242: There are Things Bigger Than You. Do Whatever It Takes to Establish a Winning Mentality Not Just For Yourself. W/ Marine Sergeant Major, Justin LeHew

0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:24 - Gunnery Sgt. Justin LeHew 3:52:53 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 4:09:13 - How to stay on THE PATH. 4:30:49 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 242 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Gunnerie Sergeant Justin D. Le Hugh, United States Marine Corps. For extraordinary heroism as amphibious assault platoon sergeant, Company A, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, Task Force Tarawa. 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom on 23 and 24 March 2003. As Regimental Combat Team 2 attacked north towards Ammazaria, Iraq, lead elements of the battalion came under heavy enemy fire.

• 0:57Jocko Willink?

  When the beleaguered United States Army 507th Maintenance Company convoy was spotted in the distance, Gunnerie Sergeant Le Hugh and his crew were dispatched to rescue the soldiers.

• 1:11Jocko Willink?

  Under constant enemy fire, he led the rescue team to the soldiers. With total disregard for his own welfare, he assisted the evacuation effort of four soldiers, two of whom were critically wounded.

• 1:25Jocko Willink?

  While still receiving enemy fire, he climbed back into his vehicle and immediately began suppressing enemy infantry.

• 1:34Jocko Willink?

  During the subsequent company attack on the eastern bridge over the Afridi's River, Gunnerie Sergeant Le Hugh continuously exposed himself to withering enemy fire during the three-hour urban firefight.

• 1:49Jocko Willink?

  His courageous battlefield presence inspired his Marines to fight a determined foe and allowed him to position his platoon's heavy machine guns to repel numerous waves of attackers.

• 2:01Jocko Willink?

  In the midst of the battle, an amphibious assault vehicle was destroyed, killing or wounding all its occupants. Gunnerie Sergeant Le Hugh immediately moved to recover the nine Marines. He again exposed himself to a barrage of fire as he worked for nearly an hour recovering casualties from the wreckage.

• 2:21Jocko Willink?

  By his outstanding display of decisive leadership, unlimited courage in the face of heavy enemy fire, and utmost devotion to duty, Gunnery Sergeant Le Hugh reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  And that is a citation about one episode in one Marine's life.

• 3:05Jocko Willink?

  And it doesn't explain everything in that Marine's life, nor does it explain everything about the Marine Corps.

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  But it does give us a glimpse into what Marines do.

• 3:22Jocko Willink?

  And what our American servicemen are capable of, but it's only a glimpse.

• 3:34Jocko Willink?

  And you know, these citations throughout the military, when you go to different military bases, and I've been to many, many military bases around the country and around the world, these citations of heroic awards, oftentimes they're posted in various places around the base, on the walls, in the classrooms, on the quarter decks.

• 4:03Jocko Willink?

  And throughout my career, starting as a young, young kid, I would stop and I would read through these citations, and I would always wish to myself.

• 4:21Jocko Willink?

  I would always wish that I could meet these men.

• 4:25Jocko Willink?

  And I could talk to them.

• 4:28Jocko Willink?

  And I could learn from them and I could see what they were. What they were really like.

• 4:35Jocko Willink?

  And with that in mind. It is an absolute honor today to have that opportunity as. Sergeant Major, retired, Justin Le Hugh is joining us. To share the experiences that he had and the lessons that he learned in his service and in his life.

• 5:01Jocko Willink?

  Justin.

• 5:04Jocko Willink?

  Honored to have you here. Thanks for coming out.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  It's an honor to be here with you today, Jaco, and you too, Echo.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  I, I, um, every, every time I get to talk to somebody and just learn from their experiences. And man, I've had the opportunity and I know we were talking a little bit about this, you know, the, the opportunity, some of the people that have come on this podcast is just unbelievable to, to capture their lessons, you know, from guys that were on Tarawa or Iwo Jima. And just incredible. And it's, it's an honor for me to sit here and, and be able to capture some of these lessons for, for people, not just, not just soldiers, not just Marines, but just people. So that we can learn.

• 5:51Jocko Willink?

  Let's, um. Let's start at the beginning. Let's start it. Let's start at where you came from. So you were born in Columbus Grove, Ohio. Is that right?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Columbus Grove, Ohio, a small, little farm community, about 2,000 people. I don't think it's been up or down of a hundred over the past 100 years that is up there. Um, it kind of was like any Norman Rockwell painting that you would ever seen. It was a great place to grow up. When I was younger, it was a place you didn't lock your doors. It was a place where parents told you to be in by the time the streetlights came on. Uh, it truly was, uh, like the fabric of America. You grew up playing Little League baseball, Pony League baseball. You grew up knowing every kid in the two schools that were in town because it was kind of like a little Northern Ireland. It was either Protestants and Catholics. It wasn't

• 6:43Speaker 02

  anything else. It was kind of those two choices. And for grades one through eight, there was the Catholic school that was on the other side of the railroad tracks. And then there was the public school. And then you knew by sports and by your neighbors, you knew everybody. And it didn't matter if it was K through 12. You knew the kindergarteners because you were to school with their brothers and sisters. And it was a really tight, very hardworking community. Now, is that where your dad and mom were from originally? No, my dad was from a place called Front Royal, Virginia, right at the northern end of the entrance to the Skyline Drive. It was right there. And then my mother was

• 7:23Speaker 02

  from Columbus Grove, Ohio. And my dad was in the Army, drafted in the Army, and was on June 6, 1944, part of the 29th Infantry, as I believe, one of the older PFCs at the age of 28, coming out of the front. Oh, he was definitely an old PFC. Oh, he definitely was, Jaco. And he came out of the front end of that LCVP at that fire of the German 352nd overlooking the bluffs of Omaha Beach. And then made it live all the way to St. Lo and all the way to the end of the war. And when he got back, he took a job in Baltimore, Maryland, at the Chrysler Corporation. And my mom's

• 8:05Speaker 02

  brother happened to be working there. And so he kind of started going back to Columbus Grove, Ohio on some little excursions. And there was quite a difference between mom and dad. There was like 15 years difference. So dad was a farmer, and this was a farm community. So he would come back, and then he would help work the Snary family, whether it was small farms, whether it was help Mr. Snary or anybody else drive his bussing firm. He would do all that. And when he'd be out there telling a thing, my mom, who was about five or whatever when they first met, used to bring lemonade out to the guys working in the field. And he was just joking with her one day, and he said, when you grow up, I'm gonna marry you.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Then he went on to not do that. He went in the infantry, drafted, he came back. And while he was working in Chrysler in 1947, he took a lunch break. And he was walking in downtown Baltimore and he was not fulfilled at that job. And he said, I saw a snappy guy in a army looking uniform, but he had different patches that I'd never seen. And he put this sign in the street and it said, come inside and talk to me about the brand new United States Air Force. And my father went inside. He talked with the recruiter. And the recruiter asked him, so was there anything during the war that you never really got to do?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  And he said, I always wanted to go to Japan. We thought we were all going to be going to Japan after that and I just wanted to see Japan. And the recruiter said, well, if you sign with the Air Force today, I promise you, I think we can send you to Japan. And we've all kind of heard these stories.

• 9:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's an important part of that. I promise that I think, I promise that I think we can send you to Japan.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely. He never went back to work for Chrysler. Two weeks later, he was sitting in Yokohama Harbor in the United States Air Force. And then he was in there all the way through the first slot in 1964. As basically a 50-year-old advisor into Vietnam. He came home and he said, I've got five kids, I'm over the age of 50, and I got these other responsibilities and this might be a younger person's war that came in.

• 10:16Jocko Willink?

  What, when, how much debriefs, how much, yeah, how much did he talk to you about D-Day?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Nothing, not at all. My father passed when he was 13, when I was 13, unfortunately. So it was right about the time when probably your life is getting really questionable about where you want to formulate your life. Going through high school and probably that time when you kind of need your dad there that was on that. And he passed away, I was 13. My mom raised me in the house. I have two older brothers, two older sisters, both of those sisters have passed away already that were there. And between us boys, there was nine years apart. Between us spread. So dad was pretty busy over a long, a long period after, after he came home from surviving the Normandy invasion.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  And that's exactly where he kind of. When I was 13, he said, "Look, I'm gonna give you one thing." He said, "I'm responsible to you till you're 18." It was in the house. And, and there's no mistake, Jack, my dad loved all of us. So this wasn't this tough love or, or anything. He said, "Look, I'm responsible to you till you're 13, till you're 18." And he said, "Then you're gonna be responsible to make a life for yourself after that. And you have some choices that are gonna be presented." He never pushed the military. He never dissuaded me from the military to do that. Maybe those questions would've came when I was 14, 15, and 16. That was around there. I really wish he would've been around when I was, you know, a 22-year-old sergeant after Desert

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Storm or sitting on seawalls in Okinawa, wondering how to lead troops and how to do different things. And you're sitting here with your father that retired as a master sergeant through three wars and, and came out of, you know, and survived the Normandy evasion. I think the guy probably knew a little bit about survival and leadership and able to do that. And you kinda just looked around and said, you know, "Now mom's not here, dad's not here." He was right. He said, "You're responsible to make your choices and you're a responsible man." It was after that. And he felt it was his job up until that time period to make sure that when he spit me out when I was 18, that I could handle what it was that the world was gonna throw at me at 18.

• 12:27Jocko Willink?

  At what point, so you played baseball in high school. Your, your dad dies when you're 13, so you're going through the high school years with no dad. Are, are you playing sports? Good student? Paying attention in school? Rebellious? What was your, what was your childhood?

• 12:42Speaker 02

  I'm playing sports. I'm an absolutely abysmal student. That was on there. My wife laughs at me all the time because in the basement of the house is 2,000 to 3,000 books. And I can't ever remember reading really a book the entire time until I went in the US Marine Corps. I only read books because the teacher said it was on the curriculum. But I had also found that the difference was, I understood the difference between teachers. And I also understood the difference between reward and punishment.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  And reward and punishment was if you don't make the grade for here, you will not be able to play the sport that you love over here. If you don't want, if you want to wear your hair like you're whatever, no, you're going to cut this, you're going to be a gentleman, you're going to get in nice clothes for these events and that. Because if you want something, you have to do this in order to get that. We're not just going to let you slough through life. And I really did love playing baseball. So my teachers would start hanging that over my head. And they would say, you know, if you don't make the grade on this next test or whatever, I'm going to have to go tell the coach and the coach is going to. And I really look back and I love the moral and ethical upbringing in that high school. That

• 13:54Speaker 02

  basically, I can't answer if that was the way for everybody, Jaco, but it was for me. And it was getting snatched up by somebody to say, you better start toeing the line or else I'm not going to put you on that field. And if I don't put you on that field, this is what it's going to cost us. And that was the reward and the punishment. The reward was you can continue to do what you love. And the punishment was not that we're going to take away something from you personally of what you love. We're going to show you how much your absence is going to hurt us that is over here. And that was displayed to me in that small little town before I ever set foot on the yellow footprints in the Marine Corps. And I believe set a phenomenal foundation for military service.

• 14:37Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you have any chance of playing like college baseball?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. I would tell you, Jaco, I was like five foot six and like 100 pounds that was on here. I remember having a scout come by one time because we're in BFE and in Northwest Ohio, you know, those were city kids. Those were people that got scouts in Cleveland. Those were people in Cincinnati, Dayton, you know, these larger division schools. If we had a really good kid that was playing in that area in the whole county, that kid was probably going to be good enough to get a scholarship to a lower level school to play somewhere. But we didn't come from a long line of people that were playing with

• 15:20Speaker 02

  the DiMaggio's and everybody else. And I can distinctly remember one time the guy saying, hey, that Lee Hugh kid playing it like his second baseman, that kid's got a million dollar glove, but he's got a $25 bat. And when you size up your options, it's that saying, this is what it's going to take to continue to invest in this in order to do this. And I had appropriate coaching. I wouldn't say that we really took individuals and kind of took them over there to groom them for that. Basically, what that high school did was kind of groom you to at least get out in the world and be a success. It wasn't a production facility to spit out professional athletes.

• 16:03Jocko Willink?

  So, did you start looking at college, or did you know that you wanted to go in the military?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  I knew I wanted to go in the military. Maybe it was because no one of my brothers and sisters went. My dad didn't talk about it. I kind of looked up to my dad as being just what a man is. I mean, he provides for his family. He works hard every day. He doesn't just lay around in the rack each morning. He gets up, even in retirement, he disappears. And then he comes home at the dinner bell at 5 o'clock, and we talk about what happened in life. And that repeatedly was there. I don't remember arguments with the parents in the house. I don't remember anything. I do remember each Sunday, he would disappear

• 16:48Speaker 02

  for about two hours. And I found out later, my dad would go to the VFW every Sunday for two hours. And now, having been through a lot of the things that I have been through, when you're talking about psychoanalyzation, you're talking about therapy, you're talking about medications, you're talking about PTSD, you're talking about things like this, you're talking about a generation of guys where every single able-bodied male went to war. They either had to tread water for four days when the USS Indianapolis, we can sank to stay away to save their brothers, and we're at the anniversary of that right now. They

• 17:30Speaker 02

  were either guys that assaulted the beaches at Iwo Jima and watched their entire high school classes wiped out in a single invasion wave to do that. But somehow, these were also the men who came home and built America to what it is today. And the VA wasn't what it was. I can't ever remember 17 or 18 bottles of pills lined up ever at the house. I can't ever remember seeing the man ever take a single thing.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  But I think I know why he went to the VFW for two hours on a Sunday. Because when he walked through that door, he was with people who lived the life that he had lived, that no amount of explanation to anybody who didn't live that life was gonna ever understand. No amount of therapy, talking to somebody. I think the therapy truly was, he sat next to a tank crewman, he sat next to a marine, he sat next to a sailor, these were also farmers, business owners, and everybody else that was there, making a life for me to play ball, making a good living for that. And I think they sat there, they had some drinks, they talked about good times, they

• 18:39Speaker 02

  talked about bad times, they looked each other in the eye every week and then said, "Hope to see you next week." And then they walked down that door, back to their families, and did the same work ethic until they died, that went out of there. And it was truly an amazing work ethic that I got to watch, at least for 13 years, of this habit and routine of a man that's still 50-plus years old, sitting in a rocking chair, but he'd burst out of a rocking chair every now and then, and be like, "How many pushups can you do?" And I'm like, "Where did that come from, Dad?" He's like, "Well, let's knock 'em out." And I barely had ever seen him lift weights, do anything else, all of a sudden, this guy

• 19:21Speaker 02

  in a white t-shirt and some jeans, it still stinks of the back shed, something kicked off in his head, and he sits right down there and he said, "You know what? You've been sitting down there for about two hours in front of that TV, with your hands on your face and everything else, because there's only one TV in the house. I'm the closest to the TV, because I have to turn the channel, it's only got 11 of them up there." You were the remote control. I was the remote control. And whatever he would see or that, it was amazing, because he would just drop down, and he'd say, "You know what? While you're down there or anything else, let me show you some other things you could probably be doing, rather than just lay there." And it wasn't any of these epiphanies of telling me to read Gulliver's Travels or any

• 20:05Speaker 02

  of this other stuff, it was just these little snippets along there, that really, for a 31-year career, served me well. At the times that I didn't understand them, they were made aware to me at the times that I needed them.

• 20:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think when I look back at my life and I see some little lesson and I do a lot of parsing the lessons that I learned and at the time it was like I barely, I wouldn't have been able to tell you an hour after I learned some lesson that I just learned a really important lesson, but when I look back 25 years or 30 years or 35 years and I go, oh yeah, I remember when that happened and that left a mark and I didn't realize it at the time, but I used that and applied it again over and over again for the rest of my life. At what point did you hear about the United States Marine Corps?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Age of 17, I want to go in the military, need a parent's signature, my mom is there. I have now grown up to be probably one of the most loyal airmen who could have ever served in the air force because that's what I wanted to do. So I signed up for the US Air Force and I took a ride down to Columbus, Ohio, about two hours away, some of the first times I've ever been to a big city like that and especially on your own. And I went in and did the swearing in with the air force and they pulled me back out and then they brought us back in because there was like two swearing ins and we went through the medical check at the MEPS and everything else and I'm like, I'm on my way.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  And the room opens up, Jaco, a major, I'll never forget it because I can still see on that air force uniform, I can still see the gold oak leaves even before I knew what a major was. He asked for everybody's attention and he said, is there a LeHew Lee Hall Lope? And I was like, this is the biggest, this is the shortest name that gets effed up the most of like anything, right? And I said, I figure he's talking about me. Pick my hand up, he said, I need to talk to you outside. And he took me into a room that was smaller than this. I go, and it was kind of like, I don't know what's about to happen in this room, but it's just me and him.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  I can still see a swab bucket sticking in the corner. This was not a professional office. And he just said, I'm, I'm really sorry I pulled you out of there. He goes, We made some mistake on your paperwork. And I said, well, what is that? And he goes, we put a different number on your medical paperwork and we should have put another number. And he said something about ones and twos. And I said, I don't understand. What does that mean? He goes, well, it means that we tested you and put that you had color vision. And he goes, unfortunately, you're colorblind. And I said, what does that mean? Nobody's ever told me that. And he goes, well, what that means, son, for the Air Force is of the 402 jobs that

• 23:03Speaker 02

  were available to you in the United States Air Force, there's now only two available. And it's not the one that you wanted to do. And I said, what are those jobs? Can I ask? I really still want to be in the Air Force. And I'll never forget this. I was going to be what was known as an Aircraft Armament Systems Specialist because I figured that the Air Force don't have infantry. So let me load the planes, let me do whatever we have to do to crew these planes to get them in there. And he came back and he said, first one is airframe specialist. I said, what is that? And he goes, well, basically they give you a rubber mallet and any time the aircraft comes back and it's got dents in it, you just kind of go out there and beat the dents out of the aircraft. He didn't sell the job. Because these guys make bank on the outside.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  He probably could have sold me on a career with a rubber mallet that said, you're going to make a lot of money on the outside. Didn't sell it. And then the second one was, I will never forget, he said pharmacist. And I looked him in the eye and I said, aren't those pills all different colors? I might kill somebody to do that. And he said, then I'm sorry, we can't enlist you in the Air Force. My mother was the biggest fanatic of the Air Force, there was, that was here. I'm sitting in Columbus, Ohio, I can't tell my mom. I mean, this comes back to, you're talking about moral and ethical courage and everything else, and you're a man and all this, and you're sitting here like, I ain't telling my mom that this just happened.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  So I wandered around Columbus, Ohio at night in a city I've never known. I disappeared from the MEPS. They kind of put an APB out on a missing potential recruit that was out there. And then my mom calls and the Air Force is kind of like, well, we can't find him. We're sorry, we lost your son. And she said, you better get down there and start looking. And I kinda went out and started actually, not kidding you, talking to bums on benches that night. Kinda like, how'd you get here, man? Did you try to get in the Air Force too? And they told you no? And it was so dangerous, just this farm kid wandering around. And you know, I could have been killed

• 25:09Speaker 02

  at any moment. Finally, I walked back over the Meps. All hell breaks loose. They get me back in. They tell me, sit your, sit your butt right there and don't go anywhere. And I'm kind of in this row of chairs with nothing. And I'm sitting there feeling sorry for myself. I'm thinking my life so, I don't know. You asked me before about, were you thinking about college? Did you do this? I didn't even take the SATs and the ACTs because I'm kind of a person that I'm gonna put my time towards the things that you can do. I'm not gonna waste my time on something that I don't believe that I'm driving towards a path to do. And the teachers, because I wasn't a good student, really wasn't pushing me to go take those

• 25:51Speaker 02

  SATs and ACTs. I think they were pushing me to start baling hay on the outside of town for the next 25 years, something to do that. And as I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself, one of the last times I've ever done that in my life, the, I saw a person stand in front of me with blue trousers and a red stripe running down. And he said exactly this, he goes, what the hell's your problem? And I can remember saying some bullshit came out of my mouth about something. And he goes, I don't know where you come from, but that's not how you talk to a person. You'll get on your feet, son, when you talk to me. I hadn't heard nobody talk to me like that in years. I wasn't around long enough for

• 26:36Speaker 02

  my dad to tell me to do that. So I stood up, Jago. And then I was staring straight at his name tag. It said, Gunnery Sergeant Spiehar. I didn't even know what a gun he was at that time. And he looked at me and he goes, you look like somebody just killed your favorite dog. What happened? And I told him. And he said, look, I'm, you're attached to the Air Force. I'm not even supposed to be talking to you right now or that. But do you mind if I give your number to the Marine recruiter? It was up near the house. He, he saw an avenue of approach. Absolutely. I got back up home. Monday shows up.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Mom answers the door. There's a snappy Marine standing there, big smile on his face. Staff Sergeant Craig Cochran. Good morning ma'am. Can I talk to you about you and your son, about the Marine Corps? And my mom said, "You're too late. My son already joined the Air Force." Because I'm still a coward, I can't tell her. And Jacko, I'm sitting right in the house, watching this happen. Boom, my mom just goes back to work, doing that. Same time, Tuesday. Persistence pays off. Tuesday, he came back to the same house. "Ma'am, can I talk to you? About great opportunities for your son, or everything else in the Marine Corps?" And she goes, "I already told you. He joined the Air Force." Boom. Wednesday. Same time.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Now mom's probably kind of figuring out, something's up. Opens the door, and I go, and I never heard my mom cuss anything else like that. And this little five foot four lady said, "That's the damn problem with you char heads. You don't listen. I already told you. He joined the Air Force. Goodbye." Slam the door. Thursday was the day it changed my life. He didn't walk away from the door. And my mom turned to me and said, "What the hell did you do?" And I said, "You better let him in the house." Sat at a table just like this. Three and a half hours, I'm seventeen, Jacko, I still need the lady's signature.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  We get there, and we didn't have to do benefit tags, we didn't have to do anything. This is an avenue. I want to be in the military. This door's shut. This door is now opened. This is what I'm gonna do. And my mom had said, "Do you know how the Marines live? Her brothers were Marines in World War II." Everybody, all their brothers, were in the war. And she said, "In the Air Force." She showed me this really cushy life. "You're gonna have the greatest base housing, the best BXs, the best everything else. You know, this is what I want for my little boy." And I wanted none of that. And that's not what I wanted in the military. I wanted the hardships. I wanted, I wanted the grooming.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I wanted whatever the military gave my father. Cause I looked at that as the key to this was a huge part of a life that I never knew about him. So I'm gonna go and seek out that answer on what that gave.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Came in, signed it. She's got tears in her eyes. She says, is this really what you want? I said, yes, this is what I want. She signed it. And he said, when he graduates, he's all yours. And she looked right at me and she goes, you're gonna get everything you ever asked for and more. And she goes, all I can say for you, you better harden up. Yep. After that, my mom became like before there was UFC and everything else. My mom turned into a different person magically in front of me. This woman who cooked for all of us and made the beds and did all this other stuff in a very feminine nature. Now took on the role of a father that I didn't have. And she now started exposing me to the stories that she was with.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Growing up with your father. Going through Vietnam, going through Korea, going through this, you're gonna be an NCO. Watching my mother tell me how to be an NCO. This is what's gonna be required of you in the first year, the second year, the third year. And then the day she put me there, she says, it's gonna be hard. But if you quit, don't you ever come back to this house. She goes, just don't quit. That was it. Put me on the bus, sent me down. A few weeks later, I think it was 11 at the time, Jaco, she became the, the best flag waving US Marine Corps mom that you ever, as they all do when they see their baby in the, the uniform and to that.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  And she would hold the rallies for the entire town to help the Desert Storm troops and pack all the boxes. And you just kinda saw this part of your mom that you never saw growing up. That opened that up to the leader she really was too. And then you found out in life.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  You thought you were putting all your chips in this one leadership basket when in all reality, man, you were in a, you were putting your chips in an unbalanced bet because the real person who was really balancing that out, it was a team effort. And that town, my family, everybody else, taught me before I knew what that was, that in life, you have to learn to work as a team. You have to learn to be a good teammate to somebody. And it doesn't matter if that's in the military. It doesn't matter if that's bailing that hay on the outside of town is. People want to work for people that they want to show up every day and it's a pleasure to be around. And they want to have a productive person

• 32:09Speaker 02

  and they want to have a good teammate. That was the foundation. And that's how I ended up in the Marines. It's kind of like, everybody, there's millions of people in uniform, but it's a weird, every American story is not this clear line that goes straight to the recruiter, to battle, to the Medal of Honor, to something like this. It takes this really weird nexus. And I think that's really the greatness of America. That's what makes us the strongest fighting force in the world, that nexus.

• 32:40Jocko Willink?

  How was, so how much of a shock to your system was boot camp?

• 32:44Speaker 02

  First week, like anybody else, you're really evaluating the decisions that you just made. And you're sitting here, and it's kind of laughing, you know, today is not a laugh, wanting to be in a COVID environment or anything else. But you would kind of wish that a drill instructor had a mask on or something when they're getting in your face and you're, and you're doing whatever. But the best thing was, it was the routine that I saw my dad, and it was also the expectation was laid up front by the drill instructors that came out and gave you through that drill instructor creed, if you do this, this is what you will get.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  And if you want to do that, we demand this from you to be part of this team. And I was sitting on the quarter deck at first day, I knew I was in the right place. And I knew that in a really weird way, everything happens for a reason. You are where you're supposed to be in life, at certain points in your life. It may not make sense to you at all, but it's not up to you to make sense. If you believe in the bigger collective and a higher power that moves the chess pieces, or the chess pieces, I think there's somebody else that looks at everybody's life. And somebody on the outside is looking seven moves, where you can't look. On where eventually, at the 20-year, the 30-year, the 40-year, the influential 50-year mark,

• 34:08Speaker 02

  if we put you through these trials, here's what we're going to demand back for that. And I could feel that day one. I felt this is professional, I'm in the right place. And every single day, you got better at something. And every single day, you were told that you were the worst at being something. And you need to get better tomorrow at doing this. And they didn't do it in a touchy-feely way, which then I found out, you know, in life, right up front, you don't have to, you don't have to love people to get them to do this. You know, don't be in love with them. You can love those troops. You can do that. But this harsh training and this systematic approach that has produced a product for

• 34:52Speaker 02

  the American people, that spits out this professional fighting man and woman on the other end, just get on the conveyor belt. And if you stay on the conveyor belt, we're, it's like Steve Austin. We're going to make you bigger, faster, stronger. You're 114 pounds, you get to eat three plates of chow today. And as a matter of fact, see Jaco's chow over there? You get his chow too. Or you get his chow. Because they will pack 60 pounds on you by peanut butter and jelly and bread or whatever. At the same time, they'll shave 80 pounds off of that guy in 11 to 13 weeks. To where they get this product that is malleable, once it gets to the field.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  And their job wasn't to make a combat ready Marine, it was to make a United States Marine. Then they put you on a conveyor belt to the next generation. And those guys are the warriors at either the School of Infantry or the Amphib Crewman School, or whatever they're going to do to train you to be your specific job. And then I loved the fact that the Marines would break it out and not try to do all this like, let's not teach everybody everything in an eight-hour class today. Let's focus on this razor-sharp thing. And then we're going to practice that for this week. Then, once you've somewhat got to a level, nowhere near the level of mastery that we believe you can shoulder something else, let's now add this to the plate the next week.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  And then before you know that, you've got three stripes up cross rifles. And they give you a squad of Marines and say, now, what we just did to you, we want you, this is the payback. We gave you this, we now demand this from you. You now take that. And make them into the little Steve Austins that are here. It was beautiful.

