315: Draft Dodgers. And Low IQ Men Being Used as Cannon Fodder. McNamara's Folly

0:00:00 - Opening 0:02:39 - McNamara's Folly. The Use of low-IQ troops in the Vietnam War. 2:19:13 - Final thoughts 2:44:29 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:02:35 - Closing gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 315 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  7 plus 14 equals A 21, B 22, C 23, D 24.

• 0:19Jocko Willink?

  A boy buys a sandwich for 20 cents, milk for 10 cents and pie for 15 cents. How much does he pay for it all? A 30 cents, B 35 cents, C 45 cents, D 50 cents.

• 0:38Jocko Willink?

  A rose is a kind of A animal, B bird, C fish, D flower.

• 0:48Jocko Willink?

  Awkward most nearly means A ignorant, B dangerous, C clumsy, D vulgar.

• 0:58Jocko Willink?

  Irate most nearly means A irresponsible, B insubordinate, C untidy, D angry.

• 1:09Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so those right there, clearly not the most difficult problems. Those are examples from a brochure that was handed out to potential service recruits in the 1960s to explain to them the type of questions that they were going to be asked on the AFQT, the Armed Forces Qualification Test, what we now call the ASVAB, in order to qualify them for military service. And I read that from an appendix that's in a book called McNamara's Folly, The Use of Low IQ Troops in the Vietnam War.

• 1:53Jocko Willink?

  And this book was written by a guy by the name of Hamilton Gregory, who served in Vietnam himself. And in this book, Gregory explains that not everyone could pass that test,

• 2:10Jocko Willink?

  which meant that there were people who did not qualify to join the service. It meant they did not have the cognitive capacity to be a soldier.

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  But guess what? In order to fight a war, you need men.

• 2:32Jocko Willink?

  And McNamara devised a way

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  to get more men into the military, whether they were capable or not. And it is a very sad story, indeed.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  You're going to find out that Hamilton Gregory actually ended up very close with some of these people during some parts of his service. So let's go to the book. In 1966, the US war in Vietnam was heating up rapidly. President Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, were faced with a problem. The armed forces needed more troops for the war zone. But there was a shortage of men who were considered fair game for the military draft. There were plenty of men of draft age, which is 18 to 26, in America, but most of them were unavailable. Many were attending college, using student deferments to avoid the draft. Others had found safe havens in the National Guard and reserves,

• 3:33Jocko Willink?

  which by and large were not sent to Vietnam. So if you went in the National Guard or the reserves, you weren't going to get sent to war. That's not true anymore.

• 3:44Jocko Willink?

  But in Vietnam, if you were in the National Guard, you weren't getting sent to Vietnam. Still, others were disqualified because they scored poorly on the military's mental and physical entrance tests. How could Johnson and McNamara round up enough men to send to war? They realized they would anger the vote-powerful middle class if they drafted college boys and if they sent National Guardsmen and reservists to Vietnam. So instead, they decided to induct the low-scoring men whom Johnson referred to in a secret White House tape as, quote, "second-class fellows."

• 4:23Jocko Willink?

  On October 1st, 1966, McNamara launched a program called Project 100,000,

• 4:32Jocko Willink?

  which lowered the mental standards. Men who had been unqualified for military duty the day before were now deemed qualified. By the end of the war, McNamara's program had taken 354,000 substandard men into the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy. Among the troops, these men were often known as McNamara's Morons, or the Moron Corps, or McNamara's Boys.

• 5:00Jocko Willink?

  Military leaders from William Westmoreland, the commanding general in Vietnam, to lieutenants and sergeants to the platoon level, viewed McNamara's program as a disaster. Because many of the Project 100,000 men were slow learners, they had difficulty absorbing necessary training because many of them were incompetent in combat. They endangered not only themselves, but their comrades as well. A total of 5,478 low IQ men died while in the service, most of them in combat. Their

• 5:38Jocko Willink?

  fatality rate was three times as high as other GIs. An estimated 20,000 were wounded, and some were permanently disabled. There were also tens of thousands of other "second-class" men who were not part of Project 100,000 but were inducted despite medical defects, such as missing fingers and blindness in one eye, psychiatric disorders, social maladjustment, and criminal backgrounds. Military leaders didn't want them, but were forced to accept them. We don't know how many of them died or were wounded.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  While I was in the Army, which was 1967 to 1970, I got to know some of McNamara's substandard soldiers, and I vowed that someday I would tell their stories and give the historical background. This book is the fulfillment of that vow.

• 6:37Jocko Willink?

  There's the opener. That's just the prologue. It's very disturbing to hear this. And it also, you know, as we read through this, you're going to definitely think of Forrest Gump. You, you, you, you, we have all seen that movie Forrest Gump and you think, oh, how did that guy? How was that guy in the military? He's a perfect example and you're going to hear plenty of examples like that. Same thing with Full Metal Jacket, you know, Private Pile. Obviously, a guy you think, well, how could he actually get recruited? Well, here's how. McNamara's 100K.

• 7:12Jocko Willink?

  Here's a note, he says, author's note, "I am aware words like moron, retarded, fatso, and dwarf are considered insensitive and offensive in today's society, but I use them because they were widely used in the 1960s, and it would mar the historical accuracy of my report if I replace them with words that are kinder. Likewise, I sometimes quote individuals whose descriptions are harsh and unsympathetic, but I have included them to document how men who were different were viewed and treated in those days. Names and certain other identifying features of the men at Fort Benning have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals and their families." So, there's some language clearly that is considered offensive today and he knows that,

• 7:56Jocko Willink?

  but he wanted to kind of give a feel of what these guys were like and how they were being treated, what they were being called back in the day.

• 8:06Jocko Willink?

  So, moving into this a little bit, getting into how his story started. He says, "One morning in the summer of 1967, I was seated with over 100 men in a room at the Armed Forces Induction Center in Nashville, Tennessee. It was the height of the Vietnam War and I had volunteered for service in the US Army." Sergeant walked into the room and announced that all of us would begin, would, would leave soon for travel to Fort Benning, Georgia to begin our army training. Then he asked, "Is anyone here a college graduate?"

• 8:35Jocko Willink?

  I raised my hand and he motioned me to follow him. He took me down a hallway to a bench where a young man was sitting. He informed me that the young man was named Johnny Gupton, who is also being assigned to Fort Benning. "I want you to take charge of Gupton," he said. "Go with him every step of the way." Without bothering to lower his voice, he explained that Gupton could neither read nor write, and would need help filling out paperwork when we arrived at Benning. Then he added, "Make sure he doesn't get lost. He's one of McNamara's morons." I'd never heard the term, and I was surprised that the sergeant would openly insult Gupton. In a few weeks, I would learn that McNamara's morons was a term that many officers and NCOs

• 9:20Jocko Willink?

  used to refer to low IQ men who were taken into the military under a program devised by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara to raise their IQs and mold them into productive soldiers.

• 9:36Jocko Willink?

  He goes on a little bit further and says, "I was nervous about the rigors ahead, but I felt brave and stoic and important. I envisioned losing weight and bulking up my muscles and becoming a lean, green fighting machine. As the popular saying had it, 'I looked beyond the eight weeks of hell and pictured myself going home on leave, looking hard and fit.'" I tried to make small talk with Gupton, but he didn't say much. I asked him what state he was from, but he didn't know. He spoke with a hillbilly accent and used mountain phrases like 'I knowed it' and 'sody water.'

• 10:11Jocko Willink?

  He looked unhealthily thin.

• 10:14Jocko Willink?

  I was surprised that he knew nothing about the situation he was in. He didn't understand what basic training was all about, and he didn't know that America was in a war.

• 10:24Jocko Willink?

  I tried to explain what was happening, but at the end, I could tell he was still in a fog.

• 10:31Jocko Willink?

  So that's

• 10:34Jocko Willink?

  that's that's what we're dealing with here, you know, guys that don't even know what state they're from. And there's a bunch of details in here. You got to get the book and read it. Just as he interacts with some of these folks, you know, they have to put down their address. They don't they don't know what their address is. They can't write. They can't fill out a form because they can't read. It's it's very, very sad. When is this book written? He wrote it. I mean, he wrote it now, but it's taking place in 1960. Whatever. But this book came copyright 2015. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. And I actually researched to try and get in touch with Hamilton Gregory, but unfortunately, he passed away.

• 11:18Jocko Willink?

  Here's an example of what we're dealing with. Gupton's new combat boots provided a challenge. He could tie the laces, but the knot was primitive and ineffective. I tried to teach him how to make a standard knot to no avail. So I ended up tying his boots every morning.

• 11:37Jocko Willink?

  He says Gupton was unable to make his bunk to strict army specifications. So Floellen was another guy. Floellen and I had to do job for him every morning. Gupton had difficulty distinguishing between officers and sergeants. He goes through all kinds of examples of what's going on in in boot camp. And and they show up at boot camp and they're doing standard boot camp stuff, you know, I want to go to Vietnam. I want to kill some Viet Cong. Don't call me sir. I work for a living. Kind of all those stereotypical things that that you hear about. All that's going on. Fast forward a little bit.

• 12:15Jocko Willink?

  This chapter is called Weaklings, Fatties and Dummies. One morning, as the 185 trainees of Bravo Company were assembled in front of Captain Bosch, he called out the names of 15 men, including me and Gupton. We were ordered to come forth and stand in line in front of the captain. He announced that we had been identified as being deficient. You're the scum of this company, a goddamn bunch of weaklings and fatties and dummies, he said. From now on, we would be known as the muck squad. You know what muck is? That's a shit at the bottom of a sewage pit. That's what you are worthless shit. I'm gonna run your asses all day long. He said that Bravo Company had a good chance of compiling the highest average on the final PT test of any company at Fort Benning, but that we threatened to drag down the company average.

• 13:00Jocko Willink?

  We were still members of our original platoons, but whenever Captain Bosch asked for the muck squad, we had to leave our comrades in line up in front of him. We received physical training beyond what we received with our platoons. It was often given before lunch and after dinner. So you can kind of pick this up and I forget if I highlight this or not, but, but the guy actually, Hamilton Gregory is not in good shape. And so he shows up and he mentions, no, I want to lose some fat and build some muscle. So he's not like an athletic guy that shows up and, and apparently that's why he's getting called out.

• 13:32Jocko Willink?

  Here's another interesting story about what we're dealing with. Someone in the barracks discovered that Gupton thought a nickel was more valuable than a dime because it was bigger in size. I saw him being cheated by a trainee who said, I'll give you this big nickel. If you give me your little dime.

• 13:49Jocko Willink?

  Uh, he says, word of Gub- Gupton's ignorance about coins apparently spread to the officers because one day muck squad lined up. Captain Bosch appeared with several visiting officers and the first thing they did was show Gupton a nickel and a dime and asked him which he would prefer. They all grinned when he pointed to the nickel.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Did you ever think that? Do you ever remember thinking that, that a nickel was worth more than?

• 14:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, when I was five.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too. I remember that because it kind of made sense in a way before you're good or you knew basic math.

• 14:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Cause look, you got a penny which kind of segregates itself because it's not made out of the shiny silver stuff or whatever. It's made out of something, you know, more brown, but.

• 14:30Jocko Willink?

  I actually can remember thinking a penny was more valuable than a dime.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 14:34Jocko Willink?

  I was just going size.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:35Jocko Willink?

  Just going, we're just going mass.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  But it makes sense if you just exclude the dime, uh, nickel relationship and the penny too. There's other facts, but if you exclude that little relationship, it makes sense because you go up, you go quarters bigger and then you got the 50 cent piece. That's even bigger and you got the dollar that's even bigger back then.

• 14:52Jocko Willink?

  But the point is what age did you figure out that that wasn't the deal?

• 14:55Speaker 01

  I know, bro, but I just said I can kind of relate a little bit.

• 14:57Jocko Willink?

  You can relate to Gupton when you were five, bro. This guy's in the military.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Which paints a picture.

• 15:02Jocko Willink?

  Actively trading coins.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 15:06Jocko Willink?

  It's awful.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:09Jocko Willink?

  He says, "Then the visitors stood in front of one man at a time and asked such questions as, 'Who's the President of the United States?' This question was one of the most, most of the men could not answer. One of the officers looked at me, probably noting my goofy face and asked, 'Where are we fighting a war?' 'Vietnam, sir.' 'Where's Vietnam located?' I replied as much as I could muster, 'Sir, Vietnam is situated in Asia, directly south of China and adjacent to Laos and Cambodia.' He looked surprised by my intelligent response, and his fellow officers grinned, 'He's a college graduate,' interjected Captain Bosch, 'but he's badly out of shape.' One of the visitors, who was a captain, asked Gupton, 'Which rank is higher, captain or general?' Gupton was speechless for a few moments and then stammered, 'I don't know, drill sergeant.'

• 15:54Jocko Willink?

  Drill sergeant, the officer yelled, he pointed at his insignia and said, 'Don't you know these two bars mean, Captain? Don't you know what you're supposed to say, sir?' Captain Bosch said, 'Can you believe this idiot was drafted? I'll tell you who else is an idiot, fucking Robert McNamara. How can he expect us to win a war if we draft, draft these morons?' Captain Bosch's contemptuous remark about Defense Secretary McNamara was typical of the comments I often heard from career Army men who detested McNamara's lowering of enlistment standards in order to bring low IQ men into the ranks. So, we always, well, no, we always, this is something that comes up all the time today too, right?

• 16:39Jocko Willink?

  We're always concerned about lowering the standards for things. Cause when you start to lower the standards, standards are there for a reason. Start to lower the standards, and we don't know what's gonna happen. I think that's the scariest thing about lowering standards, is that you, you don't know. You don't know what's gonna happen. You just know what has worked, and even what things you say they quote worked, you know that those things have been stressed and sometimes they didn't work all that well, and maybe the standard should have been higher, so now we're gonna lower them?

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but-

• 17:08Jocko Willink?

  It's a concerning thing to do.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  A lot of times, or, a lot of times, I don't even know what that means, but the- The thought behind it is lowering standards because we need more people.

• 17:19Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's what's happening right here.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Right, so it's like a, it's like a, this constant balancing act because sure, you can have more people, but you can't lower the standards all the way down so that more people actually hurts because there are a bunch of people who are incapable or whatever.

• 17:32Jocko Willink?

  That's the, that's the point.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I see the under, like, because what if your standards are too high? Kind of like no one can meet these standards, so now you got one guy here or three guys and they can't do the job because there's only three of them. So let's get some, you know, some, some other guys doing some other stuff where sure, you know, one of these three guys could probably do the job of eight of these other guys, but they're over here doing, you know, busy doing other stuff, so let's get eight more guys.

• 17:58Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  You know, but when they start to get in each other's way.

• 18:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and then we gotta, well, I guess the question is really,

• 18:05Jocko Willink?

  where do you draw the line?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:07Jocko Willink?

  And that's what's hard to figure out.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 18:09Jocko Willink?

  Because, well, like I said, you have your standards and you think, well, we kind of have survived with these standards.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:18Jocko Willink?

  For four wars.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:21Jocko Willink?

  Right, they kind of worked and all of a sudden we're going, well, you know what, we're actually going to lower these standards.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:27Jocko Willink?

  That's a rough move to make.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:30Jocko Willink?

  Especially, and this is very common for McNamara, to just make decisions and impose things without consulting the frontline troops that actually have to train and then go fight alongside these people that are not capable.

• 18:49Jocko Willink?

  A little bit more about boot camp here. "Day began at 4:30. Day was filled with exercise, instruction, menial chores, all accompanied by incessant shouting and insults. We were called a variety of disparaging names, including shitheads, assholes, pussies, scumbags, slimeballs, pansies, and queers. One verbally clever sergeant would refer to a poorly performing trainee as a sad sack of shit or an idiotic turd. Or he would tell him that whale shit at the bottom of the, is at the bottom of the ocean and you're lower than whale shit."

• 19:23Jocko Willink?

  At night, we got little sleep. We were supposed to go to bed at 10 o'clock, but as things turned out, we were up until 12:30, which meant we only got four hours of sleep. Some nights, we didn't even get four hours of sleep. If we had to pull fire guard duty, we'd spend an hour patrolling inside and outside the barracks, watching for fire, then we would wake up our replacement. There's a bunch of interesting information about boot camp.

• 19:46Jocko Willink?

  And then he says, "I learned that Captain Bosch wanted to rid as many of us members of the muck squad as possible because they threatened to pull down the company average for the end of basic training tests," which is, this is pretty typical of the military, where there's some weird rule or some weird goal that causes all these unintended circumstances. Like, okay, we're gonna judge, we'll give a company award for the best PT scores, and then people start running people out of the company and not training them. That's unintended consequences in the military is always, I always gotta chuckle out of them. But it happens in every industry. So that's why you gotta be aware of them. So here's this guy, you know, the commanding general or whoever, the regimental commander probably thought,

• 20:29Jocko Willink?

  you know, I wanna see, I wanna, I wanted him to really have something to strive for. Let's give, let's give the best company's PT scores an award. We'll give them a streamer on their flag. Yeah, that'll be great. So now you just got these, these leaders just getting rid of people.

• 20:47Jocko Willink?

  So that's what happens. Here's a little bit more scariness. "For a week or so, a sergeant was assigned to accompany Gupton at the rifle range. I overheard the sergeant telling other sergeants that Gupton should absolutely never be allowed to handle loaded weapons on his own. All the sergeants agreed that big trouble would happen in the weeks ahead when we trainees simulated combat with such maneuvers as fire and movement, in which you advance in parallel lines with a partner through an assault course. While your partner ran ahead, you provided cover fire. Then he dropped to the ground and provided cover fire for you as you ran ahead, and so on down the field. The sergeants

• 21:26Jocko Willink?

  foresaw disaster." So this guy's not even be able to be capable of the fundamental rudimentary tactic of war, which is cover move. Here, this is where you can see that Gregory's having some issues on one of these forced marches. He's getting called a goddamn pussy. Get back up and run like a man. This continues on after we marched an hour or so. I got heat cramps in my shoulders and became dizzy and nauseated at one rest stop. I took a swig of water from my canteen, which made me vomit. Floellen, which again is one of his buddies, came over and felt my forehead, which he said was burning up.

• 22:09Jocko Willink?

  He summoned Sergeant Boone, who splashed cool water on my face. Then to lighten my load, the sergeant carried my rifle while Floellen carried my pack and we continued our march. When we arrived at the rifle range, I felt sick and dizzy and I was parched. And I walked through a patch of glass, lay down and blanked out. Next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance headed toward the hospital. Medic was taking my temperature, which was 105. When we got to the hospital, my temperature was still 105. I was stripped down and dunked into a big hospital tub filled with ice and water. I was kept in the hospital for a few days and then released back to Bravo Company. But while I was gone, Captain Bosch had secured permission to have me sent to Special Training Company

• 22:50Jocko Willink?

  because I had missed key days of training and needed, quote, rehabilitation for being recycled to another basic training company. So he's got the opportunity to get rid of this guy that's slow and not in the best of shape. And he gets put in this special training company. So let's fast forward a little bit to this special training company. When I arrived at Special Training Company, I was taken to the orderly room to be interviewed by the first sergeant. Undoubtedly influenced by my goofy face, he said, "We gotta fill out some paperwork. Can you read and write?"

• 23:24Jocko Willink?

  Gregory replies, "I hope so. I said I'm a college graduate." He gave me a surprise look. He was just one of the many who prejudged me because I appeared to be a dolt.

• 23:34Jocko Willink?

  I smiled and said, I bet you I thought, I bet you thought I was one of McNamara's morons. He grinned and said, we got a lot of morons here. We don't need anymore. When I told him I wanted to pass through special training and finish basic as quickly as possible, he seemed pleased and we ended up having a friendly conversation. There were about 100 men in special training, most of whom had failed basic training because they possessed one or more of these attributes mentally slow, weak, inept, overweight, or psychologically troubled. Also present were trainees who were convalescing from injuries. Whereas physical training occupied about 40% of our actives in basic training, it consumed 90% in special training company. We were supposed to get instruction that would help us with the rifle and test and the G3

• 24:18Jocko Willink?

  proficiency test, but there was very little assistance. Low IQ men were supposed to get remedial reading lessons, but I saw no evidence of such training. At special training, it was PT all day, every day.

• 24:33Jocko Willink?

