456: 1st Of The 506th. Protecting Our Way of Life. With Jason Kedzior.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe In the Battle of Ramadi, in 2005 and 2006, the soldiers from the 1st of the 506th upheld the highest traditions of bravery and professionalism-and it was an honor for SEALs from Task Unit Bruiser to fight alongside them. Jason Kedzior is one of those soldiers. 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 456 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. Lieutenant Colonel Ron Clark, Commander of the 1st of the 506 Red Kerr, he told us that if we were looking for action, we'd find it. Although firefights and other hostile action are routine, IEDs are the worst problem, he said. They were responsible for five of the six deaths his men have suffered since deploying in January. As of mid-May, his troops at Camp Corregidor on eastern Ramadi had suffered 380 attacks from IEDs while finding and destroying 667 more.

• 0:41Jocko Willink?

  Corregidor is roughly the size of a super Walmart, including the parking lot. Buildings and houses outside the perimeter that the enemy could temporarily occupy are so close that they could practically heave mortars at us by hand.

• 0:57Jocko Willink?

  On average, the camp gets shelled every other day. Clark told us that because attacks are so constant, body armor and helmet are required anytime you leave a reinforced roof building. An added attraction is the snipers who occasionally pop off around into the camp from the minarets. They know of Americans unwillingness to attack religious buildings, even if they're clearly being used for military activity. When I asked Colonel Clark why Iraqi army or police couldn't be used to make sure nobody entered the mosques with weapons, he was quick to say, "We never hesitate to fire back when fired upon." However, he added, "Our fight requires strict cultural and religious sensitivity

• 1:42Jocko Willink?

  in order to be successful and legitimize the Iraqi government and army."

• 1:49Jocko Willink?

  The constant threat of snipers and mortar attacks contributes greatly to the general unpleasantness of life in Corregidor. The camp is also short on amenities, even by Iraqi standards.

• 2:03Jocko Willink?

  It's also short on men.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  Company strength should be 136. Charlie Company originally had 138 men, but because of casualties and normal leave time, Captain Claiborne, the Charlie Company commander, says he's down to only 102 men available for operations.

• 2:23Jocko Willink?

  Luckily, I've not had any soldiers killed while on the battlefield, he says, but I've taken a lot of casualties due to IEDs, shrapnel, and bullet wounds. I've had close to 20% of my company right now eligible for Purple Hearts, if that tells you anything.

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  And those right there are some excerpts from an article called "The New Band of Brothers", written by Michael Fomento, a journalist and former US Army airborne soldier, who embedded with several units in Ramadi in 2006, including obviously the 1st of the 506. He also, by proxy, was therefore embedded with SEALs from Task Unit Bruiser.

• 3:08Jocko Willink?

  And the 1st Battalion 506th Infantry Regiment is a legendary unit that traces its lineage back to the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of World War II, formed in Georgia in 1942. It's got its nickname, "The Curhees", from Curhe Mountain, which translated from Cherokee means "stand alone", and they fought extensively in World War II at Normandy, the Rhineland, the Ardennes, Bastogne. They fought throughout the Vietnam War, including during the Tet Offensive and the Counteroffensive, and the Battle of Hamburger Hill.

• 3:51Jocko Willink?

  And in World War II in Vietnam, they were decorated with four Presidential Unit citations and two valorous unit awards. And of course, the 506 was memorialized and honored by the HBO special Band of Brothers and outstanding mini-series based on the historical account from Stephen Ambrose's book by the same name, Band of Brothers. And in the Battle of Ramadi in 2005, 2006, the soldiers from the 1st of the 506th upheld without question the highest traditions of bravery and professionalism.

• 4:30Jocko Willink?

  And it was an honor for the SEALs of Task Unit Bruiser to fight alongside them. And it's also an honor to have one of those very soldiers, Jason Kedzior, here with us tonight to talk about his experiences and lessons learned from that battle. Jason, thanks for coming on, man.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Jocko.

• 4:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess this kind of started many years ago. We were both home, but I got a letter to send to my gym. And in the letter from you was your battle patch, the Ace of Spades from your helmet, First of the 506. Might be the coolest and most meaningful thing that anyone has ever given me. So that battle patch just represents so much that that happened between the First of the 506 and the guys, my guys. So when you reached out to me again and said you were going to be in San Diego, I said,

• 5:36Jocko Willink?

  hey, man, let's, let's, let's have a chat. So thanks for coming out, man.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here.

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  Let's, let's get to your story, man. So you grew up where, Illinois?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I grew up in a small town, Pekin, Illinois. It's about 40,000 people, blue collar town. Most people know Peoria, which is on the other side of the Illinois River from, from Pekin. And it's, it was formerly Caterpillar Headquarters. So, you know, your grandpa probably worked there, your dad probably worked there, your uncles probably worked there. And, but no, from Pekin, just surrounded by cornfields and just a, just a, just a small town and, but good people.

• 6:23Jocko Willink?

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

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Um, so my mom's been with the federal government for um for, you know, over thirty years. You know, she worked um at a um United States Attorney's Office and then Bureau of Prisons and a federal defender's office. Um, and my dad was a local police officer.

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  Any prior military or any military in the background grandparents or anything like that or your dad?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yes, uh, uh, quite, quite, quite a bit, actually. So, um, uh, my, on my mom's side, my, uh, my great grandpa was, uh, was in the Navy. And, um, he got, he was drafted, but I, he was, uh, um, him and my great grandmother, they had like a little, like a little coffee shop. All right, I'm sorry, um, a little like a convenience store and, uh,

• 7:14Speaker 01

  and, and like my grandpa was, was young at the time. And so when he got his draft notice to go, he was older, he was like in his thirties.

• 7:23Jocko Willink?

  Was this for World War Two?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  World War Two.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  And so, um, he's like, well, I gotta go. And my great grandma was like, what are you, what are you, what are you doing? You're just gonna leave me here with, with this? He like didn't fight it or anything like that. I guess it was some sort of, he was a, he was a character and, and he left. And, um, I don't really, nobody really knows where he was at in, in World War Two. Uh, he, he was a CB and, um, but somehow he ended up acquiring like a, a German Luger and a, and a, uh, Japanese Imperial Army rifle and somehow, uh, and my, one of my uncles still has those today. Um, and then, um, my grandpa, he was, uh, he was in the Marines, uh, during the Korea timeframe,

• 8:06Speaker 01

  but he was sent to, he was sent to Hawaii while his friends were sent to Korea and they never, um, let him live that down. Um, and then, um, my grandma's brother, he was, uh, he was a pilot and, uh, crashed over the Pacific, but it was like in the fifties, it was in wartime and nobody really knows what happened there either.

• 8:27Jocko Willink?

  What about your dad?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Uh, my dad, he was a, uh, he was a Vietnam veteran. He was a, uh, he was a door gunner on a Huey in 1965 with the first air cav.

• 8:36Jocko Willink?

  Kid's son.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Um, very quiet about it, never.

• 8:39Jocko Willink?

  You know, five thousand Hueys went to Vietnam and three thousand two hundred of them were lost in combat?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  I did not know that.

• 8:45Jocko Willink?

  Insane.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  That's insane.

• 8:47Jocko Willink?

  And the average age of the whole crew, the whole, all of them together was like twenty, including the pilot, the co-pilot, the crew chief and the gunner. Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, uh, he doesn't really, he doesn't really talk about it that much. I mean, I remember asking him when I was like little, um, you know, hey, what was it like, you know? Um, did you ever kill anybody? You know, that sort of stuff and, um.

• 9:08Jocko Willink?

  He was like, son, I was a door gunner in Nam.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  And, and I remember we were driving down the interstate. I don't even know where we were going and there was some timbered along the, along the road. And after like a long, long pause, like the conversation had switched, right? And, um, he just looked over at me and he said, Jason, he's like, do you know how hard it is to know that when you're, when you're flying at a hundred and fifty feet and, and, you know, they're in, they're in the tree line? And the conversation descended, so I didn't ask anything else.

• 9:38Jocko Willink?

  Do you have brothers or sisters?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, two brothers, uh, uh, younger brother and an older brother.

• 9:43Jocko Willink?

  So you're the middle child?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, my, my older brother is, uh, quite a bit older. He's sixteen years older than me. Uh, and so, um, I really, I don't have a lot of memories of, of him. Uh, he, he went off to college and, and stuff when I was really little.

• 9:57Jocko Willink?

  Did he go in the military?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  No, I was the only one.

• 10:00Jocko Willink?

  You're the only one. All right. So you're growing up. What are you into when you're growing up going to school?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Um, I just, uh, I mean, playing, playing and playing outside, um, doing sports. I mean, I always had a ball in my hand. Um, I was no good at anything, but, um, but I love playing baseball, love playing basketball, uh, that sort of stuff.

• 10:21Jocko Willink?

  Did you play in high school?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Uh, no, uh, right before I was a, I was a pretty good baseball player, but I got, I'm getting hit by a pitch and, uh, never picked up a bat again. And so, uh, which was a, a big regret of mine, but, uh, I had really good hand eye coordination, but I just never stuck with it.

• 10:37Jocko Willink?

  And then what about um music? Were you into music or anything?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Um, and I I've never played any any any instruments or anything, but um I was really into the Dave Matthews Band.

• 10:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Love the Dave Matthews Band.

• 10:49Jocko Willink?

  This is this this occasionally works, man. Occasionally you get the whole vibe. Echo Charles not approvingly too, by the way.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Dave Matthews all day. Love Dave Matthews.

• 10:58Jocko Willink?

  All day, all day.

• 11:01Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you spent a bunch of time, you so you grew up around corn?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:05Jocko Willink?

  Out there de-tasseling corn?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:07Jocko Willink?

  Let's go. Give us a brief on de-tasseling corn. Were you doing it back in the day like riding in the front of on on like a little rack with kids sitting in there to pull the corn out?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  To de-tass it. That was you?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Well, we were, yeah, we were doing that and we were we were walking the fields too. So I mean, it was it was pretty hard work.

• 11:24Jocko Willink?

  So explain de-tasseling corn.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Okay, um, so, all right, so when you're de- when you when you start the process of de-tasseling corn?

• 11:33Jocko Willink?

  First of all, what's the tassel all about? You got to explain to people.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:36Jocko Willink?

  Because a lot of people on here, they're they're they don't know anything about this.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  All right, so you have you have male and female rows of corn, right? And the tassel that you have to pick is pollinates the corn. And when it's at the end of the pollination process or to control the pollination process, you have to you have to pick that corn or pick that tassel and the um, the the corn is is 10 foot tall at this point. And so, um, I mean, sometimes you have to, if it's corn is too tall, then that's when you're getting on a tractor and and going it. But if it's a manageable height, then I mean, you're you're getting up there and getting that tassel. But it's it was super hard work. Um, I mean, so I was pretty sheltered uh growing up. I I would I would grew up, um, I went to a Catholic school.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And so, um, when I was in seventh or eighth grade, when I started, uh, when I got on that de-tasseling bus, I learned a lot about life on that de-tasseling bus. Stuff that I never heard before and uh.

• 12:34Jocko Willink?

  There's all kinds of things going on the de-tasseling bus.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  And.

• 12:38Jocko Willink?

  Because this is what? Just packed with a bunch of kids between the ages of 13 and? Twenty?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the like, the the crew boss or the assistant crew boss was um uh was probably in high school and you know, and then like the the pickers or whatever are are gonna be, you know, in seventh or eighth grade and going into high school. And so it's just like a young crew going out there um into these cornfields. And so um

• 13:05Jocko Willink?

  What time you start in the morning?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  You're starting early. I mean, you're getting up at five in the morning and you gotta be getting on the bus by, you know, five thirty and you're probably out of the field within thirty minutes. And you got your you got your lunch bucket and just a and just a jug of water. And that's what you have for the day. And um, I mean, you're I mean, you're uh, you know, when you when you start there, the corn is is wet. I mean, it is it's soaking wet from the dew from the day before. And then um, uh, and then maybe if it rained or whatever, I mean, it's just the the fields muddy. And I mean, you're just, I mean, you're walking through that those fields. And I mean, you're just soaking wet by the time you reach. And and then, you know, then it gets to be like, you know, ninety five degrees outside. And then you're just all stiff from, you know, the salt or whatever it is. And it's just

• 13:50Speaker 01

  it's it was hard work. But man, it was a lot of fun. Um, but going back, I mean, to in order to in order to uh, in order to control this pollination process. So so each, so you know the silk that comes off the corn?

• 14:05Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  All right. So each piece of silk that is off that corn, it goes to each individual kernel on that corn. And so when you pick that tassel, it controls, it controls the pollination process. And so um, yeah, you would just you would go, you would walk down the fields and um, you don't know how long the field is most of the time. And you're just you're just going out there. And then you're just you're just hopping row to row to row and then walking back or and then when I when I became a crew boss and assistant crew boss, I was

• 14:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  I was, yeah, yeah, I was driving the tractor and um

• 14:41Jocko Willink?

  When do you get done? Do you just work all day until sunset?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Uh, no, we we usually kind of uh, cut like um, probably right, probably say around three o'clock in the afternoon. So we were home by dinner.

• 14:51Jocko Willink?

  How much money did you make?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, if you're like, probably four or five dollars an hour, you know, I mean, probably, yeah, yeah. So it was, I mean, but like, you thought

• 15:01Jocko Willink?

  What about when you were the tractor driver? Did you make a little bit more?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, yeah. Every, every, every step up you made, um, cause it goes off like your picking quality too, right? So I mean, like you're, um, if you're a fast picker, I mean, you might, you know, get like, you might stay a little bit extra to make a little bit more money. And, um, and then they, they like, okay, hey, this guy, this guy gets it. He's able to, and you, it's, you know, baby steps and you're, you're, um, your crew boss is training you how to drive that tractor. Cause I mean, I didn't know how to, I mean, I was 12 years old, you know, I don't know how to drive a stick shift. And so like, I'm driving a stick shift and turning that, that big tractor and making sure I don't miss a row is, you know, you're going down and, but I had a lot of fun and it was, it was hard work in the sun and, um, but, uh, it was just good, hard work.

• 15:44Jocko Willink?

  And that's what you did every summer?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Every summer.

• 15:47Jocko Willink?

  From the time you were 12?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I was in seventh, whatever seventh grade is, I mean.

• 15:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Seventh grade, I think is 12.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. So, so yeah, 12, I mean, all the way through high school until my senior year of school.

• 15:58Jocko Willink?

  How much money could you make over the summer?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Um, man, I don't even know. I mean, uh, I guess it just depends.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  Could you get, could you get a few grand to buy like a little pickup truck or something?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm sure, I'm sure I did make a, make a few grand, but I don't even know where that money, that money is long gone.

• 16:15Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Uh, you, did you start, when did you start having an interest in the military?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Um, well, I was, I would, there was always an interest in the military. Um, I was, I, I was, I would watch like almost every war movie. That was, when I was out there, I mean, I mean, you know, Rambo and, uh, missing in action, Firebirds, fly to the intruder. I mean, I'm going way back. I know, uh, uh, but so it was, it was always.

• 16:39Jocko Willink?

  How about platoon apocalypse now in Full Metal Jacket?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  So I, so I, so my grandpa, he was in the Marines. I remember, uh, I remember seeing, he would always watch that. And so like, I would, I would, so, so I remember going in one time and it was just me and my grandpa and I, it was that opening scene. And I'm just like, this is out of control. You know, I'd never had seen anything like that. And he, he just let it play. And I mean,

• 17:02Jocko Willink?

  The, the opening scene, by the way, is 45 minutes long. So before people made, what is it called when you make a, a thing for YouTube and it's a bunch of different, different things?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Mashup?

• 17:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So before, before people made mashups on YouTube, somebody in my platoon made a videotape mashup of cool parts of movies. And you know, it'd be like a minute of this and two minutes of that. And then it went to the beginning of Full Metal Jacket and just played 45 minutes straight.

• 17:31Jocko Willink?

  It's like, yup, the whole thing is freaking epic. So you're, so what, your grandfather took it to you?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, took, took me down. I mean, well, I mean, I don't know if I, he, he just let it play. And I was just sitting there watching it. Uh, so that was like my first, like, you know, like real estate. But I don't, cause I don't even really know how I, cause I mean, you're talking VHS, so I don't even know really how uh, I, I got away with watching like Rainbow and stuff like that, but I did. And I was, I loved it. And, uh, and yeah, so that's, that's kind of where the interest, that where the interest was. I mean, cause, cause you know, my, like, um, my, my grandpa and my, of course, my, I was too young when my great grandpa, when he passed, so like, I didn't really ask them or anything like that. My dad was so quiet about it that I never, um, that I, that it, there, it wasn't like a big influence on me, like, oh, you're, you're, you know, you're gonna go here.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Um, it just was something that I was, I was always interested in.

• 18:27Jocko Willink?

  So you're in high school, September 11th happens what year for you?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Uh, sophomore.

• 18:32Jocko Willink?

  Sophomore year?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Sophomore year. I remember being in a, uh, history class. It was, uh, first period and, um, they had a TV on one of those rollers and they, they rolled it in and, uh, the, one of the towers was already hit. And, uh, we saw the second one come in live and, and everybody just knew then, I mean, they were just saying, hey, we're, you know, we're going to war, like this is, this is it. And I was a sophomore and I just remember being so angry. I was so angry and, um, that was, that was kind of it. That, uh, that was kind of it. And then like the influence of like my older brother, he was really kind of pushing me towards that way. Cause I was pretty, I was wild in high school and, um, and-

• 19:17Jocko Willink?

  Hold on a second. You can't just breeze by, I was wild in high school. What were you doing?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  So, like, I, I wasn't getting any trouble or anything. So, it's okay. So, like, I had mentioned my, my dad was a local police officer, right? In this, in, uh, in this, in the town that I grew up in. Well, he was, he was not only like the local police officer, but he was, um, If you're, do you guys have Crime Stoppers here or whatever?

• 19:41Jocko Willink?

  Isn't, isn't that like a, a community program?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so it was like a crime prevention thing and um they would do like reenactments and stuff like that. And so like his face would be on all these reenactments of um hey, can you help us solve this crime? Call, call this number and, and he would have a reenactment for it. So like with a unique last name that I had and then, and then um my dad being a local police officer like, it was, it was almost like um I felt like I had to kind of prove myself that, that I wasn't a, I, I wasn't a cops kid. And so um, so I drank a lot and, and went to, went to a bunch of parties and I got caught at everything I did by my parents and uh.

• 20:25Jocko Willink?

  He's a bad criminal. Just getting rolled up.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  That's terrible.

• 20:29Jocko Willink?

  Plus your dad's a cop, dude.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  I didn't have a chance, I didn't have a chance. And trying to, you know, and like I'm thinking I'm young and lying about what I'm doing and like, what do you know? Why are you all muddy? It's like, oh, I don't know, but I was really sleeping in a bean field, you know, trying to, trying to get away from the cops and it was, it was so dumb.

• 20:46Jocko Willink?

  That's a, that's a great answer. Why are you so muddy? I don't know.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:52Jocko Willink?

  That's like the first time I met JP Denell and, and he had, you know, like uh cuts on his knuckles and like a broken couple fingers. And I'm like, wh- what happened to you? He's, and he looks at me and goes, I fell down the stairs. Even he knew, even he knew that he was, shouldn't be trying to lie to me. He's like, I fell down the stairs. I was like, uh, who'd you hit? And he goes, uh, blah, blah, blah. And we, we had a little conversation about that. But yeah, when you're, you think you're gonna get away with some stuff.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so it was just, it was just me being like a, like a rebel trying to go against the grain of, of me being this, you know, um, oh, I'm the cops kid, so there's, you know, a certain, certain way I should act, but I was just like, no, like, I, I can show you I can get down and, and.

• 21:34Jocko Willink?

  Let's go to that bean field.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:37Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys party out in the cornfields?

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there's, that's where the ragers were, man. I mean, like, you know, when the parents were gone and, and, you know, uh, you know, a big party would be and then, you know, of course the cop, you know, the, the sheriff would come to, to break it up and then we'd all just scatter, you know, and, and.

• 21:55Jocko Willink?

  So your older brother saw that you could be possibly not making the best decisions?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  He 100% saw it. He 100% saw it and I actually owe a lot to him for kind of guiding me in that direction because he knew, I mean, he knew and he was, I mean, he was, I mean, he already, yeah, he was, yeah, he was well out of college and, you know, starting his own career and, you know, had, you know, a couple of kids, my niece and nephew at the time. And so he knew and I owe a lot to him to, that he guided me down that path. And so, I mean, there were no college visits. There were, there were nothing like that. I mean, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with, with his guidance and, and going to the military.

• 22:40Jocko Willink?

  So it was just kind of complete high school? You weren't striving for any valedictorian?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  No, there was nothing, nothing like that at all.

• 22:51Jocko Willink?

  So how long until, when you graduate high school, would you go straight to the recruiter? Did you go, did you enlist while you were still in high school like some kids do?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  No, it was, it was after I graduated and I went to, I went to the army recruiter and I said, hey, get me into Afghan, because we were Afghanistan. I was like, hey, get me into Afghanistan. I want to go infantry. I'm ready to go tomorrow. And they're like, hey, hey, hey, slow down, slow down, like, hold on hard charger and.

• 23:18Jocko Willink?

  This is what, 2003?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Uh, this was 2003. Uh, yeah, 2000, May of 2003.

• 23:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So as soon as you graduate?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I, I mean, I was the easiest recruit that ever, I didn't know anything about bonuses. I didn't know anything about, I didn't know anything about anything. I just, I saw Rambo and I was like, hey, let's, let's go. I want to get into that fight. Like, do not let this war end before I can get over there. I, I want to go kill as many bad guys as I possibly can. And I wanted, like, I'm ready to go tomorrow.

• 23:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep, that recruiter, I wonder how well those recruiters spot that kid?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  They didn't even have to do, they didn't have to do anything.

• 23:52Jocko Willink?

  They're just like, oh, we got a special spot for you, bro. How long did it take before you were able to leave?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Uh, so I was on the delayed entry program, uh, cause so many people like, cause at that point we had, um, we were, uh, we went to Iraq, um, and the invasion started in Iraq in 2003. And so, um, I left in October of 2003 to go to basic training.

• 24:12Jocko Willink?

  So did you get one more summer of de-tasseling in?

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't recall. I don't think I did. I don't think I did.

• 24:21Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you leave for basic in October of 20?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Uh, 2003.

• 24:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, 2003?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:28Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, so how's basic training?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Uh, it was, well, I mean, it was a, it was a shock to me cause I had never, um, I had never, you know, experienced anything like that.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  And, uh, um, well, it, well, like going back, it was, uh, like I remember my, um, like, so I, I didn't even really, I didn't tell my parents I was, I was doing this. I was just, I just was going and then I eventually told them at some point. And, um, I remember my dad being like super upset about it. And, um, I remember he came, like when the, when the recruiter came to pick me up to take me down to St. Louis to go, I remember.

• 25:07Jocko Willink?

  But you hadn't told, so you enlisted in sometime right after high school in the delayed entry program and you didn't tell your parents?

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, I just, I, yeah. I mean, I was just like, hey, this is, I mean, again, it's like, it was the rebel, right? It was wild. Like I got it figured out, right? I got it figured out. I know what I'm doing. Like this, I'm all good.

• 25:24Jocko Willink?

  Of course.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  And I knew everything. Yeah. And so, um, and so, um, I remember, um, my dad, um, coming over to the house. And it was right before the recruiter was supposed to come pick me up. And he was like, Jason, you know, don't do it. Don't get in there. There's nothing I can do for you if you get in that car. And I was like, no, I know exactly what I want to do. Um, but I know he was coming from a good place. He was coming, cause like he never talked about Vietnam, but, um, and still doesn't. But he, he knew from picking up the infantry, seeing the bloody, the bloody messes that was happening,

• 26:05Speaker 01

  picking up dead soldiers, um, probably mowing down a bunch of people. Uh, he knew exactly.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  He knew exactly what he was saying, but it just, it, um, it just didn't, like, he was just saying, you're, all you are is a number. All you are is a number. Don't go and do it. And, um, but I, but I, I mean, I did it anyway. And, and, but he, he was coming from a really good place. He was coming from a good place and I knew it. But it took me, it took me several years after the fact to, cause I remember that conversation. Um, but then, um, but, uh, as far as, as far as basic training, um, it was a-

• 26:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, just FYI, I mean, there's a whole phase of life where kids don't listen to their parents.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:49Jocko Willink?

  And it's like, maybe it starts around between the ages of probably six and 10 is where it starts. And it maybe finishes at like between 25 and 40. You know, it's like a whole, it could be anywhere in there.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:04Jocko Willink?

  You know, uh, and it's, that's actually one of the reasons in, in the Warrior Kid books, that I made it Uncle Jake instead of the dad.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 27:15Jocko Willink?

  And, and I also recognize that there's a lot of kids that don't have a dad around. So I didn't want to make a kid think like, oh, well, this, this kid has his dad to help him and I don't have a dad, so I can never do this. But it's Uncle Jake and he's just, um, you know, he's outside the fam, you know, a little bit outside the fam. So that's, that's, that's one reason. But the amount of people that come up to me and say, you know, I'm so happy you wrote those books cause my kids listen to Uncle Jake, but they won't listen to me. I say the exact same things, but they won't listen to me. And that's just the way it is. That's just the way it is. So your reaction to your dad, when your dad, a Vietnam veteran telling you like, hey, don't

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  do this. You're going to be a number. And you're like, no, dad, you don't understand. Actually, I remember, uh, my dad, when I enlisted in the Navy. He goes, you're gonna hate it. You don't like authority. You don't like people telling you what to do. And you're not gonna, you're gonna hate it. And I said, it's different dad. This is the SEAL teams. It's a team. And I was, that's how ignorant I was. I thought, well, you know, it's just a team. So there's no one in charge. I mean, that's just how stupid I was. And my, my final example is when my son was like 10 years old, he was doing jujitsu and he was putting an armlock on some other kid and I told him like, hey, you need to get your hips a little on more underneath that or something. I told him, he looked at me and said, no, you don't.

• 28:40Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, awesome. You're right, bro. You're right. You know, everything. I've been doing jujitsu for 25 years at that time. But you're good to go. So very normal, very normal. So did you start, did you start thinking when you got to bootcamp, maybe your dad was right?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I mean, it was like the, it was the shock of, of everything and it was just, you know, complete chaos and not knowing what was going on. And, but I think, you know, I think that's normal, but it would mean at the, at the time, it was the hardest thing that I had, I had ever done, you know? I remember they were like, hey, you know what, at the end of, you know, basic training, you know, you gotta, you know, the, the final event, the final FTX is like a 15 mile road march, you know? And then, and then we just had completed a two mile road march and I had never, I had never done anything. I'm like, dang, this pack is heavy, man. Like, how am I gonna get through 15 miles? Like, dude, this is like, what am I gonna do? You know? And, but then just like, you know, the, the learning of land navigation and I've never fired a weapon before, you know, but

• 29:42Speaker 01

  I was firing a rifle and all these, you know, throwing grenades. And I'm like, dude, this, this is like, this is awesome. Like, this is great.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  And, but, but yeah, but, but then like, you know, looking back on it, you know, it's, it was like, oh, you know, when you're at the 101st airborne, you know, it's like, it's like 15 miles is child's play, you know? You're doing that like every Thursday.

• 30:08Jocko Willink?

  And that rolled right into A I T?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Rolled into A I T and it was just kind of more of the same.

• 30:13Jocko Willink?

  When you get to A I T, is it still a boot camp environment? Or does it start to become a little bit more mentorship environment?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's more of a, it's more of a, it's still a boot camp environment, but I mean, they're like, you're getting a little bit more, a little bit more freedom. And, and I mean, I mean, I was 20 years ago, it's trying to try to remember, but I remember still being, it just kind of seemed like all one. It kind of seemed like it was just the kind of the same thing, but just you got a little bit more freedom.

• 30:40Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any challenges in boot camp? Did you have any challenges in A I T? Anything that, did you ever get like, oh, I'm gonna fail this thing? Or were you pretty good to go?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  No, I was, I was pretty good to go. I didn't, I didn't really have anything that, um, my, my marksmanship was, was, was really good. I mean, I started from, I started from nothing. So like the way they built me up and, and to teach me how to, how to shoot and everything was, uh, was all, everything that they did was like, had a, had a purpose. And, um, uh, I didn't like the rule, the drill and ceremony stuff, you know? I didn't like that stuff, but, um, but I never really struggled at anything. I was just like, I, you know, I don't know if it goes back to the, the tassling days or whatever, but like, you know, being in, you know, being in the mud and stuff like that. I mean, it was no big deal for me getting dirty. I mean, I was out in the timber and stuff a lot as a kid, so like I, I just, I loved it.

• 31:29Jocko Willink?

