450: Pronounced Dead. Still More to Do. CRACK ON. With Royal Marine, Mark Ormrod.

Mark Ormrod, award-winning author, coach, mentor, motivational speaker and sought-after ambassador, was born and raised in Plymouth, Devon and in 2001 realised his lifelong ambition of joining the Royal Marines. On Christmas Eve 2007, whilst serving on operations in Afghanistan with 40 Commando Royal Marines, he was blown up by an Improvised Explosive Device, resulting in the traumatic amputation of both legs and his right arm and was twice pronounced dead. 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 450 with Kerry Helton and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Kerry.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:07Jocko Willink?

  It was dead quiet when the Bowman radio crackled with HQ giving us a grid reference and range to the northwest. The order couldn't have been clearer. Hostiles. Engage. It was the first we knew about it. Game on. I was straight on the GPMG, cocked it and shattered the night silence with a short burst, fired blind at the grid position given by HQ. Another Marine was in the Sengar, watching through the Sophie and he directed my fire. Come left and you're on. There they are, about eight hostiles trying to come up behind a tractor in a field about 700 meters. They're all going firm or in cover behind the tractor. The GPMG leapt as I let another burst go.

• 0:52Jocko Willink?

  You're just short Ramers, come up a bit. Another short burst. You're on mate. Go for it. The machine gun bucked and kicked in my hands as I let go in a long burst. Tracer smashed into the enemy positions around the tractor and hit the machine gun itself, and hit the machine itself deflecting high into the night. Sangars three and five knew immediately from the long burst that I was on, and piled in with everything they'd got. The enemy were suddenly lit up as an illumination round from a 51mm mortar soared into the sky and turned night into day. Other Sangars added to the light show, firing handheld illumination flares into the night.

• 1:33Jocko Willink?

  The noise was deafening as the fob erupted, red tracer flashing into enemy positions. The high pitched rip of a Mini Me was backed by the funk funk funk of the 50 cal heavy machine gun giving it some. Another GPMG gunner in my Sanger began alternating with fire with me to keep the barrels cool. As soon as my burst ended, he took over malleting the Taliban. As soon as he stopped, I opened up again. By this point, the rest of the lads were lined up on the perimeter wall, firing whatever weapons they had to hand. The Marine on the Sophie site directed us whenever a loom packed up, giving us a running commentary. "We were hitting the Taliban hard.

• 2:18Jocko Willink?

  They were dragging their wounded into a ditch. The tractor was taking so many hits, it was practically sawn in half. Spent shells and link were piling up around my boots as hundreds and hundreds of 762 rounds went downrange with no order to cease fire." "Fuck me, Ramers, they're evacuating the wounded in wheelbarrows." The Taliban were loading up their casualties in a ditch by the tractor and bugging out as fast as they could push. They hadn't gotten closer than 700 meters to the fob. They couldn't touch us. The ceasefire came, and we took a breather. The firefight had lasted about 15 minutes. I had fired more than 800 rounds of ammunition from my GPMG alone. A ridiculous amount.

• 3:02Jocko Willink?

  Usually, I would have been more cautious, but because there were seven or eight of them, we just let it rip. We had given the Taliban a beating.

• 3:18Jocko Willink?

  Well, that brings a smile to my face, and that is an excerpt from the book, "Man Down", by Mark Ormrod. And Mark Ormrod is a Royal Marine who served from 2001 to 2010. And in addition to being a Royal Marine, he's competed in cycling and rowing and swimming. He's a Purple Belt in Jiu-Jitsu. He's a speaker. He's an author. He's a business owner. And he's done all that after losing both of his legs and his right arm in Afghanistan, where he was pronounced dead twice.

• 3:55Jocko Willink?

  But he wasn't done yet. He's still going and it's an honor to have him here with us tonight to talk about his experiences and lessons learned. Mark, thanks for joining us.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. Thank you. I've been wanting to do this for years.

• 4:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, it's interesting. I was just down, Carrie and I were downstairs and I was looking and I had a Twitter message from you from I think it's five years ago where we linked up on Twitter. You were coming to the States, but I wasn't in the area or whatever. We just didn't get it linked up.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:23Jocko Willink?

  So it's an honor to have you here. And I read some opening passages on this. That's a good one right there. I know everything that's, I know all those beautiful sounds. The 50 cal just laying it down. The mini me is just getting after it. Oh, that's just a, it's a good night right there.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  It was a good night. There were no casualties on our, on our part. So it was a great night.

• 4:48Jocko Willink?

  That's makes it a great night. So let's, let's get into it, man. Let's get into the beginning. So you're born, what, 1983?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Yep, 29th of July, 1983.

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  And what'd your, what'd your parents do?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Uh, growing up, my mom had various part-time jobs. My dad originally worked in, so we've got a giant uh, nuclear naval base in Plymouth. So he was like, uh, he worked there as a civilian. Then he spent 10 or 15 years as a, a tyler. So he would travel around the UK. We had these stores over there called Tesco, like a Walmart. And he would do all the, the floor tile in and all that kind of stuff. And then he went back to doing what he did originally.

• 5:27Jocko Willink?

  And were you born in Plymouth then?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  I was, yeah. Yeah, born and bred.

• 5:30Jocko Willink?

  And is that where you're raised?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you, that's where you're from? You're from Plymouth?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  That's where I'm from. That's where I lived. That's where I've stayed. And, you know, unless there's an extreme change in my circumstances, that's probably where I'll die. But we'll see.

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  And you had a twin sister growing up?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Yes, which is very much, uh, an Arnold Schwarzenegger, Daniel DeVito situation. Um, me previously being six foot two and weighing 16 stone, which I think is close to 200 pounds. And her being four foot 10 maybe and, you know, half that weight.

• 6:04Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I actually found a picture on my phone the other day of the, the day I passed out as a Royal Marine with my uniform on, uh, stood side by side with my sister and she, she probably used to come up to like my chest height. Um, when I, when I had legs and was six foot two.

• 6:21Jocko Willink?

  Man, that genetic. Randomness is kinda crazy, right? So was your dad tall, mom short, mom short, dad tall? Like, what's the gig?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Average, all all average, I would say. He wasn't super tall.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  I think he's probably six foot. Yeah, so no, no, no crazy. I don't know what it was, you know? But I know that from the minute I was born, you know, when I, when I was delivered, she had her umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. So I pretty much had, came out the gate fighting, trying to survive. But yeah, it's actually, not a lot of people know that, that I'm a twin. You know, I've got a great relationship with my sister. She only lives about probably less than a mile from my house. With my little nieces and nephews. But yeah, not a lot of people know that I'm a twin.

• 7:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's too bad Echo is not here to kinda go down the twin, you know? Cause it's a little different. He's got a twin, identical twin brother.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  And so they are, they are very, very close.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 7:19Jocko Willink?

  Like, it's, it can be a little bit strange sometimes. But it's, you know, but being a, what is that called? A non-identical twin?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  I guess so. Yeah. And obviously the opposite sex too. So, yeah, you're not gonna be identical.

• 7:32Jocko Willink?

  So you're in school. How'd you like school? What were you doing in school?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  I, I was average in school. Wasn't bad, wasn't good. I think a lot of the times, at the end of the year, when you get a report by your teacher, I was always referred to as, as cheeky. So, you know, a little bit mischievous, but not, not too bad. You know, I didn't love school, didn't hate school, did what I had to do to get through it. So I'd say I was an average student. You know, I just did what I had to do.

• 8:03Jocko Willink?

  And I was watching the documentary about you and it showed a picture of you and then you, you self-stated that you were like a chubby kid.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:14Jocko Willink?

  And I saw a picture of you. I was like, oh yeah, he's a little bit chubby.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:17Jocko Willink?

  And then you tell this story about some other kid picking on you. And he tells you, this is how cruel kids are.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 8:25Jocko Willink?

  This freaking other kid tells you, your body is disgusting. I was like, dang.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:32Jocko Willink?

  And that, that, that like landed on you.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:34Jocko Willink?

  How old were you?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  I would say twelve. Mm hmm. And we were sat down and we used to have like this ten, ten thirty in the morning break. And before lunch where you go and, you know, run around for fifteen, twenty minutes. And I had this routine where I'd go into the cafe and I'd get this pink bun. Uh, like this square bun with cream in the middle. And just like every day I was about to tuck into it and I was sat down in this booth. And where I was sat down, kind of my school shirt with the buttons off was kind of open and you could see in and, you know, see a little bit of side boob in there. And that's when he walked up and he kind of just stopped and looked at me. And then looked me in the eyes and he said, your body's disgusting. And, you know, I'm, I'm pretty chilled out and not a lot of stuff like that bothers me.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  But for some reason, that comment kind of hit hard. And so I ditched the slice, went to the school gym, had about ten minutes left to, to mess around. Locked the door and it was a tiny gym. It was, it was probably a little bit bigger than this room. And there was a rack of free weights in there, a peck deck, a treadmill and a lat pulldown machine. And that was it. And this is maybe ninety four, ninety five. And I took my shirt off and I looked in a mirror and I was like, you know what? That was pretty shitty what he said, but the guy's got a point. Cause I'd just gotten into this, it, it was the time when the Sega Mega Driver came out. And, you know, I had all these video games and stuff, so I was outside less and inside more.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Diet was terrible because I was a kid and just liked sweet things. And without realising, I'd, I'd put on this weight and got quite chubby and out of shape. So I kind of looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, I need to do something about this. But there was no internet back then, so there was no knowledge. And all I could do was save a portion of my dinner money throughout the week. You know, I had like a, a paper round thing that I could do that on a bit of money. And then at the end of the month, go and buy bodybuilder magazines. Cause that's all there was. They didn't have the range. I think there's just these huge guys on the front, like just jacked. And so I'd buy them and, and read them cover to cover to try and understand what I was supposed to do to lose this weight.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  And I didn't really want to look like them, but I didn't want to look like me either. And so I would just go in this, this gym at lunchtime and take what I was learning piece by piece and just apply it. And I liked the way it made me feel physically and mentally. I felt more energised after lunch. In my classes, I could pay attention more. Was feeling a bit stronger. Don't think I looked great, great. Genetically, I'm just not gifted, but I could see the improvements. And so I just kind of fell in love with training from a, from a early age, about twelve or thirteen.

• 11:18Jocko Willink?

  Did you change what you were eating at all too?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Only a little bit. I just kind of ditched some of the, the treats and sweets. But again, didn't know much about diet and nutrition.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  And here's a great example. I, I just knew from watching the Rocky movies that eggs were good for you. So I'd eat fried egg sandwiches, because I thought that was what you did. And not understanding there's different ways to cook things and, and eat and get your macros. So just muddled my way through it. And my parents weren't into that either. So I didn't really have anybody to go to for advice and just muddled my way through it and did the best I could.

• 11:54Jocko Willink?

  Tell you what, the internet nowadays, like you get into anything. It doesn't matter. And there's going to be, someone's going to show you on YouTube or on the interwebs how to do stuff. So these people, kids especially, have such a huge advantage. If they didn't then get sucked into the whole algorithm of, you know, the, the rest of the internet. If you just looked up, how should I train? And that's all it gave you. But damn, if you aren't going to get sucked into some crap. I had a, a lawnmower that was broken. And I went on the internet and, you know, how do I change the, the filter, the fuel filter on this random? Damn lawnmower. And sure enough, there's like a dude, it's like, oh yeah, if you've got this model, here it is.

• 12:38Jocko Willink?

  And just breaks down and just copied him. So yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty crazy what you used to have to do. Go to look at Dorian Yates, because that's probably what you were looking at back in the day. If you're British, you're probably like, Dorian Yates, let's go.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:52Jocko Willink?

  Get something.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  And obviously Arnie and then the big guys, the big names. But yeah, it was, um, it was difficult. It was difficult, but it was, looking back on it, it was great as well. Because it got me into the, uh, that habit. You know, if you've got an issue, this is what you've got to do. Go get some info and figure it out.

• 13:10Jocko Willink?

  It's also interesting, like. For the reaction that you had could have been so terrible to that. You know, you could have become more into your video games. I'm not going to go outside. I'm the, you know, I'm, I'm disgusting. And so now you go into like a deeper into a shell.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  So that's an interesting dynamic that you had as a young 12 year old to be, to take that information on board, not let it wreck your life and say, yeah, the person's got a point. I wrote about this in the book Leadership Strategy and Tactics. It's like a section on how do you take advice from someone that you don't respect?

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:48Jocko Willink?

  Cause it's really hard, right? And what I wrote was like, oh yeah, someone that you don't respect, that you don't like, that you think has it out for you, gives you advice or gives you criticism. What do you do? Listen to them and be like, okay, how, what can I take on board from this? How can I learn from it? And that could be different, like this person, this individual, like you said, that's, you said to yourself, that's a terrible thing to say. But I'm going to take some, something on board from it. It's a good lesson in its own right.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, I think looking back, I understand why I went the way I did rather than.

• 14:19Jocko Willink?

  Well, what was that? That's kind of the key.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Well, a lot of that indoor time that I was spending wasn't just on video games. It was, I'm a big movie nerd. And so I was Arnie Stallone, Jean Claude Van Damme, Stevens. And so I think when he said that to me, those were my kind of role models growing up. So I thought, okay, cool. I'm going to learn this working out thing because I want to be like those guys. You know, I want the muscles. I want to be the action hero, you know, the explosions and car chases and those kinds of things. Unfortunately, it took me down a positive route rather than a negative one.

• 14:51Jocko Willink?

  Good, good lesson and something to be careful for of parents. Now you got into Muay Thai. How did you end up getting into Muay Thai and boxing, kickboxing? How did that go down?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  That was Jean Claude Van Damme's fault. Um, I, I watched those, you know, this is VHS cassettes, right? I watched those VHS cassettes until they just broke. And, uh, he, he was the, the main one for me at that time. And, you know, just the, the splits and the jumping spin kicks and then the muscles and everything. And a friend of mine took me to a gym. Uh, not long after, actually, this, uh, guy had said what he said to me. His uncle was the, was a kickboxing instructor. And so I went down there and I didn't know this about myself at the time, but I was naturally flexible. So I could go in there and I think within a week I was doing the full splits. And then I could do it without warming up or anything. And I was really good at these high kicks. And while I'd watched these movies,

• 15:43Speaker 02

  I tried replicating all these fancy jumpings. And I just had a natural gift for it, you know, and I was like, and it's like anything. If you're naturally good at something, you love it, right? And you get addicted. It seems easier. And so I just started training, um, competing because of my age, I had to compete in these tournaments that were under Southwest of England. I think there were six in a year.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  Were they, were they kickboxing tournaments? What were they?

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Originally it was kickboxing, uh, almost like a jujitsu. They were matted areas, like six in a, in an arena. And you go in there and you do these couple fights in a day. Whoever had the most points at the end of the year after the six tournaments became like the grand champion of the southwest. So I did those to start with. I ended three, uh, became the grand champion of the southwest.

• 16:26Jocko Willink?

  Are they full contact?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  No, you have headgear.

• 16:29Jocko Willink?

  So it's like touch?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  No, it's not. It's not like karate where you, you touch and you break. You, you're fighting, fighting, fighting, but it's, uh, you've got the protective gear on, you know? And that's what led into Muay Thai, because then over the years, as my instructors changed, we got in a guy who was also a, a retired Royal Marine, who was the head Muay Thai instructor. Now, at the age I started training, it was very intimidating because they didn't wear pads and you could use shins and elbows. And I'm like, not really sure I'm up for this. It looks a bit dangerous. But I, you know, I'm going to blame him again, but, uh, you know, I watched Kickboxer and he's kicking down trees and coconuts and he's got Tongpo coming after his girlfriend. And I'm like, okay, let me try this.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  And so I tried that. And, and I, I, I did enjoy it. I, I enjoyed that the competing in Muay Thai was horrible. Um, and it hurt a lot more. But again, it just, it was something I felt naturally good at. Um, I wouldn't say competing, I was naturally good. That, I hated that whole process, the, the, the week leading up to it and, and everything. The training was great. The fighting was horrible. Um, but training, I just, I just loved the training, you know, and, and seeing what I could do. And I didn't know it back then, but looking back on it, it was the whole. Growth aspect of it as an individual, you know, learning these skills, testing yourself, getting better, getting mentors, learning new things. You know, I just kind of fell in love with

• 17:57Speaker 02

  that. And yeah, that's, that was my introduction to martial arts as a, as a young teenager.

• 18:03Jocko Willink?

  So then, the way this school works in England, you get done with, like, we have high school and you get done with high school, you go to college, but you're eighteen when you get done. You guys are younger than that when you get done. What's the first school that, or the, what's the, your high school equivalent?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  So we call it primary school. It might have changed now, but we would leave primary school at sixteen. Then you would go to college, but it's not the same. It's our, our version of your college is university. So college was almost like sixteen to eighteen to get the next level of qualifications. And then you can go to university.

• 18:36Jocko Willink?

  And when you're doing that, what's this, what's the two years from sixteen to eighteen? What's that called?

• 18:41Speaker 02

  That's college.

• 18:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so when you're in that college, they're assessing you to see what kind of like

• 18:49Jocko Willink?

  job would be good for you, right?

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Um, so in, in primary school, you do, the exams you do are called GCSEs. When you go to college for that two-year period, they are, you've got A-levels, GMV, all these different things. You, you kind of select at that point what your career is. And then you go and do some advanced training in that. And then if you want to go to the, the highest level, you take that training and that niche you're in and go to university to get your degree, your masters and all that kind of stuff.

• 19:18Jocko Willink?

  It seems though, like in England, this is kind of from my wife, that's where I've faded information from when my wife would tell me what her career path was like as a kid, but she did A- levels, right? And then she went to the University of Nottingham. But it seemed like in America, you graduate from high school, what are you gonna do? Go to college. And what are you gonna study? Uh, like, they don't know what they're doing. A lot of kids. Some kids are like, oh, I'm gonna be an engineer, I'm gonna be whatever. They, they know what they're gonna do, but a lot of kids, they're just gonna go to college and major in whatever. It seems like England's more specific. Am I right?

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, you, you, you get guided a bit better, I think. And it's probably much better now than it was when I was there. But yeah, you go to university knowing what it is that you're gonna study. And I think, I, I never went to university, but I think if you get there and you decide it's not for you, you can change. I'm not sure. Um. But you definitely go there with a plan and then you just, um, I think it's four years at university.

• 20:18Jocko Willink?

  So you get done at sixteen with that level of schooling.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:22Jocko Willink?

  And then you go into the next one, the next level of schooling, right?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  So I I kind of did. So I stayed at the same school I was at and went into what was called the sixth form, which is. It's not quite college. It's like the watered down version of it. And I started studying GMVQ Advanced Business Studies. Cause I didn't know what I wanted to do in my life. And so me and uh some of my friends, this is this is how we made the decision. We just got together and went, should we do this course? I'm like, yeah, cool. So I went and did it and it basically involved, and this is nineteen ninety nine, maybe two thousand. So they had desktop computers and internet was coming in and you would read these textbooks and you would get given these tasks. And then basically told to copy what the textbook says, but change some words so you don't get done for plagiarism.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  And I got about six months into that. I'm like, this is terrible. Like, this is so boring. I'm not learning anything. Like, this can't be what life is. Just just read it, copy it and make it your own a little bit. So me and one of the guys there, Tom, we we had a a conversation. He said, should we just ditch this and join the Royal Marines? I kind of been, I'd been looking into it because I had an uncle that was in the Corps. But he hadn't looked into it at all, but was just as bored as the as the course as I was. And we're, okay, cool. Let's do it. So we just quit. And um I I went to work in McDonald's um in in the interim. I had applied for the Royal Marines.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  But there was this brand new leisure complex had been built in Plymouth where I live. And there was a a gym and a health club on there. Now, if you worked in that complex and any of the other businesses, you could get access to that gym for twenty pound a month. If you didn't, it was like two hundred pound a year to be a member. You paid a monthly membership and then every time you trained, you had to pay. And I was sixteen. I had no money. So me and Tom went and worked in this McDonald's restaurant on the complex to get access to the gym to train. For the Corps. Um. And we put our our notice in, uh, waited. I don't know how it works over here, but we used to do. What was called a potential Royal Marines course, which is three days.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  You turn up at the commando training centre and you get hammered for three days, which is an opportunity for the the staff to see if you're ready um or whether they fail you and send you and tell you to come back. And a chance for you to get a taster and go, is this the life for me?

• 22:48Jocko Willink?

  Um hum.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  So I think about four months into having quit and having that job in McDonald's, I got an invitation to go and do that. Went up there, uh I think I was sixteen at the time. Passed that, came back and then just waited. They said, wait for a letter. You get one turn up at uh at your house through snail mail. Giving you a date to start training. Uh keep doing what you're doing. Here's a training program. Here's a kit list and we'll see you in a couple of months.

• 23:16Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  And that was it.

• 23:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I liked in your in your book here, this is such a classic recruiting story. You say, uh going back to the book, our house was only around the corner from the Marines recruiting office in Devonport Dockyard and I was sixteen years old when I walked in. They talked about jungle training and showed me a video. It looked like I seen out a predator, only more real. Blokes covered in cam cream, patrolled through the jungle up to their necks and swamp. The recruiter also talked about Arctic training. Someone's gonna pay me to learn how to ski. They showed me a Gucci, they showed me a few Gucci scenes of Marines leaping out of rigid raiding boats and diving out of an aircraft and parachute training. It looked like one long adventure holiday. Where do you want me to sign?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

• 23:59Jocko Willink?

  That is so classic. But there is like, there's gotta be some intrinsic thing that we have as humans that sees that and goes, yep, because let's face it, if you take a half a second to think about each one of those things, you go, wait. Being in a swamp, wait, why does that seem cool?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:18Jocko Willink?

  You know, uh jumping out of airplanes, wait, why does that seem cool? There's something internal as humans that we have that makes us wanna do that kind of shit, straight up. I know that's what it was like for me. I was like, okay, that's what we're doing. Got it.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:33Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 24:35Jocko Willink?

  I think uh you when you show up it's another thing I was watching that I was watching the documentary about you and it shows guys showing up to the marine training and they're wearing suits. Is that part of the deal?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yep, you turn up um wherever you are in the country, you go down to a train station in Exeter and the commando training center has its own dedicated stop for a train.

• 24:58Jocko Willink?

