350: Someone Must Walk The Point. With Marine Corps Major Tom Shueman

Marine Corps Major Tom Schueman. "Always Faithful: a Story of the War in Afghanistan, The fall of Kabul, and the unshakeable bond between a Marine and an interpreter. 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 350 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:09Jocko Willink?

  Sergeant Humphrey's squad secured a path and established a position from which they could overwatch second squad as they re-entered friendly lines. As Humphrey's Marines were breaking down their overwatch position to move back to FOB Inkerman, the rear element of the squad was pinned in a canal by heavy and accurate machine gun fire from Taliban hidden in a tree line. I ran to Sergeant Humphrey shouting, "Let's go, we gotta move on that gun." Staff Sergeant Henley and I were converging on Sergeant Humphrey as we rushed to develop a plan to relieve the pressure on the pinned down fire team from the Taliban machine gun. I looked back to see Zack was on my heels.

• 0:55Jocko Willink?

  There would be no need for an interpreter where I was going. He just saw me start running and he did the same.

• 1:05Jocko Willink?

  Then Sergeant Humphrey stepped on a pressure plate IED.

• 1:11Jocko Willink?

  The sound and force enveloped me in a sensation. All went black.

• 1:17Jocko Willink?

  I have no idea how long I was out, but when I came to, the first person I saw was Zack.

• 1:25Jocko Willink?

  He knelt beside me, over me, my rifle in his hand, protecting and supporting me as I fought to my feet. I imagine we looked like a filthy Madonna and child in the moment. As Zack helped me rise, I looked to my left and saw Staff Sergeant Henley. He lay in a heap, a tangle of his own limbs, himself struggling to rise. He had also been knocked out and was shouting at me, unaware that blood poured from his own blown out eardrums. I could make no sense of what he was saying, then I saw Humphrey and stopped trying to.

• 2:04Jocko Willink?

  When I got to him, Sergeant Humphrey's right foot was completely blown off. All the muscle and tissue on his left calf was gone. His left thigh lay open from a piece of shrapnel.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  Later, I would learn his jaw was broken, but for now, he lay at my feet screaming.

• 2:24Jocko Willink?

  Doc Collins and Corporal Matt Bland rushed to Sergeant Humphrey and began treating his grievous wounds. I called in a medevac as I held the meat of his calf to the bone as near-crick wrapped it.

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  With Corporal Sean Leahy directing the squad's fire upon the enemy, Corporal Spivey swept the kill zone for more IEDs and then swept a clear path to the point at which the medevac aircraft would pick up Humphrey. Through it all, Sergeant Humphrey remained poised, directing his own treatment and movement.

• 2:58Jocko Willink?

  As we carried Humphrey to the medevac helicopter, all I could think was, what a bad day.

• 3:04Jocko Willink?

  It was insufficient for the moment, but it was all I could think to say. They tried to put me on the helicopter, but with Staff Sergeant Henley and Sergeant Humphrey both wounded and gone, there was no way I was leaving.

• 3:18Jocko Willink?

  When we returned to FOB Inckerman, the CO handed me a towel to wipe the blood off my hands and gear and said Sergeant Humphrey is gonna lose a leg, but the surgeon says he will live. But what happened out there? I looked at him and exhaled. "I don't know, sir. That file is deleted."

• 3:39Jocko Willink?

  There was little else to say, so I turned away and went back to debrief my platoon.

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  I was tired and sad and likely concussed, but I had a job to do.

• 3:51Jocko Willink?

  Zack always did his and more. I could do the same. Bringing out the collective narrative in the debrief began to bring back the details for me. But Zack, standing over me, ready to kill to protect me, stood out in stark relief from the start.

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  That vision, Zack silhouetted against the dust, still swirling from the explosion that flattened me, color and detail becoming clearer as my consciousness returned, is one I still see sometimes as I wake. It says something about Zack as a man, as a battlefield interpreter, and as my friend. It was a common, it was common to hear Americans say of the Afghans, "We can't want it more than they do." But it often seemed we did. Zack was a huge exception. He was not a soldier, but he was there to fight. He understood our missions in a way that other interpreters did not.

• 4:50Jocko Willink?

  Most interpreters were like specialty items in our packs, inert, and just riding along until it was time to employ them for their purpose. But Marines are utility players capable of addressing a wide array of circumstances and expected to prevail in each. Like a Marine, Zack was an active member of First Platoon. He did not shy away from any danger. He did not question doing whatever the mission demanded because he was committed to it for Afghanistan. Zanula Zaki ran to the sound of the guns in a way that would have made a Marine infantry instructor smile.

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  Standing at the debrief, talking through what happened as is expected after every operation, I told the platoon that all of us were going out the next day for Humphrey's revenge. I thanked Zack for his willingness to always be where he might be needed, particularly when it was protecting my life. I'd already come to see Zack as more than an interpreter, but now, there was no way to call him anything but a brother.

• 6:07Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book which is called Always Faithful. A story of the war in Afghanistan, the fall of Kabul, and the unshakable bond between a Marine and an interpreter. And this is a book that was written by that Marine and that interpreter. The Marine's name is Major Tom Schuman and the interpreter, an Afghan national, his name is Zanula Zaki. And they served together in Helmand Province with three five Marines during an extremely violent deployment.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  And they had each other's back on the ground there and they continued to support each other even as Afghanistan fell apart. And it's an incredible story of how all that went down. And it's an honor to have the Marine from this story, Tom Schuman, here with us tonight to share his experiences and his lessons learned from the battlefield and from life. Tom, thanks for coming down, man.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Sir, thanks for having me, Echo. Thanks.

• 7:23Jocko Willink?

  And you're just right up the street at Camp Pendleton.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  That's a firm up in San Mateo on the north side of the base.

• 7:28Jocko Willink?

  Active duty Marine currently serving and you're the, what, XO?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Operations Officer.

• 7:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh, OpsO. Not quite XO.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Still on the trenches hooking and jabbing.

• 7:41Jocko Willink?

  Awesome, man. Well, thanks for coming down and thanks to your chain of command for allowing you to come down here for the day. I know that's not always an easy thing to pull off, but appreciate it. And I always, well, everybody knows I love the Marine Corps, so I appreciate that. We're getting a little love from the Marine Corps today. It's outstanding. Let's just get into this. This is a, this is a great story. Well, parts of it are a great story, parts of it are, are rough. I like to start at the beginning, kind of figure out where you came from and how you got to this point in your life today. So I'm gonna go to the book. It says, "I grew up steeped in chaos, surrounded by weak men who wouldn't control their temper,

• 8:23Jocko Willink?

  didn't consider consequences, and bullied women through their body language, or by getting even louder than loud women. My mom did what she could to provide stability, but in my childhood memories, there is a through line of angry screaming, holes punched in walls, thrown glasses shattered. The effect of that has been for me to seek the opposite in all things. It's almost incalculable to me that someone does not consider consequences. I am very comfortable in chaotic situations, but control over myself and my surroundings is second only to my faith in Christ in defining the essence of who I am. My mom was a good kid left to fend for herself.

• 9:08Jocko Willink?

  The South Side offers a million ways to get off track, and by 13, she was feral, drinking and drugging for the remainder of her teenage years. At 17, she was waiting tables in Chicago to pay for partying, when my father showed up on a motorcycle with a guitar and long blond hair. He chatted her up and played her a song. She put down her order pad, hopped on the back of the bike, and rode off with him. Then he decided they needed to move to Georgia. By 18, my mom was a pregnant high school dropout who quit using, who quit using, out of duty to me, her unborn child. Three years later, she was married with two kids, living 800 miles away from her family. Things got bad fast.

• 9:53Jocko Willink?

  My earliest memories are of them fighting. When my mom confided in my father's sister, "I have to get out of here, I can't raise these kids and all this", she agreed to take the three of us to Chicago. My mom packed three-year-old me and my three-month-old sister Jessie into my aunt's yellow Datsun hatchback and ran back to the South Side. When we got there, we landed in my great-aunt's house. Mom called my father in Georgia and told him we wouldn't be back.

• 10:26Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's a wild way to get it off, to get started.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a wild times there to, to start off and I think it really ended up shaping who I am and, and to some degree, it probably helped me professionally, you know, this idea of equanimity, that calm in the storm and when, when there's constantly chaos and emotion all around you, I found that I would go inside, get everything inside of me ordered and restored and to be able to, you know, there's a great line in Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield where the platoon commander,

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Dyne Ikees, he talks about the, the role of the officer is self-composure. And it's to, it's to fire your troops when they, when they won't go forward and it's to rein them in when, when they've, when they've gone blind to rage. And so this, this idea of self-composure was really a survival mechanism for me early, but it translated later on into, to I think being helpful professionally. And, and just to me, men who cannot, uh,

• 11:48Speaker 02

  men who resort to physical intimidation or to raising their voice is, is weakness. Uh, it's cowardice. And, uh, and if you can't logically compel someone with, with, at a conversational tone of, of your point, then you probably don't have a very good argument. Or maybe you're just talking to the wrong person, you know, and so, uh, yeah, it definitely shaped me. But I, I think when we're talking about cowardice, I think we can juxtapose that with courage. And that's my mom's courage. One to have me when she was 19. I mean, I look back and I reflect on that decision often.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  That how scared she must have been, the uncertainty. And, and for her to go through with it and to bring me into this world at 19, I, I, I will always just be so grateful for her courage there. And, um, and then the same thing, just to.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  What every parent wants for their child is is an opportunity. And you're going to see that, you know, when we start to talk about Zach and what he did towards the end of this book and and she understood that the that the best way for us to have an opportunity was again required courage. She's 22 years old, two little kids and drives 800 miles back to Chicago with nothing and but it's a conviction and and so yeah, really, that was my first example of courage is is my mom.

• 13:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the as far as one thing I talk a lot about with leaders is you you're basically there's a mob, right? Your team is a mob, whether it's a platoon, whether it's a troop, whether it's a sales team, it's a mob. And just like any other mob, like they can get going in a certain direction. And your job as a leader is to make sure that the direction that the mob is going is correct. And the two classic examples kind of ones you you mentioned a little bit, but my team does great, right? We go out and do a great mission and everything goes smooth. That mob mentality can be, hey, look, we're unstoppable. We don't need to, we don't need to rehearse very much. We don't need to worry about planning because we're so good.

• 14:12Jocko Willink?

  You as a leader need to go, actually, hey, we did good, but here's some things we can improve. Here's what we got to watch out for. So you got to go pull the opposite direction of the mob. The other time is like, oh, you go out, the mission goes sideways, goes bad. And you can feel the mob start to get dragged down. And then it's your job to as leaders say, hey, yep, we made some mistakes. We paid for it, but here's what we're going to do to fix it next time. So that idea of and look, there's sometimes where the mob is going in the right direction. You can just, yeah, that's the easy, that's the fun part of being a leader, that the mob is going in the right direction. You get to just cheer them on and say, hell, yeah.

• 14:46Jocko Willink?

  So that's a very important thing to pay attention to. You can't do that if you're getting emotional. You just can't. You'll be in the mob. And in the mob is not the place for you to be in a leadership situation. Yeah, the yelling thing, I think it's one of the, one of the interesting stereotypes that.

• 15:02Jocko Willink?

  The military has the stereotype that you yell and scream to get things done. Part of it's because of boot camp movies, right? How many times have you watched the first forty-five minutes of Full Metal Dracket, right? I mean, it's just, that's, oh, that must be the way leadership is. And it's, and as you and I both know, there's plenty of leaders inside the military that, that, that do yell and they do scream. And that goes back to the book, The Psychology of Military Incompetence, and what attracts the military to people like that and attracts people like that to the military. But, you know, I always have a, an interesting, you know, with a guy that worked for me and wrote these books with me, Leif Babin. You know, he's, he's worked for me, you know, for eighteen months, workup deployment,

• 15:46Jocko Willink?

  and then we've been working together for another fifteen years or something like that. And he'll always ask a crowd of people, you know, how often you think Jaco yells at me? And, you know, you know, depending on how much the people know about me, yo, oh, he must yell all the time. And he's like, he's actually never yelled, I've never yelled at him one time. And Leif usually gives the caveat that he gave me plenty of times where I probably wanted to yell at him, but it's just bad leadership. And again, the same thing you just said. If I can't convince you of my idea, my idea's probably not that great. And your idea's, either that or my idea's not that much greater than yours. So my default is let's just go with yours, that's easier. It's, it's gonna, it's gonna make everything more efficient and effective.

• 16:31Jocko Willink?

  So, going back to the story here, so you're, this chapter, as soon as I, as soon as I got this chapter, the chapter's called A Hippie Cop's Son. So, you being the son, your mom being the hippie cop. Talk to us through the transition of your mom going from being a hippie, that's, that's jumping on the back of a chopper with a random dude with long hair and going to Georgia, and having kids, to coming back here and, you know, and plus you mentioned, you know, she was drinking at a young age, doing drugs, and all of a sudden, she does like a one-eighty, and she becomes a cop. What was that all about?

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think the hippie part ever fully transitioned. Uh, I think it was, she was duty bound and uh, she-

• 17:15Jocko Willink?

  And the duty was you and your sister.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Yes. And so she didn't grow up with her dream job being a Chicago cop. It was, uh, there was health insurance and she had two hungry babies and, uh, and that was who was hiring. And so I, I, I think, yeah, the, if, if you talk to my mom today, that, that hippie part of her is still alive and well, and, uh, was never quite, uh, subordinated by the, uh, her, her time as a cop, but, um-

• 17:43Jocko Willink?

  The hippie comes out quite a bit as you're going in the Marine Corps, you're going in infantry. It comes out. Sorry, mom.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  For sure. And so, yeah, my mom had two rules, you know, don't, don't join the military and, uh, don't get a motorcycle. Did both and then, uh, crashed a motorcycle and have had quite a interesting Marine Corps career, but, uh, yeah, I, I, it was, it was simply,

• 18:06Speaker 02

  a matter of necessity and duty for her children. So that, that's why she became a cop, not, not because she'd, you know, was watching Bad Boys, Bad Boys or whatever, you know, the nineties, uh, that was not a, it was, it was, yeah.

• 18:18Jocko Willink?

  And, and I imagine single mom being a cop, that's, I mean, how the hell does that even work?

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:25Jocko Willink?

  What kind of hours is she working?

• 18:26Speaker 02

  She's a small lady too, you know, she's tiny, uh, and she's a cop in Chicago in the nineties. Um, it was tough, tough gig. Uh, but at the end of the day, she, she had something that she was serving that was bigger than herself and, uh, and, and service always comes at a cost or, or it's not service, you know, and, and service always hurts. And then, and if it doesn't hurt to some extent, you know, then, then again, I would argue maybe it's not service. And so, I, I think, uh, she's working nights, uh, on the south side of Chicago in the nineties and, uh, kind of raised by a village there as a kid,

• 19:09Speaker 02

  getting passed off between my aunt and my grandma, you know, and, and, but a little collective effort there. But yeah, it was, it was, you know, all, my, my mom, my sister and I all slept in the same bed for like the first five, six years when we got back in a room at my aunt's house. I mean, it was, uh, it was tough.

• 19:27Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, as that's going on, your dad ends up going to jail when you're eight years old. How's that go down?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was still visiting him during the summers for a couple of years after we went back to Chicago. I'd still go down there for the summer and then just one summer I wasn't going and yeah, I think he was something with drug, drug related. And what's tough for me about that, when I think about my dad, I look at pictures of me when I'm a kid and I'm the age four, five, you know, six years old. And I think, you know, you've got

• 20:14Speaker 02

  a choice. And you got this little kid, this little boy. And how could you not choose him? And that's like what will sometimes to this day when I, when I just come across and this and now that I've got, my daughter just turned four, you know, and I, and I just think, I will always choose you. And there's that, a boy needs a dad, period. And, and my mom was super mom and she did, she taught me how to throw a football and she played catch

• 20:53Speaker 02

  with me. She was not my dad. And, and that, that was something that, you know, you don't want to go to the father, son banquet with your friend's dad. And fortunately, I had, you know, some, some guys who, some of my friends' dads who looked after me, but that took a long time to, to still, I'm still kind of probably working through some of that. But yeah, he got out of jail when I was about to graduate junior high and I went back for the first time to see him. But yeah, that absence was painful and yeah.

• 21:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you, you described it in here, going back to the book here.

• 21:41Jocko Willink?

  You say, "I followed my mom into a room after dinner, and sat there while she tried to decompress from her day. She was folding clothes as she tried to talk to me. I was non-responsive. She looked me straight in the eye. Thomas, tell me what's wrong. I was suddenly crying so hard I couldn't stand. I lay on the floor. I just want a dad, I said over and over through the gasps and sobs. Eventually, my best friend's dad started taking me to the father-son events. He wasn't my father, but at least I was with a man who cared about me. I want an autographed picture of Chicago Bears wide receiver Tom Waddle at one father-and-son banquet. Winning that eight-by-ten black-and-white headshot capped off the best night of my life. Then my best friend's dad

• 22:25Jocko Willink?

  hung himself in his garage. My father was imprisoned three states away. My supplemental father figure killed himself, and most of the men in my life were unaccountable. It made me mistrustful of men, and it also left me such that now, when I perceive a void or a gap, I feel a compulsion to fill it, to make it better. Put less positively, I'm unable to resist trying to bend a situation to my will. I've never been the smartest or most talented guy in any room I've been in, but I am relentless, for better or for worse."

• 23:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, as I was reading this, we'll get to some of these parts where you are determined, a little too determined, the kind of determination that'll get you in trouble. It's the kind of thing when you have kids and you're like, "Oh, Mike, this kid's pissing me off." And you realize, oh, that's because it's a strong-willed kid and you actually want those things. You actually want those things. You mentioned your dad got out of jail when you're 13 years old. And this sounds, and when you talk about in the book, this is sort of like, Kind of a little bit of like, sounds like you're living the dream a little bit. You're down there in Georgia for the summers. You got horses, you got four wheelers, you got jet skis. And you're working hard. So that was like a good experience. You're learning a lot.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Definitely a little best of both worlds. Getting to grow up, run wild in the alleys of Chicago. That's kind of where we hung out in the alleys, playing basketball, playing whatever, getting in trouble. And then, yeah, the summers, I get to be a little pretend cowboy and ride a horse, almost fall off it. You know, crash a four wheeler and go out in the lake. Uh, so yeah, it was a, it was a nice little blend to kind of get to experience both things. And undoubtedly, I, I did learn some things about hard work, uh, working for my dad. Um, I worked for him for four years until I was 16, like all summer. And, uh, my 16th birthday said, you know, you, you've throughout the, these last four years, you've, you've saved up enough to, to get a car.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Um, you, you got a 1985 Nissan Maxima wagon with 250,000 miles on it.

• 24:34Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Uh, so like definitely appreciate, learn, learn to appreciate hard work. And, uh, so there was some, there was some good lessons learned.

• 24:41Jocko Willink?

  And you did, uh, you went to an evangelical Christian camp down there.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, uh, South Side of Chicago is all Italian and Irish and very Catholic. And, uh, so I was kind of raised in and around the Catholic church. Um, my dad was Southern Baptist. I went to the Southern Baptist camp and, uh, very different.

• 25:03Jocko Willink?

  I was going to say that's, that's very different.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Uh, definitely, definitely different, but, uh, you know, I, I, the most important day of my life happened during that camp and that's, uh, when I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior. And undoubtedly, uh, that camp in that moment, um, I'm only here today because of.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  That encounter and to be, I've always had a father, you know, and so I've always, I've, men in the church, you know, may abandon you. I've always had a father and that father has, you know, when we talk about the title, always faithful, that's always faithful. And so in my darkest, hope, most hopeless moments, there was always a little light of hope and that's thanks to what started that day when I was 14 years old down on Jekyll Island at a Baptist church camp.

• 26:04Jocko Willink?

  I'm talking a little bit about just because the way you said that, but also because

• 26:09Jocko Willink?

  you may have been born again, but you, you're not a saint at this point, by any stretch, and we'll get into some of that stuff. You may not have been always walking the enlightened path along the way.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  That's a fair assessment.

• 26:25Jocko Willink?

  So you roll into high school and you're six two, 140 pounds, which I didn't, I was a hundred percent sure that was possible. Echo Charles assessment?

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's thin, but yeah, it's possible.

• 26:40Jocko Willink?

  So what's, what's, what's your deal in high school? What are you thinking about? What are you, what's going on in high school?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Riding the bench, playing football. You know, I was basically six, 240 pounds in seventh grade. So I was the big and then just never, no, no additional development there.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  But I, I knew I wanted to get out. I knew I was getting somewhere and I knew that the chaos and the dysfunction of my childhood that I was getting out. And initially I viewed that as you go to college is how you get out of this situation. No one in my family had been to college, but I knew that my friends who seemed to have more stability, like their parents went to college. And so that, that was really the, the goal. And then I, I thought, you know, I don't know what jobs, professional jobs are. I know there are doctors and lawyers.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  And so like, I know I'm not going to be a doctor, so that means I could be a lawyer. And, uh, and so I would, I would do the debate team.

• 27:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you, yeah, you went full nerd, right? Is that, is that a?

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Oh, a hundred percent.

• 27:56Jocko Willink?

  National Honor Society Drama Club, Speech and Debate Team, Treasurer of the Service Club, President of the Ecology Club.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:06Jocko Willink?

  You went full nerd.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  That's the hippie mom part. Uh, that's how I got President of the Ecology Club. Plus, my AP Bio teacher was the, and I wasn't doing too well on AP Bio, so, uh, I, uh, yeah.

• 28:18Jocko Willink?

  Is this a Catholic school?

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:20Jocko Willink?

  Boys only?

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:22Jocko Willink?

  All boys?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:24Jocko Willink?

  How was that?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Loved it. It was a blast. I mean, it's, there's no egos. There's nobody trying to impress anybody. It's just guys being dudes and having like, uh, it was a ton of fun. I absolutely loved it.

• 28:38Jocko Willink?

  Wearing a uniform every day?

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:41Jocko Willink?

  Where'd your mom get money for this school?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so she took out a loan, her first, second mortgage for the house, uh, for us to go to school. And that's why I always felt like I had to honor, you know, her sacrifice because, uh, she's working her ass off and making all these, you know, sacrifices that I, I felt, you know, in turn, a duty and obligation to her. And so I took my studies really seriously in high school and I was, was, was doing whatever I could to, to make sure that, um, her investment in, in me was, was, there would be a return on it. And so that's part of why I was in all these clubs.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Um, but yeah, I, I, I thought I'll, I'll go to college. I'll be a lawyer and then I'll be able to take care of everybody. And that's kind of what I was thinking in high school.

• 29:33Jocko Willink?

  Now, September 11th happens. What, what year are you in? Sophomore?

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Sophomore.

• 29:38Jocko Willink?

  Did that start to? Make you think about joining the military?

• 29:44Speaker 02

  It's why I'm in the military. It, it, it made me think, uh, you know, at that point, it was still the age of innocence or ignorance. You didn't know that, at least I didn't know that there were bad people in the world who wanted to do the US harm. And so it was initially very confusing, but by the end of that day, I knew at some point I'll do something about that. And so I knew I'd serve. I didn't know I joined the Marine Corps. I didn't even probably know there was a branch called the Marine Corps and I wasn't GI Joe. I wasn't, you know, didn't have a dad in the house, wasn't doing like man stuff.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Uh, I just knew like, hey, somebody's got to do something about that. You should do that. And, and that has put me on a trajectory of where I am sitting here today.

• 30:32Jocko Willink?

  So you apply to college, you get into, uh, Loyola University, Chicago. Is that a good school? I don't even know.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  I'm sorry. It's all right. Yeah. It's pretty good.

• 30:44Jocko Willink?

  Pretty good school?

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty good school.

• 30:45Jocko Willink?

  Hard to get into?

• 30:47Speaker 02

  I, I don't, I mean, I think maybe.

• 30:51Jocko Willink?

  They're gonna, your alma mater is gonna come at you. You'd be like, hell yeah, it's hard to get into.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Hell, it's super hard to get into. It's elite.

• 30:59Jocko Willink?

  So you get in there, you're, you're kind of stoked, but you don't have any money to pay for college. And, and this is where you first kind of discover NROTC.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, it's the Ivy League of the Midwest.

• 31:12Jocko Willink?

  There we go.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Okay. Uh, yeah, I, you know, no one is, is, no one, I'm not able to talk to kind of anybody about going to college. I don't know anything about going to college. And so well after all the scholarship applications are already passed and well after I'm like, oh, like, okay, so I'm into college. Like, how am I going to pay for it? And, uh, and so I, I goo, well, there wasn't Google on AOL, uh, you know, looking up college scholarships and I find that, uh, that, that there's this thing called ROTC and that they pay for your tuition. And I said, well, I want to serve anyways. This could be a, a thing. And, and when I call them, they're like, yeah, the scholarship window closed like six months ago.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  But you could do it for free and uh and maybe if you're if in a couple of years you can you can pick up the scholarship and I thought well I got no other nothing else going for me so I'll I'll try this and uh so that's how I ended up in ROTC.

• 32:12Jocko Willink?

  It sounds like you were a little unimpressed in the book with the Navy when you like what you had in your mind for what military service would be like and then you showed up in the Navy didn't really impress you too much at the ROTC branch at Loyola Chicago?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Sure, I I the only thing I I still kind of thought I'd be a lawyer and uh and my grandma had a big uh crush on Tom Cruise so I'd seen a few good men.

• 32:37Jocko Willink?

  Dude.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  And so I think well.

• 32:39Jocko Willink?

  That'll that'll make it happen right there, huh?

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and and so my mom is really against it, but she thinks, oh, well, you you're gonna be Tom Cruise in this movie. It's not a big it's maybe not terrible. And then I I go to my little ROTC orientation week and we go up to Great Lakes Naval Base and uh get marched around and yelled at and it's just it's just clear like the the Marine staff, the Navy staff, and then the the midshipmen who are first class, who are going to commission in the Marine Corps and who are gonna I just said, I don't know, but it looks like these guys have these guys have something that this other group doesn't.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And uh so I think I want to go and so that was my still not knowing anything about the Marine Corps, not knowing what infantry was, not knowing expeditionary, none of this kind of stuff. I just know that like it seems like they got their shit together and I want to be like those guys.

• 33:27Jocko Willink?

  He picked Colonel Jessup.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Hell yeah.

