149: Fields of Fire. James and Jim Webb. United States Marine Corps.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:08:12 - Jim Webb Sr. 2:58:26 - Jim Webb Jr. 3:18:59 - How to Stay on The Path. 3:49:31 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 149 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:13Jocko Willink?

  All my life I've waited for this.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  Now I've joined you and your losses are a strength to me.

• 0:23Jocko Willink?

  I ache. And yet I know that Alec, wretched with pain on the dust road that went to Corinth.

• 0:32Jocko Willink?

  I breathe the dust. And yet I know that grandpa breathed the gas that made a hero out of Pershing.

• 0:42Jocko Willink?

  I flinch when bullets tear the air in angry rents.

• 0:48Jocko Willink?

  And yet I know that father and three farmer boys at Pickett's Charge felt a cutting edge that dropped them dead.

• 1:01Jocko Willink?

  How can I be bitter?

• 1:04Jocko Willink?

  You are my strength, you ghosts.

• 1:10Jocko Willink?

  And I have learned those things, those esoteric skills and knowledges that mark me as one of you. That loose-bowled piles of shit. Too much shit from overeating plopped randomly around the outer dykes of a ville mean trouble.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  Catching the aroma, seeing the groupings, watching flies dance lazily, rejoicing in their latest fetid morsel that bends the low grass in a muddy glob like a bomb of cow dung. Trouble.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  I can tell from the crack of a rifle, shot. The type of weapon fired and what direction the bullet is traveling.

• 1:56Jocko Willink?

  I can listen to a mortar pop and know its size, how far away it is.

• 2:01Jocko Willink?

  I know instinctively when I should prep a tree line with artillery before I move into it.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  I know which draws and fields should be crossed on line, which should be assaulted, and which are safe to cross in column.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  I know where to place my men when we stop and form a perimeter.

• 2:22Jocko Willink?

  I can shoot a rifle and throw a grenade and direct air and artillery onto any target under any circumstances.

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  I can dress any type of wound. I have dressed all types of wounds. Watered protruding intestines with my canteen to keep them from cracking under sunbake. Patched sucking chests with plastic. Tied off stumps with field expedient tourniquets.

• 2:48Jocko Willink?

  I can call in medevac helicopters, talk them, cajole them, dare them into any zone.

• 2:56Jocko Willink?

  I do these things, experience these things repeatedly, daily.

• 3:02Jocko Willink?

  Their terrors and miseries are so compelling and yet so regular that I have ascended to a high emotion that is nonetheless a crusted numbness.

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  I am an automaton bent on survival, agent and prisoner of my misery.

• 3:22Jocko Willink?

  How terribly exciting.

• 3:26Jocko Willink?

  And how, to what purpose will these skills serve me when this madness ends?

• 3:33Jocko Willink?

  What lies on the other side of all this?

• 3:38Jocko Willink?

  It frightens me. I haven't thought about it. I haven't prepared for it.

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  I am so good, so ready for these things that were my birthright.

• 3:52Jocko Willink?

  I do not enjoy them.

• 3:56Jocko Willink?

  I know they have warped me, but it will be so hard to deal with a life empty of them.

• 4:05Jocko Willink?

  And there are the daily sufferings. You ghosts have known them, but who else?

• 4:14Jocko Willink?

  I can sleep in the rain, wrapped inside my poncho, listening to the drops beat on the rubber like small explosions, then feel the water pour into rivulets inside my poncho, soaking me as I lie in the mud.

• 4:29Jocko Willink?

  I can live in the dirt. Sit and lie and sleep in the dirt. It is my chair and my bed, my floor and my walls, this clay.

• 4:43Jocko Willink?

  And like all of you, I have endured diarrhea as only an animal should endure it, squatting a yard off the trail and relieving myself unceremoniously, naturally, animali. Depravations of food, festering open sores, worms, heat, aching crotch that nags for fulfillment, any emptying hole that will relieve it.

• 5:14Jocko Willink?

  Who appreciates my sufferings?

• 5:19Jocko Willink?

  Who do I suffer for?

• 5:26Jocko Willink?

  And that, right there is an excerpt from a book

• 5:32Jocko Willink?

  that is called Fields of Fire, and it was written after the Vietnam War by a Marine who served there.

• 5:41Jocko Willink?

  And this book paints a picture of of combat, and in fact, it actually does more than that because a picture,

• 5:50Jocko Willink?

  I know a picture is supposed to paint a thousand words or say a thousand words, but pictures don't always properly convey thoughts and emotions.

• 6:01Jocko Willink?

  You need words to make that happen, and this book really captures all of it: horror, fear, disgust, love, hate, indifference, the chaos of combat, the sorrow of loss, heroism.

• 6:19Jocko Willink?

  And of course, in all that, human nature.

• 6:24Jocko Willink?

  And

• 6:26Jocko Willink?

  as I always say about this podcast, while yes, it is about war, and it's about leadership, and it's about atrocities, and it's about struggle, it is, most importantly, it's about human nature. And on top of that, the incredible power of the human will. And this book, Fields of Fire, gives us a very close examination of human nature in all of its glory.

• 6:53Jocko Willink?

  And of course, in all of its horror as well. And the book was written by a man by the name of James Webb, who was a Marine officer in Vietnam, recipient of the Navy Cross, former Secretary of the Navy, former Senator from the great state of Virginia.

• 7:13Jocko Willink?

  He's written a bunch of other books, ten, I believe. He's written and produced movies, all kinds of stuff. On top of that, he has five children, if I'm correct. One of those children, Jim, also served in the Marine Corps. And it was actually, whose time in Ramadi overlapped with my time in Ramadi, where he served as a, as an O311 Rifleman, as a member of the 16 Marines, and also as a radioman in Stapleton.

• 7:47Jocko Willink?

  So, it's awesome to read these books and know their history. And it's even more awesome and an absolute honor to have with us here today, the author of the book Fields of Fire,

• 8:04Jocko Willink?

  and also his son. So, sir, thank you for coming. Jim, thank you for coming. Thank you. Thank you for having us. I was kind of wondering, because you, you know, James and Jim, and I decided, when I was trying to figure out what to call you guys, I figured I'd call you Young Jim Jim, and I just keep calling you sir. Just call me Jim and call him Young Jim. How's that? It's easier. So, uh, yeah, I, I can't thank you guys enough for, for coming all, for coming all the way out here from the East Coast and, and to come on this and, um, for me to revisit Fields of Fire, which is just a, a, a book, and we'll, we'll get into that a little bit later. It's an iconic book about, not just the Vietnam War,

• 8:49Jocko Willink?

  but really about war and, and the, the wave laid it out. And again, we'll, we'll get into that a little bit.

• 8:55Jocko Willink?

  But I also wanted to talk to you and really get some of your backstory as well. And your upbringing, you know, we always try and start with the guests, kind of talking about where they came from and what their background was. And you have a lot of that actually laid out in your memoir. So I was gonna ask if it's cool to call this a memoir, but there it says it on the cover, a memoir. I Heard My Country Calling. And I guess one little section of this that stuck out at me. And I think, you know, obviously we'll let you expand on it, but I'm going to the book. So again, this book is called, I Heard My Country Calling. And here we go, back to the book. When it hurts, just grit your teeth and take it.

• 9:40Jocko Willink?

  Don't you ever back down. Never start a fight, but if somebody else does, never run away. If you run from a bully, you will never stop running. But if you fight, he won't risk coming back at you again. Stand up, fight back, mark him. Give him something to remember every morning when he looks in the mirror. Then even if you lose, you win. And by the way, if you ever run from a fight, I will personally beat your ass. And you go on. My father was not exactly a mellow guy. He did not spare the rod, but he taught me early that there is no substitute for moral courage, whatever the cost.

• 10:23Jocko Willink?

  And that the ultimate duty of every leader is to take care of the people who rely on him when otherwise they would be forgotten or abandoned. Courage in the face of those above you and loyalty to those below you were my father's inalterable standards. The only true way to measure the worth of another human being. So, there you go. Those are some, those are some standards your dad laid out for you.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  He was a tough guy. He was a tough guy. You know, listening to you read the excerpt from Fields of Fire, I was just thinking about how long it has been and the journey that I've had since I wrote those words. In learning, I think we were talking about this last night. Learning how to write by writing this novel, writing a novel was an act of will for a lot of different reasons. And

• 11:19Speaker 01

  One of the things when, when I think about growing up and our family was that my dad was a leader, more than anything, he was a leader and, you know, bit, different families have different conversations when, when you're sitting around the dinner table, but his was always, you know, he would talk about different issues, but it was always, how do you lead? How do you motivate people? One of his slogans was, you can make people do something, or you can make people want to do something. And so, in a nutshell, you know, learning from him, you know, he, he was a career military person. He enlisted in World War II, became

• 12:01Speaker 01

  a bomber pilot, B-17, B-29, and was in Berlin airlift when I was very young and was transitioning into jets for the Korean War and the air pressure in the cockpit blew out, the jet blew, blew his eardrums out, he got grounded. I'll never forget that day when he came home, when he, he couldn't fly anymore. We were getting ready for him to walk into the door and my mom says, "They took your dad's wings away. Don't ever mention it." He walked in and he was still wearing his wings. You know, once you qualify them, you don't take off. And so, first thing I said to him was, "Hey dad, you, they let you keep your wings." He said, "Go upstairs." But then he was a pioneer in the missile program, still didn't have a college degree,

• 12:44Speaker 01

  put the first Atlas in for the Air Force. And one of the, one of the great things to observe as a teenager was when they gave him the command of an Atlas Thor Scout Junior Missile Squadron, that the success rate on the Atlas at this time out in Vandenberg, we had opened up Vandenberg, it was an 85,000 acre wilderness when I first went out there in the eighth grade. But the success rate in that squadron was 11% and he made it 100%, 12 out of 12 successful launches. And I'd go with him out to the, the pads, you know, I'd run out in 16, 17 and, and watch how he dealt with his, his people.

• 13:23Jocko Willink?

  You, wait, you just trumped, because I always talk about how I bring my, I used to bring my son out to the training grounds and let him shoot machine guns and stuff, but you, your dad brought you out and let you shoot missiles.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Let me watch.

• 13:32Jocko Willink?

  You just, you just trumped me as the dad.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  You know, you could, back then, you know, I could go sit a, sit in a blockhouse like a thousand yards away from where one of these Atlas was going up. But watching how he treated his people and on a, you know, he'd been deployed a lot. When he went back into the, he got riffed at the end of World War II because he didn't have a college degree. When they brought him back in, he was either deployed or stationed at bases that did not have military housing for three and a half years. And we were up in St. Joe, Missouri, where I was born. My father's family had come in from the Appalachian Mountains and ended up in St. Joe. My mother was from East Arkansas. She had a very tough life, early life. Three of her seven siblings had died of childhood disease, the kinds of things you don't even

• 14:19Speaker 01

  see anymore, like her sister that was nearest to her died of typhoid fever. When's the last time we've seen an American with typhoid fever? So, we were up in St. Joe, Missouri. My mother had four kids by the time she was 24 years old. And my dad was gone and she didn't know hardly anybody in St. Joe, Missouri. We didn't have these family assistance programs like they do now. And it's been one of the great privileges of my life to try to put those into, into our military. So, my grandmother moved in. She, she was living out in Arkansas, I mean, from Arkansas to California and came back up and lived with us for several years. And there was an iron hand in the house.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  But, you know, my dad would come back, he'd leave Friday night, get off work at, at one point, but Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, drive 380 miles one way every weekend, no interstates, you know, drive all night, Friday night, show up. We never knew what time Saturday morning, but he'd be in there with, with my mom Saturday morning. Raise hell. Friday afternoon, get in, get in the car and drive back. But his example...

• 15:28Jocko Willink?

  Taught me more about the axioms of leadership than anything I learned anywhere else and being able to apply it in the Marine Corps, which, you know, was one of the great prides of my life, was really an extension of what he'd put on the table day in, a day out. And, you know, like Jim got to know, son Jim, got to know, you know, his grandfather, my dad, very well. We spent a lot of time fishing, hunting. We're an outdoor family. And we've had the same kind of few thousand hours of discussions, I think.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  I mean, you could very easily say that the passage you read would qualify as the 11th commandment in our household growing up. It was passed down to him and then passed down to me. Very, very, very simply, never walk away from a fight. Never start a fight, but never walk away from one, never quit. And you'll be judged how you treat those around you. And it's, it's, it's, it's been one of those things I've kept with me my entire life. And it's, I was lucky to have that kind of formative influence at a very young age. And I love the Marine Corps myself, but everything I've learned about leadership is from him and being around his platoon growing up. And it's absolute blessing.

• 16:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's awesome. I know. And we talked about this a little bit last night because I would have guys that are concerned that, hey, I'm not around and I got, you know, two kids and I'm doing another deployment. And, and you know, I always would tell guys, look, guys have been, I don't know what you call it in, you know, Viking years or whatever, but I don't know if they called it a deployment back then, but guys have been going on deployment and leaving their families for thousands and thousands of years. And, and that to me is an example. It's, it's that you might not be there to directly influence your kid on a day to day basis, but the, when, when a young man looks up or a kid looks up and sees, hey, this is what hard work is, this is what commitment is, this is, this is what sacrifice is, and they can emulate that. You don't have to

• 17:31Jocko Willink?

  be there every day to instruct them in every single little thing that they do. And I mean, clearly, both of you are examples of that you can turn out just fine even if dad isn't around every night.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  You know, when I was really, uh, when I was really young and he was deployed on the Berlin airlift, I used to go to, uh, bed every night with a picture of him on the runway, on the flight line, uh, that Air Force Public Affairs had taken with him and his first sergeant and some visiting general. I still have that picture over my desk today. Uh, but that was, you know, that was goodnight dad. You know, and you look at that and you, you gain an understanding of what it means to serve and what, what, what your country, uh, is all about. And, you know, serving your country and those sorts of things. The one thing I would say is my dad really didn't want me to go in the Marine Corps. He, uh, uh, from the job that we, uh, were just talking about, you know, when he had the, um,

• 18:27Speaker 01

  the missile squadron, he had gone to night school for 26 years. He graduated from college my senior in high school. He immediately was deep selected for Colonel.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  And then they sent him to the Pentagon to do legislative affairs and it was the McNamara era and he would just, he would just go crazy about, uh, the whiz kids who were running the Vietnam War and, and we would have these long discussions about, you know, you're, you're just gonna be meat. You know, you're gonna be meat. You know, the Marine Corps is a political football. Don't do it. His, his line was, go in the Navy, stay on the ship, eat ice cream.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  And then, you know, when I went in the Marine Corps, it was like, oh, man. And, um, then when my brother went in the Marine Corps, my brother was a Huey pilot in the Marine Corps, it was like, my boys are Marines.

• 19:19Jocko Willink?

  You know, going back to your, your childhood a little bit, you talk about how you moved around a ton, um, growing up. I mean, you, you sound like your dad was a little bit of a habitual house mover. Even when you get somewhere, he would move. You know, you're talking about you, you were in England, you lived in three, three different houses. And it seemed like everywhere you, you went, you would move around a lot. And one of the things you say about that. In the book is, I'm going back to the book here. I not only learned how to read a room, but by necessity became an acute observer of subtle body language of each new tribal circle. In each place, I learned valuable distinctions that helped me to develop skills and insights that carried over into leadership challenges during during my later life. In order to lead people, you must first motivate them. In order to motivate them, you must understand them.

• 20:03Jocko Willink?

  In order to understand them, you must be able to grasp not simply their words, but the emotion behind their words. The same words and gestures can have vastly different intentions in Alabama and Southern California and Nebraska, and sometimes even within the same town. I learned to be a receiver of information as well as a careful broadcaster.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  So. Absolutely. You know, and first of all, with with my dad moving, yeah, we, I think the longest we ever lived in a house was like 17 months while I was growing up, you know. Part of it was that, you know, the Scotch-Irish tradition, the Ulster Scots that settled Appalachian Mountains and then spread further west and, you know, they're they're they like to say, you know, you you haven't you don't stop moving till you've lived in at least two or three houses. There's something over the mountain that you haven't seen yet. And, yeah.

• 20:54Jocko Willink?

  And he took that literally.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, we got we got, you know, the this post-World War II military was, you know, it was still sort of reseating itself in terms of having large standing military and where the missions were going to be with the space program, all this stuff, missile program going on. So, yeah, we by necessity moved a lot, but then, yeah, we'd get in a house, Amarillo, Texas. We lived in Amarillo, Texas, one year. We lived in three different houses. You know, I saw one down there, someone down there on Sunset, on Sunset Street. We're gonna move in that house. And my brother and I, we lived on the back porch, you know, with the, you know, the windows rattling, you know, etc.

• 21:34Jocko Willink?

  You guys were destined to either become Marines or start a moving company.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, really. So then. There was an upside, there was a downside of that, and that is, you know, academically, I went to, I think, nine different public schools in five years at one point, with three different schools in the eighth grade, no, you know, continuum in the academic curriculum. When I started in the eighth grade, it was in Santa Maria, California, when they first opened up Vandenberg, they tested the whole class, they took four of us, they put us in different rooms, and said, it was like the beginning of GT, you know, or whatever, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna be like an experiment, you're gonna grow it academically

• 22:18Speaker 01

  at your own rate. By the time I got to, one, two, three, like, the fifth school in Nebraska, I was on non-college prep, work, release, get this guy out of here, you know, and I ended up, you know, like, they let us go an hour early and I went to work. But I could always take a standardized test, and that's really how I was able to get into the scholarship program that later led me to go to the Naval Academy. But the most important lesson from all of that was, I was able to see such a cross-section of America, first in the military, you know, the military was the first institution in the country that was racially integrated, and we had a totally different environment than if I had grown up in East Arkansas

• 23:02Speaker 01

  or somewhere else. But also, so many different communities, and you walk in, and you're the new guy, and you read the room, and you figure out where the problem is, but you also, as, you know, from the quote that you read, you learn that a big part of leadership is knowing what motivates people, and understanding that different things motivate different people, not only culturally but individually, and so, sort of figuring out what, you know, what a person is thinking when they are saying certain things to you, what body language means, et cetera, and you translate that into the combat environment, particularly in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, when I was there.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  And we had an incredible cross-section, particularly of the working side of American society. And by that time, I'd been a boxer for eight years. I'd been around, you know, a lot of African-Americans. My hero when I was in high school was African-American, incredible fighter, went to the Olympics in 1964. But the Hispanic communities, California, the farming communities, the southern, you know, the southern mentality of which my culture derived. And so, when you look at a problem, you look at a potential problem, you know, I got CAT 1s, I got CAT 4s in terms of, you know, the testing scores of people out there, you learn

• 24:30Speaker 01

  how to listen, and then how to make decisions, and how to preclude a lot of problems that were going on. We had racial problems in the military writ large during that period. Our society had these problems. I never had a racial problem in any unit I commanded.

• 24:47Jocko Willink?

  Did you, now, one of the things that, while you were jumping from school to school, that was problematic, although you were learning this stuff about human nature and the way people are, you know, in one part of the book here, you say, "From the time I was 10, my dad had challenged me to read a book a week. And if that did not remedy my restlessness to try and read two books a week, 'Read, read, read,' he urged me." And I had, including poetry, fiction, history, and anything I'd get my hands on that was about sports or the military. You read that much as a young kid?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Constantly. And that really saved me in terms of the differing standards and whatever in the schools that I was going to. And the other thing that my dad and I would do from the time I was very young was have poetry contests. You know, he was a big reader, too. And so, you know, all the way through his lifetime, we would do that, you know, up until... You know, very soon before he passed away, we would go every summer, uh, we'd get the, the males in the family of the different generations, get a fishing camp in Minnesota for two weeks and hang out, build a fire, goof around, catch fish, clean fish, talk, talk, talk.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  And my dad and I would always, we'd do kipling, or we'd do the British and the Irish poets. And, you know, one of us would give a line and another would give another line to see who really remembered, you know. I always knew when I was, like, in high school, when he, when he was wanting to go, go up to Minnesota, even at that point, because he would go and he'd start talking to my mother. This one, this one poem called, "Do you fear the wind? Do you fear the force of the wind, the slash of the rain? Go face it and fight it, be savage again. I'm gonna go cold and hungry like a wolf." I'm like, "Okay, I think we're going to Minnesota now."

• 26:39Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. Yeah. And, and you also say in a book, um, "I knew and as I had always known that I was born to be a soldier."

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Growing up, you know, we were, uh, and still are, an outdoors family. Hunt, fish, shoot. You know, I taught Jim from the time he was six, Jim started shooting when he was six years old. I got my first rifle when I was eight years old. It was a part of a long-going tradition from the pioneer, the pioneer days, you know, here's your, here's your rifle. Uh, I loved being in the outdoors. Uh, and I loved all of the mechanics of that part of the, the world. And of course, um, at that time, post-World War II, you turn on a TV in a weekend and you've got Victory at Sea and, uh, you know, Air Power and all these shows and, and, uh, um, I loved military history.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  I'd watch that stuff and I said, "I, I'm, I'm gonna be a soldier." Uh, and I didn't know at that time, really, it was a, it was a close call in, in high school, would I go in the army or would I be a marine? I wanted to do that. Um, and when I got to, I didn't know what college was. We, we, it was not part of our family heritage at that time, you know, directly going to college and figuring out what school you should go to and those sorts of things. So I went, I remember when I was 14 years old, I went to my dad and I said, "Dad, I wanna, I, I wanna be a soldier." He says, "Go to college." I said, "What are you doing in college?" He says, "You're gonna be an engineer." I said, "What do engineers do?" He said, "They invent things." I said, "I don't wanna invent anything."

• 28:16Speaker 01

  I wanna shoot stuff. That's right. I wanna go in the woods. I wanna, I wanna leave people, you know. And, uh, so I, uh, found out that the, the Navy had this ROT scholarship, this first scholarship, full scholarship program, because I could not have gotten a Naval Academy out of, out of high school. My, my, my grades weren't that great, you know, the other things I had in place, I think, uh, but, uh, uh, the Army did not have an ROTC scholarship at that time. They had a program where after two years you could get a full scholarship, but you only had a partial at the beginning. So I, I, uh, applied to the, uh, Navy Scholarship Program. At that time, uh, you took a standardized test and anybody who passed a standardized

• 29:00Speaker 01

  test got into the interview process and you could go make your case. So I went with the school, it was heavily military kids in this, in the school. We had 12 people from our school who passed the test and got into the, the, uh, interviews. Our valedictorian, our salutatorian, all-state basketball player, all-district football player, and me. It's like, hey, pump your gas.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Come see me fight. And, uh, I really lucked out because the two interviewers, the first one was a Mustang commander, uh, who had seen me fight, and, and just totally by coincidence. The name was Commander Lassiter. He says, you know, where have I seen you before? And I went, uh, it wasn't me.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, he talked about, what do you wanna do? I said, I, I want to do this. This is what I wanna do. He says, what are you gonna do if you don't get it? I said, I'm gonna be here next year. You know, if you, you know, i- if I don't get it this year, I'll be here next year. Uh, and we, you know, we talked about working through high school, because I worked all through high school. Um, and, uh, he would come after this, he'd come over, I was packing groceries at the base commissary, he'd come by and, and say hello. And, uh, the second interviewer was a Naval Academy graduate who had graduated in the bottom two-thirds of his class and, from, from South Dakota, and he, he was saying, we don't, we got enough brains in this world. We need leaders. And he threw examples out,

• 30:26Speaker 01

  you know, like, things you're not supposed to be able to solve. You probably know this from different interviews you went through in, in your time in the Navy. So he goes, we got all this mud in the Mississippi River. What are we gonna do about the mud in the Mississippi River? And I said, Commander, I've been thinking about this.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  I said, "Look, you know, here's what you do. You shut that river down for eight hours a day, and you run a big, like a screen through there, like a filter, big filter, on a rotator, and on each end you put like a car wash, you know, with the sprays. And so you run, you run the filters through and you spray the mud out, and you put it in a culvert and you get a truck under there. I said, "Captain, that's topsoil. Send it back up and, you know, sell it back to the farmers." He said, "I know. Okay." And so I got this scholarship and...

