274: Being the Best. Can You Handle The Cost of Going Against The Grain? Is it Worth It? Tony Herbert, "Soldier"

0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:20 - Tony Herbert, "Soldier" 2:31:09 - Final thoughts. 2:48:27 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:59:12 - 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 274 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. All right. So the last podcast 273, we were with Anthony Herbert, Tony Herbert, also known as, and we started off his journey from a kid growing up in Pennsylvania. So if you haven't listened to Podcast 273, go listen to that right now. He tried to join the Marines at 14, 14 years old, credit. Eventually joined the army at 17, off to the Korean War, went from private to master sergeant. All kinds of heroic actions, suffered all kinds of wounds.

• 0:45Jocko Willink?

  Shot, hit with frag, white phosphorus burns, and also bayoneted multiple times, including one bayonet stab that broke off in his chest.

• 1:00Jocko Willink?

  He, in the Korean War, served as a platoon leader, even though he was just a young enlisted guy.

• 1:06Jocko Willink?

  And eventually, at the end of that podcast, and at the end of that part of his life, he was pulled off the battlefield, one of the most decorated soldiers of the war, sent on a morale, it was basically a morale tour. And first got flown back to the, to the White House, met President Truman. And then basically went to London and Antwerp and Brussels and The Hague and all the other European allies that were fighting alongside America in the Korean War. Along the way, he met Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. She encouraged him to go to college. He kind of agreed. One of the quotes he says in the book is, he, he agreed because he was already the youngest master sergeant in the army. And he said, what am I going to do? Sit around the enlisted man's club telling stories about Korea?

• 1:50Jocko Willink?

  So he was sort of not, not over it, but he realized that he had kind of done what he was going to do. So he ends up getting assigned as an ROTC instructor at a high school in Denver, because he liked to ski.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  Goes to the third Ranger class that ever happened. He was in. He ends up getting married to his hometown sweetheart, Mary Grace. Starts going to college or he then he gets out of the army. Then starts going to college at the University of Pittsburgh. While he's there, he writes a book called Conquest to No War Nowhere, which was his first book about the Korean War, which he later rewrote, which we covered what when it was rewritten, it was called The Making of a Soldier. That was podcast 273 for the most part. Worked at a steel mill at night while he was going to college. And then eventually commissioned as an officer in the Pennsylvania National Guard. Shout out to the 228 Iron Soldiers. All right. So.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  So then he goes to then he's back kind of in the army. And he gets some warnings that the army's different now, you know, the war is over. But the good people got out. We just left with people that shouldn't even be in the army. That he got those kind of warnings. But he stayed in. He loves being a soldier. He wants to be a soldier. Goes to the basic Army Infantry Course, wins nine out of 10 awards there, including the Leadership Trophy, which is the Leadership Trophy is awarded by the other students, like the other students select who deserves this Leadership Trophy. Then he gets assigned as a Ranger Instructor. And he starts.

• 3:36Jocko Willink?

  He starts in the mountain phase. And so today we're going to be reading. So the first book that we covered, we covered a little bit. So he's written two books. Well, I guess he's written three. One was Conquest to Nowhere. That one got rewritten as The Making of a Soldier. That was the bulk of what we read last time. This time we're going to read from his second book primarily. And it's just called Soldier. Just called Soldier and lots of lessons learned. But as I mentioned in the first podcast in 273.

• 4:09Jocko Willink?

  There's some serious lessons learned about

• 4:13Jocko Willink?

  life and things get really crazy when he goes to Vietnam as a battalion commander. And we will get there. All right. So here we go. Going, going to the book Soldier written by Anthony B. Herbert. And he says this, "Teaching young men the essentials of mountain climbing, combat and survival was more of a learning experience for me than for them. I began discovering things about the resources in me as well as the way the army was moving. I was an alternate instructor at first, assigned to teach cliff descents on suspension traverses. I took it seriously. It was dangerous business if you didn't.

• 4:54Jocko Willink?

  The ropes to be used for traverses, which were one inch in diameter and 900 feet long, cost the army about $300 each. I had set up two of the traverses on a 60-foot cliff the day before a new class was to begin. And that afternoon, I went out to inspect the ropes. One of the criteria for determining the quality of the kind of rope that was the present was the presence of a tiny colored strand running all the way through its core. I inspected the first traverse and found the strand. But the second rope didn't have it, which meant that I simply couldn't approve its use.

• 5:34Jocko Willink?

  The strand was an indication that the machines used to put the hemp together into a strong enough cord had worked the way they were supposed to. If the strand wasn't there, something had gone wrong and the rope might be faulty. I went back to my quarters and wrote an unsatisfactory report on the rope and then went to the chief instructor and told him of my findings. "The army paid good money for that rope and you want to throw it away?" he argued. "We're not going to do that, Herbert." I explained what I had found, or rather what I had not found. "Strand schmanned," he said. "You go out there and test it again by going down the traverse. If it holds, if it holds you, it's okay."

• 6:12Jocko Willink?

  This is kind of a strange safety check, right? Go ahead and risk your life to see if it's gonna work. I returned to the cliff and went down the traverse. So he does it. It held. It was supposed to be sturdy enough to support a jeep. I went back and told the captain and he ordered me to conduct the class the next day using the rope. I filed the unsatisfactory report and went to bed. The next morning, as we stood at the top of the cliff, I ordered the class into two lines. The captain nodded his approval from nearby. One group would use the traverse made of the rope I'd inspected and approved. The other would be, would use the traverse of the rope I'd inspected and rejected. A young corporal in the second group stepped off.

• 6:50Jocko Willink?

  The rope snapped and he fell sixty feet to the rocks below.

• 6:55Jocko Willink?

  I went down quickly on the other traverse. His body was so broken, it almost crumbled in my hands as I lifted him into a jeep and sent him to the hospital. The captain had seen what happened. He left the scene running up over the hill. The students were nervous. They said they weren't going through with it. I made them a little speech on courage and reminded them that they'd all known that ranger training included risks. It seemed to work. We spent the rest of the morning learning how to use the traverse. There were no further accidents. And at lunchtime, I went back to base where Colonel Byerly and the captain asked me how the kid who fell was going to be. He'll be dead on arrival, I said. Don't say that, the captain said, you can't say that. How the hell do you know? Because I'm the one who put him on that jeep for the hospital.

• 7:41Jocko Willink?

  He'll be dead on arrival.

• 7:44Jocko Willink?

  The phone rang. It was a hospital calling and the captain came back to Byerly and me with a strange look on his face. The hospital says he was dead on arrival, he reported. It was quiet in the office. Finally, the captain said, I was responsible for the accident.

• 8:02Jocko Willink?

  I realize that, sir, and I'll stand whatever comes from it, I said. You're responsible, you know, he said. You're the one who's responsible. I know, sir. I know, I answered.

• 8:16Jocko Willink?

  So I'm sure it's pretty obvious why I decided to um pull out that particular quote because that is 100% accurate. Obviously, he's taking ownership for what happened, but it's not just lip service.

• 8:33Jocko Willink?

  If you don't think something is right and you execute it, it's on you.

• 8:38Jocko Willink?

  It's on you.

• 8:41Jocko Willink?

  A little bit more from Ranger School.

• 8:45Jocko Willink?

  And this book, look, this book is

• 8:49Jocko Willink?

  four, almost 500 pages long. And obviously, I'm not reading the whole thing. There is so much good information. And I'm just, I tried to

• 8:59Jocko Willink?

  parse it down to some key points along the way. But this is a, this is a book that is packed filled with knowledge. And I tried to bring out as much of that as I could. Some of the war stories that I don't even go into, there's, there's all kinds of combat scenarios that I don't even go into. Just an incredible book. Um, fast forward a little bit here. I didn't develop any really sophisticated theories about teaching, and I still haven't. What seemed to be important was that the teacher know what he was talking about and be able to show as well as tell. One of the fallacies in army training these days is that kind of experience

• 9:38Jocko Willink?

  is no longer a part of the tradition. Kids are taught combat techniques by men who, through no fault of their own, of course, have never spent a moment in combat. And we wonder how it is that we turn out soldiers like Cali. Talking about Lieutenant Cali. Mila Masker. What seemed most important then, and still does, was that the students realized that the army and war are not really games at all, even though they might seem that way at times, especially when you hear someone of the barroom tales, or when you hear some of the barroom tales of the way it was at Incheon, where that night in the Mekong Delta.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  I saw so many army teachers who were trying to make up for the times when they had been down at the bottom of the heap, when they had been the ones taking orders. They played games with their men, building their egos with nitpicking orders that produced nothing but dissent and rancor among the men.

• 10:39Jocko Willink?

  So often I found it that way in the military. The rules and the regs and the juvenile cover-ups and the children's games. It had nothing to do with creating a system of discipline or building soldiers. It was simply an ego game.

• 10:57Jocko Willink?

  Again, I think it's quite obvious while I, why, why I, you know, am talking about this. This is something that we all have to watch out for. You get put in that position of authority. You gotta watch out. You gotta watch out. Some good, good opportunity for you to pump up your ego. Make them do some stupid stuff that doesn't make any sense. And we'll do that all day long. If you let your ego run the show, that's what you're doing. And by the way, it creates, what do you say? Dissent amongst the troops.

• 11:28Jocko Willink?

  All right. So what he does in the next kind of stages of the books. He gets stationed in Germany. He kind of creates this provisional Ranger platoon. He becomes the commander of the provisional Ranger platoon. 1962, he gets promoted to captain. He's deployed to Africa. He's deployed to, well, the Congo in Africa, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, the Persian Gulf, deployed to Bahrain, all in the 60s. And there's all kinds of good stories in the book about these different situations that he's in. He's doing some kind of clandestine type operations.

• 12:07Jocko Willink?

  He's, it's just, you know, borderline spy scenarios going down. Working with the CIA, interacting with the CIA, intelligence services and this kind of stuff. So he does all that. 1966 goes back to being a Ranger instructor. Starts working towards his master's degree in psychology. Gets a degree in 1968. He gets offered a slot at War College. But of course, he doesn't want to go to War College. Not yet anyways. He wants to go to Vietnam. And there are a bunch of reasons. Obviously, he, he has always felt that he wants to be a combat leader. And he sees an opportunity to, to, to lead.

• 12:50Jocko Willink?

  He also has never worked with helicopters at the level they were used in Vietnam. So.

• 12:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, so he, he said, quote, "I wanted to know, I wanted to go, I wanted to see, I wanted to fight." Asked his chain of command, "Hey, can I please go to Vietnam?" And he does, he ends up getting orders to Vietnam. He wants to be a battalion commander because by this time he's been promoted a few more times. He wants to be a battalion commander, he, but he doesn't show up immediately in Vietnam as a battalion commander. He has to pay his dues first, and the way he pays his dues is by becoming the inspector general of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. So inspector general, what's an inspector general? The inspector general, um, their mission, the inspector general mission is to, quote,

• 13:40Jocko Willink?

  "Provide impartial, objective, and unbiased advice and oversight to the army through relevant, timely, and thorough inspections, assistance, investigations, and training to promote and enable stewardship, accountability, integrity, and efficiency."

• 13:57Jocko Willink?

  "Also good order and discipline and enhance total army readiness." That's what an IG, have you ever heard that term before, IG, inspector general?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:06Jocko Willink?

  You have?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:07Jocko Willink?

  Where'd you hear it? What movie?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Uh, it, I don't remember. It might have been like MASH or something like this.

• 14:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay, okay. I was trying to think of a good way to explain all those things, and have you ever seen police movies where they have the, uh, internal affairs?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:26Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of, I think that's a good comparison, right? It's somebody that's kind of inspecting us, like our team.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:34Jocko Willink?

  Right, it's not, it's not, "Hey, we're out inspecting, looking what the bad guys are doing. We're looking at what we're doing as good guys, we're making sure we're doing the right things."

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Internal affairs always, it's, or they came off as, kind of like, that wasn't a good thing, when internal affairs is involved. It's kind of like they're investigating some, some, some bad stuff.

• 14:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, something went, something bad happened.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, inspector general comes, I don't know, just hits me as something more like, hey, we're, almost like a compliance officer, like, kind of like, hey.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Just to make sure everyone's kinda doing the right thing. It's not like, it seems like they're kinda on your side still.

• 15:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay. No. Well, let me rephrase that. If you're doing the right things, they're on your side. If you're doing the wrong things, just like Internal Affairs, if you were doing all the right things and Internal Affairs came along, you'd be like, oh, cool, they're here to keep people straight. If you were, if you were a criminal, or you were, if you were, if you were corrupt, right? Well, Training Day, your favorite movie.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 15:34Jocko Willink?

  But is there, is there Internal Affairs in Training Day?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:37Jocko Willink?

  So, there should have been, right? You got, there should have been someone tracking, hey, what's going on? Where's this money going? Where's this, you know, where are these reports? Why aren't they?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, like in the whole scenario for sure, but probably not in the movie for giving that particular storyline, but yeah, yeah, overall, for sure.

• 15:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that guy, what's Denzel Washington's character name in that movie? Do you know?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Alonso.

• 16:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay, Alonso would be not a big fan of Internal Affairs.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  No, sir.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  Although, he was, he was such a mover and so manipulative, he might have had some Internal Affairs people that were on his side.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, he kinda did imply that, not Internal Affairs necessarily, but kinda like he had some people on the inside kinda backing his moves when they're talking about getting drug tested and stuff.

• 16:21Jocko Willink?

  There you go. There you go. So, so that's what, that's what the IG is. And look, you know, I was in the Navy for 20 years. Obviously, I saw some IG inspections go down. Or the IG would get called in, like maybe someone's,

• 16:36Jocko Willink?

  some ammunition goes missing for an extent. It's not the kinda thing where something happens one time and, you know, the command would just kinda handle that. But if there's some kind of an ongoing problem, the IG, maybe someone's falsifying travel claims, or something like that.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 16:54Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna bring in the IG, who's gonna give an unbiased look, because, you know, maybe the commander's wrapped up in it or whatever.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, okay, so they're not just sorta around all the time or nothing like that?

• 17:06Jocko Willink?

  You call them in for specifically.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:09Jocko Willink?

  And the other, the other place they could get used is, let's say you work for me and I'm a tyrannical jerk. You could, you could then reach out to the IG.

• 17:19Jocko Willink?

  Jack, so you could reach out to the IG sort of through a anonymous, you know,

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 17:28Jocko Willink?

  Email or something and say, hey, this guy Jaco is verbally and physically abusive.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  That's a good tip.

• 17:36Jocko Willink?

  To, to his subordinates. So there you go.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Or his peers, whatever.

• 17:41Jocko Willink?

  So this guy shows up as the IG now, now, like you said, it seems like they would be on our side, right?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my misinterpretation though. I thought Inspector General is sort of like just another guy who's there or another department kind of that's there all the time. That's kind of like, oh, hey, by the way, guys, you guys are kind of slacking over here. So let's tighten that up. We're all good, kind of a thing.

• 18:04Jocko Willink?

  So if you were doing the right things for the right reasons, you'd have no reason to fear the IG. But if you were doing some things that were shady, you might, you might not be very welcoming or you might be scared of them.

• 18:18Jocko Willink?

  And the IG is obviously it's a weird role to play, right? Because you're looking at your team and you're sort of, you can end up in a situation where you're accusing your team of doing things that are wrong. So it's a weird dynamic. And so he shows up as the IG for this brigade and,

• 18:40Jocko Willink?

  and this is the thing about Anthony Herbert.

• 18:46Jocko Willink?

  He seems like a very, what's the word here? He's like a straight shooter, right? A straight shooter that a little bit of black and white, a little bit of like, hey, right and wrong, good or bad, good or evil. He seems like he's got that kind of a personality. And, and actually you can go watch some of his interviews. There's interviews of him on YouTube and you can see some of them.

• 19:18Jocko Willink?

  But you're going to start to see that. And that's sort of in the first one that we, when, when I did cover the beginning of this book, just to talk about his upbringing, you know, he's a church going guy. He's, so he's a, he's kind of, he's kind of a, he's very straightforward. And right or wrong, that's what the personality comes across for the most part to me. And so this IG.

• 19:47Jocko Willink?

  You know, he's gonna kinda, he kinda comes out of the gate swinging. He kinda comes out of the gate swinging. And here we go, he's checking in to this guy. He's checking in with this guy who's a lieutenant colonel. Who they call the mayor of Anh Kay, you know, some outpost over there in Vietnam. The guy is the commander of the brigade's support battalion. So he's checking in.

• 20:10Jocko Willink?

  And the guy's saying, you know, I can get you this, I can get you that. But then he says, I I expect some cooperation from you in return, he added. Like what? I asked. Well, like talking things over before they go to the general, he replied. Most things never even have to reach his ears if you and I cooperate. You know, Herbert? Sort of run things ourselves, trust each other, get along and keep it all in the family. See where this is going? I stared at him and said he had to be joking. I realized almost instantly he was not. I'm supposed to be an IG, I said. He seemed not to have heard, launching instead into a lengthy recitation of

• 20:53Jocko Willink?

  his immense responsibilities as the man in charge of the brigade's rear area headquarters. Everything at Anh Kay was under his purview, he said. Men slept where he told them to sleep and took their meal wherever he assigned them and enjoyed themselves in his clubs and theaters and bought from his post exchange.

• 21:12Jocko Willink?

  It suddenly dawned on me that here was a senior lieutenant colonel, supposedly a professional soldier, who was bragging about his job as a bilading officer. A task generally reserved for a second lieutenant in the States and usually for a not-too-keen second lieutenant at that. He rambled on and on about the scope of his influence and I tried hard to look interested and concerned. Finally, he stopped. It was my turn. Look, Colonel, I understand your position. And if you'll just assign me a room and a mess, I'll be glad to cooperate, I said. He smiled and relaxed in his chair. But you have to understand my position too, I added. Now he was staring. I'm an IG, so I work for the commander, who, by the way, is General Allen, not you.