  Just perfect. So as you're wrapping up that, did you have a contract to go airborne? Or, you know, when, when you're gonna, you end up at the 101st. Did you have a pre-existing contract or do you have to screen for that? Like, how does that work?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  So for me, I mean, yeah, I was, again, easiest recruit that ever went. So, I mean, I just said, hey, give me, you know, army infantry. I don't care where you send me, as long as I can go to Afghanistan, like I, like, you know? And so, uh, um, so I did, I personally didn't have that contract. That's where I found out, like in basic training, I'm like, wait a second, you got $6,000 to sign up for four years? I was like, what the heck? You know, and, uh, uh, you know, and all these other, you know? Oh man, I didn't know, I didn't know a thing, you know, because I had it figured out, right? I didn't tell my parents about it. No one was there to guide me. It was just. Like this is what I wanted. So I got everything I wanted. I mean, the recruiter never, I mean, lied to me or put me in a place he didn't.

• 32:25Jocko Willink?

  You got everything you wanted and not anything else?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. And so it was, it was a basic training where they were giving out different duty stations for those who didn't have like a, you know, a RIP contractor or whatever going into it. So, uh, so yeah, so they told me I was, uh, I was selected for the 101st Airborne and I was, man, I was so fired up. I was so excited to go there.

• 32:46Jocko Willink?

  Now, is that based on your performance or, or what is that based on?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's based on performance or I remember you fill out a wish list too.

• 32:54Jocko Willink?

  Did you even know on your wish list that you wanted to be airborne?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  So the guy next to me, um, he said, I'm going to do Fort Campbell, Fort Bragg, and I think he's like third ID or no, I'm sorry, it was 10th Mountain. And I was like, those sound great. And I just copied off of his.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Again, I didn't, I didn't know, I didn't know a thing.

• 33:11Jocko Willink?

  That's so awesome, dude. So, okay. So then where do you get, where do you, where do you end up getting stationed?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Uh, so I got stationed at, uh, Fort Campbell, Kentucky and, uh, and I got there in January of 2004.

• 33:25Jocko Willink?

  And that's with the, is that with the first of 506?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  No, so.

• 33:28Jocko Willink?

  Cause you were originally, weren't you originally going somewhere else?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So talk me through that.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So, um, so I get to the 101st in, uh, January of 2004. And then at that time, um, all those, all the 101st guys were in the invasion. And so like, it was like a ghost town when I got there. And so I remember my, my mom, uh, drove me, uh, six hours from Peaking, Illinois to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. And, um, I, I was supposed to report to this replacement battalion. And so my mom's like, oh my gosh, you're going to the replacement battalion. Like, what does that mean? Are you going like, I'm like, I don't know, mom. And so, uh, and so I, I get dropped off and, um, I'm just. Kind of learning like where I'm supposed to go and then that's where they assigned me to

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Third Battalion, or I'm sorry, Alpha Company, Third Battalion, 187 Infantry, which is the Rokasans. And so, um, so, but again, I have to wait till they come back. So I'm like just with a group of guys who are waiting to, to go to their unit. Um, cause the 101st at that time had, um, had three infantry brigades. They had First Brigade, Second Brigade, and Third Brigade, which was 327 Infantry, 502 Infantry, and then the 187 Infantry. And I was assigned to the 187. And so, um, once they get, once they get back home and, um, I, I go into, I go into the unit and it's, um, I, I, again, not knowing anything, I thought that, you know, hey, I passed, I passed basic training.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  I'm going to be, I'm accepted into the family, like everything's cool. And it was anything but that. It was any, it was rough. It was like, uh, it was tough. And, uh, I mean, but you gotta think like, so the 187 Infantry, the one, the ones, the, the unit that I was first assigned to, they, they just got done with two deployments. So they, so they were the only unit in the 101st to go to Operation Anaconda in 2001. They get back home and then they go to invasion in 2003. So here I am as a cherry dick coming into the 101st with these guys who have more combat time than anybody else. And it was,

• 35:40Speaker 01

  it was rough. It was rough. They, I mean, it was, it was, uh, no holds bars, fistfights, um, takedowns, you don't measure up. Um, and I'm like, what is going on here? You know? And it was, it was just hard and rough. And, uh, man, I, I, I was like, man, dude, like, I don't know about this. Like this is, this is like, like what is going on? Like, like, is this how, is this the step to be accepted into? Um, cause I didn't have any martial arts background. I entered wrestling or anything like that. So, man, it was. Again, I was easy pick.

• 36:16Jocko Willink?

  Did you get put into a platoon or something when they get back?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just put into a platoon and um I was just surrounded by all these, all these uh veterans who like with two combat deployments under their belt and it was, man, it was just rough. It was just rough.

• 36:32Jocko Willink?

  So did you start to work up with them? Did you start training with them?

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Um, no, because they were, they were doing like a lot of um, when, when they came back, they were doing a lot of three day and four day weekends so they could go home to their family. So I had a lot of like free time on my hands. Um, and uh.

• 36:45Jocko Willink?

  When you weren't cage fighting with your platoon.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh. It was just, it was just rough. And I remember I was just like, man, like, like, we're not really learning like how we're operating here, you know, we're, I mean, we're learning if I can take a few punches and stuff like that in, in, in takedowns, but like, um, we're not learning like about like different weapon systems or stuff like that. I mean, that eventually came, but I was there such a short period of time, um, that um, I never did a, a workup with them.

• 37:12Jocko Willink?

  So what, what changed?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Um, they, so there was like a restructuring in the army and they were gonna, they were closing down third battalion of one eight seven and turning it into a calf scout unit. And so they, they had come up to all of us new guys and all of us new guys had the same experience. I mean, it wasn't just me. It wasn't just me. I mean, everybody had the same experience as I did. And so, um, uh, so they said, you can either go to, you know, first battalion or second battalion with one eight seven, or you can go to this new unit that's forming up. And we all opted to go to this new unit. I think one, one guy stayed, but the rest of us went to this new unit. But we had no idea what this new unit was gonna be. Had no clue. And uh, and we ended up um, um, heading, heading over there and they said, yeah, um, yeah, we're

• 37:58Speaker 01

  starting up this uh, fourth brigade and uh, it's gonna, you know, it's the same, same, same job infantry and uh, but if you want to, if you want to come into this unit, you have to have a minimum of like three years or something like that. And then, well, your time still applies in basic training to um, for your contract. I initially signed up for three years and so,

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And so I so I had to extend like eight eight months or something like that to to start with this new unit and they're like, okay, yeah, report in that parking lot, you know, tomorrow at zero six for PT and you'll get further instruction. It's like, okay, right on.

• 38:35Jocko Willink?

  How many people showed up in the parking lot for the first muster there?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  There was like four, four of us. It was me and me and another guy that I was with at one eight seven and then just two other brand new guys and we're just like, we had no sergeant, we had no, we had nothing. I mean, it was, it was just an empty parking lot and there was a guy, his name is Jason Dudley and he was a special, I was an E3 and he was an E4 and so he kind of just led us, led us on a PT and, and we did PT and then we came back and we're just like, we don't know what we're supposed to do. We have nothing. So we went to headquarters like, hey, it's like, yeah, just, you know, just, you know, be lost and, you know, you know,

• 39:18Jocko Willink?

  Who was in the headquarters unit?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  It was, it was just, it was just, I mean, it was like, there was hardly, it was like, there was nobody there. And, and so it was, but it wasn't like slowly but surely, like guys every day started just showing up and like the ranks started getting filled and, and so like, it was just kind of like, hey, you know, like, you're going to be in Delta Company, you're going to be in Charlie Company, you're going to be in Alpha Company. And then so next thing you know, like our ranks are, our ranks are filled up and then we started getting some structure. And I remember my, the first sergeant that I had in, that actually knew what he was, that he was doing, had some sort of structure and started training

• 40:01Speaker 01

  of us was Marco Silva. And, and he was, he was an E5 and he, I mean, he, he P'd us, P'd us like two or three times a day. And if we weren't, because we didn't have any weapons. I mean, we didn't have, we started doing like little battle drills and stuff like that with, with our hands, you know, I'm up, he sees me, I'm down, I'm down type stuff, doing obstacle courses, things like that. But it wasn't until we started getting weapons and barracks and stuff like that where it was like more regimented.

• 40:30Jocko Willink?

  How long did that take? Was it a couple of months? Was it?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would, I would go, I would probably say it was like, it was like maybe six months it took to, to be like a, to have some sort of base, some sort of foundation.

• 40:42Jocko Willink?

  And you end up in Delta Company?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Delta Company.

• 40:46Jocko Willink?

  Death Dealers.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  The Death Dealers.

• 40:47Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys have that name already established?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  No, so, um, once, once we had, um, our company and, um, when we were, um, segregated into our platoons, you know, uh, first, first through fourth platoon, um, I remember my company commander, um, Ukiah Senti, who was the man.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  He, um, he kind of like put it up to a vote and he was just like, hey, you know, we have a, and I think he understood at the time that, um, to establish culture, to establish what, what do we want this to be? And he was such an aggressive guy that, um, uh, somebody had shouted out, um, Death Dealers. And he's like, I'm good with that.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  And so that's how it happened and, and, and like, it was so, uh, it was so awesome, like to be, cause then we found out we were the 506 too. And I remember watching my, I don't have a lot of money growing up, you know? And so like, I remember, you know, again, going back to watching a bunch of war movies. I remember, um, um, one of my mom's friends had HBO and would tape Band of Brothers. And then she would, he would give them to my mom so I could watch them. And I would watch this over and over and over. And, um, uh, I was so proud to be part of the 506. And I was so proud to be a part of like the Death Dealers. Cause I mean, like it was like, just the culture that was set.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  It was, it was just everything that I, I signed up to, to do. I'm like, yeah, this, I can get down with this.

• 42:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. Ukiah Senti, the, the first time I met him, remember it was the first time I met, you know, we were doing, uh, planning and operations or whatever. And so we'd be sitting down and talking. I was with Seth Stone and we're going over whatever, whatever we're going over for an op. And we're talking, then we start, you know, after a little while, start talking about normal human things. And so his first name is Ukiah. And I was like, I don't know if I asked him, I don't really remember, but I just remember him telling me it's haiku spelled backwards. And I laughed and he's like, yeah, my parents were hippies. He's like, they got me freaking company commander of death. Let's go.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:59Jocko Willink?

  But what a, what a beast.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  So did you meet, did you meet him at, at Carrigato?

• 43:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because you know, we'd be, when you're doing, when you're planning these operations.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:09Jocko Willink?

  Uh, especially early on where I'd come over and trying to integrate and make sure that we, you know, were, were doing the right things. Um, that's where I'd met him and Clayburn and just the rest of the, the rest of the guys. Yeah.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:22Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, he was, and Stoner loved, Stoner loved senti dude, like he was fired up.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Jocko Willink?

  And then you had, and then you, on top of that, you had, you had this connection with the 506, you had the connection with Kerr he.

• 43:38Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember when Colonel Clark showed up?

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Um, I do. We had a, we had a, a battalion formation and I remember he said, today's a great day to be in the army, man. And, um, he's like, he's like, you know, we are, we are the 506th and, um, he's like, we're going to be training hard. And, um, he's like, you guys are going to love every second of this. And, um, and what an amazing guy he is.

• 44:02Jocko Willink?

  The best.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Um, he, he is such a great leader, so like, you know, of course it's like a new guy, like I'm, I'm not going to go, you know, approach him as a, as a E3 or E4. But like, he would just, he would, he would come around all the time. He would come around just to get to know you. Um, not like, like, you know, intimately, like, hey, how many, you know, brothers and sisters or whatever do you have or, you know, stuff like that. But, um, just more of just like always being around, always being a presence, always, um, always just giving that positive example. Um, and just, just a great, great man.

• 44:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. The interactions I had with him, again, going, going to Carrigato for the first time, meeting with him and just his attitude and how his attitude spread through everyone, like everyone.

• 44:53Jocko Willink?

  I mean, most people there just had such a positive attitude about what we're doing, how we're gonna do it, how we're gonna make things happen. Just, you know, I always describe him as one of the best leaders I've ever worked for anywhere. Just awesome. And that sounds exactly like the type of thing he would say when he takes over as a battalion commander. Like, it's a great day to be in the army and we're part of the first of the 506.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  And it was just such a powerful moment. And I, it was just, I just get so much pride from it, just with the history of it all. And it was just, it was just a really, really proud moment for me to be a part of something like that. I just knew there was, there was just something special about it. There was something special about it, just with the leadership that we had.

• 45:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yep. He's now, what, three-star general right now? Hopefully he'll be president one day. Did I say that? Yes, I certainly did just say that. Sergeant Major Catterton, another guy, was just great guy. And they just made a great, a great team.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did.

• 45:53Jocko Willink?

  What's the workup like? So, so now you're formed up. What's the workup consist of? What are you guys doing?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Guys are going to schools. Guys are, yeah, just, just a bunch of different schools and just a bunch of hard training, a bunch of battalion exercises, you know, company exercises, platoon exercises. And we're just getting to know each other, how we want to do stuff, what our internal SOPs are gonna be, what the battalion, what, what the kind of, the, what the standards they're, they're pushing. And, I mean, it was, it was, it was a truly trained to standard. Like, you are gonna meet this standard or we're not going home. And, I mean, it could be, it could be, you know, two in the morning before everybody gets it. Everybody helping each other out. Everybody policing our, policing

• 46:42Speaker 01

  our own. I mean, we had like onesies and twosies that would, you know, get in trouble and stuff like that. But for the most part, like, we policed our own and we were good. Like, we were, we were, we were really good when we were, when we were getting ready to go.

• 46:55Jocko Willink?

  So, you, when you're going on deployment, you guys? You guys thought you were going to Sodder City. Didn't you guys think you were going to Sodder City?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we got orders to Sodder City at first and everybody was just pissed off. Everybody was so mad because they're like, oh, great, we're going to some yellow zone. Like, like, here we are, like, we're, we're, like, we're really good.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  But, but you're sending us to some yellow zone and then like, I remember, I don't know who it was, but somebody came was like, yeah, well, we might go to a yellow zone and then it just, it might, might, might move more toward, towards a red zone later. But for right now, this is where we're gonna be. And we're like, oh, okay. We, we had, we had no idea. We, all we knew was we were going to Sodder City.

• 47:37Jocko Willink?

  And then how does your, how do you actually go on deployment? Cause you first go to Kuwait. Isn't that what you guys did? How, how do you get there?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Uh, on a plane.

• 47:44Jocko Willink?

  Like C-17s, just loading you guys up?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we went to.

• 47:47Jocko Willink?

  Do you pre-stage gear? Does your gear go over on ships or anything like that first?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the gear goes on ships, uh, in Conexes and then, um, I mean, we, we carry our, you know, rifles and machine guns with us and stuff. But, um, uh, but then, you know, after we get to, I can't remember where we landed, but we left from Fort Campbell. And then, um, we took a, we took a commercial airliner over to, over to Kuwait and then.

• 48:13Jocko Willink?

  Commercial airliner filled with all you guys or a civilian flight?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Um, no, it was just.

• 48:19Jocko Willink?

  Contracted civilian air.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Yep, it was filled with all of us. And I mean, I remember being on this, being on this enormous plane. It's the biggest plane I've ever been on in my entire life. And, and I made my machine, cause I was a, I was a, I was a 50 cal gunner. And so, uh, and so like, like my, my, my saw was, was right next to me, um, on this plane. I'm like, this is, this is crazy. I didn't expect it to be like this.

• 48:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's why I was asking, because everyone goes on deployment a little bit differently. And, and it's just always, it's usually not what people expect, what, what a civilian would expect. You know, civilian, even guys that were going to Vietnam, like I've had Vietnam guys on there like, yeah, I got on a plane and like a regular civilian aircraft and they're flying either to or from Vietnam. And that's how they got there.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:03Jocko Willink?

  And they get, then they spend their year on the ground. They go through everything they go to. They get put on another civilian plane, flying back with random civilians. It's wild.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:13Jocko Willink?

  And there you are with a saw.

• 49:17Jocko Willink?

  Just sitting in economy class. That could get you, that might be able to get you an upgrade. Having that saw with you. And so you land in Kuwait. How long are you supposed to be on the ground in Kuwait for?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Uh, so we were told just like a couple of weeks, we were going to be in Kuwait until we go to Sodder City. Um, and I believe we were in Camp Virginia at first and then, um, um, and again, we were just kind of finalizing our stuff. Right. We were finalizing, you know, confirming our zeros, um, making sure we were all locked on, ready to go. I mean, cause I mean, we're on the, we're on the preface of, of getting, going over there for like, I would say half of, half of the battalion. Um, and this is just my estimate. I could, I could be off, but I would say half of our battalion were just fresh, fresh guys. Um, who had never experienced war before, like myself. And then intermixed was, um, a bunch of guys who just got back from the invasion.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  So, I mean, you had a bunch of guys from different, different units in the army and then, but the majority of them came from the 101st and came to this new unit, which was the 506 that had combat experience.

• 50:22Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you find out you guys are, you're not going to Sodder City, you're going to a different place? It's another place called Ramadi.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  So we were, we were in Kuwait and I remember waking up and like, none of our leadership was there. Like we had like the sergeants and stuff there, but like all the officers like were gone. There might've been a couple there, but majority of them were gone. We're like, where, where is everybody? You know, cause we, you know, we still had a stand, you know, we still had a routine of what we were doing every day. So, you know, we didn't know if this was a test. We didn't know what was going on. So, um, we just, you know, continued as normal, um, as best we could. And everybody just had no idea where everybody was. And, um, um, when they, when they ended up coming back, they, they had done like a leader's recon in Ramadi and, um, they came back and, um,

• 51:08Jocko Willink?

  So they were gone for like a couple of days?

• 51:10Speaker 01

  A day or two, I would say. And, um, And we're in this tent in Kuwait and Captain Senti says, hey, you know, company formation. And so we formed up in this tent and he's just like, change of plans, we're going to Ramadi. And we're like, what? And we're like, yeah, we're going to Ramadi. And we just got back from there and, and he had this, he had this projector screen in there. And he's like, where we're going is the most violent place in theater right now. We're going, we're going to the absolute most dangerous place in the entire world.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  And he pulled up this map of, this is a topographical map of, of our AO of Ramadi, from the two nine or six grid line to the five five grid line. And I'm looking at this map and it was a blank, it was a blank map. And then the next slide was, it just looked like somebody had thrown a can of blue paint on it. And it said, all these blue dots represent the last direct contact with coalition forces in the last two weeks. And you could hardly see anything. And then the next slide was, it looked like somebody had thrown a red can of paint on there.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  And you could hardly, you couldn't even, you couldn't even see anything because it was just covered in red and blue dots everywhere. And it said, the red dots indicate all the IEDs that have been found or, or blown up by, against coalition forces in the last two weeks. And I'm just like, we, where are we going? Like this, this, this is, this is gonna be, this is, I mean, this is gonna be everything that we, we, we thought it was gonna be. I mean, like, we wanted to go to the absolute worst place and we were headed there. And, you know, a little bit more like, that's when I became like a little bit more nervous because I'm just like, all right, because I was, I was conditioned to go yellow zone and pissed off.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Like, oh, I want to, I want to go, you know, I want to go kill as many bad guys as possible. And then I'm like, man, I'm never going to get an opportunity, you know, to do this in Sodra City. And then I get to Ramadi, I'm like, man, you know, be careful what you wish for because now you're going, you're going to the big, the big dance.

• 53:28Jocko Willink?

  How were the rest of the boys?

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Uh, they were, it was ki- kinda similar. I mean, there was a lot of dudes that were, that were fired up and but I mean, you could tell like the, the tone had, the tone had definitely changed because of, um, because like, I mean, this was, we were, we were getting ready to leave in, in a few days to get, to go there. When all we were thinking in our mind was one thing and it, and it cha- and it changed to something completely different.

• 53:52Jocko Willink?

  How do you go, how did you guys get from Kuwait to Ramadi?

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Um, so they, they had told us, so we were getting intel briefs, uh, leading up to when we were leaving and

• 54:04Jocko Willink?

  And this is like November of oh five, right?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, yeah, like I think, I think it went into December, like the early part of December of two thousand and five. And, um, and so they said, hey, like these intel briefs, like once, once the enemy finds out that there's gonna be a change, like they're gonna start attacking you. Like they're, they're going to start, um, they're, they're gonna start attacking you. So we're gonna do this, you know, zero dark thirty in the morning and, um, how we're doing this is half the battalion is going in by Humvee and half of them are going in on, um, Chinooks. And it was the Marine, it was the Marine Corps version of the Chinooks. Uh, uh, was it CH forty-six? CH forty, yeah.

• 54:48Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, the forty-six is small, smaller than a Chinook.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:52Jocko Willink?

  They also have fifty threes, which may or may not have been used, but yeah, if they were using forty-sixes, that sounds about right.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were doing, so we, so I was assigned to go, we were gonna, and I'm not sure if there was like a couple waves, but I remember being in the first helicopter in the first, in like touching down first.

• 55:09Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys fly right into Crigador? Did you fly into Camp Ramadi on the other side?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  No, we flew into, uh, the cop, um, uh, across the street from Crigador.

• 55:17Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, cause we didn't have, we didn't have an airfield like at Crigador, you know, we didn't have anything.

• 55:22Jocko Willink?

  So this was obviously at night?

• 55:24Speaker 01

  This was at night. And so, um, and they said, and they were like, hey, you know, like, this is gonna be a touch and go. I mean, I mean, you're, you're gonna get, you're gonna land enough to get off the bird and then, and then the other one's coming in. And so you gotta get to your spot, you know, as quick as possible. But, um, leading up to that, they are also giving us intel briefs that like, hey, they don't have, like what you go there with is what you have. Like they don't have, they don't have anything. And so we were, and while we were in Kuwait, we were We were doing um recons in Kuwait trying to like steal ammo and uh and any piece of equipment that we could have to help us over there because we didn't know when we were going to get resupplied um and so like I I remember I mean I remember having 50 cal

• 56:09Speaker 01

  links sticking out of my um rucksack um as I was as I was getting ready to board the the bird and I remember like I was I was leaning back um and two guys had to help help pick me up because my rucksack was so heavy because I had so much equipment in there MREs I mean everything because we didn't we just had no idea and um I I had so I there was so much weight on my back that when um when I was sitting in the bird going to Ramadi I'm I I mean I just I remember it so clearly um it was we were all on we were all on nods and I remember the Marine Corps door gunner uh had a 50 cal out of

• 56:51Speaker 01

  there and he he racked that thing and I'm like man are we going into like a hot L like what are we like I just I just remember it so clearly and I remember like I was the first one to I was the last one to board and the first one gonna be off and um and we when we started our descent I mean I'm looking out the back of the uh the Chinook and I just see him flying like the rest of the guys flying in formation behind me and um like that's when I I mean I'm starting to get amped up you know and uh um I knew the I knew the spot that I was supposed to be at and so um you know it's it was the it was the same thing right like you know green light go and and the the the ramp drops

• 57:35Speaker 01

  and we're and we're getting off but there was a I couldn't see anything because it was so dark and there was like a little lip of like the birds so like it took me everything I could to stand up on my own and when I stood up I I had so much weight on the back that I tripped out of the bird and so they all think so everybody's thinking I'm hit already and so like my magazines fly out everywhere and and they're trying to pull me but you can't hear anything because of the propeller and and so that's how I spent my first Welcome to Ramadi That's how I spent my first uh steps in Ramadi right there

• 58:06Jocko Willink?

  How long, how long did it take for everyone to get there?

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Um, I remember everybody um, coming in like that night. Um, I don't, I don't remember anybody, anybody, I don't remember. I think everybody came there that night.

• 58:18Jocko Willink?

  So now, you, you, you get moved in. Where'd you move into? What building were you in?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Uh, so the, it was right across, it was right across from the headquarters building. Um, uh, it was, you know, it was an agricultural college and um, uh,

• 58:34Jocko Willink?

  By that, he means that the, the, this whole place, Camp Corregidor, Echo Charles, that you've heard us talk about a bunch over the years. It, before it was Camp Corregidor, it was an agricultural college. So they had like buildings with classrooms in them and stuff like that. And yeah, so that's what, that's what it was. But now it's just this base for the first of the 506 and, and before you guys were there, it was 269 Armor. They'd been out there. So you get moved into your room?

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we wa, I walk across the street from the cop. Um, when we landed, walk over, they said, hey, this is where you're staying. And um, we were, there were still guys from 269 there. Um, and they're just like, hey, you know, grab an open bunk. And uh, there was just, there was a, I don't know, bunk for like 20 guys in uh, in this classroom. And grabbed a bunk and just kinda got the layout of the building I was at because it was still, you know, dark. I, I didn't know where anything, I didn't know where anything was. I didn't know how big this place was. I didn't know anything. I mean, it was, I was, it was completely unknown to me at the time.

• 59:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the, the 269, prior to you guys showing up, had lost six soldiers inside Camp Corregidor. So from indirect fire.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:53Jocko Willink?

  So they'd lost six soldiers from mortars. And so Craig was gnarly. It was gnarly.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, Jocko, I don't have any perspective other than this, right? I've, this is my one and only deployment, so I have no perspective on how this is, how this is supposed to go. Right? I have no, I have no, um, I have no idea what, what I'm.

• 1:00:22Jocko Willink?

  No context whatsoever.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  None, none.

• 1:00:23Jocko Willink?

  You're just like, this is war.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  I'm kind of living day by day.

• 1:00:25Jocko Willink?

  This is what's happening.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  I'm like, okay, this is must be what the guys in Baghdad are, are living with. This must, this must be what's going on.

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  I'm glad you didn't get to see what that looks like.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  You know, I had no, I had no idea, you know, um, so, uh, so yeah, so it was, um, it wasn't until, I mean, I didn't sleep at all that night because I didn't know, uh, what was going on, but you know, um, I remember going into the classroom and there were just, there were sandbags stacked from bottom to top inside of, of our, of this one window, or that used to be a window and, um, and there were no lights. I mean, it was, it was complete noise light discipline. It was complete, um, you, you wear your body armor everywhere you go. Helmet everywhere you go. If you're going outside to have a smoke, um, if you're going to go burn your own waste, you know, whatever it is, you're wearing that body armor.

• 1:01:18Jocko Willink?

  Did, what kind of turnover did you get from the guys from two, six, nine?

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Um, it was just, um, you just gotta keep moving, like, don't, don't ever stay in one spot. Um, uh, I remember a guy telling me, don't ever stay in one spot. Just always, always move when you're out on the street. Just always move. Don't just stick, don't just stand in one place. Just constantly move, um, or you're going to get hit. Um, and just, you know, he's like, good luck with the IDs, man. They're, they're everywhere.

• 1:01:47Jocko Willink?

  How long was it before you rolled out on your first patrol?

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Uh, three days, three days, but I mean, go, go that, that very first morning that we woke up. We, we kinda, we know, we got our kit on and everything and we were just kinda, we were touring to see where everything else. Hey, this is where the phone, this is where the phones are. This is, um, this is, this is your, this is your chow hall. You know, this is, this is, this is your PX, which was, I mean, it was a, it was, there was nothing in there.

• 1:02:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Um, you know, the, the chow hall had like six seats, um, for, for us to sit down and eat. So most of us just took to go boxes, um, to, to leave, cause he couldn't, he couldn't fill, fill that in. Hey, this is, this is where you go to the bathroom, you know, this is, this is where, you know, it's, it's all outside here.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  You know, so we kinda got, though, this is where the, this is where the fuel is. This is where the, the water jugs are. And so, um, but that very next day when we were touring, I mean, it was, we, we got indirect fire on us that day. And that's the first time that I heard that siren, you know, and it, um, and sometimes it worked. Um, but other times it just, you just didn't have a chance. It just wouldn't pick it up for whatever reason. And, and but you know, it's just that bing, bing, bing, incoming, incoming, incoming. And we're, I mean, and I mean, you just find a place to just tie. So I, so me and a buddy ran into that, that PX. And it just, the mortars were just crashing in like right away. And I'm like, dude, this is nuts. This is, this is, this is war.

• 1:03:13Jocko Willink?

  Morning.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  This is war. Yeah. Like these, these guys are, these guys, that's, that's when I realized these guys are trying to kill me. And, um, and, and we're not gonna let that happen. Like, we're gonna try to kill as many of these guys as we can possibly can.

• 1:03:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was another big thing about being in Ramadi was that the, the former army base, that the Iraqi army base that was there was some kind of like artillery base. And so a lot of the insurgents actually were skilled at indirect fire. So that's why they would be able to hit targets very, they would barely even have to bracket them. They'd have them all measured out. And they were just like, the first rounds would be, be on target.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we found out that, that out really quick. Cause I mean, we got mortared every day. I mean, two and three times a day, they would just come crashing in. I mean, our chow hall had a. You know, had a mortar fall into it. Um, uh, we had, there was a video that was, that was circulating around before, before we got there. I think of them, maybe it was them doing their leaders recon. But, um, the sire was coming off and a mortar crashed into the headquarters building. And, um, and so, yeah, it was, it was every day that it was, it was like that.

• 1:04:17Jocko Willink?

  What did the guys from, uh, two, six, nine, what did they tell you about IEDs besides good luck? Were they giving you a heads up like, look for this, look for that, look for everything?

