437: Special Ops, Intelligence, Sacrifice, and War. with Joe Kent and the Story of Shannon Kent.

>Join Jocko Underground.com< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe "Send Me: The True Story of a Mother At War", by Joe Kent. Joe Kent is a retired 20-year-veteran of our nation’s Special Forces and a widower raising his two young sons in Yacolt, Washington State. His first wife, who also served, was killed while fighting ISIS in Syria. Four years later, he married Heather Kaiser. 0:00:00 - Intro 0:03:45 - Joe Kent. Early Days. 0:09:50 - Entering The Military. 0:21:51 - Selection. 0:29:22 - Shannon Kent. 0:55:57 - Baghdad 2007. 0:58:34 - Meeting Shannon. 1:16:50 - Iraq 2011. 1:57:10 - The Last Deployment. 2:00:45 - Tragedy Strikes. 2:22:22 - Joe Kent Running For Congress. 2:42:06 - How To Stay On The Path. 3:03:53 - 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?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 437 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. The Strike Force commander spoke up. Let's go, boys. Warrant gonna be around forever. Might as well go give the taxpayers their money's worth. The night's GRGs or Grid Reference Guides had already been printed out. Everyone took one and slid it into their forearm quarterback pad for easy reference. Each sailor on the manifest checked their night vision devices, completed radio checks and slid a magazine into their rifle as they walked out the door toward the flight line. At this point, it was always assumed Shannon would accompany them on target. She was too valuable to leave behind.

• 0:39Jocko Willink?

  Not much later, three Blackhawk helicopters lifted off with the Strike Force onboard and raced towards the objective. Tonight would be fun. Tonight, they were landing on the X. About 20 minutes later, the crew chief inside Shannon's bird shouted 30 seconds over the roar of the rotors while holding up his two fingers in a pinching motion in case someone couldn't hear his warning. 30 seconds out. Find your safety line. Make sure your nods are adjusted and get ready to rock. Moments later, the helicopter flared and landed about 50 meters from the target building. The SEALs sprinted toward the objective. Speed, surprise and violence of action are the keys to success on these types of missions. Shannon ran behind them, keeping close.

• 1:22Jocko Willink?

  Infrared lasers bounced on the front door. A light flicked on inside the building. The occupants knew they had company. The SEALs mechanically breached the door with a donker, a portable battering ram, and flowed in, moving through the target building with a fluidity that comes with hundreds of hours of practice as a team. As one SEAL button hooked into the prayer room, a teammate right behind him ran into a military aged male. Without hesitation, he took him to the ground and put a knee on his back. The other team guy in the room was doing the same with another. The radio call went out moments later. Objective secure. Shannon was already making her way through the breach point, anxious to see if her analysis was correct. Hey Shan, back here in the prayer room. Pretty sure we got jackpots one and two.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  Shannon rounded the corner and saw two of her friends standing there with two zip tied detainees. She didn't need to take more than a quick glance at both to know they got both of their targets. Hell yeah, she thought.

• 2:22Jocko Willink?

  It was a good night, but not as good as a few nights prior.

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  When they'd hit 13 objectives in one night. That was going to be a hard night to top.

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book that has just been released. And the book is called Send Me. The True Story of a Mother at War. And this book is the story of Shannon Kent, a US Navy Senior Chief. Who spent her life. And sacrificed her life. Working and fighting in the Special Operations and Intelligence Community.

• 3:07Jocko Willink?

  And she actually wasn't the only one in her direct family unit to serve. Her husband, Joe Kent, who co-authored this book. Spent over 20 years in the Army and in Joint Special Operations, as well as with other government agencies. Conducting missions around the world. Fighting terrorists and insurgents. And it's an honor to have Joe Kent here with us tonight. To share the story of his amazing wife, as well as his own experiences and lessons learned. From life, war, combat. And of course, leadership. Joe, thanks for joining us, man.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me here, I appreciate it.

• 3:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's great to meet you and it was really awesome to read the book and. Get the details around Shannon's life and what she did and really. Of course, you know, from my background in the SEAL Teams, I have worked with people in Shannon's role. A lot over the years, but there really hasn't been anyone that painted such a good picture. Of that side of Special Operations. So you did a great job bringing that to light. And I think a lot of people are going to get a lot out of that and start to understand what it takes to put an X on a map and send an assault force out there. There's a lot, a lot of things have to happen to get there. But um, before we get into the book, let's talk about you a little

• 4:38Jocko Willink?

  bit. So where were you born?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  So I was born in, in Oregon, Sweet Home Oregon, just to the south of the Eugene area. So kind of out in the middle of nowhere.

• 4:46Jocko Willink?

  And, and growing up in the woods scenario type thing?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Well, kind of. My dad got a job with the Forest Service. So that's how we kind of ended up there. But then shortly thereafter, both my folks got into law school. So moved to Eugene and then spent most of my life growing up in Portland, Oregon, believe it or not. So it was a kind of a good mix, I think, between growing up in a city. Portland at the time, eighties and nineties was kind of a medium sized chill city. There was none of the craziness that we have now with Portland. Uh, but I was really involved in Boy Scouts. So spent a lot of time out in the woods. So.

• 5:15Jocko Willink?

  And so what did your, your mom and dad were both lawyers?

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, my folks are both lawyers. Yeah. My mom ended up, she stopped practicing, um, once we started. I'm, I'm the oldest of five. So once I had a bunch of little brothers and sisters, she kind of pulled away from that. Um, but then my dad, he's still a practicing lawyer.

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  A practicing lawyer of what kind?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Uh, civil law.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:36Jocko Willink?

  And as you're growing up, uh, was your dad in the military?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  No. Uh-uh. So both grandparents were, you know, like they both did their time in World War II. Um, but not a family of, uh, you know, military service or military traditions.

• 5:48Jocko Willink?

  What, what were you into when you were growing up? Like in school, were you studying? Did you do work? Did you do, like, I didn't do homework. I know kids, I have four kids now and homework is, well, they're out of that grade, but we're out of that age. But, you know, when I was a kid, like, we didn't do homework. I didn't do homework.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  I did. From time to time, yes.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  I, I did not. No, no. I think I usually copied off somebody like, like right before it was due, maybe. Like, I was a pretty bad student. I did not like school. I mean, basically from the time I was, I don't know, like probably five or six, I knew I wanted to be G I Joe of some sort, you know? And like that, that kind of like matured as I watched like the A-Team. And then once I got old enough to, you know, pre-internet, you gotta go read books and stuff. So once I got a library card, I realized actually like, I like to read. And so I read all the Vietnam books and I had my mindset. I was gonna go be, be some flavor of Commando. Uh, but really what's, what solidified it for me was 93 was the Black Hawk Down. Just seeing that, you know, on TV, just piped right into people's houses. I think, I think that was the first time Americans had really seen brutal graphic combat.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  And I was 13 and I was like, man, you know, just entered high school and I was thinking there's 18 year old kids who got killed there. In a couple of years, that could be me. Who are those guys? Like, how come they're over there fighting, but nobody else is like, I want to go. Whoever those guys are, I want to go be one of them.

• 7:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Did you, were you able to kind of disseminate that there was Rangers and that there was special forces and that there was Delta? Did you figure all that out from the Black Hawk Down scenario?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Shortly thereafter, you know, I started reading as much as I could. And I think there was a couple of books that came out after that. It took a while, I think, for the actual Black Hawk Down book to come out. But really, just the mission of the Green Beret has really grabbed me because they seem like they are always constantly deployed, even at times we weren't in war. And I figured, you know, actually, especially post Black Hawk Down, that we weren't going to be involved in any kind of, you know, long enduring conflict. Kind of funny to say that now.

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  Everyone thought that.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  But that's what I thought, you know, in the 90s. And so I was like, okay, being a Green Beret sounds pretty cool. And then, of course, the recruiters were like, well, you can't go do that right away, but you can go be a Ranger, which to me was like, okay, that's pretty badass. I'm gonna try that. But I gotta say, I did read, I think I was in high school, like, right before I joined the Army. I read Rogue Warrior. And I was like, holy crap. Like, I, because I like the water. I ended up going to a dive team in SF, but I was like, man, maybe I should try and be a SEAL. But I went and I talked to the recruiter and the Navy recruiter was just like, yeah, you know, you gotta pick a Navy job first. And here's all the Navy jobs. And I was like, man, those all sound really terrible. I'm like, but how do I? He's like, but then maybe after boot camp, you can try. And luckily, I had one, one friend who had, one of my dad's friends who had been in the military was like, whatever you want to do, get it in writing. Which

• 8:29Speaker 01

  was like, actually, the best advice ever. Because I told him that. He was like, do not do that. He's like, if they put it in writing, and it's what you want, well, go ahead. He's like, but don't, don't go down that rabbit hole. So the Army was like, well, if you want to arrange your contract, it's right here, we'll spell it out for you.

• 8:41Jocko Willink?

  Boom. Yeah, it is weird that in the 90s, we didn't think that there would ever be a long range or a long term war again.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:50Jocko Willink?

  I mean, the Gulf War happened. It was over in 72 hours. And then, and, and even when Black Hawk Down went down, I was in the Navy, I was in the teams already. But I remember following that deployment, I was over off the coast of Somalia and Rwanda happened. And there was There was eight hundred thousand people that were about to get slaughtered. Was it eight hundred? Yeah, eight hundred thousand.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:14Jocko Willink?

  In a hundred days and we were there and they were spinning us up like, hey, we're gonna go and at least provide humanitarian. We didn't go anywhere. We didn't do anything because they did not want to have anyone else, any other Americans to have any kind of incident over in Africa. That just wasn't gonna happen. So the idea, yeah, the, we used to be training for like the, what we called the big mish.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:38Jocko Willink?

  You would get one big mission. That's what you would think. Oh, we're gonna get one big mission and that'll be that. And you had to keep your, your fingers and toes crossed that you were gonna be on that mish.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. Even, yeah, when I came in, I mean, even going right to Ranger Regiment, two, seven, five wasn't in the Blackhawk down incident, but we had a couple of guys who had come over from third Ranger Battalion. My squad leader had jumped into Panama. But it was like these guys who had gotten one chance, you know, but then there was a whole bunch of other guys who had been in even longer than them, who were just like, yeah, we were there, we were close, but it didn't end up happening. And so I, I thought that the combat was like this fleeting thing that you might get a shot at in a 20 year career.

• 10:16Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent. There was guys, I know guys that did 30 years.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:20Jocko Willink?

  From like 1971 to 1991, 19 or two, until 2001. And they never fired their weapon in combat.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:28Jocko Willink?

  And great guys, but

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:30Jocko Willink?

  It just, just didn't happen.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:33Jocko Willink?

  And so, um, would you go right out of high school then?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:38Jocko Willink?

  What'd you do to prepare for Ranger school? Did you like get ready for it?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wrestled in high school, played football. Wasn't very good at either one of them, but like

• 10:45Jocko Willink?

  Did you wrestle all four years?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  I wrestled all four years, yeah.

• 10:47Jocko Willink?

  How'd you do?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Not very

• 10:48Jocko Willink?

  Washington State? Washington's got some good wrestling going on.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Really good wrestling. So come, being like in the city in Portland, you could do okay. But if you get outside the city, people take their wrestling really seriously.

• 10:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I said Washington, you're in Oregon.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  But it's right on the border. So, I mean, we, we were wrestling against guys from Washington and Oregon. But if you get against any of the, the country kids, like they just kick the crap out of us. So. I got, I got beat a lot, but I got in really good shape and I think, I think mentally it really prepared me. Did lots of running and all that stuff.

• 11:14Jocko Willink?

  You're, did you wrestle prior to your freshman year?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  I didn't. There was no real wrestling programs before high school.

• 11:21Jocko Willink?

  The mental, the mental toughness that when you show up as a freshman and you've never wrestled before, that you're about to get, because your first match in your freshman year can be against a kid that's been wrestling since he was five years old and he's gonna murder you and pin you and rub your face in the mat in about forty-five seconds. And it's definitely gonna hook you up with some mental toughness.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  I think I felt like I was in pretty good shape as a whatever thirteen year old, but then I definitely had that exact same experience where there's kids who have been wrestling just because their dad was really into it or, or they would just be like freakishly strong and I got a lot of humble pie.

• 11:57Jocko Willink?

  How did your parents feel about you when you started looking at the army? You're like, I'm going to the army and your parents are lawyers. So they're highly educated people and they're looking at you thinking, what are you doing? Or were they down?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  I think they, they hoped that I was gonna outgrow it, but by the time I was old enough to start talking to recruiters, it'd been all I'd been talking about since I was like five. And the mentality in Portland, and I think in a lot of schools, especially at the time, was like, you either go to college and get a four-year degree or you're gonna be homeless on the streets. Like there's like no, there's like, don't go to trade school, don't join the military. That stuff just doesn't even get talked about. It's like, you know, you go to college or else. And I was like, the last thing I'm doing is going to college. You know, this optional four years of more school, like that is not for me. So they were actually pretty supportive of it. You know, they've always been pretty supportive. So they're like, hey, as long as you have a plan, you know, I think they figured I was gonna get free college and kind of be bored, you know, in a couple of years and just sort of come back and figure out something else.

• 12:49Jocko Willink?

  So what year was it when you enlisted?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Ninety-eight.

• 12:52Jocko Willink?

  Did you leave in the summer?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, like right after graduation. Yeah.

• 12:56Jocko Willink?

  And did you, I kind of asked you this, did you prepare for Ranger School? Like, were you rucking? Were you getting ready for it?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I don't know if I rucked. We backpacked a lot in Boy Scouts. So I felt like pretty comfortable with all that. But you know, I knew all the army like two mile standards and all that stuff. So was running, was running like five miles and all that. And you know, made sure I could do pull-ups and push-ups and I was lifting weights and stuff. So I felt physically ready.

• 13:19Jocko Willink?

  So you're in Boy Scouts, you're going to school, you're not great at school, you're not putting a lot of effort or? Are you just kind of a clean cut kid? Were you getting in any trouble? Were you like a problem child? Were you listening to rock and roll music? I was. Any other sinful activities?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Was definitely listened to heavy metal and all that type of stuff and thought I was, thought I was pretty badass. I was really lucky though. Um, my boy scout troop was badass. We had a former Green Beret Vietnam era guy who was the scout master. And basically his whole philosophy was we take the boys out in the woods and we kind of let them go Lord of the Flies. And like the, the older ones that are good leaders will take care of the younger ones and like it'll all kind of buff out. So I think a lot of the stuff they were letting us do at the time, like I think if, if I were to go try to do that now, I might end up in jail. You know? Um, so it was just a great experience, man. It was, it was just such a good outlet that like all the trouble we got into

• 14:14Speaker 01

  was out in the woods, screwing around, you know, rappelling off stuff, whitewater rafting, uh, just a great outlet for all that young male energy. So I didn't get in a ton of trouble in high school because I think, I mean, really too, like it was hard, it was hard to get in trouble in those days, as long as you, you know, used a little bit of tradecraft and like you, you weren't super blatant about it. And you know, that was, it was kind of like the nineties, you know? People would say, hey, don't do that again, but there wasn't any like recording of you on a phone and you know, the parents getting called, posted to social media. Yeah. I feel, I feel for kids that are growing up nowadays. It's just, it's so hard to actually just let kids be kids. And there's like no forgiveness or tolerance.

• 14:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you go to your recruiter, he, you see the ranger opportunity and you roll out to boot camp. Boot camp is boot camp.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:02Jocko Willink?

  Anything special about boot camp?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Uh, I really liked it. I mean, I was just stoked to be there. I was like that, that goober who was like, oh my God, this is so cool. They gave us BDU. It's like, they're going to give us M16s, you know? So I was really just happy to be there. The same thing airborne school. I was like, oh man, they're going to let us jump out of airplanes. Yeah.

• 15:19Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so you go to airborne school and then did you, so did you have orders to go to regiment?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you get the, you get the opportunity. It's like a Ranger variable contract. So you at least get to go try out to go to regiment. So the month, the month long, uh, process of, you know, getting smoked and dogged out to make sure you can get, then go to regiment.

• 15:38Jocko Willink?

  Is that rasp then?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  It was called rip at the time, but it's rasp now. Yeah.

• 15:42Jocko Willink?

  And it's a month long?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's about a month. I think now it's a little bit longer because they actually teach the guys, uh, some, some basic tactics in case they get deployed right away to war. When I went, I think we just got the crap smoked out of us. I know, I know. We did some land nav in there somewhere, but I just know everything was like time rucks, time runs, and then just beat down sessions.

• 16:00Jocko Willink?

  And Rangers is, as from what I can tell, kind of the most Spartan of the military units, period. Are you agree with me?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I would agree with you. Definitely. Yeah, definitely.

• 16:14Jocko Willink?

  Like there's no, when you're in a Ranger regiment, you are, you are going in the field. You are, you're still getting like dropped down.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:23Jocko Willink?

  Made to do pushups by people that are like one rank above you.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Very common. Yeah.

• 16:30Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's almost like, would it, is it, is it almost like a bootcamp environment kind of continues?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  It is. Yeah. Except for like with no, you know, guardrails. So like when you're, you're NCOs, I mean, for better or worse, I mean, they can really, really mess with you if they want to. Um, but I was, I mean, I think especially in the late nineties, going to Ranger regiment was really fortunate because I, I don't think the rest of the army, like the traditional infantry units, the conventional guys, at the time, I don't think they had money to really train. But I got there and it was like, hey, you know, it's a, it's Spartan, like you said, but it's also like your job is to be physically fit. Your job is to know your weapon system and to know basic tactics. And so it was a really good foundation of just basic soldiering.

• 17:10Jocko Willink?

  And when you're in Ranger Regiment in the nineties, you're not going on deployment. You're not going on like a six month deployment. You're just always ready.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Always training, always. It's a cycle. So you do your big workup so you can do an airfield seizure, which means you're like a human lawn dart, you know, doing like the, doing the, uh, the low altitude, like mass tactical with all your crap on, onto an airfield to seize it. So you get to land on concrete, you know, if you're, if you're really lucky. And then you do the same thing with the rotary wing assets, a lot of live fire, and then you do individual training. And so it's, yeah, it's just that, that cycle. If you've been there, back then, if you'd been there for a year, you just kind of rinse, repeat that year and hope your number comes up for the Panama, the grenade. Yeah, for the big mesh. Yeah.

• 17:50Jocko Willink?

  How many times did you do an airfield seizure and jump out and land on concrete?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Oh, too many to count, like a bunch. If you'd been there for, especially in those days, because that was like core bread and butter. Nowadays, I think they're, they're probably more laser focused on, you know, strategic strike. Uh, but then that was the big mission, because that was what they did in Grenade in Panama. So we were just kind of practicing that. You eventually get a little bit better about steering your parachute, like to some grass or something.

• 18:14Jocko Willink?

  How much, how much did you weigh when you were a young Ranger?

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Uh, probably 190, 200ish. Yeah. So I was hitting, and then if you're over six feet tall, you can jump the machine gun or the Gustav. And so I always had one of those stupid things strapped onto me and be like, congratulations, you're a 240 gunner or you're a Gustav gunner. And see if they're this big awkward, like, the Gustav wasn't too bad, but like the 240 just makes you.

• 18:34Jocko Willink?

  Lower it down before you hit with your ruck or you land?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  I would lower, I'd lower the ruck, but I wouldn't lower my weapon system because I was like, man, if I, if that thing's gone, then I'm going to be the biggest jackass in the world. So I'm just going to ride the sucker in.

• 18:45Jocko Willink?

  And you're living in the barracks?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:48Jocko Willink?

  So you're living in the barracks. You, talk me through like a week at, in Ranger Regiment.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Um, man, so every day is pretty much like you're doing PT and whatever, like 530, 600. And at the time, this is before I think like, you know, CrossFit and people were lifting. So we were just running or rucking. That was the two, the two forms of PT. You're either, you're either running like really long or really fast or some combination of both, or you're putting a backpack on and. Going for a long stroll, but then we'd be at the range quite a bit. I mean, especially now that I understand like how much it costs to send it. As I matured in my soldiering, I could actually appreciate what I was given as a younger guy. We were at the range quite a bit, you know, shooting. We'd usually after our PT session, you know, put on our military gear for the day and then we'd walk to the ranges. That was always, I was like, why'd we just, we just ran and now, okay, all right, whatever, you know, like sometimes, although

• 19:36Speaker 01

  sometimes we would, you know, throw everything we needed in our backpacks and take off for a couple of days and just live out of your backpack and shoot at the range. Combatives were getting pretty big then too. So there was a lot of, a lot of rolling, a lot of scrapping. I think for the, on the army side, Ranger Regiment picked up jujitsu before the rest of the army did. So we were, you know, arm barring each other and choking each other.

• 19:56Jocko Willink?

  And you had that wrestling background too?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So we were, we were fighting quite a bit. And so that was usually a big afternoon thing was lift and fight. So, I mean, really in a week as a young guy, and this is why I think I loved it. I mean, you could basically get paid to work out, get paid to go shoot and then go beat up, you know, beat each other up with your buddies, you know, so.

• 20:13Jocko Willink?

  Living the dream.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Living the dream, man. I mean, it wears on you after a while. Of course, you get tired and all that type of stuff. And there was all, there's always all the admin nonsense you gotta do here and there. But I think a lot of that is really, really minimized in Ranger Battalion.

• 20:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. Rangers are just outstanding when you work with them. They're just, you know what you got, man. You got a professional soldier ready to get after it. And so then at some point, pretty common, you, you see the Green Berets. Now, you already had that idea coming in?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  I did, I did, yeah.

• 20:42Jocko Willink?

  And the x-ray, like the 18 x-ray program wasn't available yet?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  It wasn't. It just, it had just started. Once I was in the Q course, we had the first like five test x-rays that were in, in the pipeline with us. But that was not a thing at all. You had to be an E4. For a while, you had to be an E5. But then when they started taking E4s, this is right before nine 11. I'd been a battalion for about three years, coming up on three years. And I was like, you know, I think now's a good time to do it, you know? There's never a good time to say you want to leave Ranger Regiment. Like, that's, that's just not something that you do unless you die. In the mentality while you're there in the mode, but the funny thing is like, there's only so far that you can advance as an NCO in Ranger time before you kind of have to leave. So like, you'll never hear Rangers admit this while they're, you know, wearing a tambouré, but a lot of them end up going to SF eventually. So on Fort Lewis where we were, there was also first special forces group.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  So we could kind of see the SF guys, you know, from a distance. And this is when Rangers had to have high and tights and the SF guys all had long hair. And I was like, that's pretty sweet, man. This guy's get to have long hairs, you know? But yeah, I had decided I was gonna try out and I actually ended up in special forces selection on September 11th. That was like the first, that was like our start day was like nine 11.

