503: Norm "Hoot" Hooten. Blackhawk Down & a Legendary Career in Army Special Operations

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Norm Hooten was a U. S. Army Special Forces soldier (a Green Beret) who became well known because of his role in the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, the operation later depicted in the book and film Black Hawk Down. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 503 with Kerry Helton and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Kerry.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:06Jocko Willink?

  So October 3rd, 1993.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  I would say the most definitive battle for the United States of America of that decade. Mogadishu, Somalia, and looking back from this vantage point now. That battle seemed to, for lack of a better word, redirect special operations, the way we conduct business, the way we train, the way we fight. It led us to great success in the global war on terror. I've had two soldiers from that battle on the podcast, Mike Durant, who's a helo pilot from TF-160 Nightstalkers. And his aircraft was shot down. He was captured, he was eventually recovered, he came and shared his story, and also Jim Lechner, who's a Ranger officer, who was pretty badly wounded.

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  And I eventually served with him in the Battle of Ramadi. I guess 20 something years later. And today we have another soldier who served in special operations and played a pivotal role in that battle. His name is Norm Hooten, and this is an individual who joined the Army out of high school.

• 1:18Jocko Willink?

  May have been a very good decision, we were just talking about, may have been a very good decision for him. Became a special forces soldier, eventually spent over a decade at the Army's special operations tier one unit. And it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Norm, thanks for joining us, man.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Hey, it's an honor to be here with both you guys. I'm a huge fan, so thanks for having me here.

• 1:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, I appreciate it. Yeah, and we just, we just talked for, I think, over an hour.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I will do that. So, so just give me the hook if I go off on a tangent.

• 1:52Jocko Willink?

  No, that was awesome. It's just, it's so cool to hear your perspective and, and what you lived through and the things that you saw. You know, I was in the, I was in the Navy in the 90s, so you know, we have some overlapping. Time in service and as, as I told Mike Durant, you know, when that was going on in Somalia, I was, I was at SEAL Team One and I'm watching as that stuff's going down and you're just, there's nothing you can do. You know, you're sitting back here and there's nothing you can do. Uh, but watching it unfold was crazy. And then to sit here with you guys that lived through that is, it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a very strange thing to have happen that I literally was watching you guys on the news as a young SEAL. And now here we are sitting

• 2:34Jocko Willink?

  here getting a solid debrief on, on, on all that, which we'll get to. But before we get there, let's just, let, let's talk about your background. What was growing up like for you?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I grew up Texas kid, um, west Texas. So I born in Dallas, but very shortly after, after, um, you know, a couple of years I moved to a little town called Brackerville, Texas in Kenny County, about 15 miles from the Rio Grande River. My dad took a job on the Anacachoe Ranch, which is a, um, big historic ranch down there in that area. And, um, so I spent my first couple of years down there on that ranch, um, kind of free ranging, you know? Um, but my basic rules really from before I was in school was, you know, um, be back, uh, before it gets dark and, uh, don't play with rattlesnakes, you know? So, um, um, by the time I was five or six years old, I was unsupervised with a 22 pump rifle running

• 3:26Speaker 02

  around shooting cans and, and snakes and, and, um, um, and, uh,

• 3:31Jocko Willink?

  Just no range safety officer?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  No, no range safety officer. I was telling somebody when I was in the, in the, um, in special forces, I was like, man, the army spends weeks training to do stuff I'd do off the cuff when I was seven years old, you know? Um, but, uh, um, but, uh, was very blessed to, to grow up out there like that. And then, um, um, and then, uh, you know, somebody went away, whipped me up and said, hey, we're going into town. You're going to school. And so, um, it was horrible. I mean, I, I remember, uh, uh, they, my mom took me in, um, Would I wouldn't go into the school and so she brought me back home and my dad was like, what the hell's the problem? And she said, uh, he won't go. My dad took me back in. So what are you, like eight years old or seven years old or something like that? Uh, yeah, seven years old, first grade. Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  And you just refused entry? I wouldn't go in, man. You know, I mean, cause I didn't know what it was and I was so used to doing whatever I wanted to do, um, which caused me problems for the rest of my life, by the way, and, um, that I just didn't want to be in there, uh, you know, looking at a chalkboard all day. It was, it was brutal. And then my dad finally took me out and he, he dragged me down the hallway, pushed me in, uh, um, to the, through the door of the school and I can still remember my cowboy boots sliding on the floor as he pushed me down the hallway. And then he pushed me into the classroom and I'll never forget the teacher's name was, uh, Miss Veltman. And in the town we grew up in, it was kind of like a little house on a prairie kind of school, you know? And, uh, I saw, as he pushed me through the door, I looked and there was an open window, one of those little things you roll up and

• 5:02Speaker 02

  I went across the classroom, out the window and down through the playground and into the woods. And man, he was furious. But, uh, anyway, he took me back into school and she said, all you gotta do is sit here and there was a big wooden airplane in the corner and play with that airplane. And for the first couple of days, that's all I did was just pushing an airplane around in the corner. And then, um, you know, I had to adapt to it, but I remember asking her, I said, uh, how long do I have to do this? And she says, well, what do you mean? I said, how long do I have to go to school? And she goes, well, you gotta go through the elementary school, middle school and then high school and then you're done. And I said, how long is that? And she goes, 12 years. For a seven year old kid, that's two life sentences. Right? So I was like, oh my God. And I never fit.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  I never fit. It was just, um, every day I spent in school was absolutely horrible for me. And, um, I especially, I think if I hadn't have started out doing whatever, whatever the hell I wanted to do. I might have been able to adapt a little better. But when you have no rules and all of a sudden now you did nothing but rules. It was a difficult transition, but um, I was glad when it was was over and I was, I made it all the way through. Graduated high school, first guy on that side of the family to do that, by the way, so obviously it wasn't just my problem. A lot of bad problems with it, but uh.

• 6:18Jocko Willink?

  Come from a long line of people trying to stay out of school.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Long line of people that uh, um, you know, uh, didn't like a structure, but um, my dad was a, was a ranch worker and um, you know, he um, for a time he worked on the ranch and then he took a job as a state tech rider. So he rode the border on horseback, looking for livestock that uh, didn't belong there. So livestock that crossed the river and I used to go ride the river with him when I was a little kid and uh, you know, um, and enjoyed that part of living out there in Kenny County. Um, but he also had to make a, make a little money on the side and one of the things his family did was make uh, bootleg whiskey. So and along, along with a lot of other things. And um, so grew up around that environment.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  He actually brought that in from my, my grandmother's side of the family who came in, you know, back in the eighteen forties from Texas.

• 7:10Jocko Willink?

  Just straight up old school boat bootleggers?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, they would make it in uh, you know, they weren't, they weren't uh, popcorn sutton or anything like that. They had to make huge amounts of it, but they made enough to, to, you know, put gas in the truck and uh, enough for friends and family to have, have a little bit of moonshine laying around the house when they want it. But um, um, which caused, caused me a little issue later on in, in life, um, but um, but yeah, he was um, and in and out of jail, man, that's, that's, you know, if you want to talk about my childhood, that's what I remember most about it.

• 7:40Jocko Willink?

  What was he getting rolled up for?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Everything from bootleg whiskey to uh, barroom brawling to homicide. He went to jail for homicide and uh, um, when I was about ten and um.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  I didn't see him for a few years there. He never was never convicted of a felony. He beat it, but we just couldn't bond him out. So he was in, um, and I'm doing this off, you know, memories best I can as a kid, but he was in Meridian, Mississippi. And, um, something to do related with probably bootleg whiskey and they ever he killed two guys in a parking lot. And, um, um, I remember when I was a little kid, the sheriff came to the house and told my mother. And I remember her dropping down on her knees and crying because you know, you know, you know, what do you do? But, um, but that was kind of the story of his life. I mean, if it wasn't that, he was down in Laredo, Texas, getting in a knife fight or something. I can remember early on, you know, being seeing that, that violence in that, in that side of the family.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  And, um, um, the violence doesn't scare me because I got used to seeing it. But the consequences do because I know what it did to my family, my sisters and me. But, um, that's just the way to handle things. I remember, you know, when I was in first grade, again, hating school. I can remember the first time I got my ass kicked in school, you know, I was a first grader and got in a fight with a kid named Jesse Cannon and he was a big, tough kid. And, um, got punched in the nose. That's the first time I ever got, I think, knocked out. I definitely got knocked down and all I saw was stars and the nose was bleeding, mouth was bleeding. And I went home crying, you know, and, uh, my mom met me at the front door. She said, oh my God, what happened?

• 9:20Speaker 02

  What happened? You know, and my dad was in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. And he said, shut up and get your ass in here. And, uh, he said, what's going on? And I said, Jesse punched me in the nose. And he goes, whose fault is that? I said, it's Jesse's fault. And he goes, no, no. He goes, that's your fault. Move your nose next time. Right? So you're accountable for it, right? So, um, uh, and then he, he, uh, gave me a spanking for crying. And the next day he had a ball bat in the back of his truck. It was sawed in half and it had a lanyard on it. And he said, take this to school with you today. And take care of business. And I was like, six-year-old, seven-year-old kid. I was like, this is so serious.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  So I went to school. I didn't do it. And I came back home and he goes, did I do, did you do what I told you to do? And I said, no, sir. And he goes, why? And I was like, I don't want to hurt him. And he said, then you got no business fighting. He goes, and don't come home crying about it again. And that was my first lesson of that, you know. But, um, you know, I saw a lot of it going, growing up with him and his, and his buddies and his cousins and stuff like that. I can remember being in a place called Kaisers in my friends down in Brackettville, Texas. If you've been there long enough, you know what Kaisers is. It was a local honky tonk. And owned by a buddy of his named Johnny Fritter, whose dad's name had been Kai- Kaisfritter,

• 10:42Speaker 02

  you know, and notorious little, little town honky tonk. And I think we were down there for my birthday or something and, um, a bunch of guys came in from outside of town. And that's always a bad, bad combination. And, uh, I can remember it started getting a little heated and my dad grabbed me, pushed me against the jukebox and said, uh, stay here, don't move. And then knives and guns came out. And, uh, and within a period of thirty seconds, there were dudes laying all over that place, shot and stabbed and everything else. And, um, seeing that at an early age, you know, and really the sad part about it is you get, you get used to seeing it after a while. Um, but,

• 11:24Speaker 02

  um, it taught me a couple of things, you know. One is, uh, I never feared the, the actual act of, of the violence. But I saw what it did to us as a family and that really scared me, you know. I, I, so as I grew up, I like to think I had a little more sense, you know, because I would, there was times where I would be put in that situation and I would go, hey, there's gotta be another way out of this, because I know what's gonna happen. Right? And I know what happened to me as a kid and my sisters as a kid. And, uh, I don't want that to happen to my kids, you know. I want, I want them, so it's always best to try to move out of that thing diplomatically if you can. Uh, you exhaust every means, you know, but, uh, and then if you, uh, if you can't, then you have to really do something

• 12:08Speaker 02

  really, really quick. But the thing that stood out to me was that, uh,

• 12:13Speaker 02

  It was never, there was always some sort of weapon involved in it. Always on the street, always some, some sort of object involved in it. We talked a little bit about um, how important hand to hand and our combat is to us, you know, we both have some common roots in it, but um,

• 12:29Speaker 02

  but I learned a lot of lessons watching that early on.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  So, but grew up there and.

• 12:35Jocko Willink?

  So what was your plan? You know, you're growing up in this kind of chaotic violence. What, what was your plan? Did you have a plan? Did you like, you know, you're looking for, for uh, a path to follow. You see what your dad's doing. There's a lot of kids that just follow their dad's path. Your dad's out there getting in trouble, causing chaos. But you looked at that path and said, eh, I don't know if that's for me.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:58Jocko Willink?

  Or how to work.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  I didn't have a plan. I, I um, I was really surviving day to day. You know, we didn't have a lot of money. We were, we were um, you know, by, by most standards impoverished kids, you know, we didn't have a lot of money. Of course, especially when your dad's you know, in jail for a couple of years and he's not there and, and um, your mom, my mom was a single mom at the time, you know, um, basically, and you think well, um, she knows everything. And I look back on it now, she had me when she was 18 years old. And so she was in her late twenties, mid to late twenties, and you think she knows everything, but now I look back on it now, I got a daughter who's 22 and I'm thinking, man, you know, that was my mom, you know, but um, um, and my dad was young, he was 17 when I was born. So

• 13:38Speaker 02

  again, you think they got all the answers when you're a kid, but then you look back now as a, as a 65 year old man, you realize, man, they were just, they had a lot of, a lot of responsibility on them. Um, but um, I had no plan. I, you know, I worked odd jobs out there in, in Kenny County, worked on the ranches and uh, um, drove delivery trucks, did whatever I could, went out, um, we used to call it uh, dove picking. We'd go out and hunters would come in from all over the world to hunt white winged dove out there and me and my buddies would go out and clean the duck, get the dove. We were like human retrievers really, and uh, um, uh, and you wouldn't believe how many times I've been shot being a, being a bird boy. But um, uh, but um, anything you could to make money, you know, with no, no um.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Um, trajectory to the, to anything different. Um.

• 14:26Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any military in the family, any grandparents or anything that you knew about?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  I did, yeah. My grandfather was, uh, in the army in, um, um, the South Pacific in, in World War II. So he was in Guam, Philippines and the Guinea, um, regular soldier, you know, did, did his thing. Never talked about it. Um, but, um, he never got out of high school, came back to Texas and after the war and, and, uh, had a family and, and went from there. My dad was in the Navy. Um, he was in the Navy probably before the Korean War. So between World War II and the K- uh, and, uh, Korean War. So never really saw any, any action. But, um, I actually think he was out here in San Diego, um, but as a, as a sailor. I don't know what he, what he did, but, um, um.

• 15:13Jocko Willink?

  But was the military on your, on your radar at all for a career?

• 15:16Speaker 02

  You know, I, I grew up, um, like every kid, I think, every young man at the time, every young boy, you, you watched the movies and, and, and you kind of romanticize it. I remember watching the Green Beret when I was a kid and thinking how cool that was. And, and, um, um, but I watched all the old, uh, at that time, you know, sixties. So I was born in nineteen sixty. Um, so when I was really at the age where you're interacting with other people outside your family, you know, seven, eight years old, um, small town America, I'd go down to the barber shop and you had guys from World War II, Korea and, and Vietnam was kicking off at the time pretty good. So a lot of the kids in high school, you know, uh, foot, high school football heroes and stuff like that were going off to fight in Vietnam.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  And I remember a couple of times these kids would go off to fight and they would come back and they would bring them back. And they used to have a funeral procession down the street and a lot of times they'd put it on a buggy and a horse and they'd pull it down the street. Cause it's what, you know, typical West Texas town. Um, but I remember that being very impactful. I remember how it affected the community. So growing up in small community, America back then, you know, there was a lot of respect for, for the military. And at the same time, often the cities, I guess, you know, cause we didn't really have TV or anything, but we had the, uh, the anti-war movement that was starting to pick up steam, but I was never really exposed to any of that, you know? So I had a very positive, uh, opinion of the military. I used to sit in the barber shop.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Listen to these guys talk, you know, guys missing legs and stuff and talk about, you know, being on in the third army in Germany or being in Guadalcanal and stuff like that. And, um, and I just loved it, you know, sitting down there and they were, they were just my heroes. And at the time, I'm like, these dudes are really, really old. But if I look back on it, they're probably in their 40s. And, um, and, um, but, uh, but that was a cool place to grow up and a cool, cool way to grow up. I, um, I think I always look back and I say, you know, I've had bad and good in my life like everybody else. But one of the most fortunate things I, I count my blessings for being raised in Brackettville, Texas. I mean, it was just a cool place. I loved it. And, um, you know, a lot of the guys that would come in there to get your, you know,

• 17:25Speaker 02

  it was a garrison town. So you had Fort Clark, which was built for the Indian wars down there when they were fighting the Comanche and then the Mexican-American war. Beautiful little post right, uh, right on the border. And, um, so I'd have kids that I went to school with that were descendants of the original soldiers that would serve there back in like the Indian wars, but they just never left when they got out of the army. They just built a house next to the base and, and, uh, some of them were, uh, the descendants of, uh, Buffalo soldiers and, uh, Seminole Indian scouts. It's a really cool, cool little town. So if anybody ever gets a chance to go down there and check it out and, you know, if you, most people that go to Brackettville are lost. They, they, they, they find their way there because they're, they're lost. But, uh, yeah, it was a cool place. But I had no, um,

• 18:09Speaker 02

  no plan, man. I would just live in, and I looked around at what people did and, and, you know, uh, nobody in my family had ever been to college. Nobody I knew in the town had ever been to college because I'm sure there were kids that had went to college, but they never came back to Brackettville, Texas. Um, but, um, people there were salt of the earth. Uh, but, yeah.

• 18:30Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you graduate high school. At what point do you decide to go in the army?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Um, so I, um, um, I left Brackettville when I was 14 and, um, my dad was in jail at the time. And my mom was, uh, you know, trying to make it work there in Brackettville, Texas. And we were starving to death, to be honest with you. And my uncles came down, um, and they, um, Picked up my mom, my two sisters and me. Uh, my sisters went, one of my sisters went and lived with one family member. One went and lived with another family member. I went and lived with my grandfather, who was a preacher in Oklahoma City. So when I was 14 years old, I moved to Oklahoma City and, um, live with my grandfather. And, um, so I didn't see my dad for many, many years, probably five, five years there.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  And, um, uh, went down to Texas, went to high school last year of school and, and near the Houston area. Then I took a job driving a delivery lumber, delivery truck and two trucks. Actually I drove a Tupperware delivery truck and a lumber delivery truck. And I'd take the Tupperware delivery truck any day of the week. Uh, one, because, uh, it's a lot lighter lift. Two, because I was 18 years old, long blonde hair, green eyed kid. And all the people I delivered to were like 30 year old, uh, uh, Tupperware female salesmen. So, so, um, but that's another podcast all to itself, but, uh, um, but.

• 19:56Jocko Willink?

  Nevermind podcast. That's like a romance movie or something.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  It was, uh, it was pretty funny, but, um, um, but, uh, I, um, had no idea what I was doing. And my dad called me up and he's, and he'd, he had, uh, kind of straightened his life out. And he said, I hadn't seen you in a while. Um, I'm at the Houston livestock and rodeo show. Why don't you come down and let's go get lunch? And, um, I remember going down there to get lunch with him. And he took me to a place called Angelo's Fisherman's Wharf, right there in, um, near Houston. And, um, when we got the bill, it bounced. He couldn't pay, he couldn't pay the bill. So I, I said, that's all right. I got it. So his, his credit card didn't work, but, um, um, that should have been a, shouldn't have been, shouldn't have been a clue.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Shouldn't have been a clue, but, um, he said, come down to Brackett, spend some time with me. So he was still, you know, still down in Kenny County. And so I went down there and, uh, um, you know, I mean, I knew he made whiskey and, you know, all this other stuff. Dog, dog fighting, chicken fighting, man fighting, any kind of, you know, he kind of fighting was his thing. But, uh, um, so I went down there and, uh, spent a couple of weeks with him down there. And, uh, really good to reconnect with him, you know? I don't judge my dad. He was, he was a, he was a product of where he grew up, you know? And, uh, And I had to go back to work. I was like, I'm running out of money. I gotta go back and, you know, get back in a Tupperware truck, you know, so, um, um, but, uh, uh,

• 21:26Speaker 02

  he said, hey, if you're going up that way, can you carry some whiskey up to, you know, some buddies in Houston and then a buddy of mine named Floyd Boudreau over in, uh, uh, Louisiana. I was like, sure, I'm glad to do it, you know, and, um, you know, when you're that age, you're first of all, an adult, especially your dad, actually do something, you don't really think about it. You just, you know, yeah, I'm going that way, why not? And, um, his name was Norman Hooten, so was mine. And, uh, so I, I went and, uh, saw Bobby, a guy named Bobby Hall in, uh, Houston, gave him some whiskey, then I was headed to Louisiana and, uh, got stopped on traffic, traffic stopped. But back then, we didn't have, uh, GPS. And so I got, I got

• 22:07Speaker 02

  lost in going down a wrong way street, uh, in East Texas. I pulled, you know, pulled over, uh, get something to drink and, uh, um, got stopped and, uh,

• 22:19Speaker 02

  nice, nice guy pulled me over and, uh, soon as I pulled my license out, he said,

• 22:27Speaker 02

  you're related to Norman Hooten down in Kenny County? And I said, yes, sir, I am. And he said, what's in the back of pickup truck? And, um, so, um, and one thing led to another and, and, uh, there I was, you know, standing in front of a magistrate and, and he was like, you seem like a really, really good kid, you know? And I was, I was, you know, just a hardworking, honest, uh, West Texas kid, you know, and, uh, very respectful of law enforcement, had a genuine respect for, for, uh, people in law enforcement and, um, um,

• 22:59Speaker 02

  and he said, uh,

• 23:02Speaker 02

  what's your long-term plans? Kind of like what you just asked me. And I didn't even know what that was, you know, I was like, I don't know. You mean, you mean for Friday night? Yeah, right, right. And so, um, I'm gonna be out serving some Tupperware ladies. Yeah, right. But, um, uh, I didn't really know how to answer this. I don't really know. And, uh, and, and I had actually a buddy, a couple buddies of mine, when we graduated high school, had joined the military. A couple of them went to the Marine Corps. I had one of them that went to the Navy and was a rescue swimmer, I think, in the Navy. Another one that ended up being a Navy diver. And we were all talking about it together, you know, and, um, but I was kind of the last one sitting on the fence, you know? I'd gone down to the recruiter, actually, I was telling, uh, Uh, Carrie earlier, I said, you know, went down, first guy I talked to was a marine recruiter.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  And I talked to them, but I was, I was kinda like, I don't know, it's a tough work gig, it's a pretty good gig. And so, um, uh, um, I told him, I said, I've been thinking about joining the military. And the guy said, man, today would be a good day for you to think about that, I'd have a lot harder, you know? And so, uh, um, so I did, I went, and then I went back and I, and, um, I joined the delayed entry program. And the other thing that was triggering it was that, you know, there were a couple of things triangulated. The, um, Eagle Claw had just happened.

• 24:18Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  And it was all over the news, you know? And so every young guy was like, you know, we're gonna go, we're gonna go kick some, kick some ass. And so, um, you know, not knowing that, you know, probably just gonna join and go up, uh, you know, Fort Campbell, Kentucky and sit there, you know, and, and shoot with blank adapters. But anyway, at the time, you know, you were going, we're going to war, you know? And so, uh, it was a good time, you know? But I remember going back to, uh, I joined the delayed entry program and went back to my, my mom and I told her what I'd done. And, and, um, she had always been saying, uh, don't join the army, don't join the army. Cause it was right on the heels of Vietnam. The military didn't have a, a great reputation in the community, in the country at large. And she was, you know, mom was always thinking, you're gonna go and get hurt, you know?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  So, don't do that, don't do that, you know? Um, uh, but when that happened, having known my dad's background and, and his trajectory in life, she's like, son, whatever you gotta do to get the hell out of Texas, you need to do it. And if that's the way out, then take it, you know? And I went to my dad and my dad said, uh, man, why'd you do that? Why'd you join, join the damn army? And I said, I kinda had to. And he said, oh, man, he goes, you would've got two years max. And he says, you probably would've done less than a year. And he goes, army's four, that's four years, man. And I was like, I was like, that was the way he thought, you know, and, um, but, um, but I went in and, um, immediately loved it.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  I was like, man, this is really cool. Got, you know, got to do things and, um, you know, left the state of Texas, got, I flew from, uh, uh, you know, Fort Sill, Oklahoma to, uh, Atlanta, Georgia on an airplane, first time I ever been on an airplane. So I got to do things to me. It was like, that's what rich and famous people get to do, you know, but, uh, um, but it took me about eight weeks to get in trouble in the army. So I, I was, uh, um, in basic training and we had a gap, a couple of days off on the weekend between basic training and advanced individual training. So we got a pass on the weekend. Worst thing you could have done for me. And the other thing that was bad was that my two best buddies in basic training were from South Boston. And so you take those two guys from South

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Boston, um, and put me out of, uh, the new oasis strip in, in the same room. And it was, uh, just a recipe for a disaster. So, uh, we went out, uh, um, one, on that weekend, we were down in, in this area in, in Fort Sill called the White Wolf Recreation Area. It was a training area. And it said, uh, off limits. Of course, we just went right, right to it. And we were down there swimming and jumping off cliffs and drinking beer. And, and one thing led to another. There were some guys down there fishing that were permanent party. And, um, of course, the two guys from South Boston, you know, uh, you know, the, the, the jaw and began, and then it turned into a fight. And one of them hit my buddy and then it was on, you know, and we were in a, we were in a brawl. And,

• 27:12Speaker 02

  uh, um, I didn't think much of it because I've been, you know, around that stuff all my life, but that's just the way it was, you know, if you're with somebody and somebody hits a buddy, it's, you know, man, you get the drop and go. And that's just, that's what we did. And, uh, uh, we all got arrested in, uh, um,

• 27:29Speaker 01

  First weekend off you get arrested.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  If I'd been in army eight weeks, I was in the brig, man. And, uh, my platoon sergeant at the time in training was a guy named Sergeant Iker, an old Vietnam vet. He came down and, you know, and, uh, you know, got us out of jail, took us back in for the commander. So I had my first solid in, in Texas when the guy said, you know, you got caught doing something wrong during the army. Eight weeks later, you know, I'm, I'm, or after I delayed entry program. So a few months later, I'm eight weeks in the army. I'm standing in front of this guy. I think his name was Captain Richards. I, you know, if he's still around, I owe him a great, great thanks, but. He goes, man, he goes, what the hell are you guys thinking? And I was like, you know, they, they started it. And he goes, you guys weren't even supposed to be in there, you know, and, and,

• 28:13Speaker 02

  and he said, I'm just close to throwing you out of the damn army, man. Cause you know, I was a trainee, you know, trainees don't get a lot of, a lot of grace. And he goes, do you, do you like, do you even want to stay in? Two guys from South Boston were like, fuck no. And they were gone. And I was like, yeah, I want to, I want to stay in. And he's like, okay. And I got a summarized Article fifteen, eight weeks in the army. He didn't know what the hell that was, but it was like 50 bucks fine. And I had to pay the parking lot for two weeks or something like that. And then.

• 28:44Jocko Willink?

  And did you, did you, when you enlisted, did you know about, did you enlist for special forces?

• 28:48Speaker 02

  I did. So I went in, actually, you know, like I said, I went into the Marine Corps, as I was telling Kerry earlier, and really liked the Marines, man. I had buddies that were in them, a bunch of guys that I really were, had held up on a pedestal in a small town in Texas were, you know, Marines, really sharp, sharp dudes. And, but I went in and they, they were like, a buddy of mine had joined the army. And he was like, I've got airborne school, I've got this, I've got that, I've got that. I went in Marine Corps. I was like, hey, you guys got any schools, cool stuff? And he goes, you're gonna be a Marine.

• 29:21Jocko Willink?

  You can be a Marine.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it. And what about, what about jumping in it? Bud, you're gonna be a Marine. And if you don't like that, you can go join the army. And so I joined the army. And, but I went into the army and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was like, know nothing about the army. You know, my grandfather had been in the army in war too, but he never talked about it, you know, and, they had all the posters all over the wall, you know, of different things, you know, helicopter pilots and stuff like that. And I looked at this one poster and it had a picture of a Green Beret with a rope slung across his shoulder. And I said, um, if you don't think you can do this, don't even try, right? And, um, I was like, man, gun, you know, gun, you know, and all, all the sexy, sexy stuff, right? And I was like, that looks pretty cool.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  And so I talked to recruiter and I said, uh, what I got, can I do that? And he goes, yeah, he's, you can do that. We have a program you can sign up for. And, um, I said, um, uh, well, I wanna, I wanna shoot guns and jump out airplanes and stuff. I can go scuba diving and all that stuff. And he's like, that's the place to go, bub.

• 30:24Jocko Willink?

  You're set.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  And so, um, I had no idea what I was getting into, you know, no idea. And, uh, but it was, you know, it was part of the recruiting spiel. Um, and I didn't know the difference between different MOSs or anything. I didn't know that, you know, I thought green berets are green beret. I didn't know you had rifleman, uh, weapons guys, uh, commo guys, demo guys. So I, I said, um, well, I wanna be a, I wanna be a guy with guns. I wanna, I wanna shoot, you know, that's, I have a, I'm a good shot. I like shooting guns, been doing it since I was a kid. He goes, well, you can do it, but you're gonna go in and they need a commo guy. And that's the only slots we have open. So I went in initially as a commo guy. And I, um, um, went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for my basic training. Um, and, um, but, um, had no idea what was coming my way, nothing.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  I mean, and basic training, you know, was so easy. And we talked about this earlier. I was like, man, they would plan for weeks to do shit that I was doing when I was six years old. And I was like, you know, they, I mean, guys in my family used to rob convenience stores with us, you know? I mean, the, the time the army takes a month, you know, and they go and do it like, oh, we got five minutes. Let's go do, you know, let's go hit, hit this place, right? So, um, um, but, uh, um, but basic was easy. And then my grandfather told me, one thing he did tell me when I went in, he said, those paratroopers are bad dudes. He goes, uh, in his, in his frame of reference was World War Two and, and they were bad, bad dudes, right? And, um, so he goes, jump school's hard. He goes, it's gonna be hard.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  I went to jump school and I was like, man, my feet hurt from running so slow, right? It's like, man, like, you know, you're doing this shuffle around a thing. It was just miserable. Um, and then, um, got to Fort Bragg, North Carolina and, um,

• 32:07Speaker 02

  They cycled through, uh, training was at Camp McCall, uh, it still is, but, um, that was where he ran the Q course, Special Forces Qual Course. And it was, uh, seven weeks, five days long. I know because I marked every day off of it on a calendar and I think probably 20 minutes, you know, but, um, um, but, uh, they had what they call pre-phase for SF babies. So it was maybe a month long workup, basically taught you how to put straps on your rucksack and, you know, lace your boots up and, and, uh, basically land and have and stuff like that. I got there at the end of a pre-phase cycle, so I didn't get any pre-phase. I just got there, went straight from, moved into barracks. A couple of days later, I was on a cattle car, headed to Camp McCall. I mean, way behind the curve, bub.

• 32:52Jocko Willink?

  How old were you, like 18 or 19 years old?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Uh, 19 at the time, yeah.

• 32:56Jocko Willink?

  And most of the SF students were already in the army for four or five years?

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a good mix of guys. So, um, there were, um, and the course was not a, uh, modified for SF babies. It was what it was.

• 33:08Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Right? And, um, so it was designed for seasoned army non-coms. Um, and, um, I would say most of the class had been in the army before. So I had guys in there from Ranger Battalion. I had guys in there from 82nd Airborne, all over the army who were coming, had been in the army for maybe five or six years. Now they were going to Q, Q course. And, um, and then you had a, a good mix of SF babies, guys like me, young guys. And, um, um, funny shit, man. I mean, I mean, they were, we were, we were lost, you know, but, uh, um, and, um, uh, but, um, got out there and man, dude, that was the first time I was like, well, this is hard, right? And the guy, I'll never forget, the first real green beret I ever saw was a guy named Major Howard. He met us when we got him off the

• 33:54Speaker 02

  bus. He's standing, he looked like a G.I. Joe and I was like, dude, man, who's this dude? He's, he's the guy on the poster, right? And so, um, uh, he was standing there and we came off the bus and, uh, still to this day, um, and I've met a lot of cool dudes, you know, but, and I guess maybe it was my time of life or whatever, but, uh, if you had, if I had to pick one guy, if somebody said, what's the, the baddest dude you ever met in your life? That's the guy, you know? And, um, and he was, uh, nominated for the Medal of Honor three times, I think, one, you know, one at once, can only win it once. But the stories and, and the cool thing about him was there were a lot of stories about him, but he never told them. Everybody else told him.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  And so that gives us a little bit more credibility than a lot of the guys here out there tooting their horn. And he was just a quiet stud, man. And he was probably in his 40s then, I'm guessing. But um, he used to skull drag us all over chemical. And um, I would not have made it though. Uh, you know, we talked about this earlier. Um, that's the one course that I was like, because I was so well prepared for it. You know, they pulled every, every joke in a book on me, man. It was like, uh, I thought the grid lines were actually drawn on the line and I was like, on the ground, you know? I mean, I, on a compass course, it was like, they weren't actually grid land lately. You know, I was like, where is this thing? You know, I mean, every one of them, because I was so naive to the world, you know?

