193: Operational Excellence. The Last Vietnam SEAL to be on Active Duty, Kirby Horrell

0:00:00 – Opening 0:03:58 – Master Chief Kirby Horrell 1:42:00 – A new Mission 1:59:56 – Final thoughts. 2:00:46 – How to stay on THE PATH. 2:22:14 - 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 193 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:09Jocko Willink?

  I, I often say that I was raised in the SEAL Teams.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  And I was actually, I mean, I didn't join the Navy until I was 18 years old. But, once I was in, the Teams was the only thing I knew. And when I got in,

• 0:33Jocko Willink?

  what happened when you got to a team was you got in line.

• 0:38Jocko Willink?

  You got on board with the program. You got taught how to act.

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  Not just how to fire and maneuver, not just how to shoot, move and communicate. You got taught how to act.

• 0:53Jocko Willink?

  How to carry yourself, the attitude you're supposed to have. You got turned into a frogman.

• 1:02Jocko Willink?

  Now, there was no, there was no explicit course of instructions. No one's given classes on, on mental toughness or anything like that. But you were, you were indoctrinated in other ways. You were taught the old ways. And you heard stories and you'd read stories about the NCDUs, the Naval Combat Demolition Units and the underwater demolition teams. You'd hear about their incredibly brave work in World War II. And you hear about the massive casualties that they would suffer making the beaches safe for amphibious landings.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  And that, that frogman heritage certainly ran deep.

• 1:55Jocko Willink?

  But at its core,

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  the lineage that we followed, that we emulated and that we worshipped as young SEALs was the Vietnam SEALs.

• 2:15Jocko Willink?

  They were the standard.

• 2:19Jocko Willink?

  Without question. And I was lucky because when I got to the teams, there were still some Vietnam SEALs around. Some of them were on active duty. They were at the teams. They were in training departments, or they were master chiefs, or warrant officers, or some of them were senior officers. Matter of fact, the Admiral in charge of the community when I got in was a Vietnam guy.

• 2:41Jocko Willink?

  But there weren't that many. And when they spoke, we listened. And when they taught us something, we took notes.

• 2:49Jocko Willink?

  And they taught us the things that we needed to know, the tactics, the techniques, the immediate action drills, the standard operating procedures.

• 2:58Jocko Willink?

  And they also kept us honest because this is the 80s and this is the 90s and there's no war going on. And there were some flare ups around the globe. And SEALs got some flashes of combat action, but there was no sustained operations.

• 3:16Jocko Willink?

  And we could have slacked off.

• 3:20Jocko Willink?

  But the old breed knew. They knew that it was only a matter of time before war would come again.

• 3:30Jocko Willink?

  And they wanted us to be ready. And when the time came, they were ready and we were ready because of them. Because of those Vietnam era SEALs that had continued to serve and continued to pass on the lessons and the knowledge to the younger generations. And because of them, we were ready to take the fight to the enemy.

• 3:53Jocko Willink?

  And we did.

• 3:55Jocko Willink?

  Like our forefathers, that's what we did.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  And it is an absolute honor today to have one of the longest serving SEALs

• 4:08Jocko Willink?

  clocking in at forty-seven years. The last Vietnam SEAL to be on active duty. And he's here with us tonight, Master Chief Kirby Horrell. Master Chief, welcome to the show and thanks for coming on, man.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Hello, guys. How you doing? I'm honored to be here and honored to, uh, to talk to all of your supporting people out there, uh, and let them know what my story is and what a great story it is and what a wonderful life I've had. As I told the Vice President the other day, um, I said, you know, I'd still be doing this job if I wouldn't have got old. So that's the only drawback, man. We all get old. It's the John Wayne theory. And if you know what that is.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  What's the John Wayne theory?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  None of us get out of here alive.

• 4:57Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  You know, that's the, that's the deal. But where do I start? Let me, let me go.

• 5:02Jocko Willink?

  Where do you start? Let's start with wherever you grew up. Where'd you grow up?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  I grew up in Missouri, farm boy, uh, moved to the big city, started building hot rods.

• 5:11Jocko Willink?

  Which big city?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  St. Louis.

• 5:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  That's, that's the only one in Missouri. They think other ones are, but it's not.

• 5:18Jocko Willink?

  So, so what year, what year was this that you were moving to St. Louis?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, probably around sixty-two, sixty-three, you know, and I, uh, that's where I went to high school.

• 5:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so I was gonna say, so you're in high school?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, in high school at the time and, and COE was a, a big thing in those days where you, you go to high school in the morning, get your math, arithmetic, English, and then you go work at noon time at a, at a job site, right? And get a trade, kind of something they're coming back to now because kids need trades, right, today. So I had a trade, but I worked at County Speed Shop. So it fit perfect with my uh.

• 5:54Jocko Willink?

  Uh County what?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  County Speed Shop.

• 5:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  It was a speed shop.

• 5:58Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  That built drag cars, built track cars, everything else. And I had a uh, I had a 55 Chevy that I uh, had built up, had run um, liquor from dry counties to uh, to wet counties when I was uh, living in Arkansas. It paid the bills, so that was good. And so when I got back to Missouri, I started building bigger and faster motors. And I would uh, take the car down and, and race for money down on the river flats, right? Well, I got caught one too many times and the judge said, "Young man, I have some options for you." Well, I'd just finished reading the book Frogman, and I said, "You know what, your honor? I think that going to the Navy thing is gonna be a good deal."

• 6:42Speaker 02

  So, he said, "Here's my number. If your recruiter doesn't call me tomorrow, I'm putting a bench warrant out for you."

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  So I went to sign up for the Navy the next morning, was on an airplane that evening headed for San Diego and the change in my life, right?

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  This is what kids think it's gonna be like nowadays, and it's not like that anymore.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  No.

• 7:03Jocko Willink?

  It's not like that. Matter of fact, if you get in trouble, you're not getting in the Navy and you damn sure aren't getting in the SEAL teams. If you have any kind of record, they don't want you.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 7:09Jocko Willink?

  The other thing that happens is guys think, "Oh, I'm just gonna join and then I'll be gone the next day." It's like, no, you're gonna have six months, eight months of waiting around before you go.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Completely different world. And you gotta remember the Vietnam War was.

• 7:20Jocko Willink?

  So how old were you?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  I was uh, 18 when that happened.

• 7:24Jocko Willink?

  And, and how close attention were you paying to Vietnam at the time?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Uh, not really a lot. I was paying more attention to hot rods and building fast cars, you know? And uh, and then when this thing came up and I uh, I had to kinda shift gears, uh, realized that I was in the Navy now.

• 7:42Jocko Willink?

  This is 1967.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  67.

• 7:45Jocko Willink?

  So Vietnam's full, I mean Vietnam's on right now.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  It's on, it's going. So the um, I got out here, went to boot camp at NTC here in San Diego. And in those days, you had to go do a ship tour or a Westpac tour before you could come to the teams.

• 8:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh damn.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  It wasn't coming right out of boot camp and going to BUDs, right? So, I had to do a Westpac and you know, my job on the Westpac was a fireman 'cause I happened to be the shortest guy and could crawl inside the boilers. And I went, "Wow, what a good deal."

• 8:16Jocko Willink?

  What'd you weigh back then?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Oh, probably about 130. Sure. Yeah, 130. I'm strong as a bull, right? I could do 30 pull-ups and not even bat an eye. And I'll tell you how that worked out for me when I was in training. So then the, uh, so I was on the ship and, uh, the, the cool part about it is I didn't stay in the fire room a long time because the people that were taking care of the captain's gig didn't know how to set the rack on a Slant 6 Detroit diesel. Check. I knew how to set that. So they got me out of the fire room to come up and be the captain's gig. So, uh, engineer, so that was a good deal. So are you in E1, E2? E2 at the time. Yeah, yeah, big, man. Big, big rate, big rate.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  So, so it's very cool. I got the job. The boat was running great. The first day, uh, the job, right on the, and I was on the USS Piedmont. You had to run out on the big booms that, that swing out from the ship. So they tie up all the captain's gigs and all of the officers' motorboats and stuff like that. Well, the first day, I just had taken my white tennis shoes out of the washer. They were still pretty slippery. I'm running out on the boom, slip, do a backflip from about 30 feet in the air into the water, swim over, jump on the captain's gig and standing where the engineer stands all the time. And Captain Davies, who was the, was it also a short captain?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  He starts applauding off the quarter deck and he goes, Jesus, that was the best, man. So needless to say, him and I became great friends, great friends. And, uh, and that lasted for six months. And, and then when I got back, I did my, um, my Bud's training, um, qualifications over in the PI. Did those over in the PI. When I got back to San Diego, I was expecting to go right to class, right? Not the case, cause my lieutenant had hidden the chit that I'd pushed through. And I, fortunately, I knew the captain. So Captain Davies kind of made that all right. But I still ran from 32nd Street over to Bud's training many times, trying to get all that started out. It was just good training.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  But, um, then I got over to, to the training and Captain Addy, who was over there, goes, man, you just made it just in time to start class 49. Right? Well, all the pre-training that we have nowadays that kind of prepare you for all that stuff, eh, wasn't there. So like, three days in the training, my legs are like, ready to fall off. And, and so was everybody else's, right? Class forty-nine started-

• 10:53Jocko Willink?

  So how many, so what, you checked in on what day? Like, how, how was, how long was before you actually classed up and went?

• 10:58Speaker 02

  I started on, I like, I got there on a Thursday. We started training on a Monday. Okay, so that, that was the pre-training I got.

• 11:08Jocko Willink?

  Get your kid.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Get your ass ready. Yeah, yeah, that was the whole thing, man. So it was very cool. A very cool, all of them-

• 11:16Jocko Willink?

  And all this stemmed from the fact that you had read the book, The Frogman?

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 11:19Jocko Willink?

  And you said, "That's what I'm gonna do."

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I'm gonna do.

• 11:21Jocko Willink?

  Were you a water guy? Did you-

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Not really.

• 11:24Jocko Willink?

  In the lakes or anything?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Not really. First time I was in the ocean was here in San Diego. And I had a couple of surfers, guys that were in the class, because I was trying to jump over the waves, because the only swimming I'd ever done is rivers and lakes, right? And was okay with that. But I hadn't dealt with surf before. And the surfers in the class go, "No, Kirby, you gotta dive underneath the waves." And I went, "Oh shit, okay, got it." So underneath the waves I went, and it was great, man. I think once I got my fins, I felt like, you know, I was a water baby then, because I, I could fly with the fins. I never go near the ocean without my fins anymore, anyway. So, so it was very cool. So we got, so we got started. I mean, there was two hundred and twenty, twenty-five of us that started

• 12:09Speaker 02

  class forty-nine. And, and my nemesis was, was Olivera, and this came out at my retirement, right? Olivera was this big hook-nosed Indian guy that ran like a hundred miles. He was strong as an ox and, and ugly as an ape.

• 12:22Jocko Willink?

  Was he an instructor, or was he another student?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Total instructor.

• 12:25Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Total instructor. Him and Mother Moy. Mother Moy was also an instructor. Our class forty-nine was Mother Moy's first class, right? So we're all standing out in front, you know, of the, of the building over on the old amphib base. And we're all lined up there. Well, Olivera comes out and starts looking up and down the line, and he goes, "Say."

• 12:47Speaker 02

  You're too short to be here. And I went, I'll be here when you're gone.

• 12:52Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Oh, that hurt. I ate half the mud on the bottom of San Diego Bay, man. It was wild, but Olivera and I, we had, we grew a relationship while I was going through training. So being the shortest guy that ever went through Bud's training, right? I, I felt all the-

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  How tall are you?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Five, four. All the, some days. Other days, I'm five, three. Now that I'm getting older, I'm, I'm probably gonna push five, two pretty soon. But the, some more stories about that. But so the, uh, so Olivera walks in the back of the, of the main office and tells Mother Moy, "Hey, Mother Moy, I think you got a troll in this class." And, and Mother Moy goes, "No, you're shitting me." He goes, "Well, go out there and look." And, and there I was, man, it was wild. That, that started the whole cascade of, of situations, right?

• 13:47Jocko Willink?

  But you talked shit to an instructor, that's-

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:50Jocko Willink?

  I just wanna advise people. That could go okay, it could also go terribly wrong. Cause if you piss off an instructor, they will, they will, they can crush you and destroy you. So he obviously saw something in you that he liked.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:03Jocko Willink?

  But if he wouldn't have seen that, you know, they'll, they'll eat you alive.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Well, I, I can only tell you that every day of training, every day of training, I was in the Goon Squad. So that may have been part of that, what you're saying, he didn't like me kinda thing. Cause no matter where I was at, if I was running in the middle of the pack, everybody from me back was in the Goon Squad.

• 14:25Jocko Willink?

  You were the cutoff for the Goon Squad?

• 14:26Speaker 02

  I was, I was the cutoff. I could, and one day, we just said, "Okay, I'm gonna run in front of the pack," right? And everybody in the class goes, "Okay, that's great." Cause we'd whittled the class not a lot. So I was in the front of the pack. No shit. The whole class was in the Goon Squad. Oliver, he was great. He was a hard, hard man, but, and I'll tell you, the, and it goes back to, to what I was saying earlier about pull-ups. So we'd do PT and I could, I could run hard and do a lot of PT. And I, when it came to pull-ups, I could knock out 30 pull-ups with nothing flat. Well, Mother Moy and Olivero used to make me hang on the pull-up bar and then hit me in the stomach and see how high they could make the swing. And I go, man. Everybody

• 15:10Speaker 02

  in the class will tell you that. Mike Thornton, Mike Thornton was in my class, he'll tell you that. You know, so some of the other, some of the other tidbits about going through training, Mike, Mike Thornton, because the Dirty Name is built for big guys, tall guys. Because I'm short, I got a big chest. The top log on the Dirty Name, I couldn't get over sometimes. I just would, couldn't do it. Well, Mike Thornton would come up there and throw me over the top log. And the instructors would get pissed off and go, Thornton, you stopped doing that. Where would he stand? Would he do that? Would he stand? Stand, stand on the log. You know, he'd stand on the lower log and throw me over the top log. It was great. It was great. And the, and the days I couldn't do it, the instructors made me go through the Weaver twice. But all the rest of, no problem with any of the rest

• 15:53Speaker 02

  of the obstacles, but that was part of it. You know, and the personality, I think my personality kept me going because it was, it was a good thing. And the instructors, even though I was pissing them off, they, they enjoyed having me there. Because when it came to, to being, you know, making sand cookies and, and volcanoes and stuff, well, if they got too close, they became part of the sugar cookie in the volcano. And they're going, Earl, we hate you. So, so it was very cool. Oliver bought me a steak after, after, after graduation. So that must have meant something, right? And, and Mother Moy, today, one of my best friends, you know, he comes to every event. He was at the, at my retirement, you know,

• 16:34Speaker 02

  when I retired from the Navy, I had, I had like five speakers that all came up and, and shared their, their comments about Kirby as he went through training. And Mother Moy was one of them. So it was classic 1,500 people at my retirement. Yeah, yeah. Huge, huge. But anyway, after, after we got through BUDs, you know, then we went to, we went to, SBI.

• 16:59Jocko Willink?

  How many guys made it through?

• 17:00Speaker 02

  In our class, there were twenty-two.

• 17:02Jocko Willink?

  So you started with two twenty and you ended with twenty-two.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably ten percent. But I got rolled back into class fifty, same kind of thing. That's where I'm.

• 17:09Jocko Willink?

  What'd you get rolled for?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Uh, because there was a, a chief, Chief Rose, who was one of our instructors, good guy, but he had come up with this little thing called the Little Olympics where you had to do the, all these different exercises like swim, you had to swim five hundred yards in your clothes, you had to push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and run a half mi- or a mile and a half in your clothes. And you had to do that all in a thousand seconds, right? So, I missed it by like twelve seconds. And he goes, "Sorry, we're gonna have to roll you back."

• 17:44Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  And I went, "Oh crap." Well, I wasn't the only one. There were like five guys in the class that got rolled back.

• 17:50Jocko Willink?

  How far along were you in training?