• 21:53Jocko Willink?

  So selection is how long?

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Selection's in about a month.

• 21:57Jocko Willink?

  And that's just, they're just weeding people out to see if they really want to send you to the Q course, right?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah. The Q course is about, maybe the easiest way to get out there, or the shortest way to get out of the Q course, you're still there for well over a year. But yeah, selection's a month. It's, it's a, there's some, you know, traditional like kind of beat down log PT type of stuff, but a lot of it is individual to see if you can make decisions on your own, how you do without getting feedback and guidance, those types of things. Land, land ad being the big vehicle for all that.

• 22:25Jocko Willink?

  Good times.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good times.

• 22:28Jocko Willink?

  How many people, you know, start in your selection? How many people get selected?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  So my class, I, we had around a little bit over 300 that showed up on day one. Now showing up on day one means you're just gonna take the PT test. And so there's a lot of jokers that like, I don't know, like on a whim, we're like, I'm gonna go take the PT test. Like, so that 300 number or that over 300 number, I think by the time they actually put us on the trucks to take us out to the actual camp, Camp McCall where selection happens, I think we probably lost about a hundred guys or so that just didn't pass the PT test.

• 23:00Jocko Willink?

  And then eventually at the end of the, what about at the end of the month long selection?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  At the end, I, I don't know the exact number in my class, but I think we were below 50 at the end of it.

• 23:08Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:09Jocko Willink?

  And then any, then you roll into Q course.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:14Jocko Willink?

  And what, what's your specialty?

• 23:16Speaker 01

  So I, weapons.

• 23:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It went from 11 Bravo to 18 Bravo. So I wanted to get out of the Q course as quick as possible. And I was like, oh, play of guns, like, cool.

• 23:26Jocko Willink?

  Any, any challenges going through selection or Q course, sorry?

• 23:30Speaker 01

  I mean, the interesting thing about selection, especially coming from a unit like Ranger Regiment, like in Ranger Regiment, you're never alone. You're always in a big group, all the, the vehicles and assessment tools they use to see if you're going to be a good Ranger leader. It's you're having to lead other troops. And so everything arduous that you do, it's with other people. SFAS is pretty unique in the fact that it's like one of the few places in the military where they take you and they isolate you from everybody else. And they're like, well, here's your list of tasks to do. It's on that board out there and you're going to do them or you're not going to do them. And that's it. Which at first I was like, oh, actually this is, this is really challenging. This is very different than what I've done. But then after a while, I was like, okay, I actually kind of like this. This is cool. I'm much more in charge of my own destiny than I had been any other time in my military career.

• 24:11Jocko Willink?

  Did you go to Ranger School already? So did you actually get to go to Ranger School?

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that's awesome.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that, that's a big advantage, I think, going into the Q course because you already understand tactics. You've already been dogged out and tired and you, you've kind of seen that movie a little bit before. So you're like, this is going to get ugly in about 24 hours, you know, like you kind of know that's coming. So that helped out, especially with the first part of the Q course is like a mini Ranger School, just to get everybody on the same sheet of music with, with small unit tactics. But I'd say the hardest part of the Q course is just kind of how long it is. Like you're, you're there for a really long time. So there's a lot of guys who will just mentally get it in their head that like, oh, I, you know, failed this gate or that gate. Now I'm screwed.

• 24:47Jocko Willink?

  Did you say a year? The Q course is a year long? Does that include language training?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  That, yeah, that, well, for me, that included language training. Yeah.

• 24:55Jocko Willink?

  What language would it go for?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  I got Pashto. So right, because it was like right after nine 11, they had just started sending guys into Afghanistan. They're like, all right, we got to get more Pashto speakers. And the funny thing is like, if you're like Shannon and you're an actual linguist, they test your aptitude. If you're an SF guy and they've already invested that much in you, you're going to go to a group and that group's got an X amount of languages. And if it's a really hard one, like too bad, you're not leaving here until you figure it out. So we went to take the, at the end of the, end of the actual Q course itself before language school, they have you go take the language aptitude test. And the instructor that administered it to us was like, hey, I don't care if you max this thing. It's the best score ever, or if you spell your name wrong on it. If I give you Russian or Arabic, you're not leaving here until you get a one one.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  It's like, so I don't really care. So he's like, so I don't care how the military says, whether the military says you can learn a language or not, like you're gonna learn it or you're not gonna leave, which was a pretty good motivator.

• 25:48Jocko Willink?

  Do they, do they take that D lab score though, and like assign you the level of language that's appropriate? So, cause I remember I took that test. I never, thankfully, never had to take it, which I shouldn't say that. I guess I wish I would have learned a language, but I didn't. But you had to get a certain score. And if you got a really good score, you could learn Chinese or Arabic. And if you got a bad score, then you were gonna like, get Spanish or French or whatever. And the Spanish and French schools are like six months long and the Arabic schools are a year or whatever. Were you in that kind of like selection pipeline?

• 26:17Speaker 01

  So I had taken that test before and I had done okay on it. Like, I think I qualified to learn like Arabic or whatever. But at the Q course, like they don't care. Like if you're assigned to fifth group, like you're gonna get Arabic, Farsi or Pashto. At the time, I think we had some Russian speakers too. If you went to seventh group, well, you were lucky. You were gonna get to learn Spanish and you were gonna be out of there in like four months, you know? But so it was, that was really the point there. Just like, we don't really care what this thing says. Like you're gonna learn whatever language your group needs to learn and the standard's one one. So, sorry bud.

• 26:45Jocko Willink?

  So you, from 18 years old to, how old are you now when you get done with the Q course?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Uh, 23.

• 26:52Jocko Willink?

  So you've been in for five years and you got a good grip of what's happening in the military. And how does that, you know, you and I were talking about the big mesh and nothing going on and now September 11th comes. And how did that attitude like sweep through the, the, the, the team?

• 27:08Speaker 01

  I think all of us still thought, especially my Q course class, we still thought that we were gonna miss it. So even when I got back from SFAS, there's a little bit of a gap there. Cause you have to go back to your old unit and then leave. Right when I got back, uh, from selection, this is right before third Ranger Battalion jumps into Kandahar in Afghanistan. And so it still wasn't, we weren't sure which battalion was gonna get that mission. And so every battalion, I think, got read the op order. So we got read the op order. My team, my battalion's already forward deployed there. They were already in Germany. And so me and a couple of other guys were like, hey, we're gonna get on this bird. It's taking gear. We're gonna go, we're gonna jump into Kandahar. And like within, I think the next morning, we're like watching the news. It's like the Rangers secure Kandahar. And I was like, well, I might as well go to the Q course now. Cause, cause in my mind,

• 27:52Speaker 01

  I was like, Afghanistan's over. It's done. They're gonna get Bin Laden, whatever, but we're not, they're not gonna send more guys over there. That's crazy. And then while I'm in language school, the, the ground war, the Iraq invasion starts. And I'm like, dude, I've missed everything.

• 28:07Jocko Willink?

  You thought that was gonna be over.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  I thought it was it. So I got to fifth group in the summer of oh, three. And luckily, when I walked in at fifth group, they were like, I don't know what they knew, but they're like, this is not gonna be over anytime soon. We're deploying in August, like, you know, get ready to get it on.

• 28:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was really weird to watch that whole mentality. I had the exact same. I was going to college. So I was, I was an enlisted guy. I got picked up for an officer program. And I was in college and I called my detailer, who is a friend of mine that I knew. He's like the old guy assigning officers. And I was like, please, I'll, I'll go to college when I'm 50. Like, just send me back to team. And this was early. This was like September 13th.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:42Jocko Willink?

  Or something. He goes, hey, this is gonna last a really long time.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:47Jocko Willink?

  And I didn't believe him at all, you know, it was the same mentality as you like, oh, this thing, I'm gonna miss it.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:51Jocko Willink?

  Be a loser. And yeah, so some people had a better vision of how long this thing was gonna last. And I guess you, we underestimated the, underestimated the stupidity of decisions that are getting made, the military industrial complex, all these factors that come into play. The, I mean, some of the, the, the way we handled those missions, it's like, oh, yeah, you're right. This is a hundred percent gonna last forever.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:16Jocko Willink?

  Um, or at least for 20 years.

• 29:20Jocko Willink?

  So that's kinda, that's kinda the origin story of you. But, um, you know, I wanna go to this book here and, and, and talk about Shannon a little bit here. She's, and, and talk about her story. Which I'm sure, and so the, again, the book is called Send Me. I, I, you know, I, I read it, got done reading it three days ago or whatever. It's just, like I said, it, it's a great book. It gives an, it gives insight to things that people have not really talked that much about. And especially at this level of detail from a, from a first, you know, from, from that ground level and people that were right there with her. So. Get the book and here we go. This is Pine Plains, New York, 1990.

• 30:00Jocko Willink?

  Shannon Smith, five years old, watched as other kids swung from rung to rung on the playground monkey bars. She had just started her tenure as a kindergartner at Seymour Smith Elementary School in Pine Plains, New York, about 80 miles north of New York City. The notorious horizontal ladder featured on both schoolyard playgrounds and military obstacle courses requires a bit of technique, grip, and upper body strength to move from one end of the bars to the other. Two things most five-year-old children are in short supply of. "I bet you can't do it," a young boy taunted Shannon. "Yeah, huh?" Yeah, huh, that's what a little kid says. "Yeah, huh, yes, I can," Shannon replied, not to be shouted down. "No, you're too little," the boy sneered. Shannon confidently stomped over to the bars, determined to show this bully up.

• 30:42Jocko Willink?

  She didn't start the fight, but she'd finish it by gracefully swinging from bar to bar, or so she thought. Shannon grabbed the bars, her feet dangling below. She missed as she tried to swing her hand to the next one, falling off to the P rock below. The boy laughed. She got up furious and mounted the bars again. She swung and failed again. It took everything in her to hold back the tears. She wouldn't give that boy the satisfaction of knowing she was upset. "I told you you couldn't do it," the boy pointed at her laughing. It's the kind of taunting that haunts a child for years to come. The playground bully is a common scourge among children, but that doesn't make the experience less painful. Shannon came home that day and told her mom about it. She was upset specifically because it was a boy who told her she couldn't do it. And Mary could see Shannon wasn't defeated. If anything, she was more determined than ever.

• 31:27Jocko Willink?

  The next day Shannon snuck over to the monkey bars. She tried to make it across again, but failed. She kept getting back up on the bars over and over and over again, gritting her teeth with fire in her eyes. "I'll show him," she thought. This went on for days, maybe weeks. The metal bars tore up Shannon's palms, bloodying them from her repeated attempts. Slowly, day by day, she made it from one bar to the next, then the next, and then the next. Eventually, the momentum carried all the way through and she made it to the end. Landing back on her feet, triumphant, she earned the kind of confidence that kids get from conquering the seemingly unconquerable. It was the beginning of a lifelong trend. When somebody said, "No, you can't do this," Shannon's response was always, "Oh, yes, I can."

• 32:13Jocko Willink?

  So, I mean, great little anecdotal story that I'm sure, uh, it well, you can see clearly it was so well reflected in the book, um, that that's kind of her attitude about stuff.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  That is like, oh, you don't think I can do this? Yeah.

• 32:28Jocko Willink?

  Stand by.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yep. Watch me.

• 32:30Jocko Willink?

  Um, so she, and you, you talk about, um, you know, she had this ability and a gift for languages, right? And so she's ends up working at a polo club, which is interesting. And at this polo club, she's learns to, uh, speak Spanish.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:48Jocko Willink?

  Which is again, kind of crazy for a young kid. And she was on horses. She's a horseback kid.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So Pine Plains, New York, really rural New York, uh, not the New York city that most people think of. Yeah, there's a big polo club there. I think a lot of wealthier folks from the city keep their horses up there. And so there's a whole industry around that. So she loved horses and then a lot of the ranch hands, I guess some of the best, I don't know any of my polo, but from Shannon I do, but some of the best polo players in the world come from Argentina. And so there was a lot of these professional polo hands and professional polo riders that would go up there for the summers. So Shannon got a job up there and she's like, well, everybody speaks Spanish, like, so I'm going to learn Spanish. Like, that was just her mentality, you know, because she had that, she had that mindset where she could like see patterns, especially linguistically, like the way people talk and just kind of repeat it, um, in a way that I don't think most mortal people have.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  So that was her, I think her entry into learning that if there was a language out there, she could, she could figure it out. She could crack that code.

• 33:46Jocko Willink?

  Dang, that must be nice.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:49Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so she's doing that. She's working there, um, going to the book here, although stable and its horses were, um, were where her heart was. Shannon also held a summer job at the local pharmacy, was a scholar and an athlete at school. She participated year round sports, excelling in volleyball, basketball, cross country and track and field. She sang in the chorus, played flute in the school band and was involved with school theater. Was there anything she couldn't do? So she's, she's just getting after it in all aspects.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, she would find that 25th hour that exists in a day that most people just can never unlock. So that was, I mean, that was her. That's just, I mean, every aspect of her life. I mean, she was very talented and incredibly smart, but also an incredibly hard worker. You know, and I think when those two things intersect, you just find incredible people.

• 34:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we'd be lucky enough to have one of those two, but when someone has both, that's, that's what you get. A woman like Shannon, she graduate, and again, there's such great stories and background stories and her family. So get the book. I'm going to fast forward a little bit right now. Shannon graduated from Stissing Mountain Junior Senior High School in the spring of 2001. She ends up going to college for a little while. And then September 11th, 2001, Shannon's father, and you know, this is in the book, but he's a, he's New York State Police. Her father, Steve, and her uncle, who's a firefighter in New York, responded to the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, just down the Hudson River in New York City.

• 35:15Jocko Willink?

  That infamous day, which also included an attack on the Pentagon and the downing of United Air Flight, United Airlines Flight 93 in Western Pennsylvania resulted in thousands of Americans dead at the hands of terrorists and millions more fighting a campaign against international terror organizations for more than two decades. Shannon's younger brother joined the Marines shortly after the terror attacks. And to no one's surprise, Shannon's stint in college didn't last long. America was now at war. That changed everything. During her sophomore year of college, she talked to a Navy recruiter about how she could best leverage her talent for language in the service. Emerging from the ocean at midnight with a green face on a top secret mission, like Shannon had seen in the brochures, was still out of reach due to a bar on women in combat positions.

• 35:59Jocko Willink?

  But they did have a job that seemed like a perfect fit. Cryptologic Technician Interpretive. But by the time Shannon left for recruit training in late 2003, the US had lost lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, but both wars, wars were still in their infancy. Rear Admiral John Paul Jones, famously known as the father of the US Navy, once said, "I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go into harm's way." Shannon Smith wanted to go into harm's way.

• 36:37Jocko Willink?

  It is amazing how, I know Tim Kennedy told a story when he went to enlist in the army after nine eleven and there was like a damn line around the block.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:51Jocko Willink?

  And that's out here in California.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:52Jocko Willink?

  And just the, the amount of people that stepped up, I mean Shannon's brother going in the Marine Corps, her going to talk to the Navy recruiter. The amount of people that stepped up in, in that moment to serve is still, it still moves me every time I think about it.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a pretty awesome moment and I think in our, in our history, especially for the, the guys that were in, just to see the outpouring of people that, that wanted to serve. And then, I mean, one of the first times I talk about in the book, one of the first times I met Shannon, I asked her like, what made you want to join the military? And she was like, well, I'm from New, I'm from New York.

• 37:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  They hit my towers and my dad and my uncle were down there. And so I wasn't going to just sit back and let somebody else go take care of it. I wanted to do my part.

• 37:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Jocko Willink?

  Bunch of, bunch of details that are in the book about, and it's very interesting to learn about, you know, we, we touched upon kind of the language aspect of things, but what that school looks like. Up in Monterey, there's the defense language. You guys don't go to the defense language institute here?

• 37:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 37:51Jocko Willink?

  That's like the, I think it might be the best place in the world to learn a language.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  It's gotta be. I mean, cause they take kids from all over the United States of America who've never heard, you know, one foreign word. And they teach them everything from Chinese to Arabic, you know, to Russian in 18 months. And when those guys get out, they can speak, they can read, they can listen. Like it's, I think it's pretty amazing.

• 38:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's amazing. So this is up in Monterey. It's a DLI, Defense Language Institute. So Shannon goes to boot camp, she goes to language school and I'm going to fast forward a little bit here. It says Shannon was a phenomenal linguist and everybody knew it. She picked up the nuances of opinion. And modern standard Arabic came to her rapidly. By the time she graduated from DLI, she attained a language rating of three, three, two, which meant she was rated as superior in listening and reading and advanced in speaking, rare for a brand new linguist, straight out of basic training. In addition to her language rating, she earned an associate's degree in modern standard Arabic, which is awarded in October 2005, a month after she finished DLI.

• 38:54Jocko Willink?

  But there's more to cryptologic warfare than language. Shannon's chosen field would require her to master highly technical disciplines like signals, intelligence, SIGINT, cyberspace operations, and electronic warfare. For some sailors, those skills are a one-way ticket to a desk, to a dark office, sitting behind a desk, poring over classified documents. Although Shannon was perfectly capable of performing that aspect of the job, she wanted her work to be more hands-on.

• 39:21Jocko Willink?

  Her younger brother was a marine fighting in Iraq, and although she was worried about him and hoped he would make it home, she couldn't wait to get in on the war herself. So yeah, it's very normal in the Navy, and I don't know too much about the Air Force, although I'm pretty sure it's probably something similar. But in the Navy, a lot of times, if you're a linguist, you'll be sitting in a room, listening to Yep. radio waves that are being received, you know, cellphone calls that are getting made, and, and you'll sit in a room, you know, on a ship, and you'll just interpret what's coming in. And so it's very common for, you know, a linguist to be, have a bunch of flight hours because they're flying around over some country, listening on the, listening to radios and interpreting things.

• 40:05Jocko Willink?

  And so that's a very normal career path for someone with Shannon's skillset. But as she mentions, like, she wasn't really, she wasn't really looking to do that. Yeah.

• 40:19Jocko Willink?

  So at the time, so this is what now, 2005. So at the time, they're doing something, the Navy was doing something called individual augmentees. Yeah. And what it meant was there's certain skillsets that the Army needed, the Marine Corps needed, and, or special operations needed. And you could leave, well, not leave the Navy, but you could augment these, the Marine Corps, the Army, special operations through this individual augment program. Look, you might be a lawyer, you might be a cook. I mean, we literally had individual augmentees that were cooks and radiomen and, and sometimes it would be a linguist. So it's something that people volunteered to do most of the time. Some people did get fallen told to do it. But she ends up volunteering

• 41:03Jocko Willink?

  for this individual augment and getting assigned to Baghdad. And she's going to go to Baghdad and work with, there was a, there was a joint special operations element there that was made up of SEALs and, and special forces guys, working with something called the ICTF, which was the Iraqi Counter-Terror Force. And these were, the ICTF was, they were, they were as good as the Iraqis. Well, they were some of the best Iraqi soldiers that there were. They'd been, they'd been well-trained. They were well-equipped. Like, they had all of our weapons.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:39Jocko Willink?

  They had all of our gear. They had our night vision. They had all of our gear. So this was a, a very capable partner force. Did you ever do ICTF time?

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Oh, it was with the ISOF, so the commandos. They were like the Rangers to the ICTFs, like Delta or Tier One. So, yeah, worked, worked with those guys quite a bit. It's interesting because the ICTF and the ISOF itself, I would say are probably SOF's like best enduring legacy in Iraq, because when ISIS came and the vast majority of the Iraqi security forces that we spent trillions training, threw their guns in the dirt and surrendered ISIS. ISOF didn't. They refused to. Like, their commander who we trained, he, he passed away a couple of years ago, but General Fadl, he held those guys and they got abandoned by the Iraqi military and they fought like hell in, in Anbar to hold those provinces and then to recapture them eventually. So they actually stayed, held their ground and fought and did what they were trained to do. So something we can be proud of.

• 42:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt. The, I know the Mosul guys, the, the Iraqi special operations groups that went up into Mosul, they took massive casualties, massive casualties. And you compare that to, I was in Ramadi in 2006 and There was a whole battalion of Iraqi soldiers that just left. Yeah. You know, their commander got IED and they all just left. Yeah. Like, yeah, we're not doing this. Yep. And that happened with companies on a regular basis. I mean, there was companies that got overrun and they, you know, they'd lose five, six, seven, eight, 10 guys. And then all of them would just leave. So, yeah, there wasn't, it didn't paint the best picture for the future.

• 43:11Jocko Willink?

  But like you said, that enduring relationship and the, the amount of effort that went into training the ICTF and the commandos obviously left a mark because for those guys to do what they did. And I'm, I only know about Mosul. Oh, I know the most about Mosul. I know they went into Ramadi as well. Yeah. Cause and Ramadi was, and I saw pictures after they got ISIS out of Ramadi. It was just completely destroyed.

• 43:38Jocko Willink?

  But my point is, and your point is that the Iraqis, the Iraqi Special Operations Group actually was well-trained and was committed and lasted from this time. Now we're in 2006, 2007, all the way up till Yeah. 2016, 17, 18, and, and they fought hard and, and they were able to achieve their missions there.

• 44:01Jocko Willink?

  So Shannon ends up, she's now with this, with the SEALs and the SF in Baghdad. That was actually a very cool kind of joint mission. Yeah. And I, I was supposed to go there in 2006. We, I was going to take my, I was in a tasking SEAL Team Three and we were going to go to Baghdad. And so I did my advon was to Baghdad and went out with those guys and, you know, got to know them a little bit and got the turnover. And then when I went home, it changed. Yeah. You know, things changed around and we ended up going to Ramadi. But, so I got to at least see them, spend a few, like probably there for, I don't know, five, six days, seeing how they're operating. And you could see it was, like I said, very well-equipped.

• 44:42Jocko Willink?

  And the SEALs and the Green Berets were kind of doing port and starboard like Yeah. that, you know, you got them tonight, we got them tomorrow night. And they were just kind of going back and forth, at least that's what I remember. And

• 44:54Jocko Willink?