• 35:14Speaker 02

  And um, uh, and um, and I was radioactive to the army guys. Cause they were like, they didn't like SF babies, you know? It was like, you hadn't paid your dues in the army. Um, and um, you're basically, uh, you know, screwed up, you know? And, and that shit might be contagious and I don't want any of it to get on me. So they were trying to get through the course. Uh, and they didn't need to spend any extra time helping somebody else get through the course. Cause you know, you're probably getting two or three hours of sleep a night. You know, you're getting skull drug all day and then you're having to learn how to redecomplice and do all that stuff. But um, um, there were two Marines that were from force recon. One of them was named Rich Stickel and the other one, I can't remember his first name, but his last name was Armstrong.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  He'd been an Angloco, uh, uh, I guess that's gunnery, right? Naval gunnery? Yeah, yeah. But he was an Angloco guy going, uh, but he was a force recon guy coming, coming through the course. And then Richard Stickel and Richard Stickel looked like a, uh, Hitler's wet dream. And he was, he was a, he was like six foot two, blond headed, blue eyed, chiseled, looked like a statue, like somebody carved him. And he was, I remember seeing him like, man, this dude's a beast, man. And um, really, um, uh,

• 36:28Speaker 02

  A special guy and one of the funniest interactions I've ever, ever seen in my, in my life was, and it was really mutual, mutual respect, but was between Major Howard and Richard Stickell, who was in the hand to hand pit, right? And, um, um, Major Howard goes on, say, hey, okay, who, who wants to, who wants to come in and basically train, right? And Stickell's like, oh yeah, I'll get a piece of this. And, um, Major Howard said, uh, come here, Marine. And he said, you think you can, think you can, uh, think you can get it done? And he was like, oh yeah. He goes, listen, he goes, when I was in Vietnam, and, and again, knowing Major Howard, you have to know he's joking completely because he wasn't a bracket. But he says, I used to walk in a bar and he goes, uh, I'd kick one Marine's ass and the rest of them would kick their own asses trying to get

• 37:12Speaker 02

  the fuck out of my way. Right? So, but, uh, I thought that was funny, you know, but, uh, but anyway, Richard was a good dude and Armstrong was a good dude, but they, they saw that I was struggling, you know, we were dropping people like flies. I mean, especially guys that had come off the block. You know, um, we would, I mean, literally dropping 20, 30 dudes a day. And, um, um, they came in one night and again, these guys are doing everything that everybody else is doing and they're getting two hours of sleep a night. And they go, hey bud, come here, we're gonna tighten you up. Right? And they, they, they took their time to help me. And, um, had I not gone through it, had I not had them there, I wouldn't

• 37:54Speaker 02

  have made it through it. Ended up getting on, graduating on the coming out list. Um, and, um, I didn't even know what that was at the time. I was like, what is that? And they're like, uh, you know, it's top 10, top 10% of your class. Yeah, you done good. And I was like, yeah, well, you're only coming. I was like, what the fuck is that? They're like, uh, you done good. And then so, um, but had it not been for two guys, uh, in their leadership, especially Richard, uh, Stickell, um, I would have been probably back on the ranch in Texas somewhere. Cause I don't know that I would have been a good guy in the regular army. It would have been going back to the first day of school in El Braggaville, Texas again. You know, but um. You'd have been out the window. Yeah, I'd have been out the window, one way or the other. Either of my own accord or somebody else's, and then back on our, back on our ranch and probably in prison. Hmm.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  You know, and I know people, uh, people say that, um, but I'm telling you, that was where I was headed. And, uh, and again, um, I was a good kid, but good kids can end up at bad places. You know, I just, I was an impressionable guy and I, I know the way I was raised. It was kind of like being in that, that fight when I was in the eight weeks in the army. It's like, I didn't want it, but, but once the, you hit my body and it's on, I'm not, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna run, you know? And that's how you get pulled into, it's almost like a, I tell my sons this, when we talk to them, I have three sons and, and a daughter, but, um, be careful who you, uh, commit to, because once you commit to them, you're committed. Hmm.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Alright, so be careful when you choose your friends, because, um, if one of them comes to you tomorrow and says, hey, we're gonna, it's like the old, the, the line off the, uh, the town. Yeah, whose car we take. Whose car we take. And, um, and so make sure you want to get in that car with them, because sooner or later you will have to. Yeah. Right? Friendship dues. Yeah, right. And, um, and that is what got me in most of the trouble I was in, when I was a kid. I, I never, uh, wanted to do it. It was always somebody saying, hey, you know, um, this guy, this guy did that, or this guy did that, and, and, and we're going. And I was like, okay, we're going, you know? Um, but, um, but yeah, the two Marines, I'm, I'm a little bit tangential, so I apologize. Okay.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Two Marines, uh, um, that I, um, one, respect them as people, but learned a lot about, um, leadership from two Marines that were just awesome, awesome men.

• 40:22Jocko Willink?

  So you get through the Q course and then, and then you become 18 Echo, you go to comm school?

• 40:27Speaker 02

  I did. So I went to, uh, I went to comm school and back then it was Morse code. You know, nowadays I, I can't imagine what these guys are using nowadays, but uh,

• 40:35Jocko Willink?

  Believe it or not, Morse code, well HF is coming back.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Really?

• 40:38Jocko Willink?

  And I had to learn Morse code too, uh, as a young SEAL comm guy, I had to learn Morse code and sat there with headphones on, writing groups out.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, no.

• 40:47Jocko Willink?

  Five groups or whatever.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the old, uh, the old Dyna pad with the Trigraff.

• 40:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go, all day.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then the, uh, we used to call it the angry 71 or the A N G R E 71 where you had to wind it up to send code over a, over a box and you hope that the spring lasted through the message, but, but, um,

• 41:06Speaker 02

  so it was different phases of the Q course, all the physical stuff done in the first seven weeks, five days, and then you go into comm school. And at the time, um, the highest attrition rate was probably in the medic course. We lost a lot of medics in the GOAT, GOAT, uh, life tissue training. And then, um, probably second highest with commo because of Morse code. Yeah, a lot of guys can't pick that on.

• 41:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's like a weird, uh, natural thing that you, some people can't, they just can't get it.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:33Jocko Willink?

  They don't have the ear for it.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  It's not an intellect thing, it's a skill.

• 41:36Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  And, um, so, cause I certainly was the smartest dude, you know, to ever, to ever pop out of Brackenville, Texas, but, um, um, but, um, I was a code savant.

• 41:47Jocko Willink?

  Ah, you had an ear for it.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  I was, and, and it was like, uh, guys would come in and, and, um, struggle with it and it was one of the few things that I ever ran into in life where I was just, man, this is not only easy, it was because it's easy, it's fun.

• 42:01Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  And so, um, um, went through there, did, did, uh, did good in, in code school and then went to course phase three, Robin Sage, all that stuff. And then, um, as a commo guys at the time, it was kind of a random draw when you finished the Q course. Most guys went to um um base station. So they were up at the battalion or or um you have battalion headquarters, receiving messages from A teams all over the world. So they'd sit back and they'd write copy code, break it down into a text and then uh you know, so messages moving back and forth. So so the um uh base station commo. And I was one

• 42:45Speaker 02

  of the lucky guys. I went to I went to um a company. So I went to the company B team and um was the radio operator for the commander and sergeant major at the time. So I wasn't assigned to an A team initially, um but I was a B team commo guy. And um and I was on Sante Road back when fifth group was on Fort Bragg. So before they moved to Campbell, they used to be at Fort Bragg on Sante Road. Bunch of wooden shacks and um all the team sergeants in uh A Company first of the fifth had been Sante Raiders, right? And then a lot of guys in the battalion and battalion uh worked very closely together. Our buildings

• 43:25Speaker 02

  were basically adjacent. So you had guys like um uh Djakovinko, you know, old uh stud. He was a, you know, he used to come down, sit down in a team room and and um you had Kamarowski and you had uh Major Howard would come down and hang out with his buddies and and so being a young ki- special forces guy, I mean, I knew I was around legends at the time, but it now at sixty five, I was like, man, you should have asked him this, you should have asked him that, you should have done this, you should have done that.

• 43:51Jocko Willink?

  We had a we had a Sante raid guy on the podcast and he he showed up for that mission, but he hadn't been to Vietnam yet. And so he that he was on, he was in Vietnam for like twenty minutes.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Just welcome to

• 44:04Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Just welcome to Vietnam. He got off the pl- he got off the helicopter and like shot a guy in ten feet, ten feet away, like drilled the dude.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:12Jocko Willink?

  And he was like the, and then that was it. He did the Sante raid and you know, that was it.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:16Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of, kind of wild.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had, had, I was lucky, man. Again, lucky, you know, and uh uh sometime better be lucky than good, right?

• 44:23Jocko Willink?

  Always.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Um but um I was raised by those guys.

• 44:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  And um they were a little uh standoffish at first, but once, once you you're around a while and they and they And you went them over, they were the best, best, they were like big brothers, you know, and again, old ass dudes, probably in thirties, right? And, but, I mean, evolving Dora legends, you know? And I was on the, the B team. And one of the, Francis Kameraski, Frank, came down from the scuba team. Back then, it was called ODA five eleven, and they since changed the number to five one five, but it was ODA five eleven. And he came in and said, hey kid, he goes, you think you could pass scuba school?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  And I was like, yeah, I think I can pass it. And he said, I need a demo guy. And I said, I'm a commo guy. And he goes, I've been trying to get a demo thrust through scuba school for the last couple of years, I haven't been able to get anybody through it. And he goes, but if you go as a commo guy, come back, I'll send you to demo school. And you'll be my demo guy, and you can be cross trained as a commo guy. I said, well, let's go. So I went down there, and I thought, at the time, I'm a good swimmer, you know, I used to swim the Freeo River all the time when I was a kid, I can hold my breath for, you know, I used to, I used to, you know, when we were kids, we used to go down to the highway, and the river ran into the highway through a culvert pipe. And our cool thing to do was to go in one end of the culvert pipe, and shoot out of the other end, you know, and so you had to hold your breath maybe thirty seconds at the most.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  But, but I thought I was pretty much a stud, you know, and then it took me all about thirty seconds at scuba school, I realized, man, dude, this is a different kind of swimming, you know, and so, but I, I went through pre-scuba, ma- made it through it. Pre-scuba back then was, you know, you had guys from, pretty much all services, except the Navy, because you guys, you know, you guys were the world renowned masters of the ocean. But everybody else comes to, comes to Key West to go to school. So I had PJ, CCT guys, I had some Fort Recon guys there, and a lot of Rangers, and of course SF guys went through. And I can't remember how many we started with, but it was close to a hundred people,

• 46:42Speaker 02

  and I think we graduated with fifteen, total, out of scuba school. And, and I, it took everything this cowboy had to get to scuba school. I felt like I was in the pool with cowboy boots on, because I, it was not intuitive to me. And Um, one of my buddies in scuba school was a guy named Art Glass, an old dude. He was 28. I was 22. And, um, but we hit it off as friends and, uh, um, which becomes kind of important later on in life. I talk about relationships, but he was a really, really solid dude, stud, you know, a beast. Um, but, uh, both of us drowned on the same day and went to the hospital on the same day. So that last, last day of

• 47:23Speaker 02

  pool week, which is crossovers, um, they, um, they pushed it to the point, and it turns into basically a melee underwater because guys are just, you know, it starts out organized and then it turns into a garage sale. And, um, um, but, uh, both of us, all I can remember is on the last crossover, you know, everything turned a little green. And then the next thing I know, I'm laying on my back, you know, we set a 2080s under me and, um, looked to my right and there's Art Glass laying there with me. And so, um, uh, but, uh, uh, we went to the doctor that clears to come back to train. Nowadays, I don't know if they clear, but back in the day, like as long as you, you know, you have brain damage or something, you're going back in. Slap you on the ass and say, get back in there. And, um, but while we were at the doctor, we, um, uh, everybody else was doing their, I think it's 3,000 meter surface swim.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  And, um, so we went, we came back and it was like, boy, you've got work to do. So, you know, your last thing you do is feel like going out in the middle of the ocean, swimming 3,000 meters, but we did it together, you know, and, um, um,

• 48:22Speaker 02

  became friends. And then I, I went back, uh, to, uh, you know, and funny going back a little bit. So trouble again, right? So I go to, uh, while I'm in pre-scuba at Fort Bragg, Tucker Fieldhouse. Um, I was married at the time, my first wife, and we're driving down the road. Not without going into detail, I had a disagreement with the road guard from the 82nd Airborne and, uh, um, he, um, basically dropped trial and pressed his ass up against the window when my wife was sitting there. And I was like, oh, okay. You're, you're, you're a tough guy. So I pulled the truck in and again, it's four o'clock in the morning, pitch black, pulled a truck in, you know, and, uh, um, parked in, uh, and I told my wife, I said, here, I'll be right back. And, uh, I take off running and I found

• 49:04Speaker 02

  that road guard and he was, he was oblivious of what was coming. And, um, um, I blindsided the hell out of him, you know? And it started and it was 50th signal group. And, and of course, you know, you're not thinking at the time. You're just like, this is the dude. And then you, you don't realize he's got, you know, 50 dudes behind him in a formation. And it turned into basically, I'm going to drag Norm Hooten up and down Ardennes Road. And finally, they hadn't been for their company commander, they probably would have killed me. But, um, so I go back to, uh, uh, Prescu, but he took my name and he called, called the boss. And my boss at the time was Jack Curtis Penny, JCPenny, been in Vietnam.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  And so, um, I'm in, uh, uh, Prescu, uh, and, uh, I'm in there training, you know, I'll beat the shit. And, uh, a guy comes over, hey, your commander called, you need to go back to company. And I was like, all right. So I'm back to company. I walked in and he started laughing. He goes, what are you doing? And I was like, I told him what happened. He goes, man, you can't do that shit. He goes, go back to training, you know? In today's army, I guarantee you, you wouldn't be there. But, uh, but, uh, anyway, I ended up on the, on the dive team as a demo guy. And, uh, And so what year is it now? So, um, I got out of the Q course in February of 1982. And then I, um, forgot to tell you, I went to DLI for a year. So I, I got, Oh damn. What, what language?

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Turkish. So, um, I took the D lab test. And I didn't know at the time, the plan was if you wanted to stay on a A team and go right to a team, you had to fail that thing. Nobody told me that. I didn't get the memo. So I just took it. And, uh, they came in and said, you're going to language school. I said, I don't want to do that. I want, I want to go to company. And they were like, uh, you're a barter reenlistment if you don't go to language school. So, um, um, I went out there, went to Monterey for 47 weeks, Turkish. And, um, again, one of those things where I, you know, so code is a listening thing. Language is a listening thing. It's not an intellect thing. It's a skill, right? Because,

• 51:13Speaker 02

  you know, you can have guys with very, very low IQ that speak perfectly good English. But I was the distinguished undergraduate, had the highest score ever in the history of Turkish language school. Damn. Had a, graduated with a four, four. And they said, you would have been a five, five, but you have to be a native speaker. You have to live in Turkey to be a five, five. So graduated with a four, four. Um, and again, it was one of those things where it's like, what does that, what does that mean? I didn't even know if it's good or bad, you know? And, um, um, um, went back to, uh, to, uh, Bragg. And that's when I went, went to my company B team. But, um, um, so by the time 1982 graduated, uh, language school may, would have been, uh,

• 51:56Speaker 02

  May, late spring of nineteen eighty-three, I was on the, on the, on the B-team. Summer, I went to scuba school in the summer, so within, uh, so eight, summer of nineteen eighty-three, scuba school.

• 52:08Jocko Willink?

  And so now you're, you're in an A-team, and what are you guys doing for, what's like, what are you doing?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, I remember the first thing I did is a Green Beret, and I was thinking, man, this is, this is really cool. We picked up pine cones on Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

• 52:19Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  So, yeah, it was beautiful, because there wasn't a lot of shit going on back then.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Little police call.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:24Jocko Willink?

  That was the first thing I did when I got to SEAL Team One, they're like, yep, I'm all fired up, just got done with Bud's, I'm, you know, thinking I'm this most special of the special, right? Yeah, go clean the shitter.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 52:36Jocko Willink?

  And then I went on deployment, get done with work, I'm going on deployment, and we had beepers, right? So we were high-speed, we're on deployment, we have beepers, and we get the nine-one-one page, like, get to the freaking unit right now. So we haul ass down to the unit, and, uh, it turns out we hadn't picked up the brass when we had shot on the range the previous day, and they were pissed, so they recalled us to go pick up brass. At that point, I was like, all right, my dream is over, because when I was young, dude, I thought I was going to Vietnam, you know what I mean? It was, I was going on deployment in nineteen ninety-three, I thought I was going to Nam, dude, like, it's odd. So now here I am, getting recalled to pick up brass, it's not exactly what I was signed up for, but that's what we're doing. So I guess it was much the same, picking up pine cones.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, well, I remember, um, I, I lived in the barracks, uh, fifth group barracks at the time, um, because, you know, most guys were in COs, lived off post, but I was still a, I was a PFC, and I was, uh, still a young dude, dude in the army, and, uh, um, living in the barracks, and I had staff duty one night. And, um, uh, one of the, uh, the non-cons on the scuba team in, uh, BCO, uh, I won't tell you, tell his name, but, but, good dude, you know, but he was a big Harley rider, and, uh, you know, uh, uh, an animal, savage. And, um, but, uh, he, um, I was staff duty, he comes rolling up on his, on his Harley, a big custom Harley, parks it right on the, right by the sign that said, uh, fifth group. And, um, um, so, um, uh...

• 54:02Speaker 02

  He comes walking in, he goes, "Hey, Hoot, can you wash my, wash my bike?" I said, "Yeah, no problem." And back then, you gotta remember, Army was way different. So, fifth group barracks, we actually had strippers living in one of the rooms in the barracks, and it was just like a zoo, and, and, and crazy shit was going on there. And, uh, um, but, um, uh, I said, "Yeah, I'll watch it." And then, um, hour or so later, you know, um, the battalion sergeant major comes up, and his name was Forrest K. Foreman. And, um, um, Vietnam vet, um, good, good guy, but he was, he was the smudge, right? And so, um, and we used to call him Forrest Skinner, right? So, um, since the sergeant major Foreman, but, uh, um, but he came, he was hooting. He goes, "Whose fucking motorcycle is that on my, on my grass?"

• 54:47Speaker 02

  And I said, "I don't know." And he goes, "Uh, whose motorcycle is that out there on that grass?" I said, "I don't know." And he goes, "Okay, well, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna call a tow truck, and they're gonna come get that thing, and you're gonna get it off this barracks, and you're gonna do that in thirty minutes." And I said, "Roger that, Sergeant Major." And, um, as soon as he walked out the door, I run down to barracks, and I get Gardner, I said, "You gotta move that bike, dude." I said, "I'm calling a tow truck right now, but if it's gone when the tow truck gets here, then..." "Oh, good." "Yeah, we're good." And so, um, that's what happened. And then, uh, uh, Foreman comes back, and the tow truck's there, and he's like, "Where's that fucking motorcycle?" And I was like, "I don't know, went out there with a tow truck, it was gone." And he goes, "Okay, that your story?" I said, "Roger that, Sergeant Major." And he goes, "All right."

• 55:30Speaker 02

  So, I went and did my staff duty tour, and staff duty ended, I think, at six o'clock in the morning, you know? And, um, and then at the end of staff duty, you had post, uh, police call. So, that's when you did your pine cone duty. So, you'd do your staff duty all night, then your last, uh, uh, hour or so, you'd walk around by the PX, picking up cigarette butts and pine cones. And, um, so, um, I walked around, and I came back, and he called me in at the end of the police call, and he said, "How you doing?" I said, "Good." And he goes, "You got anything for me?" I was like, "No." And he goes, "Did you do police call?" I said, "Yes." And he said, um, "Well..."

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Go back and do it again. And I was like, okay, so I went back, did a police call again, came back. Long story short, I did that thing like 10 times. And so, you know, you know, you've been up 24 hours already. So the next day at 1800 hours, I'm still doing police call. Right. And then finally, I found it. It was a, it was a can he'd put up underneath the bush. And I said, hey asshole, bring this can back to Sergeant Major Foreman. And I walked back in and I said, this is what you're looking for, Sergeant. He goes, good job. And he goes, now, what do you think about that motorcycle? And I was like, okay. And now, you know, learned my lesson there. So, you know, you get your licks in, but

• 56:49Speaker 02

  so do they. Right. And so, um, but yeah, I was, uh, it was a good, good, good tour.

• 56:55Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys go on deployments anywhere? Did you guys do like training trips to other countries and do J sets or anything like that?

• 57:00Speaker 02

  We did. So, um, um, I can't remember exactly the year, it would have been, uh, 80, 84. Back then, there was a, and I think I'm good saying this now because it's old, but there was a, um, um, a project called Roof Shingle. And it was a fifth special forces group over in Saudi Arabia, training, uh, basically giving the Q course or watered down version of the Q course to the Saudi Arabians. And, um, there were some people embedded from OGAs with us who were doing their thing. So really the roof shingle, because I remember time I was like, man, we're giving these guys a special forces course and they

• 57:43Speaker 02

  really suck. You know, and we're giving them certs and all that stuff. And then I was talking to one of these old dude, and a legendary dude, by the way, his name was Tom Roberts, and had been in a POW at Kasserine Pass, um, when he escaped, linked up with a British unit that took him back to England, and then they threw him on a boat from Normandy. Right? I'm like, man, you know, super dude. But he was a, he was an OGA guy at the time. Old, and he was old. He was in his, at the time would have been in seventies or whatever. But, um, um, but he goes, you gotta get it. He goes, you know, um, uh, that's really about the Q course, you know? He goes, but you do your thing and let me do my thing. And, um, um, so we did that for a year. It went from roof shingles, what they call Royal Oak.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  So the name changed. But I spent about probably

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Close to eighteen months in Saudi Arabia. We go over six months, come back for a couple of weeks, go back over.

• 58:36Jocko Willink?

  So that was kind of the focus for you guys.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was my first enlistment in the army was really.

• 58:42Jocko Willink?

  Did you pick up any Arabic since you're naturally good at languages?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  I did. So I was in, but you know, later I picked up Arabic when I was over there. Little, you know, enough to talk on the radio. So I could talk to him on the radio and run on the range. I could run a range and stuff like that. And then later on and later, later in life in the army, I was in Lebanon. I was there for about about six some months and um, um, picked up Arabic over there. Then I spent time in Jordan and then after the army, I spent five years in Jordan. So I picked up a good amount of Arabic, never went to formal training for it. Arabic is a lot different and a lot more difficult than Turkish. Turkish is pretty simple.

• 59:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Turkish is a year, one year DLI school?

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Forty seven weeks, I think it's a, and it's.

• 59:21Jocko Willink?

  Cause Arabic's a year and a half, right? And you can kind of judge how hard the language is on her by how long it takes to teach the knuckleheads the language. Like Spanish is like four months.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then we had dudes who went out there, Spanish, were fluent Spanish speakers. I was like, man, Dave, what do you, you know, I mean, how did you get that gig? But uh, um, but Turkish is a, is part of the oral, ulterior language group. And a lot of the languages, you know, like, how do you say, uh, radio in Turkish? Radio, you know, how do you say automobile in Turkish? Automobile, right? I mean, so they, they've adopted a lot of the, uh, modern language. And the script is, um, the same as, uh, as English, right? Arabic, you know, you're writing backwards and it's, and it's, uh, it's Martian, right? So, so, um, uh, and you have to all the, all the, yeah, stuff like that. And, and it's difficult. It's, it's a lot more difficult.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  So Turkish is fairly easy to pick up, not as easy as Spanish. But like I said, I had a buddy out there, Balders, he's out there, you know, grew up speaking in, uh, Spanish. And now he's out there on a language course for six months, basically surfing every day. And I'm like, dude, you know, I mean, you got the good deal, but, uh, um, but yeah, I did pick up some Arabic.

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  And so what was after, uh, that, that O D A five one five, five one one became?

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Five eleven, yeah, five eleven. And it became five one five when I was there. And, um, and, um, um, they were just starting the warrant course, the S F warrant. I think they call it the one eighty alpha course. I'm not sure. But guys were, you know, up to that time, you had a, you had an officer on a team and everybody else was an on com. And very rarely did I have an officer on a team. You know, we had sporadic officers, but we didn't, first of all, you know, they didn't run as many through the course. And, but in the army at the time, there wasn't a, you know, like if you were on a A team as a, as a demo guy, you were 12 Bravo. You weren't an 18. They didn't have that career field.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  So officers didn't go there because it was kind of like the dead end.

• 1:01:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, that was all a special operations.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Jocko Willink?

  Like back in those, back in the eighties and nineties, like a SEAL officer, in the early nineties, I should say, like a SEAL officer, that was like a dead end. You weren't gonna really have, and now we got, you know, like so many admirals, it's ridiculous.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:43Jocko Willink?

  And same thing with the special forces, like special forces now is a great career path.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, was not for an officer back then. And truly for an NCO, it wasn't, wasn't either. Cause you know, you were competing against a very small pool of people and they were all really good. Whereas if I'd been in like the 82nd Airborne, you're competing against a whole army.

• 1:02:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Right, and there's a lot more positions for you. But, but for officers, it was kind of like the death, the death knell, right?

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  So we didn't have a whole lot of guys, you know, jumping in line to be an officer. And the other thing was scuba school back then, you didn't have scuba pay. Right? So guys would be like, well, I'm not gonna go, go get tortured to get, you know, nothing. And but once, and that was in non-coms too, right? So, but once they started paying people, I think it was $225 a month, it was like, that was, you know, that was, I made $483 a month base pay. So that was like, you know, hell of a raise, man. But, but anyway, we didn't have, have O's there, but we had a warrant. So one of my buddies, his name was Tim Kennedy, not the current young Tim Kennedy, but an older dude.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Savage. And he went to warrant course. And he went over to, when he came back from the warrant course, he went to a second battalion. And it was ODA 545, another scuba team. But it had an additional duty. It was a Sodom team, so it was a nuclear weapons team.

• 1:03:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so he went over and he called me up and he goes, hey, man, you want to come over and be my demo guy? And I love to do.

• 1:03:19Jocko Willink?

  That's some serious demo.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  That's the most serious.

• 1:03:22Jocko Willink?

  You know what that is, Kerry?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Nuclear?

• 1:03:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So it's like a man packed nuke that you would jump in, dive in, whatever, plant and then leave.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Damn.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, it was a, it sounds sexy, but really it's a pain in the ass. I mean, it was like, uh, you, you spend a lot of time training on that device. And, um, it becomes the center of your world for you. Um, so you don't get to do, do a lot of cool stuff, you know, you're, it's like, you know, okay, you're going to go down here and you're going to work your protocols for just getting it running and taking it down, take, getting it together, taking it down, you know, uh, movement with it. All this stuff and it's highly regulated, man. You got guys always, you know, checking you, you know, and it was just, uh, when I got there, I thought, oh, that sounds so cool. And then by, you know, a couple of months into it, I'm like, man, dude, I liked it better on five eleven, but, um.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  How often does that actually get deployed?

• 1:04:14Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's never.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Like never, right?

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, never been deployed.

• 1:04:17Jocko Willink?

  We haven't dropped any, we haven't used any nukes since WWII.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  We got to do some cool exercises with it, you know, so you would jump it in like we jump into the desert and then you hump that a hundred pound piece of crap o- over the mountains and then you go set it in on a dam or a bridge or something like that. And, and the whole deal is it's not a, it's not a massive nuke, I think. And it's been, you know, forty years, but I think you can dial it in based on, on, on how you put it together. It can either, either be one kiloton or point one kiloton in it. And my memory fades a little bit. I'm sure there's somebody out there running a sharpshooting the shit out of me, but, um, um, but, uh, um, but, um, all I know is that thing was heavy. And I, I remember when I, when I got to the team, I know they wanted to jump it. And I was like, I'll do it. And so we jumped it out of a Chinook at Mott Lake in a water jump.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  So we were going to do a, um, capabilities exercise where we were going to jump it out of a Chinook, hit the bottom of Mott Lake, which was like three foot deep, you know, and then, uh, bump stumps all the way to the, to the stands where the guys were watching. And, um, so you've got twin eighties on your back, parachute on the back of that. You've got a hundred pound nuclear device between your legs and you've got your fins strapped to your side of your legs and you've got your mask, rubber band it to the top of your reserve parachute and then um, you can't even stand up.

• 1:05:45Jocko Willink?

  That is freaking ridiculous.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  So you're sitting there and your buddies grab you by the arm, you know, and you see watching the jump master and he's getting you up and then they pick you up and you waddle to the, to the ramp and then you just fall out, you know, and I fell out.

• 1:06:01Jocko Willink?

  Was it static line?

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Static line, yeah. We were, I think we were twelve, twelve hundred feet.

• 1:06:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  And I never haloed that thing, but, but I did static line it a few times and, and then you just fall out. And I remember probably after a couple of flips, I, I looked up and I didn't see a lake anywhere and all I saw was pine trees and they were, and by that time I think I was a, you know, a couple hundred foot off of the deck and crashed into trees and, and of course then, you know, the ambulance comes over. I didn't get hurt, but, but I missed the lake and because the, you know, I was just dead weight. Basically I was a bundle with, you know, a bunch of shit on me. But, but then we got, you know, we, we did it a few more times and, and got better at it, but it was cool.

• 1:06:49Jocko Willink?

  I cannot imagine a freaking land, a land landing with twin eighties.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Twin eighties, twin eighties of parachute and a hundred pound rucksack between legs and fins.

• 1:06:59Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking ridiculous.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  And it felt ridiculous, right? But I was, I was showing myself. Just a wrecking ball. But you know, in my defense, it wasn't like you could drive that thing.

• 1:07:09Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy. You could see the higher ups, you know, some brilliant general, like, I know what we can do.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure they were over there going, oh, and over here we have, we have the vehicle, right?

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  But yeah, it was uh, so, but you know, I look back on it wasn't, it wasn't as sexy as I thought it was gonna be. But those are the things that I, you know, I look back on and laugh my, and we still get together and laugh our ass off.

• 1:07:33Jocko Willink?

  I'm laughing right now.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  But uh, um, but um, but yeah, and the guys were awesome guys. So, and it was kinda at that point, we started having, um, guys that were my age that had started to really kinda become uh, more common on the teams. So they were my counterparts. And a lot of the older Vietnam guys by that point were starting to retire, you know, and, and, and move on. So I don't wanna say they were Gen 2, we were probably Gen 3, Green Berets, you know. So guys that hadn't been to Vietnam. Um, I would call the Gen 1 guys, the, the Jedbergs, the guy that weren't Green Berets. They were like, uh, um.

• 1:08:09Jocko Willink?

