261: Learning Does Not Stop. Ever. Life and Leadership w SEAL Master Chief, Steve Ward

0:00:00 - Opening 0:07:45 - SEAL Master Chief, Steve Ward 3:01:14 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 3:20:33 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:47:46 - 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 261 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  Being in the teams is the best job in the world.

• 0:18Jocko Willink?

  Probably heard me say that before, the best job in the world. Why do I say that?

• 0:24Jocko Willink?

  Why do I say that? Well, first of all, the job itself, which consists of shooting machine guns,

• 0:34Jocko Willink?

  jumping out of airplanes, blowing things up, scuba diving, running around in the woods. It's just a freaking awesome job. So, so, so you got that. On top of that, you got this mission, the mission that you're focused on. You're on a mission to protect America, to protect democracy, to protect freedom, to protect people.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  And in order to do that, kill bad guys.

• 1:09Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're supposed to do all that protecting. In order to do all that protecting, you gotta kill bad guys, which,

• 1:18Jocko Willink?

  which as a kid and really as a man for that matter, that's what me and my friends always wanted to do. And I'm sorry if that doesn't sit right with you. Or if you think I'm some kind of a monster because of it, but that,

• 1:35Jocko Willink?

  that's the reality.

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  So that's another reason why the job is awesome. But the last thing, and certainly not the least thing, in fact,

• 1:46Jocko Willink?

  the best thing about the job by far is the boys.

• 1:53Jocko Willink?

  The boys, the guys you get to work with.

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  They're, they're awesome. And contrary to popular belief, there's no cookie cutter format that represents a guy in the SEAL teams. The guys come in all shapes and sizes. They come from all different backgrounds.

• 2:14Jocko Willink?

  And it should be noted that not all of them are good guys. There are some knuckleheads for sure. There's some egomaniacs. There's some guys that really aren't part of the team. There's some guys that look out for themselves. There's guys that don't help out. There's some guys that don't care about the mission.

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  Those guys that put themselves above the team.

• 2:35Jocko Willink?

  So there's, there's some of those types running around and that's true in any organization, but as a whole,

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  the boys are pretty legit. They're hardworking. They're tough. They put the team first.

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  They get the mission done.

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  And they have fun while they're doing it and you can count on them.

• 2:59Jocko Willink?

  Which is an underrated thing, right? You can count on them.

• 3:08Jocko Willink?

  And I was lucky enough to work with a ton of those guys during my career.

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  I was leaving Ramadi. So it was the end of my last deployment. And I was leaving Ramadi and another task unit came in to take our place and

• 3:27Jocko Willink?

  they were coming into a complete and utter firestorm

• 3:34Jocko Willink?

  of sustained combat.

• 3:39Jocko Willink?

  And look, we'd all been deploying a bunch over the years since nine 11 and this was 2006. Sort of the end of 2006. And so, so guys knew what it was like to go on combat deployments. But this particular combat deployment that we had been on in the Battle of Ramadi was significant. We had a lot of casualties.

• 4:04Jocko Willink?

  And these guys that were coming to replace us,

• 4:10Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I knew that they were coming into something that SEALs hadn't deployed into in a long time. And look, I'm not saying that SEALs weren't deploying into dangerous places. They were, but kind of a known scenario like that, it'd been a while.

• 4:26Jocko Willink?

  And so I felt horrible, actually. I felt horrible for the new task unit that was showing up to replace us because I felt like we had learned so much there and we had gotten good at our jobs. And we, I felt like we were leaving this other task unit in a bad spot.

• 4:50Jocko Willink?

  And I was worried about them and worried how they would survive.

• 5:02Jocko Willink?

  Well, I knew a few of their guys.

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  A few of their guys I knew and, and that gave me a level of comfort. One of the guys that I knew was the senior enlisted guy of the task unit, a guy named Steve Ward. One of, one of the good guys and I, I kind of knew him tangentially over the years.

• 5:26Jocko Willink?

  Cause I had turned, I had turned over with him in Baghdad a couple of years earlier. He'd been in a leadership position in a platoon at Team Five and had run a bunch of operations and done a great job and I'd gotten a solid turnover from him. So that was awesome.

• 5:43Jocko Willink?

  And it just made my comfort level go up that someone was coming in that was

• 5:51Jocko Willink?

  humble enough to listen and learn, not just from me, not just from Task Unit Bruiser, but also from the Army and the Marine Corps and who is also smart enough and knowledgeable enough to mix in that knowledge and that experience with humility and make sense of the whole crazy situation.

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  Which is what he did and when Steve came back from that deployment, which, which was a hard deployment for them, we ended up working together, actually, actually truly working together for the first time at Trade Det, the Training Command. He took over the land warfare training cell as the senior enlisted advisor in that training block. And we ended up spending, spending a lot of time together. Training and preparing SEALs for combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  And it was a

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  I, I, it's hard for me to even say it was a challenging job. Yeah, it was a challenging job, but it was so critical and it was so rewarding to be able to work with the young frogmen and pass on the lessons learned to the next generation so that they could go out there and take the fight to the enemy and keep themselves safe, as safe as they possibly could. And I eventually retired out of that job and Steve carried on in his career. He went on to more senior positions of leadership and continued to deploy over and over again

• 7:26Jocko Willink?

  in support of the war on terror until a few months ago when he finally retired. And since then, we've been working together again, still, still actually training leaders, this time for leadership in the business world. But we're back at it and it is an honor to be working with Steve again and it is an honor to have Steve here on the podcast to tell us about his life, his experiences and his lessons learned. Steve, thanks for coming on, man.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Jaco.

• 8:04Jocko Willink?

  You were one of the guys in the beginning when this podcast kind of kicked off that was giving me reports from the field that you were in the game, listening to it.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, me and Gardner were going back and forth. You know, in some of the books you covered early on, like the last hundred yards, and I was like, damn, how could you not get on the net and listen to that for, you know, a couple hours? So it was good.

• 8:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And here you are, sitting in the, sitting in the chair. Uh, let's go. Let's, let's rock and roll. Let's talk about where Steve Ward, Ward came from.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yep. So grew up in Sacramento, California, small town. Um, my mom and dad were divorced. So I'd go see my dad in the, in the summer months and my sister and my mom and I, we all grew up together in Sacramento. Um, I graduated high school in 91.

• 8:48Jocko Willink?

  Slow your roll, bro.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  I got a list to cover, man. Come on.

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  So what'd you, what'd your mom do? What'd your mom do for a living?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  So she worked at Davis College. She was like an administrator there.

• 8:57Jocko Willink?

  And then what about your dad? Where was your dad?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  So my dad, he was an air traffic controller. So he kind of bounced around the US. Spent a lot of time in Florida, Puerto Rico, uh, up in Washington.

• 9:05Jocko Willink?

  So did you see much of your dad growing up?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. In the summertime, we, me and my sister go out and see him for anywhere from two weeks to 30 days at a time. So it was good.

• 9:14Jocko Willink?

  Well, so. So you just breezed through like, oh, went to high school and then graduated. You were about to like be in the Navy. Well, did you play sports?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Yes. So played baseball, soccer and football coming up.

• 9:24Jocko Willink?

  Any good?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  I'd say I was an average athlete. Nothing special. I wasn't consistent. I had good, like for baseball, I had times when I was doing good. And then I'd get in a slump and wouldn't do so good.

• 9:35Jocko Willink?

  Slump due to bad attitude?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Slump from, um, I'm trying to think of a good way to word this here. Slump from not, I guess, being good enough. You know, like you get, so I was a pitcher. I played baseball. I played pitcher and I played outfield. And I'd have some times where I'd get up there and, you know, my friends would be cracking jokes at me. You're going to beam the first batter. You're going to beam the first batter. You're going to beam the first batter. First pitch, I beam the first batter. I'm like, damn. You know, you're not, you can't crack, crack jokes up on the mound because you just hit somebody with a baseball. So, you know, it didn't pan out too good for me. So my junior year, I kind of quit baseball and my freshman year I started playing football and I really enjoyed football. Contact sport, hard, like a lot of hard work goes into that. So I enjoyed football, finished that up my, you know, senior year. I played all four years.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Um, and soccer, I kind of quit playing that when I was probably like around 13, 14 years old.

• 10:25Jocko Willink?

  What, what, what were your friends doing when you weren't playing sports?

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Getting in trouble. Getting in trouble. So sports, you know, I was probably like, uh,

• 10:37Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say a bad kid, but I was definitely off the path. Seventh, eighth, and ninth grade, not good things for me. You know, I got, I was picking up trash on the side of the roads. I was on probation, just doing stupid shit.

• 10:47Jocko Willink?

  For, for what?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Just nothing I cared to repeat on the net.

• 10:52Jocko Willink?

  Just, uh, what do they call that? Delinquent activities?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  I was a delinquent and it wasn't my friends. It was me. I was a guy that was like, when my friends came around, I was the guy instigating and kind of leading the charge on doing dumb shit.

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  What kind of music were you listening to?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  I just whatever, like country, rap, rock. It didn't matter.

• 11:09Jocko Willink?

  Just didn't matter?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  We had the old AM, FM radios. There ain't nothing going on.

• 11:13Jocko Willink?

  That's it. It was a different time.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:14Jocko Willink?

  You were limited to what you could actually hear.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  Was it a small town?

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, so I grew up actually in West Sack. That was definitely a small town.

• 11:22Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  So, yeah, small town, smaller high school. I went to a high school called River City.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  It was small.

• 11:31Jocko Willink?

  Did they have wrestling there?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  They had, they started a wrestling program, I think, when I was in about 10th grade there. I didn't, I didn't wrestle. I played football and I didn't, I stayed away from basketball.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:43Jocko Willink?

  How was your grades? I'm feeling devens.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Not good, not, they were not good. I, I passed high school by the, you know, barely passed high school. So it wasn't good for me. I didn't pay attention, had good teachers, always giving you good advice. I was just not into learning.

• 11:57Jocko Willink?

  So you were a little bit of a troublemaker, right? Do you think, when you were being a troublemaker, do you think you were doing it for attention? Do you think you were doing it for the thrill? Do you think you were doing it for adrenaline? Like, why do you think you were doing it? I, I think when I was a, which I was, I think of a lot of it, what I was doing to sort of prove to myself and my friends that I was like, uh, uh,

• 12:22Jocko Willink?

  tough, like type things, like I don't care. I'll do this, like that kind of thing. When I think back as to why I did dumb shit, which I did plenty of, I think that's why. A lot of it was like to prove. That I was a quote, and I'm putting in big air quotes here, tough. Because the stuff I was doing was by no stretch of the imagination tough.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yep, I'd say I fall in that same category. Trying to prove something, just doing, and I got adrenaline rush out of doing those dumb things. And it took a long time to get out of my system.

• 12:57Jocko Willink?

  So you said that was mostly sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth grade?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Seventh, eighth and ninth, yeah.

• 13:02Jocko Willink?

  By 10th grade, were you kind of a little bit more squared away?

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Turning the corner, yes. Yep.

• 13:07Jocko Willink?

  Did you feel, did you have some run ins with the law that kind of straightened you back out?

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Probation and picking up trash on the side of the road. Kind of squared me away real quick. You gotta wear the little orange vest. You're in the van with all the rest of the delinquents. You're on the road on Saturdays and Sundays. Not a, not a good situation.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Not a good situation, yeah.

• 13:28Jocko Willink?

  So then you, you graduate, you barely graduate high school. At what point did you think about joining the Navy? Or did you think about joining the Marine Corps, the Army? What, where, where'd you, what was the situation with enlisting in the military?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  So I remember one of my high school teachers told me, hey, you got three choices when you get out of high school. And he's kind of mentoring us, and none of us know it at the time. But he's like, hey, you can go to college, which I highly recommend. You can get a job, or you can join the military, or you can do a combination of one and two. And that kind of always stuck with me, you know? And then as I started going to college, like, man, I just, I don't want to learn. I wasn't ready to learn.

• 14:02Jocko Willink?

  Wait a second, so you just skipped right to you're in college? So you, when you, when you were still in high school, you, you didn't join the Navy or join the military while you were in high school?

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 14:11Jocko Willink?

  He gave you the three options, job, college, military. You chose college.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:17Jocko Willink?

  First.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:19Jocko Willink?

  You thought, alright, did you have any freaking vision of any kind whatsoever? You're just like, no, sign up for whatever classes they signed me up for?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I just signed up for the basic general education stuff. You know, went for a full semester and then dove into the second semester. And that's where, like, at one point, I don't even know how the recruiter wound up at our door. But the recruiter wound up on our doorstep. And I started talking to him and.

• 14:42Jocko Willink?

  Where's the doorstep of what, your?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  House. Of the house. So, you know, you go through and I was like, yeah, this is something I think I might be interested in.

• 14:49Jocko Willink?

  Your mom called the damn recruiter and sent him over there.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Oh, she was kicking him out of there.

• 14:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 14:54Speaker 02

  She was not having any other recruiter. She told him, get the hell out of here.

• 14:57Jocko Willink?

  No kidding? Was your mom a hippie or something?

• 14:59Speaker 02

  No, no. She's a farm girl. She grew up on a farm. Yeah, she just didn't. She didn't want me joining the military.

• 15:06Jocko Willink?

  But you talked to him?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  I talked to him and.

• 15:10Jocko Willink?

  Was he a Navy recruiter?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Navy guy. Yep. Navy recruiter.

• 15:12Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any, did you have any parents, grandparents, anything about the military that you understood?

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So my grandfather was in the army and he was, he never went, he was around the World War II era, but he never went and served. You know, he got stationed out in Alaska somewhere. And then my dad was in the Air Force. So I had some small touch points there with some cool stories of, you know, grandfather being the military. He was talking about throwing his grenade and the sergeant was telling him that was the best throw ever type thing. And then my dad was in the Air Force.

• 15:43Jocko Willink?

  Your grandfather was getting told, you're going to beam the batter with that grenade?

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, whack.

• 15:49Jocko Willink?

  So then, so the guy, the recruiter talks to you and at this point you realize college is like a waste of your time?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm done with school, with school. I didn't enjoy high school and I definitely wasn't enjoying college at that point.

• 16:03Jocko Willink?

  Which college was it?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  I was just called Sac City Community College.

• 16:07Jocko Willink?

  So you're, and you were, so you were living at home during this time?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Yes. Yep. Living at home, working part-time, going to college.

• 16:12Jocko Willink?

  What was your part-time job?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Man, I don't remember what it was. I had a couple of jobs growing up. Like I worked in a, a bunch of different little restaurants, being a bus boy, being a dishwasher, um, move furniture with a guy named Craig. He's a great family guy. And so we'd get on the road. He worked for Allied Furniture. We'd be trucking on down to LA with furniture in the back of his big old 18 wheeler. It was actually a good job. It was hard work, but it paid good money. It was paying 10 bucks an hour back then. That was, that was good money.

• 16:36Jocko Willink?

  You were kind of the man with 10 bucks an hour?

• 16:38Speaker 02

  The man with 10 bucks an hour. Yeah. And that was a lot better paid than the Navy paid you. I'll tell you that back then.

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  So how'd the Navy recruiter convince you?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  He was just like, hey, come in and give this a go, man. And, you know, so I went through, did all the ASVAB testing. He's like, all right, we can get you in, uh, in June timeframe.

• 16:53Jocko Willink?

  And what, what job were you signing up for? Cause you didn't enlist. Did you know about the SEALs at this point?

• 16:57Speaker 02

  No, I didn't. I never, I didn't know what a SEAL was. So I just, I was signing up to go to the regular Navy to go on a ship.

• 17:04Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  To figure life out. Yep.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Little did I know, I was about to get after some bathroom cleaning.

• 17:12Jocko Willink?

  So, so what, what like job did he sell you on?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  He didn't sell me. He was just like, I mean, so I had, I grew up with some friends and they, you know, a lot of people were getting in trouble. People were doing drugs, all that kind of dumb stuff. So I just knew I had the best option for me at that point in my life was to get out of Sacramento and go try something different. So the job I would, I didn't even know what I wanted to do.

• 17:34Jocko Willink?

  Did you go to, did you go UD, undesignated?

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh damn.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I was in, you know.

• 17:40Jocko Willink?

  So for people that don't know, like in the Navy, you have a job. It's called your rating and your job is, you know, you might be a welder. You might be a technician or an engine man that's going to work on engines. Or you might run a weapon system and they have names for all these different jobs. But if you don't have a job, they call it, and I remember this from boot camp. It was a threat. They'd say, you keep this up, you're going to go to the fleet UD, undesignated. Which means you have no job, no skill. You're just going to go in there. So that threat that I got told was actually what you got signed up for.

• 18:25Jocko Willink?

  Go to the fleet UD, undesignated.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Sign me up. I'm ready to roll.

• 18:29Jocko Willink?

  Get me out of sack.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Get me out of here. Yeah.

• 18:33Jocko Willink?

  So you rolled into boot camp?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Yep. Rolled into boot camp, finished up in, uh, I want to say right around October timeframe. So went to boot camp.

• 18:40Jocko Willink?

  When'd you go to boot camp?

• 18:41Speaker 02

  In July 1991.

• 18:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And then, did you go to Orlando?

• 18:47Speaker 02

  No, no, here in San Diego.

• 18:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you went to San Diego. That's right. West coast.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:51Jocko Willink?

  So you went, you went to boot camp and you just went to boot camp eight weeks, it was eight weeks?

• 18:56Speaker 02

  I think eight weeks.

• 18:56Jocko Willink?

  So you went to eight weeks of boot camp and then to the fleet?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Eight weeks of boot camp. Then I went to seaman training because I was going to work in deck department. That was my undesignated. I was going to be, you know, a seaman. So got trained up for three weeks there. And then showed up to a ship sometime in I think November, December timeframe of 91.

• 19:14Jocko Willink?

  Bro.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Hey Jaco, it's not that funny.

• 19:22Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy dude.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:24Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy. Well, you must have done good on your ASVABs. That guy didn't try and make you into like whatever, some other rates we could get more.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 19:32Jocko Willink?

  That's crazy dude.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Well, that's in, so that was probably my first lesson learned in life. Hey, pay attention in school. So you score good on your ASVAB, so you have options, right? Hey, when you're in high school, you don't, I didn't, I never really thought about that. Hey, I just need to make it through.

• 19:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  In life, you're going to be given some tests, whether you're going to go work in a fire department, a police department, you're going to go in the military. And so the better educated you are, the more options you're going to have available to you. And I didn't do so good, so my options were limited.

• 20:02Jocko Willink?

  Dang. Yeah, that's the one thing I always try and explain when like parents ask me about kids and like what the, and I think one of the biggest things you can do for a kid, besides getting them into jujitsu, is making them realize that their actions today have impact on the rest of their life.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 20:20Jocko Willink?

  We get little kids, and when I say little kids, I'm talking me when I was 23, right? What I'm doing right now is going to impact where I'm going to be, right? And so how can you expect a 13-year-old or a 15-year-old? And you know, girls might be a little bit smarter than boys.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  It's possible.

• 20:38Jocko Willink?

  It seems, judging from my own children. Anyways, let me, let me, let me phrase that because I don't want to generalize. In my personal family, it seems like my daughters are a little better at connecting what they're doing right now with the future than my son, who just doesn't do it as much. So yeah, that's a good point. And you realize that what I'm doing right now as a kid, and it's not just kids, what I'm doing right now as a human is going to impact the way my life goes.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:08Jocko Willink?

  And you might end up in the fleet UD.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  UD, getting after it.

• 21:12Jocko Willink?

  So, so you do eight weeks of boot camp, three weeks of prep, semen prep school, and then boom, you go to a ship.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:21Jocko Willink?

  What was that wake-up call like?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad. It was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.

• 21:29Jocko Willink?

  What, in what way?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, just it was, it was a lot of hard work. You know, it's when you show up in deck department and you're an E2, you're getting every, you know, uh...

• 21:40Speaker 02

  You're getting all the assignments that are not fun to do. You know, you're cleaning bathrooms, you're painting the ship, you're chipping paint off the ship. You're, you're just doing all the things on ship maintenance. And so you're eating some humble pie for breakfast, lunch and dinner while you're doing this. It gave me a chance to, to kind of grow up a little bit. It was good. It was hard work.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Roll the sleeves up and get dirty.

• 22:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you had, you had time to reflect.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, time to reflect.

• 22:07Jocko Willink?

  What were you thinking about when you reflecting?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  I was, so when I'm reflecting on it, I'm just like, hey, man, make the best out of this situation. So I had one of my buddies that I, I went through boot camp with, we wound up on the same ship, Chris. And me and him just always had competition. We got put into the same deck department and every assignment they gave us, we're like running up and down them stairwell ladders.

• 22:28Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Compete, you know, completing assignments, coming back like, hey, what else you got from me? Like, hey, you knuckleheads, I supposed to take you to lunchtime. We're like, well, we're done. Give us more.

• 22:36Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome, man.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  So it was, it was fun. We made the best of it, you know, and we had some good, some good leadership on the ship and some bad leadership. You got to, that was my first exposure to kind of what right looks like, what bad leadership looks like. Um, so it was good and you're taking down all these data points and you're storing it in your head, you know? And, and probably one of the biggest things I took out of that assignment is we had guys that were super knowledgeable, just very good. Like we had a BM two and he was super good at, at being a bosom mate. He knew everything, how to tie all the ropes, all the maintenance. He knew everything and he was squared away. Hard worker looked out for his guys. You're like, that's a dude I want to be like. Um, you know, we always talk about echelon front, hey, modeling the correct behaviors.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  That dude was modeling all the right behaviors, busted his ass, did good things and he was getting promoted while I was on that ship. So you're like, ah, data point. That's what right looks like. Same thing with the handful of chiefs that were on that ship. Just good, solid dudes. They weren't afraid to roll their sleeves up, get in there with the guys and get to work. You know, like, all right, check mental note on that.

• 23:38Jocko Willink?

  So then how long, how long was it when you were in the fleet until you heard about the teams?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we had a couple guys that didn't make it through SEAL training. They showed up, um, came friends with those guys at some point and they told me all about, you know, basic on water demolition SEAL training. And I was like, damn, that's something I'm interested in. So I started training up. They told me kind of all the things you need to do to be successful. They took me over to the obstacle court course, uh, showed me all the tricks on how to navigate that thing, a lot of technique. Um, in the meantime, I was getting my application together and submitting everything. So when I hit the two-year mark on the ship, I'd had my application back. I was approved to go to SEAL training and everything was dialed in as tight as it could be. No matter what I was gonna have to do two years on that ship.

• 24:22Jocko Willink?

  So you weren't even close to your two years yet and you already had your application in?

• 24:26Speaker 02

  I, I would say I had it in right around the probably thirteen, fourteen month cycle.

• 24:31Jocko Willink?

  So you owed whatever, whatever those month were, another year or something like that, ten months left?

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. Something like that.

• 24:38Jocko Willink?

  Before they'd release you?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the cool thing was, you know, we had two, my, uh, division master chief was in E9, obviously. He was a good dude. And then our CMC, our command master chief of the, of the ship was a good guy. And they're like, hey, man, you work hard, you stay out of trouble, we'll make some phone calls, we'll make sure that you get a shot at going to BUDS. And they didn't have to do that, you know, they could have been like, hey, pack sand, Jack, you, you want to get off the ship, ship, get out of the fleet and go to some other program? That's not helping us out. They didn't do that. They looked out for me, you know, working hard, staying out of trouble, being a good person. All those three things were, were, were good, you know? So again, it was kind of like reinforcing good behaviors. Um, so always be thankful of those guys.

• 25:18Jocko Willink?

  And then, uh, the guys, the, the guys that showed up that had been to BUDS, what kind of impression did that give you? Did you? Cause there's a weird thing that somehow you have to think that you can actually do it, right?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:31Jocko Willink?

  Or, you know, like for me, I was like, oh, I can, I can do this, which is a really arrogant thing to think, right? It's arrogant to think most people quit, but I'm gonna be able to do it.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I wasn't sure where I was gonna shake out on the whole thing, to be honest with you. I didn't like run long distance and growing up, you know, we did a lot of sprints in football. And I wasn't good with pull-ups. That so pull-ups, I was, I definitely sucked at, and I was like, all right, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do the amount of pull-ups that are needed done. So I just started working hard on my pull-ups, got on a good running program, got on a good swimming program. Those guys taught me how to do the side stroke. And so, you know, I'd just get up early in the morning, knock all this stuff out, go in and either do a weightlifting program and then do my cardio at lunchtime or vice versa. And every now and then, those guys would come over and be like, hey, dial this in, work on this, look at that.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  So I was, I was mentally and physically prepared for first phase on what to expect, because these guys had given me so much information.

• 26:29Jocko Willink?

  Did those guys talk about what happened to them?

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so one of the, two of the guys, one of the guys made it past hell week. Another guy was in second phase and he got dropped for a pool comp. And then the other guy, he was, he got up right around the third week mark or four week mark in first phase and he got injured and he got rolled out.

• 26:47Jocko Willink?

  Guy got dropped for pool comp?

• 26:49Speaker 02

  In second phase, yeah.

• 26:50Jocko Willink?

  And then what would you say the other one was?

• 26:51Speaker 02

  The one guy made it past hell week and something happened when he was waiting a class up for second phase and they dropped him. And then the third guy, he made it, I think to like week three or four.

• 27:04Jocko Willink?

  And then got hurt or quit?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  He got, I think he, well, he said he got.

• 27:08Jocko Willink?

  Right, right, yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  So, you know.

• 27:09Jocko Willink?

  No one ever quits.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no one ever quits.

• 27:14Jocko Willink?

  So you had a pretty good idea of what you're going into?

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 27:17Jocko Willink?

  Because like I can tell you, I didn't have anybody that, I didn't know anyone that went to SEAL training at all, you know, because I was in the civilian world. So for me, I didn't know what pool comp was. I didn't understand anything. It was just a blank, open, nothing, I do nothing. But you had a decent idea of what was gonna be coming.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. I could, I was, I was physically and mentally prepared for first phase.

• 27:40Jocko Willink?

  Did you get your pull-ups squared away?

• 27:43Speaker 02

  I did. I actually went in a little better with my pull-ups and you know the deal when you show up and you start classing up, you're starting from scratch again. So now you're, from where I came in, I was coming back down with, you know, my run times and swim times and all that stuff.

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  Meaning you were in better shape than what was required?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Which is the way you freaking should try and get there.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 28:03Jocko Willink?

  So you show up to BUDs. Did you get what you expected?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, it was, it was full benefit. So it was good times.

• 28:13Jocko Willink?

  What class were you in?

• 28:14Speaker 02

  I was in 194. So we start, we classed up, I want to say, right around January of 1994.

• 28:22Jocko Willink?

  Would you have the, did you have problems with anything?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  In BUDs?

• 28:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So first phase, first phase and third phase were, those came a lot more natural to me. You know, I grew up hunting and fishing and shooting guns and doing all that fun stuff. So third phase wasn't bad. First phase I was mentally prepared for. Second phase, I'd never scuba dived. I never did any diving. And for me, that was the hardest phase. You know, I actually failed a couple events in there. Like I failed pool comp, the, the first go around, you know, and then when I did my retest, I passed it. And then like every little thing, you know, you're doing ditch and dawn, you're doing all these little things with scuba tanks and going down and doing stuff. Like I was jacking it all up. And for me, my learning style, I really have to digest, you know, what it is I need to do and kind of like visualize it. And things were on a quick tempo for dive

• 29:15Speaker 02

  phase. So it wasn't, uh, yeah, it wasn't good for me.

• 29:20Jocko Willink?

  Were you, did you feel like you were on the bubble the whole time? Like?

• 29:23Speaker 02

  When I failed pool comp, I was like, all right, damn, I'm not going to make it through this, man. You know, you're on the wall of shame. That doesn't help either. You're like looking at bricks. You're like, geez, you know?

• 29:31Jocko Willink?

  I failed pool comp too.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I had our ops guy from TradeNet, our ops, Warren Officer from TradeNet, put me through.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:39Jocko Willink?

  Pool comp. Savage.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:43Jocko Willink?

  He just.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Well, you know what's crazy with pool comp? Like, I'm going through and in my head, I had the procedures down. And I thought I did good. I'm like, I'm down there tying the whammy knot, doing all this shit. And I'm like, I'm cool, comma, collect. I'm going through the procedures and the instructor just yanks me up by the tanks. He's like, you failed. Get on the wall. And I was like, damn, seriously? Like, I'm going through, trying to think of what I did wrong. I'm like, I, I thought I was good, you know, but I didn't know if they were playing games with me or what, but I went over on the wall. I was like, shit, I don't know if I'm gonna make it.

