382: Into The Heart of Darkness. Fighting Che Guevara's Communist Insurgents in the Congo. w/ SEAL Jim Hawes

Cold War Navy SEAL. 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 382 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. The Congo's recent independence from Belgium had triggered a secession crisis by one of the country's most mineral-rich and wealthy provinces. It led to an opening for the Soviet Bloc to exploit rebellions among local tribal factions. The US saw the country as a strategic geopolitical necessity against communism, which meant the Congo was turning into a superpower battleground. The US feared that losing influence in the Congo was the next step to losing Africa.

• 0:43Jocko Willink?

  The CIA had sent me to the Congo to conduct a clandestine operation under as deep a cover as possible while still enabling and sustaining the conduct for a successful mission. The suits in Washington recognized that the communist rebels needed to be contained. The strategy was to cut off their supply lines and strangle their resource base, which would require battle-tested and seaworthy hands. And the world could not know we were responsible. We were holding back the line on insurgent violent communism. It was the boiling years of the Cold War and Africa was becoming a hotbed of potential

• 1:27Jocko Willink?

  dominos that might fall the wrong way if we didn't pay attention. And as all eyes were focused on that other communist battleground in Southeast Asia, the US government wanted to keep Africa involvement as quiet as possible and ensure that no one could find our fingerprints on this op. Consequently, one of the most important elements in my Congo mission was to cover the ass of the US government. They needed a guy who had the knowledge and covert experience to make this a successful play. The CIA had determined that I was that guy.

• 2:10Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book which is called Cold War Navy SEAL. It's written by James Jim Haas, who as a 26-year-old SEAL lieutenant, ended up building and commanding a small navy in the Congo. A small navy that helped defeat communism in that country, including the communist icon Che Guevara. But it's not all he did in his career. He served with the US Surface Navy, was involved in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, worked with SOG in Vietnam, and has worked and lived around the world.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  And it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Jim, thanks for joining us.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It's always fun to talk to young SEALs who are interested in ancient history.

• 3:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's very, it's always nice to be called the young SEAL when I've been retired for 10 years and I'm 51 years old. So I appreciate it, but I guess everything is perspective, right?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  I'd trade you.

• 3:16Jocko Willink?

  No doubt. I always look at the younger guys. I'd trade with them in a heartbeat. Um, yeah, thanks for coming down and I guess this is a lot of stuff to cover. Let's jump into it. Um, let's just talk about, you know, you growing up. So you were born in Oklahoma, but you didn't grow up there, right?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Oklahoma, then the panhandle to Texas during the Second World War. My dad was a Pacific Battleship Sailor.

• 3:41Jocko Willink?

  So what, what year were you born?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  39.

• 3:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And so do you remember, what do you remember about the Second World War, if anything?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I remember my General MacArthur's uniform. I remember my father sending me, um...

• 3:59Speaker 01

  A bracelet made out of plexiglass from a Japanese kamikaze that hit their ship. He was in damage control. I remember the first time I saw him, which was after he had been away for three years. And I, of course, I didn't know what he looked like. All I knew is there was that guy standing there in a sailor uniform and he had to be the guy. And I set the world record in broad jump, leaping into his arms. I remember that very well. So, and then, of course, I remember the end and all the victory.

• 4:36Jocko Willink?

  What year did he come home?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  He came home in forty-six.

• 4:42Jocko Willink?

  And what year did he leave?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Forty-two.

• 4:45Jocko Willink?

  So you just didn't remember the beginning and then you're growing up.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:49Jocko Willink?

  You're listening to the news or I guess reading newspapers or is your mom telling you what's going on?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Well.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, whatever I knew, I knew from my mother.

• 5:00Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And of course, the only, you had some radio, but mostly it was, it was from, yeah.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  And this was while you were in Texas?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  This is while we were in the Panhandle of Texas. Yeah, I am, I'm a really, my mother was the classic, uh, uh, World War II, what do they call them? The.

• 5:22Jocko Willink?

  The Riveter?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  Rosie Riveter?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Except her Riveter was, was in a synthetic rubber plant in, uh, outside of, uh, Borger, Texas. And, uh, because it had taken all the, it had taken all the rubber in the world. So Phillips sixty-six built a, uh, built this butadiene plant, synthetic rubber plant. And every morning we'd get picked up on a bus, uh, in Borger and I'd get dropped off at what today would be called a daycare center. And she would go make synthetic rubber, pick me up and we'd go home. That was what it is. And, uh, my first year of grade school, you know, they weren't building classrooms. They weren't building houses, so we didn't live great.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Fifty-five years later, I gotta say this without choking up. Fifty-five years later, she apologized to me for the way we had to live during this time because it wasn't, it wasn't good. But of course, I didn't notice it, you know, I was with my mother and it's the way kids are and as long as we were together, it didn't, it didn't pay any attention to anything else. But it had bothered her all those years. Amazing. Anyway. Um, yeah, so.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  How was your dad when he came home? How was his hearing? I always think about those World War II guys with the guns firing and they didn't know about hearing protection.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean sixteen inch guns on that ship and, and damage control. He didn't talk about it once, except one time after one of those kamikazes. He said there were twenty-three guys in, uh, damage control and twenty-one of them got wounded. He was one that did, one of the two. He didn't, he never really talked much about it. And of course, in retrospect, I didn't ask all the things I should have and could have asked. Uh, but you know, I, I never, he was fine. He was like all those guys. He was ready to get back at it and, you know, be with his family, support his family, whatever.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  And what'd he end, what'd he end up doing for a living when he got back?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Well, he did a lot of things. Uh, he, um, he, he got a, he got a job in Wisconsin when he got back. And, uh, so we got on a train and, and, uh, went to Wisconsin to join him. Little town called Beaver Dam, population ten thousand. And he worked for the local lumber company and he ran the cement block plant. And he was involved in home building and he was always, he was always in sales type stuff. He had quite an outgoing personality. And, uh, yeah, so we were there for the next.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Ten years or so and I went to a, there's a local private school called Waylon Academy, which is the oldest co-educational private school in the country. And I got a scholarship there, which changed my life because Beaver Dan wasn't exactly the launching pad for colleges and universities around the area. And, and my head, the headmaster was a guy named Ray Patterson, who was the guy who built the Milwaukee Bucks and the Houston Rockets. He was a hell of a guy. He'd been an All-American basketball player at the University of Wisconsin in the early forties. Had a huge influence on my life. He was a great man.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  So that was, that was luck. And then that was all luck. And then we, we moved back to Texas when I was going into my senior year.

• 9:01Jocko Willink?

  So what year is that?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  High school, I'd be 56.

• 9:03Jocko Willink?

  So you're just growing up in the, like, one of the most iconic periods in American history?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  No question about it.

• 9:12Jocko Willink?

  And did you, I mean?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Everything is, everything, everything was possible. Everything was possible. And of course, that's the way my parents were. You can do anything you want to do. Go get them. Yeah.

• 9:23Jocko Willink?

  Were you playing sports in high school?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:26Jocko Willink?

  What'd you play?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I played football, basketball, track and tennis. Yeah.

• 9:30Jocko Willink?

  And the music, I mean, you got Elvis, like, it's just an iconic time. Is that?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  I remember, I remember when Elvis was first on Ed Sullivan's TV show. Yeah, that was a big deal. I think that was in 56. Maybe it was spring of 57, I can't remember, but anyway, yeah.

• 9:49Jocko Willink?

  So you're, at this time, are you thinking, as you're growing up, are you thinking about joining the military?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Well, everybody did. You know, everybody had a, had a, had a service requirement. So I, I just always, you always assumed that's, that you would do that. And I, I, having seen.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Having seen Woodmark, Richard Woodmark and the Frogman like so many of the other guys, I said, that's for me. And, um, but I always knew I had these terrible eyes. So I had to. But I also knew somehow I was gonna do it. I, you know, just never, it was never even doubt in my mind.

• 10:28Jocko Willink?

  But you ended up going to college right after high school?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:30Jocko Willink?

  And then what was the college experience? Again, you're, you're like in the most prime.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Oh, the worst, the worst four years of my life was college. Worst four years of my life. I had no fun. I had no money. I had no fun. I wasn't, I didn't know what I wanted to do except get out and go to OCS. I, you know, that was a four years wasted time. And I should have gone into the military right out of high school and then gone back to college.

• 10:54Jocko Willink?

  But I, I, I've made that recommendation to a lot of kids over the years. When you're 18 years old, you're not ready to go to college. You want four more years of sitting in a classroom?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  So, no, that was, well, that was so good that I started, I spent my first four weeks of college at the University of Texas. Had a girlfriend in Wisconsin. I was a walk-on in Darrell Royal's first year at the University of Texas. And, you know, he was an icon coach, football coach in Texas and I guess around the world, around the country. And, um, so, you know, Darrell Royal in his first year when Texas was coming off the floor, wasn't interested in 155, 155 pound quarterback who couldn't see. And plus I had this girlfriend in Wisconsin. So I came home from my first weekend in college.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  And my mother's all excited. I'm the first guy to go to college, of course, in the family. And, uh, I said, well, I'm going to Wisconsin.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Needless to say, it caused some hate and discontent at the table. And, uh, on every, my dad took my side. And I remember when he drove me to the bus station the next morning to get back to Austin to get, throw my stuff in a box and get on a train. He said, I want you to know that's the first time your mother ever went to bed mad and woke, woke up mad. So don't screw up. Well, of course I did, but.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Then I spent that, I spent the rest of that year at a really good place called Lawrence, now called Lawrence University, it was called Lawrence College then, in Appleton, Wisconsin. And it, and then I was so ashamed of myself by the end of that year. I said, this is just crazy. I'm gonna start all over from, forget sports. I gotta, you know, I gotta do something right. So I went to, so I went to SMU and, and there was a dean there named Mac Adams. And I said, Dean, I got no money and I'm on academic probation. But I said, the, the dean at Lawrence will give me a recommendation and help me get some jobs. I like to go to

• 13:08Speaker 01

  school here. He said, fine. So he helped me get a couple of jobs and, and so I finished my next, I basically did four years and three years at SMU.

• 13:20Jocko Willink?

  And you just worked hard the whole time?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just worked hard. I had jobs and I, you know, I had, yeah, I just had extra load of classes. But it became a matter of pride to finish in four years, which is stupid because all it meant was my grade, my grades weren't very good. So you can understand when I said to my son, who's now in college, son, you can come to me with any problem, any concern you got, because you can't make any mistake that I didn't make.

• 13:50Jocko Willink?

  And did you, so at what point did you start applying though? Do you have to, did you have to apply for OCS?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I applied to OCS. I did it during my senior year. And, and so I graduated, I think, May or June, and I went to OCS in August.

• 14:09Jocko Willink?

  What year was this? 1963?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  1961.

• 14:11Jocko Willink?

  1961?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I finished OCS because of Christmas, etc. in February of 1962.

• 14:18Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And your first job was as a surface warfare officer, right?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, on a, on a floating refrigerator. It was USS Vega AF-59. It was a reefer.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  And I was the damage control.

• 14:36Jocko Willink?

  So it's a literal refrigeration ship?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did all undersea replenishments.

• 14:40Jocko Willink?

  Replenishments.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Hell of a captain, really good captain. So that was really good. It was a good, it was a good experience. I became an OD, Officer of the Deck Underway, etc. I mean, it's not exactly like being Officer of the Deck of Destroyer in formation, but it's called independent steaming.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  And, uh, and so, um, that, yeah, so I had, uh, I bought myself some contact lenses with my first paycheck. I know when I was in OCS, so I had my contact lenses.

• 15:13Jocko Willink?

  And contact lenses at the time were brand new technology type thing?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  They weren't in the forms. They didn't have anything, anything about, anything about, uh, contact lenses in the Navy forms, so.

• 15:27Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you got a little section in your book about this, and I think I thought was pretty, um, that was pretty good. You say here, "I considered applying to become a Frogman." And you, you said that because you saw that Frogman movie?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:39Jocko Willink?

  Did your dad tell anything about Frogman? I didn't even know about it.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  No, no, my dad didn't tell me anything about it.

• 15:44Jocko Willink?

  You say, "But my eyesight was enough to keep me out of the SEALs altogether. To enter the Navy and attend Officer Candidate School to become an unrestricted line officer, I needed a medical waiver. My eyesight was 2,200, the worst allowable under the required medical standards, if correctable to 2020 with eyeglasses. So I purchased contact lenses with my first Navy paycheck. I was fully aware that my eyesight might prevent me from even entering the Frogman training. I went to Yokusa, Yokuska Naval Base Hospital and timed my eye exam to occur during the lunch period. There was a corpsman striker, a medic in training, on duty in the unit.

• 16:24Jocko Willink?

  I knew his minimal medical experience would yield the least resistance to my desired result. I said, "Corpsman, I need to get back to the ship. Can I read the chart to complete this exam?" With contact lenses in, I read the chart and passed with excellent 2015 vision. There's nothing on any of the forms that questioned the contact lenses or anything related, since the forms had not kept pace with the technology. My application sailed through channels and I got immediate orders to report to underwater demolition team replacement training, class 29, commencing January 2nd, 1963. I was in.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was of course in terrible, you know, I was in terrible shape because I just got off the ship and went east to stop for Christmas with my folks and went east and, you know, the moral dilemma that I had was officers carry their medical records and I looked in my medical jacket and sure as hell, there was my, there was my waiver, the last page in the jacket. And so, did I tear it out or did I leave it in? Well, you know, you can't, you're on, you've got an oath. And so, I thought, well, let's see if God wants

• 17:40Speaker 01

  me to be a frog man. So, I reported in over there and they had a first-class diving corpsman, not a frog, first-class diving corpsman on duty and he was receiving the medical records. So, you went in, you squat, jump, and you handed him your medical jacket and he starts going leafing through it and he flicks the pages and the last page with the waiver on it stuck to the previous page. So, he didn't see it. So, I thought, whoopee, I'm in. Of course, and I'm looking at everybody through my contact lenses. And so, we started the

• 18:22Speaker 01

  training and we're down to, we'd gone to, we'd just finished Camp Pickett, which was about halfway through training.

• 18:30Jocko Willink?

  And so, you're going through what they used to call UDT replacement training, which is now called BUDS, and you're going through class 29. And this is on the East Coast because for a while, they ran SEAL training on the East Coast and West Coast. You're on the East Coast, which is in Virginia.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:49Jocko Willink?

  And it's January.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  It was the snowiest winter they had had in recorded history in Virginia. I'm going to tell you something that you will understand this, having been an instructor. The days leading up to Hell Week were pretty nice, was pretty nice weather. And the instructors kept saying, it always snows for hell week.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  We go to bed on, on, we go to bed on Sunday evening and the weather's not bad. It, you know, after midnight it all, you know, it all cuts loose. We fall out of there, stumbling all over ourselves and we fall down in the snow.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  You can imagine the psychological impact that had was these, wow, these instructors of

• 19:42Speaker 01

  they do magic. And that was the start. That was the start of it.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  And it was cold, Jesus.

• 19:52Jocko Willink?

  But you weren't really physically prepared because you've been on a ship.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I knew.

• 19:56Jocko Willink?

  What did you know about SEAL training?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Nothing, not the movie. I didn't know anything about it, except it was gonna hurt a lot.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  That's all I know. I met some guys at the officers club in, in Yucuska who knew something about it. And they were telling me, we were having drinks and they were telling me about it. And I thought, well, shit, I guess this really is gonna hurt. But what, you know, what do you do? You just do what you have to do.

• 20:24Jocko Willink?

  How long was it? Was it like six months long?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  The base, the it was, yeah, it was six months long.

• 20:32Jocko Willink?

  And was there, was there anything that really challenged you? Did you have a hard time, like, were you good in the water?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  I was, I was, I was good runner. I was good on the obstacle course. I was good in the water in the pool, but when we got into that, into the ocean with those heavy duck feet on my skinny little legs. And that, that was painful. I remember we're in Rosie Roads for, for, for training and we're, I don't know, I think it's three miles swim or five mile swim. We are going around the island in

• 21:07Speaker 01

  I got, it was a three mile swim. I got more than six feet away from my swim buddy. So the next one, which was, I guess, five miles, whatever it was, a little fuzzy in the thing, but it was a long way. They put a three inch hawser between, tied me to my swim buddy. So I was dragging that, we were dragging that thing through the entire swim. I'm crying like a baby in my face mask. I mean, it really, it really hurt.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  But it finished.

• 21:41Jocko Willink?

  The pain will eventually stop.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  And of course, when you're swimming around and the tide's going the wrong way. All you remember is, and you try to get into the coral to break it up, but you don't want to get the coral and get cut to pieces. I remember stroke, stroke and looking up there was this little house or shed or something up on this point in the ceiling. We're as close into the coral as we can get. I'm stroking, I'm stroking and that place is staying exactly the same place.

• 22:12Jocko Willink?

  We did our, we did our five and a half nautical mile swim just in Coronado, just down and back. And I remember, you know, you're like looking at whatever, some marker on the beach and it's just not moving. It's just not going anywhere. You're like, why is this taking so long? You're thinking of the current, you're thinking of the wind, you're thinking of your swim buddy. It's like, no, it's just going to be a long, arduous time.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  And by this time, by this time, the instructors found out that I was going to be coming back to be their boss.

• 22:46Jocko Willink?

  So that, that took place because they found out about your vision. Talk us through that.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. So they found out about my, so we finished Camp Pickett, we're halfway through the training. And I get called into the, and we're down to the hard cores, pretty much the hard cores, you know? And so I get called the instructor's hut and the funniest guy there was in the SEAL teams, a guy named,

• 23:11Speaker 01

  escapes me now, but hell of a guy. And he says, Mr. Oz, how many fingers am I holding up? I thought, whoa, uh oh. And he said, I want to see you back there in officer's country. So I go back, come to attention, face to face with a guy whose job I'm subsequently going to have.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  And he says, okay, Oz, what do you do? So I told him the absolute truth, that's all I could do. He's shaking, I'm telling the story, he's shaking his head. And I, he said, "Well, do you know, you might be eligible for a court martial." And I said, "I don't think so, sir, I didn't say anything and I didn't sign anything." And he said, "Well, I don't know what's gonna happen, but you gotta get over and get to the ophthalmology department right now and get an exam." So I go over to the ophthalmology department and the doctor says, "Oh, I'm glad to meet you, you're a medical phenomenon. You got it from 2200 to 2015 in less than a year. Bureau of Medicine wants to know about you."

• 24:10Speaker 01

  And I said, "Well, it's actually the way it is, doc." And he said, "Well, we've gotta give you..." I said, "I got contact lenses and..." He said, "Well, okay." And he said, "Well, I don't know what I can do about that." And I said, "Well, doc, you gotta do something that's not good enough, you gotta do something." He said, "Well, let me give you an exam." So he does the exam and sure enough, I'm 2015. And he said, "Well, I don't know what to say, you're 2200." And I said, "Doc, you gotta say something, you just gotta say something." He said, "I can say you're extremely well adapted for contact lenses, say it." So, he said it. So I go back to training, I'm missing some evolutions and of course, the instructors

• 24:55Speaker 01

  aren't happy about that. And nobody knows what my status is, is it going to be or whatever. So, I get called over to the senior medical officer in the Atlantic Fleet. And I'd seen this guy watching training, he liked to come, come watch training, whatever. So, I get called in to see him, I walk in, ramrod, straight, tension, ten, ensign Hawes reporting his directive, sir, blah, blah, blah. He just looks at me. And...

• 25:30Speaker 01

  He just looked at me like he was looking into my soul. And finally, I couldn't stand any longer and I knew this was it. This is the court of last resort. So I just, from the tip of my toes, the intensity just came out and I said, Admiral, I'm standing first in my class right now, so don't tell me I'm not physically qualified. And he, he just looked, he just kept looking at me. And finally said, okay, I'll recommend a waiver. Part of it I know hadn't been done before. So I was always grateful. You gotta, a guy like that'll take a situation on its merits rather than just go by the... That was, that was good Navy. Yeah, anyway.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  So, that wasn't the end of it though, because in those days, you know, the Navy wouldn't let the SEALs do their own training. Because, you know, the SEALs were, the frogs were the orphans of the Navy, unwanted orphans of the Navy. And so I get, and it's, so it's run by the Naval Amphibia School, which is run by a captain, a force driver. So I get called over to the captain's office and...

• 26:40Jocko Willink?

