180: Covert Lessons Learned From "Across The Fence" in Vietnam, with John Stryker Meyer

0:00:00 – Opening 0:05:05 – Green Beret, John Stryker Meyer: Life, Lessons, and Vietnam 2:11:28 – Final thoughts and take-aways. 2:16:42 – Support: How to stay on THE PATH. 2:43:48 – 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 180 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  It was May 1968.

• 0:14Jocko Willink?

  We were triple volunteers. We had volunteered and graduated from the Army's parachute jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. Made it through the qualification course at the Special Forces Training Group in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And after attending the 5th Special Forces Group airborne in-country training program. We had volunteered to serve in MACV SOGS Command and Control. During Special Forces Training at Fort Bragg, several of the Green Berets teaching various courses told us to avoid CNC because the duty was rough and the Special Forces casualties were high in the top secret unit.

• 0:55Jocko Willink?

  Despite all those warnings, Rick Howard, John McIntyre, Rick Estes, Tony Harrell, Mark Gentry, Bob Garcia, Bobby D. Leathers, myself and a few others volunteered to serve in CNC.

• 1:13Jocko Willink?

  I'd been in training or in between training cycles since entering the Army on 1 December 1966. In May 1968, we were finally shifting gears from being in a training mode to an operational mode. None of the rumors prepared us for what followed.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  "You won't need those," the Sergeant Major said. "Put away all pens, pencils and notebooks. This is a top secret briefing. All of you have either obtained a top secret clearance or will do so in the near future or you wouldn't be here." Welcome to the Command and Control Detachment of the 5th Special Forces Group airborne, 1st Special Forces, United States Army Special Operations Augmentation Study and Observations Group, or simply CNC.

• 2:00Jocko Willink?

  Gentlemen, before you is a confidentiality agreement. You can't tell your girlfriend, your mother, no one. We were prohibited from writing anything about the operation, forbidden from keeping diaries, taking photos, making drawings, or tape recordings, notes of any sort. The Sergeant Major advised us that anyone who didn't want to sign that agreement could leave. Gentlemen, the Sergeant Major turned toward a generic map on the wall. The North Vietnamese Army controls these "neutral" countries, and pointed to Cambodia and Laos, located to the west of the Republic of South Vietnam, and of course, North Vietnam.

• 2:42Jocko Willink?

  For several years, the North Vietnamese Army had moved soldiers, supplies, rockets, guns, and propaganda south into the eastern provinces of neutral Laos and Cambodia, through an ever-increasing network of trails and roads called the Ho Chi Minh Trail Complex. Now, listen up real close, the Sergeant Major said. When you go across the fence, you will carry no identification of any manner, shape, or form. That meant no identification papers, no dog tags, no diaries, no photos, no love letters, and certainly no green berets. Everyone would wear sterile fatigues with no company insignia, no name tags, no unit

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  designators, no jump wings, or combat infantryman badges. Why? Without giving anyone a chance to respond, he said that because Laos and Cambodia were neutral, the United States government could publicly proclaim that the US repre- respected that neutrality. Thus, if we were killed in Laos, Cambodia, or North Vietnam, the US government would deny having anything to do with us. The United States government would explain that no Americans were stationed in Laos or Cambodia, which was technically accurate. The US government had plausible deniability if we were killed or captured.

• 4:08Jocko Willink?

  And if captured, we were to speak a foreign language. "Don't tell them who you are," he ordered. "Remember, technically, under the terms and conditions of the Geneva Accords, your status is different than air force and navy pilots shot down over North Vietnam. They're in uniform. They're identified as US servicemen. C and C men don't fall into the category of prisoners of war."

• 4:34Jocko Willink?

  We were, in effect, spies. Although the sergeant major never used that word. He also didn't tell us that spies had no protection under the Geneva Convention, and that we could summarily be executed if captured.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  And that right there, that's some excerpts from the beginning of a book called Across the Fence, which is written by a special forces soldier in Vietnam named John "Stryker" Meyer.

• 5:12Jocko Willink?

  And, in this particular case, it is an absolute honor for me to say that we have him here with us tonight to teach us about his experiences as a member of MACV SOG, Studies and Observations Command, Group Command, and Control Teams. Sir?

• 5:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Welcome.

• 5:36Jocko Willink?

  Welcome to the show.

• 5:38John Stryker Meyer?

  Glad to be here.

• 5:39Jocko Willink?

  That's quite the welcome you got to Vietnam, huh?

• 5:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Yes, it was quite something. Absolutely. At the time, we had just watched the John Wayne movie, The Green Berets, on top of it all. So, uh, we were all psyched. We'd seen the movie, we're ready.

• 5:53Jocko Willink?

  That's all it takes?

• 5:54John Stryker Meyer?

  And we'd been forewarned, you know, when you go there, this is gonna happen. A little guy's gonna come out and ask for people to volunteer. So we said, "Yeah, right." No. When we were done, it happened. Before they shipped us out, a little guy comes out, "We're looking for volunteers." And then Johnny Mac goes, "For what, Sarge?" "Can't tell you. Either you're in it or you're not." So we raised our hands. Next day, we're up in Da Nang for that briefing you covered.

• 6:16Jocko Willink?

  Dang. Before we jump into that, how'd you end up in the military? Where'd you grow up? You grew up in Jersey?

• 6:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, I grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. Dad was a milkman, grew up in the milk truck. And mom was a piano teacher, choir organist. And after high school, it took me two years to flunk out of college.

• 6:38John Stryker Meyer?

  Upon flunking out in 1966, I was working up in Yosemite National Park.

• 6:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, nice.

• 6:43John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, I was a garbage man, fireman up there. And the book, The Green Berets, came out. And my dad had sent me a letter saying, "Hey, that's it. You finally flunked out. You're going to get drafted. We got the notification here from the draft board." So I read the book and I said, "You know what? If I'm gonna go, if I can get in with these guys, that'd be a great challenge. And if I can do that, that's the way I want to go." Because at that time, with the Army, eight weeks of basic training, eight weeks of advanced infantry, a month leave, and you're in Vietnam. You could be with any regular conventional unit. And by that time, there had been enough stories about some issues, particularly when they were engaged in the regular North Vietnamese Army, that they were having some major issues and surprises of how strong the enemy was.

• 7:27John Stryker Meyer?

  So, "Give me some more training. I needed it."

• 7:31Jocko Willink?

  And when you were a kid, did you play sports or anything like that?

• 7:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, I was never that good at it, but I loved baseball. It was a head game. And football. And my dad wouldn't let me play football until my senior year of high school. So I had one year of football, but everything else was just like JV, little league. Just loved baseball.

• 7:52Jocko Willink?

  Why didn't he want you to play football? Didn't he want you to get hit in the head too much?

• 7:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Could be.

• 7:56Jocko Willink?

  They didn't care back then, did they?

• 7:58John Stryker Meyer?

  You know what? I think it was more... Well, in eighth grade, I hurt my knee playing soccer. And so they were worried about follow-up injuries there and still have your body in one piece when you go to college or wherever you're gonna go, you know? So they were very conservative. I mean, you know, my mom,

• 8:16John Stryker Meyer?

  she was an old farm girl from Central Jersey. And she wouldn't... She was really unhappy when my granddad gave me a cap pistol. So that's the household we grew up in. But, you know, eventually, we went out, learned about weapons a little bit along the way. And then, of course, when this came along, then we got the real deal.

• 8:34Jocko Willink?

  And the, the, so nineteen sixty-six, so public opinion wasn't completely against the war yet, was it in sixty-six?

• 8:42John Stryker Meyer?

  No, but it was beginning.

• 8:43Jocko Willink?

  It was starting.

• 8:44John Stryker Meyer?

  It was starting. You, you had people doing their protests and letters to the editor and uh, some of the fringe elements of society like we see today. There's some of those parallels.

• 8:55Jocko Willink?

  But eh, you going down, how did your parents, your dad was on board, obviously, because he sent you the letter saying, alright buddy.

• 9:03John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, well it's like-

• 9:03Jocko Willink?

  What school did you flunk out of?

• 9:05John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, Trenton State College. Yeah.

• 9:07Jocko Willink?

  And then you just said, I'm gonna go to Yosemite to be a firefighter?

• 9:11John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, we had a couple of buddies of mine that I've been in college with, helped me flunk out. Uh, and we did much, much serious drinking, just the, you know, just stupid, young, young and dumb.

• 9:22Jocko Willink?

  I have no idea what you're talking about.

• 9:24John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, I'm sure.

• 9:27John Stryker Meyer?

  And uh, so uh, they had a corrupt congressman that got us jobs in Yosemite.

• 9:34John Stryker Meyer?

  So good old Frank Thompson came through for us, we drove across and uh, in fact, in Manhattan, Kansas, we got hit with a tornado. June twelfth, going across the Rocky Mountains, we had snow with the back window blown out of the car. So it was just fun.

• 9:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 9:48John Stryker Meyer?

  A nice experience. Again, we drank a little bit too much there. But the first time, real job, real money. And then the, the reality check is just like, these guys are amazing. If, I mean, if I can get even closer to this, get to jump school, at least get a taste of this. So, that was the plan.

• 10:04Jocko Willink?

  How was the, how was the culture shock when you rolled into, to uh, army bootcamp?

• 10:09John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, by that time, I seen, you know, a couple dozen of the movies over time. From the World War Two movies, you kinda knew what was coming. So, um, early on, I had a uh, a friend of mine, uh, whose dad had been in the army. He goes, look, you go in- Just remember, this is like a game. They wanna see if they can break you or not. And you just gotta have the right mindset. And that stuck with me. So through basic, particularly with jump school, they come in and shake you out of bed, two o'clock in the morning for bogus inspections, just to see if they could mess you up or break you a little bit. It's kinda like, okay, we all know this is a game. We all know we're training here. And so that was the way we moved forward.

• 10:49Jocko Willink?

  And you guys could go right into the, you could go right into the Q course? Like you could just do that pipeline? It was open for you?

• 10:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, because we lost so many people, they came out with what, at that time, we called the baby SF course. So, yes. And even to this day, some of the guys I went through training group with are still down to brag now training SF guys. And, I mean, we're biased, but we feel that if you come through basic, advanced, jump school, and go right into the Q course and qualify, now they have a pre-qualification, then your qualification, and then you get the beret.

• 11:26John Stryker Meyer?

  That, there's no bad habits. Like a lot of the sergeants from the old days when they came in, you, you had to be an E5 above, more, more time in grade, et cetera, et cetera. And before they'd be even consider you. But, um, they needed bodies. Well, the guys, again, we're biased, so let me get the bias out front. It's the green kids that came in, that went off and did the job. And eventually at SOG, um, by sixty-eight, sixty-nine, the majority of the ones, zeros, team leaders were young guys. And there's a lot of us that either got bored, like in my case, flunked out, or just wanted some different, something different.

• 12:07John Stryker Meyer?

  And said, this is special forces, and then you get the rumors, and then you finally get to that briefing where you say, hey, there's a chance to volunteer. Little do you realize, it's the highest casualty operation in the entire war. But they, they forgot to tell you that.

• 12:20Jocko Willink?

  They didn't tell you that part? So, did you, did you volunteer for CNC while you were still stateside? Or was that once you got overseas?

• 12:27John Stryker Meyer?

  No, at that time, the only way you could get into Special Forces, that program, was to enlist for airborne on assigned. And then when you went through basic, then at advanced infantry, you, you would be offered the opportunity to volunteer. So during one of the classes, they would have, you know, like, in my case, it was a rainy day, we're in the gym, there's like 600, 700 people sitting on the floor. And they had the stage up front with side steps, and a cook would come up and say, hey, the coolest MOS, you'll never go hungry with us. And they're all fat and sloppy, you know? Just little cooks. And then other guys coming for COMO, intel, MPs, that kind of stuff.

• 13:09John Stryker Meyer?

  And at the very end, this little banty rooster comes in, and it was raining. So everybody else had their rain jackets and stuff on, this banty rooster comes in with a beret, and his fatigues are wet. He came up and did a straight jump on the stage, turned around and said, we're looking for recruits for Special Forces. If you, if you're interested, see me outside. In fact, anybody interested? Well, hell, I read the book. I jumped up off the floor. Me and about three other guys, and the other 700 just sat there. I'm going like, WTF? You guys are going to NOM in a couple of weeks. I'm going to give just a little bit more training here. It was just amazing. So he, he jumped off the stage and that's it. So he ran us through the psychological test, had to show we could swim, run, all that stuff.

• 13:54Jocko Willink?

  Were you a COM guy initially? Did you get trained as a COM guy?

• 13:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Yes.

• 13:58Jocko Willink?

  Is it, did they still call it 18 ECHO back then, or no?

• 13:59John Stryker Meyer?

  No, this is prehistoric. O5B, 4S. The 4S is the SF designator.

• 14:05Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 14:06John Stryker Meyer?

  And O5B is COMO Morse code. And then after training group, we sent, they sent us down for 12 weeks to Fort Gordon for RTT. Because they need, a lot of the A camps, and of course CNC needed some RTT operators, radio teletype. And so that was the extra training. And that's where I got busted, me and Johnny McIntyre got busted down to private E-Deuce. So we landed in NOM where E-Deuce is.

• 14:31Jocko Willink?

  What'd you do to earn that?

• 14:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, well, we were just assholes, really. I mean, these are, these are butter bars. Two young lieutenants, they got this company, and here come these green berets. We just got done all our training. We're official green berets now, right?

• 14:44Jocko Willink?

  You're the baddest man on the planet. And you're with your buddy.

• 14:48John Stryker Meyer?

  So when I have my Article 15 hearing with the CO, I go in and there's eight Article 15s on the table. It says, "Pick one." So I picked one, scrubbed it up and threw it at him because you got nine now. And I got, me and McIntyre got busted. So it was E-Deuce. Landed in Nam was an E-Deuce.

• 15:05Jocko Willink?

  Oh, man.

• 15:06John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Jocko Willink?

  So you get to, so it wasn't until you got to Vietnam?

• 15:11John Stryker Meyer?

  Correct.

• 15:12Jocko Willink?

  That you heard about CNC? Or no, you said some training instructors?

• 15:14John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 15:15Jocko Willink?

  Had told you like, "Hey, don't even try."

• 15:16John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, you know, here, one of these little sidebars, when we go through commo, myself, McIntyre and a few others got recycled because you had to get up to, I forget, 12 or 15?

• 15:26Jocko Willink?

  Groups per minute or something?

• 15:28John Stryker Meyer?

  Groups per minute, yeah. WPMs.

• 15:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 15:31John Stryker Meyer?

  And, uh...

• 15:32Jocko Willink?

  I had to do that too at the SEAL Team.

• 15:33John Stryker Meyer?

  Is that right?

• 15:34Jocko Willink?

  I went through a course, like one of the last guys that were learning Morse code and we had to get whatever it was. I think we had a lower standard than that because we, because it was just, no one would have passed.

• 15:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, you weren't even an officer then. We couldn't give you the officer out, right?

• 15:45Jocko Willink?

  True, true.

• 15:46John Stryker Meyer?

  So, no, but we, one of our guys who took us under his wing was a guy named Paul Villa Rosa, SFC, been in Nam three times, had a little tattoo around his neck, "Cut here." And, uh, but he helped us. He got us gone. So in our mind, he, and we had Wagner and Russo, two other instructors for the O5B. And so when they got to know us, near the end, it's like, "Hey, you guys go. Don't do this volunteer stuff. Get in A camp, learn about the people, blah, blah, blah." Okay. That's what it came down to. So when we get that briefing, the top secret briefing, and one of the first things we hear about from scuttlebutt, Paul

• 16:23John Stryker Meyer?

  Villa Rosa was KIA, the first KIA out of FOB4 at the time, which was in January of 68. So here's one of our living legends who got us in the SF, trained us up, is KIA. And that had us, you know, talk about psyops. It hit hard.

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  But you, but, so that was in Vietnam when they, for, when they now said to you, "Okay, do you want to be a part of this other program?"

• 16:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 16:50Jocko Willink?

  "Do you want to go one more volunteer route and end up here?"

• 16:53John Stryker Meyer?

  Yes, sir.

• 16:54Jocko Willink?

  And of course, you're like, "Yeah, let's bring it."

• 16:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Let's go.

• 16:58John Stryker Meyer?

  Young and dumb.

• 17:00Jocko Willink?

  And then, so then, so then you immediately got assigned?

• 17:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Right, right away.

• 17:05Jocko Willink?

  Did they have to test you, screen you, anything, anything else? Or they just said, oh, cool, you're, you're smart enough to volunteer?

• 17:09John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, by that time, all the vetting had been done. And all of us either had the top secret or it was in process. And so from there, literally the next day, a plane to Da Nang up north. And then we had the briefing. And of course, you know, we had a safe house at Da Nang where there's, there's house 22. That's our safe house. And welcome to special forces, you know? And that was a safe house that was run by either us or the agency or both. And you know, you go in and here's old SF guys. In fact, there was one of the teams that just got back from trying to rescue one of our hatchet forces. And they were just sitting there talking about the combat.

• 17:52John Stryker Meyer?

  And Mac and I are sitting there going, oh shit, we're gonna really die. It's a good thing we spent all our money. Cause we, because when we were going through the RT and T training, we had a weekend pass. We go up, we're in Washington, when we see the TED offensive and the tanks are running over Langvee, the A camp at Langvee A 101. And we go, we, we know we're gonna die with high degree of certainty. So we went home, took our money out of the bank, all of our princely earnings of a thousand dollars. We ate steak dinners until we went to Vietnam. So there we were at this house 22. And we're thinking about the same thing as going, oh shit, we're really into it now. And so we go upstairs, take showers.

• 18:32John Stryker Meyer?

  And in the showers, a couple of these hookers that are in there, douching out with Coke, Coca-Cola.

• 18:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 18:38John Stryker Meyer?

  And they're cleaning up, just like welcoming. You hear a couple of guys getting a load in the back there and they're all pumping away. It's like, oh, this is really cool. They didn't tell us about this side of Vietnam.

• 18:49Jocko Willink?

  Here we go.

• 18:50John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, so bring it on, we're ready.

• 18:52Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then you, you talk about that flight up to, the first place you got assigned was, was FOB 1?

• 19:00John Stryker Meyer?

  FOB 1, yeah, sorry, we, we always called him FOB where you guys call it FOB in your generation.

• 19:05Jocko Willink?

  I guess we're, I guess we're cutting corners over here. Okay, so you're going to FOB 1?

• 19:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Call it anything you like, still getting you late for supper.

• 19:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, there's a whole, there's a whole, there's a whole offshoot of the word FOB, which we turned into FOB. Have you ever heard the term FOB it before?

• 19:21John Stryker Meyer?

  Yes.

• 19:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so someone that stays on the FOB and never goes out.

• 19:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 19:27John Stryker Meyer?

  Also known as a REMS.

• 19:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, yes, the REMS is, is, is what you guys called them. And I don't know if you, the, the name of my consulting company is Echelon Front. And the reason we called the company Echelon Front is because we wanted people to know that we were the guys that were like in the front and not, not the, not the REMS. Which is specifically taken from David Hackworth's book.

• 19:47John Stryker Meyer?

  Indeed, yes.

• 19:48Jocko Willink?

  Read a ton, read a ton of times.

• 19:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, me too.

• 19:51Jocko Willink?

  How was, yeah, awesome. And flying up into FOB one.

• 19:56John Stryker Meyer?

  Right, with the King Bee.

• 19:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, how, how was that?

• 19:58John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, God, it was.

• 20:01John Stryker Meyer?

  It's just another day in the secret war, you know, because they had the old H thirty fours. And so the pilots sit up high and then you had the, the apartment in the back for the passengers and there's a door gunner. So when McIntyre, me and John Hutchins get on the H thirty fours, the door is only on the right side. So we all get in and I see the helicopter pilot gone, I mean, the gunner gone.

• 20:26Jocko Willink?

  Was the gunner Vietnamese?

• 20:28John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, this is all Vietnamese crew.

• 20:29Jocko Willink?

  Were you, were you ready for that mentally?

• 20:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Not at all.

• 20:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 20:33John Stryker Meyer?

  It's like, yeah.

• 20:34Jocko Willink?

  Cause.

• 20:34John Stryker Meyer?

  There's one more novelty.

• 20:36Jocko Willink?