• 30:12Jocko Willink?

  That, uh, that guy that failed me, who's a great guy, but when he, he same thing. He had me down there. I was down there. Pool comp was thirty minutes when I went through, and I know they shortened it at some point to twenty minutes, but when I went through, it was thirty minutes. And he just, what he did was, was he just, uh, he ripped my mask off and then he just started doing like a bob and he would bob down, he would come down, he would just knock the regulator out of my mouth. And then he'd go back up and I would grab the regulator, put it back in, I'd clear it, and then he'd knock it out again. And he did that for nineteen minutes.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 30:44Jocko Willink?

  And then, and I just kept replacing it and every one of those breaths was a nightmare because you're trying to

• 30:50Jocko Willink?

  get them, get the water out of there, swallow some of the water and then get a breath and then, and then boom, he'd knock it out again. And you can't defend yourself, you can't protect yourself and you can't panic. So I just kept doing it. And then at nineteen minutes, he just comes down and gives me the thumbs up, come to the surface. And I come up and I'm like, I feel fine. And he goes, he goes, you didn't look comfortable down there. You fail. And I was like, okay, I guess that's that.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Roger that.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's a whammy knot?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Like they just tighten this complex knot. Oh, it's like a multiple knots and.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's not like a specific, like methodology or is it just like a generally speaking jam?

• 31:25Jocko Willink?

  So that during this evolution called pool competency, also known as pool comp. They want to make sure that you are beyond fully comfortable in the water. You will not pass this if you're not comfortable in the water. Zero percent chance. So what they do is they, they cause problems. You have these old school scuba gear on, like Jacques Cousteau style stuff. With these big hoses, one hose goes in, one hose comes out and they're just like rubber hoses and they start taking these things. And they first they start off, they knock off your mask, they rip off your fins, they pull your regulator out. And then they start pulling your regulator out and then like undoing your thing and eventually they pull it out and put it behind you.

• 32:10Jocko Willink?

  Pull your regulator behind you and tie it in a knot. You gotta take your gear off, pull the rig over your back. Untie the knot, start breathing again, put everything back on in order, following the procedures. As soon as you get it back on, boom, they hit you again. And so they keep doing this. And eventually, they give you what's called a whammy knot, which is a knot that you cannot get out. You won't come out. So now what you have to do is ditch your rig, which means you have to take it off. You have to lay it on the bottom of the pool. You have to take your weight belt off and place it on top of the tank so they don't float. And you have to kiss your regu- or kiss your manifold.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 32:46Jocko Willink?

  You kiss your manifold. Oh no, you request permission to go up. They give you permission. You know, you give them a thumbs up. They give you like an okay thumbs up. Then you kiss your manifold and then you blow and go to the surface.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  What do you mean kiss your manifold?

• 32:59Jocko Willink?

  You literally, the, the part of the scuba tank is called a manifold. It's where the regulator kind of comes out of. You kiss that.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Like, why? I don't get it.

• 33:09Jocko Willink?

  Because those are the procedures.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Oh, that's just the deal. Okay, like you gotta follow these directions.

• 33:14Jocko Willink?

  You kiss your manifold, right? Did you have to kiss your manifold? Yeah, so you kiss your manifold and then you blow and go, which means you're not gonna give yourself a, an air ambulism. By the, by the air expanding your lungs and you go to the surface. You blow and go to the surface. When you get to the surface, you give a thumbs up and you say, I feel fine. And they either say, you know, good job, you passed, or they say, you looked uncomfortable, you failed. Which for me, they said, you looked uncomfortable, you failed. And then for Steve, they said, you looked uncomfortable, you failed. I would say though, one thing that's different about me was I did good on everything else. So when I failed pool comp, I was like, oh God, like this is it. I can't, I'm, I'm gonna fail. I was super sketched out.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, not me. That wasn't my first time failing. So.

• 34:00Jocko Willink?

  So you like failed like ditching dawn and buddy breathe?

• 34:05Speaker 02

  I was good on the buddy breathe, ditching dawn and something else. I don't know what else I failed. There was like three things.

• 34:11Jocko Willink?

  My buddy breathe partner was a freaking wrestler from Iowa. He was a beast of a guy. He was a total freaking panic in the water. This dude would take the freaking buddy breathe from me because you're using one set of scuba tanks. He would take it and just breathe off of it for like a long time. And then I'd be like, hey, you know, like give him a single like, hey, bro, I need that right now, you know? And so he'd give it back to me and as soon as I took one breath, he'd be like, you know, giving me the signal. He needs more.

• 34:41Jocko Willink?

  But you, but you passed the second time.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yep. Passed it, made it out, made it, made it into the third phase and then third phase was, uh, uneventful. Easy. You know, you're just doing a lot of running, swimming and shooting. So it was, it was, that was a lot easier than second phase for me.

• 34:58Jocko Willink?

  And running, you were good?

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Running good. I had all my run times down before I went into buds. I wasn't so concerned about run. I was just worried about kind of getting injured.

• 35:05Jocko Willink?

  Swimming? What about the open ocean swims?

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Good to go.

• 35:09Jocko Willink?

  No factor.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  No factor.

• 35:11Jocko Willink?

  Did you, you, you were honor man?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I.

• 35:14Jocko Willink?

  And you were firing the gut?

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the way they.

• 35:17Jocko Willink?

  Impressive dude.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. The way they've worked it is I think we voted the fire in the gut before the honor man results came out. You know, the class voted that for me and I was like, all right, that's awesome. And then they're like, hey, Ward, you got honor man too. And I was like, all right, check, Roger that.

• 35:32Jocko Willink?

  Well, well, the reason I say that's impressive is the honor man is usually somebody that's like, it does really well in all the events, like running, swimming, O course. And the fire in the gut is usually a guy that like doesn't. It's a guy that had to kind of gruel through it and gut through it to pass. Like in my class, it was Jeff Higgs who had hypothermia multiple times, like five or six times. And he just, he, he showed back up to buds, even though they kicked him out, he showed up to class in his dungarees and just kept doing it. So he got firing gut, like of course. And then honor man was Keith Kamiro. He's a total stud athlete, but. For you to get both those, that's pretty freaking.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 36:12Jocko Willink?

  How did you even get that?

• 36:14Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know, man. I don't know. It didn't feel like it, you know?

• 36:18Jocko Willink?

  Were you one of the leading guys? Were you an E4 at this point?

• 36:21Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I'd made E4 off the ship before I went to Bud's. So I showed up to Bud's and I was an E4 already.

• 36:26Jocko Willink?

  Were you the class leading petty officer? Was there like a second class nurse?

• 36:28Speaker 02

  No, we had a second class in there and I think eventually we had a, you know, he got the, the guy, uh, original LPO, he got stress fractures and, um, had real bad shin splints. So he got rolled out and another guy came in and, uh, he took over the class LPO stuff, so.

• 36:44Jocko Willink?

  What was Hell Week like for you?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Hell Week, I'll tell you what, Hell Week wasn't, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be. It sucks for everyone. I had enough gas in my tank. I think I could've went one more day. But you, you, you know, it was manageable. It was manageable.

• 37:01Jocko Willink?

  We just had a guy on who ended up in SF, but he went to Bud's and he didn't make it through Bud's, but he said Bud's was really, really hard. You know, he was like, he goes, if you're thinking you're gonna go there, you're gonna get what you ask for.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for me, Hell Week was kinda cool because I wasn't the best runner. I wasn't the best swimmer. And so it was like hard for me, like I had to put out super hard to pass those evolutions and I had the fear of failing.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:27Jocko Willink?

  And, and Hell Week, you, there's no time limit on, there's no time limit on the evolutions. Just keep going. And I'm pretty good at keeping going. That's, that's, that's a, that's a good thing I'm good at. Just keep going no matter what.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  I, I, the one thing I remember about Hell Week is, you remember when we were doing Steel Pier?

• 37:43Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  That was one of the coldest points I'd had in my life. You know, they were hosing us off on that thing and it felt like my damn hip flexors were gonna pop off. We were doing flutter kicks and then they'd pop us in the ocean and the ocean had to been around 60 degrees, but the ocean was way warmer than Steel Pier.

• 37:57Jocko Willink?

  It feels hot.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  So you're in there and you're like, oh, man, this is great. Keep us in the ocean for a little longer, you know, and they'd pop you back up there and back and forth and, man, I could barely walk when we got off of that damn, that damn pier. So the pier evolution in Hell Week was, was horrible. And then the instructors just wrenching down on that rope when you're carrying the boats to and from child, that shit sucked.

• 38:16Jocko Willink?

  You mean wrenching down on the rope so that the thing is pulling down on your head?

• 38:20Speaker 02

  On your head, yes. Yeah, I thought my little neck was gonna snap off there.

• 38:23Jocko Willink?

  Were they jumping from boat to boat when you were in?

• 38:26Speaker 02

  We had instructors in our boat. I don't remember jumping to another boat, but we were carrying them around.

• 38:30Jocko Willink?

  Instructors were jumping from boat to boat.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 38:33Jocko Willink?

  And like, I remember hearing my freaking neck bones just grinding.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 38:38Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, this doesn't seem like it's good for me, but oh well.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  So, honor man and firing the gut guy. And of course, you check into Team Five and no one cares about any of that.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  No one cares. They're like, hey, new guy, grab, go clean the shitters. You're like, damn, I thought I got away from these shitters. They're following me everywhere.

• 38:56Jocko Willink?

  And you checked into Team Five?

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Yep, checked into Team Five in August 1994. And then back then, you know, we started to go through STT. So they pop you in a platoon and you start doing your platoon workup. But you also gotta detach from your platoon and go over and go through SEAL tactical training.

• 39:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no kidding. So, okay. So, but your platoon workup started?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Our platoon workup, we, it was almost, we were a couple of months before starting the workup, but we were broken off and going to STT. And the platoon had just started some things when we had finished up.

• 39:29Jocko Willink?

  And you went to the group STT, didn't you?

• 39:33Speaker 02

  No, team, I think, no, it was just a team.

• 39:35Jocko Willink?

  Just to your team?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yep, just our team. Yep.

• 39:38Jocko Willink?

  God, I thought they had already combined because eventually they combined.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 39:42Jocko Willink?

  Where every guy went directly to a group, well, not directly, but everyone went through STT together for a while. They still do now, but there was a time when they started. I thought they started around that time. So with you, it's just guys from Team Five?

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 39:56Jocko Willink?

  Was it run by Team Five?

• 39:58Speaker 02

  It was run by Team Five, our training.

• 39:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the same thing that I did. And well, did you have any idea what your job was gonna be?

• 40:05Speaker 02

  No, I got, you know, put in the platoon and initially I was a A-Dub, A-Dub guy in there and I worked in air. The problem I had with A-Dub is I was left-handed.

• 40:14Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  And we'd had one of our guys in training and he's like, hey, man, you're, that dude's left-handed. Why do you guys have him shooting in A-Dub? Because you know, all the rounds are the brass and.

• 40:24Jocko Willink?

  Link.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, link are going out to the right, which is going right across your field of fire and in your, in your face and stuff. So like, hey, put him on rear security. So, got on rear security for that first platoon and then worked in air and dabbled around in First Lieutenant and Ordnance.

• 40:39Jocko Willink?

  What kind of platoon was it? Just a spec ops platoon?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Spec ops platoon, yep, yep. So we were deploying out to a little island out there in the Pacific.

• 40:46Jocko Willink?

  Did you, uh, how was, how was like your platoon leadership?

• 40:50Speaker 02

  The first platoon was not, was not good. So I got to see, hey, what wrong looks like, you know? And it was kind of funny, like our, uh, it was a classic case of, you know, our, our OIC was, was a good dude, but I think he was too smart for his own good. And, uh, he, he was a little more concerned with PT and being in good shape. And he was a phenomenal athlete, like one of them triathlete guys. But it came at the cost of showing up to dive evolutions on time, came at the cost of being a good tactical leader down on the ground, which is what everyone's hungry for. Um, so I think he kind of lost, you know, a lot of our guys' respects. And he was kind of hard headed, you know, that, that classic, uh, I'm smarter than everyone else type thing.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  So it didn't go over good and it, it was just a, it, it was weird, you know? It was weird and I didn't realize how, you know?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Trying to find of a good way to word this. It wasn't an ideal platoon. And you don't realize that until you get into a really good platoon.

• 41:51Jocko Willink?

  For you, you didn't know anything different. So for you, that's just the way a platoon was.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 41:55Jocko Willink?

  And the scary thing about that is you get such a big impression made on you by your first platoon.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:01Jocko Willink?

  That if you're not careful, you can think that other platoons are jacked up because they're not like your first platoon.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:09Jocko Willink?

  You know, you're so impressionable.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So it was, it was interesting. So the, there was a huge difference between my first platoon and third platoon. Our, my, the third platoon I did, we were like the best platoon of the team and it felt good. Like the leadership was dialed in, they were balanced out. Our platoon chief was squared away, well respected. He was good tactically, he was good administratively, like that's the dude I want to be like, you know?

• 42:33Jocko Willink?

  That was in your third platoon?

• 42:34Speaker 02

  That was my third platoon. My, you know, my second platoon was, was better than my first, still a lot of room for improvement, you know?

• 42:40Jocko Willink?

  And were you rear security? Did you move up to point man or something?

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Moved up to a point man at some point. I think my second platoon, the third platoon, I was running point.

• 42:48Jocko Willink?

  Running point. You're tall for a point man. How tall are you?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, six, two.

• 42:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Cause you have A dub written all over you till they find out you're left-handed.

• 43:00Jocko Willink?

  And what were you, you know, just to give people a reminder, this is the nineties. So we don't have a lot of assets.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 43:07Jocko Willink?

  We don't have a lot of money.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 43:09Jocko Willink?

  We don't have, we're not really doing any real missions, barely. Uh, you know, some guys like Gardner went to Somalia, uh, but that was a real rare occurrence.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:22Jocko Willink?

  So what we would do is train, get ready, go on deployment, kind of party.

• 43:31Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of like what the, what the scene was.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, it was kind of funny because when I showed up to the team, Gardner was already in there. He already had a couple of platoons on his belt. I'm on the damn quarter deck watch and, uh, this dude has a long name. He's, he's still in, so I won't say his name, but he had a long name and I'm like, attention to the team five compound. So and so, you know, reports of the quarter deck and I butchered his name. Well, who do you think's calling me on the damn phone, you know, Gardner? And he was a hard case, man. Hey, you F the new guy, say his name right. And I was like, shit, man.

• 44:00Jocko Willink?

  Pretty good Gardner invitation.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was. And I was like, damn, I'm not getting out of the compound tonight without getting taped up and throwing in a damn mill van, you know?

• 44:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  So, but.

• 44:09Jocko Willink?

  So this was ninety, yeah, because at that time, actually, yeah. At those years, you were starting to get a migration to team five from like, for instance, from team one. People wanted to leave team one if they didn't like the stalag. And so there's a whole like gang of guys that went down to team five.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  I remember that.

• 44:28Jocko Willink?

  To just get, to, to have some freedom.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  No fun one.

• 44:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  They're migrating down the street.

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  They were coming on down the street.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Great north.

• 44:37Jocko Willink?

  Gardner, Gardner was always at team five, so he would, but he was just like, why would I, more like, why would I want to be over there where there's a bunch of rules that you have to follow?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Oh, Gardner was funny, man. Well, you could always find Gardner out when we're doing, uh, working in the desert. Cause you just look for some smoke.

• 44:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh, look for fire.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Look for fire. There's Gardner. He's lighting some shit on fire, that Gardner guy.

• 45:01Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, you do your third platoon. And then what? What are you thinking? What are you thinking about your life at that point? So what, what year is it?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  So this is, uh, I finished my third platoon in ninety nine and, uh, so I was going through a divorce, had a kid. And I was like, hey, I gotta hit the reset button. So I, I talked to our mass chief, our CMC. I was like, hey, man. He's like, hey, we want to bring you in here and be the training cell LPO. And I was like, hey, man, I, I got a lot of baggage right now. I need to. Break contact here, go reset. So I got orders over to our special boat team at the headquarters element. And I got put in their training cell and we were basically setting up operational readiness exercises, just like we used to run.

• 45:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep. So, so you went, just so everyone understands, you went from, instead of being a team training cell, which you're going to be gone all the time doing training trips. You go to a boat training and then the O R E training. So you're going to be home a lot more.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Yes. Yep. And so at that point I was ready to go back to school. So as soon as I got there, I was already enrolled back in college on like a, a one year. I don't know what you call it, but you know, they have the military program. So I was going to school Saturday and Sunday to knock out all my upper level units from my bachelor's degree. And then I was working on my lower level units at the same time. So I did, I wound it up finishing up my degree in about three years. And so I'm, I'm there going through the training, we're home, away trips every now and every now and again, and it was good, man. I had good leadership in there. These, you know, the special warfare combatant craft crewmen, them dudes are squared away. And so I got to learn a lot about the boats and that playoff, or it helped me out later on, because you're really learning, you know, hey, how far can these things go?

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Load capacity, all those key tactical things that matter when it comes into a mission planning process for training or for a mission.

• 46:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And what's good is you start to relate those to helicopters and aircraft and vehicles. And so it gives you a better sense, because as a young team guy, I was really lucky. I was a, I was a communicator. I was a calm guy. So I was always involved in the planning more than my peers, right? The point man might plan the, the, you know, the route, but like, I was like, okay, here's what we're gonna, here's what we're gonna do for communications during the insert. And then once we're on target. So I was more involved in planning, which was super lucky. And then I did ARGs. Where I was working with the Marine Corps and working with the big Navy. So once again, what's the distance that this helicopter can take us to insert us? What's the distance that we can get with our boats? What's the distance that our ribs?

• 47:31Jocko Willink?

  Once again, the boats, how far can they take us? What's their capacity? So I was very lucky that I got that opportunity because once you realize how to plan with assets. It's a big, it transfers to all different assets. Makes you, makes you smarter across the board.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Yep. So all that was good. So in, uh, while I was there at the boat, at the boat debt, I was like, hey, not much going on in the nineties. I was kinda like ready to punch out of the military. And so I started, uh, putting in my application for the CHP, California Highway Patrol. Went in through all the interview process, all the testing, got my letter of acceptance and I was kinda just on standby. I was gonna transition out. And then in August of that year in 2001, I made chief. I don't know how the hell I made chief that, you know, I wasn't expecting to put it on. It was like a total shocker, you know? And then in September 2001, nine 11 happened. I was like, alright shit, I'm staying in, man. We've been waiting a long time to get in the mix.

• 48:25Jocko Willink?

  I've been training for whatever, it had been seven years.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Seven years, yep, yep. So, you know, from there I worked with, uh, the CMC over at Team Five to get back there. And he's like, hey, I got a platoon chief slot open if you want it. And I was like, hell yeah.

• 48:36Jocko Willink?

  You rolled right into a platoon chief slot.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 48:40Jocko Willink?

  After September 11th.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Yes. So I went back to the team. I left like a few months early TAD to go back to Team Five until my orders could catch up. And then got over there and like, I think right around January, February timeframe, we started forming up our platoon, getting ready for a 12-month workup cycle.

• 48:55Jocko Willink?

  So you called the CMC at Team Five?

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 48:58Jocko Willink?

  And said, hey, bro.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Well, I, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say I was saying, hey, bro. But I was, the other mass chief I had with me at the boat debt, he was my second platoon chief. And he's like, hey, I'm working with, with Jimmy over here at Team Five. You wanna, they got a spot open. You want it? I was like, hell yeah, I want it.

• 49:14Jocko Willink?

  Dude, my point is like,

• 49:18Jocko Willink?

  eh, man, build some good relationships with people.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:22Jocko Willink?

  Build some good relationships with people, cause that pays off, you know? And that means, how do you build good relationships? Not by kissing ass, by working hard, by doing a good job. That's how you build good relationships. When I checked into Team Seven after September 11th, it was actually like, whatever, two years after September 11th, my, the, the CO there.

• 49:42Jocko Willink?

  Which, first of all, the detailer, who I was friends with, sent me to the next deploying team. So when I left, I had to go to college for a semen animal program. When I left college, I went to the next deploying team. That's not luck, bro. And then when I got to the team, the commanding officer, who I'd also worked for in the past, fired a platoon commander and put me in as a platoon commander, whatever, three months before deployment. That's, that's just, you know, that's based on my past performance and relationships for sure, but the relationships are built on the fact that I worked hard and was trustworthy to get the job done. So you

• 50:27Jocko Willink?

  never, plus you just never know who you're gonna be working with, you know? Don't burn any bridges, man. Don't burn any bridges.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and just going back to what you're saying there, that your credibility in the teams is everything, your reputation. You don't want to have a reputation of being a, you know, a cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. You don't want to be that.

• 50:50Jocko Willink?

  And your reputation is, is a, I don't know what the word to describe it. It is a heavy thing that sticks with you. I should say it's a sticky thing. It's a sticky thing. And if you have good reputation, it'll stick with you. If you have a bad reputation, it'll stick with you. It can take people years to overturn a bad reputation. And interestingly, it can also take people years to ruin a good reputation. Like, a person with a good reputation can make mistakes and people are like, "Oh yeah, don't worry about it. It's Fred. You know, Fred's good to go." Or a person with a bad reputation can make one little slip up and people are like, "You gotta be kidding me. We need to get rid of this cop."

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Polish tried to get him out of here.

• 51:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I like, and I hate to say that, because right, that's like, that's like what? That's like political and all this stuff.

• 51:38Jocko Willink?

  But it's just the reality of the situation and there's, there's a reason for that. Cause look, human beings are gonna mess up. But if you, I guess the difference is you have a good, a good person with a good reputation. They earn that reputation by consistent good performance.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 51:51Jocko Willink?

  And eventually that reputation stands on its own and therefore if they make a mistake, which everyone's gonna make mistakes, when they make a mistake, when they make a mistake, which they will, people go, ooh, you know, like, guess what? You know what? They've done, they've done a hundred good things. That's how they built that reputation. Now here comes a bad one. All right, we'll, we'll, we'll carry on. Whereas if you've done a bunch of bad things, and now you do something bad, you're, you're, you don't have any leg to stand on.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, you're screwed.

• 52:21Jocko Willink?

  So that reputation thing, it's every, it's everywhere. It's everywhere, but man, in the teams, it's, it's a big thing. It's a big thing.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  It's damn near everything.

• 52:33Jocko Willink?

  It's damn near everything. It's damn near everything. Your rep. Uh, so you roll in, now you're a platoon, a platoon chief at Team Five.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 52:42Jocko Willink?

  Getting ready to deploy.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Yes, yep.

• 52:45Jocko Willink?

  At what point do you realize you guys are going to Iraq?

• 52:47Speaker 02

  We didn't know until probably January 2003. So we're, you know, I'm there, I get there in October 2001, January, February 2002, we start our 12 month long workup cycle. And it's going through and it looks like, hey, we're going into Iraq, you know? We, no one really understood the scale of that thing. How big it would wind up being, how many years it'd wind up being, you know? So when they told us, hey, you're going over, we were like, hell yeah, man, this is awesome, you know?

• 53:16Jocko Willink?

  Because you, like everybody else in the teams, was worried that there would be a three month war and you'd miss the whole thing.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 53:25Jocko Willink?

  Which is so hard to explain to people, especially now that we've been at war for almost 20 years straight.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:31Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to explain to people how much it meant to go to war when there was no war going on.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was everything. Like you were just like, man, this is gonna be awesome, you know? And everyone's getting prepped, you don't know, you know, like, I don't know what to expect. They, everyone was thinking they had chemical weapons, you know? Hell, we were going through all kinds of mop drills with our CBR gear and just going through everything. Our EOD guys were getting everyone tuned up, so we were dialed in.

• 53:55Jocko Willink?

  And you're looking at the freaking mop uniforms?

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:59Jocko Willink?

  And it's like got a elastic drawstring at the waist and like you're thinking, wait a second.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 54:06Jocko Willink?

  This is supposed to keep me alive? Ain't happening. Whatever. Let's rock and roll. Did you ever think that? Do you ever take that charcoal freaking light laden suit and be like, hey, how, wait, you're saying this thing's gonna save me? It's got some elastic drawstring around the ankles and that's supposed to keep me good to go?

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that mop suit didn't have a good reputation.

• 54:27Jocko Willink?

  Dude.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  For sure. It was, it was lacking.

• 54:30Jocko Willink?

  I don't know what the US government paid for those mop suits. And what level of security they provided us, but I don't have a lot of confidence.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  I guarantee you it was a lot.

• 54:41Jocko Willink?

  And the gas masks, dude, like one of the chances.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 54:46Jocko Willink?

  But that's what we were getting told we were gonna do and not one single guy said, no, because we, I did one. Op where we mopped up because we thought we were hitting a target that had allegedly some whatever chemical weapons. And you know what everyone did? Everyone got jocked up. Everyone put those gas masks on. Everyone put those stupid freaking uniforms on.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what, we had quite a few missions when we got over to Iraq where we were going around with some of those three letter agencies, looking all over the place, seeing what was around. And everything we saw was, uh, was old. It was like it'd been there, left, you know, nothing new at all, you know?

• 55:24Jocko Willink?

  As far as CBR?

• 55:25Speaker 02

  CBR, yeah.

• 55:26Jocko Willink?

  Shit.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Like all the facilities and everything was like, nothing's been here for a long ass time. So.

• 55:34Jocko Willink?

  So, all right, well, let's, so you get done with your workup, you find out you're going to Iraq in January and you guys are going on deployment in like April or something?

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, April timeframe. So Team Three was already over there and just going back to your relationships piece, we had a couple of guys in the battunes that were dialed in with some Team Three guys. And they started sharing information, you know, back and forth. Hey, here's what's going on. Here's what to expect. So that gave us a really good idea on what we needed to prep for. And so, right around April timeframe, we deploy over to Kuwait. And we're staging in Kuwait, waiting to go into Iraq. Team threes, I think wrapping things up at that point. And we might have already turned over with them. Um, and we're actually in Kuwait for a handful of weeks there. I want to say right around three weeks. And we actually did our first op out of Kuwait into Iraq on 53s.

• 56:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that sounded like a crazy op.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  It was good. It was a good shakeout. Nothing, nothing happened. But we planned for 96 hours. We went through all of our helicopter rehearsals, you know, and it was a big op. We loaded up those, uh, our DPVs, Desert Patrol Vehicles, and we went in with a big package.

• 56:41Jocko Willink?

  And we- What was your mission?

• 56:43Speaker 02

  To go take down the dam. Get control-

• 56:45Jocko Willink?

  To get control of Haditha?

• 56:47Speaker 02

  It wasn't Haditha, it was somewhere up north, Muqarim.

• 56:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Muqarim Dam. So, uh, we went up there and it was a long ass flight in there. And we're all jacked up on the catnip. You think you're gonna get in the shit, you know? And we're flying there, we got our E and R plan laid out in case a helicopter gets shot down. We got our mop gear with us.

• 57:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  And we're roping down off 53s onto the dam. With our CBR gear, you look like, you know, Michelin Snowman.

• 57:09Jocko Willink?

  Were you masked up when you, when you fast roped?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  We were not. The, the game plan was, secure the dam, get everything set up, get everything cleared. And then they had some tunneling systems in there, because it was a dam.

• 57:19Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  They wanted us to go inside the tunneling system, see if there's any, you know, weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons in there. So, the, once we secured the dam, which, it took a little while, because you don't really think about how big a dam is on the inside. There's a lot of shit going on in there.

• 57:34Jocko Willink?

  Is this a one platoon op?

• 57:36Speaker 02

  This is, so we had-

• 57:37Jocko Willink?

  Or like a platoon plus?

• 57:38Speaker 02

  No, we had platoon plus. We had our platoon, our mobility element, and we also brought in some, uh, STV above us. Which was good, they'd already been there and they'd cleared a ton of ships, small, you know, little, uh, what do you call the little boats out there?

• 57:51Jocko Willink?

  Dows.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Dows, they cleared a ton of dows. So, these guys had already had some reps under their belt. So, we were excited to, uh, to get them on the op with us. But yeah, we went in there uneventful, cleared it, checked the tunnels, nothing there. Then we, you know, waited there a couple of days and then we, uh, pulled out.