• 21:56Jocko Willink?

  Since I work for the general, I'll report to the general. And if that isn't a satisfactory arrangement for you, well, then you can talk it over with the general and maybe the two of you can work something out more suitable. His jawline straightened noticeably. "In the meantime, if you're finished, I have a lot of work to do." I concluded. He looked ill. "Is there anything wrong?" I asked, rising from the bed. "No, not at all," he said rather glumly, also rising. "I have some things to do myself." I nodded, opened the door to the outer room, and he left. The place was quiet until the sergeant spoke. "You just made an enemy, sir," he said from his desk. "A real dangerous enemy." I walked into the outer room. "Real dangerous?" "Real dangerous, sir."

• 22:39Jocko Willink?

  "Real, real dangerous?" I repeated, smiling slightly. "Yes, sir. He's okay, sir," he said sheepishly when he noticed my grin. "No kidding, sir. He's really bad news." I took some papers from his desk and looked at him. "So am I, Sarge," I asked. I said, "And I'm not kidding either."

• 23:02Jocko Willink?

  You see where this is going, right? So...

• 23:10Jocko Willink?

  You can see where this is going. He's forming an antagonistic relationship with a guy right out of the gate. And... You know, I talked about this on EF Online the other day. We, you know, we talk about, "Take the high ground, or the high ground will take you." But when you're on the high ground, you have to be careful that you don't...

• 23:34Jocko Willink?

  That you don't launch attacks on other people from a position where you feel like you're superior to everybody else.

• 23:48Jocko Willink?

  You are in a superior position. This is known, right? When you're on the high ground, you're in a superior position. But let me tell you this: When you start to launch attacks with the attitude that you're superior, you're giving up some of the high ground.

• 24:03Jocko Willink?

  So, and this is what's really, what's really a hard line to walk in this book. And as I try and talk through this, I'm not going to do a good job of it. But just because you're right, doesn't mean you're right. And you're going to see this over and over again. I mean, this guy is a like morally, at least he appears to be. And again, there's some controversy around this, everything we're talking about. He certainly appears, if you read the words that he writes in this book, he certainly appears to be a morally upstanding human being that, and look at what he did, look at his heroic actions from the last, last podcast, what he did in the Korean War. This guy is willing to sacrifice for his brothers in arms. He's an incredible soldier.

• 24:49Jocko Willink?

  And you're going to see how much his men, how much his men loved and revered him, which is awesome.

• 24:57Jocko Willink?

  But he's on that high ground and he's, this is, this is, this is what he's doing. He's on the high ground and he's looking down on others from the high ground. And when you do that, they don't like it, people don't like it, doesn't feel good.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. What you, what, what did you, how did you split it? Like you, just because you're right, doesn't mean you're right or whatever.

• 25:21Jocko Willink?

  Just because you're right, doesn't mean you're right.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:23Jocko Willink?

  There's got to be a better way to say that. It's like, just because you're right,

• 25:28Jocko Willink?

  doesn't mean you should smack people in the, it doesn't mean other people are going to think that you're right.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, just because you're right, doesn't mean you're right. Or what you said actually does sound kind of cool. I feel like that should be the quote. Uh, I used to like get into little debates, whatever with my brother. I think I told you this before where, you know how he is, he's the kind where.

• 25:49Jocko Willink?

  There's no, we understand getting in debates with your brother.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. He's down for the cause and he goes hard. But, um.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Anyway, so we'd get into these things, you know, sometimes against my will or whatever. And so finally I came to the conclusion, I said, hey, what you're saying is like right is right. But what you're doing is wrong. Like I see what you're saying, you're saying all the correct stuff is all true stuff. It's all factual and all this stuff, but what you're doing right now is wrong. Like you can't like force people into debates. You can't like, so it's kind of the same concept essentially, you know? Where it's like, yeah, this guy is taking that he's doing the right thing. You know, he's, he's right. He's doing the right thing, but what you're doing kind of right now in a big and essentially in a bigger picture. There's just a bigger picture in play.

• 26:30Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And look, there's a, there, there's things that are universally morally wrong. So there are things like that. Well, almost universally morally wrong. There's things that you can say that that is not correct. That is not right. That should not happen.

• 26:49Jocko Willink?

  When he starts, he's getting into some of this stuff early on.

• 26:54Jocko Willink?

  Look, you, you're right. Colonel Herbert, you're right, but you're, you're not gonna make this easy. And if you, and if you, if you run around just slapping people from the high ground. What you're doing is you're, you're, you're, you have to get off the high ground to slap people. You're coming down off the high ground to slap people. And well, we're gonna see how this unfolds.

• 27:22Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Uh, within a few weeks, I realized that the desk sergeant had been worth listening to. He had it pegged pound for pound. The brigade was garbage. Discipline was lax. The troops were slovenly, disrespectful and sluggish. Ment- mentally as well as physically, it was obvious that Anh K. It was obvious that in Anh K, at least there were no match for either the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese regulars. As the sergeant had said, they preferred pot, two to one. But marijuana was only an expression of deeper, more serious failure. At Anh K, the troops wore what they damn well wanted to wear, including beads and bracelets. They capped their teeth with different colors, red, blue, and gold. And they called the hierarchy "motherfuckers",

• 28:04Jocko Willink?

  and printed "Fuck the Green Machine" on their jackets and hats. Some of them wore earrings, a few sported nose rings, and the battle flag of the Confederacy flew for many of the bunkers. The sergeant was right about "nobody giving a damn too", almost everyone looked the other way. Anh K was a staff and headquarters post crammed with "chair-borne commando" types. In any other war, it would have been ridiculous, but not in Vietnam. Every careerist who could wheedle his way was over there drawing combat pay while the citizens back home were getting bled for the bill. The troops knew best what to call it, a humbug.

• 28:47Jocko Willink?

  The 173rd was the largest brigade in Vietnam, with over 10,000 men attached to it. It was, according to the manual, a combat brigade with absolutely no dead weight. But it was a humbug. There were five so-called combat battalions in the brigade, and not one of them had more than 600 physically present for duty. Out of a total of 10,000 men, there were no more than 3,000 at the battalion level, which means that some 7,000 were assigned to support roles: steak houses, pizza huts, clubs, headquarters, the generals' mess, artillery, engineers, etc. Even among the approximately 3,000 at the combat battalion level, not all were out looking with their rifles.

• 29:33Jocko Willink?

  Some were, of course, but the battalions had their own rear areas, just like the brigade, with their own steak houses and their own clubs. Each battalion was composed of five companies, one of them a makeshift outfit responsible for heavy weapons, which left four companies for walking. No company in the battalion or brigade had more than 75 men physically present and ready to go. Thus, each battalion fielded about 300 combat troopers. Except that each battalion assigned one company to guard its base of operations each day. That left a maximum of 225 men available for the field. Or 1,125 on the brigade bases. And that would have been on a good day with everybody out and everybody with a rifle.

• 30:17Jocko Willink?

  But everybody didn't carry a rifle. Some toted radials, some stayed back and typed, some worked in company supply. Some were fireflies, the daily helicopter resupply lifts, and some were just plain screwed off. So on an average day, the 173rd Airborne Brigade could field approximately 800 men. If all of its battalions were out. In the year I was in the brigade, all the battalions were never out simultaneously. We fielded less than 800 out of 10,000 troops in the brigade. On a countrywide basis, it meant that out of 500,000 men we had there at the peak of our involvement, less than 50,000 were engaged in the business of fighting in the field.

• 30:59Jocko Willink?

  And that figure applies only if all the other outfits were doing as well as the 173rd. As General Wes Moreland liked to say, the 173rd was the cream of the whole crop. It wasn't that our kids didn't fight well in the field. It was just that so damn few of them ever got there. We had a 500,000 man army fielding less than one infantry division in did in World War II or in Korea. On paper, we were hell on wheels. The reports had a column for it. In the field. And on paper, it was 98% or more every day. I filed those reports myself and they looked truly magnificent. All the guys at the steakhouse in the field, all the guys at the club in the field,

• 31:41Jocko Willink?

  the generals, orderlies in the field, the lifeguards at Esther Williams Swimming Pool in the field. Stunning, absolutely stunning. And from the, and from time to time, I found myself inclined to go along with it. It was so mesmerizing that when I later took over a battalion myself, I added another column to my reporting procedure just to keep things straight. Ass in the grass, I called the new column. It was no joke, it was necessary. And ass in the grass means you're actually in the field.

• 32:15Jocko Willink?

  You can see this guy, he's going hard in the paint. And again,

• 32:23Jocko Willink?

  I'm reading from the book. I'm not, these, I don't, I, there, we're gonna get to sort of some of the pushback against this stuff, but we have to, we have to take him for what he's saying.

• 32:34Jocko Willink?

  Well, we have to, let me rephrase that. We have to listen to what he's saying.

• 32:39Jocko Willink?

  He goes on here, "I soon discovered that almost all the problems at any level of the brigade were either the direct or indirect result of piss poor leadership." Being an IG, so you got, he's got this attitude and he's the IG. Well, is he gonna be making friends? What's your prediction?

• 32:59Jocko Willink?

  "Being an IG was an extremely educational experience. I was spending about 20 nights a month with ass in the grass troops, blending in as well as I could, taking every opportunity afforded afforded me to discuss tactics. I found that one of the best ways to get to know any particular outfit was to accompany its men on an ambush. Generally, they were a disgrace." So this is interesting. I guarantee, and I don't, you know, I don't use that word very often. He shows up as the IG and what does he do? He starts going in the field all the time with the troops. Cause he's that kind of bro, you know, he's that kind of brother that's just like, oh, I'm in the army, we got troops, I'm going in the field. So that's what he starts doing. And as he's going out on patrol, well, this is what he finds. "The fault was obvious, poor leadership and more specific absentee leadership.

• 33:45Jocko Willink?

  Few of the ambushed patrols I accompanied included a senior or non-commissioned officer. The enlisted men had humped all day long and carried their load, and then at night they were expected to stay awake and cut it again the next day. They took their sleep where and when they could get it on patrol and for what most, and for the most part, the company commanders didn't know what the hell was going on or worse, just didn't care. It was their fault, but the real culprits were at the higher level. Battalion commanders who wrote out the procedures, almost verbatim from the Fort Benning Operations and Training Handbook, passed them down to their subordinates and let it go at that. They were covered. The procedures had no relationship to the realities of combat."

• 34:26Jocko Willink?

  And you've got to remember that the Colonel that originally told me about this book, this guy is the same kind of vein as Hackworth. He's coming at you. And he loves being a soldier and he loves his soldiers. But he's got no love, he's got no love for the upper chain of command, you can, as you can see. Uh, field standards which apply to combat conditions are important. And those were the criteria I applied as I walked through B Company's area and then he's getting into like actually being out there. A good soldier wears even the most ragged gear well. Even in the field, he is trim, neat and tight with pockets buttoned and no loose or hanging straps or webbing.

• 35:08Jocko Willink?

  He does not wear sunglasses. He keeps a clean face and clean weapon and clean ammunition. These kids didn't cut it. The reason, I could only conclude was poor leadership. Leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield.

• 35:21Jocko Willink?

  Good or bad, it was strictly a matter of leadership. He's, he's talking about going on patrol with a couple of different, um, companies. Take the contrast I found between B Company and C Company. It was the same battalion, same area of operations with approximately the same number of troops and the same kind of mission. Yet while B Company was a mess, C Company was strack. Strategic tough and ready around the clock. They were airborne, man, all the way. One night I went along in a platoon sized patrol commanded by a young lieutenant. It was like clockwork, like beautiful Swiss clockwork. We moved quietly, paused for a silent C RAP meal and drifted off further into the brush to set up shop. Nobody smoked, nobody talked. Charlie Company and its Lieutenant Webster were hunters. And as I sat tight against a palm tree that night, I felt good about being out there with them.

• 36:06Jocko Willink?

  They had a purpose. Just before dawn, Webster received orders, ah, this is such a good lesson. Just before dawn, Webster received orders to drift back to base. About 12 miles away, helicopters were unavailable, he was told. So orders were to foot it back and bring along the Mermite's, the thermal food containers that weighed about 30 pounds or were clumsy as hell to carry. Webster stared at me in the early morning light. "It's stupid," he said. "But it's an order," I replied, playing it straight. He looked at me steadily and then made up his mind. "Yeah," he said. "Well, fuck them. We're not carrying no goddamn cans back through the bush." He turned to his radio man.

• 36:47Jocko Willink?

  "Pass the word to get rid of the garbage cans and all. We're going to take a hike, so keep it light and don't leave anything for Charlie." The radio man turned to leave and Webster stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

• 36:58Jocko Willink?

  "The first fucking noise, somebody gets it in the mouth," he warned, "and then turned to me, "I'll take the gig and the ass chewing." Webster had a real outfit because he was a real leader. He had a good reputation and he earned an even larger one by the time we left. The captain in B Company and Webster in C Company, both had the same raw material, yet one was running a sloppy sad-ass show that couldn't cut it, the other was commanding a tough, tight, combat-ready and combat-able outfit. The difference was leadership.

• 37:31Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. That's a freaking classic case of you get told to do something stupid, what's a good leader do? Now, he could have had that argument, maybe said like, "Hey, you really want me to carry this stuff?" That's just a big pain in the ass. And he says, "You know what? There's a Colonel here. Fuck it. We're not doing that. That doesn't make sense."

• 37:57Jocko Willink?

  He says this, "If a legitimate study is made of that war, most Americans will be stunned to learn that we killed a hell of a lot of our own people. Once again, a failure directly traceable to poor leadership. All it took was the sound of a booby trap or the sighting of movement and we were prone to just open up, to fire to the jungle and brush in every direction without any idea of who might be on the right or left or behind or ahead. We did it over and over again to ourselves."

• 38:26Jocko Willink?

  Here's an example he gives. "Once again, we had killed one of our own. In this particular case, he had caused his own death," it was said. He was a young lieutenant out on his first patrol. According to the report, he had set up the ambush and then left its perimeter to establish security, which was completely ass-backwards, but nevertheless, the way he had been trained by the US Army."

• 38:52Jocko Willink?

  When I was in Ranger School at Fort Benning, I had seen the example set dozens of times without any criticism. Training bullshit. We had too many damn academics. We trained not only with blank ammunition, but with blank attitudes as well. Using instructors who had gone through the same kind of blank training. Men who in their wildest dreams could not relate to a real combat patrol because it had never been part of their own experience. The Army claimed the instructors were combat veterans, and some no doubt were, but most had merely been in combat zones.

• 39:27Jocko Willink?

  Because of that kind of training, the young lieutenant was dead. The report detailed how he had gone out from the patrol's main body to position the outpost people himself, just as he had been taught, and then headed back through the deep jungle and at night alone toward his main group. In the daylight, moving through brushes hard. At night, it's a formidable task. When his men heard movement to their rear, the report related, they called him on the radio. At least he had enough sense to take it along. So, they got an ambush set up. He goes to set some security out. Now he's walking back, and the guys that are in the ambush hear noise.

• 40:10Jocko Willink?

  So they call him up and say, "Hey, you know, we hear noise behind us." And what does the lieutenant say? He says, "Cream 'em." And they did. He was dropped in his tracks. Schooled, trained, Ranger, airborne, and he had ordered his own execution.

• 40:28Jocko Willink?

  I tried to console myself by thinking that anybody so goddamn ignorant deserved to die, but it didn't work. I knew he had been trained by guys like me. Not me personally, but by senior personnel like me. It was our fault.

• 40:43Jocko Willink?

  I tried to imagine myself doing what he had done even several years earlier and I couldn't. He was worse than untrained. He was badly trained. He had no business being out there in charge on his first patrol and his battalion commander couldn't be held blameless either. It was sickening.

• 41:01Jocko Willink?

  We were the healthiest, wealthiest, supposedly best-trained soldiers in the world. Our army had the finest raw material of any country. We had the equipment and the experience to do better. We fought like a bunch of amateurs. I shoved my coffee aside and looked around the talk. There were white cloths and flowers on the tables and paintings on the walls. It was ludicrous. I grabbed a chopper back to Anke and on the way constructed the rest of the night's, that night's pitiful drama. The dead lieutenant was from a little town in Pennsylvania, not far from where I had grown up. A telegram would soon arrive and the middle-aged mother would collapse on the couch in the living room while the father tried to console her through his own tears.

• 41:44Jocko Willink?

  I imagined myself walking into the room and standing at the end of the couch, looking down on them and saying that I had killed their kid.

• 41:54Jocko Willink?

  The vision passed and I was grateful that he wasn't one of my men and I wouldn't have to explain it even to myself.

• 42:07Jocko Willink?

  We had much, much too much. Whatever the reason was, the nature of war, the difference in the attitudes of the personnel, the abundance was overwhelming. The Red Cross, for instance, came up with 15,000 individual Christmas packages for the 10,000 men of the 173rd. He's kind of going on a rant here about just what that giant logistical and rear echelon footprint was like. Sergeant Wren, the motel, they have a motel, the motel manager told me and Booth that the tab for the brigade's entertainment ran close to $200,000 a month. So there's all this stuff is going on and, and look, I'm, he, he accounts for a lot

• 42:49Jocko Willink?

  of this stuff that he's investigating with the IG. There's stealing going on, there's fraud going on, there's rape going on, sexual harassment, sexual assaults and murder and prisoner abuse, people going AWOL. There's all kinds of criminal behavior happening.

• 43:09Jocko Willink?