  And this is a regular fleet guy?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah. So I get, Rinson Hawes reported, he's directed, sir, and he said, okay, what'd you do? So, telling the story, shaking his head. He said, well, I have, I have a recommendation here for a waiver that I can forward either approved or disapproved. How would you like to come back as an instructor? I said, Captain, I'd love to do that. After I've operated a couple of years, I'd love to come back as an instructor. He said, I don't think you understood me, Rinson. I got a waiver here that I can forward either approved or disapproved. How would you like to come back as an instructor? I said, I'd love it, Captain.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  So the, the board came down, I went to jump school. You don't have to be able to see to jump, as you know. And then went to underwater swim school and the diving medical officer there wasn't gonna allow me to, to complete underwater swim school, because I had contact lenses. I said, Doc, I said, I'm not trying to hurt myself or anybody else. I went into a chamber, went down to 200 feet with my contact lenses in. It doesn't, doesn't matter. Well, you're gonna do it. So I go to see the XO and the XO is an ex-Frog.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Don't worry Jim, by the time, uh, we'll cross the wave, by the time they act on it, you'll, you'll be finished with the training, so.

• 28:00Jocko Willink?

  So did you pretty much wear contact lenses all the time?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 28:03Jocko Willink?

  And they never like fell out or?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  One did one time.

• 28:06Jocko Willink?

  And no factor?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  No, no factor.

• 28:09Jocko Willink?

  Did you carry a spare?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Actually, it was what we were doing around the world in, in Hell Week. And a, and a branch just picked it right out. Just, I'm glad they had the lens, the weather was got my eyeball. He just picked it right out. It didn't matter, I had another set, so.

• 28:24Jocko Willink?

  What's around the world?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, during Hell Week, we had this, um,

• 28:31Speaker 01

  exercise where we, we took the boats, we took through all canals, we went through all kinds of mud flats, all kinds of whatever stuff around the world. He ended up, as I recall, back in the bay paddling into the, whatever. But it took most of the night.

• 28:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and Coronado, what they do is they, they launch you into the bay side of Coronado? And you, you know, you carry the boats over there, go through the mud, then you launch, and then you paddle all the way around Coronado, all the way back out the channel, out into the ocean, and then back, and you come into the beach. But it takes like, like six, seven hours.

• 29:08Jocko Willink?

  And people are falling asleep, and it's usually pretty late. I mean, it's maybe two or three days in Hell Week. And it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit like you get time away from the instructors, you know, so you're, so people are like falling asleep and, but yeah, it's just a long.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  I really can't, almost can't remember. I mean, I can only remember bits and pieces of it. It's like, you know, your mind's so far out of gear by this point, you're just...

• 29:30Jocko Willink?

  People are hallucinating and stuff, and seeing stuff, and probably not the best time to lose your contact lens, but, oh well. Uh, so, so then you come back, so you just graduate from training, and then they send you right back as an instructor?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so then I have, so we're down in Puerto Rico during, you know, and doing these long swims and all that stuff. And, and, uh, the instructors find out, of course, they always, always find out. And, um, Master Chief Tom Blaze, who is one of the old legends,

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Said to me, Mr. Oz, I'm gonna make it my mission to make sure you deserve to be my boss. So I had his personal, so you asked me about swimming, so I had his personal attention in Puerto Rico. And I'd be on those long swims and my legs would be like rubber and blazes would be on my ass.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  So I got a lot better at it, but I was never really, never really one of the top guys in the water.

• 30:40Jocko Willink?

  Were those UDT guys that were putting you through training, were some of those guys World War II guys?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, we had a guy named John Parrish who drove the, who drove the landing boats at Iwo Jima. Oh, no, at Terawa, at Terawa. We had a fabulous guy, just died a few years ago, named Jim Cook, who was a World War II frog. We had a fabulous, and we had a fabulous guy named Chester Cleveland Stevens, actually had him later. Chester Cleveland Stevens, who had gone to work for the agency and he was down at a base they had in North Carolina. When I was doing some training for the agency down there and conducting some training with Chester.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  And he was one of the guys whose body they used when they put together the Navy diving tables. They would put him in a chamber and take him down and he met the woman who was his wife for 50 years or whatever. She was, she was one of the nurses on the chamber. And so they would take him down, start to bring him up, if he went, if he started to go, if he started to bend, we'd quickly take him back down again. Oh, hell of a guy, hell of a guy.

• 31:56Jocko Willink?

  What was his name?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Chester Cleveland Stevens.

• 31:59Jocko Willink?

  The guy that they based the Navy diving tables on?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  I don't know, I'm sure they had more than one, but he was one.

• 32:05Jocko Willink?

  But that's still crazy.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, crazy. But what else they were gonna do? Trial and error. I mean, how was she gonna do it? So anyway, and Benny Slinski, Chief Slinski was our, was our chief instructor and he was World War II guy. He was a hell of a guy. Hell of a guy. All these guys treated me when I reported into the, you know, after training, treated me like I'd been their teammate for 20 years and the best they ever met. I mean, they were so professional. This is fabulous year.

• 32:37Jocko Willink?

  And how many classes did you watch get put through?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Two, two.

• 32:42Jocko Willink?

  What'd you learn from watching classes get put through, especially because it was so fresh in your mind?

• 32:46Speaker 01

  I sure learned that you can't tell anything about anybody that you can't see inside of.

• 32:52Jocko Willink?

  It's a weird thing, isn't it?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And how to, how, and try to get a little better at how to look inside, but it's pretty hard. You gotta, you gotta put them under, people under stress of one kind or another to find out what they're made of.

• 33:05Jocko Willink?

  It's very bizarre.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  I went down, right after I reported, I went down to Key West to screen, to screen people that were going to apply.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  I came back and I said, the instructors, I said, I met the guy who's going to be honor man in this next class. Oh, yeah, Mr. Hodge. You know, that damn guy was the first to quit, not the second, the first to quit. Well, you can imagine the flak that I took from these guys and that one.

• 33:35Jocko Willink?

  What made you think he was going to be so awesome?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  He was just really good physically.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  And even after having just gone through it, I still undervalued the mental toughness it takes.

• 33:48Jocko Willink?

  I had, I had a friend, he was a captain and he was very, very careful and he's never recommended anybody. He would say this, he'd say, I'm never recommending anybody. And finally this candidate came along, officer, and he spoke a few different languages and he had all these assets and went to some Ivy League school. And he would, this, this particular captain was very forward thinking and like, oh, we need to start learning languages. And I think he spoke, you know, like some crazy combination of languages, like Farsi and Chinese. I mean, some really good combination. So he finally breaks down and gets this guy, gets this guy to go to Bud's. The same thing. I, I, I didn't remember, I didn't know about any of that part.

• 34:29Jocko Willink?

  I only knew when the guy quit and I was, I was in the office with this guy, get the word, are you kidding me? I'm never doing this again. I've never recommended anybody again.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Well, in the next, in the next class, we had this officer. Really good physically, top Ivy League university, spoke fluently, Spanish and Portuguese, had everything. And the instructors were saying, no, this, these guys, Mr. Smith's gonna be Honor Man. I said, nope. I'm telling you, this guy has, has imposed his own limitations, and when he hits them, he's gonna quit. Ah, ah, ah, yeah, what about so and so? So, we start, we start Hell Week, and on the first day, I ease up to him as we're running on the beach in the afternoon. I said, how you doing, Mr. Smith? Fine instructor. I said, Mr. Smith, these instructors think you're gonna be Honor Man, but I think you're gonna

• 35:23Speaker 01

  quit. And, uh, never instructor. Okay, well, when you get ready, let me know. So I ease off. Next Tuesday, the next morning, on the next afternoon, Tuesday, and it's a beautiful day. I say, Mr. Smith, how you doing? Oh, fine instructor. I said, you know, Mr. Smith, look at all those ships exercising out there in the bay. I said, all the smart officers are sitting in the wardroom drinking coffee. Why are you here? Oh, gonna be a frog, Mr. instructor. Okay, well, I don't think you are. When you're ready, let me know. Wednesday. Mr. Smith, I can see your dragon. You sure you wanna put up with this? I mean, you're

• 36:04Speaker 01

  so smart and well-educated, whatever. You sure you wanna do this? Yes, instructor. I said, well, I don't think so, Mr. Smith, but when you're ready, just hand me your helmet. Thursday afternoon.

• 36:15Jocko Willink?

  Is this Hell Week? This is Hell Week? So we made it through four days?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Thursday afternoon. I said, well, Mr. Smith, you ready to quit? Yes, instructor. And he hands me his helmet. Yeah, how do you know? And we had another guy, you've probably heard of him, named Randy Wise. He was in all, he was a, he was jump happy. He was a parachute guy.

• 36:39Jocko Willink?

  I had heard of him.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Wonderful guy, wonderful guy. And he was in the same class. So I thought, well, I'll work. I always worked on the officers. I didn't, you know, I worked hard on the officers. And, uh, so I went up to Randy on the same beach, same, sort of, you know, how you doing, Mr. Wise? Oh, fine instructor. I said, uh, Mr. Wise, what makes you think you're gonna complete this training? He said, you did, instructor. So I left him alone.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  We became great friends.

• 37:13Jocko Willink?

  Now, this is what, wait, so are we in 1963 right now?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  We're in 1963, yes.

• 37:20Jocko Willink?

  So what do you know about the SEAL teams versus going to a UDT team?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Well, I just see these guys in the chat hall. That's all. I don't know, don't know much about them. Because after all, remember, all they did basically was take the secondary missions of the, of the, of the UDTs to make them the primary mission of the SEALs. And everybody was going through the same training. So there was no, you know, it was kind of like, how do you go, how does, how does the Navy get more appropriations?

• 37:49Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Particularly in the aftermath of the JFK thing for special warfare and so forth. And the Navy looked around. That's why Ben Milligan's book is so instructive.

• 37:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  It's just

• 37:59Jocko Willink?

  Great book.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Great book.

• 38:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  And it's also why though, I don't believe there'll ever be a Navy, there'll never be another Admiral in charge of SOCOM. The regular army's got it.

• 38:10Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Oh, and SOCOM will be diluted. It'll be, they can't stand themselves. Culturally, they can't stand themselves. They have to, they have to be big army, big regular army. They can't help it. And to some extent, the Navy is that way, but less so, thank God. Otherwise, we wouldn't be around, we wouldn't have got to do what we did. But I, yeah, I've, right, these, the cultures are such that they can't stand, well, look at how long the Marine Corps fought.

• 38:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Before they finally, finally came around because they had to. There was too much pressure on them.

• 38:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, that'll be interesting. It seemed like they have a little bit of a rotation going on for the SOCOM commander.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Well, I think they did. We'll see if it continues. I'm just skeptical. Okay. Cause I, you know, I've spent all, all, I, I never got to really work much with SEALs. I was always kind of the Lone Ranger. And, and always we were there and everything was so politically sensitive. We were always talking to these guys at headquarters. And the guys at headquarters think they're at headquarters because they're smarter than the guys in the field. If you were, if you were as smart as I am, you'd be here. You wouldn't be in the field. I mean, look at Vietnam with Lou Conine, the guy had worked with Ho Chi Minh. He wouldn't get listened to. I talked to Jacque Richardson, who was chief of station during the, at the DMCU. I knew him. I talked to him. He said, we told him, uh,

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Don't get rid of him now. We've got nobody to replace him. We can get rid of him anytime, but don't do it now. And of course, you know, the glorious elite determined otherwise. And what do we have then for the next? And we were there. So what do they have? Five, five new governments in the next six months, all of which we were there, some of which during the demonstrations were targeting us in Bogdung with the white elephant in Da Nang. That was also another lesson that I got for, for agitate, for, for crowd manipulation

• 40:15Speaker 01

  in the communist agitation propaganda department of how to control mobs. We stood up there on the third floor, there's only three floors in Bogdung after one of these changes, the government and watching the, you know, they got in this crowd of people whipped up and they were going to come in and we had everything burned and we weren't going to fire until they started coming up, you know, from the second floor. And we're looking down on this mob and you see five guys. It was right out of the, right out of the manual. Five guys manipulating, manipulating this crowd. So if you know what you're doing, it's easy because the mob's got no mind.

• 40:50Jocko Willink?

  Right. Just need someone to give them, push them in the right direction momentarily and they follow each other.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 40:57Jocko Willink?

  Um, so you get, so, so how long you do two classes? You, you're there as an instructor for two classes. Are they, are they, how many classes do they do in a year at that time? Like, how long did that take? Okay. So you're there for basically a year.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  I wasn't there for the full second class because they.

• 41:13Jocko Willink?

  How long was it until you got orders to UDT 21?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Oh, of course, you know, I would go to work on that immediately. So I went over, I went over to see Ken Wolfe, who was the lieutenant commander in charge of 21. I said, I said, Mr. Wolfe, you, you need operators. I want to operate. Get me a waiver. He says, sure. So he, separate, separate chain, separate chain of command. So boom, he got me, he got me set orders. Then come the orders. Phone rings. It's Captain Lee at the Naval Amphibious School. Hawes, get your ass over here right now. So I went over to him and he said, it's Hawes reporting, he's directed, Captain. You frogs are always pulling this crap.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  We got a deal. You're an instructor. I'm getting these orders canceled right now, which he picked up the phone and did. Four stripes, two and a half stripes.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  But the waiver was on the books. That was the key.

• 42:13Jocko Willink?

  The waiver to be an operational.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  The waiver was on the books. And that paved the way then for when Tarbox called me from SEAL. That paved the way for when Tarbox called me from SEAL Team Two and said, you want to go to Vietnam? I can't tell you what it is because I don't know if she has how soon you'll be ready to go.

• 42:33Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah. So you have this waiver in the books, which means despite your eyesight, you're going to be able to go and operate. You get the orders get canceled at UDT 21. And you got a little section about this in the book. You say, almost a year later, I received a phone call from Tom Tarbox, SEAL Team Two XO. He was calling with the kind of offer I'd been waiting for. I have two questions, he said. One, do you want to be assigned to Vietnam on a mission so secret that it comes right straight out of Secretary of Defense McNamara's office? And two, how soon can you be ready to go? I replied, yes, sir, in 24 hours. There were very few officers available with my experience and Tarbox knew I was more than ready

• 43:16Jocko Willink?

  to join an operating team. When Captain Lee heard about it, he was infuriated with me all over again, thinking I had circumvented him and the agreement we had made. He summoned me to his office yet again, and after venting his fury, he picked up the phone to get my orders to Vietnam canceled. A struggle to hold in this surging joy as I watched his demeanor turn from imperious to obedient. He finally hung up and said, congratulations, Lieutenant JG Haas. Whatever it is, it's so politically sensitive. It comes straight from Secretary McNamara's office. Is there anything I can do to assist you? So I was off to Vietnam, reported SEAL Team Two the next day and had a cup of coffee with Tarbox and my life as a covert operator began.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  When I went to the 25th reunion, which was not anything fancy like they do these days of SEAL Team Two, it was in a, it was in a bar in Virginia Beach. And you know the name Eagle Gallagher, Bob Gallagher, Eagle. Eagle Gallagher walks up to me like he's about to beat my ass and he's so, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm here because I belong here and speak to Tarbox if you, if you've got any questions, you got any doubt? Well, of course, and he swayed up in a hurry, but it was, it was, I must have had the shortest tenure in SEAL Team Two and anybody in history.

• 44:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a, I like, I like Captain Lee just having to go from, you know, you're not going to, is there anything I can do to assist you?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Well, you know, but again, that's another good, that's to me, that's another kudo for the Navy because the guy said, okay, geez, whatever, let me help.

• 44:57Jocko Willink?

  That's a word away. Good point. You say here, after detaching from SEAL Team Two bound for Vietnam, I stopped by to visit my parents and brother. By that time I was trained and fit, frogman headed for war and the pursuit of my dreams. As I concluded the visit with my folks, my mother put her arms around my neck and said, Jim, take good care of yourself. Please tell them not to send your body home if you get killed. I could not go through it twice. Her words were liberating to me. I knew it was hard for her to let me go, but I also understood and always had that she wouldn't try to deter me. Maybe you had to grow up as she did in the heart of the Dust Bowl and as a wife of a World War II sailor on a battleship to be able to be that strong.

• 45:39Jocko Willink?

  It was typical of her to be encouraging of whatever I wanted to do, yet saying goodbye to me twice, once as I departed for war and then again as a casualty, wasn't something she could do.

• 45:50Jocko Willink?

  But there were no guilt trips, no whining, she didn't cry, she was completely supportive without a selfish gesture of any kind. Her only other request was just please write.

• 46:02Jocko Willink?

  I was ordered immediately to Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Special Operations Group, Naval Advisory Detachment, based in Da Nang, where I would spend the next year participating in the takeover of the CIA's Operation 34A and its expansion and intensification under the Department of Defense.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  I wrote every week on Sunday night.

• 46:29Jocko Willink?

  That's a good sign right there.

• 46:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a good, that's a good sign right there. I guess people have it easier nowadays with email.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:39Jocko Willink?

  And I think email was a good thing because, you know, if you can call, or nowadays, guys can FaceTime, right? And you, and then that's cool, but it's lost, right? It's, it's very interesting for me to go back. We didn't have that kind of communications. You could, I, I, I would call my wife like once a week, maybe once every two weeks. In fact, we had BTF Tony, who was one of my friends, and he, he remembered, he came into my office and he's looking over my shoulder, I have an email from my wife, it says something like, "I haven't heard from you in a month, is everything okay?" He just looked at me and said, "What's wrong with you, dude, right, your wife?" Uh, but, um, but I think that's cool because now you can look back and you say, you can read your old emails, you know?

• 47:24Jocko Willink?

  You can, you can read, like, I know what was happening during deployment, I'm looking at what I'm writing, my wife, I'm like, "Oh, I hope everything's okay," you know? And there's a lot of stuff going on at deployment, but it's interesting to, to be able to review that, so, you know, that's a good thing about writing letters as opposed to just a phone call.

• 47:42Jocko Willink?

  So you end up with this MACV SOG in, you know, you say, "Under this authority and McNamara's direction, the military would take over OP Plan 34A where a principal strategy included the establishment of the Naval Advisory Detachment, NAD, do you call it NAD, or do you call it?

• 48:01Speaker 01

  NAD, yes.

• 48:03Jocko Willink?

  Employing small boats to run harassing raids against North Vietnamese installations. All 34A maritime operations were approved by President Johnson's National Security Advisor, uh, McGeorge Bundy.

• 48:18Jocko Willink?

  And communicated directly to NAD Da Nang with a copy to inform Saigon. I mean, this is micromanagement at the highest level.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Oh, you can't believe it. You, as we go on, you'll hear, you'll hear why I made the comment before about headquarters mentality. Jesus.

• 48:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, McNamara was the worst.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:35Jocko Willink?

  And Johnson, those guys were just absolutely horrible.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:39Jocko Willink?

  Uh, targeting was done in a vault at Bakh Dung, Bakh Dang, Bakh Dang?

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Bakh Dung, it means white elephant in Vietnamese.

• 48:49Jocko Willink?

  Uh, where the intel was secured, ops planning took place, including proficient aerial photography, interpretation by a Navy intel lieutenant, who's a central part of that mix. The SEALs took part in the planning of the operations and conducted the training of the raiding teams, which were made up of South Vietnamese Navy personnel. I was assigned as training officer and assistant operations officer to help run the operation. So you, you're.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  The only reason, the only way that could happen is that the Navy had no idea. They, the Navy was told to send somebody with these qualifications. It wasn't told about rank, no talk about nothing, because I got relieved by, uh, I was still a JG. I got relieved by a full lieutenant and a lieutenant commander. Same job. So the only, only way I got that job was to J, is a JG is because the Navy didn't know what it was all about.

• 49:38Jocko Willink?

  And what years this, this is now, we're in 1964?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Sixty-four, yeah, spring of sixty-four.

• 49:43Jocko Willink?

  You, you show up there, um, actually, you say this is pretty interesting, since there were no, no precedents, no manuals, no procedures for what we were doing. The learning curve was dramatic and we were only limited by imagination of what we could make work.

• 49:56Jocko Willink?

  Our group was plausibly deniable, clandestine operation and needed to stay that way. We had to not only avoid our own media, but the International Control Commission, the ICC, a group of three inspectors representing Canada, Poland and India, who were tasked with monitoring aggression in the region. An important part of my mission was to avoid the ICC because the North Vietnamese were protesting our raids and trying to bring international public attention to our actions, while Secretary of State Dean Rusk repeatedly and publicly denied our existence.

• 50:30Jocko Willink?