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Oh, we went through second phase. We had to go through second phase, dive phase again, and then go into the third phase. But, you know, third phase to me was, you know, that was like a vacation because of land warfare, because I'm great shot, I'm good on the land. Uh, because I was a hunter and, you know, I was a country boy, so I knew about all that stuff.

• 18:08Jocko Willink?

  And Mike Martin was in your bud's class as well?

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, class fifty, rolled back in.

• 18:13Jocko Willink?

  So you rolled into his class?

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:14Jocko Willink?

  From Mike Thornton to Mike Martin?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, that's good. I never thought about that before, from one Mike to the other. And Mike, uh, Mike and I were swim buddies. I mean, we did all the dives together, everything else. He was a hoot when it came to doing ocean dives because he'd always get above me and I couldn't, you know, when you're diving, you're looking for your swim buddy to the sides, right? Not above you. And Mike would screw with me all the time and hide up there in the kelp. And I'd go, "I just lost my swim buddy. Where the hell is he?", right? But that was when we were out in Point Loma.

• 18:45Jocko Willink?

  Were you guys diving the Emerson rig?

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. You mean, yeah, the one that, that bubbled the way everything?

• 18:52Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, I don't know. I've only heard they called it green death.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. That's.

• 18:56Jocko Willink?

  Because it was not a good rig.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Well, because of all of the bags. See, the bags that they had on it were built, uh, to keep, you know, the air, but because of your rubbing on things and operating and everything else, they'd always get a wear pattern in them. So you're always off-gassing in those bags. So you always had to charge them. And if you didn't make sure your bags were charged, that's why they called it the green death. So, yeah, we, we, we, uh, we dove those a lot.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  A lot, but, uh, but we made it. We made it through and then we all went to San Clemente Island, which was another hoot and had a great, great time out at San Clemente Island, blowing up stuff, shooting stuff. I mean, you know,

• 19:38Jocko Willink?

  It's a dream.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  It's a dream.

• 19:40Jocko Willink?

  It's a dream.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Total dream. Coming across the beach at night, you know, it was, uh, it was definitely, definitely a good thing. And then, and, and once we graduated, but our graduations in those days were certainly not what the graduations are today. We were out behind building 401 and they came by and gave us our certificates and goes, congratulations you guys. You know, we all felt 10 foot tall because we graduated BUDS, but at the same time, there was no crowds. There were no nothing. It was just us. So different.

• 20:11Jocko Willink?

  And you, how did you not go to a UDT team?

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Uh, I was great at land warfare and I was a great shot. So they kind of, that's the way it worked in those days. If you were a good swimmer, if you're a real good swimmer and you were, were kind of trended towards that, then you would go to UDT. If you were good at land warfare, good at, at blowing up things and, and shooting, then you'd go to SEAL Team. And that's how I got picked to go to SEAL Team One because I was much better on land than I was in the water. So that was the, uh, that's what brought us over there. Mike and I went there. We went through SBI together.

• 20:49Jocko Willink?

  And now when you get to SBI, oh, now there's just one SEAL Team on the coast. So obviously SEAL Team One's running the SBI, which is the,

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:56Jocko Willink?

  The training to get you,

• 20:58Speaker 02

  SEAL baking.

• 20:59Jocko Willink?

  The actual, the actual skills to be a SEAL because in BUDS you don't learn a lot of those.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah.

• 21:05Jocko Willink?

  And who's running that? Cadre?

• 21:07Speaker 02

  The Cadre. The Cadre. I mean, we had, um, Moki Martin, you know, uh, and he was there and we had a number of other excellent guys that were, had been to Vietnam several times. They were our instructors. The, um, and they took us out to our famous location is Nyland. You know, when there was nothing there, we lived in, uh, we had trailers that all the streams, uh, Silver Stream trailers, Stream trailers. That's what we lived in with no, no windows. It was 120 degrees. You know, we'd get up every morning and have our protein breakfast, which was fruit cocktail out of a can because there was nobody cooking anything.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  And then we, and then we'd go work in the desert all day and come back in that heat. And then we'd have, uh, we'd have dinner, which was fruit cocktail in a can and Kipper snacks, which was another good deal. So, and then they had the, uh, then they had the irrigation ditches up in the, in the desert where they'd irrigate all the fields. Well, that was our shower because we didn't have any running water. So we would fill our, we'd fill our canteens up to go train and in the desert at the filling station in town and off we'd go. That was the, uh, that was, but we had a lot of bullets and that's all that mattered. Bullets, but the heat was unbearable. I mean, it's unbearable. 120 degrees. So it got us ready basically for Vietnam because when we got to Vietnam, it was kind

• 22:34Speaker 02

  of like, shit, this place is cold.

• 22:36Jocko Willink?

  But. So SBI, how long was SBI?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  SBI was like six weeks.

• 22:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Six weeks and, and that got us up to speed. And then they got us into our platoons and then.

• 22:49Jocko Willink?

  And so what, what year was this now?

• 22:51Speaker 02

  This was 1969.

• 22:54Jocko Willink?

  1969.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:56Jocko Willink?

  And what platoon did you go into at SEAL Team One?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  At Foxtrot Platoon. I was a point man at Foxtrot Platoon, Squad One, and Mikey was a point man of Squad Two.

• 23:05Jocko Willink?

  Mike Thornton or Mike Martin?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Mike Martin.

• 23:07Jocko Willink?

  Mike Martin.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  You're right. Mike Martin, I mean, Mike Thornton had already been over with another.

• 23:12Jocko Willink?

  Because he was in Class 49.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Class 49. Yeah. And we, since we were kind of six weeks behind those guys, that's why we rolled. But there was no, we didn't have the time lag they have today about going to war. When you finish SBI, you are going right now. So I remember the day when they go, okay, you guys are deploying. And we went over to North Island Air Station.

• 23:33Jocko Willink?

  Did you do any kind of workup as a, as a platoon?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  A couple of weeks, you know, a couple.

• 23:38Jocko Willink?

  So you finished SBI.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:41Jocko Willink?

  And then it's into a platoon. You spend a few weeks into, in the platoon.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  And then off.

• 23:45Jocko Willink?

  And I guess there wasn't really, because there's so many less SEALs, there was only, what, on the west coast, there was what, 100 SEALs? 80 SEALs. Okay, so, everybody's kind of uniformed anyways, because you're all learning from the exact same cadre.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  That's right. And that's why when, when I came back from Vietnam, that's why they put me right in the training cell, because we had new guys that had to be trained up, and there was no time to like, to get that going, right? So that's what they, that's what they were doing. The guys that were really good in the, in the field, they would take them and put them right in the, to training department and get the guys that are ready to go into it and off they go, so.

• 24:22Jocko Willink?

  So how long was it, so how long were you in your platoon? You were in Foxconn platoon for like, a couple months, then you, then they said, alright, you're going on deployment?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Probably nine. We were, we were in there three months prior to deployment, and then we'd deploy, we'd be over there six months and come back, and then they'd break the platoon apart and off it goes.

• 24:39Jocko Willink?

  Was there any, I mean, was there any like this anti-war stuff that, did you even think about it?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  We were all way too busy to even think about that. I mean, we, we saw it when we got home, you know, because of the, because of the anti-war stuff and all that kind of stuff. And you know, and we were too hardened to even care, right? We didn't care. And, uh, so that we just kind of blew right past that. We never got into anyone. I mean, when we got home, there was kind of a demonstration outside of, of North Island, you know, about that kind of thing, but we drove right by it. So it was no, no big deal.

• 25:16Jocko Willink?

  So what was in your, so how old are you now, right now? Are you like 19, 20 years old?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:21Jocko Willink?

  So you're 20 years old, you're going on your first deployment to Vietnam?

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I turned 21 over there.

• 25:25Jocko Willink?

  What was your, what was your thoughts flying over to Vietnam?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Well, we had like a, a C-17, which was like a World War II plane that we were flying in, and it seemed like we flew forever. And, you know, and then, the cool thing about it is when you left North Island, they gave you a boxed lunch. Then when you landed in Hawaii, they gave you a boxed lunch. Well, the, you know, the boxed lunch was like, an egg, an orange. You had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then a meat and cheese sandwich, and some milk. So that was your box lunch and and off you went, man. We went in high style, you know, and we landed at Tonsanute Airport. We we landed there and they we hung out there for

• 26:09Speaker 02

  a while. And then the even before we had to fly from Tonsanute down to Bentui because our the Special Operations Office or SEAL Team Office was at Bentui. So we flew into there. I flew into there because I was like the part of the pre-party to go to Sea Float and start setting up for the new platoon to run the first ops and stuff with the with the old platoon and stuff like that. So that was we flew from there. The rest of the guys stayed in the Victoria Hotel, you know, in in Saigon at the time. And we took off and flew down to Bentui, got ready to catch a bird and go on down to Sea Float.

• 26:48Jocko Willink?

  And were you pretty much just completely amped to go and get some?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. We all are. I mean, hey, that's the way that's who we are, right? Yeah, we wanted to get with it. We wanted to get with the program and and get there as soon as possible. We did our breaking op, you know.

• 27:03Jocko Willink?

  What about older guys that were on there? Who who in your platoon had been on like three, four, five deployments already?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Well, the chief that we had, Chief Jones, had been on it. He'd been on a couple of deployments. My radioman, Lee Pittman, who had been there. We had another guy, Al Yatz, who was our rear security guy, you know, and they're all good guys, all good guys.

• 27:24Jocko Willink?

  And what was their attitude like going back?

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Let's rock. Let's rock. Yeah, let's rock.

• 27:30Jocko Willink?

  So legit.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Lee Pittman was my was was the best. He was the best radioman you could ever want, right? He was in there calling them and just, hey, get over here, you know. But they were all, you know, I think I think probably the biggest guy, the gun shy one, was the chief. He he just had seen a lot of war. And I don't think that he really he knew he had to be there because he was the chief, right? But some of the shit that we got into, you know, he just it was time for him to go home, right? And so we did. We sent him home because when the shit we got into, man, I mean, one night when we got ambushed on the Dam Doy, and Mike probably told you this, but we were going in and I had I was going in on a sampan.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  We had like four sampons on the bow of the of the SEAL light support craft. And I was asleep in the, in the sampan, right? We hit this canal called the Dam Doy. Something woke me up. I think it's a guy upstairs, you know? The Lord was going, Kirby, it's time for you to wake up. So I woke up and I go, holy shit. And I jump, I start to jump in the boat and a B-40 rocket blows the bow of the boat off. I roll and come up right behind, right? I'm holding on to the 50 caliber machine gun. We're right in the middle of the kill zone of an ambush. Everything we learned, right? If you're in a kill zone, blast your way out of it. So that 50 swung around and it just started blasting.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  And I had a couple of guys on the floor, which the chief was one of them. And they were linking that 50 cal ammo and that 50 cal was going for everything it was worth, man. People on the, on the banks, guys were shooting flares. And every time I saw a guy, the 50 caliber took them out. So it was like, we were doing damage. But by then, the first boat that Mike was on, Ms. Mike Martin, they had called in the Sea Wolves. So the Sea Wolves were scrambling. Here these guys come flying over, miniguns blaring. The door gunners have got their white BVDs on and flak jackets. They never even took time to get dressed and they're blowing the shit out of this place over there. Right?

• 29:42Speaker 02

  So by the time we got all that settled, the, the, um, I had had bullet holes through my clothes that had burned my skin, but no through and through. Everybody, the boat was, we had to scrap the boat because it had so many bullet holes and it was unbelievable. Mike's boat, the medium support had to toe us a line. Then we had to make a circle and come back out of the Dam Doy. Hell of a firefight, hell of a firefight. Went on for a long, long time. And the, um, and when we got back to sea float, you know, the, the boat that I was in was almost ready to sink, right? So it was, it was very well destroyed, but nobody got shot, nobody got killed. I got burn marks. That was the biggest, that was the biggest deal.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  But the, um, that was a wild time and the, and the coxswain, whose name was Willie Williams, that guy was, uh, he was an older guy, right? And every time he'd go out with us, he needed to take a shot of whiskey, just, just to keep himself sane. Get the edge off. Take the edge off. And he was like a, ah. Yeah, he was, that was one crazy night for Willie. But we all made it home safe, you know, and ready for the next day.

• 30:54Jocko Willink?

  So when you got there, what was the, what was the primary, what was the mission that you guys were tasked with doing? What were you guys doing?

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Well, we were, you know, when we got there Admiral Zumwalt had towed a bunch of barges up, right? Thirteen barges. We called it Sea Float. You can go online and look at it. It's a bunch of barges that supported all of the riverine boats and all of the air squadrons in South Vietnam. So it's set, they anchored it right in the middle of the San Kulan River with these giant anchors, right? So it was probably about, I don't know, a hundred yards, you know, on each side of it, on the riverbanks, until the tides, you know, went, when the tides changed over there, because there were 14-foot tide change. Then you'd have mud banks and stuff like that. So it worked out perfectly. The problem with it, and that's where we were all stationed.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  The problem with it was that the zappers would use the current and tie explosives on a line, let the explosives float down with the current and hook around your anchor chain. And then these explosives would come into the side of Sea Float and try to blow you up. So all of the guards that were posted 24/7 at the thing would have to watch out for that and shoot it out. So in the middle of the night, when you're trying to get sleep and all of a sudden this big charge blows up, and you go, oh, cool, well, that one didn't get us. And so that was the, that was life on Sea Float. I mean, every, every night-

• 32:20Jocko Willink?

  And that's where your birding was and everything?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Everything, everything, yeah. Birding, showers, food, everything. That's where our offices were at and all that kind of stuff. So it was, it was an experiment to do that, very successful.

• 32:33Jocko Willink?

  Was that your whole deployment on that thing?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Yes, well, except when I was working Phoenix program. If I was working Phoenix program, then I would go to different locations, right? But they, but we usually would launch off of there. And some of the Phoenix stuff we would do were two-man sampan ops, where myself, Leon Rousch, rest his soul, him and I would get in a sampan and take a KCS scout with us. And we would paddle 10 clicks into bad guy country and snatch this guy out of his hooch and bring him back because he's a, was a bad guy.

• 33:04Jocko Willink?

  Like a high-level VC?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, high-level VC.

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  Where would that intel come from?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  From the Kid Carson Scouts, from Navy Intelligence, you know, from, from a lot of different areas and we would bring it all in because we sent a lot, we did a lot of own our own intelligence gathering in the southern region down there.

• 33:22Jocko Willink?

  Explain the Phoenix Program for people that don't know what it is.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Well, the Phoenix Program was designed by the agency and probably several other people and what it was, was to root out the, the bad guys in villages that were working, kind of like double agents, that were working for the South Vietnamese government, also working for the Viet Cong. So what we relied on, what this Phoenix Program relied on was intel from the locals that this guy was a double agent. And then when we got that, then we would send teams in to snatch the guy and bring him out and do further interrogation on him by not only us, but by other groups, you know? And that worked, it worked well

• 34:07Speaker 02

  until the bad guys started fingering good guys and now the intelligence was all mixed up. So, you know, in the beginning of it, it worked fantastic because we got a lot of, a lot of bad guys, you know, basically out of the jungle. But then the bad guys-

• 34:24Jocko Willink?

  It was like psychological operations too, because these guys who thought that they were safe and thought they could get away with it, all of a sudden they disappear in the middle of the night.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 34:33Jocko Willink?

  And put the fear of God into them.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  That's right. That's what the men in the green faces did, was make them disappear.

• 34:38Jocko Willink?

  And you were running two man operations.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:42Jocko Willink?

  Getting in a, getting in a sampan and you were paddling, how, how far would you guys paddle?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  I think the furthest we ever, the deepest we ever went was probably 10 clicks from a safe zone into-

• 34:54Jocko Willink?

  What would you carry for radio? Where would you carry your radio?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  We carried a regular radio, Pric 25.

• 34:59Jocko Willink?

  Pric 25.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I carried- I carried a

• 35:03Jocko Willink?

  But you're dressed like a Vietnamese guy.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Black pajamas, you know.

• 35:07Jocko Willink?

  But it's nighttime, so they can't see that you're a white boy from Missouri.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  That's right. That's, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Probably the hairiest op that I tell everybody about this op because Leon and I went on on this op and we captured this high level VC and we're paddling back out.