  He goes into this one, "The records of the Steakhouse and Pizza Hut were equally shocking. Tons of meat were unaccounted for, along with thousands of prefixed pizzas and truckloads of liquor and beer. Three years later, Congress would be pulling the covers off what would become known as the Club Scandals. It would involve generals at the very top, and the very top Sergeant of the whole Army, Sergeant Major Woolridge, whom General Wes Moreland himself had handpicked as the US Army's first top kick. Even then, the Army would be trying to sweep it under the rug. It was in our brigade that the investigation which led to the scandal started. Our investigation launched at General Allen's request. The

• 43:50Jocko Willink?

  lines were being drawn and the IG shop was no longer sloughed off in dinner conversations. It had become a power and I had become, for some of my comrades in arms, the enemy."

• 44:10Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. He's looking, he's, remember, he went there as the IG, but he's supposed to get a battalion and become a battalion commander eventually. "It would be the 3rd Battalion and I would get it in April," he said. "This would necessitate an extension of my tour so I could get in my six months minimum of command time. But it would be worth the extension," he said. "The present commander of the 3rd Battalion would have six months in by April, which was another anomaly of the Vietnam War. It mattered not that a commander was doing a great job or a crappy job. Six months was the magic number." Officers got their tickets punched in six months and then got the hell out to some other assignment to work on another credit or get their, another coupon certified. General Wes Moreland had said it a long time before, when I was a major, that the Russians

• 44:55Jocko Willink?

  were very envious of the way our officer corps was getting tremendous combat experience in Vietnam, and even then I knew it was bullshit. It takes a commander a couple of months to become acclimated to his responsibility. A couple more to get going and then he's gone. It was crazy. Besides, we were losing in Vietnam, a fact which the US Army Officers Corps seemed not to want to recognize. It would have been better to have fought the whole goddamn war with a hundred honest to God commanders than a thousand of the half-assed combat leader types we were producing. Whatever gave the notion we could build a better mousetrap in six months, it was a pipe dream. And what was worse was that the leaders, quote, the, the, the quote leaders we were grinding out

• 45:40Jocko Willink?

  would be not an asset but a detriment in a big war, should one come. Then they would be considered experts and the delusion would cost us plenty.

• 45:54Jocko Willink?

  So you go there, you're battalion commander for six months. You get, you get your box checked and then you're out. And by the way, now all of a sudden you're, you're a battalion commander. So that means what you say is gold.

• 46:12Jocko Willink?

  Another thing he's got to deal with, fragging. Fragging, the deliberate attack on a non-com or an officer by an enlisted man or men was not unknown in the 173rd. One sergeant over in the signal section had made the mistake of raising hell with a trooper about the cleanliness of his area. The man wired a claymore mine outside the sergeant's room, aimed it right through the wall of the switch, at the switchboard, went to a phone and called his victim. The sergeant lost both legs. There was a fragging in 2nd Battalion too, with seven wounded. They tried to get Nicholson with explosives and on another occasion, they tried to blow up his tactical operations center.

• 46:54Jocko Willink?

  One of the men in 2nd Battalion had reportedly blown himself to bits with a claymore mine, but my investigation failed to corroborate this. It had been in his hands. So here's a guy with a claymore mine in his hands. That was certain, but there were two men in a nearby bunker handling the, handling the controls of the mine when it went off. The victim had left the bunker to retrieve the mine at the request of the other two. And somehow they said the circuit had been completed. I wasn't a real detective, but even though, even though two company commanders swore it was accidental, I did sign my report with a recommendation that the criminal investigate, investigation division, check into it. They never did.

• 47:37Jocko Willink?

  Fourth Battalion had a genuine insurrection. Herb Matsuo, the executive, the battalion executive officer told me, "An old Colonel living in an air-conditioned trailer had become sort of a father figure for the riffraff in the battalion." No kidding, Tony, Herb said. He's actually pulled all the freaks in around him and made a personal bodyguard outfit with weapons and all. And the old geezer is dumb enough to believe they're responding to him. The Colonel called his men "The Mafioso." "They're gonna cause serious trouble, Tony." "They're the worst kind of people we have over here. They're killers, and I'm not joking." "You better get word to General Allen before it's too late."

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I think I might be kinda confused. So fragging is what?

• 48:23Jocko Willink?

  Fragging is a term where it's, it's, um, what it means is, you got an officer or you got a senior enlisted person that you don't like, and you kill them.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's a thing?

• 48:37Jocko Willink?

  That's a, there you go. There's two examples.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Damn, okay.

• 48:40Jocko Willink?

  Uh, they put it in movies, in Platoon. You've seen Platoon, right?

• 48:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 48:45Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  I know, heresy, I know.

• 48:48Jocko Willink?

  Are you serious?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  I am serious. I have never seen Platoon.

• 48:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, go assignment. Go watch Platoon.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so, okay, okay, it's in movies, uh, yeah, there's a lot of things in movies, but it's, that seems really weird. Obviously, that doesn't happen nowadays.

• 49:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, you'd certainly hope not.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:09Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I've, I've, I've never heard of a case of, case of fragging now, but yes, in Vietnam, it absolutely, like, there's, there you go. There's cases of it right there. So, so imagine this. You are a young, 21-year-old, 19-year-old, 18-year-old person. You don't believe in this war. You don't like it. You don't wanna die. And in comes, you know, Lieutenant Rambo, that's like, "We're gonna go out. We're gonna take the fight to the enemy." And you think you're gonna get killed.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:42Jocko Willink?

  And he's gonna charge you with being a coward, or whatever.

• 49:46Jocko Willink?

  You're killing people. That's what's happening over there. So you're going out on a combat operation. You get into a firefight. Oh, Lieutenant, young Lieutenant happens to get shot.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I guess on Training Day, technically, that's what he did. Or was trying to do. Where it's like, yeah, you know, we're gonna see if this guy's gonna play ball with us in our, in our group. He doesn't. And then he sets him up to get killed.

• 50:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a, well, yeah, that's a fragging.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  It tries to anyway.

• 50:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a real thing. It's a real thing.

• 50:21Jocko Willink?

  There's another, he's doing an investigation of a company that got creamed, he said. So this company like took massive casualties and he's talking through it, what had happened with, uh, he's about to talk through with General Allen. It had been marijuana. I took it back to Allen and he didn't like it one bit. The company had been creamed and there wasn't a single dead enemy. I suggested that we write it up as a lesson learned, one that even a nitwit trooper could understand. No one individual had been at fault, I reasoned. It had been marijuana. And as bad as that was, it would serve as a valuable purpose. It would serve a valuable purpose as a combat lesson for the living. Marijuana and guns don't miss, mix.

• 51:07Jocko Willink?

  The general was staring at me when I finished. You must be mad, I said. Sir, do you realize what you're asking, he said, walking over to his window for another glance at those goddamn flowers. He, this guy had flowers like planted outside of his window. Can you imagine what you've just suggested? Those were American kids. Two captains and a hell of a lot of American kids are dead. He threw up his hands in disgust and sat down at his desk. And you want me to tell higher headquarters and their families that they were on dope? Not dope, sir, marijuana. And we don't have to say that everyone was on it. Just point out that the reason that they had left, that that was the reason they had had their asses creamed. He stood up again. I'll have to think about it. For the

• 51:49Jocko Willink?

  time being, just keep it to yourself, understand? I stood up. I understand, sir. He sat back down again. And I will consider it. Later I read about A Company's fate in the Stars and Stripes and in our own brigade newspaper, The Sky Soldier. The two accounts were nearly identical. The company had put up one hell of a fight, but it had been overrun by a numerically superior force at a substantial cost to the enemy.

• 52:15Jocko Willink?

  It was one more glorious chapter in the glorious history of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. The official accounts of that night on the hill were a goddamn discredit to every mother's son who fought worth a lick in Vietnam. The general, no doubt, believed it saved some face.

• 52:31Jocko Willink?

  I never mentioned it again.

• 52:37Jocko Willink?

  So you know, you get like, this is about mass cover-ups, right? And no lessons learned, by the way. So that lesson learned doesn't get passed on to anybody.

• 52:48Jocko Willink?

  The story of A Company's heroism and gallantry was published about the same day that Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Ross Franklin joined the brigade as a replacement as the deputy commander. Franklin had graduated from West Point in 1949, won a distinguished service cross in Korea. His head was completely hairless, he shaved it, he looked like a badass combat commander. He was impressive, no doubt.

• 53:13Jocko Willink?

  And his teeth sparkled. They say he's a breath of fresh air, Abbott remarked. So here comes this guy Franklin. And

• 53:24Jocko Willink?

  I think he's the most decorated officer from his class at West Point. This guy Franklin.

• 53:33Jocko Willink?

  And that's from Korea. And so you think, you know, if you were a decorated, highly decorated veteran from Korea, and I was a decorated, highly decorated veteran from Korea, there's a good chance that you and I could meet and be like, hey, bro, right on. Right? Like, we could just be, you know, have this kind of unified past, right?

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 53:52Jocko Willink?

  What else could happen?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  A little bit threatened, some competition.

• 53:56Jocko Willink?

  You could have some ego scenarios, right? We could have that competition between you and me. I think I'm a little bit braver than you, my medals are a little bit, you know, ma, whatever.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:06Jocko Willink?

  Well, unfortunately,

• 54:09Jocko Willink?

  it ain't, it ain't gonna be bro-ing out.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:17Jocko Willink?

  Here we go. How about a briefing? He finally suggested, and don't pull any punches, Herbert. When I finished, he had one question. We're that bad, huh? We're worse, sir, but you'll see it for yourself. And it's not because the caliber of the troops either. We have the finest top sergeants I have ever known in the army, and we have the healthiest, toughest privates you can find anywhere. But the worst general, he said. Not really, I said. Allen is okay. Then, leadership, sir, I said. And then, as he nodded, I related every last error I'd seen in the brigade. When I finished, I attributed them all directly to lack of leadership. How do you mean that, Herbert? Franklin asked. It was precisely what I wanted him to ask.

• 55:02Jocko Willink?

  The troops are ragged ass because they have no one to emulate that they respect. Men are dying because leaders don't care enough to lead. It isn't Allen in particular, although he's included. But the real problem is at a much lower level, at the level of the battalions and the companies. If I followed regulations, I'd be recommending courts martial for every last battalion commander I've seen in this brigade, and I've seen them all. They write policy books, have their men initial them, and then try and correct any violations after they occur. Nobody leads by example. They command from 1,500 feet up in a chopper, and they wear spit-shined boots like they're on parade while their men hump through the bush with their asses half out of their trousers. Everybody plans big, but nobody sees to it

• 55:46Jocko Willink?

  that their plans are carried out. Our lieutenant colonels fight their battalions on paper as if they were chess pieces on a board.

• 55:56Jocko Willink?

  That's Herbert.

• 55:58Jocko Willink?

  The office was definitely quiet until he spoke. What do you recommend, Herbert? Well, since you asked, kick a couple battalion commanders in the ass. Get them out of their birds and onto the ground. Make them spend a few nights out with their units, and don't permit them the right to transfer the men they consider bad news. Force them to get off their asses and lead, and then we'll have a brigade. That's exactly why I'm here, Herbert, he said. Sir, to lead, he said. That's why the brigade is getting a new general to lead. General Pierce is damn sick of Allen and his entire hodgepodge. He walked to the door. Things are about to change, Herbert, for the better. He stepped out into the darkness. I slipped the files back into the cabinet and sat down for a moment to think about it.

• 56:41Jocko Willink?

  Maybe he was going to make a difference, I mused. Maybe, as Abbott had told me, Franklin would be a breath of fresh air. So, off to a good start. We'll do a little bit of bro-ing out.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:57Jocko Willink?

  Then we have Brigadier General John W. Barnes took over the 173rd, thus making a complete change of command that, as Abbott had said, was supposed to be bring a breath of fresh air to that part of Vietnam.

• 57:14Jocko Willink?

  So then things start to go sideways.

• 57:18Jocko Willink?

  There's a little incident that goes down. The next day, I was summoned to LZ English by Franklin, the new deputy commander of the brigade. "You're a no-good, disloyal son of a bitch," he said, for openers. "What are you talking about?" I asked. "You insulted one of my battalion commanders." "One of your battalion commanders?" I repeated. "Yes, goddammit, one of mine." "No sense in trying to lie out of it either, because your ass is gonna swing." I was dumbfounded until he finally explained that he'd heard about the call from Northington to General Allen, and Northington said, "You suggested that call," Franklin said. "You did it without permission." "What do you think I should have done?" I asked. "Come to me, that's what. For what reason?" "Because I'm the commander, that's why," he said. And all along, I thought General Barnes was the new top man in the brigade.

• 58:02Jocko Willink?

  My eyes were wide, but I tried to keep the emotion out of my voice. I knew damn well I was treading on very thin ice. "You, sir, are not my commander. The general is." You can tell, it's just like a bad move. He exploded, and the breath of fresh air was gone forever. "I was," he said again, "a no-good son of a bitch and a disloyal liar." "I had continued..." "I had," he continued, "tried to sink Angel and others in the brigade for my personal gain as the IG." General Barnes stepped out of his trailer, and Franklin hailed him. "General, do you know what this Colonel of yours did?" he said, shoving his finger into my chest. "He illegally warned General Allen of an investigation we had talked about."

• 58:47Jocko Willink?

  So, things are going sideways.

• 58:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that it was sort of the re- I didn't even cover the the thing that he did because it was like it was almost nothing. I called Ed Northington, who had been Allen's aide, who was now in his new job, and asked him if he had heard about the investigation. Is the general in trouble? No. That's what he did. He like basically gave a heads up and but it was like a little bit outside the chain of command. So, General, or sorry, Colonel Franklin freaks out.

• 59:30Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. He is in Hawaii with on leave with his wife, Mary Grace. Mary Grace finally asked him about Vietnam. "A royal screw up," I said. "You're anti-war, Tony Herbert?" "No, that's not what I mean. I mean, I'm just disgusted by what I've seen happening to the Army," I said. She looked puzzled. "I had already told her about getting battalion command, and though she knew it meant that I would be more vulnerable to injury or death than I was as an IG, she took it as she'd always taken my career. She was proud, she said. But now she looked bewildered as I talked about some of the things I had seen.

• 1:00:10Jocko Willink?

  This war is not only killing our people, it's ruining our army. The whole damn show is run without leaders and we're losing, really losing. We talked the rest of the afternoon, and finally she asked about what would happen when my Vietnam tour was finished. Wait till you hear this," I said, grinning. "You're gonna quit?" she said, throwing some sand my way. "Right, Colonel Herbert?" "Wrong, Mrs. Herbert. I've got orders for the Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth." "Oh, Tony, that's great. And after that, I'm gonna try and finish my doctorate. Maybe then I can really contribute something to the Army."

• 1:00:49Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. I kissed Mary Grace and lay back in bed staring out at the ocean through the glass doors at the end of our room. I thought about them all night and about the years that had passed and the things that had happened to all of us. Now it was 1968 and I was 38 years old. I had a wife and daughter and I had killed one hell of a lot of people and watched a lot more suffer and cry and die. And now Ma was gone and Pa and Sister Irene.

• 1:01:17Jocko Willink?

  "You are what you are, you dumbass Lithuanian." I thought that night as the moon illuminated the far end of the room. "You are what you are and what you always wanted to be: a soldier."

• 1:01:37Jocko Willink?

  Gets back to Vietnam and...

• 1:01:44Jocko Willink?

  I'm just going through so much of this book. Look, I'm just skipping so much. There's so much detail in here about all these different things that he's dealing with. These relationships that he has with Colonel Franklin and General Barnes and how these things are just going sideways and...

• 1:02:02Jocko Willink?

  He gets to this one point. "Take a look. Take a look at this and please read it all before you comment," Ray said, handing me a file folder. "The investigation had been handled by Major Henry Boyer, the Executive Officer of Second Battalion." I flipped the cover sheet and turned to the first page. A three-inch by five-inch colored photograph stared at me. It was a picture of a Vietnamese male lying on his back in what appeared to be a shell crater. His face had been blown away. In gilt beneath the picture was engraved "Peace on Earth" from the Peacemakers, C Company 173rd Airborne Brigade, or something to that effect. I glanced at Ray. "C Company of Second Battalion?" He said. I turned the page and read it through. "Well," he said. I put it down on his desk. "It's a cover-up."

• 1:02:47Jocko Willink?

  "You're damn right it's a cover-up. And little old Paul here is not going to be caught in the middle." "You know what Franklin wants?" he asked without waiting for me to answer. "Franklin wants it swept under the rug." "There are exactly 50 cards out like that and he wants them gathered and covered." And what if that's not possible? Well, then I guess we just have to put the burden on Christ. He said, referring to Captain Christ, the company officer of C Company. So like, it's just big cover ups going on. Make this go away. No one, everyone's worried about their career.

• 1:03:28Jocko Willink?

  All right, through

• 1:03:32Jocko Willink?

  through all, through, through all this chaos. And he's, he's been the IG at the 173rd. And you don't think he's going to get a battalion because he's kind of created these bad relationships, but he ends up getting tasked, getting awarded, getting tasked, getting charged with taking over Second Battalion.

• 1:03:56Jocko Willink?

  So he's going to be working for the guy that has hated him as the IG.

• 1:04:03Jocko Willink?

  As I walked back to my sack that night, I decided to use the next 24 hours as prep time. I wanted to work out the Second Battalion in my mind. I laid down and began. And in the States, you might be able to go in and take your time with changes, but not in Vietnam. In the States, you could look around for a bit and maybe take a couple of weeks before actually making a change. But in Vietnam, it was a different story. Take your time in Vietnam and men died or lost legs or arms or eyes. So I had already been looking and thanks to my opportunities as an IG and, and coach's help. I knew about as much as anybody could know about Second Battalion. And it all boiled down to one primary conclusion. Like the entire brigade, the Second Battalion was fat in every area except combat. The solution was to trim.

• 1:04:47Jocko Willink?