• 36:35Jocko Willink?

  Did you know what your job was going to be when you went, when you enlisted?

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Uh, I knew I had a opportunity to be in four jobs. And it was tanks, it was Amtraks, um, it was field artillery, or it was a combat engineer. It was called a combat B C option. Had four jobs into that. And then by about the 17th day of boot camp, you take this other classification test. And then they kind of take those skill sets. And then they, according to whatever is there, and I just happened to be a really great swimmer. It was in the pool. And I didn't know that that was going to get me anything else. But when the decisions all laid out, they said, look, you swim like a fish in the swim tank, uh, we're going to put him in amphibious tanks that are over there. And it was just like Full Metal Jacket.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  The tail end, the platoon is still there. Nowadays, a majority of them all know what they're going to do. It was still on the quarter deck with the proverbial gunnery sergeant Hartman having you stand up and say, sir, yes, sir, you, and this is going to be your job. And he said amphibious, you know, amphibious tractor crewman, something like that. He said, Amtraks, it's on there.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  I said, aye, sir, sat down, they went to the next kid, infantry, whatever, I'm sitting here like I got screwed. You're going to the grunts, that's what I'm gonna do. I said, I'm gonna be at some depot loading trains, man, for the next four years, because I thought that's what an Amtrak was. It was a train. I never knew that it was an amphibious tank. I didn't even think that was an option. And then when the drone instructor showed me the photograph and everything else like that, you are where you're supposed to be.

• 38:21Jocko Willink?

  So then you go to, what, amphibious track school?

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Was, right here at Camp Del Mar, California. Yep, absolutely. And unfortunately, you know, a shout out to all of our brothers and that that are going through some hard times today because one of those same amphibian tractors were lost last night in a train evolution, somewhere out here off the Pacific coast. And right now, we still have, at last record, about six Marines that are still missing, that are in that. And that's the danger of the business, of the everyday business of doing that kind of work. And prayers go out to their families. I remember what every one of those is like. I mean, tonight, the absence of a news void or anything else for the next past 24 hours, when you don't know

• 39:10Speaker 02

  if your kid was one of the ones, but you do know they're in that unit, and the unit's blacked out, and they're in River City, and nobody can say anything, and you just want to hear confirmation of this. And then these people, unfortunately, are gonna sit right in front of the news media, and they're gonna start feeding off of whatever bits and pieces that they can do. Tragic. But as you and I discussed before, Jaco, it's the cost of doing business to maintain a ready state in the United States military. And that was the job that I was given. Yesterday, I got to go up here to Camp, I was back in the area.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  To actually go and reopen a museum that I had a hand in creating in 1996. It was called the Landing Vehicle Tracked Museum for World War II in Korea. So it's the predecessors of those guys out there on the 15th Mew right now. And we reopened a beautiful museum that had LVT1s and 2s that were at Tarawa and Saipan and all the way through Korea with LVT3s. And being a young sergeant, I was one of the last people that drove those last generation working vehicles into that Quonset hut where they still sit today and parked them.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  And yesterday was an absolutely joyous occasion for that same community that hours later are now sitting here on that Debba tragedy of doing that. So the wave of emotions going back from one side to another of happiness to sadness to back to happiness. It was like that every day that you climbed in those vehicles.

• 40:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, one of the things about working in the water, and this is something I used to tell guys, is every time you do work in the water, it's a real world mission because you make a mistake out there, the ocean has no mercy. And it's a dangerous, dangerous environment. And, you know, I was always, you know, you talk about you ending up in kind of the perfect place. I always felt like that. Every damn day I felt like I was in the perfect job. And one of the things that would make me think that was, you know, I did two ARG deployments out here on the west coast. We worked hand in hand with the Marines all the time, but, you know, we'd be launching our Zodiacs or our Ribs off the side of the boat. And, you know, they'd be launching AAVs.

• 41:34Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, you look at it, it's kind of like, it's kind of like looking at a bumblebee fly, right? You look at that thing and you go, that thing's not gonna float.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Not gonna float, that's right.

• 41:44Jocko Willink?

  How's that gonna work? And then you see it and you go, wow, that's awesome. But, you know, how tall is an AAV? 10 feet, 12 feet?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  About 14 feet.

• 41:51Jocko Willink?

  14 feet tall? And then you see him in the water and there's a few feet sticking up and the rest of it is underneath. And, you know, you just can't help but think that every time you look at him, you know, you think, man, I hope that's gonna go all right, especially when there would be rough seas. And those things would... So every time you do water work, it's a real world op. And, and what was crazy about yesterday, you know, it's, it's summertime here in Southern California. It's beautiful. The beaches are beautiful and, and I woke up this morning and saw the news and I just thought to myself, you know, it's, it's a sickening feeling that you get. Cause we're all here and it's a, like I said, it's a sunny, beautiful day in Southern California. And it's, uh, you know, gonna be a, it's a horrible day for the Marine Corps.

• 42:38Jocko Willink?

  But like you said, that's, that's what everyone in that job does to maintain readiness. There's a risk to maintain readiness and of course, the risk to maintain readiness is miniscule compared to the risk to not maintain readiness and not be ready to defend the country. What year was this? So you, did you enlist in eight, 1988?

• 43:04Speaker 02

  1988. So 88, 89, I was over there at track school.

• 43:10Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then at what point, so now we start brewing up for, uh, for Desert Storm, where were you when we started brewing, where were you when, when Saddam invaded Kuwait?

• 43:20Speaker 02

  I was actually in South America. I was at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and I was down there doing, uh, some, uh, unitas deployment, uh, that was in South America. So August 2nd kicks off and then we're somewhere on the other sides of the Straits of Magellan, going around the thing and one of the first naval ships to be porting back in Argentina. So, you know, excitement is happening, everybody wants to do that. And then you kind of get the, the battle order and then you realize you're not part of the battle order. Everybody else is starting to go towards Southwest Asia. You're still gonna finish what you're doing because that's the mission that you're required to do.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Right? And, and that was another great learning lesson at that age of, you are where you're supposed to be at that is, your drive, discipline, desire, motivation was everything. You wanted to be there, that's why you did this, that's why you did that. But as you just said about maintaining a balanced force and a state of readiness, you can't run from one theater to do to another theater on an impulse that has not presented itself to do that. And of course, when you're down in the well deck or you're in the birthing areas down below and you're only an E3 or an E4. The news is what people tell you the news is that day. And the news for you is get your weapon and get on post for the next six hours and do

• 44:48Speaker 02

  your job and then let people start talking up here about what's going to happen and you'd watch that formulate. The best thing was roughly we pulled back in in just prior to Christmas that year. And when I got back to Camp June, North Carolina, this ramp, we call it this field of amphibian vehicles that are usually about 200 or 250 of them sitting out there was none sitting there because they're already on ships, end of the war. So now the depression creeps in, you're the rear party, congratulations. And we came in, we parked them, dinner after ops.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  The battalion commander at the time met us when we came in off of the ship and he had brought us into the hangar, dropped all of our gear and he said, here's what's going on. And that's what I really respected. He gave you the time, the mission, the place. He gave you exactly, don't worry about what you're hearing in the news. Listen to me and I'm going to, this is real. And he said, I want you guys to go home. He was, you just came off of a six-month deployment. I want you guys to take Christmas. And he said this, on January 3rd, I'm going to be standing back in this hangar. If you want to go to combat, you be here.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  It almost sounds like something out of Kelly's Heroes when you think about it like, okay, do I have to tell anybody or clear this? But no one is kind of like, go, go home, get your plane takes, get out of here. And the best thing was after that was also the worst thing. I go.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  When you actually look to the left and right every day and you have that trust factor, this well-oiled unit and you live with these people and you do that, it's a lot of times when you're driving towards the mission that you don't believe is going to result in combat, the cohesion of that unit is missing something, a little bit more than when you know that you're going to go in and be responsible to possibly be the person to bring somebody's father or somebody home to do that. And it wasn't presented that way to me when I was a PFC or a Lance Corporal. It was kind of, we're just going to go on this float and you'll get a ribbon and people come back. You go out and the next unit will come in. Desert Storm made it real that was on that. But what it also made it real was, there

• 47:14Speaker 02

  was only seven of us that showed back up in that aircraft hangar on January 3rd. My platoon sergeant was one of them. And a guy that I respected retired as a sergeant major that was out of there, a couple of NCOs, a couple of us troops that were inside of there, and that was it. And they put us on a truck and the rest of them, we went back up to the barracks and they said, you have four hours to pack your stuff and any of your gear you're missing, you'll take it down to there. And you just kind of saw a different thing.

• 47:48Jocko Willink?

  Were people's EAOS up?

• 47:50Speaker 02

  You do. You have orders.

• 47:53Jocko Willink?

  I mean, how many people were in your battalion?

• 47:54Speaker 02

  You have orders, EAOSs, you have everything going on at that time, but you also have the difference of somebody being presented with the thing of, you're going to war. You're not going to the vacation that's over here now. You're going to war. And that is what I have always told people. That's the first punch in your face in life. And you have to do something. And you're going to go left, you're going to go right. A lot of people don't want to continue to get punched in the face, so they learn the skills to prevent that from happening. Some people have to continue to repeatedly get punched in the

• 48:33Speaker 02

  face before they do this, but some people react differently after that happens. And I still say, you know, I don't know if that makes you a bad person or whatever, because I don't know what's going on in your life. But there was a lot more of us standing here a couple of weeks ago when this happened. And now there's a lot less of us that are standing here actually doing that. And true to his word, we packed up, got on the thing, we were on a plane and we were some of the last people to land, um, right before Desert Storm kicked off at the end of January.

• 49:05Jocko Willink?

  So did you deploy, so what did you deploy as, what kind of unit?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Combat replacement.

• 49:09Jocko Willink?

  Ah.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I deployed as a combat repla-, you're, you're not even, basically right now deploying, knowing whether you're going to do your job, you're going to be a combat replacement because you don't know if the war, by the time you get there, Saudi are going to be kicking off.

• 49:23Jocko Willink?

  So were they taking volunteers to be combat replacements, is that what that was?

• 49:26Speaker 02

  You didn't have a choice. If you volunteered and you were sent to Southwest Asia, you were needs of the Marine Corps once you got on deck. It just worked out for me very well that there was still a shortage of people in my job career field to do that. So I got put in a tent, briefed, we all got separated and then we got sent throughout the Saudi Arabian desert to report to these units. And this is just a couple of weeks before the invasion is going to kick off. Um, the unit that I got put into, Jaco, was, I was one of only two active duty Marines, dropped into an all reserve unit.

• 50:06Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  And that was an eye opener. Uh, they're wearing the same uniforms, sometimes they believe in a different thing. And, and, and it's not, again, it's not bad, it's like, it's just the way it was.

• 50:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  And the reality was, two weeks, lash this whole thing up, stay in the desert, train, whatever you have to do, and then you're going to be in charge of blowing these breach lanes that are going to be going in, in for the assault forces to go up into, into the Kuwaiti invasion. And I can remember being taken into a tent, kind of for a, a brief, and it really wasn't a brief, the chaplain kind of came in and, you know, the prayers start happening, this is the night, basically before you're going to go and cross the breach lanes. And they said at that time, they said, everybody is standing in this tent, we're not going to bullshit you, we're expecting 82% casualties tomorrow, when we went through that. And I don't know if there was a fear in what they had said.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Or there was a fear in you guys have already done the big blue arrows and red arrows and war gaming or whatever to come up with that thing. That's not just an arbitrary number that you all came up with. And I'm, you know, Joe shit, the rag man standing here going, get in the middle of the desert. And then that was it. You got sent out to your unit. Best of luck. Hope to see you on the other side of the breach and boom. And then the hundred hour war goes.

• 51:41Jocko Willink?

  Just so everyone knows, normally we try to do a little bit better when we're planning missions to think that we're going to have an 82% casualty rate. And I was going to say that earlier, you know, so I got in the Navy in 1990. And so as all this stuff was brewing up, the thing that will always stick in my mind. And, and so I was, you know, going through boot camp and whatnot. They were saying there's going to be 40,000 casualties in the first, I think it was 40. I remember watching CNN and here's the, you know, whatever, whatever talking head was on there, whatever, you know, retired army or retired Marine Corps Colonel, I don't remember. And they were going back and forth with these numbers and what they were predicting because of chemical warfare and the, and the, the resistance that they

• 52:23Jocko Willink?

  were going to meet. They were expecting 40,000 casualties in the first 24 to 48 hours, which is, I guess, right in line with 82%. And I was of course thinking, well, I'm going to get, I'm, you know, in my freaking whatever 18 year old idiot mind, I'm thinking, okay, maybe I won't miss this because they're going to need, I don't think I knew the term replacement, but I was like, they're going to need more guys. They're going to need me. They're going to need me and I'm ready to rock and roll. Because that's what you think like when you're, when you're young and stupid. And then, so then what did it look like? What, what happened on the push?

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Well, when you kind of quantify that in your head, that was there at large, open expanses of just wide open desert that is on there. The number was more of a reality to me because I kinda knew the history of what my career field had had since it was enveloped in 1941 and 42 and when it was delivering the infantry onto the objective. There was no ship to shore movement here. So you're just in the objective from A to B and the objectives are supposed to be crossing the flaming tank ditches that Saddam Hussein had rolled all these things in because I believe at the time they were talking this is the fourth largest army in the world.

• 53:44Jocko Willink?

  Battle hardened army that just fought for 10 years with Iran.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  With Iran.

• 53:49Jocko Willink?

  A million casualties or whatever.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely, it was there. And then you're kinda sitting here going, okay. You get through the breach lanes, you sit there and I will remember one of the most powerful things outside of 2003 of seeing a US strike force cross the deserts into Iraq. One of the most powerful things I've ever seen in my life was sitting on the opposite side of the breach lanes with the hatches, what we call combat lock. So it only gives you enough to see out of it, but enough to save you from fragmentation or anything else that's coming in and having the night vision that is of quality of 1991. So it looks like a big fishbowl and everything in the driver's seat. But hearing the waves of B-52s come

• 54:35Speaker 02

  over to pound the target made my heart pump more than anything in my life up till that point because you heard the rumble before. And this was what you had heard like in World War II, they sent thousand plane raids into Germany with B-17s, B-24s, things that I've been blessed to go out and find these crews now that had went on IPs and didn't come home for all those years. These B-52s wingtip to wingtip. And then you see what an arc light raid can do. And then you just hear the bombs hit and the whole sky turns to fire.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  And that's where you're going. And it's kind of like, you know what? That's where I want to go. And that's where everybody is loaded up here and wants to go. And that was always the greatness of, you know, whether it's the SEAL teams, whether it's, whether it's the tank team, whether it's the infantry rifle squad or anything else. And men and women that I grew up and trained at left and right on were the people who always wanted to run to the sound of the guns. And there's something different about those people. And it doesn't make them different in a weird way. It makes them very different in the fact that you really are, you're really proud that you knew people like that in your life.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  And you're really proud that those were the people who were there at that time period that said, you know, put the right hand in the air and said, send me, I'll go. And then you look five or six guys down going, I never thought you'd even be here. Like, I can remember, like, you can't even tie your own shoes or to do something. And then the best thing is when the bullets start flying, you find out that's the American kid that's dragging his buddies 100 meters across the thing that was here. And you see people just step up and being presented as a young man at 21 at that time period, to see that much awesomeness, to see this is what your country can, when it puts its mind to it, this is what your country can do.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  And even in your head, you're like, no, this is what my country can do when they're still on the leash. I can only imagine what this country can do when they're not on the leash. Because you know, we don't train and we don't do a thing. It's, you know, in our schools and that, that fights a Chinese wave of total war and the Genghis Khan war. And, you know, the United States still does train its individuals to positive identification of a target. You're just not going to go in to do this to a village without this. Now, whether that happens or not, that's part of the individuals that make that choice after they get there. But it isn't the way that they were trained that they went up to that.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  And I was lucky to be part of the units that were really fluid when they went in there to do that. And within those first 48 hours, we kind of knew what was going to happen. Because we would be driving, as we're driving north, all we just kept seeing is lines of Iraqis.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  On each side of the road, they had already dropped their weapons. There wasn't large firefights. They had the tank fights out near Kafji with, uh, with LAR. Eighty Second Airborne had a little bit of action that was going up there. But for the most part, the Hundred Hour War, the Blitzkrieg War, was basically overwhelming, getting the enemy on the horns of a dilemma where they cannot react to what's being thrown at them. And then they just get so scared, they just throw their stuff. And I think that predominantly, they threw their stuff because they were in somebody else's country. Big mindset change when you train your troops for the 2003 invasion. And I don't believe a lot of leaders at the time learned from the lessons in 1991. I believe in the ground

• 58:31Speaker 02

  war operations. A lot of people that were still around, that were in higher levels to plan those mission things, actually thought that they were still gonna fight, that when, when the Iraqis see this awesome power come at them, they're just gonna drop their weapons. They're gonna do what they did in 1991. There is a reason, and I'm very proud of, of the inflicting the most amount of casualties on the enemy and bringing the most amount of my people home. And doing that is for the simple fact is on a 30-day boat ride in 2003, those boys didn't lay in the rack. They moved ammunition from the front of the ship to the back of the ship. We would move up things and put machine guns off of

• 59:12Speaker 02

  the aft fantailes. We would kick buckets. You would train until people were just exhausted. And when they laid in the racket, 2000 at night, 05, you're up, you're PTing, you're doing this. Get the boxing gloves. You're gonna get punched in the face in the well deck before we get over here. And it's not gonna be Lance Corporal against Lance Corporal. No, it's gonna be plus or minus 10 pounds that were inside of here. You're gonna do this. But also, this is bow in the ring. This isn't, uh, that white collar leadership thing, that basically sends the troops out to beat each other up while they hang out in the cheese mess. No. Staff Sergeant, Gunny, Lieutenant.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  We're all in the ring too. And we're all in the ring going, you're next. Come on in. You got 30 seconds. Blow the thing. Wear it out. Where's the next one coming from? And you would watch people go, they're Am trackers. That, I've never seen that. These guys are training like combatants, like they are expecting close quarter battle. They're expecting this. Cause the end result, Jaco, was it's pretty easy to throw your hands up when you've invaded somebody else's country and just say, oops, my bad, I'm out of here, man. Leave me alone. We're going into their backyard. They got nowhere to run. I don't think they're gonna be so apt to throw their weapons down or anything else, nor would somebody in Nebraska, Ohio, or anything else on an invading thing.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  So the mindset was different. Some ways had to be harsher.

• 1:00:43Jocko Willink?

  So the 100 hour war, I mean, what did, how did that wrap up for you?

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Wrapped up with rolling up into Kuwait. War's over. Who wants to go home? I don't. We're looking for people to stay on a working party afterwards. Why? Extra combat pay, extra everything for a young person. I'm not married. I would just rip off the case of the MRE carton, cause you didn't have to, and the letter, didn't have to have mail. You just sign on anything there, just say, Mom, I'll, I'll kinda be home when I get home. And I stayed an extra six months that was in there. And I went down to the port of Al-Jubail and backloaded all the American equipment onto Black Bottom Shipping. And then also all the Iraq War trophies that came out, which was BMPs, ZSUs, anything else.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Agricultural inspections when you're younger are a way of life. So you're out there cleaning that stuff to get all that grit off before it goes on that American ship to get back. But the best thing was how you were treated and the autonomy that you got being an NCO was there wasn't anybody there any day telling you what to do. It was, you knew your job. Here's your mission. Each morning you get up, you gotta move this equipment from here to here, which was 19, 20 miles, down to a thing sometimes. You learned how to drive tanks, LAVs. You learned it because you were cross-trained to move all this equipment, which gave you a different skill set. And then, at the meantime, they put you over a place called Camp 15 that had this gigantic swimming pool.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  You got a room to yourself, and you're living high on the hog at that. And then, every couple of weeks, they had contracted a ship down south that was a cruise ship for the American troops to do R and R on for like, three days at a pop. And you could drink cavort. You had to check your uniform before you went on the ship. No one was allowed to use ranks, nothing. And there's like, 2,000 people on the ship pier side in Bahrain that's like, here's your three days R and R, like it's China Beach with no beach, no nothing. You're not going anywhere. But these were exposed to you. It was kind of like, making more money, more autonomy, learning multitude of skills.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  I think I like this. Until somebody knocked on the door one day and said, "Time's up, bud, you gotta go home." And we went back. And then, at the tail end of that, you kind of get put back into this post-war thing that I had not seen. And I'd heard stories of it from Vietnam of, "Time's up." There wasn't a transition for these guys. There wasn't hardly anything. It was kind of like, we brought on well over 250,000 Marines at a time when we only had, oh god, 120,000 before that war, and then plus the reserves and all this. And I just watched guys that volunteered. Now that they're back there, it's Monday, you're out of the Marines on Friday.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Go to the admin center, go to here, go to everything else. And you know as well as I do, a lot of them wanted that. Just get me out of here, things. And there were other people that were kind of asking, "Can I stay and do this? Do you need a thing?" And the answer to that, when we usually demobilize from war is, "No, I'm, thank you for your service. I need you to transition back out into civilian society." So, we watched our numbers completely get depleted. And then, you watch the wear and tear on all those vehicles when they came back home. So, you go into this post-war rebuilding period, and you figure Somalia is right around the corner.

• 1:04:22Jocko Willink?

  And you knew, at what point did you just realize you were going to be doing 20 or 30 years in the Marine Corps?

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  It was when I went to the first professional course that the Marine Corps ever sent me to. And when I got back from the war, things in peacetime are different. And you know what I'm talking about. In 2007 timeframe, when we're fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, up at any Marine base, and you can probably attest to this in the teams.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  You were coming or going, and you'd see your buddies passing through bases. And one of you was coming from, the other one is going. And there is no one to two dwell. It's seven in, five out, seven in, whatever the rotations were at. And that was the rate that was going. It's nowhere near that now. Well, it was definitely nowhere near that in 1992, 93, 94. It was now kind of, okay, I've been to South America. I've been to Okinawa. I came in to do all of this. This is what I'm gonna do, and I'm gonna get out. I've kind of, I want to go be a hard helmet diver. I want to go do some things like that. And my leadership came to me, Jack, and I said, you've got four months left in the Marines.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  We, we don't know what to do with you. And you talked about that before, but you know, whether it's fleet assistance programs or something that these short-term billets are out there. This guy came in and he goes, I'm gonna send you to this professional NCO school. And I'm like, it's a waste of time, and I'm getting out. He's like, just go over there for 30 days. Do me a favor. In other words, he's got to build a team that he's gonna have. And he can't trust that, he can't rely on you. Somebody else has to learn your job now, Justin, because you're not gonna be here. Okay, so I'm confident you can do your job, but I can't count on you in four months. Now get out of here and let the corporal now learn how to do your job. And it was, it was pretty cool.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  And I went over there and I saw something like I'd never seen.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  It wasn't a bunch of grease monkeys. It wasn't a bunch of hours working 17 and 18 hours. It wasn't anything. It was in uniforms, and it was learning all these other professional things. Nobody was really teaching you on the jump seat of amphibious tractor. Because you just had to work to do the job done. So I got rolled up being the bad student I was. Okay, I got rolled up within the first week. And it's kind of like, bro, come in here. Uh, what's your problem? And I know you've got a short time and everything else, but you're here. So that means you'll give a hundred percent why you're here. Thank you very much, Kenny. Got that. And then he took the time. This is why I'll never forget.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  He took the time that other people would not take. Um, when I told you I was a bad student in high school, I could have been a better student in high school. And I'm not blaming the teachers. The ownership is me on that. I could have applied myself better. I could have done this. But I will tell you, there were courses that I applied myself in more because the teacher actually cared. And they actually didn't just ring the bell and say, we'll see you tomorrow. And if you had problems, it would be like, can I, can I hold you after class? And I'll let the next teacher know you're gonna be a little late. Hey, you're having some problems doing this or that. And they would take this time, even if it was just a small period of time. It was time they didn't have.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  And I learned how to appreciate the biggest thing that you can do to somebody if you disrespect them in life is to take away their time because it's something they can never get back. That, that's it. And I knew she didn't have the time to do this, but she took the time. Um, I became a better student in that class. I didn't become a great student, but I did what I had to do to continue to make mission that was on there to graduate. I applied the same thing, even after what the Marines taught me. I applied that, I regressed, Jaco, because I wasn't being challenged. And when I went to that school, people started challenging me. The status quo was not good enough. You're better than this. Why are you doing?

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Why are you getting out? What are you gonna do when you get out? People didn't even ask that, that were in your own unit. It was like, you made your choice, so right ahead. You don't even want to talk to me about if I'm gonna go to college or what we're gonna do? And then you find out, you know, not all units are the same. And then you also find out when you have goals and things that you want to do, don't let what the perception is of that, adjust the goals and the accomplishments that you want to do in your life, because people are different. And you, one platoon and the other platoon have the basic same things. It's the leaders and the people in them that make it different. And that is exactly what I saw in this course. So I didn't study.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  I just became a straight Marine. And I would turn in my thing and they'd be like, you want to know your grade? You got 102. How do you even get an extra two points? It's because you did this and this and went above and beyond for that. It was the first time that somebody said, you'd make a really good instructor. He said, you have caring, compassion, concern for another human being, very young age to do that or what you think. And they made me reach into this box. They said, I want you to pull out, first thing you grab in that box. Pulled it out was a coat hanger. And the instructor stared at me and he goes, now I want you to teach me about that coat hanger for five minutes.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  And he said this, he goes, what did I say? I want you to teach me about the coat hanger for five minutes. He said, did I say five minutes and five seconds? Did I say four minutes and 30 seconds? He goes, you have a 15 second window to fall inside of that thing. Now go. And I taught him how to jimmy locks. I taught him how to hang clothes. I taught him how to everything else. And when I was done and put the coat hanger on there, it was four minutes and 49 seconds. There was no clocks or no watches in the room. It was understanding what the parameters were. It was understanding, they gave you a task, a condition and a standard. And then you went to that and said, I think there's going to be a repercussion if I don't come in within five minutes to do this. 105 points, hand it over.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  And by the time it was there, all the instructors pulled me back in that room and said, why are you getting out? This is what you could be. I walked away from that school and re-enlisted in the Marine Corps and then stayed for the next almost 30 years. Because people invested in you.