• 31:18Jocko Willink?

  When you, you mentioned fighting and you mentioned boxing and, you know, that, you mentioned it a couple of times and, well, obviously, I like fighting and, one of the things, I mean, I always, I'm more of a jiu-jitsu player, but the things that jiu-jitsu teaches you about life and about everything really, and I know a lot of those similar lessons come from boxing. You had a nice little, nice little thing about boxing in here, and I just wanted to throw it out there before we jump too much further because, you know, boxing stays with you through your, through your Naval Academy career and whatnot. But here we go back to the book, "Boxing and the Rough Hewn World in Which the Sport Resided Taught Me Valuable Lessons About Human Struggle and the Thin Line Between Success and Failure.

• 32:03Jocko Willink?

  In the ring, you quickly learned that life was not always fair and that it did not always offer you a face-saving timeout when things were going badly. Once the bell rang, you were out there by yourself, exposed for all the world to see, until it rang again. No excuses, no sitting out for a couple of plays just because somebody hit you so hard you couldn't see straight, and your toes felt numb." When, you know, my kids would compete in jiu-jitsu a lot when they were little. And and I would see these kids would go to these tournaments and Jiu Jitsu tournaments are very popular, especially out here in California at that time and they're popular everywhere now. But I would notice that when a kid loses, you know, because my kids played all kinds of sports,

• 32:48Jocko Willink?

  whatever soccer and basketball and this and that, the kid, if the team loses the soccer game, the kids, you know, they walk off the field. When a kid loses a Jiu Jitsu match, and this is just not just my kids, but like 90% of kids, when they lose that Jiu Jitsu match when they're six years old, when they're seven years old, they're gonna start crying. And, you know, it made sense to me instantly. There's two parts of it that make sense to me. Number one, they're by themselves. There's no one to blame. It's not anyone else's fault on the team. It's just them. And number two, when you get beat in a combat sport, it's there's, there's a primal thing that you just realize you got beat by another human being in this game. And, and

• 33:32Jocko Willink?

  it's not a game. And so it's, it's like you said, it's like there's no, there's no way out of it. And for me, those lessons that people take away from combat sports are extremely important. And it's the things that you just talked about right here.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely right. And on a, on a number of different levels, you know, and one thing about, well, first of all, and one thing about Judo and Jiu Jitsu is, you know, when I was a kid, I used to read a lot and read a lot about Asian history and you learn the, the Japanese philosophy behind it, which is to take your opponent's strength and use it against him, you know, and it was just a kind of a different thing than boxing, but I've always thought about that, you know, and in other areas of my life, I've thought about that. And in terms of boxing, you know, you never know who the judges are, you know, and one, you know, you, you're absolutely right. I mean, nothing, nothing is worse than losing

• 34:30Speaker 01

  when it's just you out there. If it was a team out there, you know, you've got, you've got people you can pat on the back and whatever, but it's just you or is One of the great fighters in Omaha when I was fighting, used to say, "It's just you and another guy and all that smoke." But, so you, you learn to deal with, and you know, when I say, you know, you may perceive unfairness, you know, you, you, "All right, you know, I think I won that fight." But you can't talk about it for the rest of your life. You just say, "All right, you gotta, you gotta swallow it and you gotta say, 'That was that.'" And the other thing is, you have to prepare. You know, when you, when you say, "I'm gonna," you know, like fifteen, sixteen years, I

• 35:15Speaker 01

  could, I could be fighting in front of three thousand people, you know, Omaha, and then I have a lot going on in the winter and it was cold and they'd come in the Coliseum and watch, watch, and they're good fighters, you know, really, Omaha had, Omaha had good fighters back then, including a professional, uh, stable as well. But, uh, yeah, "I'm gonna be in front of three thousand people and I don't want to look like an ass." You know, and so you put it on yourself. You put preparation on yourself, which actually is, uh, a, a great learning tool for being a writer. You know, you, you may think you're working hard, or you may think you're just passing the time, but when the book comes out, you're gonna be exposed to all these reviews and that sort of stuff, you know, so.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  And also, it's kind of interesting, 'cause I was just talking to, uh, a, a friend of mine who is in, in government right now, who was a very fine football player, and we were comparing, he was talking about how, how hard it was to deal with a certain individual because he'd been a wrestler, and he didn't understand how, you know, you get the team around you to, to solve these problems. Well, you know, you learn to, to step forward and take responsibility for solutions. You know, if you're in an individual sport, I mean, probably more than any other kind of a sport, you know, it's like, "All right, this is what I believe and this is what I'm gonna fight for, and if we lose, we lose, but this is what we're going to do." And in my life, combining that with, with the Marine Corps, you know, where you are

• 36:42Speaker 01

  responsible for the lives of, of other people and you have to make decisions that affect other people, there couldn't have been better training for any other leadership situation I've been in.

• 36:56Jocko Willink?

  When, when, uh, going back to where you got selected amongst for this, for this scholarship program, you, you, one thing you said is here, nobody's gonna outwork me.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I remember the day I got that, you know, cause I, I just said, okay, I'm gonna wrap myself a little tighter here, you know, somebody up there likes me. I, I remember that when I, you know, when the, you got the, the letter from the Navy in the mailbox, if it was a thin little letter, you know, it was a no, you know, and I got the packet and I remember it was cold. I got that packet and I went, I did this, you know, and I am gonna bust my tail, you know, and then it came, alright, back then it was like there were 51 schools that had these programs and you, you listed the top six in order and then yes, no, yes, no, will I go to these others? And I'm sitting in Omaha, Nebraska, freezing.

• 37:51Jocko Willink?

  I'll go anywhere.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  And then I put down the six warmest schools. I did not know the University of California from the man in the moon, but I said, University of California sounds warm and I, and I put it on the top and I got into University of California. I mean, they didn't have their Nebraska quota that year or something, I don't know. And, uh, had a great time there. Um, did very well in the military program and my, uh, my Marine Corps, uh, the Marine Corps officer in the program said, you, you really should go to the academy, you know, and so did my dad. My dad saw how, saw how much fun I was having down there and he was like, we need to lock this boy up.

• 38:30Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so, so you applied then for the Naval Academy while you're at USC?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:35Jocko Willink?

  And, and was that, were you surprised to get in there?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Well, um, I think, first of all, I had, I had ranked first in the leadership programs at Southern Cal and I got strong recommendations. Uh, Major Untor Koffler was the, the Marine and, uh, and my, uh, Lieutenant Culver was the naval instructor and they both wrote strong letters for me. Um, and I had to get, uh, letters of recommendation from high school and you know, when I was in high school, um, I did really well in the literature programs, even though I've got put in dummy English my, my, my senior year, you know, and you know, we were like, what did you do last summer while they were studying the, the great artists? But the woman who was, uh, was my teacher.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  She saw how much I loved to write and, and read and this sort of thing and say, and so she wrote me a wonderful letter and, and then, you know, I was on the presidential appointment side, which was the active duty military.

• 39:35Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  And I think they took, I can't remember now whether they took 50 or 75, but they took a certain number from the, from the country and I, and I got in, so.

• 39:46Jocko Willink?

  So, I, you know, the Naval Academy is a, is a, is a story unto itself. You have one section, and I, I obviously didn't go to the Naval Academy, of course, I worked with a ton of people over the years that, that did, but I, I thought that this little story, well, I just thought it might capture some stuff about the Naval Academy and, and I'm gonna read this going, again, this is still from the book, I Heard My Country Calling. "After dinner, I reported to the room across the hall where the four who had joined evening come around towards its end, took turns beating me with a cricket bat. Touch your toes. Aye aye, sir. I would lean over and touch my toes.

• 40:29Jocko Willink?

  They would hit me, swinging the bat as if taking batting practice for slow pitch softball game. I would then come to attention and resume my brace, which is standing at the position of attention. Beat army, sir. Did that hurt, Webb? No, sir. Touch your toes. Aye aye, sir. The bat would connect again. Beat army, sir. Did it hurt? No, sir. Okay, touch your toes. Aye aye, sir. The blow would come. I would straighten up again. Beat army, sir. Did it hurt? No, sir. After they had each hit a couple of slow pitch home runs, it had apparently stopped being fun and their exuberance diminished. One of them finally told me that if I would simply admit that it hurt, they would stop beating me."

• 41:14Jocko Willink?

  But for all I knew, even this guarantee could have been double think. If I told them it hurt, would I really be allowed to leave? Or would it just bring yet another lecture in another round? Or worse yet, did they really want to send me back across the hallway? I had already dealt with Doctor No Pain before dinner. I did not want to survive the cricket bat only to go back to the toothpick, which was another torture they were putting me through. The pain actually left my body, or maybe it was merely my brain's reaction, as I would later find out with Marines who were wounded so severely that their nervous systems became overloaded and shut down so that they could not feel any pain. I had detached myself from the moment. It was as if I was watching myself from another room. Did it hurt, Webb?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  No, sir.

• 41:56Jocko Willink?

  Just tell us that it hurt, idiot. Did it hurt? I could hear worry in his voice. Somehow, the very abuse that they were now weary of perpetrating had inspired me. By refusing to lose, I felt that I was somehow winning.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  No, sir.

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  Touch your toes. Another blow.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Beat army, sir.

• 42:15Jocko Willink?

  Behind me, I heard them discussing that the bat had split lengthwise on my ass. Alright, get out of here, Webb.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Aye, aye, sir.

• 42:25Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:27Jocko Willink?

  What year was this, 1964?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Naval Academy was a different place, needless to say, than it is now.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, when Bob Timberg was writing his book Nightingale Song, we discussed that incident. And one of the comments he made was, he, meaning me, was not particularly bitter about it, but he could still give me the individuals' names. And I still could, I'm not going to. But, you know, the Naval Academy at that time, you know, the pendulum swings in terms of indoctrination and where education fits in and what type of education, et cetera, et cetera. But that, our, this class, a class of 1968.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  The pendulum in terms of plebe indoctrination had swung very far and it was by company, really. They were like tribal systems were thirty-six different companies. And some of them were relatively loose and some of them were really, you know, actually, we had two, two companies in, in my class that ran out, physically ran out more than half of their plebes. And these were people who were highly screened. I give some details in the book about the number of class valedictorians, varsity athletes, Eagle Scouts, et cetera. Which actually, when people have asked me, you know, what, what's the great benefit you got out of going to Naval Academy? And one thing I said is, well, I knew that I could achieve among these people who had achieved in different ways in, in high school than I had.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  I learned, you know, that I could compete in, in that, you know, why I was on the right track attitudinally and everything. But this class, I think we started with thirteen fifty. And, um, the first week or two of, of plebe year, when some people resigned, they allowed new increments to come in just for a very short period of time. So let's just stick with thirteen fifty. I think we graduated eight forty-one. We had the highest attrition rate of any post-war Naval Academy, post-war, war-two Naval Academy class. Uh, and there were some really people who would have been fine officers who were run out for one reason or left.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Uh, and that time period too, um, coincided with the very beginning of the Vietnam War. The civil rights movement, a lot of different, you know, things that were tearing the country aside. I can remember coming back from boxing practice in the summer of nineteen sixty-four. We had to know the, one of the rates when you went down on the tables was to know the three top news stories of the day. And there on the front page was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in, in the Gulf of the coast of Hanoi, the picture of the CO and, uh... We were like saying, okay, I think this is, this is really going to happen. We, the year that I graduated in 1968 was, was the, the worst year for American casualties.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  And it also was the year where in April Martin Luther King was killed, in, in June, the night before we graduated, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. It was just, and, and to, to back it up, the Tet 68 offensive happened before, right before Martin Luther King was killed. So that was just boom, boom, boom, the, the last year. And different people reacted in different ways, but I think the majority of the people that I was with there during that period, it, it gave us a real seriousness of purpose. We knew where we were going. It wasn't going to go away, particularly for the Marine Corps. We all knew that we were

• 46:05Speaker 01

  going. And so by the time I, I graduated, there was no doubt in my mind where, where I was going to go. It was one of the reasons why on first class crews, you know, at, at the Naval Academy, you, it used to be after your first year, you cruised with the enlisted folks. You know, we, I lived with the Snipes on a CVS after my first, that was a great learning experience too, by the way, to see how hard those guys worked down there. They hardly ever saw the light of day. They were a trip too, in, in the living spaces. I remember when they, you know, that we had like six or seven midshipmen in this big, uh, living

• 46:49Speaker 01

  space and, you know, they're giving us the dirtiest job they could give us, uh, you know, get down into pillages and scrub, whether we've saved this for you, et cetera. And I said, whatever they want me to do, man, I'll do. And, uh, so I remember the day they accepted me, we had this first class petty officer who was kind of like the, the guy there. And they had one wall locker, it was four by four wall locker where they kept all of their different types of books and other supplies. (laughing) And they had a, okay, Webb, come on over here. And they gave me the combination to that locker. And then they broke out a bottle of booze and they sent a boot up to the, to the mess

• 47:32Speaker 01

  hall and scored a can of apple juice and it came back and we said, okay, you know, you're, you're all right, Webb, you know. And after my third year, cause I knew I was going to Vietnam, I said, I'd like, like maybe to see the Meds. So I signed up for a Med cruise, um, got on the Saratoga, USS Saratoga. And as I wrote about in this book, um, we, uh, graduated the, the morning after the Arab Israeli war of 1967 began. And so we, we went to, we flew to Rhoda, Spain, then out to Suda Bay, Crete, where the Saratoga came in to, to pick us up. Uh, and they had just metevac the USS Liberty.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Uh, the hangar deck was littered with casualties from the USS Liberty. And when we, uh, you know, we took the, the small boats out and started bringing our gear in and got to, to the hangar deck and, and there were marine guards around them. They said, do not talk to any of these people. And, you know, we went up to our, there were 48 of us that were on the Saratoga. Uh, we went up to our living spaces and that was an incredible cruise because the Soviet Navy had just broken down into the Med and we were playing games with them the whole time. Uh, they cross decked the Liberty casualties into the America, which took them into, into Athens, but it was, you know, constant air ops on that carrier while we were there. Incredible learning experience.

• 48:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, that's, if you have, seeing air ops on an aircraft carrier, the first time that I saw it, I was, it's, it's, it's, it's insane is what it is. It's insane that, and that's just normal life on a carrier.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  And you know, the difference, um, in the same thing, talking about my dad and the missile squad, the difference back then and now was I had a little eight millimeter movie camera and, you know, after evening meal, I could go sit on the flight deck and take pictures of flight ops, you know? Now, you know, for, for safety reasons and whatever other reasons, you can't do that. But I've got some great shots of some of the, you know, the RA5s taking off of those things and we had spads on there. Uh, and that whole cruise, we had a, an A4, they said with a nuke on it and the front right catapult because of the situation that was going on in the Middle East. So, yeah, that's a.

• 49:48Jocko Willink?

  This is a, I thought, pretty pertinent here is you're at the academy and this is what you're talking about right now, but going back to the book, as the Vietnam War gathered intensity, the leadership of the brigade began posting pictures and biographies of alumni who had been killed or missing in action on a large board in the middle of the rotunda just inside the main entrance to Bancroft Hall. The pictures and short biographies were taken from the lucky bag, the class yearbook from the year that each alumnus had graduated. The board on which the notices were placed was large, perhaps eight feet high and four or five feet wide.

• 50:28Jocko Willink?

  At its top was a boldly lettered inscription, "To those who went before of us, before us." As the class of 1968 neared graduation, the "To those who went before us" board had become two boards, and then three. A high percentage of the alumni listed were either Marines or naval aviators. Many of their names and faces were familiar to all of us, more than a few included friends, and some of these were especially close. So, that's a, that's a reality for everyone there, especially because in 1964, that wasn't

• 51:10Jocko Willink?

  happening, and then you go to 1968 and you're filling up this board.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  You walk by it every day and look at the, you know, you look to see what the new faces are. And the classes of 66 and 67 in the Marine Corps were hit very hard, perhaps 68. Uh, yeah, and I think, I, I wrote about this, but I think one of the, one of the toughest moments, you know, of that period of my life was when, I, I was the brigade administrative officer, and so, you know, my job, which wasn't much of a job, was to go to, one of the things was to go to the main office, clear out all the correspondence in there, sort it out, pass it to the rest of the brigade staff, et cetera, and one of them was bringing the casualty reps to, uh, the brigade first lieutenant who, who kept the board on.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  And without even, uh, knowing it, while I picked them up, I picked up the casualty, uh, report of one of my good friends.

• 52:07Jocko Willink?

  And you graduate from the academy and it's time to go to, time to go to, time to go to the basic school and learn. And I've talked about, a bit about the basic school. I've had Marines on here that, that went through it. Brian Stan, and he gave us pretty good details on the basic school and, but, um, obviously at this time, for you, you know, I'm just gonna go to the book. For the Marines, combat and overseas deployments were unending. The greatest burden fell on the privates and Lance Corporals fresh from boot camp who populated

• 52:50Jocko Willink?

  the lower ranks of the rifle platoons and the lieutenants just out of the basic school who commanded them. The basic school, which we called TBS, was now starting a new class of 250 lieutenants every three weeks. In pre-Vietnam, days TBS had taken 30 weeks to complete, as Vietnam accelerated, the time a new lieutenant spent at TBS was reduced to 26 weeks, and then to 21. But true to the traditions of long-held disciplines of the Corps, this reduction took place not by cutting the quality or the content of the curriculum, but by, rather by lengthening the number of hours spent in class and in the field every work week. Almost every week, TBS companies worked late into Saturday

• 53:33Jocko Willink?

  evening. They spent a high percentage of their time in the field, and a large percentage of that time was dedicated to night maneuvers and bivouacs. Our company was given the day off on Christmas, working late into the evening of December 24th, and assembling on the tarmac for a field activity at 06:30 in the morning of December 26th. Within a month of, within a month after finishing TBS, the infantry lieutenants among us would be boarding military flights to Travis Air Force Base, California to report immediately for 13-month tours in Vietnam as individual replacements in infantry battalions that were already engaged in sustained heavy combat.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Well, first, let me say something about about Basic School at that time. That's probably the best school I've ever been to. As I wrote, the course got condensed in its time, but not in the quality of what they were preparing us to do. On the one hand, the Marine Corps had dropped a 60-millimeter mortar out of its arsenal after the Korean War. They decided that they didn't need it with more artillery, close air, etc. They learned early in the Vietnam War that it was a valuable weapon. They put the 60 Mike Mike package back into Basic School, so that actually added a tactical

• 55:02Speaker 01

  package into the Basic School curriculum. They cut out some of the dress and ceremony stuff. You know, they did take that stuff out, not all of it, but some of it. But we worked six days a week. And we worked, yeah, we worked on the 24th and the 26th of December. We worked on the 31st and the 2nd of July, I mean of January. And, you know, it was, I think the intensity actually helped prepare us. Some of the great friends of my life are people that I met in Basic School. We were constantly together.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  And by doing this every day, you know, intensely every day, you got a better feel for what you actually were going to be required to do. The interesting thing about Basic School, one of the reasons I say it was the best school I've ever been to, was it was educational, it was practical, and it was looking toward the future. For any weapon system, we learned every weapon in the infantry battalion in Basic School. They would teach it to you in class, then you would walk out, assemble, disassemble, familiarize it, and then you would go shoot it, every single weapon. My...

• 56:22Speaker 01

  First day, my first night as a rifle platoon commander, I took the platoon that I had just picked up into a night move, night ambush, and hit a North Vietnamese unit with a 51 caliber machine gun, used every supporting arm in the Marine Corps except for close air. My very first patrol, did all the on calls, etc., and, you know, that was basic school. So...

• 56:49Jocko Willink?

  Did they, did they go out, how did they run problems with you in the field during the basic school? Would they take you on a patrol? Did they have OPFOR players that would attack you?

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Planes, we ran close air. There weren't any planes attacking us in Vietnam.

• 57:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no, no, no, I said, I said role players. So, when you would, when you're doing a patrol in the basic school, how did you simulate? And how well did they simulate it?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Some of it was, was walkthrough. You know, you would start with the walkthroughs. First of all, we had, we had really talented, combat experienced instructors. And all of our, our platoons, our companies broke down into five platoons, alphabetically. You know, you know how that works when you're sort of at the end of the alphabet, you know? We got the worst gear, we got the last in line for everything. I can remember one night, we were, we were getting dismissed, we're in a company formation,

• 57:57Speaker 01

  and one of the, was a former enlisted Marine in our platoon, we were Roberts through Zell something, you know, and he just started yelling, "This fucking zoo!" And from that point forward, a lot of times when we'd march, we'd go, "Zoo, zoo." But we had, you know, our, our staff platoon commander had been seriously wounded as a rifle platoon commander in the 5th Marines. You know, all of, all of our staff platoon commanders had, had been in, in combat. There were a lot of talks, you know, those sorts of things. But then on the tactics side...

• 58:41Speaker 01

  You'd go out, you'd learn it, you know, you'd learn it in class, you'd go out and walk through it and then you'd have aggressors, you know, a lot of these were S D T, called S D T aggressors, which were enlisted Marines just back from Vietnam who just loved to mess with the, with the, the basic school lieutenants. The big problem, and the greatest surprise, I have to say, in, in moving into combat, the big problem was if, if you were, say, for this exercise, if you're the platoon commander on this platoon in the attack exercise, you've got forty-nine other lieutenants sitting there saying, "No, we're not gonna do it that way, no, look, look, come on, man, no, that's no, you don't need to be online, we need to be in a wedge, you know, or, you know, you need

• 59:25Speaker 01

  to do whatever, whatever, whatever," you know? And I'll never forget the feeling of actually commanding a rifle platoon in combat and being on the move and I just said, "Hold it up," and everything just stopped. You know, that word just right now, boom, I mean, when that is, everybody stopped, you know, and I went, "Wow, this is, this is pretty good." Yeah. But, you know, the, there were, there were things that could have been taught better. The one thing's a, one of the things that I am very proud of in terms of the way that we did operate in Vietnam, we had, had a lot of leeway to innovate. And that's, that's kind of been lost, I think, in the, in the history of it.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  And there were, and it's in letters I wrote back to officers that I knew, talking about, "You don't really, you didn't, you have a patrolling package over here and you got a platoon and a attack package over here, but really what we do all the time is we patrol, then we assemble, then we attack," you know, or, or if we're gonna go into a built-up area, as from the, the section you read, the excerpt you read from, from Fields of Fire, you know, "I know when to go online, I know when to put my troops online, I know where to put my guns." That didn't come from, from basic school. The separate, the separate entities did, we connected it in the, in the reality of, of, of what we were doing. And I'll tell you, there's a long line, we're getting a little ahead of, of things, but

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  there, there, there's a long line of things that...

