The Unravelling 5: "Do You Guys Have Run-Flats?"

Jocko completes his first tour and heads back to the US as Iraq begins to come apart at the sectarian seams. 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 the Jocko Unravelling Podcast, episode five, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. Where did we leave off, Daryl?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  You were going home, and Iraq was just starting to come apart at the seams.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  You and your boys took down Sadr's lieutenant, the Shia rose up. Down in the south, we had to redirect forces down there to get them under control, which was a problem because at the same exact time, we had problems with the Sunni population in the west out in Anbar. In Fallujah, four Blackwater contractors got lynched, mutilated, tortured, and hung up on display by a cheering crowd of people there. A few days after that, we sent a guy named Mattis and his Marines into that city to retaliate. And if you tell the Marines that there's people in that city that killed a bunch of Americans,

• 1:02Speaker 01

  and mutilated, and tortured them, and hung them up on display, go do something about it. You better provide very specific orders, because the Marines are going to tear somebody up. And they went in hard, and they went in fast, and the Arab language press just had a field day with that. It started spreading out all over the Middle East, all over Iraq. The Americans are killing civilians, they're destroying indiscriminately, and this is going on right at the time that the Shia uprising is happening in the south. And so, we are split up all over the country.

• 1:37Jocko Willink?

  You seem to focus a lot on the Shia uprising on the south, which was definitely

• 1:42Jocko Willink?

  a real problem. But the first thing that pops into my mind when you talk about the Shia uprising is Baghdad, is Sadr City. That's the first thing I think about. Maybe that's because I was in Baghdad. But but also, there was a this is what I remember. I remember that Sodder City like was immediately, there was a lot of heavy casualties in Sodder City, in and around Sodder City to the troops that were out there, like right after we went and got Yakubi. So I part of it's because it was more visible to me. Part of it's because this is another big thing that that is always was always evident was things that happened in Baghdad got a lot of press because it was Baghdad, the Green Zone. You know, you'd walk around the Green Zone. There

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  was reporters and there was normal, you know, there was all kinds of press in the Green Zone. And that means they're they're 10 yards from from Baghdad. They're in Baghdad. And things that were going on in other parts of the country wouldn't receive as much press. And you know, Fallujah had less press. Ramadi had even less press. When we when by the time we get to Ramadi in 2006, there was very little press out in Ramadi, almost none.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  I didn't really start to get an idea of what was going on out in Ramadi while you were there until maybe 2009, 2010, before I started to read like some of the longer pieces that started to come out about what happened. And I was following it pretty close. You know, I knew there was some fighting going on out there, the stuff that you would get in the New York Times or the, you know, Wall Street Journal. But it took a while for people to really process what had happened out in Anbar.

• 3:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's so so Baghdad was Baghdad went south real quick. Baghdad got bad real quick after, you know, that April. And again, that's about the time we're going home. Now, you know, we did, we did some turnover ops with the guys that relieved us. And they were all pretty straightforward. You know, it wasn't, they weren't looking around going, hey, everything's going to change for us. The IED threat had escalated, but it was still, it wasn't even close to what it turned into, you know?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  There is a reason that I I tend to focus on the South a little bit. And you can tell me if I'm a little off base here, but this is this was always my perception.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  This is right around the time, so let's see. Back in August 2003, just before you first showed up, that was when Al Qaeda in Iraq hit the UN, they hit the Jordanian Embassy, all the NGOs leave, the UN evacuates the country, and they're really working hard to do two things. One, not make this a coalition war, you know, where the UN is present and overseeing what's going on. This is the Americans in there against the Muslims, against the Iraqis, right? And so, and they accomplished that in 2003, in a lot of people's minds. And at the same time, they start hitting indiscriminately Shia holy sites, trying to foment a civil war. So now the Americans are just caught in this maelstrom, right? So that happens back in the fall, before you get there.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  You're going around hitting targets, doing your thing, and we're trying to clean this stuff up as it's starting to escalate, but we don't have a full grasp of what's going on yet. We think that it's remnants of the regime who are doing this kind of stuff. We don't have the idea yet, really, that there's an insurgency forming, an organized insurgency. We get up to March, March 2nd, 2004, maybe March 11th, I'm sorry, I don't have it in front of me, and the Spanish train, the Madrid train bombing happens. Hundreds of people are killed, 2,000 people are killed because Al Qaeda in Spain hits a train. This is a couple days, three days before the Spanish general elections, and it went

• 5:24Speaker 01

  from a candidate who was the frontrunner, who was supporting America, who was on board, and it just swung immediately over to the anti-war candidate, and Spain was the hell out of there, right? You had had this movement, like you said, every war, every conflict, there is going to be a piece of the population that just says no. And there's going to be a piece within that group who doesn't just say no, who says, who has the idea that we are the bad guys here, right? And those, those people are pretty tireless, and they're going to keep working.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  As the war starts to go on and things start to happen and we start to lose control, those people start to make inroads into, you know, the rest of our own domestic population. Their side starts to grow. In Europe, it's already stronger than it is here in America. The Madrid train bombings happen. More Europeans start to say, "I don't know if we really want to be a piece of, a part of this." And when the, uh, when you guys took down Jacoby in Najaf, at the time, I mentioned this in the previous episode, uh, you know, we, because it was a little bit more pacified down there with the Shia, uh, we had Bulgarians, the Poles,

• 6:47Speaker 01

  a bunch of our allies, coalition allies down there, and they start getting hammered by Sadr's forces and they're getting overrun, they're getting pushed back. And so that's more of our European allies who were like, "Ugh, this is getting a little bit uglier than we thought and we're getting a little more isolated." And then we've got to redirect forces that maybe properly ought to be out in Anbar keeping, you know, this is, this is a time where Al Qaeda in Iraq is starting to consolidate their control over the rest of the Sunni insurgency, right? But we've got to redirect to go support our coalition allies in the south now. And it's funny because, you know, I just, I look at maps of Iraq and stuff. I didn't realize that Najaf is a five-hour drive down there. You know, I think it's maybe 150, 200 miles or something, but you know, we're not all driving on Interstate 5.

