247: W.T.F. What it Takes to Beat The Odds, with John Stryker Meyer. Wiskey Tango Foxtrot, by Lynne Black.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:05:14 - Lynne Black's "Wiskey Tango Foxtrot" with Tilt. 3:10:55 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 3:22:10 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:39:24 - 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 247 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  Are you old enough to have a draft card? He says. Yes, yes, I'm old enough. I'm 18. We have to have one. Well, do you have one? Yeah, I say with a full mouth. Sorry about that. Spitting hash browns across the table. Then you're old enough to enlist and get your duty out of the way. You sure you're old enough? You don't look 18, kind of skinny too. I don't know if you'd make it through the most basic of training. He wryly smiles. I'm 18 and can prove it. You want to see the card? Testily reaching for my wallet, spitting a mouthful of eggs on the table. Hey, don't go sideways on me, boy. This is a friendly conversation, not a food fight. The sergeant laughs.

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  The only thing I want you to hand me is your bill for this meal. My treat. You're trying real hard to get me to enlist. Smiling, I hand him the bill. You a recruiter? Yes, I'm a recruiter. I'm Staff Sergeant King. What's your name? Lynn. Lynn Black. Well, Lynn Black. If you volunteer, you get your choice of assignments and which country you want to serve in. How does that sound? And behind door number two? It's got to sound a hell of a lot better than wandering than wondering where you're going to spend the night. King cracks a smile.

• 1:35Jocko Willink?

  My office is right down the street.

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  We eat. Afterwards, I enlist. And then spend the night at the YMCA paid for by the US Army. The next morning. I'm on a Boeing 707 headed for a medical examination and basic training at Fort Ord, California. During basic, I'm selected for the advanced leadership school at Fort Knox, Kentucky before going on to the armor school.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  Fort Knox, that's the place they keep all the gold. Staff Sergeant King has signed me for three years active duty in the 13th Armored Career Group, Europe, Germany, where I'll have access to all the great European art museums and the artwork of the old masters. The Army's going to pay me to tour Europe. What a deal.

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  My driving passion and greatest ambition has always been to spend my life as a fine art painter. I've been working at the local Seattle television station art department all the way through high school. The art director, Robert C. Dinsmore, is a decorated WWII veteran who has encouraged me to get my military duty out of the way.

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  The world in 1963 is a peaceful place. Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy are on television.

• 3:07Jocko Willink?

  So you might have caught that name, Lynn Black, and it might sound familiar to you. If it does, it's probably because you heard it here from John Stryker Meyer, aka Tilt, on Podcast 180, 181, or 182, or maybe you heard it from Doug the Frenchman Letourneau on Podcast 186. Like John Stryker Meyer and like Doug Letourneau, Lynn Black was an Army soldier, a Green Beret, and he fought in Vietnam as a member of SOG, the Studies and Observation Group, a highly classified group that conducted missions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

• 3:52Jocko Willink?

  They suffered over 100% casualties.

• 3:57Jocko Willink?

  Meaning, if you are a SOG operator, you are going to get wounded or killed.

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  That is how these men served and sacrificed. And before you listen to this podcast, if you haven't listened to 180, 181, 182, 186, and additionally, 204, 205, and 206 with Dick Thompson, go listen to them. Go listen to them, and you'll see that the men of SOG are true heroes, heroes that conducted completely insane missions, missions that very few people ever knew about.

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  And Lynn Black, codenamed Blackjack, wrote a book about his experiences. And I just read from that book. The book is called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, WTF, which we are going to dig into today. Now, unfortunately for a variety of reasons, Lynn could not make an appearance on the podcast today, but we were able to bring back Tilt, John Stryker Meyer, one of my heroes, who served with Lynn on many operations, to talk us through the book and provide some

• 5:23Jocko Willink?

  details that only someone who was there would know and understand. With that, Tilt, thanks for coming back on.

• 5:34John Stryker Meyer?

  Good evening, sir. Good to be back.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  Awesome to have you here.

• 5:37John Stryker Meyer?

  Indeed.

• 5:38Jocko Willink?

  You, you actually sent me this book. Do you remember sending me this book?

• 5:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Absolutely.

• 5:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 5:44John Stryker Meyer?

  Because we did the Frenchman, and I said, Lynn's book was out, and Lynn Maurice Black Jr. is just the man that I always held in the highest esteem ever since the first time we ran into each other, FUBA in 1968, just a character.

• 6:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, and, and it's, I'm hoping that at some point, we have the opportunity to get him on here. We'll see how that plays out, but hopefully this will provide some encouragement, you know, just to, just to do this section of the book. And, man, it's, um, just like every single time I start reviewing what you guys did in Vietnam.

• 6:25Jocko Willink?

  I just, I cannot believe what you guys did. I can't, I can't believe the level of heroism and courage that you guys had on all these operations. They're crazy. They're freaking crazy operations. I told you last time, I said, hey, if I was in charge, I wouldn't have improved any of those operations.

• 6:45John Stryker Meyer?

  Right. I remember that.

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, unbelievable. And, and, and believe me, I approved some pretty, some pretty sketchy operations in my time. But you guys took it to a whole new level and the success that you guys had on the battlefield was awesome. And, um, yeah, every time I, every time I read through these books, it, it just blows my mind and it's an honor to have you on and to pay some kind of tribute to what you guys did and to have, you know, what you guys did was, you know, that's, that's my heritage, you know, even though I'm in the Navy, you're in the Army. I mean, just the special operations, what you guys did over there was just laid the groundwork and, and set the bar so high for the rest of us forever.

• 7:31John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, well, thank you. Well, and you know, and I'm glad you're reading WTF because Lynn's just one of those characters. I mean, of all the stories for SOG for eight years, if you put down some of the most harrowing stories, the top five for eight years, Lynn's got to be right near the top, if not the top one. That's why I'm glad we're going to dig into it a little bit today, just to pay homage to a man that I've respected from day one.

• 7:56Jocko Willink?

  And you guys did, and I don't think we're going to go into this part today, but you got, he, but when we covered across the fence and on the ground, you, you and Lynn worked together for how long? How long were you guys actually working together?

• 8:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Uh, he ran a, he's, he came on our team for a few matches as a strap hanger.

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 8:13John Stryker Meyer?

  And then we went down to CCN in, in the January of 69, then he came on the team. Bubba Schur left, Lynn came on, and then our little people loved him, plus they knew him from October. And so, um, when I left, I just turned the team over to him. I just knew the team was in good hands. I never worried about it. I came back, Lynn was the one zero. That was his one one for a while. And then we took turns and then they finally just said, hey, you've got too much experience here, black. And they yanked him and put him in some special projects that, uh, He went off and did and I took over Idaho and went back to run the simple recon where Lynn was doing some, some classified stuff.

• 8:56Jocko Willink?

  All right. Well, let's get a little bit, let's learn a little bit about Lynn Black and where he came from. I'm going to go to the book here. And it says this, in the category of common things that go unnoticed in the world. While Ho Chi Minh was working for the OSS, saving allied lives. Lynn Maurice Black Jr. Was born to Lynn Senior and Violet Black of Albany, Oregon. Lynn Jr., that's me. This is where I come into the picture. I was immediately given the name Bosco. When my mother found that by mixing a bit of the chocolate drink into my baby milk, I dozed right off.

• 9:37Jocko Willink?

  In Berlin, what is Bosco? What is it? Of some kind of old school chocolate drink or something?

• 9:41John Stryker Meyer?

  Like Hershey's chocolate.

• 9:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Yeah. I never had Bosco. I don't know how that missed me because I'm a chocolate milk kind of fiend.

• 9:48Jocko Willink?

  He goes on here, in Berlin, Germany, on the date an hour of my birth at 10 a.m. On April 22nd, Adolf Hitler declared to his general staff that Germany had lost the war and that he would commit suicide. In 19, and here's the caveat, or here's the warning, I'm skipping through this book. I'm not going to read the whole thing. So if it seems a little bit chopped up, that's why you gotta get the book. He fast forward here, in 1946, my mother was pregnant with my brother Hugh. We lived in Salem, Oregon, where my father worked for the post-war state employment office. The war machine was winding down and unemployment was high. I was one year old.

• 10:27Jocko Willink?

  April 1947, on my second birthday, we moved to the corner of 123 Baum and 456 Detonator, Ordnance, Oregon, which was a munitions depot town for World War II war supplies. My father managed the payroll office for the depot. That's just pretty much the coolest place, the coolest address ever.

• 10:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Is that great or what? That's perfect for Lynn.

• 10:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. No doubt about it. Blowing things up.

• 10:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:00Jocko Willink?

  In 1950, I was five when the Korean War broke out. We had moved down the road to Hermiston, Oregon, and our father had taken a job with the Guy F. Atkinson Construction Company as the head of their payroll office. Our mother had purchased a small roadhouse diner. After that, my brothers Hugh, Bruce, and I were on our own. I was the little man, Bosco, the babysitter. In that same year, the Soviet Union recognized Ho Chi Minh's government, even though Vietnam was recognized internationally as part of French Indochina. Joseph Stalin convinced Ho that the Soviet Union would bankroll his fight against the

• 11:43Jocko Willink?

  French if he agreed to allow Chinese advisers to train 60,000 to 70,000 Vietminh. Ho bit his lip and agreed to China's support, which enabled him to escalate his fight against France. In 1953, the Korean War ended. I was eight years old, in the third grade, and in love with the red-headed freckle-faced girl next door. On March 13, 1954, with the monetary backing of the Soviets and Chinese advisers, the Vietminh engaged the French at Denbiên Phu.

• 12:25Jocko Willink?

  On March 23, the Vietminh captured the main airstrip, resulting in partial isolation of French army units. Inclement weather closed in on the area, preventing airdrops of supplies, evacuation of the wounded, or close combat air support, as the French ran ever lower on supplies and casualties mounted. The Vietminh took control of the countryside. When the French could no longer patrol, they were forced into purely defensive positions, which were shelled with big guns several times a day. On April 7, 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his domino theory speech during a news conference, declaring, "Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the falling domino principle.

• 13:10Jocko Willink?

  You have a row of dominoes set up. You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly."

• 13:20Jocko Willink?

  So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences. Nine days later, Vice President Richard Nixon announced that the United States may be putting our own boys in Indochina regardless of allied support.

• 13:40Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's always important to me to roll through kind of the way these things unfold and, and pay attention to them.

• 13:48John Stryker Meyer?

  History.

• 13:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and we're living it right now, you know, and, and I was talking to a friend of mine the other day.

• 13:57Jocko Willink?

  And it seems like maybe we're not always part of history, maybe the 90s, right? What was going on the 90s? The Berlin Wall came down, so that was kind of historical, but then it was down and, and there was kind of some time where you feel like, how much are we really a part of history that people will be reading about? And then things happen like what's going on right now and 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and you start realizing, no, no, we're, we're unfortunately going to play, we're going to, we're going to have our own history as well. And when you read things like this, it, it makes a connection for me that you better remember that what's happening, this could, this could always escalate. Things could always go in a direction that you didn't anticipate.

• 14:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Little USAID can lead to mighty big troubles later down the road.

• 14:45Jocko Willink?

  Crazy.

• 14:46John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:48Jocko Willink?

  On May 7th, the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu ended in a French defeat. The Viet Minh shot the wounded and marched the ambulatory French to the coast where they were loaded on ships and sent packing back to France. The French government did not want their citizens to know of the defeat and refused to allow their brave soldiers to disembark from the ships. Many brave French soldier citizens died in the holes of those ships. Dien Bien Phu was the first time a non-European colonial independence movement had evolved through all the stages, from guerrilla bands to a conventionally organized and equipped

• 15:31Jocko Willink?

  army able to defeat a modern Western occupier in pitched battle.

• 15:39Jocko Willink?

  On April 22nd, 1957, I turned 12 and announced I was no longer to be called Bosco.

• 15:49Jocko Willink?

  My name is Lynn, and I wanted to be called by my real name. Besides, kids my age were teasing the hell out of me. When they found out my real name, things got worse. Lynn, what a sissy name. This began a boy named Sue era that never ended.

• 16:05John Stryker Meyer?

  Never.

• 16:06Jocko Willink?

  So he thought I was, "Look, everyone's making fun of my nickname Bosco. That's mean. I'm just gonna go with my real name, Lynn."

• 16:13John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 16:19Jocko Willink?

  In June of 1963, I graduated from Rainier Beach High School in Seattle, Washington. I was sleeping late on Saturday morning when, "Wake up," orders my father, shaking my shoulder. "I'm awake, barely. What's going on?" "Are you going back to work at the television station?" Mom asks. "Not today. It's Saturday," I give them my best 18-year-old, smart-ass smile. I quit the station six months before graduation to pay attention to a sagging grade average. "I think I'm going to take the summer and just goof off."

• 16:51Jocko Willink?

  "Do you plan on using either of your scholarships?" My father needles me, knowing I have no intention of going to college. "I went to college," he chides. "Maybe art school, but no college. It would be a waste of my time and everybody's money." "I thought we already had this conversation," I reply, yawning.

• 17:10Jocko Willink?

  "Don't be a smartass," prompts mom. "Do you have enough money saved up to pay rent, purchase your own food, and transportation?" "I thought I'd live here during the summer and go back to work in the fall. Then I'll get a place of my own. How about that?" "If you live here, you'll pay rent. Not the kind of rent you pay now, but the kind of rent as if you had your own place. You'll be out of money pretty fast. You'll need a job, understand?" "You heard what your mother said," father insists. I don't have the savings to pay that kind of rent, I groggily complain. I would really like to take a break after graduation. I take it what you really want is to get me out of the house. Growing up, both of my parents had worked and I was responsible, starting at the age of five, for taking care of my two brothers.

• 17:55Jocko Willink?

  The little man, they called me, better than my other name, Bosco. I've been working and saving my money since I was 15. All I want to do is take the summer off, go back to work and then get an apartment. Can't this one wait the summer? Sounds to me like we aren't looking at the same roadmap, Mom says firmly. Both your brothers are old enough to take care of themselves and your father is retired and at home. This evening is your last free meal here, understand?

• 18:27Jocko Willink?

  Yep, sure do. Start naked, I jump out of bed and boldly head for the shower. Boy, this pisses me off, why the hell can't they wait until the fall? When I come out, they're gone. I dress, walk a mile to the bus stop and head for the Seattle Pike Place Market to get something to eat and wander around the open air art galleries. What am I going to do?

• 18:49Jocko Willink?

  So, at that point, you know, this is when he goes and he actually meets that recruiter. So that's why that recruiter can tell that he's kind of got nowhere to go. And he starts his, uh, starts his journey.

• 19:01John Stryker Meyer?

  Sergeant King gets him in.

• 19:03Jocko Willink?

  Yep, Sergeant King, man, scored at the diner. Paid that bill and made his quota.

• 19:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Jocko Willink?

  He goes, continues on here. While at Armor School, an airborne recruiter dangles the possibility of an extra $55 a month in addition to my meager monthly $79 base pay if I am only man enough to make three parachute jumps. Sounds as easy as falling out of an airplane. I volunteer a second time. This volunteering thing is getting to be a habit. 134 monthly for a PFC clothes along with three hots and a cot. That's crazy that you guys got that much money for going to airborne school.

• 19:43John Stryker Meyer?

  Fifty-five.

• 19:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it might not seem like a big deal, except for that, I think I got a hundred and ten in like nineteen ninety. Where my base pay was probably a thousand bucks. You know what I'm saying? So it was like one tenth of my base pay, where you guys were getting almost double your base pay.

• 20:01John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah, my case, I was getting fifty dollars a week. I'm not sure where Lynn got that inflated salary. Cause I was getting fifty and the jump school was fifty-five dollars. So it was like a hundred percent plus. I'm in.

• 20:15Jocko Willink?

  So he goes to jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia.

• 20:18John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Jocko Willink?

  Which is where I was lucky enough to go. They don't send Navy guys there anymore.

• 20:21John Stryker Meyer?

  Where'd he send them?

• 20:22Jocko Willink?

  They go to.

• 20:23John Stryker Meyer?

  Yuma?

• 20:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they go somewhere else. Yeah, Yuma, or actually it might be here in San Diego, but they, you basically go and learn a, it's more of a gentleman's course.

• 20:31John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:32Jocko Willink?

  And it's, it's faster and you go, you get more experience really quick.

• 20:36John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, that three weeks can be consolidated.

• 20:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you think? But I had a great time at airport school, man. It was awesome.

• 20:47Jocko Willink?

  And then he goes to a heavy drop school. Learning, I guess, how to, how to get everything rigged up to throw out of the back of airplanes.

• 20:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:56Jocko Willink?

  And then he says this, "After several weeks of rigor training, I received orders for Delta Company, sixteenth armor, one hundred and seventy-third airborne brigade in Okinawa." Hey, Okinawa is not a city in Germany. This is not what I signed up for. For an extra fifty-five bucks a month, I've blown away a European tour and art education. But I can rig heavy supply loads and vehicles for such snatchouts at high level drops. Now there's something I can use in the civilian life. Black, you dumbass. The one seventy-third had, had been activated in June nineteen sixty-three, the same month I had graduated from Rainier Beach High School in Seattle. The one seventy-third

• 21:38Jocko Willink?

  has assumed the assets of the second airborne battle group, then stationed on Okinawa, just south of Japan. The one seventy-third, the one seventy-third mission is to quickly close with and destroy the enemy forces using fire, maneuver, and shock action in coordination with other armed forces.

• 21:56Jocko Willink?

  It was because of its many parachute exercises on Taiwan that the members of the 173rd earned the respect and admiration of the nationalist Chinese soldiers. So impressed with the paratroopers of the 173rd were the Chinese that they nicknamed the men of the brigade Tin Bing, or sky soldiers. The name stuck. The Pentagon's public expectation of us is that we can be deployed within 24 hours to any hotspot in a Pacific theater, engage with and deter an enemy for 72 hours. This delaying suicidal action would allow time to deploy real forces such as the Marines. Thank God there aren't any hotspots to be deployed to.

• 22:39Jocko Willink?

  Thank God this is the peacetime army and having no enemy. Tonight, let's go to the Ville and get drunk. We'll watch the strip shows. Life's good on the rock. That's what the jarheads call Okinawa. And I'm fast forwarding through some other stuff, but he's, he's there, you know, he's there. He's kind of doing the peacetime army thing. Living the dream. March 14th, 1965 is the 19th birthday of Hugh Robert Black, one of my younger brothers. That morning, he arrives on Okinawa with the future 3rd Platoon Leader, 1st Lieutenant Richard H. Goldsmith. PFC Hugh is assigned to the 173rd Engineering Company.

• 23:24Jocko Willink?

  I'm happy to see him. All the way through school, I admired Hugh's scholastic capability and am admittedly envious of his high grade point average and seemingly easy learning style. Both of us have enlisted voluntarily to do our duty and then return to pursue life. Why the hell didn't I just go to art school? Because you're doing your duty, dimwit. Shut up, put your head down and just get it done and stop talking to yourself or they think you belong here permanently. Yeah, the way he's written this book, he's got all kinds of these italicized sections where he's kind of just giving his own thoughts. Oh, yeah. And, and they're, they're, they're awesome to read.

• 24:07John Stryker Meyer?

  The rich mind of Lynn Black.

• 24:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 24:10John Stryker Meyer?

  It's just funny. No matter what you talk to him about, like that stuff there in particular, his self-examination and his commentary is just like.

• 24:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I I'm not gonna get too much into it, but the way this book is written, a lot of it is written, and I'll try and explain, a lot of it is written

• 24:28Jocko Willink?

  as conversations that are debriefs. Either debriefs, official debriefs, or unofficial debriefs that you guys have in your in your team room.

• 24:38John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 24:39Jocko Willink?

  With beers and playing dice.

• 24:40John Stryker Meyer?

  And in between, stream of consciousness.

• 24:42Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 24:43John Stryker Meyer?

  He gets a hot streak going. You can just hear the keys going. They'll take a break for a beer and he comes back.

• 24:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the atmosphere that he gives out of the team room of you guys is pretty awesome. And you guys playing playing freaking liar's dice all the time and and the little

• 25:02Jocko Willink?

  those those little debrief sessions, though. He mentions it, that's how you were learning.

• 25:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:08Jocko Willink?

  That's that's where you were figuring out what to do and what mistakes this group made and what these guys did right and what they did wrong and those those those sessions where you're giving each other a bunch of shit, but you're also passing valuable information on.

• 25:23John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, absolutely. Particularly in our early time at FOB1. That's where we learned was from the senior NCOs and any other team member that had been on the ground. We faithfully made a point of talking to them. Some wouldn't, some couldn't. Um, too much trauma, but the ones who would talk, I mean, Pat Watkins, Spider Parks, John McGovern, they're all men that we just admired and they took time to talk to us. We could ask them questions and then when we got to Flying Covey, we'd hear about the mission, what went wrong. Always trying to improve the tactics to see what we could do to improve when we get in the field.

• 26:01Jocko Willink?

  Would did when you did you say when you got to Flying Covey?

• 26:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, Spider Parks became Covey.

• 26:07Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 26:07John Stryker Meyer?

  Pat Watkins, after time on the ground.

• 26:09Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 26:10John Stryker Meyer?

  They were our best Covey riders.

• 26:11Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 26:12John Stryker Meyer?

  And so, and the 68, particularly with the October 5th mission, they were both alternating on station. That day was so historic, part of that historic moment in time. That missionary and so before that like during September and August. Uh, Pat had run several missions out of FOB three in the layoffs and then we'd talk. You always learn stuff. We just sat there and just try to sponge it in, bring it in.

• 26:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and we'll get to some of uh Lynn's Vietnam experience prior to being in SOG and prior to being in special forces. But for someone like you, and we talked about this in, in across the fence, I mean, it is crazy. That you were, how old were you on your first mission?

• 26:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Twenty-two.

• 26:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 26:59John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, I was old by some extent. I, I spent two years in college trying to flunk out there, you know?

• 27:06John Stryker Meyer?

  But by August of sixty-eight, they, that's when they finally, after that, uh, attack at the FOB four. Um, they came up with the idea of putting together a, um, a one-zero school. So they would train, but there was nothing in place. So when we got to FUBI, May and June. Man, you just talk to the men who would talk to you. Anybody had any experience at all? Like John Walton came back from two or three really bad targets. We talked to him. We were both, well, he was a high-powered E4. I was just low, private.

• 27:38John Stryker Meyer?

  But anybody who would talk, we talked. And that's where it was. You're right. That clubhouse was uh, better than anything we could get in terms of really learning what was going on on the ground, air assets, weather. And the reality of the, of the King Bees, what we worked with at the time. It's one thing to talk about in training. Helicopters come pick you up. Well, you gotta have other conditions there.

• 28:02Jocko Willink?

  Man.

• 28:04John Stryker Meyer?

  You know how that goes.

• 28:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, crazy.

• 28:09Jocko Willink?

  So now we get to nineteen sixty-five. And Lynn says, somewhere in the middle of April nineteen sixty-five, cryptic rumors begin to spread rampantly from company to company around the brigade. HQ directs all training to cease and practice mount outs be conducted, which is them basically gearing up to go.

• 28:30John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:31Jocko Willink?

  Shortly, the company receives its basic load of live ammunition and begins to prepare all vehicles for a combat check. Man, these rounds are heavy, complains one of the new loaders.

• 28:44Jocko Willink?

  April 22nd, 1965. Man, he nails these dates in here.

• 28:48John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:49Jocko Willink?

  It makes me wish I would have kept the journal, which I never did.

• 28:52John Stryker Meyer?

  Me too.

• 28:53Jocko Willink?

  April 22nd, 1965. I celebrate my 20th birthday.

• 28:59Jocko Willink?

  May 2nd, rumors begin to fly as word spreads that key personnel have received advance party orders to an unknown destination.

• 29:09Jocko Willink?

  May 3rd, company commander Joseph C. Jordan Jr. at last announces the destination. And he says, "I have just come from General Williamson's morning briefing. What I'm about to tell you is a chronology of events leading to a temporary offshore assignment." On April 24th, the general received a top secret message from General Wes Morland to meet him in Saigon, Saigon, South Vietnam, at MACV headquarters. It seems there's a guerrilla war being waged in that Southeast Asian country. The 173rd is to be a part of what is called "rolling thunder" being conducted by the US Air Force out of bases in that country. What we heard this morning is that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, known as the

• 29:54Jocko Willink?

  ARVINS, are having difficulty providing adequate security for the air bases and supporting rolling thunder raids. The ARVIN, the ARVINS are also having difficulty performing offensive operations against the guerrillas, known as Vietcong or VC. General Williamson also revealed that several US divisions are scheduled to arrive in South Vietnam within months. The 173rd's mission is to clear the incoming unit's proposed base campsites of the VC. Our deployment will be a temporary one, probably not lasting more than 60 days. The advance party will leave for Bien Hoa, Republic of South Vietnam. The 173rd is to conduct a security action.

