330: One Piece At a Time Until It's Built Into Something Worthwhile. Ben Milligan. Pt.2

0:00:00 - Opening 0:07:00 - By Water Beneath The Walls with Ben Milligan. 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 330 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  A little after midnight on Thanksgiving 1943, while patrolling the Black Waters off Cape St. George near New Guinea, Burke's five-ship wolf pack spotted a Japanese radar contact.

• 0:25Jocko Willink?

  Immediately and without permission, Burke radioed his squadron, "Hold your hats, boys. Here we go."

• 0:35Jocko Willink?

  Into the dark and into the enemy's guns, Burke's destroyers dropped throttles to flank speed and launched torpedoes, exploding two Japanese ships outright, then wheeled the starboard like the parthine horses' archers into the face of three more enemy ships that immediately tucked tail and fled.

• 0:57Jocko Willink?

  In the night-long pursuit, Burke's deck sailors discharged and loaded their guns so fast and so long that many passed out in their turrets from the fumes and from sheer exhaustion.

• 1:10Jocko Willink?

  When Burke's squadron finally returned to port, said a Time Magazine reporter, "Every ship in the roadstead turned up its searchlights and every blue jacket in the fleet manned the rails in tribute."

• 1:25Jocko Willink?

  It was, Halsey said afterward, "The classic sea action of this war."

• 1:33Jocko Willink?

  For 13 months, Burke commanded his destroyers like patented his tanks. To every order, he invariably responded, proceeding at 31 knots. "A boiler-bursting pace," said one historian that caught Admiral William Bull Halsey's attention, who addressed his future dispatches to 31 knot Burke.

• 1:57Jocko Willink?

  The name stuck.

• 2:01Jocko Willink?

  In the last two years of the war, Burke was forced to give up command of his own squadron in order to become chief of staff to Mark Mishner, a famous aircraft carrier admiral. Neither a pilot nor possessing any experience in aircraft carriers, Burke was at first out of place in the new staff role, an onlooker to the aviators and a jolt to his morale that almost immediately expanded to his waistline. Essentially confined to the flag plot, the ship's tactical command center, Burke was forced not only to learn everything he could about aircraft carriers and their tactics, but also to elevate his operational understanding beyond the amateur's urge for the battle at hand in order to plan for the next one.

• 2:42Jocko Willink?

  Beyond the Marianas to the Philippine Sea, beyond that to Leyte Gulf, then on to Iwo Jima. When submarine intelligence told him the battleship Yamato was spotted en route to an unknown location, he spent all night hunched over his charts, a caliper in hand, then launched 400 planes against the spot where he would be if the roles were reversed and sank the ship with more than 3,000 men aboard. Before his planes returned, Burke had already switched his attention to the next battle. By the time they reached Okinawa, the final terrible fight of the World War of World War

• 3:24Jocko Willink?

  II, Burke had settled into a punishing routine, always up at 0330. The sleep he did manage was usually interrupted by some 20 calls a night. In his waking hours, Burke watched nightmares unfold, his only sanctuary, the flashes of courage that for years to come, said a biographer, would seem to whisper to him something about the meaning of the US Navy. The worst of these and the greatest was the final transmission of a newly commissioned ensign who had taken command of his crippled destroyer after everyone else in his chain of command had been killed. Before the ship sank and the transmission was cut off, Burke heard the young man say,

• 4:09Jocko Willink?

  quote, "I will fight this ship to the best of my ability and forgive me the mistakes I am about to make," end quote. That voice would haunt and steal him for the rest of his life.

• 4:31Jocko Willink?

  And that is an emotion and a haunting

• 4:39Jocko Willink?

  that I think many of us feel.

• 4:43Jocko Willink?

  Did I do enough to train the young leaders that followed me?

• 4:49Jocko Willink?

  And the answer always seems to be no, I could have done more. I could have passed on more lessons learned. I could have done a better job teaching our operational history to the next generation so that they would not repeat the mistakes we made.

• 5:07Jocko Willink?

  But there's so much to teach and there's so much to learn and there's so many lessons to pass on. And sometimes lessons don't get passed on.

• 5:16Jocko Willink?

  They get forgotten.

• 5:20Jocko Willink?

  And only the deepest of dedication and research and commitment can bring those lessons back.

• 5:31Jocko Willink?

  And that reading that I opened with was an excerpt from the book. The book is called By Water Beneath the Walls, which was written by a friend of mine, a SEAL teammate of mine by the name of Ben Milligan. Ben has been on this podcast before. It's podcast number 298. Go listen to that if you haven't listened to it yet. But on that podcast, we discussed where Ben came from, how he ended up in the SEAL teams,

• 6:03Jocko Willink?

  and how he ended up writing this incredible book, which took him seven years to write. And the book is, is an amazing book. I think this is the most important historical book I have ever read on the SEAL teams. And I think it actually might be the most important book on special operations as a whole that I have read. And if you haven't read this book, buy it immediately. It is absolutely an incredible look at the history of the SEAL teams, but it ties in so many other aspects of the military and special operations and the wars we've been through.

• 6:43Jocko Willink?

  And

• 6:45Jocko Willink?

  The amount of commitment that it took to write this was one amount of commitment that can come from only someone with Ben's personality and his drive to find out and unravel history. And we're lucky enough to have Ben back with us to discuss more of these incredible accounts of histories, history from the SEAL teams and of the entire community of special operations. So Ben, thanks for coming back, man.

• 7:17Ben Milligan?

  Thanks, Jaco. It's great to be here.

• 7:18Jocko Willink?

  And

• 7:19Ben Milligan?

  Thanks for that section, too. It's one of my favorite sections in the book. I, I, one of the hardest things you do when you write a book is you have to edit it and you have to cut it. And I think we talked about that last time. This was one of those sections that I had probably 15 more pages just on Burke that I had to drop. That chapter had been completely structured differently. I had started with Burke at his change of command ceremony when he became the CNO, and then I rolled into, you know, this, you know, 15-page just, it was my biggest introduction of a character, even bigger probably than

• 8:02Ben Milligan?

  Draper Kaufman's. I justified that in my head when I was writing it because I always felt like Burke, or at least when I discovered Burke, when I discovered his contribution to the creation of the SEAL teams, I felt like next to Phil Bucklew, Arlie Burke is the indispensable man. He, the SEAL teams would not have existed without him, without, and the, it wouldn't have existed without his biography that he just consolidated into, you know, this complete preoccupation with keeping the Navy connected to offensive warfare.

• 8:37Ben Milligan?

  And there was just example after example of his time in World War II. He was in at least two vessels being shot out from under him, or two vessels were sunk by the Japanese that he had to, and he had to escape from. And in each instance of his escape, he was leaving behind every possession that he had, every possession that he'd gone through the war with. And in the process, he was rescuing guys around him. In one case, he risked his life going into a completely smoke-filled passageway to rescue a, I think it was a seaman, like a radioman.

• 9:19Ben Milligan?

  He's the chief of staff of the ship, and he had no business, he'd get off the ship, but he's saving the sailors around him.

• 9:29Ben Milligan?

  But yeah, he was, like you mentioned in your opening, the, his commitment to passing on what he had learned, not just what he had learned, but his belief in what the Navy was to the next generation. That's what kept him as a CNO for six years. Like I say in the book, it's two years longer than even the closest competitor. CNO is normally just a two-year spot. Admiral King, who was the CNO during World War II, he served for four. But after King, nobody else comes close, except Burke, and Burke's there for six years.

• 10:13Ben Milligan?

  And whenever, I know that you, you know, you take pictures of your watch when you start working on a 4:30. It's funny, because I've often thought that I should start taking a picture of my watch when I sit down at my computer to start writing. I'm not sure it would be as motivating, but whenever I hear somebody talking about how you have to get eight hours of sleep a night, sleep's the most important thing, I'm like, man, I know that you're wrong, and I know it because of Burke. I know it because of other people, high achievers, like, somebody like Burke, he never slept.

• 10:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, why that passage stood out to me, and look, I've got so many marks in this book now, from the last time we did this, and just from reading it, but that idea that here's this guy who's listening to a young ensign.

• 11:05Jocko Willink?

  Go down with his ship and he's thinking to himself, you know, after this guy says, forgive me the mistakes I'm about to make. And you know, Arlie Burke's sitting there thinking, he could have taught him, he could have given him a heads up, he could have given whoever that commander was, or the lieutenant commander, or the lieutenant that was above this guy in the chain of command, all these guys, he could have taught them something that maybe they wouldn't be in this situation. And just knowing that every effort that you gave to pass on the lessons, they failed. And now this guy is this young man, this young ensign is dying, and he's going to go down with his ship with all these sailors on board. And there's, there's just all these lessons. And, and I mean, there's so many times when

• 11:50Jocko Willink?

  when I was in the teams, well, a good example is Mike Thornton. You know, Mike Thornton came on this podcast a couple of years ago, and we went moment by moment and debriefed the operation where he, for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor. And it's three hours, it's like a three hour debrief. And I was in the SEAL teams with, at the same time as Mike Thornton. I knew Mike Thornton. I had met Mike Thornton on several occasions. I'd spent time with Mike Thornton. But I'd never gotten like a full debrief of what happened.

• 12:30Jocko Willink?

  And you think to yourself, all those lessons that didn't get passed on until he came on the podcast and told me, like, all these little lessons. And then you start thinking about someone like Burke, or, or this entire book that you've written, where there's just all these lessons that are completely forgotten. And, well, I should say, they're almost completely forgotten.

• 12:52Ben Milligan?

  I don't know that they're completely forgotten. I know, I know the point you're trying to make, and I agree. Like, since the book has come out, I've been keeping a list. There's been 12, 12 guys that I interviewed in the course of the book that aren't with us anymore. And

• 13:06Ben Milligan?

  I always think like, what would have happened if I had started the book a year late, or a year later than I did? Or what opportunities did I miss because I started the book when I did and not two years earlier? Like, how many, how many stories did I miss? Or how many lessons did I miss? The one thing though, that I think about when I think of like, you know, somebody who's as young as that Ensign was in the, in the section that you read, who's going down. I mean, that Ensign, Mike Thornton, when he's, I think Mike Thornton was 25 when he rescued Tommy Norris. He's not old enough. I mean, he's old enough to, he's, he's a, he's a grown man. I mean, he's, he, he has a 25-year-old's perspective on life, but he doesn't have all the context that, you know, that you and I have. And I go, I mean, we've lived long lives.

• 13:51Ben Milligan?

  I mean, we've, we've been around here for a minute and we've collected stories and we've collected context. And we have, you know, enough ammunition, you know, whether it's Marley or, or whatever, to help us or to convince us to, to, to make right decisions. But somebody who's 25 years old, or this Ensign, I, I imagine this Ensign, you know, probably 22 years old. Like, he doesn't know anything. Doesn't know anything about the world. He hasn't heard, you know, stories, you know, like the one that you just read. But what he does have, he, he has this, he's been imprinted by the institution that he

• 14:34Ben Milligan?

  served in and by the people that are around him. And that's, I think that's an important thing that, you know, Buzz does or Boot Camp does. You're, you're taking young folks and, you know, from lots of different backgrounds and without, you know, the context that we have as you get older and you, and you read books and you have these experiences. But you imprint, you know, the values of that institution on these people and you give them new mandates for what's expected.

• 15:01Jocko Willink?

  And that's cool.

• 15:05Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Jocko Willink?

  And I appreciate that. But...

• 15:10Jocko Willink?

  You know, like I said, this Ensign wasn't in charge of the ship, right? There was a, there was an XO, there was a CO, there was an Ops boss that are all now dead. And even with the imprints of kind of the broad value system that we have in the Navy, or the broad value system that you have in the Marine Corps, the broad value system that you have in the Army. There are actual tactics that you can know that can save your ass in certain situations. And, you know, when I was in trade at, like I remember sometimes, especially when I first got home from Ramadi, I'd be watching a guy move through the streets in, in mount training, right?

• 15:51Jocko Willink?

  And I would feel like sick to my stomach if a guy wasn't taking cover. And it's a really simple thing that, hey, someone tells you, hey, listen, man, only move from cover to cover. Don't ever be in a spot where you're standing and you're not in cover. Don't ever let that happen. When you're not behind cover, you're moving. That's the way it is.

• 16:11Jocko Willink?

  Obviously, it wasn't instinctual to a bunch of people coming through, you know, advanced SEAL training, coming through workup. There would be, out of every 10 new guys, there would be three of them that would stand around in the open, like, nothing's gonna happen to them. And so there's, there's instincts, and that's why when I read this passage, I was like, the feeling of the sickness, that I can only imagine is even worse for him. Because he's thinking, here's another ship with however many 300 souls going down on it. And I know that

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  I could have had them, you know, do, do whatever they could have done differently. And, and the lessons just didn't get passed on. And, and that's why, to me, this book that you've written is so important, because it does have lessons that I saw, I saw us relearn some of the lessons that you've got in this book. I, I watched this happen. And so,

• 17:05Jocko Willink?

  I'm glad, look, I'm, I wish you would have written it earlier, right? I wish you would have written it 10 years ago or 15 years ago, uh, but you didn't, because you're lazy.

• 17:16Jocko Willink?

  But it took you seven years to write this thing. And the lessons are, are just, they're just awesome and they're important. And, you know, you know, the whole dynamic, when you understand the whole dynamic of...

• 17:33Jocko Willink?

  Where, where this personality comes from, where this mode of operating that, that is sort of, look, the SEAL teams, every SEAL is a little bit different, but there's some core things there that are, that they're gonna be there. No matter what SEAL you talk to, from what generation, they've got this, they got a couple of things in their soul. And when people start to, those things can fade, but when people start to understand where that thing, that little nugget in their soul, where that came from, and they go, oh, that's actually not just a, that's not just a rock, that's a cornerstone. And we should focus on that. We should remember that. We should know where that came from. We should know why that was important, that we had that characteristic, or we had that, that, that way of thinking about things. And for me, this book illuminated so many

• 18:18Jocko Willink?

  threads of the thought process that we have as SEALs, where they came from, to make sure when someone says, well, you know, we, we need to just fall in line with, no, actually, we don't need to just fall in line. There's a reason that we think this way. There's a reason that it's beneficial. There's a reason that it's beneficial to keep an open mind. There's a reason that it's beneficial to utilize decentralized command. There's a reason for those things, and we should never forget where they came from. And the more we understand where they came from, the more we can act upon them correctly.

• 18:47Ben Milligan?

  Right.

• 18:48Jocko Willink?

  So, with that, I'm sorry, your book gets me super fired up about some stuff.

• 18:55Jocko Willink?

  So, this, uh, my idea, and I don't know how well we're gonna be able to stick this idea, because you have way too much freaking, you have way too many facts and stories running around in your head, and I've got too many questions running around in mind. But my idea was to try and go through some of the chapters, and like you just did, you just said you cut about 15 pages, cut out 15 pages of Arlie Burke. By the way, did you actually write those 15 pages?

• 19:19Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, yeah, they're written.

• 19:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:20Ben Milligan?

  I mean, I had.

• 19:21Jocko Willink?

  That's horrible.

• 19:22Ben Milligan?

  Some of it's like, you know, some of it's like.

• 19:24Jocko Willink?

  Some of it's notes.

• 19:25Ben Milligan?

  No, no, no. I mean, it's all written. And it was all like, I mean, I mean, I have not a paragraph, but I have a couple of sentences on Burke's wife. Like, all right, I need, not all of this needs to be written. You know, but when you find, like, I don't know your experience, but when you're editing, like, if you're writing a novel, I expect like, the, the impulse when you're, you know, cutting stuff, is that, you know, you have a turn of phrase that you really like, and you're like, oh, man, that is. I mean, that's the best thing that's been written since the Bible. And you don't want to get rid of it, and your editor tells you, "Well, nobody gets what you're trying to say. It sucks. You know, you need to lose it." But I think when you're, you know, when you're writing history, and you're, you've done all this research,

• 20:10Ben Milligan?

  you've followed, you know, you know, so many rabbit holes, and you've done so many requests, the Navy Yard, or wherever you've gotten your material, and you've found what you think is this incredible document. You want to use that stuff. I mean, you fought for it. I mean, you want to put it in there. I mean, I, um, I have a lot of detail in each sentence. And I don't do that, you know, to make a reader, you know, frustrated. I have it because, you know, I'm, I'm, the way that I'm writing is I have four note cards that all sit in front of me. And those four note cards, you will usually have, you know, two or three points on them. I'll star which one, which point I have on each note card. I'll be like, "I want to put that, that, and that in one sentence." How do I do that? Like, how do I fit all that, you know, stuff in there?

• 20:54Ben Milligan?

  So, yes, I did. I cut probably between 10 and 15 pages of Burke's biography. However, when I, when I rewrote the chapter, I didn't completely lose that. I mean, I, I try to say that I, I left as much on the field as possible. I just, you know, compressed it into this really, really, you know, tight diamond of, of information. But yeah, everybody, I mean, I, there were whole characters that I cut, and I got better as time went on. So, um, when I was thinking about how we were going to do this, and I started to go back through, you know, chapter by chapter, you know, what were sections that I cut, what were sections that I lost? And, um, you know, not just characters, but entire episodes. I saw, um, I saw in these chapters, my notes that I was putting together were getting shorter and shorter

• 21:39Ben Milligan?

  and shorter each chapter, because I was learning as I was doing this whole book. And I, I did my research, and I did my writing, chapter by chapter. I would research and write one chapter, and I would go back to an archive. I'd collect all the stuff, and I'd write that next chapter. And then I'd do it again for the third chapter, for whatever it was doing. And I got better as I went.

• 21:58Jocko Willink?

  Better at identifying what what was gonna fit and also you must have seen a better, a clearer vision of the story arc.

• 22:05Ben Milligan?

  Yes.

• 22:05Jocko Willink?

  And so you knew what was important and what was not.

• 22:07Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, much better, much better idea of the story and much better respect for my reader. Cause I was, you know, when I was reading this, I was completely in love with my own pen. I thought everything I wrote was fantastic. I wrote the first chapter, I said, well, you know, I probably should just send this off to the Pulitzer committee. So they have just, you know, have this thing up front. They'll, they'll know what's coming eventually. But, you know, when I reread that chapter six months after I'd written it and I saw it was like, I'm not sure why that character's in here. It's like, oh, that, I don't know about him either. I found myself, I had like, I, I, I did five introductions of five different characters in that first chapter before I really got to Carlson and his Raiders.

• 22:52Ben Milligan?

  Like, what the hell was I doing? Like, I don't even know why I spent all that time doing it. Like, I was just, but I was learning, you know, even you're, you're learning the process and you're learning how to get better as you go.

• 23:05Ben Milligan?

  But yeah.

• 23:06Jocko Willink?

  You seem to think about the, you seem to think about the reader a lot more than I do. Are you like, oh, I don't wanna put the reader through this, I'm like.

• 23:13Ben Milligan?

  Well, I'm the reader. I mean, I mean, I'm the reader. I'm my imagine, I mean, I'm, I'm my own reader. Like I wrote, like I said, I, I wrote the book that I wanted to read. And I, you know, but like you, you have to think about your, your reader. You have to, or at least I felt, felt like I have to think about my reader because otherwise I'm writing a diary. I don't wanna write a diary. I want people to read what I'm writing.

• 23:35Jocko Willink?

  I guess the closest I would come to is like, does this, would this make sense if I was reading it? So yeah, I guess I'd think about the reader a little bit.

• 23:41Ben Milligan?

  You're your reader, you're, I mean.

• 23:42Jocko Willink?

  I don't think about the reader. It sounds like you think about the reader sympathetically. They're getting no sympathy for me. You're like, well, I don't wanna put the reader through this. I'm like, I hate the reader, I'm bored with this.

• 23:52Ben Milligan?

  I don't know if I, like I, my reader was, uh, um, I wanted it to be, I wanted my reader to be, you know, a team guy. I wanted this book to be for the seals, but I wanted my mom to be able to read it too. So that when I was thinking like, when I wrote this paragraph up,

• 24:10Ben Milligan?

  uh, was it sufficiently dense? Was it sufficiently, was there, was there enough material in it or enough interesting things on that to, you know, to make me like, oh, that's, that's good stuff. But was it also written well enough that my mom could understand it? That's what I was thinking about. Well, also the last time that we were on here.

• 24:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 24:27Ben Milligan?

  Uh, and you asked me what my mom did and I just said that she was a housewife.

• 24:30Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh. How'd that go over?

• 24:31Ben Milligan?

  It didn't go over great.

• 24:32Jocko Willink?

  So what's the real deal?

• 24:36Ben Milligan?

  I don't, I don't have a great, my mom was everything. She did everything.

• 24:40Jocko Willink?

  You set yourself up and that's real life?

• 24:41Ben Milligan?

  No, my mom did everything. She was, uh, she was, she was the chief of staff.

• 24:46Jocko Willink?

  There you go. That's a, that sounds better than housewife, I guess.

• 24:49Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 24:49Jocko Willink?

  Um, unless you're a badass housewife, in which case you're like, yeah, I'm a badass housewife. What's up? We know what that entails. That means I'm the, the, the, the chief staff officer, the chief financial officer, the troop motivator. You're everything.

• 25:02Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 25:03Jocko Willink?

  Getting after it. So there you go, moms.

• 25:05Ben Milligan?

  So now she can stop being mad at me when it's six months later?