  Like OSS types.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, those guys. And then you had the guys that were post Kennedy. Uh, so, so after, uh, what was it, 63, they got into Beret. And then you had the, the, uh, the new guys, the frat boys, you know, and, uh, um, and I was one of those guys. But, uh, uh, but yeah, cool. I loved, I loved being, being on the team. Loved it. It was fun. And, and when you were on the scuba teams, uh, there's something about the water that's a separator of guys. And, um, I, I got respect for all the guys on the company and stuff like that, but there was nobody could hang with those scuba teams. Even later on in life, when I went to my tier one unit, I would go down to those teams and I would, I never said it, but I was like, "Boy, you don't wanna go down there and train with those scuba teams."

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  No, not physically. I mean, there's some studs over there, but, but, you know, um, those dive teams were tough.

• 1:09:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the water's tough to do. It's a tough environment, man. It's just a tough environment. Makes everything harder.

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, now, my son, um, when he was going through, uh, uh, training to do his job now in a Marine Corps, um, they did a lot of water training, a lot, you know, probably, obviously not near as much as probably the SEAL teams, but a hell of a lot more than, than Army, uh, SF training.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  And it's not just the dive teams, it's all of them. So it's just because virtue of their environment they live out of. That it was so you go to the Q course, you don't see the water unless you're on scuba team, other than maybe a, you know, a confident swim or something.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  And but even in in the Green Beret community, you know, you would have guys that would be studs on the other teams and they would go to that scuba school or pre-scuba and water sorts that shit out real quick, you know, and um, but Marine Corps now and their special operations, you know, all those guys are getting scold drug in the water. Cause I remember he used to call me every day going, oh, you know, this sucked. And I go, well, go back in the next morning. And he would tell me this, I know, I know the feeling. I know you probably do as well. But um, when I went to scuba school, it was like, uh, the easiest gentleman's course in the army. I mean, nobody was, it was like, hey dude, uh, let's go for a run. And, you know, you know, it just happened to be a five

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  minute mile, five mile run, you know, or, um, you know, let's go swimming, you know, only thing is, is you're going to be underwater the whole time, you know, it was like, and you got off every day at five and, and, um, uh, could go do whatever you wanted to do, but nobody did because I used to sit there all night. It's one of the courses I've been in where I'd sit there all night thinking, oh, my God, in eight more hours, I'm gonna be fighting for my life. Right? And then you get that nervousness, you know, and, and you sit there all night and you can't sleep because you're worried about the next day. And, uh, so my son was going through that. And I was like, man, dude, you just gotta, you just gotta gut it out. But, um, water makes a difference.

• 1:10:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, water, that lack of oxygen can get to you real quick.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't, you can't fake that, right? You can't just walk around with your head, you know, uh, up your ass. You gotta be, you gotta be fighting.

• 1:11:09Jocko Willink?

  And then, so then after that is when you, uh, tried to go over to the, the tier one unit?

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, I spent, um, probably a little over a year on that team. So by this point, I've got, um, about five years in the army, maybe a little, maybe a little less. And I remember, you know, I told you about my, the guy I trained with in scuba school, got him Mark Glass. So I got a, um, a letter. Uh, it's kind of a standard recruiting letter back then. And, and back in the day, that unit really, they started in 77. So the tier one unit.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Nobody knew anything about them. You knew they were out there, but um, you know, they hadn't been around long enough for you to really understand anything about them. And um, um, I had a couple of guys who had gone to the, their recruiting brief and then ultimately went to selection and they were guys off the dive team and other teams in the company. And um, savages, you know, and um, they came back, you know, very quickly from, from the selection process. And they, it would never tell you anything. First of all, I hadn't been there long enough to learn anything about it, but they, whatever they told them back then, and I know what they told them, but they read the, they put the fear of God in them. You don't, you don't go talk about this to anybody because you'd ask them what happened.

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  And they go, I used to make it. What was it like? Can't tell you. I mean, and whatever they, you know, they did a good job of scaring the shit out of them. And um, so the word on the street was, you know, nothing, you know? I think there's a little more information about it now, but back then, you kind of, and they were in the post stockade. So that's what their building was on Bragg. They initially, when, before they built their compound now, which is crazy, you know, big, but back then they were on the stockade and the teams were actually in the, in the cells. That was their team rooms, the, the cells for, and I was like, yeah, that's probably where you guys belong. But um, but um, um, I got a, a letter

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  said, hey, look, you, you, you're been identified as a potential candidate. Didn't say what. We're having a briefing this time, this place in um, uh, post theater, uh, Fort Bragg, uh, post theater. Went there and the guy that I went to school, school with was there, Art Glass. And um, so um, he said, how you doing? I said, good. And he goes, gave us the, gave me the spiel and said you should do it, you know? And so um, so I went and um, um, and uh, I was probably nineteen, that would have been nineteen eighty, um, spring, spring of eighty-six, so, spring of eighty-seven. Uh, so April eighty-seven, um, is when I went

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  to the, the course. And um, um, reported to the, to the, to the gun teams on, um, in November nineteen eighty-seven.

• 1:14:03Jocko Willink?

  So it wasn't too, too long after, so Panama was eighty-nine.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so um, um, I um, had been there, you know, you get there and you go through West Virginia and you go through the training part of it, then you go through, um, you're still, you know, selection never ends, you know, it's, they tell you when you get there, selection is a never-ending process. Um, but your first eighteen months in the, uh, in the building, um, you're on probation. And they're continually evaluating you, but they're now, now you're out of the training unit and now you're on an active team. So you're under, there are certain things they do, they send you out on your, by yourself. I went to Beirut, so about a year in it, went over there, um, spent about, actually flew over there, um, it was December of, uh, eighty-eight,

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  because I, I flew over, um, landed in, uh, Athens and stayed in Cyprus waiting to go into, um, Beirut. I got a call, said, hey, um, we lost a guy. And if you remember back what was going on in Beirut back in the eighties, you had the bombing of the embassy, you had the bombing of the marine barracks. And then you had the assassination, kidnapping and assassination of, uh, Bill Buckley, who was a

• 1:15:15Jocko Willink?

  Station Chief, right.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Station Chief, and he'd been a former Green Beret. So it was personal, right? And so, um, we were over there, um, you know, around the heels of that. And it was, Beirut was a mess back then. I think it stabilized a little bit, still probably a mess, but, um, back then it was a real, real mess. But, um, um, when I landed, I was, my counterpart, the guy that had been over there before me, um, was on his way home. And, um, he was booked on the flight, um, uh, is it one oh three that crashed in Lockerbie?

• 1:15:47Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  He was on that flight. So he was, he was supposed to be on that flight.

• 1:15:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  He was on, he was booked on that flight with a State Department guy. And, um, so we're thinking that he was on the crash, but at some point when he got to, uh, I think it was Frankfurt, um, and again, it could be, it could be, you know, Berlin, I don't know, but, um, he got on another plane. He probably met some girl or something, I don't know, but he got on another plane and uh wasn't on that plane, but the State Department guy was on it. And he died on the, in Lockerbie. Um, so, you know, hit there, hit Beirut that day and it was like a beehive, you know, and um, um, and then um, came back, I think it was May or June, whenever in December, came back in June.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Um, but um, um, by myself, you know, and as a young, young dude, came back, didn't get fired, you know, so, so I guess it went okay. Um, and then um, um, next thing at the time would have been probably, yeah, Panama.

• 1:16:53Jocko Willink?

  How far out did you know Panama was going down?

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  A long time.

• 1:16:57Jocko Willink?

  We were clearing, like doing a big clearance in, in Ramadi and, you know, we're just moving through the streets and I'm, you know, I'm the ground force commander, so you know, I'm kind of outside of a building, let's, you know, move to the next building, get inside, you know, check with, just doing, just doing that kind of command and control stuff. And my breachers like, well, one of the breachers, you know, he comes up, he's like, hey, there's a safe in this building, can we blow it? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, all good, you know, let's take, yep, go ahead. And then, you know, whatever, three minutes later, he goes running past me and I go, oh. And I like got outside of a building and boom, I'm like, yeah, okay, I should have been a little bit more, uh, a little bit more thoughtful when I said, yeah, you're cleared, how to blow this safe, cause he, like, yeah, he went P for plenty as well.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had no format, there was no, I was like, hey, I've never done this before, but I've been everything I got and then everything the other guys had, bring, bring me your shit, right? So we started stacking it on there, but uh, literally it, it, it took his roof and just peeled it back and, and I was like, and my sergeant major was like, looked at me like, dude, and I was like, I don't know, I'll tell you, but um, but that was my first cigar. So um, it was Christmas and um, um, around Christmas time, a couple of days before Christmas and um, um, I had never smoked a cigar before. I drank a lot of whiskey growing up, but never seen a cigar. And so um, my team leader at the time was like the biggest Mexican ever born, his name was Mike Beltran. Ended up being the best man in my wedding, but um, he was six foot six, like 270 pounds, like 10% body fat.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  And he was, you know, looked like a, looked the typical, looked like an operator and I looked like a kid, you know? And uh, so uh, he goes, we're gonna, we're gonna open up his Christmas presents and we're gonna, we're gonna smoke his cigars next to his tree. We're gonna put, give these pictures to like a. Um, the guys that were running music and running information so that he knows that, hey, we missed you, but we got your stuff. And so, um, so we went into his desk and he had a box of cigars on his desk that said, uh, it were gold bands and it said, um, M A N Manuel Antonio Noriega, his own private stash. And, uh, we, um, stood in front of the Christmas tree. This is like Eagles Nest.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  Whitted up and, uh, took pictures and, uh, um, and I told Mike at times, I don't smoke cigars. He goes, yes, you do. And so, so I guess I do. You do now. Yeah. And so, um, uh, we, we, um, uh, ransacked his house, blew the roof off of it, messed up his safe and then, uh, caught him a few days later. And, uh, I remember, um, when, uh, we finally got him, he ran into the Papal Nuncia, which is like, um, I'm not Catholic. So I don't, it's like a, it's like an embassy for the, for the, uh, for the Vatican. Um, and, um, he, he was sought refuge in there. So he ran in there and, and they, you know,

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  we couldn't go in, but he couldn't come out. And somehow through negotiations, the Catholic Church was like, you gotta, you gotta leave, you know? And, um, um, but I'll remember when we, uh, when we, when we posted up around there, I had, uh, I can't remember which side it was, which cardinal direction was, but on, on one side, I was next to the bathroom window where he would come in every morning, brush his teeth and comb his hair. And I remember he came and looked at me and he goes, uh, how you doing? I said, Feliz Navidad. And then a couple of days later he came out, you know, and, uh, um, and then we turned him over. But, um, but yeah, I, I look back on some of the, and we did a lot of, uh, I think we did thirty-three buildings or something back then looking for him. And some of it was super funny. I mean, like we, we had, we had a building where his girlfriend's mistress was

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  living and, uh, it was like forty stories up. And so, um, you know, you're not supposed to take the elevator, right? You're supposed to just take the stairs. My, my team are about to take an elevator. So, um, we're all kitted up, you know, totally kitted up. And we take the elevator up and, uh, the door opens up and it's a, it's a husband, a wife and like two little kids are like, we'll take the next one. And I was like, okay. And so, uh, um, but, um, uh, yeah, we got his, uh, his mistress there, prick her in and started running some siles. But, uh, yeah, that was my first, uh, first, uh, First look gunfire.

• 1:21:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I did the elevator thing. We were, we were hitting the target in Baghdad and it was like in a hotel where there was contractors were staying. There was kind of like a nicer hotel and but there was a bad guy there and we knew what room he was in and it was on like the 14th floor or something like this. And so we, we wore plain clothes and we just dressed up like we were American contractors, right? And, uh, but we rolled through the same thing. Like we just rolled through like we, like we've lived there, got in the elevator, 14th floor, went up and it was, it was pretty funny to be sitting in the elevator, music playing.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:39Jocko Willink?

  You're like, alright. And then, yeah, so we would have, we, it would have been quiet, but that door was like indestructible. And, you know, the, the terp was like knocked on the door and he was like, yeah, you know, let us in. And the guy's like, no. And he's like, no, like room service or whatever the hell my terp was saying. It's then I, then I was like, hey, step aside. And so I start, I'm gonna kick this door open. I've kicked open like, I don't know how many doors I kicked open. So I, you know, turn around and give this thing the big mule kick. That thing doesn't move. So I kick it like three or four more times, five more times. And my breacher, he had gotten out a little extendable hammer that he had in his, uh, in his, in his gear. And he's like, hammer, hammer, hammer. And then I got out of the way and

• 1:22:20Jocko Willink?

  he started hammering this door. And he actually hammered through the door, like it didn't come off as in just, dude, when we finally got in there, I was like, what the hell was that? And it had a big giant metal, like pole, post that went down the entire door.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:34Jocko Willink?

  It to lock it into the floor. It was like, there was no way that thing was coming open.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had a similar thing on that mission in Panama. And we went up, up to Vicky's house was his, his mistress's name. And, uh, we used every door charge. And you know, the thing is, you know, our, our charges are all made for doors that are made to code. There's no codes in these third countries, man. They can build whatever they want, you know? And, uh, we had a similar thing and we used every one of them. And, uh, we would run up the stairs and they go, fuck, another charge. And then, cause you know, we were, the door was at the top of the landing. And so you would, and there was no place to, to take cover. So you had to run down, the charge would blow, you'd run up. And we're like, give me another charge. And you run down. We was done like 10 times. And finally, um, there was a little, little door that looked like a closet door. And, um, we're sitting there, you know, hammering away at this door and this, uh, the door opens and it's a maid and she goes, what are you guys doing?

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  Get in, she goes, come in. And so we're like, oh shit. So we went in, but uh, um, you know, the thing you learn, man. But uh, yeah.

• 1:23:32Jocko Willink?

  For all the badass, uh, videos there are of operators clearing, you know, uh, CQC killhouses. It'd be really cool if you had.

• 1:23:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the blooper reels would be classic.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  No, we had that when we went into, uh, uh, Noriega's house, the first time we were using helos. But after, you know, after we lost the element surprise, we rolled in on the back of one, one, threes. Because we use, we use one, one, threes, I think from Task Force Gator, I think was what it's called. Uh, to go, uh, recover the helo they crashed. So we go rolling into Altus to golf second time. With, um, on APCs, you know, and that's the first time I'd ever been on APC. But anyway, I was looking forward. You know, sitting, sitting on, on the front of the vehicle looking forward. Then we had teams, you know, guys on each side, kind of looking out left and right. And we had a rear security guy on the back of the vehicle and his name was Gary Gardner. He's an old, old dude. He'd been there for a while.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  And he was facing backwards and, uh, we turned the corner and it was like, you only had like a second, you know? We turned the corner and pulled in the driveway and there's archway over the thing and the archway was about that high of the APC. So I, um, and literally a split second decision, I just jumped up and over the archway. The guys on the side jumped off.

• 1:24:45Jocko Willink?

  Freaking Jackie Chan over here.

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  I mean, it was instinct, right? It's like, here it is. You get, you know, it's on you and the guys on the side jumped off, but Gary didn't know it was coming.

• 1:24:54Jocko Willink?

  Get cleaned out.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Oh my God, dude, it wiped him out. And, uh, but, um, it was on video. And it was like getting hit by Lawrence Taylor, you know, from behind and it flat off the top of an APC. Face planting on the pavement, you know, but, um, but those are the things that, you know, that you don't want people to know about, except for, you know, your buddies, but.

• 1:25:18Jocko Willink?

  I'd never thought of that, calling it the blooper reel. Cause I've always thought like, dude, there's so much shit where you're like, that was, that looked terrible. Keystone cop activity going on and, but yeah, just a full on blooper reel of dudes. Cause everyone looks good. The kill house. Like, oh yeah.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  But yeah, you could make a, you could make a hell of a, hell of a movie with the blooper reel.

• 1:25:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and then it, so, so how did you, how did you guys do like after Panama? You guys must've been like freaking pretty damn proud of that whole thing.

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, um, it was a great learning experience for me. I got to, you know, be down there for, watch it go from being a four or five guys to like, you know, okay, now we're gonna, you know, this is D-Day invasion. And, um, um, so I got to watch the progression of the thing and train. So when we first went down there, you know, we're training for basically taking out a vehicle or motorcade. And so we did a lot of work on, on motorcade work. Stopping a motorcade and, and you learn all those things you're learning for that particular thing. You're gonna show up later on in life in your career. So it helped out in the Balkans. So, learning that when you go out and you try to shoot a motorcade, a vehicle that's moving,

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  and you're ninety degrees to that vehicle and you try to hit it with an AT4 or a LA,

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  if it's going faster than fifteen miles an hour, it's about eighty percent chance you're gonna miss it. Right? So learning how to, how to, how to manipulate a motorcade into where you wanna kill zone, hit it from the front or make it stop or stuff like that, that you, you hear about and read about. But there's nothing like going out and trying to do it and then having it go, go south on you, you know? And, um, um, so, and then it progressed to the next phase. Okay, now we're gonna get bigger. It's more than five guys. It's trooper guys. It's a squadron of guys. And so it's kinda like, you know, um, to use an analogy that we're both familiar with, it's like starting out and learning arm lock. And then, and then how do you position that? And then it's still useful, but now you got this move.

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  And, and, um, so I learned progression of kind of, of a lot of the progression of special ops through that, through that, uh, um, particular workup.

• 1:27:34Jocko Willink?

  And, and the other good thing is like, like you said, a lot of the Vietnam guys are starting to retire. You know, and, in, in, yeah, eighty-nine, ninety, ninety, you know, cause they did twenty years, you know, they were, came in in nineteen seventy or nineteen sixty-eight. So a lot of those guys are retiring. So it's good to get some of that combat experience on your belt.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  And, um, and it was different, right? So things changed. So the Vietnam guys were, you know, jungle patrols and stuff like that. And the stories they used to tell were like, we'd go out thirty days at a time with four dudes. With um, no support, you know, and um, one of the stories that stands out um, was where they, this, this team went out, Green Berets, and there were, there were five guys that were doing reconnaissance uh, work and they, they um, posted up in the jungle and then um, and then a battalion of Vietnamese soldiers moved in and set up camp right on top of them. And I'm thinking, man, dude, and it was a couple of days. So they're sitting in there underneath a, you know, underneath some bushes and guys are posted right up on top

• 1:28:36Speaker 02

  of them, walking within meters, you know, feet of them, inches of them. And um, that's, that, I don't know if I, you know, I'd probably just pass out. I don't know about that, but um, but they didn't have vehicles, right? They were all on foot and they carried a lot of weight and they were really into like um, camouflage and concealment and operating in the jungle and, and it was like they'd come through, the old scene where I think it's platoon where the guy goes, you don't need that, you don't need that, you don't need, that's, that was real, you know? Um, you would jump up and down and they'd listen for, for, you know, things that rattle and stuff. So um, and I, I think it's a different psychology, you know, psychologically it's different, you know, guys are hunting people that are hunting them and it's not like they had a bunch of assets that we have now where

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  guys are gonna fly in and, you know, in Blackhawk gunships and bail them out, or you didn't have a Spectre, you know, they were kinda on their own and they were a different breed of men, I'm telling you, and not that the modern warrior isn't, but there's different uh, um, parameters.

• 1:29:36Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, I mean, I've told the SOG guys that have come on the podcast, like, that we tell me about a mission, I'm like, yeah, I, I was a troop commander, there's no way I would have approved you to go do that. Like, you're gonna take you and one other American and four indige and you're going how far into Laos and you're gonna, you know, set up, uh, I, I couldn't in good conscience be like, yeah, go ahead and do that. And they did that over and over and over and over again.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  And um, um, they were um, they're, I don't know how to explain it, but I, there was an iciness about those guys that I didn't have. So I'm gonna say we as a generation, my, my generation of, of, of special operators in the army, um, We didn't have that ice water in our veins. We were good. I mean, we were good at what we did, you know, unstoppable.

• 1:30:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  But there's something different about those guys.

• 1:30:27Jocko Willink?

  And part of it too is like, you know, when I think about like those operations, I say I wouldn't approve them. But like I had one of my, one of my buddies, he was one of the platoon chiefs named Tony Affrady. He's a great dude. He's a freaking, he's just a stud. But one time he came to me, he said, Hey, I want to go down here with like by myself and I want to set up a thing over here. And I'm like, Yeah, dude, I love you. Can't do that. Like, it's not, it's not happening. You can't do that. But the reality is, he probably would have been perfectly safe going to do that. And my comparison is my first deployment to Iraq. We, we had guys going out and doing like low vis operations where they would go out and do reconnaissance,

• 1:31:09Jocko Willink?

  right? Go out, because we'd, we'd take cars off a target, like we go catch a bad guy, we take his car, right? And then we take his car and we'd rig it up with cameras and stuff like this. And then those guys would go out and drive by the next target and get footage of the door and the fence and the whole nine yards. And I would start getting questions from like the leadership, like, you know, these guys are out here, they're, they're, what happens if they get rolled up? And one time I was like, come and watch one of these videos. Because you'd watch a video and you'd see just normal people in Baghdad walking around and this car's right there driving by them and like, no one cares. Like, no one notices, no one cares. And so even though it seemed like it was less safe.

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Jocko Willink?

  The reality was, it was actually kind of more safe to do that.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Jocko Willink?

  And it just, a little bit of perspective, because, you know, you talk to the SAW guys and like, it seems so crazy to do what they did, which is, you know, 20 miles, uh, insert into Laos.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:32:08Jocko Willink?

  Or Cambodia, or North Vietnam. And you're like, what's your support? Well, hopefully if the weather's good, we'll have aircraft over it. And if it's not, then we'll suck it up for a day until the weather gets good. And it seems like we would just never take that risk. But at the same time, it's like,

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Those guys were freaking good at it. They were good at it and they um, they had limited resources. They didn't have the, the uh capability with like Task Force 160 F there. Or, you know, I want to ask, got the fifth group, there weren't very many vehicles in the group. I mean, I think the battalion had a couple of jeeps. Yeah. And uh, when we would go jump at Sicily drop zone, it's 12 miles, I would pray that it was an aircraft. So we could go to Pope Air Force Base, get on an aircraft and fly out. Cause if it was a HALO, it was like, okay, three o'clock in the morning, we're going to ruck 12 miles to Sicily. We're going to jump for a couple of times, we're going to ruck back. Damn. Cause we didn't have trucks, you know, we didn't have vehicle. And um, and that was, but that was the, that was the um, the culture back then and you can,

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  I can see it physically um, with the guys. Um, when I first signed into my company,

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  they could ruck all day long and they could run like deer, but there weren't a lot of big bulky guys there. Um, because what they did is run and ruck, right? And as, as I got to, you know, older and we started focusing more on uh, you know, and we got more vehicles, right? We started doing, you know, um, uh, there was a time where we were a lot of HALO and the X type of stuff, you know? And um, um, and we could ruck and run and stuff like that, but we had more time to spend in the gym. We got bulked up and we looked, looked a hell of a lot better and a lot more handsome than those guys. But um, but those old dudes could ruck, man. And they could do, I mean, I had a, you know, my team started, man, he was like a chain smoker and could, you know,

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  he used to show up for a PT test. He'd uh, light a cigarette, take a couple of puffs, run the two mile run, be back before his cigarette was out. You know what I mean? He was a, and I don't know how he did it, but they were, they were. Different, different guy to human. Different guys, man. And um, and uh, um, I just, I don't know how to describe it. And it, and it's not that it's better. Um, because our certain, our guys in the last, over the last 20 years have been, you know, accounting for themselves very well. But they were different guys. And, and um, um, I think it's, it would be a lot more stressful to be in the environment where you didn't have any support. Where they flew you in in a Huey, kicked you out in the jungle and said, see you in a month. It's different.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Till was talking about weighing a hundred and forty pounds out there.

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Hundred, hundred and fifty pounds carrying eighty.

• 1:34:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  Eighty hundred pounds. That's wild jungle.

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it was and and you know, you have to take care of yourself. You got to, you know, your, your feet. You know, you're getting, you're getting bug bites and you know.

• 1:34:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Vietnam, David Hackworth, you know, he, he said like, because he was in Korea and he was in Vietnam. And he was at the tail end of World War Two. He didn't fight in World War Two, but you know, they, he was like one of the occupying forces. And he, and he said Vietnam was the worst. Vietnam was the worst. It was just like the jungle, the mosquitoes, the foot rot, the, the lack of food. He said it was like.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  Terrible.

• 1:35:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just terrible.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  Um, you know, you never feel good, you know.

• 1:35:21Jocko Willink?

  No, disentree the whole nine yards.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  And I haven't done a lot of jungle work, but I, you know, I did, did some, I did a jungle school down in Army Jungle School down in, I think.

• 1:35:29Jocko Willink?

  In Panama.

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  Panama.

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  I got enough of it to know that I, I, I don't like it. And, um, um, I remember when I, when I went down there for jungle school, it was like, um, I got a packing list and I was like, take all it, all this shit, some mosquito net, you know, all that. And I was famous for like, I don't need that. I don't need that. I don't need that. And when I got there and I saw the first initial brief about the bats and the snakes and the mice and the, and all this shit. I was like, holy shit. And so, um, I hit that jungle, man. My first order of business was building like my Swiss Family Robinson hooch that was ten feet off the ground. But, um, um, but it's a different environment.

• 1:36:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the, the CQC and even vehicles, like when I first got to SEAL Team One, nineteen ninety one. If, if we had to use vehicles, they would, they would, we would call it a helo truck. They'd be like, oh, we have to use a helo truck because we don't have real helos. But the idea that we would use vehicles to go on an operation was like, it wasn't a thing. And when I was in Iraq, I mean, I never actually went on a helicopter operation in my life. I only took vehicles. I only took vehicles to, to, to do ops. So it's like a totally different, uh, totally different mindset to think, yeah, actually, it's like you, you said the first time you were ever on APC was going on a freaking combat operation, you know?

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  I had never been on, I've never seen one. Um, uh, and, uh, but yeah.

• 1:36:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cool. So what came after Panama?

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  Um, so, um.

• 1:36:58Jocko Willink?

  You mentioned, were you, were you doing one of the Pifwick operations over in Bosnia?

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that was after, that was in the mid nineties. So after, so first it would have been Desert Storm. So, um, shortly after Panama, we had Desert Storm.

• 1:37:09Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  And, um, um, that was my first exposure to life, life as a sailor. So, um,

• 1:37:17Jocko Willink?

  Did you get put on a ship somewhere?

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, put on the Guadalcanal.

• 1:37:20Jocko Willink?

  Get some.

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, um, we got into all kinds of trouble, man. We were all, I didn't know there were certain stairwells you couldn't go up. I, I, I just went everywhere and, and you know, I didn't know you weren't supposed to be up on the flight deck. But, um, um, but I learned enough, uh, on that trip to know that when I joined the army, I made the right call. Like shit dude, um, I would hate to be a guy that joined the Navy thinking I'm going to be a SEAL and not make it through BUDs and then end up on one of them BUDs.

• 1:37:46Jocko Willink?

  That's the biggest risk in the, in the SEAL pipeline is if you don't, you know, if you don't make it through the Q course, you can be an infantryman, a freaking badass machine gunner, in a freaking infantry platoon, which is awesome.

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:57Jocko Willink?

  If you don't make it through SEAL training.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59Jocko Willink?

  You're going to be on a ship and, and look, there's some people that's what they want to do and God bless them. Like there's some people that are totally into that. They're motorheads. They like freaking engines. They like working, they love that stuff.

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  And I'm going to tell you, dude, when I, when I, um, uh, we would, uh, launch the helos off that boat and we, we couldn't launch them all at once. So we had, we had, we would move them up on the elevator to the flight deck. We would launch them, you know, fold the blades out, launch them. Then we would fly around and wait for the next sortie to come up. And, um,

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  it gave me goosebumps because you're flying around that, uh, um, I don't know what, what ships, vessels, I guess, uh, accompany the Guadalcanal.

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  But whatever it was.

• 1:38:40Jocko Willink?

  The badass battle group.

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  I was like, holy shit dude. I mean, there was hundreds of, there were jets flying over, helos flying around, uh, boats and it was night. So you could see the, the phosphorus coming off the props. I was like, oh my God, dude. I don't, I feel sorry for the other guys. I mean, look at this. And, um, it was the most awesome display of American military power I've ever seen.

• 1:38:57Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  You know, when you put all that together and it was, uh, it was just, and I was very impressed with the, um, um, the way that ship operates. It's a machine.

• 1:39:08Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  The guys are a machine. It's like, I mean, they're. You know, doing whatever, whatever it is they do.

• 1:39:13Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever see them do a replenishment under, underway replenishment where they're getting supplies from another ship? That's when you see that stuff, there's like a big giant supply ship that pulls alongside in a sea state. There's freaking lines getting passed back and forth. It's total chaos and it's freaking dangerous as hell. And they do that, you know, whatever, every three weeks they're doing these massive resupply. That's, it's impressive.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  It was, uh, it was really impressive. I mean, not that I'd want to live that lifestyle, but man, dude.

• 1:39:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  That's, I mean, uh,

• 1:39:43Jocko Willink?

  You know, I, I,

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  Literally gave me, it still gives me goosebumps.

• 1:39:46Jocko Willink?

  I was on a ship and I was, we were getting ready. It was like two o'clock in the morning. There's a freaking massive storm going through. It's raining, there's big waves coming through the bottom of the ship. And we're launching our boats off the back, uh, the back of the ship. And there's a bosun's mate, this, this black dude, he's a bosun's mate. And he's up there, get, you know, making things happen. And we're getting ready to launch, waves coming in. And he looks at me and he goes, damn, I'm glad I don't have your job. And I look back and I was like, dude, I'm glad I don't have yours. So we're even and we fist bumped and rolled out. But that's the thing, you know, like that's what he's into. Like that's a badass job for him and that wasn't a job for me, but you know, put me out in the water and I'm going to go get it.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I would take your job, but, um, but, um, yeah, you know, and there's all kinds of, uh, like it's almost a class system on the boat. It's like you got little dudes that were in different colors and different rules. I remember I was at E seven, so I made E seven in seven years in the army.

• 1:40:40Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, uh, but that's not uncommon in special operations. But E seven and seven, E eight and, uh, 12.

• 1:40:47Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, um, um, but I was, uh, you know, it seems like the, the mess hall is always open in the Navy. I mean, it's like never shuts down. There's like 10 males a day or something, but, um, um, so we're on the Guadalcanal and I'm, I'm standing in this long line, getting ready to go through the mess line. And I see the sign that says chief's mess, E seven's in the boat. I'm like, fuck, I'm in E seven. I was, I was. Twenty-six, you know, and uh.

• 1:41:14Jocko Willink?

  That's a young looking chief, man.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  And I was young looking anyway. I mean, I didn't even have whiskers, you know, and um, and uh, I look like a, like a kid, you know, I was a hundred and sixty-five pounds, five-eight. Um, baby-faced kid, you know, no rank, you know, and uh. So how many, seven, I walked in there and there was a bunch of these old dudes that were like a hundred and fifty years old sitting in there and they were like, and it wasn't big, it was much, wasn't much bigger than this room. And but the food was a lot better.

• 1:41:40Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:41:41Speaker 02

  And I was like, and then he looked at me, I sat down and guy's, you know, giving me the stink eye, and he walks over and he goes, hey, this is E7s in the buff. And I said, uh, well, I'm an E7. I pull my ID card, he goes, no way. And he goes, come over here, look at this dude. He goes, you're E7. I said, yeah. And I said, he goes, and I said, not only that, all my buddies are E7s too. And he goes, and finally they had to make a rule, no, no more army guys in the chief's mouth, but uh.

• 1:42:05Jocko Willink?

  Damn, we booed for everyone. You should have kept your mouth shut, you freaking god in there, got that good chief, yeah.

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  But uh, yeah, it was uh, it was cool. I remember walking up a stairway one time, there was rain and standing at the top, you know, it was like the, like the boss's stairway or something, you know, I was like, you know, I, I have a clue, but I was all over, I was exploring, you know, I was doing what I did in Braggaville, Texas, I was all over the place.

