The Unravelling 3: A Festering Sore

The traumatic experience of Vietnam shapes the US approach to the Gulf War. The easy victory in Kuwait shapes expectations of the Global War on Terror. 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.

• 0:01Jocko Willink?

  This is the Jaco Unravelling Podcast, Episode 3, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Let's keep going.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  I know where I want to pick up. If you have somewhere, you can go first. I want to know what little Jaco, little semen recruit Willink, who joined in 1990, you taught us last week, last episode. You come into the, you come into the SEAL teams in the 1990s and

• 0:30Speaker 01

  if you're a warrior looking for a war, the 90s are a little bit of a dead zone for the

• 0:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, you've got to remember, partially accurate, but as we already talked about, warrior looking for a war in the delayed entry program through the summer of 1990, as this buildup is happening, I'm thinking, I'm going to get exactly what I asked for, and I am super pumped about that. You know, I'm ready to rock and roll. I think that this, and like I said, I, on one of the earlier podcasts, I thought there was, there were reports, there was 40,000, 40,000 casualties in the first 48 hours. And I'm like, oh yeah, they're going to need me. They're going to need me to help win this bad boy, because I'm young and dumb and ready to rock and roll. So,

• 1:18Jocko Willink?

  then when it was over, then I'm in buds and it's over. In buds and it's over. So now I'm thinking, okay, what's, what's, what's going to happen? And, you know, showed up and then it was peacetime, peacetime teams, which is not, not what you dream about when you're, when you're a young lad going in the teams, going through SEAL training. You think you're just going to war. And I, I was dumb. And so I was checking into SEAL Team 1, and I thought they were going to send me to Vietnam, like, even though the Gulf War is over, but that's okay. SEALs were sneaking around the world, doing stuff everywhere. You know, that's just not true. Just not true. It's, it is kind of true now.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  In fact, I'll go ahead and say, it is true now. Like, there are things happening around the world all the time. That's the way it is now. That's post-September 11th. Pre-September 11th, There was, there was years, you know, I knew guys that were master chiefs that were in the SEAL teams for thirty years. You know, they came in in nineteen seventy-one and retired in nineteen, or in two thousand and one. And they never fired a shot in anger. So, yeah, the nineties was, was not, was not good from a perspective of wanting to go to war. And look, man, I'm sorry, everybody, that, that that's what I wanted to do with my life.

• 2:45Jocko Willink?

  I, I, I don't know what to tell you. Uh, I guess let's be happy that I didn't want to be a criminal, or I didn't want to be a gangster, or I didn't want to be a murderer. I, I wanted to be a SEAL and I wanted to go to war. That's the way it was. And, and I'm sorry that that's the way it is, but that's the way it is. And, and I can tell you that with something else, I'm not alone.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  He's not that sorry.

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and he, and, and I'm not alone. There's all kinds of young men, and I don't know where we get it from. I don't know where it comes from. It's part of our instinct is to, is to fight wars.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  To tell you where it comes from is, when you look at people like Al Qaeda in Iraq, who ended up taking over large sections of the country in two thousand four, five, and six. Who do you want to send after them? You know, people have this idea that the American military, because it's so technologically advanced, and we've got all this, it's just access to so many tools and, and toys that other people don't have that, um, that our soldiers are sort of like skilled labor. And that's not, it's not, it's not how, how it works, you know? You need people who are gonna go in, you know, unless you're, unless you're sort of itching for the fight. Um, you're not gonna be ready to handle, handle the kind of thing that you guys had to deal with over there.

• 3:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it is weird, though, to think that there's a bunch of people that there, that, that want to go fight. Like, that's a weird, if, if you think about it, you know, from a basic human instinct, right, is survival, right? The self-preservation, that's a basic human instinct. The last job you would sign up for with that instinct is, I'm gonna be some kind of a soldier, I'm gonna go to war. So, it's, it's a little bit tricky to understand. It's a little bit tricky to understand. Uh, and even if you go, even if you say, well, you know, people fight, right? Like, you know, you go out on a Friday night in downtown, wherever, there's gonna be some fights.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  And that's the way it is. But, and I guess, you know, out of those, out of those fights that break out, some of those people are going out looking for fights. It's just a human instinct. And I think you take that to the next level. And you've got people like me that, that want to go to war. And again, like, knowing what I now know about war and understanding it at a deeper level, I do say, hey, I'm sorry, that's the way it is. But it's also, I'm sorry that that's the reality. And I'm not going to lie about it. I'm not going to tell you, oh, you know, when, when nine 11 happened, there wasn't a giant part of me that was saying, oh, cool, now I get to go fight, you know? Oh, yeah, it's tragic and horrible. And how dare they? But someone's gonna have to avenge this.

• 5:26Jocko Willink?

  And thank God that someone is me and my friends.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  So, well, that, I want to ask you about that part. So this drive to go, to go to war, I do wonder if some part of it for people is they have an intuition that, you know, people love their friends. They got really great friends. And those friendships were usually made great during the most difficult times of those people's lives. The guys who were there for them, you know, through a difficult breakup, or whatever it was, those are the times when those friendships get forged. And I think maybe people have an intuition that when you enter into a human experience with that level of intensity, something like war, it's really not, it's a level of intense human experience, it's not really accessible to most people in, in any way in their

• 6:15Speaker 01

  normal life, unless they're a criminal, that you're going to experience that, for, for you, was it that you wanted to go to war? Was there some part of you that, like, you were gonna go to war with your friends? You were gonna be part of this thing with other people?

• 6:32Jocko Willink?

  I appreciate you throwing out some nice little bait softball thing to make me sound like I had this altruistic thing of going to war with my friends. And way before I had any friends, you know, in the military, I still had that feeling.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  All right, that's the last time I'll pander to you, man.

• 6:48Jocko Willink?

  I appreciate it. I appreciate you trying to me look, trying to make me look like a good human. But, hey, man.

• 6:56Jocko Willink?

  Let's face it, there's, there's, there's a group of humans that have, I mean, every person has some sort of natural proclivity towards something, right? And I've said this before, when, when, when some people are walking around as a 10-year-old and they see a businessman in a suit with a briefcase, they think that looks cool. Like, they think that guy's got power, that looks cool. They see someone else, they, they see the fireman, and they go, "That looks cool, I want to do that." They're, they, they see an astronaut, they go, "I want to fly into space," or they see a, whatever, you name their occupation, and there's people, and you know, at, at Echelon

• 7:37Jocko Willink?

  Front, I work with people that love doing their job. Like, that's what they love doing. You love your job, right? That's what you love doing. It's like, okay, cool. Guess what?

• 7:51Jocko Willink?

  My natural thing was, I really wanted to do, do this job, and...

• 7:58Jocko Willink?

  You, you weren't gonna be a model, so... I definitely wasn't gonna be a model. And, and, and, and, you know, I, I don't know that I really would have been so, um, I wouldn't have been so, I don't know that I could have been as committed as I was to anything else. I can't imagine trying to, trying to, to, to have some other job that I would have been this committed to. Now, I learned through the military and through the SEAL teams that commitment was a good thing, and that I could kind of fake commitment. Like, I fake, when I went to college, the Navy sent me to college from 2000 and, from 2000 to 2003.

• 8:42Jocko Willink?