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  The young leaders in Fifth Marines had done before I got there and also in what I was able personally to do as a rifle platoon and particularly as a company commander. One of the things we saw, and I wrote an article about this concept when I got back from Vietnam, was that the Marine Corps Fire Team, this is simple and small, but it really is, you know, institutionally important. The Marine Corps Fire Team is four Marines. It was built around the BAR, Browning Automatic Rifle. It had been put into place in World War II because at the beginning of World War II, the Marines only operated in squads, like 11 Marine squads.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  And they found that a squad couldn't control, directly control, 11 people. So they went into the triangular concept with the, you know, the four Marine Fire Teams. But the problem with that was if you took two casualties, you don't have a maneuver element. And it is built around an artificial notion because the M16 could be fully automatic. You know, I had, I kept some M14s in my platoon as well. So what the young leaders in the Fifth Marines just sort of, over time, just started doing was cannibalizing the Third Rifle Squad.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  And so in our rifle platoon, instead of having three rifle squads and then a gun team attached from this notional weapons platoon, we put the riflemen into two squads and then brought the gun team in as the third squad for the triangular concept. And that just kind of happened, you know. And no one told us to do it. We just said, you know, you can't, with the casualties, casualty flow that we were taking, you just couldn't do it any other way and be effective with Fire Teams as maneuver elements. We moved at night. Constantly, fifth Marines, we moved at night. We were known for moving at night. We

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  walked when we moved. The helicopter assets in Vietnam for the Marine Corps were scarce. The H-46 was built to standards from amphibious carriers, amphibious assault ships. So they were built to deck space and, you know, for amphibious assaults. But then when you get in this continuous ground operation, there just weren't enough of them and they were very vulnerable to ground fire. So in areas where the Army would have been, you know, picking up with a, you know, a Huey, you know, getting breakfast and getting on the Hueys and I'm not running them down. This was a great concept, the air mobile concept. And

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  moving in on areas, we walk. We had, for a long time, we had two H-46s for our entire sector during the day, you know, resupply or medevacs, whatever. So we did a lot of walking. It taught you how to fight at night, but also when something happened, the casualties were high. Because your, you know, ass hold a belly button when you're walking along, you know. If you hit a, you know, it was not an uncommon practice. They get a booby trap, IED go off and you get an ambush on it at night, you know, your people are packed

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  in, et cetera. But, and 60 mic mortar, I decided, there were people who taught us as a company tactics in basic school, the 60 millimeter mortar is the company commander's personal weapon. So I decided, when I was a company commander, I would get sent, and I liked this, I would get sent, you know, way away, at the edge of our battalion's sector, kind of operating independently, but I'd fire sometimes 600 rounds a day. I'd send a rifle platoon in to secure an area when we're on the move. You know, pay a combat patrol to get a new spot, send a rifle platoon in, secure the area, take a resupply, have them drop a pallet.

• 1:05:08Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna ask him to hump six hundred rounds.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  No, no, see, that was the tradition beforehand, yeah, you can hump maybe forty rounds, you know. But I'd have them drop a pallet in, I'd have them build two sandbag parapet areas for the sixing, we kept two. The TO was three, we kept two. And I'd use them for prep fires, I'd use them for H and I's, you know, and my guys got really, really good.

• 1:05:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the mortar teams, I've been out in the field with the Marine Corps, when you watch those guys set up and fire mortars, you know, just in training, and it's ridiculous how good they are, it's an awesome thing to watch, it's a beautiful thing to watch. Yeah, the reason I kind of dug in a little bit about the training, because when I came back from my last deployment to Ramadi, I took over the training, and so, it was all that, that's all I was trying to do, was getting guys ready for what they were about to face, and we had this incredible opportunity, you know, we had this, you ever heard of Miles Gear?

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so we had something that wasn't Miles Gear, it was like Miles Gear, but it was infinitely better. It was super high speed, multi-million dollar system, had little speakers on your shoulders, so when you were getting shot at, you'd hear snaps from these little speakers, or you'd get mortared and there'd be explosions going off in your ears. It was awesome.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  No, we didn't have any of that, they actually had the very beginning of that concept when we went live fire early on, where they had targets would pop up and you'd shoot the target, that was the most sophisticated we got.

• 1:06:43Jocko Willink?

  And what I found with live fire was, live fire, because when I came in, it was all, we did everything live fire, and that was the big deal, and we still, we never got away from live fire, but we added to it this whole force on force training, where you're going against guys with, either with lasers or with paintballs, and that was infinitely more realistic, because the paper targets never maneuvered on you. And same thing, when you had the guys returning from Vietnam who were maneuvering on you and you were at the basic school, I had all my SEALs that had just come back from combat deployments, and they were the guys that were going against the platoons that were getting ready to deploy, so, it was awesome, and I would get, the feedback I would get was always, hey, it was... It was actually easier in combat, you know, minus the, the, the actual death, but the, the threat

• 1:07:28Jocko Willink?

  of actual death, the maneuvering that would happen, you know, they were used to maneuvering against SEALs who were badass. And now they're maneuvering against someone else, it's not quite as, you know, in the game. And also, the enemy doesn't know our tactics as well as we know it. So my guys would know the tactics that was going to be used against them. So it was, uh, it was awesome, but it's, it, just when you talk about showing up in Vietnam and, and your first patrol, you're going out and you're in that and you handle it. That's, that's a complete testament to the quality of that training, cause it's freaking crazy.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think we were talking about this last night. Attitude development is the key to everything, you know, and getting your mind right is the, in terms of what you're gonna do and, uh, knowing the assets that are available. And, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about this too, you know, uh, in terms of what, what I was going to face. I, I had, I had one really terrific mentor, um, uh, who, when I graduated from the Naval Academy, I, I spent, uh, like two months as a drill officer at the, at the, with the new class coming in before we reported to, to basic school. And I was a battalion

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  drill officer. There were six of us, there were six battalions. I, I got the Marine Battalion Officer who had just gotten out of the hospital from, had been wounded in, in Conti End, was a company commander, Alpha 11. And, uh, he was terrific. Bill Stensland was his name. And, uh, you know, he'd been shot, he'd been blown up and, and he was like so easy. I mean, no bullshit, easy. Um, and easy as a leader. And so the other, the other five drill officers in my class, they, they got their own office, you know, with their battalion officer and Stensland goes, Why do you need an office?

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  He said, you know, so you're a lieutenant now, you get an office. Why do you need an office? Why don't you just sit in my office? So I'd sat in his office and every day it was like, you know, talking back and forth, you know, and I'd go out and I'd do, you know, I'd go do my four miles and do all my stuff and he'd come back and he'd say, what are you doing? And I said, oh, I'm getting ready to go to Vietnam. He says, you want to know what it's like in Vietnam? He said, I'm gonna take you out tonight and we're gonna get really, really drunk and I'm gonna keep you up all night and then tomorrow you're gonna work and that's what it feels like. And he did. You know, and the next day I was like, oh man, please, don't talk so loud, sir.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  And then, uh, before I, before I left, one of the things I, you know, I talked to him about before I left for basic school, I said, what did it feel like to get shot at? And he goes, uh, look, don't even think about that stuff. I mean, it's just, you know, forget about that stuff. Just do your job, you know? And that was the very first thing I thought about when I took that, that patrol out. I could hear Stenson going, just don't even think about that stuff, you know?

• 1:10:32Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna take it to the book here for a minute, cause, uh, well, this is the chapter called Hell in a Very Small Place, and it talks about exactly what you're saying here. So back to the book. From the day of my arrival as platoon commander with dying Delta, we had been engaged in continuous combat operations intensified in recent weeks by a series of unpredictable vicious firefights. Despite a steady flow of individual replacements, the numerical field strength of our rifle company had been reduced by about half over the past three months. This was an equal opportunity battlefield. We lost Marines through every possibility that infantry combat offered, including gunshot wounds from several different caliber weapons and all kinds of shrapnel, large caliber rockets,

• 1:11:16Jocko Willink?

  rocket propelled grenades, RPGs, different sorts of hand grenades, 61 and 82 millimeter mortar fire, recoilless rifles, plus landmines of every size from a grenade to large caliber artillery shells. Rifle platoons were largely made up of young, both officers and enlisted. By 1969, the vaunted ranks of the career and staff NCOs who had historically been the backbone of the Marine Corps were showing the effects of four years of heavy combat. In the infantry battalions, that impact was both visible and profound. Within a few days of my, within a few days, my platoon sergeant, the fourth Marine to

• 1:11:58Jocko Willink?

  hold this key position in the past three months, would leave us, a severe case of ringworm covering his torso, including his entire crotch area, front and back. My first platoon sergeant had been hit by a booby trap while maneuvering one segment of our platoon onto a ridgeline during an extensive firefight, suffering, suffering shrapnel wounds in his hands and arms and stomach area, blowing off pieces of his fingers and slicing his bladder.

• 1:12:26Jocko Willink?

  The second platoon sergeant had served with us for a couple of weeks and then was sent by the company commander to another unit. The third had picked up his third Purple Heart after being hit by an RPG and thus had been rotated out of Vietnam. The fifth, on his second Vietnam tour, became sick of the constant combat and suddenly decided to leave the Marine Corps and our rifle company when his enlistment expired toward the end of this very operation. In practical terms, this turbulence intensified the relationships between the platoon commanders and the squad leaders as daily life and death tactical decisions would need, needed to be made. In these relationships, I often ended up being the oldest and most wizened voice at the age of 23.

• 1:13:12Jocko Willink?

  I was now on my fourth platoon radio operator, who within weeks would be shot through his elbow, ending his days in the Marine Corps. Two months before, in April, I had lost two radio operators in one day. The first shot through the, the hand by the, by an enemy sniper as he held the receiver of our PRC 25 radio in the middle of a firefight. Luckily for our platoon, if not for him, his hand had partially shielded the radio's handset, which survived the bullet, otherwise we would have been isolated, surrounded by hundreds of mobile and highly adept enemy soldiers. On combat patrols that ranged far away from our company headquarters, the tactical radio was our sole means of communicating our position and to call in artillery support and medevacs.

• 1:13:56Jocko Willink?

  This, of course, was why the enemy loved to shoot at it. An hour later, the second radio operator had been blown off his feet, hit below the knees in both legs by a booby trap as we assaulted a ridge. Radio operators did not have much luck in my platoon. By the time I left the platoon, I had gone through six. Two of my original three squad leaders had been killed, one by an enemy rocket and the other from a gunshot wound to the chest. The third had been shot through the lung and in the liver during the onset of an enemy ambush. Although grievously wounded, he had survived the firefight and was later medevaced to a Navy hospital ship.

• 1:14:38Jocko Willink?

  And so it had been for the officers who had initially staffed our rifle company. The first platoon commander had been killed three weeks before. The second platoon commander had been lightly wounded less than two weeks before and within the next few weeks would suffer a serious gunshot wound in his upper thigh, a bullet narrowly missing it in artery. I had been lightly wounded and would be seriously wounded a month later.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Well, let's set the stage. Let's start the final couple of days in basic school because one of the most important, wasn't a speech, but one of the most important speeches that I had listened to during my preparation time was given. There was a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who was assigned to the basic school, who asked to talk to the infantry lieutenants. We had, I think, somewhere in the 70s of our 243 who finished basics who were assigned to the infantry. And...

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  This guy was highly respected. He'd been an enlisted Marine rifleman on Iwo Jima. He had been a platoon commander in Korea, recipient of the Navy Cross, and had just finished commanding a battalion in Vietnam. And he said, "I want you to understand something. Vietnam is the hardest war the Marine Corps has ever fought, not simply because of the casualties, which by the way, ended up being higher even than World War II if you combine killed and wounded, more killed in World War II, but because of the living conditions that these Marines are facing."

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  This excerpt you were reading was sort of in the middle of an operation. In addition to those types of experiences, people rarely understand, in America, the America of then and particularly the America of today, what it was like to be in the Marine infantry in Vietnam, particularly, well, all of them, but particularly out in Quang Nam Province where we fought. The Marines fought in five provinces in Vietnam. In Quang Tri, which is where Kaesan and up

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  next to the DMZ, to A Tien, which is where Hue was, Quang Nam, west of Da Nang, where we fought, and Quang Nai, and Quang Tin was also a province then, is not a province now. But a plurality and almost a majority of the Marines killed in Vietnam were killed in Quang Nam Province. And I can't give you a really major battle. I mean, there are some operations that are notable in sort of Marine Corps lore, but no one in the country would

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  even recognize them. These were squad, platoon, company-size engagements, and where the constant, constant combat activity.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  And where the Marines operated were usually outside of anything. We didn't have tents. We didn't have barbed wire. We didn't have cots. We didn't have electricity. Didn't have hot food. Didn't have clean water. It was an extraordinarily rough environment in terms of hygiene, potential disease, and just the wear and tear it put on human bodies. So you put that on top of the combat side and then on top of what you had mentioned earlier, which is the constant flow of people through the apparatus that was the combat unit and the political tensions in the country. You put all that together. You have a very, very

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  tough environment where the Marines lived and also where the young leaders operated. So, you know, when I'm taking over a rifle platoon in that area called Anh Hoa Basin, I'm just off the plane, you know, graduated from basic school, ten days travel, ten days proceed, a little bit of leave, get on the plane, go through Okinawa for, you know, to kind of get your time zone straight and then I didn't even know what regiment or what division I was going to when I hit Vietnam. They, we got to, actually on Okinawa, they decided whether which division you were going to go to. Okay, we're looking at the casualty

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  flow. You guys, you're going to Third Mar Div. You guys, you're going to First Mar Div. And then when you got to Dunang, headquarters of the First Marine Division, they would kind of sort us out to which regiment we were going to. We got a regiment. They say, okay, you're going to First Battalion. We're First Battalion. They said, Delta. Delta needs a platoon commander. And get on a convoy, take off. The company had been through some, you know, some serious combat in the previous days. I think they'd had five platoon commanders in the previous five or six months. So dying Delta was the... Where was the nickname? Is that like a derogatory? Was that just gallows humor?

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  We kind of liked it. We just got a deadly dying Delta, you know, or dog tired Delta, whatever. But you're constantly on the move. And, you know, I'm new and they're justifiably, they're going, oh, man, here we got a new guy here, now what? And there's always, in the realm of leadership, the, the relationship that you have to put into place. And you don't, you know, some, some people like to say, like to say, okay, when a lieutenant comes in, you can be like the observer for a while and go along in the patrol and watch. Rarely did those people ever fully take over their platoon. You're either ready or you're not ready. And so I, when I picked up my platoon,

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  I got them on a side of a hill, I explained, you know.

• 1:21:02Jocko Willink?

  Did you insert into the field to take them over?

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  Hardly.

• 1:21:05Jocko Willink?

  Did you go right into the field?

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. They were on the move. They were on the move from Liberty Bridge to Henderson Hill. On a company move, the convoy passed by, I jumped off the convoy. I'd, I'd talked on the radio to our, our, our company commander, you know, before. And I didn't even get three days in Anwar. So, you know, usually it's three days in Anwar for familiarization. He said, this, this guy's class ornament in basic school, get him out here now. And so I took these guys over, had them on a side of a hill, and I said, you know, this is, Bob Timberg in his book, The Nightingale, so he called this an audition for a fragging. I said, all right, I'm Lieutenant Webb, you call me lieutenant, or you call me sir. And this is what I expect. And I, I laid it all out, you know, and, and one of the things

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  I said, which I think is very important when you're, when you're leading anything, I said, I want you to know something. Anything you tell me, I will believe. Anything. You tell me this guy's brown, I will believe you. And if you lie to me, you're dead meat. And so there was like, what the hell does this guy think he's doing, you know? And then we went out that night, you know, and I sat down, I planned it. We, we moved to the new perimeter. I went and I called my squad leaders together.

• 1:22:12Jocko Willink?

  Is that a company-sized perimeter?

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  Company-sized perimeter. I got, got my squad leaders in, I said, we got an IDAC and we're gonna go here in a, I think it was a FULOX. You know, got their input. Listen, listen, listen. You always listen. You know, being a commander doesn't mean you know all the answers. It, it means you know how to make a decision, you know, and, and how to, how to follow through. And so I figured out, I listened to them, I figured out a place where we would go. I had a really terrific squad leader who was actually acting platoon commander that afternoon. And set a series of on calls, you know, the thing basic school taught you. Went out that night, walked in, you know, walked into a situation, used all the, you know,

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  the supporting arms, did our, did our thing and that was put to rest, which was actually a good thing. And then the other thing, which I think is so important, you know, when you say know your people, know, you know, what's leadership, leadership is knowledge. Know your people, know your job, know their job and know the next job because you never know when something's going to happen and you're going to have that next job. And it's character and part of, part of character is consistency and humility before your people. You know, and as you mentioned from what the excerpt about my dad, moral courage, there's different kinds of courage. Moral courage is sometimes you gotta take the hits. You gotta lay out what you believe is right and you gotta stay with it.

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  Um, and you know, vision, in other words, what even taking over a rifle platoon, you know, they, they knew fairly quickly that I, I knew what I was expecting, even though I hadn't done it yet. But knowledge of people and listening to people, I would go in, the first, you know, month or so that I was a platoon commander, I would take three hours to set my lines in every night. Sit down in every fighting hole, talk to every one of my marines and you find out, as you know, you find out really interesting things about maybe simple things like somebody hadn't gotten paid or somebody got married and she had a queue a lot and was not going to his wife and nobody's taking care, just simple things, you know?

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  And then, you know, then the bonds move from there.

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you, you, just, just to reiterate the conditions, cause I, I pulled out this, this section in here where you talk about the conditions and just to reiterate what you're talking about, going back to the book here, in, in the rifle companies, we spent endless months patrolling ridge lines and villages and mountains far away from tents, barbed wire, hot food or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what we could fit inside one's pack, which after a few humps, usually boiled down to letter writing material, towel, soap, toothbrush, poncho liner and a small transistor radio. Due to casualties and disease during this period in the war, relatively few Marines would actually survive a full 13-month tour as members of rifle companies in the bush

• 1:25:12Jocko Willink?

  of the basin. We moved through the boiling heat, carrying 60 pounds of weapons and gear, causing a typical Marine to drop 20% of his body weight while in the bush. When we stopped, we dug chest-deep fighting holes and slit trenches for toilets. We slept on the ground, under makeshift poncho hooches, and when it rained, we usually took down our hooches because wet ponchos shone under illumination flares, making great targets. Sleep itself was fitful, never more than an hour or two at a stretch for months at a time, as we mixed daytime patrolling with nighttime ambushes, listening posts, foxhole duty, and radio watches.

• 1:25:54Jocko Willink?

  Ringworm, hookworm, malaria, dysentery were common, as was trench foot, which in Vietnam was called immersion foot, when the monsoons came. We respite for, was rotating back to the mud-filled regimental combat base at Anhoy for four or five days, where rocket and mortar attacks were frequent, and our troops manned defensive bunkers at night. That was your break time.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Anhoy, yeah. They called it Little Dien bin Phu. There, you know, because-

• 1:26:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they had a sign that actually said that, right?

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, "Welcome to Little Dien bin Phu." And, you know, to-

• 1:26:35Jocko Willink?

  At least they kept their sense of humor.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  To ver, you know, the first, you know, how, you know, people, gallows humor is what gets you through that kind of stuff. And to sort of set the tone of the, on the tactical side-

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  You need to remember in terms of what was happening to the country at this time. This was a war that had been going on and it had its controversies. But hundreds of people were dying every week, still, every week. I brought this, and I know we're not on TV, but I brought this. There's a people can watch the video. You know, you're welcome to keep this and make copies of it if you would send it back to me, but this was the cover of Life magazine, June 27th, 1969. Average week during this period, this was the period of hamburger hill, etc. 242 Americans died that week. Two of Marines are in that.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  But in the post-TET 69 period, which was April, May, we were losing more than 400 Americans dead a week. You know, even though the war had, for the Americans and casualties, had peaked in 1968. The three worst years for combat for Americans in Vietnam were 67, 68, and 69. They're like the top of the bell curve. We had in 69, I think we lost twice as many Americans killed as have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the entire war. And, you know, the American people supported this.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  And I've always believed in what we were attempting to do, however screwed up it got. But if you're out here in the Anh Hoa Basin, the one thing that a good rifle platoon or company commander or battalion commander learned was how to adapt. How to adapt. You couldn't rarely, you could rarely plan.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  Uh, operations, um, you know, sort of like what Mike Tyson said about being in a fight, everything's great until the first time you get hit, you know? Uh, on any given patrol, uh, or, or day in the N1 base, in particularly in Arizona Valley, you could hit, you know, some idiot with, not idiots, maybe some smart, smart individual or small group of people with a couple of grenades, or you could hit a, a main force Viet Cong unit, which was heavily North Vietnamese, or you could hit a large for, large force, uh, North Vietnamese. We fought in, in May of 1916, what we, nine, we fought with the, the 90th Regiment in

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  the Arizona Valley, went on for like eight days and, and, and eight nights. We had a North Vietnamese division in base area 112, right off from where we were, the, the mountain started, uh, and up into Laos with the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that sort of thing. Uh, we had, uh, a very fine of Viet Cong Regiment, which was, you know, rather rare, that an independent regiment, the first VC Regiment. Uh, we had the Q83rd Main Force Battalion that were operating out of the Arizona Valley. And then you had a lot of cats and dogs. And the other thing was, this area had basically been written off by, by American war planners

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  in terms of the politicization, you know, the bringing them into the South Vietnamese government at that time. They categorized villages, intel categorized villages, um, A through E, uh, in terms of loyalty to the South Vietnamese government. A was totally loyal, E was totally the, on the other way. And then they had category five, which was politically hopeless, just forget it. And, uh, by 1958, you know, the, the, the country was divided in 1954, a million people came south, including my, my wife's entire family. Not very many went north. Basically cadre went north and they trained and starting in

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  nineteen fifty-eight, they started moving back into central Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh's idea was to, or whoever was doing his planning was to cut off central Vietnam first, Anam. And so you had these assassination squads move into this area and by nineteen sixty-one, they were killing eleven government officials a day. And that was by John Kennedy's account when he decided to start increasing our troops there. So the villages had had their fights. Beginning fifty-eight, heavily fifty-eight to sixty-two, that time period and those

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  who were staying with the communists basically had kicked out the people who weren't. A lot of them moved to Da Nang and some of them later to Saigon. So out where we were, I say this because operationally, the populated villages that we operated in, you know, they had big family bunkers, they were very, you know, they were stoic when we went through. Their people were up in the mountains. We had no illusions that they were going to be moving to our side, at least during the, you know, I never thought the war was going to end the way that it did, but at least during the period that we were there.

• 1:32:20Jocko Willink?

  We were chatting about this a little bit before, but I wanted to call out this one point from the book. "Almost every Marine who has ever fought in close combat can relay his stories of short rounds, stray rounds, misdirected shots, accidental discharges, and other chaos resulting from friendly fire. Mortars, artillery, and airstrikes can easily wander from their intended targets, sometimes due to map error and other times because of human error. Historically, friendly fire incidents during mobile, close combat operations make up about ten percent of casualties. Intramural firefights can break out among friendly units that misidentify..." identify their fellow infantrymen, particularly while moving through enemy terrain at night.

• 1:33:03Jocko Willink?

  And you got one incident that you call out, the CH-46 helicopter approached the perimeter, ready to drop our day's load. Two Huey gunships circle overhead, flying for cover the highly vulnerable resupply helicopter, which would soon be hovering above the battlefield and slowly descending into the small dirt clearing we had scraped out to make a landing zone. At the center of our perimeter, the strobe light flashed, showing the pilot where to land. But circling in the weed beds, one of the gunships mistook the strobe light for the tracer bullets of an enemy machine gun. The Huey immediately powered toward us in a low attack line that came in just above our heads, strafing our weary, beleaguered perimeter, its machine gun spitting out hundreds

• 1:33:48Jocko Willink?

  of 762mm bullets. I had just climbed a small sand dune to urinate at an empty spot away from the poncho hooches and radios of my platoon command post. The Huey's machine guns sprayed back and forth inside our lines, kicking up a trail of dust spots just below my feet as I stood in the open. After one pass, the Huey was finally waved away, back into its circling defensive laps around our perimeter. Exposed as we were, it seemed a miracle that only one Marine radio operator near the strobe light in our company command post was hit, taking a bullet in the stomach.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Well, that's one among many, when you're fighting so close. And actually, that incident occurred not too long after an Arc light strike. We were doing the BDA on an Arc light. It's one of the great ironies, if I may digress just a little bit, because I think it's important to point out that in our operational concepts, we never used B-52s north of Vinh. We never, until 1972, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. And when I go back, I've been back to Vietnam 28 out of the last 29 years. I speak Vietnamese. You know, I...