• 33:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, I had a conversation with a good friend of mine who's a who's a regular Navy guy and he he said something, you know, we were just he's deeply involved with the the SEAL community now. But we we just had a quick conversation about, you know, like the Navy versus the SEAL teams because when people go to BUDs, if they don't make it through BUDs, they're in the Navy. And the job for someone that wants to go to BUDs. That doesn't make it and ends up in the Navy is not the job that they're looking for. If you go into the Army and you want to be a special forces soldier and you don't make it, cool. You can be a rifleman in the 82nd Airborne or 101st Airborne.

• 34:12Jocko Willink?

  Or that's still an outstanding job and you're doing something proximal to what you want to do. The Navy is not like that. And he said, well, you know, that makes, makes it sound like my job was horrible. And I said, no, not at all. It's just that there's certain people that are attracted to certain jobs. And I told him this story that I've told a hundred times about. I'm on an LPD, you know, amphibious ship out here off the coast of San Diego. We're 30 miles off of Pendleton. We're about to go do a hydrographic or chronosence. The freaking waves are huge. It's raining and miserable. And I'm standing, I'm standing there getting these, you know, getting ready to launch our Zodiacs off the back of this LPD.

• 34:52Jocko Willink?

  And this bosun's mate, first class, and it's, you know, it's whatever, 10 o'clock at night, storms. And he looks at me and he looks out there and he looks back at me and he goes, man, I'm glad I don't have your job. And I looked back at him and I said, well, I'm glad I don't have yours. So there you go. Like everyone's got their own little thing. So that's why when you look at people that are in Navy ROTC, they're a different type of person than the type of person. There's people that look at Marines and go, oh, hell no, I'm not doing that. Because they look at the Navy people like, oh, they look like they're going to be doing some finance and some working on engine, engineers. And like this kind of thing. It's just, it's just a propensity of job that people want. And you looked at the Navy guys and said, they look like they're going to be engineers.

• 35:36Jocko Willink?

  And these guys over here look like they're going to carry machine guns. And you're a machine gun carrying type of dude.

• 35:43Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, but you still have, you see, you still don't have a scholarship yet. So you're, at this point, you're working at Costco, you're time, you're changing tires. Which is a rewarding job.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, someone brings you something, it's damaged, broken, and then you give it back to them and it works again.

• 35:59Jocko Willink?

  And I thought this was cool. You, you had a guy. So now it's your junior year and your gunny, gunny steel tells you that your grades, your grades aren't good enough for, for a scholarship. And he says, you know what you better do is you better go to this platoon leaders class. So explain the, explain the platoon leaders class.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  There are a couple of different ways to commission as an officer. You can go to, um, the academies are one commissioning source. You can do it through ROTC and then there's, you can do it through OCC, meaning you've already graduated college and you can just do a little 10 week thing, or you can kind of hit two summers during your college year through this platoon leaders class course, PLC. And so you do two six week hits. And, uh, so since I still didn't have a scholarship going into my junior year and I wanted to be a marine, I was advised that this was probably the route I would need to go. And so, um, I went to what's called PLC juniors and, uh, it was a very good learning experience. We talked about learning experiences before we started today.

• 37:01Jocko Willink?

  Yes, we did.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  And, uh,

• 37:03Jocko Willink?

  People still learning all the time.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Sure. And, uh, and it, and you know, I'm so jacked up, like, you know, more effed up than a football bat, as they'll say, you know, I, I probably needed, um, an extra go. And so I think ultimately there's, there's a lot of benefit in that six weeks, but, uh, and I think my gunny sergeant recognized that I probably could use a little extra training. And so I think he withheld some information there, uh, until graduation rehearsal. And, uh, he said, you know, it's human. You had the scholarship. I just, uh, didn't tell you. So congratulations.

• 37:43Jocko Willink?

  So instead of spending six weeks hanging out with your friends or whatever, you spent six weeks doing Marine Corps stuff.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Yep, down at Quantico.

• 37:50Jocko Willink?

  Where's that? Is that at Quantico?

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:51Jocko Willink?

  How was that course?

• 37:54Speaker 02

  When I went in 2006, it was, uh, it was tough. Uh, I don't want to tell, you know, too many OCS war stories because I'll get heckled. Uh, but, uh, I, I, I thought it was, it was this guy Colonel Chase used to stand at the top of the hill and just say like, "Quick candidate, you shouldn't be here. You're worthless." Like, and then when I went back in 07, it was a new CO and, and I think we, the surge was happening, so we needed to make sure people got through. And so I, I'll tell you, you know, one thing that I'll never, you know, I'll always remember from that 06 is I had this mean as hell Sergeant Instructor, Skefo. He was a mean, mean man. And, uh, every night we would hold the M16 by the front side tip between our thumb and our index finger,

• 38:39Speaker 02

  uh, fully extended, straightforward. And he would say, "Discipline is?" And we'd scream, "Instant willingness and obedience to orders." And say, "Discipline is instant willingness and obedience to orders." And so we'd just do that over and over again. And I've, I've always, uh, thought, you know, that's, that's shaped how I think about discipline. And,

• 39:03Speaker 02

  you know, close order drill is the most basic form of discipline. It's, it's, it's the most rudimentary, basic form of discipline that we have, that we build off, off in the military. And then there's, then you do battle drills, which are another form of discipline. You do immediate action drills, another kind of, it's all, all this ties into just instant willingness and obedience to orders. A drill is so that you, you don't have to think about it, you know? And so thumb clip, twist, pull, pin, frag out, right? And so that's a ba- a battle drill or contact left. And it, and it's all predicated on a drill, something that you do over and over again until it, it becomes less thinking.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  And, and when you, why do you do this? It, it reduces the need of physical courage. When something is drilled into you, it's, you're not relying so much on your physical courage in that moment.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  And, and what I, what I've been thinking about as I continue my career in, in the Marine Corps is, is when you become more senior,

• 40:10Speaker 02

  You actually need a lot more discipline than when you're a PFC or last corporal or junior officer. When you are a PFC or junior in the organization, so much of your life is dictated to you. So there's not a lot of opportunity to do things that are undisciplined. And as you become senior, you have more opportunity to discern what you, what route you want to go. And the thing is that as you get more latitude or more freedom, you have the potential

• 40:51Speaker 02

  to be less disciplined. And I think when you think of the hard thing is usually the right thing. And the right thing is usually the hard thing. And as you advance in this organization, it requires you to have discipline to continue to do the hard and right thing. And it's not that you would do the wrong thing, you would just do the less right thing. And so I can just cut this little corner and be like, well, you know, like, I've been here for 15 years. Like, do I really need to do like, I'll generally kind of get it in the box, but I don't have to like, do all these little. And so I find that, that discipline in your

• 41:36Speaker 02

  habits and your actions and in your thoughts, that helps you, because otherwise you're relying on moral courage. And so if physical courage, if you rely less on physical courage through battle drills and immediate action drills and close order drill, you rely less on moral courage when you have disciplined thoughts, habits and actions in your life. And so that, that way, it's not, I don't have to say, I don't need to put myself in a position where my moral courage has to carry the day for me to do, get up in the morning to, like, my boss, like, we had to be at work at 6:30 PTN. No one's checking if I'm there at 6:30. Like I'm the op, so I could probably come in at 6:40,

• 42:18Speaker 02

  6:45, you know, and but by having the discipline of getting up when my alarm goes off at 5 a.m. every day, I reduce the need to have the moral courage to kind of make that decision. And same thing with, you know, if you don't put ice cream in your freezer, it's not a matter of discipline at that point. It's I had the discipline not to buy it at the store because otherwise if it's in the freezer, every time I walk by the fridge, it's a matter of moral courage. Do I have the moral courage?

• 42:45Jocko Willink?

  You're talking in Echo's world right now, man.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  To do this thing or not?

• 42:48Jocko Willink?

  Echo also equates moral courage with avoiding the ice cream. You know what I'm saying? It's always surprising, or not always, but a lot of times people are surprised that in basic SEAL training, you have weekends off. You can go do whatever you want. You can, you can do whatever you want. You can go get drunk. You can go party. You can, you can get crazy. And that's part of the test because once you're in the SEAL teams, there's, there's literally no one cares if you're showing up to PT. Now, if you go out on a rock hump and you can't hang, you're going to get destroyed. But they want people that find that, that, that will discipline themselves, that have the self-discipline. Cause and that's, there's been plenty of people that didn't make it through SEAL training because they were, because they didn't want to have discipline on the weekends just to do what they should be doing.

• 43:33Jocko Willink?

  Instead, they went and did what they wanted to do. So that, that's interesting. The other thing is, man, as you get older and you get more senior and you can start cutting some corners, every single person below you in the chain of command can see it. And this is where I got very lucky because I was, I was prior enlisted. So I was the youngest and most junior guy in my first two platoons, which thank God, what a, what a freaking incredible opportunity. But I would watch my platoon chief. I would watch my platoon commander. And if they were three minutes late, I was tracking it. If they forgot a piece of gear, I was tracking it. If they needed a little extra something to get, need a little help

• 44:15Jocko Willink?

  getting up the ladder, I was tracking it. So when I moved into a leadership position, I always felt those eyes, man. I felt those eyes all the time and I didn't want to let those guys down. So, so that's something that always weighed on me. And then the last thing, you know, when we, when we start talking about. You know, immediate action drills and battle drills. What's really awesome is, because sometimes people think, oh, well, so what you have is a bunch of robots. You know, you've trained a bunch of robots to just do whatever you say. No, actually, you get these battle drills down. You get people, it's like, uh, do you play any musical instruments? Negative. Uh, so guitar, which I play, I'm not good at it. But Jimmy Page, who played for the band Led Zeppelin? Echo Charles, we good? Sir.

• 45:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay. He was a studio musician for years, which meant he went into a studio. He was very well known as a studio, meaning they would tell him exactly what to play. And he would play the notes that they wanted him to play. And he did that for, for, for, forever. Just highly disciplined, mechanical playing of the instrument. And that's how he made a living for a long time. And because he had all that discipline, because he knew every fret and every note and how to bend them and how to, how to manipulate them, he knew them so well that when he got into Led Zeppelin, now all of a sudden he could take those things and break rules. So what you end up with, like in a SEAL platoon, especially like a new guy in a SEAL platoon, they're, they're a robot for a little while.

• 45:43Jocko Willink?

  You want to make sure that their weapons always point in a safe direction. They know exactly where the other people are during a, during an immediate action drill, that they're doing the safe thing. So you, you drill them, so it becomes mechanical. And then once they start getting it, now all of a sudden they can start saying, wait, I know I'm supposed to be over here, but I can provide better cover for my other squad. If I scurry up this little, this little mound of dirt a little bit. And it's still in a safe zone because I'm not getting in front of anyone, not cutting off anyone's field of fire. So boom. And so you even have the, the frontline shooters, the new guys after a little while, they're starting to think. But they know the rules. They know the rules so well that they can really think they can go

• 46:27Jocko Willink?

  right to the edge of that box. They can go, they can go right up to the edge of that berm that they know if they go any further, they're going to cut off someone else's field of fire. They know that. So you get them so well trained and so well disciplined that they end up with a bunch of freedom. And then that goes all the way up the chain. Now the guys that have got two platoons under the belt, they can start making little adjustments with their whole fire team. And then eventually you get a platoon commander that goes, oh, here's the rule right now. And here's what I should do, but I actually see something that I can do that doesn't break the rules, but it bends them and it's going to give us a better opportunity to get a bigger bite on this battlefield right now. So those immediate action drills and like close order drill, boom, like we are doing without thinking. And you gotta have that. But then when you get

• 47:11Jocko Willink?

  to the actual immediate action drills, people start to understand the concepts of what we're doing. And then they understand the parameters. You know, there's certain, certain notes on a guitar. If you play this note, then you play this other note, it's not, it doesn't work. Literally doesn't work. The whole world will go, that sounds like shit. Like everyone will think that. So when a guy's good at IAS or good at moving through a mountain environment, when they're good at it, they understand, oh, I can do this right here. I can actually play this note. I can play this note over here. I can bend that note. Here's something I can't play that note over there. It's not going to work. And that's what we want. We want people, we want thinking shooters. We want people that are understand that are so disciplined that they can actually

• 47:52Jocko Willink?

  have more freedom out there. And that's what always is the goal, you know? And in the beginning, that means we need to be highly disciplined and never, you know, when you're going through basic SEAL training, if you make a tiny mistake, it's like you're getting swarmed by instructors. They do not want you to make the, like you will not sweep someone. You will not, you give, give a SEAL that's, you know, in his first platoon, give him a squirt gun. And you give him that squirt gun and he's gonna like immediately have the best muzzle discipline that you've ever seen. Like he won't point it at his kid to squirt him. He like it's like a physical like, yeah, I can't point this squirt gun at my son because it

• 48:35Jocko Willink?

  just doesn't feel right. That's how like ingrained it is. And that's what you want. That discipline is embedded in their brains. And then over time, they go, okay, now I have such a good foundation to work with. My mind can be free. That's the goal. So you got some of that stuff drilled into you. I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump into the book here for a second. In my senior year with a scholarship, I was over the hump money wise, but there was a new problem. My metabolism slowed down and my regular diet of pizza and beer suddenly started yielding different results on my permanent perennial skinny frame. I wasn't

• 49:16Jocko Willink?

  prepared for the metabolic cost of that in the appearance is reality Marine Corps where fitness is a virtue superseding most flaws. In the Corps, fatness is an unpardonable sin. Gunny Steele again took me on and as a personal mission. He was a picture perfect Marine, thin, haircut, high and tight, multiple meritorious promotions because he was genuinely squared away Marine. I still kept my eyes peeled for him whenever I was at Northwestern, trying to avoid him and heavy objects. But one day he called me on my cell phone. There was no avoiding him. He ordered me to come to his office. That was never good. This was no different. Schuman, Schuman, you might let yourself become a fat piece of shit, but

• 50:01Jocko Willink?

  I ain't. We ain't commissioning a pig to lead Marines. Normally I would have at least offered II Gunny, but I was stunned into silence. He continued, you're gonna come here, come in here every morning for PT. After that, you're gonna have a uniform inspection every day. Every day of your life is gonna be the worst day of your life until you conform to standards. Boom.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  There you go. Yeah, I was lacking some discipline for sure. And it caught up to me. And, and we talked about again before we started about how good friends tell you what you need to hear. And nobody told me I was getting fat. So I don't want to like not take accountability for my own fatness. Uh, but like, I didn't think it was possible. You know, I'd always been a rail scale like it. When I would go up in waist size, I was like, this is time for new pants. Like it was, nothing was clicking that. I was getting fat and

• 50:53Jocko Willink?

  You're like the slow boat, the boiling frog, right? That doesn't notice at the waters.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 50:58Jocko Willink?

  Looks like a size forty two.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  And he, he got me squared away.

• 51:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I had one of my friends, um, he, he's in the SEAL teams and he had a guy that was, that was not to standards. And he brought him into his office and says, hey, bro, there's no fat SEALs. And you're fat editing, you're gonna start taking the PRT until you're good to go. So I, I, sometimes that direct approach.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  What's the PRT?

• 51:25Jocko Willink?

  Physical readiness test, which again, in the SEAL teams, there's not, there's not, but there's not a bunch of people tracking you. And there was years that go by where the guy, a guy can, if, you know, oh, I had a trip, wasn't there for the PRT. Cause like a command, like the SEAL team would do one PRT a year. And you'd see it, you know, months in advance. Like, oh, the PRT is on October fifteenth or whatever. So if a guy's like, cool, I'm taking leave or I'm gonna go on a trip, October fifteenth, he's not there. You do that three years in a row, your, your pant size could be a forty six.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Well, what, what is it though? Like a performance or?

• 52:01Jocko Willink?

  Physical, it's like a three mile run, pushups, pullups, swim, something like that.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  So technically you could get, gain a bunch of weight, still pass that thing and be good to go or what?

• 52:12Jocko Willink?

  You could, but you probably wouldn't be able to pass it. If, and you know, it's weird too. Like this goes back and forth. The Navy has a PRT, the regular Navy. And the SEALs for a while used the Navy PRT, but that one you could probably could be out of shape. Like from a SEAL perspective and still be able to pass. So then the SEALs made their own PRT. That just to make sure you don't have anybody that's a, that's not, you know. Cause there's no fat seals like just to enforce that rule without having to tell anybody like here's the PRT if you don't pass it you gotta get on the run program homie.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's not like the kind there you're measuring body fat or nothing like this and be like, hey, you're over, you know, 14% or whatever.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  We do have that as well. So if you're out of there, there are height and weight standards. And every year you're supposed to get height and weight and if and if you don't make weight, you get taped. And if you're not within tape, then you get put on the BCP program, what we call, and basically you're on the fat body program and you gotta do weekly check ins and.

• 53:14Jocko Willink?

  What's tape? Tape is they they measure your to get your body fat percentage. So they'll measure like your waist, your chest, your arms, that kind of. Echo is wondering if there's a way to get involved in that.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Could I do a pose down or?

• 53:28Jocko Willink?

  No, I mean, I like the the body weight. I got taped my whole career. Because if you're like, if you're bigger and stronger, you're gonna get taped. Cause you know, like for me, the max body weight or for something for a guy that's 511 was like, you know, 178. Or something, maybe like 182 or something like that. And I would I weighed 225. And so they tape you and they go, yeah, you're just you're just a big, stronger.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Oh, so it's probably like a ratio then. It's not like, hey, your waist is over this, therefore you're out kind of.

• 54:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Cause you know, you get these bigger guys who can, you know, they can do the PRT.

• 54:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  And but they're yeah, 225, 235. But they can perform at that, you know, like you can't measure it like that, you know, or it's like, oh, but you're overweight. Doesn't make sense.

• 54:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, they they have a ratio and then I never like had any issue with the tape at all. I mean, it was like, good to go.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  What about the PRT? Ever had issues?

• 54:26Jocko Willink?

  No, PRT, good to go. Good to go. No, you gotta be, if you work out regularly, you're gonna you're gonna pass the PRT.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  So it's.

• 54:34Jocko Willink?

  You gotta be a slacker dude. And like, they're not that kind of, this is a rare dude in the SEAL teams that just gives up on work. I mean, you're not wearing a shirt like 87% of the time. Like, if you're not in the field, you're not wearing a shirt. So if you're, you know, you're walking around every day and you're just putting on the LBs, there's not too many. Occasionally it happens. Occasionally it happens, but most of the time, and not to mention like the actual physical part of the job. If you're not in good shape, you're gonna get fired. Like if you can't go out and walk around the desert with, you know, a hundred pounds and do it and hang,

• 55:14Jocko Willink?

  you're, you're gonna get fired. You won't be in a platoon. So, no one, and I guess if you don't want to be in a SEAL platoon, which is a weird thing to even be.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Right, at that point, for sure.

• 55:26Jocko Willink?

  So, you got on the run program.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:29Jocko Willink?

  Gunny Steel straightened your ass out for a second time.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Sure did.

• 55:33Jocko Willink?

  We appreciate, we appreciate him.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Love him.

• 55:35Jocko Willink?

  This is the, this is the, uh, the non-commissioned officers that, that make the, that make the Marine Corps what it is, make the Navy what it is, make the military what it is.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 55:45Jocko Willink?

  By keeping the young JOs in line, and often the senioros as well.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:52Jocko Willink?

  You, so you end up graduating, which is awesome, and you had to get Lasik eye surgery. So you get commissioned, they cover that, but that, that makes it a little time for you to go to the basic school. Now, at the basic school, are you still thinking you still might be Tom Cruise at this point? It seems like in the book, you were still thinking it could be Tom Cruise.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  No, uh, you, you've gotta go into that with a law contract.

• 56:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Pilots and lawyers aren't competing at the basic school. They've already got their, their contracts ahead of time.

• 56:23Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  I didn't know what I wanted to be when I was heading into the basic school. I, it's in there, I don't know, I, I discovered pretty quickly what I wanted to be.

• 56:34Jocko Willink?

  Field exercise one, right? That's what changed your mind?

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:37Jocko Willink?

  Tell us about field exercise one.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  So, you know, even though I got to do little summers with my dad and pretend to be a cowboy, I still didn't know anything about being outside. I didn't know how to camp. I didn't know how to, and, uh, we, we got, we, our class picked up in, uh, October, so our first field exercise is in, sometime in, in mid, mid-November. And it got down to five degrees, and, uh, everybody's canteens were frozen, no one knew, like, put the canteen upside down or put it in your sleeping bag with you. Like, you'd try to bite in the MREs, like breaking your teeth off, like, uh, all, all our, like, cold weather gear is super old, sucks, and like, don't know how to layer, don't know anything about how to live outside in the cold, at least the majority of us. And, and so, uh,

• 57:24Speaker 02

  You know, up into that point, everybody kind of talks about, oh, we're gonna be infantry. I'm gonna be infantry, you're gonna be infantry. And at that point, I know what I wanted to do. Like, tanks sound cool, or this sounds cool, like artillery sounds cool. But at the end of FEX1, Field Exercise 1, no, no one wanted to be infantry anymore. And I was just like, well, shit, if you all don't want to do that, that makes me want to do that. And so it's kind of like, just a response to my environment. When people don't want to challenge, or when people don't, I want the opposite. And so I was like, well, now I do want to be infantry. And that's, that was my, I still had no idea what that actually meant.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Beyond that, it was a response to what other people didn't want. It wasn't until I got out in the woods that I knew, at infantry course, I said, yes, yes, this is the right place. But that was still to come.

• 58:20Jocko Willink?

  And how was the basic school for you?

• 58:24Speaker 02

  You know, they call it the big suck. I mean, it was, it was, it was challenging. It was not like extremely challenging. It was, it was more a grind than anything. It's just six months is a long time. And, and so I think I've gone back to Quantico a couple of times when I've taken the midshipmen down there. And I've got to talk to some of the instructors and see their POI down there now. I think it's, I think it's really good.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  It was just long. It was long. That's what it was.

• 58:56Jocko Willink?

  Now, when you're going through that, are you getting, is it like Ranger School? You like get put in leadership position in a patrol, you take it out, you get graded. Then the next one, you're a machine gunner, the next one, you're a point man.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 59:07Jocko Willink?

  So you're getting good experience in the field?

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, there's several field exercises. Everybody's getting rotated through leadership billets. And, you know, the goal is to make every Marine officer able to lead a basic rifle platoon. That's, that's the intent of putting, we're the only service that, that puts, you know, our pilots and our lawyers and our adjutants all through this, this course where they're, we're going out and training as riflemen.

• 59:34Jocko Willink?

  Every Marine's a rifleman.

• 59:37Jocko Willink?

  Was it hard to get selected for infantry?

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so by the time slashing came down, I don't know, what's like 300 in a one class Alpha Company? And I think there's maybe 30, 40 infantry slots out of that. And I mean, I remember you were, I was first platoon and we were, when the SBC, the platoon commander was reading out who got what MOS. There was a dude who was solid. His dad was sergeant major and he didn't get it. And I thought, oh, well, he's like way more square away than me. Maybe, maybe I'm not going to get it. So, yeah, I think it was competitive for sure.

• 1:00:19Jocko Willink?

  Is that because like the talent spread thing?

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's top third, middle third, bottom third, so that you have a quality spread across.

• 1:00:27Jocko Willink?

  That, that, that right there, that concept is what shows you that the Marine Corps puts the Marine Corps first. It really is. So what it is, Echo Charles is, when you go to the basic school, you'd think number one guy would get the number one pick. What does he want to do? Number two guy get the number two pick. But then everyone would pick the, the jobs, like the good jobs, the cool jobs, and the people at the bottom would get, you know, whatever is considered a crappy job. So instead, what they do is they cut the class up into thirds. The first guy in the first group gets the first pick. The first guy in the second group.

• 1:01:08Jocko Willink?

  So out of 100, this guy might be the 100th or the 101st guy. Is that right?

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Jocko Willink?

  No, the 201st guy gets the second pick. The 301st guy gets the third pick. So you end up with this quality getting spread through all the different jobs in the Marine Corps. So it's not like there's some category of, of Marines, of Marine officers that are all just like, oh, they're just like the, the lowest ranking guys are just terrible. No, it's you get uneven spread across the board. And that is a thing that tells you that the Marine Corps puts the Marine Corps, the whole Marine Corps first. That is one of the clearest indicators in history that we want everyone in the Marine Corps to have an opportunity and the Marine Corps comes first.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Wait, so what do they base that on? Like the?

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, throughout the six months, it's academic. There's a leadership score. There's a PT score, your rifle score. So there's several kinds of scores that are calculated into your overall class ranking, largely academic, but that definitely like leadership evaluations all kind of. I always say like, I only think that I got it because we were in the defense. And the ground was frozen and my SBC and I was a machine gunner and I just had a pickaxe and I was right next to a tree with big roots and he walked by and is hitting this ground and literally not just the shovel's bouncing off. He's like, what are you trying to do there Schuman? I'm getting a chest deep fighting hole, sir. Not on that ground, you're not. Chuckled and walked away.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Several hours later, comes by, how's that going Schuman? I'm like two inches deep. He's like, I'm away, sir. And then by day three, he goes by and he's like, this guy's maybe just stubborn enough to be a grunt. Cause I'm sitting in a chest deep fighting hole. And I always think like, maybe that's, I think that's my, how I got selected.

• 1:03:02Jocko Willink?

  Dude, I got this story from Hackworth that I read the other day. And I gotta like do more with it, but he's in Korea. And he's freezing. And he wants to go home. And he figures out a plan in like when the sun goes down, he starts to freeze. He's like, I'm out of here. How can I get out of here? So what he plans to do is he's going to dig a hole, big enough to put his leg in. And then he's going to toss a grenade into this hole and blow his leg up, get some shrapnel and go home. So the sun goes down and he's alone in this fighting hole. He starts digging, man. It's the same thing. He digs and he starts digging and he's digging

• 1:03:45Jocko Willink?

  and he's digging. He's digging through the night. And right as he's finishing up this hole and he's getting to a point where he can finally throw this grenade in there and go home. The sun starts to come up. And he's like, you know what? I got this. But it's a, it's a good thing to remember that when it really sucks, the sun's going to come up at some point and you'll start to get warm again, push through it. And it's a good lesson that it's not easy to dig in frozen ground. It's okay, my Mike just to dig a hole big enough for his leg to toss it. It's funny to hear a guy like Hackworth who was, you know, A very brave person, just based on his action, but he was done. He was done. It's like,

• 1:04:25Jocko Willink?

