467: All It Takes Is All You Got. Risking it All For The People. With Chad Robichaux

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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 467 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The previous day, we'd visited mass graves. Whole sections of forest cleared of trees with long, deep pits carved out of the soil and filled with bodies. As many as 1,500 people in each. Nearly all that I saw were women and children with their hands bound behind their backs. They'd all been shot in the head.

• 0:30Jocko Willink?

  Some of the bodies had been burned, or at least someone had attempted to set fire to them, which is what people do when they want to cover up a mass execution. But bodies don't burn well. Crimes like that are hard to hide. Having seen those mass graves, I appreciated the few, having a few moments to pause and think about and pray while we waited on in our Land Cruiser at the side of the country road. But the quiet buzz around our little internet cafe was interrupted when C-Spray's phone rang. In addition to gathering evidence about possible war crimes committed by Russian troops, we were looking for a wounded and captured US Marine.

• 1:14Jocko Willink?

  America wasn't in the war, not officially at least, but my guess was that there was as many as 4,000 former US servicemen

• 1:25Jocko Willink?

  doing what they could do in Ukraine. Some, like the Marine who had been caught by the Russians, had come to fight. Others, like C-Spray and me, had just come to help. We carried no guns and rode around the country in our specially modified vehicle, rescuing people who couldn't rescue themselves and providing Ukrainian troops with whatever support we could. Sometimes that was as simple as free medical supplies, some of the fastest free wifi on the planet, and a double strength espresso. C-Spray's call didn't last long. They lost comms. He said, "Nobody knows where he is now."

• 2:02Jocko Willink?

  It was not the news either of us wanted to hear and the Marines chances of rescue were now practically zero. But there wasn't time to discuss it. Almost immediately, we heard the familiar whistle of incoming Russian artillery, followed by the devastating womp as it exploded behind us, shaking the ground beneath our feet. Then, seconds later, another one, this time even closer. The troops scattered and Seespray and I took over, took cover next to the nearby building. Another round came in, then a third and a fourth. The indirect fire was getting near with every explosion. Soon it was close enough to our position for us to see clouds of dirt spraying out from the blast.

• 2:45Jocko Willink?

  It was heavy artillery, the kind where every impact sends a blast of pressure that rattles through your body, shakes your brain, and takes air from your lungs. Neither Seespray nor I spoke. Unarmed and protected by only Level 4 ballistic vests and Gator ballistic eyewear, we pinned our backs to the wall and watched carefully as the Ukrainian soldiers organized themselves to repel the attack. None of them appeared anxious, but the Russian gunfire got closer still. So close that the Ukrainians engaged in small arms fire and I could hear the sound of AK-47s springs functioning as they fired.

• 3:28Jocko Willink?

  The Russians couldn't have been more than 100 yards away. Maybe closer. And that right there is an excerpt from a book called "A Mission Without Borders: Why a Father and Son Wristed All for the People of Ukraine." And it's written by Chad Robishow. Chad was a Force Recon Marine who also served in Afghanistan as part of a Joint Special Operations Task Force, JSOC.

• 3:57Jocko Willink?

  He's the founder of the Mighty Oaks Ranch Foundation, which helps veterans and first responders overcome combat trauma. He's the co-founder of Save Our Allies, a nonprofit that focuses on the evacuation of Americans and our allies and other vulnerable people from war-torn countries or hostile environments. He helped coordinate the rescue of 17,000 people from Afghanistan, including his interpreter and friend Aziz. He's written books, a book called Saving Aziz, a book called An Unfair Advantage, and another one Fight For Us. And he has a podcast called The Resilient Show. He is a black belt in jujitsu. He's been on this podcast before,

• 4:40Jocko Willink?

  episode 375. If you hadn't listened to that, go have a listen to hear his background and his origin story. But he's back here with us tonight to share his experiences from his latest, latest lessons learned and his latest endeavors around the world. So Chad, thanks for coming back, man.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Thanks, brother. Thanks.

• 5:03Jocko Willink?

  Glad you're here.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:04Jocko Willink?

  Glad you avoided some of this, uh, some of this incoming heavy artillery coming your way.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did not expect that when we went into Ukraine. But I mean, obviously it wasn't a surprise. It's a, you know, it was a very hostile environment as soon as those 100,000 troops crossed into Ukraine. And we just felt really burdened to go and initially just to help Americans that were left behind, you know, when, uh, when this first started, Putin put 100,000 troops into mortar and, and we flexed. One of the things that happened was the White House made the decision to remove our embassy, our consulate and our US troops that were there, only 160, but enough to be a threat to Article Five violation and keep Putin at bay. And I believe the White House gave a green light for. Russia to come through. And when we seen that happen, we knew that they were moving out our,

• 5:52Speaker 01

  our US government officials before our civilians. And that's the fourth time we've seen that in the last couple of years. And so we knew we need to be there to help Americans. So originally, the the effort was just to go and remove Americans off of the what we knew would be a battlefield.

• 6:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And you talk about in the book, you know, you talk about, you basically like, hey, this isn't a book about the politics of Ukraine. And there's a bunch of different arguments and a bunch of different directions on that.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  But, you know, from my perspective, what I what I get from you is, it's like, where there's war, there are people that are hurting. There are people that are suffering. And obviously, the Americans is who you focus on first. But then even after that, there's more people that are need help. There's more people that need food, water, transportation, life, medical treatment, all kinds of things. And that's what you guys, that's what you've seen, that's what you know, and that's what you go and try and help out with.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, when we first, you know, I made a real big point in the beginning of that book to to make a point of the not being a geopolitical book, not sharing that side of the issue, because I'm a very strong conservative, I'm a Christian. So a lot of people from my world were writing me like, what are you doing in Ukraine? Like, Zelensky is corrupt. There's, we're sending hundreds of billions of dollars there. And it's being put in this corrupt machine, like, what are you even doing helping there? And my point is, Zelensky probably is corrupt. And so is every politician, most politicians since the beginning of time, like a read a history book. So we shouldn't be surprised by that. But if we ever let our politics get away from our compassion for people, then we should probably change our politics, right? I mean, the people that are victims of the corruption that people are against, which I'm against

• 7:26Speaker 01

  it as well, are are innocent human lives. And in Ukraine, there's been over 100 million, I mean, over, I'm sorry, over a million deaths at this point. And these are, these people are innocent. They're the victims of this corruption. And I believe this war could be ended in 24 hours. I believe that by the time this podcast releases, it may be, it may be over, it may be negotiated and be over. But Look, I didn't go there for President Biden, President Zelensky, anyone else who went there to help people that couldn't help themselves and so did our team. And that was, we put all of that aside. In fact, we worked with our, with our US government to do a lot of this stuff as a surrogate, as a fourth option. One of the efforts I do this under is called

• 8:07Speaker 01

  fourth option. For those that don't know, the US government has a protocol for people, Americans or people, vulnerable people that are trapped in other countries. First option would be diplomacy. Second would be military action. Third option would be covert action. And a fourth option would be a surrogate outside the government in an unofficial capacity. And those things happen all the time by great patriots who have access and placement in different places around the world, create that and work with the agency, the Central Intelligence Agency through the SOLO, Special Operations Liaison Officers, through the Pentagon to say, hey, we're in this area, we have this capability. We could either do what the government can't or won't do. And we work in liaison with that. So it's very important for NGOs

• 8:48Speaker 01

  that work in that capacity to, to have those relationships in order to de-conflict. Because the last thing an NGO, not government organization, a humanitarian rescue effort wants to do is go into the front door while dev groups coming in the back door and, and create a conflict. So you want to be de-conflicting those things. So we work very closely with our government. And our government has been a strong partner with us. In Afghanistan, there are evacuations and Ukraine and other areas around the world that we're, you know, we're working right now that I haven't written books about and talked about.

• 9:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's another vote against bureaucracy. Because a lot of times what slows up the government is just government bureaucracy. They just can't make things happen fast enough. Whereas if you have a very nimble organization like yours, you can just flip and make things happen, which is...

• 9:32Speaker 01

  I could do things faster and I could do things cheaper, a lot cheaper. But, and much more effective. You know, we talk a lot in this book about, about, I mean, we were in, we were in a crocodile pole and, and the special mission unit in Poland was, was Delta Force. And they were, we knew a lot of the guys. So we were sitting down, hanging out with them, having dinner. And they were just chomping at a bit, wanting to go across the border. So our guys want to go across the border into Ukraine, but the White House was not allowing them to. And, and so we were able to just, an operation comes up, a rescue. We were able to just coordinate right with that SOLO, the Special Operations Liaison Officer, roll across the border and, and go get that done where, you know, it would take...

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Days, weeks to get approval for them to roll across. We were able to just hop in a car and go.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  It's the ultimate red tape avoidance.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:20Jocko Willink?

  Especially because you know, when you're in the military, you could do something like in five minutes. You're like, oh, I can go outside and grab this thing or do this thing right now. It'll take us five minutes to go do it. But once you start running that concept of operations up the chain of command and it's like, oh, they're gonna start asking questions that don't really matter and making requests that don't make any sense. So it can be really problematic. Just any, any big bureaucratic, bureaucratic system is gonna be really hard to work and really hard to maneuver and they're not gonna be nimble and they're gonna need permissions because they're not willing to take risks. And there's a huge, there's also a huge difference between, you know, some guys from the US Army get rolled up or shot up.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:01Jocko Willink?

  That's a, that's an international incident, escalation of war, whereas, no offense, bro.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:06Jocko Willink?

  Some random, uh, you know, American that's over there.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:10Jocko Willink?

  Doing God's work gets blown up. It's like, yeah, that's too bad, but.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:13Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't really interfere with international politics.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. He chose to be there. He's, it was his choice. And yeah, that's, and that's a very convenient thing. When I say that fourth option, that's a very convenient thing for the government. There's no contractual relationship. There's no money exchange. As soon as money would be exchanged, a contract to the government, now it's not a fourth option anymore. Because now it comes with the restrictions, the red tapes, the bureaucracy. So that also gives them a, a complete, like a disassociation with it. And, uh, they like that. The best example I could probably give out a whole book was the rescue of Benjamin Hall, uh, which, you know, I'm not sure if you want to talk.

• 11:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we'll get into it. Let's, let's, let's get into the book then a little bit. Um, so this whole thing kicks off and obviously there's a huge underlying theme in this book, which is you're going to war with your son, which is.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:55Jocko Willink?

  Risking, you know, pretty, pretty crazy to read about. So go to the book here. On October 14th, 2022, two days after the announcement of the withdrawal of US troops from Ukraine, Biden flinched for a second time. He announced the closure of the US embassy in Kiev and evacuated the last of the American diplomats. After months of Putin's flexing on the borders, it seemed inevitable that Russia would invade Ukraine. That's when I got the call. The moment I saw Sarah's name on my phone, I knew what she would be calling about. Sarah Verardo, Verardo was a co-founder of Save Our Allies. This could only really be about one thing. You're going to Ukraine, she said. Is that how she talks to you?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  She does.

• 12:31Jocko Willink?

  You're going to Ukraine.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  You know Sarah?

• 12:32Jocko Willink?

  I don't know her, but I know about her.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. She's, that's how she talks.

• 12:36Jocko Willink?

  You say, I am. She said, yeah, C spray is there. He says the invasion is going to happen any day. We want you to be there to prepare for when it happens because when the invasion starts, we were, we're going to want to be able to move people out. We talked about the details a little and I told her I'd talk with C spray as soon as I could reach him. But there wasn't any need to say much more at this point. I could feel my heart burning with that old familiar feeling to take action and help to serve. What I needed most of all was to get on my knees and pray. And you go on to say you also had to talk, talk to Kathy, your wife about everything that you have going on. She's got to be getting at least a little bit tired of you just rogering up for this stuff all over the world.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  I mean, we're just coming off Ukraine. I mean, we're just coming off Afghanistan. I was still like, I was still like burnt out from Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a the withdrawal was just, it was emotional, physical, emotional.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just, I was just burnt out and so I was not expecting to want to do anything like this and.

• 13:34Jocko Willink?

  And plus you have stuff going on at home. You got the mighty Oaks foundation, which is a awesome organization, you know, and actually it's, you know, I have called you multiple times and said, hey, I got a situation going on with somebody. I need help and you guys are sort of my fourth option. You know, I run out of my options of like, well, did you talk to the VA? Did you talk? You know, of course I try and help people and talk to them, but I, I don't know what I'm doing. And then, you know, my fourth option is like, all right, I gotta call you guys and you guys have done a great job of reaching out to people, going to get people and taking care of people that are really not in a good spot, veterans that are not in a good spot. So I appreciate that from the bottom of my heart, what you've done for some of my friends has been awesome. So

• 14:19Jocko Willink?

  so you have that going on.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:21Jocko Willink?

  And the rest of your life going on. And meanwhile, you get a freaking random call that says, hey, you're going to Ukraine. How does your wife feel about this when this, when this happens?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 14:31Jocko Willink?

  She know what she got into when she married your dumbass?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, we, I was, you know, we met when we were seventeen, eighteen. She saw me go through, you know, BRC to become recon Marine and she been through all the deployments and all that stuff. So I think at the end of Afghanistan, and I talked about this last time I was on the show, she was like, after the H Kaya and, and uh, in Mazza Sharif part, when I went to Tajikistan to do the river operation, she was like, you're pushing it too far. And, and I, I talk about this in the book, like, I get, just like you, I get asked to do a million different things. And what people read about is like me, or me, you know, what I talk about is the things I do do. People don't see all the things I say no to. I say no to a lot of things. So I don't, I'm not opportunist that's, you know, war kicks off and I'm like rushing over.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  I didn't go to Israel. Uh, I was asked probably a hundred times, like literally probably a hundred times to go to Israel. I, I haven't, I haven't went. So I don't just do things to just jump in, but if, if my, I really feel my heart's burden and God's burden in my heart and, and, you know, I have a process to go through. I pray about it. I talk to mentors and people I have around me in my life that this is good accountability. I'll talk to Kathy and, and, and uh, if all those things check and I feel like God's opening doors, then I'll go. If the doors are closing, I don't force my way through it. And that would be my ego, with my desire to want to be involved in these things. And, and look, I don't have anything to prove. I've, I've done, my, my deployments in Afghanistan. I've got, I got, I got to do all the things I want to do. So if I feel like I could be of help and it's not for me,

• 15:55Speaker 01

  then I'll do it. And with this, I really felt burden to go. I, I really did. And, and Sea Spray is someone I'm very close to. I love the guy. He's one of the most incredible human beings ever. And I knew he was out there days before, like the invasion in, in Ukraine. He was out there by himself. He wanted me to be there. And, and you know, he's one of those guys. I'm sure you have brothers like that. They call and say, you go, yeah, I'm gonna go. And uh, and that was the circumstances. And Kath, Kathy, actually in this one, she didn't push back. She was pretty supportive. She was not so supportive when Hunter comes into the picture.

• 16:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so fast forward a little bit, you talked about sea spray, sea spray is, um, uh, you know, it sounds like a, it sounds like a real character. I've never met him before, but he's a green beret.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:38Jocko Willink?

  He was, uh, he did a bunch of stuff with the, with the paramilitary inside of our O G A. So he's a real experienced guy.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Ground branch, maritime branch. I tell you, I tell you, uh, uh, to let you know who he is as you hear these things. He, he, uh, to get to ground branch, maritime branch, doesn't matter how qualified you are. It's like a lottery to you, right? You gotta, everything has to line up. Oxford educated, incredible human being, gets the dream job. You know, to be a, uh, precision rescue operator, a paramilitary officer at maritime branch. And then he goes to Afghanistan to help us with the withdrawal. He, he took vacation to say he was sailing, gets caught there by the agency and they tell him, hey, you have to go home. Like, we love you, slap on the wrist. You gotta, you can't be here doing this humanitarian rescue. Like, you gotta go home.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  And the guy, he resigned. He resigned from this career that like most people would chop their hand off for, him included, to help people that couldn't help themselves in a country not his own. I mean, the guy in 10 days at H Kaya, he lost 37 pounds because he wouldn't stop to drink water. Um, him and this guy named Sean, like walked out the gate to get these little girls. Two Taliban shot two guys right in front of them. They stepped right over them, kept going. Like, he's like one of the most selfless human beings I know. And so when he resigned from that job to do that, like, we've kept him employed ever since. And he's, uh, he leads all the, all the stuff that I get to do and I get the credit for, cause I'm, the kind of face of it, it's really him.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Like, he's, uh, he's the guy, he's the brains behind it. He's the, the workhorse. He lives in a hammock or at the back of a truck. You know, it's, I don't even know where he's at right now. Every few days I have to check in where you're at, like, cause he just, he's not a very good communicator. Uh, but, uh, he's this incredible human being. That's who, the kind of people I get to, you know, it's such a blessing, man, to be around people, human beings like that.

• 18:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 18:30Jocko Willink?

  You guys link up on the phone, "Hey brother, when are you getting here?" He said when he was finally able to return my call. Russia's gonna cross, it's happening. What makes special operations specialists, you always look to, you always look to do something that no one else could do. It's not an ego thing, it's practical and pragmatic. If you're doing something that could easily be duplicated by someone else, what's the point? So, any planning for any operation always starts with a clear question, which is exactly what I asked Sea Spray. What's the unique need that nobody else can do, but we can? Sea Spray paused to be, then gave me his answer. It's not gonna be a mass medevac like Afghanistan, where we're moving thousands of people. Anyone can drive a minivan or a bus over the border from Poland and haul a bunch of people out. It's those who can't get out that are gonna need help.

• 19:14Jocko Willink?

  Injured, sick, incapacitated, trapped Americans, my brain was already firing. Yeah. So... "It's gonna get bad real quick," he says. "When kinetic combat starts, there are gonna be people who should've got out already but didn't." "We've got to build a capacity and a capability to help." So, that's how it kicks off, that's all you need to hear, apparently.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that was it. I went into two things, operational planning and fundraising. These things cost a lot of money.

• 19:46Jocko Willink?

  And this is, everything you do, when you write about this stuff in the book, it's all just donations from people.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have incredible network. I think my superpower in all this is not my military experiences, my networking ability. I have built networking relationships over time that when I call for something like this, to support it, we're able to get the resource in place. Permissions, which are important for access and placement, and in the financial resources, because this stuff costs money. And I've been speaking at a lot of corporate events on this type of thing, networking and integrity. Like, how do you pull something like that off so quickly? And raise that much money so quickly, you know, for Afghanistan, tens of millions of dollars in three days? We don't do it in three days.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  You do it over fifteen, twenty, thirty years of demonstrating you have integrity, you can be trusted, you have the ability to execute and produce impact. So, you do that over years, and then when it comes time they really have the need, that's when you cash in on it, and so...