  And he goes on about how he's going to get rid of people or move people into more combat roles because there's all these people that are not doing combat.

• 1:04:59Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. I didn't like the way Nicholson had handled the men who were on the way home. Frequently, they would come back to the rear as much as 30 days before they were scheduled to depart. That was a bunch of crap. I had learned my lesson in Korea. Rotation had been established and tigers became pussies. So what are you talking about there? And we covered that in the last podcast. In World War II, when you went on deployment for the war, you went on deployment for the war. You were going to get to go home when the war was over. In Korea is when they started, hey, you're going to deploy for six, well, a year, you're going to deploy for a year and then you get to go home. Well, what does that do? Well, according to him, it turns tigers into pussies.

• 1:05:44Jocko Willink?

  They had hung back and played it safe until they, until we wised up and came up with a new policy. He who fought up front went home up front. I didn't have the authority to establish that policy in Vietnam, but I did have the authority to decide who came back to the rear and when. I could make sure that a man kept his ass in the grass until seven days before his departure date, and I was determined that the battalion would start rewarding achievement rather than failure.

• 1:06:13Jocko Willink?

  Under Nicholson, the last battalion commander, if a guy wrapped a sergeant in the mouth, or if he refused to fight, he came back to the rear, sat on his ass, waiting, drinking, seeing shows, smoking pot, and screwing everything that wiggled downtown until he was court martialed, or given an Article 15, at which point he would pay a small fine for his vacation of several weeks or months. Then he went back to his unit and did it again. But not with me. Every mother's son was going to hump it and carry his share of the load, just like the few already out there.

• 1:06:48Jocko Willink?

  There were other, so that's, that's, that's the secondary consequences that you gotta think about. Or unintended consequences that you gotta think about. Hey, if Echo Charles, you know, punches his platoon sergeant, well, we're gonna send him back to the rear. And what's he gonna do at the rear? Get drunk, you know, smoke pot. Get a vacation, have to pay a small amount of money, then you come back right out and do it again, cuz you don't wanna fight. You're, you're, we're actually giving you what you want.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kinda like the kid, the teenager, right? With the, with the video, he's like, he gets punished and sent to his room. But then in his room is like video games and magazines and, you know, all this stuff, his phone, internet, yeah, all this stuff. So he'll go, you know, when things get tough, in real life, you know, go mow the lawn, I don't know, whatever. He'll, he'll act up, get sent to his room.

• 1:07:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. That's why the punishment, the modern day punishment with kids, with teenagers, is phone.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:07:44Jocko Willink?

  Just give me that phone.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's brutal.

• 1:07:47Jocko Willink?

  My, my kids, like, if I say that to my kids, they're like, uh, uh, uh, squares them away quick.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Ew. You ever seen Ozark?

• 1:07:55Jocko Willink?

  I have not seen it.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's like, anyway, I don't wanna go too deep into it, but basically they're, they're put, oversimplifying it. They're running from these, the drug cartels.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  So they're trying to leave, they're trying to disappear. And so it's like two, two kids, one is 12, one is like, I don't know, 16, 17, the girl. And then the two parents, so the parents are like, hey, we gotta go, we're changing our identities and all this stuff, so here, give me your phone. The girl just starts flipping out. And it's kinda one of those things where, yeah, man, like, some, especially kids, well, it depends on who you are, but a lot of times, kids are so attached to that phone.

• 1:08:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Like, it's such a big deal.

• 1:08:35Jocko Willink?

  It's the social thing, like, you know, when I was a kid, you know, you would get grounded, right? Which meant you, you couldn't see your friends. You couldn't see your girlfriend, you couldn't see your bros, like, you were grounded. Well, nowadays, you, like you said, you can send to room, but you're still gonna hang out with your friends cuz you're gonna be on Snapchat, right? That's what's gonna be happening.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Jocko Willink?

  So. Sending them to a room doesn't really, it's not really grounding them. The way you ground them is you gotta get that device. Get that phone. There's so many kids that are mad at me right now for putting out this word.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Hey, what's Article 15?

• 1:09:13Jocko Willink?

  It's, uh, if I'm your commander and you, you do something wrong, then you can be punished under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the UCMJ. Article 15. Article 15 means that I can dock your pay, I can reduce your rank, like I can apply punishment to you. Now, you have to opt, you can, you can say, you can accept, you can accept the UCMJ, or you can say, I want a court martial, in which case you're gonna get a lawyer, and you're gonna get a jury and all that kinda stuff. So Article 15 is, is it gonna be lesser?

• 1:09:56Jocko Willink?

  It's a little bit of a gamble sometimes, depending on, you know, what you did and, cause you could say, you know, the, if I'm your boss and you did something wrong, people might be telling you, just dude, just take, just take Article 15, and you know, Jaco's pretty lenient, you know, he's a pretty, or people might be like, you don't wanna do UCMJ, you don't wanna go Article 15 with Jaco, he crazy. He's gonna throw the buck at you.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  So it's kinda like, what, like a, I guess not like a plea bargain then, cause you know,

• 1:10:24Jocko Willink?

  Not like a plea bargain, um, it's just accepting your fate.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 1:10:29Jocko Willink?

  With what your boss is gonna, your boss has the, the authority, Article 15, UCMJ, to say, okay, Echo Charles, he stole a piece of gear from the platoon. We're kicking him out of the platoon, well, he's gonna go to UCMJ, so you go to, you go to me, I'm your boss, and I say, okay, you stole gear, we're taking your trident, you have to pay back the money, I'm busting you down in rank, and you're gonna go to the brig for 30 days. There you go. Now you could, let's say you didn't, you thought you didn't steal it. And you, you won't want to make a case. You could say, I request court martial. In which case, now we go to court martial. Now you get a lawyer that says, well, he said, he was just borrowing that gear.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:10Jocko Willink?

  And everyone knows that, that you're lying.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  So that's the kind of similarity to going to trial. You know how guys like, no, I'll take the plea, I'll go to trial.

• 1:11:18Jocko Willink?

  So in that case it is, except for you don't necessarily know what the bargain is.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Right. So it's not like a plea bargain. It's almost like a blind plea.

• 1:11:26Jocko Willink?

  It's a little bit of blind. It's a little bit of blind, but it sort of is a little bit of like, hey, look, I know I kind of did this. I'm throwing myself at the mercy of the court. Hey, boss, I screwed up. I'm sorry. Hit me.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, like pleading guilty essentially in a minor kind of way. Cause the, you know, you're kind of, it's up to the judge. How he's like, okay.

• 1:11:49Jocko Willink?

  You're putting, you're throwing yourself, kind of that, kind of throwing yourself at the mercy of the court.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  So what is, forgive me, by the way, I'm deviating. What are you, and I've heard this, I hear you guys say this all the time, taking your trident. What does that mean? You're not a Navy SEAL anymore?

• 1:12:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Just straight up. You can't get it back. Can't go through the whole deal.

• 1:12:06Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Um, yep. It's kind of everything, right?

• 1:12:11Jocko Willink?

  Not kinda.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  That's everything. But you're still in the Navy though.

• 1:12:15Jocko Willink?

  You could still be in the Navy.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  But that's not your jam if you're a SEAL typically.

• 1:12:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's not, not your jam. I remember there was a guy that stole a pair of sunglasses.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  From who?

• 1:12:26Jocko Willink?

  From like another platoon guy. Yep. They had his, they had a captain's mask the next day for a little Article 15, took his bird, he was gone like that. I was, I was a pretty new guy. Cause if you're a thief in the teams.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, it's brutal. Yep.

• 1:12:45Jocko Willink?

  You, you are gonna get. You are gonna get crushed.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Jocko Willink?

  Like you will get, there's, there's, you can leave anything out in the SEAL teams. You can leave a freaking diamond, uh, uh, encrusted knife.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Jocko Willink?

  And no one will touch it in the teams.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Jocko Willink?

  You don't, we don't steal anything in the teams.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that makes sense. I mean, especially like, especially when you're like a cohesive or supposed to be cohesive team, you know?

• 1:13:11Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Bruh, oh, yeah.

• 1:13:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You're gonna steal something.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Jocko Willink?

  That's like nuts.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  I've heard of, and he still, still serves his sunglasses too. I mean, dang.

• 1:13:21Jocko Willink?

  I know, especially when you get issued sunglasses. Hey, supply guy, I need new sunglasses. And I don't even know what all the circumstances were behind it, cuz let's face it, we all have Oakleys back.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  We're all wearing the same sunglasses.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Jocko Willink?

  So I don't know if a dude had some engraving on there or scratched his name into it, whatever, but man, this guy was gone.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  And that makes even less sense when you think about it, because it's not like you're not gonna wear them. What are you gonna do? Just steal them and put them in your house under your pillow or something like this? You're gonna be wearing them around.

• 1:13:49Jocko Willink?

  Who knows? Maybe there was other things that I didn't know about. I was a new guy. I didn't know anything. They're just like, hey, don't steal shit. I'm like, cool, got it. Got it. It's like, we're not stealing in the SEAL teams. It freaking pissed me off one time when we, one of my first shipboard deployment and a guy stole, I had my gear out and a guy stole a knife.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Jocko Willink?

  They wasn't from my platoon, but it's just somebody on the ship.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Jocko Willink?

  Maybe it was a marine, maybe it was a navy guy. I don't know.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Oh, they didn't find him?

• 1:14:17Jocko Willink?

  No, we never found him. But same thing, like, what's this guy gonna do? He's gonna hide that knife and then take it home and put it under his pillow? Like, he's not gonna be able to use it.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Jocko Willink?

  Cuz we'll see him.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Jocko Willink?

  And then we'll throw him off the ship.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. Yeah, and that makes sense. You even hear about a guy stealing from someone else on the team. It's like, brah. Like, yeah, you, you're, no one's messing with that guy anymore. The, brah, we had a guy's name, I forget his name. He stole a video game systems, like a Super Nintendo or something like that, from one of the guys in the dorms. Who's on the football team, both of them. And they were like, it was weird because yeah, my friend, uh, his name's Davey. He's the one who got it stolen from him. He was like looking around for, he's like, you know, you're just confused. It's not like someone's gonna steal your whole video game out of your dorm room. And he lives in the same dorm too. So it's not like.

• 1:15:07Jocko Willink?

  What do you do? Set it up four doors down?

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying. So it was just gone. So he was confused. And then after a while, it's like, no, someone stole this, you know? So they, you know, they went through the thing and they were like dusting for prints, which was like, you know, that doesn't matter. Cause everyone comes in and out of the dorm. So it just doesn't, didn't even matter. But I think Davey was suspicious of this guy. I don't know if he became suspicious or he was already suspicious.

• 1:15:30Jocko Willink?

  That guy was sus.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  He was sus. And he went to his room and just was like, you know what? I'm gonna get to the bottom of this thing. And he was like asking him, he was like, no, what are you talking about? All mad or whatever. It became this big thing. And then he looked and in the dorms, there's these beds, right? The beds are like, and you can like, take, there's like a drawer under the bed and all this stuff, right? You know, everything gotta, gotta fit, uh, gotta fit in the dorm. So he, pulled out the drawer of the bed and like took, you know, you can take out the drawer. So he unhooked it and like took it out and boom, there it was.

• 1:16:04Jocko Willink?

  Davey did that?

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Davey did that too. Yeah. The guy's, it was a call out essentially, but you, you know, when you call somebody out, you better get the stuff because you're gonna look dumb.

• 1:16:13Jocko Willink?

  He must've been super suspect then.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was like.

• 1:16:16Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's weird too. Imagine accusing someone, right?

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Jocko Willink?

  But also you can kind of tell.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:16:22Jocko Willink?

  When you're looking at someone, you can tell.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And consider.

• 1:16:27Jocko Willink?

  You can smell it. Smell the freaking lies.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And usually, but and, consider even, I mean, I'm sure it's like this in the military too, where you kind of consider who could or had the opportunity, or whatever. And if they did, what would they have done? It's like, oh, they, he could.

• 1:16:43Jocko Willink?

  Well, I wasn't Freddie at freaking practice the other day and I come home and my shit's gone.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right. Yeah. So I think there was that kind of going on as well. And then.

• 1:16:51Jocko Willink?

  He had some circumstantial evidence. Then he read his face and called it.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  So they arrest him straight up. Everyone was like, oh my, I can't believe this even happened. Like, why would you do that? It just wasn't computing for a lot of us. And boom, they arrested him. He was in jail. So this guy, I remember his name. I don't want to call him out. It's too mean, but he, uh, so he calls the coach. Like, you know, you know, when you're in college, let's face it, like you get into some sort of thing. You say, hey, coach, I'm in this thing. Like, what can we do to sort of, you know, work it out? Um, so he calls the coach and he's like, hey, this is what happened. I'm in jail. I think you need to get bail out because he didn't live in Hawaii. He was from the, from the mainland. So it's like, you know, it's hard. He's like, anyway, he calls the coach and the coach, um, you know, here's the story and he goes, Rod in there.

• 1:17:38Jocko Willink?

  That's what I like to hear.

• 1:17:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Don't like thieves.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:17:45Jocko Willink?

  Don't be stealing.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  Don't steal.

• 1:17:49Jocko Willink?

  Otherwise you're gonna get UCMJ to Article 15. All right.

• 1:17:54Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here, there were other things running through my mind that night. Tactics, for instance. The infantry maxim was just a slogan and I wanted it to be in practice. Find them, fix them, fight them and finish them. But it simply wasn't being used. I wanted to change that. Find them. Use reconnaissance and intelligence. The reconnaissance platoon is being used as a special ambush unit rather than for reconnaissance. The battalion had to have eyes and ears. Its area of operations was bordered on the east by the South China Sea and on the west, South China Sea and on the west by a string of mountains running north and south. From those ridges, a trooper with binoculars could see in most cases all the way to the sea, but it wasn't being used. Fix them. Fire and maneuver.

• 1:18:39Jocko Willink?

  One pins them down with fire while the other runs up around the rocks and comes in from the flank or from the behind. Fire maneuver.

• 1:18:49Jocko Willink?

  Have always been the key to infantry success.

• 1:18:55Jocko Willink?

  But in Vietnam, we were just calling in artillery and backing off to wait. The next day, we would go in and pick up the pieces and generally there weren't any except for the women and kids who hadn't had the sense to make it out of the area. Fight them, close with and destroy the enemy, the military enemy. Kill them or capture them, but emphasize prisoners because they give information that leads to more prisoners. Dead men are just dead men. Capture them if possible, but if not, finish them off for good. I lay there in my sack that night, trying to put it all together in my mind. Where I had been and what I had done and how I had got to where I was at that very moment in time and space. I was alive, I decided because of two things, sheer luck and not forgetting.

• 1:19:35Jocko Willink?

  I attributed it to nothing else, but I knew that the presence of mind had a great deal to do with one's fortunes. I also knew there were some things beyond anybody's control. They just happened regardless of planning or preparation or skill or courage or cowardice. I went to sleep thinking about all that. The next day, I pored over my battalion plans again. And when I hit the sack the next night, I knew I was ready as I'd ever been. I slept well.

• 1:20:03Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 1:20:06Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna jump through some of this stuff right now. This is where he starts, he takes over the battalion, he starts squaring things away, he starts going on operations. He's still having, it's not an overnight process. It's not like the battalion, oh, there's a new commander, like, we're good to go now, everything's perfect. It's not like that.

• 1:20:25Jocko Willink?

  And as he's starting to dig into the, he's going on some ops, he's starting to dig in to try and find out how to get the, get the platoons moving in the right direction.

• 1:20:35Jocko Willink?

  He's got, he sits down to talk to one of, one of these lieutenants. He's talking to this lieutenant and the lieutenant kinda, this lieutenant doesn't want to go in the field. Doesn't want to go in the field. And he's trying to figure out why and the lieutenant says, you know, not with this particular leader. And he says, why not? And he's kind of doesn't want to say anything. He's finally says, tell me. And he, and then he says, he opened up. He had been a platoon leader and his group had policed up a detainee from a village that had reported the details to his CO over the company net. The platoon had begun to tie up the detainee for extraction when the CO called back. The lieutenant told me, the CO said, what they had out there was a KIA, a dead dink,

• 1:21:19Jocko Willink?

  a body count of one, to which the lieutenant replied that he did not have a dead person, but a detainee in reasonably good health. So he says, no, what we have is a dead dink, killed trying to get away. The lieutenant continued. So what did you say? I asked. Well, I told him the guy might be a civilian. And what did he say? He said, that wasn't hardly possible because once he's dead, he's a dink. Which in fact was about the only way it was played in Vietnam. Regardless of what a person might have been before he was killed afterwards, he was a dink. Very, very damn few people ever reported killing a civilian, regardless of how unavoidable

• 1:22:01Jocko Willink?

  the death might have been. And very damn few dead civilians failed to be included in body counts. It was time to stop the lieutenant, though, before his narrative went beyond the point of no return. I held up my hand.

• 1:22:14Jocko Willink?

  Do you, do you understand? Did that make sense? Cause I know I jumped into the story. So basically this young lieutenant is there, they have a detainee that they've captured. And he calls his company commander and says, hey, company commander, I got a, I got a captured individual. I got a detainee. You know, what do you want me to do? And this, the commanding officer calls back and says, you don't have a detainee. You have a killed in action. And you know, the, the, the term dink, obviously this is a slur. And, but it doesn't just mean, it means enemy. That's what they're saying. If you kill someone, they're enemy.

• 1:22:49Jocko Willink?