• 30:36Jocko Willink?

  The CO announces that he thinks we'll be back on Oke for sure by Christmas. Our first mission is to secure, patrol, and neutralize any threat to Bien Hoa Air Base.

• 30:51Jocko Willink?

  Which is our base camp area. You all now know about as much about this assignment as I do. So there you go. These guys go from not even knowing that there was anything going on in Vietnam. I was thinking how different that is now.

• 31:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 31:04Jocko Willink?

  You know, because when there's some kind of action taking place in the world, everybody knows about it instantly. You know, you know about it instantly because you look at your phone and there's the news. And whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or Somalia or wherever, everybody knows when there's something happening in the world. And here these guys, they're not, they don't have any idea what's happening in Vietnam.

• 31:25John Stryker Meyer?

  And they're on the rocks. They're not getting the New York Times or any other newspaper. That by that time had carried stories for a few years and pissed off President Kennedy, pissed off LBJ. But so they missed that. And so here's Lynn, like, oh, you're gonna go to Benoit. It could only be a 60 days, not.

• 31:49Jocko Willink?

  Uh, he goes into this thing about how they had to dye their, their underwear green.

• 31:55Jocko Willink?

  On May 4th, the company receives word, we are to delete nine spats from our inventory and replace them with the M113 armored personnel carriers or APC.

• 32:08Jocko Willink?

  So this is 1965.

• 32:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Jocko Willink?

  And you know what we used for Kazakov vehicles in the Battle of Ramadi in 2006?

• 32:16John Stryker Meyer?

  M113s.

• 32:17Jocko Willink?

  M113s.

• 32:19John Stryker Meyer?

  Which almost any bullet can still penetrate.

• 32:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, my, uh, my commanding officer at one time, you know, he was, he was talking me through an operation that, that the guys were going out on. And he said, what's the Kazakov plan? I said, hey, the Kazakov plan is this, we'll contact this company. They have 113s. They'll come out. And he says, what if, what if that 113 hits a subsurface IED? So at the time, subsurface IED had it, everybody knew what that was and what it was with somebody, the enemy would bury the, the explosives, you know, underneath the ground and you couldn't see them. So it wasn't like a, something sitting on the side of the road. It was under the ground and they would make them big. And he says, what, what'll happen if that 113 hits a, hits a subsurface IED?

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  And I said, sir, if the 113 hits a subsurface IED, everyone in that 113 is going to be dead. And that was the facts, you know, that was the facts.

• 33:14John Stryker Meyer?

  It's gonna be their casket.

• 33:16Jocko Willink?

  The really weird thing is.

• 33:19Jocko Willink?

  Most at that time, including the 113, the Abrams, all these older vehicles, the, when you build those vehicles, you build them as low as to the ground as you can. It's the lowest possible profile so that you can't be seen. It's like ducking, right? You build the, even a Humvee is built like that, right? A Humvee is wide, but it's low.

• 33:37John Stryker Meyer?

  Sure.

• 33:38Jocko Willink?

  And, and an Abrams is, is wide, but it's low and a 113 is low to the ground. They don't have much clearance. Because you know, you don't want to get shot at by another tank. So you can hide behind, you know, a little ridge line or a little knoll or something like that. The problem is that's the worst possible vehicle to have when it comes to getting blown up from the ground. And so now, when you see the, the mine resistant vehicles now, they're massive, they're tall. You've got to get a lot, you get into them with a ladder. You literally, there's a ladder, there's like five, four or five rungs on a ladder to get up into them because they're built really high.

• 34:11John Stryker Meyer?

  And you exit with a parachute.

• 34:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. They have a V shaped hole that deflects the, the blast as well. And a 113 has a complete flat bottom. It's super low to the ground, but they were just, they weren't, this was not the problem that they were coming up against at that time.

• 34:31John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah.

• 34:34Jocko Willink?

  May 5th, the company begins feverishly working to prepare our vehicles for shipment the following day. May 6th, we arrive, we drive to Okinawa, to the Okinawa port of Naha, where the vehicles are loaded under the direction of Lieutenant Gilmore, the embarkation officer. And again, I'm just jumping through this stuff. You got, it's so great to read this. You got to get this book because the details that he gives, I don't know how he's got a way better memory than me, right? Dates are logged down, names for everyone. I mean, who remembers the name of the damn embarkation officer? He must've written that down.

• 35:10John Stryker Meyer?

  It has to.

• 35:12Jocko Willink?

  But it's great. It makes you feel like you're there.

• 35:14John Stryker Meyer?

  You're right there.

• 35:15Jocko Willink?

  Perfect.

• 35:16John Stryker Meyer?

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 35:17Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the 173rd Airborne Brigade is the first US Army unit sent to Vietnam.

• 35:23John Stryker Meyer?

  Can you imagine?

• 35:24Jocko Willink?

  So talking about history.

• 35:25John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah.

• 35:27Jocko Willink?

  May 12th, at 12 16 hours, Company D 16th Armor arrives in Saigon Harbor, the Paris of Southeast Asia.

• 35:37Jocko Willink?

  Company D's first combat assignment comes in the form of ambush patrols. We're ordered to attach 12 enlisted personnel each day to the first of the 503rd for a three day period. So much for riding on tracks. So they got all these vehicles, but now they're going out on patrols. Needs of the army. Do they say needs of the army?

• 35:56John Stryker Meyer?

  No.

• 35:56Jocko Willink?

  Okay. In the Navy, that's like a kind of a joke. Someone will say, well, what do you think your job's going to be? It's like, well, needs in the Navy. It's like, whatever the Navy needs you to do, you're going to do. And even though they might not say that in the Army, that's the way it is. Cause we don't care if you've been trained on these tracks to, to fight from armor. You're going to go out and you're going to be on foot patrol.

• 36:17Jocko Willink?

  May 18th, our vehicles arrive and the company turns to the task of prepping them. Thank God now, now maybe we can start doing, stop doing patrols with the grunts. I'm an armor guy, not a ground pounder. One track crew member complains. And here's Lynn's thoughts. I disagree with that. No one in their right mind wants to be walking this miserable place when you can be riding. Oh, sorry. I agree with that. No one in their right mind wants to be walking this miserable place when you can be riding. Who the hell wants to sleep on the stinking wet ground with bugs, snakes, and God knows what else? God damn it. I'm supposed to be in Europe.

• 36:52John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, it is the Paris of the Orient.

• 36:56Jocko Willink?

  May 19th, the first platoon is attached to the three third, three, 319th artillery for a security mission. The remainder of the month is spent training and seemingly endless improvement of the defensive perimeter.

• 37:08Jocko Willink?

  Here's, here's, here's Lynn's thoughts. Dig endless trenches, trenches, fill sandbags, build bunkers, string concertina wire, put up tents, wind and rain flood the trenches and bunkers and flatten the tents. Put up tents again. Go out and patrol with ground pounders, pull KP, stand guard duty. How in the hell can any of these lifers do this for a living? I'm so tired of pots and pans duty. I could kill somebody. There's a thought. So that's how they psychologically prepare us. Pots and pans.

• 37:40Jocko Willink?

  On the last day of May, General Williamson initiated a four-day operation. Three objectives were hit by our sky soldiers. Casualties were few against light resistance, though our guys experienced no heavy fighting. The operation, the first US offensive action in South Vietnam, greatly contributed to the confidence of the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

• 38:04Jocko Willink?

  The first operation of July is Search and Destroy in conjunction with elements of the 1st Battalion 503rd Infantry. July 16th, the company in conjunction with Elm is the 1st of 503rd, and the engineering company conduct a Search and Destroy operation. During that operation, my younger brother Hugh is critically wounded by an unseen enemy during a mortar attack, and several of his friends are killed. He's medevaced out of the AO and back to Conus. So, you know, I kind of drifted through that part where his brother showed up in Okinawa. Well, his brother, they're both at the same unit. They end up deploying to Vietnam, the first Americans in Vietnam, and his brother ends up getting wounded by a mortar, pretty bad.

• 38:50Jocko Willink?

  And here's Lynn's thoughts on that. You fuckers, not my brother, not my brother, show yourselves, you cowards, goddammit. Here we are, driving up and down the roads while those bastards are hiding in the bushes, bushes. They can see us, but we can't see them. Where the hell are they? Somebody has to know where they are. I'm sorry, Hugh, I hope you can forgive me. I should have been there with you. I'll find them, they'll pay, I promise.

• 39:15John Stryker Meyer?

  Welcome to the jungle, baby.

• 39:25Jocko Willink?

  That's one of the things that, you know, when I was in Ramadi, I would always read the book about face, you know, by, by David Hackworth, and, and one of the things that was so similar was what just happened right there. This is the beginning of the war, and you're fighting against an enemy that you can't see, right? And it's so frustrating, especially for the conventional troops that are out there and, and, you know, I was talking about this today with a client.

• 39:54Jocko Willink?

  The mentality and what it does to your mentality of being on offense versus being on defense. And when you got out, when they, we know, when, when the mission is go out and walk down this road, you might think you're being on offense, but if you think about it a little bit deeper, you're on defense because you're walking down that road and they can have booby traps and IEDs and snipers and mortars. They can have all that stuff and you are on defense, even though you're moving, you're on defense. And that was definitely how I felt on my first deployment. Same thing. I would ask like young junior officers, I'd say, is this an offensive operation? I talk about a direct action mission in downtown Baghdad.

• 40:36Jocko Willink?

  I'd show them a profile of a mission and I'd say, is this an offensive operation? They go, absolutely. And I go, how long are you on offense for? Because the whole mission takes an hour and a half, two hours, right? So you drive from Baghdad to some other part of Baghdad. It takes you a half an hour to get there. And then you hit the target. It takes 15 minutes and then you drive back. It takes another half an hour. So you were out for an hour and 15 minutes. I would say, how much time were you on offense for? And then they'd start thinking about it. Sometimes they'd say the whole time, we're always on offense. And I'd say, well, that sounds good, but it's not true. It's not true. When you're out on patrol, when you're moving through enemy territory, you are on defense.

• 41:19John Stryker Meyer?

  You're a target.

• 41:19Jocko Willink?

  You're a target. Now, once you get to that target and you set up, believe me, we go on offense for a good solid three or four minutes. But then even once we hit the target, now all the bad guys know we're there. And now we're on defense again. So that, what that does to your mentality is it can be hard on people. It can be hard to be constantly paranoid and constantly on defense. And it's the same thing in life, right? You know, somebody was asking me, what do you do? And, you know, what do you do when you've got all these things are happening and the market's changing? And I said, look, you can either be on defense and try and just keep it together, which doesn't feel good, or you can look at the problem and go on offense and attack the problem. And that's exactly the mentality that Lynn's having right here. He wants to go on the attack.

• 42:02John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

• 42:09Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, the 173rd along with other American units and Vietnamese troops work together to break the siege of special forces at Camp Du- Duco. Am I saying that right? Duco? Duco. Captain Jordan, D, the Delta Company Commander, leads his company on foot patrols to an exploit, to exploit a suspected VC stronghold, as well as other armored patrols and security details. Sir, Captain Jordan, let me go with you on the patrols. No, Black, you aren't in any shape to be going with us. I need soldiers, not a revenge squad.

• 42:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so Black's getting left behind, and he wants to go get after it, and his boss is saying, you just need to, you need to slow your roll, Black.

• 42:57Jocko Willink?

  August 6th, Company D ferries the Royal Australian Regiment Infantry to their area of operations. August 17th, the 2nd and 3rd platoons along with Command Track leave for extended operation. September 9th, 1965, Captain Joseph C. Jordan relinquishes his command for a staff position with the Great Brigade HQ. Captain John E. Dunlop Jr., formerly HQ Company Commander, is recipient of the guidon.

• 43:27Jocko Willink?

  While on patrol, Platoon Sergeant Herman Trent, Spec 5 Correo, PFC's Henry S. Baker, and Robert L. Adams are all wounded when they come under heavy mortar fire by the still unseen enemy.

• 43:46Jocko Willink?

  Spec 4 Craig is credited with saving two lives and later receives the Soldier's Medal Commendation. October 8th, 1965, Company D departs our Ben Hua base for the Iron Triangle on a search and destroy operation. Not far down the road, around the first bend, a command detonated mine is set off by the VC, completely destroying the APC, killing the driver, PFC Michael Brancato, and severely wounding Staff Sergeant St. Clair Westerman and Sampson Moore.

• 44:24Jocko Willink?

  Son of bitches blew us up, Westerman later slurs through his wired jaws. He's trying to explain to me what happened. Blew the goddamn track off the PC and flipped it upside down. Killed Brancato. Good kid. God damn it.

• 44:41Jocko Willink?

  On and on it went. Warzone C and D, the Iron Triangle, op plans, new life and smash in December, search and destroy and convoy security along with blocking force missions. That first tour of duty rolled on much the same way as it did the first six months until Specialist Fourth Class Lynn M. Black Jr. got promoted.

• 45:05Jocko Willink?

  Then I went back to the world in July of 1966. Later that year, I appeared on a television morning show hosted by a guy named Preston Price at King TV, Seattle, Washington. So here he is, he's out of the army. With me was an army helicopter gunner who had become a war protester. The door gunners mantra for the 30 minute show was that the United States had no business being in Southeast Asia. Why would communists on the other side of the world have any effect on our American freedom? He didn't believe that any young man of draft age had any responsibility to fight an illegal war. We needed to question the use of illegal authority.

• 45:44Jocko Willink?

  This is more than I can take and I accuse the gunner of being a coward and a traitor to his country. I immediately launched into a duty honor country speech that would have shamed any man. It certainly did me. What I wanted to do was kick the unseen enemy's ass for whacking hue.

• 46:04Jocko Willink?

  It didn't make a dent in the door gunners resolve and the two of us morning show guests began to talk over the top of one another as the lights were switched off in the studio and the station went into a prolonged set of live beer and appliance dealer commercials in an adjacent studio.

• 46:20Jocko Willink?

  The unseen enemy killed several of my fellow soldiers and had severely wounded many more. My brother and my best friend had been crippled for life or grotesquely wounded. I can't say for sure I ever saw the face of the enemy during that tour of duty. Sitting in my apartment in Hawaii, watching the evening news, I felt guilty, pissed off, alone, and completely consumed by feelings of revenge. US planes began bombing Hanoi. We see you now, you sons of bitches. North Vietnam declares general mobilization. The Warsaw Pact promises to support North Vietnam. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, I'm reenlisting.

• 47:03Jocko Willink?

  And if anyone hasn't figured out what WTF Whiskey Tango Foxtrot stands for, it stands for what the fuck?

• 47:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Over?

• 47:15Jocko Willink?

  So that's his first tour of duty. And it's crazy to think he's saying, hey, I don't even think I ever saw the enemy during that. And he's got his brother wounded, he's got other guys wounded and killed and never saw the enemy.

• 47:26John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, and they had a couple of times, I forget how detailed he went in that first part, but when they were in the APCs, they got into the rubber plantations. We had rows and rows of trees. You figure you go in there and, hey, man, we can figure it out. Well, they didn't, and they got hammered in there. I remember Lynn talking about that, in both tours of duty. At some point, we got into a reflection thing. He would go back once in a while, but the rubber plantations. And they, between the snipers and their controlled fire lanes, and obviously, they set things up in practice before the 173rd ever got there.

• 48:09John Stryker Meyer?

  And then, they had to be careful not to damage any rubber trees. Because they did the plantation orders, but they'd come back and sue the United States and pay for the damaged rubber trees. Vietcong, well, you know, he can't deal with them. But politics, but that story, and the APCs, that thin armor. Oh, he had some nightmares, though. I just can't imagine. And that's a traditional unit, early on. And they learned some lessons the hard way. Boy.

• 48:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, when I did Lewis Puller Jr.'s book on here.

• 48:43Jocko Willink?

  Fortunate son and he's go he's rotating between three areas and you know like one of them was bridge security one of them was camp security and then one of them was called the Riviera I think or the Rivera but every time they'd go out there they'd get take take casualties and they'd never see the enemy and they would do a high five with you know their platoon was heading out there's another platoon rotating back in yeah I forget if it was platoon or company is I think it was platoon platoon size he'd be heading out he'd high five you know the other platoon commander and you know the guy'd say yeah we took two casualties or three casualties we evacuated them out did you see the enemy nope they're just going out there and taking hits and you don't see the enemy and

• 49:27Jocko Willink?

  that that's very similar to Iraq you know very similar to Iraq where many much of the time guys be out there they just get blown up by an IED or you get hit by mortar fire you get hit by sniper fire and that's a that's the way that's the way the guerrillas fight against a against a America

• 49:44John Stryker Meyer?

  absolutely and then even with the snipers they knew how to get back in the building so they fired out there be no direct smoke or evidence of them where the rounds came from you really had to have good ear detection or some kind of sensor yeah sixth sense to figure out where the hell the rounds are coming from

• 50:03Jocko Willink?

  I think it would have to be a sixth sense because you can't tell where those rounds are coming from

• 50:07John Stryker Meyer?

  not with that goes

• 50:09Jocko Willink?

  and you see you see in movies you know there's always a sniper in a window and his barrel sticking two feet out of the window but you're right the snipers are actually not even in that room they're in a room deep one room deep maybe even more down a hallway so their field of vision is tiny but you there's no possible way that you're seeing them

• 50:27John Stryker Meyer?

  no

• 50:31Jocko Willink?

  but luckily some people learn to adapt and take the fight to the enemy

• 50:35John Stryker Meyer?

  indeed

• 50:39Jocko Willink?

  July 1968, and these are some thoughts. During my first tour with the 173rd, I watched them, Special Forces and other recon men from The Herd, which is the nickname, which is a great nickname for the 173rd, The Herd. From The Herd, Marine Force Recon, the 82nd and the 101st Airborne Divisions. There's something different, special about recon men. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I sure as hell wanna be one. Intense, yet always joking around. It was like they were fighting a different war than the rest of us. Everyone knew they were the best of the best.

• 51:18Jocko Willink?

  We graduated from Company B Special Forces Training Group, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. At the beginning of the class, had been 500 of the finest physically fit soldiers ever produced in the United States Army. That May 1968 graduating class contained less than 70 men, standing at attention proudly waiting to be awarded the coveted Green Beret. When did you graduate from Special Forces Training?

• 51:42John Stryker Meyer?

  December 67.

• 51:44Jocko Willink?

  So you're already, you're already done, and he's a new guy.

• 51:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. I'm in camp. I'm an FOB1, waiting for them to get there.

• 51:55Jocko Willink?

  We had earned the right to work with the best of the best. Hell, we were the best. And he kind of just runs through some of the Special Forces Training back then. In the beginning, Phase 1, we sat in the classroom for eight hours a day, listening to lectures and taking notes. We were given homework assignments, papers to write, and participated in the small in-class and after-class working teams. Half the group was eliminated in Phase 1. Every day we heard phrases like, "If I wanted to sit on my ass all day in a classroom, I'd join the Air Force." This is college prep school, this is college prep school nonsense, nonsense. A lot of what it took to get through Phase 1 was attitude of willingness, being willing to adore the unexpected. I don't think any of us expected the classroom. Did you spend that much time in the classroom?

• 52:39John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:40Jocko Willink?

  What were you guys learning about?

• 52:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, they, they, all the indoctrination stuff, history, and then procedures, then like our commo class, you sat down, you're in that class for eight to 10 hours, just there taking commo, and... Land navigation, all kinds of different things like that. You had to take notes. I remember, well, packing to move now, going through, finding some of my old notes back there. It's like, oh my God, I forgot all about that. That's like, I got it out of my mind.

• 53:10Jocko Willink?

  When you find those notes, just take a picture of them and send them to me so we can talk about them at some point. That sounds freaking awesome. I got this book that I wrote when I was a E5 in the SEAL teams and I was teaching, I was teaching communications and I found it. It just says SEAL Team One Communications. And it's basically on how to work the different radios, but then in the back I have a section called Lessons Learned. I'm going to cover it on the podcast because it's legit.

• 53:39John Stryker Meyer?

  Is that right?

• 53:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Maybe we have to go back and compare notes.

• 53:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Indeed. Got a little Morse code training in there?

• 53:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I was one of the last guys that had to learn Morse code.

• 53:48John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. Diddy dum dum diddy.

• 53:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. My, uh, the guy that was teaching us to it, because there was people that were pushing back like, we don't need to learn Morse code. You know, we have satellites now. And this guy says, in the event of, what was his phrase? He said, uh, in the event of a nuclear war, the only thing that's going to be punching through the ionosphere is HF comms.

• 54:09John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Jocko Willink?

  And Morse code. So we gotta learn it. Of course, I'm 19 years old. I'm totally down. I'm like, cool. If there's a nuclear war, I'm ready to make comms. Yeah. They don't teach you it in basic SEAL training.

• 54:28Jocko Willink?

  There is no mental challenge whatsoever. I mean, there's no, you don't sit in a classroom, you don't sit in a classroom probably ever for more than like an hour when they're trying to teach you dive physics or hydrographic reconnaissance. It's just totally, they don't do that with us. That's why you get some knuckle draggers in the teams.

• 54:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know, the special forces guy just, you know, they got, they like that. They like that kind of thing. They like that kind of thing, being a little bit smarter.

• 55:03Jocko Willink?

  During Phase Two, we were divided amongst our various specialty groups such as Operations, Intelligence, Medical Weapons, and so on. I was the hands-on portions. This was the hands-on portion training. In my case, I was being trained as a weapons specialist, which I imagine everybody wants to be.

• 55:17John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:19John Stryker Meyer?

  Boy toys to the max.

• 55:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and how do they pick what you're gonna do?

• 55:23John Stryker Meyer?

  Um, they gave you tests and then they're supposed to indicate what you're good at. And then there's needs, what the Army needs.

• 55:30Jocko Willink?

  Needs of the Army.

• 55:31John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Jocko Willink?

  And you ended up comms.

• 55:33John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Jocko Willink?

  I ended up comms too, because I had this, um, I stood watch at the SEAL Team One quarter deck, like a new guy, you're gonna stand and watch. And so I'm standing and watch, I'm standing with this, this officer, he's a, like a platoon commander, but he's, you know, more experienced than me. And he's talking to me and we, we have to stay there the whole night, you know, we're like sleeping in the bunk beds or whatever, to make sure no one attacks SEAL Team One. This is like 1991. And the guy after talking to me, he says, you know what, you know, and he's asking me, well, what do you, what do you join the SEAL Teams for? I go, I wanna be an operator, I wanna go on missions, right? And he's, in the morning, he says, hey, you

• 56:12Jocko Willink?

  know what? What you should do is you should go to the radio room tomorrow, or, or when you, when we get off and go tell them you wanna be a radio man, because the radio man always goes on operations. As though, he is the only guy that's going on every operation. I mean, the medic, kind of, but the radio man for sure.

• 56:33John Stryker Meyer?

  Have to.

• 56:33Jocko Willink?

  And so I went up, got off a watch, went right up, banged on the radio, I wanna be a radio man. Why? I wanna go on every operation. Cool. Right on, sign up here. I was probably the only person in the history of SEAL Team One to do that. Because what does everyone else wanna do? They wanna be a machine gunner and a sniper.

• 56:48John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:50Jocko Willink?

  They wanna be a weapons guy.

• 56:54Jocko Willink?

  So, fast forward a little bit, he's home in Seattle on leave. He's got some of his SF buddies with him named Bob and Steve. And here they are kinda hanging out with Hugh. And here we go. Hugh, one of my two younger brothers, has joined us during our last afternoon out on our sister Carla's back deck. This is our last day in the civilian world. This is before they go on deployment. He's wearing a tank top and t-shirt and a pair of shorts, which shows off the scar running from one knee up the length of his leg to his hip. After a couple beers, he tells the story about the mortar attack, his leg wound, broken ribs, arm and shrapnel-filled face and torso.

• 57:37Jocko Willink?

  He recounts the months spent recovering at Madigan Army Hospital. Bob and Steve are visibly shaken by the sight of wounds, and more so by the story of inadequate medical treatment and disdain from the hospital staff for anyone dumb enough to get suckered into volunteering for NOM. The mood of the afternoon darkens and alcohol consumption increases.

• 58:04Jocko Willink?

  Last day, Gillette softly drones, "Yep, give me a beer."

• 58:09Jocko Willink?

  How do you say this, Engelke? How do you say his name? Do you know?

• 58:12John Stryker Meyer?

  Engelke.

• 58:13Jocko Willink?