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't recall. They just said they're just everywhere. It's just, they're just, it's just absolutely everywhere. And it just kind of confirmed what that map showed. I mean, uh, like at that point, cause like you're, you're trying to find, like later on, you're trying to find patterns, trying to find, find out how are they doing this? How are they, what, what is the pattern that's being established here that, or how do we keep getting hit? And, um, we'll probably dive into that like a little bit later, but, um, at that, at that point, it was, everything was so raw and so new that, um, I was just kinda, I was just trying to learn as much as they were, they were giving me in the short time that we had together of those guys who'd been there. But they, I mean, just like looking at their faces, you could just tell they went through it.

• 1:05:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I can't remember if, I don't know if I have it in my notes or not, but I was reading some Ramadi stuff, uh, yesterday. And one of the things that Colonel Clark was talking about, maybe it was an interview or something, but they had, there was the, the army had found, I think it was two, six, nine had found 18 IEDs in some very short distance and cleared them all. Maybe it was the five oh six, but anyways, army unit found 18 IEDs in, you know, 300 yards or 200 yards or something like this. They clear them all. The next day they go back, 18 more IEDs.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Jocko Willink?

  Just reseeded all those holes. Like they, they, they were freaking aggressive and active in making this happen.

• 1:05:49Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so now what's good, so a couple of days later, three days later, you're going on your first patrol.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, three days later, I go on my first patrol.

• 1:05:57Jocko Willink?

  And you're a freaking turret gunner.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  And I'm a 50 cal gunner.

• 1:06:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, did you guys have the enhanced like Pope class around your, your turret or no?

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Not when we first got there.

• 1:06:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you had to build it out.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like when like the first, I remember the first truck that I had was, um, I'm looking at, I'm looking at my space and you know, Humvee is a Humvee, you know, um, and but we, it wasn't, I mean, it might, there might've been some armor on it, but we didn't get, we didn't have the new ones yet at the time. And I mean, I remember like the, the piece of armor, I mean, it was like somebody on their spare time had welded a, a, a protection around the turret, um, that we had, and it was like jaggedy and it, you know, it would cut you and stuff as you were getting in. Um, it was just all, you know, rusty from some piece of metal that they found. Um, I remember the, when I was, when I was setting up my 50, um, they, uh,

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  the, the, the box of ammo that they had, cause I was used to like, like, cause we were like, we had a certain, uh, way about like loading our 50 cal's and, and like, hey, you know, once we go through this box, like we know what we're, I'm coming to this box, to this box, to this box, we just had it, we had it down through our workup. And so I remember this, this huge, this huge box of 50 cal ammo that I had, I mean, this, there must've been 500 rounds in this thing. It was so, it was so heavy that it was hard for me to, it was hard for me to turn the turret as I needed to. And, um, I'm like, well, you know, maybe they need all this, you know what I mean? Because you know, I have no idea like, like, I'm just gonna ride with this for right now and until I, until I get my own groove.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  And, um, um, I remember, uh, I remember like we were going out at night and, um, it was to recover a vehicle that had been blown up and then entrapped in Constantina wire. So, um, you know, as like the Baghdad International Highway Route Michigan, that was our, that was our main objective to, um, to keep clear for coalition forces. I mean, that's how we got everything. That's how we got food, mail, um, laundry, I mean, everything, right? And so, um, It was just, it was, it was a main supply route and it was about a 70 mile stretch of road from Baghdad to Ramadi and on one side of the road, you had coalition forces where

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  we could only drive down and then the other side was for the civilians and every day, you know, every day. Now, we could go on both sides of the road, but in the middle of that was the Constantino wire that stretched all the way down and there were certain guard positions all the way down Ramadi because they, they would just, they would, they would blow us up every day on that road. And so, so they had, you know, at, at certain positions, you know, they had like OP graveyard, you know, that was, that was, that was an over, that was this huge graveyard that was overlooking Route Michigan. Then they had, maybe it was a couple more Humvees down the road that could get a stretch of road and then maybe

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  a couple of tanks on, you know, it just went all the way down like that. And, but you couldn't, I mean, with human nature and everything, you know, being so tired and everything, I mean, like you couldn't cover it all, all the time. And it was just one of those things that you just kinda had to trust that guys were doing the right thing and keeping awake and, you know, smoking dudes who were trying to set up, set up IEDs. And so, so I remember this, this truck had been blown up.

• 1:09:25Jocko Willink?

  Is this your first patrol?

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  This is my very first patrol.

• 1:09:28Jocko Willink?

  Your very first patrol. So a truck gets blown up and it's wrapped up in Constantino wire?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a, and we had to go out there and, and you know how that Constantino wire is, it just gets around the axles and everything like that. And it had, had some sort of sensitive equipment on there. I can't remember what, but they were trying to, so, you know, we geared up and we head out, we're, we get down there, we set up our, we set up our perimeter, we shut everything down and we have this, we have this, and we didn't know anything about the 45 minute rule at the time, right? We had no idea about the 45 minute rule.

• 1:10:00Jocko Willink?

  You're about to find out.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, and so we, so we set up our perimeter and everything, everything and like, I'm, like, I'm ready to go, right? I'm thinking, I'm thinking, just like when I arrived in Ramadi the first time. I'm thinking, all right, as soon as I touch down, we're gonna get in a firefight, you know? So I, I set up and um, um, nothing happens. Nothing happens and we couldn't get, we couldn't recover the vehicle. And so we were, we were out there for about an hour. And um, um, they finally said, hey, we're just, we're blowing this thing in place. We're leaving it here. We can't, we cannot get to it.

• 1:10:33Jocko Willink?

  What was it a Hummer?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  It was, I think it was like a, like a, uh, like a, like a two ton, like a, like where the troop, uh, the troops were in that, I can't remember the name of it. Where they, they was right, right in the back.

• 1:10:44Jocko Willink?

  Like a Mat V or something like a six by?

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it, um, so they're just like, hey, we're just gonna blow it in place. Um, and, and then we're gonna, we're gonna head out. And so, um, we blew it in place.

• 1:10:55Jocko Willink?

  You guys, are there guys from, from, uh, uh, two, six, nine armor with you? Or are you guys on your own?

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  I think we were on our own. It was just, it was just my first, it was first platoon. And so, uh, the dirty first. And so we, uh, so we head, um, so we're heading back and, um, how, how we had our formation always set up to where I was always in the third Humvee. And so it was 50 cal gunner, mark 19 gunner, 50 cal gunner, mark 19 gunner. So the 50 cal gunners always, their primary weapon system was the 50 cal. And then their secondary weapon system was the saw. And then now with the mark 19s, we had the mark 19 and then we had the two 40 bravos. So they could have a little bit of both too. And so that's how it was set up. So I had my, I had my 50 cal and I was normally always facing towards the three o'clock position and just in the formation.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  So, you know, number one guy's facing noon. Um, number two guy's facing nine o'clock, I'm facing three o'clock and the truck behind me is facing six o'clock. So we had that 360 degrees coverage at all times. And, uh, we were told by two, six, nine, it was like, hey, when you're going somewhere, go fast. You know, don't, don't go slow, don't be driving Miss Daisy. I mean, just, you know, drive fast. And so we were, we were driving fast. And next thing you know, like I'm sitting in the gun and, um, and I'm facing to the right and I'm holding on to the 50 cal. All of a sudden I see tracers flying over. Over my head and I'm looking up and I'm like, oh, there's tracers. And my sergeant who was super like very aggressively, he was kind of reminds me of the Marlboro man.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  It was his, it was his second deployment and just a hard, hard dude Sergeant Holbert. He, um, he, he was like, kids, get up and shoot. And I, I just kind of snapped out of it and I, I remember taking my 50 cal in the building that I saw the tracers coming from. I just hammered down on that 50 cal. And I mean, I let that thing eat and I was, but at the time, so with that, with that big, with that big, um, Ammo can. Ammo can that I had, uh, I didn't real, I didn't check to see what rounds were in there. Um, so they were, they were A P I T rounds. So they're armor piercing incendiary tracer rounds.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  And I didn't, I, I, I guess I wasn't supposed to shoot those, but, um, I was shooting them and I was catching everything on fire inside the house and just that building was just crumbling down. And, um, uh, um, and then so I, I, I mean, they, my Holbert was just like, all right, kids, all right, kid. Cause I mean, I was like, I was going from the three o'clock, like heading towards the six. I mean, I was just letting them have it, you know? And, uh, and then, you know, we get back to Corrigador and I'm just, man, I am just amped up. Your first patrol. My first patrol ever in Ramadi. Dumped a hundred rounds of 50 cal. Oh, yeah. Or more. Oh, yeah, probably more. And, uh, in a short period of time, cause I knew everything about that. I mean, the M two H B 50 cal, I mean, you could just, oh God, I love that thing.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  It was just such a great weapon system and I was really good on it. I was really good on it.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  And, uh, couldn't let this, I mean, I remember getting trained up on that thing and like one of my sergeants was like, you know, this thing was actually recalled in world war two because it was too accurate and it had to be, it wanted to be more crucer. So it could space out the rounds. But, um, I just, I knew everything about that in that weapon system and I, I, I loved it. I was just a natural on it. I just felt good on it and, uh, And so when we got back to Corrigidor, I remember we were doing, we were like, you know, hey, how many rounds do you think you fired? You know, um, you know, did you see, did you see anybody get hit? All that, all that sort of stuff. And, you know, hey, how are our vehicles looking? Cause we knew our vehicle got shot up. And so I remember looking on the side and the side that I was facing on the passenger side where the, where the rounds

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  were coming from. Um, there was three bolt holes in the, in the, in the, in the glass that had, that had, that the glass had stopped the rounds. And I'm just like, man, like this is my first patrol. Like, how am I going to make it out of here alive?

• 1:14:56Jocko Willink?

  What's your op tempo turned into now? You know, day two, like what's, what, do you start getting a consistent op tempo?

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we just, we like, you know, uh, Captain sent he wanted, um, he, uh, we, I asked him, I said, what was our, what was our op tempo compared to, compared to other, uh, the other companies that we had? It was just 10x. Um, we were a unique, um, company in like being in the, within the 506 because we mostly operated on Humvees. We did a lot, we did some foot patrols too. Um, but the majority of our time we were operating on Humvees. We were a heavy weapons platoon. And, uh, so we did, so we were, we were doing a lot. We were doing, we were QRF at some point. We were, um, uh, we were, uh, you know, mission platoons. We were, um, you know, we had, we had to man guard positions

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  along inside Corrigidor and outside. So we were constantly working all the time. And so from what I remember, it was kind of set up like this. Like you had, um, if you were a mission platoon one day, then the next day you were, um, like duty platoon. And what that meant was like duty on the, on the, um, whether guarding on the guard towers outside of Corrigidor or, um, on Route Michigan itself. And then you were secondary mission platoon and then QRF. And it just kind of rotated, rotated like that. So there was some sort of order that, that we always had. But I mean, you know, a mission comes down and, and third platoon is out there. Um, it's secondary mission comes in. Now we're going out, you know? So I mean, there was never any break. I mean, we were going out

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  day and night, two and three times a day.

• 1:16:37Jocko Willink?

  What does the operation look like kind of from so let's say you get a mission like an actual mission that you're gonna do?

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:45Jocko Willink?

  What how's that taking place? Are you getting a warning order? Are you doing the operations order? What are you doing for gear prep? And then and then what's your mentality going out? So let's start with like like how are you hearing about a mission that you're about to do?

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, so um, one of the one of the squad leaders would come in and say, hey, you know, we got it. We got a mission coming up, you know, stand by. And that's kind of how it would be, you know, and we just knew that to be, hey, go start prepping. Go start prepping. And I mean, um, we didn't have any, we didn't have any anybody, you know? So like what we had, what we had, what we had is what we took out there with us. And so we had to make sure that we were self sustaining for um, for who knows how long. So we always had, we always had to make sure we had water with us. We had to make sure our radios, I was a, I was a radio guy too. So like, we had to make sure our radios were filled because we were constantly, you know, doing stuff with the radios and um, making sure, making sure stuff was, was, you know,

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  clean and swept out, making sure things were properly marked and stuff, just to make our jobs as easy as possible, so we could just get to work when we needed to. And um, and then, you know, after that was done, we, we go into, we had a, we had a war room, like right as you walk into the front, I don't know if you remember that, but you walk into the front, it was to the right and we lived to the left. And uh, we had just had a big, uh, big topographical map of, of our AO. And it would just, a mission would kind of sound like, it would be like, hey, um, we're gonna go out and um, we're gonna support, um, uh, we're gonna go support um, EOD um, on a route clearance mission. Um, you know, we're expecting maybe 10% casualties um, when we go out, but um, this is what

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  time that they're getting ready to go out and um, you're gonna be escorting them all night long. Or um, you know, you're gonna be going to do in a mission at um, The hospital and we think there's a weapons cache cache in there first and third platoon are going to go out there and this is what third platoon's mission is this is what first platoon mission is and we're going to try to clear that weapons cache.

• 1:18:45Jocko Willink?

  Did each platoon have their own Humvees or did you rotate Humvees?

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, we had our, we had our own Humvees. We had our own Humvees.

• 1:18:51Jocko Willink?

  So you had your, so you were on the same gun all the time. You had your little baby.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my, that was my baby for sure.

• 1:18:57Jocko Willink?

  Did you have a name for your, for your gun?

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I didn't, I didn't name the gun, but um, you know, our platoon name was, was Dirty First and uh, and uh, each, each platoon kind of had their own, their own name. Like second platoon was Jolly Rogers. Um, you know, fourth platoon was the Shockers and, and so we just had like different, you know, different cultures inside of, you know, our, our, uh, our, our company.

• 1:19:22Jocko Willink?

  Hmm. Going out and you know, you, you mentioned, hey, we're going out, go out and do security for the route clearance that's going down.

• 1:19:31Jocko Willink?

  How are you feeling rolling out on that mission? Now you know you're going to get there. They're going to, they're literally looking for IEDs and I, I wrote in those things, I wrote in, but I got the comfort of riding in like the Buffalo or whatever, you know, where it's like, I'm just like kind of along for the ride. Almost like I'm watching a, a show because it's so relatively safe in there. Yeah. Compared to a Humvee. They did lose those mine clearance vehicles on our deployment, but you know, you feel relatively safe in there, but and it was actually one, the, one of the cooler things. Cause you know, when you're in a Humvee, your kind of vision is all terrible and you're looking around, you can't move. You had pretty clear vision standing up in the freaking turret.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  I did, yeah.

• 1:20:11Jocko Willink?

  Maniac.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Jocko Willink?

  Uh, but, but they, but the interesting thing on those route clearances are when they find something, which they're going to, they're probably going to find, you know, between five and 10 IEDs that they're going to have to stop and clear, which means you're sitting there. So when you're, you know, you, you mentioned the 45 minute rule earlier. We didn't really talk about what it was echo Charles. You got 45 minutes and you're getting attacked and it got shorter and shorter over time, but that was sort of a general rule. If you were out there and you gave the enemy 45 minutes, they were going to be on you and they're going to be, they're going to be hitting you. And the more you understood that, the, the quicker you would move, but on an IED clearance.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Slow going.

• 1:20:52Jocko Willink?

  You, you stop and then they're going to spend 15 minutes poking at that IED, putting a charge on it, blowing it up. And then you move. Eighty yards down the road, they find another one and you're stopping again.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  So that's exactly how it went.

• 1:21:06Jocko Willink?

  Are you ever getting out of your Humvee as a 50 cal gunner? Rarely?

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Rarely. I mean, like if we were doing like a, if we were doing like a dismounted patrol to where, to where we were, you know, hitting a bunch of houses or something like that, like maybe one guy, maybe a couple of guys would stay with the Humvees. So we, because we didn't have like a lot of people. I mean, so like, so when we got out, we needed all hands on deck. And so like a couple of guys could, could guard the Humvees while we were clearing houses and stuff, doing hard knocks and things of that nature. But for the most part, I was, I was in the 50 cal.

• 1:21:39Jocko Willink?

  When I was a young SEAL, we had this thing, this 96 hour planning cycle. So you'd get like tasked with a mission and, and then we had this whole protocol that we'd follow. And it was based on the military decision-making process. This was all coming from like higher headquarters throughout the entire military. This 96 hour planning cycle, that was what the nineties was like for me. And then fast forward, my first deployment to Iraq, we're just kind of in the same mode that you're talking about where our gears loaded, like we're in the same Humvees, like we can roll. And I remember my commanding officer, he wanted to brief up the chain of command, how long it takes us to respond. He goes, hey, Jocko, you know, if we, if you get tasked with something, how long do you need

• 1:22:23Jocko Willink?

  to, to go and launch? And I said 15 minutes and he, and he thought I was kidding. Like he goes, no, seriously. And I said, oh no, I'm serious. We, we'll, we'll be out the, we'll be out the front gate in 15 minutes. That's how much time we need. All I need is a location. I need a frequency of the, of the conventional forces that are running that AO and I'll, we're good. And that's kind of the mode that you guys got into.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Jocko Willink?

  Here's the mission. Here's where we're going. Plus you start to know the city, you know, all the routes, you know, the, the blocks numbering on the battle map. And it just becomes, all right, tell us where we're going and what we're doing. And the gear prep's the same, the comms procedures are the same. The CASVAC QRF procedures are pretty close and that's kind of the mode that you get into.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  And our debriefs were brutal. So if something, so if somebody didn't do their job or somebody overlooked something because they got distracted with something and we didn't have a piece of equipment that we needed or something like that, or we didn't, you know, or the tank wasn't, or if our fuel tank wasn't completely full at all times, like we were letting them have it. And, you know, I mean, I remember being a part of some brutal debriefs of because of how serious the situation was in Ramadi. And it was just a testament to our sergeants who kind of held that, held that standard of, of a, of a debrief to, to make sure that we were always on top of our stuff.

• 1:23:48Jocko Willink?

  You're there, you get there in early December. You actually sent me a speech. It's a, I think it's a Memorial Day speech. Your friend Jason McNamara gave this speech and it's covers an important event. So I'm going to get into it right now. It says, this is Jason McNamara. He's one of your best friends and he says this, "It was the night of March 13th, 2006. I was mounting the weapon system on our vehicle, not knowing I was preparing for a different mission that would forever change my life and take two of my brother's lives.

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  My platoon was supposed to escort EOD to clear a route to the east for a battalion mission the next morning. As I was mounting my 240 Bravo, my weapon, a belt fed machine gun and my Mark 19 belt fed grenade launcher onto our vehicle, gunfire erupted about a click to the west in the Malab district. This was nothing new in a regular occurrence. I could see the tracer rounds lighting up the night sky. Then we heard chatter on our truck radio. Charlie Company had received contact and had several wounded that needed to be extracted immediately."

• 1:24:57Jocko Willink?

  This is what's interesting about this and I was just talking about being in Baghdad. In Baghdad, stuff's going on, but it's going on 12 miles away, 18 miles away, 14 miles away. It, cause Baghdad's huge. In Ramadi, when there's a firefight going on in the city and if you go outside in any one of the combat outposts, any one of the, either, either on Camp Ramadi on the west side or Camp, uh, Camp Corregidor on the east side, if there's a firefight going on in the city, you know, you can just hear it, you can see it, you can see the tracers going. And, and so that is what this was like where you'd be doing something, preparing for something. And if you were outside and a firefight breaks out, you'd see tracers flying through the sky.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was wild. It, it almost felt to me like, um, we were surrounded. It felt like Corregidor, we were surrounded by 400,000 people. Uh, that's, that's what it's, that's what it felt like to me. It felt like, like, uh, we were always being watched. Um, and that's why we were running from place to place. Um, and, but when you were setting up your equipment, I mean, you could, I mean, you could just, you know, stand on the Humvee and just watch it all go down. Like you just had a front row seat to it.

• 1:26:08Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, we were not the designated QRF that night, but we were ready and would be the quickest option to get to them. Our platoon of four Humvees left seconds later with my truck being the second in line. I was in the gunner seat. My section leader, Sergeant Dar was riding shotgun and my platoon leader, Lieutenant Cooley was riding in the rear passenger seat and Specialist Dan was driving our vehicle.

• 1:26:34Jocko Willink?

  So again, this firefight breaks out, these guys are preparing to go and do an EOD route clearance, kind of a standard. And then Charlie Company gets hit. And now in a matter of seconds, it's changed mission and we're going to recover a vehicle.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  QRF, yep.

• 1:26:55Jocko Willink?

  Charlie Company had marked an area where we could evacuate their wounded with an IR chem light. Little did any of us know that we had just pulled up into a complex ambush and the first truck and my truck were sitting directly on top of buried IEDs composed of anti-tank mines and 155mm mortars. We didn't get a chance to start loading the wounded before both IEDs detonated. The next thing I remember was being in excruciating pain. My face and goggles were covered in burnt ordinance and dirt. My body armor was shredded. I couldn't see my legs, but I knew they were severely injured. After I removed my soot-filled goggles, I could see

• 1:27:38Jocko Willink?

  my legs twisted and pushed backwards underneath me. As my legs quivered from the trauma and adrenaline, I could feel my bones grinding together. I didn't know if my legs were even attached or just held together by my clothing. I couldn't breathe with all the smoke from the explosion and my burning truck. I yelled to Dan to shut off the truck and got no answer. The explosion had blown three of the doors off our truck and as I looked out the driver's side, I could see Dan laying on the ground unresponsive. The blast had blown Dan and Lieutenant Cooley out of the truck. Sergeant Dar was still in his seat, but the blast had bent his door

• 1:28:20Jocko Willink?

  frame and he could not open his door. He asked if I was okay. I replied my legs were both broken. Every person in the first two trucks was wounded. Moments later, our guys from second and third truck were outside our vehicle, now having to extract our wounded into the remaining two trucks. Staff Sergeant Hudspeth was behind me, trying to get out, trying to get me out. I was stuck in the gunner seat strap hovering about two feet off the floor of the truck. I took out my knife and cut myself free and dropped to the bottom of the truck. Hudspeth proceeded to grab the back of my body armor behind my neck and tried to drag me out. My broken legs

• 1:29:03Jocko Willink?

  kept on catching on the twisted metal of what remained of the floor of my truck. The explosion had ripped a hole almost as wide as our Humvee.

• 1:29:13Jocko Willink?

  When I was able to get my legs free, he dragged me out and as I hit the ground, my legs twisted up on top of me. Hudspeth wasted no time in putting his tourniquet on one leg and I handed him my tourniquet for my other leg. This all happened while under fire from small arms and RPGs. They loaded me into the back of the third truck under Specialist Casey Patterson. As we were running, as we were turning around to get out of the ambush, another RPG exploded next to our vehicle. With all the smoke and dust in the air, Private Perez, the driver of the third truck, couldn't see. We ended up crashing into a wall. Luckily, he was able to back up and maneuver us out of there before the insurgents could fire another RPG.

• 1:29:57Jocko Willink?

  On our way back to Camp Corregidor, I remember Casey looking down on me from the gunner seat. I kept closing my eyes and nodding off, but Casey made sure that I stayed conscious by shaking me and trying to give me words of encouragement. I didn't know at the time, but Dan was losing his life in the fourth truck. Dan died that night in Sergeant Dar's arms before we made it back to base. Dan, a brand-new father that would never meet his baby that was born just weeks before that night. We passed the QRF on the way out. It was a platoon of M1 Abrams tanks from the Pennsylvania National Guard. They were able to evacuate the wounded from Charlie Company and one killed in action.

• 1:30:40Jocko Willink?

  I would later find out while lying in the hospital bed that Staff Sergeant Silva was the KIA. He'd been attached to Charlie Company as a sniper. He was the reason I was assigned to Delta Company and was my very first squad leader. The blast had shattered both of my heels. I had bilateral open fractures to my tibia and fibula. Shrapnel had ripped through the muscle and lodged in my legs. I had second-degree burns on my body and a traumatic brain injury. I was medevaced by helicopter to a medical facility in Balad where they performed emergency surgeries. I awoke in a hospital in Germany and doctors there gave me an option to amputate both of my legs below the knee.

• 1:31:22Jocko Willink?

  They said that I would more than likely never walk again or wear a regular pair of shoes, but they said you might surprise us. I opted not to amputate my legs.

• 1:31:34Jocko Willink?

  I spent two years on and off at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington DC. I would end up having 12 operations done, including washouts where the doctors would open my wounds up to clean any debris. And an additional three reconstructive surgeries here in Minnesota with one more operation looming.

• 1:31:54Jocko Willink?

  I was hesitant to tell my story about that night because I am still here. And this day is about our fellow Americans that paid the ultimate price for our freedoms.

• 1:32:04Jocko Willink?

  My wife Rachel reminded me that if my fellow brothers were still here. They would want me to tell that story of that night.

• 1:32:14Jocko Willink?

  My conclusions was that I could tell it today. If only to give a brief window into the trials and tribulations that our country's soldiers endured. And in honor of Staff Sergeant Marco Silva of Alva, Florida. And Sergeant Dan Sergeant Corey Dan from Norway, Maine. Whose lives ended too soon.

• 1:32:40Jocko Willink?

  I will never forget your sacrifice.

• 1:32:44Jocko Willink?

  Or your memory.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  So a lot to unpack there.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  That was, you know, we had gone from basically December till that night, March 13th. Without, I mean, guys were getting shot every single day. Guys were getting blown up every single day, but. That was the, that was the first night that we lost, that we, that we had two guys get killed and. It was absolutely terrible. Because we kind of felt like, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, like we felt like. We were just taking care of business every single day. I mean, we were.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  We felt, we felt that we were eliminating the enemy at such a high volume every single day. That we were, we were. Kind of untouchable in a way. Um, yeah, you know, bumps and bruises along the way. But nothing as severe as this had happened and uh, it was, it was absolutely terrible.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  The way it all went down and there's just so much going on there.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  And you know, Jason McNamara from uh, Mankato, Minnesota. I mean, him and I were super close and uh, and still are. We still keep in contact to this day and um,

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  I mean, his parents met my parents. Um, so my birthday is in January. And so like before we left for Ramadi,

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  like, you know, we had, you know, we celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas and my birthday all in one because they knew that I was, I wasn't gonna be there for him. And um, my parents had met his parents and they kicked it off right away and they just knew the connection that we had and they had their own connection and um, so when my parents found out about it, they were equally as devastated um, as, as what happened and um, and it just, I remember watching that firefight go down and um, it just never, it just seemed like it wasn't ever stopping. Uh, it just, it just was going on and on and on. I mean, you, you initially heard the firefight go down and then second platoon goes out.

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden you heard ma- like major explosions going off and then it's just nothing but uh, of just a continuous firefight, seeing tracers going up and down, left and right for um, several minutes going on. And then next thing you know, um, air support is coming in. They're doing strafing runs on, on the buildings and Where, where were you? Um, I was, I was, I was in on duty platoon in a guard tower when this was going on. Where, which guard tower? Like on Corregidor? Yeah, on Corregidor. I'm, I'm watching it all go down and I'm, and you kind of feel helpless and you can't do anything. Cause I mean, that's not your, that's not your mission, but you knew that, you knew it was going down. Then you're hearing the radio chatter that's going off and then

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  You're hearing mortuary affairs. You're hearing, you're hearing, hey, we got several, we got several wounded. Um, and heavy QRF is, is ramping up to go out the front gate. Cause I mean, it was a small, a small camp that we were in. And, um, I'm just watching this whole thing go down and it just, and everything I just, you just felt helpless. I felt helpless. Um, watching this whole thing and, um, and then when I got relieved, second platoon was come back and they were, I mean, effectively combat and effective at that point. Um, because like the one whole truck was, was gone. I mean, um, lieutenant was there, but Sergeant Dar was, was now gone. Corey Dan was killed.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  Um, Jason McNamara was catastrophically injured. Um, and, uh, and then I remember like getting debriefed by second platoon and they're just like, they're just like, I just, I don't know how we made it out of there. I don't, I have no idea how we made it out of there. And just the, the heroic actions of Sergeant Hudspeth is he's, is, I mean, I remember him telling me he was trying, like, I mean, this is nighttime, you know, and there's a firefight going on as we're trying to like, get guys out of this burning vehicle. And he's trying to like pull Mac out of the turret, but he can't see anything. And his legs are getting stuck on the, on the turret. Cause there's not that, cause it, cause it was only so big.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  And, um, just the, just the actions of everybody. And then you're, and then, and then you gotta figure out how, how are we going to recover these vehicles? Right? How are we going to get these vehicles back? So then that's where, I mean, your mission turns into, um, winning the fight, right? And then going to, um, going to recover these vehicles and then, and then get, get back in a safe manner. And I want to say they got blown up on the way back out too. Um, it was just a, um, there was a couple of silver stars that were earned that night from guys in Charlie Company, um, from the initial, from the initial engagement. Um, but overall it was,

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  it was absolutely just tragic. And that's where really, um, you just, you kind of felt, okay, anybody, anybody can get it here. I mean, nobody's, we gotta, we gotta stay locked in because we can't go out and, you know, be reckless at all because, um, those guys did everything right and we're still. You know, like, and I don't know how many times Mac was blown up because everybody got blown up, right? Like, I was blown up four times. So, but I often think I'm like, okay. Like, I got, I was in four roadside bombs, right? And two of them were direct hits. But he didn't even maybe get through one, you know, and just catastrophically injured.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  And then Corey Dan, like, he just showed up. He was there for four days. He was, he was, I remember seeing him passing by, but I didn't know him because like, when we all, when we all, we all started this 506, we all started this 506 unit together. Like, we built it up from the ground. There was nothing there. And so, like, we, we hung out all the time. We went to Nashville all the time, hung out.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  And so, we all knew each other so well and because we were all brand new, starting, starting off together. And then to not even know, not even know him and just, you know, Ramadi took him in four days. It was just terrible. And then, and then, you know, going to Silva, you know, he, he was a, he was originally in Delta Company and then went to go be a sniper. But I mean, he was a, he was a, he was a smaller and smaller statured guy. And like, we always would tease him that the 50, the Barrett 50 cal that he would carry was taller than he was. And just to know that he was killed was just absolutely terrible. Just, just terrible.

