77: War Stories. Mental Toughness and Clever Tactics in Vietnam and for Life. With CWO Roger Hayden

0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:25 - Training and Going to Vietnam 0:44:02 - Differences between Volunteers VS Draft guys. 0:45:26 - Wounded in a Fire Fight. 0:50:20 - More Deployments to Vietnam. 1:05:01 - Kilo Platoon Deployment to Vietnam. 1:22:28 - OP Tempo. 1:30:46 - Blue on Blue and Lessons. 1:38:07 - The Stay-Behind Ambush. 2:01:43 - The Fist Fight with a Big Dude. 2:04:33 - Becoming a Warrant Officer. 2:05:29 - Advice on Going into the SEAL Teams. 2:12:02 - Some details about the Boobie Traps in Vietnam. 2:17:19 - Support, Cool Onnit http://www.onnit.com/jocko, JockoStore http://www.jockostore.com stuff, with Jocko White Tea http://www.jockotea.com and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes) https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/psychological-warfare/id1183222322. Extreme Ownership (book) http://amzn.to/2jonHTx, (Jocko's Kids' Book) Way of the Warrior Kid http://amzn.to/2n9k6I9, and The Muster 003 http://www.extremeownership.com. 2:28:35 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  The names and the stories in this episode have been omitted to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 77 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  And tonight, we welcome back to the show retired Chief Warrant Officer Roger Hayden. And if you don't know who Roger Hayden is, then just stop right now and go back to episode 37 of this podcast. And you can listen to Roger came on for a short period of time. We had some time constraints on the first time that Roger came on, but he's one of the men on which the reputation of the SEAL Teams is built. Started off as a frogman, member of the underwater demolition teams and deployed to Vietnam with underwater demolition team 12, and then came back and checked into SEAL Team One,

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  where he deployed again, two times to Vietnam and then spent 30 years in the SEAL Teams. And then as a civilian has another, how many years?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  20.

• 1:09Jocko Willink?

  Another, so we're just looking at a solid 50 years of service to Naval Special Warfare and the SEAL Teams. So, like I said, Roger's been on before and I'm tell one real quick story to kind of give a little background as to Roger's attitude about things. And so I was on, and I told this part of the story last time we were on a ship, we were, we were having our, our operational readiness exercise was being graded. It's called an ORE and the person that's grading it is Roger Hayden. So you know, the, the young SEAL platoons were getting graded and making sure that we know what we're doing. And at this point, Roger is a warrant officer. So he's a commissioned officer and he's out on the ship with us going, you know, watching

• 1:54Jocko Willink?

  how we're planning and seeing how we're preparing our gear and making sure that we're, we know what we're doing. Like I said, And as a commissioned officer, you're supposed to be eating in what's called the wardroom with the rest of the officers. So, you know, the military has officers and they have enlisted guys and the officers are sort of the managers and the enlisted guys are the workers. Right. And as an officer on a ship, on a Navy ship, you have something called a wardroom, which is nice to have. It's, it's just a little, it's, it's not even a little level up. It's pretty darn nice in the wardroom. I've eaten in both the wardroom and on the mess decks. And the wardroom, you know, you have real silverware and there's actually people serving you. So the wardroom is, is kinda nice. Well, Roger, as a warrant officer, is, you know,

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  permitted or authorized or supposed to eat with the rest of the officers. You know, he's supposed to go get that good treatment. And Roger didn't wanna eat with the officers. He wanted to eat with the chiefs. So then the middle management of the, of the Navy is the chief, the chief petty officers. And there's chiefs, senior chiefs and master chiefs. And they're like the backbone of the Navy. They have the, the tactical knowledge and the SEAL teams. And so Roger, instead of wanting, instead of eating with the officers, he wanted to eat with the chiefs. And before he was a warrant officer, what were you, a senior chief before you were a warrant officer? Master chief. Oh, master chief. So he was already a master chief before he became a warrant officer.

• 3:19Jocko Willink?

  And so he started eating the chief's mess with all the chiefs. Well, some of the, the, the chiefs on the ship, they didn't like having an officer, you know? We don't want this officer in here. This is our territory, right? This is our area. You can't, you know, we can't, why is this officer coming in here? And so my platoon chief at the time was actually friends with, with Roger, but, you know, he was the guy that was getting, had really, building relationships with the chiefs on the ship and all that stuff. And so they knew him. And they, and he was a senior chief. And they pulled him aside. They said, hey, you know, Hey, hey, Senior Chief, you know, it's kind of, we got this warrant officer, he's a SEAL, why is he coming in? He's not, shouldn't be coming in here, he needs to go to the, he

• 4:03Jocko Willink?

  needs to go to the, uh, the, the wardroom with the rest of the officers, this is the chief's mess, he doesn't belong in here. And so, my chief was like, listening to him, "Oh, okay, well, I'm not sure why you feel that way," but this goes on for a couple of days, and finally, my platoon chief, and I wasn't there for this, but I got told the story, and my platoon chief was a guy from the south, and he had a great accent and talked in a very distinct manner. And so, so they get into lunch, I think it was lunch, they roll into the, the chief's mess for lunch, and Warrant Officer Hayden comes in, and he's standing in there, and he's getting a couple of looks from people. And finally, my platoon chief stands up and says, uh,

• 4:48Jocko Willink?

  "Can I ask everyone in here a question, real quick?" And they go, "Okay, you know, what, what?" And he says, "Well, this here is Warrant Officer Roger Hayden, member of the underwater demolition teams, member of the SEAL team, served three tours in Vietnam, highly decorated, including a Purple Heart for being wounded, and he was a Master Chief before he got commissioned, and he wants to eat with us in the chief's mess. Does anyone here have a problem with that?" And of course, no one did. Nothing but crickets. And so, Roger Hayden eats what

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  Roger Hayden wants to eat. So Roger, welcome to the show once again, thanks for coming back. I know last time we were time constrained, and, uh, you said you'd come back, so here you are, I appreciate you coming back on.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  No, it's my pleasure, thank you.

• 5:46Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, like I said, anybody that wants to get the full background... You know, listen to podcast number thirty seven and he talks a little bit about how you grew up. But I had a question. When you joined, so you came in and your dad was UDT, which is awesome. And then when you joined the Navy in nineteen sixty five, did you know you were going to Vietnam? Was the war big enough yet? Because we had this guy on last time, Captain Charlie Plum, and he went to the Naval Academy. And he, he said, he graduated from the Naval Academy, I think in nineteen sixty five as well. But he said he never heard, he never heard the word Vietnam one time while he was going to the Naval Academy.

• 6:25Jocko Willink?

  It wasn't until he graduated that the war escalated and all of a sudden they realized when he was going through flight training that yeah, you're going to Vietnam. But when you joined in sixty five, did you know, I mean, were you thinking, yeah, I'm definitely going to go to war and go to Vietnam?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much because I'd have been drafted in the Army and I knew the Army was going to Vietnam. So I figured, um, I knew I wanted to go in the Navy and into UDT. My dad never talked about it much, but uh, you know, when I was younger, I watched the movies of the Marines attacking beachheads and getting mowed down. You know, Rangers taking heavies and stuff. And then I saw the bridge of the river crying, the guns of Navarone. And I figured, yeah, if you're going to fight, that's the kind of outfit you want to fight.

• 7:10Jocko Willink?

  You want to sneak around a little bit more.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I did. I, in fact, as soon as I got in to the Navy, I, I took the screening test and all that stuff. And, you know, before I even went to, no, right after, when I was at radio man's school. I was a radio man. So that was a twenty-two week long school. And that's what I did is I worked and did all that stuff and did the screening tests and, you know, and they wanted me to go to Rota or some other Navy installation because I didn't do too bad in radio man's school. I wasn't the number one guy, but and I went, no, I'm going to go to UDT and so.

• 7:49Jocko Willink?

  And then you, you went to what the, the USS?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, they, we, our class, our class wasn't starting up for about six months. So they stuck me on the USS Paul Revere, 32nd Street, waiting for a UDT training. And I was a designated seaman. Back in the day, a designated seaman was pretty good. Wasn't like it is now. And I figured I'd work in the Radio Shack or something like that. Well, as soon as they checked aboard, they put me mess cooking. I was down in the scullery. And when I went down there, there were two other guys that were waiting for a training too, that were in the scullery. So we sat there and did that for six months and got off the ship and went next door, crossed the bay there to training.

• 8:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's something in the Navy. It's, if you're a new guy, everyone talks about how new guys get treated wherever you are in the military, but in the Navy, when you go, when you show up to a ship, you, doesn't matter, you have to work in the, in the scullery, which is washing dishes. What is it, a 90 day stint you gotta do in there?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 8:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, pretty much 90 days. And, and you only, don't do that if you're an E4 and above.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:56Jocko Willink?

  And we did, I did an deployment where we had a guy that was a SEAL, but he was an E3. And, you know, he was saying, hey, wait, how, how, how am I gonna get out of this, you know, doing the scullery duty? And we were like, you're not. That's the rules. And you're gonna go do it.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  You can do it. And I was a senior chief, two of us, a guy named, real good friend of mine. We couldn't get a flight back, so they put us on an ARG to float back here to San Diego. And we kept all of our guys, and the mess cooking that were seamen.

• 9:28Jocko Willink?

  That's legit.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Because we just went, we got stuff to do, we're doing training, and they haven't got time to do that. So we kept them out of, of course, I was a senior chief then, and so it was, so we had a little pull.

• 9:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Plus the COB of the boat, he really liked us a lot. And, you know, the, the CMC, and he was a PBR Vietnam guy.

• 9:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  So we got along really well, yeah.

• 9:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, and actually this kid ended up making E4 luckily before we went on deployment. So he skated out of it, but uh.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  But we still did bringing in the supplies and stuff like that, you know, because it was a good workout.

• 10:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  I forget what they call that, Unreps or something.

• 10:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we did that too.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:07Jocko Willink?

  We actually, when I, so my first deployment, I deployed to Guam. And, you know, we just did whatever we wanted. I was 21 years old. It was completely insane. You got all this per diem money. You felt like the richest, you never mind felt like. You were the richest guy you ever met. I mean, you never made any money when you're in 16, 17 years old. You get in the SEAL teams, you're getting all this money and then they go overseas and they're giving you per diem. And so you're the richest dude in the world. You have very limited responsibilities because you're a new guy in a SEAL platoon. So what do you do? Just get crazy and get after it. And, you know, you're doing whatever you want. And then my next deployment was on a ship. And we pull into the first port and they say, um, you know, E4 and below, liberty expires at 10 o'clock.

• 10:50Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, oh yeah, whatever, you know, I'm a SEAL. And they're like, no, actually you'll be back on the ship at 10 o'clock. And there was no way around it. I mean, there was ways around it. We found ways around. You know what the way around it was? I'd put my PT gear in a backpack. And then go off the ship to go out, whatever. And then hang out all night until 5 o'clock in the morning. And I put my PT gear back on. I'd run, get a sweat, go and walk up the brow at whenever I was coming back and say, yeah, I was just out for a run. Got my rock on. So there was ways. There was ways to make it happen. So. Speaking of guys from, from, when you were going through training, was there guys?

• 11:33Jocko Willink?

  When you're going through Bud's training, was there Korean, Korean vet, UDT guys in there? Was it World War II? Was it just Vietnam guys, early Vietnam guys?

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Instructors?

• 11:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Oh, there were World War II guys. There was one guy named, um, um, god damn it, um. Great big tall guy, Koo Cut.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  And

• 11:53Jocko Willink?

  And he was a World War II UDT guy?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Well, let me tell you the story on that guy. So we're out at, we just get to San Clemente, the last part of the training, you know, third phase, you know, so we're all lined up there. We just got off, we went out there on an LCU, you know, with all of our ammo and ammo and all that other crap. And we just mustered out there and this guy comes walking up, great big tall guy, real old, what was I, nineteen, eighteen, you know what I mean? He looked probably like you do or I do. We thought he was an old guy.

• 12:24Jocko Willink?

  Oldest guy you've ever seen.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he looks at us and he starts talking, you know, and he goes, "God damn it, I'm the, I'm your demo instructor." And keeps talking. He says, "I don't brook no bullshit on the ranges," you know, and we're kind of just looking at him like, "What the hell?" And he gets himself worked up a little bit. And he goes, "Matter of fact, anybody that screws up, we'd just go out behind the shitter and get it squared away," you know, and we're still looking at him. He talks a little bit more and gets himself all excited and shit. And he goes, "Matter of fact, anybody wants to go out behind the shitter right now, we'll go," you know. We're just looking. Well, come to find out later on, was in the Eighty Second Airborne and jumped into Normandy.

• 13:03Jocko Willink?

  Oh, damn.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Got captured, escaped, on and on. And then he was in the Korean War too. That was one of our instructors. Almost all of them there were in the Korean War, you know, pretty much. But then we had another guy, and on his jacket he wore, he had a UDT instructor on the other side was God, you know, he was. He was a hook-nosed Indian Apache, and he was a badass dude, man. We had some great guys. And now, most of the instructors, yeah, were, and some were Vietnam guys, you know, like, had this one blue-eyed guy, he was, oh, can't think of his name right now either, but he was

• 13:45Speaker 02

  On vacation was paddling up north uh in uh on the Columbia River, no, not that north, the east coast side and uh his, he was uh on a excursion with some other people and his canoe tipped over and uh he, it was real cold and shit and he was trying to swim a couple on the shore and shit and then just uh just went out, but this guy would run behind you. And you, of course, we didn't have a lot of hair, but what we had stood up, you know, and you turn and look and there he was just staring at you, had these blue eyes, you know. I'll think of his name in a minute, real good guy, though.

• 14:20Jocko Willink?

  And there, there must have been, because Bud's is pretty regimented now, but they must have had no, it was, it was definitely less regimented when I went through, for sure. It must have been completely just like no rules when you went through.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Now, we had this guy during Hell Week, he had what they called the swimmer line. And like I say, we're on the bayside, mind you, we're in training in January, started uh three January, something colder than God, you know. What he would do is uh we'd all, he'd have us hook into what we call the flutterboard line. You know, like you, when you do recons, the guys hold on the line, you move down the line and stuff and uh he'd send us all out. And hell, there was about

• 15:05Speaker 02

  fuck, it's about sixty of us, excuse my language.

• 15:07Jocko Willink?

  That's a big, that's a big flutter.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  He'd send us out and we had to be in a straight line, if we weren't, he'd bring us all back and line us all up again. And we weren't straight, so he sent us out again, brought us all back in. And we're freezing, the guys are almost getting hypothermia because we're not, we're just in a CAPOC and uh, you know, regular uh utilities that you wear for training, you know. So he sent us out again the third time. And like if you're on the bitter end line, you're, you're, you're screwed, you know. Then he brought us back in, he goes, well, goddamn, I guess it still wasn't very uh you guys still weren't in a straight line, uh we may, we're gonna have to send you out again, all the way down the line, all you heard was click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. We just looked at him.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Well, alright, we got other things to do.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  That was it, we were done, man. You'd have lost the whole class.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  That was so cold.

• 16:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, people always, if you don't know California and you think California is like Baywatch, the old TV show, and you think the water's all warm, it's not warm. It's not warm, especially in January. January 3rd, it's not gonna be warm. And you were saying you guys were swimming like crazy going through that, because you knew that you were going to UDT.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you're a frogman, that's what you're being trained for, not SEALs. So we did a lot more water work than you guys did going through BUDs. Because we didn't have the SEAL portion of it. We got that after we made our deployment, came back, went in SEAL team, then you went into CADRA.

• 16:40Jocko Willink?

  Did you get any land warfare at all in BUDs?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, a little bit. It was more like, yeah, basic stuff and little immediate IEDs, but immediate action drills, but not much. It was like our last op that we had, I think I told you this, on San Clemente was we did swimmer scouts in on the other side of a rock formation we called Birdshit Rock and got to the island. They gave us all the 40-pound haversacks and we went from there all the way 23 miles to the other end of the island.

• 17:11Jocko Willink?

  Wait, you were walking?

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you humped 23 miles after you swam over the beach?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then came back and attacked the camp. That was our last op.

• 17:20Jocko Willink?

  Damn. That's a crappy patrol, too, those cactus.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 17:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a...

• 17:28Speaker 02

  I was small, I thought I was pretty smart, see, so I wore a kind of a wet suit, what do you call that, the small one, you know?

• 17:36Jocko Willink?

  Oh, like a wet suit top?

• 17:37Speaker 02

  The cheater, yeah. And because, you know, so I wouldn't freeze to death coming in. And actually, this was April, almost... The end of April and it was still cold out at San Comeney, you know, so we swam in and I humped with that thing on all the way up there and it got sunny and warm and I almost friggin died. By the time I got back, he could peel it off me like this, you know, just.

• 17:59Jocko Willink?

  There's no good, there's no good way to do it. There's like no good way to handle coming over the beach. It's not going to be convenient. You're not going to be comfortable. That's one of the things that makes, in my opinion, that one of the things that makes the SEAL team, the guys in the SEAL teams really good, is that we just have to deal with the water. And as soon as you're dealing with the water, like you just said, there's no easy way to do that. Like you're going to either be freezing in the water or you're going to be sweating on land or you're going to be too hot. No, actually you're not. You're going to, you're going to be okay in the, on the, on the land. It's just, you're just screwed is what I'm saying. And not to mention your weapons. Your, your weapons all get, your radios all get jacked up. Your, your weapons all get jacked up. Your gear gets all jacked up. You got sand in your boots. There's no good way to deal with it.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  No, there's not.

• 18:43Jocko Willink?

  And on top of that, the communications, like you're in the water, you can't talk to people. You can't, there's no, the radios aren't working. It just, everything sucks. And so when we would do ops dry, it just seems like it's so easy to do. And I think that's the one big thing that separates, it doesn't separate us, but it's one of the things that makes us good is that we have to deal with the water and we deal with it our whole career.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Bottom line is you should never bring a boat to shore. You always swim in.

• 19:08Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  That's what we do.

• 19:09Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Just like swimmer scouts, the whole nine yards. That's the bottom line. Well, as a chief, that's pretty hard on that stuff. We never brought the boats ashore.