  Doing a lot of targeted raids.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:57Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's what was happening. Um, so now I think this is, what is this, 2007?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  2007.

• 45:04Jocko Willink?

  That's where you were in 2007.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  So 07, I'm in Baghdad as well. So we had done, but I, that was my fourth deployment. Um, so I was back and actually in Baghdad and I was working with the Iraqi special operations intel guys. So we had guys that we trained up to go out there and do recons for us. We'd go out every now and again, low profile with them, either to snatch guys or just to do the advanced recon to make sure our guys weren't going to get IED on the way out there. But their, their biggest role in the fight for us was the human intelligence. So we had a bunch of them that we had trained up uh, to run sources. Um, so that was specifically what I was doing over there was just working with the ISAF Iraqi guys.

• 45:41Jocko Willink?

  And you and I were both in Iraq at the same time too, in 03. I got there in like fall of 03 and left in spring of 04 and you were there that whole time.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  We were. Yeah. Yeah. I think you guys took it because we were doing the unilateral direct action, us and, us and the Grom, the Polos were there too. And then we went to go train up the, the initial Iraqi special forces guys in the middle of Baghdad. Um, and then, yeah, you guys stayed there and kept kicking in doors. Yeah.

• 46:04Jocko Willink?

  And then you, so you went to Baghdad, downtown Baghdad, you were in the green zone?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  So this trip I was 06, 07, and then the next trip, 08, I was in the green zone. Uh, before that, when we were training the commandos, we were up at FOB Justice in Khatamiya.

• 46:18Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:19Jocko Willink?

  Um, yeah, that's pretty, I, you know, I forget what we were talking about before we pressed record, but one thing that made me a little suspect of everything in the world was there was this road that went around that, uh, Biap. And it had these big giant potholes in it.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:37Jocko Willink?

  And it sucked to drive on, you know, and then they filled in all the potholes and then put tank treads across as speed bumps so you couldn't drive real fast.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:48Jocko Willink?

  And I said to myself, well, this is a, this is almost like a catch 22 type scenario. You've got the military doing things where you say, this makes no sense whatsoever.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  And then after a while, there's MPs out there giving out speeding tickets and yeah.

• 47:02Jocko Willink?

  It was, that was, that was a cool thing about being over there that early in, in 2003, because it was still.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:09Jocko Willink?

  You know, everyone uses the term Wild West. It was pretty Wild West in 2003.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, we were kind of like pirates then. I mean, it was, it was pretty wild then. There wasn't a lot of rules. Yeah, as the years drug on and we were there for way too long. That's been like the garrison mentality broke out, unfortunately.

• 47:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was my first indication that, oh,

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:27Jocko Willink?

  I can see where this might be going was when they they filled in the potholes and then put so a tank tread Echo Charles is just basically like a big thick piece of tank tread. But it it's a speed bump. It's a ready made speed bump. And so they filled in the potholes, put these things out there. And I'm like, oh, I can see where this is going. And then, yes, I do remember some of my guys coming back like we got pulled over.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  We got a speedy ticket. What do I do with this? What does this even mean?

• 47:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so now fast forward from 2004, 2005, when or 2003, 2004, when you and I were there together. Now we're going 2007 and Shannon is with this group in Baghdad and will go here. She took every opportunity to talk to Iraqi commandos in their native tongue. She could walk up to any of them confidently converse with such ease that it actually threw many of the Iraqi commandos off. They became enamored with her because it was so rare to see a beautiful white American woman and even more rare to hear them speak perfect Iraqi dialect. Her excellence was obvious to anyone who's watching. She was the only one who could do this because the ICTF was completely mixed unit, which created a unique language environment. There were Shia and Sunni operators working side by side with Kurdish and Christians,

• 48:37Jocko Willink?

  resulting in a mix of dialects and accents being used in any given conversation. The Green Berets and SEALs were beside themselves the first few times they witnessed Shannon at work as they are typically the ones trained and responsible for rapport building through learning of a language. But language proficiency had taken a backseat for many in SOF as the war in Iraq escalated. And SEALs have no like focus on language whatsoever.

• 49:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's very interesting that you got all the, you know, we don't think about that, but there's all these different dialects, just like, you know, in America, we got someone from Long Island and you got someone from like deep Alabama.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:17Jocko Willink?

  And you've got some girl from the valley out here. They're almost mutually unintelligible languages.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  They can be, yeah.

• 49:25Jocko Willink?

  And it's the same thing that happens in Iraq. I know that one thing that we loved about our Iraqi soldiers and our interpreters was we'd go into a building in Ramadi and they'd talk for. Two minutes with people, you're like, this guy's not from here.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:37Jocko Willink?

  And it'd be the equivalent of, you know, you're walking in New York and somebody breaks out some deep Alabama accent. You're like, hold on a second. One of these people is not like the other. And so they would just sort that out.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:47Jocko Willink?

  So fast. And it sounds like Shannon was able to do that.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, she, she had a thing for the dialects too, because modern standard Arabic is so, it's universal because of the Quran, but it's not commonly spoken in places like Saudi Arabia. They, they still speak pretty traditional, uh, modern standard Arabic. But Iraq and the Gulf, they speak completely different. It's actually very, very different. It's very frustrating if you spend any time studying modern standard than to go to a place like Iraq and you're like, wait a second, you guys don't actually speak this Arabic. But she loved it. Uh, and so she just grasped onto it really, really quick. And that was like a huge rapport builder for her, was just being able to speak like a native. So there was a bunch of Iraqis that I met later on who, who insisted that Shannon had either an Iraqi father or mother. They're, they're like, yeah, we get it. She's redheaded. But there's some redheaded Iraqis out there too. And so they were like, what's the deal?

• 50:33Speaker 01

  You know, where's the Iraqi in her, in her blood? But it was just her passion for languages.

• 50:38Jocko Willink?

  Would, even when you knew her, would she like listen to recordings and be like, practicing on her own?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. She was a true lover and student of, of Arabic especially. So she would, we listened, we listened to a crazy amount of Arabic music, like Arabic hip hop, like, and then when she, because they get tested on listening, reading, and then also speaking. And so to get good at reading, this is a, this is a Shannon trick. She would watch Bollywood movies with Arabic subtitles. So there's like this Bollywood stuff going on with the crazy Hindi music. But then the Arabic subtitles, and I'm like, what are you doing? Like what beautiful mind nonsense is this? And she's like, no, that's how you get to know the, because you have to read the subtitles. You, you pick a language that you don't speak. So then you have to read the one language that you do speak.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  And I was like, okay, that's, that's not how most humans learn things, but okay, whatever, whatever works. But yeah, she would immerse our, you know, entire house and everything in, in Arabic.

• 51:33Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever pick up any Arabic from it?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  So I actually, I never went to Afghanistan. I went to Iraq on repeat. I couldn't buy an Afghan trip. So I went to Iraq, Yemen. So I eventually just picked up Arabic and then, because we have to test every year on language, I just switched over my language to Arabic. So I did like a three-month course and like, kind of figured that was, I was good enough. But we don't have to pass the, uh, the DLPT. We don't have to pass the listening and the, and the, uh, reading. We can just get by with an oral interview. So I could kind of BS in Arabic. But I was nothing like her. I mean, as I was studying Arabic, I was, I, I'd asked her, I'm like, hey, so what's your, what's your secret? And she's like, okay, so you listen to the word and then you imitate it and you don't forget it. I was like, thanks. That, that does not help me whatsoever. I'm gonna go back to writing it down, you know, a hundred times. I don't forget it.

• 52:20Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, fast forward a little bit in the book. Although her deployment began behind a desk as an analyst, the Navy SEAL Lieutenant Commander that she reported to recognized that she was capable of more and wanted her to start going out on target. It may seem like people in the military, especially those deployed to a war zone, would just intuitively know how to be ready for a real world combat mission, but that's rarely the case. They need to be shown how to arrange ammunition pouches on their plate carriers, where the bleeder kit or medical pouch goes. So anyone responding to an injury knows where to find it. And even the not to use the tie-down sensitive items, items like lasers and optics and a signed rifle. Shannon was no exception, but had not received any formal special operations combat training at that point. Roe, and it's another guy that you mentioned, is mentioned in the book. Roe had already gone on some 60

• 53:05Jocko Willink?

  or 70 combat missions, which made him the perfect mentor. The task force operational tempo was so high that during that deployment, it was not uncommon to go on a mission, then immediately be sent on a follow-on mission, then another follow-on mission. Under Roe's tutelage, Shannon learned to not only set up her kit properly, but also to narrow down the timeframe she needed to get ready when alerted for a time-sensitive target. Shannon and Roe were tied at the hip and often alternated as the intel asset on combat missions. Sometimes Roe would go out on missions resulting from information Shannon analyzed, and other times Shannon would go out based on Roe's analysis. It became so obvious, it became obvious to everyone around her that she was never going back to Fort Gordon. The trajectory of her career had been permanently altered. She had been baptized into the world of special operations.

• 53:59Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, the word that Shannon had a knack for finding bad guys spread fast and halfway through her deployment, it was not uncommon for other operators to ask, "Hey, can you do that for us? What's your training? Can you work with these guys? Can you talk to the Iraqis for us? Can we bring you out on target to deal with the females?" She was eventually pulled to another side of special operations world in Iraq at that time. It's not clear who found her or some, or how high up they had to be to have enough power to pull Shannon from her position. Like most of Shannon's career, much of her work with this group was, was and is classified and likely won't see the light of day for at least another decade. The citation for the Joint Service Commendation Medal she

• 54:40Jocko Willink?

  received for that deployment is the only unclassified documentation of her contributions. It describes how her efforts led, quote, "directly to the capture of hundreds of enemy insurgents and severely degraded enemy combat capability."

• 54:57Jocko Willink?

  So, she got noticed, you know, and that's one thing that's cool about war.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:05Jocko Willink?

  Is that you, you do, when it gets, when, when, when it gets tough enough and when it's intense enough, all of a sudden, people just want to know what's going to work. You know, people ask me about the rivalry between like different units and between the Army and the Marine Corps. In Ramadi, it's like, no rivalry. You know, it's like, hey, will you help us? Yes, we will. We'll help you. That's kind of how it's going down.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Who can do the job?

• 55:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And, and she got, you know, noticed for doing her job well, pulled to another, another unit doing more work and, you know, ends up, as she, as, as you write in the book, you know, baptized in special operations and it can be very difficult to go back to, well, depending on your attitude. There's some people that would look what she was doing and say, "Oh, get me out of here."

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:53Jocko Willink?

  She obviously liked it and.

• 55:57Jocko Willink?

  Uh, carried on with it. Now, this is 2007 and we already talked about, so you're, you're in Baghdad as well.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  I am, yeah.

• 56:07Jocko Willink?

  You're working and, and what, so you're training commandos?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  So, working with our intel guys. So, we're, we're trying to run down targets for the ICTF to go out after. But specifically, we, we had a pretty unique job. This is right when the EFP thing is kicking off. So, we actually sliced off a handful of the Iraqi special operations recon guys who had access to the Shia side. To really start tracking down those networks that were bringing over the EFPs from Iran. So, we were doing a lot of pretty high level targets, but we had to do a lot of intel work to, to get to that level. So, that was like my single minded focus for that trip was the, the EFPs. But then we also had another group of Sunni Iraqis who were working heavily on the foreign fighter flow. That was a big thing too. So, we were working that mission. I actually briefly met Shannon.

• 56:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Then for like 10 minutes.

• 56:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the EFPs explosively formed projectile. This is now 2007. What the, what they realized is you can, you can make a shape charge, a flying shape charge, basically. That's going to go and it rips through pretty much any armor. And it, they're very devastating against vehicles and, and just a horror, it's a horror show. And so, and the Iranians were kind of bringing that.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:21Jocko Willink?

  In through the Shia and they were using it devi- in a devastating manner. So, that's what you guys were focused on. And then like you said, you also had the foreign fighters coming in on the Sunni side.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, we had guys trying to look, cause the, the day to day battle rhythm of just trying to basically take bad guys off the battlefield that weren't going to kill us there, that was a full time job. But we wanted to actually have people that were starting to look exterior, like, hey, we've got the Iranians playing here. We've got the foreign fighter flow. Let's start taking a bigger picture. Can we interdict these things before they hit the major urban centers? So, that was kind of our, our charter at the time. So, I had kind of made that jump from being a regular team guy to like, hey, I want to be more on the ops intel side. Cause I figured after our like 03 and 04 deployment, I figured like, hey, that the problem here in Iraq isn't like, can we go kill the bad guys? Like, if we find the bad guys, we kill them. I mean, whether it's Green Berets, SEALs, Delta Force, or the Kentucky National Guard. If we know where they are, they're going to die. Like, that's not the issue.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  The issue is trying to figure out like what's causing the insurgency, you know, who's supporting the insurgency? And like where the high value bad dudes actually are. So, that was, that kind of became my. My little lane I carved out in special operations and ultimately how I ended up meeting Shannon.

• 58:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so you're doing that very job. You're kind of putting together a mission, consolidating info and you're, you're walking around trying to get this stuff sorted out. And it says this in the book, as Joe rounded a corner, he heard a woman's voice discussing locations for Abu Abbas, the leader of a Shia terrorist cell he was trying to hunt, to run down. His eyes quickly honed in on the woman the voice belonged to. She was a gorgeous, slender, young redhead, wearing faded New York Yankees ball, baseball hat, with piercing blue eyes and a welcoming face. Almost instantly, nothing else mattered. Wow, Joe thought. He guessed the Yankees ball cap was part of an effort to play down her natural beauty, but it wasn't working. Her reddish blonde hair and ponytail protruding

• 59:10Jocko Willink?

  from the back of her ball cap was somehow both elegant and casual. She wore a light red and white flannel button down shirt with her sleeves pushed up and a pair of blue jeans with leather work boots. The Sig Sauer P226 9mm pistol in a black Kydex holster was on her right hip, contrasted her beauty. It snapped Joe out of his reverie and reminded him where they were and how serious this business was. She stood to the map of Baghdad behind her while her computer monitor displayed Arabic text and map coordinates, addressing a few analysts from Joe's unit. He changed head, he exchanged head nods with them and then stood to the side to listen to what the beauty in the Yankees cap had to say. Based on the pattern of life, we assess he still lives in this neighborhood, in this

• 59:55Jocko Willink?

  area, she said, pointing at a map of Baghdad. She glanced up. She made eye contact with Joe and held it. His heart skipped a beat as she smiled at him like they were old friends. Joe caught himself staring into her eyes for a little too long, grinning as if he was relieved to see her. Sure, there was a spark of instant attraction, but there was also something new and profound. Her gaze gave him a feeling of instant peace. She held eye contact with him for a moment longer before turning her head back to the group of analysts. Her face, all business again.

• 1:00:23Jocko Willink?

  So there you go.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Yep, it's the first time I meet.

• 1:00:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a, I imagine from your perspective at that point in time, seeing a beautiful red haired woman with a freaking 226 on her belt, yeah, you're ready to rock and roll.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:40Jocko Willink?

  Will you marry me?

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  I should have asked the question because it took me a while to, I didn't see her again after that day for quite a while, but yeah, that was a, yeah, it was an interesting way, way to meet your wife for sure.

• 1:00:53Jocko Willink?

  When you're out on that deployment, so now it's 2007, um, what, what was the atmosphere of the war that you're, that you're thinking during that time?

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Uh, chaos and frustration, I think. I mean, cause I had been over, that was my, my fourth trip. We had been there for, you know, a minute. We kicked this thing off in 03. We had already caught Saddam a long time ago. We killed Zarqawi and things were not slowing down whatsoever. I mean, there was Americans that were coming back in body bags and mangled pretty much every day. I mean, this is, this is right as the surge is kicking off and guys are fighting block by block every day. So I, I felt like we were just trying to stop the bleeding at that point. I mean, especially me as a guy who had had some time over there and watched the evolution. I felt like, hey, I actually have a responsibility here to, to try to bring some sort of order to this because I understand Iraq at this point. Uh, and I think a lot of us felt that way, like fixing Iraq almost became like a religion, I think

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  in the military at that point in time. Um, so it just seemed like we never had enough time. It always seemed like we were a day late and dollar short. Um, so just a lot of frustration. I was pretty skeptical that adding a ton of troops into the mix was going to do anything but get more guys killed. Um, but yeah, it was just a, it's a, I mean, it's hard to explain, um, nowadays because I think like the, just the frustration and the angst and the chaos of that era was just so palpable then. It's hard to replicate now. I mean, I think as things drug on in Afghanistan, people felt the same way, but, but especially with the body count being as high as it was. And when the EFPs came up, we had, we had barely just started to control some of the Sunni insurgency, but then there was the Shia insurgency and there was the EFPs. And it was like, man, now we've

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  got Iran plan in this whole thing. It was just, how do we sort this out? So it definitely seemed like a, a, there was no, not enough time in every single day to, to do everything we needed to do.

• 1:02:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I I always think back to World War II when you left for World War II.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Jocko Willink?

  You would come home when it was done.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  When it was done, right.

• 1:02:54Jocko Willink?

  And the nature of doing, you know, either it's a six month deployment. Some cases, a four month deployment, some cases, a year long deployment. But there's a, there's an end in sight and it doesn't really matter. You know, I'm going to turn it over to you and hey, man, good luck. Like I, I did what I could do and you're going to do what you can do. But there's, there's a lack of continuity and there's also a lack of, well, there's a lack of continuity for sure. But there's also, uh, I guess you, I guess you were just talking about, there's a frustration because you're going to go and you, you don't get to stick with it and what, what's going to happen in the next, okay, I'll be back in a year and a half or a year.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Jocko Willink?

  What, did anyone make any real progress? And it's like every new unit that shows up, when you show up there, it takes a little while to figure things out. And yeah, it's just, doesn't seem like the smartest way to run a war. As much as I hate to say that because it sucks to deploy for long periods of time.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:56Jocko Willink?

  That's why you need to, before you go into war, you need to decide, okay, is this really what we want to do?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. And what the end state is too. I, I think that's another big problem that we had, especially at this timeframe. It was like, what was the goal? Like we came in here because like Saddam was a bad guy and he had, we, we took out Saddam. So now are we really going to stay here until there's no more violence? And then us being here creates more violence. So it's like, this does seem like a big, big loop that we're in, you know? And then when you step back and you look like, well, there were people that were benefiting from this. That's where a lot of my frustration comes from nowadays. But at the time, it was just like, man, we were beating our head against the walls and we, we just couldn't figure out how to actually solve this problem.

• 1:04:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Jocko Willink?

  Shannon wraps up that deployment. Go back to Shannon here. Shannon crashed onto the special operations scene headfirst and didn't slow down once getting in. After Shannon returned from her first deployment, she made a quick stop in Germany for language training and a little snowboarding in the Austrian Alps before volunteering for the new Naval Special Warfare Direct Support Course, which would allow her to serve in combat alongside Navy SEALs. She was the first female to attend, but she wouldn't be the last. So this is, you know, we read that her first deployment, she was not, she didn't know how to put her gear together. Yeah. So she, all these people that were doing these individual augmentees that were going to come and work with SEALs, we needed something to do to get them trained up. And so that's what they started doing, this direct support course.

• 1:05:20Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, she was permanently assigned to Naval Special Warfare Support Activity 2 in Norfolk, Virginia, where she worked side by side with East Coast based Navy SEALs. The SEALs were initially hesitant, not because she was a female, but because non-Seal support in general was a new concept at the time. Yep. This is all of us were thinking that. One of my bosses laid something great out to me, which was, I was getting ready to deploy to Iraq and we were taking these EOD augments. And I said, hey, why don't we just send SEALs to EOD school? Like, then we don't have to worry about having someone else. And he said, because SEALs will be thinking about SEAL things, even when they're EOD, and EOD guys will think about EOD things. And that was so smart. Yeah.

• 1:06:04Jocko Willink?

  And I ended up having the best EOD guys. The EOD guys end up going through, they now go through your, like, your entire workup with the SEALs. So they're basically, if you're one of those EOD guys that comes to the SEAL teams, you're going to be basically qualified as a SEAL. And they did everything with us. Yeah. So, but there was definitely resistance across the board. Hey, we just want SEALs. Yep. Which probably especially sensitive in the SEAL teams, because, you know, we are so.

• 1:06:37Jocko Willink?

  We don't have the idea like in in special forces, you guys have the idea of like, oh, we're going to train up these local nationals and we're going to put our trust in these other people and we didn't do a lot of that. That's not part of our nature, you know? And that's why even the guys that the ICTF, you know, that was kind of a new mission for us. And look, we we did, look, I did it in the in the 90s. I went over to seas and trained people from the Philippines and trained people from Thailand and trained, you know, we did all that stuff, but it was not. I don't know, we just didn't view it the same way. We didn't view that as our mission.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  As your mission, right?

• 1:07:11Jocko Willink?

  Even though it completely is our mission. I mean, it's in our doctrine that that is our mission.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Jocko Willink?

  Foreign internal defense, the same thing as you guys.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:07:17Jocko Willink?

  But we don't, we don't, we, we used to not really think about it that way.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:21Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I can tell you 100% as a young SEAL and look, was I the smartest dude in the world when I was, am I the smartest dude in the world now? No. Was I, was I even dumber when I was, you know, 22 years old in a SEAL platoon and they're like, this is foreign internal defense, building relationships with the host nation. I was like, what? Tell me what door to kick in.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:07:40Jocko Willink?

  Freaking SEAL with a machine gun.

• 1:07:44Jocko Willink?

  So it's, it's no surprise that, you know, someone like Shannon showing up, everyone, there is pushback.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Jocko Willink?

  That being said, you, once you realize the skill set that you don't have as a SEAL, then you go, oh.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is 100% needed.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  That's the interesting thing. People ask me all the time, like, was there, you know, how did, did Shannon get put on one of those specialized teams that just brought women in? And I'm like, no, there was this whole period of the, the initial war on terror where technically women weren't allowed to the front lines, but there was a lot of women who found their way onto the front lines, either because of circumstance or just because they were the best person for the job. I mean, like you said before, there was no like, do you have this qualification, that qualification? Like, if you were willing to go there and you could perform, you got to slot up the team. And that was it. Maybe it wasn't codified, you know, in military doctrine, that was going to be your full-time job when you redeployed. But there was a lot of folks like Shannon who had that ability. They went and they proved themselves and they were out there operating at the highest levels.