• 1:39:43Jocko Willink?

  How long was it before you went out on your next patrol?

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  Probably the next day, I would say. I think they, I think they, they kind of stood everything down.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  That night, of course, after everything was, everything was secure. But I don't, I don't remember any, any laps in, in, in, I don't remember like,

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  anything where anything was on standstill. I think we just kept going.

• 1:40:13Jocko Willink?

  How did it impact the morale of the rest of the boys?

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  I think everybody was the, I think everybody was the same because like we just, we were so, all of us were so close. Um, and we all, we were all in, we were all enlisted, you know, young guys and we all hung out with each other. So it was, um, everybody was just feeling the same. It was just kind of just, uh, depressing. It was, it was just super, it was just, I remember just like, it was dark. It was just, it was just a sad time. Um, because he, because we didn't know at the time that, that Mac, because everybody was saying, Mac's gonna lose his legs. Mac's gonna lose his legs. And I just couldn't imagine, I'm like, here's this dude who's so good. I mean, just a, just so good at be like, he, I remember Mark 19 gunners were, were really good. And, um, I'm like, how is this, this guy is so good at what

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  he does. And, um, and now we're talking about him losing his legs? Like, what? Um, and we, we just all couldn't believe it. But we had, but we had, we, I mean, but this was March. I mean, we, we had a long way to go.

• 1:41:16Jocko Willink?

  He kept his legs.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  Kept his legs. Kept his legs. I remember going up to, uh, I remember going up to his wedding and it was, uh, super emotional for me because it's the first time I've seen him since, um, since he was wounded. And, uh, I remember him telling me, he's just like, he's like, hey, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna walk with my cane down the aisle. I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk by myself. And, um, and, and it took him a long time, but he, he made it there. And it was, it was awesome to see him and, and everything. And he's doing really well now. He's still up in Mankato, um, just doing so many things for veterans and giving back. He's a great man.

• 1:41:52Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding. Still work to do. You guys are back out there. I've had this conversation with many people that when someone gets wounded or someone gets killed, the war doesn't stop. And you gotta get your gear back on and go. And then a short time later, April 9th, 2006, 2006, Sergeant David Collins of Jasper, Georgia, and Sergeant First Class Gregory Rogers of Cincinnati, Ohio. They both get killed by ID.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Sergeant, Sergeant Lamberson too.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  They were all killed that they were all killed that day. So what they would do, they were so smart, right? Um, the enemy was like really smart. So what they would do is when we figured it out is, I don't know if you guys were getting the same intel as we were, but what they would do is they would

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  they would burn tires in the road.

• 1:42:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  And they would loosen up that asphalt. And then they would dig out that asphalt. And then they put the they put the IDs in that hole and then they'd recover it with asphalt and you look at the roads.

• 1:43:05Jocko Willink?

  And then they'd sweep dust on it.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  And it just looked normal.

• 1:43:07Jocko Willink?

  Totally normal because it's not like the roads are nice anyways. I mean, these roads are all jacked up. And so it just looks like another piece of road.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, so it even our IED task force team couldn't couldn't didn't have the capability to to find them and they were good and those guys were good too. I mean, they they were they were they they they had, I mean, every single night they those guys would go out and do such a fantastic job to keep us safe because like, you know, just like, you know, a rule was to, you know, don't go outside, you know, your building without, you know, body armor or kit.

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  Same rules applied. You don't go down a road that hasn't been cleared. You don't do it or you're going to get blown up.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  And so, and so that's how that's how that enemy would would operate. And I remember the the third time that I was blown up, the same the same thing hap- the same thing happened to me as it happened to Sergeant Rogers vehicle. It was it was buried under underneath the road. He he rolled, he rolled over it and is just complete, complete direct hit. And just a devastating devastating IED to that Humvee. But on my third time I was blown up, it was the IED, we were going to do a mission up in Sophia. The the IED task force team had had just cleared the route. We were we were we were following them up there.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  And it was on the side of the road and I was facing, I had I had the Marine Corps working dogs in the back of my Humvee with me. And IED blows up and just, I mean, just jars me where my head's rattling back and forth in in the turret. And the, you know, the dog is freaking out. I'm thinking it's going to bite, you know, bite me. And, you know, a huge piece of concrete lands on my head and and.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  It was the same, it was the same thing, but only his was underneath his vehicle and mine was on the side.

• 1:45:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, when we were over there, so once we started putting snipers out and oftentimes we put snipers out, oh, after a clearance team goes through. So the clearance team would go through, we'd put snipers out and when we, when those insurgents would come to reseat those IEDs, we'd kill them. And people were kind of surprised at how many people we were killing, how many enemy we were killing. And it was like, no, this is, we need to kill a lot more, actually. And that's one of the things that I think endeared us to the, to the army and the marine corps was being able to kill those IED emplacers.

• 1:45:44Jocko Willink?

  Get them off the battlefield. And you know, that's, we, I got so much appreciation from all the battalion commanders, but then the company commanders. They were so happy when we could get guys, because we only had so many, we could only cover so many routes at any one time. But they would be so happy to hear, oh yeah, oh yeah, we're going to come out and watch, you know, Farouk Way, which is a nice, long road to watch, which has so many IEDs on it, you know, and they'd be so happy when we could watch Route Sunset, when we could get our eyes on those roads, especially after the mine clearance team went through, there's, you're guaranteed going to get kills, guaranteed, it's going to happen.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  I remember the worst, that worst intersection, Farouk and Easy Street, that intersection right there. Oh my gosh, I make shills right now thinking about how dangerous, like, because you're deep, you're, you're deep into the Mulab district at that point.

• 1:46:39Jocko Willink?

  And by deep in the Mulab, it's not that far.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:46:43Jocko Willink?

  It's not that far. When you look at a map, you go, what do you, what is that? You know, how many meters is that? I mean, you'd measure it in meters, you wouldn't measure it in kilometers, you'd measure it in meters. Maybe it's a click, I don't know, but it's not very far. And yet that's deep in the Mulab.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  That's very deep in the Mulab.

• 1:46:58Jocko Willink?

  So that was one of the, that was one of the. Benefits of us, we got very lucky in my task unit because we had 13 snipers, which is a high number of snipers for a SEAL task unit. We just happened to be lucky that our platoon chiefs were snipers, our LPOs were snipers, and we had had snuck a couple guys, a few more guys into snipers and some legacy snipers. So we end up with 13 snipers in the task unit. And that was just the perfect, the perfect group to have in an environment like this.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  So how did you guys, did you guys develop that strategy on your own for the placing the snipers after, after the route clearance team would go in? Because that's, that's, I mean, that's brilliant. I mean, because you know, because you know, they're going to do that.

• 1:47:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was that, it was anytime the coalition forces were going to do something, we would look at it and say, okay, what, how's the enemy going to attack this? So if you guys are putting in a combat outpost, we know the enemy is going to come. They're going to come in the first 24 to 48 hours before the combat outpost is built. So in that first 24 to 48 hours, we'll be out there the whole time. And when they come to attack, we're going to kill them.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 1:48:08Jocko Willink?

  You clear a road, okay, you done clearing the road? Cool. When you're clearing that road, we'll put snipers out there. And again, we didn't get to do this all the time, but as often as we could, put snipers out there. Now the people come in to reseed, enemy comes in to reseed the bombs, kill them. Doing a big clearance operation, oh, you're going to be clearing for four hours? Well, we know, we'd look at the area that was being cleared and say, oh yeah, they're going to clear the pizza slice, they're going to clear the P block, they're going to clear whatever, whatever conventional, and by conventional, it's usually Iraqi forces and some form of American. But we'd see, oh, you're going to be clearing in this direction through these buildings? Here's where the enemy is going to, enemy is going to come from? We would set up on hopefully the longest access roads we could.

• 1:48:51Jocko Willink?

  And then the enemy would come to attack and we'd be able to kill them, interdict. And that's what we were doing. You know, that was, that was where we. That was where we could best support.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:02Jocko Willink?

  What the conventionals were doing. So, and you got, you were over there with, we had a, there's about seven guys that were over there with you all in Camp Corregidor.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm sure you can't remember them all, but Seth Stone was, you know, the, the platoon commander over there. You know, it's funny, we, we would have put everyone in ACUs because those guys ended up in ACUs. Because we didn't want to stand out. We wanted to blend in with the conventionals. We, and, but we didn't have enough. We had like one set of ACUs per guy in the whole task unit.

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:49:38Jocko Willink?

  And what we ended up doing was the, the other platoon donated all their ACUs to Seth's guys. So that at least them with the first of 506 could blend in completely.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you guys, I mean, for what I remember is you guys maintained the same grooming standards as us too. I mean, I mean, I mean, we, I mean, you know, we had to, we had to shave when, when we could. And, you know, make sure we got haircuts and all, you know, all that sort of thing from, you know, an old, like a rusty pair of, you know, clippers and all that stuff. But, but yeah, you got, man, you guys were great. You guys, I, I mean, you guys just, you guys helped us out so much. I mean, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, but like, again, not knowing anything, but I remember having a, I remember when we were doing a lot of, you know, hard knocks and, and clearing, you know, house to house.

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  In order to get into some of these doors, I mean, they're reinforced with steel and, you know, concrete and this sort of stuff. And so like, I remember having like a, like a thing of C4 duct taped in my right pocket. And then I remember having the blasting cap in my other pocket as I'm, as I'm going down the road and I'm thinking, I'm like, all right, well, the last house that I did, the deck cord, I had about, it was about this big. So maybe I need to do about this big. And I would, I would plug in the C4 to, to blow these doors. And you guys are like, what are you doing? And you guys had all this like awesome equipment with you and, and like you would, you would, and so that you gave us like a brief demolition course. You know, taking care of us because you cannot do that anymore.

• 1:51:21Jocko Willink?

  That was such an awesome brotherhood that was. When you're going against the, an enemy like that, that's so determined and you, when so much is at risk on a daily basis, you learn real fast, we better get along, or we're all gonna, we're all gonna get killed if you don't get along.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you guys were man, you guys were man in the, you guys were man in the camp corrigidor, just like, just like we were when, um, you know, we were, you know, um, when there was like a heavy enemy presence that we were thinking we were, they were gonna try to, you know, overrun or something like that. Um, you guys would be right out there with us. Um, I mean, every, every, I mean, you guys, you guys were outstanding, absolutely outstanding, have nothing but respect and, I mean, just, and then the stuff that, when we came home, that we, we maintained that camaraderie and it was, it, I mean, it was, it was almost like the stars aligned, the stars aligned for just something so great.

• 1:52:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And again, I, when you have an enemy like that, you have a battlefield like that, and you're taking casualties like that, and there just is no room for, you know, to this day, I like, don't, I don't, if someone, you know, tries to make a snide comment about the army or a snide comment about the Marine Corps, like, I don't, I don't participate in that game. Like, it's just not, it's just, I can't do it. I can't do it. Not after all the, all the sacrifice and all the teamwork. It's like, it's just not gonna happen. My first team that I was at, when I graduated from SEAL training was SEAL Team One, and when, when I got to SEAL Team One, it was, they used to call it stalag Team One, because

• 1:52:59Jocko Willink?

  it was all like following the rules. And you get a lot of your DNA as a SEAL from your first team and from your first platoon. And so my, there was this, this Master Chief, the Master Chief of the team was Mr. Professionalism and uniforms and haircuts. And so that always kind of stuck with me. And, and then I worked a bunch with the Marine Corps, because I did two amphibious ready group deployments where you're working directly with them. It's working with the big Navy and with the Marine Corps. And so as a SEAL in the nineties, if you weren't working with the big Navy and the Marine Corps, you were kind of out on your

• 1:53:43Jocko Willink?

  own, just doing your own thing, and you kind of do.

• 1:53:47Jocko Willink?

  Kind of whatever you wanted to do, but for me as a young SEAL, I was always working with the Marine Corps and work with the big Navy. So I was, I understood how important it was and how they judged people. And one of the ways that they judge people is and is through what they look like. And you know, if you can't put on a uniform, if a Marine looks at another human being and says that person can't put on a uniform, there's no way I can trust him to do anything, right? And then on my first deployment to Iraq, where I'm now working with the army and I was, yep, this is, this is the same thing, right? It's, it's called the military and the military has standards. And if you don't fit in with those standards, you know, people are going to question what you're doing. So that was kind of the, that was kind of the,

• 1:54:32Jocko Willink?

  the DNA for me of how I grew up and why I always leaned toward, and listen, like getting SEALs to wear a uniform period, like much less a matching uniform is really, really difficult. So, but I was able to pull it off and you know, I just explained why to everybody. The other thing huge was

• 1:54:55Jocko Willink?

  like having a beard in Ramadi

• 1:55:00Jocko Willink?

  is terrible. You know what I mean? Just as far as PID goes, if you have a beard and you're carrying a gun, that's not, you know, you're, that's not good. That's not good for your survival. And just that extra second of PID where someone goes, oh yeah, it's clean shaven face, carrying a weapon. Okay. That's probably an American. So you combine all those things together and it's not real eh, not real hard. And then also if you're running around in uniform that a 18 year old

• 1:55:30Jocko Willink?

  like a, or let's say a 21 year old 50 cal gunner. If he sees someone in a uniform that he's never seen before and it takes him an extra half second to identify. And you remember they had, that was one of the scariest things when I came to Craig or for the first time was they were showing like uniforms and body armor captured from the enemy. And it was like, it was chocolate chip uniforms and coalition body armor. And then also the local Iraqi or the Iraqi army wore chocolate chip camis. So anything we could do to help a brother identify that you're friendly, I was all about it. So that was all played into the, the.

• 1:56:15Jocko Willink?

  The clean cut uniforms and the clean and the regular haircuts and the no beards and all that stuff. So and everybody kind of got it, you know, which is always surprising because SEALs are are very fashion conscious group, you know, they really like to make sure they're they're looking good. You know, they have that whole thing like if you're gonna if you uh you gotta look cool while you're doing it, you know, that whole thing. So I never really bought into it. Like, I can't say never.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:41Jocko Willink?

  Because when I was a young SEAL, my first deployment, yo, all right, we're looking cool. Is that what we're doing?

• 1:56:49Jocko Willink?

  So I had some long, long hair, some long sideburns.

• 1:56:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:54Jocko Willink?

  You know, there's you can you can have like a beard now in the Navy again. I don't know what they're doing in the Army. Are they doing that in the Army?

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  I don't know what they're doing in the Army now.

• 1:57:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, in the Navy, there's people, I've seen pictures of them and they just like have a beard. Now, that was also true in the eighties. In the eighties, in the Navy, you could have a beard. And they got rid of it when they they tried to clean up a lot of the military in in the eighties because you know, the post Vietnam military was was really, really lacked a lot of discipline. I'm talking broadly speaking, if you were a person in the eighties, I'm not saying you were undisciplined, but there was a lot of drugs because they weren't drug testing.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:34Jocko Willink?

  There was they were trying to get people to stay in because the military was so popular after Vietnam. I should have said the seventies and eighties. Eighties has started to turn back around and they started, you know, implementing more control and and all that kind of stuff. But it was a big deal. And and another thing like when when you meet Colonel Clark, and when I met Colonel Clark, and I'm like, oh, this guy's in the middle of of a crazy deployment and he still looks squared away. All of the soldier looks squared away. We we can look squared away. We don't need to go out here and pretend like we're freaking Colonel Kurtz, right? Out on the on the brink of sanity out here in in North Vietnam or whatever. It's like, no, we're actually part of the military, the US military.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:19Jocko Willink?

  We have rules and regulations. We can follow them just like the rest of these soldiers are. So that's kind of a little background on it.

• 1:58:31Jocko Willink?

  You start to lead, like what, what was your leadership experience like as far as you personally?

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  So yeah, so I started off as a fifty cal gunner. I remained, I remained a E4. I mean, I went to the promotion board, I guess it was in, in Ramadi in front of all the first sergeants and Sergeant Major Catterton. And so I, I, I was like an E4 promotable or whatever. So my sergeant started, you know, tasking me with, because I went through that process to, to start, you know, stepping up and leading more and stuff. And, and I would, at that point, I was, I was kind of seasoned, you know, understanding the layout, the area of operations and stuff. I would, I would try to memorize, I would try to memorize the

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  roads, you know, to, to help me better. I mean, when you started getting into like, you know, the subsections of this, that was a little bit more difficult. But as far as, okay, you know, my left and right limits, you know, I got to five, five to the two, nine or six, you know, right outside of, you know, Corrigidor, I got Canal, then Market, then, you know, whatever they were, you know, Farouk and Easy, as we talked about earlier. So I, because I always wanted to know where I, where I was in case I needed to get out of there, you know, and, you know, to say, hey, we could just cut down this alley or, and then swing back around because of, you know, how much contact we were receiving on a daily basis. And so I think my sergeants recognized that and they started, you know,

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  putting me into more of like a leadership role. And plus, I was, I was good with the radios too. I was, I was, I was, you know, filling the radios and, and stuff. And I was always by my platoon sergeant, like when we were, when we were on foot and, and stuff as, as an RTO. So I just kind of like learned a lot from, from him and just seeing how, how my sergeants kind of operated.

• 2:00:35Jocko Willink?

  What was Operation Ridgeline? That was one of the notes that you sent me. He talks about Operation Ridgeline.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Operation Ridgeline was a was a battalion-sized mission, but we were the lead on it. And what it was, was we were gonna, we were gonna go out into the Mulab and we had a, we had a group of houses that we were tasked with with hitting and and it ended up being like we were, we cleared like 20 houses. I mean, we spent all day out there. And we just went from house to house to house, interviewing people, talking to people, trying to figure out where the enemy was, what they were doing, how they were intimidating them, the local populace. And it was just a, it was just like a, like roughly like a seven or eight hour firefight,

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  just sporadic all day long. Cause I don't know what, I don't know what it is. I don't know if if your guys had the same experiences we did when you guys first got over there, but when we first got over there,

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  like the, like the enemy always knew where we were. They always knew, like no matter how sneaky we tried to be, it didn't matter. It, it, it did not matter. We would do fake drops with Humvees while another platoon would go and, and actually do a mission and they knew where, they knew where everybody was. And, and it was because they were, they were calling and they always, they always, they always knew where we were at and we were trying to figure out how are, how are they doing this? And what the intimidation like, you know, what, cause they, they would go into house. It was, it was commonplace for them for the for the enemy to go in and say, you know, go to the male of the house and say, if you don't go kill,

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  you know, three Americans, I'm gonna kill your whole family, cause I know where they sleep. And that's just how disgusting they, they were. And so that's what, that's, that's what we were trying to figure out and through, through all, all of that, that whole operation, we did a, we did an excellent job of, of gaining intel and finding a couple caches and and nobody, nobody got wounded or hurt and, but it was, it was good.

• 2:02:52Jocko Willink?

  What do you remember about putting in Cope Eagles Nest?

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  So that was, man, we, we really pissed them off when, when we did that and

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  You know, something I wanna, something I wanna emphasize like to you is like, I wasn't like Captain Centi or Colonel Clark. I'm your, your, who you're talking to right now is one, one guy who

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  was in a minor leadership role and I didn't do anything great. I didn't have, I didn't understand a lot that was going on. I was just a, I was just an E4 in one of the most violent battles of the Iraq war.

• 2:03:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just to really quickly counter what you just said.

• 2:03:42Jocko Willink?

  First of all, the, it's the soldier that wins the battles. And we used to look at you guys and I'm talking, I'm gonna speak on behalf of my whole task in it. We looked at the soldiers, the, the, the frontline private soldiers that were out there in a 50 cal turret, on patrol, every single day, sometimes, you know, not even, you know, not even getting any rest whatsoever, back on the street, back on the street, back on the street, and doing it day after day after day after day after night after night after night after night. So, and believe me, I, I mean, I've, you, you know, I had Colonel Sean McFarland on here, that was in charge of

• 2:04:20Jocko Willink?

  everything, that, that ran the whole place. And he knows, and he knows and knows in certain terms. It was, it was you guys that were out there every single day, doing what you had to do, stepping up over and over and over again, to take the fight to the enemy. So, it may not seem like, you know, you were a, you were a, in a leadership position, or whatever, whatever the case may be, but what you guys did at your level is, is what made victory attainable.

• 2:04:54Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for that. And I recently spoke with Captain Centi and he basically just said the same exact thing that you did. He, he was telling us that, you know, a lot of the information that they were implementing was because of- Of the information we were providing to them of of how to counter all of this, how not to get blown up anymore, how, you know, what patterns are we are we seeing with the enemy that we can implement, you know, throughout the whole battalion? And what can we, what can we do? I mean, so like, somebody had said, you know, hey, start driving on the sidewalks.

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  And we started driving on the sidewalks because we knew that they weren't, they weren't going to be placing IEDs on there. And so, so yeah, so he, he, he said the same exact thing that you just said there. Which, I mean, it's, it's pretty cool. But as far as OP Eagles Nest, that, that was a, I didn't understand what we were doing because I was coming from just an individual soldier's point of view. I had no, I don't know, I didn't know the whole seize, build, clear concept, if I said that right. I didn't understand that at the time. And so, but I'm like, man, you're going to set up an OP on Farouk and Easy Street?

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  Like, are you, are you out of your mind? Like, that play, I mean, you're not, it's not, how are you going to build that thing? And, but whoever, whoever made that, that determination knew exactly like that, yeah, that's exactly what we're going to do. And it wasn't until, you know, afterward, I understand why we did it. But that, to try to build that was so difficult and we got so many guys wounded on that. So not only, so like, so not only are we doing, you know, mission platoon, secondary mission platoon, QRF, guard towers on Michigan, well, now what do we got to do? Delta Company is going to come out and start doing, doing presence patrols on, well, nothing

• 2:07:06Speaker 01

  was really presence patrol, it was all a combat patrol. To Farouk and Easy Street 24/7 because we had to, we had to maintain the integrity of, of building that up. And so, that same sergeant who pulled MAC out of the Humvee Sergeant Hudsby, he lost his, he lost his ankle on an IED.

• 2:07:28Speaker 01

  Uh, trying to move some Constantina wire over and they had placed it right there. They had, they had moved it and there was an opening. And so he's just like, I gotta go, I gotta go move that. And he moved it and it, it took his ankle off. We had, uh,

• 2:07:43Speaker 01

  they started throwing rocks at us. I don't know if they did that to you guys at all, but they started throwing rocks at us. And we were, and we were, and we were like, well, cause so going back to the 45 minute rule, like you kind of felt okay when the shops were open. And kids were out on the street and you know, people were doing, just doing their thing, right? In Malab, like you kind of felt okay.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  It wasn't until, you go back, back to the patterns. It wasn't until they started pulling their kids off the street.

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  Wasn't until the shop started closing up and you looked around and then like where it was once busy, now it's Ghost town. Empty. And you're just like, and you get that feeling on the back of your neck and you're like, something's about to go down. And then it just, it just pops off and, um, and that's what was happening. But like at this time they were out, but they were throwing rocks at us. And we didn't understand like what was going on because that had never happened before. And this was like, this was later on in the, in the deployment. And so, um, we had, we hadn't experienced anything like that, but they were throwing it right at, you know, the turret gunners and, and everything. So,

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  one night we go out, we're like, we, like my, my squad just had gone out to do the, do the patrol on Eagle's Nest for hours. No contact, nothing, nothing of significance happened at all. And, um, our relief, um, our, um, first squad came out to, to relieve us. So we went back to Criggador and they came back out. Well,

• 2:09:20Speaker 01

  when they came, when they came back out, it was, I mean, we didn't even get out of our Humvees before they got in contact. And what happened was, is, So how we would do it on Farouk and Easy, if you remember, um Farouk was, I, I don't know if, I can't remember if it was north and south or east or west, but whatever it was, it was a, it was a straight road, right? And it intersected with-

• 2:09:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Farouk was east west, we had like the baseline of Ramadi, yeah.

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  So towards, um, so what we would do is we would loop and we would always have Humvees kind of circling each other to, to cover each other and to always just maintain that integrity of nothing coming through. Um, and so

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  when the Humvee was heading back towards, back towards the Corrigidor way, um,

• 2:10:09Speaker 01

  the enemy up on top of rooftops threw pineapple grenades down onto the Humvee and blew up, blew up my platoon guys. And so like, um, the gunners yells out grenade and, um, he's trying to button up the Humvee, but he's got, I mean, when you, when you empty a Mark 19, you know, like you're going to have like a couple of loose rounds, guy floating. Well, that, that, that pineapple grenade cooked off, cooked off the other Mark 19 grenades and you had, um, a guy named Chris Bealobos who lost a couple of fingers, um, in my platoon and, um, I mean, everybody got wounded in that, in that Humvee. And, um, I mean, it was, it was a mass, it was a

• 2:10:50Speaker 01

  mass, mass casualty event. And in order to get them back to, um, Corrigidor to the, um, to the aid station, um, this guy, this, this, the other sergeant in my platoon, Sergeant Ramon Melendez, um,

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I had never seen anything like so heroic at the time. Like he sent, like he got out of the vehicle, got the saw off the vehicle, said, get back to Corrigidor. And he was out on Farouk Street by himself, laying down spire while, you know, other, cause he couldn't fit any of the guys, cause guys were laying down, cause they were so wounded in the Humvees. And he's laying down saw fire as we're rolling up and we're like, where is everybody? He's like, I sent them back. And I'm like, well, get in. And, um, he's just sitting there by himself, 23 years old, just, just, um, getting after it. Um, and it was, it was, but they, what they were doing is they were probing us with those, with those, um, uh, with those, uh, rocks that they were throwing.

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  And, uh, and it was just another way that another thing that we had to deal with another, another pattern we had to, we had to solve another piece to the puzzle.

• 2:12:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, there you go. Case in point with, um, Melinda, as you say, yep. There's a case in point. Young soldier making things happen outstanding. And then when you talk about like the kids, the little kids and yeah, um, throwing rocks and this kind of thing. And this was the moos would make them do that. The, the insurgents would make the kids do that, go out and they would try and figure out, they're trying to pinpoint where, in our case would be where our sniper overwatch positions were like send kids out there, look around, snoop around, do anything, you know, what the moos is hoping is that you engage those kids. That's what they want. They want you. They're, they're hoping and praying that you shoot a kid so that they can put it on their, uh, Al Jazeera and everything else. So that's what they want.

• 2:12:44Jocko Willink?

  And, and you know, you have to contend with this. You obviously can't engage them. So what are you going to do? You know, like, so, it's one of those things. You gotta, you gotta figure out that's what makes that urban combat so difficult. And we, you know, we'd throw crashes at them, you know, um, that kind of thing to try and get them to go away and be scared enough. Uh, but again, one of the many things that is very difficult in these situations and, and yeah, what's crazy is I, when I had Colonel McFarland on or General McFarland on, his plan was to do one of those big operations like every three or four days. And we did like,

• 2:13:27Jocko Willink?

  when I think about how often those, those happened and I had a, I had a, one of the task unit bruiser EOD guys on the other day. And I asked him, how long do you think it was between, and I named off like the emplacement of three combat outposts. And he goes, I don't know, two months? And I was like, no, it was two weeks. In fact, it wasn't even two weeks. It was like seven days and there's four major combat outposts went in. With, you know, each one of those combat outposts having 200 Texas barriers in place around them. And Jersey barriers in front of that and 10 or 15 or 20,000 sandbags inside the building and Constantino Island generators installed and what rewiring all those buildings, all that stuff was happening.

• 2:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Two or three days apart on each one of those operations. It was, it was crazy to be thinking about that. And. A cop Falcon went in simultaneously. I think it went in simultaneously or it was offset by a day or two as or sorry Eagles Nest and cop Falcon were almost the same time. Like they were both happening at the same time at the opposite ends of Faruk way. Which you want to talk about putting a squeeze on the enemy like that was perfect.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. What a, what a brilliant strategy. I mean, like I said, I didn't understand it at the time, but like now looking back on it, I mean, if there's a, and, and, and the Iraqi army was manning it. We weren't, we weren't manning it. It's like finally, I think after what we were going through with them, like we finally saw them like stepping up and, and guarding that place, you know?