• 20:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, at Echelon Front, we say you can't build relationships once the emergency starts. You know, you can't just be like, oh, you and I are friends now. You know, now that I need something from you, I want to be your friend. It's like, no, we had to have been friends and now I need something. And of course you take care of me all because you know, I'll take care of you. Uh, that's awesome. So fast forward a little bit in the book. And by the way, everyone get the book. Once again, book's called A Mission Without Borders. I'm going to read some highlights of it today, but get the book. There's all kinds of awesome details in here about, about life, about the war, about the path. So pick it up. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. March 4th, 2022. Did you say Krakow? Did you say Krakow? I always said Krakow. Is that because I'm an American?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Krakow, Krakow, Krakow. They, they have like, it's weird. Like even Ukrainians will say a different, and you go look at different maps in a spell different.

• 21:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  So.

• 21:37Jocko Willink?

  And, and I'm also very bad at pronouncing anything other than English. And even English, I'm marginal, but any, any other language I, I kind of suck.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, same here.

• 21:47Jocko Willink?

  So it's been two weeks since Seaspray and I had spoken, Russia had invaded Ukraine. Obviously 2 million people had already fled. Um, at the airport, I linked up with Roman. A Ukrainian Russian national who I had brought on board through a trusted NGO partner. He'd been heavily vetted and was fluent in Russian, Ukrainian and English. Together, we headed to the Sheraton located in the center of Krakow where Seaspray had based himself. So again, this is the kind of stuff that doing this on such a rapid turnaround and having the money to start executing this stuff. Do you keep a fund of money that's ready for this or do you have to raise?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Like I have a fund ready for the, for initial phase, emergency phase. Yeah, but, but you, you, you don't, I can't keep tens of millions of dollars in the bank. And sometimes, you know, some of these things cost that. And so, uh, but a lot of the relationships I have could, could turn around really quick. So, um, and, uh, man, it's, it's like amazing, like patriots that really that have wealth, have capacity that really, you know,

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Want to do stuff like this. They just don't know how.

• 22:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  And so give them the ability to build to contribute to something like this.

• 22:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  And they they jump on board.

• 22:57Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. You got another guy named Bo, another special operations guy that worked with sea spray before. He's a medic, a professional, and you say he polishes up like Clark Kenton here. But you show up here, both were dirty. Their eyes look like they hadn't seen a decent night's sleep since you last spoke to sea spray. Fast forward a little bit, I figured it'd take a day, at least a day for sea spray and Bo to recharge. So you go on the train station and you're going to go check things out for yourself.

• 23:25Jocko Willink?

  And you're starting to see the people at the train station that are fleeing Ukraine. This had to be pretty impactful. You you talk about them, they're they're breathing, but they're scared.

• 23:34Jocko Willink?

  They're waking up to the fact that there's no next step for them. Going to the book here. I've been around refugee programs before in Africa, as well as other parts of the world. And there's something instantly familiar about people gathered in the train station. I guess the trauma of being forced to leave your home and your homeland is so deep and fundamental that it makes people respond in similar ways. Parents hold their children tighter. Children let themselves be held. Both of them keep their eyes open, alert and possible to any danger. There is so much uncertainty and fear that you can not only see it, you can practically feel it with your soul. President Zelensky had recently ordered that all males of fighting age were barred from leaving the country. So there were no men waiting on the concourse. At least no man between the ages of 16 and 60. As I walked among the groups of girls, women and boys, I couldn't help but thinking of all the fathers, husbands and sons left behind.

• 24:20Jocko Willink?

  That had to be eerie.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's it was just different than anything I've seen before, you know, and you've you've been in all over the world and seen war zones. And it was just different. And and there's always a transition that, at least for me, there's always been a transition when I go to different war zones around the world. I go for one reason, right? Afghanistan, nine 11, retaliate for the for the attack on September, September of the 2001. And

• 24:46Speaker 01

  So I go there for, but immediately fell in love with the Afghan people and, and feeling the pain of their oppression and wanting to help liberate or bring stability to the Afghan people. That's kind of what happened here. I went there to help rescue Americans and walking at train station and seeing what was happening to these, these Ukrainian people. And I'm like, these people are like, not much different than us. I've been to lots of third world countries. Ukraine's not a third world country. I mean, you, you drive around, you see pizza parlors and ice cream shops and shopping malls and people dressed like us and, and just very modernized people. And, and so that really caught me. And to see that and then to see them alone without their husbands. And I'm like, what would I feel like if, if I was, if my wife and children had to leave to another country and I'm back

• 25:31Speaker 01

  behind fighting? We've, we've never been in that situation. We've, our wives and children are always safe at home while we went out and fought. But they're staying behind and fighting and they're sending their wives and children off with no communication. And it just really, it just really struck a chord in me.

• 25:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's really wild to, to watch that stuff on the news and see, like you said, the, the visualization of the first world country in a full-on war. And you're thinking, wow, we haven't progressed at all. You know, that was my thought. I'm like, really? This is what we're doing?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Uniform or uniform?

• 26:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Uh, this is not terrorist groups, like uniform or uniform. But ballistic missiles the size of telephone poles flying into apartment buildings. This isn't IEDs or, this is MiG fighter jets, uh, you know, firing into neighborhoods where, where only women and children are left, elderly communities. This is like, I mean, the news has not captured it, the, at the brutality that it really is.

• 26:28Jocko Willink?

  Um, fast forward a little bit, watching the crowds, they collected and ate their food. I was struck by another difference between these refugees and those I'd met before. Without their winter coats on, the people looked just like folks at home. This is my first time seeing refugees in a first world country. And they looked just like the people from my neighborhood, just like the people I lived among. If it wasn't for the buzz of Ukrainian being spoken, I could have easily been in some church meeting attended by Kathy and her friends.

• 26:56Jocko Willink?

  You meet a person named Sasha. I asked Sasha if we could pray with the people. She agreed. And so Roman and I spent as long or as little with people as they wanted. I didn't have any magic words to say and didn't expect to take away the pain or fear. Mostly, I prayed that they would know that God loved them and that he was going to be with them every step of the way, especially in the middle of such hardship. A lifetime of being around people who are living in the shadow of war has taught me that's the best way to pray.

• 27:23Jocko Willink?

  She gave me a look and told me she understood perfectly what I had said, but that she also thought I was just plain wrong. When Russia, when Russia come, will America help? This is the question this woman asked you. I thought back to the previous summer to Biden's decision to withdraw those 160 National Guard troops and shut the embassy in Kyiv. If I was going to give her my honest answer, it wouldn't have eased her fear. So I chose to offer comfort instead. If that ever happened, if there's enough compassion and courage in America and among her allies to come here, to come in and drive Putin all the way back. But what I really want to say to you is that it's okay that you feel scared right now. It's normal to feel fear when war is close by, but look around. We're all here for each other.

• 28:11Jocko Willink?

  So they knew. And they were questioning what we were gonna do.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they were questioning that, you know, if, if we allowed Russia to push all the way to the Eastern European border, because that's where we're talking about pulling the Eastern European border, you know, where would it end? You know, where would it end? If we wouldn't step in now, when will we step in? And, you know, there's a lot, that's a very complex question, because there's a lot of like, I mean, does America want to put troops around Ukraine? I'd say, no, we don't. But there's a, there's a way to stop it without doing that. And I felt that way now. And I felt that way from day one. We could have ended this without ever putting. You know, a US boot on the ground in Ukraine.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  I suppose we'll find out. Yeah. Coming months. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, that's one of the things that President Trump said in the debate, that he would end this as President-elect. That provoked a response from Putin and from Zelensky. And just that, that statement from President Trump on the debate stage led to conversation. And now that he's President-elect, he's had conversations with both. And I think he has, I think, well, I say think he has, I think any strong leader in the White House, Commander in Chief of the United States Military and in the leader of the real world has the ability to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine. I don't think this is a very complex issue. I think it's been allowed to happen for several reasons. And, you know, a lot of people get rich, very rich off of wars.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Afghanistan was shut down. You know, conspiracy or not, the industrial military complex of the United States is one of the most profitable, you know, line item in the United States government. And people make a lot of money off of war. And there's a lot of pressure, you know, for political figures to allow stuff like this to happen. And sadly, it is. And that's what, one of the things I hope to see in this new administration is that corruption, to be ended. Because, you know, those kind of decisions lead to our military, our young men and women who put on uniforms that kind of trust the Commander in Chief to lead them to do, being involved in just wars, to be involved in conflicts that are unjust for personal profit. And we've, we've been part of some of those things.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  And we've lost friends through some of those things. And, you know, my sons, both my sons served. And, you know, my family served for eight years. I don't want any family to be part of serving that way. And, you know, and it also risks our national security when we deplete our surplus and spread our troops then, and that jeopardize our national security. And so I just hope and pray that we have people that'll go into this new administration and make decisions that'll...

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Keep America out of these, you know, these wars in, in a way that we don't need to be involved in, uh, through just good leadership.

• 31:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's a real, I hope you have, um, and I, I'm, I'm right there with you.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:10Jocko Willink?

  And I mean, this is definitely, I would say that right now, you know, the way this, uh, the Trump administration is shaping up with the people that he's, um, bringing on board to his cabinet. I'd say it's the most radical group to be coming in. And, you know, one, one thing that I think is, you know, you look at like what, what we learned in the Vietnam war. And there were so many lessons to be learned and so many lessons that we did not learn

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:40Jocko Willink?

  In the Vietnam war. And you can say, now say the same thing about Iraq and Afghanistan. And so hopefully this new, you know, the new administration will, will pay attention to those lessons that we should have learned in Vietnam, lessons we should have learned from, uh, Iraq and Afghanistan. And they'll make more prudent decisions and, and that's the best we can hope for.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:02Jocko Willink?

  Um, they are different.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  They're different and they're not coming from the institution.

• 32:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Uh, most of these picks, including like Pete, I know a lot, I just talked about this morning, Pete Hex, Hex, a lot of people like, why did President Trump pick a Fox News host to be the, the Secretary of Defense? Well, he's not from the institution. You know, he doesn't have the strategic level, military leadership experience, you know, what you, you see in oh six and higher.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  But if I'm going to be hired to be a CEO of a construction company, I don't need to know how to swing a hammer. I don't know, give vision. I need to know how to lead. I need to know how to assemble the right team of subject matter experts of construction guys. And, uh, and I need to be trusted by the investors. President Trump trusts Pete. He does have military experience. He did 20 years in the reserves and which is, he never led at a strategic level. He's an infantry officer. He's led at a battalion level, uh, but never led at a strategic level. But he's not going to be sitting in a situation where I'm in a silo. He'd be sitting there shoulder to shoulder with the commander in chief and the joint chiefs and the head of CENTCOM and SOCS out and all those people. And they're going to make decisions together and, uh, and, and he recognizes the most, and I think President Trump recognized this, the most.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Crucial decision on our national security right now, or the most crucial factor in our national security right now, it's not our strategic ability to battlefield, it's our morale, our recruitment and our retention. And so, a guy from inside the institution of the military right now, has proven not to be the best choice of that and it burned President Trump last time. So I think he wants somebody from outside the institutions and Pete's just an example. But uh, that's kind of what he's done.

• 33:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And um, what Pete went to Harvard and Princeton and then Harvard or something like that. I mean, he's smart, he's smart, he's well spoken. Yeah. And like you said, he's not part of the, he's not part of the institution right now. And, and so.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  He wrote that book, A War on Warriors, which is about DEI and wokeness and our morale and, and recruitment retention, which is, I think is the biggest issue in our military right now. I mean, if you have a motivated military, who could recruit the America's best and brightest, uh, and could retain them, uh, to stay in and keep that experience moving forward, especially our warfighters who are leaving at rapid rates, uh, you have a capable military and you could bring in subject matter experts and assistants to help with the strategic leadership stuff. And I said, I think it was, I think it was a wise choice for what President Trump's doing right now. And Pete's a patriot too.

• 34:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, for sure. Um, a while ago, when all this recruiting problems were happening, I was kept meaning to, to put some words together and write an article and the title of the article was going to be called, Why Didn't Become a Ballerina? And Echo Charles, you like that?

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:41Jocko Willink?

  You want to know why I didn't become a ballerina? Why? Because I wanted to carry a machine gun. You see what I'm saying?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  I do.

• 34:46Jocko Willink?

  And that's what I never was like, I never looked at a pair of, of ballet shoes and was like, hmm, that seems like a good option. Nope. Never had that thought. But I, as soon as I knew what a machine gun was, I was like, that's what I want to do. So, there's a bunch of people that feel that way. A bunch of young men that want to carry a machine gun. And so when you tell them, hey, you want to carry a machine gun? We got, we got the spot for you. Just come on over here, sign up, we'll give, we'll pay you money to shoot that machine gun. And you go, oh, cool. I'm in. And that's exactly what happened to me. I was like, want to be a commando. I want to, I want to, uh, put camouflage paint on my face and swim across the beach and go kill bad guys. That's what I want to do. That's, that's it.

• 35:29Jocko Willink?

  And so the recruiting at the time was like pretty solid, you know, oh, you want to be a commando? Cool. You can go in the army. You can be a special force guy. You can be a ranger. You can go in the Marine Corps. And the only, the branch of the Navy that only had, didn't have the best recruiting, which was kind of good recruiting at the time. Cause if you knew about it, you're like, oh, that's kind of the deal right there.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Was that video that, that was filmed under Strand?

• 35:50Jocko Willink?

  I didn't see that until I was already in the, um, in the DEP program.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:56Jocko Willink?

  In the, what's it delayed entry program. I didn't see the video until that.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:59Jocko Willink?

  Until I was already in.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:01Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, there's a video Echo Charles, you can watch it on YouTube. It's called be someone special.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Yes, that's it.

• 36:05Jocko Willink?

  And it, it is not great. It's actually pretty funny because it's like, it's like a super low budget.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Motivated.

• 36:14Jocko Willink?

  Eighties video. So there's fake explosions and cheesy soundtrack and whatnot. And so when I, I'm kind of lucky, I guess, that I didn't see that before. Cause it maybe, because the Marine Corps always does like kind of the best job with recruiting.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like slaying a demon.

• 36:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  With a sword.

• 36:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just slaying demons. So.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  I want to do that.

• 36:36Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. So my point in saying all this was for a while, do you remember these commercials that they were putting out? The military was putting out these recruiting commercials.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:43Jocko Willink?

  And their recruiting commercials had nothing to do with carrying a machine gun and putting camouflage paint on your face and going across the beach and killing bad guys. The recruiting commercials were about like just really weird things that.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  I was raised, I was raised by two moms.

• 36:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Those, these things where you're like, I don't understand what this is. I don't, I don't, that doesn't appeal to me. This, whatever they're showing me, it doesn't make sense to me. I don't, I don't want to do that. Just like if I would have seen a recruiting poster for the New York ballet when I was 14, I wouldn't have been like, oh, that looks sick. I wouldn't, wouldn't have done that. If you showed me a freaking guy coming across the beach with a machine gun, I'd be like, that's what I want to do. Would I sign up for that? So we, the military started putting out these advertisements and the recruiting posters. We were like, well, I don't, any 18 year old dudes looking at the going, oh, I guess I don't want to do that.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:30Jocko Willink?

  Cause that doesn't look like what I wanted to do. I want to carry a machine gun. That didn't even show a machine gun in that commercial. Well, what's happening? So I don't, I'll go somewhere, do something else. And so that's my point in saying I didn't want to be a ballerina and that's why I didn't become one. I want to become a commando and all they had to do was show me there's the commando place. Like go down there, this is the commando thing. You want to be, we want to be commando, go down there. Yeah, we got you. You get paid money or you get paid money to shoot machine guns, blow things up, jump out airplanes. It's the best. And when you're 14 years old, if they show that to you, you're like, oh, you show me a picture of guys jumping out of airplanes, shooting machine guns and blowing things up. Okay, cool. Where do I sign up?

• 38:13Jocko Willink?

  If you show me some random weird things, you go, oh, that doesn't really look like my jam. So there was actually a while, Echo, where I was thinking you and I should just start making recruiting commercials. I told you that, didn't I? We were just gonna go rogue. It was like the fourth option.

• 38:31Jocko Willink?

  People in the military. I was like, we'll make some sick freaking commercials. You know what, though? Here's the problem with that. I don't want to recruit people that don't want to do it.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:39Jocko Willink?

  Cause, cause, and listen, I've recruited a lot of people. I've recruited a lot of people.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  You're influential, people are gonna listen, right?

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  I meet them all the time. Like, I meet them all the time and it's awesome. I'm super stoked. But occasionally you're like, hey, this person, their life didn't go the way they wanted it to. They didn't make it through the training or whatever. And so it, it doesn't make me feel good that somebody kind of went down a path that they maybe shouldn't have gone down. So I was a little, I'm a little nervous about making recruiting things because we'll get people that it's too much brainwashing. You know what I mean?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:08Jocko Willink?

  Where it should be, if you want to go in that door, you should be able to find it. But we need to at least tell them about the door. We need to at least tell people that it's there. Hey, go through door number two or door number three. Door number three, there's a machine gun. We said Dave on it.

• 39:24Jocko Willink?

  So that's the way it works, man. All right. You are at, you're at this place with all these refugees and you, you end up going to a florist and getting a bunch of flowers and, and walking around just giving flowers to people, giving a little, little light to their world.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  And that was

• 39:43Jocko Willink?

  Pretty moving.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  I was actually worried. The, we passed by this florish shop and I'm like, hey, what do you think about? Like all these women are gonna get freaked out. Their husbands aren't there. They're scared. Now two dudes come in. With a bunch of flowers like is this could be creepy. They think we had the bad intentions. And uh, and Roman was like, no, no, let's do it. And so I just started ordering these flowers and the ladies were like the at the florist shop was like, what are you doing this for? And we told them they were just like all in. Throwing extra flowers in and and we went in there and we were just giving these flowers to these ladies and and they were like literally take it ball up and was crying like smelling these flowers and uh. So it's just we had time and it just felt like uh opportunity to do something nice.

• 40:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I imagine a lot of those, a lot of those women and children lost their husbands and sons or husbands and fathers at this point.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  For sure, for sure.

• 40:32Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Next morning, you drove out to the Ukrainian Polish border. Uh, you see a line of cars disappearing in the distance for people waiting to get into Poland. Uh, some people were waiting fi- up to five days to get in there.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  That was days, days.