  So what's, what's your op tempo like? Like, what's going on? Like, what's a day look, a day in the life for Lieutenant JG Haas in this 1964 in Vietnam?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  I was a training officer and assistant ops officer. So with respect to training, this, this detachments came out from SEAL Team One to actually do the training. Irish Flynn, you know, our first admiral was the first, first OIC of that training detachment that I met. And he was relieved by Maynard Wires. You know? I don't. You ought to know that guy and you ought to get him on. Open invite. He's got, he's got history like crazy and he was a hell of an officer. And so they were, they were running the training of our, of our individual teams and we had,

• 51:23Speaker 01

  as I recall, six, six individual teams of, composed of Nungs, not, not mixed, couldn't mix, Nungs and, and Vietnamese. And they were, we were had them isolated in camps one, one mile apart along China Beach. So this is the same area that Meyer later occupied after NAD was gone. And this was all taken over by SOG, SOG CNC. They talk about Marble Mountain. Marble Mountain was the southern end of this whole complex. That's where I learned to rappel.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  You know, I didn't, I picked, where did I learn to, to, to free fall? You know, the chiefs, couple of chiefs got me, got a helicopter and said, okay, here's what you do, blah, blah, blah. And we got up and. That was in Vietnam? Yeah, I was in Vietnam. You went to free fall school in Vietnam, which was just a couple of chiefs throwing you out of the airplane? Which is on China Beach, right? Safety third. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, um, uh, so, yeah, so we had these six, six teams along here, which would then go do the, do the raids in, in the north. And I would, if I can remember the op tempo correctly, because we definitely accelerated

• 52:52Speaker 01

  it from what it had been, it probably twice a month, but not always a team, but always the boats. Cause we got there, the Navy had no small boats. I am not exaggerating. No small boats. So the only three boats that we had were the Swifts.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  And they were brought there by the CIA because they were really good for, they were really good boat. But CIA mostly was doing junks. They'd get, they'd get fishing junks, which they felt were more, had a less chance of being observed. And so they would modify fishing junks and send guys, send, send their teams up before we, we took over. And then we had the, then we had the Swifts. And, but they, none of this could do the kind of harassment of the coastal installations, which could be done with the nasties. So to the Navy's credit, they bought the best boats in the world from the Norwegians, which were the nasty PT boats. And they were ninety-five feet long. They made forty-five knots. You

• 53:55Speaker 01

  could go all full, all reverse, just like that. High-performance Napier, Napier Deltec diesel engines that you, you couldn't even be in the engine room. They had such a whine, you know, whatever. They were terrific boats. And so those started going up two or three times a month. And that was, those were the boats that were causing the, the irritations to, I, I don't pretend to be able to say how valuable what we did really was. And I'm not sure anybody can. If they said they could, I'm not sure I would believe them. We, it, it's reasonable to assume that we tied up a lot of North Vietnamese assets

• 54:40Speaker 01

  because we were a pain in their butts. How actually destructive we were, I'm not sure. A couple of times got really lucky and did some real, real good stuff. One of those was prior, just prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. And following up that one that was quite successful, we, with the boats went up to Do Han Mat and Han Mei and Han Nu, which were islands, sort of in the roads leading to the Haifong Harbor. And of course, Haifong Harbor was sacrosanct.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Let me tell you how sacrosanct they were. When I arrived in Da Nang, Green, Lieutenant JG, and I said, okay, let's look at the intel. And so there was two dredges, Port of Haifeng. If they're out of action, the Port of Haifeng silts up in six weeks. I said, well, this is easy. Let's go get the dredges. Oh, no, can't touch the dredges. Never touched the dredges the entire war.

• 55:54Jocko Willink?

  Why is that?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I think it's criminal, but I don't know why it is because it was, you know, it was our. I think it had to do with the headquarters genius concept that, which McNamara describes himself later on when he's trying to excuse all he did, all he did wrong.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  By thinking that we were going to increase our pressure incrementally to the point where Ho Chi Minh would say, okay, ouch, we're done. And so I think part of the incremental approach was to allow them to continue to have access to Haifeng Harbor, and we would impose the punishment elsewhere. Okay? That's thinking doesn't make any, that logic doesn't make sense to me, but I can't think of anything any better. Because that's where all the Soviet stuff came in, a lot of the Chinese stuff came in. It was terrible.

• 56:59Jocko Willink?

  You know, I wrote a book called Leadership Strategy and Tactics. And in that book, I write about something called the iterative decision-making process. Meaning, hey, we take a little step in this direction, and we see what the results are. And if it seems like we get good results, we go a little bit further in that direction. And if we see more good results, we go a little bit further in that direction. If we see, oh, that didn't work the way we want it to, we make adjustments. And it's the way I always made decisions. You know, I always, you know, I don't need to, I don't need to make a big giant decision. I can make a little one, and I can make a little one, make adjustments. And then, you know, as I started reading a lot about McNamara. You know, you get this idea of this incremental approach. And I started thinking to myself like, hold on.

• 57:45Jocko Willink?

  Well, if I was McNamara, maybe I would have been thinking the same thing. I'm going to make these small steps. Why was McNamara's incremental approach? Why did it turn out so bad compared to what I did in my whole career? Which was this iterative approach that basically the same thing. And it didn't take me very long of thinking about it to realize why? Because the key component of me making a small decision is to pay attention to the feedback and make adjustments when it doesn't work. And what you can see with McNamara and Johnson is that they were getting feedback and they were just not paying attention to it. They weren't listening to it. They were just saying, no, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. And they never paid attention to the feedback and they continued to take the same approach over and over again, and it never worked.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Well, I couldn't agree more. I think that's astute. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. They didn't understand will. They didn't understand the will. And these guys are such compromisers. They just didn't understand the will.

• 58:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you know, I think we're seeing that. You know, people ask me about the war in Ukraine right now. And it's a test of wills. And that's the thing, when you go to war, the only reason you're going to war is you don't know who has the stronger will. Because if you knew, you wouldn't go. If you look at someone and go, yep, they're going to go and they're never going to stop. Then you say, hey, this isn't a good thing to engage in. And so who's got the stronger will in Vietnam? You know, we thought after the Battle of Idrang, like, oh, we killed 100, 150 to 1. We're going to beat them. We got air power, we're going to beat them. We didn't realize that they didn't care if they lost 150, they didn't care if they lost 150,000, they didn't care if they lost a million.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Well, that statement right there applied to Ukraine. The simple arithmetic of Vietnam, when, when Westmoreland, every day at four o'clock, at the infamous four o'clock volleys, would talk about body counts. And the so-called strategy, which was no strategy, but was the closest thing, I guess they had to a strategy, was attrition. And nobody ever stopped to look at the simple arithmetic that the, the birth rate in Hanoi always exceeded the attrition rate in the South, ensuring an unlimited supply of manpower.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  And it's the same thing, and right now, you know, the Ukrainians are brave as hell. But if Putin's prepared to sacrifice all the Russians that it takes, which all indications are he will,

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  he'll grind them down. They can't win. He'll kill, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll fight to the last Ukrainian.

• 1:00:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Or, and this is what we don't know. We don't know if the Russian population says, hey, you know what, I'm not sending my kid. Or I'm not gonna go. And if that happens, things could go the other way.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  History doesn't support that.

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  That is true.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  The Russians just inch it up another notch and

• 1:00:35Jocko Willink?

  The Russians know how to suffer.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:39Jocko Willink?

  But you get, in the end, it's a test of wills that you don't know what the answer is. You don't know who has the stronger will. I mean, look, the Ukrainians obviously have an incredible will. It's their homeland. It's their houses. It's their country. They're gonna have an incredible will. But at the end of the day, you're gonna end up with this, if you end up in attrition fight. And we just, the Russians can keep pouring bodies at it. It's terrible.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Maybe what we ought to do is take all his resources or put it, put them into, into stockpiles and caches in various places. So invite the Russians in and let the Ukrainians go at them with guerrilla activities.

• 1:01:20Jocko Willink?

  I, I have been very surprised that the Ukrainians didn't go into that already.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Jocko Willink?

  I mean, they have well-trained snipers. They could kill, they could kill a hundred Russians a day. Just without engaging them in any attrition, ground, you know, force on force, peer-to-peer combat. Well, it doesn't make sense to do that. So they're gonna figure, I mean, it seems like they're gonna have to figure that out. Is we, we can't beat them with numbers. We need to beat them with guerrilla warfare. And we'll see what they do. Be interesting.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  By the way, back to the, back to the dredges in Haiphong.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  I went back to Hanoi before Americans were allowed to go back. Because I was working with a guy in Hong Kong, hell of a guy. And I was chairman of the, well, we built the first office building in Hanoi after the war, right next to the Metropole Hotel near the What year was that? Upper House, this would have been, geez, early 90s. Okay. Makes that, I have to think about that, but yeah. It was before Woodcock went there and did the, the whatever. No, that was late 70s, wasn't it? I think that was in the 70s. Yeah, so it would have been somewhere in the 80s, I think, yeah, when I did that. Anyway, so I, I, I took a day off.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  By the way, Vietnamese at this time, everything was still raw. Vietnamese were gracious as could be, because of course they had won. So they could, they could afford to be. And they were, and the young ones were interested in building what they subsequently built. But during, I, during one of the days, I said, you gotta, you gotta excuse me, I gotta get a taxi and I gotta go take a drive to Haiphong. I gotta see those dredges. So I drove up there. There's still, there's still all kinds of bomb damage all over the place. I look over at this narrow gauge railroad. Narrow gauge, that's where all this stuff was coming down. A narrow gauge railroad.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  So much the stuff's coming because the roads weren't any good. A couple of bridges were still damaged. But the narrow gauge railroad was just, I mean, I, I kept saying, how could they move all this tonnage? How could they move all this stuff south? And, and if you were paying any attention at all, I mean, it's like, it's a story, I don't know, if somebody, I'd like to, if I could be here in a couple of more days, I would see Ron Bell, who's gonna be here for the old frogs and things that Bill Schultz does. And, because he's reputedly the first SEAL that went into a tunnel, that went into a coochie tunnel. I don't know if this is a true story or not, but, and, and supposedly, Ron Bell came out of that tunnel, he said, these guys are prepared to live like this.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  We can, there's no way we're gonna win. And that would have been about sixty-six or sixty-seven.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:04:25Jocko Willink?

  So were the barges still there when you went there?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were the two dredges.

• 1:04:29Jocko Willink?

  Same two dredges.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  It was incredible. Anyway, so we, so we, we took them back to Ha Anh Manh Anh Nu. So they were in the sort of the road. So when we hit Anh Manh Anh Nu and did some damage, I think that provoked some kind of a retaliation. Now, what the retaliation was, I'm not sure whose, whose story, I believe.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  But they, they were really, if that's what led, you know, then after that came the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

• 1:05:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you say up here, when we sent the nasties up there, knowing they'd get the job done quickly, these islands are in the direct path, the entrances to the harbor, and hitting them could have been considered a threat to the harbor itself. We came in fast and hit the targets hard and successfully. When we finished, North Vietnamese patrol craft came after us with a fury, chasing us back down toward Da Nang. Our boats outran them somewhere north of the seventeenth parallel. Those North Vietnamese boats that were chasing us that night were the ones that allegedly attacked the USS Maddox and the USS Turner-Joy. And our attacks on them most likely triggered their strategy to engage the US in retaliation. What happened with us and the Turner-Joy and Maddox on that night would result in

• 1:05:53Jocko Willink?

  the joint Congressional Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which authorized President Johnson to escalate US military efforts in Vietnam.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Now, a young Jim Hawes would not have attributed any nefarious motives

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  to those decisions. An older and more cynical Jim Hawes would attribute it to selfish political reasons. And I wish I, I wish I knew the truth.

• 1:06:30Jocko Willink?

  So I'm going to read this section here. You say, "Younger SEALs," which I am one, "cannot appreciate the atmosphere in those days. The frogmen and early SEALs were barely tolerated by the traditional Navy, and 34A was the most politically sensitive operation in the country. Ignorance and disinterest in covert operations, along with security compartmentalization, made it inevitable that the Navy would appoint an officer in charge with no training, no experience, no interest in a vessel smaller than a destroyer." So you're dealing with this guy, and all that you were doing there, you say, "But dealing with that was part of what I had to go through in Vietnam in order to be prepared for the Congo.

• 1:07:10Jocko Willink?

  There I learned the clandestine art of plausible deniability and gathered the experience that led me to build and lead a mercenary navy for the CIA. I was incredibly lucky. I was being paid to do what I would have done for free."

• 1:07:30Jocko Willink?

  This is just a little bit of information here. You say, "While I was learning covert ops on the job in Vietnam, the Cold War was heating up in Africa. What preceded my arrival in the Congo was an extraordinary effort that included the talents of an American operator, Jordy McKay. He did everything he was supposed to do and more. As a one-man show, McKay was in the Congo to work with Five Commando as he made up the entirety of the US clandestine maritime paramilitary team. The agency had sent him there before they sent me, and no contribution was more vital to mission success than McKay's. But through an event in the middle of a crucial battle, McKay made a judgment and acted on it, and it was exactly

• 1:08:13Jocko Willink?

  the wrong decision, according to the State Department. Because of that, the operation

• 1:08:19Jocko Willink?

  became available to me, but the groundwork for our mission's success lay in actions McKay took at a place called Fizzi Baraka." Am I saying that right? Fizzi. Fizzi. So it's just like it's written, Fizzi Baraka. So now we're talking, it's 1965, the Congo battlefield had heated and cooled to a varying degree of ferocity over the preceding several years. The Simba Rebels, and these are communist rebels.

• 1:08:45Jocko Willink?

  Were a ragtag bunch of untrained renegades, more interested in pillaging and butchery than ideology or cause, but they began to receive the support of communist advisors and troops who had been training in Eastern Europe and China, and supplies of weapons and ammunition steadily increased. The US worried that Soviet bloc reinforcement and training the simbas might actually turn into a coordinated fighting force. That notion began to drive policy. You talk about McKay, and by the way, I always have to say this, I'm reading chunks of this book, I'm reading a small percentage of the book. There's all kinds of details in here. There's an incredible story that's flowing through, we're hitting the highlights of it. But get the book so that you can get all these details. Some of the, you talk about McKay.

• 1:09:30Jocko Willink?

  McKay left the Navy in 1950 to start a salvage business in Cuba, and eventually he gets pressured out of Cuba by the communists. He gets put out of business. The person that put him out of business in Cuba was there, was the ministry of, the minister of industry, which is a guy named Che Guevara. That's the guy who put McKay out of business when he started this, this, uh, this, uh, company down in Cuba. And after he gets forced out of Cuba, he goes back to the CIA because he was in the CIA before. So, uh, McKay, and, and we'll get into who he links up with, a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Mad Mike Hoare. Uh, he's the commander

• 1:10:15Jocko Willink?

  of these five commando mercenaries. And these guys kind of join up. They get some vessels. Um, the five commando starts, they start doing basically amphibious operations. Uh, there's this giant lake. How do you say that lake?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Taganika.

• 1:10:34Jocko Willink?

  Taganika. So Taganika.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Tan Ganika.

• 1:10:37Jocko Willink?

  Taganika. I'm going to brutalize that one.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  450 miles long, 50 miles wide.

• 1:10:42Jocko Willink?

  Taganika.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Second deepest lake in the world.

• 1:10:45Jocko Willink?

  And it's actually in between what, two countries?

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  It's between, uh, on the one hand, it's Tanzania and Burundi, and then Eastern Congo.

• 1:10:56Jocko Willink?

  And it divides those two countries. So they have, um, they're, they're running operations to try and suppress these rebels.

• 1:11:06Jocko Willink?

  And you say this during the assault McKay would make a significant difference in the war, albeit by making a conscious decision that would contra contra neveen the CIA instructions. He wasn't supposed to be in the fight. The State Department wanted no US fingerprints on the operation and plausible deniability was the purpose behind using five commando boat crews. If a mercenary were killed in the Congo, so be it. But if an American turned up shot and dead there, particularly an ex Navy personnel, it would be much more difficult to ignore and whitewash away. McKay was the only American officer involved in the planning, training, and preparation of this operation and despite CIA instructions, ultimately the only one who unexpectedly ended up engaged in combat. So they're doing this big amphibious amphibious

• 1:11:50Jocko Willink?

  operation. And again, get the book. There's really cool details about it. They do this amphibious operation to land troops on the beach. They get resistance when they get on the beach. They start kind of they can't really get off the beach for a while. And they're pinned down. And you say this as five commando forces took casualties, they became bogged down. Around eight hour plus three, the attack started to stall. These guys are short on ammunition. And over on the left flank of the of the landing beach, there was this church and in the church, there was some snipers, apparently, that were really reaping havoc on the five commando guys. And so you say this McKay went to the captain of the

• 1:12:34Jocko Willink?

  Ermonds and this was the ship that they were using. A five commando mercenary under horse command and asked him to bring the boat around. And also to get someone on the 75 millimeter recoilless perched on the stern, but there was no response. McKay, face to face and under fire in the middle of a battle stared at a frozen captain who would be who had gone gun shy. Without hesitation, McKay took control of the ship himself. He ordered the helmsman to steer the airmen's parallel to the beach until they were approximately 150 meters offshore and only 250 meters from the gun nest. McKay laid called for a dead slow course with the engine stopped and the Ermonds began taking

• 1:13:15Jocko Willink?

  Direct enemy fire McKay ran to the aft deck and got on to the giant 75 millimeter weapon. He had bore sighted and tested the rifle the day before so he could fire with accuracy. He loaded the recoilless, took aim and fired the powerful weapon at the steeple. Where the hidden gunners continued to pin down the landing troops. His first shot was a bullseye. The heavy rounds inside of the recoilless struck. The machine gun nest with a force that demolished the steeple. Two bodies were flung into the air like a pair of rag dolls. As the nest was splintered and blown apart, the gunners were silenced. Lieutenant Colonel Hor began to plan a breakout that would take troops into the interior.

• 1:13:58Jocko Willink?

  From Fizzy to pursue the retreating Simba's. He buried his five KIA's, the enemy count was 215. So this is like before you get there and this guy McKay. After this happens, he finds out that his father had died. His father was a cop, a New York NYPD detective. His father had had a heart attack. He goes home. When he gets home. It sounds like they say, hey, look, you were out there doing what you weren't supposed to be doing. And they kind of don't let him come back. To the Congo.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  The State Department wants you to do, wants you to be successful in your mission. But not break any rules. The CIA wants you to be successful in your mission and not get caught. Breaking any rules.

• 1:14:49Jocko Willink?

  How did he get caught?

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  It's my observation.

• 1:14:51Jocko Willink?

  How did he get caught?

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Oh, um, Hor. Mike Hor was the, the most. Notorious mercenary of the 20th century by far. You hear about Black Jack, Shram and. And some of these other guys, they were nothing compared to Hor. Or, sorry.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were nothing compared to Hor.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Among, and I don't like Hor, but I think he was exactly the right guy for the job. And we worked together just fine. I didn't like him because to me, he was too much of a prima donna. And, and, and that's one example right there. He invited two American correspondents.

• 1:15:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  To this. And of course, that was a no-no, but it served him, it served him well. And, and fortunately, they were, they were old-style correspondents because they kept their word on, on not disclosing anything about American presence. But, uh, uh, it was enough to get, so that the State Department was able to find out. And so they, uh, they just leaned on, they leaned on Africa Division, which would be more politically sensitive than the Special Operations Division. So, so it was, it was really interesting.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  The, the Africa Division wanted, some of them, not all of them, of course, wanted to hammer him. And the Special Operations Division wanted to, to.

• 1:16:24Jocko Willink?

  Award him.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Award him. And, and Bill Hamilton, the old, our old frog father.

• 1:16:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Was very instrumental in, in protecting, uh, Jordy. And, um, so he went on and spent another, you know, about thirty, forty years. He didn't retire until his early seventies. So, but, but not in Africa.

• 1:16:51Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, as that's happening, you are, you, you get orders, I think you get orders so that you can, you, you know your next assignment is to take a platoon to Vietnam. But you're still in Vietnam at the time.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I volunteered to take the first detachment to the Delta.

• 1:17:11Jocko Willink?

  So that call comes in, you say, hey, look, I'll go. And you say, hey, can you send me a replacement? Because I want to get back and start training with my.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a whole different type of operation, of course.

• 1:17:25Jocko Willink?

  So you say, can you send me a replacement? And BUPERS, which is the Bureau of Navy Personnel. This is sort of the nightmarish bureaucracy that anyone would think of. This big giant organization that's, you know, doesn't think of people as people, but as numbers and billets. So you say, can you send me a replacement? Well, they don't send you a replacement.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  So sorry, we can't, we just can't.

• 1:17:48Jocko Willink?

  Can't do it. Can't do it, it's too late. So you wait. You're waiting.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  So I said, okay, I'll just get a half of a training session, whatever.

• 1:17:57Jocko Willink?

  But then your replacement finally shows up.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Two replacements.

• 1:18:00Jocko Willink?