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  We still have our disagreements, but you know, I go back there. And when I first started going back to Vietnam in the early 90s, everybody wanted to talk about that eight days. Everybody, you know, when they did this, and they were living under the illusion that they were withstanding American air power when we had these light aircraft like John McCain's aircraft coming in and, you know, making the runs when if somebody had made a different decision, I mean, a war is a war. Somebody made a different decision, things might have, might have happened differently. But we did use arc lights on the area that we supposedly were, were trying to salvage, you know, Gonoy Island, um, you know, we lit that place up.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  We were, uh, our, uh, our company was, I think, three clicks away when, when that, when that arc light landed and I was holding on to the ground, moving to the right and to the left, you know?

• 1:36:08Jocko Willink?

  How many, how many pounds of bombs would get dropped during one of those?

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Oh, I got, I've got some statistics in there, but thousands and thousands of, of pounds of, of, uh, you know, three, three B-52s would go over. And actually, I think in there, I put the number I, uh, but, um, you know, so, but to the, uh, the friendly fire incidents and how close it was, um, you know, we, the way that we would mark, um, our areas, when we're, when you're on close air in that environment, uh, you, you know, and, and this isn't about the helicopter hitting our, our guy that was, uh, you know, mistaking the strobe for a, a machine gun round, but in general, you always

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  run your airstrikes parallel to your lines because you don't want them to drop short, you know, and drop on you. So they have to make a run, you know, and we put air panels out usually. Sometimes we pop a smoke, but it's better with air, air panels during the day. Um, and, uh, so they'd, they'd make a run before they drop and, uh, so they'd, you know, they'd say, okay. No, you're too close. No, you're not, or whatever. And we had one in a during this period where we were fighting the 90th Regiment out there in the Arizona Valley in May, we were running an airstrike against an NVA unit at a tree line about 400 meters away. And we had F4s coming in, you know, and F4 is a fighter. It's not a bomber. I mean, we

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  use them for bombers, but so the F4 pilots, they're coming in at, I don't know, 450 knots, whatever it is, and they're looking out the side of their window to see to see what's on the ground. So we were running the the F4s. I had my platoon actually was, we had a rear security in the perimeter while they were doing this. And they made their run, and then they came on the second run, and the the F4 dropped on us. And actually, it bounced right outside our perimeter. And then, you know, I went, what the hell? I hear it. I hear it going right over the top of us. So I turned around, I start, you know, I want to go into the company CP and ask them what the hell is going on. So I'm walking through this scraggle of bushes, and I got all these Marines running, running

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  the other way. And this thing had bounced, and we call the snake and nape. You know, the the snake was the the way, like a kind of a propeller would break out of the the tail to arm it when you when you drop it. And luckily, the the tail had broken off of this bomb when it hit. And so, but, you know, I turned around, and these guys are, you know, I see this thing flying through there. I thought it was a body. You know, it's this green thing flying through the air and going down to where the where the CP and I'm going in, and all these guys are running the other way. And and that that bomb had had landed on the pack of our 81s FO artillery radio operator. I mean, pack

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  of his pack board, you know, dead center. If that thing had gone off, curtains, you know. And the other thing is night moose, you know, where one of the things you learn is in in when you when you operate like the 5th Marines did is Always be responsible for the person behind you, not the person in front of you. If you lose the person in front of you, stop. Don't try to catch up with them because there were a number of friendly fire incidents where someone would get lost, try to catch up, end up on the flank of the main unit and you'd have an intermodal firefight. Luckily, we didn't have that happen in my company, but it happened in the 5th Marines. So you

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  stop. If you can't see the guy in front of you, stop. And then if you can't see the person behind you, then you retrace the exact route that you've been on to go pick them up. So, you know, there were lessons that were learned and put into place.

• 1:40:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we always talk about the fact that, and Leif was my buddy's platoon commander with me, and wrote books with me, but he was saying, you know, if you had asked him before we went to Ramadi, if we would have blue on blue, you know, fratricide situations, he'd have been like, "Oh, there's no possible way." And me, same thing, you know, like, it seemed like, especially in the SEAL teams, it was like, "Oh, that will never happen, that'll never happen." And sure enough, I mean, in that book, in our first book, we happened to write about three different, I mean, there's 12 chapters and three of them concern friendly fire. Because you had to be more concerned about, well, not more concerned about, you had to be at least as concerned about deconfliction. And, you know, we would

• 1:40:51Jocko Willink?

  hang, we would hang, you know, giant aircraft panels. Once my guys would take a building for a sniper overwatch position, oftentimes, if there was any question about where they were, they'd hang giant air panels right out the way, like, as soon as they started shooting and the enemy knew where we were, we wanted to make sure that their friendlies knew where we were just as bad. So, yeah, the friendly fire problems that happened, but when I came back and I started running training, I would induce those. And they happened to 100% of the platoons that I put through training. 100% of them had blue on blues, you know, with paintball or with the laser tag system that we used. Because it's one of those things, no one thinks it can happen to them.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  You know, the other part of that, to be really frank here...

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  In the areas where we were operating, you know, you'd send night acts out every night. You know, you could move, we moved every three, four days, new perimeter. You'd send out listening posts and ambushes after dark. And, you know, you've got Marines out there, they don't really know where they are. You know, I mean, they don't have a map, you know, two or three people in a platoon have a map. And sometimes, they aren't out where they're supposed to be, or they think they are.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  And sometimes, you know, if you get somebody who's getting a little flaky, you know, he'll say, "Well, we don't have to go out there. Well, let's just go sit in this bomb crater here." And they had an incident before I got to the company where there was a fire team that was sitting in a bomb crater about 50 meters outside the lines. And a guy stood up at like 2:00 in the morning to take a leak, and the Marine on the line shot him. And, you know, the guy who shot him ended up being a chaplain's assistant. I mean, you'd live with that the rest of your life. And by the time I got to be a company commander, I put something into place which was very effective.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  And that is, the first thing I would do is, I would send out my night acts when it was still light. And I would send them what I called a day pause. The listening posts out to an outpost further away. The ambush to a site, I would have them walk by the site where they're, you know, quietly check it out, and then go to a pause like 100 meters away, whatever. And then when it got dark, they both were moving into known terrain. You know, the LP coming back toward the perimeter, so they had a sense of security there. The ambush, having researched the ambush and moving back into it.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  And then I would mortar their day pause.

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  And the first time I did that, I had an ambush out about a click and a half away. And they called me and they go, be advised, you're dropping mortars on us. I said, you are not where you're supposed to be, dude. What are you gonna do if you hit something? You know, where are we gonna drop, we're gonna really drop rounds on you, you know? So, so I got everything real straight.

• 1:44:04Jocko Willink?

  When in doubt, drop mortars on your people.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Make sure, well, if I'm hitting you with a mortar, you're not where you're supposed to be. And it's gonna get a lot worse if you get hit out there.

• 1:44:14Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man. That'll solve that problem. You talk about, you know, I walked, this is back to the book, I walked every square kilometers of those ridges and rice fields. I fought many of those villages. I was wounded there. And here is where I and my fellow combat veterans stand on one side of a great impassable divide, with the rest of the world on the other.

• 1:44:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Because every one of us knows that if our luck had run out, or if someone among us had made one inadvertent mistake, we could have died there.

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  No question. You can be, that's one thing about, you know, I've heard you talk about IEDs before, you know? I would say 25 to 30% of our casualties were IEDs. Most of them were gunshot, a lot of shrapnel wounds. Uh, but with an IED, there's nothing more demoralizing, or booby trap, as we call it then. Uh, and the, particularly if you're moving at night, the casualties are large. Uh, and there's nowhere to put your anger, you know? And if you're on the, on the outside of that, you go, whoa, you know? That easily could have been me. You can be 100% right and still be dead. We had one device on a night move.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Every member of my platoon stepped over it on a, on a narrow trail. I was walking fourth, fourth marine, fourth marine in the, in the column. And the last, I had a brand new guy. I put him on tail end Charlie. It was a company move, actually leading a battalion in, but it was a company move. And it was some branch on the trail or something, kaboom. And, you know, there were 19 casualties and an ambush after that, so.

• 1:46:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for those of you that aren't in the military when you're moving at night, especially pre-night vision, then the only way you can do it is you have to be closer to the person in front of you because you gotta be able to see them. And so what that does, and you'll be within, within, and sometimes when it's really dark, you'll be able to touch the person in front of you. So therefore, if someone hits a booby trap or an IED, or you get ambushed, the casualties are increased dramatically because you're just all together.

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  And to add one thing about Ramadi on that is, I think when we got there, they had 140 known IEDs on the board at any given time. And there were a couple of different incidents. One in particular that sticks in my mind was when we were putting in the 17th Street Security Station. A friend of mine's platoon was out providing external security with gun trucks. And I guess he's, his truck sat on an IED all night. And then right when they were about to move, it went off and took the front of the truck with it. Luckily, nobody was killed. But it's nothing you can shoot back at. You can't really prepare for it.

• 1:47:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, sometimes you gotta get lucky. We had the similar thing where we, we were going to a combat outpost in a convoy of just, you know, our SEALs heading to a convoy, or heading to a combat outpost. And my point man or lead driver or someone said, hey, I think there's something ahead of us in the road, stops the vehicle. I'm actually watching him. He gets out looking underneath the vehicle with a flashlight to look and see. I'm thinking to myself, hmm, this doesn't seem good. Didn't identify anything. We roll through, we get to the combat outpost, and then a couple hours later, the dagger clearance team came through and found a triple stack, you know, 120 millimeter mortars that would have killed everyone in that vehicle for sure, and if not, a few others. So sometimes it's better

• 1:47:55Jocko Willink?

  to be lucky than good. And for those of you out there, if you think you're on an IED, maybe not the flashlight approach.

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  No, absolutely not. Quietly walk away.

• 1:48:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've I had I I did that. It was my my first deployment to Iraq. I'm I'm standing there and my EOD guys were doing a target hit and I my EOD guys find a a booby trap. And it was in a planter box outside perfect spot where where an assault team would stack up. And there was a little plant and it was filled with the two or three 16 millimeter mortars that were rigged from the house. And so my EOD guy found it was just you plug it into the wall and it goes off. So there was and there was actually a little a little hole cut in the curtain. So the guy could actually sit there and watch and when we rolled up boom. And so he found the wire. He saw it went out the window followed it out there finds the booby trap. And I'm standing there watching him, you know, disarm this

• 1:48:47Jocko Willink?

  booby trap. And he looks over his shoulder and he says, you might not want to stand here. And I was like, that's a good point. I'll be somewhere else.

• 1:48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, they in in this area, in this area of Vietnam, they could become accustomed to a lot of our operational decisions. You know, we like the high ground. We like to get a spot where you can see some of these rice paddies were like a mile wide, you know, and if you you want a place where you can have visuals and also provide, you know, potential supporting weaponry for people crossing the patio, etc., etc. And so, you know, they they picked these out, you know, and we had one hill, Hill 11 in the Arizona Valley where

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  you know, we'd send when we'd be getting these terrain features, the thing you do is you'd send a platoon to sweep it. You know, when you first get up, sweep it, secure it, not just for for booby traps, but you know, for putting your your your other units in. The platoon swept it with second platoon, they found a mine, blew the mine. I left, I was gonna put my lines in and I would I didn't want to bring my platoon up on that hill with with the having found the mine. So I left the rest of my platoon on the bottom hill on air panel and. McGarvey's head, uh, my radio operator, said, "Do not move. I want to see where you are."

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  I brought my squad leaders. We were clearing lanes down into where we were going to put, uh, our Marines and I heard this kaboom and I look up behind me and someone had moved these people up to the top of the hill. I turned around to see a guy flying through the air with a big artillery round. Um, and I saw McGarvey, him running with his arm hanging by, by a shred. He was standing behind him. So we, we had casualties on top of that hill. Pretty, pretty messy after a lot of other things we'd been through. Um, and, um, then the next morning, our, uh, eighty-one's FO, you know, we, we set up our perimeter, got

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  mortared that afternoon. Uh, and, uh, he, he rolled over the next morning and his elbow went down. And he reached up and it was like a piece of, little piece of C ration cardboard. Uh, he peeled it, covered it with mud, like, you know, like plastic surgery. So nothing. Lifted it up and there was a one, seven, five artillery round with a pressure release detonator on it that he had slept on all night. Uh, if he had just rolled over, it would have been, I think they found fifteen booby traps on that, on that one hill eventually. Uh, so.

• 1:51:39Jocko Willink?

  What a nightmare. Um, and I guess what a, what a good job on him on, on getting sound night sleep, not rolling over.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  I think, I think he's probably woke up in the middle of the night on that one a few times thinking about how lucky, how lucky.

• 1:51:56Jocko Willink?

  Um, here, here's, you're talking, you talk a little bit about the overall, kind of the overall, I guess the overall occurrences that were going on were beyond what's just sitting right in front of you. So here we go. But something else was going on. It stemmed from the reality that on any given day, three different wars were being fought in the basin. The first war involved conventional combat against North Vietnamese Army regulars and main force Viet Cong soldiers. The second war was the daily challenge of an insurgency dominated by a long-term war of attrition aimed at driving American public opinion and troop morale against our own involvement in Vietnam.

• 1:52:38Jocko Willink?

  At the beginning of what became known as the American War, Communist leader Ho Chi Minh famously predicted for every one of you, "We kill, you will kill ten of us. But in the end, it is you who will grow tired."

• 1:52:54Jocko Willink?

  The Third War focused, was a focused and precise form of domestic terrorism. At this point in our history, America's top leadership had yet to fully grasp the power and impact of a type of terrorism that went well beyond the traditional notions of military insurgency. Nor did the South Vietnamese government ever find a way to completely counter it. It was, uh, sorry, a largely invisible war of terror and seduction was taking place daily among the rural populace, designed to discredit the South Vietnamese government and to drive a murderous wedge between the people and the government. And you go on to talk about Bernard Fall and his book. You know, he's a French author who wrote a bunch of books,

• 1:53:38Jocko Willink?

  uh, spent time there, wrote a book called Hell in a Very Small Place, and he warned the Dick Van, am I saying that right? Dick Von. Dick Von. Von. Dick Von. Um, or Moral Intervention Cadres. These were groups and what they were doing was the violent act for psychological rather than military reasons, which is the source of the success of the Viet Minh. And the Dick Von will simply go on murdering village chiefs, youth leaders, teachers, and anti-malarial teams, thus isolating the Saigon government from the countryside. And you describe one of these situations. "There was no warning.

• 1:54:24Jocko Willink?

  From around that unseen bend, the air suddenly belched and erupted, quick explosions piercing our ears and reverberating like an unseen blast of wind. My adrenaline surged. I counted three quick bursts of rifle fire and then a whomp of three grenades. The entire platoon became animated, tense, picking up the pace to a jog as we strode toward the noise. Within a few heartbeats, a young Vietnamese wild-eyed and gasping for breath collided on the trail with the point man of the platoon. Instinctively, the marine tackled the young man and held him on the ground. We did not know it yet, but there had been two others. After its attack, the assassination squad had split apart. We would not capture the other two, more regrettably, we would not be able to kill them.

• 1:55:09Jocko Willink?

  The district chief's meeting had not lasted very long. We were the first Marines to reach the hooch. I quickly deployed my platoon in defensive positions around it in case there was a second attack, then I stepped inside the shadowed, blood-soaked room. My platoon corpsman and my radio operator came with me. Within minutes, our company's chief corpsman stepped inside, having jogged down from the command post on Henderson Hill. Their unit one medical bags would soon be empty of battle dressing and tourniquet, tourniquets. Together, we began the ugly business of triage, separating the dead from the near dead and the near dead from those who might be medically saved. Inside the hooch, my hands, armed, arms, trousers and boots had quickly become covered with blood.

• 1:55:54Jocko Willink?

  We pulled the dead outside, lining them up in the field as if they were already under markers in a cemetery, then covered them up so that the feasting flies might find some other place to linger. We had a problem with flies on the battlefield. They buzzed everywhere into our food and onto our open sores. On an earlier morning, I had counted more than a dozen floating inside my canteen cup as I heated a mix of water and sea rash and hot chocolate. Foolishly, I had bitten into them, thinking they were chunks of chocolate. We carried out the wounded. On the dirt floor of the hooch, we had found them wriggling and turning like worms among each other as they had sought to escape the ankle-deep syrup of blood and innards.

• 1:56:36Jocko Willink?

  I noticed the district chief's young deputy, deputy, who stood out from the others due to his fancy clothes. Blown backward into a family altar by the blast, he was frozen in death with one arm raised in the air as if he were trying to catch the grenade that had killed him. That hand was gone. Nothing but the top of a forearm remained, its white tendons sticking out randomly like unspliced electrical wires. I had approached an old woman who was leaning back against a mud wall with a stunned look on her face. Her jaw had dropped and her eyes stared unbelievably at nothing. I had thought she was merely in shock. I pulled her arm and immediately recognized the lack of muscular response of the dead.

• 1:57:18Jocko Willink?

  I took a closer look and saw that she had taken a square, nickel-sized piece of shrapnel in the middle of her forehead, just above her eyes.

• 1:57:27Jocko Willink?

  And so on. As I waited in the muck, it did not get any better.

• 1:57:33Jocko Willink?

  This was the war we were losing, perfectly summarizing Bernard Falls' observation. On this morning, the Vietcong were not asking for anyone's support. They were asserting their control. For all of the bombs we dropped, many of them so randomly that they killed people, that they killed the very people we were trying to help, and for all the, for all of us enemy soldiers we killed, our leaders did not understand the cold, focused violence perpetrated by the other side. They had deliberately killed a room full of their own people. A violent act for psychological, rather than military reasons, as a warning to everyone in the basin.

• 1:58:15Jocko Willink?

  That it was a crime punishable by death to even attend a political meeting hosted by the other side.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  True. Let me, let me, uh, see if I can, I can go back to the three points that, that you read about and, um, just elaborate a little bit.

• 1:58:38Speaker 01

  There were three wars at any given day. I talked a little bit about it earlier. On the straight, uh, conventional side, unit against unit, there's, there's no question we, we defeated. Those forces. Finally, and, you know, people during the war were talking about the body count, the body count, the inflated body count, et cetera, et cetera. In 1995, Hanoi admitted they lost 1.4 million soldiers dead. 1.4 million soldiers dead. We lost 58,000. The South Vietnamese, who I really want to say something about because I think they have been disrespected by history, they lost about 250,000 dead.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  And so, we did our job. That was our main job. The second war you're talking about, the guerrilla war, I think we did well, but we could have done better. One of the things that Bernard Fall talked about was how our, you know, our supporting arms, we used, we heavily used artillery, mortars, and these sort of things, and in the villages, it seemed kind of random. And the communists were very focused, you know, not on the battlefield, but how they used stuff outside the battlefield. They were very focused on who they were, who they were after, in addition to like showing that they could, they could meet up with us. But even on, even on that war, I mean, we adapted.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  And in that area that I operated in, you know, by the time I'd been there four or five months, I understood the tempo of that place, I understood where they, where they were, where they had been, I could anticipate them. And we did some, I think, some really great things by the time I got to be a company commander out there in terms of knocking, knocking them off balance, keeping the morale of our troops up, you know, showing them that we really, we could go where they were and we could figure out what they were going to do. The third was the key, and I will say, I want to say a couple of things about that. First, you know, the South Vietnamese, the motivation of the South Vietnamese, I think, has been misunderstood.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  And I didn't understand this when I was in Vietnam. I understood this a lot better when I got back from Vietnam. I started working with the Vietnamese community here after 1975, helping them understand the political system that they were moving into, you know, they came, they came here, they were very, they were organized into community groups, they, they knew that, you know, they...

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  We're going to put the future into their kids, you know, from day one. It was like, "Get a job," you know, but meeting with them, "Get a job, get your kids in school, the next generation is going to succeed." But also, they were able to explain in a way that I never got out there where I was about what it was they were trying to do and how, you know, if you could, the communist approach to this was very Stalinist. Ho Chi Minh was, he may, he may have been a nationalist, but he studied the commentary in Moscow for like seven years. He knew the tactics that were going to be used to eliminate the opposition,

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  the Vietnamese opposition, and to also put the markers down. The South Vietnamese never found a way to totally respond to this, and they were constantly getting their leaders, they had a lot of corruption. The culture is a Mandarin culture. There's a lot of corruption in the culture at large when you get, you know, people in positions of power. It's a very big temptation in the Mandarin system. But they were saying, despite what I mentioned earlier about the assassination programs that were not fully understood in our country, they were saying, the people who opposed the war were saying, "The South Vietnamese

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  are so corrupt, they won't go out there." You know, we have a district chief in Da Nang. He lives in his villa. He has a great life. He won't go out to the Anh Wah Basit. And so our company commander, who part of his first tour he had done as a, you know, pacification officer working with them, said, "We're going to get him out here. We're going to get him out here. We're going to protect him." And they found out about that, and as I wrote in the book, I mean, they killed seventeen of their own people in one little room, and the district chief and his aide

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  You know, just to send the signal. That signal was well understood, you know, by the people in these areas. And what we were doing was not as well understood even by ourselves. One of the, you know, the most interesting moments for me was when I had a, uh, I was toward the end of my tour. I had a Marine who was getting court martialed in Da Nang for hitting an NCO. He was not in my company anymore. But he said, I'm getting court martialed. Like, you know, I called on his land light on the regimental three shop, you know. He said, I'm getting court martialed and I don't, uh, you know, I don't have a lawyer I can talk to. Can you come in and help me? I said, all right.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  I got permission to go into Da Nang. So I went to the three math headquarters. They had this great dining hall, you know, that you had to try to get to. So I went over to the three math and had dinner and I went into a bar and this, this woman, this Vietnamese woman who was working behind the bar, she had a black diamond sewn into her alzai.

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  And so she was, you know, she saw me, all droopy, you know, mustache, my boots are blonde, definitely my hair's a little long, I definitely don't belong in three math headquarters. She said, you're, you're from out there.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  I said, yeah. She said, where are you? And I said, I'm in Anhwa. And she says, I'm from Dai Lo, which is, was the major town at the corner, eastern corner of the Arizona Valley. And she said, you're doing so much good. And I went, whoa, really? And she said, she said, you know why I wear this? She said, they killed my entire family. She said, in Dai Lo, her father was a police officer. They came in. At night, they killed everybody. She was shot. Everybody but her was killed. Her husband was in Arvin. He was just, had just been killed. She said, you know, you, we, you know, we can go places now. We couldn't go three years ago. You know, you are, you are

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  winning. And, you know, it's the first time anybody had ever, ever said that to me, you know. And another comment needs to be made, and that is that the South Vietnamese leadership, the military leadership, my age, there were a lot of really fine leaders in there. And even, even David Hackworth, you know, who said, you know, this North Vietnamese flag is going to be flying over Saigon by 1975, also said emphatically to me, when I was interviewing him, if you'd gotten these people into position, they would have, they would have, I'm not going to say they would have won, but they would have survived. South Vietnamese would have survived like South Korea, survived West Germany, survived for an eventual better

• 2:06:00Speaker 01

  solution. So they, they have been, I think, you know, libeled in, in history in terms of the competence of, of a lot of their, their really good leaders. And people, and soldiers and Marines.

• 2:06:14Jocko Willink?

  And that, that's, and that's from your perspective. Were you doing joint patrols with them?