  And when I, when I went to college, I faked that I was into it, and I did really well. Why? Because I made it my job. And I guess that was still tied into, you know, uh, I guess, no, I guess, I was gonna say it's tied into SEALs, that was just, a lot of it, that was just ego. "I'm gonna be number one, that's me, I'm gonna make this happen." Part of it was ego versus the, the professors. "Oh, you think you're smart? Cool. You give me any, ask me any question about your little test, and I'm gonna know it." And that's that's what I that was the attitude. I made it into a game. I boost my ego driven by ego and you know, that's not a bad thing, right? I'm not saying it was my ego and I should have put no, no, no. My ego helped me do well in college. I didn't want to get shown up by a professor.

• 9:25Jocko Willink?

  I wanted to be to to to to go to battle with my professors and win, you know? So that's what I did.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  And so there are some false starts in the 90s. I think I remember you saying before that you were on a ship off the coast of Africa while Rwanda was going on in 1994.

• 9:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  And so there might have been some times where you thought, maybe this is my.

• 9:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that maybe this is my. And and part of that Somalia, I was sitting off the coast of Somalia, that same deployment, we had our gear loaded. It's the first time I loaded out, like we loaded out our weapons, loaded out our gear, had our web gear filled with ammo and grenades and, you know, we were ready on that one.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Was it 93?

• 10:04Jocko Willink?

  This was in or this was in 94.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Okay, 94.

• 10:07Jocko Willink?

  So I forget what had happened, but there was, you know, something was going on in Somalia and.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  This is after we had pulled out.

• 10:13Jocko Willink?

  It was, yeah.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Or maybe we were in the process.

• 10:16Jocko Willink?

  I think we were in the process, but whatever had spun up, it spun up. And it's it's actually surprising. If you would have asked me this pre 911, I would have told you the entire, the entire enemy order of battle. I would have known everything and it just because that was one time.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:33Jocko Willink?

  My whole and now I can't even, I literally can't even remember right now what was happening. You know, and if it wasn't for Rwanda being this massive genocide, I probably wouldn't remember that either because we were spun up to go on that one and we didn't go and do anything.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  And you are just spending that decade just sharpening the edge. And then Tuesday morning, 9:30 or so in the morning, I guess it was, I was on the East Coast. I was actually just over by Arlington at the time when it happened. It would have been early in the morning here, but you get up at 4:30. So you would have been aware. 9/11 happens and not only are we going to war, but you are being fed an enemy that. It's not a lot of ambiguity here. This guy's flying planes into civilian buildings. Um, you're not being asked to go invade Vietnam for maybe a reason that half the country doesn't understand. This is a, this is a bad guy. And you're.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  What's your rank at this point? What are you in 2001?

• 11:32Jocko Willink?

  In 2001, I'm a lieutenant junior grade. So I had been commissioned. I got commissioned in 1998. I did a tour at SEAL Team Two and at SEAL Team Two, I promoted from Ensign to Lieutenant Junior Grade. And I promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade. It was like the day I left. So I was, I was only at SEAL Team Two for two years. And then Lieutenant Junior Grade and then they, the Navy sent me to college. I hadn't been to college yet. And then while I was in college, I automatically made Lieutenant. But I hadn't made Lieutenant yet. So yeah, I was a Lieutenant Junior Grade going to college.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  And so you're, nine 11 happens and you're a SEAL officer and you're ready to roll. You've been sharpening the edge for 10 years almost, or I guess it would have been about 10 years at that point. And do you have in your head the first Gulf War a little bit like this thing's going to be over before I get out of school?

• 12:29Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely worried, absolutely scared that I'm going to miss it. I called the officer, D Taylor, who was a friend of mine, who I said, hey, you know, sir, pull me out of college. Cause I was in college and I still had two more years of college left. Like it was, I was graduating in 2003. And I said, and this is a nightmare for me. This is a nightmare.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  You don't want to be one of the SEALs who didn't, who doesn't have any combat when everybody else goes.

• 12:55Jocko Willink?

  It's a nightmare. And so I called this, the SEAL D Taylor, who was, who was a friend of mine. I had worked for him. He was a great guy. And I said, sir, you know, please just get me out of school. I'll get my degree online. I have no reason to be here. I can go. I, you know, I'm ready. And he said, and I.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  This was in Afghanistan or when Iraq was coming up?

• 13:17Jocko Willink?

  This was like September 12th.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Right, right. Okay. So you want to go to Afghanistan or wherever.

• 13:21Jocko Willink?

  Wherever we're going, I'm, I'm in. Like you, you could have told me we were invading. Didn't matter. You could have told me we were invading.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Sorry, Denmark.

• 13:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Denmark, whatever. Bring it. I'm, I'm ready to rock and roll. And.

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  Which is interesting because I'm saying these remarks like about how excited and fired up and motivated and dumb I was and that's why we have leadership, you know? That's why we have leadership. We have leadership and that's why I became a leader. And as a leader, like that's what makes the military work. You've got guys that are ready to chomping at the bit, right? And sometimes you guys got people that aren't chomping at the bit. And what you have to do as leaders, you have to find the balance. You have to get people, if they're not chomping at the bit, you gotta push them. If they're chomping at the bit, you gotta pull in the reins, you know? And I'm gonna tell you right now, it's much easier to have guys that you have to pull in the reins on.

• 14:16Jocko Willink?

  And I almost always, I almost always produced guys that I had to pull the reins on. I reinforced behavior that was aggressive. That's what I did. So all I had to do is pull the reins because that's a much easier job. It's a much easier job. So that's the way I set myself up. That's the, that's the culture that I produced. If you worked for me, I was pulling the reins on you. And people that, people that needed to be pushed, they weren't really front runners for me and they probably would find themselves in different situations. So what I'm saying, it's interesting, you know, and I'm telling you like, look, I would have invaded Denmark. If they put the target on Denmark, I will go, you know? We're joking about that, but that's what you have to think about.

• 15:01Jocko Willink?

  You know, when you're in a leadership position, that's what you've got. And especially pre 9/11, this early phase of the war, everybody was worried. And so this is, this is the interesting, so I called my detail and said, hey, boss, please send me to a team. I'll go to any team, I'll take any job. And he says to me, Jaco, this war is gonna last a long time. And I didn't believe him and I don't even know if he believed himself. Because all the lessons that you, you know, that you talked about,

• 15:30Jocko Willink?

  that we learned unfortunately, hey, we can kick their ass really quickly. They're not, they're not a formidable enemy, blah, blah, blah. I, I believe that and I'm sure he must have had some sense of that. Maybe his sense was that this was gonna be a broader, longer kind of global, low intensity conflict and there would be plenty of time for me to do an operation here or an operation there. Because back in those days, I spent most of my career training for an operation. Like if you were lucky, you did a singular, real mission. Like, like I would have done in Somalia, like I would have done in Rwanda, had they given us the go.

• 16:11Jocko Willink?

  One mission and I would have been totally happy. And so I think in his mind, now that I'm reflecting on it, he was probably thinking, hey, this is gonna be a long global war. It'll last a long time. We'll be striking targets for the next 20 years. Or that probably the next, next three or four years, we'll be striking these kind of terrorist targets around the world. That's probably what he was thinking. The other interesting thing about this is, is I was talking to him, him actually, I saw him and his wife a few months ago, several months ago, actually. And I was talking about, hey, I remember when I called you after September 11th and he said, he said, yeah, everyone called me. So, so the reality is, yeah, Jaco was fired up.

• 16:56Jocko Willink?