• 1:08:40Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And. I'll tell you another one. Oh, you can't be in combat arms. Okay. So you're in logistics in the army.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Jocko Willink?

  And guess what you end up doing in logistics in the army in Iraq? Logistics convoys.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:51Jocko Willink?

  One of the most dangerous things that you can do.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Probably more dangerous than the vast majority of what we did.

• 1:08:55Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Cause I would rather go kicking the door with a bad guy behind it than go just run the, the gauntlet of rude Irish over and over again.

• 1:09:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So that, that was an interesting dynamic was these logistics. So someone comes in to be a logistics person in the army or the Marine Corps and you end up out there running convoys and same thing in, in Ramadi, I remember I was watching a casualty evacuation go. I had an element out of seals with Iraqi soldiers and one of the, two of the Iraqi soldiers got hit and there goes the casualty evacuation and the person in the turret was a woman out there in the turret of a 113. And I was like, yep, check. And she's rolling down, complete exposure, IEDs everywhere. There's active gunfights going on and like, yep, salute, go get some.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:45Jocko Willink?

  Um, so now she, she, again, she details, or you guys detail some of that training in here and what she's going through. Um, fast forward a little bit, Baghdad, Iraq, 2009. Shannon was with AJ and his platoon, a small group of Navy SEALs and Iraqi special operations assigned to a strike force, uh, in task, task force 17, charged with hunting Iranian thugs in the back alleys of a Baghdad neighborhood. It was her second deployment to Iraq. So the hot summer air that smelled like trash and human and expired humans was familiar as well as the not so gentle reminder of what their fate entailed should they fail on any given night. These raids were so regular that they took, that it would be easy to become complacent. But Shannon took her work too seriously to allow that to happen. She was tasked with

• 1:10:27Jocko Willink?

  producing some of the most valuable intelligence in the war, usually at great risk. This mission was no different, especially for Shannon. She was the lone female on the manifest with nothing but her wits and language ability to see her through the night. No other Americans had her talent with the local dialect and the Iraqi operators were impressed with the way she was able to draw information out of people on target. So what a huge capability. So you go and. A lot of times like the the females, they're not going to talk to a male.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:10:55Jocko Willink?

  Even an Iraqi soldier or an Iraqi interpreter, they're they're not going to talk to them. And sometimes Iraqi soldiers didn't want to talk to the women either.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Jocko Willink?

  And they don't see any value in it. So having someone that could speak Arabic to the women and pull them aside.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:09Jocko Willink?

  And all of a sudden, you have a whole nother story to compare to the story that you're being told.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's tough, especially in the Middle East. I mean, just women aren't going to talk to just some guy, you know? And so we really, I think for the first couple of years there, before we actually just started deploying a lot of women on the intel side, we had half the population that we got nothing from.

• 1:11:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  You know, which is crazy to think about how much of an intel fight it was. It was just like, well, half the population who's seeing everything and in general ignored. You know, once we started really tapping into a lot of the women by, you know, trending up Iraqi women or getting American women over there, then I think we finally saw like, man, these chicks are everywhere. Like, and and the men ignore them like they they're like a piece of furniture.

• 1:11:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  But they can tell you everything that's going on.

• 1:11:51Jocko Willink?

  To that point, having a female on target for a high level HVT raid was almost unheard of at the time, but she played a pivotal role by conducting on target interrogations that led to follow on targets. It's not an understatement to say that the secretive task force 17 was more effective and deadly because of her efforts and her performance directly led to initiatives that resulted in a broader implementation of females in SOF for years to come. Although their deployment was off to a busy start with frequent night raids, the task force was stood down for 97 consecutive days after a Ranger made a controversial kill on target. After waiting for over half their deployment to start working again, it became clear that the Rangers were on indefinite hold. AJ's platoon knew a change was needed. So that's one of those things.

• 1:12:37Jocko Willink?

  You go out on target and, you know, I don't know the particular situation here, but a controversial kill.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Jocko Willink?

  Maybe the person was unarmed, maybe, you know, who knows? But something like that, you kill an unarmed civilian or a controversial situation, they get stood down for 97 days.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Jocko Willink?

  Like, that's what happens. And they, I thought it was interesting that they put that in there because now, you know, everybody knows that on the on a team. You're like, hey, if something bad happens, we're not working anymore.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially that phase of the war.

• 1:13:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Heavily adjudicated that that phase of the war was.

• 1:13:10Jocko Willink?

  Heavily adjudicated and it's like, well, so what are we going to do? We got to be careful about what we're doing.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Jocko Willink?

  So that's what they have to do. That's what they have to contend with. They worked through it. Fast forward a little bit. In my opinion, you are the gold standard for females entering special operations. The gold standard, A.J. told her. Indeed, on only her second combat deployment, Shannon was responsible for and credited with, quote, "executing human intelligence operations in a very complex environment in support of a joint task force," and, quote, "expertly led an indigenous network, producing many information intelligence reports which were of national significance." According to her post-deployment awards. Shannon returned home from Iraq. So just real quick on that. I mean,

• 1:13:58Jocko Willink?

  I kind of mentioned this early on. What it takes to put an X on a map to get an assault force to go in there is so complicated, takes so much work effort, so many meetings and reports. And the way it appears in the movies, you know, like, oh, bad guy's gonna be here tomorrow night. Oh, great, cool. Let's go hit that target. That's just not, not what happens. It takes, it takes so much effort to make these things happen. I mean, I, uh, one of my lieutenants was like, we had to beat our heads against the wall to get an operation to happen. You have to, like, you have to be so determined.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Jocko Willink?

  If you don't have determination, you're not gonna execute a single mission. Like, if you don't have a few people on the intel side that are completely determined to make things happen, you're not gonna execute anything.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's really the ultimate form of hunting. Like, you're hunting humans, and it's, it's hard. I mean, especially when you have a complex network of insurgents that know what they're doing, and they've got a couple of years under their belt, and they're constantly switching up their tactics. And that's another way that Shannon was able to become value-added for the task force, because not only did she speak the language, she was a certified signals intelligence collector, so she could do all the SIGINT stuff. She could do the analysis that went with that, which is almost in itself. That's three different jobs. And then she got human qualified, so she could actually go out and run sources on her own. So she was kind of a one-stop shop. So even just as, like, I did human collection, but I would have to double-check stuff from our SIGINT analysts and all this. She could do all of it all on her own. I had to take a Terp with me. Like, she could literally do all of it. So her flash to bang on intel, I mean, that's just like, you're trying to get

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  the customer what they want. She could get it in a shorter time. And so she made herself very valuable that way. And she was obsessed. I mean, that was her, that was her thing.

• 1:15:43Jocko Willink?

  No, that's that's literally amazing. So the three things that you just mentioned, you have signal intelligence. You've got some type of electronic information coming in through various capabilities. And then you have the language itself.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Jocko Willink?

  And then you have the human side of things. And those three things are normally three different people, three different departments. It's very hard to get. But here you have one person, Shannon, that can do all those things.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding. Um, back to the book here. Shannon returned home from Iraq at the end of 2009, back to a role at support activity two. More women were being assigned to the teams at this point, and Shannon was not only expected to assume more leadership responsibilities as someone who had been there, done that, but also to be a mentor as it pertain to women serving in SOF. Brittany Burris was one of the women who arrived at the unit while Shannon was deployed. The first time they met was in a locker room on base. At best, it was a lukewarm exchange. Her first impression of Shannon was that she didn't like her and didn't want to mess with her. But after they talked a few times, Brittany realized their personalities were very similar. Shannon and Brittany became quick friends over the course of the next year before their next deployment, leaning on each other as one of the few females in the unit.

• 1:16:53Jocko Willink?

  But while they were training and preparing for the next trip overseas, major events were happening that would change the course of our war in Iraq.

• 1:17:03Jocko Willink?

  So now we get to Iraq 2011. Where are you in 2011?

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  So I'm right back in Iraq.

• 1:17:10Jocko Willink?

  You're back there again.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were gluttons for punishment in fifth group. So yeah, that was my, I was there uh, from the like late spring up until we withdrew, right? Thanksgiving 11.

• 1:17:20Jocko Willink?

  Fifth group's assigned AO is the Middle East.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Center, center of the Middle East.

• 1:17:24Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take for them to invite someone else in to support them?

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  So us and 10th group, so 10th is supposed to have like Europe, but they actually did a lot with the Kurds up in northern Iraq and Turkey, because that was kind of their AO as well. So us and 10th were switching out back and forth. Seventh and third got in the mix a little bit, like third groups, uh, in extremist force, their direct action guys. They came and did quite a bit with the, uh, the ICTF throughout the war. But really, at any given time of the Iraq war proper, it was either fifth group or 10th group that was running the show.

• 1:17:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, I I worked for there. There was fifth group the first time I was there and then it was 10th group. In 2006, at least in Al Anbar province. That's who was who was running the show. But yeah, I, you know, the the SEAL teams used to be geographically assigned. I guess broadly speaking, they are, but they used to be more specifically. Like SEAL Team One was Southeast Asia and SEAL Team Three was Southwest Asia and SEAL Team Five was like North Asia. And SEAL Team Two was Europe and SEAL Team Four was South America. So it was more specific than it is now. And if we would have kept it that way, it would have been just SEAL Team Three, you know, the whole time.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Good deal for them.

• 1:18:32Jocko Willink?

  Good deal for everyone else doing whatever they're doing in whatever other part of the world. But obviously, once the war kicked off, it's like, oh, yeah.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's gonna take everybody.

• 1:18:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So now we're in Iraq, 2011. What was your job at this time? Were you just back over there with?

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Back over there on team. I had actually just gone warrant to extend my team time.

• 1:18:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so I was over there. As a warrant, we were trying to wrap up the whole mess as we got the as the sofa fell apart and we realized we're gonna have to withdraw. So I was actually doing advisory work with two of the different Iraqi intel services. And so we were actually establishing a lot of our long term intel relationships at the time. But I was actually right back in RPC as we shut that thing down. I actually ended up getting condemned. It's like a structural issue, like it's gonna kind of like implode on itself eventually. But yeah, we were living based out of there and just trying to wind things down. So.

• 1:19:20Jocko Willink?

  RPC.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:22Jocko Willink?

  What did that stand for?

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  Radwania Palace Complex.

• 1:19:25Jocko Willink?

  That's what it was.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:27Jocko Willink?

  It was really easy to find on a map because it had that spiral.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Big old spiral. Yeah, yeah. Kuse's like zoo had been there. So like in oh, three, there was all the rumors of like, there's still tigers out here. I think there were, but yeah.

• 1:19:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was disturbing going in those like torture chambers and stuff like this.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  Super creepy.

• 1:19:45Jocko Willink?

  But now it's 2011. Going back to the book, we have a high confidence grid verified by both Siggen and Human. Shannon delivered findings to her peers, a platoon of Navy SEALs who were already jocked up and ready to roll prior to the concept of Operations or Con Ops Planning Briefing. Shannon was deployed to Iraq for a third time in 2011 during a period of transition with US forces drawing down and leaving the country in the hands of American military contractors and Iraqi government while the Islamic State or ISIS gained momentum. As an intelligence professional, Shannon was skeptical of the path the US had chosen in Iraq and was more, and it was more than news on the television to her. She had friends across the country who would be impacted, many of them negatively. But the war, but

• 1:20:28Jocko Willink?

  with the war in Iraq ending, where else could Shannon go to contribute to the fight against terrorism that, that now defined her in so many ways or were her fighting days over? So you're there at this time, is the, is everyone just thinking, bro, why are we pulling like this is, is gonna be, gonna completely fall apart?

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  Pretty much. I mean, it was a mixed bag. There's a lot of people were like, well, it kinda ran its course. Like, let's, let's just pull stakes and go. And I could understand that mentality. But at the same time, I remember sitting in a meeting at the embassy with the State Department and the CIA, all the players are there. And at the end of it, I just asked one of the CIA analysts and one of the state analysts, I said, hey, so what's the actual goal here? Now that we've left, what's the US's long-term goal here? And they said, well, we want to make sure that Al Qaeda in Iraq never resurfaces and this doesn't become a hotbed for terror. And I was like, man, do you guys realize we handed this entire government over to the Iranians who have been using all the power that we gave them for the last couple of years to systematically run down and kill and torture and just really oppress

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  the Sunnis? And you've got the Sunnis pressed between basically Baghdad and Damascus in this pressure cooker. And now we're gonna leave. It's like, I mean, I didn't, none of us really predicted exactly how ISIS was gonna come back, but we all could see the direction that it was heading. Cause people were like, oh, the surge worked, therefore there'll never be another Al Qaeda again. We killed all those Abu, what's his names, guys? Like, they'll never pop back up. And I'm like, well, these people have no other means of recourse. Like, I don't, you know, condone the fact they've chosen radical Islam, but I kinda understand it, especially since we've handed this entire government over to the Iranians. But then the negotiations fell apart for the sofa and it was just sort of like, everybody kinda got tired. And it was like, well, I guess we'll just leave. And we just left and Sharon and I, we were back right, right back there a couple of years later.

• 1:22:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, that, the, the Shia oppression of the Sunnis, I mean, what are the Sunnis gonna do? They're looking around and here comes Al Qaeda and ISIS. It's like, oh, you're gonna help us get rid of these guys or at least punish them for the way they've treated us? We're, we're in.

• 1:22:40Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here, fast forward a little bit. For Shannon, it would be a good last deployment to the country which she had spent so much of her adult life, living and fighting. It was the best troop she was ever a part of. She was recognized for her, quote, "understanding of insurgent networks," coupled with her impressive leadership. She deftly managed several networks and extensive sub-networks, producing numerous high-level intelligence reports, providing critical information to special operations commanders targeting militia groups. Her dedication resulted in several operations that captured high-value individuals and disrupted well-known insurgent networks.

• 1:23:14Jocko Willink?

  This wouldn't be her last adventure, though. She recently volunteered for an assessment and selection course, which she would attend later that year. If she was successful, she would join the ranks of an organization that was regarded as the pinnacle of clandestine intelligence operations in the special operations community. The selection would not be easy. There are no published standards and no real way to prepare for it. Both males and females can attend, and there's only one standard, the standard, to pass and be selected for further training. Shannon had seen SEALs try out and come back empty-handed. This was a no-joke program, but she was confident that she could, would crush whatever they threw at her. Shannon was also recognized as the Department of Defense's Linguist of the Year. It was

• 1:23:56Jocko Willink?

  a prestigious honor and a meaningful, meaningful validation of her skill, proof that she was playing at a different level than most others in the intelligence community. Yeah, that's, to be the Defense Department's Linguist of the Year, that is some very serious recognition.

• 1:24:14Jocko Willink?

  And she realized that there was another, another group, another rung up the ladder. I think she, she, or you guys referred to it in the book, but it's a, it's an organization that combines special operations and intelligence gathering at a very high level. And she realizes, oh, I could go and volunteer for that and carry on this trajectory that she obviously liked.

• 1:24:41Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here. Afghanistan 2012. Shannon deployed once more with Naval Special Warfare in 2012 for her first trip to Afghanistan. She was assigned to NSW Special Reconnaissance Team Two and tasked with supporting an East Coast SEAL platoon at a village stability operations site. VSOs were the Afghan application of counterinsurgency doctrine. SOF troops, supported by conventional forces, embedded with Afghan tribal elements and Afghan security forces at the village level in an effort to deny the Taliban the ability to exploit locals. Much like the Iraqi coin surge in coins counterinsurgency. These operations brought the US into daily close contact with the local populace.

• 1:25:26Jocko Willink?

  The VSO portion of the Afghan coin strategy sent US SOF out to live in small village outposts, living side by side with Afghans and training the village's security forces at the local level. The VSO program, in conjunction with the Afghan surge, brought the subject of women in combat, in particular, women in special operations, to public eye. Afghan culture segregated women from men in a more drastic way than US forces had experienced in Iraq. It was culturally taboo for male service members fighting in Afghanistan to interact with local women, so the need for women in combat roles shifted from luxury to necessity. But Shannon's mission was not just interacting with local Afghan females. She had mastered the ability to blend her human and sigint knowledge to become a more

• 1:26:09Jocko Willink?

  virtual, one-stop-shop for painting an X on the enemy. That was a huge advantage for Shannon. With all her experience, she was assigned to a VSO site in Zabul and tasked with collecting actionable human and accompanying SEALs on operations. The team guys understood how unique her skillset was. They needed her to do what she did best: hunt the enemy. So she just rolls out on another deployment.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  She did, yeah. She got picked up for, she passed selection for the unit, but then that was right when the SEAL team that she was assigned to got orders to go to Afghanistan. And so she could have said, "No, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna carry on my career." But she was like, "Well, if they're going to combat, I'm not gonna sit it out and go."

• 1:26:50Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:26:54Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit here, so she's in Afghanistan on this deployment. Shannon worked closely with Commander Job Price, a 42-year-old Navy SEAL from Pennsylvania and respected leader of SEAL Team Four. He'd been dealing with a lot on that deployment. Their task force had just lost 32-year-old Petty Officer First Class Kevin Ebert on a few weeks prior on November 24th. He was a Navy SEAL corpsman assigned to SEAL Team Four and was killed in action on his second combat deployment during a firefight. At the time of his death, he was preparing to leave the Navy and pursue his medical degree and become a physician. Shortly after his death, the Taliban killed, shortly after his death, the Taliban killed a young girl. She was around the same age as Price's daughter. Many in the task force felt like they were essentially losing the war at that point,

• 1:27:38Jocko Willink?

  but continued to work around the clock to the point of exhaustion. It was all they could do to feel like they were making a difference. Shannon and most of her SOF and conventional counterparts were multiple deployments into the seemingly endless, certainly doomed war on terror that was over a decade old with no end in sight. The loss of teammates and the daily grinding stress of being in danger while cycling through never-ending deployments was one more thing for everyone to deal with, to suffer in silence as the mantra goes. On December 22nd, 2012, all outside communication was suddenly shut down. No one knew why their comms had been cut, but typically that only happened when a family back home needed to be notified of a death.

• 1:28:22Jocko Willink?

  Commander Price was found in his room with a pool of blood on the floor, still holding his assigned pistol. A picture of his daughter was missing from his desk. His death came as a shock to everyone. So this was, um, just a absolutely terrible situation. And, uh, Job Price was in my sister platoon when I was at SEAL Team Two. Oh, really? Um, and this seemed really, this was, this was crazy to hear about, um, terrible to hear about, cause he was just like, a squared away guy. It was, he, he'd gone to Ranger School as a SEAL. Oh, really? So he had a lot of, he had a lot of Ranger-ous tendencies.

• 1:29:06Jocko Willink?

  You know, we call him Ranger Price and stuff like that, uh, but... You know, just, this was a shockwaves, right, through the community to have the commanding officer on deployment of a SEAL team.

• 1:29:22Jocko Willink?

  This was just shocking and

• 1:29:26Jocko Willink?

  in here, Shannon called Brittany, which is one of her friends. They talk about it and it says Commander's price death was the final straw on what they saw as a series of unaddressed issues. They constantly dealt with the challenges of being women, a women in NSW. Out of the approximately 400 SEALs and enablers assigned to their team, there were only seven women. And Shannon and Brittany were two of them. Brittany had already been sexually harassed and assaulted during that deployment and Shannon had faced her share of harassment too. It wasn't all bad, but they were often treated very poorly. Shannon carried that weight with her. They considered themselves tough role models. And Shannon was fierce in that regard. "We need to make a pact to help people like us," Shannon said. "I want to help people like us who are in this community, but feel like they need to be tough because they're scared

• 1:30:11Jocko Willink?

  of losing their security clearance and scared of retribution. Scared of people thinking differently of you, thinking that you're weak. So you bury those feelings, then people commit suicide. Why? Because we're too scared to tell people."

• 1:30:24Jocko Willink?

  They cried together and swore to help.

• 1:30:30Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, the reason, you know, that that comes into play is because in the future, she's gonna like have this opportunity to become a psychologist where she thought she could truly help out in that regard.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, she saw the mental health crisis that I think gets talked about a lot now. But she saw it from this incident. She saw it really, I think, before it was commonly being discussed. She saw what was bubbling up under the surface. I mean, something that she always talked to me about was like how isolating it can be to be in leadership. And that's, you know, when she stood back and really thought of like, why would our commander kill himself? And, you know, a lot of people were like, well, why did this even happen? This guy was so strong. You know, he was such a great leader. How could this happen? And she said, hey, when I stood back and I thought about it, it was like, because who's the commander gonna talk to? He's the boss, like he's not gonna go complain to what the XO, to the senior enlisted guys. He doesn't have that. He can't even, you know, reach out and touch his group of peers.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  So he was completely isolated dealing with all of that on his own. And then she saw it, you know, a lot of her other counterparts, a lot of the intel enablers who like the last thing they wanted to do was look weak in front of the guys. And then, you know, she had been around for a while too. She's like, you know, SEALs, Green Berets, right? Like, nobody's immune to this stuff, but nobody's asking for help because of the way our culture is.

• 1:31:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and different people are different and some people can just do 10, 12 combat deployments and they're, they're okay. And some people do two and it really messes them up.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Jocko Willink?

  And so you've got everyone, if some people do one and, and it messes them up. Some people are one bad situation and it messes them up. Some people go through bad situation after bad situation, lose a bunch of friends and they're okay. But you have this whole spectrum and you can't, you can't just kind of cookie cutter.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Jocko Willink?

  Hey, okay, after three deployments, you need this much downtime. It doesn't work like that.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Jocko Willink?

  You know?

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's no formula for it.

• 1:32:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  If you've seen X, you get Y.

• 1:32:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  It's a very human thing.

• 1:32:22Jocko Willink?

  It's a very human and it varies so much. And that's probably one of the huge things that causes it to be such a problem. And people, and absolutely like, oh, going and telling everyone, hey, I need a break, like in the SEAL platoon. No, no, it's not, it's not happening. It's not happening. Hey, I need a break right now. Like, this is not happening. And guys won't say it. And if they do need a break, especially because if you're one of those guys that's messed up after two deployments and you're looking at your buddy who's done six and, and he's still going strong.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  You're definitely not gonna say anything.