• 58:07Jocko Willink?

  But that that's a that's like a big that's the big mish that we were planning for in the 90s like that type of thing.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:14Jocko Willink?

  Like, hey, here it is.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:15Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna helo in, this is the big mish. And plus, that was your first combat operation?

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Yes, yep. It was a big deal. It felt good to get that under our belt. And we we it was a good shakeout for planning. Cause you know, you're over there going through the 96 hour planning cycle. A lot of good lessons learned. First time using 53s on a mission like that. So it was good, you know. And and one of the things I jacked up is me and another guy, our medical guy who scored away duty, stayed in the teams for a while. But we roped down and we had our CBR gear strapped on our sides. And so as we're coming down, we got that damn molly pack. You know, you gotta weave it in and out of the the nylon. I didn't weave mine in and out like I was supposed to. So I went through a couple, but I left like the bottom undone.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  And I don't know if I hit the wheel or the skin of the aircraft, but that thing, that damn thing came popping off. Of course, I had my MVGs in there.

• 59:08Jocko Willink?

  Ooh.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  The helo, you know, and the the backpack goes over the side. Same thing with the other cat that was with me. We think the rotor washed, you know, put it in the river and stuff. And everyone was talking about, hey, it's not a big deal. You can you get, you know, write it off as a combat, as a combat loss. That's what everyone was talking about, you know, like, all right, I guess it's not a big deal. Combat loss. I was like, dude, the skipper was not happy. The combat loss write-off was not a thing. Yeah. You ever learn that?

• 59:37Jocko Willink?

  Well, what's really not a thing is trying to do a night clearance without nods, without night vision.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  We white lighted everything then. So back then, we're coming up on the dam, we're white lighting it, and then even the clearance on the inside.

• 59:48Jocko Willink?

  So you were lucky in that respect.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 59:53Jocko Willink?

  I'm saying if you you said you said you lost your nods, right?

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 59:57Jocko Willink?

  I'm saying you're lucky that you didn't, that you weren't, didn't need them.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, that is accurate.

• 1:00:04Jocko Willink?

  Cause that would have freaking, you'd have just been blind, walking around, waiting to

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  walk into a wall.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was.

• 1:00:10Jocko Willink?

  You'd have just buddy along with somebody.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was a good lesson learned for me, especially being a platoon chief.

• 1:00:16Jocko Willink?

  Did you, uh, that little Molly weave, how many Molly weaves did you make, like two?

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  I think I had about three in there. I think there was around five and I just left out the last two and snapped it in.

• 1:00:29Jocko Willink?

  Snapped her in.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Yep, snapped her in. Get her done, she's good. Not so good.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Not a good situation.

• 1:00:36Jocko Willink?

  And the skipper was pissed?

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Oh, he was hot, man. I was on the mat with him. Like he's, you know, calling me to task on that one.

• 1:00:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, luck luckily, like I said, you had a good reputation. Like if you had a bad reputation at that point, that would have really sucked.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:50Jocko Willink?

  Would have really sucked.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:00:52Jocko Willink?

  So that was your first big mesh and then what, but and that was out of Kuwait?

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  That was out of Kuwait, yep.

• 1:00:57Jocko Willink?

  And then what happened?

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Then we moved up into Baghdad. We had a little camp set up out there. We called it Camp Posey. You know, we had a, I don't know if you know Posey, but a good warrant officer, Vietnam dude.

• 1:01:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Good, like good stories.

• 1:01:08Jocko Willink?

  The best.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  And we had another guy, we called him Ranger and those two dudes came in, they helped build out the camp. You know, we took a Ranger with us on, uh, on quite a few missions, good dude. And then we just started operating out of Posey into Baghdad. We were right there at the Baghdad International Airport.

• 1:01:23Jocko Willink?

  And what I was impressed with, looking back, or what I am impressed at looking back is you guys were freaking super proactive in getting missions started. Like you guys were super proactive in forming relationships and, and getting the intel that you needed from various sources and, and starting to do a lot of operations.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, we set the foundation for you guys. You guys came in and did like four times more than what we did, but we were definitely laying that foundation. And, and one of the things we had, our task unit, senior enlisted leader, um, he was dialed in and he came from Dam Neck. And so he had a lot of good relationships and, you know, you know, Dam Neck was over there at that point. And so he was tied in with a lot of the three letter agencies, which opened up the door with quite a few missions, shared intelligence. So that really helped set that, uh, that foundation for us. And then from there, we were starting to get, you know, some good missions and hell, even if you're getting one mission, you're like, all right, we're good to go, you know? Cause you think, we all think we're going to be out of there within six, seven months, like the whole thing shutting down.

• 1:02:24Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Um, but obviously it didn't.

• 1:02:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:02:30Jocko Willink?

  What was your, you guys got in some gunfights too?

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Jocko Willink?

  What was, what was the first one like? What do you remember?

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Our first shootout was kind of funny. We were dialing in our standard operating procedures for a shootout. Which we hadn't done. Like, you know, we went through training, training was good, but it was nowhere near the level that, you know, we provided our guys, once we got over to trade it, it wasn't anywhere near that. So we identified a few of the gaps we had and we went, we developed, we brought in the platoon, we brought in, guys with experience and we developed our standard operating procedure for what we're gonna do, inside a house if we get in a shootout. And it was basically suppress fire, cover, crash maneuver. Using a cover and move, we're gonna deploy some crashes, someone's gonna be suppressing fire while all that's happening. So on this particular mission, we went in and uh,

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  the house, the guy marked for us was the wrong house. We didn't know that. On imagery, everything looked dialed in tight and they, mark it, it looks good. We go in, breach the door, so we've gone explosive. So now the neighborhood's starting to wake up. We clear the house, I kept everything on the clock, we clear the, you know, two-story house in under two minutes. And we get the call on the net, hey, reset. The, the actual target house is down the street. So we reset, reconsolidate, you know, one's on the left, two's on the right. Gear check, you know, sensitive equipment check, everyone's good. Come back out of the house, grab our wood ladders, patrol back down the, the road, and the right house is marked. And we go up there, and it was the right house. It had a double security screen door. We go explosive on it, we got a, a failed breach. So now it's turning into a big construction project. Guys were up with the quickies.

• 1:04:01Jocko Willink?

  And not to mention, just so everybody knows, like, after you hit the first house, everybody in a two-mile square radius knows what's happening. And if you're in that neighborhood, you know exactly what's happening. So if you're a bad guy in that neighborhood, you are now alert and ready to be attacked and you're prepping.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Yep. Exactly. So now we got a failed breach. We're on the outside of the structure. The breachers are working through, getting through that heavy security screen door. We're kind of raking windows. We're deploying crashes in there to keep people away from the front door. We finally get entry. Clear the first floor. Everything's good. We're dialed in. And back then, we always pressed into our guys, hey, you make the call. If you stack on the stairs, you're the number two guy. You got three or four more guys behind you. Make the call and go up the stairs. We don't want to just have this lag period where you're waiting for me or the OIC to make a decision, tell you what to do. Decentralized command. So the guys stack on the stairs. I'm right there. I just came out of the kitchen area. They start moving up the stairs and there's young kid upstairs with an AK-47. So he's like 10 feet away and he's just

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  full auto, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka. And our guys are on the stairs. They're trying to return fire, but the volley is just all around our dudes, man. I'm yelling at the guys, get back down here. They come back down the stairs. And then we go through our shootout procedures, which, which paid dividends. They worked. We couldn't shoot, get at the guy because the guy's on the second deck and now we're down below him. So there's no way to get the direct fire. So our guys are exposing themselves a little bit, trying to get an angle here. Guys are deploying crashes. We deployed about five, six crashes. There's no more gunfire. We're like, alright, check.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  We're going up. So, you know, we go up the stairs. The kid had actually dropped his gun. We clear the, uh, the second deck. There's fricking smoke everywhere. So we're just, I mean, we're gagging. There's so much smoke in the house.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Go up there. The guy's not there. We're like, where the hell this guy go? And, um, our guys go out on the, on the, on the deck patio and they're clearing and now we're looking really hard. Like where is this guy? And the kid is a young kid hiding behind curtains. And, you know, the guy's there and then boom, our guys muzzle strike the guy, get him into the center of the room. We cuff him up and that was that. So

• 1:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Anyone get hit by him, by the bad guy?

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  No, so, you know, our, our guy heading up the stairs first, the first guy up, he had a grazer over his NVGs. Um, it actually hit his, his mount. Um, but he, he didn't get hit. It was like, it was a total Pope fiction.

• 1:06:25Jocko Willink?

  Pope fiction scenario.

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  Boom, boom, boom. Yeah. Like he had angels on his, because that could have been a bad night. We could have had two, three guys hit in that one volley and no one got hit. We, we were extremely lucky.

• 1:06:34Jocko Willink?

  How many, how many rounds do you think the guy shot? One mag or two mags? Did he get a reload?

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  No, no, no. He didn't get a reload. He, he, I think he got a full mag off, somewhere in between 25 and 30 rounds.

• 1:06:44Jocko Willink?

  From ten feet.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yep, close. It's close. I mean, I don't know how he, he probably missed because he was on full auto. You know how those things get, you're just bouncing all around when you go on full auto. Um, and, and the dude, you know, the guy was just a total douchebag that shot at us too. And he's like, I love George Bush. I love Coca-Cola. And you're like, you just shut up, man. So, yeah, we cuffed him up and that was, that was emotional when you're getting shot at that close and you're dealing with a bad dude that just tried to kill you. You know, those, uh, emotions get jacked up pretty high. Um, we had some good teammates there. I mean, I was, I wanted to kill the dude. Um, but you, we can't do that, you know, as much as you want to. It's, you're gonna, it's not gonna be good.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  But we got him cuffed up, took him over to our detention facility and, you know, the guys did good that night and they did good because of the training, the talk-throughs that we did, going through the checklist, going through multiple rehearsals. Every time these missions came up, all that panned out, all that worked in our favor. For that one event, for that one shootout, that all worked for us, you know?

• 1:07:49Jocko Willink?

  Having, uh, having contingency plans, which is that what you guys had? And it's what, you know, we have all kinds of contingency plans. I mean, every IAD, every immediate action drill that we do is a contingency plan. Like, oh, if we get shot at from over there, that's what we're gonna do. If we get shot at from over there, that's what we're gonna do. So having those contingency plans, it just makes it so that you don't really have to think. Decentralized command just works. Everyone knows what to do. They know what the objective is. They make it happen. And so you can make very little call, very, very, you can give very little direction and things still will proceed the way they're supposed to.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Jocko Willink?

  What about, um, what about your next, what about your next gunfight?

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  So our next one, I think was our, uh, our helicopter. So we'd gone in after this guy and he, um, He'd shot an RPG and killed an army guy. And so we were going in after him. And so we came in, we did quite a bit of heli work that deployment. So we came in with our helicopters and our game plan was to, you know, land on the X, assault the building and get, and grab the guy and go. And he was out in this, uh, I think he was actually out in Fallujah or Ramadi. So there were some palm groves out there. So on insertion, we come in and, and the helicopters went to the wrong house. You know, and our MBGs back then, they're kind of, they're not good. So we could see how that, so we, we, we set down and we're like, this is not the right house. Get back up, they get back up, do one orbit, come back into the right house, land us, we dump off,

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  clear the building, everything's unavailable, we get the bad guy. Now, as we're going through all the, uh, sensitive site exploitation, we're trying to grab as much as we can on this guy. You know, we get a, a report as we're breaking out that, hey, there's two or three armed guys coming your way in through this palm grove. So the helicopters were a ways out, but we had a gunship overhead. And so we set up a quick hasty perimeter, little foot hook, and we're gonna wait to see if these guys came into us. Well, they never came into us. They sensed something was wrong and they bagged us. So we get set up in the palm grove and we're calling in the helicopters at this point to come pick us up. And as we're setting up the perimeter, you know, someone calls out over the radio, hey, man, there's a tracer fire that just went by.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  And no one else had seen it. There's one dude paying attention in his field of fire, sees one round come in. And so he calls it out. So we kind of go on hyper alert here. We're, we're waiting, we're watching. And as the helos are coming in, this dude, they were probably like 300 yards from us. They start opening up with AAA fire over our LZ. Now, the only thing protecting us at that time is we had a palm grove and the LZ is here and the house is somewhere over here. So this tracer fire is coming over the palm grove. And the, the issue we had is like, um, communicating this backup to chain. We had our task unit commander on the ground with us on this one. And some people just didn't see this shit. Some people didn't see the tracer fire coming. And I picked it up pretty damn quick. Once the guy called it out and you're like, holy shit, that's a good volley of fire.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  We're gonna get a helicopter shot down if we're not careful there. So anyways, the helicopter comes in, picks up the package, grabs our headquarters element, they bounce out. And then we just go over to our secondary LZ, which was, you know, pretty easy. But, uh, it, it was very uncomfortable knowing that, hey, you got AAA fire coming over the top of you. You know, when these helos get shut down, this is gonna be a long night, especially out here in this rural area. We didn't have any backup.

• 1:10:59Jocko Willink?

  And then, what was your op tempo like?

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  It wasn't bad. It wasn't like we were going out dinging targets every night, but we would, we got a point there where we were going out at least twice a week, I'd say, once or twice a week. Yeah, more like twice a week. But in between that, we were doing other stuff. Like you're doing mobility stuff, you're going to do a little bit of sniper stuff here and there.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Which, which was, which was good. And then just going back on decentralized command, you know, the, the other CQC, or close court of combat shootout we had, you know, our guys were going up to this, uh, house. And man, there's fricking telephone wires everywhere, man. And you know how that is. You're like, there's no rhyme or reason. Why do you guys live with this? Just wires dangling? You know, and we gotta hop over this damn gate, you know, to get to this house. So.

• 1:11:45Jocko Willink?

  Literally like thirty or forty wires. Like you could be just some total mayhem wires.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Yep. And we, we planned for it. We actually picked it up on the imagery. We're going through our rehearsals and we're like, hey, there's wires everywhere. As you're coming over, at this spot right here, be careful. Don't get your nods hit on them. Don't, you know, we gotta be quiet. So we start going up and over. We get the entry team over and actually we had our, our full squad into the courtyard because the distance from the gate to the actual house was a lot. And it was a big house, so we needed assaulters up front. So we get up front and the, uh, you know, the, the entry teams going through, you know, our breach is going through, laying the charge on the door, going through all the procedures. And the next thing you know, you get this whap, bang, bang, bang, doors are, rounds are coming through the door. And so, you know, our breacher, we borrowed him from another platoon. He was dialed in, good dude. Um, you and Leif know him. But so he's,

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  he's laying the charge and he's using his cover right. If he's in the center of the door, the dude's getting shot with a forty-five cal pistol. But he's off to the side, using his covers like he's supposed to, sets the charge. Our guys, our other guys holding security, they go through our standard operating procedures. They're awaking the windows, they're shooting in through the window to get the person away from it, and they're dumping crashes in to keep the person away, kick them out away from the doorway. So boom, we blow it. Of course, there's a propane tank there. So the whole damn doorway catches on fire. So now we can't, you know, we got a failed breach area. We can't get in there. The door's open, but there's just this massive propane fire going on. So we got to go to our secondary door and get over the secondary door and these dudes got a damn drop bar on there. So we, I mean, it took us forever to get in.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  It was a shit show. We get entry into the, into the doorway and there's like a family of eight people sleeping in there. And like they're still sleeping. Like, how is it possible? We just blew in your door. There's gunshots going on and you are, you all are still like physically sleeping like zombies, you know? So anyways, we got in there, cleared the building.

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  That sounds so unbelievable. If you haven't been into Iraq before, like you can't explain things like that. You can't, you can't explain things like that. To get an explosive breach, a failed breach, shotguns going off of fire and the team, the freaking family just racked out.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  Yep. They're racked out. Yeah, they were zombies, man.

• 1:13:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, did you ever catch the guy that was shooting through the door?

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, uh, it was actually the, I think it was, uh, one of the guy's wife shooting through there. And she's like, hey, I thought you, thought you were looters. You're like coming in to rob our house. And we're like, yeah, no, we're not looters, you know? But, um, anyways, we got that situation all squared away.

• 1:14:10Jocko Willink?

  That's a rough, that, that, well, when I say that's a rough one, that's the kind of mission where things can go really sideways. Like if you start fragging that room.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:14:19Jocko Willink?

  Which you could easily do to say, Ham, look, we just got shot at. I'm throwing some frag grenades into this room. And actually, you know, you got a family, eight person family and they're getting blown apart by frag grenades because the woman was trying to defend her house from looters. Which again, may sound like a crazy story and it could also be the absolute 100% truth. I don't know. I'm not going to try and, you know, replay the situation that you lived through, but that could be legit. And you have no idea when you're out there.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  And that'd have been, that'd have been horrible.

• 1:14:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it'd been a freaking nightmare. Well, any other big missions that, uh, that you guys did? Didn't you guys do like some, some like SA seven recovery?

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we, I forgot about that one. So we were out, we went out there, you know, working with some. Other intel people out there and they're like, hey, we're going after some of this sensitive stuff here. We, you know, anyways, so we went and hit this farmhouse. We got good air coverage overhead of us. No one's there. The place is a ghost town. We start going through our sensitive site exploitation and man, it was like a gold mine. You know, the, the, the perimeter around it was just this big, huge cache. And so we found a, a truckload of, you know, uh, SA seven and SA 14 missiles, a ton of RPGs, uh, rocket propelled grenades and launchers. And so things started getting a little spicy around the areas. We're calling

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  a little bit of a fire support and we actually had to turn that over to an army unit who came in the next day during daylight and they started going through the field and there was like, I mean, it was like radios. It was like enough shit to outfit a damn army, you know? So that, that was a, that was a good op. Nothing happened, but we found a lot of stuff. So, you know, you leave there feeling pretty good about it.

• 1:16:02Jocko Willink?

  And that, so that was a good, that was a freaking great deployment for you guys, especially in like, whatever, 2003, that, that deployment was pretty freaking epic.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Oh man, we left there and we're like, we're the man. We're never coming back here again.

• 1:16:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Cause no one, no one ever thought you'd be back there again.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  No, no, no. And it was good. And so the one thing we did that was really good with our platoon that we learned from the team three guys when we relieved them is we shared information. You know, I was back with, you know, your old, your brother there at team one communicating everything I had back to him. Hey, here's what we're doing. Here's what worked. Here was, here's what didn't work. Here's some things to think about with mobility and you just try to share as much information as possible, you know? That way the next guys coming in, they know what to expect and they can adjust training, come in at a high level, ready to, to rock and roll. I know when you guys came in, you guys did, I don't know, four time, four or five times the amount of missions we did for that deployment.

• 1:16:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, you get, you guys were pushing a lot of information back to us. I know you guys were feeding my platoon chief and my platoon chief was already like a mobility kind of mobility dude. And so he was just amped, bro. We were doing freaking, uh, freaking tire change drills like NASCAR, like a pit crew. I mean, it was just like it was on. But here's the funny thing. We were, we were on an ORE. Prior to that deployment, so like maybe three months before going on deployment, we were on an OR, we, we did our ORE shipboard and we went and we were doing hydrographic reconnaissance of Red Beach up at Camp Pendleton with lead line and slate dude. Like it was, the world hadn't caught up.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:17:34Jocko Willink?

  Right? The world hadn't caught up yet. And thank God, you know, like after that, we were, we, we found some Humvees. We borrowed Humvees from like the Seabees or something and started running op, running, you know, training ops down at like the old NTC, the old Naval Training Center where they had a bunch of old buildings that were all dilapidated, but we started running little ops in there with our, you know, and our task unit commander had actually been in Iraq on the push up. So he had some experience. Our task unit SCA had also been in Iraq on the push up. So he had some experience.

• 1:18:10Jocko Willink?

  Which was awesome and they're both great guys. So we were, and we were just going off of the reports of how you guys were doing stuff. And we were just like, okay, this is what they're doing. Cool. This is what we're gonna do. This is what they did. This is how they rigged their vehicles. Okay. This is how we're gonna rig our vehicles. So that's kinda what we did. And then I know you and I did a turnover and like, wasn't, we, we did it like Bahrain, right?

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, Bahrain. That's where I was at. We had a platoon left up there and our, and our mobility element was left up there.

• 1:18:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  And we came back a few weeks early out of Bahrain, just cause there wasn't enough room to bring everyone in. So.

• 1:18:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So we sat down, did an awesome turnover with you guys, with you and your OIC.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:18:45Jocko Willink?

  Who's a freaking great dude. That was awesome. And I was kinda like, I knew who you were.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Jocko Willink?

  Just from, I guess, being around, but then that was, that was when I was like, that's when I first really remember getting a working. Like, you know, I might've seen you at McPee's or something.

• 1:19:02Jocko Willink?

  But the first time I ever actually got a working, I think that was the first time I ever did some kinda working, uh.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  I think that was the first time I crossed paths with you.

• 1:19:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Always hear the name out there. I mean, I was roommates with Taco and Taco had nightmare stories with you and Chris. He's like, those guys, man. They need to quit beating us up.

• 1:19:20Jocko Willink?

  We were, we were, we were hostile as young seals. Yeah. We had the gang mentality for sure, for sure. So then what'd you do when you got home from that deployment?

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  So got back off that deployment and there was another platoon chief slot open. So it seems he was like, hey, man, you, the guy that was gonna come doesn't look like he's gonna come. You want to do another one? I was like, hell yeah, dude. So then, you know, started form up another platoon, got a bunch of new guys in, new OIC and started another 12 month workup cycle.

• 1:19:48Jocko Willink?

  Dang, that's you got freaking two platoon chief slots.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. It was awesome, man. That's the best job in the world. The task unit spot is, is good. But the platoon chief slots a lot.

• 1:19:59Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, platoon chief. I mean, I always say like E5 in a platoon. I was just talking to some guys the other night that were E5 students. I was like, hey, you're good, man. E5 in a platoon is an awesome place to be. And it is, it is. It's an awesome place to be. And hopefully you reach a point where you go, I can take care of those awesome guys.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:20:16Jocko Willink?

  And that's when you go, okay, I'm gonna be an OPO or I'm gonna be a platoon chief. Or I'm gonna be a, you know, if you go the officer route, you can try and go that officer route. But at some point you realize the best thing I can do as a, to be a good E5, to take care of the other few E5s, means I gotta get promoted. I gotta take care of them. And the best way I can do that is to in- increase my rank a little bit.

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:20:36Jocko Willink?

  So I have a little bit more sway.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:20:38Jocko Willink?

  We don't have to do dumb shit.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 1:20:41Jocko Willink?

  You know, I'm complaining about my boss, you know, you can only complain so much before you gotta actually do something about it.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:20:48Jocko Willink?

  And it's rare that someone gets to do platoon chiefs back to back like that. I mean, no, it's rare that a guy even gets to do two platoon chiefs slots. That's freaking rare.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're getting better at it now.

• 1:20:58Jocko Willink?

  That's good.

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  That's one of the things that I know at the headquarters level they're really looking at, you know, before there are, um, our rating really took control over, hey, you can only do one. You gotta move out. Another guy's gotta move in. And they started looking at that because, you know, we had, we were losing quite a few tactical leaders. Like their guys are getting fired. Why are they getting fired? Hey, they need more seasoning.

• 1:21:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  Hey, let's grab, let's keep two, three guys that are doing really good to keep that, uh,

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  What's the word I'm looking for?

• 1:21:27Jocko Willink?

  Continuity?

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  Continuity at the team and these are dialed in people, you know, you can count on them and uh move it forward. So we've gotten better with uh with that over the last 10 years. So those guys, it's common now for your top two or three guys to stay at the team. Even if they pick up senior chief, they're going to stay in that platoon chief.

• 1:21:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:21:46Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. And so then you do another workup. You must've been freaking dialed now. You're doing a second platoon chief workup.

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  The second platoon chief was way easier than the first.

• 1:21:55Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  The first one, so I didn't do a platoon LPO, so I was sucking on a fire hose.

• 1:22:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:22:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you were.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you know, setting up the platoon, there's just.

• 1:22:04Jocko Willink?

  And you had never worked in training either.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Nope, not a team.

• 1:22:08Jocko Willink?

  See, I'll tell you, man. My whole.

• 1:22:14Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's probably, you know, my first three platoons, the leadership strategy tactics we were talking about. My first three platoons, I learned these certain things, right?

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:22:21Jocko Willink?

  And I wrote about it in leadership strategy and tactics. But where, that was like where all these seeds got planted.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28Jocko Willink?

  But I'll tell you what, you want to know where the fertilizer and the water came from on those seeds? It was working in training cell at SEAL Team One where I was a single enlisted E5. And you know what trip I went on? Every freaking trip there was, I taught everything. I would volunteer for every course I'd, you know, we would go teach land warfare, then I'd teach diving, then I'd teach CQC. I'd just do, and I was the main instructor on any of them.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Jocko Willink?

  I was just a guy that was out there like, I'll go on that trip, oh, I'll go on that trip. And that's where those little seeds started to come to fruition. And the biggest thing was when you're instructing, and you know this now that we worked in land warfare. When you're running, when you're watching IADS or you're teaching IADS, you are de facto detached. So you're watching and you can see and you realize how easy it is when you're detached. And when you realize how easy it is when you're detached and you go, wait a second, if I'm in there, I just need to take a step back and see what the hell is going on and that can make a good call. So that is where I learned so much. So for you have not done that, definitely had to make your first platoon chief go around a little rough.

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  It was hard. I got lucky like the our sister platoon, that platoon chief was dialed in, he'd done all those things. He was on like seventh platoon. I was doing my fourth at the time. And so I leaned on him. I'd ask him a hundred million questions on things and he always gave me good, good guidance, man. Yeah, Dano, good dude, you know.

• 1:23:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so then you get done with that one.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:23:56Jocko Willink?

  And now you're now you're going through it again. And now you're kind of like,

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  I'm like, this is easy. You're dealing with the same issues. I got all my standard operating procedures in place. So for every block of training we're doing.

• 1:24:05Jocko Willink?

  Plus, you're a freaking combat vet.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  I'm combat.

• 1:24:08Jocko Willink?

  You're kind of the man.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  I'm ready to get after it. Yeah. So it was way easier, man. Way easier. You know, you're always going to have those same personnel issues. And now you know how to deal with them. You know what right looks like.

• 1:24:21Jocko Willink?

  And then what was that? Then you were going back to Iraq again?

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  Yep. So we wound up back over, you know, you guys came in in late September, 2003. We went back in September, 2004. And the place was just a disaster. Roadside bombs all over the place. I mean, you know, the drill, four fighters all over the place. It was a shit show.

• 1:24:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that that was the the end of my first deployment was when we went and got Yakubi, which was Sodder's guy. That set the whole freaking thing into a just a total mayhem.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:24:52Jocko Willink?

  And we saw that we saw the like, it was, it was a radical change.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Jocko Willink?

  Because before that, like in what would be in March of 2004, it was kind of like, okay, we'll go do a mission in April, we were, you could look out and you'd see smoke and fire, vehicles burning. And like, it was totally, it was a very different scenario.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:18Jocko Willink?

  In that one month period in April of 2004.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  Damn, yeah.

• 1:25:22Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  It just got worse from there.

• 1:25:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then by the time you guys showed up.

• 1:25:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a disaster. I remember, and we were doing the PSD mission. So we weren't doing our typical. Direct action, but we got in there and in my platoon, we got split up. So we're in squads now supporting other platoons because you need X number of people to protect these guys. And one of the good things that the headquarters element did is they rotated guys out for sniper missions. So if you're sniper qualified, you've come on in. And so we covered down within our PSD elements and guys would go out and do sniper stuff. So I was lucky. I got to get out there on Hypha Street a couple of times.

• 1:25:59Jocko Willink?

  Were you a sniper?