• 2:14:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we were able to establish enough of a foothold. Like it's a lot easier to man an outpost for the Iraqi army than it is for them to go out and patrol and seize an outpost. And so they didn't have the capability of doing that.

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:04Jocko Willink?

  But once we would establish, get it built up, then they could at least man it. And it gives them a little bit of confidence and takes a little way, gives us a little relief on combat power to go set up the next one.

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  And the populace could go and talk to them and, and communicate with them about what is going on in the area.

• 2:15:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um. Were you were out, were you at Eagles Nest when Mikey got killed? Where were you on September 29th?

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  So I was close, I was close. I was like a block away because um, from my recollection, they were at um, they were oper, you guys were operating at like near the train station when we had called in. I mean, we had called in airstrike after airstrike on that train station because they were using it as a weapons cache. And um, I mean, we'd have secondary explosions going off there all the time from, from that area and um.

• 2:15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember we were, we were right next to um, OP Eagles Nest as, as you know, it was getting built up or maybe it was already built. I can't remember. Um, but yeah, we, we heard that firefight going down. I mean, it was just, it was right there and um.

• 2:16:06Speaker 01

  You know, we saw the, we saw the uh, Bradleys come in and uh, and come get you guys and. Uh, uh, I mean, but we couldn't, I mean, we had to, we had a, we had a route to, we had a route to man, but I mean, we were, we were super, I mean, we were the closest element. Um, to you guys when that was all going down and I don't know.

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  You know. Why we, why we couldn't go or didn't go, but I knew, I mean, but it was, it was right there.

• 2:16:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, the QRF came out from, you know, from Kragador and like you said, everyone's got a mission that you're doing out there. You just can't abandon your post to go do something else. So. Um, when you're, um, you know, it's another thing to think of is remember the, remember how crazy the soccer field was?

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:16:50Jocko Willink?

  So Echo Charles, there's like a, in downtown Ramadi, there's a big soccer field. And it was just a, like a muster point for the enemy. When things would start going off, they'd go there and muster. They had weapons, the weapons caches there. And so they could kind of go in there, but the, the soccer field was just this, uh, total muster point for the enemy. And I remember I, I, and we, we, you guys ended up not executing it, but there was a, an op, a concept of operations that Seth Stone put up the chain of command through me. I approved, uh, and it actually used the symbol, the, the, uh,

• 2:17:32Jocko Willink?

  operational terms and graphics for destroy, which you almost never get to see that. But there was a certain area of the soccer field. It was like a wall that was on the western side. And it was, it was really easy for the enemy to hide behind, maneuver behind. And it really pissed off Seth. And he was like, we need to destroy this thing. And we started ordering the massive amount of explosives that was going to take to blow this thing up. And I forget why, why it didn't get executed. But that's how bad the, uh, the soccer stadium was as, as just a place for the enemy to, to convene and go execute operations.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was kind of like in the mid, like, not, I want to say in the middle of nowhere, but they, they had just had kind of open rain there because it was right off of Michigan and it was kind of like in the center. If I remember correctly and, uh, like, cause OP Hotel was, was further down the road in Camp Prigga. So it was kind of like in the middle, uh, of, of that. But man, they found a, they found a major weapons cache there. I want to say like, they did like a couple of A10, A10 strafing runs in there and just, um.

• 2:18:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, that place was crazy. As you're getting through deployment now, you know, now we're talking like September, October. You guys are supposed to be going home in November. The reason, the only reason I say supposed to is because the, the 11 AD all got delayed an extra three or four months. How is your, how is you and your, and your platoon and your company's mentality as more casualties are coming? And the clock is kind of ticking. You start feeling like, well, Hey, we're gonna go home soon if we can make it. How's that mentality? And how'd you deal with that mentality?

• 2:19:16Speaker 01

  Ah, so that was, that was kinda it is, is so. How I always try to explain it was. The first two months were the worst and the last two months were the worst. Everything else in between is just in between. The first two months is just, it's just that chaos, right? It's just like you have no idea where anything's at. You don't know. You can't, you're not establishing any patterns of the enemy.

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  How, you know, like, how are you gonna respond to the enemy? You know? Am I gonna make it the next day? Like, like, that's, that's how I was, that's how I was thinking because of, I, we were getting guys just hit every single day.

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

  And then at the very end, you're like, I almost made it out of this thing, virtually unscathed, right? And I mean, I have all my fingers, I have all my toes. Like, I, I, I'm looking at a platoon that was once, I don't know, 20 men strong. And now there's like seven original guys left in the my platoon.

• 2:20:17Speaker 01

  And now, like, we're getting close to the end.

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  But there was always this thing of. Hey, everybody told us that when we first got here that the Battle of Ramadi is lost. And there's no way you're gonna win that thing. And what we, what we had accomplished from, from when we got there in December of 05 to now October, November timeframe. I mean, it wasn't just, it wasn't just we were, we were killing all the bad guys, right? I mean, that did happen, but, but like, we were also handing out pallets of water to people. You know, we were, we were, we were doing things to try to help that populace, fixing the roads. So the kids could play in the street to have a somewhat of a normal, normal life.

• 2:21:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was the, a whole line of operations. I mean, the civil affairs efforts, the engaging with the sheikhs efforts, the.

• 2:21:18Jocko Willink?

  tribal engagements, the building the police force, the engaging with the actual government of Ramadi and the, the, the governor of Al Ombar who lived in Ramadi. So all these, look, you and I sit here because we're a couple dudes talking about combat. And of course, what do we talk about? We talk about machine guns. We talk about 50 cal. But all these other events were taking place. Now it's important to remember that you can't do any civil affairs. If you don't have some kind of security, you can't interact with the sheiks if you don't have some kind of security. You can't build and give away water. You can't build wells and give away water and repair the roads.

• 2:21:58Jocko Willink?

  If you don't have some kind of security. So you had to, you have to establish through kinetic operations. Control, some level of control and the more control you get, the more you can do civil affairs. The more you can engage with the tribes, the more you can engage with the local police, like all those things. Rely upon the violence being at least mitigated to some extent. And the more we were able to mitigate the violence, the more you can interact with the populace. And let them see that there's another way to live and they don't have to live with these insurgents. So yes, even though especially for someone like you, a straight freaking 50 cal gunner

• 2:22:41Jocko Willink?

  in a turret or a saw gunner out on patrol, you don't get to see all those other things taking place. But there's whole other units where that is their primary focus. Their primary focus is not a machine gun. Their primary focus is a, a hammer and a drill. Or doing med caps as well. I forgot about med caps. So you're going out there and you've got teams that are going out. Their sole mission is to go out and give medical support to the local populace. So all those things were taking place and the longer we were there, the more they took place. Because the, the more enemy was eliminated and the more the local populace trusted us. And so, yes, very important point to be able to see that progress. And for me, one, one thing I always remember is

• 2:23:26Jocko Willink?

  Going in like, uh, Cop Falcon. So when we put in Cop Falcon and then going out from Cop Falcon over the coming weeks and, and actually months. The first time we went out and went into a, uh, someone's house, like knocked on their door and wanted to do, find out what was going on in there. The, the, the dad like would take the family away and wouldn't even look at us, wouldn't talk to us at all. Cause they were so scared that the insurgents would see them talking to coalition forces. But fast forward another, you know, three, four, five weeks. And all of a sudden the local populace is like, oh yeah, there's a bad guy that lives over there. You need to get him, you need to get him. Or they'd be sitting down, giving, giving tea to the Iraqi soldiers. Like

• 2:24:10Jocko Willink?

  the attitude of the local populace changed so much while we were there. And I think that's what, if I had any indication, cause I left in, in October, if I had any indication of the positive things that were going to happen, it was number one, seeing the local, local populace actively communicating with coalition forces. That was number one. And the other big one was when we put in Cop Sword, which was right on 20th street, right? Just south of Route Michigan. And there was a bunch of intel from the enemy that they were going to fight for it. And they were never, you know, no one was ever going to need no coalition force or whatever to get in there. And we went in there and it was, it was like my guys didn't shoot, didn't engage anybody.

• 2:24:56Jocko Willink?

  And they almost always engaged enemy fighters. And here we go into this last combat outpost, no enemy fighters. There was, there was other, uh, the, the 137 killed some guys, but my guys didn't kill anyone. Why didn't they kill anyone? There was no one to kill. And so then I said, huh, that's pretty interesting that we thought this was going to be a hornet's nest and there was no hornets. And so that, again, when I look back, when I looked back on it, six months later, when, you know, essentially peace had broken out. I was like, oh, that was the first little turning point in this battle was number one, the civilian populace kind of opening up. And number two, going into combat outpost sword or OP sword and.

• 2:25:40Jocko Willink?

  It was actually, it was actually myself and it was actually me and Colonel McFarland. We like, you know, with us, I was with a couple of the army guys and him and we're standing there. And like, this is actually pretty mellow. He also jokes about the fact that I was like, hey, sir, can you, uh, can you not stand like so close to that window right now? He's like, Roger that.

• 2:26:03Jocko Willink?

  Cause like, there's no shooting going on right now, but we don't know what's gonna happen. So that was your, as you're getting towards the end of deployment. And again, even though there's more of these kind of civil affairs types, it's still, it's still horrific.

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're not even, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's just the same that's going on every single day. I mean, I mean, it's just again, still going out two and three times a day, still getting shot at two and three times a day. Still, you know, um, you know, as a 50 caliber gunner, I'm just trying to, I'm trying to keep everybody in my truck alive. I'm trying to just, I'm just trying to, I'm trying to kill as many people as I can so I can keep my whole truck alive. Um, and, and get back home. Um, and so.

• 2:26:46Jocko Willink?

  Did you end up with the Pope glass and everything on your, uh, on your Humvee turret?

• 2:26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, we ended up, we ended up getting those, uh, I can't remember when, but it was like halfway through, halfway through our deployment. We ended up, we ended up getting those.

• 2:26:57Jocko Willink?

  Bro, we showed up on our deployment. The vehicles that we had were, were like the old school Humvees with like the one like machine gun shield in the front.

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:08Jocko Willink?

  I mean, just embarrassing. It was like, are you serious? No one's gonna get this thing. You're kidding me?

• 2:27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I don't know how we ended up getting them, but like, I mean, I remember guys getting mad cause like, cause again, like my, my perspective for the majority of the time was Camp Corrigidor, right? It's all I knew. Just a absolute, um, absolute like worst possible living conditions you can, you can possibly have. Because, um, because of where we were at, but then like, you know, every once in a while, like, I know, I remember, well, the second time I was, uh, the second time I was blown up, I was blown up with Colonel Clark, actually. And we were, we were heading to, um, we were heading to the Gov. Center for, for, he had to do some meeting. They asked for some volunteers and so I, me and a couple of guys volunteered and, um, uh,

• 2:27:55Speaker 01

  I was driving at the time and, uh, cause we, two, two gunners volunteered. So one, um, and the other guy was like, hey, just if you're on the, if it's, we had a mark 19. So I was like, hey, you're a mark 19, you're gonna go ahead and get in the mark. And, and so I was driving and, um, and so we had to go to the Gov. Center and I think we went to Camp Ramadi and then I, it was my first time at Camp Ramadi and I'm like, I'm like, what the hell is this? Like this, like you guys got showers? You guys have a chow hall? You can sit down? I mean, I remember walking into this chow hall and I mean, I probably hadn't showered in three or four days and, um, my, my, my uniform is just completely dirty. Um, and, uh, I remember walking into this chow hall and every, and everybody's just kinda looking, looking at us, you know, coming in and we sit down, you know, by ourselves

• 2:28:36Speaker 01

  and, and we, we, uh, uh, you know, we, we get, I mean, I mean, I, I went up there for seconds. I mean, I mean, you had like, like, you had so much food there and it was so good and, um, it wasn't the same thing every, you know, every single day like it was at Corrigidor and, um, you guys had, uh, you know, bathrooms that were air conditioning. I mean, I remember like, you know, the ones at Corrigidor, you had, you know, you had a shower curtain, you know, over you and you were, you know, taking a dump in a, in a, in a waste can and then burning it in the, in the daytime because you couldn't do it at night because of the night discipline. Um, and so you had all this stuff and I'm just like, dude, this is, this is, this is great. Like this is, this is how the other half lives.

• 2:29:18Jocko Willink?

  And, and what's really crazy about that is they're only four miles apart. But that four miles was Route Michigan.

• 2:29:25Speaker 01

  Route Michigan.

• 2:29:26Jocko Willink?

  And that four miles, if you were to say, all right, everybody, do you want, you know, do you guys want ice cream? Cool. Here's what's gonna happen for you to get a, here's what's gonna have to happen for you to get ice cream. This is what's, this is what the convoy's gonna have to be. Like, it would, it was serious logistics nightmare to try and get that four mile stretch of road covered on a regular basis where, and, and I guarantee, I mean, look, there's no one that's gonna look out for their troops more than Colonel Clark and Colonel McFarland. I, I, I, I know those guys. Like there's no two guys that are gonna do more to take care of their troops than those two guys.

• 2:30:08Jocko Willink?

  And what they, I guarantee, decided was, well, I would like to, really like to give my guys some whatever, ice cream or seconds. Do I want to risk their lives on three more convoys to make that happen every day?

• 2:30:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:30:23Jocko Willink?

  And they just looked at each other and probably said, nope.

• 2:30:25Speaker 01

  They couldn't, there's no way they could do it. I mean, I mean, not with the amount of IEDs that were out there. There was just no possible way. And again, we didn't know any better, but it was, it was like one of those things like where, um, you know, if, if, uh, you've been, you've been good for a while and dad's like, hey, come on, let's go get some ice cream. And he's like, oh, really? Okay. Let's, let's go have some ice cream. You know, cause you never really get it, but that's how it was. And so it was, it was such a joy to go to Camp Ramadi or Alta Katom to, in order to, in order to get those things because we, we just didn't have it. Um, but we didn't, but nobody, everybody was fine with it. Everybody, everybody was fine with it. It was, it was kind of, it felt good to be so hardcore. It felt, it felt fucking great, to be honest with you.

• 2:31:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The, the, for my guys, you know, we, we went out to Camp Corregidor within a couple of weeks of getting there. We were doing the, a big operation with you guys and we had the blue on blue happen, which was terrible. And then we went back and basically Colonel Clark had rolled out the, the offer of, hey, if you guys want to come out here, like I'll, let's go. And it, it was actually, um, Clayburn, um, who, who had told Colonel Clark, like, can I have SEALs with me on every mission? Like he walked up after our first patrol and he's like, can I take SEALs with me on every mission? So it was a really good, kind of instant, awesome relationship.

• 2:31:53Jocko Willink?

  And then, so now I had everyone back at Camp Ramadi and I.

• 2:31:59Jocko Willink?

  Told them, I told Colonel Gronski, like, yes, I'll put guys out there. And then I wrote up on the board, hey, and, and so now three quarters of the, the task unit had just been in Camp Ramadi. And when we were staying, we were staying in Full Metal Jacket, there's dirt floors, there's mosquitoes and bed like bugs everywhere. And it was just miserable. And I put a, I, I took a whiteboard and I said, hey, I need to put together, and actually Stoner, Seth Stone, he said, hey, you know, I want to pick my guys to go. And I said, don't, I said, get volunteers. Cause if you pick guys, just don't, it, some guys, you might pick a guy that doesn't want to go.

• 2:32:40Jocko Willink?

  It was miserable out there, like the, it's so kinetic, it's completely hazardous. You need to like, let's get volunteers. So I put out the word to everyone. I said, hey, y'all just got back from Camp Corregidor, you know what's going on out there, you know what the living conditions are. You, there's gonna be casualties out there. And we need like a squad of guys to go out there. So I put a whiteboard up and I said, if you want to go, put your name on this list. And I walked out and I came back 20 minutes later. And every guy in the task unit had their name on the list. Let's go. So then Seth got to kind of pick and choose and figure out what, what would be the best combo. But yeah, man, Corregidor was, was no joke.

• 2:33:24Jocko Willink?

  And that was probably what most people would think of a military deployment. Oh, yeah. Is a lot more like Camp Corregidor than it is like Camp Ramadi or, or. I'm glad you never went to, you know, Baghdad or something like that. You would have been seriously disappointed. Yeah. That, you know, some, some of those places like they had pools. I heard. It makes me sick. Swimming pools echo Charles. Like legit gyms, legit gyms. Actually, Corregidor had a, you know, had a.

• 2:33:58Jocko Willink?

  Kind of a, kind of a hardcore gym, you know what I mean?

• 2:34:01Speaker 01

  It's a place like where Rocky worked out.

• 2:34:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was a rocky gym. It was a rocky gym. It was freaking legit. But some of those other bases, some of those big bases, bro, they had legit. Uh, I want to say hammer strength. Remember hammer strength?

• 2:34:14Speaker 01

  Hell yeah.

• 2:34:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, hammer strength was kind of top line stuff and they would have the full, cause you know, you could get, you could get a hammer strength machine for like your right forearm and then a different hammer strength machine for your left forearm and then like one for your right calf and one for your quad. They would have them all. Yeah, it was, it was, it was kind of nuts. Craigador, that wasn't happening.

• 2:34:35Speaker 01

  No, makes me sick.

• 2:34:37Jocko Willink?

  It, and you know, actually I had Colonel Dean on who was the one three five commander and he was talking about the first meeting that Colonel McFarland, General McFarland had and he's up there talking about, you know, this is, hey, he's about to take over as the brigade commander in charge of Ramadi and he's standing there and like six mortars hit and like Colonel Dean said, you know, he's kind of like trying to like find some cover very, very clandestinely like lean back against the wall in case something blows up. And he said, Colonel McFarland like didn't miss a beat, just kept talking. And it's like, that was right in Camp Ramadi getting mortared. And as a matter of fact, I, if I remember correctly,

• 2:35:20Jocko Willink?

  a soldier got killed by those, by those mortars. So, yeah, that was bad. Craigador.

• 2:35:29Jocko Willink?

  Even worse. So your mentality as you're going out towards the end of deployment.

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you still had to maintain that, that certain amount of aggression, uh, because it wasn't over. I mean, you, I mean, just you couldn't, you couldn't, you had to stay locked in the entire time and, um, because you knew what was waiting for you when you were getting out, the 45 minute rule still applied. Um, guys were still getting blown up. Um, but there was, there was a lot of me that was really excited like to get back home. Um, cause I almost had made it, right? It was almost like a, like it's almost like you didn't want to know like when you were going home because like you're, you know, you didn't want to do the countdown thing, right? You just did not want to do that. You know, there's a bad mental space to, to, to do that, but, um, I also felt personally like the job wasn't done.

• 2:36:19Speaker 01

  Like you had all told, like we had all just heard that, you know, the battle for Ramadi is lost. There's no way you can win it, um, all that type of crap. Um, but then like what we accomplished over there was so good and, uh, uh, we did an amazing job, an amazing work and, um, I just felt like the job wasn't done and I just wanted to see it through. I wanted to see it through to say, no, because like, I don't even think like a lot of people know that the 101st Airborne was in the Battle of Ramadi. I don't think like a lot of people know that the first of the 506 had played such a significant role in the Battle of Ramadi and we absolutely did and, um, and, uh,

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  and it's just, and it's just like, you know, cause like when we got back home, I couldn't believe the stories I was hearing from Ramadi about like having battalion runs down Michigan or, um, I'm like, what? I, I, I couldn't, it was, it was impossible for me. Like I couldn't, I couldn't picture it. I was like, there's no way, there's no way that's happening and, uh, but that's, but that's how in the, in the, in the one year that I lived over there, that what we, what we accomplished as a team over there, um, I think led to, led, led to it.

• 2:37:45Jocko Willink?

  No, no doubt about that. Did you, I, I always told myself or I wouldn't tell my guys, like this is the last mission you're going on.

• 2:37:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:54Jocko Willink?

  Cause I felt like that was a, a jinx that no one wanted. So I, I just, hey, we're working until we go home.

• 2:38:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  And then it'd be like, oh, we got a plane coming. All right. These guys are out of here and just put them on a plane and they're out and they, that way they never, in their mind, they never went on their last mission. It just, oh, they looked back and was like, oh, I guess that was my last mission there. Is that the way it was for you? Or do you remember like, okay, we're leaving in two days and I'm going out tonight?

• 2:38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I don't remember, um, I don't remember how it happened, but, um, I remember, um, like, um,

• 2:38:30Speaker 01

  So we, you know, when we first got, when we first got to Korigado, there was like, we had, you know, a six-person chow hall table, um, no, you know, we were, we were taking a dump outside instead like, but then we had porter potties, um, and we had an air, we had a, we had a landing pad in Camp Ramadi. Somebody had built, like the CBs had built, um, us a better chow hall where we could, where we could fit more people in there. And then they, they had built a helipad, um, um, on, in the backside of, of, of Korigado, where the, where it was real dusty, like moon dust back there. And, um, and that's where I, that's where we took out off of, um, as opposed to like when I remember first

• 2:39:11Speaker 01

  coming in. And, um, uh, I just remember, I remember, uh, I don't remember my last mission. I don't remember, um, how it all, how that all happened, like now that I'm thinking about it. But, um, I do remember getting on that, uh, getting on that helicopter for the, for the last time and lifting off out of, out of, out of Ramadi and just being like, holy shit, I, I made it. I made it. And, um, and that was it.

• 2:39:41Jocko Willink?

  So where'd you fly to TQ and then jump on a bird to Kuwait and, and then jump on one of those civilian? Did you have, was it, was it the 506th together?

• 2:39:52Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 2:39:54Jocko Willink?

  So you were redeploying as a unit?

• 2:39:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:57Jocko Willink?

  I mean, as much as possible?

• 2:39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure we did it by company by company, but then, yeah, it was the 506th as a unit redeploying back home. And, um, and, um, I remember we, um, we left Kuwait and got to Bangor, Maine. And then, um, from Bangor, Maine, we flew into, um, Fort Campbell. And, um, that's where all our families were to, to greet us, um, to greet us back home.

• 2:40:25Jocko Willink?

  From your platoon, how many guys that, that you deployed with, how many of the guys, the same guys were on the flight home?

• 2:40:33Speaker 01

  Nine.

• 2:40:34Jocko Willink?

  Out of how many?

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  Twenty.

• 2:40:44Jocko Willink?

  What's the, what's the protocol when you guys get home? What do they, do they, do they do any debriefing? Do they put you in a offsite for a little while, anything like that?

• 2:40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you, um, from what I remember is we had to do like, like some debriefs, um, and things like that. We had to, uh, um, you know, go talk to different, um, doctors. Um, and then, um, but then there was like a lot of leave. We had a, we had a, we had a mandatory, um, leave where we were home for like three weeks. Um, and then we had to go back, but then like after that, it was, it was kind of like when I first got to the Hunter first. There was a lot of three and four day weekends that they would, that they would give us to, um, to help us slowly get back into, into the groove.

• 2:41:33Jocko Willink?

  What was your plan at this point? Like, how much time did you owe the army?

• 2:41:38Speaker 01

  Um, so I was, so let's see, I got home in, um, December of oh six. And so I had until August of oh seven was my ETS date. So, um,

• 2:41:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so like you had another six months, seven months? Um, and were you planning to get out?

• 2:41:55Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, so like, um, I, I, I wanted to go to school, um, I, um,

• 2:42:00Jocko Willink?

  Did you think that all deployments were like the one you just went on? And you're like, yo.

• 2:42:05Speaker 01

  I, I just, you know, I, you know, I just, I think my, you know, I thank my almighty father in heaven for protecting me and putting a hedge of protection around me, um, during that whole time. Um, and I just, like, I, I had, I had, I had, I had been through so much. I had, I had been blown up, you know, so I just didn't know how much, I didn't know if I could, you know, keep rolling the dice. And, um, I just said, hey, you know, I, I felt like I did my time. I felt like I served my country well, um, and, um, I was ready to go to school. I was ready to, I was ready to get on, ready to get on with my life. I, I just, I think I was like just so tired too.

• 2:42:45Speaker 01

  I'm, I was just, I was just so exhausted from war, um, just the constant, um, battles that we were in. Um, I was just, I was just tired. And I think I thought it was just a good time to get out, um, before, before, if I re, before I reenlisted. I just didn't, I, the reenlistment just didn't sound, um, appealing to me at the time. I just never even thought about it.

• 2:43:08Jocko Willink?

  What was it like driving down freaking Main Street, USA? Like, whatever, twenty-four or forty-eight hours after you came home from driving down Farouk Way and Easy Street?

• 2:43:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I was, I was a wreck, man. Um, I, like, I felt like I was always forgetting something, uh, cause we had to wear our body armor everywhere we went, you know, so like, I felt like when I was leaving, I remember like leaving like the dinner table, you know, and I, I would, I would try to pick, pick up my body armor and my rifle, um, you know, and I could, cause that's, that's what you had to have, uh, at all times and, um, you know, just driving down, driving down the road, um, you know, any, any piece of debris that was in the road, I would, I was, I was over to the left, I was over to the right, I was never driving in this, in the center. Um, and I was, um, I remember my, I remember my, I think it was my, my mom picking me up from

• 2:44:06Speaker 01

  the airport, if I remember correctly, and we were driving, we were driving back home on the interstate, and I remember her being like, she was like tailgating this car in front of us. I was like, what are you doing? Will you stop? Will you please stop? And she, she had, you know, she was totally oblivious of, of what was going on, but, um, but, you know, I was just like, I was like, hey, I was like, just, just, can you just back off just a little bit for me, please? And there was like a, there was a lot of adjustment that, that I, that I had to do internally, um,

• 2:44:33Speaker 01

  because of just what we, what we had just gone through in that whole year.

• 2:44:38Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take for that to start to fade a little bit?

• 2:44:41Speaker 01

  Um, I would, I would, I would say, um, man, I would, I would say it took, you know, it took a year. I mean, it took, it took a long time for me, um, just to get, just to get through it, um, just to understand, okay, like, you're fine here, everything's good here, but, I mean, you gotta think, I mean, nothing ever stopped when I came home, or when we came home. You know, nothing, nothing, everything was just going on. The world was still turning, everything was going on, um, while I was,

• 2:45:09Speaker 01

  while we were killing a lot of people and, um, and, and trying to avoid IEDs and getting blown up in the process and, like, there was a, uh, so, but nothing ever stopped here, and that was, that was the hard thing, that was the hard thing to adjust to.

• 2:45:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was definitely a weird thing and, and I remember I came home and... Man, I was just walking. I live in a little sub community here in in San Diego. And I was just walking down the street and and like you said, nothing had changed for them. Like, everything was just, it's all kept going. And I remember seeing some, you know, some just whatever people that are clearly totally

• 2:45:53Jocko Willink?

  oblivious, totally oblivious to the war, whether that was, you know, it's kind of like looking at everyone. I looked at like some some high school kids, you know, some fifteen year old kids walking down the street. I'm like, these, they have no idea the war is going on. And then some soccer mom, I'm like, she's not thinking about the war. And then some business still can do it. I'm like, oh, he's not thinking about them. And I realized none of these people are even thinking about something that I had been completely immersed in. And they're not, it's not even a factor in any way in their world. It's not a factor in any way. Maybe they see it on the news, maybe. Maybe if they watch the news, they'll catch a sliver of something that's going on in Baghdad, maybe. These people are completely oblivious to what's happening right now. And that was a

• 2:46:36Jocko Willink?

  that was, it took me a little bit of mental jujitsu to be like, to to look at that and say, that's not a horrible thing, because that's what we're supposed to be doing. Let's let them live their lives. We're trying to protect this way of life. It took a lot of mental gymnastics. I didn't get there, obviously. You can't get fully there, because people should recognize what's happening when the country's at war, when when Americans are getting killed, when Americans are putting themselves at risk every single day. They should be thinking about that. And the fact that they don't think about it is is wrong. The mental gymnastics I had to do was to not allow that to like, make me mad at everyone.

• 2:47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:22Jocko Willink?

  Because it's real easy to get everyone like, you know, you see your wife's friends, who, you know, you've been gone for six months, they were they were awesome support to my wife, right? Because I don't have any family around here. So everything was support, supported by her friends. And so they were at least, they at least understood what was happening. You take one step outside of my wife's friends, like my wife's friends' friends, they don't have any clue what's happening, none. So it took me a little bit of mental gymnastics and jujitsu to figure out like, oh,

• 2:47:56Jocko Willink?

  It's okay that these people aren't paying attention to this right now and don't be mad at them. That's, don't be mad at them. So it took a little bit of gymnastics to get through that.

• 2:48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I learned really quick, like, like through everything you just said is, like, I can't, like, I can't share, I can't, I can't even talk about this unless it's with, you know, the guys I was with. I can't even, because I, like, trying to explain this to, like, you know, just, like, like, the best man at my wedding, right? Who's a great dude. And trying to, trying to explain that to him is, it was just like, oh, okay, you know, and, and it just, you weren't getting the feedback that you needed, like, to kind of, like, talk through that. And it was only like the guys that you served with who really understood, right? Like, like, what? Not just like what the battle of Ramadi was, but

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  just like the whole, with Corregidor and everything that we went through. It was just, I learned really quick that, like, I just need to, like, there's, there's people I can talk about this with, and there's people that I'm just not going to, because I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to have that, that reaction from, from them. Not that there's, not that, they just don't know. And that, so that was, that took me a little bit, too.