• 1:42:25Jocko Willink?

  So would you, what was your, what missions did you do in uh, the, the first Gulf War there?

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  So um, um, actually worked a lot with red team on this one. We didn't do the mission, but it was called uh, um. Uh, Pacific Wind. So if you remember when the Iraqis rolled into Kuwait City, they surrounded, they didn't take, physically take the embassy, but they surrounded the embassy. So they were, they posted up on the walls around the embassy. And so um, um, before we were gonna do anything, it was kinda like the Kurt Muse situation. We don't wanna do something and have them kill the guys in the embassy. And I wanna say there was twenty-seven. Staff remaining in the embassy, I might be wrong about that. I think it's close though, because I remember we, we, we did our workup for how, you know, how we're gonna load them

• 1:43:14Speaker 02

  up, and then what happens if we lose all the birds and we only have one. And we put thirty two people on a Blackhawk. Damn. Thirty-two. And, um, we put them in standing up and we had them all sit down at the same time. And I was like, there's no way you get thirty-two dudes on a Blackhawk. We did. So we were trying to figure out. That's freaking amazing. Yeah, we were trying to figure out, um, um, hey, we, we lose a helo, how are we gonna split them up? We lose two helos, how are we gonna split them up? What if we only have one helo? Can we do it? And we're like, and the, and the pilot's like, you can carry the weight, the cube is the problem. Right? You're not gonna, you're not gonna overload it, you're gonna cube it. And so we're like, well, how can we get them all in there? And so we, we, um, took a bunch of role players, put them in the, put them in the helo standing up, and then had them all sit down and basically sitting on each other's laps, but, uh, without

• 1:43:59Speaker 02

  the aux tanks. So we pulled the aux tanks out. But, um, I think it was thirty-two dudes we put them out there. A lot of people. Um, but, um, our mission was to go in to, um, uh, lead the, before the first shots of the war, we're gonna be, we're gonna get the embassy back. And so, um, we were gonna go in, um, and that's the first time I ever saw precision guided weapons. Cause I remember they were talking about, we're gonna bomb all these dudes. And, um, we're thinking, okay, how's that? You know, that's pretty close. Right? And, um, you know, we're comfortable with it. And they started explaining the capabilities. And I was like, okay, we'll see if it works. But, um, um, we were doing it in, in training,

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  we were running, you know, live fire training with, with ordnance and everything. And we would have to, uh, it would throw the debris so high in the air, we would have to pause the helos because the falling debris would knock the helo out. So, um, but, um, um, and we worked with, with, um, your counterparts in, in the Navy. Plan was to go in by helo and then, um, fly out by helo. But then they were gonna come in, secure the beach and as a exfil, alternate exfil, we were gonna get on boats and go out. And, uh, and they integrated with the, with the mission on the ground as well. So it was really, really cool. And that's, uh, about the time we started working more closely with the Navy counterparts. Because up to that time, you know, if you look back at the original gangsters of, of

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  tier one units, you had Mark Chinko, and then you had Charlie Beckwith. And they evolved differently. I can't remember which one came first, but about the same time, they started developing their capability. And it took guys like that to get that going, especially in the army. Cause you know, like I told you earlier, the big army is not necessarily friends with special operations. You know, they see us as, you know, renegades. Um, and it took those kinds of personalities to push that through, you know, um, and they didn't always work well together. And consequently, the organizations didn't work well together.

• 1:45:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Speaker 02

  Guys were the same kind of guys, you know, just guys. Um, but, um, um, that's the first time I started working very closely with, um, my Navy counterparts and tier one unit in the Navy. Met some really good guys there, Art Toki, Fitz, Fitz, all those guys, uh, um, um, and became yarded in with, uh, with the red team. That's a, never forget it. They fed me Changal chicken. We did it underway and, uh, and I got back for the hot wash and they say, you want anything to eat? And I said, yeah. And they had some chicken there and I ate like, I almost ate like a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. And, um, nobody else was eating. Right?

• 1:46:32Jocko Willink?

  If you say, was it better coming up or going down?

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  You know where I'm going, but, uh, they brought in this, uh, big buffalo hat and a trash can and a, a, uh, big beer bomb. And they called me up and yarded me in and it went down and it came up with chicken, man. And, um, I wondered why they pulled the trash can. I had no clue what was going on. They pulled a trash can up and I was like, it took me about three seconds to realize what, what that trash can was for, but, uh...

• 1:46:55Jocko Willink?

  It's like when you're about to get dusted by the mafia and you walk into the, the, the living room and there's plastic out on the floor. You're like, damn, I screwed up.

• 1:47:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. But, um, um, but, um, we focused primarily on that one. That was our my sections mission without going into too much detail. So that was our, our, um, our mission. It was the primary mission. And then the other guys in the unit at the time were hunting scuds, right? Um, we never, because our mission was, um, the focal point, we never...

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  Got in a scud hunting business. So we, we sat there on that one. At some point they, the Iraqis pulled away from it and it went away. We never, we never did anything with it, but we sat there on standby to do it. But another great work, workup, training workup where I learned a lot, but really significantly for me is that that's the very first time we started working closely with Red Team. And, and then shortly after that came something called the George Cycle. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. It's called the Joint Operational Redness Training Cycle. These were like big giant exercises? Um, yes, but it was a somebody that whoever came up with it, super smart. Okay. Right. Because it was, um, we started working more closely with our naval counterparts.

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  Always worked with Task Force One Sixtieth and so did the Navy. Working and Rangers started, because Downing was, um, I can't remember if he was the JSOC commander at the time, but he started integrating the Rangers more because we used to kind of work in a silo. And when I was in a tier one unit in the Army, we didn't really work with other guys. If we needed more guys, we called another squadron. And so, um, but we didn't reach outside of our own little, little silo to, uh, for numbers. Um, but we would go do an exercise or do like, uh, like, like the deal in Kuwait. And one time you'd be with one team, next time it'd be a different team. All good, you know, but different. And so you kind of got to learn,

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  get to know each other over and over again. By the time you go through, you know, a couple of years goes by, it may be different guys. So, um, um, they said, we're going to pair, we're going to make this official. We're going to pair up, uh, Red Team, C, Bravo Company, Rangers, B Company, Task Force One Sixtieth. So every time you go somewhere, that's your team. Right, so I got to know the guys really well. You know, I would spend the time up in, you know, up in Virginia, they'd come down to North Carolina, knew all the pilots. And I was talking to Bruno Fallon about this the other day. He's like, oh yeah, it was great. Cause we, I, truthfully, I worked with other squadrons in the unit, knew them because I'd gone through selection with them and we worked closely. But as far as like physically working with them,

• 1:49:40Speaker 02

  I worked with guys from the Navy more than I worked with the guys in the other squadrons. Because every time we would deploy on a training op, they would come with us. Every time we went to combat, they would come with us. And it was just really cool. It was great for the community. They needed it.

• 1:49:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  And

• 1:49:58Jocko Willink?

  Need to have those relationships.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they've become very important. It's a lot easier to go to war with somebody that you know and trust than it is with a stranger. But it was, it was a cool thing.

• 1:50:07Jocko Willink?

  And so then, you get done with, you get done with Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and what's next, next on the plate? When do you guys start, when does Somalia come up on the radar?

• 1:50:17Speaker 02

  Ninety-three. So Desert Storm was ninety-one?

• 1:50:20Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:50:21Speaker 02

  Ninety, ninety-one. And I should know the day.

• 1:50:23Jocko Willink?

  Actually, ninety.

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  Ninety.

• 1:50:25Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no. You're right. It's, it's ninety, and then ninety was the buildup, and then the ninety-one, like March of ninety-one.

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  You gotta forgive my memory. It all kind of runs together. But I made team leader. I did, right after, actually in the first Gulf War, I was over in England. I was, I was doing an exchange with Brits. So I worked with two, two for, for about six months. Another cool bunch of dudes. Loved them. Funny, funny. Not only do they, do they work hard, they know how to play hard, right? And so, so, and it was, it was just a cool bunch of dudes. So I actually was over there with them when, when we first, when I got called back. I was like, you can't come home, we got something going on.

• 1:51:06Jocko Willink?

  My, my wife's a Brit. And so I'm over in Iraq, and we're getting ready to do a bunch of hits, and we're, we're hitting some targets, and the SAS is hitting some targets, and some, other people are hitting targets. But we're all kind of talking together. So I'm sitting there at this, with the, standing with the Brit, like the, whatever, troop commander, and we're looking at the battle map, and we're like going, yeah, I'll go here, and You know, looking at the point and at the targets and I go, hey, man, I'm actually married to a Brit and the dude without missing a beat, he just keeps looking at the map and he goes, sorry to hear that, mate. And then we just kept reading.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  It was freaking awesome. No, they're awesome dudes, man, and, um, and very good. And, um, um, I would argue that, um, knowing what I know, I wasn't one of the original gangsters of, of, uh, the SMU. But, um, Charlie Beckwith and, um, Bucky Burris had both gone over and gone through the, uh, selection for two, two. And I want to say they spent three years over there each and they came back with an epiphany. They were like, and they'd both been green berets in Vietnam and they, they knew though, they could see that the, that the earth was moving and they were like, we're not in the jungle anymore and these guys, we can learn something from these guys.

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  And they organized the, um, the army side, almost identical in the selection process and in the structure of the unit, everything else to the two, two. And, um, they were, they were, um, they were very, very instrumental in getting the army, SMU, uh, on the right track early on.

• 1:52:41Jocko Willink?

  And so you, did you do like a full pat billet, two years over there or something?

• 1:52:44Speaker 02

  No, I did a short look. So my, uh, they had the long look, which was a two-year billet and a, and a short look, which was six months.

• 1:52:49Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  And, um, I did a six-month short look and was on the end of that when, when the Gulf thing kicked off. And then they would send guys over with us and do the, do the short look. And I worked with B squadron primarily, which was the guys who were, uh, so when I left to come back at the start of the Gulf, uh, um, Desert, Desert Storm, um, the guys I was working with were probably two, zero.

• 1:53:12Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  Right? So, so I knew the guys that got, ran out of their hide site and, and, uh, ran off into the desert and I think only one of them survived, isn't it? Colin Armstrong. But, um, um, super dudes, super, I still talk to them today. You know, you make those friendships that last a lifetime, but, um, I learned a lot from them. Um, and I think that, again, I've been out for a while, but I think, uh, both on the Navy, uh, our Navy side and on the Army side, they work a lot closer with them now. I think you guys did a lot of work with them.

• 1:53:41Jocko Willink?

  The Brits are pros, man.

• 1:53:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, dude. So they've been doing that shit for thousands of years, man. They, they, you know, they've been, they've been sneaking up on dudes for a long time and, uh, they're really good at it.

• 1:53:50Jocko Willink?

  So when'd you start hearing about Somalia?

• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  So I got back from Gulf War and I'm a team leader. So I'd been in about five years, four little, maybe four and a half, five years. Young dude as a team leader. And

• 1:54:09Speaker 02

  there was a couple of things going on at the time that were big, big things. So yeah, the other two squadrons, A and B, had been around longer. They were, there was a big mission that was, everybody was working on and they were the ones that were kind of in the queue to get it. And C Squadron was kind of left, left hanging. And, and this, this kind of weird mission came up in Somalia that was more like a, like a peacekeeping mission. And it started out, it was going to be a team of guys. And it, but it was, we looked at it as kind of almost like a, you know, they're just the one that said just keep us busy. And, and then it started growing and then the other one went away. So they, they So now you guys had lead?

• 1:54:52Speaker 02

  So now we're the, we're the only missions going down and it's Somalia. And, but now they're not going to pull it from us because we've been doing a workup on it. And again, we were on the Jortz, so we're working with Red, Red Team, Bravo Company from the Rangers, and then B Company Task Force 160th. And then we had Rick Kaiser, Howard Wozden, Homer Nearpass, and that was one more guy, I can't remember his name, but John Day? Might be, yeah, it might be. But he was, he was, they were down there with us and we were doing, doing the workup and it just grew, it grew to a squadron size thing. And then of course, everybody knows the, the story on how it played out. But we went over,

• 1:55:35Speaker 02

  got there in like, I want to say June, June of 93. Again, my memory fails me, maybe in July, it may have been, you know, May, I don't know. But summer of 93, we went over and we, we, of course, the mission was killer capture, one guy, Mohammed Adeed. And then disrupt his, his infrastructure if he could. And then As soon as we got there, the day we got there, we got hit with a mortar. And no casualties, but then we started going out and doing missions. And the word on the street was that he was gone, that he left the country. We didn't know for sure, but nobody had seen him for a while. So we're like, he's probably gone. So we focused on his, his, uh, his team.

• 1:56:19Speaker 02

  So like, um, Osman Otto, Omar Salad and those guys started rolling up his staff. And we did, um, a lot of missions, but most of them didn't amount to anything. But there were seven significant ones, uh, including October 3rd, which was the roll, roll up the whole staff.

• 1:56:37Jocko Willink?

  How'd you feel, uh, so you guys, you know, you start doing these hits out there. Um, did you feel like you guys had a pretty like, pretty, uh, uh, I don't want to say cookie cutter, but I want to say cookie cutter. Like when I was in Baghdad, like we got to a point where it was just, we're just, we could just roll out 15 minutes. Boom. Like, tell us where, yeah. You guys got in that mode?

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

  We did, and we had to, uh, as probably you had to as well. So we, um, we would get these, um, it wasn't like traditionally you get to look at a target and you can take as long as you want to, to work up on it. Right? Some of these guys may only show up for five minutes and you may get, hey, there they are. And so you couldn't go into the talk and put everybody in there and go through a planning cycle. You had to have that plan in a library, right? To pick from, you had to go, it's a, it's a motorcade. It's a, it's, um, it's a building, you know? It's, um, a series of buildings. So, you know, single building, multiple, single structure, multi-structure, uh, uh, motorcade. Stuff like that.

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  We had those things, kind of a couple of courses of action for each one of those.

• 1:57:42Jocko Willink?

  Standard operating procedure.

• 1:57:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Template plan, cookie cutter, as you said.

• 1:57:45Jocko Willink?

  My, uh, my commanding officer was like halfway through my first deployment to Iraq. And he, he's like, hey, you know, I want to brief, how much time do you guys need to be able to launch on a mission? Like, how much time do you need? And I go 15 minutes. And he's like, no, really? And I go, no, really? 15 minutes? Like if you give me 15 minutes, guys will have the gear and we'll be in the, and the only thing I need is on the way, when we get on the road, if you pass me the target location and the frequency of the, uh, battlespace commander that they're on, we're good. And we, we did that multiple occasions, like 15 minutes, let's roll. So it sounds like you guys were in that mode.

• 1:58:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, same thing. And, um, um, literally we used to get the, uh, we'd get a, uh, we had a, uh, uh, uh, air horn that would go off. And the air horn would go off, the team leaders would run to the talk. The assistant team leader in the team would equip the birds, right? And so they'd run out there with the fast ropes and they'd load the birds and the rotors were turning and they were already on the aircraft. So I would, I would be in the, be in the talk and for example, when we hit Osmanado, he was a vehicle and we rolled in and they said, we were watching it on the camera. We saw a blue Fiat driving down Army Forces Boulevard and we're like, okay. And we, we knew, okay, this is the way this is going to go down because we have the plan already.

• 1:59:01Speaker 02

  And I ran out to the aircraft and you know, rotors turning, guys sitting on there. And I had a, I had a illuminated board with a grease marker. And I drew a car, car, car. I drew a halo, halo, halo and I went, and they went, just like this, not a word passed between us.

• 1:59:20Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:59:21Speaker 02

  And, and within, you know, 15 minutes, we were airborne. And of course, we, we got, we got it done. And it works for you and against you, you really cannot operate in that environment without that kind of thing. You know, so people have often said, well, did you think doing the same thing over and over and over again was going to hurt you? Well, yeah, but the option is just to not, not do it. You know, let it, let it go, you know, because you can't respond fast enough. So you have to have, you have to have some sort of way to launch, you know, on something that's, that happens that quick. But, but we, that's the way we did it over there and, and it worked for us until it didn't, you know?

• 2:00:03Jocko Willink?

  So going on October 3rd, it's the same thing again, right? Like you basically get intel and it's go time.

• 2:00:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So October 3rd, you know, and we were at that point, we're like, man, we've, we've rolled everybody up. We've gone out on a lot of dry holes. You know, sometimes you get good information, sometimes you wouldn't and.

• 2:00:26Speaker 02

  They said, and it wasn't like a fast response. They said, hey, we've got something going on. And it was Sunday afternoon. We got something, Sunday morning, we got something going on. Um, my team leaders come into the top for a minute, came in and we were literally in a black running shorts. You know, sunning out there on the beach in Longwood issue and they said, come on in. So we went in and I, you know, I remember sitting there and they go, this is, there's a meeting and it's a, it's a bunch of his guys. And, um, supposed to be here, but we're not sure about it yet. We got one source that's saying it's gonna happen. And, but we don't have anything to back it up, confirm it. So let's keep an eye on it, you know? And, um, we were like, I think, you know, nothing gonna happen. And, um,

• 2:01:10Speaker 02

  Let's go sun, let's go out in the sun again. Yeah, yeah. Go get some, go get an M R E, man. And, um, but, uh, we started to watch it develop through the day. You know, and then they had a backup source that neither, and then, and they didn't know each other. So they were both telling the same story, independent of each other. And, um, and then we started watching stuff on the ground, started seeing guys show up. All right, oh, wait a minute. This, this looks like it might be legit. And then, uh, one of the sources, um, uh, they told him, they said, hey, look, um, we want you to pull up. They put a, literally, you know, they put an X on top of his car. And they said, we want you to pull up next to the building where you're telling us that this is gonna go down.

• 2:01:52Speaker 02

  And, um, lift your hood, right? And, um, they were, they were, had a West cam ball on him and they also were filming him with the P three Orion. So they were watching him through, through a surveillance aircraft. And we're watching it in real time. And he pulls up short, about a block short and like, that's not the building. Cause we know the other guy's saying it doesn't batch, right? And so they call him up and they said, hey bud, are you sure that's the right place? And he goes, no, it's not. He goes, but they've got armed guards out and I can't go any further. It's a block up on the right. And so we're like, okay, now, now it's confirmed. And it went from being this ain't gonna happen to horns blowing. And we launched and, um,

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  Flew in and first thing I noticed was that when we launched, we saw they had, they used to light tires on fire to signal everybody. We saw that pretty early on October 3rd. As soon as we, and they were watching the airfield and they also, we think they had some, some embeds in some of the UN troops who occupied the same airfield that we did. So we think they had their guys in, you know, in some of these smaller country teams that were, that were, you know, ratting us out basically. And, um, but we flew in and it went, and we really, I mean.

• 2:03:13Jocko Willink?

  Just normal hit.

• 2:03:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, normal hit. We, we did, that was probably the first time the gun birds ever went hot on, on insertion though. So we had, we were let out by two little bird gunships. And, um, um, I would, you know, sitting on the, on the skids on outside, outside the aircraft, I would always watch the gunships in the front. And if they flew past and I was like, okay, it's not, they didn't see anything to shoot, you know? So it's not hot. At least it wasn't when they went by it. But this time, they did their pop-up and came down and, and cut this with the, with the miniguns. And I was like, okay, we're, we're hot. And, um, um, they were, you know, the shooting started before we even got on

• 2:03:59Speaker 02

  the ground. So, um, but once we got on target building, you know, like, and I'm sure you've seen it, I mean, if you get eyeball, eyeball with them, they don't want nothing to do with the fight, you know? You know, they, if they think they can do it, get away with it, they're good, but you know, they don't want, they don't want none of it when it's, when it's looking them in the face. But, um, um, we didn't have any, any, um, gunfights in the building. They laid their stuff down and gave up. But, um, I had the, um, lower level on the, um, I guess north east side of the building.

• 2:04:38Speaker 02

  And um, looked like from imagery that we could go in there and then link up with the other teams and go up the stairs, but there was no passageway through. So went in the back, there were several guys there, we cuffed them, left them, and then um, moved around the building till the um, south side of the building went in. And then by that time, they'd already, the other teams had already gone up this, cleared the first level on their side and then gone up to the second level. And uh, captured dude, there was a meeting, I think it was fifteen guys or something like that, can't remember the number, but they were all sitting down on the rug with tea, um, you know, having their meeting, and it was everybody we thought it was gonna be. And um, but it was quick, it was literally.

• 2:05:21Jocko Willink?

  When you got up there, they were already cuffed?

• 2:05:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were already uh, cuffing them, right, they were already working it. And um, and then um, um, we were standing there kind of um, you know, uh, with nothing to do. And so I said, let's move to the roof and pull, pull security, waiting for the, you know, waiting for the aircraft come get us, and they'd already called uh, Loria, which was our exfil. And um, so um.

• 2:05:45Jocko Willink?

  You already, now Ranger had already fallen out of the.

• 2:05:47Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah Ranger.

• 2:05:48Jocko Willink?

  So that's a little bit of a, well, it's a, it's a major issue for him, but it's an issue to, to the operation.

• 2:05:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure it is.

• 2:05:56Jocko Willink?

  And you were tracking that?

• 2:05:57Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, yeah, we were, and so um, um, and I forgot to mention that, we went in, did our, our clearing on the north, the east side of that building, and then when we came out, they were already working at Cas, Cas, Casvac. And um, he had fallen like ninety feet off a fast rope, really, really uh, a bad fall, young kid, but um, um, but now we're packaging him for medevac. And um, so our medics are working on the, on the issue, and I find out, Jocko, I find out more about this thing every day, because there was, there was so much stuff going on around us, I was like, I was talking to Scott Miller um, a couple of weeks ago, and he told me one of his problems when calling exfil was that. When the medic, our medic, went over to help the Ranger medics with the Kazakh,

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  nobody, nobody counted him, so they didn't know where he was. So when they're doing head count, you're going, where is he? Where is he? So there was a loss of accountability, not blaming anybody. Uh, but that's the shit that happens. Right? And so he can't really truly call, uh, for, for exfil until he has his guys. And we're missing a guy. And I didn't never, I never knew that. You know, that's something that was at his level, but, um, I mean, the, I knew the medic was there. If anybody'd asked me, hey, where's, where's Bart Bullock? I was working on a casualty. But they're trying to do head counts and they're getting a, you know, getting a, a man short. Yeah. You know, where's this, you know? And, um, um, but anyway, um, while, while they were, you know, um, cuffing these guys up, getting ready to move them, I started, I took my silts to the roof.

• 2:07:24Speaker 02

  So we went up to the roof and as I got to the roof, a buddy of mine named Tony Copper, super dude, uh, another, another just super operator. He was saying, hey, um, we're getting, uh, keep your head down. We're getting, getting, the fire's increasing. So we got, we got small arms fire coming in, so keep, keep your head down. And a couple of RBGs had gone over the building and stuff like that. But, um, uh, still nothing to, you know, it's not like D-Day, you know? Just kind of a, you know, sporadic, you know? I mean, you know, just looking. Yeah, but so you're not, you're not really feeling a huge escalation yet? We're feeling it and, and there's this, it's kind of like, um, my analogy, I've never played quarterback in football and I never, I played football, but I never saw the ball.

• 2:08:06Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, um, but, um, um, but my analogy would be a guy standing in the pocket. You know, if you've been in standing there a while, you're kind of like, okay, I, I don't see anything yet, but. I need to get rid of this ball. But something needs to happen pretty quick because, um, cause I've been here a while. It's like a clock that starts ticking and that's the best analogy I can give you. No, that makes sense. Um, but, um, I started to get that feeling. It's like, oh man, we gotta, we gotta get out of here. We've been here a lot longer than, than all the other things, you know, that we've done. And, um, I know we got a casualty and as I'm talking to Tony, um, we see the Hilo get hit. And I'm like, man, you know, and going back to what I said before, you know, I try to shoot a vehicle with an AT4 or a LAU, go on 15 miles an hour at 20 meters and I miss half the time.

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  That has to be just a miracle shot. All right, I, I mean, I can't, I, cause I know I couldn't do it. You know, I was like, holy shit, you know? And we both looked at each other like, and we watched it and it literally looked like it was going in slow motion and it just, of course, it sped faster and faster and faster than it. Then we saw it go down behind the buildings, maybe a little less than a mile away. And, um, still hard for me to judge the distance on it, but all I saw was debris, a debris field and, and dirt. And I was like, well, we got a bird down. And, um, of course that changes everything. Now it's another mission. You've done one mission, which is the, the target building, but now you've got a search and rescue mission and recovery. And so, um, um, and we had a problem.

• 2:09:33Speaker 02

  We had, um, prisoners and we had rangers that pulled up to transport prisoners that were sitting there in vehicles, you know, cause the, the plan was let them on vehicles and get them out. And now these vehicles have been exposed for a long time because we got a casualty. Right? And so things are, things, it's never just one thing.

• 2:09:52Jocko Willink?

  It started to compound.

• 2:09:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's never one thing. It's always, you know, a couple of things that, that line up. And, um, um, so Miller calls us down. He said, hey, here's what we're gonna do. I need one team to go with the prisoners, with the rangers on the motorcade. And, uh, that was Matt Ryerson's team, C team at the, at the time. Super guy. Um, and, um, rest of you guys, you need to move to the crash site and, um, handle that problem, get the, get the survivors, take casualties if we got them and get them ready to move them. And, um, you know, when I got down off the building, things look a lot different on the ground than they did from four stories up looking down.

• 2:10:35Speaker 02

  It's kinda like we talked about, you know, if you're looking at a football game from above, it's really easy to see the field. But once we got on the ground, even though I knew the general place where the heli had got down, you know, had gone down, we were like, okay, we're headed in the right direction generally, but things weren't, it's not like in America where streets, you know, have street signs and stuff, you know, you're like. We're gonna move, uh, east and then we're gonna gotta move a little bit north, but then, you know, where is it? It's an alleyway and a, you know, a dead end alleyway. And, um, and now it's, it's busy because now all these guys had come in to surround the building and shoot at the building, the bad guys. Now you're pushing out through them. So you're

• 2:11:16Speaker 02

  actually kind of, um, they had a loose, what I call a loose perimeter around that building that was out several blocks. So now you're, um, you're not only fighting to the aircraft, you're fighting out of the perimeter that the enemy's starting to accidentally, um, assemble, right? They didn't do it on purpose, but they were just coming in from all directions.

• 2:11:36Jocko Willink?

  Just like mob mentality.

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, um, um, so we started getting a lot of fire on the ground, you know, and usually at the intersections. So you hit an intersection and then, and then left and right, you'd come at you.

• 2:11:48Jocko Willink?

  And it's you and you got a bunch of Rangers with you too?

• 2:11:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's, um, a couple of assault teams and in, uh, um, one of the Ranger blocking positions that had been, we, we positioned blocking positions around the target building, roughly four corners, um, and about maybe a half a block out. Right? So they weren't right on the building, but they were maybe a half a block out on every, on the four corners. And as we started moving down that road, we just moved into a blocking position. They were already there. So they were blocking. And we said, come with us. So they just picked up and came with us, right? So now, you know, we had, would have been, uh, three, three teams, three, uh, uh, tier one teams and then a Ranger blocking position that was

• 2:12:31Speaker 02

  around 12 dudes, you know? Um, and one of the other blocking positions on the, on the, the sister blocking position on the other corner had seen the aircraft. They were on the same street.

• 2:12:42Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:12:43Speaker 02

  And, um, they, they moved directly to it. So now they're paralleling each other.

• 2:12:48Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:49Speaker 02

  Right? So I've got a blocking position with me and three teams. And, um, and I wasn't in charge. I was a brand new team leader. So you had Scotty Miller, who was a captain at the time. Awesome dude, you know? And then you had our troop sergeant major, Ben Ferber at the time. And, uh, um, can't remember the other, other one, but, um, but Scotty was the ground force commander. Right? And so we were moving with him. Um, and, um, we were a point. So F team, I was F team leader. We were, we were a point at the time.

• 2:13:20Speaker 02

  And we were listening on radios, okay, move more block up, more block up, turn left. And, um, but the, but the vehicles were on the same freak.

• 2:13:29Speaker 02

  So he's giving directions to two units and we're both hearing them. Right? Hindsight 2020. You know, don't do that again.

• 2:13:37Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys, were you guys each wearing the radio? Like each individual?

• 2:13:41Speaker 02

  Each individual had a radio that was on the assault.

• 2:13:43Jocko Willink?

  On the assault freak and then the vehicles were on the assault freak as well?

• 2:13:46Speaker 02

  Um. I was a TL and I had two radios, so I had a radio that was on the assault freak and then I had a command freak radio.

• 2:13:53Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:13:54Speaker 02

  And I think the vehicles were on the command freak. They were not on the assault freak. Right? They were on their own freak, but I mean, they were on, they had their own internal comps, but they also were on the assault freak. So the directions that were coming down to us. But, uh, were on the command freak. So I'm listening to the command freak. It's like, go turn left, turn left. No, no, not you. Right? So, um, you know, um, so, um, um, it was a cluster.

• 2:14:19Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:14:20Speaker 02

  All right, on comps.

• 2:14:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:22Speaker 02

  And I've been told that since I was a kid in special forces. First thing to kill you is comps.

• 2:14:25Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  You know, you better have that wired. It's better than, more important than shooting. Um, but, um, it had worked for us so many times before, we didn't see a reason not to do that. You know? Um, but, um, um, so.

• 2:14:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a, uh, comms always, you know, like you said, it's like the most important thing that'll, no one wants to talk about it, but it's, it's where major problems can ensue. But it's interesting for me to hear this. I was always like the, the most strict person about talking on the radio. Like if you, if you were on the assault force, you weren't talking on the radio unless you were like gonna die. Like no one, if, if you were down the hallway and I had something to tell you, I'd either yell at you or I'd walk down there and grab you and be like, hey, this is what's going on. But I would never get on the radio and say, I, you know, hey, hey, can you push, push two guys down? Like you weren't allowed to do that in my troop.

• 2:15:20Jocko Willink?

  The only people that would talk on the radios would be people that needed to talk on the radio, like a vehicle that needs to move because he's far away from another vehicle. Uh, but in a situation like that, it's like you, you, it's going to get clustered really quickly.

• 2:15:36Speaker 02

  I tell you, man, I, um, I'm lucky I wasn't an O because, uh, Miller, I had two radios. It was all my little brain can handle. Miller had like four.

• 2:15:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:46Speaker 02

  And, and he was talking to the, on the gun freak. He was talking on the assault freak. He was on, he was on everything. And I was like, man, he must be like a genius, man. Cause I, uh, little, little, one more, uh, radio would have busted my little head wide open. But, um, and it was, as you can imagine, it was like, I mean, and, and you know how it is. It's like, um, and back then we didn't have great comms. We, I mean, great. We had throat mics.

• 2:16:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:07Speaker 02

  We had throat mics, dude.

• 2:16:08Jocko Willink?

  And you didn't have the noise canceling headsets?

• 2:16:10Speaker 02

  We didn't. We, in fact, um,

• 2:16:12Jocko Willink?

  It's a different game.

• 2:16:13Speaker 02

  In fact, um, um, we had, um, bone phones, I think. Bone phones and throat mics. And, um, and I didn't even have earplugs in. I remember my ears were ringing for a month at that. But, um, um, but, uh, we didn't have the, we had, we had, uh, skateboard, skateboard helmets, Pro Tex.

• 2:16:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:32Speaker 02

  And, um, um, funny, uh, funny backstory to it is, and again, I love, I love the Navy guys. And I was, by this time I'm buddies with these dudes. But, um, we figured out real quick that, um, we needed ballistic helmets and we did, we never had that. We had skateboard helmets. Um, and, um, I'm still kind of torn on whether, but back then they were like, they were the K pots. They were not, uh, like the modern day, um, Kevlar helmets. They didn't have integrated comms and, and nod mounts and all that shit on. They were, they were like, uh, you know, German, uh, SS helmets.