  Wait, so is he implying that you should, that he should kill him? Yep. Yeah. And he's about, that's what he's, he's about to get to that part. And, and Colonel Herbert says, hold on. Yeah. And he, he says, hold it. I cautioned him, sir. Look, before you get too far, there are some other questions, but first you have to realize that if you say what I think you may be going to say, I'm gonna have to report it. Therefore, it's only fair, in fact, by the regulation, in fact, it's required by regulations and the UCMJ that I make you aware of your rights. Do you understand? Yes, sir. Well, then let me ask you this. Do you understand your rights under Article 31? Yes, sir, I do. Well, let me go over them again for you anyways. You don't have to say anything. Anything that you say can be used in court.

• 1:23:32Jocko Willink?

  You can stop right now, or, or you can continue, or you can have a military counsel right here while you do talk, if you wish. And that's in, that's it in a nutshell. Now, do you want to go on? Since I've gone this far, for Christ's sake, Lieutenant, at least think before you answer my next question, okay? Okay. Was the execution, in fact, carried out? Yes, sir, it was. Now, Lieutenant, here comes the big one, and let me state again that you neither have to answer, nor are you expected to answer, just because I'm your commander. If it's going to incriminate you, I want you to understand that part for sure. Do you? Yes, sir, I do. All right, then, who actually did the killing? He started to answer, and then stopped abruptly.

• 1:24:17Jocko Willink?

  Sir, I prefer not to answer that one right now, if it's okay with you. That's your prerogative. You keep this to yourself until I get back to you. Do you want to put it in writing? I think that, I think I'd better do that. Good, he said. I said, handing him a pad. Bring it back when you've finished. And forget about going out with C Company right now. It can wait.

• 1:24:45Jocko Willink?

  So, obviously, bad situation. Um, he starts to run it up the chain of command. Who's that include Franklin? What does Franklin say? "What the hell kind of commander are you?" He asked. "It's none of your business. What occurred before you assumed command?" "I'll back it up with an investigation," I said. "There'll be no investigation," says Franklin. "It's required, sir. I..." "God damn it, Herbert. I'll handle it. I said I'll handle it, and I will. If anything is done, it will be done with the general's approval, and it will be done by me. Can you understand that much?" "I understand, sir. Do you want a statement from Major Boyer?" "I want nothing until I'm ready,

• 1:25:26Jocko Willink?

  which means I don't want anyone discussing it either." That. Um, so while he's dealing with all this, and while he's continuing to create friction, and again, there's so much of this, and there's so much in this book. So many good lessons. Here's a lesson. He's talking about planning and how he planned, because he's still leading troops. He's still, they're still doing all kinds of operations. He says this to his troops. "I want you all to come up with the plans and recommendations I told them, and I meant it.

• 1:26:09Jocko Willink?

  Hell, I didn't profess to be an expert in anything." And by the way, if you're a leader, just write this whole thing down. "I didn't profess to be an expert in anything. I was the dumb son of a fine coal miner, and I could use all the help I could get. If anybody came up with a brainstorm, I damn sure wanted to hear about it. And that includes suggestions for a commander raid on Hanoi from Doc Tally," I concluded. "I really wanted to listen to them, because if a man makes a contribution to a plan, he has a material interest in making it succeed. So the trick is to forget about taking credit for ideas and to persuade others that they are their own."

• 1:26:56Jocko Willink?

  Take notes. I talk about that very thing all the time.

• 1:27:04Jocko Willink?

  He also says, "I thought out everything and tried not to waste words or time. Frequently may have appeared to have been spur of the moment response, but it was generally prepared. Even though they were volunteers, as all paratroopers are, the grunts were different. The grunts were by nature different. They were not career men in the same sense that officers and most of the senior NCOs were career men, and they were not sensitive to opportunities for promotion or self-aggrandizement. But because individuals are aggressive and competitive by nature, the grunts did require an opportunity to express those instincts, or in a word, a chance to operate. I knew the grunt. Hell, I was one of them. A promoted grunt to be sure, but still a grunt.

• 1:27:47Jocko Willink?

  I'd been an enlisted man over half my entire career. I had fought as one and been wounded as one, and I understood what made a grunt tick because I knew what made me tick. I'd also been fortunate enough to gather enough psychological insight to comprehend them and myself even more deeply and thoroughly, at the same time gaining enough military experience to recognize that they were the best raw material in the world. They were bigger and healthier and more intelligent and better educated than any soldier the US Army had ever had the opportunity to use before, and they were superior to any soldier any other country was getting. Even with our training shortcomings, and there were, by God, plentiful, the grunts

• 1:28:30Jocko Willink?

  in Vietnam were still the best trained men around, as well as the best fed and best equipped. Moreover, I think I recognized something that must have slipped by most of the brass, including Wes Moreland and later Abrams, that the length of the hair on a man's head wasn't nearly as important as the caliber of the brain inside."

• 1:28:51Jocko Willink?

  I knew that the grunt was a man just like me and that he was entitled to the same respect I myself demanded. His dignity was sacred, it could never be changed. The commander could scream and rant and rage and curse like a sailor, but he could never encroach on the trooper's dignity. If the leader attacks his trooper's dignity, the trooper has but two alternatives: to fold up, roll over, and die, or strike back. I was determined to follow the pattern that had worked for me in the past, to allow my men to make at least as many of the same kind of mistakes as I had made, and God knows

• 1:29:31Jocko Willink?

  I had made my share and more, to deal with them honestly, to express admiration, respect, love, patriotism, and my own conviction that he represented with all my faults, with all its faults, the greatest country in the history of civilization and the mightiest combat arm this universe ever assembled under a single power, to persuade him that it not really been equipment and mass production that had won World War I, World War II, and Korea for us, but rather blood, guts, courage, know-how, and a steadfast devotion to a cause.

• 1:30:16Jocko Willink?

  Respect your people. I laid out the strategy for my battalion. It was some lousy war when a piddling battalion commander had to lay out a master's strategy, but that's the way it was. Hell, nobody else laid out anything for these men, either from a national or an international perspective. I owed it to them to give them some kind of purpose and a reason at the battalion level at least. Gotta know why you're doing what you're doing, and he's saying that they're not even hearing that.

• 1:30:50Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. In fact, the whole damned US Army in Vietnam was crazy. The generals, Westmoreland, Abrams, Pierce, Ross and Dupuy, Richardson, Ewell, Ramsey, and the rest, were all working on the premise that they were the best and that whatever problems we were having were the fault of the commanders at lower levels.

• 1:31:13Jocko Willink?

  Not my fault. Bullshit. Bullshit. The major leadership problem in Vietnam was the generals. And the rest of the senior officer corps, the colonels, the lieutenant colonels, and the majors, the captains, lieutenants, enlisted men weren't to blame. The generals were has-beens or never-bens from WWII vintage who had paper images built up by the public information people.

• 1:31:44Jocko Willink?

  So again, you know, we're, we're, we're reading this book. And really, he's placing the blame on everybody else, which is not good. But he's telling what it looks like from his perspective.

• 1:31:59Jocko Willink?

  He says about those generals, "They walked and talked like leaders and wore ribbons and uniforms, so it was only reasonable that back in Washington they were regarded as leaders and were listened to."

• 1:32:10Jocko Willink?

  If you were in the military, you must be a great leader. Right? This, we still have that. Anybody that was in the military must be a great leader. It's like, hmm, I wish it was true. It's not always true.

• 1:32:24Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately.

• 1:32:29Jocko Willink?

  Um, again, he wasn't just talking. This guy's not just a talker. This guy's not, when he's talking smack about these other leaders, he's not just talking smack and saying, "Oh, they're not leading." He's leading. He's actually leading. There's all kinds of stories in here. Here's one. "I crossed the yard to the, they're out on a mission. I crossed the yard to the bunker and nailed myself up against its outer edge. 'Chuh hoy!' I shouted, using the name of the program we had set up for leniency in return for immediate, unresisting surrender. 'Chuh hoy!' As always, there was no response. I waited, then stepped back and fired two quick rounds into the sandbags around the doorway. Then, stepping back against the wall, I lifted a grenade

• 1:33:10Jocko Willink?

  from my belt. The old woman on the porch screamed, and there was one hell of a scuffling inside the bronker, bunker." They tripped all over each other, coming out hands first. "Chuhoy, chuhoy, me chuhoy, chuhoy!" They were shouting. "I figured you were," I mumbled to myself. There were three of them, two in khakis and the wounded guy stripped down to his shorts. I nudged them toward a warden. "Keep them covered," I said. "I'll get the bunker." "I'll get it," Sir Schmitty said, trotting across toward me. "God damn it, keep that group covered," I shouted. "I'll get the damned bunker. We all get paid by the same people." I don't think it was bravado. It was just that I had learned years before that if you wanted to be followed, then you had to get your ass out and lead by setting the example.

• 1:33:56Jocko Willink?

  If I expected other people to go down inside bunkers and holes after the enemy, then I had better be ready to do it myself. This time it was my turn. I kept my rifle in front.

• 1:34:09Jocko Willink?

  Someone shouted "Grenade!" And the others hit the dirt. I dropped the one knee, holding my head down low in front of my shoulders. I saw the guy break out of the bush, out of the bush with another grenade in his hands. I squeezed twice on the trigger and watched the rounds slam into his chest, driving him up against one of the palms, bouncing him off into the bushes. Two of our men had been hit by the explosion. I didn't remember even hearing the grenade detonate, except vaguely perhaps. That's how unimportant grenades were, for me at least. I'd seen them all over the world and had used them and had had them used against me over and over. I did not respect them as a weapon. They were charges, they blew up and out. Lay one at arm's length, stay down flat, and the worst you would do was give you a concussion.

• 1:34:53Jocko Willink?

  Run and you got some shrapnel in your ass. "Watch him," I said, and turned to Larray. "That grenade came from the building. You take that side and I'll take this one." I turned the muzzle of the M16 west and followed it around the building. I heard Larray fire. Just then a grenade exploded and I got the building just in time to see Larray kicking away the reeds and dragging the body from between the false walls. The guy had been wedged into a section about the size of a birdcage. Larray nudged the bloody, the bloody body with his foot. "A loser, sir," he said quietly, gently with that same catch in his voice that you hear in the movies just before tears. "A goddamn loser, dink." He rolled it over gently. The guy had been a real trooper.

• 1:35:36Jocko Willink?

  And he had tried to do just as he had been told, just as so many of our kids had been told and would have tried had they been in his place. Uncle Ho would never even know the poor bastard was dead, nor would he have given a shit if he had known. Like those on our side, he was just another statistic. We left him there in the dirt.

• 1:36:04Jocko Willink?

  We started back down the trail at a trot. An outright run was out of the question because more than likely if you broke out of the bush running, you were a dead ass. Even at our speed, it was more than a few seconds before we reached a large grassy clearing. The American lieutenant, the advisor, was on my left as we entered the clearing and the rest of were standing around in no particular formation.

• 1:36:29Jocko Willink?

  Across the clearing, I saw one man, a Vietnamese, holding the young girl's hair with his left hand, bending her head back, baring her throat.

• 1:36:39Jocko Willink?

  His right arm was around her neck and a knife in his right hand was dug deeply into her flesh, beneath and to the left of her esophagus. All he had to do was pull and she was gone.

• 1:36:54Jocko Willink?

  One of the children was hanging on to her pajamas, screaming, and the other child's face was being steadily squashed into the sand by the foot of another Vietnamese soldier.

• 1:37:06Jocko Willink?

  The child was suffocating. I shoved the American lieutenant out of the way and shouted something, staring at the guy with the knife in the girl's throat. He was staring at me too.

• 1:37:19Jocko Willink?

  And these Vietnamese, these are South Vietnamese soldiers and the first person that he pushed out of the way was an American advisor.

• 1:37:29Jocko Willink?

  So he comes on this scene in this clearing and there's an American lieutenant, he pushes that guy out of the way and these Vietnamese soldiers that the American lieutenant was an advisor to, all this is happening. So these are South Vietnamese soldiers.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  With the young girls?

• 1:37:47Jocko Willink?

  Yep, holding the knife to this young girl's throat. So this is an ally.

• 1:37:54Jocko Willink?

  So this Vietnamese soldiers staring at Herbert with a knife to the girl's throat. Back to the book with great ease. He pulled the blade across her blood spurted and gushed down the front of her pajamas and she dropped to the darkening sand. Pulling the child with her. It took no more than a second from the instant he moved the knife until she crumpled in a lifeless heap. Her baby still screaming, still pawing at her legs. Her killer jumped back into the group of Vietnamese, pulling with him the guy who'd been suffocating the child. I should have shot them on the spot while I could still identify them. The rest of the detainees were lined up against the bushes.

• 1:38:35Jocko Willink?

  Four of the men were already dead, lying off in the grass to my right with their heads blown away. A Vietnamese soldier was parading up and down in front of the survivors waving a pistol. I noticed that one of the four dead men was the stud we had captured in the hut.

• 1:38:52Jocko Willink?

  I felt myself go empty, something drained from me in that moment that you that I have yet to replace. You dumb son of a bitch, I screamed, grabbing the American lieutenant by the by his shirt. In that instant, I was only a flick a flick away from killing him. It passed. I calmed and turned him loose. Just what the hell did you let happen here, Lieutenant? He was only an advisor, he said. There they were only doing a job. They knew their business. Guerrillas weren't protected under the Geneva Accords. They were following orders. Oh, God, I thought. A big badass American who had never killed anyone in combat or captured a single prisoner legitimately had played hell with these poor devils. Big badass all American boy. God, I was frustrated.

• 1:39:37Jocko Willink?

  I raised my hand to slap him clear across the area. I lowered it.

• 1:39:42Jocko Willink?

  You get all your scrap together and then get the hell out of here, I screamed at him. Sir, I have a job. I glanced down at the four dead men and over to the woman's body. Not anymore, you don't, Lieutenant. He was staring at me with what seemed to be disbelief. I moved as near to him as possible without touching. Now get your people out of here. Out of here, I said quietly and calmly. You're finished here. The rest of this, like the charges, will take care back at base.

• 1:40:12Jocko Willink?

  So he witnesses this, this, this atrocity and gets back to base. Runs it up the chain of command. Tells to Franklin, Franklin. Frankly Franklin, he tells Franklin what happens. Uh Franklin finally asked what had happened and I told him every last story detail, right down to the blood leaping from the girl's throat. Herbert, you're a goddamn liar, he said. I assured him I wasn't lying. There are other witnesses, sir. Then you're exaggerating, he said. Did the American, did the lieutenant take part? Yes, sir. He was in charge. He had assumed responsibility from Sergeant Warden. But did you see him do any killing?

• 1:40:57Jocko Willink?

  No, sir, I didn't. Then you're a goddamn liar. There were no US personnel involved, he said. God damn it, Herbert. You're always coming in with these wild ass exaggerated stories trying to make trouble. What the hell is wrong with you? You're getting carried away. Maybe you're getting too old.

• 1:41:24Jocko Willink?

  A day or two, so, so they start going through and this is what's really interesting about this book is they have like the, the actual documents. From this guy Warden, I Sergeant First Class Warden during the period of 14 February, that's Valentine's Day, 1969 was a platoon sergeant for, so he explains what he saw happen.

• 1:41:49Jocko Willink?

  And you can get this book and read those documents. Then this happens, a day or two after the St. Valentine's Day massacre, which we just read about, a black trooper named White refused to go into the field. And offered his refusal loud and clear out in the battalion street where he could be heard by one and all. You're going out, White, just like everybody else, I told him. Like hell I am, you son of a bitch, I ain't fighting for no whities. Right, White?

• 1:42:19Jocko Willink?

  You're going to fight for your country, or for your dollars, or for anything else you can think of, but by God, you're going. Like hell I am, he said, taking off his glasses and slamming them against the ground. They were unbroken. He stepped on them and ground them into tiny pieces. Now, you bastard, he said, I ain't going because I can't see. I shrugged and laughed at him. So I'll have you put on a listening post. Guys with bad eyes always do better at night. You dumb son of a bitch, he laughed, you don't understand, you send me out there and I'll desert. No, you won't, White, because out there, baby, ain't back here. You leave the guys out there and you're on your own. I tapped him on the chest, but listen, I'll tell you what I'll do. You go AWOL out there and make it back here and I'll give you a Bronze Star.

• 1:43:05Jocko Willink?

  And even if you don't, I'll see to it that you get a Purple Heart. Out there, when you're on your own, you're anybody's and everybody's meat. If VC or NVA don't get you, the locals will. You are money and they're all bounty hunters. I'll cut out as soon as I get back then. No, you won't, because you either straighten out here, you either straighten out, out there, or when the company returns, you'll be transferred to a unit that replaces them. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out another pair of glasses. He was swaggering away, he was swaggering as he walked away toward the helicopter. Big guy, big bad guy, you'll get yours, baby.

• 1:43:46Jocko Willink?

  The best I could do is hope that, the best I could hope for would be that he would do a good job. It was his only chance. If he didn't cut it, he was going back out with the next unit, just as I had promised. It was the only way. Reward the right response and do everything you can to get it. Most of the time, it worked. With White, it didn't. So, just to kind of debrief that, we heard earlier about his policies. He doesn't want to punish people for acting badly. So if this guy, with his old battalion commander acted this way, he'd get, okay, you're, you know, you're in trouble. You need, you know, you need to go stay in the barracks. And you're gonna go to, you know, UCMJ and whatever, but he's not gonna go fight, which is what he actually wanted. So,

• 1:44:31Jocko Willink?

  his deal is, not only are you gonna go fight, but if you don't do a good job, when this, when this platoon gets back from this mission, you're going out with the next platoon, until you do a freaking good job.

• 1:44:48Jocko Willink?

  He performed poorly in the field, just as he vowed he would. And I had him held at the gate when his unit came back.

• 1:44:57Jocko Willink?

  I had asked Childers, which is his senior NCO, to get the very best trooper he could find to guard White until the replacement unit he was going to join came out. Someone who wouldn't scare. And he came up with PFC Schnelling.

• 1:45:13Jocko Willink?