  Dick Winters, you know, Dick Winters, after everything he did in World War II, they brought all, they got recalled for Korea. He showed up to the boat there in San Francisco. And they're like, hey, if you're a combat vet from World War II, you don't have to go. And he's like, cool, I'm out. That was Dick Winters. I mean, who's going to question Dick Winters courage? But he was like, yeah, I'm going back to my farm in Pennsylvania. Um, have good luck, gentlemen. And that was that. Um, all right, got to go to the book here. We gotta get, gotta get mom back in the picture here. Um, every time I visited my real home, it was a fight over the Marine Corps. When I was selected for the infantry, my mom lost it. I remember her yelling, the hell you are? That's not fucking happening. You'll be used as cannon fodder. She mentioned something about shooting me in the kneecaps.

• 1:05:10Jocko Willink?

  She swore this was just some macho shit because she was a cop. She said it wasn't just me. I was dragging down this road. I was forcing her to travel it too. But a young man has to live his own life and I realized that mine was the Marine infantry. So mom was not stoked on this whole scene.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  Oh, it was every time I came home and it was for the first maybe 10 years. Uh, and it was, it's like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George Bush oil. I'm like, mom, where's the detergent? Like I came home to do my laundry and you're yelling at me about Donald Trump. Like, I don't know anything about all these kind of things. I want to be a Marine infantry. I want to fight. And right now I just gotta do my laundry. So, uh, it was, it was

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  always, she's always on a 10, always yelling about it. And then, you know, I end up going to a pretty dangerous place. And then it's like, okay, you're going to get out. And I'm like, uh, I think I'm going to stay in. And then like, you know, my tour comes up again, like, okay, come back, be a fireman, dude. Uh, I think I'm going to stay in.

• 1:06:18Jocko Willink?

  Awesome stuff. Way to listen to your mom.

• 1:06:23Jocko Willink?

  From, from basic school, you get infantry officer school. How long is that course?

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Three months.

• 1:06:29Jocko Willink?

  And you and I were talking earlier about when I had James Webb on the podcast.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Jocko Willink?

  And he like gets done with the basic school, gets done with the infantry officer course, goes to Vietnam. They like bring him out in the field, point up at a ridge line. They go, your platoon's up there. Who am I relieving? Oh, it's just a sergeant. You're, you're the other platoon commander was wounded or killed or evacuated. You got it. And he, he rolls up there and the first night he's in combat, he's just calling for fire. I mean, just get it, just getting after it and really leading a complex scenario. And I, you know, I said, how did you feel like you were prepared for that? And he was like, yes. And I can only imagine that you going to, now, what is it? 2007, 2008?

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  I started that course 2009.

• 1:07:22Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So 2009, so we, we got two wars going on, got all these veterans teaching you. That must've been about as squared away as a course could be.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  And I would answer same as Secretary Webb. I would say yes, you know, that course is an incredible course. And more than anything, it prepares you technically and tactically to lead Marines on the very first day. It definitely helps you become mentally and physically tougher. There, there's a lot of mental and physical development that happens there. Moral development that, that happens there. And the instructors, as you alluded to, were all Iraq guys. And so the quality of the instructor is super selective there. And then just the, the actual curriculum there. I, I, you know, two, two of my buddies, our final exercise is in 29 Palms.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  And they didn't come back with us to graduate. They went to platoons that were in 29 Palms and deployed, you know, a week later. And so this, you know, this Webb part is, is still, is still happening. And, and you know, when I showed up to my platoon, I know that I have a lot to learn about leadership. I know that I need to listen to my squad leaders. I know all these things. I also know that I could lead this platoon today and, and that is a, a great testament to the infantry officer's course.

• 1:08:40Jocko Willink?

  Are, is there one on the east coast or one on the west coast? Are they all?

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  It's just in Quantico.

• 1:08:44Jocko Willink?

  Just in Quantico.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  You just fly out for the final exercise out to 200 palms.

• 1:08:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay, go out there and get some. This is also where in the book you start talking about.

• 1:08:57Jocko Willink?

  You start really forming your bond's brotherhood now. You got a bunch of, bunch of names, bunch of guys you list off, Ty Anthony, Alex Pearson, Vince Young, Cameron West. You got some prior enlisted guys. Johnny Epps, am I saying that right? And hey, to all the Marines who are butchering your names.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  No, those are all good.

• 1:09:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm sorry. Joe Patterson. Robert Kelly. So. This is Rob Kelly. This is the son of General John Kelly.

• 1:09:26Jocko Willink?

  John Kelly enlisted in 1970, eventually became a four star general. If you recognize his name, it's probably from when he, and you're not in the military, it's from when he, when he was the White House Chief of Staff. Rob was a prior enlisted guy, like his dad fought in Fallujah. These are the guys that you're now forming a bond with. And.

• 1:09:50Jocko Willink?

  This is kind of like where you. Really start to become a Marine.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah, it's, it's where I. Everything up to this point was hypothetical, like I, I think this is, you know, it all started when I was a sophomore, I said, oh, I should go do something about that. No idea what that was. And then like, oh, I Navy Marine, Marine guys, I like those guys. They've got something. And then like, oh, no one wants to be infantry. I want to be, and so all this stuff is just a theory. And then I get to IOC and it's like, no, like these are the people I want to be around. This violent, aggressive. Stuff that we do here, like it speaks to me in a very, and so. You know, again, grew up with a mom, even though she's a cop, she's still this hippie, like there's no like. Talks about being a warrior, there's no, I, and so it was.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  I, you know, in, in, in reflection, there's, there's something about a warrior calling that was inside my heart and inside my soul that it finally resonated, felt validated when I'm running through those woods like a wild animal, uh, just attacking and shooting machine guns and rockets all day with this group of savage men. And for the first time, I said like, yes, like you've made the right decision and this is, these are your people. This is your shit. And, uh, and it, you know, it taught me this many lessons, but one is that, you know, it, it's all, it's all hard. It's all shitty work. It's all tough work. But when you're doing it with the right group of men, like you just talked about, like, those are the good

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  times and, and, and you wouldn't rather be anywhere else. And so, um, yeah, I, I mean, that, that, that, that list of names that you just read off, all those guys went on to combat, all those guys went on to do incredible things. And then, you know, if we get back to November 9th, where we opened with my, with my squad leader, I mean, that, that's the day that Robert Kelly was killed and, and, uh, to have Rob Kelly as a, as a mentor and a friend. Um, you know, I didn't know his dad was a general until he was coming to speak to us. You know, that's the kind of guy Rob was that he, he never would, would mention that. Um, and just, uh, I, I, I hope we maybe, I don't know if we're going to come back to him, but when we find out about the deployment, you know, so I'll, I'll, I'll hold.

• 1:12:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, actually, um, as soon as I was reading that section, it, cause you, the way you had it broken out, broken on the book, you're like, oh, we had these guys that are all just done with either OCS or ROTC and we're all, you know, went to the basic school. And then it was prior enlisted guys. And you mentioned Johnny Epps and Joe Patterson and Robert. And I was like, I was like, Rob Kelly, son of a general is prior enlisted? I actually went and looked that up because it was amazing, right? That this guy whose dad is a general was like, oh, cool. What are you doing? I'm enlisted in Marine Corps. Like, hell yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Hell yeah.

• 1:12:37Jocko Willink?

  I was going to college. So I went to college. I had to go to college. Uh, uh, once I got commissioned, did a couple of deployments and then I had to go to college. And I was in college, September 11th had happened. Um, and I'm talking to, I went, I went to the University of San Diego and I had one of my professors, I was an English major, one of my professors was a nun. And I'm talking to her. And she says like, like, you know, are you going to be able to stay here longer? And I was like, what do you mean? She says, well, don't, don't you want to stay? Can't you maybe try and get your masters? I was like, what, I was, what are you talking about, sister? Quite literally, I said, what do you mean? And she just couldn't comprehend. And she goes, well, don't you want to stay here?

• 1:13:22Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, be, isn't this like, in her mind, this was the greatest thing ever. I'm this guy that was in the Navy and now I'm just going to have to go to school. And I was like, no, I want to go back. I'd go back tomorrow if they would let me. And she says, why do you want to go back? She's like, why do you, she's dumbfounded. Why do you, why, why do you want to go back? And I, in some awkward way, because it sounds bad to say it. I was like, well, I go back there and I get to be around a bunch of dudes like me that we listen to the same music. We like to do the same stuff. We're interested in the same thing. We laugh at the same jokes. We, we, that's where I want to go. I want to get back there. And, you know, for you showing up there with all these studs, it's like, yeah,

• 1:14:07Jocko Willink?

  this is, this is where I'm supposed to be. Well, did you have any challenges there? Was there anything that you, any major lessons learned? If you could go back and square yourself away?

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  I, I had the benefit of having a couple of months between when I graduated TBS and showing up to IOC. So, you know, Joe Patterson would, would PT us each day and I'd, I'd work out with Ty Anthony. And, and so, uh, Steve Trisna, so we, we, I showed up in pretty good shape, thankfully, because you, it's hard to maintain or improve your fitness at the basic school because it's just zero six to 1900 every day. And then you're studying on the weekends. And so thankfully I had a couple of months. And so I, I.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  The lesson I learned at IOC is is how to embrace the suck. And I would say the only thing that I would say is like, it would have been better if I learned it sooner. But I was, I was out, we were doing a patrolling exercise at Fort AP Hill. And I was just GP holding security and been days without food. July in Virginia at AP Hill and just ticks and, and I'm holding the security and just flies landing on my face. Ants crawling up my sleeves, spiders rappelling down, gnats in my ears and on my belly is grumbling.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  And I got chafe everywhere and I'm just trying to fight all this and kind of so sad and this,

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  and just trying to survive moment to moment. And as I continued to kind of fight nature, I'm on security for 30 minutes at this point and, and all the gnats are still there, all the ants are still coming. And I just finally said like, you can't, you're not going to defeat nature. You just gotta accept it. And in that moment, I stopped swatting the flies. I didn't care that the ants were crawling up my sleeve. And it allows you to thrive. And, and when, when you, when you, when you, when you, it's, it's good, you know? Embrace the suck is the Marine Corps version of good. It's, it's the Stoics version of amor fati, love your fate. It's, it's, it's this idea that whatever the circumstances are, I accept them.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  And I'm going to find opportunities within this current environment instead of circumstances, rather than just try to survive in it. And, and it, it's, it gives you power. It gives you agency, autonomy. You know, you no longer just become this, this, like this leaf that's in a, in a brook that's getting tossed around. Now I have a vote. It may be a lot, pretty restrained options based on the, the circumstances, but at least I can say, how can I best use these challenges? And, and I think of like, somebody like Stockdale, when, when he's, when he's in prison, they say, well, was I a victim?

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  No. You know, you think of Solzhenstein, when he's in the Gulag Archipelago and he says, thank you, prison. When you think of someone like Paul, who,

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  When he's in prison, he's rejoicing. I think of Sergeant Ian Tawney as he's dying. He, he turns, his last words are, is everybody okay?

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  And so it takes all these moments and it allows you to just, uh, to take ownership back. And, uh, and so, yeah, I think that is, I, I probably learned that two thirds of the way through. And I was probably feeling a little victim, uh, throughout most of that curriculum. And then finally I said, you know, good.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  And, and now, now I'm like crazy because you know, when I'm going up the mountains in Bridgeport, I just wish it was colder or I just wish there was some more snow. I'm so happy that's so hot out here in 20. I promise if it was hotter, it'd just be a little bit better. And, you know, uh, but you, you gotta say that kind of stuff and you gotta try to at least believe it. Otherwise you're just, uh, powerless.

• 1:18:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Otherwise everything really sucks. It sucks when it sucks, but if you can't accept it, it's going to suck a lot, a lot worse. Um, now this whole book, and by the way, obviously I'm only reading highlights. Get the book so that you can get the whole story. But it's not just your story. It's, uh, about half of it is written by your interpreter, Zach. And it's really interesting to hear his perspective. Because we as Americans, we have a really hard time, uh, picturing what, we just picture a stereotype of what we think an Iraqi is, what we think an Afghan is or whatever.

• 1:19:00Jocko Willink?

  We just have this stereotype in our head and that's kind of what we blanket over. And I, I know I always have to reiterate what an Iraqi person is. What Iraqi dad is, what an Iraqi mom is, what an Iraqi family is. Oh, they're a family. Actually, the way I usually describe it is to say they're like you are. So if you're sitting here listening to me, what's an Iraqi family like? Oh, it's a family. There's a dad. There's a mom. They want to look out for their kids. They're trying to grow their business. They're trying to get by. They're trying to fix their car. They got payments due, right? That, that's what they're doing. And it's really interesting to hear Zach's story and his perspective. He's one of nine children. He's from Kunar. He's a Pashtun.

• 1:19:42Jocko Willink?

  He talks about the Pashtun Wali, which is their, their culture, which some people have heard a little bit about. He goes into some details. Hospitality for visitors, right? Showing courage. That's just the way they roll. You have to show courage in daily life and you have to show courage and bravery defending their communities. You gotta show loyalty. You gotta show kindness. You gotta show respect.

• 1:20:08Jocko Willink?

  Then there's also, they have a code for revenge. They don't tolerate insults. They're expected to take revenge if something goes against them. Or at least negotiate some kind of compensation if something happens to their family or to their community. Zach's mother's father worked for President Najibullah, who, who, who they called Dr. Najib, who was the president of Afghanistan after the Soviet, Soviet Union was driven out. So in 1989, the Soviet Union leaves. And, and this, this guy, Dr. Najib, takes over as the president. And that's where Zach's mother's father worked.

• 1:20:52Jocko Willink?

  Zach's father was a soldier who, who worked for the government in Kunar. After he got out of the army, he worked as a clerk for the Red Cross, worked for the Red Crescent.

• 1:21:04Jocko Willink?

  The Dr. Najib's government collapsed in 1992. By 1996, the Taliban is expanding out of Kandahar province. They eventually capture and execute Dr. Najib. They take him and his brother and hang him from light poles in front of the presidential palace. That's what's transpiring during, you know, as Zach is growing up, this is what Zach's growing up in. And I'm going to go to the book here. And again, these are, this is a section that's from Zach's writing.

• 1:21:37Jocko Willink?

  And he says this, "I was only five years old when they came from Kandahar, with their long beards and black makeup surrounding their eyes to take control of Kunar, but I knew that my parents were scared. I remember life was very hard when they were in power. In Kunar, we Pashtuns were already very conservative, but the Taliban declared controls over everything in our lives. Each night, I heard father tell my mother about the new rules imposed by the Taliban. Every day, there were new prohibitions. They have declared television and music un-Islamic. Then, they closed the newspaper. Then, women may no longer work or go to school. Father began to grow his beard.

• 1:22:20Jocko Willink?

  Mother, my mother had to wear a burka covering her entire body outside of our home. Even her eyes were hidden behind a screen. She was prohibited from looking at strangers and could not go out of the house without my father or one of her sons. It was strange to me that I had to escort my mother. Except for the madrassa, there were no schools, no university. Electricity was scarce. Maintenance of roads and buildings stopped. There was really no access to any of the basic life needs a government is supposed to provide. Except guns. There were always plenty of guns. The Talibs carried AK-47s and rocket launchers everywhere they went. There was Sharia law, of course.

• 1:23:04Jocko Willink?

  That was a form of government the Taliban were interested in. They cut off hands, cut off the hands of thieves. Talibs from the Department for the Enforcement of Right Islamic Way and Prevention of Evils, the religious police enforced laws about modesty with sticks. They beat people in public who said they were not following the laws, especially women. Many people were killed by beheading or stoning as punishment for their violations. There was no real court, just the Taliban. Although they were from a very different part of Afghanistan and had very different accents, the Taliban and Pashtun, like the people in my village,

• 1:23:47Jocko Willink?

  so some of our neighbors were for the Taliban. My father was not, and he suffered for that. Power shifts suddenly in Afghanistan. Who you know and support matters more than who you are. It has always been that way. My father lost his job because he'd worked under Dr. Najib. He grew his beard even longer, so that he would not attract Taliban attention. Without his clerk job, he became a farmer. In our family, any child old enough to walk was a farmer. We grew enough vegetables to feed ourselves with the leftover to sell in the village market. We grew and sold flowers, too, red roses. Afghans love flowers and plant them everywhere. Maybe they represent hope, that something good can grow from dust.

• 1:24:32Jocko Willink?

  I was only 11 years old on September 11, 2001. I did not really understand what happened that day. We really had no concept of America or the West. We were told that the people there were infidels, and that they would try to make us stop practicing Islam or living in an Islamic way. I certainly did not understand their governments, or laws, or the things to come soon. After the Americans began their invasion, I still farmed and played cricket in the forest, but our village was growing more and more frightened every day. People were scared that the Americans would kill us with their planes, especially those who worked for the Taliban or Al Qaeda. My father had the radio up to his ear all the time.

• 1:25:19Jocko Willink?

  The day the American bombs started falling across Afghanistan, the President of the United States said, "The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine, and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan."

• 1:25:41Jocko Willink?

  The world had finally remembered we existed. The Americans came with more guns, and more trucks, and more planes. We hoped they would bring good things, too. Afghanistan had nothing. After two decades of war, there was no government. We had no schools, no police, no military. Literacy was 18.6% in 1979. In 2001, no one knew, because no one had asked.

• 1:26:08Jocko Willink?

  There was nothing to make us a nation, except our hopes.

• 1:26:18Jocko Willink?

  So I think it's really lucky that Zach kinda got to see, you know, he understood freedom, he understood education, and maybe that's not the best section to read, but he definitely understood freedom, he understood education. He saw the oppressiveness of the Taliban. If he wouldn't have seen that, he might have not had this place in his heart where he wanted to really help out America. And again, almost half the book is his words. So get the book, and we'll read some more, but get the book. You want to get the real details of what it was like on the ground for these people? That's a great place to get it.

• 1:27:06Jocko Willink?

  But September 11th happens, America enters Afghanistan. And for him, that's an opportunity, and he talks about that, that's an opportunity for freedom again. Like, he sees that. And eventually, he does end up getting a job as an interpreter, and we'll get there to that. But going back to you, you get done with IOC, and you get assigned 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 35 Marines. And anyone that listens to this podcast knows about 35 Marines from, well, from With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge. Eugene Sledge, 35 fought in World War I.

• 1:27:47Jocko Willink?

  They fought in Nicaragua, they fought in World War II in Guadalcanal, New Britain, Pellou, Okinawa, in Korea. They were at Inchon. They were at the breakout and withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir in Vietnam. They were in Huahe City. They were in the Khe Sanh Valley, the Death Valley. They were in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and of course, Iraq and Afghanistan. So you get orders, the 35 hallowed unit.

• 1:28:17Jocko Willink?

  You get there, and you get assigned, little quote from the book, 2nd Lieutenant Schuman, 1st Platoon, Kilo Company. That's what you get told.

• 1:28:30Jocko Willink?

  How's that make you feel?

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, excited. I, uh, I had been reading with the old breed in, in, with EB Sledge there and it's, that's Kilo 35 and, uh, just one thing that we as Marines do, we do a very good job of preserving our, our history, our heritage, our legacy. It's, it's drilled into you everywhere you go and then, um, so it's, it's a lie. It's a, it's a lie from the, the stories that your sergeant instructors tell you at boot camp and, and officer candidate school and, and then, and, but, uh, you know, you check in, you, you walk outside of the 35, uh, Kilo office and the CP for 35, there's a picture

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  of Kilo on Pelulue with a note from EB Sledge and like, uh, just the, this, the idea like that you have a responsibility and an opportunity to carry that legacy forward. I mean, it's, it's more, it's all you could ever dream of. It's all you could ever hope for.

• 1:29:33Jocko Willink?

  Second Lieutenant Schuman, First Platoon, Kilo Company.

• 1:29:39Jocko Willink?

  You've been, how long have you been in the Marine Corps for at this point?

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  A year, nine months.

• 1:29:44Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you're nine months to a year and this is everything you've been working for through college and you get this, um, but that being said, there's also like some, and it'll be weird for people to hear this. There's also some bad news and the bad news is that you're scheduled to go on a Westpac deployment, which means you're going to be on a ship going around the Pacific Ocean, not going into combat. That was the plan for your battalion.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. All I want to do is fight. I mean, you leave IOC and, and you, it's just basically this controlled aggression and this, this maximum violence and, uh, and, and you, and you're, all your instructors have just left Iraq and, and, you know, it's what you've been seeing for the last several years and, uh, you're ready to do that. You, you, you know, you've, Allen Iverson, you know, he says, we're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. You want to get, it's time for the game and you want to go get validated.

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  And, uh, and so when you find out, hey, you're going to go to Okinawa and float around a little bit, you think, well, shit, uh, that's not what I was trying to do here. Uh, so yeah, definitely, uh, initially disappointed. I got, I was, I guess that disappointment to an extent persisted, but once I started working and leading Marines, I mean, every day I'm living in San Clemente, driving down El Camino Rio, past Trestles Beach, into the north side of Camp Pendleton to go shoot machine guns with 35 Savages. Like it's a pretty good deal. And so like pretty quickly, like my little sadness was, was mostly taken care of. But I, yeah, still a little disappointed for sure.

• 1:31:29Jocko Willink?

  Any, any challenges when you were doing your workup, preparing for deployment?

• 1:31:32Speaker 02

  Undoubtedly, the, the, the start, these, so 35 last went to Iraq in 08. And so the senior Lance Corporals all had, um, done the Iraq deployment and, and some of the sergeants. And then, then the platoon that I picked up had just gotten back from Okinawa. They were the first time that 35 hadn't been in combat in 10 years. And so they are all feeling, that's why infantry Marines joined for one reason. They joined to fight. And so they're, you know, all their seniors have been to Iraq. They've all been to combat. They had to live with this that they didn't.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  Then they, of course, like always their, their leadership is saying, well, we could go, we're going to go, we're going to go. And then they, they don't go and they just, you know, and so, uh, morale was low, discipline very low. Uh, there was, I mean, it was, uh, it was very tough.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  Leadership is always.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  Challenging and so like I the midshipman kinda when I want to teach the naval academy would kinda like you know bitching complain about different aspects of of leadership or timing and and I can't think of a time as a second lieutenant in the over 245 years in Marine Corps where it would be oh this is this must have been the easy time to be a second lieutenant. It's it's always a tough time to be it's in in in Hue City and Cason I bet it was pretty hard to be a second lieutenant you know immediately following Vietnam in the 1970s probably pretty hard to be so there's no time where it's it's easy and it's it's just those challenges are different based on peacetime, garrison, wartime. But those Marines were disgruntled, low morale, and not disciplined. And that's what I was stepping

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  into initially as a platoon commander. Now, when we found out we got we were headed, you better shape up or you're getting put on the bench.

• 1:33:34Jocko Willink?

  But you did much of your workout thinking you were going on Westpac, right?

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  About six months.

• 1:33:39Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, this is when the guys were like, well, we gotta do this again. We're just gonna go sit on a boat. Not cool. But as you mentioned, things things changed. So you guys get together, it's around Christmas time, you get together, you gather for your Christmas leave, a safety brief where they're gonna tell you not to be idiots. Battalion commander has some word to put out and here's what he says. Here's what he say in the book. As we gathered for our safety brief, prior to releasing Marines for Christmas leave, Lieutenant Colonel Morris stood in a circle of more than 1,000 Marines, all impatient for the freedom of the leave period and prepared for the usual tired exhortations about tire pressure

• 1:34:22Jocko Willink?

  and not drinking and driving. Those came in as expected. But when Morris announced we would no longer be deploying to Japan, the air became suddenly charged, like the ozone smell before a lightning storm. A thousand Marines collectively leaned in to hear his next words. When he announced that Dark Horse, which is 35, when he announced that Dark Horse was instead deploying to the Sangin Pro- District of Helmand Province, Afghanistan, there was a roar so loud, I felt it as much as I heard it. I could not have wanted anything more for Christmas. I felt a surge of heat through my body, a charge of adrenaline and excitement,

• 1:35:02Jocko Willink?

  and deep down, a tiny cold pit of fear. I looked over at Rob Kelly, expecting to see the same excitement on his face, and I did not find it. I gave him a "come on, man" look. He looked back at me with half a smile and said, "I was ready for a Mew," meaning the Japan deployment. Mine was the fire of the unblooded. Rob knew Sangin meant we would bury Marines.

• 1:35:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. That's what's happening.

• 1:35:45Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to explain to civilians that the young men that sign up to go to war really want to go to war. And it's hard to, hard to convince young men that are really excited to go to war to be careful what you wish for.

• 1:36:09Jocko Willink?

  At this point, we haven't really talked about this yet, but you have longtime girlfriend at this point.

• 1:36:18Jocko Willink?

  Andrea, is that right? Andrea?

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  Andrea.

• 1:36:20Jocko Willink?

  Andrea. So you got Andrea. How long have you been together with her at this point?

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  Close to 10 years.

• 1:36:29Jocko Willink?

  And so you met in high school?

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:36:31Jocko Willink?

  And, so this is a lot, I mean, you don't get more, much more long-term in a relationship as a 20, whatever old you're a guy you are at the time, than 10 years. That's, that's a long time. And you weren't a perfect boyfriend.

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:36:47Jocko Willink?

  But you'd still been together for a long time.

• 1:36:51Jocko Willink?

  And you decide that you're gonna break up with her just before deployment?

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I couldn't get my shit together. I I knew it was the right thing to do. She's my high school sweetheart. You know, we met at youth group. Um, she'd always been good and loyal and devoted. And she's beautiful and uh, she's everything I could ever hope or or dream of and um,

• 1:37:19Speaker 02

  the right thing to do for a girl that's been dealing with your crap for, you know, 10 years at that point is

• 1:37:24Jocko Willink?

  A decade, by the way.

• 1:37:25Speaker 02

  Is to make an honest woman of her, you know, and uh, so we go ring shopping.

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  This is all pre-deployment leave. We go ring shopping, we're talking about it and uh, and I don't have the courage to to do the right thing. And uh, so we pull up to LAX. We're about to deploy the next day and she's about to fly back to Chicago and um,

• 1:37:51Speaker 02

  she thinks I'm about to ask her to marry me and so I say, uh, you should, you should find a new boyfriend while I'm gone. And she just uh, she had a, you know, she had a fountain drink in the cup holder. Get me a little fountain drink bath and uh, told me that I was real piece of shit and that was it. And um, yeah, uh, terrible, terrible thing I did there and.

• 1:38:26Jocko Willink?

  You, alright, you get done with that, you spend the last day um, back in, back in California. You go over, you go with Cam, who's one of your buddies, and you go with Rob, you go to General Kelly's house. And you have a barbecue.

• 1:38:45Jocko Willink?

  It's like, pretty poetic scenario for you guys to be rolling out. It's gotta be kinda crazy going to General Kelly's house for like, the going away, right?