• 19:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know, we, we, we did the same thing when we were in the art platoon. We never brought the boats in because there's a, there's a 10, 15, maybe 20% chance that you're going to flip a boat. You're going to lose a boat. Something's going to happen to a boat and then you're screwed. Now you got a boat washing up against the shore and you got to deal with it and it's a big, no, we always swam in.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  It's a big, it's a big target.

• 19:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. For sure.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Like in Desert Storm, you know, when we inserted those Kuwaitis, the officer, I won't mention any names, but wanted to bring both the boats in, you know, and into Kuwait and let the Kuwaiti guys off. And I went, no. Keep at least, if you're gonna do that, keep one boat back, even if you keep another boat in shore because they can give covering fire. You know what I'm saying?

• 19:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  And then if they have to E and E and, you know, you can be seen. You know what I mean? That's a big target. You know what I mean? You just don't do that, you know?

• 20:06Jocko Willink?

  No. That's, there's so many things you gotta figure out with the water. And when you, when you go, that's why when we were in Iraq and we rarely did boat ops, we did some in, in, in the river, but you're just either on foot. It's just, everything is so much easier. It's, it's crazy. It's crazy. Uh, you get, so you get done with training. Sanco de Mayo, 1967, you get done with training and you check into UDT 12. And you didn't really know too much about the SEAL teams. I guess no one at that time knew much about the SEAL teams.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Not much at all, no.

• 20:37Jocko Willink?

  And you were saying on that first podcast that we did that the platoons weren't really formed up yet. You kinda showed up at UDT and you're, it's, it's, it's kind of a loose situation, but you do do a workup.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Oh, once we started working up, then it was regimented. You know, you knew what you had to do. But we had a while, they had just come back and relieved, uh, UDT 11 had just deployed and then 12 came back and you have a kind of a stand down for about a month or two.

• 21:03Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so that's what you showed up for?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause it's a nine month deployment for UDTs. So you have about a six months workup. And then you have three months where the guys go and leave school, stuff like that. And we came, I came in just at that time. So it was really kinda like, uh, we'd go up and do what they call silver slippers up at, uh, Pendleton. When the Marines would do amphibious landings and we'd be the lifeguards and stuff like that. You know what I mean? Until we started forming up and started working, then it got, it got pretty good.

• 21:33Jocko Willink?

  What did you guys do? Was the, were they hardcore about PT back then?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:37Jocko Willink?

  Would you guys do team PTs?

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:39Jocko Willink?

  Platoons or team?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Team.

• 21:41Jocko Willink?

  The whole team?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:42Jocko Willink?

  And was it just-

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Every, every, every day.

• 21:45Jocko Willink?

  Was it the same? Was it flutter kicks, pushups, pullups?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, just it was your basic PT. In fact, I didn't start lifting weights until shit, I was in about.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Fifteen years, maybe sixteen, seventeen years because you do old core swimming, all the PT we did and everything. We were in really good shape. I mean, you know what I mean? And you didn't see a lot of the guys in the gym lifting heavy and stuff. That came on later on. Then also, which I changed when I was later on when I was a chief and a senior chief and stuff and even, no, not as an LPL. We still did platoon PT every morning, but we'd do it every other day than let the guys go off and do their running, do their PT, uh, weightlifting and stuff like that. And it worked out well. You know, you can change, even though I thought PT in the morning first thing is the best to do.

• 22:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Especially when we were in Subi can, you know, about three, about half the guys would be throwing up and stuff when they're doing PT.

• 22:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I always liked, we used to, at Team One, when I got to Team One, there was that, that Team PT we did every day and Team Two is the same thing. But you know, I'll tell you, once the war started, there's a lot less focus on PT and it, it just was.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on where you are too, Jocko. You can't really go for long runs and shit when you're in a rock and shit, you know?

• 23:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we'd run around bases.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  But did you guys have, uh, my, my question is, uh, did you take weights with you? Did you have a workout place and stuff?

• 23:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we deployed and actually once one team shows up somewhere on deployment, they all bring a bunch of gear.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:21Jocko Willink?

  And then there's enough to do it, to get it done. And then other teams, they don't have to bring everything, but they'll bring more stuff. And eventually, you know, whatever compound you're in is pretty nice.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  If you go to that same compound, yeah.

• 23:34Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, and I always brought, I brought mats for, for jiu-jitsu. I'd make a little jiu-jitsu area so I could still.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 23:42Jocko Willink?

  So I could still train and get the boys training. And, um, you know what's funny too is like you were talking about, it's, it's weird how some of this stuff stays. Cause you were talking about walking around in UDT shorts and, and coral boots and un- unfortunately, UDT shorts, I don't think guys wear them. I don't think they even get issued them anymore. But when I got to Team One, we absolutely got issued UDT shorts and that's what, that was our uniform. And we got issued coral booties, those old gray coral booties. And I didn't realize, you know, that's what you guys wore. That's, that's something that they've, yeah, probably been issued for. I don't know.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Even out in town, you'd see guys with coral boots on with their Levi's and their Rolex watch and stuff. You know what I mean? You could pick out a team guy in a heartbeat.

• 24:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was, I was, I looked, I looked up coral booties and I was just seeing if anybody makes them anymore. They're hard to get. They're on eBay. You gotta buy a pair on eBay. You gotta be lucky if they have your size. I gotta go through my gear and see if I still have my coral booties.

• 24:39Jocko Willink?

  But, and then you did do a legit workup though, where you did all your hydro recon.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, we did river recon, uh, like up the coast by Pendleton. We drug this one rocket looking thing in up over these fucking mountains and put it in a lake and stuff like that. And then we swam across the, uh, uh, well, did we swim? No, we didn't. Right there at the channel and it goes out. And you have those old gun emplacements and shit. We had to attack those and they had them set up with Boobie traps and stuff. So we'd go across and work our way up and shit like that. Always stuff, yeah. And UDT, it was, it wasn't bad. It was good training. I mean, but it wasn't, you know, like a story I told you was, um, during the sixty seven, sixty eight tet, we were in Dongtown on the Aschary.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  And that's when we were, I was with UDT and there were about seventeen of us on there. We're doing that dart thing later on, getting that a little bit more. But, uh, that's when we worked with the nine tivintree and stuff. And, uh, anyway, uh, they had a SEAL platoon in Mito, which wasn't too, too far away, but it was right in the town. Why these coasts would have a, would have a, their place in, in a town, I'd never know. Because anytime you left or went anywhere, you know what I'm saying? You could be picked out. But anyway, so they were almost getting overran, but they were on the tallest building. They had a fifty seven recoil rifle and stuff. Anyway, they sent a call out, hey, we need help. And there were seventeen of us, you know, on the Aschary, UDT guys. We wanted to go in and rescue them and save them.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  And our officer, uh, just a great guy lieutenant said, no, you ain't going anywhere. We were so pissed.

• 26:21Jocko Willink?

  How would you have gotten in there? Helicopter?

• 26:22Speaker 02

  We don't know.

• 26:23Jocko Willink?

  Don't even know.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  We just wanted to go and help them. Yeah, you know, big hearts, just ready to go. Yeah. You know, they're SEALs, but they're UDT guys too. So anyway, so, um, we didn't do that. And then I got back from deployment when the SEAL team went through the cadre.

• 26:38Jocko Willink?

  And those guys, those guys, by the way, they didn't get overrun.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  No, they, they brought them off. They were coming up the stairways and they were throwing grenades down at them and stuff like that. And then finally the Arvin and the US came in and took me to back over. It was during the sixty seven, sixty eight attack, which was real bad. But anyway, so when I got back and I went through Cadre and stuff, I found out, you know, okay, we weren't ready for this. We didn't know any immediate action drills and well, not a lot, not, not, not, you know, pounded into our head where we'd automatically think about them.

• 27:11Jocko Willink?

  Did you do any urban environment whatsoever?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  That's what I was gonna say. Plus, we weren't urban and that was urban. We'd had our asses handed to, you know? Cause we didn't know, we were fighters, we'd have fought, but you know, figure those guys in Mito, the VC and stuff, they're, they had their shit together. That was their town and stuff, you know what I mean? We'd, uh, you know, you know more about the urban stuff than I do. Cause I never fought urban, you know? We'd hit hooches and stuff like that, but we never swept through, uh, we did one village one time, but it was, you know, it was good, you know what I mean?

• 27:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so when you deploy to, with UDT, did you guys ride a ship over there? Did you fly over there? How'd you get to Vietnam?

• 27:52Speaker 02

  We flew over to Subic Bay and, uh, like I said, uh, that's where we were at. That's like you went to Guam. Well, Subic was our place, Subic Bay. And then, uh, they would, uh, we'd fly over to, uh, we had different depths that we had in Vietnam, like in Da Nang, they had Camp Tin Shah. And from Da Nang, you'd work up and around Fubai, Way, Quang Tri, Dung Hall, the northern part of the area and stuff, you know? And then we got on the Da Shinko and I don't know if we picked the Da Shinko up at Subic or not, we might have. And then it was when we did all them beach rebounds. And then the next debt I went to was down in Dong Tam on the.

• 28:32Jocko Willink?

  Would you go back to Subic in between at all?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 28:36Speaker 02

  And we'd be there for about a month and or three weeks and then we, we, we had to get.

• 28:40Jocko Willink?

  Basically deploy from Subic out to Vietnam, do operations for a month, then go back.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Well, three months.

• 28:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for three months at a time?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Three months at a time, yeah.

• 28:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, but it's a nine month deployment?

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah, we, my three deaths were Da Nang, then on the Da Shinko, and then down in Dong Tam when I was in UDT and that was three months at each place.

• 29:00Jocko Willink?

  And first of all, on the last one, you talked about doing 130 miles worth of beach recon.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  It was about 120, I think, yeah.

• 29:08Jocko Willink?

  I'll give you the bonus 10, Roger.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  It was three months, I mean, you know.

• 29:12Jocko Willink?

  But you know, you were kind of talking about it like, oh, you know, we were doing this recon. But that was, you were reconning beaches in North Vietnam?

• 29:19Speaker 02

  No, South Vietnam.

• 29:20Jocko Willink?

  South Vietnam. And was there any resistance? Were you guys in jeopardy of getting rolled up? Or was it more of like almost an admin thing? Or was it somewhere in between?

• 29:28Speaker 02

  No, we always had either Marines or the ARVEN, which was the South Vietnamese Army. They would screen, put screens out when we would do the beaches to cover us in case we got hit with anything.

• 29:41Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Because they were, nobody knew what was really on the beaches and stuff. But if the Marines were in the area, they'd send a patrol and they'd work the back shore and stuff as we were doing our recon and stuff. And the one I told you we got hit was we didn't have any Army or Marines. So we sent two of our guys in the back to kind of check things out as we were doing our recon. And that's when we got caught in that, almost caught in that L-shaped ambush. And what happened was, is we were coming down the beach and we had the guys out and I was a photographer. So I was out front with another guy and I had a pair of bathing suits, UDTs on, coral booties and my super slate. And I was writing the back shore information down.

• 30:24Jocko Willink?

  So everyone knows what we're talking about. When you're going to land people on beaches, or if you're potentially going to land people on beaches, you have to do a reconnaissance of the beach, but not just of the beach itself, but of the water and how deep the water is and make sure there's no obstacles in there. And so the people that did this since World War II was the underwater demolition teams. So that's what we're talking about. The way you do it is you have a, literally, you have a line, a big rope. It's small, it's more like a line than it is rope. But that stretches from the beach, from a couple of guys on the beach. Called the beach party, all the way out to a boat, a small little rubber boat.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Well, sometimes, yeah. And then that was an IBS we hooked it to and it's about thirty feet, it has knots where you know each pair is gonna be holding on to and you mark, take the sounding, then you, as you went to the next sounding, which was twenty-five yards down the beach, and on the beach they'd be holding up these, uh, markers so that you could get yourself on them, you'd be dippy dooing down until you got to that point again, then you'd take your sounding again, then you'd come back and make a hydrographic chart.

• 31:30Jocko Willink?

  So there's guys on the beach that are holding what we call range markers and they're set, what are they set? Like ten yards apart, like one guy in the front, one guy in the back, and they're looking at a compass so that they're making sure that they're lined up, so that lines up this whole line. So it's this, it's this kinda complicated, and it seems like an administrative thing, but you gotta do it. Otherwise, you know, you get a situation where the Marines come in to land and they hit a...

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Like they did.

• 31:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like they did in Tarawa, and they hit a big, they hit a reef, and then they dropped the ramps, the guys get out, and they didn't know that that reef was only ten feet long, it's two feet deep, but now on the other side of the reef, the guys are going into ten, twelve, fifteen feet of water and drown. So that's why you have to actually be fairly precise, or at least as precise as you can be when you're taking these, when you're doing this hydrographic reconnaissance, so...

• 32:19Speaker 02

  You, you have the backshore party, you know, the two guys there, and you have the officer and a couple other guys, picking up the stakes, putting the stakes out, and that's usually a cartographer's job, you're way out ahead of everybody else, taking the backshore information, so when you come back and do your hydrographic chart, you know, you, you can lay it out exactly, then you have to do it Leroy Pan... I was a cartographer, I know all this shit, so... Which I hated, you know?

• 32:44Jocko Willink?

  Cause you had to man make, hand draw the maps, you're hand drawing, that, and those, those, those charts that you draw... You're gonna present, those are gonna get presented to, you know, the, the Navy and they're gonna use those charts to conduct this landing. So like I said, they gotta be good. Gotta be good quality.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, anyway, so, uh, our two guys are walking along and we're doing our beach reconnaissance and everything. Well, they, they, uh, had a nail shaped ambush on us and they had a spire hole back here with a couple of guys that, once we got hit and if anybody ran back, these guys would hold them down. Our two guys hit those two guys in the spider hole and opened up on them, which made them open up on the sooner. So we all leapfrogged back down the beach and we had really a great guy. I mean, he took charge. Everything was perfect. We grabbed him to the line, the boat, uh, IBS took off and, you know, nine horse, nine and a half, uh, horsepower engine didn't go real fast, you know. And we had a Coast Guard cutter out there. They started lobbing in, uh,

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Willie Peter on them, but we didn't know it was them and some of it landed pretty close to us. And we thought that was them doing, uh, trying to hit us. Anyway, we got out far enough and our PL that we finally got to and got on, PL's, uh, you know, the boat that the, uh, uh, that we inserted off of and stuff. And, uh, they picked us up and the guy was shooting his 50 and stuff, but what was really neat was in come these two jets.

• 34:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, nice.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  And they napalm the whole beach.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  That was, that was kinda cool. That's when I told you when I got back to the boat, I said, screw this naked warrior shit, you know.

• 34:23Jocko Willink?

  I can't, I can't, so you're in a pair of UDTs.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:27Jocko Willink?

  Coral booties.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Coral booties, that's like what, like reef walkers, those little?

• 34:31Jocko Willink?

  They're like, uh, they're like Chuck, Converse Chuck Taylors.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:34Jocko Willink?

  But a little bit leaner.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Do they have the, the, the split for the?

• 34:39Jocko Willink?

  No, no.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  No, it was solid.

• 34:41Jocko Willink?

  They're like, yeah, they're just like Converse Chuck Taylors.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  So you could walk on coral.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  And not get cut up.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  But would it like hold you down? They're not big, big.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  No, no, no. They were, they were light. They were canvas and they had a kind of a real thick rubberized bottom on it.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were good. And then, uh, I had an M79, so I'm shooting that thing as I'm running back and stuff.

• 34:59Jocko Willink?

  Then that's the only weapon you had is an M79?

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all I had, yeah.

• 35:02Jocko Willink?

  That and your, your slate to draw on.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:04Jocko Willink?

  To collect back short information.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  That was kinda exciting.

• 35:08Jocko Willink?

  And was that before you, was that, was that recon before you worked with the 9th Infantry?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  I went from there, from the Dyshenko down to Dong Tam and worked with the 9th Infantry.

• 35:20Jocko Willink?

  And the uh, the 9th Infantry. Man, so this stuff, I, I was looking about, you know, about the 9th Infantry and what they did and. But just, first of all, the 9th Infantry is the, is the unit that the fictional character Forrest Gump was supposed to be attached to, which is why in the movies, working by the water and all that stuff. I imagine that's what they, that's why they picked it. The 9th Infantry in Vietnam had 10 Medal of Honors awarded to soldiers and three sailors. So they were working in conjunction very closely with the Brown Water Navy, which again, to pull a quote

• 36:00Jocko Willink?

  from the last time you, you were on, Roger, you were like saying that job as being Brown Water Navy was just vicious job, vicious job. And General Wes Moreland said that the 9th Infantry Division and the Mobile Riverine Forces saved the Delta Region from falling to the North Vietnamese during, during Tet.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  That could have been, I mean, I didn't, I wasn't on land with them. Don't know everything they did, remember, I was a second class then, and we got, we were on the, uh, the, um, Askerian Benowah as, uh, reconnaissance guys.

• 36:35Jocko Willink?

  What's the Askerian Benowah?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  They were APDs.

• 36:39Jocko Willink?

  What's that?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Um, uh, amphibious.

• 36:41Jocko Willink?

  Some, some kind of an amphibious ship?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, both of them were big ones. And troop ships, one was a troop, I think the Askeri was a troop ship. I'm not sure, could have been the Benowah too, but they were a pretty good sized, uh, ships and they were right at, uh, on the, uh, right at Dong Tam, which was the Dong Tam was, had a big army base and a navy base. And late, my third trip to Vietnam, I went back there as a SEAL and it was a, same, same place, same area.

• 37:12Jocko Willink?

  So when you, how did you guys get linked up with the 9th Infantry?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Well, we, uh, that's who we're doing the reconnaissance for to see if they could go up the canals and up the rivers. You know, see what the depth was so they could bring the, uh, the, uh, brown water navy up there, that the troop carriers and stuff like that for the ninth inventory. And they didn't know what the depth of the, some of the places they were gonna go in. So they dropped us off on these, uh, we call them the darts. They were like a jet ski.

• 37:39Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Except you didn't sit up on them, you laid down on them, used your feet to, uh, guide them. And they had a three hundred and fifty-five degree camera and a phasometer. And they would take two of us up, drop us off, and we'd come down and do the reconnaissance. I mean, take soundings and, uh, take pictures of Nones Point, like a pagoda or another canal coming in or something, you know? We'd come back and we'd do a chart. And we'd give it to them, and that's what they used, those charts to go up and do their, uh, amphibious landings. But you could only go up those, down those things maybe once.

