 01

  He was a Navy Chaplain, yeah.

• 3:19:10Jocko Willink?

  I knew he had retired and was living in North Carolina. I called him to explain my situation. And he said, "I look forward to seeing you on your knees in front of a Catholic altar."

• 3:19:22Jocko Willink?

  Father slash Lieutenant McHugh married us at Our Lady of the Presentation in Brighton in front of our many friends and from the many chapters in our lives.

• 3:19:33Jocko Willink?

  And then a week after my 62nd birthday, Christine was due to give birth to our first son. I thought about giving him, naming him Ulik. Is that how you say it? Ulik or Yulik?

• 3:19:42Speaker 01

  Yulik.

• 3:19:43Jocko Willink?

  Yulik. Yulik, after my father. Something our friends had talked to me about over a drink. We would name him Charlie, not just after me, but for the two uncles I never met, who had been killed leading platoons in France.

• 3:20:01Speaker 01

  One thing about back then, when Christine first came down to Key West after Mary had died, there's a wonderful piano player there, played around the world and cruised and all that stuff. He was based in, he and his partner live in Key West. The day that Christine walked in, he played Love Walked In and Drove This.

• 3:20:26Speaker 01

  Shadows away, Jesus, that was great.

• 3:20:30Speaker 01

  But, you know, the trouble is, she's the most wonderful person I've ever met and the best wife I've ever had and I don't have any more. But she can be really difficult because the guy played that in a place up in Ireland. Played that and I love that song. She goes over, next thing I hear is, "Love is better the second time around." I said to that prick, "You play that again." He said, "Hey, I am afraid of Mr. Daley more than I am of you."

• 3:21:10Speaker 01

  It was better, but didn't have to be difficult.

• 3:21:16Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ, he was your son.

• 3:21:21Jocko Willink?

  The, um, you continued over some of this, um, you got involved with other, other things and one of the things you, I mentioned it really briefly, but the Ireland Fund. Here we go through our work together in the Ireland Fund. Tony O'Reilly and I built a lasting and trusting friendship. His rugby interested me just as much as the Marine Corps interested him. He was a famous rugby player. And in 1999, Tony invited me to join him in Cape Town where he was meeting with his South African Advisory Board.

• 3:21:50Speaker 01

  He was the richest guy in Ireland at that time. Went to Boston later, but he had like 75 newspapers around the world. And based in Ireland and he got me on that general board. But he got, partly because he went down to play a hundred thousand people all white. Uh, at age 18, rugby in, in South Africa, anybody fell in love with the place. So he asked me to come down.

• 3:22:19Jocko Willink?

  The board would have an annual lunch with Nelson Mandela. When I met him, he remembered his visit to the Kennedy Library shortly after being given his freedom. At my first meeting with him in South Africa, he noticed my PT 109 tie clip, a souvenir from the Kennedy White House. He asked if he could have it. "Here it is," I said, "but what are you gonna do with it? You don't wear a tie." He clamped the miniature brass boat to his tunic. Mandela's presence can best be described as a staggering and powerful gentleness. What's truly remarkable about this man is the way he, the way his example inspired others to actualize courage and patience in the face of a system that told them they had no dignity and honor to preserve.

• 3:23:03Speaker 01

  I think that the one thing I hope you consider putting in this thing is why I got interested in, in South Africa, other than the idea of being invited to the most beautiful city in Africa and the richest city in Africa, Cape Town. And I did that because O'Reilly was sensitive to, "How did Bobby have gone down there?" and so on, he knew I was interested in that. And so he asked us to come down on a holiday, just to come see, I'd never been to South Africa. So we flew down, first class of course, and on his nickel. And as we flew into the airport, we noticed this big sea of, looked like a bunch of shacks.

• 3:23:46Speaker 01

  And so then we landed and drove back into Cape Town. I looked at the shacks and they were really shacks and no windows or anything like that. And some tin roof bits and pieces they found by the street or whatever. There were hundreds of thousands of people, unbelievable, lived there. So we got into the sitting before I met with O'Reilly to sit down for a while. He said, "Just mess around a while and let's have a little lunch and so on." So I went back out there. It was unbelievable. I mean, they just, it was, I went out with one of his drivers.

• 3:24:27Speaker 01

  And obviously, an armed white policeman. And so, dropped me off. There was a little clinic there. And I walked in, and this Eric Gomer was, I asked you who the guy is, and he told me this.

• 3:24:42Jocko Willink?

  Eric Gomer, that's the doctor that worked there?

• 3:24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, he said, I'd like to walk around there. I said, you'll have someone from the clinic, and we won't have any problem. So, I went around, looked at it. And it was just unbelievable. We talked about that. And then, found this situation specific to such charming things as the Minister of Health believed that if you took lemon juice, and I've forgotten the exact formula, and garlic, and something else, you didn't need to worry about AIDS. And she's the Surgeon General of this, that the idea of bringing medicine in was illegal. You could lose your license. It was absurd.

• 3:25:29Jocko Willink?

  So, this is 1998 when this is happening. And, you know, I know you, you went into that little village. Obviously, you saw the suffering that was going on there.

• 3:25:39Speaker 01

  This little village had 850,000 people in it.

• 3:25:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I should have said giant village.

• 3:25:43Speaker 01

  It was unbelievable.