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  There's the cabins on Palatin and we went down to the Del Mar beach and those cabins there. And Cam and I, after the little fiasco with Andrea, we got hammered drunk. And like, the next morning, it's like, the day we're gonna get on the buses that night, but Rob says, hey, you know, stop by, have some lunch. And like, he's got the shakes still from, and General Kelly, you know, they like to drink PBR. And it's like, have a beer, Tom. Like, what are you gonna say? He says, yes, sir. And so, yeah, I mean, it was, I mean, it's always when you're a second lieutenant and you're around a four-star general, it's a, there's, it's a little bit weird.

• 1:39:38Speaker 02

  But really, despite the hangover, what was really captured my attention is just the overall family dynamic of just a family really centered around service and duty. And then just the love, and how so much of that love was through Rob and emanated from Rob. And just as a guy who never had that, it just was always remarkable just to kinda, to see that.

• 1:40:13Jocko Willink?

  From there, it's go time. Going to the book. "From the battalion headquarters at Ford Operating Base Jackson, 3-5 was responsible for almost 37 square miles of Sangin District and almost 60,000 people living throughout. I was in Afghanistan a week and at PB fires for 24 hours when I received my first mission on October 9th, 2010. I had everything I thought I wanted. Now it was time to find out the truth. I left patrol base fires with a mix of 96 Marines and Afghan National Army soldiers to look out three areas the 3-5 headquarters wanted to know more about. In addition to First Platoon, I had a host of attachments,

• 1:40:55Jocko Willink?

  four Marines from 3-7 to give us their insight into the area and their experience within it." An entire squad of engineers and two explosive ordnance disposal Marines to contend with IEDs, the primary threat in Sangan, a section of six snipers, the embedded training team, detailed to work with the ANA, three interpreters to help us communicate, a joint terminal attack controller to get us air support if any, the Taliban who typically operated in groups of three to four men wanted to challenge a group of ninety-six. Sangan was primarily dirt and blowing dust, but irrigation canals stretching out from the banks of the Helmand River created verdant fields of corn and the pink and red splashes of opium poppy.

• 1:41:39Jocko Willink?

  On trails, roads, anywhere we would be forced to pass, the Taliban hid IEDs by the hundreds. They buried yellow plastic jugs containing pounds of homemade explosives triggered by pressure plates that completed a circuit when someone stepped on them. IEDs were indiscriminate weapons, killing Marines and Afghan civilians alike. Their density demanded we move single file, with about thirty feet between each person to keep an IED from getting more than two or three of us at once. Patrol base fires was at the center of it all. Walking single file is the best way to mitigate an IED threat, but is a horrible way to encounter your first ambush.

• 1:42:22Jocko Willink?

  I was at the front of the formation, moving among the jade leaves and whispers of wind through a cornfield, stalks towering over us all and concealing our movement, when machine gun rounds from a nearby building began ripping through the corn. I dove behind a brush pile that concealed me from view, but would not stop a bullet, much less hundreds of them. The size of our group and the dispersed formation meant our element was in a firefight before the remainder of my patrol completely exited from PB fires. I was going to die before I got the second half of my unit out of the base.

• 1:42:59Jocko Willink?

  I looked to my left at one of my Marines, Sergeant Joseph Nykirk. Nykirk?

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  Nykirk.

• 1:43:04Jocko Willink?

  Nykirk. And shouted, "I'm gonna stand up and put some progressive fire through that window. You fire grenade through it." I stood and fired at the window as quickly as I could while still retaining any kind of accuracy. Nykirk followed with a grenade that silenced the machine gun. We both dropped into the back into the corn where the 37th Lieutenant, acting as our tour guide, turned to me and said sarcastically, "Lieutenant Schuman, you got your combat action ribbon. Now make a decision."

• 1:43:32Jocko Willink?

  I was angry. He was a fellow lieutenant, not some, not an IOC instructor. I was the new guy, so I just stayed quiet and took it. But I did think to myself, "Make a decision." I did make a decision. My decision was not to die in the impact zone of a machine gun and kill the guy shooting at us.

• 1:43:48Jocko Willink?

  I thought I wanted combat, but finding myself in a complex ambush with half the platoon still in the patrol base seemed like a bad way to start. Suddenly, the combat action ribbon seemed less important. Less than an hour later, I knelt at the edge of a cornfield as the ANA, their American advisors, and the three interpreters spoke to a local elder to tell him we would need to use his compound for 24 hours. Like most in Helmand, it was a mini fortress made of thick walls, six to 10 feet high, with a sheet sheet steel gate. Goats and children would almost certainly roam within, while women and burkas stayed out of sight. Inside homes made of the same mud brick as the walls. As I waited for an update from the compound, a single shot rang out, followed by Sergeant Decker coming at me in a run.

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  "Sir, Teague..." Is it Teague? "Sir, Teague shot someone." I took a breath. "Okay, did he have a gun?" Decker nodded his head. "Yes, sir." "Is he dead?" "Very." "All right, well, tell Teague he did a good job." That's when the reality of Sangin hit me. We could kill people here. It was a notion that would soon become prosaic, but in the moment, it was striking.

• 1:45:00Jocko Willink?

  So that's the kickoff to deployment right there.

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  Right into it.

• 1:45:06Jocko Willink?

  Right into it. I've, I always say that I got very lucky in my combat experience that it was the most gradual, nice escalation over time.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:45:18Jocko Willink?

  And that's just, that's just pure luck. And you did not get that gradual escalation.

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  Baptism by fire.

• 1:45:27Jocko Willink?

  I had a guy that was one of the Sante Raiders on, uh, special forces guy. He did one mission in Vietnam. He, he, they flew from America. He was a brand new special forces guy. He, his first combat operation was the Sante raid. He got off the aircraft and five seconds later was killing a dude. Like stepped off the aircraft and killed someone and 20 minutes later they were gone. And that was his whole experience in Vietnam, but it was a pretty intense 20 minutes.

• 1:45:57Jocko Willink?

  That's the kickoff to this deployment and this deployment is extremely kinetic deployment for you guys. And you know, this is the true of all wars. I mean, depending on where you are and when you're there, it, it can be anything from a deployment where you're sitting around a chow hall, eating whatever gourmet food from some contractor, or it can be this, this type of deployment. This is a, this is a hardcore deployment. How, how much did you know when you were going in? How hot was it when you were showing up there? You, you knew what you were getting into?

• 1:46:33Speaker 02

  Not really. We were still very coin centric. So you know, the, the final exercise that a, that a battalion does before they go out to deployment is called EMV or Hanson Mojave Viper. Now it's got a new name of course, but uh, like that final exercise that we're doing was all about kissing babies. Uh, there's a big key leader engagement where you're sitting with the village elder and you're shaking hands with him. And so it was like shuras and KLEs and.

• 1:47:03Jocko Willink?

  When I ran training, we had, we started doing key leader engagements, right? And. They were going to go bad 100% of the time. It was so awesome, like, but we had great actors and people would come out being the key leader guy. And, you know, it's very nice to meet you and the spider hole would open up and that would come people with machine guns. But it sounds like maybe you weren't getting that treatment. You were getting the treatment like it was going to go like, hey, that's what you're there to do.

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  So we still did our, our live fire training, uh, but the emphasis was, you know, the, to try to recreate the Iraq awakening, you know? That, that was, that was the playbook and, uh, about a week before we left though, the company commander of the AO that we were going to rip out, um, he's now battalion commander, Ryan Cohen, Lieutenant Colonel Cohen, came and he'd been medevaced and he's like, shit is real. And this was the first guy that kind of say like, hey, you, you're going to go there and fight where-

• 1:48:00Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys know you were going, where you were going specifically?

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

  We did, but the intel briefs were pretty spotty, the ARs, there's, there, there was not a whole lot of-

• 1:48:11Jocko Willink?

  Are you communicating with guys directly?

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  So I, I think some guys have sipper maybe talking, but you know, second lieutenant, no, not getting read in on really much of this stuff and, and still, I mean, to the point that the book that I'm reading on the flight over is three cups of tea. And, uh, that's an appropriate reaction. And then, uh, you know, we're doing the, the, the cultural courses at Leatherneck, the big base before we fly into, out to the patrol bases. And I've got like a, a little smart pack of like, how are you? How do you do? Nice to meet you, sir. And I'm, I'm quizzing all my squad leaders and I'm like, no, you don't know how to say, nice to meet you. Like, let's do it again. And like, that's still really what I thought we were, we were headed into and, um,

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  it very immediately, uh, was apparent that no one was going to drink tea and everybody was going to try to kill us.

• 1:49:06Jocko Willink?

  We, when, um, in Ramadi, we had guys like our friends were coming to relieve us. And so we're telling them, um, what's going down and what's happening and, and they're going to-

• 1:49:21Jocko Willink?

  Like my guys are coming home wounded. They're going to my guys' funerals here. It was like a, it was a rare occasion for, you know, that tight turnover into like really hard combat. But, you know, they came over, they, they knew what they were getting into. Doesn't, a lot of times it doesn't, doesn't work like that. Three Cups of Tea. I had, uh, one of my, uh, senior leaders who's a friend of mine and, but, you know, he was really hyped on Three Cups of Tea. And we were not, especially coming home from Ramadi, we were especially not hyped about Three Cups of Tea. And when that book turned out to be a big lie, boy, did I have fun with that one, throwing it back in his face.

• 1:50:10Jocko Willink?

  Did you, when you, um, during like those final exercises and stuff, what was the attitude with your guys? Were they like, okay, well, that's what, you know, that's what the boss is saying we're gonna be doing. We're gonna be drinking tea with the locals.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  No, no one had any Afghanistan experience and, and so, you know, some of those guys had been in the flugian oh eight where it was kind of that, uh, you know, clear hold build. It was really more towards the build phase there. And so that oh eight Iraq experience was kind of reinforced some of the stuff that we're doing. And so, you know, we're all hoping for a fight, but we're Marines and we're gonna do whatever we're told we gotta do and do it well. And so if, if it's kissing babies, uh, you know, and then we'll, we'll do that, you know, and that's kind of what we're.

• 1:51:00Jocko Willink?

  So what was the, what was the mission that you guys were tasked to do, like broadly?

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Secure, provide security for the saying in District AO, increase security. That, I mean, increase security. That's it.

• 1:51:16Jocko Willink?

  And your company commander was, when you write about him in the book, he had an aggressive attitude?

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

  He did, um.

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  But it was hard to know like what his tolerance or willingness of risk assessment or you know, risk tolerance was or what he would accept or what he wouldn't. But he's, we Kilo Company, Sledgehammer, EB Sledge have historically always had the aggressive reputation and we had hardcore sergeants that work up and yeah, so we maintain this, which it was enabled by our CO is this really aggressive company for sure.

• 1:51:56Jocko Willink?

  And then in order to maintain or establish security, you're going out on patrols.

• 1:52:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Jocko Willink?

  You're taking ANA with you all the time?

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  Uh, trying not to. Initially, we would often forget them at the patrol base. But towards the latter half of the deployment, we were bringing them, always bringing them out. But we, that first mission had like such high visibility because it was a, we were securing battalion objectives and doing a three day operation that we had to have the ANA with us. But the ANA were happy to not go out and we were happy to not take them out. And so it wasn't towards the latter half of the deployment that we really started kind of employing them consistently. But yeah, that, those first patrols were conventional

• 1:52:48Speaker 02

  fighting. I mean, it was the enemy was in a defensive depth with obstacles covered by machine guns and we were on the offense and just straight assaulting into an enemy defense. And that's, and so anything about improving local security or doing any kind of counter insurgency, it was no, just go out there and kill as many guys as you can.

• 1:53:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's actually part of counter insurgency is killing a bunch of bad guys. And that was, that's a very effective and necessary part of it because you can't build schools while you're getting blown up. And you know, security for the populace is the way that I For lack of a better word pitched it up my chain of command what we were doing hey we're gonna provide security for the populace well how are you gonna do that we're gonna kill all these bad guys or at least as many of them as we can um what was your optempo like so how often are you guys going out how long are you staying out for

• 1:53:44Speaker 02

  I mean every day I mean we're we're doing platoon sized patrols every day for the first month or two and and that's because you needed a platoon sized element to get in the to effectively fight types of fights that we were engaged in and then it then and then it was a squad and but it was tough because you had a you had a squad on post you had a squad on QRF and then you had a squad patrolling and the QRF squad almost always got called out and so that rest squad was really never resting and so you're either on post patrolling or responding out as QRF so it was it was a that tempo was pretty brutal and and so the troops were out every day

• 1:54:32Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if that's the right word but it sounds like it might be the right word you kind of got in a little bit of trouble up the chain of command

• 1:54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah

• 1:54:40Jocko Willink?

  You got counseled for your cowboy attitude and this kind of thing break that down a little bit what mistakes did you make what could you have done that better where were you right where were you wrong

• 1:54:52Speaker 02

  We were out on operation and we'd been out till two or three and and I and I called into the main the CP and I said hey we're gonna we're gonna turn our radio off for a couple hours conserve battery we'll be up at zero six and call in with the radio check and when I turned the radio back on at zero six couple hours later it was like broken arrow where are you sledgehammer have you been overrun like sledgehammer one call in I'm like hey we called you guys got rogered up that that we were turning the radio off and the night watcho said that was good to go uh so and it's like no you're not in the logbook I'm like

• 1:55:31Speaker 02

  So, yeah, when we got back, you know, my, my CO was there and he said, you know, I'm gonna kick your ass and you think you don't have to call in and you don't think you don't have to report. And one of my squad leaders, uh, we were in a fight and, uh, they had shot some arty or a HIMAR and the main kept calling for a sit rep. I was like, you know, what's the BDA? What's the sit rep? And he said, how about you guys just grab a cup of coffee, take a seat, I'm in a fight. And, uh, you know, we had, uh, this company gunny Carlisle, he was a savage dude and he's like, what'd you say, you motherfucker? Like, they're fighting over the radio. And so my guys were, yeah, my guys were, uh, um, it's like, kind of

• 1:56:15Speaker 02

  that common tension between higher headquarters and the dudes doing the fighting. And, uh, so yeah, we got reined in and, and, uh, we got, but, you know, it was punishment to have to go back to the company position, uh, from being out at a, a patrol base, just as the platoon by ourselves. But it would, it turned out it was a reward because the area around the company hadn't been patrolled aggressively. And we had been patrolling now for a month, month and a half. So we kind of created a little security bubble. We were having a harder time getting in fights. And so they brought us back. And then the first time we go out, we killed a ton of dudes and come back with some AK-47s. We're like, yeah, such hammer ones here now, you know, here's his AKs. Uh, and so, yeah, I, I could have

• 1:56:59Speaker 02

  had more tact, for sure. Um, yeah, I was probably, I was probably light on tact.

• 1:57:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, one thing I used to tell my guys was that like the next, the next echelon is always messed up, right? From our perspective, the next echelon up the chain of command is always like, they don't understand. Well, here's the deal. Why don't they understand? They don't understand because I'm not doing a good job of pushing them information and I'm not seeing what their perspective is. Cause they're probably got someone screaming at them going, what do you mean you're dropping arty into that? Tell us what's going on. And they're asking, And that's how these things, that's how you get a little disconnect. You get a disconnect between the guys that are fighting and the guys that are not. There, there, there can be some animosity there and it can be a problem if you're not careful, especially from a leadership position. You know, for you, for you guys that are out there, you're going to be the one that translates things up and down the chain of command.

• 1:57:51Jocko Willink?

  And that, that, that is not an easy job. Um, but it's a really important job because if we have a real disconnect, then we're not getting the support that we need and it causes all, all kinds of problems. So don't take anything personally. Right? When they're asking you what the hell's going on, just do your best to try and tell them what the hell's going on. When they're asking you stupid questions, it's because you didn't tell them what, you know, how you were going to do a CASA VAC in this particular scenario or what you, how you were going to handle this particular type of threat. They're asking you this stuff because they want to know because you didn't tell them and just do your best. I know it's hard.

• 1:58:35Jocko Willink?

  And for senior leaders out there, when your folks are in the field, they're working on some shit. And as soon as they get the chance, they're going to tell you what's up, but leave them alone as long as you possibly can. Leave them alone and let them sort their shit out. And then they'll get back to you and you can, you can get your numbers and get your update and get your sit rep and all that. Just try and understand each other's perspectives, please. It goes a long way.

• 1:59:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that was a good summation of lessons learned.

• 1:59:10Jocko Willink?

  All this fighting going on, um, it's going to, there's going to be a price. Cam, your buddy Cam gets severely wounded by an IED. Lost his right leg in, um, injured his left leg. Or sorry, lost one leg, it really injured the other one. Um, right eyes messed up. That, that seemed, at least when I read it in the book, it seemed like that was a little bit of a reality check for you. Cause we are young and we feel like invincible.

• 1:59:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, Cam was this kind of larger than life John Wayne kind of figure to me, a guy, big, strong dude that we all looked up to, charismatic. And when I came into patrol base that day, you know, Will Donnelly, the second platoon commander meets me and says, I don't think Cam's gonna make it. And we were taking casualties at such a crazy rate. And I'm like, man, if Cam can go down, I mean, like, and I hadn't, I was good in a firefight, I could still kind of compartmentalize and focus on the thing that I needed to focus on in that moment to make the right decisions. But I was, I, there's, there's another great scene in Gates of Fire,

• 2:00:29Speaker 02

  where the Spartans before battle will break the twigs and they'll put half the twig in the basket. It's, it's like symbolic of a, of a dog tag. And so that if they get so disfigured, they match up the twigs at the end of the battle and they say, okay, this is this guy. But there's another aspect of that is they break off their humanity, because their, their, their sons, their dads, their husbands, and they're about to go have to stick a xiphos sword into somebody's guts. And so they've got to separate. And I still had not separated my humanity from the violent warrior killing and death that I was so intimately, that was the world I was living in. I think of like, if you think of it as like the river Styx,

• 2:01:13Speaker 02

  you know, we had crossed the river Styx and we were living in Hades. And I kind of had one foot on one shore and one foot in hell. And I was kind of just, and, and when I, when I found out, when I heard Cam wasn't gonna make it, he did ultimately make it. But when I found that out, I just, I broke down. And then I went back to my room and I had stored away a little Snickers bar at the bottom of my ruck. And I thought, on a rainy day, you will need this for your morale. And I didn't think that rainy day was gonna be like a week and a half into the deployment. But I go to dig in my ruck and I, and I find that these little Taliban mice have been living and shitting in my ruck and they ate my Snickers

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  bar. And I had, I had no more resilience left, you know? And so that was like the, and so I got sick, I was puking, emotional, not in front of my troops, this is all, you know, private, but.

• 2:02:11Speaker 02

  It was at that point that I said, you can't be feeling these things anymore. Like you have a job and so you separate from you detach from that humanity. And everything is compartmentalized from that moment forward, which makes you super effective under fire. The issue is if you don't reconnect to that humanity after your deployment, you become cold, emotionally unavailable. You don't experience the richness and fullness of life. It's a really safe way to live, very compartmentalized, because I don't get too happy, I don't get too sad, but it's not a very fulfilling way to live.

• 2:02:54Speaker 02

  And, and, and the longer you, and you know, I was right back in Afghanistan 12 months later. And so the longer you kind of keep all those nerve endings dead so that you don't can't feel anything, the longer it's harder to turn them back on. And, and also you, you, you start to get afraid of like, what will I feel when I do turn all that stuff back on? Because I've been packing stuff in the C bag for a long time here. And so what I convinced myself is, is like, hey, you don't have time. You got troops to lead, you got stuff to do, like you don't have. And what really what I found is like, I didn't have the courage to turn it back on. I didn't have the courage to feel the things that I needed to feel to figure out what the hell was going on.

• 2:03:38Speaker 02

  And, and I basically told myself a lie that said, you're too busy, you're too busy. But really I was too scared to unpack that C bag. And as I said, good way to be in combat, probably a bad way to live.

• 2:03:49Jocko Willink?

  Well, I think it's important to, a lot of times things are going on around us and we just don't know that they're happening. So like you pointing that out, it will help someone else go, oh, I know what's going on. Like I, I know my wife, I was on deployment, my wife sent me an email, this is before FaceTime and stuff like this, but she sent me an email and said, the kids want to see a picture of where you sleep. Like, can you send a picture of where you sleep? And I said, yep, got it. And I, I remember I took a picture of, you know, like my little wooden plywood cot thing. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, this isn't good. And I pulled out, you know, from some dug down in some backpack, grabbed some pictures

• 2:04:33Jocko Willink?

  of my wife and kids, hung them up around the bed, took a picture.

• 2:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Took them back down, put them back in the folder and back in the rucksack because the last thing I needed to be doing was thinking about my wife and kids when I got guys that are, you know, counting on me to make decisions. And I think that that was like a physical representation that I knew what I was doing. And I think that when I got home, I kind of knew, okay, you can put these pictures back up now in your head. And I think a lot of times, like just you, the way you're describing that, other people will recognize that, oh, they took those pictures down. They put them in a folder. They're not looking at them. When you get done with that deployment, you can open that folder back up and it's going to be okay. Important stuff to learn.

• 2:05:27Jocko Willink?

  At this point, you meet Zach for the first time. Seemed like you guys kicked it off pretty good, hit it off pretty good out of the gate.

• 2:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, initially very transactional. He was a good interpreter. He knew his past due. He knew English up to that point. The only interpreters who were left either didn't speak English or didn't speak the local dialect. And so they knew they weren't going to be able to get a job. So they hung around and and what I was finding is that every interpreter was quitting. Or they were such a liability under fire that we'd have bounded a couple hundred meters like where's the turp and we got to go. And so we had had a rough, rough go with our interpreter. So yeah, he shows up. He's fit. He's healthy. He's not a coward. And yeah, it's good.

• 2:06:15Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, you're pushing, going to the book here. In our first nine days of operations, first platoon had killed 15 Taliban. We were fighting harder and killing more enemy than any unit in three, five. By extension, that meant we were fighting and killing more than any unit in Afghanistan. I saw that as in keeping with my CO's direction as I understood it. But pushing that hard can create political and personal issues that people more removed from the sharp end of things can perceive as unnecessary risk. They may even be right, given the clarity that distance can offer. In my aggressive approach to the area of operations, I followed the rules of engagement, but I was not particularly attuned to political liability that increased the farther anyone got from PB fires.

• 2:07:00Jocko Willink?

  But I was consciously absorbing a lot of physical risk. It made me short of patience with people I saw as less engaged, which to be honest, was everyone who was in Afghanistan and not in first platoon. When I got back to PB fires that day, the CO told me he was pulling first platoon back to FOB Inkerman over his concerns that I required closer supervision. We were moving, but thankfully, Zach was coming with us. We kind of addressed that, the fact that that little disconnect showed up between you. And this is like, I mean, how many books can you read, movies can you watch about that

• 2:07:43Jocko Willink?

  disconnect between the rems, the rear echelon motherfuckers and the people on the front line? There's a lot of documentation about that. You just, you get back to FOB Inkerman, like you said, and the ops continue. The ops are still going on. Back to the book. That command is lonely, is a trite observation, but it is no less true for the countless times it's been observed. It should be paired with the fact that leadership hurts. Every time you discipline a marine that you love, every time you watch them bleed, every

• 2:08:25Jocko Willink?

  time you watch them breed their last, it hurts. I was 24 years old and living a reality that I now look back upon and wonder if some of it even truly happened. I want to deny that humans could be so callous as I became in the destruction of people put on this earth by the same God I was. I was convinced I would not survive Sangan, but I had realized that life is a gift and if I did survive, I had some growing up to do.

• 2:08:57Jocko Willink?

  I prayed to God and asked that if I did survive, he would help me live a grateful, meaningful life that would do honor to the people, denied that chance. It was large, I was largely incapable of making any objective decisions myself beyond where to patrol next and how to fight through the next ambush. But I was ready to acknowledge I was not the man I professed to be. I called Andrea and told her I wanted to be a better man, that I could only do that with her behind, beside me. I apologized for mistreating the woman who loved me and begged her to take me back. She agreed. Though I still thought it unlikely I would ever live to see her again, the idea was something

• 2:09:40Jocko Willink?

  to live for. At some point that evening, the CO came in and told me that my friend and mentor Lieutenant Robert Kelly was dead, struck and killed instantly by an IED earlier that day. I rolled over and stared at the wall. I thought about Rob, Cam West, and me spending the last day before we deployed drinking beer at Del Mar with Robert and his family. The next day was the 245th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. First Platoon killed four Taliban. It didn't bring anyone back.

• 2:10:25Jocko Willink?

  By Thanksgiving 2010, most of my closest friends in 3-5, Rob Kelly, Cameron West, Will Donnelly, and Gunner Sergeant Carlisle, had been killed or wounded. Only Staff Sergeant Henley and Lieutenant Vic Garcia, who replaced Cam at PB Fires with Third Platoon, remained. I only saw Vic in passing. Another IOC classmate, James Beiler, had been horribly wounded, losing both his legs. The death or grievous injury of friends with whom I had been living, training, and fighting for two years left me feeling dead inside. I was just waiting for my body to catch up.

• 2:11:05Jocko Willink?

  We'd arrived in Sangin in October 2010 and settled into a life of brutal sameness. We patrolled through suffocating heat and penetrating cold, sometimes multiple hours long patrols in a day. We engaged the elders. We did post blast analysis. We responded to ambushes. We called in medevacs. We called in air support. We zipped our friends into bags for a final ride home.

• 2:11:31Jocko Willink?

  They were men I loved because I knew them, or I loved despite not knowing them for the simple fact that they had volunteered to serve as Marine infantrymen in a time when that meant war.

• 2:11:44Jocko Willink?

  But it was harder and harder to feel that emotion as the toll of dead and wounded grew, and I felt increasingly ground under the wheels of war.

• 2:12:02Jocko Willink?

  So this is the burden of command that you're talking about. And as you mentioned, it's a burden that leaders have to bear alone.

• 2:12:20Jocko Willink?

  And what's interesting, and it's an interesting, I mean, this is what the book is about, is that you actually had an outlet for this. And that outlet ended up being your interpreter, Zach.

• 2:12:38Jocko Willink?

  He wasn't a Marine. He was, there was no, there was no mask to put on with Zach.

• 2:12:48Jocko Willink?

  How did that relationship grow and develop?

• 2:12:52Speaker 02

  Out of necessity for my sanity is kind of how it came to be. And, you know, this idea that...