• 2:17:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:06Speaker 02

  And, um, um, but, uh, but our buddies up at Red, Red Team had, had some helmets that were a little bitter. They were like, um,

• 2:17:17Jocko Willink?

  They're like one generation up.

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit better.

• 2:17:19Jocko Willink?

  I forget what they were called, but yeah.

• 2:17:20Speaker 02

  A little bit better. And, um, so they, um, they heard about what happened and they sent their helmets down. Right, from uh, from uh, six. And there was a note on top of it that said, hey, guys, sorry here, but what happened? Um, and uh, please, please uh, accept this uh, accept this gift from six. Uh, but maybe next time you'll ask for the whole operator to go with it. So um, but even in that, you know, you had the, you had the, the fun. I loved it. But um, um, but yeah, we um, we moved and we fi- and again, we're shoot- we're shooting. And at this point, we've taken a couple of little minor casualties. And you got the guy that fell to Hilo. And um, then we turned, I went past the um, the, they said, I went past

• 2:18:05Speaker 02

  the street we're supposed to turn on, maybe 10 meters. Did you have a battle map with you? We did, big S. Big S? Big S one. We don't, I think today they're doing this stuff off of tablets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They do it off tablets now. Yeah, but we had a big one, but um, and we had a, you know, the old chocolate chip desert camis with the, with the map that we laminated, put in our pocket that, you know. Um, um, but um, it was, it was not accurate. I mean, it was generally accurate, but people just build houses in the middle road and stuff, you know, that. So it was, it was um, it was good at orienting you, but when you got down into the minutia of the city, it was kinda like, you know, that shack's not on the map. You weren't gonna, you weren't gonna make a terrain feature calls? No, no, it was um, it generally gets you there. But um, um, but um, I got the

• 2:18:50Speaker 02

  call to turn a little bit late, because we'd already, you know, we're shooting and fighting, shooting and fighting. Pushed forward and um, and then I was like, okay, you went too far. Right? Now, I was a point, point team. So F team was point. But instead of just totally reorient, reorganizing everybody and getting back in the lineup, we just backed it up. So now the guys that were in a trail were in point. Right? And um, as soon as we made that turn north, they got hammered. And um, uh, we had um, six, one KIA right there, it was Earl Fillmore, and then um, probably six or seven other guys severely

• 2:19:28Speaker 02

  wounded in, in just a couple of minutes of gunfight. And um, um, we couldn't see the Hilo, but we knew it was a couple of blocks up, you know? And we had, we had split the um, the column, one on the right side of the road, one on the left side of the road. And we were cross covering as we moved up. And um, um, and we stopped.

• 2:19:54Speaker 02

  After we made that turn north and we kind of rearranged the um the formation where now I'm in the I'm in the trail um we stopped because we were like, okay, is it this street or the next street? And we're waiting for the call on the radio and um because we can't physically see it, you know, and again, you're in the street and you're now now it's a gunfight. And um I remember Earl looking around and he's sitting there on a corner, you know, and he's waiting for somebody to tell him something. He turns around and he goes,

• 2:20:28Speaker 02

  what are we doing? You know, and uh and that's and he dropped right there. But um um and then

• 2:20:36Speaker 02

  I've got um one guy next to me that was shot through the arm. He was shooting like this and a round came in just above the wrist, came out the wrist, hit him in the bicep and came out the tricep. And um and he just looked at me goes and he yelled and he rolled over his back goes, God, he goes, that fucking hurt, you know, and I remember thinking, I was like, yeah, I bet it did, you know, and then as we were picking him up, um, you know, I had him like, kind of lifted him up, we're gonna walk him in a building and my my buddy was with us. We were all kind of together behind a pile of rubble. And um he got hit in the back and he dropped. And um, man, he was, you know, of course, of course, um, letting everybody know

• 2:21:19Speaker 02

  he'd been hit because it was hurt. But then I I was laying on top of him and I was trying to find the wound. And, you know, going through your mind, you must stuff, God, whatever I'm gonna do. And um, I couldn't find it. And then I felt something hot on the back of my hand and the round had gone all the way through the uh kevlar and the tip of it was sticking out. And so all he felt was a blood trauma, but it was hot and it burned a big, you know, blister on his back. But um, his whole it hit him right in the kidney. And um, but it didn't go in him. So um, but it messed him up. His whole whole back turned black, his groin um um turned just black, all the way down both legs, black. So he had some some internal bleeding. But um, um, but yeah, we took a lot of hits right there in that corner.

• 2:22:02Speaker 02

  And then um, uh, Rangers took some hits there on the corner and the same same corner. And because I remember uh, we were we were kind of like in an L and we had fire coming from this way and we had a little wall and maybe it was at the most 10 meters from us. And they would stick their guns up over the wall and shoot, you know, and we were, we were throwing hand grenades over, over the wall and hitting it with, with two oh three. And, um, um, the Rangers that blocked the position that we'd gone through was now behind us. And they came up and they sat down in that same spot. And that's where Jim Lettner was.

• 2:22:38Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 2:22:39Speaker 02

  Right. And, uh, Jim came up with, um, Captain Steele and he, and they knelt down at that same spot and I, I looked out the door and I said, guys, I said, not there. Come in. And in that short verbal exchange, they got hit, you know, and that's where Jim got, got hit in the leg. And one of the worst leg wounds I've, I've seen, lucky as his leg.

• 2:22:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, um, and we got him off the street and then, um, uh, we, we, we held a casualty, uh, collection point there. And, um, we're pretty busy and across the street, guys had been hit too. Um, and, um, um, they had a young, young guy that was, uh, bleeding out over there, you know, and, um, um, so we're running IVs back and forth across the street. But then we sat there, uh, for a bit and then, um, the SAR bird had come in on the crash site as Dan Gelada's aircraft, really cool dude. If you ever talked to Dan, he's, he's a awesome dude. Um, but, um, they all roped in and within a short period of time, they were all wounded, you know, and, uh, our squadron sergeant major was on that bird. It was Tommy Corbett. He was wounded there. None of them, none of them were killed.

• 2:23:42Speaker 02

  Um, but they were all w- wounded. And so there was nobody on the crash site working the problem. You had a bunch of wounded guys, you know, doing their best to fight, fight guys off, but nobody there that could solve it. And so Miller calls over and said, hey, I need you to, I need you to move up to my position, move up to the aircraft. And I said, I can't see it. Where is it? And he goes, come to me. Come to me and I'll show you where it's at. And so I went across the street to Miller with, um, with my team. And then we, uh, then he said, there's the tail right there of the aircraft. And I was like, okay. So, um, we went over, worked the aircraft and we got there and, you know,

• 2:24:20Speaker 02

  They had the Starbird, a quickie saw, some manual tools that they were using and stuff in. But I'm telling you, if you ever try to get in a Blackhawk with a quickie saw, it's tough. And we went through several blades and couldn't, couldn't even budget. And when I first one got there, I was like, you know, I, I don't see anybody in the aircraft. And they'd already gotten one of the pilots out and looking through the rubble, you know? And it was the hot spot on the battlefield. There was, you know, they were shooting into the aircraft and it had laid up against a wall. And they were throwing hand grenades over the, over the wall into the aircraft. But they weren't pulling the shipping bales off of them.

• 2:25:01Speaker 02

  So they were pulling the pins, but they, when they pulled them out of the, out of the shipping, it must've been brand new because they still had the shipping bales on them. So, so there were a bunch of them laying on the ground with pins out, but no, no, you know, they didn't go off because the shipping bales were off them, thank God, you know? But sometimes better to be lucky than good, right? So, but.

• 2:25:22Jocko Willink?

  So did you leave the casualty collection point? Were those guys still there and you pushed up to the helos by yourself?

• 2:25:27Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:25:27Jocko Willink?

  With the rest of your team?

• 2:25:28Speaker 02

  With F team, yeah. F team and a Bravo team. So a guy named John Boswell was a good friend of mine. But we pulled up to the, but we left the casualties there. There were some young Rangers there that were pulling security for, for the casualty collection point.

• 2:25:46Jocko Willink?

  It was like a block or two?

• 2:25:48Speaker 02

  A block south, about a block south. And so when we were moving up from Miller's site to, to the crash site, we were going to move across the street, occupy the corner building, and then bound, building to building to the crash site. And I remember looking across the street and we were going to, we didn't, we didn't have anybody in the building. So I was like, we got any friendlies in that building? And so we just assumed it was occupied by enemy, by bad guys. And so I got my two or three gunners up, a couple, two or three gunners up from the teams. And we said, okay, here's what we're going to do.

• 2:26:29Speaker 02

  We're going to, we're going to do a countdown and we're going to hit all the windows with the two or three rounds and then we're going to enter.

• 2:26:39Speaker 02

  Right. And, um, and, uh, so we're gonna, again, prep it with two oh three. And then as you're shooting, we're running across the street, we're kicking a door and going. And, um, we got everybody up, we're like five, four, three, two, and I saw like a flash of light and Buzz says, uh, I saw a gun light. And I go, it was, I saw it, is that a gun? He goes, I think that was a gun light. And I went, okay, we called and says, do you have anybody in the building on this corner? Negative, we have nobody. He was, okay, five, four, three, two, gun light. I'm like, it looked like somebody was clearing, you know, and I was like, okay, wait a minute. Um, let's make another call. And while we were making that radio call, the door opened up and a green camo light came out.

• 2:27:25Speaker 02

  I was like, shit, dude. You know, and it was literally like two seconds off of, you know, blue on blue. And it was, um, some of the guys from the SAR team, some of the wounded guys were ambulatory. But they were clearing their way back because that, on the other side of that building was the crash site. And that's where the SAR team had, had hunkered down. And they were like, well, we gotta clear this because we don't know what's in it. So they cleared the way back and it just happened to be a really good kid that I went to Ranger School with, his name was John Bellman. He was, I was like an old dude when I went to Ranger School and he was like a brand new guy to high school. And, um, um,

• 2:28:03Speaker 02

  he looks across the street and he says, who? I said, John. He goes, what are you doing? He goes, yeah, we gotta, this is the way through. So we went, actually we followed him back through to the crash site. And, um, but literally I think back on that, we talked about blue and blue earlier. Second.

• 2:28:17Speaker 02

  You know?

• 2:28:17Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Um, you know, and that's again, before we hit record, you know, I was talking through some police, police nurse. Clearly I had one where I had an Iraqi guy get killed and one of my guys get wounded. And then, but there was a couple of other ones. There was one, um, that I didn't tell you about, but it's in, it's in the book, Extreme Ownership, but, uh, you know, the army.

• 2:28:37Jocko Willink?

  Chris Kyle is on his, he's a sniper, he's on his weapon and he's looking and he goes, hey, man, I see some guys in a scope weapon. Like in and out of the shadows in this building. And he talks to platoon commander Leif and goes, Leif, like, hey, is there any army dudes in there? Cause like, I see a guy with a scope weapon. Leif calls, hey, we see a guy with a scope weapon. Do you have anyone in this building, whatever the building number was? The guys are like, nope, we don't have anyone there. And the army guys, who we had all lost people from snipers, they were like, take him, take the shot, take him out. Like really encouraging Leif to get Chris to take the shot. Chris didn't feel, he's like, I can't, I can't P I D, I can't P I D. And Leif finally goes, hey, we're not taking the shot. Can you send someone to clear that building? And the army guys are okay, like they were pissed.

• 2:29:23Jocko Willink?

  And I'm not doing the story justice, but they were pissed. And again, they were pissed. Because dude, we're asking them to go hit a building where we think there's enemy. That's not a friendly thing to do, right? They're like, but of course there are brothers and they're like, all right, we're hitting it. You know, stand by and a minute goes by and Leif sees the guys exit that building. To go and hit a different building because there was confusion about what number of building it was. So it was like, again, you know, a millisecond of decision making.

• 2:29:50Speaker 02

  Yep. And you know, it's um, luck.

• 2:29:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:54Speaker 02

  Right?

• 2:29:55Jocko Willink?

  You know, the, and I'm thankful. If we wouldn't have that blue on blue in the beginning, because that first blue on blue that happened with us was, was in a couple of weeks of the maybe three, three weeks into the deployment. If we wouldn't have had that, we would have had a much worse one later.

• 2:30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:10Jocko Willink?

  Because everyone became so paranoid about it. That, I mean, you would just be so like paranoid. You know, was there anything worse you can do?

• 2:30:21Speaker 02

  I know the feeling, yeah. And both ways, right? So we talked about this earlier. It's like when I got ready to move and people say, I need you to move from here to there.

• 2:30:29Speaker 02

  I was like, man, I'm not, I'm not real worried about the bad guys. I mean, I can handle that, but, but the Rangers don't miss. Man, I mean, or, or an assault team. If they light you up with a, with a, you know, from assault team or, or Ranger squad, uh, you know, you're, you're done.

• 2:30:44Jocko Willink?

  I mean, was it dark? So when you saw that light, was that, were you seeing the light in the late daytime?

• 2:30:50Speaker 02

  No, it was pitch black.

• 2:30:51Jocko Willink?

  So it was already pitch black. So it was already dark at this?

• 2:30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'd gone through several hours, so, um.

• 2:30:56Jocko Willink?

  So you're super lucky that you could see it, because if it was in the daytime, you wouldn't have seen that light.

• 2:30:58Speaker 02

  If it had been in the daytime, we wouldn't have, uh.

• 2:31:00Jocko Willink?

  Of course, you might have been able to see them themselves, which could have helped.

• 2:31:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I would tell you, it was black, so, so we had, we had spent, um, um, I'll lose track of the timeline, but around, I think we launched around three in the afternoon.

• 2:31:12Jocko Willink?

  How many mags did you have with you?

• 2:31:14Speaker 02

  Uh, 210 rounds. And we borrowed through every one of them, and they were, they were flying over and kicking rucksacks out with, uh, preloaded magazines in them. But, uh, we went through a lot more than that, but, um, but we were again configured for a thirty, thirty minute hit. And everything we'd done up to that point, in five, 10 minutes, we were kicking ass, you know, and, um, um, we were not equipped to sustain, you know, it was like, we're gonna go in and out.

• 2:31:41Jocko Willink?

  Did you have the extra magazines and stuff, uh, already loaded, already in staged?

• 2:31:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:31:47Jocko Willink?

  In case something happened?

• 2:31:47Speaker 02

  They had, yes, we had already loaded them up, put them into bundles, and, um.

• 2:31:51Jocko Willink?

  We always did, we always had that because of you guys. Because of you guys, we always had, like, in, in the Humvees, we had extra mags already loaded in the.

• 2:31:58Speaker 02

  Ammo's and, ammo and Bandoliers ain't gonna help you. I mean, it's like, I got, you know, um, but, yeah, they were already preloaded and stuff like that, so, um, uh, and we had some, uh, and we ran out of IVs, you know, we started running, and everybody carried one, and we started running out of IVs, so they were dropping med supplies and, uh, um, I remember, um, listening on the radio, they were talking about that we had one casualty in a Ranger, a young kid, and, um, and, um, if he had been, I may, I hate to say this, you know, but if he had been, if we'd been able to get him out, he would have left, but it went on for hours and hours and hours. And we, we were running IVs over, running, running them, and finally it was like, yeah, he's gone, you know, heartbreaking, you know, but, um, um,

• 2:32:41Speaker 02

  it was, um, yeah, so it was dark, pitch black.

• 2:32:46Jocko Willink?

  Now.

• 2:32:48Jocko Willink?

  So you end up pulling up in one of these buildings for the night, right?

• 2:32:52Speaker 02

  At the crash site.

• 2:32:53Jocko Willink?

  At the crash site.

• 2:32:53Speaker 02

  So when we, um, when we moved from our initial point where we got hit, we moved across to Scotty Miller. And then he, we went to the crash site from there, F team did. We posted a team, so there were a couple of teams that moved up, F team was one of them. And I could get them mixed up because it's been a long time, but Bravo team, I think, went. Um, we didn't have anybody on the north side of the perimeter for on the crash site. We had a SARB team on there and we had moved up from the south. So Miller and a couple of guys were on the, uh, west side of the crash. When I say west side, you're talking half a block, you know, maybe less.

• 2:33:35Speaker 02

  And then we didn't, we had the, the position that we had just vacated was occupied by, uh, you had the casualties, but you had a ranger, ranger block and position there too, that had some guys who were, were capable of fighting and they had ammo. So they, they kind of had the southern side of it. But nobody was really to the east of the crash site or to the north of it. So when we pushed over there, when we left Miller's position, we pushed a team on the north side, which was Baza's team. And that, that little courtyard where all that, the grenades were coming over, he cleared that out and occupied there. So we didn't have to worry about that anymore. And then the F team, uh, my team moved through the crash site to the, to the east of it.

• 2:34:15Speaker 02

  And, um, uh, um, positioned ourselves to the east of that crash site to block on that end. And then, so I, I put, and I had a couple of, um, guys who were, um, not assigned to, to the assault force, but they were operators. They were, and I can't remember what, what they were doing. One of them was on the SARB, um, and one of them had been a, um, like they were, they were like a, a backup team. It was kinda like guys who were on a affiliate with a team, but we pushed them up with F team to the east of the crash site. And then I went back to the crash site with my ATL and say, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna try to get the pilot out. First thing I noticed, well, I couldn't see

• 2:35:00Speaker 02

  a pilot. I was like, there's nothing there. Just a wreckage, a pile of wreckage. And they'd pulled one of the pilots out and then I talked to one of the guys on the SRT team. He goes, no, he's in there. He's down underneath the wreckage. So when a bird crashed, it kinda crashed at a weird angle and all the engine and stuff collapsed into the, to the crew compartment. So I looked down and I could see a glove, you know. And so we started trying to take it apart with the quickie saws and everything else and went on for hours, man. And we were down to like multi tools,

• 2:35:38Speaker 02

  trying to just take stuff apart. And meanwhile, you know, you got, you got in a gunfight. And so we got a couple more guys wounded while that was going on. And then it got close to the point where, where I'm starting to worry like, man, I can't do it. You know, I'm like, I can't, I can't, I don't know what to do to get him out. And that's a, that's a terrible feeling. Cause you got to, you know, but you're like, it's like, man, I don't, I don't know what else I can do. You know, it was just a, I'd never felt that before where I was like, man, if I had a crane, I couldn't get him out, you know. And then I heard a main gun from a tank. It was like, boom, I was like,

• 2:36:23Speaker 02

  man, what was that? You know? And heard it again. And then I got a call that, hey, leave in Arsdale. So Colonel Ben Arsdale at the time, really good dude. He had been in C Squadron before. And then he moved over to JSOC and he was with the J3 shop. And he heard everything that was going on. He was over in the, in the TAC, listening to this on the radio. And

• 2:36:57Speaker 02

  Said, okay, we're going in, going in. So on his own accord, he got up, left his post, went down to the Malaysians who, again, this is a UN compound. So we had the Malaysians and the Pakis. And he goes, um, uh, give me your, give me your APCs.

• 2:37:14Speaker 02

  Right. Give me, and they had like a, their version of an APC, which looks, it looks kind of like a, um, a lav, right? Like a Marine Corps lav. Um, I can't remember who made it, but, but, um, it was a little wheeled armored personnel carrier with a main, with a gun on the top of it. Don't ask me what kind. It was like a 30 millimeter or something like that. But, um, um, so, um, he got them and he walked over to the Pakis and said, give me your tanks, right? With the drivers. And so he, he basically cobbled together this reaction force of, uh, UN guys and, uh, 10th Mountain. There was a 10th Mountain unit there was, that was the designated QRF, Quick Reaction Force. And we never met them.

• 2:37:58Speaker 02

  And that's one of the things we did wrong. They were, we were like, I will never use them, but they're there if we need them. We should have gone over and introduced ourselves and gone through some sort of, uh, at least rock, rock trail or something, right? But we never did because we were like, uh, that was so many layers deep. We were like, I would probably never do that. And, uh, going back on it now would be the first thing I would do. But he got those guys with, uh, so they were in their, uh, their Humvees, which by the way, we armored up with sandbags back then. We just piled up sandbag. We didn't have armored, up armored Humvees. And, um, and he had some Malaysian, um, um, fighting vehicles, you know, for lack of better terms, and then a couple of Paki tanks. And, um, I remember thinking when he was, when those tanks were going off, I was like, well, I hope he knows what he's doing, you know? Uh, uh, because, uh,

• 2:38:42Jocko Willink?

  Blue on blue with the gang.

• 2:38:44Speaker 02

  Wouldn't, wouldn't hurt. But anyway, he came rolling in there. And, um,

• 2:38:47Jocko Willink?

  Did you, now this whole time, the, did you know that Super Six Four had gone down as well?

• 2:38:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:38:53Jocko Willink?

  You didn't even know that this had happened?

• 2:38:54Speaker 02

  No, I got one radio call early in the day, you know? Um, as we, before we got to the first crash site. So before we got to six one, I got a radio call from, uh, Granny Sugar. And he said, and it just, he was on the assault net and it, um, uh, or the command net, sorry. And, uh, I got this, uh, weird call. It was like, hey, uh, uh, I was Fox one at ten. What's your location? I said, we're on, en route to the crash site. And he goes, how long? And at the time, you're thinking I'll be there in a minute. I said, five minutes. And he said, uh, hurry. And that was the last I heard of him. But I didn't know. Um, so when I got to the crash site, I'm thinking he's there at the first crash site.

• 2:39:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:35Speaker 02

  And I remember thinking when I got there, I wonder where he's at. But, you know, you're thinking he's out on a perimeter or something. And, um, never gave it a second thought. But, um, um, no idea that it went down.

• 2:39:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:49Speaker 02

  And, um, you know, we were so, and everything was invested into the first one. You know, but, um, um.

• 2:39:56Jocko Willink?

  So the APCs make it.

• 2:39:58Speaker 02

  Make it there. Well, they, yeah, they make it up there on, um, um, we had some Humvees that came in and they made it to the crash site, physically to the crash site and a couple of APCs that were about maybe a hundred meters away in a tank. So, um, um, but, um, that doesn't make you feel better because they wiped out a bunch of pack of tanks before we got there. Right? So, so, um, but it's good to, you know, now at least, you know, we got something going, you know? And, um, so we pulled the vehicles around and we used the vehicles. We'd used, um, fast ropes and these heavy duty tow straps to basically yank the vehicle apart until we could get access. And, um, um, and it went pretty quick.

• 2:40:40Speaker 02

  And I'm glad it did because sun started to come up. And, um, we didn't have our NVGs. We had a couple pairs that we had scavenged off the aircraft. But we went in, you know, in the afternoon thinking we're gonna be back and we should have carried them with us.

• 2:40:53Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's another lesson we took from you guys. Like, we never went anywhere.

• 2:40:56Speaker 02

  Never go anywhere without them.

• 2:40:58Jocko Willink?

  Never go anywhere without those things. I mean, we might not wear them, but we have them in a pouch.

• 2:41:02Speaker 02

  If you think about it, though, it just doesn't make sense not to. Because what if you go in a building, you're in a basement, it's dark. Right? I mean, you never know when it can get dark. And you may not be planning to stay there until it gets dark, but it you might be there. And I would never, that's one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. And, um, and I made a lot of them, but that's one of the biggest ones. But, um, um, but, um, um, we, we had MVGs enough to put out with the guys on like the saw. And the two or three gunner, they had, you know, MVGs. And so the guys out on these little, you know, blocking positions minus. At least they could see, you know, but I was thinking, man, when this thing gets daylight, these now they can see.

• 2:41:46Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, cause they'd literally walk down the street into a, into a, you know, into a, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and, uh, but I was thinking this is about to get crazy. And, um, at some point though, we got a call, it was like, Hey, look, uh, you guys are going to have to, uh, this is before Van Arsdale showed up. You guys are gonna have to get everybody you got, once you get, uh, the pilot out, get everybody you got. And we don't have the resources to come get you, you're gonna have to walk to the Pecy Stadium.

• 2:42:15Speaker 02

  I don't wanna say it's a mile, but it, in your mind, it's a, it's a hundred miles. Because, um, now you're, we had 70% casualties. And so you're thinking, okay, I got in here hard enough to move here a couple of blocks. Healthy. Now I gotta carry people out of here.

• 2:42:33Speaker 02

  Three times as far. And I remember getting that call and that's again, one of those things where you go, oh, you kind of gulp, you know? And normally things are so busy, you don't have time to think about stuff like that. But when you get that call, it's, oh man, you know, and I was thinking, man, please. Figure this out. You know, I was like, cause I just, I had this sinking feeling if we did that, that, you know, it was gonna be terrible.

• 2:42:56Jocko Willink?

  Were you thinking about like, hey, no, we're gonna hold up in a building and we're gonna strong point a building? And you leave some tanks here and we're gonna stay here until you assemble a force to get us out of here?

• 2:43:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I, I just.

• 2:43:06Jocko Willink?

  Staying in the city just seemed like even worse.

• 2:43:08Speaker 02

  There was so much going through your head at the time. I just remember getting that call thinking, damn. You know, and then, and then you just get the sense of urgency like, God damn, you know, get, just get, I'm gonna take care of my one meter of ground and I gotta get this guy out. And it's like, it's almost like, um, you become hyper focused. And, and I don't know whether that is a, a defense mechanism. I, I thought about that a lot. I wonder if it's like, um, I didn't like that, to hear that. So, boom, I'm gonna just kill dudes. You know, I mean, kinda like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna work on this. And I'm gonna just deny that I just heard that. You know, I, I, you know, and it's a weird thing. And I, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. But, um, um, but, um, it's almost like

• 2:43:49Speaker 02

  my, uh, childhood ADD kicked in. It was like, I'm just, you know, I can't worry about what's happening tomorrow, what's happening in a minute, or what I just heard. I just have to, I'm just gonna shoot. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a weird, and maybe it's a flaw. I don't know. But I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And I don't hide my flaws from anybody.

• 2:44:08Jocko Willink?

  Might be a feature. It might be a feature or a flaw. It might be a feature like, hey, there's one thing you gotta get done.

• 2:44:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, I'm gonna, I can't worry about that. I gotta do this right now. And I'll worry about that when I get to it. But I, I felt a lot like I did, um, when I was playing with an airplane in the corner, I was in first grade. You know, it was kinda like, I'm just gonna deal with this right now. I mean, I'm not worried about the 12 year penitentiary sentence that I got coming at me. But, um, uh, but, um, it was weird. And I don't know if everybody goes through that, but I did. I was like, I can't believe I just heard what I heard. You know, because my, for, in a, in an instant, I thought, man. You know, my West Texas math started kicking. I'm like, dude, we just, we just took, half the guys are wounded. And we gotta move daylight through that, carrying guys, carrying KIA

• 2:44:55Speaker 02

  and WIA. And I went, okay, I'll just deal with this. You know, it was, it was a weird, weird thing that happened to me. You know, um, and I think about that a lot. My man, what, what was going through your head? You know, because I had no, uh, response to it. I guess. It was just a, but it was a weird dynamic. Something happened in my brain that clicked. My little, you know, my little cowboy brain just went, okay, dude, just, you know, do what you can do here. And just forget you heard that, kinda thing. And, um, um, I can't explain it, but odd. But then the, you know, the vehicles, uh, started, started showing up. And, um, um,

• 2:45:35Speaker 02

  Of course, if Van Arsdale hadn't made that call, you know, I don't, I don't know what would have happened. We would have tried to walk out, I guess. Um, but, um, we pulled that vehicle apart with the vehicles, uh, I'm not the Harold Helo apart with the vehicles and then, um, got the pilot out. And then, uh, we had so many casualties, we couldn't put people on the APCs or the vehicles. We just loaded K I and W I on there. And, um, we, and the main body of 10th Mountain had posted up maybe, I don't know, maybe quarter of a mile south of us. And they couldn't get the whole bunch through, they just got through a few. And then we went down there, um, and linked up with them and then moved to the Paki Stadium.

• 2:46:17Speaker 02

  And, um, part of the way by foot, but I remember being in the back of a Hummer, you know, that we got on down at the link up site. So we ran to the link up site and, um, uh, jumped in the back of a Hummer with the rest of the guys and they started going. And then, um, we ran, we got to a point where they had a roadblock up. So now you're piled in the back of this vehicle at an intersection, trying to get a roadblock cleared. And I'm thinking, man, dude, I'd rather be out walking, you know, cause, cause you just any minute, you know, uh, you, you got that feel coming. But then we got to the Paki Stadium and then, and then it was like, you know, up to that point, you're looking at the one meter of ground you're on and the problem you're solving. But when I got to that Paki Stadium, it was just surreal. It was like, um, as soon as I walked in, they said, uh, they offered me tea and rice, tea and food, you know, they had.

• 2:47:02Speaker 02

  And I was like, and I looked around and there were vehicles shot to pieces. There were casualties laying out, K I laid out on the ground, not, not just, um, just us, but the, the 10th Mountain guys. And, and I was looking around going, man, you know, what, what just happened? And it was like, it really was surreal and a sun was coming up. And, um, they came over and they said, uh, Scott Miller came over and goes, hey, get your shit on, we gotta go, we gotta go back out. I went, what's up? And he said, um, we got a bird down. I was like, what are you talking about? And he goes, yeah, we got another aircraft down. No way. And he goes, yep. I said, when did he go down? He goes, not sure, but he goes,

• 2:47:40Speaker 02

  get your shit on, let's go. And so, um, we, um, we flew from Paki Stadium back to the hangar, because that's where our gear was. And we started, uh, trying to reconsolidate as best we could, you know, put some teams together. And then, um, uh, 10th Mountain had gone out. One of the, one of the other guys, absolute savage, his name is John Masonus, um, really cool guy. And, um, he had gone out with 10th Mountain because he was actually one of the guys on the, on the aircraft that was flying around dropping resupplies. So we were getting our, our, um, and he was, he had been on a sniper team. So he wasn't part of the assault force. So he was on the heel kicking resupply bundles to us. And then at some point he got with 10th Mountain

• 2:48:24Speaker 02

  and, um, led a, um, a group of guys to the six-four. And when he got there, it, there was, you know, a bunch of casings, some blood trails and, um, um, no, no survivors. And Durant was already, you know, captured, but, um, no traces of the other guys because they were, you know, they'd already been, you know, drugged them through the street and everything else. But, um, um, we estimate that that, that battle probably lasted about half an hour. And I was, and this is secondhand information, I wasn't privy to it until the next day. But, um, um, we think it was probably 30 minutes total that they fought it out. Um, there's

• 2:49:06Speaker 02

  one surviving member of that team, and he'd probably give our good guy to talk to to get that perspective. And his name is Brad Holling. Um, um, just left the unit as a civilian, he was a civilian OTC instructor there. But, um, he could tell you the story on it. But I just get it, you know, secondhand. But, um, by all accounts, it was a, you know, when they got put into a, to a meat grinder and, um, lasted maybe half an hour.

• 2:49:38Speaker 02

  So you're reconsolidating gear and getting ready to go back? Getting ready to go back out. And um, we still didn't really know what we're looking at. I mean, what went down, you know, and um, but we got reports back from uh, from the guys who had been there. And I believe it was just Mace, if I'm not mistaken. Again, I'm still trying to piece it together, you know, thirty something years later, but I think it was just John, Mace Owens, that called back, said, there's nothing there. It's a burr, it's down, and it's, but there's no bodies, there are no survivors that I can find. And um, and then we started, you know, we got, okay, now we've got guys missing, we don't know they're dead. You know, we don't know, you know, um, how many were killed, how many are maybe prisoners?