  So was every other SEAL that wasn't at a SEAL team was calling, trying to get to a SEAL team. Well, 97% of the SEALs that weren't at a SEAL team, or maybe 90% were, that they wanted to go, they wanted to go get in there.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  SEALs had to rework their mission, I imagine. I mean, you guys are, you go to Afghanistan, you're doing mountain warfare, maybe doing some of the higher risk missions, but semi-conventional missions a lot of the time, right?

• 17:22Jocko Willink?

  Well, you want to talk about reworking your mission. I had never done any type of vehicle assault until about maybe a month before we left for Iraq. The only time we would use vehicles, we would call them helo trucks because it was to simulate helicopter. Because you can't always get helicopters for your training evolutions. So we would get in the back of a, you know, a six ton or whatever, and, or a six by, and, and drive up to a target area and get out and pretend we just got out of a helicopter. We didn't look at it.

• 18:04Jocko Willink?

  It never even made sense to us that that was like a viable combat system, a Humvee. And it's actually kind of crazy because it's not just, I can tell you right now and any, any SEAL that says anything different would be full of shit, you know, there was, we had these, this, this uh, vehicle called a DPV, a desert patrol vehicle, which was like a

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Those old dune buggies?

• 18:29Jocko Willink?

  It was a dune buggy looking thing and like that was kind of a thing, but it was almost like that was this little specialized thing where if you were going to do a reconnaissance in the desert, very specific, you might use one of those. There was no way we were thinking, hey, a SEAL assault force rolling down, you know, downtown Baghdad in vehicles. We just didn't think of it. We just didn't think of it. And really our urban combat, combat, um, I would say our urban, our assessment of urban combat, not our assessment, but our, our idea that we would be engaged in these like, hey, we're going to be in urban, which is totally ignorant. If you think

• 19:12Jocko Willink?

  about it, it's just totally ignorant. I mean, we would go out and train, let me put it this way, we'd go out and train for a month in the desert. We'd go train for a month in the jungle. We'd train for three weeks in the mountains. We'd go for a week in the urban environment. Like we just didn't put it together.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Even the Somalia experience in 93 didn't really change that at all?

• 19:32Jocko Willink?

  Not as much as it should have. Not as much as it should have. It should have been a eye opener. But you know, what, you know what that was? That was one mission. So it was plenty of, you know, just like I said, you're training for one mission. That was one mission. And it's like, oh, well, that kind of mission probably won't happen again. That was a little, little chance encounter. It happened to be in a city, you know, where we're, we are going to be ready for these desert patrols, foot patrols. So our

• 20:06Jocko Willink?

  Our attitude had to shift very, very quickly and it did. And, and one of the best things about the SEAL teams is one of our strengths, one of our weaknesses is that we don't have doctrine, or we didn't. We have doctrine now. We didn't have doctrine. And so when we would do, when we would do one of these desert raids on a desert target in training, no one would tell us exactly how to do it. We kind of figured stuff out and it got passed down through oral history. And so we, we didn't have a lot of doctrine and we, therefore, when missions changed for us, we could, we, we still knew how to figure things out. That was the, that was the biggest strength we had was we could be in a situation

• 20:50Jocko Willink?

  and go, okay, here's, here's the adjustments we need to make. How do we make these adjustments? And we could make them.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  You, and it seems like you guys probably had the expectation of being given a task and you've got to figure out how to go accomplish that task rather than kind of being told, you're part of the war and you're going to be handed some extra high risk, you know, high value missions and so forth, but you're just part of the war. And, um, you know, your detailer told you to hang on that you'd be getting some action. Little did you know that, uh, the civilians up top at the DOD and everywhere else were cooking something up for you.

• 21:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Cause we, and I guess, I guess it became very evident very quickly that we were going to go into Afghanistan. And so that kicked off and that, that kicked off very, very quickly.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:46Jocko Willink?

  You know, very, very quickly. And I think we had, we had troops in there by October.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  October. Yeah. Pretty remarkable how quickly we were able to get people in there with the Northern Alliance and start working on that.

• 21:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  But it was the same day that the planes at the towers in the Pentagon, uh, that people started talking about Iraq in the Defense Department and in the White House. Uh, Paul Wolfowitz and what Rumsfeld, they were the ones pushing it early. And it was that day they started talking about, is there a way to connect Iraq with this? They had their own reasons that we talked about in the last episode for wanting that guy out of there. There probably weren't a lot of ways to connect Saddam Hussein.

• 22:22Jocko Willink?

  So you're kind of, you're kind of implying that they're looking to make a connection, almost, you're almost implying that it was in a, in a disingenuous way?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  I think that-

• 22:35Jocko Willink?

  Or let me ask you, are you implying that it was a disingenuous way?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  I think that some of the civilians at the high level, specifically Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, Cheney to a degree, that they believed there were good reasons to take out Saddam Hussein and go in there and do this. And that this provided them an opportunity to do it. Yeah, I do think that.

• 22:56Jocko Willink?

  So, so I would agree. Okay, now that you've kind of taken, taken that little nuanced adjustment, for me, I would, I would say their assessment was, what we want is greater stability and we want better security and we don't want any of these areas where these kind of people can fester and grow. We're here, we're looking at Afghanistan, let's look at Iraq too. You know, and now, now you, you, you take that attitude and then you overlay that on top of, hey, this is the asshole that, you know, did all these things in the Gulf War, this is the guy that tried to kill my dad. Like all these things, you overlay that and now I, you know, I, I get it.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Well, what did we learn from what happened in Afghanistan? We, we learned that you can't have big swaths of territory that aren't under the firm control of states, right? Because there's nobody to hold responsible for what goes on there. And they become these festering sores. Where do we have problems? Somalia, Afghanistan, Mexico in a different way, you know, they don't so much, you know, not international terror or anything, but there's large swaths of groups that are pretty nasty down there controlling large swaths of territory. And we kind of decided that that's not acceptable anymore, to just have these areas that are not really under anybody's control, or even worse, are a state that is willing to ally itself with.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Terrorists. I think they made some tenuous and disingenuous connections to Saddam Hussein. I do think that, and I think that there's been people from the CIA and other places who've come out and said that there were some people in the administration who, you know, we would tell them, here's one side of the story, but here's the other side of the story, and they would just ignore the other side of the story.

• 24:48Jocko Willink?

  And part of that is just like, you know, confirmation biases and the whole nine yards. And, and, and, and that, yes, this is where, you know, we started touching on this subject earlier. This is where, as a leader, as a decision maker, you, you, you have to take the time and do the, do the mental homework to really and truly try and understand what the other side of the argument is. And, you know, you talked about this when you came on my podcast, you talked about the fact that you, when you, when you put the podcast together, you want to, your, your kind of bar that you're trying to set for yourself is that you can empathize with both sides of an argument. And that is a very

• 25:31Jocko Willink?

  important tool to have as a leader, to not just look at the other side of the argument and say, they're wrong, they don't get it, they don't make any sense. That, that is not the right thing to do. And in fact, whenever, you know, as a leader, when you present to me a plan, or when I, when you come to me and you say, hey, here's how I want to solve this problem, or here's what I think about this, and I have a different opinion, my immediate reaction is, okay, how is he right? That's my, my, my immediate reaction isn't, isn't how is Daryl wrong? My immediate reaction is, how is he right? How is he seeing this? How can I be wrong? That's my immediate reaction. So when we, yeah, when I hear reports like that, that, that the attitude is, here's what we think, you come in here with your

• 26:12Jocko Willink?

  opinion, and I'm just going to disregard it because I know better? That's an awful, it's arrogance, it's ego, and it'll drive to bad decision making.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that there were people in the civilian power structure who, you know, they were at mid and junior levels in those same, in the same power structure, the DOD and other places during the first Gulf War. They felt a lot of guilt over the fact that we had told the Shia and the Kurds, encouraged them to rise up, and then stood aside while Saddam butchered them. And they felt that we, that we besmirched ourselves a little bit by doing that, and that we should have taken that guy out then.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  What I resent about the way that they handled it early on was I feel like I think that they didn't trust the American people enough to give them the story straight. Rather than laying everything out and saying, "Look, here's the strategic situation. Here's why we can't let this guy stay here anymore. Here's the, you know, for regional stability reasons, for..."