• 40:46Jocko Willink?

  On the, oh, go ahead.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  It was, it was days and it was cold and it was cold and wet. Kind of define physics. You know, when it's like cold enough and wet enough to where it like should be snowing, but it's like freezing temperatures, but it's not snowing.

• 40:57Jocko Willink?

  Which is worse by the way.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 40:59Jocko Willink?

  Rain is thirty-three degree rain is worse than ten degrees snow.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:04Jocko Willink?

  As far as just being freaking cold.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:06Jocko Willink?

  And this is coming from a place of experience, Echo Charles. You're over there in Hawaii, but you don't know nothing about this stuff.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  And me, and these aren't, these aren't Jocko human beings. These are, these are women and little girls coming across dragging their stuff soaking wet. And it's gray, the gray sky. It's just, it's cold, man.

• 41:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  And uh.

• 41:25Jocko Willink?

  You say on the Polish side of the border, the expressions on the faces of those who had just crossed told of their journey so far exhaustion, relief, sorrow, confusion, fear and hope. Many people displayed them all. Tens of thousands of refugees were there. Um, hundreds of volunteers, NGOs, kind-hearted people who had turned up to help.

• 41:45Jocko Willink?

  Everything like people giving them um rides, people giving them cell phones, people giving them SIM cards. And these are all NGO, NGOs.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  No, not one government agency was represented on that border.

• 41:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the point that you make is like, is like, I recognize most of the names of the nonprofits who had shown up. And many of them were from the Christian community, but not one single government was represented there. Not one.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  No. Man, it was, uh, I mean, there was, there was a, one of the things that still hit most is there was this group of guys from India.

• 42:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, you talked about in the book, they were Sikhs, right?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were Sikhs and they just had a food truck out there and they were making a, they were making cauliflower curry. And it was like, people were lined up just having this bowl of hot, I mean, imagine being that cold for that long. You've been there and, and having something warm go inside and hit your internal parts of your body like, uh, they were, they were delivering the goods, man. It was, it was really cool.

• 42:35Jocko Willink?

  I mean, the Sikhs is a warrior culture right there, big time.

• 42:40Jocko Willink?

  The, so these medical NGOs, you end up, there's a field hospital, this was pretty moving. You, um, there, there's someone in there, you're, you go into this field hospital and there's, you can hear someone just like crying hysterically in the back. And you say, I introduced myself to one of the medics and was told to wait while the team leader finished up with someone. The sound of the person weeping gradually eased and eventually the doctor I was waiting for emerged from the back. John Cooper was my age, American and had the air of someone who'd been in places like this before. I knew a little of his bio. He was a former US Navy surgeon who had worked in the cache on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's combat support hospitals. He had chosen to come to Poland to see if he could provide emergency medical care for those crossing. He'd been there only a few days, but he was clearly disturbed by what was going on.

• 43:26Jocko Willink?

  We're seeing a lot of people like that, John said quietly, nodding in the direction of the back cubicle where the woman was still crying. She was held captive by Russian soldiers who killed her husband and then raped her repeatedly over five days. She said the soldiers forced her to, children to watch.

• 43:43Jocko Willink?

  We paused and both sat in silence. What gets me is their strength, he continued. They've been through such trauma, but they don't crumble. They keep, they keep it together long enough to reach the border and get their kids to safety. It's only when they get here and realize that they're safe that they do let go like this.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing strength in these people. Uh, especially these women. And, and you gotta think like these women aren't. They're not warriors, they're not fighters. They were, they were from first world country. They're housewives and, and moms and, and, uh, you know, but in this moment, they just rose up and protected their children. Some of them got their children safely and went, and went back across the border. And went back to help.

• 44:28Jocko Willink?

  Um, you end up at a, you go back to your hotel and well, this is where you talk about this is kind of a key crux of the story. You guys are going through like a brief and you said, I don't know who said it first, but as soon as the word communications was mentioned, everyone's focus intensified and the conversation became a tumble of ideas. If Russia takes out the phone grid or the power grid, those NGOs will be in trouble. They won't be effective and they'll all be vulnerable. They don't have sat phones? Not enough. Interesting. We could help with that. Set up an alternative communications grid? Exactly. Get them the right equipment and teach them how to use it. Satellite phones and HF and VHF radios. Needs to be encrypted. These are all just comments from your team.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:02Jocko Willink?

  And with solar panel charging stations. It'd be complicated and expensive. The room paused. Since when has money ever been a problem for God? I said, if it's God will, if it's God's will, it's God's bill.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  That's been my motto for quite some time.

• 45:16Jocko Willink?

  You'll find, you'll find the money. But the reason again, I'm skimming the book, but the communication thing is huge. Obviously in, in war, you have to be able to communicate with other people. And if they're relying on their civilian network of communication and the Russians take that out, it's a disaster.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had, we, it was one of the things in that moment, we identified as a vulnerability point. We felt like, hey, this is something we could do that's being overlooked by others. Uh, we were watching how the NGOs were working so well with the Ukrainian government, Ukrainian military. But it was all based on their ability to communicate. And if that goes down, then, uh, you know, people are just gonna be blind and, and, and, and not be able to continue this coordinating efforts that were successful. So we knew we needed to step in that, in that role and build something.

• 45:59Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, our contracts, our contacts within the US, Polish and Ukrainian governments were able to give us helpful information about the operational threat environments on the Ukrainian frontlines. Most important, we learned that Russia had been sending its own special forces teams into Ukraine to identify possible targets and call in airstrikes. These guys, mainly in their 30s and 40s, were rumored to be athletic looking and confident, had been given blue American passports and were wearing high-end adventure gear and posing as humanitarian workers. In other words, they looked exactly like us. That's sketchy.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:29Jocko Willink?

  This was bad news, but it wasn't necessarily catastrophic. Seespray had already told us how nervous some of the Ukrainians were on their checkpoints, and at least now we had a little more understanding as to why. Most of the country's makeshift checkpoints were manned by everyday citizens armed with hunting rifles, shotguns and machetes. It was easy to imagine how nervous they would feel and how suspicious they would be if a bunch of middle-aged humanitarian workers looked like us. So you guys doubled down on trying to look as low-key and unthreatening as you possibly could.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:58Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, in addition to buying high-vis fluorescent yellow jackets and covering all our vehicles with prominent red crosses, we created official-looking laminated ID cards with a QR code that linked to our NGO's website. We also added a little extra flourish by visiting a local stationery store and getting a rubber stamp made for an organization we'd made up, the International Association of Humanitarian Services.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Little tradecraft tip for everyone, is that rubber stamps work everywhere in the world. If you had a rubber stamp on something, most places in the world, you'd get by. Lamination? Lamination's good.

• 47:29Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, finding the vehicles that would serve as ambulances was a challenge. Building comms network packages was proving to be a big undertaking as well. You finally come up with a list of what each comms package should contain. Iridium's satellite telephone with year-long subscriptions, a reliable extensive satellite network, very high-frequency radios for vehicle-to-vehicle communication, GoTenna 264-bit encrypted closed-loop network allowing a group to create their own secure cellular mesh network and track each other's locations in real time, GPS units so we could track each package and be easily notified if any user got, if they got in distress, Gold Star solar panels

• 48:10Jocko Willink?

  and power banks to keep everything working if the power grid went down. So you put these kits together that you're thinking about, they're gonna cost about 10 grand. Uh, fast forward, there's only one real solution to our problem and that was have someone buy the gear in the US and bring it over to Poland in person. And there's only one person I could think of who I trusted to tackle a task like that in such a short timeframe.

• 48:36Jocko Willink?

  My eldest son, Hunter.

• 48:39Jocko Willink?

  So you, you talking here about your, your, your, your family has 80 years of service, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, finally Afghanistan. Both your sons, Hunter and Hayden, both went into Marine Corps. Hunter ends up in Anglico. So was he out by this time?

• 48:55Speaker 01

  He was out. He was out. He did his deployment to Afghanistan. He did eight years and he was working with me at Mighty Oaks. He was part of Afghanistan withdrawal. However, I kept him benched.

• 49:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you kept him in Abu Dhabi and he didn't get to go forward and

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:12Jocko Willink?

  Dad taking care of his son, be a little overprotective, but it's like, what, what are you gonna do?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Right, right. Take him and swim across the Panjshir River into Afghanistan? Like, I wasn't gonna do that.

• 49:25Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, you talk about that. You talk about some of the stuff that he did and being benched. You talk about him being benched. So fast forward, you give him a call. Hunter, I said when I called him from Krakow on Wednesday, March 9th, it was 3 a.m. in Houston, but there was no time to waste. You still want to be a part of this? Sure. What do I have to do? I'm sending you a list of comms equipment and a $300,000 budget. I need you to buy everything on the list. You're gonna have to search the whole country to pull it off because much of this stuff won't be in one place. Then you're gonna have to get everything bagged up, fly it here and turn around and fly home. It's not super sexy or anything, but I'm telling you, this is super important. This is literally an opportunity to change the course of history and how we help stop World War III. Okay, he said, calm as ever. When you need me to bring it to you? I paused for a moment. It was Wednesday already. Saturday.

• 50:07Jocko Willink?

  Hunter didn't skip a beat. Okay, he said, send me the list. So your boy's just ready to rock and roll.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  He, he's like super stoic. He's like a, he's real, he's not really easily like excitable. And he just like, that's just him and he's very competent. He'll come out of Anglico's, all those kids in Anglico, I say kids, they're just calm nerds.

• 50:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and they're, they're, they're comms guys. They're not just calm emotionally. They're comms guys because they have to talk to radios and stuff. I'll talk on the radios to aircraft and ships. So he knows, he's familiar with communications equipment and whatnot.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:40Jocko Willink?

  Which is beneficial.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he's like, he just geeks out at all that stuff and, and he's, he's kind of a gearhead. Yeah, he, he just, uh, Like him buying that stuff and getting that stuff together like I trusted him to do it. And man, he pulled it off. He pulled it off.

• 50:58Jocko Willink?

  You say we added a couple more members to the team. Sean Lee, who was a former 82nd Airborne soldier, worked for Sarah and Dr. Mike Simpson, who'd served over 30 years as Green Beret Airborne Ranger and a doctor on the premier special operations medical unit in the US military. Mike had a couple of other doctors with him, including Richard Jadik and Will Dutton. Am I saying that right? Jadik?

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Jadik, yeah.

• 51:18Jocko Willink?

  So you're getting more people on the team?

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, subject matter experts in their different fields and that's how you build a team like this. You, everybody, when you're doing something like this, everyone wants to come on. And so I'm always so grateful and like flattered that everyone wants to come on board. But you got to pick the right people that you need and you can't clutter their team. And, you know, just subject matter experts in different areas you need and.

• 51:40Jocko Willink?

  Does your phone just start blowing up when something goes down globally?

• 51:43Speaker 01

  It does.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  I wouldn't even go into Israel whenever it's like, sign me up. I want to go. I want to go. I'm like, I'm not going. We, I had guys there, but I wasn't there.

• 51:53Jocko Willink?

  You talk about some of these other NGOs, seeing guys from on the payroll of the World Health Organization and the World Food Program lounging around the Sheraton Restaurant, feasting on steaks and red wine, while I knew for a fact they were still doing nothing at the borders of Ukraine itself, really boiled my blood.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think anyone that's seen that would.

• 52:13Jocko Willink?

  Piss anybody off.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  It's disgusting.

• 52:17Jocko Willink?

  Then you had an encounter, one of your favorite NGOs Samaritans Purse. You, you link up with those guys in this particular meeting. There was no talk about congregation numbers, building programs or outreach events. Here it was all about the war and what the churches within the network were doing to help keep people or help people that were in need. So tell me a little bit about Samaritans Purse.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, a lot of, there's a lot of big organizations, right? Big in like Red Cross and all this. But Samaritans Purse, I'll tell you firsthand, from Afghanistan to Ukraine, all the, they are legit. Like people that. I mean, I raise money from, but I'll tell you like, if you ever want a good place to donate to Samaritan's Purse, they're absolutely incredible what they do, their capabilities and their integrity and how they operate. They're always, they're always like right there in the, in the front of, of everything, every crisis around the world. And, uh, you know, Edward Graham, uh, who's, who is an armor ranger, uh, he's, he's the son, the grandson of Billy Graham, the son of Franklin Graham, just incredible human being. Um, he actually wrote the foreword to this book. Uh, and Ken Isaac, Ken Isaac's the guy at Samaritan's Purse no one knows about.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  He's the, he leads all the international operations, incredible human being, one of the smartest human beings I know. And that's who we were liaising with there and, uh, and they, they really like building networks really well. And so they had built in, built a network with the local, uh, church in Ukraine. When I say local church, I mean, just like pastors, and that was the most trusted, reliable network. Cause it was a liaison to communities. And so we needed to tap into that and our, our partner to tap into that was Ken Isaac. And he brought us in to tap it because we wanted to get these communication systems that worked at trustable, reliable people that were doing good work. And that was a local church and Samaritan's Purse was the one that liaised on that for us.

• 54:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You say the Ukrainian church had formed its own underground network and was playing a vital role in getting the aid that the NGOs were providing across the country to the troops themselves. So there you go.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:13Jocko Willink?

  They're, they're getting after it. Meanwhile, fast forward a little bit. Hunter walked through customs at Krakow airport at 2:00 PM on Saturday, March 12th. He freaking kid pulled it off.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Pulled it off. Yeah.

• 54:23Jocko Willink?

  Somehow managing to push three trolleys with a combined total of 14 bags in a little under 100 hours. He'd been able to locate, acquire, pack and personally courier everything we'd asked him to bring. We hugged. Yeah.

• 54:36Jocko Willink?

  Now he's like, Hey, you want me to set this stuff up? Of course you guys don't know what the hell you're doing.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:42Jocko Willink?

  And so for three days solid, he worked pretty much without sleep. I resisted the urge to play dad and tell him to go get some rest. So he's just making things happen.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Maybe setting this stuff up, you're like, I mean, just setting up a in reach like or, you know, GPS like and then getting it connected onto the flat screens. We're building like a top now. So now we have flat screens around. You want to see where all these things are going to be distributed throughout Ukraine. Like he's building all of that. It's like, you know, stuff that I can't do.

• 55:09Jocko Willink?

  This is not stuff for the boomers.

• 55:16Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Late in the afternoon, March 15th, the call came in. The moment sea spray took it, he held up his hand for silence and crouched over a pad of paper. We knew it was on. What's the extent of their injuries? I asked, he asked in his voice, calm and clear. I could just about hear a woman's voice on the other end. What was their last known location? Anyone they spoke to recently? Cell phones. All have US passports. The call ended in sea spray, added final notes to the pad before turning to us all. There's an American journalist, Benjamin Hall, worked for Fox News. Appears the rest of his team were killed. He's severely wounded and with his injuries, possibly only for only has 48 hours to live. He won't get the care he needs in Ukraine and won't survive if he stays there.

• 55:57Jocko Willink?

  He paused. He's likely in Kiev, which is currently under siege by the Russians. He's an American. He's got a wife and two little girls at home.

• 56:06Jocko Willink?

  And no one's going to get him. If we don't go for him right now, he won't make it. Who wants to go? There were 11 people in the living room of our safe house that night. Without hesitation, every single man there, including Hunter, said yes.

• 56:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And just to reiterate at this point, like Kiev is under siege.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  That's the, that's the moment that they're trying to take Kiev that like it's about 80% encircled. Infantry mechanized vehicles, MiGs ballistic missiles. That's, that's why Benjamin Hall was, was hit because he was hit in the middle of that. And, uh, and I mean, we're in a phone, that phone call, we're in a phone with the Pentagon, talking directly to Solo and the White House has said, no, like, um, they're not going to go. They're not going to go. So we were literally his only, his only option.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  And uh, yeah, I mean, it was, it was a God ordained thing too, because we talk about have, you know, when you're doing things like this, access and placement is, is the most crucial. Like you could be, you could be dev group or, or CAG and one of the most capable units in the world. But if you don't have access and placement scenario, you can't put those, those skills to, to, to solve the problem.

• 57:16Jocko Willink?

  Especially now here, you know, you got like, you, you guys are, you guys are actually the perfect solution. Cause you're low vis, low profile, like it's, it's the fourth option.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  It's the fourth option. And, but like what I said was God ordained is because to build to have that access to placement, it happened about an hour before the phone call. We got the ambulances. We had got all the jackets and, you know, everything that we, we were, we were, we were equipped to build to pull that off only for about an hour previous to that call. And, uh, and you know, have we not been equipped? This was late at night. Of course, everything happens like this late at night. You never get the call at like nine in the morning, right? You always get it at like, you're about to go to bed and now you get the call. Right? So, uh, so now we have to go, you know, 18 hours through Ukraine, through these checkpoints and stuff like that, past curfew and those ambulances and passes, you know, was, was able to get us through. But, um,

• 58:09Jocko Willink?

  10:55, nine of us in three vehicles rolled out of the talk, leaving Hunter and Sean behind. We were going to get Ben Hall and bring him home to his family. So Hunter stayed, he gets radio watch. And you know, you talk about his attitude in here. Of course he wants to go like everybody else wants to go.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:23Jocko Willink?

  And he realizes he's the guy with the best capability to be in the talk, making sure all the comms works. And so he does what the team needs him to do.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he, he did it gratefully. I'm sure he was, it was eating him up, but, and then, uh, I, I think another really important note with that is the solo actually came to our talk and worked shoulder to shoulder with him.

• 58:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 58:42Speaker 01

  So that was kind of like shows that real true collaboration with our government, the fourth option. Yeah. He comes in there, our talk, shoulder to shoulder, Sean, uh, Solo and Hunter kind of run the talk. And, uh, we were on with the Pentagon. The whole time we're, we're, we're working with the Pentagon and the solo and liaising with the 82nd Airborne. So they're staged at the Polish border. Waiting to receive, yeah. So they second everyone with a Blackhawk helicopter, the Aero Medical C-130 on standby. And launch to Germany, he's already knows he's coming. So they're standing by for us to do this. So it's kind of neat when you talk about a fourth option because afford, we take it from a fourth option back to a second option. Right. We hand it off and now it's back. We hand it off to them.

• 59:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's just a sketchy zone in the middle. I mean, like I said, if you can imagine if, if rescue, an American rescue force gets rolled up or gets shot up or even gets accidentally, you know, shot out of the sky. It's just, there's a bunch of terrible things that can happen that are going to create global catastrophe. And that's why the government goes, they're risk averse and they go, you know, it's a Fox News reporter. We don't really, you know, we're not doing anything. So it's the fourth option is a real thing and it's necessary.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  It is, yeah.