• 1:32:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What are you gonna do? Hey, I'm, I'm burnt out. I'm tired. It's like, no, you're not gonna say anything and you're just gonna bury it. And clearly, and I, you know, after, I was, I was with, with Job in like 1998 to 2000. So, I mean, I, I, you know, you lose track of his career. I don't even know what his career looked like, but I can tell you what it looked like. I don't know exactly what it was, but I'll tell you what it was. It was deployment, deployment, deployment, deployment, deployment, deployment, deployment.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Jocko Willink?

  And so, yeah, terrible thing. Great guy.

• 1:33:32Jocko Willink?

  So I'm gonna fast forward now to this next chapter.

• 1:33:36Jocko Willink?

  Which, look, am I trying to sell books here for you? Maybe. But maybe we reach to a whole new audience right now because the name of this chapter is "Secret Love."

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:33:48Jocko Willink?

  So, the name of the chapter, "Secret Love," I've never covered a, uh, a secret love chapter here.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  I'm glad to be Jocko's first love story.

• 1:33:57Jocko Willink?

  First, first, first, first romance novel we're getting into, man. Well, then it, but as I get into it, um, we see where the title comes from. Undisclosed location, 2014, anticipation and fear of the unknown was hung as thick as Virginia's humidity in July. About 20 service members met at an obscure parking lot at 8:00 a.m., but they didn't know anything about what was in store. What little information they did have came from a short email they'd received the night before telling them where to be and where, and to wear business casual attire. Everyone present had already been through a 40-day selection course for this murky unit and knew to expect the unexpected. But this didn't ease anyone's nerves. It was only the first day of a course that would last about a year. And that exact duration wasn't even clear.

• 1:34:43Jocko Willink?

  Joe Kent was terrified of failing, but was terrified of failing of not making the cut. For a veteran Green Beret, that was the most potent form of fear he was capable of feeling. "There was no time to dwell on that, though. Time to fake it till you make it," he told himself while attempting to make small talk with the classmates. Suddenly, the sound of metal on metal broke the silence. Joe turned to see a blue Nissan pickup truck strike a car. His eyes focused on the driver, a gorgeous, athletic strawberry blonde that was in the driver's seat. A flash of familiarity washed over him. "I know her." "Maybe 2007? Shannon." "A," Shannon said without missing a beat. She looked right at Joe with cold, with cool, blue eyes, grinned, shrugged, and then quickly corrected her parking.

• 1:35:28Jocko Willink?

  She jumped out of the truck and walked to another group of students like any other day at the office. "Damn, she's cool," Joe thought. He had thought about Shannon on and off over the years and returned to Iraq several times, hoping he might run into her again. He promised himself that he wouldn't let her get away. Go talk to her. Now Joe fought. As he approached, their eyes met, triggering the same spark of familiar comfort he felt in Baghdad all those years before. This was gonna, this was the woman who gave him a brief reprieve from the angst of the war in his 2007 deployment to Iraq. As she approached, Shannon looked at Joe like she was almost expecting to see him. She was the one who got away, Joe thought. But now here she is, six years later, competing for a slot in the same unit I'm trying to get into.

• 1:36:10Jocko Willink?

  He wasn't surprised she found a way into the qualification course for this outfit considering her skill sets, but he, but it still felt serendipitous. "I can't believe that parked car jumped out and bit your bumper like that," Joe said. "That shit'll buff out," she replied. Joe let himself laugh out loud, maybe a little too loud. Her cool devil may care demeanor confirmed he was talking to the right girl. "I'm Joe. Were you in Baghdad 2007?" He extended his hand, which grasped with a firm handshake in return. "I remember." So there we start the secret love.

• 1:36:48Jocko Willink?

  You know, you go into some details about the course and some, some, as you two are, actually, there's less details about the courses, you know, classified stuff and that you guys are doing and, but in the midst of that, this, this romance is taking place. Secret love. The secret love is, is happening. Man, the secret love, strong.

• 1:37:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna fast forward now. And, and again, that's where you get the book. Get the book to get those details, you know, the stuff that's not classified to talk about, the, the way the relationship's develops. It's, it's really interesting to see that from, from the outside, but to get kind of an insider's look at what it's like for two military people that are both entering the murky world of intelligence and paramilitary operations and how does that, you know, what does that look like in real life? Cause there's movies about that. Echo Charles? Yes. Some movies like, like that, right? Where it's, you know, the husband and wife team, right? It's a thing. Yeah. But what does it look like in real life? It could be a real thing. And here we go.

• 1:37:58Jocko Willink?

  So get the book, fast forward a little bit, you guys are done with training and and selection and you're both get selected for this organization. I'm gonna go to the book here. I need a beer. It had been a long day, most of which had been spent driving in a new city. He could feel it in his back as he got out of a rental car at his hotel. He had been looking at locations a terrorist leader was using to plan attacks while determining if he was being followed. Now was time to write a report. That's the part they don't show you in the Jason Bourne movies. Speaking of movies, he thought fortunately, there was a pub across the street where he could grab dinner and a beer and knock out his report before catching a few hours of sleep. As he walked over, he turned his cellphone back on to catch up on his life. This was just a training mission after all. Hey hun, call

• 1:38:40Jocko Willink?

  me when you can. I love you, the text message read. I wonder what she wants to talk about, Joe Fawn, as he hit the callback button. Shannon rarely called Joe while he was working. She knew firsthand how important it was not to have distractions in this profession. Hey, she answered ecstatic. Hey, what's the good news? He said figuring her tone might mean something good happened. Well, she had hesitated a moment. I was gonna wait to tell you, but I can't. You're gonna be a dad and I'm gonna be a mom. Holy shit, a baby. Joe was ecstatic. He never had an interest in kids or raising a family, but Shannon had changed how he viewed the world and he wanted that out of life. The idea of bringing a child into the world with her genuinely, genuinely excited him. So let's get married soon, Joe said without thinking. Oh yeah, way ahead of you. You're good with Lake Placid,

• 1:39:25Jocko Willink?

  right? She said her, her, in her all business voice. Of course, hey, I just asked you to marry me. Joe laughed. You've had my heart from day one, Joe Kent. We are getting married ASAP. So, right on. So you guys get done with this course and you find out she's pregnant, time to get married. You have a small wedding in Lake Placid, New York, just as directed by Shannon. Exactly. Like she always wanted. You end up with your first kid. She's got a, while she's giving birth, she has a, she has a playlist that she's playing. It's called, it's called Colt Infill. This, the

• 1:40:08Jocko Willink?

  boy's name is Colt. So when he's showing up to this, this, this playlist, Colton Kent was born August 11th, and then you leave on your 10th deployment.

• 1:40:21Jocko Willink?

  How was it? How much different was it going on deployment when you had a baby now?

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  Night and day, night and day difference. I mean, when I was younger, my first, I don't know, nine deployments, I just wanted to go, go, go. And I felt like I could, you know, just put everything on hold because there was really nothing to put on hold. I could just go and deploy and, you know, figure out life later on. And my, my life was deploying. And then when I got married and had a kid and had obligations and had, you know, things that I wanted to be there for back at home, it was a completely different ballgame. I actually ended up going back and having to apologize to some friends of mine. I was like, man, I actually did not realize how hard this was because, you know, as a young

• 1:40:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, your married friends?

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  My married friends. Yeah. Cause like as a young team guy, I'm like, hell yeah, we wanted to deploy. Like you want to give us a year off? I'd be like, I'd be furious. Like we can't take a year off. There's a war going on, you know? But then, you know, seeing that on the flip side, like, hey, man, this is, this is hard. It's hard to walk away from your, your wife and kids and get on an airplane and say, Hey, I'll see you in six months.

• 1:41:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. My buddy Leif, who didn't have any kids when he was in the teams and, you know, now we work together and he, we had, you know, like a, a four day trip and he has three young kids.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Jocko Willink?

  And he was just like, bro, I don't know how you did that because I had like all my kids.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:30Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, you're leaving on deployment. It's like terrible.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:35Jocko Willink?

  And I know I, I, you know, you just miss so much of all the, all those highlights of growing up. You just miss them. You just miss them all.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:48Jocko Willink?

  You know, learning to walk, learning to crawl, learning to swim, first this, first that. It's like, you're not there for any of them. If you're lucky, you get a text or a picture and other than that, it's like, you're not there.

• 1:42:01Jocko Willink?

  Did you, so that was your 10th deployment. Did you, did you start reconsidering your, your job?

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  I didn't, I didn't. I, I just, that was what I was born to do in my mind. I, I honestly didn't even look at any other options, you know, after, you know, being in SF and then going to the unit and then, you know, eventually transitioned over to CIA. I was just, that was what I did. You know, I, I figured Shannon would, you know, stay in the intel world too. And kind of, we'd be able to make our careers and make our families around that. But that was just kind of a me justifying it in my own head. But yeah, I definitely had that initial like, hey, maybe I shouldn't be doing this. But then I immediately, you know, pushed that off into a, into a corner of my mind and said, no, your, your, your role here is to go fight our wars.

• 1:42:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I've had that conversation as well with many people, which is guys have been deploying, like whether it was in the ancient days where a sailor is leaving on a ship for four years or six years.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:59Jocko Willink?

  And then coming back and that's, that's what you're doing. Or you're going on some war for three years, five years, you know, traveling around the world. So this is what men have been doing for a really long time.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:11Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, the, the world, the kids, the kids carry on.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:16Jocko Willink?

  Kids can, can push through it.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  It's definitely hardwired into our DNA. I, I, I think it's, um, it's not something that's common nowadays, just because of modern society, but I, I do think that warrior trait of this is, this is what I do. I go and I fight and we'll sort the rest out later. I, I think that's hardwired into our DNA.

• 1:43:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I can tell you that when I was going on a planet, like it sucked, but I wasn't even a factor.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:36Jocko Willink?

  You know?

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  That's what you gotta do.

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  It wasn't like a thought like, well, what am I gonna do? I was the same way. It's like, well, I'm gonna do my job. This is what I, this is what I do. Everyone knows what to do.

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  The date's on the calendar. We get on airplanes. See you when I see you. Yeah.

• 1:43:48Jocko Willink?

  That's what's happening.

• 1:43:52Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Actually fast forward a pretty good chunk here.

• 1:43:58Jocko Willink?

  Shannon is with some doctors. All right, Shannon, thanks for making the time to see us today. We have some answers explaining why you felt so awful. Shannon nodded her head anxious for him to go on. We confirmed you have thyroid cancer, which isn't surprising since your diagnosis puts you at a higher risk, the doctor said, getting right to the point. Shannon couldn't help but show emotion. Tears ran down her cheeks. There are a few different treatment options, but the most direct way to deal with this is to conduct a biopsy and cut it right out. Shannon composed herself and straightened her posture. Well, let's cut it out. Shouldn't be a big deal, right? I have stuff to do.

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  She mentioned the upcoming biopsy to Joe in a text message on her way home, but didn't elaborate. She didn't want him to think it was anything other than a routine medical procedure. Joe was caught up in what he was doing in Iraq and figured it must not be a big deal if she was texting him. The surgeon removed the cancer in one surgery and Shannon was back to work within a day without missing a beat. On top of being a special operations combat veteran, a mother and a wife, Shannon now added cancer survivor to her list of titles. She sent Joe another text message, this time with a photo of a noticeable laceration across her throat, freshly stitched. Got a touch of cancer cut out, she typed in a blunt follow-up text. Joe was instantly worried. He had no idea it was that bad.

• 1:45:16Jocko Willink?

  He asked if he should go home, but Shannon insisted it wasn't a big deal and she could take care of it. Dude.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was her. I mean,

• 1:45:23Jocko Willink?

  Just no factor.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  She said something about like a doctor's appointment, maybe a biopsy. And then like the next day or two, she sends me that picture and it's like this fresh, I mean, because cancer thyroid, like they cut right into your throat. So it looks like somebody tried to slit your throat. And she's like, got the cancer cut out. I was like, wait, what did I miss? Do I need to come home like cancer? And she's like, no, we're fine. Like, yeah, just no factor, no big deal.

• 1:45:45Jocko Willink?

  What year is this?

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  This is 2016.

• 1:45:49Jocko Willink?

  And you're just still doing these deployments?

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm right back, right back in Iraq because the counter ISIS fights going on. So we're, we're right back over there, basically as we predicted in 2011. And this is, this is before we decided we were actually going to drop the hammer and go into Mosul. So we were in that weird period where there was like, you know, the trench warfare going on.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  There was the Iranians were playing there as well. ISIS was still sending suicide bombers in. So I was kind of working between Baghdad and Kirk Cook, but just, yeah, for, for me, it felt, felt like what I've been doing for most of my twenties and thirties at that point.

• 1:46:23Jocko Willink?

  Was there, what was the gap between 2016 in Iraq? What was the longest time you spent out of Iraq?

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  It was that gap right there because I left Thanksgiving of 2011, we properly withdrew.

• 1:46:37Jocko Willink?

  So you show up five years later.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  Five years later.

• 1:46:39Jocko Willink?

  And you're just like same shit.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  Same shit, man. Except for they, well now ISIS holds entire towns, which Al Qaeda in Iraq never did. It was like, oh, so we actually made things even worse. And all the guys that we trained, with the exception of the ISOF, like the trillions of dollars we spent there, then nearly 5,000 dead Americans, these guys surrendered. And now we have to reconstitute and rebuild an Iraqi army. I was just like, man, this is ridiculous. We've got to do things differently. But no, and then at the time, it was just so absurd because ISIS had captured most of the equipment that we had given the Iraqi army. So they've got like US stuff. And so we're occasionally doing bombing missions, like to bomb the US stuff. Like it was just absolutely ridiculous. This is like the military industrial complex, self-licking ice cream cone.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  But it's obviously a real threat because ISIS has now taken over large swaths of multiple countries. You know, there's terrorist threats in America and in Europe. So it's like, well, we're back here and we have to deal with it. At the time, Obama basically had no tolerance for us going really hot and going kinetic. So it was just like, we're here, we're collecting intel, we're kind of doing some ops, but there was no will from higher for us to actually just take care of it and cut the cancer out.

• 1:47:50Jocko Willink?

  All right. So after four months, Shannon's declared permanently cancer-free. Awesome. And you're coming up on your 20-year mark. And okay, just hitting some highlights here, Shannon's pregnant again. So, so you've got a lot of stuff going on. As the arrival of your second son is getting closer, you get asked if you can deploy again for your 11th deployment, of course.

• 1:48:22Jocko Willink?

  And this is where it kinda sucked that Shannon was like familiar with the whole deal because she knew that you didn't really have to go like you're at the end of your career. You can be like, yep, I'm, I'm gonna, you know, get my medical stuff taken care of. And I'm gonna, you know, I need a little twilight time. I need to ramp down. She knew all that.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:48:48Jocko Willink?

  You couldn't be like, hey, you know, I gotta go.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:51Jocko Willink?

  She knew you were full of shit.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:48:55Jocko Willink?

  And um, she didn't like it.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, usually it helps that I could be forthright with her, you know, but this was a case where it did not help me at all. Cause there was another deployment that, that came up and they did need some of my skillsets. But at the end of the day, they could have picked somebody else, but like my commander asked me if I could go and I couldn't say no, right? Like I'm really important, so I gotta go over and, and she was just like, you are so full of shit. Like you, you just got home. Like I'm pregnant again. Like so this, this deployment did not go over very well with Shannon.

• 1:49:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. Shannon did not take the news well. She worked in the same community. So there's no bullshitting her. She didn't need to, she knew I didn't need to go and didn't, and was unhappy with this decision. I get it. This is you. This is one of the reasons I love you, but I'm not happy about it. You have, you'll have to figure out how to be you without this someday.

• 1:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Felt like he just returned from his last deployment. So, so this, you going on deployment again. She, and we had mentioned, you know, when, when Joe Price killed himself, how that she recognized this, this, this problem psychologically with so many guys. And, and so there's a, there's a PhD program that she hears about.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:09Jocko Willink?

  And she decides she's gonna go try and get this PhD, get her PhD in psychology and like help out the community and, and in that manner, um, fast forward a little bit, it says Joe's final deployment came and went. He did not save the world or win the war on terror. Maybe they didn't need him so bad after all. That was, that was like a, a big star next to that because that is something to keep in mind, you know, like, and this happens in the SEAL teams and it's like you think that the machine needs you.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:50:42Jocko Willink?

  But the machine doesn't need you and the machine is gonna carry on and you do your duty and then you get done with your duty. Carry on.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:51Jocko Willink?

  I had a friend that was Aussie and he was like SAS for a very long, like over 30 years. And you know, he was getting to that point where he's going to get out and I could see, you know, and I said, Hey, bro, I'm going to tell you right now, the SAS is going to still be the SAS.

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:51:09Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't matter if you go to work tomorrow or not.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:51:12Jocko Willink?

  And that's a rough truth, you know, because we all think it's about, you know, like I'm so important. I have these skills. No one else. It's like, nope.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:21Jocko Willink?

  So you did not save the world.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  Did not.

• 1:51:25Jocko Willink?

  June 21st, 2017, baby Josh was born. And Joe had been promoted to chief warrant officer three the year before. So his number, so his number for some sort of bureaucratic staff purgatory assignment would be inevitably called. He had plenty of vacation to burn and decided to quit while he's ahead, concluding what most in the military would characterize as a legendary career, the kind almost anyone who had served would envy. That's affirmative. He figured he could find some kind of work in special operations or intelligence community when he retired and could continue to contribute to the fight with a plan in place. Chief Joe Kent requested to retire from the US Army and move on to the next chapter with Shannon and their two boys. So you make the call. All right.

• 1:52:11Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to get out. Now, did you think about going to the OGA with paramilitary at that time?

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I had a plan. I had a hundred percent plan. So I had already like.

• 1:52:23Jocko Willink?

  Changing shit.

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  I'd already spent all my like SF team time and then I bought more team time by going warrant. And then about the time I was getting looked at to do admin at special forces group, I went to the special operations unit that Shannon and I met at. And then I had had a good run there and I was a CWU three. And so at some point they were going to make me do actual officer stuff. And I was like, well, my 20 year mark has just hit. And so I'm going to go. But I had already worked with those guys, a good deal over in ground branch. And it's, I mean, for people who are outside the world, it sounds like super murky and secret squirrel, but it's pretty common. I mean, ground branch recruits heavily out of the special operations community. And so if you've been there for 20 years, you know, guys that were over there. I knew our mutual friend, Brian, Brian Hoke and some other guys, some of my other former teammates were already over there. So I had it all planned out. And you know, as we, you'll get into it in the book, or if you, if you buy the book, Shannon knew exactly what I was

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  planning. It wasn't a secret.

• 1:53:12Jocko Willink?

  So you had all that going on. Yeah. Meanwhile, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Department of Medical and Clinical Psychology runs an American Psychological Association accredited doctoral program that produces certified clinical psychologists for the for service in the US Army, Navy, and Air Force. The Navy provides funding for only two doctoral students per year to attend this prestigious program, and those slots are highly competitive as they are open to anyone who has at least a bachelor's degree, including civilians and enlisted Navy personnel alike and are fully paid for. Passing the admissions board is crucial for acceptance into this program, but applicants must also be eligible for and meet the standard standards of a commissioned naval officer.

• 1:53:56Jocko Willink?

  This is required even if you are already serving in the Navy. As a session's standards for commissioning as an officer are different from retention standards in the military regulations, the former being significantly more stringent than the latter. So she's going to apply for this program. I mean, taking two people out of the Navy, that's that's ridiculous, obviously, a stringent program to get your doctorate. She goes through a whole series of interviews and this big application progress. Fast forward a little bit, Joe was getting ready for work when he heard Shannon shout, "Holy shit." She popped out of the bathroom and handed Joe her phone. "Read that email and make sure I'm not hallucinating," Shannon said. "Congratulations on your acceptance to the Uniformed Services Health Service Clinical Psychology Program," Joe said as he hugged her.

• 1:54:40Jocko Willink?

  "This is life-changing," Joe, Shannon said, wiping away a tear. "I can stay with the boys and have a job that matters. This is everything."

• 1:54:48Jocko Willink?

  So, awesome. I mean, just so awesome. And that's one of those things where when you're applying for a program like that, like I applied for the officer program and the one I did, they took 50 out of the Navy.

• 1:55:03Jocko Willink?

  Like the first year I applied for it, I didn't get it. And there's like, there's nothing you can do. It's just a big bureaucratic machine.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:09Jocko Willink?

  And so, so when you, when I got picked up the next year, it's like, again, you, you, you're very happy because it's something you have very little control over. Like, so for her to get picked up, like I'm, I bet, I guarantee thirty totally awesome qualified.

• 1:55:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:25Jocko Willink?

  Applicants, at least, probably if not three hundred, totally awesome qualified applicants that, for whatever reason, now look, she, she, she must've had a hell of a record. At this point with her experience and everything and, and you actually, it's in the book, you know, some of the things that she wrote about why she wanted to do it. She talks about Commander Price and like, it's, it's, it's, it's awesome. And I'm sure she was a front runner, but nonetheless.

• 1:55:51Jocko Willink?

  It's a bureau, it's a bureaucratic machine.

• 1:55:53Speaker 01

  Oh, big time.

• 1:55:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And you don't have, it's not going to be fair. Let me just say that.

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  It's not like a selection process where you can like, make sure you're the fastest runner and you've got the mentality. It's like, at some point you put your packet together and you hand it to a bunch of dudes and.

• 1:56:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  You know, they, they make the call, you know?

• 1:56:08Jocko Willink?

  Uh, now as she's all stoked, you're all stoked. And then. It turns out that in her medical record, they didn't screen it closely enough the first time. And because she had cancer. Even though it was completely gone, she's not eligible for the program.

• 1:56:26Speaker 01

  Right. It's that, uh, it's like the, it's literally a catch 22, which is insane when you think about it. Cause you have people in the Navy who the Navy says, hey, you guys are good enough for us to keep. For us to send to combat, for us to do whatever we want to do with you. But if you want to move or rung up, we're going to hold you to the standards we'd hold somebody coming off the streets. So technically she wasn't able to, uh, qualify to, to be assessed into the military, but she was good enough for retention standards. So literally a catch 22, incredibly frustrating.