• 27:20Jocko Willink?

  Humanitarian reasons.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Humanitarian reasons. Just lay it all out and let the American people make a decision about that. Instead, they kind of gambled on a few things. Now, I'll give them, like, by all accounts, they all believed that he had stockpiles of WMD everywhere, right? And if that was the case, he's a guy who's perfectly willing to use those in irrational, wildly irrational ways. So if he had them, that's a very dangerous thing. By all accounts, these people weren't lying about that. You know, they weren't making it up. They expected to find them. They were surprised when we didn't find them everywhere. I wish that they had not rolled the dice on making that the frontline of their argument.

• 28:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. And, you know, this is, this comes up all the time. You've got to tell people the truth about what's happening. And when you tell people the truth about what's happening, then that, that will have the ultimate positive result. Now, and to take that a little bit further, when you are telling people the truth, that means you also tell them the truth about things that you don't know 100%. Because when you say, "Listen, we really think, well, this is going to keep, this is going to help stability. We can't have these areas where Al Qaeda could train. If they get pushed out of Afghanistan, they can easily come here. We can't allow that to happen. This is an unstable region, by the way.

• 28:44Jocko Willink?

  And also, there's a strong possibility that there could be weapons of mass destruction there." So, do we know any of these things 100%? No, of course not. This is what we're thinking. And when, instead, when you go out there on a limb and you, you know, it's beyond just putting your, all your eggs in one basket, because that's one problem, but then the problem was the level of certitude that they gave was...

• 29:08Jocko Willink?

  Because they were trying to sell it.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:11Jocko Willink?

  It came across with a lot of certitude. And you know, look, man, when you look at those overhead pictures and you see, you see Condoleezza Rice and, and General Powell, these, you know, highly respected people in the United Nations and the United Nations are all nodding their head in agreement. Hey, man, that's, and like we, we talked about earlier, this is a, this is coming from people in Saddam's own people that are saying, yes.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:39Jocko Willink?

  Of course he has these things. Yes. Yes, he has them. Right? Even with all that, you gotta give yourself an out as a leader. And the way you give yourself an out as a leader is by not being so egotistical and arrogant that you know something 100%. You know how many things I know 100%? Like, almost nothing. There's almost nothing that I know 100%. And I will never, like, very rarely will you catch me saying, this is the fact. I'm just not gonna say that. You don't have an out. And you lose trust and confidence with people when you, when you express yourself that way. So, I always joke with people. I say, if I ever tell you something like 100%, if I ever say,

• 30:24Jocko Willink?

  Daryl, this is what you need to do 100%, I'm telling you this. Then you should probably do it.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:30Jocko Willink?

  Because I will not, you, you probably likely will never hear me say anything like that. So, those are some mistakes that I, I think, compound the, the mistake that you're talking about.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  There was an element within some of the brass up in the civilian leadership, um, who it, you know, these, this is, this is from stories that have come out since then, as people have reported it, including people on the inside, that the decision that we were going after Iraq, it wasn't a debate. What are we gonna do? We got hit on nine eleven. We gotta do something about Afghanistan. Where else are our threats? That there were some people in there in powerful places. Who made the decision, we're going into Iraq and we're gonna figure out how to tie this thing in and sell it.

• 31:16Jocko Willink?

  What's that book by, what is it? Bob Woodward?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Woodward's got one and uh, there's a good one.

• 31:23Jocko Willink?

  I, the, I'm.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  My favorite one on the early period up until about oh five is Fiasco by Tom Ricks.

• 31:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, see, I'm, I should have reviewed because, you know, I'm, I'm trying to think through these things and I haven't thought about them for a long, long, long time.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Neither have I.

• 31:35Jocko Willink?

  You know, so I'm trying to, I'm trying to think through, you know, what, what, like, like these players, because there certainly were players and.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  A lot of them were there in the first Gulf War and we talked about before, uh, you know, one of the, one of the things that happened after the Gulf War is the military people. Uh, the generals in the first Gulf War, including General Powell, who's now the Secretary of State, who's now quite skeptical of the idea of going into Iraq. He agrees to go to the UN and provide his, lend his credibility to the, to, to, to the salesmanship, but um. He was worried about it and he was, he was counseling caution. Well, he was doing that in the first Gulf War too. He, you know, the generals at the time were saying, we want six carrier strike groups. We want overwhelming force because they were Vietnam guys and they didn't want to get bogged down into a quagmire.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  And a lot of the civilians who were there at the time in the Defense Department and the rest of the, the power structure were there in the Bush administration in oh three. And they're hearing the same thing again from the military. A lot of the military brass is like, wait a second here. You want to do what? They're a little more hesitant. And the civilians, Wolfowitz and them are like, yeah, yeah, okay. We've heard this before. We just, this is just, this is just how you guys are apparently. And since then, they had watched us just take apart the Iraqis in the first, in, in the, in the Gulf War. Use basically air power and some, you know, and some patrols in Kosovo to achieve a pretty, you know, a pretty good result there.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  And so now, and now we're in Afghanistan and that hasn't dragged on for nineteen years yet. We're just a couple of years into that one. And so we're thinking, you know, I think there were some people who were a little bit blasé about it because they had the idea that at this point, there's nothing that the American military can't do.

• 33:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  That there's just nothing it can't do.

• 33:20Jocko Willink?

  When, uh, when the Kosovo thing was happening, it kicked off and we, and I was at SEAL Team Two at the time. And we started dropping bombs and it like hit the, I forget the timing of it, but the timing of it

• 33:35Jocko Willink?

  played out that it had kind of kicked off and maybe it, you know, in the afternoon or something and overnight, you know, we wake up in the morning and there's the bombs being dropped and we show up to work and at SEAL Team Two, we have quarters and we're, so we're all standing there and, and you know, there's a couple of basic announcements that come out, you know, and then I'm not kidding, like one of the admin girls gets up and is like, hey, we're having the potluck dinner on whatever. So it's going to start at this time, you know, families are invited or whatever. And then one of my buddies, um, says something along the lines of, and it was kind of like one of those moments where, you know, the young, I think he was in E six at the time, but you know, barks out,

• 34:18Jocko Willink?

  hey, everyone, potluck dinner aside, it's, we should, we're at war right now, you know? And I was kind of, I always laughed about that because even that, you know, we started dropping these bombs and everything, it was really, really distant. And, and again, this is coming from me all amped up, hoping to go to war, praying for war, blah, blah, blah. And the war, a little war started and everyone's kind of like, ah, whatever, you know, we're going to drop some bombs, you know, uh, it's, it seems so regional and so small and, and potluck dinner aside, you know, we're at war right now. And what was it? Eighty-six day bombing campaign. It was some.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, about that.