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I was a sniper. Yeah. So I went through, uh, went through sniper school in 98 and that was back when it was out at Coleing and stuff. And when I got back off of that deployment, 99, I want to work for Mark. He was running the sniper course. So I did a couple of instructor, you know, uh, courses with him. So it was, it was good. And that helped me out for, you know, the 2003 deployment, 2004, the 2006 deployments, you know? But I remember getting out on Hypha Street and it was the first time we're out and we did sniper work in 2003, but there wasn't nothing going on. Everything was under control. And I remember going out there and we're supporting an army unit. They're doing a clearance. So we come in, dump out of the Bradley, set up in the, in the buildings.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  We got all our sectors covered and like, there's this moog in an apartment building with an RPG, launching RPGs at Apaches that are in the area. And like, you know, the deal, he's like, you don't shoot a rocket from a room. That's not good, good practice, right? You're going to jack yourself up. He's just in there getting after it. Dunk, dunk. And like, so the Apache's coming and they're just like, go, go, go, go. And they just take the dude out and you're like, holy shit, man. This place is not good.

• 1:27:08Jocko Willink?

  Totally different.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  And then you come out for extract, the Brad's are coming in to pull us out and like there's rounds coming in at you. We didn't deal with that in 2003. 2003, we had the upper hand, you know, you're operating at nighttime, but we had the upper hand with what we were doing. Um, so it's just, it was different. And then at that same time in 2004, you had Phantom Fury out there and Fallujah going off, you know? You had good dudes supporting that. And that was just, I remember looking up on the, uh, the jock screen and the Marines are going through and doing a clearance at nighttime. And there's like grenades getting chucked out and the Marines are just going in and getting after it. I mean, they're carrying like 25 mags in there.

• 1:27:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  And going building by building. And like, God bless the Marine Corps, man. These dudes are like. Badasses and we all wanted to be there like, hey, switch with us, man. Come do the PSD thing. We want to be out there doing what you're doing.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  But so anyway, so you know, Phantom Fury had just died down. Like, hey, we want to send a sniper element up to Samara. And so like Leif got chosen to be OIC and I was like, hey, they selected me to come in there with Leif. I was like, cool. Put our 10 man, 11 man team together, went up to Samara. We thought we were going to get after it, you know?

• 1:28:14Jocko Willink?

  It was go time.

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  It was go time. We were going to get some and it was uneventful, man. Nothing happened. We set up damn near, we were out in the streets every damn day setting up, man. And it was just, you know, the, the guys were going after their real cage. It was like civilians. You don't know what your enemy look like. They'd come in, set an IED, you didn't even know they said it and then they'd be out of there.

• 1:28:34Jocko Willink?

  How many, how much did you spend? How much time did you spend on Haifa Street?

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Not much. I'd say I probably got out there about six or seven times total for that. And I was only in Iraq for 90 days during that time period.

• 1:28:45Jocko Willink?

  And then you rotated out to the Pacific?

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. Over to PI. Yep, Guam and PI.

• 1:28:51Jocko Willink?

  And the PSD was, look, it was a hard mission and everything, but relatively uneventful because that's what it was supposed to. So at that time SEALs were providing security for the top seven.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Something like that.

• 1:29:05Jocko Willink?

  Authorities in Iraq and, you know, in charge of keeping them safe and did an awesome job.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Jocko Willink?

  But that, in doing an awesome job, meant there wasn't action, thankfully.

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Jocko Willink?

  Because the action probably would have been a giant 2000 bomb V bid that would have killed everybody or some, something crazy like that.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. In 2004, that was the first time we, I really started seeing the, you know, you know, the truck bombs, the car bombs they were building. And I mean, they built them, you know, this, they, they put so much explosives in them that the damn springs and shocks would break on them. You know, if you're trying to get on base and they're like jacked up, you know, yeah, not good.

• 1:29:42Jocko Willink?

  So, but that, but that wrapped up another deployment for you.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:29:47Jocko Willink?

  And, and then, so then what, then what'd you do?

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  So then stayed at Team Five. I made Senior Chief in 2005, picked up a task.

• 1:29:55Jocko Willink?

  Dude, you're making up for going to the Fleet UD.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you're making rank quick.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. Yeah.

• 1:30:00Jocko Willink?

  Were you, were you making rank quick for, on average, above average? It seems like you are.

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I would say. Probably above average up to chief. And then, you know, I got passed over the first time for senior chief and then made it the second time, rightfully so. You don't want guys to make rank too fast. You want guys to really understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, which takes time. Takes a lot of reading, takes repetitions. And I think when I put on chief, I didn't, I was undergunned, you know, with my, my training and my experience. So it was good that I got passed over my first time for senior chief, you know? So anyway, so I made senior chief in 2005 and then picked up a task unit and, you know, from there we started working up to relieve you guys.

• 1:30:46Jocko Willink?

  When did you guys know that you were going to relieve us?

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  I, I would say right around March, April timeframe of 2006, right when you're deploying over.

• 1:30:53Jocko Willink?

  We got there.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  Yep, right around that same timeframe. Yep. Yep. They're like, hey, you guys are going to come in behind these guys and replace them.

• 1:30:59Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you guys start tracking like what was happening?

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  You guys started getting hot and heavy in what, May, June timeframe?

• 1:31:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, in April.

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  April timeframe.

• 1:31:09Jocko Willink?

  Like as soon as we got there, it was getting crazy.

• 1:31:11Speaker 02

  It was right around then. And like we, all of us were just kind of thinking, hey, it's going to be like a Fallujah style clearance. And Fallujah went pretty quick.

• 1:31:21Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  It went pretty quick. You know, there was a lot of, you know, a lot of good work being done, a lot of people getting killed, US soldiers getting injured.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  We thought it was going to be like that. We didn't know it was going to be what it was. You know, we hadn't gone up against that type of enemy before.

• 1:31:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, we thought it was going to be a Fallujah type thing too.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Jocko Willink?

  And we talked about this on, on the unraveling with Daryl Cooper. That we, well, that's what we got told when we got there. They're like, hey, you guys are gonna, we're gonna do Fallujah. And we're like, thank you, thank you. This is going to be, because Fallujah at that point was a real high watermark for, for just awesome, crushing kinetic operations by the Marine Corps. And there was SEALs in there supporting, and they did a great job. So we were thinking, okay, like it's on and it's going to be, whatever, it's going to be two weeks or three weeks, maybe a fighting and we'll get cleared through the city.

• 1:32:20Jocko Willink?

  But it ended up not going that way. It ended up being that there's a smart move by the prime minister, who was a Shia, to recognize that if, if the Shia army, which it basically was a Shia army, went in there and did this type of crushing kinetic sweep through Ramadi, which was most, which was Sunni, it would have set up Sunni versus Shia civil war. And so he said, we're not doing that. You're gonna find another way to do it. And the other way to do it was a counter insurgency, was going into the neighborhoods and trying to pervert, preserve the infrastructure and trying to keep the civilian populace as

• 1:33:00Jocko Willink?

  safe as you can as you do it. And yet, at the same time, do battle with these insurgents. So that's what, that's what we ended up doing. And I, I always wonder what it was like for you guys, once we started taking a lot of casualties and once we started losing guys. You guys must have been like, um, a little, a little nervous about coming.

• 1:33:25Speaker 02

  Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, absolutely, man. No, no one had been through, you know, that amount of combat, like for us at that point, like heavy combat. You know, we had, uh, our group Commodore, he was out there with us doing our, you know, uh, ORE, what do they call the final battle problem? And he's like, hey, man, you guys are going to Ramadi, stand by. There's a lot going on there. And he was like, I mean, a lot going on there. And uh, and I think things really hit home for us. Um, like I remember Cali, Cali coming back when he was shot. And like, you look at these things, you're like, okay, that's manageable. Like, hey, he's shot, he's coming in through. It looks like he's gonna be okay.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  And then shit really hit the fan for us when Mark was killed. We're like, holy shit. This is, we're going into something that we like, you know, we hadn't been in before.

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  So we had like we dialed in our training. You guys were giving us information, telling us everything you're doing, what's working, what's not working. We had some hard conversations with our operators. Hey, man, like someone's gonna get wounded. Someone might get killed. Like we there are some of these things we can't control. What we can do is our rehearsals, train to this, make good decisions on the battlefield to reduce our casualty levels. But we're gonna be shot at. Someone's gonna get hit. That's coming. And at the end of the day, it's gonna be us standing here that's gonna kind of get us out of this shit. So we gotta, we gotta run a tight game. We gotta be tight with what we're doing. And the guys understood that, you know, the guys understood that. But it's different when you get on the ground and you got a lot of rounds coming at you, you know?

• 1:35:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, it's I, I trying to, I'm trying to think of a way to explain the difference that in my mind that you got like, it seems like, but prior to that point, most of the times when guys would go out, even when the guys would go out and get wounded, or guys would go out and no one had been killed in Iraq yet, but even in Afghanistan, it was like, it was a mission, right? It was like a mission, a, an isolated mission where something had happened. And then once that isolated mission is over, it's like you reset the clock. And now, okay, we're in a different, it's a different mission. And so it's almost like, like you do get to reset the clock.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Jocko Willink?

  But Ramadi was like, you were in the same game and the clock was freaking ticking the whole time.

• 1:35:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:35:48Jocko Willink?

  And, and so you guys knew that you were just gonna come in and get in the game and it wasn't gonna be one mission and it wasn't gonna be three missions. It was gonna be mission after mission after mission after mission after mission. And it was gonna be as many days as you were there.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:36:03Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, I remember you guys showing up and I remember actually briefing your task unit and literally saying,

• 1:36:12Jocko Willink?

  You guys are gonna, you guys are gonna take casualties, which is the, which was the, it was a thing I was thinking to myself, do I say that? Is that a bad attitude? Is that a negative attitude? Is that a self fulfilling prophecy? Or is that just the fucking truth about what's going on?

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:36:28Jocko Willink?

  And I would rather have you guys thinking, okay, this is the truth and if we can avoid it, great, but we have to be ready and we need to do everything we can, but we gotta be ready for it.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. I remember you guys were telling us, man, we had, we had our go bags ready. So if someone gets injured or standard operating procedure in place with who's going with the guy that's injured, all of our passports, IDs, everything were in the bag. Someone gets injured, boom, they're getting on the heli with the injured guy. They're pushing out, you know, at least getting them over to Germany. Um, so we were definitely in the right mindset. Um, you know, in our first op out there, you guys helped set that up out there at Firecracker.

• 1:37:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  And that was, that was a good one with the Marine Corps.

• 1:37:06Jocko Willink?

  God, well, we set you guys up at Firecracker for your first op. What assholes.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're like, hey, you guys are going around racetrack and we'll just call this, uh, we'll call this operation Firecracker, cause there's gonna be some shit going down up there.

• 1:37:19Jocko Willink?

  God.

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  And, uh, it was, it was a good first shakeout, you know, and the Marine Corps is up there. You know, the Colonel that was running the Marine Corps, I forget his name, but he was just a good.

• 1:37:29Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding.

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  Good leader, just good, like, good dude, man. Um, so we set that up and it, you know, there's a, you know, our guys, our snipers killed a few guys on that one, which was good.

• 1:37:40Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:40Speaker 02

  Um, you know, and they, I'm just remembering, I was a Humvee out in the street and he's pulling security down from us. And the dude starts, you know, gets lit up with an RPG and like the Marines are dumping out of it and they're doing cover move drills, getting back and they're taking small arms fire. We're in a position where we can't, that, you know, the enemy's in dead speech. We can't even do anything to support them. Um, and they'd come back and there was a couple like smaller mortars that came in that day. Uh, you know, didn't hit our building, but they were out in front of us there. It wasn't too bad. They were small. Um, but it was a good, it was a good shakeout for us. Like, hey, a little confidence builder, whacked a couple of bad guys. No one got injured. These are all good things.

• 1:38:17Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:19Jocko Willink?

  And then you guys started rolling.

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  Then we started rolling and our first, I was on that mission. The next mission we did, I was not on. And our guys went up down the street, I think from Falcon. And they're setting up overwatch positions and you know, they're, I think they're in the morning time and grenades come in. You know, I think they had one or two grenades come in. They yelled grenades. The guys are diving down the stairs and we had two guys get fragged from those.

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  And from that point, it was like, all right, you know, we knew we were getting into, but then it's like, now it's real. You know, now our guys are getting injured. We knew we were going to get wounded. Now you got two guys wounded with frags. And their injuries weren't bad enough. They had to get medevac'd out. So they stayed, they stayed with us, you know, and it took them about three weeks to, to heal up and they were, they were okay.

• 1:39:03Jocko Willink?

  And that was like your second op?

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. That was like our second one.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, throughout that thing there, you know, one of the things I realized, and this is further down the road, but we did this, this river op and we're going to set support, setting up a combat outpost. And we're using the marine riverine.

• 1:39:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  Unit.

• 1:39:25Jocko Willink?

  And those guys were awesome.

• 1:39:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're awesome. But think how funny that is. Like, hey, the Navy's supposed to deliver the Marines. Now the Marines are delivering us. And they were good dudes, man. They were dialed in.

• 1:39:34Jocko Willink?

  They were awesome.

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  They were squared away. So they take us down river and we had all of our deconfliction up. Hey, here's when we hit this point in the water, call up to the security, army security checkpoint up ahead. Make sure everything's dialed in. Went through all the procedures and there was obviously a disconnect. So we get close to where we're going. And we can see the security position off to the right and it's on a two-story building. And we get that, we're like, that's not good. That's a round coming over our head from the security position. And then we're like, hey, light your strobes, do your shit. And then the boat starts speeding up a little bit to get us to shore. And like, now we're all pissed because we just got shot at. And then we get the, you know, like fricking tracers are coming over us. We're like, get us to the shoreline, man. So we get to the shoreline and we're dumping out. At that point, it's a full on.

• 1:40:20Jocko Willink?

  Dude, I just got chills. I just got chills because, because when you start talking about you're receiving fire from friendlies, it's freaking horrible.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  And then it's a full on, no, we're not shooting back. But then it's full on, they think we're moved in boats coming down the river and it's just, we're dumping off in the toolies and I'm, I'm fricking hot, man. So I'm. Dumping in the side of the toolies and we learned from you guys, hey, de-conflict that with your white star cluster. So I had old trustee right here, you know, and as I'm going to the shoreline, I'm popping this thing out, my weapons flying all over the place and I'm yelling at the A O I C. I was like, hey, fricking call back there and get this shit de-conflicted now. And I'm pissed. I'm yelling at him. I'm yelling. He's like, what the after you think I'm doing? What the after you think I'm doing? I'm like, fucking hurry up, man. And so we're yelling back and forth. I'm popping up the white star cluster and of course, as soon as you get the white star cluster up, it, the shit

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  stops. But I couldn't get to that damn thing fast enough. By the time I got it, I had it out in probably like less than 30 seconds.

• 1:41:17Jocko Willink?

  Dude, 30 seconds, a long time to be receiving fire from American machine gunners.

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were all sucking mud, man. So it was, it was a good lesson learned. And one of the things with Ramadi is when you go into a, a high stress environment, there's multiple units in the area, the likelihood of you having a blue on blue, it just go up drastically. You know, you, you've done a lot of podcasts with the Vietnam shit. So when you're in those type of environments,

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  you've got to have your de-confliction down. You can't, you can't do it enough, really.

• 1:41:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And you know, another thing I've been thinking about is from a leadership perspective, a thing that I've been talking about all the time is, is like, if, if you, if you work for me and I come to talk to you, I got to understand what your perspective is. Like, I got to understand that. So that I can like, okay, he's reacting like this because of that. And, and even more in depth than that, I got to kind of know what your freaking story is. So I can't just know your perspective. I got to know what your story is. Like, oh, this is Steve. He's, he's been here for 20 years. He's, he's done a good job. He also is known for having a bad temper. He also has some trouble at home right now. So I got to know this stuff. So that I can assess like, okay,

• 1:42:31Jocko Willink?

  what approach am I going to take? What reaction am I going to get? Well, guess what? When you're in a combat situation, you better think about the perspective of the people that you're working with.

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:43Jocko Willink?

  Because guess what? You take a kid that's 18 years old. He's scared shitless. He doesn't, he, he's freaking sick of being on this post. He's afraid he's gonna get killed.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:42:54Jocko Willink?

  He's not being briefed by his seniors. He's tired. He's pissed off. He's got an itchy trigger, trigger finger. And what do you think this guy's gonna do?

• 1:43:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:06Jocko Willink?

  He's gonna shoot at you.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:43:07Jocko Willink?

  If you don't make it clear what's happening.

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:43:11Jocko Willink?

  So it's important to remember that you, when you, you have to understand other people's perspective and understand what their story is, and then you need to account for that.

• 1:43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:20Jocko Willink?

  Somehow. Otherwise, bad things happen. And like, that's a nightmare, man. Like, if those, those, there's no protection on those circ boats.

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  Oh, hell no.

• 1:43:29Jocko Willink?

  If that, if one, one iteration of fire hit those circ boats, you'd have three, four guys dead, wounded, whatever.

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  Maybe more.

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:43:38Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you got 10 guys in a boat. Damn, it's a nightmare.

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It, it wasn't good. And just talking about perspective, I know the army guys, there were a couple of units there that, you know, they'd been there for like eight months. I wanna say like eight months, and then they get the call, hey, you're gonna stay like three more months.

• 1:43:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:54Speaker 02

  And them dudes are wore out, man. I mean, they're pulling security out front. They're taking round RPG rounds.

• 1:43:59Jocko Willink?

  They've lost two of their friends, three of their friends, four of their friends. They've seen VBIEDs go in. They've heard rumors about boats. I mean, yeah, and look, the army guys and the marines that were there are the most professional badass dudes ever, ever. But there's a lot of them.

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:17Jocko Willink?

  And if you, if you have, look, you can have a platoon of 40 guys and 39 of them can be the most squared away guys you've ever met and can understand everything and be calm, cool and collected, but there's gonna be one person in there that's not.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 1:44:31Jocko Willink?

  And, and once one person starts shooting, bro.

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:35Jocko Willink?

  It's a real problem to get, it's a real problem if you think other people aren't gonna start shooting as well. That's, that's what we literally get trained to do. Oh, if there's a contact, start shooting. Help your buddy.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, not, uh, not good, understandable, but, uh, not, not a good situation. We definitely could have done a better job on that with us.

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it wasn't good. We were lucky. No one got hit on that one.

• 1:45:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. We had one other blue on blue that I know about. I'm convinced there's, there were, I'm convinced there was probably quite a few blue on blues going on that you just don't, you don't know.

• 1:45:12Jocko Willink?

  There was, because I was, I was, we talk about this with the brigade commander all the time. There was one, there was usually one blue on blue per day, per day.

• 1:45:25Jocko Willink?

  But that, that wouldn't get reported and there was one blue on blue per week that actually got reported of like, hey, we were taking fire from this unit at this time. Most of them was like, hey, get the, get the, excuse fire, excuse fire. You know, that's friendly position. Like that happened all the, it happened once a day.

• 1:45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40Jocko Willink?

  Once a day, you know, usually at night, but the, the most harrowing example of that was there was a blue on blue between Hum V's. Like one Hum V at night saw another Hum V and started shooting at it.

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:53Jocko Willink?

  And there weren't no moose that had Hum V's. Like at least a boat, the boats weren't super common to be in the river, even the Marine Corps boats, they weren't super common to be in the river. So if they rolled out, someone goes, oh, wait a second. I don't know what this is. This might be moose boats. Let's shoot them. But a Hum V? Like that's how itchy the trigger fingers can get and you gotta understand people's perspective, man. We were so freaking paranoid about that stuff.

• 1:46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It was, uh, it wasn't a good feeling. That's for sure.

• 1:46:19Jocko Willink?

  Jeez. And there's nothing you can't, like, what are you gonna do? Shoot back? Like you can't do that.

• 1:46:24Speaker 02

  No, yeah.

• 1:46:25Jocko Willink?

  You've grabbed that damn white star cluster and get fired off, boy. Damn.

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. We had one other blue on blue. We were out there and we were down there by Grant, Cop Grant and, uh, we, we went to the unit, de-conflicted everything and, you know, our guys went out there and we're getting set up on a rooftop and like. Damn, come on, man.

• 1:46:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  You know, wasn't good, but um those high stress level areas, people are getting wounded and shit. People are gonna see different things. Um it's out there, it's real. You gotta be careful.

• 1:46:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, when Leif and I wrote Extreme Ownership, like, we didn't plan to write, there's three chapters in there that are just blue on blue chapters.

• 1:47:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:06Jocko Willink?

  Out of 12 chapters.

• 1:47:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Jocko Willink?

  So a quarter of the chapters are about blue on blue. Like, that's, we didn't think about that, but that's what the reality of the situation was. Those are some of the scariest situations.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  You know what's crazy is when we went back to trade at, and we incorporated our, our laser gear.

• 1:47:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:21Speaker 02

  People found out how easy it is to have blue on blue, just to your point with perspectives. Like, we drew that out.

• 1:47:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  It was awesome to draw that out in training. Um, yeah. So, anyway, so after, you know, after those handful ops, we had, uh, you know, we had November 19th, and so this is putting us, you know, right before Thanksgiving, and we had the whole tasking it out. And so we had, uh, you know, our Criggador guys are up in the Papa Suckers. Our, our, our platoon is down, we're down past Grant. I think we're down past ground in that area. We're about eight blocks from those guys, half mile, mile, something like that.

• 1:48:01Jocko Willink?

  Maybe Juliet.

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:03Jocko Willink?

  Juliet Sector.

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't remember all the sectors, but man, we're out there and things are going good and like eight o'clock in the morning, we're set up. We got mutually supporting positions with our platoon, they got mutually supporting positions with their platoon. Things are good. And I remember the first thing I was like, alright, this is gonna be a shit show in here. You know, we had a car going around with the, the hazards on, you know, so they're signaling in the area, hey, man, US troops are in there. But they didn't know where we're at. We didn't have any, you know, loopholes. We didn't pound out any, any, any brick or use explosives. So they had a hard time figuring out where we were throughout the whole day. But as we're sitting there, things start heating up. You know, hey, there's MAMS over, two streets over, and uh, they're all consolidating one area. Hey, they got weapons, and then, you know, hey, it's coming. We're gonna get, we're gonna get in the mix here.

• 1:48:48Speaker 02

  And so like around 11 o'clock, we started calling in for our, our Gimmlers. Guided multiple launch rocket system. And, and we started getting that ready commensurating coordinates to, to bring in rockets because it was different requirements. That wasn't coming from off the rails from the air. So it was easier to get it approved. And so as we're doing that, you know, we get a call over the, the radio, you know, that, you know, our other unit from Corrigidor's hit. And we didn't know how bad they were hit, but you know, the, the A O I C came over and was like, hey, man. Elliot said he's in bad, he's in bad shape and so is Joe, you know, and we're like, oh shit, man. And you know, they're taking him down to the cache and shit.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  Which wasn't good. And we're like, everyone just got a sick feeling into their stomach, you know? Um, but we didn't know what had happened until after we got back, but we're like, shit, is he going to make it? He's not going to make it. But you know, those guys were in a position, they started taking light fire. And as they're taking light fire, you know, they had rooftop jumpers in Ramadi. They'd get as close as they could and they'd dump grenades right on top of your position. So the first thing that happened is they had a grenade dumped on their position and Elliot gets sliced in the damn wrist pretty bad. So you know, they're collapsing off, down off the rooftop and we had explosives up there. So the guys were clacking off explosives to, you know, move the, the rooftop jumpers away from, from their guys. So as they collapsed down into,

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  you know, on the bottom floor, everything's still under control. There's a light volley of fire. They're calling to the other, the other sniper supporting element. Hey, we're hit. We're going to call in an extract. As they're calling an extract, you know, the, the, the Iraqis come out and our unit comes out to get in the Bradleys. And you know, they're hit with some type of white phosphorus explosive device. And I did a lot of analysis on, hey, what that was a roadside bomb? What was it? I can never determine what it was. But you know, it killed, I think, three Iraqis, wounded two, our two guys, our two SEALs were hit critically injured. You know, so now they're pulling everyone back into the house. The Bradleys are getting out of there because it's just a total shit show. Um, the other unit's fighting their way down the street to get in a position to help these guys out by this, by this time.

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  And long story short, you know, everyone's in a bad position and, and Elliot was such a, uh, is such a good dude. He's sitting there telling dudes, he's cool, calm and collected. He's got shit burning on him. You know, burning through his camis and he's telling guys what to do to how to patch them up and do all this shit. And he's jacked up. You know, and Joey had his legs kind of blown backwards on his lower extremities. So it's a complex situation, you know, outside still heated up. Injured guys on the inside, dead guys, our own dead guys, Iraqi troops out on the street, guys fighting their ways back down. It's like as bad as a situation is, is you can conjure up, right? But, you know, they get things under control, they call in another quicker reactionary force, they load these guys up, and you know, and that's when we get the call over the radio

• 1:51:36Speaker 02

  that tho- that those guys had been hit. Meanwhile, over in our sector, things are starting to heat up, and so we're spinning up aircraft, we're trying to get our Gimblers in position to start launching, and you know, our guys are out there, you know, laying down some A-Dub fire and launching a few Carl Gustaf rockets into some positions down there by us. Uh, but it was just a, you know, shitty day for us, you know, the, you know, obviously the whole task unit was hit, was hit hard on that, um, wasn't good.

• 1:52:01Jocko Willink?

  Hmm. Yeah, and I mean Elliot is probably one of the most severely wounded SEALs from the Iraq war.

• 1:52:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he's, I mean, he's, he's a freaking warrior.

• 1:52:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16Jocko Willink?

  But he, he, he took a heavy hit that day.

• 1:52:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, in Elliot's story, you know, that guy never quit, he never gave up on life. And, um, you know, he's going through physical therapy, and him and his physical therapist fall in love, and Elliot marries her. They get married, they have kids, um, which is just awesome. You know, I've seen Elliot a handful of times over the years, you know, at Bud's graduations and stuff like that, um, you know, just sucks that shit happen to him, man.

• 1:52:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and, and Leif was super good friends with Elliot, and you know, obviously, we had just all high-fived on the tarmac and said goodbye, and

• 1:52:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:55Jocko Willink?

  And then the next thing that Leif's doing, he's down at the burn center, you know, trying to, trying to give support to Elliot, you know, it was freaking, freaking rough, man.

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  That shit took the, uh, that took the wind out of our cell for the whole task unit, you know, because you're just wondering like what the hell is gonna happen to this guy. So now we got two guys, uh, wounded with frags, you got Joe and Elliot with, with what they got going on. And then actually, the first week we were there, you know, we had Jimmy left over from you guys, he gets

• 1:53:22Jocko Willink?

  He got shot.

• 1:53:22Speaker 02

  He gets a grazer, um, across his nipple. So, yeah, things were starting to stack up, man, you know, and Elliot was a unknown, we, we weren't sure if he was gonna make it or not.

• 1:53:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I left October 21st, and that was November 19th, so you guys had only been on the ground without us for under a month.

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 1:53:42Jocko Willink?

  And you had all this already stacked up.

• 1:53:44Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 1:53:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. We.

• 1:53:47Jocko Willink?

  And not to mention, in a way, you are riding in already with the mental thought of all of our casualties and our lost guys.

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:56Jocko Willink?

  You know, so you already know that this is just the way.

• 1:53:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. We had, uh, you know, so we get past November 19th. We're kind of reorging and things are starting to, to change at that point. I can't remember if it was November, December, but you know, we had one of the, the tribes out there. They had Al Qaeda come in and they killed a couple of their tribesmen and they were like, F Al Qaeda, we want to come over to the, you know, US side. And, uh, that was, that was a, a, a big tipping point out there at Corregidor. I forget the name of the tribe out there, but the guys went out there and they're meeting up with the sheik and their local guys and it was a, it was a weird situation because at that point, those guys were dropping mortars on Corregidor. So there's this friction like I ain't fricking helping these dudes out. They want to join us now. They're just, you know, the other day they're dropping mortars on us, you know?

• 1:54:44Speaker 02

  Um, so that was, that was, that was interesting. And then, uh, December timeframe, we'd set up, uh, I think it was right before Christmas. We're, we're up there around racetrack and, uh, the Marine Corps is doing a big, huge push in through to clear out that whole area. That area was still pretty much contested when you guys were there and that was an area we'd operate in quite a bit. And so we're, we're out there for like, I don't know, three, four days. And this is right before Christmas time. We think we're going to be out there past Christmas and a couple of events there, like the, the moos, they were so good at using dead space. You know, I remember we're on a two-story building. We got Marine Corps snipers in position. We're in position. We're spread out. And, uh, I go to use the bathroom and I'm looking out this window and there's a tank down in my

• 1:55:28Speaker 02

  corner and a dude slips out of dead space with an RPG and like moos, boom, he clacks that thing off in under three seconds, melts back away. And you're like, even if I was on my gun, I don't think I'd have had enough time to, to shoot that guy. Um, we had a couple of close calls in that area. You know, they had some snipers in vehicles. And so it muffled the sound. You couldn't tell where they were coming from, you know? And when, uh, you know, I, I took a damn shot in through our position right at the 12 o'clock. So, you know, we got our loophole set up and around 762 by 54, big one punches all the way through the wall. Right at the 12 o'clock position. So the guy's dead center trying to get into our hole where we're at. And I just remember thinking, damn, man, that's whoever shot that, that's a good shot.