  Two replacements finally show up. And you, you know, you're just, hey, welcome.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  One of the guys I went through training with.

• 1:18:07Jocko Willink?

  And you say, hey, you know, welcome, here's what we're doing.

• 1:18:12Jocko Willink?

  You say something along the lines of, and you've got it in the book, but you know, I wish you guys could have gotten here a little earlier. And the guy looks at you and goes, I haven't, I could have come anytime. I've been totally free. And you got, you got so frustrated that you, uh.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Well, it was the, it was the cavalier attitude or the nonchalance or the whatever, the just, Jesus, it just hit me at exactly the wrong, the wrong time.

• 1:18:43Jocko Willink?

  Just the fact that BUPERS could have sent a replacement. Here you are, you're in war, you're getting ready to go back to war. I just need a replacement. And they just didn't do anything about it. And here's this guy going, yeah, I could have come months ago, it doesn't matter. And you got so pissed off that you called BUPERS.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I picked up the phone and got right in those days. Went Saigon switchboard, Honolulu switchboard, right to, right to BUPERS. I, I said, my name is Hawes. My file number is 653959. I'm on a voluntary extension. I want out of this Navy right now. I want a voluntary extension. Boom, in comes a set of orders. Goodbye.

• 1:19:29Jocko Willink?

  That was it. I mean, you went back to San Francisco.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Went to San Francisco, mustered out. And then started making a slow, uh, slow drive across the coast. Cause this time I had cool office said, geez, you love what you're doing. What the hell did you do?

• 1:19:45Jocko Willink?

  I'm constantly telling people not to make decisions when they're emotional. This is why. Cause you're in the freaking teams. You have the best job in the world. You get pissed off and so you say, I'm gonna get out. Uh, you start driving across, back towards the east coast. Um, at some point you get a call from one of your, one of your buddies.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Well, I'm already back on, I'm back on the, on the east coast. I'm back in Little Creek.

• 1:20:08Jocko Willink?

  So what are you doing? Are you just like going to the team?

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Reacquainting some, uh, reacquainting with some old friends.

• 1:20:14Jocko Willink?

  How long had it been? How long had it been since you, uh, since you got out? Been when you showed back up at the teams? Oh, like you just drove across country? A week or whatever?

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, probably maybe a month. Cause I stopped and stopped to see my folks.

• 1:20:28Jocko Willink?

  Did you, and were you thinking Ham's gonna get back in?

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I thought, yeah, sure. Couldn't think anything I'd rather do.

• 1:20:37Jocko Willink?

  And it's not, not that hard. I remember talking to Dick Thompson, you know, Sog guy. And you know, he had, he was officer, Green Beret and, and Sog. And I said, was it, I said, was it hard to, you know, become an officer? And he was like, no, just signed up. And I go, was it hard to get selected for special forces? He goes, no, you just had to go. And I go, was it hard to get into Sog? He said, no. And he's like, it was Vietnam. No one wanted to be doing this stuff. There was no waiting line at the door to do any of this stuff.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  All I had to do was call Tarbox and Tarbox said, we'd make it happen.

• 1:21:09Jocko Willink?

  So that was the plan?

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  That was the plan. Then I get the call from Phil.

• 1:21:13Jocko Willink?

  And what, what was Phil's situation?

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Well, Phil was a plank owner in SEAL Team One.

• 1:21:18Jocko Willink?

  Phil Gaddis, plank owner.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  And he, uh, not his true name, of course. And, um, Phil had been one of the first SEALs to go to Vietnam in 62 or whenever it was earlier. One of the first detachment that went, about a handful of guys went over. Phil was the officer in charge.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  Really, really smart guy, really good guy, Harvard guy, Harvard graduate, um, great physically, good guy. And his wife was at least as smart as he was. And she was actually, just as an aside,

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  When they made all the, when they made all the dependents leave Vietnam, they forgot Barbara was in Da Nang. So Barbara kept quiet, they all kept, kept quiet. So Barbara stayed in Da Nang for quite a long time till someone realized she was there. By the time she left, she could speak, read and write Vietnamese and she was a hell of an asset to have. But anyway, um, yeah, so Phil, Phil had, Phil was the only other SEAL officer with, with swift boat experience. And he had been, the year that I was there, he had been, he was ship, sheep dipped in the agency. And he was there, but he was doing other things. He

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  wasn't in, much involved in our operations. Um, and he was getting out of the Navy, had been in our, in ROTC and his time was up, he's getting out of the Navy, he was gonna go to the CIA career training program. So he called me, he called me and said, Jim, he said, uh, they want me to go to the Congo and I'm starting the career training program and Barbara's about to pop. He said, I really don't want to go, but I don't want to say I don't want to go. Are you interested? And I said, you mean I'll get paid? And he said, yeah. I said, let's, you know, let's do it. So Bill, and Bill Hamilton was the, was the chief of the maritime branch of CIA.

• 1:23:17Jocko Willink?

  And Bill Hamilton, just, he was a frogman.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Oh, what a guy.

• 1:23:21Jocko Willink?

  And pilot and just like an absolute stud.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Everything. Every, he's like, he was like, this is delicate, so I gotta be careful because I'm not sure you know how strongly I believe it myself, but in those days, officers knew they were gonna make admiral. So was the team, the teams, the teams. That's why we survived, in my opinion. Because guys like Fane and Hamilton and so forth and, and what's his name from, uh, Del Judas and so forth, they all did the things necessary to, to keep the teams alive. And it wasn't about, when am I gonna get my stars?

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Anyway, Hamilton Naval Academy graduate, son of an admiral, naval aviator in Korea. And he says, I want to be a frogman. So he comes and he is, he becomes UDU II, which is Underwater Demolition Unit, which was in charge of the teams, the UDT teams and the, I think, beach jumpers or something else at the time, whatever. Anyways, he was the senior frog. And he was, God, he had it all. He was big, handsome, outgoing guy, smart as hell. I mean, he's the kind of guy you needed to keep us alive, basically, which he helped

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  do at OPNAV when the SEALs were formed. He was in the right place at the right time. And, you know, the East Coast and West Coast have stupid arguments about who, in those days, about who was the most important. Well, they were all important, but he was really important. Okay. So.

• 1:25:01Jocko Willink?

  And now he was...

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so now he's head of the Maritime Branch in the CIA.

• 1:25:10Jocko Willink?

  Maritime Branch of CIA.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  So I get a call from Bill and says, come on up, let's talk. I said, okay. So I go up and he, of course, by that time, he didn't have any trouble checking me out as an individual. He just wanted to know if I knew anything about SWPS. And I didn't know why, but he asked me some questions, obviously, and what I was talking about, about SWPS. So that was it. He said, okay, let's go. Get ready. You've got to get out there right now. So he takes me to see a guy named Cheever, who was the head of Special Operations Division, a retired Marine Colonel, smart guy. Can you imagine? I go in and talk to this guy and he's got to decide whether or not this kid is, should go to the middle of the Congo all by himself with all the weapons and cash that it takes to do it.

• 1:25:54Jocko Willink?

  And you're 26 years old right now?

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Twenty-five, twenty-six. Yeah, I think I was 25 or 26, whatever. And he's got to make the decision.

• 1:26:01Jocko Willink?

  And you're out of the Navy, so you're civilian.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I was civilian, yeah, right. And so I passed that passed that test and and then he says, you know, you probably ought to have some idea who you're working for. So I go down to, so they send me to to orientation course down in outside of

• 1:26:23Jocko Willink?

  Marana?

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, Marana, yeah. At Marana and which was also a a training place for smoke jumpers. And it's also where they they train their kickers for Laos. It's the kickers for Laos. Most of them have been smoke jumpers. Okay. So I went down there and got, you know, got sort of an orientation program. And then I came back and went around headquarters to get what I needed. And what a wonderful thing. It was like, boy, when you had an emergency, it was like everybody said, hooray, we got an emergency. Everybody woke up and couldn't

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  couldn't do enough for you. It was really, it was extraordinary. So, yeah, so I I went out there and said, Dick Johnson will meet you. He's going to be your boss and you'll find out what you need to know.

• 1:27:15Jocko Willink?

  You say, I arrived in the capital of Leopoldville on a commercial UTA flight from Paris with 2,500 in cash stuffed in my socks and a quantity of morphine filled syringes in my bag. I knew there would inevitably be casualties and CIA supply and logistics made sure I had what I needed to help get the job done. Just rolling in there. What was your cover?

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  Well, when I got on the plane, I was Department of the Army, excuse me, Department of the Navy or something. When I got off the plane, I was Department of, I don't, I can't even remember now because nobody ever asked me.

• 1:27:50Jocko Willink?

  No one cared?

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  Nobody cared. Yeah, nobody cared. But I had one. It was flimsy, but I had one.

• 1:27:58Jocko Willink?

  Then you leave Leopoldville for Albertville.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Which is now called Kalimi.

• 1:28:07Jocko Willink?

  And what's Leopoldville called now?

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  Kinshasa.

• 1:28:14Jocko Willink?

  You say this, "I began to learn everything in this operation should be different. My SEAL training in Vietnam experience included highly skilled professionals and state of the art resources immediately at hand. In the military, I'd also been accustomed to a formal structure of working with other troops and adhering to a coordinated strategy. And where Vietnam, and where Vietnam may have been the precedent for this new practical reality, this was a remote enterprise where I went from high-tech to no-tech. There were no historical how-tos and no one with previous experience to give me direction or assistance. Once in Albertville, I was completely on my own. No one was there to meet me. No crew existed. And few available boats were in need of substantial repair. In this remote corner of Africa, the CIA just expected me to handle things on my own

• 1:28:58Jocko Willink?

  and go out and get the job done. That's exactly what I did."

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, Dick was, Dick was terrific. He was a World War II Marine.

• 1:29:07Jocko Willink?

  This is Dick Johnson?

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dick Johnson.

• 1:29:10Jocko Willink?

  And what was his position?

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  He was the head of all military, uh, paramilitary activities in the Congo, working for Larry Devon, who was the chief of station. And he had been a chief of station himself. He was a really experienced guy. And just a, just a terrific fellow. And he, but, but he basically said, look, after he decided I was, he was gonna keep me, so I had to go, I'd have his, uh, stamp of approval in order to stay, because he could have sent me home. After, uh, he just said, "Look, I'll help you any way I can, but it's not much I can do. It's 2,000 miles across the jungle over there. You just gotta figure it out." So.

• 1:29:51Jocko Willink?

  One more guy, one more guy asked for it.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, gee, that's tough. Oh, please.

• 1:30:04Jocko Willink?

  Here's your intro to Five Commando. You say this, "I knew these guys were Five Commando mercenaries." Lieutenant Colonel Mad Mike Horace Troops. Probably the most famous mercenary in modern history, the colorful Mad Mike had collected a hodgepodge of experienced soldiers, pretenders, and combat castoffs the way others collected stamps. He had the, uh, he had ability and charisma and he never shied away from an opportunity to inflate his reputation. His exploits in Africa are said to be the inspiration for Daniel Carney's novel and film The Wild Geese, which starred Richard Burton and Roger Moore. Over the next few months, I would learn firsthand of the vicious

• 1:30:46Jocko Willink?

  nature of this Five Commando band of cutthroats, the way they almost revered a code of duplicity instead of loyalty, and how their ruthless tactics adhered only to a pale version of military standard. These all-white paramilitaries from former British colonies in Africa, Europe, and the UK were definitely not your well-disciplined combat troops. They had little respect for treatment of civilians and property, particularly safes, and they would demonstrate their shady conduct many times while I worked with them.

• 1:31:20Jocko Willink?

  And you got a story in here about, it's, it's kinda how you formed your quick reputation with them. They, they were trying to get into a safe and they were trying to blow it open and they didn't know what they were doing. Um, and you helped them blow the safe open and then when they talked about, you know, how they were gonna divide what was in it, you were like, "Hey, I'm not here for that."

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:39Jocko Willink?

  Uh, did you know, what, what intel did you have on Five Commando when you showed up there?

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  What you just read?

• 1:31:48Jocko Willink?

  That's it. These guys are just running around causing mayhem.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  They would sign contracts that I can't remember, six months contracts for them, and the quality deteriorated over time. Cause it was a nasty environment. And I mean, if it wasn't, you know, if it wasn't the simbas, it was, uh, hemorrhagic dingy fever or, or whatever. So the quality of the people who were, who were signing contracts deteriorated over the time. So by the end, it was real dregs. I mean, not that, yeah, there were some real dregs. There were all, there were a few amongst all of those who were first class, who were first-class soldiers, but, uh, not many.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  And the ones that were, were, were, when I say first-class soldiers, they had the, they had the soldier skills, but.

• 1:32:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because otherwise they'd be still in the British Army or whatever.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Mentality was, whatever.

• 1:32:46Jocko Willink?

  You, you, now you're, you're starting, you have to, you, you gotta work with them. I mean, that's just the way it is.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Well, the leadership lesson, they, imagine this, they were mercenaries.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  I mean, the first thing, the first thing they did when they hit a new town was half of them peeled off to get the missionaries and half peeled off to get the banks. Okay? So they were mercenaries. I didn't pay them.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  Uh, they were five commando. I wasn't, I wasn't in their chain of command.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Um, they didn't have to take any orders from me, so I had to make sure, but I had to get them to take orders from me. Um, if there was any discipline to be done, I had to say what needed to be done and not, and, and it would get done, but I had no, no official position in any of this, so.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  I can't think, I couldn't have been better prepared than for having been a SEAL to do it. I really couldn't. And when I got in, in, where I, what really helped was instinct, instinct that was honed in training and in Vietnam, because, you know, when I get, when I finished Harvard Business School, I had unlearned instinct. Took me a long time to realize how, what a mistake that was and to get back to trusting my instincts. It's true, pretty good.

• 1:34:16Jocko Willink?

  This is a, kind of a cool, along those lines, you say, "The event that had contributed more to any other toward the success of the Force Naval Congolese," am I saying that right?

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26Jocko Willink?

  "Was the recruitment..."

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  You know, I don't, absolutely no, sure, that's just what I named it.

• 1:34:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:34:32Jocko Willink?

  Sounds good.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  I don't know if the grammar is perfect or not.

• 1:34:36Jocko Willink?

  Was the recruitment of Five Commandos Regimental Sergeant Major Samuel Jock Cassidy. He had trained every Five Commando mercenary in the country and was a hardened soldier of fortune, a veteran of Congo and mercenary warfare. The key to his real value was the personnel files he held in his head. Acquiring Cassidy with his knowledge and assessment of the troops meant that I might be able to recruit the best of the mercenaries and if I could do that, I'd assemble a navy with the capabilities to accomplish the mission. Cassidy was older than I was and I knew him as a murderer and a plunderer with a hair trigger that often led to violence. He was tough, mean tough, and the word on him was that he had racked up a catalog of

• 1:35:16Jocko Willink?

  savage acts that had earned the fear of every mercenary working in the Congo and many other parts of Africa. Instinctively, I addressed him as if he were a UDT SEAL trainee, which was a direct line back to the year I'd spent as instructor. Thank you, Captain Lee.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Instinct.

• 1:35:36Jocko Willink?

  You say, "We're gonna build a navy," I told him, "with or without you. But if you come on board, together we'll make an effective force in this war." I forced him to stand as if he were a subordinate officer and he stared at me with a lacerating glare. "I know you're a mercenary," I continued, "but I will not bid against Lieutenant Colonel Hor for your services." I was in my element and felt as though I had the upper hand in this conversation because I had a desirable card to play, so I sweetened the pot. "What I will do," I told him, "is see to it that you are commissioned as lieutenant. And if you are as good as you are reputed to be, and I believe you are, I'll make you captain." Cassidy nodded in agreement. And you kept the Army ranks, you go into that a little bit.

• 1:36:21Jocko Willink?

  Then you say, "weeks later, you guys had a conversation about this." Cassidy finally gave me his impression of this initial meeting. "Commander," he said, "I trained every mercenary in Five Commando and no one, including Lieutenant Colonel Hor, ever talked to me the way you did on that first day. I didn't know whether to join you or kill you. Luckily for us both, I signed on." Once again, the old adage, "better lucky than good," proved valid, whatever his reasoning. We were now working as a team. We set our sights on assembling a Congo Navy.

• 1:36:50Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  Thank you, Solinsky and Blaze and all those instructors. I can't tell you. It was, you know, boy, why didn't this, you know, yeah, I can't tell you. It just turned out right. I said, I guess, again, God wanted, God wanted to be a good frogman.

• 1:37:11Jocko Willink?

  You give background on Lieutenant Colonel Hor. You say his transition to adventure came out of unlikely circumstances like many people who have lived a bland life. Hor's personal history might seem obscure and nondescript, right up to the point where he first gained notoriety. And that happened in the Congo. He was born in India, served in Lord Mountbatten's staff in World War II in the British Army in South Asia, had been educated as a, as a chartered accountant, hardly rigorous prerequisites for a mercenary commander. But through a friend, he was introduced to one of the Congo's most powerful political figures.

• 1:37:47Jocko Willink?

  Mois Chambi.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:49Jocko Willink?

  The governor of the breakaway Katanga province. And once he was in, he took full advantage. Some of his critics would label Hor a puppet, puppet, which is far from accurate. Hor's ability to act his role was crucial to commanding a mercenary army, particularly because he had no formal judicial recourse structure. What he did was have good fundamental military skills, and that meant he could recognize those same skills and others and employ them and employ them accordingly. He masterfully played above the riffraff, the role of a British gentleman officer, tapped to lead mercenary troops in overcoming a communist threat. His theater of war was a small but important strategic part of the Cold World, Cold War world.

• 1:38:28Jocko Willink?

  He had an acute sense for both strategy and tactics, and I saw him juggle cold-blooded killers, African leaders and US embassy employees with aplomb while still focusing on chasing down and destroying the rebels.

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I totally, I had a great respect for him. I didn't like him, but I had a lot of respect.

• 1:38:46Jocko Willink?

  What was it you didn't like about him?

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  To his, I didn't like his ego.

• 1:38:51Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  I don't, you know, ego guy, egos always gets you in difficulty.

• 1:38:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  So was Shaver Form. And in, uh, other than that, no, I think, and he, uh, he very resented me, uh, because he, he didn't want the Navy to be separate from his command.

• 1:39:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  And I knew, and I knew that Dick Johnson would back me up as long as I was doing the right things for the right reason. And I, um, and he wasn't going to bug Dick Johnson.

• 1:39:22Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Uh, and, uh,

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  uh, so I say, look, my mission, my primary reason to be here is interdiction. I said, you watch, we'll support you. You get all the support you could possibly want, but, but my primary mission here is interdiction and that's, I don't need any help. Thank you.

• 1:39:42Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  And he had a hard time with that for a little while, but it ended up working out just fine. We'd meet every day about four o'clock to talk about the next, next days or next upcoming operations and so forth. Then we did, we supported him very well and that problem went away.

• 1:40:01Jocko Willink?

  You start scrounging up.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  But he never liked me because I'm, you know, because his ego wouldn't.

• 1:40:06Jocko Willink?

  He must have been, he must have been what, 50 years old?

• 1:40:10Jocko Willink?

  I mean, if he was in World War II, he must have been 50 years old and you were 26 year old, little, little punk ass frog man.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  He had actually had his wife with him for much of his campaigning and she had a baby along with him. She was, and she was great looking and tough as could be. Uh, he's written a couple of books that are good reads.

• 1:40:32Jocko Willink?

  I'll check those out.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  You should do that.

• 1:40:35Jocko Willink?

  So now you start scrounging up boats. Uh, you got the boat called the Kivu. Am I saying that right? The Kivu? And it was, uh, you liked it because it was built in 1910, but you liked it because you could um, basically to help recruit.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  Oh, it was a great recruiting tool because it, it was a barracks and we made it a barracks vessel. So they could eat, they could eat good and sleep clean and did their own cooks. They're like those five commandos, army guys and five commando army guys. Oh, John, I love terrible. So that sense, it was a hell of a recruiting tool. So with, with that plus Cassidy's knowledge of the individuals. That was another reason Hor got a little resentful. I took away his.

• 1:41:21Jocko Willink?

  And yet you didn't pay him, you didn't pay Cassidy? So what was, how was he making money?

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  Oh, he was paid five, they were in five commandos. So they got paid their five commando money, plus all the money they could, uh, they could pillage, they could plunder.

• 1:41:34Jocko Willink?

  But he still kept getting paid by five commando even when he worked for you? Cause you're all part of one big mission?

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  They were all five, still five commando, but they were under my, my jurisdiction.

• 1:41:45Jocko Willink?

  Who was paying five commando?

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

  Well, ostensibly the Congolese government.

• 1:41:50Jocko Willink?