• 34:56Jocko Willink?

  Some certain number of days, very, very effective bombing. And, you know, the first time that we kind of looked around and said, Hey, maybe we don't need to put boots on the ground to to win, which no one ever said that. And even after that, you know, going into the going into Iraq, it was like, oh, you're gonna have to put boots on the ground. Still would hear that. But I'm sure some people are going, really?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  And even the ground forces that the coalition did commit in Kosovo, they were just driving around, showing presence. You know, I, um, one of my, uh, one of my friends was in the army, said that some, some of the people took calling it dabbing, driving around. Uh, and, and, yeah, so you get up to 2003, and, um, we're going into Iraq. That decision's been made around the summer of 2002. It's a matter of selling it to the people, selling it to which allies of ours we could. Um, we get into early 2003, and there are global protests, largest protests in history, as far as I know, 30 million

• 36:04Speaker 01

  people, um, participated, massive ones, six, eight million people on February 15th or so, much of which, by the way, was, you know, you would think something like that would be a global event. I think most people just, unless they were participating, or, you know, knew somebody who knew somebody, they know where like there were some protests, but the idea that there were these giant protests, I think most people, that passed right by a lot of people.

• 36:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't even remember anything about that. Um, I kind, I kind of remember it. I remember, you know, it was a three minute news story somewhere. That's about it.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  And we end up going into Iraq, largely because this is what Rumsfeld wanted to do.

• 36:41Jocko Willink?

  Let me, let me just jump in real quick. Yeah. Cause I was gonna bring this to present day, what's happening, something happened right now for COVID virus. What you just said, right? This is very standard when a war scenario starts to unfold, that you are going to get.

• 37:00Jocko Willink?

  One half roughly of the population even after September 11th, you know, okay, what 80% of the population after 9/11 said Afghanistan, they had something to do with it, cool, go get them. By the time we fast forward two years, now we're looking at Iraq and you got at least half the population going, I don't know. And what's interesting about what's unfolding right now is March, it is March 25th, 2020, we're like in the in the middle of this COVID virus thing, the country shut down, you know, not allowed to go out of our houses in California, New York is, you know, under serious pressure.

• 37:43Jocko Willink?

  So the whole country, the economy is at a standstill. That's where we're at right now. Well, when you go to war with Iraq, where you go to war with Afghanistan, or you go to war with anybody, there's a whole group of Americans that raise their hand and say no. And it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what the, what the, what the cause is, you know, even when we were going to take out ISIS. A lot of it just has to do with their own self conception. War is just never good. And so you get some level of resistance against the government, right? There's some level of public outcry against the governmental decisions. And what's

• 38:22Jocko Willink?

  been interesting about this, and I think it's turning a corner right now, is this virus war, there's no resistance. There's no, there's like no, and I'm starting to see it now, but basically everything, it's total war. If we need to shut down the government, if we need to shut down the economy, it doesn't matter. This is all bad. And look, I don't, whether that's the right decision or not, we, I don't know yet. But I do know this, there's almost no resistance. And case in point, you have both Democrats and Republicans during the most divisive time we've had in a long time in America. I mean, I think

• 39:05Jocko Willink?

  you got to go to Vietnam to have this much divisiveness between, and even in Vietnam, like if you talk to Okay, the civilian populace that was was more divisive than the government was. Would you agree with that statement?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:21Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, in this, in the city, in New York City, you had construction workers and you had hippies. And they were more, they were further apart than the Republicans and Democrats were at the time.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:34Jocko Willink?

  So, so, but right now, it's the opposite, actually. Most Americans are closer together. It's the government officials, it's the Republicans and Democrats that are so, so separated.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 39:47Jocko Willink?

  Until you throw this war against a virus, and then all of a sudden, it's all hands on deck. We're all moving in the same direction. Now, there's been some disruption now because this bill came through and the Democrats, you know, the Republicans put forth the bill, Democrats came and added a bunch of, a bunch of things that they want to it. And so we've got a dispute going on now. But broadly, all I'm saying is, we have a situation right now where there's no, there's very, much, much, much less resistance than the government is used to.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  It was kind of shocking how rapidly we decided we were okay with that. And again, I'm not saying it's not the right thing to do. I don't know. I'm not that guy. I'm not the expert on how to handle an epidemic. But if you would have asked me a couple of months ago, what would it take for whole states to just accept being told to stay in their homes for an indefinite period of time? I would have said millions of people would have to be dying in the streets. Otherwise, no way we would, we would accept that. But it kind of goes to show you, for, for as much as we like to complain when pollsters call us up and ask you like, what do you think of the government? What do you think of the media and all these other institutions? And we say, ah, I hate them, 10%, you know, 5% approval rating.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  That, I think this kind of shows like the ease with which we handed over pretty authoritarian powers to the government because the media told us there was something out there that was scary. And I'm not saying it's not scary, but that was the information we had. Is that a couple hundred people had died. Shows that we actually do have a little more faith in our institutions than we like to pretend sometimes, I think.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  I think the other thing that made this a little bit of a perfect storm is you had a lot, not only did you have alignment between the people and the government, you had alignment between the two political parties, and then you had this high level of alignment between. Social media and the real media, you know, instead of there being, you know,

• 41:43Jocko Willink?

  you know, you instead of finding these extreme views, hey, covid's nothing. Like after, you know, a couple of weeks ago, you weren't really allowed to say that, you know, because early on, there's people going, it's just a flu. Who's gonna get it? I don't care. That got shut down real quick. And all of a sudden, you had the media, the bigs, the big media, and the social media all aligned with this is the plague and we better get it under control.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  It was interesting to see how the social media kind of mob mentality that is usually mobilized for political correctness issues and things, very quickly, those same networks got mobilized for this.

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  It was interesting to see how that works. And I don't know if maybe that's the first time that it's jumped, you know, kind of jumped issues like that.

• 42:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's crazy to watch.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:34Jocko Willink?

  It's crazy to watch. So in this situation, going into Iraq, um, yeah, we had, we had resistance from the people against the government move, not, you know, obviously, it wasn't unified resistance. There was a lot of Americans that like, yeah, cool.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  In March 2003, it was either, it was either Pew or Gallup, the biggest poll that was run at the time in March 2003, 74% of Americans supported the war. And that's why you'll find, you will not find anybody who was of, of age at that time. You say, did you support the war in 2003? No. It's like funny, that's funny, because according to the polls, three out of every four people did, but I cannot find anybody who admit to it now.

• 43:13Jocko Willink?

  Well, you talked about the generals and the politicians learning bad lessons from the first Gulf War. So did all of America. And all of America said, you know what? Let's go over there and kick some ass.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  And we, we took the lesson and our, and our leaders indulged this from Kosovo in the first Gulf War, that war is primarily about liberation and freedom and getting rid of tyranny. And that's what war is primarily about. And war is not primarily about those things. War is about suffering and destruction and death. And we let ourselves forget that because of the 90s, because of the way things went in the 90s. And, um, you know, we, we let ourselves forget that to our detriment, because if we would have gone into the war with clearer eyes. You know, we would have been more prepared for the, you know, for the shock of the violence when it hit us.