  It's freaking legit.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's right on the bottom field assault course. Um so you turn up there, you get off and you're already watching guys probably in week fifteen twenty running around rope climbing, firemen's carrying people. You turn up there in your suit. Some guys have got ironing boards under their arms, they've got their backpacks and you know, I had uh a huge bag. I couldn't fit my boots in it because I didn't know how to pack properly. So they were, the laces were tied, they were draped over the bag and an ironing board under the other arm. Just stood there terrified with this guy with a clipboard, like ticking names off. And he didn't do what what I expected, which was, you know, shouting and screaming, which which made it more terrifying because I was just anticipating this guy shouting and screaming.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  And that made me more worried. And that that never really came. And he just checked everyone off and then marched us off to the the foundation block, which is the the big sixty odd man room with all the beds and that's where you spend your first two weeks learning how to iron and wash and shave and all that kind of stuff.

• 25:56Jocko Willink?

  Dang, it's freaking legit. The the Brits. The Brits military is just freaking professional. It really is. I've I've worked with them, not not a ton, but I've worked with them enough. And just their level of professionalism is so freaking squared away and so British, you know. It's so badass. One thing that's really funny, you get in here, uh the the the drill leader, I think that's what it is, the DL screamed us fast in bootneck slang. They actually handed out crib sheets to make sure we got it. Most of the stuff was simple Navy stuff. The kitchen is a galley.

• 26:37Jocko Willink?

  It produced scram. So you got all these freaking, this, so scram is food. Toilets were heads. Excellent was hoofing.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:45Jocko Willink?

  Moldy sock, moldy socks didn't stink. They were honking or gopping. Tea or coffee was a wet. Best served reders. What's reders? Hot?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Hot.

• 26:56Jocko Willink?

  Mistakes made the instructors threaders, which is mad.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Pissed off, yeah.

• 27:00Jocko Willink?

  Not angry. Juice was screech. Pork pies and mustaches were both growlers for some reason. We didn't moan, we dripped. If we stopped dripping long enough to pass out as Royal Marines, we would be allowed to wear the precious green lid that marked us out as Royal Marine Commandos, bootnecks, booties, or Royals.

• 27:27Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit in the book. The book has awesome details. Get the book. One of the corporals didn't like the name Ormrod and kept calling me Ramrod instead. It stuck. From then on, I was known as Rammers in the Corps.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:41Jocko Willink?

  So that's how you got your nickname. Makes sense.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think a Ramrod, it used to be what you would push a round down with the gunpowder. I think it was an aircraft name as well. But in the Marines, I don't know why we just put E R S on the end of all these words. So Redders, Threaders, and they just abbreviate. It made the word longer, which I didn't understand, right? But yeah, I just picked up the name Rammers. Because it was easier to pronounce and that's what I got known as from the day I turned up.

• 28:10Jocko Willink?

  I was like, it seemed like the Aussies did that with people's names. Everyone was a O or an E. Like everyone just like had a nickname that was just their name plus an O on the end of it.

• 28:22Jocko Willink?

  This one point, again, I'm gonna fast forward. You got all kinds of cool stories in this. One point, you say you're in your sleeping bag, you're out on the tactical exercise. It's been raining all day because it's England. You say, I didn't want to get out of my quite warm, mostly dry pit. It was about zero four hundred and pouring with rain. I looked stupidly at my plastic bag of soaking wet, freezing cold clothing. I forced myself to get a grip and dragged myself into the sopping white wet rig. It felt as if the clothes were coated in icy slime. I wanted to cry. My morale turned to shit. This was bollocks. What was the point? We weren't learning anything here except how to endure misery. I considered jogging back to our accommodation block. At least a run would warm me up, then a couple hours kip in a dry bed

• 29:03Jocko Willink?

  and check out a limestone or limestone later in the morning. Basically, you're saying quit.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:09Jocko Willink?

  It started to rain harder. I told myself, you can do that if you want, just give it a minute first. After sixty of those minutes, I was still there and it was someone else's turn because you were on watch, I guess.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:20Jocko Willink?

  I didn't care what they threw at me. Now I'd take it and get through it. Otherwise, that miserable night would have been for nothing. So it sounds like that was kind of your closest uh scenario where you were going to quit.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think, and you know this, right? This is probably the same across the board when it comes to to military training. You can be super fit and and want to run these marathons and ultra marathons and be a great swimmer and all this, but if you can't handle being cold, wet, tired, miserable, sleep deprived, food deprived, then you're not going to make it. And you know, you you were saying earlier, off air, you know, about

• 30:00Speaker 02

  people you know that would be in the the top five percent of runs and stuff. I was in the the bottom five percent for everything. I'd be the guy with snot coming out his nose, crying, moaning, losing his temper, but I just wouldn't quit. And I could be cold and wet and I would see guys that would thrash me on runs and everything that would quit because they didn't like the cold and the wet, you know, and I don't know if it was if my ignorance or my my stupidity or just being stubborn, but I just couldn't I couldn't pull that trigger and quit. I just was like, it's only temporary. This will be fine. We'll we'll get through this. And I actually and I feel a little bit bad saying this, but I actually took some joy when I watched people quit.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  It almost gave me strength. It's like, you know, their soul came out of their body and gave me some extra. So I'm like, I would smirk like, yes, there's another one gone. I've made it another step closer.

• 30:49Jocko Willink?

  How do they quit? Do you just walk away? Like in in SEAL training, you ring this bell. It's a big, not a big ceremony because I'm telling you what, when you're going through SEAL training, there's so many people quitting. You just don't even know. You're you're like mustering, like one muster, you have one hundred and fifty people. And then two hours later, you muster again and you're down to like a hundred. And then two hours or whatever, a day later, you're down to sixty two. And you're just like, well, what what happened? Because most of the people, you're you're you're not in proximity to them. You're in your boat crew. But there's, starting off, there's whatever, like twenty boat crews. So there's just dudes just dropping like flies and you don't even see them. You don't know them. They just disappear, gone. How do you quit? How does someone quit in Royal Marine Training?

• 31:34Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a couple of ways. They can just, they can quit on the spot. They can go to, when we're on camp, um, doing whatever we're doing internally, they can just go to the training team's office and say, this isn't for me, and hand an official notice. I don't know if it's changed now, but you used to go to a place called the opt out block, where everyone that quit would go while they waited for that train to turn up and take them home. There was actually a point there where you can rescind that and go, actually, I've changed my mind. And you, you would get what we call back troops and go back two weeks to join the next recruit troop coming through. And then there's obviously injuries and, and not making the grade and, and things like that. But yeah, there, there's, there's a couple of ways to do it.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  And um, I think that, not the funniest, that's not the right word, but the, the way I enjoyed the most is when people would do it on the spot. Yeah. You know, and there's one particular example where we were all, it was probably about sixteen, seventeen weeks out of the thirty. And we were all outside our accommodation block on camp, stood in three ranks, ready to go on this thing called Dig X, where you wear a full M B C chemical suit with a respirator. Get some. You do a, a kilometer insertion march, you spend the entire night with this tiny little intrenching tool, dig in trenches. Then you get a, a fake chemical attack, and then you do all of this stuff, and then you've got to do a one or two kilometer,

• 32:57Speaker 02

  excursion march. And we were stood there about to go and everyone knew how miserable this was going to be. It was like the, the, the one exercise that nobody wanted to do. And this guy, he's still in, in, in file and said, Sergeant, what would happen if I said I didn't want to go on this exercise? And he went, well, then you quit and you'd be gone. And he went, Sergeant, I don't want to go on this exercise. And he went, right, out you get then, just calm, very British. He was like, out you get then, go on the accommodation, hand your paperwork in, see you later. And that was it. And he was gone.

• 33:30Jocko Willink?

  I heard this story this because they you're just talking about gassing and I don't know did they use like a tear gas or something on you when they actually hit you with the CBR attack?

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Not in that scenario. We do that differently on camp in a in a chamber.

• 33:45Jocko Willink?

  They do that in SEAL training and it's a lot of gas like it's it's next level. Well, I think you don't really know when it's going to come, but uh I was talking to some guys and one person was a rollback. So he had just gone through and gotten rolled back for whatever. And so now he's going again. And the point comes where they're about to get gassed and like someone looks at the guy and and like, oh, are we about to get gassed? And he said he just like gave that look like it's coming.

• 34:19Jocko Willink?

  Just there's nothing you could do about it.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  No, they used to put us in a chamber down on camp on the bottom floor of your circle says a CS gas chamber and you go in there with all your kit and then they light the CS tablets and you've got to take your mask off and say your name, rank, number, and then wait to be told you can put it back on before you leave. And you get the brief, you know, don't touch your face, don't rub your eyes. And I remember I ran out of there and there was like a waist high fence and I had my eyes closed and I was snot coming out and I hit the fence and somersaulted over the fence onto the grass and was just trying my hardest not to touch my eyes, waiting for the wind to kind of blow it out. But yeah, it's brutal.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I didn't know the human body was capable of producing that much.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  You see it like going from a nose to a guy's chest.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's brutal.

• 35:08Jocko Willink?

  It's being able to, and I think this is something that, you know, when you when you I was reading that piece where I said, you said, oh, you don't, you're not learning anything. What you learn through all these things is how to just turn off your brain and keep going. And even when I was reading that thing and you're saying, oh, I've got these wet, it's freezing cold out. I've got wet clothes that I took off that are now in a pile and I got to wake up and put these wet, cold clothes back on. There's you just have to just have a mind that you can just turn off and just put because that just is terrible. Putting on wet, cold clothes when it's cold outside is just terrible. It's just terrible. And that's what you're going to do. And you're going to do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. That's your life.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  But I think you get to a point, don't you where? You realise it's bullshit, you realise it's a game and then you laugh about it. And you're like, okay, cool. It's all part of the game. This isn't necessarily real life. Once you finish the training, you know, I never ever once had to do that again after that. But you just, you're like, okay, I I understand this is designed to break me. I'm just gonna roll with it, laugh about it and watch other people quit.

• 36:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you're definitely in the SEAL teams, you get way colder in the SEAL teams than you do in training. You get way more fatigued in the SEAL teams than you do in training.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Really?

• 36:25Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, freezing cold, like.

• 36:30Jocko Willink?

  And there's no, you know, you go, you get put in the water and people are whatever, they're they're really cold in your. But in the SEAL teams, I mean, you know, the deal, you're you went to Arctic Warfare. You get in situations where, oh, my God, like, this is absolutely freaking terrible. And there's no bell to ring. You have to just keep going. You have to get it done. And I always tell people, any of that compared to rolling out on a patrol in combat for the thirty eighth night in a row, it's like, hmm. You're, you know that there's things that are gonna kill you out there, people that are trying to kill you.

• 37:05Jocko Willink?

  That's that, that's why they have that training in place. Cause it's gonna get rid of the people that can't say, yep, I don't wanna do this. I'm gonna go do it anyways. That's what's happening.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:14Jocko Willink?

  What's the, do you know what the attrition rate is in that training, like on average?

• 37:21Speaker 02

  So when we started and we went from that training station platform to the the foundation block, there were sixty four of us. Uh, by the time we had finished thirty weeks, well, if you factor in leave is the best part of a year later. There were, I think fourteen of us, what we called originals, that had gone from day one all the way to the end without quitting or failing. Maybe the troop was twenty five strong, um, but there are only a handful of us that had survived from day one all the way to the end.

• 37:48Jocko Willink?

  That's impressive.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  The dropout rate, the dropout rate is huge.

• 37:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:53Jocko Willink?

  You say this back to the book by week 30 of the training course, four tests stood between us and our green berets. It starts with a six mile endurance test in two parts, a two mile obstacle course with pipes full of honking brown water to crawl through, followed by a four mile run, the whole to be completed in 73 minutes. Next is the nine mile speed march carrying 32 pounds of kit in fighting order to be accomplished, to be completed in 90 minutes. The Tarzan assault course and the bottom field assault course have to be completed together in 13 minutes. Finally, a 30 mile march in full fighting order to be completed in eight hours. On top of the load you have to carry between the troop,

• 38:37Jocko Willink?

  you have to carry between the troop, an emergency day sack with medical supplies and hypothermia blankets. I completed the first three tests with no problems. It was exhausting, but I was coping. I could almost feel the green beret on my head. Then came the 30 miler across Dartmoor. I think I've blanked out most of the horrendous parts of it, but I can't forget the last 800 meters. After 30 miles, they decided to end the course with a hill, Riders Hill. My legs felt like I had a pair of concrete boots on as I approached it and started up the incline. I reached the top of the rise and felt relief as the ground leveled out. Then my heart sank as I saw it was only the first in a series of inclines that we had to get up. Pain jolted up and down my muscles of my legs, and I

• 39:21Jocko Willink?

  forced one foot in front of the other. My left boot squelched with a mixture of bright red blood and dirty brown water with every step. At last, I got to the top of the last true hill and plodded down the other side over a stone bridge across the stream to a load of mini buses parked up to collect us. I sat down and couldn't get up again. All through training, we'd learned what an honor the green beret was for Royal Marines. There was a superstition in the Corps that if a recruit touched a beret during the training course, he'd never wear one for real. I expected the clouds to part in a shaft of sunlight and a choir of angels to lower the green beret down from heaven onto my head. In fact, a sergeant jammed the lid into my hand and said, Rammers, good effort.

• 40:07Jocko Willink?

  I placed the beret on my head and dressed it over to the right. It was the proudest moment of my life. There you go.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, quite the anticlimax. Um, that's pretty much as it is. You get to the end exhausted. You know, your body, you can feel the depletion by the time you get to the end. Your feet are just numb and covered in blisters. And then it just gets shoved into your hand and you say, good job, next thing. And I went and sat down after that because we, we do this in, in groups. And there were a couple of groups behind us. And I sat down by the minibus and then by the time the last group came in. I had to get people to pick me up because my, my legs had seized up and I just couldn't stand. You know, but um, yeah, I, I thought it was going to descend from heaven with a choir of angels and place it gently on my head. Perfectly positioned and I was going to get a shot of energy, but it wasn't that at all.

• 41:01Jocko Willink?

  That's funny. When I got to SEAL Team One, so I graduated basic SEAL training and I got to SEAL Team One and the Master Chief was like, uh, hey, you graduated SEAL training. So did everyone else here. No one cares. Yeah, Roger that.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much it.

• 41:15Jocko Willink?

  So you end up becoming a driver. So you got a choice of jobs clerk, chef, mortarman and driver.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, there, there was this thing at the time, uh, DSS, the Direct Specialization Scheme. And basically some guy sits in Naval HQ somewhere and goes, we need people in this specialization, this one, this one, this one, and this one. And so before we done our, you know, marching ceremonial side of things with our family, our pass up parade. They called you onto the accommodation block landing and just told you where you were going and what you were doing. And it, I remember it being like this massive like kick in the teeth. And I'm like, are you serious? I've just done all of this. I didn't join to drive vehicles and you're going to send me on this driving course. And, and I knew to a degree what that job entailed and it was very boring.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Um, but you know, after I had a little temper tantrum to myself, I kind of took myself off and I was like, okay, listen. You're going to get something out of this. You're going to be able to drive this, this, this, this, this and this. You've got no choice. Go out there, do it, and then we can figure out if we can switch later and, and do something that's more enjoyable. And really more in line with what you joined to do.

• 42:25Jocko Willink?

  The United States Marine Corps used to do that too.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Really?

• 42:28Jocko Willink?

  You joined the Marines.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 42:30Jocko Willink?

  Like that's what was happening. You joined the Marines. And at the end of boot camp, they would tell you. What job you are gonna be in the reason, maybe they gave you some choice along the way. But that's the way it was. When I was looking at joining the military, the Marines was like, I said, well, what, you know, what would I do in the Marines? They're like, be a Marine, which almost got it. It was almost there, you know? I was like, cool, I'm in, definitely close. But the Navy had the option of like, oh, what will my job be? Oh, well, you'll, you can try and be a SEAL. Okay. And that's what I ended up doing. But the Marine, the US Marines, you have more influence now. But

• 43:10Speaker 02

  And I think ours do too, because we kinda had a choice. You put your top three on, but it was just ignored. It was just to give you that, that false sense of hope. They knew what you were doing anyway. But this was back when you had to do it on paper. Now there's a whole digital computer system and you can kind of, I think, to a degree, bypass the sergeant major and the chain of command, go straight to naval man and give them your preferences and just do that like multiple times a week or a month until you kind of get what you want. But you never used to go in, the amount of requests I put in for like parachute courses and my sergeant major, I'm sure as soon as I left, just went, ripped it up and threw it in the bin.

• 43:47Jocko Willink?

  When you joined, did you think about the whole idea that there was cooks and drivers and whatever clerks? Did you think about that?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  I did because it was explained to me in the recruiting office. But the way they sell it is, and this, this might be quite unique to the Royal Marines. Your primary job is always infantry. So it doesn't matter if you're a chef or a driver or a sniper, whatever it is. When you deploy, like I did in, in Iraq and Afghanistan, you go back to be in infantry. And then secondarily, you're a driver, you know? So that it kind of takes the sting out of it a little bit. But then when you're in the UK, it's just, you know?

• 44:28Jocko Willink?

  Well, the Marines have a similar protocol, which is every Marine's a rifleman.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:33Jocko Willink?

  Because that's what they're gonna tell you. They're like, now, you're gonna be carrying a spatula.

• 44:39Jocko Willink?

  But every Marine is a rifleman and that's what they say. And, and look, as you both know, I love the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps is outstanding, but definitely they've changed it now where you can have more influence. And listen, the thing is, if that's what you want to do, that's awesome. That's awesome. Like it's awesome that you can go into the military and if you want to be a cook, what a great way to get experience as a cook and serve your country. That's outstanding. If you want to be a diesel mechanic, guess what? We need diesel mechanics in the Army, in the Navy, in the Marine Corps, in the Air Force. You, it's what a great way to serve your country and get that skill set. But if you don't want to do that and that's what you get assigned, that's what turns into a little bit of a bummer. But they've done a good job of fixing that where people have a lot more influence over it.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  I think they had to too, because I know so many people that just left. I don't want to do this. I didn't join to do this. I'm going. And you pay a hundred thousand pounds to, to a trainer or Marine parson. You know, it's a lot of wasted money.

• 45:37Jocko Willink?

  I was on a ship and I was getting ready to go out on a training operation here off of the coast of Southern California. And it was like a bad storm was coming through and it was freezing cold. And we were on our boats, on our little Zodiac boats, and we were on the back of this amphibious ship. And the bosun's mate, first class Navy guy was down there. And it's the, the, the well decked, go the, the hatch goes down or whatever they call that thing. This big giant thing goes down in the back. And so now we're exposed to the ocean. There's huge waves. It's freezing cold. It's raining. And this bosun's mate Navy dude looks at me and he goes, damn, I'm sure, I'm glad I don't have your job. And I looked back at him and I said, man, I'm glad I don't have your job. And it's totally

• 46:21Jocko Willink?

  true. Like that's the best example. Like that guy was doing what he wanted to do and I was doing what I wanted to do. And it's all good. That's how the military works.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 46:29Jocko Willink?

  So you graduate basically what? Two thousand and two?

• 46:36Speaker 02

  One, October two thousand and one, four weeks after.

• 46:39Jocko Willink?

  So right after September 11th. And you end up.

• 46:44Jocko Willink?

  Going to Iraq. That's where you end up going to. Uh, how's it like checking in once you get done with the, with your initial training? You check into what?

• 46:54Speaker 02

  So for me, what happened, there, there's a bit of a, a, a lull, I guess, in the battle where you're waiting to, you know, drive the course. I was waiting to be loaded onto it. So I ended up doing security at the Commander Training Center. Went and did that course and then was actually originally trained to do Afghanistan on Operation Jakan in two thousand and two. So I went through the pre-deployment training. You know, I was eighteen years old. A little bit stupid, a little bit dumb, didn't really know what war was actually all about. So quite excited to go out and, and do this. And I, I still don't know why to this day, but it got scaled back massively. I think it became more of a special forces thing and lots of recce and stuff. So tons of us didn't go. So I felt a little bit disappointed.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  And then two thousand and three, uh, Iraq came, uh, Operation Telik One. So I got put through pre-deployment training for that. Um, went out and deployed there. Did three and a half months out there.

• 47:48Jocko Willink?

  You got some good stories about that in the book. Uh, a lot of it is waiting for war, right? You're waiting for the thing to kick off. You're getting a ton of CBR practice. I forget if you guys go, uh, chemical, biological radiation, like you're in and out of that suit.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 48:05Jocko Willink?

  Hundreds of times. And you talk a lot about that. You talk about the fastest slit trench ever dug.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:12Jocko Willink?

  This was a great.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Delegation.

• 48:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was awesome. You get told to dig this giant, uh, slit trench.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, we had basically driven through the night and I had a, a naval medical officer who was in the back of my, uh, Land Rover, sleeping the entire time. I think we did about, it was like a sixteen hour road. And we got there and, um.

• 48:34Jocko Willink?

  He, maybe he's related to my wife. Cause every time I go on a road trip, that girl is just asleep, bro. But we were. One time I did a seventeen hour drive from Montana down to San, back down to San Diego. We're coming home. We wake up like in. Escondido, which is like a half an hour away. She wakes up and she says, she says, oh, do you want me to drive some? I said, darling, I'm gonna be home in 20 minutes. It's all good. I got this. Yeah. So you had, you had basically one of her relatives in the back sleeping.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Maybe, yeah. But we did this whole road move, um, cause we were acting as uh, like force protection for the, the medics. And we had pushed up from uh, the bottom of Kuwait right to the border. And as soon as we got there, all of the, the naval officers went, right, we've got a really important meeting to go to. You guys dig the trench. And we'd been driving all through, we were all exhausted. And I saw this J C B like a digger in the distance. And as I got closer to it, I walked over and there was like this very young looking, you know, spotty kid in there. So we just kind of bribed him and said, uh, listen, can you, can you dig this trench for us? And we, I think we gave him some of your M R Es actually, cause we had stolen a load of them.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Um, and I, I had a friend as well, who was just jacked and he had his shirt off in the sun. And I think he intimidated this kid a little bit. So he just got this J C B and dug this massive trench. They came back an hour later. Again, we only had small entrenching tools to dig with. And they were shocked, like, how the hell have you dug this like 12 foot trench in an hour? So we didn't tell them. I mean, they might've read the book. They might know now. But um, yeah, we, we achieved the objective and then set up camp there for a week or two.

• 50:14Jocko Willink?

  And it's three and a half months you're over there, you end up, you don't shoot your weapon. Um, you're, again, you kind of mentioned the fact that you were young and dumb, like we all were. So you don't get to shoot your weapon. You don't see any combat, true combat. And you're kind of disappointed about that, of course, because that's what young men want to do. Sometimes even us old men want.

• 50:41Jocko Willink?

  You get home, your daughter's born.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:44Jocko Willink?

  How do you say her name?

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Kezia.

• 50:46Jocko Willink?

  Kezia. What kind of name is that?

• 50:48Speaker 02

  A different one. And that's why we chose it. We went, when it's something a little bit different.

• 50:53Jocko Willink?