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  Well, here's the interesting thing. One of the reasons that the Combat Temple went up in early 69 was that Nixon had been elected president. The communists were very smart at keying in their military operations to our politics. 64, Gulf of Tonka. In 68, knocked the president out. That's 68. 72, the Easter Offensive, which your Colonel Reader, was that his name, was, was talking about so eloquently in one of your shows. And they wanted Nixon, Nixon was going to meet President Tieu on, in Guam, in June of, of 1969. And they wanted the Americans to say they're getting out of there. I don't

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  know, I can't, I couldn't sit there when I was over there going, yeah, this is what's happening. But so, late April, all of May, Hamburger Hill, and 90th Regiment, every, you know, the place lit up, 450 people dying.

• 2:07:18Speaker 01

  But Nixon announced Vietnamization. It's been mocked. It should not have been mocked. In the Arizona Valley, we hadn't seen South Vietnamese out in the Arizona Valley. And then I was out there as a company commander, brought a Ranger unit out and it kinda got waxed and we actually moved in to their perimeter and they were jumping on helicopters to get out. And then they sent a unit, well, the 51st Arvin Regiment out there, and these guys were good. I mean, I would have operated with them any day. And I've got, you know, many, many friends who were Arvin in Vietnam who will talk to you about what happened when

• 2:07:58Speaker 01

  the Watergate Congress took over. You know, when Nixon resigned and then, you know, this anti-war Congress came in and one of the first substantive votes they took was to cut off all supplemental appropriations to the South Vietnamese Army. There was, that was, there was no reason for that. Our forces weren't even on the ground over there. And at the same time, the North Vietnamese refurbished and they attacked them when they were repositioned. They had to reposition. I have a really great friend, you know, who, when I was listening to your show, they were talking about the American who had spent nine years as a prisoner

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  of war, Le Cao, who's here now, spent 12 years on the battlefield, was a regimental commander at age 28, recipient of their Medal of Honor, and in 13 and a half years locked up, five years in a conics box. He was down to two artillery rounds per tube per day when he was trying to reposition his forces when this thing hit. So it was a very complicated war. I'm not trying to like, you know, re, you know, reimagine what was happening, but I had always thought that the end result would probably be kind of like what you see

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  in Iraq, just sort of a slowdown and sort things out rather than what happened.

• 2:09:36Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, "While my mother slept so fitfully and so fitfully dreamed, I was hit by two enemy grenades while clearing a series of well camouflaged bunkers. The bunkers were built inside a bamboo thicket at the edge of a murky stream bed. The first grenade peppered me lightly on the face and shoulders, the second detonated behind me just after I shot the man who threw it and a second soldier who was inside the same bunker. I was hit in the head, back, arm, and leg. The grenade's concussion lifted me into the air and threw me down a hill into the stream. I still carry shrapnel at the base of my skull and in one kidney from the blast.

• 2:10:18Jocko Willink?

  But the square quarter-sized piece that scored the inside of my left knee joint and lodged against the bone of my lower leg would eventually change the direction of my life. Having for months repeatedly seen far worse among many of my Marines, I did not pay a great deal of attention to my wounds. Medevaced into Al-Hoa, I was treated for several days at the battalion aid station. Some of the shrapnel in the back of, in my head, back, and arm was removed, and some was left to work its way out naturally as my skin healed over time, the scars pushing shrapnel out onto the surface. I returned to the bush as soon as possible, but the leg wound went deep into the joint

• 2:11:01Jocko Willink?

  and had not completely healed. In the muck of the rice paddies and the filth of the basin, vills, it soon became infected. I did not know it at the time, but the infection was moving into the bone, causing permanent septic damage." And then you go to, in August, your company executive officer, he lets you know that there's a billet opened up for Force Service Regiment on Okinawa. And for those people that don't know what is, this is like a plush billet, and here you go. If I accepted the assignment, for me, the Vietnam War would be over within weeks. And, and an assignment on the quaint and gorgeous island of Okinawa would give me several

• 2:11:45Jocko Willink?

  months to decompress from battlefield combat before I returned home. Life's gambles are sometimes settled in mere moments, weighed against years of previous thought and decades on the other side where one might reflect on the wisdom involved in a sudden decision. I listened to the executive officer and fought inside myself, pressing the radio handset against my face as I leaned against an old grave in the middle of a desolate village. Those few seconds became, as they like to say in the Marine Corps, a teachable moment.

• 2:12:21Jocko Willink?

  But I could not say yes.

• 2:12:25Jocko Willink?

  After all the years of preparation and months of hardship that I had endured with one infantry battalion in this small but violent section of a seemingly never-ending war, I could not simply walk away. Bonds formed on the battlefield are often as unbreakable as the strongest family ties. In a word, I felt obligated. Like my father, service to country defined my self-respect. More to the point, I loved leading infantry Marines. With a gritty elan, they faced the gravest dangers. They took the greatest risks. They absorbed the highest casualties. They had the fewest creature comforts.

• 2:13:08Jocko Willink?

  But they also stood face-to-face and toe-to-toe with the enemy every day.

• 2:13:14Jocko Willink?

  And they answered in their honor to no one.

• 2:13:20Jocko Willink?

  Taking a deep breath, I finally said, "No", and stayed in the bush. In September, I was given command of dying Delta.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  No complaints.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  You know, it's, um...

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  During that time, I'd served under four battalion commanders and three regimental commanders. And, as you know, I mean, I'd say the majority of the people who go through this experience know, there are a few bonds in your life tighter than the people that you have served with under extraordinary circumstances. I once wrote in one article, "I don't say I would trust my life to these people because I already have." And I knew what I was doing.

• 2:14:25Speaker 01

  You know, I knew the terrain. I felt like I belonged there. There's a scene in Fields of Fire where Snake, the squallier, they're getting ready to go on an operation. He goes and sits on a bunker, looking out across the patties at the fog pouring down the mountains and says, "You know, yeah, this is where I belong." You know, and my third regimental commander, who was a real piece of work, named Noble Beck, pulled me in. He found out I had two Purple Hearts as an officer in the bush, which was against the division

• 2:15:06Speaker 01

  order. And as he said, when I left Vietnam, he said, "This guy came in with tears as big as horse turds in his eyes." And, you know, the greatest job I've ever had is being a rifle company commander. Just enough independence to really be innovative, but still totally connected with your people. And I've been very privileged in my life to be able to maintain contact, not only with the people that I, many of the people that I've served with, but also with the operating military. And I learned, when I...

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  When I was in law school, I, you know, that's where I finally ended up, um, cause I needed, figured I needed to screw my brain on and figure out, you know, the rest of my life. I found out that I could make money by writing, you know, it was like the pure formula here, you know, I could actually get people to pay me to indulge my curiosities and, uh, so I was, I was able, among other things, to, you know, to be with the military, our military, in a lot of different places. I was in Beirut, uh, in 1983, uh, when I covered it for PBS, um, and actually I, I left right before the building blew up. I, I stop every year, uh, October 23rd and think about that. That was a good battalion, First Battalion, Eighth

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Marines. You know, you've been around this long enough, you can smell a good, good unit and you can tell a bad unit, and they were a good unit. They were well-led. Um, I, uh, was able to be in Afghanistan, you know, as a, as an embed over there, um, spent, been able to spend time working on veterans issues, spent five years in the Pentagon. Uh, so, uh, you can, you can take this sort of, you know, affiliation and camaraderie and, and have it still help in other things you do in your life.

• 2:17:12Jocko Willink?

  So that was, that was it, right? When, uh, when the Colonel brought you in and he just said, "Hey, look, I don't care, you're going home, you're, you're out, you're, you're not gonna stay here anymore." And there was no, no assandar butts about that one?

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  No, there was not. Um, you know, he, as soon as he found out I had two Purple Hearts, um, and I, I was on the regimental, in the regimental three shot for my last two months and then came home and then I started, you know, my, uh, situation with the, the joint in my leg started acting up after I got home.

• 2:17:45Jocko Willink?

  And, and by the way, you, you wrote this whole book and you spent, I think it was a half or maybe a quarter paragraph or maybe three sentences talking about you attacking enemy bunkers, throwing grenades in, getting wounded, fighting on. Um, that's, that's the, that's, that's what you received the Navy Cross for. And, um, well, I just wanted to point out that that's, uh, that takes humble to a new level for you to write this book and give yourself a, a sentence or two.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  When I decided to write Fields of Fire, I was in law school. There was a, you know, there was a very important concept that stuck in my mind and it's still there. And that is that the people who went over and interrupted their lives, a lot of them just spent one tour in the Marine Corps and went home, have never been fully appreciated, have never been fully understood, you know, in what they did, getting that down, you know, the environment in which they served and, you know, the, there's a, when we talk about courage, there's physical courage, which is maybe shooting somebody in a bunker, I don't

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  know. There's moral courage, which is standing up for what you believe in and having the courage to say it to those above you and sometimes you have to say it to those who are, who are below you, you know, no, you gotta do this, that's all there is to it. And then there's what I like to call daily courage, you know, and daily courage is taking a hand God dealt you and doing something with it, you know, like Tom Martin, who was one of my squad leaders, it was a, he's now passed away, he was an interesting, he was an interesting ear for me in the bush. He had been in Vanderbilt University, was in favor of the war, I was in a debate on

• 2:19:45Speaker 01

  the war and this guy who supposedly was going to Canada turned around and said, if you think this is such a great war, why don't you just go serve in it? And he enlisted, so he was a very, very smart, knowing guy, could, you know, when things would get down, he'd come and talk, talk to me about different stuff. Then he got shot. And he used to keep, you know, everybody had this Zippo lighter, you know, you know, with your slogan on it and his, his, his slogan was, "Life is not in drawing a good hand, but learning to play a poor hand well." And that takes daily courage, you know, and we had in our, in our platoon...

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

  Had two triple amputees. One, one died before they got him out of Vietnam. But Dale Wilson was the other one, the Silver Star recipient. One of the most positive people I've ever met. If you, if you met him, you wouldn't, you would know that he had, had lost an arm, but you wouldn't, you know, he'd be leaning on a cane, you wouldn't be able to tell he'd lost one leg up by the thigh or above the thigh and the other one down below. And he takes Dale Wilson 15 minutes to get out of bed. That's daily courage. And never, never complains. He'll, he'll say, well, I was going to be in the NFL. What else, what else should I be doing here?

• 2:21:06Speaker 01

  Mac McGarvey, arm blown off, might below the shoulder. Went out and got a tattoo that says, "Cut on dotted line." When I ran for the Senate, when I decided to run for the Senate nine months to the day before the election, zero money, zero campaign staff. I just said, "I'm going to do this." First guy I called was McGarvey. He was the night manager of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville, Tennessee. And I said, "Man, I need somebody I can trust, you know, 24 hours a day. You've got to be my driver." He says, "I got one arm." I said, "I don't care. You're my driver." He quit his job, moved into our basement for a year and, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't have done it without him. Great, great friend of Sun Jim's too, by the way.

• 2:21:48Speaker 01

  So that's, that's daily courage, you know? And that's, you know, that's really, when you look at the ramifications of that place and having people understand, you know, what, how this was in many ways positive for our country too. That's my goal.

• 2:22:07Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you're in law school and, you know, you've, you've mentioned this a couple of times so far, but at some point you decide, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to start writing. Why did you decide to write a novel instead of write a book of your own experiences? And I mean, I know, and I'm going to get into it a little bit. I mean, clearly there's a major amount of crossover, but is there a specific reason why you said, you know what, I'm going to write a novel instead of a, a memoir?

• 2:22:29Speaker 01

  Well, there's two things. I started writing my last year in the Marine Corps. I was put on the Secretary of the Navy staff and I was on this medical hold. And I, you know, as, as we discussed earlier, I was an avid reader. I loved, I loved to write. I was writing for my job. I wrote three. Magazine articles in that year, one of them was very controversial, it was about the roles and missions of the Marine Corps, how they were on paper an amphibious force and they were doing all these other things and it did it make a difference and my bottom line was you better believe it makes a difference. There's not one Marine general on any of these J-staffs anywhere except that, you know, if the Navy gives them one and the Marine Corps wasn't even represented when they decided that that was their mission, it was the Chief of Naval Operations.

• 2:23:12Speaker 01

  And I was 25 years old and I got in big trouble. You think I got in big trouble in some of these other things I've written? You know, the Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps was calling me and talking to me and the Commandant ordered a counter article to be written about what I had said because they were being accused in the JCS of, you know, wanting to start some sort of a campaign. So I learned the power of the written word. And then I wrote, my first year in law school, I started looking, I'd started looking at Micronesia and what's going to happen after the Vietnam War? What should the United States basing system look like in the Pacific? And I was reading a lot of World War II stuff and, you know, Rommel in the desert was, you know, fighting from what he called the interior position.

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  You know, logistically, shortening logistic lines, being able to hit the Brits when they were after them and hit the Americans when they were after them. And I said, "We need to develop an interior position in Pacific Asia and that's Guam-Tenion." I got really kind of into this, wrote my first book actually about that and went out and worked for the Governor of Guam doing a study. So then, I'm saying, I'm listening to the stuff that people were saying about those who served. I think I met three people in three years in Georgetown Law School who had been in combat in Vietnam. Eighteen hundred people, student body, same age group, something was wrong. And I actually was sitting in Constitutional Law Class when they were debating the War Powers Act and it got to be very vicious on, you know, the people who served there

• 2:24:39Speaker 01

  and all this stuff they'd never said to my face, they're saying to each other in this class. I'm going, "Holy shit, that's what they really believe." And I started writing the last chapter of Fields of Fire sitting in Constitutional Law Class. And then, as I wrote it, you know, the first time, I wrote this book seven times, cover to cover, and an engineering degree, you know, and I'm... You know, I, I never went to a creative writing class. I started reading the people I thought were the greats, um, in, in a different way, not for enjoyment, but for structure and these sorts of things. Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, uh, Graham Greene, uh, the British and the Irish poets, et cetera. Um, so the first time through, it was sort of like, just, you know, it was a very good catharsis. And then I got to the point where I said, no, I've got a piece of

• 2:25:23Speaker 01

  literature here. Uh, every one of these characters is a little bit different and it is an escalating moral drama, uh, in terms of how they are reacting to, to operating in this particular area. Uh, and so the, the power, the literary power of the novel was, was more important than me telling, uh, I was there kind of story. Uh, it had a universality to it. And, uh, Ted Purdy, uh, who came in to help me on this, um, who had, well, discovered Leon Yeros was editor in chief of Putnam at one time, uh, uh, just really encouraged me to stay with it. And I,

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  you know, I'm very lucky that I did because I, it, the book survived, you know, 12 rejections and everything else and is still out there.

• 2:26:14Jocko Willink?

  No, so, uh, I, and, and honestly, I, I kinda answered that question for myself. And I think when people read it, they'll figure out why you did it. Cause it does. It has this power to it that you couldn't have done, um, just writing your own story, even though your own story is, is very similar and has probably parts that are just even more impactful, but the way that this ties together. And this is, this is like the iconic novel. And I will say about Vietnam War, but really like you could put this over just war and you got these characters in it. You, you know, you, you already talked about one of them. You got Snake, who's like the street smart, kinda badass Marine. You got Lieutenant Robert E. Lee

• 2:26:59Jocko Willink?

  Hodges, who's, who's the lieutenant. You got the Senator, who's this Harvard kid that thought he was gonna play the French horn in the Marine Corps. And he ends up in the basin.

• 2:27:11Jocko Willink?

  You got Cat Man, who's the Mexican Point Man. You got the Terp, the interpreters, we called them, Dan. You got Cannonball, Flaky, Bagger, Rabbit, Gilliland, Baby Cakes, Sergeant Austins. And all these characters, and you know, as I read this, it was just, you know, I probably read this 10 years ago or something, maybe 15 years ago. And when I read it again, I mean, it's just infinitely, I mean, just because I'm older and I understand things more, I guess, I hope. But just the way that each one of these characters, and here's something that I realized as I was reading this book. First of all, we know these characters, like these characters, they exist in real life,

• 2:27:54Jocko Willink?

  they exist in combat, they enlisted, they exist in the SEAL teams, they exist in the Marine Corps, they exist in the Army. I met all these characters, they're all out there and they're all out there. I work with businesses now, they're in those businesses as well. They're in, these are human beings. And, and that's incredible. And then you put them in this, you know, again, I'm interested always in learning about human nature, but you put them in this environment, that is what you've talked about. And this environment is gonna, is gonna reveal human nature in incredible ways. And you just capture so much of it.

• 2:28:29Jocko Willink?

  And, I mean, I want to take a look at when, when Hodges kind of arrives in Vietnam and he sits down with Major Otto. So here we go, this is Fields of Fire, going back to the book. Major Otto, the battalion executive officer, sat behind his field desk and examined Hodges' record book. He was young for a major in his early 30s. He seemed pleasant enough to Hodges, who had expected a hatchet-faced, ravening warrior after hearing of the major's background. Otto had been a company commander during his first tour and was highly decorated. His right forearm was gashed with a six-inch purple trough left by a bone-shattering machine gun bullet.

• 2:29:11Jocko Willink?

  And yet he had the inquisitive, sensitive demeanor of a brooding scholar. He smiled casually to Hodges. So, you think you're ready? Hodges stood at a loose parade rest in the musty heat of the tent. He was scheduled to attend three more days of regimental indoctrination school, but he had not found it helpful and he had learned to hate the dust-filled boredom of Anawa.

• 2:29:35Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir. I'm ready. Think so? Good. They need you out there. Lost another lieutenant last night. The major watched him closely. Yes, sir. I heard. Yeah. Good old dying Delta. They like to call themselves Deadly Delta. Otto chuckled.

• 2:29:54Jocko Willink?

  He had a beaten tone in his voice as if he had seen the ritual so many times it had lost its meaning. Deadly dying Delta. Hodges watched him, dripping with sweat in the dark heat. Outside, a jeep rumbled past, leaving a wave of red dirt that seeped underneath the tent flap like a creeping frog.

• 2:30:14Jocko Willink?

  In the distance, an artillery battery fired a mission towards the Arizona Territory. The major swiped at a fly, then lit a cigarette. As an afterthought, he offered one to Hodges. No, thank you, sir. Major Otto sighed. You'll learn. He dragged deeply on the cigarette, frankly, studying Hodges. Yeah, dying Delta. You're not ready, Lieutenant. The only reason I'm telling you is I don't want you to panic when you get out there and find out. Nothing in your entire goddamn life will have prepared you for the bush. Not a damn thing. Yes, sir. Do you know what I mean? No, sir. Jesus Christ. The major dragged again on his cigarette. Deadly Delta. Yeah.

• 2:30:59Jocko Willink?

  They really caught the shit last night. I watched it. It was almost embarrassing to admit. He still felt uncomfortable about the irony of sitting on a bunker and watching someone else's war. Otto leaned forward, absently rubbing the purple gash on his forearm. Well, what kind of person do you think goes through that shit day in and day out, Lieutenant? Because that's what it is. Shit. And that's the way you take it. Every stinking day, something piddly ass or something heavy. This isn't World War II where we can pull you out to Australia and parade after a month of fighting. Nope, and it isn't 1965. When we first came into Vietnam, we would send a company out on a two-day operation, then bring the men back for hot chow and liberty. Yeah, that's right. Liberty, Lieutenant. In Da Nang.

• 2:31:44Jocko Willink?

  Then we started week-long operations. Then it was a month. Now, well, we just leave them out there all the time. It's more convenient. The major offered Hodges a small, challenging smile. "They go wild, Lieutenant, and there's nothing you can do about it. You'll go wild too. Wild as hell. You spend a month in the bush and you're not a Marine anymore.

• 2:32:07Jocko Willink?

  Hell, you're not even a goddamn person. There's no tents, no barbed wire, no hot food, no jeeps or trucks, no clean clothes, nothing. You're an animal.

• 2:32:18Jocko Willink?

  It gets so that it's natural to squat when you take a shit. You get ringworm and hookworm and gook sores. You roll around in your own filth. You forget how bad you smell. Dead people, guts in the goddamn dirt, miserable civilian. It all gets sort of boring. You cry when your friends are killed, but a new friend comes on a helicopter a few days later. And the dead friend becomes enshrined, a martyr to friendship. You teach the new friend about him, and you all remember him. It's very romantic. It doesn't sound very romantic. That's after a month, or two.

• 2:32:57Jocko Willink?

  "But Lieutenant, when you do it for six, or nine, or even longer, by Christ, you'll never shake it. The bush gets in your blood, and you hate anyone who hasn't fermented in his own stench for months, or stood inside a dirt hole all night waiting to kill a man who's trying to kill him first."

• 2:33:15Jocko Willink?

  Major auto-scrutinized Hodges. "Oh yeah, I've done a lot of thinking about it. That's something a grunt isn't supposed to do."

• 2:33:24Jocko Willink?

  He chuckled again, a sort of dry bark. "But what else can a man do in Anhoah? Oh, and it becomes an oasis. You like Anhoah, Lieutenant? I hate it." "You'll like it when you get back from the bush, I guarantee." "So, what kind of person can take it for months on end?" Hodges felt uneasy. He'd expected the major to wave the flag and talk about Iwo Jima, and then send him aboard the resupply helicopter with fire in his heart.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Someone who is very dedicated, sir.

• 2:33:59Jocko Willink?

  Either that. Or someone who is very crazy. Well, there you are. That's in a nutshell. You just hit the nail on the goddamn head.

• 2:34:10Speaker 01

  It's been a long time since I read that book.

• 2:34:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. That, uh. I mean. It's, it's the icon, it's the iconic conversation between the new lieutenant and the executive officer. And you, you just nailed it.

• 2:34:27Speaker 01

  I guess I'm, I'm, I'm lucky I wrote that when I was 28.

• 2:34:33Speaker 01

  No, I, I wanted. There, there are a couple of things here. When, when I started. I said, I am not going to write this book unless. The third guy down in the third fire team says, this is true. This is real. I mean, you know, true, real, however you want to put it. This is real.

• 2:34:55Speaker 01

  And that was my guidepost in terms of all of the, the combat sequences and, and, and this, this sort of thing is. You don't want to go through this and have it be, dear author, I love you, signed author. Or the way I wish it had been, uh, or, you know, the way I would like to present it. I remember when the, when the book came out, there was a, um. A marine three-star general who had been very helpful when I was trying to help one of, one of my former Marines who. Uh, had, had been out in this area and I sent him a copy of the, the proofs. And he summoned me, I was working on the hill. He summoned me to his quarters in Eighth and I. And he said, this could be a primer on Marine Corps tactics, but these were not my Marines.

• 2:35:39Speaker 01

  And I went, he was a colonel when he was over there. And I said, sir. I don't know what to tell you because that's as honest as I can be. Um, and they were my Marines. And I don't have to try to make it Iwo Jima to, to give, give respect to the, to the people who were there. But I'll tell you what, I walked out of that. Uh, meeting with him thinking, oh my God, you know, this is going to be really bad if, you know, the, the Marine Corps turns on me for writing a book about Marines. And then there was another two-star, um. General Schultz, uh, who'd been a battalion commander and been on Taylor Common. He was in, with third Marine Division, but he'd been on Taylor Common down here. He, he read the book and he called me. He read it on a C-130 from, you know, Andrews to Pendleton.

• 2:36:24Speaker 01

  He called me, he said, "This is the book. This is the book." I said, "Will you send me a letter, sir?"

• 2:36:31Speaker 01

  And I said, he sent me a letter. And, uh, so when I had this little, uh, you know, uh, command visit to General Wilson, who was the commandant, when, when the book came out, I'm going, "Boy, I'm, I'm really nervous about this." General Wilson was a hard ass, you know, and, uh, so I got in to see General Wilson, I give him a, give him a copy of the book and I said, "And this is what General Schultz thinks about it."