• 44:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and if you go into war thinking the, the, the thing that I always say is you gotta go into war with the, the will. And it's two wills wrapped up in that, the will to kill and the will to die. And if you don't, if you think you're gonna go into war and you think you're not gonna kill people. And by kill people, I mean, you're gonna kill civilians, you're gonna kill kids, there's gonna be, you know, babies murder or killed by errant bombs and errant machine gun fire. And there's gonna be some of your soldiers are gonna lose their minds and do some horrible things like that's gonna happen. That's gonna happen. So if you don't think that's gonna happen, you're wrong. You're wrong.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Children died on that first night of bombing.

• 44:47Jocko Willink?

  You are, you are wrong if you think that. And if you think you can get in and out without taking any casualties on your side. If you think you're not gonna be putting American flags over, over caskets, you're wrong. And so, yes, I totally agree that when you come off of you, and it's actually a little escalation in the, in the, uh, in the niceness of war, cuz you go from the Gulf War. We took some, we took some casualties in the Gulf War, a lot of more friendly fire, but you know, there was, there was Americans killed. But then you go from that to Kosovo and now you're like, wait a second. We, you, you track the, you track the, uh, trajectory from Vietnam to the Gulf War. And now you're in Kosovo where, uh, hey, we, we can pull this off.

• 45:32Jocko Willink?

  And I guarantee there were people thinking, you know what, okay, we, maybe, maybe some people will kill, you know, but we're gonna be alright.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  And there was the provide comfort, uh, example where we kind of, you know, we pushed the Iraqi forces back and made room for the Kurds. And the Kurds moved in and they, you know, they created our bill as it is right now, which is a pretty nice place to be relatively speaking. And so we, we had this idea that all you gotta do is get rid of some of the bad people, break down the bad power structures, the oppressive power structures. You know, there's a, I got, I love trolling my libertarian friends. And, uh, I told them that, you know, there was a libertarian streak. In the Iraq war planners and they say, "Well, what do you mean, we're against war?" "Yeah, yeah, you're against war, that's fine." But the impulse, the idea that all we have to do is go in there and get rid of Saddam's regime, and then since that's not there, freedom will break out.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Everything will just sort of be, you know, it'll just take over. They'll become Vermont Democrats just overnight. And that's not how it works. Freedom is something that exists in a hothouse environment, you know, where order is enforced and security is provided. And, you know, I'm always shocked. I don't know why I would be. I wasn't in a position to have to make these kind of calls back then, obviously. And I hate, you know, I always refrain from like armchair generalship, and I can't stand people who do that kind of thing. I get a little resentful and frustrated where I see civilians making decisions that seem motivated by politics.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  But it seems like across the board, nobody really expected there to be an insurgency. The civilians didn't expect it. Most of the generals didn't expect it. Some did. Some had something to say about it, but they weren't in a position to, you know, to really have their voices heard. And so, we had military leaders who, even then, even still, not expecting a full-blown insurgency, were asking for 300,000 or 400,000 troops to secure the country. And they were told, "We don't need that many." You know, they felt that the war would be politically more difficult to sell if we had to tell people we're sending, you know, 300,000 or 400,000 troops over there.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  And so, we end up going in with 120, 130, I think, something like that. And the first part of it, it goes the way the first Gulf War went, right? The US military does what it does.

• 48:02Jocko Willink?

  There's one thing, just before we get too far beyond this, you know, when you talk about what you think's gonna happen is you create a, create an opportunity for freedom and freedom's gonna break out. That's what's gonna happen. What I think happens is you have to establish an environment for freedom, and then it's going to take a number of generations.

• 48:32Jocko Willink?

  For people to be able to own that freedom and not and have it flourish. Because, you know, when you've had generations, so 2003, what we're talking about 20, almost 25 years under this brutal regime, you got, you got people that are absolutely conditioned for, you know, to be, to be, to, to fall under the, the orders of violence. That's what they're conditioned for. And, and for them, it's like, okay, I'm on board with whatever you want to do, boss, you know? Yeah, you know, I, I recently had a Rose Schindler on, on my podcast.

• 49:15Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, she was in Auschwitz, an Auschwitz survivor. And there was just complete compliance by the Jews. And if they got told, hey, you know, go put your family in the oven, you go put your family in the oven because the alternative was instant death. And, and so how long does it take to first, when you do that to generation upon generation, generation upon generation, they're not, they don't even know what to do when you give them freedom. So what you have to do is you have to give them a taste, you have to start, you have to, you have to get them, you have to get them addicted to freedom, right? You have to let, you have to protect it for them, you have to feed it to them, you have to let them eat it, you have to let them grow accustomed to the taste, you have to let them get that taste and, and start

• 50:00Jocko Willink?

  to love that taste so much. And that won't happen with the first generation, it's just not going to happen because they still won't trust it. You have to go to the second generation where those kids are raised like, oh, I can do what I want and I won't have my tongue cut out.

• 50:16Jocko Willink?

  And then maybe the third generation where you've got people that are like, hey, you're not going to take my freedom from me. That, that's what I think. I think it takes that kind of, that kind of, of, of nurturing of the environment of freedom, freedom and getting people conditioned to understand that human beings, as a human being, it's a right that you have. They don't have that attitude. Their attitude isn't, I have a right to freedom. That's not the attitude. And when you give them a glimpse of it like, hey, like, like when you see the troops that pushed up into Baghdad initially, it was like, they're waving American flags. It's like, okay. And, and that's why it's there, like the, the, the, the seed is there. And you know, you recently saw that in some of the protests in Hong Kong and China where,

• 51:00Jocko Willink?

  like you, there, these people are getting this from somewhere. Well, in Hong Kong, it's pretty obvious where they're getting it from. They, they lived as free people for many, many years, but, so they still have some of that. But there's a seed that exists like in, in the mind. But it's been so buried by, by fear that you have to do something that's a long-term plan. And that's why, you know, that's why when you look at, you know, when you look at Germany and you look at Japan and you look post-World War II, it was like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna,

• 51:30Jocko Willink?

  I don't even know if you can say this, we're gonna impose freedom on you for an extended period of time until that's what you want. Because human beings do, they are, they do want freedom. But sometimes it's just been buried and abused and beat down so hard that the, that it's not worth it to them. And they don't understand it.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  And I think one of the prerequisites to living in a free society is you have to have a population that trusts each other. You know, you had had Sunni, the Sunni minority in control in Iraq for a long time. Uh, and the, the Mashia majority and the Kurds had been abused under that system, under Saddam for a long time. And now you've got to convince the Shiites who have the votes now under democracy to just take over the government. You gotta convince them not to take revenge on the Sunnis. You gotta teach them why it's a good idea to allow the Sunnis into the government at all, after everything that they've been through. You've got to convince the Sunnis to buy into a government that's now going to be led primarily by Shiites.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Um, and you, and you gotta, that takes generations.

• 52:41Jocko Willink?

  Generations.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  You know?

• 52:42Jocko Willink?

  It's generations.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  And, and in order to do it, um, you know, the first and foremost thing you have to be able to do is you gotta provide security in the place. You have to be able to let everybody know. That, look, you don't have to go after the Sunnis. Sunnis, you don't have to worry about the Shiites coming after you because daddy's here.

• 53:01Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And, um, you know, when we decided to go in light and then reinforce that decision by canceling the first cavalry's deployment, uh, pulling the third ID back when we replaced them with the first armored division, um, for what I believe, I mean, and you know, people can debate about this and they do and they will for a long time, for what I think were political reasons, you know, they didn't, they, they didn't, they'd been telling everybody that

• 53:28Jocko Willink?