• 1:56:12Speaker 02

  That's not, you know, some JV dude making that shot.

• 1:56:17Speaker 02

  And, and as I gotta tell the story, I forgot about this one, but we had our country boy, old Charlie. He's out now. So I'll say his name on the net, but Charlie, we're on the, this is all in this three, four day period. And, uh, we're on the rooftop and it's the same day that I take that round and through the 12 o'clock position. And there's moose doing a center peel down the street.

• 1:56:38Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:56:38Speaker 02

  And so like I'm here, Charlie's position is over here with his crew. And we got a pilot up overhead and he's like, Hey, you got some, you got bad guys coming down the street towards you. And, you know, Charlie's just a good old country boy. He's like, Roger that, you know? He's like frag out. He dumps a frag and it like hit, I don't know how he does it. He throws the frag in the blind, throws it down on the street. It hits in between where these moose are at and the pilot's more excited than anyone. He's like, it's a direct hit. It's a direct hit.

• 1:57:08Speaker 02

  And I'm like talking to Charlie, I'm like, Charlie, what'd you do? He's like, I just popped my grenade and threw it out there, you know? And I was like, Roger that dude, but so.

• 1:57:15Jocko Willink?

  You guys, you guys were getting aircraft overhead inside the city?

• 1:57:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, you know, on the day Elliot got hit, we had a, I don't know if it was a 14 or 15.

• 1:57:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Fast movers.

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, fast.

• 1:57:26Jocko Willink?

  You weren't getting helos, were you?

• 1:57:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:57:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:29Speaker 02

  I don't remember having any helos. They'd be too slow. They'd get shot down.

• 1:57:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The helos wouldn't, wouldn't come in for us, uh, because of that reason. They didn't want a freaking Black Hawk Down scenario unfolding.

• 1:57:40Speaker 02

  Which is, which would have happened.

• 1:57:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The Apaches came in one time and they left and didn't come back.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:46Jocko Willink?

  They got, they got lit up like it was crazy. It was a crazy amount of volume of fire. We were putting it in a combat outpost. And they came in, they said they want a sport, they flew in and it was like, it was freaking crazy.

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59Jocko Willink?

  They flew away and didn't come back.

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  We, man, things were so confusing over there. I remember being out there in positions and we had, you know, these two young ladies and they're doing clothes, they're hanging clothes. And then this other, what looks like a lady comes out there and she's like laying clothes out.

• 1:58:17Speaker 02

  But the third person that came out late, they're just looking everywhere. They're looking for us. And it was a dude dressed like a woman, you know, they got the garb over their head, so you can't even tell. But he's constantly looking, looking, looking. The girls are giggling because it's, you know, it's kind of funny of them. I was like, it took me a long time to put that, uh, that picture together, what transpired. And I couldn't do it while I was in the field. You know, I was like, it was just weird. I'm like, alright, that had to been a dude trying to find our positions dressed as a woman. Um, and these dudes were just, they were cagey, man. We were out there in the Papa Sector on another, uh, mission. And it's me and another dude and we're set up in, in the hole. And, uh, and I remember I'm looking and a guy's looking at, looking directly at us, but he's got like a three or four year old girl right next to him.

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

  But he's looking in our direction. I'm like, that shit ain't right. But he's got no gun. He's like two, three hundred yards away. I'm keeping my eye on him, watching, watching, watching. Nothing happens. Me and, me and the other guy rotate out of the hole. He gets in there and shit, five minutes after he gets in the hole, we just started, you know, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka into the hole, man. And like, I'm yelling at dude, roll out of there. You know, and he rolls out, but there's shit flying everywhere, you know? And we're like, damn, that was close. Lucky that dude didn't get hit, you know?

• 1:59:26Jocko Willink?

  Yep. But that guy was spotting with his daughter.

• 1:59:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. If it even was his daughter.

• 1:59:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Oh, yes. Spotting with a child that he grabbed out and said, hold my hand, come over here. Boom.

• 1:59:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if the guy had a gun, I'd have felt comfortable taking a shot, but he doesn't have anything. So you're just like, is this just more weird shit going on over here? There's so many weird things going on. It's hard to piece it all together.

• 1:59:48Jocko Willink?

  Weird, inexplicable things that are happening all the time. And they're all look freaking crazy suspicious.

• 1:59:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:59:54Jocko Willink?

  I mean, we had a, a ISR asset one time over, go flying overhead, like it was a fast mover or something. And. He's like, hey, we got, we got a vehicle pulling up like we got a vehicle. So there, everyone's looking at this vehicle. I'm looking at this vehicle on the ISR screen. And like it's, this looks super suspect. They're stopping. They're looking around. They get out. Open the trunk. All right. Oh, they're opening the trunk. Open the trunk. You know, everyone's on this mode. And then, all right, they're reaching in, they're reaching, they're pulling something out. They're pulling something out. They're pulling out, they're pulling out an object right now. And sure enough, like, everyone's all excited and thinking this is like, we need to drop a bomb on this thing. And sure enough, they got out of, jack out of the thing and jacked up their freaking car and changed the tire and put it all away and left.

• 2:00:36Jocko Willink?

  And like they tracked them, they, they left. They weren't, it wasn't like a, a setup, you know? And, and man, it's so difficult to, to decipher what's really happening. And you get better at it. But it's a tough war to fight, you know? It's a tough war to fight.

• 2:00:55Speaker 02

  You know, like, I know when we turned over to you guys, you always talked about the, hey, it was a good shoot, bad result. Hey, the, what they're doing is lined up with the enemy procedures. You build the story and you make the best decision you can with what you're looking at. And sometimes just your point, it's actually legitimate, but you don't know that, you know?

• 2:01:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that was something I, I learned and stole from the first of the 506. Cause we had, or they, they, we, when we, when we first got there and we were over with them and they had some, one of their guys shot and killed somebody and they were, like the person was out. I forget what suspicious activity they were doing, but it was like they were digging a hole in the side of the road and they shot, killed the guy. And then they sent a team out there to inspect and he was whatever, uh, you know? He had, he was planting the plant. I don't know what he was doing, but it was something that was not the activity that, that the shooter thought it was. And I was talking to their ops officer and he was like, hey, you know what? This is a, this is a good shot, bad result, meaning the,

• 2:01:56Jocko Willink?

  Our soldier was following the proper rules of engagement. And it turns out that the result of that shot is bad, even though the shot was good, the result was bad.

• 2:02:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:08Jocko Willink?

  And, and you know, it, it bothers me so much when I hear people talk about, you know, these, uh, the US military, you know, causing all these civilian casualties, man, we go through such great lengths to prevent civilian casualties and, and put our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marine at such risk to prevent those casual, those civilian casualties from happen, happening, but it does happen. That's the reality. Like it's gonna happen. And that's why if you're gonna go to war, you better be ready for that.

• 2:02:37Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 2:02:38Jocko Willink?

  You can't go to war thinking, oh yeah, don't worry, we won't kill any civilians. It's like, you know, if you go to war, you're killing civilians.

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm trying to think, I know in the other deployments I did over there, we started doing a lot of collateral damage assessments before we did anything. I don't remember doing that when we were in Ramadi, like, cause we weren't really dropping bombs and there was mostly just ground.

• 2:03:02Speaker 02

  Ground units handling business, you know, um, but anyways, that, that, that became a factor later on for sure. Everything with the CD, you know?

• 2:03:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, even, even, even when I relieved you in Baghdad, we started looking at collateral damage in terms of like breaching.

• 2:03:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:03:16Jocko Willink?

  Like, okay, we're gonna breach this building. What's the collateral damage? Could we hurt someone? Can we, are we gonna ruin this? You know, how many, how many windshields are we, or how many windows in this neighborhood are we gonna blow out? With this explosive breaching charge? And what good does that do for our overall strategic mission here? If we're the assholes that come in every night and blow up everyone's house and windows, right?

• 2:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:40Jocko Willink?

  All of a sudden, we're not cool. So sometimes it was like, oh, okay, well, maybe we shouldn't explosively breach. Well, then how are you gonna execute the mission and what risk does it put the troops at? Cause the safest way to do a, a direct action mission is to explosively breach the shit out of them. Shock everyone in the building and like, okay, cool. So there's other tactics that we had to develop to to mitigate the risk, but what I'm saying is we were taking risks for sure. To try and mitigate and not just us every when I say we I mean the US military at large. Mitigates risk of civilian casualties by risking our own casualties. That's what we do. And and even as much as we mitigate them, we can't mitigate them all and civilians are going to die.

• 2:04:25Jocko Willink?

  So you need to think about that.

• 2:04:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:04:28Jocko Willink?

  So how did when you guys had that horrific incident with Elliot and Joe? Then what? Then like, how did the rest of the deployment and I know that you guys so one thing that's really positive is. And part of this transition, I don't even know if you knew this, so we were doing everything we could we we that whole. Sons of Ambar and that whole thing started when we were there and. And then the other thing we were trying to do is we were trying to get the Iraqi police force built up and we just started to get it built.

• 2:05:01Jocko Willink?

  As we left and so you guys got the benefit of the Iraqi police force all of a sudden. The local Iraqi police force was respected. They were manned. They had they they understood the neighborhoods. They were tribal. Most of the guys were tribal guys and so all of a sudden, over a very quick period of time. The the violence went down a lot.

• 2:05:23Speaker 02

  Yo, absolutely, absolutely. I remember the. Police became a huge factor. I think it was late January, early February for us. They came in, they're setting up their own police stations and combat outpost. But man, them dudes were targeted by AQ. You mean, they had the head police chief. They're they're trying to car bomb him and his entire family. They they eventually got him. But it was it was rough and it definitely settled down everything. I would say in by the, you know. Mid mid January to February, somewhere in there is where things really settled and good where hey, the attacks are going way down. You know, we're still getting the occasional IED, you know, they had them, you know, an army. Civil affairs, they're going down to fricking Falcon and.

• 2:06:08Speaker 02

  Boom, they hit an ID, killed all four people.

• 2:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, that was, that was Travis Patrick Quinn and he's was a freaking epic guy. That and that was a Major McClung, the, the female Marine Corps officer who was just, uh, because they were there when I was there. They were both just freaking awesome, awesome people, just awesome, unbelievable. That was such a freaking horrific situation.

• 2:06:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's absolutely horrible, but things definitely died down there towards, you know, January, February timeframe. It was in a good place, you know.

• 2:06:39Jocko Willink?

  Then you redeploy, you came back to America.

• 2:06:41Speaker 02

  Came back to America and boom, I'm going to work for Jocko Willink at training.

• 2:06:46Jocko Willink?

  Rolled into trade at man, and that was, um, that was awesome. That was awesome. Did you, did you volunteer to come there or what happened? How'd you?

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so before deployment, I know I was working with our group CMC and they were doing team level detailing. So he came in, he's like, hey man, what do you want to do? I was like, well, hey, I want to stay out, I want to stay in the area. And he's like, well, what do you think about going to trade? I was like, is it keep me in the area? He's like, yeah, I was like, hell yeah, I'll do it. So Roger that, man. And I was looking forward to it, you know, and you know, the, the guy I lived over there BG is just a good dude, smart. And I think he set up a good foundation, uh, with, with what he had. So I inherited a really, a, a good product. He was doing good shit.

• 2:07:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it was, uh, it was, it was legit. And then when you showed up, it was awesome.

• 2:07:32Jocko Willink?

  And then, I mean, what was, what was your experience at trade at like in terms of, see now, this is interesting. You know, I told you that like the seeds of my experience and knowledge were watered heavily and fertilized heavily. But I was young, so now you get to experience this in a much, in a much more powerful environment. Because the training we were conducting was so much more advanced. Then, and also you were more advanced and you were a combat veteran of multiple combat tours and you were a senior enlisted guy. So man, it was just.

• 2:08:07Speaker 02

  It was awesome. It was a good experience, but I'll tell you what, I went in there and I'm like, holy, it's different when you're responsible for a live fire range versus you're going through a live fire range. And so there was, there was a lot to that, you know, the, the most stressful thing for me during land warfare was doing all the live fire training. Cause there was definitely a lot of opportunity for someone to get injured or wounded, you know, you know what I mean? And so it was good and getting up there and teaching these things, you just learn so much more. I mean, the pipeline should be, we need guys in instructor positions, but you need them at Bud's, you also need them over at our trade at.

• 2:08:45Speaker 02

  If there was a way to split that to where they do 15 months, if Bud's 15 months of trade, it would be ideal. There's just, it, it's not practicable, you know? But going to trade, it was an eye opener and I really started, you know, I'd say around 2003, I started 2003, 2004, started reading quite a bit. Started, I never heard of the last hundred yards, you know, we didn't have a portal with libraries. We didn't have guys going around. If you went in a training cell, you might see it. But I really started building up a good, uh, reading block. And I remember talking to you when we were at trade at and we were reading, I think I just went through, um, the maneuver warfare handbook. And I was like, man, I'm thinking these things. And then you read it and it reinforces what you were thinking. So like now your confidence just goes through the roof.

• 2:09:30Speaker 02

  And I think one of the things we did good in, in, in NSW continues to do this is developing our future leaders. I mean, think about when you and I came up, we didn't, there was no portal, there was no, none of this stuff. We've got stuff hanging. Hey, you want to be a good tactical lever leader, go read your doctrine, go read these books here and that is going to boost you up. And the guys that are hungry, they're going to go in there and read it. The guys that are, you know, a little bit lackadaisical and they don't want to do it, they're going to meet the minimum standard. But you definitely need to have something out there to where, you know, your high performers are hungry. Give it to them so that they can become, uh, you know, a better leader. So I think we did that good, but just going back to land warfare, I think, you know, the, the stress levels, they were high during live fire training.

• 2:10:13Speaker 02

  The field training exercises we did were just badass. We're building, you know, little wood huts all over the damn place on those ranges. And, uh, I think the guys. You know, I mean shit, we had a thermal camera out there at one point and we're videotaping the guys coming in. So they come back and go through their debrief, we're going, this is what you all look like. Here's what we're telling you, here's what you look like. And the people see what they look like, like, oh damn, check, Roger that, you know, and they're making some adjustments. But I thought it was good. I was definitely learning a lot while I was there. I wish I'd have done that, um, that assignment earlier on, in, in at least a team five training cell would have, it would have boosted me up a lot, you know?

• 2:10:51Jocko Willink?

  Would you see, what did you notice from the, I mean, the crazy thing about it is you get to, it's the best la- I, I, I truly think this, I think that that land warfare training is the best leadership laboratory in the world. I think that's it. I don't think there's a better leadership laboratory where you can see leadership in action. I really don't, because you get the whole dynamic and someone might be saying, well, you know, in a, you know, in some business or in some, you know, bureaucratic situation or some boardroom, you, you get that part too, because you got the mission planning that's taking place. And there's no gunfire going on during the mission planning, but you get the stress and you get the people that have to make decisions. You get the team arguing with each other and you get the different personalities that are coming out.

• 2:11:36Jocko Willink?

  And so you get to watch all this and you get to learn and you get to see how people react and you get to see human nature over and over and over again. And you get to see one platoon do it. And then you see another platoon do the same thing, the same, I mean, we had all those little, uh, pet nicknames for all the different maneuvers that we knew that our mooj was gonna do. And we, so you'd see a platoon go through the octopus, you'd see a platoon go through the corner of death, right? You'd see the, the, the trail of tears, you'd get to see how they would react. And you'd see what a good leader would do and you'd see how that would turn the platoon and all of a sudden they'd be able to get things together and survive and make it happen and do a good job.

• 2:12:22Jocko Willink?

  And you'd see bad leadership and you'd go, well, these guys are just, it's gonna be a suffer fest. And so that, that leadership laboratory was just unbelievably powerful. And, and really it was, it was powerful for, for us as instructors because we were detached and we got to watch it. Look, the troops obvi- obviously get a ton out of it too, but getting to see it over and over again was just- Ridiculous amount of learning.

• 2:12:49Speaker 02

  One of the things I, I really respected about land warfare. You got to see people's true character. When they're coming through there, they're up late at night, you're under a lot of stress. Whatever you're thinking in your head, or whatever type of attitude you have, good or bad, that's coming out. And you really get to see what you're working with, with your platoon, you know?

• 2:13:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's a good precursor. Because when you go to combat, if you end up going on deployment, you end up getting in real combat, you're gonna see that. That's the only place it's gonna come out even more.

• 2:13:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:13:20Jocko Willink?

  Is when you go into combat, people start acting crazy.

• 2:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:23Jocko Willink?

  Like, and I'm not talking about, hey, in a gunfight, no, I'm talking about, on a day to day basis, you start seeing what their character is.

• 2:13:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:13:30Jocko Willink?

  They, do they wanna operate? Do they wanna hide? Do they, like, you get to see, start to see all that stuff. And you'll see it. You'll see it out in the desert in training. You'll see people start to crack.

• 2:13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:41Jocko Willink?

  And you'll also see people step up, and you'll see people start to lead, and you see people that are tough. And when you see those good leaders coming through, and look, the good leader could be anyone in the platoon, from an E5 to the, to the platoon, or the task unit commander, anyone in between. You have one good leader, or two good leaders in there, and they're gonna do a good job.

• 2:14:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:14:02Jocko Willink?

  They can be countered by bad leadership. So you can have a good leader that gets countered by someone that's an ego jackass.

• 2:14:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:14:09Jocko Willink?

  And, and they, that ego jackass can actually ruin everything.

• 2:14:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:12Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes if you just have one good leader, that's the LPO of one platoon, and he's a really good, solid leader, he can carry the whole task unit. Now, if you put a jackass senior chief in there, a jackass chief, or a jackass lieutenant, he can, he can override two or three squared away leaders. Because he's a knucklehead, and doesn't wanna listen, and wants to do everything his way, and wants to, you know, let his ego run the show. It's a freaking disaster.

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:41Speaker 02

  We saw, it's funny, we saw quite a few good leaders come through. Probably the most rewarding thing, having guys come through training is they're coming through, they're just starting out as a unit, you know, they're figuring some things out if they haven't been through another block. And they come in and the growth that you see, that you're providing as instructors, you know, as a cadre, as a unit. And you see them start here and by the time they finish after that three, four weeks, they're, they're up here.

• 2:15:07Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:15:08Speaker 02

  The growth is, is tremendous. And guess what? The harder the trainer, the harder the training, the more the guys appreciate it, the more growth you have, right? That's what I physically saw happening with, with our, with our, uh, formation.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cause it was miserable.

• 2:15:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:15:23Jocko Willink?

  It was freaking miserable. It was freaking hard. When you're carrying out, I mean, we, if, if a platoon did a bad job, they'd have 12 down men. They'd be carrying out 12 down men for three or four kilometers before they could finally get a helicopter in there to pick up and take the wounded. Then they still gotta walk, the rest of them gotta walk out. Like when you got your ass kicked, you got your ass kicked. And it would sometimes, you know, that was another big difference when a, when a leader, when the leadership in the task unit or in the platoon would say, would come back and say, hey, we screwed up, we better fix it. They would fix it. If the, if they came back and said, oh, trade at's cheating or trade at, this is, this, this training is unrealistic.

• 2:16:08Jocko Willink?

  If they said that, they wouldn't improve and they just fall apart. But when they say, hey, we spent too much time on target or hey, we didn't cover and move. Or hey, we didn't give the priorities correctly. Or we didn't have, when they came back and said that and recognized it, fixed it, they'd come out and a good task unit, by the end, our trade at guys couldn't keep them under wraps. Like they would get the, the trade at guys would get their asses kicked. Cause there's, cause there's 40 of the back, I mean, 40 of the, of the platoon guys. So they could freaking, they, when they would do good cover and move, you can't stop them. They're unstoppable.

• 2:16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what I always tell people, hey, man, the, the people that utilized the laws of combat did good. Cover and move, kept things simple, good communications across the board, prioritizing executed, stayed detached from what was going on. And the guys that utilized decentralized command where they're allowing fire team leaders and squad leaders to make decisions at their level. Cause you can't be everywhere as the boss making these decisions. You gotta train your, you gotta train your, your leaders up. Put up some guard wells, get them to where they need to be, and then you you let them start making decisions, you know? And that that's probably like one of the most beautiful things with land warfare. Guys are going out there, they're learning these things, and they're slowly building their confidence. To where when they get to the field training exercise week and they start making some of these decisions,

• 2:17:27Speaker 02

  then it's even that much more of a confidence builder, you know?

• 2:17:31Jocko Willink?

  It's weird because

• 2:17:34Jocko Willink?

  you can, you can. I mean, look, I would explain this stuff ad nauseam, right? Ad nauseam. I mean, I would explain it and explain it. I'd say, look, you gotta do this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. But sometimes, man, it would just take like it happening to someone.

• 2:17:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:17:52Jocko Willink?

  And and being and and me sitting there like literally running over to a fire team leader and saying, hey, what are you doing? Those guys are freaking running right now. You gotta get them down. You gotta put down cover fire for them. And them going, oh, wait a second. I get it. And then you'd see this light come on, or I'd run up to a freaking task unit commander and be like, where do you want everyone to go right now? What do you want everyone to do? And he'd say, we need to get out of here. Okay, what what direction? I said, are you gonna be able to move everyone out of here? No. Can you think your fire teams can start moving? Yes. Tell them where you want them to move. Just tell them all and they'll start making it happen. And you could see the little like, all of a sudden, the little light would come on.

• 2:18:35Jocko Willink?

  But sometimes it would just take that, like you have to live, you almost have to live through it. Yep. So in some cases, some guys would be like, yeah, got it. Cover move. Check. Got it. Because you learn cover move day one, or day one in the teams, you learn to cover and move.

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 2:18:48Jocko Willink?

  You better freaking cover and move.

• 2:18:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, sometimes it took guys a little while to figure out how to utilize the terrain correctly. You know, because the the terrain was a was a factor, Rockies, small wadis, um, uneven terrain, which was hard to maneuver, and especially when you got a down man.

• 2:19:06Speaker 02

  There was something there too.

• 2:19:07Jocko Willink?

  Terrain, terrain is the, is the next level, right? The next level is, oh, I don't just know how to cover and move. I just don't know simple. I just don't know prioritize and execute. I don't just know decentralized command. I know how to utilize the terrain to my advantage. That's the next level up. That's the next level up. When you realize, oh, I can get a little high ground. Oh, there's a little dead space. Oh, there's a ravine over here. I can get the guys out. That's the next level. And we tried to teach it in that method. You know, you start off doing IADS in a flat, you know, spot. And then all of a sudden you start to get, use terrain. But when the leadership, I, I even, when the, when the, when the whole task unit,

• 2:19:51Jocko Willink?

  when a fire team leader knows how to use terrain, and then all the fire team leaders know how to use terrain, all of a sudden we're in a whole different spot. We're in a whole different spot. So yes, the terrain is so freaking critical.

• 2:20:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, wow.

• 2:20:06Jocko Willink?

  Getting a little bit of high ground.

• 2:20:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had guys down in that micro train doing good things. Tough, stuff on the body.

• 2:20:15Jocko Willink?

  And we had, I mean, we had, we had Rangers out there helping us, which was awesome.

• 2:20:20Speaker 02

  Dude, those guys, they brought a lot. And the Rangers we had out there, they had all kinds of, uh, both of them came from leadership assignments within their, their Ranger unit. And they had a lot of reps, man. They brought a lot to the table. They had all kinds of good info, man. We were eating, we were just like on standby, keep it coming, keep it coming, keep it coming.

• 2:20:37Jocko Willink?

  It, it's always, it's one of the, the, the worst, one of the bad things, one of the worst things about the, the SEAL teams is

• 2:20:46Jocko Willink?

  we don't come from an infantry background.

• 2:20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:20:49Jocko Willink?

  You know, we're not soldiers. We're not infantry. We're, we're, so we don't have that skillset. And you can get lucky and you can get brushed up against it. I got, I got at least brushed up against it doing ARGs with the Marines and being like, okay, I at least understand what a infantry platoon is. Because if you're a regular SEAL, new guy, you don't know what the hell an infantry platoon is. You have no idea. You think a platoon is 16 guys, you know, in a platoon. But, but yeah, so those, so in the army, you have that infantry background. In the Marine Corps, you have that infantry background. It's so helpful. So having like Rangers out there with us, who are freaking great guys, by the way. And they bring that, that infantry background and,

• 2:21:30Jocko Willink?

  and they were stoked too. They were, they freaking loved, they, they loved our training.

• 2:21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were awesome. Both those guys had a lot of reps in Afghanistan, if I remember right. And I know where the, the one guy came in and he was really tightening up our helicopter procedures. Just, you know, he covered so much, like, damn, I didn't even think about that, you know? All my deployments were to Iraq at that point. But yeah, good dudes, man.

• 2:21:58Jocko Willink?

  Did you read About Face back then?

• 2:21:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So I read it when I got to Trade It. You know, you had that as your bible.

• 2:22:05Speaker 02

  Damn, what was the guy's name? I had him in here. There was another Colonel that, uh, he's got a page on four, page four something in About Face. But the, the guy was just a beast.

• 2:22:19Jocko Willink?

  Oh, Glover Jones.

• 2:22:20Speaker 02

  That's him, man. Dude, that guy had so many good nuggets on the page and a half he had. But I remember reading through that, page 402, Hackworth, and he just has some nuggets in there. He's got like 15 things that he covers, you know, strive to do small things well, be a doer and a self-starter. You know, the one that, that I always hit home with me, because I think it's so true, is, uh, what is it? The two, you know, in order to be a good, two good characteristics of a leader is you've got to be a good communicator and you've got to be a good writer. And, and the writing piece comes into play as you start moving up in your upper level leadership and management positions, because you're writing evals for the guys. And I remember being at Trade It and you were kind of like, hey, man, if you guys bring me

• 2:23:02Speaker 02

  an eval and the thing requires minor or requires major surgery, I'm only going to be able to do so much to it to make it better. But you bring me an eval that's dialed in pretty damn tight, I'm gonna get it over the line. It's gonna be a beautiful piece of work. It's gonna be a piece of art. And you were getting into people shit on it. You were not a happy camper because there was like all these evals coming in. But it's so true when you think about it. Hey, how do we take care of our people? A way is in through our evaluation system, making sure the right people are getting promoted and through awards. Those all require some type of writing skill.

• 2:23:36Jocko Willink?

  Bruh, one freaking series, one year of evaluations, probably the first year that you were there. The shit that you guys turned in and I had no choice. I didn't get them till too late. And I just had to, I just had to do nine days in my office, just rewriting every single one of them. And that's why the next year, early, I said, hey, everyone, write me the eval for your best guy. And then I brought you guys, you were in this group, right? I brought you guys into the, into the conference room and posted them up on the screen. I made you guys read your sentences to me and you guys, you guys were just like, you know,

• 2:24:16Jocko Willink?

  like the very first sentence that each guy read, it would just be like, uh, this blah, blah, just a shit sentence. And I'd be like, all right, how does that sound like not good? But that worked so well because then everyone realized, oh, I should actually read this stuff. I should actually read it aloud to myself. I should actually see if these sentences make sense. And it just helped everybody so, so mu- it helped me because now you guys were all turning in squared away stuff, which then I could, what, what did you say? Turn into a piece of art? I don't know if I could quite go that far.

• 2:24:49Speaker 02

  I believe in quotations, a piece of art.

• 2:24:55Speaker 02

  We got an artist on the net over here.

• 2:24:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Glover Johns from Hackworth too. And he wrote a book called The Clay Pigeons of St. Lo, which we covered on this podcast. And it's written, it's hard to tell because he wrote it in the third person, talking about himself as if he was a different person, but it's about him. And it's a great book and it gives all kinds of leadership lessons as well.

• 2:25:16Speaker 02

  Hey, one of the things, I want to camp out real quick on, on Hackworth. One of the things is I was reading through that book and it took me, I think, six months to get through it.