• 7:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and again, you're talking about driving in Humvees and they're, they're slower, you know, um, they, you know, we're going usually 55 miles an hour. You know, that's like flat out, you know, maybe we could get to 60, but pretty much you're going 55, 60 miles an hour.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  And also there was, um, you know, you'd have, you'd have to do some checkpoint stuff along the way. We'd, we'd go and check with the battle space. So, you know, you know, the 200 miles, you know, what, going 50 miles an hour, you know, that's a four-hour drive. You make a stop for fuel, you make a, because you know, we're not going to, we're not going to drive our vehicles until they're out of fuel or till we're low on fuel. So we'd stop some, at some FOB somewhere, get a refuel and, you know, check in with some battle space commander somewhere. So that, that brings it out, that stretches it out there. Next thing you know, you're looking at, yeah, you're looking at five hours.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Okay. So we get to the point now where we've got our already, our, a force that... Our military brass already thinks it's a little bit too low, or really a lot too low to keep, to provide overall security in the country. Now we're split up over here in Anbar, down to the south in the Shia areas. Our allies, because of Madrid, because of them getting hammered in the south right now, because of the marketing of the anti-war movement in the west, are already starting to lose faith in us. And then in April, as the country is starting to spiral, we know what's coming there. That's when Abu Ghraib happens. And that's kind of the frame that I put it in, is that we're starting to lose control of

• 8:53Speaker 01

  the domestic conversation. Not only in America, but within our European, you know, with the European allies as well, and with the rest of the world. And to the extent that this becomes an American war, you know, an American crusade against the Muslims, and we lose the rest of the coalition, the whole complex, the whole constellation of the war starts to change. And were you aware of any of that? Like, was that in your head at all as you were starting to get ready to leave there in April?

• 9:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, you know, it's a good indicator, and I mentioned this on the last episode, that when there's the CPA in Najaf is getting overrun. So think about what that means. The CPA is getting overrun.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Let everybody know exactly.

• 9:43Jocko Willink?

  That means, so the coalition provisional authority, it's the, it's the kind of makeshift government that's running Najaf. You know, there's different civilian authorities there, Iraqi and American, and they're trying to, you know, trying to rebuild some kind of a government. And this gets attacked and is about to be overrun, meaning that it's going to get taken over. And the guys that were there, there was a lot of, actually it was a lot of contractors that were there, they, they were able to defend the situation. But when that's happening, again, and I said this on the last episode, they called me and my guys in Baghdad. So there's a multitude of these foreign, you know, foreign military

• 10:28Jocko Willink?

  units down there on that road. There's like a road that goes from Baghdad to Najaf. And along that way, you know, when I talk about stopping at checkpoints, you know, these were like different nationalities, different countries, you would have their little base, we'd pull in there, get fuel, whatever. And some of those people had armor. And instead of sending any of that, who are an hour away, 40 minutes away, two hours away, they take a group of guys that are in Baghdad with thin-skinned Humvees to drive five hours to get down there.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Who had just returned from driving five hours down there, executing an op, turning around, getting home, and now you're getting this. And you're the best option.

• 11:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and we're the best option. And, you know, it's complimentary. Great, thank you. You know, I appreciate it. But from a tactical perspective, well, I mean, General Patton himself says a good plan executed now is better than a great plan executed in a week, right? Well, guess what? Even if I go right now, it's five hours. When a building or a compound is under the threat of being overrun, you're not thinking that they're going to make it five hours.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  You said, yes, Jay, you used the term. Was this what they told you? Said, "We need you to go down there as a QRF"? Like, you were the quick reaction.

• 11:42Jocko Willink?

  We were the QRF, absolutely.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And you're five hours away.

• 11:44Jocko Willink?

  We're five hours away. So, you know, that's an indicator, okay, well. And it was one of those things where, you know, look, you're in the military, right? And you're thinking to yourself, what are these, what is the chain of command thinking? They don't get it. They don't understand what's happening. Whatever. We'll do our job. Maybe we're not seeing everything that they're seeing. So, but yeah, as I mentioned on the last episode, as I'm standing in a tower, looking out at the highway, and I see multiple burning vehicles. I hadn't, we hadn't seen that. We had not seen that type of thing at all. You'd see a vehicle somewhere.

• 12:25Jocko Willink?

  You wouldn't look out on the horizon and see five burning, you know, smoking vehicles that had just been hit with IEDs or RPGs and are now, now under attack. So, yeah. I could tell it was getting bad. And again, as I said on the last episode, if you asked me March 1st, if I would ever be coming back to Iraq as a combat leader, I would've said, "Probably not. This'll be mopped up." If you asked me April 15th, I'd say, "Hmm, we might be back here."

• 12:58Speaker 01

  When, did you have a sense of, and I would understand if this wasn't the case, did you have a sense of the public mood shifting? Especially when Abu Ghraib happened? Like, did you have a moment when Abu Ghraib happened where, you know, were you just so in the military world at that point where you were just like, what are these guys doing? What are those, you know, MPs thinking? Or did you have a sense of like, oh, this is not good?

• 13:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I knew it was not good. Yeah, I knew it was not good. There had been some things that had taken place where, where some things got caught up by the media, got captured by the media, and it was bad. I had a couple incidents that happened where we, you know, we didn't look good. And absolutely tiny in comparison, but enough that I said, okay, if this, if this caused a, caused this much backlash, then what's it, what just happened in Abu Ghraib is not going to be good.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Were you, it sounded like when we talked about it yesterday, you had some experience, like that you must have been in country at the time because you talked about the mood of some of the Iraqis like seeming to shift when that happened. Was that something you got when you returned in 06 or?

• 14:17Jocko Willink?

  You're saying that the mood had shifted?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  With the, with some of the Iraqis you were interacting with?

• 14:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you could, you could feel it somewhat. It also was very regional dependent, right? Depending on where you were. And it was, that was like one of those just creepy things. You know, you'd go through a certain town, certain village, and I remember we went, we, actually, we were on our way, I think we were actually on our way to Najaf, and we went through a town, you got a map there, of Iraq? So I think there's a town called Hala. It's on the way down there, and we went through there and...

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Hila, yeah.

• 14:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so there was Hala, we started driving through there, and there was people, there was people, as we started coming into the city, where we hear them, they're blowing whistles.

• 15:07Jocko Willink?

  And like you're just thinking and then they're giving you the the the look of we don't like you. And you know, we get the traffic, we get caught behind traffic and we're we're dismounting. This is before we had armored vehicles. So when we would stop the vehicles, almost every time if the vehicles were held up, we'd dismount and get away from the vehicles because the vehicles were kind of bullet magnets and RPG magnets. So, you know, we'd come to a stop and we would patrol, we'd foot patrol along with the vehicles. So the drivers would stay and the gunner would stay and everyone else would dismount. And we would foot patrol so we could get a little space. If we were to get attacked, we'd be able to react in a much better way. Because the vehicles are basically stopped. You're in a traffic jam. You're in a traffic jam.

• 15:51Jocko Willink?

  So I remember and that is where you would notice different areas. You'd get a different vibe from the people. And and yes, as time went on, the vibe shifted. Earlier, it was more positive. And as as we rolled into April.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  And this is in a Shia zone you're talking about down in Hilal.

• 16:12Jocko Willink?