  "Don't take any crap from him," I told Schnelling, "and watch out, the unit coming out will pick him up." That was it.

• 1:45:22Jocko Willink?

  Except that Schnelling drilled him through the head and killed him right outside the gate. White had some words and Schnelling had paid no attention. White had made a threat and then gone for his rifle. He got it to his shoulder before Schnelling squeezed the trigger. And the MP at the gate had seen and heard it all. Thank God. It was that cut and dry.

• 1:45:45Jocko Willink?

  Schnelling had done his job. I brought in the Criminal Investigation Division people. They questioned everyone, took statements, and that was it. Except that later in the day, I had Schnelling into the office. A crowd of White's friends gathered outside chanting, "We want Schnelling. We want Schnelling. He killed a brother. He killed a brother. We want Schnelling. We want Schnelling."

• 1:46:12Jocko Willink?

  Freaking nasty. And this is like horrible. So, again, just to make sure everyone's tracking. He puts, the guy comes back, he hadn't, White comes back, hadn't done a good job. So he's got him standing by for the next platoon that's gonna go out. While he's standing by,

• 1:46:35Jocko Willink?

  Herbert puts a guy to guard him, this guy named Schnelling.

• 1:46:40Jocko Willink?

  Schnelling's out there guarding him. White makes a move. Schnelling kills him.

• 1:46:48Jocko Willink?

  Luckily, there's a witness, which is the MP, who had seen and heard it all.

• 1:47:00Jocko Willink?

  So, now, they're in the office of Herbert and there's a crowd out front of White's friends, saying, "We want Schnelling, we want Schnelling. He killed a brother, he killed a brother."

• 1:47:15Jocko Willink?

  And here's what Herbert does. "I reached over and picked up my M16.

• 1:47:20Jocko Willink?

  Look, Schnelling, you are now a spec four." So he promotes him. And says, "Not because you killed a man, but because you didn't fail to do it when it was your job. Now, about that out there, that's up to you. I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd walk out there and end it right now. I'd pick out the biggest mouth out there and walk up and explain the facts. Tell them, tell them that you just made corporal. And if they don't clear out, you might take it into your mind to try for sergeant."

• 1:47:55Jocko Willink?

  I jacked around into the M16 chamber. "I'll cover you from up here, and if anyone so much as raises a weapon, I'll drop him. That's the least I can do." I shrugged.

• 1:48:09Jocko Willink?

  He stepped through the door and walked over to the group. I could not hear what he said, but they dispersed and I never heard White's name again. Which is sad, too, that a man could die and snap, just fade out of people's minds and disappear.

• 1:48:29Jocko Willink?

  Fucking gnarly. Want to talk about some leadership challenges? That's like insane, right?

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:38Jocko Willink?

  That's insane.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  Does this kind of stuff still happen like now?

• 1:48:48Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just seems so almost like Wild West-ish.

• 1:48:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. That, that's, that section right there, like, that's a, that's an insane. The whole thing is freaking crazy.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that is crazy. I mean, like, there's so many elements too, you know, where it's like, alright.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  You, you know, you have a friend, he gets straight up just killed by. You know, and, and it's like, it's hard, it's one of those deals where you kind of got to take sides a little bit or whatever, right? If you're, if you're in that mix or whatever. So your guy, your friend, your brother gets killed by another guy. So it's like, alright, we got to seek vengeance. This is obviously out of line, obviously not part of this. You know, we're all on the same team, why are you going to kill this guy? Oh, you know, no matter what happened, it's kind of like you didn't have to kill him. It's easy to be like, you didn't have to kill him or whatever. So, yeah, of course, so they want vengeance, they want justice, they want like all this stuff or whatever. And, and they kind of have a point in, in a, in a way, especially if they don't know the whole thing, they kind of have a point.

• 1:49:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, you're also, let's face it, there's a huge assumption that the lone MP is just of the, the big witness, right? This one, I mean, what if, what if Schnelling's friends with the MP? Says, hey, I got this issue with this guy.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:50:11Jocko Willink?

  Or, hey, we just had beef and I shot this guy, you got me? And he's like, yeah, I got you, I saw what happened, he shouldered his weapon.

• 1:50:17Speaker 01

  Right, one guy.

• 1:50:18Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's, it's such a freaking nightmare.

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  And then, okay, then it gets worse. So we're, we're, you know, he's, he's like, hey, this is what you should do, this is what I would do, right? Go out there, let him know. And the thing is, bro, that's not gonna, I mean, of course it worked, right? But.

• 1:50:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, we don't, we don't even know what he said, we don't know.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  In the moment before he went out, bro, that's not gonna work. Bro, these guys, like, they want to, they want to kill me. I already, you know, I already killed their guy, like, we're at war right now. Where there's a war within the war going on right now.

• 1:50:52Jocko Willink?

  Here's what, here's the only thing that makes me think.

• 1:50:57Jocko Willink?

  Well, how it turned out, you think, well, I, I wonder if his friends were kind of like, look, we know White and White was kind of like, he, maybe he, you know, maybe they, they knew what type of person he was and they knew how that he was close to the ragged edge or whatever.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:14Jocko Willink?

  But God, I don't even know what to say about this. Like, it's just a freaking nightmare.

• 1:51:22Jocko Willink?

  This whole book is freaking crazy. Like, when you think, look, look at what we just read. You got this freaking soldier killing another soldier. You got the woman getting her throat slashed. There's four other people executed. It's madness.

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:51:39Jocko Willink?

  It's madness.

• 1:51:46Jocko Willink?

  All right.

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  Under what circumstances do you slit a girl's throat? Cause obviously that girl's not military, nothing like this.

• 1:51:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, they, you know, oh, she's a VC sympathizer. That's, you know, probably what their claim was.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess, right?

• 1:52:05Jocko Willink?

  I, I will give you no circumstances if that's what you're looking for. Well, I shouldn't say that, you, you know, this, you know, you could obviously be in some kind of a hand to hand combat scenario where you've got a enemy fighter that happens to be female. Could happen.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  With her baby?

• 1:52:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah. I mean, there's, okay, in this scenario, it makes no sense whatsoever. In this scenario, Herbert's saying, look, that's a freaking war crime. That's what he's saying. That's what's weird too. Like Herbert, he's, you know, like on the, like he's a, what I say earlier, he's like a straight laced guy, right? He's like a straight laced guy. And so when he sees stuff like that, it, it's unacceptable to him. And, and that's what's about the, um, about the guy White getting killed. He's not the, Herbert's not the kind, Herbert, you remember in Korean War, they go, hey, burn down this village. He's like, I'm not gonna do it. They, they bring that up and that's kind of why I focused on some of that stuff in, um, when we did the last podcast. You know, he had had this.

• 1:53:08Jocko Willink?

  He, he, he mentioned that they had, uh, uh, the first black replacement showing up. And he was like, we didn't, you know, we don't, the, well, the troops didn't care. If you did a good job, you, we're, we're good. He talked about the fact that he was raised, um, by that doctor that was like, hey, all these people in the world, they're people like you. They're out there hunting, trying to feed their families. So he's, seems like he's this kind of straight laced, for lack of a better word, good person.

• 1:53:40Jocko Willink?

  Man, I'd like to sit down with this dude. He's not alive anymore, but.

• 1:53:52Jocko Willink?

  I know you haven't seen the movie Platoon. You should watch it. It shows a lot of chaos and mayhem. But all these things that you read, all the books you read about Vietnam and all the movies that you see about Vietnam. Like it's all wrapped up in this, in these scenarios that are just freaking insane.

• 1:54:15Jocko Willink?

  I mean, one of your soldiers kills one of your other soldiers.

• 1:54:21Jocko Willink?

  After you say, hey, you, you gotta go out. It's like nuts. And then you're thinking, well, look, then you're thinking, is it worth it?

• 1:54:30Jocko Willink?

  Like, hey, I, this guy white, I could have just said, all right, fine. You're not going out, right? Fine. You go, I'll put you on KP duty. You can go peel potatoes. You know what I mean? And then what happens to the battalion? Then other people like, well, I don't want to go out either.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:54:42Jocko Willink?

  So now what are we doing?

• 1:54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:46Speaker 01

  I mean, it kind of could be viewed as like, yeah, man, that's like, that's how it needs to be almost.

• 1:54:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it could be. This is why it's, you gotta be very careful about painting yourself into a corner. Right? You gotta be very careful about painting yourself into a corner in life. Especially as, from a leadership position. If you paint yourself into a corner, you're, you're painted in that corner. There's no moving. There's no moving. So, for me.

• 1:55:15Jocko Willink?

  As I look at this like, okay, I got a guy that doesn't want to go out. What can I get from him? What can I do with him? How can I talk to him? And again, we don't know any of the history of the guy. We don't know how bad of a soldier he was. We know his behavior was. I mean, obviously, he's calling, he's calling his commander like a son of a bitch and all this stuff. So he's not, you can tell he's not down for the cause. Not down, no. Right? So why is that? How do we build a relationship with that guy? And there's some guys that are totally overboard, right? They're gone. Like, you're not going to get him back. Was he there? And if he's there, why are you actually having him out on patrol?

• 1:55:51Jocko Willink?

  But if everything to you is kind of black and white, you're sort of, you're sort of like, hey, this is what everyone, this is what you're going to do. And you have no, you painted yourself in that corner and you have no way out of it.

• 1:56:12Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, I should never have had any problems in Vietnam because it was an infantry war, infantry and helicopters.

• 1:56:20Jocko Willink?

  With a different quality of commanders, the helicopters could have played a very important role in command and control. The unfortunate fact was that the commanders kept their butts glued in the seats in the birds. I don't think I can overemphasize the weaknesses inherent in this. From 1,500 feet up, war was simply a lot of little guys in green, running here and there, shooting up the landscape. The birdmen, he's talking about the commanders, fast forward a little bit. The birdmen may have been commanders in the technical sense of the word, but they weren't leaders and the grunts knew it. Down there was their world. It was a ground war, an infantry exercise. And as infantry, we could have won it. Man for man, we were better.

• 1:57:05Jocko Willink?

  And we could have won it with less than half the people we had there. All we had to do was get rid of the wasted headquarters, chaff, get rid of the PXs and the steak houses and the clubs and the massage parlors and the pools and the pizza houses and the commissaries and get down to fighting an infantry war. We had the training and we had the men who could have done the job. The problem was not only a lack of command leadership, but a lack of distinct mission. We didn't have one before I got there. We didn't have one while I was there and we never had one after I left. But an army requires a mission. It desperately needs some direction towards a specific goal.

• 1:57:47Jocko Willink?

  It was all charts and graphs for us with machine technicians like the West Point engineers running the show. I don't think we have to be conditioned to kill. We need no training to destroy. We're built for that. Killing comes easy. Establish no rules and leave a vacuum and what you end up with are me lie and cool boy. The absence of policy and mission was a policy in itself.

• 1:58:23Jocko Willink?

  Need to know what the freaking mission is. By the way. In war freaking absolutely. I guess we'll in your normal life. Yes, absolutely. In your business, in your job, yes, you need to know what the freaking mission is.

• 1:58:41Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward as we continued to score every night. Franklin began to increase his visits to the field. Finally, he made it a point to be on hand personally to personally count the bodies. And I found myself as his constant escort, guiding him from one dead man to the next and standing by while he snapped photos. It was another syndrome. The guys that didn't kill anybody were the ones who broke their asses to get a picture. What the hell? It would probably have been the same way with Indian scalps if we had cameras back then.

• 1:59:11Jocko Willink?

  So Franklin is out there kind of coming up and he goes through a bunch of this stuff.

• 1:59:20Jocko Willink?

  There was a guy named Grimshaw and we're going to hear his name later.

• 1:59:26Jocko Willink?

  One of his company commanders Grimshaw said, a dead VC is a dead VC and a dead NVA is a dead NVA and a dead VCI is a dead VCI, except of course, when killed by the second battalion.

• 1:59:39Jocko Willink?

  Then they're only dead if Franklin touches the touches his toe to them. And they better be wearing a uniform and have a weapon. What the hell was I trying to do? Franklin asked, I had to be an ass to move two rifle companies that distance in the dark. Why they might have opened up on each other if either of them had become disoriented? And besides, he said, it was one big waste. We could have taken them all in a court and search and saved all the inconvenience. So meanwhile, while this stuff is happening.

• 2:00:10Jocko Willink?

  The brigade is keeping battalion scores. They're keeping scores to figure out who's the best battalion. Who's the best battalion? Who's the best battalion? They keep track of a bunch of different things. Enemy killed in a, killed in action body count. Enemy prisoners of war. Enemy contacts, enemy weapons captured. Number of AWOLs. So who's absent? How many people you got absent without leave? How many Article 15s have you done? Meaning, how many times have you punished somebody? How many delinquencies have you had? How many malaria cases do you have? How many reenlistments do you have? How many special courts do you have? And then they take all these different numbers and they put them into like one final number.

• 2:00:55Jocko Willink?

  So here's how the numbers shake out. Basically, they shake out that second battalion. So Herbert's battalion is winning in all categories. It's not even close. For enemy killed in action, it's, uh, the other battalions are 14, 4, 29, and 36. Second Battalion has 84. So more than twice as much as the next battalion. For enemy captured, listen to these numbers. 8, 0, 0, and 3. How many does the second battalion have? 90. For enemy contacts, it's 34, 27, 37, 60, and second battalion has 66.

• 2:01:37Jocko Willink?

  For enemy weapons captured, it's 15, 11, 3, and 17. Second Battalion has 57. So there's not even, it's almost like it's not even close. For absent without leave. So this is, this should, you want the low number here. It's 14, 24, 26, and 24. And what does second battalion have? Eight. They only have eight people that have gone AWOL. For Article 15s, the numbers are 39, 56, 57, and 52. What does second battalion have? 24. For delinquency reports, 17, 9, 11, 10. Second Battalion has 5. Malaria, they're all the same. Reenlistments, listen to this, reenlistments.

• 2:02:22Jocko Willink?

  The numbers are 0, 0, 40, and 0. No one wants to freaking stay in. What does second battalion have? 53.

• 2:02:34Jocko Willink?

  So the total score, and they have whatever, they have this way of making all this into one number. Second Battalion for this particular month, this is February 1969, has 420 points. They're in the lead. And then the other ones are 180, 145, 70, and 20. I mean, just combat ineffective, right? And they're, and by the way, this is, so they're getting graded by Franklin and Barnes, getting graded, and they're crushing. Second Battalion, under Herbert, is absolutely crushing everything. But the hits just keep on coming.

• 2:03:17Jocko Willink?

  There's some military intelligence interrogation rooms that are on their little base. And Herbert pays a visit. "I walked into one of the rooms in back and knocked lightly on the door one night. Who's there? Herbert. Just a moment, sir, someone answered, and second later the door swung inward. Sergeant Carmody greeted me. Come in, sir. I squeezed past him and closed the door behind me. Inside, in addition to Carmody, were Captain Bowers, a Vietnamese man, and one of the honeys the Wildcats had captured in the morning. She was seated to my left in a chair against the wall, just off the corner. Carmody was standing to her right, my left, and the Vietnamese man was sitting just off my right foot, facing the girl in the chair, their knees only a couple inches apart.

• 2:04:01Jocko Willink?

  Captain Bowers was just behind the Vietnamese man, sitting in a chair and leaning over the Viet's shoulder. The girl was moaning and trembling. Find anything out? I asked, turning to Carmody. She claimed she was out picking water bugs, sir, he said and laughed. What patrol? Where was it headed? What about, what about the patrol? Where was it headed? Carmody turned to her and asked something in Vietnamese. She shook her head. He hit her with the back of his hand, raking it down along her face. You're a fucking liar, he shouted. Blood began to rush into the long abrasion on her cheek. It began to happen in a rush. I turned to Bowers, thinking he would say something. Carmody said something in Vietnamese. Bowers nodded to the Vietnamese man in front of him and touched his shoulder with his

• 2:04:46Jocko Willink?

  hand. The girl screamed. I glanced down and saw for the first time that there were wires from her body to a telephone between the Viet's knees. He was cranking it."

• 2:05:00Jocko Willink?

  I grabbed the wires and yanked damn near lifting the Viet up with them before the wires separated from the phone. It clattered to the floor. Are you crazy Bowers? I yelled. So ju- just so you understand these, these telephone machines that you can power them by cranking them. It's an old school like telephone. And so that's where he had they have these, they're basically electroshock, electro electrocuting her. Are you crazy Bowers? I yelled. Sir, I what the hell kind of crap are you pulling here? Sir, I go get O Kane. Sir, Major O Kane says, I don't give a damn what he says, you go get him, I said. I turned to Carmody and knocked this off until this thing is settled. Bowers left and Carmody, the Viet, and I followed him out to the hall, leaving the girl alone in the little room. In a moment, Bowers returned. Major O Kane isn't here, he said. Where the hell

• 2:05:45Jocko Willink?

  is he? He's gone down to Brigade, sir. And behind him, through the open doorway, I saw the major getting into a Jeep. I left too and walked down to Franklin's office where, not surprisingly, O Kane was still deep in conversation with the deputy commander. Franklin signaled to me to hold up until he was finished. When O Kane left, Franklin called me in and immediately began screaming. We were right back where we'd left off. You son of a bitch, he ranted. You dirty, rotten son of a bitch. How many times have I warned you to stay the hell away from MI or have your tap cut off? It seemed like the time for accuracy. Four times, sir, I said. And did you understand? Yes, sir, but I understand torture too. I don't give a shit about that. I, sir, goddamn it, Herbert, Herbert, don't you sir me. I gave you a direct order. Did you understand it?