• 25:10Jocko Willink?

  All right. So my, my thought was we go through this and talk about some of the, cause you, you know, you and I had conversations during the, during the podcast, after the podcast, about the amount of people, the same thing you're saying right now. You had to just cut things out, cut stories out.

• 25:21Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 25:22Jocko Willink?

  And so many of these things can, can be their own book, can be their own story. You could peel, pull back the, pull the thread on any of these characters and you could, you could, you have your own book. You have another book on just about any of these characters.

• 25:35Jocko Willink?

  But I thought just going through some of the chapters, going through the chapters and talking about some of the things that didn't quite make it. Uh, chapter one. Is called the reluctant, by the way, I was thinking about this as I was putting this together. Chapter one is called the reluctant creation and violent demise of the Navy's first commandos, the Marine Corps Raiders. Your subtitles for each chapter indicate that you have a lot to say. This is gonna be a long book. Like, chapter one, the reluctant, you know, my books have like, chapter one, get some, you know, boom, we're done, right? Chapter two, get more. Like, I'm an idiot. You're over here, the reluctant creation and violent demise of the Navy's first commandos, the Marine Corps Raiders.

• 26:12Ben Milligan?

  That was my editors. That was Julian Pavia. He, uh, he sort of insisted. So each of my chapters were something like, I don't know, like, it wasn't, it wasn't as, uh, as tight as like Carlson's Raiders, but it was something like, uh, the, the only one that I remember is for chapter five from my UDTs. It was like the, the mermen of war. Before they had come up with the frogmen as like a moniker for them. They were calling them like, really clunky.

• 26:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh, God, that's awful, especially after that movie. What's that movie? Echo Charles?

• 26:38Ben Milligan?

  Which one?

• 26:38Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Zoolander. You know what I'm talking about? So in the movie Zoolander, uh, which has Owen Wilson in it. Who's like, one of my favorite people of all time. That guy seems so chill and cool. And it also has

• 26:54Ben Milligan?

  Ben Stiller.

• 26:54Jocko Willink?

  Ben Stiller. So Ben Stiller plays like a really dumb model, a man model, right? And he comes from some friggin' mining town in Pennsylvania or something. And he's in this bar with his dad. He's trying to be like more manly. And his dad's in there and his dad's played by, uh,

• 27:12Ben Milligan?

  John Voight.

• 27:12Jocko Willink?

  John Voight. They're all, they're all like covered in mine dust.

• 27:16Ben Milligan?

  Vince Vaughn's in there, no lines. He has no lines.

• 27:18Jocko Willink?

  Just no lines, just being tough. And so Ben Stiller's in there trying to be tougher. And a, and a commercial comes on the TV and it's him advertising some like fragrance. And he's dressed up like a mermaid and his dad's like, I can't have you running around here as a damn mermaid. And he says, it's not a mermaid, dad. It's merman.

• 27:43Jocko Willink?

  So that's what I thought of when I saw that thing. I was reading through it yesterday. I'm like, did we really have to go there with the Merman?

• 27:49Ben Milligan?

  Clunky.

• 27:50Jocko Willink?

  Clunky's at the least. Alright, so.

• 27:52Ben Milligan?

  So but my, yes, so his point was you need to give the reader some idea of what's in store for them. Like if you start a chapter on the, if you, okay, so imagine you're a reader. You're picking up a book ostensibly about the Navy SEALs. And that first chapter is, you know, you're, you're reading page, you know, three pages and it's all about the Marine Corps. What the hell are you doing? You have to give, you know, your reader some idea of what this is about. And, you know, when I, when I thought about it, you know, it completely made sense because, you know, now I'm, I'm not just doing the, you know, the reader, you know, help on chapter one with the Marine Corps Raiders. But I'm going to help, I'm going to be helping the reader when it gets to the Army Rangers and everything else.

• 28:34Ben Milligan?

  Like it has to tie back in, each of these chapters had to tie back in to the SEAL teams. It had to be relevant to, you know, how the Navy had, you know, created this first.

• 28:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Ben Milligan?

  Well, that's why we have the clunky.

• 28:45Jocko Willink?

  That's why you have the big, long. Big, long titles for all your chapters. You, you're one of these guys that pulls off like, hey, if I'm just really nice, maybe Jaco will leave me alone. You're like, you gave this super nice explanation. Now I kind of feel bad. Like, no, that's a good title. You did good. You put me in check all humble and I'm like, oh my God, I'm a jerk.

• 29:04Ben Milligan?

  I'll just go, I'll leave.

• 29:06Jocko Willink?

  So, uh,

• 29:10Jocko Willink?

  Marine Corps, um,

• 29:13Jocko Willink?

  let's talk about this chapter. I know one of the guys that you mentioned to me is a guy named Pete Ellis.

• 29:18Ben Milligan?

  Pete Ellis.

• 29:19Jocko Willink?

  He didn't make the cut, huh?

• 29:21Ben Milligan?

  No, I thought Pete Ellis, Pete Ellis is relevant because Pete Ellis is the, um, he's the Marine, he's a first world war Marine who is, he's the first Marine to articulate a vision for the Marine Corps that is more than just a subordinate service to the US Navy or the Navy's police force. He imagines, after he sees what the Marine Corps is capable of on the Western Front. The Marine Corps is the, uh, when World War One starts, uh, and, um, the US military finds itself in the trenches, uh, not just in the trenches, but then moving on the German army.

• 29:57Ben Milligan?

  The best force that the United States military has is the Marine Corps. So there's all these marine officers, staff officers, marine commanders, who suddenly, by comparison with their peers in the US Army, see that the Marine Corps is the best service, the most capable service, you know, that we have. So why not, you know, start thinking beyond, you know, just this idea of being, you know, the shipboard, or the shipborne utility force for the US Navy? Why not start thinking of the US Marine Corps as almost a rival to the US Army? So in order to do that, in order to justify that in Congress, the Marine Corps had to articulate a mission for itself. And that mission was, you know, it was essentially come up with by Pete Ellis.

• 30:42Ben Milligan?

  Pete Ellis, he identifies the enemy, or at least, you know, he's writing this in 1922, 20 years before World War II starts. He knows that the next war the US is in is going to be with Imperial Japan. He knows how rapacious Japan is. He knows their ambitions to dominate all of Asia. And if the US military wants to confront Japan, it's going to have to have a force capable of doing that. A force that's not just, you know, like I said, the shipborne utility force of raiders or jungle fighters, anything like that. They're going to have to have all the logistics capable of supporting an amphibious army ashore.

• 31:23Ben Milligan?

  Artillery, aircraft, logistics, ships, landing craft, all that stuff. So he is the one that comes up with this plan. Problem with Pete Ellis is he is a personal disaster. He is, nobody that I wrote about is as much of a liberty risk. I mean, he is, he suffers from depression, something they call neuroaznia. And he, whenever he, when he's writing this plan, the advanced base operations for Micronesia, when he's writing, when he's drafting this plan for the Marine Corps, he's doing periodic bouts at the mental hospital in Washington DC. He

• 32:04Ben Milligan?

  Eventually.

• 32:05Jocko Willink?

  What did he do in World War I?

• 32:07Ben Milligan?

  He was a staff officer, but I wasn't completely clear on his combat record. I got the sense that he actually saw a decent amount of combat. He wrote a plan of operations for, I can't remember which assault it was, I think it was on the Blomkamp section of the Hindenburg Line, but it was supposed to be a brilliant operational plan and it was totally successful. And it was, I think it was noticed by Pershing at one point. It was called one of the best plans in the war. But after that, you know, when he's, you know, during this period of the twenties, after one bout in a mental institution, he convinces the Secretary of the Navy, or

• 32:51Ben Milligan?

  the Under Secretary of the Navy, which is Theodore Roosevelt Jr. at the time, to send him on a, like on an island hopping survey of the Central Pacific, so he can justify, or so he can prove what he suspects, which is the Japanese are building all of these island readouts throughout the Pacific. He gets the authorization by Teddy Roosevelt Jr. He goes out there, something happens at one of these island bars, he starts announcing his intentions while he's on a bender.

• 33:24Ben Milligan?

  The spies try and like, collect him and get him packed off. He manages to escape, escapes the island, makes his way to another island, and then drinks himself to death. There's a, you know, there's a whole cottage industry of writers out there that, you know, say that he was poisoned, or he was killed by the Japanese. I think he was just a drunk and he just, his liver couldn't handle it.

• 33:52Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever train, I don't know what the name of the place is, but for a while, we were using some facility, and I don't want to name it, but you'll know what I'm talking about, that was, used to be an institution, like a mental institution. Did you ever train at that place?

• 34:06Ben Milligan?

  Oh, boy, that sounds familiar.

• 34:08Jocko Willink?

  For a while, we and the teams were going to someplace that was formerly a mental institution. And it was creepy, creepy, like you'd go into certain...

• 34:21Ben Milligan?

  Was this east coast or west coast?

• 34:23Jocko Willink?

  It's in the middle of the country, kind of.

• 34:24Ben Milligan?

  I don't know that I was there.

• 34:25Jocko Willink?

  Um, man, it was weird. You'd go into rooms and you'd just like, look around and there'd be weird...

• 34:34Jocko Willink?

  It was weird. It was really weird. You know, uh, like you get a little bit of scariness. You know what I'm saying? Where, you know, it's night and you, you're with like one other dude and you're standing in some weird hallway and there and it's, it looks like it's from 1922. That's what made me think of it. Like 1922. Well, you know, you start talking about what a mental institution was like in 1922. It's not like what it's like now, right? Right now, it's, you know, probably they've got nice windows and they wanna make things safe and open for people to understand and learn and feel good about themselves. This was not the scenario in this place where I trained at at all, man.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Like what, like an asylum?

• 35:15Jocko Willink?

  Yes. No, a hundred percent.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  It was asylum.

• 35:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was like an asylum.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  You thought it was haunted. That's why you're scared.

• 35:21Jocko Willink?

  Kind of.

• 35:22Ben Milligan?

  I think there's probably justifiable reason to think that too. I mean, when you, you see like, not just, you know, asylums, but uh, there's this been, there's been this story of this uh orphanage in Canada, you know, that had all these indigenous children and they're finding uh, just mass, massive burial plots now of all these kids that were killed there. It's horrific.

• 35:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, that was a

• 35:45Ben Milligan?

  I'm not an expert on that for any

• 35:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that was, that was one of the goals was to uh, just re-educate the children. You see it happening now, right now with our school systems. Kids are getting re-educated in a new way.

• 35:59Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of ending up in asylums. So

• 36:05Jocko Willink?

  there's another character that's uh,

• 36:10Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. A, a, a guy named uh, Red Mike.

• 36:14Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, I was hoping you'd ask about him. You could write a book about Red Mike.

• 36:18Jocko Willink?

  That's um,

• 36:19Ben Milligan?

  Red Mike Edson. He's uh, so when um, I was trying to, you know, sort through the uh, the relevance of the Raiders. Uh, the Raiders are important to the history of the SEAL teams because uh, they're the first instance where the Navy telegraphs its desire for its own raiding force. Uh, they want to Broadcast, or they want to franchise raids throughout the Pacific to draw the Japanese attention away from the areas that they're about to attack. So, Japanese defenses are too consolidated, they want to spread them out on all these islands. So, when, before the invasion of Guadalcanal, it was the Navy's idea to pull the Japanese

• 36:59Ben Milligan?

  attention all the way to the Central Pacific, you know, 2,000 miles north. So, the idea is, launch some submarine raiders on these things. And, you know, like I said, spread the, spread Japanese attention, spread Japanese defenses. And I was looking, I knew that, you know, I knew that that's, that was the goal, and there were two raider battalions to do it, or that were designed to do it. The first raider battalion and the second raider battalion. Now, I knew the second raider battalion had taken Macon, and that was probably more in keeping with the, the point that I'd needed to make, to launch pad into my second chapter. What I didn't like was that I would have to spend so much time with Evans Carlson.

• 37:41Ben Milligan?

  Now, if you read the book, Evans Carlson is one of probably the three most peculiar characters in the book. He's really frustrating, and, you know, you, if you're writing history, you know, the goal is always to be objective with characters. You don't want to telegraph to your reader that you don't like somebody. Evans Carlson is a, is a person, it's hard not to dislike. Merritt Red Mike Edson, on the other hand, is, he's incredible. Like, you, I mean, he's, I mean, he, he was incredible before the war in Nicaragua. He, I mean, he fought, he fought through all these little banana wars.

• 38:21Ben Milligan?

  Like, I, I know that the Marine Corps has this love affair with Chesty Puller. There's no reason that, that they should have any less affinity for Red Mike Edson. He's everywhere during World War II. Leads some of the most daring assaults of the war. He's at Tullaghi, he's at Guadalcanal, he's at Tarawa. I mean, three major battles in Marine Corps history. He's got a, I think he had two Navy Crosses, a Medal of Honor, Silver Stars. I mean, he was, he was incredible.

• 38:56Ben Milligan?

  And he's got a terribly tragic end. He.

• 39:01Jocko Willink?

  It's bizarre.

• 39:02Ben Milligan?

  It is bizarre. Did you read about him?

• 39:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Ben Milligan?

  He, uh, he, he leaves the Navy or he leaves the Marine Corps uh, under protest when, uh, during the, uh, the revolt of the admirals, uh, after World War Two, right before the Korean War. Um, when the army and the air force kind of collaborated to, uh, strip the Navy and the Marine Corps of funding. Uh, he resigns the Marine Corps in protest so he can, uh, protest more loudly. Um, he, he has a series of jobs and eventually he commits suicide in his garage. He, um, I don't know. I mean, it's one of those, you don't hear a lot of, uh, World War Two veterans that, uh, that, that made that decision. Um, but I mean, it stands to reason, you know, considering everything that we're going through right now.

• 39:48Ben Milligan?

  I mean, someone who has gone through as much as, you know, Red Mike Edson did, had suffered as many blast injuries as he no doubt, you know, suffered. I think he was probably dealing with all the same, uh, same things that so many of our friends are.

• 40:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So, um, I think that idea of resigning in protest and what you get from it, where, where it ends up is a tough thing to talk about because once you're done.

• 40:16Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 40:17Jocko Willink?

  You're done. You're done. And actually, um, I think it was Green during the Vietnam War, addressed it, who he was like the commander of the Marine Corps. I, I can't, I forgive my memory, but, you know, he was getting interviewed. Well, why didn't you, you know, leave? Cause you got McNamara, who's a jackass. You got LBJ, who's a total jackass. Maybe it's time just to, you know, make your statement. Hey, and he said, look, I'll be in the news for, for 48 hours and then that's it. They'll have another guy and I'll have no influence. And that's, you know, I've often talked about Hackworth doing the same thing in Vietnam, you know? He could have been a division, he could have been a brigade commander, could have been a division commander, would have had whatever, thousands of troops underneath him that he could have fought in a different way, but instead he sort of resigned in protest.

• 41:00Ben Milligan?

  Right.

• 41:00Jocko Willink?

  And, and yeah, you know, there's a, there's another, um, the commanding officer of, uh,

• 41:10Jocko Willink?

  I want to say the lost battalion world war one, but he was a medal of honor recipient and he killed himself. Um, after the, he was one of the pall bearers at

• 41:24Jocko Willink?

  the two, for the tomb of the unknown soldier. And you know, that happened, I want to say like 1919 was when they actually had everything set up for the, to dedicate the tomb of the unknown soldier. He was one, as a medal of honor recipient, he was one of the guys that

• 41:42Jocko Willink?

  that was one of those pall bearers. And then I think it was about a year later, he booked a, a sea passage from New York to Cuba or New York to Florida or something. And then wrote it, wrote a note and disappeared, you know, killed himself.

• 41:59Ben Milligan?

  Did you read that Patrick O'Donnell book?

• 42:01Jocko Willink?

  What is it called?

• 42:03Ben Milligan?

  I can't remember what it, what it's called. It was just one that I had seen. It was, it looked interesting.

• 42:08Jocko Willink?

  What's it about?

• 42:09Ben Milligan?

  It's about the tomb of the unknown soldier.

• 42:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. No, I did not read it.

• 42:13Ben Milligan?

  I'd be curious to read it. It's about, I think it's about all, all the pall bearers in that.

• 42:21Jocko Willink?

  Wow. Oh, there's one of them.

• 42:25Jocko Willink?

  And it will, a little bit, what, what, what was it that you didn't like about Carlson so much?

• 42:30Ben Milligan?

  Carlson, he's just, man, Carlson is

• 42:41Ben Milligan?

  and Carlson, I, there were lots of characters that I came in contact with that are other Carlsons. They're characters that you, you know, they, they've done, I mean, they've done an incredible amount for their country and

• 43:00Ben Milligan?

  but you can, you have the benefit of hindsight, you have the benefit of perspective and you have to, um, you have to weigh in on their legacy.

• 43:09Ben Milligan?

  So. Has Carlson done more than me? Yeah. Has Carlson done more than you? Yeah. I mean, he's fought through World War II. He's not even close. Yeah, there's nothing we can't compare, you know, our contribution to somebody like Carlson. He's in the first, one of the first raids of the entire war, and then he fights in successive battles. What's important about Carlson, though, is that the Marine Corps loses all respect for him after the Macon Island Raid. They give him another chance with the long patrol on Guadalcanal, and he does admirable work there, but it's not enough to overshadow the defeat and the aftermath of the Macon Island Raid.

• 43:54Ben Milligan?

  The Macon Island Raid, it isn't really known how disastrous it is until 1943, a whole year later, when US forces retake the island, and they discover that the Marines that they believed to have been drowned in the evacuation weren't drowned but captured and killed, beheaded by the Japanese. So it's sort of a failure that kind of unfolds over time. But when the full scope of the failure of the Macon Island Raid is understood, the Marine Corps never lets Evans-Carlson command troops ever again. Now, that's perfectly, you know, fine for the Marine Corps leadership.

• 44:38Ben Milligan?

  Was there something about his personality that... His personality, yeah, but there's also his politics. He was, I think he was a borderline communist. He was definitely a populist, definitely like a socialist populist. But he was, by the end of the war, he's advocating for the Chinese, not the Nationalists, Chinese, the Chinese communists.

• 45:02Ben Milligan?

  Eventually, he dies in disgrace penniless because he resigned from the Marine Corps. I can't remember exactly what happens to him in the aftermath, but I know he has no money. Teddy Roosevelt has to pay for his funeral. Not Teddy Roosevelt, James Roosevelt. But some of it's his personality, some of it's just he's kind of ponderous. Like, he's a bit boring, like, you know, stuffy. Like, one of the things that I think is most telling, the most descriptive episode I have, or a little vignette in the book, is when one of his junior officers comes up to him and asks him for, you know, a few books to read that will help him understand, you know, how to command or the military art better.

• 45:46Ben Milligan?

  And all the books that Carlson recommends are books that he's written. Like, you've got to think a lot of yourself to tell somebody, you know, if they're looking for books to read, "Read these five that I've written." So he tried to read them, and they're all impenetrable, boring books about China. Like, he gave up.

• 46:06Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm very thankful right now for the book About Face by Colonel David Hackworth, because whenever somebody says, "Hey, you know, what's a good book for me to read about leadership?" I always say, "Oh, yeah, Read About Face." Because otherwise, I'd be pulling a Carlson and telling him to read Extreme Ownership or Leadership Strategy and Tactics. I'm a loser. No, you don't like me, too. I'm right up there with Carlson.

• 46:27Ben Milligan?

  I didn't say that.

• 46:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, if it wasn't for Hackworth, I'd be right up there with Carlson.

• 46:30Ben Milligan?

  Oh, and hang on, you haven't seen the books that Carlson wrote, too. I had to read them.

• 46:34Jocko Willink?

  Were they just nasty?

• 46:36Ben Milligan?

  They're just boring.

• 46:37Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember any titles of them?

• 46:39Ben Milligan?

  Uh...

• 46:40Jocko Willink?

  Did you read the whole thing, or you're like, "This is ridiculous. I get the idea. Carlson's a dork."

• 46:45Ben Milligan?

  In the beginning, I did. In the beginning, I had everything collected. I read books that I knew that Carlson had read, just because I wanted to think like he was thinking. He was fascinated with Mao, so I was reading Mao when I was writing this chapter. So I got better with my research as I went on. But at the time, like, when I wrote Chapter One, I had not yet stepped into an archive. I wrote the first draft of Chapter One just based off of, out of, books that existed, from online archives. I was able to find a ton of material online on the Macon Island raid, so, I mean, you pay, you know, 20 bucks a month, you have access to Fold Three and a couple of other archives, and you can find the after-action report of the USS Nautilus or the USS Argonaut.

• 47:33Ben Milligan?

  So, you know, not having stepped into an archive, I was taking advantage of everything else that was available to me. All the books that Carlson had written, books that Mao had written, you know, things, things like that. So I was, I was saturated with all this stuff, this sort of extraneous. And I got better, you know, in my research. So, chapter two was the first time I stepped foot into an archive and I was like, oh, I can do this better. So.

• 47:56Jocko Willink?

  All right, well, let's get to chapter two. Um, chapter two, which is called "The Sidelining of the Army's Amphibious Soldier Scouts and the Call-Up of the Navy's Second-String Sailors."

• 48:12Ben Milligan?

  I think that's a pretty good title.

• 48:14Jocko Willink?

  It's pretty good, pretty good.