  Important note to make to everyone so that the, the aircraft is being flown by a Vietnamese pilot with a Vietnamese copilot and a Vietnamese gunner.

• 20:43John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, it was the two nineteen special operations squadron for the South Vietnamese Air Force. And all pilots. And so. You know, our training was we were going to work with the people there, the indigenous people. But when you literally climb into their helicopter and your life is now in their hands. That's like, you know, we didn't, I'm glad you mentioned that, cause I didn't really think about it much, but it was taking those couple steps, jumping in and going like. Now WTF two? What's going on here now? I thought we have, you know, like Huey, like we've seen in the movie with John Wayne. They all had Hueys, none of this old H thirty four Sikorsky thing. And that has it, and the engine in that was a B-17 rotary engine.

• 21:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and we're going to get into the fact of how those guys proved themselves over and over and over and over again to be just incredibly brave and not not just incredibly good pilots, but just brave beyond comprehension. When you were flying up there, was it was it a mellow flight up there?

• 21:45John Stryker Meyer?

  It was cool. Yeah, it was a beautiful day. You know, it's warm like it's always hot, but once you get air, you get the flow. You know how it is when you're flying through. And we gone over to Cemeteries and everything and we're going down Highway one, which is heading north from Da Nang up to Fubai. And we went past the Fubai Airport. And so we're flying north on the west side of the Highway one. And you see the airport and then there's this big compound, which was the second, uh, Armin Division Training Company. And then all of a sudden, it's like you're flying north and then you're on your side, looking straight down at the road. You did a 90 degree flip as it begins to turn.

• 22:24John Stryker Meyer?

  So I seen the guy talking, the door gunner like doing a scrunchy thing, you know, because we all had our new fatigues and you could just tell we're newbies. Disgusting newbies, green ass green berets, man, this guy's going to have his kick. So I was kind of thinking something's going to happen. Well, this is it. Well, McAtar goes, Jesus, you know, and Hutchins goes the same way. And I'm watching the guy.

• 22:48John Stryker Meyer?

  So we did the, you know, you look down, there's the road. And it's the first time we had a helicopter with that kind of a radical ride. And so he did a 180, then came back and did a 360 and landed. We get off. Well, we get off and then a recon team gets on.

• 23:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Disappears.

• 23:06Jocko Willink?

  Was that was that Spike Team Idaho that got on?

• 23:09John Stryker Meyer?

  Correct, yes, sir.

• 23:10Jocko Willink?

  So, so that happens.

• 23:12John Stryker Meyer?

  The one zero, that's the bracelet right there.

• 23:14Jocko Willink?

  And that does the, you got off that bird that brought you into FOB one?

• 23:18John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Jocko Willink?

  And that, and it was Spike Team Idaho that got on board.

• 23:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Yep. Glenn Lane was the one zero and Robert Owen was the one one with four indigenous troops or five indigenous troops.

• 23:29Jocko Willink?

  And, and so you start your check in and whatever, and then whatever, however many hours goes by.

• 23:36John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 23:36Jocko Willink?

  And all of a sudden, what's happening on camp when you start to realize that something's going sideways?

• 23:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, you know, I was very fortunate. When I went with the training group, I was a catcher and played center field for a company softball team. And we went undefeated that summer. And the reason why Spider Parks, Robert J. Spider Parks was our pitcher. And that little skinny ass Texan could bring it. And we still played fast pitch. None of this wimpy, slow pitch shit. And so we won our games. And so I come in, we land McIntyre and I in Hutchins and we're like literally walking in front of the S3 office. Just, it had a long road that went from highway one east into the compound. The training center's on the right. It's all new. We hear the Vietnamese and we hear Cambodians on the left. If we go down and we get in and take our stuff out, we're just standing looking stupid.

• 24:25John Stryker Meyer?

  And then here comes Spider Parks. And it's like, whoa, am I glad to see you? Cause we, he was, we were both in a company together. Spent many months there training up before we came.

• 24:35Jocko Willink?

  And now he, but he wasn't the one that told you what was going on with, uh?

• 24:39John Stryker Meyer?

  No, cause right at that point it was like, hey, you know, I got a spare bunk. If he goes in, talks to this Sergeant Major, says, I know this asshole. I'm going to bring him in with me for a couple of days and we'll see what's going to happen. Cause at that point, uh, Spider had been on Idaho, had run four or five missions with Sergeant Lane. And then Lane said, you're ready for your own team. So he promotes him off. They appoint him as a one zero. And so he was in that interim time, waiting for the transition to come where he's going to get assigned to team. And, uh, so he's in base, team goes out. So he's got a high degree of interest in what, what their status is. So they missed the first combo check. They gave a team. Okay. Which in our case, once you're on the ground,

• 25:22John Stryker Meyer?

  you usually wait about 10 minutes to see what's going on around you. Gave a team. Okay. Then the assets leave because they can't stay that long anyway. At least the helicopters. Do they head back?

• 25:32Jocko Willink?

  Which the team OK was uh break and squelch on the radio?

• 25:36John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 25:36Jocko Willink?

  Generally?

• 25:37John Stryker Meyer?

  Generally speaking, yeah.

• 25:38Jocko Willink?

  So for those of you that don't know what that is, when you break, you squeeze the handset on the radio, it you can tell on the other end, OK, they just purposefully squeeze that microphone three times. We know that that's the signal for OK.

• 25:51John Stryker Meyer?

  Right. And sometimes like early on, the guys may say um team OK, but yeah, later on, that's all it was. Just break, break. And then they say, OK, then Covey would leave.

• 26:04John Stryker Meyer?

  So they were in and then Spider came back later, he goes, hey, we haven't heard from Idaho. So by dinnertime, hey, we haven't heard about Idaho. We haven't heard from them. We're really concerned about what's going on here. And then by the morning, uh they're still at that point, not not a word.

• 26:22Jocko Willink?

  And what at what point did you guys get word?

• 26:25John Stryker Meyer?

  Uh, you know what? I'm hazy on how many, what the day or timeframe was, but eventually uh another, they decided that it's been too long, no commo. They put in what they call a bright light, which is a team that's goes in to either find the other team. If there's casualties or down pilots. That's what the bright light missions were. Down pilots, uh bring relief or just bring casualties out or help people get the team out, the wounded team. So they went in, the team that went in, everybody was wounded, one guy was killed.

• 26:56Jocko Willink?

  This is from the team that went in?

• 26:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Went in for the bright light.

• 26:58Jocko Willink?

  This is this is uh Oregon?

• 27:00John Stryker Meyer?

  Correct.

• 27:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 27:01John Stryker Meyer?

  With uh Mike Tucker and uh and George the Troll Sternberg. They went in and at one point they were thrown a hand, they were in a bomb crater. And so the NVA were hitting them with our weapons, car 15 fire. They had our M 26 frag grenades, one of which blew off George's jungle boot. So all these guys were really banged up pretty bad when they came out. But they got out.

• 27:26Jocko Willink?

  And they but they didn't find anybody from Idaho?

• 27:29John Stryker Meyer?

  Correct.

• 27:32Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna take it back to the book here.

• 27:35Jocko Willink?

  This is sort of the, this is, this is the reaction back at FOB 1. When Oregon comes back. "Back at base, there was a collective sigh of relief that ST Oregon had survived the short-lived, but furious, but ferocious Bright Light mission. The loss of ST Idaho, however, hung over the camp like an invisible fog.

• 27:59Jocko Willink?

  Spider was the first person I spoke to after that Bright Light. He went straight to the bar, unable to believe that ST Idaho had vanished. The complete lack of clues added to the mystery. Were they killed? Were they wounded, captured, and now prisoners of the NVA? McIntyre voiced everyone's next thought. Before he'd be captured by the NVA, he said he'd kill himself with a round from his Car 15 or pretend to be dead and blow up as many NVA as possible with one final hand grenade. There was no doubt in my mind. I'd never be taken alive. From that day forward, I always carried an M26 frag grenade on the upper hook of my web gear. It was the last one I'd used, I would use."

• 28:45Jocko Willink?

  "Welcome to CNC," McIntyre muttered.

• 28:50Jocko Willink?

  We had heard about ST ASP from FOB 4, vanishing in Laos, presumed KIA on 28 March 1968. But there were others. Sergeant 1st Class Robert L. Taylor, killed 4 April. ST Bear from FOB 3, KIA, Laos. Major George Cuomo, U-17 crash, died 14 April. FOB 5 Base Spike Team Member Sergeant 1st Class Leroy N. Wright and Staff Sergeant Lloyd F. Musao, KIA, Fishhook area of Cambodia, 2 May. FOB 2 Base Lieutenant Joseph C. Shreve, KIA, Hatchet Force Operation, 1 May."

• 29:37Jocko Willink?

  FOB 1 based ST Alabama, team members Specialist 5th Class Kenneth M. Cryon and Private 1st Class Paul Chester King, KIA A-10 Target 4 May. FOB 1 Hatchet 4 Sergeant 1st Class Ronald J. Miller, KIA 12 May. FOB 1 based Master Sergeant Robert D. Plato and Sergeant 1st Class John Hartley Robertson, KIA King B Helicopter Crash Laos 20 May. Additionally, 5 SF troops were killed at FOB 3 from mortar and artillery shrapnel between 15 and 21 April 1968.

• 30:21Jocko Willink?

  Specialist 5th Class Charles M. Corey, Specialist 5th Class Daniel F. Sandoval, Sergeant Dennis Thorpe, Sergeant 1st Class Stefan Mazak, and Specialist 5th Class Samuel R. Hughes.

• 30:38Jocko Willink?

  McIntyre and I didn't personally know any of the KIA's, but the sheer number in that short period of time was sobering. Most of them were veteran Special Forces soldiers. Being as green as we were made us all the more nervous, but not scared enough to quit CNC.

• 31:02Jocko Willink?

  That's quite the welcome aboard.

• 31:07John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah, and then one little side note on Spider Parks, on that bright light, when the team came out, they were so shot up because one of the team members got additionally wounded on the extraction, that they never gave a team okay. Spider went down with a King B, separate King B, got out, looking to make sure everybody was out. And they took intense fire, that King B got fired up, and on extraction, the door gunner was KIA on that. So Spider was quite a mess when he got back.

• 31:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that was such a short period of time to be losing all those guys. That's a matter of months.

• 31:51John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. And we left several out.

• 31:58Jocko Willink?

  So, these, uh, these Spike teams going in, will you explain a little bit about what the Spike teams were? Like what it consisted of?

• 32:07John Stryker Meyer?

  The Spike teams was a code name for our recon teams. It had two basic elements with CNC. The hatchet force, which could be a company platoon or a company sized operation. And then the recon teams, which we had, would be two or three Americans with the corresponding number of indigenous troops. So initially, we ran three Americans with three South Vietnamese. And the South Vietnamese in our team were really good. And then later, they were so good, I just ran myself on a one-on-one with four indigenous. And, uh, we trained up heavily, particularly after that, and then, uh,

• 32:51John Stryker Meyer?

  learned who the best ones were. And we had a couple of the guys that had been like HEP, our interpreter, Sal, who had been there, they'd been running missions for over two years by 68. So they were highly respected. In fact, um, only by the grace of God, they weren't on the team that disappeared. Cause we were able to build around them.

• 33:12Jocko Willink?

  You have this other part in the book here. This is another sort of welcome to FOB one. During the, during the first few weeks in FOB one, I attended at least three memorial services for fallen SF comrades. Services were held in the mess hall. The last one I attended was for Lane and Owens. During the service, the chaplain hesitated on Lane's name. This was the last official function honoring Spike Team Idaho's members. And the chaplain couldn't remember Lane's name. I didn't care if he had attended a dozen memorial services for other branches of the military that day. I was so angry, I never attended another memorial service at FOB one. The services soon stopped anyway because there were so many casualties. No official announcement.

• 33:59Jocko Willink?

  They just stopped.

• 34:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you and I were talking a little bit about Ramadi when we were in Ramadi and the, you know, one thing that we started doing immediately was going to the memorial services of the soldiers and Marines that were getting killed and that was a big wake-up call for everybody. I can tell you, I don't think probably anyone in my task unit had ever been to a

• 34:29Jocko Willink?

  yeah, had ever been to a memorial service overseas for guys that have been killed. I mean, and here we were, they were happening every day.

• 34:36John Stryker Meyer?

  You never think about it.

• 34:37Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 34:37John Stryker Meyer?

  Until you're there.

• 34:38Jocko Willink?

  No. And you guys were having so many casualties that they just said, okay, well, we're not even gonna have them anymore.

• 34:50Jocko Willink?

  Here's, talking about some of your first few operations that you went on. And I don't think I've talked about this, but so these little teams that you had.

• 35:01John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Jocko Willink?

  These little teams were getting into helicopters and flying over the fence, which means over the border into Laos and Cambodia to do reconnaissance, pretty much in the middle of nowhere by yourselves.

• 35:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Correct.

• 35:24Jocko Willink?

  This type of operation in present day is not very likely to happen. The amount of risk that you guys were taking, it's crazy to read about. Like my, my personal contingency that I'm running through my head, you know, what if this happened? What if that happens?

• 35:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 35:41Jocko Willink?

  I'm looking at these saying, yeah, if I was the commander in charge, I'd say, well, you need to come up with a better plan. You need to come up with something where we have better backup, especially when the situation is, because you guys can get air support and you guys used it heavily, but as soon as the weather rolled in, it was like you guys are out there on your own. And I mean, we'll get into some stories where you're out there on your own.

• 36:02John Stryker Meyer?

  For sure. And, you know, and

• 36:06John Stryker Meyer?

  it's that, that element of it is an extra contingency. We had no artillery, no traditional army or Marine Corps support. And of course, no SEAL teams.

• 36:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:18John Stryker Meyer?

  They were busy doing their stuff on the coast. And so it was quite something, go across the fence. And in a way, we were flying into the 18th century. Because everything was so old, the way of working. And they used to do slash and burn agriculture. So you come in with the helicopter. Everybody would hear you coming. And the local people had to cooperate with the NVA or because their motto was, "Work with us or we're gonna kill your dumb ass." So, um, the game was on.

• 36:51Jocko Willink?

  And the purpose of most of these was to figure out where the trails were, what was being transported, where the location of enemy personnel were. It was ba- it was your basic reconnaissance missions, right?

• 37:01John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, in addition, yes, that was the first part. So you always had general missions. Either a point mission, uh, cause by the end of 68, they were building fuel lines from the north. They were coming down. They were going across the DMZ River in Laos. And, uh, so we heard reports about that. So that could be a point mission or a general recon to see where the movement's gone, what the supplies are. And then wiretaps, POW snatch, and, uh, those were the other missions. And so our, our South Vietnamese were trained. We trained them up. So back then we had Stade Ar, a cassette player, right?

• 37:41John Stryker Meyer?

  And Sal could climb up a telephone pole, hook it up and then cover the wire all the way up with mud. So if anybody walked past, they would never see that wire. And we would record, cause the CIA told us, if you record, even though you don't hear anything, keep it on. Cause when you get the taste back to us, we're gonna amplify it a hundred times. Cause the North Vietnamese phones, even though we're in the cradle, they were still on. And we could record it. They'd amplify and then you hear people talking in the background, get intel off of that. So those are some of the other missions.

• 38:16Jocko Willink?

  So you start going on your first few operations here. Um, and by the next morning, back to the book, by the next morning, the weather had broken and we were inserted smack dab in the middle of the biggest road running north to south through the Ashao Valley. Am I saying that right?

• 38:29John Stryker Meyer?

  Ashao.

• 38:30Jocko Willink?

  Ashao Valley.

• 38:32Jocko Willink?

  Uh, there was no jungle. There were, however, hundreds of bomb craters of various sizes. But what surprised me the most was the number of punji pits that we passed. Some were huge, large enough for animals. And you go through this mission, this is one of your first missions, and there's like no enemy contact. And one of the guys who was walking and I looked at each other in complete disbelief. We had just walked down into the valley of the shadow of death without seeing one NVA soldier. Spider joked with me saying that I was one of the few people in the history of CNC to have a run a practice mission and two missions and still have not gotten the combat infantryman's badge. The award given to soldiers who had seen combat with the enemy or were under direct hostile fire.

• 39:15Jocko Willink?

  I kept telling myself that this was a fluke and I remembered what the special forces trainers told us at Fort Bragg. The NVA and the Vietcong guerrillas will fight when they want to, no sooner.

• 39:27Jocko Willink?

  So your first couple of operations, you got pretty, uh, pretty lucky.

• 39:30John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah, we're a snail snout. We went in because we put in those air force sensors and then we had all this air, tac air stacked up. Cause we just figured it's gonna be a shit show. Nothing happened. So we left out some poor, some poor NVA gunner opens up with a 50 caliber. They killed him several times, man. Napalm, bombs, because they wanted to use something on this big mission, right?

• 39:56Jocko Willink?

  Were you, uh, the other interesting, you talk about in the book, uh, I don't think it was one of yours, but there were, even when you guys would do training missions over there, there was like a potential for enemy contact on your training missions.

• 40:05John Stryker Meyer?

  Absolutely. Yeah, Lynn Black and his team, they ran a heavy contact. In fact, it was the Navy that saved their dumb ass. Although one training mission, because they just happened to have the frequency, the Kinkies couldn't get in. And they called the Navy and they came in, I don't know, a big boat.

• 40:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:24John Stryker Meyer?

  But they came in and pulled their ass out because they, the Vietcong had mustered a couple hundred people that were coming after them.

• 40:30Jocko Willink?

  And they, they were just out trying to do like a shakeout patrol, just a little training operation.

• 40:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, just a little in-country thing, you know, just go train, get a couple of days, get out of camp, eat some, eat some lerps, have some fun.

• 40:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, your, uh, your luck didn't hold up, I guess. Going back to the book and is this guy's name Sal? Am I saying that right? Perfect. Okay. By now Sal's eyes were bigger than sauces. So you've been inserted and now you're starting to have a situation unfold. If you raise Spider Walken said, tell him I'm declaring prairie fire emergency. If he says anything about not hearing any gunshots, tell him to fuck off. I'll explain later. Sal's never been wrong. Look at him. As we spoke, Sal looked at us. Boku VC, Boku VC, call King bees now, he whispered. And then you get on the horn. I have a prairie fire emergency. Team in distress. I have a prairie fire emergency. Can anyone hear me?

• 41:29Jocko Willink?

  I spoke in a hushed tone with my hand cupped over the mouth of the radio. I looked at my watch. We still had more than a hundred minutes before our next scheduled commo check with Spider at sixteen hundred. No one responded.

• 41:45Jocko Willink?

  So the, the deal with comm windows are back in the day when we had batteries that would run out. You couldn't just sit there and monitor the radio all the time on either side. People that were waiting for you to call, they'd be waiting and they didn't want to, they, they wouldn't monitor the whole time. So they would come up at certain pre-designated communication windows. So that's what's going on here. You have this bad situation unfolding and you go to call, but they're not particularly listening at that moment, which is why no one's responding. Right. Yeah. I'm just explaining that to some folks that, because nowadays we have, well, first of all, we have cell phones where we call anyone, whatever we want. It makes a nice ringtone and you talk to whoever you want to. But even when I got in, we had comm windows. Oh, is that right? Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, we set up, I was a comm guy too.

• 42:30Jocko Willink?

  Sure, yeah. We set up comm windows and we'll call you, you know, whatever it was every two hours or whatever. And that's the situation that's unfolding right here.

• 42:40Jocko Willink?

  You guys still hadn't been contacted yet, so back to the book. I sat down with my back against the PRC-25 and opened a can of apricots. I was facing south and just starting to sip the sweet apricot nectar when all hell broke loose. The green jungle around us erupted with deafening full automatic blasts from NVA AK-47s and R-CAR-15s. Because my back was to them, I hadn't seen Sal's warning gestures or watched him get the jump on the approaching NVA. I remember spilling apricot nectar on the stock of my CAR-15 as I turned to my left where the majority of the NVA gunfire was coming from.

• 43:18Jocko Willink?

  Foolishly, my first thoughts were that I'd have to clean off the nectar off my weapon and not spill the entire can of apricots because I had waited so damn long to eat them. They were always a treat in the jungle.

• 43:33Jocko Willink?