• 1:11:14Jocko Willink?

  So then, what was your next job after you? That school was like an NCO school? Like an NCO leadership school?

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  It was an NCO leadership school. And then I became an Amtrak instructor. Right out here, my first time in Southern California. One of the best two years of my life. I'm in Southern California. I'm not at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, that is there. And I'm in Camp Delmar on Camp Pendleton, which is right in the boat basin on the beach with everything. So if there's a place to be in Camp Pendleton, that's the place to be. And this was before the gigantic First Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into there years later and that. So this is just a small, it was like being over on the Naval Amphib Base at that time period. Okay. I don't even need to go to the exchange over on North Island.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  Those flyboys and I can stay over here. We got our own little piece on the Amphib Base to do that. That's what Delmar was. And that's where I learned to be a lead above my pay grade. Learn to learn the job above you, know the jobs below you, but always know the job of the person that's above you that was on that. And that was the first time that I was truly required to really give back the skills that I thought the Marine Corps had given to me. And that was for a two-year period up there.

• 1:12:32Jocko Willink?

  And then what was the next bill? It?

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  I wanted to be a drill instructor. And I remember my drill instructor, when he gave me that Amtrak thing, he said, there's going to be two of you come back to be drill instructors. And I can remember I wasn't one of them. Meaning, he wasn't looking at me when he said that. But in my head, I knew I was going to be one of them and did whatever I could do to do that. So now I'm in Southern California. I'm kind of liking it. And MCRD San Diego is right down here near the Naval Training Center. I want to go be a drill instructor. So I came down here from 96 to almost 2000

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  to push about eight cycles of recruits through here on 62-day training cycles with small breaks in between. As a drill instructor, a senior drill instructor, and then became an academics instructor teaching history for the US Marine Corps over there. And you are where you are. I went down to dental one day, just on a routine check, and saw this woman in dental. Was just like, man, I need it. I got teeth problems. My teeth wasn't hurting or nothing. And as a drill instructor, I go, you can probably understand, you don't have any time. I mean, it's, it's 19 and 20 hour days, 62 straight days. Somebody's got to be with those recruits

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  the entire time to do that sunup, sundown. Then you got to be on deck, even staying there throughout the night when they're there. And it's a really restricted environment. I looked for every opportunity I could do to take a few recruits down to dental to do that. And quite frankly, you know, 22 years later, that was my wife. And she was working down there. She was in the Navy as a dental technician and a reservist at that. I finished out my tour of duty down here to do that. And she goes and works at 4th Tank Battalion at Miramar for the US Marines. And this was when women didn't

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  do that. It was here. And I had told her, if we're going to be doing this, you're not going to like what I have to tell you. Because even though the Marines and the Navy are naval services, unless you become a corpsman, I'm probably never going to see you because you'll be on the blue side Navy for the most time. And my wife was seven years older than I was at the time. And that school's going to hurt. And it was right up at the hills at Camp Pendleton. And she threw her hands up and volunteered to become a Fleet Marine Force corpsman. Went up there, threw the pack on her. She got her FMF device. I did her studying, all that

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  stuff that was in there. I also poured the blood out of her socks and her boots on the hikes and helped pack her frame so that it didn't shift around on her back and do some things up there. And I remember the instructors giving me a call saying, some of them, they need to make this next hike. Some of them are having a harder time. It was on here. And I got to go up there and didn't tell her, the last participant on the hike, I showed up off the drill field, cammed up, didn't know I was there. So I could watch the Trail of Tears that was going up the hill to do this. Because selfishly, you're going to go, I also knew from my own family, not only would she be a phenomenal corpsman for the Navy and the Marines, I also knew she needed to get over that hill. For what we needed if we were going to have that.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  And I also knew how much of a pride thing when you thought you'd never be able to achieve that because of all those excuses that were packing up for your own self. You need to get over this hill. And she got over the hill and she stayed with me for the rest of the time in the Marine Corps. We would slap hands as I would come out of combat and she would go back into combat. And the hardest job that I had was about 2007 when I had to stay back for seven months and play Mr. Mom to a 13-year-old daughter going through those daughter kind of things of, boy, you were a tomboy about five months ago and we like to do this. And now you got makeup, now you have this, and mom's not here to deal with this. So it was an interesting time.

• 1:16:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that is an interesting time.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  It was a really, it was quite a leadership challenge.

• 1:16:53Jocko Willink?

  And so you had the, so you did drill instructor and then you did that until 2001?

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then we went back out to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina for a tour. Back out there, I kind of always liked to rotate coasts that were there and also rotate overseas, kind of get a more well-rounded thing because we kind of grew up in communities of where people said they were either on an East Coast tour or they were West Coasters or they did this. And I had the rare opportunity to kind of circumnavigate the globe and do all those. So that took us all the way up to the invasion in 2003.

• 1:17:30Jocko Willink?

  Where were you on September 11th?

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  On September 11th, I was, I was at Camp Lejeune and we were doing a non-commissioned officer of the quarter board that morning. And we were outside and somebody had ran outside and just said, you never can believe this, some jackass just kind of flew a plane in the World Trade Center. Like, and everybody thought it was like a Cessna or something that was here. It was no, it was no news. Everybody just kind of went about their way and that's kind of weird. And then the world changes. Eight months later, when these kids run out of the company office and we're all out in the parking lots going, that was no Cessna and a second plane has just hit the other tower that was in there. And instantly.

• 1:18:18Speaker 02

  Everybody. There was no one questioning, if you remember, there was no one. It was the light that just came on in the darkness when the second plane hit as we're under attack in the United States. So for the next week, you don't know where that's coming from. So it can't be what we were in charge of security and start to get ammunition and machine guns out of buildings that normally you're not drawing ammunition and machine guns and you're getting war stock and then you're putting machine guns on top of barracks, roofs, looking for air cover. You're stringing concertina over every road possible to prevent what would then be known as V-bids coming in because you don't know where they're coming

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  from. And you just kind of stayed there at work for five days trying to figure out everything that was going on and everybody kind of glued to the one TV that's in the company office or wherever it's at, trying to get the news that they can get.

• 1:19:12Jocko Willink?

  And so you were, you said you were working base security. Were you in a battalion?

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  I was in, I was in an operational battalion and basically at the drop of a hat, we had to figure out the MPs can't just secure everything. And now it's get to the armory, get the heavy weapons, get this. Okay. Where's the ammunition at? Do we need grenades? Do we need all this? And you're trying to go through this whole thing and get the nods up. Attack could come at night and you're basically writing the book because there's no book that's written.

• 1:19:43Jocko Willink?

  Did you feel like after you got back from the first Gulf War, that maybe after, you know, another six months goes by, maybe another year go by, did you, did you feel like the Marine Corps, the US military was in a state of basically, you know, we're really not going to have to fight another war? I mean, the whole world just saw what we did to these guys over here. I know I had leadership that would straight up tell us that, you know, listen, the days of you guys are never gonna do a direct action mission. It's just not gonna happen. And then on top of that, we had technology. So it was, why would we send you guys to do a direct action mission? When we can put a T-LAM in a 10-digit grid? Why would we have you guys go do a special reconnaissance?

• 1:20:27Jocko Willink?

  When we can fly a drone over, we have satellite imagery that can tell us the same thing. So, you know, I will tell you, I never, I never bought into that, you know, I always thought and hoped that, you know, I would, I would be called upon to do what I was trained to do. But it certainly was hard, you know, and we were off the coast of Somalia. So we saw that happen. So you, maybe you'd get the feeling that maybe there would be some sort of a, you know, what we, what we used to call the big mission, you know, we get some one mission. In fact, a lot of our training was, you know, our full mission profiles oftentimes were around like, hey, this is a mission. This is

• 1:21:11Jocko Willink?

  a mission. There's a situation and you're gonna do this mission. You know, even when we worked with the Marine Corps, it was always like, hey, you know, this could be a big, I think it's gonna last a long time. But as far as just the, the mentality of the SEAL teams was very much, hey, we're probably gonna, you know, you're gonna do one mission. If you're lucky, if you're lucky, you're gonna do one mission, whether it's a, a special reconnaissance of one thing, or some kind of a direct action on a ship or a hostage situation. And that was kind of it. Uh, did you feel like that, that attitude was around in the Marine Corps? Or was there just, is there enough kind of institutional knowledge in the Marine Corps that people say, yeah, hey, you know what? It's peaceful right now, but it's a cycle and it'll, it'll be back again?

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  No, because a lot of the people that are involved in that cycle gets out. And whether they're at a leadership level to influence that, your staff and COs and your younger junior officers that were involved in a major conflict in 1991, there's a large probability that over 60% of those guys 10 years later are not gonna be wearing the uniform to be able to train that mentality into another mindset. But what I actually did see was that the military was very conflicted at that time, because you still had, um,

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  The wall may have been coming down in Europe and everything else, but we had aggregate forces all over the world. And all of a sudden, you started seeing mission sets diminish that we used to be. There used to be the jungle schools, and then you'd have the jungle experts that went to learn how to do that. Well, the focus wasn't so much on that. Then you'd have the mountain warriors that went into the mountains, like the 10th Mountain and everybody else, but the 10th Mountain, that's their job. But we have other smaller forces all throughout the military that go to Bridgeport, or they go to Fort McCoy, or they go to ADAC, or they do those. And you watch those start to collapse of where we wasn't, we wasn't going to Norway the way we were doing. We wasn't doing these mission sets that we were doing.

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  And then it was, it was large scale. Now it's going to be desert because after 1991, then Somalia happens right there. So there's more of a Middle Eastern focus that's now shifting into this whole training paradigm that's there, mixed in with these humanitarian missions like Haiti and everything else that's happening. So you've got forces all over the place. And the funny thing is, I really truly do hope that in places in the government, in the higher places in uniform, above and beyond where you and I ever achieved to be at, you really do hope that that mentality did not sip in and they started to promulgate it

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  down to do that. Because that would just tell you that the people that we're relying on to know the most about the business of doing warfare don't know as much that we actually believe that they do. Because if everything in the context from 1775 all the way up to present day of America is a blueprint for what is going to happen in the next 20 to 25 years, and it is undisputable. And a training environment to actually think that we are not going to be fighting another large scale war there at this time period while in between that time period, we're going to go and fight in four and five other shitty little engagements around the thing.

• 1:24:43Speaker 02

  The Somalias, the Hades, the Grenadiers are going to happen and those are going to be compartmentalized. Not everybody gets to go to that party and then you got to keep your motivation up. You got to train the troops and say that that's that unit's mission this time. Ours will be coming, ours will do that. If you are going to make a career of a lengthy career in the US military, you are going to go to war. And there are other services that are going to go parts and pieces, maybe before you. But you've got everything from 1775 to 1783 and then there's your big one. And then all of a sudden, roughly about the years of 1800 to 1805 with the Barbary Pirates

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  and all that, we have compartmentalized little things about there. Then all of a sudden, War of 1812 and that happens, everybody's going to the big one. 1820s, we're fighting insurrections with Indians. You're, you're fighting a different kind of warfare. It's that insurgent, small warfare again that's here. And then all of a sudden, somebody pops in and starts going, we're going to Mexico. Everybody's going to Mexico City. Then you compartmentalize that. Then you get 1861 to 65, the whole show goes to town. Following that, 60s and 70s, then you hit the Spanish American War that comes in. Just after the Spanish American War, World War I kicks off. Banana Wars happen after that.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  We start learning how to develop an amphibious doctrine throughout the Pacific. Guys like Pete Ellis are out there saying that the Japanese are going to strike in the Pacific. We have people in jungle training like Chesty Puller and all those, learning these jungle skills in Nicaragua, in Haiti, and all these small little wars at that time period. And then we come out of the small wars period, 1941, 1945, where the United States is in the big one. Everybody goes home again, put the uniforms up, ruptured duck goes on the sleeves, let's go start working the Chrysler. Holy shit, the Pusan perimeter and we're down to about 100,000 troops because we let everybody go home. Get them all back out there.

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  Fifty-one to fifty-three, then you're starting back into the Dominican Republic in these small little things, fifty-eight, and then Vietnam hits. And runs all the way from the early years of sixty-one, all the way to seventy-five. Bad mindset comes out of there, people are tired, a lot of the NCO corps leaves, the trainers leave that's on there, and then we rebuild this force of small wars in the eighties again. Grenada, Lebanon, Beirut bombing happens, the first terrorist action targeting the United States military in centuries, happens at that. Because it was an act of war by the Japanese on December seventh, that wasn't an act of war, that was a truck bomb going into a marine barracks, they killed two-hundred-and-forty-three

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  people when they were sleeping, that was in there. Kind of roundabout way gets to what you were talking about. I go, it's when you start letting things down, rules of engagement are different. You can't fire until fired upon, you're in a police action, you're not in a designated war. And then you get through Noriega, you roll right into the Desert Storm, there's your big one again, you roll right into the Somalis, the small wars, and then we've been fighting ever since in the major wars and also the small ones. I believe our small war period started again roughly about the two thousand and eight time period, because if you actually look at that clock, and I just need out, every

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  twenty to twenty-five years, this nation all has to mount up and go fight somebody. Everybody, on a bigger scale to do that, all the way since seventeen seventy-five. And then, in the next twenty-year period, we have to reposition, we have to rebuild, and we have to fight these smaller, little compressed areas around the things.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  And prepare for the next one because history tells us the next one is eventually going to happen. And if that's going to be an invasion of Incheon, of which what you were saying is there are certain skill sets. Let's take the amphibious warriors that we have out there today. You know, they've been being told now that there'll never be another scale of D-Day. There'll never be another scale of this. And you know what? To an extent, you have to weigh where you need to put those forces now to where you need to put those forces somewhere in the future. And at the same time, maybe a fire down here on one of our LHA's and a few other things that just got taken offline when we've been running those ships ragged for about the past

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  20 years too, in and out of dry docks and everything else, puts us probably in one of the most invulnerable times again. Prior to 1941, we've been fighting for 20 years. We've been recycling that equipment. We've been throwing people into the breach seven, eight, nine, and 10 times. We have sons and daughters that are now fighting the same war that their fathers and mothers went in. The resilience of the American people is strong, but it's going to be tested. It's going to be tested very soon.

• 1:29:58Jocko Willink?

  I was up in Montana a few weeks ago, and I was doing this archery shoot, a bunch of people from all over the country, and you're out in little, small groups, and I'm seeing a bunch of military guys, and they're saying what's up. And I get to this one spot, and I see this guy coming over the hill, and he's, I don't know, maybe he's 28, 30 years old, something like that, got long hair, beard, scrappy looking guy, and he sees me, his eyes light up, and, you know, he's got the big smile on his face, and comes over, and he says, he says, "Hey, sir. Awesome to see you, Semper Fi. Kill."

• 1:30:43Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, so we talked a little bit, he's in the Marine Corps, the whole nine yards. And I'm, you know, we're out there walking these mountains, and I'm thinking to myself, "That guy?"

• 1:31:00Jocko Willink?

  We're always gonna have to have that guy. We're always gonna have to have that guy. If anybody ever thinks that you don't need that

• 1:31:14Jocko Willink?

  soldier or marine that's gonna mount up and go to wherever they get sent

• 1:31:24Jocko Willink?

  and take that mission and risk their lives and kill the enemy. If you ever think that we don't need that guy, and it just gave me great reass- reassurance. Because he's out of the Marine Corps. But he's out there. And there's

• 1:31:46Jocko Willink?

  that's something we need to make sure that we always have. And I think it's part of our instinct. I think it's part of being a, being an American. But if we ever decide that maybe we need to dispel that attitude from our society,

• 1:32:05Jocko Willink?

  we're heading down the wrong road, in my opinion. Because the world, look, it's a, the world's a nice place when you live in America. But America's not the world. And there's evil out there. And there has to be people that have the attitude that when the call comes, they'll go and, they'll go and handle that problem.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  You know, two really good, you'd said with that, you said earlier, when you were getting at people were developing and utilizing modern day technology as the basis of not having to send a man or a woman into a fight. Uh, whether we're gonna put AI in aircraft, whether we're gonna do that. I'm a armed believer, I go, that all of that is a battle enhancer. That is not what you build the platform on. The man and the woman is the platform that you invest in and you build. You build the resiliency into them. You bring the determination, the strength, the warrior spirit, the fight. You put that into them and it doesn't matter if it's 20 years old. I think if it's even better when they hear that fire coming out of somebody that's 50 and 51

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  and everything else. And you talk to some guy that came across the beaches at Tara where it's 94 and they're crisp, clear and concise and has a day and they're basically looking at you going, "Don't screw this up on your watch, man. We held the line on our watch." And I believe generationally, we all have a responsibility to do that. Make no mistake, war will never become so advanced to where you can hold a piece of ground without putting a person on that ground to hold that piece of ground in that battle space. You can cover it by fire. You can cover avenues. You can cover large swathes that are out there. But if you want to go down and actually get at the business of what war is related to,

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  you are going to have to put a man or a woman in a battle space to control that from the ground. This is exactly why we use forward air controllers that are out there. You don't fire missions onto something that you don't lace a target. You don't have that in. We don't drop dumb bombs from B78s anymore. And just because people believe that we have laser guided munitions and all this other stuff, or as the naval threat is becoming the A2D2 standoff distance and they don't want to fight in the littorals because they don't believe we have to drop Marines into the littorals that much anymore to swim those infantrymen ashore that is on that. And then the nation might start making ships that don't have well decks in them anymore. And it takes that capability off of the table to do that.

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  Because you and I talked before, Ospreys, Hilo envelopments, a lot of these platforms, that's the solution that's here. You know what? The battleship was the solution to the aircraft carrier was the solution to the battleship.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  The toys are not what makes the fight in the military. The fight comes from the heart and it comes from how you grow the next generation to utilize the enhancements that you're going to give them. And you give them the best enhancements that you possibly can to do that, but you do not put an enhancement on the battlefield that cannot be employed by somebody tactically that doesn't have the resilience and the knowledge to control that. Rules of engagement. I will never forget, I went to a combat resiliency conference before I was getting out of the Marine Corps and I had to get up and I had to talk. We had everybody from the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, everybody. The one that I was very most interested in.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  It wasn't the combat resiliency from us as Marines because you're in the six-foot fight with somebody, or the teams that are going to go in and they're going to throw dogs and they're going to hit on target. They're looking at watches, "We got this much time on the ground. We have to get A, B, and C tertiary targets, primaries. We got everything here and you're making those calculated things." No, the average person, well, we don't, that carries the rest of the military, there are supply troops and everybody else that does that. But when I heard an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel say one of the biggest problems they're having right now is the common resiliency of the mentalness of their drone pilots, I kind of sat up in my seat.

• 1:36:24Speaker 02

  And they explained it as it's one thing to be standing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and you're having the six-foot fight and you're doing that and there is that risk that is involved into that, right? Then you go, you do your mission, you do your direct action, you come back, you debrief, you do your equipment, you do that. You get cocked and reset because you're still in the zone. Because I'm in Iraq and I'm in Afghanistan. And he said, "We kinda wasn't prepared, and I know we're more prepared, and I believe they're totally prepared now." Because this was years ago at the infancy of when we're gonna have enlisted drone pilots. We're gonna start flying drones out of these cans, out of places in the United States.

• 1:37:06Speaker 02

  To where these people show up to work in the morning, get a debrief on a thing, do a battle handover, and then fly on its own missions and predators and that, that at the end of the day, somebody puts a board up like they did in Vietnam and go, "Well, we had five today." Walks out of there. And then you get back in your car, your wife calls you and says, "Can you pick up Burger King on the way home?" Um, "Yeah." And then tomorrow morning at eight in the morning, you're gonna go back in that box again. And it's not a game. Those are lives on the other side of that. And that is the evolution of warfare that I believe that you have to prepare the person for when you put that on to shoulder that responsibility and not take away that because

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  of the technological enhancements you and I are talking about. It scares the world. Doesn't matter when they hear that there is a SEAL team that just hit something, uh, the team's usually gone by the time the news is there, and they find out that that incursion just happened in a place in the world that nobody was looking. It strikes the hair on the back of somebody's neck. Okay, America's still watching. They have this capability that are out there, whether it's Delta, whether it's anybody that's on that. But make no mistake, the world knows America's really serious. When a young Lance Corporal or a PFC in the Army with a bayonet on the end of their rifle waves ashore and stands on a piece of sand, and then they have a battalion that's coming

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  behind them, that makes more than people's hair on the back of their neck stand up. It says that we ain't gonna get rid of these guys anytime soon, and if we don't behave, I hate to see what else that they're gonna throw inside of here. So you are spot on in that go of saying that it is always gonna be the person. And I mean, that's right back to that mindset of Teddy Roosevelt, the man in the arena. Today, it's the man and woman in the arena because their lives are out there on the line to do that, whether it's Blue Lives, whether it's military lives, or anybody else. But to have that mindset, we can never lose the mindset of fielding people who want to be in the arena.

• 1:39:17Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take for you to get your, for your battalion to know that you guys were going to spin up and head over?

• 1:39:27Speaker 02

  In 2003, we were on leave, we got called. I was put in a unit that we only had a few months to train up until that time period. So we kept them in the field, lashed them together. We kind of went on leave and we got called off of leave and said that everybody else, for the most part, is going to fly over. But we need you to take your tracks and get on the ships and you're going to ride the ships over. That was here. And we rode one of the last trips of the USS Portland. It was pretty awesome. I always loved the smaller ships than the bigger ships. I mean, they ride differently and that, that's a little bit weird, but the camaraderie with the Navy crew that you have on a smaller ship, especially when you're driving amphibious tanks and everything else is the first people, other than the ship's captain, the XO and

• 1:40:12Speaker 02

  the CMC and that, that you check in on there is, you always check in with the mess chief, make sure that guy's got his stuff squared away, right? You check in with the building chief, show them where they're at. The third people is all the damage control people and everything else on the ship that has the machinery that can help you fix the equipment that's in that weld deck. Whether they're brazers, whether they have welding capabilities, because some of the best people I've ever seen in my life, they can turn a piece of sheet metal into something, is a sailor in the US Navy. And that, it's their home and they got nowhere else to go. So they do the most resilient things, to patch things, to weld things, to do what they have to do. And there's a lot of times I have to go inside of there and go, you don't know me from Shinola,

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  but I don't have a welder out here right now and that. Can you come down here and braise a three inch thing that's on this armored vehicle? Yeah, and it's pretty cool. You throw them a coin, you throw them a K-bar, something for some great work.

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  Because it's a people business, you build assets and camaraderie that way. You don't build an adversarial nature by being the Marines that show up on the ship and they put everybody on water hours because the Marines take showers that are five minutes long or anything else. You just kinda, you know whose house you're in. And you build that rapport because they're going to war too, and they have a mission. And you're really, and their mission isn't just to drop you off. They tie into a bigger mission. They're kinda hoping in that camaraderie that they see you come back. And to be looking at your naval brothers to go when you get pushed ashore and go, "We'll be here. We'll be here when you get back. We don't know what we're gonna be doing. We'll be here."

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  The Portland wasn't there because that thing was part out of decommissioning just to get us into the thing of the fleet. Is that an LPD? Yep. Small, little as Sweet Pea, it was called, you know, and it's kinda sitting about 17,000 feet below the waves. And it's one of those things, it's just a great little ship from a great city that was out there. I mean, the USS Portland's that held that name before that, these were ships that were in Dewey's battle line and everything before. And the naming of these ships and these cities. And when you were talking about, do you think that people sometimes lost their way on what they were doing, you know, like the naming of naval ships. And you look around the world, and you see the invincible, and you see different

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  things that are out there. One that builds pride in your own ship that was here. More importantly is when the enemy kinda sees a flotilla coming at them and they see the names of these ships that are actually coming, that leads to a mindset of the people that are on that ship and a country behind that ship. So when we're sending the Roosevelts out, we're naming these cities. And right down to these little LSTs that were called Barber Counties and Harland Counties. And these were produced to represent these Americans who were the fabric of our nation along there. And then you just kinda see...

• 1:43:15Speaker 02

  How that name can get over here? Where is this at? And how are we naming these things that are on here? Rather than, you know, my, my wife and I chuckle, Jaco, that's on here. And I, you know, I try to reduce my amount of cussing over the years. It's not so grandfatherly when you're out there. But on the screen and the TV, I grew up with the recruiting of the US Navy. Right? Seeing the posters of stripped to the wing sailors throwing depth charges, saying, "Join the US Navy, join this." Brown water Navy boats going in there and doing business on the enemy. Tiger striped cammies, you name it, that was doing this.

• 1:43:57Speaker 02

  And then here for a while, you know, we've got, it's not a job, it's an adventure. We have this, we have this. And all of a sudden, you start, the troops start talking. It's kind of like, what is our identity right now? Am I the Pepsi generation? Am I the join the Navy, see the world generation? Am I that? You know, the Marines or the Semper Fidelis? We didn't promise you a damn Rose Garden type generation. And we don't jockey with our message, like, a lot to do that. But the best thing that I have seen in maybe years is I heard a rumble in my house, because I'm hard of hearing, so the volume's up. I heard a rumble and I saw an aircraft carrier come from the right hand side of the screen with a full battle lineup across the top of that.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  And it cruised across that thing and the house was like rumbling. I yelled to my wife, like, babe, you get down here, your, your, your commercial is on. She runs down, she's laughing at me, Jaco. And here comes this thing, you see the white caps coming and it's rumbling and you know the commercial, it's here. And then at the same tail end of that, it's like, the United States Navy, a global force for good. And I just looked at her and I said, "We wouldn't be married for 22 years if I got us all freaking jacked up to like, like do some stuff tonight." And then it's kind of like, "Okay, baby, you ready? We're gonna get this." And then, "This is how we're gonna drop the ending on this thing." I said, "I probably wouldn't be your husband for the past 22 years." And you know what?

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  I loved it. I loved the messaging that it had, that was on there. Because the messaging, the politically incorrect messaging, they should've came on there. "United States Navy, we will completely destroy your way of life at the same end of this." And then things like, listing the battle things of saying, "This is just one. We have quite a few more of these." And then more importantly is, once again, you don't make it about the machines. You make it about the person. And when people start seeing recruiting posters that actually have the resilience and the fighting thing, I've seen America's Army come out. They're actually really good ones. They got some door kicking things. I mean, they're actually targeting like, "We want infantry makeup." I haven't seen that for a lot of years, to do that.