• 35:21Jocko Willink?

  So, hold on, it's a good one. Let's talk about it. So, this is Phoenix program operation?

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Phoenix program operation.

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  And you get intel on a bad guy?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:31Jocko Willink?

  They tell you, okay, now, how detailed was the intelligence that you would get? Would they say, okay, here's the village? Would you get overhead imagery of that village?

• 35:40Speaker 02

  No, not in those days.

• 35:41Jocko Willink?

  So, you just would look at a map?

• 35:44Speaker 02

  We would look at a map. We would talk with our KCS and the KCS were, were kind of guys that we paid on our side to, that knew the local area because we had captured them, but we had switched them over to our side. We were paying them. We also had a village with their family that we supported.

• 36:03Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  In it, so we made sure that they weren't going to go to the other side because their family was visiting us. Right? So, that was the whole thing. So, they would help us decide exactly where this were at. And they were good guys and for the most part, they were wonderful, wonderful operators.

• 36:19Jocko Willink?

  So, you'd be looking at, you, you, okay, there's a village at this grid coordinate or whatever. You'd look at it, you'd do a map study, looking at the river.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 36:27Jocko Willink?

  And you think, okay, when this river turns to whatever, 280 degrees, then we have to go another 200 meters and the village will be on the left side of the, the bank.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And then work the tides because remember the tides are 14 feet. So, you got to move with the tides. There was nothing moving against the tide. You can move at ebb, but you gotta, you gotta move with the flow.

• 36:48Jocko Willink?

  Would you try and time it so you were going in with the tide and coming out with the tide?

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. That, that was key.

• 36:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And if you didn't do that, you're kind of screwed.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, you were very slow, one way or the other.

• 36:59Jocko Willink?

  And then you're going into a little, like, this is just your stereotypical Vietnamese village.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 37:05Jocko Willink?

  With a bunch of little hooches set up.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:07Jocko Willink?

  And you would know, hey, third hooch from the water on the right-hand side, it's got a, whatever, a freaking.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's how we would target it.

• 37:18Jocko Willink?

  And then, okay, so you go up, you paddle, you're tracking. Are you using any night vision at all? Are you trying to do it with moon, with half moon, with starlight? Did you want it completely dark? What did you want? What was ideal?

• 37:31Speaker 02

  All the half moon would have been ideal. And that's what we would have. But you don't always get that. So that was the whole thing. So that was a roll of the dice sometimes, depending on what the moon coverage was at. You know, and tides, you know, what was going. So you always had to work those two, especially with a two man team. Two man team, you don't have a whole lot there. I mean, you got everybody on standby.

• 37:53Jocko Willink?

  What are you carrying for a weapon?

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Stoner, man. Come on. I didn't go anywhere without Betsy. She was, she was with me all the time. She was a great equalizer.

• 38:05Jocko Willink?

  How many rounds would you carry?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Thousand.

• 38:08Jocko Willink?

  And, and what, like two canteens of water and a K bar and you're good?

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 38:12Jocko Willink?

  Some grenades?

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Maybe one canteen of water, a K bar, a medical kit and four grenades. And I was good. That, that was my black pajama outfit.

• 38:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And so.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  A body armor, body armor was a T-shirt with a bullseye painted on it.

• 38:33Jocko Willink?

  And you're in black pajamas? And so you get, so you paddle up? And then you, do you just beach the boat?

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, coast right in.

• 38:42Jocko Willink?

  Coast right in. It's quiet. Is there any other activity on the water at night? And if there is, isn't there other VC activity?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I'll, I'll tell you a story about coming out of one of the villages where there were. You know, I mean, they're moving the same way you're moving. They're moving with tides and everything else.

• 38:58Jocko Willink?

  If they're moving at night, are they VC?

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Yep. Only people out there that were friendly were us. And that, and the, the philosophy goes. Everything on this op, everything, everybody that's on this op is coming home safe. Everything else is not. Right? So that's what it was. So we slid into a village one night. So we slide in, we take the people we want, knock them out, throw them in the bottom of the boat.

• 39:23Jocko Willink?

  What'd you do to knock them out?

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Hit them with the hammer, hit them with the whatever.

• 39:27Jocko Willink?

  Just standard operating procedure.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Carry the slapper. The slapper always works, man. Slapper on the jaw, you'll knock a guy out.

• 39:35Jocko Willink?

  Did you carry any suppressed weapons?

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Um, I did. Twenty twos. That's all we had in those days. We didn't have any nine.

• 39:42Jocko Willink?

  The little hush puppies?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And we did those mostly for dogs that were and geese that were, you know, that were put out there to act as.

• 39:51Jocko Willink?

  Shooting headshot on a geese? That's impressive.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, it is, but you usually shot them in the fat body.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  With the twenty two, with the twenty two long, they go, what, what, what, what was that?

• 40:06Speaker 02

  But the, um, but the stoner, one night we're coming out, we met some VC going in. We were just kind of laying up, waiting for the tide to change. And we were laying in the weeds, right? And a VC sampan came by and I put my stoner up, had my stoner pointed at him, following on the sampan's, and he reaches out to knock all the weeds away and touches the cold steel. Well, his eyes were very big at that moment, but they weren't big for very long. So we eliminated those boys and kept on moving. Yeah.

• 40:45Jocko Willink?

  So once you get in a contact like that, now everybody knows you're there.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Everybody's scram, everything gets scrambled. Everything.

• 40:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So now you're scrambling the Sea Wolves?

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 40:56Jocko Willink?

  And they come out at night to try and help you?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:59Jocko Willink?

  We, we had a guy from, we had Dennis Rowley on here from, he was a Sea Wolf pilot. And he just was just awesome. Awesome talking to them. They didn't care about anything. Oh, they were going. They were going. If you guys called them, they were going 100%.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Oh, they're, they were full on. And if you haven't seen their new video, you gotta see it.

• 41:17Jocko Willink?

  We, we, we put out the word scramble the Sea Wolves.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, scramble the Sea Wolves. You gotta do it. It's a great, great film and talks about those guys and you can't say enough about those guys. They're coming now to our, our Vietnam, you know, um, parties, get togethers that we have because they were so vital to our survival, you know, they saved our ass way more. Then we can even count.

• 41:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, crazy.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  They were crazy.

• 41:42Jocko Willink?

  He told a story, they were, they, they stayed on station so long, they, he goes, look, we're going to run out of fuel. Oh, well, they run out of fuel, they land in the middle of a rice paddy.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 41:53Jocko Willink?

  And they're using ammo cans to, to transport fuel from one.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Those.

• 41:59Jocko Willink?

  Total insanity.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  They, they were all garage mechanics. Those guys were unbelievable. I mean, I was a hot rod mechanic, so I understood the mechanism, but what they did to get those birds airborne in the beginning was phenomenal. I mean, they took pieces and parts and pieces and parts and did it. And to see them do that, and then, you know, as the war carried on, people at the army actually started copying what they were doing. They're going, how, how come those guys do that? We can't do that, right? So now there's mini guns on way more aircraft than they ever had before. And that was because the Sea Wolves were the ones that started it. And they put their rocket pods on there. I mean, hey, man, you know, it was all good. It was all good.

• 42:43Jocko Willink?

  So you, you whack this VC that touches the barrel of your weapon in the dark.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:50Jocko Willink?

  You kill him, now it's on.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  It's on.

• 42:53Jocko Willink?

  Cause it's been completely silent the whole night.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Whole, whole night.

• 42:57Jocko Willink?

  And all of a sudden, there's a burst of five, five, six rounds, and now everyone's awake.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 43:03Jocko Willink?

  So now you, do you get on the radio?

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:05Jocko Willink?

  And you gotta go, hey, we just, we're in contact.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  The VC, the, our, our KCS is paddling like a wild man. Leon is on the radio and I got the stoner out of the front of the, of the sampan and we're going.

• 43:18Jocko Willink?

  How far, how far away are you from getting picked up?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  We were probably like three, four clicks inside VC country. So that's how we had to go 4,000 yards to get off. I mean, everybody knew where we were at, so the launch was good. It was hairy to say this thing.

• 43:37Jocko Willink?

  The good thing is they don't have night vision.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  That was a good thing.

• 43:40Jocko Willink?

  How?

• 43:40Speaker 02

  We didn't have, we didn't have night vision either.

• 43:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but I mean, at that point, I'd take that trade because I don't want them to have night vision on a river. It's a night, it's scary.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 43:48Jocko Willink?

  I've been on the river, it's like, hmm, in a combat zone, you feel real naked. Oh, if the enemy possibly has night vision, even when they don't have night vision. Depending on the moon, it's sketchy.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Your whole instinctive reaction is heightened, right? The hair on the back of your neck, everything's going, right? Because you know, they, they are feeling exactly the same thing you're feeling like they're going, holy shit, man. Where's this person at? Because they don't know exactly where you're at. All they heard was a burst. So they're coming and they're cautious and you're moving as fast as you can. Right? So that was the whole thing. We knock on wood. The Lord was with us that night and we got home safe, right?

• 44:25Jocko Willink?

  And so what's your, what's your extract point? Do you get, do you meet a?

• 44:29Speaker 02

  In the main canal, the main canal.

• 44:31Jocko Willink?

  The main canal and there's, there's a boat of some kind?

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:33Jocko Willink?

  What kind of boats were you guys using?

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, the MSC, we had light seal support craft, which was the one that we got ambushed in. We had medium seal support craft, which were aluminum boats that had a step on the back of them. Had two twin 427 Chevy motors in them with Holly carburetors. We, I put the Holly carburetors on. So, and these things, I mean, they were fast and they would do 50 miles an hour plus on those rivers. So if, once you got them on step, get out of the way. There wasn't anything stopping. And then we had swift boats and we had PBRs. Then we had the big junks that were down at sea floating and everything else. So there was, there was more than enough coverage to pick us up once we were on the big river.

• 45:15Jocko Willink?

  So you're paddling out, do you stay close to the edge of the river? So you're in the dark?

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. Shadows, man.

• 45:22Jocko Willink?

  True, so you try and stay in the shadows?

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't get in a hurry when, and rush something, right? Take your time. I mean, you just, you, you had a burst. Nobody knows what that was, but they know there's something, right? Because there's not flares or anything.

• 45:37Jocko Willink?

  Burst, it's hard for them to even triangulate by sound where it was.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Yes, totally.

• 45:42Jocko Willink?

  Is that true in the jungle too? Like in the city, you, it was hard to, really hard to tell where a one burst, it'd be hard to tell where it came from.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Same, because you, you have the same situation. It's, that sound is bouncing off of everything. So, you know, that's why they have, they invented the. When we were over in Bosnia, you know, the Brits had the triangulation thing where when a mortar would go off, they could triangulate right where the noise was at.

• 46:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  And then we could drop stuff right on that. That was an excellent thing. We didn't have that in Vietnam.

• 46:11Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  We're kind of going, I think it's over there. Yeah, yeah. Maybe over there. Right?

• 46:16Jocko Willink?

  And as soon as you're, I mean, you scramble out of the immediate area, but you get 200 meters away and then it's like, okay, let's get quiet.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 46:23Jocko Willink?

  Pull to the edge.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Same thing, the same thing as you do as an insertion, right? You move off that noisy spot, you move in, you set, you wait. Is anything moving? Is anything coming at us? No, it's not. Okay, let's move. Right? Get going. That's where the word black came from. When you.

• 46:41Jocko Willink?

  Go black.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Go black. That came from, guess who?

• 46:46Speaker 02

  That was a Vietnam thing. Go black. Nobody knows what that word means. Only you. Right? So when you're, all the shit's going, everything else is going, go black. Boom. Now where does everybody, nobody knows where it's all coming from. They suspect it, but they don't know. And are they brave enough to stick their face out there to find out? Not really. So that was, that was, that was one of many. I mean.

• 47:11Jocko Willink?

  So is that the op, I cut you off and then we kind of ran off on another story. Is that the one you said, this is a story I always tell. It was Phoenix program. It was in a village.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Oh, one of, one of many.

• 47:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of many.

• 47:23Jocko Willink?

  So that's the one.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:24Jocko Willink?

  Where you had that guy, you had that contact.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  Well, we.

• 47:26Jocko Willink?

  Blank range.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  And then I'll go to another one that was down south when we inserted because we had some VC, we had intelligence, the VC was coming up south. We had done all the sensor planning to, in the jungles to make sure we could pick up movement in the jungles and stuff like that. And we got movement way down deep, but we had to go in and set. So Alpha Battalion of Foxtrot, we went down to set up on a river that we thought they were going to be coming across. So we moved in. Late in the evening.

• 48:00Jocko Willink?

  So you're setting up an ambush.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  We're setting up an ambush.

• 48:02Jocko Willink?

  And it's an ambush on a river.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  On a river.

• 48:04Jocko Willink?

  And this is straight up the same thing that you guys taught us.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 48:09Jocko Willink?

  Did you put out claymores?

• 48:11Speaker 02

  The same thing. It's absolutely the same thing. Claymores on each flank, claymore in the rear. Let's watch, see what happens, right? So I'm on the left flank, right? I run my claymore out, come back in, I'm sitting. Right? And all of a sudden I hear movement, right? So I'm watching the tides, the tides are going down. And I see this, um, bridge start bubbling up from the water. So they have a hidden bridge in it. So I see that. The only saving graces were on high ground, they're on low ground. I see all these guys, there's like 80 guys down there that are trying to come across that bridge to do

• 48:54Speaker 02

  a ambush on seafloat on the San Kulan River. So I let the first guy, right? I tell the, oh, get the black ponies and the sea wolves in the air. So he scrambles those guys, right? So this guy comes walking across and it's a point element.

• 49:13Jocko Willink?

  What's their range from you?

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Uh, probably when I initiate, probably five feet. So, so he's got to walk up like this, up the bridge, right? While I'm right here. So the old stoner comes over and I go, wah! And we light them up, all right? Grenades, boom, boom, boom. Light them up and overhead, OV10s. Right? And one of the pilots lives right here in town. We call him, we throw the, uh, we had, um, Tiara, which was kind of the early stages of chem light juice that we could throw in the water that marked our line.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  So we threw that in the water, marked our line, and the OV10s come flying out of the sky. And they're coming from like 3,000 feet directly at the ground, letting loose the zoomy rockets going wah, wah, wah, wah. And they're getting kinda close and I'm going, blow the claymores and get the hell out of here. So we're blowing the claymores and we're getting the hell out of there, right? And these guys are just tearing it up across the river. And so we're taking off and all of a sudden we hear this, and I go, shit, what is that? Run. So, so we're taking off. Well, what it was, was our, our lieutenant had just pulled his life jacket just enough

• 50:39Speaker 02

  in the frenzy to where the CO2 cartridge was, was just, was weeping. I'm going, get away from him. He's gonna blow. So we're hauling ass, we're hauling ass back up the canal. It was, what a night that was. Holy shit, man. And then we sent down a, um, a group of Arvins the next morning to check it out and they, there was like 80 dead bodies down there. So it was wild.

• 51:02Jocko Willink?

  So on op like that, what, what, how did you guys insert?

• 51:04Speaker 02

  We inserted on boat up the river where the river turned.

• 51:08Jocko Willink?

  So up the river, how far, how far away would you guys patrol?

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Probably, probably a click.

• 51:12Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So pretty close.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:15Jocko Willink?

  And you patrolling, what are you wearing? You're wearing, are you wearing blue jeans?

• 51:18Speaker 02

  I didn't wear blue jeans that night. I did wear blue jeans, but that night I didn't wear blue jeans.

• 51:23Jocko Willink?

  How about, how about barefoot?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Oh, no. Oh, no. Jim Burden is the only one that does barefoot. The, no, I wore my boots and I'm glad I wore my boots.

• 51:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, that always seemed crazy to me, but I know those guys that did it.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I know. So I, and I know guys that did it too, but I, hey, when I'm moving, I'm moving way too fast to worry about stepping on something, right? Yeah. Cause it was, uh, that was a busy night.

• 51:50Jocko Willink?