  But the initial seconds of the firefight, I remember Sal and, how do I say his name? Fook? What? Oh, Fook, yes. Fook yelling profanities at the NVA as they fired on full automatic. The crack of AK-47 rounds had never sounded louder or closer. All I could see from our perimeter was gunsmoke, the red and orange blasts coming from the darker-than-ever green jungle, and the green AK-47 tracers flying over our heads. In an odd sort of way, there was an eerie beauty to the scene. The thunderous fury of dozens of men blasting away at each other on full automatic within 10 feet of each other killed all other sounds. The eardrums were numb. Adrenaline had slammed into our bloodstreams and was now screaming through our systems. It heightened all senses. It extended time.

• 44:16Jocko Willink?

  For example, a CAR-15 fires 20 rounds of 556 high-velocity ammunition in less than 1.5 seconds. Yet those first opening moments of combat with the NVA seemed much longer than a half a second, than a second and a half. Ordinarily, when firing on full automatic, the weapon expended rounds quickly and we trained ourselves to try and gauge when that last round in the magazine was slamming into the receiver. Some men placed a tracer round in the magazine as a visual cue. During that firefight, it seemed as though I counted the rounds leaving the CAR-15 and knew exactly when the 18th and last round was exiting the weapon. Also during that first exchange, Fook was slightly behind me to my right and since I was on the ground, he was firing over my shoulder.

• 45:00Jocko Willink?

  That exposed my right ear to almost a full blast from his CAR-15. The explosions were painful, but Fook saved my life. I had aimed the Kar-15 down the hill toward the largest number of AK-47 muzzle flashes that I could see to my left. What I hadn't seen were a handful of, a handful of NVA soldiers who broke out of the jungle to the right and had opened fire on us. Fook realized I hadn't seen the NVA troops coming up the hill, so he got to my right and blasted them back into the jungle. I was so focused on the first muzzle flashes that I completely missed the others. If those NVA soldiers had advanced a few more feet, we would have been history. And the remainder of the team, which was on my left, would have been at risk.

• 45:41Jocko Willink?

  That time warp continued when everybody ran out of bullets simultaneously. The only audible, the only sounds audible were the metal clicks of cold magazines being slammed into hot machine guns and bolts slamming shut to resume the firefight. A key element in any firefight is the race to reload after the initial contact. On 7 October 1968, ST Idaho won the race. No one was faster than sow heap hep hep Fook at getting the first magazine out, the second one in, and returning full automatic gunfire on the enemy. Within seconds, we had gained fire superiority. The months and months of training on the range under the tutelage of Spider and Wilken,

• 46:27Jocko Willink?

  all of the live fire drills, all the live fire races to see who finished reloading first, paid off. All other games in life were frivolous and irrelevant. In this deadly game, if you missed hitting the target, you died.

• 46:45Jocko Willink?

  So that was your first big contact, huh?

• 46:47John Stryker Meyer?

  That was it.

• 46:48Jocko Willink?

  That's a doozy.

• 46:50John Stryker Meyer?

  It was, absolutely. And it still sticks with us, you know, you'll never forget it. And Fook, I mean, later on, we're back in base. I was complaining, because I didn't realize what had happened. And so, talking through hep, the interpreter, he said, "You dumb fucker. I just saved your ass. These guys were coming up the hill and you're too stupid to realize it."

• 47:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you were mad at him for shooting too close to your ear?

• 47:13John Stryker Meyer?

  Because my ear was just fucked. I couldn't hear for days.

• 47:17John Stryker Meyer?

  It's like, so thanks for saving my life. I'm complaining, right?

• 47:22Jocko Willink?

  Uh, classic.

• 47:23John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:24Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you continue on with this a little bit as, as we gained complete fire superiority, I turned on the U R C ten beeper and started screaming into the P R C twenty five. I have a fucking prairie fire emergency. That bitter fear laced plea was greeted with complete silence. Woken was less than subtle. Keep yelling until you get someone. A key factor in S T Idaho's favor that day was the small knoll that Woken has driven us to. The jungle is so thick and the knoll is so small that only a score of N V A could rush at once. They weren't move, they weren't fast moving. Fear inspiring charges that the N V A were known for successfully executing either. Here the jungle worked against them, but the N V A kept coming.

• 48:05Jocko Willink?

  At one point, Woken pulled me over, pointed into the jungle and said, look, they're stacking up dead bodies to get to us. Hip showed me. Can you believe it? And they keep coming. Hell, if we kill enough of them, the body stack will be as high as we are. Because the jungle area was so dark, at first I couldn't tell exactly what I was looking at, but Woken was right. The N V A were stacking bodies and firing at us from behind their dead comrades. A lot of N V A soldiers died in those first few minutes of hell on earth.

• 48:39Jocko Willink?

  That's a determined enemy.

• 48:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. And we heard about, you know, it's one thing to, to hear about it basic and, and, uh, special forces training, how determined the enemy was.

• 48:52John Stryker Meyer?

  And, uh, to see it firsthand, dying like that, I mean, Lily just kept coming. And we had high ground. You know, thank God for high ground, thick jungle, and the fact that it wasn't, uh, a big, a big area where they could mass more.

• 49:06Jocko Willink?

  You guys didn't bring a, you guys didn't have an automatic weapon with you? You guys didn't have an A dub like a, like a, like a belt fed machine gun? You guys wouldn't carry those?

• 49:14John Stryker Meyer?

  No, we had a six, well, in their case, a six man team. And the, uh, the teams, some of the teams began carrying the, uh, M60 a little later. And then, uh, the RPG. Cause they cut the barrel off and it had the, um, the magazine, the, uh, circular, um, magazine that holds, I think it's 200, 250 rounds.

• 49:35Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 49:36John Stryker Meyer?

  But they would, some of them did it, but in our case, because we carried the M79 also, the solid off M79. Cause that gave you a lot of extra firepower.

• 49:44Jocko Willink?

  Did you use the flechet rounds with that or just the, just the HE?

• 49:47John Stryker Meyer?

  The first round would be flechet. So if anything was close, that would be the first round. And then if we needed the HEs, we had the HE rounds.

• 49:55Jocko Willink?

  But no AWs, man, that's it. This, I, I, when I hear that story right there, I would do anything to have an M60 machine gun.

• 50:02John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

• 50:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 50:06John Stryker Meyer?

  But just the weight, the rounds and everything else, you know, like in my case, I carried the radio, always carried the radio.

• 50:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 50:12John Stryker Meyer?

  And so between the radio, the battery, and we always had 600 plus rounds.

• 50:16Jocko Willink?

  We were, um, we, I was on my first deployment to Iraq. I was on like one of my first patrols in Humvees and we were out. And we, we ended up, we hit a, uh, a little, I don't know what you call them, a steel hedgehog. Do you know what that is?

• 50:33John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Jocko Willink?

  It's like a little obstacle, right?

• 50:34John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 50:35Jocko Willink?

  That Americans had put out, Americans had put out a steel hedgehog, a little, it's like a little obstacle for those of you don't know. It's to prevent cars from going by.

• 50:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 50:43Jocko Willink?

  Well, we were, we, we made a wrong turn somewhere and we went down a road we weren't supposed to go to. And we hit, uh, one of those little steel hedgehogs. We didn't know what it was. So we're driving along, it's actually my Humvee too, and it, it made a loud noise and sparked. And I actually thought, in my mind, I thought we just got hit with a low order IED, like a low order booby, booby trap that didn't fully explode. So we come to a stop and we all get out of the vehicles and now we're in the middle of Baghdad. And we're just surrounded by threats. And in our mind, we're about to be attacked because we didn't know that we just ran over our own American thing, but we're too stupid to know that.

• 51:20John Stryker Meyer?

  You don't know.

• 51:21Jocko Willink?

  We don't know that. So everyone's out there and we're all out there with our, with our M4s, our little basically Car 15s. And you, like, I felt, I think, I felt completely naked. I was saying to myself, God, you know, like, we need better weapons. Now, we had 50 cal's mounted in the Humvees, but you know, once we were mobile, I'm thinking, we, why don't we have, why don't we have, you know, belt fed machine guns? When I got, when we got back that night, it wasn't just me that felt like, because that, because that night, all my guys, they went in every Humvee, everyone put belt fed machine guns, we mounted them, we staged them. So anytime we got out of those vehicles, we, we were ready to go to war.

• 51:56John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 51:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Particularly in a situation like that, because you have unlimited people coming after you.

• 52:01Jocko Willink?

  It's nuts. But yet that naked feeling, yeah, because an AW in a situation like this, oof, that'd be nice. Going back to the book, for more than an hour, my cries and screams into the radio and the URC 10 beeper went unanswered as the NVA mounted more attacks. There was no need for radio secure procedures. Now, the hide and seek portion of the game was over. Now it was simply a matter of survival. My respect for the NVA's tenacity grew that day, but the hill, the jungle in our Car 15s worked against them as they continued to pile up or drag away more bodies. With no help around conserving ammo while keeping the enemy back became a top priority. There were no more full automatic blasts from us, although we had been in contact less

• 52:45Jocko Willink?

  than two hours, it felt like we'd been fighting for several. As the team anxiously awaited for help from above, the few team members pitted against the enemy NVA seemed ludicrous in terms of survival. The enormity of the jungle hit home. Yeah, so you got, how many rounds did you say you would bring?

• 53:05John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, we always carried 600 plus.

• 53:07Jocko Willink?

  Per man?

• 53:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, no. The Vietnamese would carry a lighter load because they could, they only were like 98 pounds.

• 53:13Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 53:14John Stryker Meyer?

  So I forget what their load was.

• 53:16Jocko Willink?

  And you guys had 20 round magazines at this point, right?

• 53:18John Stryker Meyer?

  Correct. No, 30 were just a dream we thought about. And a couple of guys were smart enough to write to Colt, order them, and they had to mail to them later. We weren't that smart. So we had the 20 rounds, but because of the spring, you only put 18 in.

• 53:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Oof. And so you're taking at this, at some point, probably, how long into this are you starting to take point shots instead of?

• 53:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. You just wait until things come out, you see it, and then just one, two.

• 53:48Jocko Willink?

  Finally, I heard the Texas drawl of Spider on the radio. An F-4 Phantom jet returning from a bombing run in northern Laos had heard the beeper and called him. I told Spider we had a prairie fire emergency. Spider said that he had also called the judge and the executioner. Who were the judge and the executioner?

• 54:07John Stryker Meyer?

  They were pilots for the 176th out of Americal Division, and they were the muskets. And they had been assigned permanently to CNC earlier in the year, and they'd been up to Camp Duck. And then they'd been assigned, when Camp Duck was closed down, they came to Fubai, and they actually built the barracks that the helicopter pods could stay in. They were one of the crews, them and the Marine Corps, a Scarface, were gunships that regularly hung out with us and saved our bacon. So the judge, they had these old gunships that could barely get off the ground. But he had the rocket pods, and then the executioner was a cook, and he had the minigun.

• 54:52Jocko Willink?

  Those are some awesome call signs.

• 54:56John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:58Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, thankfully, we had made mirror contact with Spider earlier, and he was able to pinpoint our location in a matter of minutes. Soon Spider was over us. He told me to pop smoke. Our SOP was not to say what color smoke grenade we would use, assuming the NVA were monitoring our FM frequency. I popped a yellow smoke. He said he saw two yellows, which meant the NVA were monitoring our frequency and had guessed which color we would use. We changed frequencies, and I popped a violet smoke. A few minutes later, the first A-1E Skyraider arrived on target and made a gun run on our eastern perimeter. His wingman made the first napalm run on the south side. "Put your heads down, I'm gonna make you sweat," he said. He brought it so close, we could feel the heat from the deadly jelly.

• 55:42Jocko Willink?

  A few seconds later, we smelled burning flesh. He dived toward us a third time. The pilot drawled, "It's crispy critter time."

• 55:52Jocko Willink?

  The napalm run was so close, we could feel the air being sucked away from us by the exploding material. If the jelly had landed on a person's skin, it would continue to burn either until it burned itself out or was deprived of air by mud or some other substance. The spads arrival changed the tempo of the firefight. When the NVA heard the old World War II plane making another run, they charged us in a desperate attempt to get as close as they could in order to avoid the Skyraiders deadly ordinance. The NVA were getting close to the belt. That's horrifying. So for those that don't understand the tactics of that situation, you got aircraft overhead, they're dropping napalm. So what do the, you think, oh, cool, that'll make the NVA run away. No, actually, what they want to do is get close enough to Americans that they can't get napalm dropped on them.

• 56:37John Stryker Meyer?

  By 68, they had the tactic down really tight. They knew when the aircraft were there, that they were safer, closer to us. And then so they get closer, hopefully to wipe us out and to save their own ass.

• 56:49Jocko Willink?

  That's like, there's, I guess there's no higher motivation than napalm coming at you if you stay where you're at.

• 56:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Nasty.

• 56:59John Stryker Meyer?

  And so therefore, even at that stage of the game, we had to go back to full automatic a couple of times.

• 57:03Jocko Willink?

  Because they're charging hard.

• 57:05John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:06Jocko Willink?

  What numbers are we talking about?

• 57:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Never knew. We just stacked them up so high. We'd never had, you know, no time to go do a body count. You know how that is. You're just busy killing them.

• 57:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I don't want to throw that out, this all nonchalant, like, yeah, I know how that is. No, actually, we never stacked up bodies so high that we lost count.

• 57:25Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, then an Air Force pilot in an F-4 Phantom arrived on station. "Tell your people the ordinance will arrive on target before you hear me or the rounds", the pilot said. "I told the team to put their heads down. The phenomenon of having bullets tearing into a target before anyone could hear the aircraft which delivered them was unbelievable. The jungle in front of us was shredded by the F-4's gun run. Within a minute or two, his wingman dropped two 500-pound bombs. The change in aircraft staggered the NVA for a few moments. Right then and there, I thank the Lord for Uncle Sam's Air Force." The judge and the executioner rolled in right behind the fast mover. The judge's minigun was real close to our perimeter. Seconds later, the executioner followed behind him,

• 58:10Jocko Willink?

  firing several 2.75 millimeter rockets while his door gunners blasted away with their M60 machine guns. Because we hadn't expended any ordnance to our west, we ran the gunships over the western edge of our perimeter. They drew no enemy fire either.

• 58:27Jocko Willink?

  About a half an hour before dusk, Spider told us the King bees were on their way. By that time, the judge and the executioner had refueled, reloaded, and were returning a few minutes in front of them. Everyone in ST Idaho was dangerously low on ammo, grenades, and M79 rounds. So now you've got the extract platforms are coming back. The King bees are coming to get you.

• 58:51Jocko Willink?

  Before the King bees moved in and attempted to pick us up, Spider had the judge and the executioner make gun runs so close to our perimeter that we could hear the expended shell casings from the gunships, M60 and miniguns falling to earth. Through all the excitement, I told Walken that Spider had spotted an area west of our perimeter where a King bee might be able to settle into some elephant grass for us. Walken and Hip passed the word to the team, and we started moving toward the area. From our location, we couldn't see the elephant grass, and I had assumed we were locked into double or triple canopy jungle. Again, the judge and executioner hammered our eastern flank as we moved toward the tentative LZ.

• 59:33Jocko Willink?

  So I got to, or if you could explain Spider's position a little bit? Because that's pretty, I think that's pretty unique to Vietnam of how those guys could be up overhead, sort of watching and directing.

• 59:47John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, they're, we called them Covey. Their code name was Covey, C-O-V-E-Y. But they were the forward air controllers, basically. And in the CNC mission, you have an Air Force pilot. At that time, most of the Coveys were O2s, Cessna O2. They had a push-pull double engine. And, but they always would have.

• 1:00:11John Stryker Meyer?

  A prior one zero, somebody with experience who'd been on the ground, who would be with the air force pilot. So the pilot would fly, then he would turn the radios over so to Spider, or whoever the Covy rider was. But that was a slot. So sometimes the guys would be wounded, they couldn't go to the field, but they could fly Covy.

• 1:00:32Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:00:33John Stryker Meyer?

  So that when we're on the ground, we have a situation that we're dealing with, then he's able to understand as opposed to talking to an air force pilot.

• 1:00:41Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:00:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Who's just used to getting a bomb and drop it somewhere. And talk about the contingent liabilities that spin off of a firefight. And so that was Spider's job. He was the Covy rider. And he and Pat Watkins that day were the two Covy riders that came in, and they covered us until they got us out.

• 1:01:04Jocko Willink?

  Man, going back to the book, Sal and Hip were, covered our frantic desperate drive to the chopper. After taking 10 minutes to cover those last 10 yards, we reached the hovering King B, which is about eight feet above the ground. Fox set up an impromptu security watch on the western side of the rotor wash. A quick check of my ammunition revealed I was down to one frag grenade, one white phosphorus grenade, and two magazines of car 15 rounds. If I didn't get extracted, that last frag grenade would be mine. There was no way in hell I was going to be a POW, especially after all the NVA, ST Idaho, and Tac Air had killed. If I had to use it, I'd take as many NVA with me as I could.

• 1:01:55Jocko Willink?

  That's a bold statement.

• 1:01:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. But I just, by that time, we knew about POWs, what they'd gone through. And we had lost a couple of guys, and one of them had escaped. And they were, you know, by now, we're hearing the POW stories.

• 1:02:13Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:02:13John Stryker Meyer?

  So it's bad enough in country, but for our mission? No, wasn't gonna happen. I figured if this is it, I'm just trying to take as many as we can. Make it a final contact.

• 1:02:26Jocko Willink?

  Check. Now, you guys eventually get to where you're loading the the King bees, which again, these are Vietnamese pilots. They're old aircrafts.

• 1:02:39John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 1:02:40Jocko Willink?

  Probably look like they were held together with duct tape and.

• 1:02:45John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, they always had oil and fluids inside. And sometimes if you sat in too deep, you get the fluid on your head.

• 1:02:52John Stryker Meyer?

  But we liked them better than the Uy. Because they could take they could take more hits. And they had those old B seventeen engines up front. The nine rotary heads and they could take more hits. That's why we liked them.

• 1:03:07Jocko Willink?

  And this Captain Thin, is that how you say it?

• 1:03:09John Stryker Meyer?

  Captain Tin.

• 1:03:10Jocko Willink?

  Tin. At some point during the craziness, I looked up at the pilot of the King bee, Captain Tin. He was above all the madness on the ground, completely calm and collected while his aircraft took numerous hits from enemy rounds. What made his demeanor all the more extraordinary was how it contrasted with our adrenaline-hyped frantic behavior on the ground. We'd been fighting for hours. We were dirty, we were sweaty, and we were exhausted. And there sat Captain Tin, cool as a Rocky Mountain breeze, giving the impression that it was just another milk run. It was as though he said, no sweat, boys. I got all day. You just take your time. The stewardesses will break out the beverages after you've secured your seats. Looking at Captain Tin for a brief moment generated a mental image I'd carried with me forever.

• 1:03:55Jocko Willink?

  Frankly, I never understood how one man could be so steady under so much enemy fire and keep the chopper hovering.

• 1:04:05John Stryker Meyer?

  Can you imagine?

• 1:04:07John Stryker Meyer?

  To this day, I can't.

• 1:04:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and you go into a little bit further here. A day or two after the extraction, Captain Tin and his crew came into FOB 1's Green Beret Lounge. I went in and thanked him again and ordered a couple rounds of drink for all the King B pilots and crew members. Speaking through an interpreter, Captain Tin said the King B he flew to extract us from Echo 4 had 48 holes in it from enemy ordnance. Sitting at the bar, Captain Tin appeared to be just as cool and above the fray of daily life as he had on 7 October. Tin said that an enemy round had torn a baseball-sized hole through one of the rotor blades. I asked him how he could hover so long. He told me that when he piloted a helicopter, he thought only about flying, nothing else. No enemy bullets, weather, or anything.

• 1:04:54Jocko Willink?

  Only flying. If it's my turn to die, I die. That day wasn't my turn to die.

• 1:05:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Amazing man. He's uh, he lives in Arizona today.

• 1:05:07Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 1:05:08John Stryker Meyer?

  He's still alive, yeah.

• 1:05:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, we'll be having him on the podcast. Hopefully he wants to come on here.

• 1:05:15Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 1:05:19Jocko Willink?

  And then you had one of your guys, and this is, this is like the other end of the spectrum. Like, it's hard to maintain. One of your guys, Davidson, had to talk to you and he came up and he said, "Tilt." And I haven't mentioned that your nickname was Tilt yet. Where'd you get that nickname?