• 2:49:17Jocko Willink?

  So your last six months in the Army, what are you doing?

• 2:49:20Speaker 01

  So, last six months in the Army, like, we're getting a lot of new guys in to replace, to replace, to replace the guys. And then, we're, we're starting to do, like, another workup in, because we were, they were getting ready to go to Afghanistan. And, and so, and, but I ended up, I ended up, like, start, I started applying for, for colleges back home, and got accepted into Western Illinois University. And, and then, so, it was just a, just a matter of time until I, until I got out. And I, and I didn't feel, I didn't

• 2:50:04Speaker 01

  have any, I didn't feel bad about it. I just, I just, it was like, it was just like the right time for me.

• 2:50:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Colonel Clark, this is one of the biggest lessons I learned. I was going to see Colonel Clark in, in Corregidor, and we had some kind of a mission going up with them. And I was...

• 2:50:24Jocko Willink?

  Uh, waiting outside of his office there to talk to him and he has a soldier in there and I can't really hear what they're saying, but you know, I'm not gonna like eavesdrop. So I'm just standing there and then the soldier leaves. And I go in and you know, he says, you know, he just made some comment like outstanding soldier and I was like, oh, you know, whatever, what, what's happening with him? And he said, you know, he's, he's, he's leaving the army. And he said, when someone is leaving the army, he said, a lot of times commanders will say, hey, you need to reenlist. You need to stay in longer. You can't leave us. We're only halfway through deployment. What about your brothers in arms? What about your comrades?

• 2:51:07Jocko Willink?

  And he says, you know what I tell them, Jocko? And I was like, no, sir. And he said, I tell them, thank you. Thank you for what you do. Thank you. Thank you for your service. We appreciate it. Your country appreciates it. Man, what a great man. And I was like, that is so next level. Uh, and you know, I, I can't imagine that a lot of guys didn't walk out of that office and go, wait a second, I'm going to re-up. I'm going to stay here. You know what I mean? It was such the opposite. Here's another thing going back to my, uh, my upbringing in the SEAL teams. If someone was getting out of the SEAL teams, they were a quitter, which in the SEAL teams, like the worst thing you can be is a quitter. So if someone was getting out of the SEAL teams,

• 2:51:47Jocko Willink?

  they were a quitter. And actually, when I first got to the SEAL teams, they would take SEALs that were getting out and put them on gate guard across the street. And gate guard normally oftentimes would be like a punishment for, so a normal SEAL gets in trouble like, oh dude, you, you messed up. You're going to be gate guard. And so now you take a guy that's served his country honorably and put him on gate guard because he's getting out. And it was just such the opposite attitude. And that's just a, a, a great

• 2:52:20Jocko Willink?

  learn, uh, learning moment for me from, from Colonel Clark, one of many, many learning moments for me from, from Colonel Clark and the way that he interacted with, with his soldiers and how appreciative he was and how it wasn't about him. It was about the army and it was about that individual who had served. So, uh, for you to get back and be like, oh, I did my time in the army. I served, I served in a freaking rough scenario and I'm going to move on. Did you?

• 2:52:53Jocko Willink?

  You know, a lot of guys come back and all of a sudden they're like drinking. What about was alcohol any issue for you? Or were you not that into it?

• 2:53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, alcohol was was an issue for me. But it was weird because like I knew it was I knew it was. I knew what I was doing wasn't right, but like I just I just was doing it to do it. I don't even I don't even really know why. And but I but you know, just with the support system that I have with you know, my family and.

• 2:53:27Speaker 01

  Like it, you know, it wasn't it never got to a point where it was it was devastating for me at all, but I just needed to I just needed to, you know, find that. Find that thing, you know, to to get me through just because I don't know, maybe I felt sorry for myself a little bit. But but yeah, I mean, alcohol was a thing when I when I first got out, but but I'm. It was it's no factor anymore.

• 2:53:53Jocko Willink?

  You know, what's interesting is, you know, before we hit record, we were talking about jujitsu and and basically Echo was like, yeah, you know, if if. If you if me and Echo are doing jujitsu and you're hanging around with us, eventually you're kind of gonna start doing jujitsu too. Well, guess what? If Echo and I are just drinking and you're hanging around with us, what are you gonna start doing? You're gonna start drinking and.

• 2:54:15Speaker 01

  And I was in a college environment. I was a I was a college environment, but I was it was unique because. I had I was four years older than everybody in my class. And so I was with a bunch of 18 year olds, you know, you know, opening up a textbook that I haven't opened in, you know, four years, you know, learning algebra. You know, and then like, you know, you're kind of creating your own, you're you know, you're creating your own schedule and in doing your thing, but I was a lot was a lot more focused than I was in high school, to say the least. And and so, but yeah, you're exactly you're exactly right on on that. If if all your friends are going to be doing that, then you just kind of. You're kind of falling in line.

• 2:54:55Jocko Willink?

  Man, hang out with some people and if you can in your friend group, man, get your friends to start doing some jujitsu or some lifting or doing something that's like smarter than drinking.

• 2:55:05Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:55:06Jocko Willink?

  Drinking doesn't help you. It's not going to help your friends. In fact, it's going to hurt everybody. So. You're going to college. So now you're going to college. So you, did you have like a like legit college experience like dorms and all that stuff?

• 2:55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, um, I, uh, got a waiver for, for some of those things. Um.

• 2:55:26Jocko Willink?

  What school was it?

• 2:55:27Speaker 01

  Uh, Western Illinois University. Um, and, uh, so I got a, I got a waiver and so I didn't have to stay in the dorm. So I could just, and it was more of a, like, uh, Western Illinois is just kind of more, uh, like, uh, like resident, you know, residential area. So like, um, you just rent houses.

• 2:55:42Jocko Willink?

  Cool.

• 2:55:43Speaker 01

  And, um, so, uh, that, that's, that's what I did. And I just got with some people that I knew and, um, yeah, rented, rented houses all through, all throughout college and.

• 2:55:54Jocko Willink?

  So how did you steer from, cause there's, there's one particular, uh, story here, which goes, you get home from Ramadi, you show up at college and you turn, you know, you are going to live the craziest life that, you know, that you weren't allowed to live, that you hadn't lived before. You're lucky to be alive. You know, you're lucky to be alive. And I'm going to go in that direction of getting after it. As opposed to like, you know what? I actually see a future. I actually want to be squared away. Like, what do you think? Cause not everybody, when those two roads diverge in the woods, not everybody jumps on the road that leads to a, a good place.

• 2:56:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, so I met a, I met a girl and, and, um, well, reconnected with, with a girl and, um, and she, and I knew, um, I knew right away she was the one. So, um, uh, so yeah, so like, like I didn't want to.

• 2:56:53Jocko Willink?

  Just like that.

• 2:56:54Speaker 01

  I didn't want to.

• 2:56:55Jocko Willink?

  Just like that.

• 2:56:56Speaker 01

  I didn't want to, uh, lose, lose that at all. Um, and she's the best thing that's ever happened to me and, and, um,

• 2:57:03Jocko Willink?

  So you, did you grow up with her?

• 2:57:04Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:57:05Jocko Willink?

  How did you reconnect with her?

• 2:57:06Speaker 01

  So, so, so I was in Catholic grade school and, um, I, um, and she was, um, so I was, I was, I went, I played at Saint Joseph's School in, in Peaking, Illinois, and she was in the same grade and. Saint Marks in Peoria and then

• 2:57:25Jocko Willink?

  Was yours all boys?

• 2:57:27Speaker 01

  No, it was, yeah, it's coed and like, just like hers. And so she was, you know, she was a cheerleader and I was on the basketball team, but there like, there was always this thing, you know, she took, and then, you know, she took me to, uh, she took me to a vice versa dance, uh, when she went to her high school and then, so I went to a public high school. And, uh,

• 2:57:45Jocko Willink?

  What's vice versa dance?

• 2:57:46Speaker 01

  So it's like a Sadie Hawkins, uh, thing where like the girl takes the guy out.

• 2:57:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay, got it.

• 2:57:50Speaker 01

  Um, and so she, you know, so she took, uh, she took me there and then that was like freshman year and then, you know, we, I mean, we, we couldn't drive. I mean, we were, you know, 14, 15 years old or whatever it was. We lost contact.

• 2:58:04Jocko Willink?

  Tractor.

• 2:58:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58:05Jocko Willink?

  You don't hook that up, Jason.

• 2:58:07Speaker 01

  Man.

• 2:58:10Speaker 01

  So, uh, so yeah, so we just kind of lost contact and then like, you know, um, I get home from Amadi, I'm at a bar, um, talking to another girl and next thing you know, she, um, she comes up to me and she's like, are you Jason? And I was like, yeah, I am. And she's like, I'm Melissa. I'm like, no way. And, uh, and then so, and then like the rest is history.

• 2:58:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so we've been together ever since.

• 2:58:34Jocko Willink?

  And that was, that was basically right when you got to college.

• 2:58:37Speaker 01

  That was, I was in 2007, January, I was on mid tour leave as a matter of fact. I was on mid, mid tour leave as a matter of fact. Yeah. I remember like she had, she ended up taking me to, uh, like after, um, after we hung out that night, um, she ended up, uh, inviting me.

• 2:58:53Jocko Willink?

  Wait, that was mid tour leave from Amadi?

• 2:58:55Speaker 01

  No, no, no, that wasn't mid tour. I'm sorry. I misspoke. That was post appointment leave. Yeah. I'm sorry about that. Um, yeah. And she ended up, she ended up taking me to church the next, like the next day. Um, and it was just, again, like, you know, God has a plan and, and I knew I, and, and like, I just, I just knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

• 2:59:16Jocko Willink?

  Boom.

• 2:59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:17Jocko Willink?

  Dang, that's outstanding.

• 2:59:19Speaker 01

  But I needed, I needed, I needed an educate, I mean, I needed an education. I needed, I needed a job in order to support her. Cause there's no way I was gonna be asking my father in law, you know, I was like, hey, can I, can I have your blessing to marry your daughter? And, and not have an income like, like as a, as a man who just went through something like that, there's, that ain't happening, you know?

• 2:59:39Jocko Willink?

  So did you have a plan on what you wanted to do? Did you know you wanted to go into law enforcement?

• 2:59:43Speaker 01

  Um, I didn't know at first, um, so I wanted to get some like general stuff out of the way, but I started like leaning towards, leaning towards, uh, law enforcement, uh, route.

• 2:59:52Jocko Willink?

  So what'd you get your degree in?

• 2:59:54Speaker 01

  Law enforcement and justice administration.

• 2:59:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:59:57Speaker 01

  With a minor in history.

• 2:59:59Jocko Willink?

  At some point you realized you were gonna be.

• 3:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Which was, which was, I mean, I like, looking back on it, I mean, the degree's the degree, but, and it kinda helped me like with through like constitutional stuff, but like, but as, as far as you don't really need a law enforcement degree to go into law enforcement, you know, like I didn't know that at the time, you know, so, um, but Western Illinois has like, you know, one of the best law enforcement programs out there, so, um, but if, I mean, I should have done something like, I'm looking back, I should have done something like in business or some, or something like that to, you know, um, I don't know.

• 3:00:35Jocko Willink?

  I got some news for you. Guess what? Just like you don't need a law enforcement degree to be in law enforcement, you damn sure don't need a business degree to be.

• 3:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:00:43Jocko Willink?

  To be in business. I, I, I could speak for experience.

• 3:00:49Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, you get through college, any ma- any major challenges in college? You're focused, you're, you're a 24 year old dude. You're just, there's no factor.

• 3:00:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, just, uh, yeah, I mean, it was no, it was no factor. I mean, I always wanted like the early classes, you know, wake up early and, and, and get it done. And, um, uh, I mean, just like with. Yeah, there was really no, no issues. It was just like, that's when I, but I, that's when I kind of found like, like I couldn't hear as well. Um, like my, like when I, in a, in a, in just a silent room, you know, I can hear my, you know, the ringing in my ears, you know, that like that, like those little things are the stuff that I noticed and. Um, but no, I mean, it was a, it was a good experience. Um, overall, I was a lot more focused and it just took me, like, I just wasn't, I wasn't.

• 3:01:33Speaker 01

  It just took, I wasn't ready for, um, college, like going in, like coming out of high school in any way. So, um, so having the discipline that, that the army gave me. And, um, and things like that. I was a lot more ready to, um, to start, to start that, um, and be more focused.

• 3:01:52Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you to get through college? Four years?

• 3:01:54Speaker 01

  Oh, like three and a half, cause a lot of military credits transferred over. Yeah.

• 3:01:59Jocko Willink?

  And then you got a job in law enforcement right away?

• 3:02:02Speaker 01

  Right. Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it, yeah, it took me, um, took me about, uh, I'd say eight months, but yeah.

• 3:02:09Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you ask Alyssa to marry you? Or what, did you ask dad first?

• 3:02:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, had to ask dad first. Yeah, had to ask dad first. I, I remember, um, cause I mean, she was, I mean, she was ready. I mean, we're the same age, but she, she was, she was already starting with her career. You know what I mean? So like she was ready and, but like I couldn't, I couldn't tell her that like I wasn't right. So like, um, cause I needed an income first and so, um. So, yeah, so.

• 3:02:37Jocko Willink?

  Were you just stalling it this whole time?

• 3:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, it was, it was so bad. Cause I wanted to.

• 3:02:41Jocko Willink?

  Changing the subject. Like, you know, you know, Jessica got married. You're like, hey, how about, you know, how about those bears and that whole thing?

• 3:02:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was just like.

• 3:02:48Jocko Willink?

  And what about her dad? Was he starting to pressure you?

• 3:02:50Speaker 01

  No, no, they're like, man, I got.

• 3:02:52Jocko Willink?

  Job first, boy.

• 3:02:53Speaker 01

  No, I got, I have, I have absolutely awesome in-laws and, and.

• 3:02:59Speaker 01

  But it was, you know, always the bridesmaid, never the bride type. I remember hearing that all the time and.

• 3:03:05Jocko Willink?

  Wait a second, what does that mean? Echo Charles, help me out.

• 3:03:07Speaker 02

  It's like a second place scenario, right? Where it's like, it's almost happening, but never really happening for me, you know? Kind of a scenario.

• 3:03:15Jocko Willink?

  Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Oh, so that's how she was feeling?

• 3:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:03:19Jocko Willink?

  Got it, got it.

• 3:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, which I mean, I, I, I don't know. I, I just couldn't, I just couldn't, I couldn't do it without an income as a man. I just couldn't do it. And so, yeah, so I remember, uh, yeah, just taking, uh, ask, going over to her parents' house one day and, um, yeah, I just said, hey, can you come, can you come like, look under the hood of my car for it with me? And he's not a mechanic or anything. He's like, yeah, sure. So he comes out and I was like, hey, I really didn't come out here to, to ask, you know, to see if anything's wrong. My car's fine, but I was just asking you to, if I can take your hand, your daughter's hand in marriage. And he said, yes.

• 3:03:55Jocko Willink?

  Right on. And then you asked her?

• 3:03:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, then I asked her.

• 3:03:58Jocko Willink?

  She said, yes.

• 3:03:59Speaker 01

  She said, yes. And, uh, we just have a beautiful family. We're so blessed.

• 3:04:03Jocko Willink?

  And how many kids you got now?

• 3:04:04Speaker 01

  Three.

• 3:04:05Jocko Willink?

  Three kids?

• 3:04:06Speaker 01

  All doing jujitsu.

• 3:04:08Jocko Willink?

  So tell us about the, so you go into law enforcement and at some point, maybe in the future, we'll talk about your law enforcement career and your federal, you went from, you went from.

• 3:04:18Speaker 01

  Went from, uh, being a sheriff's deputy.

• 3:04:20Jocko Willink?

  Into federal law enforcement.

• 3:04:21Speaker 01

  Into federal law enforcement.

• 3:04:22Jocko Willink?

  And that's a, another story. Um, when did you start training the jujitsu?

• 3:04:28Speaker 01

  Uh, so it was about 2016, I would say, yeah.

• 3:04:32Jocko Willink?

  And what triggered that?

• 3:04:36Speaker 01

  The men sitting right in front of me.

• 3:04:38Jocko Willink?

  Dude, we just, you, you just got sick of hearing us talk about jujitsu and you're like, all right, there's something going on. I gotta try this.

• 3:04:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, yeah, it was, um, there's, there was definitely something going on. I was, I just needed, I needed like more. I just needed more of a challenge, you know? Like, you know, when you don't have that every day, you just, you know, you're looking for something, or at least I am, you know? And I'd get bored. I'd just do triathlons, you know? I remember, you know, it was just something like that. And, um, but, but then like after hearing you, hearing you guys just talk about jujitsu all the time, it's just, that's all I needed was just, just that little extra push. And I remember going into the, uh, gym. So I, so in, in Illinois, I was, uh, training at the Peoria Athletic Club, which is a McVickers Jujitsu, Jack McVicker and, um, So, uh, so I go, I go in there and you know, at this time, I mean, I'm lifting and I'm running,

• 3:05:28Speaker 01

  you know, and I'm, I'm like 230 pounds and.

• 3:05:32Jocko Willink?

  Around here, we call that jacked.

• 3:05:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Which is the, which is the perfect thing to be when you're walking into the Jiu Jitsu Academy for the first time.

• 3:05:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I remember talking to, I remember talking to, um, my, my buddy Nick, who, um, who grew up in martial arts is, is his whole life. And I remember like parking outside of the gym and I remember looking, looking inside the glass. And I'm just like, what am I doing? Like, what, like, what are they wearing? What am I doing? Like.

• 3:06:02Jocko Willink?

  This is weird.

• 3:06:03Speaker 01

  So I.

• 3:06:03Jocko Willink?

  This is kinda weird, right?

• 3:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I called.

• 3:06:05Jocko Willink?

  Echo, no, no, doesn't seem a little bit weird?

• 3:06:08Speaker 02

  I guess now that you mention it.

• 3:06:09Jocko Willink?

  Like picture him, like he's looking, you know, he's an army dude. He's now in law enforcement. He's looking in, there's people wearing funny outfits.

• 3:06:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:06:18Jocko Willink?

  And they're kinda rolling around on the ground.

• 3:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there's like Taekwondo, you know, back when you're young, there's like Taekwondo, Judo. I mean, you know, it's like, you're not, it's not like you're looking in there and be like, what are they wearing? No, you know, that's a martial art. They wear that stuff.

• 3:06:31Jocko Willink?

  I think, I think we collectively, meaning you, Echo Charles, are kinda forgetting like what? Cause we all, we all know Jiu Jitsu, even from the UFC, we kinda get it, right? We get that there's this ground thing that can happen, but back in the day, man, you know, it's kinda like, this looks a little strange.

• 3:06:49Speaker 02

  I, I never thought that, to be honest with you. Only because I took.

• 3:06:52Jocko Willink?

  You did have a little.

• 3:06:53Speaker 02

  I took Aikido when I was a little kid. I took Judo when I was a little kid. And then some of our family friends were Aikido was, or not Aikido, sorry, uh, Taekwondo family. So it was like, the gi to me was like, okay, even when I felt when I first put on the gi, I was like, oh, this is like a Judo gi. It's like tough, you know? So I was, it was, I did not feel that at all.

• 3:07:13Jocko Willink?

  Bronson movie. It's called The Mechanic.

• 3:07:16Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:07:16Jocko Willink?

  And I was, I was, I was a real, real big into Charles Bronson when I was a kid.

• 3:07:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:07:20Jocko Willink?

  In the movie The Mechanic, he does judo with some guys. And he's wearing a gi. That, I always remembered that. But when I put a gi on for the first time, I was like, wait a second.

• 3:07:29Speaker 01

  Charles Bronson.

• 3:07:33Jocko Willink?

  Alright, so you're, you're standing outside.

• 3:07:34Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so I call my buddy Nick and, and he's like, just walk in, just go in. And I was just like, okay. I remember going in and, um, you know, he's like, yeah, he's a, he's like, first class is free. You know, come on in. And he's like, they're getting ready to start. I'm like, okay. And I was like, do I, do I need anything? He's like, no, shorts and a t-shirt's fine. And I was like, okay. So I get in there and there's this, um, purple belt who's getting ready to teach the beginner class. And, um, uh, and he's, I don't know, five eight, a hundred and seventy-five pounds maybe. And, um, and we start learning the technique and everything. And, um, and then we start going into live rolls. And, uh, and we went into live rolls.

• 3:08:19Speaker 01

  He came right over to me and I'm like, you know, I'm, you know, six, three, two thirty and, um.

• 3:08:24Jocko Willink?

  Jacked.

• 3:08:26Speaker 01

  Just, just lifting weights. And, uh, this guy is sweeping me, um, arm barring me, choking me. And I'm like, what? Like, how, how is he doing this? Like, I, I mean, I remember being like so exhausted.

• 3:08:39Jocko Willink?

  And you're a cop.

• 3:08:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:08:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Like, this is crazy.

• 3:08:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I just couldn't, couldn't figure it out. And this dude was just having his day with me. And then there was a blue belt that came in. That was more, that was my size. And I, I think that was even worse. Um, and, uh, it was, it was just, it was, I was like, what is going on here? And, but I felt like, I felt really good at, like, after doing it. And, um, and so I thanked everybody and, um, they invited me back. And so the very next day I showed up again and, um, and, uh, they said, yeah, come, yeah, come on in. You know? And I was like, well, I, I, I didn't, you know, you said the first class was free. He's like, just, just go in there again. And I was like, okay. And so same thing happened, just had, it made, but I had a blast. I mean, I was just having so much fun.

• 3:09:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I was getting choked out and arm barred and all this, um, and, and I went up to, uh, went up to him. And I just, to the instructor, Brad, Brad Peplo. And I said, hey, I said, I'd like to, uh, I'd like to uh Commit my entire life to this game. Absolutely. And I'd like to do this. And he's and he just said, yeah, let's you know, let's sign right back up and get you a gi. He got me a gi and he came over, gave me a big hug and said, welcome to the family. And then that started. Um, I mean, really, I mean, you guys had kind of changed my family tree because now I have all three of my kids in it. My wife is coming to tournaments. I mean, it's a whole, it's a whole thing and it's and it's uh, it's really cool to watch. Um, and um,

• 3:10:10Speaker 01

  and so, yeah, so I started off there and I mean, I was just, I mean, I, I don't know what my wife was think. I mean, like, she's like, oh, he's just doing this thing or whatever. And because she had no idea. I was just gone, you know, for a couple of hours. And then next thing you know, I mean, this has turned into a lifestyle and um, and uh, and so, and so, yeah, so, yeah, I, I'm going up the ranks and, and uh, just doing really well, understanding like a lot of things and just, uh, I'm just having a, having a ton of fun. And now it's, now it's just a part of my life. How, how much has it come into play in law enforcement? So, um, when I was a sheriff's deputy, um, it like, so I used to get in a lot of fights, um, like, cause I, I worked third shift because I like, I like to,

• 3:10:52Speaker 01

  I like to be where the action is. And uh, so I worked, uh, so I worked nights a lot and uh, um, for like six years and I used to get into a lot of fights, um, like, you know, just not knowing how to control like Even pre jujitsu? Even pre jujitsu. Oh, yeah. So we're talking. The majority, yeah, majority of the time was, was pre jujitsu. And then, um, but once, once I learned jujitsu, like, it was like, almost I'd never gotten to a fight anymore. Except there was this one time though, and uh, it was like everything I'd been waiting for. And so, and so it was, I was on, I was on second shift working in overtime detail. And I remember, um, I get this call. It was like, like our shift ended at like,

• 3:11:36Speaker 01

  10 o'clock and it was like 9:30 the call came in and that was like right next to my house. And we had take home cars. And so, um, so I was like, all right, I'm gonna go handle this real quick. And, and so it was like, it was like two minutes away from my house. I get, I get there. And uh, there's this guy sitting in. How, how deep into jujitsu are you at this point? I'm, uh, I'm a blue belt. Sure. And um, uh, I'm a blue belt and the, the guy, this guy, um,

• 3:12:04Speaker 01

  Super intoxicated dude and it's and it was colder in Illinois at the time so he was wearing. We call that gee season.

• 3:12:15Speaker 01

  So he was wearing, he was wearing like a coat and a hoodie and. Perfect and and so there was this older female, elderly female that was sitting in the driver's seat of this, of this car with her windows locked and she was like white knuckling the steering wheel and this guy's like, you know, we parked down the road, you know, before we go up and so like I, I, I go up there and I just hear this screaming from this guy saying, you know, get the fuck out of the car, get the fuck out of the car right now, let me in the house, let me in the house. And I'm, I'm trying to look and I was like, hey, um, and so I'm like looking around and I finally see him and I see the female first though,

• 3:12:58Speaker 01

  in the, in the car and I see him and I shine my flashlight at him and I said, um, I said, hey, I was like, with the sheriff's office, get on the ground and he's like, fuck you, what are you gonna do? And I was like, and so I was like, I was like, hey, it's like, get on the, just get on your belly and he said, you want to fucking go? And I was like, yeah. And, and, and so, and so like his eyes lit up and I started, I went in there for a double leg and I went in there to go duck, because I couldn't tase him. I mean, he had had all this that thick clothing on, I already knew that and, um, and so I go to double leg him, but I double leg him into the garage and, um, so he's, he starts, he starts, um, he starts like, like thrashing at me and so he had ripped off my radio.

• 3:13:37Speaker 01

  So before, um, before the fight was really on, um, I had say, I said, hey, step it up, we're fighting because they knew and like, you know, you know, rule number one, you always got to sound cool on the radio, you know what I mean? So like, so like, so like, nobody, like, everybody was so super surprised that I had said this on the radio, but then he had ripped my radio, uh, radio off and so, but I didn't know that at the time and my gun belt was hanging open. The only thing that was keeping it open was my, was my belt keepers.

• 3:14:03Speaker 01

  And so I just gave him like just a basic trip. I mean, it wasn't anything because the double leg didn't work and we were pinned up against the wall. And so I just, I just gave him a basic trip to the right and I, I landed on top of him and he, and he just, he, he was laying on his back and, um, and I remember getting on side control on him and his arm was just laying like this. I'm like, oh, Americana.

• 3:14:23Speaker 01

  And I'm like, and I just, I just sat there and I, and I, you know, it was pressure, uh, no pressure. And he's like, get off me. I can't breathe. So I would let go and then he tried to get up and I'd give him, I'd give him a little, uh, Americana action and then he'd stop. And then I just kept doing that back and forth. And I'm like, this is fucking awesome. Like, I'm like, this is so like, and I was like, where's my backup? Like, I, I, like, where is everybody? Cause I'm close enough to the city. Cause it was like, we were actually in the country club when this was going, when this was going on. So it was kind of close to the city, but it was, uh, sheriff's office jurisdiction. And I had no idea where my backup was because he had ripped off my radio. And, uh, and so it was, you know, it was winter time. So like the leaves were off the, off the timber. And so I could see, I could just see red and blue lights, you know, coming down.

• 3:15:09Speaker 01

  I knew they were coming for me. And, but I'm like, dude, I could sit here all day. I mean, this is badass. Like this is the moment I've been waiting for, for so long. Like I was just going, I was going heavy. I was, and, and, uh, and he didn't get, he didn't get hurt until like every, because they all thought I was hurt. Like, so they, so, so all the, all the officers from the city and from the county were coming in, uh, cause I wasn't answering status. And, uh, so they had, they had all come in and then when they all came in, they came in like ready to go. And that's when he got hurt. And, and so, so, but yeah, I didn't have to, you know, throw a punch or kick or, or do anything like that. Man, I just maintained side control for like, for like four minutes and I was good to go.

• 3:15:50Jocko Willink?

  Freaking outstanding.

• 3:15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:15:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, man. That's how it should be. People got, law enforcement got to train, man. Train that jujitsu.

• 3:15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:15:57Jocko Willink?

  How much, how much time did you get when you were sheriff? How much time did you get training in defensive tactics?

• 3:16:04Speaker 01

  Oh, it was, it was pathetic. It was, it was, and it's, and it's, you know, it's, uh, it was like, you, you did the, you did the basic, you know, uh, once a year, four hours, four hours mandatory training. And, you know, I, I would, I would go up to, I would go up to, you know, the sheriff and, and the, in the command. And I would say, hey, like, we need to do jujitsu. I mean, like, we need, like, even, you know, they have a Gracie law enforcement program. They have all these different programs that, that we can do. Um, and it was, nope, nope. And, um, and so I was just like, I don't mind spending my own money to, to do this because one, I'm having a blast doing it. And number two, I'm learning a skill that's, that is proven, right? And I, I even used that example. Like, I didn't have to, I didn't, I didn't tase the dude.

