449: Be Loyal To Your Team, Friends, and Your Dogs. With Jay Kopelman

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Kopelman began his military career in the US Navy in 1985, training to become a Naval Aviator, and then transferred to the Marine Corps in 1992, where he continued to fly before becoming a forward air controller and earning his gold naval parachutist wings. His last assignment was as the Deputy Director for advisor training at Camp Pendleton. 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 449 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  In an abandoned house in the northeast section of Fallujah, members of the 1st Battalion 3rd Marines, known as the Lava Dogs, froze when they heard a series of clicks coming from one remaining room of the compound. Grenade pins? Most of the military deaths in Fallujah during that first week of the US invasion happened inside buildings like this, where insurgents hid in upper rooms and threw grenades down at the Marines as they moved upward.

• 0:36Jocko Willink?

  There were a lot of head and face injuries, and while the Lava Dogs considered themselves some of the toughest Marines around, they named themselves out of respect for the jagged pumice they trained on back in Hawaii. Just being a Lava Dog didn't shield you from a grenade's fancy special effects.

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  Being careful did. Being focused did. Having your weapon locked and loaded when you inched around every corner did. Click, click, click. Maybe timed explosives. Throughout the first days of the invasion of Fallujah, the Marines discovered weapons, caches, suicide vests, and large amounts of heroin, speed, and cocaine, apparently used to bolster suicide bombers' courage. They found dead bodies of fighters from Chechnya, Syria, Libya, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. They walked into human slaughterhouses with hooks hanging from the ceilings, black masks, knives, bloody straw mats, and videos of beheadings.

• 1:41Jocko Willink?

  They freed emaciated prisoners, shackled and insane with fear.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  Fallujah, near the center of where it all began, was now a city cordoned off from the rest of the world, inhabited only by invisible snipers and stray dogs feasting on the dead.

• 2:01Jocko Willink?

  Click, snuffle, snuffle, click. The lava dogs tightened their jaws and clenched their weapons as they ran through the rules in their heads. Cover danger areas, stay low, move stealthily, be prepared to adapt, and eliminate threats. Snuffle. Click, click, click, snuffle, snuffle. An insurgent strapping a bomb to his chest? They should have prepped the room with a grenade, tossed it in, and just let it do all the dirty work. Instead, for reasons still obscured by war and fear and things just destined to be, they backed up to the walls on either side of the doorway and positioned their weapons to fire.

• 2:46Jocko Willink?

  Then they thrust their rifles around the corner, squared off, and zeroed in on the clicks as their target rushed to the other side of the room. Holy shit! The puppy turned around at the sound of their voices and stared at them. What the hell? The puppy cocked his head, trying to interpret their intent rather than their words. You've gotta be kidding. Then, the dog yipped, wagged his tail, and clicked his toenails on the floor as he pranced up and down in place, happy it seemed someone had found him at last.

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  And, that right there is an excerpt from the prologue of a book called From Baghdad With Love: A Dog, A Marine, and The Love That Saved Them. The book was written by Lieutenant Colonel Jay Kopelman, who served in the Navy. Prior to going into the Marine Corps or transferring over to the Marine Corps, he fought in Iraq where he eventually found a dog that he named Lava that changed and likely saved his life. It's an honor to have Jay here with us tonight to share his stories and lessons learned. Jay, thanks for joining us, man.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you, Jocko, for having me.

• 4:07Jocko Willink?

  It's a different kind of book to read. The book centers around you saving this dog.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's a story of love for sure. A story of salvation, not just for Lava, but for me, and I think for all the Marines who were around him. And I just have to say that the beginning of the book is written that way. But in reality, Lava was found in the middle of a firefight by Marines from 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines. He was hiding in a 50 gallon drum. I didn't know this part of the story till after the book came out.

• 4:49Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  And one of the Marines there, he was a corporal, I believe, at the time, or a lance corporal. His squad leader said, "Hey, do something about that dog, right? Take care of that dog, because he's gonna give away their position." So the Marine hands his rifle off to another Marine, crawls in the 50 gallon drum, throws the dog in his pro gear, and they end up taking it back to the house. And that's where I first met him.

• 5:20Jocko Willink?

  Damn. Jack.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:23Jocko Willink?

  Well, before we get into that whole thing, you had a pretty interesting ride just getting into the Marine Corps. So let's go back a little bit to your, to your life. Where'd you grow up?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was born there, raised there, stayed there till I was 18 and went off to college.

• 5:39Jocko Willink?

  What'd your, what'd your mom and dad do?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  My father was a business owner. He had a, back in the day, a direct mail business, so...

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  What does that even mean?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so think junk mail, right? Yeah, so he had a business where he had a big plant in the back with all these machines. It would, you know, put an address label on this thing, and then other machines would bundle them all up. They'd stuff them in mail sacks, and that was really my first real job, so to speak, was hauling around 100 pound mail sacks as a scrawny 14 year old.

• 6:13Jocko Willink?

  And what about your mom? What'd she do?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Uh, mom was a stay at home housewife for most of my life. Uh, when I was in high school, she then

• 6:23Speaker 01

  opened up a store with a friend of hers. They started a stationery and invitation store, you know, personalized stuff and uh, she kept that going for quite a while, even after she and my father moved to Tampa, Florida, she opened up another one there.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  When, were you still in high school when they moved to Tampa?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  No, they moved there as I was going into my senior year of college. So I, you know, that was the last time I was in Pittsburgh to live there was that summer between junior and senior year of college.

• 6:52Jocko Willink?

  And what were you doing in, in high school?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  In high school, uh, so I was not a great student. Um, you know, I, I was one of those kids that guidance counselor always telling my parents I was underachieving my potential, of course. Um, I, you know, I played all the sports, right? Growing up.

• 7:13Jocko Willink?

  Any good?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Not especially. I think I was pretty good at tennis at one point, like my parents hired a coach and the coach was like, oh yeah, this kid, if he stays with it, if he works, he can get a scholarship.

• 7:27Jocko Willink?

  He's looking for those extra coaching fees too. Those coaches are just like, I see a lot of potential with your kid. They definitely could make something happen. If we give him a couple more private lessons a week, we can really get there.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, yeah, it was probably like that, but uh, I just wasn't in a jumping rope and running for that stuff. But, um, you know, I was always a big football fan. My father was a Penn State alum and he had season tickets. So I started going to Penn State football games. I was like seven years old and all I wanted to do was play football. And my father said, well, if you get to be six foot two and 210 pounds, which he knew in our family was never going to happen. Although my son is six three, which is crazy. Um, he said, then you can play football. And I said, I'm, I've always kind of done things because people said I couldn't. So I said, well, I'll show you. And senior year in high school, I played football.

• 8:21Jocko Willink?

  Was that the first year that you played?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  I played a little in fifth and sixth grade, you know, played quarterback. And then, uh, in seventh grade, I was playing quarterback and jammed my fingers into the ground and my whole hands were, I mean, it was a mess. And so I didn't play again after that until senior year in high school. I was, I was a kicker. I was a place kicker on the team.

• 8:44Jocko Willink?

  Echo, you're excited about that.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Cake nuts was a kicker.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Well, you know, when I was so practice, I was kicking 55 yard field goals and I had never done it before. Right? So, uh, I go off to college, uh, start wanting to thinking I can play football.

• 9:01Jocko Willink?

  And where'd you go to college?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  University of Miami.

• 9:03Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  So, you know, I'm thinking I can play football in college and I get down there. Lou Saban was the head coach. I went on a recruiting trip actually.

• 9:13Jocko Willink?

  So you must've done pretty good in high school if you got, went on a recruiting trip.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I was mediocre. We had, we had a coach, uh, who had a favorite, uh, who was a running back and punter. And then he let him start kicking and I kind of just got forgotten about it. I managed the letter, but that was about it. So I go down there and they got this kid Danny Miller, who could just bomb the ball. I mean, he was incredible. You know, he had thighs like the size of this table. Right? I mean, kid could kick a football like nobody's business. So I said, okay, that's not going to work. So I better do something. So I weighed 155 pounds and, uh, like can't play football. I'm this is like this slow Jewish kid. Nobody, nobody wants me on their football team.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  So I started lifting weights a lot, bulking up. By the end of freshman year, I was 205. And playing defensive back. And then, uh, spring practice freshman year, going against the first team offense, they're running an end around and as a D back, you either come up and you take out the lineman who's pulling, or you go head on for the running back. Well, I hit the running back at a bad angle. My knee buckled, first knee injury, you know, Howard Schnellenberger was our coach at that point. And he comes running over, you know. They were nice as could be, but you know, here I am. I'm just a walk on. Nobody gives a shit. Right. It's like, okay, let's just get them off the field.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  But I came back after that, you know, I had knee surgery. I came back, kept trying and finally by the end of junior year, I realized, you know what? You're never gonna be a real college football player. I was a human blocking and tackling dummy for the most part. I'd made it up to first string special teams.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  But then got hurt and that was the end of that. So I figured I better graduate from this school pretty quick.

• 11:14Jocko Willink?

  So what'd you graduate with a degree in?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Broadcast journalism.

• 11:21Jocko Willink?

  What even is that?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So.

• 11:24Jocko Willink?

  Is that like you're gonna be a news anchor type?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you, or you would do sports broadcasting, something like that.

• 11:30Jocko Willink?

  So are you in a classroom like getting taught?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You get taught on how to, how to write, how to produce stuff. I had one class where we had to do like an improv improvised stand-up comedy thing. You know, it was, it was some crazy stuff that I had, I didn't, my, my roommate was a broadcast journalism major. So I said, that sounds good. What happened is I started out as a drama major. And that was too hard.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  So, and it wasn't, I mean, it was.

• 12:10Jocko Willink?

  That's a low bar.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  I told you, man, I was not a great student and.

• 12:16Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you though, when we had Rain on the podcast from the office and he, he talked about what that, cause he did the whole drama thing. He went to college for drama. And it sounded like, you know, he's playing Shakespeare and I was an English major and so I had to read Shakespeare. But when you're doing drama, you gotta go and memorize all those lines and act in plays and have that stuff memorized. That's, that's a big task. So I could see if, if you're not into it and they're like, hey, go ahead and memorize King Lear over here. One semester of that, you say, yeah, I'm out.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  You know, I did all that theater stuff in high school and I actually, um, at one point auditioned when I was in high school for NYU's drama program. You had to do a monologue and.

• 13:08Jocko Willink?

  What monologue did you do?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  I want to say it was from Death of a Salesman.

• 13:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  But I don't remember exactly. It's a lot, a lot of years ago.

• 13:19Jocko Willink?

  Willie Lowman on.

• 13:22Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles. I know this isn't, I know this wasn't on Hawaii five oh, but you know, we're still in the game.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  But, uh, the one good thing about it, uh, freshman year I was, uh, you had to take dance classes, right? So I'm in a, I'm in a ballet class.

• 13:38Jocko Willink?

  Charles, settle down.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm in a.

• 13:40Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember those times when Schwarzenegger and everyone was doing ballet back in the day?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Herschel Walker was in there. Did you get in the game?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:48Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  I did not get in the game.

• 13:50Jocko Willink?

  Confess. I don't want to see, you know, internet pictures later like, no, Echo Charles took dance.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  You will not, but hey, not that there's anything wrong with that. You know, I hear good things. So, you know, get some. Yeah. So, so I'm in a ballet class and the only other guy in there is Greg Leganis, who's like the greatest diver in the world of all time.

• 14:10Jocko Willink?

  Isn't he from San Diego?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  He's from Orange County.

• 14:12Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh.

• 14:14Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so this is in college freshman year.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  This is in college freshman year and, uh, and so, you know, Greg, um, didn't like girls. You know, it's public. I'm not saying anything out of school here and the professor, it was so bad. This professor was just like all up into Greg.

• 14:36Jocko Willink?

  Oh, like.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, like digging on him big time, but that meant all those girls were there for me.

• 14:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, there you go.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  And then I realized they really weren't.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  That was just, that was in my mind.

• 14:53Jocko Willink?

  So what, what were you planning to do? Or what, once you graduated, what'd you do with this degree? Were you, were you thinking about the military yet?

• 15:00Speaker 01

  I, I had never given the military any thought. Interestingly enough, though, I had a couple of neighbors, guys like four or five years ahead of me in high school or in school, uh, who did join. Uh, one of them became a F-15 backseater in the air force and the other one joined the Marine Corps. Uh, he became an F-18 pilot and eventual squadron commander here in San Diego, actually. So I had no designs on the military. I figured I'd just go into business like my father did and had, really had no intention of using the degree other than to get out of college, right?

• 15:39Jocko Willink?

  So then what was your first move when you got out of college?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I worked for a company in the same business as my father's. They, he had actually sold his business to this huge company called Advo Systems and they were the biggest in, in the world really, when it comes to direct mail advertising. Uh, so I had a, I had a sales job with them for 12 bucks an hour, uh, with my college degree.

• 16:02Jocko Willink?

  Plus commish?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Uh, no.

• 16:05Jocko Willink?

  Dang, 12 bucks an hour, no commission.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Well, remember this is 1982. So it wasn't horrible, right? You could afford an apartment.

• 16:15Jocko Willink?

  And how long did you do that for?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Maybe a year or something. And I realized it just wasn't for me. Um, and I

• 16:25Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't sound like it's for much of anybody.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  No, yeah. And, uh, and, and so I ended up parking cars, waiting tables. I was, uh, just kind of floundering for a while, ended up moving to Tampa where my folks were. Um, and started teaching high school and coaching high school football.

• 16:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's cool. How long, how long did you do that for?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Uh, that was also less than a year because during that time I started thinking about the, you know, I gotta do something else with my life and. Thought I'd give the military a shot. So I ended up going to the recruiter Marine Corps. Didn't need pilots at the time, but the Navy did. And somehow I managed to pass the exams for aviation, got a pilot contract.

• 17:13Jocko Willink?

  And this is what 1985?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  1985, yeah.

• 17:17Jocko Willink?

  So Top Gun didn't come out until 86. I actually had to go and look that up to confirm if that motivated you. How come you wanted to be a pilot?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Um, it just seemed kind of cool to fly airplanes on and off of ships, you know? That looked like a fun thing to do and uh, so why not? It was something, something I had never done. I had never considered. But you know, I figured I had pretty decent monkey skills and they could teach me the rest, so.

• 17:48Jocko Willink?

  How was AOCs? Cause you went, you went to the old school AOCs, right?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  I did. I went to the whole, uh, Richard Gere Officer and a Gentleman thing. It wasn't in, you know, BFE Washington. It was down in Pensacola. And uh, it was, it was good. It was a, it was a fun time. Um, we had Marine Corps drill instructors there and these guys all came off the drill field somewhere. They were either from MCRD San Diego or MCRD Paris Island. So they took the cream of the crop drill instructors. They'd send them up to, to Pensacola. But they had to learn how to deal with officer candidates instead of recruits. And you could tell when the new ones would come in, they just had no clue.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  And there was one guy, uh, he was just mean. I mean, little guy couldn't understand anything he said, right? He like normally drill instructor, give you a command. Okay. I want you to get up top side, brush your fangs, get that back down on my line. You got 30 seconds to get a dumb move, right? You can understand that. This guy, what's he gonna do now if I was gonna get him?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Move. And that was it. Like, what do you say? So everybody scrambled, just running in different directions, not knowing what the hell to do.

• 19:07Jocko Willink?

  Was it a shock to the system? Did you think like, alright, I found my home? Or were you thinking, what did I get myself into?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Um, I think it's always a shock to the system, right? Completely different environment from anything you're used to, especially when you got these, these totally squared away Marines just yelling at you. In fact, there was a guy there, one of the drill instructors, who they say they modeled Louis Gossett Jr.'s character on for the movie, The Officer and the Gentleman.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was interesting. There's some good stories from that.

• 19:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I went to OCS. It was different because you went to when it was just aviation OCS.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:46Jocko Willink?