• 38:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Or twice, and then you didn't do it again because they'd be waiting for you. So when we weren't doing that, which you could only do so many of them.

• 38:21Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Then we started riding with the ninth inventory as their demo guys.

• 38:24Jocko Willink?

  And, and so you would, would you have already seen it? Cause you'd do the dart mission? And then you'd come back and then they'd come up with their plan? And then they'd say, okay, we're gonna go up that river that you just came down? And so you'd be from, would you be familiar with it now?

• 38:37Speaker 02

  No, they took us, we went up to Four Corners and other places that we'd never been.

• 38:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  That was deep enough for them to go up and stuff, but, uh, they might have, I don't know. You know, that would have been John Odish, my OT, that would have probably been in on the planning when they were gonna go in something and talk about our charts and stuff, you know? Remember, I was just a booger reader. I was just one of the guys in the darts, you know?

• 38:59Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, and, but then they said, okay, we're gonna need you. What were the log? I know you were saying on the last podcast that they had these log dams at the...

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they'd put dams across logs and they'd stop the boats up and just different obstacles and shit or bunkers along. And, uh, we'd go in and blow up the bunkers or blow up the log dams, you know, if they had them. And that's why I said they first put us on what they called an alpha boat, which was the lead boat.

• 39:23Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  And they had one in the rear and one in the front. And, um, what would they look like, um... God, I don't have a picture ever I could show you.

• 39:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I actually, I actually.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Anybody looks, looks up on the ninth infantry, they'll be able to see him.

• 39:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  But anyway, the Alpha boat, we were on one of those and that's the one I told you we got sunk on. Cause a B forty rocket hit us right in the exhaust and the thing started going down and we ran it to shore. If it'd been a little bit higher to hit all those stacks of uh, C four we had, so. But and then they started putting us in about the third or fourth boat back.

• 39:55Jocko Willink?

  That's because they didn't want the big demo load in the front Alpha boat. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Pretty much.

• 40:01Jocko Willink?

  Figured that one out. So your boat gets hit with a rocket and it starts sinking and then the, the, was it like a chief running the boat?

• 40:10Speaker 02

  No, I was, it could have been. I didn't know exactly who they were. Yeah, and they ran us up. And then it started sinking down and we got off, did a little perimeter and then the um, a Zippo boat came up and just hosed everything down and we swam over the Zippo boat and got off.

• 40:26Jocko Willink?

  The Zippo boat is so named because after the Zippo lighter, because it has a flamethrower, a big giant flamethrower.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  I, I know, I popped this stuff off like people know what it is. You had it been there to, to, to see it, but I mean, it came zipping up and then we swam over to it and we got on it and got out of there.

• 40:44Jocko Willink?

  And you got everyone out of there or?

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, nobody got hurt or killed on that, just that B forty rocket. They started opening up at our, the boats opened up too and they, they had fifties, you know, Jesus Christ, twenty mill.

• 40:55Jocko Willink?

  Did you try and salvage any of the demo or did you leave it?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Well, actually.

• 40:59Jocko Willink?

  Or did you blow it in place?

• 41:00Speaker 02

  We were gonna come back and do that, but they decided to have EOD do it. So EOD went back and blew the boat up and all that crap, so.

• 41:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Cause it was just partly out of the water and stuff, but they, you know, pissed us off, we're underwater demolition. It was like, you know, WTF, you know, we could do that, you know? That's what we do, you know?

• 41:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Well, the EOD guys, I guess they didn't have a lot to do, so they sent them down there. I don't know if it was Army or Navy EOD, but.

• 41:26Jocko Willink?

  Who knows? It's always good to blow things up. That's one of my.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:29Jocko Willink?

  My first deployment to Iraq, we didn't blow very much up. And when I went to my second deployment to Iraq, I, I kinda had the attitude is if we had the opportunity to blow something up, we were gonna blow it up. It seems like the smart thing to do.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  You never take it apart, dip, blow in place, you know?

• 41:44Jocko Willink?

  Blow in place. And uh,

• 41:48Jocko Willink?

  That one, you know, on, on the last podcast, you were talking about that one operation that you went on and you, it was basically a giant ambush against the whatever seven or eight boats that you guys had, that the ninth infantry had. And they must have been prepared, waiting for you got, for, for this group to show up. I mean, were they, was the enemy that well organized at that point?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say well organized, but when you got psyops guys dropping pamphlets in saying, uh, you know, we may be doing something in this area, uh, you know, all the good guys leave and stuff like that. You know, psyops had a lot to play with that, or choppers going around with their speakers and you know what I mean?

• 42:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  So, yeah, that particular one, there was another group of boats that went up ahead of us, dropped off their guys, the ninth infantry, and were coming back and we passed them. And as soon as we got by them, I'd say about, uh, 10 minutes and we got opened up on, they didn't hit the first group, they just hit our group. And, uh, you know, that was a, that was a bad day in Dodge City, but it, you know, got hit really bad, but managed to get to the shore and put some of the guys off and stuff. And it was, I think it was going to be a pincher movement where they came in and caught people because they dropped the other guys way off. And there were three UDT guys on that group and then there was three of us on the group that when we got, uh, hit.

• 43:16Jocko Willink?

  And your main mission was going to be demo if needed?

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically, yeah, but, uh, you know.

• 43:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Those, uh, those big, it's weird, those are like straight up amphibious operations the army's conducting.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, think about that and the Marines are holding the DMZ.

• 43:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, you were saying that the Marines were busy upholding the DMZ at that time.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that kind of blew me away that, but the ninth infantry did a good job. I mean, they were fighters, you know, and they were out of Washington, the state of Washington, you know? And, uh, they, uh, they were good, good troops.

• 43:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, um, what about another different, difference? I mean, even with the ninth infantry, those guys, I mean, in UDT, you guys are all volunteers. And, I mean, and you said you would have been drafted had you not joined. What did you, did you notice any difference between drafted guys and guys that were volunteers?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Didn't really work with that many army guys in the ninth infantry. The only thing I can remember that stands out is I had a second lieutenant come up to me when I was on a riverboat, one of the riverboats, and they were about ready to land him, and he came up to me with his map and asked me where he was, you know?

• 44:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  And that kinda, I went, hmm, and that's the second lieutenant? He's leading a, you know, platoon or squad of guys in, you know, that kinda, you know what I'm saying? I just don't know, I don't know, my thought of that was, is, we were trained and we knew what we were gonna do, just like in SEAL Team.

• 44:50Jocko Willink?

  Mm.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  And we leaned forward and that's what we're gonna do. You're just picked off the street, go through basic training, and then you, uh, you know, next thing you know, you're up on a hill in Vietnam being overrun and stuff, that's gotta be pretty traumatic, you know? But then again, Americans are Americans, we fight, you know what I mean, regardless? But I think we were more psychologically set for what we did than your, cause of the extra training we had and stuff, and plus the guys that trained us, where a lot of them were Vietnam guys, and like I said, Second World War and Korean, that gives you, I mean, with the type of job they did, that's what we do.

• 45:29Jocko Willink?

  You got wounded on that mission too?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:31Jocko Willink?

  Right? How bad did you get wounded?

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Just some shrapnel in my foot and my leg, no big thing.

• 45:36Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did it take you out of the field for any amount of time?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  No, not at all. In fact, I got up and started shooting along with this guy, uh, this other guy.

• 45:42Jocko Willink?

  That's one thing you could do, hey?

• 45:44Speaker 02

  But we had this buddy of ours, I think I told you this, he got hit really bad with shrapnel on his arms and legs, and I crawled over to him after I moved my fingers and toes and everything and realized that we all got blown down. And then I went over to him, hit him with morphine, put it through his collar, then the thirty gunner got blown off his gun. So I got up there and started shooting a thirty, you know what I mean, no big thing, but it's just what you do, you know?

• 46:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  We're in an ambush, so you shoot. So you shoot back, and then, uh, he got blown on the other side of him, and crawls over to him, didn't see my pin through his collar, so hits him with another shot of morphine, you know?

• 46:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Then in about, uh, four or five minutes, he kinda set up like this and wanted to do something, but he was, he was screwed. He was hurt really bad, and then me and the other guy got up and started shooting and stuff, and... The guys that were down and everything were after I the thirty ran out of ammo, I started shooting sixteens and they would hand us up sixteens to shoot and stuff, load them for us and shit. And then like I said, the ramp went down, we started going in towards the beach to let the guys that weren't wounded get off. And we started taking fire right through the front. So I went to one side, he went to the other side and I was using a M seventy nine to try to suppress fire and stuff. And we backed off and then we got out of there.

• 47:04Jocko Willink?

  And did you insert any of the army guys?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, about eight or nine of them, yeah.

• 47:08Jocko Willink?

  And how big was, how many guys got inserted? Was that a company, a company strength?

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, not, yeah, it was more than a company. It was eight boats. A lot of people about, you can put about twenty five, thirty guys in the boats, yeah. Yeah, we were here, we, like I said, it was really a weird thing because, you know, we're sitting there and then everything just started, fire going off and we heard number one boat's hit, or number four boat, or number three, number four, yeah. Number two boat's hit, number three boat's hit. And I remember I just turned and looked at it and said, we're fucked. And we got hit. And what it did is, it has a canvas cover and they had all those wire

• 47:51Speaker 02

  stretchers stacked up. And the B forty rocket was heading right towards the, the conning tower, you know what I mean, where they're driving and everything. But it went low and hit those stretchers and it just went, you know, all that shit went out, so.

• 48:09Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys get good medical training? I mean, obviously you knew how to give morphine.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Well, UDT, yeah, pretty good. But in SEAL Team, we had extensive medical training. In fact, the first platoon I went over is, we had a first class corpsman. Probably the best, every week he'd run us through something, whether it was soggy head wounds or something, sucking chest wounds. And we had the same stuff that you guys did, have the mannequins up in the woods and you'd have to run up and treat him and what to do. And we learned to give ourselves serum albumin in case the corpsman was hit or something, you need to give yourself an IV. We did all that stuff. All of us carry that with us. Everybody had serum albumin, which is a blood volume expander, you know what I mean, just in case you had to have it. But UDT, not so much.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  We knew morphine, we knew the basics, some of the basics and, you know, pressurize and tourniquets and stuff like that, but not, not real, real good in UDT.

• 49:08Jocko Willink?

  They do a good job with that T-triple-C class that they teach now. I forget, you forget what it stands for, but it's good. Combat trauma. You guys learn that and so they know what to do when somebody gets hit. Everybody in the platoon knows like a decent amount to get the guy stabilized.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Told us in the platoon, this is the one in sixty-nine, he says, "Yeah, I'm the only corpsman here, and if I get hit, somebody's got to take care of me."

• 49:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so he wanted people...

• 49:34Jocko Willink?

  Good for him. So, you get home from that deployment and now, like you said, you, you knew you had enough of the naked warrior stuff and you said, "I want to get a big machine gun."

• 49:47Speaker 02

  But I will say that was one of the best deployments I was on. The guys and everything. The UDT-12 at that time was comprised of class forty, forty-one, and forty-two and some of forty-three, but everybody knew everybody. You know, I mean, it was real tight and real good. And Seaweb Bay would put Guam to shame.

• 50:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I'm sure it would.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah, like I say, after we'd been there for about three weeks, you, you were ready to go to another debt just to get out of there.

• 50:15Jocko Willink?

  You needed to go to Vietnam to stay alive.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 50:18Jocko Willink?

  No, I, I never realized that you guys would go back to, you know, back to Seaweb Bay in the middle of deployments. That's, that's...

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we would for, then you'd head off to your next debt. Like I said, we were there for nine months and each debt was about three months, you know, I mean, maybe a little less, but we'd have some downtime in Seaweb and then we'd head over to our next debt, which is pretty nice, you know. Nine months is a long time, but still, you know, then actually back in the day, Subic Bay was almost worse than Vietnam in some areas because uh it was almost like the gangsters back in Chicago. You had all these uh different gangs were after each other and shit and when you was walking down McSaisa, you almost had to look around the corner to see if, you know, they were shooting at each other before you walked by and shit. It was uh, it was pretty uh, kinda like the wild, wild west.

• 51:08Jocko Willink?

  And you said that the whole UDT uh twelve at that time was made up of all guys from the same, like five or six buds classes mostly?

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Guys that were there too from other classes, but it was a, the majority of us that were put into the platoons and stuff were from class forty, thirty-nine maybe, yeah, thirty-nine was ahead of us. They, a lot of them went, uh, some went to twelve too. They used to split in eleven and twelve. You went to a UDT team.

• 51:34Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  And then uh, yeah, a lot of them were guys that were, you know, behind us. But remember, we only ran two classes a year in buds.

• 51:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no kidding?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:43Jocko Willink?

  Two classes a year?

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, because thirty-nine was graduated and then we started forty.

• 51:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  And then we graduated and that's when forty-one was starting, you know what I mean?

• 51:55Jocko Willink?

  What do they run now, like five?

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like that, five, six.

• 51:58Jocko Willink?

  It was something like five when I went through.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so.

• 52:01Jocko Willink?

  So, you had a good experience with UDT, but you still wanted to?

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:07Jocko Willink?

  You wanted to go get?

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Me and Danny, we'd put in the shit every month to go to SEAL Team and they yelled at us and said, yeah, none till you get back, you know? So when we got back, we were the first two out of UDT into cadre.

• 52:20Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. And I was, you know, Echo and I had a conversation, I was talking about how at SEAL Team One, when I was in training SEAL Team One, we called ourselves cadre. And I didn't really know where that came from, but I knew that that was what it was called. And we were proud that we were cadre. But then I, I was listening to the podcast that you, you came on and you were talking about cadre and you guys actually called it cadre training.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  That's what SQT was.

• 52:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Was cadre.

• 52:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Guys that taught it were cadre instructors.

• 52:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  And that just carried on.

• 52:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it carried on.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Platoon training was different, you know, once you got in your, got out of SQT or cadre, then you went to a platoon, then you went through platoon training too. And that was still ran by some of the cadre instructors, yeah, because we had our own training cell in Team One.

• 53:04Jocko Willink?

  Team one training cell's been around that long, huh?

• 53:06Speaker 02

  It was, yeah. Yeah, that was the only team.

• 53:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  And it wasn't another team. It was UDT guys and SEAL guys.

• 53:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. That workup, or the cadre training, now you started getting heavy with field craft with, I mean...

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Oh, everything. Yeah, all every ambushes, you name it. And then we had the Alamo River we worked on. And the Alamo River is a lot like Vietnam. They actually set up a whole thing there to look like a valley. They had a little wooden outpost where the, you know, at the whole nine yards, you have to work, you'll go down, get in, and then work your way in and stuff. And it was just like Vietnam. It was pretty close.

• 53:45Jocko Willink?

  And that, once again, the people that are teaching you are SEALs that are in cadre now who probably just got back from Vietnam. So they got fresh information from the battle, fresh experience.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Platoon training, our training cell in Team One, every time a platoon came back, they'd pull two or three of the best guys from that platoon and put them into our training cell. And that was every platoon that came back, they did that. So you had a crosscut of all the different areas of Vietnam and guys that had been in there that did well. And that's who, uh, that you trained. We had guys like and just some great guys. I mean, we got good training and I mean, there was no bullshit because they knew, we knew that what we learned there was going to save our asses and our buddies' butts. So we, uh, it got pounded into our heads. We did river and stream crossing

• 54:36Speaker 02

  a lot because you had a lot of rivers and, you know, small canal, well, not small canals, but pretty good size. You either walked on them and up the other side, or you went across them, you know. Like as a 60 gunner, I always carried about three UDTs with me, you know, to help me float across. But I'm just saying, you had to judge the current, right? So when you went out, it would bring you right into where you're supposed to be and stuff like that. You know what I mean? Just a extensive training. The Alamo River's not real.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  It's not a real fast moving stream, but it has a good current in it. So you learned all that, you know what I mean? You learned what you had to have, your gear you had. Like we'd do swimming pool stuff with our sixties and shit to see where we needed to have the flotation and stuff like that. You know what I mean? It was pretty good. Actually, when I went out to Nyland, we didn't even have the camp out there. We had, in Nyland itself, the town, there was a gas station and it had about four or five green, little green trailers. And that's where we stayed at. And then they'd truck us up to where the canal was to shoot and stuff. And a lot of times we'd go up there, then we'd run back and stuff. You know what

• 55:49Speaker 02

  I mean? And we'd go up to the Chocolate Mountains, up to Beal Wells and stuff like that for ambushes and just, you know what I mean? And we had no camp. There was no camp there. Siphon, siphon. What was that siphon? I can't remember the siphon. I mean, all along that whole area. In fact, later on, when I was in platoons and stuff, we'd be going up to Chocolate Mountains, come back some other way. And you'd still see holes where Forty Mike, Mike had went into and stuff, you know? From back in the day.

• 56:18Jocko Willink?

  How much, how much work were you doing at night?

• 56:20Speaker 02

  Oh, that's all the only time we worked, pretty much. We'd do our media action drills and stuff during the day and stuff. But all of our ambushes and all the other field craft that we did and everything was all at night because that's when we worked.

• 56:33Jocko Willink?

  And that was the, that was the known thing. It was like, yep, we're gonna go out at night. That's what we do.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 56:39Jocko Willink?

  How much did you guys, did you guys go out? If there was a full moon, would you go out less? In Vietnam, would you go out less if there's a full moon?

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Mm-mm. Cause you had foliage and stuff. You couldn't see that well.

• 56:49Jocko Willink?

  It was still dark enough. Cause sometimes in the desert, a full moon, it's almost like daytime out there.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 56:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And

• 56:58Jocko Willink?

  What, you know, you're talking about gear a little bit and what you carried. And there's all these kind of myths about what guys were doing. Burke in the day and in Vietnam. One of them's blue jeans. Like everyone wore blue jeans or a lot, a lot of guys wore blue jeans, which kind of makes sense to me because they're tough, right?