  After I stowed my gear in a wall locker, I joined the company which was on the PT field, struggling with the most excruciating physical torment I have ever endured in my life. Intensive log drills. And he goes on to talk about log PT. He actually has a picture of, of SEALs in here doing log PT, because if you don't know, that's a huge part of, not a huge part, it's a substantial part of basic SEAL training. We call it log PT.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, is that, the log PT, is that mainly, because they're not really exercises, right? They're just like, oh, we want to introduce this log to your whole thing to make everything hard? Or is it actual like a program to work out?

• 25:18Jocko Willink?

  It's, wow.

• 25:21Jocko Willink?

  What he says here is the drill is nothing but torture involving no true rehabilitation or strengthening. That's what he says. So maybe that answered your question. But, um, when you do it in BUDs, you're, it's, it's definitely like, uh, it's teamwork and strength. So you have a log, it's basically a small telephone pole. Maybe it's...

• 25:44Jocko Willink?

  Probably fifteen feet long or something like that. Maybe, maybe, no, maybe ten feet long.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Do you ever take it in the water?

• 25:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Does it float?

• 25:51Jocko Willink?

  You take it in the water, you take it through the obstacle course.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Like, how does it, is, cause.

• 25:55Jocko Willink?

  Water is not a huge part of it.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:57Jocko Willink?

  And it would have to float, like, otherwise you would drown.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Right, but you know how there's different, okay, so in Kauai, we have logs too, we mess with or whatever in the water, but sometimes if they're super dry, they'll float, float. They're like a little floaty thing, but if they're not, they'll kind of float, but if you get on it, it'll sink and it's a pain in the ass.

• 26:13Jocko Willink?

  It's much more a land device.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  It's more of a land.

• 26:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but you do, like, you, you, you all put it on your left shoulder, then you do squats, then you do overhead press and you hold it up there, and then you do like left shoulder, right shoulder, overhead press. And then you do lay down, you do sit-ups with it, you do, so you just, any kind of PT, calisthenics.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's a little bit of a program there, like, where it's like, okay, like.

• 26:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like, you do push-ups, you lay down, you do, like, bench press with it.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:42Jocko Willink?

  You know, then you do push-ups on it, and then you do sit-up. I remember doing sit-ups, cause I remember they said, "Sit-ups", and I was kind of thinking, "How, how are we gonna do a sit-up for a log?", but yeah, you just all lay there, put it across your chest and do sit-ups.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  With it across your chest.

• 26:54Jocko Willink?

  With it across your chest.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Oh, so it's like a little piece of workout equipment?

• 26:57Jocko Willink?

  It's a little, it's a big piece of workout equipment.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So, do you ever, and I thought it was you who might even have said this, but I don't know, clarified, so have you ever, do they ever, um, say, "Hey, just bring this log, you guys", you know, like, to, if you're going to the, I don't know, what do you call it, cafeteria or something?

• 27:13Jocko Willink?

  No, you would meet for a log PT.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so it was pretty specific.

• 27:17Jocko Willink?

  And then, one, for a while, they had a log that was called Old Misery. That was, that was way thicker.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:25Jocko Willink?

  Than the other logs, and so if your boat crew was doing bad, they'd give you Old Misery. And I guess now they have an even better log, which is, it's a log, but it's cut up into pieces and tied together with a rope.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:42Jocko Willink?

  So each piece, so they can tell who's putting out and who's not. So you just, you know, you've got your fifty-pound chunk or whatever, you know, if there's, if it's one continuous log, and I'm under it and you're under it, and there's five other people under it, it's kind of hard to tell who's putting out and who's not. Or they get that log that's all broken up.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  You're in the middle there.

• 28:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're in the middle, you're kind of cruising, right?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  You can be.

• 28:05Jocko Willink?

  You could be, you probably could be. So, now they have this log that's cut up.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:12Jocko Willink?

  And yet attached. So let's see how you're looking now with that part of your log sagging.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Doesn't that psychologically, again, it might do the opposite. Cause psychologically, like if it's all one log and you kinda can't tell who's putting out and who's not. Doesn't that kinda add to the team building experience where you kinda gotta trust the guy?

• 28:33Jocko Willink?

  Yes, but let's say I, they didn't have that log. They didn't have either one of those logs. When I went through, we didn't have old misery log and we didn't have this cut up log.

• 28:43Jocko Willink?

  But, so I don't know, but you feel, you know, you should feel peer pressure to like lift. But let's say you were an instructor and you're watching this boat crew kinda fa- kinda fail. And you're wondering, hey, who in this boat crew is actually getting after it?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:01Jocko Willink?

  And who's not?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:03Jocko Willink?

  Hey, go grab this cut up log.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna see.

• 29:05Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna find out real quick.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:08Jocko Willink?

  That's the thing, man, that that training makes you, it figures out what your weaknesses are.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  That's interesting because that really illustrates the two separate elements of buds and training and stuff. Where it's like the instructor's perspective and then the, the user, the person, right? The candidate, what do you, who do you call the cadet?

• 29:31Jocko Willink?

  Tadpole.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:33Jocko Willink?

  That's legitimately, they call them tadpoles, like a baby frog.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  So it really clarifies that those, the difference in perspective because look, if I'm a little guy who's not very strong. And I, and each one of our, and I'm, and we got the cut up log and everybody, and you know, you got, I don't know, how many guys?

• 29:48Jocko Willink?

  You're in a boat crew with other guys that are your same height or very similar. Couple inches difference.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's say my strength isn't strength, it's distance running or something like this, yeah. But now. The functionality as a team kinda breaks down a little bit.

• 30:07Jocko Willink?

  Little bit.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  From the user perspective.

• 30:08Jocko Willink?

  Here's the deal. If you're my swim buddy, you're my boat crew, we're together and I know you're a fast runner. And I know that you're not that as strong as you could be, but you're a good guy. Guess what? Come on, man. We got this. What if you're a turd? And I'm like, hey dude, you aren't putting out.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:26Jocko Willink?

  So it does help develop, it helps identify people that that aren't good teammates. Cause if you're a fast runner, you might be like, hey Jaco, you know, let's say I'm a slow runner. I'm stronger than you, but you're faster than me. Hey Jaco, I'll pace you on this run. And you help me and you push me. And that's the thing. You're gonna have good days and bad, or good days and bad days, A. You're also gonna have strengths and weaknesses. Everyone is.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:52Jocko Willink?

  So there's no one. I'm trying to think. There's just about no one that goes through buds that just doesn't have any issues. They're gonna find, cause hey, you might be a really fast runner, but you get cold. You know, you might be really good at the obstacle course, but you get cold. You might be a really good swimmer, but you get cold. Do you see what I'm saying? They're gonna find something. And the cold thing is funny because, but I think that's what makes a lot of people quit is just being cold and uncomfortable and miserable.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that warmth.

• 31:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that warmth seems, but it's so temporary. It's a freaking lie.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can, I can, I understand.

• 31:34Jocko Willink?

  But there's very few people that don't have a problem with some area of buds. You know what? Maybe that's strong. There's, there's, there's, there's a decent amount of people that have, that are like, oh, I was kind of okay at everything. Okay, believe me. I'm not trying to say I was good. I definitely wasn't great at anything. I definitely wasn't. But I was kind of okay. And there was people that were more okay than me at everything. So there's people that kinda. But if you're really good, here's, here's, I guess where it comes in. If you're really good at one thing, chances are you're not gonna be really good at everything. There were some guys in my class that were really good at just about everything. They might have one or two things that they weren't great at, but they were usually pretty small.

• 32:19Jocko Willink?

  I mean, my honor man, a guy named Keith Kamira, he was pretty much good at everything. He was a stud in the water. He was fast. He was awesome at the O course, but I will say this.

• 32:29Jocko Willink?

  Even the like the guys that were really good at everything, they would very, they actually wouldn't be, they wouldn't be the best at something.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:38Jocko Willink?

  They wouldn't be like, oh, this guy, we're gonna win the runs by a record number, or this guy's gonna do the Oak Horse in a record number. There might be a guy that's just, hey, I swam in college and that guy's just gonna crush the swims.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:52Jocko Willink?

  You know, we're we're looking for him on the rugs.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Right, but that's kind of what I'm saying with the cut up log versus the full log. So it's like, hey, you're a good teammate, you wanna pick up the slack for this guy and he's gonna be, you can't pick up, it's harder to pick up the slack.

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's definitely harder.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Definitely harder. You see what I'm saying? So look, this poor guy who's great at swimming, great at running, and then, but he's just a little skinnier or whatever.

• 33:15Jocko Willink?

  Needs help on the belts, boy.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  And if you got a full log, a connected log, it's like, hey, let's all do this together. I got you. Hey, I'm gonna trust you to put out what you can.

• 33:26Jocko Willink?

  And that would be the standard. Occasionally, this is what would I imagine triggered this? Because again, they didn't have this kind of log when I went through. What I think would trigger this is you see a boat crew that's now yelling at each other. Now we got, now we got a problem. Let's see what's going on for real. Because a lot of times, not a lot of times, it can definitely happen that the guy that's yelling at everybody is the guy that's not putting out. You know what I'm saying?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So. Yeah, but doesn't that kind of work both ways though? So like, yeah, if you got, what if I'm weak in the cut up log? And I, man, I just can't do these reps the way these other guys can. But if you're a good teammate versus a bad teammate, that's gonna show regardless, right? If you're a bad teammate, put it this way, because you see a guy and he's like, he's putting out as much as he can, he's physically weaker than everybody and I start yelling at him.

• 34:17Jocko Willink?

  That's bad.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:18Jocko Willink?

  Unless you're encouraging him. Here's the thing, I think that people get, get, get, what's it, jammed up? Jammed up during seal training is. And instructors know this, like, let's say you and I are in a boat crew, right? And we probably would have been a boat crew because you're five eleven, I'm five eleven, right? So we're in a boat crew and you're sick or you have cramps or you, maybe you're just not strong at, you know, maybe your neck is hurt.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:48Jocko Willink?

  And so we're getting told to do something and you can't do it. And you're like, I can't hold this boat on my head right now. I can't do this anymore, right? The instructors see that and they go over and they go, oh, you, you know what they start saying to you? You're holding back the team.

• 35:05Jocko Willink?

  You're holding back the team.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:07Jocko Willink?

  The team doesn't want you. You're gonna make them lose. When they lose, they're gonna get hammered by us. We're gonna crush them and it's all gonna be your fault. They're getting in that person's head and it works. And that person goes, I quit, I don't wanna be a detriment to the team, right? So they quit. It's a lie. It's actually a lie. They, cuz everyone, every one of those guys in BUDs is gonna have a time where they're like, oh, this isn't my strength right now and I need, can somebody help me with whatever? Maybe they got like heinous, there's just things are gonna happen. And, well, to, to a lot of people, to a lot of people, things are gonna happen where they're feeling like, oh my God.

• 35:49Jocko Willink?

  I'm trying to think, I don't think I actually was ever in that bad of a situation during BUDs, where I was like, gotta carry me across the line or whatever. But I saw it happen to people.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:59Jocko Willink?

  And sometimes they would get in those, and it was okay.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:02Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's, hey, man, don't worry, we, we got you. Hey, just hang on. We'll, we'll, like, someone's freezing, I'll cuddle around them to like, to like get them warm, stuff like that, you know? That's what you're trying to do. Now, if the person's a piece of shit, you're kinda like, dude, you look a little chilly over there. So there's like a little selection going on. There's a little class selection, even though it's not formal, like in Ranger School, they do peer, peer evaluations, where you have to rank everyone in the class and like the last person's getting dropped if they got a couple of times in a row. And I forget the actual rules cuz I never went through Ranger School, but,

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:35Jocko Willink?

  But if you, if they rank Echo Charles number forty-eight, again, bottom of the list. Oh, there's Echo Charles again, we're getting rid of him. And so they actually rotate through, they're like, okay, rank me last this time, rank Echo last next time. And so if you do it smart, if you work together, you can, no one gets dropped. No one gets peered out.

• 36:54Jocko Willink?

  In SEAL training, they They don't really have that, except for what I'm just talking about, which is looking at a guy going, "Oh, we don't want to help him right now."

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:05Jocko Willink?

  In his moment of weakness.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  It's handled internally.

• 37:08Jocko Willink?

  It's handled internally.

• 37:11Jocko Willink?

  Uh, all right, here we go. Let's get back to the book. Speaking of this, there's various tests. He talks about these, this, this test that they have to pass that has, that has a bunch of different components. It's got like a low crawl that you gotta make. You gotta do these monkey bars. You gotta do this, this sprint, jump over trenches type thing. There's a grenade throw. They got, and then a mile run. So that they have a test that they have to pass to get out of this training company. And he, and he talks about the various things and what would make people fail. But one of the things he said is, he says, "To succeed in the mile run, you obviously needed endurance, but you also needed problem solving ability." "At the beginning, some of the men would sprint as if they were running a hundred yard dash. This caused them to become out of breath and tired and they would slow down and struggle

• 37:56Jocko Willink?

  for the rest of the mile. They couldn't grasp or apply what the sergeants told them about the need to maintain a steady pace throughout the entire mile." "For most of the men in special training company, passing the test was impossible. Their low mental capacity doomed them to failure. They could never pass." "Under military rules, they were supposed to stay at special training until they passed all requirements for, for graduation from basic." So what was going to happen to them? Would the army keep them in the company until their service time came to an end? Or would they be discharged and sent home? Or horrible to imagine, would there be cheating of the kind that Captain Bosch had used in Bravo Company to send them on to Vietnam?

• 38:42Jocko Willink?

  So you got this special training company. In order to get out of there, you gotta pass the basic requirements to get out of basic training and then you can go back to your company and complete.

• 38:51Jocko Willink?

  And we already got an example of Captain Bosch. I was like, "Oh, we're gonna get rid of some of these guys." And there's another incident that he talked about where there's various forms of cheating that they did to get someone a better PT score, get someone to pass a test. So that's happening. Again, it's a unintended consequence of what, of this whole training program.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:14Jocko Willink?

  He says here, "While most of the men did poorly on the PT test because they were limited mentally, this was not the case with Charles Lassiter, who was very intelligent but too weak and clumsy to pass. He was about 6'1", had long spindly legs, and yet he was unable to jump across the ditch in the run and dodge and jump. When he ran through the course, he took short, dainty steps, and he was too uncoordinated to make the leap. There was something about Lassiter that elicited fierce hatred from the sergeants. They hounded him constantly, calling him a queer and a pansy. During the training day, he was screamed at more than anyone else, and in the evenings, he was always given log drills as punishment. Finally, he couldn't take it anymore. At lunchtime one day, he sat on his bunk and declined to fall out for afternoon formation. I tried to coax him into getting up, but he said,

• 39:59Jocko Willink?

  "I can't take any more of this shit." He seemed deeply depressed. A sergeant appeared and ordered him to join the company, but he refused. The sergeant fetched the company commander, Captain Brown, who gave him a direct order to get off the bunk and join the company on the PT field. Again, Lassiter refused. The MPs were summoned, and they arrested him and took him to the stockade. We never saw him again. I later heard that he was court martialed and sentenced to four years hard labor in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

• 40:34Jocko Willink?

  Lassiter's refusal to train must have caught the attention of high-ranking officers at Fort Benning because a few days after the event, a full-bird colonel visited the company. Captain Brown assembled us in front of the colonel and said that we were fortunate to have him with us because he was a combat veteran of World War II, and he had important things to say to us. The colonel proceeded to give us a motivational talk. He was a white-haired, distinguished-looking officer, and he seemed sincere and concerned. Without making any reference to Lassiter's deed, he exhorted us to fulfill our duties and fight, to guarantee the liberties enjoyed by our families and friends. Our nation was involved in a conflict between the forces of freedom and the forces of darkness. Insidious totalitarian

• 41:19Jocko Willink?

  communists wanted to enslave us and trample upon our rights. We must be strong men, obedient men, and we must be willing to sacrifice like Washington's troops did at Valley Forge in the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, or like Eisenhower troops did on the beaches of Normandy.

• 41:39Jocko Willink?

  He continued in this vein, and as he spoke, I glanced at the men near me.

• 41:44Jocko Willink?

  They were looking at the speaker respectfully, but I knew that most of them were not comprehending his concepts. It was a bit comical, as well as a bit sad. Here was a well-meaning WWII veteran who seemed unaware of the intelligence level of most of his listeners, talking about patriotism and other abstractions to men who had no idea of what he was talking about.

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Jocko Willink?

  I probably should have covered, there's just so many incidents that he covers in here that kind of identifies the mental capacity of the people that he's dealing with. And that's one example, but there's really other obvious ones. You know, he talked about not being able to tie the shoe, not be able to read and write. These guys are, they're just, they just don't have the cognitive capacity to, to do this stuff. And that was sort of the, the crux of it. Um, this, this WWII veteran coming down and delivering this eloquent speech that the guys just don't, they just don't understand it. It just doesn't mean anything to them.

• 42:54Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. He says, "After a few weeks at special training, I took the final PT test and passed it easily. I was recycled to a new company where I picked off, where I picked up where I'd left off with Bravo Company. I finished basic training with my new company, and then I went to US Army Intelligence School. While I was there, I happened to run into a man who had been at special training as a convalescent while he recuperated from a hand injury. He informed me that all of the men I had known at special training had been quote administratively passed, end quote, and sent on to advanced training. He said that the company commander had been ordered to certify that the men were malingurers, who could have passed the final test if they had truly wanted to."

• 43:38Jocko Willink?

  Just to give you a little bit more of his story, he says, "After intelligence school, I went to Vietnam, but I had no contact with Project 100,000 men because I served as an Army intelligence agent. Wearing civilian clothes and using a fake name, I posed as a journalist and worked on a team that recruited and trained agents for espionage missions in Cambodia, a country from which Communist forces launched attacks on American forces. While I was in Vietnam, I continued to write letters to members of Congress. And I had one moment of success." And he started writing letters to Congress saying, "Hey, these guys should not be in the military and they definitely shouldn't be sent to combat." He says, "An aide to Senator Robert Kennedy wrote me that he was moved by my descriptions

• 44:19Jocko Willink?

  of the low IQ men and was urging the Senate to hold a hearing on Project 100,000. I eagerly watched the mail for a letter detailing plans by Senator Kennedy. But one morning in June 1968, I heard news that Kennedy had been assassinated. I suspect that my only chance for congressional action had died with the senator. I was correct. A few years after the war ended, I arranged to get a computer printout listing all the names of Americans who died in Vietnam. I skimmed the list, looking for the last names that matched the names of men I had known at Fort Benning. Unfortunately, the death list included the names of two men I had known at Special Training Company, Ernesto Lozano and Freddie Hensley.

• 45:04Jocko Willink?

  Lozano was a man I didn't know very well. The only thing I remembered about him was that some of the sergeants had given him the nickname Retardo. Freddie Hensley, of course, I knew well. I was not surprised to discover that he had been killed in combat. With his good looks, he probably was assumed to be normal and moved along to Vietnam and sent out in the field. And I didn't cover that part, but Freddie Hensley was a guy that looked very handsome guy, normal looking guy, but he just wasn't very intellectually capable." He says, "Freddie's death hit me hard. I remembered how he was always sighing, an indication of the tremendous anxiety he experienced in special training.

• 45:45Jocko Willink?

  I remembered how he lacked the mental quickness to qualify with the M14 rifle. I felt enormous anger, which I still feel decades later. He never should have been drafted. He never should have been administratively passed at special training. He never should have been sent into combat."

• 46:05Jocko Willink?