  I went to when they combined aviation OCS and regular OCS. And yeah, same thing though, Marine Corps drill instructors just absolutely squared away and awesome across the board. Everything that they did was, was, it's echo Charles, just so you know, Marine Corps drill instructors,

• 20:03Jocko Willink?

  like everything they do is perfect. Like they don't make mistakes. For instance, and I think this kind of sums it up. When they change their uniform, like two, three times a day, so it doesn't show, ever show that they sweat. So they just always look like nothing's phasing them, right? So, and that's the way they are with everything. And, and they know their job. They do it perfectly. And it's just a really impressive indoctrination into the military. Marine Corps does it.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's super impressive. And, and you know, think about it, they're there, all that, it's like, when do these guys sleep? You know, it's like, how can they be like this? Our, our class drill instructor has since passed. He was, he was a great guy. And he, he, uh, he would come out, take us on a run, right? But he's like stomping out a cigarette right before the run and still running us into the ground, calling cadence in it. It's just like, God, this guy is just, he's a machine.

• 21:08Jocko Willink?

  Oddly enough, I was a SEAL when I went through OCS and my drill instructor's name was Gunnerie Sergeant Seals.

• 21:18Jocko Willink?

  And he was awesome, total professional. I don't, I don't know what happened to him. If I, I'd love to talk to him and get in touch with him because he was squared away.

• 21:27Jocko Willink?

  You get done with that and then you roll into flight training.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's true.

• 21:31Jocko Willink?

  And then how's flight training for you?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, flight training was good. I went to Corpus Christi for primary flight training. And what you do is as you go through primary, it's like the guy that gets the best grades, gets his choice of what he wants to fly. And so the goal is to do as well as you possibly can in primary flight training. So that when it comes time for selection, you get what you want. And they break it up into thirds and you know, the, the old joke is about Hilo pilots, so bottom third. But that's not true of course. And, uh, and so I did alright. I think I had about a 3.1 GPA coming out of, out of flight school, which is by the way, the highest GPA I ever had on anything.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  So, so I was pretty stoked. And then, uh, I, I selected for jets. Uh, went to Beeville, Texas, which is now shut down, uh, for, for jet training. And it's where, uh, when Bush, first Bush was VP for Reagan, he would fly in there and go dove hunting.

• 22:39Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we'd always see Air Force Two coming in for him to go fly, to go dove hunting. But, uh, yeah, that was, that was a tiny little town with nothing there, but a dental hygienist school and, and the naval air station. So, yeah, it was good. Uh, I, I enjoyed it. I had one flight instructor, we'd be doing really close formation stuff and having to pull a lot of G's. And, you know, he was an exchange pilot from, uh, Colombia, I think, or Venezuela. And he'd always be in the backseat of the T2 when we were just learning this stuff. Eventually you go out, you solo formation, you have to solo everything to prove you can do it.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And he's just back there yelling at me, more Y's, yay, more Y's. I'm like, what? And I'm like, oh, okay. I got it.

• 23:33Jocko Willink?

  And so what'd you end up getting to fly? What'd you?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so uh, I, I completely fucked up the first time I went to the carrier. Uh, super nervous, of course, as, as everybody is. And so it's no excuse, but I, uh, I got the big Dairy Queen, the DQ at the, at the boat the first time.

• 23:54Jocko Willink?

  And that's flying? What were you flying?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Flying the T2 Buckeye.

• 23:57Jocko Willink?

  So they take, they take, you land a T2 Buckeye on the aircraft carrier?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Uh, not anymore, cause now that they're gone, I guess they're flying T45s now in training. And, uh, so I, I DQ'd, they sent me back to the beach and, uh, you know, bring those of us at DQ in our room. Okay, look, this didn't go so well. We're gonna go back. We'll do it again. In the meantime, the Navy had a big push on for E2 and C2 pilots. So, for those that don't know, an E2 is essentially the Navy's version of a shipborne AWACS. And the C2 is, you know, it's essentially, you know, flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong kinda thing.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  But taking it out to the carrier. So delivering mail and VIPs, that kinda stuff out to the carriers. And so that was it. We went back, uh, did, uh, you know, field carrier quals again, and then.

• 24:58Jocko Willink?

  Is it easier in the C2? Or were you just like a little bit more confident now that you'd done it?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Well, first had to go back and quall in the T2, right? And then go learn to fly the E2 or C2. And you don't know what you're getting until you're in the, what's called the RAG, the Replacement Air Group, or the Fleet Replacement Squadron. So I did select for C2s. Um, and it's, it's definitely not easier. That thing isn't there, cause the props aren't reciprocating. So they both go in the same direction. So as you're coming in to land, you're constantly having to make a rudder input to correct your flight path to so you land centerline.

• 25:45Jocko Willink?

  How did you deal with, you know, here you are, you have this goal of becoming a jet pilot, a fighter pilot, and you don't qualify, you get disqualified on the carrier landing. And the thing is, the reason I bring this up is this happens to people, it happens to everyone in life. I mean, it just happens. No matter what your goal is, eventually, if you're pushing hard, you're going to get to some kind of goal that you don't get to, you know, whether it's Echo Charles not making it to the NFL, right?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 26:13Jocko Willink?

  Hey, you didn't, you know?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 26:15Jocko Willink?

  Or, hey, I put, the first time I put in an officer, a package to become an officer in the SEAL Teams, I didn't get selected. And, you know, it's like, okay, well, what am I gonna do? Luckily, I had another year to try it. But, yeah, things come up. And I know there's all kinds of people that try out for special operations, whether it's Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps, and they don't make it. And here you are with that situation happening. How did, what, like, what went through your mind?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the first thing you always think of is, man, I'm a failure, right? I'm, I'm never gonna be any good at this. And how could I do this? Like, you're just kicking yourself in the teeth really badly. And then you take a moment, you reflect, and you say, okay, you know what? It's not meant to be. But, and this is. And now I'm just gonna do my level best to make sure that, that I don't fail again. I'm gonna succeed. And I'm gonna just fucking push through this. And nothing's gonna stop me now.

• 27:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the attitude you gotta have. And I, you know, there's, there's a lot of guys that I would meet in the Navy, in the fleet. And I'd be thinking they're super squared away guys, you know, with whatever they were, intel, they were radio men or whatever. And I find out later, they, they dropped out from BUDs. They're still good dudes. They just, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't meant to be in that job. And so they switched to their regular job in the Navy and got after it. And then, hell, yeah. So, good attitude. So now you, now you graduate from that school and now you show up for, is that when you go to the rag? After?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  So you go to the rag after T2s and then you go back down to Corpus Christi to fly twin-engine props, get some training in that. It's not all, it's like 12 flights or something. Most of them are just two student pilots going up and flying together and trying not to kill themselves. So, which, you know, I, like I said, I, I always like doing things people say I can't. Right? I'm gonna prove you wrong. And so I go out in, in primary flight training, you, you do 10 flights with an instructor. You get a check flight to go out and solo.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Got it. Easy. Did that. And then you do acrobatics, aerobatics. And then you get a solo. You get to go out in solo and they have all the authorized maneuvers you're supposed to do as a student and doing aerobatics and then some that aren't authorized. So I had a great, great, uh, on what's called an on-wing instructor, the guy you fly your first nine or 10 flights with. Super squared away guy, Marine Corps C-130 pilot, but he had his own, I think it was a Pitts special, this super acrobatic airplane. So he'd take me out all the time and show me these great maneuvers and it was like,

• 29:10Speaker 01

  this is awesome. And so of course, when I went out and did my aerobatic solo, I'm gonna try this split S that he showed me that it's unauthorized. So in a split S, you come up like you're doing a loop. Uh, and then as you come back over, you roll the plane back upright and you come down and then you pull up, right? So it's it's a good way for attack aircraft to get on target without using up extra airspace. And so I did that. I'm like, the plane's not coming up. Plane's not, nose isn't coming up. And I realized I hadn't taken the power off. So now I'm just, just, you know,

• 29:55Speaker 01

  nose diving right into the Gulf of Mexico.

• 29:58Jocko Willink?

  Oof.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  And at the last second, I remember I pulled the power back, got the nose up. I, I don't think I was a hundred feet off the water when that happened.

• 30:07Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  And salvaged it, brought the plane back and, uh, you know, you, you always went to maintenance to report any issues with the plane. So I had to go back and tell them that I overstressed the airframe. Put too many Gs on it pulling out of that dive. And, uh, well, how, how'd that happen? Uh, I, I think I had a hard landing when I got back.

• 30:30Jocko Willink?

  Does it track the Gs that you're getting?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:33Jocko Willink?

  So you can't just hide it?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Oh, no. And you wouldn't want to because if there's even just one popped rivet or something from overstressing the airframe, it could be fatal to somebody else.

• 30:44Jocko Willink?

  How many G, like, how many Gs are we talking about?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Uh, it wasn't a lot, maybe seven. Yeah.

• 30:51Jocko Willink?

  I, I, I got the backseat ride in the F-18 back in the day and I, we did like seven or eight Gs. It's pretty cool, pretty good times. But I could see if you're not in a F-18, how that could definitely stress the aircraft for sure.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, these airplanes, you know, they had like max G of seven and a half, so.

• 31:08Jocko Willink?

  And you were right there.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Pushed those limits.

• 31:12Jocko Willink?

  And then, so then after that, you get up, you get to your squadron?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So after I finished with the, uh, C2 rag, which was an adventure in itself. We can talk about that a little bit, uh, get to a C2 squadron.

• 31:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, what was, what was an adventure about the rag?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  In addition to not being a great student, I didn't have a great temper for a lot of my life and I always was kind of quick to fists. So, we're at a party at Dam Neck, at the Officers Club out on that beach there in Virginia one summer and there may or may not have been alcohol involved in this situation, but I got into a fight with another guy in the squadron, a guy I'd gone through flight school with. And so, the next day, he ended up with a broken nose and ten stitches over his eye. So, Monday morning, get called into the commanding off, or the executive officer's office.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  And he said, "Okay, here's what's gonna happen. You're going in hack for thirty days and we're gonna..."

• 32:25Jocko Willink?

  What's hack?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  So hack, hack is essentially, it's confinement for officers.

• 32:30Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I got confined to base for thirty days, had to live in the bachelor officer quarters. I couldn't go anywhere. I had to eat all my meals at the BOQ.

• 32:39Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, it was, it was kind of, kind of weird. Everybody who I thought were my friends just kind of turned their back on me, wanted no association with me. The only guy that really stuck by my side was a friend of mine from AOCs who was over at Oceana. He was an ASICS bombardier navigator and now he's a orthopedic surgeon, but Dougal would come visit me in the BOQ, bring me stuff and

• 33:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, you might be kind of lucky that you didn't just get kicked out, or like, kicked out of the program, right?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Well, they boarded me. They sent me to what was called in the Navy a FENAB in the Marine Corps, it's called an FFPB, so flight, was it some, it's a performance review, right? Where they can take your wings.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:32Jocko Willink?

  Were you sweating at this point?

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Big time.

• 33:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Were you thinking that maybe you shouldn't be drinking alcohol and fighting?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:42Jocko Willink?

  Still weren't old enough to figure that one out.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  No, I was, uh, I was in the mindset of this is bullshit and, uh, it was a fair fight. And, um, they didn't see it that way, of course. Yeah, I was still too immature to really think along those terms. And so they convened the board, uh, had, it's supposed to be made up of pilots from outside the squadron. Well, they put the, the XO is the head of the board, is the president of the board. And the guy that I beat up was kind of his favorite guy. And so you can see the direction this is heading.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  So they, they have this board all set up and then they start bringing in witnesses. And pretty soon I'm thinking, you know what? I'm not too good at this witness stuff. I'm there getting attorney. So the Navy won't provide an attorney for you, nothing. So my brother's an attorney. He leaves his job in Atlanta to come up and be with me for a week in Norfolk to, to go through this board. And they're bringing in guys, there's one guy who comes in, this guy, this instructor pilot, and he's like, "Yeah, you know, I can't believe it. If, look at this guy's former college football player.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  You know, if he had hit me like that, I would have crumbled." And, uh, I was like, "Oh dude, come on, let's, you know, enough melodrama here, you know, this isn't televised, right?" And, and so, uh, my brother, he was great during this time. He, he'd sit there, if he didn't think I should answer something, he'd put up his hand, then whisper to me. And you could see the XO, the president of the board, he's getting all pissed off, all this is happening. And, uh, he finally says to me, he goes, "So what's the matter? You can't answer questions for yourself?" My brother goes, "Hold on a second." Leans over, whispers something to me. And I go, yes, sir, I can.

• 35:52Jocko Willink?

  Well, I think it's even more impressive that they didn't uh kick you out after rolling up there with your brother and everything. I'm surprised that if the XO who already doesn't like you, that's a rough one. Oh, but luckily you didn't get kicked out.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 36:07Jocko Willink?

  So then next up is what? Now you go to your squadron.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  There's one more board. Yeah, this story gets crazy. So so I don't mean to beat a dead horse to death here, but this this is really part of the story. So they send the package. Of course, they find five nothing against me. They're gonna, I'm done. And uh.

• 36:29Jocko Willink?

  Would you get kicked out of the Navy at that time?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  No, I'd probably had to go drive ships or something. I don't know if they were gonna give me the option of getting out. So in the meantime, I get tired of this bullshit. And I said, you know what? If you don't want me here, I don't want to be here. But I do want a package to go to Bud's.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  I've never seen anything get approved so fast in the military. They're like, they were so happy to be rid of me. So the Navy captain that was the wing commander there, he signed that off like that. It was done. I'm gone. Whole thing goes to the admiral's office. I have to go over there and see one of his aides. The guy's like, look, uh. Yeah, the admiral doesn't want this to happen this way. We don't think the board was convened properly, and we're sending you back for a second board.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  So now the squadron has to bring in all new people. And people that were in there talking shit about me the first time. Now all of a sudden, they're saying nice things about me, like board members even. And that one goes through three to two. I gotta go back. Now I gotta meet.

• 37:42Jocko Willink?

  Three to two for you or against?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  For me.

• 37:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  So now I gotta go back and see the admiral himself, three star admiral, big guy, like six foot four, massive hands, right? And uh, so his aide comes out, greets me. I'm in my Navy dress blues and uh, he says, hey, look. You're good to go. Don't get your powder wet. Everything's fine. Like awesome. So I go in, see the Admiral stands up. Hey Jay, Paul Miller, you know, good to meet you. So his calls, I'm sorry, Fred Lewis, not Paul Miller. Fred Lewis, he goes, uh, his callsign is Bad Fred. And, uh, I'm like, okay.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  He goes, have a seat. So I sit down. I just kind of don't sit at attention or anything, right? I just kind of lean back and relax a little bit because now I know everything's good. Well, then, uh, his aide comes in and kind of stands in a corner behind the door. What's that guy there for? So, uh, Admiral, Admiral Lewis says to me, he goes, so Jay, uh, what seems to be the problem with your attitude? I'm sitting there, I go, I got no attitude problem, sir. Guy launches himself across the desk at me. What the fuck is this? What's that? Get the fuck out of my office. I don't ever want to see you again, or I'm going to kick your ass.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  I'm shit my pants at that point. That was it. And sent me back. Everything tracked after that, finished up, did, did great on my flying, everything academics. Did great at the ship during the carrier qualifications and went to my squadron.

• 39:24Jocko Willink?

  And how was life at, uh, life at the squadron?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Uh, that was good. Uh, life was fine. Did some fun deployments, you know, Rosie Rhodes, Corpus Christi, no living on the ship, just, you know, flying and living life in good old Norfolk and Virginia Beach.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  I did get my callsign out of that situation though, of that one thing. Well, as I was, uh, finishing up at the rag, we were getting a new XO at the squadron I was going to, and somebody introduced me to him, said, hey, uh, Commander Littlefield, this is, uh, this is Jay Kopelman. He's going to be coming to your squadron. And he goes, oh, I've heard about you slugger. And it stuck.