  Does it have like, where's it from? Did you just put letters together?

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Pretty much, just put letters together. Yeah, there's no significant meaning behind it. It was just a nice name.

• 51:01Jocko Willink?

  So is she the only person named Kesia? You didn't see anyone else named that before?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Not until after. I probably, she's nineteen now, I probably met two, maybe three other people with that name and someone put an H on the end of it, but hers is just K K E Z I A.

• 51:17Jocko Willink?

  Kesia.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:19Jocko Willink?

  So she's born and at this point, you get assigned a trip to Norway. And this is where you kind of start thinking, maybe I'm going to do something else.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I looked at my career at that point and I thought, you know, our minimum

• 51:39Speaker 02

  term that we have to serve is five years. And I thought, okay, I've owned the Green Beret, I've been to quote unquote war. I've done the art that I think the only thing I didn't do was go to the jungle in that, in that first five year period. I'd boxed as a heavyweight boxer for the Marine. I squeezed a lot in. And I think I was twenty two and I thought, I've got responsibilities now. I can't be jetting off all over the place for months on end and not see my daughter grow up. So, you know, I had a, a, a long, long conversation with myself about the future and what I was going to do. And the right thing to do is what I did and I put my notice in to leave. I thought, I'm quite proud of what I've done this five years. I've ticked a lot of boxes.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Now I need to go get a new job, maybe with the police or the fire brigade and be a dad, be around to see my daughter grow up, enjoy that. And then figure life out after that. I thought, I'm definitely young enough to, to start a new career. So I put my notice in to leave.

• 52:35Jocko Willink?

  How long was it between putting your notice in to leave and you, when you actually got out?

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Twelve months.

• 52:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you had a full year?

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:43Jocko Willink?

  What did you prepare for the civilian sector?

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Not much.

• 52:49Jocko Willink?

  This is kind of a loaded question because I didn't recognize, I thought it was nine months, but yeah. So you have a year to prepare to get out.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:56Jocko Willink?

  What kind of job did you line up? What kind of career did you have squared away from when you got out?

• 53:00Speaker 02

  So here's the issue with it, right? And I don't know if this is how it works over here in the, in the US military. But you get that twelve months, but that doesn't mean. That you're exempt from doing other stuff. So I think in that period, I actually did another deployment to Norway for a couple of months. So that completely ruined everything. Um. We had to go on exercises um around the UK. So that add up another couple of weeks, couple of months. And it wasn't until maybe the last eight to ten weeks that I actually started to take action on on stuff and to do stuff. And I did what a lot of guys do back then. I don't have many skills, don't have many qualifications, and I and I just went and retrained as a bodyguard. I flew out to South Africa. Um. I had I'd actually separated from my daughter's mum at this point as well. So I was in a bit of a.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  I could have took my notice out and stayed in, but mentally I'd already made that switch.

• 53:48Jocko Willink?

  And you you first you became a bouncer as soon as you got out, right? That was sort of the first thing you did?

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Well, I can say this now because I'm out, but I was a bouncer while I was in. I spent six years. The pay was so bad. I had a daughter, a mortgage. I was earning. Oh, my God, eleven hundred pound a month, um trying to pay all these bills. So I had to take an extra job and I was doing three nights a week for years. As a nightclub doorman. And actually, in the day when I was in the UK, I would climb in the back of the trucks, button them up and sleep. Because I tried to explain this to people at the time, like in the military, they they would take us at seven in the morning and dump us eight miles from camp and we'd have these runs to do and. You know, it's very physically demanding. When you're not getting home till three o'clock in the morning a couple of nights a week and then having to do that, you've got to grab a sleep where you can.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  So it was a very stressful period for me. And then when me and my daughter's mum separated, we get a a bit of money. Um. To retrain when you leave the military. And I had a bit saved. So I just took all of that. Um. Signed up to this course in South Africa and went over there for six weeks.

• 54:49Jocko Willink?

  And the goal was you were going to get into like executive protection and.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  That's what I thought. I thought I'd be walking around London with a fancy suit on, talking into my wrist and protecting celebrities. But um I'm sure you guys know that's not the way that world operates, um not all the time. So, yeah, it was a bit. It was a bit.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  I was a bit disillusioned with it. And for some reason, I think it was because of my age. It certainly wasn't for the lack of work, but I just couldn't seem to get my foot in the door with anybody that was willing to employ me and give me some good jobs. So, you know, I was I was working as a doorman at the time, sleeping on a friend's sofa. Eventually graduated to renting a room in a house, just trying to figure it all out, you know, and getting in some trouble.

• 55:32Jocko Willink?

  When you were being a bouncer out in town and you are you not allowed to do that while you're in the Royal Marines?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  It's like the one thing you can't do is security work. You can have another job, but like the there's like three things that you can't do. I don't know what the other two are, but security is like number one. And I actually, as I was leaving, my Q M, I can't remember his name now, he's a major, caught me three times working.

• 55:55Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, how did you work in town without the boys showing up and being like, bro, what are you doing?

• 56:01Speaker 02

  I didn't, but they were all pretty cool with it. But there was one who just wasn't. And every time he dragged me in his office, and I think the third time he dragged me in, I was about six weeks from leaving, so I didn't really care. Um, but it was, I remember having mixed feelings about it. I'm like, I get it, but the times you've seen me, you've been out partying, you've been drunk, you could have just let it go. But you dragged me in the office Monday morning with my heels together. You know, yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir, doing the the routine. And I was a little bit annoyed about it, but, you know, I got away with it. I didn't end up getting charged or anything like that. And then just, you know, did that until, you know, tried to figure something else out.

• 56:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you you mentioned in the book, and again, get the book, because all this cool stuff is in there. But you mentioned that when you go to this training, this five weeks of training in South Africa, you learn, look, you learn some stuff, you get to do some ambulance rides, you see people get shot, you see people get stabbed, you have a baby get born, like, there's a bunch of cool stories in there about that. And when you get home and you don't really get a job, what you realized you learned from that school? Was that you like that kind of job?

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 57:10Jocko Willink?

  Meaning you like guns, you know, you like doing dangerous, cool stuff, and you missed having like the camaraderie.

• 57:19Jocko Willink?

  That you had with going through that course because there was a bunch of other military, ex military guys in that course and this lead you to the decision that you're going to go back in the Marines.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, I very much missed it. Very much struggled as a civilian. And do you know what it felt like? It was when I was, even when I was working as a, as a bouncer while I was in the military, it was cool. But when I left, it was like someone had flicked the switch and put a giant neon sign above my head saying, he's a civilian now. Treat him differently. And that's how it felt like even the people I used to serve with treated me differently. The, the civilians that were coming in the nightclubs felt like they treated me differently. Whenever police were involved in incidents, they felt like they treated me differently. I didn't like it. It's like all the respect I felt that I had been a Royal Marine had gone. And so I'm like, all right, I'm not doing this. I can't live this way.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  I'm going to go back to what I ironically thought was the, the warm, safe, loving embrace of the Royal Marines. Um, so yeah, re, reapplied, um, went to go back in, didn't have to do training again because I, I think I've been a civilian for 12 months. So just did the annual test, fitness, shooting, the, the NBC CS gas thing again. Um, and was back in uniform within four weeks.

• 58:34Jocko Willink?

  Dang, they get it done.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I could have done the whole thing in a week. I don't understand what they did. Like you turn up one week and it's the fitness test. Come back next week for the weapon handling test. Come back for the shooting test. I'm like, I could do most of this in one day. But yeah, they spread it out for four weeks. They were paying me, so I wasn't complaining.

• 58:53Jocko Willink?

  You end up going to 40 commando.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:57Jocko Willink?

  You say here, within a matter of weeks, I was in OP Tag training for Afghanistan. The Operational Training Advisory Group was responsible for constantly updating training packages for troops about to deploy to theaters such as Afghanistan or Iraq. So you roll right in.

• 59:13Jocko Willink?

  You're doing an exercise. This is kind of an interesting story. You, you had a vehicle that had like an issue. And it would, it would shut down when you shut it off and it would need to jumpstart.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 59:22Jocko Willink?

  So you pull over the side of the road and you're trying to get this thing restarted. There's a couple of Land Rovers parked nearby. Some Army officers in there and you say, I went back to one of them. Excuse me, sir. Any chance I could borrow your slave leads? I need to jumpstart that four tonner over there. While they were sorting the leads for me, I noticed the young officer with ginger hair, sitting quietly in the back of the rover on the right. I recognized him straight away. I went back to the four tonner with the leads and told the other drivers, Stu Green and a fellow Marine called Rookie, what I had seen. Here, Prince Harry, sitting in the back of that Landy. Yeah, Ramers, of course he is. Eyebrows he is. And by the way, you guys have this thing that you talk about. It's eyebrows means if I'm wrong, I'll shave my eyebrows off.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:03Jocko Willink?

  So eyebrows he is. Go have a look for yourself. The rookie, rookie went over and confirmed I was telling the truth, so I wouldn't have to shave my eyebrows off. After that, the prince realized there was no point in lying low and he got out of the Landy for a leg stretch. At the time, almost no one knew what Prince Harry knew. He was going to serve in Afghanistan for real and was doing his op tag for a reason. I didn't give him a second glance. I presume never see him again. So why would I?

• 1:00:29Jocko Willink?

  So you're back in and you detail some of the training preparing for that.

• 1:00:35Jocko Willink?

  But eventually you're, you're going to Afghanistan. And you fly to Afghanistan. You first stop at the big base, Camp Bastion. And then you head out to FOB Rob.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Yes. Forward operating base Robinson.

• 1:00:52Jocko Willink?

  Going to the book here, as the dust cleared, uh, this is you landing, landing at FOB Rob. As the dust cleared, a bare chested boot neck, wearing shorts and flip flops, grinned at us through an uber Chad mustache. And massive lamb chop sides. He looked like he'd stepped out of a 1970s porn movie. The RSM back at Bastion would have given a, would have had a coronary, just looking at a photo of his growler. Welcome to FOB Rob, he chuckled. Grab your stuff and follow me. So there's your arrival.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:01:27Jocko Willink?

  Going a little bit here. I didn't know, fast forward, I didn't know any of the lads here and we didn't, and we hadn't even started to get to know each other when we trooped outside to be allocated to Sanger Watches and to meet the Sanger commanders. I was pleased when I saw mine was Corporal Helsby, because I knew him. We'd been through training at Limpstone together at the same time and served in Iraq together. I'd taken a year out in Sivvy Street and he'd re-enlisted since then while, and re-enlisted since then while Sean, that's his name Sean, Sean had carried on. He was a bit shorter than me at around five foot 10, but he was mega fit. He was from Manchester and had his brown hair shaved tight to his head. The good thing about Sean was that he was a natural leader. He never had to raise his voice, lose his temper,

• 1:02:12Jocko Willink?

  or bollock people for, to get things done. The lads just didn't want to let him down. Part of what he did was that he never passed shit downhill. If we messed up, we knew we had earned him a bollocking from the Troop Stripey or HQ, but he would never let you know about it. He could make you feel terrible just by a shake of the head, which would let you know he was disappointed with you. He would seem perplexed that you would behave like a dickhead when you were capable of much better. It was worse than copying a bollocking. The other thing was his judgment. It seemed to be spot on all the time. He never had any worries about going on, I never had any worries about going on patrol with him. He made you feel safe. You felt that if the shit hit the fan, Sean would be able to sort it out, do the right thing,

• 1:02:56Jocko Willink?

  and get you out alive at least. In short, I would have followed him pretty much anywhere, and most of the lads felt the same.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Yup.

• 1:03:06Jocko Willink?

  It's always good to dispel the rumors or the, the stereotype of military leadership, that the military leadership of good leaders like yelling and screaming at everybody and it's like, here's a guy, totally respected, you'd follow him anywhere, never even had to raise his voice.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Yup, 100%. Natural leader, 100%.

• 1:03:26Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. The ground heaved, clouds of dust drifted down from the mosque ceiling. That's where you guys were staying. Yep. And chips of clay render fell off the walls and rattled the deck. What the incoming yelled Jürgen. The shelter quick and get the books. You can get the introduction, all these different characters. They're freaking awesome. Jürgen being one of them. Uh, I leapt off my cot, flapping like a novice and piled on my body armor and helmet. Shit, I was wearing flip flops. I started putting on my boots. Ramers, come on, ah, fuck it. I flapped my way out of the mosque and ran at full tilt 10 yards across the compound into a shelter, a two story HESCO shack topped with railway sleepers piled up with sandbags on top. Marines were piling in. What the fuck was that asked? I asked a mortar.

• 1:04:11Jocko Willink?

  Nah, Ramers, you can hear mortars whistle, whistling before it hits. That was a Chinese rocket, I reckon. 107 millimeter. They don't make that much noise as they come in. Sounded quite close. Yeah, it was near the bogs. Let's hope no one was turfing out one just then. I looked around the shelter. I was scared and trying not to show it. The HESCO could soak up a lot of damage, but a direct hit. I looked at the railway sleepers up top. We were sitting underneath tons and tons of sand and gravel. If this was brought down on top of us, it would bury us alive. This was not the glamorous warfighting I'd come out here for. Sitting in a gloomy cave, no way to fight back, waiting for the sleepers to collapse in a ball of flame shrapnel and rock.

• 1:04:56Jocko Willink?

  What was I doing here? I got a grip on myself. There's nothing you can do about it. Just chill out, I told myself. The Taliban can't aim those rockets to save their lives. Be one in a million if they manage to hit us here. Slowly, I got over the shock and composed myself. We were all in it together and none of the other lads seemed to be bothered.

• 1:05:16Jocko Willink?

  Little bit of a reality check there.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:18Jocko Willink?

  Getting freaking bombed for the first time.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And like I say, you just feel helpless and defenseless, right? You just got to wait and see what happens and and hope for the best. And it's not, it's not a great feeling, is it? You know, just sitting around waiting and really what you want to be doing is is reacting. You know, but they were built pretty sturdy. There were never any incidents. Um, and they did their job. They protected us, kept us safe.

• 1:05:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the times that I've been like in vicinity, getting mortared. Um, I always just think about those guys in World War One. Like it's gnarly getting mortared with four rounds of sixty millimeter mortar. That sucks. Can you imagine just being in a trench line on the front? And just receiving massive artillery for weeks and months and years on end? Uh, I I can't imagine what that, I can't imagine what that was like.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  No, me neither. Terrifying is what it's like.

• 1:06:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cuz you get a like what you described there is a little bit of, a little bit, you know, a little fraction, a little probably four minutes of terror, you know? You hear, you can hear like you like it describes there, you can hear mortars if they're getting launched close. And you can hear them coming in. So you kind of get a little bit of that feeling of like, oh, chant, there's a chance.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:06:39Jocko Willink?

  There's a chance I'm in my last twenty seconds of life.

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:06:44Jocko Willink?

  But, you know, what do you get? Four mortar shot at you, six mortar shot at you? So that's, you know, maybe you go through three minutes of that, this might be my last twenty seconds of life. But go a day, a week, a month? It's why those freaking horrific videos, you've seen those videos of guys in World War One that come back, the guys that had really bad.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Shell shock.

• 1:07:07Jocko Willink?

  Shell shock.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:07:08Jocko Willink?

  And they can't stand up and they're just shaking so bad. It's freaking horrific to watch.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  It's heartbreaking. Yeah, it must've been tough.

• 1:07:16Jocko Willink?

  What was your, when you were getting into Afghanistan, were you pretty much still with the young, dumb attitude of like, hell, yeah?

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. A hundred percent. Um, I remember.

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  Feeling curious, is this gonna be different to Iraq? And the pre-deployment training had already let me know that it was gonna be, because it was completely different, the training that we did. Lot more intense, lot more focused, I think is the word. And so I knew it was gonna be different. But there were still elements that caught me off guard. Like when you went to Camp Bastion, you know, and there's a coffee shop and a pizza hut. I'm like, what's this? This is like going to Disneyland. And you're walking around and there's, there's people immaculately dressed with creases in their uniform. And I'm like, okay, this is not gonna be the whole six months, I doubt. And then when we flew into Far Robinson, I was expecting this Chinook to land. And we'd all be running off, getting around and all around the fence.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  And then a guy turns up with flip flops and no T-shirt on. I'm like, what's, what? I thought he was gonna have body armor and a helmet and be fully rigged, ready to go. So that was kind of like an adjustment period. And then, you know, that stuff started happening, the mortars coming in, getting attacked. And then you're like, okay, cool. This is, this is what I thought war was going to be like. And it very much lived up to my expectations.

• 1:08:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and if you think about your training when you were going to Iraq, there was just no combat experience for, like, the guys that we were training, most likely zero of them had combat experience. You know, maybe one or two of them, maybe you had some holdover. Maybe some guy came home early from Afghanistan or something like that. But, you know, there was just didn't have combat experience. And so the training is gonna be different. Because if people are operating off what they think the war might, what they think war might be like, it's gonna be different and it's gonna be substandard. And then when you have people that are coming back from war and actually coming back from the specific theater that you are going to, you know, they know how to run good training. So they're definitely gonna step it up.

• 1:09:25Jocko Willink?

  The training that we conducted, look, and we did our best in the, in the nineties. We did our best to conduct good training. And we had good ideas and good principles from the Vietnam era guys.

• 1:09:39Jocko Willink?

  But there was a different theater and they passed us on their principles. But it still wasn't there where it should be. But then, once we all started coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. And it's like, oh, yeah, we're going to run this training. We're going to make sure our friends are ready.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Jocko Willink?

  And that's what it was about.

• 1:09:58Jocko Willink?

  Another little note here on leadership. You say the commanding officer, the officer commanding the FOB was a Royal Marines captain named Chris Jesson. FOB bosses were usually majors, but Captain Jesson was no ordinary officer. For a start, he joined the Marines as a booty in the eighties. And been promoted to warrant officer class two, a serious non-commissioned rank. He then took it a stage further to become a senior corps commissioned officer and was promoted to lieutenant. He was now in his late thirties with 20 years' experience and knew the corps backwards. He was backed up by CSM Bob Toomey, a married man with two young children who was about 37.

• 1:10:37Jocko Willink?

  Between the pair, they had almost 40 years' experience as Royal Marines and they commanded instant respect among the bootnecks.

• 1:10:47Jocko Willink?

  So you got a good crew of leadership out here.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did. Yeah, very good.

• 1:10:52Jocko Willink?

  And you, you talk a lot in the book, you're spending a lot of time on, basically on guard duty, for lack of a better word. And you're in these sangers. Are the sangers pre-built? Describe a sanger for me.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  So they were built by engineers, you know, the Hesco barriers.

• 1:11:10Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  So basically, the entire FOB was made of Hesco barriers. It was like a giant kidney shape. If you were lucky, it was stacked too high, but most of the time, just one. And the Hesco barriers were one level, sorry, the sangers were one level of Hesco barriers. Externally, they were covered in barbed wire to stop people storming them. And there were little windows. We had two windows in ours and on the roof, the roof was railway sleepers and corrugated iron, just stacked with sandbags and dart and grit to protect it. And that was it. Internally, there was a map of the local area and a little crib sheet with some local phrases where you could try and communicate with people. A radio.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  And that was it, you know, and you just sat there observing, you know, watching your arcs for hours a day and night and then defending from any incoming attacks. It was it was pretty solid. And that was proved with our success rate. You know, every time we were attacked, nothing happened. It was in an elevated position too. So that that was to our advantage.

• 1:12:16Jocko Willink?

  The whole FOB was in an elevated position, yeah.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, for that area. And I think in total, there were seven of these sangre. We had responsibility for three. And then we had, there were some Americans with us, Dutch, maybe French as well, that manned all the other ones. Yeah, but it's pretty tight and defensive in there. And we never really had any, any issues. I just could never get my head quite around how when we were in these, these FOBs, in the FOB, walking around, you had to have your helmet on and your body armor and your weapon close to you. But if you wanted to go out and do a run, you could run around the whole thing in shorts and no t-shirt. So I'm just like, this makes no sense to me. Like, I'm still in as much danger as I would be, but

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  I can run around in a pair of shorts and trainers and that's it. But yeah, luckily, nothing, nothing bad happened. We did, we did, however, and I think it was the Americans, they spent a long time building, because we were living in these pre-existing mud huts and stuff that were in the area. They had built wooden accommodation and literally the day they finished it, it took about three weeks, a mortar came in, straight in the middle, no one was hurt luckily, burnt the thing to the ground, you know. So, yeah, it was, it was a, it was a very well defended FOB that we worked out of.

• 1:13:38Jocko Willink?

  You talk, you talk and you tell some stories about sort of the, the rules of engagement that you were following. And sometimes you'd be saying, hey, why aren't we engaging this guy? And, and you go through some pretty good examples of why? Why those rules of engagement are in place and how they work. So I thought that was a really good, uh, really good thing to understand from, from your perspective. Um, that being said, I'm going to go back to the book here. I was itching to get into a scrap and let off some steam. A mid-morning dust up against an enemy prepared to stand and fight was what we were all looking for. There was a definite competition between some of us to see who could be, who could do the best in a contact. It would put all our training to the test and give us something to tell the grandkids about. The biggest fear for all

• 1:14:23Jocko Willink?

  of us was landmines or IEDs. In a contact, you can fight back. Use your superior skills, communications and firepower to win. There was no way to fight an IED. All you could do is try and detect it before it detected you.

• 1:14:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the IED threat is a nightmare.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  I, I always remember me and the lads having conversations and we used to say, you've got to be pretty dumb to set off an IED. You know, obviously there's remote detonated ones, but because of the terrain that we were working in, it would be easy to see where that ground had been disrupted and where there'd been, someone had been digging and, you know, you could see the wires and everything. And we had a lot of these conversations, like, you've got to be dumb. Like if you can't see where they've dug these in, then you're an idiot. And then, as you know, a couple of weeks later.

• 1:15:16Jocko Willink?

  Note, note to self, don't talk smack.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:15:20Jocko Willink?

  That's weird. We, it was hard. And I was, you know, in an urban environment. Um, and man, they were good at putting in those IEDs.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:15:30Jocko Willink?

  One of the things, I'll give you an example. They would put a tire on the, on the road, burn it. That would melt the tar. They would then remove the tar, put the IED in the ground. And then put the tar back on and then put dust on it. And so these are literally, we we call them subsurface IEDs, but they were underneath the pavement of a road.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15:54Jocko Willink?

  With the wires running underground, off site, or they'd be a pressure plate. So it was freaking hard to identify and in an urban environment. Cause in a rural environment, if you see something that's manmade, it's very suspect, right? If you see a wire, it stands out.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:16:14Jocko Willink?