• 2:50:24Speaker 02

  Um, and so we started doing uh, profile flights, so we started sending guys out in helos, flying, listening. Uh, we had, I wasn't listening, but we had guys that were um, capable of picking up on their transmissions, trying to vector in on it. And they had, we were trying to find their brick one-twelves. I don't know if they still use those when you're young. Yeah, yeah, we used them. But um, we were trying to vector in on them, and we actually um, we did vector in on one of them, and basically we heard a bunch of chatter on it. That was Somali chatter. So we knew, I was like, well, that ain't good, you know, that ain't good. And so um, um, kind of lose track of what happened with that, but at the end of the day, they negotiated a way out of it.

• 2:51:06Speaker 02

  So we were, we were going to, and of course, I'm gonna tell you right now, if they had turned us loose in that city in any capacity, the mind was different. And um, I go back and forth on whether they should have or shouldn't have, but it's probably good for us that they didn't. You know, um, because it would have been a Denver ballgame, you know? Um, it was personal, as you know, you know, guys in special operations in any unit, but especially guys in spec ops, you spend a lot of time with each other. You know, it's not like guys come in for a year or two and leave. You, you, you know their, you know them, you know their kids, you know their wives, you know, their mom, their dad. And um, so it was um, it was personal, so it may have been a good idea that we didn't go back out in it.

• 2:51:51Speaker 02

  But um, basically, they came in, I can't remember the guy they sent in, he was a State Department guy, and he, he went to him and said, look, right now, you're dealing with me. And you need to, you need to return the remains of the, of anybody that was killed and you need to release any survivors. Tomorrow, you're going to be dealing with a different group of guys and I'm not responsible for what they do. And I released Mike Durant.

• 2:52:21Jocko Willink?

  How much longer did you stay on the ground there?

• 2:52:23Speaker 02

  Um, we actually, um, and again, I, I, um, trying to remember, but a couple of weeks, maybe a month. But on October 6th, we were, um, and I should know this, I mean, but he gets, when we get old, I can't remember if they released Mike Durant before or after October 6th. But, um, um, October 6th, we're standing around, um, and the JSOC guys had come over from the headquarters. So we had General Downing, um, who was the JSOC commander at the time. We had Jesse Lay, who was a CSM with JSOC, I believe, and I could be wrong. And I'm sure there's some guy out there, Sharpshoot, but that's the way I remember.

• 2:53:03Speaker 02

  But, um, um, we were standing around doing a hot wash. And so it was the first time we really started, um, being able to get the big picture together. Like, okay, what happened with the vehicles and what happened with crash site with 6-1 and 6-4 and where were you and what was 10th Mountain? And, and it was like, we were trying to figure out what just happened. And, and we were all standing around outside the front of the hangar. And, um, um, we were talking and it became a heated discussion. A little bit of finger pointing going on. And, um, General Harrell, or Colonel Harrell at the time, he was the C Squadron

• 2:53:43Speaker 02

  Commander. And, um, he said, hey, guys, let's cool off. Take a break. Come back in a few, you know, 30 minutes or whatever, and we'll, we'll pick up where we left off, but cool off. And a couple of guys had been, it was kind of a Contentious and it was kind of like unit on unit contentious. So it was like, well, you guys did this or you guys did that, which is not, not healthy, right? And so, um, General Harrow was doing his best to diffuse it and he said, okay, stay, you stay, I want to talk to you for a minute and you stay, I want to talk to you for a minute. And as I remember turning around to walk back to the hangar and I took maybe 10 steps and a mortar landed

• 2:54:23Speaker 02

  right there where we were, we're, um, having the hot wash and, um, killed, uh, Matt Ryerson, probably the, if not the best operator in, in C Squadron. He was one of the top operators in C Squadron and he was one of those dudes that was just a natural leader. Everybody loved him. You know, everybody's important in those units and you, and you miss every one of them. But when he, those are some guys that kind of are the heart and soul of the organization. He was one of them. And, um, um, and it was just devastating. So we lost him. We had, um, General Harrow almost, almost died. He was hit and I think the frag

• 2:55:02Speaker 02

  went through his femur, cut his femoral artery. And, um, he was bleeding out and then the surgeon was standing there, um, John Marsh and, uh, his dad used to be John O'Marsh Jr., the Secretary of the Army. And he was a, he was the JSOC surgeon and, um, he, um, he was hit, nearly died. Um, General Downing was hit. General Boykin was hit, who was the unit commander. Um, Sergeant Major Lay was hit. Um, and several other guys were hit. And, um, and of course, Matt was killed, um, by that mortar. So it, I'd insult the injury, you know, three days,

• 2:55:42Speaker 02

  three days after October 3rd, you know, that's what happened. But, um, and I'm trying to remember if there's anything else, but yeah, that was, that was, that was a kick in the nuts. Um, and it just made matters worse. We were like, okay, now, you know, and we felt like at the time was like, now we need to be able to go out. You need to, you guys need to turn us loose. We want to.

• 2:56:05Speaker 02

  We're not going to sit here and be, you know, shooting, you know, sitting ducks for anybody. We want to go back out and fight and, and we couldn't understand, you know, what the deal was. And, um, um, and then of course you had the politics at the time and they negotiated their, you know, way out of it. And very couple of weeks later, we went home. Um, and I didn't like that. I was like, you know what? I feel like we got, we got unfinished business over there. And, you know, you brought us home. I felt like at the time it was like, cause it's not politically correct for you to do it anymore. It's not, it's not something that's good for you. But, um, it was never about politics with the guys on the ground. This is, you know, if it's worth us going in and risking our lives and dying over, then you need a lot of do our thing.

• 2:56:45Speaker 02

  And, um, um, it just, it, you know, that was kind of the, but that's a story that plays out in every conflict in every generation, right? You know, you have politicians, um, doing what they do, and then you have us doing what we do. And sometimes they don't, they don't always line up.

• 2:57:05Speaker 02

  How was it, uh, when you get back home? Um, you know, the biggest, um, um,

• 2:57:15Speaker 02

  the thing I remember going back home was that, you know, you go back home to these families. And, um, it's a sense of like, man, you know, you, you don't even want to, if you love them. Because again, you're talking about extended families, you know, and, uh, um,

• 2:57:31Speaker 02

  you see these kids and your wives and, and you know, wait a minute, I, I lost something pretty special. I lost a, a mate. But this is going to change the trajectory of your family, not just for this generation, but for generations to come. And, um, you know, I was, uh, um, married a second time, uh, uh, had been married maybe about a year. And when, and my wife's name is Bonnie, when she came, came on board, you know, it was a bunch of young, young guys and their wives, young families. And it was fun, you know, you'd hang out at team parties, you know, you, you, and you were like this big extended family. And, um, um, it, it devastates everybody, but it really devastated the family and my wife.

• 2:58:15Speaker 02

  You know, I, I remember towards the end of my career, when I got ready to make a decision to get out or stay in. She was like, you know, Norm. If you haven't been paying attention, she goes, you remember when we used to hang out with, with Barb and Trish and Steph and Carmen and we'd go hang out and do team parties and, and she goes, you know, when I go back there now, she goes, I'm the only one that has a living husband. The rest of them are widows. And she goes, I, I don't want to do this anymore with you. You know, um, so if you go forward with your, your life, good luck, but I'm, I know, she goes, I know, you know, I feel like she had this sense of impending doom and that it came.

• 2:58:55Speaker 02

  I think it started in Somalia, you know, and she was, I stayed in another 10 years. But she was never the same after that. You know, it was more serious to her. And when you're gone away for a long trip, you may do nothing for months, but they don't know that. You know, they don't know what's happening. Um, so seeing the families when I came back and, um, how it affected them still, still, still troubles me the most, I think of anything. Cause you know, we all eventually, we, we choose what we do. I wouldn't have done anything else. I know those guys wouldn't either. I mean, they loved what they did.

• 2:59:35Speaker 02

  They were very proud to be, um, uh, special operators in the army and, and of course in the Navy. And we had some great SEALs there with us too. Um, but, um, um, but, uh, and if any one of them had been left off the mission, they, I guarantee you, they would have been raising hell back home. But the families don't, don't get to do that. You know, and they just kind of sit back there and wait and see what happens. And that was brutal. And, um, um, still to this day, you know, have a little sense of survivor's guilt.

• 3:00:10Jocko Willink?

  Yes, that is one thing. So through, so through the nineties for me, it was like, um, you'd think about doing one mission, basically like one big mission. And by the time I was in Iraq, my second deployment where I, you know, I lost my first guy and Mark Lee, it's like,

• 3:00:31Jocko Willink?

  We're going back out, you know, in a couple of days. And like, that's just what's gonna happen. And, you know, the army was taking so many, the army and Marine Corps taking so many casualties. It was freaking rough and horrible. And yet, it's like, you're gonna get your gear back on, you're gonna go back out. That's what everyone's gonna do over and over again, in the same exact streets where you just had, where you just lost a guy. Yep, you're going, you're going. And the fact that it's, it's just not gonna stop. And then like on the home front, like my wife was going to my guys' funerals.

• 3:01:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01:08Jocko Willink?

  And going to visit my guys in the hospital that were really badly wounded. And that was a whole new, you know, a whole new, a whole new scenario.

• 3:01:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01:19Jocko Willink?

  And, and all those families that were going to the guys' funerals.

• 3:01:24Jocko Willink?

  In their minds, they might as well be going to their husband, brother, son funeral. That's what, that's what it seems like.

• 3:01:32Jocko Willink?

  When, when you guys got back, I mean, did you guys, obviously you must have had some like memorial, incredible memorial services. And then it's like, okay, now we're back on the game.

• 3:01:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, we, um, we had a memorial service in Somalia.

• 3:01:51Speaker 02

  You know, where we had, and it was interesting that we lost, um, there were nineteen, um, guys killed in that day. And but, but eighteen of them came out of TF Rangers. So, um, and it's funny, it was six, six guys from, from my unit, six guys from Rangers, and six guys from Task Force One Sixty. So they were all, you know, six, six and six. And then, um, of, um, of course, you know, seventy percent wounded. I mean, it's hard to find a guy that wasn't. And, um, um, but, um, um, we got back, we had a, had a memorial service. But you know how it is, you know, you don't, at that time, I can't remember what we worked up for.

• 3:02:32Speaker 02

  I believe it was Pablo Escobar, you know, so we get back, we, we, um, um, reorganize. We, we try to fill our ranks the best we could and we start working on those next, those next problem sets. And, um,

• 3:02:48Speaker 02

  You know, you wonder, you gotta be a little off to, you know, be able to live that. You can't be normal. And, um, because you just go, okay, that happened and now I've got this hot board coming up for this next, next job, you know, and, uh, but that's, I think, um, what makes, uh, guys like you, you and the guys in the army different, you know, is you're able to, to do that. And, um, it doesn't work well in all careers, but it works perfect in that one. Right? You know, but, um, um, yeah, you just get ready for the next one. And that's, that's something that people, soldiers have done forever, right? Oh, yeah.

• 3:03:33Speaker 02

  You just, uh, sharpen your sword and move on. Did you, what kind of changes did you see in training? So, um, um, I, the silver lining to, to, uh, Somalia was that, you know, in the army, they used to say, we're always fighting the last war. So when, um, when they went into Korea, they fought like they had in World War Two. When they went into World War Two, they fought kind of like they remembered fighting in World War One. Um, but there's been enough time between those conflicts to where nobody had ever really done it. They just knew what they, what was written down. Somebody else wrote in a book. And so not only did the, did the procedures, the tactics, techniques, procedures and equipment not apply anymore.

• 3:04:17Speaker 02

  They had no context because they, you know, um, they just read what somebody else wrote. Um, what Somalia did, and it was unforeseen, was that, um, first thing that we'd notice when we got back, and I remember talking to General Boykin, I said, you know, I looked back over the history of the unit and, uh, we, we, um, we crashed a Hilo in, uh, Grenada. And we had to go in on ground and get it out. We crashed a Hilo in Panama. We had to go in and get it on the ground and get it out. We crashed Hilo's in Somalia, had to go to the ground and get it out. In Desert Storm, we crashed a Hilo. Had to go by ground on vehicle, get it out. And I said, and every time I go out and I do training with a SWAT team in Houston, or Dallas, or Pittsburgh, or New Orleans,

• 3:05:02Speaker 02

  they have an APC, they have an armored vehicle. And we always borrow a light-skinned vehicle from somebody like 10th Mountain and drive through town with Protext and think because we're badasses that nobody's gonna shoot us. I said, but the other guys don't know who we are, you know, and they don't care. They're gonna shoot at us and we take casualties because we don't. So, so why don't we have armored vehicles? And there was a big fight in the unit, you know, about should we have armored vehicles or not? And that's, that's not really cool. That's not a, you know, that's not commando stuff. And Kevlar helmets are, you know, are dorky looking,

• 3:05:45Speaker 02

  you know, kind of stuff. I mean, really, I mean, it may sound ridiculously petty, but those are the conversations that were going on. And, and the big problem with the vehicles were like, hey, look, it's more than just bringing in vehicles. You have to bring in all the supplies and logistics and the garage, the mechanics and stuff to go with it. So it's a big money item. But if you look at an armored vehicle, and knowing what I know about how you fight in a city with AT weapons, so any tank weapons, you have to be a next level of training to hit a moving vehicle with a, with a, with an AT weapon, like a RPG. There may be a lot of them out there, but I know because of my experience, like

• 3:06:27Speaker 02

  in Panama, that yeah, if I'm driving fast and they're at the wrong angle, I can, I can defeat them by, by tactics and speed. And they may get lucky and hit one of these vehicles, but they're not going to be able to consistently engage me with RPGs all the time and hit me if I'm moving an armored vehicle. And 90% of the guys on the battlefield don't have an RPG. They have an AK-47. So if I look at it from a math point, I can, I can decrease my casualties maybe by 90% or decrease the number of people who can kill me by 90% just by changing the vehicle. And I can mitigate the others by using tactics.

• 3:07:05Speaker 02

  So it only makes sense. I said, if we're gonna be fighting in cities, you know, let's not think we're gonna drive through cities in, in, uh, um, you know, light-skinned vehicles anymore. So they put together this, uh, team of guys. And again, there was a lot of resistance in the unit at the time. But, you know, we don't really want these. We don't need these. And, um, um, and the other thing was we'd always had to rely on other people's drive and driving them. Guys you hadn't worked with before.

• 3:07:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:30Speaker 02

  Right. And so, um, we, um, me and a guy named Jody Nacy and a couple other guys, um, first place we went was Camp Lejeune. We went down and, and we, Army had Bradleys, right? And you had M113s. Those are tracked. We didn't have any wheeled armored vehicles at the time that I know of. Right? Marine Corps did. The LAV. So we went down to Camp Lejeune and we, we walked, we went out and worked with, I can't remember what unit it was, but, um, we went in and looked at their labs, did some, watched them do some training. And I was like, man, um, they do a lot of good stuff with these things. One, you can swim it. Not that we would ever do that, but you can, right? It's got a two-foot vertical

• 3:08:10Speaker 02

  step. Um, you can shoot mortars out of the back of it, you know? Um, and, um, you can reduce by 90% the number of people who can get on a battlefield, roughly, right? You know? Cause, uh, most people have an AK-47. And the guys having RPGs don't know how to use them. But, um, so, um, we, um, looked at those and at the time, I can't remember if they were renewing the contract on them or something, but we ended up going up to, uh, Cadillac Gage, which I think was in Detroit. And we looked at this new bunch of stuff that was coming down. And we looked at stuff all over the world, but we ended up buying, um, um,

• 3:08:52Speaker 02

  what was it? It was a-

• 3:08:54Jocko Willink?

  They just got the pens hours?

• 3:08:55Speaker 02

  Uh, we had a pens gar- uh, it was a light-skinned vehicle. But I want to say it was a, uh, Pander, Pander.

• 3:09:02Jocko Willink?

  Oh, Pander.

• 3:09:03Speaker 02

  Pander, yeah. The Pander. So we bought the Pander. And, um, and of course, you know, um, uh, tier one guys use different money. But, um, and we started using them. And there were a lot of guys when I was down, you know? But, um, um, but I think at the end of it, and I was gone by, by the time they really started coming into their own. But I, guys were calling me, oh yeah, guys are, everybody's calling these, calling you at Barnum now. But, um, I don't remember, I don't forget, uh, um, Shinseki, General Shinseki was, uh-

• 3:09:33Speaker 02

  Chairman? Chairman and Joint Chiefs, I think at the time, yeah, he came in for a capabilities exercise. And we came, and he was an armored dude. Oh, yeah. Right, he was an armored dude. He was either really excited or really pissed, which one was it? Yeah, he was pissed at first, so, but he got excited about it, but he, uh, we come rolling in the Panthers, he goes, "Hey," he goes, "Uh, where'd you get those?" And, um, I wasn't the guy that was explaining it, I think it was, uh, I think it was, uh, uh, General Harold at the time, but he was, uh, he was pissed that we went outside the Army procurement system to get them. And then, uh, and then it became, "Tell me why are you doing that and not using the, the Bradley, or you're not using what we have?" And then when we went through the, and I didn't do it, so the, you know, obviously the guys

• 3:10:17Speaker 02

  above my level did it, they, they explained to him why we made that choice. Um, he was like, "I like this." And he went out to, uh, Fort Lewis, and he started this Striker program. Oh, got it. Right, so, going back to your question about, what are some of the things that happened after Somalia? Had that not happened, you know, we lost nineteen guys. And, um, um, that sounds a lot, and it is a lot, one's too many, if it's a friend. Indeed. But, um, we were better prepared for the global war on terror when it kicked off in the, you know, early two thousands, because we'd already been working with Panthers and, and, um, had realized what, what we, what you could see in that type of environment

• 3:11:01Speaker 02

  and the enemy, the profile that enemy was similar. You know, so, um, um, and they evolved as well, but we like to think we evolved faster. Um, so, um, but, um, so we started integrating like, um, one, the services started working closer together. Right, so you started seeing, I mean, we were working close anyway, but guys started, started becoming more familiar with each other because we realized, "Hey, man, this is, this is a heavy lift." And, you know, you can't work in a silo, because you're gonna be working with other people, and, and you're gonna need them. Right, and so we started working very closely with Navy Special Warfare, working with the Air Force guys, um, and, um, um...

• 3:11:42Speaker 02

  And then we start our equipment evolved, you know? And so I like to think that because of Somalia, when we started the global war on terror, we weren't fighting the last war.

• 3:11:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:52Speaker 02

  We were better prepared for the war they were in.

• 3:11:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:54Speaker 02

  And, uh.

• 3:11:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like I was saying, I mean, I think that you what you guys did and we got, we got debriefs and of course, like you said, it's still 30 years later. However, many years later, people are still figuring out what happened, but like we had seals that were there. Oh, yeah. Debrief us on what happened and what to watch out for and what to, you know, be careful of and, you know, it's like we were paying attention, you know? We were listening. We were trying to take whatever lessons we could from that. Um, and even like, uh, it's interesting.

• 3:12:23Jocko Willink?

  Like we were using MP5s, you know?

• 3:12:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:12:25Jocko Willink?

  In the early nineties.

• 3:12:26Speaker 02

  Love them, man.

• 3:12:27Jocko Willink?

  And I mean, I love the MP5 and it's, you know, I was, when people ask me like what they, what should they get for a home defense weapon? I'm like MP5 all day. Like your, your eight year old kid can freaking drive nails with that thing.

• 3:12:40Speaker 02

  Man, it's cool. I mean, accurate.

• 3:12:42Jocko Willink?

  But in the street, it's like, no chance.

• 3:12:44Speaker 02

  If you're gonna fight in a permissive environment, it's a cool, uh, if you get the right ammo and stuff, it's a cool piece of gear.

• 3:12:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:50Speaker 02

  But if you gotta fight from house to house.

• 3:12:51Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:12:52Speaker 02

  You gotta fight your way in and out.

• 3:12:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:53Speaker 02

  Man, you don't want it. But I was one of the guys that was like, I don't want to, when we had a tournament, I was like, I want to keep mine. I don't want to turn it down because I love shooting so much, but, um.

• 3:13:01Jocko Willink?

  That makes everyone a freaking the best shot in the world.

• 3:13:04Speaker 02

  Shoots itself.

• 3:13:05Jocko Willink?

  So it does.

• 3:13:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:06Jocko Willink?

  But that's like the type of thing where we looked at and go, oh yeah, well, what happened over there? What, you know, if you guys would have been in the streets with MP5s, it would have been a disaster.

• 3:13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Bad business.

• 3:13:16Jocko Willink?

  So we, we definitely tried to pay attention to what you guys did. And the other big thing was like force on force training where, you know, in the early nineties, man, I was, me and my platoon were freaking the best guys in the world. Against paper targets hanging on a wall.

• 3:13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:32Jocko Willink?

  You know, and all of a sudden, when we said, okay, here we got simunition and eventually we got a high speed laser tag system. Those a lot better than miles gear, but that stuff really lets you. It's like jujitsu, right? And jujitsu, one of the best things about jujitsu is you and I can train and we can try and kill each other. And if you want to, you just tap and okay, we, we start again. You know, you can't do that with live fire. You can't go force on force with live fire, but and you, and it, and live fire takes away the two things that the enemy is gonna do. That that you have to watch out for move and shoot back like it's so easy to be an enemy that doesn't move it doesn't shoot back. So when we were able to start doing that, and again, I think a lot of that came from, hey, we need to open up our minds because the things that we do in the kill house against paper targets.

• 3:14:17Jocko Willink?

  For instance, stacking 12 guys in the hallway to while we're waiting to move down the hallway. It's like, yeah, that that's not a good idea. And so that definitely changed our mentality and started getting us moving in the right direction. And how about from a from like a strategic perspective, I I again, my first appointment to Iraq, um, we went out and hit a target. And like, you know, it was like, you know, I got I got the target package from intel. Here's a neighborhood and there's a building and there's an X on it. And they're like, yeah, bad guy, this building. I'm like, cool. We go out, we hit the building and we get in there. And of course, it's like some random family and where we start asking, you know, well, you know, who do you know this guy is?

• 3:15:00Jocko Willink?

  And they're like, oh, yeah, that guy's two doors down. And we're like, oh, okay, sorry. We walk out, but you know, here I am thinking, you know, this is terrible. We just breached this freaking normal Iraqi family. We gave them money in the whole nine yards, but still it's not, that's not good business. So I get back and I go, I go to my intel, I go, hey, who drew this red X here? And that, and you know, the first guy is like, well, I, well, it was like that when I got to it. Well, who gave it to you? And I go up the chain of command and finally it was like just some random person. That was like, yeah, we we got information that it was one of the buildings in this neighborhood. Drew a circle around the neighborhood and picked the building in the middle and put a red X on it. And that's the building we hit. And even if it did just dug down a little bit, we could have gotten more clarification.

• 3:15:43Jocko Willink?

  But that changed my attitude as far as like what we're gonna do and why we're gonna do it. And did you get, and now, you know, you're looking back at what happened in Mogadishu. You know, a month later, six months later, a year later. And I even saw this with my guys like in Ramadi, you know, we first get to Ramadi, like you were saying, you couldn't leave, you couldn't get a guy. I couldn't pay a guy cash money to stay back from going on an operation. Like they were going no matter what. You fast forward three months, we're taking casualties. It's like, you know, when I, we, we say, hey, here's, here's what we're doing tonight. Some guys like, wait, why are we doing that? Like they start asking those questions.

• 3:16:23Speaker 02

  Right, they wake up.

• 3:16:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they start waking up and it's like, hold on, why are we doing this? What's the situation? What are we trying to make happen? What's the purpose of this? Which is what you want, right? Of course, that's what you want. Did you, looking back, did you feel like you and, and you, the people at your team started going, hold on a second, let's, let's rethink this?

• 3:16:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, especially when it comes to helos, right? Um, and, and it's really, um, you know, I remember growing up with the guys in fifth group, the old timers from NOM. And I remember him telling me, man, hey, look, you know, you want to offset your helos, you want to set off out here. Um, don't ever come and go from the same LZ, little stuff like that, you know? That, um, that you forget. And then I look, I look, um, uh, back on Mogadishu and I go, okay. I heard that before, right? In my distant memory, but it didn't mean anything to me at the time. Right? And so, um, you know, who in their right mind thinks that over and over, you might get by with a couple of times, but who thinks in their right mind that over and over and over again,

• 3:17:24Speaker 02

  I can land a helo right enough at the front door of a target building full of bad guys? And not get that thing shot down? Yeah, right. And we had five helos shot down that day, not just two. So we had, um, one, Super Six Four. Then we had the Sar Bird, Dangelot was flying, it got hit and it flew back and crashed later at the airfield. Um, we had, um, the bird that Randy and Gordy were on, uh, when they went in, um, to get Duran out. That bird was hit, crashed at another, um, facility, um, in Somalia. And Brad was the only surviving member of that sniper team, and Brad Holling, and he lost his leg on that.

• 3:18:06Speaker 02

  Um, and there were a little more, but there were five, five that were, that were, were shot. And then, um, many, many more that were, you know, had the windshield shot out of them. You know, I remember when we went up to, we were getting near the crash site, um, They had Carl Meyer, who was flying a little bird for Task Force One Sixty. Set his bird down in the middle of the street, right near the crash site and got the windshield shot out of it. He was shooting, he was sitting there on the ground with the rotors turning. While one of the guys went to pick up Dan Bush, who had been shot and killed. And he had an MP5, shooting out, shooting out of the side of it, rotors turning windshield shot out of the halo.

• 3:18:49Speaker 02

  But yeah, you know, there's times you can get by with that, there's times you can't. But what it, what it does is it provokes you to think a lot harder when you go, okay, man. I'm gonna put a halo in here and what are all the things that can go wrong and where do I not want to put that thing? When you used to, when you grew up doing it in training a lot of time, we're gonna land on the roof, you know, whatever.

• 3:19:11Speaker 02

  Really cool in training, you know, and sometimes applicable, but risky, right? And you forget the risk involved in it. And, but in everything we did, you know, we, we would, I would always look at it after thinking, oh man. What, what can possibly go wrong here, you know?

• 3:19:30Speaker 02

  Because I, at the point, I used to think, nothing's gonna go wrong. And, and after that, I was like, everything is gonna go wrong. Right? And so I lost my optimism after that. Where I was like, I'd look at everything after that very seriously, go, man. And probably the way I should have been looking at it before, I just had no context. And we had done things before, but we'd been so successful and lucky. One of the things we'd done before builds a sense of confidence in you, there's probably a false sense of confidence.

• 3:19:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I definitely saw that with even like, like with ITCO platoons that would. You go out and do a hit and it goes well, because the enemy didn't shoot at you. And so you start going, well, we can do a little bit faster, we can. Guys got really aggressive with like surrounding the whole target. And I'm like, hmm, what if somebody starts shooting from inside that target building? Now you're on hold, this is not gonna work out the way. And for me, it was the old Vietnam guys that were like, there's only two ways to assault the target. Either you go online or you do an L at the most.

• 3:20:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:20:26Jocko Willink?

  He goes.

• 3:20:26Speaker 02

  Don't put yourself down range.

• 3:20:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, don't put yourself down range.

• 3:20:30Speaker 02

  Don't put yourself down range.

• 3:20:30Jocko Willink?

  But those lessons, man, they just, they just, they just get. They get faded out by training because training, if you make training too easy, if you make training too easy and you win every time, it gets you bad habits and you start doing the wrong things.

• 3:20:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and you know, um, um, there's some things that don't change, you know? Men don't change, you know, I mean, we're all the same as we probably were a couple thousand years ago. But, um, gear changes, weapons change, stuff like that. And so you gotta be able to, to stay relevant. And that's hard to do if you don't have, you don't have work. And, um, you know, we used to say that, you ever heard of the five monkey experiment?

• 3:21:08Jocko Willink?

  Five monkeys?

• 3:21:09Speaker 02

  Five monkey experiment.

• 3:21:10Jocko Willink?

  Let's hear it.

• 3:21:10Speaker 02

  So, so, um, and I don't know whether this is real or whether it's a made up story. It's probably made up. But, um, um, there was, they were doing a study and they took, uh, five monkeys and they put them in a room. And, um, they had a ladder in there and every day they'd put a banana on top of the ladder. And, um, um, monkey would go up and, and, uh, go for the banana. And they'd come in and they'd hose their, haul the monkeys down with, you know, the fire hose. And then, uh, they would do that every day. Right? And then, um, they'd take one of the monkeys out. Once the monkey stopped going for the, figured out that, hey, that's not, that's not the right thing to do, you know? Uh, they'd take one of them out and put a new guy in. Right?

• 3:21:54Speaker 02

  Well, what's the new guy do when he gets there, first thing? Right? He goes for the, for the banana and they hose everybody down. Right? And then, um, they move one monkey out, once he figures it out, they move another new guy in. Right? And then it gets to the point where the monkeys jump on the monkey that's, they're like, hey, don't, don't, don't do that, you know? Because, uh, we're about to all get, get, uh, skull drug for this. And, um, at some point, there are none of the original monkeys in there. Right? And everybody's jumping on the new guy when he goes for the banana. And he's like, Why are we, uh, why are you jumping on me? And he goes, that's just the way we do things around here.

• 3:22:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:36Speaker 02

  Alright, so nobody had any context.

• 3:22:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:38Speaker 02

  But they're just remember that, hey, look, they stopped hosing them down a long time ago. They just, they just learned, hey, look, jump on the new guy when he comes in with a new idea. Right? And why? That's just the way we do it.

• 3:22:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:53Speaker 02

  And I probably butchered that, but.

• 3:22:55Jocko Willink?

  No, it makes sense.

• 3:22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, um, at some point, you just, uh, there are none of the original guys left and you're doing things. And you don't know why you're doing them, you're just doing them because that's what you do.

• 3:23:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, I had that, I had that happen. I was on the west coast field teams and I went out to the east coast and the way we would do appeal, you'd like, well, what you would do is on appeal left, when you would turn, you'd turn outboard and you would check your flank and then you would turn backwards and check behind you. And what you're really supposed to be doing is shooting, like you'd shoot to your flank and you'd shoot behind you. The Vietnam guys told me, they were like, hey, when you're doing appeal, as before you peel, you turn to the flank, you dump, dump rounds and then you turn behind, you dump rounds and then you tap your guy out and you leave. But the way it looks on the range is, you know, you're like basically spinning around in a circle. It looks stupid.

• 3:23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:23:44Jocko Willink?

  And I got out to the east coast and they're like, hey, we don't do that out here. And I was like, well, what don't you do? And he goes, like, we don't do that spin, that safety spin. And I go, what safety spin? They're like, you know, when you're, when it's your turn to go, we're watching you and you're like spinning to the out and spinning around so you don't sweep anybody, but you just need to high port your weapon and you can go. And I said, oh, no, no, no, like, this is why that happens. I'm the one monkey, right? One monkey left. I was like, hey, this is why, because when you're, when you're in a firefight, you want to turn to the flank, dump rounds in case somebody's trying to flank you and then turn behind you, dump rounds in case someone's trying to, you know, come up your ass and then you can tap the guy out. And it was like one of those connections where it just got lost in the translation. No one knew why they were doing it and they eventually said, why are we doing this anymore? And there you go.

• 3:24:26Speaker 02

  Five monkeys.