• 3:25:44Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then you start, you get put in charge of the AIDS reports.

• 3:25:50Speaker 01

  Well, I said to Tony, this dream, and this beautiful, beautiful place, forgetting Robben Island, the prison out in the middle. And I just described to him exactly how beautiful it, I acknowledged all that. But it's also during apartheid, they had all of the blacks out. I mean, out. So, it's all white there now. But the thing was murderous. And we'd done nothing about it. So, when I described in some, the tale, and he later said he went to places he would never go, and never did go. But, nor did anyone else in the South African employ. But anyway.

• 3:26:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, you, you, you, you end up giving these reports to this board. And here, here you say, "In my reports, I would follow up with statistics about South Africa's AIDS orphans. Eight hundred and fifty thousand in number as of two thousand and six, and urge anyone who finds boner jokes offensive to consider the obscenities of that number. I swore a lot during board meetings, even by my standards. Some members of the board didn't appreciate my obscene language. I tell them it's an obscene fucking world. Real obscenity is drinking mineral water and vintage wines in a palatial hotel guarded by armed security, just thirty minute drive from a city of tin shacks where little girls are afraid to use the toilet."

• 3:27:20Speaker 01

  I explained to them that the, the, the legend was you, um, can cure AIDS if you have sex with a virg- with a virgin. And they were widespread practice of, of raping very young girls, um, in some cases killing them. But, uh, one was defended by somebody who said that wasn't a crime because she wasn't a virgin, aged five. And I said, "This is the shit that we're putting up with since we met yesterday afternoon. Now, six hundred South Africans, mostly women and children, have died of, of AIDS, and we don't do shit about it."

• 3:28:00Speaker 01

  And, uh, I, I described some of the, the deaths, including one, uh, who I had, had described in a previous session, um, brave and smart and young and so on. And, uh, she was raped, uh, the previous week by, turned out fifteen young guys, one, one is fifteen years of age. And when she screamed out, "Stop that, that, uh, she had AIDS, they killed her." And, uh, that's the one, the other volunteers kept going. And, uh, so I, he made me that advisor and, uh,

• 3:28:43Speaker 01

  we funded what we could do, we changed our editorial boards, employees included blacks. We had condoms and, um,

• 3:28:52Speaker 01

  In our workplaces, uh, one priest had said to me, uh, our pope would tell you that the country are evil, and he talked as if raincoats, raincoats cause rain, but I mean, they're fucking nuts, everybody, so, as bluntly as I possibly could, as vividly as I possibly could, um, we did help that, that change, and, and Gomers was, uh, in, what was the main city, Johannesburg, uh, they pulled the guy's license for that, and they threatened,

• 3:29:33Speaker 01

  and three times ordered the, uh, medical practice of his clinic in Calais, uh, pulled, and he wouldn't do it, and he said to me, uh, you know, it just, it takes nothing to buy a bullet to put in a man's head, uh, and somehow, because instinct spread, what a great thing he was doing, I mean, he had a white Supreme Court Justice of, uh, South Africa, and, uh, extraordinary liberal guy, he got AIDS probably from homosexual, I don't know, but I knew him, and he, uh, so he came out and said, I have AIDS, and he said, I'm

• 3:30:12Speaker 01

  alive, because I have the four hundred rands, or whatever it was, a month, to buy, uh, AIDS, you can get them overseas to, to delay or not cure, I guess more or less cure, something called heart, and he said, uh, I know, uh, people who, who die because I have money and they don't, and he said, uh, I'm alive, but he said, I'm ashamed that I'm alive, and it's a fucking mess, and I thought, the more you can spell that out, and the more you can shame these guys, the goddamn, uh, President of the country, and Becky, uh...

• 3:30:54Speaker 01

  Said, uh, he did have sex with a woman, it's alleged rape or not, but he didn't have any problem because he'd taken a shower afterwards. It's the president of the fucking country. And they get, uh, the Times later said, looking at Pac on his, on his years in service, when he was in office, if he had, if he had just permitted treatment and so on, 350,000 South Africans would still be alive. And that's the New York Times editorial. And that brings us to sitting there. Anyway, that's, that's what motivated me there.

• 3:31:28Jocko Willink?

  This is how you describe it in the book. It was hard to comprehend the magnitude of the suffering there. It's hard to imagine a place where going to the toilet can be fatal. A place where there's roughly one flush toilet for every 17,000 people. A place that is largely ignored by those with the power to improve those conditions. In the absence of government leadership on the AIDS issue, rumor and superstition has taken over. One rumor said that condoms had worms in them. A sitting president of South Africa endorsed the rumor that post-coital shower could prevent AIDS. The Minister of Health went on to, went to the World's Aid Conference promoting the rumor that garlic and lemon juice were effective treatments.

• 3:32:12Jocko Willink?

  And that HART, which is highly active anti-retroviral treatment, was more dangerous than AIDS. But the worst rumor of all, the one that once again made me pause to choke back tears at the podium delivering another report, was the rumor that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS. This had sparked an epidemic of infant rape. Researching my report, I sat down with a member of one family whose baby was essentially brain dead following a gang rape. There were instances of four and five year olds who'd already been raped many times. In at least one case, the rapist of a five year old was let off on the grounds that his victim was not a virgin.