  Engelke.

• 58:13John Stryker Meyer?

  Steve Engelke and Bob Gillette.

• 58:16Jocko Willink?

  Those are his two buddies.

• 58:17John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, Gillette, okay. Engelke? Engelke?

• 58:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Engelke.

• 58:23Jocko Willink?

  Engelke. Man, I'm gonna keep messing that one. Engelke?

• 58:26John Stryker Meyer?

  Stick with Steve.

• 58:31Jocko Willink?

  Carla serves up an early dinner. We eat our last supper and Hugh bluntly asks, "What the hell are you going to do back in that shithole?" For a moment, I sit there, surprised, staring at him, dumbfounded. "It's payback time," I quietly reply. "Payback for what?" He looks surprised, then it dawns on him. "You dumbass, you aren't my babysitter, my big brother anymore. I don't need you to fight any battles on my behalf. I did my duty, took my hits, and now I'm going to college. It's time for me to build my life. The government got there three years, and you can bet your bippy that there's no one in this country who gives a shit except those who went there and did it. Sometimes I'm not sure most of them care either. Time to move on, brother. Time to move on.

• 59:16Jocko Willink?

  Grab me one of those beers out of the cooler, will you, you stupid idiot?"

• 59:22Jocko Willink?

  And here's Len's thoughts on that. Now that announcement certainly shoots the shit out of my public reason for going back. I've been telling everyone who asked that I'm going to extract a little hide from the Charlies who nailed my little brother. Now he's telling me he's not my little brother and to grow up. Well crap, why the hell didn't he make that speech before I re-enlisted? Laughing to myself. I'm a green beret. I'm gonna be a recon man. That's why I'm going back. I want to find out what it's like to be the best at something.

• 59:56Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward, Denang Safe House 22. The three of us anxiously await a top secret briefing in a small secured outbuilding that once was a carriage house. A Sergeant First Class E7 is standing behind a long, wide, thick plank table. Behind him, a captain wearing the green beret and a starched uniform sits quietly watching with an offhanded relaxed gesture so typical of SF men. The E7 motions to us to sit. Rising from his chair, the captain says, "During your training at Bragg, you men were selected as potential candidates for Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group." Studies and observations? What the hell is that? God damn it, I came back to be a recon

• 1:00:41Jocko Willink?

  man. Sounds like they're gonna make us into a bunch of clerks. "I will give you a series of briefings, the first of which requires you to make a decision as to whether you want to go on with the second." Before we continue, what you are about to hear is classified top secret, requiring you to sign the non-disclosure form in front of you. Read the form. If you choose not to sign, get up and leave the room. No questions asked. Read the form. Okay, sign the form and give it to the E7. This better not be a clerk's job. Top secret clerk. I read the form and scribble my signature at the bottom, handing it to the E7 as he circulates among us.

• 1:01:20Jocko Willink?

  I know this is a lot of, and he goes through some history. That's, that's what's part of the briefing is.

• 1:01:27Jocko Willink?

  He says this, "Four years ago, April 1964, the government of South Vietnam created the Special Exploitation Service, or SES, to replace the VN Special Forces Command. Concurrently, the CIA transferred its advisory role to the newly formed Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group, or MACV-SOG, which is run by the US Military Joint Services. Last year, the South Vietnamese renamed the SES the Strategic Technical Directorate." Clearing his throat, the captain picks up a glass of water, taking a long drink.

• 1:02:07Jocko Willink?

  And why do I need to know all this? Questions? No? Okay, to the point. "You men will be assigned to an FOB. Forward Operations Base, or FOBs, have been in existence since 1964. They are located in Phu Bai, Khe Son, Cam Duoc, and Da Nang. FOBs conduct classified operations outside South Vietnam." Classified operations? Doesn't sound like a clerk's job to me. This is getting interesting.

• 1:02:35Jocko Willink?

  "Operations in Da Laoce commenced September 1965 as part of Operation Shining Brass and recently have been renamed Prairie Fire. Out-of-country operations are conducted by recon teams called Spike Teams, Hatchet Forces, and Slam Companies." Break those down for us real quick. Spike Teams, Hatchet Forces, and, and there's also like RT, which is Recon Team.

• 1:03:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, in the early days, up until the end of 68, it was Spike Team because it was top secret code for Recon Team.

• 1:03:11Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:03:12John Stryker Meyer?

  And then you had the Hatchet Force, which could be anything from a platoon up to a company-sized operation like Operation Tailwind. And then the Slam operations, that would be one or two Hatchet Force components depending on the size. They would go in and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Back it up, and then the Air Force would have air power. So anything that backed up on the trail, they would hit it, hit it hard. And of course, the NVA responded very quickly and the elements that were on the ground got hammered. So Slam got slammed with those operations. That's why by the time you get the tailwind in 70, they changed the MO a little bit, but that's the breakdown.

• 1:03:51Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:03:52John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Jocko Willink?

  Uh, this, this captain continues on Mac V Sog, Mac V Sog is a Joint Service High Command Unconventional Warfare Task Force, whose charters to conduct top secret sabotage, psychological and special operations in North and South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Southern China. It has been given the title Studies and Observation Group as a cover. The Joint Staff is allegedly performing an analysis of the lessons learned up to this point in the war. It's obviously a special operations group. Mac V Sog is organized into two field commands, Command and Control South and North, also called CCS and CCN.

• 1:04:39Jocko Willink?

  I know this is a lot of material, and I'm jumping ahead. I know this is a lot of material, but we want you to know what you're volunteering for. To continue, and he keeps the, throughout this, and Lynn doesn't, actually Lynn says this, "I volunteered to be here. I volunteered for recon. Sounds like I'm getting exactly what I asked for."

• 1:04:59Jocko Willink?

  How old is Lynn at this point?

• 1:05:01John Stryker Meyer?

  Seventy-five.

• 1:05:02Jocko Willink?

  No, at this point in the book.

• 1:05:03John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, there, um.

• 1:05:05Jocko Willink?

  He must be young, cuz he didn't do, oh no, he did a deployment with the, oh yeah, no, so he's, he's older, actually.

• 1:05:11John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Jocko Willink?

  He's actually probably older than you. How old?

• 1:05:13John Stryker Meyer?

  Probably. I was 22. I think Lynn would have been, he's a year ahead of me.

• 1:05:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:05:17John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. Like, he's 75 now, I'm four.

• 1:05:20Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 1:05:22Jocko Willink?

  Um, but still, damn, that's young. But you know why? The reason I ask you that is cuz when I think about what a young, um, American male mind is like, it's like this. You're sitting here and you, there's nothing more that anyone wants to hear than, uh,

• 1:05:47Jocko Willink?

  Joint Service High Command Unconventional Warfare Task Force, whose charters to conduct top secret sabotage, psychological and special operations. Sign me up.

• 1:05:57John Stryker Meyer?

  There we go. Airborne.

• 1:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, MACV's mission is twofold: support South Vietnam against communist aggression, assist in the development of the Southern Republic. The United States and our allies will succeed by winning the people, depriving the enemy of safe havens, rests, and supplies, depriving the enemy...

• 1:06:20Jocko Willink?

  And this is where MACV SOG comes into the picture. SOG has five primary responsibilities, and the capability to undertake additional special missions as required. Listen up. SOG's primary responsibilities include: first, cross-border operations conducted to disrupt Khmer Rouge,

• 1:06:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Pathet Lao.

• 1:06:41Jocko Willink?

  Pathet Lao, and NVA in their own territories.

• 1:06:47Jocko Willink?

  So that's Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam.

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  Secondly, keep track of all the imprisoned and missing Americans, and conducting raids to assist and free them as part of the escape and invasion mission for all captured US ground personnel and downed airmen. Mission three is training and dispatching agents into North Vietnam to run resistance operations called "black psychological operations", such as establishing false national NVA broadcasting stations inside North Vietnam, and "yellow psychological operations" as typified by the way Citadel propaganda transmitter mentioned earlier. "Four," the captain holds up four fingers waving them at us, "MACV SOG is also entrusted with specific tasks such as kidnapping, assassination, and insertion

• 1:07:36Jocko Willink?

  of rigged mortar rounds into enemy ammunition supply system, which are set to explode and destroy their crews upon use." He pauses to study our faces, again clearing his throat. "Five," he coughs again, "is the retrieval of sensitive documents and equipment if lost or captured through enemy action." He pauses. "Any questions?" Silence in the room.

• 1:08:03Jocko Willink?

  Lynn thinks to himself, "This is a hell of a lot more than just recon. Wow."

• 1:08:10Jocko Willink?

  "The next level of information reveals daily operational details. I will show you out of the country, areas of operations, talk in detail about the team makeup, and the commitment we hope you will volunteer to make. Any of you who want to bail out, now is the time." He pauses, looking around the room. "Looks like we're all in. This is going to be a hell of a lot of fun." Reaching to his left, the captain rolls back a black cloth covering a map of Southeast Asia. MAC vsOG is a top-secret organization operating the width and breadth of the DMZ, west into Laos, and south down through Cambodia. The shaded areas you see delineate the AO, our area of operations. You will enter the AO with no personal identification. Your weapons

• 1:08:53Jocko Willink?

  will not contain serial numbers. You and your gear will be what we call "sterile." You will carry nothing that identifies you as an American. You will not carry pictures of your loved ones or anything else that doesn't directly pertain to your mission. Occasionally, you will use enemy weapons as well, and dress like them." He pauses. "Are there any questions?" He picks up a glass of water. "Are there any questions?" The captain asks a second times. The second time, receiving no response other than stunned faces, he continues, "Accepting this assignments, accepting this assignment means you will be expected to run a minimum of three cross-border missions to complete your tour of duty with

• 1:09:34Jocko Willink?

  SOG. After those missions, you can request a change of assignment to finish out your year in-country. If you wish to leave SOG, we will honor that request. If you wish to leave Special Forces, we will send you to another unit, or you can stay and continue running missions. Now, are there any questions?"

• 1:09:55Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir. Are we spies? Asked one of our party without hesitation. By international law, yes. This is a covert operation, as I said, top secret. Our job is to trail watch, POW snatch, wiretap, ambush, and just plain old enemy interdiction. You will be assigned to recon teams, RTs. Those teams are led by three Americans who are supported by nine mercenary commandos, which make up a full 12-man team. The American leader is designated a 1-0. The assistant team leader is a 1-1, and finally, the radio operator has a designation of 1-2. The mercenaries are paid by us to work in the AO you see on this map.

• 1:10:39Jocko Willink?

  Additionally, there might be an Arvin Special Forces team member whose job it is to handle the mercenaries while you do your intelligence work.

• 1:10:50Jocko Willink?

  E7, next form, please. Please read this carefully before accepting or rejecting it. If you sign, you will become members of the most elite fighting force the United States has ever put in the field against an enemy. We are fighting a secret war. As I said earlier, you can never divulge your participation, recognize or give credence to any second or third-party knowledge of our existence. The captain and E7 move into a shadowed corner, quietly talking. I read carefully through the non-disclosure statements. Threats of imprisonment, disgrace, loss of rights and freedoms.

• 1:11:28Jocko Willink?

  I sign. Talk about getting what you ask for.

• 1:11:35Jocko Willink?

  The E7 distributes another set of papers to each of us. Gentlemen, welcome to MAC vs. SOG, smiles the captain. We now need to address this last little consideration. If you're unlucky enough to be captured and wind up as a POW, we have a cover story along with an individual recognition procedure. Don't share what you are about to write with anyone. There are questions on this form. They are the same questions for each of you. However, your response will be individual and will become the key to recognizing you and obtaining your release as a POW. Please fill in the answers. Make them simple and conversational. Put the form into the attached manila envelope and seal it. Hand the envelope to me and no one else in this room. Do not look at each other's answers.

• 1:12:20Jocko Willink?

  Collecting the envelopes and stuffing them into a canvas attache. The captain says, "Men, thank you for volunteering. Good luck and goodbye."

• 1:12:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, I forgot that part about the, uh, the last, the second document. You put your individual information down. I forgot about that Lynn being sharper as he is.

• 1:12:46Jocko Willink?

  He must have taken notes. He's got some incredible information. Man.

• 1:12:52John Stryker Meyer?

  Welcome to the secret war.

• 1:12:53Jocko Willink?

  Welcome to SOG.

• 1:12:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Yes, indeed.

• 1:13:00Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you, when you were going through that moment, did you have any like hesitation? Oh, you just so all in, it was ridiculous.

• 1:13:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Ridiculous. Yeah, absolutely. Just like Lynn. I mean, you know, in my case, we had been going through all our training for all those months. And it's like, this is, this is the war and like, you know, the Green Beret movie had been out. What would the Duke do?

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And what's crazy is you were told, you were told, "Don't volunteer for SOG."

• 1:13:30John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah, we went through training group.

• 1:13:31Jocko Willink?

  They're like, "Hey, listen."

• 1:13:33John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Jocko Willink?

  "Don't volunteer for SOG or whatever you do, don't volunteer for SOG."

• 1:13:37John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, even there, it wasn't that direct. It would be like, you know, when you go get to an A camp, learn about the country, the people, and there's projects, don't volunteer. Get, because those people are dying. And this is 68, we had so many teams have been wiped out by that point. The, uh, briefer didn't tell Lynn anything about that.

• 1:13:56John Stryker Meyer?

  The casualty rate by that point. Oh yeah.

• 1:14:05Jocko Willink?

  Gearing up, each individual will wear or carry sterile fatigues or tiger suit, flop brim hat with a portion of panel sewn inside the top. Jungle boots, pistol belt, harness, first aid packet, pill kit, heavy and sharp canteens with water purification tablets, smoke grenades, compass survival kit, individual pistol, submachine gun, and sawed off M79 weapon, signal mirror, panel, strobe light, pen flare with flares, ammo pouches, rucksack with reinforced straps, rations, weapons cleaning kit, maps, poncho and liner, can opener, P38 or knife with can opener, waterproof matches,

• 1:14:45Jocko Willink?

  insect and leech repellent, jungle sweater, RT10 survival radio, pen light, six foot of nylon cord, parachute suspension cord, Swiss seat, two snap links, notebook and pencil, two plastic bags, fragmentation white phosphorus and gas grenades, two cravat bandages, gloves, claymore serum.

• 1:15:07Jocko Willink?

  The team will need to carry a camera and film, binoculars, ANPRC 25 radio, or as you call it, a Prick 25 with extra battery, M14 tow popper mines and booby traps, anti-intrusion device, wiretaps, and equipment for prisoner snatches.

• 1:15:27John Stryker Meyer?

  That's all.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  What exactly is a wiretap?

• 1:15:33Jocko Willink?

  It's like, go ahead, Tilt.

• 1:15:34John Stryker Meyer?

  You'd have the telephone lines, so that's the wire, and you tap into it. And then you're, in our case, you go up the telephone pole, put the wires, our wires, onto their wire, tape it, then come down the pole, cover it with mud, so if anybody walked by, they wouldn't see it. And we have it tied into a, at that time, state of the art cassette recorder. And we would record, even if there was nobody talking, the CIA had us do the actual recordings, so that they could hear it, they would amplify the tapes, they could, they said they amplified it a hundred times, they could hear things in the background, because the NVA phones, when they're in the cradle, they're live, like our phones, they're, they shut off, those are still alive, and the CIA would,

• 1:16:17John Stryker Meyer?

  we give them all our tapes, and they would amplify it, they said they got intel off those things.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we hear people talking in the background about stuff, yeah.

• 1:16:25John Stryker Meyer?

  And of course, CIA, we give, they take, and they're done, you never hear anything back at all.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  So when you say you're you wiretap's part of the list of stuff that you guys have, what is it like a little apparatus or something?

• 1:16:38John Stryker Meyer?

  It was the actual cassette recorder, then a wire and then at the end of the wire, there'd be two little things that you tape on to it. Or there or go through sometimes a wire have like a double area.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:50John Stryker Meyer?

  Plug it in between. Yeah, and then you tape it.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 1:16:53Jocko Willink?

  How big was the cassette recorder? Shoebox? I'm picturing shoebox.

• 1:16:59Jocko Willink?

  Was it as big as a shoebox?

• 1:17:00John Stryker Meyer?

  No, no, not that big. It'd be about this side, like this side.

• 1:17:03Jocko Willink?

  Like the size of a book.

• 1:17:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, like a book size.

• 1:17:06Jocko Willink?

  Like a thick book.

• 1:17:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, like the old school.

• 1:17:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Very old school.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09John Stryker Meyer?

  You have the handle.

• 1:17:10Jocko Willink?

  Was it, was it, was there tape cassettes in there or was it like some kind of reel to reel scenario? No kidding, you guys were high speed.

• 1:17:17John Stryker Meyer?

  I'm telling you, this is state of the art, bro. This is nineteen sixty, none of that real, real stuff in the field.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:24John Stryker Meyer?

  Dang. And the cassettes, you know, I think we had by then they had the two hour cassette, so you could do an hour on each one side.

• 1:17:32John Stryker Meyer?

  As opposed to a sixty with thirty on each side.

• 1:17:34Jocko Willink?

  And someone's sitting down there freaking flipping those damn cassettes over while you're out in Laos in Cambodia.

• 1:17:41John Stryker Meyer?

  Hey, it keeps you something to divert your attention from watching the trail, yeah. Swatting mosquitoes.

• 1:17:49Jocko Willink?

  So I I mentioned that the way he sets this book up as you're reading and it makes it very conversational in a way. But he sets a lot of it up as debriefing.

• 1:17:58John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Jocko Willink?

  And and he also wrote this, and this is one of his thoughts, have you ever seen yourself through the eyes of someone you've become? No, this isn't an existential existential question, really, have you? And what that made me think about is when you're debriefing. You're kind of, you're kind of forcing yourself to detach and explain what you did and it's almost like you're seeing yourself.

• 1:18:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:23Jocko Willink?

  In a, in a, in a third person situation.

• 1:18:28Jocko Willink?

  So in this particular set, to set this up, they're in there and this isn't, we, we, we talked a little bit about you guys playing liar's dice and sitting around the bar and having some drinks and debriefing amongst yourselves.

• 1:18:39John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 1:18:40Jocko Willink?

  Well, this one is set up not like that. This is an official debriefing.

• 1:18:45John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:45Jocko Willink?

  And did you guys always do official debriefings? Cause it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like this was a an operation that was so significant that it required a. Like a, like an onsite special debriefing.

• 1:18:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah, always. We went right to S2.

• 1:18:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you guys always did this?

• 1:19:01John Stryker Meyer?

  AAR, that's the SOP.

• 1:19:03Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:19:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Absolutely. And if it was really hot, they would get the initial word down by radio transmission on RTT and then come back with a full air-to-air action report.

• 1:19:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it sounds like this one is, um, pretty significant.

• 1:19:21Jocko Willink?

  So, a- a- and, and I'm gonna fast forward just a little bit. And here we go. Specialist Black, please begin. Which again, this is crazy. He's in E4.

• 1:19:33John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:33Jocko Willink?

  Freaking crazy. Specialist Black, please, please begin. Apprehensively, I mentally moved back in time. The monthly Saigon target list arrived and as usual, the team leaders gathered in the Tactical Operations Center to pick or be assigned their missions. Some have to be assigned because no one wants to run those targets. Why is that? They're known to be one-way trips. "I see," responds the sergeant. Oscar Eight, which is known to be one of those one-way trips, is always assigned on a lottery system. My understanding is that the last 12 teams attempting to run that mission have never been heard from again.

• 1:20:19Jocko Willink?

  Or, or were so shot up that they've been disbanded.

• 1:20:25Jocko Willink?

  So, this one particular mission set was called Oscar Eight. And this Oscar Eight, there's been 12 teams that have gone to execute this operation and they've either totally disappeared or they've been so, so messed up that they disbanded the teams.

• 1:20:41John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah. It's just the nasty targets where major roads came together. I forget the exact highways, like 92. There's a couple other that all came into northern part of South Vietnam. And we later learned they had a major headquarters area there. And that's where like on the ground, the first book with Pat, first chapter with Pat Watkins, they were in Oscar Eight when the NVA came up and said, "It's your turn for guard duty." That's what Lynn's talking about.

• 1:21:09Jocko Willink?

  He says, uh, here, one of them, one of them, that one of the analysts, Specialist Black, we're interested in the intel gathered during the VR. We know the history of the target. Chides the lieutenant analyst. So the guy's basically going, look, we know it's a bad target. We want to know about your visual reconnaissance. Sir, that's, and you, he's showing a lot of restraint right now. Sir, that's precisely the point I'm getting at. Please bear with me as I step through this process so I don't forget any of the details. Keep calm, man. He doesn't have a clue of the edge I'm teetering on. Calm down. Got to get calm down. How long's it take to get over the after mission jitters? Be quick about it, Specialist, replies the lieutenant impatiently.

• 1:21:53John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, a ref at that.

• 1:21:59Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir. Alabama won the lottery.

• 1:22:04Jocko Willink?

  R11. I point to Angel Key.

• 1:22:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Angle Key.

• 1:22:09Jocko Willink?

  Angle Key. I point to Angle Key.

• 1:22:13Jocko Willink?

  Volunteered to lead us through a map study, picking primary, secondary, and alternate landing zones, landing and extraction zones. We studied every bit of intelligence we could lay our hands on about the weather patterns in the AO, area of operation, the known enemy, and how they maneuver. Sometimes you can pick up more information in the club than in the reports. Not in this case. There are no surviving old hands to talk about the lottery. There was no intel in the target folder. That's the point, sir. So they're going in blind. No turnover.

• 1:22:50Jocko Willink?

  And then he, then fast forward a little bit. The, the analyst says, you were provided no target intelligence? We were told none was available. Armed with maps and a camera, Bulldog scheduled a VR two days before mission launch, offers 11. Bulldog, whose code name is that? It was the code name of Sergeant Stride, the Alabama team leader, R10. As you know, he was greased, uh, killed in action.

• 1:23:20Jocko Willink?

  Like 1-1 said, "The same person sitting next to you? The same 1-1? Are you referring to Specialist Angelkey?" "Yes, sir. Recon Team Alabama's 1-1, the assistant team leader. Like he said, he was sick, so I ran the VR with Bulldog. We needed the intel to be as fresh as possible for the mission. It takes one day to develop film and study the pictures, so it was never, it was then or never if we were going to launch on October 5th. 1-1 wasn't feeling well. That made me the photographer. Bulldog and I squeezed side by side into the narrow rear seat of a Vietnamese Air Force U-17. The weather was clear, and we took off from Phu Bai Airfield circling out over the China Sea.

• 1:24:02Jocko Willink?

  We came in high, taking pictures of the entire AO, yelling at each other over the engine noise in order to discuss what we could see and attempting to orient what we saw to the maps. With those windows, and this is a thought, with those windows open and the maps were blowing all over the damn place until Bulldog got them under control. We flew under clouds and over rivers of mist, filled ridges, plateaus, and valleys, picking a primary and two alternate LZs. Bulldog ordered the pilot to make a photo pass over the primary LZ at 100 feet. The pilot objected and told us he wanted to stay high and leave the area soon. 'Good thinking,' replies the sergeant. Bulldog slapped the pilot on the back of his head.

• 1:24:46Jocko Willink?

  So this is him, this is, I'm not doing this very well, but this is, this is Lynn Black kind of explaining, "Hey, Bulldog ordered the pilots make another, to, to make another pass, and the pilot said, 'No, I'm not gonna do it.'" And then the sergeant says, "Good thinking." And he says, "Well," Bulldog slapped the pilot on the back of his helmet, barking the order again. "We dropped down to teardrop, to treetop level, and I managed one picture before the nose of the ship rose, and we began banking for another pass. As we climbed, our plane was stitched with machine gun fire. Rounds ripped through the floor, exited the ceiling. The cabin was sprayed and flecked with blood as the copilot was struck under the chin, his helmet slammed against the ceiling, ricocheting into my lap, still containing part of his head. That picture will be imprinted in my mind forever."

• 1:25:34John Stryker Meyer?

  Forever.

• 1:25:37Jocko Willink?

  And he says, he, he thinks it's a, it's a pain. I guess I'm sad. Sadness that grips the soul of my very being. I like that co-pilot. Before we took off from Fubai, he was trying to tell me a joke in really bad English. I didn't get it, but laughed anyways.

• 1:25:53Jocko Willink?

  You're okay, Specialist Black.

• 1:25:58Jocko Willink?

  You're sorry, you okay Specialist Black? Asked Chief Sog, glancing at his medical team. Yes, sir. I was telling you about the incident. The image of the helmet and partial head popped into my mind. I'd never seen anything like that before. I was fighting a thousand emotions all at once, all flooding through me, forcing my eyes to glisten. Those kind of images have a way of staying with us for the remainder of our lives. Each of us has to find a way to deal with them in order to go on. Continue with your story, orders the chief patiently. Yes, sir. I collect my thoughts. The pilot dropped the Cessna back down to treetop level. We got the hell out of Dodge in the Wild West. Yeah, you know, you, you mentioned REMFs.