• 2:13:02Speaker 02

  War is both heaven and hell and that each, each day you're experiencing the worst depravity that you can imagine, but then you're seeing, you know, no greater love that has a man who laid down his life for his friends. You're seeing the greatest forms of love manifested, where someone willingly lays down their life for their friend. And so you, you get these little glimpses of heaven and hell. And through that, you know, you, you start to grow and mature and, and, you know, General, uh, General Mattis kind of talks about it. He, he got his PhD in combat, you know, that, that you learn so much about life, um, in, in five minutes in a, in a firefight that maybe

• 2:13:45Speaker 02

  could take five years outside of it. And so I'm refining my character. I'm growing up finally as a little boy. I went to combat a little boy and I finally start to say it's time for you to be a man. And you, you, none of this is guaranteed. And if you do make it, what are you going to do differently? Because you, the, what you profess is not congruent with your actions. And so first time I get the sat phone, like call Andrea, a little cry and a little sad, you know, I know I broke up with you. Please forgive me. Take me back. Um, and then, uh, yeah, I, I, it's, you,

• 2:14:24Speaker 02

  you, you kind of hinted at this idea that, that as the junior officer, you are the dam. You, you, you're the, between two rushing tides, you know, higher and then, and then your troops and your subordinates. And so you, you are in the middle of, of this. And so you're trying to keep all the crap from rolling downhill on them. But at the same time, you've got all this stuff bubbling up because you've got a bunch of 18 year old kids that got stuff going on in their lives that are losing their own friends. And it's all valid. It's all valid.

• 2:14:55Jocko Willink?

  It's almost all valid, I should say.

• 2:14:57Speaker 02

  And it's, and it's you who's the mediator of, of all this higher, the pressure from higher and the bubbling up from, from your supportness. Plus you've got some stuff going on in your own life, like you're trying to get back with your girlfriend, like your best friends getting killed or injured, right? And so like, you've got your own, and, and you've got to be like this, this person, this intermediary, right? In between all that and the pressure, just, you just keep absorbing pressure. Uh, because you don't want to pass it to your troops and you can't pass it to higher. And so, uh, an outlet, uh, was critical and, and, and, cause you, you can't, like my platoon sergeant had been through enough. Like I couldn't, he was dealing with all the same crap. And so I didn't want

• 2:15:41Speaker 02

  to put anything else on his plate. And, uh, there's really only one

• 2:15:47Speaker 02

  person who I could vent to and that, and that, and that was Zach and, uh,

• 2:15:52Speaker 02

  yeah, it was, uh, it really was what helped me maintain my sanity.

• 2:16:00Jocko Willink?

  So th- this book, again, I'm reading 10, less than 10%, I'm reading 4% of this book. You have a ton of experiences here that you talk about. I'm trying to get some of the high points. You develop this awesome relationship with Zach, who's a good listener and, and who you can talk to about what's going on. Um, fast forward a little bit, actually fast forward quite a bit. There's a, this is a, was this a seven month deployment?

• 2:16:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:16:29Jocko Willink?

  So it's a seven month deployment. I think we covered maybe one or two operations. I'm going to go all the way, um, forward to, I think it was your last op, or certainly one of your last ops. This is the, a turnover operation.

• 2:16:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:16:44Jocko Willink?

  Which is always a, which is always sketchy anyways, because you've got a bunch of people that are coming in. They have their ideas. You have your ideas. And if that's not a good, if they're not open to your ideas, it's going to be, it's going to be a lot harder.

• 2:16:58Jocko Willink?

  There's an area outside the wire that's called the golf course. And when you guys go on patrol, you stay away from the golf course because it's filled with IEDs. You guys go out on patrol. When you leave to go out on patrol, you guys are going through the village where there's a bunch of Afghans running around. So you can't put a bunch of pressure plate IEDs. So it's a lot less IEDs.

• 2:17:22Jocko Willink?

  New lieutenant, so on this op, is it mostly your guys or is it mostly his guys?

• 2:17:27Speaker 02

  No, it's this, the last of the left seat, right seat. So it's just me and two sergeants and all his guys.

• 2:17:32Jocko Willink?

  And it's all his guys. He wants to go out patrol through the golf course. You strongly recommend that that's not a great idea. He decides that it is a good idea and he's gonna go out.

• 2:17:49Jocko Willink?

  Gonna go out, gonna take the patrol to the golf course.

• 2:17:54Jocko Willink?

  Guy hits a low, low order IED out of the gate. What happens then?

• 2:17:59Speaker 02

  So Sergeant Nykirk was one of my, one of my three Marines that was, or one of my two other Marines that were on that patrol. He, I see him go up in the yellow smoke and I think, you know, son of a bitch. And when I get up to him, he's uh, standing on top of a 105 shell with a, with one, a yellow jug underneath it and the yellow jug just is barely cracked open. And uh, we're, we're, we're only a hundred meters outside the patrol base at this point. So we call EOD to come from the company position. They come out and they say, 105 shell on a 40 pound jug would have killed, you know, a couple of people in front, a couple of people in back. You know, Nykirk, you would be in little pieces. Uh, and they said, this is actually a tripwire ID.

• 2:18:42Speaker 02

  This is the first time we've seen this in this AO. We've never seen this uh, little fish line that you, you kick in the, and it was so two little branches. And you kick the little fish wire, you can't see it. And that's what closed the circuit rather than a pressure plate. And uh, and so they reduced the IED. Uh, Nykirk has HME, the homemade explosives all over his face. He's been doused in it and he's all jittery and he's like, uh, can I go back with EOD? Back to the CP? And I'm like, yeah, go ahead. Uh, and Decker, my, my third squad leader turns to me and says like, can I go back with them too? Because uh, these guys, they're gonna get us killed. And I just had a son on this deployment and I haven't met my son yet.

• 2:19:26Speaker 02

  He named his son Maximum Danger, Decker, by the way. And uh, kinda guy he is, uh, he's still in. Uh, one of my heroes and, and uh, I'm like, hey, Decker, like, if, if stuff goes sideways out here, I need at least one other person that I know that I can rely on. Like, sorry, you gotta stay.

• 2:19:46Speaker 02

  And he's not happy about it, but Roger.

• 2:19:48Jocko Willink?

  And you still couldn't convince the new lieutenant like, hey, bro, remember when I said this was a bad idea? We just got the absolute luckiest thing we could have ever hoped for.

• 2:19:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:00Jocko Willink?

  Let's backtrack and try this again tomorrow.

• 2:20:03Speaker 02

  Correct. Couldn't talk him off crossing the field. What I was able to do is convince him that, hey, send the engineer who's already on the far side to sweep back through the field because he's clearly missed at least one IED. Uh, that should have had a pretty big signature coming off a 105 shell. So he's going to resweep if we're going to push through this field. And as that guy starts to sweep back,

• 2:20:27Speaker 02

  goes up and immediately huge ambush. I mean, just firing from everywhere. And this is this unit's first time in contact. So they're, you know, just heads down, just not looking where they're firing, just, you know, blossom, shooting everywhere. And there's only one marine who's standing up, running into the field to go get the guy who got dismoned up. And it's Sergeant Decker, the guy who just said a few minutes before, hey, sir, can I go back? Cause I've never met my son. I'm like, okay, well now he's going to be dead. And the last thing I'm going to live with forever is that this, this kid will never meet his dad because, uh, and so I, I, I'm able to flag him down. I'm like, you're not going to go, I'm going to go.

• 2:21:12Speaker 02

  But just getting across the canal towards the field. I mean, that the canal looked like it was like a hailstorm with just the bullets ripping through the water, hitting all the sides of the dirt. And so just,

• 2:21:24Speaker 02

  it was, uh, and so I'm running along the line. I'm like, where's the corpsman? Where's the corpsman? Where's the corpsman? Uh, finally one little hand goes up. I'm like grabbing by the troop staff. I'm like, you're following me. I'm like, Decker, you calling medevac? I'll go out there and get this guy. And I'm the only guy standing up. And, uh, so the, the machine gun, the PKM is just following me through this field. And as I enter into this field, I'm like,

• 2:21:51Speaker 02

  105 shell on top of 40 pound jug. Like the kids told us that they said they saw them at least put 15 to 20 IDs in this field. Uh, we were out on a big op. We had just left like a skeleton security. It was in, it was, uh, and this place was in like, uh, low ground. We couldn't see it. And so the Taliban puts at least 15 to 20 IDs in there. We've been in this field for five minutes and hit two of them. So I'm going in this field thinking, uh, best case scenario, no legs. MLK, most likely course of action here. You, you are dead and in a lot of pieces. People are picking you up with a vacuum, you know? Um, and I'm also like the PK, PKM is just following me

• 2:22:34Speaker 02

  the whole way through. You know, I'm a tall guy with a big head. They're just like, yeah, that's an easy target. Uh, shoot that thing. And, uh, and every time I put my foot down, I'm like, mother fucker, you know, like, uh, and we get to the casualty, start the treatment on the casualty. He's got it lower dead it again, but it, it heaved him up and slammed him down and he, his hit a compound fracture. His arm bone was sticking through. And so I'm like, okay, that's good. That's not a big deal. Doc, you got that. And I'd been carrying them M32 for a couple of weeks and it's a six, six shooter grenade launcher. It's like a revolver that shoots grenades. And I'm

• 2:23:12Speaker 02

  like, yeah. And, uh, so I got to pop some nugs, you know, six piece nug, nope, 12 piece nug. Well, how many nugs do you need before you quiet down? And, and, you know, we, I'm able to get these guys to, you know, break contact. And, uh, but now I'm thinking like, okay, now I gotta walk back with this guy. Because when I'm running out, I'm thinking I'm gonna get shot. I'm thinking I gotta go help this marine. Oh, I don't even know this marine, right? He's from a different unit, but he's a marine, so it doesn't matter. So like, um, at that point, I am thinking with every step, like little pucker factor for sure, but there's a lot compelling me forward, like not getting shot and trying to get to this guy. And now I'm like, okay, well now we gotta walk back. And this is the

• 2:23:55Speaker 02

  engineer. Uh, so he's the guy that sweeps the ground. And so, uh, yeah, it was, uh, It was a, the tailband did not treat me nice. I'm a way out, that's for sure.

• 2:24:09Jocko Willink?

  You get back, you get the wounded guy back to the line. You look at the lieutenant and you say this patrol's over. At which point he admits, I guess I should have listened to you about the route.

• 2:24:21Speaker 02

  It's, that's the thing about combat. It's so, um, unique is that everybody can live the same experience, but have a different version of it. And so like, this guy's a super talented guy, way smarter than me. He did, he did, he did great stuff with that platoon. So I have nothing but great stuff to say about him. He remembers it, some of the, these details differently. So I will, I will put it, put that out there. I remember this clear as day to me from my perspective. Is this how it happened? Uh, but yeah, we, we agreed, patrol's over.

• 2:24:56Speaker 02

  He said, yeah, that was maybe going through the golf course wasn't the right call. I said, yeah, I think so. And when I smoked my first cigarette.

• 2:25:02Jocko Willink?

  Did you talk to him while you were writing this?

• 2:25:05Speaker 02

  Uh, I posted something about it one day. Again, not indicting him, not calling him out, but just kind of talking about, talking through this patrol. And he, you know, he had sent me a message. He's like, well, you know, here's what, how I saw that all kind of unfold. And again, there's no, uh, there's no animosity. There's a ton of mutual respect. Nobody knows. Well, besides Vic Garcia, I think who was the, my adjacent platoon commander out there, out there in the northern green zone. Like, nobody else can empathize with what we were doing on the edge of the empire and the most kinetic area of operations more than this guy. So like, there's a lot of mutual respect, but, um, yeah, we had our difference of opinion there.

• 2:25:50Jocko Willink?

  You've smoked your first cigarette after this operation.

• 2:25:56Jocko Willink?

  You said, uh, and that's it, right? For this deployment? Yeah. You leave Zach. You talk about the fact, you talk about what that's like when, um, when, you know, you're leaving Zach basically on the tarmac. Um, you had this great relationship with him.

• 2:26:14Jocko Willink?

  He ends up getting a job, another translating job. He ends up leaving that A O as well. Uh, but we'll, we'll get into some of that. But it's you at this juncture, returning home. I'm gonna go to the book.

• 2:26:30Jocko Willink?

  "On April 20th, 2011, I landed back on U.S. soil. I was 25 years old and had just lived a lifetime on fast forward. My body was battered and my brain was traumatized by multiple blasts, the type of injuries sustained by so many of us in the post nine 11 wars. But I also came home from Sengen exhausted, embittered, angry, and unsure how to express any of it. There was no way to physically represent the moral injuries I had sustained, and I did not know a way to talk about them, though they were evident to anyone who knew me. I was still angry at what I had felt been, what I'd felt had been Kilo Company Headquarters

• 2:27:13Jocko Willink?

  punishing me for aggressively implementing orders I was given. I was depressed by the death and injury of my friends. I was physically wrung out from seven months of insomnia, long daily movements under load, and the accumulated stress of leading young men in a place where someone was trying to kill all of us every day. Strangely, like an addict, having withdrawals, I still missed the almost daily combat for the, of the first four months of our deployment. Worse yet, just as an IED does invisible damage to Marines, as it shot, as its shock wave passes through their soft internal organs, people in my orbit were suffering from my injuries.

• 2:27:58Jocko Willink?

  In the week before we got back, my mom was counting the hours through sleepless nights. At work, her inability to stop crying in a bathroom stall got her sent home for the day to recover. When she met me in Southern California on return..."

• 2:28:16Jocko Willink?

  She tried to talk to me about how I was feeling. I didn't want to talk about it. My desire not to talk never really mattered where my mom is concerned, especially after she took it upon herself to read my journal from Sangin.

• 2:28:30Jocko Willink?

  I was angry at the violation of my privacy. "Thomas, I can't understand what happened over there because you won't talk about it." "Mom, I'm fine." "Then please make eye contact with me when I'm talking to you." "Would you just let it go? Thomas, you're my son and my best friend. You have been since you were born. It's like you're not there anymore. You're just this angry person and I'm on eggshells. I'm not letting anything go."

• 2:28:56Jocko Willink?

  "What do you want to say to me, Mom?" "I said, I'm fine."

• 2:29:05Jocko Willink?

  So, doing just fine, huh?

• 2:29:09Jocko Willink?

  You weren't exactly fine. Lot of stuff going on in the head.

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, undoubtedly, there are tons of benefits of those experiences. At that time, still a little bit raw. I think ultimately, we get to post-traumatic growth. But you've got to, before you can get to post-traumatic growth, you've got to get to gratitude and you've got to find a way to be thankful for that adversity, thankful for that hardship. You've got to get to your good. And, you know, initially, when those tough things happen, you don't say, "Oh, I'm so happy that this tough thing happened." You know, whether it's a car accident or cancer, you don't say, "Oh, I'm so hap..." But the thing happened.

• 2:30:00Speaker 02

  And so at some point, you can either continue to be a victim of that thing or you can take your agency back and say, "Good." And, and, and when you do that, you can say, I am thankful for the, the things that I've learned from having this experience. And, and that's why, you know, I know many amputees and lots of, and, and this is the cycle, you know, initially bitter, angry, uh, but even the double amputee, triple amputee, these guys I know, they'll, they'll finally get to a place where they say, you know, I wouldn't trade that experience because of the things that I've learned and benefited from and the man that I am today because of that. And so you get to gratitude and then you finally can kind of get to that growth. But undoubtedly

• 2:30:44Speaker 02

  in this moment, I'm still very

• 2:30:49Speaker 02

  hurt and offended, I don't know offended, but I, I, again, there was, there was, felt like sort of some betrayal, um, do this thing, but then like I'd come back in and be like, why, why your hands bloody? Why, why you got, you know, why so, you got a lot, you kind of seems pretty messy out there. Like, yeah, you go out there and tell everybody, we go kill these guys, go do this thing. And then you, when the generals come, we're like, hey, sledgehammer kills everybody. And then you call me in and say, oh, well, are you sure that guy had a gun? Like, yes, what are you implying, sir? Like, and, and so it, and,

• 2:31:28Speaker 02

  and it's, and, uh, you're just carrying too much weight already to have, did not feel like your chain of command has your back. And, um, there were times within the company where I felt extremely betrayed. And, and so, uh, yeah, I, I think I was, I was dealing with that. Um, ultimately though, I think I was thankful to have porcelain toilets, California burritos, pretty girlfriend, uh, San Clemente doesn't suck, you know? So like the, a lot of things to be thankful for, uh, at that time as well, but still trying

• 2:32:10Speaker 02

  to figure some things out and maybe not doing it that well.

• 2:32:16Jocko Willink?

  What was your like enlistment status at this point? Like where were you at? Did you, did you come back thinking, maybe you'll get out? Did you come back thinking, I'm definitely staying in like?

• 2:32:28Speaker 02

  No, I thought I was gonna get out. I mean, I didn't know, I, I didn't have this lifelong desire to serve. I didn't grow up as a kid thinking, oh, I want to be a soldier someday. And I didn't, I didn't, uh, I never thought, oh, I want to be a general or a colonel or any of this kind of stuff. Um, I thought, uh, I should do something. And then I thought, I should be a Marine. I thought I should be an infantry Marine. And then once I finally figured out, yes, I should be an infantry Marine. I thought, I should fight. And I did that. And I got to lead, you know, the best men in this nation. And so I had met my career goals. And then, uh, and with the amount of crap that I had experienced, I said, maybe, maybe I'm out. And so there's this thing called career designation that you're offered as a, as a lieutenant,

• 2:33:13Speaker 02

  and you've got to accept it. And I was not going to designate, um, because of, I was really disenchanted or just disappointed with some of that company leadership. And so, uh, I was gonna get out. I was serving as an XO in an adjacent company. Uh, I got so.

• 2:33:31Jocko Willink?

  Is this when you get, went to Lima Company?

• 2:33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:33:34Jocko Willink?

  You know, the frustration that you're talking about, like with the leadership, right? How did you work through that?

• 2:33:42Speaker 02

  During the deployment, um, not well. I, I mean, between my company gunny, who ended up getting medevaced and Zach, like, I, I would say there were, there were times where I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was never the Taliban. It was like, I've been training to shoot silhouettes of men for years. And now I'm shooting, and so like, I am only happy when a Taliban is dead. Like, uh, like that is no problem. Uh, and I also am not personally offended that the Taliban is shooting at me. Like, I know that that's what the Taliban does. They shoot at us. And so, uh, I've been training for that.

• 2:34:23Speaker 02

  Um, contact front, contact left, like, I'm training for the, to be shot at. And, and, and then like Marines get wounded. Well. Why do we have tourniquets on? Why do we do tourniquet drills? Why are we doing all these combat lifesaver? It's, it's all these things you expect and if you're paying attention and taking your training seriously, you expect that there will be casualties, that you will have to kill people, that you will. And so all that was okay. And, and, and when you go outside the wire, you're in the yellow, you know, you're, you're alert, you're scanning your baseline, you're waiting for that. And, and so when you're in the yellow and you're alert, you can respond to things fluidly, adaptively.

• 2:35:03Speaker 02

  But you leave the wire, condition one. You leave the wire in full P P, flak, Kevlar, because you know you're going into a hostile environment. When you come back inside the wire, condition four, take your flak off, take, because you're so, now you're within friendly lines. And that, when you get ambushed within friendly lines, that's where you're vulnerable. And that's when you can really get hurt. And those moral injuries, I think, often outlast the, the pain associated with, with those, with physical injuries. And so what I did when I got back

• 2:35:40Speaker 02

  to the States is I just ran. I ran and ran and ran. And those fire breaks outside Camp Pendleton, I just, every morning I would just go run for as long as I could, for as far as I could. And then I would just pour myself into my work. That's how I was dealing with things.

• 2:36:01Jocko Willink?

  How did you come to the conclusion that you would stay in?

• 2:36:05Speaker 02

  I had a new boss and the new, the new Lima Company Commander came in. He's my current boss. And he was everything I'd hoped for. He was, those IOC instructors, you know, had such high standards and they were so challenging and they were so good. And I was like, man, a Marine captain, that's something. That is, a Marine captain, that is really something. And then I found myself disappointed throughout my work up in deployment and disillusioned. And then this, and so I'm, I'm, I'm thinking I'm out. I'll go back to Chicago, going to be a fireman, took the, took the fireman test. Then this guy came in.

• 2:36:49Speaker 02

  And we want to be Marines because we want to do hard shit. We want to be challenged. We want, and I wanted to be a Marine because they had higher standards. I looked in the Navy, I thought it's a high standards. That's what I want. And this guy came in and he emulated all those high standards and every day I had to be at the top of my game. Every day I had to get better. And that's all I want. A leader who emulated what he espoused, a leader who was accountable. And who held me accountable, you know, as a lieutenant, I had very little

• 2:37:21Speaker 02

  oversight, which in some ways was awesome. So I just got to go run and gun all the time out doing my thing. But I needed somebody to mentor me. I needed someone to hold me more accountable. I needed someone to develop me and, and coach me and teach me. And he did those things and I said, okay, well, I want to, I want to do this, what he's doing for somebody someday. And so I, I said, I'm going to stay in. But as we grinded towards the Mew, I saw a flyer at the gym that said, you have what it takes. Come try out for recon. And I said, yeah, maybe this XO staff life isn't for me. I'm going to try to go fight again with some troops.

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, I guess

• 2:38:05Jocko Willink?

  no matter what industry you're in, whether you're in the Marine Corps, Army, IBM, you know, what, what you name the company, you're going to have some, you're going to have some good bosses, you're going to have some bad bosses. And, and a lot of it has to do with what I was talking about earlier. Like if you're not doing your best to understand the perspective of the person above you in the chain of command, it's going to be hard. And here's the thing, there's at least a 50% chance that they don't, they're not trying to understand your perspective at all. There's a 50% chance that they just think you should just be. Conforming to what I'm telling you and complying with what I tell you. There's a 50% chance you got a boss like that.

• 2:38:46Jocko Willink?

  And in that case, you can't, you can sit there and be mad like, why don't they understand? Or you can say, okay, I gotta work with this. I gotta make, I gotta, I gotta make sure I do my best to make them understand. I gotta paint a better picture. I've gotta do a better job. And again, it goes back to, you know, that gives you some kind of agency over your life to think, okay, my boss is an egomaniac. My boss has a bad temper. My boss doesn't understand my perspective. My boss is looking to, you know, get promoted and that's the main thing he's for. Like all those things, all those horrible things. And we've all worked for people like that. And you go, okay, cool. That's what my boss is like, all right, here's what I'm gonna do.

• 2:39:26Jocko Willink?

  Here's how I'm gonna build a relationship with my boss. Here's how I'm gonna build trust with my boss, regardless of what their situation is. So I'm just saying, I like the fact that you were able to get to a point where you say, okay, you know, there's good bosses, there's bad bosses out there. Of course, everybody, try and be a good boss. Try and support the people in the field. That's 100% it. But when you're a subordinate and your boss is maybe not quite what you dreamed of, good challenge, build a good relationship with them and, and things are gonna get better. That's the way it works.

• 2:40:03Jocko Willink?

  In the meantime, you get married, right? You, you make that decision. You finally say, all right, I'm gonna do this. Is that before you screened for recon?

• 2:40:14Speaker 02

  It was before I screened. It was, it was right when I got back.

• 2:40:16Jocko Willink?

  Right when you back, got back, you closed the deal?

• 2:40:18Speaker 02

  Court wedding. Yeah. I, she put up with me dumping her right before I left and then all my sad phone calls. And I remember I get the sad phone. I said, you know, you better go do the right thing. And so did a court wedding a couple of weeks after I got back.

• 2:40:32Jocko Willink?

  And then you go to recon and you got some cool, you had an interesting day of getting selected for recon, which was actually a pretty cool story. We won't go into it now. People can read the book for that one. But you end up getting selected for recon. But do I get, do I have this right? Instead of going to reconnaissance school? They have recon on deployment or going on deployment quickly and they say, hey, you're not going to recon school. You're gonna go be an advisor.

• 2:40:59Speaker 02

  So the battalion was deployed. So when I showed up, the battalion was deployed. I'm the one guy back, one, a couple of guys back. And they, and I was supposed to go to school and then it's called an IA, an individual augment came down and they said, hey, we need one dude to go advise the Afghan on how to be recon. You're all we got. Uh, even though you haven't been to school, you're going to go advise these, these, these guys how to be. And so I joined an advisor team that was mostly guys, senior officers who are going to advise like a brigade level. Uh, so like staff stuff and, and, and me and a, and a recon staff sergeant, we're going to go out and advise the Afghan recon company.

• 2:41:40Jocko Willink?

  So you've been back home for how long at this point?

• 2:41:44Speaker 02

  I was home probably for about five or six months when, uh, I got the word that I was going to get the individual augment.

• 2:41:52Jocko Willink?

  And, and then you, July 2012, you go back to Afghanistan. You're out at patrol base, Long Beach. What was that setup like?

• 2:42:00Speaker 02

  It was an old artillery firing position. It was just a triangle, tiny, tiny little firing base outside of Marja. And, uh, it was July and the human factors, if it, like the human factors of the first deployment was the losing the guys and the, and the, and the fighting and the grinding every day. This was, I mean, and not that I had any amenities really on that first deployment, but this deployment, I mean, it was a cot, a camionette, a pallet of water and a pallet of MREs. And that's it. And I was living with the ANA right downwind from the shitter. Uh, it was like the plagues of Moses coming through that place, like bugs coming through and waves blocking out the sun.

• 2:42:42Speaker 02

  I mean, it was a, it was hard, hard living out there, uh, in, in July. And then, you know, I'm, I'm going out, I'm fighting with the ANA and then I'm a, I'm a JTAC. So I'm like a freelance JTAC. So anybody, uh, who needs the guy for an op, they're calling me and I'm getting to go on some pretty cool ops.

• 2:43:00Jocko Willink?

  How many ANA are you out there with?

• 2:43:02Speaker 02

  About 50.

• 2:43:04Jocko Willink?

  So it's you, how many American advisors?

• 2:43:07Speaker 02

  The one other staff sergeant counterpart and then we'd pull like four or five grunts from the AAO who would kind of help stand security. So it was very lonely.

• 2:43:18Jocko Willink?

  So this is a totally different kind of deployment.

• 2:43:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:43:20Jocko Willink?

  Again, the disparity of different types of deployments you can go on is insane for you to be out in the middle of nowhere now with a bunch of freaking Afghans. God. Um, did you, so is your mission just to train these guys up?

• 2:43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, train, train the Afghan and partner advise assist and then, you know, go out with them on operations and yeah, it was, but I mean, at this point, those guys had been trained for a really long time. So, I mean, really I'm just kind of talking to their leadership and then going out on operations with them.

• 2:43:55Jocko Willink?

  What's the op temp like? How often are you guys going out?