• 3:33:03Speaker 01

  See, that's an illustration of why I get carried away like we just did. That you looking at that, analyzing it, and reading it is better than my getting so disturbed. I can, I'm almost incoherent. So, I appreciate very much, I'm not kidding you, that you've taken the time to read that, and I wish I'd listened to your questions and tried to respond more rationally.

• 3:33:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's, this is the kind of thing that can make you think irrationally. And, and here's what you say in here, "I don't think any, anything can prepare someone to understand that kind of suffering. I don't think that kind of suffering can be understood. Some of my family and friends saw a straight line between war and my fieldwork in South Africa. Perhaps I was continuing my search for a sense of purpose and mission, seeking once again the company of people who live heroically. Maybe. But, but AIDS in South Africa was death, pointless agony and cruelty like nothing I'd ever seen. These people weren't combatants. They were simply victims of an unlucky birth, even more unlucky than the civilians, than the civilian victims of war. I found their pain to be overwhelming.

• 3:34:10Jocko Willink?

  War may have prepared me to witness such pain without looking away, but nothing could have prepared me to understand it. I was seventy-two years old when I started going to South Africa, and I turned eighty shortly after my final trip. More than once I was asked, 'What were you thinking? Why did I take up fieldwork and reporting in a dangerous place when I could have been golfing and napping? Maybe I had one more battle in me. Maybe I just don't know how to stay out of it when I see suffering. On a personal level, I knew that it felt better to observe, to be somewhere I could work with brave and dedicated, whom I admired, the way I had admired Gunner Dosie, and Kenny O'Donnell, and finally, Dr. Eric Gomer."

• 3:34:55Jocko Willink?

  And these are the, Dr. Eric Gomer is that one that you, you were describing.

• 3:35:03Jocko Willink?

  And then we get here, in the middle of delivering one of my final aids reports, I started mumbling. That was nothing new. I mumble all the time.

• 3:35:11Jocko Willink?

  And we may get some confirmations of that.

• 3:35:14Jocko Willink?

  As my fellow board member, Lady Margaret Jay remembers, I'd have liked to have understood more of what he said, because it all seemed interesting. The problem was that day, I don't remember mumbling. I don't remember halting my report mid-sentence. I don't remember returning to my seat at the board table. After several minutes I can't account for, I asked David Dinkins, who was sitting next to me, what had happened.

• 3:35:40Jocko Willink?

  "You just stopped," he said. "Are you okay?" "I think so," I told him. After the meeting, I contacted Margaret Jay's husband, Dr. Michael Al- Adler. He surmised that I had a minor stroke, the good kind of stroke, if there is such a thing. He told me to get to a hospital right away. I found all this more than a little upsetting. I wanted to get back to Christine and the boys at once. So I did what was apparently one of the worst things imaginable for a stroke survivor to do. I hopped on a series of flights lasting 24 hours.

• 3:36:14Jocko Willink?

  A doctor in the States scolded me for flying and told me I was lucky to be alive. He ran tests, wrote prescriptions, and advised me to stay away from the great pleasures, the three great pleasures of my old age: tennis, red wine, and Viagra.

• 3:36:32Jocko Willink?

  Hearing the doctor's advice, I was transported back to 1942. I remembered sitting in a waiting room at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. I could hear my father's voice through the door to the doctor's office after he'd just been told that the best he could live with, to do, to live with multiple sclerosis, was to cut out martinis, golf, and his pipe. I will never forget his response. "Do you expect me to live in a vacuum tube?" he said. I looked at the doctor, "Have a nice day," and I walked out the door and into Christine's arms.

• 3:37:11Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:37:13Speaker 01

  Hey, shut up and let's listen to you would've been better.

• 3:37:18Jocko Willink?

  That's

• 3:37:19Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, Bill.

• 3:37:20Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's, you know, that's, that's how this manuscript of the book ends. Obviously, that's not what the story ends.

• 3:37:29Jocko Willink?

  And right now, what do you, what are you doing day to day right now?

• 3:37:37Speaker 01

  What damage am I doing?

• 3:37:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, I mean, I, I, I hope you're doing, um, I hope you're doing tennis and red wine and Viagra.

• 3:37:48Speaker 01

  Tennis is a little not too great. The other stuff works.

• 3:37:54Speaker 01

  I think also that it's, uh,

• 3:38:00Speaker 01

  I guess as much as, uh, I can do damage to, um, Trump, I would do it because I think that he really destroyed much there is, but there's a lot of good in this country. I mean, you look at, you look at almost every aspect of it. And when you see him throwing away the life breath of a lot of people in the world and other stuff he believes or says he believes.

• 3:38:26Speaker 01

  They try to do some things there, Christine tries. But we'll see.

• 3:38:33Speaker 01

  I'll settle for what I got.

• 3:38:35Jocko Willink?

  And do you have any, any other closing thoughts that you want to give?

• 3:38:42Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:38:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:38:45Jocko Willink?

  Well, you, you, you don't, definitely don't have to thank me.

• 3:38:47Speaker 01

  Yes, I do.

• 3:38:49Jocko Willink?

  Well, one person I want to thank is I want to thank your son Charlie for, for setting this up. And, you know, for sending me the manuscript and, but thank you, obviously, for coming on the podcast and, and more important, um, you know, thanks, thanks for your service to our great country.

• 3:39:09Speaker 01

  Thanks for my citizenship.