• 1:26:43Jocko Willink?

  You know, you said that this Lieutenant Alanis is a REMF, and for those people that don't know, REMF is, stands for Rear Echelon Motherfucker, and that's the person that's, these are the people that are not on the front lines, not doing the fighting. It's actually the genesis of the name of my consulting company, Echelon Front. Which is not Rear Echelon. Hey, I'm in the rear with the gear, but hey, frontline leadership. And, and this whole scene. You know, for whatever Hollywood director is listening to this right now, or whatever producer, who, who makes movies, Echo Charles?

• 1:27:18John Stryker Meyer?

  All, all of those people.

• 1:27:19Jocko Willink?

  Whoever's gonna make this into a movie, this is the iconic scene of the Rear Echelon Motherfuckers trying to debrief this guy, and we're gonna get into the mission, and once you, once you realize what he just went through, you can see why this is such an intense scene. Because he's sitting there, just having barely survived, lost guys, and they're asking him these questions, and it's just your classic iconic scene of a disconnect between the people on the front lines and the Rear Echelon Motherfuckers.

• 1:27:54John Stryker Meyer?

  And that's October 3rd, two days before the actual mission. Doing a VR.

• 1:27:59Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's right. So, so the debrief is after the mission, but the part that he's talking about, they haven't even done the mission yet.

• 1:28:06John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:06Jocko Willink?

  This is they're getting shot at as they're doing a visual reconnaissance. They lose a pilot while they're doing the visual reconnaissance. Can you imagine? This is why this is till if you did this VR and you came back to me and said, hey, Jaco, we did the visual reconnaissance. By the way, we had a pilot shot. The plane got shot up.

• 1:28:24John Stryker Meyer?

  I got a used helmet if you want to use it.

• 1:28:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'd say, hey, guess what? We're not going into there. I'd say, well, it's not happening. Okay? It's not. We're not go. It's a no go.

• 1:28:34John Stryker Meyer?

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 1:28:37Jocko Willink?

  You guys had freaking balls.

• 1:28:41John Stryker Meyer?

  We didn't have you.

• 1:28:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, crazy.

• 1:28:47Jocko Willink?

  The insertion Covey was Captain Greg Hartness. Covey 265 was his call sign. His rider was Sergeant First Class Patrick Watkins, code night, code name Mandolin.

• 1:29:00Jocko Willink?

  The second Covey pilot was Colonel Don Borncastle and his rider was Staff Sergeant Bob Parks. His code name is Spider.

• 1:29:09Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant George Miller, Scarface 56, was the lead gunship pilot who escorted the King Bs into the insertion. So now we're now we're actually getting into the operation.

• 1:29:18John Stryker Meyer?

  October 5th. Yes, sir.

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  And they do, you know, I'm skipping forward, you know, and look, as I said before, to get the rest of the details, just buy the book and read it. And it's, it's, it's incredible. The, the details that he captures are, are awesome. So, but I'm going to fast forward a little bit. So, um, the, he covers the insertions and then the lieutenant says,

• 1:29:46Jocko Willink?

  the, the analyst lieutenant says, we expect you to take as long as you need on this portion of the debrief. When you're finished, I'm sure your one, one will fill any missing details. Gather your thoughts and begin when ready.

• 1:29:59Jocko Willink?

  1-1, fill in the details, never mind that. Back across the fence, we're moving through dense foliage, a ridge rising to our right. Okay, here goes.

• 1:30:10Jocko Willink?

  RT Alabama was ambushed at approximately 0800 hours on October 5th, 1968. At coordinates Yankee Charlie 561692. Our point man, Hua, was hit multiple times in his chest and lower body. In that same instant, three rounds penetrated our 1-0 team leader's head. Cowboy, the interpreter, was behind stride and took an RPD round below his left shoulder. I was behind Cowboy when he went down. The assistant team leader, the 1-1, went down at the same time. I thought he was hit as well.

• 1:30:51Jocko Willink?

  "Are you hit?" I yell at the 1-1, receiving no response. "Damn, he's dead too." Only six of us left standing. Bring out the bodies.

• 1:31:02Jocko Willink?

  Engage the enemy. Lakhua, the 0-1 Vietnamese team leader, orders the recon team Alabama to fire a full magazine just off the ground level to suppress enemy fire. At our right, on a slight rise, there's a line of NVA firing down into our position. "They're above us to the right, over there," I yell over the din of the ambush. Thumbing the selector of my Kar-15 to single shot, I begin picking them off, one at a time. 20 rounds expended, I push the magazine extraction button on the receiver. Shredding vegetation royals in the air punctuated by green NVA tracers, searching out their targets. Fumbling for another magazine in a canteen pouch on my web gear, I peer through the raging flora storm in the direction of the tracer source.

• 1:31:45Jocko Willink?

  An NVA I shot a moment ago is getting up and pointing in my direction. Okay, second magazine snaps into place. Slapping the left side of the receiver, the Kar-15 bolt slams home. As I raise the weapon, firing twice. "Stay down, damn it!" "We gotta break contact," I yell at the team. Continuing down the line, emptying magazine two, the NVA fall like targets in a shooting gallery. Another line moves in behind them, taking their place. "We're in a low spot, we have to get out of this hole," I yell. Cowboy interprets to the team. "Who's Cowboy?" Is he an American interpreter? Queries the puzzled lieutenant analyst as he searches through his notes. Huh? What did you ask, sir? Cowboy. Who's cowboy? Cowboy's our Vietnamese interpreter.

• 1:32:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Don Van Khan. 1-1 inserts quickly. Continue, orders lieutenant. Crouching, I reload. Surveying our situation, then grab the radio handset off my web harness. Covey, Blackjack, we have three killed and two wounded. Over. Who's down? Covey Rider Patrick Watkins calmly demands. Point Bulldog and 1-1. Over. Blackjack, you're not a doctor, nor for that fact, a medic. You can't determine who's dead or alive. You must attempt to bring out all the bodies for verification of death. A fresh swarm of automatic weapon fire up another foliage hurricane drowning out Covey communication. Finally, it settles down.

• 1:33:12Jocko Willink?

  Mandolin, Blackjack, we're taking heavy automatic fire. We'll be lucky to get the living out. They have us surrounded on three sides and are firing down into our position. I'm moving the team out of this hole. Over. Chu Hoi, translated means surrender, yells one of the NVA in a short lull of the ambush. I don't think so, I yell back, firing in his general direction. Alabama's weapons on full auto drown out further. Chu Hoi requests. 1-1 is alive and praying. In the middle of a fire, in the middle of a gunfight. This is no time to pray. Get up off your sorry ass and return fire, I yell.

• 1:33:53Jocko Willink?

  1-1 looks at me with doe eyes, shifting his body in an attempt to make him, make his form smaller. I kneel down next to him and find he has a Catholic rosary pressed to his lips and is quietly chanting a prayer. I need you to take tactical command while I do my job directing airstrikes and get us a ride home. I don't know what to do. I, I can't think. I can't. Angle Key slips into himself. Well, whiskey, tango, foxtrot. Over. Leaves and twigs rain down on Alabama as the ground erupts around us from automatic weapons fire. So his 1-1 is locked up mentally at this point.

• 1:34:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Gone. Body there, but no mind, no courage.

• 1:34:35Jocko Willink?

  And he actually thought he was dead. When everyone got shot in that opening ambush. Lynn, which by the way, his nickname, his code name is Blackjack. So that's, that's who it is. Blackjack thinks he's dead. But then he finally gets to him and looks at him and he's not even shot. But he's, he's having, he's having a meltdown.

• 1:34:55John Stryker Meyer?

  He's on his rosaries.

• 1:35:02Jocko Willink?

  Back on the radio, Mandolin. So Mandolin is the call sign of the Covey. Mandolin Blackjack, you're right. We don't have three dead. We only have two. 1-1 is alive. The NVA are now on all sides with snipers climbing into trees. I have to take action quickly or die. Blackjack, put your 1-1 on the horn, over. So here's, here's the Covey rider saying, hey, put your, put the guy in charge on the radio. I attempt to push the radio handset into 1-1's hands, but he wraps both hands around his rosary chanting. He drops his head, drawing his form further inward. Cowboy, tell the team, I'm the 1-0 and Lox and Loke's in charge of B team.

• 1:35:44Jocko Willink?

  As if I had to tell them, Loke's already doing the job. Mandolin Blackjack, 1-1 is unable to talk right at the moment. I'm the 1-0 of Alabama. Stand by. He's just freaking taking over. Blackjack's ready.

• 1:35:56John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:59Jocko Willink?

  No hesitation whatsoever.

• 1:36:00John Stryker Meyer?

  None.

• 1:36:02Jocko Willink?

  Roger replies Mandolin. Cowboy, I have two, have two men strip the bodies. Get all weapons, ammunition, masks, maps, anything the NVA can use. Distribute their gear to the team quickly now. Cowboy interprets as the two immediately go to work on the bodies while the rest of the rest continue returning fire. Cowboy, come with me. Tell Loki he's in command until we get back. I give Loke a thumbs up as the two of us slowly crawl, advancing on hands and knees towards a cluster of bushes. Flicking aside, a large black beetle has to not crush it.

• 1:36:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Isn't that funny?

• 1:36:38Jocko Willink?

  Were able to move close enough to the NVA that Cowboy hears their commander yell at his troops, "Prepare to charge their position." At the periphery of my vision sits a small bird staring, sitting below the normal human level of observation. In an instant, in a flicker of wings, it vanishes into the undergrowth. "I wish I could do that. Must have been after the beetle. Everybody seems to be after somebody." A kind-hearted reverence for life pushes its way into my thoughts. Get the claymore out of Cowboy's ruck. Blasting cap from the survival vest. That's it. Cowboy finishes out a hand grenade and wire spool. Hastily, we rig the claymore in the direction of those willing men from the north. The loving husband and the son-in-law who likes to grow his own vegetables. Fuck them all.

• 1:37:21Jocko Willink?

  A cloud of shredded foliage rains down on Cowboy and me as we work our way back towards Alabama, laying the detonation wires. "Get out of the line of fire, my little friend," I whisper after the bird. The insistent husbands, brothers, and son-in-laws stampede towards our indefensible position with weapons blazing, with their bulging veins frothing at the mouth, the whites of their eyes wide. Cowboy detonates the claymore. The air is filled with animal-like howls, gunfire, the smell of cordite, rotting vegetation, and death.

• 1:37:56Jocko Willink?

  We have blown a bloody path right down through the middle of them. Claymore smokes clearing, I yell. "Alabama up! Follow me!" The team moves through the path of carnage with our weapons on full auto as we assist the wounded. "On line!" This is what you get for screwing with one of the Black Brothers. What's left of their ragged line sporadically fires into our small band. Cowboy stumbles and falls, having taken another round on his left side. He comes haltingly to his feet, giving the OK signal. Once seemingly through and past the NVA battle line, Loke collapses our online formation to inline and orders the team to go in on single shot.

• 1:38:41Jocko Willink?

  The left of Cowboy's shirt is soaked with blood, blocked by impassable terrain on one side and NVA forces on the other. We work our way through the dense undergrowth back toward our point of insertion. To our rear and in parallel on both flanks, we can hear the NVA regrouping, gathering their strength. Random enemy shooting subsides as they begin firing signal shots to indicate the path of our travel. Flanking teams of two trackers for each enemy squad intermittently push us along. As they reveal themselves, we cut them down with single shots. Fire discipline is good. Got to find a place where we can stop to patch up our wounded. Don't fire randomly. Kill the enemy, low quarters. We continue maneuvering on our way

• 1:39:24Jocko Willink?

  through the high, thick underbrush toward the primary LZ, leaving behind the striped, the stripped bodies of our point man, Hoa, and our 1-0 Jim stride.

• 1:39:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, I know. Can you imagine? I mean, just how any of them lived?

• 1:39:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's amazing to see too. I mean, just the, just to see someone step up both, both Blackjack and Cowboy. Cowboy who's getting shot, he's wounded, and he's just leading and, and Lynn's stepping up and leading when all this mayhem is taking and, and you know, I always say leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, right? If these guys didn't step up and lead, everyone's dead. Hundred percent. It's a guarantee. These guys step up, they take action, they lead, and at this point, they're gonna, it looks like they're gonna get some progress.

• 1:40:25John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, his 0-1 was sharp and fearless because he rallied them, took care of the other details while Lynn and Cowboy are going on. And poor Cowboy getting hit a second time like that. Oh my God. He was, he was a big Vietnamese. He was tall.

• 1:40:40Jocko Willink?

  Who, the 0-1 Cowboy?

• 1:40:41John Stryker Meyer?

  Cowboy. He was the interpreter. The 0-1, I forget his name, you mentioned it there. I just remember the 0-1. That's our Vietnamese counterpart. The 1-0 is the American, the 0-1. He's had the experience because Alabama, four months earlier, the entire team was wiped out except for the 1-0. And he escaped and did a personal E and E back to the Ashaw Valley and they picked him up. So sixty-eight was a bad year for Alabama. But the zero one did not go on that faithful mission. So they had his experience for October the fifth that between him and Cowboy.

• 1:41:19Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Loke.

• 1:41:21John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Jocko Willink?

  That's who we're talking about. Loke is the zero.

• 1:41:23John Stryker Meyer?

  Zero one. And then the other guy on air is Doty Kwong, who later became the Idaho. I stole him from Alabama a couple of years later. He was great, but just a fearless, absolute warrior.

• 1:41:36Jocko Willink?

  Badasses.

• 1:41:37John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. True and true.

• 1:41:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, what's crazy is, you know, um, they used to, what was the bombers in Europe? The bombers in Europe, the American bombers that bombed Europe in World War Two. I think they had to do twenty-five missions. If they did twenty-five missions, they were done.

• 1:41:56John Stryker Meyer?

  And sometimes they'd push them a little further.

• 1:41:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:58John Stryker Meyer?

  But yeah, that was what the rule in place was.

• 1:42:00Jocko Willink?

  And the rule that they gave you guys was three. And I mean, those bombers, those guys were taking mass casualties, mass casualties.

• 1:42:11John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, absolute profound casualties.

• 1:42:13Jocko Willink?

  And yet they said, hey, you guys are gonna do twenty-five missions. And you guys, they're saying, hey, listen, can you, can we get three out of you?

• 1:42:20John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. See now, we never, I don't remember that part of the brief, if we ever had it. See, Lynn remembers those details. That's why his stuff is just so great. It's vivid. Yeah. And don't forget, they call it the bombers. Remember the Frenchman, his dad was the lead on that one squadron, twenty-three, only one comes back out of a thousand airplanes. So, yeah, same catastrophic effects by the enemy.

• 1:42:52Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on October fifth, Blackjack, Mandolin, we're returning with the King bees to Fubai for fuel. No extraction is possible for at least two, maybe three hours. Over. Another Covey is on station. You'll be talking to Spider.

• 1:43:12Jocko Willink?

  As fast as possible. Mandolin, we're about to find out how much longer we can hold out. Don't panic Blackjack, find the path, don't let them pin you down. Spider, Spider, Bob Parks, X10 of RT Idaho, just like Mandolin. Spider, Blackjack, over. Blackjack, Spider, keeping your cool buddy, keeping your cool buddy. He's there, we're not alone. Man, having you guys with that direct relationship with your coveys and they sat in the briefs and they knew what you were gonna do. That's a powerful thing.

• 1:43:45John Stryker Meyer?

  That was the key, having that rider. And that's the epitome of it, that moment in time right there. Cause Lynn's like, oh, Watkins is gone, the King bees are gone, nobody's gonna come back for two or three hours. You be cool? There's Spider talking to him. The night before, he's beating his ass on liar's dice at the clubhouse.

• 1:44:04Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if you've ever heard this story, but Dave Burke.

• 1:44:07John Stryker Meyer?

  Good deal, Dave.

• 1:44:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he was in Ramadi. And he's Angloco supporting, I think he's supporting an army unit. And it's the first real close air support that he's actually calling. And you know, he's a former F or he's an F-18 pilot. And it just so happens by coincidence and miracle and other coincidence that he keys up the mic and says, this is Lightning Six. And the guy that answers, the guy that's in the air about to give ordinance for him is like one of his buddies.

• 1:44:37John Stryker Meyer?

  No.

• 1:44:37Jocko Willink?

  And he says something like, hey, Chip, it's, you know, hey, Chip, it's Maverick. I'm, I'm ready to rock and roll. He goes, oh, it's like this. So having that relationship that you guys had with these coveys, man.

• 1:44:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Critical, absolutely critical.

• 1:44:52Jocko Willink?

  So he says, keeping your cool buddy. Standby Spider, they're pushing us from all sides. We're moving back towards the LZ perimeter and we'll be ready for extraction, over. Grabbing a claymore from one of the rucksacks, I set up a 10 second fuse pointing at it to our rear while Loke covers me. We can hear them screaming in agony as we move through the bush back towards our insertion. And you know what, before we go on, I just want to go back to this, cause it's a, it's a little bit of a point of contention in the book.

• 1:45:23Jocko Willink?

  If you remember, I read this part where he says, "We continue maneuvering our way through the high, thick underbrush toward the primary LZ, leaving behind the stripped bodies of our point man, Hoa, and our 1-0 Jim stride." So, he had to make a decision, the hardest possible decision that a person could have to make, which is, "Hey, these guys are dead. We're gonna strip their bodies and we're gonna leave them." Because if we try and, and, and look, anybody that hasn't ever carried a freaking another human being through rough terrain, you have no idea. You have no idea. Look, and you can say, "Oh, I'll pick up my, I'll pick up Echo right now and I'll run, you know, across the parking lot or whatever, run 100 yards."

• 1:46:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, it might not seem like that big of a deal. If you make Echo actual dead weight, where he's not helping in any way, not adjusting his weight on you, not holding on to your neck or holding on to your shoulders, none of that. If it's just true dead weight, 205 pounds or 210 pounds or whatever. What are you, 220?

• 1:46:23John Stryker Meyer?

  About 220.

• 1:46:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay, 220 pounds of dead weight. You're 185?

• 1:46:31Jocko Willink?

  It's not that big of a deal to do it. It's not. When you pick up a buddy and you carry him across the, the field, the football field or the parking lot, it's not that big of a deal. When they're dead weight, it's totally different. When you're in terrain, it's even more different. And then when you're getting freaking shot at and assaulted by a massive number of NVA, you gotta make a decision. What are we gonna do? Are we gonna survive? Or are we gonna perish to save our friend's body? What would I want? What would, what would, if I was shot, if I was dead, what would I want you to do? All die to bring my body out? Hell no. You'd get your ass out of there. And, and so Lynn had to make this decision. And he made it quick and, you know, that's how you survive.

• 1:47:14John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:17John Stryker Meyer?

  It wasn't easy, but he did the right thing.

• 1:47:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, that's the, that's what you gotta do. And it's not like, and by the way, when you, when you leave that body, you're not saying, "Oh, we're never gonna do anything." No, you go do a bright light. You could do what, what you gotta do to, once you get your forces assembled and you can get more guys and you can get the right air cover and all that stuff, you're not abandoning them. But at that moment in time, you gotta make a decision to, for the survivability of the team. It just, that's what you have to do.

• 1:47:52Jocko Willink?

  Here's his thoughts. Wait a minute. We just marked our location. How stupid was that? This is after they blow, after they blow up a claymore, they're like, oh, that was a bad move. We just marked our location evade, stay out of contact as long as possible. Yeah, right. The NVA know we're heading toward the LZ and are trying to push us onto it to where we'll be easier targets. They intend to use us as bait so they can shoot down more helicopters. Once we're dead and the helicopters are down, they'll lie and wait for the bright light. Rescue choppers. Screw that. Today it's not gonna, today it's gonna end with us. Dead or alive, these bastards aren't gonna use me as bait. Bait. Maybe we can bait them out on the LZ where our gunships can get at them. Hunt the hunters.

• 1:48:38Jocko Willink?

  So those are just, these are Lynn's thoughts. Those were Lynn's thoughts. Quickly working through cowboy, Loc and I decide to turn back against the NVA.

• 1:48:48Jocko Willink?

  We employ fire and maneuver. A team firing while B team is maneuvering, searching, destroying and clearing a path. Old school cover move. We turn, we turn moving back through the claymore swath.

• 1:49:03Jocko Willink?

  Until we encounter a larger enemy force online searching us out. Down, wait, ready, fire. Red and green, red and green tracers fill the air moving like rush hour traffic lights.

• 1:49:16Jocko Willink?

  We are able to grease a couple of platoon sized forces up on me. Alabama forms up as I point southwest towards the LZ. A new NVA line is flooding in this behind searching us out. They are using grenades to clear the jungle as they move. Whistles are sounding on two sides indicating we are moving into a possible ambush. They're attempting to herd us together on the edge of the LZ where there's a 2,000 foot sheer drop on the southern edge.

• 1:49:47Jocko Willink?

  Alabama online yells Loc pointing to pointing our direction of travel. Boldly we charge pushing them back mowing them down like weeds bold move. We close to the perimeter to the LZ perimeter. Don't let them force us out into the open. A fast moving object enters my peripheral vision whack. My head is snapped back by a wooden handled grenade instantly I'm looking into the jungle canopy. Seeing a muddled green light stream through a haze of cordite. It's over. You saw it coming and couldn't get out of the way. Lower below me the concussion lifts me from the ground pushing me through the air. My feet are over my head green tracers track crack around me like lady finger firecrackers.

• 1:50:31Jocko Willink?

  That tree is upside down and moving fast. This is all wrong. Focus or you'll miss the moment of your death. I hear myself say I can't breathe. I feel like I'm drowning. The team they are frantically beating me back to consciousness pouring water over my head. Okay, okay, I'm back. I tried to get up. My legs don't work. From the knees down my fatigue pants are shredded and I'm bleeding. One of the men quang starts smearing. Gelatinized rice on my legs, arms, face and chest. Web gear and what is left of my survival vest are lying on the ground and a bloody tatters along with the car 15. It's bent where the barrel meets the receiver and the bolt can't be pulled back.

• 1:51:12Jocko Willink?

  Loc orders a scout to bury the car cowboy hands me strides weapon cowboy what's wrong with your hand? Grenade shrapnel. He winces. Handing me the weapon.

• 1:51:25Jocko Willink?

  You have now officially pissed me off. I scream at the NVA.

• 1:51:31Jocko Willink?

  So at this point they're they're doing fire maneuver. They're get to the edge of the LZ. He gets hit in the head with a freaking grenade. And then it detonates blows him up in the air. Destroyed his car 15. Destroyed his car 15.

• 1:51:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, this is after they charged through the NVA rank. They go through them. It's like, even in my best day, I don't think I would have thought of that. It had to be somebody like Lynn. It's just such a distinct courageous move.

• 1:52:03Jocko Willink?

  It is, and it's one of those things where that's the last thing that the enemy thinks you're gonna do, and they probably just, it was the last thing they would think, and then when it happens, they're not ready for it. They're like, wait a second, what's happening?

• 1:52:13John Stryker Meyer?

  It's a brilliant, just a brilliant move.

• 1:52:17Jocko Willink?

  So he says, "You have now officially pissed me off." "I scream at the NVA. Goddamn, my head hurts when I do that." "Scrabbling around my position, I finally find the radio handset." "Spider, Blackjack, I'm declaring a prairie fire emergency."

• 1:52:34Jocko Willink?

  "A prairie fire emergency should drop enough Maypom on you suckers to ruin your day." "Laughing, Blackjack says." "Laughing, the reply comes, Blackjack, no kidding, brother. Keep your cool. Above all else, keep your cool."

• 1:52:51Jocko Willink?

  So that's awesome. I mean, Spider had already said, hey, he's already moving assets into place. He can tell that this is a shit sandwich down here. And then he gives this advice, you know, this is advice we could all use. "Keep your cool. Above all else, keep your cool."

• 1:53:06John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:07Jocko Willink?

  And that means so much, because it's coming from Spider, who's a 1-0 himself. That's been on the ground, that knows what's happening, and he's saying, "Above all else, keep your cool."

• 1:53:19Jocko Willink?

  And so then he says to himself, "Calm the hell down, Blackjack. Be cool." So that actually worked. He actually listened. "Spider, Blackjack, so what's our asset status? Over." "All assets have been diverted to your location. Covey will coordinate them as they arrive and let you know what armament is available. You make the decision what you want, when and where you want it. Any questions? Who's up first?" "I attempt to rise but fall flat on my face. Goddamn it." "Six gunships will prep the LZ with gun and rocket runs. Amongst them, one will attempt to land." If that's not possible... It will trail a ladder improvised brother Roger spider. I roll over hugging the radio receiver to my ear trying to get to my feet.