• 1:05:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Pinballs.

• 1:05:35John Stryker Meyer?

  See, when you play a pinball machine, you lose and walk away pissed off. When I lose, I shake the shit out of it. Get to see my nickname, Neon. Then I leave.

• 1:05:45Jocko Willink?

  How did the SF guys know about that? How'd they learn about it?

• 1:05:47John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, this goes way back. Yeah, as a kid, we used to play pinballs all the time.

• 1:05:53Jocko Willink?

  Little anger management issues.

• 1:05:54John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, indeed.

• 1:05:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So Davidson, he comes up, "Tilt, I have to tell you something, brother. I don't think I can do this. I survived DAC 2, brother, but I ain't seen, I ain't never seen shit like that before in my life. We were really lucky to survive that mission. I don't think I can go on. I hate to desert you, brother, but I think I want off the team." Now I understood that look on his face from the previous day. I told Davidson that I respected his decision and that I appreciate his frankness. I thought it took more courage to be honest in camp than to not say anything and go in the field. A man unsure in the field could get other

• 1:06:38Jocko Willink?

  team members hurt. I reiterated that he had performed well under fire in Echo Four. He hadn't run, he hadn't quit, and he had demonstrated exemplary courage during the entire mission. As we walked and talked, I put my hand on his shoulder. James, you and I in Walken did something few men in America will ever do. We survived Echo Four and all the NVA could throw at us. There were six of us against hundreds of North Vietnamese finists. We will always have a special bond, something no one can ever take away from us. Thanks again for your honesty. I asked him if he wanted me to talk to the Sergeant Major, or did he want to do it?

• 1:07:21Jocko Willink?

  Because he'd only been in camp a short while, he asked me if I wouldn't mind speaking to the Sergeant Major first. I agreed and asked him what sort of assignment he preferred. I don't know, brother. I'll need some time to get my head straight. And you have a note in here, 32 years later, I talked to James Davidson in New Orleans on a telephone. One of the things he said was, "Brother, I've never been the same since those two days in Laos."

• 1:07:50John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah. And getting back to Captain Tin for a moment, after he pulled us out, and we landed Phu Bai, I'd climb up and thank him, say, "Come on in, I'll get you a drink." He goes, "No, my family's waiting for me. They're holding dinner."

• 1:08:08John Stryker Meyer?

  No, and even on that extraction, that night, because it was right at sunset, and so when we pulled out, it's one of those beautiful scenes where it's a dark green, evergreen of the jungle, and all these little sparkling lights that are red with the green tracers coming up. If it hadn't been tracers, it was just a beautiful scene, but then you realize, hey, that's the NVA still trying to shoot our dumb ass down.

• 1:08:32John Stryker Meyer?

  And it was but then we flew, he headed south directly for a few minutes. We had the sunset. It was that sweet sunset. And it was at that point that Sal looked at me and gave me that look. That's all it was. So we we cut the mustard. So he, you know, because when I first got into camp, he looked at me when I came in, when Spider introduced me. He goes, he's too tall, his feet are too big and he looks stupid. It took me five months to get to get on his good side, but we finally got there in Echo Four.

• 1:09:06Jocko Willink?

  And all you had to do was just fend off a few hundred NVA.

• 1:09:09John Stryker Meyer?

  Together.

• 1:09:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's all it took. And and so Davidson, so this was a volunteer to get into the program and you could at any point say,

• 1:09:17John Stryker Meyer?

  Anytime you could quit. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And no dishonor to it.

• 1:09:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Always preferred because like with Lynn Black in in Chapter Six, when they came up against 10,000, one of his Americans, who was the son of a general, who was just there to try to get some medals for himself, never fired one round in anger and prayed during the entire day with his face in the ground. The Vietnamese were ready to kill him. So that's the kind of thing that you don't want.

• 1:09:44Jocko Willink?

  No, no, that's that's horrible.

• 1:09:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, these these contacts that you're getting in, I just, it's it's hard for me to get my head around. You know, to be out there like alone like that with with just really limited support, you know?

• 1:10:02John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah, there are days, but we had Uncle Sam's Air Force. And those door gunners were great.

• 1:10:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09John Stryker Meyer?

  Absolutely. And we had Scarface, you know, from the Marine Corps, and we had different units that were attached to us. And we're just really lucky. Whenever we called, they always came. And in fact, the one Scarface was Lieutenant Colonel Robinson. He pulled us out several times. After he pulled us out that one time, he got his Plexiglas shot out, the bird shot up. We get us back to food, but he chewed my ass. Every time we come to get you, he chewed my ass out. We go into the club, he still chewed my ass out. I bought him drinks, got him so drunk he couldn't walk, he had to fly.

• 1:10:43John Stryker Meyer?

  He's still chewing my ass. I said, Colonel, are you saying you're not going to come the next time? He said, I didn't say that. Every time you rang the bell, they came. But oh my God, they could barely, they were trying, the door guns would get out of the helicopter. They were like the B or D models, those really early U's. This is true with the muskets. The door guns had to get out and kind of lift the helicopter as they tried to get enough power to get off the ground because they're just so loaded with ordnance. Then they jump in once they got moving.

• 1:11:13John Stryker Meyer?

  Quite a sight.

• 1:11:15John Stryker Meyer?

  But they always came.

• 1:11:16Jocko Willink?

  And the other thing is that's weird is they didn't really have nighttime capability.

• 1:11:21John Stryker Meyer?

  None.

• 1:11:21Jocko Willink?

  Like anyone. So, well, I, it seems like, like nowadays, night is no factor for America.

• 1:11:29John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, I know. We would have run over our mother for one of those nods.

• 1:11:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. But for you guys, once the sun went down, it was hard to get picked up. It was hard to call for fire. It seemed that way.

• 1:11:43John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:45John Stryker Meyer?

  No doubt.

• 1:11:45Jocko Willink?

  And then you were racing the sun.

• 1:11:48John Stryker Meyer?

  Mother Nature always. Yeah. She's a, she's a key player between the weather and the sunset.

• 1:11:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. That's the other scary thing is, I mean, you, you know, this is something I usually say early on, but I haven't said yet. I'm reading tiny excerpts of this book. So if you're listening to the podcast, these are tiny excerpts. This is less than five, less than 3% of this book. This book is filled with this kind of mayhem. So you have to get the book to appreciate it all. I'm just kind of hitting some of the, the highlights. But yeah, the fact that you guys were racing against the sun going down and how, oh, the sun goes down. Okay, cool. What does that mean? In modern day SEAL teams, for me, that means we use a night strobe, an infrared strobe that the enemy can't see instead of a marking panel.

• 1:12:35Jocko Willink?

  What does it mean for you? It means another, another 12 hours out in the bush because you're not getting picked up.

• 1:12:41John Stryker Meyer?

  I just hope that the, the lions leave you alone, you know, I mean, the tigers.

• 1:12:48Jocko Willink?

  You had this one idea, or you know, you're, you're, the group had an idea of dropping like a big giant daisy cutter. But a big bomb, like a 2,000 pound bomb.

• 1:13:00John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 1:13:00Jocko Willink?

  In order, in areas that were so packed with, with vegetation, that you couldn't get in a helicopter in there and say, oh, we got an idea. We'll just drop a big bomb and then let's go land in there.

• 1:13:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Jocko Willink?

  Get dropped off in there. And um, so this, this one operation where you're doing that, you're, you're heading into the jungle. You're going to one of these things where you dropped 2,000 pound daisy cutter bomb. You're rappelling, you're the number one man heading down.

• 1:13:26John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 1:13:27Jocko Willink?

  And you, you decide that like, hey, this is an abort situation. I think you saw some enemy.

• 1:13:31John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  And so you decide, okay, let's abort this thing. And here we're going to the book. As I looked up, I was glad to see King, who's one of your team members, climbing back into the King Bee. I got on the radio and told Covey to abort the mission as we had been compromised again. For a few fleeting moments, I'd considered trying to get the team on the ground. Frankly, I was sick and tired of getting shot out of LZs and I wanted to run a mission instead of going through the gut wrenching firefight. On the LZs, which is, you know, again, I'm skipping around this book, but you would do mission after mission where you guys would try and land and you'd get shot off the LZ.

• 1:14:03John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:06John Stryker Meyer?

  That'd be the primary, secondary, and then the alternate LZs.

• 1:14:11Jocko Willink?

  So you, you try three insertions. You know, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, for the record, if I go one insertion and I get shot off, I'm coming home.

• 1:14:20Jocko Willink?

  I'm coming home.

• 1:14:21John Stryker Meyer?

  We were smart enough.

• 1:14:22Jocko Willink?

  I'm not, I'm not gonna go to the secondary. And if I get shot off the secondary, I'm damn sure not going to the tertiary and think I'm getting away with it. I'm gonna go back and come up with a new plan.

• 1:14:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, by then the King Bee run out of gas, they had to go back.

• 1:14:36Jocko Willink?

  So you're there. Then I saw the helmet of an NVA soldier heading toward the bombed area. He was approaching from the area where I heard the first voice from the jungle area in front of the helicopter, which was up the hill from where I was on the ground. As soon as I saw him, I opened fire with my Kar-15. Suddenly, the King B swerved away, leaving me on the ground. Suddenly, it was eerily quiet. Then it hit me. I was standing in the middle of a smoking LZ in the middle of Laos, and I was alone. All of a sudden, I felt small, very small. The trees that had survived the bomb blast were tall. The jungle surrounding the LZ was both impressive and formidable, and not somewhere I wanted to travel by myself. I tried to raise Covey on the radio. There was no answer from Watkins. Even though I was the American team leader on ST Idaho,

• 1:15:21Jocko Willink?

  I insisted on carrying the radio because I wanted to be the person calling airstrikes around my team. The Vietnamese kept us alive in the field, and I felt my end of surviving the jungle warfare was to direct tactical airstrikes and helicopter gunships to the enemy.

• 1:15:36Jocko Willink?

  So, the King B comes back. So, you're there. The King B comes back.

• 1:15:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Captain Tuong.

• 1:15:41Jocko Willink?

  Drops a rope down to you for you to clip into because it's, I guess, too tight for it to land or it doesn't want to land because it's going to take a bunch of time and energy. So, they just throw you a rope.

• 1:15:51John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, they can't land because there are too many tree stumps. The daisy cutter didn't cut everything down. And then, at that time, we were just refining the tactic of using rope extractions.

• 1:16:03Jocko Willink?

  So, for anyone that's listening right now,

• 1:16:08Jocko Willink?

  when you're refining tactics, try and do it on training operations.

• 1:16:14John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, we did. We trained first. We had the 150-foot rope with a sandbag to it, and then it had a D-ring on the end. And be 150-foot rope. And so, they had to have a sandbag so we'd get through the jungle, get to the ground, to you. And we hadn't developed other tactics, but you had a D-ring on your chest. Well, you're going to get to that.

• 1:16:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. So, here we go. I saw no NVA, but the weapon that was being fired had the unmistakable bark of an AK-47. I fired another M79 round in that direction. That round's explosion must have startled Captain Tuong because he jerked the King B upward, yanking me off the ground before I could slip the D-ring on my left shoulder around the rope. That shoulder D-ring was critical for staying in the Swiss seat. We had heard horror stories about the body desecrations and the NVA had performed on SOG men, and I didn't want that happening to me. As Tuong lifted me into the air, I opened fire with my Kar-15 on what appeared to be a muzzle flash coming from the hilltop area. So, you're getting hoisted up by the helicopter while you're returning fire and slipping out

• 1:17:17Jocko Willink?

  of your D-ring?

• 1:17:18John Stryker Meyer?

  It didn't quite get hooked in, because as we got a little higher up, I was ricocheting off the trees. I was a human pinball for a few minutes there.

• 1:17:26Jocko Willink?

  Tilt.

• 1:17:27John Stryker Meyer?

  There we go.

• 1:17:30Jocko Willink?

  Then I became scared. So then you decided to become scared. Okay, that's fine.

• 1:17:37Jocko Willink?

  I still hadn't hooked my shoulder D-ring and someone fired a few green tracers at us. Captain Tuong started to pull out of the target area. As he started gaining speed, I ricocheted off a few trees before I cleared the jungle. Having sat in the King B's copilot seat, I understood why he pulled away from the LZ before I had cleared the trees. If the chopper gets shot down, the mission turns into an operational nightmare while potentially injuring or killing the crew and the recon team members aboard the ship. I wasn't angry with him, hell, he came back for me. I would have been stranded down here for at least two more hours before other choppers with ropes could have been able to extract me if he hadn't. But being dragged through the trees hurt. I was angry at myself for not getting the damn D-ring hooked before I lifted off the ground. My arms were getting very sore.

• 1:18:19Jocko Willink?

  As I went to switch arms, I was struck by some sort of air pocket and suddenly I was upside down at 5,000 feet.

• 1:18:29Jocko Willink?

  My only physical link to life was the D-ring hooked into my rope seat and the 150-foot piece of rope hanging from the helicopter. I twisted my body to look up at King again. Thank God he was still hanging out the door. I signaled to get the chopper to land. As I was giving King signs, I felt the rope slipping down my thighs to my knees. At the same time, my web gear was sliding from my hips over my stomach toward my neck. In a matter of moments, the Swiss seat was at my knees. The only way I stopped it from moving further was by spreading my legs.

• 1:19:00Jocko Willink?

  I felt really stupid. After all the training, this was gonna be a dumb way to die. As the ropes slid across my feet, I knew I was moments away from passing out and there was no way I could keep my legs spread. Just before the end, several brief scenes from my life flashed through my mind. Dolores, my kindergarten sweetheart, why did she move to California? I saw my dad's new 1949 Chevrolet milk truck with its dark evergreen paint with the white side panels and rich gold leaf letters. My red wagon from childhood, high school football games. And to add insult to injury, I saw the front page article in my hometown paper about my death. The story was below the fold because stories about local boys dying in Nam were now commonplace.

• 1:19:44Jocko Willink?

  That angered me because my family would never know where I really died. On the other hand, I didn't want them to know how I really died. Just as I started to pass out, I felt the rope slip off my feet. My body went limp. I vaguely remember hitting the elephant grass before landing hard on my back on the ground. I had fallen only 10 or 20 feet, the elephant grass cushioned the fall. I hadn't realized that Captain Tuong had the aircraft descending during those last frantic moments.

• 1:20:20John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah, had those legs spread like a New York City hooker.

• 1:20:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a nightmare.

• 1:20:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, King came out and picked me up and threw me in the chopper, left all my gear there. So my Car 15 and my Sog knife, which now would be a highly treasured item, still in layoff.

• 1:20:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you, you, you lost it.

• 1:20:45John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah, he just pulled to open the web gear and I had to get the thing off my neck, the rucksack. The web gear had all just choked me out. He pulled it off and just picked me up and then threw me in the helicopter. I never, I was really happy to feel my head bounce off that metal floor. It hurt, but it's a happy hurt.

• 1:21:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:21:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, again, if you have to get this book, because that's, I'm, I'm trying to pick like some good stories, but these are just the kind of ridiculous

• 1:21:15Jocko Willink?

  things that, that are going on.

• 1:21:16John Stryker Meyer?

  Just another day in Sog.

• 1:21:18Jocko Willink?

  Just another day in Sog, getting hung upside down 5,000 feet above enemy territory by a D-ring.

• 1:21:28Jocko Willink?

  Another one here. You guys got some bad weather. You're got no support overhead. That's another thing people need to understand is when you because of where you guys were located at a pretty good distance away from the bases. If there was no aircraft overhead, then you wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone because they you'd lose line of sight. Did you guys carry ever carry HF radios to try and make long distance?

• 1:21:53John Stryker Meyer?

  We had VHF or UHF. Yeah, the R10 was that. And but at nights during the day, there was a there was always an airborne command aircraft up. So at the daytime was Hillsboro code. At night it was Moonbeam. So they would check in with us on our frequency.

• 1:22:12Jocko Willink?

  So you would no matter what you'd have some level of comps. Okay, that's good to hear.

• 1:22:16John Stryker Meyer?

  And so because of the we knew the NVA RDF radial direction finder was really good. They were they were sharp on that. So when they would check in with us again, it would be just a click click. No discussion.

• 1:22:30Jocko Willink?

  And for those of you that don't know, the that's direct radio direction finding. So if you sit there and talk on the radio for a long period of time, the enemy can actually capture those those transmissions.

• 1:22:41John Stryker Meyer?

  They triangulate.

• 1:22:41Jocko Willink?

  They use multiple stations and they can tell what direction they're coming from and they can triangulate where you're at and they can come and get you. So for this particular one, you guys are the weather's bad, so you don't have any you don't have any actual direct support overhead. The the NVA had been chased. This is the one where you got you try to set up an ambush and they told you don't do it?

• 1:23:02John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, we had the ambush set up. We'd been in it.

• 1:23:04Jocko Willink?

  But then they told you don't execute the ambush, right?

• 1:23:06John Stryker Meyer?

  Don't execute it because we were had visions of we get the POW because in that day if you we captured a live POW, five day R and R anywhere in the world, hundred dollar bonus. I was like, man, we're talking about we're just planning plans Hawaii or Australia. We hadn't quite decided. And then Spider came back over and I gave him the code. We got a POW will be back at the primary LZ in one hour. That's what he said, don't move.

• 1:23:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but you hadn't initiated, you didn't have the POW yet, you were waiting.

• 1:23:36John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah, they're walking up and down a trail.

• 1:23:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so it was just a matter of time before you were gonna

• 1:23:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, we

• 1:23:40Jocko Willink?

  spring your ambush.

• 1:23:41John Stryker Meyer?

  And this is one of those deals where we violated all the rules of recon. Normally we'd go ten and ten. Walk ten minutes, pause ten to hear the jungle, let the jungle see how it's gone. Well, in this one, because we had so much trouble trying to get in, they had slash and burn areas that were underneath the jungle canopy. I divided the team, we had an eight man team this time, put four on each side, and I said, we're gonna go up this hill until we get to an area, to a trail or whatever. And we didn't stop, we went really hard, maybe twenty, thirty, forty minutes, I forget now. We came up to a big trail, we crossed it one at a time, covered our tracks,

• 1:24:22John Stryker Meyer?

  got things set up, salved, put up the wiretap, had a perfect ambush. You know, we had trained, Lynn Black had developed the ambush kill zone, so that we'd have claymores that would go across, but in the center there'd be a six foot area that there'd be no shrapnel. But we had, he practiced on himself with C4. So he finally figured out at this certain length what a stick of C4 was, where you'd knock yourself out. He did, literally.

• 1:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know, this is another entertaining thing.

• 1:24:54John Stryker Meyer?

  So anyway, that's our ambush.

• 1:24:56Jocko Willink?

  It's in the book, yeah.

• 1:24:56John Stryker Meyer?

  But we had it all set up. So we had the C4 to knock out one person, claymores to kill everybody else with sides, perimeters, and one in the rear, just in case they came down the mountain on us. And they're ditty bopping up and down the trail. We could, we could have had officers, they're walking down the trail, nobody's that upset because we had gone so far, so fast, violating all of our rules, that the people up the hill didn't know what was going on down the hill. And then Spider says, "Don't move." It's like, that's when things got really ugly.

• 1:25:29Jocko Willink?

  And, and what, what was the reason why he told you guys, "Don't do it"? Because the weather was moving in?

• 1:25:33John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. They inserted, we had only been on the ground two or three hours. And the weather socked it. He's at 10,000 feet. I can't even see the mountain, let alone see an LZ.

• 1:25:42Jocko Willink?

  So he's saying, "Look, we're not gonna be able to get you out of there right now. Just don't do whatever you're gonna do and, and, and

• 1:25:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:49Jocko Willink?

  Break contact, get away."

• 1:25:51John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:51Jocko Willink?

  So you guys are kind of, kind of on the run. You guys start moving out of there.

• 1:25:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Right. And so about that time up the hill, we hear the tanks and other trucks starting up their engines. And all of a sudden, the activity on the trail goes from casual to frantic. Now, everybody's two or three guys, they all got their AKs.

• 1:26:08Jocko Willink?

  What do you think clued him in that, that you were there?

• 1:26:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, they heard us come in. And by then, we could hear the dogs. They had some dogs that were back on the LZ. So they had started looking for us officially.