  Getting funneled through America and cash.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's what I'm saying. He wouldn't do anything to buck Dick Johnson, which means he was bucking Larry Devlin, the chief of station. And he and Devlin, Devlin liked him. But Devlin called him a, uh, a, uh, oh, what do you call it? Gentleman. Um, it was a British, would be a British expression.

• 1:42:11Jocko Willink?

  A British expression for?

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  A gentleman adventurer. And that's not the exact term, but it's close.

• 1:42:19Jocko Willink?

  An adventurer.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  And they stayed, they were friends till, uh, till Devlin died.

• 1:42:24Jocko Willink?

  So he didn't want to rock the boat with you?

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  No, he wouldn't rock.

• 1:42:27Jocko Willink?

  He knew who he was writing his paychecks? And, and those had to be some fat paychecks?

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 1:42:34Jocko Willink?

  But the US government doesn't play around.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, never ask. And I have no idea. Plus, uh, you know, as I said, he pretended to be above the fray, but Cassidy and John Peters, who if anybody was meaner than Cassidy, it was John Peters.

• 1:42:48Jocko Willink?

  What did, what did you heard about Cassidy? Like you're calling him a murderer and all this stuff in the book. Like what, what did you heard about him?

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  That's what I'd heard about him.

• 1:42:56Jocko Willink?

  He would just kill people?

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, he, when he got drunk, he wouldn't do it unless he was drunk.

• 1:43:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  But he had a bad liver.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  But anyway, he, in fact, he was away on medical leave when I arrived. That's what I heard about him. And so I got word to him as soon as he came, when I heard he was coming back to come and see me. So before Hor could get his hands on him or do anything. And by, and by, I'd also, some, I can't tell you now how I realized, came to realize that the thing he wanted was to be an officer, be a commission, be the whatever. And he had never could do that under Hor because he's too valuable. Hor is the original sergeant major. So.

• 1:43:40Jocko Willink?

  But it's interesting, like you're wanting to be commissioned as an officer in five commando, a random mercenary group, right?

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Well, there you go. Yeah.

• 1:43:48Jocko Willink?

  And there's no pension that comes with it or anything?

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  There's, that's right.

• 1:43:53Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you say here, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. Uh, things were beginning to fall into place. Our primary focus now had to be on the boats. We had a few smaller boats, exaggeratedly termed PTs, which were operated from the Irman's, the 250 ton lake vessel that we inherited from McKay and commandeered for the Navy. We called the Irman's the mothership. She was the command operations vessel for the, for the PTs and armed with captured Russian weapons, including a 12.7 millimeter Russian machine guns and a US 75 millimeter recoilless rifle. Uh, the Irman's had radar on it. You talk about that.

• 1:44:34Jocko Willink?

  Um, then you say here, Peter Jessup of the National Security Staff wrote a memo to President Johnson stating that a more substantial pocket coast guard is necessary.

• 1:44:46Jocko Willink?

  He approved the purchase, transport and by air and armament and manning of six additional boats, two Swifts and four Seacrafts. So they are getting word that you need more support over there.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And that was all at the beginning. I mean, uh, again, Hamilton and his deputy, Tom Kleins, who's a hell of a guy and the guy who the Cubans totally trusted him. We'll get into that story. You, you learn the new definition of the word trust. Anyway, so Hamilton and got these, got these swifts and went down to Seward Seacraft in Louisiana where they were built and got the, got the Cajuns to come on board and his only havel could sell it, you know, he basically, we cut the superstructure, cut, cut the bow, cut the superstructure, cut the whole logitunnally, threw everything into

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Globemasters, flew it into this, you know, this strip next to Kalimi, there's a Neil Grady Railroad, put it on that, put it over to the port, brought the coonasses out, or sorry, the Cajuns, you can call them coonasses if you're their buddy. And brought the Cajuns out and the Cajuns, I'm not sure where the Cajuns even knew where they were because it was hot and humid and everybody was black, but whatever it was, they did their, they, they were terrific. I mean, these guys worked like hell, had a cold beer at the end and laugh at the end of the day and up the next morning. Everyone thought it'd take a month, it took them like a week or two to get the boats.

• 1:46:19Jocko Willink?

  Were those two boats, those were two boats, were, those are the ones that had been used in the anti-Castro maritime raids?

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Jocko Willink?

  So, they, they take these boats, that's just, and you go into the details in the story, but when you talk about Klein's, you know, he said here, well, first of all, why, when you talk about Klein's and in his relationship with the Cubans, what was that relationship based on?

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  All the anti-Castro stuff out of Miami.

• 1:46:51Jocko Willink?

  They had just, they had just been working together?

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. They trusted him. I mean, they didn't even know where they were going.

• 1:46:59Jocko Willink?

  And, and these guys, these Cubans, get basically turned over to you?

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:06Jocko Willink?

  And, and you say here, Klein's would turn the Cuban contingent over to me with a message, "These men are tough, respectful, tough, resourceful and brave and take pride in their performance, but above all else, they're loyal. Chavez is a proven leader and the men believe in him, so there will be no discipline problems. Over the years, we have developed a trusting relationship based on shared experiences and I am assigning these bonds of trust and friendship over to you." When he endorsed the transferred expectations to me, I received a team prepared to work unconditionally, under my command, no questions asked. You're all set, Klein's told me. Now, don't fuck it up.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 1:47:47Jocko Willink?

  So you had these Cuban Americans.

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:50Jocko Willink?

  That, this is after the Bay of Pigs, all that had happened and they're, they had fought Castro, they'd fought communism. They're now basically in America, mostly in Florida. They get this opportunity to go to freaking.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

  Couple of Bay of Pigs and had been in prison, were liberated with the tractors, you know?

• 1:48:09Jocko Willink?

  So they, they get, they get put together, all right, you want to go fight the communists? We got a, we got a spot for you. It's in Congo, Africa. And they say, hell yeah, let's go.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I can tell you, we did not have one single discipline problem. We didn't have any other kind of, these guys were so professional. So, you know, I liken it to my boat crew in training. I had such a boat crew, I just had to not fall out of the boat.

• 1:48:37Jocko Willink?

  You know what's interesting?

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  These Cubans were almost the same thing. They were.

• 1:48:41Jocko Willink?

  I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who's a.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  As long as I had him, you know?

• 1:48:44Jocko Willink?

  A friend of mine yesterday who's Cuban American who came over on the boats and he said, his, you know, his mom and dad, his dad wanted to come to America. His mom was like, hey, it's not that bad here. I got my family here. We're gonna stay. And finally, they started taking, they started taking the Cuban military aged males and saying, you're gonna go to Africa and fight for communism. And when he, when the mom heard that, she said, we're out. And they came to America. So that, that's how much they, like, number one, they were willing to sacrifice everything to get away from communism. And also the fact that the Cuban communists

• 1:49:27Jocko Willink?

  were exporting fighters to go overseas. It was really interesting. Yeah, that I had this conversation yesterday with a guy who's like, oh yeah, that's one of the reasons we left is my mom didn't want me to get sent to Africa to fight for communism. Nope, not happening.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  When I started to write this book, which was, I really wrote most of it 25 years ago because I didn't want to, you know, the older you get, the smarter, tougher, faster, stronger you were, blah, blah, blah. And I was trying to avoid that. And I went to the Swiss Embassy in Washington, which is where they were had whatever they call it representative thing of the Cubans. And I met a Cuban guy who was the first secretary, very bright, very articulate, whatever. And I said, look, I'm gonna write this book. It's, you know, there's a lot of you guys in this. I said, I'd like to talk to the guy who was in charge, who at this point was on the Politburo of, in Havana. And I said, he said, I like, I said, I like,

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  you know, I want to put your side of the story in. And he thought that was just a great idea. So he got a hold of those guys, but they wouldn't cooperate. So I said, okay, I'll with you. That's it.

• 1:50:41Jocko Willink?

  You talked a little bit about these guys with the showing up with those boats. You talk about a guy named Joe Bresch, who showed up, engine men, shows up with the Cajun builders. This is just like a crazy story.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Oh, these guys, yeah.

• 1:51:02Jocko Willink?

  Bill Bain, an old frogman, shows up. He's another one of these guys.

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Bill Bain could do, he was a World War II guy, another one of the World War II guys. He could do anything. I mean, he was, you know, talk about the utility player. God, the guy was good to anything. So, yeah, that was all, all part of the team that Hamilton assembled. You know, to sort of help make me look good. Yeah.

• 1:51:28Jocko Willink?

  When interviewed for this book, Burchard, and that's the guy who's running the Cajuns, about the job his crew did, the CIA had apparently expected the reconstruction would take them two or three months to complete. He and his team did it in a month. He said, I'm not gonna brag. He said, I'm gonna brag. We were expert at this stuff. We built them from the keel up. I worked on the boats when I first went to Seward, and we knew every piece of the boat. We knew what we were fooling with. The Cajuns slipped into the country, undetected, black in, blackout, in the vernacular of the CIA.

• 1:52:01Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  You know, Seward, of course, died and he sold it and his company's called Swift Ships or something right now. And I tried to get ahold of those guys because I thought, boy, they'd love this because their sons are probably working in the shipyard, you know, grandsons, whatever. And I never got a reply. Never got a reply.

• 1:52:21Jocko Willink?

  They might reach out to you now. The Swifts were powered by high-performance Detroit Diesel GMV 1271 engines that were extremely reliable, as were the inboard, outboard gasoline engines on the little PTs, but maintenance and repair requirements were inevitable. Locally, the capabilities to perform that kind of work just didn't exist. Bill Hamilton looked to the teams for support and he knew the right person for the job. Renee Goff, known as Gooch. When Hamilton was the commander of underwater demolition unit two at Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek, Virginia, Gooch served as a frogman with a specialty as an engineman. He stayed in that post until his retirement when he left Virginia Beach and headed for

• 1:53:05Jocko Willink?

  an idyllic Caribbean spot in St. Thomas with his wife and four children. They had all sailed down to the Caribbean on a 57-foot retired oyster boat, a type of vessel known as a Chesapeake Bay skipjack, which he had converted into a floating family residence. They had endured hurricane-force winds, a rejected sanctuary landing in Haiti by Papa Doc's paranoid regime, and the impasse of the doldrum in the Sargasso Sea before pitching up for a couple of years on an idyllic island, living aboard a sailboat, fishing and enjoying being a family again. Then the CIA came calling about a one-of-a-kind mission in the Congo.

• 1:53:48Jocko Willink?

  Ever the dedicated frogman, Gooch said, "Gooch could not say no to his old commander. This veteran old frog would provide age and experience because at 26, I was decidedly short on both. He was the kind of guy who could do anything, a good sailor, a brilliant engineman, and a confident and selfless friend. Gooch had the perfect demeanor for the job and when he arrived in the Congo, he made an immediate impact on the smooth running of our operations."

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  That was a terrific guy. Wow. I wasn't allowed to, you know, when, when he died. Cassidy and I had to pan, had to hammer together a casket. And then wrapped him in a heavy sailcloth. And managed to find a cool spot until I could get a plane over to get his body out to get him back to Leopoville. I was never allowed to speak to his family. The agency took care of him, of course. But I was never allowed to speak to him until about the time this, till this thing came out. And we've become, you know, friends and so forth since. I've never forgiven myself for obeying that order. Wasn't the right thing to do.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I understand the reasoning behind it, but it wasn't the right thing to do. Anyway, it wasn't the right thing for me to do.

• 1:55:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  But anyway, he was, he was just a remarkable guy and a hell of a friend and helper and advisor. He got along with everybody. Mercenaries all liked him. Cubans adored him. Yeah, he was a great guy. And he could, again, he could fix anything. You know, I guess if you can take a skipjack, turn it into a living quarters, you can do anything. He sure could.

• 1:55:36Jocko Willink?

  And keep your wife happy while you're doing it. That's double impressive. You say here, "When I first learned the Cubans would be coming to train the five commando mercenaries, I realized there might be a potential problem. The mercenaries had a range of motivations for being in the Congo. Some were strictly there for money, being paid for professional soldiering, but others were perverted, so perverted and deranged that they were just there because they wanted to kill kaffirs, the pejorative South African term for blacks. Fighting in the Congo conflict enabled them to do this and get paid for it. Because some of the Cubans were dark complexioned, I needed to make sure that before they arrived, they would be allowed, they would be allowed to have a smooth introduction into the equation. I approached Jock Cassidy. Jock, these Cubans are professionals.

• 1:56:17Jocko Willink?

  They've been fighting a real adversary, not a bunch of ganja, hyped up teenage soldiers, and they know what they're doing. After allowing Cassidy to acknowledge this, I proceeded. And some of the Cubans have dark complexions. So I'm holding you responsible. There better not be any trouble." Cassidy's reply was filled with a perfect mercenary rationale. "No problem, Commander. They ain't kaffirs. They're Cubans." And so our operation rolled on fueled by a commitment to racial harmony.

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  That was such a funny incident. Don't worry, don't worry commander. They ain't Caffers, they're Cubans.

• 1:56:54Speaker 01

  Oh, Lord alive, people, Jesus.

• 1:57:02Jocko Willink?

  You, I'm gonna fast forward again. There's so many good, great details in this book. Get the book. You say here, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit on December 30th Chavez. So Chavez is your lead guy of the Cubans that came and he's basically the

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  Extraordinary.

• 1:57:17Jocko Willink?

  Extraordinary leader of these Cubans and he's outrunning operations.

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:57:22Jocko Willink?

  On December 30th Chavez reported coming across a boat in the lake. They maneuvered Lobo one. These are some of the, again, I'm fast forwarding, but these are the vessels that they, they gave the, the vessel's name. Lobo one in a circle around the small boat to take advantage of the moon to illuminate it. The ship's log notes that it was a boat with an outboard motor, a definite sign of a rebel vessel. Chavez ordered a high firing and immediately the boat attempted to get away. Lobo one went into pursuit and instead of firing over their heads, the crew took aim at them for real, firing several rounds. They approached the boat slowly and found that everyone on board had jumped into the lake and was trying to swim away. Chavez ordered a slow speed chase, dodging the rebels through the water until they tired out Lobos.

• 1:58:02Jocko Willink?

  Lobo one's crew fired rounds into the water just to scare the swimmers as Chavez recorded. They finally captured the rebels and brought them on board. The Cubans were motivated by a general hatred of communism, but they also perceived early on in their recruiting that something was happening in the Congo that related to their Cuban problem. They would soon find out for certain rumors circulated throughout Miami that communist Cubans were fighting in the Congo, but no one knew for sure if it was true or not until my Navy crew confirmed it.

• 1:58:40Jocko Willink?

  Here's another, just, I mean, you're, you're in all, you've got leadership challenges all over the place down here. Here's fast forward a little as well. After midnight, there was a loud banging on my hotel room door. Even though half asleep, I instinctively picked up my Walther PPK from the night table and went reluctantly to the door. It's never good news. At that hour, I eased the door open. A severely inebriated Jock Cassidy stood swaying in the hallway behind him. The tall, gangly Dern was quaking with fear. The color had drained from his face and he was so pale with fright that he almost seemed to glow in the dark. I shook my head at the sight of them and Cassidy immediately blurted out, Commander, this arsehole insulted me in front of the men. I thought about Cassidy's foul temper and having witnessed

• 1:59:23Jocko Willink?

  his vengeful brand of discipline with the, and this is another story that you tell in here about how he handled somebody that had stolen something. I knew he was capable, capable of meeting out irrational punishment. Cassidy glared at Dern, "I'm going to kill him," he said. His eyes flared with an alarming rage that continued to build. "And then I'm gonna burn down the Navy." I stepped back in my hotel room, held the door open a little wider. As Cassidy turned to enter, I motioned to Dern to stand fast. I needed to diffuse the tension and do it quickly before Dern did something really stupid. My instincts told me that I needed to maintain a casual atmosphere in this situation. Come on, and I said, tell me what happened and let's talk about it. So what was Dern's role over there?

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  Well, they, when we found out that Jay was in the area, they decided they needed a, a real intel guy. So they came, they came out and made, he was chief of base, which made him my boss, in effect, but he didn't, he didn't get, he didn't interfere with anything I was doing. But he was there supposedly to try to collect intel. And I, be careful about his name because he's, he's a bit of an, his real name is a bit of a name in Washington DC, so. Tells you more about headquarters mentality. Anyway, so.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  So he would go, I never drank with the mercenaries. I did one time. I drank with them one time. I competitively shot with them one time. So I made them think I could hold my liquor, which I can't. And again, God wanted to make me a successful frogman, and I really hit what I was shooting at, pointing at those days. So I never did it again. Never let them, I, I was friendly, I just. Kept a little distance. Kept distance, kept distance, and I did everything to jock. Cause I, for some reason, I had jocks total, total. In the Congo definition of the word.

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  Total loyalty.

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  But, but, what's his name, Dern? Dern, he would go to the, to the watering hole and drink with these guys. Stupid. I mean, they're, they're, they're screwed up anyway. They got weapons on them and they got alcohol. Well, what the hell's the definition of trouble?

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  I never, not one time did I ever do that. But he would go do it. And I guess maybe he thought he was collecting information or something. I don't know. But he was just drinking as far as I was concerned. So, you know, this is, he insulted Cassidy in front of the men, or Cassidy thought he insulted him in front of the men, whichever it was. So then they come back to the, come back to the, to the, to the Hotel du Lac, and there they are. So, I shoot Dern away, and Cassidy came in, he said, and he say, repeat himself, I'm gonna kill him, I'm gonna burn down the Navy. And I said, Jock, I don't give a shit if you kill him. But why would you want to burn down the Navy? We worked so hard to

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  build, you know, trying to do, anyway. So that worked. And over the course of the next three or four hours till dawn, and he sobered up a little bit. And then he, I said, look, I'll keep, I'll keep Dern away from the Navy. Don't worry. We'll just get on, do our stuff. So, okay, that, that was agreeable to him. And so he staggered back to the Navy and asleep it off. And I went down to Dern's room. That dumbass that kept drinking. Can you believe that? And I said, you know, I said, I don't know whether we can keep you alive. I said, I don't know for sure. I said, we'll try, but my advice to you is get out of here. He said, yeah, that's good advice.

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  So that's when I had the story. That's when I had the talk with Gooch about how we were going to have to kill Cassidy. If it came down to it, it was either Cassidy or Dern. And so that's that, that's what that story is about.

• 2:03:33Jocko Willink?

  You and Gooch came up with a whole plan.

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:35Jocko Willink?

  That you were going to have to kill Cassidy because you couldn't obviously let him kill this American.

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Fortunately, fortunately, Dern took off and it was all dissipated.

• 2:03:44Jocko Willink?

  He took your advice, thankfully. Luckily, he put his ego in check because there's people that are like, no, I'm not leaving. It was on him. That's how people end up getting killed.

• 2:03:52Speaker 01

  He had an ego, but he also had a sense of saving his own ass.

• 2:04:03Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit here. Again, that's a, but just, you're just dealing with like mayhem. I mean, this is just mayhem.

• 2:04:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:10Jocko Willink?

  And you're just keeping it together. It's a 26 year old lieutenant, former lieutenant JG.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, the reason I'm commander.

• 2:04:17Jocko Willink?

  Admiral of the fleet.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Well, no, they started calling me commander. And I thought, okay, I'll be a commander. Why not? That made me equal to whore, by the way, in terms of rank. So that also worked. It was totally accidental, but.

• 2:04:29Jocko Willink?

  Did you look old for your age? Or not really?

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  Well, there's a picture in the book. You do tell me.

• 2:04:37Jocko Willink?

  You look like maybe, you don't look like a full commander, though.

• 2:04:40Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no way. Yeah.

• 2:04:43Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit here. You say, I was back at base monitoring the radio and I suddenly heard Ricardo Chavez's voice shout, "Attack." The distinct pop, pop, pop of machine gun came crackling through the radio immediately distinguishable from the mundane static and clutter. My ear was attuned to the prospect of a firefight and the hair on my arms began to prickle as that unmistakable sound cut through the feeble reception of our rudimentary equipment. The Swifts were out on the lake and. in some shit. The only question was how deep the boat crew opened fire with the first semi-automatic Soviet AK-47 weapons we'd capture captured in the previous raids. That was one of our ways we hurt them using their own guns against them. If the boats got really close during the melee of the firefight, the AKs would come in handy.

• 2:05:28Jocko Willink?