• 2:43:57Speaker 02

  We're going out every day, but it's not reconnaissance type missions. It's like, they're just basically better infantrymen than your average Afghan soldier. And so, but we, we really patrolled from like 2am to 6am because by, you know, when the sun came up, it was over a hundred degrees. And so for the first couple of months, it was just real early morning patrols, not too kinetic with those guys. But again, a company going out would say, oh, we can have a JTAC just jump on this op. And so when I was jumping on these ops with the different marine companies, we were getting it, really getting into it.

• 2:44:33Jocko Willink?

  Freelance JTAC in Afghanistan. What'd you take away from a leadership perspective on this deployment?

• 2:44:40Speaker 02

  Leadership is lonely, which I've, I've kind of already knew, but it was particularly lonely when it's, you know, a couple Lance Corporals are the only other Americans around. And so you could only talk about the things that Lance Corporals talk about for so long. And so that was really a lot of time to think by myself.

• 2:45:08Speaker 02

  The, you know, one of the things that I'm advising these guys and one of them turns to me and says, "Well, you know, when you leave is Taliban is just gonna take Afghanistan back anyways." And I'm like, "What are you talking about? You got a whole army. You got 10 years of training. You got millions of..." And, and I was like, "I want Afghanistan more than you want Afghanistan." And it was a really important lesson for me to, that you can't want something more for someone than they want it for themselves. And that applies to many different areas of life. And so that was kinda hard to, to accept.

• 2:45:49Speaker 02

  And I found that I am happiest when I'm under fire. And like, it, when, when, when you have a purpose, and that is being a warrior or lead, combat leader, and you're good at that thing, there is nothing more rewarding or satisfying than when you get to... And so, got right back in the game and right back in my first firefight, and I'm like, "Okay, here's..." I don't do like, "You're gonna do this, you're gonna do that." And so, and then I was an enabler. And that was a weird role for me, because I'm used to being a commander.

• 2:46:29Speaker 02

  And so when I'm the JTAC, I don't, I don't have command of anybody. I'm just there to support commander. And so, it's tough, because you see like, here's, here's what we need, should be doing, but like, that's not your role. And so like, staying in, staying in my role as an enabler was, was, was different for me. And so I got to appreciate maybe that, that role a little bit.

• 2:46:56Jocko Willink?

  You get orders, go back to Pendleton. It's now March 2013.

• 2:47:03Jocko Willink?

  When you get home, it's safe to say at this juncture, your work-life balance was not in balance at all.

• 2:47:12Speaker 02

  I just only did marine stuff.

• 2:47:15Jocko Willink?

  Andrea, at this point, she had moved back to Chicago.

• 2:47:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:22Jocko Willink?

  One of your buddies pulls you aside and is like, um, do you, do you want the Marine Corps or do you want marriage? Like which one of these two things that you want? Because they're mutually exclusive. Like you're, doesn't it sound like you'd be able to do both?

• 2:47:37Jocko Willink?

  You decide marriage. That's the thing you're gonna work towards and you tell your wife, I'll get out of the Marine Corps. We can go home. We'll figure it out.

• 2:47:47Jocko Willink?

  She says, nope, not it. I still don't want to be with you.

• 2:47:55Jocko Willink?

  So this is a rough, this is rough. Eventually, uh, you get her to come back.

• 2:48:01Jocko Willink?

  She comes back out, um, back out here?

• 2:48:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:48:07Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't end up being, once again, it's still not, it's still not where it needs to be with, with her. And you eventually find out that she'd been unfaithful to you while you were on deployment.

• 2:48:23Jocko Willink?

  With one of your fellow Marines. With a, a Marine that, that, that lived with you.

• 2:48:40Jocko Willink?

  How do you get through that?

• 2:48:43Speaker 02

  So I talk about ambushes, that, that life is full of ambushes and, um,

• 2:48:50Speaker 02

  you know, like sometimes combat veterans will try to say like, oh, well, I was in an ambush with, with bullets and bombs. And, and, and so you can, and, and I'll tell you that my worst ambush was that, that was my worst ambush in my life. You know, and, uh, and so I, I tried not to establish higher, like everyone's trying to compete and who had it the worst or who, and, and, and, and so, and combat veterans think that we have this, or veterans in general think that we have this special kind of, you know, people should feel bad for us because we did this. Like first off, I volunteered for those things. I wanted those things. I sought those things. No one made me do that. Um, I was trained and prepared for those things. Uh, I wasn't trained or prepared for that.

• 2:49:36Speaker 02

  And, uh,

• 2:49:39Speaker 02

  and that was a moral injury that took.

• 2:49:44Speaker 02

  A long time. Uh, and maybe still presently one that um you're you heal from and.

• 2:49:54Speaker 02

  You know, I. Much of my motivation in life is a response not to repeat the same mistakes that I experienced when I was growing up and and one of those was divorce. And so I thought, you know, no matter what, I'm not I'm not going to get divorced.

• 2:50:11Speaker 02

  But at that point, um, I thought, yeah, this this is uh, this is over and um.

• 2:50:23Speaker 02

  I I wanted to just make it very clear that ultimately that.

• 2:50:29Speaker 02

  Um, that. Those actions from my wife are not representative of who she is as a woman. Uh, and that she has been the greatest blessing of my life, um, outside of my savior. And so uh, I wouldn't be here today without her. Uh, but I was hurt. I was angry. Uh, I lost my mind a little bit. Uh, I went. Crazy, you know, I I not like crazy like yelling or screaming or uh, but just kind of went on a bender of doing unhealthy shit um for a long time.

• 2:51:12Speaker 02

  But through it all, uh. I dated and did whatever, but there there were always inside me. I.

• 2:51:23Speaker 02

  I was so happily married and I was so much looking forward to starting a family and there was no one else that I wanted to be the mother of my children. There was no one else that I wanted to grow old with. There was no one else I wanted to do life with more than her. And so even though I met some great people along the way and had a lot of fun along the way.

• 2:51:43Speaker 02

  At the, at the end of the day, I'd always come back to thinking about her. And so I kept trying to stuff other stuff into that. And if I said, you know, maybe you stop trying to force and, and, and so she'd been so forgiving with me and so graceful with me and so merciful with me. And I have gone wayward many, many times. And yeah, and I'd finally called her and I said, yeah, let's, uh, let's try this again. Which was probably the best decision I ever made because now I've got the most beautiful,

• 2:52:25Speaker 02

  loyal, devoted wife and most phenomenal mother to my three children. And so I messed a lot of things up in life. I think doing a re-attack on that was, uh, it leads to some really interesting conversations that I pack, you know, the, the, you know, uh, when you go to the S1 or the admin and they're doing your S1 audit, they say like, do you ever get divorced? And like, yes. And like, okay, who's like, who'd you divorce? And then like, are you remarried? I'm like, yes. And like, who, okay, who's in it? Like, and it's always like, this Lance Corporal's like, oh my God, I, uh, this, keep pushing, Lance Corporal, just keep pushing.

• 2:53:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, I, I, I mean, again, I'm only reading a small part of this book and you give a lot more background on the whole situation on, you know, you take ownership of a lot of your behavior. Um, and I think that's, you, you can kind of, as, as I read the story, I was like, yeah, well, that's to be, you know, you can see it. And then even the reconciliation, you can see it as it's, as, as it's being put together, um, that you had to square your shit away. Um, and, and that's what was able to, you know, allow this to happen. Um, but again, I, I think it's just like, man, I mean, the SEAL teams has like a 90% divorce rate. It's like, it's like insane because of all this stuff.

• 2:53:46Jocko Willink?

  You're gone, you're, it's just, it's just, it's just mayhem. I don't know what it is in the military at large, but it's really freaking hard on relationships, really freaking hard on relationships. So, um, I think it's just a way that you spell this stuff out, you talk about it is really important, is going to help a lot of people when, when they're going through this kind of thing. So, um, appreciate you putting it in there. Um.

• 2:54:14Jocko Willink?

  Two thousand fourteen, winter, you're assigned to the School of Infantry. You're gonna, you're the, you become the Director of Combat Instructor School. So what does that exactly mean?

• 2:54:24Speaker 02

  So, the School of Infantry is where all the privates come after they go to boot camp. And so if you're gonna be a non-infantry Marine, you go to a course called MCT where you get like six weeks of basic infantry stuff or four weeks of basic. And then if you're gonna be an infantry Marine, you get three months of your basic. You're a rifleman, machine gunner, mortarman, and so. And then from there, you go out to your unit. And so that, the combat instructors are the ones that receive those privates and PFCs and train them in their, in their, their craft. It's also where we have all the advanced infantry schools. So if you come back as a squad leader to go to the advanced squad leader, advanced machine gunner, uh, the combat instructors are the ones bringing the squad leaders in and teaching them the advanced tactics.

• 2:55:07Speaker 02

  And so, but before you can be an instructor there, you've got to go through a course, Combat Instructor School, and then you go out and you train the privates or you train the sergeants. And so, uh, I was the Director of, of that school, which was, uh, just a phenomenal position, working with the highest caliber sergeants and staff sergeants, uh, in the entire Marine Corps. And it was really, really, uh, refreshing and good for my soul to be around twenty to twenty-five dudes who are at the top of their game every day and just doing grunt shit. Uh, it was, it was a great time.

• 2:55:41Jocko Willink?

  And were you teaching as well?

• 2:55:43Speaker 02

  I did a little bit of the platform instruction, but, uh, I was more like the principal and, and my, I had combat instructors who taught Combat Instructor School. And so, you know, hike with them, go out on the range, oh, I see the range, uh, do a little class here and there. But generally, uh, I, I, my, my instructors did the bulk of the teaching.

• 2:56:02Jocko Willink?

  I always feel like you learn so much when you're in instructor role. And I was very, very lucky to have been in that role quite a few times. I was in E5, man. I was in E5 teaching immediate action drills. And you've learned so much, man. You're detached, you're watching it happen. You see that officer that's looking down his gun instead of looking around. You're like, hey, what are you doing? And by the time you're in that, by the time I was in a position like, it was friggin' awesome. Um, to have been through that from a detached perspective, because you're watching it over and over again. Sir, you're doing that. Meanwhile, Zach is carrying on, by the way. And again, Zach's not here. We're not reading much of his story, but he's,

• 2:56:45Jocko Willink?

  he got married. He married a woman named DeWah. Is that right, DeWah?

• 2:56:50Jocko Willink?

  They're having kids.

• 2:56:53Jocko Willink?

  He graduates from a school.

• 2:56:57Jocko Willink?

  Of course, the Taliban's still gaining power.

• 2:57:01Jocko Willink?

  And that's not good for him. Not good for his family. 2016, they're receiving night letters, which are just straight up death threats from the Taliban to kill him, to hurt his family, kill his family, anyone that helped America. I mean, it's like a nightmare for him.

• 2:57:20Jocko Willink?

  He decides to apply for the Special Immigrant Visa Program.

• 2:57:26Jocko Willink?

  That's a long process, still not even complete for him to this day. So

• 2:57:32Jocko Willink?

  he gets poisoned. At some point, loses his pancreas. So he gets poisoned. He's, you know, his guts hurting. He goes to the doctor. The doctor's like, hey, they're poisoning people. The Taliban's poisoning people. Loses, like I said, loses his pancreas. I mean, it's just horrible.

• 2:57:51Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, still no, still no real progress in

• 2:57:56Jocko Willink?

  in his SIV, you know, to get his visa to get over here.

• 2:58:02Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, you are going through your career. You take command of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. Lucky Lima. So now you're kind of back in the game, back to leading troops. You're gonna go on a

• 2:58:18Jocko Willink?

  deployment. Was the whole deployment planned for Australia?

• 2:58:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:58:23Jocko Willink?

  Damn, I never, I, when I was in the military, man, uh, the, the guys talked about Australia as if it is like the promised land, heaven. And I never went there until I retired. Uh, and it is, it's, it's freaking amazing. Um, there's a place called Nusa. Have you ever heard of this?

• 2:58:44Speaker 02

  I was there.

• 2:58:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There's not too many places in the world I would move to like tomorrow afternoon, but that's a one of them. The freaking waves there. They got like the most incredible waves. There's a place in California called Malibu. I'm sure you've heard of it. There's like 10 Malibus in a row. Like all just different little spots and you can walk, walk down. You ever been to, uh, the San Diego Zoo? The one right here in downtown?

• 2:59:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:59:11Jocko Willink?

  It's all like, uh, all really manicured, these nice paths. And it just looks like, this is like the most like, like Jurassic Park scenario. You can walk around this thing at Nusa is like that. It's like you're on this Jurassic Park, beautiful, nice little trail. And then you're just watching these beautiful, beautiful waves. Um. So you're going to Australia. Uh, you're company commander. How, how was that? How was that? How are you like being in command again?

• 2:59:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. When I was at the School of Infantry, I, there was one regiment, 7th Marine Regiment, which is out in 29 Palms. And they were the only ones doing the special personnel act half. So they were going to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. And so I contacted the monitor and I say, Hey, I want to volunteer to be a company commander because I know it's my time's coming up. I want to go out to 7th Marines. Not a lot of people volunteered to go to 29 Palms. And so within like 30 seconds, he writes me back. It's like, you got it. And this, and the monitor is like a person who's always impossible to get a hold of. You know, you're right in time. And, and this, this instantaneous, you got, you want 29 Palms? No problem. You got it, man. Uh, I'm like, cool. He's like, you're gonna go to 34. I'm like, okay, cool. Uh, and then I find out that they're not even, they had deactivated because of force cut structure.

• 3:00:23Speaker 02

  And then they had reactivated. So there, there's only an H and S company of 34 right now. And I'm like, okay. And by the way, they're going to Australia. And so I call, I called monitor back. I said, Hey, I said, I want to go to 29 Palms. So I can go on one of the deployments to Iraq. And he's like, uh, you said 29 Palms? You got 29 Palms? Gotta go. And so I was initially a little butthurt, but ultimately, yeah, Osheli doesn't suck. There are worse places to be deployed. And so had a good time there. Company Command was awesome. I mean, Company Command was awesome. It's just 150, just savage, aggressive,

• 3:01:05Speaker 02

  out in 29 palms, just attacking, shooting shit, blowing shit up. And great lieutenants, great platoon sergeants, great squad leaders. I mean, just an aggressive company, aggressive workup. It's infantryman's Disneyland out there, you know, and so every day you get to go do great infantry training. And so workup was a blast. It was a great team. I was very, very fortunate to have the team that I had. And then, uh, yeah, we had a good time in Osheli.

• 3:01:31Jocko Willink?

  Any, any major leadership lessons learned there?

• 3:01:35Speaker 02

  A whole lot, um, for sure. I, I think

• 3:01:40Speaker 02

  I've become very obsessive in how I approach training and command. And it's because at a very young age, I gained a great appreciation for the consequence of this profession. That there, that it's not Call of Duty, there is no responding, uh, and that when these kids are dead, they're dead forever. And that the hole that is left is felt for eternity. And, uh,

• 3:02:14Speaker 02

  and having had that shaped me, that's, that's how I, I approach everything that I do is like, I will not stop until I know that these Marines are as lethal as possible. And I had the best opportunity to come back to their moms, you know, and their wives and their children. And, and so push, push, push. And, um, also I'm very competitive. And so like, I want to be the best platoon. I want to be the best company I want. And so. With that in mind, you know, we were the main effort company. We got during all the big exercises and then on deployment, we got to go to Queensland and I got to become part of a Australian battalions that my boss where the rest of everybody stayed back in Darwin.

• 3:02:58Speaker 02

  And so it's like staying in Indiana or being in Malibu, you know, so it's like, uh, you want to get it. And so, uh, it Queensland is much nicer and I was a senior marine in Queensland. So a lot of this like was pretty good.

• 3:03:16Speaker 02

  But I didn't have.

• 3:03:20Speaker 02

  All that came at a cost where I drove my marine so hard that I burned them out.

• 3:03:28Speaker 02

  Pissed them off.

• 3:03:30Speaker 02

  And I could have had a more harmonious approach to leadership. And I look at you either you're either I'm either looking at you professionally or personal as a person, but not both at the same time. And so if you come into my office and you could be anybody and say, hey, sir, this my mom got breast cancer. Okay, whatever I can do to support you right now, how can I help you? Like you have my undivided attention. I care about you. How so I will still treat you very much like I like you're my son and, uh, but outside of that, I'm just, I I'm ruthless. Like, I don't want you to be sorry. I just want you to be better. I don't want your excuses. I just want your results.

• 3:04:15Speaker 02

  The solution is generally just work harder and be more aggressive. And so I drove, you know, redlined the company and that's a long workup, a long deployment. And by the end of it, um, I'd really wore out a lot of those Marines. And I think I, I think I could have had a more harmonious approach to leadership and try to at least keep them humans and Marines kind of a little bit at the same time. But, uh, so, you know, if I have an opportunity to be a battalion commander, I think I'm trying to be more mindful of, of that.

• 3:04:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's definitely something that you, you, uh, a lot of these great leaders or allegedly great leaders or even mythological leaders that we have in the military.

• 3:05:07Jocko Willink?

  You see, that's the thing that shines through about a lot of them. That you don't see on the surface, but when you read about them, or you read their books, like Chesty Puller, like, "Oh, he's just the ultimate hard ass." But when you read about him and how he treated the troops and how much he cared about them. You know, Hackworth the same way, like the hardest dudes you could ever imagine, and yet they would completely know when they were pushing too hard, pull back the reins, protect their guys from stupid shit. And like, that's why these guys were so totally beloved by their troops, because the troops want to get pushed hard.

• 3:05:46Jocko Willink?

  But they don't want to do dumb shit. And they're humans, and they need to get treated that way. So that's definitely some great advice for anybody that's in a leadership position in any scenario. Yeah, you want to push hard. Yeah, you want to win. Yeah, you want to do better than everybody else. And one of the ways to get the most out of your people is to treat them like people.

• 3:06:08Jocko Willink?

  You come back from that deployment. Is that when you actually get remarried, is after that deployment?

• 3:06:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:06:14Jocko Willink?

  So you get remarried.

• 3:06:17Jocko Willink?

  All's looking good. You are now driving across country. Get your next set of orders, and I'm gonna go to the book here. You're driving across country.

• 3:06:29Jocko Willink?

  "Now I had a lot to think about. I'd been to war twice.

• 3:06:35Jocko Willink?

  I had married, divorced, and was about to remarry the same woman. I had commanded a company of Marines, and the Marine Corps had seen fit to select me for a promotion to Major. I was now a career Marine, on my way to spend three years molding future Navy and Marine officers." This is when you're heading to the Naval Academy via some schooling. "As I crossed our nation, I visited the graves of nine Dark Horse Marines. Where and when I could, I visited their families."

• 3:07:09Jocko Willink?

  They were still living, breathing men to me. They certainly were to their families.

• 3:07:17Jocko Willink?

  As I began to turn my thoughts to training and educating future officers, I felt it critical to visit and reflect in the presence of some of the men who had made me who I am.

• 3:07:30Jocko Willink?

  Corporal Tevin Nguyen. Sergeant Jason Pedo. Pedo?

• 3:07:38Jocko Willink?

  Sergeant Jason Pedo.

• 3:07:41Jocko Willink?

  Lance Corporal Alec Cathcart Wood. First Lieutenant Robert Kelly.

• 3:07:48Jocko Willink?

  First Lieutenant William Donnelly the Fourth. Corporal Derek Wyatt.

• 3:07:57Jocko Willink?

  Lance Corporal Arden Benagua.

• 3:08:01Jocko Willink?

  First Sergeant Christopher Carlisle.

• 3:08:05Jocko Willink?

  And Sergeant Matthew Abate.

• 3:08:10Jocko Willink?

  All but Sergeant Pedo and First Sergeant Carlisle died in Sangin. Sergeant Pedo made it back to Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland before he died.

• 3:08:22Jocko Willink?

  First Sergeant Carlisle survived his wounds the day Zach and I watched from a distance, then got promoted, retired, and was killed in a motorcycle accident. I owed him much of my sanity while in Sangin. I needed to tell him that.

• 3:08:42Jocko Willink?

  Matt Abate was the heart and soul of 35. A recipient of the Navy Cross, the second highest award for valor presented by our nation, his death in combat stunned every Marine in the battalion. He was a scout sniper who spent much of his time in support of Kilo Company.

• 3:09:03Jocko Willink?

  He was the one. The one of whom Heraklit spoke, the one who will bring the others back.

• 3:09:13Jocko Willink?

  No one was cooler than Abate. No one cared more than Abate.

• 3:09:21Jocko Willink?

  He was the author of "The Gunfighting Commandments", posted on the wall at PB Fires and now inscribed on the back of his grave marker. Quote.

• 3:09:33Jocko Willink?

  Thou shall never leave the wire without bandana containing at least four inches of slack.

• 3:09:40Jocko Willink?

  In any situation, thou shall blaze. Nothing matters more than thy brethren to thy left and right.

• 3:09:51Jocko Willink?

  Thou shall protect no matter what. When going out in a hail of gunfire, thou shall pop them nugs until the body runs dry of blood. And look hella sick.

• 3:10:19Jocko Willink?

  I found a newspaper article about Abate. It said, Sergeant James Finney, 25, served with Abate in Sangin. When he heard of his friend's death, he had the same reaction as many of the Marines in the battalion.

• 3:10:35Jocko Willink?

  How do we win this war without him?

• 3:10:51Jocko Willink?

  As you're driving across country, as you're stopping by gravestones, as you're talking to families, how is your perspective changing?

• 3:11:09Speaker 02

  These Gold Star families

• 3:11:12Speaker 02

  are incredible.

• 3:11:16Speaker 02

  And the loss for them

• 3:11:19Speaker 02

  is as present today as it was the day they lost their son.

• 3:11:25Speaker 02

  And

• 3:11:28Speaker 02

  The pain doesn't go away. And we have a collective duty and responsibility to carry their son's legacy forward. And to do everything that we can to honor their sacrifice.

• 3:11:47Speaker 02

  I have a personal responsibility to honor these men and how I live.

• 3:11:54Speaker 02

  And a responsibility to the families. And so

• 3:12:00Speaker 02

  Tevin Nguyen was killed December 28th. His son, he'd been there for the birth of his son right before he deployed and that was it. And so going to see little Tevin Jr.

• 3:12:16Speaker 02

  Art of Benaguwa, his first generation American, both his parents immigrants.

• 3:12:24Speaker 02

  Was killed when he was 19.

• 3:12:28Speaker 02

  He was the of that engineer squad attached to Kila Company, he was the 12th Marine that was injured or killed.

• 3:12:38Speaker 02

  And I gotta tell this family like

• 3:12:43Speaker 02

  your son is my hero and your son is the reason I'm alive.

• 3:12:48Speaker 02

  And that everybody in his position before him, who was walking point through Minefield, either died or lost their limb. And your son, when he was 18 years old, still grabbed his pack, grabbed his rifle and a metal detector and walked out in front of us. Never once turning to me at 18 years old and saying, sir, can somebody else take this responsibility?

• 3:13:08Speaker 02

  My son is his namesake.

• 3:13:13Speaker 02

  And the idea that these men knew the consequences ahead of time and went anyways. And then if you told them how the story ends, every single one of them would be right where they were, fighting next to their brothers.

• 3:13:28Speaker 02

  Matt Abate, when he got his Navy Cross, the squad leader got shot and one Marine goes to help the squad leader, he gets blown up, the corpsman goes to help the Marine that gets blown up, he gets blown up, the next Marine goes to help the corpsman, he gets blown up. Finally, everyone recognized, we're in the middle of a minefield and every time somebody moves, they're killed. So people stop moving. It's a normal thing to do. Everybody but one Marine. And he runs and he treats all the casualties, he coordinates them at a back, he grabs the metal detector, sweeps the LZ, doesn't, not trained to do that, just proofs the minefield with his feet, repels the enemy, calls in that helicopter.

• 3:14:14Speaker 02

  And so when I talk to these families, it's it's so heavy, but it's so important. And I just thank God that men like this lived and that I had, and just for a little bit, just for a moment, I got to know them. And not only did these men die well, but they lived well. And they're men to celebrate. And it is my lifelong duty to continue to honor these men every opportunity I get.

• 3:14:58Jocko Willink?

  I know I eventually told Mark Lee's mom a story about Mark. Very similar to what you're talking about, so. I would start off by telling her that in Vietnam, like the point men would rotate. Because you're walking point, you're gonna get ambushed, you're gonna get blown up, you're gonna hit a tripwire, and they would rotate those guys. And in Ramadi, being in a lead vehicle, you're the one that's gonna get blown up, you're the one that's gonna get hit in ID. And especially being the gunner, you know, well now you're not in any armor, and you're just totally, you're exposed. And we'd line up the vehicles and Mark Lee, you know, he's a new guy.

• 3:15:43Jocko Willink?

  And so guess what he is? Turret gunner in vehicle one.

• 3:15:49Jocko Willink?

  Night after night and and when you leave the gate at Ramadi. Uh, when you, when you drive towards the gate to go out into town, there was a uh, vehicle graveyard and there's like.

• 3:16:03Jocko Willink?

  Seventy-five or a hundred vehicles out there and they're ever just twisted and gnarled. They've all been dragged back. And every one of those vehicles represents. One, two, three, four, five casualties, wounded, killed, you know, just, just heinous. And that's what, I don't know who the. I don't know who the hell decided that was a good place for the vehicle graveyard, but it was a shitty place for the vehicle graveyard because that's what you saw. And. Same thing with Mark, man. Never asked for somebody else to take his spot.

• 3:16:51Jocko Willink?

  Some heroic dudes for sure.

• 3:16:55Jocko Willink?

  And did it with a smile on his face. I'd, I'd go, how you feeling? Hey, Mark, what's up, man? How you feeling? And like, his favorite response, he liked to gamble a little bit. He'd say, I'm feeling lucky, sir.

• 3:17:09Jocko Willink?

  So that's the guys we get to work with.

• 3:17:13Jocko Willink?

  Now.

• 3:17:15Jocko Willink?

  Uh, this, you're taking all this with you to be. Um, a professor at, at the Naval Academy, which is a pretty. I mean, you're, you, you've got all this awesome combat experience. I know awesome might not be the right word, but you've got this real experience and you're going to take that back now to.

• 3:17:39Jocko Willink?

  The Naval Academy. How did you, how did you end up getting that billet? How did that billet end up coming about?

• 3:17:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it was a mistake. Um, I, I, uh. I was deployed to Australia and I said, you know, when's the last time you read any fiction? All you do is read biographies and. Uh, you used to be in high school, you were a smart, you liked to do AP literature, you, you're kind of, as you pointed out, nerdy. Uh, and then progressively got dumber through college and, uh, um, maybe try to read a book that isn't just a. And, and so I Googled.