• 57:15Speaker 02

  That was the whole reason was that mosquitoes wouldn't go through them. And if you're in mangrove and stuff, it wouldn't tear them and stuff ripstop would tear. And if you bend down like when you stopped and stuff, the skews would eat you alive right through the ripstop and stuff. So we started wearing the uh. Blue jeans and you wanted to get zip up blue jeans, not the button up. Cause they also kept leeches off you. If you had the button button button up ones, you were screwed. And then sometimes we wore pantyhose underneath that to keep leeches off us. But we'd take the Levi's and. Put them into our jungle boots and riggers tape them around. So, you know, we did, they wouldn't just be hanging down where shit could come up and stuff. Cause there were a lot of leeches over there. No big thing, but I mean.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  You just, you just learned, you know, like I said, the pantyhose is pretty funny because when we were on sea float. Guys would be walking around with pink and blue and. Yellow pantyhose on and stuff and sailors are giving us kind of some weird looks and shit.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  It's kind of funny.

• 58:15Jocko Willink?

  How about guys going barefoot?

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Well, we had a couple of guys that do that and guys stepped on stuff and injured themselves and that. I didn't see that very much at all myself in my platoons. Maybe other platoons would tell you, yeah, that was a big thing, but a lot of times we don't walk on trails. We walk outside of the trails and there's all kinds of shit in there and you don't want to just be barefoot, I guarantee you.

• 58:42Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with that um workup and everything. How about, how about like your? You're, you're a pig gunner. I heard stories about guys taking every round out of their belt and lubing every individual round, especially stoner. I heard that about stoner gunners, that they'd take every round out of their belt and lube every individual round and put it back in there. Is that not true?

• 59:03Speaker 02

  I've never seen that happen. And we had four guys that carried the stoner machine gun in my last platoon. But I don't know why you'd take them out and put them back in.

• 59:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  They jammed a lot, but that was just a stoner thing. We sent our guys to Cadillac Gage, which is who made the stoner, so they could learn all the intricacies and what to do if something happened, you know what I mean?

• 59:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  But the pig gun, the sixty, you didn't have to worry about it that much. As long as you took care of that baby, it did work for you. Every time I ever had a malfunction was operator error, you know?

• 59:38Jocko Willink?

  Uh oh.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Like having it slide down your arm.

• 59:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  And you get a link stuck in there, or you're shooting it and you have your do rag around your neck, and it gets caught and starts dragging your head down like this.

• 59:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I heard this story.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Things you learn, you know?

• 59:53Jocko Willink?

  And I don't know who told me, one of the Vietnam SEALs told me this story, that like he had the, the, um, he had, he was a stoner gunner. And when he came back, he checked in his weapon and he was going and joining another platoon. So he went to get a new stoner, not a new stoner, but one of the stoners out of the armory. And he got, went and checked the stoner out of the armory and engraved in the buttstock of the stoner, it said, "Everybody must get stoned," which, which I always got a good kick out of.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  That could have been, yeah. No, it was, uh, but that sixty, it was just, um, and you developed exactly, uh, like my basic load was about six thirty, because we had a hundred and thirty round box.

• 1:00:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  That we had China Lake made, that went right on the side of it and we slung it, you know, and shot it from the hip. But after shooting thousands of rounds from, from the hip, you had really good eye to barrel coordination of exactly where that round was going to go. But even regardless, you always worked it in, because it wasn't a, uh, Excuse me, a point weapon like a M fourteen.

• 1:00:59Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  You know, it was a, it's an area weapon, but still you can get pretty accurate with that son of a bitch. And you'd always walk your rounds in because what, you know, rounds Richard Shane off could uh hit a guy just as well as getting him right square in the chest or something. And um I use canteen pouches. And I carried uh five campaign, canteen pouches around my waist and I'd put a hundred rounds in there and leave about uh an inch out of that.

• 1:01:26Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  And then when I would fire and I knew I was getting low, I'd pop my lid open on my uh can I had. Grab my uh thing of my uh sixty rounds, snap them in and dump them in and close it. Or the lid when it opened up had ridges on the side and it would slide right in, just depended, you know. But what was good about that box is you could be blown upside down or anything and still have that hundred and thirty rounds ready to shoot. You know what I mean? That's why we liked it, but this place uh it was an, it's a Navy experimental place called China Lake. And we used to, we had them build them for us and they worked really well.

• 1:02:03Jocko Willink?

  Did you use a sling?

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. What we did is we took the big butt plate off, put an aircraft butt plate on. And if you notice in the back, you have that round thing that would take a, it hooked it through that, bringing it up and took a hanger and made it down, roll like this, and I put it around the front of the hanger so you could take it off when you're in a chopper so you can hold it down. And then you could take it off, put it on, but you got it fit just right where it was just right, exactly where you wanted it to and it worked great, you know. We were inventive fucks, man, we figured it out, you know. Like we was on this one boat one time and we saw these uh sixty guys, they were, uh they had sixties on the bolts, you know, and they had these big metal containers that the rounds went in and we're looking at that and it was a flex tube that went into the sixty and so

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  couple K bars later, we walked off with a couple of those and they were fit perfect in the back of a brick seventy seven uh backpack. We could put them on, held five hundred rounds and you had the flex tube that went right into your sixty. You had to have a special feed tray for it, you know what I mean, it was feed tray, the uh, the uh feed tray was right on the end of the flex tube, so it set right in there, perfect, so. And then if we're doing an off the chopper, charge the bunker op, you had 500 rounds right there.

• 1:03:20Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  It was kinda neat. We're the only ones in Vietnam that had that. In fact, we came off choppers one time. We were doing parakeet ops, I'll tell you about that later, and there was a whole bunch of army guys and stuff where we landed with the choppers, we're getting off, beating each other on the back, and a couple of good firefights and shit, you know, and just smell the cord light coming up and everything. We're all bearded and, you know, Levi's and all that shit, and they're saying, "God damn, I told you we had mercenaries over here."

• 1:03:47Jocko Willink?

  (laughing)

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Was it mercenaries? And one guy says, "No, that's SEALs."

• 1:03:51Jocko Willink?

  So you guys had, you guys were the originators of the Predator pack?

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Pretty much, I think. I think we were. They used them on the boats, but not on, not out in the field. You couldn't patrol at night with them.

• 1:04:01Jocko Willink?

  Did you have to feed it?

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:04:03Jocko Willink?

  It just, it fed itself?

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  It fed itself, right off the bottom of that.

• 1:04:05Jocko Willink?

  No kidding? You didn't have to pull it or nothing?

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  No, nothing. It just rooop right through their butt. You gotta be careful, because if you took that thing off and laid it down and didn't put a nail through the, through the flex part of it, all your rounds would come out. So they have this big pile of 500 rounds, it's not good, you know, especially if you was in a firefight and stuff, trying to put it back in, you know, I'm just saying, it's just funny. But it was, it was pretty good. Me and a guy named, the two of us had those, and we fixed them up, just, just playing, looking at it, thinking, hmm. But you couldn't patrol at night with them on patrol, because they would go clank, clank, you could hear them moving. That was only if you were actually going off and hitting something. Like you say, there was three types of ops we'd go into if we knew we were gonna take heavies.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  One was a down pilot, and another SEAL platoon in trouble in a bright light.

• 1:04:55Jocko Willink?

  What was bright light?

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  That's prisoner war, going in to hit them, get them out. But those three ops were the main, the main three, what he went into no matter what, you know?

• 1:05:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome. You get, so you finish your workup, and...

• 1:05:14Jocko Willink?

  Now you're over, you go your first deployment to Vietnam. Was this Kilo platoon?

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Jocko Willink?

  Kilo platoon, Vietnam. And you're saying you were doing, the first podcast, you were saying that you did dartboard operations, which was have a guy huck a dart, because you guys didn't have good intel, you didn't have good support.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  No, we were, we were at a place called, uh, New Nam Can, and it was a Vietnamese, uh, firebase out in BF Egypt, you know? And, uh, we were here, then down here, you had the river and sea float where our other squad was, but our squad got put up here. That was the one.

• 1:05:47Jocko Willink?

  So just one squad out there by itself?

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  With the Vietnamese guys, they had a firebase there.

• 1:05:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And there was not good intel, so you basically would throw a dart at the dartboard and then do what? Go do an ambush there? Go set an ambush, basically?

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  Just go out and look, set up ambush or something, see what was out there.

• 1:06:03Jocko Willink?

  Go patrol?

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Jocko Willink?

  And that, and you also were inserting primarily on, on sandpans during that deployment?

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Pretty much, otherwise we, uh, about three times, we walked out of the firebase and walked back in, and that's just, that doesn't give you a warm and fuzzy, you know? Cause, uh, change guards and stuff, and you come back in, all they see is movement out there, and maybe they don't know what the, uh, bona fide is for you coming back in and shit, and you know what I'm saying?

• 1:06:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  So, yeah, we didn't do a lot up at New Nam Can because of that, and we only had sandpans. We didn't have any of our boats up there, none of the mediums or lights or anything. So, uh, after we'd been up there for about a month, I think, month and a half, then they brought us, uh, maybe two months. And then, then they brought us down to sea float, and then we started doing some good ops down there.

• 1:06:52Jocko Willink?

  The sandpans, how big is a sandpan? How many guys could you fit in it?

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  Oh, four or five.

• 1:06:58Jocko Willink?

  So you take two sandpans?

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  Because we were heavy, yeah, we'd take two sandpans.

• 1:07:01Jocko Willink?

  Take two sandpans?

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  Have you ever gotten into a sandpan?

• 1:07:04Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  They're not a real stable boat.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  Vietnamese are good in them because they're small, but you get about five big Americans in there and it's a, you have to be real careful.

• 1:07:16Jocko Willink?

  And are you rowing it?

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  No, it's got a little motor on the back, yeah.

• 1:07:20Jocko Willink?

  The little like.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  We usually had a VN with us that could put along with us, wasn't just ourselves, no.

• 1:07:26Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then someone would stay with the boats?

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:29Jocko Willink?

  The VN would stay with the boats or something?

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  And come back and get us, you know?

• 1:07:34Jocko Willink?

  But you didn't start working a lot until you got to sea float?

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Jocko Willink?

  And then what kind of ops were you doing on a sea float?

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  Uh, same thing, uh, ambushes and going up rivers, setting up ambushes and that's what I told you. I think it would, you know, I get a little bit confused sometimes on PBRs and Swifts. I'm thinking they were PBRs that were down in sea float with us, but they would, uh, we'd go up on the, uh, PBR and have a Boston Whaler with us and a Boston Whaler could probably hold four or five guys, you know? Plus the guy on the front with a sixty and, uh, the guy driving it. Well, the way we'd work that is we had the whole platoon there. One platoon would be going to do something, well, two guys out of the other, I mean, uh, one squad would go up and two guys from the other squad luckily got to pick to be the, uh, driver sitting up on a thing,

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  driving the, uh, the, uh, Boston Whaler and the other guy in the sixties. While everybody else was just looking over the edge like this and didn't get, there again, it wasn't, you didn't get real excited when you were chosen to be the, uh, the coxswain, you know?

• 1:08:37Jocko Willink?

  How often would you guys make enemy contact when you guys go out on ambush? Cause that had to be kinda like looking for a needle in a haystack, right?

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got some contact. That was the one down at the square bay I told you about when we hit the, when I wasn't on that up, when they hit that junk and then all them other flares started popping up and they realizing. And a few other times we got in some, uh, some crap, but that particular, that.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  That platoon and that deployment wasn't, we didn't do an awful lot. We went out a lot. Don't get me wrong, but we didn't get a lot of firefights and stuff. It was my second platoon where we kicked ass and took names.

• 1:09:16Jocko Willink?

  And it sounds like, I mean, this is sort of classic and you and I were talking about this earlier today. If you don't have good intel.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 1:09:22Jocko Willink?

  You can go out on the ambush all day long.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  Even down in the seafloor, we didn't have that good of intel, you know, and like we didn't have a chief of a platoon. We had an LPO and no mention of any names, but he wasn't real good. But we had this other guy, that chief corpsman, not chief, but that corpsman. It was a first class and he kind of took over everything. He had been with the Marines twice to Vietnam. So he was a good hand, you know what I mean? Had his shit together, was smart and just a couple of funny things happened. It was down in the seafloor, I told you, where that pilot of clothes moved and stuck his head up. Oh, you're looking for me? We thought we had lost him, you know? And that was like, the chopper comes in and lands, two of them did, and one was pretty shot up and door gunner had been hit.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  So he said, hey, anybody want to be a door gunner? We got to go back and pick up some other guys. Well, of course, as a corpsman, yeah, I'll go. So he's in UDTs, he throws a flak jacket on the helmet and takes the door gunner position, you know, and they take off. And about a half hour later, the chopper comes back in and lands, shot up even more. Harry gets off the, I mean, he gets off the boat, throws his helmet down, takes his flak jacket off. Fuck, I'll never do that again.

• 1:10:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, those, uh, we, when we had, um, this guy, Colonel, Colonel Reader on, who was a, uh, pilot in Vietnam. He flew Cobras in Vietnam in his second deployment. But those guys, those pilots in Vietnam, the helicopter pilots in Vietnam, they did not, they knew they were going to take rounds. They just went in anyways. They, they were badass.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  That was the same as our Sea Wolves and the Black Ponies, but the Sea Wolves especially were just unbelievable guys, you know, just, uh. They were just badass dudes, man. They uh, and I I told you that one story, didn't I, about that one chopper?

• 1:11:09Jocko Willink?

  No, I don't think so.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Kind of pinned down behind this Reichsteig and we're getting some pretty heavy fire from the uh, tree lines. So we're calling for uh, close air support and it's the Sea Wolves, you know, so. We're getting up, shooting, getting back down my sixty and we're getting kind of low on ammo too, except the Sea Wolves. We always had ammo staged on the Sea Wolves so they could kick it off to us when they came in. So the Sea Wolves were coming, we could hear the rotors, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, when the Sea Wolves weren't doing, they were the greatest. When they weren't doing uh, close air support, they do PsyOps, they had these great big speakers. So, we hear this one Sea Wolf coming in behind us and we're still shooting everything. All of a sudden out of the clear blue sky, I swear to God, you hear this.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  "We are the gods of hellfire and we bring you fire." And the fucking rockets went over our heads and hit the tree line. And they either had a fifty or a minigun on one side of the uh, Sea Wolf. And that Sea Wolf turned like that and just holds it down. I think that one had a minigun on it. Then right behind him came another Sea Wolf. But when they, when we heard that, we were like, everybody just stopped shooting and we looked back up like, what the fuck?

• 1:12:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh dude.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  It was unreal.

• 1:12:20Jocko Willink?

  And that's just everyone.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Really suppress the fire. So then the Black Pony, they had two point seven rockets and uh, Black Ponies came in with the five inch Zoomies. And when they hit the tree line, it was blowing shit clear up over our head and that pretty much squelched it. It was done and we got out of there. The Sea Lords came in, the regular Hueys that picked us up and got us out of there. That was, that was a good op though.

• 1:12:41Jocko Willink?

  The uh, the Sea Wolves were the Navy uh, pilots, Navy Vietnam pilots, gunships that came and supported.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  They weren't like Cobras, they were regular Hueys that set up with rocket pods and I think uh, like the uh, Black Ponies had the uh, twenty milli- millimeter uh, guns in the front. And then the five inch Zoomies, they had the, just the rocket pods, but they had a fifty on one side. And or a uh a s- a a minigun on the other side.

• 1:13:09Jocko Willink?

  And the most important thing that they had from everything I've heard and from what you're telling me right now is they had balls.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They were good.

• 1:13:17Jocko Willink?

  They would just come in and.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  We got drunk one night in our bar and Seawolves are on the army side. That's where they had their thing. So we figured, hell, we'll go over and visit them and have them drink with us. So we jumped in our six by and headed out. We were, they had the army base here. And the Navy base here. We lived on the Vietnamese side and had our own, own barracks all fortified. It was perfect. So anyway, we got in our six by and was heading out. Went over to where the Seawolf guys were. We wanted to drink with us, you know. We had our sixties with us and stuff. You never knew, you know. So we get over there and go walking in their compound and everything. All right, boys, get up. Let's drink. Well, see, we made them drink with us naked because we were all naked. So we're all sitting there drinking beers.

• 1:14:04Jocko Willink?

  Uh, nakedness, M60s and booze. I like where this is going. So you guys had way much, way more fun in Vietnam than we had.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. We, we had a good time. I'm telling you, we weren't, uh, we'd, we'd get back from an op, do our debrief, clean our weapons and go up and get shit face, you know.

• 1:14:23Jocko Willink?

  That's another thing. Colonel Reader said the same thing. He goes, he goes, yeah, you know, we'd go out, we'd fly, we'd get shot up, we'd have to come back and like put the birds in for repair. And then we'd get drunk.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Jocko Willink?

  And then we go, and he goes, I don't know. And he, he really like looked at me and he said, I don't know how you guys did it without alcohol, basically is what he was saying.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Well, I was a, you know, went to Desert Storm. We were over there nine months and no alcohol and stuff. It was okay. But I mean, to me, it was just like, yeah, this isn't my war, you know.

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  We really didn't do that much in, uh, you know, the guys did recon's and stuff up from Mashab and we did that one deception op and, uh, when we inserted the Quades and shit during, and that's. Outside of that, they never really got into, uh, firefight and shit, you know.

• 1:15:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Now that, that op with the Seawolves, that was, I'm assuming that was on your second deployment to Vietnam. Cause your first, your first deployment, you know, you did what you did, but it wasn't as fruitful.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  No, I get, to me, to tell you the honest, I got the truth coming out of ET and the SEAL team, I was ready to hit the deck running. And it just seemed like we didn't hit the deck running over there and. Just didn't have the intel. I don't think our, as you were saying, leadership was all that good and stuff. I mean, we had one guy, the LT. They were doing some shit down in Sea Float, but up where we were, we just didn't. You couldn't. It just wasn't that much you could do. You would go out and look, try to find shit and everything, but we didn't have actionable intel.

• 1:15:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  That we could react on, you know, which you found out later, that's what you have to have.