• 2:36:56Speaker 01

  And over time, you know, it's, it been mandatory reading on the commandant's reading list for decades. And I can't tell you how many letters I've gotten from, particularly staff and COs. You know, I remember when I was in Beirut, uh, and, you know, as a, as a journalist there at 83, there was, there was one, uh, gunnery sergeant who came and he told me, "I have read your book 11 times. It is a text on, you know, on leadership, if you really read it." And, and at the same time, the, the important thing also is, if you're, if you're going to write a novel that lasts, you want that universality. As you say, this doesn't just Vietnam, it just isn't my experience. Um, and so it really is a very carefully drawn moral drama.

• 2:37:40Speaker 01

  Um, and, you know, some of these passages you're reading, I haven't heard them in years and I still remember, because I've written some of these 25 times, you know, the, the one you start off with, I knew the words. You know, I knew the words were gonna come out of your mouth. Uh, so that is, you know, that was my intention of, with, with the book. And, um, you know, what can I say? It's still out there and I'm, you know, it's as honest as I can be. And I know as, you know, There's a lot of rough spots in this book, but I don't have to, I don't have to put it any differently. The one other thing I will say is the dialogue, it maybe from having benefited

• 2:38:20Speaker 01

  from living in so many different places and whatever, the dialect is, you know, carefully accurate in like seven or eight different American dialects and the way they say words in there.

• 2:38:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. No, you, you nail that. It's very clear that, yeah, you know these people, you know, that you were able to capture it. You also did a great job, obviously, of capturing some of the just straight combat. And I'm gonna go here, just one little situation. Suddenly there were loud explosions across the river. The northern compound literally erupted. Recorless rifles flashed and boomed again and again, their explosions raising clouds of dirt inside the compound. Machine guns and small arms hammered at the Marines. The two platoon perimeter fought back. Red and green tracers interlaced, careening into the black air, making weaving patterns in the night. The artillery battery on the bridge

• 2:39:14Jocko Willink?

  compound reacted. It turns its guns north and lobbed dozens of projectiles across the river, seeking to silence the attack. New bright flashes, hazes of dust grouped around the northern compound. Then a moment of anticipatory lull. Goodrich knew what was about to happen. He wished he could tell them in the bridge compound. He wished he could dig a hole in the dirt and come back out in California. "Watch out," he groaned inwardly, too afraid to cry. "Oh shit, here it comes, right now." An avalanche of mortar rounds timed from a dozen tubes to land together on the southern compound. Then, just above the stranded team, the deep pops of heavy machine gun. Goodrich listened to himself whimper. He could not

• 2:39:59Jocko Willink?

  stifle it. It seemed to him a scream that would give them all away. But he finally realized it was no more than a scratchy, whispering whine. The bridge compound's defenders were caught unaware, having to feel like spectators in the northern compound's furious defense. Bodies went flat inside their bunkers, seeking cover from the mortar barrage. As they Did streams of sappers poured through the outer wire, sliding pipes of Bangalore torpedoes to clear pathways through the concertina. For a moment, they were unnoticed, the explosions they created blundering in with the mortars. They broke through both sides of the J-shaped hill, just at its hook, tossing satchel charges of explosives into the nearest bunkers. Half of the bunkers on the artillery side, unmanned as their defenders had helped with

• 2:40:42Jocko Willink?

  the fire missions on the north compound, were quickly taken by the NVA. The rest of the perimeter swarmed with creeping, dashing sappers. Two bunkers were lost just down from third platoon's last position. The sappers manned the bunkers after killing the occupants with satchel charges and provided a beachhead on the lines. A stream of shadows poured into the compound between the bunkers. The first cell of NVA that raced past the bunkers burned an entrance with a whooshing flamethrower. It ignited the corner of a nearby tent and drew bright red answers from a host of rifles fired from nearby bunkers. There was no second whoosh. Its trigger manned and its mate lay dead beside low smoulders from the torchlit tent.

• 2:41:23Jocko Willink?

  Another sapper team quipped quietly into the center of the compound and encountered two almost identical bunkers. In its haste, it demolished the chapel, leaving the compound, leaving the command center bunker unscathed. After the chapel exploded in detonation that raised a blight, bright flash and leveled the bunker in a smoking heap, another fierce mortar barrage shook the hill. The north Vietnamese would attempt to take out more bunkers, consolidate, then retreat through the breaks in the, they had made in the wire. Speedy's gun team cringed in the stream bed, unspeaking, wincing as the gun cut loose again. Its explosion seemed to be so close that one could reach up a hand and lose it to a bullet.

• 2:42:04Jocko Willink?

  Each man knew that if he were made an untoward, an untoward move, revealing himself in any way, the whole team would not last five minutes. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.

• 2:42:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, one of the, uh, have you read Anton Meyer, Anton Meyer's books? I have not. Once an Eagle. I have not.

• 2:42:36Speaker 01

  When we, when the- Actually, I think I have read Once an Eagle. Yeah, it's a great, great book. You know, when, when, uh, when we sent the proofs around on, on, uh, Fields, they, you know, Prentiss Hall didn't quite know what to expect. They, you know, the book had been rejected by 12 publishers. Nobody wanted to see this side of it. Uh, and the, the editor in chief of Prentiss Hall, John Kirk, had been a, a naval aviator in, in the Korean War. He was a Harvard graduate, which I, I thought was kind of interesting, cause when he asked me to come and talk to him, he asked me to meet him at the Harvard Club, you know, Goodrich is the Harvard goof, you know. Um, but he said, I think this can be the great novel. You know, he said, the, the, the, the great novels of different wars go against the grain of prevailing orthodoxy. Um, and he made a deal

• 2:43:21Speaker 01

  with me. He said, uh, you know, I'll give you $5,000. You've been working this for four years. They give you $5,000, I'll print 5,000 copies, uh, but I will put your book on the cover of Publishers Weekly and I'll send you on a major tour. And I said, you know, done. And, uh, he said, actually, the draft he had only had like a, a, a five-page epilogue on Goodrich. And he said, I'd actually like to see more of Goodrich coming back. I said, would you like the 28-page version, the 35-page version, or the 62-page version? Let me look at that. I gave him like the 30-page version, but, uh, typed page version back. But then they started sending the, the book around, um, before publication date

• 2:44:01Speaker 01

  for advance quotes, and he got a torrent of them, you know. And one, one of the, the advance quotes that I treasured the most was from Anton Meyer. Um, he had been, uh- He also was a Harvard guy, but he'd been a Marine in World War II. Had been on either Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, was wounded. And wrote Once an Eagle, which is a marvelous book.

• 2:44:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I haven't read that.

• 2:44:27Speaker 01

  America's War and Peace is like a thousand pages long. But he, you know, he took one character, well, actually two characters, but from before World War I all the way into Vietnam, although we didn't call it Vietnam in his book. And, you know, one of them was a, you know, a Nebraska farm kid who was enlisted and, you know, and he got a battlefield commission in World War I. And the other was a, you know, West Point guy who punched all the buttons exactly right. His name was Massengale. The other one was Sam David. But he wrote really good combat scenes. And I, and I loved his book.

• 2:45:07Speaker 01

  And he sent, when he, when he sent, he sent this long advance quote in his book and, you know, I just, of all of them, I'm like, wow. You know, he said, "Here at last is the real story of those who are in Vietnam, you know, devoid of histrionics, et cetera, et cetera." And, you know, it, it, but that, you know, when you read passages like that, I think of, you know, people like him, you know, reacting to this gamble, you know, at the time.

• 2:45:41Jocko Willink?

  Because there was nothing else like this at the time.

• 2:45:44Speaker 01

  No. This was the first revisionist novel. And I'll tell you, when I went on my tour, I'd spent a year and a half on, I was working on the House Veterans Committee, developing what I, sort of a factual basis for discussion on the Vietnam War. You know, how long did people really serve? How many were draftees? How many were volunteers? What was the makeup of the casualties, you know, and those who served, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, just trying to lay the whole thing out year by year. So I went out and the shows that I did, that's what I wanted to talk about, you know, I would talk about this other stuff. But there were, you know, I had some real moments. And also, by the way, I had been representing a so-called war criminal pro bono from my

• 2:46:29Speaker 01

  first year in law school, who I represented for six years. He committed suicide halfway through, I cleared his name, probably after six years. But that wasn't very popular out there. But I had a, I was on a radio show in Boston and in the middle of the show, this guy stopped, he said, "I can't, I can't hold this back any longer. Don't you consider yourself to be a murderer?" And I went, "No." And actually, what I said ended up being the intro and the American rifleman, whatever, I said, "No, man is by nature a violent animal and society puts restrictions, you know, like, let me give you A, B, C here, you know, society puts restrictions on how that violence

• 2:47:11Speaker 01

  is used and I don't consider myself to be a murderer any more than, you know, a police officer, okay?" So, and I had, I was on Good Morning Boston and the woman producer was so nice to me, et cetera, right before I go on the show, she said, "We used to hate you guys." I said, "What?" She said, "No, really, I mean, hate you." And I went, "Oh, thank you for that." And I'm now going with the screaming wolf here, you know. And it's interesting because I did a show in, I think it was Cincinnati, which was a TV show, speaking about the passage you just read, right, a little further in that passage, there is a, a sequence where there is a, an enemy soldier who is in the, trapped in the wire and he's all, you know, like, kind of blown away and he starts yelling, "Chuhoy", I surrender, "Chuhoy, chuhoy, chuhoy",

• 2:47:56Speaker 01

  and somebody yelled, "Shut up" and shot him. And it's the woman who was interviewing me, she says, "How can you put that in a book?" You know, somebody who was trying to surrender, who was shot, and I said, "Well, look, you know, this is the reality of what was going on." She says, "I want to put that to a vote." And she asked the viewers, "How many of you agree with him?" Ninety-four percent of them agreed with me. I think, gee, I think maybe we're starting to get somewhere here, you know, not, you know, not the lionizing, shooting wounded soldiers, but, you know, I mean, reality is reality.

• 2:48:30Jocko Willink?

  It is indeed.

• 2:48:31Speaker 01

  Once you touch them, then it's different, you know.

• 2:48:34Jocko Willink?

  And speaking of reality being reality, and this is, to kind of point out some of the reality that's in this book, I got one more thing I want to read from it. "How'd you like to stay in, on Okinawa?" "Sir?" "That's right," the major smiled. "Jesus, Lieutenant, I thought you would have jumped over the desk by now." "I'm on the level. We just had a billet open up over at Special Services, Recreation Officer. A lieutenant rotated early on emergency leave. He had less than ninety days on his tour, so he'll be reassigned from the States. I have the authority to fill the billet from the transients who've been in country already. Your ideal: combat time, hospital time. Would you like it?" The major jibed him, grinning.

• 2:49:19Jocko Willink?

  "Good duty, lots of free time. Stick around, Hodges, we'll turn you into a whore-mongering drunk. A simple yes, and the war would be over. But so would everything else. And for the first time, he confronted the truth. Yes, Major, thank you, sir, and the rest of his life would be anticlimax. There was nothing on the other side. What does a man do when his war is over?" "Wondered Hodges. Except keep fighting it. All expectancies then lived, and if not fulfilled, well, at least confronted. The bald, red hills with their sandbag bunkers, the banter and frolic of dirt-covered grunts,

• 2:50:03Jocko Willink?

  the fearful intensity of contact. It was too deep inside him, and he had not yet done enough to be free of it. He suddenly felt superior to the major, a creature apart, capable of absorbing combat's horror without asking for quarter."

• 2:50:23Jocko Willink?

  Down south, his men were on patrol, or digging new perimeters, or dying, and he was nothing if he did not share that misery.

• 2:50:32Jocko Willink?

  He stared deep into the major's face, enjoying the one moment of nobility that his months of terror had allowed.

• 2:50:42Jocko Willink?

  "Thanks, Major, but I didn't come halfway around the world to referee basketball games."

• 2:50:50Speaker 01

  The most powerful and telling scene, or one of the most powerful and telling scenes in the novel is the way that I originally ended it, which is with Mitsuko taking her son to Camp Hanson. And she's, on the one hand, she's trying to, you know, to build some positive feelings in him about the father he never knew, and the price that he was paying for being half-American in the Okinawan society. And she says, was this, he says, you know, she takes him to Camp Hanson, you know, because

• 2:51:35Speaker 01

  he can, she can see the Marines there, he can see the Marines in there, and he says, "Well, this was a good thing. If I'm like them, then I'll be a warrior." You know, and that's like, whoa, you know. And then when I was in the Senate, this is very ironic, we actually had a situation on Okinawa, which was an exact replay, where I was able to help a family, a Marine, who had deployed to Iraq, and found out that his fiance was pregnant, and they arranged for them to be married on the phone.

• 2:52:20Speaker 01

  And they had immigration issues and kid issues and all this stuff, and my counsel, Trevor Moe, was, when he was handling this, I gave him a coffee field so far.

• 2:52:34Speaker 01

  It was an amazing coincidence.

• 2:52:37Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of sons, I want to go here back to "I Heard My Country Calling", talking about as you were heading off to Vietnam. "I would soon drive west, heading for California, where Barbara would rent a house across the street from my granny, and I would catch a flight to Vietnam. My parents would clear their quarters at Andrew Air Force Base and then head south to stay for a while with my dad's longtime friend Bud Caldwell as they adjusted to the unknowns of retirement that awaited them in Florida. Alpha had just begun. Omega was not so happily done. In less than 20 years, our lives had traveled full circle. I was now the one who was leaving.

• 2:53:19Jocko Willink?

  My dad was the one being left behind. There was nothing left to say. It was time to go. We rose from the years-worn couches and began to say our final, deliberate, understated goodbyes. We slowly made our way toward the front door of the farmhouse. The radio in the dining room began playing Danny Boy sung by Johnny Cash. I'm not sure that anyone other than God Himself could have arranged the sweet sorrow of that moment. Johnny Cash was my favorite singer. Danny Boy, emblematic of our long-held Scots-Irish heritage of military service, is perhaps the greatest song ever written about the painful anguish

• 2:54:02Jocko Willink?

  of a father watching helplessly as his son marches off to war.

• 2:54:08Jocko Willink?

  "Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling, from glen to glen and down the mountainside. The summer's gone and all the roses falling. 'Tis you, 'tis you must go, and I must bide. But come ye back, when summer's in the meadow, or when the valleys hushed and white with snow, 'tis I'll be here, in sunshine or in shadow. Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so."

• 2:54:41Jocko Willink?

  It was the first and only time I ever saw my father cry.

• 2:54:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:51Speaker 01

  And then

• 2:54:54Speaker 01

  thirty odd years later, you're sending your son into the Marine Corps.

• 2:55:02Speaker 01

  The Iraq war is escalating, because this is what, 2003?

• 2:55:06Speaker 02

  2000, uh, I joined in early 2005.

• 2:55:09Speaker 01

  Oh, so yeah, it's full escalation mode at this point. And you're going through the same thing. That's harder going through it.

• 2:55:20Speaker 01

  I think, um,

• 2:55:23Speaker 01

  it's, it's harder having a loved one gone than it is being gone emotionally, I think. Um, you know, uh,

• 2:55:35Speaker 01

  my dad was gone a lot.

• 2:55:38Speaker 01

  Um,

• 2:55:41Speaker 01

  I never expected that he would react that way, you know? Um, and then when, you know, when Jim was gone, you know, it was, uh, it was hard for a lot of reasons. Um,

• 2:55:53Speaker 01

  partly because I was out there campaigning part of the time and this was a very private thing to me. I'm a father. I refuse to talk about it other than in, in general terms. Um, but, uh,

• 2:56:11Speaker 01

  he was able to call every now and then and send, send emails and that sort of thing. And actually, that made it a little harder, you know, because you're getting a bit of peace here.

• 2:56:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:56:22Speaker 01

  Um, we had, uh, just as a, as an anecdote, I got to make like, I think, three phone calls from, from Vietnam, um, when you get back in, in war. Uh, you know, on these Mars radio stations where you have three minutes, you're standing there, you got three minutes and you got, you say something and you go over and then they talk on the other end. So I go, "Hey, hey, Mom, I'm, I'm here in Vietnam, over. Over where?"

• 2:56:48Speaker 01

  Well, I gotta go now. But, you know, getting some of the bits and pieces of what's going on and, you know, Jim was very, very well read and smart about that region. So he was seeing things even as a Lance Corporal that a lot of people weren't. That was tough. And then, you know, truly waking up every morning, not knowing if your kid's alive, you know, I mean, that's the unknowns bother you, the unknowns and the partial knowns bother you more than actually being there, I think. But yeah, it's very hard, but it's also our family way, you know, and so, um, when he came back, it was, I'll have to tell you a funny story. They got extended

• 2:57:32Speaker 01

  on the search, you know, 1-6 got extended on the search.

• 2:57:35Speaker 02

  Doing such a good job, we got to stay longer.

• 2:57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think there was, uh, there was a lot of fistfights going on at that point.

• 2:57:40Speaker 02

  There were?

• 2:57:41Speaker 01

  But, uh, and Jim's never backed down from one, from anybody. But, uh, so I finally said to him, uh, an email, "All right, when you get back, anything you want." And he says, um, "Yankees and Red Sox, Fenway Park, May 19th." And I have a great, great friend, and I got a lot of great friends and from South Boston, big Marine Corps community up there. Guy Tommy Lyons, who, who has, uh, ran the veterans programs up there, he got tickets. And not only that, but Jim and, uh, one of his, uh, company mates who was from, uh, Boston, they got off the, the plane at Logan and there was the State Highway Patrol waiting for them in a, like a squad car or whatever. I don't know what it was, but

• 2:58:24Speaker 01

  they had the sirens going, coming to, coming to Fenway and, uh, yeah, it couldn't have, that couldn't have been any better.

• 2:58:31Jocko Willink?

  Hey Jim, so how, how old were you when you were like thinking to yourself, "All right, um, I'm following in my dad's footsteps?"

• 2:58:39Speaker 02

  Earliest I could think, there was uh two things I wanted to be a professional baseball player and a Marine, both at the same time. And when I was 13, a good friend of mine, we were warming up for a baseball game, told me that could not happen. And so it became kind of a binary choice. And then, but the Marine Corps was always at the front. My dad had a rope hanging in the backyard the entire time we were growing up. I think it was one day he came home. I don't know how old I was, but I climbed it, got back down, and asked if I could be a Marine. And his reaction was that I need to get some sort of organized athletics immediately.

• 2:59:14Speaker 01

  Need to wait 10 years.

• 2:59:15Jocko Willink?

  And when you were, when you were going to Ramadi, so you, you had paid attention to what was going on in Ramadi, and you guys knew you were deploying there. I mean, the 38 had done an awesome job, and they take, I mean, they'd obviously taken a ton of casualties, as had the whole 118 and the 228 before them. And the 38 actually overlapped between the, you know, they were there, just like the 1st, the 506, they were there between when the 228 left, the 38 stayed, the 1st, the 506 stayed, some of the other battalions stayed, I think. But, so you guys both knew how bad Ramadi was when you were heading there.

• 2:59:57Speaker 02

  Right. And it's, that was, go back to when we were announced that we were going there. You mentioned last night, there was some rumor that we were going to go on a booze cruise, there was going to be a reward for our battalion having done some seriously good work in Fallujah and in Afghanistan. And there was a fairly, I don't want to say it was dejection, because that would sound wrong, but it was kind of a whoa moment. Because we had heard what was happening to 38, and they were in a serious fight, and all the units that had been there before them had been in serious fights. And I tried to get as much information as I could about the place that I was going to be going. And there wasn't much written quite yet. There was a little bit about 24, one of the first

• 3:00:42Speaker 02

  units, Marine units in there that was in, in print. But in terms of press reports, they were... They were an eye opener. I believe it was in bed with 38 where they were detailing an average day of patrolling, these guys hopping walls and talking about the, the average time to contact from leaving wherever you were was about five minutes. Mm-hmm. And it was, it was an eye opener and I was a boot at the time. And one of the, one of the things that I would do would be, would be get on Ogrish or LiveLeak. And I wanted to find some way to rationalize, you know, the TTPs of the enemy. Could I, like, could I see what they were setting up when they're videotaping these complex attacks, the IED

• 3:01:25Speaker 02

  strikes? And there was really no way to do it. You get a 30 second clip of a gun truck getting hit or a complex ambush. And eventually, one of my friends at the time, Cliff Collinsworth, he's passed, you know, laid into me one night about doing that. It's like, it's like, you're not going to learn a damn thing. You're just going to get wrapped up in a ball, knock it off. And I took his advice and just played video games. But, uh, but it was, uh, it was, it was, it was interesting trying to get mentally prepared for it. And I remember before we deployed, I was in a hotel room with him. And one of the things that stood out, and as you have all these things going on, as you know, where particularly if it's

• 3:02:07Speaker 02

  your first deployment, you know, your family is trying to be there for you. There's a lot of emotions flowing around. And he, he said, you know, if you survive. And that woke me up in a big way. I'd never thought that was going to be even a question. And it was something that was relayed to me by not only my own father, but by someone who had been through his own very serious combat experience. And as I try to kind of rehash all this in my head, I was, I was brought back to a book that you reviewed on Vietnam a couple podcasts ago where this new lieutenant was talking about getting ready to leave. And, you know,

• 3:02:52Speaker 02

  how he was eating his meal the night before. And there was absolutely no desire to be, to have the meal, to be involved with it. His mind was somewhere else. And The night before I deployed, uh, my cousins lived in Jacksonville. Um, my dad took us out to, I believe it was Sharpshooter's. And it's a burger joint. Favorite thing in the world? Cheeseburger. Um, every year on my birthday, my mom would make a special meal and I'd always ask for a cheeseburger. And I got a bacon double cheeseburger and basically just stared at it. And all I could think about was where I was gonna be in 48 hours and how the world around me there was just gonna keep going on.

• 3:03:33Speaker 02

  Um, and it was a, it's a very interesting period. Um, although he did make me famous, uh, a couple of months later, cause the next morning, we're getting ready to go out and once again, uh, Dale Wilson was there, uh, triple MPT. He actually walked up to our barracks room, uh, the night before we deployed. Um, you know, walked up to the second or third deck, uh, nobody could tell he was triple MPT, hung out in the barracks with my dad, uh, and us for a bit. And then in the next, the, uh, the next morning, getting ready to go on the bus and somebody, I guess it was whiskey or moonshine.

• 3:04:08Speaker 01

  You're on, you're on, you're on the radio.

• 3:04:12Speaker 02

  Whiskey. Uh, and did, uh, going away shots in the parking lot. And there was a nice picture of it. Couple of months later in Iraq, my company first sergeant pulls me aside. There's a New York Times article apparently about it.

• 3:04:25Speaker 01

  Really?

• 3:04:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:27Speaker 01

  I wish I should have researched better and we could have read that on the podcast.

• 3:04:31Speaker 02

  It was a mention, it wasn't anything crazy, but he's like, "Oh, really, Web? Drink it on the job." It's like, uh...

• 3:04:36Speaker 01

  Tell you one of the tough, the tough moments when it, when it, talking about being able to communicate? When I was campaigning for the senate and this was like a couple of weeks before the election, um, Jim called me and he just said, "Three guys, you know, were killed." And so, I'm in his car, you know, getting ready to go to a football game, a big football game, um, down in the Norfolk area. And I get that information, you know, and I'm like, "What do you do?" You know? You put it in a box.

• 3:05:11Speaker 01

  You bury the box, you go do your thing and then you can come back and pull the box out. But you know, getting that and that's it, you know, like two or three minutes and then walking out and having to do like two or three hours saying hello to people and not mentioning anything and whatever. That, you know, that was really hard when, when he was gone and when I was going through that.

• 3:05:28Jocko Willink?

  Let me ask you this, kind of a critical question. As a dad, I'm gonna come at you right now. So, if my son was getting ready to go on deployment, I don't know if I'd say, "If you survive."