• 3:18:17Speaker 02

  Popular works of fiction and the first one that came up was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I read that and I said, oh, I like this and um. A message came out and we said, we need someone to teach English at the Naval Academy. I know anything about the Naval Academy and not an academy guy. Uh, I'm not an English major, uh, failed English and uh, I said, well, maybe that's me.

• 3:18:41Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like a good pick.

• 3:18:42Speaker 02

  And uh, so I'm a guy that, you know, shoot your shot and uh, put my hat in the ring and yeah, clearly the Marine Corps needs to refine that selection process, but uh, they, they picked me. And uh, before I knew it, I was at Georgetown, uh, in a MA, English MA program. Get in my ass kicked, uh.

• 3:19:08Speaker 02

  Not qualified to be in that program.

• 3:19:11Speaker 02

  And I should have been in the T-ball league and I showed up at the All-Star game.

• 3:19:14Jocko Willink?

  How, how long, how long was that course of instruction?

• 3:19:17Speaker 02

  So it was supposed to be a two-year program. Marine Corps likes to keep the money tight. So 12 months. So I did 12, two-year program in one month, or 12 months. Uh, so yeah, working on a compressed timeline. Been in the fleet at that point for 10, 11 years. Um. And so just through, got thrown in the deep end of the pool, uh, didn't know how to swim.

• 3:19:40Speaker 02

  But it was an incredible experience. It was, it was experience I really needed. Cause I very much was just a hammer and that's all I knew and I had no other tools in life and um. Studying literature and, and writing and it really, uh, it helped me work out a lot of things that I'd not unpacked yet. And uh, so I, I knew I was going to be outside of my comfort zone. I didn't know quite how out of my comfort zone I was, but I was, I was outside of it and uh, from like orientation. To when we're going around the table where I think you just tell people what's your name is like I'm Tom Fromm, it's called like no from orientation I was already out of my depth through conclusion.

• 3:20:23Speaker 02

  But I had a great, I had some great friends that I met there that helped me and I had some great professors and um. Yeah, then I uh, a year later I show up and I start teaching English.

• 3:20:32Jocko Willink?

  And how, how was it when you showed up at the Naval Academy? Had you ever even been to the Naval Academy before?

• 3:20:37Speaker 02

  No, I couldn't even told you where the Naval Academy was when I applied for that position. Just uh, I just thought, I, what I thought is like, they're gonna pay me to go read books and I gotta write a little book report on it. Like that's what I thought like an English program would be. And then we're, we're having these discussions in class and I'm like, what the hell are these words like this is supposed to be English and we're using all these words. I had no idea what anybody's talking about. Like we're doing this close reading and literary analysis and all this kind of stuff and.

• 3:21:05Speaker 02

  But yeah, I got up to Indianapolis, it's beautiful. Uh, and it was an awesome, awesome job. These midshipmen were hungry, they're good, good Americans. And I got to pick my favorite books and then talk to, talk to them about my favorite books, you know? So we're doing Fields of Fire and Matterhorn and Gets Fire and Starship Troopers and uh, and so.

• 3:21:28Jocko Willink?

  That course was not offered when I went to, when I was an English major. I didn't get to do any of those books unfortunately.

• 3:21:33Speaker 02

  And uh, so yeah, teaching these midshipmen poetry and composition and um. But I was teaching a little bit about leadership, uh, literature. I was teaching a little bit about composition and I was teaching a lot about leadership uh, in the classroom and um, it was a super rewarding tour and uh, really, really enjoyed my time there.

• 3:21:55Jocko Willink?

  Now, one thing that you talk about in the book is as you start, as you start teaching, Justin, Justin McLeod, who's one of your Marines,

• 3:22:05Jocko Willink?

  dies of an overdose. And in the same month, two of your other Marines.

• 3:22:14Jocko Willink?

  Die by suicide.

• 3:22:18Jocko Willink?

  You at this juncture.

• 3:22:22Jocko Willink?

  Ask for and get. Counseling, professional counseling.

• 3:22:28Jocko Willink?

  What, what did that consist of? And how did it? Help you?

• 3:22:34Speaker 02

  So. McLeod wasn't my first Marine that, that I lost to the war after it, but McLeod was. Tough in a lot of ways.

• 3:22:44Speaker 02

  I just. I still have a hard time coming out of the yellow, you know, getting into the white and being vulnerable and, and but when I would sing. My daughter to bed and she was one years old at the time, I'd always try to just be real present and vulnerable with her and. Seeing you know. This little light of mine with her and then I just finished that and then I come in my room and one of my Marines from saying, so say you gotta call me.

• 3:23:08Speaker 02

  And. McLeod. He had, he had shown up to three, five and 2008. He had gone on the Iraq deployment, he'd gone on the M U deployment and so he'd done our workup, but then he was going to E A S. He said, you know, I thought I was going to extend, but I just had a son. I'm gonna, I'm gonna E A S and I said, you know, you're my best shot. You're my best nav guy like. Uh, I know you just had a son, but.

• 3:23:35Speaker 02

  We really need you, so do whatever you need to do. If you want to E A S, E A S if you, but I hope you extend. And he comes back and says, you know, sir, you're my family too.

• 3:23:46Speaker 02

  Few months later.

• 3:23:49Speaker 02

  The engineer steps on the pressure plate, the McLeod is over the charge and they both get. Hit and.

• 3:23:59Speaker 02

  I'm about like five people back and as I come up.

• 3:24:05Speaker 02

  As I come up, one of my Marines hands me

• 3:24:11Speaker 02

  McLeod's fingers. And I look at McLeod, he's missing his arm and his legs and like, it was Teague, I said, "Thanks, Teague."

• 3:24:25Speaker 02

  And now I'm in this like weird position. I had these body parts with a body part that doesn't exist anymore. I put them in my cargo pocket. And my engineer's going into shock. So I, all I have is my frog top. So I take my, I take my blouse off, I wrap him in my blouse and I've got nothing on under my flak jacket and I go back to McLeod and initially he's like real calm and cool. He's smoking a cigarette, saying like, "Kill these mothers," you know, whatever. And, but we're having a really hard time landing the medevac burden. There's, there's probably five or six guys all working on him. When you've got an amputee, it takes a couple dudes to patch up, you know, each thing. And so what I would always do is the first thing is I would take a junior Marine off and

• 3:25:10Speaker 02

  once I had security set, once I had the medevac in motion, I would take that junior Marine off so that they can hold security and I get my hands on that Marine's guts. And so but it was dusk and they were having a hard time tailing a laser or smoke. They couldn't, they couldn't see where to land. And so and then every time they'd come in, that zone would get hot and Taliban would start shooting at them. And so they keep waving off. And McLeod starts to succumb to his wounds and

• 3:25:41Speaker 02

  and I, I said IOC and the Marine Corps training is, is just so, it's phenomenal. It prepares you to do the things technically and tactically.

• 3:25:52Speaker 02

  But there's nothing that can prepare you to have a conversation with a guy who you convinced to extend, who said, "I'm going to get out because I want to teach my son to play baseball." Because McLeod had high school scholarship, or college scholarship to go play baseball, but he enlisted instead. And I'm saying, "Hey, you gotta stay here for Desmond because someday you're going to teach him how to play catch and you got, and and knowing that what is he going to be able to do? You know, he's got no arm, no legs.

• 3:26:25Speaker 02

  And he starts a flat line.

• 3:26:29Speaker 02

  And I'm just like, everything in me wants to cry for this Marine. But everybody's, you know, as a leader, like you said, everybody is looking at you, how you're going to respond to this thing. And, and, and I gotta keep trying to talk to this guy about finding that will to live again for his son. And, uh, very, um, and the, the will to live is a powerful thing and he stays and he, and but he, he never stopped fighting that battle and 10 years later, um, sang and claimed him. And, uh,

• 3:27:03Speaker 02

  and so,

• 3:27:06Speaker 02

  yeah, that's what got me on the, the road to PB Abate, but it, it also,

• 3:27:12Speaker 02

  I was still

• 3:27:15Speaker 02

  very destructive in my tendencies, in my thoughts, in my actions. And, uh, and my family was the casualties. And so I was still fighting the war myself in a lot of ways. And being selfish and being harmful. And, uh, my family was the one suffering and, um,

• 3:27:41Speaker 02

  you know, I, I thought, oh, I, I just push, push, push. That's how I've dealt with everything, you push. And, uh, but you, you gotta look at this as, we know how, if, if you're a, if we, we, we do a really good job of teaching our Marines and sailors how to treat casualties physically. If you're, if you're routine, we know it's self aid. If, if you're a priority, it's buddy aid. If you're urgent, it's, it's gotta get to higher echelon of care. And so if you've got a, a sucking chest wound, we say, we gotta get you to the doc. We don't say just, hey, you got a sucking chest wound, you can probably just patch this up, you'd be okay. No, we say, we got it. But what we don't do is say, these invisible wounds, are you routine?

• 3:28:26Speaker 02

  Are you priority or are you urgent? And so, um, you know, if you're routine and you're just having a bad day, that's normal. Everybody has sad day, funky day, whatever. And you just, whatever, whatever you gotta do, put on the Jocko podcast, go for a run, you know, you get out of it, you know? If you're priority, you need some buddy aid. Hey, I'm going through this thing, share it with your buddy. You know, your buddy can kind of fire team, fireman carry you out of that thing. And you, but sometime you got a sucking chest wound.

• 3:28:55Speaker 02

  And talking to your buddy or going for a run is, those are helpful, but they're not going to heal that wound. And I've been bleeding for a long time, but I lacked the self-awareness to be able to triage that. And I also lacked the ability to. And so I needed to go to, just like if I had a stuck chest wound, I want to go to a doctor. I needed to go to a doctor. And so, um, yeah, I, I finally went and, and there's this CPT, cognitive processing therapy, I think it's called. And, and what it does is it brings you to the traumatic

• 3:29:38Speaker 02

  event over and over, which is a super dangerous thing to do by yourself. You know, you can't, you don't, those are all volatile and you need a trained professional to open up your sandbag and start to unpack and pull some of those things out. And, and through like that repeated exposure, you, you, you start to kind of be able to negotiate or navigate that. And, and so my wife says, and I had to distrust her judgment, that that was what saved me in a lot of ways, saved our marriage. And, um, so yeah, I, that, that was kind of how I ended up there. And it was, it was, yeah, it was very helpful.

• 3:30:23Jocko Willink?

  How often do you go?

• 3:30:25Speaker 02

  Well, I went for about nine months while I was at the Naval Academy. And, you know, you're supposed to do, I don't know, 12, 15, 20 sessions of this CPT. And mine got a little truncated because I got orders to the Naval War College. And I haven't been back. But it's at least to a point where it's, I'm not, I don't think I'm an urgent casualty, right? So I think, uh, so probably still benefit from it. But, um, yeah. And, and it's, it's one of those things where it's this self-delusion where you just say, oh, I don't have time for it. I don't have time for it. I got, I got Marines lead. I got,

• 3:31:06Speaker 02

  it's like, man, if you don't get to the root cause of some of the stuff that you're doing, you're gonna.

• 3:31:15Speaker 02

  So make it a priority and also mostly by the way you're just scared of dealing with it and so you're making excuses because you don't have the courage to deal with the tough stuff that's going on inside you and so yeah that's uh that was kind of my my experience with all that.

• 3:31:35Jocko Willink?

  You you mentioned really quickly that you established a charity organization called Patrol Base Abate, P B Abate dot org and that was in November 2020. What's the purpose behind that?

• 3:31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I I I've always been like a person that if there's a problem you should walk point like you should try to figure out how you can contribute and I said this suicide thing whatever's whatever we got going is it seems to be not working and so I said let me go read all the VA suicide reports. So I pulled up you know 10 years of VA suicide reports and what I kept coming back to is that the leading possible cause of veteran suicide were feelings of disconnectness and isolation. So that veterans who are disconnected or isolated are are more vulnerable to to suicide. Okay. And then there's a little

• 3:32:36Speaker 02

  stat that kept showing up that was really surprising and that there's no correlation between combat and suicide in veterans. And that people generally have a like what really? And and that was my same reaction and and but as I thought and reflected on that, when you transition, the thing that you're missing is that tribe and that purpose. And you can find that in other ways, jujitsu, there's plenty of ways where you can find that tribe, find that purpose again. But it not everybody's able to fall into or find that thing. And and I think when I think of a an air crew on a on a C-17 or C-130, when I think of

• 3:33:18Speaker 02

  a motor T crew or comm section, everybody in that unit has said I'm willing to die for you. And everybody in that unit understands that.

• 3:33:30Speaker 02

  Keeping aircraft flying is, that's important. Keeping trucks rolling, like, that's important. The ability to communicate, important. So everybody, when you look at a mission, a mission is a task and purpose. And so the military quite literally issues you, a tribe, here's your squad, you're in first squad. And then they, and then they give you a mission, which, which actually has a purpose built into the mission statement. And so then, as you transition, there's this identity crisis because over your left heart, you've got a name tape that says Navy, Marines, you know? And it's like, we just hand you a piece of paper and say, you're not that thing. You say, well, man, I still, I've been indoctrinated into this thing.

• 3:34:12Speaker 02

  And there's not a process of indoctrination in, out of it. And, and so I said, what is out there that is getting people? If, if isolation and disconnecting is are the, the two big risk factors here? What is out there that's getting all veterans in community? And getting all veterans connected? Because it's, if it's not just a combat veteran problem. And what I found is like, the overwhelming majority of veteran service organizations out there, and there were many, are dedicated to supporting our special operations, our wounded and our Gold Star families. And I am so grateful that as an American, that we recognize the people who've made the most sacrifice,

• 3:34:57Speaker 02

  our special, our Navy SEAL Foundation, our Green Beret Foundation. Like, I'm so happy that we say, these people have paid the most cost. They've given a limb, they've deployed seven, 10, 12 times, special forces, their Gold Star. I'm happy that that's where we've resourced and put and invested in, because these, these people deserve it. But what the data tells us is that there's, there's more to this picture.

• 3:35:23Speaker 02

  And so I didn't find an organization at the time that I felt was inclusive or accessible to everybody that's raised a right hand. And I wanted, and there was always some kind of barrier to entry. Said, you know, you gotta, you don't, you're not disabled enough to be eligible. You're not, you don't have enough of a disorder. You haven't been through combat enough. You, it's always this barrier or check this box, check this box. And then, or they were like very reactive. I've overdosed. I've had a suicide attempt. It was right a bang. Now, now that you're right a bang and that you're in your moment of crisis, now you're eligible. And I said, well, let's, what's preemptive? What's proactive? What's

• 3:36:05Speaker 02

  left of being in this? And I didn't find a whole lot. And I said, let's create a space where your service is your price of admission. That, that you don't, I can, I can check a lot of these boxes, by the way. I don't want to be defined by disorder or by my disability or by, you know, I just want to say, hey, I'm Tom, and I could use some community and I could use some connection. And so we went and we got 350 acres up in Montana. And we said, we're going to do the things that you like to do, veterans. So what are the things that you want to do? Well, let's build around a shared common interest. So we've got a Fight Club that does jujitsu. We've got a strength club that does powerlifting. We've got a music club that's been up there. We've got an art club that's been up there. We've

• 3:36:50Speaker 02

  got a book club that's been up there. We've got a hunting club that's been up there. And so a lot of these organizations are predicated around fishing, for example. And I think that's really good. A lot of healing could happen during that. Not everybody is into fishing, you know? And so like, you, you, you, and so we want to say, I want to say, hey, if it was up to me, I'm a grunt who likes to read. So like, I like to hike and I like to read books. And so like, I would just have PBOT, they'd be like the hiking book club. But that's not everybody's thing. And so we want to say, whatever you're into, if you're willing to walk point. We'll resource you and we'll build a club around you. And so, and we're going to, and we're going to fly you up to where our dojo is, is on the side

• 3:37:34Speaker 02

  of a mountain in a Montana River Valley. There's no more beautiful dojo in the world to roll than on the side of that mountain, the P B Abate. There's no better place to lift weights or, and so, and we fly you out free of cost. We pick you up, we feed you, it's all free of cost because it's all this idea of so many veterans, especially G W veterans or post nine 11 veterans are conditioned, this thing where, well, I was just a, and they use this just, and we've, we've really, I think largely through social media, constructed this hierarchy of what it means to serve. And if you weren't in Ramadi, or if you weren't part of this organization, or you like, and

• 3:38:15Speaker 02

  it's this weird competition of, and this redefinition, redefining of what service means. It's like, no, service means you raise your right hand, you swore an oath to the constitution, you did that for four years honorably. That is what service is by definition. And so, you serve something greater than yourself. And, and so, we want the airmen, the sailor, the soldier, the marine, the national guard, the reservist, active duty PFC, if you, if you raise your right hand, you're eligible and you're in, no additional qual. And, and like, many people, when we would say this, they'd be like, wait, me? Oh, I'm just a, nope, I'm just an airmen. I'm just a motor tease. Like, nope, we actually built this place for you. Like, for me, well, I would go, but I can't afford it. It's like, oh, good, because it's free of cost.

• 3:38:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I would go, but like, I don't do that. It's like, what do you do? Well, let's go do that thing. And, and so, we've run two, we call it the return to base program. We've run two summers of it. And, you know, the pillars are getting around the fire, because I really think that connection forms around the fireside chats, getting out in nature, because I think, I believe good things happen outside, and then getting back into service. And so, we do a service project around there. And then we sustain that through local chapters. And so, we just say like, what sandbag do you want to fill? We need somebody to walk point. And we created this space for you. And we got a big tent, we got a seat for you at the table.

• 3:39:43Speaker 02

  Come on, get in community, get connected. And that's what we've been doing, and it's been pretty incredible to be a part of it.

• 3:39:50Jocko Willink?

  How many people have you put through in the two summers?

• 3:39:52Speaker 02

  About 150 people up to Montana and then we're still running another program this fall. And you know, if we can't do the thing that you do on the side of a mountain, I'll find a way to support you. So, so somebody said, hey, I'm in the scuba diving. Can't scuba dive on the side of the mountain. So, okay, so I found a partner down in the Bahamas and we're going to send 15 veterans out in October. And so about 150, but people who have been through our local chapter programs. I mean, it thousands, right? And so every month all around this country, you've got PB Abate, New York, Boston, Orange County, San Diego, Austin, meeting and getting into community and getting connected.

• 3:40:35Speaker 02

  And so it's been pretty awesome to watch it grow and yeah.

• 3:40:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that sounds awesome. And if people want to support it, they go to PBAbate.org to support it.

• 3:40:48Speaker 02

  That's the best way.

• 3:40:50Jocko Willink?

  So, trying to, trying to follow the book a little bit here. By summer 2021, meanwhile, while this is going on, Zach and his world is falling apart.

• 3:41:03Jocko Willink?

  In Afghanistan, the Taliban is taking over.

• 3:41:09Jocko Willink?

  Time is short. Again, you detail a lot of stuff in the book, but you go into like full combat mode, but administrative effort to get Zach and his family out of there. And you're going down. I mean, you're just, you're taking everything you can possibly do to get this done. Social media, fundraising, senior military leaders, politicians, to try and get something going to get him out of there. And of course, this is no small task because at the time, there's tens of thousands of other people that are also trying to get out of Afghanistan as all of this stuff, as it starts to fall apart.

• 3:41:53Jocko Willink?

  And, and just to give a little bit of Zach's perspective here. And again, I'm fast forward, there's so much, so much more detail in the book, get the book.

• 3:42:04Jocko Willink?

  This is from Zach, "On July 16th, 2021, when Tom told me I needed to get to Kabul and explained why, I had to stop and sit for a moment. I was relieved that more people than just Tom and I cared about the survival of my family, but I knew chaos was coming. I just needed it to be still before it began. I just needed to be still before it began. Even when you've been planning for it, the thought of leaving your home forever is overwhelming. How do you say goodbye to your family members when you know you may never see them again? How do you kiss your mother for the last time? How do you keep from forgetting the smell of her hair after you do? I sat on the terrace of our home, where so many of the simple things at the center of my life had happened:

• 3:42:46Jocko Willink?

  childhood, marriage, my children taking their first steps. They were moments as tied to a place as I was. Now I was being forced to leave them behind with my home. For all my sadness, there was no hiding from the situation. Life for regular Afghans was bad and getting steadily worse. I was living in hiding. The Taliban's messages, which had long made it clear they were looking for me and would kill me for working with the Americans when they found me, were growing bolder and coming more often. I could not live in Kunar. I could not survive there. More importantly, my family could not. When I learned that the Americans left Bagram in the middle of the night on July 2nd, I thought about my own times flying in and out

• 3:43:31Jocko Willink?

  of there. I remembered how the airbase felt like it could not contain all the planes and helicopters. It seemed like America's power was without end. I had placed my faith in that. I did not see then how the Americans and our government would ever let the Taliban come back.

• 3:43:51Jocko Willink?

  But here the Taliban were, leaving me messages at my family's doorstep during the night."

• 3:44:00Jocko Willink?

  So it's just awful for him and um at this point the book kind of kind of turns into a suspense espionage spy political thriller. It's it's mayhem, but it's not a novel. It's what's really going on and what's really happening to this real person and his real family. And and one thing that's cool is the way this the way the book is set up, it's telling it both from your perspective and then you hear his perspective and then you hear his perspective and you hear hear your perspective. As you're trying to coordinate this movement and linkups and bona fides and messages and

• 3:44:43Jocko Willink?

  like dying batteries on cell phones, right? Which you think, you know, when you're in a first world problem, you know, oh no, my cellphone died and I'm not going to be able to get a message until I get to my car and get it charged, right?

• 3:44:58Jocko Willink?

  Um, you know, he's out there, his his batteries low and he's literally standing at the wall trying to make comms.

• 3:45:08Jocko Willink?

  It it's it's it's a crazy scene. And again, we all, I mean, everybody watched this on the news. But to hear somebody that was on the ground, their perspective as they're trying to escape, this is Zach again, at the airport wall. So he's at the wall trying to get into the airport. A Taliban fighter stood closer to the wall and was watching the crowd and AK-47 hanging across his chest. He saw us looking up at the American on the tower roof. He looked in the same direction and reached out to alert his friends. I saw him look up at the American again. I could tell they made eye contact with each other. The Taliban put his pistol, put his hand on his pistol grip of his AK.

• 3:45:51Jocko Willink?

  The American reached towards his hip, but another American standing on a half wall below him, reached out to grab his leg. He shook his head, no. And the one on the tower moved his hand away from his hip. The Taliban below made their hands into the shape of pistols and pointed them at the American as he carefully climbed down and stepped back over the wire. I kept my eyes focused on him. I could not see his face. I did not know if it was Major Jared LaFever. Is that right, LaFever? Major Jared LaFever, but I felt in my heart that this was the moment. Then I saw him lift his hand to his mouth and speak into a phone. A message arrived on my own in the group chat with Tom and Jared.

• 3:46:34Jocko Willink?

  The text said, "Put your son on your shoulder." I lifted my son over his head, over the shouting, sweating mass of people. He was wearing a bright blue shirt, as John Shattuck had told me to have him do early that morning. The American waved me closer. I grabbed my family and we fought through the crowd to the base of the wall with our new friend following. As we pushed my countrymen aside, I was nodding at the man I knew now as Major LaFever. He shouted to me, "Do you have your family?" "Yes," I yelled back, "and one more." Major LaFever turned to the three Americans next to him, all large men and heavily armed. I could not hear them all talking, but from their gesture I could tell they were trying to decide

• 3:47:18Jocko Willink?

  how to pull seven people up and over the wall. They began to attract attention from more of the Taliban. Drowning people will reach for any hand they see. The crowd was beginning to move toward the base of the wall below where they stood. The Americans finished conferring and began to move. My eyes were locked on Major LaFever as he sent me a text. "We have to figure out how to get you to us at the door to your left."

• 3:47:50Jocko Willink?

  And that's the way this book goes, reading through this. It's agonizing and you just don't know how this is gonna end. Other than the fact that the title of the book indicates that, you know, we have to keep the faith. You keep the faith. Zack keeps the faith and ultimately the servicemen and women on the ground remain faithful. And Zack does get through all kinds of gates and wickets to get him and his family out of there.

• 3:48:27Jocko Willink?

  Gets out before the attack at Abbey Gate.

• 3:48:33Jocko Willink?

  Which happened a few days after he left where we lost one US Army soldier, one US Navy corpsman, and 11 United States Marines.

• 3:48:44Jocko Willink?

  Perhaps the last to die for that particular cause and that particular nation by that particular enemy, or

• 3:48:54Jocko Willink?

  perhaps not, only time will tell.

• 3:48:58Jocko Willink?

  But Zack made it out and, and made it to America and

• 3:49:05Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it's, it's very powerful. It's very powerful to hear his,

• 3:49:12Jocko Willink?

  you know, his perspective. Let me just give you a little bit of that. This is when he's back. "I was willing to risk my life. Thousands of my fellow Afghans lost theirs. I worked for my people and country in pursuit of a better future for all of us. But I also worked with and for the Americans because they came to help us build a better Afghanistan. I would do it again. I would still sacrifice my, myself for my country, for my people, and for America, the country that saved and welcomed me and my family.

• 3:49:48Jocko Willink?

  Too many good people died for a dream for me to ignore the obligation to pay it back. The Taliban were not our only problem. The corruption in our own national government was a chain around our collective necks. Leaders must earn their positions by deserving the trust of the people. A government with anything less will never survive and the governed will never thrive. Too many of our leaders bought their way into power as a means of enriching themselves. Too many warlords held on to power by force, placing themselves ahead of the people they were supposed to protect. It was a frail system that fell when the foreign support holding it up ceased to exist.

• 3:50:33Jocko Willink?

  For now, the Taliban own Afghanistan. The Afghan people are again living in a nightmare.

• 3:50:41Jocko Willink?

  People I love who are still there are suffering. They are starving with no food and no money with which to buy it."

• 3:50:49Jocko Willink?

  Modern medical care is already only a memory. Security and freedom are a dream. When they seized the nation, the Taliban claimed that former members of the security forces and people who worked with the Americans would be safe in a Taliban regime. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now. The executions and torture have already begun. I knew that was coming.

• 3:51:17Jocko Willink?

  The Taliban told me themselves.

• 3:51:31Jocko Willink?

  And you know, those statements about Afghanistan and the leadership really apply anywhere. And corruption and nepotism and arrogance and power-hungry leaders are the downfall of any organization, any team, any company, and any country.