  And so for a night like that, since you're not wearing the black pajamas, you're wearing web gear, you got your stoner, you're still carrying a thousand rounds?

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Thousand rounds.

• 52:00Jocko Willink?

  Offensive operation, are you bringing more grenades?

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Uh, we would have probably, you know, and smoke. I mean, since I was a point man, I would, I would have carried whatever the red or the green smoke and the radium would usually carry the red smoke. If we need to mark something, if we need to mark an LCE, they would have, somebody else would have yellow and purple, you know, out through the, out through the squad.

• 52:19Jocko Willink?

  And then in the squad, how many 60s would you have in the squad?

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Uh, two.

• 52:23Jocko Willink?

  Two 60s. And then would the rear security be carrying a stoner too?

• 52:26Speaker 02

  You bet.

• 52:27Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Nothing like far superiority.

• 52:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so any what about would you would be so there'd be two stoners and two sixties?

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Two stoners, two sixties, and sometimes three stoners and two sixties. The lieutenant would carry M16, right? AOIC would probably carry and they would probably have, you know.

• 52:47Jocko Willink?

  M79?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  M79s or have a 203 underneath of it, you know, that's probably what would would have went on.

• 52:55Jocko Willink?

  And were you guys in in seven or eight man squads?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  We were in eight.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, eight eight men squads, right? So it was, yeah, that was.

• 53:08Jocko Willink?

  How long would you guys plan for these missions for?

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Oh, that's, you know, I mean, we had our own intel. So I mean, when we get something, we could put together an op in a couple hours and ready to go because, you know, just as as every SEAL knows, you know, once the you get there and you get the routine down, everybody knows what their job is. That's what makes us what we are. And so we can put together an op very, very quickly, you know? And, you know, just in in Germany, when I was working in Germany, you know, N plus two, that's what it meant, man, N plus two. When you get the call, you got two hours to get the airport, get on that airplane and get going. And that happened more than I want to. We can shift gears, but the that was that was the Vietnam War. And then I came back and.

• 53:52Jocko Willink?

  So what just hold on the Vietnam War. How was your op tempo like? Like, how often were you guys working?

• 53:59Speaker 02

  We ran probably in that six month period of time, well over 100 ops. So I mean, there were days when there would be three ops a day, you know, other days where there's two ops, one op.

• 54:12Jocko Willink?

  Did you do any of those parakeet ops flying in the daytime, like just pouncing on a village or something?

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. We did that. And I'll tell you a good story about that. We we did one of those when because I was appointment. I was a guy that hung out the door and located the village, right? Because we didn't have GPS in those days. So I was hanging out the door and I'd find the village where the bad guys were at and I'd tell the birds set down. So we're flying down this canal. I mean, we're doing every maneuver, we're following each bend in that canal. I'm hanging out the door and I go, that's the village right there. So he flares, we jump out, hit it. We're in a skirmish line. We start taking fire from the village. Not long. Are close behind us are the Sea Wolves. So we get in the skirmish line, we start moving on this village, right?

• 55:00Speaker 02

  And taking, taking all the bad guys down this village and we call in the Sea Wolves. Well, the Sea Wolves come in probably 10 feet over our head with the miniguns and just start breaking the village, right? Needless to say, we looked like wild men running at the village and that was because all the hot brass coming out of the miniguns were going down the back of our necks. And we were going, "Help us!" So I was gonna kill anybody that was in front of me, I didn't care who it was. We all got back, we all got back to sea float and all of us had like 20 burn marks on our back where the hot brass had fallen out of that minigun. I went, "That's probably the last time I'm gonna do that." But it wasn't, but it wasn't.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  But it worked out, that worked out fantastic. And that was like the same what you're calling parakeet, absolutely, yeah. Any kind of ops, stay behind ambushes, all that kind of stuff, we did all that. We incorporated all that in our tactics.

• 55:58Jocko Willink?

  How often would you guys get contact with the enemy on an op? So if you did 100 operations, how often would you guys get contacted with the enemy?

• 56:06Speaker 02

  You know, I want to say 70% of the time because we did most of our own intelligence. So we were always involved in contact, you know? It wasn't, there were a few times where we walked and walked and-

• 56:21Jocko Willink?

  Dry hole or whatever, no one shows up.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, wasn't, wasn't where it was supposed to be. But the majority of the time, we had contact, which was, which kept us all kind of, you know, jazzed and ready to go, pumped, that was the whole thing. But it kept it real because we were all, we knew when we'd go out, we were gonna have contact, so you better have your shit in one bag.

• 56:44Jocko Willink?

  Did, uh, how, how'd you guys do for taking casualties?

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Uh, well, you know, everybody in fox trap a tune except for one of our officers who-

• 56:56Speaker 02

  I have to laugh because Mike Martin pointed out a booby trap to him and he turned around to tell somebody about the booby trap and walked into the booby trap and it put some BBs in his butt. So he was a casualty. So we had to fly him back to Sea Float and get the holes in his ass patched up. But other than that, everybody, I think, I mean, we all got hit, but nobody got hit so badly that they had to be medevaced off. Now, our group when we were there is when we had the biggest loss of life in Vietnam when the helo went down, that we lost five guys. We got off of that bird and that bird, that operation,

• 57:41Speaker 02

  was an operation that we had just come off of because we went after a Russian advisor to the Vietcong. We had him in a village. He was able to run out of that village and run into the forest, you know, that was at the end of a rice paddy. So we decided to go after that. But going after that, we got met with like 500 VC because they had a whole company size element down there. So we kind of got it handed to us in a bit, but nobody lost their lives. We were able to You guys break contact? Break contact, get on our birds and get home. But the bird took some hits, right?

• 58:25Speaker 02

  So when it landed at Sea Float, we told them, shut it down. Let's take a look at it. The army pilot said, no, no, all my gauges are good. It's good and everything else. Well, our five guys, Jack Donnelly and Toby Thomas and Sparks and Ritter and Gore, got on the bird to go up to Bentui. And like 1,000 yards out from Bentui, the bird spun its rotors and inverted. And the guys, all of them were skydivers, so they all left the bird.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  You know, and tracking across the sky. But what happened is they, from what I know, is they hit the, hit the rice paddies and stuck in the mud and drowned in the, in the rice paddies. They couldn't get themselves loose from the, from the mud. So that was, that was a crime. We all cried about that. It was, they were all great, great team guys. That was a bad day, bad day in our lives.

• 59:20Jocko Willink?

  What'd they do with that platoon?

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Um, just backfilled it. Backfilled it, you know? And the, um, and then we all kept working. Cause when we got to sea float, there was one platoon, Foxtrot was there. When we left, there, cause there was so much action, we had four platoons at, at there trying to cover down on, on everything that was going on. Right? So it was a, it was a very active, active place. Another good op I'll tell you about that was a, um, Square Bay, Square Bay op, which was a location right up from the entrance of the San Kulan River. And it was at night, the VC would run, um, supply, uh, trains down across Square Bay

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  in Sam Pans and deliver it to the VC, which were down south of us, uh, that we were always hitting. So we found this out, so we decided to set up an op on, on Square Bay. So I, we built a, um, I built a twin sixty mount for the Boston Whaler, which we had silent running, you know, twenty fives on. And we took that up to Square Bay and we parked in a little cove up there and just waited. That night we had night vision, our great big night vision glass. And we're watching these Sam Pans as they're coming across Square Bay. And there was like twenty five of them. And we said, wow, this is the wild, wild west. So we got on the boats, the boat driver was there, got on the sixties and we hit it.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  And we hit it, cause the Square Bay, very shallow, probably ten foot of water. And we come across their blazing them sixties and all those guys in that in that whole sampan sticking out like dogs balls. So we just let them have it, let them have it.

• 1:01:08Jocko Willink?

  With one Boston Whaler.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  One Boston.

• 1:01:10Jocko Willink?

  With sixties.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Twin sixties.

• 1:01:11Jocko Willink?

  Twin sixties mounted on it.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 1:01:13Jocko Willink?

  And there's how many sampanes?

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  There's, I think there was like forty, right? So, I mean, we had other team guys in the boats with stoners and stuff, right? So we hit these guys, devastate them, devastate them. And now we got, now we got forty sampanes full of fish, rice, you know, guns, everything that the bad guys need down south. They, we waited for daylight, which was probably about forty-five minutes. So we just let them set there, right? Waiting for any guys, that kind of pool blood that wanted to get up and shoot again. So we just set. Then we, then we approached once it started breaking daylight, right? So the only person that was alive was this old woman that was chewing beech nut,

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  had like three teeth going. So, so we made her drive. So she drove all the sampanes back to Sea Float. It was wild. I know, I know there's helos because there's helos over the top of us. Somebody was taking a picture of that, but it was, it was a magnificent thing, right? And bringing all these sampanes back to Sea Float. And then we gave them to, we distributed them to the village that we had started, which was upriver. We had captured so many people at Sea Float that we started a village upriver, probably about, probably about a half a mile from Sea Float. And we just, that was our village, right? So we,

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  anything we would recover, anything else from the Viet Cong, we would give to the village. It was a fishing village, right? Started with like five people. By the time we left country, it was like fifteen hundred people.

• 1:02:51Jocko Willink?

  Who were these people?

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  They were just innocent fishermen and, you know, and innocent citizens that had gotten caught up in the war, right? And they were trying to get out of the war zone. So we moved them up there. Great fishing where it was at and the and you know they would go to market you know which was up in Vong Tao and not Vong Tao but Bintui and and sell their fish and all that kind of stuff so they were just trying to make a living so we would take everything to those guys so that day they got all kinds of fish and brand new sampanes and everything else they loved us I love those Americans so it was very that was very cool very very cool the old lady we took the old lady up there too and said you have a new home now

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  she just kept going chewing her beach nut crazy crazy man but that was one that was one crazy op that made the history books so it was it was good but yeah we all got home safe which was a blessing you know except for our five guys we lost they lost their lives and you know and then we had the mighty mo got got ambushed when it went down south we lost Mikey got hit then should have got a purple heart didn't Wagslin got hit in the eye with a piece of shrapnel

• 1:04:05Jocko Willink?

  What happened with that what was the

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Well the the mighty mo was a big mike boat you know had all kinds of armor on it and everything else and what they were doing which they shouldn't have done we were trying to punch away through a canal down to VC country well the VC had grenades and had mines and everything else on it so when the boat would go down there it get would catch on cables right and then snag their props so they became immobile so they were setting ducks when all these mines started going off and they got hit from all sides by the VC so the VC really shot the boat up again seawolves got us out of there came in black ponies got us out of there we had to go pull the boat out but the guys that were on the boat

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  you know were inside and the rockets were going inside and the hot core was bouncing all over the place so we lost I think two guys that day and Wagslin got his eye put out and then a lot of other people got shrapnel wounds and stuff like that off of the off of the mighty mo but that was not not a good day and it it probably shouldn't have happened but it did right so a lot going on when you're out there pushing

• 1:05:21Jocko Willink?

  How'd you decide when your last op was gonna be?

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Gosh, you know, I can't answer that question because we were working so hard, you know, and everybody goes, okay, we're gonna, we're not, we're gonna stop operating in two weeks, right, before we take off. Well, that didn't happen. We just operated up. I know, I, I know that when I, I got home off a op, I got my gear and put it on a helo and flew off. That's when my last day was. So, and I know the rest of the guys were probably very close to the same, you know, because I was one of the last guys to take off. We did the turnover op with the new platoon coming in, you know, and that's when we moved off of, we moved off of, of Sea float and moved into Solid Anchor because they had built

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  a base over on, we had, you know, stabilized the situation enough where the CBs could come in and build the base, you know, over on the shore.

• 1:06:21Jocko Willink?

  I always felt like it was a jinx to say, okay, this is our last op.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:26Jocko Willink?

  I never said that.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:06:28Jocko Willink?

  I just, we just kept going. And then one day it was like, guess what, we're gonna go home. So, we can't do anymore.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:06:33Jocko Willink?

  So, that last op that we just did, that was our last op.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  That's, and I feel exactly the same way.

• 1:06:38Jocko Willink?

  I feel like it was...

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Don't jinx it and go, okay, you know. No, and, you know, because our world, it's push, push, push. I mean, we're all jacked up to do everything we can. And you want to do that. I mean, the time to sleep is on your way home. I know I came off of one of the Africa ops that we did down in Sierra Leone, right? And we had saved probably 3,000 people, you know, on that particular thing and got them back safe and stuff. And when I jumped on that C-140 fun to come home, and I looked at all the guys that were there with us, I go, man, this hero shit is really hard. And I went to sleep, man. I went, see ya later. I was gone till we landed in Stuttgart, Germany. Yeah, it was wild. It was wild.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  But Vietnam was a great, and it's just what you said earlier, Vietnam was a huge learning ground, a huge proving ground for SEAL Team. If we would not have had Vietnam, we would not be where we're at today. It's that simple. It's that simple. And, you know, the guys, the personalities, they came from all walks of life, all walks of life. And, and we have that same thing today at Naval Special Warfare. I mean, I see it in every young man that I see it. Every one of them has got a different personality, but the fire in their gut, the fire in their eyes is there. And they want to do the job, and they want to do it the best they possibly can, right? With all the other crap that's

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  going on. I mean, you gotta give it to the men, the men. And we're so fortunate to have the quality of men, both officers and enlisted, that we have in Naval Special Warfare. Because they're professional, they get the job done. Every now and then they drop the ball, but for the most part, they get it done.

• 1:08:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So, so you come home from Vietnam?

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  I, I come home from Vietnam, I, I get on my Harley, and I

• 1:08:34Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like a plan right there.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  It was, it was a plan, it was a plan. I, well, I had a chopper shop, so I came home. I had a chopper shop before I left to go to Vietnam, and, and I had, still had the chopper shop.

• 1:08:47Jocko Willink?

  Somewhere in San Diego?

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, in Imperial Beach.

• 1:08:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  So, I, so I built, I built a bike, I built Mike's first bike. Mike took off and went back to Ohio. I said, you know what, I'm gonna build a bike, and I'm gonna go for a ride. So, I built the bike, toured around the United States, met Americans again, which was a real eye-opener. Because, you know, a lot of, like today, a lot of guys have a lot of mental problems adjusting from the war and stuff like that. I used to travel around the country to adjust myself, right? I didn't have a lot of money. I had a great Harley, and I would, I'd stop, I'd work, get a job for a day or two, get some gas money, get some food money, put it in the tank, and I'd hit it again. And I I made it around the country and enjoyed the hell out of it.

• 1:09:30Jocko Willink?

  Are you on leave at this point?

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  No, no, out of the Navy.

• 1:09:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so this is, so you came home.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Jocko Willink?

  What'd you do just when you got home?

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  When I ju- well, when I just got home.

• 1:09:39Jocko Willink?

  Just got home from Vietnam?

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  I went back to the training cell. I was I was on active duty for another two years.

• 1:09:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  After I got home.

• 1:09:46Jocko Willink?

  Were you planning to get out? When you got home, were you like, okay, uh, well, when Vietnam ended?

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  I, you know, I don't, I didn't know. I was there for, um, you know, and the whole thing was I got out. I was out for like ninety days, did this trip around the country and then came back and got back on active duty. You know, and and I said, well, you know, it's the only thing I know and it's the only thing I love, so I'll do that. And then I got off of active duty cleanly and went into the reserves in seventy-five. And in seventy-five, that's when we started the SEAL Reserve Unit in in San Diego and also on the west, uh, east coast. And so I was in the reserve unit, um, you know, as a second, third class, second class petty officer. Made first class in the reserves and then.

• 1:10:30Jocko Willink?

  And what was your civilian job at this point?