• 48:15Ben Milligan?

  All right, for the second string sailors, that's a nod to, you know, these guys, all these second string sailors were all members, every single one of the initial, uh, Navy contingent of the Scouts and Raider Program are all NFL veterans. They've all been, Buck Lou, he's, uh, not only, um, a, uh, not only was he a college football star, not only an NFL star, but he was, uh, uh, he was building his own football team.

• 48:45Jocko Willink?

  He made his own team, right?

• 48:46Ben Milligan?

  He, he founded the Columbus Bullies, uh, and it would have probably been a, um, a successful NFL franchise had it not been for the start of World War II.

• 48:55Jocko Willink?

  That is a freaking legit name, too, right?

• 48:58Ben Milligan?

  Columbus Bullies.

• 48:59Jocko Willink?

  The Columbus Bullies.

• 49:01Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Jocko Willink?

  Man, if I would have known, see, if I would have known that, tasking a bruiser might have been tasking it bullies. I guess it doesn't quite work quite as well, does it?

• 49:11Ben Milligan?

  No, seems kind of sinister.

• 49:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but today's, I guess, I guess, especially in today's climate, you'd be like, politically incorrect to call yourself the Bullies.

• 49:20Ben Milligan?

  That's true.

• 49:21Jocko Willink?

  I'm a bully.

• 49:22Ben Milligan?

  He looked like a bully. If you see pictures of him, there, I mean, I went through, you know, like piles of pictures of Buck Lou, um, and, uh,

• 49:31Ben Milligan?

  You know, every, every picture, especially in those World War II days, he just looks like a, looks like a dick. He's a natural. Looks like it. But that's completely opposite of what everybody I talked to said of his personality. He said, they, they all described him as the nicest guy. Like, he was, he was just so much fun to be around. Was super humble. But yeah, every picture, he managed to like, you know, go from what I assume is a, you know, pretty fun-loving guy and to, you know, has this big scowl on his face.

• 50:00Jocko Willink?

  And so what, I, I meant to go down this path with a little bit of Carlson. So Carlson's personality, was, was he a dick? Was he a arrogant guy?

• 50:09Ben Milligan?

  No.

• 50:09Jocko Willink?

  What was his deal?

• 50:10Ben Milligan?

  He was, uh...

• 50:11Jocko Willink?

  How did he end up on these failing missions? Was it a lack of experience?

• 50:15Ben Milligan?

  I think it was, it was a couple of things. He, um, he was infatuated with the Chinese and the Chinese operational system. He was in, uh, the, the, the Marine Corps, or the, the slogan, the Marine Corps slogan of gung ho, came from Carlson. He, that's his, that's his lasting legacy to the Marine Corps. We understand gung ho to me, an expression that, um, you know, epitomizes, you know, Marine Corps tenacity and Marine Corps, um, what he...

• 50:42Jocko Willink?

  Freaking charge the machine gun nests is what it means.

• 50:45Ben Milligan?

  Uh, but...

• 50:45Jocko Willink?

  What up? But it really means work together.

• 50:48Ben Milligan?

  It means work together. Right. It's a Chinese expression. It's vague. I'm not sure if it's even accurate, but he took it from his time, uh, on the long march with Mao's guerrillas. Um, yeah, it means work together. Uh, but...

• 51:00Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what, when we picked apart, uh, some of Mao's work on the podcast, the thing that's crazy about Mao's work is, it's ba, it's essentially saying you need to utilize decentralized command to win in military operations. And I'm like, hey, bro, Mao, that applies to everything, dude. Like, you can't have decentralized organization in order to win a war and then centralize your government as soon as you're done and think that you can explain how many, you know, what, what every farmer in the, in the country's supposed to grow and how much we're gonna sell, whatever we're gonna sell it for. Like, it's crazy that they came to that conclusion.

• 51:34Ben Milligan?

  I don't understand, you know, there's so many contradictions like that in World War II. Uh, I mean, how are the Germans, who are the most, you know, hierarchical government system, you know, on the planet? And they managed to produce a military that was able to use initiative, decentralized command, yet at the top, they're stultified. They, they don't, they can't accomplish anything. I mean, they can't, you know, release the Panzers and D-Day. Like, I mean, they're... But yeah, at the lower level, they're, you know, able to do, you know, able to be dynamic and fluid and agile and all the rest.

• 52:03Jocko Willink?

  You know what, when your ego starts to get out of control, you start to think, I better control everything. That's what happens. And you could see, I mean, it seemed like Hitler did that throughout World War II. The more he won, the more he thought, well, I better just control everything. See, it's working. I better just keep doing this. And by the end, it was all on him. Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna attack Russia, even though his generals are saying, hey, bro, not a good idea. No, we're doing it.

• 52:24Ben Milligan?

  Yeah. But Carlson, the other thing that Carlson did was he was, he was so infatuated with the Chinese system that he was, he would eat with his men, he would have these like town hall discussions, he would, he essentially abolished rank, except for like in certain aspects. He, but when he got on the, I mean, when he was, you know, on the actual Macon Island raid, you can see a clear misunderstanding of what the mission was. Which told me, I mean, that is conveying to you, he doesn't know what his mission objective is. He hasn't thought through. He spent two weeks sitting on a submarine, you know, driving across the Pacific under,

• 53:09Ben Milligan?

  you know, completely miserable conditions, you know, sweating, you know, through his, you know, yeah, like, and he finally gets there.

• 53:16Jocko Willink?

  I was on modern day subs that had AC and they were super clean and you're not worried about getting depth charges dropped on your freaking head. Imagine a two week transit?

• 53:26Ben Milligan?

  No, I can't.

• 53:27Jocko Willink?

  God. Diesel fumes all up in there.

• 53:31Ben Milligan?

  And he gets there, they get on the island and they look around and there's, you know, there's nothing really to raid. I mean, just the fact that they landed there, the fact that they were able to assault a Japanese position and win. Mission accomplished, get off the island. There's nothing else that you have to do here. There's no intelligence that you're really gonna gather. But he, he just, he's paralyzed, which just, you know, like I said, it conveys that he doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't really know what the, the purpose of this mission is. He hasn't connected, you know, the Navy's planners' vision, you know, to their actions on, on that island.

• 54:07Jocko Willink?

  And then you're comparing that to Buck Lou, who was like a good guy, a nice guy, even though he looked like a bully. So what you, you said this is when you started going into the archives for the first time was chapter two?

• 54:22Ben Milligan?

  Chapter two, yeah.

• 54:22Jocko Willink?

  Cause you didn't spend enough freaking time invested in research just on, just on online reading Carlson's books. So you wanted more. You're a glutton.

• 54:33Ben Milligan?

  I don't know. I mean, if I had known, so there were two things that I got from chapter one, writing that I was like, I was encouraged because I felt like I was a good researcher. I'd put, you know, a compelling chapter together.

• 54:48Jocko Willink?

  Were you a sniper?

• 54:49Ben Milligan?

  No, I was a calm guy and a breacher.

• 54:54Ben Milligan?

  J-TAC type.

• 54:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was a calm guy too, but I'm just thinking from a patient's perspective.

• 55:00Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, I'm really antsy. It's, I find my, yeah, I, I don't know what the disconnect is because I find myself like in ever, whenever I'm being instructed now, or like I find myself like, I get real like, I can't, I can't listen to this guy. I gotta get out of here. I'll find myself just leaving.

• 55:16Jocko Willink?

  I would have thought you would have gone down the sniper route because you have this, you know, super, anyone that's, you know, going into archives and, and reading Carlson's third book on whatever communist leadership from 1932.

• 55:29Ben Milligan?

  Now, I didn't want to read it though. Like I remember looking at that book and just kind of like hanging my head like I gotta read another one of these things.

• 55:37Ben Milligan?

  I don't know what, I don't know why I was compelled to do it. I was though, and I wanted, I just wanted to get it right. I wanted to, I wanted to have a good idea of who this guy was. And I also didn't have the benefit of reading Carlson's, you know, letters like I did with other people, you know, say like a Buck Lou or a Halpern.

• 55:52Jocko Willink?

  Is that because Carlson didn't have letters?

• 55:53Ben Milligan?

  No, he has them. I just didn't go to the archive.

• 55:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so now you get to the archives.

• 55:57Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 55:57Jocko Willink?

  And now you're starting to find real.

• 55:59Ben Milligan?

  I'm finding real documents. I'm finding like, I'm getting, I know Buck Lou, I know Halpern because I've, I'm, I'm reading their letters. I'm reading like, um, I'm reading, you know, the letters of the, the folks that, um, you know, created the scouts and raiders like Petticord. And, you know, not just, you know, reading their letters, but I'm talking to family members, talking to people that actually knew them, and getting a real sense of who they are. It completely changed how I researched, but it did, it also told me one thing. I was not going to be able to, you know, write this book from my basement, which was terrifying. I was gonna have to go places, I was gonna have to, you know, hunt for stuff. And it was terrifying in the beginning. And talk to people. Talk to people, the worst. That, that did become like, you know, the one nice thing about, you know, writing a book

• 56:43Ben Milligan?

  about World War II is, um, you don't have anybody arguing with what you're gonna write about them, you know? They don't exist, they're not around anymore. Yeah, when you get to Vietnam, I'll tell you, I'll tell you a story later in the podcast. There's people who are still alive that I wrote about that don't like what was written about them. Ouch. But, you know, you, you insulate yourself from, you know, the, the criticism by your due diligence. You make sure that you get it right. If you don't, shame on you. But in chapter two- Have you had to retract anything? No, there's nothing that I've retracted. Nothing, there's nothing that I would, I've, I've communicated with, with folks, uh, you know, after.

• 57:24Ben Milligan?

  Um, and, and the, uh, one case, uh, he, the, the person I wrote about, he had just passed away. His family read about, uh, what I wrote about them. It's nothing, you know, particularly damning or anything like that, but they weren't, uh, they weren't thrilled to hear that their dad had, um, you know, not completely succeeded in Vietnam and had kinda run off with a nurse in Saigon. So what I said to them is, you know, they, they, they were, I think the, the note that they sent me said, you know, "We were disappointed to learn about, you know, what you perceive as our dad's failure in Vietnam." And I responded, "I don't think your dad was a failure, absolutely not.

• 58:09Ben Milligan?

  He prepared SEAL Team One for war." He failed in this one narrow, narrow context. And that context being, did he advance or, uh, did he advance naval special warfare toward, you know, what they ultimately became, land-focused commando raiders? I, in, in that context, no, he didn't. In another, he did. He was a success. But, um, you know, I, I told them, I, you know, even though, uh-

• 58:39Ben Milligan?

  He failed in that, you know, particular moment. Lots of people were failing in that particular moment. Nobody really understood what, you know, what they were getting their hands into.

• 58:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's really easy to look back with hindsight and say, well, yeah, we've done, obviously, we should have done this instead of that. It's like very easy to look back and say that, you know?

• 58:57Ben Milligan?

  Right. And so I ultimately told him, I was like, I'm, I'm proud to call him my teammate. I mean, I, I look at his legacy and, you know, I, I see, you know, mistakes that I made. Like, I'm not perfect either and nobody is. So, anyway.

• 59:11Jocko Willink?

  So, so we get the second string sailors. These are the tuna fish, right?

• 59:16Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Jocko Willink?

  He's the tuna fish.

• 59:19Ben Milligan?

  These are all guys that have gotten kind of roped into the US Navy, um, kind of accidentally. Like Bucklew, he joins the Navy because the Army and the Marine Corps won't take him because he's a humongous. I mean, he's too big. He tries to volunteer for the paratroopers. He's too big. And the, the quote from, from his oral history is that the recruiter told him that the, uh, the Army could take two instead of him based on just his weight, which is completely accurate. And Bucklew isn't even the biggest one. Big John Trippson, um, when you see pictures of Bucklew and Trippson next to each other, Trippson is a head taller than Bucklew.

• 59:54Jocko Willink?

  How tall you think Trippson was?

• 59:55Ben Milligan?

  I have six, seven, probably. I mean, he's massive. He's a mountain of a man. He's huge.

• 1:00:00Jocko Willink?

  Six, seven?

• 1:00:01Ben Milligan?

  And he's just big.

• 1:00:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We had this conversation on the last podcast because imagine being six, seven, like two sixty, two seventy in nineteen forty.

• 1:00:13Ben Milligan?

  Right.

• 1:00:14Jocko Willink?

  I mean, no one's even lifting, bro.

• 1:00:15Ben Milligan?

  No, nobody's lifting.

• 1:00:16Jocko Willink?

  These guys are just jacked through nature.

• 1:00:19Ben Milligan?

  Through football. They're playing a lot of football, like, and Halpern, who I wrote about, he's the smallest one. Halpern was the, you know, he's the Jewish guy that, you know, went to play for Notre Dame. And, uh, I think he was like six, two, two twenty-five, something like that. And he's the smallest, the smallest of the tuna fish.

• 1:00:37Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, so all these guys end up in the Navy. Which and they're thinking, hey, we're gonna figure something out because we're jacked. We're physical, we're kind of beasts.

• 1:00:47Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, they they pull them in to be like calisthenics.

• 1:00:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say that, and that's what they get pulled.

• 1:00:52Ben Milligan?

  They think that that's what they're gonna do. They think they're, you know, joining to go, you know, do this like, you know, whatever commando program and they get, you know, roped into, you know, Gene Tunney. Gene Tunney is, you know, he's a famous character himself. He's the uh,

• 1:01:07Ben Milligan?

  he's the two-time boxing champion. He beat, uh, help me out.

• 1:01:13Jocko Willink?

  Joe Louis?

• 1:01:14Ben Milligan?

  No, not Joe Louis. Um,

• 1:01:17Ben Milligan?

  this is terrible because I wrote, I wrote two whole pages about Tunney's fight in Philadelphia, uh, with um.

• 1:01:26Jocko Willink?

  I can't think of it. Uh, I know that I know that you wrote about the fact that he like trained. He was the first person that trained.

• 1:01:33Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, he's the first guy that like.

• 1:01:35Jocko Willink?

  That that that was going through physical training in order to get good. And he was able to, he only fought like three times though.

• 1:01:43Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Jocko Willink?

  And two of those were championship fights.

• 1:01:46Ben Milligan?

  Jack Dempsey.

• 1:01:47Jocko Willink?

  Jack Dempsey, that's right.

• 1:01:50Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, all right, so now we got these guys.

• 1:01:53Ben Milligan?

  So, yeah, so they they're they're in Gene Tunney's regime of physical fitness instructors. They're kind of getting, uh, they're taking Navy recruits. They're they're they're training them. They're putting them through, um, you know, little little PT sessions like, uh, they're they're doing log PTs. They're doing like little, uh, like group activities, these stuff that, you know, uh, either Gene Tunney had pulled from the Marine Corps or, uh, that they had kind of, um, developed along the way themselves. Which, you know, that's gonna plant a seed for later when, you know, the scouts and raiders, uh, uh, conditioning curriculum gets compressed by Draper Coffin. Uh, but they all volunteer for this, uh, this commando program. They don't really know what it is.

• 1:02:36Ben Milligan?

  Uh, but then they get hoodwinked again from, um, you know, Tunney's regime, uh, to being landing craft skippers for Army commandos, the, you know, the Raider, uh, section of the Scouts and Raider program.

• 1:02:48Jocko Willink?

  That would piss me off so bad.

• 1:02:50Ben Milligan?

  Wouldn't it?

• 1:02:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man.

• 1:02:51Ben Milligan?

  They find themselves out there and they're like, all right, you guys are gonna be in charge of the boats.

• 1:02:57Jocko Willink?

  I would be angry. What's the character? You got some guy named Witzleben? Somebody that you caught, you were telling me about this guy, what's this guy?

• 1:03:06Ben Milligan?

  Vitslevin. So when I wrote the initial draft of this chapter, the thing that I felt like I had to convey was that the senior commanders in World War II, they had a serious problem when it came to amphibious warfare. One, they didn't have landing craft. But two, even if they did have landing craft-

• 1:03:29Jocko Willink?

  It's a bit of a problem.

• 1:03:30Ben Milligan?

  They didn't know, the army's commanders, they didn't know how to put troops ashore. And there were logistics problems. They knew that they would need to, even if they were able to land men, even if they were able to put landing craft on beaches, they needed to put men on beaches in which there were beach exits. Exit so you could drive vehicles off the beach. I mean, if you land on a beach that has, you know, cliff faces and you can't drive off the beach, then what good is it that you've, you know, had all these landing craft? You have to have guys that can find beaches, good beaches, and then alert the

• 1:04:10Ben Milligan?

  army to where those beaches are, so, you know, can bring an entire landing force ashore. The army has completely, in the interwar period from World War I to World War II, they've done almost nothing when it comes to the development of amphibious doctrine. Nothing showcased the threat of all of that more than the terrible disaster at Dieppe, which happens in August of 1942. That's the first time the Allies attempt to land troops on an enemy beach, or a Nazi-controlled enemy beach. Now, the proponents of troops in the battle are Canadians, there's a decent amount of British commandos, there's a handful of

• 1:04:52Ben Milligan?

  American, of Army Rangers. They go ashore, most of the Canadians are killed or captured. And part of the reason that this raid, or this assault, or this attempted, you know, dress rehearsal of D-Day fails is because they don't have a good assessment of what the beach exits were like. They don't know how. When they got ashore, the tanks either, they weren't able to get off the beach because the sand was too loose, they couldn't, their treads buried up to the hubs, they couldn't get out, they couldn't get off the beach, the tanks, or the tanks and the vehicles that were able to get off the beach, they ran into tank traps almost immediately. So, um, the idea was, you know, create, you know, writing this whole chapter on, you

• 1:05:36Ben Milligan?

  know, the DEUP raid was just, you know, a way for me to talk about, uh, you know, all of the imperatives that a, uh, a scout and raider force would need to, um, um, solve.

• 1:05:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Bring to the table for the, for the, for the mission.

• 1:05:53Ben Milligan?

  Right. You needed to find a beach, you know, that you could land on, you know, the sand is dense enough, uh, that had beach exits, uh, and that you could, you know, signal the rest of the fleet for. Cut it all. Gone. All of it's gone. And Witzlaven was one of those characters. He was one of the architects of, uh, you know, Hitler's initial push to fortify, um, the, the Atlantic Wall. Uh, I don't know why I put Witzlaven on my notes, but he was, he was a character that I got sucked into because he was one of those guys that, he hated Hitler, uh, and yet he still did everything he could to, you know, fortify the coast. He was ultimately one of those guys that, uh, participated in the July 20th plot to kill Hitler and he ended up, uh, getting executed by dangling from a meat hook.

• 1:06:36Ben Milligan?

  Um, anyway.

• 1:06:40Jocko Willink?

  It's a little bit of a rabbit hole, isn't it?

• 1:06:43Ben Milligan?

  Isn't it?

• 1:06:44Jocko Willink?

  Every one of these freaking characters is like...

• 1:06:47Ben Milligan?

  I know. It's a lot. I mean, it's a lot, but, you know, all these things are just, you know, they're, they're...

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  What, what's the, what's the problem with Bucklew?

• 1:06:55Ben Milligan?

  The problem with Bucklew is he's everywhere.

• 1:06:58Jocko Willink?

  Meaning what? He's too, he's moving around too much?

• 1:07:01Ben Milligan?

  No.

• 1:07:02Jocko Willink?

  Trying to do too much what?

• 1:07:03Ben Milligan?

  No, no, no. He, like, the pro, the pro, the Bucklew presents a problem, presented a problem for, uh, for a writer, not for anybody else. Bucklew's, Bucklew's incredible. And I, uh, I wrote, I wrote, you know, sections about Bucklew in chapter two. I wrote sections about Bucklew in chapter four, sections about Bucklew in chapter six, cha, a section, I mean, a whole chapter about him on, uh, um, in the Bucklew Report. And then again, uh, he, he comes on the stage, uh, in, uh, in my chapters on Vietnam when he's the commander of Naval Operational Support Group. He's everywhere. He is the indispensable person in, uh, the history of naval special warfare. What was, uh, the, the problem that I ran into is that if I had talked about him a little

• 1:07:46Ben Milligan?

  bit here and I talked about him a little bit here and then a little bit there, I was kind of wasting ammo on him. I was gonna let her, I was gonna, you know, I was gonna force a reader to kind of, um, discover, um...

• 1:07:58Ben Milligan?

  Bucklew's relevance, you know, instead of like compressing Bucklew into that final chapter in, you know, on the Bucklew Report and really, you know, instead of, you know, spreading, spreading out your tanks, you know, consolidating into one punch. So the reader finally gets a sense of how important this person is. I just didn't want to waste Bucklew, you know, throughout the book. I wanted to, you know, collect him all in one thing, but it took me, you know, almost until the book was entirely written and then I had to go back through the book and I cut Bucklew, cut Bucklew, cut Bucklew so I could, you know.

• 1:08:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because otherwise you're kind of giving away the story because Bucklew doesn't become, but you're not, he wasn't Bucklew out of the gate. I mean, he was a stud, sure, but he wasn't like Phil H. Bucklew, which is what the, where SEAL training takes place. It's called the Phil H. Bucklew Center for Naval Special Warfare. Our schoolhouse is named after this guy, but he didn't come out of the gate that way. Came out of the gate as a guy.

• 1:08:53Ben Milligan?