  Grasping at straws, I got to thinking that maybe there was another man named Freddie Hensley who died. So I tried to find his family by telephoning people in his hometown with the last name, the same last name. I eventually made contact with his mother and ascertained that Freddie, the Freddie I had known was indeed the man who had died in Vietnam. I told her that I had been Freddie's friend at Fort Benning. She said that she and the family were proud that Freddie had given his life to defend his country. As we talked, I carefully introduced my belief that Freddie should not have been sent into combat. Before long, she was expressing grief and anger and bewilderment. She told me that

• 46:48Jocko Willink?

  when Freddie received his draft notice, she and other family members went to the induction center and explained that Freddie had been a EMR, Educable Mentally Retarded Classes at School, and had not been able to drive a car and that it was a mistake to draft him. In response, the drill sergeant reassured the family that Freddie would not be put into danger. He would just do menial jobs such as sweeping floors and peeling potatoes. "He was a good boy," she said. "When he was little, we used to go everywhere together. He was my little man." She began to sob and she lamented, "Why did they have

• 47:29Jocko Willink?

  to draft him?" I want to know why. So now we get into the part of the book that answers that question, why? Why was this happening? This section's about Project 100,000. It gives some really interesting information. And you know, I usually, when we have Vietnam guys on here, I always kind of probe this area of what was it like? What was, what were the protests like? You know, I kind of, and I've never had anybody... Talk too deeply about, hey, this was this dynamic environment, this polarized, they don't really,

• 48:11Jocko Willink?

  it seems like because there wasn't social media, because there wasn't 24 hour news cycle. If you lived in, you know, Ohio and you were going to join the army, you only saw the other people in Ohio and probably the people that you hung out with were like, yeah, well, you know, you're joining the army, you're from Ohio and we're Americans, so we're joining the army or, oh, you got drafted, cool. It was like, it seems like there was less connection. But it's interesting to hear some of these statistics that he talks about here and the way this all looked and the way this all washed out. And the other thing is, we have guys that either got drafted and said, Roger that, or they joined up. Either way.

• 48:51Jocko Willink?

  So,

• 48:53Jocko Willink?

  here we go. Yes, the majority of Americans who served in Vietnam were technically volunteers. Some were indeed true volunteers, such as the idealistic patriotic youths described. But most of them volunteered only because of the way the draft was carried out. Local draft boards or military recruiters told them that they were likely to be drafted soon and they had two choices. They could submit to the draft and serve two years, probably in combat, or they could volunteer and serve three years in non-combat MOS, which is military occupational specialty like mechanic, cook, or computer programmer. Most men chose the second, safer option, because the vast majority of them would never have enlisted

• 49:37Jocko Willink?

  if the draft had not been in place, been in place. It would be more accurate to call them draft-induced volunteers.

• 49:47Jocko Willink?

  And he says, I was in another category, which I call draft-influenced volunteer. My local draft board put me on a list of possible draftees, but my family doctor told me, without any prompting on my part, that I could, that I could avoid the draft if he wrote a letter to the draft board about a pre-existing medical condition.

• 50:06Jocko Willink?

  Hyperthyroidism. I declined his off offer because the draft board's interest in me woke out of my woke me out of my adolescent days and forced me to take a hard look at the issues. Because I was a strong believer in America's fight against communism, I decided that it was my patriotic duty to serve. So I signed up for three years in the army with a promise of an interesting assignment, military intelligence. But I make no claim to be a hero. I did not volunteer for infantry. So there's got people getting drafted. You got people getting told, hey, you're gonna get drafted, bro. You might just so they never would have enlisted voluntarily. It's like saying, oh, yeah, he volunteered. Hey, Echo, you can either volunteer or you can possibly take this job over here, which is going to get you into combat. And if you don't want to go to

• 50:51Jocko Willink?

  combat, well, you're gonna you're gonna sign up. So it's draft induced draft influenced some different things that happen. Just to run some numbers here, he says during the major years of the Vietnam era, 1964 to 1973, there were 26,800,000 draft age American males, 68% of whom never had to serve in the military. They were excused because they were students or fathers or had physical limitations of some or some other disqualifying status. You know, this whole freaking thing. I used to wonder, I mean, when I was younger, why is going to college? How does that

• 51:32Jocko Willink?

  get you out of military service? I don't get that. Right? How's that work? Wait, you're going to college and now you can't go fight? Why can't you fight? And then it doesn't take much thinking to realize, oh, because I'm my parents have money, they sent me to college. Now I have to have to go fight.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you mentioned it earlier too, right? Where where that'll kind of make the general society unhappy where it's like, hey, these are like, they have important roles in our society because they're educated and all this stuff. Yeah. So if you send them to war, we don't have these people.

• 52:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's also the middle class. So the middle class kids are going to college. So if you don't want to piss off the middle class parents who are the ones that vote, what do you do? You say, hey, don't worry, don't worry about Johnny. As long as he's going to college, he doesn't have to worry about signing up for the draft.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I would imagine back then, there was a lot less people going to college as well.

• 52:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  I would imagine.

• 52:29Jocko Willink?

  Until the Vietnam War kicked off and they found out they could get out of the draft.

• 52:35Jocko Willink?

  He said that left 32% to fill the ranks.

• 52:40Jocko Willink?

  Some signed up for hazardous duty, but the majority managed to steer clear of the battlefield by going to the National Guard or Reserves, which in the Vietnam War were rarely used for combat, or by signing up for non-combat positions in the Army, Air Force, Navy, or Coast Guard. Some men spent their entire service in, their entire service time in non-lethal locales such as the US, Germany, Korea, and the Panama Canal Zone.

• 53:07Jocko Willink?

  So you could have enlisted and gotten any, any of these non-combat jobs. Ultimately, out of every 100 American males of draft age in the Vietnam area, era, only 12 were sent to Vietnam. Of these 12 men, nine had non-combat support roles, but weren't entirely risk-free. They were potential targets of rocket, booby traps, terrorist attacks, mortars. The remaining three men, so out of 100, we're down to three. The remaining three men served under fire in one of the following high-risk situations. Fighting in one of the hardcore combat arms of the Army or Marine Corps Infantry, Artillery, Army Special Operations, Close Air Support.

• 53:52Jocko Willink?

  Two, serving in the dangerous positions such in the Air Force, Navy, or Coast Guard, such as Combat Aviators or Patrol Boat Warriors. Or three, trying to save lives in one of the most vulnerable of all battlefield jobs, Combat Medic.

• 54:09Jocko Willink?

  While a few men were eager for combat, most were not. Tony Zinni, a Vietnam veteran who later became a four-star general in the Marine Corps, said, "It was hard to find Americans who'd actually chosen to fight in Vietnam. Most who served there had to be forced to go."

• 54:27Jocko Willink?

  So that's what we're dealing with. Twenty eight million, twenty six million people that are drafted, twenty six million men that were draft age, sixty eight percent never, they were, they were disqualified because they were students or physical limitations or fathers or some other disqualifying status. Then you end up with a bunch of them that join the National Guard or the reserves, which during Vietnam was kind of a way out of going to Vietnam. Then you got guys that joined into noncombat role and eventually you get down to that small percentage of people that stepped up to fight. There's a section here called avoidance. During the Vietnam War, almost all of the nation's affluent youth and a majority of

• 55:08Jocko Willink?

  the middle class escaped the draft by going to college or claiming a disability or exemption. A University of Notre Dame study estimated that seventy five percent of excused men had actively tried to avoid the draft. Throughout the war years, many loopholes were available. One of the most famous cases involved actor George Hamilton, who persuaded his draft board to give him a hardship deferment because he was the sole support of his mother who lived in his Hollywood mansion and relied on his $200,000 annual income. Which would be 1.375 million in today's dollars. Men in certain occupations such as engineers, farmers, teachers, ministers, and divinity students won automatic exemptions.

• 55:51Jocko Willink?

  Fatherhood would, could win a deferral. So a number of young men felt pressure to get married and start a family. He has a little section here talking about peace children, which are basically guys that had kids so they didn't have to go to war. A popular way to avoid the draft was to find a doctor who would attest to a medical problem such as flat feet, extreme allergies, or skin rashes. While he was a student at Harvard, writer James Fallows recalled, sympathetic medical students helped us in, helped us search for disqualifying conditions that we in our many good, years of good health might have overlooked. For $120, a young man could purchase a psychological disqualification. They're a reputer, quote, they're a reputable anti-war psychiatrist who will put, put one

• 56:36Jocko Willink?

  through a series of personality tests to find some tendencies they can distort, end quote. That's from a Harvard graduate, undergraduate.

• 56:46Jocko Willink?

  Having a letter from a doctor was a sure way to win a medical exemption. For example, the induction center in Seattle, Washington divided men into two groups. Those who had letters from doctors and those that did not. Everyone with a letter got an exemption, no matter what the letter said. Induction centers rarely had the time to contest what an outside expert said. Using letters demonstrated the advantages held by middle-class men who had easy access to sympathetic physician. Working-class and poor men either had no such access, or they were unaware that a doctor's letter was an option. Some men gained disqualifications by contriving to fail their pre-induction physical exams.

• 57:28Jocko Willink?

  A University of Michigan student ate three large peaches each night for six months so that he exceeded the military's weight limit for his height. He was disqualified. Some men jabbed their arms with needles to pass themselves off as heroin addicts. He goes on talking about people that were getting, or getting braces. I guess you weren't allowed to have braces, so he'd get people, dentists would charge a thousand to two thousand dollars, which in today's money is between seven and fourteen thousand dollars to get braces put on, so now you don't get drafted.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  I had a neighbor, I might have told you this before. I had a neighbor who, she was an older lady, you know, who was like our neighbor's mom or whatever, and she said her brother dodged the draft by drinking soy sauce and getting high blood pressure. So he was medically exempt or whatever because of high blood pressure, and that was like a thing, like, and other people, like his friends or whatever, would do that as well.

• 58:23Jocko Willink?

  Trick.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  So they wouldn't have.

• 58:25Jocko Willink?

  I wonder how much soy sauce they had to drink.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  I know, right? But blood pressure is like, that seems like something you can just sort of cure with, like, even like the weight thing, it's like, probably just lose weight or whatever, like, do this, and, or even like, blood pressure, like, if you change your diet even just a little bit, like, okay, so I went to the doctor coincidentally today, just to get, you know, check up, you know, normal stuff, and they take your blood pressure, and the doctor said...

• 58:52Speaker 01

  There's a thing called white coat syndrome. You ever heard of that?

• 58:55Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  I never did either until today. And I was like, oh, what is that? It's like people's blood pressure will rise.

• 59:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, cuz they're in the doctor's office.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, just cuz they're nervous in the doctor's office. That's how blood pressure is. So now I'm thinking back, it's like, bro, that's, you can, I mean, shoot braces? Bro, these are some really low standard medical exemption scenarios.

• 59:13Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  So on one hand, the bar's really low.

• 59:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's the thing. It's gonna get lower.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  But it's kinda high in a way, is what I'm saying.

• 59:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is early, though, right? This is, and this is also, this is also, they didn't, they, they didn't lower this part of the bar.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:33Jocko Willink?

  They lowered other parts of the bar.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:35Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:36Jocko Willink?

  So they made it so that some rich or middle-class person that had access to a, to a freaking dentist and the money to pay for braces could all of a sudden get exempt. But if you don't know about that little trick, cuz you're from someplace that doesn't have that kinda access or doesn't have that kinda money or doesn't have that kind of information, then Google, how do I get out of the draft?

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  There's a lot of that, right? In a way, I mean, that's a, that's a spectrum, too, where like, isn't that like a typical thing people might say about the criminal justice? Right? Where it's like, if you can afford a good lawyer, kind of a thing, you know?

• 1:00:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, a good lawyer makes a big-

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Get away with a lot.

• 1:00:18Jocko Willink?

  A good lawyer, it makes a huge difference. A huge difference. If you have access to that good lawyer.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Jocko Willink?

  As opposed to not having access to a good lawyer.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Jocko Willink?

  Either cuz A, you don't know about it, or B, cuz you don't have the money for it.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Jocko Willink?

  For a hundred percent.

• 1:00:40Jocko Willink?

  Check this out. Professional football players were virtually immune to being drafted.

• 1:00:46Jocko Willink?

  In 1966, selective service grabbed only two of 960 pro players, many of the rest finding refuge in the National Guard or reserves. "We have an arrangement with the Baltimore Colts," Major General George Gelson Jr. of the Maryland National Guard said in 1966. "When they have a player with a military problem, they send him to us." End quote. The Dallas Cowboys had 10 players assigned to the same National Guard division at one time. This is a freaking scam. The most sensational football star of the era, the New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath, was excused from service on grounds that his frequently injured knees made him unfit for combat.

• 1:01:29Jocko Willink?

  Yet he continued to play bone-crushing football on Sunday afternoons. By the way, three years after that, he won the Super Bowl. If a young man refused to submit to the draft, he was subject to arrest and imprisonment. To escape this fate, over 40,000 American youths fled to countries that were willing to give them asylum, including Canada, Sweden, and France. About 171,000 men refused to submit to the draft because they were conscientious objectors whose religious or moral beliefs forbade them to kill in any war, or, in the case of Vietnam War, a war they considered unjust. Some of them were excused by local draft boards, while about 96,000 agreed to alternative

• 1:02:12Jocko Willink?

  service in jobs such as medics. An estimated 4,000 conscientious objectors were given long prison terms, usually five years. Yeah, and what's jacked up about that is if you're honest and say, "Look, I don't want to go fight because I don't believe in the war," you're going to jail. Meanwhile, someone that's getting braces is like cleared. Some draft avoiders felt remorse over their actions. When he was 66 years old, film and TV actor John Lithgow revealed that while he was in his twenties, he won a disqualification by wearing urine-soaked clothes and pretending to be insane during a pre-induction interview. "A sense of shame," he said, "stayed with me for years and has never entirely disappeared."

• 1:02:57Jocko Willink?

  Some of that shame had to do with the appalling suffering caused by the Vietnam War, suffering that I so conveniently avoided.

• 1:03:07Jocko Willink?

  Novelist Mark Helprin, in an address at West Point in 1992, told the cadets that during the Vietnam War, "I dodged the draft and I was wrong. This is regret that I will carry to my grave." Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who spent the war in college and graduate school, sought and received five deferments from his draft board: four student deferments and one hardship deferment, even though he was pro-war. That's freaking unique, isn't it? "I'm pro-war, just not for me." Years later, when he was one of the prime architects of the war in Iraq and was accused of being a hypocrite for sending thousands of men into combat, he justified his Vietnam

• 1:03:50Jocko Willink?

  era behavior in this way: "I had other priorities in the 60s than military service. I don't regret the decisions I made." Hmm. Okay. You don't regret the decisions you made. Got it there, dick. Reacting to comments by Cheney and other successful politicians, Paul Marx, a draftee in the Korean War, wrote the Baltimore Sun: "For every draft avoider, someone else was made to serve in order to meet the military's quotas. That 'someone else' might very well have been killed in Vietnam. Many of America's most accomplished young men were ready to pass the buck and let someone else, someone less sophisticated and knowledgeable, make

• 1:04:35Jocko Willink?

  the sacrifices while they pursued their personal ambitions." Joining the National Guard or Reserves was a popular option because relatively few guardsmen and reservists were sent to Vietnam. Again, this is totally different now, and National Guard and Reserve were deployed all the time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Out of every 1 million men who enlisted in the National Guard and Reserves during the Vietnam era, only 15,000 of them actually served in Vietnam. That's a tiny percentage. Alan Vanaman, who served in a combat artillery unit in Vietnam in 1968, 1969, said: "I trained with several hundred country boys from Louisiana and Alabama who were bound for National Guard

• 1:05:19Jocko Willink?

  units. They were, as they gleefully put it, NG. Not going."

• 1:05:31Jocko Willink?

  Some men who avoided the draft would later become prominent leaders such as Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney. But in fairness, it should be noted that a few young men who later became national leaders served in Vietnam and risked their lives. For example, three men who were members of US senate at the same time Chuck Hagel, John Kerry, and John McCain were decorated heroes of combat in Vietnam. Says here, although some affluent men suffered in Vietnam, the typical infantry platoon was made up of minorities, the poor and the working class with a sprinkling of middle-class youth. San Antonio lawyer Maury Maverick Jr. recalled that during the war, "My friends at the local

• 1:06:14Jocko Willink?

  office of the American Friends Service Committee placed a cross on the map of San Antonio at the home address of each person killed in combat. On the west side where the Mexican-Americans lived, there was a sea of crosses. In Alamo Heights, Almost Park, and Terrell Hills where the rich people live, there were virtually no crosses at all. Most of America's privileged elite seemed unbothered by the unfair burden placed on men on the lower rungs of society, but there were some leaders who were angry and indignant." In 1966, Kingman Brewster, the president of Yale University, used his address to the

• 1:06:57Jocko Willink?

  graduating seniors to denounce a system that had drafted, quote, "Only those who cannot hide in the endless catacombs of formal education." So, yeah, this freaking... just pisses you off to hear this shit.

• 1:07:22Jocko Willink?

  This is going into McNamara's plan. The year 1966 was crunch time for the American military because so many middle-class American males were avoiding the draft, the military faced the prospect of serious manpower shortages. Because most of the men did not volunteer to extend their tour of duty, thousands of fresh troops had to be deployed to Vietnam every month to replace the thousands that were departing. To supply extra troops that were urgently needed, President Johnson was faced with a tough choice. Here you go, President Johnson, he could have revoked student deferments and forced thousands of college boys into the army, or he could have used the 1 million men in the National Guard and reserves, but either action would have angered the vote-powerful

• 1:08:05Jocko Willink?

  middle class, so instead he turned to the working class and the poor. God, what a shit bird. Here, however, he also found trouble rounding up enough eligible men. There are plenty of men of the right age in the poorer neighborhoods, but many of them have flunked the military's entrance exam, the Armed Forces Qualification Test, that's what I kicked the podcast off with. Johnson and Defense Secretary McNamara desperately needed them, however, so they lowered the standards for passing the AFQT. Suddenly, thousands of low aptitude men, once declared unacceptable because of low AFQT scores, were now subject to the draft. Johnson and McNamara tried to make their action appear to be based on humanitarian compassion.

• 1:08:50Jocko Willink?

  With much fanfare at the 1966 National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, McNamara unveiled his plan to salvage and rehabilitate 100,000 substandard men each year, hence the official title, "Project 100,000." Though the men may have failed in these subjects in school, they wouldn't fail now because the military was, quote, "the world's greatest educator of skilled manpower."

• 1:09:19Jocko Willink?

  McNamara, once considered one of the most brilliant men in America. He had made a name for himself as one of the whiz kids who revitalized Ford Motor Company, believed that he could raise the intelligence of low-ability men through a use of videotapes and closed-circuit TV lessons. Quote, "A low aptitude student can use videotapes as an aid to his formal instruction and end by becoming as proficient as a high-aptitude student," end quote. In his starry-eyed belief that videotapes could dramatically transform slow learners, McNamara was revealing the same blind faith in the power of technology that deluded him

• 1:10:02Jocko Willink?

  into thinking that he could outsmart the enemy in Vietnam by using calculators, computers, and statistical analysis. According to biographer Deborah Shapley, McNamara was, quote, "a naive believer in technological mirrors, miracles," end quote. In announcing Project 100,000, McNamara never said a word about combat. To hear him, one would have thought men were going not off to war, but off to school. In his view, the military was doing them a favor. When they got out of the service, they would have valuable skills and self-confidence with which they could get good-paying jobs in the civilian market. Its leading advocate, leading advocate of this program, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist who later became a US Senator from New York, whose argument went like this.

• 1:10:46Jocko Willink?

  "The best way to solve poverty in America is to draft the hundreds of thousands of young men being rejected annually as unfit for military service. Take inner-city blacks and poor rural whites, both groups tending to be lazy and fond of booze, and put them into uniform. Instill discipline. Train them to bathe daily, salute, and take orders. Teach them a marketable skill. At the end of the couple of years, you'll have transformed lazy, unmotivated slackers into hard-working, law-abiding citizens." Shit's unbelievable, right?

• 1:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Now, there was pushback. There was pushback from the, from the uniformed military. So, so you got McNamara, who's the Secretary of Defense, you know, he's a civilian, but he's getting, he presenting this great plan and the, the leadership inside the military was going, "Hey, this shit ain't gonna work."

• 1:11:45Jocko Willink?

  And McNamara tells Johnson, McNamara told Johnson that uniformed officers in the Defense Department were opposed to drafting low aptitude men because, quote, "They don't want to be in the business of dealing with morons in moron camps. The Army doesn't want to be thought of as a rehabilitation agency," end quote.

• 1:12:02Jocko Willink?

  But McNamara, who's a fucking arrogant guy and thinks he's smart, just pushes this program anyways. Between October 1st in 1966 and December 31st, 1971, which are the dates of the official program, Project 100,000 took in some 354,000 men, 91% of them based on lowered mental standards, the remaining 9% because of less stringent physical standards.