• 1:46:12Speaker 02

  And it's awesome. And you still see Naval Special Warfare commercials out that are targeting a generation of, of the next generation that has to go forward and do these things. I'm not sold on the fact, I go, that we should be selling a lot of skills that are on there. You know, that's a recruiter's job. Let's get them into the recruiter, let's kind of pump them up, let's get them to that. But I also know, and I had one of them say, "Justin, we don't want to scare anybody that's on there, because we gotta get people to come to the door." And I said, "The right ones will come to the door. The other ones, you'll do a little bit more work for, but you'll find them in those high schools and you'll do another thing."

• 1:46:58Jocko Willink?

  If you're getting scared by a commercial, I don't think I want you here.

• 1:47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:01Jocko Willink?

  Sorry.

• 1:47:02Speaker 02

  It rattled. That's exactly right. I don't want you here.

• 1:47:06Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so how early for the invasion did you guys get to, um, the staging point?

• 1:47:13Speaker 02

  Uh, we landed and we moved about a 30 day movement up into our TAAs, our tactical assembly areas that are on there. So we landed in Kuwait to move, um, a good way of land. We didn't low boy. We didn't do a lot of those. You're driving up into a lot of these positions, uh, to do a couple of weeks of training that was there, but we only learned the mission that we were going to have to take those bridges down. Uh, we didn't know until we actually got up physically to the tactical assembly areas.

• 1:47:42Jocko Willink?

  What month did you guys set sail?

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  Uh, in January and then we landed in the end of February. So we were on the ground and started making our movement on February 18th and 19th up into the northern portion of Kuwait, just below the border.

• 1:47:56Jocko Willink?

  So both these wars for you, you showed up very short, didn't have to sit around in the desert like everybody else for nine months or 11 months. You're the man.

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  I was Dennis, I was Dennis Rodman in the thing when somebody's, you know, you're eating the cheeseburger saying you need to get your sweats off. They're about to walk onto the thing.

• 1:48:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We're about to play the world champions. Hey, can you come on over here right now?

• 1:48:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:48:17Jocko Willink?

  Dang. So you got up there, you said February 18th?

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  Got up there in February. Uh, we offloaded in February in Kuwait and then we made the march up in, uh, to the northern portion of Kuwait to stage where we're going to go through the breach lanes into Iraq.

• 1:48:33Jocko Willink?

  And then, uh, going in, going into this, how did the attitude compare to what you experienced in the first Gulf War of the, of, of your fellow Marines?

• 1:48:42Speaker 02

  The attitude was absolutely, there was no problem getting any Marines to do anything. It was a problem keeping them from doing something because they still had the twin towers burning in their head. You still have people in your platoon that were in New York when that actually happened and had joined the Marines a couple of years later. So they were kids that were 70. That was the catalyst to make them Marines. Um, and you have that fight of you did this and that, that was the energy that was going in as we, you know, some of us who were here the first time. Knew that we were going to be back there again because people had always chastised or whatever or armchair quarterback George Bush's decision on should he have just pushed

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  the troops up into Baghdad and knocked out Saddam Hussein in 1991 and the mission was get him out of Kuwait, put him back in their own house and then they pulled back. We kinda, I kinda knew when I was running enemy prisoners of war in the backs of those Amtrak's in 1991, a lot of those kids didn't want to be there but the older warriors did. And their lieutenant colonels and their senior NCOs that had been through the Iran war and everything else, the look that they had on their face was, "Trust me, man, this is not over. These kids that are in here don't have the fight and didn't grow up with that, but my generation's still around." And I can still remember a lieutenant colonel sitting in the back and

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  I remember how dumb I was because I had a knife like on the top shoulder of my flak jacket so I could get to it, but I was sitting on a camionette against engine panels so I could watch everybody in the crew compartment. But I remember my weapon at the time wasn't like in a condition one weapon with it on fire. Wouldn't even been, it would have been condition one on safe, but you're in close quarter and you have a long rifle in here. And that's the ignorance that you have as a kid. You feel you're protected. I have this, they don't want to fight anymore. But I also looked up in out the cargo hatches and my platoon

• 1:50:49Speaker 02

  sergeant had the weapon station turned all the way to the back with the 1500 and that depressed into the back of the nule and the other E7 that was in this hatch was leaning and riding the vehicle backwards with a Beretta and was in overwatch of me down there. In other words, they probably wasn't so scared of me because they were probably scared those crazy guys will fire into the back of here and kill even at the risk of killing one of their own. So we didn't have any problem holding them. Going into that, training that mindset that we're going into their backyard this time with the greatest Marines that we could put forward on the field of battle at that

• 1:51:29Speaker 02

  time and all the other cohesive forces going into there. There was not a mindset other than let's just get this show started.

• 1:51:37Jocko Willink?

  Did you think, look, I know you said that you thought, hey, we're going into their, we're going into their territory now. This is actually where they live. We're probably going to see more resistance. Was that widespread or did a lot of people think, hey, man, we, you know, we're probably looking two weeks at the most. I know I was worried about that, which is a weird thing to say, but I was thinking, because I was not over there and I was thinking, I'm going to miss this. This is going to be over in a few weeks or at least it could be. What did you see?

• 1:52:08Speaker 02

  We talked about that in training earlier. Different units trained to a different mentality that was here. I can only speak to the one that we trained to. We trained to be there to basically prevent Iraqis from ever being able to do this again to somebody else at that. And it wasn't going to be a 1991. It was not going to be they're just going to throw up their hands and they're going to walk away to do that. But I'm not telling you that other people were like that, that you saw in training areas or you didn't see putting in the hours and the reps and the sets that it actually took to lay the maps and talk the history and kind of really engrain that mindset into somebody. It was overall

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  the Marines had the mindset, subunit levels that were on there. It always goes back to whatever the commander, whatever the ownership is going to make a focus of training at that time period, because you can have the higher authority that basically says, we're going to go in and we're going to do this mission. But the people that you train, eat, sleep, breathe with, that put that into you is normally not the chief of naval operations or the commander of the Marine Corps. It is your lieutenant colonel. It is your captain. It's your lieutenant. It's your gunny sergeant. It's your chief petty officer or it's your guy on your left and the right. So I couldn't have had a more cohesive unit that went in for the short amount of time that we did, because I all do believe that they didn't believe this

• 1:53:35Speaker 02

  was going to be a two and a Q, man. And we're out of here. I think they actually were very fearful when they kind of knew the major thing is to now. Take this guy out and we're going to do it in such a manner and such a speed that was out here that we're sitting there with these vehicles, they're left over from the end of Vietnam when they were brand new, going, we're going to push them across the desert, sometimes at night, sometime with no maps, sometimes broken down and you have to leave that one back with a crew to fix it and then they have to travel 80 miles to catch up with the rest of the crew and they're out of radio range. So at night, you're just kind of looking at the tracks that you can follow to try to catch up and then you call in these radio things to get within that radio range and you don't even know

• 1:54:20Speaker 02

  if you're driving through a bazillion minefields or anything else that is out there. That's focus.

• 1:54:29Jocko Willink?

  When the, when the invasion kicked off, where, what were you guys doing immediately? Were you guys rolling up, what was that, was that March 20th?

• 1:54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were, we were already in position and rolling and refueling. We kicked off on about March 19th and started to track up because you're talking hundreds of miles that was in there. And again, fixing things along the way, whatever you have to do because the thing was push, push, push, push, push. You can't stop. You can't do this. Which really bonds to that old thing we were talking about, like the USS Indianapolis. You know, it was maintain radio silence, keep pushing, keep pushing, don't give away positions, don't do whatever you have to do, right? Get to the end of the result. And about, we started topping off and refueling about the 21st. It was kind of the invasion load for the fuel. We've already loaded with ammunition. You're already loaded with everything. The

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  22nd rolls into there and you instantly know the call is the 23rd is going to go into the city. And then that's when you've already rehearsed that your position to take a certain bridge. Here's your mission and here's the time and date stamp that you have to be accomplished by, whether it is setting off at 04 in the morning to get to a bridge by 08 so that you have somebody that is here.

• 1:55:47Jocko Willink?

  So did your battalion get tasked to take Naziriyah?

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, the entire task force. It was called ironically Task Force Tarawa. And Task Force Tarawa was 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines. And that was completely away in its own task force. And that task force was to secure the bridges of Nazaria. So that the entire 1st Marine Division and the Army and everybody else could pass through that city all the way up the route and make a straight shot up to Baghdad. So that's why they needed those bridges.

• 1:56:17Jocko Willink?

  What was the intel telling you about the resistance you were gonna face?

• 1:56:20Speaker 02

  Uh, the resistance was about 500,000 people inside of a city. So it was a large, major city, uh, at the timeframe. It was bracketed by the Euphrates and the Saddam Canal, uh, that was on that. And, uh, at the time, there was small units and it was a headquarters of the Iraqi Fedahin that was down there. So we kinda knew more of your fanatical fighters were gonna be inside of that area. The 51st Mechanized Division was down there and we still knew that Iraq still had a will and a means to fight. So they still had these capabilities that they could probably put a good hurt on you. Uh, but we still had the capabilities that nobody was foreseeing the buzzsaw that was

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  gonna happen when, uh, when we crossed over those bridges that morning on the 23rd.

• 1:57:06Jocko Willink?

  Were you guys debrief, are you briefing your, your platoons like out in the field? Or are you, are you in the assembly area? How's, how's the word getting transmitted to the troops?

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  You're already doing the pre-briefs, uh, that are out there in the days leading up to that. Once, once we got, everything else is kind of on the move. Uh, at one time, I've got six different radio nets that are going on inside of my helmet. Little box down here that I can switch between Battalion Tac 1, Tac 2, fires, anything else. While you're still maintaining, uh, your communications for your intercoms for your vehicles, you're still maintaining tactical control of your own people in relation to the battle that was on there. And once the things are rolling, there was no time to just stop and say, we need to get everybody back together and talk about what we're about to do tomorrow.

• 1:57:55Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you, you already had the whole thing?

• 1:57:57Speaker 02

  We already had the pre-brief that was there.

• 1:58:00Jocko Willink?

  And then you go across the bridges. What was the first indication that, um, oh, it's on?

• 1:58:06Speaker 02

  Uh, the first indication it was on was even before we got to the bridges. Because all of a sudden that morning, we found out and started hearing calls. That there was an army unit that had made its way into Nazaria. And they had went up across one of the bridges that we were supposed to on, uh, the southern bridge. Made it across the northern bridge, all the way what's now known as Ambush Alley. Uh, US five oh seventh maintenance was there and just managed to take a wrong turn. Captain Troy King, uh, got the unit on the northern side. They kind of figured out we're off the path of where we're at. And figured at the time, the best plan was to cut the shortest distance again. To try to get back to where the convoy, they had turned that, they'd made that wrong turn.

• 1:58:50Speaker 02

  Um, so the greatest thing was when we first started hearing. That we've got army vehicles on fire, sitting in front of here. Blood, weapons laying all over the place. And we are the nor, we're, we're the spearhead of the entire, nobody's supposed to be in front of us. So to hear over the radio, what, what do you mean there's an army unit? Uh, are they engaged? Are they not engaged? It's here, no. The first vehicles start calling, which are the tanks back. And they're rolling past these burning vehicles. And there are fuel trucks and there are convoy trucks. It's not a combat convoy that was on there. And they're pushing. And they're just relaying those positions that are back here. So now the generals, colonels, everybody else is getting these fragmented stuff back here.

• 1:59:35Speaker 02

  They're all trying to figure out what's going on. And I get a call to go up and start figuring out what's going on up there. Take another vehicle. I grabbed another vehicle and started pushing as far as we could. And at first I heard it's about a mile and a half somewhere up the road. Where the tanks had said they may have seen some soldiers on the side of the road. We passed the burning vehicles that were there, all shot to pieces. And then we just kinda kept driving up the road and saw nothing. And then I got up to the forward line where the M1 Abrams tanks and 8th Tank Battalion. And Major Bill Peoples was in charge of that.

• 2:00:18Speaker 02

  And I drove the Amtrak down into the side, sent the driver over near the tank. The tank's main guns are engaging, T-62s in the field. Everything, this is getting real, main gun overpressure blasting. You can't get a hold of them. Their mission fixed this here. Got on the ground, quined up the side of the tank, got on the back of the gunner's thing and grabbed the gunner's helmet off the top, which I believe kinda startled him a little bit, because they are actively engaging troops that are in the field. And started to ask him, I mean, he looked and was like, "Where the fuck did you come from?" And I said, "Did you see some soldiers?"

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  And he said, "A little bit past the burning trucks and not far behind from where we're at. In between that area, we saw some soldiers that may be a few hundred yards off in the areas." And, "Thank you very much." My feet did not hit the deck. He looked enough to see me start to climb down the side of that tank to jump off. And that's about this high that was here, to get back to the vehicle. And when he saw me jump off the tank, that main gun fired. It was like the best roller coaster ride I've ever had in my life. Because the overpressure, it's just like it arched your back and I got back up, I'm laughing, he's laughing that's up there, give him a thumbs up, run back to the thing, tell the drivers they're somewhere in here.

• 2:01:44Speaker 02

  Now, we're in Indian country that's out here. They're engaging that way. We've now got artillery positions that are getting set up to start firing into the city and start doing the prep. You're starting to see helicopters start to come into the, into the air. And then, we couldn't see any soldiers. Uh, so we started weaving the vehicles, Jaco, back and forth, like you drive down some country road, trying to find something in the ditch that was here with two vehicles. And eventually, my driver yelled, and he said, "I see somebody over in the field." And I looked over there, and it was a soldier waving her hands up. It was the chief warrant officer that was in there. We pulled the vehicles over inside of there, and I tell people to this day, I go, because

• 2:02:28Speaker 02

  they've caught a tremendous amount of heat for being the unit that was, had people captured and wandered into this, or whatever else. I get credit a lot for being the individuals that went out there and saved the individuals and triaged in this here. For, for that maintenance unit that was on the ground when we got there and, and put troops on the deck, they did the best job that they could possibly have done with trying to treat their own casualties. One individual, Specialist Grub, had four gunshot wounds. A big boy. I think if it was me, he wouldn't, I wouldn't have lived. The, the shots where his were at, were arms, upper arms, legs, and, and I just remember

• 2:03:12Speaker 02

  him having this calm zen thing, and when I stopped over, he just looked up and he said, "I never thought I'd be so happy to see a Marine in my life." And, uh, we said, "We're gonna take care of you." And we started ripping t-shirts, bandages, corpsmen were there. Uh, they had made like a little 360-degree perimeter. Specialist Miller was awarded the Silver Star out of that unit for defending those perimeters that were here out of that maintenance unit. So this whole kind of shtick that they get, that they didn't fight, they didn't do this, they were just a maintenance unit that wandered in. Their training kicked in, they did the initial things that were out there, uh, sent the other group over to the other little wagon wheel that they had another individual set up in there.

• 2:03:55Speaker 02

  And I can just remember looking at Grub and thinking, "The calmest, here's this guy, he's just..." Boy, he's on point. Thank you for showing up, saving. He's not howling, he's not screaming. And then we have one of the other ones that's missing part of the back of his foot that's over there. We get them in, we get back down south, tanks are still engaging and pushing north. We get enough time to just kick them out of the vehicles, Jaco, at the first, like, ambulance I could find. Because at this time, no, there's no aid stations set up, there's nothing. So you get them back there, drop them, because I got a, I got a convoy to get back up here. And instantly, we dropped them right there, fell back into the battle

• 2:04:36Speaker 02

  line, and started moving in on those bridges into Nazaria. And the first bridge we hit was a rail bridge. And the first thing that I heard net was that there was a van coming, and there was an RPG gunner hanging out the side of the van. And we saw the first shot, and yelled sagar, sagar, sagar, which was the cue to the armored vehicles to start driving erratically to try to evade a rocket attack. Jaco, when they did that, I knew everything was gonna be okay. I did. Because instant willingness in that confusion, and they're hearing all this chaos going on in their helmet, and they're listening still for the key words

• 2:05:18Speaker 02

  and the reactionary things, they're not going, where's that coming from? They just start doing what they're trained to do, that short amount of time. Move across that railhead, nothing's sitting, move over the southern bridge, and it was eerily quiet. Moving over the southern bridge of the Euphrates River was eerily like nothing was going on. It's, I don't know if you tuned it out in the city, but it was like there was no firing going on, it was eerily quiet moving into there. And then I was sitting on top in the center of that bridge, in the forward part, and I'm the last vehicle. So there's about 13 other AVs that are staggered in front of me.

• 2:06:00Speaker 02

  And about eight seconds into that feeling, the entire world exploded. Rockets, mortars, coordinated RPK, machine gun fire on corners of the bridges and everything here. I'm yelling over the thing to the first section leader, that's the first vehicle at the bottom, you need to push and get us off of this bridge that's down there. We get down and off the other side of that bridge, and those vehicles start moving into these herringbone battle positions. And now, they need to drop their infantry because we are on our objective. We still have other units that have to pass through this objective to get to their objective that are up there. And using situational awareness in the battlefield, I still to this day can't remember seeing

• 2:06:45Speaker 02

  another armored column roll feet away through there because you're so focused on what you're doing in that area. And now they're calling out RPG gunners, they're calling out mortar men on the top. You're seeing the RPGs flip and hitting the road. Some of them are duds, some of them aren't duds. And then, you have to disembark the infantry. The infantry gets out there, and this is like something that was, I can only imagine this is what Custer felt like. When you've got a 360 degree and it's coming from everywhere, and you can't figure out what the main part of this, whether it's artillery that's coming in on you, whether it's forward observers. There were people watching the battle, and I go, they were just sitting up there drinking

• 2:07:30Speaker 02

  tea with their family on these verandas that are just watching, and you're sitting here going, is that a spotter? Is that somebody? I mean, the guy looks like he's 70, but I don't know right now. And a lot of guys are then asking you, are we authorized to return fire to do this? Because that was probably the biggest thing that happened in Nazaria, was the epic scope and scale of it. You would think that people were itching to pull the trigger. It was quite the opposite. They were really running the rules of engagement and saying, until I get some real positive ID or something like this, I'm not just going to sling a 50 cal into this building until I have a reason to do that. And it was a really short time until we were given a reason to do all of that and more.

• 2:08:15Speaker 02

  Whether it's 40 millimeter grenade launchers, 50 cal's, laying 60 millimeter mortars on direct fire down avenues of approach. It was every range you had ever been on, all packed into one that was there. And it was that way for a solid straight eight hours. And nothing lit up. There wasn't a breather. There wasn't anything that was in there. The supply chains aren't going to come up to you because they know what's going on up there. So at the times this is all happening, the tanks are a pretty big signature. All of a sudden, tanks run out of gas really quick. When they're burning through that gas, the tanks start pulling out of the battle position

• 2:08:58Speaker 02

  because you can't get the fuel in to refuel the tanks that are in the city. The tanks are now going to leave the city. So the only thing about your heart going down in your stomach is when you see those bad boys start rolling the opposite way and you're left with thin-skinned vehicles because our Amtraks on that deployment cycle, we didn't have enough time when we got the deployment order jacko to get the bolt-on armor to put on the outside of vehicles. So our vehicles at the thickest point was two inches of aluminum. We didn't have the applique. We didn't have the enhanced armor that was in there. And then the Humvees still just had cloth doors and they had that ghetto armor, as we called it in 2004 and '05, and armor plates and all that were the product of what we

• 2:09:43Speaker 02

  learned back then to do that. And as they're going, the tanks go that way. And now the fight is in a 360. And we're about an hour and a half into that.

• 2:09:58Speaker 02

  Don't know what's going on at the other northern bridge. Don't know what's going on on the outskirts of town where our third maneuver unit was supposed to be on the outskirts of town. And that had the commander in the third maneuver unit on the outskirts of Nazaria. They kind of tried to do an end around with these command vehicles. And they got into this Iraqi cesspool bog. It was no, it's a shit dump. It was a, and an armored vehicle. It looks like it's sand on top. First one launches into there, sinks all the way down. It can't get out. And one Abrams goes in after it. It's gone. Command vehicles go in. It's gone. And you're talking about now we're thermiting engine compartments and everything because we're going to have to leave these vehicles inside of these cities.

• 2:10:42Speaker 02

  This is the blueprint that wasn't supposed to happen.

• 2:10:45Jocko Willink?

  This is what? How many hours into it are you?

• 2:10:50Speaker 02

  This is two into that.

• 2:10:52Jocko Willink?

  Are you, have you already taken casualties at this point?

• 2:10:57Speaker 02

  At that point, none in my immediate area. And then right after that is when I was faced in opposite direction, firing a turret in kind of a rearward thing to keep the Iraqis back from this avenue of approach. And we saw an ambulance coming at a high rate of speed up the thing. And I can remember what the C was on the side and all this. And myself and another vehicle, Alpha 311, was sitting on each side of the spread. And this thing just kept coming, kept coming, kept coming, closing the distance, 200 meters. And I kept telling them, just call it out, call it out. We did.

• 2:11:38Speaker 02

  You're usually not supposed to do a burst of warning fire to do that, but this is the first stages of combat. And this is kind of an ambulance. It's also at the same time, kind of a V bit that's coming this way because some of us did remember Beirut, a few things that were like that when we were younger.

• 2:11:57Speaker 02

  It gets to about 75 meters, game on. And we lit into that thing and that vehicle careened off and stopped and pounded into a wall. The whole cab lit red that was on that. And as soon as it smacked into that wall, that back hatch opened up and six black-clad Iraqi Fedahin, fully armed-to-the-teeth fighters, came out of the back of that vehicle and started running across the street. And they're, you know, now it's, my God, now they're gonna use ambulances. Now they're gonna do this. Now you're really into this. And it's all in that two-hour window, right? And then you're talking about rules of engagement, rules not of engagement. You're an 18-year-old kid that's out here as gunner or sergeant. Do I, am I authorized to shoot? Something like that?

• 2:12:41Speaker 02

  Or am I gonna be charged with some kind of, mm, it's after here? Amen. This is what we have to do at this time, to keep the family alive. And when they jumped out with weapons, it was just like that. Every avenue approached. You would see a mass. You would look up on verandas. You would see people come out and fire rockets down the road to try to skip them into tanks. And then you'd see them disappear. And then a few seconds later, you'd see somebody come out on the top veranda again, kind of put their head around. About 20 seconds later, that person, now that person's a spotter for the person that's underneath.

• 2:13:20Speaker 02

  And you just got to watch the Marines calculate all that at the rapid rate and start to deduce, this is what's happening. Can I do this? Can I not do this? Here's what I'm gonna do. And then my driver yells, "Hey, boss, look at these dumbasses going the wrong way." And it was kind of this little Georgian kid, 19-years-old, loved him to death, PFC Sasser. He's looking right at the road. And what he saw was an Amtrak going the opposite direction. And the first thing I can remember thinking, Jaco, was don't let that be one of mine. Because I didn't tell any of them to go that way to do that.

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  And then when the clarity happens, you look and the RPG gunner at the top materializes 50 feet above that Amtrak. He fires a rocket down into the top of that Amtrak and then it blows the back end of the Amtrak open and then you see an Iraqi RPG gunner walk right out in the middle of the street, take a knee and fire the second rocket right into the street troop compartment, which is a completely coordinated effort of attack. These aren't just a bunch of insurgents that are there. And then you see that blew open, next thing you see is a US Marine fall out on fire. And I could tell it was one of ours. He still had his communications cord

• 2:14:44Speaker 02

  and helmet attached in the back of that. And it's all surreal at that time. You don't have sights and sounds. You don't have it. It just kind of, and you're in this vacuum watching all this happen. And the vehicle comes to a rolling stop on its own power because you can see smoke coming out every hatch. It's on fire. And then you can see troops laying in the hatchets. And I can just remember the infantry is engaged, but I can just remember that nobody's kind of running near that thing right now. So I yelled in the back to my doc, grab your unit one kit and come with me. And Alex Velazquez

• 2:15:25Speaker 02

  from Puerto Rico, great little kid, first time in combat. He grabs his stuff. He runs out the back. I got no helmet. I got it because you're throwing everything off, right? And we get out there, we run to the vehicle. And the first thing I see is half the leg of a Marine laying in the vehicle. And I remember picking it up. There's nothing else to do. And, and you're like, Doc laid this off to the side because maybe there's people here alive. You know, in your own way, you're trying to think maybe this can be reattached or doing that. And I still remember the picture in my head of him standing there holding this leg, amputated leg, combat trauma of a Marine and this look on his face like, oh my God, what's going on?

• 2:16:09Speaker 02

  And then we went into the back of the vehicle. The back of the vehicle, Jagga was completely collapsed in. And this is a 26-ton vehicle. So the top of these cargo hatches, they need a few Marines on a good day to open them up. And these are imploded into the back of the vehicle. And then you have to remember, inside of the vehicle, you have no shortage of about 1,000 Mark 19 grenades. You have boxes of hand grenades, the infantry. You couldn't sit in the back of a US combat vehicle, going into combat in 2003, and actually put your feet on the actual deck of a vehicle. Because there was a subdeck. And the upper deck was all the ammunition that was laid across there.

• 2:16:53Speaker 02

  So not only are these infantrymen, on a regular day, packed in like you and I talked about before, now their knees are to their chest. They're sitting on top of a powder keg. And it's just nothing but cordite and pitch black. And you can't see and you start feeling. And I just started walking through Jagga from Marine to Marine. And I would see a Marine and I'd move up and try to feel shake, check for a pulse, whatever. Because they're just all mixed in together. These cargo hatches had also imploded and bent them all into L-shaped positions when they collapsed on their backs. So even if you have the average Marine, let's just say a buck 80 that is out there,

• 2:17:38Speaker 02

  you had, you know, another 60 pounds of kit on top of that kid and all of his weapons and everything else. It's a mess. And as we're moving through there, I'm looking back and telling Doc, he's triaging people. And I could look back and Doc was feeling for a pulse. And I would tell Doc, forget it. Go to the next one, he's dead. Because Doc couldn't see the side of his head that was missing that I could see. He could only see the other side when he came through. And now I figure Jaco, everybody's dead. There is not a single living person that's inside of here that could have survived this.