• 40:08Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, and so then what happens? You're, you're doing these, um, deployments, whatever, flying out with the carrier. And at some point you decide you, you, you don't want to be in the Navy anymore. What brought about that decision?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, I still had that kind of dream about flying jets and, uh, I heard about the opportunity to do this inter-service transfer to the Marine Corps. I just kind of felt that I wanted to be with warfighters.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  And when I was going through these boards, at one point, I did say something to the effect of like, well, if we're gonna treat somebody that gets in a fight like this, granted, I was wrong. Hundred percent, hundred percent wrong. And, you know, I still think about that to this day. But, you know, I said to them, I said, if we're not gonna support people that are willing to stand up and defend themselves, or, you know, have that will to fight, I want to be with people who are. And, and so,

• 41:19Speaker 01

  did the inter-service transfer, put in the application. I had a quote-unquote Rabbi, who I had met a Marine Colonel. He was a Lieutenant Colonel then, got promoted to Colonel, who was helping shepherd this whole thing. So, the way it works is you put in your package for inter-service transfer. The Marine Corps says, yeah, okay, yeah, we'll consider this. So what has to happen is kind of simultaneously, the Navy has to sign off on releasing you, and the Marine Corps has to sign off on accepting you. So I was up in Washington DC, running back and forth from Headquarters Marine Corps

• 41:59Speaker 01

  to Chief of Naval Operations, to get this paperwork signed off and get accepted into the Marine Corps. And sure enough, it happened in like January of 92, I think. And then, February of 92, I woke up one morning, I was a Navy Lieutenant. I went to bed that night as a Marine Corps Captain.

• 42:17Jocko Willink?

  And the Marine Corps doesn't do a lot of, they don't take a lot of people into the Marine Corps with prior service?

• 42:23Speaker 01

  It's, it's not very common for somebody to go from Navy to the Marine Corps. It's more common for guys to go the other way. I, I knew flight instructors in jet training who had done that. And I even met a SEAL. Uh, when I was down in Coronado at one point working as an instructor, I was over uh doing my lunch PT at uh on your own course. And I met this guy, short, short, stocky guy, bald headed guy, um, really good dude. I forget his name, but he had been an F4 pilot in the Marine Corps.

• 42:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I know him. Yep.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  And then came over, joined the SEALs.

• 43:01Jocko Willink?

  I know. Yep. I was at team one with him as a matter of fact.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good dude.

• 43:05Jocko Willink?

  I remember when he, he checked into team one and he was already like a lieutenant, but he had been a pilot in the Marine Corps.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome. That's pretty funny.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:15Jocko Willink?

  Um, and so then what was your job? What job did you pick up in the Marine Corps? Cause they don't, they don't fly, they don't fly C2s in the Marine Corps.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  No, no, no. So I was pushing hard to get jets. Uh.

• 43:26Jocko Willink?

  Which would be what?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  I wanted to fly Harriers.

• 43:28Jocko Willink?

  F-18s or Harriers?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  So, so the Marine Colonel who kinda, you know, helped me along this path, he was a Harrier guy, great guy.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Very subdued, quiet guy, very, very bright guy. And uh, so Charlie's like, okay, we're gonna get you in the Harrier program. And of course, the Marine Corps said, nope, flew turboprops in the Navy. You're gonna fly turboprops in the Marine Corps and C-130s, here I came. But, but I was committed. I, I really wanted to be a Marine. I had originally applied to be a Marine and they weren't taking pilots then and, you know, it just solidified for me when I was in AOCs, seeing those drill instructors and a couple of the class officers who were Marines and, the uniform looks good. And I said, damn, I want to be with these guys. Yep.

• 44:21Jocko Willink?

  And then how was that job as, as being a C-130 pilot? What was that?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  It was kinda boring, to be honest. Um, we did some aerial refueling missions. That was like the primary mission. I was flying the KC-130. It's a airborne tanker. And uh, it's kind of an incestuous community, you know, so here I am.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  I'm a Navy guy that becomes a Marine. I haven't gone to Marine Corps OCS at Quantico. I didn't go to the basic school. They didn't.

• 44:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, they didn't make you go to the basics?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  No. After I did my inter-service transfer, I worked at what was called FMF LANT, Fleet Marine Force Atlantic. So now it's called, uh, MAR4LANT, Marine Forces Atlantic. Uh, I worked there for probably six months, went to a school called Amphibious Warfare School, and now they call it Expeditionary Warfare School in Quantico. Did that for nine months and then went to learn to fly the C-130. So I was an outsider, got treated like an outsider. Within a few months of getting to my squadron, they were sending me over to work at the Marine Air Group. Uh, I worked in the three shop there.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Uh, while I was in Norfolk, though, I did get to go fly the Harrier. I went down, did the simulator, flew the two-stick Harrier.

• 45:47Jocko Willink?

  I flew the carrier, uh, I flew the Harrier simulator at Yuma. And I crashed it like 17 times in 10 minutes. I was just like, because they didn't tell us anything. They just put us in there and I just crashed it over and over again.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  It's.

• 46:02Jocko Willink?

  I mean, literally, they didn't, I got no in-brief. It wasn't like, hey, this thing does this, this thing does that. They're just like, yeah, here you go. And I figured, of course, I'm a young frogman. I got this. I crashed that thing just over and over again. But we got no in-brief. I think if I got a little bit of an in-brief, I would have had a chance. But the Harrier is hard to fly, right? Because it's, especially when you're doing vertical takeoff and landing, you gotta, there's all kinds of different, uh, monitoring you have to do and make sure that you got your power in the right spot. It's not like when Echo Charles is flying a drone.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Whenever that's hard.

• 46:36Jocko Willink?

  And he thinks, yeah, you know, watch me.

• 46:40Jocko Willink?

  But, alright, so you flew the simulator?

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I flew the Harrier sim in the airplane.

• 46:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  And then when I was at the air group, I worked in the three shop. I managed the flight program for all the F-18 squadrons and the C-130 squadron. And my boss was a Hornet guy, the S3 there, the Ops Officer. And he goes, hey, make yourself available to fly the Hornet. Like, that sounds great. So I got to do some two-stick Hornet flights with the rag there, VMFA 101 at El Toro. And did that for a little while. And then I decided, you know what? The C-130 thing ain't working out either. It wasn't my lifelong dream of be a pilot. You know, I could have stayed there and pushed things, but it was pretty clear that I wasn't really welcome.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I do still have one really dear friend from that squadron. We're friends to this day. He's a captain with Delta. He retired as a Colonel. But, so we're still really good friends and I'm glad that I was there. You know, I met some really good people, some not so good people, like anywhere, right? And so I put in for orders. I requested orders to go to First Anglico, Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company. When I was back in Norfolk, when I first started, we had a reservist who would come in there and work with us. We were at the air shop for this huge headquarters. And V8 had been in Anglico. He was telling me all about it. And so that kind of stuck with me. I remembered that.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I said, I want to go to Anglico. So they gave me orders to Anglico. And 94, went down to Camp Pendleton, First Anglico, got my first real taste of.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Doing anything on the ground with Marines and um the kind of PT that they do.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  You know, it was an airborne unit, so got to go to jump school, did all the roping out of helicopters. I I went down there as a forward air controller, so I went to the T A C P school down at Coronado.

• 48:50Jocko Willink?

  Sure.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Had a team of 12 guys and we could go anywhere in the world, support any allied or US service military troops that needed somebody to call in close air support artillery and naval gunfire.

• 49:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, the Anglico is an awesome, awesome unit and I worked a ton with them. Yeah, that's very cool. And and then how, what did you end up with that?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I got to Anglico coming off a big knee operation. I had a torn ACL repairs. I had a reconstruction and then while I'm in the hospital right afterward, my surgeon came in. We had become pretty good friends and he comes up to the room and he's holding some cigars and I'm like, uh oh, this can't be good. So he looks at me and goes, hey, man, I have some bad news.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  When we went in and placed the new ligament into your femur, we didn't realize till the x-rays post operatively that you have a growth on the femur that showed us the wrong place. We didn't realize where we were putting the placement to hold that ligament in place, so we're gonna have to do a revision. And so he goes, but here's, here's a couple cigars and if you go out, out, out that door out there, you can go out onto a deck and smoke the cigars here in the hospital over the weekend. So I had to have a revision on that and they said it'd be six months before I was returned fit for full duty.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Again, I'm like, that's what you say, but that's not what I say. I got through it all. I was returned fit for full duty in three months and I was in jump school before the six months was up. So I pushed it, but I did the Anglico thing for about two years.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  You know, as you can tell from this, I did not have the linear path to success in the military, right? I was kind of doing my own thing, just enjoying it the whole time. And it was great to do things that way, but it's not good for promotion. So I got passed over for major and the second time that happens, you get out, you're done. So in January of 97, I was done, got out of the military, stayed in the reserves. I was working as a civilian for

• 51:20Speaker 01

  the US Attorney in San Diego, Alan Burson. We were out in El Centro and I was running teams on OPs and LPs, looking for drug and human traffickers coming across. So.

• 51:34Jocko Willink?

  Still having a good time then?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Still having a good time. Yeah. Right up until the night that DEA helicopter ejaculated my team on a mountainside. And I filed a big complaint about it, wrote a letter to the head of the DEA in San Diego saying cowboys are out there trying to get my guys killed. And, you know, this guy was classic. I mean, he had the slick back hair, the double breasted suits, looked like, you know, you would expect right out of a movie. And then things got a little uncomfortable for me there too, you know, kind of having to watch my back a lot. DEA doesn't like when you call them out like that. So, and again, not, not a super mature, well thought out act.

• 52:22Jocko Willink?

  So what was the next move then?

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Uh, next move was, uh, I got what's called active duty special work orders ADSW. To come back on active duty down at Coronado. Uh, where I was teaching at the TACP school. I became a Hearst master, so helicopter rope suspension training, teaching people how to rappel, fast rope, spy rig. And then I was also an MCIWS, Marine Combat Instructor of Water Survival, which was great. Uh, so a lot, it was a job that involved a lot of PT for me. So that's when I was going over to the Budsoe course and doing that for training at lunchtime, so.

• 53:06Jocko Willink?

  Right on. That'll make for a good time. And how long did you run that job for?

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Uh, that was for probably nine months and then I got a job at a small tech company. The, the founders of that company had, uh, sold shopping.com and started a new one. And so did that for a little while till about 99, then, then went to work at Solomon Smith Barney as a stockbroker.

• 53:35Jocko Willink?

  And where were you, where was that?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  It was in Orange County.

• 53:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  In Irvine. Yeah.

• 53:39Jocko Willink?

  How, how'd you like to do in that job?

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was pretty good. Um, I learned a lot there. It was good. I had, uh, uh, an office branch manager who was a great guy. He had been Navy. In fact, his son was a, or his uncle, yeah, his nephew was a Marine F-18 pilot who I'd gone to amphibious warfare school with. And maybe that's why I got the job, but, um, but Gene was always very supportive of my reserve time and, uh, he was, he was a good guy for me to work for. Um, so did that for a while and then.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  9/11 happened, so September 11th, 2001 happens and you know, we got to work really early. I did anyway, I was always there. An hour before the market opened, so I'd be there by 5:30 in the morning. And there was another guy who was a bond trading guy, he was in his office, he had TV in there. I hear Fred start yelling something, I'm like, what the hell? So I run down to his, his office just in time and see the second plane hit the towers. I'm like, fuck, we're going to war. And you were still in the reserves? I was in the reserves, I was at Third Anglico up in Long Beach at the time. And how long did it take for the recall to happen? Uh, it came pretty quick.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Did you volunteer for it? I did. So you just call up and say, hey, I'm here. Yeah, so what happened was when I was at Third Anglico, I had taken a team over to Jordan to support the 11th Mew. They were doing exercises there and we get there and the XO and the OPSO from 11th Mew meet us at the airport. And they're like, yeah, this hop is canceled. You guys are going back. And what sucks is I had met some girl from France, I can't remember where I met her or any of that, but I had lined up a trip for the guys that I took over.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  We were going to France and this girl was going to be our tour guide. So after Jordan, we were going to go to fly to France and go have a good time and then come back to the States. So all that got canceled. I mean, we spent one night in Amman and got on a plane the next day and came home. What happened was Osama bin Laden had been threatening the Navy ships in the Gulf at that time. They were gonna blow them up and all this stuff. So rather than saying, screw you, you're not gonna do that. They just pulled chocks and got the hell out of Dodge and the exercise was canceled. So I remembered this guy who was the XO of the Mew.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  I got in touch with him and I said, hey, I'm available if you guys need somebody. So sure enough, like within a couple of weeks, I had active duty orders to go to the 11th Mew and work in the three shop. And get ready to deploy with them. And where was that deployment to? That was a Westpac deployment. So we went over, uh, did some exercises in Kuwait and Jordan, all that kind of stuff, you know, nothing was really happening yet. The only thing that had happened is when we sent guys into Afghanistan initially in what October of 2001. So we deployed in oh two in like May of oh two.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  And they kept, they'd send me advance party everywhere because I was a major at this time, like got promoted in the reserves.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  And go over doing advanced party stuff in Jordan and Kuwait. Uh, it was great for me. I was having a great time. You know, I lived in the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman for a month, right? You know, worked out of the embassy there. And, uh, just kind of ran around the Middle East causing trouble in, uh, in Kuwait, we were coming in, bringing the ARG, the amphibious ready group in at least two of the ships where we were doing split ARG ops at the time, just in case something happened. So the two ships are getting ready to come in. They send me in to negotiate contracts for facilities at the port.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  And I mean, it was rundown. It was, it was a mess. So I go in and I have to meet with a guy, uh, from the Kuwaiti government. And he's now all of a sudden, they're trying to start extorting money. These exorbitant fees, like almost a million dollars. And, you know.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  He kept running back and forth between me and some other guy. I felt like I was buying a used car, to be honest.

• 58:28Jocko Willink?

  Let me go check with my manager.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  It was exactly like that. And so finally he comes back and he says, okay, this is what it is. I said, no, I said, this ends right now. I said, I'm not negotiating anymore. I said, there's a thing called the sofa. It's the status of forces agreement that we signed with Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991. And I said, here's what's gonna happen. I'm gonna get these facilities at this price, or I'm gonna take the sofa and shove it so far up your ass, you're gonna be able to read it. So, we got what we wanted, but the next morning, I'm in my hotel room in Kuwait city, I get a phone call. Is this, uh, Jake Hopelman? Yes.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  This is so and so from the US Embassy. Or, oh, did it again. And, uh, so the conversation is, uh, we heard that you told Mr. Mufik this, that, he was hysterical. You know, I'm, I'm still an asshole at this point in my life. And I said, look, only women get hysterical. And here's what happened. They were trying to extort us, get millions of dollars that we really didn't have to pay. The facilities are a disaster. And that was the end of the conversation, the end of the story, but saved, saved the US government a shit ton of money.

• 59:51Jocko Willink?

  Did you get any repercussions from that?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  None at all. None at all.

• 59:55Jocko Willink?

  You're pretty lucky from that respect, because that could definitely go sideways.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it could.

• 1:00:01Jocko Willink?

  If they want, if they get, you know, hey, you need to make an example out of this guy, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Well, I was, you know, I was, of course, the mighty USA, right, in this Kuwait, and we're gonna get what we want because we saved your asses.

• 1:00:14Jocko Willink?

  Right on. So then you come home from that deployment. What's next?

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  I heard about an opportunity at one MEF, First Marine Expeditionary Force, where they needed a SOF LNO, Special Operations Forces Liaison Officer. I went over, talked to the G3. He said, job is yours. Yep.

• 1:00:34Jocko Willink?

  And then what was that? You went on deployment there?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, ultimately did. First, though, they would send me around to like, to go support a MUE. Just, I was doing a lot of deconfliction work for special forces, operating in Marine Corps AOs and Marines operating in SOF AOs, just to make sure that everybody was talking to the people that needed to talk and make sure that the operations weren't deconflicting in any way.

• 1:01:04Jocko Willink?

  Was that in Iraq or was that just like?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  That was anyway.

• 1:01:08Jocko Willink?

  Exercises or something?

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be exercises. It could be for combat operations. Yeah. So, yep.

• 1:01:15Jocko Willink?

  And then, well, did you, did you go through any training with anybody with like any of the MARSOC or anything? I guess MARSOC with the Raiders or anything?

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, wasn't around yet.

• 1:01:24Jocko Willink?

  That one?

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wasn't around yet. This was still oh, four.

• 1:01:28Jocko Willink?

  Wasn't that one was formed up in oh, four, wasn't it?

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Not till oh, six, oh, seven. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:01:34Jocko Willink?

  Cause they, well, they sent a crew over in oh, four that relieved me in, in Baghdad. And there was like, I think they called, they did, they called it that one. And it wasn't.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  It must have been from Force Recon.

• 1:01:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was like an assemblage of guys from Force Recon. And I actually luckily knew a bunch of them. They were awesome guys.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Jocko Willink?