• 1:56:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, so she's, you know, she's fighting it. She's writing letters. She's trying to get these things changed. You know, there's. They always say there's a waiver for everything in the military. Like you got some kind of an issue, you can find a waiver, you can find a way around it. So she's. Trying to find a way around it, but she's literally being told this is not possible. So it's a tough fight. Meanwhile, back to the book here, her unit's next rotation to Iraq and Syria approached, and Shannon knew she was fit for combat. Since the clinical psychology program wasn't happening anytime soon, she had a choice to make. She was in an all-volunteer special operations unit, and no one forced her to do anything. If she didn't want to go, all she needed to do was say the word and transfer to a different unit. It wasn't lost on her

• 1:57:40Jocko Willink?

  that if her commission had been approved, she wouldn't even need to consider going to combat again.

• 1:57:47Jocko Willink?

  Shannon's sense of duty was ultimately overwhelming. Her unwavering commitment as a leader to both her comrades and the nation was something she couldn't shake, no matter how conflicted she felt. She came to the resolution that with the psychology program off the table for now, she would deploy and do her job, whether that was part, whether that was a part of her and Joe's life plan or not. "I just don't see any way I can avoid this deployment and still look myself in the mirror," Shannon told Joe after dinner one night.

• 1:58:19Jocko Willink?

  Shannon and Joe weren't so different from each other. They would always go if asked, no matter what, no matter the consequence. They lived by Isaiah 6:8, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here I am, send me."

• 1:58:38Jocko Willink?

  It was that simple for both of them, but also represented their most significant marital conflict.

• 1:58:49Jocko Willink?

  So, the tables got flipped.

• 1:58:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:52Jocko Willink?

  I mean, just directly flipped.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:55Jocko Willink?

  And now, you're looking at her, and she's getting called to go back again, and same thing. She knows she can walk away from the unit and say, "I'm not deploying anymore."

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Jocko Willink?

  I got, I mean, how old is your youngest at this time, Josh?

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  One.

• 1:59:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So she could easily say, "Yep, I'm done." And how many years did she have in at this time, like 15, 14?

• 1:59:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, 15 years.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, she, she easily could have, but we, we had that very discussion right there, you know, and I, as much as I didn't want to support her on it, I couldn't argue with the logic because she was like, look, I've been going to war, you know, my entire adult life. And every time I've deployed, half the guys have had fathers and she, or I've had kids, they've been fathers and they, they've gone over there. And so what am I going to say? And I say, well, no, it's different because I'm a woman, you know, and she's like that, that logic doesn't make any sense. And I was like, well, actually I agree with that logic. I think it is different because you're a mom. And she was like, I understand where you're coming from, but you know, that just doesn't make it, I can't justify that to myself, you know, and if you were me, you'd, you'd be saying the exact same thing. And I, I couldn't argue with that logic, you know? And also, I mean, it was, I had deployed so much and

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  she had deployed so much, you, uh, it was pretty easy for us to talk ourselves into like, hey, this is just, it's just another deployment. Like, what's the big deal? It's not that big. We'll, we'll be fine, you know, six months on the other side of this, it'll all be, everything will be back to normal, just like it was the last couple of times I deployed, just like it was for all of our adult lives up to that point. So there was definitely a lot of anxiety and tension initially, but once we accepted it, we were both like, well, this isn't our first rodeo, you know, like we can, we can handle this.

• 2:00:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And the atmospherics in the world at this time, this is now 2018, late 2018.

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:36Jocko Willink?

  And in the meantime, you retire.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:38Jocko Willink?

  From the army and you go to OGA, CIA, paramilitary.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:45Jocko Willink?

  You, you pick up that job and so now you're going on deployments.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:00:51Jocko Willink?

  Who's, who's with the kids?

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  So the only, the only time that we were both gone was right before Shannon was killed. She deployed, uh, after Thanksgiving in 2018, was killed in, uh, January. I deployed in, uh, early January, right before she was killed. So I was supposed to be gone for about 40 days or so on a shorter trip. Um, but she was killed within about a week or so with me, me getting there.

• 2:01:15Jocko Willink?

  Where were the kids?

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  With my parents, with my parents.

• 2:01:18Jocko Willink?

  Did they, did they, did your parents come down to live at your house? Or did you send the parents up?

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, my mom would come and my dad would come as well. Yeah.

• 2:01:27Jocko Willink?

  So you're on deployment, like you just said, she's on deployment. Um, and she ends up with a, a cross-functional team in Manbij, Manbij. Um, which is in Syria. Uh, just to give kind of an explanation around that. Captain John Turnbull, a civil affairs officer in charge of the cross-functional team in Manbij. Cross-functional teams were somewhat of a hodgepodge, hodgepodge of special operations and conventional soldiers combining the unique skillsets of civil affairs, psychological operations and special forces soldiers with the security that local partner forces and American infantry units provided. John's small team operated out of, out of a cluster of grain silos on the edge of Manbij proper.

• 2:02:11Jocko Willink?

  Their only backup was a small unit of soldiers from the US Army Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. At a small camp to their west, it was outlaw country and his team had broad authority to stabilize and rejuvenate the small northern city of approximately 300,000 that would eventually be cited as the model for what Syria could look like post ISIS. They weren't technically qualified to perform intelligence gathering activities, but they did have access and influence in the community and collected information accordingly. This is where Shannon came into play. CFT Manbij was an excellent source of leads for her. So she planned to make Manbij a regular stop during this deployment to keep tabs on what they had in development.

• 2:02:56Jocko Willink?

  So this is just, you know, uh, it's almost like you get to piggyback on with the, with this, with this cross-functional team. And she sees that they have access and they go into this place and they know the routes and, um, she also has a, a guy named Scotty Wertz with her, who's a guy from SEAL Team Five. Um, he's now, at this time, he was with the, the DIA. So he's out there, like a security type role.

• 2:03:27Jocko Willink?

  And that's what they're doing. And this is, this is common stuff to be, to be happening to merge, especially, you know, this is the kind of thing that would never have happened pre nine eleven.

• 2:03:37Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 2:03:38Jocko Willink?

  But post nine eleven, like people working together and trying to make good outcomes in bad situations, trying to reinforce each other and, and synergize, synergize the, the, the various teams together so you can make progress.

• 2:03:58Jocko Willink?

  So that's what she's doing.

• 2:04:03Jocko Willink?

  So again, there's, there's so many good stories in this book. Obviously I'm not doing the whole thing, but so many, so much good information, how things are being done, the, the, the risks that are being taken, the, how to overcome and mitigate those risks, some of the, some really powerful breakdowns of intel gathering. I mean, there's a whole breakdown of, of trying to get Baghdadi, like just how those are looking. I mean, it's very interesting to read, get the book.

• 2:04:39Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to fast forward January 16th, 2019, CFT man bitch report departed from the silos at approximately 11 a.m. local time. There were two American vehicles in the convoy, Shannon and John in the lead vehicle, while Clark drove the other with Scotty and Chief Farmer, Jasmine, two more American Green Berets and 16 SDF soldiers, those are Syrian Defense Forces soldiers, following in gun trucks rounded out the rest of the manifest. Their convoy, convoy tried parking at the school as planned, but the situation on the ground dictated a move to their alternate location outside the Palace of Prince restaurant. And this is, you know, it's interesting is when I was a kid in the teams and

• 2:05:19Jocko Willink?

  they would talk about this idea of a semi-permissive environment.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:22Jocko Willink?

  Right. And it's where, but it never, it never made a lot of sense to me until the war started. And then you realize there's different parts of the world, there's different things happening. And this is kind of a classic semi-permissive environment where they're going into town. Of course they have to have security, but the threat is not visible. It's certainly present. And, and that's this, this environment that they're in, again, it's hard to define to someone that doesn't understand it. Cause are they at war? Well.

• 2:05:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  Kind of.

• 2:05:57Jocko Willink?

  But are they at war where there's an enemy that's clearly visible that's who they're fighting against?

• 2:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Not, not really. So you end up in this weird, in this weird situation that actually is more difficult.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:10Jocko Willink?

  The semi.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  Much more.

• 2:06:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's more, it's more difficult because, and actually, when you were talking about ISIS earlier, man, I was so happy to see those ISIS flags on trucks in big convoys.

• 2:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:23Jocko Willink?

  I was like, oh, this is.

• 2:06:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. We're, we're actually good at this.

• 2:06:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  Like the counter insurgency thing, like we're not so hot at, but like if you are willing to hoist your flag and say the enemy are over here.

• 2:06:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  We will remove you.

• 2:06:33Jocko Willink?

  That was.

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  We, we can do that.

• 2:06:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I was so stoked to see that. I was thinking to myself, oh, this, this is not going to go well for them.

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:06:39Jocko Willink?

  Um, as opposed to being in a environment where you've got insurgents mixed in with the civilian populace, local populace, using them as human shields, maneuvering in ways that are, that are difficult to detect. So that's the situation that they're in here. This semi-permissive, leaning towards not permissive, uh, but a semi-permissive environment and they're going in to, and, and the mission is to go in and gather some intelligence. They have a meat set up. Uh, back to the book, after parking their vehicles, to deliberately make it difficult for anyone to walk up unnoticed and slip an IED under their trucks. Clark moved to the restaurant's top floor and established overwatch for most of the market.

• 2:07:21Jocko Willink?

  On the sidewalk below, Shannon and Scotty synced watches and reaffirmed the exact time everyone was required to be back. All right, John, we'll be back no later than 1100 Zulu. You know what to do if we're not back by then, Shannon said, confirming an abbreviated five-point contingency plan commonly used throughout the military. Roger, we know the plan. Good luck, guys, John replied. Clark watched as the routine patrol departed with Shannon and Scotty breaking off to move toward their destination. He didn't know exactly where they were going or who they were meeting, but such was life on a Shannon Kent mission.

• 2:07:55Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, pulling security during the daytime in a bustling city market is nerve wracking. They are, they were surrounded by two and three story buildings, all with their own windows and doors that could open at any time. You never know what's truly going on or who might be watching you from afar. Clark felt uncomfortable but couldn't fit his, put his finger on what it was. Then he noticed something outside the window. Four or five guys were literally staring him down, not talking. They didn't seem very friendly, but they weren't doing anything that could be considered hostile either. Little did he know ISIS had started planning an assassination in December of 2018. They wanted to use a suicide bomber to hit the American soldiers in Manbij,

• 2:08:38Jocko Willink?

  who had been causing so many problems. So they imported operatives from Aleppo, who linked up with local contacts that were already patrolling the city, looking for a chance to attack. They finally saw an opportunity on the 16th of January. Clark moved back down to the street so that one of the Green Berets could go inside and use the bathroom. As the Green Beret came out to relieve Clark, they saw Shannon and Scotty on their way back to the restaurant, along with the rest of the element that had been out on foot patrol. They regrouped out front as the vehicles were prepared for movement. Clark was standing next to his truck, ready to go, talking to one of the Green Berets and an SDF soldier.

• 2:09:20Jocko Willink?

  At 12:38 local time, just as the team was about to get back in their trucks and drive back to the grain silos, a man approached their position from south of the market. He walked right past Clark toward the restaurant entrance where the rest of the group stood.

• 2:09:36Jocko Willink?

  Without warning, he detonated a hidden suicide vest within feet of Shannon, Scotty, and the rest of their group.

• 2:09:57Jocko Willink?

  Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, loving wife, daughter, sister, friend, and mother of two, was killed in action alongside Special Forces Chief Warrant Officer II, Jonathan R. Farmer, loving husband and father of four, former Navy SEAL Scott A. Wertz,

• 2:10:16Jocko Willink?

  and Gahid Gadir Tahir, an American working as a civilian interpreter.

• 2:10:23Jocko Willink?

  Eleven Syrian nationals also died in the attack, with another 18 wounded.

• 2:10:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, um, the difficulty in these environments is that you have to be right all the time, and they only have to be right once.

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:11:00Jocko Willink?

  They, they only have to be right one time, and they don't care about human life, so it doesn't matter. You know, you kill some of them, they don't care, but they kill some of you, and...

• 2:11:19Jocko Willink?

  And, and of course, meanwhile, while this is happening, you're on deployment, you're working your new job, and we'll go to the book. This is, this is how you find out. Joe left the States in early January for his first deployment as a CIA paramilitary officer and was fortunate to work for one of his best friends, Rocco. They were on an ODA in 5th Group together and had remained close since 2005. Later that evening, Joe returned to the office after a mission to check in with Rocco. As he walked in, he noticed Rocco looked somber.

• 2:11:50Jocko Willink?

  Hey guys, why don't you give Joe and I, Joe and me a minute, Rocco said, indicating he wanted everyone to leave the room. They obliged. Shit, what did I screw up, Joe thought. Hey, man, there's been an attack in Man Beach on the task force. Two females are KIA, that's all we know right now. We're trying to get names, do you know where Shannon is? Fuck, man bitch, she's in man bitch, Joe replied. She was not the only female in the task force, so he could not be entirely certain it was her. He ran back to his room to get his phone, hoping for a text saying she was safe, no text. Joe ran back to the office, he had another number in Syria and her work email, no answer on the phone and no email either.

• 2:12:32Jocko Willink?

  There was nothing to do but wait. At one point, Rocco looked up at Joe from his computer screen, he stood up and walked over. I just got an email, brother. Rocco didn't want to say the next part, he had tears in his eyes. It was Shannon, she was killed. I'm sorry, man.

• 2:13:18Jocko Willink?

  So...

• 2:13:25Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, immediate...

• 2:13:31Jocko Willink?

  numbness and disbelief and all that?

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:34Jocko Willink?

  Did you get all those?

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  I did, um, but being overseas, I knew I had to get home and I also knew that, um, there was going to be people who were tasked of notifying Shannon's parents. So I had to, I had to call her chain of command and say, hey, I've been notified. What's the timeline, uh, for notifying her family? Cause I'd, I'd never had to actually do the duties of casualty affairs, but I had to do the training. And so I knew, I knew the machinery that was taking place in the States. And I didn't want her parents to just get a random knock on the door. So I pretty quickly made the decision, I'm just gonna call her mom and, and tell her. So I had to stay relatively focused, you know, kind of compartmentalize a lot just to

• 2:14:20Speaker 01

  get through that phone call, get through the phone call, back to my parents. And then, you know, luckily, the agency got me out of there pretty quick. But yeah, it was, it was, it was a whirlwind getting out of, out of theater, back home, and then just waiting to receive Shannon's remains and, and all that. But yeah, it was a lot of numbness, you know, obviously a lot of regret and then, but a lot of clarity, too. I was overseas. My wife got killed. My kids are at home with grandparents. I was out in a non-permissive, semi-permissive environment, doing something very similar to what Shannon was doing in a different part of the world. I could have gotten killed that day, too. I mean, really, you can roll the dice so many times and your number's gonna come up. And so I felt incredibly

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  selfish and pretty guilty for being there. You know, it was like, hey, my kids have no idea. They just lost their mom and I could have made them orphans today. So I was, you know, flying back and I was like, I gotta step away from this life that I've lived for my entire adult life. That was the, the only bit of clarity in all the, you know, sorrow that I had then.

• 2:15:22Jocko Willink?

  How old were the boys at this point?

• 2:15:23Speaker 01

  They were one and three.

• 2:15:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. In the book, you, you, you go through some of this stuff in, in detail and talk about, you know, some of that, some of that emotions that you're going through. And very powerful, very powerful. And yeah, very moving. One thing that I, you know, you, you get to the point where you're talking about the funeral and you, you, it says this, "A thousand sailors, hundreds of other service members, dozens of New York State police officers, and many family and friends filled the pews at the Naval Academy's chapel in Annapolis in memory of Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent. Having her memorial service at the Academy's chapel was a big deal. She was the first enlisted sailor in the, in

• 2:16:14Jocko Willink?

  US Navy history to be given the honor."

• 2:16:26Jocko Willink?

  Like I said, there's the, get the book.

• 2:16:30Jocko Willink?

  Because there's just so much, so many details of, of her life and it paints such a, such an awesome picture. So much heroism, such a, such a look inside Spec Ops Intel, but on top of that. You know, I, I often try to explain to people that the people you read out about in books, they're people.

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:51Jocko Willink?

  And you, you, in writing this book, um, you do a great job of painting the picture, not just of, uh, not just of another soldier, another sailor, another marine, but a, a person. And it's just, it, it's very moving and, um, just to close out the book.

• 2:17:18Jocko Willink?

  You say this, "A month after her death, US-backed Kurdish forces arrested five members of ISIS. They were believed to be involved in the January 16th attack that resulted in Shannon's death. In a series of raids, Shannon's fellow warriors took out target after target, killing or capturing those responsible, methodically striking them down from the shadows. The violence America's warrior elite is capable of knows no bounds. If you take one of theirs, they will take 10 of yours." And so it was.

• 2:17:50Jocko Willink?

  "The death of the man ultimately responsible for the suicide attack wouldn't bring Shannon back. But knowing a price was paid for her and her teammates' deaths was reassuring. The world is a better place without such evil in it. The world is a better place because Shannon Kent made her mark."

• 2:18:22Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you know, you obviously, like you said, probably with the most crystal clarity, you needed to leave the life behind. What did that transition look like?

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  It was pretty rapid. Got back and, you know, we did Shannon's funeral and all that. And the CIA said, hey, take as much time as you need. Tell us what you want to do. They were very supportive. A bunch of other jobs I could have done there. But I know myself well enough to know that like I can't be halfway in that world. That if you give me enough time, I'd find a way. I'd find a justification in my head. So I knew I needed a hard break and I needed to get my kids closer to the family. But then also a big part of moving back to, back home, back to the West Coast was, you know, just really to remove myself from the DC area in the intelligence world. Cause I knew if I stayed there and halfway in, I'd, you know, I'd get back into it somehow. So it happened pretty quick. You know, I decided within a couple of months, I moved back home

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  and, you know, bought a house, you know, back, back in the Northwest and, you know, just decided to carry on from there, you know, to give my kids as much stability as we could, get them closer to my family.

• 2:19:32Jocko Willink?

  And then what about work?

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So right away I resigned from the agency and then I did some contract stuff for a while, teaching stuff based out of Fort Lewis. But then I got a job, just a regular job as a program manager for a technology company. Work from home, you know, so flexible hours.

• 2:19:51Jocko Willink?

  Was this, was COVID yet? Was it like?

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  This is right before, I got it right before COVID. It's a 2019. So.

• 2:19:57Jocko Willink?

  How did you like working from home at a computer managing project in the civilian sector?

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  Uh, you know.

• 2:20:03Jocko Willink?

  That seems like a rough transition.

• 2:20:04Speaker 01

  It was a rough transition. Yeah. It was a rough transition. I mean, honestly, if I hadn't had a good supportive network of my family and, you know, my own ways of, you know, making sure I worked out in the morning and stayed sane and, you know, was still hanging out with some of my friends. Um, I probably would have gone a little crazy, but no, it's a hard transition, especially if you don't plan it like I did not plan on getting out. My transition plan was to go be a paramilitary guy. I mean, that's, I, I never thought through, I'd, I'd hear people talk about transition, this and that. And I was just like, I'd, you know, I'm never gonna, I'm never gonna do that. I'm never gonna go be a, be like a real nine to five guy. Then I found myself in that world pretty quick. So really, I mean, I, I think had I not had the kids to keep me grounded, probably would have been a lot messier.

• 2:20:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I want to see a copy of your first resume that you sent in.

• 2:20:52Jocko Willink?

  You have literally zero civilian experience doing anything. They're like, can you do project management? You're like, I can run sources and I can assault targets and I can blow things up. What, you know?

• 2:21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:02Jocko Willink?

  How does that help? Does it, can that, can that work?

• 2:21:04Speaker 01

  Definitely found though, that, uh, you know, a lot of our skills, especially of management, I think from the military, definitely immediately apply. I read, I mean, I read your book right away, actually. It was heavily recommended by a couple of people. And I was like, oh yeah, okay, we can do this. This stuff actually applies. Managing, whether it's managing people who are assaulting targets, or whether it's managing guys that are, you know, doing tech projects. At the end of the day, you're still just managing people. One's probably more appealing to me than the other. But at the end of the day, you're still dealing with people, you're still working your way through problems. So it wasn't, uh, obviously my, my preferred line of work.

• 2:21:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I didn't know either because, you know, I did, the, the last couple of years I was in, I was running the West Coast training. And so I was teaching leadership. And, but I didn't think that what we were leading in the SEAL teams had anything to do with what, how you'd lead on the outside. And it wasn't until I went and talked to a company and ta-talked about those principles I, I talked, it wasn't really, because you know, I'm standing up there talking about these principles that we use. But I didn't know how they were landing until people started asking me questions and I started solving them the same way I would solve a, an assault on the target that had gone a little bit sideways. Like, what are we gonna do?

• 2:22:14Jocko Willink?

  And that, it literally, the first question I got asked, I thought to myself, oh, everything that we know from the teams and from the military, when done correctly, applies to any leadership situation. So.

• 2:22:28Jocko Willink?

  So, so you're doing that for a while. Um, and then in 2022, you decide you're going to run for Congress.

• 2:22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:36Jocko Willink?

  So, so you're a glutton for punishment.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  I'm a glutton for punishment, man. Yeah. Yeah. So actually, I mean, I started running in 21. It was basically, um, I got involved in politics, really, um, meeting Trump at Dover. Uh, Shannon was killed a month after our troops were supposed to be out of Syria. So Trump gave the order to get our troops out just before Christmas in 18 because we had taken away all the ground that ISIS controlled. So Trump did what no other president in the war on terror had done. He had actually said like, when we get rid of all the ground ISIS controls, then we're leaving. We're not going to stay here and chase these guys around the desert for 20 plus years. Like we've seen that. We're not going to do it again. So when we took out that last little stronghold they had, Trump said, all right, let's get the troops out.