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  I had a couple civilian jobs. I had a, uh, I had a boiler shop that worked and did Navy repair ships over at the thirty-second Street. Uh, Long Beach, and then I'd go up to Swan Island and do stuff up there because I repaired boilers. Uh, because it was easy mechanical stuff, machinery stuff. Um, and so I did that, had a company of probably about fifteen guys. We did that for a while. Then I had got another company that did it and, uh, that grew to about ninety people, you know? And then I got rid of both those. I sold those. And then a friend of mine came to me and wanted to, um, start another company with the, um, um, it's called the Takeoff and Estimating System.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  Company was called Texonics and, uh, and we came up with and devised a system where if you put a, um, a set of building plans on sighted on the top of a digitizing board. We had a guy that wrote the algorithm that would could tell you if you touch that stylus in two different points. It would give you the dimension of that eight-foot wall, tell you all the pieces that you needed to build that. Tell you what your labor cost would be and everything else. So we sold about five thousand of those systems to, uh, across the world and, uh, and we sold that company to a group of Canadian guys. And that's when I, uh, Went to reserves in 1990 and they said, hey, we need some volunteers to come back for Desert Storm,

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  Desert Shield. And I went, I think that's me. So, so that's when I re-engaged. That's when I re-engaged with.

• 1:12:06Jocko Willink?

  So you came back on active duty at that point?

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  At, yeah.

• 1:12:09Jocko Willink?

  But you had spent that whole time in the reserves?

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  At the 15 years I'd spent in the reserves.

• 1:12:13Jocko Willink?

  Which is one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer or something like that?

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Weekend in a month, yeah. Weekend a month and two weeks during the reserves. And we, we were very creative about that. We, you know, we would do cold water training in the Colorado River in a big raft. Yeah, that was good. And then we do cold weather training and, and.

• 1:12:33Jocko Willink?

  Mammoth or something?

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  Mammoth, yes, yes. Trying, trying to get down the hill as fast as you possibly could. Yes. It was hell, but somebody had to do it. So, but we always got to shoot and we got to blow up things to keep our quals up. We got to jump, which is, which was better in the reserves than it was on active duty because you always had assets. So that was very cool. So for those 15 years, that's pretty much what I did. And then 1990, I went in. I got called back to active duty and went to SEAL Team Three, started working a training cell with Mike Martin and K-Bar and a couple of other guys that were there and.

• 1:13:09Jocko Willink?

  Were you a master chief at this point?

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  No, no, I was a first class.

• 1:13:12Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because in the old days, rank never meant anything. I mean, some of those ops I was telling you about in Vietnam, we ran them as second class petty officers, you know, I mean, so, so the rank was never a big deal. And so not till I got back on in 1990, did I realize that rank was a big deal. And I went, Jesus, I guess I better study. So, so when the chief's test come around, I took the chief's test. We were Ingerman then, not, you know, and there wasn't anything I didn't know about Ingerman. So I passed the test.

• 1:13:47Jocko Willink?

  How fired up, how fired up was Mike Martin to have you checking back into SEAL Team Three?

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Oh, he's great. Well, Mike, when, when Mike originally came back, he lived with me. You know, he moved in the house. We.

• 1:13:56Jocko Willink?

  So after Vietnam, Mike got out?

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Jocko Willink?

  And then what did he do? Because this is a good story.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Mike, Mike got on the, Mike got on the bike. I built him and rode back to Ohio. That's where he met Gail, his wife, right? So Mike went to work at the steel mills back in Ohio, working the steel mills with his, with his new Triumph motorcycle. Right? So he'd ride it there and he was working there. That's where he'd learned to tattoo. You know, he ran into a guy back there that was a, also a biker and learned how to tattoo from this guy. And, and that became his new career. Well, the steel mills, after 13 years, the steel mills were going to close down. So Mike went to a reunion in Florida and saw Steve Frisk,

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  who was one of our, who Mike worked with in Vietnam. He was one of the two man ops, right? Him and Steve would do the two man ops together and myself and Leon would do the two man ops together. We went down there, saw Steve and, and Frisk was a commander, I think, in the teams at the time. And Steve goes, hey, if you want to come back in, I'll help you. So that's how it happened, right? Got back in because of a, something vet, like a M vet or something like that. I don't know what it was, but it was a program they had where they're trying to bring, you know, vets back on that had skills and stuff like that. And Mike got it and fell into that category. Well, then he calls me, you know, and I'm still in the carpet world doing business and stuff like that.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  And he goes, hey, hey, it's me, Mike Martin. I go, I know a lot of Mikes who, you know. Me, you. And so he starts going off on me and I go, all right, Mike, I got it, I got it. So he came out, hung around. I gave him one of my bedrooms and, and he lived with us till he got back on his feet and got his family moved out here, everything else. But what a wonderful deal for him, right? Because the steel mills were down. There was no job for him back there. And he was able to get back on active duty and come back on active duty. And everybody knows what a stud he was. So that was just cool. Besides a wonderful personality. Wonderful man, wonderful, wonderful man. Great brother, great, great brother. So we had, we had tons.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  fun, you know, rehashing the thing and then all the new personalities at, you know, at Team Three, like Shirazi, you know, like, you know, and they were like on and on, like the Chang, right? So, it was, it was a welcome, you know, thing for me to come back into because being in the business world, you don't have that kind of camaraderie that you do with the guys, right? So the guys are there and that's what it's all about anyway. It's about the brotherhood. It's about the camaraderie you have with one another coming back. And I know Mike and I missed both of that. And when we came back together at SEAL Team Three,

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  it was just happening. So, we let it go from there, you know, and it, and it proved to be fantastic. So I was in SEAL Team Three from, from the 90s until 95. 95, I got orders, which I was a chief now, over to Stuttgart, Germany, to move Unit Two from McEnany, Scotland, down to Stuttgart, right? I get over there and I'm going, holy crap, Germany, right? And my wife was going, wow, Germany, because she's starting to travel and she loves it, right? So we got over there and then we got into the, into the world of moving from McEnany,

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  Scotland. We had to go get all the stuff from the base at McEnany, Scotland, which is a story all its own, and drive it down to Stuttgart. And they gave us the worst base in Stuttgart to fix up, right? At Panzer.

• 1:17:50Jocko Willink?

  Panzer.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  Which was Rommel's old tank garage.

• 1:17:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  You know, and that's, that goes a whole nother thing, but we.

• 1:17:58Jocko Willink?

  The, they still have the cranes.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:18:02Jocko Willink?

  There to pull the engines out of the Panzers.

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:18:05Jocko Willink?

  They're in there. They're in the bays. It's like part of the building.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  I know, I know. All those, all those cages that you see in there, guess who put those up?

• 1:18:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm reckoning you did.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So it was wild. But I had the ardent department, training department at the time when we were moving then. So that was, that was a good thing. And then we got on to the ESAT team and the RST teams where we had to start doing.

• 1:18:27Jocko Willink?

  One second, you threw your wife into the scenario there.

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:18:30Jocko Willink?

  When did that all start?

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, well, I probably should discuss that. My, my wife was my biggest supporter, right? So, you know, as, as we were going through this and going back on active duty in the nineties, she had never been involved in the Navy at all, right? So Mikey and I are going out to Nyland to train the guys at Nyland and I'm going, hey, honey, I'm going to be gone for a couple of weeks. Well, she was a professional woman, had her own career and stuff like that. And our son was, John was old enough to kind of take care of himself. So she'd say, okay, well, just call me, let me know what it is. So it wasn't that big of an affair. So we were going and then she worked for San Diego Gas and Electric. So when I got orders to Germany, she retired from San Diego Gas and Electric.

• 1:19:16Speaker 02

  And this was a new adventure for her. So she was all excited about going to Germany and everything else. And so it was, it was great for her. I mean, she absolutely loved going there.

• 1:19:27Jocko Willink?

  Did you, was your son old enough to, that he went to Germany or not?

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  No, he was, he turned into a college boy.

• 1:19:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  College boy and my house paid for it, yes. All my neighbors were calling me in Germany going, they're wrecking the house, they're wrecking the house. I'm going, holy crap. So.

• 1:19:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you left him here?

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:46Jocko Willink?

  Going to college in your house?

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:19:48Jocko Willink?

  Yay.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Yes, big mistake, but you know, but we lived through it. That's the whole part we lived through it. So she was very excited about it. So it was, it was a fun, it was a fun move because it was her first one. As we go on through the career, she's going, this is not getting to be as much fun as I thought, right? So she got there and we got moved on to Kelly Barracks, right? Well, because I was a chief, I got the top floor, right? In the barracks, well, there's four floors, 90 steps every time you go up, no elevators. So every time she would buy groceries, the groceries would be waiting at the bottom of the steps for guess who to carry up when I got home, right? Laundry, she'd bring the laundry down, I'd take the laundry back up.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  And it was like, oh my God. So now I know why the Germans have such strong legs because they were up and down those things. It was crazy. So that was, it was a good move. We got into a, a real rhythm over there where we really justified.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  General Lambert was the general there and he loved, you know, naval special warfare. So we justified by being on the ESAT teams and being on these RST teams. We justified our existence there and everybody wanted us to be there because anytime we would go on an operation, the operation would work perfect. That's where the NIOS came into, how we started doing the NIOS in Africa.

• 1:21:15Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's a non-combatant evacuation operation where there's something going wrong in a country, whether it's civil unrest, it could even be disease, it could be disaster, it could be anything, but there's a problem and somebody's got to get basically the Americans out of there, you know? And so, you know, you've seen them happen all over the world and you did, you did one where Liberia or Sierra Leone?

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  We did Liberia. We did one in Liberia, we did one in Brazzaville, we did one in Sierra Leone and we used, I mean, you used all methods and the reason they, this is the reason why they wanted us on, because we were the marine piece to it. So if there was any landings that had to come, I had to survey the beaches before the guys got there, had to make sure they had access on and off of the beach, all that kind of stuff that was secure. That was my job, plus going to the embassies, find out what kind of supplies they have, what kind of food, what kind of medicine, all those kinds of things. So when they called us to go down and do this, you kind of took control. You worked at the, at the ambassador's hess pretty much, but the military guy could take

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  over at any time.

• 1:22:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because this is, these operations are so vast in the responsibilities because you've got security, obviously, but you've got logistics, you've got medical, you've got, you've got food supplies. I mean, there's all these things that have to take place.

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  Fuel, everything, yeah.

• 1:22:38Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it's like, it's a massive undertaking to get. A thousand, two thousand, three thousand people rounded up.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:22:46Jocko Willink?

  Marshaled into an area and then extracted from that area.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:22:50Jocko Willink?

  And, and keep them comfortable the whole time, at least.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:22:53Jocko Willink?

  Somewhat comfortable, otherwise you're gonna hear about that, too.

• 1:22:55Speaker 02

  Yes, you will. I'm gonna call my representative. But that's, but that's the whole thing. That's, I mean, we had to go out in town. I'll break it down, just like the first one. The first one we went on was into Liberia. Liberia was, we landed in Sierra Leone. I use Sierra Leone as a safe haven. And that was the best place to do that because we'd just surveyed the airport and stuff like that.

• 1:23:18Jocko Willink?

  And you know, when Sierra Leone is your safe haven, you know you're going into a rough neighborhood. Sierra Leone is nasty.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  That's right. It's not the safest neighborhood, anyway. So the, so we flew in the Liberia and the, and the embassy was basically under siege. So we had to shut the siege down, close the gates up, take care of the bad guys that were there and start, you know, vetting people coming into the, the compound, the embassy. Cause the ambassador wanted to save as many people as possible. He said, that's great, but they're not bringing everything they got, especially people with American passports coming in. So we were, we probably flew ninety chocks out of there of people with, with thing. And I mean, when you're flying in, you're flying in low. A rocket team tried to, to take us out going in and, and the door gunner with the minigun

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  got pointed in the right direction and that rocket team disappeared. So that was very cool. And so we flew in, we had to chop trees down, we had to move light poles, we had to do all this for this evacuation. Plus, we had to tell catalog, everybody coming in, take care of medical stuff coming in and everything else. So our job was, was big, was big. And the ambassador loved this, but, but it was a big job. So we were on that siege probably for about two and a half weeks. Right? So the, we evacuated, I think, close, well, ninety chocks. So probably, probably close to fifteen hundred people on that, on that thing and getting them out there.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  And they were all people with American passports are tied to an American passport, one or the other. So we, we turned that whole thing over to the Marines when the MAR got there. That's their job and everything else, everything was pretty well done. We had to go back in the, into the country, fly in, we'd run security, we'd pick up people and bring them back. We had to recover the ambassador's Egyptian daughter, the Egyptian ambassador's daughter that got taken away by bad guys. So we had to go convince them that they didn't need to keep her. So we helped them with that decision and then we, and then we got her back. So he was quite grateful and everything else. And then, and then the news media started showing up and they wanted it going.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  But, but in Liberia, they have a cannibal community. So we used to call them the street sweepers. Cause in during the day when the battles were raging and stuff like that, all the dead people would be removed at night because the cannibals would come in and go whoopee.

• 1:25:54Jocko Willink?

  Roadkill.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  Roadkill.

• 1:25:55Jocko Willink?

  Roadkill for dinner.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  It's exactly.

• 1:25:57Jocko Willink?

  Just happened to be human.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  Happened to be here. That was classic, man. That was, that's the first time I ever seen anything like that. But it was something I think every human being should see and realize that it's out there. But it was wild. So we were able to successfully close that down and move on. A lot of first came out of that. That was the first time that a P3 had a camera mounted in it and was flying overhead and we could get the images from the city. So that was very, very cool. And that was a 96. So, and you know how that's grown today with all the drones and everything else today. So yeah, it was, it was, it was quite an operation for a SEAL team to be there.

• 1:26:41Jocko Willink?

  And then you stayed, so you stayed in Germany and you did, the other thing that you mentioned, I mean, in order to prepare sort of logistically and just for planning purposes, you, you guys would travel around and go into countries and say, okay, if we have to do this in this country, here's some contacts, here's some people, here's some places, here's some recon, check these things out. And then also at this time Bosnia was going on.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  It hadn't kicked off yet. It was still kind of bubbling up. You know, in the 90s, it was still going. We would fly around. We did probably like 11 different embassies where we put together packages on that and knew exactly what needed to be done if for some reason the Americans in those particular countries had to be evacuated. So that's something that's a standard type of operation. They just got us involved in it because we did a good job with it. And we had a team of Army guys, Air Force guys and everything else, you know. And then I left Germany in

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  probably 98. And I'm trying to think, I probably had my first, we were in Bosnia because we were going to Bon steel all the time. And I probably did, I don't know, like four months over there before I took off and headed back. But once I came back, then I was the, I went to Group One and was the weapons officer there. And that's when the, we put the Mark 46 and the Mark 48 into into a contracting play and got and got those two weapons. God bless you. Oh, yeah. Those are hell of a weapons right there. They're the best, man. As we call them, they're fire breathers. Yeah, they are.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  They are fire breathers. So we got that done. And as soon as I got that off and running and they started the manufacturing those, then I got sent to Spain. And that's when the, I took over the training department in Spain at Unit 10. And What year was that? That was 2000, 2000, 2003. I went over there. And that's when we started running Bosnia. We did a couple of African gigs then, but Kosovo was there. Kosovo was still in Germany too, because we were running it then. And that was, let me back up a little bit, but the Kosovo War. As well as Bosnia, they were filthy wars.

• 1:29:01Jocko Willink?

  Horrible.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, the guys that were there, they were just the serds, fucking, you know. They were horrible people, horrible, horrible people. I don't know what possessed them to be the way that they are, but they were horrible people. They had no qualms about shooting innocents, none at all. And we had no qualms about shooting people with guns, so it was good. The, you've always heard the story about the building where the 130 blew the corner of the building out because we couldn't find a sniper that was in it. Okay, I was there when that happened.

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  And I also was there when we went, we reenlisted in the paper, on the paper's building steps. There was like 10 of us and we were flipping off to the snipers when we're doing our reenlistment. It was great, it was great. And so, because we had our counter snipers up, all we wanted to see was a barrel. Please let me see a barrel. And so that was, that is actually when Sniper Alley just lost all its support after we blew that building down, killing, trying to kill that one guy. There wasn't any other snipers that really were on Sniper Alley after that. So it kind of, it kind of lost its weight because they knew that we weren't going to hesitate to take the buildings down if we couldn't get the guys.

• 1:30:26Jocko Willink?

  They would ask us in Ramadi, you know, for good counter sniper technology. And we'd say, you guys have the counter sniper technology. It's called an M1 Abrams tank.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:30:37Jocko Willink?