  And, but they were, they were sort of the first, uh, crew to come over and they, they, I want to say they reported to the, the SEAL team that was there and they were working for the SEAL team that was there, but we turned over with them and went through ops with them, but.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah. So I never got any formal training. Um, as I was coming into this role, I had to get read in on a lot of very high level stuff. So, you know, I had a TSSCI clearance. Um, I had to go to SOCCENT and get read in in their SCIF. And then I actually went down to the SMU in North Carolina. Got right in on their stuff, spent a day with them, uh, because ultimately I would end up supporting them in, in Iraq as well. Um, and so that was really the only training that I had for that. But, um, you know, as, as an L and O, it's, it's really more about the relationships

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  and, and understanding what's being done on both sides and being able to, to interpret that and then translate it so that the folks on both sides know exactly what's happening at all times. Cause the last thing you want is to have missions that are decon, that are conflicting and, and have something happen.

• 1:03:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I was real lucky because I was a young enlisted guy. I did two arg platoons, like, you know, obviously with the big Navy, but also just embedded with the Marine Corps. And so even as a young SEAL, when, when SEALs, this is in the nineties, man, like SEALs were such a carved out, kind of on our own island with no relationships with anybody. And, but for me in our platoons, we did everything with the Marine Corps and with the big Navy too. So I got a real good introduction into like deconfliction and all that and just understanding how the Marine Corps worked. Cause otherwise I wouldn't have really known. I, I just wouldn't have known. And then, and then my first deployment to Iraq, you know, obviously we're rolling into battle spaces. The Marine Corps owns the battle space. The army owns the battle

• 1:04:01Jocko Willink?

  space. So we'd go and meet and greet with those guys. Again, it's the reason I knew that we kind of needed to do that was because of my young days doing arg platoons with the Marine Corps and yeah, and with the big Navy. So you definitely, if you, if you stay in a silo, if you kind of grow up in a silo, you won't recognize how much interoperability and deconfliction needs to happen. And luckily for me, again, it's very lucky because most, you know, if you're at a SEAL team back in the day, there'd be six platoons and only one of them. Only one of them would be an Arg platoon and it would only be one every couple rotations because we actually shared that. So I got lucky because I did two of them. And of course, most SEALs didn't want to be shipboard.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got to work with SEALs when I had my Angloco debt on a Mew. So we ended up over in Korea, over at Osan. And so the SEAL debt that was with us came with my team. And we went out on the coast and we did close air support.

• 1:05:06Jocko Willink?

  Get some. Yeah, awesome. So now you, when you finally end up deploying in 2000, now it's 2004. And you deploy to Iraq and you end up working with, with the Iraqi special forces of the Iraqi.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were so special. In fact, they were called the specialized special forces.

• 1:05:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's very special.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  So these guys, it doesn't get any more special, right? And so these guys were based at Camp Fallujah, where one MEF was headquartered. And so I'm over there to train the Iraqi special forces. Really, FID was probably the biggest thing that we were working on. Also foreign internal defense for folks that don't know, though I suspect the majority of your listeners do. And so we go over there, we're working with them, training them, you know, it's Ramadan coming and it, it was actually a really good experience because I got to really embed with them a lot.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, we'd be invited for, for break the fast with them. Had some great meals, you know, just the big piles of lamb and maybe goat, I don't know, but it was good. And it certainly beat eating that chow hall all the time. But you know, you you you got to know the people too. And going back really when I was doing all this Singleton stuff in Oman or Kuwait or wherever before I deployed, I got, I got Arabic lessons. Like I, I took the time to sit down and get one of those courses and, and do that on the computer. So my Arabic was passable for a while.

• 1:06:52Jocko Willink?

  Like conversational Arabic?

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  I could, I could, I could understand it, except the one time, I'm in an elevator in the Intercontinental and some women get on and they say to me, Marhaba. And I'm like, oh, shoot, I don't know what that one means. It sounds kind of like something I learned in Hebrew that means what time is it? But so I start looking at my watch and I'm telling them the time and they're just looking at me like this guy's an idiot. And so later I asked my fixer what that means. And he said, it's just kind of like hello.

• 1:07:29Jocko Willink?

  So maybe not so passable.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  No, no. I could, I could give directions to the cab driver to get to the Austrian flight attendants apartment. So.

• 1:07:40Jocko Willink?

  What was the buildup to Phantom Fury like? So Phantom Fury is the big assault on Baghdad, or sorry, on, on Fallujah. From your perspective, you're, you're in Camp Fallujah at that time as this big preparation is taking place?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm in Camp Fallujah at the time and it was going to be a big army led invasion, right? So I forget the general who was over there sent come, he'd come to Camp Fallujah, there'd be briefings in the conference room of everybody from the headquarters element, you know, all the key players were in there. It was, it was interesting. I was still spending a lot of time with the Iraqi Special Forces, but I'd be in there for, for meetings. What happened is they started planning all this and I was still working with the Iraqi Special Forces and then the Chief of Staff comes to me and he goes, hey, I got a deal for you. I said, sure, what's going

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  on? He said, you're going to take an Iraqi Army Battalion into the Battle of Fallujah. So, okay, I'm in, you know, I'm, I'm a Marine.

• 1:08:49Jocko Willink?

  How many, how, how, how big was your, your American team with the Iraqi battalion?

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I didn't have a team. I had to go around and find Marines who wanted to go and do this.

• 1:09:01Jocko Willink?

  How many guys did you put together?

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Uh, let's see, I had probably about five. Um, and then they, there was a SEAL who was over at the adjacent camp, but he was working as liaison to one MEF and, uh, they put him with me as well. So I'm a lieutenant colonel at this point, right? And, but I'm gonna go lead these Iraqis into Fallujah. And, uh, so we had maybe six guys, you know, I grabbed the, the, the Ranger who was in the, in the COC, who was there as liaison from the Army and I got, so I got Dan Doyle on my team and Dan,

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  he looked like he was about 60 then. But this dude is just a born gunfighter, man.

• 1:09:53Jocko Willink?

  He was a Ranger.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  I mean, he was, he was hard as woodpecker lips. I mean, and just a great human being. You know, one of my favorite people of all time and, uh, unfortunately I've kind of lost touch with Dan, but, so he's on my team. I get a communicator, you know, it's young Marine corporal. I get, uh, my buddy, Tim, who comes over from the commanding generals PSD. He's gonna be my turret gunner, Tim O'Brien and, uh, another great Marine just, just could just sling lead like nobody's business. He's taking income and he's just standing there cool as a cucumber in the turret, just laying it down. And so we go into Fallujah, we get,

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  first they build up a camp next to Camp Fallujah. They just burn it up, throw up some tents, right? The Iraqis come, there's two battalions. They gotta keep them separate because they don't get along. And so I go to, I go to meet the CO of the battalion I'm with and his team. And, uh, all of a sudden we hear. Mortars, right? I'm like, don't worry, it's outgoing. It's all outgoing. Next thing like not 50 meters from the berm. Boom. I'm like, maybe it's incoming. So they scatter. They find any solid structure they can find. I'm like, oh, boy, this is not going to go real well.

• 1:11:20Jocko Willink?

  All right. Well, with that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get into the book here.

• 1:11:26Jocko Willink?

  We're going. Here we go. I don't remember exactly when I got to the house that served as our command post in the northwest sector of Fallujah, and I don't remember exactly how I got there. It was a couple of days after the lava dogs arrived and took over the compound. I do know that much. I remember that after four days of dodging sniper fire, sleeping on the ground and patrolling Fallujah with wide eyed Iraqi soldiers in training who shot at anything that moved, including their own boots. I walked up to the building with a sense of having escaped an abstract rendition of the wrong hereafter. I remember being exhausted and tired and tiredness weighing more heavily on me than the 60 pound rucksack I lugged around. And as I walked through the front door and shrugged off shrugged what I could off my back, all I could think about was

• 1:12:10Jocko Willink?

  sleep. That's when I saw lava for the first time. Only it's not as if I walked in and saw a chubby puppy cuddled up on a blanket under underfilled by the world like an overstuffed lamb. There was no squeaky toys, no baby yips, no eyes looking up at me with an artless blue gray innocence. Instead, with a sudden flash of something rolled toward me out of nowhere, shooting so much adrenaline into my wiring that I jumped back and slam into a wall. A ball of fur not much bigger than a grenade skids across the floor, screeches to a halt at my boots, and then whirls in circles around me with the torque of a wind up toy. It scares me, right? Like I'm tired and wired and anything quick coming at me jerked at my nerves. So I

• 1:12:53Jocko Willink?

  peeled back off the wall and reached for my rifle, even though I can see it's only a puppy. So there's your introduction to the dog. And this is a like this job that you've got with these battalion, battalion of Iraqi soldiers.

• 1:13:10Jocko Willink?

  That are going into Fallujah, this is a, a very hard job, obviously. Uh, fast forward a little bit, some Marines patrol the streets, some clear buildings looking for weapons and some get killed and don't do much of anything after that. Me, I have to patrol the streets with three wide-eyed Iraqi soldiers who in their brand-new US-issued chocolate chip camis, waved their rifles around as if clearing away spider webs. Most still haven't figured out how to keep their rifles safely locked. They are untrained, out of shape, and terrified. They're members of the Iraqi Armed Forces, stout-hearted doublespeak for conquered and unemployed,

• 1:13:50Jocko Willink?

  who were coaxed by the United States to help root out insurgents in Fallujah before the upcoming national elections.

• 1:13:59Jocko Willink?

  Here's an example, fast forward a little bit. "One afternoon about a week after I arrived at the compound," so this is all just taking, and again, get the book, there's a lot of detail about what's going on in Fallujah. And I'm reading out some of the examples here. "One afternoon about a week after I arrived at the compound, a few other Marines and I are patrolling one of the main streets with them. We're in front of a mosque, right? And the Iraqi soldiers, they're all bug-eyed and waving their guns around, and I'm a little strung out myself about what's going on around us. Only I can't let that on because I'm their example of what they're supposed to do and feel and be. But they're so freaked out, they're clearly about to shoot me or one of the other Marines by accident. So I figure the best thing is to make them more afraid of me than they are of the streets.

• 1:14:44Jocko Willink?

  You know, take their mind off of it for a little while. So I started yelling, knock that shit off. And I keep yelling, safe your weapons. And they keep jerking their eyes one way and then the other, and their rifles another way. I said, knock that shit off. Until I see they've gone into another zone of fear that even I don't have access to. And then one of the other Marines, I don't remember who, Tim O'Brien, Dan Doyle, or Mark Lombard, says to me, take it easy on them, man, they don't understand English. Which kind of ruins my whole show. Yeah, well, they better learn fast. But I stopped yelling and give them a look instead. Then something rips past us in the air." And we just freeze, just like that. It comes from nowhere but explodes a few yards away.

• 1:15:24Jocko Willink?

  Now we're moving, fast, fast. A second rocket propelled grenade comes screaming our way, and I assess the situation, taking fire from two directions, small arm, medium machine guns, and rocket propelled grenades. Two men wounded, Iraqi soldiers running for cover, outnumbered in more ways than one. I maneuver behind the hood of the Humvee to direct the men as Tim O'Brien, up in the turret, opens up with a Mark 19 turret gun, laying down a base of covering fire, so the rest of us can position to fight. Dan Doyle picks up a squad automatic weapons and fires towards the southwest. Tim's a primary target in the turret, especially with his Mark 19 jams, and he has to fight with his M4, while he's trying to clear the Mark 19 and make it ready to fire again. But it's Dan

• 1:16:05Jocko Willink?

  who gets hit. Blood runs down the inside left of his leg. "Dan, get into that mosque", I order, but he ignores me and takes off running to get to Humvees positions, so we can evacuate the rest of the wounded, including Mark Lombard, who's bleeding all over the place but is on the radio calling in our situation report anyway. Bullets and shrapnel ricochet from the hood of the Humvee inches to my right. Blood soaks Dan's pant leg. "Get your ass in that mosque", I yell again, but he, get this, looks over at me and grins, just a flesh wound. Two armor piercing rounds hit the vehicle and tear through its quarter inch steel plate easier than needles through skin. I fire my M16 and yell for the Iraqi soldiers to direct their fire to the south. Only I don't see them. Where the hell are they? I have to get the wounded to safety, so when I see them, from the corner of my eye,

• 1:16:49Jocko Willink?

  crouched numb between two overturned vehicles, I realize we're on our own. I abandon my M16 for a more powerful squad automatic weapon, run in front of the Humvee and fire away to the south. This apparently inspires one of the Iraqi soldiers to stick his head out, fire two rounds quickly, using me as cover, and then duck back in. It's the last I see of the Iraqis for the rest of the 35 minute firefight.

• 1:17:15Jocko Willink?

  So that's good times with the Iraqi soldiers. Good times. Um, you get back to the compound and again, get the book so you could read some more of those details. You get back to the compound and I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. Hey, what's with that puppy anyway? I ask one of the other Marines. What are you guys planning on doing with him? No one answers. Then one of the Marines stretches out, yawns and says he's turning in. Others grunt. Lava crawls out of my lap and turns a few circles, flops down and falls asleep with his nose buried in my empty boot.

• 1:17:47Jocko Willink?

  I guess they didn't want to answer my question about lava that night because like everything else in Fallujah during the invasion, nothing but the immediate was worth thinking about. And you're thinking about the, the dog and I'm fast forward a little bit. I've been a Marine since 1992 when I was transferred from the Navy and I know that the little guy is going to die. I knew it right away when I saw him in the hall. This one won't make it. Just like you could look at some of the other guys and think this one won't make it because his eye twitches or this one won't make it because he, he parts his hair on the right instead of the left. Superstitious stuff like that, which you know doesn't make sense, but oils your engine anyway. I was thinking this one won't make it because he's too damn cute. I'm also Lieutenant Colonel, which means I know the military rules as

• 1:18:30Jocko Willink?

  well as anyone. And every time I picked up lava, they darted across my brain like flares. Prohibited activities for service members under general order one A include adopting as pets or mascots, caring for or feeding any type of domestic or wild animals. So just in case anyone doesn't know, there's a whole set of rules that you follow in the military and in, in Iraq, there's very specific general order number one, you know, things like no porn, no alcohol, no taking pictures of enemy, no pets, no, they have a whole bunch of rules and you literally sign a paper when you get there that spells them out. Correct. And they do a good job of making it pretty simple, clear and concise. It's like

• 1:19:13Jocko Willink?

  real straightforward and that's what you just quoted. No pets, no domestic animals or wild animals of any kind for mascots, pets or anything else. So there's rules in place. I would say of all the rules that got bent, probably the animal rule was the one that got bent the most. For sure. And it's part of it was because.

• 1:19:35Jocko Willink?

  Well, I can tell you how my first deployment, the rule got bent was because there's just dogs. And you know, the dogs are in the compound. And you know, you don't see a dog and go, okay, I'm gonna kill this dog. No, you know, you go, oh, there's a dog. Well, you don't shoot it. You think, oh, I'm gonna give it a piece of M R E. And then guess what the dog does? Starts following you around. And this is not me. This is like guys in my platoon, first deployment. Oh, so now they're giving a little scrap of the dog. Now the dog's hanging around. Now they're teaching the dog to sit and all of a sudden the dog's buddy shows up and now you got two dogs. We had two dogs. Two dogs in our compound in Baghdad. They were named Mortar and R P G, you know, which was a pretty good set of names. But again, it was like, if anyone came down

• 1:20:20Jocko Willink?

  and gave us an inspection and said, what are those dogs in here? You go, I don't know. They're just here, you know, it's almost, it's almost like there's nothing you could do about it other than freaking just execute the dogs. But the dogs would go away and come back. And so it's, it's like the rule is getting bent. You don't have a dog bowl. You don't have, you're not, you're not giving the dog a house. It's just a dog. It's around. It's, you, it's almost like, uh, having, you know, you're on patrol and there's a dog. Like, what are you gonna do? It's gonna follow you. Well, it's, you know, like, that's just what's gonna happen. So that's kind of the situation that you guys are in, you know, this dog's there and you start hanging around with the dog.

• 1:21:03Jocko Willink?

  And you know, you start, dog starts becoming a little bit more friendly, starts, it knows what it's gonna get, knows it's gonna get some, some M R E crackers and whatnot.

• 1:21:15Jocko Willink?