• 3:39:11Jocko Willink?

  Jack, that's right, the Irishman. And thanks for what you did after the military. Thanks for your service in government and thank you for what you did, not just for this country, but for countries around the world like what you did in South Africa to try and help there and to try and do your best in your life to end suffering in the world. It's been an honor to sit down and talk with you and I thank you for coming on.

• 3:39:37Speaker 01

  You too. I think I also, incidentally, I'm very, not so incidentally, I'm very grateful you mentioned Charlie. The accuracy, which I really strove for in there, immense help from two other persons, Charlie on the research and editing and much of the writing and then Christine because she reads back to me some that I've written and if it rings false, I can tell her, she looks at me the way you look at me. But it was really important to hear it. This is important, but earlier to hear Christine, to listen as I listen to you, really was very helpful.

• 3:40:22Speaker 01

  I didn't understand what a podcast, what a podcast was and I understand now, I understand the value of it also. I mean, how many books are going to get written, but how many person might be hooked on listening to some of this thing and care of some of the things which you put on, not just this program, but the bulk of those. And for me to get, I get deep, deep satisfaction to, I get your regimental order or whatever, I mean, to read all that stuff. Jesus Christ, every time I get near a gym, it makes me nervous, but when I found out that celebration is my power naps, that was a hell of a deal. And I do.

• 3:40:59Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on.

• 3:41:02Speaker 01

  You too. Sorry to keep you so long. I've been forever.

• 3:41:05Jocko Willink?

  It's been an honor. Thank you.

• 3:41:07Speaker 01

  Thanks very much.

• 3:41:09Jocko Willink?

  And Charles Daly has left the building.

• 3:41:14Jocko Willink?

  And that, just FYI, that we were reading off of a manuscript for a book. So it's out there, not sure what Charlie, which is Charles's son, Chuck's son. And they got that manuscript out there, but they have, it's a, well, obviously we covered a little part of it, it's a lot bigger, lots of stuff in there. Sort of felt like a Forrest Gump scenario.

• 3:41:43Speaker 02

  It did.

• 3:41:44Jocko Willink?

  You know, like just wild things happening.

• 3:41:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:41:47Jocko Willink?

  And just a crazy life.

• 3:41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:41:51Jocko Willink?

  But you know, Charles Daly, out there trying to make the world a better place. And I'm thinking,

• 3:42:00Jocko Willink?

  if you want to make the world a better place, which I think we do, might as well start with yourself.

• 3:42:06Speaker 02

  Yourself in your own backyard?

• 3:42:08Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:42:09Speaker 02

  Front porch?

• 3:42:09Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:42:10Speaker 02

  What's the deal?

• 3:42:11Jocko Willink?

  Your own AO, area of operations. Make your own AO better. You might have some ideas on how to do that.

• 3:42:19Speaker 02

  I do.

• 3:42:20Jocko Willink?

  Share.

• 3:42:20Speaker 02

  All right. Well, we are in, well, currently we're in Boston.

• 3:42:27Speaker 02

  Soon to be in,

• 3:42:29Jocko Willink?

  Maine.

• 3:42:29Speaker 02

  Maine. For the Jiu Jitsu immersion camp.

• 3:42:32Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:42:32Speaker 02

  With Origin. Okay, so Jiu Jitsu, that's one of the ways we can keep our AO intact.

• 3:42:41Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:42:42Speaker 02

  To learn Jiu Jitsu.

• 3:42:43Jocko Willink?

  Improve our AO.

• 3:42:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, multiple levels, multiple facets.

• 3:42:46Jocko Willink?

  The thing that's good about, the thing that's good is Jiu Jitsu will not just help you with your Jiu Jitsu.

• 3:42:52Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 3:42:53Jocko Willink?

  Jiu Jitsu will help you with all aspects.

• 3:42:55Speaker 02

  All aspects.

• 3:42:56Jocko Willink?

  People on a daily basis, start Jiu Jitsu and let us know, let me know, let you know that they started Jiu Jitsu. Ninety seven percent of the time, they say, I started and it's awesome. Three percent of the time, maybe even less than that. I've only had, I can only think of two people that actually, they're like, I just don't like it. It's just not for me. Two people out of thousands. Think about that. Two people that said, I'm just not gonna do it.

• 3:43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:43:24Jocko Willink?

  And there's the whole one that I said, there was one that said, I, you know, what if you just don't want to fight? And I said, if you don't want to fight, the best thing you can do is no jujitsu. So what we're getting at is, yes, train jujitsu.

• 3:43:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:43:35Jocko Willink?

  And if you're gonna train jujitsu, you're gonna need a gi.

• 3:43:38Speaker 02

  Yep, cuz we do recommend gi and no gi jujitsu. Two different, different thing. I think as time goes on, they become more and more like different from each other. Which, in my opinion, is more of a reason to do both.

• 3:43:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:43:53Speaker 02

  Come on, back in the day.

• 3:43:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay, bro, why?

• 3:43:56Speaker 02

  I was about to just reinforce the whole, the whole situation.

• 3:44:00Jocko Willink?

  We got people that are wrapping gees behind the neck, leg, whatever.

• 3:44:04Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:44:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:06Speaker 02

  Some worm guard.

• 3:44:07Jocko Willink?

  Worm guard.