  And he never kind of shines in the way that other characters did. So I was always frustrated because I knew that I had to talk about Bucklew and I knew that Bucklew's so important, but he never, you know, he's not the first guy ashore like Halpern is. He's not, uh, he's not the, the ground force commander in China like Halpern is. But he's there. He's always there, like all the, you know, like some, some other characters too. So, but I, I just didn't want to lose the.

• 1:09:18Jocko Willink?

  Was he, was he younger? Is that why he was still around when Vietnam gets, comes into play?

• 1:09:23Ben Milligan?

  They were all about the same age. Uh, I think he was younger than Halpern. Halpern was the old man of the group. Halpern was 34. I think he.

• 1:09:30Jocko Willink?

  He was 34 when he enlisted as a seaman, right?

• 1:09:32Ben Milligan?

  Halpern was.

• 1:09:33Jocko Willink?

  And he was a Notre Dame graduate, NFL player and all this other crazy stuff.

• 1:09:38Ben Milligan?

  NFL player. He was running his dad's, uh, commercial light company in Chicago. He was developing a clothing store. I mean, he was kind of like, he was kind of the Jaco. Like he had, he had a lot going on.

• 1:09:48Jocko Willink?

  And then he just enlists as a seaman.

• 1:09:50Ben Milligan?

  He was married, like, and he, and he was a professional, you know, sailboat racer. He was a competitive sailboat racer on Lake Michigan. I, I don't know if you remember in the, the, in his epitaph that I write in the book, he was, Halpern was, uh, he was in the 1960s Olympics, uh, for sailing. Wins a bronze medal.

• 1:10:07Jocko Willink?

  What a freaking stud.

• 1:10:08Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, he's incredible.

• 1:10:09Jocko Willink?

  And he was 34 when he, so he must've been old in 1960.

• 1:10:13Ben Milligan?

  He's, he's old and you, in the pictures of him.

• 1:10:16Jocko Willink?

  He must've been like 55, 60 years old in the Olympics.

• 1:10:19Ben Milligan?

  He's the oldest man that was competing at that time. But by then, uh, Halpern has developed, I mean, Halpern is. You know, he's more than how he's got, he's friends with, uh, he's friends with Sinatra. He knows everybody like he's running, you know, he, he founded LL Bean like he was by that point in his life. I mean, he's

• 1:10:38Jocko Willink?

  Wait Buck Halpern founded LL Bean?

• 1:10:40Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Jocko Willink?

  Explain that to me a little bit.

• 1:10:43Ben Milligan?

  That's, that's as much as I know. I know he was one of the founders.

• 1:10:45Jocko Willink?

  Finally, I got to the end of one of your rabbit holes. You, you, you didn't have the freaking wherewithal to dig in.

• 1:10:50Ben Milligan?

  All details of it all.

• 1:10:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, maybe if, you know, if it wasn't for the fact that I have a factory up in Maine where we produce stuff near LL Bean, maybe that's a little bit of an important deal. We could have known a little bit more about the Frogman history of LL Bean.

• 1:11:02Ben Milligan?

  Well, I'll

• 1:11:03Jocko Willink?

  Give them some props.

• 1:11:04Ben Milligan?

  I'll get to the bottom of that one for you. I think he sold his shares.

• 1:11:09Ben Milligan?

  But Buck, yeah, Buck Lou, he doesn't, he doesn't quite, you know, outshine, you know, Halpern and, and or other, other guys in all these other episodes. So, but he does, you know, like he finally takes center stage, you know, during the Buckler report and his whole biography is compressed into that, uh, into that report. But that's getting ahead of the story.

• 1:11:29Jocko Willink?

  All right. We roll into chapter three and this was, um,

• 1:11:35Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it's a rough one to read. Uh, I, I was listening to and, and re, rereading it. I was listening to the podcast we did on it, man. This is a freaking hard one to read because it's, um, well, the name of the chapter is the US Army's first commandos and the raid that wasn't. So this is

• 1:11:51Ben Milligan?

  That's not a bad

• 1:11:51Jocko Willink?

  This is one of your more abbreviated titles. So, so we give you credit for that.

• 1:11:58Ben Milligan?

  I don't know why you're laughing.

• 1:12:01Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, Echo hasn't, doesn't even say anything. I try and keep it, I try and keep it tight. Echo's not even talking. So

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Once you mentioned it, I can't unsee it.

• 1:12:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, he's just getting warmed up, man. I'm telling you, he's going off from here. It's kind of like when Theo Von said, he looked at you halfway through the podcast and says like, what about you? Your name is Echo. You haven't said anything yet.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  For a guy named Echo, you sure don't say much.

• 1:12:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go. That was a good observant, uh, situation. This was a rough one because.

• 1:12:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, I guess because of what happened with the Rangers in the beginning. What was it like writing this chapter?

• 1:12:45Ben Milligan?

  This is a...

• 1:12:48Ben Milligan?

  This was the fifth chapter I wrote, so I felt like I was further along, I was better than I was with some of the earlier chapters. I don't know if that accounts for, you know, why I think the chapter has such a great arc to it, or it's just because the, you know, the history itself has such, you know, such a tragic arc.

• 1:13:10Ben Milligan?

  It was hard to write this in the sense that I was...

• 1:13:15Ben Milligan?

  I always assumed that I'd be rooting for the Navy, like throughout the book, rooting for, you know, the Navy chapters, and then I'd get to an Army or Marine Corps chapter and I'd be like, "See, I told you so." Like, I knew that you guys were gonna, you know, screw up and there'd be an opportunity for the Navy. I found the opposite to be true, or maybe not the opposite, but I found myself, you know,

• 1:13:38Ben Milligan?

  you know, just, you know, empathizing with these guys so much, like there were... I mean, this... The Ranger contribution in World War II is remarkable.

• 1:13:54Ben Milligan?

  The contribution of guys like Darby, remarkable, I mean.

• 1:13:59Ben Milligan?

  And to have to write about Darby critically, that wasn't easy to do. I had to...

• 1:14:07Ben Milligan?

  It was the first time that I had to write about somebody who, you know, I knew to be, you know, a legitimate American hero and write about them, you know, in a light that's not flattering. And I'm not sure that anybody's ever done that before. I'd read a lot of books about Darby, and every single one of them, they, you know, they burnish his legacy. They consider him, you know, to be one of the founders or one of the most important, you know, greatest contributors to American Special Operations history. And that's true, but there's also this other truth, that Darby should have known better.

• 1:14:46Ben Milligan?

  And he didn't. And I don't know why. I mean, I thought, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Like, nobody in the US Army knew better than Darby what a raid was, and how a raid could be successful, and what elements would have to be put together for that raid to fail. And that raid, I mean, there were so many, you know, kind of warning bells about the raid on Cisterna that should have alerted Darby and the rest of the chain of command that this was, this was a disaster waiting to happen, and yet, you know, nobody threw the brakes on.

• 1:15:19Jocko Willink?

  This is one of the ones where you do a little psychological kind of profiling of Darby. I actually wanted to read this section. Part of it I read on the last one, but it's worth reading again, because part of it I didn't read on the last one. "Black-haired, blue-eyed, wide-mouthed as a duck. Darby had a ruddy face, divided into equal parts, forehead and chin. His left cheek bore a mysterious, brilliant red scar, not particularly muscular. He nevertheless affected chest-out, shoulders-back posture in which his arms always seemed cocked to the rear, as if never more than a moment away from snapping to attention. Son of a printer and a musician, the second child between two sisters. He grew up scouting the Arkansas

• 1:16:04Jocko Willink?

  woods and playing the saxophone. When in high school, his older sister died in Texas, he married, then divorced in spite of disappointment and tragedy. His attitude remained just as it's ever been, good-humored and irrepressible. In personality, just like in posture, he was direct, forceful, and never vacillating. Had the military gene not dominated and driven him to a life of soldiering, he would have been, been a salesman. He is the ideal commando leader, wrote Colonel Vaughn at the end of the course. He possesses the energy, keenness, and personality which produces the best out of those under his command." Graduated from West Point in 1933 at the apex of the bell curve, ranked 177 out of a class

• 1:16:49Jocko Willink?

  of 346, he was originally assigned as a field artillery officer. Like all soldiers who graduated then, and with that assignment, he embarked on an eight-year career punctuated by the peacetime artillery corps' elements, boredom, and horse manure. In 1941, he was one of the few soldiers who attended the Joint Army, Marine Corps amphibious exercises in Puerto Rico. Disappointed at not snagging a combat command in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks, in mid-January 1942, he was made assistant to Major General Russell P. Hardle, commander of the 34th Infantry and assigned to Northern Ireland, the staging area for a theater of operations till two years in the future. Anxious to get into the

• 1:17:31Jocko Willink?

  war, when assigned to escort General Truscott on his base tour and Ranger recruitment drive, Darby made the most of it. Truscott duly rewarded Darby's professionalism and interest with an offer to command the 1st Ranger Battalion. Few offers have been accepted so enthusiastically. At first glance, Darby's Rangers viewed him as a pencil-pushing aide-de-camp, and why not? He was, after all, little more than a peacetime artillery officer, not even an infantryman. This perception died a quick death. Throughout their training, Darby slung a standard M1 over his shoulder and rotated between companies, marching, climbing, shooting,

• 1:18:14Jocko Willink?

  doing whatever the men were doing, and doing it better. After an intelligence officer from headquarters briefed the Rangers on the Allied procedures for surrendering to the enemy, Darby bristled and took the floor. “This formation, this information you have just heard is all very well for those troops who are going to be captured, but that is not for Rangers. If there's any capturing to be done,” he continued, “it is the Rangers who will do it.” Within two months of training together, the men were reverently calling him “El Darbo.” By the end, he would defy comparison. An Army staff officer waiting ashore at Sorrento in 1943 would find a man wearing a Ranger patch and ask

• 1:18:57Jocko Willink?

  where he might find Darby. Smirking, the Ranger would reply, “You'll never find him this far back.” If the ideal Army officer was equal parts confidence, bravery, energy, and obedience, Darby was all these things, but perhaps too much the last. And that sentence stuck with me, you know, from a leadership perspective, of course, because it's about balance, right? And you do need to be obedient, but at the same time, if you're too obedient, you're...

• 1:19:34Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, there's a You're too obedient. Right, there's a famous quote by one of Frederick the Great's generals. He says to a young officer, "The king gave you a commission because he assumed that you would know when to break orders." And that's all part of initiative. I mean, that's all like, if there was one trait that I sort of settled on as being the reason that the Navy seemed to be ahead of the game, or at least ahead of its peers when it came to the creation of special operations units, it was because the Navy

• 1:20:17Ben Milligan?

  had this culture of latitude and this decentralized command and initiative that enabled subordinates to feel like they had the flexibility to make decisions on the fly or adjust to the realities that they were facing. Whereas somebody like Darby, Darby is in the US Army, and one thing that I wrote is, you know, the chain of command in the US Army has never been, it's never been delinked. It's only been progressively thickened over time.

• 1:20:57Ben Milligan?

  And you see that, not just in, not just today, but you can kind of see it happen gradually. And I would see it, you know, a little bit in World War II, and I kind of got my first sense of it here, reading and writing about the Rangers. But I also saw it, you know, in my Korean War chapters. And I would come across, you know, an army general like Edwin Walker, who he's flying above his troops, above his soldiers, in a little spotter plane with a bullhorn, telling individual units which one, you know, which one to move, like, I mean... In some sense, that, you know, that says to you, the reader, you, you know, uh, what a cool, what a cool general that he's, you know, willing to, you know, put himself out there for the same

• 1:21:40Ben Milligan?

  time. Like, that's also like, that's taking all of the initiative away from your guys. And you're, you know, you're, you're not only telling them where they should advance, but you're also telling them that they don't have the authority to, to retreat either if they need to, or to, you know, gain a tactical advantage by maneuver.

• 1:21:56Jocko Willink?

  Centralized command at its worst right there.

• 1:21:59Ben Milligan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:21:59Jocko Willink?

  And, and the last time we, we, you were on, we talked about the fact that, hey, when you're in the Navy, you know, throughout history, and you, you know, if Ben's in charge of this ship, you're gonna go sail away from me as the admiral? I can't talk to you anymore. Like, you're, you're, you got the mission, you're gonna do it to the best of your ability. The other thing that's interesting about this is, sometimes the ocean is going to dictate what you're gonna do. Like, there are certain times where you cannot, you cannot proceed, you cannot continue. The ocean is gonna stop you. You know, you can get some really, really extreme examples where weather could inhibit you on land from making the type of progress you wanna make, but you-

• 1:22:43Ben Milligan?

  Right, a river swollen.

• 1:22:44Jocko Willink?

  Right, a river swollen, but those are extreme examples.

• 1:22:48Ben Milligan?

  Right.

• 1:22:48Jocko Willink?

  The, out in the ocean, that's kind of a regular thing. You know, there's giant sea states that come through. It's, it's, so, so, you have to have some more ability to adapt because you are go- Look, if you're in a sailboat, the wind's not blowing, you're not going anywhere.

• 1:23:05Ben Milligan?

  Right.

• 1:23:05Jocko Willink?

  That's what's happening. You can't maneuver to the north because of the direction of the wind, or the direction of the sea state. You can't do it, it's not gonna happen. So you have to have some level of flexibility, whereas, more so, on the ground, you can power through a lot of weather events. And again, I'm going back to, you know, times before radios and before, before motors where you're just gonna make this happen. So-

• 1:23:33Jocko Willink?

  It seems like, yeah, unfortunately, that Darby was a little heavy on the obedience. And it's not always a positive thing.

• 1:23:43Ben Milligan?

  No, I mean, I, um, and not just on, um, not just on obedience, but on, uh, um, prerogatives, that's not, that's not the right word either, but protocol, I would say. So he gets, uh, one of the, one of the shocking, um, things that I saw when he was putting the, the Susterne raid together, was he, uh, put in charge of the entire assault element, a, uh, an officer who'd never been with the Rangers.

• 1:24:10Jocko Willink?

  Oof, but just because he was in the rank?

• 1:24:12Ben Milligan?

  Just because he, uh, he had a date of rank, um, uh, you know, that preceded, you know, the, the Rangers, uh, that he'd been working with since they'd been training together in Scotland. These were Rangers that knew what being a Ranger was. They, they, these guys had been trained by the British Commandos. They knew what a raid was. They knew the, you know, how a raid would succeed and how it would fail and what, and the, and instead of, you know, putting one of his, you know, one of his Rangers, uh, that he knew from Scotland in charge, he selected the guy, um, who'd never been a Ranger. Not, and he's not a bad leader. He's an excellent leader and he acquits himself, you know, incredibly during the battle. But he also doesn't know, um, as, as daylight's,

• 1:24:56Ben Milligan?

  um, creeping up on these guys and they have a sense of, we are in the middle of a German division. There is, we can't do this. We can't accomplish this. He does not have the confidence to say, guys, we're turning around and so.

• 1:25:14Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of British Commandos, uh, I know one of the, one of the people that you had to kind of cut was Mountbatten.

• 1:25:24Jocko Willink?

  Lord Lewis Mountbatten. This dude is like the British of all British, right?

• 1:25:31Ben Milligan?

  He is, but he's not. The one thing that I thought was interesting about Mountbatten is they're Germans. The Mountbatten family, they're Germans. His father, I believe it's his father, he becomes the first lord of the Admiralty, but he's born in Germany, he serves in the German Navy. He doesn't emigrate to England or to the United Kingdom until he's a bit older, and then he rises up through the ranks of the British Navy, becomes the first lord. But Mountbatten, so Prince Philip, Prince Philip who just passed away, he was a Mountbatten. So Lord Louis Mountbatten was his uncle.

• 1:26:09Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:26:11Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, so Mountbatten, I mean, he's a fascinating character. By the time he's put in charge of Combined Operations Headquarters, or the entity that commands all British commandos, he's been, I think he's been shot out from under two ships, or he's had two ships that were sunk.

• 1:26:30Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's the second time you've made that statement about, hey, this guy had two ships shot out from under him?

• 1:26:38Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Jocko Willink?

  And it sounds really cool right now, right?

• 1:26:41Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Jocko Willink?

  We're like, damn, you know, because we're like, you know, we think that's kind of cool, but I wonder if there's any negative, where someone's looking at like, dude, this guy's lost two ships, bro, what's wrong with you?

• 1:26:52Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, I wonder. I didn't think about it. Well, he kept getting promoted. He had the political connections. He's really young, he's really dynamic. He's one of the few people that is able to not dominate Churchill, but he's able to, like Churchill thinks he's just, I mean, he's this cavalier.

• 1:27:10Jocko Willink?

  And so he, wait, so he's the one that grew up in Germany?

• 1:27:14Ben Milligan?

  Mm-mm.

• 1:27:15Jocko Willink?

  That's his dad?

• 1:27:16Ben Milligan?

  That's his dad. Louis Mountbatten, he grows up, he's as British as, I don't know.

• 1:27:22Jocko Willink?

  He's British?

• 1:27:23Ben Milligan?

  He's British.

• 1:27:24Jocko Willink?

  And he seems to have like all the stereotypical kind of British personality?

• 1:27:28Ben Milligan?

  Absolutely. Yeah, he acts British. Yes, he's the, he's...

• 1:27:36Jocko Willink?

  I mean, he's playing polo and writing books on polo and stuff like this. I mean, this is it, man.

• 1:27:42Ben Milligan?

  He's hanging out with the king and queen. He's got a cigarette holder. I mean, he's British. He's the quintessential British.

• 1:27:49Jocko Willink?

  But the commandos themselves, who we kind of...

• 1:27:54Jocko Willink?

  Who we throw in with the sort of, who played the biggest role in

• 1:27:59Ben Milligan?

  Creating the

• 1:27:59Jocko Willink?

  Creating the British Commandos, is that, is that Clark?

• 1:28:02Ben Milligan?

  Uh, yeah, Dudley Clark, he's the guy who initially comes up with the idea, he's another weirdo. Um, really fun to learn about, really fun to write, he's, um, he was a, he was a British Army officer. He'd grown up, I believe, in Palestine, uh, he had, um, uh, seen, um, not only, he'd seen, um, uh, British Raiders during, uh, the First World War, he'd kind of experienced, uh, what some of that was like. I think he, he was friendly with Lord Wingate, he was, um, a, uh,

• 1:28:36Ben Milligan?

  oh, yeah, one of, one of the things, one of the ways that he got the idea for British Commandos was he was, uh, infatuated with the Napoleonic War history and, in fact, and not, uh, he was a real student of Wellington's peninsular wars and all of the, uh, partisans that Wellington had, uh, hired and, uh, and sent against the, the French forces, uh, so he, when, um, after the disaster at Dunkirk, you know, Dudley Clark, who's a bit, you know, bit of an oddball in the military, uh, hierarchy. I think his hobby is he's a, uh, he's an amateur actor, but he puts a little paper together

• 1:29:15Ben Milligan?

  and he sends it up to Churchill and it's, uh, the, the paper is essentially, uh, create special troops, uh, that are capable at sea, uh, and send them on all of these little, um, uh, raids against the, the coastline, spread out German defenses, not, you know, dissimilar from what the Navy was trying to do in the Central Pacific. Um, Churchill, uh, is the, he, Churchill's, you know, completely infatuated with any idea that, uh, his generals do not like, and this is one of them, he, um, He thinks this is a great idea, not just because, you know, this is going to spread German defenses out, but, you know, more importantly than that, it's going to energize the British people.

• 1:29:57Ben Milligan?

  The British people have just suffered this, uh, this terrible, um, you know, um, defeat at Dunkirk. They need a win. They need a series of wins. Um, so, yeah, uh, he agrees to it. He, uh, is, um, uh, pushes the entire, um, uh, British establishment, uh, to create these commandos. Uh, what he does not expect and what his generals don't expect is that these raids start being successful. Um, so successful that, uh, they, they want to develop more of them. And, um, so the, uh, by nine, by the end of, or by 1942, there's not just British commandos at this point. There's Canadian commandos, there's French commandos, and they're all sort of operating under this, uh, the CO HQ.

• 1:30:41Ben Milligan?

  Um, have you ever read the book Rogue Heroes? It's a book about the, uh, British SAS.

• 1:30:47Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:30:48Ben Milligan?

  In, uh, North Africa. It follows them all through the war, but, boy, if you want, uh, a, a book that is kind of outside of, you know, the American Special Operations Experience, um, that is...

• 1:31:00Jocko Willink?

  That's the one?

• 1:31:01Ben Milligan?

  It's, it's interesting because, you know, uh, it's even, I would say it's, uh, the, the SAS experience, the SAS and the SB, SBS experience, uh, during World War II establishes a, um, a type of commando that we're not familiar with. Like, and it, it establishes a legacy, uh, of expectations that, you know, we don't really have. Like, our, we have sort of a no-fail expectations on our commando operations. The SAS, the SBS, they were willing to just try stuff. And if they lost an entire team, well, that's the price of doing business. I mean, and I think they kind of carry that cavalier-ness through today. Like, I think, I mean, if you've ever worked with SAS or SBS, I'm sure you have.

• 1:31:46Jocko Willink?

  I have, yeah.

• 1:31:47Ben Milligan?

  I mean, I don't know if you noticed that in them. I, I certainly noticed it when we worked with the SBS. These guys are, you know, maybe not, uh, as, I wouldn't say they're not, they're less well-trained, but they are willing to, they, they have an expectation of, uh, risk, uh, that I was not familiar with. And I think they pull that directly from this experience in World War II.