  Hilal is definitely definitely a Shia zone. So now, when we were down there for QRF, it was like, yeah, we were we were not getting nice looks from people.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Coming from, I was in the States at the time, I was in the Navy, but

• 16:32Speaker 01

  we weren't engaged, right, in Iraq or anything like that. And you we're experiencing something, we're experiencing Abu Ghraib when it hits, something like the civilians experienced it, right? So I can speak from that perspective.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  There were people who had been starting to starting to come in all along, who said, this is going to be another Vietnam. And they didn't just mean by that that we were going to get bogged down and our mission wasn't going to be accomplished. You know, there was a moral kind of commentary being made on what we were doing over there. And those people who had been making the argument that America is this imperialist aggressor going over there in this unjust preemptive war to attack the Muslim world out of rage for 9/11 or whatever it is.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  The Iraq War in March 2003 had a 74% approval rating in a Gallup poll. Now, part of that is people like to win, they expected to win, and if we had just cleaned it up, it would have stayed, even if Abu Ghraib had happened, if we had just cleaned up the war and won it, I think, you know, people like to win, it would have stayed that way. But as it starts to seem like we're losing control of the country, and in an election year, that's a big part of this as well, this is in 2004, it's, you know, six, five months, six months before an election, a presidential election, those pictures hit the news. There were a lot of, there were a lot of moderate people, not hardcore anti-war people

• 18:04Speaker 01

  or anything like that, who start to ask, wait a second, like, not only do we seem to be losing control of the country over there, what are we doing? Like, it seems like we're losing control of ourselves. And when, I think it was, it was only two weeks after that, I believe, that, yeah, it was two weeks after that news hit, that Zarqawi put out the Nick Berg tape, and all of a sudden, the American people, this is the first American that was beheaded by Al Qaeda in Iraq over there, and all of a sudden, Americans are, they're thinking of war in very different terms. Rather than thinking of it as a liberation operation, that, of course, there's civilian

• 18:49Speaker 01

  casualties, there's going to be some messy things that happen, there's even going to be some soldiers that do some things that they oughtn't do. Now, there seems to be this situation where there is some very, very dark things going on in this incredibly chaotic place, and we are just, that we're starting to get caught up in that, and that we're just one element of darkness in this dark place. Because I think Americans, they didn't want to, they didn't want to...

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Think or believe that about themselves. And when you see those pictures, you know, they are incredibly shocking for people who are just civilians. I mean, I think they're probably shocking for people who have seen violence as well because there's a certain, there's a certain macabre aspect to a lot of them and the casual nature with which some of those reservists were, were posing with some of those inmates. And I happen to be, I don't know where you fall in this, I can, like, I happen to be of the, of the mind that I, Abu Ghraib makes me enraged at the, the high level political people who set the conditions for that place to happen.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't, I don't give myself the right to draw harsh judgments on the soldiers and the MPs who were there, the ones who actually got punished. I wasn't there. They were. I'm not saying it was right or justified or anything like that. I'm saying that you had this, this group of reservists from West Pennsylvania who were put into a situation that they're absolutely not trained for. They were trained as combat support MPs, they were not trained as prison guards, and they are put into an absurd situation, under incredible stress, in a prison that's in a combat zone. You know, Abu Ghraib is between Fallujah and Baghdad, right? Right in there somewhere?

• 20:46Jocko Willink?

  It's sort of north of the airport. It's sort of north, so, so it's, so it's northwest of Baghdad. And it was a bad area. Yes, you're right. It was in a combat zone.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  They're taking fire at the prison. And now maybe as somebody who is over there and had to be responsible for your behavior and for the behavior of your men, you can feel more comfortable coming down straight on the, directly on the people who were involved. I just don't, I don't like to do that. I wasn't there. I don't justify it, but I don't.

• 21:16Jocko Willink?

  What do you think, what do you think, I think?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  I would assume that, obviously you talk a lot about leadership and so the people who set the conditions and created that those conditions are going to be important, but I would, maybe I would just assume because I know other people who served in Iraq who do hold the people who were directly involved with those things, the soldiers there, the MPs, very responsible because, yeah, I was over there in Iraq too. There were times that I wanted to beat the hell out of somebody or do this, but I didn't. And they did, and that's on them, and look what they cost us. And I get that, and I don't gain, say, I don't contradict them and say, well, what about these, that's their right to have that

• 22:01Speaker 01

  view, and I don't give myself that right. But, I mean, tell me what you think.

• 22:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, you called it. When, when I see some frontline troops doing something that they shouldn't be doing, sure, they shouldn't be doing that. Whose fault is it that they're doing that? It's easy to say it's their fault, sure. But as leaders, guess what? If, if you have troops, you're responsible for their actions. That's the way it is. That's the way it is. And if you have to understand people well enough, that's why I talk about human nature all the time. You're going to tell me, you're going to take 19, 20, 21, 22-year-old kids from Western Pennsylvania that are reservists, that have very limited, limited military training, and what you're going to do is you're going to take them

• 22:50Jocko Willink?

  and put them in charge of the detainee, a bunch of detainees that they think are terrorists.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  While they're being attacked on a daily basis by terrorists.

• 23:01Jocko Willink?

  If you don't think, if you, if you can't see what could unfold there, you're, you're not having, you don't understand human nature very well. So, what does that mean? As a leader, you're responsible for telling everyone, hey, this, these are the rules, this is what's in place. This is why it's important. If Al Jazeera sees us, and I, I'll use Al Jazeera, and I think they're, they're, and you, you probably, well, I know, you, you probably will understand their arc of, of the way Al Jazeera has.

• 23:33Jocko Willink?

  What Al Jazeera has been, because Al Jazeera kind of started as a, as a sort of, almost like a secular kind of anti like extremist broadcast.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  The way Al Jazeera English still primarily is. I've got Arabic speaking friends who send me over stuff. It's very, very different in the Arab language version.

• 23:55Jocko Willink?

  So, so the, the, at the time, what Al Jazeera was to us was they're going to take whatever we do, and they're going to spin it to anti-American, you know, in an anti-American way. So that was always my kind of like warning to guys. Look, if Al Jazeera sees you doing something, you're, it's going to be, it's going to be a massive, you know, strategic hit. A little tactical move that you make could be a massive negative strategic hit. Negative to, to what goes on in the war. So when those guys are doing that, when those male and female detainee handlers do that, yeah, sure, do they deserve some punishment? Absolutely.

• 24:40Jocko Willink?

  Could that have been prevented and should it have been prevented? It absolutely should have. And I had, you know, we, we were running detainee operations as well. So my SEALs would go and capture someone and bring them back and put them in a, in a temporary holding facility and we would stand watch on them. That's what would happen. This is also not a smart idea. You know, you, you, you, I'm going to go capture you.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Was just shooting.

• 25:06Jocko Willink?