• 2:25:23Jocko Willink?

  It's a big book.

• 2:25:23Speaker 02

  It's a big book, but it really reinforced, you know, when you're coming in as, as a leader at any level, when you're new to that leadership assignment, you're always uncomfortable. So you're trying to figure out, am I making the right decision? And when you're going through and you're reading some nonfiction that pertains to your field, your field craft. It just reinforces what you're thinking. And I remember after reading About Face, the Maneuver Warfare Handbook, I came out of it, I was like, damn, a lot of these decisions I was uncertain about, it reinforced that I was making the right decision. So how do you become better? You read that stuff before you get in those leadership positions. And who's responsible for just throwing that out? The leadership. You know, if you're in a leadership position out there, what are you doing to develop your future leaders? You have people that want

• 2:26:07Speaker 02

  to want to take your your job. What are you doing to develop them? And you look across the world, like, we got COVID everywhere. You can get in a car accident. Who's the next person in line that's going to take your job? Who is that person? And what are you doing to develop them? You know, we've gotten way better over the years in the military and NSW doing this. But that's, you think about that, it's pretty powerful, you know?

• 2:26:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, dude, JP said, because I gave, I gave JP a copy of, at least I think I gave it to him. Anyways, he got a copy of the new edition of About Face with the forward in and everything. And so he's like, sending me highlighted passages. And he's, and he's not happy. And he's like, bro, I cannot believe that you didn't make me read this when I was, you know, when I was 23 or 22. And I'm like, dude, I'm sorry. Like, I'm a horrible leader, because there's so much information in there. And I just ripped it off wholesale, wholesale, just ripped it off. And it's like, why didn't I share that? And part of me was,

• 2:27:09Jocko Willink?

  I just didn't think team guys had any desire to read anything, you know? Because most team guys didn't. Most team guys were like, beer.

• 2:27:17Speaker 02

  You know what I did with my About Face when I got back over to, when I got over to Team Seven, I gave it out to one of our younger tactical leaders. Like here, he's like, that's a big book. I'm like, yes, you need to read that. And then when you're done with it, you need to pass it on to someone else.

• 2:27:33Jocko Willink?

  Do you think you read it?

• 2:27:34Speaker 02

  I don't know, man. It's such a big book.

• 2:27:36Jocko Willink?

  It's such a big book.

• 2:27:37Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's good. And here's the thing, we always talk about making hard calls. You look at those decisions he made in there. Those were, he was going to be hated. He knew that going in. He didn't care. He knew what the right thing to do was. He made the right calls. And, you know, he wound up saving a lot of lives with his guys from it.

• 2:27:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, see, there's a little nuance there in what you said.

• 2:28:00Jocko Willink?

  He had to make hard calls. He knew that he would be hated in the short term. He knew that there would be resistance.

• 2:28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:09Jocko Willink?

  But he knew in the end, he would be admired and he would be loved.

• 2:28:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:13Jocko Willink?

  Because he would be able to keep his guys alive and he knew that that what, what, what would shine through is the fact that he cared about his men.

• 2:28:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:28:21Jocko Willink?

  That's what would shine through. And believe me, when we had, uh, General Mukuyama on, I was so, not really worried, but like going into it, here I'm gonna meet a guy that worked for freaking Hack.

• 2:28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:35Jocko Willink?

  And, and what is he gonna say?

• 2:28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:38Jocko Willink?

  Like, is he gonna be like, well, you know, Hack made himself out to be a little bit more than he was, or, Hack talked a good game, but that really wasn't the guy. He was Eric. I didn't know what he was gonna say.

• 2:28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:46Jocko Willink?

  But dude, he was just 100%, 100%, Hack was the man.

• 2:28:51Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 2:28:52Jocko Willink?

  And, and he was a company commander when he, when, when Hack was a battalion commander. I mean, that's, that's the, that's the leadership.

• 2:28:57Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:28:57Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, what, what, you know, and I said, did you know who Hack was? He goes, everybody knew who Hack was.

• 2:29:03Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 2:29:04Jocko Willink?

  And like that attitude.

• 2:29:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:29:07Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and I said, you know, what, how did you? What was it that made? He goes, everything. Like the way he carried himself. The way he looked, the way he had his, he had his hair. He was like, he had his head shaved and he just looked like, this guy's just freaking squared away from day one.

• 2:29:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:29:24Jocko Willink?

  But so you're gonna make, cause, cause one thing I don't like, and Leif and I have talked about this on the podcast is, the, someone thinking, well, you know, I'm in charge, so I'm gonna be hated and that's okay. It's like, no, that's actually not okay. If you're hated by your troops, that's a freaking problem. That means you're doing something wrong. For your troops, for, to take over a, a, a, a unit, or take over a team, or take over a position, and say, all right, we're gonna start making some adjustments. Now, one thing that's different too in Hack's case, when he took over the 439th is he took over a disaster, a known disaster. He had to come in there and kind of swing the hammer a little bit.

• 2:30:02Speaker 02

  Oh, he had to bring out the flamethrower, man. He had to do some barbecuing.

• 2:30:06Jocko Willink?

  He had to do some barbecuing. But he also eventually, you know, anyone would do anything, you know, like talking to General Mukiyama, those guys would do absolutely anything for Hack, anything. And even the freaking, even the draftees would do anything for Hackworth. Like, they loved him.

• 2:30:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:21Jocko Willink?

  And it's kind of like you said earlier, when people go through hard training, they appreciate it and they love the training more. When you are disciplined with your troops, when you're hard on your troops, they respect you and they respect themselves. And you start to get this camaraderie that you need.

• 2:30:38Speaker 02

  You know, I think of Hackworth, I think of, like you said, a dude showing up, right haircut, right uniform. Just everything he's communicating lines up with his actions.

• 2:30:49Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:30:49Speaker 02

  And the guys just had to been like, damn, does this guy do anything wrong? You know what I mean? Does he sleep? What's going on with this dude? And when you look at that, you're like, hey, my margin of error is gonna be small. Cause this dude's doing everything he's saying.

• 2:31:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:02Speaker 02

  You know, it's powerful. Leadership by example, right?

• 2:31:05Jocko Willink?

  That's how you gotta roll.

• 2:31:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 2:31:09Jocko Willink?

  What, anything else from Trade Dad?

• 2:31:11Speaker 02

  No, man. No, it's all good.

• 2:31:12Jocko Willink?

  Christmas in the desert?

• 2:31:14Speaker 02

  Christmas in the desert. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I remember an island, man. We were wrapping up and we had, it was a good run. The troop came through, good energy levels, and we're getting ready to go home. And you came and you said, "That wasn't bad, guys." And I was like, alright, let me put that through my enlisted decryption device up here. What Jaco's saying is, "Good job, have a good Christmas." He loves you all. And you're like, "Oh, go, go, go." You gave a little chuckle out of there. So I got you kind of being Huggy Bear there right before Christmas. The spirits were good.

• 2:31:47Jocko Willink?

  So I said that wasn't bad. And that's, that's as good of a compliment as you're gonna get out of me.

• 2:31:51Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. I had to translate it for him. But, yeah.

• 2:31:54Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:31:57Jocko Willink?

  Maybe compliments weren't my strong point.

• 2:32:00Speaker 02

  They were not.

• 2:32:03Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I got some recordings of some of those debriefs.

• 2:32:06Speaker 02

  Do you really?

• 2:32:06Jocko Willink?

  Somebody's, somebody's hooking me up. Uh, one of, one of my buddies, he's, he just texted me a, a couple of weeks ago. He's like, yeah, somebody gave me recordings of your debriefs. He's like, you're gonna wanna hear them. I'm like, chat.

• 2:32:20Speaker 02

  I remember being on target out there and, uh, this unit was maneuvering. I forget what siphon we're at, but one of the guys, communication is so long. Hey, I need you to grab your guys and move to the mountain like in Black Hawk Down. You're like, what the hell? Why don't you, you know, what are you talking about, man? It's just crazy talk, you know?

• 2:32:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I would just hit record on my voice recorder during those things and play it back for people. Like, listen to yourself. I'd be like, hey, you need to keep your stuff a little clearer, more simple, clear and concise. I was keeping it simple. Oh, really? Listen to this. Here's you telling your troops, peel right. Hey, I need everyone to blah, blah, blah, blah. Freaking ridiculous. Freaking totally ridiculous.

• 2:32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that was crazy.

• 2:33:03Jocko Willink?

  So then where'd you go?

• 2:33:04Speaker 02

  Yep. So after that headed back over to, uh, or headed to Team Seven. And at that point, I'd already made Master Chief. So I was going to, there's the Ops Master Chief, senior enlisted guy. And then I got pegged to do, so I went back there in what? Uh, October twenty, two thousand nine, October two thousand and nine. Just finished up the Senior enlisted academy. And they're like, hey, this is a big one. They're trying to pump as many people as they can over in Afghanistan. So I got hit with a joint individual augment, headed out to a small outstation out in Afghanistan. I was the senior enlisted leader out there, which was a good experience. It was the first time at that point where I really worked in a joint environment. So the, my boss was a full bird colonel. He was SF dude, good guy. Learned a lot from him. He'd been in like thirty-two years.

• 2:33:48Speaker 02

  He was prior enlisted and then worked his way up through the ranks, just salty old dog. Um, and then we had, you know, Army, Air Force, uh, Marine Corps out there, everyone. And then we had, you know, quite a few military officers from different countries. You know, we had Afghanistan and a few other surrounding countries in there. In our, our primary goal was to fusion intel and then, you know, we had some reconnaissance platforms up overhead and that, you know, they were doing their, doing their stuff in some other countries. But it was good and that was the first time I really appreciated our special forces unit. And I was working with another senior enlisted leader, he was in another country and he's like, hey, man, here's what we got going on and me and him would communicate back and forth, you know, like once or twice a week.

• 2:34:33Speaker 02

  And he's like, hey, I got my SF battalion, we're training up this. And he's like, here's our numbers. And I was like, hey, wait a minute. You guys have this many, you know, ODAs over there and you've trained up, you've man trained and equipped 2,000 of these soldiers? He's like, yeah. And I was like, holy shit dude, that's a big deal, man. That's like our formation, ITW in action over there, you know?

• 2:34:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like by, by that you mean all of the west coast SEAL and all support in action?

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so these guys are training up these guys and they're going in and they're fighting the Taliban and he's got his ODAs doing it. I was like, holy shit, that's pretty badass, man. So it was a good deployment, like not much going on outside the wire there. I was in, was actually like, yeah, I was like, cool, I just got out of an island, then I go over there and I'm like, damn, I'm back in an island, the terrain is exactly the same.

• 2:35:22Jocko Willink?

  There was some hubbub about us losing our desert training facility, someone else was going to take it over. And I made these, this slideshow. Did I ever show you that? I made a slideshow and it was pictures of Afghanistan and pictures of our desert training facility, side by side, and you literally couldn't tell the difference. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me if you think that this isn't the greatest training site for, for us to have.

• 2:35:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyways, that was a, a short deployment. At that point, I'm the ops master chief and I'm deployed, come back, six months later, I got home right before July and then as I'm back at the team, the team's going through unit level training and then we're prepping up for our deployment in March timeframe. And that was a weird deployment, like we winded up, some of us wound up back over in Iraq and so this is 2010, 2011 timeframe now and we're breaking down Iraq. But then we're also, yeah, we're waiting for our four platoons that are still in San Diego to get over to Afghanistan and they're going over to do village stability operations. So get over to Iraq and that, you know, that deployment, it was a long one. It was like

• 2:36:34Speaker 02

  eight, eight and a half months long. A lot of, you know, the unit we were working with had all the bells and whistles and it was, it was good, man. So a lot of good things happening. Our guys wrapped up quite a few bad guys and it was, it was a good learning experience. It was, it was the first time I was in, you know, a professional jock setting where you're actually seeing everything unfold in real time, all the assets you can imagine. You know, and our guys did some good targeting. They got a couple of bad guys have been after for four or five years. So it was good. Then came back off that deployment and then took over as the team, you know, command master chief.

• 2:37:10Jocko Willink?

  So explain what a team command master chief is.

• 2:37:14Speaker 02

  Well, our primary job is to initially is to set up the platoons. You're working with the, you know, the top five of the team, the commanding officer, the XO, your operations department, you know, the senior enlisted in there and the, and the ops boss. And, and your primary functions are manning, training and equipping the SEAL team. And you're the senior enlisted leader and tactical advisor to the commanding officer. Your primary goal is training up all these, you're not training, educating and training, you know, your, your platoon chiefs and tasking it, senior enlisted advisors and junior officers.

• 2:37:52Jocko Willink?

  And so you take over this position and you, you start building platoons?

• 2:37:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:58Jocko Willink?

  And I always used to say about platoons, let's say there's a magic number. Let's say the number, number is 20. In your top four in a platoon, so your LPO, your assistant platoon commander, your platoon commander and your platoon chief, that number's gotta equal 20 when you add them all together.

• 2:38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18Jocko Willink?

  So that means if you have a... A platoon chief that's like a 16 because he's just a badass. Cool. You can give him a platoon commander. That's like a two and a LPO. That's a one. If you have a platoon chief, that's like a, you know, maybe a six. You gotta give him a platoon commander. That's maybe like a seven and you gotta even it out.

• 2:38:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:41Jocko Willink?

  What you don't want to do is make sure, first of all, you gotta make sure that the number gets to 20. Because if it doesn't get to 20, you're gonna have issues. Uh, then then you gotta compliment strengths and weaknesses. You know, if you've got a guy that's got a bunch of tactical experience, but he's horrible at paperwork. Well, cool. You know, uh, put him with a person that's good at good with paperwork. So there's a lot of balancing in in there that you need to do.

• 2:39:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I know, uh, our 20, when we formed up the team in 2010, we went with some heavy platoons with the idea we're gonna go back in Afghanistan. And and one of the things with our our training and deployment schedule is that there's a lot of lag time in there. So things are always changing. And I was like, man, when we get back and I'm forming up the team, I want to make sure, just to your point, all these platoons are balanced out. Um, you know, when you go heavy in some platoons, that means you're gonna be light in the others.

• 2:39:33Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:39:33Speaker 02

  And that comes, that comes at a cost. And and really what I wanted was you got however many platoons you have at a SEAL team, you should be able to pick up any one of those platoons and snap them in no matter where, you know, where you're going, what the mission is. They should all be pretty balanced out equally with experience in the platoon, leadership, you know, you're you're yeah, check.

• 2:39:54Jocko Willink?

  And here's another thing to be careful of. Be to watch out for. You, you're trying to get to 20? Don't build a platoon with a leadership level 40.

• 2:40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:07Jocko Willink?

  Because it's probably not gonna work the way you think it is. What you're gonna end up with is a bunch of big personalities. Like you take the strongest possible OIC, the strongest possible chief, the strongest possible

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  LPO and the strongest, what you're gonna end up with is people that they all want to freaking stab each other in the back. They all want to be the guy. They all want it. They have such big egos and it just turns into a nightmare. So building the stacked platoon leadership is generally not a good call. And you're gonna even even if it happened, if you actually had such exceptional individuals that they actually did work well together. Well, then you're it's bad that you have them all together because like you said, now you're not balancing out the rest of the teams because because you should take those exceptionally because for for a for a level 20 individual leader, actually for for a level 17 individual leader

• 2:41:01Jocko Willink?

  to work with another high performing leader, that other leader needs to be a 20.

• 2:41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:07Jocko Willink?

  Because that the person that's a 20 instead of a 17, the difference between a 17 and a 20 is that 17 can

• 2:41:16Jocko Willink?

  can subordinate their ego. That's the difference because when you take two people that are 18s, they're missing quality that they don't have is that they don't they don't know how to work with other people and subordinate their ego. That's what gets you to a freaking level 20 yourself.

• 2:41:29Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, the balanced out platoons are are key for the entire team. It's goodness. And you think about it. So if I'm bringing in a platoon and you know, we really spread out our guys with with two and three platoons because those guys are developing the next set of leaders below them. You know, the platoon chief and LPO and everyone's got to develop the other guys too, but those guys have the most impact. When the leadership's gone, they're the guys that are around and they're showing them what right looks like. So we cross decked, you know, quite a few guys, got everything balanced out good. And overall, you know, our deployment was uneventful for that one went over to CENTCOM.

• 2:42:09Speaker 02

  And we were on standby to standby, you know, that was after Benghazi and Happy. So the new normal was hey, be on standby in case there's a crisis in there. If a crisis comes up, we want to have special operations posture to go handle an embassy type event. And it was good. So for that deployment, we winded up, you know, in and out of the embassy quite a bit, which was good because that I was like, oh, I've never been at an embassy before. So you're talking directly to the ambassador and

• 2:42:34Jocko Willink?

  Whole new world.

• 2:42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got to be professional. You got to have your suit on and you know, you can't drop any F bombs out there.

• 2:42:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a whole new world.

• 2:42:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it was a really good learning experience, although nothing happened. And I'll say this, we got postured, you know, we had a A unit over in a neighboring country and that country was, you know, uh, they were going through a withdrawal process. And our unit still stayed in position, but we were going to reinforce that unit. So we were staged. We had to stage. So we brought in the aircraft, which, you know, we're going through a full blown rehearsal, like we're, we thinking we're going to launch our guys. And you know, our, my biggest takeaway from that deployment was like, hey, these relationships we have with the embassy, they matter because all we had to do was call up there because we had a tight relationship and they'd tell us, hey, here's what's going on.

• 2:43:23Speaker 02

  The ambassador's working with the prince and the prince and they're going through this whole thing. Do we want to launch out of here? Do we not want to launch out of here? Um, so it was good, you know, it was boring, but it was a good learning experience.

• 2:43:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And for, for people that don't, uh, really know too much about this world, there, there can be, and usually is a lot of tension between the state department, which is the ambassadors and whatnot, and the military.

• 2:43:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:48Jocko Willink?

  Because the state department wants to solve things diplomatically.

• 2:43:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:53Jocko Willink?

  That's what their life is, right? And the military, we think we can solve things militarily. So there's tension.

• 2:43:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:00Jocko Willink?

  There's often tension between those two sides. But if you remember that, hey, we all have the same goal, right? We all have the goal of stability and security and, and overall peace. So if we understand that and we're working towards the same goal, let's figure out the best way to go about it. And those tensions, hopefully we can overcome.

• 2:44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:20Jocko Willink?

  Because they can cause, they can cause some really bad things to happen. You know, there can be times where the military should be used. And if the relationship was good, the military would be used.

• 2:44:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:30Jocko Willink?

  And there's some times where the military shouldn't be used.

• 2:44:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:33Jocko Willink?

  And if the relationship is bad, the military gets used even though it really shouldn't be used.

• 2:44:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:38Jocko Willink?

  So once again, forming good relationships is.

• 2:44:42Jocko Willink?

  It's just freaking critical.

• 2:44:44Speaker 02

  No, absolutely, especially in that environment, more so than than ever, you know. Hey, going back into when we were forming up, you know, one of the first things we did is, you know, what grabbed in our goat locker, you know, our our enlisted formation, E79, and we went through roles and responsibilities. And the CMC I had at the time, when I was my task unit, when I was a task unit senior listed advisor, he'd went through, and I don't know how much you played into the roles and responsibilities he developed, or if they crossed after what, but he went through every position. So I'd already had something that I'd kept for, geez, what is this, four years now, four or five years later, and I've got it, and I go through, and I'm tweaking the verbiage in

• 2:45:26Speaker 02

  there to fit to, you know, to our to our air, our timeframe.

• 2:45:30Jocko Willink?

  Got it, got it.

• 2:45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so go through roles and responsibilities with the goat locker and our tactical level leaders. Hey, here's my expectations as a leader. And we had your Jocko brief on there. So I had a little reading folder on our drive. Here's what's in there. Read this shit. It's going to make you a better leader. And I think for the most part, our guys did like, we didn't have too many missteps for that, for that workup cycle and deployment, you know, things were relatively contained, you know, like, no kooky shit, no big events.

• 2:46:00Jocko Willink?

  Yes, setting expectations is definitely solid. And in the in the SEAL version of the Jocko brief, there's a slide that was roles and responsibilities by person.

• 2:46:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:46:09Jocko Willink?

  Like, task unit commander, here's what you're doing. And I went right on down the line. And I'm sure you guys had to adjust it to. But the point is, and the reason I don't give it really in the civil, because I don't give it, I don't give roles and responsibilities part of the brief.

• 2:46:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46:24Jocko Willink?

  Because I don't know what the roles and responsibilities are in this construction company, or in this manufacturing company, or in this financial company, right? It changes, it shifts. But in the in a SEAL platoon, in a SEAL task unit, I knew what the rules and responsibilities were. And listen, and here's something I used to explain, like, if you're the platoon chief.

• 2:46:44Jocko Willink?

  And you're supposed to be the, the person that's handling the tactical situation. Okay. If the officer is supposed to be looking at the next move that we're going to take. Hey, listen, chief, if your officer is not capable of doing that, you better get your LPO trained up so he can handle the tactical situation. So you can go and, and figure out what you're going to do next. So, so we have to be able to not just do like our specific job, our role and responsibility. But if we have to inside of our platoon, we might have to say, hey, you know what, chief, you handle this over here. You know, if I got a chief that's not super dynamic on target, and I got an LPO that's a badass, I'll go, hey, hey, LPO, you're going to be, you're going to, you're going to be responsible for this stuff.

• 2:47:28Jocko Willink?

  You're going to be responsible for the assault. Chief, you're going to be responsible for the marshaling. Okay, cool. Got it. You're like, that's okay. It doesn't matter. Now, like, don't let your ego get in the way. Cause the chief, well, I'm supposed to be in charge of the assault. Cool. You're not good at it. And of course I'd be much more gentle about it. What I would say is, hey, you know, well, the thing is I want the LPO to get some experience. So we're going to let him handle some of these right now and see how he does. And in the meantime, you can just kind of handle the marshaling over here. You know, with the, with the AOIC. But yeah, those roles, responsibilities. So the fact that you laid those out early lets everyone know what the expectation is. Lets everybody know where you stand. Right? Lets everybody know like, hey, I don't put up, I'm not going to put up with this.

• 2:48:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm not going to put up with that. I'm not going to put up with the other thing. If you're out of line, you better come and tell me what's going on. If I get blindsided, there're going to be problems. So all those, all those things, absolutely. Like, that's a great point. Setting those expectations of what you, what, what you need, what you want, what your standards are. You set those out of the gate, it's going to align people real quick.

• 2:48:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you model them. You gotta model them. You gotta do what you're saying.

• 2:48:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. If you're, if you're not, you might as well just freaking. Just not even put out the word. If you're gonna say, hey, everyone be squared away and you're gonna act like a jackass, just don't even put it out.

• 2:48:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just clears everybody else out to do that shit.

• 2:48:55Jocko Willink?

  Dumb move. And then what?

• 2:48:58Speaker 02

  And then what? So finish up that deployment, come back and then I go and work at our headquarters for our, uh, force master chief. Which was an awesome guy at the time, learned a truckload from him, which I'd, which I'd be able to use for my next two positions. And so at the headquarters element, you know, what I have on here.

• 2:49:16Speaker 02

  Let me just go back one real quick. The headquarters element was, was good because it was the first time I'm outside of that.

• 2:49:23Speaker 02

  That SEAL team, you know, whether it's training or just SEAL, you know, um, mission. You're up at the headquarters element, you know, I was in the same office you were, but I'm working for the force, you're working for the admiral. So it's very similar line.

• 2:49:38Jocko Willink?

  Did you do, how long did you work there for?

• 2:49:40Speaker 02

  Uh, right around less than a year and a half.

• 2:49:42Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:49:43Speaker 02

  But it was enough. You're ready to get out of there after 12 months. But here's what I would say, I wished I would have done that position earlier on, probably like as a, a chief or a senior chief. But what, what does right look like? Where does it fit in? The training I think would have priority because that's going to set you up tactically. But going up there, you're like, holy cow, your aperture just opens wide up with actually how things work. You know, with, uh, with SEAL platoons going over into Afghanistan, into Iraq, how all that stuff works. You want more gear? Here's the, here's the process to procure the gear. And you're going through all that. And one of the things the guy I worked for did is he was up there and he like, he laid out initiatives.

• 2:50:25Speaker 02

  Hey, here's the initiatives. I want to get over the line. And then I was the guy, you know, when he's on travel back at the, the black palace, trying to move these things forward as, you know, as quickly as possible without missing anything. So it was, it was a good experience. And the guy I worked for, he'd had over 30 years and he'd bounced around. Just, he was a good dude, man. Learned a lot from him.

• 2:50:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, you're right. I did work, we worked in the exact same front, they call it the front office. And, and for sure, when you start to see, you start to see how small of a role, right? Like.

• 2:51:00Jocko Willink?

  You're small. There's like, there's like the whole military. That's the first time you get a taste of, like, did you go to the Pentagon? Did you go on travel with your boss?

• 2:51:09Speaker 02

  I went back to SOCOM. I didn't travel that much with those guys.

• 2:51:12Jocko Willink?

  So I was going to the Pentagon, bro. The Pentagon.

• 2:51:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:15Jocko Willink?

  I was, I was, I was, you know, sitting in, in the back, in the back of the meeting with SOCOM, you know, over and over again and, and hearing the word being put out and seeing them, seeing that the handwritten notes from the Secretary of Defense. You know what I'm saying? Like, all of a sudden you realize how big this machine is. And, and that puts things in perspective for you. And yes, you learn a lot about, you know, how to make things happen and how, well, not how to make things happen, but how things happen. And then you can at least provide some level of influence on trying to hopefully make things happen yourself. Cause that's a big.

• 2:51:53Speaker 02

  Understanding it makes all the difference in the world. Cause now you know how to navigate it.

• 2:51:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And you also know, like, I'm, I'm, there's no point in getting frustrated about this thing over here. Cause I can at least explain to the troops, hey, this is why this is happening. I know it seems crazy, but guess what? The money that's getting spent for weapons right now was actually allocated five years ago.

• 2:52:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:14Jocko Willink?

  And so if you're going to be mad about it, that's fine, but it's not going to help.

• 2:52:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And that was issues. I remember we were getting gear three, four years later that was designed for the previous three, four years. And it was already obsolete. You're like, I don't, I can't even use this stuff right now, you know? But it was good. And I remember being up there in 2015 and I think that was when you and Leif sent your first published copy of Extreme Ownership up there for approval.

• 2:52:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. Well, then it wasn't a published copy. It was probably like a manuscript.

• 2:52:44Speaker 02

  That's what it was. So I got me a copy of that.

• 2:52:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh really? You got the early one?

• 2:52:48Speaker 02

  I got the early one. So I read through it. I didn't know what to expect, you know? And back then everyone's going, hey, man, people are on the net writing books. I'm like, oh, let's see what Jaco and Leif are writing about here. A little courtesy copy. And I remember picking it up and reading them like, damn, this is really good. Cause the way you guys translated into the business world was just, you know, it made sense, you know? So.

• 2:53:07Jocko Willink?

  And plus you recognized it all.

• 2:53:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:09Jocko Willink?

  From, from the Jaco brief, which is, you know, basically where it all came from.

• 2:53:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you're guys, the way you wrote it, the position on it was from a humility standpoint, which people are going to appreciate that. So it was good, man.

• 2:53:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. That was a, that was a big obstacle to overcome mentally, you know, like.

• 2:53:30Jocko Willink?

  For me, it was massive. You know, I can't speak for Leif, but like for me, I mean, we just talked, opened this whole thing up about talking about reputation.

• 2:53:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:40Jocko Willink?

  And all of a sudden, you know, you can, you can destroy your reputation by becoming that guy.

• 2:53:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:47Jocko Willink?

  You wrote that book and, you know, and, and so that was horrible. That was a horrible experience to go through. It was like walking into the unknown and you can't look and you can't,

• 2:54:00Jocko Willink?

  there's, look, when you write a book,

• 2:54:04Jocko Willink?

  it is not a humble act, right? Like there's no, there's, it's like saying, hey, I'm gonna go freaking,

• 2:54:10Speaker 02

  Start a podcast?

• 2:54:11Jocko Willink?