• 1:32:08Jocko Willink?

  Check. What else was it that made Dudley Clark an oddball?

• 1:32:15Jocko Willink?

  I mean, the dude's an actor. I mean, we know Echo isn't a bit of an actor. I don't think he's odd.

• 1:32:22Jocko Willink?

  Was there some other, was there some other thing that dragged you into this or that you started getting the feeling this guy's a little strange?

• 1:32:29Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, he leads the first commando raid. And it's a completely, I mean, so he has this idea, you know, not much different than Carlson, you know, to come up with these, you know, commandos, but, and like Carlson, he leads one of the first raids and like Carlson, he's completely unsuited to do it. Like, I mean, he's not a, he's not an operational commander. He's a thinker. I think he kinda, he suspects that, but he's willing to, you know, put himself on the line to prove, you know, his, his idea. He ends up going through the war and coming up with, he, he ends up being

• 1:33:05Ben Milligan?

  a really capable spy, not spy master, but like deception officer. He's able to convince the Germans at, you know, different points during the war that we're about to attack in, in this, in this spot, which forces the Germans to move troops to an area. But he leads that first commando raid.

• 1:33:25Ben Milligan?

  And they don't really raid anything. I think they stumble across two German bicyclists. They kill both of them. They forget to search them. They don't know what they were even guarding. And then on his, on his particular raid, they, one of the, one of the guys accidentally ejects a magazine onto a beach right when there's an approaching German patrol. The Germans counter ambush them and they have to race into the, the water to get back to their boats. When they get back to their boats, Dudley Clark realizes that his ear has been, almost been shot off and a sailor has to stitch it back in place for the transit back to, back to England.

• 1:34:03Jocko Willink?

  Damn. Getting the ear stitched back on.

• 1:34:07Ben Milligan?

  By a, by a little, by a petty officer.

• 1:34:09Jocko Willink?

  In like, in like a freaking Zodiac or something?

• 1:34:12Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, and the mission is so badly planned when they get, when they finally get back to the coast, back to, they, they didn't have any deconfliction. They get stopped by British shore patrol boats, thinking that they're a German boat, you know, trying to send raiders ashore. And when the, and when the, um, the coast guard comes aboard their, their vessel, all the British commandos are drunk. So not only did they get shot off the beach, they drank the entire boat's liquor supply.

• 1:34:42Jocko Willink?

  There you go. How about the Devil's Brigade? How does that play into this, uh, whole scene?

• 1:34:47Ben Milligan?

  The Devil's Brigade are, um, they were just one, they were one of those, uh, units that I was really interested in. I really, I was almost trying, like, looking for an excuse to, to write about them. They were, um, they were a unit that was a, was a joint, um, uh, Canadian and American, uh, unit, and it was the, kind of the brainchild of Mount Batten. Um, Marshall had buy-in. Uh, it was supposed to be a unit that they dropped into Norway on, uh, like snowmobiles or, or snow tractors, um, that would lead raids. Ultimately became a pretty adequate, um, uh, semi-commando force. Uh, it was an air, sort of, sort of ranger, sort of airborne. Um, and Robert Fredericks became the commander of it.

• 1:35:31Ben Milligan?

  And he was, uh, as, um, as interesting as Darby, uh, you know, was, um, uh, had, you know, as equally a storied, uh, career. I think he was, uh, wounded something like nine times, uh, during the course of the war.

• 1:35:49Jocko Willink?

  And what was the, how come the Devil's Brigade didn't sustain?

• 1:35:54Ben Milligan?

  Well, I mean, the Army Special Forces, when they are, um, when they are claiming, uh, their, um, their forefathers, they always point to the Devil's Brigade. And I don't really. I don't really see a connection between Army Special Forces and the Devils.

• 1:36:09Jocko Willink?

  It's getting heated in here.

• 1:36:11Ben Milligan?

  Except for the fact that these guys are.

• 1:36:13Jocko Willink?

  In the Army?

• 1:36:14Ben Milligan?

  Well, they're in the Army and they're airborne qualified. So, but they're not leading partisans or anything like that. They're shock troops.

• 1:36:22Jocko Willink?

  They're more like Rangers then.

• 1:36:23Ben Milligan?

  They're more like Rangers, just like Merrill's Marauders. Merrill's Marauders are, you know, when I set out to write a chapter on the Rangers and to talk about how the Rangers opened a gap for the Navy to fill, I didn't think that I'd be covering Darby. Other people had covered Darby before and I was like, I kinda wanna avoid that. I'd rather focus on, you know, a Ranger legacy that hasn't, you know, that's less well-known. And my idea initially was to cover the 5307th, which is Merrill's Marauders in Burma. I really wanted to, instead of Sisterna, cover the Battle of Michikina, which is an isolated hilltop in Burma that the Merrill's Marauders seize and there's, you know, pretty interesting characters. Merrill, he's another oddball. I think he, by that point in the war, he's

• 1:37:07Ben Milligan?

  been removed because he's already had two heart attacks in Burma. He stayed in the field. And it was another excuse for, you know, to talk about Stillwell. Stillwell's another character that I've always, you know, kinda had a soft spot in my heart for. But they just didn't fit because, you know, the reason that I had to cover Sisterna, the reason that I had to talk about Sisterna as opposed to Pointe de Hawk or Michikina or another one of these really important Ranger battles, is because Sisterna is the one that leaves its impression on the Army hierarchy, on the chain of command. Even when you have a success as incredible as Pointe de Hawk, even when you have a success as incredible as Kabatitouan, the rescue of all those POWs, it doesn't leave its legacy

• 1:37:52Ben Milligan?

  or it doesn't leave an impression on the Army chain of command like Sisterna does. Sisterna clouds an entire generation of hostility, of regular conventional Army leaders to the concept of elite commandos, if that makes sense.

• 1:38:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's definitely, that section of the book, and again, I read it on the last time we worked together on this podcast, it's just, it's...

• 1:38:19Jocko Willink?

  It's very difficult, it's still difficult to even read. And, and what's incredible about it is it's, it's the notes from the radio room. These are, these are transcripts of what was actually said between Darby and his frontline leadership who are being overrun and slaughtered. And you can, you can read exactly what they were saying to each other. It's, um, another just incredible.

• 1:38:42Ben Milligan?

  A lot of that, a lot of that's taken from, um, you know, like, like you said, the transcripts, which I, that's one of the few times that I was at an archive going through it, uh, going through a document and not just, you know, quickly taking a photo and moving on. That was one of those times where I was like, I was trying, I mean, I knew what happened and I'm, I was reading it like it was a novel, like, and I was, you know, tensing up, like, knowing what each page, that each page was going to get worse and worse and worse. And then I was, I was watching this unfold in an archive, you know, eight years after the fact, but it was, you know, it was every bit as real to me. Well, maybe not every bit as real, but you know, you're, these are, you know, fellow, fellow Americans, you know, doing the absolute best they could for their country, for each other.

• 1:39:26Ben Milligan?

  And, and, you know, the guy on the other end of the radio was watching his friends die around him.

• 1:39:32Jocko Willink?

  And then before we move to chapter four, what about, what about Charles Shunstrom? What's that guy's deal? He got cut completely out of the book. Is that right?

• 1:39:43Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, sort of. I mean, he got, um, so he, he's responsible for writing the Shunstrom Report, which is the, uh, it was, it was a report written, um, only, um, well, if I do the math right, probably a month after Sisterna. So he's one of, um, he's one of the guys that was captured in the, in the, in the final moments of the raid. He was, um, he had been with Darby all the way through, uh, the, the Rangers experience. So he'd been one of the handful of Rangers trained by the British Commandos in Akkern Car, Scotland. Fought through North Africa, fought through Sicily, uh, fought through, uh, Italy, the winter line.

• 1:40:26Ben Milligan?

  Uh, and then he's one of the officers, uh, captured. He's one, he's the officer who's driving Darby, uh, in Jala when Darby is in the back, uh, with a 50 cal or with the, uh, the recoilless rifle and destroys the Italian tank that turns Darby from Darby into Darby the legend.

• 1:40:43Ben Milligan?

  So he's with Darby throughout, you know, the everything. He's, he's as, you know, he's, he's as incredible or as, anyway, he, he's captured at Sisterna, escapes two weeks later,

• 1:41:02Ben Milligan?

  makes it back to friendly lines and from, from his escape, he's able to write this report of what actually happened. He's one of the few guys that got out and he drafts this, I can't remember, the 10-page report. So a lot of what's in those final pages is drawn from the Shunstrom report. Now, he has a really tragic end to his life. He, I can't remember how he passes away. I think he's dead within 10 years, though, of this event. He, after World War II, he, I think he goes to Southern California. He tries to be an actor. It doesn't work out. And then he, you know, turns to drink and a series of bad decisions lead to

• 1:41:44Ben Milligan?

  a series of worse decisions and I think he starts robbing banks. He's one of those guys that, you know, he just isn't able to reintegrate into society. He'd been a Ranger officer, one of the, you know, guys in charge and here he is, he's not able to, you know,

• 1:42:03Ben Milligan?

  reintegrate into, you know, polite society and he ultimately, I can't remember how he dies, but I think it's some combination of alcohol and

• 1:42:12Jocko Willink?

  Some combination of alcohol, robbing banks, guns, just getting after it.

• 1:42:20Jocko Willink?

  You know, this

• 1:42:23Ben Milligan?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:42:24Jocko Willink?

  You gotta kind of ask yourself. And I had a conversation with someone the other day about, you know, that just like modern times and all this.

• 1:42:34Jocko Willink?

  Who's gonna fight the wars?

• 1:42:36Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:37Jocko Willink?

  Right? Who is going to put freaking black paint on their face? And pick up a weapon and crawl across the beach and start killing enemy? Like, that's a certain type of human being, right? That's the type of human being that may not correctly reintegrate into society. This dude might end up robbing banks when he gets back.

• 1:43:02Ben Milligan?

  It's the Martin Watson problem.

• 1:43:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's the Martin Watson problem, which we'll get to. But, but we do have to think about that and, and when you have guys, you know, we talked about obedience as a characteristic being, look, is it, is it good to have some obedience? Yes, it is. And was Darby maybe too far on the spectrum of being too obedient? Yes, but then you get some other guys that are on the other end of the spectrum that you want. You want to have someone that's going to be like, hey, I don't care what you tell me to do. I'm going to go attack this machine gun nest. Get out of my way. You want to have some guys like that. They're hard to control. But if you get rid of these guys, you get rid of the Charles Shunstroms and the Watsons, you get rid of those guys, your military is not going to be able to function, in my opinion.

• 1:43:46Ben Milligan?

  It's not going to be able to win.

• 1:43:47Jocko Willink?

  It's okay. Yep, you're right. It's not, it's going to be able to function, probably going to be able to function very effectively in a peacetime environment.

• 1:43:53Ben Milligan?

  So my question, you've commanded these guys. How, how, I mean, what, what's the answer? How do you, how do you, you know, take the strengths of a, of a Shunstrom or a Watson? Um, but how do you make sure that they don't go off the rails?

• 1:44:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, what you have to do is you have to put, put the, put the guardrails in place. And you have to, and it's not, here's the, the interesting thing about this. This isn't that hard. This isn't where you've got to be constantly monitoring every single thing that they do. You have a good relationship with your guys? Then when you say, hey, listen, here's the line, we're not crossing it. Guys go, yep, Roger that. And they know you're not playing around. They, you haven't.

• 1:44:32Jocko Willink?

  You haven't shown them where, hey, you know, Jaco says this, but he doesn't really mean that. No, it's like, when I say something, this is what I mean. And this is what we're gonna do. This is what we're not gonna do. And, and look, I mean, I had guys that were definitely, actually, I wanna have guys, just like I just said. I wanna have guys that are gonna say, hey, if I can get, if I get the chance to do this in a hyper aggressive way, I'm gonna do it. You, you give me a chance to kill the enemy, I'm gonna do it. That's what I'm gonna do. That's what I'm here for. That's why, that's why I was born. Dude, Tony Affrati, you know Tony Affrati? Tony was a platoon chief in Charlie Platoon, tasking a bruiser. If, he would do anything to be able to go out and kill the enemy. And he would also never cross the line of like, oh, okay, hey, we're not doing that. Cool. That's, that's, then that's the line.

• 1:45:18Jocko Willink?

  And that's exactly what you want.

• 1:45:21Jocko Willink?

  And, and what, so, so the question that you posed to me, how do you do it? What you do is you have a good relationship with the guys. You explain to them what we can do, what we can't do, and then you explain why we can't do it. And there was, um, uh, I used to go and brief the JOTZI classes, the, the junior officer training classes and, and. I briefed mine. Okay, well, there, there you go. One of the things that I used to tell these guys was, hey, listen, when it comes to, when it comes to the rules of engagement, when it comes to the law of armed conflict, you have to not just do what you think is right. You have to do what you think, what, you have to do not just what is, you think is right, but what is legal. And here's the reason. And, and Leif had to have this conversation.

• 1:46:06Jocko Willink?

  Leif had a senior officer in the room when I was explaining this to these young guys like yourself. That,

• 1:46:14Jocko Willink?

  what's, what people think is right? What, you, you take 16 SEALs and you say, you give them a case example of, is this right in your own personal moral code? You're gonna get 16 different answers. You're gonna get some guys that's, oh yeah, this, this, this person's a insurgent, we'll kill him. Or this person's an insurgent, oh, well, we, we shouldn't, we shouldn't hurt him because we can reform him. You're gonna have all these kind of wild different answers. So what you, the only thing you can actually follow isn't what an individual quote thinks is right. You have to follow what is actually legal. And I made that, I always made that very clear with my guys. Hey, listen, this is what you can do. This is what you cannot do.

• 1:46:57Jocko Willink?

  And here's why. And of course, in any leadership situation, it's important to explain the why. And you know, for instance, in Ramadi, there was a bunch of reasons why you can't go out and shoot an innocent person. Well, first of all, yeah, it's morally wrong. Second of all, everyone would know about it immediately. So it's not like, it's not like I could have a sniper going, oh, you know, I'll sneak in a shot over here. No one's gonna know. No, we're in a city with 400,000 Iraqi civilians that we, there's a mayor, there's a police force, there's a, there's a governor, there's a whole, there's teachers and doctors inside that city. You kill an innocent civilian, everybody's gonna know about it. And by the way, all those Iraqi government officials, they have relationships with the brigade commanders, with the battalion commanders, with the company commanders. We're all talking.

• 1:47:43Jocko Willink?

  So if you think, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna shoot some innocent person, get away with it, you're never gonna get away with it. It's not happening. And on top of that, we are now losing the war. When you go out and kill an innocent civilian, you're giving, you're giving propaganda to the enemy. And you're creating more insurgents by killing an innocent person. So you have to not just explain, hey, legally you can't do this, but also here's why you can't do it.

• 1:48:14Jocko Willink?

  I was speaking to a group of army leaders one time and I, I said, hey, in any, in any platoon, you're gonna have a sociopath in there. You have somebody that's, you give them the opportunity to kill. Or maybe even you don't. They might take advantage of that. They're gonna look for an opportunity to kill. They're gonna look for an opportunity to torture someone. They're gonna look for an opportunity to rape a woman. Like, you take. A platoon, you're gonna have that in there. And I got some looks from the crowd, kinda like, oh, that's not, that's not realistic. And no kidding, two weeks later, I was doing a podcast with Jordan Peterson. And before we started recording, I said, hey, let me ask you a question. Here's what I told this group of army guys. I said, in your platoon, you're gonna have at least one person that's a sociopath. Is that an accurate statement?

• 1:48:59Jocko Willink?

  And he says, how many people in a platoon? I'm like, well, in a platoon, forty, fifty. And he goes, oh, you know, I won't try and imitate Jordan Peterson, but you know, he basically, oh, yes, definitely. And then he said, because it's like one in a hundred in normal society, that you have a sociopath. But the, the army or the Marine Corps is not normal society. You've already screened out a bunch of pacifists, right? You've already screened out a bunch of people that, that are definitely not sociopaths. And so to have, you probably actually have two or three sociopaths inside your platoon. And, and then look, you also get some guys that just, you know, like, like Shunstrom.

• 1:49:42Jocko Willink?

  He's not necessarily a sociopath, but maybe, you know, who knows how this guy was raised? Maybe occasionally, somebody gets smacked around, you know? Occasionally, you beat someone up. Violence is part of, you know, culture in some parts of America, in some families in America. Like, that's what you grew up with, so that's what you get. So, to, once again, to answer your question, you gotta put, you gotta put the very clear guardrails in place that say, hey, look, this is what we're doing, this is what we're not doing. And then you have to have the, the consistency that when you say something, the guys know that you are not playing around and that you are gonna follow through with whatever it is you say. And, and, and I think where guys get caught sometimes from a leadership perspective is they don't put out those guardrails.

• 1:50:27Jocko Willink?

  And then when Ben crosses the line and you do something you weren't supposed to do, I feel kinda bad, cuz I didn't even tell you not to do it. So I'm looking at you going, well, I guess I'm gonna, you know, send you to court martial now. And you're going, wait a second, you know, we killed three guys on that last operation and four guys on the operation before that? Now you're mad at me cuz I killed somebody? Well, what were the circumstances? Well, you didn't talk to me about any circumstances? Well, you gotta know the rules of engagement. Well, I know the rules of engagement that seemed like that way to me. So you see where I'm going with this. I have to be very clear about what the line is and why we cannot cross it.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  It also seems like, like in an extreme team environment, like I said, like in football, it seemed like there were, there were some sociopaths there too. And I actually know of one who's, I think he's still in jail right now, but he, in an, in extreme team environment, it's like people who are just normal people who are, I'm down for the team, they get influenced just to do stuff, good and bad, just because of the team environment. Do you find that a lot?

• 1:51:31Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  Where it's like, I mean, actually, you know what, now that I'm thinking of like the massacres, certain massacres.

• 1:51:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. The Melel massacre, that's definitely what happened. Like, oh, that's what we're doing? Okay, we're, we're ready for it. You know, I've been talking a lot about this lately, is that just the fact that people, human beings are so, so, their brains are so pliable. You can program a person so easily to believe whatever. And by the way, it's happening all day long right now with all these people out there that are looking at their social media all day long. That's, they're getting programmed. You're getting programmed. You're receiving information. You don't even know what you're, you're seeing. It's happening right now, you know, the, the propaganda that's coming out from both sides from, from Ukraine, right? It's like, oh, you have people going high and to the right on whatever image that they saw. And you gotta take everything that's coming out of there with a grain of salt. But what it's showing you is how easily influenced human beings are. And that's a really negative

• 1:52:22Jocko Willink?

  thing, but it's also a really positive thing. Because you as a leader have the ability to say, hey, here's what's going on. Here's what we need to do. Here's why we need to do it. Here's why we can go to this line and we can't go past it. And those are the rules. That's, that's what you need to do. If you start to allow slack, and then you develop a habit of allowing slack, you're gonna have a freaking issue. You're gonna have, you're gonna, you're gonna end up with issues. If you don't have the ability to say, hey, listen, dude, this is not, we're not doing that. Uh, one thing that's interesting in the, in the SEAL teams is most of the guys want to do a good job and have a good reputation. So when you say, hey, hey, Ben, we're not doing that.

• 1:53:07Jocko Willink?

  Or, hey, Ben, it looked seemed like you were thinking about doing something. Let me tell you why we're not doing it. You don't go, it's bullshit. No, you go, yeah, I got it, boss. Thanks for explaining that to me. It's not that hard, but if I'm weak and you know that you end up with that dynamic in the military where you have a really strong personality.

• 1:53:25Ben Milligan?

  Or a really strong chief.

• 1:53:26Jocko Willink?

  Or really, yeah, really strong.

• 1:53:28Ben Milligan?

  And a, and a brand new officer.

• 1:53:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And if, if that, that can, that's a classic scenario, right? That's the, that's the damn platoon, right? That's the, the movie platoon, right? You have, you have Barnes and you have whatever that officer's name was, and he just gets run roughshod over by Barnes. And that's a perfect example. That's a perfect example. Hey, you're a new guy. Shut up. You don't know what you're talking about. This is the only way to win this. Okay. Well, yes, sir. Or yes, yes, Sergeant Barnes. And then you have a guy like Elias, who is saying, hey, but what are you, what are you doing? But he doesn't have the strength to back it up to, and to, to get his platoon officer on board with what's happening.

• 1:54:13Jocko Willink?

  So it's a classic thing to watch out for 100%.

• 1:54:19Jocko Willink?

  All right, let's jump back into the book here. Go a little bit more forward, go into chapter four. Chapter four.

• 1:54:28Jocko Willink?

  Draper Kaufman and the course that cracked the Atlantic wall, then laid the first bricks of the legends of Navy, of the legend of Navy's special warfare. So there you go.

• 1:54:40Jocko Willink?

  And this, this really.

• 1:54:42Ben Milligan?

  You should have, you should have saved that dramatic intake for the last chapter. That's the longest one.

• 1:54:49Jocko Willink?

  They get, there's only one that's short. There's only one more that's coming that short.

• 1:54:55Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to read a little chunk from the book here.

• 1:54:59Jocko Willink?