• 2:06:29Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir, but they were torturing a Vietnamese. Did you personally see them torturing this girl? At least he knew it had been a girl. Yes, sir, they US soldiers? No, sir, this Vietnamese. God damn it, Herbert, how many times must I explain the rules of land warfare to you? Over here, what the Vietnamese do is none of our damn business. But sir, the guy was cranking this phone generator while Bowers was. Who was cranking cranking the generator? This interpreter, I guess. And was he Vietnamese? Yes, sir, but and was Bowers cranking? No, sir, but then god damn it, that's the end of it. O Kane said, that's all there is to know. He lifted his hand and shook his finger. One more goddamn interference, Herbert, and you're all washed up at MI. Understand? No, sir, I don't. Carmody was, did you see Carmody crank the phone? No, sir. Did you see

• 2:07:14Jocko Willink?

  any US crank that phone? No, sir. Then what's your bitch? It was the first time I'd had to really compose a sentence. For one thing, I told him it was a violation of US Army directives, as well as Geneva Accords and the rules of land warfare. And for another I finished, it just is an army. "Oh, you son of a bitch," he said, "you're so goddamn righteous. You never did anything like that, right?" "No, sir, I haven't." "He slapped the girl and, and you never have, huh, Herbert? Is that correct?" "That is correct, sir, I..." "But you saw Carmody slap her, huh?" "Yes, sir, I did, and, and so, all at once, you're the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Is that correct, Herbert?" "No, sir, I..." "No, sir, I..." "No, sir, I..." "No, sir." "I tell you what you are, Herbert.

• 2:07:58Jocko Willink?

  You're a disloyal, and you're maybe getting kind of old. You just can't stomach it anymore. What the hell is the matter with you?"

• 2:08:07Jocko Willink?

  "Look," he said with relative benevolence in his voice, "let me explain. These are the enemy. Even you must be able to understand that, right? These are the guys who killed your buddies." "Whom did she kill, sir?" "God damn it, I'm talking about the enemy in general." He said, raising his hand. "Let me put it this way, they're VC." I decided there was no sense in carrying out this farce any further. "And we were supposed to be soldiers, and we are supposed to be soldiers, sir. American soldiers. I want to make a charge." "I'd like to..." "Charge? Charge my ass! You've already made a charge, and now it's an investigation, and I'll take care of that, not you. You just be able to back your mouth with sworn, verified testimony." "Sure," I said, "sir, anytime."

• 2:09:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So, again, it's very strange, uh, not very strange, but you can see this guy, he's, seems to be trying to do the right thing, but man, he's making some enemies.

• 2:09:14Speaker 01

  And I, and I guess, big, uh, big part of it is me trying my best to look at it from all, or more than just Herbert's perspective. And you kinda gotta admit, when you think about it, where, you know, when like, okay, when you're in a complex situation, and you have like a goal, and then you have all these rules, sometimes those rules do get kinda looked over, some of them, on a smaller level, right? And sometimes it can be more efficient.

• 2:09:48Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, you got this guy who's kind of by the book and most people are, most people, I'm, I'm pretty. I almost want to say everybody's not going to be by the book hundred percent of the time.

• 2:10:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:10:00Speaker 01

  In one way or another.

• 2:10:01Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  And you get a group of people and they're, they're, they're carrying out a goal, whatever.

• 2:10:06Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  And, and it's working and it's working out. And they're.

• 2:10:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, that's an assumption.

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:13Jocko Willink?

  Cause it doesn't, cause, cause let's face it, if we just look at how well the battalions are doing. His battalion is doing the best and he's kind of flying the righteous path.

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, fully. And, and yeah, this is, this particular story aside, I'm saying in general.

• 2:10:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:10:28Speaker 01

  And then you get, uh, whether it be a new guy or just somebody there who's always like, how should I, it's not in micromanaging, but like nitpicking on certain things and it kind of jams up your whole approach to what you're doing. Sure, it could be better or not or whatever, but it becomes kind of a nuisance, you know?

• 2:10:46Jocko Willink?

  Well, well, okay. I mean, I, I see what you're saying. But let's, let's remember that this guy is witnessing murders, tortures, sexual assaults, which I didn't really cover, rapes, which I didn't really cover, but they're in here. He's, he's seeing all kinds of horrible shit. This isn't somebody, this isn't, all of these people are kind of bending the rules to get the job done. This ain't that.

• 2:11:10Speaker 01

  Hmm, yeah.

• 2:11:11Jocko Willink?

  This ain't that.

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully. And that's what I'm, so, and that's what I mean, just what you said, like people bending the rules to get the job done. Kind of a thing.

• 2:11:21Jocko Willink?

  Right. We, we understand that.

• 2:11:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:11:23Jocko Willink?

  And he understands it.

• 2:11:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:11:25Jocko Willink?

  Remember the guy that got told, hey, bring back the Mermites on your patrol? And, and the guy says, this is stupid. And Herbert says, well, it's an order. And he says, fuck them. Remember that part?

• 2:11:36Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:11:36Jocko Willink?

  He's down with bending the rules if the rules don't make sense.

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, fully. And, uh.

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  And yes, that is true, and we got a good bird's eye view of the whole deal, for sure. But the guy, this guy that he's talking to, who is he? Yeah, Franklin, from his perspective, he might be looking at it as, hey, we're bending the rules to get the job done. He might be genuinely feeling that.

• 2:12:00Jocko Willink?

  He might be, he might be. Now, what you have to fall back on is you have to, you have to fall back, and this is a tough one. You have to fall back not only on what is the right thing to do, but you also have to bounce that off of what is legal.

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:12:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so for the young leaders out there, especially military leaders, but this applies to anything. This applies to business, because, look, there's things you do in business where, oh, there's the right thing to do, and then there's the wrong thing to do, and then there's the legal thing to do.

• 2:12:33Speaker 01

  That's true, yeah, criminal.

• 2:12:35Jocko Willink?

  And then, yeah, there's the criminal thing to do. So when you're doing something, hey, listen, I can explain this. Or, you know, the CNN test, have you ever heard of this before? Look, if I can go on CNN and say, hey, this is why I made this decision, and you don't feel shame because of what you did, that's definitely part of the test. The other thing you got to remember is what is legal? Because if you let, and this is something you can tell your employees or your troops, you got to remember about what's legal. Because someone, that should steer, because, look, if, if, if you're,

• 2:13:19Jocko Willink?

  let's say you're in a platoon, you're out on a target, and you find somebody that's killed Americans, right? They freaking killed, they have the bodies. And you catch them with the bodies and with the freaking bloody knife. There's almost no one that would say, oh, okay, I don't feel like killing those bad guys.

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:13:40Jocko Willink?

  There's a guy with a bloody knife, you see him killing Americans. To say, hey, do the right thing, a lot of people like, I know what the right thing to do is, we kill that guy, we execute him. You have, you have to remember that that is not legal, you are not allowed to do that. So you have to get your people to understand that regardless of how you feel, it's not just a CNN test, because that kind of passed the CNN test, hey, I showed up, this guy had killed a bunch of Americans, and we freaking, I shot him.

• 2:14:11Jocko Willink?

  And you can, that's the way it is, and I feel no shame because of it. You pass the CNN test, guess what, you can still go to, you can still go to jail. It's legally wrong. So as a leader, what you have to do is you have to sort of merge all these ideas into one final thought, and you have to take the fact that, hey, what, this is not legal to do this. This is not legal to do this. Now, there's others, we could come up with scenarios where doing the legal thing still isn't the right thing. And it's actually wrong. It's wrong to do that, and sometimes you may have to break that rule. But what we're talking about here is they're doing things that are not legal.

• 2:14:54Jocko Willink?

  So regardless of how you feel, you're doing something that is not legal on a very, in a very big way, these aren't minor charges, these are war crimes scenarios, which, right? This isn't like, hey, we bent the rules, we left some freaking mermite out in the field.

• 2:15:11Jocko Willink?

  Which is pretty easy to argue, right? Hey, listen, my guys were already tired, if we were gonna carry these things, it was gonna bog us down, we had a better chance of getting ambushed, it was gonna be a problem, I left them. Okay, got it.

• 2:15:22Jocko Willink?

  That's not war crimes.

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully.

• 2:15:24Jocko Willink?

  So there's a, there's a difference.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there does, there comes a point where it gets like, you just can't defend certain things. You know, and, yeah, especially when you're talking about like,

• 2:15:35Jocko Willink?

  you gotta remember though, it's not even just that you can't defend them, because if I roll up and I find an ISIS fighter that killed three people, you can defend that all day. You can defend, oh yeah, I saw him, and I shot him. He killed three Americans, I saw him doing it. You can defend that all day long, but it's not legal. So now you gotta deal with the ramifications, whatever those are.

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  You ever seen the movie Cobra?

• 2:16:01Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  Come on, Sylvester Stallone, Cobra.

• 2:16:04Jocko Willink?

  I have not seen it.

• 2:16:04Speaker 01

  Dang, alright, I'll watch Platoon, you watch Cobra.

• 2:16:07Jocko Willink?

  No, not deal.

• 2:16:08Speaker 01

  So, there's a part, there's a part in the beginning where this psycho guy takes over the supermarket or whatever, right? And Cobra is kinda one of these guys, he uses excessive force, you know? Kinda like Demolition Man, same actor by the way, Sylvester Stallone. Either way, so Cobra ends up killing this guy, right? And then the, the press comes, not CNN, but the press comes and they're trying to interview Cobra. And they're like, he's like, hey, did you have to kill him? You know, did you have to die or did you, you know?

• 2:16:40Speaker 01

  You know, he has a right to live and all this stuff or whatever. And he's like, yeah, you, you know, did you use excessive force and all this? He's like, yeah, I used everything I have. And he's like, hey, you know, like, people are protected, you know, entitled to protection by the law or whatever. And he says, uh, so he grabs the reporter. And unwraps or he uncovers like one of the bodies, right? And he's like, you tell that to his family, huh?

• 2:17:06Speaker 01

  He passed the CNN test is what I'm saying.

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yep.

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  I think it was legal too though, technically.

• 2:17:12Jocko Willink?

  It depends on the situation.

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  It was like borderline, so, yeah, I don't wanna go into the movie, what happened in order to kind of, to get Cobra off the hook or nothing like that, but nonetheless, that's the CNN test, you see what I'm saying?

• 2:17:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, that, so, so the CNN test is, but it's not a,

• 2:17:30Jocko Willink?

  it's not a unilateral test that just because it passed the CNN test, it's okay. That's what I'm trying to explain to young leaders. It's not just the CNN test, it's the CNN test plus it's the legal test. Is what you're doing legal or is it illegal? And if it's illegal, there are going to be repercussions, even if you pass the CNN test.

• 2:17:57Jocko Willink?

  So, as a leader, you've gotta pay attention to those things and what you have to do is keep your troops out of trouble. It's incumbent upon you to keep your troops out of trouble. Because they, they might be reacting emotionally.

• 2:18:12Jocko Willink?

  And you're the one that's supposed to rein them in and make sure that they're not getting, not, not doing things that are illegal.

• 2:18:22Jocko Willink?

  And I'm not saying those things aren't deserved. You know, you find somebody that just killed three Americans, that ISIS member deserves to die. We get it. Not legal.

• 2:18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Jocko Willink?

  Not allowed.

• 2:18:33Speaker 01

  So where do these guy and, and my original point was like Franklin, maybe to him, it was, he was quote unquote, like I said, um, maybe bending a few rules or turning a blind eye to just small minor things and the means kind of justify the ends scenario. Um, and yeah, you, I agree. I think that's true.

• 2:18:55Jocko Willink?

  Right. But remember, we're slitting a girl's throat.

• 2:18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, fully.

• 2:18:59Jocko Willink?

  We have to, leaders have to lead their troops to make sure that they are not just doing the right thing, that they're not just passing the CNN test, but they're also doing what's legal. Otherwise, there's going to be repercussions. That's just, that's just the way it is. That's the reality.

• 2:19:20Jocko Willink?

  All right. Back to the book. When I remember the folly of it all now, I rationalize a bit and tell myself that there wasn't enough time to be fully sensitive to the finality of death. For instance, to say that it had not been a very important day because the second battalion had but two NVA kills now seems ludicrous. It was a damn important day for those two dead men. When even just one man died or got his fingers blown off or his leg shattered or his hearing impaired or his eyes bloodied and blinded, it was one hell of a costly battle, especially if you happen to be the guy who got it that day.

• 2:19:59Jocko Willink?

  It's something generals and presidents can never understand. Only mothers, fathers, brothers, sons, daughters and wives.

• 2:20:10Jocko Willink?

  Maybe if I were a general or a president who never went to war with his men or who never risked paying the same price, maybe I'd want to convert the whole damn show into a statistical table to be read solemnly by some broadcaster every Thursday night.

• 2:20:27Jocko Willink?

  Generals and presidents are fine for explaining to all of us those things that we ought to be willing to die for, but when the war is over, all that's left are statistics and the generals and the presidents are always among the living.

• 2:20:45Jocko Willink?

  If anything has happened to our country as a result of the Vietnam War, it is that our national infection with the sickness of the numbers game. We reduced the blood and the suffering and the death and destruction to mere ciphers. And in doing so, we reduced our own souls.

• 2:21:06Jocko Willink?

  Numbers don't die. People do. Columns of figures don't disintegrate in the explosion of a bomb. Human beings do. Statistics don't bleed. And if you make your war a war of numbers, you will have no trouble sleeping. Most generals and presidents slept well.

• 2:21:41Jocko Willink?

  So, this stuff is continuing on and in another mind-boggling

• 2:21:48Jocko Willink?

  plot twist. On April 2nd, 1969, Barnes gave me a letter of commendation from General Connors, who had replaced General Pierce as the commander of the 1st Field Force Victor. He also handed me a letter from Pierce, which had come all the way from the States. Pierce was quite complimentary and Barnes added that the 2nd Battalion was the best in the Brigade and that I was the best battalion commander he had personally ever known. So that's Franklin's boss.

• 2:22:17Jocko Willink?

  Then he handed me his own letter of commendation. The score sheet for the Brigade, which again listed the 2nd Battalion as the top battalion and the official IG report, which listed the 2nd Battalion as the tops in the Brigade. He also assured me that I would very soon begin reaping the awards, rewards for my efforts, as he called them. He said the Distinguished Service Cross was being prepared and the general already had a verbal assurance it would be approved.

• 2:22:52Jocko Willink?

  He's getting some love.

• 2:22:55Jocko Willink?

  I went back to the battalion and sat down with warm iceless bourbon. My God, what was happening? Two months of nothing but crap. And now all this in one day. Maybe things really were going to be different. Maybe the brigade was going to shape up. With less than two and a half months to go, sweetness and light were in the air. And there were signs that everything was going to be okay.

• 2:23:18Jocko Willink?

  But something else gnawed at me. I had reported eight atrocities or war crimes or whatever the hell they wanted to call them. The abuse of the detainees at Ankeny, the three torture incidents, the murders, the looting, the alleged murder of a young lieutenant, and the alleged execution of the detainee in the custody of the hero lieutenant. If I could get those things cleared up, I'd really be up to date. And I knew I'd better get my statements down soon or I'd have to get them in writing from back in the States, taking time out of the command and general staff college at Leavenworth, and I didn't expect to have that kind of time.

• 2:24:01Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, this all comes really clear right now. I went down on the morning of April 3rd, so the next day, to talk to Franklin about them. "Sir," I jokingly said when I entered, "your best battalion commander of yesterday would like to have a talk with you today, okay?"

• 2:24:16Jocko Willink?

  "Sure, Herbert, come in," he said, "have a seat." I sat down where he indicated. It was only, it was the only chair in the room. "What's on your mind?"

• 2:24:27Jocko Willink?

  "The eight allegations, sir, the atrocities I reported." "I want atrocities," he interrupted. "What the hell are you talking about? Atrocities." "Eight, sir," and I ticked them off one by one, counting them on my fingers as I went. "Sir, I'm going home in less than two weeks and most of the other witnesses have already gone. I'd like to get my part wound up now while I still have time and things are going kind of slow."

• 2:24:53Jocko Willink?

  "God damn it, Tony," he said. "The investigations are ongoing. What more can I do?"

• 2:25:03Jocko Willink?

  The next morning, when I reported, Barnes was behind his desk and Franklin was in the chair to his right. It was quick. "Colonel Herbert," the general said, "I'm going to replace you as the commander of second battalion." I felt the blood drain from my head. "Replace, sir? You mean relieve?" "Not relieve, Tony, replace. I'm giving you a maximum efficiency report and sending you to Saigon." It hit me like a ton of rocks. "Is it over the allegations I've made, sir?" Franklin leaped to his feet screaming, "That's right, you son of a bitch. You and your goddamn lies about Beecham and Crouch and all the rest, that poor lieutenant, and every other one of your damn lies and exaggerations." So, clearly, they were buttering him up. "Hey, you've done great. You're our best battalion.

• 2:25:48Jocko Willink?

  We're got you. We give you a maximum efficiency report like you're the best guy. How about you just freaking keep the old mouth shut about these allegations?"

• 2:26:00Jocko Willink?

  And then when he brings him up again, they realize he's gonna stick to his guns. I felt cold and empty, then a wave of relief swept over me and calm said, and I stared at Franklin as though he were an insect. And I tried to speak as deliberately and as coolly as I could. "I'm not talking to you, sir. I'm trying to speak to my commander, General Barnes." It stopped Franklin's ranting and he gave me the chance to turn back to Barnes. "Sir, the very least you owe me is a complete investigation to see who really is telling the lies and exaggerating." The general had his head down over his desk, scribbling on a piece of notepaper. "Colonel Franklin has already investigated all your charges and I'm satisfied," he said, reaching

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  out and handing me the note. "You'll be out on the landing zone in one hour. There are two planes leaving for Saigon today. You be on one of them. Your records will be ready for you in Saigon or on K when you get there. You report to Colonel Lou Ashley in Saigon. It's on the note." "Sir," I said, "I have a battalion. I've signed for over a million dollars worth of material and equipment. I just can't clear out in an hour," Franklin broke in. "One hour, Herbert. One hour, or you'll be picked up under arrest and taken out by the Provost Marshal." "One hour," Barnes said again. I saluted. "Don't do me any favors with the efficiency report. I intend to see you all again."