• 1:12:31Jocko Willink?

  Project 100,000 men were, on average, 20 years old. Half came from the South, 41% were minorities. Some 46% were draftees, while the remaining 54% were volunteers. However, as I pointed out earlier, the term volunteer is misleading. Military recruiters would get the names of low-scoring men who were now acceptable to the armed forces and visit them to steer them toward the three-year hitch. The recruiters would tell them that if they waited for the draft, they'd only serve two years, but almost certainly end up in an infantry platoon in Vietnam.

• 1:13:06Jocko Willink?

  But if they signed up for three years, they would be assigned to a non-combat job. There was, however, a big catch. The military did not have to honor any oral promises made by a recruiter. A recruiter might promise a man a job like helicopter maintenance, but after basic training, when it was time to go to a specialized school, the military could decide that his test scores were not high enough to call, qualify for helicopter maintenance, or in some cases, he could be sent to helicopter maintenance school, and if he flunked during training, he was subject to transfer to infantry.

• 1:13:37Jocko Willink?

  Thousands of three-year projects, 100,000 volunteers ended up in infantry because of this catch. Many critics denounced this fraudulent behavior.

• 1:13:48Jocko Willink?

  Project 100,000 men were assigned to all major branches of the armed forces. 71% to the army, 10% to the Marine Corps, 10% to the Navy, 9% to the Air Force.

• 1:14:01Jocko Willink?

  Brings me back to that one book. All this stuff is going on, all these people avoiding. We covered that one book called Company Commander and the guys going through Army OC, Army Officer Candidate School and they're like, where do you, I think that's what book it was. I think it was the book Company Commander, but you have to write down your three choices of where you want to get stationed. He writes infantry platoon commander, infantry platoon commander, infantry platoon commander. God. And all these other people just avoiding fighting.

• 1:14:28Jocko Willink?

  It's hard for me just straight up to understand the perspective. Like when I read this and I read that all these 68% of people avoided the draft, like I read that, it doesn't, it's hard for me to compute that. It's hard for me to compute like being a man and being like, oh, a bunch of people are going to go fight a war. I'm going to hide over here. It's hard for me to compute that. I gotta be honest with you.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense to me that it'd be.

• 1:14:56Jocko Willink?

  It's hard for me to understand it. What, what kind of human you have to be. Now, if you're like, hey, actively saying, look, I don't believe in this war. I actually get that. I actually get that. If someone says, look, listen, we shouldn't be over there fighting and I'm not going and you want to send me to jail, send me to jail. You want to, you want to make me a serve in some other capacity? Okay, but I'm not going to go fight that war. If you do that, I'll respect you. Right? If you hide and get braces and get a letter from a psychologist and that's what you do? No, I, I cannot believe that the numbers are that high. It's crazy.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and being in your presence for a long time and kind of reading this book with you, that makes sense. But if you think back to, let's say a 20-year-old person who isn't like you, like maybe, maybe, maybe they do have money, maybe they're middle class and they got normal stuff, quote unquote, normal stuff going on. They're not really into politics or history or nothing like that. They're just into normal stuff. And. Then they hear on the news.

• 1:16:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Hey, there's a war going on. And you know what? You don't have a choice. You have to fight it. He was like, I don't want to go in the military. Like, that was never my plan. That was never nothing. In fact, I don't want to just be a doctor.

• 1:16:20Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's a good point. And the good point, the great point that you're making is a point that I've actually been making a lot lately. And I talked about it when I was on with Rogan, which is when you impose something on someone, they reject it. So that's a great example. You impose the draft on people, they're gonna get freaking pissed off. They're gonna get nervous. They're gonna run away from it. So that's a good point. And when I take that into account, then I understand it better. So thank you for helping me understand a little bit better when someone says, hey, you're going to war. And that's not part of your thing. You kind of think, wait a second, I'm not going to war. Where's the dentist? I need some braces over here.

• 1:16:55Jocko Willink?

  But even with that being said, so I understand that's a good point. But even that being said, the fact that the numbers are that large, that it was a thing to go get braces, that it was a thing that people were writing home from college going, don't worry, mom, I gotta get a letter from a psychologist. We have to pay a hundred and twenty-five dollars. No, write up a report of, that was a thing. It wasn't like a rare case.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but and then even then, again, from, you know, our perspective, when it's done with and, you know, when things kind of sort themselves out, like, that makes sense, for sure, to maybe have trouble seeing that. But again, think, think about how it was probably like for anything, like, hey, what if your neighbor, what if, hey, look, I grew up on, you know, Fifth Street, and bro, we're not into politics. We're into, we play baseball. And yeah, I heard about this quote-unquote war. I don't know anyone in the military. I don't know anyone, not one single person. In fact, I just, I heard of, you know, my neighbor's cousin that lives in the other side of the country, went in the military. I don't know anyone in the military. You know, I want to be a dentist. I want to be a lawyer.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  And, you know, I want to be a fireman. And that's the culture and then it's like, oh my gosh, you know, you hear it on the news, you get in the mail, whatever. You're you got to register for the draft, which is this. You have to go to the military and you got to go fight this war that you don't know anything about. You don't know anything in military. And now you have to do it. Otherwise you go to jail. So and it's like, damn. Now I got to risk my life for something I don't really know about. Not necessarily that I'm against or for or nothing like that. I just don't really know about it. I'm eighteen years old. I don't know about that kind of stuff right now. And then your neighbor goes and is like, hey, I can't go. I got flat feet. And we're like, oh, wait, do I have? I don't even know if I have flat feet. Let me go in the to the doctor or whatever and see what up. Oh, this guy, oh, I had braces. I don't well, wait, let me go see if I need some braces.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Cause I don't want to go either. None of us want to go. We never did. And all I have to do is, you know, and then you start to just get that culture where it's not shameful to go get braces.

• 1:18:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's a big piece of it. That that's those are all great points and it's you're you're you're right. And imposing things on people. And just like this, just like imposing the draft. That's why people is like, hey, don't you think everyone should serve in the military? I was generally think not really, because when you start imposing things on people, hey, would it be good? Yes. Would it be good to do some kind of service? Would it be good to understand what it's like to be in the military or go overseas? Yes, that stuff would all be great. But when you start imposing things on people. So you're right. I guess I was having a little bit of an allergic reaction to this.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:19:30Jocko Willink?

  I was having a little bit of a maybe a lot of bit of an allergic reaction.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  That's a bias, right?

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Curse of knowledge or I don't know, something where you can't.

• 1:19:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I guess it's also, I guess what makes me most frustrated is just is that it's like the entire chain of command, right? You got Lyndon Johnson, the president, you got the second, they're all making these moves. That are based on helping people. Hey, well, we're not going to, you know, you go to college, it's all a scam. That's what's pissing me off, I guess, more than anything else is that it's a scam. And the other thing is, if you. If you are gonna go to war, right? You, you should be able to explain why we're going to war. And the people should be able to say, yeah, that actually makes sense. And then you go to war. And you realize that people are gonna get killed and you realize you're gonna kill some bad people and you realize that some civilians are gonna die as well. All those things, talk about that stuff all the time. All that stuff is gonna happen.

• 1:20:23Jocko Willink?

  And also, if you say, hey, here's, we're going to war and you cannot explain why? And the populace goes, hey dude, what are we doing? As soon as you got people going, hey, I'm, I'm gonna go get freaking, uh, gonna go piss on myself so I don't have to go. And now you got a whole group, a whole class of people that are saying, we don't wanna fight? Maybe we should reconsider what, what we're doing there. Cause that's a problem. You know, if you're in charge of a company or you're in charge of a platoon, you say, hey, we're gonna go over this hill. And the whole platoon or two thirds of the platoon goes, hey boss, I'm not so sure about that. Or you're in a company, say, we're gonna go in this new market area and a bunch of your leadership and a bunch of your mid-level managers say, hey boss, I don't wanna go into that market area. What about you? I don't wanna go, what about you? I don't wanna go, well, okay, you have to go into that market area.

• 1:21:08Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you should reconsider what you're doing. You're not smarter than everybody else. That's a problem.

• 1:21:20Jocko Willink?

  Going back to this book.

• 1:21:23Jocko Willink?

  Most Project 100,000 men were graduated from basic training, even if, even if company commanders had to cheat to get them through. After leaving basic training, Project 100,000 men were sent to AIT, which is Advanced Individual Training, to learn infantry tactics, or if they were lucky, specialized skills such as radio telephone operator, RTO, props.

• 1:21:45Jocko Willink?

  Called the Moron Corps at Fort Polk, Project 100,000 men were, quote, "pretty damn bad", recalled one officer. Somebody had to help them to get dressed in the morning. They couldn't understand what was going on. Another officer said, lots of these guys just weren't fit to do a job. I had to help one buy a toothbrush and pack his bags so he could report to another duty station.

• 1:22:08Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, most of the 354,000 men of Project 100K went to Vietnam, with about half of them assigned to combat units, which is just insane. A total of 5,478 of these men died while in service, most of them in combat. Their fatality rate was three times that of the other GIs, though precise figures are unavailable. All of these tallies would be higher if we knew the number of deaths and injuries of substandard men who were not officially counted in Project 100,000, according to Colonel David Hackworth, and salute, who fought in both Korea and Vietnam wars, and became one of

• 1:22:52Jocko Willink?

  the most highly decorated warriors in American history. "Project 100,000 was implemented to produce more grunts for the killing fields of Vietnam. It took unfit recruits from the bottom of the barrel and rushed them to Vietnam. The result was human applesauce." He added that, for fighting in combat, "10 smart and fit soldiers are better than 100 out of shape dummies." And that's, you know, what your comments you were bringing up earlier, you know, men get three guys, they get eight guys, that's his ratio. He's giving up 10 to 100. Is that a hyperbole, a little exaggerated? Maybe. But, if you're talking about people that can't tie their shoes, it might not be hyperbole, it might be reality.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, nonetheless, he's making the point, that that's a big deal.

• 1:23:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. One veteran who had good reason to be dismayed by the deaths of Project 100,000 men in Vietnam was Leslie John Shellhase, who had been wounded in the Battle of Bulge in WWII and had served as a lieutenant colonel under McNamara at the Pentagon in the late 1960s. He said he played a central role in planning for Project 100,000, which he considered a bad idea from the start. "We," meaning the Pentagon planners, "resisted Project 100,000 because we knew that wars are not won by using marginal manpower as cannon fodder, but rather by risking and sometimes losing the flower of a nation's youth." End quote.

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  Can you imagine being in charge of something and you're getting all this resistance from people that actually do that for a living and you force it down their throats anyways? That's again, to your point earlier, which is a reference to my point, when you impose things on people, it's a bad move. Lieutenant Paul D. Walker, who served in Viet... Oh, and by the way, you know what? You've heard me say that imposing things on people doesn't work? It doesn't, clearly, because you impose the draft on people and they avoid it. They get braces, they piss on themselves, whatever. So you think, oh, we'll just draft... It doesn't work. It doesn't work to impose things on people.

• 1:25:03Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Paul D. Walker, who served in Vietnam as a platoon leader in the armored cavalry of the 1st Infantry Division, wrote about the worst episode during his tour of duty. "We had not seen a single enemy soldier in two days of combat operations, resulting in three killed, 10 wounded, and three vehicles destroyed." He blamed the four Project 100,000 men in his platoon, who accounted for more than their share of casualties and accidents. He said that some of the Project 100,000 men were, quote, "virtually untrainable and never should have been allowed into the military and certainly not sent into combat."

• 1:25:38Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. "Not only were low-quality enlisted men sent to Vietnam," said Wes Moreland, "but low-quality officers as well." He cited Lieutenant William Calley, convicted in the murder of more than 100 unarmed citizens in the battle of... in the... in the My Lai massacre in 1968. According to Arnold R. Isaacs, the Vietnam War correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, Calley, quote, "flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College with two Cs, a D, and four Fs in his first year, and reportedly managed to get through Officer Candidate School without even learning how to read a map or use a compass," end quote. Marine Corps Colonel Robert D. Heinel said that the Army had to take Calley, quote, "because no one else was available." His own attorney used Calley's low intelligence as a courtroom defense.

• 1:26:22Jocko Willink?

  "The Army," he said, "was to blame for the My Lai massacre because it had lowered mental standards, men... If it hadn't lowered mental standards, men like Calley never would have been commissioned." Richard A. Gabriel, who spent 22 years as a US Army officer, says, quote, "Even the staunchest defenders of the Army agree that in normal times, a man of Lieutenant Calley's intelligence and predispositions would never have been allowed to hold a commission."

• 1:26:53Jocko Willink?

  Talking about that pushback during the early years of the war when McNamara was campaigning to draft lower aptitude men, wise military commanders and veterans were warning against this his misguided idea. For example, in 1964, two years before Project 100K was launched, an impassioned article appeared in the American Bar Association Journal by Texas Attorney and Reserve Air Force Captain William F. Walsh, who wrote, "Warfare is steadily growing more complex. The day is past when an effective soldier need only the intelligence to point a musket downhill and obey an order. Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes. Service in the armed forces today requires an alert, questioning mind, simply to master the technology of weapons and tactics. There is likely to be no room for the low IQ soldier,

• 1:27:38Jocko Willink?

  the warm body who cannot or will not cut the mustard. That man is going to get in the way of those who will have to do the job." End quote. This guy was hearing this. Despite such warnings, McNamara plowed ahead, and the results are disastrous. "One of the biggest blunders of our Vietnam experience," said Lieutenant Colonel Charles L. Armstrong of the Marine Corps, "was the Project 100,000 folly of taking on board marginally qualified individuals under the mistaken watchword of the infantry doesn't have to be real smart. Dumb grunt, however, is not a complete phrase. Dumb dead grunt is. You don't have to be a Fulbright scholar. You don't have to be

• 1:28:20Jocko Willink?

  a Fulbright scholar to be a good rifleman. But you can't be stupid. To survive in combat, you had to be smart. You had to know how to use your rifle effectively and keep it clean and operable, how to navigate through jungles and rice paddies without alerting the enemy, and how to communicate and cooperate with other members of your team. Sad to say, many low aptitude men were not smart enough to be successful in combat, and as a result, they were killed or wounded."

• 1:28:50Jocko Willink?

  Barry Romo and his nephew Robert ended up in Vietnam at the same time. I loved Robert like a brother. We grew up together. He was only one month younger. Barry served in infantry as a platoon leader in 1967 to 1968. Saw a lot of combat, winning a Bronze Star for his courage on the battlefield. During his tour, he learned that Robert had been drafted and was being trained in Fort Lewis, Washington to be an infantryman destined for Vietnam. Barry was alarmed because Robert was "very slow" and had failed the Army's mental test. But then along came Project 100K, lowering standards and making him draftable. A host of people, his relatives, his comrades at Fort Lewis, his sergeants and officers, wrote to the commanding general at Fort Lewis, asking that Robert not be sent into combat because,

• 1:29:33Jocko Willink?

  as one relative put it, "he would die." But the general turned down the request. Once in Vietnam, Robert was sent to an infantry unit near the border of North Vietnam, one of the most dangerous combat areas. During a patrol, he was shot in the neck while trying to help a wounded friend.

• 1:29:50Jocko Willink?

  "He did not die instantly, but heavy gunfire kept a medic from reaching him. He drowned in his own blood," said Barry.

• 1:29:58Jocko Willink?

  Looking back, Barry said that Robert really didn't have much luck. While others were getting draft deferments, he was drafted. While Congressman's sons were getting four Fs, which were exemptions, for braces on their teeth, Robert was drafted as part of Project 100K.

• 1:30:18Jocko Willink?

  In a speech delivered 42 years later, Barry Romo said that the family had never recovered from losing Robert. "His death almost destroyed us with anger and sorrow."

• 1:30:32Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit here. Mental slowness and extreme anxiety were among the worst enemies of Project 100K men in combat. "While training at Fort Benning," says Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kimball, a combat veteran of Vietnam War, "we had the idea cemented into our heads that there were two kinds of soldiers, the quick and the dead. To survive in combat, you had to be quick to recognize a threat and quick to respond to it. All soldiers in combat experience fear, and fear causes a soldier to slow down. Fear can have a major impact on whether or not a soldier survives war."

• 1:31:08Jocko Willink?

  Sergeant Major Francis T. McNeve said that people who were borderline retarded did not respond fast enough and that's how people became casualties.

• 1:31:20Jocko Willink?

  Marine Captain David Anthony Dawson said, "Men who could not understand simple orders or perform simple tasks clearly posed a danger to themselves and other members of the unit." He gave the following example. "While serving as a battalion commander in Vietnam, Brigadier General William Wise watched the squad leader give an order for an ambush patrol. The squad leader gave simple, clear order, but one Marine couldn't remember any of the crucial details, including the password. That night, this Marine left the ambush to relieve himself without telling anyone. When returning, he wandered into the kill zone."

• 1:31:55Jocko Willink?

  The squad leader sprang the ambush and his squad killed him.

• 1:32:08Jocko Willink?

  "The dull-witted soldier," said Pentagon official Elliot Cohen, "does not simply get himself killed. He causes the deaths of others as well." According to Chief Warrant Officer Four William S. Tuttle, "A Vietnam veteran, if you take someone with an IQ of 40 and give him a rifle, he's more dangerous to you than he is to the enemy."

• 1:32:39Jocko Willink?

  There's another. Fast forward a little bit. "New inexperienced men in Army and Marine units, especially Project 100K men, had a high rate of getting themselves and their comrades wounded or killed in the first few months of their tours in Vietnam." James R. Ebert found that 43% of Army fatalities happened in the first three months.

• 1:32:58Jocko Willink?

  What sucks about reading that statistic is you realize that there's training that you could do to get better, to get prepared, and it just wasn't happening.

• 1:33:11Jocko Willink?

  John L. Ward rejoiced when Project 100K came into his life. He grew up in poverty in a black neighborhood of Glasgow, Missouri, living in a shanty that had no running water.

• 1:33:25Jocko Willink?

  And he talks about John L. Ward's situation. He had taken the test to try and see if he could get into the military. Didn't, wasn't good enough, his score wasn't high enough. And then he says, "Then to my utter surprise, the Marine Corps recruiter showed up and explained to me that I could join them now, despite the low test score. Thanks to Project 100K and the newly lowered standards, I could now pursue my dream of getting out of Glasgow and seeing the world."

• 1:33:54Jocko Willink?

  And this is an example, he gives this guy, John L. Ward is an example of a guy that couldn't pass the test because he was uneducated, but not because he wasn't smart. So he had what he calls native intelligence, meaning he hadn't gone to school, so he never learned math or whatever, but he, but he actually was a smart human. And so when he became a Marine, he did well. Ward became a proud Marine, quickly won a promotion to Corporal. Unfortunately, his dreams were shattered in Vietnam. During the night of August 18th, 1968, enemy troops attacked and overran a Marine bunker at Phu Loa, killing 17 Marines and wounding many more. Ward suffered severe injuries and he was returned to the United States for a long and painful recovery.

• 1:34:35Jocko Willink?

  After leaving the service with rank of Sergeant, Ward spent 15 years just trying to survive his physical and mental torments. Eventually, he became a counselor and advocate for Project 100K veterans. In 2012, he wrote a book entitled Moron Corps, about his experience as one of McNamara's Morons, a term that he hated but nevertheless embraced to remind America that Project 100K was insensitive, morally unjust, and inhumane.

• 1:35:02Jocko Willink?

  He stated that men who were accepted under McNamara's program served their country honorably. Even with our so-called limited abilities, we were willing to lay down our lives for our country. But the program was carried out in a morally shameful manner. Project 100K men were overrepresented in combat and they died in disproportionate numbers. Those who managed to survive were, quote, "thrown back into society without skills promised us." Many of the men were homeless and suffered isolation, unemployment, drug addiction, and medical neglect. Many failed to receive the assistance that they were supposed to receive from the US Department of Affairs.

• 1:35:46Jocko Willink?

  Because the National Guard and reserves were relatively safe avenues for military service, they were filled to capacity with middle-class and wealthy men, mostly white. You usually had to have connections to get in. Poor and working-class men, especially blacks, were excluded.

• 1:36:05Jocko Willink?

  In 1968, the Army National Guard was only 1.26% black. In Mississippi, where blacks made up 42% of the population, only one black man was admitted to the 10,365-man Mississippi National Guard. So again, if you got the right connections, in this case, oh, if you're a white dude, you can sneak into the National Guard and avoid going to war.