  You're trying to kill us. Now we get a hold of you, we bring you back and now, now we're responsible for your safety and comfort. This, that's not a good plan. This, it's not a good plan. There needs to be a level of detachment there. So, yeah, that's a, that's a leadership issue. And you've got to understand, this goes back to the conversation that we had about, you know, hey, you've got a sadist in your platoon. And you've gotta have that consideration. You've got a, you've got an asshole in your platoon. You know, you've got an asshole, you're, you're, you've got 25 people that are, that are guards at this prisoner. One of them's gonna be an asshole. One of them is gonna say, hey, if I get the chance, I'm gonna slap one of these guys around. Hey, if I get the chance,

• 25:48Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna abuse these people. That's what I'm gonna do. You've got someone on the other end of that spectrum that they under, they'll, they'll get it and they would put a stop to that. And you've got everyone else in the middle. And so when that guy's not, when the good guy's not on watch, this shit happens.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, there, there is that, but I, I tend to think of Abu Ghraib as the, as the culmination of a lot of the bad decisions we talked about yesterday. Not being able to provide security in the country, not having, which leads to not having enough intelligence, which leads to General Abbasid saying, I need more intelligence, go get me actionable intelligence. And so you have all this stuff with, you know, the fourth ID going out there and just doing mass roundups and bringing people in, whole villages that they're bringing in because we gotta, we don't know the difference. We don't have any human intelligence yet. They're all getting sent to Abu Ghraib because we don't have anywhere else to keep them. Abu Ghraib is the prison that is like the symbol of Saddam's brutal power, right? This had execution chambers, torch. This is where you got, did not want to get sent if you were

• 26:44Speaker 01

  under Saddam's regime. We start sending all of these people there, huge number by the, by, by the army's own estimate, 70, 80% of them ended up free of charges, didn't need to be there. They get in there and a lot of people don't know the whole story of Abu Ghraib. They get stuck on the, the grotesque pictures and everything. These reservists from western Pennsylvania, they get sent into this place. It is vastly overcrowded and undermanned to, to, you know, they, they, in, I believe in September of 03, they basically got the number of guards that they were gonna have until the next spring. Meanwhile, the population of the prison doubles and then it doubles again. They don't have the manpower

• 27:26Speaker 01

  to do this. You've got these 18, 19, 20 year old kids who, they walk into this situation and they, people are already being stood on boxes naked by military intelligence. They're already being, you know, pinned up against walls and trussed up like in, in stress positions. This is already going on when they arrive, right? And so I'm, I try to put myself in this situation where...

• 27:51Speaker 01

  You know, yes, you're supposed to disobey an unlawful order, right? If you see something that's going on, there's an open door policy and you're supposed to go on. But if you're, if I'm a 19 year old or 20 year old, I don't know anything about war. I know what I've seen on TV, right? And so I show up the first day and this stuff is already going on. They didn't invent this. It wasn't these little group of guys that, you know, that went completely off the rails and nobody knew about it. It was this dark thing that happened occasionally, like at nighttime. You know, the famous picture where you have the pile of naked guys? That was the screensaver on the computer in the, in the military police office. Everybody knew what was going on. There were times when these kids would go to medics, go to other people and show them pictures and be like, is this authorized? Can I do this?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  And they're like, well, the, the famous picture of Lindy England, the female, who was not supposed to be on the block, by the way. She was dating one of the guys on the block. She's from a completely different area. She's not cleared to be there. Gives you an idea of how the discipline had broken down, right? But she's coming just to hang out with her boyfriend every night and they're goofing around with the prisoners. And there's the famous one where she's walking the naked guy on a leash. So we would end up, uh, we, we ended up in Abu Ghraib with a bunch of people who were mentally ill, right? There wasn't like a bunch of psychiatric hospitals.

• 29:07Jocko Willink?

  The prisoners.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. The prisoners. There weren't a bunch of functional psychiatric, mental health facilities all over Iraq at the time. And so we would be out there and a lot of time, these people who were mentally ill would give our soldiers problems and, you know, uh, we would be like, okay, this guy's a problem. Take him in. And we would take them in and then they would get into the general population.

• 29:25Jocko Willink?

  Just to even clarify that more, when you say give them problems, this is just someone that's not doing what you're telling them to do because they don't understand, they're, they're scared and you're, you're a 22 year old soldier and you look at the guy and go, you know, I, I can't judge what's happening, but this guy's not doing what I tell him to do. But zip him up.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  And we bring the guy in. He's unmanageable in the general population. So we sent him over to the heart site where we actually have individual cells and we put them in there. And, um, they're trying to get this guy. He's spitting on people, this guy in question, the one in that picture. He's spitting on people, he's throwing feces at people. He takes off his own clothes. They didn't strip him. Okay. And he goes and gets a tie strap from a Humvee. And he puts it around his shoulders to like walk this guy over. And the guy goes down on his hands and knees and the strap comes up around his neck. So it looks like a leash. And they're walking him to the place that they're trying to bring him. And he actually, the guy, uh, uh, Grainer, who's like, kind of, he's supposed to be the

• 30:24Speaker 01

  real sadist in the group and he has some sadistic tendencies, there's no question about that. He took that picture and he took it to the medics and he explained the situation of what happened and said, is this, like, this is what happened? Is this okay? And they gave, they said, well, yeah, under the circumstances, you know, I mean, that seems fine. And so, you know, this, this was the environment that these 19, 20, 21-year-old reservists who are not trained to be prison guards are finding themselves in here. And I think one of the other things that blows me away, um, it just blows me away that this is how it is, is, uh, that, you know, the military intelligence folks, the interrogators,

• 31:05Speaker 01

  they wanted to be able to kind of play some good cop, bad cop and, you know, be the, uh, kind of, uh, be able to build a relationship with some of these people they're trying to interrogate in various ways, depending on who they are. And it was the military police who were in charge of kind of setting the conditions in the place and making sure that the prisoners were in a sufficient level of discomfort so that when they went in to be interrogated, um, the military police, uh, the, the military intelligence guys, the interrogators could kind of play that good cop side. And so you have, now, now that is something, you're supposed to walk this fine line between, you know, setting conditions to make people properly uncomfortable and abuse, like that fine line.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  And that is something that should require extraordinary training and discipline, right? That is a hard, hard thing to do, especially when you're talking about unsophisticated 20-year-old reservists who are dealing with jihadis. You're dealing with guys who are, you know, maybe he was a colonel in Saddam's army. And you've got to think of like, what kind of, you know, just adaptable savvy cockroach you've got to be to survive that long, you know, under Saddam and make your way through the system. And now I am a guy who doesn't speak Arabic, and I've got to figure out how to make this guy do what I

• 32:30Speaker 01

  want him to do. And I have no ways to control this guy who's looking at me. He's just not taking me remotely seriously, and I can sense that. And I have no way to control this guy other than force in order to make him respect my authority and comply with what I... They were absolutely not prepared to be in that situation. And I blame the people who put them there and who created the conditions for that to happen. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what group of 20-year-old reservists you could have put into a situation like that that would have handled it well. Would they have done what they did?