• 1:00:00Jocko Willink?

  Starting on this mission a little bit, I've been held at gunpoint at checkpoints many time in my life. I've never liked having a gun pointed at me. And it's not good to feel out of control in a situation where people are tense and armed, but checkpoints are a necessary part of the job. If you're going to visit that kind of area where we work, you have to learn how to talk your way out of situations like the one we're facing. So this is sort of a nightmare. You're going into these checkpoints and everyone's on edge and you gotta, you gotta basically not provoke anybody. You gotta explain what's happening without explaining too much of what's happening. Like it's serious business.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Civil war in, in America and you're in Oklahoma, backwoods Oklahoma, and you pull up next to three dudes at mullets next to a barrel with a, with a machete and a shotgun and a, and you're trying to convince them that you're there for the right reasons.

• 1:00:46Jocko Willink?

  I haven't seen the whole movie, but there's a movie called Civil War and I've seen a clip of it and there's some dude with like bleached blonde hair and pink glasses on. And the guy's like, we're American. He's like, what kind of Americans are you? And you go, oh damn, this sucks. So that's what I was thinking of when I was thinking of these checkpoints that you're rolling through because there's Russian special operations guys that are saying, hey, we're, you know, we're here to help. We're, we're Americans and we're here to help. And he's like, what kind of Americans are you? The Russian kind of Americans?

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  They're scared and you know, scared people hurt people. And so you gotta be smiles, hands up, you know, and uh,

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Totally cooperative. You, you wanna give them things, but you don't wanna sound like you're, you're trying to bribe them, because then you're, you know, so it's, it's a, it's a balance. And you gotta, and it's, it's ti- like, time consuming. They gotta take your, you know, bags out, dump everything out, maybe rob you, like, it's, yeah.

• 1:01:41Jocko Willink?

  You go into a lot of details. Get the books, you can get the details. I'm gonna fast forward some, through some of that stuff.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I'm good.

• 1:01:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay. It was light when we finally approached a small town on the outskirts of Kiev. It had taken us fifteen hours to get there.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:56Jocko Willink?

  Dozens of checkpoints. You finally end up in the safe house. Sea Spray, Bo, Doc J- Jadic?

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Jadic.

• 1:02:04Jocko Willink?

  Jadic. Doc Jadic and Roman were to go ahead to the military hospital where Ben Hall was. Fa- go ahead, fa- fast forward a little bit. Ben Hall had lost his legs in the attack. His eye and hand injuries were serious and he had suffered significant burns, but the main problem was the shrapnel in his neck. Doc Jadic said that there was a risk of it coming loose and severing an artery. That made driving potentially fatal, given the bombed out state of the roads around Kiev. Not to mention the fact that Ben didn't have the twenty plus hours it had taken us to drive from the border in the first place. The only options were air or rail, and neither of those were actually feasible. Flying out, flying was out of the question unless you wanted to be immediately shot down, and the

• 1:02:47Jocko Willink?

  chances of trains running in the middle of a war zone was practically zero. All through the night, Sea Spray, Sarah Rysko?

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Rysko.

• 1:02:54Jocko Willink?

  Rysko and I had been contacting people to find a solution. After hours of getting nowhere, a possibility emerged. We learned that a secret meeting was taking place in Kiev between the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia, who had come for a high-level security talks with President Zelensky. They traveled by train, accompanied by the Polish Grom.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:16Jocko Willink?

  Forces and equivalent, they're, they're equivalent to US Delta Force, and were due to leave that morning. As soon as we heard about the train, we got to work trying to secure permission for Ben and the team to be on it. It was kind of frantic, and we relied on a bunch of things happening that were way beyond our control. We needed God to be in the director's chair.

• 1:03:39Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. You got the Grom coming in. Grom. Let's go Grom. Did you ever work with the Grom?

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  No, except that, except in Ukraine. They're, they're solid, man.

• 1:03:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, freaking outstanding. I actually like worked a lot with the Grom.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:03:52Jocko Willink?

  Because my first deployment to Iraq, we, we, we were linked up with them and we lived with them. And so we did ops with them all the time. I mean, I did, I don't even know how many ops I did with the Grom. And you know, sometimes they would be, sometimes they would be like driving and we would be assault. Sometimes we would drive them and they'd be assault. Sometimes we'd both be assaulting. It was just, we just did all kinds of stuff with them. But, and then my friend Drago was the liaison with the Grom for like, for like half the war or something crazy. And so, uh, yeah, love the Grom. Fast forward a little bit. Eventually we had good news. Kind of Ben and his team had been granted permission to ride on the train,

• 1:04:32Jocko Willink?

  but they only had 30 minutes to get to the station. It was a high risk journey requiring them not only to navigate checkpoints where soldiers were operating under the shoot onsite order, but also avoiding the advancing Russians, all while keeping Ben Hall alive. And they had to do it all in an ambulance that could still not go faster than 15 miles an hour.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was breaking.

• 1:04:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  It was dying, yeah.

• 1:04:54Jocko Willink?

  Again, get the book. This is, the story's so awesome to read. Somehow C-Spray and the others made it onto the train with Ben alive. It's an incredible achievement, possible only by the grace of God and commitment of our team. Soon after, we heard from the talk with an update on the Russian assault on Kiev. They had yet to gain complete control of the city, but their Python grip had tightened. In the hours since we'd left, they had captured more land to the south and west, including one significant building, a hospital in the same neighborhood as the facility C-Spray had found Ben in. The Russians were holding 500 patients and staff hostage. Yeah.

• 1:05:33Jocko Willink?

  The mission wasn't over. Four others had been killed in the attack. Pierre, Ben's cameraman, and Sasha, Fox's Ukrainian correspondent, as well as two Ukrainian soldiers, who were their security. I'd been thinking about all of them during the drive back. I guess we all had. Do you know anything about the other bodies? I asked. Are they recoverable? C-Spray shook his head. Not Sasha. All they could find of her was a piece of her arm. Pierre was hit by shrapnel that severed his femoral artery. So yes, there's a body and Fox wants us to go out and get him.

• 1:06:03Jocko Willink?

  So the mission's not over.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, my response was no. I mean, you know, Russia was making a second attempt to take here that that that by the time we got back and and we were just like, I'm not going to risk the team to go recover a body. I mean, this guy, they Fox love this guy. He'd been 25 years with Fox, Pierre Zeskeski. He's he did Afghanistan. He was just amazing. Everybody like loves this guy. And so we had said no. And then they said, hey, we have someone on the phone. I want to talk to you. It was wife Michelle and she said, guys, I want my husband. And we were like, yes, ma'am. Change of plans. And and we made a decision to go back and get Pierre's body.

• 1:06:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, that was is a powerful part that you write about in the book, just getting hearing her voice on the phone.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then the part about the flag, like, I got really, I got really shaken up.

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  With the with that flag and just like really, something about it just really rocked me.

• 1:06:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no. So you you guys go out, you have to, you have to, you meet with a hearse because you're going out to kind of get Pierre, once you kind of located where he was. And then you have to check on the body to make sure it's him.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, because moving a body out of a across the border is like a big deal. So we had to get all the paperwork, which was very complex. See, spray had done this before. So he had knew exactly to get all the paperwork. So we had all we had to pull a lot of strings through the agency to get the page. So we had all the paperwork. But one of the things you have to visually identify the body. So we opened the casket, identified the body. And and he was he was pretty damn real dignified. He was clean. And and then when I put the lid back on, I seen this Irish flag in the corner. He was he was Irish. And immediately my mind went back to our guys, you know, when we bring them back, like, when we bring them back, we put the the stars over their head and the red and white stripes go down to their feet. And we like, put that flag crisp on their casket to return them home with dignity. And I'm like, we

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  have to put this flag on. So I literally Googled, because cell phone service works better in Ukraine than it does here in San Diego. It's a I literally Googled, like, is it or is it green, white, orange? Is it orange, white, green? And to get it right. And and I was putting it on and and I think I was shaking and see spray came and he grabbed my arm. And he's like, you OK? And I'm like, actually, no, I'm not. And he's let me help you. And we put that flag on, like, like, super crisp and. And then we uh, and I actually drove the hearse because the guy wanted to, he wanted to drive out because he wanted to escape the war. And that was a long, you know, story of getting him, you know, getting the hearse, but we

• 1:08:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you paid, you bought the hearse from them.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, hey, either, either you make the deal of your life with Fox News right now and sell this hearse or we're taking it like we're stealing it from you. So here's the phone, make the deal of your life and uh, and he did. And uh, and so I drove the hearse with Pierre and uh, man, I was so tired, like I hadn't slept in days. I was like driving, this hearse was like having a hard time standing in the road and we crossed, we crossed the Ukrainian border, uh, Fox News had a

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  they had like two vehicles in front of us and his wife was, Michelle was in it, but we didn't want to stop because we didn't want her to come out. So we just kept moving and they kind of jumped in. And so there in front of me, I'm following them, sea spray and Bo's behind me in the, in the, in the ambulance and and I'm like trying to stay awake. I'm like Pierre, like help me out, man. Like uh, and I'm like just like trying to stay awake this whole drive back to Kowal and and uh, we get back to uh, we meet her, we pull in in a morgue and uh, and we take him out and deliver the body to Michelle and she was really sweet and grateful and we just spent a moment with, a few moments with her and with Pierre's body and yeah, it was it, it felt like, it really felt like it was the right thing to do, even the risk. It felt like the right thing to do, to do that.

• 1:09:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's the way you write about that, the, the whole transaction and, and the flag and everything in the book. It was, it's, I could getting choked up reading it because you know, um, what that's like, um, with, for Americans and the fact that you were you know, wanting to do it the right way was just, it was powerful to read about, man.

• 1:10:07Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, what will Russia do next? The answer was revealing itself before our eyes. We were contacted by a church leader about a large group of civilians who were leaving the city of, how do you say that? Gimprow? D N I P R O?

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Oh, Ne, Ne, Nepro.

• 1:10:21Jocko Willink?

  Nepro.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Jocko Willink?

  When the Russians blew out a bridge, the civilians were trapped on the eastern side of the river and their leader sent pictures showing the crowd of a hundred women and children hiding with nowhere to go. Sea Spray was on a call with one of our senior military generals at the Pentagon, bridges, he said, when the call was over. That's what we need contingency for. If Russia starts taking them out or puts checkpoints on them, they'll have people trapped. We need a way to manage evacs without bridges. So you guys start trying to figure out contingency for that. The contingency you figure out is the F-470 Zodiac, which is the boats that we used to, you don't actually use Zodiacs anymore. This is a different brand. But it's what you and I were raised on.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:05Jocko Willink?

  The F-470 Zodiac.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Yep, combat, combat ra- water raider craft.

• 1:11:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, combat rubber, rubber raider craft.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Yep, CRC.

• 1:11:15Jocko Willink?

  Yep. So the CRC, I've heard people call them Cricks.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Oh, I never heard that.

• 1:11:20Jocko Willink?

  Which is interesting. It's interesting how some things get, get morph over time, like Cricks. And then another funny one is the guys in Vietnam, like when I, when I see like a FOB, I call it a FOB. They call it FOB. They don't call it FOB. Like Tilt was like, what's a FOB? And I go, FOB, oh, so.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Just like a CRC or a Crick?

• 1:11:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like I never heard CR, we, we never called it a CR. We called Zodiacs.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:48Jocko Willink?

  Or Z-Birds for some reason, but.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Which was the brand?

• 1:11:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, which is the brand. But the, the Crick, I think the first thing I heard say that was Marines.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:11:58Jocko Willink?

  Was like, we got our Cricks ready. I was like, what, what, what's a Crick?

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Something new.

• 1:12:03Jocko Willink?

  So there you go.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Jocko Willink?

  So you guys get this idea. You guys got to get the Cricks.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Jocko Willink?

  The Zodiacs. You guys got to get them ready. And once again, you have a great network of people. And you need to get them bought back in America, wherever else you can buy them. And then you got to fly them. You figure out the best way to get them there is to fly them.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:24Jocko Willink?

  And of course, in order to do that, you need a plane. So how'd you end up managing this? You have a freaking private plane.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Called someone that I have a, you know, fortunately I have a lot of relationships that have people with private planes and you need one big enough to put four cricks in and, and gas engines and, and the bladders and then electric engines and the batteries and, and so we, we literally like this, my, my friend who's this plane, this is like a 70 million dollar plane and it's brand new and it's really for his mother-in-law. And so we were like trying not to tear off the trim and keep this thing, this thing so pristine and the pilot's like loving it. The pilot's like, I'm used to flying, got a bunch of rich jerks around the Gulf and, and now I'm getting to do this guy's a marine Vietnam veteran. So he was like loving it.

• 1:13:09Jocko Willink?

  He was all fired up.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was all fired up to sneak these things into.

• 1:13:12Jocko Willink?

  But damn, if I would let anyone get near my 70 million dollar plane with a bunch of freaking Zodiacs and engines and gas platters. Oh man, that's.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  We, we just like, you know, and his plane's supposed to be comfortable, right? But now we got all this stuff in there. So we were like sleeping on the floor to get, you know, get there. And we had Tyler Merritt from a nine line was, he was going on a different trip. So we get, he hitched a ride with us.

• 1:13:34Jocko Willink?

  H hitched a ride, right on. No, that's awesome. Good for that dude. Put Corey Scott making that happen.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, Corey's incredible human being. He's a marine as well. And yeah, but yeah, he put his mother-in-law's plane on the line for us. That's a big risk, man. You could get, that can ruin your Christmases and, and Thanksgiving.

• 1:13:54Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. In spite of everything that was happening in Ukraine, the work of mighty oaks at home continued. Before heading to Krakow, Corey and I took a trip to Camp Pendleton, California, the west coast base of the US Marine Corps, where I had the honor of addressing the graduating class of basic reconnaissance course, class two, tac 22. This was my third time as a guest speaker at a BRC graduation. And while I felt the same burden to say something that these warriors will remember for a lifetime, with everything that I'd seen so far in the Ukraine fresh in my mind, my desire to encourage and inspire them was even greater. As reconnaissance Marines and as men, you will continually be given the choice to do what is right, to do what is wrong, or to do nothing, I said in closing. Remember this, there is never a wrong time to do the right thing. I trust

• 1:14:38Jocko Willink?

  when the time comes, you will follow the giants who came before you and you will do what is right. I ended with a BRC saying, quote, "All it takes is all you got," end quote.

• 1:14:56Jocko Willink?

  Is that like their motto?

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Gave me chills, man.

• 1:14:59Jocko Willink?

  Is that their motto?

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:15:00Jocko Willink?

  All it takes is all you got.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  That's the BRC motto is all it takes is all you got. That's all they look for there. I mean,

• 1:15:08Jocko Willink?

  Yep, just give us everything. That's it. That's the way we roll.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  I've seen guys there that, you know, have more than others, but this, but they're not giving it their all. And, and they want the guys that's could give everything, you know that.

• 1:15:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, hell yeah. That's it. I never heard that motto until I read this book. Yeah, all it takes is all you got. I've fought that before. Like, hey, you just need to like get, just want you to give everything. Like, that's it. Just give it everything you got.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  That's what the instructors look for there. They, they, they don't look for the best athletes. They don't look for the, they look for the guys that's get, that's gonna leave it all on table. And, uh, because, you know, then you know, because recon's a small community. It's just like teams, like you know that that guy, once you give him that MOS and he becomes a reconnaissance marine, he could be in your platoon, he could be in your platoon, he's gonna be in your friend's platoon. And when you're gonna walk through a door with him one day and you don't, you don't have to look over your shoulder and wonder if he's gonna be there. You know that he's gonna be there because when he, when he earned that MOS, he, he gave it all.

• 1:16:04Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Keep the standards high.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:06Jocko Willink?

  Keep the freaking standards high. No slack.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  You hear that Pete? Pete's listening? Hold the line for us.

• 1:16:18Jocko Willink?

  Back to Krakow, um, there were signs of a Russian change in tactics. From the start, we'd been aware of the rumors that Russian kill squads going into Ukraine posing as American humanitarian workers.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Again.

• 1:16:29Jocko Willink?

  But as the war had entered its second month, whispers began that Russian special operations snipers were actively targeting genuine US humanitarian workers in Ukraine. People just like us. None of us were surprised by this, but it was something we were factored into each mission undertook over the border. Dude, what are they thinking? They probably just don't want people coming and help. And just kill, kill a few aid workers and it's like that problem's gonna go away.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's one of those most affect, it was one of the most effective things in the battlefield. Like, I mean, without the NGO community, Ukrainian military would not have been equipped to resist the, the Russians. So, I mean, if you're, I mean, it's. If I was them, if I was a Russians, I'd, you're, you're, you're a combatant at that point. Like we're providing, uh, we're providing, you know, support, resources.

• 1:17:14Jocko Willink?

  Logistics.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  Well, just, yeah. So you, I mean, you can't blame them for targeting. I mean, if they're, if you could blame them for being engaged in a war, but if they are going to be engaged in a war, you can't blame them for killing logistics train and the NGOs were a threat to them. And so, yeah, it's a, we're legitimate target in a battlefield now.

• 1:17:29Jocko Willink?

  Snipers are horrifying too.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  I mean, there was a, I think I remember this, there was this, when I went to the border, that first trip, there was this, uh, German, uh, bus. It was all German volunteer paramedics and, and EMTs. And they, and, and somebody had sponsored this bus and they went out there and they were cruising around. They showed us their bus because we were trying to build a medical, uh, vehicle. And, uh, and we had spent like the day with them. They were just amazing people. They're doing the right thing. And, uh, they were going to the front line and Russians sent a rocket inside that thing and killed them all. I mean.

• 1:18:02Jocko Willink?

  Were they, were they, were they fighters or were they like medical people?

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  They were just medical people. They were just providing medical aid in front. And, and look, it like, I'm sure if they would have found the wounded Russian, they would have treated him too. They were there just to help and, uh, but they were, you know, those resources, those NGOs, those, that's a threat to, um, the Russians. It's, it's improving the capability of the Ukrainian military.

• 1:18:28Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, while all this is going on, you got this question in the book. Will I ever let Hunter go with me on a trip over the border into Ukraine?

• 1:18:36Jocko Willink?

  I didn't have to wait long before the question was reality. So there you go. It's coming.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  Couldn't avoid it.