• 2:18:17Speaker 02

  Then you just start hearing all the stuff ricocheting off the outside of the vehicle. You still see the rocket trails that are flying behind because they're now, this is a large target right in the middle of the thing. Magnet. It's a magnet. And they're aiming everything they can for it. And I just figured, first of all, we need to get as much weapons as we can. We need to zero the radios out. We need to get the crypto out of here. We need to do that. And started to go up because I figured I was asking for a thermite grenade. Because if I couldn't get the radios out or whatever, you can drop a thermite and burn them. And this is what we're going to do because we may not have to leave this here. Which is one of the saddest things, you know, you don't leave a dead and wounded comrade

• 2:19:02Speaker 02

  behind, but in the middle of the fight, you have to do what you do to survive. And also get the materials you have to do to carry the fight to the enemy. And you cannot quit. Because even if you're tired, cold, wet, hungry, somebody else is more tired, cold, wet, hungry, anything else than you. You're talking 136 degrees or anything else. We're already in the fight where Marines have already sucked through all their canteens of water or their camelbacks to do that. The water's hot already, as you know, it's not chilled water. And they're in it. And I stepped into the middle of that and dropped down on my right knee trying to get through, and I heard a man gasp for air.

• 2:19:47Speaker 02

  It was who I was stepping on that was here. And it turned out to be a corporal by the name of Matthew Jaska. That was a vehicle and a Marine that was in a completely different unit. They were charged with taking the northern bridge where we had the southern bridge. So now, in your head, how did they get here? How are they backed down here to do this? And you find out. What had happened at the Northern Bridge, when they got along that Northern Bridge, they were hit with Iraqi artillery fire, they were hit with that, and then they were also the unit that were hit by the A-10 strafes that were up there and had all this madness going on at one time. These vehicles that were, we were now seeing coming back in, they were the vehicles that

• 2:20:31Speaker 02

  were loaded with casualties trying to get back south of the city to do what we had done with the 507. And then the Iraqis were picking them off, just like they did the 507 when they came back into the city.

• 2:20:43Jocko Willink?

  Debrief the, um, the A-10 friendly fire situation that unfolded is, you know, from what you, from what you know about it.

• 2:20:51Speaker 02

  Well, when it was actually happening, we're at the Southern Bridge, so it's pretty distinctive when you can hear an A-10 come over and it, it makes a pretty distinctive sound as well when those cannons are actually going off, so you know they're in the area. Now, the Northern Bridge and that where it's happening is probably about another one and a half, two miles up Ambush Alley. And what we can assess is there were actually survivors in that track that I was in that were also crew members that were in the front. So I was able to garner, after we coherently were able to get some people to talk, wasn't the casualty I pulled out of the back, and it really wasn't the two guys that were inside that was there.

• 2:21:34Speaker 02

  Another AM track had called out and said a second vehicle was here and they're trying to get us to come help them up at the Northern Bridge. And he was saying what was happening at the Northern Bridge. And the open source that you can find, the redacted after action, it's online, that was here, was basically what had been happening was when they got forward to the Northern Bridge and they were hit with this multiple things, they're calling airstrikes that were coming in. The forward air controller was, the FAC is supposed to actually be having eyes on the target. And the FAC...

• 2:22:16Speaker 02

  Did not have eyes on the target that was at that position and he was co-located in the, with the command element that was back in the city. And when the AT-10s are coming in, the AT-10s are getting grids that there are no US vehicles forward of a certain position. Kind of like when we got the call for the Army. What do you mean the Army's up there to do that? And then they're getting confusing calls of vehicles are coming back in to the city, which I am assuming at that, if I'm a pilot or anything else and I'm seeing armored vehicles coming back into a city. It may be enemy reinforcements, it may be something like that.

• 2:22:57Speaker 02

  But at one period, whatever it was, Jaco, they were given the clearance to fire. Fire on the vehicles that were north of that city. And when they came in, call signs were, were gyrated that is on there and they came in and made their first run and their first strafing run, they made a couple of those. And then they flew back off, up to the level in the stack to start coming back around and to do that again. And they made multiple runs on those vehicles that were up there. So, the vehicles that you can see online, the vehicles that you could see there, the ones that look like they're completely gutted and split open like a can opener, that shows all the aluminum melted on the outside of the things, that wasn't from Iraqi small arms

• 2:23:42Speaker 02

  fire or anything else that was like that. That was the Marines that were in the mass confusion at the northern portion of the bridge, holding what their battle position was, trying to figure out where this enemy fire is coming from, calling in the air to help out with that enemy fire. And then that enemy fire in the middle of the Fratricide incident happens to frag Marines that are in that, in that mass confusion.

• 2:24:11Speaker 02

  You know it was later because, you know, they fired depleted uranium rounds. And when you see the aftermath of all these nickels and depleted uranium rounds, they leave a nice little melded, looks like the Terminator. Like when the Terminator shot in the head, you know, you see the bullet hole go through Arnold Schwarzenegger's head and then you see the metal go back, it just kind of peels out, it's like that. And you can see these cavernous things that are sitting inside of there to do that. But at the same time that you're down at the south, you don't know, Jaco, that's going on. You only find out with the luxury of history now, but you also knew by the time, it was about five or six o'clock, when you were able to get up to that northern bridge, you

• 2:24:53Speaker 02

  instantly were getting the feedback from the troops on the ground on what happened here and seeing, you know, their homes are gone. Some of them are, their gear is still on those vehicles that are there, they only have the ammunition that's on their back, they don't know how they're going to survive, they got each other that's up there and they're in a battle position and they're defending and holding their perimeter. And then back in the city, we are now still trying to figure out what is going on with these vehicles. We find this individual and we get him in the vehicle and we have him taken back over to the back end of an Amtrak. And when I say this individual Marine, this individual Marine was the largest Marine

• 2:25:38Speaker 02

  that was in that company. He was 240 plus pounds, he was about six foot five and overall with all of his gear weighed well over 300 some pounds. And, you know, I'm at the time pushing a buck sixty, Doc is pushing even less than that and we're in the back trying to dislodge a 300 plus pound individual that's in the back of this with all this equipment mixed in. And I can see when he's bent in the L-shaped position, Jaco, his head is split from the base of his neck all the way to the top to where you can see his entire cranium, his head. So what I did was, we yelled for some more Marines. We kinda made a daisy chain. I held on to him as much as we could.

• 2:26:22Speaker 02

  The company first sergeant came in, got some more Marines. Doc held on to me. We started cutting as much equipment as we could and started daisy chaining this big boy out the back of that. Because you had to make a decision at the time. If I leave him here, he's dead. If I move him, he's dead. In my head, that's what I'm thinking because I see the trauma that he has on him. And I know the type of injuries in these places. We're talking about spinal injuries, we're talking about head injuries. And you don't have the means with the rockets and everything else to stabilize spine boards and all this. So you had to make a decision. Yanking him out. And the decision was made at that time.

• 2:27:05Speaker 02

  I'd much rather if it was me, somebody yank my ass out of here to where I can get back to some medical treatment. And Doc and I and the Marine ran him across the intersection under fire. Placed him into the back of another vehicle where Doc started to treat his head injury. And then I had ran back out in the street to tell him, there's more. So I went back to the vehicle again. Still have to do the weapons, still have to do everything else that's inside the vehicle. And then I also hear that somebody had moved some casualties to a house right across the street. And some Marine machine gunners were yelling and they kept pointing, I think they're down that way. And I went into this house, Jago. I don't have a weapon on me that's here.

• 2:27:48Speaker 02

  I do have a nine mil that's on that, but the long gun's an arrow in the back. And I come into this house. And what I see in this house is I look to the left and the side of the room and I see three individuals. And one of them gets up and he's gray from head to toe. And he has a communications helmet on his head. And he is burnt. Back of his leg is partially missing, some other things there. He's got some burns and some trauma. And this kid was named Corporal Vasquez. And Corporal Vasquez I knew was a crew chief in that other unit at that northern bridge. And... I looked over against the wall and the other two crewmen that made it out of those hatches were leaning against the wall and they had their uniforms on. And remember,

• 2:28:33Speaker 02

  everybody's in mop conditions. So you're fighting in full mop floors. It isn't like going to gas chamber just to go to training one day and then you strip out all your gear. You're in mop for days and you're fighting in that charcoal suit on top of all this stuff in that 130 degree heat with no water anymore for these hours. And they're sitting against that, that wall. And I can still remember seeing the blood out of their eyes, their ears. You could tell they were concussed. And they were sitting there. And Corporal Vasquez comes up and I just told Vasquez, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get you out of here. And he said,

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  I don't want to go anywhere, honey. He said, I can still fight. Now you're sitting here having the wounded protect the wounded, right? Anything else? And went outside the door, picked up and they were on the ground that were here, came back in, racked around and put Corporal Vasquez, after I patched up his wounds, I put him in the doorway. And there are still Iraqi voices in the back of the house. I figured there's probably five or six rooms in the house that are in the back. But the Marines are right in the street on the outside of the room. And you have access to the back end side of the house if I put you in this access on this doorway. I'm gonna go get some help. Racked around,

• 2:29:58Speaker 02

  put his arms and said, I'm gonna come to the right. Don't shoot anybody coming from this direction. Somebody coming from the left hand side. This is an unsecure facility. You know what you have to do, Marine. And he said, Roger that. Went back out, grabbed some more Marines, some more weapons, come back in, got those three, moved them to the vehicle as well. Now you're sitting here having to make the decision, I go, you gotta get back on the radio to at least let your commander and that assess the situation. And Captain Mike Brooks was a phenomenal infantry company commander on the ground with the boys. And he's watching this all happen.

• 2:30:39Speaker 02

  So he knows we have casualties. He knows that we have very serious ones. He also knows that we have an Amtrak that ain't going anywhere. That's got US equipment and all this stuff in here. And he also knows something is going on at the Northern Bridge that allowed all this to happen down here. And this is what you're talking about, you know, as that commander, right? You're also been told, you will hold that bridge. And you're the guy on the ground hearing all this happen now. I've got to get people out of here. I've got to find a way to get reinforcements up to here. I've got to find a way to help to survive. You know, in a firefight, nobody cares who the President of the United States

• 2:31:20Speaker 02

  is. They care about who's on their left and their right. They care about, you know, the promises they made to people. I'm gonna bring your son home, or I'm gonna do that as a commander. But they also know, I got a mission. My mission is a smaller part of a bigger picture that's here. And he did phenomenal. And we assessed the casualties, and we knew damn well, we can't have any vehicles leave in this position. And who in hell's gonna fly a helicopter in here? It is an intersection worse than Black Hawk Down, when you watch it. And just at that time, I relayed the casualties, and I heard it come over the net. We got an inbound bird. It's gonna come. A CH-46 is gonna come in

• 2:32:03Speaker 02

  the top. Kind of looked up in the air. We need to get the casualty away from here to provide a more safer landing zone for that helicopter, which is about 150, 200 meters down the road. We start loading up the casualties. Just go, the other Marines that are there, some other Marines, and we start running them another 150 meters in an opposite direction to a clearing where we believe we can get a helicopter in. And then, we're gonna mark that clearing. And one of the problems was, in the rapid pace of the movement involved this, one of the things that we never really did, Bruce, was like an aerial signal plan for medevac. You know, you know nine lines, you know everything else, but what color smoke?

• 2:32:48Speaker 02

  Where are you gonna throw it? What are you gonna do? Green smoke to the grunts means different than green smoke to a helicopter pilot. It's on there.

• 2:32:56Speaker 02

  That's what happens. Officer runs up and he says, "Do we have any other smoke grenades?" We don't. So we have like these pyrotechnics. Give the pyrotechist, he fires a pyrotechnic, it bounces off the thing and it kind of just disappears and doesn't do anything. And it's one of those things where we're now, I go all laughing, even in the middle of this chaos, is like, "Come on, man. That's, that's what we had to do." And he's sitting there with this rocket looking at me and he goes, and I just started laughing. And he started yelling around and someone got a purple grenade, purple smoke. He pops this thing. We see

• 2:33:39Speaker 02

  the helicopter start to come in. One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. That thing flares, it comes in and it's in a slide about 75 meters above our head. And he sees that smoke pop and he instantly stops his slide. And then he sees smoke pop back in the middle of the intersection where we just took the casualties from and sees green smoke over there. And he slides back into that intersection and puts the helicopter down right next to the burning amp truck and this thing and drops the ramp. Now it's on the ground. Crew chief kind of walks out and we start making a run toward that because I had found out that the purple smoke don't land here. This is a dangerous thing. And

• 2:34:24Speaker 02

  he saw that pop and he said the green was over there, right? The grunts didn't throw that green to mark that landing zone. They were throwing it to shift fires and do what they had to do. And he slid that and put that right down. This marine gunner sort of walks out the back like John Wayne. I'll never remember it. I mean, like you could really tell, he's got to know what's going on, but he doesn't really know what's going on. And he's kind of standing on the ramp, surveying the kingdom that's here. And we're all running to the back. Casualties are in and this is fitted with litter kits in the back of it. So it's called in for, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't when it was above there. They were doing that as they're hearing that we, we have marines and we have to get them

• 2:35:06Speaker 02

  out. So they're up there in the air and they're doing that. That thing flares down and... The first Marines that we get on top of there, bless the gunner's heart, he kept yelling, "I need you to put them on the top rack." Because he needs to fill his bird his way. And I'm sitting here like, "We've been in the streets, we've got no juice, we've got nothing, man. You don't realize how dangerous this is." And I said, "Brother, there are RPGs here. You need to take these Marines and get in." And he said, "RPGs? Are you shitting me? Just put them down, we'll take care of them." And we started running. And like I said, bless his heart, now it's not the top rack, now it's let's get them

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  to where we're at. He has situational awareness. And one of the most heartbreaking and proud things I've ever seen in my life, though, is when he took ownership of that and made a decision because he knew lives mattered. He's relaying it to the pilot that is up there. Without a gunner's belt, that gunner's sergeant, Juska, was the last Marine we laid on the ramp. The biggest one. The one with the crane and everything else. That helicopter, he said, "Drop him, I got him." As soon as I got off the back of the helicopter, the helicopter lifted off.

• 2:36:32Speaker 02

  And the last thing that I had saw when I looked up was Juska's legs hanging out the back of the helicopter with blood dripping off of his boots and that gunner's sergeant holding him in the helicopter with his own life that may have been pulled out the back of that helicopter or something because he said, "I got him." And when somebody says, "I got him," and that's another man, another Marine, end the conversation. You got him. Now go back to the business that you need to do. And then somehow, at that time period, we find a second taco to get against the wall, myself, H.N. Velazquez, the corpsman, and another Marine that was here.

• 2:37:12Speaker 02

  And thank God, somebody threw us a canteen that had about a half of, full of water between all three of us. Because I could feel tunnel vision happening when I sat down at that wall and the lights going out. And I could only imagine, across the battle line, that was everybody that that was happening to. And we're still another hour and a half or whatever from that.

• 2:37:37Speaker 02

  Position still being maintained. Captain Brooks ran over to me at the time and he said, "Look, I've got communications with the unit that's coming in behind us. They're right on the other side of the bridge. They've reported they're at the bridge, so there's going to be a battle handover." He said, "I need you to make sure that everybody gets a ride." He goes, "We're going to push up to the northern bridge and we're going to help those Marines." "Roger that. Everybody gets a ride. That means it's Kelly's heroes. Lay on top of the cargo hatches. Safety to the winds, it doesn't matter. You hold on to the side, you're getting out of here, but you got to make sure you have everybody."

• 2:38:20Speaker 02

  As we're doing this, the tanks show up. And when the tanks came back, you could just see the Marines like Santa Claus just showed up on Christmas Eve. And they started pulling into positions. They're starting to take fire to perimeter, run over to a tank, jump on the tank again. And there was a second story window that I can remember that had red windows in it. And we were taking a lot of fire from there. And just went over the back of the tank, on the tank phone, and said, "Second level windows, red windows, take the top of that building off, would you?" "My pleasure." Wham, one round through that, no more red windows, no more fire from that area.

• 2:39:02Speaker 02

  And then that's when it kind of started to die down, because you could see the Iraqis probably thinking reinforcements, "They're right over the bridge, they're coming. Now the tanks are here. Now everybody gets a ride, including on those tanks." Now, we just heard or saw what happened on Ambush Alley of those vehicles coming through there. We just saw the rockets coming off the tops and the rooftops of buildings. Jagger, we're now going to make a run for a mile and a half of that, to get to that northern bridge and go through that gauntlet. So, once we got a thumbs up that everybody, every Swinging American was there that was on that, we just gave the order.

• 2:39:44Speaker 02

  Tanks stay in the front because they can swivel the turrets to the left and the right side and AV only has a turret on the starboard side so you can't shoot over the driver's station. So trim the AVs and the turrets to the right. AVs are going to cover the right-hand side of these buildings with their Mark 19 grenade launchers and their 50 cows. And then the tanks are going to swivel and cover the left-hand side. And we are just going to go 45 miles an hour up that thing and just lay lead the entire way so that no more RKG3s come off the buildings, something that, I mean, it almost reminds you like what you'd see in Stalingrad. I thought Molotov cocktails are coming next. This is what's going to come off into these hatches to do that. And we just took levels off of those.

• 2:40:29Speaker 02

  Kept those all down, got up to the northern bridge. And then we got the northern bridge, assessed that, bolstered the defense on that northern bridge. We now held the southern bridge. We now held the northern bridge. We reassessed everything for about a day that was up there. And then we figured we got to push on out to the western intersection because there's two bridges that are on that side over there and start basically having control of all the bridges on that city. And then within the next 48 hours, that's when the entire 1st Marine Division was stacked up on that southern bridge. And the greatest thing is standing on those bridges, watching what looked like the bridge of Remagen, watching the American Army just come through with vehicle after vehicle on the way to Baghdad.

• 2:41:14Speaker 02

  And that feeling at the time of success of we did, but you know, hold until relieved. That's that age-old American, that's that, that's General McCullough telling people nuts, that's, that's your generation of, of doing that and saying, you know. So I, I get a little testy, you know, like when people try to claim that this generation is, you know, the millennials and they will never hold up to their forefathers and they will, yeah, every generation has jackasses. They're out there, they do. But every generation has the ones that matter too, that, that know when the chips are down. They really rise up and they rise up to the occasion. And we are lucky to be associated with a lot of people like that.

• 2:41:57Speaker 02

  All the way through those battles and that battle kicked off when you started to come in. And then, you know, unfortunately, we're still putting people in Arlington and that today. Still holding to that truth.

• 2:42:11Jocko Willink?

  The overall, um, I, I, I was, I think the numbers are you, you guys lost seven of your tracks in, is that right? In Nazaria?

• 2:42:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:42:24Jocko Willink?

  Eighteen, eighteen Marines killed?

• 2:42:27Speaker 02

  Eventually it was eighteen that was on there. I put them all. We have everything that's on here. I've carried that for over almost 29 years. That was given to me as a young troop. It was a map case, uh, leftover from Vietnam that was on that. And, uh, those are all the guys from Task Force Tarawa that were on that day. The rank that my wife pulled off when I got home off my collar that I was wearing in the street that day, which started black and it has no black left on it that was here. Uh, that was the rank that she pulled off my collar when I survived the cemetery fight in the Jaff in 2004, first battalion, fourth Marines. And then that was the rank when I got home, she pulled off my collar when I brought first

• 2:43:12Speaker 02

  recon battalion home out of the Yazidi mountain range and that up at the South Sinjar mountain range. So that's the Marines from 2003. That is Jessica Lynch's column of the soldiers that are memorialized on there that had given their lives that day. Uh, and then on the backside of there was the Marines from BLT 14, uh, in the cemetery fight in 2004.

• 2:43:38Jocko Willink?

  What was the, once you guys got relieved, uh, what was the next thing that you guys did?

• 2:43:50Speaker 02

  Uh, we had to pull out of that position and we went up to Al Kutt, uh, that was, we were basically going to stay out near Alamarra in that sector that was over here. Um, and we went up to Al Kutt to reinforce. It was at Al Kutt. We pushed all the way out to the border in Alamarra. Uh, we did a counter offensive against the, uh, the 51st Mechanized Division that was actually mounting a counter offensive. Uh, but when we were actually in the city and we were still running JACO, about the 26th that was in there, uh, the supply trains had still not come through. This is three days. So.

• 2:44:29Speaker 02

  The Marines that were missing their gear, what we had ours do is if you have two, you only need one, therefore give one to your brother. Throw it out behind the vehicle in ponchos, canteens, backpacks, whatever you can do to give the guys who just lost their gear and all those things, something to live with. And then we're down to less than an eighth of a tank of fuel on each of these vehicles that are overlooking the Saddam Canal back into the city. And we're preparing for what we hear is a 2,000 man counteroffensive that is going to come by boats and by armored vehicles that's coming out of the center of the city. In order to maintain the radios and AAV, you have to have the AAV run to charge the

• 2:45:13Speaker 02

  radio systems that are on there. We're down to about an eighth of a tank. So you'd shut your vehicle off for a while, you'd only charge it up, run it for about 10 minutes to keep the radio fills, so it doesn't drop the fills in the radios. And you shut them back down to conserve gas. You're down to, there's no MREs, there is nothing. You aren't drinking the water in the vehicles, and this is what I love about armored room and that people just don't know. Jago is, it's horse, gun, and man. You always take care of your ride first, you take care of your weapons first, you take care of yourself last. That doesn't matter if you're a ground pounder, you're a team leader, it doesn't matter.

• 2:45:55Speaker 02

  It's the same thing, just a different concept, applied a different way. You don't drink the horse's water, because the horse needs the water to still survive. So the water, as the vehicles are overheating and all of this, you can't drink the vehicle water out of the five gallon water cans, because you gotta cool the radiators down to keep the vehicles going. So you kind of start sharing what looks like, I don't know, like shaving cream cup, like a shaving cream lid full of water, just to get a little bit of water and continue to do that. Split down one MRE between seven individuals, start hacking that thing apart to whatever to stretch that out.

• 2:46:39Speaker 02

  And then you're sitting in there on watch and you're not on 50%, you're not, it's 100% because this is a counteroffensive. We heard they're coming and the most glorious thing happened is one, they didn't come. The reason they didn't come is because the Marine artillery already put 900 rounds, I believe, into that city that night in this parking garage area where they were supposedly massing and did just a battery for effect that was in that to completely crush that counteroffensive in the middle of that city. Because it would have been a hell of a fight if 2,000 of them started swimming into that battle position after the Marines had been

• 2:47:19Speaker 02

  about three days down on food, water. You're still on ammunition. You know, you only have the ammo that's still left that you brought across with you the first time. So I learned tricks of the trade along the way, Jagger, to help people like that. You know, that's why, you know, history is important. Like you said, looking at citations on buildings and learning about and saying, I want to meet that person. I don't know why I want to meet that person, but something tells me I want to meet that person. I grew up with stories of Hill 488 in Howard's Hill and Jimmy Howard in 1966 takes a Marine Recon Patrol of 19 people above the Kason Operating Base and inserts for three days. And within

• 2:48:04Speaker 02

  hours, Howard is completely wounded. He has to crawl from position to position because he can't use his legs with a radio to continue to repel an NVA regiment that is heading towards that fire base. And he stays on top of that hill for days. And as they're running low on ammunition, Jimmy Howard tells his boys, throw rocks at the enemy. One, you're like, that's the mindset. That's the killer instinct, the mindset we were talking about. You know what? It's also the resilience. Because he told them, when they're like, throw rocks? Are you crazy? He said, the enemy at night will think it's a hand grenade and they will

• 2:48:46Speaker 02

  jump out of the way and you can kill them with a single shot. Rat to conserve your ammunition. Genius. And he said, they were making single shot kills all along the perimeter, every night, holding that perimeter. And then, when 27th Marines came in three days later, Howard refused to be medevaced off of that hill. They were calling danger close within 50 meters on that hill, everything. And they repulsed that entire legion.

• 2:49:15Speaker 02

  Eighteen recon Marines and pushed them back. Howard only said he would get on the helicopter when the last one of his Marines was found. And they found him dead in death struggle with two NBA soldiers who were trying to drag him off the top of that hill. And the infantry Marines refused to leave until they got all Howard's boys and they put him on the helicopter with Howard. One Medal of Honor, four Navy Crosses, thirteen Silver Stars, and everybody on that hill was multiply wounded to do that and held their mission. Food, water, rations, all depleted.

• 2:49:56Speaker 02

  I knew things like that and I grew up on things like that and I had a knowledge of on my time and on my generation, on my watch. Their generation could do that, this generation can hold that line to do that too. And in those times when those individual young kids are scared and they do that, to show them the resilience of people who wore their uniform or held their positions before and then to say, "You have a legacy. This is what Americans do." And you'll do that for that. It gives you amplified fighting power. It's almost like on a video game when you see your life force start decreasing. Now you know you don't have food, you don't have water. Well, let's not start thinking about the things we don't have and let's start focusing

• 2:50:40Speaker 02

  on the positive things we do have. And then that just, the food, the water, and that goes down this way, but your pride, discipline, and everything else starts countering that to where you still feel like regardless, "Come on, man. It doesn't matter. Whatever you got, bring it."

• 2:51:03Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you guys leave Naziriyah?

• 2:51:06Speaker 02

  It was for good. We actually came back down that way, but for good. Not long after the teams came in and was able to secure Jessica Lynch out of the hospital, which was roughly, I think, March 30th, first timeframe is when we had done and accomplished all of that, everything out at the other bridges as well, and then started to have to pull out of there on the way to, on the way to Outcut.

• 2:51:35Jocko Willink?

  How much longer did your, did this deployment last for you guys?

• 2:51:39Speaker 02

  Not long. We, we were in country until about the middle of May that was on there. And it was kind of like first in. This time it wasn't last out. It was kind of like first in and you guys got chewed up and held your line. So, uh, let's get you on back down south. We had to, the vehicles were so shot up, Jaco, we couldn't swim them back aboard the ship. So we had to load all the vehicles into Black Bottom Civilian Shipping and drive them in. So we made a trip all the way back on the USS Saipan, I believe it was. I may be wrong about that. It was an LHA, but we didn't have our equipment. We didn't have our machinery.

• 2:52:19Speaker 02

  So the rigorous training regime that we had on the way over on ship was not so rigorous on the way back. You know, a lot of card playing, a lot of award writing, a lot of, a lot of things that you could be able to do that, that you did. So, uh, and then we went back through Rota and we came back in and offloaded all that equipment. And we were kind of back home by the middle of May. It was on it, not middle of May, but June, June timeframe.

• 2:52:44Jocko Willink?

  What was the, um, you know, adjusting, I mean, you coming back, losing so many guys. What was the, um, how did you handle that with the families when you guys got home? What, what, what did that, what did that look like?