• 1:26:19Jocko Willink?

  So when you hear dogs, tanks, trucks, and a bunch of people with AK-47s?

• 1:26:25John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Jocko Willink?

  How do you feel about that?

• 1:26:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Um, the pucker factor is minus zero. It really is. It's like, oh, my god.

• 1:26:38Jocko Willink?

  And you know that you've got no form of extraction?

• 1:26:41John Stryker Meyer?

  Correct.

• 1:26:42Jocko Willink?

  The weird thing is, I guess, and, and having worked in the jungle a little bit, you know, I, I spent some time in the jungle in South America and then Southeast Asia. Like, I will say this, the jungle's huge, right? And you could see where, okay, I can get, I can make myself scarce at least.

• 1:26:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:58Jocko Willink?

  Until you remember they got trackers, right? And they got dogs.

• 1:27:02John Stryker Meyer?

  Lots of them.

• 1:27:04Jocko Willink?

  So you're in that situation here.

• 1:27:06John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Jocko Willink?

  Another Thursday night.

• 1:27:09John Stryker Meyer?

  But we did get, we did get the wiretap, though. Sal had run the wiretap for over an hour.

• 1:27:12Jocko Willink?

  So once you, you guys had to take the tape recorder with you, though, right?

• 1:27:15John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. We carried the little, um, you know, you think about a traditional, early, old cassette recorder. So it had like, two or four of the trip, of the, uh, D batteries in it. And then we had the, um, microphone that had a little plug-in in. And then Sal would run up the tree, or fly up the telephone pole. In this case, he'd gone up, when he came back down, put mud on the whole thing. So anybody going by on the trail looked at the pole, they wouldn't see it. And, um, so we ran it for over an hour. We had run that wiretap and flipped the cassette over because that was state of the art at the time.

• 1:27:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55John Stryker Meyer?

  Cassettes.

• 1:27:57Jocko Willink?

  Alright, so you guys.

• 1:27:58John Stryker Meyer?

  So that's where we were.

• 1:27:59Jocko Willink?

  So you break that stuff down. Now you guys are moving.

• 1:28:01John Stryker Meyer?

  Pull back all the clay and more, it's the C4.

• 1:28:04Jocko Willink?

  Which direction did you head? Did you go away from where you inserted or did you go back to where you inserted?

• 1:28:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Um, we went, no, we went away from it. Um, if I'm facing the LZ, we went to our left.

• 1:28:16Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:28:17John Stryker Meyer?

  And we went, we had to go re-cross that big trail again, but this time we had to cross it in between enemy coming up and down. The truck had went past us and so it took us a while to get back across the big trail. Because this trail, again, this is layoffs.

• 1:28:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. By the way, this is the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

• 1:28:34John Stryker Meyer?

  The Ho Chi Minh Trail. Spiders that, even when he could see the jungle, he couldn't see that road. And the road was big enough, you could drive tanks down it side by side. It's huge. It would be the equivalent of, uh, Highway 78.

• 1:28:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:28:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Or 52, two lanes. So tanks side by side.

• 1:28:53Jocko Willink?

  But it's completely covered by the.

• 1:28:54John Stryker Meyer?

  Covered by the vegetation. So it took us a while to get across the road. Then we went to the left, then we finally came to a little stream bed and went up that stream bed because now it's dark. But now we hear more dogs, the activity on the trail, another couple of trucks go by and all this noise. We know they're looking.

• 1:29:13Jocko Willink?

  And eventually you're holed up and you're, you, you, you stop.

• 1:29:17John Stryker Meyer?

  Right. And on, on the way up that stream, we put out pepper, we put out, um, mace.

• 1:29:23Jocko Willink?

  To throw off the dogs.

• 1:29:24John Stryker Meyer?

  Throw off the dogs and we had our team go up and down these little, because it's about 10 foot tall bank. We're in this little creek or stream, it had water in it. And so we were trying to lose the dogs. We knew they're coming at night. And now it's dark and we continued up that stream for a while. I wanted to get as far away from them as we could. Because Sal had climbed a tree and said, they're coming. He pointed out, he told Hector, there were hundreds of them coming with lights. They all had lanterns and the dogs were getting closer.

• 1:29:54John Stryker Meyer?

  So we continued up that stream for another hour or two at night, doing, still going out, putting down the mace, and we finally went up to the bank on the right, set up our RON for tonight, rest overnight, and I'm facing the bank, and the other seven guys are around. And so, again, we hear the dogs, the people, so we're there in the RON for maybe two or three hours, two guys come up, up the stream with a lantern, burning brightly, and they go past us. Lantern goes out and they come back, as they come back, Hep coughs, and then they stopped, and I think that's where you're going next.

• 1:30:32Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, that's, here it is. One of the NVA in the creek started crawling up the embankment toward me. I was still facing the creek. The NVA soldier was good. He only moved when the wind stirred the trees. For a moment, my thoughts drifted to summer camp in New Hampshire, years earlier, when we played capture the flag on those clear summer nights. My favorite trick was to use the woods to get as close to the flag as possible. Now, my mind was racing 100 miles per hour, and I realized I was the flag, and he was closing in. He was too close for me to tell anyone on my team. The jungle that night seemed deadly quiet, except of course, when the wind stirred. As the NVA soldier crawled

• 1:31:15Jocko Willink?

  closer, I remembered thinking that my heart was beating so damn loud that Ho Chi Minh could hear it in Hanoi. I flashed back to my childhood, when we used to play hide and go seek on West Paul Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey. One of my favorite hiding places was behind the hedges in Mrs. Amico's front yard. I remember worrying that Teddy Zabrowski, or John Wayne Austin, or worse, Barbara Pointon, would find me because they could hear my heart beating so loud. I tried to comfort myself by thinking that because I had not been running in recent hours, my heartbeat shouldn't be too loud. Yet my heart sounded like a kettle drum during Beethoven's Ninth, no matter the NVA soldier kept moving up

• 1:31:57Jocko Willink?

  the embankment. I was very impressed with his stealth. I could barely hear him. Then it happened. During one windy moment, I heard movement very close to me. It was only a slight sound, but a sound nonetheless. Before the wind stopped, the NVA soldier touched the sole of my size 10 R Army Issue Jungle Boot. I heard a slight gasp of surprise from him. At that moment, I had a death grip on my Car 15. I had it on single shot. A Car 15 on full automatic sounds much different from the bark of an AK-47 on full automatic. If I had to shoot, it would be single shots. For a millisecond, I wondered if my left foot was far enough to the left so that when I fired it, I wouldn't shoot myself.

• 1:32:42Jocko Willink?

  Time stood still. My pucker factor was minus zero. After a few of the longest seconds of my life, the wind stirred, but there was no movement. He remained still. After what seemed like an eternity, the wind stirred again, and I heard the NVA move backward just slightly. He was so cool. I knew he was facing me. I wondered why I couldn't hear his heart. The jungle around us remained pitch black.

• 1:33:12John Stryker Meyer?

  That was my Twilight Zone moment.

• 1:33:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a, that's, that's craziness. And you think he was, um, you think he just decided like this, this guy's probably got the drop on me and I want to live? What do you think he decided?

• 1:33:29John Stryker Meyer?

  I, I believe so because if there had been any other movement at all, then he would have been on the receiving end of the 556.

• 1:33:35Jocko Willink?

  Hmm. So he made it, he made a tactical decision to live.

• 1:33:39John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:40Jocko Willink?

  Thank God.

• 1:33:41John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Jocko Willink?

  Cause then, then obviously, once you started shooting, the gig, gigs up and you would have been, people would have been on your trail close.

• 1:33:47John Stryker Meyer?

  And had it happened, I mean, my thought was if I just did one single shot, could the muzzle flash would light up where he was? And then I was hoping just it would take no more than a second shot to finish him off. So that the jungle, they would hear gunshots, but they wouldn't, wouldn't be quite sure where.

• 1:34:03Jocko Willink?

  Was this, and people that haven't spent time out in the woods or out in the jungle. It can get completely pitch black in the jungle. Is that what this was? Was this just like completely like he's you could barely even could you see his face at all?

• 1:34:17John Stryker Meyer?

  Nothing.

• 1:34:18Jocko Willink?

  You just knew he was there.

• 1:34:19John Stryker Meyer?

  You sit there, you could feel your hand in front of your nose when you shake, move it back and forth. You could feel the breeze from your hand, but you can't see it.

• 1:34:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So for those of you that haven't been in this, it's when you get at nighttime and then it's a cloudy night. And then you're in triple canopy jungle. There is no light. You can't see anything. And that's what this situation is.

• 1:34:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, luckily you, you, you got out of that and then you guys continue on going back to the book by nine o'clock. We had located the LZ and secured it. The clear area had several feet of grass on it. And the ground was at an angle because it was on the side of a mountain. Again, we heard dogs. Our tactical scenario stunk. We were in a relatively open area on a hillside with minimal cover. And the NVA had the high ground. Times seemed to be our worst enemy, although having limited air, air resources didn't improve our mood. Finally, the other team was extracted without taking further casualties. And Spider was overhead, taking ground fire from the north of the LZ.

• 1:35:22Jocko Willink?

  He told the trusty and reliable Marine Corps UH1B gunships with the radio call sign Scarface were seconds away. As we heard the choppers approaching us, one of the tow poppers that Sal and Son had planted exploded, exploded. So you guys were doing that too. You guys would set booby traps on them, on the enemy. You'd set claymores on them.

• 1:35:44John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 1:35:46Jocko Willink?

  Which would really piss them off.

• 1:35:47John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:50John Stryker Meyer?

  Try to ruin their parade.

• 1:35:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We knew the NVA were going to be hopping mad now. That's a gentle way of putting it. Spider was able to vector the Scarface gunship to our location quickly. There was no time for orientations. We popped smoke and seconds later, the first Scarface chopper roared in. The jungle north of us erupted with small arms fire. The second Scarface chopper roared in so close that I could see the facial expressions on the door gunners. He blasted the area north of our LZ with his M60 machine gun. Both Scarface, both Scarface aircraft took several hits. When the Sky Raiders made their passes, they also took hits from small arm fire that sounded like AK-47s. During the second gun run, Sal blew a claymore in the face of an NVA scout. Sal then blew his second claymore and returned to the LZ, reporting more NVA troops right behind him.

• 1:36:37Jocko Willink?

  And you guys, this is another interesting SOP. We would do this too. Carry claymores, I didn't do that. I, let me rephrase that. We would, we got trained to do this. You know, in a jungle situation.

• 1:36:47John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 1:36:47Jocko Willink?

  You guys would make claymores with like five second and 10 second fuses on them.

• 1:36:51John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 1:36:52Jocko Willink?

  Boom, put them down, pull the fuse.

• 1:36:53John Stryker Meyer?

  And run.

• 1:36:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and run.

• 1:36:59Jocko Willink?

  I never used one of those. And I'm very thankful that I did not.

• 1:37:03John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Apparently, the combination of air assets in our 40 millimeter barrage has slowed the NVA troops long enough for the extraction ships to come to the LZ. Spider told me that the 101st Airborne Division was going to extract us. The Marine Corps gunships would make one more gun run and, for the first time, ST Idaho slicks from the 101st Airborne Division would follow right behind them and get as close to the LZ as possible. We were used to the King Bs and knew most of the pilots on a first-name basis. The 101st pilots were good too, but because this was our first time with the 101st Airborne Division slicks, I told Shoren King that they had to be the first people to approach the ship and that they had to alert the young door gunners that five, that five of our men were Vietnamese. That's a crazy thing to think about.

• 1:37:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:37:50Jocko Willink?

  So you got.

• 1:37:50John Stryker Meyer?

  We had, we had horrible results when they weren't, when they weren't careful. Again, you know, young door gunners.

• 1:37:57Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 1:37:57John Stryker Meyer?

  That come in the country and if they're not briefed properly, uh, cause our guys dressed irregularly, they're not that they would look like NVA, but they're, they weren't Americans.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:07John Stryker Meyer?

  And we've had team members that, that lost Vietnamese that way.

• 1:38:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Tragically.

• 1:38:11Jocko Willink?

  We, we, uh, when Roger Hayden was on, he told a story of the same thing. He had, they had, they had Vietnamese scouts and they were doing a hammer and anvil operation with a platoon they hadn't worked with before. That was new in country. And there were some mix-ups on the insertion and, you know, just some, some mistakes that compounded. And anyways, these guys, the, the anvil portion was waiting and the first guys that came out of the tree line were their Vietnamese scouts. Yeah. And they got, they got lit up.

• 1:38:41Jocko Willink?

  You know, we were in, in, when I was in Ramadi, we, I, you know, you see like pictures of SEALs with like beards and all that.

• 1:38:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:49Jocko Willink?

  And look at all cool, like everyone shaved and everyone, we wore regular uniforms, what the army and what the Marine Corps wore. Why? Because that exact reason, you know, you swing around a corner and you've got a 19 year old on a 50 cal. And he sees some guy with a beard and a gun, there's a chance you're getting shot. Whereas an American, you know, cause, cause the jihadists would have beards, right? And in Ramadi, we just didn't, we, everything we could do to identify ourselves as good guys, we did.

• 1:39:19John Stryker Meyer?

  And your jihadists could have everything from M16s to carbines to AKs. You didn't know what they'd be carrying.

• 1:39:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And they also wore.

• 1:39:26John Stryker Meyer?

  At least we knew our guys had AKs or SKSs.

• 1:39:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, the other thing was they wore, they wore paramilitary outfits.

• 1:39:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 1:39:35Jocko Willink?

  They wore camis, they wore body armor sometime, they wore helmets sometimes. So, yeah, that's amazing that you guys that, and also you had the, you had the cognizance to say, hey, wait a second. We've never worked with these helicopters before. Get out there and tell them we got some Vietnamese folks coming their way with AK47s.

• 1:39:54John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, they were pissed because when King went down through the first chopper, nobody else followed. I said, you make sure you tell them, then you give me the green light, then we'll send some little people. And then Bubba and I got on the second extract. And there's two other things on that mission.

• 1:40:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08John Stryker Meyer?

  King had experimental pump M79, which he carried, he held five rounds and we, we thought we'd try it once. But he carried it for five day, well, that whole five days we were on the ground. And so at that LZ, it worked. And imagine five M79 rounds going off the 40 millimeters. Then also one night was the night that the Russians flew over us and did a resupply. And we were begging for Moonbeam to show up to get somebody on that Russian ass. But the whole side of the mountain lit up. It was the weirdest damn thing we ever saw.

• 1:40:40Jocko Willink?

  So that was like a signaling device for, that was signaling devices that the, that the Vietnamese were using to have the Russians drop the resupply in there?

• 1:40:49John Stryker Meyer?

  They were doing resupplies to the Vietnamese.

• 1:40:51Jocko Willink?

  What language did you speak?

• 1:40:53John Stryker Meyer?

  Uh, my foreign language is English.

• 1:40:57John Stryker Meyer?

  So they pushed us through and they waived the way the language requirement because by sixty eight they knew we had a SF had a strong interpreter corps.

• 1:41:05Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:41:06John Stryker Meyer?

  Like like HEP, he spoke four languages, he'd been educated in France and he cracked up my English and he was a smart ass on top of it. A little fucker.

• 1:41:18John Stryker Meyer?

  But he was our little guy.

• 1:41:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:21John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:22Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Going back to the book, the extraction was slick and quick when as we pulled out of the automatic, as we pulled out of the LZ, the slick took several hits. Three of us returned full automatic fire from our Car 15s. I threw a white phosphorus grenade as the area north of the LZ lit up with dozens of muzzle flashes from AK-47s and SKSs. The green tracers from the AK-47s appeared as though they were coming between my legs. I was told later that as our slick pulled out of the LZ, the Scarface gunship laid down a full fuselage, fuselage of suppressing fire. The lead marine aircraft piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Robinson had the Plexiglas windshield blown out of the aircraft. In addition, his chopper and the

• 1:42:06Jocko Willink?

  second gunship had taken more than a dozen hits. And yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's the, uh, Colonel that you were saying, he was, he was riding you and riding you and finally the way you tell it in the book. Colonel, does this mean the next time we're in trouble and we call for Scarface, you won't respond to the bell? Hell no, Robinson responded. I never said that. It just pisses me off when my aircraft gets shot up. Parts are hard to come by and I'd rather be flying.

• 1:42:36John Stryker Meyer?

  Fearless.

• 1:42:39Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, you continue on here. I went back to my room. So this is after that crazy operation. You barely make it out for the hundredth time that you, you, you dance in death's face. I went back to my room and picked up a news magazine with a picture on the front page about the biggest latest anti-war protest side. Insane. Whose side were they on? They hadn't seen Charlie like ST Idaho had. They never, they never asked Sal, Hip, and other Vietnamese men on my team what they felt about the war. What a day. S3 refused to pull us out when we were ready for extraction, then S3 questioned my integrity despite the fact that we were only minutes away from fighting NVA in close quarters.

• 1:43:23Jocko Willink?

  Battle had not scarfaced. The AE1Es and the 101st Airborne slicks defended us from the sky. And there are people back in the States protesting this war. I shook my head, dropped my rucksack and web gear, picked up a small ammo belt holding several magazines of 556 ammo, and went to the S3 to get a jeep. The dentist was only a short drive up the road, but I kept my trusty Car 15 nearby anyway. I went to the dentist, got my tooth pulled, and drew new rations and PRC 25 batteries. And the reason I read all that is to read this line right here. The next day, the next day, ST Idaho got shot out of five LZs.

• 1:44:03John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. And by that time, when we got inserted on that mission there, we had gone a couple days the same thing in the morning, get shot out. On one of those missions, on the primary LZ, when the King B was going in,

• 1:44:23Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:24John Stryker Meyer?

  Sal saw a wire across the LZ. Now, how does Sal even see a wire in a helicopter when we're going in? He saw it, he told the door gunner, fortunately, the Vietnamese thing was quick, and they were able to swerve away, and the A1 came in and hit that. It was a 500-pound bomb. They knew we were coming, and we had been compromised. We never realized how seriously we'd been compromised. And that was proof, hard proof.

• 1:44:57John Stryker Meyer?

  And our guys are so tired, I switched a lot of the Vietnamese around.

• 1:45:01Jocko Willink?

  So your guys were, some of your Vietnamese were getting burned out?

• 1:45:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh sure, because you know, you do that long flight, go out to the LZ, then you go in and get shot out, shot out, shot out, fly back, get lunch, get a new target. Sometimes they just say, here's your next target. Covey would know where it would be. We wouldn't even have any kind of background or anything on it, just they wanted to get a team on the ground. Go back and then we did it again, bam bam bam.

• 1:45:29Jocko Willink?

  And sometimes would you, and so your Vietnamese sometimes say, alright, I had enough of this. Who's your main, who's your main other guy?

• 1:45:34John Stryker Meyer?

  Sal was my counterpart. He was the assistant team leader, he was the Vietnamese team leader.

• 1:45:39Jocko Willink?

  Who was the other American that would be with you?

• 1:45:41John Stryker Meyer?

  At that point in time was Bubba, John Schur. He came on the team in November when I became the 1-0 at the end of October.

• 1:45:49Jocko Willink?

  And these guys were all freaked out too, because you were like, young.

• 1:45:51John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:45:52Jocko Willink?

  And what were you, what was your rank at that time?

• 1:45:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, by then I'd been promoted to an E4, because I remember I had, yeah. I'm an E-Deuce in camp with a billet for an E8 or E9 on the recon team. So Spider promptly got me promoted back to PFC and said, now roll up your sleeves so people think you're a sergeant. We don't want them knowing you're just a dumbass PFC.

• 1:46:17John Stryker Meyer?

  And so then by October, we were able to, out of Spec 4, and then when Jim went on off the team, which we respected, and to this day I respect it, I'll never say a word against them on that, then Bubba came on. So in November, that's when Bubba, he was the 1-1, and then on that one mission, King came along. I just felt funny about it, I wanted a little extra firepower, and he wanted to try that, that pump M79.

• 1:46:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, why not just go on a mission to test out that thing?

• 1:46:51Jocko Willink?

  We had that, uh, they sent us some thermobaric grenades for the M79.

• 1:46:57John Stryker Meyer?

  Ooh, really?