• 1:18:44Jocko Willink?

  Going to, how do you say Lviv? Is that right?

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Lviv, yeah.

• 1:18:47Jocko Willink?

  Lviv. Going to Lviv was a relative, relatively short distance on the map, but a slow journey in reality. Driving a few hours, you approach the city.

• 1:18:56Jocko Willink?

  Did I miss what this on was? What are you guys going to do here?

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  We're just going to deliver some, uh, some communications, one of those communication packages.

• 1:19:02Jocko Willink?

  Right, there you go. So you, so you're going to do that. As you're approaching the column of black smoke up ahead as we approach, we saw that it was the aftermath of a Russian strike on a fuel depot. From the thickness of the smoke, I guess it happened the day before, maybe two. It was a brutal attack, one of the main ones to hit Lviv. Since the invasion had begun, by this stage in the war, the Russians' use of ballistic cruise missiles had all, had been well reported, but this is my first time seeing the aftermath of a strike with my own eyes. Two missiles, both roughly the size of a telegraph pole, had been used in this particular attack. There's nothing much left of the depot. Or the shopping mall, or the grocery store, or the rows of houses nearby. Nobody was searching for survivors.

• 1:19:45Jocko Willink?

  Hunter drove slowly as we passed by, part out of curiosity, mostly out of respect. He was doing great. I, on the other hand, could feel the first wave of doubt. What kind of a father takes his son on a road trip into a war zone? Was Hunter ready for this? Was I? Alright, so how do you, how do you make that decision?

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  Well, so.

• 1:20:07Jocko Willink?

  And how do you freaking explain that decision to your wife Kathy? That's one thing for you to make that decision, but getting on the phone like, hey, hey babe, you know your son that you birthed and raised, um, I'm gonna put him in harm's way.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that you trusted me to protect? Yeah, I mean, look, this, Hunter's was raised by me. He's, he's grew up around people like you. I mean, he's, his friends, he's, he's an old soul, so his friends were my friends. Like, he was around SEALs and recon Marines his whole life, MMA fighters. He started Jiu-Jitsu at threes. Never went to be anything other than a Marine. He had been a Marine. He'd been in that combat already. He, he's proven his worth in Afghan, the Afghanistan withdrawals and in so far this Ukraine operation. And so I was pushed in this corner to say like, okay, as a father, uh, I want to protect him. I want to control this situ, I always want to, I'm very controlling, right? I want to control the situation. So as a, as a father, I want to control and protect this situation, but I had to come to this realization that he's his own man.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  God burdens his heart just like he burdens mine. He's a strong believer. Uh, he's very personally convicted as a, as a Christian. Uh, and he's a, he has a real heart, compassion, humanitarian heart. So I had to do this dilemma like. And come to this conclusion, this is the conclusion I came to. I love Hunter, but I don't love him more than God loves him. As much as I love my son, God loves him more. I could protect Hunter, but God could protect him more. And while God's burdened his heart to do these things that he's burdened my heart to do, I had to realize that there's probably no safer place for my son to be. Safer than being in a couch in Houston or in the front line of the Ukrainian war, the Russian Ukrainian war. There's probably no safer place for him to be than in the will of God. If God's burdened his heart to do that,

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  who am I to keep him from doing those things? I could steward it and protect it, but I should not keep him from it. It's really easy to say right here. It's a very difficult thing to say when you're, when I had already been to the front. By that time, I'd already been to the front lines. I'd already seen the dead bodies in Ukraine. I've seen, I had already, by the way, eight deployments to Afghanistan. I'd never seen more kinetic combat than my time in Ukraine. Me personally, I'm

• 1:22:16Jocko Willink?

  You had both sides have the weapons. Like this is a next level type of war.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Yep. So I had never seen anything like that before. So I'm recently exposed to this and having to make this decision. So it's a very, sounds easy to say that, but it was a very difficult decision to make, but I just felt like

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  I could take something from him that he was ordained to do and be part of and grow him into being, I think, the person that God created him to be. And I didn't want to get in the way of that. So I had to make this decision to relinquish my fear and control into a trust in him and a trust in God. And I did. And it was probably one of the hardest decisions ever made. However, on the other side of it, quickly on the other side of it, it was probably one of the most incredible things I got to witness, to witness some of the things that I've got to see my son do in Ukraine. And he, and we go through some of them, but he just, he did some incredible things there that made me see him in a different way and have a tremendous amount of respect for him and just be proud. I'm so proud of him. Like some of the things he did there was just incredible.

• 1:23:15Jocko Willink?

  Reminds me of that story of John McCain when he was over in prison camp and his dad was the Admiral in overall in charge. And so he's in prison camp and the Admiral has to make the decision, do we continue bombing like around Hanoi?

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:23:32Jocko Willink?

  My own son is in a prison camp there and there's no like, you know,

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  You didn't know where he's at?

• 1:23:36Jocko Willink?

  There's this is a, you know, back in the day, there's no GPS guided bombs. So you start dropping a lot of bombs, then there's a chance that you kill your kid.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48Jocko Willink?

  And he dropped those bombs, man. And he never like treated his son any different than he did the rest of the people that were there that he was trying to help win the war, you know, broadly speaking, and taking a risk strategically with his with the with the prisoners of war. But yeah, that's a very similar scenario that you're in right here.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  I did not know that story.

• 1:24:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and, and also John McCain, they were like the, the Vietnamese, North Vietnamese were like, hey, you can go home. They wanted him to go home early because they wanted to be able to say like, you see, the Admiral's wanted his son to come home and they took care of his, he took care of his kid. Why isn't he taking care of you? But John McCain did not leave. He was like, nope, I'm not going home. So credit to the McCains for heroic behavior on all fronts.

• 1:24:36Jocko Willink?

  Um, so you say this too, this is like a little bit of a life review for a big, and some of this we talked about before, but for a big part of Hunter's childhood, I was not in a good place. By the time he was 13 years old, my life was unraveling fast. After eight special operations deployments to Afghanistan, I was deep in the pit of PTSD and I brought my family along with me. Hunter's younger brother Hayden and their sister Haley, am I saying that right?

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Jocko Willink?

  And Kathy too. I pushed everyone away. As far as I could tell, the only option ahead of me was killing myself and becoming another veteran suicide statistic. It seems that some of the biggest changes in life happen only when we're pushed to our limits. That's how I was molded to become a force recon Marine and now. And it's how I became a father and a husband again. I was ready to give up on myself, but there were a handful of people around me who weren't. They refused to be swayed by the man I'd become, and they still had faith in the man God had created me to be. It took a lot of prayer and a lot of tears, but six months after being suicidal, my life had been transformed, not changed, not improved, transformed. I was a new creation, plain and simple. It was though, it was through these new eyes that I saw my wife and my children clearly for what

• 1:25:46Jocko Willink?

  felt like the first time ever. I saw their gifts, their character, their potential. Each of them blew me away. I decided to make up for lost time and threw myself at the task. I was obsessed reading every book about parenting I could get my hands on. It was like I was planning for the most significant mission of my life, which I guess is exactly what I was doing. I read Captivating by Stotzi Elridge to understand Kathy and Haley better as women. After reading one book in particular, Raising a Modern Day Knight by Robert Lewis, I got real deliberate about everything with my boys who were becoming young men. Over several weeks and months, I followed the program that taught them what it meant to be a man of God. The whole thing culminated in a ceremony in which I got to tell Hunter and Hayden exactly what I saw in them. And you go

• 1:26:30Jocko Willink?

  through that little ceremony type thing, very, very cool to read about. In the 13 years since I hit my rock bottom, God has taught me so much. He's surrounded me with people who love and care for me enough to fight for me. He's given me mentors who have disciplined me and taught me how to recalibrate my life. Most important of all has been the second chance and grace that God gives us all. It turns out that rock bottom is a pretty good foundation to rebuild your life on. So, yeah, there you go.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Jocko Willink?

  Transformed, not just changed, not just improved, but transformed your life.

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a mess. I mean, when I came home and I talked about a lot in your last episode, I was, I was a complete train wreck and I felt like I had a completely lost identity, purpose, and, you know, and.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  And uh, there's a lot of things I tried in my, in my route to recovery, medicine and VA programs, civilian programs and professional success, financial success. I'd been success in, in, in that rock bottom moment I was in professionally, but my life was, you know, was dead. And, uh, you know, there's a lot of things that helped me my road to recovery, but probably nothing was more profound than a restoration of my faith and becoming a Christian and, uh, and really, uh, kind of trying to identify, build my identity in, in something bigger than myself. And, uh, and, and my life had really took a, took a big turn to, to be burdened towards a service to others, different than I was in a uniform. And that, that's what led to the building of Mighty Oaks Foundation and some of the work that I do now. And, uh, and man, I loved my job as a Fort Shreveport Marine, like I'd

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  never would, like, I, I'm extremely proud of that. And it's important thing, but my, my identity was tied to that job and not the cause or the service. It was, my identity was tied to that. So the problem with these jobs, you know, being a police officer, being, being a school, whatever you're proud of, like those jobs are noble and we should be proud of them. When your identity is tied to those, um, it's dangerous because at any moment those can be taken away from you. You get injured, you get sick, you're going to retire. And when you, when you lose those things, uh, if your identity was tied to that, then you feel like you have no identity and purpose anymore. And that could be detrimental. And that's what had happened to me. So their, their transformation for me was really understand my identity was bigger than any job. As, as cool as those jobs may be, it's bigger than

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  any job. My identity, uh, relies on my eternal purpose, uh, to be a servant. And, uh, and so that was really transformational to me.

• 1:28:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, you've been getting after it. So your servant levels have been high. Uh, going back to this mission, after several hours of driving, you guys go through some of these checkpoints. Um, again, you go through, it's good learning for anybody, getting these, like how you guys handle these checkpoints, really good information in there. And it's also a good read because it's freaking tense. Uh, fast forward a little late in the evening, we reached our destination on the outskirts of the Lviv. We're visiting our, uh, visiting friends of Pastor Bodan. Uh, this is a husband and wife and you talked about Pastor Bodan. I didn't, I didn't cover it. Um, in the book, get the book to read, but he's a pretty powerful figure.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  He is, he is. He's incredible guy. I, I'm one of the Ukrainian, one of the hundreds of thousands Ukrainians that went back that chose to be back there.

• 1:29:39Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah. He was like living in America, right?

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Everyone talks about Ukrainians leaving and fleeing, but there's hundreds of thousands, I think like two or 300,000 that have chosen to go back to participate in defending their country.

• 1:29:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  And he's one of them. That's, that's pretty, pretty noteworthy.

• 1:29:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, very noteworthy. Yeah, it's a great part of the book. Um, you, so you're visiting some of their friends. You're, they're kind of using them and, uh, are you using their, their house, like a safe house type thing, staying for the night, getting in some shelter.

• 1:30:07Jocko Willink?

  And then she lets you know about her son.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you know, her son, when the war started, he was sent to Kar, um, Kharkiv.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Which is a very bad place, the frontline.

• 1:30:19Jocko Willink?

  Yep. He ended up getting hit. There was a missile. He gets shrapnel from moral artery.

• 1:30:27Jocko Willink?

  His name was, what was his name? Andre? Andre? Is that how you say his name?

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  I think that was it. Yeah, Andre. Uh, yeah.

• 1:30:32Jocko Willink?

  One of the men who was with Andre phoned me after his die, after he died. The man said that he'd called for a medic, but none of them was around. He said Ukrainian soldiers are not given any real medical training or equipment. And that soldiers are not to do first aid on each other. Only doctors can treat a wounded man, even if he's dying. So even if he had a bandage or anything like that, he could not have used it to help Andre without knowing how. All he could do was hold him as he died. So this is this mom that's telling you this story that her, her son got hit with shrapnel, hits a femoral artery, which is really bad, but if you know how to apply tourniquet, you know how to stop the bleeding, like you can absolutely save someone's life. You gotta do it fast.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:14Jocko Willink?

  But the, in our war, you know, that you and I fought in the global war on terror, you know, there was all kinds of guys that had femoral bleeds that were saved.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:31:23Jocko Willink?

  And so you hear this story like.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  And by the way, by a mom at a table in her house while she's making us breakfast. You know, she just cooked us breakfast and she's telling us you can't escape that. You're sitting there face to face with her and you're like, you don't want to tell her, but like, he could have easily been saved where by a tourniquet and ratcheted it down and.

• 1:31:48Jocko Willink?

  So as you say goodbye to them, you drive away, as you're driving away, finally Hunter said exactly what I'd been thinking. We have to do something, don't we? And that's how you guys sort of come up with your next, next focus of your mission. Not the full focus, but it's definitely another line of operation that you get into, which is doing training for people.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  This area we can help.

• 1:32:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it wasn't difficult to decide to pack up our operations center in Krakow and leave Poland entirely. The Ukrainian military hadn't just resisted the Russians advance on Kiev. They'd pushed the invasion way back, which meant the city was now relatively safe and stable outside of rocket attacks. Made sense for us to be there. So again, you go through a bunch of details in the book, but Kiev had pretty much been held by the Ukrainians, which was amazing to watch from the outside. And it was weird too, like they were living like.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  It's so weird.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  You go to a restaurant and have dinner. You might hear rocket every now and then, but I mean, they just were like, they were so defiant. They were like, we're not gonna live cowering in our basements. There's, I think I write about in there, there was this moment that really just defined their resilience. The sky is like, his, his house is burnt down, there's smoke in the background and there's a bright, fresh Ukrainian flag up on this building. And he's mowing his lawn. It's like a big F you to the Russians. Yeah, you could do it, you could blow up my house, but I'm gonna mow my lawn like.

• 1:33:17Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit as we drove into Bucha, am I saying that right?

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Bukha.

• 1:33:21Jocko Willink?

  Bukha, what I saw was much worse than I'd expected, worse than the story the media had communicated. Parts of Bukha had been decimated. Whole streets were reduced to rubble from holes in several parked and burned out cars. I was pretty sure the Russians had been firing 25 millimeter or 30 millimeter rounds, most likely from tanks. If the attack on the previous house had been designed to instill fear, what I saw could have been planned with only one goal in mind and evil intent to terrorize. So this is, it sounds like it's absolutely horrific, worse than anything we were seeing on the news.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was definitely terroristic to, to break the morale of the Ukrainian people. I mean, it would be like a military complex here and, and they were like ready to go toe to toe to fight the Russians and the Russians would move over here and destroy elderly community. Because that's how they break them, right? They could, they could fight the troops and, and they're gonna, you know, they might take big losses, but they're, they're in to fight for their freedom and their homes. They're gonna fight till the end. And so why fight the Ukrainian troops when they could totally break their will by killing their parents or their wives and children? Uh, and so, you know, we see apartment complexes that were no military target in sight. Uh, and, you know, rock, like bombs dropped from the sky, like three buildings is not in this, this is not, uh,

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  like collateral damage, like three apartment buildings with a bomb in the center of each of them. You know, where only women and children are, or in Bukha, that, that elderly community that we went in, it was just leveled.

• 1:34:54Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, between April and August, we were busy. We made a number of trips to rescue more people, distribute medical supplies, provide more resiliency training for frontline troops. At one point I made a trip with Dennis Corey and Jeremy Stallmecker, a former Marine Infantry Commander and co-founder of Mighty Oaks, to Kiev, to liaise with Samaritans, Pers, local chaplains and other NGOs and providing frontline medical care. It was an ambitious project, working together, to, working together to turn our six wheeler into a mobile field hospital to treat troops injured on the front line.

• 1:35:26Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, you say, I was ready to let someone else take charge of the planning and preparation for the upcoming operation. Hunter stepped up and spent weeks putting together a detailed plan for a 14 day trip into the red zone, frontline of the battle area in eastern Ukraine. So you're gonna go on another.

• 1:35:44Jocko Willink?

  What would you consider this like a mission, an operation to go up there for 14 days?

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is more where Mighty Oaks steps in and does what Mighty Oaks does on our international side. Training, training them to do, that's where, that's where Hunter, you know, his team really do, he's just such a great job. I've got a lot of soft veterans that went through Mighty Oaks that found new purpose again and they want to go out to other countries and ally partners and train them what we do at Mighty Oaks. And, uh, and, and so we wanted to be able to, to bring that ministry type aspect to them, but no one really cares about that. A lot of these commanders like, we don't want to be ministered to right now. What we need is this. So part of that's building relationships and what do they need most is they needed medical training and medical care. Uh, so we were bringing really good medical, all that's billions of dollars that we were sending there, the guys still didn't have tourniquets on the battlefield. So we're bringing tourniquets and first aid kits.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  IFACS, you know, individual first aid kits that we were the really good ones that slide inside your, uh, that slide inside your body armor that you could just pull out with a tab off your, and, and teaching them how to use it. So we're bringing guys that were like, uh, doctors from, uh, who had, who teach at 18 Delta School. So we're bringing high level instructors to be able to not just give them the equipment, but teach them how to use it. And that would build rapport, allow our guys to share their stories and help build some spiritual residency on the battlefield for them. Offer things like some of our resources that we have Mighty Oaks, audio Bible sticks to encourage and encourage them. So those are the kind of things that the Mighty Oaks set, set in to do. One of the things I was really proud of Hunter was, uh, they came up with a, a, a plan based on the

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  void of chaplains in the Ukrainian military. They didn't have a chaplaincy. And so they had all these pastors, uh, imagine a pastor going to church one Sunday. He has half men, half women. The next Sunday goes, it's all women, right? The men have been conscripted or drafted. And so these are small communities. So the pastors would be like, hey, I've been knowing a little bit of Von since he was in, uh, you know, Sunday school. And I care about him. I want to go to the front lines, but I don't know how to be a chaplain. I don't know how to, how to sleep in the woods, poop in the woods, like, uh, provide uh, first aid or, or anything like that. I'm going to be a burden to, to them. And, and, you know, being a pastor doesn't equip you to be a chaplain. The, the average lifespan on the front line of Ukraine war is four and a half days. So like, how do you minister to someone like that?

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  To someone that their, their buddies are dying. And so, uh, so Mighty Oaks and Hunter had this effort. They trained 300 chap pastors, converted them to chaplains, equipped and deployed them to the front line and helped distribute it on the front lines. And so that was a really. 300 might not sound like a lot, but when you talk about like 300 chaplains, that's, that's pretty impactful.

• 1:38:16Jocko Willink?

  So for this, for this mission, you got some of your guys from Mighty Oaks, like you were mentioning Dennis Reed Hasty?

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Hasty, yeah Reed Hasty.