• 1:54:03Jocko Willink?

  The gunships fire rockets and then make gun runs near our position. The rescue ship attempts to land twice twice we make our move. Too much lead in the air. Ground fire is much too intense. They're hammering our pickup to pieces. Get it out of here spider. Do you copy over? The rescue ship limps off while the while marine scar face ships expend their ordinance and covering fire. Blackjack spider. Fubai is mounting a bright light rescue to assist you in the fight. That's kind of crazy because bright. It I mean, bright light is as bad as it gets, right? That means we either had people overrun or had people captured and they're already launching.

• 1:54:46John Stryker Meyer?

  We're getting ready. They talked about it. That's where because we were scheduled for the next day and that we were the bright light.

• 1:54:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you guys were the freaking bright light?

• 1:54:53John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:55Jocko Willink?

  And they're telling so so what is that like? What are you hearing?

• 1:54:58John Stryker Meyer?

  It's like this is this is not going to be a good day. And you just don't know.

• 1:55:05Jocko Willink?

  Can you hear what the aircraft? Because I know you can't hear what the guys on the ground are saying because they're on the ground and they it's not line of sight. So you wouldn't be able. Could you guys hear what the aircraft are saying back to the guys on the ground when you guys were?

• 1:55:16John Stryker Meyer?

  Pick up some spiders transmission and Pat Watkins, you could hear some of it. Could depend on where they were, how low they were and up. So we picked up some we just knew it was a shit show. Because the whole camp, this is Saturday. Everybody just came to a pause and started praying for them.

• 1:55:34Jocko Willink?

  And so what are you guys? So so are you the are you the one zero?

• 1:55:37John Stryker Meyer?

  No, Don Walken was the one zero back then I was the one one for Idaho. And they talked about the bright light. Don had gone in for the brief and they said we might be the bright light.

• 1:55:47Jocko Willink?

  What's your what are you doing when you're when you might be the bright light? Do you already have all your mags are all loaded?

• 1:55:52John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, we're ready for the mission next day. You just well, you just take anything out. Then it's just all bullets and grenades and the extra bandages, maybe a couple of body bags. And then we never even got to the launch site. They canceled it because the it's between the enemy, the anti aircraft and and then the weather. Because it started to cloud over and then all the gun smoke, the cordite and then the clouds.

• 1:56:21John Stryker Meyer?

  They figured one more team win and we'd be more casualties and the and the king be like like what Lynn just described.

• 1:56:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:27John Stryker Meyer?

  The first attempt to get him out, just like, get out of here. You if you want to live themselves.

• 1:56:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, which you think about the mindset of Lynn Black.

• 1:56:38John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:38Jocko Willink?

  Your savior is coming down to rescue you and you say, nope, get out of here.

• 1:56:45John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. What an honorable move.

• 1:56:47Jocko Willink?

  Beyond.

• 1:56:48John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:51Jocko Willink?

  He says, uh, so he says, so, so Spider says, hey, we're getting a bright light ready for you. And then Blackjack, Spider Blackjack, how would they get in here? We don't need more people on the ground or helicopters shot down. Don't let the NVA use us as bait. We need to get off the ground and out of the line of fire. In the meantime, what I really need is a resupply of ammo, over. Blackjack, you okay? I got nailed with a grenade, nothing serious, over. Just can't walk. Ammo's on the way and I agree with your assessment of the bright light, over. Spider, tell Fubai Alabama is not a sacrificial lamb. No bright light, over. So not only did he call off his, the helicopters from coming in, he's calling off the rescue mission himself.

• 1:57:35Jocko Willink?

  He's saying, hey, don't send a bright light.

• 1:57:39John Stryker Meyer?

  I'm glad he said that.

• 1:57:45Jocko Willink?

  He says, Roger Blackjack, by the way, the assets are beginning to have difficulty with the weather and smoke hanging over the LZ. You're difficult to spot, which makes accurate airstrikes increasingly difficult, over. Cowboy's working on my legs while he's telling me, Boku NVA on LZ.

• 1:58:03Jocko Willink?

  We can hear gunships overhead and witness NVA tracers riddling the lead ship. The NVA move across the grassy plain of the LZ like a work party of ants, ants tr- trampling down the two-foot razor grass, which is the only concealment we have. Suddenly, 1-1 panics, shouting skyward, God save us.

• 1:58:24Jocko Willink?

  The NVA swarm migrates in our direction.

• 1:58:29Jocko Willink?

  So the 1-1

• 1:58:31Jocko Willink?

  who's been freaked out this whole time and hasn't done his job now yells out, God save us, and the NVA hear it.

• 1:58:41Jocko Willink?

  Vietnamese team members speaking through Cowboys say, "We're going to kill 1-1 if he doesn't shut up. I'll pull the trigger on him myself." I agree. Tearfully, 1-1 whispers, "God forgive you." Sounds of an approaching King B and our diversion as the carrots of survival are dangled in front of us again. Each King B can hold four, so we gotta get everyone out on two. Sure hope they brought a dozen to this party. We've meant, we've gotta get to the center of the LV. "Help the wounded, move!" I scream in 1-1's face. Fearfully confused, 1-1 takes hold of Loke, who is in the, who brushes him off with disdain. Blackjack, Spider, first King B inbound.

• 1:59:25Jocko Willink?

  Gunships begin prepping the LZ with rockets, 40 Mike Mike and M60s. Blackjack, Spider, "I've got a fast mover on track. Key your handset so he can get a lock. Put your heads in the dirt. Over." Roger, Roger Spider, "Handset keyed, heads down." We look into the haze, streaked sun as a full-flapped Phantom, his glide path ratio critical, ignites the tree line across the LZ into sheets of white, yellow and orange flames. The ship banks sharply after burners crank on and he powers into the valley below. NVA small arms open up on three sides. Lazy wagging tongues of green tracer fire sweep the sky for miles.

• 2:00:10Jocko Willink?

  Heavy AAA fire chase the F4. Jesus, some of those guns aren't far from our location. How many of these bastards are there? What the hell are we in the middle of? Keying my handset, Spider Blackjack, "Did you see that anti-aircraft fire on the fast mover? Over." Roger Blackjack, "Marking map coordinates now. This is Mandolin, back on station. Over." So they've gone from Spider as the Covey, well, from Mandolin to Spider, and now we're back to Mandolin. And by the way, props to that, the F4 Phantom, you know, we had, we've, we've had a couple F4 Phantom Vietnam pilots on here.

• 2:00:48Jocko Willink?

  Those guys were, those guys were doing a freaking, doing God's work up there, especially in a case like this, dropping napalm to save these guys.

• 2:00:58Jocko Willink?

  Among those shooting are several NVA about 20 feet from our perimeter. Napalm torches the jungle, forcing dozens of the enemy to scurry onto the LZ, escaping the inferno, engulfing their comrades just as another F4 rolls in for a gun run. The NVA move it, move in close to us, making every possible attempt to avoid the firestorm. Firing on single shot, we begin to pick them off as they stream out of the fire drenched jungle. Those close to us endeavor to suppress our fire, attempting to protect their comrades. Their friends, fathers, brothers, uncles, that onion eating son-in-law. As they pop up, we put them down. Phantoms return with two cannon and gun runs along our perimeter.

• 2:01:42Jocko Willink?

  And I haven't really gone into this, but you can hear a couple of times that Lynn has replied, referred to the enemy as fathers and sons and, and brothers and uncles. And so he, he just does that to kind of let you know what he's thinking about. And he's thinking like, yeah, these are, these are other men and we're about to kill them. That's the way it goes.

• 2:02:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:02:08Jocko Willink?

  He yells out ammo check.

• 2:02:12Jocko Willink?

  And then two nine cylinder radial engine King Bs come chugging up the valley toward us. We ignite green smoke, marking our position. The NVA ignite identical smoke markers at several locations, confusing the pilots.

• 2:02:26John Stryker Meyer?

  God. Oh yeah.

• 2:02:29Jocko Willink?

  Bastards.

• 2:02:30John Stryker Meyer?

  It gets worse.

• 2:02:32Jocko Willink?

  We rise, moving toward the approaching ships, killing everyone in our path. Ammo's getting critical. Each of the team has less than a full magazine and those are 20 round mags.

• 2:02:45Jocko Willink?

  Whoever invented the 20 round mag instead of a 30 round mag?

• 2:02:51Jocko Willink?

  The M79 men are down to their last bandoliers. I'm stumbling along, working with my brown man.

• 2:02:59Jocko Willink?

  It's cord peeling the skin off the back of my burned neck.

• 2:03:04Jocko Willink?

  We watch in disbelief as this first King Bee touches down right over an NVA smoke marker, taking multiple RPG rocket round hits on the flight deck. So just to clarify that so everyone can understand, when you're marking for location to get, first of all, you got to understand that when you're in a, when you're in the sky, when you're in a helicopter and you're looking down at the ground, it's freaking huge. It's massive. And, and I've, I had a time where I was in a, in a training operation and there was a helicopter coming to pick us up. And I was standing there, and this was in the desert.

• 2:03:39John Stryker Meyer?

  With your panel.

• 2:03:40Jocko Willink?

  And I was standing there with my panel and I'm waving it and I'm like, oh yeah, I'm right here. And he goes, where are you? And I said, I'm right here. And he says, where are you? And I said, I'm right freaking here. And I'm on the hilltop or whatever stupid thing I said, because I was a younger guy. Yeah, I'm on the hilltop. Well, I let, I learned a lesson. You know how many hilltops he can see from his helicopter? He can see 500 of them. So I don't narrow it down at all. So what we do is we mark our position with something that's very obvious, like green smoke. So in this situation, Blackjack gets the green smoke out. Hey, come land on this green smoke. The, the, the NVA see that and they go, oh, yep, we know what that is. They're marked with green smoke. Hey, pull out the green smoke. Boom. So they start throwing green smoke. So now what does it look like? There's green smoke everywhere.

• 2:04:26John Stryker Meyer?

  Additionally, they were monitoring the radio.

• 2:04:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:04:30John Stryker Meyer?

  So they had RDF as well as some monitoring capabilities. And so when they heard, I don't think Lynn would have said green. He probably was going to pop a smoke. The NVA either guessed, was a good guess. And you got the results coming.

• 2:04:46Jocko Willink?

  So here we go. We watch in disbelief as the first King Bee touches down right over an NVA smoke marker, taking multiple RPG rocket rounds, round hits on its flight deck. The force of the blast is so great, the ship teeters and finally topples to its side, each subsequent rotor blades smashing into the ground, whoop, whoop, whooping in our direction, narrowly missing Alabama as we approach. We grab up NVA weapons, turning them on the enemy. They're everywhere.

• 2:05:16Jocko Willink?

  Why didn't we see them until now? Without hesitation, we charge the rocket position, killing several NVA before a hail of fire drives us back to our starting point. These AKs have a slower rate of cyclic fire. Cyclical fire. The ammunition will last longer. We don't need a resupply. We can keep doing this till hell freezes over.

• 2:05:37Jocko Willink?

  The second, so there they ran out of ammo, basically. Now they're picking up the enemy AK-47s. And they're shooting and the AK is definitely slower shooting than a than a Car 15. The second ship hits an outcropping of rock on the western side of the Knoll after taking heavy gunfire and falls onto the valley floor below. Blackjack, Mandolin, nice try, over. Screw you, Mandolin. I no longer want to be extracted. I'm going to kill every one of these sons of mothers before this day ends.

• 2:06:12Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. I'm gonna read that again. I no longer want to be extracted. I'm going to kill every one of these sons of mothers before this day ends.

• 2:06:24John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah, Lynn Black.

• 2:06:27Jocko Willink?

  You don't want to piss off Lynn Black.

• 2:06:29John Stryker Meyer?

  No, no, no.

• 2:06:34John Stryker Meyer?

  Even on a good day.

• 2:06:36Jocko Willink?

  Then Cowboy says to the, in response to that Cowboy, who's again, this is the interpreter. Right? He's the interpreter?

• 2:06:43John Stryker Meyer?

  Yes.

• 2:06:43Jocko Willink?

  He says, "1-1." This is the 1-1 of the guy that's been praying the whole time. He says, "1-1, please pray for the team. Accept Blackjack. He's on the devil's side now."

• 2:06:57Jocko Willink?

  Blackjack, Mandolin, fast movers have expended their ordnance and are returning for resupply. Your ammo was on that second King Bee. Assets in 20 minutes. Good luck, brother. Mandolin, Blackjack, we don't need. Forget it, over. Blackjack, Mandolin, Blackjack, Mandolin, what's your status? Over. Damn it Blackjack. Bugles are sounding. Wave upon wave of NVA troops carrying rifles with fixed bayonets is advancing online.

• 2:07:26Jocko Willink?

  When they are feet away, we open fire using weapons we have taken from their dead. After the first burst of full automatic, the team fumbles with AK-47 selector switches to single shot, pushing them back. We move from body to body, using their weapons and their cadavers as shields. Crawling, kneeling, knee walking, standing, scrambling, online, in line, we defend each other and ourselves. Without a word, a look, a plan, acting on training, pure survival instinct, all of us, except 1-1, are scampering around, dragging, lugging bodies, placing them in a circle around Alabama. Stacking them high, we construct a cadaver garrison. Cowboy is bleeding from a grazing wound to the back of his neck.

• 2:08:10Jocko Willink?

  Tiny army green leeches inch out of the trampled razor grass, following the blood trails we've created, dragging the dead. Focusing on details, directly in front of me, I notice the vampire mosquitoes and ravenous cannibalistic horseflies competing with the leeches to feed on the dead and the wounded and on the living. One of the Vietnamese flips me a plastic mosquito repellent bottle. "Hey, that stings. What the hell are we doing worrying about mosquitoes when people are trying to kill us? Snag us as much ammo as possible," I order. Back and forth, and again, it's important to remember that this is, this is Lynn telling the story. He's debriefing, and the way it's laid out, you can tell that he's debriefing in the book.

• 2:08:53Jocko Willink?

  I'm probably not doing a great job, but this is during the debrief. And what's interesting, all these things that he's saying about the 1-1, the 1-1 is in the debrief with him. He's saying like, "Oh, he's not doing anything," and 1-1's in there. And he just kind of is, and he goes into it a little bit, but he's just kind of averting his eye and he's keeping his head down, like, you know, he, he knows he didn't do a good job.

• 2:09:18Jocko Willink?

  Back and forth between the NVA and recon team Alabama continues. The back and forth between the NVA and the recon team Alabama continues on and on and on. They just keep coming. I don't know how much longer we can keep them up, keep this up, keep them off us. The matted grass is saturated with slimy slippery blood and human innards. Smoke, cordite, and the stench of death choke us as foul weather closes in. Mosquitoes, horseflies, and the enemy are all conspiring to nibble us to death, to swallow us whole. Soon air support will be possible. Slowly I come to the realization that I have no physical strength left and I can barely move. I can't let my team down. One of the team slips and slides on his stomachs over the cadaver garrison to retrieve ammo while

• 2:10:02Jocko Willink?

  other members of the team provide covering fire.

• 2:10:07Jocko Willink?

  So these guys are in a freaking small little fort that they've conducted with enemy bodies. And when someone goes outside of that perimeter, they've constructed a little perimeter, when someone goes outside that perimeter from the team to go gather ammo, the other guys are laying down fire to protect that guy.

• 2:10:28John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. You know, here's another thing too with that team. They won zero, they had another one zero on the team prior to stride being assigned to it. And they worked really hard on their team emergency action, reaction drills. And what they're doing there, I think some of that goes back to the training. That one zero was Tim Schoff. He really worked the team hard. And it's a good one zero, but stride for reasons known only to the command, they pulled Tim off and put stride into it because he had more rank. But that team, right there, that moment in time when the team's doing all that together, that's all that training that they had prior. And experience, cowboy with his years, Locke, and of course Lynn from the herd.

• 2:11:19Jocko Willink?

  Blackjack, Mandolin, Jolly Greens 10 minutes out. Get ready to go home. Over. That announcement lifts a thousand pound sandbag off my shoulders. We're going home. Mandolin, Blackjack, do you have any idea what size of the force is? Over. Blackjack, Mandolin, what you're up against is the regiment you were sent to track. Over. Is that all? Only 3,000 of the bastards? Well, I think we made a dent, I think we made a dent in them, don't you? Just barely, brother. Bugle sound. The sky is filled with grenades. We're hugging the ground as if, as they explode around us and it's...

• 2:11:57Jocko Willink?

  Tilt, tell us a little bit about the fact that the enemy, they don't have radios, so what they use is whistles and bugles to coordinate their attacks.

• 2:12:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, the command levels have some radios and the command gets to their, to their command, like if you break it down from a platoon to squad leaders. And then with the bugles and the commands, that's, they're, they're trained how they are on attack, with, withdraw. And that's what then came up against. Over and over again.

• 2:12:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they, in the Korean War, all those, all those times when, that, that's like the most horrifying thing. Is all those times when they were to get these human assault, human wave assaults towards their positions. It was all whistles. They'd hear the whistles and they'd hear the bugles and they would know what was about to happen.

• 2:12:48John Stryker Meyer?

  Sometimes it's for psy ops, just to make the noise. Every time you hear it, you know they're coming.

• 2:12:52Jocko Willink?

  Bugle sound. The sky is filled with grenades. We're hugging the ground as they explode around us. Hey, these aren't fragmentation, they're concussion, just a bunch of noise, not sending out much shrapnel. Concussion stu- stuff like the ones they used on me earlier. You're mine now, you bastards. We stand back up.

• 2:13:13Jocko Willink?

  Catching some and begin throwing them immediately back. You should have seen the look on their faces. Oh crap, here they come. Wooden grenade shrapnel severs the prick 25 radio antenna. I begin to rig an impromptu long wire aerial with the intention of laying it over the cliff behind us out of harms way. Relentless, the NVA continue their advance alongside the leeches, mosquitoes and horseflies inch by bloody inch. Chew hoy, surrender, I yell at no one in particular. Mandolin Blackjack, a large force is now yards away from our perimeter. We need help. Two Huey Hog attack helicopters rotor chop their way into the LZ. First with the M60 chatter,

• 2:13:56Jocko Willink?

  followed up by the whoosh of rockets placed into the NVA ranks. Blackjack, Judge, over. Go Judge. And the Judge is one of the call signs for, for the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps.

• 2:14:10John Stryker Meyer?

  No, this is the, um, the muskets.

• 2:14:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:14:13John Stryker Meyer?

  Judge and the executioner.

• 2:14:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:14:15John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. So these are army units that came out of Americal.

• 2:14:18Jocko Willink?

  And oh, yes. Scarface is, Scarface is Marine Corps.

• 2:14:21John Stryker Meyer?

  Our Marine Corps, yes.

• 2:14:22Jocko Willink?

  So what kind of aircraft or is Judge an executioner?

• 2:14:24John Stryker Meyer?

  Same thing.

• 2:14:25Jocko Willink?

  The, oh, so they're, they're also Cobras?

• 2:14:27John Stryker Meyer?

  No, not, no Cobras at this time. All the gunships were old UEs that could barely get off the ground.

• 2:14:33Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:14:33John Stryker Meyer?

  In fact.

• 2:14:33Jocko Willink?

  They're so weighted down with ammo.

• 2:14:35John Stryker Meyer?

  And there's, they didn't have the power that the later models had. In fact, a lot of times when they took off the door gunners would get out to try to lift the helicopter and get it moving. And once they got a little forward momentum, they'd jump back in the helicopter.

• 2:14:47Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 2:14:48John Stryker Meyer?

  And the muskets even put little wheels on the front of the skids so that when they're on asphalt, they would be able to move better without having the skid bind. They figured the wheel would roll better and they got to go out there pushing these things.

• 2:15:02Jocko Willink?

  That's like Fred Flintstone situation trying to get that.

• 2:15:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Right. So here's a sidebar on, on one of these, on the muskets. There was a guy, his name is Berg. And Berg, this was his very first mission with, with the muskets on Prairie Fire for a SOG mission. Welcome to SOG.

• 2:15:22Jocko Willink?

  Welcome to SOG.

• 2:15:23John Stryker Meyer?

  His first mission as a door gunner.

• 2:15:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, these are two, these are some epic call signs though. Judge and executioner.

• 2:15:29John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:15:31Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, so Judge checks in on the radio and this is just such a, you know, I was a calm guy. So when you get that aircraft checking in, it's like the best feeling in the world. And he comes up Blackjack Judge over and the pilots are always a little bit more, you know, just sort of really smooth on the radio. And so he's coming in this totally hot situation. Blackjack Judge over and he says, go Judge. Anyone in particular or just kill them all? He's laughing.

• 2:15:58John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:59Jocko Willink?

  Grease them all, I say with my levelled, bloodied grimace. You're just in time for the party. Judge's door gunners are working their M60s in long bursts. My guns are gone meltdown. Executioner is right behind me. The NVA back off a few moments. Briefly licking their wounds, far from discouraged. New assault lines form before they can open fire on us. Executioner confronts them head on. Both door gunners blazing away. He is hovering inches off the LZ skipping rockets off the ground into their ranks. Executioner lifts up his rotors chopping loudly at the mist filled air. They make it over the Trelawny ducking down into the basin below, remaining below anti aircraft capability.

• 2:16:41Jocko Willink?

  Regaining airspeed as they come up the executioner and his crew returning for another pass to protect our perimeter. The NVA charge before we can celebrate. Fire, fire, we add more, we add more of them to the cadaver garrison. Along with the weapons and much needed ammo. Silence, no birds chirping, no voices, mosquitoes, flies, no sounds, none. Even the aircraft have flown far enough away that their absence amplifies the quiet after an almost continuous melee of gunfire grenades and claymore explosions. Air ordinance expenditures, including cluster bomb units, napalm and gun runs and 20 millimeter cannons. Silence, have I gone deaf?

• 2:17:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Complete silence.

• 2:17:25John Stryker Meyer?

  You've been there.

• 2:17:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's freaking crazy.

• 2:17:27John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:29Jocko Willink?

  In dead rest, each of us lays motionless. And by the way, when you say I've been there, no. Till I have not been in a freaking cadaver.

• 2:17:38John Stryker Meyer?

  Everybody's changing magazines.

• 2:17:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a little mag change going on. Uh, each of us rests, each in dead rest, each of us lays motionless, barely breathing. My mind is focused inward, unaware of its physical surrounding. Mind and body are not one. One, one continues to quietly chant his prayer. Cowboy has taken another hit during the last skirmish along with two of the others. Come back, think, move, summoning energy from where I don't know. I fumble around in my medical gear. I'm giving you a morphine and we'll apply a compress to that wound. We're going to run out of bandages if you keep getting shot. Knock it off, okay? So cowboy's been hit a couple of times.

• 2:18:20John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, more than that. Yeah, it's like four or five. I lost count.

• 2:18:24Jocko Willink?

  And so Lynn tells him, Lynn tells him you're gonna run out of bandages so quick getting shot. And then cowboy says, where's John Wayne when you need him?

• 2:18:33Jocko Willink?

  Alabama laughs as an NVA boisterously yells, "Chuhoy, dumah." Another NVA orders us to chuhoy in English. I flip him the bird as a sniper shoots Kwong, our tail gunner, in the crotch. I flip my borrowed AK on full auto and unload it into a tree about a hundred yards away, resulting in the sniper falling through his limbs, through its limbs, and brush below to the ground with a thud. If I could rip your heart out and eat it, I would. Kong, Kwong, what have we done? Last week you got arrested by national police in a way, in a way whorehouse for carrying a pistol. The entire Alabama team put on their gear and went down and broke you out of jail so you could go on this mission.

• 2:19:16Jocko Willink?

  God damn it, I wish we'd left you in that place where you'd be safe right now.

• 2:19:23Jocko Willink?