• 1:36:41Jocko Willink?

  In 1972, Professor Leslie Fiedler, who knew of hundreds of young people at his college, State University of New York at Buffalo, slowly realized that he knew not a single Vietnam veteran. This is 1972. "I had never known a single family that had lost a son in Vietnam." The reason, he concluded, was that Vietnam was the first war that, quote, "has been fought for us by our servants." The actual fighting of the war has become more and more exclusively an occupation of the exploited and dispossessed, end quote.

• 1:37:18Jocko Willink?

  During the Vietnam War Congressman William A. Steiger of Wisconsin said the draft as a the draft survives as a last vestige of the ancient custom whereby the rich and powerful forced the poor and weak to provide service at substantive wages.

• 1:37:37Jocko Willink?

  While it was true that men had grown up in poverty were disproportionately represented in combat, I don't want to leave the impression that only the extremely poor fought in Vietnam.

• 1:37:49Jocko Willink?

  In infantry units, the poor were joined by many men from working-class families described by historian Christian G. Appes as quote, "The nineteen-year-old children of waitresses, factory workers, truck drivers, secretaries, firefighters, carpenters, custodians, police officers, salespeople, clerks, mechanics, miners, and farmworkers," end quote. Men from lower economic levels, poor and working-class, comprised eighty percent of the combat forces, while the remaining twenty percent came from the middle class, half of them serving as officers.

• 1:38:26Jocko Willink?

  I think I have my answer next time that somebody asks me about the draft. My draft, my answer is no, because this is the kind of government bullshit that goes down.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's and that's another one, right? Another reason why, what, I mean, kind of rewinding back to why someone would dodge the draft in whatever way is yeah, the straight-up government is telling you, you gotta work for them, probably lose your life or what, you know, that's in your mind, that's what you're thinking, like, you know, or and or kill other people about, you know, for reasons that you you're not completely sure of. Um, and then, yes, it's up to the government now, not you, government.

• 1:39:06Jocko Willink?

  That's imposed, that's imposed, man.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:08Jocko Willink?

  People, humans don't like to have things imposed on them.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, okay, so taxes, right?

• 1:39:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we don't like taxes being imposed on us.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  Even though the idea of taxes makes sense, you're like, wait a second, the government has to function, you know, all this stuff, and and the government needs money to function and do all this stuff, so the idea of taxes, but...

• 1:39:25Jocko Willink?

  Just like the idea of, hey, this, if I pitch the draft to you like this, listen, we're at war, we need people, everyone's gonna have to serve, we're gonna do a lottery, that sounds fair, right? Because that's what it was, it was a lottery based on what day you were born.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:39:39Jocko Willink?

  So, hey, look, this is what we're gonna do. If we're everyone, we're out of war, we need people, we're gonna do a draft. We're gonna do a lottery. If you get picked, you gotta go. You'd be like, you know what? Don't really like it, but it seems like the fair thing to do. Cool, I'm down. Let's do the draft. Right? Cause that's kind of the pitch. But then, but then you go, wait, I don't want my son to go. Well, send your son to college.

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And then we work around the voting thing. We, that way we, I'm not work around the voting thing. That way we please the group that's gonna get the most out of this scenario.

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  What, what would be your, okay, let's say hypothetically, you need a draft scenario. Like basically the draft was a solution to this in issue, right? A problem. We need people or whatever. What would be your, off the top of your head? Way to go about doing that?

• 1:40:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, first of all, I'm thinking that if I'm doing something where the only way I can get the people to come and fight is to force them. I, there's something, I'm doing something wrong. It could be that I'm explaining to everyone wrong, why this is important. Which it's hard to explain to someone in 1968 that, hey, this is a threat to us. And why is that? Well, cause it's, it's far away. And so if you can't explain that, maybe you need to rethink what your strategy is. People get, people's egos get in the way. They get addicted to their plan. They believe their own bullshit. You get a guy like McNamara and, and all the people that surrounded him. It was ridiculous. And, and Johnson, same thing.

• 1:41:12Jocko Willink?

  Like these, these guys have, Johnson knew that we weren't gonna win Vietnam halfway through. And continued to send troops there, continued to have Americans get killed.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  So you would have started just, you know, I mean, that makes sense. You'd say that, start with yourself first. Like if, if you're in charge of the world, like start with the beginning first. Like, is this a? Is this solution a real solution or is it adding to another problem?

• 1:41:39Jocko Willink?

  If I can't articulate to my team why we, why we need to do something, then I need to either develop my articulation more, come up with those reasons, make them clear to everyone. Someone goes, yeah, you know what? This is a rough, rough solution, but it's the only solution. We get it. We're on board. That's why you hear me talk. I don't, I, I, the amount of times that I ordered my troops to do something is zero. There are times that are like, listen, enough debate. This is what we're doing. Shut up. I never had to do that. Because if you can say, hey, listen, here's what, here's the goal that we gotta get accomplished. Here's why we're doing it. I'm open to suggestions. If you can think of a better way, if we, you can't think of a better way, what do you think of this idea? And everyone goes, yeah, it sounds pretty good. And there's people that freak out and get all scared like,

• 1:42:25Jocko Willink?

  sometimes you gotta just say, shut up and do that too. You actually don't have to do that. You actually don't have to do that. Now, could we be in a situation in a gunfight where I'm like, Echo, go take that building over there? Yeah, that could happen. And you'll be like, cool, got it, boss. Or you'll be like, hold on, I can't take that building. There's enemy in it. I'll take this other one. I go, cool. But you understand what we're trying to do. So the idea of imposing things on people is wrong. It's wrong to impose things on people.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  When was the era of like the propaganda posters and all that?

• 1:42:54Jocko Willink?

  Always.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  Even, even for Vietnam War?

• 1:42:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we make propaganda posters.

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  Okay. So, but you know how like there was like a very distinct era?

• 1:43:04Jocko Willink?

  World War II is the ones you're talking about.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. So to me, and I don't know, what do I know? Pretty much nothing. But that being said, that seems like, I see what they were doing there. I see what they're, it's essentially a marketing campaign.

• 1:43:18Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent. What do you mean essentially? That is a marketing campaign.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  Sometimes you go past marketing into propaganda, you know, kind of thing, kind of a thing. And that's what I mean by it, of course, but you're right either way. The, the.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  It feels like, and it's kind of a different way of maybe, yeah, like it's a different way of saying what you said where if you can't convince them that of a good reason to do this, then you're not, it's like something's up, right?

• 1:43:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and here's the deal, like when you're in World War II and you're fighting the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, it ain't a hard sell.

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:55Jocko Willink?

  These people are trying to take over the whole world and impose darkness on it, and we gotta go scrap.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Jocko Willink?

  That's what's about to happen.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Jocko Willink?

  So that's not a hard sell. That's what makes, that's why you have freaking lines, it's after September 11th.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08Jocko Willink?

  The lines around the recruiting, Tim Kennedy, remember Tim Kennedy, he's like, yeah, I went down to join after September 11th, there's a line, or that's because it's real easy to see why we're doing this.

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:44:20Jocko Willink?

  Well, what happened in Vietnam, in the beginning of Vietnam, I was like, okay, we're gonna go fight these people. Then after a while, they're going, wait a second, what are they doing? Wait, why have we gone through, because the South Vietnamese shuffled through three, four, five governments. We're, we're, we're, we're gonna help this government, oh, well now it's a new government, now it's another government, oh now they're corrupt. This guy got assassinated, it's freaking crazy. And you start looking over there, what are we doing? So as that stuff starts to build up, okay. And that's what pisses me off, going back to this whole draft thing, what pisses me off is this, you hear me say this. If someone on the team doesn't like what we're doing, you need to raise your hand and say, hey boss, we don't like what's going on here. So if you're getting drafted and you don't like it, what the proper thing to do is for the country is to stand up and say, hey, listen,

• 1:45:04Jocko Willink?

  hey, listen, I am not gonna go do this. Because I don't think this is right, because I see we went through four or five different governments in Vietnam, it seems like it's corrupt. We don't know what's happening, we're getting guys killed, we're killing civilians, we need to figure this out better before I sign up. And if, if 68% of the draftable populace would have said, hey, I'm not gonna go fight, not because I have braces, not because I pissed on myself, not because I'm in college, but because I don't think it's the right thing to do. Maybe someone says, okay, we gotta figure out, we gotta reassess what's happening.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  So, in a way, let's go back to the marketing campaign.

• 1:45:38Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  Expression. So.

• 1:45:41Jocko Willink?

  Let me ask you this, with a great marketing campaign, can you sell me an ice cream cone full of shit?

• 1:45:48Jocko Willink?

  Can you?

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  No, sir.

• 1:45:51Jocko Willink?

  You cannot, right? So if you're trying to sell me an ice cream cone full of shit, I'm not gonna buy it.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:45:56Jocko Willink?

  So what you need to do is say, wait, my product is wrong. I need to put milk and sugar and chocolate in here.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:03Jocko Willink?

  That you need to make an adjustment, not an adjustment on what you're, not an adjustment on your message, on your product.

• 1:46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or which I think what the propaganda posters kinda seems like this was their, their little approach was, um, well, some of the ones I see anyway, it's less about the ice cream cone full of shit. It's more about what kind of person has the strength to endure an ice cream cone full of shit? It's kinda like that, you know?

• 1:46:31Jocko Willink?

  So that's some messaging there, for sure.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, okay.

• 1:46:34Jocko Willink?

  But let me ask you this, in a straight up, direct question.

• 1:46:38Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:46:39Jocko Willink?

  What would be my chances of convincing you to eat an ice cream cone full of shit? By saying, dude, if you're tough, you can eat this. There's very few people that are down for that. Now, if I could say, listen, hey, hey, listen, this thing, this ice cream cone, it's got seaweed. And it's got freaking clay. No, clay's not edible. It's got seaweed in it. This is seaweed ice cream. It doesn't taste good, but you gotta get some of this. If you're badass, there's a chance I can convince you. Look, we do stupid, men do dumb shit all the time.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:47:12Jocko Willink?

  Because we just wanna prove that we're cool. We're gonna prove that we're tough. So there's a difference between trying to get someone to eat ice seaweed and someone trying to get someone to eat shit. So what I'm saying is, if I'm trying to pitch you and the only thing I've got as a product is shit, it's not gonna work. And what I need you to say is, hey, listen, Jaco, I appreciate it. I'm not gonna eat shit. It's not happening. You can call me a wimp. You can call me weak. You can call me pathetic, but I'm not gonna eat shit. Now, with the seaweed, you'd be like, well, dude, I don't really wanna be weak. I don't really wanna be pathetic. So hand me the, hand me the cone. We're gonna get it on. So there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a.

• 1:47:59Jocko Willink?

  There's a, it's close, but it's not the same thing.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and essentially, it's like you, you look at the, the after September 11th as an easy sell.

• 1:48:07Jocko Willink?

  Right, easy sell.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  Ice cream, there's a spectrum, ice cream cone full of shit, hard sell.

• 1:48:11Jocko Willink?

  Hard sell.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  We'll say.

• 1:48:12Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  And then the seaweed.

• 1:48:14Jocko Willink?

  World War II, World War II, easy sell.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Easier.

• 1:48:17Jocko Willink?

  It's a pretty easy sell.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:18Jocko Willink?

  It's a pretty freaking easy sell. They, oh, by the way, they attacked Pearl Harbor. What's the sell now? We got, we got, this, you don't have to sell.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:26Jocko Willink?

  The ice cream's there, everyone's taking it.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Jocko Willink?

  We want it.

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  So, on the, and this goes on the spectrum of all things, wars, whatever. Where, yeah, the easier the sell, the less you gotta focus on these marketing campaigns.

• 1:48:38Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  The harder the sell, the more you gotta focus and be more clever with it.

• 1:48:41Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  See what I'm saying?

• 1:48:42Jocko Willink?

  But you also have to be able to say to yourself, you know what? What I'm trying to sell is shit.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the end of the day, yeah.

• 1:48:49Jocko Willink?

  And if you have that, then you don't say, well, I'm just gonna keep forcing it down people's throat. Now, you know what you say? Hey, listen, I gotta change my product.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:55Jocko Willink?

  What I'm trying to sell is wrong.

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:57Jocko Willink?

  And that's where people get stuck. That's where McNamara, that's where Johnson, that's where these people get stuck. Cause they, their egos are too big to admit that this was a dumb idea and say, listen, hey, we tried, this was a bad plan. We didn't realize how corrupt the Vietnamese government was. We didn't realize how strong the Vietcong were. We didn't realize how much we were gonna have to sacrifice to get in there. And we're gonna cut our losses, we're gonna come home, we're gonna observe and see what happens. That, that's what a squared away, humble human being would do.

• 1:49:33Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book. William Broyles, who commanded a marine infantry platoon in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971, said it was not a privilege to be able to fight. It was instead evidence that one had failed to understand how to manipulate the system as if anyone not smart enough to get a deferment, or at least to get a job in the rear, was too dumb to do anything but carry a rifle.

• 1:49:58Jocko Willink?

  Wayne Johnson, who served as a grunt in Vietnam, 1968, told me that his squad leader assigned, quote, "one of McNamara's boys to walk point", and justified his action by saying, "if anyone has to die, better a dummy than the rest of us." Johnson said, "It was unfair, I know, but none of us protested."

• 1:50:18Jocko Willink?

  While he was with the unit, he added, "none of the point men were injured or killed."

• 1:50:27Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, he said, "Earlier I showed," and by the way, this book is, I'm obviously just skimming the surface here, this book is really fascinating and informative about all of this, not just around Project Hundred Thousand, but obviously about the draft and spills over into leadership as well. He says, "Earlier I showed how tens of thousands of middle-class and upper-class men beat the draft by employing such strategies as getting a family doctor to write a letter attesting to some minor medical problem. By contrast, most low-income youths knew nothing about how they could manage their draft status. In many cases, they had legitimate problems that should have kept them from serving, such as being blind in one eye or only having one kidney, but they possessed no awareness

• 1:51:10Jocko Willink?

  or skills to argue the case. They didn't know that they could go to a draft board or induction center and explain their rightful grounds for an exemption. Later, if they were abused in basic training or AIT, they lacked the skills to complain to a member of Congress. After discharge, if they were denied veterans' benefits, they didn't know how to work through the bureaucracy." In my research, I found only one case of a Project Hundred K man or his family using the tools of protest and persuasion that middle-class citizens knew how to use. In 1969, a father in Oregon bought the Army's plan to send, or sorry, fought the Army's plan to send his son, whom he described as retarded with the mental age of a 10-year-old, to Vietnam as an infantryman.

• 1:51:54Jocko Willink?

  His mother said, "He's just a little boy. He'll be killed, sure." The parents generated publicity in Oregon newspapers and enlisted the aid of Congressman Wendell Wyatt and Senator Mark Hatfield. Because of all the negative publicity, the Army canceled the youth's assignment to combat in Vietnam and sent him instead to Germany to perform clerical tasks. That's only one case. And why? That's what he's pointing out, is somebody that's up in the freaking poor rural area doesn't even understand, "Oh, well, you can defer, you can, you can try and get out of this." Or someone from the ghettos doesn't understand, "Oh, you can, you can try, there's a way to get out of this." They haven't heard it yet.

• 1:52:37Jocko Willink?

  Going crazy. He says this, "During my lifetime, in moments of extreme stress, anxiety, or panic, I have done things that are dumb and destructive. It is humbling and instructive to remember my own episodes of dysfunction when I consider the insane actions of some Project 100K men who were young, typically 19 or 20, and burdened with more anxiety and vulnerability than I will ever experience." That's a freaking great point. You think about the things that you've done when you're stressed out, freaked out, and you've done dumb things, behaved badly, made bad decisions because of that, and you're a smart person. Imagine what these other people had under more stress in a combat scenario.

• 1:53:18Jocko Willink?

  "In a study of intellectually disabled men at the mental hygiene clinic at the 67th evacuation hospital in Quynon, in a six-month period, two Army psychiatrists found that Project 100K soldiers were referred for psychiatric help 10 times as frequently as other troops. Project 100K men, they said, seemed to have lowered stress tolerance and a relative lack of the usual mechanisms for coping with stress. In a separate study, four Army psychiatrists concluded, quote, 'Individuals of lower intellectual capacity have greater difficulty in adjustment than persons of average intelligence and thus more frequently become psychiatric problems or disciplinary offenders,' end quote."

• 1:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Can you imagine that in Vietnam, during the war, they're studying intellectually disabled men in the Army in Vietnam, in combat? God, what a freaking disaster.

• 1:54:23Jocko Willink?

  Jim Bracewell, a helicopter pilot who commanded an air cavalry squadron in the Mekong Delta in 1970, tells the story of Mike Sanchez, not his real name, who was a product of Project 100K and never should have been sent to a war zone. As soon as Mike was assigned to an infantry platoon in the field, the young lieutenant platoon leader realized that a terrible mistake had been made.

• 1:54:44Jocko Willink?

  He requested that Mike be moved to a rare area. While the request was being processed, Mike, a simple young man who could neither read nor write, remained in the infantry platoon and was asked to perform beyond his mental capabilities. The platoon leader was very compassionate and tried to keep Mike under his wing, protecting him from ridicule from unfeeling soldiers. In return, Mike developed an intense loyalty to the lieutenant. One day, as the platoon moved through some rice paddies, the men came under heavy fire from the enemy and they ran for cover. As soon as they reached cover, Mike looked for his lieutenant. He couldn't find him. He frantically began calling the platoon leader's name. One of the other soldiers told Mike to stop yelling, that he had seen the lieutenant go down and thought he was dead. Mike tearfully asked where he was. When he pinpointed the lieutenant's position,

• 1:55:27Jocko Willink?

  he shed his equipment, including his rifle, and ran through heavy fire to his lieutenant. He scrambled to his young leader's side and discovered that he was badly hit in both legs. Mike didn't know whether the lieutenant was dead or alive. He made no attempt at first aid. It never occurred to him. He simply picked up the lieutenant as if he were a doll and ran back to the tree line. Neither of them were hit during the dash to the trees and no one could believe it considering the intensity of enemy fire. They said the pattern of bullets hitting the rice paddy water all around him made it seem impossible that they were not hit. The lieutenant received first aid and a short time later was evacuated by a helicopter. He survived. About a month later, Bracewell said, Mike was sent to the rear area to participate in a parade and receive a Silver Star for heroism presented by the commanding general of his

• 1:56:12Jocko Willink?

  division. As was customary, he had ceremonies. The general presented the medal and then chatted with him for a few minutes. It was during this chat that the general realized that something was not quite right. He ordered his subordinates to remove Mike from combat. That's a, that kind of rings of like the Forrest Gump scenario, you know? And that that section, there's some other, there's some other good stories in there about, just about guys that did perform, like even though they were not quite, didn't have as much cognitive capacity, they, and he's got a bunch of examples like that.

• 1:56:54Jocko Willink?

  Uh, bottom of the barrel, this section's called, and recalling the day in 1969, when he reported to the induction center in downtown Cleveland, Ohio for his pre induction exam. Mark Fruitkin said at one point, at that point in the war, they were taking just about anyone they could get misfits, flat footed, the half crippled and the half crazed.

• 1:57:14Jocko Willink?

  And so they had to get more people. They had two ways to get more people. Induction centers had a monthly quota for how many project hundred K men they could take. When they used up their quota, they were instructed to continue to take low scoring men, but not count them as part, part of project hundred K. In this way, thousands of additional low IQ men were brought into the ranks to recruiters and induction centers were pressured to cast a wider net and bring in thousands of additional men who would normally fail to qualify for military duty, men with health problems, physical defects, psychological disorders, criminal backgrounds, or and drug and alcohol addiction. These second class fellows, to use President Johnson's term, served a political goal. They spared healthier, wealthier men in the middle class from being drafted.

• 1:57:59Jocko Willink?

  Many military commanders lamented the skewed priorities that put the playing of, put playing politics ahead of creating a high quality fighting force. Adrian R. Lewis, a retired US Army major who taught at West Point said, "The primary concern of the draft was pacification of the American people to disrupt American society as little as possible. Providing the armed forces with the best men possible was at best a secondary consideration." It was just about politics, man.