• 3:44:08Speaker 02

  Keen and Cornelius.

• 3:44:08Jocko Willink?

  Keenan.

• 3:44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:44:10Jocko Willink?

  Worm guard.

• 3:44:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's it. And that's a system.

• 3:44:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:44:13Speaker 02

  Do that no gi. I don't even know if any of that applies to no gi.

• 3:44:17Jocko Willink?

  And try thinking, oh, well, how would you do that? Oh, that's how you do it. You know what I'm saying? Cuz remember when you got arm locked for the first time? And you're like, well, I'll just stop him from doing that. But then you realize you can't really stop it.

• 3:44:29Speaker 02

  Right, goes deep.

• 3:44:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then it's the same thing. People saying, well, how would you actually get someone's gi over there? But there's a whole setup.

• 3:44:37Speaker 02

  System, man, yeah. And that system is, does not exist in no gi, certain ones. Some do, some kind of do. So I'm saying this like a big, you know, it's, it's just very vast is what I'm saying. So when you get your gi, you're gonna get an origin gi. Hundred percent. Like, you don't even have to ask anymore. Everyone knows already. Get origin gi.

• 3:44:55Jocko Willink?

  It's a monopoly, really.

• 3:44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:44:57Jocko Willink?

  It's a monopoly on the market. Cuz really, what, you're not gonna get a different gi?

• 3:45:02Speaker 02

  Is the monopoly in cornering the market the same thing?

• 3:45:05Jocko Willink?

  I guess. I guess you, I, I see your distinction you're implying, and I accept it. The market is cornered, is what you're saying.

• 3:45:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:45:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm saying monopoly.

• 3:45:13Speaker 02

  Monopoly is like no choice. Like, consumers, no choice, right? Monopoly?

• 3:45:17Jocko Willink?

  I'm kinda saying no choice, though.

• 3:45:19Speaker 02

  I don't know, man. You have, look, there's.

• 3:45:21Jocko Willink?

  It's like the choice between steak and baloney. That's not really a choice.

• 3:45:25Speaker 02

  Well, there's like obvious choice, not to split hairs, but there's like obvious choice versus like. Kind of ridiculous choice. You know, it's like that kind. It's like, oh, that's a, that's an obviously good choice versus it obviously.

• 3:45:38Jocko Willink?

  The obvious good choice is get yourself an Origin G. Get yourself an Origin rash guard. Get yourself some Origin T-shirts. And you know what you can do right now?

• 3:45:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:45:47Jocko Willink?

  You can get yourself some Origin jeans, which I am wearing at this time.

• 3:45:50Speaker 02

  You look good, by the way.

• 3:45:51Jocko Willink?

  They're so legit.

• 3:45:52Speaker 02

  Very fashionable.

• 3:45:53Jocko Willink?

  Hey, back off. I look functional.

• 3:45:55Speaker 02

  Very functional.

• 3:45:56Jocko Willink?

  Very functional.

• 3:45:57Speaker 02

  Very, um.

• 3:45:58Jocko Willink?

  Functional.

• 3:45:59Speaker 02

  Biz, biz tack.

• 3:46:00Jocko Willink?

  Business tactical.

• 3:46:01Speaker 02

  Isn't that, did you guys make that up?

• 3:46:03Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:46:04Speaker 02

  Yes. I like it, man. It flies. Nonetheless, they look business tactical.

• 3:46:08Jocko Willink?

  Any kind of clothing.

• 3:46:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:46:10Jocko Willink?

  Check Origin. We've got boots coming, by the way.

• 3:46:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:46:12Jocko Willink?

  Boots are coming.

• 3:46:13Speaker 02

  Those look good.

• 3:46:14Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I already have them. I don't think you do yet because you're not quite on that inner circle.

• 3:46:19Speaker 02

  Intermediary circle. I got jeans though, so boom. Anyway, go to originmaine.com. That's where you can get this stuff. Also supplements. These are important supplements, though. They're not the kind that like the guy at the local gym. He's trying to pedal to you. It's made like 90% of chalk. It's not that. It's like the for real one that, that, that not only do they actually work, but you, they kind of help your life.

• 3:46:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:46:43Speaker 02

  You see what I'm saying? So you got the joint warfare for your joints, krill oil for your joints and, and general health.

• 3:46:50Speaker 02

  Uh, joint warfare is for that too. Also. Discipline. It's for your mind. Guy at the airport, guy working at the airport, straight up, asking about it.

• 3:47:00Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 3:47:01Speaker 02

  Straight up. Asking about discipline, out of the blue.

• 3:47:03Jocko Willink?

  Ask good deal Dave Burke about discipline. Ask JP about discipline. See, what do you, what do you think of that stuff?

• 3:47:10Speaker 02

  I'll tell you all about it.

• 3:47:13Jocko Willink?

  He's addicted. I feel bad.

• 3:47:15Speaker 02

  Yep. So, yeah, there it is.

• 3:47:16Jocko Willink?

  If it wasn't considerably just honing their performance in all aspects, I'd feel bad, but I'm not because their performance is honed.

• 3:47:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:47:25Jocko Willink?

  JP Sniper. Dave Burke, fighter pilot. On the discipline, on the discipline. Alright, cool. Also, don't forget about milk. Because you're gonna need extra protein when you track big steel or you're training hard or whatever. You're gonna need some extra protein. You might as well drink protein that tastes like a dessert.