  Look, I was calling him Look, sorry, Locke. Locke is applying direct pressure to call to Kwong the tail gunner's wound. Seconds later, an AE1, A1E Skyraider lumbers into the AO, flown by a pilot codenamed Snoopy. It roars in from the west, brushing treetops, full flaps, working the throttle. The aircraft is so close to the team, we can hear the distinctive metallic click click of the napalm canister being released from the second world war aeroplane. The Skyraider appears to be falling, but actually it slips down into the valley to escape gunfire as helicopters and fast movers have maneuvered earlier. His wingman roils through the clouds

• 2:20:05Jocko Willink?

  and cordite. We can hear nuts, bolts and god knows what creaking, groaning as he salvoes his ship's rockets. Three NVA mortars open fire. Doop, doop, boom, doop, boom, boom. They're long. The rounds fall into the valley at our rear. There's no way in hell any of us can catch mortars and throw them back. Time to go back to work, I order. Locke and I slide over the cadaver wall, crouching, crawling, knee walking, we move towards the mortars, cautiously picking our way through the charred bodies from previous airborne assaults. Quietly, yeah, right, we travel into the jungle within a few yards of the first mortar tube. Locke stops me to draw a plan in the dirt. He will hit one tube, I will

• 2:20:50Jocko Willink?

  take tube three and we will combine on tube two. Damn suicide mission, I say under my breath. Locke nods at me. Keat Roy, he replies, we die. After the mortar, after the mortar men launch the next set of three salvos, Locke opens fire on his target while I attack tube three, discovering several nearby infantry. God, so he's in the middle of all this freaking crap and then they're going out and assaulting these three mortar positions.

• 2:21:16John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:17Jocko Willink?

  Which, god knows, I mean, how far? They had to be at least, what, 100 yards away?

• 2:21:21John Stryker Meyer?

  At least.

• 2:21:22Jocko Willink?

  They're talking a football field.

• 2:21:25Jocko Willink?

  And there's just some spare infantry trying to kill them in between.

• 2:21:32Jocko Willink?

  And those are some motivational words. We die and that's sort of like fuck it, let's go.

• 2:21:37John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:37Jocko Willink?

  Let's do this.

• 2:21:38John Stryker Meyer?

  He was a tiger.

• 2:21:41Jocko Willink?

  Uh, oh crap. There are more of these bastards than I thought. I begin moving low and fast as the survivors chase me heading toward tube one where Locke is pinned down yelling as loud as possible, drawing their attention, allowing Locke to move out of the kill zone. I roll our last fragmentation grenade into their midst, killing several, wounding the rest. Locke and I attack the second tube before returning to the team, picking ammo from the dead. Snipers dog us all the way back to our cadaver garrison. The two of us press our bloody bodies against the jungle floor as green tracers search the air around us. "One, one, take a look at this," I say while rolling over. "The blood and dirt on me are forming a second skin. Leaves and grasses have begun to stick to my bare skin. Ants and beetles

• 2:22:25Jocko Willink?

  seem to be making a home on my new crust. I'm building my own camouflage. It looks like I'm becoming part of this place. If I lay down, I bet you they won't tell me from the dead." "Oh God, please don't go crazy. You gotta get us out of here. I wanna go home," he pleads. "We'll all be dead long before I go crazy." Through the clouds and haze of battle, we glimpse a jolly green. JG28, starting its descent into the LZ. As it approaches, the radio crackles. Blackjack, this is 28 on short final, looking for an orange panel on the southeast side of the LZ. Over.

• 2:23:03Jocko Willink?

  28 Blackjack, panel is on the ground. We'll attempt to suppress enemy fire for your landing. "Orange panel in sight, adjusting approach, preparing for touchdown. Blackjack, get your people on board. Over." "Negative, negative, not southeast, we're southwest. You're in the wrong place. Get out of there." The NVA raise, raise up all around JG28, firing everything they have. The pilot keys his radio to answer back. I hear a crew member in the background, calm, yelling, "We have fuel leak, it's everywhere. Get us out of here." We watch as the glass in the cockpit on the copilot's side disappears with successive rocket explosions. The pilot struggles to lift while, lift off while maintaining control of his ship. Twenty-eight is up. Twenty-eight is up.

• 2:23:48Jocko Willink?

  Our ride home is slipping sideways across the LZ, passing within touching distance above us, over the lip of the plateau, down into the valley to escape the relentless enemy barrage. Alabama goes insane on full auto, burning up the majority of our ammo on anything that moves. One-one praise. Snoopy and his wingman move into the next, move in next to the crippled JG-28. Through the haze and darkening storm clouds, Covey is attempting to direct gunships across the LZ to pick off targets of opportunity. Their rotors are moving smoke and clouds down across our cadaver-strewn landscape, obscuring everyone's view. Twenty-eight Blackjack, twenty-eight Blackjack, are you guys okay?

• 2:24:33Jocko Willink?

  Over. Blackjack, we have a severed fuel line. The stuff's sloshing all over the deck. Fuel fumes are blinding my crew. We can't fire our guns without going up in flames. Snoopy will escort us out of here. Good luck Blackjack, out. Oh yeah. Green tracers shift from horizontal grazing fire across the LZ to vertical as jolly green Giant Ten approaches. The green fury's playing a deafening tune through its skin. JG, JG Ten Blackjack, the enemy is under you right now. Over.

• 2:25:14Jocko Willink?

  From our position, we can see an NVA rocket crew rise up in the grass, take aim, and fire directly into the underbelly of JG Ten. We're hit. We have a six-inch hole through the floor. Both engine warning lights just came on. We can't make the pickup. Oh my God, look at that. Both engines are on fire. The pilot performs a 180-degree turn, moving the damaged aircraft away from the enemy fire, away from Alabama. We can see him struggling to keep his bird airborne as his crew continues firing. Time has run out. Traveling several hundred yards, the pilot comes up on his survival frequency. Brace for crash landing. They continue firing while the burning ship settles into the jungle. Blackjack, mandolin, over. Go mandolin.

• 2:26:00Jocko Willink?

  First you won the lottery, then you maneuvered your way into a prairie fire, and now for the bonus round. Saigon has ordered an arc light, over. Bonus round? What do they think this is? The price is right? There's no way we can survive an arc light. Tell it to the NVA. Maybe they'll run like hell and leave us be. What altitude will they be bombing from? They'll be cruising at 25,000 feet for a standard carpet bombing mission. Not exactly accurate from that altitude. Saigon is assuming you won't be there or be alive by the time the B-52s get here, over. Damn straight. I have to get back to camp for recon company football game this evening. How long do we have, over?

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  One of the indiges outside the garrison stealing AK-47 magazines from the dead. He's tossing them into our garrison as the rest of us return fire. Blackjack, mandolin, the arc light is off the runway and heading your way, over. So what, tell us about, tell us about an arc light.

• 2:26:59John Stryker Meyer?

  B-52. And what their load is like over 20,000 pounds of bombs. And they usually come more than one. And you don't hear them, as you know, you don't hear anything until the first round impacts. And that was the code for an arc light. And amazing firepower.

• 2:27:20Jocko Willink?

  And they're gonna basically carpet bomb this area.

• 2:27:23John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 2:27:24Jocko Willink?

  That's the plan.

• 2:27:26John Stryker Meyer?

  What is carpet bomb?

• 2:27:27Jocko Willink?

  Bombs everywhere, like, yeah, just lay down. I mean, I don't know how many aircraft there are in this particular mission, but it's a probably multiple aircraft with all those bombs. And they get over the location and they just open their bombardier doors and out come their bay doors and out come the bombs. You know, when you see pictures or videos where there's just all these airplanes flying, there's just bombs falling out, that's it.

• 2:27:52John Stryker Meyer?

  Leaking out.

• 2:27:53Jocko Willink?

  Yep, just leaking out.

• 2:27:54John Stryker Meyer?

  As I suppose the direct support will come in, one or two bombs around the team. This is like every, like Jaco saying, you may have four or five planes and they fly over and everything's, all bombs are dropped. Over a hundred, at least, yeah. They'd be anywhere from 250, 500, 1,000 pounders.

• 2:28:18Jocko Willink?

  Blackjack, Mandolin, I don't think I want to be here, or sorry, Mandolin Blackjack, I don't think I want to be here when they arrive, over. Blackjack, Mandolin, well, you have one last option, over. What is it, over. Unexpectedly, our radio frequency is flooded with fast-talking Vietnamese. God, you can't get a break. So the Vietnamese figure out what radio frequency they're on, they start using that. Unexpectedly, our radio frequency is flooded with fast-talking Vietnamese. Cowboy listens for a few seconds and says, "NVA, find our frequency. I switch to an alternate frequency as it is jammed, and it is jammed as well. I throw the PRC radio over the cliff and switch to the URC-10 Survival Radio."

• 2:29:01Jocko Willink?

  Mandolin, Blackjack, over. Mandolin, Blackjack, over. Blackjack, JG-32, over. Go, JG-32. You're on an Air Force Survival Guard frequency 243. Covey 265 is busy on other channels. We'll get his attention for you. I'm hovering in a draw to your west. We have 20 minutes of fuel left before I leave. The first person we see better be an American. Hurry. We're taking heavy ground fire. Our armor is not holding up this close to the source. JG-32, can you hook me up with Covey? Blackjack, Mandolin, over. Mandolin, can you lay down covering fire between us and JG-32? Give me two minutes to line up assets, then move out. We're getting

• 2:29:46Jocko Willink?

  empty. The next voice you hear will be Spider's, over. Roger Spider, Blackjack, over. I turn and yell at the team, "Alabama, discard everything we don't need over the side. Get ready to move out. Cowboy and I move to the edge of the cliff while Locke demands, commands the garrison."

• 2:30:07Jocko Willink?

  The two of us cautiously peep over the edge. Fifteen feet below us is a ledge that moves in the direction we want to travel. "Move the team to this location," I order. Cowboy crawls back to the cadaver garrison while I make another attempt at contacting Spider. One at a time, Alabama comes crawling over to me. I begin lowering each of them to the ledge below. One One scales the rock face, making his own way out. Making his own way. Immediately beginning to move along the ledge in the direction of JG32. Cowboy, stop him. From the ledge, we look up the face of the cliff. We can see tracers dancing across the lip of the rim. Covey's directing daisy chain airstrikes between Alabama and JG32. Blackjack,

• 2:30:51Jocko Willink?

  Spider, we're dropping cluster bomb unit CBU on the path between you and JG32. It will kill some and should temporarily drive the rest out of the zone.

• 2:31:02Jocko Willink?

  Man.

• 2:31:05Jocko Willink?

  So they want to get to where this helicopter is located, flying in this little draw. And in order to get there, they drop cluster bombs on their path.

• 2:31:14John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, for good luck. And then that Jolly Green settled into the jungle, chopping down smaller trees to settle. So that way, it's a brilliant move.

• 2:31:24Jocko Willink?

  Somewhat protected.

• 2:31:25John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, so that way, they're not visible, not completely exposed. They're going to shoot at them. They go to shoot through the jungle to get to him.

• 2:31:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's counterintuitive when you're in the air in a helicopter. Yeah, in a helicopter. But I guess on fast movers or aircraft as well, you'd think the closer you get to the ground, the more danger you're in. But the opposite is actually true. Because when you get down low enough, people can't shoot at you because they don't have an angle to shoot at you. Whether it's in the city or whether it's in a jungle like this, people just, they can't see you anymore because you're low.

• 2:31:58John Stryker Meyer?

  Right. So here, the helicopter's in the jungle. And then, like you said, with the A1 Skyraiders, the key to their success was how low they made their gun runs. They would just come screaming across the path, drop their ordnance and be on their way. Oh, yeah. So anybody that's in the jungle, you can hear them coming.

• 2:32:17Jocko Willink?

  You can't see them until it's too late.

• 2:32:19John Stryker Meyer?

  Even for a slow mover like that. But, oh, we loved them.

• 2:32:23Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, thick choking smoke moves across the LZ, roiling over the ledge above, obscuring our escape from the plane, from the plane of death. We inch our way toward the last chance. Arc light's coming. Blackjack, the CBU strike has created negative visibility. We're unable to provide support until we get a window. Over. You're looking for a window and I'm looking for a door. Spider, Blackjack. The good news is, it has also decreased visibility for the NVA. Gunfire has noticeably subsided. Keep up the smoke and we'll move by ear. Hugging the face of the cliff, making our way across the rubble of the ledge, we come to a dead end. Crap, we're gonna have to climb back up to the plateau. Wait here while I take a

• 2:33:08Jocko Willink?

  look. If it's okay, I'll signal. Easily climbing with the aid of vines trailing over the ledge, I crawl over one side and slide under the low vegetation. Seconds later, one woods head appears. Spotting me, he crawls to my location up under a large broad leaf plant. Where's your weapon, I ask. I don't know, he sheepishly replies. Take this AK and cover us while I get the rest of the team up here. Over. Can you do that? Uh huh. Locke, the zero one, is the last person to go over the rim, joining the remainder of the team in the undergrowth, giving me two thumbs up. As quickly as the underbrush will allow, we move up a small incline under the protection of enormous broadleaf undergrowth. Shortly, we come to the periphery of a short ledge where we stop. Before us is a carnivorous, half-lit clearing

• 2:33:53Jocko Willink?

  under jungle canopy. Look at this. Hundreds of large huts built up on stilts stretch back into the low light. Everywhere there are trails, campfires, and cooking area, cooking areas. To our left is a latrine and a shower facility. Smoke from cooking fires spiral upward gently mingling with the battle haze sealing drifting just below the canopy. Clothes are hung over low plants and ropes strung between towering hardwood trees.

• 2:34:24Jocko Willink?

  This must be their main camp. This is amazing. It's an entire town under the trees. No one seems to be home. From the sounds of it, they must all be over there, I say, pointing at the direction of JG 32. Look over there. Who's that? Looks like an American. Hey you! He turns, pointing a 45 caliber pistol in our direction. I stand up, motioning him to us. He raises a 45 pistol to his lips, signaling us to be quiet. We cautiously move to his location. Who are you? I'm the JG 10 PJ, Dan Casbeer. Rotorhead is over there, under that hut, talking to the 30, talking with 32. Who's Rotorhead, I ask? Our pilot, Colonel Sam Grenier. I think he has a broken back, but he can still walk.

• 2:35:09Jocko Willink?

  The other members of your crew, did they make it? 10 was burning. There was only time to get out Grenier before it exploded. Our flight engineer Greg Lawrence and co-pilot Dwayne Wester were trapped inside. I didn't have time, the PJ pauses. JG 10 exploded before I could get back to them. We've been waiting for you guys here, hoping you would make it before we had to E and E. Grab Rotorhead and fall in with the seven of us now. So, so these guys have now just miraculously ran into the pilot and the pararescue guy that had, that was inside that helicopter that got shot down and then exploded.

• 2:35:46John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, and the pilot's got a broken back. He's still mobile.

• 2:35:55Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir.

• 2:35:57Jocko Willink?

  The NVA are focused on JG 32 easing pressure on us. We need to move there as quickly as possible. 32 doesn't have much time left on station. We have to go now, orders Sam Grenier. None of us have much time left. Form up, we're going home, I demand. Casbeer, help your Colonel. We can hear them moving through the jungle all around us. They seem to be traveling to the ship, paralleling us. Blackjack, Spider, time's against you, buddy. 32 can't wait much longer, and the arc light is closing fast. The B-52s have begun their countdown. They're on long final.

• 2:36:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you can't make this up.

• 2:36:34John Stryker Meyer?

  No.

• 2:36:35Jocko Willink?

  The arc light's coming in to drop bombs all over everything in the area. The aircraft that they're trying to get to that could possibly get them home that's hidden in the jungle is almost out of fuel. And they can hear as they're moving towards the helicopter, they can hear they're being paralleled by the NVA.

• 2:36:57Jocko Willink?

  On the move, Spider. Arc light's on the way. We intersect a trail running down the middle of the ravine. I stopped the team. Helicopter gunships and Sky Raiders are making blind gun runs up and down the narrow ravine and around JG32. Smoke from airstrikes hangs over the plateau, threading its way down the ravines into the depths of the murky Chasm. Blackjack, Spider, airstrikes to clear the way is impossible. We can no longer see the jungle, let alone your ride home. Get a move on. Over. I feel as though we are moving past mad dogs guarding the gates of hell itself. NVA are pouring small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades into the hovering chopper, while door gunners and pilots intermittently fire the Gatling gun and M60s.

• 2:37:41Jocko Willink?

  Desperate, I move the team and onto the trail toward the hovering ship. Don't move on a trail, you dumbass. Well, this is one of those times when jungle rules don't apply.

• 2:37:52John Stryker Meyer?

  Amen.

• 2:37:53Jocko Willink?

  So they can see the helicopter, they can see that it's taking fire, there's a trail. And you guys and anyone in Vietnam is constantly avoiding the trails because that's where ambushes and booby traps get set. But in this situation, there's no choice.

• 2:38:08John Stryker Meyer?

  No choice.

• 2:38:11Jocko Willink?

  We progress hastily. Tail Gunner begins violently shaking and has turned to pasty white. Two Vietnamese assistant hiding him in thick bushes. So Tail Gunner is your rear security guy. And he's.

• 2:38:24John Stryker Meyer?

  He's the one who shot in the groin earlier.

• 2:38:25Jocko Willink?

  He's losing blood. He's pale white. Two Vietnamese assist hiding him in the thick bushes. Then they flee to the chopper. I stopped them taking lead. At the crest, we see JG32 taking hits and dealing out death. Its M60 is red hot. Someone is firing an M16 out of rear port. As we move to JG32, the intensity of gunfire seems to multiply a hundred fold. "Jesus, the air is so full of lead, I can see it," I report to myself loudly. Fuel and bits of metal skin are falling from the aircraft as we approach. On one side of the turbine, Cowling is lying on the jungle floor. Blackjack Spider, who are you talking to? Over. God, Buddha, anyone that'll listen.

• 2:39:09Jocko Willink?

  Spider Blackjack, sorry, I didn't realize I had the radio keyed. Over. The jungle penetrator from JG's winch smashes into the ground and then raises a couple feet. PJ Dan Caspier scrambles to put three team members on the first load. "When you get in the chopper, man a gun and return fire. Protect us," I yell after them. Rotorhead and PJ, and the PJ along with Quang, a wounded Alabama Vietnamese, are on the second lift. Quang becomes entangled in jungle vines while being hoisted. The operator has to stop the hoist, lower it to give him time to untangle himself. When the hoist moves up toward the aircraft, Quang is not sitting in the seat, but hanging on with assistance from Caspier.

• 2:39:50Jocko Willink?

  Quang, I return tracing, I return, I turn retracing our path back down the trail to the thicket where we had left our tail gunner. Halfway back, I realize I'm alone with no weapon. For the first time, paralyzing fear sweeps through me. I stop, what am I doing? You couldn't help Hugh when he was hit, but you can, Quang. Face the boogeyman, do your job asshole, move. Quang is covered with bloated black leeches, mosquitoes, and giant flies feeding off the last of his ebbing life. Mumbling, he wobbles his Colt 45 at advancing NVA. Toy Keat, I die. The tail gunner motions to me to return to the jolly green.

• 2:40:34Jocko Willink?

  I turn, and Quang shoots himself. You sons of bitches. My cry is lost in the sounds of battle. Tears obscure my vision as I scramble like a raving lunatic back in the direction of the waiting ship, sma- rushing smack into two screaming NVA. Their AKs pointed at me. Chew hoy.

• 2:40:56Jocko Willink?

  I surrender.

• 2:40:59Jocko Willink?

  Surrendering, stretching out my arms, continuing to move quickly in their direction, within arms' reach, I yell in their faces, "Chew whole yourself, motherfucker!" The young soldiers are taken by surprise. Before they can respond, I grab a searing hot AK-47 barrel, jerking the weapon from one of them. Blistered skin rolls off my hand. I backhand the one on my right and smash the soldier on my left in the face with his own weapon. Hot, hot, hot! I scramble to the penetrator, finding a praying 1-1 on the ground. The rest of the team have abandoned him and are on board, firing any weapon they can get their hands on. As the penetrator lifts in what seems like slow motion, 1-1 and I look upward, wondering what the hell is taking so long.

• 2:41:44Jocko Willink?

  We are showered with hot, spent M60 and other weapon shell casing. Hot brass is sticking to my bare skin, creating long water blisters similar to the ones on my hand from the AK I'd grabbed. The air is filled with smoke, jet fuel, and green tracers, moving past us in slow motion like mad hornets. Never-ending shell casings raining down along with metal debris and a tornado of jungle vegetation. The penetrator cable is vibrating violently, as JG-32 takes hit after hit. "It's all coming apart!" I yell at 1-1. JG-32, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Jim Grady, begins lifting out of the jungle ravine

• 2:42:27Jocko Willink?

  with the two of us hanging on below like a couple of crippled puppets on a quarter-inch steel wire. There are several great trees on both sides of the ship, all of them large enough to severely damage the five 62-foot rotors, causing it to crash. Ascending out of the jungle, we can feel the heat of B-40 rocket motors as they pass by on their way to slamming into JG-32's plated underside. The ship is being boosted upward with each explosion. I slump on the penetrator and begin sliding off as my backside is sprayed with shrapnel. "Hey, that hurts!" 1-1 grabs hold, wrapping his arms around me, saving my life.

• 2:43:07Jocko Willink?

  "Hope what's left of the armor holds." I weakly yell, grasping at the penetrator cable for balance. The JG flight mechanic reaches out, pulling me off the penetrator into the ship, dumping me on red-hot, shell-covered deck with 1-1 on my heels. Para-rescue specialist Alan Avery leaves his gun position and begins tending to Alabama's wounds. Once clear of the jungle hole, the ship begins its ascent out of the valley. The flight mechanic, Sergeant John Nussbaum, removes his helmet and places it on my head. Co-pilot Major Don Olson tells me, "We're on our way out of here, partner."

• 2:43:51Jocko Willink?

  I'm cold.

• 2:43:56Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Analyst breaks the silence. "1-1, do you have anything to add to Blackjack's story?" "No, sir," he softly mumbles with his head down. "How many NVA do you think were in the area and how many do you think were killed or wounded?" asks Sergeant Analysis. "I believe the question was directed to 1-1," but before he can muster with an answer, I jump in. "The answer to both of those questions is more than we had time to count. However, I'll estimate somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000 NVA."

• 2:44:33Jocko Willink?

  "How many did we kill before we ran out of our ammo?" "We killed hundreds. When we started using their weapons, we killed hundreds more. Between us and the air support, maybe 2,000 or 3,000." "The ArcLight followed that after we left. I hope they finished off the rest of them."

• 2:44:55Jocko Willink?

  Crazy.

• 2:44:56John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah, and then that Jolly Green Giant...

• 2:45:01John Stryker Meyer?

  Couldn't fly too far. It only went over two more mountain tops. It lands, another one comes in, picks up some of the guys. Then Lynn and the 1-1 had to go back on the Cobra gunship. Cause the Cobra, the, the, the weapon doors come down and they have seat belts on them.

• 2:45:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh my God.

• 2:45:19John Stryker Meyer?

  So all the way from Laos back to Da Nang, they're with the, uh, yeah. Uh, just to, just to top everything off for them. And they froze their balls off, of course, because they're dangling out there 5,000 feet.

• 2:45:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, take it up to 5,000 feet to get away from any

• 2:45:36John Stryker Meyer?

  Yes.

• 2:45:36Jocko Willink?

  enemy fire.

• 2:45:39John Stryker Meyer?

  And, and the, uh, and of course the motto of the Jolly Greens, that others may live.

• 2:45:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:46John Stryker Meyer?

  That they, they put it right on the line. Amazing.

• 2:45:50Jocko Willink?

  Uh, going in after you see multiple birds shot down, like, oh, one bird goes and gets shot out. The next bird goes and gets shot out. The next bird goes and gets shot down.

• 2:45:59John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:59Jocko Willink?

  And you're still coming in. Yep, we're here.

• 2:46:01John Stryker Meyer?

  And one got shot up so bad, limped back to base, barely got back.

• 2:46:10Jocko Willink?

  They continue on with this debrief and, and one of the analysts says, tell us about the terrain again. 1-1, you were closer to the terrain than I was. Why don't you answer that question?

• 2:46:27Jocko Willink?

  1-1 breaks down. A medical aide gives him a sedative to quiet his nerves. He's been through a lot. I sigh. Do you also need a sedative? Asked the medic. No, thanks. I don't handle any kind of drugs very well. If I take that, I'll be asleep in 10 minutes. Give me an understanding of where you are physically and psychologically, asked one of the medics. Physically, today I'm less than 50%. I took some hard hits and I'm still trying to recover. Psychologically, who the heck knows? Anyone doing this kind of work is probably crazy from the get-go. You know what I mean? A combat soldier focuses on what they feel physically, what they see, hear and smell. Feelings of fear, sadness, boredom and joy are suppressed as much as possible.

• 2:47:11Jocko Willink?

  So we can focus on the mission, our team and staying alive. The psychological stuff has to come later or we won't make it. Does that make sense to you? So there you go. This is a classic thing. We're putting off all this stuff, like not worrying about it right now. We got a job to do.

• 2:47:30Jocko Willink?