• 2:53:01Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you the, uh, you've seen We Were Soldiers Once and Young. It was here. And when Hal Moore's wife has to deliver telegrams and she takes ownership saying, you know, give those to me and I'll walk around and I'll do that. Casualty assistance in 2003 had not became what it is now. It wasn't, you know, Chaplain doing this, kind of the way that CAOCO calls are made now. Um, my wife.

• 2:53:29Speaker 02

  Didn't hear from me because I had a rule in the platoon, you know, I go that the leadership were the last ones to get the iridium phone to call anybody. Every single person gets to call first. Once the last person is called, bring me the iridium phone, we call. They hand it around. On March 17th, we're pulling out and about 1:00 in the morning that night, my staff sort of knocks on the hatch, says, I need you to come out here, Kenny. And I stepped outside, the entire platoon was standing there. And he says, they want you to make your phone call. They've all managed to make their phone call home. So I dialed the phone and I talked to myself on the answering machine at the house because my wife wasn't home. They were at Walmart or something like that. She said that they ran into the house right

• 2:54:11Speaker 02

  as I was cutting off the thing. And then she did not hear from me until April 23rd, the first time. And I had went through a battle position about 60 miles south of where Nazarri was at. We heard that there were AVs, another AV unit, and they had parts that they could do. And I needed hydraulic parts and a lot of other things. Went down there and when I got in the compound, one of my best friends was in charge of that unit. And it had like a Mars phone, it had everything else that was here. And I'm like, oh my God. And there was 150 people in line. It was out, there was no internet, there's nothing what we have now, right? And he just got me out of the thing. And he just looked and he said, I'm so glad to hear, I heard about what you're doing up there. He goes, you look like shit,

• 2:54:55Speaker 02

  man. I said, well, nice to see you too. I love, I love those kinds of conversations. And then he just grabbed me and he said, you're not standing in here, go to the front line. Call your wife. Right up the front, not a single one of those 150 people said, why is that? I mean, I was still singed from head to toe. They could see the difference that was here. Walked in, called her and I got to talk to her and say I was kind of okay. But Jacko, my wife and daughter found out where I was at.

• 2:55:25Speaker 02

  Just like people did in the Idrang Valley in 1965. Jacksonville, North Carolina, they did not know where we were at. We were mission secret in River City the whole entire time. We took our vehicles and put them on the ship. And before we did that, we did the combat lane markings on the sides of the vehicles. And we knew that. And then we kind of had a family day where the families could come down to say goodbye. My daughter would always come down, play around the vehicles. They are sitting at home on March 23rd, and they see the news come on. And it shows burning Amtrak's in Nazariah. And the ticker across the bottom says, "United States Marines Taking Heavy Casualties in Nazariah, Iraq."

• 2:56:09Speaker 02

  And the vehicles that they saw, my daughter yelled for Mom to come into the house. And she said, "I know where Dad's at." And she goes, "There's her Dad's vehicle markings that are on the side of that, on that news flipping that was there." And then I asked her, I said, "What was it like after that?" And not knowing the rest of the night, she goes, "Nobody answered the phone for weeks. Nobody went outside their house. You didn't want to have anybody come to your house? You didn't want to know?" She said, "Because you would hear that, you know, seven or eight houses down the road, so-and-so's husband was just notified that they're not coming home. And then over in the next housing area, so-and-so's, it was not going to come home. And then they don't know if you're coming home. This is a whole month later.

• 2:56:54Speaker 02

  And they know every single day, you know, it's like America watching the Vietnam War, eating dinner every night. I know my son's in there, I know my husband's in there, and I know, am I going to see him again? And then you don't hear from him about a month later. I can only imagine. So the hardest thing I've ever had to do in life, and I go, never compares to the mental anguish of somebody sitting there not knowing whether or not the person that they love is going to come back home or not. Which I believe had a very huge driving force jacking into my second career on what I did when I hung that uniform up.

• 2:57:34Jocko Willink?

  And then you guys get home, are you now, did you just roll right into another workup?

• 2:57:40Speaker 02

  I did. What I did is we start patching everything up, rest and refit. I get orders, I get promoted. It's out of that. Now I've become a first sergeant in the Marines and I was sent out to the West Coast. And I was, I was waiting around in an Amtrak unit for a while when I got the call. And they said, congratulations, you're now a first sergeant. And the difference in the Marine Corps and the first sergeant, that now opens up the opportunities for you to go anywhere. It's a leadership role. So now you can go to the infantry, you can go to the air wing, you can go anywhere else. And I wanted to stay in ground combat the entire time. So I requested to go to the infantry. And I said, there's a battalion working up for deployment right now, first battalion, fourth Marines.

• 2:58:23Speaker 02

  They're about 20 miles north of where this is at. And before my sergeant major could tell me whether or not I had orders, I kind of war gamed it and said, I already called that sergeant major to see if he had a slot. And they have a slot open, can I pack my stuff? Made a few phone calls, packed my stuff, went up with first battalion, fourth Marines, and then started kind of the infantry career that then blossomed into a reconnaissance career at a much older age out of that. And I kind of got that perverse wish, you know, other than being a drill instructor and other than spending a couple of years in school, being my own Amtrak instructor that was on there, I spent an entire 31 year in the US Marine Corps in ground combat from private all the way up to sergeant major.

• 2:59:07Speaker 02

  I would not have changed a single day of that. Doesn't matter if you crawl out of bed backwards. Doesn't matter if you have to have your wife help put your boots on certain days because of certain pain. I would never change any of that pain in days to change any of that career path along that line. So that's how I ended up back in California, packed them up, brought them back out there, went with.

• 2:59:32Speaker 02

  First Battalion, Fourth Marines, and we were supposed to do a regular float that was out there and our Mew got sent right into a take a battle space. And that was a six month float that turned into, I think, fourteen months.

• 2:59:45Jocko Willink?

  You guys went, you guys went-

• 2:59:47Speaker 02

  We just kept getting extended. So we, we started on ship and we were just supposed to do-

• 2:59:52Jocko Willink?

  Like a normal west pack?

• 2:59:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, like just a normal, like we're seeing out here right now with the fifteenth Mew, the eleventh, the thirteenth thing you do. One month out of there, you're going straight into Iraq, you're going straight into the Ambar province, you guys are going in to take Najaf in this battle space from the US Army. And I remember the first of the four, Alpha Company, first of the fourteenth, the twenty-fifth Infantry, the Tropical Lightning was in there in that battle space and they had moved down. They were up around to Crit and they kept moving them down and that, and they moved them in there and we moved in to take the battle space. And once you hold battle space, you don't hold, you don't leave until it's secure and that six month deployment turned into like eleven months, twelve months, thirteen months.

• 3:00:37Jocko Willink?

  So in, uh, my, I was on deployment two thousand three, two thousand four, probably the last mission that we did, my last significant mission that we did was we went down to Najaf and we captured Sodder's top lieutenant. And that, that really caused some, well, it, it, it, it sent things out of control and we, you know, we were executing the mission, you know, it was one of, we'd been looking at Sodder the whole time. There was, there was a lot of hesitation to go and get Sodder, worried about what would happen.

• 3:01:20Jocko Willink?

  And so I think it was an attitude of, hey, you know, we're, we don't know if maybe it's the best call to go get Sodder. Let's see what happens if we grab one of his boys and giddy up. That's what we did. Uh, that was in early April. We went and did it. Mayhem broke out and you know, Sadr City turned into total chaos. Najaf erupted and, and, and like a, you know, I feel awful. Look, we went home, you know? So that was it for, for that deployment for me. And this is ends up and it just, you know, the way things connect, it ends up for you, you're in Najaf and, and

• 3:02:02Jocko Willink?

  you guys end up going through that city and some, you know, some, some tough fighting.

• 3:02:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and actually, uh, when you go in the city and you're doing, you're working with the ING, the 405th, 404th, the Iraqi National Guard, and you're sent there to train them up and you're doing that. And then you're actually figuring out every day that we give you a bunch of weapons tomorrow when we do the weapons count, where's all your weapons at? Doesn't take a genius to figure out right now why you're training a battalion that has an attrition rate or a desertion rate the following day after they're trained. And then you continue to do that is the point of, of like lunacy. I think it's the definition of doing that. So then you don't start doing that. You start building them as much as you can into these resilient things. You back up the police stations. But more importantly,

• 3:02:51Speaker 02

  when we took over the battle space from the army, it wasn't that the army didn't have the fighter, the equipment, the two at, the rules of engagement for them were when we would do the left seat, right seat rides, they would tell you exactly where everybody's at. Here's where Sadr's house is. You don't want to go by here. Here's Kufa. This is a little flare up. Uh, if you want to know where they're all hiding, they're in the cemetery over there. And then you look on the maps on the wall and those are called exclusion zones. You are not allowed to go inside of those. Those are holy cities. Those are holy things like this. And I can remember, uh, Colonel John Mayer, um, who, who was just sitting there at the table one day and he's like, well, don't take a genius to figure

• 3:03:34Speaker 02

  out where they're at. God damn, where all the Reds at? And then the army left. Uh, and when they left, we developed kind of a battle plan to Encroach upon those areas with tactical probes to make sure to draw them out because the police stations and other places that we were reinforcing were real close to this, around there, real close to Kufa, real close to Siders areas. One, you're putting them in check on the chessboard to do that while you're still maneuvering your elements. And then August 5th was a typical day. We were up late that night, the night before, and August 5th, they start doing a run on an Iraqi police station that's right across the street

• 3:04:19Speaker 02

  from Revolutionary Square. And my people happened to be in the city, in these platoons, in these reinforced police stations. And then before you knew it, the call came over, again, Blackhawk down, we've got a UH-1 that's crashed in Revolutionary Square, now need to move in to do the crash site. And it's just, you're sitting there going, you're watching the dominoes fall again. Now they're overrunning a police station, they're taking more aggressive actions. And then finally, the most blessed thing, outside of just sitting there getting mortared for no reason whatsoever, going, is this going to be somewhat of the same? Get on

• 3:04:59Speaker 02

  the phone. And the commander and everybody else is, the only exclusion zone now is the mosque that's in the center of that. Prepare the forces, we're moving in to the cemetery, and we're going to prosecute these things. Jackal, again, it's 1600 in the afternoon, temperature on the ground's 130. You're away from the FOB 14 miles with all, whatever you have. And now you just got an order, the order is, we want you to push 1400 meters through that cemetery by tomorrow morning. Because I have a rifle company of 162 Marines that are here. And I don't have any machine guns. Because they're out at the FOB, on FOB

• 3:05:43Speaker 02

  security, because nobody thought that this battle was going to kick off. So they're up on post one, post two, post three, the recon platoon's not being used, they're just over in their tents that are here, and we're in the city. And we start pushing in on August 5th. Within a matter of a hundred yards of mausoleums, crypts, no roads, anything else like this, and the road, the only road was the one that was at your back that you just crossed to get in there. So that's your supply line. If you lose this, we're gonna lose something. And all of a sudden, you start getting people getting shot from behind that are moving through

• 3:06:23Speaker 02

  this because 1,400 meters, you can't move that fast. Captain Matt Morrissey, great man, or looked at me, what do you think of this? We pushed as far as we could that night, and then through the center of this gigantic cemetery is this thing called the diagonal road. And back in the 80s or 90s, Saddam Hussein thought it'd be cool to take a bulldozer and plow through some of these graves of like, people he didn't care for too much, and make this road through there as a big F U to them, I'm in charge. We got our backs to that road and made a tactical decision, this is where we're gonna hold the line tonight.

• 3:07:05Speaker 02

  Because now I can bring tanks into that road. Now we've just leapt 50 yards onto the field. We don't need this one. And now we can actually start bringing the more reinforcements and load them up onto here. So we're sitting on that diagonal road in these crypts all night, fighting this, this operations from, you couldn't know where you were at, you're getting mortared, they're dropping on with 82s, they're walking them on top, and then you're just kinda sitting there, and then you're going in and out and throwing frag grenades down into the crypts as you're passing them. And then at times, kinda like a tunnel rat in the nom, you're also following this stuff because those catacombs started connecting

• 3:07:46Speaker 02

  underneath that cemetery with these individuals. So you're stripping off things, you're stripping off armor, smaller guys, you're racking a pistol, you're doing a round, you're launching a grenade, you're following that. You know, you've got people coming up to the chest, whatever you have to do. And then you're leapfrogging all the way through the cemetery to get to that and hold that line. And then that night, we really didn't know what the situation was. And we had an adjacent platoon get mortar, drop right on their CP. So I ran down through the cemetery, Lieutenant Lewis, a few other ones blinded that's on there. There were some other ones that were killed in the blast.

• 3:08:30Speaker 02

  And this is at night, and then all of a sudden, we're trying to figure out, I wonder where we're at. So somebody came up with a great idea, which I believe was the Forward Air Controller. We're going to get a pilot to buzz the cemetery. They will never lay off of a target like that. So when that pilot comes through, they're firing red tracers out of those weapons. When that came down, about 200 meters blazing, whatever, 100 knots it was on that, it looked like something out of Star Wars coming up there. Red tracers were everywhere, back, front, front. And it was kind of like that comment that Chesty Puller made, and it's, I'm like, well, good. We know where they're at, you know, they have us surrounded, and now we can fight in any direction.

• 3:09:14Speaker 02

  You kind of know where you're at. And then we were in that position on the 5th, the 6th, the 7th, fighting through that position. The next day, I lost Lance Corporal Wells from a sniper through the, right through his collar that was on there. So I believe it was a dragon off, from what I could see, because the collar's only made for fragmentation, as you know, not to stop a direct round that was coming through. But we had to carry that out and get him out of the cemetery. Then we get pulled back out, rest and refit. This kind of fight continued to happen. The probing continued to happen, the nighttime patrols back down into the cemetery. Now, other reinforcements from other units from Diwania and all that are all collapsing

• 3:09:58Speaker 02

  onto what is kind of now the pre-falutia, because the same ones started to move up north in November to take care of that. And this goes on. And then that leads us to our very weird connection that you just mentioned, Sodder before, of being on August 10th and getting a mission with an Army Delta unit to go in to...

• 3:10:22Speaker 02

  Take Sodder's house in one area and then the Sodder School was in another section. And Mass Sardanich and Forrest went into the school and the hopped up insurgents were at the second row of the school and they started rolling Egyptian grenades down the ladder wells at the troops coming up and fragged the troops that were coming in. We get the call that we now have wounded Marines inside of the Sodder School into this fiddle and we pull into position. A platoon Sardanich, Todd Boyston, one of the best infantry staff Sardans I've ever seen, is standing there on this intersection of this corner and there's this long axis of this wall and this building is inside of here.

• 3:11:05Speaker 02

  There's another axis that's here and these Marines are bleeding out inside of here that just was hit with the Egyptian grenades rolling down the ladder well. Rolled in, got the assessment of what that situation was and we didn't know, you know, you don't know what you're going to see on the inside, it's about 100 meters away down there. And so I just told Todd at the time, okay, here's what we're going to do. Put the machine gunners on the corners of this direction. The road's about maybe eight feet wide from wall to wall. We know where they're at, it's down there. I'm going to run down the axis and hug the wall on this side because what kept them from doing that, Jack, was in the building overlooking that road was a sniper that kept

• 3:11:50Speaker 02

  the Marines from being able to evacuate the wounded out of the house. Another coordinated effort to trap them inside the lower aspects. So, kind of on my mark, I'm going to run, hug the wall that's here and I'm going to get in and hopefully the guy's going to shoot and miss. The machine gunners are going to see where that came from and they're going to kill that sniper or fix that position in the building, long enough to keep his head down, to get in, triage, assess, and then tell him on the radio on the ORR.

• 3:12:23Speaker 02

  We're gonna throw a hand grenade because our hand grenades sound differently than theirs do. Big, large whomp, thump. We're gonna throw a hand grenade. When you hear the hand grenade go off, I'd have the machine gunners shift to the left wall and continue to still lay lead into that building. We are gonna bring the casualties hugging the right wall about eight feet away from them of where they're at and get these guys out of the building. And that action all happened probably from flash to bang within a 12-minute period. In and out of not pre-coordination before. First sergeants aren't supposed to be door breachers or something that actually does that, but at the time, you just kinda think, I'm really kinda the most expendable person here.

• 3:13:07Speaker 02

  You have a job, you have a job, you have a job, you're doing your job. I just rolled up into here. I bring you food, water, chow, ammunition, everything else. And primarily, my job is to get them boys out alive. So here's what I do. Work like a champ. One of the, one of the things, picked it up and showed me a few years ago. I had no idea that the company clerk had filmed the entire thing from the hood of the Humvee that was on that. And, and a blogger that was out there named Funker, 540, picked that up and posted that that was online a few years ago. And it's, it's time of the year again. It's kinda one of those things that's really hard to, it's kinda hard to watch, but you're happy that everybody, we didn't lose anybody on that. The Marines didn't on that one. The Army did.

• 3:13:51Speaker 02

  The Army Special Forces team lost their master sergeant when they went in and they took a beating going into that and came out.

• 3:13:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's actually posted on YouTube, that, that whole scenario. And you said he filmed everything. He filmed almost everything because at one point, he must have been getting some stray rounds because he drops the camera and takes cover for a second before he gets back up to get the rest of it.

• 3:14:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's, he's a funny cat. He's a really good, every Marine a rifleman, every Marine a rifleman. I mean, he was an infantryman, was a company clerk, but by God. When the round hit over his head or whatever, I've had a good look at that one time and had a good laugh like you did of the camera drops for a while and he needs to pick it back up and stabilize that.

• 3:14:33Jocko Willink?

  You know, you also told me a little bit about when you guys were clearing some of those underground spots and you had, I think you said it was a Lance Corporal rolling into one of these situations, ends up in a hand-to-hand combat with an insurgent. What happened there?

• 3:14:51Speaker 02

  This is on August 25th. We're now getting the, we're now preparing for the assault on and around the Ammali shrine. There's an NFA of 400 meters that's around the shrine, but we're now going to push with infantry and Amtraks and make this big push and kind of drive them into the shrine and contain them that was in there. And then every night, bring in the spooky Cunship to circle that and contain them even more.

• 3:15:19Jocko Willink?

  Beautiful.

• 3:15:20Speaker 02

  It was beautiful. So on August 25th, at roughly about 22:30 at night, we inserted a infantry, a couple of infantry companies in 1st Battalion, 4th Marines. Charlie was mine. Alpha and Bravo were the other two. Bravo wasn't on the initial insert, but Alpha was off to our left. And we go to the top and we are tasked with inserting the infantry into this place. It's like a three-story hotel. And it looks like something you would have seen in Beirut blasted and everything else in there. So it's a critical position that holds an intersection that allows us observation down these long accesses to get

• 3:16:04Speaker 02

  access to the Ammali shrine. 22:30, my 2nd platoon enters the first layer of the building. PFC Ryan Cullen Ward is one of the first men in the stack. He goes into the lower half and he sees an opening on the right-hand side when he goes in and now he's under night vision. He's fully loaded out and he looks to the right and he sees, even in night vision, an insurgent coming out of the basement of the hotel with an RPG on his shoulder, walking up the stairs. Cullen Ward holds a grenade that's fragged already, getting ready to prep and throw that was here. That instantaneous thing kicks over.

• 3:16:46Jocko Willink?

  So, so wait, so he was going into the room and he was ready to huck a grenade?

• 3:16:50Speaker 02

  But he wasn't ready to do it that way.

• 3:16:52Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, but he had the grenade in his hand, pin already pulled.

• 3:16:56Speaker 02

  And he's ready to go because they're going to frag the room that's around the thing. Somehow, he gets that off in a way, has a situational awareness to still in the direction they're supposed to go. And he rolls right, starts down that stairs, makes it about three steps, slings his rifle behind him, jumps off the top step, tackles the insurgent with the RPG, rolls down another flight of steps into that basement. And then all you could hear is that insurgent screaming when Cullen Ward was taking a bayonet to him in, in moral combat in a dark basement while he's got MBGs on his head. Nineteen years old.

• 3:17:39Speaker 02

  Kills the insurgent, brings the RPG back upstairs, and then goes on to continue to clear the building with the rest of the squad. We were in the building from the 25th to the 28th. By the time that the recon platoon that came in after us, a very good friend of mine, retired Master Gunery Sergeant Brian Yarlem, brought this platoon in, they came in and then went down and cleared the rest of the basement. Not only was that one dead insurgent down there, there was another insurgent that wasn't there with Cullen Ward because he was cowering behind a ladder well, watching his buddy get killed by a US Marine. And then he got taken out by the recon platoon that came in on the backside.

• 3:18:20Speaker 02

  Surgically did that because Cullen Ward's platoon is now going up the ladder well to chase the other insurgents up to the third level, and they're pinning them up there where squad automatic weapons and everything else did their job. And they cleared that entire element. And at the same time, you're on the radio right outside, and you're hearing, "We just took a casualty." You're hearing, "We just lost Cullen Ward because he just went that way." Right? And you hear the screaming, and that's going on here. And then you're hearing, "Another Marine just fell down the elevator shaft that was here." And it's an old burned out elevator shaft that's still got rebar sticking out of it. And Lance Washburn was stuck down there on that rebar.

• 3:19:05Speaker 02

  He's on nods as well. I mean, you're looking down a dark elevator shaft. God, I thought within two seconds, I just lost the first two Marines that just went into the building. Both of them survived and we're out of there. We got him, Washburn, out of the elevator shaft. Cullen Ward went on to do some more great things in the fight all the way through the 28th. And then roughly about the 28th is when Al Sardar came in and brokered the brokered the supposed peace deal that called for the ceasefire. And then that that day was surreal.

• 3:19:39Speaker 02

  Because then we had this, in a matter of two hours, we had to then watch everybody take their rockets and donkey carts and move them across the street. And you can't shoot anybody. Here's what this is. So you set up these roadblocks and these things and you're just watching them move their weaponry from one side of the city to the other. And you still know this is something that's gonna have to do something about this.

• 3:20:05Speaker 02

  But then we had people who were actually detainees. And they showed up with news media. And in the regular Iraqi tone that you would always hear when you add some women to the mix and they start screaming and pointing and everything else, the news media starts saying, you know, there's the murderers. There's the people who desecrated our bodies. And what are you talking about? So they come over. And what I didn't tell you before, Jacque, was the dead bodies that were in the building, never left the building. Because for the next couple of days, Marines couldn't get out of the building because of the snipers. They kept them in the building. So it was very dangerous to expose your head or anything

• 3:20:49Speaker 02

  else to do that. And we'd maneuver through these these channels out there.

• 3:20:55Speaker 02

  And it was making the Marines sick. These bodies were just decomposing. Two of them in the basement, a couple of them upstairs and all that that was here. And it got to the point where I walked past a battle position one day and saw a Marine with a green skivvy shirt around his face, wet, and it had probably 500 flies on his face, on that thing, from those bodies. And I had called over to, again, Colonel John Mayer back at the, had requested like 20 gallons of gasoline. And he asked me, "What are you gonna do with the gasoline?" "I'll burn them." I can't put them anywhere else. And thank God, he goes, "Whatever you do, man, don't burn them." Right? Because he probably had more of a top-level view of maybe what that would have looked

• 3:21:40Speaker 02

  like if it was here. I don't know. But I still have the problem. You're not gonna give the gas. Problem still exists. What do we need to do? Grab blankets? Shove Vaseline up in these noses? Put everything else to corpsmen, start doing that? And then we taco these dead bodies into these things? Put the machine gunners and people on the roof to pin the snipers down? And run those dead Iraqi bodies across the street? And put them in a house, Johnny? When I put them in a house, so this is another thing that I don't really like to tolerate about all these people that they try to paint US troops as they're just barbarians or... Put them in a house, pull them in the humpus.

• 3:22:22Speaker 02

  And actually, when they put them down inside the house, I said, "Face their heads towards Mecca." They were fighters. They were, they deserve, you know, people call them shitheads, or they were hopped up, they were in search or whatever. I have a little bit of a respect of another human being. I may not believe in what you're doing, but he picked up a rifle, he did whatever he was gonna do for whatever that guy believed in and was trying to kill me. And on the field of battle, we just got one up on him that was here. So, put them inside of there, turn them, cover them with this pile of rocks that was there, because the wild dogs start to go through there. And then over the next 24 hours, that's all you heard all night, was the wild dogs beating

• 3:23:04Speaker 02

  their head to get into that building, to start tearing at the bodies. Then the next morning, these same Lance Corporals that you're seeing, that made you start that in the first place, you're seeing them just go like, "Would you look at that?" And you see a dog roll down the street, like with a foot hanging out of its mouth, like it's nobody's business. Right? And then this news media is here. And all of a sudden, these dogs have torn at those bodies. Now, the story is the Marines mutilated the bodies. They allowed the dogs to desecrate them, bah, bah, bah. Rolled up and told them, through the interpreter, you look at the way their heads are facing. Those individuals are dropped there out of respect.

• 3:23:47Speaker 02

  At their own lives, these individuals took them across and put them in. The chattering stopped, you know, it just stopped the instant we knew. And then we went about, one of them started pointing about a hundred yards away. Interpreter comes up, what's he saying? He said, "We're missing a body, he's over there." I'm like, how does he know he's over there? Probably because he was with him when that guy was killed. Walked behind another rock pile a hundred meters away, dead insurgent laying right over there. Because he was probably spotting or something with him. These kids were seventeen, eighteen, that was on that. Popped them in the ambulance, pulled them off down the street.

• 3:24:25Speaker 02

  You know, international incident circumvented by kind of not desecrating or not doing what you're... You know, a lot of people may not even blame you. Got an animosity, you're amped up, you're doing this, but you trained them differently to say that... You know, these kind of things in the past only actually embolden the culture when you do that to somebody to fight them even harder. Imagine somebody coming in and mutilating your mother or doing something after that, and you believe that that's going to suppress you in an amount of hatred to not want to go and do whatever you can to do that. So, all those little steps along the way of a hundred and sixty-two guys of a rifle company.

• 3:25:07Speaker 02

  You know, you watch a Band of Brothers, and then you're sitting here going, man, in 2004, I wasn't part of the five ohth's parachute infantry, but I had the best damn Americans in America's friggin scene since that timeframe in this city.

• 3:25:25Jocko Willink?

  Once that peace deal, I don't know what else to call it, ceasefire deal was brokered, what was the rest of that deployment like?

• 3:25:32Speaker 02

  It was now just going through the city and doing reparations payments through the city and we would set up things on a Monday that was probably even more dangerous than combat. Because you'd bring them to the same place, same day, same time, they would line up, you'd be driving through the city and you'd do talk and knocks on there. Are you claiming any damage that the Americans did on your house or did you lose a son in combat? Did you do something like this? Then that's where you find out how they fabricate multiple death certificates and they're trying to get money from the Americans. And it was just, it was a lot of that.