• 1:15:59Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes too, I think people spread their forces too thin. Like you think about it, you just take a squad and put them out there in the middle of nowhere with no intel support. And then you got another squad in some other area with no intel support. You know, you might as well bring them together, put a couple of guys to gather intel and you start making something happen.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  Well, the platoon before us that was there and stuff that, uh, that was platoon. Those guys gotten a lot of shit, you know what I mean? That's when he got his Medal of Honor and stuff like that. And actually, my second trip over had been in that platoon, you know what I mean? And he told me some stories about it. They got a lot of shit. But that's, we were stuck at New Nam Can and just didn't, well, shit, right? You could see the Umen Forest, which was the very southern part of Vietnam. And it's just triple canopy, just, I mean, it's, we were away from that a little bit, you know? But there was this old Vietnamese guy there, he had tattoos all over and I guess he had fought with the French against the Viet- Vietmin, you know, which was the bad guys fighting the French, same as VC.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  And we were, to an interpreter, we were talking to him and I'm like, goddamn Umen Forest, you know, that's a, he says, yeah, a whole, uh, uh, company of, uh, French Four Legion paratroopers jumped in there and none of them ever came back out and we're going, hmm.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Plus, that's when I was telling you in my last, uh, podcast I did, that's where we landed and we were just starting to put our shit away. And the sloach lands and it's a prude visor and a good friend of mine, real good friend of mine now. And then when that loach took off, we got the ship mortared out here for about two hours. And that's when we told him, don't ever come here again, you know?

• 1:17:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so now when you get back, you get back, you do another workup and well, actually you got out for a little bit, you come back in, you decide, you know, that's like when I went to college, I had to go, I had to get my, once I got my commission, I had to go to college and people tell, what'd you learn in college? And I'd say, I learned in college, never, ever, ever, ever get out of the teams, ever.

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  Same with me, you know, it's a thing deal.

• 1:18:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so you, you get out for a year or something and you come back in and getting your, your second platoon, getting ready to go to, was that November platoon?

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:18:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  He just passed and what a great guy. I mean,

• 1:18:18Jocko Willink?

  Was he the platoon commander?

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Yes, he was the OT, Daiwi OT, you know, he's a great guy, just a great guy, man. He, and he just passed here about three weeks ago. We went up in Rosecrans and they buried him and stuff, but he was a great guy, man.

• 1:18:33Jocko Willink?

  And that workup, that workup, did it, did, did much change between your first workup at SEAL Team and your second one?

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  Actually, when I got out, came back in, I went back through Cadre.

• 1:18:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Just to, you know, kind of get yourself refreshed. It'd been about a year I was out, you know what I mean? And it just, that's the way you did in Team One. If you were gone way over six months or something, you went back through Cadre. Just even the guys that came from the East Coast, you know, just so they'd know how we worked and stuff, which was good. When I was going through Cadre, Jerry Fletch was out there with his platoon and I got to know him and I knew some of the other guys in platoon. So as soon as I got out of Cadre, they lost a guy in their platoon and lucky enough, I was good enough to get into it. So I didn't go through the whole workup with November platoon. I just got in it. And that's what I was telling you was down at the Ream Field, they used

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  to have a firing range down there. And I was figuring out, man, I might shoot something else. And I, you know, that's when I, actually that's the first, that's when I picked up at 60, me and this guy.

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  We shot at this Krieger log, pieces flew off the Krieger log and we set it on fire. And I remember looking at, he looked at me and it was like, we're in. So that was it.

• 1:19:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the 60s are beautiful things.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  Oh, it's a great thing.

• 1:20:01Jocko Willink?

  So this next deployment, and you mentioned this on the, on the, on the first podcast when you came on, about the orders that you got from, was it from MACV Sog? Is that who you're getting orders from?

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, NAV4V.

• 1:20:14Jocko Willink?

  NAV4V.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we landed in Saigon and our LT, Daiwei went up to, to see where we're gonna go, what area we're gonna work in, what province, you know, and he went up there and they told him, well, you got the Vinlong province, which is where Dongtam is and stuff. And he said, uh, his orders were to pacify it. That was it. And we brought it, he picked up a whole bunch of money so we could pay our Kikarson scouts and stuff like that. And we went to Dongtam. Well, we stopped at Benluck first. It's about 40 miles away from Dongtam. And there was another platoon there, Gary Gallagher's platoon. And we shows up in our six buys and stuff. And we're kind of rugged looking because we'd been in Saigon for three days and having a good time and shit.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  And he comes walking out and he looks at us, he goes, "God damn, you guys look like you've been here six months already." You know, we was a little bedraggled and shit. Then we went to Dongtam, but we used to go back and forth. Was in that platoon where they just had some great guys.

• 1:21:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  And they were like, I said, they were our sister platoon, you know, so we'd go and see each other once in a while.

• 1:21:22Jocko Willink?

  Would the sister platoons deploy at the same time?

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  No, they had been over there for three months.

• 1:21:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so was it like a overlap of three months between the platoons?

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  Some of them, yeah. Two of them may go at the same time. Usually when you got there, there was another platoon somewhere around you, whether east coast or west coast. Of course, east coast had two platoons over there, so Vong Tao, I'm thinking it was Vong Tao. God, I'm still trying to think of that name. It's right on a river and that's where the East Coast Platoon was. We never, Na Bay. That's where it was, Na Bay.

• 1:21:52Jocko Willink?

  And that's where the East Coast Platoon was?

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had a platoon there and they had a platoon in Mito. And that was their two platoons. And then we took over, when they left, we took over the one at Dong, uh, uh, Mito, but we moved to Dong Tam because we didn't want to be right in the middle of a, a city, you know, or a big, big, uh, town or city. So we moved down to Dong Tam and then the Navy base didn't want us. The Army base didn't want us, so they put us in the Vietnamese base that split them, so.

• 1:22:18Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that was good. We had our boats right there. Everything was perfect. We'd go to the Army base to test fire our weapons and shit and they were doing that all the time anyway, so it wasn't, it's another thing. I wonder how in Mito, how they test fired their weapons and shit. Anyway.

• 1:22:33Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, what was your op tempo like when you were on the second deployment?

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  Second deployment was, uh, we'd go out about

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  every two to three days. Cause you had to gather intel and stuff like that and, uh, and then we'd get a little break and if we were real bored, we'd do what we called parakeet ops. And, uh, there was this area, I don't know if I talked about this in the first podcast, but it was a place called the Plain of Reeds and it was all enemy, it was all VC. And so we'd take off, uh, four or five of us in a, um, Huey didn't have a, a Sea Wolf in front and back of us. And then we'd just fly out there, start looking, go over, go over small hamlets and villages and if you see VC running around to get shot at, they'd land us, we'd sweep through, then they'd pick us up and we'd go look for some more, you know?

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  That's when we were bored, you know? We called them parakeet ops. Then the, uh, when we hit and started spreading around, the Sea Wolf would go off, I mean, not Sea Wolf, the Sea Lord, which was our Huey. And then the Sea Wolves would start circling, looking for squatters and stuff, you know?

• 1:23:39Jocko Willink?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  It was good. We might get in two or three firefights, you know?

• 1:23:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. That was daytime ops, you know?

• 1:23:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so you're just running those daytime ops and what, you would, you would just look at the map and say, hey, this is probably a good spot?

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Plain of Reeds, the whole place was a, uh, uh,

• 1:23:58Jocko Willink?

  VC stronghold?

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, VC stronghold, a lot of VC out there. So, and then that's when we took a couple of the Australians with us on that. Those parakeets and stuff and it blew them out of the water.

• 1:24:11Jocko Willink?

  How'd they like it? Did they come back for more?

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. We, we had two groups come down with us and me and that. To New Ede where the Australian SAS were and went out with them and that was pretty, pretty unique, you know. My sixty and about five hundred rounds and a hundred and twenty pound pack and walked around for about eight days. I was real happy about that.

• 1:24:33Jocko Willink?

  Damn. Yeah, that's no joke.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  But it was good. They were, they were great troops and, you know, they loved coming down, working with us because we got contact and when they, you know, up there, they look for things to see if, what they could find. They had two types of things. They had a five man fighting patrol or a ten, I mean a five man recce or a ten man fighting patrol. When we went out with them, it was a ten man fighting patrol because we were going to go into this area that the Australian armored infantry had taken over this, uh, North Indian, uh, NVA, North Vietnamese Army Base Camp and just decimated it. Well, our job was to go see if any of the NVA had moved back into the area or not. It was good.

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  That's like I said in my first podcast, they're the best reconnaissance guys I've ever, ever worked with and they're fighters too.

• 1:25:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  They're good, good, good, uh, good troops.

• 1:25:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. For some reason, a lot of people ask me, if you've ever worked with foreign troops, everyone wanna, kinda wants to know what we think of their countries and their troops, you know, and, uh, you know, the Brits and the Aussies, you know.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  The SAS are top shelf.

• 1:25:36Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  They're the only ones that went out with us on patrol and I think we're in Vietnam, we were the only ones that went out with them. You know, and, uh, it all started out with a couple of SAS guys drinking in a bar with a couple of our guys and pooper pats and telling tall tales and, you know, drinking beers and shit. Next thing you know, we had this exchange and it's been ongoing since, yeah.

• 1:25:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, always. When I was a team one, there was always a, an SAS guy there.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Did you, uh, did you, when you went to, did you get to go to Australia?

• 1:26:07Jocko Willink?

  I never went, no.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  Oh, you'd love it there.

• 1:26:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. That's what everyone tells me.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  It's great.

• 1:26:12Jocko Willink?

  I always got, uh, I always got screwed out of going to Australia for some reason.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I went there five times after Vietnam and hell, there were still guys there that had been to Vietnam with from the SAS. You know what I mean? It was good. It was great.

• 1:26:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I I always got screwed for some reason. I'd always go, well, yeah, we're gonna go to Australia and some something would come up and we wouldn't get to go.

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

  That's because your platoon officer wasn't very well liked or something.

• 1:26:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, most likely. What, uh, when you said you were getting contact a lot, so you're doing an op every two, three days. How often are you guys getting an en- enemy contact?

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  Just about every time we went out because we were going out on actionable intel, you know what I mean? And, uh, shit, I can't think of all of it like that. One time I was telling you and another time we hit these two hooches and guys came out. It was like the old Kate Correll, except we won. And, um, another time we was doing this recon, just looking and this one guy, um, gets up on top of this bunker because we couldn't find any entrance around it. They may have had a tunnel coming into it somewhere and he's up there. I'm standing here and this guy who has a six, he's there and we're kinda watching the area for him while he's up there looking around and tune, tune, tune, tune, right by me comes this AK forty seven rounds and they missed me. I don't know how the hell they missed me. But, uh, then, uh,

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  jumps off the, the bunker down right beside me and is going, yeah, the guy's over there, the guy's over there and me and you are yelling and we'll shoot the son of a bitch. Finally, we saw where his rounds came in and we started shooting. Another time we got pinned down a little bit and we were gonna go in and hit this, uh, check this hospital out and stuff. We got hit pretty hard and we had to pull back and, you know, move out. That might've been when we got pinned down, you know?

• 1:27:59Jocko Willink?

  Was that when you called them the Sea Wolves to me?

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  We called them in a few times, you know?

• 1:28:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's interesting because people think that every time you go out, you're gonna get enemy contact and you could see, I mean, your first deployment, it was rare that you'd get enemy contact. The second time it's a lot more often.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:14Jocko Willink?

  Like my first deployment to Iraq, we got in like, I don't know, like four or five firefights maybe. And they were all pretty like, not, not really a big deal. And then when I was a troop commander in Ramadi, the, the platoons were getting into it all the, I mean, almost every, not, not almost every, but a lot of the times, I mean, a majority of the times, there'd be, there'd be shooting going on, you know?

• 1:28:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I might tell you, I've talked to a lot of guys that were in your platoon in Ramadi. And they, uh, they'd follow you to the. To hell if they had it, they loved you. So just letting you know, you had a real good impression and you you were outstanding. So just telling you that that's for my guy, you know, talking to the guys in the ground, drinking and stuff when your name comes up, you know.

• 1:28:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, they're drunk, I guess. That's that's the reason.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  No, I'm just telling you, just letting you know, you know.

• 1:29:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, those guys were, those guys did, those guys actually, never mind they would, they did, they they did all kinds of stuff that was above, way above and beyond the call of duty for sure. And uh,

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  Well, you fought the fight. You took it to them. That's what that's what you're supposed to do, you know?

• 1:29:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was a, it was an awesome deployment, awesome deployment with working with awesome guys for sure.

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, hell, we went out one time and we heard there was this cachet, you know, so, but we didn't want people to know they were going out there. So we got into a refrigerator truck and hid in the back of that until they got close to where the cachet was. And then we went out and dug it up and came back. Just little things, you know what I mean? That was a neat op.

• 1:29:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's uh, that is good stuff. When um, when you get back from that deployment, and that was the last, November platoon was the last fully deployed to Vietnam.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Jocko Willink?

  And you didn't get any, you didn't go back to Subic when you were in a SEAL platoon, did you?

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:30:02Jocko Willink?

  That was like in country the whole time.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  The whole time, yeah. Well, you did get two weeks or a week or two weeks, I think of R and R and uh, I think I went to Hawaii

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  and Thailand one time, so.

• 1:30:14Jocko Willink?

  Echo supports your choice of going to Hawaii. He's from Hawaii, so.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, Hawaii isn't bad. Nope, it's not. Kind of weird though, going to Hawaii and everything is all quiet and peaceful and everything. And you just come out of the woods and, you know, after you've been there for a while, you're, you you kind of want to go back, you know what I mean?

• 1:30:33Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'd have went to Thailand, I probably would have stayed in Thailand and still been there now and I'd probably be dead.

• 1:30:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a lot of people that go to Thailand and don't come back.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  Bangkok makes the hard man humble, I guarantee you.

• 1:30:47Jocko Willink?

  Did, uh, I remember last time we talked about this blue on blue that you guys had, was that in November platoon?

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  No, that was in, uh, Kilo.

• 1:30:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that was in Kilo.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that was our, um, that was our, the officer that was with us up in, um, Ngunnamcan. And it was, like you say, it was supposed to be a hammer and ammo op, it just went wrong.

• 1:31:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  And I, I'm not sure if he was, uh, stood up to shoot, or if he was trying to wave and tell him to stop shooting, anyway he got hit, you know, and killed him, so. And then we almost had another in November platoon, I forgot to mention this, so we're hitting this island, it's not a big island, but it had hooches all along one side. So they wanted us to go through and check out the hooches, and we had what we called white mice with us, they were Vietnamese intel guys that could look through things and find out if there's any VC stuff, you know what I mean, sort of thing? So we lands and we're sweeping through it, and I had this one white mice with me and I had my sixty. Well, the guy that

• 1:31:49Speaker 02

  planned this op and thought it was a good idea was our Det Golf guy. And Det Golf was your senior seal, was that Def Golf, and he was kind of in charge of all the other platoons that were spread out. And, um, so we did it and he was with us and his interpreter, so. And we were told, everybody stay on the side when we patrol, because anything on the left side is a free fire zone, right? So we're walking along and I'm looking at the woods, and also I see this flitting through the woods. So I bring my sixty up, take it off a safe and I'm watching, well, where the woods were, there was a space in another part of the woods, well, I wanted the VC, who I thought it was, to get out in the space. And then I'd hammer him, you know, open up my sixty.

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  And, uh, we were spread out a little bit because everybody was checking different things out as we're going along. So I had it off safe, I'm just have laid it up on this, uh, rice, rice bag, you know, with rice on it and just waiting, who comes out? But the Lieutenant Commander, the dead golf guy, I was so fucking pissed. If I'd have been a new guy, I'd have opened up, you know, I mean, maybe killed him and things. So I told Jerry Fletcher, my LT about it and he never went out with us again. Cause that was crazy. He was on the free fire zone. You know what I mean? And like you say, what if I'd been a brand new guy or something, you know, but I wanted to wait till he got out. So I had a clear picture before I opened up on him.

• 1:33:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, even your mindset wasn't even, let me confirm this is a bad guy. You knew it was a bad guy. You were just waiting for the him, the bad guy.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I wasn't saying that might be one of our guys. I knew it was a bad guy because we had already briefed heavily. Everybody stay on this side. Anybody over there and you see him, open up on him.

• 1:33:30Jocko Willink?

  You know, when I was running training, man, I, I worked those guys. They, we'd have blue on blues all the time in training. I mean, we would just make stuff so confusing and just put the enemy in the wrong place and get guys confused. I wanted them to have blue on blues in training. So they realized how easy it is to happen. So you get a guy instead of making that decision like, oh, just, you know what? Just probably get a good vantage point over here. If I just walk over here and they'll know it's me. You know, it's like, no, they won't know it's you. They'll kill you. So yeah, it's, uh, man, you gotta, people don't understand how confusing it gets out there, man. It gets confusing.

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  It does. That's, that's where you're training in your, like I was telling you, though it saved our butt in Vietnam was our immediate action drills. And have them so ingrained into us that it's dark, you know exactly where the guy's gonna be and what you're gonna do. Whether it's a peel off or whether you're going to the right or left, you know what I mean?

• 1:34:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  Getting out of the, uh, the, the fire zone, whatever, you know what I mean?

• 1:34:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  But you had to have that, man. Those immediate action drills to me are the key. No matter what you're doing, whether it's urban or I think, which I can't really say.

• 1:34:33Jocko Willink?

  No, it's the same thing. It's the same thing in an urban environment. You gotta have a immediate.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  Well, just like, say you have a hooch there and you're gonna hit the hooch, you know? And we know there's probably bad guys in it and we're coming in. What we do is two guys that branch out to the right or left to get anybody from behind. The rest would go in, one guy would turn around, look that way and the guys would go in. And that way they could shoot, you know, uh, 180, you know what I mean? And nobody was down. Now if the hooch was covered and had foliage around it. Then as we came in, one of the guys on the left would go down, lay down, look behind. The other guy'd be right here at the corner so he could see anybody coming out a window. And then we'd have the other guy over here. And then we'd go in and hit it. But what I'm saying is when we did that, it was like that.

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  I mean, that and that was our immediate action stuff that we did. That's how we'd hit a hooch.

• 1:35:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  And then when guys went in, they'd switch, one would swing high, one would swing low. Just to, you know, to check it out, then they'd go through. Then they'd say clear or we got someone. And then whoever was right next to the door facing out, because we had our security, you didn't know if anybody was gonna come behind you. As they'd bring the guy out, like I had my sixty, I'd stick my sixty right between his legs and he'd fall down, then I'd put my sixty in his mouth and go shh. He wouldn't say much, you know?

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  And we'd take off.