• 1:38:22Jocko Willink?

  He's a combat engineer and two former SEALs Lou Rivera and Colin Fields.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  You know Lou, right?

• 1:38:30Jocko Willink?

  Yep, very well, yep. All four Mighty Oaks instructors. In fact, we're supposed to have Lou on the podcast. I think I talked to you about that.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:38:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Did you, did you hear about, did you read in there about Lou doing breakdancing?

• 1:38:40Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I did. I did, I never saw, he kept that, you know, concealed.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Oh man.

• 1:38:46Jocko Willink?

  His breakdown, at least I never knew his breakdown.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  We really had bombs going off and he's break, did a breakdancing competition with Ukrainians in the middle of the, we posted a video and people were saying that it was fake, like guys don't do that in a war zone. I'm like, that, actually they do.

• 1:39:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just shout out to Fieldcraft Survival and Summit Point Training, these, and you guys did tactical combat casualty care with them to get ready for this trip, just cool.

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Driving, training, form weapons, familiar, like they did a good job training our guys, get our guys up to speed.

• 1:39:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, Kharkiv had been home to 1.5 billion people, it was a major city built for modern living, yet the Russian missiles had dragged it back decades, high-rise apartment blocks had been decimated, shopping malls turned into twisted piles of metal, ice cream parlors reduced to broken signs and piles of rocks, kids playground equipment charred and melted, dead bodies were trapped beneath crushed homes and apartment complexes, even if not one more bomb fell, it would take years to put Kharkiv back together again.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, Kharkiv's like, is like apocalyptic, like we were driving in and first of all, at nighttime, if you have a light, it's gonna get hit, so you go lights out.

• 1:39:59Jocko Willink?

  Are you guys on nods?

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  No, no, we were just, I mean, we, we had some nods, but we were, we, we had nods, but we didn't have everybody driving in nods, we were just, there's like, that night that we drove in, that particular night we drove in, it was pretty, pretty ambient and, but we, we were, we were driving in and, and it just, I just remember how like, everybody got quiet, cause it just looked like, like you were driving through like downtown Houston or downtown San Diego and you just see like, just decimated, like buildings knocked down, like high-rise buildings broken in half. Just like so apocalyptic and one of the Ukrainians came over the radio and he said, "Welcome to Kharkiv. The only thing that lives here is Will Smith and his dog." In the movie I Am Legend. And that's just, it was exactly right how I felt. It was crazy.

• 1:40:47Jocko Willink?

  Um, you guys were going up there to train people. That was the, that was the goal.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're going to provide, provide uh, medical equipment and combat casualty care training.

• 1:40:58Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you say from time to time Vitaly, he's like one of your, one of your guides, pretty much?

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, Vitaly. He's like, uh, he was former Secret Service, uh, for Zawinski's detail, but also a chaplain. Uh, he, so he ended up taking the role of a chaplain. Uh, it just really like, I mean, he had, he had a, uh, started a nonprofit to rebuild people's homes. He's just an amazing guy. And so he's very networked and connected. So he ended up being pretty vital to be able to have access to different areas of Ukraine.

• 1:41:25Jocko Willink?

  Oh, he's well named then because his name is Vitaly and he's very vital to the situation.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:41:29Jocko Willink?

  Uh, "Take photos," he'd say, "show people what's happened here. We did," as he said, "walking slowly and quietly staring at the carnage all around us. Eventually someone asked the question we'd all been thinking, where is everyone? Vitaly stopped and turned around like he was convinced he'd seen people if he only looked hard, if he only looked hard enough. Almost everyone is gone. Those who have stayed live among the ruins and know how to hide."

• 1:41:50Jocko Willink?

  "Fast forward a little bit. That evening, I found myself talking with a woman who had been leading the worship earlier that day. She told me her name was Anna and she was around my age. She looked and sounded like a regular soccer mom. And I told her that I'd enjoyed the service. When she responded, her words were nothing like the typical conversation I'd have over coffee after church at home. "There is evil in this world," she began. "There is danger and violence and people who want to hurt and destroy you. And just because you put your trust in God for your children, your loved ones, and everyone else that you care about, doesn't mean that they are going to be safe. You understand?" "I do. I started to share some of my experiences, but stopped myself. This was a moment to listen and not speak."

• 1:42:34Jocko Willink?

  "People say they trust God, but what they actually say is I trust that God will..."

• 1:42:43Jocko Willink?

  They have a contract all grown up, all drawn up, and they expect God to come through for them exactly the way they want him to. But really, trusting God means letting go of the outcome. It means giving up on getting results that you want. And when you do that, everything changes. That's what you saw today. Almost everyone here is learning what it means to truly put your faith in God. And when the Russians came, we all started from the same place, telling God that we trusted him to do what we wanted, to protect our children and loved ones. But everyone here has lost someone they loved. Some of the people you are worshiping alongside have seen their own children shot to death, blown up, or executed.

• 1:43:29Jocko Willink?

  But they're still here. They're still believing that God exists and is with us. And they're finding that God can take their rage and their sorrow and their pain. He can take it all. Every tear and every shout. He is enough.

• 1:43:48Jocko Willink?

  This was a lesson I desperately needed to learn. It was also one that I would soon be tested on.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I walked away and wrote that down after her talk show. I was just so moved by it. That morning, they had asked, we had got bombed that night, that night prior, and in that morning, they were having the church service and this is like people, like she said, lost everything. And they're having a church service. It asked me to speak and I'm like, what am I gonna say to these people that lost everything like? And the only thing I knew how to say is like, I don't, I don't have the answers, like, I can't explain what's happening here. I could just tell you that people care. Uh, and we're here. We're here because as if anything else is a representative that people around the world do care, you're not alone. And if anything, God sent us here to let you know you're not alone.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  And, uh, and yeah, she, but when she said that, I was just like so struck by it. And because in the moment that I was in, dealing with Hunter and some of the other things I was dealing with at the time, it spoke directly to me and I wrote that down.

• 1:44:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's kind of what you were talking about making that decision with Hunter earlier. It's like this was the verbal, she kind of verbalized the thought process that you had. It was like. Trust in God isn't like, oh, he's gonna give me the outcome that I want.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:04Jocko Willink?

  That's not, that's not what you get.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:07Jocko Willink?

  Um, you're gonna get what's supposed to happen.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:45:17Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. We drove south. Vitaly had arranged for us to stay in an inn for the night. And then he explains that you're gonna go work with this, uh, group of Ukrainians. He says they are called Safari. He explained to me when we stopped the next morning to buy a load of pizzas in the nearest town. And they are not like other units. They are special. The unit was created by a call, a guy called Baton. Saying that right?

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Baton.

• 1:45:43Jocko Willink?

  Baton.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Which means concrete.

• 1:45:44Jocko Willink?

  Check. He's like the Dana White of Ukrainian MMA. And former Ukrainian Special Forces from the 2014 war. When the invasion happened, Baton was asked to create a special unit that would cause chaos among the Russians. Basically a hit squad. He used his influence and contacts to reach out to all the coaches for MMA fighters, boxers, wrestlers, and martial arts grapplers. He brought them and their athletes together and the level of camaraderie that they have is hard to find. But Vitaly paused, like he wasn't sure whether what he was about to say was okay. Safari is tough, but they need military training. That's why Baton and the men of Safari are so excited to meet you.

• 1:46:29Jocko Willink?

  You are a professional fighter from Strike Force in Bellator. And you were Special Operations who fought in Afghanistan. If they like you and the team, maybe we can come back and help them some more.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  I think I'm most excited, I think I'm most excited about this interview right now, that you got to read this story.

• 1:46:46Jocko Willink?

  It's freaking epic dude.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  This is like a, a movie, man. When I'm like, are you being for real? Like they put together, could you imagine like Victory MMA as a company?

• 1:46:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's not just Victory MMA. It's like every freaking badass MMA gym in America. Just like, all right, we send us your best five fighters.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  The coaches and the platoon sergeants.

• 1:47:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  That's.

• 1:47:08Jocko Willink?

  Freaking awesome, man.

• 1:47:11Jocko Willink?

  Very cool story. Fast forward about the next two days, our guys were spread among batons unit. All of us spent hours hanging out, talking, sharing gear, giving advice, training, demonstrating things that we picked up through the years of training in combat. Hunter spent a long time demonstrating how to use water filters we'd bought. And of course, Hunter and I got to do a little wrestling with some of the men, trading techniques and sharing old stories. There's a cool story. I didn't read the story, but there's a story where you like, basically, you guys have to earn your respect through a freaking sniper shot.

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, sniper shootout.

• 1:47:39Jocko Willink?

  And you pulled it off.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  We did.

• 1:47:41Jocko Willink?

  Which is freaking epic. Yeah. I imagine it was a little bit of that with the jujitsu as well.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. They want it right. They want to kill you. All these guys are call us out here, jacked, like jacked guys. And they want their, they want their scrap at Hunter and I. We were right on the dirt. And then Dennis, Dennis Price did that shootout with that Ukrainian sniper. And it was, it was great.

• 1:48:03Jocko Willink?

  All throughout the time there, I could hear our Mighty Oaks guys, Dennis, Reed, Lewis, and Colin and Hunter, sharing parts of their own stories and talk about the importance of being spiritually strong, just like I'd heard them all do countless times in our programs back home with the American veterans and service members. So you're really trying to not just give them military training, but give them some spiritual training as well.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was really great. You know, Louis, Lou, he just so, he demands respect right away. I mean, I think in teams, they call them Amaloo. And we call them Amaloo at Mighty Oaks. But he immediately like has this like kind of father figure. And he just stepped in and rolled so well. Colin Fields was a team guy. And he's a, he's 18 Delta. So he was providing medical training. All that Reed Hasty, those guys just did such a good job on that trip and earned the respect of this unit Safari and many other units. But that one particularly was one that I wanted to connect with. And they just did such a good job.

• 1:48:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's freaking outstanding. Um, yeah, like, and you do, you get the job done. And, uh, you know, there's a part, if I remember correctly, you had like a, the sticks with the Bible on.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, the audio Bible sticks.

• 1:49:09Jocko Willink?

  And you didn't like, say like, hey, you didn't issue them.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:49:13Jocko Willink?

  You just left them out. And the guys took them.

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  They took them. And Vitali had said they'd been there before with those and never took any. And there was like over a thousand between those, uh, and between those two units we went to, they were all gone. And they weren't able to give away any before. And it was just through that relationship, right? It's not there just evangelizing, pushing, you know, pushing faith or pushing whatever on them. It's just like, Getting to know them on a personal level, connecting to them, building a relationship, building their rapport and trust and then sharing our personal stories, being vulnerable with them. And here's the things that we've been through. We never, we never experienced this. I remember telling them like, hey, I've never had someone invade my country. We had nine 11, but then we left and went to Afghanistan. But the ones I didn't have to worry about my wife and kids at, at, at home. Like, I can't relate to you guys, but, but we're

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  here. And, and, you know, and we're going to be here for you.

• 1:50:05Jocko Willink?

  Um, fast forward a little bit, you were, you say back at home for much of September. Um, Ukraine launched a rapid counter offensive in northeastern Kyiv. So there's, there's fighting is just, just escalating, keep going. Um, you decided you're going back to Ukraine. It's going to be your last visit. You arrive at the talk in Kiev. Sea Spray received a call that there was a US Marine who had been fighting for the Ukrainians. Reports suggested that he'd been shot in the abdomen and was captured, but there was credible intelligence to suggest there was potential for him to be rescued if we were willing to go in and get him. So you got that coming down the pipe. And then on, on top of that, within the hour, we received another call. There's a report of mass graves in Izium.

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  Azum.

• 1:50:45Jocko Willink?

  Azum. 1500 women and children. Reisco wants to go get eyes on and verify. With billions of dollars flowing into Ukraine from the Biden White House, there was clearly an incentive for Ukraine to embellish or falsify reports of atrocities. So our government contacts wanted to verify, wanted independent verification. If it was true, we needed to know, the world needed to know. Both the rescue of the Marine and verification of mass graves felt exactly like the kind of thing we were there to do. But saying yes to both of them would mean leaving Hunter to carry out his mission without me. Do I leave Hunter to lead the operation without being by his side? Or do I give in to my desire to be a hovering dad and say

• 1:51:25Jocko Willink?

  no to sea spray? It was a question of trust, but not my trust of Hunter. It was about my own trust of God. Was I prepared to let go? Was I willing to put aside my own need to be there to protect my son and ensure his safety? Or was I okay with handing him over to God? Could I accept that the safest place Hunter could be was in the center of God's will, not under my own supervision? After all I'd seen in Ukraine, I knew what I had to do. It was time to let go. Deep down, deeper than the fear I was sensing, I knew that I trusted Hunter and I knew that I trusted God even more. As much as I love Hunter, God loves him more. As much as I want to protect Hunter, God can do it better.

• 1:52:08Jocko Willink?

  So yes, it was time to risk it all. It was time to trust God.

• 1:52:14Jocko Willink?

  So UNC Spray ended up heading for the mass graves and Hunter goes to try and recover the wounded Marine.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the wounded, actually the wounded Marine in the mass graves were me and C Spray.

• 1:52:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, did I get it backwards?

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  Well, and Hunter was doing the original mission, which was providing medical supplies.

• 1:52:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  So he's bringing medical, so I had to break off from that one to do. So C Spray and I were doing that. Those both in a Zoom, which Zoom had been occupied for six months by the Russians. So that, that, that was part of the, that's why the mass graves were uncovered because the Ukrainians had pushed them out. And that was a RISCO as a pseudo name, by the way, as for the SOLO, the Special Operations Liaison Officer. So that was the agency asking us to validate those. Yeah, and that was a big decision, right? And, you know, they had some good guys in his team. He had a Fort Shri Kaya guy, he had a Marsa guy. He had, I can't remember the fourth person, but he had some good guys in his team. But sending him off to do that without was, was, was a big decision and, you know, C Spray and I,

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  you know, we, we, we set off, we set off before them and, and we drove through the night and, and headed out to Zoom.

• 1:53:27Jocko Willink?

  Pick this up. We parked near one of the pits and followed Vadim. Is that right?

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, Vadim. He was the, he was the chief of police for the entire country of Ukraine, which is like the, it's kind of a weird position. It'd be like, almost like the SecDef, the, the director of the FBI, the attorney general, like all in one position. Yeah.

• 1:53:46Jocko Willink?

  He walked slowly toward it. A few soldiers were gathered around it, some working, some staring into space and taking a moment. Hardly anyone was speaking. Someone had put hazard tape around the edge of the earth mound that surrounded the pit, but I didn't need the tape to tell me it was a crime scene. I could smell it in the air, the stench of decomposing bodies. I wanted to take a moment before walking in there, but no matter how much I anger or sorrow I wanted to feel, I had a job to do. I needed to focus to observe what the Russians had done and report back. We needed to bear witness to what we were seeing. The earth mounds were mass graves. As I watched the Ukrainian soldiers were working through each pile, pulling out bodies, transferring them to a waiting open grave, then burying them in individual graves that they were digging nearby.

• 1:54:29Jocko Willink?

  None of the bodies could be identified, but each was buried with a cross bearing the name of one of the missing people from the town. The Ukrainians had been working on the site for six days. In the mass grave I was standing by, they had found 475 bodies. In another grave, they had found 1,100 bodies. Most of them had been burned, likely to try and hide the evidence. Many had their hands tied in front or behind it, a clear sign they had been executed. They were all civilians, all of them, children, women, elderly. It was a war crime, an atrocity, an act of evil. And from everything I'd seen and heard, this wasn't the only mass grave in Ukraine, and it wasn't a rogue act by an individual commander going behind the backs of his superior officers.

• 1:55:14Jocko Willink?

  What had happened here, the invasion of a town, the six-month occupation that ended when the civilian women and children were rounded up with their hands bound and brought here to be executed, this was a pattern. This was a strategy. This was a logical final step for an invading force that had targeted civilians from day one.

• 1:55:35Jocko Willink?

  I assured Vadim that I would tell the right people about what we witnessed, but it didn't feel like enough to simply file my report back with intelligence agencies who'd commissioned us in the first place. I wanted to bear witness to the rest of the world, so I recorded a video and sent it to Fox News who broke the story. Later, while we were driving away, one of the reporters called. I put her on speaker so C-Spray could be part of the interview. When she was almost done, she said she had two final questions for us.

• 1:56:06Jocko Willink?

  "Why are you guys out there helping these people?" My answer was equally as simple. "Because it's the right thing to do." Her final question was directed at C-Spray. His answer will stick with me for the rest of my life. "Is it worth it?" she asked. It doesn't have to be, said Sea Spray, not skipping a beat. Those five words summarize everything about our time in Ukraine. It doesn't have to be worth it to do the right thing. Sometimes we just do the right thing simply because it's just that, the right thing to do. There doesn't always need to be an ROI. We don't have to calculate what we will get in return if we choose to expend our time, money, energy, or resources.

• 1:56:51Jocko Willink?

  We don't need to worry about who gets the reward or who deserves credit. Forget whether it's safe, forget about whether it's safe, popular, or dangerous. When it comes to helping people in need, the world needs fewer people who are calculating what they're going to get out of it. And a whole lot more people who will simply do the right thing.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  That's from a guy that says it doesn't have to be who gave up everything, right? When you think about the context of who he is and what he gave up. Is it worth it to a guy who gave up his whole career? It doesn't have to be.

• 1:57:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, these, um,

• 1:57:39Jocko Willink?

  those, those mass graves and everything is just freaking horrific.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I could see why, you know, our government would want to, eyes on validation. I mean, that's a great way to get, you know, more sympathy, more with those, you know, I could say it's a firsthand, you know, firsthand testimony. It was real. And, uh, and the Ukrainian forces that came in to recapture Azum that we were with in the beginning, we talked about that, that gunfight that we got into. Uh, those guys, that was their families. That, that was, they, they were, that unit was local to the area. So that was their wives, their children. They were in that area. And so we were, we were with them. We actually, uh, one of the, I don't think I write in a book, but I'll show you the video later if you want to see, uh, they captured some of them and we got a, got a video of them jailed and, and, uh, you know, some of the ones the Russians had they captured.

• 1:58:26Jocko Willink?