  Lobo one was armed for combat, carrying 50-cal machine guns mounted amidships, port, starboard, and aft, plus a shoulder-fired 57mm recoilless rifle on the gun tub above the cabin. A concussive barrage erupted as five enemy vessels returned fire, bullets screaming between boats. Toledo recalled the events vividly, as soon as we made contact, one boat separated from the group. In hindsight, we realized it was obviously to distract us, leaving us to contend with the other four boats that were firing intensely. The fifth boat that cut away was stationed a short distance behind the others, not firing a shot, just waiting, as if trying to decide whether to reengage or depart. Then their decision made, the fifth boat suddenly swung around and opened up again

• 2:06:13Jocko Willink?

  in a hail of bullets that covered their escape as it sped east across the Black Waters toward the enemy refuge of Tanzania. I debriefed Chavez, and it was clear to both of us that there was something very curious about that fifth boat. The manner in which it had escaped suggested it sheltered someone or something very important, a VIP, we thought. Otherwise, the remaining enemy boats would not have put up such fierce resistance. Their previous behavior had consistently been cut and run. We had already discovered that Castro Cubans were fighting alongside communist rebels. We had detected their radio calls because they weren't disciplined enough to protect their names or language. They blatantly violated even minimal tactical cover on the radio, and of course, one Cuban recognizes another.

• 2:06:57Jocko Willink?

  So who had been on that boat? Who had merited such fierce protection? We believed it had to be Che Guevara. It was reasonable to assume that it would have taken someone of his stature and importance of Che to motivate the four boats to remain in the fight and to sacrifice themselves in order to give the fifth boat protection so it could open up and withdraw and escape.

• 2:07:21Jocko Willink?

  And then you got in here in Guevara's diary, "The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo." He writes about the pressure he and the rebels felt from the five commando ground troops and from the Navy's interdiction efforts. "By our daily patrols, we had been able to nearly close down the rebel supply lines," which created a shortage of everything, particularly food. "We also made sure weapons, ammunition, medicine could not reach their base." They were systematically being deprived of everything they depended on. As our Navy began to live up to its capabilities, the battle strategy was working exactly as we

• 2:08:03Jocko Willink?

  had planned and prepared for. We intensified patrolling even more. And as Che's diary indicates, the intimidation factor we created kept the captains of their vessels from even attempting translake supply missions. As supplies ran out, the attrition rate kicked up, and toward the end of the summer, the Simbas began deserting. Those desertion numbers would escalate slowly and then become a critical exodus into the fall campaign. And you just posted up with Che Guevara's diary.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, here's the African Dream, the Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. And in the epilogue, he makes other references in the book, but in the epilogue, when he's discussing the mercenaries and the opposition centers, he says, "Their weapons do not currently add up." This is, he's writing to himself and to Castro. "Their weapons do not currently add up to much. The most telling have been their PT boats, which have made it difficult to cross the lake." Blah, blah, blah.

• 2:09:03Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  It worked.

• 2:09:05Jocko Willink?

  By his own admission. Yeah. And you've got some, you've got some good quotes in here that you pulled from, from there. Guevara's army suffered from a scarcity of competent leadership and lack of organization. According to his writings, his group was continually outmaneuvered by the five commando mercenaries that he refers to as guardsmen. He says in that, in that book, "I was informed that a large number of guardsmen were outflanking us from the hills. Only one unit did honor to our army and resisted for another hour." He continues, "From a military point of view, the situation is difficult in that our troops, our collections of armed men, without the slightest discipline and without fighting

• 2:09:50Jocko Willink?

  spirit." The CIA had built, and fast forward a little bit, "The CIA had built a massive air force, and the air campaign was critical to our mission's success. A training program that had begun as early as 1961, at the request of the Congolese, grew into a superb air force, piloted solely by Cuban exiles." And, and you go into some of that, but that's another just awesome piece. You know, the Cubans were willing to go out and fight where they ever could, wherever they could against communism. And, and they did, they were out there flying around strafing troops and taking out their boats. I mean, pretty awesome effort.

• 2:10:35Jocko Willink?

  And you say this here, "Ultimately, Che seemed to recognize the futility of his position." And this is again from his diary, "Could I ask the Cubans to die in the trenches to defend this piece of nothing?" He questions. He then sent another message by radio to, to Fidel Castro. "Things are falling apart. Whole units and peasants are going over to the enemy. Crew and boats in good condition urgently needed." Che's calamity was nearly finished in the Congo.

• 2:11:08Speaker 01

  Well, it was his, his, his own arrogance and ignorance at the outset, which led to this, because he really, he did, had did no assessment of the environment he was coming into and the people he thought he was going to be working with. He just thought he was going to come in and make these people ideologically committed. And they had, and they didn't know communism from capitalism, from, you know, whatever, utopianism to whatever. They wanted to-

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  Do what they'd always done, which rape, pillage and plunder. And the thought that he could turn them into some kind of ideological force was just nonsense. He was a romantic revolutionary in every sense of the word. He had, he loved to kill. There's ample evidence of that. And whenever he wanted some practice, he'd just go into the prison in Havana. And he, it was all about his zeal for, quote, "the revolution." And he couldn't build anything, which he proved when he was Minister of Industries in Cuba. He wasn't a builder, he was just a killer, just a killer.

• 2:12:32Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. November 21st, you talk about this would have been the day that Guevara and his men evacuated out of Tanzania. Guevara and his ill-fated rebel band had been out of food, money, weapons, supplies and luck. We ran them out of the Congo. They were sent packing by the combined efforts of the Force Naval Congolese and the mighty Makasi Air Force and the Five Commando Mercenary Army. But even with that portion of the rebels, forces on the runs are, on the run are operations against the remaining insurgents continued. The events in Congo began to move quickly after the Communist Cuban forces pulled out.

• 2:13:12Jocko Willink?

  The same week on November 25th, General Mobutu staged a bloodless coup d'etat, which ousted President Kaza Vubu and Prime Minister Kimba. The coup also created internal Congolese constitutional problems. And even though the US saw it as a way of preventing political and military disintegration, Mobutu was only 35 years old and the Constitution required a minimum presidential age of 40. The Constitution would have to be amended to accommodate him. I've said that all of us in the Congo believe that Mobutu was the best option at the time. He was comparatively non-corrupt, had demonstrated leadership skills, acknowledged his failures of his own troops as a part of an effort to upgrade its quality and performance, and

• 2:13:56Jocko Willink?

  showed no signs of seeking revenge or retribution for any of, anything in the past. The corruption and megalomania that would become the standard in his government was not evident at this time in his personal history.

• 2:14:12Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Mike Horr decides he's not going to extend his contract, so he's done. You got Mobutu taking over.

• 2:14:26Jocko Willink?

  You say this here, "At this point, Lobo 1 was only one nautical mile offshore. Chavez and the crew then withdrew and took their swift boats another four miles out, waited until dawn. Through the course of the night, began to rain hard. There was an absolutely no visibility, and there were no longer any night lights discernible. At 4:00 a.m., they began to patrol again, searching for lights as they had earlier. They patrolled that area for another two hours, but as the sun came up, they lost any chance of spotting those lights again." Chavez wrote how bright the lights on the beach were.

• 2:15:00Jocko Willink?

  And then you say, "They waited, still hoping to see those lights. When no illumination were spotted on the shore, the crew headed south, back to their previous target at the end of the peninsula. There, they found clusters of lights in two groups. When the crew was ordered to make a high fire, all the lights in both groups suddenly went out. Chavez ordered the crew to fire again, and they found the enemy. A rapid exchange of gunfire erupted between the boats and the enemy on the shore. For nearly an hour, Chavez and his crew were embroiled in a ship-to-shore battle, using all weapons onboard, until Chavez's log finally records, 'They don't shoot anymore. Lobo 1 had taken out an enemy stronghold. They had been out on the lake for more than 24 hours and had engaged in two serious gunfights, attacked on the water and from the shore.'" And these are all, these are just highlights that I'm hitting. You give really good details.

• 2:15:45Jocko Willink?

  You've got the logbooks from Chavez. I mean, it's pretty awesome to read this stuff.

• 2:15:52Jocko Willink?

  In fact, this is like one of those cool points you say. "When I began the project of writing this book, I opened the ship's logbook for the first time in years. I found a note, one page of lined paper torn from a loose-leaf binder lying inside the front cover. The note is addressed to me. I don't remember reading it at the time, but seeing it nearly half-century later, written in a little bit of phonetic Spanglish. I found it a gracious parting gift from the crew. 'Chief,' it says, 'we give you good year 1966. Employees of Force Navy Kivu, Captain R. Chavez.'"

• 2:16:28Jocko Willink?

  1966. Ricardo and his men had indeed handed me, and all of us concerned, a very good year.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  No, it's a treasure.

• 2:16:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome to be able to find that. So, as this stuff is kind of winding down, and we mentioned that Mike Horr's kind of done with his contract, and you've got this, you know, you've got this story in here, just get the book to get this story, but the, and you mentioned these guys earlier, you got this guy named John Peters, who's one of Horr's, you know, top guys.

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  And then you've got Cassidy.

• 2:17:13Jocko Willink?

  And Peters, you say, let me make sure I get this right, Peters

• 2:17:19Jocko Willink?

  had been responsible for securing any of the resources Five Commando had taken during their raids. Peters was an ex-NCO, who is said to have a fanatical prejudice against the British officer class. He was also ruthless killer, may have been a deserter from the British Army. And then on the, so you got that guy, you got this guy, John Peters, and then you've also got another guy named Van Oppen, or sorry, Van Oppen. And Van Oppen, you say here, was textbook perfect as a British officer, tall and handsome, upper middle, upper crust British accent, had attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he got court martialed because of something had happened, like something got stolen, and he ends up

• 2:18:04Jocko Willink?

  not graduating, but he ends up fighting in Korea, he ends up fighting in Egypt, then he serves in the Federal Army in Rhodesia. And basically, you go through this whole story, it's just fascinating to read about, these guys are basically in competition for who's going to take over as leaders of the Five Commando.

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:18:26Jocko Willink?

  And one of them ends up dead.

• 2:18:30Jocko Willink?

  Van Oppen ends up dead with a bunch of bullets in his stomach, and...

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  Self-inflicted.

• 2:18:35Jocko Willink?

  Allegedly.

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  A click, a click.

• 2:18:37Jocko Willink?

  I mean, a clip, a whole clip, self-inflicted, tough guy.

• 2:18:45Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's wild, you know, because a lot of this stuff, you know, growing up, I was always fascinated with the military, you know, I was fascinated with anyone, you know, mercenaries, soldier of fortune, like all this stuff was part of my childhood, you know, the movies. And so when you like, you kind of know these names, like I did, I mean, I've always known about, about my core, you know, he's this famous guy and Five Commando, you know about these things that you know about the Rhodesians and you know, the recruiting that happened with the Rhodesians to bring British military down there and they're just like the Rhodesian commandos, like all those things.

• 2:19:20Jocko Willink?

  That that all you shed so much light on those things and it's it's wild for me to think about because every time I think about my core, I'm like, no, you were actually you you worked with this guy. Yeah. How long were you there for total? A little less than a year. So this is a guy you worked with like directly and and and all these merc crazy mercenary killers. When crazy mercenary killers was a thing because listen, there's a modern day version of a mercenary who you know, that goes out and does security and they're working for the government and they're getting hired by one of these big contractors. And look, there's been some flare ups, there's been some things that have happened that are certainly have been investigated and some people have been punished.

• 2:20:02Jocko Willink?

  I I don't have a lot of details about that, but but basically it's a much more common thing that, oh, this guy retired from the Marine Corps, went to work for this company, he's going overseas as a contractor. That's not the same thing. That's just not the same thing as what these guys were. These guys are legit mercenaries. And this is your day to day interactions. You built a navy with these guys. Oh, it's wild to read.

• 2:20:33Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here, and you mentioned this earlier, but it was a cruel element of fate that came into our world on the afternoon of November 28th, it would take a major toll on our crew. About six o'clock in the evening, a young Congolese corporal was driving a poorly maintained truck.

• 2:20:51Jocko Willink?

  Down this military transport road. And with no warning, the truck sputtered and stopped stalling directly in front of the bar Calame. Just near the Bada Bada Boot Store and a few hundred meters north of the Hotel Duloc. That's where you guys lived.

• 2:21:11Speaker 01

  The Bada Boot Store was the only store in Albertville that had glass on the windows.

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  An anecdote.

• 2:21:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so this truck breaks down. And and it just doesn't move. And so it's a Sunday evening, a new moon had just occurred. So at 1:35 a.m. on Monday, it was pitch black African night on a deserted street with a five ton hazard laying in wait. There was no caution lights on the truck, no reflectors, nothing that would mark the presence of an enormous vehicle. Abandoned on a dark, dry road in the middle of the night, a pair of five commando mercenary soldiers from South Africa. Hans Von Leers. And Cornelius Johannes Von Week. Had been out together that night. Gooch was with them. The three of them had driven that road many times and knew the terrain very well.

• 2:22:04Jocko Willink?

  Von Leers was behind the wheel and Gooch was in the shotgun seat. Van White was riding in the back. In the blackness of the African night with the driver feeling sure of himself, the Jeep came racing down that road at a high rate of speed. The official accident report states that the Jeep slammed full force into the back of the transport truck. Thrusting the truck forward and embedding its front bumper solidly into a coconut palm.

• 2:22:29Jocko Willink?

  Man, there is lay half inside and half outside. The GP was still alive when the first witness. Ran to the scene. The other South African Van Week was also still alive and was quickly taken to the hospital for treatment. Gooch was killed instantly.

• 2:22:45Jocko Willink?

  I was not informed about the incident, about the accident until the next morning. When I got the news, I was immediately, I went immediately to where his body had been placed. Cassidy came with me from the source that is now lost to memory. We found wood and materials and hammered together a coffin. With the assistance of Chavez, Pachardo and Papo, we wrapped it in a strong, heavy canvas and transported it down to the port where we somehow managed to get a refrigeration unit in one of the warehouses working. We made sure that Gooch's body was held appropriately until a plane could get it to Albertville to make the transport to Leopoldville. There it could be properly prepared for the onward trip back to the USA.

• 2:23:27Jocko Willink?

  Gooch was certainly not the first casualty I had dealt with.

• 2:23:31Jocko Willink?

  But he was the one that affected me the most. Having to handle his body with respect in those extremely crude circumstances was most disheartening. It was my challenge and my responsibility. And we did our best in that terrible situation to get our friend and comrade's body back safely to his family. His contribution to our mission had been essential. I have carried guilt around for 50 years for obeying my instructions from the agency not to speak with his wife at the time. In retrospect, in retrospect, it was an exaggerated security concern by the agency. I'm hoping that this book will adequately say what I would have said all those years ago.

• 2:24:12Jocko Willink?

  The Goff family children remember the day well when they heard the news. They arrived home from school and some family friends were there. A priest, Father Alphonse Olive, who is also a family friend, was there. He took the children into the bedroom and told them what happened. It was a very difficult time for the family. They were not able to get a lot of information from the agency about the circumstances of Gooch's death. Youngest son Nat was the one who eventually did the research years later, trying to fit all the pieces together. Marcel Rene Goff, Gooch to us, was buried at the Arlington National Cemetery on December 6, 1965. He was just 41 years old.

• 2:24:57Jocko Willink?

  His son Mickey, who is known as Little Gooch, remembers that many of his father's UDT and EOD mates were at Arlington that day for the funeral. One of his most vivid memories is of the casket. He describes it as being made of dark tropical wood. It was a small piece of the Congo that went with Gooch and then on to his final rest. His name is also inscribed on the memorial wall at the Navy SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, where it belongs. And also, and you've mentioned this later in the book, in 2016, they added a gold

• 2:25:37Jocko Willink?

  star to the CIA memorial wall at their headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in honor of Gooch's sacrifice.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  Hell of a guy.

• 2:25:53Jocko Willink?

  When did you, you said you met, you finally met the family around the time this book came out?

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:26:05Jocko Willink?

  What'd they do afterwards?

• 2:26:08Speaker 01

  Uh, she worked at the CIA and, you know, whatever. They, uh, they, uh, I think we, if I remember correctly, we met, in 2014, we had the 50th commemoration of the hostage rescue at Stanleyville, which was the prelude to this, to this book. And that was the large, I think the largest rescue of American hostages in history, at least up to that time. And Five Commando gets the credit for the rescue, but it was really Cubans led by an American guy named Rip Robertson, CIA paramilitary guy who got there first.

• 2:26:52Speaker 01

  There's on the cover of Paris Match Magazine and sometime in sixty-five or sixty-six, sixty-five, sorry, sixty-four, damn it, come on Jim. There's a picture of this swarthy guy, who she didn't know was Cuban, holding this little blond-haired, blue-eyed, four-year-old girl with a machine gun in his other hand. And she and a whole bunch of the other people who were rescued, including four of the five sons of the American missionary who was murdered at KM eight, kilometer eight outside of Stanley

• 2:27:37Speaker 01

  ville. Two of the sons were wounded but not severely during that rescue period. Four of those five sons and all these other people, including this little girl, not a little girl any longer, obviously, fifty years later, all came to Miami to the commemoration because none of them had ever met the people who rescued them. It was very moving, you can imagine, for sure. Yeah, this, you know, they'd never met the people who'd saved their lives. And these four American guys, or I guess they're Americans, they've been born and raised in the Congo, their dad was died, they're still in the Congo doing the Lord's work. The amazing guys.

• 2:28:20Speaker 01

  Anyway, these people all came. The only coverage, the only coverage was Miami, Miami TV station. Gee, what's the guy's name? He's been a real friend of the community. For this very moving event. I mean, you know, all these people whose lives were saved, both Americans and other nationalities, not counting all the Congolese.

• 2:28:58Speaker 01

  And that's one of the reasons I wanted to write this because the Cubans have never given, been given any recognition for what they did. This is it.

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's, it's, it's just outrageous in my mind and none of those Cuban politicians have gotten off their butts and done anything about it in Florida either, which I cannot understand.

• 2:29:25Speaker 01

  But anyway, that was a very moving event, that 50th commemoration. Wow. All those people there to say thanks for coming from all around the world and we couldn't even get anybody from Washington DC. Figures.

• 2:29:43Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit here, you know, you, you got more fighting with the rebels, you're beating the rebels, the, the Cuban sailors start, start kind of turning over with the locals and with the five commando. And just to close out this part, part of the book, you say here, "With my Cuban crew gone and missions winding down, it was finally time for me to pack up and leave Congo. I did so exactly as I had arrived quietly. I boarded the C-46 in Albertville with my three pairs of khaki pants, three safari shirts and a pair of desert boots."

• 2:30:20Jocko Willink?

  And that was that.

• 2:30:22Speaker 01

  That was that.

• 2:30:25Jocko Willink?

  How was, so what did you do when you got back? How was your transition back to the world?

• 2:30:30Speaker 01

  Well,

• 2:30:38Speaker 01

  well, you know, when you're, when you're, when you're, you know very well, when you're working with that amount of adrenaline constantly pumping into your system, it, it, it takes a while to come down. You know, you, you miss it. It's, it's, it's, I've never done a drug in my life, but I can't imagine it can be any more addictive than, than that degree of, of adrenaline constantly being injected into your system. So, I,

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  I met a lady in Leopoville. She worked at the embassy there. And she was, and so I kinda chased her around for a little while and

• 2:31:33Speaker 01

  tried to figure out what I really, what I was gonna do next. By this time, the agency had decided they wanted me to go into the career training program.

• 2:31:44Speaker 01

  And I really liked what I'd been done and I liked the people that I'd worked with. I mean, how, you know, how can you be, first you deal with SEALs and then you deal with the best guys they got in the agency. I mean, that's a, that's a hell of a run.

• 2:31:59Jocko Willink?

  With an incredible amount of autonomy as a 26-year-old. You're freaking running a war in the Congo.

• 2:32:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, then I, what I, oh, I remember now what I was gonna do. I wanted to go to Laos. Then I'd have been the only guy, the only guy in the sort of special ops community who had done Vietnam, Congo, and Laos. Whoopie. I mean, today, what was it? Anyway, at the time, thought it'd be fun to do. Well, I got conned by the best. Who basically said, okay, you can be a knuckle tracker all your life or you can really get into the, into the tough stuff. And he wanted me to be a strictly a foreign intelligence, to be an intelligence, be a case officer. So, and so I went into the, I went into the career training program.

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  Got all the, all the training, which was terrific. And then at the end of that, you basically, I didn't want to go in the embassy. I didn't want anything to do with the embassy. And of course, that's the career path in the, in the, in the agency. You've got to really, gotta be in the, you gotta be in the embassy because that's where most case officers are. And I said, no, that's not for me. And they said, well, might as well be a nonofficial cover. And I said, you'll be all alone. And I said, sounds great. And so, so they fixed me up with a cover that was illegal in the country that I went to.

• 2:33:36Speaker 01

  So I had to set my own cover, which meant starting a business. And that worked out well. It provided a good cover and the business was afforded me a way of enhancing my ability to collect the kind of intelligence they were interested at the time. This was in Southeast Asia, so Vietnam was hot.