  Landing at 0625, one of the earliest crews to arrive, Gregory and the Army Engineers had dragged their rubber boat into the surf, lashed it to a wooden stake, and run for the farthest belt of hedgehogs. "It looked impossible to be there without being hit," one of Karnowski's men remembered afterward. "It looked even worse without a helmet. Despite the chaos, Karnowski and the demolition ears laid their charges, ran out their primer cord, tied in and blew their charge. The first shot was magnificent," remembered one man. "After it, nothing else was. As soon as the charge blew, machine guns opened up from everywhere and men pushed

• 1:55:43Jocko Willink?

  their bellies into the sand. Conrad Milas, a quiet California carpenter, made chief petty officer for the example he had set during training, grabbed the primer cord reel and sprinted for the next row of obstacles. He was identified later by the pack of explosives around his neck with a big hole in his chest." As the waves of infantry landed, the demolition job grew even more complicated. Terrified soldiers either did not notice the purple smoke warnings swirling around them or did not care. "I thought I'd never get one of the infantrymen out from behind a piling," a demolition ear confessed later. "He moved out just in time and our second shot went off."

• 1:56:27Jocko Willink?

  As obstacles blew apart, the Army and Navy sections began working together, mingling as a single team regardless of the advancing tide. Lieutenant Gregory, having destroyed the tank crippling hedgehogs at the far end of the beach, turned away from the enemy and splashed back into the surf. Like a man possessed, he waited or swam to each remaining stake, where he waited until someone threw him a charge. Then, using the lessons taught to him by the NC2Us, stretched his arms as far as they would reach and placed his bomb next to Rommels, then blew them to nothing.

• 1:57:08Jocko Willink?

  So, D-Day.

• 1:57:14Jocko Willink?

  You, you, you talk about this being the most consequential day in, in the history of NSW. There's a hundred and Navy, a hundred and ninety Navy demolition ears. Thirty-two of them are killed. Sixty-five are wounded. So that's a total number of casualties being at ninety-seven. This is fifty-one percent, fifty-one percent casualties.

• 1:57:35Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, I mean, just in contribution, or just in sacrifice. It's a, it outmatches any other tragedy or that NSW has experienced. It's far, far exceeds anything, at least in any single day experience. And this happens mostly in the space of, of around three or four hours. Gap assault teams, three and fourteen, eleven, they're all destroyed even before, I mean, right, eleven's destroyed as soon as its ramp drops. Three and fourteen are destroyed, destroyed before their ramps even dropped. They're

• 1:58:13Jocko Willink?

  Hit with mortars.

• 1:58:14Ben Milligan?

  Mortars and just about everybody aboard is killed.

• 1:58:20Ben Milligan?

  It's the, it's the most important day of the twentieth century. I mean, it's the day that determines whether or not Hitler's going to be removed from the continent. And it's a, it's tough to, you know, write this chapter and not make it, you know, outshine everything else. It's a, it's too much. The chapter was twice as long when I, you know, when I finished the first draft. It was, I, I, I wanted to, I didn't want to leave anything behind. I wanted, you know, every, every gap assault team, every, every NCDU to, you know, have full representation. I think there's twenty-one gap assault teams that land. I ultimately had to, you know, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, and try and, you know, consolidate

• 1:59:03Ben Milligan?

  as much as possible, just so it was a readable chapter. And I also had to like, figure out what the hell am I trying to say in this thing? You know, I, I expected that Writing a history of the SEAL teams or writing how the Navy had been the first to create this type of unit, I always expected that it'd be tough to justify how I put the, you know, the Army or Marine Corps chapters in, and it wouldn't be tough to, you know, justify the Navy chapters. The Navy chapters would just sort of write themselves. I just had to say, what happened? Just say what happened. I found the opposite to be true. Because, you know, it was, you know, with the Army chapters and the Marine Corps chapters, all you're really just, you know, trying to show like why these units failed or why

• 1:59:42Ben Milligan?

  they, why the, you know, their senior leaders pulled the rug out from under them. The Navy chapters, you're having to, you know, show how, you know, a unit like the NC2Us, which is, you know, created just to solve one problem, and that problem is the obstacles in France or the obstacles on the coast. How did that, why is that relevant, you know, to the ultimate creation of go-anywhere, you know, naval commandos? So I, it took a long time and it took multiple drafts before I realized that the point of this whole thing or the relevance to that story is not so much, you know, the fact that they were, you know, just blowing up obstacles. It's the fact that they left such

• 2:00:24Ben Milligan?

  an impression on the Navy leaders after that. You know, there's, you know, there's all these, you know, episodes of naval bravery. You know, there's the experience of the, of the destroyers that ultimately saved the day, that pushed the Army ashore. These destroyers, you know, they're, they're on the outskirts of the battle until Admiral Hall, the Army, the Army is looking at what's happening on Omaha Beach. There's, there's successful landings on Goldsor in Juneau. There's successful landings at Utah Beach. Everywhere, the, you know, the, the landing to get troops ashore on D-Day is going well, except here at Omaha. At Omaha, you know, the Army commander's like, we might need to pull our troops off.

• 2:01:07Ben Milligan?

  They might need to do something that they've never trained to do, which is a full-scale evacuation in front of the enemy. Admiral Hall, who has made it a point to make sure that he's in charge of the invasion until the forces are firmly established ashore, says, "No, we're not doing that." And he does what, you know, nobody has done up to that point, which is push destroyers right up to the, as close to the coast as possible, pushes them 800 yards away from the coast.

• 2:01:38Jocko Willink?

  That's insane.

• 2:01:39Ben Milligan?

  Destroyers, they come in at flank speed, and as soon as they get to about where their hulls are about three feet off the bottom, they all turn left, and they all start going right along the coast. So you have all this bravery that happens. As soon as they get, you know, to a point to the end of Omaha Beach, you think all these ships are going to turn, and some of them do, some of them have enough depth where they're able to turn around. The ships that don't, they just, they just reverse, and then they just start going backwards. And they're blasting away at these pillboxes and structures. And some, in some cases, they are, they're blasting underneath the pillboxes.

• 2:02:19Ben Milligan?

  So the pillboxes full of Germans just start tumbling off the, off the escarpment.

• 2:02:25Jocko Willink?

  So in all that- I don't think I've seen that represented-

• 2:02:31Ben Milligan?

  No.

• 2:02:32Jocko Willink?

  -in like, in Saving Private Ryan or anything like that.

• 2:02:35Ben Milligan?

  No, and everybody thinks-

• 2:02:36Jocko Willink?

  Because 800 yards off the beach is freaking close.

• 2:02:41Ben Milligan?

  Everybody walks away, or everybody, you know, comes away from, you know, the reading of Omaha Beach as this, as this victory of American infantry over, you know, the German obstacles. And that's true, but there's also another truth, and that's the, that's the commitment, or that's the force that the Navy brought to bear on that day. And the, and the Army would not have gotten off those killing fields or killing beaches without the contribution of the US Navy. But what I found was the point of this chapter was that with all of that, with all of the contribution that the Navy had made, with all the bravery, the-

• 2:03:23Ben Milligan?

  The Navy walks away from that battle with knowing that the greatest contribution that they'd given that day was with the naval, with the NCDUs, with the Naval Combat Demolition Units. They are awarded, you know, six Navy Crosses, more Silver Stars than you can shake a stick at. They've got, they award the NCDUs only one of three Presidential Unit citations that are awarded from a naval unit on Omaha Beach. Right, so the reason that that's so important is because when the Navy, when the dust settles and the Navy is looking at, you know, their entire contribution at Omaha Beach, they

• 2:04:04Ben Milligan?

  know that, they know how important the NCDU's contribution was, and more importantly, they know how important the curriculum was that created these units. And that curriculum, I don't know if anybody in charge of Omaha Beach had realized what curriculum had created them, but there are people that know, and that curriculum is now validated because of everything the NCDUs did. And that curriculum, as you know, you know, developed by Draper Kaufman.

• 2:04:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the main part of that curriculum is hell week.

• 2:04:38Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, the crucible of that curriculum is hell week, and then, and the reason that it's developed is because, you know, it's the closest thing, or the least Draper Kaufman had ever come in contact with to combat. I mean, it's a, at least it matches the experience that Draper Kaufman had had when it came to combat. He'd been in, you know, we can get to Draper Kaufman, but it prepared the guys that went to Omaha Beach for exactly what they experienced. You know, they were...

• 2:05:16Ben Milligan?

  They were wet, they were cold. I mean, they'd spent almost forty-eight hours on, on ships that were, you know, often, some of these ships were sinking prior to, they were so overwhelmed with, with water and rain and that, you know, they went into battle cold, hungry. Often, you know, nearly all of them were seasick. They're all retching their guts out, so they don't have anything in them when they hit the beaches. And then the, the chaos that unfolds around them is, they've, they've gotten at least a taste of it on the beaches at Fort Pierce. They, you know, they, you know, the, the SoSali Day, I mean, they'd been peppered with all these bombs going off around them. They were probably better prepared for what, what they encountered than any other troops on Omaha Beach.

• 2:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the Hell Week thing is definitely interesting.

• 2:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Cause it is, it's shocking when you, when you, when you look at it and you know the kind of people that show up. Just the numbers of people that show up. I mean, a class will start with a couple hundred people. And by the time they're done with Hell Week, they'll be down to ten, fifteen, twenty percent of that. And these are people that enlisted in the Navy, that had a goal, that told their families they were gonna be Navy SEALs. That dedicated six years of their life to signing that dotted line. They trained, they worked, they went to boot camp, they gave up whatever other possibilities they had in life and they poured all that into this one singular dream.

• 2:06:52Ben Milligan?

  Without a fallback plan, too.

• 2:06:53Jocko Willink?

  With no, with the crappiest fallback. There's a fallback plan, it just sucks.

• 2:06:56Ben Milligan?

  It sucks. But I mean, it's not like if you go to the Marine Corps, like, and you don't, you know, get into our sock, you could still be a pretty awesome Marine.

• 2:07:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're a freaking infantryman in the Marine Corps, which is a beautiful thing. And same thing with the Army, special operations. Oh, you don't make it through special forces training? Okay, cool. You're a freaking ground pounder, which is awesome. The Navy, you don't make it through SEAL training, and if you have the mindset where you wanna be some kind of a machine gun toting badass. Well, guess what? You don't make it through SEAL training. You are literally not going to be a machine gun toting badass at all. And, and, and that's a horrible, a horrible fate for these young guys. But they know that, that, that's their fate. And yet with that fate, they still ring that bell. And people from every background, people that were

• 2:07:45Jocko Willink?

  Division one athletes of every division one athlete wrestlers, football players, uh, you name it swimmers, runners, they all quit. People that were, you know, raised with a silver spoon in their mouth that went to Ivy League schools, they quit. People that were raised in the ghetto with really hard lives, they quit. Some of them make it, some of them quit. Same with the Ivy League. Some of them make it, some of them quit. It's a crazy crucible and, and we still don't even understand it. We don't understand who's gonna make it.

• 2:08:15Ben Milligan?

  No, I think the only thing that we, we really know is where it came from. That's about it. And we don't, and I mean, as much as Draper Kaufman wrote, and I came, I mean, when I, so I went to his daughter's house in Indiana and uh, um, she let me have, you know, two days just to go through this entire, this humongous file cabinet. He kept everything. And I, there was letters, I mean, tons of letters between, you know, him, family members, friends. Um, the one thing that he never really kind of, um, talked about, at least contemporaneously, he only really talked about it in his oral history was this, you know, this hell week that he invented. I mean, and nobody really, I mean, all the guys that went through it talked about it. He didn't even talk about, you know, his own experience

• 2:09:00Ben Milligan?

  going through it. So after he created hell week, and he didn't really create hell week, all he did was compress, you know, that, uh, that curriculum that, you know, Phil Buckloo and all those other scouts and raiders, they established it. All Draper Kaufman did was like, okay, I like this. This is eight weeks long. That's great. Let's put it in, let's make all this five days. It's like, how are you gonna do that? Well, you're just gonna cut out all the stuff that you don't need, like, you know, like sleep. We'll just, you know, keep, keep the guy. And he did it himself. I mean, he not only, you know, creates this, he puts himself through the training.

• 2:09:31Jocko Willink?

  At 32 years old.

• 2:09:32Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:33Jocko Willink?

  And he's a terrible athlete.

• 2:09:34Ben Milligan?

  He's a terrible athlete. He's a terrible swimmer. He can't, he can't qualify. I mean, his, his eyesight, he can't even qualify for the standards that he sets for himself or for, sets for the program. Like, he would not be, he would not qualify for, you know, the course that he creates. Then he does it.

• 2:09:53Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you visited, did you, you visited where Omaha Beach, you visited Fort Pierce?

• 2:09:59Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:00Jocko Willink?

  How was that with the, with the breadth of knowledge that you have when you're down there?

• 2:10:04Ben Milligan?

  That's incredible.

• 2:10:08Ben Milligan?

  It's, um, there's nothing quite like, you know, going to the places that you're writing about. If I could have gone, I wish I could have gone to every single place that I, I wrote about. And I've kind of made it a mental mandate for me, of future books, I'm, I'm never gonna write about anything unless I go to the place. Um, the, uh, there's a way to Omaha. I mean, there's a way to, you know, all of, all of Normandy. And, um, I mean, you, I'm not sure, uh, which point you, you should go to the cemetery at Omaha Beach. If you should go to the cemetery first, before you go to the beachheads and before you go to all the battlefields in Pointe du Hoc, or if you should go see the battlefields and Pointe du Hoc and everything, and then go to the cemetery. Either way, um, you're

• 2:10:53Ben Milligan?

  going to that cemetery and you're going to walk around it. And the, the one thing that you're gonna see, and there, there's a, a poem by Robert Frost, when you, before you go into that cemetery, and it said something like, you know, uh, don't talk, um, just listen, just look, and, uh, note the dates on these headstones. Note how young they were, and they died for you. And it's, it's overwhelming. And then to take that, and then to go see the places where all of these guys were, you see Dog Green, Dog Red, and all the, all the beaches, and then you go to Pointe du Hoc. You can't even look over the cliffs. I mean, look, you see where these Rangers, they climbed up, like, and

• 2:11:36Ben Milligan?

  they, I mean, the Germans at the top are cutting ropes, and they're throwing grenades, and they're leaning over the cliffs, and they're machine gunning them off the ropes, and still they came. Um, and with the, the section that you read of, uh, Karnowski, uh, he dropped his helmet in the water before, you know, the, the operation even started, before the, you know, the, um, before the ramp even dropped. He did not have a helmet, and he, you know, spent, he ran, you know, from, I mean, and who, where was he gonna get a helmet? Everybody else needed their helmet, and there's no other helmets to take. And he, you know, ran, ran ashore and, um...

• 2:12:14Ben Milligan?

  Wasn't able to get a helmet, you know, for almost 24 hours. He finally, finally found a helmet that wasn't attached to somebody that he was able to take.

• 2:12:24Ben Milligan?

  But, yeah.

• 2:12:25Jocko Willink?

  And how about Fort Pierce?

• 2:12:27Ben Milligan?

  Fort Pierce is really something. We can talk about Fort Pierce a bit later. There's a,

• 2:12:33Ben Milligan?

  recently went to Fort Pierce for their annual muster and, but yeah, Fort Pierce is one of the first places I went and I didn't, I didn't quite understand like what the island was like, what the, what the separation of Hutchinson Island was. Cause Fort Pierce is the actual town. It's on the mainland where Hutchinson Island, where, you know, that's what we colloquial call, or that's what we call, you know, Fort Pierce. It's actually two separate islands. It's an intercoastal island that separates, you know, from the Indian River and the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic is, you know, kind of a crushing surf and you can see all the rocks that are there. I mean, the, the idea of a rock portage and everything like that, we all, you know, we always think of it as, you know, right there at the hotel.

• 2:13:18Jocko Willink?

  Hotel Dell.

• 2:13:19Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, you know, you get this fairy tale hotel, you know, and, and these, you know, jagged, you know, humongous, you know, rocks. They have the exact same rocks right there at Fort Pierce and they did the exact same rock portage. And it was just as dangerous then as it is now. But you, you, you can see it. I mean, you, you can see, you know, this is the birthplace. This is where it all happened. And it wasn't just the birthplace of, you know, the NCDUs and the Scouts and Raiders, but it was the birthplace of, you know, kind of American Special Operations thinking. Everybody took a turn at Fort Pierce. Anybody was going to do any sort of amphibious training. Any special unit was going to take a stop at Fort Pierce. The Rangers, the, the Army Raiders that, that, you know,

• 2:14:01Ben Milligan?

  went up the Seabook River on the Dallas. They all, everybody, everybody took a turn through Fort Pierce. It was the,

• 2:14:10Ben Milligan?

  it was the garden bed of, of Special Operations thinking at the time, so.

• 2:14:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you might just mentioned the, the UDT SEAL Museum, which is down there in Fort Pierce and it's friggin unbelievable.

• 2:14:24Ben Milligan?

  It is, it's really.

• 2:14:24Jocko Willink?

  Awesome thing that they're continuing to build down there.

• 2:14:28Ben Milligan?

  Yeah. Couldn't have done the book without him.

• 2:14:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really? Like as far as them giving you information and pointing you in the right direction?

• 2:14:36Ben Milligan?

  You know, it was the first place that I went to and it was, um, um, this was, I, I went there before I even knew what an archive was. And their archive is, um, it's not, it's not really an ar- I mean, it's a, it's a room with a bunch of file cabinets in it. And the first time that I went in there, you know, nobody, um, uh, nobody told me what I couldn't look at. I mean, I just, I just went in there with a camera and, you know, I got to work. I didn't know where World War II was. I didn't know where Korea was, Vietnam, but it's all in there and I was gathering stuff that, you know, um, I didn't know what I was looking at. I took a thousand pictures away my first day at an archive and it took me a month to go through them.

• 2:15:19Ben Milligan?

  And just to sort of, you know, figure out this is this, this is that, you know, this is a, this is an operations plan for Okinawa. This is a, you know, this is an op order for, um, you know, a train demolition raid in Korea, something like that. I mean, um, but yeah, that was the first time that I, you know, really kind of got the evidence of the cold case mystery that I was trying to, you know, sort out.

• 2:15:47Jocko Willink?

  All right. Let's move on to, a- a- and again, uh, I've already told you, if you're listening to this, to buy this book and to do it as quickly as you possibly can. Um, we are literally just hitting wave tops on this stuff. There's so much incredible information. Obviously D-Day, I mean, we, I read one, I read two paragraphs about D-Day. There's entire incredible section about all of it, about Draper Kaufman, who we, we covered him a lot on the first, the first time you were on because he's such a, he's such an incredible character. He's not the guy that you would think created or was one of the, one of the lead role players in creating this organization that we have. He's a guy and you know, you, you know what you pointed out on that first podcast is?

• 2:16:34Jocko Willink?

  He's a guy that was, he didn't really wanna be, he didn't wanna be some kinda commander. He wanted to be a naval officer that was in charge of a ship and it just wasn't gonna happen for him. His eyesight was bad, it wasn't gonna happen. And he just made things happen. He looked around and said, alright, well, what can I do? And what does the military need? What does the, what does the, what does the, the, the fighting people need? Cause he wasn't necessarily gonna work for America either. It was like, who's fighting? I'm in.

• 2:17:03Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, I think that's important. I mean, for anybody who's trying to be a SEAL right now, I mean, whether you succeed or whether you don't, I mean, there's so many ways to serve your country. I mean, here's a guy who spent four years at the Naval Academy, hoping to fulfill his dream to be a destroyer sailor. He wants to just be on a destroyer, that's all he wants. And it's, you know, the rug's pulled out from under him, right at the moment, he's, he's ready to take the fleet. And he's gotta come up with Plan B. He doesn't know what Plan B is gonna be, but he doesn't, you know, let that paralyze him. He, when he doesn't see a way to contribute to his country, he makes one up. And then he makes one up again. The thing that just keeps, the, the, his guiding star in that whole process is just

• 2:17:48Ben Milligan?

  like, I wanna be useful. I wanna, I wanna, you know, help and I wanna be as close as I can to, you know, to that, to that help. And if I can, you know, if I can't fight, then I'll carry, I'll carry stretchers, I'll be an ambulance driver. If I can't be an RAF pilot, or if I can't be on a British ship, then I will dispose the bombs that are landing in central London. If I can't be a ship driver in the US Navy, then I will teach the rest of the Navy how to dismantle bombs. I'll do whatever I can. And then when he's, anyway.

• 2:18:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, it's incredible, incredible story that, it's just crazy. It's a crazy thing. He's, he becomes a French ambulance driver and then becomes a British. Naval officer, and then finally, they eventually let him into the US Navy. That's crazy.

• 2:18:38Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, if you want to like, like for somebody, and his dad is one of the most famous destroyer skippers in the Navy. And his dad, I mean, who clearly loves his son, because I mean, you see the, you see the paralysis in his, you know, like we talked about last time, the paralysis and the letters between the two, like, he knows that his son's going to be committed or sent on these, you know, terribly dangerous missions. It's never been done before, like when, before Draper Kaufman heads out with UDT-5 to scout the beaches for Saipan, his dad knows that these guys are going into combat with nothing. And the letters are, you know, he signs them off, you know, just the same way, you know, anybody, any, any other dad would, you know, "I love you, lots and lots of luck, and that's

• 2:19:23Ben Milligan?

  all I can do, like, that's all I can do for you." He's not getting received on his son's behalf.