• 3:16:46Speaker 01

  I didn't shoot the dude. I didn't, um, punch him. I didn't throw a kick. I didn't slap him. I didn't do anything. It was a basic trip and just maintaining pressure. And it was two years of jujitsu? Two and a half years, something like that when I, because it was right after I got my blue belt.

• 3:17:01Jocko Willink?

  Freaking outstanding. And how, how'd the kids get into it?

• 3:17:05Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 3:17:05Jocko Willink?

  What, what, what have you learned about getting your kids into it?

• 3:17:08Speaker 01

  Um, you know, just the confidence, uh, the confidence, um, that, that, uh, that I wanted them to have, um, growing up is what I really, is what I really wanted. And, um, I knew just watching our kids program, um, when I was in Illinois, how good it was. But man, when I got to California, like, I thought we had a good kids program in Illinois. Bro, like, dude, this California jujitsu out here is no joke. So I'm, I'm training. So, um, so I got, so I go to Pacific Martial Arts in Fresno.

• 3:17:45Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 3:17:45Speaker 01

  And, um, which outstanding gym, outstanding gym. And I, like, we go from the kids program to Illinois. And there's nothing against my old gym at all. Like, they just, you don't know what you don't know, right? And so I go into, um, I go into Pacific Martial Arts and, uh, and my daughter has, like, my, my two boys weren't old enough to, to do it yet. And so, but my daughter was, and my daughter was, was really good. And um, so, so I, my man was like, hey, it's her first class, you know, she wants to try and like just the warmups alone was, was just intense. And I'm like, dang, man, this is, this is unlike anything. And like the way they had, like how many kids were in the class? Um, how many people, you know, were doing it? How many instructors they had, the kid ratio?

• 3:18:31Speaker 01

  Into the techniques that they were, that they were doing. It was just, uh, it was, it was, it was awesome. And then like they go up then. So she had, she had gone from a, from a gray and white belt, or she was a gray and white belt and when she showed up. And um, the coach, super, super nice guy. And he was just like, hey, do you want her to have a hard roll or like, I, you know, how is it? And I was like, oh, well, um, yeah, like, you know, you'll give her a challenge. I don't want her to get like, you know, you know, beat up or anything, you know? She's like, okay. And so she goes against this another gray and white belt and just gets absolutely destroyed. And um, and so I'm like, man, what is going on here? So, um, the only thing I can think of is, is maybe just like, not, I mean,

• 3:19:14Speaker 01

  like, so there was one was an attendance based school and another one is, is hey, what kind of skill do you actually have? And so, um, so my, my daughter actually humbled herself, went back to a white belt and then got a couple of stripes right, right away. Yeah, took, uh, because, um, cause she hadn't competed at this point. And uh, and then she, uh, and then so yeah, so she's close to getting that great, she's still not gray and white belt. I mean, and this has been, this has been almost two years and she's been doing judo for a long time. She's, she's almost there, but um, but yeah, she's done, she's done, uh, tournaments, placed in every tournament. I mean, she's, man, she's so good. She's so good.

• 3:19:56Jocko Willink?

  And the boys are doing it now too.

• 3:19:58Speaker 01

  And the boys are doing it. My, my son, uh, has competed too. I mean, he, he wants to, he wants to get in there all the time. And there's, and there's something about like a, like just like your son, like just wanting to do it. You know, not somebody saying, hey, like, like, what do you think about competing? You know, you know, he wants to get in there and do it. So, yeah. So he recently just won gold in a tournament and then my, and then he won silver in his first tournament. And then, um, and then my, my youngest, he's, he's just in the little kids class. He's four.

• 3:20:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I found there's only one.

• 3:20:30Jocko Willink?

  Four year old boy, what I taught kids classes at Victory for probably like five or six, or maybe even something seven years, something like that, maybe six years. But there was only one four year old ever that was actually like, could take a class for real. Yeah. Boys. Yeah. There were some girls that would pull it off, more girls, like more girls than I could remember that were four and they were kind of squared away. Boys are knuckleheads. And so like, even my own son, he wasn't, I mean, he was in there through forced labor to be in there, you know, just like, that's just what he was doing. Uh, but he wasn't actually actively mentally participating in the class actively. Does that make sense?

• 3:21:15Jocko Willink?

  Like actively mentally participating in the class until he was like maybe six. Now, you learn by osmosis and you learn things and even a four year old, you, I think it's best maybe for a four year old, especially the four year old boy, like just wrestle around with them. Just do jujitsu with your kids, you know, just mount, mount escape, get the back, do the arm lock. Like you're doing that stuff for 10 minutes, five minutes. You have mats at your house? No. Not yet. Okay. So we got to some mats at the house. Cause I mean, it's cool. You know what though? The, you know, you're on the bed, you're on the carpet. Like it's all good. You're just rolling. And, and trying, and this is the biggest mistake that I made with my kids was I didn't make jujitsu fun. I made it.

• 3:21:57Jocko Willink?

  I made it into what it was for me, you know, discipline and winning and all these other things that you don't want to make it that for a kid. Some kids are going to be that way, by the way. Some kids, they're just, they want to win at everything and that's just the way they are. Some kids don't really care. Some kids don't want to do it. You're going to have this whole spectrum and I'm talking with any kid, anywhere in anything. Like you could have some kids playing hockey, some kid's going to want to win. You could have, you know, and some other kid doesn't care. That's just, it's not that they don't care, but maybe they don't care much. Or maybe they just legitimately don't care. So the best thing you can do is make it fun. And I'm, I'm really talking to the, the parents of the world right now because it is such a gift.

• 3:22:41Jocko Willink?

  It's the best gift that you can give your kids. The best gift that you can give your kids is jujitsu. It is the best gift that you can give them because if they have jujitsu. They can protect themselves. They have confidence. They have friends. They have a skill that's gonna last them a lifetime. There's always that, that question in the back of a conversation that you're having, even as a grown man of like, wait, if Echo like stands up to me right now, there's really nothing I can do about it. Or if Echo wants to, you know, uh, uh, push me around and I don't know how to fight, I, I just kinda have to accept it. And that impacts your whole attitude in life, right?

• 3:23:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:23:25Jocko Willink?

  Look, am I sitting here saying that everybody I see, I'm sizing up like, well, I don't really care. No, I'm not saying that, but I'm kinda saying that. And as you mentioned earlier, like you get into the military, in a SEAL platoon, there's a pecking order.

• 3:23:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:23:41Jocko Willink?

  You know, what you were talking about when you showed up at that first unit, there's a pecking order. And if you show up to a job site, there's a pecking order. And part of that pecking order is physical. I'm sorry to tell you this. I'm sorry to tell the world this. There is a, a subtext of physical combat in all situations. I'm not saying that's right. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying it's the reality of life, especially for a dude, especially for a boy, a seven-year-old boy, a 12-year-old boy, a 15-year-old boy. That is there. And

• 3:24:25Jocko Willink?

  you gotta learn how to not use it. And that's one of the beautiful things that jujitsu teaches you. You don't have to, look at all the times that you mentioned, being a police officer, you got in all kinds of scraps when you didn't know jujitsu. Once you knew it, you were happy to get in one.

• 3:24:41Speaker 01

  I can't, I can't explain it. I don't, I don't know why that is. I don't know if it's the way I've carried myself. I don't know if it's the way I talk to people or if I respected somebody a, um, a little bit more. I don't know. I don't know what it was, but, um, I can't, I can't explain it, but there was only one and it was that one that I, that I just told that story about. And it's, I mean, it's been the best thing for my life. It's helped me, it's helped me so much and it's, um, I'm seeing it. I'm seeing the benefits of, of my kids and, and you know, just learning with what you guys are talking about. Through podcasts, I mean, cause I would, I mean, I would listen to your podcast from start to finish to the supplements, right? Cause I just loved it. I loved every second of it. I didn't want to miss anything because there were so many lessons in there.

• 3:25:21Speaker 01

  And so, um, and so like, you know, with you, I, we, I remember you telling that story in one of the podcasts about, about how you would push yourself or like you, you ended up, uh, putting your, your son into a higher weight class or whatever the situation was. And, um, I, you know, I, I learned from that. It's like, okay, hey, maybe that not, I might not want to go that aggressive and just kind of let, let it be kind of a natural thing of whatever their coaches are thinking. And so it's, I think it's, um, what you guys are, are doing to, to tell the world about jujitsu. I mean, that's the, that's the whole reason why I got in. That's the whole reason my family tree has changed because of jujitsu and it's been nothing but, um, benefits. I mean, my, like, my kids are, um, so well behaved. They're eating all their dinner at night after jujitsu.

• 3:26:06Speaker 01

  And, um, I mean, they, they, they play their instructors, they role play their instructors at home when they're, when it's, you know, when the, when the TV's off, you know, for the day. And so it's, um, it's just, uh, it's awesome.

• 3:26:19Jocko Willink?

  I don't know how much I'm allowed to talk about this, but I'm gonna talk about it anyways. Uh, there's a movie coming out called Way of the Warrior Kid. It's being filmed basically now. And jujitsu is a central character of this movie. It is, you could go so far as to call it the central character of the movie. And what was interesting earlier, you mentioned karate, right? Uh, Echo Charles and, and we all at our age group, maybe not, how old are you?

• 3:26:49Speaker 01

  Uh, I'll be thirty, four, uh, I'll be forty in January.

• 3:26:52Jocko Willink?

  Did you watch Karate Kid?

• 3:26:54Speaker 01

  I did.

• 3:26:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Karate Kid was a big deal, right? Here's the thing. When you watched Karate Kid, if you were a kid and you said, oh, I see karate, karate's cool. I'm going to go to karate school. I'm going to train karate. Then you show up at a karate school to train karate. First of all, that meant a million different things. And a lot of those schools that someone might have gone into was not cool. You know, it was you're you're you're not doing the thing that you saw in the movie. You're not fighting, you're not doing whatever that crane kick like that stuff. It was movie stuff.

• 3:27:33Jocko Willink?

  When kids see this movie, they're gonna go, I want to try out that jujitsu stuff. And then they're gonna go to a jujitsu academy. And when they go to a jujitsu academy, it's gonna be what they saw in the movie, and it's gonna work. And That's great. I think the amount of jujitsu in this country, after this movie comes out, is going to exponentially increase. Like I said, jujitsu is the central, one of the central characters of the movie. It's kind of the star of the movie. And I'm talking scene by scene.

• 3:28:13Jocko Willink?

  It's the star of the movie. So when you have that, and it's dramatic, and it's impactful, and now all these kids are gonna go from that movie theater to the low, and there's jujitsu all over the place. I mean, you had it in Illinois, you had it. There's jujitsu everywhere now. There should be. It's getting close. So when kids go from, you know, same thing with like boxing, you know, when Rocky came out. Now Rocky was an adult movie. And it didn't convey this positive message, really. It portrayed a positive message to us as dudes, we're like, kick ass, you know? It's based on everything I just said, which is like, I can fight, you know, like that was kind of the thing. It wasn't a positive message for kids. Karate Kid

• 3:28:56Jocko Willink?

  was a positive message for kids, but it was kind of hollow, because let's face it, again, all respect to karate, but karate's not jujitsu, not by a long shot. Now we're gonna give kids jujitsu, and then they're gonna go from a movie, where they see this awesome thing? They see the hero of the movie is jujitsu? And now they go, or one of the heroes of the movie is jujitsu? Straight up. And now they go to a jiu jitsu academy and they learned that thing. They recognize it from the movie and they get to be the star now. They get to be this thing. So it's gonna be kinda next level.

• 3:29:34Speaker 01

  So awesome. So awesome. My, my, my kids love the Warrior Kid books. They have, they have all of them and they love them. They read them all the time. Um, and one thing if I may add, so with, um, with that, so like my daughter, she was super easy to get into like, she just was like, okay, we're gonna do this. And like, she just fell into it just fine. My son, on the other hand, I mean, it, it, it was a battle. And I mean, I remember having to, as a purple belt, having to, uh, take his hand, uh, ask, ask, uh, uh, the coach, be like, hey, do you mind if I just get on the mat with him, you know, um, and just, just be with him to get him comfortable. He's like, yeah, man, sure.

• 3:30:15Speaker 01

  And so I remember my son, I remember taking him by the hand, having all these parents look at me, um, and just, I was taking him by the hand. He is bawling, like at the, just crying so hard. I'm like, hey, we're, you said you're gonna do this, we're gonna do this. And then just, and like, I'm feeling terrible. Like, man, am I pushing him too hard? You know, my daughter was a little bit older, um, maybe I'm pushing him too hard, but then I just, I just stuck with it. And he stuck with it. And now I, he went from crying, didn't wanna be on the mats to like, this is all he wants to do. And because he's got that confidence, he knows it works, he's competed, he's gotten gold, arm barring people in tournaments. I mean, from where he was to where he is now, it's, you just, like, as parents, you just gotta stick with it, even if your kid is scared, just, just have them stick with it

• 3:31:00Speaker 01

  because it's gonna be beneficial.

• 3:31:02Jocko Willink?

  Another little outlet I've been giving parents or little tactic techniques and procedures is, oh, you know, hey, kid, you don't, hey Johnny, you don't wanna do jiu jitsu? Okay, that's fine. We, we only have to do it twice a week. Hey, oh no, you don't want to do it. It's cool. You only have to do it twice a week. You know, so that's kind of like just the minimum standard for our family. You know, not my family, but like, you know, you're saying like, oh, hey, no, you don't, you don't have to do it. You don't have to do it. Just like, hey, oh, you don't want to clean your room every day? That's no problem. But you know, you know, at least there, at least you have to put the dirty clothes in the hamper and you got to pick the toys up off the score. You don't have to clean your room. You have to dust everything. You don't have to vacuum, but we do have a minimum standard. Oh, you don't want to floss your teeth in the morning and the night? It's okay. You can just floss them at night. That's just the, you know, that's what we're doing.

• 3:31:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you don't want to, you know, you can make, you can go through anything. And you, as a family, have got a minimum standard. You know, the minimum standard is, you don't want to spend all dinner? You don't want to sit with us and talk after dinner? Okay, but you at least have to stay until we're done with the main course. That's the minimum standard. Then you can, you can be excused. You know what I'm saying? So you got these minimum standards. One of the minimum standards you can have is like, yeah, you know, you don't have to do jujitsu. No, you don't have to do jujitsu. That's fine. You don't have to, you don't have to do it. I mean, you got to do it twice a week because that's just the minimum standard. But if you don't want to do it, that's fine. You only have to do it twice a week. That's another thing, because eventually, like you said, eventually they go, oh, this is kind of fun. And another piece of advice that I used to give to adults was, because I'd have people say, I don't, two things.

• 3:32:31Jocko Willink?

  Number one, I don't like fighting, so I don't want to do jujitsu. My answer to that was, if you don't like fighting, you should do jujitsu even more than someone that likes fighting. That's number one. And number two, you don't like it? Keep doing it at least until you get a submission on someone. Just because that, that's going to give you a certain feeling that you've never had before. You're going to get this certain feeling that you've never had before. And when you get that feeling, you might realize, I want to pursue this a little bit more. Now, if you get to that point where you've been training for four months and you finally submit another human and you go, this isn't for me? Cool. You can go down to the minimum standard twice a week just to maintain. You know what I mean? But most people, once they get that one,

• 3:33:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:33:15Jocko Willink?

  They kind of like, they're gonna keep it going. So those are some good, that's real sound advice. That, you know, if your kid, also your kid's crying, like, I don't want to go, I don't want to go. Same thing that we talk about all the time. Trust, listen, respect, influence and care. Oh, you want to take a day off? Hey, no problem. I'll take today off. You don't have to go today. But you, but you're gonna go tomorrow, right? Cause you gotta go to, you know, gotta do twice a week. So if you don't want to go today, it's okay. But you know, we gotta go, then we're gonna have to go Thursday and Friday. If you miss Tuesday, so we're gonna have to go Thursday, Friday. So you just listen to what they have to say. Uh, what's that word? You, you appease them. You allow yourself to be influenced by them. Oh, you don't want to do it today? That's fine.

• 3:33:57Jocko Willink?

  You only gotta do it twice a week. So it's, you know, you can do it Friday and, you know, you can do it Friday and Saturday if that's what you want to do. I can't take you on Wednesday, but you know, so that's what you do. You listen to what they have to say, even as a little kid. And the other thing is, and we already said this, but man, make it fun. And how do you make it fun? By doing it with the, with the old man.

• 3:34:13Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 3:34:13Jocko Willink?

  You know, let's just do some jujitsu. By the way, that gets them ready for what they're about to go do in class. And now they already know what an arm lock is. And they already know what an oompa is. They already know what an elbow escape is. So all of a sudden, it's like they're ready to go. And just like that book,

• 3:34:27Jocko Willink?

  uh, outliers. The book outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. One of the things that happens in Canadian hockey is the kids that are older, you know, you got one year, the league is made up of a bunch of people that are the same age. But some of those people were born in January and some of those people were born in December. The people that were born in January are a year, 11 months older than those other kids. So they're a little bit bigger. They're a little bit more coordinated. They're a little bit smarter and they score more goals and they get to puck more. And then the coach leaves them in longer. And so now they get even better and it just compiles over time. And by the way, since they scored goals and they had fun while they were playing,

• 3:35:11Jocko Willink?

  they like it. So what do they do when they get home? They practice. And those kids get, get better and it compounds itself. Whereas the kid that is the youngest kid on that team, he's a little bit smaller. He's a little bit slower. He's a little bit less coordinated. He didn't score any goals. His coach isn't giving him the playing time and that kid is going in the other direction. So keep that in mind with your kids. Another thing is, which I, this is one failure that you mentioned that I did with my kids was like, "Oh, I'm gonna put you in a tournament." "Oh, by the way, I'm gonna put you up a weight class, up a belt level, and up in age group."

• 3:35:48Jocko Willink?

  And in my mind, like an idiot, I'm thinking I'm making them tougher and better. And in, in their minds, I'm just making them hate jiu-jitsu because they're getting crushed. You know, they spend all this time training and then I put them in there with a 12-year-old when they're nine? Like, you're getting crushed. That's all there is to it.

• 3:36:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:36:05Jocko Willink?

  So we gotta watch out for those things.

• 3:36:11Jocko Willink?

  Does that get us up to speed? And again, I know we have a whole, you know, federal law enforcement thing.

• 3:36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:36:16Jocko Willink?

  We could talk about sometime in the future. We gotta get a little bit of, uh, maybe some permission to do that at some point.

• 3:36:21Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 3:36:22Jocko Willink?

  But on the, on the rest of your life, does this get us up to speed?

• 3:36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure, that does.

• 3:36:27Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles?

• 3:36:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:36:29Jocko Willink?

  Any questions?

• 3:36:30Speaker 02

  Yes. First off, how big was the guy that, that you got, um, you know, apprehended?

• 3:36:35Speaker 01

  Um, so he was, um, so he was probably, probably about five or six years older than I was and, um, I don't know, he was, um, probably, I'm sorry, six foot, um, probably 190.

• 3:36:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So still pretty big, a threat, we'll say that. Six foot, 190.

• 3:36:54Speaker 01

  And, and just drunk off his ass.

• 3:36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. That'd be shitty. Uh, you were 6'3"? And at the time, what, 230-ish?

• 3:37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, yeah, maybe he had cut some weight, cause, uh, you know, competitions and stuff.

• 3:37:06Speaker 02

  Let's say 220.

• 3:37:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was probably around that.

• 3:37:08Speaker 02

  6'3", 220, side control.

• 3:37:11Jocko Willink?

  That's a problem.

• 3:37:12Speaker 02

  Americana. Right? You're not going nowhere.

• 3:37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, I was, I was even thinking at the time, like, now that you're, now that I'm kinda reflecting on this, is I don't even know the last time I was doing jiu-jitsu at that point, where somebody just had their arm out like that. So like, when I saw it, it just took me. I'm like, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, it's right there." Like, I've been, and then it was, it was just beautiful.

• 3:37:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it is, that experience, and then, so it kinda ties into, you know, when you say, "Hey, do jiu-jitsu until you get your first submission." Where that's kinda the feeling, even when you get your first submission, cause you're almost like surprised that it works so good. So I remember one time, remember Tyrone Glover? Not Jeff, Tyrone Glover. So I met him, I was a white belt still and I knew who he was or whatever. And I met him and I'm kind of this big buff guy, I was a white belt, he's uh, you know, accomplished black belt at this time. He's like, hey, come train at City Boxing in PB. Remember the City Boxing PB?

• 3:38:05Jocko Willink?

  And Ty, what's Tyrone weigh, like 170?

• 3:38:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe. I did, I did not roll.

• 3:38:11Jocko Willink?

  He probably competed at a, at a lesser weight, but I bet you he walked around 170. That's my guess right now.

• 3:38:15Speaker 02

  Yes, a, a solid dude, but he's not 6'3", 220. No, he's not. Um, nonetheless, he's like, hey, come, come train at Rona class at, at City Boxing down in PB. I was like, cool. And I, I was like, kind of into it at this time where I'm, you know, but still a white belt completely.

• 3:38:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, bro, that's, that's called lunch.

• 3:38:30Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, for me. Plus I was kind of big too, like 210, 215. That's like, oh, white belt, you know, guys, you get a bigger payoff when you beat up the bigger guy, right? So I was, oh, I was, that's a good way to put it. You are a lunch.

• 3:38:42Jocko Willink?

  He's like, I'll come train with you, I'll pay for you, I'll pay for your cab ride to come down there.

• 3:38:46Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. Yeah, you're right. If I was like 135, white belt, it's like, no one really wants to roll with you for that reason though, you know?

• 3:38:53Jocko Willink?

  And, and by the way, just as a caveat, Tyrone Glover's like, super cool and chill. Like I, I wasn't trying to make it out like he's looking at you like, oh, I'm going to get this guy because he's super.

• 3:39:01Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing, he wasn't.

• 3:39:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what I mean. He's super cool and chill.

• 3:39:04Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, I get, I get that even now, people will be like, yeah, come train. And you see it in their eyes, you're like, bro, you just want to see if you can beat me. I see, and I dig it, man, I dig it, but this is not what Tyrone was doing. He was just super nice. He was like, yeah, come train at Rona, run a class. I'm a white belt, let's face it. Accomplished black belt, some white belt, he don't care, you know? And so anyway, um, I go to the, the class and the classes ran a little bit different. So, you know, different schools have different ways the classes run or whatever. So anyway, uh, we, we did, you know, warm up drills, technique drills, and then we have this, before open mat rolling, they have like these lines, like three lines, and you'd basically go down the line to face the guy in front of the line, right? So if you, it's like, kind of like the.

• 3:39:47Jocko Willink?

  You got lines facing lines?

• 3:39:48Speaker 02

  No, line facing one guy. So one guy's facing a line of people.

• 3:39:52Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 3:39:53Speaker 02

  So you face the guy, it's like a three minute roll. If you get tapped, you go to the back of the line.

• 3:39:57Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 3:39:57Speaker 02

  No matter what. So if you, if you don't get tapped, you do the tapping, you stay there, right? So I'm like the third or something and the guy right in front of me is big. He's like bigger than me. But white belt, we're all white belts in there, right? So I'm there. This was like my first taste of uh, this was like before any tournament. So it's my first taste of rolling with guys I don't know, you know? So it's like, it's a little, it's like an in-betweener tournament, kind of a mental scenario. So I go in, boom, I start rolling with this guy because he won. He beat the guy that was in front of him. So, so I was like, okay, I gotta go against this guy. So I'm a little bit nervous to be honest with you. So I go and boom, we're rolling. I go and it's just like how you were saying, his arm kinda came out. I was like, oh shoot, Kimura. And I got, and he tapped real quick. I was like, bruh, this is the best, this is the best thing in the world.

• 3:40:43Speaker 02

  You know, big guy, I didn't know him. So I was like, bruh, this is a legitimate proof, you know? So every time you say that, where you say, um, tap your first person, then see if you like it. That, that is the ultimate like test to see whether or not you like jiu-jitsu. And I'd be surprised, uh, if you don't like it after that.

• 3:40:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that other comment about people that don't like fighting? They're the ones that even more than a person that likes fighting, that should train. Cause it's gonna be easier for you to get, you don't have to fight if you know jiu-jitsu. And if you do have to fight, it's gonna be over quick for your enemy.

• 3:41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And sometimes even, even when you get more advanced, it is surprising how easy it gets. You know, even in the situation outside of training, like, you know, your friend wants to mess with you. And you're like, bro, I'm not in the mood to like mess with you. But then finally you're like, okay. And you're like, bro, why did you even try to mess with me? It was so easy. Like it wasn't, you know, you're like surprised sometimes. But yeah, okay, um, what's a weapons cache, cache? What does that look like?

• 3:41:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, weapons cache is like where, um, the enemy, uh, goes to hide weapons. So they could, they can hide them, um, underground or bury them, um, um, put them in walls or cabinets or whatever. I mean, it's just a massive amount of weapons to where they can easily go to. Everybody, all the enemy knows where that weapons cache is. And so they can immediately go there and get, get their, um, get their weapons, um, in order to attack us. Um, I mean, it can have everything from RPK, machine guns, AK-47s, explosives, um, bomb making materials. Um, and I remember one major one was like right next to the Euphrates River. Um, and they, right in Sophia and, uh, they, uh, they had, they had buried a huge weapons cache. And we somehow we got intelligence that it was up there.

• 3:42:25Speaker 02

  What, so? So I'm trying to like, kind of imagine, because, so they don't have like a base that they go to, is that why? I mean, so it's like a secret hiding spot for all their weapons that they all can, can, can kind of visit or whatever.

• 3:42:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:42:39Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:42:40Speaker 01

  Cause they know. Yeah, because they know we would go house to house and like if, I think they were allowed like one AK-47 or something like that for personal offensive. They had anything else like.

• 3:42:48Jocko Willink?

  They're strong on the second amendment, as Colonel McFarlane said, they're allowed to have one AK-47.

• 3:42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but if they had any more than that, or if they had like some weird bomb making materials, they know that we, we, um, we take them with us and we, and, uh, we take the prisoner to go get interrogated to figure out what's going on.

• 3:43:03Jocko Willink?

  But they, and they, they did kind of like, at, at one point, like the, the Ramadi hospital was kind of a headquarters for them almost. Cause it was a big, tall building. It was just off of Route Michigan, like it, but it was a tall building, so they had communications, line of sight communications. So they could use radios and talk back to them and they would, you know, I, I forgot to ask you this, but the, the enemy,

• 3:43:28Jocko Willink?

  they were good, like they did things that we did. They had quick reaction forces that would come in like that 45 minutes. Part of that 45 minutes is how long is it going to take for the enemy to go, oh yep, here they are. Let, let's get our reaction forces in there and go attack. And then if they start taking casualties, they had QRFs that would come in and extract wounded and bring them to the hospital. So they did the kind of things that we did as a fighting force, combined arms, which is a really complex idea. But they wouldn't just attack with just an IED or just an RPG or just mortars or just rockets. They would do these complex attacks where they're starting with machine gun fire to get your head down, hit you with RPG, hit you with mortars.

• 3:44:13Jocko Willink?

  And then all this time of vehicle born IED is driving and getting to the target. When everyone is distracted by other things. So the enemy was really good, but, but yes, in order to.

• 3:44:26Speaker 02

  Different that, as far as like the, because even the hospital, I mean, let's face it, that's not a base, you know? That's not like some place comparatively speaking is what I'm saying.

• 3:44:37Jocko Willink?

  Not a base like we would have.

• 3:44:38Speaker 02

  And just like the US is not going to have a weapons cache, cache, cachet. They're not going to have like a weapons cache somewhere, you know? Or I mean, maybe, but it's like.

• 3:44:46Jocko Willink?

  Technically. We have massive weapons caches, but they're just, they're not hidden. They're just like on our base.

• 3:44:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. So they got to, it's like more of the guerrilla insurgent freaking methodology.

• 3:45:00Speaker 01

  And they were strategic. I mean, they were, they were, they were in separate places. I mean, like I had mentioned the train station, the Euphrates River and the Ramadi Hospital. I mean, that's like a triangle, triangle difference of, of where, where they would keep their weapons and they, they, and they knew where those weapons were. And so like when we were getting close, it was, um, you could tell like we were getting close and they, they, that's where like the, the intensive fire would start coming from. Cause like, they didn't want us anywhere near that. Cause they knew that we were close and stupid. Cause like, why else would you be in that area? You know, why else would you, why else would you, um, be snooping around that area, you know, in, in any way. So like, like they knew, like, cause you are like, the one thing, um, that I also failed to mention is like,

• 3:45:42Speaker 01

  the, like the enemy knew our rules of engagement better than we did. They knew what we, they knew what we could, they knew where that line was. They knew, they knew, and they knew how good we were. We weren't doing things the wrong way. We were doing things the right way. And so they, they definitely knew, they definitely knew all that.

• 3:45:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And they, they made adjustments to like the, the escalation or not the escalation, but one of the things that they changed noticeably was they started using grenades as an offensive weapon more towards the end of our deployment. And one of the reasons was because if you see a guy maneuvering tactically and he's got an AK-47 or he's got an RPG, he's getting killed. If you see a guy that's walking down the street and he's acting suspicious, but he's, doesn't have a weapon, well, you're not engaging him. And if you can hear, you can hold a grenade in your pocket or whatever, and you can perform a really good attack. And so that's one of those, but that's an example of them adapting to.