  The medic looks up from taking notes. It will do for now. Please continue with your train of thought. As soon as my wounds fully close and the stitches come out, I'll begin training again. I heal fast and definitely have some ideas on needed training for Alabama to be an effective team. Don't you think that's up to the 1-0 to determine what training is needed for his team? 1-1 perks up. I jump in ahead of him. Yes, sir. No, sir. I mean, it's up to all of us to conduct training as Americans. The welfare of a special forces team is the responsibility of every man on that team.

• 2:48:10Jocko Willink?

  If the designated leader can't lead, then it's incumbent on any one of us to step forward and provide that leadership. That's what I did, and that's what I'll do again if needed. So there you go.

• 2:48:24John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:48:24Jocko Willink?

  Real leadership. Pure leadership.

• 2:48:28John Stryker Meyer?

  Fearless. Fearless.

• 2:48:34Jocko Willink?

  So you're ready to go do it again?

• 2:48:39Jocko Willink?

  And he thinks to himself, I've heard that several guys have hung it up after the first mission. I think I know why.

• 2:48:48Jocko Willink?

  It's these damn debriefs.

• 2:48:53John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:56John Stryker Meyer?

  They were a pain in the ass, that's for sure.

• 2:48:58Jocko Willink?

  The analyst continues, our best intelligence indicates there's probably, or I think this is,

• 2:49:06Jocko Willink?

  yeah, this is the chief sog. Our best intelligence indicates that there's approximately 2,000 miles of trail. And between 12 to 15 bin tram, and those are like, bin tram is like these organizations, what are they, like a battalion sized?

• 2:49:21John Stryker Meyer?

  It's long a trail. There'd be a command and control element as well as a hospital, overnight rest facilities. And then from there, they run people out to keep the trails open, work with the local indigenous people, the conscripts. Cause they're constantly bombing the trail.

• 2:49:38Jocko Willink?

  So these, these are organizations along the trail. They're called bin trams. Then thousands of anti-aircraft guns, 20 to 30,000 support soldiers, all defended by 40 to 60,000 security troops. That's what we need intel on. Are you ready to take another whack at it? Chief Sog asks, half grinning at the two of us.

• 2:50:00Jocko Willink?

  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, I'm not sure I really wanted to know that.

• 2:50:06Jocko Willink?

  I will be once the wounds have healed. When I'm in better physical condition and we get the training that I talked about, and after I have a couple more beers. Tell me about what you thought about out there, asks a tall, slender, gray-haired medical officer on the other side of the table. Behind him sits two obvious assistants taking notes.

• 2:50:26Jocko Willink?

  Lynn thinks, didn't I just answer the question a few minutes ago? These guys are not going to let up. And then he says, do you mean me personally? Yes, you personally. What went through your mind? What emotions did you feel? How much detail are you asking for? God, I hate that. I hate, and he thinks to himself, God, I hate this. How did you feel? Shit. Didn't I answer that question a few minutes ago? We've heard excellent tour guide level detail from the point of the initial ambush to your team's extraction. Tell us about the period of time from the point of insertion to the ambush. Take your time. Give me a tour of your thoughts. What were you thinking? I lean back in my chair, pausing, thinking.

• 2:51:08Jocko Willink?

  I'm a guy, I'm a guy, not some woman who wants to do nothing but talk about her feelings. Guys don't think about their feelings. This is just his thoughts. We're either happy, sad, thirsty, horny, or hungry. Okay, calm the hell down and give him an answer.

• 2:51:25Jocko Willink?

  And then he says, I was on the second King B. We watched Bulldog and the others disembark from the first ship just before our spiral began. Our dorgonar announced, we go down now. Chuckles around the room. We assumed the get ready position with me sitting in the door. The lottery LZ corkscrewed up to meet us. Several feet off touchdown, I spotted an NVA flag posted near the edge. I remember thinking, oh crap. Several of them laugh or quiet or quietly chuckle. What? You spotted freaking NVA flag on the landing zone?

• 2:52:03John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, I think he goes into a little bit more detail.

• 2:52:05Jocko Willink?

  Jeez. Specialist Black, I've heard about the mission. I want to know about your feelings, what you felt emotionally. Do you understand? Well, sir, oh crap, to me is a pretty strong feeling. However, when a soldier is in that situation, that causes thoughts like, oh crap, or others, we usually don't have time to stop and consider our feelings. As soon as our King B tires bounced down, tracers punched to the side of our ship. We got the hell out of there. I remember thinking, what a mistake that was. Actually, sir, it was more like, we are screwed.

• 2:52:37Jocko Willink?

  Blackjack, the sergeant major objects. Yes, Sergeant Major, in mid lift off, the green swarm engulfed the ship like a disturbed nest of hornets. The King B hung in midair, laboring, slipping to its left, the pilot wrestling with a stick. His copilot was slumped in his seat. Down it went in a ball of flames. The two Scarface ships providing covering fire as I moved my portion of Alabama to link up with the 1-0. I yelled to Bulldog that we needed to get off the LZ. He ordered us to form up. We quickly moved in a low crouch through the knee-high razor grass to a log where Bulldog and the others were. We were knee-deep in kimchi, and I knew it.

• 2:53:20Jocko Willink?

  And there's a little bit of a, of a

• 2:53:24Jocko Willink?

  a little bit of a tension between, um, between, uh,

• 2:53:28John Stryker Meyer?

  Bulldog.

• 2:53:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, between Bulldog and and Blackjack. And with that tension, and I'm fast forward a little bit. He said, uh, did it make you, the one of the analysts says, did it make you anger? Angry? How did it make you feel? I didn't care. I came back here to do a job. Why did you come back? The medical officer insists. Because they nailed my brother and best friend and several of the guys in my 173rd unit. I came back here to get even. Is that what you want to know? Am I mad? No. When I got out of the first, when I got out the first time and went home, it bugged me that so many of us had been killed or wounded, and I couldn't really say I had seen the enemy. I felt like a failure. I'm gonna fight in a war. If I'm gonna fight in a war, I want to see the enemy.

• 2:54:11Jocko Willink?

  I want to look on their face when I pull the trigger, or I have them roasted with napalm. Are you getting what you need with this answer? And then he thinks to himself, don't ask me this shit again. I'm here doing a job that most of the guys back home don't want to do. Just be satisfied. You can get people like me who want to be up here and are qualified. Yes, thank you. The medical officer deadpans. Black, continue on with the narration, instructs Lieutenant Analyst. And with feeling, he snorts.

• 2:54:42Jocko Willink?

  Again, this whole scene is just straight out of a freaking Hollywood movie of, you know, the, the, the combat soldier fresh off the battlefield getting interrogated by these rems.

• 2:54:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. And even there, like the whole thing with the flag and experienced one zero would have gone, but said, no, we're out of here. They had a green one zero. And Lynn tried to, I forget if he goes into detail.

• 2:55:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he goes into a little bit.

• 2:55:09John Stryker Meyer?

  But he wouldn't listen.

• 2:55:11Jocko Willink?

  There was just a couple, like that little bit of disagreement, you know, why didn't Sergeant stride make you the radio operator, one, two, and black the one, one, he goes through this, you know?

• 2:55:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:30Jocko Willink?

  So he continues here.

• 2:55:33Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir. Covey asked for a sit rep at which time I reported that the second King B was shot down and we were waiting for Bulldog to make a go no go decision. Mandolin asked to talk with Bulldog, who said he was going to continue with the mission. He then motioned to our point man to move over to a well traveled trail across the LZ into the jungle. Cowboy, point, the Vietnamese team leader, Locke, and I vigorously argued against walking a trail, especially when we had already made contact. To be honest, I thought the order was stupid. There, I said it. And he's thinking to himself there, I said it. You want to know how I feel? That's it. So this is when you're the tension that we were talking about.

• 2:56:15John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:56:16Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Analyst, his face red, eyes narrowed. You argued with your one zero in the middle of making contact with the enemy? And then Lynn thinks to himself, "Your ass is in trouble now. Keep calm. He's never been in a combat situation, except maybe fighting with his older sister." The first rule of recon is never use trails, especially well-traveled trails. That trail I set to stride definitely fits that category. He told me he was in command and that I would follow his orders without questions. Did you? Yes, sir. Into really deep Kimchi. Continue, the chief orders impatiently. Bulldog angrily motioned to the team to move up on the trail. Point leading the way with Bulldog pushing from behind on his rucksack.

• 2:56:59Jocko Willink?

  The trail wound into dense jungle foliage bending to the left. Point tried to move cautiously paralleling a small team, a small 10 to 20 foot rise to our right. Bulldog hurried him along, pushing, pushing him to his death. Is that statement necessary? The lieutenant analyst sarcastically cracks. I was instructed to tell you what I was personally thinking. I was the only American on the team with Vietnam experience, with combat experience. I was the fourth person in line, right behind Cowboy. I think Sergeant Stride's experience went back to an A-team in Korea. And 1-1 had never seen combat. Is that statement necessary? I think so, yes. Rank and combat experience are not necessarily synonymous. Don't you agree?

• 2:57:44Jocko Willink?

  And then he says to himself, "Stay calm, stay calm." Point taken. How did you feel when taking fire on insertion? Asks the doc. When we took fire going in, I felt anxious. He thinks to himself, "That's an understatement. It scared the shit out of me." That anxiety turned to disbelief when Bulldog made the decision to continue the mission. And then again, when the decision was made to walk a trail. I remained on the state of high alert, high alert right up to the ambush. An interesting thing happened. They all laughed. "We can imagine people were killing your teammates and you were pinned down. How much more interesting could it get?" observes Sergeant Analyst. They all nervously laugh again.

• 2:58:27Jocko Willink?

  I sit silent, expressionless, looking into each of their eyes. The medical officer is quietly observing me. After what seems like a long time, I turn and look at the 1-1. His head is down, his hands folded in his lap. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot over, I think to myself. Turning back to the debrief panel.

• 2:58:52Jocko Willink?

  "You ever been ambushed?" I asked flatly. Chief Sog and the Command Sergeant Major both shift uncomfortably in their chair. "None of them have. My impatience with this process is giving way to temper. I'm tired. Remember what Covey said. Keep your cool. All these questions have been covered in our initial debrief and documented in the AAR. What are these guys after? Give them what they want and then get the hell out of here."

• 2:59:19Jocko Willink?

  Then he starts speaking again. "When the NVA triggered the ambush, all that anxiety disappeared. I went to work. Previous experience and training kicked in. I returned fire with the intent of suppressing the NVA attack and being able to maneuver out of the spot we were in. Bulldog and 1-1 was down. Like I said before, I thought he was hit and took charge. I've learned the best defense is an aggressive offense. As long as we had ammunition and could move, I took charge of our not-so-little, no-name battle, moving at will, causing as much confusion for the enemy as possible, preventing them from forming up a large force to overrun us.

• 3:00:02Jocko Willink?

  That tactic worked, until we ran out of ammo." The anxiety returned.

• 3:00:10Jocko Willink?

  No sir, fear. One one turns to face me with a little disbelief. How did you deal with it prompts the doctor. Our situation seemed impossible. The fact is, I was completely overcome with fear. For an instant, I couldn't move. And he thinks to himself, I haven't thought about this until now. I don't know if I can express that feeling. He continues, oddly, it seemed to be unconnected to the physical danger. The fear, yes. There were three things going on all at once. It was this, it was as if I had stepped outside myself. Seeing all things, feeling all emotions, all at the same time.

• 3:00:53Jocko Willink?

  In that instant, I became completely demoralized.

• 3:00:59Jocko Willink?

  And he thinks to himself, every person in this room is fixed on what I am saying. I wish I knew what I was saying or how to say it. I'm talking like a woman or like the shrink.

• 3:01:12Jocko Willink?

  Demoralized, the doc gently urges. What made the emotion so overpowering was the realization that I had violated every moral precept of my upbringing. My childhood focused sharply, blending into the present. I couldn't wrap my mind around our deeds. I was alive, we were alive, hundreds of others were dead. Fathers, sons, husbands, you know, more would die, maybe thousands. I raised my hand to hold off further questions as I stared down at the table to focus my thoughts and emotions. Emotions, here they are. That, he continues, that entire thought process lasted a fraction of a second.

• 3:01:55Jocko Willink?

  Then the usual, if I can call it that, the reemergence of our deadly danger. The possibility of a sudden assault and total annihilation was welcome and composing. Reality pacified me. Our reality emerged in my mind like a clap of thunder. My emotions were out prioritized by mortality.

• 3:02:21Jocko Willink?

  You might want to talk with this about with you might want to talk with one of our medical staff, offers the chief SOG. And he thinks I just did, and there's nothing they can do for me. Ignoring his comment. It's interesting to watch the changes in people who are on the spot. For instance, in that fraction of a second, when the concussion grenade hit me, I became interesting to myself. What does that mean, interested in yourself? The medical officer is surprised. Not interested in myself, but interesting to myself. An object of interest outside myself. It's difficult to describe. However, all that serves no purpose in the moment.

• 3:03:04Jocko Willink?

  Distractions of that kind prevent us from witnessing our own death, from dealing with the present. Someone on the team mentioned surrendering. We all knew they would kill us. Good thinking, offers the command sergeant major. Anyway, that led to a conversation about breaking the team into two-man groups to escape and evade. At that point, in the battle, we felt the terrain and enemy activity prevented us from E and D. That's when we decided to fight it out using our, using their weapons during daylight hours and then try to get some of the people out under the cover of darkness. We now had options and resolve. The fear was diminished and a new purpose and mission had gripped every man on the

• 3:03:49Jocko Willink?

  team. Explain, orders the lieutenant analyst. I thought I just did. Blackjack, chides the sergeant major. Okay, okay. I hesitate looking for the words. During daylight hours, we decided to fight them as hard as we could using their weapons and tactics. I know from experience that when you use the enemy's tactics against them, they are, they quickly become confused. Have you ever considered countermeasures against your own tactics? Of course not. No one ever does. You're not going to fight yourself, right? That's why it's so important for us to study their tactics and use those tactics against

• 3:04:30Jocko Willink?

  them in the field. The reports Saigon send out each month are the basis for that knowledge, along with what we learn directly in the field. Practical experience. You all are here making a major contribution to us staying alive and being successful. What you've told me about being trams today adds to that knowledge. They're smiling, shooting approval glances at one another. And then he thinks to himself, Blackjack, you're being a kiss ass. Knock it off. Thank you, Specialist Black, for the performance review of my staff, replies the chief's Sog with a straight face. Please continue. Instantly, they all get serious.

• 3:05:11Jocko Willink?

  All we had to do was hold out until dark. What about the B-52 strike that was on the way, mocks the lieutenant analyst? Minor consideration. If thousands of enemy couldn't kill us 20 feet from 20 feet away, we could certainly live through B-52's bombing from 20 or 30,000 feet. The LT gives me his narrowed eyed, narrow eyed, I don't believe you, look as the medical officer and others suppress their laughter. We begin to pair up as the curtain of death fell around us, even though we were still acting as a team. Curtain of death, asks the medical officer quizzically. I remember that when the decision was made,

• 3:05:51Jocko Willink?

  I felt as if a black curtain were being lowered around me. It was something I could see in my mind. We made every attempt to maneuver ourselves into an E and E launch position, which turned out to be the route we took to the last Jolly Green Giant. We figured because we were small and they were so large at night, we would have, they would have to set up blocking positions and not move on us. The reasoning was that if they tried to move, they would wind up shooting each other. In large blocking groups, they would make noise revealing themselves and their positions. This would give us the opportunity to try and move out between those positions and get out. It's a good thing we didn't have to E and E at night using that route. It would have led us directly into the heart

• 3:06:32Jocko Willink?

  of their camp. My job became getting as many of my team off the battlefield and out of the AO to safety as possible.

• 3:06:43Jocko Willink?

  Black, your Alabama team is very lucky you didn't have to E and E because of the B-52 strikes, even if you survived them, the NVA would have taken to widely dispersing its units. For instance, a 2,000-man NVA regiment might be spread across a five-mile stretch of trail dug in into each bend in the road and hilltop. This is by the way of explaining, this is by the way of explaining why some SOG teams just vanish unwittingly landing amid such an overlapping concentration of NVA forces. My guess is that no matter which way you would have turned every half-mile or so, you

• 3:07:21Jocko Willink?

  would have bumped into enemy platoons or companies, even 500-man battalions. Looking directly at Chief SOG, "Did you know they were all there at that place we chose as an LZ?" Without hesitation, he responds. So, so you got Lynn saying, "Wait a second, bro. You knew that there was all these people on the freaking ground that we were going to put in an LZ?" And the Chief SOG says, "No, not specifically. The 12 teams before Alabama were tracking a regiment down the trail. That tracking mission, as you know, became known as the lottery. We believe you found that regiment and Bintram, those are these organizations that protect

• 3:08:04Jocko Willink?

  the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Bintram 611 at that same location. Our intelligence led us to believe that your LZ was approximately five miles from that base and that Alabama might have a chance at gathering very important intel along the network of trails so prevalent in that area. The fact is, we now know exactly where Bintram 611 was located and you have confirmed the type and number of personnel on site. Rarely has such a small team engaged such a large force with so few casualties and lived to tell about it. The Bintram 611 you all encountered has been destroyed for now, along with the regiment that took 12 SOG teams.

• 3:08:46Jocko Willink?

  We here are all very proud to work with men like you and your Alabama team."

• 3:08:55Jocko Willink?

  Blackjack, is there anything else you want to say? Asks Sergeant Analyst, anything at all?

• 3:09:02Jocko Willink?

  Yes. The jolly green giants, the motto painted on the sides of their ships, so that others may live.

• 3:09:15Jocko Willink?

  Emotion wells up. Give me a minute, please. The thought of the JGs, the Vietnamese King Bs, and all the others who have committed their lives to saving Alabama emotionally, in date my senses overpowering my ability to stuff emotions back down. My, my eyes flood with tears. We're alive today due to all of you.

• 3:09:42Jocko Willink?

  Thank you.

• 3:09:47John Stryker Meyer?

  Amen.

• 3:09:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and, and by the way, so, that right there is page 60, that, that just got us to page 60 of this book, of this 300 page book.

• 3:10:07Jocko Willink?

  That's one mission.

• 3:10:10John Stryker Meyer?

  One historic SOG mission.

• 3:10:12Jocko Willink?

  One, one mission, one historic mission, but a mission that represents another day in SOG, which was the same that you guys had.

• 3:10:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. One many like that, that was in a special category.

• 3:10:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. But the, I mean, the setup, that's what you guys did. You know, like the setup, hey, like, we're gonna go in there, we're gonna find out where the bad guys are. We're taking the King Bs in. We'll call for fire support if we get in trouble. That was your, that was your model. That was your, that was what you guys did.

• 3:10:43John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:10:47John Stryker Meyer?

  Although if we saw a flag, we would definitely try to get out of there if we could. Post haste.

• 3:10:53Jocko Willink?

  How about when you're taking massive fire on insert? What about that one? Is that another thing? A good idea? Or one of your insert craft gets shot down? You say, we're going to continue the mission?

• 3:11:03John Stryker Meyer?

  Can you imagine? No.

• 3:11:05Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 3:11:06John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:09Jocko Willink?

  Well, there's a ton of other missions to discuss. This book, it's called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. It's written by Lynn Black Jr.

• 3:11:21Jocko Willink?

  Just get the book and a bunch of the other missions there. I want to save some of them. So hopefully we can get, we can get the man himself on here. Uh, to talk through some of these, give us his experiences. And it's also cool because we'll get both you guys on here because, you know, he writes about some of the same missions you guys were on together and you guys both wrote about these missions. So to get both of you in here to kind of go through those, um, I'll do my job, shut up and just let you guys talk, which would be freaking awesome. Awesome to do.

• 3:11:54Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, hopefully we can get him on at some point. And if not, then if he does, if he can't make it on, then we'll, we'll go through some of these other stories and, and share them.

• 3:12:02John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, it's an honor to pay homage to him. He's just a great guy. Fieldless warrior and some of the things he did in that mission. Oh my God.

• 3:12:11Jocko Willink?

  When you think about these times, was it seem like, does it seem like a long time ago? Does it seem like yesterday? Or, and I'm going to ask you this, does it seem like both? Because for me, sometimes my experience seems like it was a long time ago, and sometimes it seems like it was yesterday. What does it seem like to you?

• 3:12:27John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, clearly both.

• 3:12:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:28John Stryker Meyer?

  Absolutely. Because I can just remember us standing there at the, outside the S3 shop, waiting for the go, for the bright light. Cause Don already told us. And we were switching everything out. Just nothing but ammo, hand grenades and bandages and some body bags. And, uh, quite glad that they changed their mind. Lynn, you know, again, he had his right tactical decision on the ground.

• 3:12:56John Stryker Meyer?

  And he called it right because if we had tried to go in, just like his, the other helicopter shot down and there's more people on the ground, more casualties possibly. And so, yeah, so that day comes back every October 5th, you know, we have our little email loop, Spider, Pat Watkins, and it was go, hey, Lynn, this is your day, brother. We don't know how you did it, but we're glad you did.

• 3:13:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the fact that, you know, he's, he's saying in the beginning when they inserted, like they should have left immediately, meaning he's kind of looking to save his own ass, right?

• 3:13:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, sure.

• 3:13:35Jocko Willink?

  God bless him. But then you fast forward, whatever it is, a few hours, and now he's saying, nope, I'm saving everyone else's ass. Don't come and get me. I mean, that's, hey, don't land your bird. He calls off King bees, get out of here. Don't take off. Leave us here. Bright light? No, don't send them. We're not going to be bait.

• 3:13:54John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. And you know, when he, when he finally came back to base, like a day or two later, they had to go patch them up. And then they had a little ceremony with the Air Force guys where they swapped berets, because the PJs had their berets and I think Lynn and Steve swapped out theirs. And when he came back to base, he never talked about it. We, we'd heard about what Spider, Mandolin are all saying about the mission, but you know, Lynn wouldn't talk about it. So even when I did the book, I had to go back and physically go, come on, Lynn, I want to get this story into the books. I flew up to the like 1980, 90, finally interviewed.

• 3:14:37John Stryker Meyer?

  That's where I learned stuff that I never knew about the mission. Already some of the little details about the, um, finding the PJ cooking, the broken back. And oh my God.

• 3:14:49John Stryker Meyer?

  So he's just an amazing, amazing warrior, great guy, and an artist on top of it. And when he was talking about the Chief SOG, that was Steve Kavanaugh, who was a highly decorated WWII vet. And then when Korea, he was in Germany. But then he was Chief SOG. He came in right after Jack Singlov. And his welcome to SOG was August 23rd, 68, FOB 4.

• 3:15:13Jocko Willink?

  Sheesh.

• 3:15:14John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. So he was a really good Chief SOG. He really cared about the men. But uh...

• 3:15:21Jocko Willink?

  What was his rank as the Chief SOG?

• 3:15:23John Stryker Meyer?

  Bird, O6.

• 3:15:24Jocko Willink?

  So he was a full bird Colonel?

• 3:15:26John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:26Jocko Willink?

  And he was in charge of, and he's in charge of all SOG?

• 3:15:29John Stryker Meyer?

  Correct.

• 3:15:30Jocko Willink?

  CCN, CCS, and CCC?

• 3:15:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, all of our operations. And then, um, see, this is again, the regular army. Instead of having a general that could go do battle with other generals, they had a Colonel.

• 3:15:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 3:15:43John Stryker Meyer?

  Part of the in-house fighting with the boys down in Saigon.

• 3:15:48John Stryker Meyer?

  And so, that's why I love the book. Cause Ling gets into this little exchanges, back and forth, and then he has little, his editorials on my comments with these assholes.

• 3:15:58Jocko Willink?

  It's so freaking classic.

• 3:15:59John Stryker Meyer?

  It's precious.

• 3:16:00Jocko Willink?

  It's crazy, cause I know you. And so I'm reading, Tilt said this, and Tilt said that, and Tilt was throwing this. It's so awesome to read. Yeah, it's freaking awesome. He also, you know, he also breaks into the whole, you get the, you get a better, you get a very good feeling of the whole kind of deployment when he's going into town, and he's, there's all kinds of shady kind of CIA stuff going on in there that he's wrapped up in.

• 3:16:28John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah.

• 3:16:29Jocko Willink?

  That's for, it's like, it's legit.

• 3:16:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, and even in the first 60 pages, there are segments there for what he did under fire.

• 3:16:40John Stryker Meyer?

  That could be cut out and used in any leadership school.

• 3:16:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for sure.

• 3:16:44John Stryker Meyer?

  Military, anywhere's. It's just incredible stuff.

• 3:16:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, not to mention anything that he did multiple times over could be used to write an award citation. What did he, what did he receive for this?

• 3:16:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, he wound up with a Silver Star.