• 3:47:44Speaker 02

  Like a dessert.

• 3:47:45Jocko Willink?

  So there's that. Get some milk, all different flavors. They're all awesome. And get yourself some Jocka White Tea. In the summertime, drink it cold. In the wintertime, you can drink it warm. If your throat is sore, you can have some warm Jocko White Tea. If your deadlift is weak, you can have some Jocko White Tea.

• 3:48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'll help it big time.

• 3:48:07Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. All that stuff that we just talked about, originmaine.com.

• 3:48:11Speaker 02

  Also, don't forget to wear your kid milk. Because you know, when your kids.

• 3:48:15Jocko Willink?

  Back to school. Kids are back in school. They come home from school, they're starving. And they could eat some sugar filled diabetes treat.

• 3:48:26Speaker 02

  Chocolate chip cookies.

• 3:48:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, or they could have a milk and get stronger.

• 3:48:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, hit all avenues of, uh, what do you call desire? Is that the word? Nonetheless, yes, very good, uh, kid approved, which is a good thing, of course. Uh, so yeah, all at originmaine.com. Also, Jocko is a store. It's called Jocko Store. And this is where we all get our shirts to represent the path. Deathcore, discipline equals freedom.

• 3:48:54Jocko Willink?

  That we're wearing at this time.

• 3:48:55Speaker 02

  Currently wearing them. Yeah. It's actually, at the end of the day, I mean, it's a few origin ones. I have a Jody Middick one that I always wear. It's pretty much all I'm wearing.

• 3:49:06Jocko Willink?

  Approved.

• 3:49:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:49:07Jocko Willink?

  Rash guards.

• 3:49:09Speaker 02

  Rash guards on there big time.

• 3:49:10Jocko Willink?

  Trucker's hats.

• 3:49:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:49:13Jocko Willink?

  Beanie's.

• 3:49:14Speaker 02

  Dry fit. Dry fit is, they're being produced.

• 3:49:18Jocko Willink?

  We'll talk about that.

• 3:49:19Speaker 02

  They're coming. They're coming. Be on the lookout for that. Hoodies, lightweight, and I wear the lightweight. What do you think? It looked good.

• 3:49:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay, next.

• 3:49:28Speaker 02

  You didn't care that it looked good, but you thought it looked good. That's the, right? You thought it looked good.

• 3:49:33Jocko Willink?

  It looked like a t-shirt that had long sleeves and a hood. That's what it looked like.

• 3:49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, you liked it.

• 3:49:39Speaker 02

  Anyway, yeah, a lot of cool stuff on there. JockoStore.com.

• 3:49:42Jocko Willink?

  Good way to support.

• 3:49:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and support yourself and represent while you're on the path. It's good to represent, I think.

• 3:49:49Jocko Willink?

  We saw the person representing on the UFC.

• 3:49:51Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, big time. Felt good.

• 3:49:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there he was.

• 3:49:54Speaker 02

  We all, it kind of felt like we were all at the UFC.

• 3:49:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we were.

• 3:49:57Speaker 02

  Little bit.

• 3:49:58Jocko Willink?

  Little bit. Alright, subscribe to the podcast if you don't already. iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, wherever. Leave reviews if you want us to read them and get a good laugh out of your awesome review. Also, don't forget about the Warrior Kid Podcast, which is also available and good for kids, parents, teachers, adults, human beings. And there's some Warrior Kid Soap you can get from IrishOaksRanch.com. Which is a young warrior kid making soap that you allows you to stay clean.

• 3:50:28Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, two flavors on that one, by the way. Not flavors, sorry. Two separate kinds of so trooper soap, Jaco soap. That's what Aiden's making up there. Also, we have a YouTube channel, official YouTube channel, Jocko Podcast. You can see the video version of this podcast, of every podcast.

• 3:50:47Jocko Willink?

  You can see what Charles Daly looks like.

• 3:50:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:50:49Jocko Willink?

  Watch his reactions.

• 3:50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:50:51Jocko Willink?

  There's some emotional moments during that podcast, some heavy moments.

• 3:50:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, yeah, you could tell, man, he, his, like, every step of his journey, you could tell he was caring about stuff.

• 3:51:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:02Speaker 02

  You know, like, he was, yeah, you could tell a lot of it was, was affecting him from the beginning.

• 3:51:07Jocko Willink?

  Good. You've also been making little excerpts.

• 3:51:11Speaker 02

  Excerpts.

• 3:51:12Jocko Willink?

  Some of them are just a straight excerpt. Occasionally, you enhance the excerpt with things like cello music.

• 3:51:17Speaker 02

  Sometimes.

• 3:51:17Jocko Willink?

  Explosions.

• 3:51:18Speaker 02

  Sometimes.

• 3:51:18Jocko Willink?

  Fire, smoke.

• 3:51:20Speaker 02

  Sometimes.

• 3:51:21Jocko Willink?

  Reflections.

• 3:51:22Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:51:22Jocko Willink?

  Puzzles in my facial expressions. Why would you do that? You're just like, I'm gonna freeze your facial expression at this time.

• 3:51:30Speaker 02

  Oh, it wasn't frozen.

• 3:51:31Jocko Willink?

  The voice is still going on, but you're just sitting there.