  What about those decisions? When, when you're talking about, what about those?

• 53:32Speaker 01

  So, the military all along had wanted more troops. They said, we need more people to secure this country. Um, eventually, General Franks, CENTCOM general, uh, who was commander of Iraqi forces, of our, of our forces in Iraq at the time, he finally bought in and he got his subordinate generals to buy in, um, to the lower amount, under the assumption that they would be reinforced once we knew that Saddam wasn't going to use chemical weapons on us and things like that, they were going to be reinforced and that we were going to have the Iraqi military and police available to, for SASSO operations. And just none of those things ended up happening, right? You get up into April, um, I think, yeah, and so, and we go in in March 2003.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Well, actually, let's back up a little bit. Where, where are you? When did you get out of college?

• 54:22Jocko Willink?

  So, I graduated college in the spring.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Of oh three?

• 54:25Jocko Willink?

  Of oh three.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  And you get a platoon.

• 54:27Jocko Willink?

  This is, again, why my life has been just awesome. I've been so blessed. I, I showed up, when I asked for orders to a SEAL team, the guy that I asked for orders to, when he, the guy that told me, you wait. When he did give me orders, he gave me orders to the next deploying SEAL team, right? He gave me orders to the next deploying SEAL team. That's a miracle, right? That's, that's, it's a miracle. It's also relationships. It's like, also, like, you know, I worked hard when I worked for that guy. I worked hard and he, he, he trusted me, you know, and he took care of me. He sent me to the next deploying SEAL Team. So it is, I graduate in the spring.

• 55:09Jocko Willink?

  So June, July, August, September, set for a, set for a September deployment. So I go to SEAL Team Seven, SEAL Team Five is on deployment. They got one platoon in Iraq. SEAL Team Five is on deployment. They're coming home in September and SEAL Team Seven is replacing them. And by the way, not all SEAL Team Seven, just a couple platoons are, actually one platoon is scheduled to go to Iraq.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Did you know these guys yet?

• 55:35Jocko Willink?

  Who?

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Uh, your platoon, like, did you, I know it's a small world.

• 55:39Jocko Willink?

  It's a small world. Here's the, here's the, the really, um, lucky things. The SEAL Team Seven commanding officer was my executive officer when I was at SEAL Team Two. So again, I knew him, I had a great relationship with him. We got along great, he's a great guy.

• 56:00Jocko Willink?

  And so I show up at SEAL Team Seven in the spring, 2003. Their workup, their pre-deployment workup cycle for civilians out there, you know, you, you train to deploy. And the, the deployment training ends long before you go on deployment. It'll end six months before. And then you spend six months doing some kind of fine tweaking. You do a, you do what's called, what we used to do, we don't do it anymore, but you do like an operational readiness exercise, a big exercise to prove that you're good to go. And then you do some additional sort of theater-based training, like, okay, we know we're going to this area. We'll do some focus training on that. So that the main bulk of the workup was done, it was over.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  By the time you got there.

• 56:44Jocko Willink?

  When I showed up. So I show up and I'm there for a matter of days. And I'm walking and actually SEAL Team Seven had just been commissioned at the beginning of that workup cycle. So SEAL Team Seven's brand new, we don't even have a building yet. So we're wa, I'm walking outside, you know, we, we're, we're, we're kind of thrown into some ad hoc buildings. And so I show up and the commanding officer, like I said, is a guy that I work for. And so he knew me and, and, and you know, when you work with someone, you know them, you trust them and I had a great relationship with them and. I'm walking down the hallway, so I check in, and I'm done with my check in and

• 57:24Jocko Willink?

  and there's one, one platoon is slated to go to war.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  That's you.

• 57:29Jocko Willink?

  No, I'm not even in a platoon.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Oh, this is before that?

• 57:32Jocko Willink?

  I'm not even in a platoon.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 57:34Jocko Willink?

  I show up to be ops, I show up to be, you know, whatever.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:38Jocko Willink?

  And I'm walking down the hallway, uh, the external part of the building, and I see the commanding officer, and I'm like, hey, what's up, sir? And he goes, Jaco, you look so angry. What are you so angry about?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  It's just my face, sir.

• 57:51Jocko Willink?

  I said, it's just my face, sir, you know that. And he goes, what can I do to make you happy? And I said, give me a one-way ticket to Iraq. And he just smiled. And I was like, well, that's interesting. And looking back, I knew, I, looking back, he knew what he was going to do. And what he did was, there was a week platoon commander. And a week after I showed up at SEAL Team Seven, he fired that platoon commander and gave me that platoon.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  How much time do you have to get to know your guys?

• 58:24Jocko Willink?

  Couple of months.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  And, uh, what kind of war do you think you're getting into at this point?

• 58:29Jocko Willink?

  I don't care.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  You're just...

• 58:32Jocko Willink?

  I, I, you know, whatever. Um, so we're starting...

• 58:35Speaker 01

  You guys got information coming back from the deploy.

• 58:36Jocko Willink?

  We're knowing what SEAL Team Five is doing, and what they're doing is dream ops for us. Direct action missions, load up Humvees. So now, now we're thinking about Humvees, load up Humvees, go out in the middle of the night, take down a target, grab a bad guy, come back, interrogate him, find out, you know, what he's doing, get more targets, go hit those targets. It's like a dream come true.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  What's the op tempo here? I mean, you're talking about nightly missions, like several times a week?

• 59:00Jocko Willink?

  They're doing, they're doing, you know, they're doing, their op tempo's high. I don't know what the specific numbers are. I would say they're probably doing two, three, four targets a week. This is, this is glory. This is awesome.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Like you said, there'd be SEALs who would spend their entire 30-year careers be Master Chiefs who would never fire a shot in anger. And these guys are taking down targets every other day.

• 59:22Jocko Willink?

  After target, after target. And, and not only that, but like I said, we, we train for a mission. A single mission would be, would be, you know, the, the highlight of my life. And here's guys doing three, four, five, six missions.

• 59:36Jocko Willink?

  So...

• 59:38Jocko Willink?

  I get put in this platoon. And I remember as soon as I took over the platoon. We had a training mission that night. Was it that night? Yes, it was that night. And when I took over the platoon, actually, the, um, the, the commanding officer called me. The off going, the guy that was about to get relieved, they called him and the platoon chief into the office, into his office, and we get in there and he goes, you know, Lieutenant so and so. Your performance is subpar and you are hereby relieved. And, uh, of, and Jaco, you are now taking over. And he says, uh, how did this go down?

• 1:00:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. And he says, you know, Lieutenant so and so, you're dismissed. That guy walks out. He says, Chief, I know you, I know, um, you know, you got a, you got a platoon of good guys. You had bad leadership. I should have done this earlier. Whatever he said, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he said, you know, Chief, you got Jaco. And so you asked me if I knew these guys, I knew that guy.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:44Jocko Willink?

  The platoon chief was a buddy of mine from team one. We kind of, one of the guys I grew up with at SEAL Team One.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  That helps.

• 1:00:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  And he had a, he had a good relationship with the guys?

• 1:00:53Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  He could kind of slide you in?

• 1:00:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, so I was excited about that. And the LPO of the sister platoon was like my best friend for, forever in the teams. So that was really solid too. Uh, the, and then the task unit, who ended up being the task unit senior chief was another like guy that I grew up with at Team One. So yeah, I had some great connections and that guy was like one of my favorite guys ever. So, so yeah, I'm pretty stoked, man. I mean, I got the commanding officer. I'm super stoked. It's just, it's awesome. It's awesome. And this is, this is, you know, this is-

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  You're glowing right now.