• 3:26:13Speaker 02

  It was then a lot of going back into the town to then again say that, you know, we don't want to fight. Meaning if you, we'll give you a fight if you want it, but let's kind of get back to doing what it was, we were here to stabilize this and help you out. And then this is the beginning, you know, of what turned out to be that led into you and Ramadi and the Sunni, and everything else. I mean, this is the infancy of the next two years, like you had said, Jaco, I'll call it a peace deal or whatever, because more casualties and sustained combat at a greater level happened immediately after that in the next two years, all throughout that region.

• 3:26:57Speaker 02

  And it didn't stabilize it that was there. And it's still not stable today.

• 3:27:02Jocko Willink?

  You get home from that deployment and what's next? Is this when your recon career starts?

• 3:27:09Speaker 02

  This is, this is when I like to say that I got to serve in a reconnaissance unit, being a Marine in a reconnaissance unit was one of the proudest Marines. Not being a recon Marine, because just because you're in somebody's unit, doesn't mean that you're the person that's the cat's butt that's inside of that. And I didn't go as a Lance Corporal to do selection assessment. I didn't go through the things that those guys had to do. I was a first sergeant that was happy to be in the infantry, but that master gunnery sergeant I told you about in that recon platoon that was just sitting out on a bomb doing nothing, along with my machine gunners. And that's how I found them.

• 3:27:52Speaker 02

  Went out of that city when we were running casualties and 14 miles away was the Alamoth Mew headquarters out of a place called FOB Duke. I rolled into post one all the way to the CP. And when we sent the casualties over to get treated at the main BAS. Almost there, I always taught the Marines, if you ever take a vehicle back to the rear, you do not bring it back to the front empty. Ammunition, food, water, whatever you have. So the same guy that filmed the thing, Corporal Chris, that was in there, washes the blood out of the vehicles, he does the things, he goes over to the KBR representatives, which were actually really great.

• 3:28:35Speaker 02

  There was no, hey, do you want 12 apples or anything else? Guy would unlock an entire ISO container and go, you take what you want. And then just sign off the whole ISO container or whatever, whatever they had to do. But it wasn't, you can't have this, that. Fresh fruit, whatever you can do, get it back in there, it rolls up. I go over in the main CP and I get called up there because somebody finds out, I just brought casualties back in here, we're going to go back into the city. And when we made that 14 thing with a shot out windscreen, Chris, who is not a Humvee driver or a licensed Humvee driver, right? I told him, get in the vehicle and get ready to drive. And I had four flat tires on run flats.

• 3:29:19Speaker 02

  And he spun that vehicle around on that diagonal road so I could load Lance Corporal Brooks with the sucking chest wound on August 6th in the back of that vehicle. Bypassed the forward casualty collection point because this kid's got a sucking chest wound. So I laid on Brooks in the back of the vehicle and told Chris to drive that vehicle like he stole it. Because he used to be this kid that had one of these little souped up Subarus. And he'd go up to Los Angeles on his free time and maybe do some street racing and some things. So it's kind of knowing your Marines in their off time, how it benefits, the skills that you can have. I know you can drive, get in there. He goes off and we get in there and drop the casualty.

• 3:30:01Speaker 02

  I get called over because I call my gunnery sergeant that's on the fob that's left back with my weapons platoon and said, go over to this other unit, tell them I need the machine gunners. Tell them they're going to need to put people up in those things to do this. And we're taking our machine gunners and we're going back in the city with these guys. Um, I knew I'd be there about an hour. All that, machine guns came out, loaded up, we're all rolling in the city before we rode out. I took them out, went back in the city, Jacko, had to make another run that was back out. And somehow, um, a lieutenant colonel that was up at the Mew headquarters had come in and he had said, if that SOB gets back on here again, I want to see him before he goes out.

• 3:30:46Speaker 02

  Uh, love him to death, Lieutenant John Johnson. Um, I walked up in there, still covered, went from head to toe. And he was carrying like an MP5 on his back. And he grabbed me, got real close. And he was like, first Sergeant Le Hugh, you get us over here. And we're in like 40, 50 people in a CP. And he goes, you reduce the, the strength of this fighting position that's out here. Took those machine guns that was off of here to do that. And I was, I was just standing there, I'm like, I, I need machine guns that are down. These are my boys, they're on here. I coordinated with this other unit to do that. They're going to watch these posts. They've been standing guard before, they're over here to do that, right?

• 3:31:32Speaker 02

  And he just kind of looked at me, kind of shook his head, he's an infantryman and was like,

• 3:31:41Speaker 02

  and then just gave me a really big hug and said, best of luck when you roll out of here down in that city, man. You do what you gotta do. We'll take this carrier. And then he yelled, if you ever do that again, I will make sure that you're not going to be in the Marines very long. Because he did, he, in the end, the right thing is done. Uh, in that chaotic situation that is there, that's laid out before you. You don't have hours, you don't have things, it's reactionary, you're saving, you're losing lives to do that.

• 3:32:14Speaker 02

  Pretty beautiful thing.

• 3:32:17Jocko Willink?

  And then how did that lead to you getting attached to the recon unit?

• 3:32:21Speaker 02

  Uh, the guy that was-

• 3:32:22Jocko Willink?

  The guy remembered you?

• 3:32:23Speaker 02

  The guy remembered me getting him out of the tent and saying, "I need a provisional rifle platoon to beef us up down there." And the recon officer and gunnery sergeant came up and said, "We'll do that job. Just get us in the fight." We rolled them out, made the request, recon mounts up. They end up being a provisional rifle platoon and a recon platoon attached to us. I'm their first sergeant. We get done with that entire thing that was there, Jaco. I get back up. We're done with the deployment. I get a phone call from First Recon Battalion. "You ever thought about coming to recon?" "Sir?" Like, "Yeah, because that's what I

• 3:33:04Speaker 02

  wanted to do when I came in." But they also told me when I was a Lance Corporal, because after you get in, even if you're an AM tracker, you can try out. You can do that. But you couldn't if you were colorblind. So I couldn't do that. So it's one of those things where you find a way. And it might not be this year, might be some year. That was the way. Said, "Absolutely." Sergeant Major gave me a call. He said, "Show up down here in the pool deck about 3:15 in the morning. Bring your PT shorts. Bring your things down here. Get in the pool, do some things, run a PFT that was over here. Do a little bit of an interview. Brought some people down in." And at the tail end of the thing, he said, "How'd you like to be a first sergeant here at Recon Battalion?" Said, "I'd absolutely love that job." And he goes, "Okay, consider it done. Go back up. I've already called

• 3:33:49Speaker 02

  your sergeant major up there before you even said yes. You're gonna come back here." Went up to First Battalion, Fourth Marines, same thing. Pack my stuff, went down there and spent from the year of 2005 to 2010 as the first sergeant for Company Eight mostly that was there. Restored up a company of Delta Company that was a Vietnam existence. This is when the force recon platoons that were MEF assets were then put back down into battalions. So they start showing up the tier. We're building a pretty good force. Then about 2007, I got asked to stay on to be the sergeant major of that unit and was the sergeant major from '07 to '10, up in the Sinjar Mountain Range, operating out of

• 3:34:33Speaker 02

  Al Asad. I was there, controlling the rat lines, coming up with the Azizis. Had some really good mission sets that were out of there, about the eight and nine timeframe.

• 3:34:44Jocko Willink?

  And then what did you do when you were done with that?

• 3:34:47Speaker 02

  Once I was done with that one, I went back to be the Sergeant Major for about a year at the Amtrak Schoolhouse that I grew up in as a kid that was there. And then got a call asking me to pick a job because they weren't going to leave you there. And they presented me with a couple of options and they asked me what I wanted. I said, I want to be a regimental infantry Sergeant Major. And they said, good to go, pack your stuff. You're going to go to Hawaii to be the Third Marine Regiment. I'm like, you'd be kidding me, man. You have a Fifth Marines, you got this other... Because at the time, this regiment didn't have this really good... And people didn't know this history. But I had asked for it because, go in my head, that regiment with aviation assets, engineering

• 3:35:32Speaker 02

  assets, Amtrak assets, most infantry regiments don't have those organic to their own thing. Then you have the 20... You have the air wing that's out there at K Bay as well, that's your lift capacity, that's all that. You own Canoe Bay as the Marine Regiment along that, I figured. And now we're doing this repivot to the Pacific and we're posturing on keeping the Chinese at bay. We're negotiating to open up Australia as more training areas. I'm like, my God, you are where you're supposed to be. How would you like to be in charge of like the biggest strike force in the middle of the Pacific that's out here? I think that's a pretty good deal. One less infantry battalion than the rest.

• 3:36:17Speaker 02

  And they cover the most ground that's out there in the Pacific from northern China all the way to Darwin. And one of the best fighting regiments, it's storied, they're the China Marines. They had operations in China, Fourth Marines at the China Marines. But Third Marines has quite a legacy.

• 3:36:38Speaker 02

  And a legacy that goes back to Rafael Peralta, a legacy of these battalions going in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq, because when larger battalions got longer dwell ratios, when you had one less battalion in a regiment that usually has four that's in there plus what they have, and you have three, systematically they have to deploy more that goes out. So now you're kind of in charge of a regiment that's got one of the highest deployment tempos and also like the highest divorce rate in the entire United States Marine Corps, because they live in paradise, but they're never there. You know, the families are on that island, but their loved ones are out training. And to do all your training in Hawaii, you

• 3:37:19Speaker 02

  have to leave Hawaii to do it. So on your dwell time, like you had said before, dwell isn't dwell. Dwell for some places in their backyard is dwell. And other places, when you can't train in your backyard, you have to fly to California, fly to the Big Island, fly to do different things like that, all your dwell time then turns into training time.

• 3:37:41Jocko Willink?

  Then, so how long was that tour?

• 3:37:44Speaker 02

  That was about two and a half years.

• 3:37:46Jocko Willink?

  And where does that, what did that bring you after that?

• 3:37:49Speaker 02

  They brought me up to a two-star command at Training and Education Command for the US Marine Corps out of Quantico, Virginia. And that's where I eventually figured, finished out of up there.

• 3:38:00Jocko Willink?

  That was, was that 30 years?

• 3:38:02Speaker 02

  That was at 30 years.

• 3:38:05Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you start getting involved in history flight?

• 3:38:10Speaker 02

  About 2014 timeframe. We got a package in the Marine Corps for an honorary Marine. It was a guy named Mark Noah. And we'd started reading through this package and the general officer that I worked for was the guy that originally did the nomination when he was in charge of the 2nd Marine Division. And he was now the TCOM commanding general. This comes in and General Dunford is going to make this man an honorary Marine. He wants us to do the ceremony. So we go over to the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Mark Noah and his family comes up. We host them for a couple of days. And then we do the honorary Marine ceremony.

• 3:38:54Speaker 02

  And at that time, the Marine Corps had given bestowed that honor to less than 100 people in their lives. It was a pretty big deal. I didn't know when he did and I started reading this dossier and it was an individual who was a pilot, still a pilot for UPS. And he used to run this aircraft, I think it flew B-24s or a B-25, a couple AT-6 Texans, some other things like air shows around the nation with some other pilots. And they started lifting these veterans and hearing these veterans' stories. And his father was in the military. And it goes on and on.

• 3:39:36Speaker 02

  And he starts funding some of these search and recovery type things with some of the money that they're getting from that. And then the housing industry kind of crushes the airplane ride industry and things like this when people can't pay their mortgages, they don't want to spend money to fly on a aircraft to do that. And so he kind of recocks and he starts doing some research and finds in his research comes across a thing that says that in the Pacific Island Campaign in Tarawa, the Marines had had 541 people roughly killed and they were left on the island that were out there. And a majority of them were never recovered. And then as he starts researching more and more and more, he finds out this happened in other places and he can't believe what he's seeing.

• 3:40:21Speaker 02

  So he starts kind of making inquiries, research, and he starts doing this. And all the way through nine, 10, 11, 12, he starts making trips out to Tarawa on his own funding and his own time. And he goes out there and in the early years, it was as it was as easy as people displaying macabre bones on their front porch at Tarawa and saying, you know, we told, we told people 25 years ago that these people were here, they just never came and got them. And then she would say like, but they're mine now because they've been here. And you could tell that they were Caucasian by the bones, everything else that was on there. And he starts taking those first two, turn them over for identification. You start doing that, you start doing the

• 3:41:06Speaker 02

  investigating, getting more and more and more. By the time that I had went up with Mark Noah at that thing, he had repatriated and located, I believe at the time, at least about 70 Marines that were lost and sailors. Also had recovered a bomber crew that in 1944 had taken off from the runway in Tarawa and kind of made it just over the lagoon and crashed into the lagoon. And then had also done some work in Europe on some bomber P-47 sites, a few other things. And I found it really fascinating because this is something all the way back since I was teaching history in the Marine Corps. And I told you before about, you know,

• 3:41:50Speaker 02

  what my wife had saw in 2003 and this feeling of this family, you kind of, you know, you're done with this mission, but you know, you have a calling to do another mission. And the door was kind of clear to me. And I even wrote on my transition paperwork in the Marine Corps. My wife laughs. Everybody else, you know, I don't know what I want to do. I'm going to do this. And it said, fly and be part of a search and recovery afterwards to try to locate missing men and bring them back home, their families. Didn't know how you're going to do that. Didn't know what you're going to do. And then I picked up the phone after I transitioned out of the Marine Corps and just gave Mark a call. And we had a nice conversation for about five minutes. He goes, are you out of the Marine Corps? Came up. I said, absolutely. He said, you'd like to come down. I'd like to talk to you.

• 3:42:35Speaker 02

  Came down to Key West for a little bit of a meeting. Came back and we started this operation I've been doing for about two years. And it's a great relationship, a great group of individuals that are military, civilians, scientists, world-renowned archaeologists, EOD experts, military medics, you name it, the repertoire to do that, that are just passionate Americans that are going and researching over 78,000 missing cases that are still left out there, trying to get at some closure to fulfill America's promise of, we don't leave our dead and wounded. If we know where we're at, we're going to go and get you.

• 3:43:19Speaker 02

  We may not be able to get you at the time the fight is actually happening, but dead or alive, you're coming home. It's a promise. We all made it fighting, everything you and I had just talked about in the past hours. And I go, my generation was very easy to go into a fight knowing that I was not going to be buried in some foreign dirt nation that was somewhere else in the world. Because the person on your left and right was going to make sure that wasn't going to happen. Just like when we went out there in the middle of that burning Amtrak in that street. It was not an option to leave those Marines, to have their bodies drug through streets, or to have anything else like that. Not on my watch. And to find out, the gravity of this is, over all these years, that did happen in places.

• 3:44:01Speaker 02

  And the iteration of the United States going out and having this honorable mission to go do that. It's like, I want to be a part of that. How can I fit into the paradigm of doing this? And that was about 2018, kicked off at that time period. And then just offered up Mark Hale, do an assessment of the organization. And I just found out this passionate story of how many people, what they were giving up to go and do this. And I said, I'll give you an organizational assessment. And he kind of said, what's that going to cost me? I said, nothing. Give me 30 days, I'm gonna fly to all the fighting positions, I'm gonna get to know the people that's here, everything, I'll come back and I kinda give you a little, here's

• 3:44:44Speaker 02

  what's working, here's what's not working, here's a perspective that's not so close to the boat, you do this, came back. And he turned around and he said, when I delivered that, and he said, yes, and I paid somebody almost 50,000 hours to do that one time. And you know what they told me at the end of the assessment? I said, what's that, Mark? He said, if Mark Noah ever wants to stop doing this, then this mission will be over. And he goes, I paid somebody money to do that. Came back, gave him a breakdown, organizational structure, how to couch things into situation reports that where people can do that, because you're coming from the government, so you're actually writing reports that other people that's in another organization can actually see, and they kinda understand, and you're not so far off the course.

• 3:45:29Speaker 02

  And then, it was just utterly amazing. I went to a funeral. And when I went to a funeral, the first funeral was for a funeral by a man of the name of Tech Sergeant Carlson. And he just happened to be the Alpha Company Platoon Sergeant for First Battalion, Second Marines, the landing force from Second Assault Amphibian Battalion, that was Second Amphibian Tractor Battalion, which was my job on the 23rd of March of 2003. And that was the first individual that was identified when I was here. So it was an AM tracker. They got to attend the AM tracker of a guy who did his job on November 20th and lost

• 3:46:10Speaker 02

  his life on 1943, leading the first assault wave in the first LVTs that were ever used in offensive combat. And then, to be able to be a guy in 2003 that was part of Task Force Tarawa, that was named after those guys. My wife, I put her on the USS Tarawa to go to war, and she just lucked. And even before I met Mark Noah, my license plate on my car, as early as 2010, I said Tarawa, across the back of the plate, before I ever knew that this was what I was gonna get into after I hung up this thing. It's just amazing that, I don't think it's habits, it's how that happens.

• 3:46:57Jocko Willink?

  Certainly not. Have you gone to Tarawa yet?

• 3:47:00Speaker 02

  Absolutely. About five times now. Went to Europe last year. So, uh, last year in March, we recovered a lost row called the missing Row D of Cemetery 33 that on Tarawa is called the Maine Marine Cemetery. Now, Tarawa is only about 800 meters wide by about a click and a half long. It's not a very thing on the island of Basio down there. Every ounce of that is habited. Now, there's huts, there's everything else built on top of these. And years ago, the cemeteries, the Marines did the best thing they could to bury and record

• 3:47:43Speaker 02

  the things. And then they had to then go to the next island to fight, load up on the next ship to fight, a thing like that. Turns it over, airfield expansion starts going, and then the cemeteries and that start moving around that island. And then roughly in 1946, America has this big thing in the American Graves Registration Unit, and they're sent around the world to try to recover as many lost people in 1946 as they can. And they get this mandate and they visit Tarawa. They get some bones and they bring it back. They do that. But there was still 541 people they couldn't find that was out there. And that's airfield expansion. Now it's encroachment of the islanders coming back and they're built

• 3:48:23Speaker 02

  on top. So you can see this mess just magnifies itself. And after so many years of looking for this row, in January of the past year, not this past year, but in 19, we had a weatherstorm go through and blew down a building in an area that we were looking to remove the building from. And when it did, it opened up an excavation opportunity that didn't exist prior to do that. And that is where we had located Row D. And Row D eventually turned into 33 United States Marines. By the time of the end of that bulldozer row was recovered that were missing.

• 3:49:05Speaker 02

  PFC Athens, as I told you today, even in the tragic times that's happening out in the Pacific and that, the bright point that was here is I got a text from my people right before I walked in to talk to you, and one more Marine out of that trench line was just identified and published by the DOD today from the Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency. So that's another promise fulfilled to an American family that we don't leave our dead and wounded behind, we'll go and we'll do what it takes to do this. And so I go out as many times as we can. The archaeologists go out about six week rotations. They come back for about four weeks, they go back out, it's in there. And systematically, we were hoping over the next five years to process that entire island

• 3:49:49Speaker 02

  to the fullest extent possible because there's still roughly approximately 400 that hasn't been identified. Jaco, the whole organization has recovered over 337 sets of missing American remains. Approximately 130 plus have been positively identified. The other moons are in the possession of the DNA labs and that. So these are going to be more success stories each week, each month of all the moons that are already in there. And then on top of that, you have operations in Europe, you have operations in the Philippines, you've got the US government in Vietnam, you've got everybody out there doing what they can.

• 3:50:34Speaker 02

  And then we as a private organization augment the skills that the US government out there. 78,000 people, probably a lot are naval casualties, as you know. You probably got roughly 28,000 that are able to be accessed that are here. And if you're talking about a recovery rate of the government at about 200 of those a year on their own, they're going to be doing this for hundreds of years and they're never going to be able to catch that. And these things, whether it's foresteries, whether it's city development, whether it's anything else, you have the, the loss is going to happen each year to where possibly

• 3:51:17Speaker 02

  some of these areas that you could have recovered a previous year are not accessible a year or two from now. So you're always racing against time. And especially with the World War II generation, you're really racing against their own time. And we have a young rifleman named Wendell Perkins that is a Tarawa survivor and a veteran. And we had the great privilege a couple of months ago, and it was covered here on Memorial Day nationally, of locating Wendell's two best friends. And Wendell had to leave on that island. And he survived. And Wendell is living a happy and successful life up here, dealing with COVID like everybody else is.

• 3:51:59Jocko Willink?

  Whereabouts is he?

• 3:52:00Speaker 02

  Uh, Wendell right now is in, sorry, uh, here in California, up in Northern California. And we're going to be able to hopefully do some live feeds for each of the services that are coming up as COVID restrictions lift, so that Wendell can digitally attend the funerals for both of his best friends.

• 3:52:21Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's awesome. And, and obviously if this COVID lifts, we get a chance, we'll fly up to where we're not flying to to talk to Wendell. I know you and I were talking about Dean Ladd and how awesome that was to sit there and talk to him. And I guess he didn't quite make it to Tarawa because Dean Ladd got gut shot on the way in. But yeah, I mean, obviously, we'll do whatever we can to, to have the opportunity to talk to him and, and anybody else, you know, because these are, these are the, you know, you're, you're out there trying to capture the, or trying to recover the physical. But we can capture the stories, you know?

• 3:53:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 3:53:05Jocko Willink?

  That would be awesome. Now, is this, this is a charitable organization?

• 3:53:09Speaker 02

  It is.

• 3:53:09Jocko Willink?

  You guys run off charities?

• 3:53:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. This is a 501(c)(3) that just happens to have a contracted partnership limited for Tarawa with the government that is there, but we prosecute other cases around the world, accepting donations. We accept different cases from people to do the research for those against what the knowledge is that's out there. Help these families along. And then we actually look and take the historical documentation, lay it against kind of a cold case that is out there. Take the time, take the resources that you have. And in certain cases, we will actually take on missions of family members or something that are, you know, kind of they would like to donate and they want to make sure that the only is going towards, you know,

• 3:53:54Speaker 02

  the Burma hump or they went over to certain things that are like that. But it helps augment, we have a burn rate, I go at $10,000 a day to try to locate these. That's just for one day for two teams to exist to try to find these American heroes on Tarawa. And that is just operations on Tarawa. If you expound that out to doing, uh, uh, uh, crash sites in Europe, looking for boys in the Caserain Pass, for anything else on that, that just greatly increases the cost rates that are up there. And time, equipment, uh, security of US remains like we have in this COVID time period on Tarawa.

• 3:54:37Speaker 02

  And just going out and raising what you can to do what you said, you know? How can you put a dollar value on it? It's one of those things you look around and you're just like, we made a promise to people years ago.

• 3:54:56Speaker 02

  I can only imagine what it was like to get a telegram from the Western Union telling you on Christmas Eve that your son's not coming home, which many of our veterans from Tarawa, their families got that. On December 23rd, they just happened to show up at the house to do that, "Merry Christmas," or the Sullivan Brothers, or something like this that isn't here. And that's a bad telegram to get. But the telegrams that really break my heart is roughly the telegrams that you can see in the National Archives from like 1949. And those are the telegrams that were sent to families that said, "Not only has your son been killed, and he's not coming home, but we're no longer looking for them."

• 3:55:38Speaker 02

  I can only imagine being a mother, sitting there, reading, four years later, after writing letter after letter after letter to Hap Arnold, or to whoever would listen, "Can you give me some whereabouts of my boy? Can I have some find... Where are they at?" And we have these telegrams that go to these service leaders like Hap Arnold. And they're very nice. And it says, "Thank you very much. The life insurance was received, and thank you for the pleasantries and all this." But the bottom line is, where's my boy at? You haven't answered that. And then these families went for decades, never getting

• 3:56:17Speaker 02

  an answer on where their boy was at. So to be able to be a US Marine, to go back to the island of Tarawa, to stand over top of a unit and watch the excavation and the detailed thing of the systematic processing of 120 centimeters down, roughly about the waterline, and then you see the skeletal remains start to come through, and you see the boots on the individual that are still from the Goodyear Rubber Company that are on there, that are still there. And then you see the gun belt that's still there that says that that was a BAR gunner. He was a rifleman. And to hear my young archaeologists that are out there, when you're

• 3:57:01Speaker 02

  saying, I wonder if that guy was 27 or he's 29 or whatever, they're telling you by looking and reading these bones, this kid was 18 years old. The sutures on his head are not close enough. Here's how you look at this. It's here. And you sit there and you watch them and they're like, you've never been in the military. What are you doing out here on the island of Taro? And you found in all these travels, you've got military, civilian, PhDs, hunters, Republicans, Democrats, blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, Jews. It's this organization that even in today's day and age with all this polarity, can come together like this

• 3:57:41Speaker 02

  to perform this mission to fill the void of 76 years and provide closure and bring that back to reinforce that promise that dead or alive, we're going to find you and we're going to come back and have a collective unit like that. Those were units, like I see the pride in your eyes when you talk about the team and you see that feel and right about the same thing on this side. They ain't wearing a uniform in one nation, but the service that they chose to perform for the nation in a crappy fourth world infested little island in the middle that doesn't look like Tahiti or Fiji or anything else like that. My God, man, they are where they're supposed to be.

• 3:58:25Jocko Willink?

  Man, it's just awesome. Awesome. I know. I know. We've been sitting here for, for quite a while. I want to wrap up, but, but before we wrap up, I just want to go through real quick. You sent like some bullet points to me just of, of kind of some reflections of some principles that, that guided you, you know, and, and still guide you. And I just wanted to kind of just, just go through them real quick here. Cause when I read them, each one of them, you know, as I sat, sat there silently reading my email, I was just kind of sitting there nodding my head saying, yep, yep. Number one, whatever it takes.

• 3:59:09Jocko Willink?

  Number two, savage action and aggression in combat and in life.

• 3:59:17Jocko Willink?

  Number three, in total combat and warfare, you will get punched in the face. Number four, no excuses, don't have a victim mentality.

• 3:59:34Jocko Willink?

  Number five, never leave a fallen comrade behind, both in and out of the military.

• 3:59:43Jocko Willink?

  Number six, moral and ethical leadership, both in and out of combat.

• 3:59:51Jocko Willink?

  Number seven, take total responsibility.

• 3:59:56Jocko Willink?

  Number eight, always in the fight and never out of it.

• 4:00:03Jocko Willink?

  Number nine, do what it takes to build the best team.

• 4:00:09Jocko Willink?

  Number 10, accept blame and shoulder burdens.

• 4:00:15Jocko Willink?

  Number 11, set your ego aside for the good of the collective.

• 4:00:23Jocko Willink?