  So that's what you're dealing with and with this dog lava.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. There's you, you, you intro, there's a Iraqi, um, or sorry, there, there's a reporter, she's not Iraqi. She's American. She's a war journalist. Her name is Anne Gerrels. She actually died a couple of years ago, I think in, uh, 2022. But she's there and she's a war reporter and she's, you know, you're right. She's been in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, former Soviet Union, Central America, Tiananmen Square and Pakistan. So she's been around and she's, you're developing, you know.

• 1:21:53Jocko Willink?

  I guess, I don't know if you'd call it a friendship with a journalist, because I, you know, journalists, you've got to keep them a little bit in check.

• 1:22:02Jocko Willink?

  You say, but you develop a friendship with her. One of the things that I think worries Ann the most is that she's not telling her radio audience, because she was with NPR, the real story about us. She complains about it a lot. How can you explain how lethal, how faulty, how fundamentally lousy the whole situation is here in general? Chaotic, she reports. Moments of sheer terror. She tries, but she always feels she misses the mark by a few inches.

• 1:22:31Jocko Willink?

  You go on talking about, um, she interviews a marine psychologist that's there. They experience horrible shame of being helpless, he told her. Marines hate above everything to be helpless, passive. It's not the way they see themselves, and it makes it hard for them to get back the feeling of confidence, just talking about bombs and snipers and things that you can't see, and it's very difficult to fight against.

• 1:23:00Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. I don't let lava sleep with me at first. I always scoot him off towards Ann or somebody else more willing to sleep with a snoring piglet who farts MREs all night. Then one night, Ann says to me, he's so adorable, what's going to happen to him?

• 1:23:16Jocko Willink?

  I give the shrug, don't know.

• 1:23:20Jocko Willink?

  And then fast forward a little bit, you say, but I feel like shit and let him sleep on my poncho that night. And I think that's how Ann finds her story. And here's part of her story. During the firefight, during the fighting, the battalion has gained a new member, a tiny puppy they named Lava Dog. Though filthy themselves, they've lovinly, lovinly washed him down to get rid of sand fleas. He sleeps nestled in a marine poncho.

• 1:23:48Jocko Willink?

  So that's kind of your introduction to this dog.

• 1:23:53Jocko Willink?

  And is it so did that story, did she report that story on NPR?

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  You know, I don't know if that got, if that got reported.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  I do know, we stayed in touch for a little while afterward.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  She, she's, she was a great person, great, great reporter. I think always very fair about her reporting. And she could tell a great story as well.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Very bright person, obviously her, her husband was also a very accomplished guy. I think he had been CIA at one point and then became a cartoonist, an artist. And

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  so I don't know that if ever got reported. But Anne, Anne does play a big part in lava's rescue as the story goes on.

• 1:24:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a whole bunch of players in lava's rescue. I mean, this is literally a book about the rescue of a dog. This is the vast majority of what it's about.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:57Jocko Willink?

  It, I mean, clearly there's a ton of, you know, your personal story and the story of the glorious Marines you served alongside. And that fought in the Battle of Fallujah and the army as well.

• 1:25:10Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, that's the thing that the, the journalists, you know,

• 1:25:16Jocko Willink?

  they can be so awesome. And yeah, there were some awesome journalists that I met and did incredible stories overseas. I never really, quite frankly, I don't think I've ever had like a horrible interaction with a journalist. They've all been pretty cool. But I know that there's people that have definitely not had the best interaction with journalists. So I think it's important to be a little bit cautious.

• 1:25:40Jocko Willink?

  They're looking to publish a story, right? And they're looking to get people to read that story. And sometimes, hopefully, what brings people to read a story is a positive story and a story about good things happening. But a lot of times, often, what brings a story is, you know, uh, conflict and drama. So, negative drama, so.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  I will say this on their behalf, though. It, it takes some big balls.

• 1:26:05Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  To put on a cheesy helmet and, and a flak jacket, right? And go out there with no weapon.

• 1:26:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  You know, and you're in the middle of firefight and, you know, there was a reporter who had been with us, I think from, uh, Christian Science Monitor, got shot in the arm. I mean, it happens.

• 1:26:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think there's, I think there's a certain level of people that are true combat journalists that truly embed. And there were some guys in, in Ramadi that were like that. And they, they wrote awesome stories and badass stories and really captured what was happening. And that was very cool. Again, I've had, I had positive experiences, but I have definitely heard and seen when people don't want to write a good story, they want to write a story that's gonna get them the most clicks and the negativity certainly gets the most, gets, can get clicks. And it's easier to write a negative story, I would imagine, than a positive story. So, yeah, I, again, like, um,

• 1:27:11Jocko Willink?

  Younger, who embedded with Restrepo. I mean, yeah, Sebastian Younger, who, who, I mean, he did a great job. And, and there's a lot of journalists like that. I mean, we had Holly on this podcast a couple of times. She did incredible things, you know? Going into horrible places, putting herself at extreme risk to capture stories. And she did a great job. And so, yes, I, I, I don't mean to be too, um,

• 1:27:40Jocko Willink?

  Negative, but I my I just would always be cautious in in interacting.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  I would I would agree a hundred percent in any situation.

• 1:27:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Everybody has an agenda, right? And and they can put any spin on anything they want to. I mean, but you're you're right. I mean, look at some of these people that do amazing things as journalists and show a lot of bravery like Benjamin Hall from Fox.

• 1:28:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  You know, just crazy story.

• 1:28:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's there's definitely incredible journalists out there that do that take extreme risks in order to capture stories. So there, I think I've balanced myself out a little bit. I didn't want to be too hard on on like I said, especially there's journalist Michael Fumento, who's a guy in in Ramadi, did incredible work and took incredible risks and was out there. Like you said, he's out there with a flak jacket, a helmet and a camera, running around like a maniac. And he can get shot just as easy as anybody else. And and there's the Stars and Stripes journalists, there's just a slew of journalists that are out there. So again, I think I was a little bit negative. I don't want to be too negative. I'm just, I would be cautious because there's also been journalists that their whole goal

• 1:28:55Jocko Willink?

  is to write a negative story. So use caution.

• 1:29:01Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here, you spend a bunch of time with, you know, with what's going on in Fallujah. You spend a bunch of time with how that kind of develops with with lava dog. And I'm going to fast forward a little bit, though. You now getting towards the end of your time there. You say later that day, I received word that I'm supposed to report to the Joint Task Force in Balad to replace Lieutenant Colonel Ignatius Buck Liberto, who's going on leave for six weeks. I know the guy, right? So I email him in Balad and ask him if he'll take lava home with him when he leaves. No problem from Buck's end, but he's flying out on a military plane. In order to transport a puppy, he'll need all Levi's lava's vaccination papers and approval from brass.

• 1:29:44Jocko Willink?

  I'm thinking that this is no big deal until I get the response from the military veterinarian in Baghdad. He respectfully reiterates general order number one A that prevents the Marines from keeping pets and further points out that diseases such as leishmania, hytidded disease and rabies are common among stray dogs in Iraq.

• 1:30:04Jocko Willink?

  Quote, "My apparent, my apparent lack of concern for this puppy isn't due to not caring. I'm simply following orders, regulations, and my desire to protect the public health of our soldiers." The veterinarian writes. "What I'm trying to make clear, sir, is that, is that nothing we can do for you is going to assist you in getting the dog home." Well, shit. And clearly, that was not exactly the answer you were looking for. It is a real problem to try and get a dog home. And actually, my buddy Seth Stone, he ended up getting a dog home from Afghanistan. The dog wasn't, uh, Harry, was an Australian, but he was a working dog.

• 1:30:45Jocko Willink?

  You know, he was, he was a, a golden retriever, but he was a bomb sniffing dog. And so that made it a little bit easier because he was kind of in the system. But even for a dog that was in the system, that had all of its shots, that was trained, that all those things, it still took monumental efforts to get Harry back to America. And I guess there were some Australian transfers. So there's, there's just all these administrative rules and loops that you're going to have to jump through, and it's crazy. Um, fast forward a little bit here. You end up in Balad. Balad isn't like a super secret mission or anything, but the group I work with, Task Force 626, is a special operations unit that pursues high value individuals like AMZ, Zarqawi.

• 1:31:30Jocko Willink?

  "We also work with Iraqi prisoners whom we suspect know the most important stuff, stuff that could help break the back of the insurgency, but who don't want to tell us what they know. I have great accommodations, including a trailer with my own room, a real bed, a refrigerator, a closet, and a wall locker. There's a bathroom with a real sit-down flushable toilet, a sink, and a shower. We have a gym that back home would cost $500 initiation fee and 50 bucks a month to join. Plasma TVs in our command center, and a full PX, complete with a Burger King."

• 1:32:02Jocko Willink?

  I went to Balad for like one day, but yeah, these are the big built up bases. It might've been a great mission, except that, except this one thing that keeps peeking or pecking away at me. This thing that I have to do that I don't want to do from the minute I get to Balad. I keep hoping that something will happen magically behind my back to solve everything concerning lava. So you start going on this effort. To try and figure out if you can make this happen, and I can't even begin to give credit to everyone that deserves it. And when you read the book, you really start to appreciate the Headwood Woodward Helen, sorry Helen Woodward Animal Care Center. You got people from Triple Canopy, which is like a contracting company. They're helping you out. There's an Iraqi veteran, Dr. Marani.

• 1:32:47Jocko Willink?

  You get I'm, how do you say I'm's pet food? I am's. I am's pet food. You've got all these assorted cast of characters to try and help you get this dog. Yeah. Home.

• 1:33:04Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, and by the way, you're still doing, you're still having to do your normal job. The elections are coming up, January 2005, you're at the Syria or at the Syrian border. Again, this is one of the many plots that you try and execute to get lava dog home. By the time the elections are a week away, Annie is, is in flight to Baghdad. Lava is still at Camp Fallujah and I'm at the Syrian border. I'm back to babysitting Iraqi soldiers who in this part of the country call themselves the Desert Wolves. I'm worried about lava whom I haven't seen in more than a month. I'm also worried about Matt and his guys who are arranging a special convoy. They're calling a chow run to get him to Baghdad. So you've got Marines that are setting up convoys to try and get this dog to Baghdad.

• 1:33:49Jocko Willink?

  So. But so lava can link up with, with Annie and hopefully get left. Marines are prime targets these days and the insurgents are, and everyone related to them hate our guts for what we did in Fallujah. But I'm most worried about Anne, who's going to have to pick him up somewhere in the city. The ref seems to be pissing on these days. Here's the current, fast forward a little bit, here's the current headlines the week leading up to the elections. At least 21 people killed by suicide bombers, but these are just all headlines. Baghdad governor assassinated. At least 20 people killed in insurgent attacks. Militants behead Iraqi who worked for the coalition and kill at least four others. Militants kill eight Iraqi National Guard soldiers. 11 people die in suicide bombings.

• 1:34:33Jocko Willink?

  At least 14 people killed and 40 wounded by car bomb near Shia Muslim mosque. Bomb detonates near Iraqi premier's offices. Iraqi judge assassinated in Baghdad. Car bomb at provincial government headquarters kills five people. 20 people killed in a series of attacks involving rockets, roadside bombs, and suicide car bombs. People stationed or stuck in Baghdad are starting to unravel as all these contractors and civilians and Iraqi soldiers get killed. As for US forces, we don't fare much better. During the month of January, 641 of our troops are killed or wounded.

• 1:35:13Jocko Willink?

  This includes 31 lava dogs, these are the Marines, who go down in a helicopter during a sandstorm four days before the election. So this is all kinds of fighting, all kinds of death, all kinds of destruction going on. This is actually when the SEALs mission was protecting the top eight of the Iraqi government officials. And it's just interesting because that was, everyone called that a no fail mission, right? We can't let these guys get killed. And it was so, the environment was so absolutely hostile at that time towards them. And they managed to do it. This is, it was incredible that they were able, and look, I can tell you, there was

• 1:35:58Jocko Willink?

  no SEAL that, that said to themselves, "Oh, my goal in life is to do personal security for Iraqis, for Iraqi government officials."

• 1:36:09Jocko Willink?

  But that's what the task was and they did an outstanding job. So. Lot going on. And this is what's happening in the country and while all this is going on and while you're doing your job. You're still trying these attempts planes, trains and automobiles. Uh taxis. Military and and civilian flights are trying to get this stuff dialed in. You're building relationships with all kinds of different people trying to figure out with journalists, with military people, with civilians, with industries, with charities. You have some good luck. Usually often turns into bad luck. Uh Baghdad, Syria, Kuwait. Uh again, there's so much going on. Get the book.

• 1:36:54Jocko Willink?

  So that you can follow all this, all this mayhem. Um. Eventually, again, get the book. Eventually you end up. You redeploy back to America. And now you're back in America trying still to see if you can help. With lava dog. Um, I'm going to fast forward a little bit. I checked the email again, nothing. And you're checking for one of these emails for all this that you're trying to make happen. It's the middle of the day here in Baghdad, there in Baghdad, the middle of the night here in California. And no time in particular to to me everywhere else in between. Something must have gone wrong. Maybe the little shit is dead already.

• 1:37:35Jocko Willink?

  Or maybe they didn't make it through and now he's lost on the streets of Baghdad, wondering where everybody went. I pray that if lava doesn't make it through, he'll find a body somewhere in Baghdad to keep him alive for just one more day. Which brings me to the last part of my confession. I want lava to stay alive. No matter how bad things get, it's still better to be alive. I want to know he's breathing and leaping after dust balls and chasing imaginary imaginary enemies in his sleep. I want him to be alive because then there's still hope that he'll make it here to California and get to be an American dog. Who runs on the beach and chases the mailman instead of strangers with guns. I want him to be alive and and almost more than anything I can think of, which feels like a confession.

• 1:38:18Jocko Willink?

  Because before lava, I was a marine who wasn't required to cross any lines with alive on one side and dead on the other. I carried a rucksack full of coupons redeemable towards absolution. Now, after meeting lava and letting fear in, I feel distantly related to a serial killer.

• 1:38:41Jocko Willink?

  What's that all about?

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  You know, you made reference in an earlier passage to the ref.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Euphemistically God.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  And, you know, for my entire life, really, I didn't have to care about anybody else or be responsible for anybody else. And part of why this became such a huge mission for me was when I asked the Marines back in Fallujah, you know, what's gonna, what do you think's gonna happen to this dog? Cause I was well aware of general order one A. And they said, well, we're gonna get him back to Hawaii. You're not gonna get that dog to Hawaii. There's no way. I said, first of all, it's in blatant violation of the orders. And I said, secondly, Hawaii has some of the strictest quarantine regulations of any place in the world, much less the United States.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  And this dog isn't gonna make it back. I mean, they had gone to Okinawa for a unit deployment program. Uh, they flew there, right? And then when they get to Okinawa with thirty first Mew, they take ships over to the Gulf to come ashore in Iraq. So I said, you're gonna have to get the dog onto a Navy ship and keep it a secret.

• 1:40:10Jocko Willink?

  Ain't happening.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  No, not even for a second. And then you're gonna have to get to Okinawa and put the dog on a flight and get him back to Hawaii and then face the quarantine. I said, they'll probably euthanize him there. They're not gonna take him. But I know some people.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Let me make this happen for you. I'll get him back to the States and then you can come pick him up, take him back to Hawaii if you want. So now,

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  I'm seeing it as I'm a Marine, I'm a Lieutenant Colonel. And I've just made a promise to a bunch of young Marines that I'm gonna do something. And I damn well better keep my word. Because that's all I have is my word. When I was a little kid, my father, he said to me one day, he goes, "Son,

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna leave you a lot of money." He said, "All I can leave you is your name, so don't fuck it up." And you know, that that holds true today for anybody. All you have is your name and your word. And as soon as you go back on that, you're screwed. And I can't expect Marines to follow me in combat if I can't keep my word about a dog, right? So this becomes a big mission for me and I'm a dog lover from, from the jump, even as a little kid. And, and you know, I, I wanted to fulfill my promise to these Marines.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  But obviously I became very attached to lava and I want him to live. I mean, if, if he hadn't made it back, I don't know what it would have done to me. It would, you know, it would have been heartbreaking for sure. And I'm sure life would have gone on, but it just wouldn't have been the same. And so now, I'm gonna fulfill this, this promise.

• 1:42:11Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit.

• 1:42:16Jocko Willink?