• 3:24:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:27Speaker 02

  It's just the way we do things. But, uh, yeah, look it up. You've probably better, better explained on the, on the internet than I can explain it, but, uh. But yeah, you know, I look back to, you know, I mean, when I first got to group, we used to laugh, you know, young guys, you know, had this one old guy and he was like, you know what? You know, you're carrying 300 pounds of lightweight gear, we used to say, right? Because everything's lightweight, but you're gonna, you're gonna carry it. So when you add it up, it's 300 fucking pounds of gear. And so, um, we had this old guy that was an old, old crusty sergeant major goes, oh yeah, and when I was in, in NOM, I got shot and I used to carry a silver dollar that my dad gave me and it would hit the silver dollar. And so I carry a silver dollar everywhere I go now. And one guy was a Bible and we used to, a young guy's going, yeah, man, sure, I got a silver dollar,

• 3:25:11Speaker 02

  I got a Bible, I got my wallet. I mean, by the time I get to carry all this stuff that stops bullets, I, I got 500 pounds of crap, you know? Um, but, um, uh, so you, you know, it, you evolve and, and, um, and not everything's applicable. And that's why it's so important that you try to train realistically. Because sometimes you don't have work. And I think we're going to go through a phase, hopefully, God willing, we're going to go through a phase where some of these young guys have the ability to get back in shape and train and, and, and have some peacetime training, but they gotta be relevant, right? And they can't lose sight of the lessons they've learned, you know? Because 20 years of war, man, a long time.

• 3:25:55Speaker 02

  And, um, 20 years of combat and I, and I, I differentiate between the two. So I look at what goes on in war and I see Russia and Ukraine. What we were doing, what I did, I can't speak for what you guys did, but I can say that I, I, I got pretty good at combat operations. I don't know if I'd be good at war, you know? But, but, um, I was, um, I was blessed to be around guys that, you know, we, I got to participate in a lot of, uh, combat operations. I got to learn from some of the best soldiers of their generation and the generation before.

• 3:26:26Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'm ready for warfare. I, I'll watch what's going on over there where these guys are in their trenches and there's, man, that's a different game. It is a different game.

• 3:26:35Jocko Willink?

  So then post Somalia, what's the next thing that comes up for you guys? Is it the Pifwick stuff?

• 3:26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Balkans were kicking off and I think everybody was doing, I think the Navy was, Navy was doing their, their part of it. We were doing it. A couple of other organizations were doing it, but we started rotating in and out of the Balkans. And I think Strabaneza must have happened in what, 94 or something like that? I mean, if you've ever heard of the massacre of Strabaneza, nasty, nasty incident, which really kind of accelerated our involvement in, in the going after personnel indicted for war crimes, Pifwick's. And that went on for several years, but I mean, there were some, some, a few things that happened, but

• 3:27:23Speaker 02

  pretty much unremarkable, really. Lot of, lot of good workup, training time, application, kept enough going on to keep you relevant. And then it, that kind of went, went on until the end of the late, the late 90s, you know? And, and then that time I had moved, I can't remember my dates, but sometime around, I guess 95, 96, I went to S and T, so selection and training. And I was an instructor over, cadre over selection and training for a couple of years. And then rotated back in as a troop sergeant major in C Squadron at the end.

• 3:28:01Jocko Willink?

  And then you say at the end, and then you're making your decision that you're gonna, you're gonna retire?

• 3:28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I did a couple of years in S and T, loved it. I didn't want to go. I went kicking and screaming S and T. I just, I've lived in the same locker for 10 years. And I was like, I live in a team room. And I don't care less. Whatever it is you got for me, I don't want to do it. As long as I can stay on a team, I'm good. And that was just the way I thought. I had no...

• 3:28:25Speaker 02

  Ambition to be the sergeant major of the army or anything, I would just, I just wanted to kick doors. That's, that's what I love to do. And, um, um, I was never a sniper, right? You know, I was, uh, very limited in my, um, my, uh, capacity.

• 3:28:39Speaker 01

  Mark one motto, door kick. Let's go.

• 3:28:41Speaker 02

  And, um, um, you know, when they wanted something done, like, hey, we gotta do a special, special mission takes a special guy, we're gonna send a one day, I didn't get picked. But, uh, when they said, we want to send a mob through the door, I, I, I did that pretty well. I enjoyed doing it. But, um, um, but, uh, we worked some stuffs, um, with the, um, in South America with, uh, cartels and stuff like that, but limited. And again, I was blond headed, green eyed, you know, fair skinned guy. So.

• 3:29:08Speaker 01

  Going low vis.

• 3:29:09Speaker 02

  I didn't, yeah, I didn't go into medigame, um, um, none of that stuff. But, uh, um, but, um, um, S and T was a good experience for me. And I look back on it now, one of the, I really needed that, you know? Um, one, I got to work very closely with, uh, guys, uh, from the other squadrons. Um, I got to, um, you know, when you're, when you're doing something, a lot of times you're not thinking about it, you're just doing it. But when you're teaching it, somebody asks you a question, you gotta be able to answer it. And the question can come in a lot of different ways. So you really can't just say, well, that's because that's the way we do things around here. Right? You can't do the five monkeys. You have to, you have to be able to, so it forces you to really think, well, why do we do that? You

• 3:29:50Speaker 02

  know? You know? And, um, so it really, um, sets you up for success. And generally speaking, um, if you go to selection and training in the unit, usually what that is, that tells you, you've been, you've been selected to go over and be a troop sergeant major. But before you do that.

• 3:30:07Speaker 01

  They send you over there.

• 3:30:08Speaker 02

  We want you to go be able to understand, you're gonna teach, uh, the basic firearm stuff, uh, you're gonna teach, uh, close quarters battle, you're gonna, you're gonna work all, all the tactics, techniques, procedures that are associated with, uh, being in a saber squadron. You're gonna, you're not, you're gonna teach it. So when you come back and you're gonna, uh, you know, even in the same building, people, um, Evolved differently. So one squadron for a couple of years, they may be, the times on their charges may be different, the way they make them may be different, the way they clear corners may be a little different. And if you let it go long enough, it's dramatically different, right? And two different units. So when you go over to S and T, you get to hang out and

• 3:30:52Speaker 02

  you so you standardize your, it's like a central point for consolidation of tactics, techniques, procedures.

• 3:30:59Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, I can't believe I didn't bring this up earlier, but you were training jiu-jitsu this whole time, right?

• 3:31:05Speaker 02

  I was, yeah.

• 3:31:06Jocko Willink?

  And how'd that, how'd that kick off with you?

• 3:31:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it was a life-changing thing for me, really. So I, you know, I, we talked about how I grew up and I saw a lot of, early on, saw a lot, a lot of very, very serious conflicts in bars and stuff, because I grew up in them. My dad was a, owned bars, made whiskey, saw guys getting knifed and shot in kaisers when I was, you know, eight, nine, 10 years old. Dad was in and out of jail. So I saw it growing up, but I, I was never a believer in formal martial arts. I remember in high school, I saw this dude square off with a dude and go into a traditional karate stance and just get his ass whipped. And, you know, the back in the day, you know, I'm, I'm a little bit older than you, but everybody

• 3:31:52Speaker 02

  got in this Kung Fu thing. They had a movie on TV. It was called Kung Fu and, and, but they were all going out and going to class and learning all this weird stuff, but they were always losing the fights. And so I didn't have a lot of confidence in a lot of, and we used to almost joke about it. Oh, yeah, one of those guys, right? Guy just stepped off and, and I go, oh, okay, here we go. You know, but, so I didn't have a lot of respect for it. I just didn't. Cause I, I felt like, you know, it wasn't applicable to the street. And so when I was in the unit, guys, the, the hand-to-hand program was not formalized. It was guys doing one thing over here, one thing over in another squadron,

• 3:32:36Speaker 02

  another thing in another squadron, and they were training in silos. Right? So they, they trained with the guys that thought like they did. And, but we didn't have a formal program. And I've been training a little bit, seeing stuff going around, but we, we were bringing in subject matter experts.

• 3:32:56Speaker 02

  And one guy in one squadron would bring a dude in with a hood over his head and he would, you know, you know, teach you how to fight by feel. Another guy would come in and teach you basically how to do a college football stiff arm, you know, and how to, that's how you do CQB, gun in one hand, stiff arm in the other. And, um, uh, and some guy would come in and teach something else. And it was really just kind of, uh, all over the place. And we had some tough dudes, you know, um, but, um, I was of the school, hey, look, go work out, run, uh, ball your fist up, hit the bag and, and swing them harder and faster than the next guy and move your nose. You know, that's, that's, uh, um, kind of the way I grew up and, um, and it worked for me up to that point. And, um, so, um,

• 3:33:41Speaker 02

  when I, um, got into S and T, um, you know, we, we were bringing S and, uh, subject matter experts and, and, um, um, we were bringing these guys in and paying them a lot of money, you know, and, um, I was tasked with, with the hand to hand program and S and T, it's selection and training. And, um, so we, we brought guys in and, but none of them could really do what they said they could do when you put them in a scenario that they didn't control. So this is how you get out of a headlock and with their, with their, with their paid, uh, assistant. I say, well, I got Joe Vega over here. He benches 400 pounds, the biggest meanest Puerto Rican ever walked off the island and, uh, he's going to put

• 3:34:23Speaker 02

  a headlock on you. Uh, um, we'll see if you get out of that. And none of them could do it, you know? And then you have guys go, oh, I'm not a fighter. I'm a trainer and all, all hurt it all. And so, um, um, I had a buddy of mine, his name was Ben Flores and he came, he's got, you gotta check these dudes out. And now at this time, I'd already like gotten disgusted with all, everything else I'd seen. And I thought, okay, another one of these, right? And he slides this tape across. It was like a beta tape or something like that. It had, uh, it was called, uh, Gracys in Action. Gracys in Action. Hell yeah. Yeah. Two dudes, two dudes with speedos. And I was like, what is this? And I was like, uh, You gave me the wrong tape, homie. Yeah. I was like, I've, I've seen this stuff before, but I don't watch the stuff with two men in it. So, um, but, uh, um, so he goes, dude, he goes, they're real deal.

• 3:35:08Speaker 02

  And I said, um,

• 3:35:11Speaker 02

  I said, I don't know, man. And he goes, give him a chance. So we brought him in. We, uh, and, and, um, it was Hoist and, uh, Horan. And Hoist, I don't know how old Hoist was, but he didn't look like he was much over 20 when we brought him in. So it had been in the early nineties. And, um, they flew out to, uh, Fort Bragg. It was the winter and there's Southern California boys. They showed up at the front gate. I think there was snow on the ground and, um, they were out there shivering with, uh, with snot running out of their noses. And I was like, oh my goodness. And, and Hoist does not look like an imposing guy. He's a, you know, he's a pretty boy. And, um, I was like, man, and he looked young and I was like, oh, these dudes are about to get it. And, um, Was this pre UFC? Yes. Okay.

• 3:35:51Speaker 02

  Just before the first UFC. So nobody knew who they were. And, um, um, I think they, they had the Gracie Academy on, uh, in Torrance, so Carson and Crenshaw, I think, where it was. And, um, but just a year or two before that, they had been training out of garage.

• 3:36:09Speaker 01

  This was the Gracie Challenge.

• 3:36:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, they still, they still had that going on. And I saw, I got to watch that. And, um, very, very cool. Um, but their main, um, instructor other than Horan and Hoist out at Carson, uh, at the, uh, uh, Torrance Academy. I can't remember his name, but, but he was one of the guys that started, he was a heroin addict that started training with Horan in his garage. And, um, so they were still early generation of, uh, of their trainers there. And, um, um, some of the guys that are world renowned black belts now that came out of that, that, that cohort of instructors that, uh, Cor- Horan had then are now, uh, were blue belts then. You know, blue and white belts. And, um,

• 3:36:55Speaker 02

  so, um, anyway, they show up at Bragg and they, they go up and I'm gonna give them the same treatment that I give everybody else, you know? Uh, you know, but they didn't come in with the hoods and all that bullshit. They came in and, uh, um, they were teaching like escape from the headlock. I watched that and I go, okay. I said, we'll see if you can get out of his headlock. So they, okay, put him in there, boom, into work. And they go, they'd show us these different scenarios. And at some point, Horan said, uh, I, I, I feel that you're skeptical. And I said, I'm a little bit. And I said, cause I've seen a lot of bullshit come through here. And he said, I'll tell you what. He goes, uh, line, uh, line everybody up. And he goes, um, um, I said, what are the, what are the, what are the parameters? What are the rules? He goes, there are no parameters, there are no rules. Whatever you do to me, I'm gonna do to you.

• 3:37:40Speaker 02

  So if you don't want it done to you, then don't do it to me. Right? So we came up with roughly the, um, what became kind of similar to the first UFC rules. No, uh, no, uh, eye gouging, no biting, no fish hooking, no, no maiming, you know? Um, but, um, uh, but, uh, other than that, it was kind of a free for all. And it didn't take long, 30 minutes, I think it tapped everybody in the squadron. And I was like, holy shit, this is, you know, this is, uh, real, um, with caveats. Right? So I knew what I seen on the street and none of that stuff. You better be better prepared to that if you're gonna go down to Braggadil, Texas to Kaisers. Cause, um, uh, they're not gonna play that game. They're gonna, it's gonna, they're gonna grab an object real quick.

• 3:38:24Speaker 02

  But it's a good place to start, right? Right? Let's start with that. And, um, you gotta start somewhere. So, um, you can't just say, hey, go in there and, uh, grab something and start poking and swinging. You know, you have to be able to have a system. And that was a good place to build it on. Right? The other thing that I noticed, Jocko, was that, um, when I first got to special forces, guys were in fights all the time. You know, you'd be up at the NCO club, guys getting a fight. You, guys would come in from the weekend, fights. I remember teammates when I was on the SADAM team, we were out in Visalia, California doing, uh, I think it was Galen Eagle. And we had a SADAM, um, scenario out there. We jumped in, but, um, um, two of my buddies, uh, uh, we were out in a tent and they were like,

• 3:39:09Speaker 02

  hey, we, we got a ride into town in Visalia, let's go. And I was like, ah, I'm tired, man. You guys go ahead. Two o'clock in the morning, they came walking back in and the medic was sewing one of them's ear back on, cause he got, you know, something happened to him in a bar fight. But, uh, um, as I progressed through my career, that became less and less frequent. And then we used to send a questionnaire out in selection and training would say, um, when was the last fight you were in and describe it? And, um, most of the guys, at a certain point, after a certain, once that generation kind of started filtering out, it was like, I've never been in a fight. And if you think about it, the military got really hard on people.

• 3:39:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:49Speaker 02

  So you didn't have the, they weeded the guys out that were the, you know, I would have never made it by the modern standards. They wouldn't let me in the army, you know, um, um, and they certainly would have, uh, about the time I jumped on a formation on Ardennes Road and Fort Bragg, they would have said, hey, you're done. You know, um, but, um, so these guys were super athletes. They were smart guys. They were very capable guys, but they'd never been in a bar fight before. And I was thinking, man, it's going to be terrible. The first time you're in a fight, it's going to be a life and death fight. You might want to do a little, a couple of little easier ones before that one, right? You know, before you do them back alley in Mogadishu, you might want to go down to Rick's Lounge on Fort Bragg and, and give it a try. And there's a little bit of difference in it, but there's some similarities, right? You're having to function under the same body chemistry.

• 3:40:33Speaker 02

  So, so you've got all this adrenaline pumping to your brains, your, your, you know, um, uh, having to, having to perform under a lot of, um, a lot of a unique accelerated body chemistry. And, um, it's very similar to what you might see in combat, right? And the more you do it, the more, um, comfortable you feel in the environment, right? But I would hate to throw my son out there in combat, having known he's never been punched in the nose. You know, because the next thing you see is going to be a lot worse than that. So it's a way to put a guy in a position where he's operating in a controlled environment. But he's still, you know, can get, you know, hurt, you know? I mean, he's, he's getting punched in the nose or he's getting, he's getting caught, he's getting choked.

• 3:41:19Speaker 02

  Um, and so you, and then once you get that going, you can build on that, you know? Um, but if you've never done that before, you know, you, you don't want, the first one to be a life and death fight. The other thing is, is what point do you want to, uh, um, do you want to, uh, just say, okay, I got the best bombers in the world. I got the best boats, ships in the world. I got the best, uh, fighter fights in the world. I got the best guns in the world. I got the best helmets in the world.

• 3:41:49Speaker 02

  But some point it comes down to the guy. Right? So start with him. Right? Because if you don't have that, then you're just hanging gear on something. Right? It doesn't take long to hang gear on something. We used to say it takes five minutes to look like an operator, but it takes a lifetime to be one. Right? And so, um, um, but at what point do you want to relinquish? I'm on a battlefield. I don't have anything but me. I run into a Russian soldier. Oh, you got me because I never trained in hand to hand. Right? Now that scenario is unlikely. But at what point are you willing to, um, uh, to give that up? Right? Should start at, if you want to be a true pro at what we do.

• 3:42:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:30Speaker 02

  I think that you should say, I'm going to win every time.

• 3:42:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:32Speaker 02

  I don't care what it is. It's going to be with a pistol. I'm going to win it with a knife. I'm going to win it with a rifle. I'm going to win it. And if I'm out there butt ass naked, light coat of oil and a pair of flip flops, I'm going to win it.

• 3:42:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I had some discussions around this when I was in and it was like, you know, I was, you know, saying, hey, look, you know, we need to train wrestling, boxing, jujitsu and Muay Thai. Like that's, that's what we need to be doing. And some of the pushback was like, well, it takes, it takes a long time to get good at those things.

• 3:43:00Speaker 02

  Takes a long time to get good. A lot of things.

• 3:43:02Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, hey, man, number one, if you think you're going to become a good fighter in five days, like you're an idiot. And number two, you're in the teams for 20 years. So how good can you be in 20 years? You know, like,

• 3:43:12Speaker 02

  It takes a long time to do a lot of shit.

• 3:43:14Jocko Willink?

  Exactly.

• 3:43:14Speaker 02

  Right? So, uh, doesn't mean that I don't do it.

• 3:43:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:43:17Speaker 02

  Um, but at what point are you willing to go, okay, I, um, I, um,

• 3:43:22Jocko Willink?

  Surrender.

• 3:43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I surrender. Right? Um, I don't have my guns. I don't have my buddies. I don't have my, my vehicles. I don't have my helos. Fuck it. You got me. You know, I never, right? Not me and not you.

• 3:43:33Jocko Willink?

  How much did you, did you keep training?

• 3:43:35Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. We trained, um, um, I got, I fell in love with it. Right? And even though I, I still, you gotta be careful with it. Right? You have to have context and, um, I would never go into Kaisers and, and rely on that. First thing I, cause I know I'm like, man, before I do anything, I'm going to, I'm going to look for a pistol. I'm going to look for something. And, um, and, but, but if I don't have that, at least I got something. Right? And, um, but I trained a lot. Now we, um, I trained all the way. Through um, uh, until I was in my forties and, and my oldest son went on to become a, a black belt under Rob Kahn. Rob, and Robbie was one of the original blue belts out at the Torrance Academy.

• 3:44:17Speaker 02

  Um, and I got my, my first blue, my blue belt, you know, um, naked ass blue belt, uh, from, uh, from Helio.

• 3:44:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:25Speaker 02

  Right. And, um, um, but we trained a lot and, um, um, and, uh, all my sons, my sons train and, uh, and my buddies train. I believe in it.

• 3:44:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:36Speaker 02

  Right. And with caveats, right? You, it, and you know, people always go, oh, it doesn't work against multiple assailants. And I saw him say that to Horian one time, said, oh, so, so, um, uh, you and me getting a, getting a fight, I can beat you, but if there were two of me, you could do better. All right. He said, so nothing works against multiple assailants, right? It's a, it's all, uh, context and perspective. But, um, loved it. And, um, and, um, uh, learned a lot, learned a lot from not, not, and learned a lot about life through, through jujitsu. And I'm not a philosophical, uh, um, you know, uh, Mr. Miyagi cat guy. I'm just not. But, um, I remember I was talking to, to Horian Gracie one time and I said, what do you think the success is in, uh,

• 3:45:22Speaker 02

  in jujitsu? What, what is fast track success? He goes, well, he goes, it's the same as, as in everywhere else in life. He goes, uh, you gotta learn to love the things that are good for you, not the things that feel good to you. Right. And that includes food, people, um, while you train. And he goes, so, so, you know, you may like this particular way of doing things. He goes, but, but you really need to be working on this because this is what you like to do, but this is what you need to do. And he goes, and those are, uh, easy, easy things to, to see, but they're hard to, uh, implement. And he goes, cause I could put, I can take a bunch of kids in here. I can tell them, here's an apple, really good for you. Here's a candy bar, not good for you. And I'll leave the room, I'll come back. What do you think's gonna be good?

• 3:46:04Speaker 02

  Right. So, and that's life, right? But, um, uh, and that's about as deep as I'm gonna get on that, that crap. But, uh, but yeah, it, uh, it was, um, it was, uh, really something cool. I still, still, uh, love it. Um, still very close friends with, with, with Horian and Horace, but, um, um, and it was, uh, really good for my kids, you know?

• 3:46:27Jocko Willink?

  Did they start at a young age?

• 3:46:28Speaker 02

  They did. Um, I started them all really young, but I was very careful, um, Not to push it on them, expose it, expose them to it.

• 3:46:37Jocko Willink?

  No, I was, I totally messed that up. I was a total psycho and just like forced my kids to train jujitsu. They were literally training jujitsu seven days a week when they were little and they all, well, I didn't allow really my son to like stop because he was a boy and I'm like, yeah, no, this is just, this is just for life. But my daughters stopped for, they all stopped for a little while. Now they're back on to it.

• 3:46:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, they'll come back to the touchstone, but um, I, I learned that from football, right? So um, I used to watch these guys go um, when my kids were in like a, a Peewee football, Pop Warner football. Saw it when I was a kid playing football in, in school. Um, you know, you had the daddy ball thing going on and um, um, and I think it's a, it's such a fine line of walk, you know, you wanna give them the opportunity. And you wanna push them because they don't know how far they can go, but how far you do it. And so I, I got to the point where I was like, look, I got coaches to do that. And um, at the end of the day, when they get in the car and leave football practice, have a bad day in practice, you know, whatever.

• 3:47:34Speaker 02

  Um, I don't need to be getting on them. And I would see dads uh, in the jujitsu gym that would, their sons will get caught and it's almost like they caught the dad, you know? He's over there chewing the kid's ass in the parking lot and I'm going, man, he feels bad enough as it is. Why don't you just say, well, let me get some ice cream or something, you know, and uh, um, but um, I wanted to show it to them early on and uh, what I really tried to do was uh, if I would go train, I started them out like, sit over there in the corner and you watch, watch me train. And they got to where they felt comfortable with, with, in the environment and with the people. And a, and a lot of people, I've seen guys walk into martial arts gyms and they don't stay long because they get intimidated by the environment.

• 3:48:16Speaker 02

  You shouldn't, right?

• 3:48:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:17Speaker 02

  But um, but some people do.

• 3:48:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:19Speaker 02

  Um, so especially with kids though, you wanna get them used to it. It's almost like playtime.

• 3:48:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, make it fun.

• 3:48:24Speaker 02

  Make it fun, man.

• 3:48:25Jocko Willink?

  That's the main thing.

• 3:48:25Speaker 02

  Make it fun, make it enjoyable, make them, you know, you should be running down the driveway when you're, daddy, where are you going? I'm going to, I'm going on the train with jujitsu. I'm gonna go with you, right?

• 3:48:34Jocko Willink?

  That's the goal.

• 3:48:35Speaker 02

  Right, that's the goal. And um, and um, um, but yeah, they all, you know, it started early, but like you said, they, they.

• 3:48:45Speaker 02

  Couple of years, they would go without training, but as adults, they all came back to it.

• 3:48:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:50Speaker 02

  You know, they all came back to it, but there were times when they were like, I want to go train.

• 3:48:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:54Speaker 02

  And I think that's normal.

• 3:48:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:57Speaker 02

  Um, but yeah, it was really cool. And, um, um, it became later, it was, it was the genesis of the, um, uh, Army Combatant Program.

• 3:49:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:06Speaker 02

  And it started there in Fort Bragg and, and the unit, but I remember nobody had ever heard of them. Where they came down and, and what they could do, I never had a man be able to dominate me like that, man. I was like, and I didn't like it.

• 3:49:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:18Speaker 02

  I was like, man.

• 3:49:19Jocko Willink?

  People handle that two different ways. Some people go, I never want to, I'm going to make sure I'm never near that thing again. And some people go, whatever just happened to me, I'm going to make sure it doesn't ever happen again, because I'm going to learn whatever, whatever magic these people know.

• 3:49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't like it, man. I didn't like it, guy being able to do anything he wanted to do to me.

• 3:49:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:32Speaker 02

  And I was like, I'm not going to let that happen. Yeah, really scary. And it's almost, at the time, now it's, the streets are a lot more dangerous now, because everybody knows it, but at the time,

• 3:49:42Jocko Willink?

  No one knew anything.

• 3:49:43Speaker 02

  It was like taking candy from a baby.

• 3:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:45Speaker 02

  Man, I mean, it was like, uh, it was like magic dust.

• 3:49:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's this, so I was on my first deployment, this is like nineteen ninety-two, nineteen ninety-three, and I'm a new guy, and this master chief, this old master chief, he had to be like forty years old or something. I mean, just like ancient. I'm looking at this old man and he comes in and it's, Steve Bailey's his name, he's a freaking legend. And he goes, anyone here want to learn how to fight? And I'm like, well, I don't know what this old man's going to teach me, but I raised my hand, sure. He goes, yeah, meet at this place. And it was like a judo club. Well, he had been training with the Gracies in the, in the garage in Torrance, in like the late eighties and early nineties. And so a few of us rolled up there and he's like, uh, yeah, I'm going to teach you guys how to fight. And he just, he just lined us up and tapped us out over and over and over again.

• 3:50:31Jocko Willink?

  And, and he was like a white, he was like a high level white belt at the time. But no one knew anything. No one knew guard, no one knew mount, no one knew, fucking knew what an arm lock was. It wasn't even a thing.

• 3:50:41Speaker 02

  It was like smallpox on a blanket.

• 3:50:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it really, I mean, it was, it was, uh, it was, uh, it was terrible shit, man, it was, but, uh, yeah, you know, right after that, when they first came out, I was like, man, dude, this is like really magic.

• 3:50:53Speaker 02

  And and it really, I wanted to cry because like my whole life, man, I've been this could have been so much easier, right? You know, I was like, I would do a lot of, a lot of, a lot of bloody noses. I could have, could have made it a lot easier on myself. But um, so we had a couple, a core guys that were like the subject matter experts from each one of those squadrons. And we would come out to Torrance a couple of times, several times a year, as many times as I could, you know. And we would train here at the academy. And you mentioned, Kerry mentioned the Gracie Challenge. Never heard of that, you know? I mean, it was something that you guys might have known about here on the west coast, but you know, back in, you know, the hub of the eastern seaboard, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I've never heard of it. And so I, I came in and the very first day I was there, they

• 3:51:36Speaker 02

  had, they're, they're, one of their lead black, brown, brown belts, because they don't, they only had a couple of black belts. And most of them had Gracie on their last name, right? And, but one of their brown belts was a guy named Lowell Anderson. And Lowell was about maybe five, six, maybe, standing on his tiptoes. And he was probably a buck forty, right? Wire reeling dude from Montana. And they had these guys come in to take the Gracie Challenge. Couple of local boys, right? And, and they were, both of them were over six foot tall, both of them probably two fifty, maybe, and shredded, you know?

• 3:52:17Speaker 02

  And the rule of the time was if you fight, I think, and, and again, somebody's gonna check me on this, but I don't give a shit. But I think the rule was you come in and you fight one of their junior belts that they select. Whether it's a blue belt, a brown belt, a purple belt, whatever. If you could beat that guy, all right, for free, then you get to, you get to go against Hoyce. And if you beat Hoyce, I think you get a hundred grand or something like that. Something crazy. Something like that. Anyway, I saw these guys walk in and, and, and of course, all of the guys, all the guys in the, all the belts line up on each side of the, the training room. And then you walk in the door and you walk the gauntlet. And at the other end of the gauntlet is the guy you're gonna, you're gonna go against. And it was Lowell Anderson.

• 3:53:02Speaker 02

  And Lowell's tiny. And he's, you know, his first was two of them. So first guy walks down. And you could always see just the, the environment, the tail goes between their legs a little bit. But they, he walks down there and he looks at Lowell and he's like, looks back at his buddy, he goes, yeah, okay, here we go. And

• 3:53:22Speaker 02

  Game on and it didn't take long, but uh little ragdoll that dude over the mat. And I was like, before that I was thinking, man, I can't believe he's gonna put that little dude in there with him. And he ragdolled the hell out of him, man. And I was like, oh my goodness, man, look at this. And then the other guy was like, no, I don't want to go. But the buddy that just got his ass whipped turned around and goes, no, no, you're going. Because if I'm gonna do it, you're gonna do it. And he beat him too. And um, so you know, you look at the Gracies and you look at Hoise and, and again, he's, he's an athlete. But he's not the 350 pound dude with the muscles and, and he, he's, he's a, he's a, just a normal, kind of a normal looking dude. And you see him do it and you go, hell, if he can do that, then I can do it. Right?

• 3:54:08Speaker 02

  And um, uh, it was just um, eye opening, you know? And I got to watch several of those things play out in that gym and I never saw anybody walk out of there with money.

• 3:54:20Jocko Willink?

  I don't think anyone ever did walk out of there. I don't think.

• 3:54:22Speaker 02

  Never saw him walk out with money.

• 3:54:24Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and that's epic. That's a epic uh, little tale of, of the beautiful jujitsu.

• 3:54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it grew, it grew uh, you know, into, into what it is today.

• 3:54:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, it's everywhere. I, I don't know how much it is in the, what'd you call it? The gem of the eastern seaboard?

• 3:54:39Speaker 02

  Hub of the eastern seaboard, yeah.

• 3:54:41Jocko Willink?

  But in, in San Diego in Southern California, like you, there's jujitsu on every corner. It's freaking crazy.

• 3:54:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, Florida too. And uh, my son who's in the, in the 82nd is uh, he trains at Greg Thompson Gym there. Greg was one of the, one of the guys that went out there with us on the instructor training program. So he's, he has Team Rock.

• 3:54:59Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 3:55:00Speaker 02

  But um, yeah, it's cool stuff.

• 3:55:03Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so now you're getting towards the end of your career, getting towards 20 years and you gotta make the call.

• 3:55:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I um, you know, I had known two lives. I'd known the life in, in Brackettville, Texas and, and, and then the life in the army. And I'd never, nothing else, nothing in between. And I was very comfortable at that point in the, in that environment, in the unit. It, it was, you know, 500 acre chain link fence, safe space for me. Right? And um, um, my wife was a pharmacist. And uh, I think we talked earlier how it was very, being in a unit as a spouse was very difficult, not just for her, but for all of them. And um, got to the point where we're getting ready to, you know, I'm getting ready to commit to a. What would probably be the rest of my life after that, you know, because if you stay much beyond twenty, you might as well stay for thirty.

• 3:55:53Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:55:54Speaker 02

  You know, and because, one, your opportunities on the outside are diminished, right? You're not going to get out and, and start a new career. Every year that you spend in the unit, or any military branch, whether you're, whether you're a special ops or not, every year you spend after twenty is an opportunity cost. Right, so you're losing opportunities on the outside, so you have to weigh it. So I, you know, like I said, I'm eighty-seven and seven, I'm eighty-eight, thirteen years. I was alternate select for sergeant major, year after year after year. Finally got to the point where I was, I was getting ready to make it, and I was, I just assumed I was going to be there forever, you know, and came home and told my wife, and

• 3:56:36Speaker 02

  man, she started crying, she's like, you know, I, I don't know if I can do this with you. It scares me to death, I, I, you've lost all your friends, I, you know, this is not the same place it used to be for me. And I said, I don't know how to do anything else. I, I, I got through high school, but my, my, the extent of my math in high school was consumer math, where they taught you how to read a parking meter and write a check, you know? And I didn't do all good, all, all that great at that, you know, and I, again, I, I, every day I went to school as a kid, literally was like, it was like, I felt like an inmate. I hated it.