• 3:46:41Jocko Willink?

  RROEs, right? Oh, they they figure out, oh, if we're carrying an AK-47 or we're carrying a a machine gun or an RPG and we're maneuvering tactically, we're gonna get shot. But if we're out there and we're just walking and we're maneuvering, but we don't have anything on our hands, then that's gonna be okay. Or echo, if we pre-stage weapons in this building in a cache, now we can walk down the street free and clear, enemy can walk down the street free and clear, go into the building, pick up a weapon, fire it at us, and then put the weapon down and leave. So, they were good.

• 3:47:21Speaker 02

  You ever watch the movie Predator?

• 3:47:22Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:47:23Speaker 02

  Same thing. Brad, if you don't have any weapons, Predator's not gonna mess with you. See what I'm saying?

• 3:47:27Jocko Willink?

  Is that, is that?

• 3:47:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. In fact, Predator 1, if you remember correctly, Jason, the girl picks up a weapon. Arnold says, hey, he yells, kicks the weapon out of her hand, steps in front of her. See what I'm saying? Predator doesn't kill the chick.

• 3:47:44Jocko Willink?

  Chick.

• 3:47:45Speaker 02

  And even told the chick later, or it might have been earlier, I think it was later, he said, hey, don't pick up that weapon. He's like, he didn't kill you because you weren't armed. Same thing. So the Predator has rules of engagement.

• 3:47:55Jocko Willink?

  Rules of engagement.

• 3:47:57Speaker 02

  Here to tell you.

• 3:47:58Jocko Willink?

  They adapt.

• 3:47:59Speaker 02

  Good to meet you, my brother.

• 3:48:00Speaker 01

  And good to meet you as well. Thanks for having me.

• 3:48:02Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Jason, any, any closing thoughts?

• 3:48:04Speaker 01

  Uh, no, just, um, thank you so much for what you guys are doing, um, every day. Um, the content that you're putting out, the books, everything like that. I mean, you're, you're changing lives and you've changed my life. And, um, it was an honor to serve with you. It was an honor to finally meet you. Um, and, um, I just, I just can't thank you enough for the opportunity to share, like, just from one soldier's perspective of, you know, the 101st Airborne and the first of the 506 of how proud we were and how, how hard we fought in the Battle of Ramadi. And it was just an honor to share a battle space with you, sir.

• 3:48:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, um, first of all, I didn't change your life. You did it and you did an outstanding job. And as, as I mentioned, you know, is that it was you all, it was you all that were on the front lines that were making this stuff happen day to day that were going out every single day, every single night, making things, these things happen. And we've, we've, you've heard us cover on this podcast, the, the frontline soldiers, um, because they're the ones that win the war. And so, awesome to meet you, uh, here. Thanks for just coming on and, and thanks for everything that you did in the Battle of Ramadi to support the 228, to support the 118 and of course, the

• 3:49:29Jocko Willink?

  incredible support that you and your entire battalion from the first of 506 provided to my SEALs from Task Unit Bruiser, the bond formed through the blood, sweat and tears on that deployment, never going to be forgotten. That was one of the hugest honors was going after deployment to your battalion and seeing Mike Monsour's name on your wall of honor for your fallen soldiers and to see Mike Monsour on that wall as well. It'll never be forgotten and we'll never forget the service and the sacrifice made by the Band of Brothers from the first of

• 3:50:12Jocko Willink?

  the 506. So, thank you, Jason, and thank you to all of the soldiers of the magnificent, the revered and the heroic Red Currie. And we will never forget you all and we won't forget your heroes

• 3:50:32Jocko Willink?

  that did not come home. Thank you.

• 3:50:37Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Jason Kedzior has left the building. Pretty awesome to get the context and the perspective of General McFarland, the brigade commander in charge of the entire Battle of Ramadi, and get Jason's perspective, a 21-year-old or 22-year-old frontline soldier out on the streets on a daily basis, getting after it. So, pretty awesome stuff. And yeah, pretty, pretty cool to hear all those different perspectives

• 3:51:20Jocko Willink?

  and definitely a lot to learn from those different perspectives. And also to hear his perspective being inside the first of the 506, which was just a outstanding, outstanding unit. Also, good to hear that he got on that jujitsu train. He's brown belt, by the way.

• 3:51:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:51:46Jocko Willink?

  He may, he may be the first kind of Jocko Podcast brown belt, he was saying when we were in the, before we hit record.

• 3:51:55Speaker 02

  It's possible. I think Vic, Vic, Arvic.

• 3:52:00Jocko Willink?

  Arvic?

• 3:52:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause when I met him, if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong. If I'm not mistaken, he was a white belt when he started and he started jujitsu because of the podcast.

• 3:52:11Jocko Willink?

  And he's a black belt now.

• 3:52:12Speaker 02

  He's a black belt now.

• 3:52:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, there we go.

• 3:52:15Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 3:52:16Jocko Willink?

  Jason, good to go.

• 3:52:17Speaker 02

  But brown belt, very impressive. Actually, I don't know if he said that.

• 3:52:20Jocko Willink?

  Plus he's 6'3", you know, kind of strong. That's six, you know, that's a, it's a, the long lanky thing.

• 3:52:27Speaker 02

  The height, and I've always said this, and I'll say it again, I still maintain, I still maintain that height, as far as natural attributes to have in jujitsu that are beneficial, height is, is ranked number one, I think. More so than strength, more so than flexibility.

• 3:52:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, you can get stronger and you can get more flexible. You can't get any taller.

• 3:52:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:52:46Jocko Willink?

  Unless I guess technically you could cut weight and go down to where you're taller for. Yeah, but

• 3:52:52Speaker 02

  For sure. Yeah, yeah, that's true. But it's still different. That's different. So to put it this way, it starts at about six one. Where now you're height, now you have a for real advantage, I think.

• 3:53:02Jocko Willink?

  You ever roll with Craig Baker?

• 3:53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, Craig Baker, hell yeah.

• 3:53:05Jocko Willink?

  So I'm gonna go ahead and throw this out there. If you go to the other, how tall is Craig Baker?

• 3:53:11Speaker 02

  Oh, five.

• 3:53:12Jocko Willink?

  Five, eight?

• 3:53:12Speaker 02

  Seven, yeah, eight, we'll say.

• 3:53:15Jocko Willink?

  He's compact.

• 3:53:15Speaker 02

  Maybe, yeah, he's compact.

• 3:53:16Jocko Willink?

  He's compact. There's a lot to handle with Craig Baker.

• 3:53:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:53:19Jocko Willink?

  And what the, my point in saying that is, I think there's a bell curve of height. And if you're in the middle of the bell curve, it's not an advantage in jujitsu. Obviously, it's just, you're just normal. If you're either taller or shorter than normal, it's problematic for other people that have to roll with you.

• 3:53:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's possible. Um, I think, I think they both are true, though, at the same time, if in fact that is true. Because yes.

• 3:53:45Jocko Willink?

  You don't think it's true?

• 3:53:46Speaker 02

  I don't know. Maybe if I'd thought about it. Yeah, this, I, I would say I agree with that for sure. I still do think that height is as far as natural attributes, because Craig Baker, freaking, yeah, he's a freaking handful. Because he's Craig Baker, because he's good at jujitsu in his very specific way.

• 3:54:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but that very specific way is but based on his body style.

• 3:54:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think most of us have that, where our game kind of like is formed around our body style, for sure. But coming into jujitsu, I think, and this is why, there's a technical reason why, because you can do all the moves. All the regular, like, base, like, fundamentals of jujitsu, you can do them all. Like, so, let's say, we know just off the top of our head, three, two moves, we'll say. That's shorter, stockier, guys are gonna have a harder time with, than, let's say, a kind of tall guy, six, two, six, three, six, four, something like this. So, what, triangle choke is the obvious one. Certain, uh, other chokes, you know, like a dars or anaconda is gonna be harder for a short, you know? But tall guys don't really have that problem.

• 3:54:44Jocko Willink?

  Have you rolled with Brayler?

• 3:54:45Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:54:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Cause he, he's, how tall is Brayler?

• 3:54:49Speaker 02

  Well, I'd give him what, six?

• 3:54:51Jocko Willink?

  Eight.

• 3:54:52Speaker 02

  Six.

• 3:54:53Jocko Willink?

  But he's six, but he's actually also long.

• 3:54:58Speaker 02

  To me, once you're past six, uh, four, no, if you're past six, three, to me, you're all the same height.

• 3:55:04Jocko Willink?

  No, I don't agree. Cause Brayler, not only is he tall, he's also like has long limbs for someone who's already tall. You know how John Jones, John Jones had the mega wingspan, I forget what it was, but his wingspan was abnormally long. That's what Brayler's like. Like it's not just tall. It's tall, abnormally long legs, abnormally long arms.

• 3:55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:55:31Jocko Willink?

  That's such a horrible compound.

• 3:55:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:55:33Jocko Willink?

  Comp- compilation there.

• 3:55:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. They got a, okay. So the height, well, you can do all the moves and then you can, and when you start to really get tall, you can do all these other moves. Like just flagrant, like, um, a lot of body locks, like that kind of stuff, you know?

• 3:55:48Jocko Willink?

  Like for instance, there's people that can't do a buggy choke. But there's, if you're long, the buggy choke is not just an option. It's like a pretty obvious, straightforward option.

• 3:55:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. So you always see that these real tall guys doing these moves that like, kind of no one else can do, you know? So that's why I say that. And I get it that like, you know, when you're super strong, you know, for sure, that's, that is a good helpful attribute when you're strong versus not being strong. But I think the guy with the height versus the guy with just the, you know, if you kind of compare them, I think that's my hypothesis. Can we prove it? I don't know. But I think.

• 3:56:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, we know we can't get any taller.

• 3:56:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:56:28Jocko Willink?

  Right? You ever seen the people that get surgery in their legs?

• 3:56:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:56:32Jocko Willink?

  Opened up and, and like extend their legs.

• 3:56:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:56:35Jocko Willink?

  So I guess technically speaking, you could get taller if you really wanted to.

• 3:56:39Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:56:40Jocko Willink?

  But I don't recommend that.

• 3:56:42Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:56:42Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't seem like a good sacrifice.

• 3:56:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, and hey, to each their own. But yes, I agree with you. I think kind of formulating our whole life game around our body type is probably going to be the best scenario for sure.

• 3:56:54Jocko Willink?

  And even though we can't get taller, barring that one exception.

• 3:56:58Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:56:58Jocko Willink?

  We can get stronger.

• 3:56:59Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:57:00Jocko Willink?

  We can get more flexible.

• 3:57:01Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:57:01Jocko Willink?

  We can get better at jiu jitsu.

• 3:57:03Speaker 02

  Yes, we can.

• 3:57:04Jocko Willink?

  We can lift more weights. We can have better cardio conditioning. Better metabolic conditioning. Can do all those things. As long as you're willing to go to work for it.

• 3:57:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:57:16Jocko Willink?

  And if you decide to do that, guess what you're gonna need?

• 3:57:18Speaker 02

  What are we gonna need, Jocko? What are we gonna need?

• 3:57:20Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna need some fuel. Hey, check out Jocko Fuel, JacoFuel.com.

• 3:57:25Jocko Willink?

  We're out there. We're out there in the world. You can go to JacoFuel.com. We make everything that you need. The hydration, we make energy drink, we make the best protein in the world. By the way, we make the best energy drink in the world. By the way, we best make the best hydrate. We make the best protein powder. We make the best joint sup. We make the best of everything. So check out JacoFuel.com so you can train and you can stay on the path. You can also get it from Walmart. We're expanding into Walmart at this time to keep your eyes open in there. Wawa, Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Commissaries, Afees, Hannaford's Dash Stores, Wakefern, ShopRite, HEB, Meyer

• 3:58:10Jocko Willink?

  in the Midwest. So you got Meyer and they're doing awesome with Jocko Fuel. And it's performing really well in that area, which is like the Midwest, like Michigan. And they're just, they're just doing a lot of great stuff. So if you're up in that area, check out Meyer. Wegmans out there in Pennsylvania, they're putting pallets on the floor. Do you know that? Like a big pallet full of Jocko Fuel. So you can just grab a case of whatever that you want, grab what you want. So check that out. Harris Teeter, oh yeah, HEB, went to HEB down in Texas recently. Giant wall filled with Jocko Fuel. That's because it's Texas too, you know?

• 3:58:53Jocko Willink?

  These are our people down in Texas. Yeah, they're getting after it. So Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, small gyms everywhere. By the way, we went to the CrossFit Games and a bunch of people came to talk to us about bringing Jocko Fuel into their CrossFit gyms. Jiu Jitsu gyms, same thing. We're at jujitsu competitions, whether it's CJI or ADCC or Five Grappling or World Jujitsu League or Jujitsu World League. I always mess that one up. But we're there and people say, hey, I want to get this stuff out. You're at our gym or we get this at our gym. So that's cool. If you want this stuff at your gym, check out [email protected].

• 3:59:39Jocko Willink?

  Also, if we're doing jujitsu, which we are. Yes, sir, we are. You need a jujitsu gi, go to originusa.com and get an awesome, American-made jujitsu gi. Check this out. Look, we have adversaries in the world. One of them is China. We're not in a hot war right now. There's no missiles flying back and forth. There's no troops on the ground. But we are in an economic war with them. And at some juncture, we may become engaged in a real war with them. So in order to avoid giving them money that they will use to build weapons to kill our

• 4:00:25Jocko Willink?

  soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, instead of buying something that's made in China that will be utilized to attack our country. Instead, just go to originusa.com.

• 4:00:41Jocko Willink?

  Keep the money here. Good idea. I mean, would you give money to your enemy? I would not want to do that. Enemies might be a strong word right now, but let's face it. Are there?

• 4:00:55Jocko Willink?

  Are there, is this our potential, actual enemy in a war? Yeah. We got Taiwan sitting out there. They think Taiwan is theirs. The people of Taiwan thinks Taiwan is theirs.

• 4:01:08Jocko Willink?

  Could that turn into a war? Yes, it could. Are we gonna pay, are we gonna fund the war against ourselves? Yeah, you, we are. If you keep buying stuff from China, that's exactly what you'll be doing. So instead of doing that, buy some stuff made here in America. By the way, it's not just like, it's not just, oh, I got a pair of jeans and they're American made and that helped because it kept the money inside the economy. And on top of that, it brings manufacturing back here. It lets other companies know that it's feasible to manufacture things in America. And they say, hey, wait a second, why should, why should we buy this thing in China? Why should we manufacture this thing in China? Why don't we just do it here? So other companies are doing that and we're happy about that.

• 4:01:50Jocko Willink?

  And the American public knows that they don't want to buy bullets that are going to be used to kill their sons and daughters.

• 4:02:00Jocko Willink?

  So buy American. OriginUSA.com, get hunt gear. John Dudley now on the hunt team. Cameron Haynes on the hunt team. You see what we're doing? These are the best in the world.

• 4:02:14Jocko Willink?

  So check it out, OriginUSA.com, get some American made jeans. Stop putting money into the hands of our adversaries. That's what I got.

• 4:02:26Speaker 02

  It's true. Also Jocko's store, call Jocko's store. Discipline equals freedom. No matter where you go or do. When you're working out by yourself, have you ever worked out with a partner before?

• 4:02:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Many, many years I had a, I had a, I did two platoons with a guy I went through SEAL training with. And we were workout buddies pretty much that whole time.

• 4:02:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:02:50Jocko Willink?

  I was, there was, I had a buddy that I talk about a lot, who I don't say his name, but we were running mates for three platoons and SEAL training and SQT and working in training cell. But we knew, we would work out together. Uh, for lack of a better way of saying it, we would like, we would like socially work out together.

• 4:03:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03:11Jocko Willink?

  You know what I mean? Like, you know, you ever hear people say like social drinking?

• 4:03:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:03:14Jocko Willink?

  You know, like, oh, I just, I'm just a social drinker. We would work out together like as a social thing. Like we'd both be going on Saturday.

• 4:03:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:03:21Jocko Willink?

  But he would be doing some, and he was a very strange workout dude.

• 4:03:24Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 4:03:24Jocko Willink?

  Which, which, which worked because he's such a sick athlete, you know? He's a much better athlete than, than I was and am.

• 4:03:33Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 4:03:33Jocko Willink?

  So he could go in there and just do weird stuff.

• 4:03:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03:36Jocko Willink?

  And still just kind of perform at an exceptional level.

• 4:03:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03:40Jocko Willink?

  Just genetically. Uh, look, he worked out too. It wasn't like all genetics.

• 4:03:45Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 4:03:45Jocko Willink?

  But one of my other buddies, who I did BUDs and SQT and two platoons with, we worked out together, workout buddies.

• 4:03:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03:55Jocko Willink?

  Like workout partners.

• 4:03:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03:57Jocko Willink?

  He's the lo- and that's the longest running workout partner I had. But so that was probably like five years.

• 4:04:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 4:04:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, five years.

• 4:04:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's a legit workout.

• 4:04:05Jocko Willink?

  Well, maybe four years. Yeah, I think it was four years.

• 4:04:07Speaker 02

  So.

• 4:04:08Jocko Willink?

  But we also like developed a lot of the game together, you know, like.

• 4:04:12Speaker 02

  The workout game?

• 4:04:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just like we, at the time, you know, you didn't really know what was what. There wasn't a bunch of information out there. You, you could look at a muscle and fitness and be like, well, I guess what we need to do is freaking whatever.

• 4:04:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:04:23Jocko Willink?

  Four sets of chest with drop sets and all this stuff. But we, but we figured out that we needed to work out in a different way. You know, we were, he and I were, were doing pull ups, you know, tons of pull ups and push ups and dips. And doing squats and running. And so we, we, we had a pretty well-rounded kind of early version of maybe like a CrossFit-ish, functional fitness-ish, uh, that kind of thing.

• 4:04:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. That's good. So you know the difference very distinctly, uh, of working out with a partner and no partner?

• 4:05:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:05:02Speaker 02

  Yep. And so I would say, and I, this is fresh in my mind, because recently I've not had a partner in a few years. But it's different. It's more challenging with no partner.

• 4:05:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, oh yeah, for sure.

• 4:05:15Speaker 02

  So, so you ever, okay, so 20 rep squats, right? I didn't want to get too deep into this, but we're talking about it. And I think this has some value. So 20 rep squats, right? So now, okay, so my squat routine now, thanks to you, by the way, is like kind of a, kind of a siege. It's a, it's a battle. It's a struggle. So I do my first set after warm up, my first set is between 15 and 20 reps. And I try to get the, the, the good weight where it's freaking hard. It's not just like, let me, you know, bust out a quick 20 here. So it's a, that first set is already like my heart's beating all fast. It's like, you know how you get all like freaking nervous, you know? So it's a big struggle. So you do it. And then you rest and then you do a set of eight.

• 4:05:57Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna tell you something right now. You ever sell any real estate?

• 4:06:02Speaker 02

  Me?

• 4:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:06:03Speaker 02

  No.

• 4:06:03Jocko Willink?

  Okay. If you have a list, if you ever see a listing for a house. And they do something called listing the house like in a range.

• 4:06:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:06:11Jocko Willink?

  Right? And it's between, you know, 400 and 450,000 dollars.

• 4:06:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:06:21Jocko Willink?

  What do you think the offer is going to be? Or let's take negotiation. I got a couple of examples. Let's take negotiation. If you come to me and, and I say, Echo, I'd like you to work for me. And you say, okay. I would like to work for you. And I say, well, what do you need to make? And you give me a range.

• 4:06:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:06:36Jocko Willink?

  Of, you say, I need to make between 55 and 60,000 dollars a year. What do you think you're getting paid?

• 4:06:42Speaker 02

  55.

• 4:06:43Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. So my point in telling you this is, oh, by the way, if you, if you're trying to sell your house and you put between 400 and 450,000 dollars for the house, what are you going to get for an offer? 400,000. So my point in telling you this is, if you tell me right now, what you just did, on this podcast.

• 4:06:59Speaker 02

  Yes, I did.

• 4:07:00Jocko Willink?

  That you have a range of reps that you're trying to hit between 15 and 20?

• 4:07:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:07:06Jocko Willink?

  We already know the outcome of this story.

• 4:07:07Speaker 02

  No, because that's a bad analogy, unfortunately. Because of the goals or whatever. I see, I understand what you're saying. I do, but.

• 4:07:14Jocko Willink?

  I worry about you.

• 4:07:16Speaker 02

  You don't gotta worry, when it comes to, you know, the lifting scenario, I know it's squats. I know I'm more new to the whole deep squats and the 20, right? Look, I'm newer to that than you are, but the approach still stays the same. When I say, and I said this before, I'll say it again, I'll keep saying it, and just know this or whatever. Anytime I say a rep range, this is what it means. Let's say I say 13 to 15. No, actually, I said 15 to 20, right? All this means is, I'm going for 20.

• 4:07:42Jocko Willink?

  You have an out.

• 4:07:44Speaker 02

  Yep, kind of, in a way. But it's in a legitimate way. In fact, forget the 20.

• 4:07:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 4:07:50Speaker 02

  Cause everything, my whole workout is like this. So if my rep range is 13 to 15, I'm going for the 15. The reps is 15, but if, but I have to go as hard as I can for the 15. Every set, by the way. So if I fail at 14, that's fine. I still did a good workout for that workout, because the rep range is 13 to 15. If I fail at 13, that's still fine, but that's a heads up, though. If I fail at 12, outside of the rep range, I didn't do, or I did too much weight for that rep range.

• 4:08:19Jocko Willink?

  There's kind of a difference here, though, is because when you get into the 15 and 20 rep range.

• 4:08:24Speaker 02

  With squats, by the way.

• 4:08:25Jocko Willink?

  With squats, very specifically.

• 4:08:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:08:28Jocko Willink?

  You can do 20.

• 4:08:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:08:30Jocko Willink?

  You just choose not to.

• 4:08:34Speaker 02

  So actually, you know what, Brad, you're, I didn't even really realize this until right now. You are kind of, not fully, you are kind of right, because that's true. Because I haven't done the actual 20 in kind of a while, probably like a few months. But I've done 15, actually not, only a few times. I usually get minimum 16, and then a lot of times I'll do like 18. And you're right, I could get to 19, or even the 20, probably. But I get scared, I don't know what it is, but it's like this weird struggle, which is gonna be part of my point, by the way. So be patient with me, bear with me. So, and that struggle, especially when I'm not used to like 20, you know?

• 4:09:14Speaker 02

  It's like, bro, that's a for real struggle. That's why my heart's beating off fast, like, oh my gosh, like, you know, you get there and you get up to like 14, 15. You get 16, 17, and you're like, technically, I did the workout. I did the workout. But like, the strain, the struggle, the hell, the torment that you have to go through for three more reps is like, sometimes mentally and emotionally, like, it's hard to face that.

• 4:09:39Jocko Willink?

  It is hard, it is very hard.

• 4:09:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:09:41Jocko Willink?

  It is very hard.

• 4:09:43Speaker 02

  So wait, here's the point.

• 4:09:46Speaker 02

  So when you're there without a workout partner,

• 4:09:50Speaker 02

  nobody cares if you get those extra three reps, by the way, nobody. Yeah, if you lack integrity. Exactly right. That's the whole point. That's the whole point right there. It's like, and, and really the point put in different words is you're on this path by yourself sometimes. Sometimes like, if I, if I, let's say I said, you know what? Cause I thought about this in like, I've thought these exact thoughts before where I'm like looking at this weight. I'm like freaking, I gotta do this 20 times. And I'm looking right now and I'm looking, I'm searching my emotional state. And it's not checking out, you know? And I'm looking around like, if I literally say, you know what? I'm not gonna do squats today. I know I warmed up. I know I did all that. I'm just gonna skip squats today. Hopefully I feel better and more up to this challenge next time.

• 4:10:35Speaker 02

  I could skip it. Not one single soul in this whole world would care. Not my wife. What about your own soul? Exactly right. So there's only one. And that's why I say you're on this path alone sometimes. So of course you do and you feel better, all this stuff for sure. But I'm saying, oh, and then, okay, so I do it. I do it. I do my second set, third set, fourth set, right? So usually I go 28 and then I do pause squats where you pause at the bottom. I go six and six. So four sets and it's hard. It's for real hard. The kind of like, I'll, I'll be making noise by myself, kinda hard, you know, sometimes.

• 4:11:13Speaker 02

  And I, and then at the end you're done and you're like, oh man, that was like a battle. Like, that's why I'll text you sometimes for real. Like that's literally, cause I gotta share it with somebody. I can't feel that lonely. So anyway, so when I'm done and sometimes I won't text nobody, I'll go inside and I'll freaking lay down or whatever. And then let's say, for example, and this happened many times where I'll lay down, I said, we got it done to my wife who's sitting there. And she goes, oh, good job. With this lighthearted, nonchalant, like she doesn't care at all what I just went through. You know why? Cause she doesn't care. She doesn't care and I'm on this path alone. Here's the thing, sometimes even if you're on this path alone, you wanna represent. See what I'm saying?

• 4:11:53Speaker 02

  Because discipline, discipline brings you through. And that's the only way you can be free from all this, this, this bad stuff. Anyway, when you want to represent on the past, go to jockstore.com is where you can get Discipline Equals Freedom shirts. Hat, you want to wear a hat? Good, I don't really wear hats at all. But you, you want to wear a hat? You wear a hat, Discipline Equals Freedom. Boom, we got you.

• 4:12:11Jocko Willink?

  Also, but what, did I miss anything? Were you gonna say something else?

• 4:12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, the shirt locker.

• 4:12:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 4:12:17Speaker 02

  It's okay, it's okay, you know.

• 4:12:19Jocko Willink?

  You know, people gotta know about that one.

• 4:12:20Speaker 02

  You do take it for granted because you have, you know, full access to these things. Not everyone does and not everyone knows about it. So I'm gonna let them know. Shirt Locker is a new design with discipline equals freedom and good themes, undertones, if you will, but they're different types of designs. You get a new one every month, subscription scenario. Click on the top where it says Shirt Locker, boom, take you to the page, see past some past designs, see what it's all about. So yeah, check that out. It is available, it's all available, jockstore.com.

• 4:12:48Jocko Willink?

  Also primalbeef.com

• 4:12:53Jocko Willink?

  and coloradocraftbeef.com. If you need steak in your life, which you do, go to one of those websites, hook it up, coloradocraftbeef.com, primalbeef.com, awesome steak from awesome people and awesome companies. Also subscribe to the podcast, also jockounderground.com, also YouTube, also Psychological Warfare, also flipsidecanvas.com, also books, I've written a bunch of them, check them out if you want to, also Echelon Front, leadership instruction, leadership guidance, leadership consulting. Go to echelonfront.com if you need leadership help inside your world.

• 4:13:32Jocko Willink?

  Also, we have an online training academy so you can learn the skills of leadership that will help you in every aspect of your life. Go to extremeownership.com. If you want to help service members, active and retired, you can 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, helps out so many of these veterans. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warrior, warriors.org. Don't forget about Micah Fink also taking our veterans, which you heard a lot about veterans today, you heard a lot about people that served. When they get home, it can be a rough transition. Micah Fink helps with that transition, heroesandhorses.org.

• 4:14:13Jocko Willink?

  And finally, Jimmy May has got an organization called beyondthebrotherhood.org, helping SEALs transition from the SEAL teams into the civilian sector. So check out those charities if you can. If you want to connect with us on the interwebs, go to jocko.com. Also, social media, Echoes@EchoCharles, I'm at @JockoWilling. Just watch out for the algorithm because it's trying to ruin your entire life. Thanks once again to Jason Kedzior for joining us, sharing his lessons learned, and thanks to everything that you did for me, for Task Unit Bruiser, for the First of the 506,

• 4:14:54Jocko Willink?

  for the Army, and for America, and what you're still doing for America today. And thanks to all our service members tonight with a

• 4:15:05Jocko Willink?

  direct salute to that entire battalion, the First of the 506, who stood alone, together with us, with the rest of the 110AD, faced down a determined enemy, and achieved victory on that battlefield. Our units are forever joined through that shared history, and we will never forget. And also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all other first responders. Thank you for what you do to keep us safe here at home.

• 4:15:47Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there, we heard a story tonight from one man in one platoon, in one company, in one battalion, in one battle, in one war.

• 4:16:03Jocko Willink?

  And there are thousands and thousands and thousands of stories like that, of thousands and thousands and thousands of men and women who stepped up

• 4:16:17Jocko Willink?

  and stood together, stood alone together,

• 4:16:24Jocko Willink?

  to protect us and our way of life.

• 4:16:28Jocko Willink?

  And many of them did not come home.

• 4:16:35Jocko Willink?

  And it's a gift for us to be here, alive, and blessed with the freedom that we have. So do not squander this gift.

• 4:16:47Jocko Willink?

  Go live life.

• 4:16:50Jocko Willink?

  And that's all we've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko, out.