  Quite a bit, actually. The email arrives, but instead of opening it, you sit there and stare at your computer. You think about things like whether you'd ever blow yourself up for your country and whether you'd feel better about things in general if you did. No, you decide. You'd only feel dead.

• 1:42:35Jocko Willink?

  Then you open it.

• 1:42:38Jocko Willink?

  Iraq closes its border with Jordan, four Romanian journalists are kidnapped in Baghdad. A major US newspaper reports that mental disorders among Afghanistan and Iraq veterans are on the ride, on the rise. Then you read it. A car bomb kills 11 more in Baghdad.

• 1:42:56Jocko Willink?

  As of 1600 hours, Iraq time, lava is out of the country.

• 1:43:03Jocko Willink?

  And for the second time in your adult life, you break down and cry.

• 1:43:09Jocko Willink?

  So that was the email where you got the word that lava was.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:43:15Jocko Willink?

  Lava was.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  In the game.

• 1:43:20Jocko Willink?

  Lava was coming home.

• 1:43:25Jocko Willink?

  So where to go from there? You're back stateside. Yeah, you get reunited.

• 1:43:34Jocko Willink?

  Where's go from there?

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so lava becomes my dog and he is not a tame dog at all. So Helen Woodward Animal Center had a dog trainer there, a guy named Graham Bloom, who's a fantastic trainer and he's done fantastic things aside from just training dogs. He, he has started his own nonprofit called Shelter to Soldier, where they get, you know, sheltered dogs and train them to be service dogs for, for veterans coming back. And they decided to give me free lessons with Graham to work with lava. So we do that for a while and get him trained up pretty good. You know, he's, he's got all

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  the commands, sit, stay, heal, all that kind of stuff. He's, he's doing all right. Start doing some media for it, right? So the day he got back to the States, they. They flew him in, he lands in Chicago with these triple canopy working dogs, right? So, you know, you got a six month old Iraqi mutt, mutt, mutt. And he's in with the Malinois and German Shepherds, right? Coming back from deployment. And in fact, the contractor with triple canopy, who was assigned to bring all these dogs back, he slept on the ground in a parking garage in Amman at the airport

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  the night before their flight, just to make sure nobody would come and confiscate him. And they pass him off as a working dog. You know, he's in a crate, so they couldn't see him too good. But they get him back and we're doing all this media and then we're supposed to be on Good Morning America. And so that was going to be a big deal, right? But then the Pope died, like the night before. So we get preempted, like it happens in media, as you know. And so that story doesn't go, but they do some kind of remote and, you know, there's just multiple stories, like Fox News, CBS, everybody's covering this story.

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  Cause we were really the first, first ones to get a dog back, like that anybody knew about, for sure. So there's a lot of media attention around it. And people are saying, oh, you should write a book, you should write a book. I'm like, no, I'm not going to write a book. I can barely read a book. I'm not writing, I don't know the first thing about it, how to, how to get a publisher, none of this stuff. And so I'm just like, nah, I'm not going to do it. And then finally, I just got tired of it. I said, fine, I'll write a book. And not knowing the first thing about it, you know, Amazon was coming around this time.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  So I go on Amazon and I start searching for books about rescued dogs and all this other stuff. And I find a co-author, I found a book that had been co-written by this gal. And so I'd start figuring out how to reach out to her and. Call the publisher. They say, oh, we can't help you, but maybe her publicist can give you an email address. And so sure enough, got an email address, sent her an email. Don't hear anything from her, but at least I made the commitment. And finally, a few months later, get an email back. Yeah, I'd love to do this. Let me check with my agent. She's in San Diego. And sure enough, the agent said, yeah, do it. So we start working together to

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  put the book together about lava's lava's journey.

• 1:47:14Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take before the book came out?

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  Probably took a year from the time we started working together, more than about 14 months. So we started working together like in August of oh, five, the book came out in October of oh, six. And in the meantime, I met the agent, she signed me. And she starts shopping it around. Nobody would publish it. I had had a cousin who was at a big publishing house at the time, I think Random House. And she even she says to me, she goes, Why is this a book and not a magazine article?

• 1:47:52Jocko Willink?

  It's encouraging.

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, and that's my cousin. I didn't know what the hell do I know? And so, so finally, this small publisher in Connecticut, Lions Press decides, Yeah, we'll do it. And give us this tiny advance. And so we're off to the races. Now we're writing the book. You know, we had all we had just sent them, you know, essentially an outline, and they thought it was okay. And they they wrote like travel guides and outdoors books and stuff. They didn't or publish those. They didn't know about this kind of stuff, but they took a chance. And that in May of oh, five, there's this huge thing called Book

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  Expo America. I don't know how big it is anymore. But that year was in Washington DC. And they had printed out 500, what's called galleys. So essentially, readers proofs of the book before it's, it's kind of like a paperback, but it's not the final version. There's still a little editing and stuff to do to it. So they do 500 of those to have there. And my agent and I fly out. And I got to sign 500 copies of this for them to give out to media and whomever. So.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  Publishers Weekly writes a nice review. Guy from USA Today writes a really good review. They were gonna print, I think, 25,000 copies originally. They had another book. There was gonna be their big book about the four presidents. You know, Clinton, Bush, Carter. I forget who else was in there. But they were doing this book about how these presidents get along and all this other stuff. Their legacies and how they had done. And they were gonna do 50,000 copies. That was their big book for the year. And so it does so well at BEA. Now all of a sudden, the publisher says, okay, we're gonna up it to 50,000.

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  Then there's more press. Ends up being 100,000 copies first run. And so now they're hiring a publicist to set up a book tour for me. So now I'm gonna have to travel the world or travel the States anyway, and go do book signings and speak about the book and my time in Iraq, all this stuff. And I've never done any of this, right? This is all new. I'm basically a homebody. You know, I don't go out. I don't do anything. I go to jujitsu and I come home and work and that's it. And so now I gotta be out in the public and doing all this stuff. So they end up doing that.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  And I was at Amazon up in Seattle was one of the trips they had set up for me to talk to their media team, which includes books. So I'm up there talking to them. I come out of that and get a phone call from my agent. And this is like October, November of 2006. And she says, yeah.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  You just made New York Times bestseller list. It's like, what are you talking about? But I was really determined. I was, I'm sure I was very difficult to work with because if we're gonna do this, we're gonna do it right. And we're gonna do, and of course, my way was the right way. You know, not knowing anything about book publishing, but god damn it, I'm gonna do it. And, and it worked, obviously. I didn't want to put out something that was just a fluff piece or something inferior. You know, I did go through channels with the Marine Corps. I gave galleys to the commanding general, the P A O, the attorney.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Everybody had a chance to review it, make sure there was nothing in there that couldn't be in there before it was published. And, and it did, it came out and that's, that's kind of where things went once Lava got back. But he, he was, he was clearly a troubled dog. I mean, you know, they say people get PTSD. Well, Lava, Lava had it in spades. He, he just could never, ever relax. Like, the entire time I had him for 11 years, he was just really high strung and just nervous all the time. Just, yeah, it was tough.

• 1:52:27Jocko Willink?

  And you end up getting out of the Marine Corps? Did you retire from the Marine Corps?

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  I did. And so we were getting ready to stand up Marsoc and Major General Denny Halick was the deputy commanding general at one MEF at the time. And I was working as the deputy director for the advisor training program. So Denny approached me and he said, hey, I've been tasked with standing up Marsoc. I'd like you to come with me. And I'm like, wow, that's, you know, that's a big honor. And I started thinking about it a little bit. I had met the gal who I would end up marrying. We were having a good time surfing. I was racing bicycles. So just riding a lot and training all the time and living the good life in Southern California and.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  I said, sir, can I have a day to think about this? He said, absolutely. And I talked to him the next day and I said, I've thought about it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna retire. I just didn't see my role at Marsoc as being anything more than maybe a chief of staff. You know, I might get promoted one more time. I'm sure Denny would have seen to it, but I, I didn't want that. I didn't want to be just riding the desk for the next three, four years. As you know, once you've been in combat, it's hard to go back. That adrenaline rush and everything else, you know, I wanted to be a gun

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  fighter still if I was gonna stay in. And that's when you get to that level, it's just, it's, it's not the works. It's not gonna happen. So what was your next move after you retired? So I retired. I left active service in probably November, December of 2006. And I was still technically in the reserves. I put in my retirement papers, got that February 1st of 2007. And prior to that, I'd gotten a phone call from Headquarters Marine Corps. May I speak to Lieutenant Colonel Kopelman? Yeah, this is Jay. Cause I, at that point, considered myself a civilian. And the

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  gal on the other end says, well, this is Colonel Nancy Jones. I don't remember her name. But I said, hey Nancy, how are you? She said, well, I'm calling to, to advise you that you've failed selection for Colonel. I said, that's okay. I'm out. You know, I've already put in my retirement paperwork and clearly you didn't get the memo. So I appreciate the call, though. So I was so busy with the book tour stuff still, and I was then signed by a speakers bureau to go out and do a lot of public speaking. So I was getting paid for that. I wasn't working. And that went on for quite a

• 1:55:22Speaker 01

  while. Meantime, I did end up getting married in June of 06 on the summer solstice in Coronado.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  Had maybe eleven, twelve people, couple of my buddies, uh, her mom, her brother, a couple of nephews, my stepson, just had a great time, you know, we took my, my best friend and I took my stepson fishing. One day he caught a shark. It was great. You know, on this little boat, he catches a shark, maybe three, four feet big, right? I'm grabbing it by the tail, holding it up, trying to get the hook out, right? And the thing is curling up on its own body, trying to bite me. I'm like, this shark doesn't like Jews. And so, so, uh, yeah, so that went on for a little while, just doing that. And then in, uh, oh, eight, I realized, okay, I better get to work

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  here. And, uh, had been introduced to a small nonprofit in San Diego called Freedom is Not Free. I knew they needed a new executive director. I approached them. They said, sure. So I did that for a couple of years, uh, ran that small nonprofit. We did some really good things. I started a couple of programs that had hadn't been in place before, uh, did a golf tournament. Uh, we got San Diego, I'm sorry, uh, was it Delmar Country Club to donate the whole club. They donated everything, the food, everything. Your friend of mine, Mike Thornton, came, spoke, raised a lot of money. He's, you know, he, you know, Mikey's larger than life guy. Yes, indeed.

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  And, uh, so that was a lot of fun. I put together a program called The Little Warriors Surf Camp. Nice. And got a company that, uh, INT Surf Boards. They donated like a hundred surfboards to the camp and some money for lunches for the kids. So, uh, Wahoos did the lunches, um, down at Oya Shores and Surf Diva provide all the instruction. Um, I was good friends with, uh, Izzy Tejani and her sister Coco. They own Surf Diva. They came out, provide all the instruction, did this for like a week, and then we were able to give the boards to these kids to take home. So, military kids, yeah, it was, that was cool.

• 1:57:44Jocko Willink?

  And you ended up writing another book.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  I did, yeah.

• 1:57:48Jocko Willink?

  And what was that one about?

• 1:57:49Speaker 01

  So that one's called From Baghdad to America. And I wanted to write about the reintegration process and the issues that veterans deal with coming home.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  It was a different publisher. The first publisher told my agent they wouldn't work with me again.

• 1:58:09Speaker 01

  And in fact, one of the guys there started cursing at her one day after the second book came out, though, because he was pissed off that we didn't write the second book with them. She said, well, you told me you didn't want to write another book with him. So this other publisher offered me a pretty decent advance to write the book. I wrote it. I don't think they marketed it right because it came out as a dog book again, when really it's not.

• 1:58:38Jocko Willink?

  It's a human book?

• 1:58:38Speaker 01

  It's definitely a human book. And I used the dog metaphorically for myself in that book to talk about PTSD and TBI and having to go to the VA and see a psychologist and all that stuff.

• 1:58:53Jocko Willink?

  And you end up getting cancer.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and much later, so in between then, I'd gone to grad school at UCSD and started working healthcare.

• 1:59:15Speaker 01

  I've always liked helping people, right? Like, you know, I was a teacher. When I was a kid, if I saw somebody getting bullied, even if the bully was bigger, I'd run over and intervene and just sling in fists, right? Not always a good decision, but what I felt was the right one. And so healthcare seemed like a natural choice for me. If I could somehow improve patient outcomes and help people's lives be better in any little way, that's what I wanted to do. You know, I worked in nonprofit. So I'm just going to continue on helping people. And went into healthcare.

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  And the second company I was with while I was there, I went to the VA for a checkup. And the doctor says, yeah, I don't like your numbers here. And. Up on the screen was my A1C, which is an indicator for diabetes. You know, I'd always worked out. I stayed really fit. And I said, you think I have diabetes? And she goes, oh, no, not those numbers. Your PSA, which is a prostate specific antigen, and it's a big marker for prostate cancer. So I said, nah, that's gotta be a false positive. I'm fine. So go back, do the blood work again, and the number comes up higher. So like, your PSA should never be over 4.0, I think.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Mine was like 12. So go into the VA. You know, they do the digital exam. And sure enough, I got an enlarged prostate. They do the biopsies. Sure enough, I got cancer. And in 2015, a really dear friend of mine, older guy, had developed prostate cancer. So he can afford any care, anywhere in the world, the best of anything. And he ends up going to a guy here in San Diego, a guy named Carl Rossi,

• 2:01:20Speaker 01

  who is the preeminent radiation oncologist, or proton radiation oncologist in the world. The guy gets flown everywhere to lecture on this, do everything. And that's where he ended up going. So he had just finished his treatments. And August of 15, I get diagnosed in October of 15. I call him up and I said, hey, Tim, I want you to know, you know, how highly I think of you. And, you know, I try to do things the way you would do them. But just to show you how much I do look up to you, I decided to get prostate cancer too. And he says, first thing, okay,

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  you're gonna go meet Richard Lamb in LA, and you're gonna do this, and you're gonna do that. Like, the whole thing was mapped out for me. I didn't even have to think about it. And so I end up going in the VA, seeing a urologist there. And she's like, oh, you're a perfect candidate for surgery. I said, well, why do you say that? Well, you're young, you're healthy. I said, that's exactly why I was 55 at the time. And she says, well, you know, you're a good candidate. I said, that's exactly why I don't want surgery. I still want everything to work. I'm still, you know, a pretty vital guy. I don't want to take that chance. Well, it's robotics. I said, yeah, but robots can make mistakes too, or the person operating it. I said, I want to do proton radiation.

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  Well, we don't offer that and there's, there's no good data on it, on the efficacy. I said, that's not true. They've been using it for decades to treat childhood brain cancer, you know, pediatric brain cancer. And I said, this is what I want and that's what we're going to do. And she starts slinging things at me. I said, look, I have as many degrees as you do and I've done the research and I know that it's efficacious and that's what I want to do. And the VA ended up paying for like $150,000 of treatment for me to go do this. And it wasn't pleasant.

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  You know, if, back then, they were still sticking a balloon up your butt to separate organs, make sure the radiation didn't hit anything it shouldn't. So 30 treatments of that. And in February of 2016, I got to ring the bell and kill cancer. The first time.

• 2:03:54Jocko Willink?

  And meanwhile, though, while that's happened, you're getting separated from your wife, right?

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We were separated when I started the treatments.

• 2:04:01Jocko Willink?

  And then on top of all that, you end up having to put down lava.

• 2:04:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, the day that I started treatment, I had to put down lava.

• 2:04:13Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna read this from the book. Lava was once again becoming increasingly ill at ease. He just couldn't stop. I called the vet to describe the scene. "It's time," he said. I knew, but I said nothing. "You've done more for Lava than anyone would have," he said. "You gave him eight years more than I would ever have expected. There's nothing more you can do." I was sick at heart, but I knew the vet was right. I knew others would have given up years before. Lava had given me hope and restored my faith in life itself. I owed him that. The inevitable saying goodbye, knowing it was time to free Lava from his demons, had always been there, hovering as his unease increased.

• 2:04:58Jocko Willink?

  I knew this final act would end his constant agitations. I knew it would, in some small way, repay the debt I owed him for all he had done for me. I knew it would be a tribute, in some dark way, a final heartbreaking measure of love. I knew all that, but grief is not an abstraction. Even though I was prepared, I still felt as if I'd been blindsided. I was aware in some fashion that the circle of life, the beginning, middle, and end we all face, had not been broken that day. It was completed with Lava's last sigh. I told myself that as I walked away from the vets on January 4th, 2016.