• 3:05:41Speaker 01

  I'm not sure I said that.

• 3:05:42Speaker 02

  You did.

• 3:05:43Jocko Willink?

  Is that something, I mean, I could see why you'd say it to, you know, as I'm sitting there trying to think about, why would I tell my son that? The reason I would tell, if I was to tell my son that, it'd be because I would want him to stay sharp and on point the entire time and not take it for granted and realize what's at stake. So, that might be...

• 3:05:59Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't really remember the context in which I would have said that. But, uh, you know.

• 3:06:06Speaker 02

  I mean, that, that's exactly how I took it.

• 3:06:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:09Speaker 02

  It, uh, it stripped away the, like, all aspects of the relationship except marine to marine. And I've always been very cognizant of my dad's experience and reputation in the Marine Corps. Um, and it was a very clear message that, you know, this is going to be different, you're not special, and you'd better pay attention.

• 3:06:32Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. So, you might not remember saying it, but it sounds like some good advice. I'll keep that one in my back pocket.

• 3:06:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were a lot of words going back and forth when he was getting ready to ship out, so...

• 3:06:44Jocko Willink?

  And, and from, from your perspective, having grown up like with such a, with such a focus on leadership in your family and the tradition in your family and showing up as a Lance Corporal inside of a platoon and having more awareness than the normal Lance Corporal would have. Cause I'll tell you, I mean, if, if I'm picturing myself when I'm 19 years old, if I was a Lance Corporal, I would have been a normal Lance Corporal. I would have been, you know, I wouldn't have had this sort of elevated look at things. I mean, even having read your dad's book over and over again and, and just, just that level of understanding.

• 3:07:22Jocko Willink?

  How did that, how did that, how did that set in your platoon? How did that set with you? Were you ever, were you ever looking at your boss thinking, or looking at your platoon commander thinking, eh, did he listen to you? Did he talk to you? Did he know who you were? Did he, was there anything like that?

• 3:07:36Speaker 02

  They all knew. Um, I think the, the best, or the most amount of time I kept that off the skyline was two to three days. No matter which unit I was at, uh, boot camp, I got pulled out and paraded around. And it wasn't till I started asking questions. This was before they actually kicked off the training. They're like, hey, this is, this is wedge kid.

• 3:07:55Speaker 02

  But, uh, I, I think it, it put an extra, like extra demand, particularly once I hit the fleet marine forces, uh, for humility. Because I could have, you know, all the informal,

• 3:08:10Speaker 02

  training, if you like, in the world, and it was world-class. But at the same time, I'm walking into an environment where I have not been there and done what these guys have done, and I need to listen. And when the opportunity presents itself, you know, then the, the practical application of what I had learned growing up would be there. But until you earn your stripes, you're nothing. Um, and, uh,

• 3:08:33Speaker 01

  I think it put an extra layer on him. No, no question about it, particularly among the officers, you know? And, and the thing is, Jim has really, really been smart and thoughtful, uh, about that part of the world. Um, so he had a, you know, he had a lens on, on what was going on that a lot of people at his level didn't have.

• 3:08:55Jocko Willink?

  Did you, okay, here's a, here's a, here's another question that I'll throw at you. And we were talking about it a little bit yesterday, but, um, you know, and I covered Chesty Puller and Lou Puller on this podcast, number 121 and number 2122. If you haven't listened to him, go listen to him. If you don't know that story, you should know it. Everyone should know it. But, you know, Lou, Lou Puller got severely wounded as Chesty Puller's son. You know, that, that's another thing that would just, I, I can't imagine the, cause you were friends with Lou Puller.

• 3:09:26Speaker 01

  Yes, I was.

• 3:09:28Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, you told me a, a story yesterday about you and him arguing about the draft. And his, his thoughts about that. And I, I can't imagine that at some level, you're thinking to yourself, well, I know how I feel. I know I'm patriotic. I believe in service.

• 3:09:51Jocko Willink?

  But this is my boy.

• 3:09:56Speaker 01

  That's a hard choice everyone has to make.

• 3:10:01Speaker 01

  You know, Lou Puller, by the way, I don't think, we had a lot of debate, but I never really got into an argument with him. I want to say that clearly because he is such a decent, basically gentle guy, you know. But we certainly, you know, we certainly had our disagreements about policy and service and wars in general. I think by the time he and I were hanging out, he was a really, really fine guy.

• 3:10:28Speaker 01

  My, you know, for me, Jim going into the military, it's a part of a family tradition. You accept the risk. There's an article I wrote for Parade Magazine years ago about a father still tending the grave of his son in Arlington. I used to walk by it all the time. And it's one of the most beautiful stories about father and son and duty and whatever. The father was wounded in World War II. His son was wounded three times and killed in Vietnam, went back from Okinawa and was killed. You know, it's called "The Price of Duty." And I actually mentioned, Jim was really young when I wrote that piece. But I mentioned, you know, he had already said he wanted to be a Marine, you know.

• 3:11:11Speaker 01

  So you don't want to take away from someone what they believe that they should do personally and for the country. So I totally respect it and you just gotta put your hands inside the bobsled, you know.

• 3:11:29Jocko Willink?

  And you also, I know we're, we've been at it for a while, but the one other thing I wanted to ask you about is I talk about Hackworth a lot, and I know you interviewed him and spent, you spent like a week with him on Australia?

• 3:11:43Speaker 01

  No, I actually-

• 3:11:44Jocko Willink?

  On Hawaii?

• 3:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was thinking I would get the gig to go to Australia, but we met in Hawaii, which is not a bad-

• 3:11:50Jocko Willink?

  Not a bad gig.

• 3:11:51Speaker 01

  Second place. I spent about a week with him when he was-

• 3:11:57Speaker 01

  You know, I guess people who listen to you know, know his backstory, but when he was deciding to come home from Australia after his exile for a number of reasons, and his book had not yet come out, and Parade Magazine could not review books, but I went and did a feature, a long feature, one of the longest pieces they've done on him, and, you know, read about him beforehand, talked to people, knew him, and then got to know him pretty well, kept up with him for years, actually, and he was, he was the kind of soldier that if you are going into a bad place, you want to be with, you know, he was the real deal.

• 3:12:39Speaker 01

  And, and he had a hard time at the end for a number of reasons that I pointed out in, in, in the article. I, I phrased it in a certain way in my article, you know, I think it was a quote from one of the people who'd served with him, that, you know, the army disappointed in him, and he just decided to declare war on the army. But he was a soldier. And, yeah, I, I thought a lot of him in that part of his life.

• 3:13:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, it's some of the stuff you told me, and I, and I read that article, and Jim, thanks for forwarding that to me. And I'd actually read it before, but I hadn't made the connection, you know, I didn't look at the author's name, I apologize. I just folded up, read the article, I didn't make that connection, but I should have. You know, obviously, thanks to both of you for coming on, and, and, and thanks for your service. And we'll put the links to buy these books. And, and there's a new version coming out of Fields of Fire?

• 3:13:35Speaker 01

  There's an anniversary, a 40th anniversary edition that they've put out already in the Kindle form, and it will be out by, say, December in, in the paperback. It's no different other than there's a short essay in the front that I wrote, and, you know, danced the cover up a little bit. Glad to know it's still in print, it's been a while.

• 3:13:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's, it's, it's in print, and there's, there's lots of, I'll just say there's lots of books and movies and series and TV shows that...

• 3:14:07Jocko Willink?

  I don't know how to say this, but they reflect, certainly reflect some of the characters and some of the goings on inside the book, so.

• 3:14:13Speaker 01

  I'd love to, I'd love to see Fields become probably a TV series. I wrote a proposal a year ago on it and we, you know, it's Hollywood's funny, you know, it's a, when I was working out there a lot, I think they were registering forty, close to forty thousand screenplays a year, the Writers Guild, and we're making two hundred and sixty movies. So, you know, you get to that final cutoff, it's pretty competitive, but would like to see that. It's been a pleasure being with you. It's been a great conversation.

• 3:14:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, thanks for, thanks for coming on. And I would maybe propose this, and I know it's a long trip, so maybe next time I'll do the trip, but we've done this once before. We did it with the novel Musashi, which is told people we were gonna do it, and then once everyone had the chance to read it, we came back, I came back on and I had a friend of mine, Tim Ferriss, who was an Asian Studies major at Princeton and had lived in Japan and studied Judo, and we went through the book and kind of, you know, parsed it apart. But if you'd ever like to do that, let me know and.

• 3:15:13Speaker 01

  Right, thank you.

• 3:15:14Jocko Willink?

  Come back on and we'll go through it and pull, you know, I, I didn't, you know, I like to talk about leadership. The leadership lessons inside Fields of Fire are phenomenal. Just the pattern recognition of knowing what kind of people you're dealing with, and you can learn a lot of that just from the book. But I'd love to hear about, you know, how you got to some of those characters. One of my, well, one real obvious character is Austin, Sergeant Austin, who's like the by-the-book Marine that's, hey, it's my way or the highway, and, and just the way, you know, just the way that Hodges kind of handles him. And, and, and there's a certain, there's a conversation that they're having, and you can see Hodges is pushing that, pushing back up against him a little bit, and then he decides, oh, you know, I'm not gonna push back any further, because I'm gonna create

• 3:15:56Jocko Willink?

  a relationship with this guy and we'll get him along the way. But those little subtleties that you put in this book are, are phenomenal leadership lessons.

• 3:16:03Speaker 01

  One, one, one small point on that, because I probably should have mentioned it earlier in terms of one of the motivations in writing it, is there, there was so much out there demeaning things that happened in Vietnam without a comprehensive understanding, not only of Vietnam, but of warfare in general, that.

• 3:16:26Speaker 01

  I felt like it was important to, to create characters that could give context to how some of these things happen, you know, um, that's with, with Sergeant Austin, how to, you know, the, the, the numbers, um, you know, when I was in, in, in law school and writing this about, everybody was getting fragged, you know, and I remember I had a really good friend who was a, a World War II veteran, um, who was needling me one day saying, "Tell me about fragging." I said, "Screw you." I was raised on stories of a bad lieutenant in World War II having 10 seconds once the ramp dropped on the landing ramp before somebody was gonna get him out of the way. And he said, "Well, I shot a lieutenant."

• 3:17:07Speaker 01

  I don't know if he was telling the truth or not, but, you know, there, there are leadership lessons in, in, in, in the book and are also, and Austin's one of them. I mean, how do you, how do you create positive environments? If you look at where these people had been at the time that he was coming in, doing the, you know, the, the pre-Vietnam junk on the bunk, uh, which was probably essential to developing an attitude of discipline when you didn't have this stuff, but, um, you know, somebody, you got 1.3, 3.7 million people, over the 500,000 people in Vietnam at the time, a lot of them from pretty rough backgrounds and, uh, you know, there, there are ways to motivate them, you know, and then there are ways when things go the other way.

• 3:17:49Jocko Willink?

  There's ways to get yourself fragged.

• 3:17:51Speaker 01

  That didn't happen often, but it, it was not, it, it did happen, you know, uh, at times.

• 3:18:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's probably always happened.

• 3:18:03Speaker 01

  It has, in some form or another.

• 3:18:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's why it's important to be a good leadership, important to be a good leader, especially when the people that you're leading have weapons.

• 3:18:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 3:18:14Jocko Willink?

  So, uh, well, again, that's one of the many multitude of, of lessons that are in the book and again, we'll put them on the website so everyone can get them and you can educate yourself. Uh, Jim, you got any, any final thoughts, anything else to say?

• 3:18:29Speaker 02

  No, just thanks for having us. It was incredible. Just listening to you two talk back and forth. It's amazing.

• 3:18:34Speaker 01

  Well, it's been a real pleasure.

• 3:18:37Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks for coming on. Obviously, it's, it's an honor to, to, to have you on and I think anyone that's gonna listen to this, or anyone that does listen to this, and you're gonna hear from a lot of people that do listen to this, um, they keep their... Their minds open, keep their hearts humble, as you both have talked about today. You guys have set an incredible example for people to follow, and thanks for coming on. It's been an honor to talk to you, and we appreciate, most of all, your service to the country.

• 3:19:07Speaker 03

  And yours.

• 3:19:08Speaker 01

  And yours as well.

• 3:19:08Jocko Willink?

  Thanks.

• 3:19:11Jocko Willink?

  And, at this time, our guests have departed the studio. Awesome to have them on, an honor to sit and talk with such men, and, and it's, it's just an honor to be able to do that.

• 3:19:28Speaker 03

  Agreed.

• 3:19:28Jocko Willink?

  Incredible story, incredible books, and get them. The books will be on the website, on jockopodcast.com, under books.

• 3:19:38Speaker 03

  Books from episodes.

• 3:19:39Jocko Willink?

  Books from episodes is what the technical name is, cool.

• 3:19:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:19:45Jocko Willink?

  I think everyone can learn from those books,

• 3:19:50Jocko Willink?

  if you read them. Speaking of learning, speaking of teaching and whatnot, Echo Charles, maybe you could teach us how to, you know, get after it a little bit harder.

• 3:20:02Speaker 03

  Sure, of course I will. Okay, shift gears to jujitsu, obviously.

• 3:20:09Jocko Willink?

  Seems obvious.

• 3:20:10Speaker 03

  Seems obvious, yeah. And I, I think you're in the same boat, where

• 3:20:17Speaker 03

  you default to jujitsu as like a solution, or a way to look at things, even earlier today, we were talking about.

• 3:20:24Jocko Willink?

  True, it is, yeah, it is, it is a default way to, well, I've talked about it before, the fact that it's a thread that ties a lot of things together. It's comparable to a lot of things. It's a struggle. Life is a struggle.

• 3:20:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:20:37Jocko Willink?

  Business is a struggle. Combat is a struggle. All these things are a struggle, and you have to learn to deal with them, and they all have threads in them that are the same. So yes, I do refer to jujitsu from time to time. If you don't like that, go start your own podcast and don't talk about jujitsu.

• 3:20:53Speaker 03

  Dang, bro. Wait, are you saying me? Shoot, if I don't like that, by who you think you're talking to?

• 3:20:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay, I'm just making sure.

• 3:20:59Speaker 03

  I remember, back when I'm remembering it right now, that you referred to jujitsu as the solution to something. Humility, that's what it is.

• 3:21:11Jocko Willink?

  Well, that definitely-

• 3:21:12Speaker 03

  If you want to work on humility, use jujitsu as the answer. That'll help you. Anyway, while you do that- You're gonna need a gi cuz you're gonna do both gi and no gi so when you get your gi no question go to origin maine.com to get your gi that's where you get it 100%

• 3:21:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep, no doubt, no doubt and you can get rash guards there if you're gonna train no gi you don't have to use a gi in jujitsu you can I recommend that you do and if you're wondering if you do should do gi or no gi do both that's just that's just the way to go they both will help each other and they'll both useful and but you can get rash guards if you're gonna do jujitsu with a rash guard which is a good thing to do because it doesn't get all caught up in your opponent's toes

• 3:21:57Speaker 03

  Yes

• 3:21:58Jocko Willink?

  There's not too many things in life when you're worried about your opponent's toes in jujitsu you are a little bit worried about your opponent's toes

• 3:22:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and your own toes by the way

• 3:22:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you can use the rash guards for other activities such as surfing

• 3:22:13Speaker 03

  Cycling

• 3:22:14Jocko Willink?

  You don't cycle

• 3:22:15Speaker 03

  I know, but I hear good things

• 3:22:18Jocko Willink?

  Okay, okay, yeah, well, I guess you can wear them for cycling as well and and spats don't forget about spats

• 3:22:25Speaker 03

  Spats which is essentially compression pants we'll call them but they're essentially a rash guard for your legs for your other 50% of your body

• 3:22:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, as Dean Lister would say Uh, plus they got t-shirt they got clothes and we're making more clothes at origin we are making more clothes at origin

• 3:22:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like full on underway, yeah denim

• 3:22:45Jocko Willink?

  Yep

• 3:22:46Speaker 03

  I called Pete the other day

• 3:22:47Jocko Willink?

  You didn't get yours yet?

• 3:22:48Speaker 03

  No

• 3:22:49Jocko Willink?

  Your jeans?

• 3:22:49Speaker 03

  And that was really the topic of discussion

• 3:22:52Jocko Willink?

  You were right, critical about that one, so yeah, we're gonna make it all close keep just keep paying attention to that and we'll get them out Um, supplements we got some good supplements things that will help you in all aspects of getting after it for instance, help your joints with joint warfare, help your joints with krill oil, help your cognitive and physical capacity

• 3:23:19Speaker 03

  Yes

• 3:23:20Jocko Willink?

  With discipline and there's actually so discipline we just made a new form of discipline so there's the discipline powder drink cool here's the problem with the discipline powder drink I'm getting ready to go into a meeting and I'm gonna be in there for two hours and I wanna get like a little bit of a cognitive bump

• 3:23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah

• 3:23:38Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying? A little bit of a

• 3:23:40Speaker 03

  Sure

• 3:23:41Jocko Willink?

  A little a little bump

• 3:23:42Speaker 03

  Yes

• 3:23:42Jocko Willink?

  And I don't maybe wanna drink

• 3:23:47Jocko Willink?

  Uh, uh, a thousand or drink five hundred milliliters of water or whatever, a bottle of water. I don't want to drink a bottle of water because I'm then, you know, biologically, what's going to occur in forty five minutes? If I pounded a bunch of water.

• 3:23:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:23:59Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna have to quit, stop and use the head.

• 3:24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:24:01Jocko Willink?

  Not quit, but I'm gonna have to stop for a moment and use that, which I don't like.

• 3:24:04Speaker 03

  No.

• 3:24:05Jocko Willink?

  So made, uh, one, you know, some pills, uh, a capsule, actually. A capsule. So boom, it's got the, it's got a little caffeine in it. It's got some nootropics in it. Get you a little bit of a.

• 3:24:18Speaker 03

  Does it get, does it have more caffeine than the regular?

• 3:24:22Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:24:23Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's literally discipline on the go.

• 3:24:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's discipline on the go.

• 3:24:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:24:27Jocko Willink?

  Discipline on the go.

• 3:24:28Speaker 03

  Okay, interesting. Yeah, I have mine. Took some. Good.

• 3:24:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you got yours?

• 3:24:32Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:24:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, check.

• 3:24:33Speaker 03

  I don't, I mean, obviously I don't go, not obviously, but I don't go into many meetings.

• 3:24:38Jocko Willink?

  Took some one? JP took some and he sent like a text to me and Pete and Brian. He was like, I just gave the best speech ever.

• 3:24:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, okay, so that, I don't feel fired up when I.

• 3:24:50Jocko Willink?

  Well, JP feels fired up anyways.

• 3:24:52Speaker 03

  Right, so.

• 3:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Just like enhancement.

• 3:24:53Speaker 03

  You can tell JP going on stage, everything's clicking for him. Oh, you know, he's fired up. Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.

• 3:24:59Jocko Willink?

  So that's discipline go. Um, but milk, the milk train.

• 3:25:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, milk train, big time. Stay on it. If you're on it.

• 3:25:07Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of hard to get. The problem with the milk train is you just, it ends up just being sort of.

• 3:25:11Speaker 03

  It's kind of a dessert.

• 3:25:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:13Speaker 03

  It is, yeah. And it's interesting because, you know, the, the idea that protein powder is, it's either it tastes good or it's good quality. That's it. That's sort of it.

• 3:25:23Jocko Willink?

  That's a dichotomy that used to exist.

• 3:25:25Speaker 03

  Used to exist.

• 3:25:26Jocko Willink?

  That, that, the, the, the gap in that dichotomy could not be crossed.

• 3:25:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:25:31Jocko Willink?

  Could not be brought together. It has been brought together.

• 3:25:34Speaker 03

  Been brought together. I was talking to my friend Terry, AKA Big Sexy, last night.

• 3:25:39Jocko Willink?

  Is he on the milk train?

• 3:25:40Speaker 03

  No, that's the thing. And, bruh, I might as well have just made a commercial for it. Cause you know how you start talking about it, then you start saying, yeah, and you get yourself kind of fired up about it. You know, that's what I was doing. Anyway, he was like, hey, man, I got it. It's good. I got it.

• 3:25:53Jocko Willink?

  Gets on the milk train.

• 3:25:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, hopefully.

• 3:25:55Jocko Willink?

  Uh, mint chocolate chip, my personal favorite, peanut butter chocolate.

• 3:26:01Jocko Willink?

  Dave Burke's personal favorite.

• 3:26:02Speaker 03

  Good deal.

• 3:26:03Jocko Willink?

  Vanilla Gorilla, technically named not directly for Leif Babin, but certainly associated with Leif Babin.

• 3:26:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:26:12Jocko Willink?

  And he said the other day that he mixed it up and he was like, he's like, hey, that vanilla gorilla. He was pumped on the vanilla gorilla.

• 3:26:20Speaker 03

  Amen.

• 3:26:20Jocko Willink?

  And then there's the darkness. Which is just pure chocolate.

• 3:26:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:26:25Jocko Willink?

  Pure chocolate.

• 3:26:25Speaker 03

  In my house household, the darkness is ascending to.

• 3:26:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 3:26:30Speaker 03

  Mint chip chocolate levels. Cause it has like a dark chocolatey taste.

• 3:26:36Jocko Willink?

  Who's, who's?

• 3:26:37Speaker 03

  This guy right here, yeah. Yep.

• 3:26:39Jocko Willink?

  Huh, interesting.

• 3:26:40Speaker 03

  I still add peanut butter in it, by the way, I should, I should mention that.

• 3:26:44Jocko Willink?

  That I could understand. But um, also, you know, we, we also just came out with Warrior Kid Molk. We got strawberry and chocolate right now. They have a little bit less protein.

• 3:26:57Jocko Willink?

  I mean, cause if your kid's eight years old, he should hopefully be getting protein from natural food sources. The problem is sometimes they don't get enough. We got, we got some protein in there. We got vitamins in there. Got some probiotics in there. Cause we know Timmy, when he hears about probiotics, he gets fired up. And this is the amazing thing, they are delicious. They are just freaking delicious.

• 3:27:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:27:22Jocko Willink?

  And so in my house, the strawberry kids milk is just getting crazy. I, as soon as I tasted the strawberry kids milk, I sent Brian a text and said, make adult warrior kid milk immediately. Now, so he's got that coming.

• 3:27:39Speaker 03

  Oh, right, adult strawberry.

• 3:27:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, adult strawberry. And I called it strawberry quick the other day.

• 3:27:47Speaker 03

  That's where your brain went?

• 3:27:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, cause it tastes that good. It's, it's, it literally tastes like strawberry quick.

• 3:27:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:27:53Jocko Willink?

  The chocolate's damn good, too.

• 3:27:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:27:55Jocko Willink?

  But anyways, that's the warrior kid. This is the only drink, this is the only thing that you, you got with your kids that you want your kids to have it as bad as they want to have it. There's no other thing in the world that's like that.

• 3:28:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:28:06Jocko Willink?

  This is it. Maybe the Warrior Kid books.

• 3:28:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's possible. I was drinking Mountain Dew the other day.

• 3:28:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, God.

• 3:28:14Speaker 03

  Straight up.

• 3:28:15Jocko Willink?

  What is up with you?

• 3:28:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, just.

• 3:28:16Jocko Willink?

  Just a savage.

• 3:28:17Speaker 03

  Bear with me.

• 3:28:18Jocko Willink?

  Why are you doing that to yourself?

• 3:28:20Speaker 03

  Nonetheless, I was, and I came to kind of this realization.

• 3:28:24Jocko Willink?

  You're fired.

• 3:28:27Speaker 03

  I was telling you.

• 3:28:28Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so, all right, I'll be quiet.