• 2:33:59Jocko Willink?

  What year was this, 1965?

• 2:34:02Speaker 01

  This is sixty-eight, sixty, sixty-seven, sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine. And so the country that I went to was hostile at the time. And so that was pretty exciting, doing some interesting stuff. And then the country went our way. They just opted for the West. It was, it was, it was a battleground country from the communists or from the West. It went our way. So then I just got bored. I mean, I just got bored. It was, it was...

• 2:34:37Jocko Willink?

  Was there any other countries they put on the plate for you?

• 2:34:40Speaker 01

  Well, then, there would have been.

• 2:34:41Jocko Willink?

  But you were bored.

• 2:34:42Speaker 01

  But, but, but I was bored. I had a, we had a personal problem we had to deal with. It required some professional help and couldn't get it anywhere else. And I had really liked starting that business. And so I fired off an application to Harvard Business School. Figuring, you know, it's time. It's not like that today, I don't think. But at the time, they were interested in screwballs, who had sort of, under different kind of backgrounds. And I thought, well, you know, I'm happy doing what I, I like, I got no complaints. I'm happy doing what, if I can get to Harvard Business School, I'll go. Otherwise, I'll keep doing what I'm doing. This is not bad. And...

• 2:35:29Speaker 01

  I got in and so I fired off a resignation, which shocked everybody because again, I didn't have any complaints. I'd been well-treated. They said, quote, the words were shocked and dismayed. And I said, hey, what can I say? I got no complaints. This has been great. I'm just gonna do something else. So that was it. That was it. I went to business school, went back, went back to Asia for the next thirty-five years.

• 2:35:57Jocko Willink?

  And what were you doing? What kind of businesses were you in?

• 2:35:59Speaker 01

  Well, we were, first thing I did was, I was in charge of building the first Sheraton in Asia, which was the Hong Kong Sheraton. And I met this guy in Atlanta who was the most remarkable business guy I've ever worked with. And it was terrible to start with him because I thought this is what business was gonna be like, and I never met another one like it. But in a way, he was kinda like Dick Johnson. You know, you see, once he made a, once he made a decision on you, that was it. He just backed you to the hilt. So with two weeks of real estate experience, one week in his office and one week at the Travel Crow Company in Dallas, which was the number one real estate company in the whole

• 2:36:40Speaker 01

  country at the time, I went out, he took me out to Hong Kong, said, this is Jim Hawes, he speaks for me, and left. And it was the deepest hole in Hong Kong at the time. It was, financing was not in place. It was on the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. So people in Hong Kong were still looking for the exit because they didn't know what was gonna happen, whatever it is fifty years later was gonna, might happen then. And so he basically said, figure it out. So I'd had some experience at that. So it was okay. I mean, I didn't, really didn't know much. There was talent around the new real estate. It was sort of how to get it all, all put together.

• 2:37:26Speaker 01

  And my deal on that was a handshake. I worked for mighty low wages for a project. That was the biggest, most glamorous project in Hong Kong. And I was basically working for peanuts. But the deal was that he'd give me a steak on my own, because he correctly said when we first got acquainted, he said, "Look, I know what you're like. You're gonna wanna go on your own. And that's fine. Just promise me we'll do a deal together." So that was, it was a handshake. This guy was, I told you, I never met anyone like him in the business world. Anyway, his personal life was a shambles, but his professional life was absolutely perfect. The guy was just, behaved perfectly in business. And, which defies the usual, you know, the usual rule that people have about that.

• 2:38:11Speaker 01

  Anyway, so the Sheraton was, and we, in Hong Kong, the culture revolution was, was ending, and Hong Kong was starting to come back because it was such an incredibly resilient and energetic place with all those Chinese entrepreneurs. And, so, the project was going good. So I called him and I said, "Well, I'm ready to, I'm ready to, to do my own deal." There was kind of a silence, and he said, "Okay, let me know. What you wanna do?" So I go back to Indonesia, dumbass that I am, because here I've done the most glamorous project in Hong Kong.

• 2:38:56Speaker 01

  So what do I do? I leave to go back, to go back to Indonesia. Well, I got lucky on Indonesia because the offshore industry was just starting. There was no office space. And I created the first office park in Indonesia, which was, which is as close as I can make it to perimeter office park in Atlanta, Georgia. In fact, I went into them, said, "I'd like to do this in Indonesia. Can I have a set of your plans?" The guy said, "Well, I guess we'll never do anything in Indonesia." "Yeah, here." So he gave me a set of the plans and modified them. No kidding. And, and did this office park in Jakarta, which was a roaring success, which is exactly when I should've quit. Except at this point, I thought I was a hell of a businessman.

• 2:39:39Speaker 01

  I thought I was a hell of a businessman. Anyway, so I stayed in Indonesia for a while, did some more stuff in Indonesia, and...

• 2:39:49Speaker 01

  And by this time, we had a, had one, we had one daughter and another one on the way. And my wife had trouble caring, uh, so we had to be near the right kind of medical facilities. There were none in Indonesia, so we moved to Singapore, stayed in Singapore for the next, I don't know, ten or twelve years or whatever. And, uh, had huge successes and huge failures. I went up and down like a yo-yo. And, uh, so I've, I've basically been connected with Asia ever since. And we started the first venture capital firm in, which was based in Hong Kong with the grand capital fund of

• 2:40:30Speaker 01

  two million dollars, mostly passing the hat to people around and about. And that, that brought Mc, the first McDonald's to Asia, which of course was a roaring success and made us all look better than we were. Um, and, um, they did a number of other things. First Akaya's in Asia, the first McDonald's in Asia, first shirt in Asia. It was a great time to be there, great time to be there. Uh, and the thing I loved about Southeast Asia is it was kinda like going through SEAL training. Nobody knew who your daddy was. Nobody cared. It was all, all on you. You, you've made your own reputation. That was,

• 2:41:12Speaker 01

  that was good with me. And then, you know, then the American lawyers and the American banks started coming in and screwing it up. But it was the best time in the history of the world to be there. And then since then, I've just, since then, I've just done stuff, um, you know, business things, that are entrepreneurial type things.

• 2:41:32Jocko Willink?

  But you spent the last few years in Africa, is that right?

• 2:41:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:41:35Jocko Willink?

  And what were you doing there this time?

• 2:41:37Speaker 01

  Well, when I, when I was-

• 2:41:38Jocko Willink?

  Allegedly.

• 2:41:38Speaker 01

  When I, when I was, I was, when I was in Burma on a, on a two-month consulting gig that turned out to be a year, a friend of mine had taken over CEO, CEO of the first, of the biggest bank in Burma and mentored to the daughters of the owner. A really remarkable guy he is. Um, and he said, come on, take a look around. Cause they had four hundred and fifty branches and scattered throughout Burma, or Myanmar as it's known today. And about half of them are out there in the boonies where there are thirty-one to thirty-three dissident armies, depending on whose drugs you're moving that day. And so, and everything was cash. Ninety-five percent of that economy is cash, was cash.

• 2:42:19Speaker 01

  So, they had some security concerns and my pal came, you know, my friend, who I'd worked on some stuff with in China years before, said, "Come on out and have a look around, will you, for a couple of months?" And I said, "Sure." Well, that turned out to be a year. And during that year, the military did their coup. So, it was becoming a little less inviting for people with our kind of a background. And about this time, about this time, I get a call from Africa, from Congo, says, "Are you interested in doing a surveillance program in the Gulf of Guinea?" Because the locus of kidnapping and piracy and so forth, it was shifting from Horn of

• 2:43:03Speaker 01

  Africa to the Gulf of Guinea. And I said, "No, I'm not interested in a surveillance program." I said, "You can get a radar, you guys think surveillance is radars? You can get a radar manufacturer, we'll be glad to flog you some radars, half-ass train your people and disappear. I'm not interested in that." I said, "If you're interested in a comprehensive solution, I'd be interested." And they said, "Well, what's that?" And I said, "Well, I'll write it up for you and send you a PowerPoint." And it had to do with detection, surveillance, detection, reliable communications, rapid reaction force, blah, blah, blah. None of which any of them had. And they said, "Oh, you like this."

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  So, I said, "Okay, I'll come, but let's get one thing straight. I'm too old to run away from the IRS. And y'all's reputation is your doing, not mine. So, anything I do, I gotta be able to sign with a US company, LLC, and a US bank account." "Oh, yeah, don't worry, no problem, no problem." "Look, these places are as corrupt as Washington, okay? They're terrible." And so, I've been the last three years working on those in several countries. And it looks like it's gonna happen.

• 2:44:24Speaker 01

  I hope it's gonna happen, because it's a worthy, it's a worthy way to go out. Eastern Congo is where seventy-five percent of the rare earth minerals come from. It's actually slavery. I mean, it is real life slavery. I'm not exaggerating. It's slavery. It's terrible. And, uh, they're more, it's, it's a worse, it's distinguishing is hardly worth doing, but it's arguably worse than the Ukraine. And, uh, you know, periodically, the western, western countries send out a training team and blah, blah, and they go around, but you know, they're out in a terrain that's got

• 2:45:07Speaker 01

  no roads, or if they do, they're impassable for most of the year. Uh, and so how do the, how do the, how do people move around? Well, they move around in the rivers. The bad guys move around in the rivers. The good guys don't. They don't have a riverine capability. And, and, and all the locals move around in the rivers. So I, you know, I finally met this minister, and I said, "Minister, you don't have a way, I said, number one, you, the only way you know what's going on out there is if you get in a plane with your staff and you fly out there, and then you gotta find them on impassable roads. And then when you find them, you've got no maneuverability, and you don't have any way

• 2:45:51Speaker 01

  of finding out what you did, what happened after you got there. So you gotta have instant communications, which are available, if you know how to access them. I said, "You gotta have a riverine capability, because that's how the bad guys move. So you gotta have a rapid reaction force, and you have gotta have the right kind of equipment, and have the right kind of training. And here's the package." And they all say they wanna do it, and a, a critical part of it has been figuring out to get them financed, and I think we've got that, I think we've got that figured out, solved. So we're getting mighty close, but I hate to say we're doing it, because, you know,

• 2:46:34Speaker 01

  you're not doing it till you're doing it, but we're, we're mighty close, and that's what I've been working on. It's about four countries.

• 2:46:41Jocko Willink?

  Still got a lot of stuff going on.

• 2:46:43Speaker 01

  Well, only way to go.

• 2:46:45Jocko Willink?

  Um. You know, it's interesting too, and just going back to the book here for a second, you know, the way this all turned out. Uh, government corruption, of course, allowed many idea, many of the riches of the Congo to be exported. It was a country with deep reserves of copper, cobalt, uranium and diamonds. 1971 Mobutu renamed the coun- the country Zaire.

• 2:47:08Jocko Willink?

  Uh, diamonds ended up surpassing everything as the Congo's main export, including cobalt and copper. Diamonds made, made up 30% of the country's total exports in 1989, but through corruption and financial mismanagement, the entire mining industry was in jeopardy and its share of the GDP went from 11.3% in 1988 to 4.7% in 1994. Mobutu's ill-conceived fiscal programs drove the country from bad to worse as the years wore on, even as his personal fortune soared. Over his 32-year reign, he was estimated to be worth as much as $5 billion. While almost all facets of life in Congo deteriorated,

• 2:47:47Jocko Willink?

  he maintained a presidential services fund that took up between 17 and 20% of the government's budget. He owned personal stock in every enterprise relating to Zaire and Congo. And it was said that no business transaction with a foreign-owned company was allowed to take place unless a kickback was paid to Mobutu personally. He was the largest shareholder in the Bank of K- of Kinsasha and had personal ownership, either partial or outright, in agricultural businesses, mining and manufacturing in all provinces of the country. But as Mobutu and his family members and handpicked cronies grew wealthier, the country fell to near ruin. The highway road and rail systems were in utter disrepair.

• 2:48:31Jocko Willink?

  The healthcare system wasn't funded. Human rights violations were rampant. Just a few years before Mobutu would finally leave the scene, according to the same Harvard study, the country faced a risk of virtual disintegration due to hyperinflation. The GDP plummeted, pushing the economy into substance agriculture. By the end of 1995, income per capita was only one-third its pre-independence levels.

• 2:49:01Jocko Willink?

  Mobutu got forced out of power in 1997. He died in exile a year after that. Lornik Kabila took over. I was in Sierra Leone in 1998. As the war was going off and things were getting crazy again in the Congo, the Echo Mog was down there working.

• 2:49:23Jocko Willink?

  But it sounds like you're back there now, at least trying to make a positive impact.

• 2:49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, four different countries.

• 2:49:30Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding. What else? Do we get every, is that it? Are we up to speed? Are we up to present day?

• 2:49:37Speaker 01

  I think we're pretty close.

• 2:49:39Jocko Willink?

  Echo, you got any questions?

• 2:49:41Speaker 02

  This is gonna seem out of nowhere, but how Singapore right now is a place to live?

• 2:49:47Speaker 01

  I was in Singapore, went anywhere and declared independence. Right after that, because I went down from Vietnam before you were allowed to go to Singapore from Vietnam. And it was, so I've seen the whole, the whole transition, the whole growth. Remarkable. Remarkable what can be done when the corruption is at an absolute minimum. And you got everybody focused with a strong leader. Singapore is a garden spot, just a garden spot. It's now expensive. And now they're, now they have a bit of a social problem and it's just gotten so expensive.

• 2:50:30Speaker 01

  They gotta do, they gotta do something to keep the spark, uh, spark going, which was, but yes, Lee Kuan Yew was, it was a multiracial with all the, with all of the, I mean, just the next door in Malaysia, there was always the Chinese Malay problem. They wouldn't, none of that in Singapore. The Indian community in Singapore was, was small, comparatively small, but extremely important.

• 2:51:05Speaker 01

  And Lee Kuan Yew was able to take this team of Chinese Indians and and a couple of Malays and lead that growth. No corruption tolerated. And unleash the entrepreneurial spirit within the rules. And it's just been, it's been extraordinary to watch it, just extraordinary. I knew those guys. I mean, I knew his, you know, so many of his old team. That's what, so remember, you know, I can, I can remember when they did the classic thing and came the garment, garment guys, because that's where they had to get people employed.

• 2:51:46Speaker 01

  What he did, what he did was he gave everybody a stake in success of Singapore by, by making sure everybody was an owner of their own residence. Now, in doing that, he had to get rid of the traditional villages, which caused, you know, a lot of people in the West. Yeah, just remember when all this was going on and you guys were having to read the New York Times and the Washington Post. I was, I was out there and I was reading the Bangkok Post and the Strait, and the Singapore Straits Times and the Jakarta Post and the Malaysian Times. All different stuff. Okay.

• 2:52:27Speaker 01

  So he, I can remember, I can remember when, at the start of it all, once a year, Lee Kuan Yew would pick out an expatriate business leader and hang him. Not, not literally hang him, but you know, he just would assume that he was up to something and make an example. Okay, was that fair and good? He generally picked the right guys. I remember how significant it was the first time he picked a Chinese business leader to make an example of. That was, you know, that was because it reflected actually what was happening in this, in the society.

• 2:53:09Speaker 01

  The Chinese were slowly taking over everything, that it had previously been colonial, whatever.

• 2:53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that started out with a factory, you know, just the factory, the garment workers. I remember how embarrassed they were in Singapore when they had an outbreak of Korro. And Korro was supposed, was a, was a group hysteria in which the, the, the men were afraid that their, that their scrotums were ascending into their lower abdomen. And they would, and they got hysterical. This happened in factories. They had a name for it. I think it was Korro, if I remember correctly. And dealing with all that kind of stuff. And, I mean, they went through the whole, whole thing, except they went through it with

• 2:53:54Speaker 01

  a guy who was, who was adamant against corruption and was focused on, on success and what was good for Singapore. And the US, the US didn't make it easy for him at, at, early on, in the early days, because they considered him a socialist. And when I take a look around at the guys, you know, I go back to that headquarters thing. We never listened to the guys who worked with Ho Chi Minh during the Second World War. Never paid any attention to Ho Chi Minh was a communist. Ho Chi Minh wanted to be successful. In Hong Kong, in Lumumba, in Lumumba, communist, communist, communist, communist. Lumumba was looking for friends. We weren't going to be his friend because the Belgians didn't like him and therefore,

• 2:54:38Speaker 01

  and we couldn't like him. So he goes to the, go to, go to Russia. When I was doing the research for this, I was all starting off with a, what I'd always thought about Lumumba. I would come to the conclusion Lumumba wasn't a hardcore communist. He was just looking for friends and where he could get the money to help him do what he was trying to do. Lee Kuan Yew, socialist. Lee Kuan Yew wasn't a socialist. He understood what he is. He understood his people. You know, he understood what it would take to grow and he would listen. He got this Dutch economic guy, economist, and the two of them together put the master plan for what has become Singapore. And then not only that, he voluntarily stepped down.

• 2:55:20Speaker 01

  I mean, tell me how many dictators have done that? Anywhere, any continent. So.

• 2:55:30Speaker 01

  Anyway, that starts as kind of a wordy answer to your question. It's a great place. I lived there for fifteen or twenty years. Redo? Yeah.

• 2:55:41Jocko Willink?

  Jim, any other, any other closing thoughts?

• 2:55:45Speaker 01

  Term limits.

• 2:55:47Jocko Willink?

  I support them.

• 2:55:51Speaker 01

  Meritocracy.

• 2:55:52Jocko Willink?

  I support it.

• 2:55:56Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Well, you know, before closing out, I just wanted to go to the book one last time. I want to, you, you gave a speech at a reunion to honor those that had fought in the Congo, the Americans, the Cubans, the Belgians. I think this was 2014.

• 2:56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that was the 50th commemoration.

• 2:56:12Jocko Willink?

  And here, here's what you said about these men, and I'm just going to read an excerpt of it. You said, "These men, these fine men, will receive no recognition, no medals, no rose garden thanks. They've always known that is the way it would be, and they have never asked for more. What they will have that no one can ever deny them is the respect, admiration, and affection of those who were there and who, and who truly know how bravely and honorably these men performed, and of course, the gratitude from those who were saved. What these men had was each other, their mutual trust, respect, their pride in their performance, and their dedication to the eradication of communism.

• 2:56:55Jocko Willink?

  There were no expressions of entitlement, and there are still none. They took the conditions, circumstances, and threats that were presented and did what they were tasked with accomplishing. They were disciplined and proud participants in a historical event, saving thousands of lives, including those we are privileged to have with us here today in their desire to salute their rescuers. It is no exaggeration to say that these folks would not have survived that terror without the intervention and performance of these men. Fifty years later, there are lessons in these events relevant to today's war on terror. It takes dedicated men of intelligence, judgment, and courage, willing to go into

• 2:57:39Jocko Willink?

  harm's way to do the job, to protect the lives of the innocent, and to destroy those of perverted political and religious beliefs who seek to harm us. Please join me and salute these deserving men."

• 2:57:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, sir, we salute these heroes for sure and glad we can tell their story and salute you for your service and, and thank you, sir, for what you did for the teams and what you did for our country and for the cause of freedom in the world.

• 2:58:18Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you for what you do. Thank you for what you did. Thank you for what you do and what you're going to continue to do. And I really appreciate this because not enough people know about these guys.

• 2:58:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, we're telling them now. Thanks, sir. Appreciate it.

• 2:58:34Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:58:36Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Jim Haas has left the building. Definitely a pretty awesome conversation. Twenty, you go back to that 26 years old, being in the Congo by yourself, working with random mercenaries and foreign nationals and, and putting together to fight a war against insurgents. That's pretty awesome. And it's pretty awesome. He kept referring back to the training, right? And I think that's such a huge part. And he, he mentioned Ben Milligan. I'll mention Ben Milligan as well in that book, in, in Ben Milligan's book, uh, By,

• 2:59:21Jocko Willink?

  By Water Beneath the Walls. You know, he, he ties that route back into the US Navy and the Navy in general and how when you're out on a ship by yourself in the middle of nowhere, you gotta make things happen. It's decentralized command. So this is an incredible example of decentralized command for a 26-year-old Lieutenant Junior Gray in the US Navy to roll out and run a...

• 2:59:48Jocko Willink?

  Of of a counter insurgency in a different country. So very cool. Lots of things going on. Definitely appreciate it. I also obviously love hearing some of those old stories about what training was like. When he sent me some, a little bit of a bio, he said, you know, class 29 E. And then he had in parentheses, winter. He wanted to let me know that it was a winter.

• 3:00:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:11Jocko Willink?

  Hell week and he talked about the snow and everything, but yeah, that stuff's pretty cool.