  That's not a, gonna be a comfortable prison sentence.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:58:34Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Sea Spray took the call telling us the effort to rescue the Marine had hit a dead end after a couple of days with no updates. I wasn't surprised that they'd lost comms altogether, but I was troubled by it and Sea Spray was too. We'd been a long shot, but, but still a shot. I doubted the Marine would have any more chances at rescue, even if he was still alive. Then we heard the familiar whistle of incoming Russian artillery. Round after round was shaking the ground. Sea Spray and I took cover as each explosion crept closer to our location. The Ukrainians had it under control and I felt calm. At least I did until the moment I phoned Hunter and heard the explosions going on around him, too. "We're taking indirect fire too, Dad. Don't worry, I'm driving like a bat out of hell. We're good. I'll call you when we're clear." Hunter disconnected before I had the

• 1:59:19Jocko Willink?

  chance to respond.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  That's, that was a crazy feeling. That made me, in that moment, kind of questioned that decision, you know, did I make the right decision, you know? I was totally fine with what was happening with us.

• 1:59:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:59:36Speaker 01

  And then, uh, I wasn't fine when I got that call.

• 1:59:40Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and well luckily, you know, Hunter did make it through that.

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  He did.

• 1:59:44Jocko Willink?

  And

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  He's still with us.

• 1:59:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I'm going to fast forward to the epilogue here, which is actually written by your son, Hunter, because he did survive that indirect fire attack. And he says this, "When I was six years old, I had a dream. I didn't know what country I was in, but I knew it was overseas. My six-year-old brain recognized the dusty streets, the men wearing their long and flowing robes, the women in their black veils. But I wasn't there alone. My dad was with me. And in my dream, I knew that meant everything was going to be okay. We were doing some kind of work that I didn't fully understand, but I did know that wherever we were and whatever we were doing, we were helping rescue people who needed. I liked

• 2:00:27Jocko Willink?

  being there with my dad, working side by side like that. Suddenly there was chaos and we were running, heading toward a bunch of people who needed our help. Bad men were shooting at us and trying to stop us from rescuing the people. We were in the fight of our lives and had no weapons to defend ourselves, but we still continued to rescue anyone that we could. The dream ended soon after. And the thing is, my dream wasn't a nightmare. I didn't feel, didn't even feel much fear, knowing that those bad guys had the intention of killing me and my dad. All along, I just felt like I was okay." I was where I was meant to be, helping people who couldn't help themselves, standing up to evil.

• 2:01:10Jocko Willink?

  That dream never left me. It was in my head when I enlisted the United States Marine Corps, and I thought about it often when I was deployed to Afghanistan, too. But even though there were plenty of times when I could have helped, when I could help people as a Marine, it never felt like the fulfillment of my dream. I always had this sense that at some point in my future, I'd be doing exactly what I dreamed about when I was six, helping rescue people with my dad while bad guys tried to stop us.

• 2:01:41Jocko Willink?

  I'll close it out with this, says, "When God puts a burden on your heart, it's like a seed. It can take a long time before you see any signs of life up above the surface, and even longer until it starts to bloom. But if you water it with faith, if you put your trust in God, that seed will grow. It might not look how you thought it would, or sprout when you want it to, but when he is ready, it'll grow. And eventually, it'll produce fruit in the perfect season of life."

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  When I read that, when he wrote that and sent it to me, like I started, I just got teared up, started crying, man. It's like...

• 2:02:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  That epilogue.

• 2:02:25Jocko Willink?

  And, I mean, you guys got it done. You're able to serve together with your son.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's went to Ukraine more times than me, by the way, now. So I did 10 trips, he's did 13 trips there. He's doing a, he's doing a lot, he's doing a lot of the stuff in South America right now. He's a, yeah, he's, he really, this is kind of what his heart beats for.

• 2:02:46Jocko Willink?

  You raised him right. Outstanding. So, he's on his 13th trip, you're on your 10th trip, you did 10 trips. So what else, what else you focused on right now? What have you got going on? You got, I know one thing you got going on is the Resilient Podcast.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  The Resilient.

• 2:03:00Jocko Willink?

  The Resilient Show.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Resilient Show.

• 2:03:02Jocko Willink?

  Which is your podcast.

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 2:03:04Jocko Willink?

  You're getting ready to record one with me here?

• 2:03:06Speaker 01

  I am.

• 2:03:06Jocko Willink?

  In a little while, when we're done with this. And what's that all about? What's the Resilient Show all about?

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  You know, I just, just like you, I have access to some amazing human beings and I get to hear their stories and I just feel like, you know, the world needs to hear more stories like that. And a lot of my veterans have incredible stories of overcoming. Don't really have a platform to do that. And I so wanted to create, make sure that they had opportunity to share their stories and share stories of resilience and overcoming. And then I also feel like I've asked a lot of people to have a lot of information that could inform the listeners. And, and the mainstream media seems like they've lost the desire to share true journalistic stories and inform the American public. And, and you're watching guys like you, Sean Ryan, especially has, has really shared a lot of information with

• 2:03:52Speaker 01

  the public that's helped make people resilient because they're informed. I believe, you know, being resilient is, part of being resilient is being informed. And so because of have, have access to these people, I just wanted to create a platform to do that. And so we're, we're thirty, right now, thirty four episodes in. I've had incredible guests, Terry Crews, Sean Ryan, having Marcus Luttrell, and Dr. Stephen Greer, the UFO guy, like, that's some great guests and just sharing stories that are, I'm interested in, that I want to know more about. So I'm having fun with it. And just sharing incredible stories that people never heard before. I just shared a story with a guy named Aaron Hall. Never, never been on a big podcast before or anything. He lost his, his total vision, total hearing, and ID blast. And they interviewed him at that, he had a cochlear implant that barely

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  he could hear through. You have to wear a microphone to talk to him. And he's just an incredible human being, runs ultra marathons. Yeah. You know, this guy is, yeah. Ultra marathons, whitewater kayaking.

• 2:04:47Jocko Willink?

  But he makes, he makes like, he's a chocolatier.

• 2:04:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:51Jocko Willink?

  Like, makes, what's his fudge company called?

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:04:53Jocko Willink?

  Do you know?

• 2:04:54Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, wait, wait. What is it? Yeah, EOD. Extraordinary, extraordinary something delights or something. Yeah, not EOD.

• 2:05:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  Extraordinary delights. I think that's it.

• 2:05:07Jocko Willink?

  Extraordinary, EOD chocolate, or EOD fudge, or something like that.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:12Jocko Willink?

  All right. So that's awesome. And then, and then you, you also wrote a new book, like a series of books, right? But it's a fiction type scenario.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was approached to, by Ten Dayo, that asked me if I'd be interested in doing fiction. And, and I always had interest in it. So it was just like, right away, I was like, yes, I'd love to. You know, a lot of my career, I couldn't. Put, I mean, Saving Aziz was like extremely redacted by the Pentagon. So a lot of stuff I can't write about, uh, so I figured I could kind of mimic the character a little bit after my career and, uh, and, uh, it's called Silent Horizons. It's the program name, the SAP program that he's in. Silent Horizons.

• 2:05:50Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, you like that?

• 2:05:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:51Jocko Willink?

  I can already tell when, when Echo's nodding his head vigorously.

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  Silent Horizons, yeah.

• 2:05:56Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's right up Echo Charles alley. He likes some Silent Horizon activities over there.

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so Foster Quinn is the character. He's a.

• 2:06:03Jocko Willink?

  Foster Quinn?

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the character.

• 2:06:05Jocko Willink?

  Where'd you come up with that?

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  Well, uh, Foster was one of my best buddies. In fact, I got his bracelet on right now. Foster, Foster Harrington, uh, who was killed in, uh, in, in 2004. And, uh, you know, he served in my wedding, was there in all three of my kids were born. We did 10 years together. So, uh, he was the first big loss I had. So a lot of the characters in the book are named after Seth Stone. As a, a friend of yours, he's, so a lot of the characters in the book are after KIA guys.

• 2:06:29Jocko Willink?

  But you have a straight up character named Seth Stone?

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  That's Seth Stone. We just, she's first names.

• 2:06:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  But the book is dedicated to, uh, cause my, my, uh, with author, uh, that helped me write it, uh, Jack, Jack Stewart, he, he was, he was at, he was, he served with him as a, cause, uh, Jack was a, is a Top Gun pilot, Top Gun instructor, but his ground time, he worked with Seth.

• 2:06:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  And, uh, and so he had, so we had, uh, dedicated it to two guys each and Seth was one of them.

• 2:06:55Jocko Willink?

  Freaking outstanding.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, yeah, but the book just really about a force recon Marine who goes to Dev Group, uh, as an AFO, advanced force operator doing clandestine logistics. And, uh, yeah.

• 2:07:06Jocko Willink?

  Gee, interesting story.

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, uh, not Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa, Iran. And, uh, and he stays on as a contractor there and, and, uh, does some great stuff. He's a, but he's really tall and handsome. So.

• 2:07:22Jocko Willink?

  Do you have to get, oh, yeah, that's right. He's six, three.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:26Jocko Willink?

  Do, uh, do you still have to get it Pentagon reviewed?

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  Uh, you, you know, it's up to the publishers and the publisher chose not to. I know like guys like Jack Card, they don't do that anymore. Um, you could. I, I had, I kind of picked the independent panel to read it and review it. I had some guys that are at, you know, the unit at CAG, at, at Dev Group, uh, ground branch to kind of read it and tell me, I got a guy as a former intel officer, uh, Marine Corps 06 Colonel. And, uh, let me know if I'm passing, you know, crossing lines with TTPs or, or means and methods. And so I feel pretty good with it. But one of the things I did the book is even those fictions, I wanted everything to be extremely accurate. It was so important to me. Like I do a chapter, about half the chapters are free fall jump. And so I use my experience to write it as a military free fall parachutists. However, I had like a guy at ground branch, a guy at the unit right now,

• 2:08:12Speaker 01

  who's free fall jump masters read it and it's just dialed in perfect. Like the dive stuff, the dive equipment, everything's just dialed in perfect. And even if you're, if I say-

• 2:08:20Jocko Willink?

  Who helped you with the dive stuff?

• 2:08:21Speaker 01

  Uh, sea spray, more time, more time branch guy. Cause a lot of the stuff he's using and he's using a civilian gear. Like some civilian rebreathers and stuff. So, yeah.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if he's like, if he's like in Iran and I'm like this, you're in the street in Iran and there's a coffee shop here, that coffee shop's really there. So I wanted to have that accuracy.

• 2:08:40Jocko Willink?

  That's cool. Yeah. That's one thing, uh, you know, Jack Carr goes into like a level 12 detail on stuff. Yeah. Weapon systems and belts and like watches and all this stuff. And it's funny cause when we, when we wrote Extreme Ownership with Leif, Leif was like adding all this details, like, bro, no one cares about this stuff. I was like, no one cares what, you know, which rifle this guy's carrying or what scope this guy's using. Like, no one cares. And we literally legitimately like pulled stuff out. Like we just, it was just too much detail. Then of course, they're obviously different. But the fact that Jack Carr will tell you like what type of knife a dude has on his E and E kit, you're like, okay. But it's a thing. People love that stuff.

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  People like the detail in it. Yeah. Especially in those type of books, right? Obviously Extreme Ownership's a different genre. Yeah. But, uh-

• 2:09:26Jocko Willink?

  But it is pretty wild to, to see that people are so interested in that stuff.

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's three book series. So book one comes out May 13th. It's actually for sale now. So people that want to support it can preorder it, uh, right now on Amazon.

• 2:09:38Jocko Willink?

  Silent Horizons.

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  Silent Horizons. Yeah. And then, uh, and then every year, every year, uh, you want to come out for three, uh, maybe more. But right now it's, we have a contractor for three books. I've already written the first two.

• 2:09:48Jocko Willink?

  And you like them?

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  Uh, it's really fun. It's been really fun writing. Uh, I mean, and Jack's amazing. Jack, Jack, Jack Stewart, the guy I write with, he's, you know, he's brilliant. Obviously he's a, he was a Top Gun adversary instructor. He's just a really smart guy. And so, and it's difficult writing with you, you know, it's the difficult writing sometimes with two people when you're trying to master one voice. Uh, but we've, we have a system in place and, uh, and, and so we'll probably keep working together for a while. It's-

• 2:10:13Jocko Willink?

  I mean, Leif and I actually- Didn't really do that because I wrote chapters and he wrote chapters and they're they're Sep like they say like who wrote it.

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:10:22Jocko Willink?

  Although, you know, when we write like a forward or something like that, you know, if we do it, there's there's some of the parts of the books that we've written together is a little bit of that, you know, like I said, like the forward or something. So, yeah.

• 2:10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:32Jocko Willink?

  You get you get a little system going.

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  So, yeah, the resilient show, writing books, speaking, I'm still speaking a lot and definitely, you know, very involved with this international stuff, making sure that our teams are in place.

• 2:10:45Jocko Willink?

  Just to save our allies.

• 2:10:46Speaker 01

  Uh, no, uh, for fourth option is is.

• 2:10:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:10:49Speaker 01

  So, Tim and Sarah and they're still running save it, save our allies. And, uh, you know, for not not any bad reasons, we just, we just, we're doing different, there was different focuses.

• 2:11:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  And, uh, so doing, uh, the fourth option is what we call it. So.

• 2:11:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so.

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  And then and then mighty Oaks, uh, mighty Oaks, of course.

• 2:11:07Jocko Willink?

  So is the fourth option now like a charity?

• 2:11:10Speaker 01

  It is. It's a nonprofit.

• 2:11:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  We're really like, I mean, I could say it here. It's not like us, but we don't like publicize it or advertise it.

• 2:11:16Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  Not out soliciting support for it.

• 2:11:19Jocko Willink?

  Just a thing.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:20Jocko Willink?

  It's a thing running in the background, saving people's lives.

• 2:11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yep. It's a five one C three, you know, people can donate to, but we just, uh, we, we don't have to run like a charitable campaign for it. Cause when, when, you know, when we need something, people step up in a bigger, significant.

• 2:11:34Jocko Willink?

  And save our lives or sorry, mighty Oaks is still going strong?

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  Mighty Oaks still going strong. Save our allies is too. I mean, uh, Tim, Tim and Sarah are still running that Nick, Nick Palmigano, uh, uh, they're still running, running that and they're still doing great. They just did some great stuff out in North Carolina and Florida.

• 2:11:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. They're freaking awesome.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, and, and, um, and I was talking to Tim right before I got here. Uh, he said to say hi, by the way.

• 2:11:55Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 2:11:55Speaker 01

  But, yeah, um, there's a lot of great heroes for humanity, uh, Samaritan's Purse. So many great organizations out there doing great things. Uh, fourth option, we specifically are focused internationally on, you know, rescuing Americans or people that are in war zones that the government either can't or won't, uh, get. And, uh, so it's very specific kind of niche area.

• 2:12:14Jocko Willink?

  And then Mighty Oaks, how many people are you running through Mighty Oaks a year?

• 2:12:18Speaker 01

  Well Mighty Oaks on the on the resiliency side, that's speaking on basis, which primarily me doing that. I've spoken about half a million troops now on basis. A lot of them right here next door at San Diego MCRD. Speaking at Boomer Co Boot Camp. So I speak to the troops on resiliency, you know, the four pillars of resiliency, mind, body, spirit, social. Speak at spiritual resiliency conferences, suicide prevention conferences. The recovery program at our ranches, we're doing about seven, eight million dollars a year in programming there. We've had 6,000 graduates, but we're doing about 1,000 per year now. We pay for everything. For active service members, veterans, first responders, spouses, even pay for their travel. And so that's, that is an effort that people want to support financially, get behind, donate to Mighty Oaks.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Definitely needs support because the demand on it's so huge. And if anybody listening is, like you said earlier, it needs help. No strings attached. We pay for everything, including travel. Go on the website, fill out an application, someone will get back to you right away. You don't have to be a train wreck to go, by the way. If you need some life course corrections, get on it early. And it's just amazing program. We've got great people to work there. We've got a most incredible team.

• 2:13:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And like I said, I mean, I've literally called you and sent you texts and I've sent Lou texts too. I've group text you guys and stuff, but uh, you know, cause sometimes people, by the time they're talking to me, they're pretty, they're pretty hurting. And they really need some help and you guys have been freaking amazing. So I really appreciate what you guys have done there. And it's MightyOaksProgram.org.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  Mighty Oaks Programs with an S.org.

• 2:13:45Jocko Willink?

  Programs.

• 2:13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then we also do like, I'm in DC a lot, testifying before Congress, doing advocacy work. We've got some great team guys in Congress, Derek Van Orden, Morgan Luttrell.

• 2:13:57Jocko Willink?

  There's more coming too.

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, Corey Mills is there, Eli Crane. Yes. All those guys, like I've been working with those guys a lot on, on, on policy and, and legislation for veterans care. And one of the things that I'm a big advocate for is alternative treatments, including faith-based care that. Currently, right now, the current administration only allows the VA can only do programs that are approved by the FDA, which is crazy.

• 2:14:22Jocko Willink?

  Crazy.

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  And so I've just got back from Congress testifying on that. So Mighty Oaks, because of successes we have in independent doctoral studies, we've had on the success of faith-based programs, it gives us a voice and credibility to testify before Congress. So Mighty Oaks is a strong voice in that. I'll probably serve in this administration again as a, like as a chairman of a coalition, which is not a huge task, but it's just kind of leading some efforts there.

• 2:14:44Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, Once again, you're stepping up and serving.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we got to, man. Everybody, everybody has to contribute something right now, uh, as much as they can. And then the last thing we do at Mighty Oaks is the international stuff, right? Mighty Oaks really participates in a lot of international stuff and Hunter and his team there do a great job. Aziz is on the team there now.

• 2:14:59Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 2:14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:59Jocko Willink?

  That's right. It's freaking awesome. And like I said, people can find MightyOaksPrograms.org. Uh, Save Our Allies is just SaveOurAllies.org.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  SaveOurAllies.org, yeah.

• 2:15:09Jocko Willink?

  People can find you if they want you to come talk. Uh, Chad Robichaud, it's R O B I C H A U X dot com.

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  Dot com, yep.

• 2:15:19Jocko Willink?

  And that kind of links to all your different stuff. You're on Facebook, um, at Chad Robichaud, on Twitter Chad Robo, on Instagram Chad Robo Official, underscore official.

• 2:15:30Speaker 01

  Instagram, Instagram's our most active.

• 2:15:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And then you've got your, your podcast, which is out now, which is also, it's got a YouTube, um,

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15:38Jocko Willink?

  YouTube place for it as well.

• 2:15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, please subscribe to the podcast. We have incredible guests and conversation and like, we got you coming up.

• 2:15:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, right on, right on. We'll get that done.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  Our, our, our New Year's episode.

• 2:15:51Jocko Willink?