• 33:09Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what group. A group that had a good leader. You have a good leader that explains what's going on, these things. An American soldier, reservist, active duty, doesn't matter. You put good leadership over to those individuals, and they will do what they're supposed to do. That's what happens. And I've seen this over and over and over again in my time in the US military, working with soldiers, working with Marines, meeting 18-year-old kids, 20-year-old kids. If you lead them correctly, they will absolutely do what they are supposed to do. If you don't, if you don't, well, then they're going to, they're going to go where nature takes them. And you know, another thing we have to remember

• 33:50Jocko Willink?

  is, and you know, this was my sort of initial reaction, was like, oh, whatever. You know, when I joined the SEAL Teams...

• 34:02Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's a, it was a, it's a very, uh, very violent culture and a very hard culture to be a part of. And, you know, we got hazed, we got, we got hazed significantly and, and that's just the way it was. So every single one of those pictures, I was like, oh yeah, you know, we, we,

• 34:21Speaker 01

  I've been that, I've been that guy on the ground.

• 34:23Jocko Willink?

  You know, I've been that guy. I've been beat up. I've been, been taped up. I've been hung up. I've been all those things. Um, you know, that, that's, that's normal every day. And then you take it one step further. You look at the whole Navy, uh, oh, when I went through the shell back ceremony, uh, not quite as bad as a SEAL team hazing, but it was a big authorized hazing. And then I was like, oh, what about SERE school? Well, what, what happened to me at SERE school? Oh, guess what they're doing to you in SERE school? They're slapping you around, you know, you're, you're naked, you're, you're being abused. That's the way it is. You're freezing. Um, they're putting you in stress positions. It's all the same stuff. So from my, my, you know, my, my initial reaction was like, yeah, well, whatever.

• 35:08Jocko Willink?

  These are, these are terrorists. And by the way, you, you contrast that against the fact that Zarqawi is sawing people's heads off. Right? And I'm like, wait a second, the enemy is sawing people's heads off? And I'm supposed to be mad at this reservist because she walked a guy around with a leash? Look, that's, that's, and that, and you know what? That is actually the reality. That, that's the reality. That's the reality of what happened.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Well, when you compare what was going on in there to what was going on in there under, in that same facility under Saddam.

• 35:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  A year and a half before.

• 35:45Jocko Willink?

  And here's the deal, even though that's the reality of what happened, it didn't matter. It didn't matter. Everything I just said had no, had no, it did nothing to paint, to clean up the, the picture that got put out by the insurgent and the, the Al Jazeera media. And really, and our own media that posted these pictures over and over again with no explanations. And, and you know, you show that to an Iraqi, this is what the Americans are doing to us. In Abu Ghraib. In Abu Ghraib, this is absolutely what this, this added, this is why I said on the last

• 36:23Jocko Willink?

  episode, this is what added so much fuel to the fire that it became, yeah, this is, this is, this is a turning point. And that is why, from a leadership perspective, everybody on your team has to understand that their tactical decisions can have strategic impacts. And that is an example I use all the time at Echelon Front of a tactical decision that had strategic impact on an entire war. That, that's exactly, like, you know, you want to look at Bremer, you want to talk about, you know, disbanding the Iraqi police and the Iraqi military? Yeah, that's a strategic blunder and it had strategic implications.

• 37:05Jocko Willink?

  But this is a tactical blunder committed by frontline troops, E3s and E4s, that had a massive strategic negative impact on the war. There's a lesson to be learned from that all day long. Also, and I'll go back and forth with people on this as well. You know, how could I have been responsible if I was the, if I was the, if I was the company commander, if I was the battalion commander, if I was in charge of a person, how can I be responsible for what those frontline troops do? And that right there is just where everything falls apart. Because the minute you have people saying, hey, it's not my responsibility what the frontline troops do, this is the complete wrong answer. It's the complete

• 37:48Jocko Willink?

  wrong answer. You have to do the proper training, you have to give them the proper understanding of what the mission is, you have to give them an understanding of what the impact of their mission is, what the parameters of it, they have to understand. You as a leader are absolutely responsible for that. And when we fail to lead, this is the kind of thing that happens.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  I agree, and I agree that it was ugly when people started scrambling for cover rather than taking responsibility after it happened. Although there's evidence that they were getting political pressure put on them to do that, remember, this is an election year and, I mean, to me, like, the idea that nobody in the upper echelon of the Defense Department resigned their position over Abu Ghraib just blows me away, but the Bush administration was in a point where we're in the middle of a close election. This, we have to just put this on, you know, these E2s and E3s and E4s on the ground and, like, wash our hands of this, when there was a lieutenant colonel in the prison who knew what was going on, there were JAG officers who came through that prison and, you know, there was an incident where Grainer, that, you know, the main, kind of the main ringleader

• 38:54Speaker 01

  guy, he had this game where he would have hooded prisoners and he would like to just jokingly kind of walk them around and get them disoriented and then walk them into a wall. And one of them got a bloody nose, and so, you know, medics saw it and cleaned him up and everything, and they decided they needed to counsel Grainer over, give him a counseling shit, right? And now, normally, for non-military people out there, a counseling shit is like sort of a reprimand, right? We have this counseling shit, it's been, you know, it's been printed in newspapers and stuff, it's not at all. It just kind of says like, hey, you're doing a great job, if you need any kind of clarification on the rules or anything, or if you're under too much stress, make sure you talk to us, dah dah dah dah dah, but keep up the great work. And, you know, this was after a guy had just walked a prisoner into a wall and made his

• 39:38Speaker 01

  nose bleed, which, again, like, in the context of Al Qaeda, in the context of Saddam is nothing.

• 39:44Jocko Willink?

  In the context of being a new guy in a SEAL platoon.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:46Jocko Willink?

  You're like, if I got away with just a bloody nose and walk into a wall, I'd be pretty stoked.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  So the fact that, the fact that that was your initial reaction, this is interesting, the fact that that was your kind of initial reaction, and I think it was a lot of people's initial reaction, it's like, well, okay, yeah, but we're still not them. It tells me, though, that at this point in the war... We still did not realize that we were fighting, we were running a counter insurgency.

• 40:11Jocko Willink?

  I, I think you're, you're right that we didn't realize it. I don't think we were. I think that this is what turned, this is what, this is what solidified the insurgency.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:21Jocko Willink?