  That's the best counter sniper that I've seen. Oh, you want to shoot us up from that building or at least one of those buildings over there? Cool, watch this.

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:30:44Jocko Willink?

  Those M1s, man, those things.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  Oh, I know, man. They, yeah, they do the trick. It's called overload and there's a reason for it, right? That is so cool, so cool. But that was a good thing and we would fly back and forth to Bosnia all the time and Kosovo was exactly the same thing. We'd be in the woods with chasing those guys down in the woods. And it was, you know, that was our business and we did a good job of it. Everybody loved having us there, all the United Nations people.

• 1:31:14Jocko Willink?

  So you were in Spain when September 11th happened?

• 1:31:16Speaker 02

  I was. I was in Spain when September 11th happened and I had just come back from the range, walked into the training department and was watching this on, on the TV and I'm go, what movie is that? It was no movie. It really, really sent us home and we had to move back on base after September low. We had to move back on base and everybody started, started going. How are we going to prep for it? Where are we going? We had a couple of people come by and talk to us that we were going to be doing different things and we did those different things, right? But none of us, I don't think any of us at the time left to go to Iraq.

• 1:32:00Speaker 02

  I think it was more of a supportive kind of thing that we had at 10 because I was still doing Africa gigs, going down to Africa at the time. I think most of the Iraqi, you know, Afghanistan kind of thing at the time was still happening from east and west coast. That's what they broke it off and Admiral Wilson came by and told us that it's going to be a slow crawl. We're not going to get this for the long term. We're going to take our time. We got a plan. We're going to make sure we don't burn out our guys. Right? So that was, that was good information. Good information. Then I left.

• 1:32:36Jocko Willink?

  You think he was thinking 20 years at that time?

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  I think that he's a smart enough guy where he was going, yes, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. He's a very smart guy and love Admiral Wilson. Great, great guy.

• 1:32:47Jocko Willink?

  Every, all the senior officers, especially the officer detailer who I called.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52Jocko Willink?

  And said, hey, get me to a SEAL team, please, right now. He was like, this thing's going to last a long, long time.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:57Jocko Willink?

  You know, and yeah, he's right. So then where did you go when you got done with Spain?

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  Uh, then I came back to, cause that was like 2003. I came back to.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  Trade at, that's when Ronnie Cooper, Joe Byrne, all the boys, we put together Trade at One.

• 1:33:18Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  And I was the Ops Chief for Trade at One. So Mike Turcot was, if you know Mike, he was the, he was the boss in the Ops shop. So we started putting together that, which was fascinating. And I did that from the inception of Trade at to like 2005. And then I got a call from a good buddy of mine, Doug McNutt, I don't know whether you know him or not, but he was a detailer. And he goes, hey, cause George Young had gotten hit over when he was over in Iraq. And he needed a place to kind of settle because he was getting retired. I said, well, you take my shop, my spot here and I'll find someplace else to go. And so that's when Doug McNutt,

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  I thought I was gonna stay, he, west coast, right? He goes, I got a hard to fill billet. I go, hey, where's it at, man? He goes Hawaii. I go Hawaii? Hard to fill billet in Hawaii? He goes, yeah, I, I need an Ops Chief over in Hawaii. I said, well, you know, I'll go. Not knowing I have to go to SDV school.

• 1:34:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  To go to this billet, right? So now I'm a senior citizen almost. And, and Doug's going, yeah, you gotta go to SDV.

• 1:34:39Jocko Willink?

  Are you a Master Chief yet?

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  Uh, I made Master Chief at SDV school.

• 1:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:34:45Jocko Willink?

  Interestingly, George was my third platoon chief.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:34:48Jocko Willink?

  And then when I took over Trade at was when he was the Master Chief of Trade at.

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, okay. George Young?

• 1:34:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. So that's probably his, what he did after, when he went to the, took my job. And then he became. Cause I, I think Ron Cooper was the master chief of trade and he probably relieved Ron Cooper.

• 1:35:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, probably.

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  Probably. So anyway, uh, off to, uh, two thousand five.

• 1:35:14Jocko Willink?

  So you go to SDV school?

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  SD school in Panama City, Florida. Uh, I was like fifty six at the time. Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:22Jocko Willink?

  For those of you that don't know what an SDV is, Echo.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:35:25Jocko Willink?

  It's so sealed delivery vehicle. It's a miniature submarine, but it's not a submarine that keeps you dry. It's called a wet submarine. So it's got a motor on it and it's, it's enclosed, but water comes in and out of it. So you wear a scuba rig inside of this thing and, cause otherwise you know, you'd have to worry about pressurizing this thing. It'd have to be this hole and you have to get in and out of it. All that would make it too complicated. So they just take a, basically a shell, put a motor in it and then you get inside the shell and you drive this small underwater submarine.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  Is that that like real claustrophobic one?

• 1:36:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:03Jocko Willink?

  If you're, yeah, it's very claustrophobic.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, my friend Jeremy.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  Especially if you're a big guy.

• 1:36:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's not, it's, it takes a lot of skill to drive them and that, and when you have a driver, you, you want to keep that driver that's real good at it. I was not real good at driving the boat because I needed my glasses.

• 1:36:25Jocko Willink?

  That's what they give for sending a fifty seven year old to an SDV school.

• 1:36:29Speaker 02

  Right. So, and so anyway.

• 1:36:31Jocko Willink?

  How long is that school?

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  The school is three months.

• 1:36:35Jocko Willink?

  At least it's in Florida.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. But.

• 1:36:37Jocko Willink?

  But still you're doing what? Eight hour dives and shit like that?

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  All the time, all the time. Taking the boat apart, putting the boat back together, doing it. I mean, you're just, you're doing what you have to do.

• 1:36:47Jocko Willink?

  At least you got your motorhead, your motorhead.

• 1:36:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I could take the boats apart and put them back together. Driving them was the, you know, a whole nother thing, right? And stay, keeping them, keeping them level and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:36:59Jocko Willink?

  Hey, when you can't read, when you can't read the numbers on the depth gates, that's gonna be a challenge.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  Kevin, where's my glasses? That's why I always let somebody else drive and I would ride in the back going in. But it was, but it was interesting. It was an interesting time. It's something I, I kind of enjoyed. I wish I was better at it, but, but I wasn't, but I still went to SDV team in Hawaii. So I went to the team in Hawaii. I became the, the combat systems officer over there because Jim Morrell at the time was retiring. And so I took over his job and that is where we started working and doing a whole lot of very, very cool things that they're doing today. And so it was, it was a fun gig. I mean, it was a fun tour over

• 1:37:44Speaker 02

  there. And then when I left that, I actually went to work on our dry submarine that was over there and it kind of burned up. So I kind of lost my job over there, which really pissed me off because I was really getting good at paddle boarding. And so the, so, so I had to come back to, to WarCom and that's where I took the program over in N8. And that's kind of where I, I wrapped up my career was running that program and running the palms and the funding lines and everything else to keep the new SDVs because now we have a new one. And keeping that and keeping the boys trained and getting them the gear

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  that they need. And, and it's evolved a lot since I had that, had that particular job. So it's, so it's been very, very interesting. It's been a very interesting career. I mean, for

• 1:38:38Jocko Willink?

  So 1967, you joined the Navy and now it's 2014.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. The end of 2014.

• 1:38:44Jocko Willink?

  Is when you finally retire.

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46Jocko Willink?

  After 47 years.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Wild. That's wild. And, and just for to note to

• 1:38:53Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when you retired?

• 1:38:54Speaker 02

  To all of your clients, I was, I was retired for six months and then they sucked me back in. So I still work over there.

• 1:39:05Speaker 02

  Yes. Every day I go in to do things and now I'm working analyst stuff that's for Naval Special Warfare and it's very exciting. I mean, I think And Jaco will tell you the same thing. I mean, once you work for the boys and you're working for the boys and for their health and their benefit, you want to keep doing that because they're out there on the front lines. They and they require people just like us to keep pushing and keep doing the best we can do because we're we're speaking for them. They've got more than enough to do when you're out there in the war zone.

• 1:39:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, it's when I was I was the admiral's aide for 13 months. And one of the things that my boss would say in these big meetings, he'd say, what does that? What does that do for our SEAL platoons?

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:39:49Jocko Willink?

  And and that's the always the reminder for all the guys that was at WarCom because WarCom is really elevated. They're looking at things. You know, I remember I'd go to a meeting, they'd be talking about what kind of boat engine are we going to have in 2028?

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:40:03Jocko Willink?

  Right? And and I'd be thinking to myself, how does this matter? And that's what he would say. He'd say, how does this affect the SEAL platoon? Like, how is this going? Because you know what? The SEAL teams are going to be here in 2028. And you know what they're going to need? A boat engine.

• 1:40:14Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:40:14Jocko Willink?

  So if we don't plan for it, don't figure out what the best one is right now. Smart guys looking at it that have operational experience and that care.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:40:22Jocko Willink?

  Then they'll end up with a piece of shit. But if you do it right, that's how we got the the Mark 48, the Mark 46, right?

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 1:40:30Jocko Willink?

  Because someone like you was saying, okay, this is what we need.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. Yeah, yeah. It's very true. And if you don't have people doing that and and pushing the future envelope, then you'll always be behind the power curve. All of our peer to peer competitors are doing exactly that. And and some of them are doing a better job than we're doing at it. So you we have to, we have to push harder. That's that's our job.

• 1:40:52Jocko Willink?

  And so there's your retirement, there's like 1,500 people show up for your retirement.

• 1:40:57Speaker 02

  Right. There was more, but they couldn't get in. It was at the at the Lowe's Hotel. Yeah, there was. I mean, people are piling in from everywhere. And I didn't know I knew that many people, but evidently I did. So it was wild. It was wild.

• 1:41:14Jocko Willink?

  And you had five people speak?

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And they were all great. I mean, they were all all people that had a very important part of my career as I went through Naval Special Warfare. You know, I mean, the guys that were

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  E5s with me that were now two star admirals, they spoke, right? My, I, I mean, I think I'm one of the only guys that's had an instructor from their training class come and speak at their retirement, you know? I had

• 1:41:46Jocko Willink?

  Who was that?

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  Mother Moy.

• 1:41:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, no kidding.

• 1:41:48Speaker 02

  Mother Moy. I mean, the best CO I had, John McTigh was there. He spoke at it, you know? It was, it was fantastic, you know? So it was, it was very cool. It was very, very cool retiring. Couldn't have asked for it to be any better.

• 1:42:04Jocko Willink?

  Forty seven years. You, you wrap up that career.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:42:09Jocko Willink?

  Go ahead.

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  No, that's, that was with waivers.

• 1:42:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no kidding, a lot of waivers.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  Lot of waivers, lot of waivers.

• 1:42:17Jocko Willink?

  And, and then you, you still are working for Naval Special Warfare, but at some point you realized that there was another mission that you wanted to get out. You wanted to attack.

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:42:29Jocko Willink?

  How, how did you, how did you get involved with, with your next mission that you got involved with?

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  I will, um, yeah, let me go in, let me go into that. I had an old team guy. It seems like it always happens with an old team guy. Uh, Jeff Bramstead, who was, uh, who was a sky god.

• 1:42:46Jocko Willink?

  I know Bram.

• 1:42:47Speaker 02

  Jeff came to me, um, when I, right after I retired and says, hey, I need your help um, with this particular project that I'm, I've taken on. And I went, well, what's the project? And he told me it was child trafficking. And I said, well, you know, I mean, I've dealt with that all over the world and we've saved thousands and thousands of kids all over the world because of, you know, assholes that, that want to abuse them and use them. And I said, you know, we've done that. He said, but, but this is American kids on American soil. That kind of piqued my interest. He had a, um, uh, one of the PhDs at USD had written a white paper.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Amy Carpenter, she had written a white paper. I read the white paper and I just went, "Wow." I had no idea that 3,000 children a year in Southern California were being either kidnapped or put into human trafficking in one form or another. And I said, "You know, I have to get involved in this some way." So I met Joseph Travers, who is the co-founder of Saved in America. Saved in America is a nonprofit organization. We don't charge the parents any money at all to go locate their children. The children have,

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  or the parents have to come to us. They give us the power of attorney of the child. And then the child becomes ours to locate, to find, locate, and identify, which they do. Many of them have. We've recovered over 200 kids so far. We will take that power of attorney. We will find the child. We'll locate the child, identify the child, and then we work with local law enforcement and have local law enforcement come in and recover the children, give the children to us so we can take the children to medical care, get any DA evidence off of them, and then we will take them into a counseling-type thing or a safe haven so that they can come down off the drugs. The majority of them have

• 1:44:58Speaker 02

  heroin in them. They have some type of drugs that keep them, you know, in a very lethargic state so that these pimps and predators can do whatever they want with them. Very, very sad state and a heinous crime.

• 1:45:16Jocko Willink?

  When you're dealing with these situations, where are these children coming from?

• 1:45:22Jocko Willink?

  How does it happen?

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  They, um, they come from many different areas. The, uh, the Southern California is one. We've, they've come from all over the country. They come from poorer families. They come from rich families. Uh, there's not any, uh, demographics on exactly how they get there. That we've been to determine yet. So we're only into a, a little bit over 200 kids so far. We've been working in Southern California. That's where our main location is at. We get a lot of support, philanthropic support from the community, philanthropic support from the government. So it's, uh, the local government, I mean. And that's the, um, that's kind of where we've been focused at. Now we've gone all the way to Florida to recover kids.

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  We've gone to Utah to recover kids. We've gone to, uh, Phoenix, Arizona to recover kids. And so that's what we're doing now is we're expanding, Save the America from San Diego. We're over in Las Vegas at the end of the month. They had, uh, recovering kids. We've probably got four kids over there that we've got, uh, information and intel on that we will go seek and find, call in local law enforcement and have them recover the children. Just as I mentioned, local law enforcement loves us because we're a huge asset to them in helping them find, you know, these kids because they, they don't have the time.

• 1:46:51Speaker 02

  They're so overworked, so overburdened by, you know, runaway kids or kids that gets, you know, into trafficking. They don't have the, they don't have the resources to do as much as they would like to do. So it's, it's very frustrating to law enforcement. So when law enforcement hears about us, they are totally in tune to say, hey, come in and help us. All of us are private investigators. We're all insured and licensed. We all are CCW carriers. We have a whole network of private investigators throughout the United States that we can call on, the NEMAC people. So if we know that a child's been taken to another state, we will call a PI in that particular state.

• 1:47:33Speaker 02

  He will volunteer his time to go see if he can locate that child at a particular address or where we kind of direct him. If he finds the child, then we will fly a team from San Diego here to go set up, do the surveillance, do the watching and everything that's required to identify that child, to call in local law enforcement. That's how we've been working to date to recover these over 200 kids. Now, this is a heinous crime. It's a crime that I have to ask everybody in your audience, I have to ask every grandparent, every parent that's out there to please be on the watch and be able to identify what's happening with these child trafficking things.

• 1:48:16Speaker 02

  These pimps, these perverts are taking these kids, they have to take them in public every now and then just to keep them. They keep them locked up most of the time in houses. And if you see them out on the street, don't be afraid to go seek law enforcement and ask law enforcement that something is not right with this particular situation because you may be saving that child's life. And that's what we want to do. That's why we're here. It's all, our whole organization is about the children. That's why we are bound not to charge the parents for doing this. People have charged parents in the past thousands of dollars and never found their child for them. And how heart wrenching is that?

• 1:48:59Speaker 02

  To be a parent, you've already lost your child and now you're paying thousands of dollars to some unscrupulous person and they're not locating your child. We'll locate your child. Usually the day, it takes three to four days to locate a child, no matter where they're at in the United States. We've got, I've got great computer people, I've got great people that work behind the scenes to assist and help us, even in Mexico sometimes, but we hardly ever go outside the United States because we work so well with law enforcement and supporting them. So, this is the word I want to get out. We need your help. We need your support. Please go to our website, which is savedinamerica.org.

• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  And the whole story is there. It's all about the teams. We're made up of retired special operations guys and retired police officers, some FBI guys, some old agency guys that I've worked with in the past. And I have a whole slew of IT guys that support us with chasing the internet because that's where it all starts from.

• 1:50:05Jocko Willink?