  In an urban environment, there's just wires everywhere. There's literally wires everywhere and there's pieces of trash and garbage and and so everything is manmade. And so therefore, nothing stands out and therefore, anything could be an IED. And they put IEDs in curbs, they put them in dead animals, they put them in, they just put them in everything. And it was very difficult to see. And I will tell you that I never, you know, joked around with my buddy saying, is he, anyone who find, who, anyone who steps on an IED is dumb.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, but our our environment was different. I can imagine what you're saying, because there's like, there's just trash everywhere and, you know, it'd be very, very difficult, but there was nothing where we were. It was just sand, dust, dirt and rocks. And, you know, we got the the intelligence briefs. You know, if there's a pile of rocks, that's their sign to each other that there's an IED close by. So we're always aware of that, always watching out for that. And um, yeah, it was, it would be very easy to see when someone had dug into that ground and disturbed it. So very, very different environment. Um, but and and I I think I know the reasoning behind why I didn't see the one that I stood on. I'll never know, um, but I have a theory um, as to why I didn't see it.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  And that's because the the one I stood on was in a, like a shallow bowl in the ground. And that's where we were taking covering and giving fire positions. And it had been raining prior to that. So I imagine because it's in this bowl shape, that the rain had smoothed the surface out and made it a lot more difficult to see. But then when you look back, I think I was, I was twenty four when I was in Afghanistan. And I didn't know anything about military tactics or strategies or any of that stuff. And, you know, we had intelligence briefs, like I said, but I was very like wet behind the ears and understand that. Looking back on it, it makes so much sense that where they put these things, you know, because they know that if they attack you, they're going to run to that position for cover. Let's lay the place with IEDs.

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  If I knew that back then, I would have made a different decision, but you know, fortunately, you do live and learn. I wouldn't make that decision again. But yeah, I think that's what happened. The rain smoothed the area out and it made it very, very difficult to detect.

• 1:18:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're out on these patrols. You covered one of these patrols in the book. You say, "The gravel crunch under our boots as we scanned the ground ahead for disturbance or signs of suspicious activity. The lead section was approaching a narrow footbridge across the river, giving access to the village and fields beyond. HQ was certain no Taliban had dug anything in the bridge and it was clear for us to cross, but the blokes back at the fob didn't have to test the theory with their own boots. As the lead section approached the crossing, we went firm on the hillside about 100 meters behind to cover them. Dinger sent two lads to approach the bridge and take up fire positions on either side of it. Two more pairs went across and went firm on the far side, all quiet. The rest of the section yomped across and went firm, covering arcs of the village."

• 1:19:11Jocko Willink?

  I put that, I read this part just because it's just a classic cover and move situation. You're setting up a cover position, you let an element move across. That's what we all do. That's how it happens. Fast forward a little bit. We carried on, Dinger section matching our pace through the fields on our flank outside the village, hammering home the point of the patrol to show the locals, we could come up their high street and hang around for as long as we wanted. We were the strongest force around. We were polite and we took nothing. We could take on the Taliban anywhere they wanted and win convincingly. We were strong enough to protect the villagers from the Taliban reprisals if they did start to lean our way. They'd better not think for a second about stashing weapons for the

• 1:19:55Jocko Willink?

  enemy down this high street because we would come down here anytime we liked. We were dominating the ground, not just sitting back in the fob, waiting to cop a load of indirect fire.

• 1:20:08Jocko Willink?

  So that's uh what you're doing. You're kind of out there doing these presence patrols of the local populace.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  Yep. If we weren't in FOB Robinson, you know, defending it from incoming attacks, we were out on the ground. Five, six, seven hours a day, um pushing two, three, four, five miles out with objectives, you know, there's an enemy location over there, go disrupt it. There's a weapons cache, go confiscate or destroy it. The usual basic kind of stuff. Um, and they were keen. They were keen to get us out every day if we could. We, we suffered, I think, like a, like most people would, manpower shortages from time to time. Silly little things like, you know, one of the lads fell off the back of a truck and smashed his ankle up and then a couple of lads flew out on R and R. So our manpower was down. So we couldn't always go out every day on these patrols. But whenever we had enough men to man the sangers and mount patrols, we would go out there

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  just to maintain momentum and do whatever we were tasked to do.

• 1:21:05Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Rammers, get down here, his Sean Hels- Helsby. I joined a group of Marines here as briefing in an urgent whisper. HQ got ordered to a silent stand two and triple manning of the sangers. Get all your kit, get all your weapons, systems up and get the GPMGs made ready. Once you're at your posts, no unnecessary movement outside your hard cover. So they got intel, there's going to be an attack. As I approached Sanger four, all hell was breaking loose. The crackle of multiple small arms fire opened up from outside the perimeter. It sounded very close. At the exact same incident, GPMG in, in hangar seven let rip. The gunners overlooking the southern approach to the FOB were getting hit with something with,

• 1:21:48Jocko Willink?

  or hitting something with everything they'd got. They started alternating fire, trying to put down a constant maximum of rounds without melt, melting barrels. Whoosh. Another RPG roared overhead and smashed into the ground a few meters from the doorway to Sanger three, clattering the sandbag watchtower. Fast forward a little bit. We heard on the battlefield radios that there was an estimated thirty Taliban attacking the FOB from a position we called Dicker's Walk, a ruined compound that had been bombed to rubble in a previous tour about three hundred meters from the perimeter. Every spare booty was in the sangers, putting down rounds with their rifles. Tracer streamed out of Sanger seven and its gunners hammered the enemy. Jurgen meanwhile was a busy little bastard in his mortar pit.

• 1:22:31Jocko Willink?

  The Sanger crew was yelling for him to get rounds from the 51 on to Dicker's Walk quick time. He also had a direct link to the FOB HQ via Bowman Battle Radio. Jurgen loved being in contact more than any Marine I knew. He was a true bootneck through and through. He knew Dicker's Walk well. We'd all patrolled through it and we had a panorama and we had panoramic photographs of the landscape pinned up in our compound identifying the local landmarks and ranges from the FOB. He knew what he was aiming at and where it was, but all he had to do, all he had to go on for accuracy was arrange and bearing. He tugged the firing cord again and another mortar round sailed into the air with a sharp crack. Before it even impacted, Jurgen had another round in the tube. HQ saw the fall of the shot.

• 1:23:15Jocko Willink?

  Captain Jensen was straight on the radio. Drop 50 meters and you're on Jurgen. He'd barely finished giving the order before Jurgen had shot the shot, had the shot away. It exploded roughly on target and then he just went for it, firing for effect.

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's the man that you want in a firefight, Jurgen. We were both very similar. We used to train kickboxing and everything out in the FOB. We were very similar, I think, not in just in mindset and in physical size and strength and everything. Definitely one of the blokes I spent most time with out there. And if I remember rightly, that that story leads on to the point where he actually landed a mortar on somebody's head as he was running away. And it was pure luck, but he would never, because he was down behind the wall, just tugging this cord and feeding it. But we had a cherry picker in camp with a camera on top that would scan the area all the time. And it was watching this engagement. And one of the mortars, this guy was running through the field and it just came whistling down,

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  hit him right on the back of the head and pink mist, just gone. It's crazy.

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  And he took, of course, credit for it.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  All the credit.

• 1:24:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's exactly where I put it.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Jocko Willink?

  Next question.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, pure luck. Um, and that was a frustrating engagement because that was Sanger VII and I was in Sanger IV. And our arcs didn't cover that. And everyone wanted to go over there, but you you just have to be professional, don't you? Um, and so we're just in there just, ah, we want to get over and get involved, but we couldn't. So then we had to listen to the gloating and everything else that came after. But they did a good job. They did a really good job, all those lads, in that situation.

• 1:25:01Jocko Willink?

  By the that same thing that happens in that one, a US Spectre gunship showed up. And starts laying waste in those things. So you you call it here, death from above. And it's like, yep. Um, more attacks. You know, again, the book covers a lot of these, the guard duty, some of the patrol. Um, you're static for a while. And then finally you get to go out on some patrols again. Uh, you say here, we hadn't been out of the FOB for five weeks, during which time it had, we'd been pounded to fuck by the Taliban. It must have looked like we didn't want to come out and fight. We were happy to just sit behind our perimeter soaking up the rockets. It was Christmas Eve, time to show them who's boss.

• 1:25:43Jocko Willink?

  I felt the rush of excitement at the prospect of going out on patrol and ran back to my cot to sort out my kit. The plan was simple, two sections with patrol and figure eight with the FOB at the center of the two loops.

• 1:25:56Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. I made my way up a waist deep trench that ran across the slope of a hill and into the bowl shaped depression at the top of the north fort. The ground there offered excellent arcs over the local terrain, a commanding position any infantryman would be happy to get control of. We were doing our five and twenty five checks automatically. No sign of disturbance, no suspicious rock piles, no problem. I stomped purposefully into the middle of the bowl, hefting the load on my chest and back. I placed the lads where I wanted them, indicating which arc belonged to which Marine. I moved around all over inside the bowl, checking out their arcs over their shoulders.

• 1:26:42Jocko Willink?

  Happy I'd got the lads into decent positions with interlocking arcs, I slung my rifle and took a step forward. My boot sank into a layer of drying mud, my full body weight plus thirty kilograms of kit loaded onto the few square inches of soil beneath the ball of my left foot and closed the contact on a pressure plate detonator buried beneath the surface. Boom. The blast wave and a cone of white hot shrapnel hurled me into the air and smashed my body to pieces. The enormous power of the high explosive charge gouged a massive crater out of the hill. It was measured

• 1:27:21Jocko Willink?

  later at eight feet deep and fifteen feet across. Shrapnel tore up my back, burning the skin as it ripped the rear plate out of my body armor, along with the Camelback and DaySack. Weapons and ammunition were blasted in all directions. The extra layer of mud washed over the IED by heavy rain may have soaked up a vital fraction of the blast that might have otherwise killed me, but I'll never know. As I lay there struggling to take in the extent of my injuries, pure rage swelled up inside me. Shitty thoughts were flashing through my brain unnaturally, at an unnaturally fast speed. I totally blamed myself for catching

• 1:28:02Jocko Willink?

  it up for no good reason. These were horrific injuries and we weren't even in a fight. I got more and more distressed as I realized I had just completely fucked my whole life for nothing. My little girl and my girlfriend Becky were going to pay a massive price for my stupidity. Thoughts of me turning up at her school in a wheelchair with stumps poking out all over made something snap inside me and I came to a decision. I was in shock and battered to fuck, but my head was clear. When Sean came over the lip of the bowl, I saw him take in my injuries and stare back at my face. We'd been through training together,

• 1:28:42Jocko Willink?

  served in Iraq together. I had massive respect for him as a Marine and as a bloke. I couldn't have wished for a better man to do what I was about to ask him. Sean. I looked him in the eye. Shoot me. Kezia wouldn't want a freak for a dad. Becky was only twenty-one and stunning with it. She'd find another man, a whole man, not some freaking midget stuck in a wheelchair for all time. I shouted at him. Shoot me. All the anger I was feeling came tearing out of me. I couldn't face life. I couldn't face the life on offer if I survived this and I wanted it over with now. My bloody stumps were hurting, but they'd bring a world of pain with them if I lived.

• 1:29:26Jocko Willink?

  It was index, big time. Just do me a favor and get it over with. Shaun was one of the fittest bootnecks in the Corps. If anyone could, he would understand what it meant to have that fitness ripped away forever. I instinctively knew that in a shitstorm Shaun would have the balls to do the right thing. I waited quietly for him to unholster his sidearm and plant a nine millimeter round in the back of my head.

• 1:29:55Jocko Willink?

  I could never wake up from this nightmare. There was only one way to end it. Please, put me to sleep. Do it now.

• 1:30:03Jocko Willink?

  I wasn't wrong about Shaun. "No way, Rammers," he snapped in a command voice. "We're going to get you out of here. Sit tight and don't even talk about fucking rapping. The helo's on its way."

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Intense.

• 1:30:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of eight foot deep, fifteen foot

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  Around.

• 1:30:30Jocko Willink?

  A round hole.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  With six other devices that were unearthed when this one exploded. And what they were, when the guys came in and cleared the area afterwards and wrote the report, they were anti-personnel mines with the warheads of a hundred and seven millimeter Chinese rockets on top. So, the only thing, I know it says a little bit in the book about maybe the layer of mud from the rain absorbed a fraction of the blast, but I think

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  the one that I detonated must have been where the bowl kind of went up at an angle, maybe at thirty degrees. It wasn't completely underneath me, because if it was completely underneath me and went directly up, then I would have been incinerated. So it must have came at some sort of an angle as I was going to get into my fire position, which is why, you know, a lot of my body is undamaged. It was just the legs and the arm. But it's, you know, I do a lot of quote unquote motivational speaking at corporates and stuff, and I tell this story. I've told it a million times. And I always try to emphasize to people that The thoughts, feelings and emotions that you would expect to go through in a situation like that are the last thoughts, feelings and emotions that you actually do think.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  You know, a lot of people would think you would sit there and you'd be terrified of dying and you would be fearful and you would be scared and panicking. None of that really came into into view for me at all throughout the whole thing. I I felt embarrassed to begin with, because we had had these conversations about how stupid you must be to trigger an IED and then I went and triggered one. I felt shame, I felt anger because I had now put seven other men in this situation where if there was a small arms follow up attack, they were going to die and it was going to be my fault. I thought about my daughter and Becky and instantly thought, and and this all happens in seconds, right? This is probably all these thoughts, feelings and emotions within five seconds.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  I instantly thought, right, well, their lives are ruined because they're going to be lumbered with me now. And, you know, I didn't know what it was like living as a disabled person. I just imagined people would push me in a wheelchair and wash me and feed me and dress me and all these things. And I didn't want that for anybody, let alone my girlfriend, now wife, and my first born child. So that's why I asked Shaun to do that, you know, I'm like, and I thought he'll understand because if he was in my situation, he'd be the same. So I asked, I took my helmet off and I threw it to the side. And I just thought, I imagined it was just going to feel like getting punched in the back of the head and then, you know, lights out. So I just sat there relaxed and that was a strange thing as well. I was very relaxed throughout the whole thing.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  My adrenaline had spiked, you know, my fight or flight kicked in. I I wasn't that bothered about dying because in my mind it was an honorable way to die. And because of what had happened at home, you know, I'd separated from my daughter's mother, I didn't really have a great relationship with her. I thought, well, she can grow up being proud that, you know, daddy died doing something honorable and trying to make the world a better place. So I was at peace with it and I'm like, right, just, you know, take the shot and then I'll hopefully come home and get like a hero's funeral or whatever it is. And, you know, people will turn up once a year at my gravestone and say hello to me and, you know, that's it. And I honestly was just at peace with that from the beginning. But then, obviously, the lads being the lads, why aren't gonna do that? Um, Shaun started coordinating the evacuation.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  And again, you guys know this, you know, you you drill these scenarios, right? A thousand times and you'll cock it up eight, nine times out of ten. But when you need to do it, when it's real and someone's life is on the line, those mistakes just don't happen. So instantly, I think it was Jargon was on the radio, giving a nine liner report back to HQ. They were scrambling a helicopter from Camp Bastion. I had a nineteen year old on his belly with a bayonet out, prodding the ground and then marking left and right a safe route for when the medic got there. One of the other guys was coordinating all around defence, straight away. And Shaun, the entire time, was was just talking to me. And I was just laying there and

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  imagine if you had pins and needles, right, in in your legs and your arm and then intensify it by like ten thousand, that that was the sensation. It wasn't pain, it didn't hurt, it was just very uncomfortable. And Shaun was talking to me the entire time. And I remember closing my eyes and the sun was beating down on my face. And I just pretended I was on a beach in Spain. And I and it's so strange to to explain this to people, but I felt calm and relaxed. And I was just like, cool. What's gonna happen now is I'm gonna pass out and go to sleep like I would every night. Only this time I'm not gonna wake up. And then I started to feel extreme exhaustion, like the most hard I've ever been in my life.

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  And then the medic got to me very, very quickly because we were like, we were just finishing up that patrol. We're like two hundred metres from the front gate, the HQ compound was inside the FOB. He got out to me, scrambled up onto this high feature, jumped into this uh crater that I was in via that safe route, what the the guy had marked for him. Put tourniquets on my legs. He then asked me to to tighten the tourniquet on my arm to keep me conscious and responsive because I was in and out at that point. He put his hands under my armpits and he had a, the stretcher was like, from what I remember, like a tablecloth with handles. Because we're in this huge boat, you couldn't use the rigid version. And he put his hands under my armpits and he dragged me over to the stretcher.

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  And then I felt pain, uh, and it was like a, like a stabbing sensation in my right leg. Well, I imagine, you know, if you put a screwdriver under your kneecap and it just started ratcheting down on it, that's, that's what it felt like. And I looked down, I asked him, you know, stop, put me down, looked down to my leg and coming out with my thigh was like a, like a thin piece of rope or, or string covered in blood and sand and that, and it went into, into a boot, into my boot. I don't, I don't know why I did this, but I, I picked it up and I looked inside it and my, my foot was still in there. So the medic took it, he put it on my stomach. He, my left leg was completely gone, my right leg was still, it was gone, the, the upper and lower bones were gone.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  My hand was still intact, but it was just a, like a big floppy mess. So he, he put the leg and the arm onto my stomach. And then I, I've no idea how he got me out of this crater, avoided the six other IEDs, got down off the high feature. But he did, and then he put me into the back of this vehicle, uh, called a supercat that was waiting for us. Now, the driver was, uh, Bob Toomey, the sergeant major. He's driving along, we're getting thrown all over the back of this thing because of how rough the terrain is. And I remember like, I didn't have my helmet on at the time and I remember smashing my head off the side of it. And at this point I was just kind of, they were talking to me and I was just kind of groaning, like to reply to them that I wasn't dead. I couldn't really say anything as I was trying to, uh, process everything that was going on.

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  And as we were climbing up the incline to go into the front entrance of camp, because of how loose the terrain was and, and how big the holes and, and dents in the ground were, you had to be quite aggressive with the driving. And Bob, the sergeant major had done this before. And so he got to a point where he had to, I think he had to hit the accelerator and then, and then bank to the left a little bit. And as he did, and we hit like a, a pothole, the medic that had saved me fell out the back.

• 1:38:07Speaker 02

  Now I fell out after him, but as the bottom of my back hit the kind of tailgate of the vehicle, the guy driving swang around, reached out and just grabbed whatever he could grab to kind of hold me half in half out of the vehicle. And he ended up grabbing my femur that was coming out of my right leg. Now, he left the medic because that other section of eight men that we had left with earlier, they were at the bottom of the incline. So he was safe. He had eight heavily armed men to look after him. He drove me through the front gate, right way through our compound, through camp to the H L S. And the last thing I remember is this, this Chinook landing, the sandstorm that's created from the propeller blades and then the heat of the exhaust, which is the point where I blacked out.

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  Um, and later on found out that was one of the times that they had declared me as dead. So I don't remember anything after that point.

• 1:39:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, um, actually the documentary has pictures of your injuries.

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:09Jocko Willink?

  And it's, well, I read the book first and so I read that section about how he's grabbing your femur. And in your mind, you're thinking like, well, what does that, what does that, what does that actually look like? And then I saw the pictures of your wounds and it's like, yep, there's his raw femur sticking out.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:26Jocko Willink?

  Like a, like a damn baseball bat, basically sticking out. That's what he grabbed to keep you in there. Um, so you stayed conscious for a pretty long time.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Jocko Willink?

  Are you thinking you're gonna die?

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  Never. It's, it's, I know it sounds strange. It's so bizarre. I, I, I had so much confidence, I think, in the people that I was working with, that I knew that they wouldn't let that happen. And I didn't feel scared of dying. And I think that helped me to think that I wasn't going to die. And it's, it's, I still, it still kind of shocks me now that the thought process that I went through. But I was just like, no, no, I'm cool. I'll survive this. And you know, your body, your adrenaline kicks in, the medic shot me at more morphine as well. So, you know, I'm starting to come up on that. And nothing really bothered me at that point. And like I said, the Chinook landed. I don't remember anything after that. I've met the entire Mark team over the years since and, um.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  I think it'd be quite cool to share that story because they've told me and it fascinates me. But they landed this Chinook and there was another guy injured in the blast, Stu. He got shrapnel in his tricep and shrapnel in his back, so it wasn't life threatening. And I don't know if you, you might do it differently, but the way we were prioritising casualties at that time is if you've got a dead guy and a guy that's dying, you have to just leave the dead guy because you don't want two dead guys. So when they, they felt me for a pulse, I didn't have one. They couldn't get any intravenous lines into me because all my veins had collapsed because of the massive blood loss. And when they put an oxygen mask on me, they said it should have steamed up to show that I was breathing, but it didn't. So they put me on the back and went, right, he's dead, leave him, let's go work on this

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  guy. As one of the medics walked past me to get some equipment to go and work on Stu, he said that my eyes started to flutter, which meant to them that my heart was beating. So he alerted some of the other medics, they came to work on me. And I mean, you can't make this up, three days before I was injured, whoever runs the UK military medical world had green lighted this new technique to be used where if you can't get intravenous lines into somebody's veins, you can take a medical drill and you can drill into their tibia and fibia and you can administer fluids that way. Problem being, I had no tibias and fibias. So these two medics, Charlie and Millsy, and you've got to imagine, right, this is

• 1:41:49Speaker 02

  not a clinical hospital room, this is the back of a Chinook full of sand and dirt, banking left and right to avoid RPGs and mortars from the ground and AKs. They had no idea what to do, so they got these medical drills and they decided to drill in to my hip, one at the front, one at the back. The first time they did it, they put the line in and it failed. They told me that they didn't, that the skin was too loose. So they pulled out, tightened the skin up, one in the front, one in the back again. They said three minutes later, I was awake and responsive. The first thing that I said was that my arse hurt, which isn't a marine thing, it was apparently a side effect of mass amounts of morphine. And then they were asking me these questions, which I was coherently answering, I wasn't just groaning and moaning anymore.

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  And I I I complained because prior to deploying, I had spent a significant amount of money on some custom Nike with ramblers on the tongue, ramblers on the side. They were all color coded. And I wasn't going to get to wear them. And that was my main concern at the time was I'd spent all this money on a pair of trainers and I couldn't wear them. So they then they flew me back to Camp Bastium, took me to the field hospital. Sergeants had to look at the damage and uh they had to amputate both my legs above the knee and my rot on above the elbow. That was the only way they could save me.

• 1:43:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that thing about the giving you fluids through your pelvic, like I was watching the video about it. That's just, I didn't even know that was a thing.

• 1:43:19Speaker 02

  It wasn't. They made it up on the spot. They literally made it up on the spot.

• 1:43:22Jocko Willink?

  Where are they putting the fluid into? Like into the bone marrow or something?