  This, this is what turned it from, hey, some Iraqis that, you know, you take, you take 20 Iraqis that the month prior still had that American flag in their back pocket for when the, when the tide changed, all of a sudden they were like, ah, no. And, and, you know, 10 of those 20 threw that American flag away at that point.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  I found it interesting. Uh, somebody, I've heard somebody say one time, I don't remember if it was in the context of Abu Ghraib or not, they were talking about, you know,

• 40:52Speaker 01

  you don't need, uh, you don't need sadists for something like this to happen. You have a bunch of inexperienced people under extraordinary stress who are not trained to handle the situation that they're in. Um, and from, even from the political level, from the administration, because it's in the press, people are watching the news that there's a debate going on, should torture be allowed? Where should, should we move the definition of torture over a little bit or not? So that's in the air, that there's some permissiveness going on. They walk into a situation where everything that we saw in those pictures was already happening and they're told, this is what military intelligence wants. Well, I'm an E2, I just showed up to the war. Am I going to be like, well, I don't know any better. I'll say, okay, I,

• 41:34Speaker 01

  I know what I've seen in movies and on TV, but I guess this is real war and this is how real war actually is. So I'm not going to say anything. Um, and they, they, they get into that situation, um, but it's not, it's, you, you don't have to have people ordered to do it. You don't have to have, um, you know, uh, all you need is a certain amount of permissiveness. And the way the person put it was, if you think there was, uh, if, imagine if there was a bar in San Diego or Los Angeles where it was just, you could go in there and there was a person and you could just go punch them and insult them and whatever. So you get, get done with work and you could just go home and have a beer. Or you and your buddies, you had a stressful day and you go in there, you could slap this guy around and not everybody would do it, but that place wouldn't be empty.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  It wouldn't be empty. And just, just by making it allowed and not having, I mean, there's a reason that the army is, that the military is an institution of discipline, right? Is you are gearing people up to go face an extraordinarily difficult task, which involves killing and being killed. Nineteen-year-old kids who, who were working at a, at a, at a mechanic's garage four months ago, you know? And you have to get them in the mindset that they can deal with killing somebody and with people trying to kill them and with their friends being killed. And where this is not a distant reality, where, you know, smart bombs are taking out Iraqi high-value targets while we're kind of over here in Kuwait.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Abu Ghraib is getting hit with mortars all the time. And so it's right there going on. And the people that they're processing into this prison, they're being told, "These are the people who are firing those at you. These are the people who, if they overrun this prison, or if they get loose, and there's like a prison break or something, we'll chop your head off without a second thought." And that was true of some of them, right? And these nineteen-year-olds have to figure out how to be the authority figure in a situation like that. And it is just, you know, all of the decisions from, you know, this is like, the reason I said it, you know, the decision to go in with too few troops against the advice of the military, so that we couldn't control the country and we didn't have the resources. All of those decisions are why those kids ended up in that place

• 43:48Speaker 01

  under those conditions, you know?

• 43:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's also, again, it's a lack of understanding of human nature.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:55Jocko Willink?

  Right? What's that, what's the famous experiment at Stanford where they, you know?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  The prison experiment?

• 44:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the Stanford prison experiment, right? Does, does everyone not know that? If you put people into a position of authority, they're gonna start to abuse their power. And now you set the conditions like you just said. These are, these are terrorists. In my mind, you know, these are terrorists and I'm a good guy, they're bad guys. And I'm being told actually to make sure they're uncomfortable. Cool, I got this. Where do you think that's gonna end up? Where do you think that's gonna end up?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Especially if you're not trained. I mean, just think about like, if you're in charge, say the Stanford prison experiment, you don't need sadism, right, to, to, to explain it. Like, just, "I'm in an authority position. There's a person over there on the other side who's telling me to fuck off. And now I gotta figure out how to make him compliant." Now, there's ways to do it. But you gotta be pretty sophisticated to do that, to do it without resorting to force or coercion. You can do it, but you gotta be pretty sophisticated, you know, you gotta be kind of an alpha personality. You have to have ways to do it. They were not, they were not given any of those tools. They were just told, be the man, control these people, these are terrorists. And when these people got noncompliant, they don't have any tools to handle these guys except for force and humiliation. And those are the tools that

• 45:08Speaker 01

  they have, you know? And it was just, it was, it was an awful, awful situation when it happened. And, and it became pretty clear, very shortly after that, that we were looking at something like an insurgency.

• 45:24Jocko Willink?

  As I said, in my estimation, that event and the way that it got portrayed, absolutely solidified the insurgency without, without a doubt in my mind. And if you kind of look at the time, look, there was, there was, the insurgency was starting to gel a little bit, right? A little bit, you know, you had pockets here, you had pockets there, you know, you were just talking about what was happening in Najaf, what was happening in Sadr City, what was happening in Fallujah, like you had stuff going on. But there were still Iraqis that were like, you know, I hope the Americans can pull this off. And when that happened, yeah, all that, all those little pieces that were floating around, all of a sudden started to gel.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Were you, you know, you had been taking out a lot of criminals, gangsters, people like that during your first tour. Had you seen enough by that point that when the Nick Berg tape came out in May of 2004, that that did not surprise you? Did you already have an idea of that these are the people we were kind of dealing with?

• 46:35Jocko Willink?

  I think that the Fallujah Bridge, that was the, that, that, to me was the first indicator of, okay, I see where this is going. And then Nick Berg was an exclamation point on that.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  When you, I mean, you were processing back probably by that point to start your tours, the Admiral's aide, I mean, were you just like, screw that, send me back, like turn me loose on these people?

• 47:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, it was really hard. The, it was, it was a real, it was a, when I, when I was... When I was pleading with my boss to plead with his boss, to plead with his boss, to let us go to Fallujah and, and, and help in that situation and we got stood down, that was a hard pill for me to swallow. I was very, I was very disappointed a- about that, you know, I was very disappointed about that and it kind of left a mark and yeah, that was, that was a hard, that was a hard one, you know, um, and actually

• 47:46Jocko Willink?

  those guys, okay, so one of them, Scott Halvston was a, was a SEAL and those guys had come to my compound. We, we stayed in a compound in, in Baghdad.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Those contractors?

• 48:02Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 48:04Jocko Willink?

  Those contractors came to my compound and they had kind of just shown up. Um, at least that's the impression that I got was that they had just shown up. And so we had a conversation with them and I remember like, I was like talking with some of them and remember I said my, um, my platoon chief was a, like an off-road guy? And, and so he was all dialed on vehicles and, and so we're sitting there talking to him. And I remember asking him, or either that or it was probably my chief asked him because he was, had the mindset of vehicles and he was like, do you guys have run flats? Cause they had these armored, these armored, um, like Ford Explorers, which was kind of what everyone was driving.

• 48:49Jocko Willink?