• 1:35:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, you were talking about how the SAS, one time you went out on patrol with the SAS and they went out, you were out there for like ten days? And no one said a single word the whole time?

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  If you did say something, you put your ear right next to the guy's, or your mouth, right next to his ear and talk. But normally it was all hand signals.

• 1:36:13Jocko Willink?

  But like what you're talking about, all the stuff that you just described, you do all that stuff without talking, everyone just knows where to go. It's boom, it's a standard operating procedure, it's the immediate action drill and everybody knows exactly what to do. And yeah, that's.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  Just like you hit a booby trap or something, the smartest thing to do is back away and come in a different way. But if you had to keep going, you'd feel it with your hand and grab the guy next to you behind you and show him where it was. Then you'd step over it, move on a few steps, wait till he got over it by grabbing the guy behind him and you just keep moving.

• 1:36:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, you, how often would you guys do that?

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  Not too often, we, we did run into them occasionally, but we were kinda lucky, we never hit. Plus you'd see a, uh, you'd be able to pick up the signs if you did happen to go on a trail. You could see broken branches facing a certain way or little, little sticks pointing a certain way. Or actually, we got landed one time in this rice paddy. And we looked, after we got off, everybody started looking around and all you could see was two doy signs, which meant minefield. So we didn't move, you know, we just called the choppers back in and got off.

• 1:37:20Jocko Willink?

  So your, your second deployment to Vietnam, how many casualties, how many casualties? No one got killed, right?

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  No, we didn't get anybody hit or killed.

• 1:37:28Jocko Willink?

  No one got hit or killed, despite getting in all those gunfights?

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  Yep. Don't ask me. It's just one of those things.

• 1:37:35Jocko Willink?

  God's a frog, man.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. We, we figured, you know, we're getting to the point, that's why we had six month deployments and not a year.

• 1:37:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  Or, you know, whatever, because you start feeling like you're invulnerable, you know?

• 1:37:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  But we were on the cutting edge and we just had the firepower. We were better. I mean, you could have had the odd shot, like that one, one that went right by me or something that could have hit me right in the chest.

• 1:38:00Jocko Willink?

  No, you had too much skill to get hit in the chest.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  No, I don't know. It wasn't skill, that was pure luck, dude.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I know. It's like, unfortunately in combat, you can do everything right, you can still get killed and you can do all kinds of things wrong and live.

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  We did that stay behind ambush that one night. I think I told you about that.

• 1:38:18Jocko Willink?

  I don't think so.

• 1:38:19Speaker 02

  Okay, so about our second op we had in Vietnam, I thought, hmm, we're going to go in and hit this one area here, and if nobody's in the, the little village or anything like that, then we're going to do a stay behind ambush. And so a squad of us went in and patrolled through, through some Willy Peter and the hooches and shit like that and just kind of caused hate and discontent. And then the sun started going down. So as soon as it started going down, we got in an L-shaped ambush, being where rice paddies were going this way, that way and stuff. And then we had the other choppers came in like they were going to pick us up. We had our other squad on it. They got off the chopper, ran around it and got back in it like we were being extracted, right? So we sat there and sat

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  there for about 45 minutes, almost an hour. And all of a sudden here these guys come walking down this rice deck with AK-47s and shit and stuff. And we opened up on them and, you know, blew them off the rice deck and shit. And then they opened up on us from the tree line, hit them a little bit. The sea wolves came in, did some damage and shit. And then the fucking chopper comes in, there's only one of them, so we all couldn't get on it. We landed with two choppers, you know, so me and another guy, uh, radio man and a stoner guy myself stayed there while that chopper went, Longtown wasn't too far away, come back and picked us up, you know, and my pooper was a little tight, tight on that and stuff.

• 1:39:44Jocko Willink?

  How long, how long were you sitting on the ground?

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  Oh, about another twenty minutes, thirty minutes before they came and got us. But nobody came into the village after that because we had, we had hammered them, you know, pretty bad, so, and that was pretty good, but that was a brilliant op. Anyway, so I'm shooting my sixty, he's over here shooting his forty, Mike, Mike, and there's a small stream between us and we got back, we're drinking beers, patting poopers, you know, telling tall tales and shit, and says, goddamn, didn't you see that fucking string of rounds that went right by you on the stream? And I says, no, cause I was shooting my sixty, you know?

• 1:40:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  It was pretty neat, you know, I mean, we had some good times over there.

• 1:40:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's an amazing deployment to do all that damage.

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a stable hind ambush, classic, pure, I mean, just the way you wanna do it. They knew we were there, they thought we had left, they came in and we, we got the son of bitches, you know? And then they always say, you know, did you shoot a guy yourself? Well, you know, when you open up with stoners and sixties and you see guys flying off a rice hike and shit, you're not sure if it's your sixty that hit him or if it's a stoner or whatever, you know?

• 1:40:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  So, it's only one time I know I hit a guy, for a fact, is that off the, uh, when we came off the choppers and did that OK Correll thing.

• 1:40:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  Well, then me and a guy, another guy went around the, before the squad continued moving by, we wanted to check out the back, you know? So he and I goes walking around and he had a car, he was our corpsman, and I saw him walk around the edge and fire about three times, I stepped by, he missed the guy, and here's this guy with an AK forty-seven right about here, and I stepped around with my sixty pointing right at him, you know, and I just flipped him.

• 1:41:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  And then we joined up and went, kept going, and then three guys popped up out of the rice hike and one, they started shooting at us and we were shooting back, but a Sea Wolf was coming right over us, and three rounds went right through the instrument panel on the Sea Wolf, didn't hit anybody, they turned like this and the guy had a minigun and just went, oh, and we just dropped down because there was fucking rounds going everywhere.

• 1:41:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that, the amount of firefight you guys are getting, it's take no casualties.

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we didn't.

• 1:41:53Jocko Willink?

  That's amazing.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:41:55Jocko Willink?

  That's amazing.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  And we didn't have a lot of pictures either because we didn't have a professional photographer walking around with us.

• 1:42:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a, we missed, I would say in Ramadi, we missed the real, like, a couple deployments later, maybe a year later, when guys were going on deployments, they had pictures of everything, because they had helmet cams and they had all this stuff, and we didn't, and as a matter of fact, at that time, there was like, rules against taking pictures, so we don't have a bunch of pictures.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did, we never, and both platoons I was in, uh, we took one just before we deployed, you know, the whole platoon, and then, uh, hardly, nothing else after that. We wouldn't let photographers close to us, we wouldn't let, uh, news people even come close, we were on a Vietnamese base anyway, they couldn't get on it, it was perfect, and we just, you know, we just went out and did our thing, and had a good time, and didn't beat no drums about it, you know what I mean? It was, it was good. There was a couple platoons that had a photographer with them that took a lot of pictures and shit, and you probably, you've probably seen them and stuff, and, you know, we didn't.

• 1:43:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and there's platoons, well, for, in Iraq, there was platoons that got in trouble, and that's one of the reasons why we didn't take pictures, because there was platoons that had pictures that got exposed and got released, and they shouldn't, they were pictures they shouldn't have taken, and they got trouble, and it, you know, not just that they got in trouble, but it was bad press, bad press for America, you know, and that's why there was rules, it was like, hey, no pictures, so we don't have a lot of pictures when we were in Ramadi.

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  You can do a hundred things right, and you do one thing wrong, and that's what's gonna pop up.

• 1:43:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you do one thing wrong, and you take a picture of it, that's, and these days, you know, that picture's going around the world in thirty seconds, so, it's, uh, that's one thing that has definitely changed, and, and like I said, when we were in Ramadi, we were just on the, like, I don't think people were really on social media yet, that we, you know, not everybody had a camera, and not everybody, you know, had a video camera, these guys got video cameras now, they got helmet cams, they got all this stuff, and, you know, some of it's good, some of it's beneficial, I mean, you're not gonna get any better intel, there was a, a company commander from the first of the 506, who was one of the best guys I've ever worked with, but, he videotaped, every time he went out on patrol, in a Humvee, or, or not in a Humvee, however he was going on patrol, he filmed

• 1:44:12Jocko Willink?

  the whole thing, and he was working in one specific district of Ramadi, called the Mulab District, and- He would come back and watch those videos and he would just and I sat there and watched him with him one time and he goes, yeah, you see this garbage can over here? Yeah, this, this one's a good landmark because it's a different color and then up on this street corner right here. There's a, this, this pole is always filled with so many wires. It always scares me, you know, because there's so many wires hanging off it and he just had the whole city memorized because he had a camera rolling in his Humvee the whole time. And for, so for that reason, plus when you gather intel, you know, you're going into a building and, and you got pictures of everything you got. If anyone ever goes in that building again, yeah, you hear it, here you go. Well, here's what it's laid out. So there's some definite benefits to it.

• 1:44:52Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, there's some real drawbacks as well. If, you know, for people can use that stuff for propaganda against you, or if you're videotaping things or you're recording things that are going to make, you know, the Americans look bad. And now you're saying, okay, you did this. Well, here's what was happening in the situation. Here's why this happened. And here's the context. Well, the context isn't going to make it onto YouTube. The only thing that's going to make it onto YouTube is the thing that makes America look bad and that's what's gonna, so.

• 1:45:21Speaker 02

  And that's what the reporters are going to key on regardless of anything.

• 1:45:23Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  See, we had barn dance files. Did I tell you about that?

• 1:45:26Jocko Willink?

  You did, you did mention them.

• 1:45:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, barn dance files were this, every time you went on an op and you came back. The guy was telling you was our intel guy, our first class. And we'd, he'd fill out these barn dance cards.

• 1:45:40Jocko Willink?

  Why'd they call them barn dance? Is that just a pro word for or whatever?

• 1:45:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they had the who, where, what and why's equipment, anything we found out there, what firefights we got into. What, what the enemy were using, anything that would be good intel. And it was just a five by, four by five card, but it was really good. And every platoon, like our, the platoon we relieved already had theirs. So if we were going back into a specific area that they'd went into, we had it organized, you know, we'd look it up, pull it up, read and see what they hit and what they got and all that stuff. And that would be help us out when we were going on and we'd, when we did our briefs and stuff. And we'd do the same thing, but every platoon would have these barn dance files of what they did and the areas they went into and stuff. And it was pretty good, you know?

• 1:46:28Speaker 02

  That's how we did it, you know, that's a, we didn't do the cam recorder like you're saying, but we, anything that we saw that would be of interest of another patrol or another platoon going into that area, then we'd let them know, you know, through the barn dance files.

• 1:46:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  And then like you said, when we got to.

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

  Dong Tam, Vinlong Province, what they did is split us up into provinces or districts in that province. And then we would go out with our kit, cars and scouts or interpreter and gather intel from the PSB guys, the chiefs, or from the SF that were out in the field, indoor rangers that were doing firebases and stuff like that, and bring that back and then we would put it up on our sit map and start working. You know, like, we had this one, we knew through our province that this one VCI, which is your high level guy, they wouldn't transmit communication wise, they would bring your orders in in packets, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:47:31Speaker 02

  And he would come through the province maybe once a month.

• 1:47:35Jocko Willink?

  So all the different information was to be distributed.

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he would hand it to the VC, what they wanted him to hit and stuff, but he had all this stuff. We knew he came through there every time, but there were three different trails that he used because we'd gotten intel. We didn't know which one it was, you know? So we went out on the one trail, did an ambush, waxing people and shit like that. So we knew, next time he came, he wasn't gonna do that trail. And then we did the same thing on the other trail, right?

• 1:48:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:02Speaker 02

  So we figured he's gonna come down this trail. So we set up on him.

• 1:48:06Jocko Willink?

  Got him?

• 1:48:07Speaker 02

  He came down that trail and we got him, got some good intel.

• 1:48:10Jocko Willink?

  That's beautiful.

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  But that was just working with actionable intel, trying to figure it out and working it, you know what I mean?

• 1:48:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  So, worked out real good.

• 1:48:20Jocko Willink?

  Were you on that op? I always heard about this op where they wanted to get this one VCI and they ended up hitting, like, his, his family or some member of his family, and then when they went to the, when they had the funeral, they went and got the guy that they were after?

• 1:48:35Speaker 02

  No, I wasn't on that one. There's a lot of things that happened and, like you say, when you're in your platoon, that's kinda your world and that stuff. And I've heard of, I don't remember hearing about that, but I probably was one time in the Trade Wins, the bar we used to drink at in Coronado or something, I'm sure that that was brought up. Like, guys used to hit tax collectors and get their piazza from them, their money, and then they would turn, turn that into MPC and... Stuff, you know, just different things.

• 1:49:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, guys, we're getting creative.

• 1:49:06Speaker 02

  Good hitting the tax collector because that's a, that's a good thing, you know.

• 1:49:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I support hitting the tax collector for sure.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  And if he had a whole bag full of money, well, oh, well, you know.

• 1:49:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's, that's awesome. That's a, and it's all another thing that people, you know, it's all self-generated. So much of it is self-generated, like what you're talking about is the same thing for us. I mean, I had an intel group, but my intel group was SEALs, some intel SEALs and some intel guys. And they created all of our intel and, you know, our guys fed into it. And so we produced our own targets, kind of like what you're saying.

• 1:49:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:40Jocko Willink?

  People have this thought that, you know, that the assault force is sitting there waiting for some command to come down and go hit this target. But the reality is we're making up the targets. We're figuring them out ourselves most of the time.

• 1:49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I can see the difference from my first platoon where we didn't have anything and my second platoon where we actually worked off of actionable intel that we got. It was like night and day. I would do it's a whole different world. Just like we talked about before we started this, you know, you got your fine, you got your fix, and then you got your finish and exploitation. You know what I mean?

• 1:50:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  But that, we're the best in the world, I think, on DA stuff, the finish. But you can't do the, the finish if you don't have the fine where you know what to go and hit. You know what I mean? And that's why a long time ago, we started up that field craft and all that other stuff. But we are prue advisors. We had a training site up in Quayamaca, you know, we called so advanced training. And it was for our prue advisors because they would go over there by themselves or with one other American and have about 50 VC, whatever, that they were in charge of. And the prues actually were for when the CIA would, could collect intel, but they didn't have a, a method of going out and hitting it, you know, reacting on it,

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  doing the finish part of it. So that's when they started the prue program.

• 1:51:01Jocko Willink?

  Right. And that's it for what provincial?

• 1:51:04Speaker 02

  Provincial recon units.

• 1:51:06Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  Is what they were called prues. We call them prues. Like they say, if I throw out an acronym.

• 1:51:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I'm just making sure that everybody.

• 1:51:12Speaker 02

  Just so used, you know, anyway, and. They would post select guys to go through this prue training and east coast guys too. And then they would go over and work.

• 1:51:22Jocko Willink?

  And you said they'd be in charge. You said VC, but you didn't mean that, right?

• 1:51:27Speaker 02

  Ex VC.

• 1:51:27Jocko Willink?

  Ex VC, got it.

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  Not the act, the guys that Chuihoy and stuff and decided they wanted to make money. You know what I mean? So mercenaries is what they were. And so they had that training.

• 1:51:39Jocko Willink?

  Does Chuihoy mean train? Does it mean turncoat? What is it?

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

  Uh, Chuihoy's a guy that, yeah, you left the VC side or the NBA and went to the south Vietnamese side.

• 1:51:49Jocko Willink?

  Do you know what Chuihoy actually means?

• 1:51:50Speaker 02

  No, I don't. The actual noun of it, no.

• 1:51:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:53Speaker 02

  But it was, they'd put him in this camp. And like when we went to Don Camp, we went to that camp with our interpreter, but we just happened to have a special boat guy at the time, MST, we called him Mobile Support Team, not SBU, that spoke fluent Vietnamese. So we'd bring him with us when our interpreter didn't realize this guy could speak Vietnamese too. And then we'd start interrogating guys for our district that we're in. You know, for myself or then along where the guys were. And we would, they'd talk to them, interrogate them and stuff. And they sounded like they were good to go. Then we'd bring them in as kick horse and scouts. And they would stay with us. We'd let them go and stuff, but anytime we had an op, they stayed with us until

• 1:52:36Speaker 02

  the op was done and stuff. You know what I mean? We just didn't let them go. They turned out that they were great guys. And anyway, the prue program was about six months long and half of it was trade craft, half of it was medical. Cause you had to have that when you're working out there. The medical especially because you're on your own out there, you know, and you gotta be able to take care of yourself if you get hit. And then they would come over, but these guys would also, after they got done, like would go into another platoon, wouldn't be able to get that. His, everything he did, but we had about seven guys that are six guys. There was one of them that went to a Special school like Camp Perry, but it wasn't Camp Perry as different, it was a shorter

• 1:53:21Speaker 02

  version. And they got that training and they're the ones that were the cadre for that SAT. And like my first platoon in sixty-nine, my whole platoon went through most of that before we deployed over. So you get all that stuff. We didn't get the field craft portion of it, but they had some great, really good, uh, quick kill trails and stuff like that and map and compass and everything. You know what I mean?

• 1:53:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  And we're lucky because a platoon every once in a while, if they didn't have guys going through, would be able to pick that up and go through it. But that was superb training. I mean, really good, you know?

• 1:53:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, all boys back to training all the time.

• 1:54:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:01Jocko Willink?

  And that's one of, that's one of the best things about the SEAL teams.

• 1:54:03Speaker 02

  But they called it too advanced training, it was SAT training. It was specifically for the provincial recon units that they sent the guys over to.

• 1:54:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So when you got back from that deployment to Vietnam, now, like I said, that was, the November platoon was the last full deployment to Vietnam, and you, now you know the war's kinda over, but, but you stayed in the teams. Did you go right to BUDs? I mean, after that?

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I get these orders to the amphibious base and I thought, what the shit? You know? Because that's when the Dirty Thirty was happening and all that stuff.

• 1:54:36Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Explain the Dirty Thirty to people.

• 1:54:39Speaker 02

  Now, Dirty Thirty is where after the war, we had too many people and they wanted to cut us down. So even though guys just got out of training and stuff, they picked thirty guys to go out to the fleet, be divers, EOD and stuff like that. And after two years, they could come back or whatever. And it was just sucked. It was just, it was one of the low points, I think, of the teams. Imagine you just made your, made it through BUDs and, or UDT training, whatever they called it back then, it might have been BUDs. And next thing you know, you're, you know, you're going to dive school or somewhere. Anyway, I went over to, and I was really pissed, I went over to, to, uh, BUDs as an instructor, land warfare, it was the third phase and all that shit.