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  I guess there's I've no medical knowledge at all, but whatever they do in the tibia and fibula, I guess it's the same thing. It must be the marrow or something. I don't know. But it worked, thankfully.

• 1:43:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, um.

• 1:43:41Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, getting me and Sue away from the fob quickly and safely was a massive team effort. Everyone involved responded magnificently and without a doubt, I owe them my life.

• 1:43:52Jocko Willink?

  I would like to put down a massive thank you to everyone, particularly the lads of Echo Company Forty Commando, whose skills and courage got me off that hill alive Christmas Eve. And then the medical team just freaking incredible, incredible. Um, and what I had, I had to reread this like five times to make sense of this. That was Christmas Eve. You, on on Christmas Day, you're home.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. About four o'clock in the morning.

• 1:44:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I know why it didn't make sense to me because it's so much further to go to to America.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:44:27Jocko Willink?

  No, because I'm thinking of getting to California from Iraq or Afghanistan. Like, there's no way you're getting home the same day. It's not not possible. But you only have to go to England. That's only that short. What does that have? Go to Germany? Well, how long is the flight over there?

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  No idea.

• 1:44:39Jocko Willink?

  Four hours, five hours, something like that? It's nothing.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  It's not. It wasn't long, no.

• 1:44:45Jocko Willink?

  So again, you you talk about this, just you the notification of the family. The first message that they get through is like, you lost a leg.

• 1:44:54Speaker 02

  A foot.

• 1:44:55Jocko Willink?

  A foot.

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  Just a foot to start with.

• 1:44:59Jocko Willink?

  You get home, your parents going to see you. You say Becky didn't want to be the first one to go in and see because she was frightened of the mess I'd be. Mum and dad came in first. Mum was in a state of utter shock and disbelief. I don't think she stopped crying for four days after she was told the news. She kept thinking she was in the middle of a bad dream and would wake up any second saying, oh, thank goodness Mark's okay. She was like that for months afterward. Mum was struck by how big I seemed after all the thoughts of how much of me was missing. My shoulders seemed to fill the bed, almost touching the rails of both sides. Heavy, the heavy bandaging to my stumps filled the space. Even my good left hand had caught up in an ugly piece of shrapnel that cleaved the palm to the bone.

• 1:45:41Jocko Willink?

  They were able to save the hand, but it was a bit too bandaged up like a boxing glove. Dad came out wiping the tears off his cheeks and reported to Becky, he looks okay. He just seems to be asleep. Go and see him. It's all right. He's still our Mark. Becky came in still believing that everyone, even my parents, had made a mistake. And you talk about this in the book. She was like, no, it's not Mark. It's not my Mark. She saw my face, which was unmarked, and that was it. He's still gorgeous, she said out loud.

• 1:46:12Jocko Willink?

  We kind of, we kind of didn't talk about you meeting Becky. And we was gonna talk about it when you were talking, because you met her when you were a bouncer.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:46:21Jocko Willink?

  You went through the whole courting process. You were pretty slick. She kept showing up at your club and eventually you said, hey, listen, if you, if you don't give me your number, I'm gonna ban you and all your friends from the club.

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  I, I pursued her for months and she was like, no, I know what you're doing. I'm like, not doing, not doing it. And then, and I did it in a tongue in cheek way, right? And I was like, listen, this is your last chance. Give me the number or you'll never come in this club again. And then she broke. Give me her number and the rest is history.

• 1:46:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you had been with her for now, like probably a year at this point.

• 1:46:55Speaker 02

  About a year.

• 1:46:55Jocko Willink?

  Um, and, you know, obviously traumatic for her to go through.

• 1:47:01Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, by the 28th, again, this is going so quick, by the 28th, although there was no more, although there was more surgery to go through, the injuries had settled down and I started to come around. The first thing I heard was Becky's voice. My proposal came out as a croaking whisper, and by proposal, you mean marriage proposal?

• 1:47:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:47:19Jocko Willink?

  Becky could barely hear me and I was not sure what, and was not sure what she had just heard. "Did you just ask me to marry you?" she asked. I managed to smile and nod. My aunt came into the room and Becky said, "I think he just asked me to marry him. Is that right, Mark? Did you just ask me to marry you?" They both listened and I repeated as clearly as I could, "Will you marry me?" My aunt caught it this time and told Becky, "He did, he did." Becky loud out a quiet shriek and said on the spot, "Yes, yes, of course I will."

• 1:47:48Speaker 02

  Apparently morphine doesn't get you out of a marriage proposal.

• 1:47:52Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, it's funny, people were, uh, some of the other people in your family were like, "Hey, listen, he's under morphine right now." Like, you know, let's make sure. And then you go, "The next day, I woke up for a bit longer, was properly with it for several minutes. Becky made a bit of a joke of it to cover for herself." "Mark, do you remember what you asked me yesterday?" She had a big cheesy grin all over her face. If I didn't remember, she was gonna laugh it off. "Yes, I do," I said, "and I remember your answer too." I wasn't about to let her off the hook.

• 1:48:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, when I met Becky, you know, I fell for her pretty hard. Yeah, and you know, right? And I remember, you know, it was really hard. It's always hard anyway, right? Going away from people that you love and leaving them behind. And it was just everything. Cause we were together when I was doing the bodyguarding and that, that six weeks was hard. Afghanistan was hard, all the, all these things were difficult. But I remember when I woke up on the 28th, I remember the kind of blurry lights on the scene. I couldn't open my eyes because it was, it took too much energy. And I was choking on a feeding tube and they took all the mask off and the tube.

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  And I could hear everyone around me. And I think because of the drugs that I was on, everything was echoing and was being repeated two or three times. And I heard like four voices and I instantly recognised hers and it gave me that feeling of comfort, I think, that I was in a safe place. I didn't know where I was, but it felt safe. And I had actually in a, in an ammo tin under my bed in Afghanistan, I was old school. I was writing a letter to her dad. Asking for permission to marry her and had asterisks and crosses out and everything. And I had finally written out a, a neat version that I was getting ready to send before I went on patrol. So I remember thinking, you must have just asked now, he's not going to be that mad if you don't go traditional. So I just asked during that brief moment of consciousness.

• 1:49:44Speaker 02

  I was wait for about fifteen seconds and then pass back out because I was just exhausted, just completely exhausted. And then, you know, the kind of. The initial stages of rehabilitation started. I spent seven days in intensive care. Each day, they gradually reduced my medication to bring me out of this coma that you had me in. And the first, the first day after, so the twenty ninth. I remember, and it's very hazy on a lot. I don't know what drugs I was on, but they, they were, they were wacky. And I remember thinking to myself, I've just lost a few toes and I think it was fingers.

• 1:50:25Speaker 02

  And then the next day, it was, oh, it's both my feet and some fingers. And bit by bit, day by day, I was gradually understanding it until day seven came. And I, I pulled my right arm out from under the bed sheet and scratched my nose because I was right hand dominant before. And I'd been doing that or scratching my, my torso or whatever for the entire week. And as I pulled my arm out, I started to giggle. And the nurse is like, what are you laughing for? And these drugs have been making me hallucinate all week. I had like a eight foot bottle of ketchup in the corner of the room. I got visited by Will Smith. I had a forklift truck in my room at some point. And so as I pulled my arm out and started to giggle, she said, what are you laughing at?

• 1:51:09Speaker 02

  I said, I'm hallucinating again. So my arm's fallen off. And she just gave me that look. And I was like, okay, you don't need to tell me. And on like day seven, I had a full understanding. It's both legs above the knee, right arm above the elbow, couple of burns and, and trapped in the wounds. And that was it. And then on day, on the evening of day seven, they, they took me out of intensive care, moved me upstairs in the hospital to what was called the Barnes and Plastics Ward. And that was when I was to start the, the real road to recovery after that.

• 1:51:41Jocko Willink?

  You have this, um.

• 1:51:45Jocko Willink?

  You have this, this section in here that I want to read. It's, you say, what can you say? We all did a lot of crying, but in the end, tears are no use. Imagine you've lost your legs. If you shut your eyes, you can probably feel them still there. That doesn't mean anything. I could feel my fingers and toes for weeks after the explosion. Open your eyes and take a look. Still there? Good. Now imagine every time you opened your eyes to check your legs, all you saw was a pair of stumps. No matter how many times you open your eyes, still stumps. You are not going to wake up and find it was all a bad dream ever.

• 1:52:21Jocko Willink?

  As I saw it, I had to cope with it and move on. It was like that landmine nearly finished me off, but I'm still here. Am I going to rap or am I going to make the best of it? No matter how hard I tried or how hard Becky or mum or dad wished for it, my legs and arm were not going to grow back. We all had to accept it, just deal with it and crack on.

• 1:52:53Jocko Willink?

  Deal with it and crack on.

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  What else can you do? And, and listen, when I, when I talk about this, I'm always very honest about it because you can brush over it, right? And then make, make it seem like, oh, this guy lost three limbs, woke up, got prosthetics and it was easy. It wasn't, it wasn't like mentally trying to figure that out. I'm 24 years old, went from six foot two and, you know, nearly 200 pounds to three foot five. And while I was in intensive care, because of the limb loss, the infections I was fighting off, I was under nine stone in weight. Um, I mean, right now I'm 60 kilos without my limbs on, so I was probably 50, less than that. And, and it was a lot to deal with and in those first three weeks, there was a lot of false positivity.

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  I remember thinking, I, I need to be positive for, for Becky and then my family, even if I'm not. And then hopefully when I'm feeling down, they'll be positive and we'll just bullshit our way through it, which worked for like three weeks. And then this guy knocked on my hospital room door. He wasn't part of my immediate team. I'd never met him before. I could see his face through the glass in the door. And he came in and he introduced himself and he was the UK's leading medical professional in the food of amputation. So this is January 2008, at that point for 33 years, this guy had been travelling the world, amputating people's limbs and, and following their progress. And he walked in, you know, almost non-emotional, introduced himself and said,

• 1:54:25Speaker 02

  Mark, you need to prepare yourself for the rest of your life in a wheelchair. And then he went on to explain that in his vast experience, he'd never met anybody who had one leg missing above the knee, that had any real success with prosthetics because they were too difficult to use, they were too painful and they took so much energy that people just put him in the cupboard and got in a wheelchair and then he turned around and left.

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  Now, when, when you're in hospital and you're on a lot of medication and it messes with your sleep cycles and all this like, I found myself awake a lot at like two, three, four in the morning on my own with no one around, no one to talk to. And that's when you, you start thinking about stuff. And I started thinking about, you know, how much life I had left ahead of me, seventy, eighty years, whatever it is, the condition I was in, what this guy had told me and, you know, it was difficult to process. And, and I'm always very honest when I do talks and things and I, and I say this, you know, I, I contemplated

• 1:55:26Speaker 02

  suicide that night. And now I, I will never, ever make light of, uh, you know, people that have suicidal thoughts or anything, but this is just how I dealt with it. I remember laying in bed at about three in the morning. And this isn't relevant, but I was super constipated. So that was adding to everything as well and making me feel like crap. But I remember just laughing to myself, thinking, I can't even cut my own wrists. I didn't know how to do, how to actually commit that act. Uh, but I was just going through things that I'd seen in films and I'm like, you can't even do that. And, and I had a little chuckle to myself. And that kind of brought me out of it a bit. And then I got up the next day and I was like, right, let's, let's just figure this stuff out. We, there's, there's

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  got to be some sort of life after this. About six days later, uh, another guy knocks on my hospital room door. And again, I didn't recognize him. He wasn't part of my immediate team, but I was feeling better. So I invited him in and he opened the door and he came walking in on a set of prosthetic legs. He was a double above knee amputee. He had both his arms, but had lost both his legs in Iraq. He had the rear door of a vehicle open and a suicide bomber detonated and took both his legs up above the knee. He sat with me for about six hours and he took his legs off and he put them on. He talked through all the, the Bluetooth technology and the CPUs and the, the fitting process for the sockets and how you get cast for your prosthetics. He taught me through his entire story and

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  journey. Uh, at that point, he was, he was still in the British Army. He was a father and he was on the, the Paralympic snow sport team. And he was a, a part-time prosthetic user, but he'd walked into my room, no wheelchair, no support, no cars or anything. And after about six hours, you know, he got up and left and my morale went through the roof because I had physically seen with my own eyes, somebody in a similar situation to me that was out there living. And from that moment, I thought, okay, cool. All I need to do is get these prosthetics, follow a similar process to what this guy's going through, and then I'm surely I'm going to achieve similar results. So I got a laptop

• 1:57:32Speaker 02

  brought in my room. And you remember, remember dongles, the way you used to get on the internet with a USB netting before wifi, I think. So I got a laptop and a dongle, and I started researching prosthetics, amputees, amputations. And although Mick was similar to my injuries, they weren't identical. So I was trying to find somebody who was a triple amputee, who was out there living, you know, I mean, who hadn't just resigned themselves to life in a wheelchair. And I very quickly found a guy over here in Oklahoma, a young man called Cameron Clapp, who, he's from California. He was hit by a train in two thousand and two, and lost both his legs above the knee and his right arm through the shoulder. And

• 1:58:15Speaker 02

  I saw what he was doing. And it was phenomenal. And it was everything that in my mind, in those early days, when I didn't understand my situation properly, it was everything in my mind that I wanted to do, but all my, my team were telling me wasn't possible. So I spent a lot of time watching his videos, following his social media, reading his blogs and his news articles and everything, just trying to understand this guy a bit, and then to figure out how he had done it. And eventually, I sent him an email, and I told him my story. And I didn't think he would bother replying, because from what I saw, he was flying all over the US, giving talks to schools. He was still surfing and doing these mini triathlon

• 1:58:59Speaker 02

  events and all this cool stuff. But he got back to me within the week. He then introduced me to his team down in Oklahoma, who had built his prosthetics for him. And they, they developed a specific training program for bilateral above knee amputees, because it's, apart from being amputated through your hips, it's the hardest form of amputation. And like that doctor told me, he was right, most people just quit because it's too hard. So they, he had been through this process, he had developed the process, he was the guinea pig for it. And he introduced me to this team, and they all started giving me advice and information and tips on how to improve my independence when I was at rehab. And it was brilliant because. I would go into rehab and have meetings with my team on a Monday morning and they had

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  sketched out what they wanted me to achieve by Friday and we were doing it by Tuesday because of the extra help and support I was getting. Um, so, and I don't know if I mentioned it earlier, but I was the UK's first triple amputee. So there was no path, you know, Mick had been through as a double above the amputee, but no one had dealt with a triple or more. So that made it that bit more challenging because there was no set path for me and no one not to do with me. And I understand it now, looking back, it was frustrating at the time, but they were wrapping me in cotton wool to protect me and to protect themselves. Um, in case I pushed things too hard and hurt myself and had to have surgeries and all this kind of stuff. But the, the help and support that I got from mentors and professionals just accelerated

• 2:00:26Speaker 02

  my rehab exponentially.

• 2:00:29Jocko Willink?

  We actually had a guy on this podcast named Jim Searlsley.

• 2:00:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:00:32Jocko Willink?

  Who was, uh, in Vietnam.

• 2:00:35Speaker 02

  I think I know him.

• 2:00:36Jocko Willink?

  He, yeah, he died, um, recently. Well, actually it's not that recent, it's a couple of years ago he died, but he was a triple amputee from Vietnam.

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:00:45Jocko Willink?

  And he lost his legs like at the hips, like there was no prosthetics to put, to put on him, but his attitude was freaking awesome.

• 2:00:55Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:00:55Jocko Willink?

  And he just got done, you know, got out of Vietnam. He was, he had one month left in his tours, a one-year tour back then, he was in the army, had about a month left and was out, um, set, actually he was, he had just placed his guys in the perimeter and was walking the perimeter and stepped on a landmine. It blew up. His attitude, like, he just, he came home, I think he did however many year, uh, how many months of rehab, learning how to use his wheelchair, learn how to, you know, do all the things that he needed to do. And then he went, started a roofing company.

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 2:01:32Jocko Willink?

  Got into real estate. He, he just, he had a bunch of, well, he got married, had a bunch of kids, grandkids.

• 2:01:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:01:39Jocko Willink?

  Just like an amazing human being. Attitude was just freaking spectacular, but a huge thing that he said, which is the exact same thing that you say in the book and what you're saying today was. He knew that there was nothing he could do about it. Like, there's nothing he could do. There was no, the, the chances of him getting his legs back and his arm back were zero.

• 2:01:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:01:58Jocko Willink?

  So, what is he gonna do? He's gonna go start a roofing company, go have a bunch of kids, and just get after it. And that's what he did with his life. And, just an amazing human being, but that attitude of, you know, you know, people ask me sometimes, you know, the, like, the book Extreme Ownership and the attitude of Extreme Ownership. Well, how do you take ownership of something like that? You know, how do you take ownership of this situation? Oh, you take ownership of how you respond to it. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna curl up into a ball and, you know, look for sympathy? Or, are you gonna crack on? And, clearly, your attitude is freaking outstanding.

• 2:02:35Jocko Willink?

  So, very cool to, to hear, and then you started talking about some of the technology here, and I'll fast forward a bunch of the book. Look, hey, get the book, everybody, cuz you, you go through a lot of those strials, uh, trials and tribulations of what it's like, the rehab, the reintegration with your family, all those things, it's very moving to read about. You get to this point where you say, "I worked my ass off, my arse off, sorry, you're British, so..." "I worked my arse off at Headley, trying to come to grips with the sea legs. These were like, advanced legs with technology in them, and get control of the gate, because an important event was coming. The men of Forty Commando had returned from their tour of Afghan, and were to be awarded the Operational Service Medal on the parade ground

• 2:03:20Jocko Willink?

  of their base at Norton Manor Camp. My ten-week service in the Afghan meant I'd earned the right to receive the medal alongside them. I was now walking lengths of the physio department on my sea legs, with a quad pod walking stick with four rubber-coated feet on the end of it. My knees were bending most of the time, and getting out of the bars, those are the parallel bars, made a massive difference, because I was less worried about getting tangled up and going arse over tit. It was still a struggle, but I was getting somewhere. An idea popped into my head. The parade ground at Norton Manor was flat. The whole base was flat. The only thing to stop me walking there would be a couple steps up to an office or the steep slope behind the front gate.

• 2:04:05Jocko Willink?

  That's it, I promised myself, I'm gonna walk onto that parade ground. I will stand to have that medal pinned on my chest like any other bootneck." And, that's what you're training for.

• 2:04:21Jocko Willink?

  You, you, you also, you, you have a bunch of stuff in here. Prince, Prince William and Prince Harry, they come to Headley Court. Um, you're on this city, so city salute on the BBC with Jeremy Clarkson, which I have to bring up because my fa- my family like is obsessed with uh Clarkson's Farm and Top Gear and uh, what's the new one? Top Gear got replaced with the Grand Tour. Oh, yes. So, so my family's very into Jeremy Clarkson. Uh, this buddy of yours, Ben McBean, he was an, he was another, um, amputee.

• 2:04:57Jocko Willink?

  And you guys are getting ready for this uh ceremony. And you say a week later, Ben McBean and I got ready for the medal ceremony in the sergeant's mess at Norton Camp, at Norton Manor Camp, home to Forty Commando. We had our desert rig uniforms over our prosthetic legs and we're sitting in our wheelchairs. The Royal Marines Band struck up and the men of Forty Commando marched in their positions and were brought to attention. They knew I was gonna walk, try to walk and stand shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues through the whole ceremony.

• 2:05:32Jocko Willink?

  Through the whole ceremony, I was fretting that I would stack it, get hurt and never forgive myself for, for making a tit of myself. In addition to that, they were looking at hundreds of Marines who'd come home without a scratch from the Afghan hoofing suntans and had enough war stories to last a lifetime.

• 2:05:53Jocko Willink?

  Looking at them and looking at me gave my family a couple of tough moments, I think. Everyone on that parade ground knew how lucky Ben and I were to be there at all. We'd been given a second chance and had lives to live thanks to the courage, skill and hard work of so many people. We were certainly, we certainly knew how lucky we were, especially when, when we remembered three men from Forty Commando who would never be coming home.

• 2:06:19Jocko Willink?

  My friend Corporal Damian Movahill, am I saying that right? Yes. Who was thirty-two, stepped on an IED during a patrol near two months after I was blown up. He died instantly. I'd worked with Damian in the air defense troop at Stonehouse before the Iraq War and he was a top bloke. In combat, he was a natural leader, one of the best section leaders in Forty Commando. He never flapped, no matter what was going on. He won respect up and down the chain of command for the way he looked after the lads in his section. They were devastated to lose him and so was I. Equally well-liked and well-respected were Lieutenant John Thornton,

• 2:06:58Jocko Willink?

  who was only twenty-two, and a brilliant young boss, and David Marsh, a hoof-in Marine, who was just twenty-three. They were both killed when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb during a patrol just a few weeks before the end of their tour. Every single person on the parade ground thought about those three men during the ceremony. That's why I felt lucky to be there, and that's why I was determined to make the best of the chance I'd been given. There was one more Marine who couldn't be with us for the ceremony, Joe Townsend, who lost both legs in a roadside bomb. Blast. He was in Selley Oak Hospital, too well to attend, after awarding the medals at the camp. The Second Sea Lord Vice Admiral Johns was going

• 2:07:42Jocko Willink?

  to fly straight to Joe's bedside to present him with his Operational Service Medal in person. The Commando was stood to attention, it was time for Ben and me to join them. I launched myself out of the wheelchair and stood up. There was absolute silence on the parade ground as if everyone was holding their breath. Ben and I started, Ben started moving and so did I. I had the quad pod walking stick and concentrated on taking one step at a time. The weather was good, but there was a strong wind blowing across the parade ground and it was the one thing I hadn't thought of. I concentrated like crazy on not getting knocked on my arse by that wind. Falling close behind me was Major Bob Toomey, who'd driven the Supercat to get me from North Fort to FOB Rob. If he saw me wobbling, I think he was going to try

• 2:08:27Jocko Willink?

  and scoop me up in the chair before I went. After Ben and I had managed a few steps, I was taken aback. The crowd started to applaud us. It took me a couple of seconds to realize the clapping was for me and Ben.

• 2:08:41Jocko Willink?

  I carefully walked around to the back row of Echo Company. There was a gap in the line waiting for me. I concentrated on getting myself in the right place and then shifted my weight onto my heel to lock the legs into standing position. Bob Toomey was giving a discreet running commentary to the rest of the lads who were stood at attention eyes front for the arrival of the second Sea Lord. They weren't allowed to look around or say anything to me. So Bob was quietly saying, "That's Rammer's moving into position. He stood at attention. That's him squared away. Carry on, lads."

• 2:09:16Jocko Willink?

  Admiral John stepped up to the podium and told the whole commando that their professionalism and dedication was what had seen them through a difficult tour and would continue to shine brightly.