  The armored Ford Explorers were crap. Um, they, they, they didn't, all they did was add armor. Like the, the minimum kind of armor, but there was no adjustments to the suspension. So they were just kind of crap. And I remember my platoon chief asking, I was pretty sure it was him saying, do you guys have run flats? Meaning if you get a flat tire, can you keep going? And their answer was no. And so, you know, you had, you kind of had a bad feeling. And this is now that when you're asking me this question, which you, you seem to want to know if I sensed the escalation. This is one of the things where, as I think back on it, that I, this is where we knew

• 49:33Jocko Willink?

  things were escalating because we were looking at these guys saying, hey, do you guys have run flats? Because if you're going into fluke, we knew where they were going.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they got ambushed.

• 49:43Jocko Willink?

  And they got ambushed. And I'll have to, I'll have to actually go back and ask my platoon chief if it was that crew, but I'm almost positive. And again, forgive my memory, man. This is, this is.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Lots happened between now and then.

• 49:55Jocko Willink?

  Lots happened between, between now and then. And I'm glad we're talking about it. But there was contractors that were not prepared. And three months prior, you could run around in Baghdad, however you wanted to, and you'd be fine. Two months prior, you'd be running around in Baghdad. You might want to check yourself a little bit. You know, starting to get into March, you'd be like, mm, okay, we need to think about this. Now, in April, we're looking at these guys going, do you have run flats in case you get a flat tire? Because if you get a flat tire, you, you lose your mobility, you're going to lose your survivability. So that is what, that is the kind of thing that we were thinking

• 50:38Jocko Willink?

  about. And then seeing those guys, you know, strung up from the bridges, from the bridge, and then Nick Berg, it was like, okay, yeah, this is, this is, this is going to get worse.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  That's the only, uh, that's the only one of those videos I've watched. I made myself watch the Nick Berg one when it first came out. And I, after that, I was like, I, I don't need to watch another one. I've seen it. Um, I thought about watching the Foley one when it came out, but, um,

• 51:10Speaker 01

  You know, Nick Berg, by all accounts, is a great kid. He's a little eccentric and you know who he reminds me of in certain ways? If you've ever read the book or seen the movie Into the Wild about Chris McCandless. He kind of reminds me of that guy where he's a little bit naive, maybe. He's idealistic. Just like those contractors, though, who had no idea, apparently, what country they were in. And a lot of people didn't yet.

• 51:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was another thing, like you'd see contractors. And at this point, look, I'm not, we were by no means like battle hardened, you know, guys because our first deployment, we got in a few firefights.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Playing the game on God mode.

• 51:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we, but we had done a lot of operations and we were good. We were good at what we were doing. Like when you saw our convoy, you know, when you saw our convoy maneuver through the streets, we were really good. You know, if we had a flat tire, we looked like a NASCAR pit crew, you know, again, my platoon chief, you know, running guys through drills, my, my leading petty officer, running guys through drills, the guys in the platoons just locked on. And

• 52:16Jocko Willink?

  so we, you know, we, like I said, we weren't battle hardened, but we'd done a lot of operations. And we'd see, it's like the classic, you know, and I talked about this with some of the SOG guys I've had on my podcast, or even just any of the Vietnam guys, that classic scene that you see in the movies of the new guy getting off the plane in Saigon and, you know, with his brand new clean camis on and, you know, a fresh haircut and freshly shaven.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Creedence playing in the background.

• 52:44Jocko Willink?

  Creedence playing in the background. And then, you know, who does he come across? He comes across the long haired, hardened, thousand yard stare, gear totally trashed, not even trashed, but broken in. I remember looking at these contractors and, you know, they got brand new web gear. They got brand, you know, they got brand new setup. You can tell that they haven't worn it very much. You know, they might've done some shooting drills or whatever. So you're, you're, you're a little bit nervous when you see guys like that. And

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Well, this is a different time too. But as you get into 08, 09, a lot of those contractors, these are former special ops guys. These are a bunch of guys with experience a lot of the time.

• 53:23Jocko Willink?

  Totally. These contractors, a lot of these contractors were guys that had been in. You know, been in the military, been in the SEAL teams, been in the, you know, been to Green Beret or whatever.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  In oh four, how much experience could they have had?

• 53:35Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, they were, they were a Green Beret in the nineties. They were a SEAL in, you know, nineteen eighty seven.

• 53:44Jocko Willink?

  You know, I, I, I mean, I met, I had lunch with guys. I remember having lunch with guys, you know, like teen guys, you know, and they're, they're, they're your bros. And they're fired up to be over there because, you know, as much as I talked about wanting to be in combat and had the luck of going, getting to be in combat, and I talked about guys that had been in for thirty years that never were. Well, those guys got out and all of a sudden, an opportunity came for them to lock and load their weapons and go do God's work. And they took that opportunity. But, you know, it's, I met plenty of guys, especially because this is the, this is the actual time, you know, this is the time when Blackwater and the rest of the, the rest of the contracting gigs.

• 54:24Jocko Willink?

  You know, this is like twelve hundred, fifteen hundred bucks a day. That's how, that's what the demand signal was. And the demand signal was, we want guys that were special operations, you know, because they had, at least have more training. And it was, you know, you fast forward three, four years and it was like, hey, we'll take pretty much anybody.

• 54:46Jocko Willink?

  Especially because pretty much anybody, if you were in the military, you know, you had run convoys and you knew how to handle yourself.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  It, it feels like with contractors, the way you're describing it, that they, it doesn't sound like they had the same kind of

• 55:03Speaker 01

  overarching leadership structure that was like looking after them, that they had like a looser leadership structure that, I mean, the, the, the idea that they were going into Fallujah with, you know, when they couldn't run flat and just all that, like, who's making that decision to allow them to do something like that?

• 55:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was that experience for me that, you know, fifteen hundred bucks a day, you couldn't have given me enough money to take those jobs because.

• 55:29Jocko Willink?

  I was just looking at him going, man, like I'm, I, you know, I'm literally standing there looking at a guy that has, you know, whatever, whatever dumb gear setup he had where you're looking at, you know, he's got his, he's gonna get in a vehicle and he's got his pistol like, you know, whatever in a position where he's never gonna be able to get that thing out. Or whatever dumb thing they had and you're looking at him thinking like, that sucks. And then you're looking at, you know, over at one of, one of my guys, who has everything completely dialed in, can make things happen, you know, immediately. You know, I, I, my assistant platoon commander at the time was just one of those kinda, kinda gear, gear heads, you know, and everything he was testing all the time. And I'm looking at him going, you know, this guy,

• 56:12Jocko Willink?

  you know, my guy is so eminently prepared. And I'm looking at this contractor going, sheesh. And what kind of comms do you guys have? You know, there's a question that I'm gonna ask, right? That's, you know, my, my platoon chief is gonna go, do you have run flats? I'm gonna say, hey, what kind of comms do you have? Cause I was a, I was a radioman. So in a SEAL platoon, you know, that was how I was raised. And, and I'm, I'm the guy that's asking, what kind of comms do you have? And they, you know, you get the response of, oh, we have inter-squad radios. For, you know, the two cars so we can talk to each other. Oh, what are you gonna do if you get in trouble? Well, we have, what was it?