• 1:46:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and then they called a week later and said, hey, did you guys get a cha- it was actually Leif. I think Leif dumped like an entire loadout of them on one operation. And anyways, they called back, they say, hey, did you guys, we're wondering if you got a chance to use those theramonic- therobomic grenades yet? I'm like, we used them all. Send more. There's the feedback.

• 1:47:21John Stryker Meyer?

  Do not wait.

• 1:47:24John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh yeah. And also, speaking of that, as, as one of our side missions, we always carried eldest son or Italian green, which would be enemy ordnance doctored to explode in their face. So when we would go along the trail, like with that big trail, we crossed it, we'd go down and dump a little of the ammo. So if anybody would see the ammo, they'd pick it up. And then if we ever came across cachet, which only happened a few times, we would put the bad ammo in their cachet. So they'd use it for psyops. Then it would blow up in their face.

• 1:47:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It was a good psyops thing when they, there was, there was another mission where you talk about where they killed the Americans, but they let the- Oh, yeah. Vietnamese go. That was their-

• 1:48:07John Stryker Meyer?

  January 1st, 69.

• 1:48:11Jocko Willink?

  All right. Speaking of holiday season, here's Christmas Day, 1968.

• 1:48:16Jocko Willink?

  You're inserted into like some really tall elephant grass. There's NVA around you. Going back to the book, due to the elephant grass, both in terms of the noise we were making and how muffled, how it muffled our other sounds, we couldn't tell exactly how many NVA were moving or if they were even NVA. Black said, "I smell smoke. Either our hand grenades or the NVA have started fires." "Things are really heating up on the LZ, literally, I radioed Spider. I told him we were surrounded and had fires on two sides of our perimeter." "I told him that if the King Bees didn't get in here ASAP, ST Idaho would be engaged in fighting fires as well as firefights."

• 1:49:01Jocko Willink?

  Were you really making these punny jokes in the middle of these situations?

• 1:49:06John Stryker Meyer?

  Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying.

• 1:49:10Jocko Willink?

  They're starting more fires, Bubba said. By now, the noise from the fire forced us to raise our voices when we were talking to each other. The smoke was getting thicker. I began to sweat. We threw a few more hand grenades down the hill to force the NVA to keep their heads down. The southern fire, so just so everyone understands, this is what's actually happening. You're in elephant grass, dry elephant grass, and it's burning on multiple sides of your position.

• 1:49:33John Stryker Meyer?

  Which is 12 to 15 feet tall. The elephant grass.

• 1:49:37Jocko Willink?

  So your visibility is like 5 feet, 3 feet?

• 1:49:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, minimal.

• 1:49:43Jocko Willink?

  And it's filled with smoke?

• 1:49:44John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah. And getting worse, Aurora.

• 1:49:47Jocko Willink?

  We wish you a Merry Christmas. The southern fire's intensity grew by the second and continued to move up the slope towards us and around to the east. There was fire or fires to the north and northeast, but they weren't heading toward ST Idaho with the speed of the southern flames. By now, the smoke was so thick, I had my green cravat over my face and pulled up over my nose. Burning embers from the south kicked up and flew over our small jagged perimeter, dumping ashes, soot, and small burning sparks on the elephant grass and on us. Only Hip and Twan wore hats. Several of us soaked our hair. Black told me that the NVA weren't far behind the flames.

• 1:50:28Jocko Willink?

  Twan had reported seeing images a short distance behind the flames to the south and southeast. Captain Twong knew exactly where we were as he brought the H-34 down the canyon toward us. Seconds became hours. My vision was clearer than ever, and I was acutely aware of the smoke fire popping sounds and enemy gunfire. I stood on the western edge of the perimeter, waving a colored panel skyward, trying to catch the pilot's eye. The H-34 continued its slow motion descent. All I saw was the bottom of the chopper with the front of the strut sticking out to the right and left, coming down like a giant praying mantis. The rotor wash from the King B began to hit us. Finally, the chopper's nose turned slightly to the left and I could see Captain Twong.

• 1:51:13Jocko Willink?

  Seeing his face, seeing him sitting in there so calmly in the pilot's seat, made my confidence surge. We would survive.

• 1:51:22Jocko Willink?

  And then you guys, you guys, you know, get, get around, get it under control, well, under control as you can, and you start boarding the chopper, chopper, as the last man boarded the chopper, I signaled to the door gunner to exit the area. As I sat in the door, I sat in the door as Tuong lifted the King Bee straight up for several feet before heading south. As we pulled away from the knoll, fire swept up the hill and engulfed the area where we had been standing moments earlier.

• 1:51:48John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:51:50John Stryker Meyer?

  Every Christmas, I pause.

• 1:51:56Jocko Willink?

  Captain Tuong roared down the canyon. We had chugged only a short while ago. I radioed Spider and gave him a team okay. Once again, ST Idaho entered that magical post-mission moment. The adrenaline was still flowing. We had survived another target. Every breath of air was sweeter. There was no thought of Christmas, mom, or holiday presents. Our gift was to be alive.

• 1:52:29Jocko Willink?

  That Christmas 1968 would haunt me sporadically for more than 25 years. After a while, I was able to stop sitting upright, sweating with fear when the nightmares hit. It's been almost 10 years since I had that dream, but every Christmas, nightmares or not, I always take a moment to think of Captain Tuong's courage. No sweat. King bees never rest.

• 1:52:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so that was, uh, this is, that's, that's just a crazy situation.

• 1:53:05John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. Close. And then this is like on Thanksgiving was when we had the mission down south, where our six-man recon team, the Colonel tells us, you have to find three missing NVA divisions, the first, the third, and the seventh. We found them.

• 1:53:21Jocko Willink?

  How'd that work out for you?

• 1:53:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Uh, it was pretty intense. We used, we used more than one of those five-second fuses to hold them back.

• 1:53:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, that, that, again, that's, that's why you need to buy this book and read this book if you want to hear about the eight-man spike team versus a, a division.

• 1:53:38John Stryker Meyer?

  And that day was three.

• 1:53:39Jocko Willink?

  Three divisions. For those of you that don't know what that means, that's, that's 30,000 men, roughly.

• 1:53:46Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, that's where those, those um.

• 1:53:49John Stryker Meyer?

  Five second fuse.

• 1:53:49Jocko Willink?

  Those five second fuses. Just so everybody understands what that means. You're trying to escape the enemy. You have a little thing called a claymore mine. It's like the size of a book, maybe a little bit bigger. And it's got a bunch of ball bearings on one side.

• 1:54:05John Stryker Meyer?

  Five hundred and fifty.

• 1:54:06Jocko Willink?

  Five hundred and fifty ball bearings on one side. That are, that spray out when, when this thing explodes and those are, so they wound people. How many of those things did you guys carry?

• 1:54:19John Stryker Meyer?

  Um, every, everybody had one on the team and then a one, one. Or at least carry two or three.

• 1:54:26Jocko Willink?

  So you guys had about ten.

• 1:54:27John Stryker Meyer?

  C four, yeah, at least.

• 1:54:28Jocko Willink?

  And so what these guys would do, so you can use them for a bunch of different reasons. And one of the, one of the things that you guys did a lot with them, and this is again, these are things that I was trained in. When I was first got to SEAL Team, they do, okay, when you set up a, when you're gonna sleep at night or you're gonna set up a rest overnight position. You're gonna put out claymores. And that way, if you get attacked in the middle of the night, boom, you can light off the claymores and you get, can get some fire superiority. Or at least shock the enemy or do some damage to them. So you guys did that all the time. But then you made these little five second fuses, knowing that if you're running away. You can just put this thing up, you know, put it in the ground real quick or put it up against a tree.

• 1:55:04John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, yeah, you always wanna have it up against the tree or something to take the back blast. Cause even when you put it in and you got the last four seconds before it explodes, you're running. You could still, you wanna make sure that you got a little protection on the black blast.

• 1:55:18Jocko Willink?

  We used to detonate those things at a completely unsafe distance behind them. I, I, like, I look back now and I'm thinking, what were we doing?

• 1:55:28John Stryker Meyer?

  WTF times two, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:30Jocko Willink?

  Uh, it's like, let, we, we play the game, let's find out.

• 1:55:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Are you related to Lynn Black somehow on this thing?

• 1:55:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. So you started to tell that story a little bit. For those that didn't catch the whole story, the story was Lynn Black was trying to figure out what it would take. To knock somebody out with C four. So C four.

• 1:55:49John Stryker Meyer?

  At six feet.

• 1:55:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, C four just explodes. There's no shrapnel in it. You can put shrapnel in it, but you don't have to. So it's just, it's just a big concussion. So Lynn Black was trying to figure out how much C four it would take so we can stun a guy. So we can grab him, so we can get a POW, so that we can get a five day liberty anywhere in the world.

• 1:56:09John Stryker Meyer?

  Anywhere.

• 1:56:09Jocko Willink?

  And a hundred dollars cash. And so he figured, so the way he, the way he experimented with this was by doing it to himself.

• 1:56:17John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:17Jocko Willink?

  Just standing around at the range and blasting himself with heavier and heavier weight until he got knocked out.

• 1:56:23John Stryker Meyer?

  And when he finally succeeded, he, uh, his hearing was bad for a few days.

• 1:56:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:27John Stryker Meyer?

  His hair was all.

• 1:56:28Jocko Willink?

  See now, to be honest with you, I don't know if this, in the SEAL teams, that would have been, we would have used a new guy for that. We would have used a new guy, like, okay, let's see if this works. I'll do, let's, when the, when the, uh, stun guns, the tasers first came in.

• 1:56:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 1:56:43Jocko Willink?

  It wasn't fun to be a new guy. Cause we had to see how those things worked, right? So. We, uh, we used to experiment that.

• 1:56:50John Stryker Meyer?

  Indeed.

• 1:56:51Jocko Willink?

  Um, yeah, those, that story's just crazy and you, and you looking down and seeing the fire engulf the place that you just got picked out of.

• 1:57:00John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh, yeah. Instantly.

• 1:57:03John Stryker Meyer?

  Sure. It's just like one of those moments in time. It was the same thing like on Thanksgiving Day, we got distracted. They were coming out of the jungle, running at port arms. And so they would be trying to come down. So me and the door gunner would just literally stop them in the track, like one of those cartoons you see on the TV where the guy's running and stops and gets janked. They would just push them right back in the jungle before they even fell down. And that was just, uh, yeah, you just, you don't forget those things. They stick with you.

• 1:57:33Jocko Willink?

  The next chapter is called Happy New Year.

• 1:57:35John Stryker Meyer?

  Oh.

• 1:57:39Jocko Willink?

  The day after Christmas, the S3 brass asked ST Idaho to run another MA target in Laos. I respectfully declined, citing fatigue and general weariness. I didn't tell the brass that I had a funny feeling about the target. I felt apprehensive for some reason.

• 1:57:56Jocko Willink?

  Back at FOB one around 1,200 hours, someone from the commo shack came into the club and said a Vietnamese team member from RT ASP was on the radio talking to Spider. That was very bad news. Several of the recon team members in FOB one headed toward the commo shack. Before we got there, Tony Harrell, a veteran recon man, came around the corner with some more bad news. They were hit by sappers. It doesn't look good. It appeared the Americans had been slow to react. In a matter of seconds, the sappers killed the three SF troops and chose to leave the South Vietnamese team members alive.

• 1:58:33Jocko Willink?

  The news about the sappers was a triple dose of bad news. First, we had three dead Green Berets.

• 1:58:42Jocko Willink?

  Second, reports one zeros had received for months about NVA sappers being a lethal force were now confirmed.

• 1:58:51Jocko Willink?

  Third, by killing only the Americans, the NVA pulled off a major psychological coup. By leaving the Vietnamese team members alive, their survival would plant seeds of doubt and dissension between SF troops and our little people.

• 1:59:15Jocko Willink?

  And then you guys were heading north, the 101st Airborne Division choppers carried the six men south. When the choppers landed on the helicopter pad, Colonel Jack Warren had ordered every man in FOB 4 out to the site. He was held in high regard by SF troops because he genuinely cared about his men. It had been said that because of his dedication to the SF mission and the men of SF, he would never advance beyond the rank of Colonel. He'd remained in SF too long, a career decision that the traditional army hierarchy despised and punished. ASP was from FOB 4, which Warren commanded.

• 1:59:58Jocko Willink?

  After the three corpses were unloaded from the helicopter, Warren gave a terse, teary-eyed speech to his captive audience. Warren warned everyone that if they were careless in the field, death was the result of that carelessness. Then he bent down, opened a body bag, and picked up a portion of a body of one of the dead Americans. He was now crying and screaming at his men to never be careless in the field.

• 2:00:28Jocko Willink?

  Warren was never the same after that.

• 2:00:32Jocko Willink?

  Neither was CNC.

• 2:00:37Jocko Willink?

  What was it that changed from your perspective?

• 2:00:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, we, from our early briefings, probably in October, we heard about the NVA sapper teams. They were highly trained and they would just wear a loincloth, carry a weapon. And they were really just highly trained in tracking, so that when they came to the attack part, they had minimal clothing and they knew what they were looking for. And the NVA at that point had a medal, Kill American Medal. So if they killed us, they got their medal and a bonus and they would be heroes for the rest of their lives within the Communist Party. So, we heard about them, this confirmed it.

• 2:01:26John Stryker Meyer?

  And it just kicked up everybody's concern a notch. And that being New Year's Eve, the team had, the Americans had, taken a bottle of Scotch with them. So they had had a little hit of the Scotch, we don't know how much. And that's what Jack Warren had gone the extra distance on, saying about being careless, we don't know. But those sappers were good. And that proved it and it just gave us, in our case, you know, as you know, if you do your RON at night, without the NOGs, you would do your perimeter and our people always checked. I mean, we always rotated who's asleep and who wouldn't. And we never, ever had a problem with that.

• 2:02:09John Stryker Meyer?

  No matter how tired you are, there'd be somebody awake just so something like that happened, somebody be there on full automatic, ready to respond.

• 2:02:18John Stryker Meyer?

  A new level of terror.

• 2:02:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and those guys were so, it's like they were just traveling super light and super like the sappers.

• 2:02:26John Stryker Meyer?

  Sure.

• 2:02:26Jocko Willink?

  You know, just could move quickly and, yeah, it's scary.

• 2:02:31John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, because you know, we knew that the NVA had all their sources set up, I mean, besides being compromised in headquarters. They also had people that alerted when the choppers left the launch site.

• 2:02:42Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:43John Stryker Meyer?

  They had border watchers, so that when we came in, they would report where we were heading to a higher command, and they would try to rally their troops. So we were up against that at all times. Just a question of who would be there, how many. And a lot of times, just getting on the ground was the first part, but then you hoped to get into the mission. And it was just really a challenge.

• 2:03:13Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of a challenge, here we're going back to the book. The daily grind of running missions across the fence was wearing on me physically and mentally. As sixty-nine dawned, I began a mental examination of life in SOG. Being in an elite unit within America's finest special operations was where I wanted to be. The adrenaline-enhanced high of deadly firefights against a relentless enemy under extremely lopsided odds was intoxicating. I had never experienced such exhilaration or sheer terror. Yet there was a little voice in the back of my head which spoke of survival.

• 2:03:53Jocko Willink?

  Surviving not only a vigorous enemy campaign directed against SOG members, but merely surviving the odds of going home in one piece. My mind also began the mental debate between rising to the new challenges inherent in a secret war and returning to a safer assignment. My one-year tour of duty was scheduled to end at the end of April. Under the general rules of SOG, after running targets across the fence for six months, I could request a cushy assignment. I had already spent seven months with the team.

• 2:04:31Jocko Willink?

  I was alive, however, thanks to HIP, Sal, Fuck, Twan, and the other men of ST Idaho. I couldn't just walk away.

• 2:04:46Jocko Willink?

  And that's where you, that's where you wrap up this book. Now you go into some cool, you go into some cool, one more really interesting story, and then you also have a very cool thing in there about what you guys carried.

• 2:05:01John Stryker Meyer?

  And what we didn't carry.

• 2:05:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and what you didn't carry. How much, so how much longer, so now it's January of 69.

• 2:05:07John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:07Jocko Willink?

  You'd been there for seven months. How much longer did you stay with the CNC teams?

• 2:05:12John Stryker Meyer?

  I'll stay right there to the end. We, we closed FOB 1 in January. They shipped us down to Da Nang, and that's where I picked up with the second book. And, um, they needed help down there, so we hit the ground, continued to run. Bubba asked to be taken off the team, so he left, Lynn Black came on. So Lynn and I, for my last couple of months, and at the very end, they had a mission up at the Mugia Pass, which was north of the DMZ River in Laos, which was a major channel point. And the plan was for us to go in, set up on a mountaintop,

• 2:05:55John Stryker Meyer?

  taking a lot of claymores, mortars, and calling airstrikes for two or three days on that, just to raise hell with the NVA there, because they never had a recon team go that far north. And we did an inspection, which is that inspection prior to that mission, which was about April 20th, 69. And then we finally went up to the launch site, and we were up there, I guess maybe about the 24th or 25th, I just forget the exact date now, but we went up to the launch site, got on the choppers, we're getting ready to launch, choppers take off, and they turn around and went

• 2:06:35John Stryker Meyer?

  back. That target had, just had two aircraft shot down over it. They figured they just shot down a Phantom Jet and a Skyraider. Choppers are gonna be easy to knock out this guy. So to sidebar to that, I'm at a reunion two years ago. One of the guys that ran recon says, remember those pictures you got on your second book on the ground there? I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He says, what was that mission? Wasn't that something like that's a suicide mission, right? He says, well, I don't know about suicide. It was gonna be high odds, but you know, we were going in. We had two extra Americans. We were, we had M60s. We got Buku bullets, hand grenades. We were gonna give it a shot.

• 2:07:18John Stryker Meyer?

  The guy goes, do you realize they asked me to do that? And I told him to fuck off. I go, really? I says, you saw us taking the pictures. You didn't tell me that. Says, I didn't know what your mission was. So here's a top secret operation. The recon guys, another recon man had been given that target. Said, hell, no. It was too far north and he just felt that the, uh, it would just be a suicide mission. And once you get in, you'd never get out, other than a casket or a body bag. But there's no talking between teams much because everything is like you got a mission. You do your mission, they do theirs. So.

• 2:07:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I already gave you a fair warning before we started this that we're probably gonna have to have you come back on here. Cause I mean, I, I got just, uh, I mean, this, this, these books are, they're just awesome. The, the detail that you go on to and just the experience that you've had, which are just, it's a miracle that you're sitting here, talking and able to tell us what you went through. When as far as I can tell, there's no way in hell you should be sitting here right now.

• 2:08:26John Stryker Meyer?

  I agree. I mean, there are times when, uh, in talking to friends or people that have read the book, you know? Particularly on page 202, when the guy touches your boot. I mean, I've talked to people, it's just like, it feels surreal even today. It's like, thank God everybody at home was praying, you know? And. Yeah.

• 2:08:46Jocko Willink?

  The last thing I want to read from the book is just, uh, just this section right here. The dedication, it says, "This book is dedicated to all SOG reconnaissance team members, both US Special Forces and Indigenous troops, as well as to every man in every air support unit, especially the King B pilots of the 219th South Vietnamese Air Force's Special Operations Squadron, who worked daily with SOG teams on the ground across the fence in America's secret war." "This book is also for every man in SOG and their support units, who made the ultimate sacrifice."

• 2:09:30John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, because today, as we sit here, there are still 1,589 Americans missing in action in Southeast Asia from the Vietnam War. That includes CIA, SF, regular army. In Laos alone, 50 Green Berets are amongst those MIAs. Over 140 aviation, Army, Marine Corps, Air Force MIAs died supporting our missions there. Just how deadly it was.

• 2:09:59Jocko Willink?

  You guys had a over 100% casualty rate?

• 2:10:02John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, several of our guys had multiple Purple Hearts. Bob Howard received eight. He had been put in for 11. He, he, he was a recipient of the Medal of Honor in December of 68 for a mission out of Kontum. And, uh, yeah, the casualty rate did exceed 100%.

• 2:10:20Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, and I, I didn't, I couldn't find any numbers on the numbers that were actually killed, but that was a massive number percentage-wise of guys in SOG that were killed.

• 2:10:32John Stryker Meyer?