• 3:00:15Speaker 02

  Is that, that's a big difference though, right? The winter versus, because you guys talk about that here. Or at the end of the day, is it just hard, hard?

• 3:00:23Jocko Willink?

  It's hard, hard. Let's face it. It's a little bit colder.

• 3:00:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:28Jocko Willink?

  It's a little bit colder. You know what I'm saying? My, I think my hell week was like a spring hell week.

• 3:00:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:35Jocko Willink?

  It was like a spring hell week.

• 3:00:36Speaker 02

  And that's still cold, right? Coronado?

• 3:00:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. I mean, it definitely was cold. I mean, you're going to be cold, but it wasn't 37 degrees, which in a winter hell week out here can be 37 degrees, 41 degrees.

• 3:00:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:50Jocko Willink?

  They, and, and, and listen, there's some different suffering that happens in the summertime.

• 3:00:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:55Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're hotter. And being hot sucks. And, and I guess in the winter, in the summertime, you're more swollen and more chafed.

• 3:01:04Speaker 02

  Oh, bro. Damn.

• 3:01:05Jocko Willink?

  So, well, you know, pick your poison.

• 3:01:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01:08Jocko Willink?

  But I think you gotta, if you just run the numbers, more people quit in hell week during the winter time. I think if you just run the numbers, you, I can't sit here and defend it. I can't be like, well, you know, it's just as hard. No. If you run the numbers, you're going to find a winter hell week, less survivors.

• 3:01:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's.

• 3:01:25Jocko Willink?

  And east coast winter hell week, snow on the ground. That's, you know, some people are quitting. You know, when you see that snow, some people are quitting straight up.

• 3:01:34Speaker 02

  He mentioned that, that where it's like, hey, you fall down in the snow. Like damn, that's a, just psychologically right out the gate.

• 3:01:41Jocko Willink?

  The, the interesting thing is they're going to get you.

• 3:01:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01:45Jocko Willink?

  They're gonna get you and they're gonna make you, they're gonna push you to your physical limit. You like, how many pushups can you do right now? If I dropped you down and said, I want you to do as many pushups as you can?

• 3:01:54Speaker 02

  If you give me two, a minute and a half to like fucking to stretch out?

• 3:01:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Yep. You got that minute and a half to stretch out. How many are you gonna get?

• 3:02:01Speaker 02

  Solid, probably 120 maybe.

• 3:02:03Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you do 120 pushups. And then what are you gonna do when I tell you to keep going?

• 3:02:11Speaker 02

  Lay down.

• 3:02:12Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying? Like, by the way, how long would it take you to do 120 pushups?

• 3:02:16Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know. 120, 140 seconds?

• 3:02:19Jocko Willink?

  120 seconds? Okay, so 2 minutes. So let's say I drop you down, you do 2 minutes worth of pushups.

• 3:02:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:02:25Jocko Willink?

  2 minutes. We have 14 more hours to kill in this day. First, first phase of BUDs, right? Like, you could exhaust yourself in every exercise, and guess what? You're gonna keep going.

• 3:02:34Speaker 02

  Yep, you gotta keep going. Yeah, that's, that's true.

• 3:02:36Jocko Willink?

  So, so you're gonna reach your physical limitation. You're gonna reach your mental limitation when you you freak out about stuff and stress and all this stuff. So they're gonna get you. It's gonna be 37 degrees, it might be 45 degrees, it might be 52 degrees.

• 3:02:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:02:50Jocko Willink?

  But they're gonna get you. They're gonna get a bunch of people to quit. So, the cool thing is, you learn that adaptability and you learn how to make things happen, which is what Jim Haas put to, put to use.

• 3:03:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:03Jocko Willink?

  In Vietnam, and then over in the Congo.

• 3:03:05Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 3:03:06Jocko Willink?

  The D-Rock, the Democrat, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Um, so, speaking of things going on,

• 3:03:15Jocko Willink?

  we all have a lot of things going on. You should, hopefully. We're trying to have a lot of things going on. Need to fuel that? Get yourself some Jaco Fuel. I, I just drank 2 Jaco goes.

• 3:03:28Jocko Willink?

  What's cool is, I feel so good. And I'm gonna feel good.

• 3:03:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:33Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna feel good. There's no, not gonna be a crash. Not, in 2 hours, I'm not gonna be coiled up watching a Netflix series. In fact, I'm gonna be training in a little while.

• 3:03:44Speaker 02

  Oh damn.

• 3:03:44Jocko Willink?

  You know? So that's what we're doing. That's what we're getting after. Uh, JacoFuel.com, go check that out. We got, we got ready, by the way, once, when, when Jim left the building, Jaco grabbed them all. I grabbed an RTD.

• 3:04:00Jocko Willink?

  Ready to drink, milk, protein, um, get yourself some of that. We're in a bunch of stores around the world, well, around the country right now. We're in Vitamin Shoppe, number one brand in Vitamin Shoppe, you wear that?

• 3:04:12Speaker 02

  Uh, yes, I am. I saw that process go down.

• 3:04:15Jocko Willink?

  Good to be. Um, Military Commissars, we're in there, we're in Hanford, we're in Dash Stores, we're in Wakefront Shopper, Shoprite, we're in HEB, down in Texas, where it's crushing. We, I was just in Texas, they have the big, uh, they call it an end cap in the industry. And what that means is you know how there'd be an aisle in the grocery store? And at the end of the aisle, there's, could be some product there, they have a whole

• 3:04:43Jocko Willink?

  end cap, that whole end is just Jaco Fuel stuff. Powder, pow pow. Milk pow pow.

• 3:04:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's good, cause all these things like, um, you know, when you can kind of compare it to others and all this stuff where, cause all I have been guilty of this in the past, distant past, where, man, I need like an energy drink or even like one of these little ready to drink proteins or whatever. And, but I just ignore the amount of sugar in there, I'm just gonna ignore that, cause man, I'm on the go, you know, I'm leaving or whatever.

• 3:05:12Jocko Willink?

  Excuses that are just R T Es, ready to excuse.

• 3:05:17Speaker 02

  So R T Es all day, and the thing is, that is factually true, where I'm like, hey, man, maybe I'm going into catapolic breakdown or something like this, so I do need that protein or whatever, sure, I could, you know. So I'll get the, you know, these other, I don't want to name anything, you know, throw nobody under the bus, but you do get these ready to drink protein. Milk, we'll say, gas station or a 7-Eleven, something like this, and yeah, like you, if you dare to look at the sugar or these other things.

• 3:05:43Jocko Willink?

  Hey, listen, honestly, if you remotely care about your health.

• 3:05:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:46Jocko Willink?

  And you look at the sugar, you're putting it back.

• 3:05:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:49Jocko Willink?

  Look, if I'm guilty of that. I won't, I'm not even looking, you know what I mean? And I know it's just a lie.

• 3:05:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:55Jocko Willink?

  It's, once you look and you go, oh, thirty-six grams of sugar.

• 3:06:01Jocko Willink?

  Uh, serving size, one servings per container, two. So you're about to ingest seventy two grams of sugar. This not, that doesn't make up for being catabolic. That protein's not worth it. It's not worth what you're doing to your insulin.

• 3:06:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:06:14Jocko Willink?

  Levels.

• 3:06:15Speaker 02

  And it's true, Brad. So in a situation like that, this is how it used to be for me where, hey, man, I'll just pay that price just today. Look, I'm not doing it every day. Just today I'll pay that price. And so you pay, you pay that price. Like, of course, you pay the price for the, for the product, you know, at the register. But come on, that price is going with you down the street. You see what I'm saying? Bruh, not anymore, man. Bruh, grab two of those, whatever. Sixty grams of protein.

• 3:06:39Jocko Willink?

  I pounded yesterday, I pounded two. This is back to back. Just got it done.

• 3:06:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:06:43Jocko Willink?

  Banana, banana.

• 3:06:44Speaker 02

  Yep. No, no additional cost of your, your conscience.

• 3:06:48Jocko Willink?

  Nope.

• 3:06:48Speaker 02

  At all.

• 3:06:49Jocko Willink?

  Clean, clean fuel, clean fuel, Jocko fuel. By the way, listen, time war. This is something. Here's my, here's my anecdotal story. I went to the muster at the muster. You have those downstage monitors. They are a certain size. When I look, so you were standing on stage and you look down to see what the notes are. And listen, I've been blessed, knock on wood, with that. My vision's always been good. And like, a lot of people my age, my friends, they have glasses. Like they wear eyeglasses to read or they wear eyeglasses to look far or whatever. I've been very, very lucky.

• 3:07:30Jocko Willink?

  But you know, sometimes you like, especially if my eyes get a little tired, I got read a bunch. Sometimes it's hard to notice something. I'm like, what is this?

• 3:07:39Jocko Willink?

  And so I was at the muster and I'm like, hey, did we get bigger downstage monitors?

• 3:07:44Jocko Willink?

  And Wes is like, no, it's the same size. And I said, oh, are you using a bigger font? And he's like, no, that's the standard. And I was like, oh, I can see more clearly. Why is that? There's only one variable that's changed. Time war. And we have ocular nutrition in there.

• 3:08:03Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, that's like one small element, but I'll tell you what, it's not even a small element. I will never, I will take, I will take Time War for the rest of my life right now. Like a hundred percent, just off that right there. That's just incredible. And to know that you're fueling your body and keeping it in, in, on the path is freaking epic. So get Time War, try it out. Let me know what you think. I think it's freaking legit. So, uh, there you go. JacoFuel.com. Check it out.

• 3:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that mix of Time War, cause it has a lot of stuff in there, like even vitamins, minerals, all the, all the, and the anti-aging stuff or whatever. It's funny. So a mix like that, right? Where it's not like, uh, you know, when you drink a coffee, you know? It's like, I know what the coffee is gonna do is make me feel more alert or awake, whatever, all that stuff or whatever. But a mix like that, it's funny how all the little cracks in your performance capability, like the little teeny tiny stuff, like whether it be your vision, whether it be just a little ache, whether it be like, um, you falling asleep faster or when you wake up, like certain, like just things that you just took for granted. Cause they don't like go down as smoothly.

• 3:09:12Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I'm telling you with Time Wars, this is another thing that I am noticing is like a higher consistent, I don't wanna call it energy, but there's like a higher, it is an energy, but it's not like a spike of energy. It's like, oh, I just feel more better, more better.

• 3:09:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:32Jocko Willink?

  Make that the, make that thing more better. Make that the slogan. You, you feel like, oh, like I'll be, let's call it, let's call it seven forty-seven in the morning.

• 3:09:45Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:09:47Jocko Willink?

  Workout's done. And sometimes in the past, I'd be, you know, seven forty-seven is kind of a little, little low. You know what I mean? Like kinda tired, went for, worked out, went for a run, feeling a little, feeling a little bit of a, a downturn.

• 3:10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:03Jocko Willink?

  And right now I'm like, feel good, real good.

• 3:10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Keep it going.

• 3:10:07Jocko Willink?

  Again, what's the, what's the, what's the change? Just one change, Time War. Anyways, freaking awesome. Check it out. Time War. JacoFuel.com.

• 3:10:17Speaker 02

  Also, originusa.com, this is where you can get your jeans. American made stuff, not just jeans, obviously, but all American made, from the cotton grown

• 3:10:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:27Speaker 02

  in the fields, to the manufacturing, to the, even the little buttons on there, everything made in America. That's a bit, whatever, brother, they try to trick you. These other brands, like a lot of them, they'll be like, oh yeah, made in America.

• 3:10:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, sometimes they make those buttons. Is there, how many Ts are in button?

• 3:10:44Speaker 02

  Two.

• 3:10:44Jocko Willink?

  How many do I say? Zero?

• 3:10:46Speaker 02

  Zero.

• 3:10:46Jocko Willink?

  Button.

• 3:10:46Speaker 02

  Button.

• 3:10:47Jocko Willink?

  Button.

• 3:10:48Speaker 02

  No, no, no, silent, a double silent two Ts.

• 3:10:50Jocko Willink?

  Button.

• 3:10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:10:52Jocko Willink?

  You say button.

• 3:10:54Speaker 02

  But either way, sometimes.

• 3:10:56Jocko Willink?

  Nonetheless, we want those buttons made in America.

• 3:10:58Speaker 02

  Whole gig. And if you're down for that, that's how originusa.com. Well, a lot of good stuff on there. Gee's on there too. New gee out, by the way.

• 3:11:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:07Speaker 02

  Nano. Is it pearl, nano weave?

• 3:11:10Jocko Willink?

  Nano pearl. I was calling it nano pearl.

• 3:11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. See, that one's legit. So I took mine home yesterday.

• 3:11:15Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:11:15Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. And I have my old def gee. I made the little comparison.

• 3:11:20Jocko Willink?

  Let's make it.

• 3:11:20Speaker 02

  I feel you. I feel the upgrade. Yeah, it's good. That's a good one there.

• 3:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Originusa.com, go get some. There you go.

• 3:11:26Speaker 02

  Yep, true. Also, Jaco's store, it's called Jaco's store. This is where you can get your discipline equals freedom shirts, hats, hoodies. If you're representing on this path, and we're on the path, you'd be crazy not to be in this day and age with all this good guidance.

• 3:11:40Jocko Willink?

  There's a lot of negativity, actually, is a more important reason to be on what we're calling the path. What is known as the path. I noticed that the other day. What's weird is, I noticed the other day, so listen, I'm not, you know, some people are like, hey, you gotta bring more positivity in your life, like those kinds of things, and watch out for negativity, and give me some more of those little sayings, like, negative people, cut them away, like all those kinds of things. I've heard that a lot in my life, and I've always not thought much of it. It didn't really mean much to me. You know, to me, it was like, oh, you gotta stay positive. I didn't even think that was a thing. But I don't know, there's something like, in the last week. Where I it was like I saw a bunch of negative things all in a very short period of time. I was like,

• 3:12:22Jocko Willink?

  oh, that's what people mean. And you could get sucked into that negativity.

• 3:12:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12:28Jocko Willink?

  And it didn't really make sense to me before because it's never really been a temptation for me to be negative or get sucked in that negative thing. And it's also such an instinct for me to be like, oh, cool. We got a problem. Cool. We're gonna go crush it. That's positive.

• 3:12:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:12:39Jocko Willink?

  Thinking. I never thought too much about that, but now I'm like, oh, I get it. So watch out for that negativity.

• 3:12:49Speaker 02

  Stay on that.

• 3:12:50Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm saying. So we're staying on the path, by the way.

• 3:12:52Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. And yeah, if you're represented on it, that's this is where you can get your stuff. Jocko store.com.

• 3:12:56Jocko Willink?

  Yep. It's not a it's not a placebo. Remember when you were a kid and you got new sneakers and you got to run, you ran faster?

• 3:13:02Speaker 02

  Yes, no doubt about it.

• 3:13:04Jocko Willink?

  This is like you get a shirt locker t-shirt. All of a sudden you're more disciplined.

• 3:13:07Speaker 02

  Yep. Well, the shirt locker shirt, that's like for us enjoying ourself on the path, you know? So we kind of go outside color. We color outside the lines every once in a while with the shirt locker stuff. They're fun. New design every month. That's a that's the subscription one. But you know, if you're wearing discipline equals freedom and you choose to work out with that shirt, you know, you put on that shirt, the chances of you skipping that workout go down to zero.

• 3:13:30Jocko Willink?

  Zero. Zero. It's not not possible. Not possible. So there you go. Subscribe to this podcast as well. Subscribe to Jocko Underground. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, the Origin USA YouTube channel, the Jocko Fuel YouTube channel. Go to flipsidecanvas.com and get something for you to hang on your wall. Got a bunch of books. Let's get this book Cold War Navy SEAL by James M. Haas and Mary Ann Koenig. I forgot to mention Mary Ann Koenig, but she also helped write the book. So there you go. Cold War Navy SEAL. Bunch of really interesting stuff. It's so weird. Again, I was talking about this with Jim when we were offline is just like.

• 3:14:13Jocko Willink?

  I went to the SEAL Team One anniversary. A little while back, 60th year anniversary. But I also went to the 30 year anniversary. And so 30 years before that was when SEAL Team One got made. So this is all like I've been around, I, you know, you're around people that are generally generationally all part of this group. It's kind of wild, but a lot of those historical things, I mentioned that to him like known about the, the war in the Congo, that's a thing. And now you're sitting here talking to Jim and he's literally worked directly with Lieutenant Colonel Mad Mike Horr, like that's crazy to think about.

• 3:14:58Jocko Willink?

  Crazy to think about. So anyways, check out his book, check out a bunch of books that I've written, Final Spin Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. A bunch of, bunch of books. We have a leadership consultancy, it's called Echelon Front. If you want, need help from a leadership perspective inside your organization, go to echelonfront.com. We also have an online training academy because leadership and life is not something that you just are able to just cruise through and know what to do. You don't, none of us do. That's why we made this training academy online. Go to extremeownership.com, come and check out some of our free classes. Just, when you take a free class, you'll be, oh, I get it. These are weird skills. I was telling, you know, I was telling the troops on, so we got a question on the academy the other day.

• 3:15:44Jocko Willink?

  A guy says, hey, my boss is not being transparent, not telling us what's going on, starting to, you know, be a little bit of a problem with the team. And I was like, yep, hey, here's what you're going to need to do. Everyone that's on this call, it's, we're only doing a live webinar on extremeownership.com. I said, everybody that's on this call right now, if you and we all, we all take ownership, we all subordinate our ego, we all prioritize relationships, we all work to build trust and we listen to each other. That's what we're doing. And if you're doing that, you are better at relationships and leadership than 99% of the world. So when you've got your boss that's not behaving like a good leader, you're

• 3:16:28Jocko Willink?

  the one that has to use these techniques to. Help them close the gaps on their leadership, which is a powerful thing, right? It's like you're trying to build a house, like Echo's over here, I'm watching you. Or let's say Echo, you're building a house for me. And, and I go in and all of a sudden I see like Echo doesn't have a square to make sure that the, that the walls are square. And I'm like, hey, bro, no, it's all good. I got this square right here. And you're like, oh, thanks. I'm actually helping you. It's not my job. I know you're, you're the house builder, but what am I supposed to? Sit back and watch my house be crooked? Maybe you don't have, maybe you don't, you're not good at plumbing. And so I go, hey, man, let me help you with that plumbing.

• 3:17:12Jocko Willink?

  Let me fill, let me fill in the gaps right here. Oh, hey, your drywall's not, you're not quite that good of a drywaller. Let me give you a hand. So I'm just making these little, now listen, you're the leader. You should be doing this yourself. And I can sit back and go, oh, that is all messed up. But guess what? I gotta live in the house.

• 3:17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:26Jocko Willink?

  So go to extremeownership.com, learn these skills. And then you can help your leader, you can help your peers, you can help your subordinates.

• 3:17:34Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, just FYI, you don't help them by saying, hey, Echo, you got a major problem with your leadership. No, that's not what you do, because then they get defensive. You use the indirect approach, you work through it. So that's what we're doing. Go to extremeownership.com. We will help you learn to lead. It'll make everything in your life better.

• 3:17:52Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their, their families, Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And also, don't forget about Micah Fink, who last report was riding a mountain lion through the wilderness and he was rescuing a small bear from a tree. So that's, you know, go to heroesandhorses.org. He's out there in the wilderness, helping veterans find themselves. And if you want to connect with us, Echo is at Echo Charles.

• 3:18:34Jocko Willink?

  I am at Jocko Willink. We're on the various social media platforms. But just, just be advised, you think those social media platforms are there for you?

• 3:18:45Jocko Willink?

  They're there for your benefit, they're not. They're there for their benefit. So just be careful because they got algorithms that are going to try and hook you up.

• 3:18:53Jocko Willink?

  Thanks once again to Jim Hawes for coming out and sharing his experiences and lessons learned. And more important, thanks to Jim for all he did to support and defend democracy around the world. And a special thanks to those who served with him. Aligned with freedom, the Cubans, the Belgians, the Americans, who fought and continue to fight clandestine wars to protect the cause of freedom.

• 3:19:22Jocko Willink?

  And also, thank you to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for fighting to keep us safe here at home. And to everyone else out there.

• 3:19:36Jocko Willink?

  You're not going to get things served to you on a silver platter.

• 3:19:41Jocko Willink?

  You're not going to get the money that you need. You're not going to get the support that you want. You're not going to get blessed with a perfect team of people that have the perfect set of skills. You're not going to get any of that. That's the way life is.

• 3:19:56Jocko Willink?

  But like Jim Hawes, you still have to figure it out. You have to make it happen. You have to create something from nothing.

• 3:20:08Jocko Willink?

  And if you do that, you too can achieve victory. And you do that by getting out there every day and getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.