• 56:53Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, whatever sat phone, you know, satellite, civilian satellite communication thing. Who are you gonna call? You see what I'm, you see what I'm going with this? This is just all bad. It's all bad. And that's why, you know, when you, when we saw that unfold, it was, you know, it was horrible to see. It was, it was horrible to see. And it caught them off guard. Because contractors had been running around the country doing all kinds of work, good work. Good work, yeah. Good work, providing security, you know, running convoys for people. They were, they were doing good work. And, and necessary work. And saving, you know, uh, the government money. Because even though those guys are getting paid 1,500 bucks a day,

• 57:37Jocko Willink?

  at the end of the day, that's way cheaper than hiring or than bringing, you know, bringing in an enlisted man to go through the training and be on the VA for the rest of his life. Like there's a, there's a cost benefit to it. And there's a cost benefit to them because they have the opportunity to make money. So they were doing good work.

• 57:55Jocko Willink?

  But when things started to escalate and you're and you know if you're Blackwater and you're bringing in contractors, you know, you're bringing in contractors in in whatever four or five months earlier, hey, give them a little training, cool, go run a convoy, they put their military experience with their little training they just got, they got a couple of guys that have a little experience, you're good to go, they make it happen. You fast forward to sending them into Fallujah and you see the results.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, people didn't have, they didn't have an idea of what kind of war we were in yet, and I mean, Nick Berg is a perfect example of that, I mean, he was a, you know, he would have gone to Kosovo to do what he did, so he was 26 years old, and he had a business, he was kind of an adventurous kid, he'd do cross-country bike rides, that kind of thing, and he had a business where he would fix high-rise like communications and transmission equipment, he would dangle 600 feet up in the air and do repairs, electrician repairs, and he was good at it, and he wanted to start his own business, he had actually done some work in Kenya before, where he would go down and he would kind of do humanitarian work and also like pursue some business opportunities, he's in his mid-20s, just kind of fascinating kid, most people aren't doing that in their mid-20s, so he would have gone to Kosovo

• 59:05Speaker 01

  and done something like that, and you know, the bad guys would have come across him there. They might have held him for a while, they might have, he might have, you know, caught a stray bullet or something like that, but they weren't just looking for Americans, and if they find you, they're going to kill you and publicize it, it was just a different kind of, it was a different kind of war and a different kind of enemy, and I think people didn't realize that that was the kind of war we were in yet, and there's no mistaking it after that Nick Berg tape came out, watching Zarqawi read that statement and then murder him himself in such a grisly way, and it took so long.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  That especially with it coming right after Abu Ghraib, I think people just started to get a very dark view of the war. And things only started to deteriorate in the country in many ways from then because this, I'm pretty sure that this is around the time when we didn't really exactly know what we were dealing with. We didn't exactly know who this enemy was or where they were. And so we just kind of pulled back. It was an election year. We didn't want a lot of casualties and we just started to pull back into our bases and kind of did this, you know, Petraeus called it drive by counter insurgency where we're just racing our convoys through an area and going back to our bases.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  And meanwhile, wide swaths of the country are just being taken over by Al Qaeda. And, um, you know, there was a, uh, well, there was a strategic decision that was made, arguably for what were a lot of political reasons, having to do with domestic politics. And also, I think because we just didn't, we didn't expect to be in this war. This is not the war that we planned for. We had people, right, just like this happens in a lot of wars, we had people who knew what kind of war this was and they were ready to fight this war. You know, Petraeus had been up by himself in Mosul with the 101st all this time. Mosul, for anybody who doesn't know the map of Iraq, is way, way, way up in the north,

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  far away. So he had some level of autonomy from what was going on in Baghdad and everything. And this is a guy with a PhD who literally wrote the book, right, on counter insurgency. And he, and he's the man. I mean, he knows what he's talking about. He's studied this stuff. And he was handling Mosul in a very different way. He understood the hearts and minds aspect. He understood the fact that we have to win over this population if we're going to actually, you know, provide any stability and build something here. And, you know, the particular enemy that we had, Al Qaeda, so dark. Forget about flying planes into buildings, okay? I mean, that was an evil act and everything, but something like that, I can honestly just put it as a, you know what, this is a terrorist action, but they're attacking a symbol of

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  American power for their sort of broad strategic reasons, and fine. The kind of interpersonal savagery that Al Qaeda in Iraq was engaging in, to the point where eventually, you know, Osama bin Laden said, we need to pull back from these guys, right? That they gave us this opportunity, it would have been just on a silver platter to say to the Iraqi people, "Look, this is your other option. We're the good guys here. We're gonna make mistakes, some of our soldiers are gonna do some bad things, but, you know, Saddam was here, and now these are your other options. We're your best option here." And, you know, because of Abu Ghraib, and because we had this lack of understanding,

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  and we were trying to make up for those early mistakes for a couple of years, right? We just, it took three years, until 2006, you know, before we really started to put some people in charge who knew what was going on, and were ready to take action, and take risks, you know? And that's, we're gonna get into that in the next episode here. But I want to talk about like, just what a huge gamble Ramadi was, and how, you know, people think the American military is like, "Well, it's really just a matter of focus." Like, as soon as we decide we wanna go do something, you know, we might be, we might be making bad decisions for political reasons, we might have a muddled mission, or whatever, but if we actually decide to go do something, then it's over, and we'll just go do it, right?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  At the time, it was, there were people who thought the Ramadi mission was suicidal, that there was no way you guys were gonna pull that off. And there was so much writing on it, because if you hadn't pulled it off, and it hadn't gone the way that it went, I mean, the surge wouldn't have happened. No. You know, and as you're back home, and you're watching the news, I mean, you must have had, and hearing stories from guys who were coming back, and guys who were over there, you must have had sort of this creeping understanding coming up, that like, when you go back, A, you're going back, and B, when you go back, like, it's gonna be on.

• 1:04:12Jocko Willink?

  Let's talk about that on the next episode, because there's a whole story behind that.

• 1:04:20Jocko Willink?

  Um, well, if you're listening to this podcast on the Jocko podcast feed, it's now on its own feed as well. And eventually we'll separate those. So if you want to hear these types of stories, subscribe to this podcast if you want to listen to it. You can also check out our other podcasts. I have a podcast called Jocko Podcast, the Warrior Kid Podcast as well. And then I have a more lighthearted podcast called Grounded. And Daryl has a not so lighthearted podcast called Marger Made. And if you want to support any and all of these podcasts, you

• 1:04:59Jocko Willink?

  can do so by getting some gear from Jocko Store or from OriginMaine.com. Thanks for listening as things unravel. This is Jocko and Daryl. Out.