• 3:57:17Speaker 02

  I mean, I could not describe to you how much, it still makes me bristle, right? I, I won one academic award in school, and it was a paddle, right? They hit me literally over five hundred times with it, with a paddle, and it was a baseball bat that they shaved the sides off of, and they, they wrote Builder of Men on one side of it, and the Board of Education on the other side of it. And when they gave out all the awards for best looking and smartest and all that stuff, they gave one, they, the, the coach, actually, is Coach Trevino, got up in front of the school and said, I got one more award. He goes norm hood in front and center, and I was like, uh-oh. And I was sitting in the back of the class, probably talking to some girl, and, and in the back of the auditorium, and I, I walked up to the front, and he goes,

• 3:58:04Speaker 02

  Here it is. This is yours. He goes, I wouldn't feel right hitting anybody else with this paddle.

• 3:58:08Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 3:58:09Speaker 02

  And I still got it in my office. Right. And that's, for context, that was my, that was my school.

• 3:58:16Jocko Willink?

  That was your academic prowess.

• 3:58:17Speaker 02

  That was my school experience. I was like, every, every day there was, it was, was something. And anything they could do to a kid back then, you know, it's not the same way as the day, but I mean, I have a mouth washed out with soap. I was hit with a paddle. I was, I was put in a corner. I mean, I made the stand on my head and, and I mean, naming, I did it. So, um, but, um, so I had to help my wife study through pharmacy school. So with, with three by five cars back then, you know, well, naming drugs, chemical structures, stuff like that. And she said, um, well, um, why don't you, uh, why don't you go to pharmacy school?

• 3:58:53Speaker 02

  And I was, I started laughing. I was like, no way, you know? And I said, I, I don't even know how to work a, work an algebra problem, you know, unless it's involved blowing up a bridge, you know? Um, but, um, um, but, uh, I started thinking about it. I thought, well, you know, it'd be, we'll see. And so I, I didn't, I never really thought it was going to go very far. Cause I thought, you know, I'm not going to get picked. I'm not going to get accepted. So I did the prereqs at night school in the Fort Bagge campus, you know, did the chems and, and, uh, um, all the science part of it as your prereqs.

• 3:59:27Speaker 02

  And then I took the, uh, PCAT, which is an entrance exam. You had to take the pharmacy school for pharmacy school back then. And then I got, I made it. I made the cut and, um, took that and retired. And again, you know, my, my priorities started to shift. We had young kids at the time. I had a, a two-year-old and a four-year-old, I think. And, uh, and I got to where, um, when I used to be really, really excited about going on a trip, I got to where I was missing my family more and more. And I think I just hit that age, you know? I don't know where my testosterone started dropping off or what, but something happened. And, uh, and, uh, I fell in love with something else and it was my family. And, uh,

• 4:00:01Speaker 02

  um, and I wanted to do everything I could do, even if I, even if I wasn't going to like it, you know, I never, I didn't wake up in the morning going, oh man, I'm going to be a pharmacist, you know? I was, it wasn't something that excited me, but if it allowed me to spend time around my family and have what I call a real life, I guess, you know, it was, I would do it, you know? And, um, but again, I'm, I was never thinking it was going to, you know, develop, but it did, you know? And, um, went to school at Campbell University. I went, um,

• 4:00:32Speaker 02

  For exactly one month, started in August, I was on terminal leave in August of two thousand and one. September eleventh, two thousand and one, I got recalled back to active duty. And with no idea of what was going down, you know, I didn't know whether we were going to war the next day, or what was, what was happening. And, um, um, like, uh, like Navy Special Warfare and everybody else, you know, sometimes you train jointly with civilian agencies. When I was an S and T instructor, the Federal Air Marshal Program used to come down and do their, some of their range work at Fort Bragg, and they would do, use our aircraft and stuff like that for training. And, um, um, so when I went back in, um, off of terminal leave, they said, hey, we're

• 4:01:15Speaker 02

  gonna send you up to, uh, work with the air marshals. Right. Um, and, um, so I went up there, started, um, training with them, and then, um, um, helping them build their, they had at the time, like, less than thirty men. Yeah, it was tiny. Thirty. And they were not, uh, credentialed law enforcement officers. They were regulatory guys for the FAA. And, um, they did not have arrest authority, so they could detain you until somebody else came to arrest you. And they rarely spent time on the aircraft. And then, um, um, General Grange was an old, uh, Army Special Operations guy, like second generation, third generation, uh, Spec Ops guy.

• 4:02:00Speaker 02

  Um, was friends with a guy named Tom Quinn, who ultimately became, and at the time when it kicked off on nine eleven, Mike Kavanaugh, General Kavanaugh, uh, was the head of the, uh, uh, air marshals. He was a retired Army General, a JSOC commander, I think. And, uh, um, so he really used a lot of, a lot of, uh, guys from, uh, from the Navy, from the SEALs, and from Army Spec Ops, to fly these missions for a couple of weeks, until they could start, you know, getting, getting things together. And then we took over kind of training. And, um, um, eventually, it, it, um, instead of going back to the Army, Tom Quinn said, hey, What were you doing when this thing kicked off as I was in pharmacy school? He goes, um, what does a pharmacist make?

• 4:02:45Speaker 02

  And I told him, he goes, what if I told you I paid the same thing to come over here and be a trainer? So not a, not a credential air marshal, but I was a trainer. Uh, I was a national training coordinator for their special mission unit. And so I just said, well, that makes sense. And he goes in, and I could live anywhere I wanted to live. So, um, within reason. So I had 26 offices, I think. And, uh, um, my wife wanted to be close to home, so, um, I had a choice. She lives halfway between, her family lives halfway between Atlanta and Orlando. And I knew I wasn't going to live in Atlanta. So, um, we moved to Orlando. And, uh, um, and I had no intention of going back to pharmacy school because I had no reason to now. I had everything I wanted a lot easier.

• 4:03:26Speaker 02

  So, um, um, uh, give the laziest guy the hardest job and he'll find the easiest way of doing it. So, um, but, um, uh, that's where I ended up. And I spent about, um, about seven years there. And I got a call from General Grange, uh, who was, you know, one of the guys who was involved with the relationship between the air marshals and the, and the army. And he was working on another project overseas. It was called the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center. And, um, it's a long ass story, so I'm not going to bore you with it. But, uh, anyway, I ended up going over there, leaving the air marshals, going over there, working on the commercial side as the, um, the deputy director for that facility. Spent four years in Jordan.

• 4:04:09Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 4:04:10Speaker 02

  Um, cool experience. Yeah. And, um, it was, uh, it's still going today.

• 4:04:16Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:04:17Speaker 02

  Um, one of the things I noticed over there as the deputy director was, um, we had our CADRIA guys and most of them were guys that I knew that I had hired from, from the unit. Some of them were from Rangers, but most of them were guys I had worked with before. And, um, uh, after a period of time, I had some of the guys from the Jordanian side came and said, man, we got problems with, with some of your staff. I said, what is it? And they said, um, we've got a lot of drug problems going on. I said, not only are they, they, they using, they're some of the biggest providers of it. They're bringing it in the country and we're not going to, we're not going to put up with it anymore.

• 4:04:59Speaker 02

  I also noticed that in addition to my staff of being over there, we were rotating all the big, the usual suspects in the civilian contracting world. All the big companies were coming through there and they would spend a couple of weeks there at that facility, do their workup before they went into Iraq. And, and it was across, a lot of them were special operations guys from across all services, not just Army, Navy, Air Force, but special operators. Some of them were really accomplished guys, you know, and they, they'd, at that point, some of them already seen a lot of stuff.

• 4:05:36Speaker 02

  And so they had problems with, with drugs in, in, and on the camp, you know, it was, and you name it, and they were, they were using it. All the way from abuse of prescription drugs to illicit drugs like heroin. And that stuff was going down. And so it became a big, big issue. And make a long story short, one of the guys that was the chairman of the board of the guys I was working with was a guy named Admiral Larson, Chuck Larson. And so I reported it to him and he, he straightened out and then I had a discussion with him.

• 4:06:19Speaker 02

  I was like, he was like, you know, man, would you like to go back over? And I was like, no, I'm, I'm not interested in going back over. I'm, I'm done with that. And after discussion with him, I went back, I made a determination to go back to pharmacy school. This time though, I had a little bit different idea about what I was gonna do. Before I was just gonna go back to some small town in Texas or Georgia, open up some mom and pop pharmacy and, you know, live happily ever after. This time I went back and I was like, I'm gonna figure this out. You know, I don't know what's going on with this stuff, but I'm gonna figure it out. And I'd already kind of done all the legwork with the prereqs and stuff. So it seemed like a natural path to getting involved in it.

• 4:07:01Speaker 02

  So I went to pharmacy school, this time in Palm Beach, Atlantic University in, in, uh, West Palm Beach, Florida.

• 4:07:10Speaker 02

  Got through there, you had to have a three point O GPA to be eligible for residency. I had a three point zero zero, I might've had a two point nine nine nine nine nine, but it was whatever. They rounded it up. Yeah, right. They probably rounded that thing up, but, uh, but, um, barely made it by skin of my teeth to apply for residency program. And, um, so I applied for residency and went to West, uh, actually went to Orlando for my general residency. Then I did a, another residency, um, a PGY two in neuropsych medication, so mental health. And, um, with a focus on, um, um, um, pain management, PTSD and substance use.

• 4:07:52Speaker 02

  And why those three is because when I was a first year resident, when I used to rotate from those different clinics, you know, resident rotates from clinic to clinic to clinic, maybe a month at a time. And, um, I would see the same dudes. I would see, I would say, hey, I saw you in the, in the PTSD clinic. And then the next month I'd be in the substance use clinic. I'd say, you were in the, you were, and so I, I start to see these guys who had all three of them. They're making the rounds. Yeah. So they would be, uh, uh, what they call comorbid, uh, conditions. So guys that would have PTSD would be, uh, have substance use issues and pain. Right. And they were related. So, um, we started a clinic on my second, um, um, residency and a mental health thing down in West Palm Beach, which by the way was, uh,

• 4:08:37Speaker 02

  um, ground zero for heroin in the time in Florida. It was, you know, her, Florida was famous for, um, OxyContin Express, all the things that were going on down there with, with, uh, opioids. And, um, so we were right there at ground zero and, uh, um, we started a clinic that basically, if you fell into all three of those clinics, you went, instead of going to one of those silos, you went to the one where we look at all of them. So it was interdisciplinary team. So you had a psychiatrist, you had a physician, you had a psychologist, you had social workers, you had, um, pharmacists, nurses, all of them working together as a team to treat this particular cohort and, uh, really cool. Um, and, um, and then I spent, um,

• 4:09:21Speaker 02

  By the way, I started pharmacy school the second time when I was fifty-two. And I remember telling my wife, I don't think I'm gonna be the oldest kid in the class. And I got there, I was older than the dean by about ten years. Never mind the kids in the class. Yeah, so I finished pharmacy school in fifty-six. I finished residencies by fifty-eight. So I was fifty-eight years old when I finished residency. So from the age of, and I'll count my residency time as employment with the VA because, you know, I don't wanna make it sound like I was a new guy, but I did two years of residency and then, so that'd be two thousand and sixteen. Left the VA this year, so whatever that math adds up to be, not long, but long enough.

• 4:10:05Speaker 02

  And what I learned along the way, well, I learned a whole lot, but is I don't think I'm any closer to figuring it out than I was when I got there.

• 4:10:16Speaker 02

  You know, because it's so nuanced. And I went down that rabbit hole and I got to the point where it was bothering me so much, I was thinking, you know, I'm gonna fix this. And for veterans, and especially the substance abuse side, because it's all related, you know? Pain leads to opioids, which leads to abuse of prescription opioids, which leads to I can't afford those anymore, or I can't get those anymore, but I can get heroin, right?

• 4:10:42Speaker 02

  Which leads to all the things that, you know, if you die of an overdose, you die of a suicide or your relatives. I mean, and I buried a lot of friends. I've lost eighteen guys on October third that were friends of mine, and I've lost a lot of guys since then. Guys that you would never think that you would lose to suicides and overdoses. And so I really went in there thinking, man, I owe it to my guys to go in here and try to at least help. You know, and I don't want, whatever's on the other side of this life, you know, who knows? But I don't wanna get there and have somebody go, you know, you could've done something you didn't, you know?

• 4:11:21Speaker 02

  And so I did what I thought I could do, but then as I got further and further into it, I realized, man, you know, I mean, this is more than, more than one man can do. And I also spent all that time burning all those, what few brain cells I got, you know, burning it in an oil. And learned everything there was new about drugs, and I had one experience that kinda was. Another epiphany to me. Last year I went out to Colorado, to a place called the Wind River Ranch. And they had the survivors of the Abbey Gate out there, young kids, and I mean, younger than my kids. You know, I mean, um, and, um, I had seen guys and gals, just like them, not the same guys, but guys like them

• 4:12:06Speaker 02

  for years and years and years in clinic and the VA, and had seen how they responded to treatment or didn't respond to it. And then we sat out there with a, uh, by a campfire till two o'clock in the morning

• 4:12:22Speaker 02

  with a bunch of young, young warriors and, um, had a, uh, whiskey and a cigar. And I watched what happened around that campfire when they were with each other. Cause a lot of them, that was the first time they'd seen each other since the incident, you know? And, um, and, uh, I don't think that's, that's the answer, but I didn't, I do know that what I saw there was pretty special. And sometimes it's better than, you know, it's better to talk to a friend or somebody that you have something in common with than it is to sit down and talk to a clinician, no matter how smart he is, if you don't trust him and you don't know him.

• 4:12:57Speaker 02

  And so, um, um, you know, I, I at some point was like, you know what? I don't, uh, I don't believe I'm making a difference in it.

• 4:13:06Speaker 02

  But, um, got out and went into the whiskey and cigar business, but, uh, um, but, uh, uh, but yeah. It was a, it was worth doing, but, um, but again, it'll make you be a little bit more careful about the things you commit to in the future. Because, uh, I spend a lot of time, you know, doing stuff that doesn't come natural to me. So how, what was the genesis of whiskey and cigars then? How do we get there? Yeah. So, um, um, you know, you know, my family background with it, but, um, That's right. Besides the deep heritage you have of making whiskey in bathtubs. But, yeah, but, um, uh, I, um, um, 25 years after Mogadishu,

• 4:13:48Speaker 02

  we were coming up on the anniversary, right? And, um, I was sitting down in Orlando, Florida at the time. Um, smoked a lot of cigars, drank a lot of whiskey and, um, probably a lot more of both than I should have, but, um, um, I wanted to, um, do something for the reunion. So a friend of mine from Cuba, um, had his own cigar company and, and I said, hey, can you, um, can you, uh, make 300 cigars for the guys that bragged for this reunion? And he goes, yeah, I'd love to. So we, you know, after a half a bottle, maybe more than a little half a bottle of whiskey, two o'clock in the morning on a wet cocktail napkin, we drew up a logo and the guy I was with at the time was named Tim Young and put an H

• 4:14:30Speaker 02

  for my name, a Y for his name, and then a dagger because it's kind of the standard for special operations, you know, it's like a symbolical special ops. So we, we just did it, you know, and then we printed up labels and, you know, cheap labels, glued them on with a glue stick and, and took them up in a cardboard box, you know, for the event, you know, and the whole thing of it was, it was just going to be a one-time deal. We're going to smoke cigars and drink some whiskey and tell war stories, you know, so, but it, it took off from there. Guys wanted more of them and then they started using them for auction items and, and it just grew and the whiskey kind of followed very closely behind it within about six months, doing something similar with it and before you know it, we're in a business, you know, and I think what happened really when, when

• 4:15:15Speaker 02

  it kind of turned into a business was we initially, when we made the boxes for the cigars, we put the names of the guys who had fallen on it. And a lawyer said, you better be careful with that because it's a good, good, it's a good intention, you know, but somebody may take offense to it and they may, a cousin of a cousin of a cousin of a cousin or a girlfriend or something may, may, you know, take legal action against you. And then you start to realize, hey, look, you know, also, you know, what happens if it's, you know, somebody's drinking the stuff that they get, you know, so it's just like, you need to incorporate because that's, that's the way you're going to do it. And I'm not a business guy, you know, but I was lucky enough to have some guys around me

• 4:15:58Speaker 02

  that were pretty smart with it. So they set it up and then it just grew from there. And one of the things I remember when I was a young guy in the army, we used to get all this commemorative whiskey and stuff and it never was any good. It was always like some cheap stuff, some guy poured in a bottle and I didn't want that. I was like, I want this to be really good stuff. So I know it was probably the best whiskey in the world because we paid for it. We sourced it, we make it. And when you go in to get whiskey, they can say, we got, we got the, the economy version, we got the, we got the, the mid-grade and we got the high-grade and, you know, arbitrary numbers, one's a thousand bucks a barrel, one's $2,000 a barrel, and this one's $5,000 a barrel. And we paid for the good stuff. So I knew it was good. And it just took off from there.

• 4:16:43Jocko Willink?

  And what year was that?

• 4:16:46Speaker 02

  Uh, would have been, uh, two thousand eighteen.

• 4:16:49Jocko Willink?

  And then what kind of like, did you recognize like, oh crap, we got a business on our hands? At what point did you go, oh damn, this is bigger than I thought it was gonna be?

• 4:16:58Speaker 02

  Um, not really at first, but I tell you what, what, what we did do, that logo that we basically were half drunk when we drove it up at two o'clock in the morning, uh, one of the guys, my buddy was out in Vegas and he had a, and I'm not gonna tell you the guy's name, but the guy came to him and said, I own about ten thousand dollars worth of barrel of, of whiskey. Ten thousand barrels of whiskey. And he goes, I love your logo. I'll give you two million bucks for it. For the label, for the logo. And, um, he said, uh, I, what I, I said, would you tell him? He goes, I told him, pound sand. I was like, dude, take, split, take the money, man. I was like, that's more money than I'd ever imagined, you know, but, um, um, but he goes, no, man, you don't wanna do that. He goes, because that's, uh, it's branding, you know, and he was, he was, you know, smarter guy than me, but I would have taken it.

• 4:17:41Speaker 02

  I would have, yeah, yeah, I'll take it. But, um, um, but, um, we kept it, kept moving with it.

• 4:17:47Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 4:17:48Speaker 02

  But that's when I realized, hey man, maybe there's something to this, you know?

• 4:17:51Jocko Willink?

  And then how, like, how, how available is it right now?

• 4:17:54Speaker 02

  The whiskey?

• 4:17:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:17:55Speaker 02

  Um, you can get it online. We're in, I think, thirty-four states. Um, and, um, I think we have a, um,

• 4:18:04Speaker 02

  a special with your, with podcasts. I can't remember what Courtney told me to say, but the bottom line is, you can get it. So you can buy it on, on, it's available in California. You can get it online. Um, and, um, uh, cigars are the same way.

• 4:18:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Well, through social media, I don't know what the, uh, they asked me like, hey, can, can we give some kind of special to punk? I was like, yeah, do whatever you want. Like, we're here to support. Uh, so whatever that is, we'll make it.

• 4:18:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a, there's a promotional code that they get, but, um, but that's not why I'm here. You know, I'm here because I, I, I appreciate what you do and I, I am a fan, but, uh, um, if somebody wants to buy some whiskey and they wanna use a discount code, they can do it. But that's not my priority for being here. But, um, um, I'll be Courtney's, so she might chew my ass when I get back.

• 4:18:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I definitely don't want you to get, definitely don't want you to get in trouble.

• 4:18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, uh, not, not, not, not that I've ever been in trouble, but, uh, um, but, uh, but yeah, that's how we started with it. Um, and we've had, had a lot of fun. We, and had a buddy of mine from the, you know, we have fun with it. So we start with a story on everything we do. And then we build a product around it. Like I had a buddy of mine that called me from, from six and he said, uh, uh, I sent him some cigars. He goes, I love it, but I can't deal with the army stuff. I'm not. So we, we made one, uh, called Neptune Spear. And sent it over to him, you know, and, uh, we do one for 50 Cal, um, you know, cause a buddy of mine, his kid came in with this idea, a young, young guy. Why don't you make a one that looks like a bullet? And then, um, um, but it's fun, you know, and, uh, and, um,

• 4:19:31Speaker 02

  and we spend a lot of time. It's fun, but we're serious about it because we want the products to be really good, you know, um, because we are commemorating certain events. You don't, you don't want to cut any corners on that. Cause especially ones that guys, you know, died on. And so, um, but, um, but yeah, fun stuff.

• 4:19:51Jocko Willink?

  So that's what you're up to now. Anything, anything else? What's next?

• 4:19:55Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, you know, um, uh, moved up to Orlando, Florida. My wife's got a farm up there and, and so the kids grew up. And, and once the kids grew up, I got tired of the traffic and the neighbors. So we moved out in the country and, and I put up Triple String Concertina around about five acres of land. And, uh, and, uh, and living, living my dream there. But, uh, but yeah.

• 4:20:15Jocko Willink?

  And, and all three of your boys served in the military?

• 4:20:18Speaker 02

  They all did. I got an oldest, my oldest son, Brock, was in the first and seventy fifth Rangers. He was back in the, in the Rangers during the surge. So two thousand four, two thousand five, two thousand six timeframe.

• 4:20:29Jocko Willink?

  Got out. Did he do any time in Ramadi? We had Rangers right down the street from us.

• 4:20:32Speaker 02

  He might have, he might have. I know that, um, he got to work with some of my old colleagues when they were old men and they would, they knew him when he was a baby. And, um, but, um, but yeah, he, he got out and got his black belt under Rob Kahn. And then now he's a contractor and, uh, um, and then my, um, his younger brother, uh, is in the Marines, a captain in the Marine Corps. And, um, and then his younger brother is a, a West Point captain and a second. But, um, you'll see that house, man, when it, when it's football season. And the last, last conversation I heard between the, the two, um, uh, that are actively serving was, uh, the one from my boy from West Point that, you know, First of all, Navy beat the shit out of West Point football for like a fifty, fifty

• 4:21:16Speaker 02

  years straight or something like that. And I think guys started the army and retired from the army and never won a football game. But um, so my boy from Navy was really giving it to the army guy. And he turned around to me and said, hey Mason, he said, what do they call a cadet that graduates from West Point, number one in his class? And he said, I don't know, like a second lieutenant. And I said, what do they call a guy that graduates last? And Mason said, second lieutenant? And he goes, yeah, second lieutenant. And he goes, what do they call a guy that graduates from Naval Academy, first in his class? And Mason said, Enzen. And he said, what do they call graduates, guy that graduates last? And he goes, Enzen. And he goes, no, second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. So, so they

• 4:21:59Speaker 02

  go at it quite a bit. But, but, uh, fun stuff.

• 4:22:05Jocko Willink?

  That's gotta be good. And then your daughter, she's, she's, what, started in law school, you were saying?

• 4:22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, she just graduated from the University of Alabama. She, when she went in for her West Point interview, so they asked her, so where do you rank West Point on your list of colleges you want to go to? She goes, fifteenth or something like that. And they went, oh, thirty seconds later, a guy walks out and goes, see you later. And then she, she went to University of Alabama. And, you know, held a lot of money. But she went there and she's recently graduated and she wants to go to law school next year. She's going to take a year off and then go to law school.

• 4:22:45Jocko Willink?

  Awesome, man. Awesome. Does that get us up to speed?

• 4:22:48Speaker 02

  I'm good.

• 4:22:49Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Carrie, you got any questions? No, sir. Freaking outstanding, yeah.

• 4:22:54Speaker 02

  Sorry to take us so much of your time.

• 4:22:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no, not at all.

• 4:22:56Speaker 02

  But I didn't think we were, I thought we were like an hour and a half in this thing.

• 4:22:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, the time goes quick. People want to find you, it's Hooten, H O, H O O T E N Young dot com. That's, that's where people can check out what you're doing. And you're on Instagram, at Hooten Young, Twitter, X, at Hooten Young M T R. What's that MTR mean? Do you know what that means?

• 4:23:20Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 4:23:21Jocko Willink?

  Hooten Young MTR. I don't know what it means, but it's Hooten Young MTR. That's on, uh, on Twitter X and then Facebook, Hooten Young, and you got a YouTube channel. Pretty cool. Pretty cool YouTube channel. You get, you get on there, tell some stories and whatnot. So, pretty awesome. That's where people can find you. Um, any, any, any final start, any final thoughts?

• 4:23:40Speaker 02

  No, just, um, uh, thanks for having me. Privileged to be, honored to be here and, um, um, heard a lot about you from some, some friends of mine that I served with, uh, uh, throughout my career. Guys that, um, um, if they say it, it's true. And so I'm, I'm privileged to be here with you guys and I appreciate it.

• 4:23:59Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks for coming out, man. It's a honor to be able to sit here and talk to you, get, get your lessons learned. Um, so thanks for coming out and doing that. But most of all, thanks for your service. Thanks for your sacrifice and thanks for setting an example for a whole generation of warfighters. Um, we won't forget what you did and we won't forget the brothers that you lost. Thanks for coming out, man.

• 4:24:22Speaker 02

  Likewise. I appreciate it. Appreciate what you've done. Thank you both for your service and it's an honor to be here with you.

• 4:24:28Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Norm Hooten has left the building.

• 4:24:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Not much to say after that one.

• 4:24:38Speaker 02

  It's saying.

• 4:24:39Jocko Willink?

  I mean, just, just awesome, awesome to have him. Just so down to earth and quite frankly, um, I apologize to everyone here, but we had about two hours of conversations that we didn't record. So we just talked about so much stuff, so much stuff in the special operations community and the military in general. So, so, so awesome to hear that firsthand perspective from him and how it all ties in. So, yeah. Amazing. Thanks to Norm for coming out. And, uh, you might've heard him talking about training jujitsu. Um, I know we all like to train jujitsu and I recommend that you go train jujitsu. I also recommend that when you're training jujitsu, you're going to need a little bit of extra.

• 4:25:24Jocko Willink?

  Strength, little bit extra power, little bit extra fuel.

• 4:25:29Speaker 01

  You've got a protocol, right? You've got like a full.

• 4:25:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I have a so go on my way to the gym. I have a go. And so I crack it right as I leave for the gym. And then by the time I'm at the gym, the go is gone. And then I have a hydrate with me in the bag that I will drink while I'm training. Cause I sweat a lot and then when I get home, milk. So the great protocol. Hey, check out jockofuel.com. If you need the good protocol, good few clean fuel for your system. Check it out. jockofuel.com. Also, originusa.com. You know, there's been a lot of

• 4:26:13Jocko Willink?

  hoopla about jeans currently in in the world. People are very excited about various jeans.

• 4:26:20Jocko Willink?

  Some of the jeans that you might, some of the jeans that are named with American names. They're not made in America. Did you know that?

• 4:26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:26:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So there are certain jeans that are getting a lot of buzz right now that are made in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, or Mexico.

• 4:26:39Speaker 01

  And they have America.

• 4:26:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and they have America on them. So let me just tell you that those aren't American jeans at all. Those are not American jeans. Those are junk. So don't buy into that. Buy into America. Buy into freedom.

• 4:26:54Jocko Willink?

  Buy into Origin USA, originusa.com. Go get yourself some jeans. Get a jean jacket. You can get the full, it's not American, but it's a Canadian tuxedo. Get your Canadian tuxedo. I posted up with the Canadian tuxedo for my wife, or not for my wife, but I was like posted up with it. And it didn't even like faze her. She was just like, hmm. I said, Canadian tuxedo. She's like, oh, what are you talking about? And I was like, I'm wearing an entire denim outfit.

• 4:27:21Speaker 01

  Is that, is that not a thing for the Brits? They don't have.

• 4:27:24Jocko Willink?

  She just looked at me like I was just normal. But you know, she grew up on a farm, you know, so I guess that's kind of just how they're rolling over there. I guess not a farm, but she had, you know, whatever pastures and horses. So, you know, there's jeans being worn.

• 4:27:40Jocko Willink?

  Although they're more like wearing riding pants. Cause she's from England. Anyways, hey, listen, American made boots, American made t-shirts, American made, American made, not in Bangladesh, not Vietnamese made, not Chinese made, American made. That's what you need. Go to originusa.com and get some. Also jocko store.com. Speaking of stuff to wear, you got a new deaf, new discipline equals freedom t-shirt.

• 4:28:09Speaker 01

  New discipline equals freedom t-shirt V5, I believe, uh, version five.

• 4:28:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 4:28:15Speaker 01

  At this point. Um, so sick continuing to develop those. Uh, this one's badass. Uh, new shirt locker shirts coming as well.

• 4:28:25Jocko Willink?

  Coming monthly.

• 4:28:26Speaker 01

  Sick designs.

• 4:28:27Jocko Willink?

  According to Echo Charles?

• 4:28:28Speaker 01

  According to the people.

• 4:28:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:28:30Speaker 01

  The feedback is good.

• 4:28:31Jocko Willink?

  Cool, cool. Uh, check out Dave Burke. He's got a new book. It's called Need to Lead. It's available for preorder right now. I wrote the foreword to it. So at a minimum, you can get it for that reason. Uh, great book. Lots of great leadership information in there. Check it out. Dave Burke, Need to Lead. And speaking of Dave Burke, he's another leadership instructor like me and Leif, JP and the rest of the crew. Echelonfront.com. We teach leadership. We talk about and teach the leadership principles that we learned on the battlefield. If you want them or us for your organization, go to echelonfront.com and we also have an online training platform because leadership is a skill. You heard Norm

• 4:29:13Jocko Willink?

  talking a lot today about things that are skills and a lot of people don't think that leadership is a skill, but it is a skill. It's a skill that you need to learn and you need to maintain. It's not something you're just born with. So check out extremeownership.com, our online training academy, and we will teach you those skills. And that's what we've got there. And by the way, we get some charity organizations. If you want to help service members, active and retired, check out Mark Lee's mom. She's got the most amazing charity organization. I know right now, currently she's working, helping several veterans that I personally know, and it's incredible to

• 4:29:55Jocko Willink?

  watch the organization go to work. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also check out heroesandhorses.org.

• 4:30:07Jocko Willink?

  And then finally Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. If you want to connect with us, or if you need some whiskey, check out Hoot and Young on the internet, hootandyoung.com, Instagram, @HootandYoung, Twitter, @HootandYoung, MTR, which we don't know what that means, but we're going with it. And then Facebook and YouTube also, Hoot and Young. And for us, you can check out Jaco.com. And then on social media, I'm at Jocko Willink. Kerry is at Kerry Hilton. Just don't spend too much time there, because it'll kill you.

• 4:30:44Jocko Willink?

  Once again, huge thanks to Norm Hoot Hooten for joining us today. Honored to sit down, honored to meet you. I met him several months ago, but it's honored to sit down with you and just hear your lessons learned, hear your perspective, and hear about the sacrifices that were made. So, thanks to you and your service. Also, thanks to all of our brave military personnel around the world right now. With a solemn salute to the brave soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice, October 3rd and 4th, 1993, Mogadishu, Somalia.

• 4:31:27Jocko Willink?

  We honor your service. We thank you for the lessons that were passed on, and we will not forget your sacrifice. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders. We know you sacrifice every day to keep us safe, and we are grateful for that as well. And everyone else out there,

• 4:31:54Jocko Willink?

  look, you can have a really good plan. You can have really good tactics, you can have really good equipment, but things can still go sideways. And that's why you need to train hard. That's why you need to push yourself. That's why you need to prepare for the worst case scenarios, because if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And don't count on anything else but that. You have to prepare for the worst case scenarios. And then,

• 4:32:27Jocko Willink?

  in the moment of truth, like Norm Hooten, you need to step up and lead.

• 4:32:34Jocko Willink?

  And that's all I've got for tonight. Until next time, this is Kerry and Jocko. Out.