  Get a designer suit. Yeah, or start a podcast. Hey, I'm gonna go get a designer suit, but it's not, it's not for me. Like it doesn't work. Or hey, I'm gonna start a podcast and talk a bunch. Like, what do you got to talk about, dude? So to say you're gonna write a book, or you're gonna start a podcast, or you're gonna put a spotlight on yourself is basically what you're doing. That's, that's what I'm saying. Right? When you write a book, you're putting a spotlight on yourself. Look at me.

• 2:54:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:36Jocko Willink?

  And, and there's no, doesn't matter what that book says.

• 2:54:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:40Jocko Willink?

  At least at the initial impression. Like, you, you, you, you are putting a spotlight on yourself. And I hated that. And it was really, it was hard to overcome that.

• 2:54:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:51Jocko Willink?

  But then you think, here we are, working with these civilian companies.

• 2:54:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:56Jocko Willink?

  And they are being able to move forward and execute better. And it's like, you know what? The stuff that we learned is probably worth teaching.

• 2:55:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:55:08Jocko Willink?

  The stuff that we learned is, people need to hear it. And then, uh, one of the, the Admiral,

• 2:55:16Jocko Willink?

  you know, I had to kind of have that kind of conversation with him. And he says, he said, uh, he goes, you know what, Jaco? We are quiet professionals. We are not silent professionals.

• 2:55:28Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:55:29Jocko Willink?

  And some of the stories need to be told, and some of the lessons need to be taught.

• 2:55:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55:34Jocko Willink?

  And the way you're doing it is the way it should be done.

• 2:55:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55:38Jocko Willink?

  And, and that was real, um, You know, obviously that was about as much reassurance as I could get. And then, and then, you know, just having, uh, having friends that read the book in the, in the teams and were like, bro, legit. And then, and then same thing with the podcast. Like when I started, bro, when I started with the podcast, when all my friends started like, calling me like, dude, that podcast was sick. And everyone like, that's when I was super stoked, you know, because you feel horrible. And you feel like you're shining a spotlight on yourself. And what I realized was that people saw that I was actually trying to shine a spotlight, not on me, but like on

• 2:56:17Jocko Willink?

  the community, not even just our community, but the army, the, the Marine Corps, like every, everyone that is out there working hard is where, where the spotlight was trying to be shined. It's just that I happened to hold it. And it's pretty sketchy to pick that thing up, bro.

• 2:56:34Speaker 02

  Think about this, think about if there were podcasts going on in the nineties, when we were coming up, where we could learn and go and get information on books to read and lessons learned from people that were in Vietnam that are talking, hey, here's some things we jacked up. We had a blue on blue. I wish I'd have done this. Here's what I did as a leader that was jacked up. I wish I would have, you know, came over and talked to Echo on this thing. I mean, how much better would we have been? We didn't have, we had shit, man. We had nothing.

• 2:56:59Jocko Willink?

  And, and that's, um, believe me, I think about that all the time. I mean, even when I, when Mikey Thornton came on. And, and we did a full debrief. I was like, I was in the SEAL Team for 20 years. And I never got that debrief. I never read that debrief, never saw, never, didn't know all those lessons that he learned. And it's like, wait a second, that's so wrong. I felt horrible. And, and so, you know what? Now it's like, oh, you can bring on Roger Hayden because Roger Hayden taught me stuff. But how is a new guy gonna learn about Roger Hayden and his lessons? You know, and it's not even just lessons about, hey, cover move, or hey, keep it simple. It's lessons about, hey, when this happens.

• 2:57:45Jocko Willink?

  When you lose a guy, when you get a guy badly wounded, when you get somebody that's, you know, acting a certain way, when someone's losing in combat, like all those lessons.

• 2:57:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:57:56Jocko Willink?

  Being able to, to learn them is freaking so powerful.

• 2:58:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it only helps people out in the future, you know, it's good.

• 2:58:04Jocko Willink?

  I mean, when I had James Webb on, who was, you know, Naval Academy, Marine Corps, Navy Cross, you know, Secretary of the Navy. But when we got done, and I mean, he, he, he wrote the book, Fields of Fire, incredible book. And it's sort of the book that all Vietnam movies are based on. All, every movie about Vietnam is based on that book in one way or another. And it's based, and that book is, is a thinly disguised autobiography. But when we got done, we walked out and he was like, I never got debriefed like that. No one ever debriefed anything, anything that I did in Vietnam like that.

• 2:58:47Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:58:48Jocko Willink?

  And he goes, you know, I wrote, there's some stuff written down in some library in the 12th floor of the Pentagon, you know, row 17, Alpha. He goes, no one's ever going to read that. And, and to be able to debrief like that, it's, he's like, thank you. And, and, and his son was in freaking Ramadi.

• 2:59:09Speaker 02

  Wow, wow.

• 2:59:11Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, there's a, I, I, I'm, and dude, believe me, I mean, I meet, I meet Marines and Army guys and team guys all the time and they're like, oh yeah, episode, this episode is freaking awesome. Because just what you just said, we didn't get that opportunity to be able to get the debriefs from people and hear these lessons.

• 2:59:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:59:31Jocko Willink?

  And it's so, we're so lucky to be able to do that.

• 2:59:35Speaker 02

  It's a powerful learning tool, you know, a lot of things you do, just to your point in the military, translate right over into the business world for everyone to learn from, you know?

• 2:59:46Jocko Willink?

  So then what'd you get done? You got done with WarCom, what happened?

• 2:59:48Speaker 02

  So got done with the WarCom and went over and at that time we were doing rotations with the combined joint special operations task force. Task force that goes into Iraq and then, you know, they deal with the siege of Sotaf, you know, they're in charge of the maneuver elements.

• 3:00:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so basically this is a group that's in charge of all the special operations in a area, in this case Iraq.

• 3:00:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So went up there and I think we had, you know, you're working with all these other countries and they're reporting to you. We're working together as one big team, one big unit. I think we had in between 800 and 1100 people with the siege of Sotaf and guys are dispersed everywhere. And this is a point in Iraq where, you know, ISIS has a foothold up in Mosul and we've got, you know, it was the first time I actually worked with Marsoc. We had their MSOCs and their MSOC out there along with the O5 headquarters. They were up north and we had our NSW unit and they were co-located with us there in Baghdad. And so it was a, it was a good experience, you know, and we're figuring out, hey, how

• 3:00:49Speaker 02

  are we gonna take, take down Mosul? You know, there's been several rotations before us where everyone's just waiting, one of the Iraqis is gonna want to do it, one of the Iraqis is gonna want to do it. And that came to a head on our deployment, which was good. And so finally, we get approval, guys come in there and

• 3:01:07Jocko Willink?

  So what year is this?

• 3:01:08Speaker 02

  This is 2016. 2016. So, you know, guys go in there and start clearing out Mosul, you know, and at some point, you know, one of our SEAL units rotated out and Jay and his formation rotated in, which was awesome. Jay's, Jay's team was, was awesome. Him and his commanding officer did a great job building that out. You know, they were, it was, you know, one of the best SEAL teams I'd, I'd seen. So it was good. Anyways, they come in and start clearing Mosul. Me and my boss, we push up to Erbil and then out of Erbil, we were running a, a small jock out of there. So we were co-located with

• 3:01:46Speaker 02

  God, I forget the C-jock and the C-jock was the one who could clear airspace to drop ordinance and we needed to be co-located with them to help de-conflict in case anything got snagged up. Um, so anyways, there was a lot of kinetic fighting in there going on at that point, but a good experience, we're working with, I think, seven or eight different countries. First time I've been inside a C-Desota working like that and you're up in the upper leadership and management position, you know, taking on everything that's going on. I'm trying to provide my, my boss with the, the best advice I can on, you know, what I recommend. Um, you know, and the, and the boss I had back then, he's an admiral now, but he was just squared away, just good, even tempered guy. People loved him. The other countries loved him, like, hey, where'd you get this guy?

• 3:02:31Speaker 02

  I'm like, that's my first time working with him, but he's dialed in, he had a great reputation, you know? Um, so it was, it was, it was, it was a good deployment, you know? And probably the things that, that weighed the most on that deployment is I'd never really been a part of a, a ramp ceremony to where you're like, you're leading this thing. And, uh, we had one of our warrant officers, and this was our first ramp ceremony. And so we had a, a pilot that was shot down, I want to say it was 2006 time period, and his remains were never recovered. And our warrant officer went off this and he's working with a shake. The shake's going, hey, we got the remains if you want them. And they start doing negotiations and then shake's like, hey, we want this amount of money and our guys going back and forth.

• 3:03:16Speaker 02

  And, and, and just a point up front I want to make is when you assign the right person, you know, the right talent to that, to what you're trying to accomplish, you can get a lot over the finish line. And I'm saying that up front because there was other agencies that had worked with the shake to try to get the remains back. They couldn't get it over the finish line. But here was a guy with, never done this before, the right temperament, the right attitude, went in there and was playing a little hardball with this guy, played a little softball over here and he got it over the finish line. You know, we wound it up, you know, you know, negotiating with the shake. We got the remains back. We went through our, our ramp ceremony back here and then we got the, you know, the remains back to the US who the, you know, that officer could be properly buried.

• 3:03:59Speaker 02

  And he was, he was a, a pilot that had been shot down. Um, so.

• 3:04:05Speaker 02

  It was powerful, felt good, you know, felt good. And then we had a few other ramp ceremonies. You know, we lost, uh, this was one of, one of Jay's EODs, but he was hit, you know, up there in, in Mosul with an IED and he, and he was killed. And so we did a ramp ceremony for him and brought him back. And, uh, we had one other guy and I want to, I'll tie this back into Ramadi, but the, the third guy we had, he was, you know, he was doing some stuff in another country. He was hit hard. He was killed. And we brought him back to us and it was like the night before Thanksgiving back in the U.S. And in Ramadi, we were operating right before Christmas and, you know, the Siege of Sotomayor commander pulled us out.

• 3:04:47Speaker 02

  And we were pissed off. We're like, what the hell, man? We were planning on being here and through Christmas Eve and through Christmas. And the Siege of Sotomayor commander back in 2006 said, hey, man, I don't want to report back to anyone's family that their son was wounded or killed, you know, before Christmas. And then here we are, you know, damn near 10 years later in, in Iraq, and this guy gets killed right before Thanksgiving. And his family's over with the other family or his wife and kids are over with their family and they gotta get notified. We're coming back here, going through all our procedures to make sure everything's tight and he's getting his, uh, proper respect before we send him out. But those things like when you're putting an American on an aircraft in a casket with the flag draped over, man,

• 3:05:30Speaker 02

  it just, it's a gut punch, man. It sucks. It sucks, man. And it's something I never, you know, wish upon anyone. Um, and it really hits home to you, to you, you know, not good.

• 3:05:52Jocko Willink?

  How long was that deployment?

• 3:05:53Speaker 02

  That was a six month.

• 3:05:56Jocko Willink?

  And the Iraqis took massive casualties.

• 3:05:59Speaker 02

  Oh, man. They, before we left, they were like the special unit we were working with and had trained up over the years. The SF actually trained them up. I think we had a hand in the pie somewhere in there, but they were dialed in. They were the best unit that the Iraqis had and these guys had a lot of pride, but they were like over 800 casualties when we left. And it was just, it was, I mean ISIS was no joke over there, man. They were, they're barbaric, brutal. And, you know, there's a, there's a fraction of, of people where you think you're gonna come in and you're gonna talk some sense into some people like that. You're not, you're not talking to them. And if they get a hold of you, it's not gonna

• 3:06:40Speaker 02

  be good for you. You're gonna get your head chopped off. And that's the type of, uh, that's what, that's what we were dealing with over there. And those, you know, that unit that our guys were working with, they laid it all out there. They're going in there for their country, for Iraq, to secure that city, to make it a better place. And man, they took heavy casualties. I mean, heavy casualties. Um, you know, the, the, the truck bombs they built from 2004 to 2016, they up armored them in 2016. So when they're coming at you, there's no way, there's not a good way to defeat them. You need some type of missile system or rocket system coming in on top. Or you need some type of arresting device

• 3:07:21Speaker 02

  to where you can stop the vehicle from coming at you. Um, you know, we had some good penetration with some of our heavy caliber weapons was stopping them, but it was hard. It, it was not easy. And, and they'd hide them underneath, you know, vehicle or, or carport, um, entry points and you wouldn't be able to tell what it is. And next thing you know, that big huge, you know, truck bomb is on the move and there's up armored all over the place. And there's just a small window that they can look out. And guess what? If they come off the seat or anything happens with the seat in their adjustment, the thing's rigged to just blow. So as soon as it hits something, the whole thing's going up. And man, we just remember watching CTS units, this damn thing would be coming, you'd be trying to call in an

• 3:08:02Speaker 02

  airstrike, but you got like a minute and 30 seconds to clear airspace overhead to get bombs down on targets. It's like, it wasn't gonna happen. So you had to be able to handle business as a tactical unit on the ground to take this thing out. You know, we'd give these guys rockets and, and shit, but it, they weren't effective. So it was a super complex and frustrating environment, you know, took a lot of casualties.

• 3:08:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. Jason was saying that, you know, at a certain point, they were thinking that the Iraqi unit that was doing the majority of the fighting was just gonna run out of guys. Like, they just were gonna, they were just gonna all be dead or all be casualties, which was freaking scary. And I was horrified, you know, when he was telling me that. And I was, I was hearing some of that while, while you guys were actually over there. But at the same time, even though it kind of horrified me, at the same time, I also was, this is gonna sound wrong, but I was happy to hear it because what it told me was that the Iraqis were fighting.

• 3:09:05Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 3:09:06Jocko Willink?

  And when we were in Ramadi, the Iraqis, they, they, some of them would fight, but it definitely wasn't, they weren't looking to take massive casualties to try and take a city back. Like, they didn't care that much. And they would run away. We had a whole battalion quit. A whole battalion of Iraqi soldiers said, "Yeah, we're out." We had one entire company disappear. Like, there was a, a strike on their, on one of their checkpoints, and they all just bailed. That was that. So to hear how hard the Iraqis were fighting and they were taking it to ISIS and that they were staying in the fight, that was just freaking, that was just, it was awesome to hear that. It was so horrible to hear that they were taking casualties,

• 3:09:46Jocko Willink?

  but it was great to hear that they had found the will to fight and that they were unified and, and fighting courageously to, to liberate other Iraqis inside their country from these actual savages that are doing the most, committing the most heinous atrocities imaginable. And, and it was all, it was awesome to hear that they were, that they were fighting like that. And, and it was also, you know, when, when ISIS decided to, you know, wear a uniform and put up flags, it was like, right on. Let's see how this works out for you. Freaking legit.

• 3:10:29Jocko Willink?

  And then what?

• 3:10:31Speaker 02

  Then what? So finish up with with that deployment, get back off of that. And then that's when I rolled over to group one. And so, you know, started, you know, I got a good six, six month of getting saturated with group level stuff. And, you know, at the group, you're responsible for all, you know, four West Coast SEAL teams and three other commands. So you got roughly right around 1,800 people or so. And your primary function there is manning, training and equipment. So I'm working directly with the team command master chiefs. On some occasions, they're commanding officers. And so you're in a position of a lot of influence at that point, you know, and I'm directly working with our Commodore on on our initiatives and moving the mission forward.

• 3:11:13Jocko Willink?

  And you're also dealing with whatever sort of, you know, equipment, like trying to get equipment for the guys, trying to just the whole nine yards. And and overall, responsible for their training. Did you go out to the desert during that time?

• 3:11:28Speaker 02

  Went out there a couple of times.

• 3:11:29Jocko Willink?

  Damn, bro.

• 3:11:30Speaker 02

  And it's so it's weird. It's different. When you're up at that level, when you come down in, it's never the same.

• 3:11:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:36Speaker 02

  It's never, you know, you're the guy.

• 3:11:38Jocko Willink?

  Show for you.

• 3:11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're the guy. Then it's like, hey, I'm coming in there to see this. And you're like, hey, man, you guys might want to tighten this shit up over here, you know? But it was good, you know, damn, who was there? I think Jay, yeah, Jay was at trade at at the time. So it was good. So Jay was always there as a right hand man I had out there. And we had a good crew of team committed master chiefs. And one of the things we started doing back in 2015 with the the force I was working with, the force command master chief, is he started implementing a screening process. So we were basically going through a hiring to make sure that we were getting the right leaders in at the the master chief level to take over some of these command positions. And it's not perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than where we were.

• 3:12:22Speaker 02

  And they also, we also started implementing in, you know, platoon chief and task unit senior enlisted advisor screening. And that was developing. So it's it's getting better as we move forward. Bottom line is, you know, things are getting better. You're moving things forward. That's what you want for a better formation. You know, and just going back to work on real quick. One of the things I realized when you're up there, you know, when you're down in the troops, you're just like, give me my gear. I want to get, go to war and do all these things. And people talk a lot of shit about everyone above them. And here's the deal with the people that are above you. I'm you. I'm you. I was the E5 talking that shit, saying all those things. And guess what? I moved up positions, but I moved up in positions to take care of people. Right? And so there's a lot of kooky things that come out.

• 3:13:06Speaker 02

  You're the guy behind the scenes squashing these things, you know, to make sure that our, that our people are taken care of. And I always, I had a buddy that was, you know, he was a hard case. And he's like, hey, man, why don't you ever say this? Why don't you, you need to stand up and say something about that? I'm like, hey, man, I'm handling that shit behind closed doors. I'm not going to come here and open forum with the commander and disagree with them in front of all these people, man. That's not, that's not smart. I'm getting nowhere.

• 3:13:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:31Speaker 02

  But if I come around the backside here, do a little flank, plant some seeds, you can have a lot more influence that way. Um, so anyways, you're always going to get that shit with the hard cases. You know what I'm talking about.

• 3:13:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then how long was that tour?

• 3:13:43Speaker 02

  So that was a, a two-year tour, you know, and I wanted to finish up my career there.

• 3:13:48Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and towards the end, you're like, I mean, what, what were you thinking? What was on the horizon and what was your decision-making process to, to decide to punch?

• 3:13:57Speaker 02

  Punch? Yeah. So I punched right at like the 28 and a half year mark. So I, I could have gone another year and a half, but man, I was out of juice. And one of the things people talk about is, hey, you know, when it's time to go. And man, I was in that position and we had some high-profile cases out there. And they just wear on you, man. You know, they just wear on you. And even before that happened, I knew it was time for me to go. I'm like, all right, I'm going to do this position. It's time for me to, to move out of here. I don't think I had anything left to add value to the mission and the organization. I was topped out with my leadership capacity. And we have plenty of guys that go out there and do the, the T-SOCs, you know, the Theater Special Operations Command. And that's a high level of, of influence. Those are action arms in the operational, uh, areas. And I was like, man, I just don't see myself going and working at that level.

• 3:14:42Speaker 02

  You're working with general officers, with admirals. And I was like, man, I just, and I was up at WarCom, kind of got a, a little bit of a taste of that. And I was like, that's just not me. And we need people to do those positions. Hell, we had quite a few East Coast guys go in, in, uh, in, in, into those T-SOC positions. And you need them because that's a huge, a high level of influence that the, that we have in NSW. If you have your guy in there, he can help influence some outcomes, which is super important. But I was definitely maxed out, uh, out of gas. Uh, time for me to pack up and go home. And one of the things that always, uh, it, it comes to mind with me is in 2003,

• 3:15:22Speaker 02

  you know, we had Posey out there, our Vietnam guy. Good dude, man. Just good family guy. Vietnam had more stories than you can imagine, but he was like, man, Steve, you guys are stronger, faster, smarter than, than we ever were. I was like, damn, what's he talking about? And then I look back, you know, 28, you know, 15 years later, whatever it was. And I'm like, these young guys that are coming in, they're hungry. They're smarter. They're stronger than I was. They're faster than I was. Meaning, hey, the community's in a good spot. We've got our next generation coming up and through our ranks, doing good things. You know, and one of the things, uh, one of our head leaders for the Navy put out, uh, Mick Pahn Stevens, he said, hey,

• 3:16:03Speaker 02

  work hard, stay out of trouble and be a good person. That's all I'm asking the formation to do. The entire Navy, that's, that was his mantra. Work hard, stay out of trouble, be a good and hu- uh, be a good and decent human being. Be a good person. And I never knew what the hell he meant by stay out of trouble. And then, you know, as you start moving up in these positions and you have high profile cases and things going on, they can bring your entire community down to its knees. Meaning it's hard to move initiatives forward. It's hard to, to focus on what your actual job is because you're dealing with, you know, NJP, you're dealing with court marshals. All those things weigh on you and it's never good.

• 3:16:42Speaker 02

  And my boss in 2015, our force, he hammered it home to me and it made sense. He said, hey, Steve, we've got to protect the mission. We've got to protect our credibility. Credibility that's built in other people's blood. It was spilled in other people's blood. We've got to protect that at all costs. And he's like, it's hard for us to protect the homeland if we've, if our credibility is damaged and we can't get employed overseas to wrap up bad guys. And I was like, yeah, check. That shit makes sense. So, yeah.

• 3:17:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's, it's the same thing as a reputation, right?

• 3:17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:15Jocko Willink?

  If the community has a reputation and you've got to do everything you can to protect that reputation.

• 3:17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:20Jocko Willink?

  Cause if you're, if you're, yeah, just, that's just what you have to do.

• 3:17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:24Jocko Willink?

  And, and you do your best. You do everything you can to protect the reputation. I mean, that's just what you gotta do, you know?

• 3:17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:32Jocko Willink?

  Man. Any other, Echo, you got anything?

• 3:17:38Speaker 01

  Said something about a firecracker earlier, like a firecracker scenario or whatever. And you were like, oh, you got the firecracker like right off the bat or something like that? Like that was some big deal?

• 3:17:48Jocko Willink?

  It was a nickname for an area in Ramadi that was north of Route Michigan. And it was this little road that wrapped up and around. It was called Firecracker. And the reason it was called Firecracker was because there was a lot of bad shit going on there. There was a lot of fire, a lot of fire cracking off, as you said.

• 3:18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And that was like your first?

• 3:18:11Speaker 02

  That was our first operation in Ramadi.

• 3:18:14Jocko Willink?

  Dude, that's a welcome to Ramadi situation right there. Damn.

• 3:18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was good. It was good.

• 3:18:20Jocko Willink?

  Freaking crazy. Anything else, Steve? Any closing thoughts?

• 3:18:28Speaker 02

  No, that's it.

• 3:18:30Jocko Willink?

  Right on, man. Well, thanks for coming on, man.

• 3:18:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you know what? I'll say one more thing. At one point, probably you were like six months out from retiring and you said, I have three courses of action for what I'm gonna do when I get out. Echelon Front, Echelon Front, Echelon Front. And I was like, right on, man. Freaking awesome. Uh, which is a rip off from the Marine that I covered the book on the podcast where when he was getting ready to graduate from the basic school and they had to fill out what they wanted to do. And this was in 1967. They had to fill out what they wanted to do in the Marine Corps and he put one, two, three infantry platoon commander, infantry platoon commander, infantry platoon commander. It's like, that's what I'm gonna do. I was like,

• 3:19:17Jocko Willink?

  Roger that. All right. Guess we're gonna execute on this thing. So it's freaking awesome. Thanks for what you did to the teams, for the teams, obviously, for America, obviously, and, and, and for freedom. And I know we had an awesome time working together in the past. I've, I still, I just, when I drive at night, whenever I drive at night, especially out here in California, the desert, I'm always thinking I'm driving back from, from the desert, from our desert training facility and just with, just totally amped because I wouldn't be able to sleep because I'd be so fired up for the teams and for the boys. And I'd be like just amped driving back, knowing that we made some freaking guys ready for war. So it was awesome working

• 3:20:01Jocko Willink?

  with you then and uh, awesome working with you again right now, man.

• 3:20:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I really appreciate it. I'm glad to be on with, with Echelon Front. It's uh, it's awesome. Can I say one thing real quick?

• 3:20:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:11Speaker 02

  Hey, I'd like to thank my wife, Allison. She's put up with me for all these years. She's prior military, good southern girl from Arkansas. Um, and she runs a tight game. She keeps me in, she keeps me in line. So I love her with all my heart. She's an awesome person and uh, my kids, I love you guys.

• 3:20:28Jocko Willink?

  Right on, man. Awesome. Well, Echo.

• 3:20:32Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 3:20:33Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of.

• 3:20:37Jocko Willink?

  Getting after it. Speaking of being awesome, what do you think we can do to uh become more awesome?

• 3:20:45Speaker 01

  Strive.

• 3:20:46Jocko Willink?

  Strive, strive for awesomeness?

• 3:20:47Speaker 01

  At the very least, how about that?

• 3:20:49Jocko Willink?

  There was some podcast we did from some ancient warrior.

• 3:20:53Speaker 01

  Shaking the world.

• 3:20:53Jocko Willink?

  Shaking the world with your awesomeness.

• 3:20:55Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Well, you know, that's a, that's a big step. Good striving to shaking the world. Like that's, that's kind of a big step for sure. So let's start with striving. Cool. Good. All right. Well, hey, in your path to strive for awesomeness, or in the event that you're just straight up trying to shake the world with awesomeness. Hey, look, you might need some supplementation.

• 3:21:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay, let me, let me start this by, Steve, you know, you listen to the podcast.

• 3:21:26Jocko Willink?

  How often do you listen to this part of the podcast? What percentage of time?

• 3:21:32Speaker 02

  I, I'm probably 50%.

• 3:21:35Jocko Willink?

  50% you hang on? Or is it just you can't hit stop on your freaking iPhone? So you just have to roll with it?

• 3:21:44Speaker 02

  There's so many new products coming out. You've got to listen to it to kind of go, all right, is there some new line coming out here? I'm not tracking.

• 3:21:51Speaker 01

  It's true. He makes a good point.

• 3:21:52Jocko Willink?

  So he's saying 50%. My guess is he's kind of rounding up to be nice because you know, he doesn't want to be like harsh to echo Charles.

• 3:21:58Speaker 01

  That's cool. All I need is 1%. That's all I need, man. He's over here at 50. Shoot, that's 49.

• 3:22:03Speaker 02

  Here's what I know. I just got a text from JP and uh, and uh, Dave Burke. They want to know if you're going to talk about their discipline. Go some sour apple snipe.

• 3:22:10Speaker 01

  You mean good deal, Dave?

• 3:22:11Speaker 02

  Good deal, Dave.

• 3:22:13Jocko Willink?

  JP just, just tracking on it. Like tracking that Steve's here and then sending, taking the time to send a text to say, hey, make sure you talk about sour apple sniper.

• 3:22:24Speaker 02

  Dave wants to make JP jealous. So you got to mention Dave's afterburner.

• 3:22:28Speaker 01

  No problem. We're on it fully.

• 3:22:31Jocko Willink?

  These two guys are just breaking in the game.

• 3:22:34Speaker 01

  That's all, man. That's all. And I dig it. Either way, before we get to the discipline or discipline, go, which are, you know, they're kind of different, but kind of the same. We talk about joint supplements. It's important because you don't want to think about this kind of stuff while we're trying to what? Shake the world with, you know, awesomeness or strive or whatever. You know, you don't want to think about your joints. You don't want to think about your immunity, getting sick, all this kind of stuff. So you take these supplements. Joint warfare, joints. Super krill oil, joints. Vitamin D3 immunity and general health, by the way. Vitamin D3 is good for a lot of stuff.

• 3:23:07Jocko Willink?

  All kinds, especially at this moment in time in particular. We're talking about factual information about the glory of the vitamin D.

• 3:23:18Speaker 01

  It's true, absolutely true. Also, Cold War immunity supplement. Keep those in mind so you don't have to keep the other stuff in mind.

• 3:23:26Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, that's what I, you've, you've finally gotten through to me. It's only taken 260 episodes of, uh, now I understand that you're like, oh, it's good to, to not have to think about your joints bothering you.

• 3:23:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:23:41Jocko Willink?

  That's a good thing.

• 3:23:42Speaker 01

  That is a good thing.

• 3:23:43Jocko Willink?

  So now I understand.

• 3:23:45Speaker 01

  You, we don't want to wake up and be like, I hope my joints hold up today in the workout or whatever. See what I'm saying?

• 3:23:52Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:23:52Speaker 01

  You just want to go into the workout, warm up if you got it.

• 3:23:54Jocko Willink?

  Get it done, as they say.

• 3:23:55Speaker 01

  Exactly right. Also, we have a supplement called Discipline, the supplement.

• 3:24:02Speaker 01

  For your brain, for your body, for your whole thing, really.