• 2:05:41Jocko Willink?

  I knew all that, but I didn't feel it. I felt nothing. I was numb. I was gutted.

• 2:05:56Jocko Willink?

  So how did you cope with that?

• 2:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was, I had a distraction, of course, going through the cancer treatments. But it was, it was a dark time.

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  I was a dick, as you can imagine, and, you know, women don't leave you because you're a good guy, because you're a dick, and, you know, she was right to do that at the time, and I just...

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  I kind of stopped exercising for a while. You know, I was, I'm sure I was depressed.

• 2:06:47Speaker 01

  Kind of let myself go a little bit so much that I was embarrassed to go to a gym because I mean, I was by no means fat, but to me I was, you know, I had obviously didn't have the right view of myself. But I was just feeling down and just made getting through the cancer treatments my focus and kicking cancer's ass. So that, that was where I turned. I didn't have a pity party or anything for myself. It was just, it was one of those things that just needed to happen because the, the final straw was he chewed through a wall and a door and like cut his

• 2:07:32Speaker 01

  mouth up chewing the nails in the drywall. And I'm like, this dog is just not right. There's really something wrong that he's never going to find peace. And it was a hard decision, but I think at the time, now looking back, it was the right decision. But I just coped with it by kind of focusing on the cancer and beating cancer and, and then taking the next steps in my life.

• 2:08:05Jocko Willink?

  When'd you start training jujitsu and Muay Thai?

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I started training Muay Thai about a month after I finished the cancer treatments. I, I got myself a TRX and started working out on that every day, couple of times a day, got back into shape. Believe it or not, just using a TRX, you can do that if you, if you go hard enough. And I went to, I was living downtown and I thought I wanted to train Muay Thai. So.

• 2:08:39Speaker 01

  You know, something else to challenge myself and I found city boxing, which I know you're familiar with downtown and started training under Dennis Grochew down there, who was five time world champion and was fighting now as a professional boxer. He had become the NABF light heavyweight champion. Um, just a great guy. And, uh, so started training Muay Thai there. Didn't really give Jiu Jitsu any consideration at that point, but really took to the Muay Thai. And about six months after I started training, I asked Dennis if we could spar. How'd that work out?

• 2:09:20Speaker 01

  It was going great. I mean, it was good. I, I, I was training five, six days a week, you know, and, and just really taking to it. And, you know, I was an older guy, 56 years old, but beating up the young guys coming in with testosterone and anger and whatever. And just relax. It's just, you pick them apart that way. But, uh, so we get in the ring, headgear, gloves, you know, 16 ounce gloves, shin pads. And, uh, it's going pretty well until I kicked Dennis in the head. And then when it landed, I was like, oh shit. Cause his whole me in changed, right? Like he gets that look in his eyes. I ran, I ran across

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  the ring and I said, don't blame me. You taught me. Um, from that point on, it was like, nothing given, baby. It was just like, okay, if we're gonna spar, we're gonna spar. Yeah, that's, that's not gonna be fun. Uh, you end up moving to Idaho? Yeah. In 2020, um, my son and I at the time weren't getting along well. He wasn't wanting to spend time with me and it was COVID. My best friend was up there. Uh, I'd been going up there for a couple of years to fly fish and started hunting up there. And, um, I said, you know what? I talked to my ex-wife and my son and I said,

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go. I just have to get out of San Diego and California for a while and I'm gonna head up to Idaho and live up there and it was great, you know, going down to Park City to ski, Jackson Hole to ski. Still going over to Jackson Hole to train Muay Thai at Jackson Hole MMA.

• 2:11:14Speaker 01

  And then in summer of 22, June of 22, I was down here. I would come back every month. I was driving back to see my son, spend a couple of weeks in San Diego and see him and his mom told me that June that he wanted me to come back. And so in

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  September of 22, I moved back. I started working in August of 22 for Semper Fi and Americas Fund as a as an advisor in the apprenticeship program where we take on members of Semper Fi and Americas Fund who have businesses or hobbies that they really want to get into and and we help guide them and help them with those hobbies and sometimes the hobbies become a business or if they have a business that they've started, we help them build and grow that business as well. And and now I'm back to helping people again and it gives me a lot of fulfillment, you know, it's it's not just fulfillment for them, but it gives me and I think my

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  my colleagues a lot of fulfillment to see them succeed and grow and not just as business people, but as people.

• 2:12:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome. And that's where we're, that's thefund.org, right?

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, thefund.org. Yeah.

• 2:12:34Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. And so is that when you started training Jiu-Jitsu?

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in 2020, before I went up, I met Chris Lieben. He posted on Instagram, hey, if you're down a row, down to train, hit me up. So we trained in his garage. I started training some MMA with Chris and now I'm 60 years old, right? Training MMA with Chris Lieben and loved it. I mean, it was great. So he opened up his gym.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Maybe later that year, I think, or the following year, or 22. And so I was in there training with him and we start doing some light sparring and I threw an overhand right that almost landed and Chris threw a left to the liver and I went down. And he's like, "Look, if that's how you're gonna play it, this is how it goes."

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  "Yes, sir." And I realized at 62, I probably shouldn't get punched and kicked in the head anymore because I didn't want to stroke out on a mat somewhere. So I started the jiu-jitsu in October of 22 and loved it. I mean, damn, it was great. I just, I had wrestled some as a kid, you know, in junior high. And that was my, actually, my first introduction to a Marine was in junior high school. The wrestling coach had been a captain in Vietnam and he used to put pieces of tape on our lockers when we did well and he said we were getting Leatherneck points. I didn't know what the fuck a Leatherneck was. Like, what's

• 2:14:15Speaker 01

  he talking about? Great guy, just like, you can imagine, he was a Vietnam Marine, right? Just squared away guy, great guy. And so, so I took to the jiu-jitsu. I really was just doing nogi for the longest time, taking private lessons every week from Ivan Herrera over at the training center, who's done, who's number one and ADCC, you know, he's won East Coast, uh, was it East Coast, uh, he won Chicago Open, I think. So, um, yeah, started

• 2:14:55Speaker 01

  doing it a lot. And then in March of 23, there was a Jiu-Jitsu World League tournament up in Del Mar. I said, "I'm gonna enter." You know, I'm like, "I got the bug now. Like, I'm really into this." So for nogi, though, they only did Masters 1 and 2. So I had to go down to like the 40-year-old division to fight. And, uh, and during this time, I was training so much, I started losing weight. So I was like 171. I was gonna fight lightweight, like 168 or whatever. But now I'm 162 pounds a week before the tournament. I'm like,

• 2:15:35Speaker 01

  Fuck, I'm just gonna go down and fight featherweight at 154.

• 2:15:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's awesome.

• 2:15:40Speaker 01

  So I do a weight cut the week before. And when you're 63 years old, you should not be cutting weight for anything. So, so I'm talking to my coaches and Chris and Ivan, they're like, no, don't do it. Don't do it, bro. If I did it. So I get the sauna suit, right? I'm on the bike, losing weight, doing the water cut. So I'm drinking a gallon of, uh,

• 2:16:08Jocko Willink?

  Distilled.

• 2:16:08Speaker 01

  Distilled water every day. That's my, that's what I'm eating. And like a couple ounces of protein and some lettuce. That's it for a week. So the good thing was you could weigh in the morning of, even though I didn't have anything till that evening, go there, 152 pounds. Fuck yeah, I'm in. But I'm, I'm wiped, right? I'm an old man cutting weight like I'm 20 years old again. And, uh, get in there, first match goes great. I win it. There were only three of us, thank God. I win that one 12, nothing. Um, just mount, side control, back in a half guard.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  Get the escape again, get more points for side control or mount. And then gotta do the next fight, right? And this kid is strong. He's 40 years old, fast, strong. And I get choked out. I get rear naked choke. But then he fights again, beats the other guy. So now I'm one on one. I get silver medal at Jiu Jitsu World League. You know, three guys, right?

• 2:17:19Jocko Willink?

  Whatever. Hey.

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  You guaranteed something, right? So.

• 2:17:23Jocko Willink?

  Second place, the second place, Jiu Jitsu World League, we'll take it.

• 2:17:26Speaker 01

  But, uh, I was getting ready to head back up to Idaho in June of that year and, uh, Ivan's like, hey, you gotta come to Gee tomorrow morning. Okay, I'll show up. I get there late, of course. And so I'm hustling up. He's like, get in your gi and get over here. So I get all geared up, go over, get in a roll for like one round or something. And I'm like two weeks out of elbow surgery, too. And I had signed up to do Jiu Jitsu Con last year in the, at the end of August in Las Vegas. There's a white belt. And uh, so we finished class and line up and he goes and pulls out a blue belt and he promotes my buddy,

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  Brian to blue belt. I'm like, yeah, this is awesome. That's why he wanted me here. So I could see Brian get promoted. This is great. All of a sudden he goes, pulls out another blue belt. It's like, Jay, come on up. I'm like, looking around to see if there's another Jay in class. Can't be me, but sure enough, I get promoted to blue belt in eight months. So now I gotta sign up for Master Worlds as a blue belt, right? And uh, so I'm spending time just training up in Jackson Hole last summer, doing private lessons with uh, Aiden Collins up there. He's a great, great grappler and

• 2:18:51Speaker 01

  got some good tips, good lessons, good rolls, got some hard guys up there. And uh, so we do that, uh, come back, train for about a week here before Worlds. Do the, put the final touches on it, get ready, go over. We got nine guys in, in the division now. So it's Master Seven Blue Belt, Lightweight Worlds. And I don't think I shit for three days while I was in Las Vegas. I was so nervous. I mean, my whole goal was, don't embarrass your teams. Just don't do that. So another guy and I had a fight, compete in an elimination match to get into the main bracket. So I win that.

• 2:19:37Speaker 01

  My next match is against the number one seed, the defending Pans champion and

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  I don't know how it is for younger guys, but old guys, when we are waiting to go on the mat, we start talking, right? It's just like, yeah, how many kids you got? What do you do? You know, this guy's a physician from Atlanta. He's a pathologist, teaches at Emory Medical School.

• 2:20:01Speaker 01

  And he goes, so how long you been training?

• 2:20:05Speaker 01

  Do I tell him? What do I say? I could tell him the truth. I said, 10 months. And he's like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah. I go, I still think I'm a white belt. That's why I consider myself. So we get out there, match starts. He goes for a really weak takedown. So I just sprawled, took his back, body triangle, stayed that way the whole time, end up winning 6-0. You know, I was going for subs, but I still didn't know shit. I still don't know shit. And we get up after the match, hug it out. He goes, you're a blue belt. That's like, cool.

• 2:20:47Jocko Willink?

  Right on. What'd you get overall?

• 2:20:49Speaker 01

  I got silver last year. Yeah. The guy that beat me in the finals got promoted a few months later to purple belt. So, you know, jujitsu is amazing. It's a community and being on the team over under Barrett, Yoshida, who you know well, it's a real fight team over there, I think.

• 2:21:14Speaker 01

  And, but it's a community. The whole jujitsu thing is a community. Like when I did that first tournament at Jujitsu World League, I didn't have any coaches. I'm just up there by myself. A buddy and his wife came to watch and my second match, the one where I got subbed, some guy I didn't even know, a coach, went and sat on the chair in my corner and coached me. I mean, that's just the kind of fellowship and community that you have in jujitsu. Everybody is so nice. I mean, I'm friends with the guys I've competed with in finals. You know, we stay in touch and it's just, it's a great thing. I mean, yeah.

• 2:22:00Speaker 01

  You know, I I've gone down in IBJJF to Masters Four to compete at Orange County. Last year I got silver again. Um, and was getting ready for Nogi Worlds in December. Uh, I was rolling with a big, big black belt and trying to escape half guard from the top. And he rolled away from me and tore the MCL, PCL and a meniscus in my right knee. So that put me out for about 10 weeks, but yeah.

• 2:22:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that doesn't sound like fun.

• 2:22:33Speaker 01

  No, I don't know.

• 2:22:36Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Well, yes, we definitely support jujitsu around here.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:22:40Jocko Willink?

  There's nothing about that.

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:42Jocko Willink?

  So is that, does that get us up to speed?

• 2:22:44Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I think so. Um, you know, since, since then I've had the opportunity. Um, a mutual friend of ours introduced me to psychedelic assisted therapy.

• 2:23:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:23:00Speaker 01

  For, uh, for veterans with, uh, with PTSD and TBI. And I got to go do that, uh, back in March with the mission within. And go down to Mexico. I didn't want to set any expectations about it because I just wanted it to happen organically.

• 2:23:22Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:23:23Speaker 01

  Um, I had a great experience. Um, in fact, I'm now involved with the mission within foundation. I'm on their board raising money to, to get other veterans down there. Recently raised a million dollars to, for Marines only. My friends who donate, that's what they donate to is Marines and dogs. And, uh, it, it's really important. I've spoken with our mutual friend about this and we agree that had this. Therapy been available to us, we'd have been better operators because it makes you clearer. You become really clear after this. It's not a magic pill or a panacea.

• 2:24:06Speaker 01

  You gotta put in the work afterward. But since I did it, uh, my ex-wife said she even noticed a difference in my son's behavior and his attitude. Uh, I approach everything differently now. I see the world through a different lens. Um, I'm sober. I don't drink. I don't, I used to need THC gummies to sleep at night. Nothing. Uh, you know, it's, it's been a huge benefit. Do breath work, meditation. Um, yeah, it's just really fantastic. It can completely be life-changing, I think.

• 2:24:47Speaker 01

  Uh, at least it has been for me and hopefully, uh, others will get, get this treatment as well if they're open to it. Uh, I know it's not for everybody. I know it's definitely not gonna be your jam and I've heard you mention that before, but, um...

• 2:25:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I, I, well, I don't think I really would need, I don't, I don't, don't think I'd need to go to, to that, uh, extent of anything.

• 2:25:14Speaker 01

  No, I, Jocko, I think that...

• 2:25:16Jocko Willink?

  I think jiu-jitsu and surfing and guitar.

• 2:25:18Speaker 01

  Jiu-jitsu for sure.

• 2:25:20Jocko Willink?

  That definitely helps me.

• 2:25:21Speaker 01

  You know, people think, they think it's just a physical workout, but it's not. It's, it's definitely emotional, spiritual. I mean...

• 2:25:31Jocko Willink?

  I know Echo gets quite emotional.

• 2:25:39Speaker 01

  And going back to the community thing, it's like the first time I've really felt like I was back in the Marine Corps is being part of that team.

• 2:25:47Jocko Willink?

  Jiu Jitsu is awesome for sure and, and you know, I've definitely known some people that have had really good experiences with the psychedelic type treatments and all that. So I, I, you know, I was trying to keep an open mind about everything. So if it's helping people out, right on, you know, I, I've also heard some people that have had some not good experiences.

• 2:26:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:26:06Jocko Willink?

  So I think it's definitely something that needs to be approached very, very cautiously. Uh, but then again, that's just an opinion from me. I'm an, I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know that much about it. Definitely have had people that have, it's helped them a ton. So, you know, if someone's at a point where they feel like they've, cause you know, I always think like, well, were you doing Jiu Jitsu before? Were you working out? Were you eating clean? Were you getting the right sleep? You could do all that stuff. Were you taking ownership of what's going on in your life? Cause if you're sitting around blaming a bunch of other things, it, he's gonna have a hard time resolving those things. If you don't say, yeah, you know what? It's probably my fault that I treated my spouse this way, or treated my kid this way, or treated my friends this way, or whatever.

• 2:26:49Jocko Willink?

  If you don't, if you're not able to say that, well then, you know, maybe you need some help getting there. So, uh, yeah, no, I'm glad it's, I'm glad it's helped you out. And it's definitely, like I said, it's helped out some friends of mine. So where, where can people find you right now? So you got thefun.org. I know you're on Instagram at J underscore Kopelman underscore USA. And Kopelman is K O P E L M A N. And then you're on Facebook, of course, at J, at J Kopelman. Is there any, anything else we can do to find you?

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  Uh, to find you? Missionwithin.org.

• 2:27:22Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:27:23Speaker 01

  Yep. If, uh, if you're a Marine or any service member that is interested in this, you can reach out to me for sure. Um, via social media, I'm available, but, uh, yeah, that pretty much covers it. Yep.