• 2:23:18Speaker 01

  So I had a front row ticket to see how the mid to senior level bureaucrats in the intelligence community, department of state, department of defense, basically said, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to, we're going to leave these guys here. And Shannon was there in the midst of all that friction. So there was the chaos of Mattis resigning, and then he had a bunch of downward pressure on the task force. And I could see this because I'm talking to her. We can talk on classified systems. I'm reading all the sit reps. I'm seeing the drama too at the CIA. And all the downward pressure for the guys on the ground was, hey, the boss thinks we need to leave. We need to find reasons to be here. And so there was a big pressure on those guys to go out there and like make ops happen. And so for me, I, I, when she got killed, I was surprised, but I wasn't that surprised. When I thought about it analytically, because I was like, look, man, if you're out here just fishing around for missions,

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  like you're doubling and tripling your opportunity for the enemy to kill you. And one of our last conversations we had, I was like, look, do not be the last person to die in a war that most of the country has already forgotten about. Like this is, this is a bad situation. And she knew it was too, because they had all kinds of like crazy guidance. Like they were going to be pulled out. Christmas Eve of 18, they were going to fly to Erbil because they were going to pull everybody out of Syria. And then that got fragged because you know, there's pressure coming down from CENTCOM for them to stay there. So I was watching all this friction unfold. And I had been pretty pissed off about the way the wars were conducted up to that point through multiple administrations as well. So I was a pretty early supporter of Trump when he went after Bush on the debate stage and said, like, we never should have gone into Iraq. We screwed the whole thing up. And so I really liked his, you know, just kind of

• 2:24:48Speaker 01

  common sense approach to foreign policy. But then watching all of this unfold, when I met Trump at Dover, I was like, screw it, I'm gonna resign from the agency anyways. Like, I'm just gonna tell him how I feel. And basically, I was just like, look, you're getting it right. Like, your gut instincts are right. All the so-called experts, like, they're not. Keep doing what you're doing. And I thought nothing else would come from it. I thought he was just kind of humoring me. But I got a call a couple of weeks later, and I got a chance to go meet with Jared Kushner and some other guys in the administration. They said, look, we want to hear more from guys that are on the ground. Like, we've gotten nothing but screwed over by, you know, the adults in the room, the experts, the guys who couldn't win the war for 20-plus years. We want to hear from guys like you. And so started working a little bit on the Trump campaign, did some advisory work there.

• 2:25:30Speaker 01

  And then, then being in the Northwest during COVID and during the riots was a big eye-opener for me. Like, I was like, man, I, this country's changed a lot in the time that I've been overseas deploying, like, watching Portland burn down because of what Antifa was doing. Huge eye-opener for me. But then ultimately, my Congresswoman, she voted for Trump's impeachment after January 6. And so, to me, that was a real, real call. I was like, well, you know, if we're ever gonna get involved in politics, now's the time to do it. Because the woman that I voted for is not representing, you know, my needs. She had also voted to keep our troops in Syria. She had a pretty bad voting record up to that point. But that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And really, I didn't even intend to run for

• 2:26:10Speaker 01

  Congress. I started going to, like, Republican meetings, and everybody was mad that she had done this and that she had voted this way, but nobody was doing anything. And so, you know, I was looking around. I was like, is there somebody that's already like an established politician that's gonna run against this lady that we can back? Nobody was stepping forward. And so to me, it was like, well, you know, if you're looking around, trying to figure out who the leader is, congratulations, like, that's supposed to be you. So I said, hey, I don't know how to run for Congress, but what the hell, I'll try. So, you know, I Googled, how do you run for Congress? So I could file all the right documents and you know, off the races from there. So I ran, I was like a two year campaign. So I was running against an incumbent Republican. So taking down an incumbent is pretty challenging to do.

• 2:26:50Jocko Willink?

  So for, so you had to primary, you had to get through the primary first?

• 2:26:53Speaker 01

  Get through the primary, yeah.

• 2:26:53Jocko Willink?

  And she's incumbent?

• 2:26:54Speaker 01

  She's an incumbent, yep.

• 2:26:55Jocko Willink?

  So she has the money machine and the backing?

• 2:26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's got the cash. There's a couple of other candidates that are running against her as well. So we had a five way Republican primary.

• 2:27:03Jocko Willink?

  How did you make yourself kind of stand out?

• 2:27:06Speaker 01

  Really getting out and talking to people. A lot of our politicians, because of the way money is involved in politics, they can win elections by just bombarding the airwaves with millions of dollars of ads. And that, that can work in a lot of cases. But if you've, if you've got somebody who's kind of sideways with their voters, uh, and you're willing to get out there and do town halls and go talk to people and actually build a grassroots campaign, then you can take them down.

• 2:27:29Jocko Willink?

  How many, how many days a week would you be out doing that?

• 2:27:32Speaker 01

  Like seven days a week. Cause we didn't have any money or any reach. So basically anywhere where somebody would give me a, a room of a captive audience where I could just talk to them for a minute or two, I would show up. So we did like over 300 in-person town halls, uh, in that, that time period. And then, you know, any kind of media we could get where I was out there, you know, spreading the message. So it was a very much an insurgent campaign. Ultimately, we, we ended up beating the incumbent. Had 14 million spent against me, spent all of our money.

• 2:27:59Jocko Willink?

  How much money did you bring in?

• 2:28:00Speaker 01

  We brought in about three and a half million, which was good.

• 2:28:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:03Speaker 01

  But they, they watched 14 million in the primary. And so, yeah.

• 2:28:08Jocko Willink?

  And so then, well, that's going to leave you without enough money or

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:28:13Jocko Willink?

  where you need more money to actually run the race.

• 2:28:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have really late primaries in Washington. So, uh, our primary wasn't resolved. We vote first Tuesday in August, that's the primary. But in Washington, for some reason, it takes us like two weeks to count the ballots. Whole different story, but it took, it took them two weeks to sort out the primary that I was the winner. And so by the time I was the actual Republican nominee, we were flat out of money. My campaign staff had all worked for like over a month. A couple of the, the vendors who really believed in me had credited me a bunch of money for ads. So we were, we were in the hole, like 200 grand going into the general. We raised another almost million dollars just in that, in that small period. But the Democrats were smart. They sat back and they watched the Republicans just beat the crap out of each other all summer. Cause we did, it was a bloody primary. And so they hit me with $6 million basically on day one of the general. So we still ended

• 2:29:00Speaker 01

  up only losing by less than a percentage point, had to do a recount, all that type of stuff. So, once the recount was over, because I'm too dumb to quit, I was like, well, we're gonna run again. So here we, so here we are, Groundhog Day of running for office.

• 2:29:13Jocko Willink?

  And how's it, how's it look? What are the atmospherics now on this run?

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  I think they're much better. We don't have a really contested Republican primary. Last time we had that, a lot of people felt passionately about their candidates, and we couldn't really just bring the party together going into the general. But I think we've got a lot more unity this time. I'm endorsed by the state party, endorsed by all the county parties. So, like, quite a few, quite a few years there of hard work's really paid off.

• 2:29:35Jocko Willink?

  When is the primary take place?

• 2:29:37Speaker 01

  August. Yeah, it's in August. And then the generals in November. Presidential years too, my district swings about five points more Republican. This is kind of a weakness of the Republicans. We've got a lot that only vote once every four years. There's a lot of people out there who only vote when the president's at the top. So 2022, we had 60,000 Republicans who voted for Trump in 20, voted for Trump in 16, they just didn't turn out at all. So we anticipate most of them will come back out. We're also working heavily too on legal ballot harvesting. Washington's all mail out voting. So it's completely legal in Washington for any person to go and collect ballots and then turn them in for people. So I don't like that. I wish we didn't do it, but those are the rules. And Republicans, for a very long time, because we don't like that, have said that we, we will not ballot

• 2:30:19Speaker 01

  harvest, like it's a point of pride. And the Democrats are like, oh, okay, we're, we're gonna go ahead and ballot harvest once the ballots drop. And that gives them about a month head start on collecting ballots. And so, we're finally getting-

• 2:30:30Jocko Willink?

  So, talk me through ballot harvesting.

• 2:30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you, you wanna go to areas where you've got the most, most of your voters. So Democrats do this really effectively in heavily urban areas. They'll hit apartment complexes, they'll hit retirement homes. Republicans, it's a little bit different for us. So we're looking at, you know, ballot boxes in churches, ballot boxes in gun stores, gun shows is another key place. But a big thing is just activation, getting our activists out to knock on people's doors and say, hey, you have a ballot, it's in the mail. If you'd like, you can vote right now and I'll take the ballot in for you. Or I'm gonna keep going back and knocking on your door until I see that you've actually turned your ballot in. So you can request and any person can do this in Washington, you can get lists from the Secretary of State that say, once, once the voting period has started, it will say

• 2:31:15Speaker 01

  who's turned their ballot in already. It won't say how they voted, it'll just say whether or not they've turned their ballot. So basically every day, we can start knocking people off the list that have already voted that we know are Republicans, and then we can go chase the other people who haven't turned in their ballots yet. So data drives a ton of this. So obviously, it costs money to get good data, it costs money to get people out there in front of the doors, but we're doing pretty well with raising funds right now and getting activists trained up to chase those ballots.

• 2:31:41Jocko Willink?

  It's weird how this does not sound like a democracy, does it?

• 2:31:44Speaker 01

  No, it's not.

• 2:31:45Jocko Willink?

  It sounds like just crazy.

• 2:31:47Speaker 01

  I really wish we could vote in one day in person. You show an ID card that says that you're an eligible legal voter and you vote right there and we count it in front of everybody on paper ballots, no machines. I wish that were the system, but right now it's, it's, it's money and mobilization, big time drives politics.

• 2:32:04Jocko Willink?

  Where does your money come from?

• 2:32:06Speaker 01

  Small dollar donors. So I don't, I don't take any big corporate PAC money. I get all my money from individuals. So last time we raised three and a half million, our average donation was $51. When we broke that down even further, like people weren't giving me $51 on one shot. It was a lot of people who like, over the course of three different donations, you know, that equaled 51 bucks. Got some people who give more, which is always greatly appreciated, but you know, people will ask me like, oh, I can only give you 10 bucks, I can only give you 15 bucks. Like, that's how grassroots candidates run. I mean, so we're doing national level fundraising, so we're sending out, you know, mailers and text messages to people throughout the country. And then when I go on media shows and stuff like that, that helps as well. But, uh, small dollar donors, I think that's how we actually beat the, the corporate capture of Washington DC.

• 2:32:50Jocko Willink?

  So when people hear that and they go, oh, go to joe, joe kent for congress.com and they can donate right there.

• 2:32:55Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:32:55Jocko Willink?

  Whether it's five bucks, 10 bucks, or five, what's the max they can donate?

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  Max you can donate is 21,000. So you can donate a lot. If you want to donate, donate a lot, please, please do. We greatly appreciate that. But even if it's only five bucks, man, that, that helps out a lot because if enough people do five dollars, or even folks, you could do like five bucks a month, you know, just like one, what a coffee costs nowadays. If you can donate that, you can actually really help fuel a campaign. It's gonna make a difference.

• 2:33:21Jocko Willink?

  And then what are you, what are you looking at as your concerns for America and your goals for America?

• 2:33:27Speaker 01

  Right now, I mean, we're in such a crisis, the border, I think, is a, is a massive crisis. I was just here in February, went down to San Yarcedo, went out to Yucuba Hot Springs and just watching that sea of humanity.

• 2:33:39Jocko Willink?

  It's crazy, right?

• 2:33:40Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, it's an invasion. I mean, there's no other way to put it. I mean, the Iraq Syria border was more orderly when I was serving there. I was, I went to Yuma in 2021 when Biden first said the border was open. And then it was kind of what you would expect. There was a lot of Hispanic folks coming across. Most of them, I think, genuinely seemed like they were seeking economic opportunity. When I was here in February, I think I can count on one hand, the number of Hispanic people that, that might be our neighbors that I saw. The vast majority were military aged men, Chinese nationals, ton of guys from the Middle East. They would say that they're Turkish or they're from, you know, Indonesia, but I'd go and I'd, I'd talk to, and I'd talk to some of them. They're all speaking Arabic. The Chinese nationals, to me, all look like SF guys that were invading a country low profile.

• 2:34:22Speaker 01

  I mean, like, none of them looked like they had just walked through the desert to get here. They were all in basically like, you know, REI, tactical casual, you know, clean cut, physically fit. You know, what are these guys doing here? You know, and so we've had, we think about 12 million illegals come into the country. With that, there's also been enough fentanyl to kill every American multiple times over. It's like 113,000 Americans have gotten killed by fentanyl. We know the fentanyl, the precursors come from China, the cartels are pushing it across the border. We can stop this. Like, it's not like a force of nature, doesn't has to, have to happen. If we shut down the border, we can save lives here in America. Pretty much every event I do up in my district, somebody will come up to me and they'll tell me that they lost a loved one because of fentanyl. And the vast majority of people right now that are dying from fentanyl, they're not like career drug addicts.

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  It's people that like think they're buying an oxycontin because their health, you know, their health insurance won't cover it. We're seeing it with the, it's getting put into vapes and stuff now. And now a lot of it, I was just doing a ride along the other night. It's not even coming in pill form, it's coming in powder form, which means some of the stuff that's more lethal, if you, if you touch it and it gets on your fingers, like you can OD that way. I mean, this is biological warfare that's being waged against us. So I think the border is the number one issue. Number two issue is just our out of control spending. I mean, we're 35 trillion in debt right now because of what we've done by weaponizing the dollar with these sanction regimes throughout the entire world. We could lose our status as a reserve currency holder. If that's even if that's even eroded, our entire world can change really, really quickly. I mean, America's always been able just to print money, right?

• 2:35:51Speaker 01

  You know, like our even when our economy doesn't necessarily produce anything because we shipped our manufacturing overseas, Biden's killed off our natural energy, our natural resources, we can still print more money. But that's not a luxury we're always going to have, especially with what China's doing, what the BRICS countries are doing. So if we don't get that under control, that debt is going to get leveraged against our country. And so I just think we cannot continue to like, you know, be the world's policeman, provide security guarantees for the entire world. I'm not saying we completely withdraw from everything, but Washington DC has got to get its budget under control. Like, it's very basic. Like, we take in just shy of $5 trillion per year, but we're spending $7, $7.5 trillion per year. Like, we've got to get realistic. And Washington DC refuses to do that. So I think those are some of the biggest issues.

• 2:36:36Speaker 01

  There's a bunch of other ones, but I think right now we're in such a bad way between the invasion on our border and the fact that DC is deliberately trying to kill the dollar and saddle us with debt. And that's what's driving the inflation. That's why people can barely survive right now. I think those are probably two of the most pressing issues.

• 2:36:50Jocko Willink?

  Is it? Why? If you're in Washington DC, you're a part of the government right now, it's insane to just sit there and keep writing these checks. And yet, no one seems to care.

• 2:37:01Speaker 01

  No, there's a handful of guys that are fighting really hard there in Washington DC, and they get called every name in the book all the time. But the vast majority of people in DC just think, well, we can just keep printing money. Like, hey, if all my special interests and a couple of projects here in my district are going to get funded, what do I care that we just blew the budget out by 2.5 trillion? And that's just the attitude in Washington. And I think that, you know, there's definitely some nefarious factor there. You know, there's people that are making money and they don't care. But I do also think that there is this bias that people have towards normalcy. If things have always been a certain way, in your head, you think they could never change. Basically, everyone who's alive right now, America's been the top dog. I mean, the people that were alive before World War II, they're all gone. And so all of us that are alive right now, we're like, nah, you know, America's always been on top.

• 2:37:46Speaker 01

  We've always been the prime reserve currency holder. No, actually, no, we haven't. I mean, right now, this period of like peace and relative, you know, stability and success that we're having, it's actually kind of an aberration when you look at the broad scope of history. And so I do think there's a lot of people there that are just complacent. They just think, well, you know, they've people have always been complaining about the debt. Ross Perot way back in the day was complaining about the debt. We can just keep doing this. And then China is making very, very big moves right now to make it so that we can't keep doing this.

• 2:38:18Jocko Willink?

  So your primary is in August and then it's to the polls in November.

• 2:38:27Jocko Willink?

  All right. You're a glutton for punishment.

• 2:38:30Speaker 01

  I'm a glutton for punishment. Yeah. Yeah. If anybody's thinking about getting into politics, I would say it's really important that more veterans do get involved in politics. But it's, it's also a pretty quick way to destroy your entire life.

• 2:38:43Speaker 01

  I think it's worth that. I mean, the country's worth it. I mean, I, I really think.

• 2:38:45Jocko Willink?

  You've got two young kids.

• 2:38:46Speaker 01

  Two young kids and, and you know, look, I mean, for a long time, I think that our generation of warriors thought that our fight was overseas. And now we can kind of step back and see what those wars were all about, how we were allied to, how the blood and treasure of our country were squandered. I very much think the fight is here right now. Like we cannot let this class of politicians continue to run our country. Like the warrior class has got to step up and, and really just start asserting ourselves and saying, hey, we, we've, we've seen what war is. We're not going to lead our country down that path anymore. But also we fought, bled and invested for this country. And so we are going to make sure that that is not just absolutely ground into the dirt going forward.

• 2:39:27Jocko Willink?

  Amen, man.

• 2:39:29Jocko Willink?

  So people can find you joe kent for congress.com. Go there. Also, you're on Twitter at joe kent 16 jan 19. You're on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, all at joe kent for congress. That's where people can find you. And help you, support you and, and get you to where you need to be. So you can, so you can go lead.

• 2:39:57Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, you got any questions?

• 2:39:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:39:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:59Speaker 02

  So back, back, back in the day.

• 2:40:00Jocko Willink?

  The real interview starts.

• 2:40:02Speaker 02

  Back in the day, what 2003, when you guys were talking about the tank treads.

• 2:40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:06Speaker 02

  And the, and the speed bumps. And you mentioned the MPs were giving out tickets.

• 2:40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:10Speaker 02

  Who's paying the tickets?

• 2:40:11Speaker 01

  See, that was the thing. Like, I think they could eventually take away like your on base driver's license.

• 2:40:16Speaker 02

  Just so the individual.

• 2:40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:18Speaker 02

  Go to like your boss.

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  Pay. You didn't have to pay, but it was like you've been cited.

• 2:40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:23Jocko Willink?

  So now if we cite you again, you'll be under some sort of uniform code of military justice.

• 2:40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:30Speaker 02

  So like a, like a write up.

• 2:40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:32Speaker 02

  The equivalent little write up, little verbal and a write up.

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  I did, I did have a buddy of mine who actually got a speeding ticket and he got kind of mouthy of the MPs and he got detained. But this was on the way back from a Target and he actually had detainees. Like you had like one that we had come back from Target, we're back in the wire. We cross loaded the detainees onto like some admin pickup truck and he was driving them to like the actual, and he gets pulled over. And he's, you know, just off of Target, he's tired. So he gets mouthy at the MPs, the MPs detain him and detain the detainees. So like our commander had to go down there. It ended up being, you know, commander had a good, good sense of humor about it. But it was like, so you got detained, taking the detainees.

• 2:41:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was like one of those other moments where it's like, man, I think we've been here for a little bit too long.

• 2:41:13Speaker 02

  They pulled the old switcheroo on them.

• 2:41:15Speaker 01

  They did.

• 2:41:15Speaker 02

  It's good for the gooses.

• 2:41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:17Speaker 02

  See what I'm saying? Yeah. That's my, uh, that's my question for the day.

• 2:41:20Jocko Willink?

  That was your stump the chump right there.

• 2:41:22Speaker 02

  Stump the chump all day. Yeah. Good to meet you.

• 2:41:25Speaker 01

  Nice to meet you too.

• 2:41:26Jocko Willink?

  Joe, any, uh, any, any final thoughts, man?

• 2:41:28Speaker 01

  No, man, we covered a lot. I really appreciate you having me on, man. I appreciate, uh, you providing a platform for so many of us guys from, you know, our, our generation's war to tell our story, man. I think it's really important. So appreciate what you're doing.

• 2:41:40Jocko Willink?

  Right on, man. Well, it's an honor to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your, your, your lessons learned. And of course, thanks for your sacrifice, you know, not only as a soldier, not only as a special operation to warrior, but also as the husband of Shannon Kent, who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom, for our security. And we can never repay the debt owed to you and your boys. The only thing we can do is try and live good lives.

• 2:42:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:42:12Jocko Willink?

  And honor her sacrifice, man.

• 2:42:14Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 2:42:14Jocko Willink?

  Thank you.

• 2:42:17Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Joe Kent has left the building.

• 2:42:23Jocko Willink?

  Echo, um, pretty, pretty awesome insight at the intel side and the sacrifices that get made over there, the hard work that gets done. Uh, book definitely represents that very well. So, or did we, this is stuff that you'd kind of wouldn't know stuff about.

• 2:42:43Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:42:44Jocko Willink?

  You know, other than like what you see in a movie.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:47Jocko Willink?

  And there is some, um,

• 2:42:50Jocko Willink?

  You know, there's obviously there's similarities, right? Just like there's similarities between Top Gun, the movie and Top Gun, Dave Burke. Out there doing it, just like there's similarities between Terminal List, which is a show about SEALs and actually being a SEAL. But there are obviously things that are different. And with the intel side, that's, you know, you, you, you see in movies, you know, they'll show like the, the meeting. Yeah, with the source. And so they show that kind of stuff, but it's very Hollywooded up and it actually doesn't show the amount of work that it takes, man. It is hard, hard, hard and dangerous work, clearly.

• 2:43:29Jocko Willink?

  So I thought it was awesome to meet Joe and hear these stories and the book's great. So get the book and send me the true story of a mother at war.

• 2:43:44Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, back over here, you know, we're trying to, we're trying to live good lives, trying to be the best we can. We have this opportunity, we get to do this. So let's be better. Let's make sure we are training, reading, thinking, being smart, good fuel.

• 2:44:05Jocko Willink?

  Check out jockofuel.com, get yourself some greens.

• 2:44:12Jocko Willink?

  Get yourself some protein powder. Get yourself some ready to drink protein, get yourself an energy drink. I have one right here. These things are good.

• 2:44:21Speaker 02

  And good for you.

• 2:44:21Jocko Willink?

  And good for you. Across the board, jockofuel.com, check it out, everything that you need. Also, you got DOMS today?

• 2:44:28Speaker 02

  Yep, full body DOMS.

• 2:44:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So what was it caused by?

• 2:44:32Speaker 02

  Well, the, uh, in a nutshell, short, short answer, um, a congregation, if you will, of consecutive workouts involving gi jujitsu, which I haven't done for a few months. Gi, it's all been no gi, um, and squats. So I did squats and then drank a milk straight to jujitsu.

• 2:44:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that'll do it. The other day I did 10 rounds with like kind of the heavy hitters.

• 2:44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yes.

• 2:45:00Jocko Willink?

  I was definitely feeling that one.

• 2:45:02Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, 10 rounds, even like, yeah, you guys, you're crazy for always going 10 rounds. So what's the?