• 3:24:05Jocko Willink?

  Your life.

• 3:24:06Speaker 01

  Your life, man, your life. Powder.

• 3:24:10Speaker 01

  Take Discipline Powder instead of coffee. Try that.

• 3:24:13Jocko Willink?

  Good call.

• 3:24:14Speaker 01

  It could be something, is what I'm saying, as far as the routine. Also Discipline Go, which are and, or should I say were capsules to begin with?

• 3:24:21Jocko Willink?

  They are capsules, yes.

• 3:24:22Speaker 01

  If you're on the go, see what I'm saying?

• 3:24:24Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:24:24Speaker 01

  Did that?

• 3:24:25Jocko Willink?

  They're, they're, they're very popular at Echelon Front.

• 3:24:29Speaker 02

  Hey, can I say something on the Discipline Go capsules? Hey, so I've been using that stuff and so when I'm going in and I'm doing a speaking engagement.

• 3:24:35Jocko Willink?

  That's why they're so popular at Echelon Front.

• 3:24:37Speaker 02

  I take two and here's the deal, like when I'm communicating, when I'm not taking that stuff, it's like I'm going down the highway and I, I really have to think hard about the words I'm going to communicate. It's like the, the words are in off the, a chute off a street. When I'm on the Discipline Go, the words are right there on the road. I'm going 60 miles an hour. You're like boom, boom, boom, clear concise communications. And I don't know what's in it, but it definitely clears up your mind. It clears up your mind. It works. You gotta get, I'm telling you, if you're a boss, you got some things going on, a meeting, a high-speed meeting, you're talking to people, it helps. I promise you, it helps. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it ever did.

• 3:25:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, that's why, that's why at Echelon Front, where we get up and we have to, not only we have to speak, but we gotta ta- take questions, interpret questions, we gotta come up with answers and solutions. And so, the team is always like, mm, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna, I wanna bring the A-game, right?

• 3:25:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:25:32Jocko Willink?

  How do you ensure you bring the A-game? Take a little Discipline Go.

• 3:25:35Speaker 01

  Right, Discipline Go.

• 3:25:36Jocko Willink?

  And then if you have, like, a little more time, or maybe you wanna enjoy that a little bit more,

• 3:25:41Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:25:42Jocko Willink?

  you can, you can get a can of Discipline Go.

• 3:25:45Speaker 01

  Yes, which is what you mentioned, right? Many flavors now. Shoot, the flavor roster getting big over here. So, most recently, afterburner orange. Good deal, Dave Burke. Boom. Before that, sour apple sniper. JP Denell. What are they competing with each other now?

• 3:26:04Speaker 02

  Oh, good lord. There's some competition.

• 3:26:06Jocko Willink?

  Before that, Jaco Palmer. Which, by the way, which, by the way, Jaco Palmer, Jaco Palmer is not, Jaco Palmer, what it is, is it's 50/50 iced tea lemonade. That's what it is.

• 3:26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:26:21Jocko Willink?

  Some people were thinking it was pomegranate, because we also have Jaco Pomegranate White Tea.

• 3:26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:26:26Jocko Willink?

  Which, which you probably remember, Steve.

• 3:26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:26:29Jocko Willink?

  Tell us about, that's the origin story right there. At Nylund, me rolling into those briefs with that big old plastic, uh, uh, uh, protein shaker, with freaking, with, with pomegranate tea, which I would get from wherever, and then I'd just sit there in the front row, and they'd give their brief, and Jack'd just taking notes. They'd be like, alright. You'd give your points, or actually, like, you know, whatever. The, the frontline instructors would give their points, then you'd give your points, and then be like, you'd be like, you got anything, boss? And I'd be like, oh, I got a couple things.

• 3:27:04Speaker 01

  Is there caffeine in the?

• 3:27:06Jocko Willink?

  There is.

• 3:27:07Speaker 01

  Just a little bit.

• 3:27:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just a little bit.

• 3:27:08Speaker 01

  That's why the whole thing. Yeah, so, speaking of caffeine, and just a little bit, yes, Jaco Palmer, that was the one before that, and then before that was what? Who's the first signature? Oh, Dax Savage.

• 3:27:20Jocko Willink?

  The first signature was Dax Savage.

• 3:27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:27:22Jocko Willink?

  Dakota.

• 3:27:22Speaker 02

  Tasty.

• 3:27:23Jocko Willink?

  Is that your go to? What's your go to?

• 3:27:26Speaker 02

  I like the Dax Savage and I like the story behind Dax Savage.

• 3:27:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, dude.

• 3:27:30Speaker 02

  He's a monster.

• 3:27:30Jocko Willink?

  If you can just get a little, if you can have a little bit of mentality of Dakota, then your, your whole, your whole being is better.

• 3:27:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:27:39Jocko Willink?

  No, not, no offense to JP and Dave. I mean, I want to have their mentalities too. But let's face it, it's Dax Savage. It's fricking Dakota. We're kind of in the game. Dakota's kind of take, do you, did you drink Dr. Pepper when you were a kid?

• 3:27:53Speaker 02

  I did not.

• 3:27:54Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's kind of the.

• 3:27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:27:56Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of the flavor, apparently.

• 3:27:58Speaker 02

  It's tasty.

• 3:27:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:59Speaker 02

  It's tasty.

• 3:28:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's my, that's my wife's favorite.

• 3:28:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:28:02Jocko Willink?

  Which, what do you think of that Dakota? I see you tracking on my wife. You tracking? Tracking on my wife Dakota.

• 3:28:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so that one's kind of a sour apple sniper is. I'm going to say if you have a little bit of a sweet tooth.

• 3:28:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:28:17Jocko Willink?

  Probably sour apple sniper is your go to.

• 3:28:20Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 3:28:21Jocko Willink?

  Jaco Palmer is, is if you like iced tea and lemonade.

• 3:28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my favorite before the, the orange.

• 3:28:27Jocko Willink?

  The orange is your favorite.

• 3:28:28Speaker 01

  Currently my favorite.

• 3:28:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:29Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. But hey, man, you know, to each their own and you know, we're going to move forward. So what this is though, discipline go in a can, energy drink, health, energy drink, healthy, energy drink. No, a health drink in the form of an energy drink.

• 3:28:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's been hard to figure out what to call it. I, whatever you were just saying. Steve was pretty legit about just going down the road, finding words and everything's in focus. And I'm like, yeah, dude, I know what your feeling is.

• 3:28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's what makes like the, the can so good. Cause you know how like, let's face it, you're just doing whatever during the day. Whatever we do during the day. And you're like, oh, you know, I'll grab a water. I'll grab a juice. Grab a soda sometimes, some of us.

• 3:29:13Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:29:13Speaker 01

  This, this exactly right though. This is like, you can grab it. No, you don't get the bad parts of soda.

• 3:29:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:19Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, yeah, if you're going for a water, cool, man, do it. But if you're grabbing like a Red Bull or I shouldn't say any particular brand, but. If you're grabbing a soda or an energy drink, I'm just saying you're gonna pay a price for that.

• 3:29:33Jocko Willink?

  You're paying a price.

• 3:29:33Speaker 01

  You see what I'm saying?

• 3:29:34Jocko Willink?

  You're paying a price with your health.

• 3:29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and with this discipline, go.

• 3:29:38Jocko Willink?

  You would think, you would think that somebody would have already made an equivalent, right? You would think, you would think that. It's real obvious. Hey, I'm gonna make something that makes you, enhances your performance, but it's actually good for you. You'd think somebody would have done that. Why didn't they do it? Number one, cost too much. And now they're, now they're not making, they're not maximizing profits at the freaking cash register. And number two is hard. It was hard to do because we had to, instead of just throwing a bunch of chemicals in there so it wouldn't go bad, we had to pasteurize it. Which no one does. So, there you go. And not only that, hey, well, how are you gonna make it taste good? Well, we'll just put a bunch of chemicals in there that, that are bad for you, but they'll make people taste good. And we don't care about the people that we're serving this to, so we'll just let them drink poison.

• 3:30:24Jocko Willink?

  We'll just let them drink poison. What did we do? We said, no, I was like, no, we're not doing that. We are gonna sweeten it with something real. It's monk fruit. So, that's why, it doesn't, even that doesn't seem like a lot of barriers to entry, right? Like, hey, we're gonna pasteurize it, we're gonna put, we're gonna sweeten it naturally. We're gonna only put healthy ingredients in it. You'd think that those, those bars to entry aren't that high. You'd think someone would have done it, but they didn't. They didn't do it. So, we did.

• 3:30:53Speaker 01

  Like I said.

• 3:30:53Jocko Willink?

  Now everyone else can get in line.

• 3:30:57Speaker 01

  As far as getting in line goes, for sure. Also, speaking of tasting good, milk. Superior protein in the form of a dessert. So, you know, um, you know.

• 3:31:08Jocko Willink?

  Such a good dessert.

• 3:31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much so. So, uh, Brian, I don't even know if I'm supposed to say this, but Brian sends my son and me, I'm more of a secondary thing, but sends my son milk bars.

• 3:31:19Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:31:20Speaker 01

  Right? I don't know if they're still in the experimental stage or whatever.

• 3:31:23Jocko Willink?

  The version that you're getting right now is pretty close to a done deal.

• 3:31:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, so it's like, it's one of those things where, yeah, man, if you wanna dessert, like, milk is the dessert. And it's super, as far as like, you know how like, sometimes you're like, oh, I need a dessert, but I, you know, I'm on the pass, so I'm gonna have a dessert substitute. Something like this, you know what I'm saying?

• 3:31:42Speaker 02

  You had those out. I thought those were out already.

• 3:31:44Jocko Willink?

  Molc bars?

• 3:31:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was eating something back in December last year.

• 3:31:49Jocko Willink?

  We were, we were in the experimental phase.

• 3:31:51Speaker 02

  Well, they were tasty then.

• 3:31:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they've gotten better.

• 3:31:53Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 3:31:54Jocko Willink?

  They've gotten better. So it's been hard, man. It's been really hard. There's another, it's the same, it's the same kind of battles you're fighting. With the, like with, with making the drink and how do you actually keep it stable? There's more, there's, there's, well, not more, but there's different things in play trying to make a bar. How do you keep it stable? How does it maintain its texture over time? What happens when it's sitting on the shelf for two months? There's a bunch of things to deal with. So we find in the version that you're getting right now, Echo, we finally figured out how to overcome all that and do it naturally and make it taste good and have the right flavor profile. And stay stable on the shelf. So it's been a long road. It's been a road that we almost backed away from. And, and you know me, I'm not one to.

• 3:32:35Speaker 01

  D O R.

• 3:32:36Jocko Willink?

  D O R, as they say.

• 3:32:38Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. But either way, yes, milk, protein in the form of dessert, not a dessert substitute, by the way.

• 3:32:45Jocko Willink?

  Just simply dessert.

• 3:32:47Speaker 01

  Straight up.

• 3:32:48Jocko Willink?

  Where do you get all this stuff?

• 3:32:50Speaker 01

  Origin Maine dot com. Originally, originally, there's many other places to get it. But before we go there.

• 3:32:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:32:57Speaker 01

  Let's go here. Jaco White Tea. You mentioned the pomegranate white tea. Jaco White Tea.

• 3:33:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:01Speaker 01

  That is available. We're not just talking about Jaco used to drink white tea. Now he doesn't. Bruh. Drinks even better white tea.

• 3:33:09Jocko Willink?

  I had it today.

• 3:33:10Speaker 01

  Jaco White Tea. Yeah. Remember he used to drink it in that big jar? He used to bring the big jar.

• 3:33:14Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I used to bring it even, back in the day.

• 3:33:16Speaker 01

  Like a crazy person. Yeah. Yeah. Nonetheless, yes, that's available as well at Origin Maine dot com. Also at the Vitamin Shop offline. What do you call it? Like brick and?

• 3:33:27Jocko Willink?

  Retail.

• 3:33:28Speaker 01

  Retail. Yeah. Boom. Vitamin Shop. Go get it. Also, the Discipline Go cans are at Wawa in Florida currently.

• 3:33:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And by the way, if you live in Florida and you've been, and look, I, I asked and said, hey, please, this is the mission. We wanna, we wanna go into the full chain of Wawa. We needed to go hard in Florida. We needed to go in there and clear shelves. Well, you all that have been clearing shelves, thank you. Keep going. We're on the path to victory. Don't let up.

• 3:33:59Speaker 01

  Brett's true, man.

• 3:34:00Jocko Willink?

  Keep getting after it.

• 3:34:04Jocko Willink?

  Cause you know why? Cause people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Maryland, they're, they're counting on Florida. It's all eyes on Florida. We got to rock and roll in Florida. We're on the right path. Don't let up.

• 3:34:16Speaker 01

  But it, it's true. And the, the thing is, again, I said before, it's kind of a big deal though, to go and get like an energy drink or whatever, and it'd be legitimate, healthy for you.

• 3:34:26Jocko Willink?

  It's crazy.

• 3:34:27Speaker 01

  That's a huge deal. When you, I like, you didn't even really have to think about, but, but in my case.

• 3:34:31Jocko Willink?

  So you just went, you just went back. I mean, we were talking about that 15 minutes ago, but we're talking about it again. That's cool.

• 3:34:35Speaker 01

  I don't think I, I, I capitalized, not capitalized.

• 3:34:38Jocko Willink?

  I broke down the entire thing about the bars and the thing we gotta do and how hard it was. That wasn't good enough.

• 3:34:44Speaker 01

  But not about the price you pay when you, when you take, drink an energy drink or a soda or something like this. That price you pay versus the price that you don't pay, that's a big deal. I didn't think I maximized the, uh, how should I say, the communication of that big deal.

• 3:34:57Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 3:34:58Speaker 01

  Think I have now.

• 3:34:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:34:59Speaker 01

  Also, at originmaine.com is American made stuff, jujitsu stuff, gis, rash guards, some, uh, some athletic stuff.

• 3:35:06Jocko Willink?

  Let me ask you a question. Can you wear a gi when you go to the grocery mart?

• 3:35:10Speaker 01

  Grocery mart? Yeah. Well, as far as grocery marts go, yeah, sure. I mean, you could technically.

• 3:35:17Jocko Willink?

  Advisable?

• 3:35:18Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I'm, I'm not going to sit here and advise that, but man, if you're going to do it, go ahead, do that.

• 3:35:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Was there something that we could wear that would be more acceptable?

• 3:35:28Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:35:28Jocko Willink?

  Like what?

• 3:35:29Speaker 01

  Maybe some jeans.

• 3:35:29Jocko Willink?

  Ah, there we go. There we go.

• 3:35:31Speaker 01

  Maybe, I don't know, but maybe, yeah.

• 3:35:33Jocko Willink?

  But where can you get American made jeans?

• 3:35:36Speaker 01

  You know, it's very hard. Um, well, how should I say, as far as, uh, options go, there are not as many options as, you know, one might hope. But thankfully, yes, I am here to tell you at originmaine.com, you can get American made denim jeans.

• 3:35:51Jocko Willink?

  You, you know what? You probably are thinking, if you're an American, you're probably thinking about like iconic.

• 3:35:59Jocko Willink?

  Iconic. I'm going to say three words. Iconic American jeans. And we all know there's a few brands that fall into that category. They've been around for a long time. Iconic American jeans. I got news for you. Your iconic American jeans, they're not American. They're not American.

• 3:36:17Speaker 01

  Brutal.

• 3:36:18Jocko Willink?

  So if you want to get iconic American jeans, I'll tell you where you go. You go to originmaine.com and you get yourself some iconic American jeans. We're bringing them back.

• 3:36:29Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. Yeah, good work. They're doing some good work over there at Origin. Speaking of good work, Jaco has a store. It's called Jaco Store, obviously. So JacoStore.com. That's where you can get your Discipline Equals Freedom shirts, hoodies, hats, a bunch of stuff on there. Really cool stuff, in my opinion. See if it's your opinion, too. JacoStore.com. Oh, also, we do have a t-shirt club. Kind of creative designs.

• 3:36:56Jocko Willink?

  Can you come up with something else to call this besides t-shirt club?

• 3:36:59Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 3:37:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay, please.

• 3:37:01Speaker 01

  Probably. I have that capability, sure.

• 3:37:03Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I don't know. T-shirt platoon, t-shirt brigade, t-shirt gang.

• 3:37:12Speaker 01

  We'll just say.

• 3:37:13Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying? You rolled right into the, there's something that like, you know, my 11-year-old daughter has a roller skating club, right? You see where I'm going with this? Tighten yourself up, bro.

• 3:37:27Speaker 01

  Hey, it's a working title and we're doing our best over here. Nonetheless, this is what it is. It's a subscription-based situation where you get a shirt, new shirt, every month, creative designs. Anyway, check that one out, too, if you're interested. Boom, do that. Good for a gift, too, by the way.

• 3:37:44Speaker 01

  There you go. JacoStore.com. Also, subs- oh, wait, wait, we have

• 3:37:51Speaker 01

  other podcasts.

• 3:37:53Jocko Willink?

  You didn't even mention this podcast.

• 3:37:55Speaker 01

  Well, we're on this podcast.

• 3:37:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we do have other podcasts.

• 3:37:59Speaker 01

  Oh, guess what? The podcast you're listening to, it's a podcast. It exists. Yeah, we already did that. We don't gotta mention that.

• 3:38:04Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so, uh, yeah, subscribe to all these different podcasts. Jocko Podcast, Jaco Unraveling Podcast, Grounded Podcast, and Warrior Kid Podcast. Check those out. Leave a review.

• 3:38:17Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:38:17Jocko Willink?

  Cause they're funny. If you leave a review, make it entertaining. Put some layers in it. It's appreciated.

• 3:38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, past reviews have been pretty impressive.

• 3:38:28Jocko Willink?

  You know what I haven't done for a while is read reviews, like, online, or repost it. I gotta do that. Those are awesome.

• 3:38:36Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 3:38:36Jocko Willink?

  I'll do some of that.

• 3:38:37Speaker 01

  Also, also, we have a YouTube channel. Uh, video version of this podcast, you know, you want to see what Steve Ward looks like handsome guy? I would say as far as handsome guys go, but nonetheless, if you want to see what.

• 3:38:49Jocko Willink?

  Thank you, Echo.

• 3:38:50Speaker 01

  And you're welcome, of course. But nonetheless, yes, and we have some excerpts on there. You want to, you know, watch slash listen to those, uh, that's where, that's where you can get on the YouTube channel official, by the way. We got it. YouTube. Boom. Also psychological warfare. If you don't know what that is, it's an album, Jaco's album with tracks, not music album.

• 3:39:12Jocko Willink?

  Not yet.

• 3:39:13Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 3:39:13Jocko Willink?

  We're working it.

• 3:39:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:39:15Jocko Willink?

  Boy.

• 3:39:17Speaker 01

  Anyway, it's an album with tracks of Jaco helping you through a moment of weakness. Like if you're going to skip the workout, there's a little track on there that'll help you not skip the workout, but simply is what it is.

• 3:39:32Jocko Willink?

  Flipsidecanvas.com, speaking to Dakota Meyer. He's got a, a company where he prints cool stuff to hang on your wall. That's all you need to say. Check that out. Flipsidecanvas.com. Got a bunch of books. We talked about one of them today. We talked about a couple of them today, but About Face by Colonel David Hackworth. Highly recommended. There's a new version that has a foreword in it written by me.

• 3:40:00Jocko Willink?

  You know how freaking stoked I was to do that, man?

• 3:40:03Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 3:40:04Jocko Willink?

  Did I tell you that how that happened?

• 3:40:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:40:05Jocko Willink?

  They were, so it started selling again, kind of like when I started talking about it all the time. And so they eventually pulled the thread and tried to figure out why it was selling and they eventually figured out it was selling because we were talking about it all the time on the podcast and, um, they wrote me and said, hey, do you want to write, we're going to re-release it. Do you want to write a blurb for the back, which is like a little quote, like, hey, this is a great book. And I wrote them and said, uh, I'll write, can I write a foreword to it? And they'd be like, you want to write a foreword? And I said, hell yeah, I'll write a foreword to it. Most forewords are about 500 words. If you Google like, how long should a book foreword be? It should be about 500 words. My foreword for this is 5,000 words.

• 3:40:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's like a freaking, because I just went off and explained how I found it, what it meant, you know, all these, the lessons I learned from it. And so, yeah, it's been, it's been awesome. So if you want to check out that book about face by Colonel David Hackworth, then go ahead and check that out. Also, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual.

• 3:41:09Speaker 02

  So good.

• 3:41:10Jocko Willink?

  You what? You just had a company that told you, uh, what they just said?

• 3:41:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, we so they'd already they read Extreme Ownership and their leadership team has them. They have the dichotomy of leadership. And I was like, hey, do you guys have leadership strategies and tactics? And they, one of them purchased it. And they're like, yeah, they're inbound. We got them for the whole team. And the beautiful thing with it is, is you got an issue, you can find it in that book with a, a good solution. And it might not be a hundred percent solution for your situation, but you can take that, formulate it and, and utilize it. That's the, the beauty of that thing.

• 3:41:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:43Speaker 02

  So powerful.

• 3:41:44Jocko Willink?

  That's exactly the, what I had in mind when I wrote it was can you look up in here?

• 3:41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:41:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay, let me go. I'm having a problem with my subordinate. What, how do I do? What do I do? You know, I'm having a problem with people getting on board with the new plan. What do I do? And just be able to look it up in there, find the solution.

• 3:42:01Speaker 02

  The beautiful thing about it is you don't even have to tab it because the answers are upfront. Hey, you're having this issue? Flip to this page. And in a, in a one to two pages, you find your answer. You read through it, digest it, boom, implement it. So easy.

• 3:42:15Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 3:42:18Jocko Willink?

  The code, the evaluations, the protocol. If you need some guidance on where to go. Look in the military, we got told, hey, you're slacking a little here. You could do a little better here. But we go through life without an evaluation of ourselves. How you expect to know where to go? Get the code, the evaluation, the protocol. Get the Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. New version, bigger picture of my head. Therefore, you know, obviously better. Another thirty-five or forty pages of writing in there.

• 3:42:50Jocko Willink?

  Ideal. I'm gonna say it. I don't like to throw that out there. But kind of an ideal gift book, right? It's not just like, oh, I went to the bookstore and I randomly found this book over here called whatever. I was like, I got something with a little substance. It's a little bigger. It's a little heavier.

• 3:43:07Speaker 02

  Looks cool.

• 3:43:07Jocko Willink?

  Looks cool. You could put it on a table and just have it be there. And if you read it, you're doing even better.

• 3:43:13Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:43:14Jocko Willink?

  Woo, what up?

• 3:43:17Speaker 02

  So I got this. You gave me a signed copy a few years ago.

• 3:43:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:43:20Speaker 02

  I'm just trying to see what the difference is.

• 3:43:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Well, the difference is there's about forty extra pages of what I wrote more stuff.

• 3:43:28Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 3:43:28Jocko Willink?

  More information. So there's that. And then also, there's Way of the Warrior Kid Four Field Manual, which is what your kid wants for Christmas. That's what your kid wants for Christmas. Because all these lessons that we talk about, look, you can learn them when you're forty, after you read freaking Leadership Strategy and Tactics, or you can learn them when you're seven. And you can go through life, understanding these things. You can end up in a much better place. So what are you gonna do with your kid? You're gonna put him on a path to mediocracy? Mediocrity? Are you gonna put your kid on a path to being average? Are you gonna be, put your kid on a path to blame other people and be a victim their whole life? Or are you gonna put him on the path to be a warrior kid and step up?

• 3:44:14Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what I recommend. Way of the Warrior Kid Four Field Manual. Go ahead and get some of that. Also, Way of the Warrior Kid One, Two, and Three. Mikey and the Dragons. Oh, you know what kids have to deal with? Being afraid. And it's not just kids. But why not learn at a young age how to overcome fear? Get Mikey and the Dragons. And also Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership.

• 3:44:38Jocko Willink?

  The OG books. Did I say OG?

• 3:44:41Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:44:41Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I did. We also have Echelon Front. It's our leadership consultancy. It's, Steve's with us now on the team. How long you been on the team for?

• 3:44:52Speaker 02

  March. Officially March. I've been, you know, ever since I got out, I've been kind of shadowing Dave and some of the crew, so.

• 3:44:58Jocko Willink?

  So if you wanna, if you want to work with us, if you want help aligning your leadership, if you want to learn the lessons that we learned, if you want us to come in and help your leadership get aligned, help find where the friction points are, help figure out where you can be more efficient as a team, go to echelonfront.com. We solve problems through leadership. And we also have EF Online, which is where we solve problems through leadership online. And we're on there all the time. So if you, if you wanna, if you wanna come on there and you wanna ask me a question, you wanna ask me a question, you might think, uh, how could I ever ask Jaco a question? It's easy. You go to EF Online, you can ask me a question. I'll be sitting right there.

• 3:45:39Jocko Willink?

  You wanna ask Steve a question about how he handled a certain situation, how he organized platoons, how he put teams together, how he handled these leadership challenges? Go on to EFOnline.com and you can ask Steve a question. He's literally be sitting there.

• 3:45:55Jocko Willink?

  So check that out. EFOnline.com. We have the muster, we're scheduling the muster for 2021. Go to ExtremeOwnership.com for details. We have EF Overwatch. If you want people that understand these principles to come and work at your company, go to EFOverwatch.com. And we have people that were transitioning from the military to the civilian sector, and they'll come to your company and work. And if you wanna help service members, active and retired service members, their families, Gold Star families around the world, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mark Lee's Moms Organization. Mama Lee, she's got a group called America's Mighty Warriors. And if you wanna donate or get involved, then go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org.

• 3:46:42Jocko Willink?

  And if you, let's say you just desire anguish and pain in your life,

• 3:46:49Jocko Willink?

  in your own life, we can give it to you if you want it. We can give it to you. If you want more of my mundane discourse,

• 3:46:59Jocko Willink?

  or you need more of Echo's unfathomable phraseology, then you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, which Echo only refers to as the Gram, and on Facebook, Echo is at EchoCharles, and I am at Jocko Willink. Where are you at, Steve?

• 3:47:18Speaker 02

  I'm at SteveWard194.

• 3:47:20Jocko Willink?

  SteveWard194.

• 3:47:22Speaker 02

  Whatever Instagram it is.

• 3:47:24Jocko Willink?

  On Instagram.

• 3:47:24Speaker 02

  Steve.

• 3:47:25Jocko Willink?

  At Instagram.

• 3:47:25Speaker 02

  Steve.Ward194. Is that how it works at Instagram?

• 3:47:30Jocko Willink?

  What, do you post?

• 3:47:31Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 3:47:32Jocko Willink?

  Do you post anything?

• 3:47:33Speaker 02

  So I probably will here soon. It's hunting season.

• 3:47:37Jocko Willink?

  Have you posted, have you posted anything?

• 3:47:39Speaker 02

  Uh, no.

• 3:47:40Jocko Willink?

  What are you hunting for?

• 3:47:42Speaker 02

  Ducks.

• 3:47:44Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 3:47:45Speaker 02

  It's fun, yeah.

• 3:47:46Jocko Willink?

  And it's good living.

• 3:47:49Speaker 02

  Good living, not as good eating as elk or deer.

• 3:47:54Jocko Willink?

  But you're gonna get what you can get.

• 3:47:55Speaker 02

  We can get what we can get, yeah.

• 3:47:56Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, yeah, Steve, man, thanks for coming back on. It's, uh, coming on. It's friggin awesome and, uh, appreciate everything, everything, man.

• 3:48:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48:06Jocko Willink?

  Everything. And thanks to all of our other military personnel right now out in the world on watch. A- as Steve said, you, you all are smarter and stronger and faster and more well-equipped and better-trained than we ever were. So, thanks for, uh, holding it down. Make sure you train up the people underneath you.

• 3:48:33Jocko Willink?

  And for our police and law enforcement, firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service and all first responders.

• 3:48:43Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks for protecting us here at home. And to everyone else out there, you know, Steve talked a lot today about setting a good example, modeling the right example. And you also notice that at almost every phase of his life, he talked about learning and how he learned.

• 3:49:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, I would say that's part of that good example is don't ever stop learning. Don't ever stop growing. Don't ever stop trying to improve.

• 3:49:15Jocko Willink?

  You can only do that if you stay humble. So, stay humble, listen, learn and lead. And also make sure that you keep getting after it. And until next time, this is Steve and Echo and Jaco. Out.