• 3:16:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:16:58John Stryker Meyer?

  Which should have been, in my opinion, at least a Medal of Honor. And, uh, cause in the book, he goes into it, Spider and Mandolin are talking a little bit a few days later. And the, um, S3 officer, a major who will remain nameless, um, was saying he, he didn't bring back stride. So you'd be glad we're putting him in for a Silver Star and, you know, Pat Watkins and Spider were pretty emphatic. It should have been a lot higher than that. And we could think about Medal of Honors that had been awarded.

• 3:17:29Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:17:30John Stryker Meyer?

  Where nothing like what Lynn was up against, getting knocked out all that time on the job, patching up his own people. And then leading them out and then, oh, we'll just charge right through the NVA ranks. They're not used to that.

• 3:17:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh my God. It's weird cause he's a definitely a cerebral guy, as you could hear from that last section.

• 3:17:52John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:17:53Jocko Willink?

  But damn, he would get aggressive. I mean, he's, his whole, he's pissed off. That's kind of one of the reasons he re-enlist is cause he's pissed off.

• 3:18:01John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:01Jocko Willink?

  That they wounded his brother and wounded people from the 173rd and killed people from the 173rd. So he's got this like pent up aggression, but then he's an artist.

• 3:18:09John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:18:10Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 3:18:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Sure. He worked at this TV station during high school. He's so good. But I'm one of, you know, you, we, we just read it. So, and then, uh, years later, I mean, he just comes back in his own way and it goes, gets a job at Boeing, rises through the ranks. Just did incredible work there that nobody could talk about.

• 3:18:34John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:18:35Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 3:18:35John Stryker Meyer?

  One of our SOG legends to the max and humble and modest. He just like pulling teeth to get him to talk about it.

• 3:18:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:43John Stryker Meyer?

  That's why I love the book. You know, every once, every couple of years or so, I pull it out and reread it again.

• 3:18:47Jocko Willink?

  Do you know what, what inspired him to write this book?

• 3:18:51John Stryker Meyer?

  That's a good question. I don't know. These last 15 years or so, uh, between the reunions and, uh, uh, being so far apart. Uh, I was just, everybody was talking to, come on, Lynn, got to do the book. And at one point, he told him, he threw away four to 500 pages. I said, Lynn, please tell me you just put them in a, in a little folder somewhere, give them to me, uh, or give them to somebody. But they said, no, it's, it's done.

• 3:19:22John Stryker Meyer?

  So he worked on it for a while. He really did. And we had chatted back and forth, back when I still at the newspaper back in the day.

• 3:19:30Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's, it's a, it's a phenomenal book. I hope everybody goes to pick it up. Hopefully he can come on here and, and talk through some of these stories. And if not that, then hopefully I can just go shake his hand one day because it'd be an honor.

• 3:19:43John Stryker Meyer?

  Indeed. Next time you go up to Seattle area for one of your shows.

• 3:19:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:19:51Jocko Willink?

  With that, look, we've been going for three and a half hours or something like that.

• 3:19:54John Stryker Meyer?

  Really?

• 3:19:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, I know.

• 3:19:57John Stryker Meyer?

  This must be a Jocko podcast.

• 3:20:01Jocko Willink?

  Quit harassing me.

• 3:20:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and, and we're, we're gonna come back, we're gonna do some SOG Chronicles next.

• 3:20:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:13Jocko Willink?

  Until then, uh, I'm a little bit speechless, but it's, obviously it's an honor to share these stories, these SOG stories. It's an honor always to have you on till, uh, an honor to know you. And it's an honor for me to help get the word about, get the word out about you and your brothers in SOG. Your books that you've written, that we've covered on the podcast, Across the Fence, that's the first one, On the Ground, and then SOG Chronicles, Volume One.

• 3:20:45Jocko Willink?

  You're also out there just getting after the social media.

• 3:20:50John Stryker Meyer?

  Little bit now. I get to Tennessee, we're gonna be moving here real soon. Then we're gonna get really serious. I'll be calling up Echo for some, for some skill sets here, little hints.

• 3:20:59Jocko Willink?

  You're on, you're on Twitter, but you don't do much on Twitter?

• 3:21:03John Stryker Meyer?

  Minimal on Twitter.

• 3:21:04Jocko Willink?

  You're on Twitter, you're at Sog John.

• 3:21:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Does that one and then?

• 3:21:09Jocko Willink?

  And then there's at Sog Chronicles?

• 3:21:10John Stryker Meyer?

  There's J striker.

• 3:21:12Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:21:12John Stryker Meyer?

  Meyer. That's the other handle. But see, this is Twitter. And do you think I should really be on it? You have to give me more advice here.

• 3:21:19Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 3:21:20Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles?

• 3:21:20Speaker 02

  Depends on what you do, I guess.

• 3:21:21John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, Instagram has been amazing.

• 3:21:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. That's, so I was gonna say J striker Meyer on Instagram, that's where you're at. You also have Facebook, John Stryker Meyer, and you have on the internet, on the interwebs, you're at, or it's just sogchronicles.com.

• 3:21:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Correct. And we're gonna be get a, get my 20th century website's gonna be upgraded here in the next month or two.

• 3:21:47Jocko Willink?

  It looked like you designed that one on a tape recorder.

• 3:21:51John Stryker Meyer?

  It wasn't that advanced, Jacob.

• 3:21:54John Stryker Meyer?

  My daughters are on me and Anna's on me too. So we're lining up a gentleman now. We're interviewing him to come back and redesign. Absolutely.

• 3:22:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, like I said, thank you so much for coming on.

• 3:22:06John Stryker Meyer?

  My pleasure.

• 3:22:07Jocko Willink?

  And always an honor. Appreciate it. And it's just, every time you send me a text message that says airborne, it gives me enough motivation to get through like six weeks of mayhem.

• 3:22:20Jocko Willink?

  Thanks, appreciate it.

• 3:22:21John Stryker Meyer?

  Till next time, airborne, indeed.

• 3:22:25Jocko Willink?

  And with that, John Stryker Meyer, Tilt, has left the building. And, you know, Echo, it's, you know, we're sitting here, and sometimes we feel like maybe we're getting after it. And then you sit down with someone like Tilt, and you hear the story of Lynn Black and the guys from Sog, and it makes me realize that we can do more, and we actually should do more

• 3:22:58Jocko Willink?

  with our lives to get after it more.

• 3:23:02Jocko Willink?

  So what recommendations do you have to keep us in the mode of getting after it as we pursue?

• 3:23:11Jocko Willink?

  As we pursue?

• 3:23:14Speaker 02

  Improvement.

• 3:23:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, improvement. I just wanted to say, as we improve, as we, as we pursue an unattainable standard.

• 3:23:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:23:22Jocko Willink?

  It's an unattainable standard. I'm not ever, I mean, something would have to go completely haywire for me to get after it to the level of a John Stryker Meyer, or of a Lynn Black, or of a Dick Thompson. There'd have to be, there's, something's gotta go majorly wrong. So, and I don't, you know, look, we hope that doesn't happen in the world. So, what we are in the pursuit

• 3:23:45Jocko Willink?

  of that level, we're not gonna get there, but we're trying.

• 3:23:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:23:47Jocko Willink?

  Cause we're not just gonna sit back and say, oh, they got after it more than me. I'm just gonna sit on the couch. No.

• 3:23:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:23:54Jocko Willink?

  We're not doing that.

• 3:23:55Speaker 02

  No. We are gonna get after it

• 3:24:00Speaker 02

  appropriate, at the appropriate level to our world. Anyway.

• 3:24:07Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:24:08Speaker 02

  We do.

• 3:24:08Jocko Willink?

  I like the fact that you finally came to a self-realization of what you just said made no sense.

• 3:24:13Speaker 02

  It, it.

• 3:24:13Jocko Willink?

  You don't do that, you don't get that self-realization very often.

• 3:24:16Speaker 02

  It makes sense. You just gotta think about it. That's all. Just gotta think about it more. Anyway, so yes, we're working out. Our bodies, degeneration, regeneration, as you said, wise man, Jaco. Wise man. I'm saying it. Okay, there you go. Boom. Uh, the, the beatings are the darkness, the gains are the light. So, Jaco Fuel, this will help you. These things will help you. Jaco Fuel, we got stuff for your joints, stuff for your muscles, stuff for your brain, stuff for your immunity, all the stuff.

• 3:24:48Jocko Willink?

  Some bases, you got some bases covered.

• 3:24:50Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Yes, we do. Anyway, joint warfare and krill oil, these for your joints, there's antioxidants in there, too, by the way. Also, discipline, multi, multiple forms, deployment methods.

• 3:25:05Speaker 02

  Powder mixable in water recommended. Maybe throw some juice in there.

• 3:25:11Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:25:13Speaker 02

  Alright, well, hey, I was just seeing. I know that.

• 3:25:16Jocko Willink?

  I mixed one up the other day because it was been, it's been hot here in the California AO area of operations. And I, did you see what I'm, I posted it?

• 3:25:24Speaker 02

  What?

• 3:25:25Jocko Willink?

  I mixed up, I took just, you, you know, well, I don't know if you knew this, when it's hot out, iced tea. Arnold Palmer scenarios are very nice to have. So you know those, you ever seen one of those big, basically this, it's a big pitcher, you know what a pitcher is?

• 3:25:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:25:44Jocko Willink?

  It's a clear plastic pitcher. And there's only one true purpose for that thing, and that is to mix up iced tea or Arnold Palmer on a hot, hot day. So I did it, emptied my ice thing into there, put in the Jaco Palmer, discipline, go.

• 3:26:00Speaker 02

  What, the can?

• 3:26:01Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no, the powder.

• 3:26:03Speaker 02

  That's not discipline, go.

• 3:26:04Jocko Willink?

  Put in the discipline powder.

• 3:26:08Jocko Willink?

  It was so good.

• 3:26:09Speaker 02

  It was nice.

• 3:26:09Jocko Willink?

  It was so good.

• 3:26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you got the Arnold Palmer, Jaco Palmer, you got the Arnold Palmer feel with a Jaco Palmer feel. You see what I'm saying? Look, I dig it, man, I dig it a hundred percent.

• 3:26:21Jocko Willink?

  That did make sense, even though it didn't make any sense, it made sense.

• 3:26:24Speaker 02

  See, that's what I'm talking about.

• 3:26:26Jocko Willink?

  All I had to do was think about it.

• 3:26:28Speaker 02

  Hey, look, I'm not this one up guy, you know, you know, one up, you know what a one up guy is, right? I'm not that, and I'm not a, I'm not a grammar Nazi, and I'm not a corrector.

• 3:26:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:26:38Speaker 02

  I'll, I'll correct you if you want.

• 3:26:40Jocko Willink?

  You just corrected me on discipline, go, but okay, whatever, you have your weird self-image.

• 3:26:44Speaker 02

  That's kind of why I kind of said it because I might have came off like a corrector and I might come off like a little bit of a corrector right now. But technically you have a pitcher, hot summertime, California heatwave weekend, that's kind of what it was.

• 3:26:58Speaker 02

  You want a glass pitcher? No, I'm not a plastic.

• 3:27:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:27:00Speaker 02

  Ideally, from an ideal standpoint. I don't know.

• 3:27:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. No, I agree with you.

• 3:27:04Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 3:27:05Jocko Willink?

  I don't purchase the pitchers in my house.

• 3:27:08Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 3:27:08Jocko Willink?

  Other people run that part of the machine.

• 3:27:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. No worries. We'll get some people on the phone. We'll sort it out. All good. Either way.

• 3:27:16Jocko Willink?

  Good luck with that, bro.

• 3:27:18Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Either way, again, thanks for immunity, vitamin D and Cold War. These are two things, different methodologies, but immune support. Yeah, again, that for sure. Cause you know, in these times, immunity is always a good thing. It's never a bad thing. Immunity.

• 3:27:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know what else is a good thing? Dessert.

• 3:27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:27:37Jocko Willink?

  Dessert. Being able to drink, you know, you eat a nice ribeye or a nice piece of elk and you're like, oh, that was so good. But there's still a little something in your weird brain.

• 3:27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:27:47Jocko Willink?

  That wants dessert.

• 3:27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:27:50Jocko Willink?

  Which is why we make milk.

• 3:27:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:27:52Jocko Willink?

  We make dessert for you.

• 3:27:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:27:54Jocko Willink?

  And you can just have a dessert.

• 3:27:56Speaker 02

  Short game.

• 3:27:57Jocko Willink?

  You could have ice cream. You could have carrot cake. You could have, uh, you could have chocolate pudding or you could have milk. It all tastes the same genre of food, except for all those things are bad for you, except milk, which is literally good for you.

• 3:28:14Speaker 02

  Literally good for you and will supply you with additional protein. You think a cake is going to give you more protein, a regular cake?

• 3:28:20Jocko Willink?

  We will go toe to toe, cake versus.

• 3:28:22Speaker 02

  Cake for more protein all day.

• 3:28:24Jocko Willink?

  Taste, taste and protein levels.

• 3:28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, all day. So yeah, get that one now and, uh, your kid's gonna like it too, whether it's that one or the warrior kid milk, which there is. The kid's gonna like both of those. I know from experience, kids like this, this.

• 3:28:40Jocko Willink?

  I know from experience, kids love this stuff.

• 3:28:43Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. It's true. It's all true. Also, Jaco White Tea.

• 3:28:47Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:28:48Speaker 02

  You know, a little refreshing tea scenario. Anyway, you can get all this stuff at the vitamin shop. If you want to go out and get some. Also, if you don't want to go out and get some, just go online. OriginMaine.com. That's where you get it. Also at OriginMaine.com. Can get American made products, straight up.

• 3:29:05Jocko Willink?

  American made hard goods.

• 3:29:07Speaker 02

  Hard goods, durable goods.

• 3:29:09Jocko Willink?

  Durable goods.

• 3:29:09Speaker 02

  All that, all that, and it's all made in America.

• 3:29:12Jocko Willink?

  G's for the jujitsu. You can get rash guards also for the jujitsu or other forms of working out or surfing. Although we are moving into the winter months, you might need a wetsuit, but that's up to you. We do not make wetsuits, yes, yet.

• 3:29:30Jocko Willink?

  T-shirts, jeans, boots. Basically, you need clothes to wear. I mean, look, here's the deal. We need clothes to wear.

• 3:29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:29:38Jocko Willink?

  If you're gonna get clothes to wear, get them from Origin Maine. They're made in America. We got a bunch of awesome people up there rebuilding. Rebuilding a whole industry in Maine. Support America and get the best possible clothing you can. That's, that's what we're talking about.

• 3:29:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. And they have some shorts that for whatever reason, I don't know why they don't talk about the shorts. Cause it's literally aside from board shorts, like when I swim and workout or whatever. These are the only shorts I wear. The shark fin.

• 3:30:09Jocko Willink?

  You like the shark fin?

• 3:30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:30:11Jocko Willink?

  That's Pete.

• 3:30:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:30:13Jocko Willink?

  That's naming things.

• 3:30:16Speaker 02

  He's a very creative namer and I, to be honest, I like.

• 3:30:19Jocko Willink?

  What do you think came first? Cause the shark fin shorts has like a pocket on it that kinda looks like a shark fin?

• 3:30:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't know that.

• 3:30:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, cool.

• 3:30:29Jocko Willink?

  So I don't know if he started to design it that way and then named it the shark fin and then made it look more like a shark fin?

• 3:30:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:30:35Jocko Willink?

  It's functional. There's a reason for it, but I'm just saying, Pete, where you at?

• 3:30:41Speaker 02

  Well, either way, to me shark fin sounds cool, straight up. Sounds like hell. Yeah, shark fin shirts, shorts.

• 3:30:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:49Speaker 02

  Anyway, very good, good stuff. Origin Maine.com, all made in America.

• 3:30:52Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of shorts.

• 3:30:53Speaker 02

  Speaking of shorts, we, speaking of board shorts, we have board shorts. Def core, to the core. Discipline equals freedom. Board shorts at jocko store.com and jocko store.com. If you didn't know, it is the store. It's the store where you can get stuff while you, you know, while you wanna, if you wanna represent on the path is where you can get your shirts. Your discipline equals freedom shirts, hoodies, board shorts, like I said, both digi, did, what do you call it? Digi camo?

• 3:31:22Jocko Willink?

  Digi cami.

• 3:31:23Speaker 02

  Digi cami.

• 3:31:24Jocko Willink?

  Digi cami? Digi cami? Huh, I don't know. I don't know how I've said it.

• 3:31:28Speaker 02

  Digital camo?

• 3:31:29Jocko Willink?

  I think I call it digicam. Digi cami.

• 3:31:31Speaker 02

  No, digicam is a camera. Either way camouflage, digital, you know that one. Anyway, go to JacoStore.com. Like I said, if you see whatever shorts you want, the camouflage one or the regular straight up black one, whichever one you want, boom, available. Also some girl stuff on there, some uh, some tank tops,

• 3:31:51Speaker 02

  like I said, hoodies, hats, all this stuff. Uh, if you like something, hey man, get something.

• 3:31:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and don't forget about the Warrior Kid soap. Just, well, there's Warrior Kid soap actually.

• 3:32:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:32:03Jocko Willink?

  And then there is a bunch of other soap that is made by a Warrior Kid.

• 3:32:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:32:08Jocko Willink?

  Young Aiden.

• 3:32:09Speaker 02

  Uh, we sell it on Jaco Store. There's Warrior Kid soap, there's Jaco soap, there's Trooper soap, and there's Killer Soap. All good legitimate soaps, but for the month of September, uh, Irish Oaks Ranch will be donating one dollar per bar of soap to the Cure Search Foundation. It's called Cure Search, it's a cancer research center. See what I'm saying? So yeah, for this, cause Cancer Awareness Month, September. So we're donating one dollar per bar of soap, sold.

• 3:32:40Jocko Willink?

  That's Young Aiden. That's Young Aiden up there, uh, making that happen. So, there's a kid, I think he might be 14 now, but started this company, started this company Warrior Kid out there getting after it and he wants to help out kids that have cancer. So, good for him. Appreciate the support for that one. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. Don't forget that we have some other podcasts. The Jaco Unraveling Podcast, which used to be called The Thread. We got quite a few episodes coming out of that. We have The Debrief Podcast, which is on this thread, on the Jocko Podcast, uh, what is it called? Feed for right now? We have the Grounded Podcast, we have the Warrior Kid Podcast. We also have a YouTube

• 3:33:25Jocko Willink?

  channel, which, which Echo makes YouTube videos for.

• 3:33:30Speaker 02

  Jocko Podcast YouTube channel. Also Psychological Warfare. It's an, it's an album with tracks, Jaco Tracks helping you through moments of weakness as they may arise. Maybe not every day, but they arise sometimes.

• 3:33:45Jocko Willink?

  I think you might have just reached your breaking point.

• 3:33:48Jocko Willink?

  That's the first time that you've said that and you've repeated that thing that you didn't have any enthusiasm where you had, you had, you had some enthusiasm, but it was lower.

• 3:33:56Speaker 02

  Well, you know.

• 3:33:57Jocko Willink?

  So all the times, because just by the way, my enthusiasm for you saying that ended after about four times. So now we're on, where are we on 200 something podcast of you saying that? Jocko album with track bubble, right?

• 3:34:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:34:11Jocko Willink?

  So maybe we'll, you'll think of it something else to say there. The world hopes. The world is hoping.

• 3:34:17Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm searching my brain to, to, to connect the dots there. Like I didn't, I don't feel like I'm at any breaking point in any capacity.

• 3:34:24Jocko Willink?

  You just broke right here.

• 3:34:26Speaker 02

  Apparently I am, but so may, maybe I'm going to assume that you're right.

• 3:34:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:34:30Speaker 02

  Assume. Maybe it's because recently I haven't needed psychological warfare help.

• 3:34:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:34:40Speaker 02

  So it's not like fresh on my mind, you know? So maybe it came off like I broke or less enthusiastic.

• 3:34:45Jocko Willink?

  Why don't you go and listen to the track that's about doing things that you might not want to do?

• 3:34:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Cause apparently you think you can just come in here and kind of slough off on your execution.

• 3:34:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. On the psychological warfare part thing. That's kind of, what do you call that? Ironic? It's ironic.

• 3:35:03Jocko Willink?

  Very ironic. Alright, so you can get that if you want it. There's also a flipsidecanvas.com. My brother Dakota Myers, my brother, my brother Dakota Myers company where he sells visual representation. Did you hear that? I've said that a bunch of times, but you still hear some spirit in my voice because I'm fired up when I'm talking about Dakota Meyer and flipsidecanvas.com for visual representation that you want to see something. If you're, if you feel like maybe you've, you've broken, like Echo has, you can hang one of these things up. Go to flipsidecanvas.com for that. We also got a bunch of books. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by Lynn Black. That's what we went over today. Also, John Stryker Meyer books across the fence on the ground. Those are two different books and then

• 3:35:47Jocko Willink?

  Sog Chronicles. We also have the code, the evaluation of protocols, leadership, strategy and tactics, field manual, way of the warrior kid, one, two, and three, Mikey and the dragons, discipline equals freedom, field manual.

• 3:36:03Jocko Willink?

  And then Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. So there's a bunch of books. If you want to support, you can go on to JacoPodcast.com and any of the books that have been on this podcast, you can get them from there. And if you're wondering, hey, people always ask, what's the, give me the top seven books that you've read? Or they always ask these questions, right?

• 3:36:24Speaker 02

  Reading list.

• 3:36:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Can you, hey, do you have a reading list? Can you publish reading this? Yes, I can. I already did. It's called JacoPodcast.com, Books From the Podcast. You can go on there and if you want to, if you want to, you can click through there and you can go to Amazon and you can actually buy that book.

• 3:36:40Jocko Willink?

  And then you can read it and make yourself smarter and better. We also have a leadership consultancy called Echelon Front where what we do is solve problems through leadership. If you want to hear me talk to you, if you want me to come and talk or present to your team, you don't have to go to, you don't have to Google Jaco speaking. You can just go to echelonfront.com. If you want to have myself or any of the Echelon Front instructors come and help you, come and consult with you about your leadership, get you all aligned, get you on the right path. We can do it. Go to echelonfront.com.

• 3:37:21Jocko Willink?

  We also have EF Online, which listen, if you're wondering, hey, how can I really like to know this thing from Jaco? You want to ask me a question? Go to EF Online. Come on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, and chances are I will be there. And if I'm not there, someone else from the Echelon Front team is, but usually I'm there. I will be there to answer your questions. Whatever you want to ask me.

• 3:37:47Jocko Willink?

  There's also a bunch of in-depth, granular studies of all the principles from Extreme Ownership, The Dichotomy of Leadership and Leadership Strategy and Tactics. So go to EFOnline.com. Also, we have the muster. We had one in Orlando canceled. We had one in Phoenix canceled. The next one is going to be in Dallas, Texas on December 3rd and 4th. Go to ExtremeOwnership.com if you want to come.

• 3:38:18Jocko Willink?

  And of course, we have EF Overwatch. If you need executive leadership, you can get experienced military leaders that understand the principles that we talk about. Go to EFOverwatch.com.

• 3:38:33Jocko Willink?

  And then AmericasMightyWarriors.org. That is Mama Lee, Mark Lee's mom. And what she does is she helps. She helps service members, service members that are downrange. She helps service members' families. She helps retired service members. And she helps Gold Star families around the world. So if you want to help out with that, you can go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org to donate or to get involved. And if you need to contact us, or you have any questions, or you have any answers,

• 3:39:09Jocko Willink?

  you can find us on the interwebs. Once again, for Tilt, for John Stryker Meyer, he's on Twitter at @SogJohn. He's on Instagram at J Stryker S T R Y K E R M E Y E R. And Facebook, John Stryker Meyer. And on the interwebs, at Sog Chronicles. And of course, for us two knuckleheads, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And to all of

• 3:39:40Jocko Willink?

  the military personnel out there that swore the oath to put country above self, thank you. And to Tilt, and to Lynn Black, and the rest of the SOG forces in Vietnam, we can't say thank you enough for doing what you did so that others may live.

• 3:40:02Jocko Willink?

  And to police and law enforcement, and firefighters, and paramedics, and EMTs, and dispatchers, and correctional officers, and Border Patrol, and Secret Service, and all other first responders, thanks to you as well for swearing your oath to take care of us here on the home front.

• 3:40:19Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there,

• 3:40:22Jocko Willink?

  think of the incredible odds that these Sog soldiers went up against. And they did it time and time and time again in those forgotten jungles, on those forgotten hills, in that forgotten world.

• 3:40:39Jocko Willink?

  They sacrificed so much.

• 3:40:43Jocko Willink?

  And we must never forget.

• 3:40:48Jocko Willink?

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