• 2:09:27Jocko Willink?

  He told us to remember our successes and that they were not easily won, that three men had paid the highest price for them.

• 2:09:36Jocko Willink?

  He talked about the wounded and singled out Ben, calling him Prince Harry's personal hero and me calling me a legend.

• 2:09:48Jocko Willink?

  The ceremony took 40 minutes and I spent every one of them concentrating on not falling over. I was the last one presented with my OSM for Afghanistan by the Echo Company commander who'd taken over from Chris Jensen, Major Neil Rafe and Sergeant Major Toomey. They came down the line shaking hands with me. I was willing to speak, I was willing them to speed up and get the job done. At last it was over and I'd made it. We fell out and Becky came running up to me. She slid her arms around my waist to give me a kiss. It was one of the first times she'd been able to give me a smooch in my proper height in public and it felt fantastic for both of us. The moment capped one of the proudest days of my life and I'll never forget it.

• 2:10:32Speaker 02

  It was an emotional day.

• 2:10:34Jocko Willink?

  Do they have that on video anywhere?

• 2:10:36Speaker 02

  I think the the media do, because the place was was swamped with uh local and national media. But, you know, when I when I left hospital after, I I only did six weeks in hospital, I had three surgeries, six weeks, and then went straight to rehab, uh February two thousand eight, mid mid February, I think it was. And um I didn't I didn't really do this, I didn't know this consciously, it was more subconsciously back at the time, but I I thought I need to have goals going through here, I'm just gonna, you know, part of my way through and make a little bit of progress. And the lads still had about five weeks out in theatre,

• 2:11:18Speaker 02

  and then when they came home, they were gonna get like ten weeks leave, so I thought, okay, I've got enough time to to train, to get to a reasonable standard of walking where, when this day comes around, I can stand on the sidelines, walk on the playground, stand shoulder to shoulder with these guys and get this medal uh standing. Because I knew that everybody was gonna expect me to be pushed on in a wheelchair. And and I'll be honest, the motivation, the the main motivation was to show the world that we're watching what it means to be a Royal Marines commander, because in a lot of our marketing campaigns and adverts and recruiting it, they always talk about it's a mindset.

• 2:12:01Speaker 02

  You know, it's it's not just about the physical side, we talked about it earlier, being cold, wet, tired, hungry. It's the mindset, so I wanted to show the world what that actually meant. But I also wanted to make a bunch of the lads cry, and and I knew they would do it, right? Because you know, it's like, everyone's big, rough, tough, hairy, smelly, hardcore. But in certain situations like that, th- they will break down and cry, and a bunch of them did. And and I felt so good about that.

• 2:12:32Speaker 02

  But it was.

• 2:12:34Speaker 02

  It was such a driver for me, because I'd get up in the morning in rehab and I'd have blisters on the ends of my legs and, you know, being on prosthetics throws your whole body alignment out, especially if they're not set up right. So my lower back would constantly be in pain. The sockets on my leg come up to my groin and they would constantly cut and I'd be bleeding all the time. So there were lots of days when you get up in the morning, you're like, I don't want to do anything. I just want to get in the wheelchair, have some breakfast, you know, go to some occupational therapy thing and play chess with my prosthetic arm and that's it. I don't want to put the legs on. But I put a little bit of pressure on myself with that event and the date that was set for it and my reasons behind wanting to do it to push

• 2:13:19Speaker 02

  myself when I felt like crap to get out and do something. And I just thought, even if I just take one extra step and improve by one percent, at least I'm getting closer. And even if the day comes around and I completely cock it up and I fall over and whatever, none of that really mattered. You know, what mattered was the switching mindset, having that goal and then just doing whatever it took to achieve that goal. And once I did that, I came home that day. I went back. I only live an hour, 20 minutes away from where the camp was. And I started reflecting on this period of rehab and that actual day. And just kind of like a light bulb went off and I thought, this is what I need now. This is how I'm gonna achieve

• 2:14:03Speaker 02

  things in my life, whether it's personal, professional, whatever areas in my life, fitness, finance, family, career, whatever's important to me, I need to set goals in those areas. You know, some can be short term, some long term, some easy to achieve, some more challenging to achieve. But this is what's going to keep me in a positive mindset and keep me driving forward. And I think that's where a lot of people might get things wrong and they get in that negative headspace and they turn to alcohol and substance abuse. I never felt I had the chance to get in a negative headset mindset because I was always looking from that point on what do we do next? What do we do next? What do we do next? What do we do next? And just kept setting these

• 2:14:45Speaker 02

  challenges and goals and then developing some sort of plan and then just executing as much as I could. And I've been doing that ever since then, you know, 15, 16 years later, whatever it is, just setting these goals and figuring out how to achieve them, you know, and it's kept me straight and true and on the right path.

• 2:15:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you end up staying in the Marine Corps, in the Royal Marines for a while. And I'm gonna fast forward a little bit here. Becky and I were married on 2 May 2009, 16 months after my accident, at a beautiful 800-year-old country mansion called Mann- Mannidan House.

• 2:15:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:15:24Jocko Willink?

  Set in five acres of grounds, the ceremony was conducted by the Plymouth Registarr on the porch of this magnificent old building and the sun blazed down all day. My best man was my dad, Paul, and my unofficial best man was Bob Toomey, who was helping me, helping to look after me and all my gear. And I'll close out the book with this right here. We danced in front of all of our guests. As we turned on the floor, Becky's eyes were shining, and as the song finished, all the guests roared applause. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. 16 months earlier, smashed to bloody bits in the back of a Supercat at FOB Rob, I told Dave the medic that my dancing days were over. With my beautiful bride Becky by

• 2:16:09Jocko Willink?

  my side, I'd shown everyone I'd been wrong about that. My dancing days were only just beginning.

• 2:16:20Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:16:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, your dancing days were only just beginning. You stayed in the Marines until 2010. You're a torchbearer, torchbearer for the Summer Games.

• 2:16:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:16:33Jocko Willink?

  For the Olympics. So did you run for that?

• 2:16:36Speaker 02

  Did I?

• 2:16:37Jocko Willink?

  Like, how far did you, did you have to run? How did, how did that work?

• 2:16:39Speaker 02

  It was a walk.

• 2:16:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:16:40Speaker 02

  With, with the prosthetics. Uh, it was only about a K.

• 2:16:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:16:44Speaker 02

  I think just close to my house. Big, big relay that went on all over the country.

• 2:16:50Speaker 02

  But again, that, that's another moment where, you know, when you're laying in a hospital bed at 24 with three limbs missing, you don't think there's any future, you don't think there's anything you can do, things like that. You start to change the way you think. And like, actually, this opens up doors for me and it provides opportunities that I wouldn't have had had this not happened. And, you know, that, that's just a, a small example, but hundreds of things over the years of, and, and hundreds of doors about, I wouldn't have wrote that book, you know, if, if I hadn't been injured because I had nothing to write about.

• 2:17:21Jocko Willink?

  What made you decide to write the book?

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  So, you know what we talked about in the beginning, about getting bullied, discovering fitness, martial arts, joining the Marines, the body. I always thought in the back of my mind before I was injured, when I get to about 50, it'd be cool to have like a book written. Cause I, if I'd done all this by 24, you know, surely I'm going to have some more adventures in my life and not even to, to publish and sell, just for me and the kids and grandkids, I thought this would be cool. And then when I was in rehab, because I was the first triple amputee, and there was a lot of media interest about it. I, I developed a relationship with a journalist. And he joked to me one evening, because in the evenings, all the other guys would go out on the PlayStations and things, and I couldn't do any of that with one hand. So we just used to like hang out and he said, oh, we should write a book together.

• 2:18:06Speaker 02

  And I was like, I actually think that's a good idea. Maybe we should. And, uh, cause now I've got something to write about. So, and it was difficult, right? Because I was still serving, the MOD have to clear all this. They tell you to a degree what you can and can't say.

• 2:18:21Speaker 02

  But we got to work with it. He ghost wrote it for me, which is why there are some things in there, like he refers to Afghanistan as the Afghan. No one says that. But I didn't actually read that book. That was published in 2009. The first time I read it for myself was in lockdown from COVID. Because I got bored and I'm like, maybe I should read my own book and I actually edited it, edited the whole thing um to be a bit more from me. It's a kind of a hybrid of me and him. And I understand it because you have to, if it was just me, no civilians would, they wouldn't understand what the hell is going on. And if it's just him or the military guys would be like, that's stupid. So you have to have this hybrid, you know, of the way you write these things. But yeah, I'd always wanted to do it. I just thought I'd do it for myself. And then this opportunity came up. And I'm working now, I'm trying

• 2:19:06Speaker 02

  to write a full autobiography, including all the things that we talked about, all the things I've done since leaving the military with jujitsu and reorg and fundraising and speaking and all this kind of stuff. Um, and, and also, you know, I read your books to my children during lockdown, the way the warrior kid, I'm like, I need to, I need to, because you know, you're tucking them in every night and you want to give them something empowering to read. No, I was reading them. And I'm not just saying this, I loved them. And I thought this is such an empowering way to teach kids these, these lessons about what's important. So I'm not stealing your idea, but I would like to write a version of my own story, similar to that, um, where I teach children, you

• 2:19:49Speaker 02

  know, it's okay to look and be different. And, you know, you go through some challenges and adversity in life. And if you set goals and you get around good people, this is how you can overcome it and teach them some positive lessons. So I'm working on all that. I'm sure you know, it's, it's not as easy to just have an idea. You get rejected a lot by people. Um, but I'll keep with it. I'll keep pushing these projects forward and see what happens.

• 2:20:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like an awesome book for kids. That's outstanding. How did you end up in the Invictus Games? Weren't you a little bit anti Invictus Games in the beginning?

• 2:20:21Speaker 02

  Completely anti.

• 2:20:23Jocko Willink?

  And so why were you anti? Okay. So first explain what the Invictus Games are.

• 2:20:26Speaker 02

  So the Invictus Games is, it was created by Prince Harry. It's a military only, global version of the Paralympics. So men and women that are injured physically or psychologically, um, not just through combat, through, through anything, sports injuries, wherever it is, can apply to join their country's team. And then I think it's now every two years they do it. There's a games and you go out there and you compete. And it gives them a focus and something to work towards and a positive outlet and a great addition to their rehab. But I was very against it uh in the beginning because.

• 2:21:02Speaker 02

  What happened to me was, you know, back in the day when I was in a wheelchair, I'd meet a lot of people, you talk, you know, the city sleuth, Jeremy Clarkson, you meet all these people and these celebrities and civilians. And my experience was whenever you, when I was shaking these people's hands, they would say, oh, so when are you going to start the Paralympic training? And I'm like, is that all you can do as a disabled person is? And it just, and it used to really annoy me. And because of what I did before in, in kickboxing, boxing, Muay Thai, none of these sports appealed to me and, and I'd never done anything before. And I thought that adaptive sport was all about sympathy and pity and, and, and I don't mind admitting this, I didn't look at them as real athletes. I thought they're just, they're not proper athletes, these people, they're just get, they get sympathy, they don't have to train that hard, they don't

• 2:21:46Speaker 02

  compete at a high level. I had it all completely wrong. And the Invictus Games started in two thousand and fourteen and the first one was in London, second one in Florida. In two thousand and sixteen, I was sat at home and every year at Christmas, I go in my office and I write down everything on, like I talked about, fitness, finance, family, whatever it is, I set my goals. And I realized that two thousand and seventeen was my ten year anniversary of being injured. So I thought, okay, how can I celebrate ten years of life? I want to do something that I've never done before. And I sat in my office and I closed my eyes and I, I kind of envisioned like a puzzle.

• 2:22:26Speaker 02

  And like one piece said career, one piece said family, one piece said health and there were several pieces and the middle bit was missing. I'm like, what haven't I done in these ten years? And it was sport. I, I had trained in a gym, you know, I'd kept myself fit and healthy and I'd done bits and pieces, but I'd never done sport. And I'd seen the Invictus Games over the, the previous two years. And I'd seen people that I'd gone through rehab with, go out and compete, and I'd seen them win medals and I thought that was fantastic. But when the cameras were off, what I saw was them regain their confidence, reintegrate with their family, be excited for the future and transition into the civilian world and getting a career. So I thought, well, maybe there is something in this, maybe it's not what I thought. So I applied.

• 2:23:09Speaker 02

  I, I'd never thought I'd have any chance of making a team because there's seven hundred, I think eighty people applied that year and there are seventy.

• 2:23:16Jocko Willink?

  Just from the UK, you mean?

• 2:23:17Speaker 02

  Just from the UK and there's seventy two spots in the team. I had never been to a single sporting event in that nine years. Didn't know anybody, wasn't any of the cliques or the circles. I thought they'd just see my name and go, no, we don't know him. But I went, I auditioned, um, or trialed, got there. And I remember one of the events I competed in was indoor rowing. And I'd never really been on a Concept Two rower before.

• 2:23:41Jocko Willink?

  Get some.

• 2:23:42Speaker 02

  Right. And I turned up at this event arrogant as hell in my mind, like I'm just gonna smash the life out of these people. And then go home. And uh, this was just for the trial. I got there, I took my legs off. I had a special fitted seat, I had my prosthetic arm on. And the races, you got a four minute race and a one minute race, and it is just go, as many meters as you can get. Fifteen to twenty seconds towards the end of that four minutes, I went blind. All these stars came in front of me and my vision started to, and I was like. And there's rows of these machines, I'm like, there's no way you can let people know what's going on, Mark. I was severely dehydrated, didn't prep properly. I just carried on, carried on, carried on until the buzzer went.

• 2:24:22Speaker 02

  My vision came back and I hopped off the rower, walked on my bum over to get my legs at the side of the sports hall. Got in my car and I was like, what a dick. Like, the, these are real athletes. Like, this is not just turn up, get a pat on the back and be, you've got to train for this. And so I went home. And that year, the first year, I did rowing, swimming and hand cycling. And I went home and I started, um, I made the team, started engaging in the training camps and learning these sports. Um, I had a full-time job as well at the time, I was working for a charity, so I had to fit, I had to get up at like. Five AM and do my cardio in my garage, go to work, do strength and conditioning in the evening.

• 2:25:02Speaker 02

  And then attend sports specific training camps on the weekends that were all over the UK, up as high as Edinburgh. And I lived the complete opposite end of the country. My goal, again, still a little bit arrogant, was to turn up in Canada, win all gold medals, drop the mic and retire. And, and I got there and I failed that first year. I got two silvers, two bronzes and then. They, they give out an award for. It's one athlete from every nation, so there was thousands of athletes. They give out one award for the best team and then one award for outstanding athlete and I managed to bag that as well. Um, but came home and I have an ex-army friend who, uh, as like a side hustle, he frames military memorabilia.

• 2:25:47Speaker 02

  So I gave him my two silvers and two bronzes and I gave him a flag that all these people had signed for me while I was out in Canada. And I asked him to frame it. And when he brought it back, he put the, the flag in the middle. And on the left, he had three holes and on the right, he had three holes. And in the middle, he had the silver and the bottom, he had the bronze and the top were empty. And I'm like, do you seriously think I can hang that in my house without the gold medals in? And he knew what he was doing. Um, so then I reapplied for the following year, Australia. Completely different mindset. Uh, uh, looked at the whole thing completely differently. Now I was a lot smarter with my training. Um, went back into that process. And then I think that year I got four golds, three bronzes and a silver.

• 2:26:28Speaker 02

  And then I retired. I was like, I say, I'm done. I've got enough. I've, I've filled those gaps in, in the frame. So I'll leave, but it was a, it was a big eye opener for me. My attitude was so wrong in the beginning. I just didn't think it was a serious thing. And then when I actually got there and trained, I mean, I do everything like a, like an athlete would, like nutrition, training, recovery, all of it. Um, but yeah, I did what I needed to do, retired from the games. Now I'm just an advocate for it and promote it to everyone.

• 2:27:02Jocko Willink?

  The, and did they film, uh, the No Limits documentary during that time when you were going for that?

• 2:27:08Speaker 02

  They did, but that wasn't the intention of the documentary. The documentary was supposed to be a, so with the whole media coverage that we had, I thought everyone gets to see all the cool stuff, right? The walking at Meadows praise and all the fun. They don't see the shit. And I want to make a documentary, like a fly on the wall, behind the scenes, real life thing of me with my kids, you know, changing nappies and, and this kind of stuff. Um, and that was how we set out in the beginning, but then I made the team. So we're like, oh, let's just flip it. You know, I'll see if I can get the guys out of Canada with me and we'll film this and we completely changed the, the approach. And yeah, just had the team out with me filming that. And it was a bit of a distraction. You know, you do a lot of this stuff and it's it's difficult when you're trying to focus on one thing.

• 2:27:51Speaker 02

  You've got cameras and you've got to do all these certain bits and pieces. But, you know, it turned out okay. I think it turned out okay.

• 2:28:00Jocko Willink?

  No, it's awesome.

• 2:28:01Speaker 02

  And I really enjoy it. I want to do more stuff like that. You know, say more writing, more documentaries, working in the media, that kind of stuff.

• 2:28:08Jocko Willink?

  So let's get to the important part of this podcast. When did you start training jiu jitsu?

• 2:28:14Speaker 02

  Two thousand and seventeen.

• 2:28:16Jocko Willink?

  So it was right that same timeframe, like when you get done with the the games, the Invictus Games? Did you decide, all right, cool, next thing is?

• 2:28:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I didn't decide anything. For those that can't see, the gentleman sat in the corner of this podcast studio is a friend of mine called Sam Sheriff, who's also a former Royal Marine. Sam was a physical training instructor in the Marines. He was in charge of Royal Marines on armed combat. I believe a purple belt himself at the time, and he had introduced Brazilian jiu jitsu to the Royal Marines against lots of negativity. Lots of people laughed him out of a room, said you can't do it. And he eventually did. I won't steal that story from him. I'll let him tell that another time. But I was in the sergeant's mess of Royal Marines headquarters in Plymouth, where I live.

• 2:29:08Speaker 02

  And we didn't know each other. And Sam came up and introduced himself to me. Told me a little bit about what he did and asked me if I wanted to go train Brazilian jiu jitsu. Now, I didn't know what it was, right? And growing up, between the kickboxing and the Muay Thai, I had tried Japanese jiu jitsu. I had played with karate and taekwondo and all these things. And prior to me and Sam, I had a couple of people.

• 2:29:34Speaker 02

  Offered to train me and I think it was karate and taekwondo up to black belt level. And I kind of knew that if you haven't got legs, how do you kick, right? And I knew it was it was more for them than it was for me. And I've told Sam this before, like when he first approached me, because I didn't know what it was. I was like, here we go again. Another bloke bullshitting me, trying to promise me this, promise me that. And we went down to the combat room, what Sam had created, which is basically a squash court where you jammed mats in on the floors and the walls. No, no windows or anything in there, just a door in and a door out. And he explained to me what Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was, how it's a ground based grappling system, fighting system. And I thought, okay, well, I don't do this with my legs on, so I'm already halfway there because I'm on the ground. So now I just need to learn this stuff.

• 2:30:19Speaker 02

  So he basically kicked my ass for an hour. Um, I felt at the end terrible, but also elated because I felt sick because I wasn't used to being upside down and twisted and turned in that way. So I felt like seasick on one hand, but elated on the other. Because

• 2:30:39Speaker 02

  once I was injured, I never thought I'd get that feeling and have been in a fight where your heart's beating, your lungs are burning and you you're in that survival mode. And Sam had given me that gift back of of feeling that way. And then he told me about a few basic techniques and, you know, we looked at ways we could adapt them over the weeks, different arm bars and chokes and all this stuff. And like most people, I just fell in love with it. I'm like, this is cool because this is going to be based on genuine hard work and effort. There's there's no shortcuts. I can't just be given belts or medals because people feel sorry for me. I've got to figure this out, work my way through, adapt it to to fit me and then figure out actually, you know, what's what's good about my situation, not bad, you know, you can't leg lock me.

• 2:31:24Speaker 02

  Haha, tough luck, figure it out. All I have to do is protect my neck and my left arm. And it poses problems for able bodied people. So then when I figured that out, and that took me about six years to figure that out. Once I figured that out, I started thinking, okay, this is, you know, I'm really starting to understand this a little bit now and figure this out. And You know, just like, like most people, just fell in love with it. Love, loved the training. You know, still don't love competing and then going through all that anxiety and stress.

• 2:31:52Jocko Willink?

  It's better than Muay Thai can put competition now as far as just getting annihilated.

• 2:31:56Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's not as painful. Um, but yeah, just, and just now pushing it and promoting it to anyone that, that will listen. Uh, particularly men and women, situations similar to mine, uh, with, with physical injuries. Um, just trying to explain to them. I think that the magic of this sport, you know, you have to be present when you're doing this. You can't think about your bills or your issues or relationships that you're having, you, you know, cause you're going to end up unconscious or with a broken limb. You've got to be present. You've got to put the phone down. You've got to be focused and just immersed in it. And, you know, the personal growth aspect of it is, I think, what is addictive to me.

• 2:32:41Speaker 02

  You know, you turn up one day and everyone's smashing you. You come back a couple of weeks later and, and you're having a bit of success and you know, and you're getting smashed again and you're having success again. And you just gradually, like when I was going through rehab, getting these little one percent improvements and, and getting, and getting better over time and then challenging yourself to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And with this, as you know, it never ends. So I've always got something to set goals in, always got something to strive towards, always got ways to improve. And also, you know, it brought a lot to my life outside of training as well. You know, and I can give you a physical example is what's, what's left of my right arm. I, I never thought a shoulder was a useful body part until I trained jiu jitsu.

• 2:33:25Speaker 02

  And then, so then I would go home and, you know, we'd come back from the, the supermarket. And instead of making four trips to the car to pick the bags up, I can put one in my left hand, put one on my shoulder and make half the amount of trips, you know, and it just, it just, there was no negative to it. It was all positive. You know, everything it was bringing to my life was positive. Um, and why wouldn't you want that in your life?

• 2:33:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing because, you know, when I teach people jiu jitsu. You have to explain to people that different, hey, your body style is gonna be able to, you're gonna have to adapt this to your body style because someone's a big, strong guy, someone's a skinny, flexible guy, someone's a hundred and ten pound woman, someone's a three hundred pound dude, like, and you're gonna, some people have short arms, some people have long arms, some people have long legs, some people have short legs. And so, you know, you always tell people, hey, it's gonna, you're just gonna have to adapt it to what you got. And you're like, obviously, a premier example of adapting to what you've got because, but that's what you can, you have the ability with jiu-jitsu to, to adapt your body to

• 2:34:28Jocko Willink?

  this game. And yeah, that's, it's, it is awesome. I mean, obviously, I promote jiu-jitsu to the maximum ability that I can. Was Sam still active duty when you guys met?