• 2:19:30Jocko Willink?

  Craziness.

• 2:19:34Jocko Willink?

  Chapter five. The evolving contest that created the Merman of War. World War II's only indispensable special operations unit, so we, we, we have that controversy about the Merman.

• 2:19:48Ben Milligan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:49Jocko Willink?

  We don't really like that term.

• 2:19:51Ben Milligan?

  We don't.

• 2:19:52Jocko Willink?

  But it's got, it's what got used, right?

• 2:19:54Ben Milligan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, they used it, I mean, they, that's the, I think that was the, the Wrigley spearmint gum hour that was on the radio. I mean, that's where it came from.

• 2:20:04Jocko Willink?

  That's where it came from.

• 2:20:05Ben Milligan?

  They called them the Merman. They called the Merman of War, yeah.

• 2:20:09Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunate little piece of history, but we can't change it. All right, going to the book here real quick, in the, in the late summer of 1943, right about the same time that Draper Kaufman was putting himself through Hell Week, US commanders in the Pacific were about to initiate two campaigns with one ultimate objective, the invasion of Japan. Blocked by a swath of ocean five times the size of the Sahara and whose every atoll had been turned into a Japanese fortress, the strategy to accomplish this objective was one in which the Allies would leapfrog most islands, especially the most robustly defended. "Let them wither on the vine," said Douglas MacArthur, "and seize a handful upon which

• 2:20:50Jocko Willink?

  they could build airfields substantial enough to support the long-range four-engine bombers needed to soften up the next handful on the way to mainland Japan." In the South Pacific, this path would progress from the mountainous jungles of Guadalcanal to a nearby group of similar islands, many well-charted and populated, and all of them battlefields large enough for the US Army's and MacArthur's ambitions. In the Central Pacific, this path would start some 2,000 miles west of Hawaii in the Gilbert Island chain, the first lily pads large enough to support bomber-sized airfields, but so

• 2:21:30Jocko Willink?

  small, so remote, so daunting, that their volcanic spines of white sand and green palms could almost be mistaken for the rigid backs of a thousand sea monsters. And there was only one branch of service that could lead the hunt against those, the same branch that would go on to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall, but employing an altogether different kind of method. Indeed, a method unlike any in military history. So you're setting us up pretty strong there, right? For this-

• 2:22:09Ben Milligan?

  Well, I had to make up for the Merman.

• 2:22:11Jocko Willink?

  True, true. This is the first time the Navy's kind of the master of the battlespace.

• 2:22:16Ben Milligan?

  First time in history.

• 2:22:19Jocko Willink?

  And that's going to play into a significant role because we need to get onto these islands.

• 2:22:26Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:26Jocko Willink?

  We need to figure out how to get onto these islands. And there's this weird little gap, this weird little gap of information, this weird little gap of tactical control that no one really knows how to fill.

• 2:22:44Jocko Willink?

  What's the, what's the myth behind Tarawa?

• 2:22:48Ben Milligan?

  Tarawa is, um, every history that I'd ever read about, uh, the SEAL teams starts with a, a vignette about Tarawa. Um, and that, uh, Tarawa is this, um, it's this meat grinder battle in 1943, um, in which the Marines, uh, they take this island in the central Pacific.

• 2:23:15Ben Milligan?

  And in three days, the Marines lose as many men as they've lost in the entire six month battle for Guadalcanal. It's, it's, it's the first time that Americans realize that this is going to be, uh, this is going to be something, this is going to, this is like the Shiloh moment in the Civil War where, uh, Americans realize this is going to be ugly, it's terrible, it's going to be a, a monster. Um, and you're going to have to do this on island, on every island across, uh, the Pacific to get to Japan. If we're going to, uh, carry this, you know, FDR's, uh, policy of, uh, unconditional surrender, uh, against the Japanese, this is going to be a bloody, bloody, uh, battle or bloody way to do it.

• 2:23:59Ben Milligan?

  And so the idea is that, you know, part of the reason that Tarawa was such a meat grinder is because the landing craft couldn't get past the coral reefs, which is true, uh, the landing craft couldn't get, uh, past the coral reefs and it was going to be a problem on every subsequent battle. Uh, but the Marines had already anticipated that, the Navy had already anticipated that, and they had fielded a new technological solution to overcome it, which was the LVT or the amphibious tractor, uh, it wasn't a landing craft as much as it was, um, you know, a tractor that could float. And as soon as it got to the, yeah, coral, it would just crawl right over it. I think they brought one hundred and twenty-five to Tarawa. There, I think there's only a handful left by the end of the first day.

• 2:24:43Ben Milligan?

  The rest are technologically, they're broken. So, the subsequent days, the only Marines that can land to support are, you know, they're kept on the outskirts of the battle by this coral reef. So, they have to, you know, drive up the Higgins boats, they drop their ramps, the Marines rush out into the coral, and they jump into the lagoon, and then they've got this three-thousand-yard way to shore where they've got to, you know, deal with mortars, machine gun fire. And there's, you know, pilots that are flying above this tragedy, and they, the record is that, you know, this lagoon, this, you know, pristine blue lagoon, it never, it's never free of red.

• 2:25:22Ben Milligan?

  I mean, it's just, it's a sea awash with red the entire three days. And it's, it leaves an impression on everybody who encounters it. Just because of the, you know, the Marines that are being pulled from this lagoon for the next three days, they're completely, they're, they don't have hair, they're completely swollen, it's a, it's a crime scene. Every, every single person in there, it's a crime scene. So, the, you know, the myth is that because of this, you know, the Navy decides that they have to, on every subsequent battle, they've got to create a unit that can destroy the coral so the landing craft can get in there. Which is true, sort of.

• 2:26:03Ben Milligan?

  The landing craft, you know, the coral is a problem, and it does need to be destroyed. The bigger issue that creates the UDTs, which ultimately creates the SEAL Team, is not so much the coral as it is the fact that the Navy is, at this point in the war, they're not given access to the Marine Corps Special Units. Because the Marine Corps, like I said in Chapter One, they have elevated their status to such a point that they are now on parity with the Navy. So, up until that point, the Marine, or the Navy, had this impression that the Marine Corps was its subservient service, and on every battle, Navy admirals could trump Marine Corps generals.

• 2:26:45Ben Milligan?

  But at this point in the war, Marine Corps generals, they're... They're just as, they're on, they're on par with their Navy admirals. So if the Navy wants to send out reconnaissance troops, a special reconnaissance mission, or if they wanted to conduct a raid or anything like that, they've got to go through the Marine Corps because they're the only guys that, or they're the only service that has a unit that could do any of those things. So when Turner, Turner is the commander of the 5th Amphibious Force, he does not, he hates this policy, absolutely hates it. He's the, he's the biggest, I describe him as the first personification of an actual life Ahab in the Pacific Theater.

• 2:27:29Ben Milligan?

  He is, he's the biggest, what do you call him? He's the biggest dick that's ever served in the Surface Navy. He's a tyrant almost, and he absolutely hates the fact that he does not have control of the Marines in the way that he anticipated having control of the Marines. So he's not as concerned about destroying the coral as he is with having his own unit that he can control, that he can send out to find out information and either find it out, cut it out, whatever. That's why he creates the UDTs. It's not a, it's not a issue of coral as it is chain command, control.

• 2:28:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. One of the characters that you cut, I guess, James Jones from the recon company. What's this guy all about?

• 2:28:21Ben Milligan?

  James Jones is, so one of the options that the Navy had prior to this sort of realignment or reassessment of Marine Corps authority would have been the VAC recon company, the VAC, 5th Amphibious Force, VAC. That would have been a unit that Kelly Turner, Admiral Turner, would have had access to, to send on special, special missions, special assignments, including missions to destroy coral, find coral, things like that.

• 2:28:52Ben Milligan?

  But now that the Marine Corps is, you know, has the status that it does, you know, it doesn't really have access to this unit anymore. But it's a, it's sort of the, the replacement for the Marine Corps Raiders. It's not as big as the Raiders were intended to be, but they, they, they sort of formed this unit around James Jones. He's a, he's a really interesting character. He was a tractor salesman in Africa before the war. And just by being a tractor salesman, he manages to pick up multiple languages. He's a really, really interesting guy. And he was one of the initial guys that put in charge of the Observer Group, which was the unit that ultimately became the Scouts and Raiders.

• 2:29:34Ben Milligan?

  As a side note, he is the father of James Jones, the national, of Obama's first national security advisor.

• 2:29:46Jocko Willink?

  Wait, father or grandfather?

• 2:29:48Ben Milligan?

  Father.

• 2:29:49Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 2:29:50Ben Milligan?

  He's the father. And I, so when I was doing my initial research for this, I was trying to get an interview with, with him.

• 2:29:57Jocko Willink?

  No dice?

• 2:29:58Ben Milligan?

  I was close. I had, I was going.

• 2:30:02Jocko Willink?

  That's not dice, bro.

• 2:30:03Ben Milligan?

  It was not dice. I was going back, back and forth with his secretary. He has a, not a nonprofit, but like a strategic think, think tank. And I was going back and forth with his secretary. Couldn't make it work. So no dice, you're right.

• 2:30:17Jocko Willink?

  No dice, no dice. And well, then what happened with the, with the, what happened with them?

• 2:30:22Ben Milligan?

  The VAC recon company, they initially, they, they have some pretty, pretty impressive raids right around the time of Tarawa. They, they raid a little island of Apamama that's, you know, it's kind of a, it's a similar Macon Island style raid. They use the same submarine that they, that the Raiders use for Macon Island. They, they.

• 2:30:55Ben Milligan?

  It's kind of a textbook island raid, Navy and Marine Corps cooperation. But after that, they don't really do much until the Battle of Okinawa. And the reason that they're important is because they're kind of, once the UDT are created, you can see how important the UDT become and how less important every other unit becomes. And at one point, the VAC recon company doesn't really have a mission, so they assign them to the UDTs. And so they take every Marine that's in the VAC recon company that can swim, and they plug them into a UDT.

• 2:31:32Jocko Willink?

  Do they actually get transferred to the Navy or no?

• 2:31:34Ben Milligan?

  No, they don't get transferred. And by Okinawa, they separate themselves from the UDT again, and they're back to doing their sort of island raids. But until Okinawa, there's not a lot of other little satellite islands to do the things that they were trained to do.

• 2:31:49Jocko Willink?

  And then what about the USS Burrfish recon of Yap? This was a UDT-10 operation. What was going on there?

• 2:32:00Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, that was one of the, that's in August of 44. There's a series of sort of secret reconnaissance. So after the Tinian reconnaissance, which Draper Kaufman leads, it's a combined reconnaissance between VAC recon, so the Marine recon, and UDT swimmers. The Navy really sees the potential of doing these night, secret reconnaissance of various islands. So the next group of islands that the Pacific planners are hoping to capture are in the Palau, so Palau, that whole episode in the war.

• 2:32:45Ben Milligan?

  So one of the satellite islands of Palau is this island of Yap. So the USS Burrfish with a contingent of UDT swimmers, half of whom are not, haven't really been trained in the traditional UDT curriculum, which they established at Maui, but half of them are actually OSS maritime swimmers. They send a combined recon team ashore at Yap. Three of the swimmers get separated from their boat. The boat ends up paddling back to the USS Burrfish, which is the submarine. They come back out the next night trying to recover the swimmers, hoping that they've

• 2:33:26Ben Milligan?

  managed to stay alive ashore and not get captured. But they, after the second night, they realized they're not going to be able to have a link up and three swimmers get left behind. And they are three, they're the, as far as I know, they're the only three missing. Well, there's a couple of others, but they're three unaccounted for NSW members out there. We still have not recovered their bodies. We think, based off of the research of one archivist at the National Archives, who's also, Moonlights is a historian himself, Nate Patch, he's put together a pretty convincing argument

• 2:34:06Ben Milligan?

  that the bodies are probably at Bebel Thuep. They're buried with a handful of other captured American aviators. But we have not, not found them. There's an effort right now by Project Recover to try and track their bodies down.

• 2:34:23Jocko Willink?

  All right.

• 2:34:26Ben Milligan?

  But likely they were captured, they were bounced around. The Japanese tried to, you know, do a cover up of their execution. They said that they were put on a transport bound for the South Pacific back to the Philippines. Based off of the research that Nate Patch did, looks like that was all just manufactured and they were killed right there.

• 2:34:45Jocko Willink?

  So that, that chapter kind of, kind of brings the underwater demolition teams, sort of how, how we really got the traction going on the underwater demolition teams. And then in chapter six, you start going into just the, the, a totally different aspect of warfare. I mean, a totally different aspect of warfare. Chapter six is called "The Contest for Guerrilla War in China and the Organization That Had No Damn Business Fighting It: The U.S. Navy's Army of Soldiers." And this is definitely one of the wildest sections in the book. All pretty much centered around this, this guy Miles, who...

• 2:35:31Jocko Willink?

  This is like a whole book unto itself. Of course, I guess I say that over again for all your characters, but this guy's insane.

• 2:35:39Ben Milligan?

  No, I mean.

• 2:35:40Jocko Willink?

  And quite literally at the end, I guess he is insane, right?

• 2:35:43Ben Milligan?

  Yes, I mean, the effort breaks him. It completely breaks him. He's, uh, um, he's committed to a, a, a mental institution. Um, it takes him, uh, several months to, and, and part of that's drug induced. I mean, he's self medicating by the end of the war, um, taking an incredible, uh, cocktail worth of medicine just to, you know, either stay awake, go to sleep and then, uh, deal with the, the pain, uh, that he's dealing with, and the fevers too. He's got almost constant malaria throughout the entire war. But yeah, I mean, of all the guys that I, I mean, I say, there's kind of a, um, a horse race, uh, in my head for who is the weirdest character in the book. And Miles is definitely leaning for the tape. I mean, he's like.

• 2:36:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:26Ben Milligan?

  I mean, he's, he's fascinating in, um, in the sense of how unremarkable he seems. Like when you meet Miles, like he seems like any other ship officer that you would encounter, just like if you, you know, did a visit or any of the, you know, uh, other guys, you know, he's, he's not a physical specimen. He's kind of, you know, nerdy looking. He's just forgettable. He's totally forgettable. He's not like, he's not like a exotic person. He's not like a, he's not like a Lawrence of Arabia type character at all. And yet he does every, I mean, what he contributes to the war is every bit as remarkable as, as a Lawrence of Arabia.

• 2:37:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, we, we ran over the figures on the last time you were on this podcast, but he had, there, this massive guerrilla force that he ends up running.

• 2:37:09Ben Milligan?

  With no business doing it.

• 2:37:10Jocko Willink?

  With no business doing it.

• 2:37:11Ben Milligan?

  And that quote from the title, no damn business, that comes from another Navy officer, one of Miles's friends. He's like, we have no damn business doing this. I found the letter. Like if, if, if, you know, one of Miles's friends thinks that, you know, we, the Navy has no damn business, then what hope did we really ever have?

• 2:37:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And yet the impact that they had was completely strategic. They end up killing somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000, I think, enemy Japanese soldiers, but more important tying up a million of them.

• 2:37:39Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:37:40Jocko Willink?

  Only lost a handful of Americans.

• 2:37:44Ben Milligan?

  Doesn't account for the number of Chinese lost?

• 2:37:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:47Ben Milligan?

  But you're right. I mean, the Chinese contribution is, you know, it's unaccounted for and, you know, significant. But yeah, only some six, six American, uh, six American deaths in the entire effort, which is a, you know, the effort, you know, stretches from 1942 to all the way to 1945. I mean, it's, you're absolutely right. There should be a book written about this. And when I, when I got into this, I didn't want to write this chapter. I was so tired of, not so tired, but I was like, I was so anxious to be done with World War II, when I finished my UDT chapter. And I was so ready to move on to Korea. I just wanted different scenery, different, a different record group at the National Archives. Uh, when I got to this point, I mean, all I wanted to do was leave. And I was just trying to

• 2:38:29Ben Milligan?

  like, take this China stuff and kind of stuff it into like an introductory section of my Korean War chapter. And I couldn't do it. One chapter or one page became two pages and became three pages and four pages. And I'm like, mother, mother. I had to write a whole new chapter. It derailed my entire timeline for, you know, finishing the book.

• 2:38:47Jocko Willink?

  What's the movie potential for, uh?

• 2:38:50Ben Milligan?

  For this?

• 2:38:50Jocko Willink?

  For this?

• 2:38:51Ben Milligan?

  I think that, I mean, I think, you know, if you have to, if I was going to say like, which of these, I think they could all be movies. But, you know, if you haven't seen, we've seen, you know, Saving Private Ryan. Um, we've never seen a, um, a representation of a guerrilla war, um, like what happened in China in World War II. It could totally, Miles is such a, you know, an interestingly, an interesting character. He could be like, I mean, he, he's interesting in the fact that he's so boring, but he does, I mean, he's, I mean, survives 40 assassination attempts. Um, he's, uh, he's a naval officer who's involved in, and probably more ground combat than anybody else, uh, in history.

• 2:39:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Including a freaking cavalry charge on camels.

• 2:39:39Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:41Jocko Willink?

  It's nuts.

• 2:39:41Ben Milligan?

  It's nuts. The whole thing is nuts. But yeah, the movie potential of chapter six is high. I think the movie potential of, you know, the UDT chapter is just as high too. I mean, that's, I mean, the, imagine seeing, or I can see a movie of, you know, these guys, you know, totally, you know, going into battle with just knives and, you know, fins and masks. That'd be pretty neat.

• 2:40:03Jocko Willink?

  You have another character that you bring in here, going to the book, at 60 years old, thick, jowled, and with white hair parted just off-center, Wild Bill Donovan, a nickname he had earned as a volunteer leading soldiers through mud, gas, and death on the Western Front, looked in his uniform, nothing like the head of an insatiable unconventional warfare organization, and more like an overweight toddler playing dress-up. For signs of the former, one had to look elsewhere. First, to his left breast, where he had humbly affixed a single ribbon, his Medal of Honor, in effect saying to his peers that no other awards mattered. And second, to a career as an attorney, as a New York

• 2:40:48Jocko Willink?

  attorney and politician, occupations that had introduced him to everyone from movie stars to Mussolini, and taken him farther around the world than most presidents. He had been to Siberia to size up Bolsheviks, to the Far East to hunt down business, Ethiopia to tour the Italian Front, the Balkans, Turkey, and Spain as a president's unofficial envoy. In past ages, a hero millionaire like Donovan could have responded to a world crisis simply by raising his own regiment, equipping it, and leading it into battle. In the 20th century, such impulses had been curbed by the increasing complexities of modern warfare and a corresponding bureaucracy that recognized the limited value of eccentric amateur's Medal of Honor or

• 2:41:31Jocko Willink?

  not. Now blocked from commanding regular troops, Donovan, courageous, entrepreneurial, imaginative, and most of all unstoppable, had set his sights on the only field of action whose battle lines had not yet been drawn, and on the one man who stood in his way.

• 2:41:53Jocko Willink?

  What's up with Donovan, dude?

• 2:41:55Ben Milligan?

  Well, it's an impossible

• 2:41:59Ben Milligan?

  contest. I mean, Donovan is, when I set out to write this, not this chapter, but when I set out to write an OSS chapter, and I was attracted to it just because of Donovan. He is a, I mean, there should be a Donovan movie. He's, I mean, all the, you know, the stories about

• 2:42:24Ben Milligan?

  J. Edgar Hoover, you know, dressing up in women's clothes. These are rumors that Donovan started. I mean, he's responsible for so much and, you know,

• 2:42:34Jocko Willink?

  When you say that, you mean he actually was responsible for starting the rumors about J. Edgar Hoover dressing up in women's clothing?

• 2:42:40Ben Milligan?

  He, yes.

• 2:42:41Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're saying.

• 2:42:42Ben Milligan?

  I'm saying, yes, he is responsible. I'm not saying that.

• 2:42:45Jocko Willink?

  This isn't hyperbole. This is what this guy did.

• 2:42:47Ben Milligan?

  No, and the reason he did that is because at the time, the OSS and the FBI were in some sort of competition for the International Intelligence Mission.

• 2:42:57Jocko Willink?

  And one of them turned into a cross dresser.

• 2:42:59Ben Milligan?

  He wanted to delegitimize his rival as best as he could. I mean, and at the same time, J. Edgar Hoover was, he was putting rumors out there that Donovan was having an affair with his daughter-in-law. So they were both at each other from like,

• 2:43:14Jocko Willink?

  So is there any truth to the rumor of J. Edgar Hoover dressing up in women's clothing?

• 2:43:17Ben Milligan?

  I don't know about that, but I think there is suspicion that Donovan was actually having an affair with his daughter-in-law. His son's wife. Yeah. That's, that's pretty.

• 2:43:25Jocko Willink?

  And so how does he play into our, into our story here for, for the development of the SEAL teams?

• 2:43:30Ben Milligan?

  So Donovan's important because Donovan sees what the Navy's doing in China and he wants it. He doesn't think the Navy should have anything to do with this. Donovan has established himself as the, the head of the international, or head of the US Intelligence Organization, which he has understood to include all sorts of special programs. So if there's going to be a guerrilla warfare effort in China, OSS is going to be in charge of it. So he comes to China. So first, he tries to rope Miles into the OSS, and he establishes Miles as an OSS, not operative, but head of an OSS program. Problem is,

• 2:44:11Ben Milligan?