• 1:58:33Jocko Willink?

  As the military grew more and more desperate for manpower, induction centers grabbed every warm body they could find, even men with serious medical conditions such as asthma, high blood pressure, hearing loss. Carlos Martinez, who said he grew up in the streets and orphanages of Bronx and Brooklyn, was rejected by the military in 1964, is physically unfit for service, but in 1967, lo and behold, he was now fit. "We were the bottom of the barrel," he said. "I was almost legally blind." But when we got down to the induction station in 1967, it wasn't really about the physicals. It was like you were being taken. The assumption was that, the assumption was already made that you were available. Everybody was taken. The only way you don't pass is if you don't have a leg. Fast forward a little bit more.

• 1:59:18Jocko Willink?

  Among the ranks of the armed forces in 1966, 1971, were men who had been unacceptable because of their body size. For example, too heavy, too thin, too short. Until Project 100K suddenly made them fair game. 9% of Project 100K men were accepted because of new, less stringent physical standards. So 91% was mental. But there was 9% that just lowered the physical standards. Because they were "different," in quotes, these men were often harassed and given humiliating names. Overweight men were ridiculed with names such as "fatty," "lard ass," and "porkey,"

• 1:59:59Jocko Willink?

  "excessively thin men," "skin and bones," and "tiny man," "runt," and "midget." Army veteran John Ketwig tells of a trainee called Fatso at Fort Dix, New Jersey, who committed suicide after suffering horrendous cruelty at the hands of a sadistic sergeant. "Once he'd been a law student," said Ketwig. He'd been called to do his duty. He had a wife.

• 2:00:30Jocko Willink?

  And criminals as well. For many NCOs and officers, the Pentagon policy that caused most anger and outrage in the later years of the war was the relaxation of so-called moral standards. Men who had been convicted of serious crimes like armed robbery were supposed to be disqualified from service, but recruiters and induction centers were given the authority to grant moral waivers to bring them into the ranks. In a common scenario, a judge working in collaboration with the recruiter would give a young offender a choice: go to jail, or join the Army or the Marine Corps. When a judge and recruiter worked out a deal, the procedure was known as punitive enlistment. Criminal behavior was often accompanied by alcohol and drug abuse. If a man had a police

• 2:01:13Jocko Willink?

  record for drunk driving or intoxicated assaults, he would have been rejected in the days before the Vietnam War, but after the war began, because of the manpower shortages, he was accepted.

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  That punitive enlistment, how much do you know about that? Do they do that now? I heard of that being done now.

• 2:01:31Jocko Willink?

  They don't do it anymore. I would hear guys saying that, even when I got in, "Oh, either jail or the military."

• 2:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know a guy, who straight up the judge, that's what he told him.

• 2:01:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that's then still happens. How long ago was that? It's hard to get in the military right now.

• 2:01:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was before. I don't know. I don't know. But he is younger than me.

• 2:01:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess it's a thing. I definitely knew people that told stories like that, but there's a lot of people, especially when you first get in the military, a lot of stories. Everyone was drafted to play in the NFL, but then they chose this, or, you know, everyone's a D1 football player, or a Golden Gloves boxer, and like, there's a lot of stories you hear. Or, you know, I was like Thug, you know, I was either come to jail or come here. So you hear a lot of stories, you don't know which ones to believe, kind of, when you first get in.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe this guy, I guess. I mean, yeah, I believe him, but, yeah, who knows? I didn't grow up with him or nothing.

• 2:02:35Jocko Willink?

  If you know the guy, and like, he seems legit, then maybe it's true. Yeah. But there, I'm just saying, when you get in the military, especially boot camp...

• 2:02:45Jocko Willink?

  There's a lot of people say a lot of weird stories, man. They make up a lot of stuff. Did try and sound cool. But we know that it did happen. I mean, clearly it had a name. I was, that's the first time I'd ever heard that name, punitive enlistment. I've never heard that before.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  Or maybe now it's like less like official, you know, or something like that.

• 2:03:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, maybe it's less official now. I know it's harder to get in the military now. Like if you have criminal record, it's really hard to get in the military now.

• 2:03:12Jocko Willink?

  So. Check. In the final years of the war, men who were violent, angry, or disturbed became a significant presence in the Army and Marine Corps. According to many officers, they were responsible for a serious breakdown of discipline in the troops of Vietnam. In 1971, Colonel Robert D. Heinel wrote in Armed Forces Journal, this is in 1971 he wrote this, "Our army now that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers, drug ridden and dispirited, we're not near muteness." That's an assessment in the Armed Forces Journal in 1971 from a Colonel, a full board Colonel.

• 2:03:57Jocko Willink?

  According to Basker and Strauss, "The most serious symptom of the crisis in discipline in Vietnam was fragging, real or threatened assaults on officers and high ranking sergeants. The practice got its name from fragmentation grenade, which would be rolled into the area where an officer or NCO was sleeping. When it exploded, no fingerprints could be found. The target was often a leader who was hated because he was incompetent in leading men or excessively harsh in his discipline or overly aggressive in waging war, putting the lives of soldiers and Marines at unnecessary risk just so that he could gain glory and advance his own career. In addition to thousands of threats that were never carried out, there were confirmed

• 2:04:38Jocko Willink?

  reports of at least 800 fraggings or attempted fraggings in the Army and Marine Corps." That's a lot, 800, with 86 men killed and an estimated 700 wounded.

• 2:04:49Speaker 01

  From fragging?

• 2:04:50Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:04:51Speaker 01

  Like killing your own dude.

• 2:04:53Jocko Willink?

  Yep, that's confirmed reports.

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  That's some turmoil right there.

• 2:04:59Jocko Willink?

  But this was probably only the tip of the iceberg, according to historian West Hyder. The true figure may never be known.

• 2:05:09Jocko Willink?

  Many officers felt unsafe simply because they were authority figures during his second tour in Vietnam. Major Colin Powell, later four-star general, said he was living in a large tent and I moved my cot every night partly to thwart Viet Cong informants who might be tracking me, but also because I did not rule out attacks on our authority from within the battalion itself. Coming from Colin Powell. Captain Thomas Cecil, who was stationed at Camron Bay in 1970, 1971, was so worried about attacks on his life that during his last month in Vietnam, he slept in the military intelligence bunker and only his battalion commander knew where he was at night.

• 2:05:54Jocko Willink?

  Among Marines in 1968, fragging was a worse problem than in illegal drug use, according to a team of Marine Corps historians who wrote that although the number of fraggings was relatively small, the knowledge that fraggings occurred often had a chilling effect on a leader's willingness to enforce discipline. And again, you know, when your attitude is you're going to impose things on people and you're going to enforce discipline instead of lead and listen and collaborate to figure out how to execute things. And I know someone's like, how are you going to get them to do it? Well, you got to listen to them.

• 2:06:38Jocko Willink?

  And I've actually done that. I did that my whole career. Most fraggings occurred inside camps while out in jungles and rice paddies. A different method was used by infantrymen who wanted to kill, quote, "bad officers," according to Robert Nylin, the combat infantry officer quoted earlier. "Sometimes an errant bullet struck an incompetent fool amid a firefight. Problem solved."

• 2:07:06Jocko Willink?

  During the war, army private, an army private named Paul Solo was quoted as saying, "The army keeps a lot of strange dudes off the street." The most common example of strange dudes were known in the military as misfits. Chronically maladaptive soldiers who were unable to fit in with other soldiers because they were disturbingly different from everyone else. Misfits, wrote author Peter Barnes, tend to share a number of common characteristics. A large majority are high school dropouts, who are often slow-witted loner types who are not particularly attractive or likable. In civilian life, most of them have been losers many times over. In the military, this pattern is repeated. If misfits manage to slip through pre-induction screening and they enter basic training, their

• 2:07:50Jocko Willink?

  inability to adapt becomes noticeable, and they are usually discharged, sometimes with a diagnosis of personality disorder. But during the Vietnam War, misfits were kept because of manpower shortages. Most of them were poor learners or slow adjusters. They were unable to make friends, and they became targets of their superiors' rage and their peers' resentment. Malcolm Miller Jones, a veteran who grew up in New York City, noted that group cohesion was important for platoons in training and in combat. And a man who failed to work in sync with his comrades and failed to do his share of the chores was often the recipient of a blanket party, in which a blanket was thrown over the man and his platoon mates beat him anonymously with their fists. A blanket party would cause some men to shape out and become cooperative, but it failed

• 2:08:34Jocko Willink?

  to reform others. I mentioned some of the success stories. Here's another success story. There's a chief hospital corpsman, Don Phelps, who was in charge of a sick bay, a big sick bay, and he had an assistant that he calls Elmer here, not his real name, who was not too bright, quote, "not too bright." Phelps was ordered to take Elmer, and he was immediately surprised by the young man's solid performance and eagerness to plead. "Please, Elmer made the sick bay sparkle with cleanliness." Phelps said, "I couldn't have asked for a cleaner, sharper space if I had a crew of five working for me." Because of Elmer's mental limitations, Phelps said, he never gave him any large amount of detailed work, but in the basic cleaning jobs that he assigned, Elmer took extreme

• 2:09:19Jocko Willink?

  pride in what he did accomplish. He was very polite and developed a highly commendable appearance. The story of Elmer supports the argument made by many educators and psychologists that low aptitude in individuals can be productive in low-stress, non-dangerous situations.

• 2:09:33Jocko Willink?

  Gives another example of a lieutenant that has to type letters of condolences home and and he says, "My best typist was a young man who seemingly never should have been drafted or recruited. His mental acuity was severely disabled. However, he was diligent in his duties, never distracted and rarely made an error. I wish I had more like him."

• 2:09:56Jocko Willink?

  AWOL, Absent Without Leave. "The major illegality in the armed forces during the Vietnam War was absenteeism. AWOL, which is absence of less than 30 days and desertion, 30 days or longer. During the entire period of the Vietnam War," says Baskin Strauss, "there were approximately 1.5 million AWOL incidents and 500,000 desertion incidents."

• 2:10:20Jocko Willink?

  "At the peak of the war in 1968, an American soldier was going AWOL every two minutes and deserting every six minutes. In 1970 alone," wrote Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinel, Jr., "the Army had 65,000 deserters, or roughly the equivalent of four infantry divisions."

• 2:10:43Jocko Willink?

  "Project 100K men were more likely to run away than other soldiers."

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  So AWOL is-

• 2:10:49Jocko Willink?

  Less than 30 days.

• 2:10:50Speaker 01

  And then that's desertion after that?

• 2:10:51Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  And AWOL is absent without-

• 2:10:53Jocko Willink?

  Absent Without Leave.

• 2:10:54Speaker 01

  Leave, oh, like official leave.

• 2:10:55Jocko Willink?

  Cause leave is how you go on.

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:01Jocko Willink?

  Often their behavior stemmed from their personality and family history. These 100K people that go, that run away. Many of the men grew up in poor families, no father present, little or no education, lots of chaos and confusion. For some low IQ men, running away was a common response to stress and harassment. They failed to stop and ponder the many warnings they had heard throughout their time in the military, warnings of the dire consequences of going AWOL or deserting. They were told that AWOL or desertion would cause them to receive a less than honorable discharge, which would make it difficult to get a good job. Unfortunately, the concept of a lifelong stigma was too abstract to have any real meaning for them."

• 2:11:38Jocko Willink?

  "The guy who had troubles usually had less intelligence, didn't think ahead. Most of these kids weren't bad, they were just dumb." It's coming from a, it's coming from a battalion commander.

• 2:11:51Jocko Willink?

  There's a little uprising in the Presidio, Presidio in San Francisco, they had like a prison there. October 11th, 1968, a prisoner named Richard Rusty Bunch, who's described by relatives as high IQ but severely depressed and suicidal, asked a guard, "If I run, will you shoot me?"

• 2:12:12Jocko Willink?

  He requested that the guard aim at his head, and then he skipped away. He'd gone 30 feet when the guard killed him with a 12-gauge shotgun blast in his back.

• 2:12:21Jocko Willink?

  The killing sparked a peaceful sit-down protest by 27 of the prisoners. Their spokesman tried to read a list of their grievances, but the prison commander, 25-year-old captain, called in 75 MPs to encircle the huddled men together and order a halt to the protest. When the men refused, all 27 were seized and charged with mutiny. The charges later reduced to willful disobedience of lawful order.

• 2:12:47Jocko Willink?

  In the following months, three men escaped to Canada. Two were found guilty of lesser charges, 22 were found guilty with sentences ranging from six months to 16 years. But ultimately, none of them actually had to serve service, serve more than one year, thanks to the unfavorable publicity the army received. You can influence what's going on. That's why I said, when you stand up and say, "Hey, this doesn't make sense here, this is what, no one agrees with this", you can actually gain support.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and again, it kind of goes back, in a small way, actually, maybe in a big way, to that like, marketing campaign idea.

• 2:13:21Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 2:13:22Speaker 01

  Where...

• 2:13:23Jocko Willink?

  Bad Yelp review.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, all that, it's all in play, right? So yeah, if the government, or if you need people to fight your war, you better have a good marketing campaign, and it's either gonna be an easier sell or a harder sell, whatever, that's, hey, that's on you, you know? And you gotta sell it.

• 2:13:38Jocko Willink?

  Decisions you make.

• 2:13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, fully.

• 2:13:40Jocko Willink?

  And if you have to, if it's hard to sell things, you need to think about what you're doing. It shouldn't be hard to sell things, bro.

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:47Jocko Willink?

  What, does people on my team not want to win? And if they don't want to win, then we're not aligned, so we have a real problem. But most of the time, we want to win.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, and the shoe's kind of on the other foot as well, if it's like, hey, government is not selling me, they're trying to impose, so hey, let me market to why, you know, why we shouldn't, why we don't have to do this, you know? And boom, you get that support, you get an effective, successful marketing campaign.

• 2:14:12Jocko Willink?

  Unless your marketing campaign gets banned.

• 2:14:18Speaker 01

  Then you can market against them banning your campaign.

• 2:14:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  But yeah.

• 2:14:22Jocko Willink?

  It's a little tricky these days.

• 2:14:23Speaker 01

  That makes it hard for sure.

• 2:14:27Jocko Willink?

  Bad paper. Bad paper is when you get less than honorable discharge. Or other than honorable, when it was time for Project Hundred K men to leave the military, men of them received a heavy blow, slightly over half of them. A hundred and eighty thousand, so there's only three hundred and sixty thousand of these people. A hundred and eighty thousand of them were separated with discharges under conditions other than honorable. A stigma that made it hard to get good jobs because many employers would not hire veterans who failed to produce a certificate of honorable discharge. They were often barred from veterans' benefits such as healthcare, housing assistance, employment, and counseling. Some of them became chronically homeless and troubled. Although some bad paper vets have been guilty of serious offenses, most have been accused

• 2:15:12Jocko Willink?

  of minor offenses related to the stresses of military life in combat, AWOL, missing duty, abusing alcohol or drugs, or talking back to a superior.

• 2:15:24Jocko Willink?

  There was a cruel irony in the less than honorable discharges. Millions of men who beat the draft legally by going to college or getting braces, etc., suffered nothing. In fact, they held an advantage over men who served. They got the first crack at jobs compiled and combined seniority and experience. Even the draft dodgers who fled to Canada and Sweden got amnesty from Presidents Ford and Carter. But not McNamara's bad paper vets. Unlike the articulate, politically astute war resistors, they had no one to lobby for them.

• 2:16:01Jocko Willink?

  And then he talks about one guy that, Bill Daniel of Nashville, who'd been an army recruiter in 1967. When he was interviewed 35 years later, he was still bitter about the approximately hundred McNamara's morons he had personally recruited in the slums of Cleveland, Ohio during the war. "It didn't really sit too good with me," he said, "but when you are told to do what to do in the military, you do what you are told to do." They never should have been in the military. Many of the low aptitude men that he and his fellow recruiters signed up were either killed in combat. When they left the army, they were departed with less than honorable discharges for such offenses as going AWOL, insubordination, or bedwetting.

• 2:16:45Jocko Willink?

  You take a man who can't read or write, he said, he never knew about deferments. He comes from the ghetto and he may not want to take orders and you send him into the, by the most expedient means necessary into combat. That's only going to lead to failure. Fast forward a little bit, several veterans, counselors in the 1980s told me of similar experiences with low IQ Vietnam veterans. When review boards were asked to change a discharge from undesirable to general, the uniformed officers who were compassionate toward Project 100K men would approve the change. So you got people trying to get these bad discharges changed and the military uniformed officers like, yeah, we need to give these guys a break.

• 2:17:30Jocko Willink?

  But they would be overruled by civilian superiors who regarded men who had gone AWOL as slackers who deserve no mercies. In an absurd turn of events, some of these civilians who viewed themselves as upholding military tradition had been draft avoiders during the Vietnam War. It was infuriating to see these officials kick the very men who had served in their stead. So here is the verdict, kind of puts out some word on McNamara's plan. At the dawn of Project 100K, Robert McNamara boasted that the program would, quote, "salvage

• 2:18:12Jocko Willink?

  the poverty scarred youth of our society at the rate of 100,000 men each year. First, for two years of military service, and then for a lifetime of productive activity in civilian society," end quote. Despite the soaring optimism, Project 100K became known as McNamara's folly. It was a failure, bringing more suffering than redemption, though some Project 100K men did well in the service, passing basic training and going on to productive military assignments. Large numbers of them had trouble coping with the demands of military life. They were often hazed and ridiculed and demeaned. It was ironic that McNamara, in one of his speeches extolling Project 100K, said, "I

• 2:18:57Jocko Willink?

  have directed that these men shall never be singled out or stigmatized in any manner."

• 2:19:04Jocko Willink?

  And then he puts somehow his order never worked its way down to company level. Some veterans of project 100 K were psychologically devastated by the war. Dr. John Wilson, a psychologist at Cleveland State University, who spent several years studying Vietnam veterans emotional problems, estimated that thousands of project 100 K men who had served in Southeast Asia were so severely messed up that they couldn't function in society. When I say severely messed up, I mean they can't hold jobs, raise families and cope with day to day living.

• 2:19:36Jocko Willink?

  McNamara had predicted that life after they returned to civilian world, project 100 K men would have an earning capacity, quote, "two to three times that it would have been had there been no such program." After the war, however, a follow up study on project 100 K men showed that in late 19, that in the 1986, 1987 labor market, they were either no better off or actually worse off than non veterans of similar aptitude. So much for McNamara's rosy prediction. In 2014, when many Vietnam veterans were entering their retirement years, a study funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated

• 2:20:17Jocko Willink?

  that more than 283,000 veterans still suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, which was characterized by disabling flashbacks, hyper arousal and sleep problems. The key, the study's key takeaway is that for some PTSD is not going away, said William Schlegler, a lead scientist on the study. It is chronic and prolonged for veterans with PTSD, the war is not over. The study found that low IQ veterans were more likely to suffer from PTSD than high IQ vets. Project 100 K and McNamara's other failures in the war wrecked his reputation.

• 2:20:56Jocko Willink?

  At first admired for his intelligence and analytical prowess, author Thomas Schtick wrote, McNamara later became one of the most hated men in America by the officers and enlisted personnel he had led. One officer angry over the abuse of mentally limited men in the armed forces even confronted McNamara in public. At a conference in Washington DC as McNamara touted the virtues of Project 100K, an army psychologist who was treating psychologically afflicted afflicted afflicted Vietnam veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center stood up and spoke out. Although McNamara was a me although a mere captain, Dr. Walter P.

• 2:21:38Jocko Willink?

  Nake, K-N-A-K-E, told McNamara, what you're doing is wrong. And by the way, Dr. Walter P. Nake, I looked him up. He's alive and if he wants to come on the podcast, he's invited. Did McNamara ever express regret over Project 100,000? Biographer Deborah Shapley says that to the very end, he refused to apologize or admit error. McNamara wanted to believe that Project 100K was a universally successful program, but his self congratulation was at odds with the verdict of most scholars and other observers.

• 2:22:22Jocko Willink?