• 2:34:42Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, you still at the duty, weren't you? Still serving, um, finished, did a full twenty-two year career. And that's an interesting story because, you know, what that's evolved into is a charity called Reorg. And, I mean, when you start something, right, no one, if you hand that over to somebody, no one's gonna be as passionate and as driven as you because you, you started it, you created it, you've got the long-term vision for it. And I hope Sam doesn't mind me telling this story, but when he was due to leave the military, a lot of us thought he needed to carry on because of how many lives it was changing and saving.

• 2:35:19Speaker 02

  But you weren't too sure, were you? And he was a bit, I don't really, can't do this. I think his plan was to do security, like a lot of the lads. And it took a little bit of time.

• 2:35:29Jocko Willink?

  You told him about that job market and changed his mind.

• 2:35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. But we chipped away at him, me and a couple of lads over the course of about six months, until he felt a bit more comfortable with it and realized, like, this is doing such good work, you know, not just in the UK but around the world.

• 2:35:47Jocko Willink?

  So what does Reorg do? Because this is a major part of your, what you do now is supporting this charity. What's Reorg do?

• 2:35:53Speaker 02

  So initially, it started, and it was, it was offering Brazilian jiu-jitsu just to Royal Marines who had suffered physical or psychological injuries as a result of their service. But then it gained such popularity that Sam introduced it to all the military. And then I think it was after, um, after Sam had left and it formed as an official charity. We went out to the emergency services, um, police, fire brigade. And then evolved also into the fitness world because not everyone wanted to do jiu jitsu. Some people like the CrossFit and this kind of stuff. And so we offer that to them as a form of rehab, um, to help them through any issues that they're, they're suffering with.

• 2:36:37Speaker 02

  And it's just a constantly evolving beast. So there are, there are programs now, there's the Reorg sixty, there's the Reorg three, six.

• 2:36:45Jocko Willink?

  What's the Reorg sixty?

• 2:36:46Speaker 02

  So that's the initial entry program. So if someone hears about us or they're told about us, they go on the website, they hit the apply button. They apply for the Reorg sixty, they'll have a call with, with Sam or Trish or one of the team. And almost go through like a, an interview to make sure that they're the right fit for this. And then they have to do sixty days to form that habit and see whether or not it is having a positive effect on them. They have to check in every day.

• 2:37:10Jocko Willink?

  Is the habit jiu jitsu or the habit is like, what's the habit we're talking about?

• 2:37:14Speaker 02

  I mean, the manifestation of it is jiu jitsu, yeah, but it's also getting up, having a positive thing to go. It's the physical aspect of it of training. And then you record, um, through the, the, the app and the program, how it makes you feel and what the, the effects are. And once you've done the sixty, you then.

• 2:37:33Jocko Willink?

  I wanna see the negative outtakes of that. I wanna see people be like, today, today was horrible. I never want to do jiu jitsu again. I got tapped out nine times by a hundred and ten pound fourteen year old. I'll be back tomorrow.

• 2:37:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like I said, that first time I did it, I felt like crap physically, but was elated because of what it was giving me. But then you graduate to the three, six, five, which is a year long program. And it's all funded by Reorg.

• 2:37:58Jocko Willink?

  So Reorg pays for you to go to Jiu Jitsu Academy? Is that, is that what it does?

• 2:38:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they, they pay the academy, it's of no cost to the, um, the member. They get, they do it all for free. And then the three, six, five is like the year long process. And now what they're building out now as the addition to that is, uh, I think this might already be running, but you can then go on Xpats, like go climb a mountain and, and. You know, it's the next level for people and then they're developing a mentor program essentially and a volunteer program where then you give back to reorg you mentor the next guy or girl through. So, you know, it's um, it's either one or the other, physical fitness, functional fitness or jujitsu.

• 2:38:42Speaker 02

  Going through this program, you know, we're working with a university in the UK as well to do a study to prove the positive effects of it.

• 2:38:50Jocko Willink?

  I like that.

• 2:38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, just doing it, doing it all properly, just to say to people, you know, all the doubters and then they says, here's the, the evidence with people that are much smarter than us that have been the university, have done these studies. This is what it does. This is who it's helped. This is who it can help. If we can help you, get on the website, hit that button and start your journey.

• 2:39:09Jocko Willink?

  Reorg charity dot com.

• 2:39:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:39:11Jocko Willink?

  That's where this can be found. I like the fact that it kind of grew based on demand signal and kind of goes, hey, you know, like we just need to get people in the Marines to train. All right, cool. Everyone in the Marines on board. Okay, cool. Now we'll get the military. Okay, military broadly. Yep, yep. There's still a demand signal, first responders, just grow. And then you go, okay, we've got people training jujitsu, but we also need to get on the fitness. Okay, cool. So you grow that. Oh, now we're kind of maxed out on those two things. People are making it happen. Cool. Let's just go out into expeditions and start getting after it. So that's a very cool way to grow. Uh, there's a org in America called We Defy that does similar type things.

• 2:39:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:49Jocko Willink?

  And I think you, you, you all know them, but it's just giving jujitsu to people. And I can't wait to see the scientific studies.

• 2:39:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:57Jocko Willink?

  Cause I've been telling, I've been telling, I've been telling people this for decades.

• 2:40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:03Jocko Willink?

  Decades. I've been saying, hey, man, it's gonna help everything in your life. Just go train jujitsu. Just go train jujitsu. Just go train jujitsu. And I can't wait to see the scientific feedback on this. Cause I've been right on some stuff, by the way.

• 2:40:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:40:15Jocko Willink?

  When, uh, I had Andrew Cuban on my podcast and there's all these things that I was doing in my life that are scientifically supported.

• 2:40:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:26Jocko Willink?

  Like for instance, um, when there's a problem going on, taking a step back away from the problem and broadening your field of vision. That's like a physiological thing occurs in your brain when you do that. When you take a breath to calm down, what I used to do, just because I didn't, talking on the radio in the teams, I didn't want to sound like I was panicked or freaking out. So I'd like, before I'd key up my handset. Take a breath, calm down. Well, that's a physiological thing. You can drive your physiological system by your actions. So I would put money, a big money, Kerry Hilton on, on this. I bet you when the study comes back on what jujitsu does for you, it's going to be epic. Now, I saw someone, oh, no, it's Craig Jones. I think it was Craig Jones the other day was saying like,

• 2:41:11Jocko Willink?

  jujitsu's ruined more lives than it's helped because it's like, oh, you're freaking, oh, what'd you do? You quit your job and you now, you know, don't have any money and you live in the back of your Toyota Celica and you just train jujitsu all the time. But you know what? I'll tell you, that might sound like a negative, but I'd be kind of down for that, kind of all day.

• 2:41:36Speaker 02

  Kind of a good deal.

• 2:41:38Jocko Willink?

  So that'll be awesome. And so, so can people go there? Can people donate? Like, is that, is that what we're doing? Like to help out?

• 2:41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we're on Instagram, uh, all the social medias, the website. Um, we're actually, while we're here, we're con- we're conducting a couple of, uh, reorg seminars around San Diego and LA fundraising seminars to help us to continue what it is that we're doing. Uh, the team's growing behind the scenes. Um, so we're getting a lot more help and support in now to reach more men and women.

• 2:42:07Jocko Willink?

  Do you know how many people you've sent to jujitsu right now? Like, what's a guess?

• 2:42:11Speaker 02

  Sam, you've got hundreds. There you go. There's the scientific answer, hundreds.

• 2:42:17Jocko Willink?

  So, so we're getting it done.

• 2:42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:20Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you got awarded the MBE.

• 2:42:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:42:23Jocko Willink?

  Which is the most excellent order of the British Empire. We don't have anything like that.

• 2:42:27Speaker 02

  Very British.

• 2:42:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we don't have anything that, that cool. And what was that experience like? This is in 2020.

• 2:42:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, it, it was a strange one because what I got it for was for working in the veteran community and supporting Royal Marines, which is just my passion. And I, it's not like it's hard work for me. It's easy. I just, for me, it's hanging out with my mates, doing some challenges, raising some money and helping some people. That's all it is. So to be awarded, uh, rewarded for doing that. I I struggled with it in the beginning. I'm like, well, I'm not really doing anything that's special. I'm just literally living my life, having a good time doing it and and helping people. But, you know, when I sat down, I I chatted with Becky about it and, you know, it is a huge honour.

• 2:43:13Speaker 02

  It is a huge honour to be able to to put those letters at the end of your name and and wear that medal at at fancy ceremonies. But it it's not changed anything. Like, I'm still continuing to do what I what I love doing and what I'm passionate about. Um, because I'm passionate about it, you know.

• 2:43:30Jocko Willink?

  There's a a video on YouTube. You you spoke at the Oxford Union. Was it Oxford Student Union?

• 2:43:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:43:38Jocko Willink?

  Oxford Student Union? Is that what it's called?

• 2:43:39Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know, because it was a complete. So I actually went to Oxford University because I had arranged an an evening with Mark Homrath event. Um, for me, telling my story to earn a bit of money. And my my agent, Katie, she used to go to Oxford and we were with one of the the deans. And just she was just catching up with him. And when we were in the office, this is about three hours before my event, the phone rang and he picked it up and you you could tell he was a bit miffed when he put the phone down. So we asked what was up and some lord was meant to be debating in this Oxford chamber in the evening and he had dropped out. So Katie went, Mark, do it. And I'm like, do what?

• 2:44:22Speaker 02

  She went, oh, you've got to go to this. I didn't know what it was. She went, you've got to go to this thing and debate after the talk. And, you know, I I don't know what you're like when you do talks and things, right? But I I was locked in on that focus and and I had to ignore everything else. And then I'm like, panicking a bit. I don't know. I'm I can't prep for this. I don't know what this is. Um, I think that was a good thing that I didn't know what it was, because as soon as I finished my talk, I got put in a taxi, took it to this Oxford Chamber thing. And the they basically get students and they debate. And there's a topic. And the topic was, it was, I think it was the fifty year anniversary of I will not fight for king and country. And you have a for and against argument. And they just threw me in deep. I didn't really know. I was sat in there

• 2:45:05Speaker 02

  in this chamber full of people, watching these students, trying to figure out what was going on, what they were talking about, how I could contribute to it. And there there was a guy sat opposite me. I'm I'm not really into politics. His name is George Galloway. And apparently he's like, uh, a really intimidating figure and he wears a funny hat. And he was just staring at me the whole time. And I'm like, I don't, what's this dude like? Eyeballing me for it. Anyway, I I figured out about twenty minutes in what it was all about, what they were saying, what they were doing. And it was all scripted, even like the banter between the two sides. It was all written down on paper. And I'm like, well, I haven't written anything down on paper. And I felt very much out my depth, because these were kids from wealthy

• 2:45:45Speaker 02

  families. They were academic. They were educated. They had prepared for this debate. There were some like, high ranking academics in the room. And then there was me with tangy C C's that dropped out of school to work at McDonald's and join the Royal Marines. So you remember Eight Mile with Eminem?

• 2:46:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:04Speaker 02

  You know, at the end, right? When he's like, well, I know exactly what they're gonna say about me. So I'm just gonna, I am white trash. I live in a trailer. This guy took my girl. And then they can't say anything. So I basically got up and said that I have no education to your level. You know, I I not don't live in the world that you live in. I don't even know half the fancy words that you're using. But this is what I do know. And then I just talked a little bit about having gone to combat to war and said, I would absolutely do it again. You know, no questions. And then then I walked out. Like, you're supposed to like, sit down and stay. I just walked out. Kate Katie, my agent was like,

• 2:46:42Jocko Willink?

  That's called a mic drop right there.

• 2:46:44Speaker 02

  And apparently, they, I don't know if they've never had, I might get this wrong, but I got a standing ovation and walked out. And apparently, they've never had that in that chamber before.

• 2:46:54Jocko Willink?

  That was freaking epic.

• 2:46:55Speaker 02

  But then I went and I researched it after and I saw like Barack Obama.

• 2:46:59Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, I was gonna say, you said it's a bunch of students. Like, no, they bring in pipe hitters.

• 2:47:03Speaker 02

  I know now.

• 2:47:04Jocko Willink?

  The most.

• 2:47:05Speaker 02

  I didn't know that at the time. And there was all these people that I've seen online. And I'm like, holy shit. Like, they put me in there with these people. And it's kind of cool after that.

• 2:47:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's epic. I'm gonna figure out a way to post that thing, because it's freaking legit. Uh, so what are you doing in America right now? Like, what's this whole trip about?

• 2:47:23Speaker 02

  To come here.

• 2:47:24Jocko Willink?

  Come here.

• 2:47:24Speaker 02

  To see you guys and do this podcast. Um, now, we're promoting the re-og mission. Like I said, we've got some seminars coming up. We're going back to LA after this, then back here to San Diego. Um, I think we're going to Twenty Nine Palms. Um,

• 2:47:39Jocko Willink?

  Were you guys doing a seminar in LA?

• 2:47:41Speaker 02

  Sam? U A C T P undefeated.

• 2:47:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay, what about in San Diego?

• 2:47:46Speaker 02

  Uh, National City Club.

• 2:47:48Jocko Willink?

  Uh, who mighta? Grace who mighta down there? Or tenth planet?

• 2:47:53Speaker 02

  No, it's called National City Jujitsu Club.

• 2:47:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay, cool. Right on. Awesome.

• 2:47:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're just gonna come out and, and we thought, you know, because you kindly invited me out here to do this, I thought, well, how can we maximize your opportunity while we're out there? Um, so Sam came along, we're gonna do these seminars, raise some money, hopefully go about with a nice chunk of change. I've had a good time. See our boys in the UFC Saturday night, destroy the competition.

• 2:48:19Jocko Willink?

  You're freaking out. So you're going live to this UFC? You're going?

• 2:48:22Speaker 02

  It's Manchester, isn't it?

• 2:48:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:48:24Speaker 02

  It's in England, but they've kept the same time zone. So I was, we were, we were joking in the hotel room earlier, like tomorrow. Our athletes in England, I have to go to bed about four o'clock in the afternoon because the card starts at five AM in the UK. So we can watch it here live, um, because they didn't change the timings, but in the UK, it starts like five AM.

• 2:48:45Jocko Willink?

  I was thinking it was in Vegas for a second. I was like, oh, you guys are stoked.

• 2:48:48Speaker 02

  Oh, I'd love that. We've been to a couple live, haven't we? We've got some connections in there, Sam has, and they're very kind to us, they invited us to. We went to the first one back in the UK, actually, after Covid.

• 2:48:58Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:48:58Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, it's, it's, you know, you've been, it's amazing going to these things and seeing it up, up front and live. Yeah, it's cool.

• 2:49:06Jocko Willink?

  I'm kind of spoiled at UFC. I've been to so many UFC's because back in the day I coached a lot of guys.

• 2:49:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:49:11Jocko Willink?

  So I was up there all the time. I've probably been to, I don't know how many, but I've been to dozens and dozens of UFC's and always had kind of like. Backstage, I was cornering people. I've been backstage with the champs, you know, everyone in the same warm up room. It's been, I've, I've had a cool experience. I wish I would have had a helmet cam on.

• 2:49:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:49:30Jocko Willink?

  Because I'd have a bunch of good stuff.

• 2:49:31Speaker 02

  Well, Sam sorted out a couple of months ago when we were rolling with Tom Aspinall.

• 2:49:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:49:36Speaker 02

  I got to roll with him.

• 2:49:36Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 2:49:37Speaker 02

  He's a beast.

• 2:49:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 2:49:39Speaker 02

  Obviously, he was just like, he's like a playing with a kitten with me, you know what I mean? But.

• 2:49:43Jocko Willink?

  He does that with pretty much everybody.

• 2:49:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a beast, beast. It's great to do these things, you know? This is what I said earlier.

• 2:49:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:49Speaker 02

  You know, my life now opens these doors and gives me these opportunities that I probably wouldn't have had, and I'm grateful for all of them. Yeah.

• 2:49:55Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Does that get us up to speed? What else? We miss anything?

• 2:49:58Speaker 02

  Oh, God knows. Um.

• 2:50:01Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, we've got, we hold our own Jiu Jitsu tournaments. We've got the Reorg Open. I'm competing in that on the 24th of August over in London.

• 2:50:08Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Um. The Reorg Open.

• 2:50:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an annual Jiu Jitsu tournament competition. I think we've got over 600 people signed up right now, haven't we? Um, and that's able-bodied and adaptive athletes. It's men, women. We've got children too. Yeah, man, we cater for everybody. Um, yeah, it's phenomenal. It's like the, the, I was gonna say the social highlight of it. It's not a social highlight. It's like the calendar highlight of the year. So I've got to get back from here and then kind of go into a, a small camp. I competed the other week and snapped my sternum, um, cause I didn't tap and someone, you know, cracked. But I've just about got over that now. So we're going to a camp for that.

• 2:50:45Jocko Willink?

  How much did you, um, win for not tapping in that?

• 2:50:50Speaker 02

  I didn't win anything. I, I lost completely.

• 2:50:52Jocko Willink?

  Isn't that, isn't that insane?

• 2:50:53Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:50:54Jocko Willink?

  It's like, we have been talking about that with Craig Jones, you know, people are, you're in a tournament for a $7 medal.

• 2:51:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:51:01Jocko Willink?

  And you're not tapping. You'd rather crack your sternum than tap. And now this dude's giving away $1 million.

• 2:51:08Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 2:51:08Jocko Willink?

  There's gonna be ACLs all over the mat, just spilled out, just shoulder pieces just all over the place. It's gonna be mayhem out there.

• 2:51:18Speaker 02

  And that's the same weekend as ADCC, right?

• 2:51:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but you can go to both. So the, the, the way they set it up is

• 2:51:27Jocko Willink?

  the Craig Jones invitation was, is Friday and Saturday. And ADCC is Saturday and Sunday. So you can see all like the good matches if you're up there for the whole thing. So.

• 2:51:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:51:40Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna be K. It's gonna be a freaking crazy weekend in Vegas.

• 2:51:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:51:44Jocko Willink?

  Are you going, Kerry?

• 2:51:44Speaker 01

  Negative.

• 2:51:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang, how'd that happen? Didn't, didn't build the right relationships or what, bro? Cause we got a crew going up there for that thing.

• 2:51:53Speaker 01

  Well, I haven't confirmed. Uh, I know CrossFit Games is the weekend before, I think. And then, so I, we just haven't confirmed.

• 2:52:01Jocko Willink?

  You haven't snaked your way in there yet. K-Dog hadn't made the list yet. Hell yeah. Uh, for people to find you, you're on, you're at markormod.com.

• 2:52:12Speaker 02

  That's, that's the website.

• 2:52:13Jocko Willink?

  And people can get, from there, you can get like the speaking, you can get the book, like you can pretty much get connected to you there.

• 2:52:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, Instagram's probably the best thing though. You know, that's the one I'm on daily, but I'm, I'm on all of them. X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube. LinkedIn.

• 2:52:28Jocko Willink?

  It's at Mark Ormrod.

• 2:52:31Speaker 02

  Ormrod.

• 2:52:32Jocko Willink?

  Ormrod, sorry.

• 2:52:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:33Jocko Willink?

  At Mark Ormrod. Also, the Reorg Charity is at reorgcharity.com. And then also on Instagram at Reorg Charity. So people can check that out and see the awesome work that's going on over there.

• 2:52:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:52:46Jocko Willink?

  And that's how people can follow up on this whole gig.

• 2:52:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:52:51Jocko Willink?

  Kerry, you got any questions for this whole thing? Marine to marine here? Is that what we're doing?

• 2:52:57Speaker 01

  Um, I did have one question.

• 2:52:58Jocko Willink?

  You guys have legit, there's, there's a connection, right?

• 2:53:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:01Jocko Willink?

  Like, like Marines, I mean, the Marines in England are, are down with the Marines in America.

• 2:53:07Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:53:07Jocko Willink?

  Strong connection.

• 2:53:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:09Jocko Willink?

  Plus, your mom's a Brit.

• 2:53:10Speaker 01

  Negative.

• 2:53:11Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:53:11Jocko Willink?

  I thought your mom was a Brit.

• 2:53:13Speaker 01

  No, I, I have, uh, German and Danish ancestry, but mom's not a Brit.

• 2:53:18Jocko Willink?

  How, where am I coming up with this?

• 2:53:19Speaker 01

  Not sure, bro.

• 2:53:20Jocko Willink?

  Damn, dude. No British, nothing?

• 2:53:23Speaker 02

  No. Oh, you got a British friend now? Yeah, two British friends, so.

• 2:53:28Jocko Willink?

  All right. What questions do you have?

• 2:53:29Speaker 01

  What, we were talking earlier about, uh, Jean Claude Van Damme movies.

• 2:53:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:33Speaker 01

  I was, I was curious.

• 2:53:35Jocko Willink?

  You're filling in for Echo for real, dude.

• 2:53:38Speaker 01

  I was just curious where Bloodsport ranks for you.

• 2:53:41Speaker 02

  Oh, easily top three.

• 2:53:43Speaker 01

  Top three.

• 2:53:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:53:44Speaker 01

  Right on.

• 2:53:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:53:45Speaker 01

  I would agree.

• 2:53:46Speaker 02

  Classics. Bloodsport, kickboxer. I think now is relevant, Universal Soldier.

• 2:53:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:53:52Speaker 02

  You know, you just put me in an ice bath and I'll heal and go do my thing. Um, yeah, I just, I love those things growing up, you know? It's great.

• 2:53:59Jocko Willink?

  Were you Van Damme dude there?

• 2:54:02Speaker 01

  Uh, pretty much all classic action movies. Uh, Van Damme was up there for sure. He just had that flair, you know, with like the, the level of actual martial arts that he practiced. I think differentiated him a bit in that action hero movie category. So, yeah, we, we were down with Jean Claude.

• 2:54:23Jocko Willink?

  Getting your VHS on?

• 2:54:24Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 2:54:27Jocko Willink?

  What else? Anything else?

• 2:54:28Speaker 01

  Uh, other than that, I, I just wanted to ask how. When you were talking about training earlier on and not quitting, there was that shrinking of the time horizon, I think that you were talking about where it's like, I'm just gonna give it until the end of this thing and see how I feel after that. Did that carry over into your recovery and rehab and things like that as you negotiated those challenges?

• 2:54:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think with a lot of things I do, I break it down. So like, Royal Marines training, 30 weeks, if you think about it, as 30 weeks is too overwhelming. So you break it down into months, weeks, days, and then sometimes I'd even break it into individual sessions, like one hour blocks. Same as rehab, as long as you can put a date on something like the Meadows Parade and work backwards, just break it down, break it down, make sure that you're making the right progress. Cause then, you know, when you measure it, you can see where you've got to accelerate a bit, or you can take your foot off the gas a little bit. I do it with a lot of stuff in my life, particularly if it's, if the, whatever it is I'm doing is lengthy, I just try and break it down and get through bit by bit.