• 3:51:33Speaker 02

  It wasn't frozen.

• 3:51:33Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of interesting.

• 3:51:34Speaker 02

  No, if you look close, which I, I encourage you to do.

• 3:51:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:38Speaker 02

  Okay, this is what it is. When you're, okay, me and Dan, you're talking about the one that you're saying, um, you know, what, the trump card, right?

• 3:51:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:44Speaker 02

  Like, yeah, if you wanna go drink, you know, rather than train, then I don't want you on my team. Okay. So, when you were saying that, me and Dave Burke, good deal, Dave, we were.

• 3:51:54Jocko Willink?

  You just good deal, Dave, to yourself.

• 3:51:55Speaker 02

  My man, gotta include it. Include it, man. No, we're, so we're watching you, so I'm like, okay, like, this is, this is different, right? I'm kinda.

• 3:52:04Jocko Willink?

  You were watching him watch me a little bit.

• 3:52:06Speaker 02

  I looked over at him. Oh, yeah. So.

• 3:52:08Jocko Willink?

  What was the expression, like, on his face? Did you guys look at each other? Did you guys make eye contact?

• 3:52:14Speaker 02

  Not that I can remember.

• 3:52:15Jocko Willink?

  Watching him watch me, okay.

• 3:52:17Speaker 02

  We're both kinda captivated in a way.

• 3:52:19Jocko Willink?

  Captivated?

• 3:52:20Speaker 02

  In a way, in a way.

• 3:52:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:52:21Speaker 02

  So, what I thought is.

• 3:52:22Jocko Willink?

  Detached enough to take a look and say, like, is this hitting Dave Burke the way it's hitting me?

• 3:52:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:52:28Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's kinda. So, um, so the reason I did that, or we, the reason we put your, did your face like that, or whatever, is, um, because when you're saying that, like, you give off a certain feeling. You know, like, even when you say a bunch of stuff, you give off a certain feeling. So like as a person listening to it, it's like, what feeling am I getting? I see what you're saying and I even see here how you're saying, I dig it, man. But it gives you a certain feeling as a result. So I took that feeling and it was kind of a psychotic feeling. So took that psychotic feeling, the best I could translate it graphically into the video. That's what it came out as.

• 3:53:06Jocko Willink?

  All right. So if you want to see graphic feelings expressed or not expressed subtly, or maybe not so subtly, then you can check out the YouTube channel called Jocko Podcast. Also, we have psychological warfare, which is little audio clips that can help you through challenging moments of weakness that threaten your very existence every single day. You can go to iTunes, Google Play, or other MP3 platforms to download these fire support for your ears.

• 3:53:39Speaker 02

  That was good.

• 3:53:40Jocko Willink?

  You know what? You know what? It's just go off script, brah. That's what it is. Just go off script.

• 3:53:46Speaker 02

  Well, but sometimes if you go through, like you go off script and you'll get too esoteric, then I'll be like, hey, what if they'd never heard of psychological warfare? They don't know what that is still sounded cool. Still don't know what it is. See what I'm saying? So you gotta find the, what do you call the dichotomy, medium balance thing.

• 3:54:00Jocko Willink?

  Also, don't forget about flipsidecanvas.com where you have Dakota Meyer, who is making graphic representations that will get inside your brain and keep you honed and on the path of discipline and will. Flipsidecanvas.com. Nothing else needs to be said on that one.

• 3:54:24Speaker 02

  That was good. Uh, and true, by the way. Also, don't forget about on it, on it.com slash Jaco. This is where you can get your kettlebells, your rings, your clubs, maces, battle ropes, all kinds of fitness equipment, typical stuff and atypical. You like that atypical.

• 3:54:44Speaker 02

  Also, there's this immune one, shroom tech immune. I'm just saying, I brought that because you know, when you get on the plane and stuff, you know, you gotta get the immune system going because you don't want to get sick on the plane, all those germs, nonetheless. On it.com slash Jaco. Go there. Good stuff.

• 3:55:01Jocko Willink?

  There's also a bunch of books. I wrote a new book. It's called The Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. This is the absolute frontline pragmatic information of how to lead. You got a little problem? Here's how you actually solve that problem by following these actions. That's called Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. It is available for preorder right now. And if you want to get that first edition, you better do it quick because you've got guys like Andrew Paul, who ordered 20 copies. Guaranteed Sarah Armstrong is ordering 20 copies. JP ordered eight copies. He's probably going to step it up to 20 though, as soon as he hears this.

• 3:55:41Jocko Willink?

  JP's competitive. He doesn't want to lose. Yeah. So first edition, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. Preorder it now. Also, Way of the Warrior Kid 3, Where There's a Will. That's available. Also, two in one are available. Mikey and the Dragons, best children's book, voted best children's book ever.

• 3:55:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:55:59Jocko Willink?

  In the world. Yep. Well, in my house.

• 3:56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, well.

• 3:56:03Jocko Willink?

  And well, by me and my wife.

• 3:56:04Speaker 02

  Actually, Way of the Warrior Kid gets more reps in my house.

• 3:56:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, really?

• 3:56:09Speaker 02

  Gets more reps, yes. I'm not saying it's better.

• 3:56:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I'm surprised because your kids are a little bit younger.

• 3:56:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, they like the mowing the lawn part.

• 3:56:19Jocko Willink?