  Christian Appy said Project 100K was instituted with high minded rhetoric about offering the poor an opportunity to serve. Its result, however, was to send many poor terribly confused and woefully undereducated boys to risk death in Vietnam. Annie P. Baker, a history professor at Wheaton College, said Project 100K or McNamara's morons, as the cruel joke went, was a disaster benefiting neither the men nor the armed forces. Jacob Hellebrun. Georgetown University said McNamara's experiment in social engineering had the most awful results, including ridicule in training camps and death in Vietnam. Samuel F. Yeet, a professor at Howard University, said that instead of preparing impoverished

• 2:23:03Jocko Willink?

  young men with skills for a better life, Project 100K was little more than express vehicle to Vietnam. Denouncing McNamara for his intellectual arrogance and duplicity, Myra McPherson, author of the Vietnam classic Long Time Passing, called Project 100,000 "a shameful brainchild and one of the most heinous acts as the chief, as one of his most heinous acts as chief architect of the war." On the last day of 1971, Project 100K was officially ended, and in July of 1973, the draft was replaced by the All Volunteer Force.

• 2:23:43Jocko Willink?

  Passing, the AFQT was raised from the 10th percentile IQ of 72 to the old standard, the 31st percentile IQ of 92. So they did, they shut it down. But he goes to point on that this kind of thing still happens. He says in 1976, Charlie Wilson, congressman from Texas, testified at a hearing about the death of one of his constituents, Lynn McClure, who was a 20-year-old young man from Lufkin, Texas, who had a history of non-success, who was mentally retarded, who weighed 115 pounds, somehow got into the Marine Corps and was severely beaten during basic training and died as a result of those injuries without regaining consciousness.

• 2:24:26Jocko Willink?

  In Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1976, a 25-year-old man walked out of a state mental institution where he'd lived for 14 years and wandered into an army recruiting station. He had been diagnosed as having what today is called Down Syndrome, was labeled severely retarded, retarded.

• 2:24:47Jocko Willink?

  When he entered the recruiting station, he was promptly enlisted by a sergeant who a later investigated investigation revealed faked his test scores. He was sent to Fort Ord, California for basic training, soon deserted, came back to Tulsa, arrested, put in the Fort Sill stockade to face court martial. Psychiatrist examined him and found he had the mental capacity of a nine-year-old. Even up to today, in the drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, fast forward a little bit, beginning in 2001, the US did not bring back the draft, but there were many parallels to Vietnam as the military accepted low-performing recruits because it was desperate for more and more soldiers for combat. An Army private named David Dietrich of Petrie Perry County, Pennsylvania, was subject

• 2:25:31Jocko Willink?

  of a Newsweek article entitled "He Never Should Have Gone to Iraq." Before and during his Army time, he was considered slow in his thinking, he had trouble retaining information in basic training, he couldn't hit targets on the rifle range, even though he was given extra training. One superior campaigned to have Dietrich sent home on grounds that he would pose a danger to himself and others if he was sent to Iraq, but the request was rebuffed by hires up. As with Vietnam, there was a big push to get troops in the combat zone. Soon after he arrived in Iraq, he was assigned to act as a scout in an abandoned building where he was supposed to watch from an open window. A few minutes after starting his duty, in the window, he was shot dead.

• 2:26:15Jocko Willink?

  That was in December 2006 in Ramadi, right after we left. 2007, nine Marine Corps recruiters worked in the Houston area, were punished for using stand-ins to take mental tests at the Houston Induction Center for 15 marginal prospects who might not have passed the tests on their own. The fraud was caught by an official who noticed the signatures of the test takers didn't match those on the enlistment forms. No one knew how long the fraudulent test-taking had been going on.

• 2:26:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's 2007, by the way.

• 2:26:49Jocko Willink?

  From 2004 to 2007, four major branches of the armed forces granted 125,000 moral waivers to override the rule against accepting people with criminal records.

• 2:27:01Jocko Willink?

  Stephen Green, 20, an angry misfit and high school dropout from Midland, Texas, who had racked up jail time for drug and alcohol offenses before he joined the Army with a moral waiver. In 2006, Green and four other soldiers in Iraq drank alcohol, changed into black clothes, and then raided the home of a husband and wife and their two daughters. Green killed the parents and the younger daughter. Then he and a second soldier raped the 14-year-old daughter, shot her, sent fire to her body to try to destroy the evidence. He's convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to life in prison. 2014, he committed suicide by hanging.

• 2:27:45Jocko Willink?

  But why is that guy in the military?

• 2:27:53Jocko Willink?

  Here's the closer of this book.

• 2:27:57Jocko Willink?

  "One of the lessons of McNamara's Project 100K is that the low aptitude individuals should never be used in war zones or in the dangerous rear echelon areas. Putting their lives at risk is cruel and immoral, and on sheer practical level, it degrades the effectiveness of war efforts. The least intelligent among us should never be viewed as expendable units of manpower's,

• 2:28:19Jocko Willink?

  but as our fellow sojourners on this fragile earth deserving respect and compassion and gratitude for the contributions they make to our families and our society.

• 2:28:30Jocko Willink?

  While vowing to never again induct people with intellectual disabilities, Americans should also heed warnings by military leaders that it is a mistake to take inductees who have criminal backgrounds, medical defects, social maladjustment, and psychiatric disorders.

• 2:28:46Jocko Willink?

  The armed forces need and deserve the best and the brightest."

• 2:28:52Jocko Willink?

  One of the wisest quotations that I recorded earlier in this book comes from Lieutenant Colonel John, Leslie John Shellhase, a World War II veteran who helped create Project 100K, but who was strongly opposed to sending the men into combat. Quote, "Wars are not won by using marginal manpower as cannon fodder, but rather by risking and sometimes losing the flower of a nation's youth."

• 2:29:25Jocko Willink?

  So,

• 2:29:29Jocko Willink?

  there you have it. Not, not exactly an uplifting book, definitely worth buying, definitely worth reading, but it's not gonna, not gonna make you feel any better about things.

• 2:29:43Jocko Willink?

  And then, so the, the, what, what, why read it? What do we take away from it? Why are we talking about on this podcast? Cause what can we learn from it?

• 2:29:51Jocko Willink?

  That's the, that's the thing. What can we learn from it? And I think one of the big things we can learn from it is you have to push back. You have to question, you have to question authority. Authority's not always right. Just cause someone is in a position of authority doesn't mean they're right. And in fact, an indicator of them not being right is when they impose things on you. That's an indicator that they're not right. If you have to impose something on someone, it's an indication that you're, what you're doing is not right. And if you're having something imposed on you, that's an indication that whoever's imposing on you is not right, or at least they're not confirmed. Because if I have to impose something on you, why?

• 2:30:33Jocko Willink?

  Why? If I can't explain to you how this is going to help you, help your family, help your community, help your country, if I can't explain that to you, and the only way I can get you to do something is by imposing on you, it's, there's a good chance it's wrong.

• 2:30:48Jocko Willink?

  So again, back to my earlier emotional reaction to the draft Dodgers, right? But it's, I understand it. Once I took a step back,

• 2:31:00Jocko Willink?

  you, you, you understand. Look, I understand it. Does it still make me angry that there's people that look, can you imagine watching your, again, I'm gonna get emotional, but you watch your neighbor go off to war while you stay at home? There's some, there's something wrong with that picture. So from that level, I, I don't, I can't understand it, can't agree with it. When you start looking at it from a level of, oh, this is being imposed on the country and the leadership can't explain why it's happening. And they're trying to sell it to us and they can't even sell it to us. They can't. So they have to impose.

• 2:31:40Jocko Willink?

  So we have a moral responsibility to question authority, to question the government, to figure out what it is we're actually doing.

• 2:31:51Jocko Willink?

  And

• 2:31:53Jocko Willink?

  you know, you take a guy like McNamara, I could probably, we should probably do a huge podcast about McNamara at some point.

• 2:32:01Jocko Willink?

  Because he, all the things that I talk about for bad leadership, he knocks a bunch of them out of the park.

• 2:32:09Jocko Willink?

  He, he doesn't understand people. He only listens to statistics. There's a, there's a, I know you like biases. Echo Charles?

• 2:32:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:32:19Jocko Willink?

  The McNamara fallacy. You ever heard of that? The McNamara bias. That's when you just go off of statistics. You just look at the numbers and you make a decision based on your quantitative observations and that's it. Based on the metrics. Hey, the metrics say this, that's what we're doing. It's a fallacy. Doesn't account for emotions, doesn't account for personalities, doesn't account for the human side of things and it doesn't work.

• 2:32:48Jocko Willink?

  So we can learn about leadership by reading this book. And we can learn clearly that we also have a moral obligation to protect people that are weak. Protect people that are mentally and physically disabled.

• 2:33:06Jocko Willink?

  And we need to be empathetic to other people to understand what they're where they're coming from. Like you read about some of those leaders in this book where, you know, the platoon commander took the, the, the McNamara 100 K soldier.

• 2:33:20Jocko Willink?

  Took him under his wing, protected him, took care of him. And there's a bunch of examples in there like that.

• 2:33:27Jocko Willink?

  Don't put, don't put people into positions that they cannot handle. And I'm not talking about don't push people, but don't put them in a situations, especially if they're going to be hazardous to them. Where they can get hurt or killed if they haven't been trained, if they're not capable of doing that thing.

• 2:33:45Jocko Willink?

  Certainly don't put them in danger.

• 2:33:49Jocko Willink?

  What does that mean? It means be a good freaking human being. That's what it means.

• 2:33:54Jocko Willink?

  Be a good person. That's what I learned.

• 2:33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did, did they, um, I mean, when they kind of laid that out, I,

• 2:34:04Speaker 01

  like, oh, this program is going to have this, this, this benefit on these people who otherwise wouldn't have these benefits. They're going to be trained, they're going to be more capable and all this stuff or whatever. And it's like, you kind of wondered, did they believe that? Because if you do like us, what's the opposite of a straw man? I think it's called, I don't know, the Iron Man. I don't know.

• 2:34:24Jocko Willink?

  Steel man.

• 2:34:24Speaker 01

  Steel man. Yeah. So the steel man argument for that is kind of like, yeah, like there are success stories and, and those success stories kind of play out exactly how they're purporting. You know, this is going to end up by to everyone. But.

• 2:34:40Speaker 01

  Like I said, like it's not a vacuum and it's not, you know, people are different. And when you kind of take it as a whole, the reality sets in where it's like, no, man, this is going to leave people straight up dead, confused, freaking like worse off, you know, just because all of the unintended consequences.

• 2:35:01Speaker 01

  But you wonder like, I wonder if that was on purpose, that they're kind of like, oh yeah, maybe all these other consequences, or did they really kind of think that?

• 2:35:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, you could see that McNamara is surrounded by yes men. So here's the thing, I might believe something, but I'm surrounded by people that be like, hey, John, that might not be the best idea. And I'll even say that myself, wait, am I really, are we really going to take a, a kid from some rural area that's got a fourth grade education, that's got an IQ of 60, and we're going to turn their lives around? Or take some kid from the inner city ghetto? And all of a sudden, oh, the inner city ghetto kid with an IQ of 64 is going to be like, oh, great, I'm looking forward to following orders and peeling potatoes in the US Army.

• 2:35:50Jocko Willink?

  Like, like we, we impose, we overlay our thoughts on the people that we have no idea what they're like.

• 2:35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's the point right there where you have no idea. Oh yeah, this guy's going to be more capable, like, well, how do you know? Like even, I'm not saying no one's gonna, but then you're, you're counting for like so many people, so many different types of people, by the way, and you're assigning one success solution.

• 2:36:15Jocko Willink?

  You're also assigning your values and your perspective to a bunch of other people.

• 2:36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:20Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's the worst part. You're assigning your values and your perspective to a bunch of other people, which is a freaking massive mistake. Well, of course they're going to get on board.

• 2:36:31Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:36:32Jocko Willink?

  Of course they're gonna get on board.

• 2:36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:34Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't happen. You know, when you see that, you see that with your kids, you'll be like, it's like, so many kids would I kill for the opportunity to do this?

• 2:36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:42Jocko Willink?

  You know, you're like,

• 2:36:45Jocko Willink?

  you're imposing your, your values and your perspective on other people and it doesn't work. It doesn't work. I'm sure McNamara's like, hey, this is, you know, Johnny from wherever, this rural area in the middle of nowhere, whose main goal in life is to freaking work at the service station.

• 2:37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:06Jocko Willink?

  Cause he likes cars.

• 2:37:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's a good, that's a good point with the kids, right? So I remember my brother was talking to my daughter. Um, and he was like doing some math problem, you know, on the thing.

• 2:37:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:19Speaker 01

  And he's like all into it, you know, and then she's, you can tell she was like kinda bored with it. And she's like, oh, like let's do something else or whatever. He's like, no, no, no, math is fun. And then like me and my wife are looking at each other like, what the hell is this guy talking? Who does he think he's talking to? You know, eight year old girl is gonna be like, yeah.

• 2:37:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And there's a small population of the world that think it's fun.

• 2:37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

• 2:37:43Jocko Willink?

  And she ain't one of them.

• 2:37:46Jocko Willink?

  And he's, and Jay, Jay Charles not gonna be able to impose his perspective.

• 2:37:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:37:50Jocko Willink?

  On her.

• 2:37:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:52Jocko Willink?

  So that's another good thing to be very careful of that McNamara can teach us. Cause in his mind, everyone's just thinking the way he's thinking and he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men that are saying, yeah, of course. Little Johnny in the rural area or this kid down in the ghetto, Johnny in the ghetto is gonna be just down for the cause.

• 2:38:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. They're gonna be capable.

• 2:38:10Jocko Willink?

  Wow, what a great opportunity.

• 2:38:11Speaker 01

  Right, right. Great opportunity.

• 2:38:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Oh, you're gonna send me to freaking army boot camp? That sounds like a great opportunity. Thank you so much for this educational opportunity.

• 2:38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:22Jocko Willink?

  And thinking he's all benevolent. It's a good question that you posed. Did they actually believe that or was that just propaganda? It's a good question. I get, my guess is they believed it.

• 2:38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they had to believe it somewhat.

• 2:38:35Jocko Willink?

  But the thing is, the army guy, the uniform army people saying, dude, no, bad call, not gonna work.

• 2:38:42Speaker 01

  Then again, think about it, because you could see like one of these people, especially if you're used to just like handling people on that with that kind of numbers, you know, we need a thousand guys here, we need 10,000 guys, like, who are we gonna put? Like, you're not dealing with he actual human beings anymore in your head. You're like, bruh, get the guys who don't have nothing to live for. Throw them in there, you know?

• 2:39:04Jocko Willink?

  We'll give them opportunity.

• 2:39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, they should be happy, they should be thankful.

• 2:39:08Jocko Willink?

  When I, when I started teaching jujitsu to like team guys.

• 2:39:14Jocko Willink?

  The funny thing is, I thought that every, I thought, I would thought I would have a a, a rate of acceptance and wanting to train of 100%. I thought, everybody, hey, hey, when I, when I show this to you, you're gonna 100%, I'm gonna, well, how am I gonna do this? How am I gonna train all these guys all the time? They're just gonna wanna train, I'm gonna have to do it in the morning, I have to do it at night. We're training all the time. I imposed my perspective on everybody and my, my values on it. And the reality is, I would get probably out of every 20 people, 20 people I would introduce to jujitsu, one out of 20 would be into it.

• 2:39:53Speaker 01

  See, and even that, kinda, maybe this is my bias, but that to me seems like that's a reasonable expectation.

• 2:39:58Jocko Willink?

  Reasonable.

• 2:39:59Speaker 01

  And that's how wrong you can be.

• 2:40:00Jocko Willink?

  That's how wrong I am. And I am, and I am an actual SEAL.

• 2:40:06Jocko Willink?

  It's not, it's not like I'm talking about some other group of people. This is, this is, I'm a SEAL, I've been a SEAL for 10 years at this point. And I'm thinking, oh, well, of course, anyone that I show this to is gonna be bought in, we're gonna be able to train all the time.

• 2:40:17Speaker 01

  You know SEALs, you know how they think.

• 2:40:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, I was wrong. I'm wrong. And that's one of those things. It's saying that UFC tour when I went to Virginia, I watched UFC. It's the same thing. I realized I'm wrong. That's another thing. Teaching guys jiu-jitsu. I'm wrong. Not everyone's into it. Not everyone thinks like I think. Some, some people think way better than me. Some people think different than me. But I cannot overlay my perspective on people, and neither can you. So don't do it. Watch out if you're doing that. It's a bias. I wonder what that bias is called. When I overlay my perspective on you.

• 2:40:54Jocko Willink?

  I think everyone thinks the way I think. They don't. In fact, almost no one thinks the way you think. And that's a funny thing. Team guys do think alike. There's a whole lot of group think going on. You know, everyone likes certain stuff. There's a huge overlap for the amount of people that are in the seals. The Venn diagram of like interests and what we think is funny and what we think is cool. It's a big overlap. And I'll tell you what, in the 90s, it was an even bigger overlap. Because there was a much less culture that you were exposed to because you didn't have the internet. So you, you know, if you were going to get exposed to music, it was going to be from some other team guy. That was going to be, check this band out, Alice in Chains. Okay, cool. Let me check it out.

• 2:41:34Jocko Willink?

  There was no one introducing you to some random band from Ohio that you never heard of. Whereas now you can just, that'll just pop up on your stream. So in the 90s, it was a much more unified group. And that's why the, each team had its own little personality. And each platoon inside the team had its own little personality. Now, the world is more, there's so many more fractions that you can get into. Which, when you think of it from a global perspective, is bringing people together because now everyone, everyone listens to more music. Everyone sees a bunch of movies.

• 2:42:16Jocko Willink?

  When I grew up, music was a thing of record cost freaking, you know, $7.99, which was a lot of money. So, you didn't buy a bunch of records. You didn't get to listen to a bunch of different music. Not like now, what? You can listen to anything you want. You hear of a band, for one split second, you can get their whole catalog for nothing.

• 2:42:38Speaker 01

  Like, think about it. Remember even like movies.

• 2:42:43Speaker 01

  Like you'd have to go buy the the tape.

• 2:42:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and everyone in nineteen eighty five. Everyone saw the movie. Cause there was only nine movies.

• 2:42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:54Jocko Willink?

  Everyone saw.

• 2:42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true.

• 2:42:56Jocko Willink?

  Everyone heard the song.

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:58Jocko Willink?

  Everyone knew that album, because everyone had that album. That was the only album there was to get. Nineteen eighty four by Van Halen. Every single person I knew had that album.

• 2:43:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:43:07Jocko Willink?

  In nineteen eighty four. Every, that's crazy, right? Every single person knew that. I don't know any hit songs right now. I don't know any of them. I don't even know what a hit song. Is there such a thing anymore?

• 2:43:19Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:43:20Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, but I'm listening to music.

• 2:43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43:23Jocko Willink?

  I'm listening to, I'm even listening to newer music that's coming out, but I'm not listening to what everyone else is listening to.

• 2:43:30Jocko Willink?

  So we have a less unified situation, but. If that makes it even harder for me to impose my little ideas on you and and and transfer my values on to you. It doesn't work.

• 2:43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's true.

• 2:43:44Jocko Willink?

  All right, well.

• 2:43:47Jocko Willink?

  We want to help people.

• 2:43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43:49Jocko Willink?

  We definitely want to help people out and.

• 2:43:53Jocko Willink?

  Let's talk about some things that might be able to help people out.

• 2:43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, we here. Are doing a few things to help people, because we are on this path. And if we're not, we're trying to be, most of us.

• 2:44:05Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:44:05Speaker 01

  I'm not just gonna impose my, I'm not just gonna assume.

• 2:44:08Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:44:09Speaker 01

  It's not what I'm gonna do.

• 2:44:10Jocko Willink?

  So here's the deal. What are, what is it that people may need in the world right now? I can tell you one thing that people need from time to time. Sometimes you need a little extra. Let's call it energy.

• 2:44:22Speaker 01

  Sure, energy helps for sure.

• 2:44:24Jocko Willink?

  Because the energy will help you to get through. Maybe you gotta work to do, maybe you gotta workout to do, maybe you got the jiu jitsu to do. Maybe you wanna stretch, maybe you wanna get up. This is stuff we gotta do. Maybe you gotta just focus on getting done with some work so you can go work out.

• 2:44:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:44:40Jocko Willink?

  So sometimes you need some energy.

• 2:44:41Speaker 01

  Just.

• 2:44:41Jocko Willink?

  We made some, we made some energy. Releasing projects that will release an energy into your brain and body.