• 3:51:50Jocko Willink?

  And we have to definitely be aware of that ourselves. And pay attention.

• 3:52:00Jocko Willink?

  When was the first time you saw Zach when he got to America?

• 3:52:04Speaker 02

  I flew out to Minnesota to see him. He'd been in a refugee camp in Virginia. I think it's Fort Pickett for a while. And kind of tough to get down there, get into the camp. And so he'd been maintaining all along that he wanted to go to Texas because his cousins were there. And important to assimilate with family. His cousins had also been interpreter and got here a couple of years ago. And so he was under the impression that he would get to Texas until about 24 hours. They said, you're going to Minnesota tomorrow in January. And Minneapolis in January is not Texas. And so he was in a kind of bad spot. And so I flew up there, got to see him, got to see his family, and then.

• 3:52:48Speaker 02

  He'd been waiting for like a work permit and it's better if you stay within the resettlement process because if you pull out of the resettlement process, you kind of get reset back to zero. And he had just received that work permit about the day or two before I showed up to Minnesota and he told me I got my work permit. I said, so do you need to be in Minnesota? He said, no. And I said, let's go to Texas. So the next day we were on a flight, what was it? Seven passengers, eight bags, four car seats with a layover in Denver.

• 3:53:21Speaker 02

  But we landed in San Antonio that night and it was good to see the mission through.

• 3:53:29Jocko Willink?

  And what's he up to right now?

• 3:53:32Speaker 02

  He works construction, hanging drywall at a cancer hospital, six days a week, 12 hours a day. And he just, but he just had a son while we were in New York together. So two weeks ago he had a son. And so now, so Jad is his fifth kid and American by birth.

• 3:53:53Jocko Willink?

  I've been having some great conversations with Vietnam guys and some Vietnamese that came over, you know, after the war and just their, their work ethic and what they instilled in their kids is just amazing. And, you know, when you hear about Zach, like hanging drywall 12 hours a day, it's like this guy's going to make something happen. He is going to make something happen. Just, just an awesome story of, of, you know,

• 3:54:32Jocko Willink?

  just the, the unceasing faith that you two had in each other to make this happen.

• 3:54:40Jocko Willink?

  So where are you at now?

• 3:54:44Speaker 02

  I'm back at 35, get some.

• 3:54:47Jocko Willink?

  Get some's their legit motto, right? Where do I try to research where that came from when they start saying that?

• 3:54:53Speaker 02

  In Iraq is where it.

• 3:54:55Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 3:54:56Speaker 02

  So they were they did they were Phantom Fury, Al Fager. And and so, um, yeah, I'm Dark Horse 3 and I'm the operations officer for 35. So we're training and getting ready to deploy next summer.

• 3:55:13Jocko Willink?

  You deploy next summer. Any idea where you guys are going?

• 3:55:15Speaker 02

  Pacific AO.

• 3:55:16Jocko Willink?

  Pacific AO, get some.

• 3:55:18Speaker 02

  Get some.

• 3:55:21Jocko Willink?

  I guess that kind of brings us up to present day, right? Probably a pretty good place to wrap it up. I know you got some Marines to go lead. What do we miss?

• 3:55:31Speaker 02

  No, I think we got it.

• 3:55:33Jocko Willink?

  For people to for people to find you, first of all, um, the book, uh, Always Faithful. It's available anywhere. Um, order it. We'll put a link to it. Right, Echo Charles?

• 3:55:45Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:55:45Jocko Willink?

  We will. We collectively will do that so people can find it and get it.

• 3:55:52Jocko Willink?

  Patrol Base Abate, that's your your organization. Go and check that out. PBabate.org.

• 3:56:05Jocko Willink?

  I found like a kick ass little video of Sergeant Abate too. It's like 30 seconds long. Um, I don't know if there's any more video. If there is, please let me know. He could just tell he's just like, like, whatever percentage of charisma, whatever percentage of just being a badass. It's freaking legit. You're on Instagram? You are at kill dot zone, but it's spelled funny. Z zero. So it's Z and then a zero and then an N and then a three. So at kill zone is where you're at on Instagram.

• 3:56:48Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, you got any questions?

• 3:56:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, how'd you crash your motorcycle back in the day?

• 3:56:53Speaker 02

  I crashed it twice.

• 3:56:56Jocko Willink?

  Your mom really hates it.

• 3:56:58Speaker 02

  Because I tried to go too fast too soon and so about lost my thumb and that's when I kind of retired from.

• 3:57:06Speaker 01

  Just sort of randomly or was it like a very specific incident where, you know, you made some raw, specific wrong decisions?

• 3:57:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, too fast in a turn and laid it down.

• 3:57:15Speaker 01

  Okay, everyone that I know that has a motorcycle or had a motorcycle has crashed it. Varying levels of injury or whatever. So that's kind of the thing.

• 3:57:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:57:25Jocko Willink?

  I like, you know, I mentioned Mark Lee liking to gamble. I like to gamble and man, the odds. When you're riding a motorcycle, the odds are just not in your favor for, for being okay when, when whatever happens. Happens and it's happening.

• 3:57:40Speaker 01

  Oh, that's what it, I mean, I don't know every single person in the world with a motorcycle, but every single person that I know. That had a motorcycle crashed it, including myself, by the way. And I didn't even own the motorcycle. I had my friend's motorcycle for the summer. I laid it down. So it's like all.

• 3:57:57Jocko Willink?

  But you didn't get injured? When was that?

• 3:57:58Speaker 01

  College.

• 3:58:00Jocko Willink?

  But you didn't get injured?

• 3:58:01Speaker 01

  No, I handled, but I still understood.

• 3:58:04Jocko Willink?

  What kind of bike did you have? Did you have a superbike? Did you have a Harley?

• 3:58:07Speaker 02

  I had a, my first bike was a Victory and then my second bike was a Ducati.

• 3:58:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah, that Ducati gets way tempting, doesn't it? I mean, that thing just wants you to roll.

• 3:58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's almost like one of those inevitable slippery slopes. Well, correct me. I don't know. Everybody's different. To a degree where you go fast and you're like, you kind of feel the power a little bit, but you don't want to push it. And then you kind of get coming, you're like, I can go faster. I can go faster and it just never stops, right? Till you crash.

• 3:58:36Speaker 02

  And I moved through that progression very rapidly.

• 3:58:40Jocko Willink?

  Well, we're going to, um, we're going to support your mom on the anti motorcycle gig here.

• 3:58:45Speaker 02

  Fair enough.

• 3:58:47Jocko Willink?

  Tom, any final thoughts?

• 3:58:48Speaker 02

  No, sir.

• 3:58:50Jocko Willink?

  Well, hey, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for sharing your lessons. Thanks for your continued service with the Marine Corps. And thanks for keeping the faith with your interpreter, Zach, who never let you down in the field, and you did not let down when he and his family needed you. And to everyone out there right now that's still holding the line, I recommend we remember the guidance from Sergeant Matt Abate. In any situation, thou shall blaze.

• 3:59:28Jocko Willink?

  Nothing matters more than thy brethren to thy left and right. Thou shall protect no matter what, until the body runs dry of blood. Thanks, Tom.

• 3:59:44Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 3:59:46Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Tom Schuman has left the building. Echo, I would say, you know, when you, when you reflect on, just talking about Tom's first deployment, you know, he's a platoon commander. There's just so much responsibility. And that's what's, that's what's good. If, you know, if you, if you've been in the military, you've, you've, you've had so much responsibility that for people in the civilian sector out there, you hire someone to run a branch or run a manufacturing facility, and they've had this much weight.

• 4:00:21Jocko Willink?

  There's a really good chance that they're going to have some good lessons learned and, and being able to do a good job. It's just a lot of weight is on the shoulders of these young, young soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines out there. A lot of weight, a lot of burden on these young guys. And it's, it's, it's, look, this, this highlights the story of an officer, but the young, the, the, the young corporals, the sergeants, it's just really is an incredible thing that we send these young men and women to do out there on the battlefield. And

• 4:00:54Jocko Willink?

  I'm glad we were able to capture some of these lessons and share them. And um, yeah, so there we go. So thanks again to Tom for coming down here and to 35 for letting him come down for the day. Appreciate everyone's support for the podcast. Um, if you want to support the podcast and you want to support yourself, you know, get yourself some of that Jaco fuel. Get yourself some of that Jaco fuel.com. Have you tried Pink Mist yet?

• 4:01:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:01:19Jocko Willink?

  How do you like it?

• 4:01:20Speaker 01

  I like it. It reminds me of, it doesn't remind me, but it's similar to like the orange where it's like you. I'm not saying you can't go wrong because of course you can go wrong, but it's one of those ones where it's like, it was good, but I just wasn't surprised that it was good. You know, it's like that kind.

• 4:01:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So we're talking about new flavor of Discipline Go. It's called Pink Mist. It's like a pink lemonade scenario.

• 4:01:45Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of hard to make the word pink. Sound cool, but when you put pink, that's probably the only way to make pink sound cool. Pink Mist. So there you go. That's our, our energy drink. Here's the thing.

• 4:02:00Jocko Willink?

  This is not normal energy drink. There's no chemicals in there. There's no sugar in there. It's literally good for you. So go get some Jaco Discipline Go and it'll really help you out in life.

• 4:02:11Speaker 01

  I think it was you doing a speech to a group of people. Might've been life. I don't know. Might've been at origin at the camp, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Either way. But here was the, here was one of the many points where there's like, there's companies where they'll be like, hey, let's make an energy drink. And they'll be like, okay, so what are we going to put in this energy drink? Cause we got to sell it.

• 4:02:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what they're going to put in, whatever the consumer will want right now.

• 4:02:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it was.

• 4:02:39Jocko Willink?

  And what's cheapest?

• 4:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you, and you made, you said this more eloquently than me, but I'm going to, I'm going to say what I really gathered from it. And it was kind of, um, like it was, it kind of haunted me a little bit where. You have a company that's like, okay, let me make an energy drink. What are we gonna put in it? Okay, let's put some caffeine in it for the energy, right? So, okay, cool caffeine, we'll put this much in, however much, right? He goes, okay, but we gotta preserve it, or we gotta make it taste good, and we gotta, you know, cuz we gotta get them to drink it. Right? Seems, seems, seems like, oh, of course you gotta get them to drink it.

• 4:03:10Jocko Willink?

  Add sugar.

• 4:03:11Speaker 01

  But, so let's put sugar, okay, so sugar.

• 4:03:14Jocko Willink?

  We want it to be really good, though, more sugar.

• 4:03:17Speaker 01

  More sugar, and, you know, okay, so, and even at this point, sugar is like, cool. Like, that's nothing new, you know? Oh, no, no, let's put like some other stuff, some chemicals, some preservatives in here, some stuff that, and then after a while, these things start to adding up, right? All these little ingredients, and it's like, okay, has anyone ever thought of like, wow, what this is gonna do to like, you know, seventeen year old kid, or a person, or whatever, if they drink one of these every day, which is kind of the goal? Man, if they, if everyone drank one every day, that'd be freaking awesome, right? As far as, okay, so, has anyone taken, taken account for, like, what if these people are drinking one of these, two of these, every single day? Like, what's gonna happen to them? Oh, yeah, we did that, but, like, we don't care about that, we just want them to drink them every day.

• 4:04:02Speaker 01

  Oh, what if, what if, like, what if it's really bad for them? And what if it causes maybe some deaths? Oh, well, we don't care about that, you know, as long as they're drinking them every day, kind of a thing. And that's kind of the, the picture that was kind of painted there, where it's like, bro, that's true, that's true.

• 4:04:17Jocko Willink?

  It's a hundred percent true, and they can, they cut the corners on the costs. Our drinks like three times more to make.

• 4:04:25Speaker 01

  Well, if they cut the corner.

• 4:04:27Jocko Willink?

  Four times more than some of the, than what's, what some of these other companies are putting in their drinks.

• 4:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and if they cut costs, that means they pay less for it, that means they get more money when you, you know, like, so it makes, it's weird cuz it makes sense on one hand, but on the other hand, it's so like sinister, you know?

• 4:04:42Jocko Willink?

  So, nothing sinister on our side, only goodness, only the goodness.

• 4:04:45Speaker 01

  Only the goodness.

• 4:04:46Jocko Willink?

  The goodness of monk fruit.

• 4:04:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Put some caffeine in there, not too much, though.

• 4:04:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but just ninety-five milligrams, but we got some new tropics in there, make sure you get all the energy that you're gonna need. So, there you go, get some Jaco fuel, get some milk, I've been on the milk train lately. Peanut butter, be honest with you. Ben's just going hard in the paint with peanut butter. It's so good. It's so good. It's ridiculous. Uh, so jockofuel.com. You can also go to the vitamin shop. Vitamin shop has pink mist, by the way. Little exclusive scenario going on with them right now. And also you can get the stuff at Wawa. Hey, by the way, RTDs, ready to drink.

• 4:05:23Speaker 01

  Molk.

• 4:05:24Jocko Willink?

  Molk. It's out there. It's a protein meal. It's a protein dessert. It's a protein provider of goodness to you. And it's ready to drink.

• 4:05:36Speaker 01

  It's so funny how like we had like a little stockpile, like a pre-sale stockpile at camp. And they were like, oh, this is the, we'll, we'll have enough just for the campers and you know, just not.

• 4:05:45Jocko Willink?

  No, well, we, what we thought was we will reserve multiple pallets. It'll be more than enough to last one week. Dude, people went ham. Cause once you taste one, you're like, I'm gonna have, oh, I'm gonna have one for breakfast, one for lunch, one for dinner.

• 4:06:00Speaker 01

  I'm putting my cereal.

• 4:06:01Jocko Willink?

  Putting in my cereal. It's all good. We're freaking drinking this stuff 24.

• 4:06:03Speaker 01

  And it lasts like two days.

• 4:06:04Jocko Willink?

  Lasts like two days.

• 4:06:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like two days and that was it.

• 4:06:08Jocko Willink?

  So we, uh, we are on the path, just trying to produce as much of the ready to drink milk as we possibly can right now. To get it out there. Cause it's delicious and it's freaking good for you.

• 4:06:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So good.

• 4:06:23Speaker 01

  Drink as many as you want.

• 4:06:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, that's all jockofuel.com. Hey, speaking of jiu-jitsu. Originusa.com. We're making jiu-jitsu gees. We're making jeans. We're making boots. We're making hunt gear.

• 4:06:38Speaker 01

  Hey, the Delta 68 has new colors or something like this? I saw like a picture, little thing.

• 4:06:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The, the, one of the wash houses, which is like a giant machine, a series of machines that can wash things at a high rate. So they get like. worn they get broken in

• 4:07:01Speaker 01

  yeah is that the traditional way cuz you know how you have a lighter color jean then you have the freaking dark dark ones

• 4:07:07Jocko Willink?

  it's called wash house now wash houses are really hard to build and we have one but ours wasn't working but you know the team down there in North Carolina has been busting their ass getting the wash house back up and running we had to get new machines had to get them installed put in there and now we have like the original wash house from the golden era of American textile is back up and running I think we're playing bro we're not playing we're not playing

• 4:07:37Speaker 01

  I know you're not are you gonna do acid wash remember acid wash I don't think so I feel like acid watch

• 4:07:44Jocko Willink?

  that right there is up there with like hair metal to me I don't like it

• 4:07:47Speaker 01

  right yeah it's weird how acid wash at the time was freaking awesome by the way

• 4:07:51Jocko Willink?

  not me I never liked it

• 4:07:52Speaker 01

  blah blah blah it was awesome in the time

• 4:07:54Jocko Willink?

  I'm happy I don't have any pictures of me wearing acid wash jeans or affliction t-shirts

• 4:08:01Speaker 01

  interesting

• 4:08:02Jocko Willink?

  remember when affliction was all wild and all the companies had all the weird designs

• 4:08:05Speaker 01

  I have a few pictures of us and you have it's not affliction but it's like in that direction but it was like throw down cuz a lot of people was following suit

• 4:08:14Jocko Willink?

  they had one that was a little bit and also you know what my my caveat here is I did wear some walkout shirts like for a specific fighter for a specific camp for a specific fight which I can't remember may or may not have been straight up just like cheesy affliction but luckily for me I didn't own one so no you weren't there are pictures of me at the club represent remember the affliction jeans do that like weird

• 4:08:42Speaker 01

  they go hard man they go hard those affliction

• 4:08:45Jocko Willink?

  you take something

• 4:08:46Speaker 01

  I think the jeans were acid wash

• 4:08:48Jocko Willink?

  you know yeah they were but you know the you know the book the dichotomy of leadership if you take anything and you make it an extreme it can become bad

• 4:08:54Speaker 01

  yeah

• 4:08:54Jocko Willink?

  so if you take like jeans and there's like thread on them then you start going crazy with it it turns bad you get if you put a pair of jeans in a wash house and they become like comfortable and a little bit faded That's cool, but then you put like acid on them and they look all weird. That's not cool. You can't take stuff to an extreme.

• 4:09:11Speaker 01

  I understand and that and that's why they kind of stuck in the eighties where you went hard and it was like freak out.

• 4:09:18Jocko Willink?

  Coming back, right? Yeah, because there's a show called Stranger Things, which I have not watched, but my daughters watch or yeah, one of my daughters is into it.

• 4:09:26Speaker 01

  But and do you think? Okay, and even me just starting to say, ask this question, I feel like you're probably one of the last people to ask about this or maybe one of the first. I don't know, but do you think that like, you know, things always come back, right? The retro and it comes back and you know, all this and fashion is one of those ones. But isn't there always like one, two, three things that are like, that's too hardcore eighties that that'll never come back?

• 4:09:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's true, but here's an interesting thing. First of all, the eighties in my mind, it seems like it was a few years ago. But it's like thirty five years ago. So when I was a kid, sixties stuff, right? Sixties and seventies, like things were like hype. But that was only, I mean, this is in the eighties for me. So they only like fifteen years old and they were still hype.

• 4:10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:10:13Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying? So it's weird that we're talking about things that are coming back, but it's been forty years since the eighties.

• 4:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:10:22Jocko Willink?

  Just straight Miami Vice activity going down.

• 4:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:10:25Jocko Willink?

  Did you like Miami Vice?

• 4:10:27Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, here and there, but I guess.

• 4:10:30Jocko Willink?

  That was kind of a big thing when I was a kid.

• 4:10:31Speaker 01

  Some guy I used to work with at the valet used to say like, oh, your tubs from Miami Vice.

• 4:10:36Jocko Willink?

  Oh, somebody did a Photoshop of you and me as crubs, uh, tubs and crockett and it looked legit.

• 4:10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:10:44Jocko Willink?

  They done a good job. They did a good job of that. That made me laugh and you kind of, I will say, you kind of got a little bit of tubs going on.

• 4:10:52Speaker 01

  That's what they said. I did. I didn't gather that at the time, but hey, cool, man. If more than one percent, I, you know, lend it some weight.

• 4:11:00Jocko Willink?

  All right. Uh, so there you go.

• 4:11:02Speaker 01

  So no acid wash?

• 4:11:03Jocko Willink?

  No acid wash. We'll prevent that from happening.

• 4:11:05Speaker 01

  Right on. Uh, also Jock the store, Jock the store. Discipline equals freedom. If you want to represent with a shirt, a hoodie. What winter, what fall, right? Is it fall right now and winter? You know, we've got some hoodies on there. Discipline equals freedom. Standard issue, sure, is on, it's rolling.

• 4:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the standard issue, speaking of which, layers.

• 4:11:27Speaker 01

  Layers, but people are representing currently as we speak. So yeah, look out for that. Also, we got the shirt locker, which is the subscription. People are representing that hardcore. I'll just see random people. Oh, that's our shit. That's the locker.

• 4:11:39Jocko Willink?

  Full on supporting.

• 4:11:40Speaker 01

  Yep, we get a new design every month. They're new, they're creative. See if you can recognize them.

• 4:11:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, supporting, appreciate the support and subscribe to the podcast. Also, also we have Jaco on the ground. We just recorded a couple of those, what, yesterday? So that's where we answer your questions directly. We also cover some, some subjects that I have been coming up with. I, you always give me some subjects. I feel a little bit bad because so far I think we've done one of your subjects out of 50.

• 4:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:12:12Jocko Willink?

  So I gotta open my mind a little bit more, you know? Accept what you're putting down. Maybe also I'm not seeing the vision, like you're putting some, you know, we should talk about this thing. And I'm not really, I'm like thinking, what the, what is this gonna get us?

• 4:12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I have to figure that out about you. Like, what is it exactly that goes through your mind that, that says, okay, I could talk about this versus I won't, um, because here's, here's, I'll think of something or I'll come across something or something will be presented to me. And then I'll be like, hey, that's interesting. I wonder what Jaco would think about this. So then I'm like, oh, like, write it down.

• 4:12:49Jocko Willink?

  I've never gotten that vibe from your suggestions. I've only gotten like, what is this?

• 4:12:57Jocko Willink?

  I've only gotten like, why is this interesting? You'll be like, talk about something. And I'm like, I don't understand how that's good. So we'll do one of my subjects again.

• 4:13:09Jocko Willink?

  Are you disappointed when you get the notes and you're like, oh, he didn't pick my subject again? You feel like you're spinning your wheels and wasting your time?

• 4:13:15Speaker 01

  No, I never do. I never do. But disappointed sometimes, you know, maybe here and there. Because sometimes, especially the list that I just sent you, some of those were just like a thought that popped in my, and I just wrote it down. So, and I just.

• 4:13:27Jocko Willink?

  Which one is the best one?

• 4:13:29Speaker 01

  Best one what?

• 4:13:29Jocko Willink?

  The best idea that you have had.

• 4:13:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. I'd have to look at it.

• 4:13:33Jocko Willink?

  Bro, they can't be that good of ideas if you don't even remember them.

• 4:13:35Speaker 01

  I think they're all pretty good. I thought they were all pretty good. Oh, uh, here's, here's one. I don't know if it's the best one, but like the difference between, um, like pain and suffering. So it's more like the, it's like the concept. I mean, and maybe I won't put into words as good, but the idea that like, you know how when you feel pain, the natural instinct is to be like, oh, it's pain. So avoid it. But then every once in a while you have a certain type of pain that you know is not like damage. It's not damage. You know, it's like whether it be for a good cause or it's more for like constructions, just like, like if you, you know, when you lift weights now. So when I was a little kid, I used to like do pushups or whatever. And then the next day my arms and chest would be sore and I used to hate it. Cause I didn't know what it was. I'd be like, oh, I don't want that feeling. I don't. But then when you

• 4:14:16Speaker 01

  realize what part of the process it is, you kind of like now as an adult and we talked about this before offline or whatever, where when you have DOMs, you kind of have like, whether it be from jujitsu or lifting, you kind of have a better feeling. Cause you know you're sort of in the game. So it's like, you won't avoid that anymore. In fact, it's kind of like a, so what's the difference? Like where's the difference? You know? And, and can you just flip it over mentally? See what I'm saying? Cause certain pain, you can be like, oh, this sucks. Wait a second. Wait a second. You know, see what I'm saying?

• 4:14:47Jocko Willink?

  I think I'm starting to recognize why these subjects are getting chosen. So I pick the subjects most of the time. We're waiting on some good ones. Echo Charles, I may open mine, you know?

• 4:14:58Speaker 01

  I'm gonna put out a list of subjects that I thought of and I'm gonna see if people want to vote on them. And then I'm gonna open the bottom of the list for suggestions.

• 4:15:06Jocko Willink?

  Do that. That's good.

• 4:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's kind of a good idea.

• 4:15:09Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yep. So you can, that's jockounderground.com. It costs eight dollars and 18 cents a month. If you can't afford it, just email us, assistance@[email protected]. Cause we gotta have a place that we control. Cause right now we don't control the platforms. We're good with the platforms. We get along. It's fine. But you never know when things might go sideways. So we have a YouTube channel as well. We got psychological warfare. We got flip side canvas, bunch of books. Hey, check out the books. Check out the book, Always Faithful by Tom Schuman and Zenula Zaki. Um, available. We'll have it linked in the thing. Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. Check that book out. You want to hear about the war in Iraq up close and personal? That's a great way to do it. And then I've written

• 4:15:51Jocko Willink?

  a bunch of books, of course. Also, Esalen Front Leadership Consultancy, where we solve problems through leadership. So many problems. Let me rephrase that. All your problems in your organization are leadership problems. That's what they are. So if you're having issues inside your organization, it's because you have issues with your leadership. You want to fix them? Go to esalenfront.com. Come and check out what we offer. All kinds of different things from leadership consulting to events that we put on. All through that, we also have a, an online training platform. Because just like trying to get in shape, you can't just go one time to the gym and think you're going to get in shape. You've

• 4:16:32Jocko Willink?

  got to train every day. So extremeownership.com if you want to come and check out our online academy. If you want to support Patrol Base Abate, go to pbabate.org. So support what Tom's got going on there for veterans. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, Gold Star family, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And Heroes and Horses, Micah Fink up there. He's in the wilderness right now, on a horse with 40 other guys. And they are finding themselves

• 4:17:13Jocko Willink?

  in the wilderness. And if you want to check us out on social media, Tom Schuman is at KillZoneZ0N3. And for us on the Twitter, on the Gram, on Facebook, Echo's at Echo Jaws. I am at Jocko Willink. Watch out for the algorithm that's trying to get you. And thanks once again to Major Tom Schuman for his service in the Marine Corps, his continued service in the Marine Corps. Thanks for sharing some of those lessons here. Appreciate you coming down. Thanks to 35 for cutting him loose for the day to come down here and share some of those lessons. And to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that have given their lives so that we can live in freedom.

• 4:17:59Jocko Willink?

  We are forever indebted to you and we will not squander this gift. And also to our police and law enforcement firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correction officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. Thank you for your sacrifice to keep us safe here at home. And everyone else out there.

• 4:18:27Jocko Willink?

  There's one more thing in the book and Tom mentioned it briefly today.

• 4:18:35Jocko Willink?

  It's something that Sergeant Matt Abate scrawled on the wall of his patrol base in Afghanistan. It said simply,

• 4:18:46Jocko Willink?

  "Someone must walk the point."

• 4:18:52Jocko Willink?

  And that means someone has to be out in front, someone has to take risks, someone has to make things happen, someone has to look out for threats, someone has to guide the way.

• 4:19:04Jocko Willink?

  Someone has to move forward. And it seems like Sergeant Abate was talking to all of us.

• 4:19:13Jocko Willink?

  And he wasn't just talking about war, he was talking about life. So go out there and take a point.

• 4:19:23Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco out.