  So that's what I was gonna ask you. When you see, what are some warning signs for parents to look out for, grandparents to look out for? Obviously, the internet has gotta be a huge one right now.

• 1:50:17Speaker 02

  Oh, totally. Totally. The internet is the media that gets them started, right? And a lot of them, we call it the Don Juan guys. So you have an older guy that is pursuing a younger girl, promising her all these kind of things. That's one thing you gotta watch out for. If your daughter or your son shows up with expensive purses or different gifts and things like that, where are they getting it? They're getting it from these pimps because these guys are trying to lure them in to what a good life that they can show them, as long as they can possess them. And the Don Juan's will keep them for two or three months, you know, as a girlfriend

• 1:51:01Speaker 02

  or something like that, then one day they will sell her and she'll be gone. Then if she's gone, they will sell her on the weekends, only the weekends because they'll bring them home so you can feed them all week long. And then on the weekends, you won't see them because the pimp will have them out selling these girls. And I have to remind you that, you know, one person that gives...

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  That these pimps do that is worth, and they sell them throughout that weekend in a year's particular time, a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand dollars a year. So, that's just an idea. It's better than any drug that pimp or that drug dealer could push because they use them, they bring them back, they let them go back to either a community home during the week because they don't have to feed them, they don't have to keep them, or your house, and then on the weekends, they just call them up and off they go. It's, you know, and the kids are fourteen years old, so, you know, you kind of say,

• 1:52:08Speaker 02

  what does a fourteen-year-old know? A fourteen-year-old doesn't know a whole lot, right? And they don't listen to their parents as well as they should. So, it's kind of up to the parents to be able, to be ready for the warning signs, be ready to do something. And if you have any questions at all, go to our website, savedinamerica.org, and ask the question. And we can get you steered to a counselor, get you steered to something that's going on in the cities. Like I say, if we're in, if one of the cities that we're involved in, we have counselors, we have people that you could talk to in those cities.

• 1:52:45Jocko Willink?

  Man. You said three thousand in Southern California?

• 1:52:51Speaker 02

  Yes. Shocking. That's, that's why I got involved. That's why, so imagine, if that's what you have in Southern California, imagine what you have nationwide. That is, it's, it's a crime, and it's a heinous crime that nobody wants to talk about. You, I mean, they're talking about child trafficking, they're talking about the immigration problem and everything else, but nobody's talking about the child trafficking inside the United States of American kids, right? And it's done by all kinds of unscrupulous people. I mean, the first ring we busted here in San Diego was run by Russians on Pacific Coast Highway. And we, I, I was blown away when I went there.

• 1:53:36Jocko Willink?

  So these guys are, they got multiple girls, underage girls. And they've somehow gotten them off wherever, they pulled them out of their houses, they've, they've lured them in somehow.

• 1:53:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:53:47Jocko Willink?

  They've gotten them on drugs.

• 1:53:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:53:49Jocko Willink?

  So they've got them in a, in a flaccid state of mind where they're, they're not thinking straight. And then they're just, they're just selling them.

• 1:53:57Speaker 02

  Yep, they're a tool. And you, uh, let me go back a little bit, but in every middle school that we have here in San Diego, which is gonna be shocking to many of the people that are listening, is that they are recruiters, the gangs have recruiters inside the middle schools that are trying to recruit these girls for the Donwans, so that the drug cartels and the gangs have these as income sources. So if you go, the only, uh, I mean, the schools have been real slow to recognize that this is happening. And they are still real slow to get programs in place to teach these kids about

• 1:54:38Speaker 02

  these recruiters that are in the middle schools, I mean, middle schools, that's 14 years old, 13, 14 year old, that these recruiters are trying to recruit these girls and boys into this gang styled life, or style of life. So that they can sell them on the weekends, bring them home to mom and let them be schoolgirls during the week, and then traffic them on the weekends. So that is, that's something that's going on today. So everybody has to be aware of that, and that's why I asked parents and grandparents to please keep your eyes open and be aware of these kinda things, because there is that evil out there, and it is happening every day in our world.

• 1:55:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and these kids these days, like what you're talking about. Is exactly what the, I don't know what the trend, I guess call it the trend of, you know, with social media, oh, I'm gonna be rich, I'm gonna be mature, I'm gonna have a cool car. Oh, there's drugs, cool, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be mature girl even though I'm only 14 years old. And so they, they see that and they get offered that. And that's, you know, I could imagine that's how a girl gets lured into these horrible situations.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly right. I wanna be older than I am. And I want more stuff. My family can't provide this for me, but my, my honey over here can provide it for me. He gets me new dresses, new purses, all that kinda stuff. Those are the kinda things and those are kinda the red flags that every parent needs to be aware of.

• 1:56:13Jocko Willink?

  Man, alright, so, uh, savedinamerica.org is the website. You got your team on there, bunch of old team guys too, bunch of guys I know on there.

• 1:56:24Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 1:56:24Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. And, and all guys that now have their private PI license. So, you guys are actually out doing the recon work if needed.

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  Oh absolutely. Where the, we're doing all the, where the rubber meets the road, we're there. We, and that's, that's how we find these kids. I mean, you know, the, the police department, if they had the resources to do it, I know they would be doing it, but they don't have the resources. And that's why, that's why we're holding a fundraiser in November, on November 7th, at the Estonia Hotel in La Jolla. Please go to our website, everything is on there. If you can afford to come to the event, it's gonna be fantastic. We have-

• 1:57:06Jocko Willink?

  How many seats you got?

• 1:57:07Speaker 02

  We probably have about 500.

• 1:57:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:57:11Speaker 02

  So-

• 1:57:12Jocko Willink?

  What was the date on that?

• 1:57:13Speaker 02

  November the 7th. It'll be at 6pm. Uh, our website has all the information on it and you can buy tickets off our website. Uh, if you got any questions about it, please just go to the website, send us a question, we'll answer that. It's for corporate, um, people, they can buy tables of 10 for all of the other people that they have or all their employees. They can donate, they can do, there's so many things that they can do to help sponsor us and help support us.

• 1:57:44Jocko Willink?

  Awesome, awesome. Well, I'll tell you what, we've been going almost two hours right now. I think this may be a good time to wrap up. I'll tell you right now, I'm gonna listen to this and I'm gonna have about a thousand more questions for you.

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  Okay, that's good.

• 1:57:59Jocko Willink?

  Cause I was just getting warmed up. You know, when we start talking, I mean, the stuff about Vietnam and you know, the fact that you did a hundred missions, you probably debriefed three of them, four of them maybe here briefly. I'm gonna start thinking about those and I'm gonna start, I'm gonna come up with all kinds of new questions. And it'd be awesome if you could come back on, cause I guarantee everybody that's listening to this is gonna wanna hear more.

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. And there's, you know, we, a long time ago, a friend of mine put together a book, I got like 20 guys from Vietnam to all write a story called the, the book was called The Men Behind The Trident by Dennis Cummings. And there's like 20 different stories of, you know, the people, the first contact action that they had in Vietnam. One of my stories is in there, but it's a, it's a great read and it's out on Amazon. So if you guys get a chance, go spin through that, that's interesting.

• 1:58:54Jocko Willink?

  I actually have that book.

• 1:58:56Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 1:58:56Jocko Willink?

  I was looking at it today. What I'll do is we'll, we'll do it. Next time you come on, we'll go through your story, we'll talk about some more stories. And, and that way, I seldom give out books that I'm gonna cover on the podcast prior to covering them. I don't think, and, and it, sometimes people get mad. They go, please tell us what books you're gonna cover. And I, and I don't do it because I don't even know what books I'm gonna cover. Cause I have so many books that I'm, I'll be, I'm reading five, six books at a time and I'll go, okay, this one, I like this part now, and I'll cover that book. Cause I cover a lot of books on the podcast.

• 1:59:27Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 1:59:28Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, so now everyone has a heads up. It's, it's Men Behind The Trident.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  Men Behind The Trident.

• 1:59:33Jocko Willink?

  It's by Cummings.

• 1:59:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, Cummings.

• 1:59:34Jocko Willink?

  And we'll cover that next time you come on.

• 1:59:37Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:59:37Jocko Willink?

  And that will be awesome. You got anything else? Anything else you wanna add?

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  Just, I wanna, before I jump off, I wanna thank you, all of you for your support to save the America. We definitely need it and make yourselves more aware of the human trafficking that's going on in the United States of America of hu, of US children. They're not foreign kids, they're US kids.

• 2:00:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, once again, Master Chief Kirby, sir.

• 2:00:11Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for coming on. Thanks for what you did for the country. Thanks for what you did to the Navy. Thanks for what you did for the teams. As I already said, it was your generation of SEALs that built the foundation of the tactics, of the operational excellence, and of the standard of will and perseverance. That's never going to be forgotten. It's what gave me my life. It's what gave me my life is you guys. So thanks for doing that. Thanks for coming on. And it's an honor to be part of a brotherhood that you're a member of.

• 2:00:47Speaker 02

  And thanks for having me. And we love the Brotherhood. Long live the Brotherhood.

• 2:00:51Jocko Willink?

  Indeed, sir. Thank you. And Master Chief Kirby Horrell has left the building. Real quick. He didn't mention this. For social media, for Saved in America is at Saved in America on Twitter, at Saved in America on the Instagram, and at Saved in America on Facebook. So there you go. Check that out. Follow that. Support that situation. And you know, we started off, I started off talking about learning how to act, learning how to get better.

• 2:01:34Jocko Willink?

  Echo, are you looking to get better?

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:37Jocko Willink?

  Are you trying to learn how to act better?

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  Trying to, yeah. I even worked out today. How you feel about that?

• 2:01:44Jocko Willink?

  I feel good about that. I hope you did.

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  I did, man.

• 2:01:47Jocko Willink?

  Any other things that we can do to get better?

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  Yes, we can. Oh yeah, big time. We can, uh, immersion camp coming up. I know it's sold out, but the point is, you do jujitsu. It's what you do.

• 2:02:02Jocko Willink?

  Highly recommend.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  Bro, we were, yeah, just the other day when we were waiting before we recorded, and we're sitting there, jujitsu's going on. Your boy's there doing his jujitsu. Other friends doing jujitsu. And I'm sitting, standing there, looking at it, listening to you, of course. And just watching people do jujitsu.

• 2:02:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, even watching people do jujitsu when you understand jujitsu is like.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  Filling my heart, just filling it to the brim. And I'm like talking to you and then I even said, I was like, jujitsu is so good, man. I'm just watching people, you know, beginners, whatever. Uh, uh, high level guys, whatever. It's so good. Unless when you do it, it's even better than watching it. You'll know, ask the people who do it, you'll know. They'll tell you. When you do it, you're gonna need a gi, of course. And what gi you're gonna get, none other than the best gi. Unless you want the worst gi, I don't know. But if you want the best one, you can get the Origin Gi.

• 2:02:57Jocko Willink?

  Get the best gi from originmaine.com, made in America, from the dirt to the shirt.

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03:05Jocko Willink?

  From the seed to the gi.

• 2:03:09Jocko Willink?

  So we got, we got a bunch of awesome craftsmen up in Maine. Craftsman up in Maine making these gees. They're also making gees, they're making rash guards for no gi, I meant to say. They're making shirts, t-shirts, sweatshirts. They're also making jeans right now. Jeans. Is there, I mean, jeans are as American as apple pie, right? Blue jeans. So get yourself some blue jeans. You want American jeans.

• 2:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:43Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 2:03:44Speaker 01

  Are there even any Amer- I mean, there has to be, I don't know many though.

• 2:03:48Jocko Willink?

  There are some, and you know what they do? They make these hipster American jeans, jeans, and they sell them for $280. That's what they do.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:03:59Jocko Willink?

  So you don't want those jeans.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, unless you do, I don't know, but.

• 2:04:02Jocko Willink?

  No, you don't.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  But these are not that.

• 2:04:04Jocko Willink?

  So, originmaine.com, get yourself some, some clothing of all kinds. Including clothing for training, including clothing for working and for cruising.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Cruising, yeah, all good, of course. Also, you want to keep your body intact as well while training or while just cruising, whatever. But recovering, how about that?

• 2:04:28Jocko Willink?

  Yes, you do.

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:04:31Jocko Willink?

  Joint Warfare?

• 2:04:33Jocko Willink?

  The just go read the reviews on joint warfare and then get some because I can sit here and tell you that I take joint warfare three in the morning, three at night. You take you take three in the morning for your night?

• 2:04:44Speaker 01

  Three. I was I was doing that when I when I had like

• 2:04:47Jocko Willink?

  When you were injured. Now you backed off.

• 2:04:49Speaker 01

  I'm back on the yeah, I just do three.

• 2:04:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay, read the reviews, see what other people say, because there's people that are like, oh, my mom had bad arthritis, whatever arthritis problems.

• 2:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:02Jocko Willink?

  And they go on joint warfare, which has active proven things in it.

• 2:05:09Jocko Willink?

  Curcumin, right? Turmeric, turmeric.

• 2:05:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:14Jocko Willink?

  All those things. So yeah, joint warfare, get the krill oil.

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  That's the combo right there.

• 2:05:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the combo. That's the that's the dual hitter. Get that dual hitter.

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, big time. The and here and I'm not recommending to do this, but for sake of this kind of experiment, for lack of a better term, if you're already on joint warfare and crew, try go off it. See what happens.

• 2:05:36Jocko Willink?

  I don't recommend that.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, don't really do it. I mean, that's just it's more of a dare than anything, but try go off it. I've done it out of complacency or whatever.

• 2:05:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay, when you do legs, when you squat, guess what you're gonna need? Additional protein, because the steak ain't gonna cut it. So when you squat, when you do clean, you ever do heavy cleans? And like the next day, your whole posterior chain is like sore.

• 2:06:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:01Jocko Willink?

  It needs it's you know what it's saying to you? It's going milk. Send us a milk. So listen to your body. You know, people say that you gotta listen to your body. You know what your body's saying? Your body's saying, give me some boy.

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  All right, well, there you go.

• 2:06:16Jocko Willink?

  So get yourself some of those milk. Get yourself a you know what I do when I do when I do legs? When I get done, I don't normally do this because it's pretty early in the morning. I'm usually not hungry in the morning, but when I do legs, a lot of times I'll get done. I'll have a little handful of nuts. You know, we're talking seven o'clock in the morning. A little handful of mixed nuts, which people gotta kick out of the way I say that.

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:06:35Jocko Willink?

  And then I'll do a little one scoop hitter.

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  Okay, and is this right? This is like an hour maybe two?

• 2:06:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, maybe like two hours after.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:42Jocko Willink?

  For me, that's kind of.

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  So you don't believe in the anabolic window? You know what that is?

• 2:06:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know what it is. I wouldn't say I'm not a believer, but it's just not something that I eat when I'm hungry. I listen to my body. My body wants milk.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing, though. I have a thought. I thought it was, to me, in my mind, it was proven. The anabolic window, right? When you're done working out, you go into recovery mode. Then I read like all this stuff. Oh, that's not true. Your hormones do this and that and growth hormone and all this like good stuff as far as you go.

• 2:07:11Jocko Willink?

  It's weird. So check this out. The things that I've been saying. Okay, like I used to say, I go eat steak all the time, right? Hey, eat steak, steak, steak. People. And then people, all of a sudden, that's a normal, that's an actual thing now. The carnivore diet only. Like, it's a real thing now.

• 2:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:26Jocko Willink?

  That same thing with me. I'd be like, I don't eat breakfast. I don't like to eat until, you know, ten, eleven o'clock. All of a sudden, it's called something. It's called intermittent fasting, right? This is just stuff I just kind of live, live that way.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07:37Jocko Willink?

  So now all of a sudden, same thing with people saying, oh, uh, uh, your, your, your discipline depletes throughout the day. Wrong. It's actually wrong. Now it's proven wrong. I was right.

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:07:50Jocko Willink?

  So anyways, what I'm saying is, listen to your body. The people say this. Listen to your body. I'm saying, been saying that too. Well, I'm saying it right now. Listen to your body. You know what your body says? Your body's saying milk.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:01Jocko Willink?