• 1:01:34Jocko Willink?

  Ah, man, this is why, this is why you're in the teams, right? This is why you, this is why you work hard. This is why you, this is why you take care of your teammates, right? Cause that's all this is. This is like guys that I'd known for, you know, my whole career and they're all stoked. I'm coming in. They're freaking stoked.

• 1:01:55Jocko Willink?

  So the guy, the commanding officer says, see you later to this, to this, he says, hey, you know, you're fired. And then the chief, he says, chief, you know, help with the transition. I know you've got some good guys in there. And he says, Roger that. And he goes, all right, you can, you can go. I'll talk to Jaco. And then the, the platoon chief looks at me and he goes, do you want me to tell, do you want me to tell Lieutenant so and so anything? And I said, yeah, I said, tell him to get his shit out of my desk. And like, that was that. And I, and sure enough, I, you know, he left and the commanding officer, you know, we talked for a little while. And then I went down and that guy was gone and his shit was out of my desk. And that's when I rolled in. So that night, we were

• 1:02:38Jocko Willink?

  doing a training mission. And I immediately went in there and I talked to chief and I said, hey, who's the junior guy? Who I said, who's a junior guy that like, is good to go? And he goes, this guy. And I go, he's gonna run the op tonight. And he was like, what do you mean? I go, he's, he's gonna run the op tonight. And he was like, are you sure? And I'm like, yep. So he did, you know, this young junior enlisted guy starts putting together the plan. And a couple of critical things happened. And this, this junior enlisted guy ended up being just a great friend of mine and, and very, very helpful to me. Because when you build relationships with your junior

• 1:03:20Jocko Willink?

  enlisted guys, they can tell you what's going on, blah, blah, blah. So that night, during this mission, we, during this training mission, and, and again, here we are, we're going to Iraq, or we're praying to go to Iraq. And we were slotted, there was two platoons going to CENTCOM.

• 1:03:38Jocko Willink?

  One was going to be in Bahrain, one was going to be in Iraq. We weren't sure who was who. Pretty much the other platoon, our sister platoon, and then the plan was to rotate these two platoons. And you'd spend some time in country and then, you know, then you'd go to Bahrain, then you'd switch, right? Part of that was just the fair fairy, right? Everyone wants to go to war. Hey, we're not gonna let one platoon get all the experience. So that was part of the plan. So, but still, we know we're going to Iraq. And here we are, we're going on a training mission. And it's like an over the beach pilot rescue or something, just not something we should have been focused on. So, we go, we come over the beach and

• 1:04:23Jocko Willink?

  One of the boats like capsizes and the engines flooded and it's just a disaster. And luckily for me, I had done a lot of, well, I was, you know, I'd been in the teams for a while and I'd done a lot of amphibious operations, more than normal team guy, because I had done two back to back arg platoons, meaning you know what an arg is, an amphibious ready group, working off a ship. Like back in the day, there would be one arg platoon for every six platoons that would be going on a, what we called a spec ops deployment, just going to a land based deployment. There would be one arg platoon and it was always the bad deal and no one wanted it.

• 1:05:06Jocko Willink?

  And I did two of those back to back. And the reason I did two of them back to back is because the odds were if you were gonna do something real, it was gonna be from the arg platoon because those were the guys that went to Somalia. And, and so I was like, hey, I'm gonna do those art platoons because those guys are doing real work. Forward deploy at least. So, so I had done a ton of water work and a ton of over the beaches, more than, more than a normal SEAL, you know, does, especially at that moment in time. So the boat flips, blah, blah, blah. I, the guys are like, the guys are looking at me like, hey, we need to cancel, like, we need to go admin, basically. Go admin, we gotta get a vehicle down here to get this boat back to base.

• 1:05:49Jocko Willink?

  Cause what are we gonna do? How's this gonna work? And I was like, negative. So I kinda just like took over and I said, here's, hey, here's what we're gonna do. Boom. And I gave out the plan, like here's, and it's a pretty simple plan and I, this is the kinda thing I'd done before, you know, you get one guy with the extended bow line, he's gonna go out, get through the surf, keep that thing oriented to go through the surf, everyone else is gonna push it out. Once we get in, we're gonna paddle this thing. And when I said we're gonna paddle this thing out, these guys were looking at me like I was completely insane. Cause you know, you got a 55 horsepower motor on there. It's a big Zodiac boat, but, and it's filled with gear. So it's a pain in the ass, but I know that I can do it because I've done it before. So, but what the key is that, that they didn't think about too much was somebody being in the, holding the bow line of the boat and keeping that boat oriented through the surf.

• 1:06:35Jocko Willink?

  And as long as that's happening, which it's, it's not hard to do that because you're like basically a sea anchor. So I say, guys, listen, the bow line, the thing needs to be, you know, kept forward and we'll just paddle this thing out. And once we get out there, we'll tow, because a couple of the other boats were fine and we just would tow it out once we got out there. So. So here we go. And the guys were like, okay. And I remember actually the guy that the young guy that I had run in the op later, like five years later, he told me like, when you, so I was the guy, I was like, okay, I beamed my weapon in the boat, put on my fins and took that bowline and started swimming out. And the guys got in the boat, paddled out, we paddled out through the surf zone, got it hooked up to the other boat. We towed it out. We did our rendezvous at sea. But like five years later, that young guy

• 1:07:19Jocko Willink?

  said to me, like, when you made that call and then we did it. He's like, after that, I goes, I would have done anything you ever told me to do because I couldn't believe that it, that you said it and then that it worked. So that was like the first thing I

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  First day.

• 1:07:37Jocko Willink?

  The first day I did, I think it was that night. I think it was the night that that guy got fired. We did this.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:07:43Jocko Willink?

  And so, and again, I was very lucky because, you know, I had done all these org platoons and I was a prior enlisted guy. So I had done multiple deployments and then I did deployments as an officer already. So I was very lucky that I had this experience at the time. Cause I certainly was no, you know, certainly no spectacular human by any stretch. So that was, that was the first night I meet these guys and, and it did, you know, like you, you mentioned something on one of the earlier podcasts about like bonding together. Well, we did a little bit of a shitty op and it went sideways and we pulled it off. And once we pulled it off, it was like, okay. And then we, we did our final preparation. And then we went on deployment.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  And finally Jaco's going to war.

• 1:08:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  I think we're up over an hour. So let's wrap it there and leave everybody with a cliffhanger.

• 1:08:35Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Well, Jaco's heading to war. In the meantime, if you want to support this podcast, uh, first of all, right now you're probably listening to this podcast on the Jocko podcast feed. We're going to set up this podcast, the thread on its own standalone.

• 1:08:55Jocko Willink?

  What is it? Podcast feed? It'll be its own standalone podcast, so if you want to keep listening to it, subscribe to it. And then if you want to support this podcast, you can also check out our other podcasts. I got a podcast called Jocko Podcast. I got the Warrior Kid Podcast and I got the Grounded Podcast. And Daryl has a podcast which is called Marger Made. And if you want to support any of these podcasts, you can go to a place called JacoStore.com and you can get some gear. Or you can go to OriginMaine.com and you can get some gear there. That's all I got. Thanks for listening as things unravel. This is Jaco and Daryl. Out.