  Echo, anything we missed?

• 2:15:53Speaker 02

  Nope. How old is Hunter?

• 2:15:54Jocko Willink?

  Any questions?

• 2:15:55Speaker 01

  Hunter's 28. He has, uh, he has two daughters and a son in the way. I have, I have, I have five, I have three adult kids, five grandchildren, and we just adopted, uh, our new baby girl, uh, last year. So we started all over again. So I was empty nesting for like six years and, uh, our niece got pregnant and, um, and we, uh, stepped in and so had a brand new baby girl. She's, uh, we've had her since she was, since she was infant and now she's, uh, she's, uh, she's 22 months.

• 2:16:24Jocko Willink?

  Right on, man. There you go.

• 2:16:25Speaker 02

  Wait, how old are you?

• 2:16:26Speaker 01

  I'm 49.

• 2:16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so same generation, right?

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:30Jocko Willink?

  I like the, uh,

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  She's the same age as my granddaughters.

• 2:16:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, legit. I like the name, uh, fourth option, by the way.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:38Speaker 02

  Very good one.

• 2:16:38Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of like the.

• 2:16:40Speaker 02

  Third measure.

• 2:16:40Jocko Willink?

  Third measure.

• 2:16:41Speaker 02

  A little bit.

• 2:16:42Jocko Willink?

  Echo's got a little side project called Third Measure, which is, you know, what is it? Faction? What is it?

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  Faction, see, it's a long story, but it's basically a repository of all my CGI projects that involve robots and stuff. So unrelated to your thing, but I like the name, you see what I'm saying?

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  Well, it's a, the name is exactly what it is, is the fourth option, is the fourth option.

• 2:17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Jocko Willink?

  When I was a young teen guy, there was a guy that was like a awesome SEAL. And no one wore SEAL anything back then.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:17:13Jocko Willink?

  And, and actually in the SEAL teams, like people don't, you don't wear SEAL team stuff if you're in the SEAL teams. But this guy was just legend, legend guy, and he had a freaking hat. He had a hat with a trident on it. And then underneath the trident, it just said silent option.

• 2:17:30Jocko Willink?

  And I was always like, and I was a new guy too. I was a new guy. So I was just like, yo, that's where it's at.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  One day hat, yeah. It was bull shirts where everybody.

• 2:17:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, back in the day, bull shirts, it closed down.

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  It closed, really?

• 2:17:42Jocko Willink?

  Closed down.

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  All our class shirts for BRC and, and BUDs.

• 2:17:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  BUDs were there.

• 2:17:46Jocko Willink?

  They used to have a T-shirt for your class. I don't, I don't think they, they don't do it anymore. They don't have class T-shirts anymore. There was a store in Coronado that you'd go and get T-shirts made for your class. And I don't think I even had one. And I know our class had one because it had like a really dumb saying on it. And I can't remember what it was.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  Road hard.

• 2:18:04Jocko Willink?

  It was so stupid. It was like one of those things where they made, like the class voted on our T-shirt and it was dumb. And I was like, you know, it just, when you get done with Hell Week, so I, I didn't have like any kind of voice or anything. I was like, well, that sounds dumb to me. And some other people thought it was cool. When we, we'll, we'll be able to find it. One of my friends will probably text me and be like, this was the same, what was it? It was freaking dumb. Um, I wanted to be he who suffers remembers. Because one of the instructors, like we were suffering at some point, you guys are going to remember this.

• 2:18:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, but it was, it was like, it rhymed.

• 2:18:48Jocko Willink?

  It rhymed. It was like, once we were crushed and now we're super tough or something like that. I was like, yo, I'm gonna wear this thing. Jackassery is this.

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  But that's pretty normal. I think, right? Well, we had that for football too, where we'd have like a shirt. If you, when we finished camp and then they give it in. I remember one of ours was a, I survived camp. Get you better.

• 2:19:12Jocko Willink?

  Get you better.

• 2:19:13Speaker 02

  For, that was really what it was. And everyone was laughing.

• 2:19:15Jocko Willink?

  My son went to this camp, um, the J. Rob intensive wrestling camp. And if you, they have a whole like grading system and it's really strict. It's like boot camp. The guy was a Vietnam Ranger, J. Rob. But they were doing it. You try and get this shirt that just said, I did it. And they had a video and everyone was just freaking hyping up and they're like, I did it. I did it. I did it. And you get this T-shirt. That's all. You're just doing it for this T-shirt. My son had like a real bad ankle injury and you have to do a 12 mile run to get the shirt. Like you have to do all the things. Then the last thing you have to do is a 12 mile, 12 mile run. I think it was a sophomore in high school or in between his sophomore and junior year. And I talked to him on the phone. I'm like, hey dude, you got to run tomorrow. What do you like? Your ankle's jacked up. You know, you can barely walk. What are you gonna do?

• 2:19:57Jocko Willink?

  He's like, I'm gonna tape it up so it doesn't even move and I'm gonna get that shirt. And I was like, all right, I guess that's how we rolling.

• 2:20:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:05Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Um, what else? Do we miss anything that's going on right now, Chad?

• 2:20:09Speaker 01

  No, man. Uh, I just appreciate being here, man. Uh, you know, we get to see you. Super proud of all the things you're doing. Good voice. Get awesome voice right now.

• 2:20:19Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate it, man. Um, we're gonna go do jujitsu after this. We're going to do a little open mat activity at, at, uh, Atos. Andre Galvao opened up the school. When you're doing jujitsu, by the way, you need fuel. It's true. I recommend Jocko fuel. That's what I recommend. So we got Jocko fuel. We got protein. We got hydrate. We got go drinks. We got joint warfare. We got super krill. We got greens. Got creatine. You put creatine in your greens. It's a good way to be jacked and healthy.

• 2:20:52Speaker 01

  I just stole Echo's milk, banana milk. It was so good.

• 2:20:57Jocko Willink?

  It's freaking tasty, right? People going a little catbalk in here. Check out jockofuel.com. If you need any of this stuff, you need to be stronger, faster, smarter, better. Also, you can get it at Wawa, Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Military Commissaries around the world, around the world, by the way. I know people that are overseas right now. They're like, yo, we're getting it done. Hanaford, Dashboards in Maryland, Wakefern, ShopRite, HEB down in Texas.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  That's where my neck of woods.

• 2:21:22Jocko Willink?

  That's where, dude, HEB is hot, active in Texas.

• 2:21:27Speaker 01

  HEB is awesome. You gotta get in Buc-Ee's.

• 2:21:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Buc-Ee's is an interesting, it's an interesting dynamic. We've been talking to Buc-Ee's. We'll see, we'll see where it lands. It's really hard in that, in that environment with Buc-Ee's. There's so much competition and you know, the people that we're going against are, are, you know, billion dollar companies. And so they will literally come in and just buy your space from a shelf.

• 2:21:52Speaker 01

  Just to keep you.

• 2:21:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just to keep you at bay. So it's all good though. We're, we're winning.

• 2:21:56Speaker 01

  I'll just pack, I'll just pack my milk on the road.

• 2:21:58Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  Cause I stopped at Buc-Ee's the other day and I was going on a hunt for Smith and Wesson and I packed it. I mean, I stopped at Buc-Ee's and I looked for.

• 2:22:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's unfortunate, man. I apologize for that. Next time, stop at HEB.

• 2:22:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:22:11Jocko Willink?

  That's what we'll do down in Texas. Myers up in the mid, or Meyer up in the Midwest, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields. Shields too. Shields is a big freaking awesome store and small gyms everywhere, you know, so jiu-jitsu schools, CrossFit, gyms, powerlifting gyms, wherever you're at. If you, if you're in one of those schools or you want, you're in one of those gyms? Yep. Email [email protected] and we can hook you up a little wholesale activity. You got your gym down in Houston still?

• 2:22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, Cross and Gracie Southern Headquarters. In fact, in fact, I don't even know if I can announce it, but I, but I will. Junior might get upset, but he, he's moving from Chicago to us. So he's gonna, he's taking over our school. We got a guy named Juan Lopez who's a world champion, like produces tons of world champions out of Rio. He's learning English, but his jiu-jitsu, you can, you know what he's talking about. Jiu-Jitsu is incredible. So Juan Lopez is there. Kind of like 20 black belts under me that are, that are out there, but, but we're gonna have Junior out of school full time.

• 2:23:09Jocko Willink?

  Amazing. Yeah. So check that out. Also, if you, if you're doing jiu-jitsu. You need a gi, then you need an American-made gi. Don't buy a communist gi. A communist gi, don't do that. Buy an American-made gi. Go to originusa.com, get American-made gi. And while you're there, get American-made jeans, American-made boots, American-made hunting gear, uh, joggers.

• 2:23:31Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:23:32Jocko Willink?

  I was just out at Walmart, the 434 tour, and I had to borrow a pair of joggers from Joe Mas, because it was a little

• 2:23:38Speaker 02

  Kind of cool.

• 2:23:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, a little chilly woo, as they like to say. But, and luckily, you know what he had? American-made joggers.

• 2:23:44Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:23:45Jocko Willink?

  From the Origin USA. So, look, don't buy stuff that supports slavery. You support slavery, Echo Charles?

• 2:23:50Speaker 02

  No, I don't.

• 2:23:51Jocko Willink?

  Chad, do you support slavery? Not at all. I don't think anyone over here is supporting slavery. Like, oh, we stand against it. Next level. Echo, you stand against it? Stand against it. We stand against slavery. And yet, people all over this country stand against slavery, and yet they'll just walk down and buy a pair of jeans, literally made by slaves. Literally made by slaves. So, don't do that. Go to originusa.com, get American-made freedom pants. You see what I'm saying? You see what I'm getting at? So, that's what we're doing.

• 2:24:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:24:20Jocko Willink?

  It's true. All right. What else?

• 2:24:21Speaker 02

  Don't forget about Jocko's store. We represent it on the path, on our apparel, what we wear, whatever. See what I'm saying? Discipline equals freedom. It's true, by the way. Chad wrote the show.

• 2:24:29Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  With more discipline, comes more freedom. Um, also, uh, anyway, we got shirts, hats, hoodies on there. Also, we have what we call the Shirt Locker. It's a subscription scenario, new design every month on a shirt. It's good. People seem to like it. A little bit outside the box as far as designs and ideas, but again, people seem to like it. Check that out. It's all at jacostore.com.

• 2:24:48Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. Get there. Also, we got some, you need steak? You like steak? I love steak. Yeah. I'm carnivore, so. Oh, you're straight up carnivore? Straight up carnivore. Well, I say that. You just had a mok. I'm carnivore. Mok is carnivore. I'm carnivore and berries. Carnivore and berries. Yeah, some kind of carnivore-ish.

• 2:25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:06Jocko Willink?

  It's like Carna Berry.

• 2:25:09Jocko Willink?

  So when you're eating steak, I recommend you check out Colorado craft beef.com or primalbeef.com. We got awesome people with awesome steak that can deliver it to your door. Colorado craft beef.com primalbeef.com. Get the good stuff. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also check out jockounderground.com. Also YouTube channel. Also flipsidecanvas.com Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. We got books. Look, Chad has got four books. A mission without borders. We talked about today saving a D's. We will talk about last time. Fight for us. He's also got a book called on an unfair advantage. Check all those books out. They're all available wherever you buy books.

• 2:25:50Jocko Willink?

  And then I've written a bunch of books too. You've heard too much about at this juncture. You're pretty much ready to just stop. Uh, check out the warrior kid books. Get a little kid like a neighbor across the street. Maybe it's, you know, a nephew that you got.

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  I hear more about your kids books than I do even about extreme ownership now.

• 2:26:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:08Speaker 01

  Everywhere I go, maybe this circle man, like a, you know, I mean, a lot of, you know, kind of very community or to speak at churches and stuff. Everyone yeah, raves about your, your kids.

• 2:26:17Jocko Willink?

  There's a movie coming.

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:26:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, uh, the movie's done filming at this juncture.

• 2:26:21Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:26:22Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And it's gonna be a very powerful film. It's really, really like just, it's gonna be awesome.

• 2:26:29Speaker 01

  It's so due. It's so due for that kind of message.

• 2:26:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The, the world's waiting for it right now. Echo Charles has been up there. He's in it, by the way. Got a real significant, I mean,

• 2:26:40Speaker 01

  pivotal.

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  Pivotal role. A lot of people say that's the, that's kind of the, the whole scene, like the whole epic scene. Echo Charles just keeping it with his excellence and legitimacy.

• 2:26:51Speaker 02

  I'm doing the best they can.

• 2:26:53Jocko Willink?

  This is great. So he was in the background of a scene and there's MMA going on and, um, he's in the back in a cage with his gi on, doing, doing jujitsu in the background. And as he's filming, uh, the director, a guy named McG.

• 2:27:10Speaker 01

  Terminator Salvation.

• 2:27:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Who directed Terminator Salvation and Charlie's Angels and, uh, we are Marshall. Just a bunch of really great movies. The OC, great guy. And.

• 2:27:24Jocko Willink?

  In the middle of this, while we're filming this scene, like, there's a bunch of stuff going on. He goes, "Hey, everyone, hold on." And he goes, "Hey, you two," and he didn't really know who Echo Charles was yet. He thought he was just, you know, thought he was just another extra. He goes, "Hey, you two in the cage, you're doing great up there, providing us with excellence and legitimacy for this scene."

• 2:27:45Speaker 02

  I heard that.

• 2:27:46Jocko Willink?

  And you can see Echo, his chest popped out. I was like, "Oh, dang, okay." Excellence legitimacy has arrived.

• 2:27:53Speaker 02

  Completely correct.

• 2:27:54Jocko Willink?

  He was completely correct. Um, yeah, but the super stoked, obviously Chris Pratt, he's, he's playing Uncle Jake and all that. So looking forward to that. Anyways, get those books for your neighbor, for your nephew, for whoever, your niece. Hook them up. Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. Uh, next muster is gonna be in Dallas, or sorry, in San Diego. The Dallas one's done. It sold out. We got San Diego coming up, February 23rd and 25th. We got San Antonio, April 29th through May 1st. Just if you want to go to these things, go and register. Because everything sells out and then these things sell out to where the fire marshal is like, no one else can come in. It's not like, "Hey, Jocko, last minute." And I'm like, "Oh, yeah, cool. Come on down."

• 2:28:36Jocko Willink?

  It's not like that. It's like, "Hey, last minute, Jocko." And I'm like, "No, you can't come." So don't do that to yourself. Um, don't make me do that to you. If you want to come to this stuff at Echelon Front, go to echelonfront.com and come and get it. And Extreme Ownership Academy, we got a way to learn this information that we put out through an online platform. Go to extremeownership.com. You can learn these lessons. You can apply them to every part of your life, family, everything that you're doing. We can help you. So extremeownership.com. Go and check that out. Also, if you want to help out service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org.

• 2:29:20Jocko Willink?

  Also, Micah Fink's got HeroesAndHorses.org, and then Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. And then, of course, we talked about today, MightyOaksPrograms.org. Chad's.

• 2:29:34Jocko Willink?

  Great organization. As I said, I personally, they have personally helped my friends and they will help thousands and thousands of more. So if you want to help them, go to mightyoaksprograms.org. And then if you want to connect with Chad, Chad Robichaux, and that's R O B I C H A U X dot com. He's on Facebook, he's on Twitter, and he's on the gram, the Instagram, YouTube, and the podcast is called The Resilient Show. For us, I'm at Jaco.com. I'm on social media too, and I'm at Jocko Willink. Echo's at Echo Charles. Just watch out because there's an algorithm on

• 2:30:14Jocko Willink?

  there. And you know, it'll, it'll destroy your life if you're not careful. Echo, anything else? You got any other questions? You got any questions for today?

• 2:30:22Speaker 02

  No, that was it. Prima, I liked, also, I like the last name Robichaux.

• 2:30:26Jocko Willink?

  You, oh, okay. He's getting credit just for his last name?

• 2:30:29Speaker 02

  The whole aesthetic is really, really good. It's like, you know, why, you know, because there's other words that end with the X, right? Like that, right? And it's like, you know, what, what other word has like X? It's like, um, it's like a sophisticated, I don't know, it's a feel kind of thing. But anyway, I've always liked that. Meant to tell you, you've never got an opportunity, but you know.

• 2:30:49Speaker 01

  There we have it. Louisiana, strong Louisiana name.

• 2:30:52Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir. Good to see you again.

• 2:30:54Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. Yeah, great to see you.

• 2:30:55Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Chad, anything else? Any closing thoughts for today?

• 2:30:57Speaker 01

  No, man. I'm just, like I said, super thankful to be on and, uh, and, um, you know, this, this book to me is, uh, I appreciate you kind of breaking it down like that. This book to me is like, uh, there's a lot of special things got to be a part of and saving, saving is easy in this book is, you know, a way for me to share some of the things I got to be a part of.

• 2:31:12Jocko Willink?

  It's awesome.

• 2:31:12Speaker 01

  Especially with this one, so special with me and my son. So if people want a father, son book, that's, that's a good one. Father's Day coming up?

• 2:31:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is. Uh, well, no, not really. It's in June. So swinging a miss on that one, Chad, Robichaux. But, you know, we'll work through it. Every day is Father's Day. How about that? Yes. Every day is Father's Day, Chad.

• 2:31:30Speaker 01

  Christmas is coming up.

• 2:31:32Jocko Willink?

  Awesome stuff. Thanks again for joining us, man. Um, thanks for sharing your lessons learned. Thanks for your service in the, in the Marine Corps and special operations and, and thanks for what you're doing today, um, with, with Mighty Oaks and, and everything that you do overseas now with Fourth Option. It's just outstanding. And thanks for, uh, thanks for raising some warriors yourself, man. Really appreciate it. And thanks to all our military personnel out there around the world right now that step into the fray every day to protect our freedom and protect our way of life and to protect innocent people around the world. Thank you for what you do. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service. Appreciate the hospitality this past weekend. Much appreciated.

• 2:32:17Jocko Willink?

  As well as all of our other first responders who step into the fray to protect us here at home. And everyone else out there, I think an important message from Chad's book is that there's not always an immediate positive short-term return on investment for doing the right thing. You can't count on reward or praise or even reciprocation. You can't even count on reciprocation. If you do the right thing, it doesn't necessarily mean that someone's going to do the right thing back to you. But you will know. You will know that you stepped up and you did the right things for the right reasons. And if

• 2:33:00Jocko Willink?

  you do that, in the end, you will win. And that's all we've got for tonight. Until next time, this is Chad and Echo and Jocko out.