• 2:27:37Jocko Willink?

  Awesome, man. Good. Uh, Echo Charles, you got any questions?

• 2:27:41Speaker 02

  Uh, just real quick, back to the psychedelic experience. Um, you said it, it made things clear, like what, what's clear?

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, what's interesting is with Ibogaine, it has these neuroplasticity properties.

• 2:27:54Speaker 02

  Oh, that's the one you did.

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we did Ibogaine and five M E O D M T. And, uh, It's it it makes it it's kind of like taking your hard drive and wiping it. So you get a kind of a reset in your brain. And the easiest way I can say it is that with jujitsu, as you know, learning new techniques is very difficult, especially, you know, if you've had any kind of a brain injury or something, it makes it tough. And I think Echo's definitely can relate to that.

• 2:28:33Speaker 01

  But but it's I have an easier time picking up new techniques now. Like food tastes better for some reason. I look at the sky, it's more brilliant blue. And maybe it's just a new appreciation for life that I have in general, but certainly. Yeah, it even helps your moral clarity, I feel.

• 2:28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's almost like, because I know a lot of people who did not, I've been getting about other stuff. But when they talk about the reset or clarity or whatever, it's almost like the you're almost like you go through life distracted by your preconceived notions that are like can be inaccurate or more negative than they should be, you know, so you know, you talk about you can appreciate things more. You feel like you can appreciate things more. And it seems to make sense if you're seeing something or experiencing something without the burden of some negative thought that's just running in the back of your mind the whole time, you know? So it's like the appreciation kind of moves to the front, you know, with everything that kind of you go through.

• 2:29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I I try to look at everything a little more positively now. I I take things slower.

• 2:29:45Speaker 01

  I, you know, I'm a lot calmer than I was before. I feel more at ease about things. The way I approach things with my son is completely different. Rather than Telling him what's gonna be, I'll, I'll talk to him about things and you know, I didn't necessarily have that role model growing up. So we tend to just kind of carry on what we're modeled as kids. And you know, they say that PTSD is intensified if you had any kind of childhood trauma. I believe that's true. Um, I know it was in my case. And so,

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  um, I, I think that it's just helped me, you know, look at other people, you know, and, and have a different appreciation for understanding that somebody could be having a really bad day. And that's why they're behaving the way they are. And you try to give them some grace, you know, that's really all we can do is try to give each other a little grace and, and understanding and it just, it really makes things easier.

• 2:30:54Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Cool. Good to meet you.

• 2:30:56Jocko Willink?

  Anything else, Echo Charles?

• 2:30:57Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 2:30:58Jocko Willink?

  Jay, any, uh, any, any final thoughts?

• 2:31:04Speaker 01

  Uh, just want to say thank you very much for having me here today. It's been great. Uh, made this very easy for me. I appreciate it. Uh, and, uh, hopefully get to do some roles here one of these days.

• 2:31:17Jocko Willink?

  Right on, man. Well, that's what we do. Uh, thanks for joining us, man. Definitely appreciate, appreciate hearing your story and your lessons learned and, and, uh, most important, thanks for your service in the Navy and in the Marine Corps. And, and thanks for holding your word and taking care of that dog and your boys. Semper Fi, bro. Thank you.

• 2:31:38Speaker 01

  Semper Fi.

• 2:31:41Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Jay Kopelman has left the building and clearly some good lessons to learn. And I think one of the lessons is you're, there's a really good chance that you're not going to have a perfect path in life. Things are definitely going to go wrong. And being able to, you know, as I talk about this with Dave Burke.

• 2:32:04Speaker 02

  Good deal, Dave.

• 2:32:05Jocko Willink?

  Yes, that, that Dave Burke.

• 2:32:08Jocko Willink?

  The amount of wickets that you have to get through to be an F-18 fighter pilot in the Navy or in the Marine Corps. It is like extreme wickets. And some of them you don't have a lot of control over. Meaning sometimes you'll get done with flight school and you graduated number three. But there's only two fighter billets open and there's just, that's just the way it is. And that's it. That's, that's the course of your life has totally changed. Not to mention the fact that you had to be numbered. You, so you would have had to be number one or number two to actually get to jets. And that's a wicket you gotta jump through. By the way, you gotta, gotta jump a wicket to get them.

• 2:32:52Jocko Willink?

  What if you're born and your eyesight's not good? What if you've got some weird heart murmur? What if you've got some strange like blood disease that everything's normal, but you still can't be? There's so many things that have to be right. And the SEAL teams is similar, not. Dave Burke and I have had this discussion. He'll, he'll try and be a little bit humble.

• 2:33:12Jocko Willink?

  And say, no, you know, it's, you know, but the SEAL teams, the wickets are a little wider. You know, there's just more room. There's, you think about. I don't know how many, I don't know how many F-18 pilots there are in the Marine Corps or how many F-18 pilots there are in the Navy right now. But it's not a big number. It's not a big number. So situation here, you know, you get, you're going to go through life. You're going to maybe not get exactly what you want.

• 2:33:42Jocko Willink?

  Let's see what we can do. Let's take that and run with it. So that's what we're doing. Trying to make the best out of the situation we're in. Take ownership of it, move on. One thing that's going to help us across the board is being in good physical condition. You know, you're going to be more mentally prepared. For whatever, if you're physically prepared.

• 2:34:04Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 2:34:05Jocko Willink?

  Can you imagine you're going through a stressful scenario and you feel tired or winded or whatever? It's not going to help you.

• 2:34:11Speaker 02

  Way worse.

• 2:34:12Jocko Willink?

  It's way worse. So we're working out for working out. That means we need to get that clean fuel going. So check out jockofuel.com. If you want to get a, what is it? An audio message? I send an audio message. Jocko, the team at Jocko Fuel set this up. And what you do is you text Jocko Fuel to 24672 and then I'll send you like a voicemail. It's pretty late Mondays.

• 2:34:38Speaker 02

  I dig it.

• 2:34:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, hell yeah.

• 2:34:40Jocko Willink?

  They're short. They're, they're less than 20 seconds long.

• 2:34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:43Jocko Willink?

  So anyways, jockofuel.com. Check it out. We got protein. We got energy drinks. We got hydration, which is going Richter right now.

• 2:34:53Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 2:34:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's so, it tastes delicious. It's got the best freaking ingredients in it. Clean fuel, clean, natural sweeteners. Awesome. Complex of electrolytes, the perfect electrolytes. So check that out. Also, energy drink. Don't get, don't get a junk energy drink, which is what energy drinks are. There's only one good one. Let's go. Get yourself one that's good. Across the board. A hundred percent. No downside. There's not any other energy drinks that can say, yeah, no downside. There's not. They don't exist. So here we are. So check it out. jockofuel.com. Get what you need to stay on the path physically.

• 2:35:36Jocko Willink?

  You can get it at jockofuel.com. You can check Wawa, Vitamin Shop, GNC, Military Commissaries, Afees, Hanford, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wakefern, ShopRite, HEB down in Texas is crushing. So everyone in Texas, I'd like to say a big howdy to y'all for getting into that HEB and getting it done. Same thing with Meyer up in the Midwest. I don't know what you say up in Meyer in the Midwest. But I'd like to say thanks for getting in there and getting after it. Wegmans, out on the east coast, same thing. I don't know what our terminology is for, for crushing it at Wegmans.

• 2:36:13Speaker 02

  I think it's a, don't you know?

• 2:36:15Jocko Willink?

  Don't you know?

• 2:36:15Speaker 02

  Midwest, right? Don't you know?

• 2:36:17Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, maybe. No, it's more like, this is like more like how you doing country.

• 2:36:21Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:36:21Jocko Willink?

  Like, oh, I went into Wegmans and got some, I got some Molk, how you doing?

• 2:36:29Jocko Willink?

  So, check that out. Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, crushing in Shields as well. Crushing in Lifetime Fitness, Molkas Zellman in Lifetime Fitness, just, just flying off the shelves. So, that's what, we're making the good stuff. You're drinking the good stuff. Thank you. Small gyms everywhere, Jiu Jitsu, CrossFit, we're getting in there. Email J F sales at jocko fuel dot com if you want to get this good fuel into your world. And you know what? I'll say this. Go read the ingredients. Just go read the ingredients on what we put in the, in these drinks and in these supplements. They're awesome. That's what we got. Check it out. Jocko fuel dot com.

• 2:37:09Speaker 02

  Origin USA.

• 2:37:10Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:37:11Speaker 02

  American made. So, we're doing Jiu Jitsu as well.

• 2:37:13Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. We are a hundred percent.

• 2:37:15Speaker 02

  That's good for you physically and mentally, as you did note earlier. I could have went down a whole rabbit hole. I didn't, but I could have.

• 2:37:21Jocko Willink?

  Praise.

• 2:37:22Speaker 02

  The, the whole thing, but it's true.

• 2:37:25Jocko Willink?

  Praise.

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  Because it washes away your stress as, you know, actually Jason Kalipa went kind of on this as well. Where, you know, I think it was, yeah, I think I called it a stress. You have a stress patch from stuff that you get during, throughout the day, right? You get through stress, you get, you know, disagreement, whatever. It's because of stress patch.

• 2:37:44Jocko Willink?

  You talk, I get stressed.

• 2:37:46Speaker 02

  Exactly right. So you go to Jiu Jitsu, the stress patches get washed away. Unless, you're gonna need a gi if you're training Jiu Jitsu. Go to originusa.com. This is where you can get your gi. Chris Ruiz.

• 2:37:59Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:38:00Speaker 02

  He was still texting with him the other day. He was like, hey, my love for jujitsu got rejuvenated for all these reasons. I'm getting into Ghee. Which one do you recommend? He's on Origin.

• 2:38:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:09Speaker 02

  On the website or whatever. I recommended the Rift. Are they still doing the Rift?

• 2:38:14Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:38:14Speaker 02

  Ghee? Yeah. Okay. That's the one I recommended. So nonetheless, you need a Ghee. You also got rash guards. You also got stuff outside of jujitsu jeans, boots.

• 2:38:23Jocko Willink?

  Let's go.

• 2:38:24Speaker 02

  All made in America, by the way.

• 2:38:26Jocko Willink?

  We're all about that American made thing, right? We don't want to let our jobs and our manufacturing capability and our dollars go overseas. Want to keep them here in the United States of America. So check out originusa.com and get some non-communist gear that you can wear. Might as well be putting a big giant American flag on your, on your shoulders. When you put on a pair of American made jeans, boots, t-shirt, whatever. We got you. Originusa.com. Check it out. Also, we got, we got a law enforcement, first responders, military, jujitsu camp, August 27th through the 31st up in Maine. Go and check it out. We'll see you there. It's gonna be awesome.

• 2:39:10Speaker 02

  It's true. Also Jocko's store called Jocko's store. Discipline equals freedom. Good. All these things. When you want to represent these notions where you can get your stuff. Also, what we call now the Shirt Locker. Subscription scenario, new design every month, shirts.

• 2:39:27Jocko Willink?

  Last one landed pretty well. I mean, from the feedback I've seen.

• 2:39:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:39:32Jocko Willink?

  That's a back to the book one, right?

• 2:39:33Speaker 02

  Back to the book. Actually, technically now, in now today, as of today, the technically last one. Now this one. So whatever. Is thinking strategically all the time. That's a good one as well. Back to the book was good too.

• 2:39:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:47Speaker 02

  You know, um, but yeah, new design, uh, every month, subscription scenario. It's called the Shirt Locker. That also is on Jocko's store.com. So yeah, go ahead, check that out. Uh, on that page, on that specific page, Shirt Locker page, you can see kind of past designs. See kind of what, what the whole deal is. So yeah, if you like something, get something.

• 2:40:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Going deep into the, into the roots of that one.

• 2:40:09Speaker 02

  Of course, of course.

• 2:40:11Jocko Willink?

  The first 139 episodes, you said, if you like something, get something.

• 2:40:14Speaker 02

  It, I still maintain. Yeah, I maintain.

• 2:40:18Jocko Willink?

  Taking it back. Good job. Hey, speaking of if you like something, get something. If you like steak. Go get some steak from primalbeef.com or coloradocraftbeef.com. Awesome steak from awesome people, delivered to your door, ready to be thrown into or onto the grill, cooked and eaten. So check them out. Coloradocraftbeef.com or primalbeef.com and get yourself some steak. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also, we have Jocko Underground. Subscribe to that. Check it out. We're about to record one right now. Also YouTube, we're on there. Psychological Warfare, flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Books, the one we covered today from Baghdad With Love by Jay Kopelman. Also,

• 2:41:02Jocko Willink?

  I've written a bunch of books. You can check those out as well, especially the kids books. Check out the kids books. Get the kids books. Get them hyped for the movie, Way of the Warrior Kid, that's starting filming soon. And it's gonna be an epic movie, but it will be, there's layers in it, by the way. You probably could have guessed that. Significant layers. There's actually some significant layers in this whole thing. Oh, yeah. It's, it's, it's powerful. So be ready for that. Also, Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy of Leadership, Leadership Strategy and Tactics. I've written a bunch of books about leadership and I have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. It is at echelonfront.com. If you need help with anything in your life, the solution that

• 2:41:47Jocko Willink?

  you need is leadership. So go to echelonfront.com if you need leadership inside your organization or if you want to train leadership, which will help you in every aspect of your life, we have an online training option. It's extremeownership.com. Go and check that out. Learn how to lead yourself and your team and your family and your company and your community properly. And if you want to help service members, active or retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also, don't forget about

• 2:42:28Jocko Willink?

  Micah Fink, HeroesAndHorses.org. And finally, Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. All awesome ways to help out our veterans.

• 2:42:41Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to connect with us, Jay Kopelman is on Instagram, Jay underscore Kopelman underscore USA. He's on Facebook at Jay Kopelman. And don't forget about the Semper Fi and America's Fund. Go to thefund.org. They do a lot of great work there. And for us, I'm at Jaco.com. I'm on social media. Echo's on social media. Echo's at Echo Charles. I'm at Jocko Willink.

• 2:43:09Jocko Willink?

  Just watch out for the, um, the algorithm. Oh, also, what about the app? The Def Reset App. Your brother has been building it. It looks good. Are you in it?

• 2:43:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:43:22Jocko Willink?

  I haven't seen you posting in the morning.

• 2:43:24Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I haven't posted in the morning, but I'm in there for sure.

• 2:43:28Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Maybe you should get in there and comment a little bit more so we can get visibility on you.

• 2:43:33Speaker 02

  Maybe I will. How about that?

• 2:43:34Jocko Willink?

  Okay. The app has a good sense of humor. It's almost like, it's kind of part of the crew.

• 2:43:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:43Jocko Willink?

  So it talks smack to you. So if you want to get in that, get in that, uh, it's on, it's available right now on the Apple Store.

• 2:43:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. There's like, what, you know, I don't know all the terms, but there's like a soft line.

• 2:43:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So I don't think I'm supposed to be saying it right now, but it's there.

• 2:43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's in there for sure.

• 2:43:59Jocko Willink?

  And you can go download it and you can just, because today I, I logged in this morning and I was like, hey, up before the enemy, click. And the thing is, if you, when you click up before the enemy, it traps your time. So whatever time you got up, it says it. So if you're late and you say like, oh, I, let's say you forgot to do it, or you didn't get up, straight up. And at 7:48, you click up. It says, oh, the following people beat you. Nice try.

• 2:44:30Jocko Willink?

  Do we want everything to be a competition? No, we don't. Do we all have fun? Yes, we do. So that's what we're doing. Check out the app. You can get it the Apple App Store. And thanks once again to Jay for joining us. And thanks for your service in the Navy and the Marine Corps. And thanks to all our military members around the world.

• 2:44:48Jocko Willink?

  There's evil out there. There's darkness, there's tyranny, there's extremists, and you are military. Put yourselves in harm's way to protect us from those threats, and we thank you for that. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders. You put yourselves into harm's way in order to protect us here at home, and we thank you for that. And everyone else out there. Listen, we get one run at this game. One run. It's what you get. There's no restart.

• 2:45:28Jocko Willink?

  There's no do-overs. This is what you get. So don't waste it. Get in the game, stay in the game. Run up the score. Don't give up any points. Be loyal to your team. Be loyal to your friends. And yes, be loyal to your dogs. And that's all we've got for tonight. Until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.