  Cool. So those books are available for kids. Mikey and the Dragons, Way of the Warrior Kid, Mark's Mission, and Way of the Warrior Kid 3, Where There's a Will. Also got Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, which, by the way, Charles Daly has read and approved.

• 3:56:33Speaker 02

  He called it something.

• 3:56:35Jocko Willink?

  He called it your manual.

• 3:56:38Speaker 02

  No, he said you're something. He called it something like, it sounded pretty official too. I liked what he called it. I was kind of laughing because I knew exactly what he was talking about. And he was like, you know, I don't go near a gym or whatever. But nonetheless, yeah, he read it.

• 3:56:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And he talked about the power naps because I listed in there how to take a power nap. And he was like, that's what I do. I said, that's awesome. So that's available. It's also available not on Audible, but it is available audio.

• 3:57:06Jocko Willink?

  Through iTunes, Amazon Music, Google Play, other MP3s. We also got Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership, the two books that I wrote with my brother Leif Babin about leadership and how to take leadership from the battlefield and apply it to your business that you're running right now. We got Echelon Front, our leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. That's what we do. Echelonfront.com for details on that. EF Online, this is online leadership training so that you can, so that you can get consistent, repetitive, and get the reps in. Like you just talked about getting the reps and get the reps in. You have to make leadership decisions during that training, by the way. I don't know if you know that.

• 3:57:44Speaker 02

  I do, yeah.

• 3:57:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you gotta make leadership decisions in that training, military and business. There's scenarios set up. Choose your own adventure.

• 3:57:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:57:52Jocko Willink?

  And make a call. It could be wrong. If it's wrong, go back, start again.

• 3:57:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's good about the reps too because, you know how like, because a big part of what you kinda can't teach, even in, like you can't teach this part of it, even like, I guess in Jiu Jitsu kinda can, but um, like you can't teach being in the actual scenario because you're emotional, you know? So like, it's like, hey, you know, you gotta, you know, there's this situation, what are you gonna do? You're gonna, and I'm oversimplifying the scenario for sure. Are you gonna blame someone? You're gonna take blame, or are you gonna take blame with an excuse, kinda, kinda options, right? But, and it's like, okay, cool. I know it, I know it. That's a good scenario.

• 3:58:32Jocko Willink?

  But then we see people blaming other people all the time.

• 3:58:34Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, when it comes down to it, because when you're making, when you're in that training, whatever, you're making the decision, you don't feel threatened. You don't feel defensive. You don't feel that. You feel like, okay, I'm gonna get this answer right, kinda thing. So you know the information, but now when it's come to time to execute, you gotta, you know, you gotta contend with your emotions. But when you get the reps and those scenarios are kinda readily available in your head, even though you're kinda feel defensive, you're like, oh, I know this scenario. In fact, I'm used to this scenario in my head, you know, you know what I'm saying?

• 3:59:02Jocko Willink?

  So it's more embedded in there. Also, the more time you see a scenario, even if you, even if you watch the same scenario 20 times, like let's say you watch a movie scenario unfold 20 times.

• 3:59:13Jocko Willink?

  It's, and then you see something close to it, you're gonna be more apt to recognize it in the real world than if you just saw it in a movie scenario one time.

• 3:59:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:59:21Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 3:59:22Speaker 02

  Correct, 100%.

• 3:59:23Jocko Willink?

  That's totally true. Um, also we got the muster. Chicago done, it sold out. Denver coming up next, but guess what? It's sold out. After that, December 4th and 5th in Sydney, Australia. That is the next muster that we're doing. Extreme ownership.com for details. If you want to come, please register now. Don't wait until it's sold out and then send me a Twitter that says, didn't know you were coming, sorry. Can you still get me in? Because guess what? I can't. The Fire Marshal won't allow it. Also, we have EF Overwatch where we're taking proven leaders from Spec Ops and Combat Aviation and placing them into companies that need leadership in the civilian sector. Go to EFOverwatch.com. If you're on either end of that calculus,

• 4:00:07Jocko Willink?

  whether you need a leader or whether you are a leader, go to EFOverwatch.com so we can connect you together. And if you want to communicate more with us, it's actually not that hard. You can find us on the interwebs. We're on Twitter, we're on Instagram, and we're on Dan Fajn Buchen. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Charles Daly, to his son Charlie, to his wife Christine that was here. Thanks Chuck for your service in the Marine Corps and in so many other mariner arenas out there. And as a veteran of the forgotten war, the so-called forgotten war,

• 4:00:51Jocko Willink?

  I assure you that you and your comrades are not forgotten. And the rest of the troops out there in uniform, thanks to you all as well for putting on that uniform and for protecting us from evil around the world. And to all the police and the law enforcement and the firefighters and the paramedics and the EMTs and the dispatchers and the correctional officers and the Border Patrol and Secret Service and all the first responders out there. Thank you for protecting us from evil here at home. And to everyone else that's listening, we've just got to hear a story of a amazing life, the life of Charles and Daly, a life that's still being lived.

• 4:01:33Jocko Willink?

  From a book that is literally still being written, just like life. And think about that. Think about, think about that life with so many stories and so much life. So, so don't hesitate.

• 4:01:51Jocko Willink?

  Don't hold back. Go and live your life. Go and write that story by going out every single day and getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.