  Number 12, establish and reinforce a winning mentality on and off the battlefield.

• 4:00:31Jocko Willink?

  Number 13, be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

• 4:00:39Jocko Willink?

  Number 14, leadership is about people and getting the best from them and from yourself.

• 4:00:50Jocko Willink?

  Number 15, be a man or woman of character.

• 4:00:56Jocko Willink?

  Number 16, live an honorable and valorous life.

• 4:01:04Jocko Willink?

  And number 17, not for self,

• 4:01:11Jocko Willink?

  but for country.

• 4:01:20Jocko Willink?

  Some things don't really even need further discussion. And that's what I liked about that list. As I read through it, like I said, I just nodded my head. Unbelievable guidance from your life, from your 30 years in the military, from your heroic actions, and not just your own heroic actions, but for all the heroes that you saw around you.

• 4:01:51Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, to me, that's what this is about.

• 4:01:57Jocko Willink?

  You know, you setting this example, you putting these words, and you continuing to live a life of service to go out there and, and bring home these heroes.

• 4:02:09Jocko Willink?

  I'll, I'll leave it to you for any other closing thoughts you might have right now.

• 4:02:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think these, uh, it's been an honor and privilege, really a professional pleasure to spend this time today with, with you and Echo discussing what isn't, what may be common to some people just isn't common to everybody that is out there. And, uh, your podcasts and the impact that those podcasts do have, the amount of people from all different walks of life that kind of tune in to this platform and this voice that is out there in this time right now, especially in the trying time that we have now. It's these reinforcing principles that we're talking. You know, you and I and Echo and that,

• 4:02:58Speaker 02

  we didn't make these up. You know, I didn't wake up and have some 17-part epiphany of doing that. It's, you know, it's really rare to have a, you know, a unique thought these days. Because when you actually then reach back into the context of history, you normally find somewhere along the lines what you're actually saying has been either done or displayed, or you can actually find a mentor or somebody out there that, that leads and acts the same way that you're talking. And then you kind of find out. For people that's on the podcast that are, well, you know, I've never been in the military

• 4:03:41Speaker 02

  or you find out it wasn't the military and a lot of times it taught these things that was here. You find out when you, when you look around at the goodness of your whole life and if you look at the context of your lifeline, rather than the best years of your life was these years or these years, if you look at, they're all building blocks on the entire timeline of your life, you find out that that teacher that wasn't in the military that taught you this is what you learned here. That coach that was hard on you here that taught you here. The mother that you thought was making dinner was actually married to a soldier for 26 years. So even though that soldier's not here, I might've picked

• 4:04:24Speaker 02

  up some of the leadership things from your old man. So you might want to listen because maybe it looks like me doing it, but maybe I heard it from somewhere else. And you feel that responsibility from generations and that. I've watched that and I've listened to that through these podcasts, whether it's from kids and children, there is always something here because it really reinforces what we have been discussing about today. And it doesn't have to be this traumatic, fallorous, or grievous incident that's in your life that defines that's who your life is. No, you performed in those incidences because

• 4:05:07Speaker 02

  of the conglomeration of who you were and the constitution that made it up at that period. And it allows you to overcome those instances, just like overcoming COVID, just like overcoming a car crash, just like overcoming anything else in life. I believe this provides resiliency and tools for people. They may not identify with podcast number 176. They may not identify.

• 4:05:34Speaker 02

  They may not even identify ever with a whole podcast, but there's something that somebody can take out of each little one of those and apply it to their own life that I believe in the context of overall, it builds a better person. So I thank you for the opportunity to be able to come here and do that. And it is, it was my pleasure to be here. I had my pleasure for every single day to wear the uniform and the cloth of our nation. My pleasure to be able to just have a conversation amongst two warriors today. I'm probably a little more aged or whatever that is on that. But it really is, and these are healthy.

• 4:06:14Speaker 02

  I go, and you're providing the platform for people to, to do that and also tell the story. The story of these American patriots that have been lost for generations. The average person does not know that story, Jaco. The average person on the street out there still has no idea that we have 28,000 missing people. We have 78,000. We can probably get about 28,000. But they also sometimes come up to me going, I really appreciate what it is that you do, but I didn't serve in the military and it doesn't affect me or that. But within like a five-minute conversation of anybody that tells you that they didn't serve or they didn't have a connection to the military, you can take almost anybody

• 4:06:57Speaker 02

  in this country, whether you're an immigrant or a national or anything, and within a five-minute conversation, you can expose to them that somewhere in their family line, somebody had to fight that had the same blood inside of their. Whether it's a restaurant in Little Italy right here, whether it's coming over on the boat, it doesn't matter. They had to fight to get to that. And then a lot of times, they just didn't know it. But a lot of those people had to do it in a uniform, too. And then all of a sudden, the light comes on and then you find out they're like, well, yeah, I did have an uncle that was in Vietnam, now that you think about it. And then the connecting file gets there.

• 4:07:38Speaker 02

  And when the connecting file is there, pride, discipline, desire, motivation, it transcends that uniform. And you get that passion and then it's never about the money. Never about the money. It is about fulfilling that promise. The same promise that we make those men and women today in that uniform swear to each other. That allows people like you and I, that don't wear the uniform and the cloth of the nation anymore. It allows me to sit back at night and say that if they still follow the code, they still build them the same way and put them on the conveyor belt to do that, they're going to spit out the best American fighting man and woman the world has still ever seen. And don't anybody ever forget that.

• 4:08:23Speaker 02

  It's not just guys jumping out of planes in 1944 or coming out of landing craft. Those things out there today are the most lethal things that you can put on the friggin' battlefield. If the United States, somebody wants to test the borders, or somebody wants to poke us or try to do that, you keep poking the bear. It's on there. You keep poking the bear, just watch the eagle fly over, take a dump on your head. And when the eagle does that, boom, we bring a lot of things behind that as well. Don't know what else more to say, Jaco, because it hasn't been already said except thank you. It's been my pleasure today.

• 4:09:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, thank you for coming on. More important, obviously, thanks for your service. Thanks for what you did for the country, for the Marine Corps. And, and like I said, thank you, thank you for continuing to serve by working to bring these heroes home. And truly living up to the words, Semper Fidelis. Thanks, Justin.

• 4:09:26Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 4:09:27Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Justin LaHue has left the building. Awesome honor to be able to talk to him. And another reminder that we all have more work to do. More work to do to continue to be better. More work to do to live an honorable life. To stay on the path. Echo Charles, what do you got for us?

• 4:10:00Speaker 01

  To stay on the path, well, we're gonna... So to know that we're on the path, that's a big one. Before though, before I go into that.

• 4:10:11Speaker 01

  Hearing like his story, actually a lot of these stories or whatever, but this was for some reason, maybe because it was like so long and it made me like contemplate the whole time, where it's like a reminder for us who didn't go to war, you know, who's not in the military necessarily, and we just kind of, you know, we're cruising here. And you know that thought that's like dang, all that was going on at that, like that's what, you know, because you say the dates and you're like, I remember what I was doing in 2003. I remember that, what I was doing. And you kind of flash to, man, that's what he was doing at that time? And you kind of make that little comparison. It's man, it's like, it's a big eye opener.

• 4:10:49Jocko Willink?

  Especially when you drill down to it, not, hey, that's what he was doing in August or in March. But when you say, oh, on that day, at that moment in time, he was going into a blown out AAV, trying to recover bodies under fire. Like, that's what he was doing at that moment. So yeah, it's definitely something that definitely, when you get even more specific with it, yeah, and it's the broad one is the same way. You think, oh, oh, in 2003, what was Echo Charles, what was I doing in 2003? And I was here, I was hoping I would get to go over, you know, and he's in the battle of Nazaria, you know,

• 4:11:31Jocko Willink?

  it's so, and, and you know, you need to take that one step further. And it's like, right now, there's people out holding the line. And there's people prepping to do an operation, there's people doing operations. And, you know, it's not just military operations either, but there's, you know, there's someone that just found out that, you know, they, their kid has cancer. Like, there's all these things are happening right now. And, you know, the big thing, and we talked about it briefly, is that an AAV just apparently was lost off the coast of California here. And I was very similar thought pattern, you know, this morning for me, I see that in the news. And, and I, I mean, I've been out there, right next to these AVs, doing work with them. I know that the weather's good. It's a sunny day.

• 4:12:16Jocko Willink?

  It's a beautiful day. This is Southern California and amongst all that.

• 4:12:22Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's a nightmare for um for tho- those Marines and that unit and their families. And it's just, yeah, really makes you think about where you're, where you are and what you're doing. And are you on the right path?

• 4:12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully. So, yes, so make the most of it, you know, kind of, kind of that old thing, make the most of it. Um, every once in a while, you know, like you'll get injured, like something that'll take you out, like for, you know, like a month, like a month or more recovery time or whatever. So that for that month, you can't really do certain things, if not like a lot of things. And then when you finally heal up and are able to do it, you have that like appreciation for just everyday stuff. It's like that's kind of like thinking about these things I found, like kind of just rejuvenates that appreciation.

• 4:13:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it. No doubt about it. Um, you know, also, I don't think I mentioned this during the podcast, but for if you want to support the recovery of these fallen heroes, go to historyflight.com. And then they also have an Instagram page, which is at historyflight. So you want to support some of these awesome efforts that are going on, well, that's how you do it.

• 4:13:50Speaker 01

  So, yes, staying on the path for ourselves and the people around us, because that's who it affects fully. Um, you know, we want to keep ourselves in shape, um, and keep ourselves capable doing that. We're working out, we're trying to stay healthy. It's not a hundred percent thing, I dig it, you know, eighty, twenty, ninety, ten kind of situation, ideally, in my opinion. But anyway, on the way, you will need supplementation. So, Jaco Fuel. What is Jaco Fuel? So, I, when I said Jaco Fuel one time, I remember saying it and thinking, oh, Jaco Fuel's like, seems like an individual product, the way I said it. So let me clarify. Jaco Fuel is a collection of supplementation elements.

• 4:14:33Speaker 01

  So this part we already know, super krill oil, super krill oil with some antioxidants in there, joint warfare for your joints. So your joints are gonna take a beating, you know, varying levels of beatings when you, when you're working out, you're doing different workouts, jujitsu, all that stuff. So this is why this is important. Super krill, super krill oil, uh, joint warfare. And also we have vitamin D for immune system, big, big deal.

• 4:15:01Speaker 01

  Also cold war for immune system, still a big deal. So yes, these are all part of Jaco Fuel, including in, or as should I say additionally, milk protein in the form of a dessert, meaning

• 4:15:15Speaker 01

  it's the best tasting protein mix you'll ever have. I think that's proven double blind.

• 4:15:22Jocko Willink?

  I'm on a little peanut butter, little peanut butter chocolate kick right now. Cause that is a good tasting, I mean, it is a good tasting.

• 4:15:31Speaker 01

  Do you add extra peanut butter?

• 4:15:34Jocko Willink?

  Why don't I just as is?

• 4:15:36Speaker 01

  I do sometimes when I'm feeling a little bit more peanut buttery. Nonetheless, I dig it 100% and that's what that is. Also, discipline, the supplement, discipline, powder mix is uh, this for your brain and your body, by the way, powder, mix, uh, cans, RTD cans, and discipline go pills. New flavor out, straight up out, sour apple sniper.

• 4:16:07Jocko Willink?

  And it's important to note that this is JP Donnell's signature.

• 4:16:11Speaker 01

  Right? Cause he's a sniper.

• 4:16:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So what's your, what's your assessment of the flavor?

• 4:16:18Speaker 01

  Good. Not as sour as I anticipated, but it could have been one of those deals where I'm like, I open it up, I'm like, ooh, I'm getting ready for the sourness, you know, so maybe that over, uh, yeah, over.

• 4:16:28Jocko Willink?

  Expectations were off.

• 4:16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but good, but delicious.

• 4:16:32Jocko Willink?

  Pete, Pete just said to me, it just went into first place in his book.

• 4:16:36Speaker 01

  No kidding.

• 4:16:37Jocko Willink?

  Because, and he said the reason why, he said it's sweet. He said, he said he get that little, that he's got that little. He's got a sweet tooth, you know?

• 4:16:46Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 4:16:47Jocko Willink?

  That kid's choking down baklavas and wippy pies. He's just getting after it, you know?

• 4:16:54Speaker 01

  That does make sense and it is good though in that way. It's just not as tangy or sour as I thought.

• 4:17:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so but it does have some sweetness to it. If you got that sweet tooth.

• 4:17:05Speaker 01

  What about you?

• 4:17:06Jocko Willink?

  That Pete Roberts, sweet tooth. I like, yeah, it's freaking legit. Uh, right now, Jocko Palmer's in the lead.

• 4:17:15Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 4:17:15Jocko Willink?

  Continually for me, but Pete Roberts just pushed it. Um, but my, my kids are mostly Dax Savage. That could just be in support of Dakota.

• 4:17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. But that one has the sweetness as well. The Dax Savage one.

• 4:17:30Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. I taste that. Yeah, it for me, there's sweetness to it, but it's not, it's not, it's not as sweet as Sour Apple Sniper. Is it?

• 4:17:41Speaker 01

  I can dig it. I had, it's been a few weeks and I've been pounding the Tropic Thunder and the, the Jocko Palmer one so much. I'm gonna have to go revisit it to, to evaluate accurately. That's what I think. Nonetheless, they're all good and hey, we're gonna have differences of opinion. I like, I prefer not, maybe not strongly, but I prefer a little bit of the, the tanginess in this kind of drink.

• 4:18:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:18:06Speaker 01

  I prefer that. My personal preference.

• 4:18:09Jocko Willink?

  Check. Well, if you want to get any of these supplements, then you can go to originmaine.com. You can go to the vitamin shop and you can pick this stuff up and it does actually support the podcast. It's and it supports the podcast and you know what else it supports? You know what else it supports? Sports America. Sports Americas, we're out there not only making supplements, also making things for you to

• 4:18:37Speaker 01

  Wear.

• 4:18:38Jocko Willink?

  Wear on your body. So you may need to wear something during jujitsu, right? While we're grappling, we're not going, we're not going Greek.

• 4:18:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:18:49Jocko Willink?

  Like the Greek, uh, naked wrestlers. You see the pictures back, you see the statues back in the day. We're not doing that.

• 4:18:55Speaker 01

  No, sir.

• 4:18:56Jocko Willink?

  We're not doing that. No, we're wearing clothing. So we're wearing rash guards. We're wearing the gi. T-shirts, jeans, boots, all of it, not just made in America, but formulated from the ground up, every thread, every rivet.

• 4:19:18Jocko Willink?

  It's all American, 100%.

• 4:19:22Jocko Willink?

  Building a little self-reliance back into our country. We don't have to rely on, on other countries.

• 4:19:30Jocko Willink?

  That's not, not a good thing. So, go to originmaine.com if you want any of those products. And yeah, you know what, it's, they're American-made, they're also the best.

• 4:19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:19:41Jocko Willink?

  The best things that you can put on your body.

• 4:19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like you're, you know, not, not to say you're actively neglecting this, but, but they look good, see what I'm saying? They fit good, they look good. I know you're not walking around saying, ooh, how's the fit on my jeans? You're not asking your wife, hey, do these jeans make, you know, my hips look nice or whatever? I'm assuming you're not.

• 4:20:07Speaker 01

  Or, or what have you, you know? I, I'm assuming you're not doing that, so. So, I will attest to that, that yes, these are functional, of course, made in America, of course, but they look good too.

• 4:20:25Speaker 01

  Hey, look good, feel good, feel good, look good.

• 4:20:27Jocko Willink?

  That's cool. Apparently some of us are over here thinking we look good. Cool. I'll let you hold that on lock, I'll, I'll be over here getting after it.

• 4:20:34Speaker 01

  Anyway, originmaine.com, yes. Also, speaking of clothing, Jaco has a store. So this clothing, if you want to represent discipline equals freedom, the attitude of good, when things go bad, there's some good that comes out of it. It's true.

• 4:20:51Speaker 01

  You're the one who told me that, it's true. Anyway, you want to represent these things, go to jacostore.com, check out the shirts, there's t-shirts on there, hoodies, hats, uh, we've got some new board shorts. Are they up yet? You're gonna have to check, jacostore.com.

• 4:21:07Jocko Willink?

  There's also a new t-shirt that you're wearing.

• 4:21:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:21:10Jocko Willink?

  For some reason, you're wearing it before I'm wearing it.

• 4:21:12Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 4:21:12Jocko Willink?

  Even though it's a stretch for you to wear that t-shirt. How do you like that?

• 4:21:16Speaker 01

  A bias on action, what is that? Bias for action.

• 4:21:20Jocko Willink?

  I like it. So you're wearing kind of the ultimate t-shirt. The hardcore Ricondo's t-shirt.

• 4:21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what's good is I was like, yeah, I was like, yeah, man, that's a good, that's good, that's a good idea for sure, for sure. And then when it came out, I put it on, I was like, oh, back to that looking good thing. I feel that I look good in it.

• 4:21:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I thought you were gonna say it made you feel like, oh, you know, I'm in the game, but instead you just sort of looking at yourself in the mirror. Okay, cool.

• 4:21:47Speaker 01

  Wait, so I do or I don't? So does this look, does this shirt look good on me?

• 4:21:52Jocko Willink?

  I'm not looking at your shirt.

• 4:21:53Speaker 01

  You're not?

• 4:21:54Jocko Willink?

  The shirt's cool. That's all you're getting out of me. Carry on.

• 4:21:57Speaker 01

  Hey, I'll take it. Anyway, jocko store.com. If you, if you like something, get something. Good spot.

• 4:22:02Jocko Willink?

  Uh, subscribe to this podcast. There's a bunch of different ways you can subscribe to it, do it, and then leave a review. This is according to Echo Charles. The cool thing is, if you leave a review, I actually read the reviews and there's a lot of them, but they're awesome. So that's cool. Appreciate it. And don't forget that we have some other podcasts as well. We've got the unraveling, the Jaco unraveling podcast, actually is the full title. Because in order to make it mine, well, I just put my name on it. And then no one can say like, you took my name. No, I didn't take your name. Your name isn't Jaco, is it? So Jaco unraveling, right now, we're releasing on this feed. Soon it'll be on a separate feed. We got the grounded podcast. We got the warrior kid podcast. We got warrior kid soap from Irish

• 4:22:46Jocko Willink?

  Oaks Ranch dot com, where you can get soap so that you can, for the love of God, you can stay clean.

• 4:22:59Jocko Willink?

  YouTube, you want to tell them about YouTube? Since I know you're quite, quite into that.

• 4:23:05Speaker 01

  Well, we're all into that from time to time. So yes, you want to watch the video version or have the video version playing, playing in the office, in the gym, in the house, whatever, connected to surround sound. Boom, you're right in the middle of the conversation physically, visually, all that stuff. Anyway, we have a YouTube channel. That's the point. Uh, we also have excerpts on there. So, you know, you can share them. With your friends and it's more likely your friend is gonna watch a two minute up to you know, you know, varying levels of length videos than a maybe a four hour podcast from time to time. Okay.

• 4:23:42Jocko Willink?

  Some people, some people don't have the wherewithal or the time.

• 4:23:47Speaker 01

  Well, at that, at that moment, you know, like you, you send me a link, right? You're like, hey, check this out for you need to like.

• 4:23:52Jocko Willink?

  Check this out.

• 4:23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I look, I'm sort of at the gas station right now. So maybe, you know, maybe I'll check that later.

• 4:23:58Jocko Willink?

  Watch a two minute video, just pumping gas. You're done with the video. It's over.

• 4:24:01Speaker 01

  Technically.

• 4:24:02Jocko Willink?

  You can take the information with it, maybe apply it.

• 4:24:04Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 4:24:05Jocko Willink?

  You won't have the depth of knowledge, though.

• 4:24:07Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:24:08Jocko Willink?

  You can apply it quickly, but you want to reinforce it. That's why when you are, were cutting your lawn, you listen to the whole thing. Or you watch the whole thing while you're doing dishes. It shouldn't take you two and a half hours, three and a half hours to do dishes. But maybe over a week, you're watching it, you know, it takes you 20 minutes. Consolidate some time, three meals a day, you can get there.

• 4:24:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, technically, but, but like I said, though, if, if at any given moment, you get sent a three hour video versus a two minute video. It's more likely that you're gonna have the time to watch a two minute video. So it increases the likelihood of someone actually watching it. That's the benefit of an excerpt, whatever that excerpt may be. So that's why these excerpts exist. See what I'm saying?

• 4:24:50Jocko Willink?

  Fair enough.

• 4:24:50Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, if you, if you, if you, and this is why you should share an excerpt, if it, if it resonates, resonates with you or someone you know, that or might resonate with someone you know, this is why you share it. Because if you, okay, there's an excerpt about, um, I forget the title, but it's about how you feel versus how you behave. Right? I think it was something about hangry or something like that. Remember that one? It's oldie but goodie nonetheless. So it's basically if you're frustrated on the inside or whatever, you don't have to act frustrated. You know, how you feel and how you behave should you should separate those things. You should behave as good as you can. Anyway, so a lot of people, that's a good valuable information. What if you shared that with three people around you? And they shared that with two people around them. They shared that with four people around them.

• 4:25:33Speaker 01

  And see, everyone around you is behaving correctly, whether they're frustrated or not.

• 4:25:38Jocko Willink?

  You're actually having a massive impact in the entire world, is what you're saying.

• 4:25:42Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, yes. So that's the benefit. And this goes for any concept. So there's a lot of excerpts out there is what I'm saying. So I'm saying, check them out on that YouTube channel. You know, if you got, if you got a moment, do it. It's good. Also, psychological warfare. This is an album with Jaco tracks on it. Many tracks for many different scenarios and those scenarios are moments of weakness that you might incur. Is that a good word? Is that the correct word? Incur? I'm gonna incur.

• 4:26:09Jocko Willink?

  It's an okay usage.

• 4:26:10Speaker 01

  Okay, boom, there you go. Incur.

• 4:26:12Jocko Willink?

  You get like a C.

• 4:26:13Speaker 01

  Okay, good, pass. Incur a moment of weakness. You want to invoke Jaco to help you. Not yell at you or nothing like this. Help you. Just listen to one of those tracks, the appropriate track for that particular weakness moment. Boom, he'll help you right across the bridge. Super easy too. Hundred percent effective rate, by the way.

• 4:26:34Jocko Willink?

  Also, if you want to have a visual kind of reminder, the visual help, go to flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, American-made, graphic art. There I said it.

• 4:26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it did kind of seem like you were not actively avoiding the word art.

• 4:26:54Jocko Willink?

  It's weird. It's weird. I don't know. I have a weird relationship with the word art.

• 4:26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I could see it. But it is art and artistic too.

• 4:27:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, anyways, if you want some cool graphic art, go to flipsidecanvas.com. If you want a book, if you want a book, I got a bunch of books. One's called The Code.

• 4:27:19Jocko Willink?

  One's called Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. One's called Way of the Warrior Kid, One, Two, and Three. Mikey and the Dragons, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. And Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership. A bunch of books talking about leadership, reinforcing the ideas that I talk about here. If you're an adult, teaching those ideas to a young kid.

• 4:27:42Jocko Willink?

  Get after some of those. Also have a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front where we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. If you want me to come and speak at your company, or you want me to do a virtual meeting, or you want someone on the Echelon Front team that you've heard on this podcast to get on a call with all your people and talk to them, don't go to a speakers bureau. Don't do that. Go to echelonfront.com. Just the other, the speakers bureau is just a middleman. We don't need it. This is what we do for a living. So go to echelonfront.com and we'll hook it up.

• 4:28:26Jocko Willink?

  EF Online. We're doing a lot of virtual stuff right now. One of the things that we're doing virtually, we did, we did online training before. We're doing even more now. I am live on that thing all the time. If you want to talk to me, if you want to come and ask me a question, go to EF Online, attend one of the online training, live seminars. We're talking one, two, three times a week. I'm on there, the rest of the team is on there. You want to have, you want to, you got to talk to me, let me know, come and get it. That's what we're doing. EFonline.com. Also have The Muster, which is a live gig, September 16th and 17th in Phoenix, Arizona, Dallas, Texas, December 3rd and 4th. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to come. They've all sold out, so these are going to sell out too.

• 4:29:12Jocko Willink?

  We haven't even released the video yet. I saw the video today though. Good job. Good job with that one.

• 4:29:19Jocko Willink?

  Also EF Overwatch, if you need leaders in your organization, we have experienced, battle-tested leaders. EFOverwatch.com. If you're in the military, go there. We can link you up with companies. If you're a company and you need that leadership, go to EFOverwatch.com, fill out the appropriate information for yourself.

• 4:29:41Jocko Willink?

  For charities, like I said, historyflight.com. If you want to support the recovery of these heroes around the world. Also, they have @historyflight on Instagram, so check that out. And then, of course, we got Mama Lee, Mark Lee's mom, and her organization, AmericasMightyWarriors.org. She does all kinds of things to help service members, whether that's medical treatments that they couldn't get through military channels, whether it's things that they need while they're over on deployment, whether it's Gold Star families that need some kind of support after they've lost their loved one. She does all kinds of things like this.

• 4:30:23Jocko Willink?

  So go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org if you want to get involved or if you want to donate.

• 4:30:30Jocko Willink?

  And if, for some unknown reason, you just feel like you need to hear more of my disproportionately dallying discourse, or you feel like you need more of Echo's confiscated conceptualizations,

• 4:30:56Jocko Willink?

  then you can find us on the interwebs.

• 4:31:00Jocko Willink?

  On Twitter, Instagram, and on Facebook. Echo is at EchoCharles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Justin LaHugh for coming on, for sharing the lessons with us. We thank you for your service, and we absolutely wish you Godspeed in your mission today to continue to bring home our fallen countrymen. And a solemn thanks to all that have fought for our freedom, but did not return.

• 4:31:32Jocko Willink?

  And of course, thanks to all the servicemen and women who are out there today, holding the line, training to hold the line, taking risk to hold the line, to protect our freedom. Thanks to all of you and to the police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all the first responders. Thank you for holding the line and protecting us here on the home front.

• 4:32:04Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else out there.

• 4:32:09Jocko Willink?

  You can learn a lot, I learn a lot, from a man like Sergeant Major Justin Le Hugh. Try, try to heed his advice.

• 4:32:21Jocko Willink?

  His advice to do whatever it takes to initiate savage action and aggression, to establish a winning mentality.

• 4:32:34Jocko Willink?

  And to do things not for yourself, but for your country, there is something bigger than you.

• 4:32:43Jocko Willink?

  So go out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco.

• 4:32:53Jocko Willink?

  Out.