  Wife, my wife mixed up a strawberry milk with the, do you have one of those nice blenders? Like the power blenders that has like a, like a forty horsepower engine in it?

• 2:08:12Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, I do.

• 2:08:13Jocko Willink?

  My wife mixed up a milk in there and she, I come home and she's like, I mixed milk in those things. And she was talking like almost in a sensual voice, right? And I go, okay. And she goes. She said something she never said. She goes, it was next level, which she never says that. And then she goes, she goes, it's the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. That's what she said to me. She said those words to me. It's the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. This is a protein shake, right? Let's, let's face it. That's something, right?

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 2:08:45Jocko Willink?

  That's not, no. So, yeah, and don't forget we got Warrior Kid Molk, because sometimes your body, your, your kids. You know what their body, their brain, their brain is saying, give me sugar.

• 2:08:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:08:55Jocko Willink?

  Right? Their brain's like, give me a, give me a chocolate chip cookie.

• 2:08:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:08:58Jocko Willink?

  Right? Answer that call, answer that call instead of giving them the poison, give them something that answers the call, but makes them stronger, faster, smarter, better.

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:10Jocko Willink?

  Give them some Warrior Kid Molk.

• 2:09:12Speaker 01

  Although I would not recommend that you tell your kids to listen to their body, because the kid would be like, hey, my body's telling me I want some fucking candy. Well, if my kids are any indicated, that's what they're.

• 2:09:24Jocko Willink?

  You listen, you, you feed them the right thing. So, Molk.

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, because kids listen to their taste buds. They don't listen to their body.

• 2:09:30Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm saying. Yes, you're right. So, when your kids' taste buds call out for that, that little sweetness hitter.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:38Jocko Willink?

  Give them what, give them something good.

• 2:09:39Speaker 01

  Boom, slides right in.

• 2:09:40Jocko Willink?

  Slides right in.

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Easy money. Good.

• 2:09:42Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go.

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  Right on.

• 2:09:44Jocko Willink?

  And, and don't forget about white tea.

• 2:09:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:46Jocko Willink?

  Jaco White Tea. Tastes good. Did you notice when Sean Parnell was on the podcast, he's like, this has so much caffeine in it. And I was like, no, actually it doesn't. There's only 60 grams.

• 2:09:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:58Jocko Willink?

  What you're feeling is the antioxidant kicker.

• 2:10:03Jocko Willink?

  And he did drink four of them.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  Four of them, yeah. That's what I'm saying. And here's the thing, I've drank four of them too.

• 2:10:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  Before, and the caffeine sneaks up on you, because you keep, you're just, it's like a steady dose of caffeine. You're like, oh. Yeah. So, and he's, you know, even when you're in conversation and talking about stuff or whatever. So, oh, yeah, he got hit with a double, triple whammy situation.

• 2:10:22Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:10:23Speaker 01

  Also. Jaco's store, it's called Jaco's store and this is where we, we collectively.

• 2:10:31Jocko Willink?

  We can get rash guards there.

• 2:10:32Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, let's say get after.

• 2:10:34Jocko Willink?

  When you do ring workouts, using your rings, you need to, you kinda need to wear a rash guard.

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:40Jocko Willink?

  Cause you'll get, you'll get like, uh, what is it? Rope burn, basically, chafing on your arms.

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got that. I don't do, mine's not as intense as yours, the workout, but all, you know, you do like dips and, and some push up situations or whatever, you know, various things. And I felt the chafing. My workout wasn't long enough on the rings. It wasn't long enough to actually get chafed, but I understand.

• 2:11:04Jocko Willink?

  Chafing indication.

• 2:11:07Jocko Willink?

  So you get rash guards. You can also get t-shirts. The t-shirts that I wear, JP Denell sent me a picture of these cleaning out his closet. Getting rid of shirts. And I was like, that's why all my shirts are the same. It's all my shirts are the same.

• 2:11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:21Jocko Willink?

  If you like the shirts that I wear, or you like the shirts that Echo wears, you can just get the shirts there at Jaco's store.com.

• 2:11:26Speaker 01

  Yep. Discipline equals freedom. Represent.

• 2:11:28Jocko Willink?

  Def core.

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  Represent.

• 2:11:30Jocko Willink?

  Someone was representing Def Core the other day and I had a little bit of sort of a, of a little connect, right? Cause you're kinda stepping up.

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Bro, and JP, speaking of JP, he posts a picture of one of the troopers representing big time in the wild at the UFC.

• 2:11:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, that's right. There was a guy at the UFC. I saw it too. I tried to take a picture, didn't get there quick enough. And my little daughter, who was watching UFC with me, check. She was like, oh, you didn't get a picture. I go, someone's gonna post it. Watch. And someone posted even before JP.

• 2:12:04Speaker 01

  My little brother texts me before JP texts me with it. Text me, he says, hey, someone was at the UFC wearing you guys shirt.

• 2:12:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. He said, someone's at the UFC wearing the shirt that you designed, Echo Trump.

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  No, he didn't say that, but nonetheless, he did indicate. So the point there is, yeah, when you see, when you see another person in the wild representing hardcore.

• 2:12:26Jocko Willink?

  On the UFC.

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  Oh, on the UFC or otherwise.

• 2:12:28Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  But you will, you'll feel that connect. Jaco, I feel it too, man.

• 2:12:33Jocko Willink?

  Bonafides.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, connected. So that's that. Also, you can also get a trucker hat.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  Or flex.

• 2:12:40Jocko Willink?

  Or flex it. Or you can get a beanie. Winter is coming. Hoodies, heavy, medium, light.

• 2:12:48Speaker 01

  Heavy and light, medium, heavy, light. I think they're heavy. They're heavy. They're normal hoodies is what I'm saying. And like, yeah, a lot of cool stuff. I got a new design coming out. Didn't even tell you. Boom.

• 2:12:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's a big surprise.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  But it's, you know.

• 2:13:00Jocko Willink?

  Probably lame.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  No, it's not lame. I predict that you will like that one.

• 2:13:04Jocko Willink?

  There's a fifty fifty chance.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Well, there's no.

• 2:13:08Jocko Willink?

  Seriously, fifty percent of the time when you show me something, I'm like, dang, that's dope. Fifty percent of the time I go, I don't like that at all.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Well, there you go. We're gonna see about that one and I predict that you'll like it, but whichever, you know, it's, it's, it's out. It'll be, yeah, it's out big time.

• 2:13:25Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 2:13:25Speaker 01

  Anyway, yeah, Jaco store dot com. There it is. Boom. Also, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. Google, play, iTunes, Stitcher, you know, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:13:35Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget about the Warrior Kid Podcast. We got that as well. If you're, if you've got kids or if you're an adult that just wants to get after it more.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:43Jocko Willink?

  Go to Warrior Kid Podcast and you can also support a Warrior Kid by going to Irish Oaks Ranch dot com and getting some, getting some Jaco soap. Made by Aiden from goat milk on his farm. America.

• 2:13:59Jocko Willink?

  Stay clean.

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  Stay clean big time. Also, why are you staying clean? If you want to watch some YouTube videos, don't watch the drunk girl fail videos. We have a YouTube channel. We have excerpts on there from the podcast. A lot of people watch those excerpts because, you know, every once in a while they'll miss, you know, this, you know, two hour podcast about, you know, something, maybe they didn't have the time or whatever. Maybe it's hap, it's, it's happened before. I'm saying that. But they'll catch the excerpts. So they can really get many of the lessons.

• 2:14:28Jocko Willink?

  You need to make BTF Tony compilation. That's three minutes long of him just saying awesome stuff.

• 2:14:35Speaker 01

  It'll be longer than three minutes.

• 2:14:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I'm saying just take the top highlights of them all. It still might be more than three minutes. It might be, it might be an eighty eight minute video.

• 2:14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a good idea. But nonetheless, the point is, yes, we do have a YouTube channel and a lot of cool stuff.

• 2:14:50Jocko Willink?

  If you want to see what Kirby Horrell looks like.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:53Jocko Willink?

  Then you can, you can watch the whole pod, this whole podcast will be on YouTube. You can see what he looks like, see his expressions. We also have psychological warfare, which is a little sonic boost for your brain that will make you think the right thoughts that you know you're supposed to be thinking. It's called psychological warfare and it will get you over the edge of weakness and into the realm of strength.

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  The winner circle.

• 2:15:20Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  That's a good way to put it. That's a good explanation. A little bit esoteric, little bit, but good nonetheless. Yeah.

• 2:15:28Jocko Willink?

  Flipsidecanvas.com. If you want a visual representation of the path that you can stare at every day when you wake up in the morning, hang on your wall, my brother Dakota Meyer is making art. No, he's making graphic representations of the path that you can get. Flipsidecanvas.com. So get some of that.

• 2:15:50Speaker 01

  Also on it, on it.com, go to onit.com/jaco. This is where you can get workout gear, various other things. Some, some good electrolyte, magnesium, I don't know, all the little minerals or whatever, but that's a, to me, that's like a go-to. As far as recovery, performance, I don't know. It's good for a lot of stuff, but it's, that's a daily one as well. Anyway, but the kettlebells that I get, a hundred percent on it. A hundred percent artistic ones. Go there. There's a lot of cool stuff on there is what I'm saying.

• 2:16:20Jocko Willink?

  Got a bunch of books. Right now, I have a new book. It's available for preorder. If you want to let my publisher know that they should print a lot of these books, then go and preorder Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. Not to mention, you know, you, you don't want to get the second edition. You know what's, how many chances do you get, get to get a first edition? You get one shot. Don't blow it. Don't blow it. As soon as, as soon as humanly possible, I'm gonna have them make a slight change to the cover. Second edition, I'm gonna make it different.

• 2:16:57Speaker 01

  Oh, so they missed out?

• 2:16:58Jocko Willink?

  Just to, just so I can tell, PID, Positive Identification From A Distance. Oh, that's cool. I see you got the book. I'll sign it for you. But I realize where you were at when the, when the, when the chips were on the table, you weren't there.

• 2:17:11Speaker 01

  You're in the back.

• 2:17:12Jocko Willink?

  Which is fine. Order that first edition. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. Way of the Warrior Kid 3.

• 2:17:20Jocko Willink?

  That just came out, Where There's a Will, it is live, so bust them. And then, of course, we have Way of the Warrior Kid one and two. And you know how many bad reviews I've gotten on those books?

• 2:17:32Speaker 01

  How many?

• 2:17:33Jocko Willink?

  Zero.

• 2:17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, man, I think, well, you did get a bad review from someone who didn't, not only didn't read it, but didn't even know what it was about.

• 2:17:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That one guy called, that one guy called and said it looked like a bunch of toxic masculinity for children or something crazy like that.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:17:50Jocko Willink?

  I just reposted that. About 10 million people ordered the book as soon as they saw that guy. Whatever that idiot's name was.

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  Well, you know, in his, his defense, I mean, he did speak too soon. He, that's all, that was his mistake. He spoke too soon, like without looking into it. You see him saying like that.

• 2:18:06Jocko Willink?

  And actually, you know what I did? I, I, of course, just said, hey, if you want, I'll send you one so you can actually read it.

• 2:18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:11Jocko Willink?

  Make your judgment.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  See, that's what he should have done.

• 2:18:13Jocko Willink?

  What, what really happened then is a lot of people jumped on and said, hey, I'm a woman, my, my daughter loves this book. And then someone else said, hey, this book teaches people how to be respectful. Hey, this person teaches everyone. And he finally relinquished his, he, he recanted.

• 2:18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:29Jocko Willink?

  And apologized.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  Had to, but his own fans, like his own fans were like, hey, bro, I love your stuff. You're wrong on this one, bro.

• 2:18:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  You gotta look into it.

• 2:18:37Jocko Willink?

  People just came off the top. That's what's funny. Even my comical sort of overreaction of that guy being an idiot. I didn't do that, of course, because I'm, you know, not gonna do that. But that, if I would have reacted that way, you, you know, people would have said, hey, Jaco, you know, you're being too aggressive with he, you know what I mean? Like, I would have been the bad guy. So it's, hey, man, I'll send you a copy if you want it.

• 2:18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:58Jocko Willink?

  And then you can read it. But then everyone else, it wasn't me that convinced, it was everyone else.

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:19:02Jocko Willink?

  It was the, the, the, the, it was the troopers from coming. It was troopers coming at him hard, kind of.

• 2:19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you mean the people.

• 2:19:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, not even hard. They were all, everyone just, everyone, I mean, there was a couple of people that took a little stab at him.

• 2:19:15Speaker 01

  Degrees of hardness.

• 2:19:16Jocko Willink?

  But a lot of people were just like, hey, you should, you should actually check it out because it's, it would help you.

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:20Jocko Willink?

  Actually, as a human being, be better.

• 2:19:21Speaker 01

  So he essentially got, got corrected by people who actually read the book.

• 2:19:26Jocko Willink?

  And I'll give him a little bit of credit. He rec, he recanted and said, okay, cool. I'm, I'm wrong. I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions. Okay, cool.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  So technically, is that a bad review? Technically, no, because he didn't read the book.

• 2:19:37Jocko Willink?

  Good point.

• 2:19:37Speaker 01

  You can't review something you didn't experience.

• 2:19:39Jocko Willink?

  That is true.

• 2:19:42Jocko Willink?

  So there's that, there's, there's Mikey and the Dragons. This should be with every child. The book should be with every child. Mikey and the Dragons. Get this book for every kid that you know. Get it for the library. Get it. The field manual, Discipline, Growth Freedom Field Manual. Get that book for anyone that you know that you actually care about as a human. So that you can keep them on the path. And then of course, there's Extreme Ownership. There's the Dichotomy of Leadership. The first books that I wrote with my brother Leif Babin. About leadership and how you can take leadership that we used on the battlefield and apply it to your life. We got Echelon Front, which is my leadership consultancy.

• 2:20:24Jocko Willink?

  Where we come into organizations and solve whatever the problems that they have through the one thing that matters. And that's leadership.

• 2:20:35Jocko Willink?

  Go to echelonfront.com for details on that. EF Online. That is since leadership training is not an inoculation. You need repetitive training to get the skills down. So we made EF Online, EFOnline.com. Interactive training in leadership through the interwebs. We also have the muster.

• 2:21:00Jocko Willink?

  Chicago's done. Denver, sold out. Sorry. Sydney, Australia is next, December 4th and 5th. So if you want to come to that, register now so you're not emailing Jamie. And saying, hey, we, we didn't get to put our things in in time. Is there any more seats? Cause there's not. Sold out means we sold it out. We're not like, well, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll sell it out, but we have a hundred more seats. No. It's literally sold out. So if you want to go, then go to extremeownership.com and register. And then of course, we have EF Overwatch where we are taking leaders from special operations and combat aviation. And putting them into the civilian sector.

• 2:21:44Jocko Willink?

  So go to EFOverwatch.com. If you're a company that needs leadership, which you are. Or if you're a spec ops guy, combat aviation guy, that is looking to move on to their next mission in the civilian sector. Go to EFOverwatch.com. And if you feel like you need more than the 500 hours.

• 2:22:08Jocko Willink?

  That we have spent talking on the podcast, then you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on Dufazbach.

• 2:22:22Jocko Willink?

  Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And like I said, if you want to help out Saved in America, you can follow them. They are on the same platforms, @savedinamerica. And thanks once again to Master Chief Kirby Horrell for his service in the teams. And it's literally like I told him, it's given me everything that I am right now. That's what these old team guys did for me. And also, obviously, thanks to Kirby for what him and his team is doing right now with savedinamerica.org.

• 2:23:00Jocko Willink?

  They are out there rescuing children and I don't know if there is a more noble cause than that. So, thank you, Master Chief Kirby Horrell. The rest of our military out there, that also gives us everything that we have. Thank you for doing what you do so that we can freely do what we do. And to our police and to law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and Border Patrol and Secret Service and to every other first responder, thanks for what you do as well for being on call each and every day to protect us.

• 2:23:43Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else out there, when I think about someone like Master Chief, who has given so much, but you know what, just keeps on giving. And I ask myself, what else can I give to the world? Ask yourself that same question, what else can you give to the world? Whose life can you make better? How much more can you give? Let's find out. Get up, move forward, and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.