• 2:44:48Speaker 01

  Yes, so if you're, if you're into energy drinks or.

• 2:44:53Speaker 01

  You think you might benefit again, this is me just not imposing my view.

• 2:44:57Jocko Willink?

  Wait a second, even if you're not into energy drinks, cuz you might not be, there's a good chance I wasn't in energy drinks.

• 2:45:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, especially if it's for a reason.

• 2:45:04Jocko Willink?

  Because the reason I wasn't in energy drinks is cuz they were made of poison.

• 2:45:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:45:08Jocko Willink?

  And I wasn't going to put poison into my body. Despite the fact that it might give me a short term gain of like a little bit of hype. Then I have a long crash, I have health issues, I have the whole deal.

• 2:45:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:45:21Jocko Willink?

  So we're not doing that.

• 2:45:22Speaker 01

  Nope, we got good news, we got a new era of energy drinks. Uh, Jaco, Discipline Go, energy drink, all healthy, no sugar, it's sweet still.

• 2:45:33Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Got that monk fruit.

• 2:45:34Speaker 01

  Got the monk fruit, see? So good stuff, no artificial stuff in there, none, all natural, no preservatives even. So this is a healthy energy drink.

• 2:45:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:45Speaker 01

  Good, uh, good front side, good backside, boom, good to go, you'll be healthier.

• 2:45:49Jocko Willink?

  Long term, short term, strategic and tactical. Tactical win, strategic win, boom.

• 2:45:54Speaker 01

  So yes, you are correct, you cannot be into energy drinks per se and still be into this. And it's helpful on this path that we're on.

• 2:46:01Jocko Willink?

  So we're good.

• 2:46:02Speaker 01

  So we are good to go, so check those, yes, check those out. You know, try one, see which flavor is your, your favorite.

• 2:46:09Jocko Willink?

  We got powder too, by the way.

• 2:46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:11Jocko Willink?

  You can get a powdered form of that, you can get a powdered Discipline Go pre-workout.

• 2:46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah, and that's, that's another good one, where the traditional pre-workout, I can see why people are not into that. Here's the thing, I'll even, I'll admit it, I was kinda, I got off them for various reasons, for kinda the reason we're talking about. Where it's like, I know the benefits of a traditional pre-workout, but you gotta, you pay a price with those, you know? There's all the stuff in them and all this stuff, and you kinda get, there's like this itchy feeling that you get on your face and all this stuff from a pre-workout. It is weird, but when it comes with that, that boost or whatever, you kinda accept it, then you kinda embrace it, then it's kinda like, yeah, you know, it's working, kind of a thing. But after a while, you're like, I don't know if I should be taking this stuff. So I kinda stopped, but this one's not like that. So this pre-workout,

• 2:47:00Speaker 01

  discipline go, pre-workout, doesn't give you all that weird jittery, all that weird downside, the itchy face, even though some of us might still like it, even though that's not very beneficial in a workout. You just working out with itchy face, working out with not an itchy face. That's the only difference, um, as far as itchy face goes, but still gives you the good workout, the vasodilation that we look for. Really good.

• 2:47:26Jocko Willink?

  So you got that. You got the pills, by the way, if you need to take that quick hitter. And look, then you're gonna go blast a workout, blast it.

• 2:47:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:47:35Jocko Willink?

  And then guess what you're gonna need? Yeah, you're gonna need some protein to recover. I have some, I have an announcement to make to the world.

• 2:47:42Speaker 01

  All right, lay it on me.

• 2:47:45Jocko Willink?

  You know Elvis Presley? I guess the last thing that he ate before he died was a peanut butter banana sandwich.

• 2:47:51Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, cool.

• 2:47:52Jocko Willink?

  Now, this is the king of rock and roll. You know what I'm saying?

• 2:47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:55Jocko Willink?

  This guy is the king of rock and roll. We have to, we have to hold his opinions at some level of reverence, because he is the king of rock and roll.

• 2:48:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:48:07Jocko Willink?

  Now, unfortunately for him, he wasn't healthy, right? The, you know, things got the best of him. Maybe the peanut butter, he had fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, right?

• 2:48:16Speaker 01

  Oh, the, the sandwich was fried?

• 2:48:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Upside, taste, real good, right? Downside, just off, there's a lot of downside.

• 2:48:25Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:48:26Jocko Willink?

  There's a lot of downside. So we can, we can actually have upside, upside. You want that taste? Take, get some peanut butter milk, get some banana cream milk, put one scoop of each, and you've got yourself a little treat. You've got yourself a little Elvis treat.

• 2:48:43Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, if you wanna boost that one, which that's a good move right there, and I'm literally gonna try that today.

• 2:48:48Jocko Willink?

  It's so good.

• 2:48:49Speaker 01

  So you get one scoop banana, banana cream bomber, to be specific, one scoop peanut butter chocolate, then you put... Half a cup chocolate milk.

• 2:48:59Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:49:00Speaker 01

  The rest, regular milk or almond milk, whatever you like. And then one frozen banana. See what I'm saying? Oh, and one scoop peanut butter.

• 2:49:06Jocko Willink?

  But this is untested, what you're talking about.

• 2:49:08Speaker 01

  This is my hypothesis.

• 2:49:09Jocko Willink?

  Before you do that, try what I just said.

• 2:49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:13Jocko Willink?

  Mix your fluid of choice, almond milk, coconut milk, what, what, what's the other one? Oat milk, I guess.

• 2:49:20Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:49:20Jocko Willink?

  Or dairy milk.

• 2:49:21Speaker 01

  Regular.

• 2:49:22Jocko Willink?

  Milk. Just try one on one and tell me what you think before you go crazy. Before you're out there getting chocolate milk down the store, getting a Tulsi's banana out the freezer.

• 2:49:34Speaker 01

  I'm an advocate of, of getting cra- because it's one of those things where you have like the perfect base. Because you don't need anything additional. You don't need, it's perfect as far as like.

• 2:49:42Jocko Willink?

  Just enhancement.

• 2:49:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:49:44Jocko Willink?

  A video that you make.

• 2:49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that. Yeah, exactly. So yes, perfect, best tasting protein that there is. Really? So boom, that, that's going to help you out.

• 2:49:56Jocko Willink?

  Get yourself some milk, get yourself some mobility and joint health, right? That's where we got that joint warfare, the krill oil. Go, go read the reviews of, of either one of those two to see what's up.

• 2:50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true. Yep. Also immunity.

• 2:50:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. You go with that immunity.

• 2:50:10Speaker 01

  You do. Yes, we do want the immunity. So immunity and joints, by the way, is one of those things where men, until you get compromised, it gets compromised. You might not, we might not think about it all the time, but boom, you gotta stay ahead of that train right there. So yes, vitamin D three and S A A product substance, um, capsules called Cold War. Oh, man, those will keep you out of a jam for sure.

• 2:50:33Jocko Willink?

  Out of the jam. Oh, so you got kids, get some Warrior Kid Milk for those kids. We don't want to poison our children. Seems obvious. You wouldn't even think you'd need to say that. And yet go to the store and look at what people are buying to feed their children. They're going to feed their children poison. Don't do that. Get them some Warrior Kid Milk. By the way, they're super stoked. Only product, this is the most unified product where the parents want it as much as the kids. The parent, the kids want it as much as the parents want them to have it. Because your kid's like, oh, I want my kid to be strong.

• 2:51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:05Jocko Willink?

  And healthy. Cool. And the kid's like, I want something that tastes awesome. Cool, Warrior Kid Milk.

• 2:51:09Speaker 01

  Brad, you might be, you probably are kind of past this. You've probably been out of this game for a while, but. Getting little kids to like eat their dinner, right, or eat their whatever, and then the kid being like a picky eater or whatever, right? So that's like a challenge.

• 2:51:26Jocko Willink?

  I'm a picky eater. I'm still in that game for years.

• 2:51:30Speaker 01

  But that can be a challenge with the kids. You just want to get them fed into bed. You don't want to starve your kids. And then, you know, they're, you're not going to force feed them. So it becomes a thing, right? So sometimes the easy path, right, is to be like, you know what, let me just get them something that tastes good. And get this food down them and, you know, he's not starving, whatever. She's not starving. But here's the thing. So in that battle, because that can be a battle, I'm not saying for everybody, but that's a common battle that I hear about. This is one of those

• 2:51:58Jocko Willink?

  Just a solution, bro.

• 2:51:59Speaker 01

  Tools, one of those solutions where it's like, yep, they're not going to protest. They're going to love that one. And then boom, they get their protein, they get their nutrients. Perfect.

• 2:52:08Jocko Willink?

  Everything we're talking about, you can get it at jockofuel.com. You can also get some tea if you need some tea, some chocolate white tea there. Jockofuel.com. If you subscribe to any of these things, you get free shipping. That way we can compete with the global corporations that are just shipping stuff to you for, for nothing. They're, they're getting theirs. They're getting theirs. So if you want to, if you want to do that, jockofuel.com, subscribe, get free shipping. Also, you can get the drinks at Wawa. Where? Wawa?

• 2:52:40Speaker 01

  Wawa?

• 2:52:41Jocko Willink?

  Wawa. And the Vitamin Shoppe, you can get all the products at the Vitamin Shoppe. So go check those out. So there you go.

• 2:52:47Speaker 01

  Also, Origin USA, this is where you can get your American-made jeans, boots, some wallets on there, a bunch of good stuff, jujitsu stuff, gees. Now, here's the thing, they're not just like regular fricking, like generic-ish stuff.

• 2:53:02Jocko Willink?

  You know, do you know Neil, Black Belt Neil here?

• 2:53:05Speaker 01

  Neil?

• 2:53:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Anyways, I was rolling with him and I, he's, he trains MMA. And so you probably, he trains MMA during the day. That's probably why you don't know him because you don't train MMA during the day. But he happened to throw a gi on the other day and we were rolling and He like grabbed my gi and then he was all like, hey, what is this?

• 2:53:25Speaker 01

  He started caressing me.

• 2:53:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he started caressing me. He like stopped rolling to ask me about it. I go, yeah, bro. This is the, this is called the rift.

• 2:53:32Speaker 01

  That makes complete sense to me. And that's how all of it is too, by the way. So I have two pairs of Delta 68 jeans. I have the factory jeans. Even when you put those on, you're like, oh, there's a little bit more to these just from like a physical.

• 2:53:47Jocko Willink?

  Presence.

• 2:53:48Speaker 01

  Presence standpoint. Yes, sir. So yes, they, you know, they, they're originusa.com is where you can get this stuff. Um, but this, there's, okay, American made, yes, we'll get to that, but a lot goes into this from the beginning to the end. And when you put it on, you can tell.

• 2:54:06Jocko Willink?

  And you can also tell that it's made in America.

• 2:54:08Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:54:08Jocko Willink?

  You can tell it's made in America when you see people bringing back machines from overseas, which we literally brought back machines from overseas to start making stuff back here and make more stuff back in America. I mean, come on. Are you serious right now? Yeah, we're serious. Why? We want to, we want to help people. We want to help our communities. We want to help our country. How do you do that? Go get something from originusa.com. Help everybody.

• 2:54:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:54:37Jocko Willink?

  And be super comfortable.

• 2:54:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. That's good. So I feel like, I feel like my, um, wardrobe is essentially taken over by Origin stuff.

• 2:54:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:51Speaker 01

  I've literally seen one of my old favorite sweat or sweater hoodies, whatever. Literally sitting in front of me and I spent 30 minutes looking for the Origin one.

• 2:55:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:55:03Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:55:03Jocko Willink?

  You want that one?

• 2:55:04Speaker 01

  Yep, totally. Originusa.com. Also, Jaco's store. If you're going to represent while you're on this path, you want to represent discipline equals freedom. You want a shirt, a hat, a hoodie. That's where you can get it. So yes, Jaco's store.com. Uh, there's, uh, some new stuff on there. There's always new stuff on there.

• 2:55:21Jocko Willink?

  The jujitsu section?

• 2:55:23Speaker 01

  The jujitsu section is coming along.

• 2:55:25Jocko Willink?

  How many shirts are in the jujitsu section?

• 2:55:26Speaker 01

  We have in one? There, there's one.

• 2:55:30Jocko Willink?

  Not really a section yet, is it?

• 2:55:31Speaker 01

  We're, we're completely, we're, um, what do you call it? They're in transit to be on. By the time this comes out.

• 2:55:36Jocko Willink?

  Tomorrow?

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  Might be on there. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Either way, always new stuff on there. New stuff. Uh, speaking of new stuff, Shirt Locker.

• 2:55:44Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:55:44Speaker 01

  New shirt every month. It's a subscription scenario. You get a new shirt every month if you don't know about this. It, uh, the designs are a little bit different, but they're very appropriate.

• 2:55:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay, now you finally found what you were gonna say. You used to say like, "Well, they're kind of..." Now you're saying appropriate. I like it.

• 2:55:59Speaker 01

  Appropriate.

• 2:55:59Jocko Willink?

  Good space to be.

• 2:56:00Speaker 01

  Because that is the most accurate as of right now.

• 2:56:03Jocko Willink?

  I would, I would agree with you. They are appropriate, all of them.

• 2:56:06Speaker 01

  Did you see? Oh, no, you didn't see. There's the, the February one, which is, it's not February yet, so you gotta, you gotta wait for that. I think you might, you might appreciate that one.

• 2:56:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay, check. Uh, speaking of subscriptions, subscribe to this podcast wherever you subscribe to podcasts. Leave a review so that I can make fun of Echo Charles for what you say about him.

• 2:56:26Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:56:27Jocko Willink?

  We also have the Unraveling Podcast with Daryl Cooper, Grounded Podcast, which Dean's been hitting me up, wants to get back to the grounded game. So we'll probably make that happen. Warrior Kid Podcast, y'all.

• 2:56:40Jocko Willink?

  You can also join us on the Underground, JacoUnderground.com. Look, were we, are we, are we nervous about people getting canceled and banned and all this other stuff?

• 2:56:54Jocko Willink?

  I'm not nervous. I don't stay up at night thinking about it, but is it smart to just sit around and not pay attention? No, it's not. You can see people literally getting removed from platforms right now.

• 2:57:08Jocko Willink?

  They removed, Joe Rogan had a guest on who's a Harvard, Harvard doctor. And they didn't like what he said. They removed it from YouTube, which is, which seems kinda crazy, right?

• 2:57:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, very.

• 2:57:22Jocko Willink?

  I don't know what, you know, what is he saying that needs to be removed so no one can hear it?

• 2:57:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:28Jocko Willink?

  A Harvard medical doctor.

• 2:57:32Jocko Willink?

  Does that, and it's just a little clip, you know, a little clip. Oh, we're gonna remove that. So, look, am I staying awake? Not staying awake, but am I paying attention? Yes, I am. Do we need to have a contingency plan? Yes, we do. Contingency plan, jockounderground.com. If you want to help us with that platform, you can go to jockounderground.com. You subscribe. It costs $8.18 a month. Then if anything ever happens to this platform, we'll be there.

• 2:58:03Jocko Willink?

  We'll be there. We'll do what we gotta do. I don't think it's gonna happen. But that way, we don't have to take on a bunch of sponsors that say, hey, you couldn't talk about that. We don't want you to talk about that. You said bad things about McNamara.

• 2:58:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58:15Jocko Willink?

  Right? You said bad things about Dick Cheney.

• 2:58:21Jocko Willink?

  Well, who's gonna, what are they gonna say? You said bad things about Bill Clinton. He's a draft dodger. And Mitt Romney. Okay, well, maybe we'll just get taken down. No, not on the underground. Underground's ours.

• 2:58:38Jocko Willink?

  So, if you can't afford $8.18 a month, we still would, and you still want to be in the game.

• 2:58:44Jocko Willink?

  Cool. Email [email protected]. We'll take care of you. Also, we have a YouTube channel. Speaking of adding bananas and chocolate milk to Molk.

• 2:58:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:58:57Jocko Willink?

  Usually unnecessary. Some people might want those kind of enhancements. That's what Eko Charles does with some of his videos.

• 2:59:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:59:05Jocko Willink?

  Explosions, smoke, fire, music.

• 2:59:09Speaker 01

  I'm making a video with explosions.

• 2:59:12Jocko Willink?

  More.

• 2:59:14Speaker 01

  Gunfire than anything. Small explosions. No, no, that's just a heads up for you, bro.

• 2:59:19Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go. Subscribe to that. Also, Origin USA has a, if you want to know what's happening in America with American manufacturing, go to Origin USA. Subscribe to their YouTube channel as well. We have psychological warfare. What's that all about?

• 2:59:35Speaker 01

  It's an album. It's an album me and Jaco, Jaco and I made to facilitate my moments of weakness. And I got a bunch, had a bunch.

• 2:59:46Speaker 01

  Jaco talking me through it.

• 2:59:47Jocko Willink?

  Weakness free now, are you?

• 2:59:48Speaker 01

  Weakness free. Well.

• 2:59:49Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:59:50Speaker 01

  Let's face it, we're never really weakness free.

• 2:59:54Jocko Willink?

  No one is never weakness free.

• 2:59:55Speaker 01

  But look.

• 2:59:55Jocko Willink?

  We always got it creeping up there.

• 2:59:57Speaker 01

  If you ever had a thought of, man, I wish, I wish I had Jaco kinda in my ear just to kinda let me know every once in a while. Give me a little psychological spot when I come across these moments. That's exactly what this is. So yeah, psychological warfare. Get it where you can get any MP3s and boom, Jaco got you.

• 3:00:14Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of reminders of staying on the path, flipsidecanvas.com Dakota Meyer.

• 3:00:20Jocko Willink?

  One of my favorite dudes in the world.

• 3:00:24Jocko Willink?

  It's awesome when your heroes are your friends. Dakota Meyer's got a company called flipsidecanvas.com where he's making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Check that out. We also have some books. Final Spin.

• 3:00:36Jocko Willink?

  Read it. Explore your brain a little bit. See where it ends up. Take a little emotional roller coaster of a ride.

• 3:00:46Jocko Willink?

  Also, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, The Code, The Evaluation of Protocols, Discipline vs. Freedom Field Manual. Way the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, and four. Get that book for the freaking kids you know, please. Mikey and the Dragons, About Face by Hackworth. I wrote the foreword to the new version, Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. Also have Echelon Front, which is a leadership consultancy. Leadership is the solution to your problems. So if you want to solve your problems in your organization, go to echelonfront.com. It's where you can get details for all the training that we offer, including the muster, field training exercises, battlefield. Next muster is Dallas, Texas. March 24th and 25th. We also have online training, Extreme Ownership Academy.

• 3:01:31Jocko Willink?

  If you want to take ownership of your life.

• 3:01:36Jocko Willink?

  If you want to learn the pragmatic methods to take ownership of your life, you want to learn how to interact with other people. You want to learn how to settle down problem situations. You want to learn how to detach and not get emotional when you shouldn't get emotional.

• 3:01:53Jocko Willink?

  You want to learn how to lead and you want to learn how to follow and you want to learn how to move forward in your life? Go to extremeownership.com. That's what we're teaching there. I'm on there all the time, live. You want to ask me a question? Come ask me a question there. Come and ask me a question there. Extremeownership.com. If you want to help service members, active and retired, your families, Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org.

• 3:02:26Jocko Willink?

  And if you want more of my doom-filled diatribes, or you need more of Echo's distracting dialogue,

• 3:02:34Jocko Willink?

  you can find us on the inwebs, on the Gram, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Getter.

• 3:02:41Speaker 01

  Get it?

• 3:02:43Jocko Willink?

  Echo's at Echo Charles. I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks to all the military members in uniform right now, doing what needs to be done to protect our freedom and our way of life. The same goes to police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders out there. Thank you for protecting our way of life here at home.

• 3:03:10Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there,

• 3:03:13Jocko Willink?

  remember to make yourself as capable as possible. Strong, fast, smart.

• 3:03:23Jocko Willink?

  And then remember that there are people who are not as capable as you are. Not because they're lazy or lackadaisical or lack work ethic, but they simply do not have the capacity.

• 3:03:37Jocko Willink?

  And then do your best to help those people out,

• 3:03:42Jocko Willink?

  which is part of being a good person and will make their world

• 3:03:48Jocko Willink?

  and thereby our world just a little bit better.

• 3:03:53Jocko Willink?

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