• 2:55:36Speaker 01

  Right on. Thanks, man.

• 2:55:39Speaker 02

  Cool, thank you.

• 2:55:40Jocko Willink?

  I always liked that mindset you had going through bootcamp care you talked about, which was, you knew that no matter what, even the drill instructors, who are as close to God as they could be, you knew that even they couldn't shut off the clock. And the clock was gonna go, and those, whatever it is, 13 weeks were gonna end. And that's what, that's what got you through some stuff.

• 2:56:00Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. I had a very similar realization in training where I looked up at the clock one time, and I had this little epiphany where it was like, not even the drill instructor, nobody can stop that thing from us getting through this piece, and then the next piece, and then the piece after that, nobody could stop it. So it was comforting in those dark times.

• 2:56:22Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Mark, any closing thoughts from you?

• 2:56:25Speaker 02

  No, I mean, just thank you. I mean, like we said earlier, I think it was five years ago, I was originally due to come down here and meet you all. And that didn't work out because I didn't realize how big LA was, and I was like eight hours away. But we finally got here. So thank you for the opportunity to, you know, share my story, to talk about reorg and jujitsu, and, you know, hopefully reach some people that might be in a similar situation that might be struggling and... Hopefully I've said something in these last couple of hours that might help them and get them on the right path. So, thank you.

• 2:56:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, 100% man. Thanks for joining us. I'm sorry it took five years. That's kind of ridiculous on my part.

• 2:57:05Jocko Willink?

  It kind of sucks when you're far away and I'm always on the road. So I'm glad and it's an honor to have you here to, to talk through this stuff. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your, your story, your lesson learned. Obviously, thanks for your service. Thanks for your sacrifice, but, but for me, even more important, it's just thank you for the example that you set as a human being that regardless of the, the obstacles that we face, we can overcome them.

• 2:57:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:57:34Jocko Willink?

  As long as we, um, crack on. So, thanks, brother. Appreciate it.

• 2:57:39Speaker 02

  Thank you, guys. Appreciate you.

• 2:57:41Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Mark Ormrod has left the building.

• 2:57:49Jocko Willink?

  Freaking beast.

• 2:57:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:57:51Jocko Willink?

  I mean, come on, like excuses have just been killed, all of them. Just for him to be just out there getting after it at such a level in all aspects of life, just freaking totally legit. So, awesome to have Mark on here and one example for the rest of us normal human beings of what's possible. So, that's it, man.

• 2:58:21Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate it.

• 2:58:23Jocko Willink?

  Guess what we better be doing? We better be getting after it too, at a minimum. We're training, working out, uh, doing jujitsu, lifting, rowing, running.

• 2:58:37Jocko Willink?

  Just basically getting after it. Better be, which means we're gonna need fuel.

• 2:58:43Jocko Willink?

  Jaco Fuel, by the way, official sponsor of the Craig Jones Invitational. Jaco Fuel also going into Walmart.

• 2:58:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, biggest retailer in the world. Did you know that? Biggest retailer in the world? I didn't. Yeah, going into Walmart. So if the good thing about Walmart is there's a statistic and I forget exactly what it is, but basically there's a Walmart within 10 miles of every human being in this country. There's some crazy stat like that. So one of the goals of Jaco Fuel is to be able to get Jaco Fuel, get that option, the cleaning option, the healthy option to everyone. And it's hard to do because there's different stores, different retail centers. There's just, it's, it's a complicated machine out there. But Walmart eliminates a lot of that problem for people

• 2:59:38Jocko Willink?

  that live all over the country to be able to say, oh yeah, I need some Jaco Fuel. I can go three miles, seven miles, eight miles to Walmart and get it done. I grew up in a small town in North Carolina and I'll never forget when we got the Walmart. Yeah. And we, we had arrived at that point. Our Kerners though was on the map. Our shop was called Kmart. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Kmart. I think Kmart went under. They did. Yeah. And then in the movie about the, what is it? Night of the Living Dead where he's like, don't, he works at Smart? Yeah.

• 3:00:20Jocko Willink?

  Don't, don't just shop smart, shop Smart. Right. Classic. Class. Classic scenario. So we not, might not be in Smart or Kmart, but we got them beat going into Walmart. So check it out there. Also jacofuel.com, obviously. Hey, we got like a.

• 3:00:39Jocko Willink?

  Like a crew, uh, we want to, we want to help take care of people that are in the game. So we've got like a, a reward system. So you can check that as well. Jaco.com, Jaco Fuel.com slash rewards. And this is where you can get hydrates, where you can get go, this where you can get milk. This is where you can get joint warfare, krill oil, all the stuff, all the stuff that you need to operate at a high level across the board. So check out Jaco Fuel.com or go into Walmart, go into Wawa, go into vitamin shop, GNC, Military Commissaries, A fees, Hanford, Dash Stores, Wake Fern, Shoprite, HEB, Meyer, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields.

• 3:01:20Jocko Willink?

  And then in a bunch of small gyms all over the place, just little jujitsu gyms, big jujitsu gyms, they got it. If they don't have it, tell them to email J F sales at Jaco Fuel.com. CrossFit gyms, they got it. If they don't have it, tell them to email J F sales at Jaco Fuel.com. We got, we get a team out there just going around and going into these places, rolling jujitsu, getting a workout in. And hooking it up. So that's what we're doing. Jaco Fuel.com. Check that out. Also, OriginUSA.com. We make clothing here in America.

• 3:01:50Jocko Willink?

  We make clothing here in America. We manufacture here in America with, with American made materials, which is a huge part of this. It's a huge part. It's probably at least three quarters of the process or let's say half the process. If you, if you buy some Chinese made material and sew it here, I don't even know if I can give you half credit.

• 3:02:14Jocko Willink?

  Maybe I'll give you a quarter credit. But we'll, we'll benefit of that. We'll give you half credit. If you're sewing here in America, thank you. We appreciate it. If you're cutting someone here in America, thank you. We appreciate it. But what you really need to do is what we're doing. Weave the material here. Use American made materials. American grown materials, American fabricated materials. That's what we're doing at Origin USA. And then we're taking them into our factories and sewing them and cutting and sewing them. So that's what we're doing here and it's the best stuff. Did you get, you probably didn't get the burr yet, did you?

• 3:02:49Speaker 01

  I have not gotten the burr yet.

• 3:02:50Jocko Willink?

  It's gotta suck to be you.

• 3:02:51Speaker 01

  I'm a little lower on the hierarchy.

• 3:02:55Jocko Willink?

  We need to hook that up because it is for, it's, it's perfect. It's like the silk weight, quick, dry, like totally legit.

• 3:03:05Speaker 01

  It's hot in San Diego right now.

• 3:03:06Jocko Willink?

  It's hot in San Diego and never mind freaking Arizona, never mind Nevada, right? So, so check that out. Check out the new Burr stuff, the Hunt stuff, jeans, gis, rash cards. By the way, it's almost hoodie season. We're getting there. I know it's hot right now, but hoodie seasons are coming. OriginUSA.com, American made stuff. Also, we have a jujitsu camp and we're gonna have some law enforcement, first responder, military training up there, August 27th through the 31st up in Maine. So the regular one's already sold out, but we still got some slots left. So check that out as well.

• 3:03:41Speaker 01

  We also got JacoStore.com. This is where you can get your Discipline Equals Freedom gear. You wanna take your wardrobe up to that next level.

• 3:03:50Jocko Willink?

  Look at you, you're trying to vary off of the Echo Charles path. You almost said if you wanna represent on the path, you almost said that.

• 3:03:55Speaker 01

  Almost.

• 3:03:56Jocko Willink?

  But then you decided you're gonna, you're gonna carve your own trail over here, carry help, make it his mark on the scene. I mean, you already dropped in earlier with some eighties movie, just strength, right?

• 3:04:07Speaker 01

  Bloodsport, classic.

• 3:04:09Jocko Willink?

  Is Bloodsport the, that's the Kumite, right?

• 3:04:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:13Jocko Willink?

  And what's, what's the difference? What's Kickboxer?

• 3:04:16Speaker 01

  Kickboxer is.

• 3:04:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you're getting called out, homie?

• 3:04:20Speaker 01

  Well, I'm trying to remember. No, not a fake fan. They do start to blend together, right? Bloodsport is the one where you know.

• 3:04:26Jocko Willink?

  Are they the same character?

• 3:04:28Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:04:28Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So it's two different dudes.

• 3:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, two different kind of franchise.

• 3:04:31Jocko Willink?

  Can you name me the character's name in Bloodsport?

• 3:04:35Speaker 01

  Negative.

• 3:04:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you're, you're into it, but you ain't that fire.

• 3:04:39Speaker 01

  No, a hundred percent. Well, it was the classic like imagery, like the wrapping of the fists and like the dipping in the glass, you know, that type of stuff where I just remember being super young and watching that and being like, this is cinema.

• 3:04:52Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying? Well, did you say this is cinema? Is that really what you said? Cause I saw that stuff. I wasn't thinking about cinema. I was thinking about like, when I watched. Platoon or Apocalypse Now, I wasn't thinking about movies. I was thinking about war.

• 3:05:07Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 3:05:07Jocko Willink?

  All those anti-war movies that they made, they did not work on me in the slightest.

• 3:05:11Speaker 01

  Not, not.

• 3:05:12Jocko Willink?

  In the slightest.

• 3:05:13Speaker 01

  Not, not cinema.

• 3:05:14Jocko Willink?

  Effect.

• 3:05:15Speaker 01

  But this is what movies should be. This is like what, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen as a child, you know?

• 3:05:21Jocko Willink?

  But did you think of it as a movie? Did you think of it cool because it was a cool movie? Or did you think of it cool because that's what life should be like?

• 3:05:27Speaker 01

  No, it was, it was this is, I want to do this.

• 3:05:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay, got it.

• 3:05:30Speaker 01

  This would be awesome.

• 3:05:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because that's where I was. I would see stuff like that. Charles Bronson throwing knives in, you know, the evil that men do. I'd be like, yeah, okay, well, obviously this is what I should be doing with my life, right? Like, this is what we should be doing.

• 3:05:47Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 3:05:47Jocko Willink?

  Hucking knives and hitting the target. That's what I thought it should be.

• 3:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05:53Jocko Willink?

  And it's pretty, pretty cool to hear Mark today. Mark's just talking about, and it's in the book too. He's a, he's, he saw the Royal Marine Commandos. And he, he had seen Predator and he's like, okay, that's, how do I do this in real life?

• 3:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:08Jocko Willink?

  So he didn't think of it as cinema. He thought of it as like, this is a direction to go in.

• 3:06:12Speaker 01

  When he was talking about that too, I was thinking about how I was at that age and just an eighteen, nineteen year old kid who was absolutely bored with everything else going on in their lives, like community, I was at community college, which was the worst. I was working in a restaurant in the kitchen, which was the the wor- I was just so sick of all that stuff. And then you're sitting in that recruiter's office and you watch that video. It's just like, yes, to today.

• 3:06:38Jocko Willink?

  I don't, I don't even know how much they have to plan that. You know what I mean? I'm sure they're like, yeah, that's a badass video. Let's show it to these seventeen year olds when they roll in here. We got them.

• 3:06:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:47Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 3:06:47Speaker 01

  Easy.

• 3:06:48Jocko Willink?

  But you, you don't, it's not like it takes some, uh, marketing director to figure that out.

• 3:06:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:06:52Jocko Willink?

  No, dude's like, oh, you want kids, you want a young man to come and do what, do this gig? Cool. Give me a couple of guys with machine guns, put some cami paint on them and have them jumping into the water with machine guns in their hands. We're good.

• 3:07:04Speaker 01

  Call it.

• 3:07:04Jocko Willink?

  Like, we're good. But next thing, next question. That's, this is like a, it, there's something intrinsic about being a, and I can only speak for being a young man. Young man, there's something intrinsic that is like attracted to that and wants to go do that. There's no doubt in my mind because that's how I was. That's how I was born. You know what I mean? You see that thing, you're like, especially you, you're like working in a restaurant, you're cleaning dishes and you could either be cleaning dishes and then a then a dude shows you a video

• 3:07:39Jocko Willink?

  of a dude laying down suppressive fire with a freaking M60. It's game over. That game over.

• 3:07:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:07:47Jocko Willink?

  There's no need to, no need to invest in recruiting. We're good. We got it.

• 3:07:50Speaker 01

  Tanks, amphibious vehicles, jumping out of helicopter. You know, you just see all this stuff and it's.

• 3:07:56Jocko Willink?

  Here's the weird thing. Is that like a cultural thing? Or is that a nature thing? Is that nature or nurture? Did we grow up thinking, are you born? I think we're born with it. I think some of us are. Some of us are born like, mm-hmm, war.

• 3:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think we're, we're born with that urge, that desire for combat. But I think our culture is where they, they really get us with all the, the cool toys, right? And all the amphibious vehicles and tanks and stuff. You're like, mm, that, that's the coolest way you could satisfy that, that urge, that desire for combat.

• 3:08:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it's the camaraderie too, right? And it's the elitism of wanting to be a part of this, you know, special team. You know, that's all, that's all it takes when you're a kid. Let's get it on.

• 3:08:46Speaker 01

  Easy.

• 3:08:47Jocko Willink?

  So, Kerry, we got a store, you were saying?

• 3:08:52Speaker 01

  We do have a store. Jaco's store. Jaco's store.com. This is where you can get your Discipline Equals Freedom gear. Don't forget about the Shirt Locker. Cool new shirt designed by Echo Charles every month. Lot of popular shirts coming from that one. The Sugar Coated Lies had very good reception.

• 3:09:10Jocko Willink?

  Lies, lies.

• 3:09:10Speaker 01

  Lies, lies.

• 3:09:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:12Speaker 01

  Sugar coated lies, lies. Um, just got some, some really good ones coming out of uh, the Shirt Lockers. So check that one out. Um, and some updated products, some new products on the Jaco's.

• 3:09:21Jocko Willink?

  What were we talking about?

• 3:09:22Speaker 01

  As well. Uh, we've got some new. Uh, quick flip items on there for, yeah, for your lightweight outerwear needs.

• 3:09:31Jocko Willink?

  Henner Gracie coming through.

• 3:09:32Speaker 01

  Henner Gracie coming through. Uh, but man, I've, I've used those, the, the bag.

• 3:09:37Jocko Willink?

  You like that.

• 3:09:38Speaker 01

  You don't know how much that comes in handy until you try it. Slip that full zip off. It turns into a bag in about point three seconds. Throw your keys, your phone, all that stuff in there. Throw it to the side at the gym. Easy day.

• 3:09:51Jocko Willink?

  Check. So, so there you go. Also, you need steak. Check out Colorado craft beef.com or primalbeef.com. Actually, I got a package from Colorado craft beef the other day. I opened it up. Then there's like a couple of T-shirts and some jerky in there. So I'm like, oh, cool. They sent me some jerky. I'm like, oh, this must be new experimental. You know, maybe we're going to come out with some jerky or something. So I opened this bag. It's an unmarked bag with jerky in it. Oh, cool. Start eating it. I'm like, hmm. Maybe I need to give them some feedback because not bad, but I've had better jerky than this before. So I'm kind of eating it. I'm like, yeah, this is taste, does taste a little strange, but well, maybe I'll just, you know, tell them what's,

• 3:10:34Jocko Willink?

  ask them about what they're putting in it or whatever. And as I'm eating this thing, I'm like halfway done with this piece of beef jerky. And I'm reading a note from them, from Jeff, and he's like, yeah, hey, just wanted to give you this new, uh, this new, um, uh, dog treat that we made. It's liver and organ meats, you know, compressed and into a jerky form. And I was like, awesome. I sent him a text. I was like, yo, I just eat a half a piece of dog treat of just liver and, and organ meats. So, but even liver and organ meats compressed together. It's not out yet, but they're going to make some, uh, some doggy treats with that stuff. Uh, but their steaks, awesome. I got a tomahawk on standby for tonight.

• 3:11:18Jocko Willink?

  And of course, primalbeef.com. Just two awesome companies here in America. Just great people and incredible steaks. Primal beef, fruit finished, right? Get that fruit, grain and fruit finished. So yeah, they grow up in the pastures of the Shenandoah Valley.

• 3:11:36Speaker 01

  No big deal.

• 3:11:37Jocko Willink?

  But then they, then they're going to finish them off with some grain and fruit. Think, think that thing tastes sweet? You're right. It does. So check them out. Primalbeef.com, coloradocraftbeef.com. Also subscribe to the podcast, also Jaco Underground, also YouTube. What do we got for YouTube? We got Jocko Podcast YouTube, Jocko Podcast clips that Echo Charles made. And also Jaco Fuel and Origin USA. Check all those out. Echo Charles is gonna have to get, I don't know, I kinda did with that text I sent the other day about the thumbnails, bro, he's losing his mind. He's losing his mind. He's got that AI. You guys know,

• 3:12:20Jocko Willink?

  you know that Echo Charles, he's into that kinda stuff. So he's sitting around with his damn AI generator and but he's, he's explaining, you know, I gotta go in there and tune. So he's into it.

• 3:12:33Speaker 01

  So If, if nothing else, go check out some of those new thumbnails on the YouTube.

• 3:12:38Jocko Willink?

  I don't know how many more there's gonna be, cuz I kinda had to be like, bro, this is getting crazy right now. But check out those YouTube, also Psychological Warfare, also Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Books, we got a book, Man Down, read it today, Mark Ormrod. It's a freaking outstanding book. I read 4% of it today. All kinds of really powerful stuff in that book. So check that out. Also, I've written a bunch of books, including the kids books, which Mark talked about today. Best kids books ever.

• 3:13:11Speaker 01

  Factual.

• 3:13:12Jocko Willink?

  Way of the Warrior Kid. Check them out. Get them for your kids. It's getting turned into a movie. Right now, as a matter of fact. It's gonna be an awesome movie, but you have to wait a year for that. Your kid could be off the rails. Like have, they could be in an irrecoverable situation of doom. Because you didn't, cuz you waited a year. Don't let that happen. Don't let it happen to the neighbor's kid. Don't let it happen to your nephew, your niece. Don't let that happen. Get him on the path right now. Way of the Warrior Kid. Check those out. Also, I've written a bunch of books about leadership. Also, speaking of leadership, we have a leadership consultancy. It's called Echelon Front. We solve problems through leadership.

• 3:13:54Jocko Willink?

  So, check out echelonfront.com. If you have any leadership issues in your team, in your organization, we will come and we will get them sorted for you. We've done it over and over and over again for scores of companies around the world. Echelonfront.com. We also, for teams and for individuals, for leadership skills, we have an online training academy. Boy, I wish this would have existed when I was younger. A place, because people, people don't think leadership, people think you're born with leadership. You're not just born with leadership. Just like you're not born knowing how to play guitar. You don't get born with that. You have to learn how to play guitar. You have to learn how to play basketball. You have to learn jujitsu. Your instincts are not correct.

• 3:14:41Jocko Willink?

  And your leadership instincts are not correct. And in many cases, your life instincts are not correct. We have the correct things, the correct skills to teach you how to lead and live.

• 3:14:52Jocko Willink?

  So, go to extremeownership.com and get a leg up. It's like jujitsu for life. You'll do better in your whole life. Just like, um, if you didn't know any jujitsu, Kerry, and I did, what are your chances in a fight? Zero percent. Zero percent chance. If you know jujitsu, you can win. And yet somehow people think they can just go through life without ever having to learn anything. Ever, learning leadership, learning life skills.

• 3:15:19Jocko Willink?

  So, that's where we're at. Go to extremeownership.com and learn how to lead so you can use jujitsu against, and in order to help you win. Do you use leadership against people? No, you don't. You, you use it, I, I almost said that. I almost said, oh, you can use it against your, no, you can use it against your competitors. Yeah, you can, that's true. You can use it against your competitors, but if you're using the skills that we teach within your family, it actually enhances everything for your family.

• 3:15:51Jocko Willink?

  So, check that out, extremeownership.com. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization, helping out so many veterans. I know these veterans personally, many of them. And their lives are Transformed by what Mama Lee does. So check out America's Mighty Warriors.org if you want to donate or you want to get involved. Also, HeroesAndHorses.org. Micah Fink just taking and salvaging the pieces from people's lives and reassembling them and making them

• 3:16:34Jocko Willink?

  stronger and better than they ever were. So check out HeroesAndHorses.org. And then Jimmy May has got an amazing organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. Got a great system of taking people from the SEAL teams and moving them into civilian jobs. And it's incredible. So check out BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. And if you want to connect with us on the interwebs, as I said, Mark can be connected with at MarkOrmrod.com. He's on Instagram. He's on Facebook. He's on Twitter, X, at MarkOrmrod. And check out the Reorg Charity as well. ReorgCharity.com.

• 3:17:20Jocko Willink?

  And they're also at Reorg Charity on the Gram. As far as social media, well, I'm on Jaco.com. I'm also on the social media stuff, at Jocko Willink. Kerry is at Kerry Helton. No underscore, no nothing. Just K E R R Y H E L T O N. So check that out. No, no need for, for underscores. No hyphens. No underscores. Just straight up. Just straight up. Straight up. There you go. So thanks once again to Mark for coming on board. And thanks for Sam. Great to meet you. And I can't wait to have you on and talk through your career

• 3:18:01Jocko Willink?

  as well. Thanks to the Reorg Charity for what you're doing. And thanks once again, Mark. The service, the sacrifice, and the example that you set is incredible. And we thank you for it. And thanks to all of our military around the world tonight, especially our allies, and really especially of our allies. Thanks to our, our British allies in the United Kingdom, who stand with us shoulder to shoulder to protect freedom around the world.

• 3:18:31Jocko Willink?

  We thank all of you for your service. And also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service,

• 3:18:43Jocko Willink?

  as well as all other first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe here at home. And everyone else out there,

• 3:18:52Jocko Willink?

  check out Mark's book. Look, there's moments in that book and there's moments for all of us in our lives where things aren't going right.

• 3:19:02Jocko Willink?

  Where

• 3:19:04Jocko Willink?

  the bad luck stacks up.

• 3:19:07Jocko Willink?

  Where you feel like you can't get a break, where you feel like you, you have nothing left.

• 3:19:13Jocko Willink?

  Understood. That happens. When that happens,

• 3:19:20Jocko Willink?

  accept it.

• 3:19:22Jocko Willink?

  And then get up, go out there and crack on.

• 3:19:29Jocko Willink?

  Then that's all I've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Kerry and Jaco. Out.