  Donovan also wants to send all of his OSS folks to support Sacco. But Miles, Miles starts to receive these guys and they're all, you know, a lot of these guys are, you know, they're pretty interesting guys, but Miles doesn't want anything to do with them.

• 2:44:32Jocko Willink?

  They're like wannabes.

• 2:44:33Ben Milligan?

  Sort of wannabes, they're sort of like they...

• 2:44:35Jocko Willink?

  Because, because...

• 2:44:36Ben Milligan?

  They're all boondoggers, you're right.

• 2:44:37Jocko Willink?

  Because who Miles is getting is Marine Corps officers, like primarily, right?

• 2:44:41Ben Milligan?

  He's getting Marine Corps officers in the beginning, but what he really wants are people that don't know anything about China. He doesn't want racists.

• 2:44:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:44:49Ben Milligan?

  Miles is that weird, he's the peculiar type of officer who actually, he likes the indigenous people that he's working with. He doesn't want them to, I mean, he's a perfect character for, you know, today, but at the time, like, nobody really understands, like, what's his hangup? He's infatuated with China, he's infatuated with the Chinese, he thinks that these are, you know, members of the most, you know, one of the most civilized, you know, countries on the planet. And he has respect for them in a way that other Americans don't.

• 2:45:28Ben Milligan?

  He totally rejects the Orientalism or the superior American idea. In that way, he's just like, you know, T.E. Lawrence. I mean, he's a believer. He's the worst kind of person in something, I mean, he's like, he actually, my worst, worst kind of person, I'm only joking, he's like, to other people, he's not pliable, he's, he really believes in the potential of these Chinese soldiers to tie the Japanese down or to actually attack them. And, you know, Donovan comes in, and Donovan's a manipulator. Donovan's been manipulating for years.

• 2:46:09Ben Milligan?

  He's, he, you know, managed to, he squirreled himself into positions his entire, you know, since he got that Medal of Honor, he's used it to, you know, plow pathways through bureaucracy and to create a unit that never should have been created, to create this OSS and to... And some of his schemes are completely harebrained, but some of them are not. Some of them are actually, you know, pretty good. So he, when he sees Donovan, he's trying, or when he, when Donovan sees Miles, he first wants to, you know, put Miles under his thumb. And when Miles can't be put under his thumb, he tries to take the whole thing and leave Miles with the weather stations. That's all he wants to leave Miles with. He wants to take this entire guerrilla army that Miles is starting to build.

• 2:46:51Ben Milligan?

  And he justifies that because Miles isn't, you know, like, I quote in the book, he's not putting scalps on the barrel that fast enough. And he almost does it. He gets real close. But the thing that stops him is the Chinese won't work with Donovan. But they do like Miles.

• 2:47:07Jocko Willink?

  They can smell the intent.

• 2:47:09Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:10Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 2:47:10Ben Milligan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:47:11Jocko Willink?

  Donovan is freaking shady.

• 2:47:15Ben Milligan?

  It's tough to, you know, I hate.

• 2:47:16Jocko Willink?

  I guess he's gotta be shady a little bit.

• 2:47:18Ben Milligan?

  He is. I mean, he's, I mean, he, you know, it's tough to not, you know, respect Donovan. He's, he's a character, like, and he, you know, but he's a, he's a, he's a toddler with a, with a flamethrower.

• 2:47:33Jocko Willink?

  All right.

• 2:47:33Ben Milligan?

  Can we go back real quick?

• 2:47:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, go back.

• 2:47:35Ben Milligan?

  There's two characters that I want to talk about from the UDT, I think that.

• 2:47:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay, hit them.

• 2:47:39Ben Milligan?

  Alan Gordon Leslie.

• 2:47:43Ben Milligan?

  I was, I was thinking about the contribution of other, other branches of service to the UDTs. Alan Gordon Leslie is a Marine that gets attached to CLT, or to UDT five. He becomes Draper Kaufman's executive officer of UDT five for the Battle of Saipan.

• 2:48:05Ben Milligan?

  He is, he's Canadian. And I was thinking about him the other day, because we're here in San Diego, and I was walking through the Hotel Dell, and I was looking at this, you know, this, you know, monument to, you know, Victorian architecture and everything. And it was there, you know, during World War Two. And Gordon Leslie, he goes through the entire war. He, um, he's one of the scout snipers who seizes the pier at Tarawa. He shoulders a, um, a flamethrower and, uh, assaults the entire pier. So that, there's this, there's this pier, you know, cutting into the, uh, the lagoon at Tarawa. And, uh, in that, that pier would have threatened to cut into the flank of the, uh, the Marines that were landing on the beach. So the Marines had to take it before they landed.

• 2:48:49Ben Milligan?

  So they sent a scout sniper platoon to do it. And Gordon Leslie was the guy with the flamethrower. He's fighting all, you know, pillbox to pillbox or, uh, emplacement to emplacement. And, uh, you know, um, using the, uh, the flamethrower to destroy guys while he's got a machine gunner to his left and they're going down this incrementally, taking the entire pier. Um, he survives the Battle of Tarawa and he becomes, uh, he volunteers for the UDT. Um, as sort of a Marine Corps liaison, but he falls in love with the UDT and manages to stay with them. And the Marine Corps completely loses track of him. They don't know where he is. They think, they think he's a casualty. He stays with UDT five, uh, throughout the remainder of the war.

• 2:49:30Ben Milligan?

  And when he ends the war, he tries to transfer, uh, from the, um, officially transfer for, from the Marine Corps to the UDTs. He wants to stay with the frogmen. It becomes so controversial, it goes all the way up to the commandant of the Marine Corps. The Marines, uh, say, we're not losing a Marine to the Navy, especially to the UDT. We're, we're, we're going to keep him. So he's entitled to like $4,000 for the back pay because he hasn't gotten it in three years. So in, uh, uh, in retaliation, he takes his $4,000. He goes to the Hotel Dell. He slaps that $4,000 on the, on the front desk, reserves a peninsula of rooms, um, in the, in the Dell, uh, and he throws a two-week bender.

• 2:50:10Ben Milligan?

  It's so bad that Draper Kaufman has to put up a watch bill of officers to make sure that, that his frogmen don't leave that wing of the, uh, of the hotel.

• 2:50:23Ben Milligan?

  Good times. And who's the other guy you wanted to bring up? Uh, Norman's, or, uh, um, uh, Seymour Owens, Commander Seymour Owens. So, one of the, um, one of the, uh, the great things about, you know, doing the research for this book is you get to discover all of the, uh, the characters that weren't SEALs or that weren't Frogmen that contributed to the, um, the importance or the, uh, the success of naval special warfare. And one of those, one of those that's always stood out to me is Commander Seymour Owens. He was a destroyer skipper, um, uh, and he was involved in the, uh, the fire support mission,

• 2:51:04Ben Milligan?

  prior to the invasion of Tinian. So Tinian is the greatest strategic, um, uh, battle probably of the entire Central Pacific, uh, campaign. It's the island that ultimately becomes the, uh, um, uh, the airfield, uh, that they, uh, you know, fly all the, uh, long-range bombers to, to bomb Japan on. Uh, that's, it's where the Anole Gay takes off from, uh, to bomb Japan. It's, it's a perfect, uh, tabletop island. Um, but before it can be that, it has to be taken. And one of the biggest, uh, coups of the war is Draper Kaufman's reconnaissance of the, of the beaches that, uh, nobody ever thought anybody could land on. Uh, but in order

• 2:51:46Ben Milligan?

  to sell that, in order to land all those troops on those beaches that nobody expects, uh, UDT-7 has to stage this elaborate, um, ruse, uh, on the south of the island, um, uh, at Tinian Town. And so, um, on the day of the actual invasion, when all the Marines are secretly sneaking into the, uh, the beaches that Draper Kaufman has found, um, the UDT-7 is, you know, conducting a, a daylight, you know, reconnaissance. And they're protected by, you know, multiple battleships, one being the USS Colorado. Another Colorado has lighted itself up, um, amidships are, uh, with a broadside, uh, to the beach, um, and it takes devastating, um, uh, naval gunfire,

• 2:52:31Ben Milligan?

  uh, shore gunfire, um, and the, its guns are knocked out. And the, suddenly, uh, all the swimmers of UDT-7 are exposed. And they're, they're about to, uh, the Japanese are about to switch their guns away from the ships that are defending them to the swimmers in the water. Now Seymour Owens is the brother-in-law of Draper Kaufman. He sees what's happened. He sees that the Colorado's guns have been knocked out and he commands his ship without orders. He commands the Norman Scott to get between the Colorado. So one, the Colorado can escape and two, so he can also protect the UDT swimmers that are in the water. Suddenly, the USS Norman Scott becomes the center of all Japanese naval

• 2:53:10Ben Milligan?

  gunfire and it's destroyed. I think 47 sailors are killed in the process, including Seymour Owens, but he does it because he knows how important it is to draw the Japanese attention away from those beaches in the north.

• 2:53:29Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:53:33Ben Milligan?

  How are we doing?

• 2:53:34Jocko Willink?

  We're doing, I'll tell you how we're doing. We're gonna stop for today. That's the end of World War II, right?

• 2:53:42Ben Milligan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:43Jocko Willink?

  And again, that's the end of World War II. We hit some of the wave tops. There's so much more incredible information in the book. Get it, but what we'll do is we'll just record another podcast. Actually, we'll just do it after this one so people can stay in the groove on it. But I think that's about it for today because we're looking at, we're already over three hours, bro. At least real close to three hours. So, thanks for coming out, Ben. Appreciate it. Echo, what do you think? Any major, you know, things you need to bring up?

• 2:54:19Speaker 01

  Oh, no, nothing major. It's just interesting to hear all these, all this stuff that was going on under my nose the whole time.

• 2:54:26Jocko Willink?

  Under your nose, under all of our noses the whole time. Hey, if you want to support the podcast, you can do it. I'm drinking some go right now. Probably, how's that go tasting? You said it, but I was in the middle, you were in the middle of telling me cool stories and then you said it's delicious. You got Mango Mayhem right there. You know, that's Echo Charles. It's got his own signature flavor. That's how cool Echo Charles tastes.

• 2:54:51Ben Milligan?

  It's my first time. I don't think I've ever had a

• 2:54:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:54Ben Milligan?

  An energy drink.

• 2:54:55Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know what? It's starting to get, you're probably not gonna sleep a bunch after you drink that, bad boy. So, if you need some of that stuff, get some Jaco Fuel, Jacofuel.com. That's where we're selling the stuff. Also, Vitamin Shoppe's got it going on.

• 2:55:06Ben Milligan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:07Jocko Willink?

  Wawa's got it going on for the drinks. You know, we have We have ready to drink milk coming that you can go into a store and just grab a cold milk out of the fridge, salted caramel. Ever heard of that?

• 2:55:22Speaker 01

  I've heard.

• 2:55:23Jocko Willink?

  Salted caramel is definitely a thing. We got chocolate, vanilla, um, banana cream.

• 2:55:31Speaker 01

  So the perfect mix.

• 2:55:32Jocko Willink?

  We got a mix coming your way. So we got that coming. Uh, don't forget about your joint warfare and whatnot. Crill oil. What else? OriginUSA.com.

• 2:55:40Speaker 01

  Yep. American made stuff.

• 2:55:41Jocko Willink?

  American made stuff.

• 2:55:42Speaker 01

  Keeping our economy going in the right way, by the way.

• 2:55:46Jocko Willink?

  It'd be real easy. It's real easy. I was having a conversation with someone the other day like, oh yeah, you know,

• 2:55:53Jocko Willink?

  I saw another brand like that. I was like, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. There's no other brand like this. There's no one else that's doing this. If someone goes, oh, you know, we're going to get into the uh, jujitsu market. Cool. I'd take $7,000 and I order some rash guards from China and get them printed. Cool. Now you've got a brand. Bro, no, that's not what I'm talking about. We invested our lives into this, into buying the equipment, capturing the know-how. You know, you talk about how some of the people that you would, you have interviewed that have since died, uh, and, and you wouldn't have been able to capture that knowledge.

• 2:56:35Jocko Willink?

  We've actually had that happen at Origin. People that, the old timers, and I mean that with all due respect, the old timers, the people that knew how to run a loom, the people that knew how to work on machines, the people that knew how to weave and knit, they, they passed this information out. Some of them, we're losing them now. So if you started a brand for, you know, $4,000 by ordering some stuff from China and slap that, hey, good for you. That's fine.

• 2:57:02Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 2:57:04Jocko Willink?

  But let's face it, it's not too good for you. Uh, don't do that. You want to support a real company, an American company, go to OriginUSA.com. We're making everything you need. By the way, jeans, boots. T-shirts, sweatshirts, rash guards, whole nine yards. So check that out, originusa.com.

• 2:57:22Speaker 01

  It's true. Also Jaco has a store.

• 2:57:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, Hunt Gear too. I know you're seeing it coming. And I know you like to wear camouflage pants for no reason, Echo Charles.

• 2:57:30Speaker 01

  To be camouflage.

• 2:57:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, I mean, just saying, you're that dual-use kind of survivorist, survivalist prepper. You're like, just in case I gotta go into the jungle, I'm gonna be ready to rock and roll. We got this pattern. There's a little bit of a tribute to our forefathers, the, the pattern that we've made for camouflages. You know, the, obviously the primary goal is to make sure it's effective, but we were able to make it effective, Ben, while still giving a little bit of a, of a, of a shout out to, to the Tiger Stri- to the Tiger Stripes. So, you know, one, we got one for the, one for the Highlands, sort of the Western colors, and another one for the, more like the Eastern colors. So we got like a woodland versus a more of a Highland camis, but yeah,

• 2:58:15Jocko Willink?

  a little bit of Tiger Stripe activity. It's coming.

• 2:58:17Speaker 01

  Both viable for me.

• 2:58:18Jocko Willink?

  Both viable, yeah, cuz you know, you, you never know what you're gonna get into, Echo Charles.

• 2:58:22Speaker 01

  Whatever, I wore the, I wore the heavy, the hoodie, snowboarding, viable.

• 2:58:27Jocko Willink?

  Viable, viable.

• 2:58:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:58:29Jocko Willink?

  Right on, there you go.

• 2:58:30Speaker 01

  Yep, also Jaco has a store called Jaco Store, where you can represent, where you get your shirts to represent discipline equals freedom, good, other stuffs. Just a good way to represent on the path. When you see somebody else wearing this kind of stuff, you know, you know.

• 2:58:44Jocko Willink?

  You know what's up. Subscribe to the podcast. Don't forget about Jaco Underground. We appreciate your support. We just got done recording one this morning. It's gonna be a long day in the office today, bro.

• 2:58:51Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:58:53Jocko Willink?

  If you wanna support Jaco Underground, jacoun underground.com, check that out. We got a YouTube channel. We got some books. Primary book I wanna talk about, By Water Beneath the Walls. Look, Ben, straight up, I was being straight up with you before, probably not the title we would've gone with, you know? It's hard to say. It's a mouthful. We have no idea what it means.

• 2:59:17Speaker 01

  Did you read the, you read the?

• 2:59:19Jocko Willink?

  Of course I read it. I get it. There's a tie back to whatever battle took place 9,000 years ago and you want to make that's the

• 2:59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, plus he likes the wordy.

• 2:59:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. We're actually surprised. We're actually lucky. Maybe that was the short version of the title.

• 2:59:33Ben Milligan?

  Oh, you should have seen the other. You should have seen the options I had for subtitle.

• 2:59:38Jocko Willink?

  Scary. Hey, hey, let me tell you, um, all kidding aside, this is an absolute, this is an incredible book. It's, it's, it's an incredible book. The, the knowledge that it will give you is phenomenal. It's also, it's also really funny. You've got, you, you got, you sit over there with your little dry sense of humor. Um, and that, that dry sense of humor just shines through, throughout the book and it's, it's dramatic. It's funny. Dude, it's like a, you know, I feel like a commercial for some weird, uh, summer movie, you know? Yeah, it's like funny, sad. You'll laugh and you'll cry. And that's the truth. Honestly, in this book, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll learn.

• 3:00:17Jocko Willink?

  A phenomenal book. Don't sleep on this book. And, and you know, there's, there's an audio book too. Who reads the audio? Book. Do you know some random actor, some dude?

• 3:00:28Ben Milligan?

  No, I can't believe I can't remember his name. Um, it's not Keiko, it's a Kaleo Griffiths. He's a Hawaiian name.

• 3:00:35Jocko Willink?

  I, I, I listened to, I listened to the sample just to kind of see what we were dealing with. Freaking good to go. Um, so you can get the, you can get the, uh, the audio book as well. And sort of like you, you won't, you'll feel like you're listening to a podcast or you'll feel like it's very engaging. So

• 3:00:53Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, they did a

• 3:00:53Jocko Willink?

  Support this book. Uh, Ben put seven years of his life into this book. I don't know how bad your eyesight got reading through all these things, but you've, you've made some sacrifices to get this book done. And, and as I said, the first time you were on, there's no one, in my opinion, uh, A non SEAL couldn't have written this book, in my opinion. And I think the fact that you served, the fact that you're a combat veteran, that you were in the SEAL teams is, you have a perspective that comes through, that an authenticity that comes through. It's just, it's just a phenomenal book. So, Buy Water Beneath the Walls by Ben Milligan. Get that book immediately. You already know all the books I've written, so get some of those too.

• 3:01:39Jocko Willink?

  If you need some help with leadership inside your organization, you want to talk about decentralized command? Let us know, echelonfront.com. And if you want to go check out some battlefields, we do an awesome battlefield review. We do Gettysburg, you've been to Gettysburg?

• 3:01:55Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:55Jocko Willink?

  We do Gettysburg.

• 3:01:56Ben Milligan?

  No kidding.

• 3:01:57Jocko Willink?

  We're also, yeah, if you want to come, let me know. And we also are doing Little Big Horn this year. So, if you want to check those out, go to echelonfront.com. Next muster's in Dallas. Wait, is that the next one? No, we just did Dallas. Next one's Denver.

• 3:02:13Jocko Willink?

  So, we've got a bunch of those events. We've got the Online Training Academy. Which, you know that thing, I started this thing off talking about how you can't get all the lessons learned across to everybody that you want them to. And that's one of the reasons we have the Online Academy, ExtremeOwnership.com. The goal, the mission of Echelon Front is to teach these lessons to as many people as we possibly can. That's the goal. Me, Leif, JP, Dave, Steve, we can't get around to everybody. But you know what? Everybody can get online, ExtremeOwnership.com. Come and learn these lessons of leadership. So that you can use them in every aspect of your life. Every aspect of your life.

• 3:02:56Jocko Willink?

  You can, you can help you, you can help yourself. If you want to help service members, you want to help active, active duty service members, you want to help retired service members, you want to help their families, the Gold Star families. Any of those, if you want to participate in an awesome charity, Mark Lee's mom, she's got an unbelievable charity organization. AmericasMightyWarriors.org, if you want to volunteer, or if you want to help out. And don't forget about HeroesAndHorses.com. Micah Fink, keeping people out of the algorithm, getting them back on track.

• 3:03:31Jocko Willink?

  As far as Echo and I go, we're both on Twitter. We're on the Gram. Echo's at Echo Charles. I'm at Jocko Willink. Watch out for the algorithm. What's your Instagram handle? Callsign?

• 3:03:42Ben Milligan?

  B Milligan 3.

• 3:03:44Jocko Willink?

  B Milligan 3. I think you should have made one longer than that.

• 3:03:50Ben Milligan?

  I'm on the Twitters and the Wi Fi's.

• 3:03:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you're on Twitter too?

• 3:03:53Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay, is it the same thing?

• 3:03:55Ben Milligan?

  Ben H Milligan on Twitter.

• 3:03:57Jocko Willink?

  Ben H Milligan on Twitter. Awesome. Hey, seriously, thanks for coming on again.

• 3:04:04Ben Milligan?

  Thank you.

• 3:04:04Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate it.

• 3:04:05Ben Milligan?

  This is fantastic. It's always great to be here.

• 3:04:07Jocko Willink?

  And thanks for writing that book.

• 3:04:10Ben Milligan?

  Thanks for reading it. Not only that, but thanks for, you know. It, uh, this, it took, it took a lot to do this and being able to give this back to the teams was, you know.

• 3:04:23Ben Milligan?

  You know, this is, this is why I'm here. So, this is my contribution to, you know, that institution that, you know, defined us, so.

• 3:04:31Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent, man. Awesome. Um, and we'll, we'll pick this up where we left off on the next podcast. Thanks to all the military personnel, past and present. Who laid the groundwork for progression? Who laid the groundwork for what we were able to do? Via your lessons written in blood. So, thank you. And thanks to all the police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all first responders out there. Thank you. For what you do on the home front so that we can be safe.

• 3:05:10Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there. Man, this story right here that we're talking about is about opportunities, about looking for opportunities. It's about taking ownership of what's going on in your world. It's about seeing where you can help out. It's about seeing where you can fill a gap. That's what this is about. The SEAL teams just didn't sprout up from nowhere into this fully blossomed flower. Didn't happen at all. Happened one piece of dirt at a time to build up into something that's worthwhile. That's the way life is. And the only way that happens is if you go out there and get after it.

• 3:05:56Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Ben Milligan and Echo and Jaco. Out.