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  But, uh, they still had LDNN program going on then, which is where, uh...

• 1:55:31Speaker 02

  You know, gotten his action, some other guys did. And I, I wanted to stay there and still do the LDNN, but I, I figure, I don't know. I just was one of them selected to go to BUDS.

• 1:55:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:42Speaker 02

  And when I got done with BUDS, I went back to Team One.

• 1:55:44Jocko Willink?

  How long were you a BUDS instructor for?

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

  Just, it was two years.

• 1:55:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you go back to Team One. I was there again for about seven years and took about three or four platoons. You know what I mean?

• 1:55:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. When, when you see BUDS now, because you still are in the community, is there any major difference that you noticed between what you went through and what you see now?

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  A lot more land warfare now.

• 1:56:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  I think the kids get trained better. There's so much more to learn. I don't know. Half our class probably would have flunked just academically with what the guys got to know now. I swear to God. We were Frogman. It was, you know, wasn't that hard. But now with all the COM and everything those guys go through.

• 1:56:25Jocko Willink?

  Are they teaching that stuff in BUDS? They teach COM in BUDS?

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  They teach some of it. Yeah. Not all of it, but some of it. And they, a lot of IEDs when they go out to San Clemente and stuff, I guess they do. Maybe they don't. Maybe that's more in SQT. But yeah, they got to use radios and shit there in BUDS. But it's just a, it's a mixture between what we did in SQT and what was the Frogman. But I think the Frogman part of it, the UDT part of it is kind of really slacked off. I think they do a few cursory, parallel, perpendicular recon and stuff like that. But when I went through, we were in that fucking water so much. It was so cold. And everybody always says,

• 1:57:05Jocko Willink?

  Do you wear wet suits?

• 1:57:07Speaker 02

  You earned your wet suit. And it wasn't a full wet suit. It was just the,

• 1:57:11Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's for sure. That was the same with me. We had, we had the old wet suits with beaver tails. And even when I went through, this is 1991, right?

• 1:57:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Jocko Willink?

  And so it's not like you couldn't get a decent, good surfing wet suit. Because I surfed and I knew what a good wet suit was. So they give me that shitty wet suit with the beaver tail with the big zipper, a big loose open. It looked like a 1970s disco. There's so much water going through that thing. It was almost not worth wearing.

• 1:57:36Speaker 02

  Well, we, we, our first swim was in UDTs.

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  And no fins or nothing. You earned your fins.

• 1:57:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Wet suit appreciation. They had a, they called it wet suit appreciation.

• 1:57:49Speaker 02

  And then, then also to get your fins too, you know, and then we got our fins and we still did a couple of swims without the wet suit, then we got our wet suit. And I mean, it was like, Jesus Christ, you know? Everybody always says, yeah, you, you don't mind cold water, do you? And I says, I've hated cold water all my life. It's just part of our job and it's what you do. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:58:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You only get wet once. That's what I like. You know what? You just, oh, you're gonna get wet? You could just get wet one time and it doesn't matter anymore.

• 1:58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:17Jocko Willink?

  But the, uh, I mean, and there's certain things that I don't think have changed. Like, there's always been a 5.5 nautical mile swim.

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24Jocko Willink?

  Right? That, I don't think that's gotten any shorter. I don't think that, that just is what it is.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  A lot of the standards have stayed the same physically.

• 1:58:30Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:58:30Speaker 02

  And it, uh,

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  fluctuates a little bit, I think, about who's the director over at Bud's and how many times they roll people back and everything. Back in the day, I mean, if a guy was, got dropped or something, he was gone. You never saw him again. He was just, he was out of there, you know? It wasn't come back later. Maybe they did after a couple of years or something. Like, we had a guy in our class named, uh, and he'd been in class 37, I think, and he had broke his hip. And then he was in my class and he made it. You know what I mean? We called him

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

  really got hypothermia bad.

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  A good man, though.

• 1:59:10Jocko Willink?

  There was a guy, there was a guy in my, in my class that had rolled back. It's Jeff Higgs, as a matter of fact, who's a jujitsu guy. But he had hypothermia. They dropped him for hypothermia and he would, and he wouldn't. So they, they told him he's out. They're like, you're done. Hey, man, listen, you're a great guy, but you can't, you can't be in the program anymore because you just get hypothermia too easy. And he's like, no, I'm not leaving. And they gave him his dungarees back, which is like the regular Navy thing that you wear.

• 1:59:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:38Jocko Willink?

  And he showed up with the class on Monday with his dungarees on, just PTing with the class in the compound. And they looked at him and they're like, all right, we'll give this bastard another shot. Title. Yeah, he was, he's a hard dude and he made it through.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  But you know, hypothermia is a lot like, um, uh, heated, heated, um, exhaustion when you get it the, the heat thing.

• 1:59:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:57Speaker 02

  That'll come back and bite you. You know, it really does. I mean, I swear to God.

• 2:00:01Jocko Willink?

  Hypothermia is like that too?

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you get a real bad case of it because.

• 2:00:04Jocko Willink?

  I knew it was like that with heat exhaustion, but I didn't know it was like that with hypothermia.

• 2:00:07Speaker 02

  I think it is. I mean, maybe I'm wrong.

• 2:00:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:09Speaker 02

  I'm just, yeah, that's what I heard. So I don't know.

• 2:00:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm lucky because I've always been pretty well marbled in terms of insulation. He's those really skinny lean dudes.

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  I always found out if you swim as hard as you can, you usually stay warm anyway.

• 2:00:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 2:00:25Speaker 02

  I don't like treading water and cold water, you know, but like that swimmer line I was telling you about, that was, that was painful. God almighty, that was cold. And I told you when we, uh, first got to Bud's, they had us go down to four oh one and gave us the talk, you know, the guy left here and right here, it won't be there. It's easier to pass a marshmallow through the keyhole of a needle than make it through and we're all going, yeah, whatever. And so they marched us all back in front of the bay. You know, I told you we're on the bayside and that the guy was telling you about come walking out and he kind of looked at us and we're kind of like, yeah, yeah. How tough can this be and everything? And he said, uh, about face, forward march and march us all with our dress blues right in the water. So you got your flapstick out like this, all the white hats

• 2:01:10Speaker 02

  floating and the officers had and kind of looked at each other and went, goddamn, this may not be that easy. And it went downhill from there, you know?

• 2:01:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that sucks. Getting, getting ruining your uniform.

• 2:01:21Speaker 02

  Dress blues dude.

• 2:01:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that sucks. That's typical. Uh, so you got done, you got done with being a Bud's instructor. You went back and you did a bunch, but how many platoons did you do?

• 2:01:32Speaker 02

  I think I did overall nine.

• 2:01:34Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:01:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not that many, but I mean, it was good.

• 2:01:36Jocko Willink?

  Actually, that is a lot. For anyone that's listening to a nine platoon is a lot because that's nine platoons with workups. Yeah, that's like 20 years worth of work right there. Uh, um, and then, you know, I had a story about you.

• 2:01:51Jocko Willink?

  And you got into a fight with some guy at Nylund?

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:01:58Jocko Willink?

  It was like, uh, you got into a fight with some guy at Nylund?

• 2:02:00Speaker 02

  Oh, no, that wasn't, that was this guy that was just out of prison.

• 2:02:03Jocko Willink?

  That's the one.

• 2:02:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, blue eyed, hairy and about six, six, yeah.

• 2:02:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, somehow, you, you know, I heard the story from my platoon chief and he, and he said, yeah, he said Roger Hayden, the toughest bastard alive. And I said, he goes, yeah, one time we're out at Nylund and there's some guy in a bar and he's whatever, something happens and you guys throw down and apparently you guys had like a legit, like five, maybe 10 minute fight.

• 2:02:29Speaker 02

  Oh, it was terrible. Yeah. So I walked in the bar and I'm just sitting there and the song kept playing, this western, she rides this saddle and da, da, da, on a, finally I asked the bartender, goddamn, can you play a different song? Guy turns it off and this great big guy stands up, like I said, he had blonde hair, about six, four, I think. Look, just look, you know, the steel blue eyes and stuff and how come you turned that off? And the bartender pointed right to me, well, he said to turn it off. And then the guy looks at me and I went, hmm, I don't want to fight. You know, it's just, you just don't get in fights. So I started walking out the door, going across the other bar, which is right across the

• 2:03:10Speaker 02

  street, like he wouldn't have followed me. So he follows me out the door. And I turned and looked at him and I said, now he's gonna follow me over there, we probably wanted fighting. So I jumped on one foot twice and hit him as hard as I could, right in the jaw, knocked him down, his head went like this and, and hit the wall and some bitch stood right back up. And I went, holy shit, you know? So anyway, we did about a 10 minute fight and he actually never hit me one time because I was just, I was in really good shape, you know, at Nylund, running and you know what I mean? And so finally we square us off again, you know, and I look at him, he looks at me and, you know, I'm covered in blood, but it's his blood dripping on me because I just kept, you know, punch. If the guy had ever hit me, he'd have killed

• 2:03:54Speaker 02

  me. He was fighting for fun. I was fighting for my life, you know, that's, that's the deal. So we square us off again and finally I went, uh, we can, I'm not tired yet and we can keep on fighting or we can go across the street and have a beer. And he thought about it. He says, well, let's go have a beer. Puts his arm around me, you know, you're pretty tough for a little guy. And I'm almost crying, you know, I'm going, God, thank God. That was probably the toughest fight I've ever been in. That guy was a, Jesus. And then I found out he'd been in prison.

• 2:04:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what I was.

• 2:04:24Speaker 02

  And that's what he did is weightlifting boxing was in prison.

• 2:04:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:28Speaker 02

  How I got out of that, I'll never know, man.

• 2:04:30Jocko Willink?

  That was the punchline was that dude just got out of prison. It was a weightlifter and a boxer.

• 2:04:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a, that was a. Got worn out. A few moments of excitement in that one.

• 2:04:41Jocko Willink?

  And then you, uh, you became a warrant officer.

• 2:04:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was a master chief. I was master chief of group one. And that, that was all I was gonna do. After that, I wasn't gonna go to warcom or anything. And that's when they came out with a warrant program. So I put in for warrant and went warrant and then, uh, deployed to Desert Storm, came back and then, uh, we started the, um, that special program I was in. We did that for about a year, year and a half and the benevolence of, uh, warcom decided we didn't need that anymore. So they took us all and put us in to run the first, uh, SQT

• 2:05:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:17Speaker 02

  for group one instead of having it at the teams. And then we did that and then I went from that to, uh, start doing OREs.

• 2:05:24Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 2:05:25Speaker 02

  Finished up doing OREs.

• 2:05:26Jocko Willink?

  You put, when I was in my second platoon, all the guys, that all of our new guys went through your, uh, your SQT.

• 2:05:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Jocko Willink?

  Uh, we've, we've been going for like two hours right now. Just, um, I, I wanna get one more question. Some, some people listen to the podcast that wanna go in the SEAL teams. And you know, any sort of thought on what they should be thinking about when they're trying to get in or trying to go? They ask me all the time. You know, I always say real simple stuff, you know, like, hey, do a bunch of pull-ups, push-ups, dips, swim, run, and don't quit. And, and that's how you make it into the SEAL teams. And when you get into SEAL teams, you know, work your ass off.

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you get all those kids up at the pre-training up at Great Lakes, you know, physically fit, perfect. And it's the mental thing. It's you gotta take each day at a time when you get there. And if you finish that day, be real happy, then hit the next day and keep going on. Don't look ahead of what you gotta do. But it's like when I was a, second time I was a Bud instructor, I was a master at arms, you know, and I'd get all these guys in and I'd tell them, if you wanna do everything we wanna do and have the easy life, go EOD. If you think you're gonna be a diver and a working diver, I said, go be a diver. And I told them, if you wanna be cold, wet and miserable, then go in the SEALs.

• 2:06:49Speaker 02

  But I will say one thing, even going through Bud's, and you can probably attest to this, that just gets you into the teams and then you deploy. And that's where you pull from what you experienced in Bud's. Yeah. Where you have to push yourself to the nth, you know, like there again too in sixty-nine, we were doing this, when I was with Kilo platoon, we were gonna set up this ambush on this river. We had to go through about a click and a half of mangrove shit, and that's where it was all gray and shit from Agent Orange and shit. I was up to my knees in mud, up to my waist in water.

• 2:07:32Speaker 02

  And when you're holding your weapon up high enough to keep it out of the water, and you go for about a click and a half in that shit, using just compass, because we didn't have GPS and all that shit, and you kept going till you ran into the stream or whatever you're gonna set it up on. You had a strained headache so bad your fucking eyes were crossed, and you're breathing mosquitoes in your mouth and spitting them out and shit like that. That's a... That's the teams. You do that, you come back and drink beers and pat poopers, you know you're good to go. Or you're in Korea and Pohang, and you gotta hit this target, but you gotta go over about

• 2:08:13Speaker 02

  three mountain ridges, cuz you can't run the ridges in Korea, you gotta go up and down them. And come out of a submarine and land on the beach, and it's cold, and you're kinda covering while one guy's trying to take off his wet suit, and he's falling down till he gets it off. Then you do it, and you get about halfway up the first mountain ridge before you start getting warm. That's when you find out if you got it or not. The bottom line is, we complete the mission, you know. That's what we do no matter what, but like I say, BUDS, Hell Week, all that shit. Just gets you, your mind in the right place to know that, well, goddamn, I went through Hell Week. I can do this. You know what I mean?

• 2:08:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:53Speaker 02

  And other things like the five mile swim and all that stuff. And that's all.

• 2:08:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:58Speaker 02

  It's just, it's more, I've seen when I was an instructor, great big guys that were football players, fall out and quit. And I've seen little skinny guys that you'd laugh at and think, this guy's gonna be a SEAL and he makes it through. It's all because of up here in his mind, you know? Do you agree? I mean, does that?

• 2:09:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and, and I've always, you know, the, BUDS is a screening process. And you don't actually learn much in BUDS. It just gets rid of the people that don't want to be there. And the real test comes when you, you know, when you get into combat, because going into, you know, being cold, wet and miserable for two or three or four or five days and training and doing a bunch of pushups doesn't compare to what you were just talking about.

• 2:09:38Speaker 02

  Or you, I think of the sand and the heat and all that shit that you went through. That's, I mean, I, I don't like the desert. And I don't like cold in the mountains. You give me the jungle anytime and I'm a happy camper.

• 2:09:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't like mosquitoes, so I'll take the desert or the mountains. But those are the things, you know, you know, I always say that, or I always talk about seeing my guys lined up to go out in Ramadi. And their, their Humvees are lined up. And like, if I wasn't going on the op, it was just like a platoon was going out. And I'd stand there, I'd salute them, like as they were leaving. You know, I'd just stand out there and salute them as they were rolling out. And what it takes to be the lead turret gunner in the first Humvee is more than what it takes to get through BUDS. Like, that guy who knows that there's been, you know, an IED on the road he's about to drive by. There's been seven to 10 IEDs a day on that road.

• 2:10:35Jocko Willink?

  And he's the lead turret gunner, and he's gonna roll out again. And he did it the night before. He did it the week before, and he did it the night before that. That's what the test is.

• 2:10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, plus that reminds me of when I was on that, um, Boston Whaler too. Where is he? He's up at the top, right?

• 2:10:53Speaker 02

  What can people see him?

• 2:10:54Jocko Willink?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:10:56Speaker 02

  Any rockets or anything like that, you know where it's gonna go.

• 2:10:59Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause they're gonna wanna stop that from shooting, you know what I mean? But uh, just, just an example, I mean, like when I was in Subic would be uh, we'd take the, Subic is pretty neat because the topography there was, you'd go from triple canopy jungle down to mangrove to where the lower mall was, which was their, their uh, fuel place and stuff. Well, I'd take my guys up to the uh, about four or five of them, up to the hospital, which is up top. We'd go down through the triple canopy jungle, work our way all the way through, spend the night, then come in and hit the lower mall. So they had triple canopy, regular jungle and mangrove swamp type of stuff.

• 2:11:42Speaker 02

  And they would go into, just to kinda let them know, you know?

• 2:11:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:45Speaker 02

  This is what it was like, boys, you know?

• 2:11:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's all that's, and that's what it's like. That's what it's like, that's why we train hard and to be prepared for that stuff, so. Yeah, awesome, awesome advice. Echo, speaking of advice, do you have any advice on how anyone, if they wanna maybe support the podcast or support themselves, how they could do that?

• 2:12:05Speaker 01

  Sure, of course. Quick question.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  Quick question, you mentioned the Boobie traps. Uh, like what kind of booby trap, what is it, like tripwires?

• 2:12:14Speaker 02

  Oh god, you, we went before, when we deployed in, I don't know for sake, I think it was seventy seventy one, we stopped in Hawaii. And went through the EOD booby trap course that they had, that they'd picked up over the years in Vietnam and set it all up. And after we went through that thing, you didn't even wanna go over just about because it was unbelievable. But they would uh, do stuff like um, they'd like to use, you guys would call them IEDs, but there'd be like mortars up in trees and stuff and they'd use different methods. Like a guy named they got, he got hit with a command detonated uh, might have been a mortar and you're hitting pretty bad, but I bet sometimes they would take filament down and put uh,

• 2:13:00Speaker 02

  Fish hooks on it so that you would grab it, you wouldn't feel it on the bottom, you know? And it would pull, set off, whatever they had set up. If you usually saw a filament line that was just kinda saggy and everything, you'd go ahead and cut that. If it was tight, you didn't fuck with it. Like I say, the smart thing to do is to back away and come in another direction. And the way our point scouts did it, they were really good. They would take a thin uh uh uh uh branch or stick, you know? Real thin, like, just like when you're fishing. You could feel a bite on the line. They would take that and they would hold it kind of in the center and as we're moving slow, they'd move it. Anytime that thing dipped, they had reached out and feel it.

• 2:13:42Speaker 02

  Like a lot of other times, if you're going down a trail, which isn't a really good idea anyway. But you'd step over a log. Sometimes they'd put pressure detonated stuff over that log if you stepped on it. So you'd always wanna go to the side, just a myriad of things. There was a, whoa.