• 3:28:30Speaker 03

  So bear with me, you know, I'm not pounding Mountain Dews every day, I'm not saying that. But as I drink this.

• 3:28:36Jocko Willink?

  Slippery slope.

• 3:28:37Speaker 03

  It is a slippery slope. As I drink this Mountain Dew, you know how you kind of like reflect?

• 3:28:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:42Speaker 03

  On things. And so I'm like, okay, what am I drinking? It tastes good. I like my, I've always liked Mountain Dew since literally the first time I tasted one as a kid. And so I'm like drinking it. And I'm like, you know what I'm drinking right now?

• 3:28:55Jocko Willink?

  Poison.

• 3:28:55Speaker 03

  It's liquid candy is what I'm drinking. Literally, like, you know, you know, like a Jolly Rancher or one of these, you know, that kind of candy. They make lollipops and stuff. You know, that kind of candy. Consider this exact flavor, this exact flavor, not more sweet, not less sweet, this exact Mountain Dew flavor as a lollipop or Jolly Rancher, it would fit. It would be like, yeah. And I'm just drinking the liquid form of it. Literally, that's what I'm drinking.

• 3:29:19Jocko Willink?

  Did you finish the can?

• 3:29:21Speaker 03

  Well, it was one of those small cans.

• 3:29:22Jocko Willink?

  Did you finish it?

• 3:29:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was eating sushi. You know how it is, like, it's the whole deal. Long story. Nonetheless, that's what it is.

• 3:29:29Jocko Willink?

  But there's no reason for this anymore, because now we have Molk.

• 3:29:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you can kind of consider the difference, right, where the, you know, your kid, if they're like how I was, and you see the Mountain Dew as a kid, you're like, I want that Mountain Dew. But the parent's like, no, we don't drink Mountain Dew.

• 3:29:44Jocko Willink?

  Why don't you drink Jocko White Tea? Instead, bring a can with you.

• 3:29:48Speaker 03

  Well, it's, you know, I have a bunch of cans. It's a long story, you know, and we're working very hard on the whole situation, but nonetheless, it happened, and you know, we're gonna move on. But if you're a kid, you want the Mountain Dew.

• 3:30:00Jocko Willink?

  I noticed now it's Mountain Dew. This is right up there with cotton and important.

• 3:30:06Speaker 03

  That's how you say it. The tea, it's not a sign of tea. Nonetheless, if, so you compare the scenarios, kid wants a Mountain Dew. It's like, yeah, of course you want the Mountain Dew, it tastes good. But the parent's like, no, we don't drink Mountain Dew. That's crap, that's liquid candy, you know, we're not doing that, it's not healthy for us. But, the kid wants the mulk, boom, parent, yes, every, all time, every time.

• 3:30:27Jocko Willink?

  Parents are like, hey, do you want some more mulk?

• 3:30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, I do, actually.

• 3:30:32Jocko Willink?

  Check, cool, good. So that's, that's originmaine.com for all that stuff.

• 3:30:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of good stuff on there. Also, we have a store. Jaco has a store, called Jaco Store. Anyway, there you can get, also get rash guards. Some cool shirts, if you want to represent, discipline equals freedom. A few designs on that one, there's some designs on there, on that store in general. So yeah, man, check them out. If you want to get something, get something.

• 3:31:00Jocko Willink?

  Trucker's hats. My wife said something about Jaco Store. And then my youngest daughter said, you have a store? And I said, yeah. And she says, where is it?

• 3:31:12Speaker 03

  On the internet, man.

• 3:31:13Jocko Willink?

  It's virtual, it's virtual Jaco Store.

• 3:31:15Speaker 03

  Yep, it's called Jaco Store, tell them, let your friend know. But yeah, some good stuff, some hoodies on there as well, hats, as Jaco said, trucker and flex fit. But yeah, go on there, and you know, if you want something, if you like something, get something. Good way to stay on the path and represent at the same time. Boom.

• 3:31:32Jocko Willink?

  Do you rep, when you're, does it help you stay on the path?

• 3:31:36Speaker 03

  I think so, yes.

• 3:31:36Jocko Willink?

  There's, there's quite a few people that feel, when they put on the uniform, right? They get in the game. You know, it's a classic, archetypical part of the hero's journey. Is they're getting their gear on.

• 3:31:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, suiting up.

• 3:31:51Jocko Willink?

  You know, they're suiting up.

• 3:31:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:31:53Jocko Willink?

  That's part of the deal. Watch a movie, what do they show? Whether it's a soldier getting his boots on, lock and loaded his weapon. You know in the movies when they open up like the war chest?

• 3:32:03Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, big time.

• 3:32:04Jocko Willink?

  Like in, like in Mike and the Dragons, opens up the war chest, right?

• 3:32:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32:08Jocko Willink?

  In.

• 3:32:09Speaker 03

  Commando.

• 3:32:09Jocko Willink?

  Commando, gearing up.

• 3:32:11Speaker 03

  He gets onto the shore, the final battle scene, right? He gets on the shore, oh yeah, it was like a whole montage. Boots, uh, bulletproof vest, uh, you know, I don't know if it was bulletproof, I don't know, doesn't matter. He's zipping it up, the same thing.

• 3:32:23Jocko Willink?

  I think that vest was more just, you know.

• 3:32:25Speaker 03

  Just dope.

• 3:32:26Jocko Willink?

  Just.

• 3:32:28Jocko Willink?

  Just Hollywood a hundred percent.

• 3:32:30Speaker 03

  They paint the face with the thing. Well, you know that charcoal that they paint their face with?

• 3:32:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's called Cami paint, yeah.

• 3:32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, bro. So I'm telling you, it's suiting up.

• 3:32:38Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, because of that, um, yeah, you can, you can get suited up and then you feel like you're getting in the zone for whatever it is you're about to go do. Cause you got that shirt that says, get out.

• 3:32:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32:52Jocko Willink?

  Or whatever.

• 3:32:53Speaker 03

  Well, big time. Yeah. When you get a new rash guard, you're that much more compelled to go train.

• 3:32:57Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:32:58Speaker 03

  If you.

• 3:32:58Jocko Willink?

  So this is a thing that starts when you're like six years old and you get a new pair of shoes and it just lasts your whole life.

• 3:33:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, could, yeah, actually the shoes, that's a good example because remember when you're a kid, I don't know, you might be different, but I think most of us when we're a kid, you know, when you got the new shoes.

• 3:33:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:33:13Speaker 03

  You wanna go to school. I want, oh, yeah. See, you're thinking functionality, which I dig, by the way, but you get the new shoes, the new Chuck Taylors. The half red, half green ones. You ever had those on?

• 3:33:24Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:33:25Speaker 03

  Anyway, we had those and so you buy them or you get them, whatever from parents and you're like, can't wait to just wear these to, to school.

• 3:33:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 3:33:33Speaker 03

  And like everyone's gonna see them and all this stuff. So compared to if you don't have new shoes, do you really wanna go to school? Sure, maybe, maybe not, but with the Chuck Taylor, the new shoes, you will wanna go. That's how. Same thing with the gym. The same thing with anywhere. If you got some new clothing to represent with, big time.

• 3:33:50Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 3:33:51Speaker 03

  Do you wear dry, dry fit is, I think it's what it's called. You wear dry fit, right?

• 3:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Well, in what?

• 3:33:56Speaker 03

  Like a shirt?

• 3:33:57Jocko Willink?

  Way.

• 3:33:57Speaker 03

  It's called dry fit for like working out and stuff.

• 3:33:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:34:00Speaker 03

  It's like, we don't have any of that.

• 3:34:03Jocko Willink?

  We need to.

• 3:34:03Speaker 03

  I know. That's what I was, I just thought of that right now.

• 3:34:05Jocko Willink?

  You just thought of that?

• 3:34:06Speaker 03

  Here's the thing. I knew that before because you, I think you and some people early on said that.

• 3:34:10Jocko Willink?

  I'm working on, we're, we're working on it. We're working on it at Origin that we can make dry fit, not, uh, compression. Like loose fit, right?

• 3:34:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:34:20Jocko Willink?

  Loose fit. Loose fit, quick, dry. That's what we're making.

• 3:34:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. I gave you a pretty dope red one at the muster and I was like, I don't wear dry fit at all. I put it on. I was like, dang, I'm, I, I like it. It's good. It's kind of on my radar now.

• 3:34:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I think you measure most shirts by their sleeve size. So I think I must add some small sleeves and you were stoked.

• 3:34:41Speaker 03

  That's classified. Anyway, also, stay on the path. Keep, stay on the path. Keep yourself on the path by subscribing to this podcast. I know it seems obvious, but sometimes when people are new, they're like, oh, yeah, cool podcast. In fact, or you're in that trial period, because there are certain podcasts that I'll be like, hey, I hear good things. I'm gonna go listen to it. And I only listen to it like at the gym or something like this, or under certain circumstances. And I'll forget, you know, like I won't listen to it at other times. So come back to the gym or something like that. I go, oh, let me find that podcast. And you gotta kind of do the search or whatever. You just subscribe. So I can see that scenario being the case. See what I'm saying? For people, because you know how we always say, of course, they're gonna subscribe. Seems obvious. It's obvious. You don't have to tell people to subscribe. They're either gonna subscribe if they like

• 3:35:26Speaker 03

  it, or not. But sometimes you do forget. There are circumstances, is what I'm saying. So here's a reminder. Subscribe.

• 3:35:32Jocko Willink?

  While you're subscribing to this podcast, also subscribe to the Warrior Kid Podcast. We have some more Warrior Kid Podcast episodes coming. I apologize that they're taking long. It is my fault for not being more squared away, prioritizing better, and working harder. But I have some almost ready for the release.

• 3:35:51Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 3:35:52Jocko Willink?

  Also, while you're looking at Warrior Kid stuff, you can check out IrishOaksRanch.com and get some Warrior Kid soap from American-made soap from a 13-year-old kid that is raising goats, getting the milk from the goats, and turning it into soap.

• 3:36:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Good soap too, by the way.

• 3:36:12Jocko Willink?

  On a farm here in California. A lot of people don't know that California is massive agriculture and farming. So you can support that with a little Warrior Kid soap. Also, don't forget about the YouTube while you're subscribing. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, Jocko Podcast, where you can watch these podcasts on there if you want to see us, if you want to see Jim Webb and James Webb, you want to see what their reactions are, and see what they look like. You can subscribe, or you can go to the YouTube and check it out. You can also see Echo's enhanced videos, which he is quite proud of.

• 3:36:50Speaker 03

  I'm proud that you said, use the word legit.

• 3:36:52Jocko Willink?

  Well, they are legit. I will give you credit when credit is due. And they, they enhance the message functionally.

• 3:37:01Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:37:02Jocko Willink?

  Like being able to read the words, that's functional usage. So it's not just, it's not just effects for the sake of effects, which I probably wouldn't call legit. You know, you do throw some of that stuff in there. Sometimes when walls are exploding, that might be a little bit beyond, but sometimes he goes a little too far. Let him know. Let him know if his videos are a little bit much.

• 3:37:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:37:24Jocko Willink?

  He learns, it's like the guy that learns something. And they learn the cowbell. They get a new cowbell for the drum set and they put it in through the whole album. It's just cowbell.

• 3:37:32Speaker 03

  What's a cowbell?

• 3:37:33Jocko Willink?

  It's like a, it's a cowbell.

• 3:37:35Speaker 03

  I mean, and.

• 3:37:36Jocko Willink?

  But people use it in music occasionally. It should be used sparingly.

• 3:37:39Speaker 03

  So it's a real actual.

• 3:37:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a cowbell.

• 3:37:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:37:42Jocko Willink?

  Ding.

• 3:37:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:37:43Jocko Willink?

  Or like more like a bong.

• 3:37:44Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:37:44Jocko Willink?

  I can't really do the noise.

• 3:37:46Speaker 03

  Sure, but there, there, cause in, especially drums, actually all instruments really, they have like names. For, you know, like hi-hat.

• 3:37:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the name of the drum.

• 3:37:56Speaker 03

  I know, but see what I'm saying though? That's like a name for a drum. Like if you've never seen a drum or never heard of a drum, someone says hi-hat, they'd be like, I know what hi means and I know what hat means.

• 3:38:04Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:38:04Speaker 03

  But hi-hat is a name for, you see what I'm saying? I thought that was the same deal for a cowbell.

• 3:38:08Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no. It's, it's.

• 3:38:09Speaker 03

  It's actual.

• 3:38:09Jocko Willink?

  Now they make, I mean, I don't know what the cowbells look like in 1850.

• 3:38:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:38:15Jocko Willink?

  But this has definitely been cleaned up and modified. So it's a cowbell looking thing, but it's for your, you don't, you don't go to the farm store to buy a cowbell for your drum set.

• 3:38:26Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Okay.

• 3:38:27Jocko Willink?

  You go to the, the music store and you say, I need a cowbell.

• 3:38:29Speaker 03

  I understand.

• 3:38:30Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then you start using it in every song and you think everyone wants to just hear that cowbell.

• 3:38:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Cause you like it.

• 3:38:36Jocko Willink?

  And there's a whole skit on Saturday Night Live about the cowbell.

• 3:38:39Speaker 03

  Okay. I was just gonna ask.

• 3:38:40Jocko Willink?

  And one of the patches that guys had in TU Bruiser that eventually got banned. One of the patches was more cowbell based on the Saturday Night Live skit.

• 3:38:49Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Okay. And I always did actually wonder about that more cowbell. Where'd that come?

• 3:38:55Jocko Willink?

  Now you know. You never know what you're gonna learn. Also Psychological Warfare, that's an album with tracks where you can stay on the path. And we're making another one. It's coming out soon. And that's it on that.

• 3:39:07Speaker 03

  Good. Also, if you want to vary up your workout, get more workout gear. Go to on it.com slash Jaco. Also, they got some good immunity stuff that I actually took. It reminded me because I just took some, felt the cold coming on. Shroom Tech Immune, it's a good one.

• 3:39:24Jocko Willink?

  You like that one?

• 3:39:24Speaker 03

  Very much like that one. Never let me know, before you travel, take that. Nonetheless, a lot of cool stuff on there and information. That's another one that like you can get caught up in a bad way, but it's a good resource when you want to vary up your workouts, do some new workouts, kettlebells, even that, that club workout, which I would highly recommend looking into what to do. Don't just pick that thing up and start getting nuts. Might get you, might jam you up.

• 3:39:51Jocko Willink?

  You also got Jaco White Tea, which tastes delicious and it's good for you. I say again, tastes delicious and good for you. That seems to be the theme. If we're going to put something in our body, we want it to taste good. Yes, and we want it to be good for us. Jaco White Tea. And there's no doubt that it's good for you because it's the only product, the only product that I've ever heard of, where an 8,000 pound deadlift is guaranteed 100%. Never failed.

• 3:40:18Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 3:40:18Jocko Willink?

  So get you some of that, get your deadlift up. Also, we've got some books. First of all, the books we read today and, and James Webb's, James Webb has 10 books that he's written. The two that we covered today will both be on the website. Fields of Fire and then I Heard My Country Calling. These are the two books I read today. He also mentioned a book called The Nightingale Song, which is a great book and we'll put that one on as well. Did you hear me?

• 3:40:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:40:46Jocko Willink?

  Nightingale Song.

• 3:40:47Speaker 03

  Nightingale Song.

• 3:40:49Jocko Willink?

  Great book. It's about the, the class, the Naval Academy guys that graduated with Jim Webb and what they did, they all had a huge impact on the Navy and on the country. And it's, well, the, this particular group that he talks about. So we'll put that book on there as well because it's a great book and perhaps I'll cover it at some point. Obviously for books, we also have Way of the Warrior Kid and Mark's Mission. If you know kids, get them these books and it'll get them on the right path of of going in the right direction of doing the right things. It's just gonna be, it's, it's gonna help kids out. The, the feedback that I've gotten from around the world, and yes, I've gotten feedback from around the world. By around the world, I mean Australia, New Zealand.

• 3:41:34Jocko Willink?

  I've gotten a whole package of letters from a classroom in New Zealand of kids that are on the path. So if you read a book, imagine you, you read a book and you're seven years old, nine years old, and you decided that the book was good enough that you were gonna try and find the author who lives on the other side of the world and write him a note and say, "Thanks, cuz I'm on the path now." That's the book right there. Way of the Warrior Kid and Mark's Mission. Also Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. This, you know what this is? Christmas time. You, you, it's a Christmas, this book is a gift. It's a gift for people that you know that you wanna help. If you have an enemy, don't give it to them. Cuz then your enemy's gonna get on the path, probably come back and whatever.

• 3:42:16Speaker 03

  Defeat you.

• 3:42:16Jocko Willink?

  Eighteen months and they'll be jacked and they'll be focused and they'll crush you.

• 3:42:22Speaker 03

  Or.

• 3:42:23Jocko Willink?

  Or, yes, you're right, or they could, if they, well, I guess if they're, it depends on their level of, of malevolence in their soul. Because if they have a little bit of good in there, you know what they're gonna do? They're gonna read that little part about laughter wins. And they're gonna see that the light is gonna overcome the darkness. And maybe they'll come back to you in eighteen months and like, "Hey, I got you something."

• 3:42:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:42:43Jocko Willink?

  Boom.

• 3:42:44Speaker 03

  We're not enemies anymore.

• 3:42:45Jocko Willink?

  Now we're not enemies anymore, we're moving in the right direction. By the way, do you wanna train? By the way, do you wanna jack some steel?

• 3:42:51Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:42:51Jocko Willink?

  By the way, do you wanna go out and eat some steak? Cuz I'm down.

• 3:42:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that might actually be the move.

• 3:42:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that could be the move. Nicely done, I like the way you think. That audio book is not on Audible. It is on iTunes, Amazon Music, Google Play, other MP3 platforms. Extreme Ownership. First book I wrote with my brother Leif Babin. That's, um.

• 3:43:16Jocko Willink?

  Taking the principles that we used in combat and then applying them to business and life and then we followed that up with another book called The Dichotomy of Leadership, another New York Times bestseller, which is super cool and all that, but whatever. Let's face it, what we wanted to do was write a book that actually expanded and made people better leaders. Feedback we're getting on that one is that's what it's helping people do. The little nuances of extreme ownership that are harder to handle and harder to master, this book will help you do it. The Dichotomy of Leadership, available everywhere. Appreciate everyone getting that. Of course, now we have Mikey and the Dragons. It is coming out

• 3:43:59Jocko Willink?

  November 15th. I'm trying to get as many printed as I can right now because you all ordered a lot of them. So, thank you. And it's about a little kid who's scared of everything and he finds a book and in the book, the king is dead in this village, in this kingdom, and there's a prince that's gonna have to stand up and fight. So that's what he does. The prince has to stand up and fight, but he's scared because he's only seven. So, that's that. A little excerpt from it. Do a little excerpt. The king had always been so strong and brave and protected the kingdom from the dragon cave. The dragon cave was

• 3:44:43Jocko Willink?

  just over the hill and filled with scary creatures that were ready to kill. Horrible dragons of every single type who thought people in the kingdom were especially ripe. The people thought the dragons had breath of fire and that the dragon stood 20 feet tall or higher. They thought the dragons had sword-stopping scales and powerful, long, razor-sharp tails. But the brave king never let the beast around. He stood up and fought and held his ground. And as long as the king had been the king, none of the dragons could do a thing. Yes, the king always kept the dragons at bay by going out bravely into the fray. It seemed without fear the king would go fight, he'd beat the dragons and come home at night.

• 3:45:28Jocko Willink?

  But now that the king had died and was gone, there was only one person to fight and carry on. But that person wasn't big or mighty or strong. In fact, he hadn't been alive that long. Now, the person who had dragons to chase was just a little boy with a smiling face. Yes, the person that now must stand up and be bold was just the little prince who was only seven years old. So, so there you go. Of course, the villagers are worried if this little kid's gonna be able to do it. And, well, get the book, you'll find out what happens when he goes up to face the dragons. And, and by the way, you guys put this book to number seventeen on Amazon of all books pre-release. That's crazy.

• 3:46:10Jocko Willink?

  So, you guys called me out. And I'm printing as fast as I can. And the, the good news is, I'm printing more of these first editions. So, the first editions is gonna continue. I'm gonna print as many as I can and get it out and get it to you, everyone, hopefully by Christmas. Appreciate it for the support against, against the big boys.

• 3:46:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, speaking of big boys, you remember how you used to talk trash about the publishing company, try to be all conservative? And look at you now.

• 3:46:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I was, uh, I was conservative. And I was too conservative. I didn't realize how much people were gonna get after it. And I got texts from my buddies that are saying, "I just ordered ten copies. I just ordered fourteen copies. I just ordered nineteen copies for every kid in my extended family." And I'm like, "That's awesome." I will get them printed as fast as I can. I pulled out all stops and I'm making it happen. You know what? It's my fault. I should, I should have ordered more.

• 3:47:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, because those exact things that you said about yourself were the exact same things you were saying about the publishing company.

• 3:47:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:47:19Speaker 03

  I didn't know how people were gonna get after it. Well, you just said that about the publishing company.

• 3:47:23Jocko Willink?

  They don't understand. Maybe I, apparently I didn't understand. I should have taken my own advice.

• 3:47:28Speaker 03

  Now we do?

• 3:47:29Jocko Willink?

  Now we know. The books are being printed as fast as I can print them.

• 3:47:34Speaker 03

  That's what I like about you.

• 3:47:35Jocko Willink?

  So, apologize for that. It's my fault. I should have taken my own advice. And, well, now I'm getting after it.

• 3:47:42Speaker 03

  Yes, you are, sure.

• 3:47:44Jocko Willink?

  We'll get them out there, printing a ton more. Also, Echelon Front Leadership Consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. That's what we do at the Echelon Front team. Me, Leif Babin, JP Denell, Dave Burke, Flynn Cochran, Mike Sorelli, and Mike Byma. So, if you need help in your organization, call us. Call us now because we are booked up. So, if you are thinking about doing this in the future, call now. Echelonfront.com. Go get on there and we'll hook up. Also, muster 2019. We got Chicago and Denver. Dates aren't completely locked yet, but check extremeownership.com for the information and to find out

• 3:48:28Jocko Willink?

  when it is live and when you can book and make your reservations. All the musters have sold out and this one, these will too. So, get on it early. EF Overwatch as well. We're connecting spec ops and combat aviators to companies that need leaders. So, the military produces trains and tests in combat environment leadership. And we're taking those leaders, those experienced leaders, and bringing them into the civilian sector. EFoverwatch.com if you want to get on, in the game on either side. So, whether you're a spec ops or you're combat aviation and you're looking for what your next mission is gonna be,

• 3:49:14Jocko Willink?

  or you're a company that's looking for experienced, trained leaders to come and help you out. Folks that understand the mentality of Extreme Ownership and what we do at Echelon Front. Go to EFoverwatch.com.

• 3:49:28Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to keep discussing these things with us, we are available on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on Dad Fishy Book. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to James and Jim Webb for their service and for joining us on the podcast to share their lessons learned. It was an honor to be able to sit and talk with them. And thanks to everyone else that has served or is serving in the military around the world out there, holding the line. And also thanks to police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, correctional

• 3:50:12Jocko Willink?

  officers, Border Patrol, all the first responders, everyone that is out there doing what you do for us on the home front. Thank you for what you do every day.

• 3:50:23Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else that is listening, thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting. Thanks for spreading the word. It is much appreciated. And in the book Fields of Fire, one of the main characters, Hodges, in part of the book, he quotes an old hymn, an old hymn that he's thinking about in his head. And that old hymn says, "Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its suns away. They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day." So there you go.

• 3:51:03Jocko Willink?

  A little reminder, a little reminder to all of us that time is fleeting.

• 3:51:11Jocko Willink?

  Time is short and we only get so much, so don't wait around. Don't put it off. Instead, get up. And yes, get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.