  Right. Yeah, the numbers, uh, are hard to track. And I'm, I'm working with a gal now who's a real, she's a retired Master Sergeant from the 101st. And she's beginning to do some research to, to try to put that number together because during the war, 3.2 million Americans served in Vietnam. That includes the 500,000 sailors that were off, off the coast, and your SEALs that were going up north. And, um, out of that 20,000, approximately 20,000 were SF. Out of the SF, approximately 2,000 went to SOG.

• 2:11:08John Stryker Meyer?

  Out of that, it depends on which author you talk to. There's no hard stats anywhere. It's because SF was not as good as the SEALs at keeping records. And it'd be between 500 to 7, maybe 800 Green Berets actually went across the fence with recon missions out of the 3.2 million.

• 2:11:30John Stryker Meyer?

  Those are our numbers.

• 2:11:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, amazing. Well, I hope you don't mind coming back here again.

• 2:11:38John Stryker Meyer?

  I'd be honored to come back. I've heard some of your stories, pal.

• 2:11:42Jocko Willink?

  Believe me, my stories are a big joke. I conversed with one of the guys that was in Ramadi with me, a guy by the name of Dave Burke. He was a Marine Corps anglicule guy on the ground with us. And, you know, we always joke about our experiences. You know, he had a friend, and we had him on the podcast, who served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

• 2:12:06John Stryker Meyer?

  Really?

• 2:12:06Jocko Willink?

  He was a Purple Heart recipient in every war, in every one of those wars. And, you know, that's the way I feel standing here talking to you. Like, I'm in a totally different and much lower category of experience, but that's why it's such an honor to sit here and talk with you.

• 2:12:22John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, it's mutual.

• 2:12:23Jocko Willink?

  If you have any other closing thoughts to...

• 2:12:25John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, the only thing about this book, I had Spont to mention that I couldn't have done it without my wife.

• 2:12:30Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 2:12:30John Stryker Meyer?

  My dear wife, Anna. At the time, we had four teenagers and one newborn in the house. And so if you can imagine that turmoil, and I'm working at a fish wrapper up in North County, and so between the fish wrapper and the kids, she goes, "Go write the book."

• 2:12:49Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 2:12:50John Stryker Meyer?

  She supported me all the way.

• 2:12:50Jocko Willink?

  That is one thing, real quick, when you got home from... So you got out shortly thereafter? When you got done with Vietnam, is that when you were done, right? You got out of the Army shortly thereafter?

• 2:12:59John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, I went back to CNC for a second tour, and then I got out of the Army in April 25th, what Book Two is about, going back.

• 2:13:08Jocko Willink?

  One tour wasn't enough at CNC?

• 2:13:10John Stryker Meyer?

  Well, you know what? To be honest with you, I came back in, by the time I landed in the States, like, May 1, May 2 of 69. The anti-war movement was going on strong. There was Woodstock, our men walked on the moon. But I hated it. Hated being... And I was supposed to go to Fort Bragg with the regular SF, but they put us in 10th Special Forces Group, which is up in Massachusetts. And they had five companies, A, B, C, D, and E. E was a signal company, which was rinky-dink. They had new lieutenants, butter bars, running this thing. And they treated like basic camp, not SF. And to top it off, they had old career sergeants that are all overweight, all an embarrassment to the beret they wore.

• 2:13:55John Stryker Meyer?

  And they came in and put me a platoon sergeant. And I'm, I'm in this environment that was not a good chemistry.

• 2:14:02Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:14:02John Stryker Meyer?

  So, um, I heard that the MPs were coming, basically. And, uh, I went down to Pentagon. We had a woman, Billy Alexander, who handled our orders. And I was told what kind of wine and what flowers she liked. So before I went down there, I had her wine, her flowers. And then Thursday morning, I get to the Pentagon at seven o'clock, give her the flowers, no wine. Went back to sleep in the parking lot, came back at four, she gave me the orders to NOM. I cleared on Friday. The MPs came on Monday and I was back in my team a week later.

• 2:14:33Jocko Willink?

  What were the MPs coming for?

• 2:14:34John Stryker Meyer?

  Eh, there's some bar fights, property destruction. They have reports of a four-four-two, which I had at the time, uh, four-four-two W thirty.

• 2:14:42Jocko Willink?

  Which is what?

• 2:14:42John Stryker Meyer?

  Austin Oldsmobile.

• 2:14:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay, oh, God, I got, oh, that four-four-two.

• 2:14:46John Stryker Meyer?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, yeah.

• 2:14:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:47John Stryker Meyer?

  It's a sixty-nine, which was the coolest car at the time, hear me talk.

• 2:14:51Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 2:14:52John Stryker Meyer?

  So the reports about that car going through the entrance gate on the sideways drift.

• 2:14:58John Stryker Meyer?

  Actually, I'm sorry, when it entered the base on the exit gate, that's what it was. The MPs weren't happy about that. They couldn't catch me. I was able to hide within our comm equipment, but they were trying to begin to figure things out. But anyways, they were coming.

• 2:15:11Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like a, it sounds like the next podcast. That's the warm-up for the next podcast. We'll, we'll take it from there next time.

• 2:15:18John Stryker Meyer?

  Like a bad dream, I'll be back if you ask. Thank you.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  No, that's awesome. These books, Across the Fence, which one do you think people should ride, read first?

• 2:15:26John Stryker Meyer?

  Across the Fence is the first. That's my book about my getting involved and et cetera. And the stories of, uh, other people, which by the way, we have a Green Beret medic, John Walton, who was the son of Sam Walton. You heard of a store called Walmart?

• 2:15:39Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:40John Stryker Meyer?

  Son, one of the best medics there was at the time, chapter four. Where a fellow Green Break gets his leg blown off and the one in the Vietnamese got shot four times, John brought them all back and Tom Cunningham's alive today and has two children, thanks to John.

• 2:15:57Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome. These books are available on Amazon, right?

• 2:16:00John Stryker Meyer?

  Amazon, just go to Amazon, they're available as eBooks or paperbacks. And then my website is sogchronicles.com.

• 2:16:07Jocko Willink?

  Sogchronicles.com, that's the name of Volume One, that's another book.

• 2:16:11John Stryker Meyer?

  Right.

• 2:16:12Jocko Willink?

  And then On The Ground, The Secret War In Vietnam.

• 2:16:14John Stryker Meyer?

  That's the second book.

• 2:16:15Jocko Willink?

  The second book.

• 2:16:16John Stryker Meyer?

  Because in here, there are some stories I missed because of deadlines.

• 2:16:19Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:16:20John Stryker Meyer?

  And the first story, we have the, our recon team is at our worst target, Oscar Eight, and the NVA come up and tap them on the shoulder and say, "It's your turn for guard duty."

• 2:16:30Jocko Willink?

  Ooh.

• 2:16:31John Stryker Meyer?

  That's pretty close to the enemy.

• 2:16:32Jocko Willink?

  All right, we will cover these books in the future. Everyone, go buy these books so you're ready.

• 2:16:39John Stryker Meyer?

  Thank you.

• 2:16:40Jocko Willink?

  And, really, a true honor to have you on, appreciate it.

• 2:16:44John Stryker Meyer?

  Honored to be here.

• 2:16:45Jocko Willink?

  Can't wait to have you back.

• 2:16:46John Stryker Meyer?

  Hope you turn.

• 2:16:47Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding.

• 2:16:48John Stryker Meyer?

  Thank you.

• 2:16:51Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Mr. John "Stryker" Meyer has left the building. And what an honor it was to talk to him, and I can absolutely promise we're having that guy back on. And thanks to you, John, for your, for your service and your sacrifice and the sacrifices of your teammates. It is men like you that have allowed us to live the way that we live. And that is in freedom. So, he has left the building and Echo, speaking of living, living the way we should live, what do you got for us?

• 2:17:36John Stryker Meyer?

  Well?

• 2:17:38Speaker 02

  As we have been doing, talking about jujitsu first. Jujitsu, martial arts. You know, capability is what it is. That's really what it is. You want to generalize like the whole thing into one big nugget. Capability, just improve your capability.

• 2:17:54Jocko Willink?

  We want to improve our capabilities.

• 2:17:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:57Jocko Willink?

  A sure way to do that. Not just in the martial fields, but in life.

• 2:18:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:02Jocko Willink?

  Is to train some of that jujitsu.

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was talking, there's a girl named Kara. Who trains here, you know, I see her every once in a while, I'll see her, whatever. And um, she, she said basically the stuff we were saying. Where she was like, I was like, but I only see her sort of in the men's class. I said, hey, have you tried the women's classes? Our women's class is good now. Developed. And then she was like, not yet, I want to, whatever. And I was like, yeah, that's, I think a lot of the times we'll, we'll offer more benefits depending on who you are as a girl. Will offer benefits because you can get like the moves you can kind of do. You know, on, on a body that's more similar to yours. So you can go through the moves a little bit like more thoroughly, I think in a way.

• 2:18:46Speaker 02

  Uh, for lack of a better way of putting it. She was like, yeah, that's good. That's true. She's like, you know what though? I, I really like, there's a lot of value here in, in the guys, in the men's class. And she said, straight for self-defense.

• 2:18:56Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 2:18:57Speaker 02

  And I was like, yeah. She's like, yeah, because like when you get used to guys and meanwhile, there's like. Two guys scrolling like hard though. You know the kind where they're rolling and they're grunting at right in front of us, like sweating and they're sweat splashing on us. She's like, when you get with, and we kind of laugh because she like motions to them. And I'm thinking like, yeah, any girl to come in and see that or anyone even, anyone even never.

• 2:19:19Jocko Willink?

  Participate in that.

• 2:19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm thinking, I gotta do that. No way, man. I'm not ready for that.

• 2:19:24Jocko Willink?

  A lot of girls are not ready for that.

• 2:19:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And what if you just all of a sudden, like one day you go to the grocery store and now you gotta deal with that? Man, that's, that's tough.

• 2:19:33Jocko Willink?

  There's a big psychological gap you need to make up.

• 2:19:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:19:36Jocko Willink?

  If you train jujitsu, the gap is made up.

• 2:19:38Speaker 02

  She was like, I'm used to it. And she's not a big girl either. She's just like a, a pretty small girl. She's like, yeah, and she's real nice, you know, nice to go. She's like, yeah, I'm. And I'm really used to that. And I've been training for like almost a year now. I'm like.

• 2:19:51Jocko Willink?

  It's a big difference.

• 2:19:52Speaker 02

  That's, that's good that you can come in here as often as you do and have that mindset. That's good. That's gonna get you places. Hundred percent.

• 2:20:01Jocko Willink?

  So we're talking about jujitsu.

• 2:20:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:03Jocko Willink?

  And then you need to start talking about the gear that is needed for jujitsu.

• 2:20:06Speaker 02

  Some of it, yes.

• 2:20:07Jocko Willink?

  Some of the gear that you need for jujitsu is a gi.

• 2:20:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:20:10Jocko Willink?

  If you're gonna train gi, jujitsu, which we recommend.

• 2:20:14Speaker 02

  Strong.

• 2:20:15Jocko Willink?

  Strongly recommend. We also recommend you train no gi. You train all kinds of jujitsu. That's what you train. If you need a gi, which you do, get one from Origin Maine.

• 2:20:24Speaker 02

  Yep, Origin. So you go to originmaine.com. This is breaking it. All these things. Also jeans, American denim. Again, we all know this, but I'm gonna say it again. It's all made in America. All of it.

• 2:20:35Jocko Willink?

  Yep, every little piece of it.

• 2:20:38Speaker 02

  The little seeds that they plant to eventually grow cotton, to eventually go into the loom, to eventually formulate weave.

• 2:20:45Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:20:46Speaker 02

  Formulate both. The fabric that gets sewn and stitched into gees, jeans, rash guards, all this stuff, shorts. Best shorts in the world too, by the way, factually. Anyway, all of it is in America, done in America. So boom, there's that. Huge deal, by the way. So yeah, American denim, we have some new jeans, good ones, jogger, you know, sweatpants, sweat, athletic gear. Boom, Origin Maine, their supplements, big deal.

• 2:21:19Speaker 02

  Pretty much all the essential supplements that you're gonna need as you go through this kinda hectic path. At times, the path is hectic.

• 2:21:27Jocko Willink?

  It should be.

• 2:21:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:28Jocko Willink?

  The path is easy. That's not the path we wanna be on. That's that path leads down.

• 2:21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna be easy if it's a downhill situation, cuz all you gotta do is sit there and slide.

• 2:21:39Jocko Willink?

  Don't take the path down.

• 2:21:40Speaker 02

  Yep. So yes, the supplements are joint warfare for your joints. Joint warfare is more for like if you have get abuse on your joints. You're running a lot, you're doing jujitsu where you're twisting a lot, and you're going every day or something like this.

• 2:21:54Jocko Willink?

  Or you're just lifting every day.

• 2:21:55Speaker 02

  Lifting every day. Oh, yeah.

• 2:21:56Jocko Willink?

  Basically, if you're doing physical activity.

• 2:21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's kinda like hard.

• 2:22:00Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I guess you could break it down like, oh, if you're doing. Some weak physical activity.

• 2:22:05Speaker 02

  Then you might not need it, but I think not so much the joint warfare. You made a good point though. At the muster. Remember, because your knee is like kinda on the kinda on the final stages of healing. Yeah. And you were like, um, I was like, yeah, how's your knee or whatever? And you're like, uh, what'd you say? Oh, it was good, but like, since I've been standing up on it for a long time.

• 2:22:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:25Speaker 02

  It's kinda like, yeah, at the muster, yes.

• 2:22:28Jocko Willink?

  It actually swelled up again.

• 2:22:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:22:30Jocko Willink?

  Surprisingly.

• 2:22:30Speaker 02

  So here's the thing, it it made me think when I was a bouncer, I used to stand up all the time. Like for the whole thing, you're standing at the front door and not the hey, it's active, the path is active and

• 2:22:41Jocko Willink?

  The struggle is real.

• 2:22:42Speaker 02

  It was real bad. And but I have dress shoes on. I don't have the the New Balance or the, you know, the deal. It's like dress shoes. So it's like, it was, man, joint warfare would have came in really handy. Well, you know, varying levels of hardcore.

• 2:22:56Jocko Willink?

  So get some joint warfare for your joints. Get some krill oil for your joints.

• 2:22:59Speaker 02

  That's general maintenance.

• 2:23:00Jocko Willink?

  And general maintenance of life.

• 2:23:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:23:03Jocko Willink?

  Life support.

• 2:23:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:23:05Jocko Willink?

  And then discipline and discipline go, which is sort of like, um, gives you a little bit of that.

• 2:23:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:16Speaker 02

  Little edge mentally cognitively.

• 2:23:19Jocko Willink?

  Be illegal?

• 2:23:20Speaker 02

  Negative.

• 2:23:22Jocko Willink?

  If you are going to confront someone in an intellectual battle.

• 2:23:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:28Jocko Willink?

  Is it legal for you to take discipline go and they don't?

• 2:23:34Speaker 02

  Should not be illegal because it's not an illegal drug. It's not even drugs. It's actually

• 2:23:39Jocko Willink?

  It's an advantage though, right?

• 2:23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, good. The lifting weights is an advantage. Or the results from lifting weights is an advantage. The results from eating salads, that's an advantage. So boom, same thing. But discipline just tastes really good and, uh,

• 2:23:54Jocko Willink?

  And have that advantage over your enemy, whoever they may be.

• 2:23:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:23:58Jocko Willink?

  Then we got a, we also got Molk. Which is? Milk.

• 2:24:04Speaker 02

  Delicious, delicious protein. I had a milkshake last night. I had meatloaf. No potatoes. Meatloaf, carrots, milkshake.

• 2:24:13Jocko Willink?

  That's a good meal right there.

• 2:24:14Speaker 02

  Chocolate, dark, the darkness, and I put peanut butter in it. Boom, there it is. Literally my late dinner last night. Outstanding.

• 2:24:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. That's the milk. And you can give it to your kids too. You can get the Warrior Kid Milk.

• 2:24:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:28Jocko Willink?

  For your kids.

• 2:24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:29Jocko Willink?

  So your kids, so your kids instead of turning out to be like an obese, out of shape kid. That you were like trying to, no, don't even put them on that path. Put them on the milk train.

• 2:24:39Speaker 02

  Let me ask you this. When you were young.

• 2:24:42Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:24:43Speaker 02

  And you went to whatever, elementary school, junior high, whatever, did you bring home lunch?

• 2:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes.

• 2:24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:54Jocko Willink?

  Not very often.

• 2:24:56Speaker 02

  Okay, so do you, as far as you can remember, did you, did you have a healthy home lunch? Did you, was your, you know?

• 2:25:01Jocko Willink?

  No, nothing. We didn't even know what healthy was. Like, it wasn't, that wasn't even a thing.

• 2:25:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's.

• 2:25:06Jocko Willink?

  They were just like, oh, what do you like to eat?

• 2:25:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:25:08Jocko Willink?

  And what, what do you like to eat? And what's cheap?

• 2:25:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:25:11Jocko Willink?

  Right? Cause we're gonna get you. We're not getting you cold cuts.

• 2:25:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:25:16Jocko Willink?

  Cause those cost money. Guess what doesn't cost a lot of money?

• 2:25:18Speaker 02

  Poloni?

• 2:25:19Jocko Willink?

  Jam.

• 2:25:22Jocko Willink?

  PB and jam, right? Peanut butter and jelly.

• 2:25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:25Jocko Willink?

  Go to all day long.

• 2:25:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not too bad.

• 2:25:27Jocko Willink?

  On white bread.

• 2:25:28Speaker 02

  Oh, white bread, that's okay.

• 2:25:29Jocko Willink?

  On white bread. And then you know what? You get the little, the little, uh, party mix of, of potato chips. Frito lays.

• 2:25:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:40Jocko Willink?

  Doritos, which I never liked Doritos. I still don't like Doritos.

• 2:25:43Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 2:25:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. But then you get some of that, and then like some chocolate chips, some Chips Ahoy cookies.

• 2:25:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:49Jocko Willink?

  You know what those are?

• 2:25:49Speaker 02

  Yes, I do.

• 2:25:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Get the sleeve, little, little mini sleeve of Chips Ahoy.

• 2:25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a.

• 2:25:54Jocko Willink?

  And so there's nothing nutritional, right? The nutritional value of this lunch is zero.

• 2:25:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:58Jocko Willink?

  You had nothing.

• 2:25:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, if that was.

• 2:25:59Jocko Willink?

  Best case scenario, I used to get the chocolate milk it, it from the.

• 2:26:04Speaker 02

  Peanut butter and jelly.

• 2:26:04Jocko Willink?

  It cost. Five cents for a chocolate, for a white milk, seven cents for a chocolate milk.

• 2:26:11Speaker 02

  Oh, the school lunch.

• 2:26:12Jocko Willink?

  Yep. So I used to get that. That would probably be what I actually lived off of because everything else was just, was just poison in a wrapper, basically.

• 2:26:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:21Jocko Willink?

  So that, does that answer your question?

• 2:26:22Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I mean, the reason I was asking is because, okay, so my family's, or my mom, more than my dad, I guess, but you know, my mom took care of the home lunches in the event of us bringing a home lunch. She, she's health conscious. She was like a hippie, you know? So we had like the whole wheat bread.

• 2:26:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:26:38Speaker 02

  You know, the, the, and then.

• 2:26:40Jocko Willink?

  You know what though? You're, how old are you?

• 2:26:42Speaker 02

  I will be forty two this year.

• 2:26:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you're like five years younger than me. There's a, there's a difference there in terms of what people were even thinking.

• 2:26:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, keep in mind, she, everyone wasn't like that. I'm saying my mom was. My mom was like a hippie. She was different than everyone. And here's, here's my point with that, where when we'd come to school and I'd bring home lunch, we'd get sort of teased. Because it's like, you don't get the cool snacks, the cool Frito, what like lays, chips and cookies and like the cool fun stuff. Oh, no.

• 2:27:12Jocko Willink?

  Dipping that up in the milk.

• 2:27:13Speaker 02

  Negative. No, you got, we got the whole wheat sandwich with like turkey from a real turkey.

• 2:27:19Jocko Willink?

  With sprouted grains on it or something.

• 2:27:22Speaker 02

  Whole wheat bread.

• 2:27:23Jocko Willink?

  Somebody was talking about the sprouted grains.

• 2:27:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:27:25Jocko Willink?

  That's the next level, right there.