• 2:14:01Speaker 02

  A lot of the stuff was command detonated. Like when we were on those riverboats, there was this place called Snoopy's Nose, you know? And we'd have the boats going like this and when they would turn, one group of boats, another group of boats would be here. And then they would open up on this group of boats so they would shoot across, but it wasn't that far to where the other boats were and they'd start getting hit and thinking, goddamn, we're being shot at, then you go back and forth. Or they would uh put a B forty rocket and they'd be down here in a spider hole. But they'd have a uh like singin' old posts, little ones sticking up, you know? And as soon as the boat got right there, they would hit the command thing. A rocket would go off and hit the boat.

• 2:14:43Speaker 02

  Everybody would open up here and these guys would be giggling, taking off, you know what I mean? Just uh, just uh.

• 2:14:49Jocko Willink?

  You know, the uh, the EOD guys that we had nowadays in the SEAL teams, the guys that come in, they, they go through, work up with them. They're awesome. You can't, you couldn't, if someone, normal person was watching, they wouldn't be able to tell who's EOD and who's not. In, at least when we were in Ramadi, and that's what most of the EOD guys are like. But my EOD guys, talking about not wanting to go over there. My EOD guys, they would, they would put together briefs of like the latest E, the latest IEDs that's been out there. This is when we're in Ramadi. And, you know, every couple, every, maybe like, once, once every two weeks, they'd put together more of a detailed uh brief of like, hey, this is what it does, this is this thing. And what we would do is when someone knew, like, let's say someone was in from out of town, or we had like a visitor that was gonna go on an op with us.

• 2:15:34Jocko Willink?

  You know, they'd give that extended brief to teach the guys. Well, what it actually did was it would just horrify whoever showed up there.

• 2:15:42Speaker 02

  That's what happened. That's when we went through that movie trap course that they had there.

• 2:15:46Jocko Willink?

  That became like the joke, like, you know, I'd look at the EOD, like, I'd see their slide come up, and I, the initial slide in the brief was, I could tell it was the big brief. And I'd look over at the person that was going, like, our guest. You know, maybe it was like a senior officer, or someone was gonna come, or some intel person that was gonna go out and op with us. And I'd look him at the beginning of the EOD brief. And, you know, they just have a normal look on their face. By the end of twenty-two slides later, they'd look like they didn't wanna go anymore.

• 2:16:13Speaker 02

  No, like, the VC would take these, uh, uh,

• 2:16:19Speaker 02

  stone things you have water in and stuff, right? And if you're going through a village, which we didn't do, we didn't usually sweep through villages and shit. They'd fill about half it up with gasoline. And if they knew the Americans were coming in, they'd take a grenade, wrap, say, rigorous tape or something that would disintegrate. That's what, drop it in there, then as the guys are going through checking out the hooches and everything, that would go off. I mean, like, if we were gonna go into a hooch or something, we would tie a string to the door, and then pull the door open, everybody would be down. Or if we saw something. And then, where the steps were going into it, sometimes if we weren't hitting it quick, you know, you'd check and see what was under the, uh, you know what I mean?

• 2:17:01Speaker 02

  See if there was anything. But it just, uh, they were ingenious, man. They were really good.

• 2:17:06Jocko Willink?

  Evil.

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  They beat the French and shit, you know? These guys have been fighting for a couple of years, you know? Anyway, go ahead, I'm sorry.

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no. That was it. It's crazy how they get smarter, and then you guys get smarter with trying to figure it out, then they're like, okay, they're trying to figure out this, so they get smart, you know? And it becomes, yeah.

• 2:17:25Jocko Willink?

  That's the game, and the game doesn't stop.

• 2:17:27Speaker 02

  It's all part of the game.

• 2:17:27Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:17:27Speaker 01

  Dang.

• 2:17:29Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of the game.

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  Speaking of being in the game.

• 2:17:31Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Like that? I'll give that one to you. You took some alpha brain today, apparently.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  I did. Alpha brain. Alpha brain from on it. I don't think there is any other kinda alpha brain, but nonetheless, I did take some. And we're gonna talk about it, not for too long. So, anyway.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  Supplements, supplementation. So I was thinking about this, I was taking krill oil, actually, is when I was thinking about this. Where would you be if you didn't take any krill oil or any Strongbone? Where would you be?

• 2:18:02Jocko Willink?

  We don't know.

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  Behind?

• 2:18:03Jocko Willink?

  We're not gonna find out.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, you'd be behind, exactly right. So, so it kinda makes me think like, okay, you know, anyone who's thinking about, okay, Jaco, they talk about taking krill oil all the time, how much it helps, and they didn't start taking it, you're behind. So, my recommendation is, take the krill oil. Not to mention the Alpha Brain, not to mention any other supplements that will help you get to where you wanna be. You talk about procrastination sometimes. Every once in a while.

• 2:18:32Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:32Speaker 01

  And that's the biggest thing, by definition, that's gonna keep you from doing it. Anyway, get on the supplements, that's the point there, and if you want 10% off the supplements that we all know are the best supplements, go to onnit.com/jaco. Boom, there it is. Support yourself, then you can support others. And it supports the podcast, boom, there it is. Also, another way to support podcasts is Amazon Click Through, which means before you do your Amazon shopping, click through the website, jacobodcast.com. Little banner there. A good and natural way to do it is, you know, when you shop for the books, like the books that you cover. We have a whole page of all the books, all of them.

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  Click through there, boom, it'll take you right to the books you purchased, that's a good way to support. There it is, support your brain as well with books and educating yourself. Also, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, all these other podcasting providing platforms, if you haven't already, that's a good way to do it. Leave a review if you're in the mood. If you're not in the mood, then don't do it. Or you can still do it if you're not in the mood, whatever you want. Also, YouTube, subscribe to that one. People have been subscribing, that's good.

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  It's good because it helps spread the word. Seems obvious, but when you really think about it, it's not as obvious as you might think. Because when you get that alert, it's not just the whole podcast, as we always kind of note. It's like little excerpts, you know, a lot of times, or a little bit more artistic excerpts. You'll be more compelled to share those. And we talk about shareability, right? When you get, when someone shares it with you, that's one thing. And you're like, "Okay, I'll listen to this. It's only two, three minutes long." But, on the reverse side, when you, uh, when you're about to share it, you'll be thinking kind in the other person's mind. They're more into listening to it, because it's shorter. It's subtle, but there's a difference.

• 2:20:33Speaker 01

  So anyway, if you subscribe, boom, that'll, you'll, it'll have that effect on you as well. I know it seems magic, but it's, it's very explainable. Anyway, point there is subscribe to YouTube. That's a good one. We'll put more videos on there as well. Also, Jocko has a store. It's called Jocko Store. jockostore.com. New rash guard is out. Straight up. We did it on the Facebook Live. I put it live on there. You were there?

• 2:20:59Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, I was there.

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  I think it was your Facebook Live. I don't think I've ever done a Facebook Live, by the way. Anyway, back to the store. There's women's stuff on there. There's t-shirts on there. You have a t-shirt? Did we, we gave you a t-shirt, right, last time? We'll give you another one this time, too. They're pretty dope. There's layers. There's more to the shirts than meets the eye. Warrior Kid shirt is out.

• 2:21:23Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, Warrior Kid shirts.

• 2:21:25Speaker 01

  Shirts.

• 2:21:25Jocko Willink?

  Adults and children.

• 2:21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Also, Jocko uniform. That's what I'm calling it. The Jocko uniform.

• 2:21:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the shirt.

• 2:21:34Speaker 01

  Victory MMA and Fitness shirt. You know, the actual, original shirt. Hundred percent cotton. Very soft. Like how Jocko likes it. Anyway, from my ear, alright, that's what I heard. Anyway, a lot of cool stuff on there. If you want to support, get something. There's some patches on there, too. Velcro patches, regulation size for the hats. Actually, we got hats coming out, too, by the way.

• 2:21:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:22:00Speaker 01

  A lot of people have been asking.

• 2:22:01Jocko Willink?

  Are they out now?

• 2:22:01Speaker 01

  They're not out. They're not out. I'm saying...

• 2:22:03Jocko Willink?

  So why are you even telling everyone?

• 2:22:03Speaker 01

  I'm saying because when people make these suggestions, and a lot of people start making them...

• 2:22:07Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:22:09Speaker 01

  You know, the more people that make them, the more I'm we, we are likely to begin to think about executing.

• 2:22:17Jocko Willink?

  You make it sound like such a

• 2:22:19Speaker 01

  Process.

• 2:22:19Jocko Willink?

  Long process.

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  It's a process because you can't just have like two guys saying, hey, we should get, um, you know, I don't know. Something earrings or something and another guy's, yeah, that's cool.

• 2:22:29Jocko Willink?

  No, we're not doing earrings.

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 2:22:31Jocko Willink?

  Period of the story, don't ask.

• 2:22:32Speaker 01

  Boom. So you made my point for me. So hats were one of those ones where there was a lot of people saying we need hat or we should, we should have hats. That would be cool. And people were like, yeah, I think that too. So anyway, hats are on the way.

• 2:22:45Speaker 01

  Some hoodies out there. I already mentioned the rash guard. I think.

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  I think we have a lot of good stuff on there, but only way for you to find out is to go to jocko store.com and find out for yourself. If you're in the mood, get something like that or get something that's on there and it will support the podcast. Also. Good way to support yourself in your journey, journey. Are we doing journey or same journey?

• 2:23:09Jocko Willink?

  You've been doing it, just so you know.

• 2:23:11Speaker 01

  I know, but I just, I have mixed emotions about it. Still not comfortable. Yeah. I like when other people say it, not myself. Anyway, and you're getting after it journey, waking up early, uh, sticking to the workout, sticking to the diet. I think that's the, that's the main one. You know what I'm saying?

• 2:23:26Jocko Willink?

  Maybe.

• 2:23:27Speaker 01

  But don't say maybe you were at my house the other day and you were, what were you eating?

• 2:23:31Jocko Willink?

  Chicken wings.

• 2:23:32Speaker 01

  No, there was, it was something bad. Apple pie. Wait, wait, was it apple pie?

• 2:23:36Jocko Willink?

  No. There was something.

• 2:23:39Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, as far as diets go.

• 2:23:41Jocko Willink?

  I went, I went nuts on the chicken wings.

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  Technically, the way those were made, that wasn't much of a deviation from the diet.

• 2:23:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:23:50Speaker 01

  Anyway, the point there being diet is a hard thing.

• 2:23:53Jocko Willink?

  Something else though.

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly right. And that's the point really. Even Jocko gets nuts sometimes. It was a Saturday, so that could have been his cheat day. Who knows? But I'm just saying you can be on the program and the diet thing, that'll sneak up on you. That'll sneak up on you when you're not ready. Like if you're, if you have, okay, I gotta wake up at four 30. You know when the insurgent is gonna come, is gonna come at four 30.

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  You gotta work out at eight 30 or five or whatever time you know when the weakness might come. So you can be ready for it. The diet thing, you just don't know. That's what I'm saying. So nonetheless, any moment of weakness, this is what you do.

• 2:24:29Speaker 01

  You go to iTunes or Amazon Music and get an album with tracks called Psychological Warfare. All it is is a bunch of tracks, Jocko telling you why you should not skip workout, you should not hit the snooze, you should not eat the donuts.

• 2:24:47Jocko Willink?

  No donuts.

• 2:24:48Speaker 01

  Practical, logical advice from Jocko. You know why? Because a lot of people, they look for inspirational advice.

• 2:24:59Jocko Willink?

  This is practical.

• 2:25:00Speaker 01

  Flimsy, right? Inspirational is very flimsy because it relies on you feeling like it.

• 2:25:05Jocko Willink?

  This has nothing to do with feeling.

• 2:25:06Speaker 01

  This has to do by definition with you not feeling like it. So let Jocko talk you into making the right decision. Boom, that's all it is. Hundred percent effective. I dare you to skip the workout after workout and get whatever the track is called. There's a bunch of them on there. Anyway, again, Psychological Warfare, iTunes, still number one, by the way. That's a check.

• 2:25:30Jocko Willink?

  Holding, holding strong.

• 2:25:31Speaker 01

  Holding strong for a good reason, by the way.

• 2:25:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Also, when you're on Amazon, you can get Jocko White Tea, which I'm drinking right now. And the reason I'm drinking it is because it's delicious, by the way.

• 2:25:42Speaker 01

  What does it taste like?

• 2:25:43Jocko Willink?

  Victory. Way of the Warrior Kid book came out. Feedback's been unbelievable, getting photos of kids doing pull-ups, studying, doing jiu-jitsu, basically getting after it in all realms of getting after it, which has been awesome. And if you want your kid to get after it, or other kids around your kid to get after it, and become stronger, smarter, and better, then get them Way of the Warrior Kid. And I just got an email yesterday from a friend of the family, sixty-nine years old. Is that considered a kid?

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  No, a little bit older than a kid.

• 2:26:20Jocko Willink?

  It's older than a kid, but guess what? He said he learned a lot from Uncle Jake.

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  I did. I just finished it.

• 2:26:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you finished it.

• 2:26:25Speaker 01

  I finished it a few days ago. I read one or two chapters, just every night, routine, boom, boom, with my four-year-old. Just finished it.

• 2:26:31Jocko Willink?

  Does she understand it?

• 2:26:32Speaker 01

  She understands a percentage of it. She's four.

• 2:26:34Jocko Willink?

  The good things. Does she understand the impact of things?

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is the plan. So she's gonna understand these really, really basic things. And maybe, you know, I'm gonna just read it over and over and over. So it becomes the ethos kind of thing. And then after she gets older, she's gonna start understanding the details, you know? And then the more older she gets, the more she understands.

• 2:26:53Jocko Willink?

  This is gonna be her base way of thought.

• 2:26:54Speaker 01

  Her book, Warrior Kid, the ethos, boom.

• 2:26:58Jocko Willink?

  This guy, friend of the family, sixty-nine years old. Learned from it, and then he went and bought a copy for all of his grandchildren, each of them individually. So that's good. Discipline Equals Freedom, Field Manual, Thoughts and Actions, that's coming out.

• 2:27:13Jocko Willink?

  It's available. You can get it for preorder right now. Extreme Ownership, of course, you can get Combat Leadership, Applied to Business and to Life. So you can get that book. Also, if you want to get in the game, you can contact Echelon Front, Leadership and Management Consulting Company, that we have. That contact is [email protected]. Also, the muster is around the corner, the Austin, Texas muster, thirteen and fourteen of July, at the Omni Barton Creek Resort. Pragmatic Leadership Strategies and Tactics,

• 2:27:53Jocko Willink?

  that you can utilize, day one. No, no reason to wait around. You'll learn them and you'll be sending emails in a break to your team, getting things fixed. There's only three hundred seats for this. Because we wanted a smaller venue, and this was the better venue. It's gonna sell out, so if you want to come, get your tickets now. Until the muster, if you have any feedback or questions for us, you can find us actually on the interwebs, Twitter, Instagram, and on the Facebook. And Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. Roger, of course, has no social media. He doesn't care.

• 2:28:35Jocko Willink?

  Echo, you got anything else?

• 2:28:37Speaker 01

  I thank Roger Hayden again for coming by. Thank you so much.

• 2:28:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just want to say though, Jocko, my son's been going to jiu-jitsu at your studio for about six months now, and I tell you, he loves it.

• 2:28:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:52Speaker 02

  And he was, went to about two and a half years of this. Fighting boxing guy that was really good and uh but he says that jujitsu was uh plus the instructors you got are top shelf.

• 2:29:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:06Speaker 02

  And uh it's he he really likes it. He told me to tell you he really enjoys it and thank you.

• 2:29:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of course. Uh it's it's great to have our gym Victory MMA. It's great to have it and to have it. It's just accessible to people. There's no walls around it. It's an open door. It costs money, of course, because you gotta pay rent and all that stuff, but.

• 2:29:27Speaker 01

  Not that much.

• 2:29:28Jocko Willink?

  Not not crazy. It's a hundred bucks a month. You can train anytime you want.

• 2:29:32Speaker 01

  Anytime.

• 2:29:33Jocko Willink?

  Anytime you want. Well, not 24 hours a day, but six in the morning until 10 o'clock at night.

• 2:29:38Speaker 01

  Compared to other places, that's like literally three times as much training.

• 2:29:42Speaker 02

  Plus, it's not just jujitsu. You got everything there. And he says that's what he likes about it. It's wide open and uh you know, he likes it.

• 2:29:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's got jujitsu, boxing, Muay Thai, wrestling, MMA, CrossFit. It's got everything in there. And that's why we built it. Uh Roger, you got anything else?

• 2:30:01Speaker 02

  No, I'm I'm good. I'm about burnt out now.

• 2:30:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, hey, man. Once again, thanks for coming on.

• 2:30:08Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 2:30:09Jocko Willink?

  Just awesome to have you on here. And the first time that you were on, I got a million. I know you don't do social media, but I got a million people saying, please bring Roger back on. Please bring Roger back on. And now that you were on today, and you once again, you have a good way of telling little bits of stories that are awesome. And I want to hear like a one hour story about Sea Wolves coming in and dropping bombs and spraying stuff down. I'm like, how does that? What? I want to learn the tactics of what was going on. So you're probably gonna have to. I know you're burned out for today, but you're probably gonna have to get on one one more time at least. And uh but thanks for coming on again, sharing your story, your experience, your wisdom with us. And more important, of course, thanks for what you

• 2:30:53Jocko Willink?

  did for our country, for the Navy, and of course, for the teams. You're absolutely one of the guys that made the teams what the teams are. So thank you for that, Roger. Honored to have you on here. And for the rest of the Vietnam veterans, and I hear a lot from Vietnam veterans. Thanks to all of you for holding the line and thank you for every deployment, for every operation, every mission, every day spent out on patrol, every night spent out in the bush, every helicopter assault, every river operation, every combat sortie,

• 2:31:34Jocko Willink?

  every case of jungle rot and malaria, and every wound received, and every brother lost.

• 2:31:45Jocko Willink?

  Thanks to you all for what you did for us. We will never forget.

• 2:31:54Jocko Willink?

  So until next time, this is Echo and Jocko and War and Officer SEAL Roger Hayden.

• 2:32:04Jocko Willink?

  Out.