• 2:45:09Speaker 02

  Generally speaking, I'm not saying to fulfill your deal, whatever. Like what, to me, I'm gonna say mine, you tell me if this is acceptable. So five rounds to me is kind of like the minimum standard. So if you go five rounds, you go home and you're like, cool. You go four rounds, you're like, I could have done at least one. And then you kind of really wish you did maybe two more, right? If you're at four, you do six rounds, you're like, oh shit, I'm kind of feeling that. You do eight rounds, that's a full day to me.

• 2:45:35Jocko Willink?

  Six to eight, you're, you're in the zone for sure.

• 2:45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. You go ten, now you're just like, hey, this is like an extra credit day. That's all I feel.

• 2:45:42Jocko Willink?

  But let's, let's face it, there's a whole nother variable that we're not talking about. That's who you're rolling with.

• 2:45:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:45:46Jocko Willink?

  Cause let's face it, you know, if you're going with the heavy hitters.

• 2:45:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45:51Jocko Willink?

  You know, and that, even that is different. Cause if you go with a heavy hitter, like you go with someone that's big and slow. You're not moving a bunch. You maintain, you gotta fight something, get a little, little burn in your arm because you're trying to keep your. You go someone that's moving the whole time?

• 2:46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:07Jocko Willink?

  Now you're getting, so you know, who are you rolling with? Cause that's a big, big piece. Bro, I'll go do a hundred rounds. You know what I mean? Do you know what I mean?

• 2:46:16Speaker 02

  Yes, I do.

• 2:46:16Jocko Willink?

  And not even get a workout. Meanwhile, I do two rounds. With someone that's getting after it.

• 2:46:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:22Jocko Willink?

  A little bit different.

• 2:46:23Speaker 02

  Well, oddly, maybe ironically, I don't know, a little terminology, but the times that I do do eight, nine, ten. Let's face it, I've only done all ten, probably a handful of times. Total, by the way. But every single time where it's like eight, nine, 10 rounds, whatever, it's always been with that, you know, the, the fucking, what do you call?

• 2:46:41Jocko Willink?

  The heavy hitters.

• 2:46:42Speaker 02

  The one that you organize. Yeah.

• 2:46:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:43Speaker 02

  Otherwise, bro, who's going 10 rounds? Exactly right. But think about it, when you go to the regular class, who's doing 10 rounds? Kind of not any, not everybody, you know?

• 2:46:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, in a normal class, usually I'll do five.

• 2:46:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, five. Exactly right.

• 2:46:57Jocko Willink?

  That's about a half an hour of work, you know? Then people gotta get back to their job, their kids, there are all this other stuff going on.

• 2:47:03Speaker 02

  Right. It's true.

• 2:47:03Jocko Willink?

  Cause you already spent some time doing the training, doing the drills, doing the, learning the techniques.

• 2:47:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. So yeah, full body dumps from squats, then straight to jujitsu.

• 2:47:14Jocko Willink?

  Now you were telling me something about protein the other day, like getting it in the system. What was the bro-science behind that?

• 2:47:19Speaker 02

  What do you mean? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay. This is from Thomas Delauer, by the way, one of his things. We're gonna do something with him. But nonetheless, very well accomplished guy in the fitness industry. So he knows a lot more than me. So, and I listened to him, so. Uh, he went over this idea.

• 2:47:34Jocko Willink?

  Your bro science, but it came from a legit source.

• 2:47:36Speaker 02

  Legit source, exactly. Um, so basically in a nutshell, cause he, he goes deep into it, like the mechanic, you know, the mechanisms, all this stuff. But after you work out and you're trying to get in your protein, if, if you ingest a high dose of protein after the workout, it'll send a bigger signal for protein synthesis, meaning you absorb the protein more, like the signal that tells your body to absorb the protein, physiologically is bigger, it's a bigger signal if you take in more.

• 2:48:05Jocko Willink?

  So the milk, the milk train is kinda trying to leave the building and you gotta get on the milk train.

• 2:48:09Speaker 02

  All day.

• 2:48:10Jocko Willink?

  It's 30 grams where we're at?

• 2:48:11Speaker 02

  Nope, it's actually like, uh,

• 2:48:13Jocko Willink?

  More than that?

• 2:48:13Speaker 02

  More, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if I'm not mistaken, I, I could be wrong, but I think he was like at least 60.

• 2:48:19Jocko Willink?

  So two mox.

• 2:48:20Speaker 02

  Two, if you go two mox, that's 60, yeah? Boom, boom. And then he talks, he says other stuff in there. One, one was with, with like the different types of protein. So there's like fast digesting, slow digesting. So if you do the fast digesting first, then you get the slow digesting, then you can have the fast boom. And it's like this onslaught of just protein synthesis over time. See what I'm saying? So the way I said it, that's totally bro science. You gotta listen to him. He'll say it way more eloquently than me. But we get the message, see what I'm saying? All you need is, okay, what are we doing then? We taking in plenty of protein after workout. How about that?

• 2:48:55Jocko Willink?

  Do you feel like eating when you get done working out?

• 2:48:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there's like a window, you know, so like,

• 2:49:02Speaker 02

  three minutes after your last set or three minutes after your last round? No, I don't feel like eating at all, but you take a shower,

• 2:49:12Speaker 02

  you sit down, then yeah, oh yeah, you feel like eating, drinking, the whole deal, 100%. Oh yeah.

• 2:49:19Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the doms, so you need the protein for the doms, but don't forget about the joint warfare, joint warfare.

• 2:49:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:24Jocko Willink?

  Some of that super krill. Oh, by the way, some people were asking, super krill versus fish oil.

• 2:49:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:30Jocko Willink?

  Cause we brought up fish oil.

• 2:49:33Jocko Willink?

  And people like, I thought the krill oil is better. Hey, if you can, some people can't have krill. Because it's shellfish. So they can't, they're allergic to it. We actually, we actually created the fish oil to make up for that. And some people just prefer fish oil. So personal preference, my recommendation is if you can take krill oil, take krill oil. If you can't, for whatever reason, that's okay. That's why we made the, the fish oil. And some people just, what they're looking for is fish oil. So, and they're asking for fish oil. So we made fish oil. Because not everyone translates directly to, I want fish oil. And you say, well, I got krill oil for you. And they go, no, I don't want fish oil. Like you went to a, you went to a restaurant.

• 2:50:18Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And you say, I want pizza. And the person says, no, I have cake. Tacos. Yeah. You're like, well, I don't want tacos. I don't want cake. It's different. So that's what we did. But if you can handle the krill oil, then get the krill oil. But if you have a shellfish, or you want, for whatever reason, you prefer fish oil, we got you. It's all good. So wanted to mention that. Hey, anyways, you heard the deal. Jocko Fuel dot com. You need fuel. Go get some. Also, Wawa, we got the, we got the, the milk, ready to drink protein at Wawa. Vitamin shop, GNC, Military Commissaries, AFE's, Hanford's, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wake Firm, ShopRite, HEB Down in Tejas. Dude, they're building like walls. Yeah.

• 2:51:01Jocko Willink?

  Of Jocko Fuel. So everyone in Texas, thank you for getting after it. Same thing with Meyer up in the Midwest. Thank you for getting after it. Same thing with Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness. Don't forget about Wegmans up in the Pennsylvania area. They're, they've got pallets on the floor. Go get some of that. Shields. And look, small gyms, if you've got a little gym, you've got a CrossFit gym, you've got a jiu jitsu gym, you've got a powerlifting gym. And you want them to sell Jocko Fuel there? Or you want to sell Jocko Fuel there because it's yours? Good. Email J F Sales at Jocko Fuel dot com. So there we go. Also, OriginUSA.com. You heard Joe Kent mention the fact that we gave up a lot of manufacturing. We let it go overseas. Well, at Origin USA, we are bringing it back to America. That's what we're doing.

• 2:51:46Jocko Willink?

  We are bringing manufacturing back. We brought the, we brought the freaking equipment back on ships.

• 2:51:53Jocko Willink?

  That's what we did. And now we got it. Americans are being trained to use it. They've been trained to use it. We had the people that had the knowledge that passed it on. So if you don't want communism in the world, if you don't like slave labor in the world, if you want America's economy to be strong, if you want the world to have a clean environment, because do you think they care one iota about the environment in China? They don't care at all. They don't care. Doesn't matter to them. And in many countries overseas, that's the, those are the facts. They don't have the EPA. They don't have any rules and regulations about what they can dump into the water or, or blow out their smoke stack into the atmosphere. They don't have any rules.

• 2:52:37Jocko Willink?

  So we have rules here. There's a reason for those rules. Because we care about the environment. We care about our workers. OriginUSA.com. Get the best gear you can buy. By the way, best gear.

• 2:52:46Speaker 02

  By far.

• 2:52:47Jocko Willink?

  Just FYI. Best gear. So, and we got new gear coming out all the time. We're getting better and better. We got new, um, like workout gear. Awesome. So anyways, check it out. OriginUSA.com. Go get your boots. Go get your jeans. Wouldn't it suck to wear an American pair of jeans that aren't made in America?

• 2:53:05Speaker 02

  It's like a, bro, you're, you don't want to do that.

• 2:53:09Jocko Willink?

  OriginUSA.com. Go get it. Hey, one more thing. We have law enforcement jujitsu training, August 27th through the 31st up in Maine. So if you're in law enforcement, you got some people on your crew, you want to go to train jujitsu. We got a bunch of experienced jujitsu law enforcement officers that are going to be up there helping teach, going through the mechanics of combatives. So please come and check that out. That was also at OriginUSA.com.

• 2:53:35Speaker 02

  Do you know the schedule for that? Like, is that like a few times a day? Is that, is it kind of like the camp?

• 2:53:40Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of like immersion camp. Also JP Danelle is going to be up there. He's going to be talking through leadership inside law enforcement. We got, so it's going to be awesome. It's going to be an awesome camp.

• 2:53:47Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 2:53:48Jocko Willink?

  So check that out.

• 2:53:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'd be good. Also, Jocko's store called Jocko Store, where you can represent discipline equals freedom on her apparel. You know, got some cool shirts, some hats, some hoodies on there. Summer's coming up, maybe less, less need for a hoodie, but we got some good stuff on there.

• 2:54:04Jocko Willink?

  My daughter, Rana, we were talking the other day, and she, she said something, she said discipline equals freedom, or I said discipline equals freedom, but what she said was, she was, it's so true. And I was like, hmm, okay, guess it landed. You know, it landed.

• 2:54:21Speaker 02

  It did land.

• 2:54:22Jocko Willink?

  And you get on the mats of justice, you realize it's truth.

• 2:54:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. You're not kinda, you don't feel like you're scrambling all the time for something, if you've been disciplined in that little something. And that goes for anything. So big one, the one, any something is true. Cause you know, I grew up, we grew up working out. I grew up like working out, pretty much. When it was time to start working out, I started working out. We, yeah. Oh, hell yeah. Um, so you know, every once in a while, and this is just, this is gonna seem obvious, but I think if you pause and think about it, just like Hannah did, cause she's been hearing discipline equals freedom since when?

• 2:54:55Jocko Willink?

  Since a long time.

• 2:54:56Speaker 02

  2015, like what, since she was a child. And even at age, whatever, 20, whatever, 23, 23, even at 23, she's saying that out loud. It's true.

• 2:55:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but I would say this, the way she said it, it was almost like as if the full recognition, the full understanding came to fruition in her head. So there's, imagine you're looking through a, a scope, and there's like fog, and there's some blurriness, and then all of a sudden it just comes in a perfect vision. Boom. Or like you're using your red camera.

• 2:55:30Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:55:31Jocko Willink?

  And you know, it has those little lines around whatever's in focus?

• 2:55:34Speaker 02

  Focus assist.

• 2:55:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Do you use focus assist? Is that considered weak? To use focus assist?

• 2:55:41Jocko Willink?

  Did I just, did I just, did I just dime you out?

• 2:55:43Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:55:44Jocko Willink?

  Did you lose his spect from the people out there?

• 2:55:46Speaker 02

  I don't think so. And if I do, hey, that's, that's true. So I put it this way, if people deep in the industry said, hey, it is weak. It's, it's weak to use focus assist. I would, that would make sense to me, but I'm still gonna use focus assist.

• 2:55:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Well, as focus assist on the red camera.

• 2:56:02Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:56:03Jocko Willink?

  Do the other cameras have that?

• 2:56:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 2:56:06Jocko Willink?

  Well, it came into focus like that for.

• 2:56:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:56:08Jocko Willink?

  It's just the way she said it. She goes, it's so true. And I was like, yeah, it is.

• 2:56:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:56:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:12Speaker 02

  And that.

• 2:56:13Jocko Willink?

  And you don't want to say that. You don't want to give your dad props, right? You know what I mean?

• 2:56:17Speaker 02

  It's hard.

• 2:56:17Jocko Willink?

  After 23 years, you want to be like, you know what? You're kind of right about this stuff. You know what I mean? Did you ever, did you ever give your dad props about something?

• 2:56:24Speaker 02

  No, not.

• 2:56:25Jocko Willink?

  See?

• 2:56:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, yeah, like 30 years later.

• 2:56:28Jocko Willink?

  What was it?

• 2:56:29Speaker 02

  Do it and it'll be done.

• 2:56:30Jocko Willink?

  Do it and it'll be done. He made it, he made it, he got us, he got a, an approval.

• 2:56:34Speaker 02

  Actually, yeah, yeah, I gave him the props and, uh, but I give him indirect props by using a lot of his old stuff, but I never really gave him the props, which actually I might, yeah, B C, legend of B C.

• 2:56:45Jocko Willink?

  Is there one more example you can give?

• 2:56:47Speaker 02

  Um, one never know, do one. He used to always say that. One never know, do one. And what that, what that is, is like some poetic way of saying like,

• 2:56:57Jocko Willink?

  You don't know.

• 2:56:58Speaker 02

  You just don't know, do you? Right? One never know, do one. And then I remember thinking, but you sound dumb saying that. So freaking whatever. And then I say that, I say that stuff to my kids all the time. Like you just never know.

• 2:57:09Jocko Willink?

  One never know?

• 2:57:10Speaker 02

  One never know, do one.

• 2:57:13Jocko Willink?

  That's a good idea. You know what? That's kind of, that kind of reminds me of the iterative decision making process.

• 2:57:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay. You don't really know.

• 2:57:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57:18Jocko Willink?

  Take a little step and let's see.

• 2:57:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he would use it a lot of times when something would happen that like you were expecting something else to happen. And then, you know, so it just shit doesn't go all the way that you think it's gonna go every single time. That was his whole point. And then it's like, it was his point after something would happen or when you're going into a situation. I would just be like, one never know, do one.

• 2:57:41Speaker 02

  Nonetheless, yes.

• 2:57:41Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:57:42Speaker 02

  But you're correct. And Hannah is correct too.

• 2:57:46Speaker 02

  Because and when I say the working out thing, it's like that's where you can kind of remind yourself how true that is. Cause like if you're working out all the time and you're in freaking great shape and then you go out and have dessert on Valentine's Day or you know, whatever. You're you're free to do that. Cause right, your body's just gonna burn through that whole thing. Like even in and of itself is gonna burn through the whole thing because all the working out you've been doing. And then not to mention, when you go work out tomorrow, it's gonna burn through even more, you know, so it's like literally no factor. You're free, completely free from that, the effects of that dessert. But if you're not disciplined, it's like, bro, that's just one more freaking stack upon stack upon stack of just terribleness onto your health. You see what I'm saying?

• 2:58:23Jocko Willink?

  I see what you're saying. So.

• 2:58:25Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 2:58:25Jocko Willink?

  Discipline equals freedom.

• 2:58:26Speaker 02

  Yep. So if you want to represent, you know, we got some cool news. We got a new design. It's out. Discipline equals eat freedom version four.

• 2:58:33Jocko Willink?

  I saw it and I gotta admit, I liked it.

• 2:58:35Speaker 02

  Not bad, right?

• 2:58:36Jocko Willink?

  It's freaking squared away. Cause let's face it, I'm not gonna say you're off base in the early version, the earliest version.

• 2:58:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:58:43Jocko Willink?

  But let's face it, my immediate modification was a big step.

• 2:58:46Speaker 02

  Improvement.

• 2:58:47Jocko Willink?

  It was like going from, it wasn't like iPhone, you know, one point one to iPhone one point two. It was like BlackBerry, it was like Motorola Racer to iPhone nine.

• 2:59:01Speaker 02

  Okay. All right. Hey, look, I, I can't refute that.

• 2:59:05Jocko Willink?

  But this new one that you made, step up, bro.

• 2:59:07Speaker 02

  Legit.

• 2:59:07Jocko Willink?

  It's a good one.

• 2:59:08Speaker 02

  The, the old school, the original OG has some like, you know how, you know, have the rough draft or something? And you always have a little special place in your heart for the rough draft, you know? It's not the classic.

• 2:59:19Jocko Willink?

  It's a classic.

• 2:59:19Speaker 02

  A classic. Exactly. Right. You see what I'm saying? Nonetheless, hey, they're all available. They're all available. Get anyone you want. But yes, there is a new one out there. Also the short locker. It's a subscription scenario. If you don't know, um, you know, it's like you get a new design every month. Boom. Some good designs there. I saw, um, I saw that people, or I noticed that other people noticing. The sugar coated lies one. That's from two months ago, by the way.

• 2:59:43Jocko Willink?

  That seems to have landed very well.

• 2:59:46Speaker 02

  Landed very well.

• 2:59:46Jocko Willink?

  Lies lies.

• 2:59:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm considering maybe releasing that one just to the general public, you know, so people can represent, you know?

• 2:59:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Lies lies.

• 2:59:56Speaker 02

  Sugar coated.

• 2:59:57Jocko Willink?

  Lies lies. It says lies twice.

• 2:59:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59:59Jocko Willink?

  Which is kind of a, it's kind of a big deal. Cause there's other ways you could have done it, right?

• 3:00:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00:05Jocko Willink?

  But you didn't put it twice.

• 3:00:08Speaker 02

  Thank you for that confirmation. Nonetheless, it's called the Shirt Locker, but it's on JacoStore.com. So pull them, you can see the deal. You want to check that out? There's some examples of some of the designs on there, too. So you can kind of see what up. But yeah, go on there. Like something, get some.

• 3:00:22Jocko Willink?

  Also, check out PrimalBeef.com and/or ColoradoCraftBeef.com. These are two steak companies right here in America. Primal Beef out there in the Shenandoah Valley and Colorado Craft Beef, obviously, up there in Colorado, making the tastiest steaks. And by the way, ground beef. And by the way, hot dog, like, and by the way, meat sticks and jerky. So, check them out. PrimalBeef.com, ColoradoCraftBeef.com. Great companies, great people, great steaks. Go get some. Also, subscribe to the podcast. And don't forget about Jocko Underground. And don't forget about the YouTube channels. And don't forget about Psychological Warfare. And Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Plus, books,

• 3:01:06Jocko Willink?

  obviously, today, we covered Send Me The True Story Of A Mother At War. Just, just check that book out. Written by Marty Scoveland. I haven't given you much, much love there, Marty Scoveland. And he was, he co-authored it with Joe Kent. But fantastic book. Check it out. Also, I've written a bunch of books. So if you want to check out the books that I've written, you can check those out. Especially, you might want to check out those Warrior Kid books. Just, just, and actually, I should have talked about it with Joe. His kids love them. So, check out Way of the Warrior Kid 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Check out Mikey and the Dragons. And then the books that I've written. You can check those out as well. Also, we have a leadership consultancy. Just got back from the muster in Nashville, Tennessee. How was it?

• 3:01:50Speaker 02

  Outstanding. Yeah, it's really, um, the, the event is always good, but just how smooth it is and how everyone's so, so much more refined. Yeah, the experience is great. Tilt was there, too, representing.

• 3:02:02Jocko Willink?

  Tilt came out. Man, how awesome was that?

• 3:02:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was fired up to be there.

• 3:02:08Jocko Willink?

  He was signing books, taking pictures.

• 3:02:12Jocko Willink?

  The next muster that we have is in Dallas. It's 16 to 18 October. So, look, these events always sell out. This will sell out too. So if you want to go, go register now. Also, we have something called the Council. And these are up in Washington State. They are very isolated. It's very detached. It's a very small group of people. And if you, we've got Council Four is sold out. And then that's going to be followed by Council Five. We have a few seats left, 26 to 29 June. So if you want to come check that out, go register quick. Also, we have the Women's Assembly down in San Antonio, Texas, September 11th through the 13th. So again, if you want to come to one of our events,

• 3:02:55Jocko Willink?

  check that out. But also, if you just have, if you just need leadership help inside your organization, go to Islamfront.com. That's what we do there. Also, we have online training at the Extreme Ownership Academy. Go to extremeownership.com. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also, HeroesAndHorses.org. That's Micah Finks Charity Organization up in Montana, taking, taking our veterans up into the mountains so they can get lost and get found. Jimmy May has also got his organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. Check that one out. And if you want to connect with us, once again,

• 3:03:39Jocko Willink?

  Joe Kent, JoeKentForCongress.com. He's on Twitter, @JoeKent16Jan19. And he's also on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, @JoeKentForCongress. I'm at Jaco.com. And I'm on social media, @JacoWillink. Echoes, @EchoCharles. Just be careful of the algorithm.

• 3:04:02Jocko Willink?

  Don't let it get you. And thanks once again to Joe Kent for joining us tonight. And a solemn salute to a true warrior, Senior Chief Shannon Kent. Thank you, Senior Chief, for your leadership, your courage, your service, and your sacrifice. We will follow your example. And thanks to all the men and women around the world right now, especially tonight, to those from the intel community that work so hard in the shadows and take great risks to gather the information needed to protect our great nation. Thank you for what you do every day. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers,

• 3:04:47Jocko Willink?

  correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for risking your lives to keep us safe here at home. And everyone else out there, just remember, remember that what you do, what you get to do, what we get to do, we have that opportunity, we have that freedom.

• 3:05:09Jocko Willink?

  Because other men and women, for over 200 years, have gone out and put their lives at risk for our freedom.

• 3:05:19Jocko Willink?

  And remember that they're people.

• 3:05:22Jocko Willink?

  They're real people. People like Senior Chief Shannon Kent, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a warrior,

• 3:05:31Jocko Willink?

  who sacrificed her life for us.

• 3:05:36Jocko Willink?

  Remember all those brave warriors and live accordingly.

• 3:05:43Jocko Willink?

  And that's all we've got tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko, out.