• 2:27:27Speaker 02

  It is. It is. Nonetheless, we got laughed at that. I didn't like that.

• 2:27:31Jocko Willink?

  Mama Echo was coming in hard with the sprouted grain bread.

• 2:27:34Speaker 02

  With a health, yes.

• 2:27:35Jocko Willink?

  And they was making fun of you because it tastes like cardboard.

• 2:27:39Speaker 02

  I don't even know because they don't know how it tasted. It's not that. It's more of a social thing. Everyone, everyone knows that cookies are yum, yummy. Everyone knows that like chips are delicious for snack and all this stuff. We didn't have that. We had like the snacks that they knew that weren't that good.

• 2:27:51Jocko Willink?

  Carrots.

• 2:27:51Speaker 02

  Tasting carrots and like.

• 2:27:54Jocko Willink?

  Carrots are pretty tasty though.

• 2:27:55Speaker 02

  I think so now, yeah.

• 2:27:56Jocko Willink?

  The thing that's good about carrots, if you're not eating sugar and you eat a carrot, it tastes sweet.

• 2:28:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:28:00Jocko Willink?

  You're like, oh, this is super sweet. It tastes good. You can eat too many carrots because your body can't digest them fully if you eat too many of them, just FYI.

• 2:28:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:28:08Jocko Willink?

  I've made that mistake before.

• 2:28:10Speaker 02

  Pounding bags of carrots.

• 2:28:12Jocko Willink?

  You eat like one of those bags of carrots, your gut is gonna tell you.

• 2:28:14Speaker 02

  All right.

• 2:28:15Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna be an issue.

• 2:28:16Speaker 02

  Good. Noted.

• 2:28:17Jocko Willink?

  Bro, where are you going with all this?

• 2:28:18Speaker 02

  I'm making a good point. Unless you want to talk about carrots a little bit more, I can't, we can't, but nonetheless, I'm making the point. So these kids would make fun of us because they got the cookies and we had like tomatoes and sprouts. In our sandwiches. But growing up, when you come early adulthood, adulthood, that health consciousness paid off big time. Huge time. So to make the switch from non-health consciousness to health consciousness, it's like, it's, it can be a grind.

• 2:28:49Jocko Willink?

  That can be harder.

• 2:28:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Maintain the path and it's already instilled as being a young person. So there's that. So, Molk. So my daughter comes home from school, literally yesterday, said they were teasing me because I had carrots. And she was, she wasn't very happy about it.

• 2:29:05Jocko Willink?

  That's why she knows jujitsu. Start choking fools out.

• 2:29:07Speaker 02

  Well, I'd be, I started to say that, but she was, it was no time for jokes at this point. Cause she was been like, are you serious or not? I was like, you don't want to choke anyone for teasing you for your carrots. But this is what I said. One of the things I said, I said, don't worry about them teasing. There's, first off, there's nothing funny about carrots. Like it's not, I'm not saying it's like, oh, it's so serious. I'm just saying what's funny about, I don't get it kind of thing. And she was like, yeah, that's kind of true. And I was like, and guess what? Carrots are good for you. Just like your lunch is good for you. And as you grow up, you're going to see the results of that. And you're going to see the results of them not eating, not healthy food. And you're going to see.

• 2:29:41Jocko Willink?

  You need to do better than that as a father.

• 2:29:43Speaker 02

  Why?

• 2:29:44Jocko Willink?

  Cause you need to be like, yeah, no, she needs to be like, they say, oh, what are you eating? Are you eating some, you eating some carrots?

• 2:29:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:29:52Jocko Willink?

  And then she says, what are you eating there? Some type two diabetes? You're going to die at age 32, loser. Get out of my face before I put you to sleep.

• 2:30:00Speaker 02

  All right. I'll implement, you know, that, that direction.

• 2:30:03Jocko Willink?

  That's not part of the way of the warrior kid code right there.

• 2:30:05Speaker 02

  Negative. No.

• 2:30:06Jocko Willink?

  We are having fun. Fun is part of, you know, life.

• 2:30:10Speaker 02

  But I saw her wheels turning when she was like, like, yeah, you know, like I will, I'll see the results, you know? And then, you know, then my wife's there and she's like, yeah, look at dad, how big is, well, so are all this stuff, right? So it kind of.

• 2:30:22Jocko Willink?

  Plus your wife is kind of like just making stuff up.

• 2:30:27Speaker 02

  Unless it worked, but go back to Mok Warrior Kid Mok. This is what you achieved with that. One of the many things is you actually made it like kinda cool. To have a healthy thing, have a healthy snack.

• 2:30:39Jocko Willink?

  That's where we're going. We're gonna sway a lot of people with these books and this, this stuff. That's what's gonna happen. I mean, I see that. It's not even gonna happen. It is happening. It's awesome to see. Alright, dude, we gotta rock and roll.

• 2:30:51Speaker 02

  Bruh, that was an important story.

• 2:30:52Jocko Willink?

  That was a long, that was 12 minutes deep.

• 2:30:55Speaker 02

  Anyway. Alright, we got Jaco White Tea. How about that?

• 2:30:58Jocko Willink?

  Jaco White Tea.

• 2:30:59Speaker 02

  Tell me about it.

• 2:30:59Jocko Willink?

  Get it, drink it, taste good, deadlift 8,000 pounds.

• 2:31:03Speaker 02

  Certified organic, by the way.

• 2:31:04Jocko Willink?

  Yep, certified organic and all that good stuff. And it tastes delicious and it looks cool. So, you're good.

• 2:31:11Speaker 02

  And we have a store. It's called Jaco Store. So you go to jacostore.com. This is where you can get.

• 2:31:18Jocko Willink?

  You can get rash cards. You can get t-shirts. You can get truckers hats.

• 2:31:26Jocko Willink?

  And if you're, if you're not into truckers hats, cuz whatever, you can get Flex Fit hats.

• 2:31:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, bruh. Flex Fit hats are good, though.

• 2:31:37Jocko Willink?

  You don't get to judge hats. You don't wear hats.

• 2:31:39Speaker 02

  Well, they look cool.

• 2:31:40Jocko Willink?

  Stand down. Stand down. Stand down.

• 2:31:45Speaker 02

  Anyway, you wanna represent the pad. This is what it's for. It's quality stuff. It's not ballpark giveaway shirts, the one you never wear or you use for like, you know, wiping your hands in the kitchen or whatever. It's not that. You're not gonna wipe your hands in the kitchen with these shirts.

• 2:32:00Jocko Willink?

  Quality.

• 2:32:01Speaker 02

  Quality.

• 2:32:02Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:32:02Speaker 02

  Quality and representation. So yeah, some women's stuff on there. Yeah, a lot of good stuff. I'm gonna have two more new shirts coming out.

• 2:32:11Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 2:32:11Speaker 02

  New. I don't wanna necessarily say just shirts, but two more new.

• 2:32:14Jocko Willink?

  Items.

• 2:32:15Speaker 02

  Things. Sure, coming out. So stand by for that. Also subscribe, right?

• 2:32:21Jocko Willink?

  Yes. Subscribe to what? The podcast. We're not talking about subscribe to a magazine cuz no one gets magazines anymore. Magazines are dead.

• 2:32:28Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:32:29Jocko Willink?

  Right? Why are you gonna buy a magazine now? You're gonna have somebody bring a random bunch of papers to your house with advertisement? You're not gonna do that. No one does that. So, we're not talking about subscribing to a magazine. Subscribe to this podcast if you want to.

• 2:32:43Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:32:43Jocko Willink?

  If you get value out of it.

• 2:32:47Jocko Willink?

  Whatever. And don't forget about the Warrior Kid Podcast. I just, I got hit. I got hit today. I got hit. Kind of hard. Somebody said, is the Warrior Kid Podcast dead? And I was like, oh, that stinks. That stinks. Warrior Podcast is not dead, but Warrior Kid Podcast, I need to put more out. So I need a little bit of time, which I'm making, but I need to get it done. So yes, Warrior Kid Podcast, subscribe to that. I'll get some new ones in there. Also, irishoaksranch.com is where Aiden Warrior Kid up in Central Cal has his own business.

• 2:33:28Jocko Willink?

  Thirteen years old running a business, no big deal. That's what Warrior Kids do. He makes soap from goat milk so that everyone in the world can stay clean. And don't forget about YouTube. We have a YouTube channel. Did you know that?

• 2:33:44Speaker 02

  Yes, sir, I did.

• 2:33:45Jocko Willink?

  And it's called Jocko Podcast. And it's on YouTube. So podcast is not just a podcast where it's audio only. On the video version, you can see us. If you want to know what John Stryker Meyer looks like, you can watch this on YouTube. This is going to get a lot of views on YouTube.

• 2:34:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:04Jocko Willink?

  Listening to John Stryker Meyer and hearing his stories. Yeah. So check that out. Also, Echo Charles makes what he calls enhanced videos. Some people might call them distracting from the message.

• 2:34:19Speaker 02

  Sure, they might.

• 2:34:20Jocko Willink?

  Some people like them. They have millions of views, some of your videos that you've made. Do you know that?

• 2:34:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I did.

• 2:34:28Jocko Willink?

  A lot of views.

• 2:34:30Speaker 02

  Well, like I said, or like you said, yeah, you can call them distractions on the message, which I actually won't even argue with it.

• 2:34:38Jocko Willink?

  Thank you.

• 2:34:39Speaker 02

  But some people look at it or see it as enhanced.

• 2:34:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's where you use the word enhanced.

• 2:34:46Speaker 02

  You put it enhances the message. It's kind of like, kind of like, you know, when you have a dog and you gotta feed him the heartworm pills. You know, where the pills, the heartworm pills is good for him. It's good. That message is good. But sometimes you gotta put it in the food, you know? So like tastes good. It's like the message gets to deliver it in like a good way.

• 2:35:04Jocko Willink?

  Hard to swallow that you have to put like videos around it is what I'm hearing.

• 2:35:08Speaker 02

  Music around it. Yes, sometimes.

• 2:35:09Jocko Willink?

  Break out the cellos.

• 2:35:10Speaker 02

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 2:35:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Hey, so that's the YouTube channel. Check them out. And then we also got Psychological Warfare, which is on iTunes, Google Play, other MP3 platforms. And if you want an alarm clock, that's me talking. Then you go to Psychological Warfare and that's what you get. And, and you'll see that you can use it as an alarm clock or you can use it as an emergency, as an emergency air cover.

• 2:35:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:35:36Jocko Willink?

  Fire support. You're like, I'm not sure if I should work out right now. Press play.

• 2:35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:41Jocko Willink?

  On the, on the Psychological Warfare track that's about not working out.

• 2:35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:46Jocko Willink?

  And you will get up and you will go to the gym.

• 2:35:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:35:49Jocko Willink?

  If you're about to eat some donuts.

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:35:51Jocko Willink?

  Or some chocolate chip cookies, right?

• 2:35:54Speaker 02

  Sure. Chips Ahoy, whatever.

• 2:35:56Jocko Willink?

  Chips Ahoy.

• 2:35:57Speaker 02

  The one you said.

• 2:35:57Jocko Willink?

  You find a sleeve of random Chips Ahoy hanging around somewhere. You know, you use that term for the first time when I, it was, it was James Nielsen.

• 2:36:05Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:36:06Jocko Willink?

  James Nielsen would talk about eating a sleeve of Oreos, just getting after it.

• 2:36:13Jocko Willink?

  James Nielsen, world's toughest accountant.

• 2:36:15Speaker 02

  Agree, yes.

• 2:36:17Jocko Willink?

  Black belt in jujitsu for a long time. One of the OG American jujitsu practitioners teaches on, on Saturdays here at Victory MMA and Fitness. Which by the way, is our gym in San Diego, California. Do you want to train some?

• 2:36:33Speaker 02

  You know what's funny about that too, where, you know, you say, oh yeah, the world's toughest accountant, right? And he teaches jujitsu too. So teaching jujitsu, that's a job. Like that's a career. Like you're a jujitsu instructor.

• 2:36:42Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 2:36:43Speaker 02

  But he's like, he's an accountant, but he just teaches jujitsu. It's not like an accountant is like some, you know, scraping by sort of gig.

• 2:36:50Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:36:51Speaker 02

  It's like that's a, and there's a few people like that. You know why? Because teaching jujitsu is fun.

• 2:36:56Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:36:56Speaker 02

  And it makes you better at jujitsu. That's just how it is, man. The nature of the game.

• 2:37:01Jocko Willink?

  That's on psychological warfare. Also, you can get it if you want some visual representation of the path to keep you there. You can go to flipsidecanvas.com, run by my brother Dakota Meyer. He makes art.

• 2:37:16Speaker 02

  With layers.

• 2:37:17Jocko Willink?

  With layers. The layers are free. They're not free. They come with the cost of the art.

• 2:37:22Speaker 02

  Right, right. Layers included.

• 2:37:23Jocko Willink?

  Layers included. There you go.

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:37:26Jocko Willink?

  We've designed some of the items there.

• 2:37:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:29Jocko Willink?

  You know, let them know like, hey, this would be kind of cool over here. And if you want something, just, just request Dakota on Twitter, I think is the best place.

• 2:37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:38Jocko Willink?

  And that's cool. Flipsidecanvas.com if you want to get some cool stuff to hang up in your house.

• 2:37:42Speaker 02

  Back to psychological warfare. If you use that whole thing as a playlist, psychological warfare, even if it doesn't apply to you, you know, you're not eating donuts while, a playlist while you work out. By the way, even if you're not eating donuts while you work out, which most of us do not, it still, like, it puts you in this mindset of like, you know, working and reaping results of work.

• 2:38:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it goes back to the podcast Machete season, when they talk about how the power of the audio into your ear.

• 2:38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:10Jocko Willink?

  That's what's happening with psychological warfare.

• 2:38:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:38:12Jocko Willink?

  It's going right in your ear. You're like, you walk, you get done listening to that. You're not even thinking about the fact that you're thinking about the fact.

• 2:38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18Jocko Willink?

  You hear what I just said?

• 2:38:18Speaker 02

  Yes, I did.

• 2:38:19Jocko Willink?

  You're not even thinking about the fact that you are thinking about the fact that you don't even want donuts. That you want to get in the gym, that you want to attack your project.

• 2:38:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:38:29Jocko Willink?

  That's what's happening.

• 2:38:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. It's true. Hundred percent true. Also, while you're, if you're lifting at home, if we're doing the lifting at home, which I do, which you do, which a lot of us do, actually, people hit me up, show me their home setup. Awesome. You should have kettlebells, in my opinion. Kettlebells is one of the, pretty much the biggest, as far as changes to my workout, the most valuable change, that I changed my workout.

• 2:38:55Jocko Willink?

  Functionality.

• 2:38:56Speaker 02

  Functionality, like my hands are stronger. One time I was doing, you know how you gotta, in Jiu Jitsu, you have wrist control, you know, and varying levels of wrist control depending on the position. I was rolling with a guy, literally, like, he's like, trying to release my grip from his wrist or whatever, and like, he's visibly angry because he couldn't. So I just sort of sat there and just let him like, do it, whatever.

• 2:39:20Jocko Willink?

  How was his technique? Because technically, he should be able to get out of that.

• 2:39:24Speaker 02

  Should, but I've been doing those kettlebells. So my wrist control is a lot, uh, we'll say the effectiveness is a lot higher. Nonetheless, my original point kettlebells, this is where I get my kettlebells from on it. So you go to on it.com slash Jaco there. You can get these kettlebells and they're all the cool ones too. By the way, like always say Darth Vader, my most recent one, Stormtrooper kettlebell. My second most recent one, and not to mention all the other primal bells and legend bells that I have from there. Also add on it is the electrolyte mineral mix. That's part of my daily make mix with Jaco's discipline. Like I said, the mineral electrolyte mix.

• 2:40:09Speaker 02

  Water, maybe a little Gatorade if, if I'm feeling a little feisty and. Oh, and that's how you take joint warfare and grill oil.

• 2:40:17Jocko Willink?

  Don't, don't, don't drink Gatorade everyone.

• 2:40:22Jocko Willink?

  Hey, we got some books too. We got way of the warrior kid three, where there's a will, it's out right now. And for everyone that's gotten it so far, awesome, appreciate it. Write some reviews. So I know what you think of it. That, that is cool. If you have where the work, way of the warrior kid three, where there's a will, that means you should also have where the warrior kid one and two. Number two is called Mark's mission. Also we got Mikey and the dragons. Best children's book ever written, according to a lot of people.

• 2:40:52Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:40:53Jocko Willink?

  A lot of people.

• 2:40:54Speaker 02

  I dig it.

• 2:40:55Jocko Willink?

  Lot of people been telling me that.

• 2:40:57Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 2:40:58Jocko Willink?

  Tons of people. Uh, no, seriously, check out Mikey and the dragons, help your kids overcome fear, fear of all kinds. Also got the discipline equals freedom field manual. If you need to know how to get after it, if you want the audio version of that, it's on iTunes, Amazon music and Google play. Also we got extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership written by myself and my brother Leif Babin. Extreme ownership. Number one selling business book since it got released. The whole time. We just got that little stat.

• 2:41:28Speaker 02

  Dang, it's got a, it's a big stat.

• 2:41:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:32Speaker 02

  Impressive.

• 2:41:33Jocko Willink?

  Some people.

• 2:41:35Jocko Willink?

  Tell me that dichotomy of leadership is better. It's a good combo. I'll leave it at that. Echelon Front, that is my leadership consultancy. What we do is solve problems through leadership. It is me, Leif Babin, JP Denell, Dave Burke, Flynn Cochran, Mike Strahely, Mike Byma, and Jason Gardner. If you need help in your organization with your leadership, which will help everything that you do in your business and in your life, go to echelonfront.com for details. If you want to come to the muster,

• 2:42:07Jocko Willink?

  you already missed Chicago. It was sold out. Your next opportunity is Denver, December, or sorry, September 19th and 20th. That is

• 2:42:18Jocko Willink?

  gonna sell out. And then December 4th and 5th in Sydney, Australia. If you want to come to it, sign up as quick as you can so that you can actually go and you don't get all mad. You'll be mad at me outwardly, but deep inside you'll know that you hesitated and you procrastinated and you just didn't get your game on. And that's why you're not at the muster. So if you want to come to that, check extremeownership.com, EF Online. Leadership training is not an inoculation. It doesn't take one shot and now we're good to go. You want to follow up with it. And that's what you can do with EF Online. Or if you can't make it to the muster for whatever reason, go to EF Online.

• 2:42:55Jocko Willink?

  Online, interactive leadership training.

• 2:42:59Jocko Willink?

  Check that out, EFOnline.com. And of course, we have EF Overwatch. If you have a company and you want to get some good leaders that understand the principles of extreme ownership and they're going to apply them inside your organization, go to EFOverwatch.com. We will deliver you a leader from the special operations community or the combat aviation community that is ready to step into a role and lead your company to victory.

• 2:43:29Jocko Willink?

  Also, if you want to hear more about important things like Kawaii 5-0

• 2:43:37Jocko Willink?

  or other highly intense shows from Echo Charles, or if you want to hear about leadership and war and human nature from me. Between the two of us, we are on Twitter. We are on Instagram and we are on D-Fash-Bow.

• 2:43:54Jocko Willink?

  Echo is at Echo Charles. And I am at Jaco Willinkin. Thanks to all the veterans out there, especially those like John Stryker Meyer.

• 2:44:04Jocko Willink?

  Who volunteered. And volunteered and volunteered again to do the hardest missions in the worst areas. For zero recognition, by the way.

• 2:44:17Jocko Willink?

  Not even from your own friends and family. Those are true heroes and we are forever indebted to them. We are also indebted to police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first respondents. Thanks for keeping us safe. Here at home and to everyone else. I know that life. Can be stressful.

• 2:44:50Jocko Willink?

  But chances are you aren't surrounded by elephant grass that is 12 feet tall and burning and closing in on you. Chances are you aren't being assaulted by NVA soldiers. Chances are you aren't facing death.

• 2:45:09Jocko Willink?

  But at the same time. Actually, you are facing death. We are all facing death. So remember, like John Stryker Meyer said. Every breath of air is sweet.

• 2:45:28Jocko Willink?

  And our gift is to be alive.

• 2:45:35Jocko Willink?

  So go out there. And live.

• 2:45:40Jocko Willink?

  And until next time. This is Echo and Jaco. Out.