• 2:27:24Jocko Willink?

  So even though they said we're gonna like we're gonna let you out of here with a good evaluation, he's saying, don't even.

• 2:27:34Speaker 01

  This dude does not play, bro.

• 2:27:41Jocko Willink?

  As I walked back to the battalion, I told myself it was important to remain calm, cool, and collected. I knew I had them both, just as long as I didn't blow it. They had gone far beyond their authority in removing me without any grounds for relief. I was convinced by then that it had to be something more than any allegations of atrocities. Hell, everybody knew about them anyways. Somebody else would be bringing them up again and soon. If they thought that by getting rid of me, they were also getting rid of the shame of what had occurred, then they that they had got it under the rug, they neither understood me nor the army. At that point, I still had faith in the system. I walked over to the talk. Ernie had most of the officers gathered in the briefing room. He had already told them. "Look," I began, "there's no time to screw around. You know I've been given the boot.

• 2:28:26Jocko Willink?

  That's why I wanted to talk to you all right away. I've only got about 15 minutes more before I have to get out of here, but I wanted to take some time to thank you and get the chance to shake as many of your hands as I could before I have to go." There were some protests and a few remarks about quitting. I stifled that quickly. The army has a system of military justice and rules and regs, so none of you needs to go off half-cocked and try and take things into your own hands. Nobody quits either. Just keep thinking about the battalion. That's what's important, not me. If you're if you quit, you're letting down not only me, but every last one of those grunts out here. They have to stay. They can't quit. You can, but many of them need you. And the guy who replaces me is going to need you. It's not going to be his fault what happened to me. So stick with the battalion,

• 2:29:11Jocko Willink?

  and stick with him, and stick with them," I said, waving toward the boonies. I started shaking hands.

• 2:29:20Jocko Willink?

  In the, in the landing zone area, men all along the ground were lined up, pulling off smoke canisters of every color in the rainbow. There were maybe a hundred men out there and a hundred smokes. It was their honors, smoke. When the troops were coming back after a kill, they buzzed the field with a smoke on each skid. And when one of their own left, they lit one to five, depending on how well he was like, liked, plus his reputation as a fighter. And I was looking down on at least a hundred of them, knowing all the time that nobody was that good, but choked up with appreciation nevertheless. I waved and they waved back.

• 2:30:01Jocko Willink?

  The pilot banked the ship again, and I sat against the wall, rigging and wiped my eyes.

• 2:30:12Jocko Willink?

  We landed in Saigon a bit before nine o'clock that evening. And although I shouldn't have been feeling like a bastard on Father's Day, I didn't. Although I should have been feeling like a bastard on Father's Day, I didn't. I was relieved in more ways than one, I suppose. I reasoned that if Barnes and Franklin had hated me that much, I was better off out of the outfit. I had the marbles in my pocket. They had nothing to fall back on but their own lies and falsifications. I knew I had been lucky. I could have had accidental kills of women and children or other non-combatants, and they would have had me, had the marbles in their pockets. I could have ranked second or third on the IG inspection. I could have had a high court martial rate, or accident rate, or a large

• 2:30:53Jocko Willink?

  number of Article 15s, or delinquency reports from the military police, or any one of a number of other things that could have been used against me. But I've been lucky. Frankly, I mused, I had let, Franklin, I mused, had let his personal dislike for me get the best of him. It had forced him into a premature confrontation that I was bound to win.

• 2:31:23Jocko Willink?

  I was bound to win. Well,

• 2:31:29Jocko Willink?

  it was not that clear cut. It was not that clear cut at all. And

• 2:31:37Jocko Willink?

  the book goes on and it goes into a lot of detail.

• 2:31:43Jocko Willink?

  And there are all kinds of further accusations and counter accusations. And they end up making sworn statements against Herbert, including him leading the killing of civilians. So they start making accusations against him.

• 2:32:05Jocko Willink?

  And this is, and again, these documents are in this book. That's one of the things that makes this book so good is it's got all this actual documentation here. They, they recommend revoking his orders. They recommend removing his opportunity to, to lead or be in command again.

• 2:32:24Jocko Willink?

  General Russ, who's the overall decision maker on the case, agrees with the accusatory statements. Kills Colonel Herbert's career. So the, the idea that he was bound to win? No. Actually doesn't work out that way. Colonel Herbert fights it. He fights this. Spends a bunch of his own money.

• 2:32:46Jocko Willink?

  So, and then he goes on the offense.

• 2:32:51Jocko Willink?

  Cause he wanted investigations before. Now he goes on the offense. Charges, uh, brings charges up against Colonel Franklin. 14 separate specifications, including failure to report murders and torture. He does the same thing to General Barnes. Fail up, failure to report war crimes on multiple occasions. So he's going on the offense. It gets national publicity. It's in the news.

• 2:33:18Jocko Willink?

  The lead investigator for the army. This guy by the name of Major Carl Hensley.

• 2:33:26Jocko Willink?

  According to the book. And I hate to say that I'm just. Cause I don't know what I don't know what the truth is. According to the book. This guy, Major Carl Hensley, had told Herbert, like, look, we believe you. You're right. We can win this thing.

• 2:33:42Jocko Willink?

  And then he kills himself. Kills himself with a shotgun. You can you can look that one up. It's in a New York Times press briefing. Major Carl Hensley. Suicide.

• 2:33:56Jocko Willink?

  Ends up, all the charges are eventually dropped against both Barnes and Franklin.

• 2:34:04Jocko Willink?

  Colonel Franklin eventually relieved from his command. For throwing a Vietnamese body out of a out of a helicopter. In Vietnam.

• 2:34:15Jocko Willink?

  And again, this guy was the most decorated, from what I could find in research, most decorated officer from his West Point class, 1950.

• 2:34:25Jocko Willink?

  1991, by the way, Colonel Franklin convicted. And spent five years in prison for a securities scheme scam. Swindled about 100 people out of millions of dollars.

• 2:34:40Jocko Willink?

  So there's like a, you know, you see these questionable characters, characteristics. So all the charges, so imagine this, all the charges against Barnes and Franklin get dropped. But Herbert is not charged with making a single false statement. So all these things that he had said. He never gets charged for making a false statement, but the charges get dropped.

• 2:35:09Jocko Willink?

  He goes kind of public, does a bunch of interviews. Eventually, he's retired, or he retires, you know, he's done with the army.

• 2:35:19Jocko Willink?

  He gets, eventually, he gets interviewed on 60 Minutes by Mike Wallace.

• 2:35:27Jocko Willink?

  And this is freaking crazy. So they have, and I've tried to find this, haven't been able to find it, but I read about it. They have Herbert getting interviewed by Mike Wallace. He kind of tells his story. And then, out of the other room, they bring Major Grimshaw, who was part of the unit, who comes out and says, "Yeah, look, I worked for Herbert. I know Herbert, I respect Herbert, but what he said isn't true."

• 2:35:57Jocko Willink?

  So now, who are we supposed to believe? So Herbert sues Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes for libel. It's a 13-year court case. It's a 13-year court case.

• 2:36:16Jocko Willink?

  Eventually, gets all the way to Supreme Court, and Herbert loses the case.

• 2:36:23Jocko Willink?

  Herbert eventually, he became a clinical psychologist and also a police psychologist, dies of cancer, June 7th, 2014.

• 2:36:46Jocko Willink?

  Just a, the whole thing is a travesty.

• 2:36:54Jocko Willink?

  And I guess the best thing we can do is, what can we learn from it?

• 2:37:01Jocko Willink?

  What can we learn from it?

• 2:37:04Jocko Willink?

  I would say the obvious lesson here is, put your ego aside and build relationships with people.

• 2:37:14Jocko Willink?

  Now, you might say, "Well, these people were doing wrong." Okay, so what good do you do when you just built, form an antagonistic relationship? Do you have more influence over them or less influence over them? You have less.

• 2:37:30Jocko Willink?

  So, if you can build a relationship with people, now, listen, this is, again, this is so freaking hard. This is what makes leadership hard. If there's people that are doing things that are immoral, illegal, unethical, okay, what are you gonna do?

• 2:37:43Jocko Willink?

  You can do what Herbert did, stand up to him, and guess what? He gets fired, now he has no influence over the situation.

• 2:37:49Jocko Willink?

  Because if you think like, "You have to stop that. That's my moral obligation to stop this stuff from happening." Was, did Colonel Herbert stop it from happening?

• 2:38:00Jocko Willink?

  No, instead, he's gone, he has no more influence. Who took over his battalion? Some yes-man? One of Colonel Franklin's, you know, boys that came in and started toeing the party line? So...

• 2:38:20Jocko Willink?

  Freaking disaster.

• 2:38:25Jocko Willink?

  It's just a disaster. You get the high ground, great, you got the high ground, and then you, and then you, uh, uh, look down on people, and you get an antagonistic relationship with them.

• 2:38:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and there's all, all the stuff is documented. You gotta read the book, um, and I'm sure we could have more discussions, maybe we will. Maybe we'll bring some, maybe we'll find somebody that was there, that knows more about it. I know there's, look, there's two sides to every story too. I mean, you, you were, you pointed out, you know, was, were they just trying to get the job done? Is, was he exaggerating some of this stuff? I don't know. I don't know.

• 2:39:11Jocko Willink?

  My original take was that this guy is like a hack. My original information that I got was this guy was a Hackworth-type individual.

• 2:39:26Jocko Willink?

  From that was from Colonel Howell, his

• 2:39:33Jocko Willink?

  Herbert had worked for his grandfather, right? So this is like the closest we're gonna get right now that we can go off of. I don't know. I don't know.

• 2:39:43Jocko Willink?

  I know that leadership is a freaking challenge.

• 2:39:47Jocko Willink?

  I know that.

• 2:39:50Jocko Willink?

  And this book proves it.

• 2:40:00Jocko Willink?

  Hate this feeling, Echo Charles.

• 2:40:03Jocko Willink?

  The kind of empty feeling.

• 2:40:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:40:06Jocko Willink?

  Don't like it.

• 2:40:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so

• 2:40:09Jocko Willink?

  I don't like when I can't really identify the truth. I can't, I don't like it.

• 2:40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's kind of why I did think about that, where thinking about the other people's perspective, you know?

• 2:40:24Speaker 01

  And with that, kind of, you kind of think like, how did, how did, let's say that the guy is like all wrong. Like, because let's face it, according to the story, it kind of sounds like they're almost like corrupt almost. Where they're like, hey, who cares, you know, kind of thing? So it's like, what? So what? We just have a straight up corrupt military? Is that what you're saying? Like in that little

• 2:40:45Jocko Willink?

  That's absolutely what he's saying.

• 2:40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so

• 2:40:47Jocko Willink?

  We know on certain terms, he's saying that.

• 2:40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. But in a

• 2:40:50Jocko Willink?

  Which is horrible for us to think that this entire division or this entire brigade at a minimum was corrupt.

• 2:40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's, and that's what I'm thinking, but the reality is like, so these aren't like bad people, like most people aren't just bad people who are just like destined for corruption or whatever. It's almost like you kind of got to consider, how did they get there? Like, why is it like that? It's not because they're just these evil people who finally got their position of power and now can just exploit weakness and nothing like that.

• 2:41:22Jocko Willink?

  But you take and you put all these factors in place, like the fact that, hey, if you go do this tour, you're gonna get promoted, you're gonna get more money, you're, you gotta go do this. And when you get over there, well, what's the best way to get a good evaluation? You get a good evaluation by doing what everyone else is doing. Lay, you know, you don't want to stick your head up and be the one that gets, draws a bunch of attention. So if that's what we're doing, you, you know, it's an expression that you use. You use this expression. That's what we're doing.

• 2:41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:49Jocko Willink?

  You know, like you'll say, oh, that's, I thought that's just what we were doing.

• 2:41:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:52Jocko Willink?

  You use that expression sometimes? Well, that's a normal thing for people to feel. Look, that's what we're doing. Okay. That's what everyone else is doing. I'm on, okay.

• 2:42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:02Jocko Willink?

  If we're gonna let the Vietnamese kind of run and do whatever they want, if that's what we're doing, cool. I don't want to be the one that's drawing a bunch of attention to myself. It ain't about me. So I'm just gonna kind of sit back and let it happen.

• 2:42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:14Jocko Willink?

  So people get in that mode and you lose vision. Uh, here's the other thing, like how much confidence do you have in yourself to say like, hey, everyone here is wrong?

• 2:42:25Jocko Willink?

  Everyone here that's letting this happen is wrong.

• 2:42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:27Jocko Willink?

  You know, how do you not feel like, wait a second, there's, you know, a brigade of 5,000 people here and everyone's kind of down with what's happening? And I'm the person that's not.

• 2:42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:37Jocko Willink?

  There's something wrong here. Maybe it's wrong. Maybe there's something wrong with me.

• 2:42:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:44Jocko Willink?

  And you get the momentum and the inertia of, you get the inertia of, hey, hey, we're gonna get a new battalion commander soon enough. Don't worry about this guy. He'll be gone. He's only gonna do be here for six months. Well, what are we trying to do? Make money, right? We can run these little scams and make some money. We, we just want to have the time pass so I can move on. I can just be done with my job. Trust me. That's, that's a real thing, even in today's military. Like, have you ever heard the zero defect? Zero defect model? Where it's like, oh yeah, we're gonna promote someone that has had no mistakes.

• 2:43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43:21Jocko Willink?

  So if you're over on deployment, if you're in Iraq or you're in Afghanistan and you want to get promoted. And there's a mission to go do. And you get to decide whether you go do that mission or not. Do you think you should do it or not?

• 2:43:36Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, got it. Yeah. So if you don't, basically if you don't take that much action, you don't, won't make that many mistakes. You know, and you can have the zero defect record.

• 2:43:46Jocko Willink?

  You have the zero defect record. I went on deployment. I did four missions. They all went well. Get a Bronze Star. Go home, get a good evaluation and we're good to go.

• 2:43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:00Jocko Willink?

  Or I'm gonna go over there, I'm gonna do a hundred missions. Every single one of those missions is a freaking challenger. By the way, if you're doing four missions, you can kind of handpick. You do ten missions, you do twenty missions, you're handpick, okay, this one's not bad. Not a bad area, we've got really good intel, looks good, alright, go ahead and execute this one.

• 2:44:19Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 2:44:21Jocko Willink?

  If you're gonna do a hundred missions, you're going, okay, look, this one's a little bit more high risk, but we're gonna go, it seems like it will make an impact, we'll go execute it.

• 2:44:30Jocko Willink?

  There's a tendency, well, not a tendency, there's a possibility that you say, you know what? Look, I don't want to have anyone get hurt, I don't want to have any bad, you know, I don't want to have any negatives on my evaluation. I just want to get my job done and move on. You know, I want to punch the ticket. So, you end up doing fourteen missions. And you did your job. Good for you. And now you get your ticket punched and you go home and everyone's good. And by the way, when you get home, guess what everyone says? Hey, he did it, he was a, he was a company commander, he was a battalion commander, he did a job, he's a combat experienced veteran, as he said.

• 2:45:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:45:07Jocko Willink?

  So now you're kind of on a pedestal a little bit.

• 2:45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:10Jocko Willink?

  Even though you really don't know anything. So what I'm saying is the system even more so in Vietnam was all set up where, hey, get over there, keep your mouth shut, go with the flow, fit in with the crew. And that's why Hackworth had such a freaking issue with it, and so did Herbert.

• 2:45:28Speaker 01

  Makes sense. It's almost like they should maybe think about, and I'm saying this with complete ignorance, by the way, but they should change the little system to be, to have, you know, like diving, you ever watch diving, like, I don't know, Olympics or whatever? Diving, right, like platform, whatever. They have, they have, uh, the scores and the difficulty level. Exactly, right. So you get a score for difficulty level. And if the difficulty level is low, brah, you're not gonna get a high score, you know?

• 2:45:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, it's true, and that's fine. Again, the system is really, it's very easy for the system to fall back into a zero defect mentality, a risk averse mentality, because, look, I could go on deployment tomorrow, and circumstances could be that there's just not a lot going on. And so, we did four missions, not because we weren't aggressive, but just because there wasn't that many missions to do.

• 2:46:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:21Jocko Willink?

  And so, I'd come back and you can't look down on me, you can't say, well, Jaco only did four missions. I did all the ones that I could.

• 2:46:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:46:27Jocko Willink?

  I was aggressive as I could possibly be, we only did four.

• 2:46:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:30Jocko Willink?

  You go on deployment, there's, you could do a hundred missions, but you only do four. You come back, so I did as many as Jaco, we're good to go. And I, I'm the overall leader, I wasn't there. So I'm looking at, go, hey, Echo did four, Jaco did four, hey, these guys are equivalent, we're good to go. Move on. Meanwhile, you were super risk averse, didn't take any chances, really didn't impact the battlefield. And you're gonna get the same recognition. So it's a very difficult thing to do. It's a very difficult thing. And you can see, you can see that Vietnam just got so wrapped up in this, this careerism of, hey, go do your time, keep your mouth shut, get, you know, go with the flow. And that's that. What are the missions that we're doing? Okay, we're doing that kind of mission, cool. Oh, got it. We got guys smoking pot, no one really seems to notice that.

• 2:47:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well, I guess we're smoking pot. Like, it's just bad across the board.

• 2:47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:20Jocko Willink?

  And a lot of it has to do with, what is our mission? What is our mission? Why, what, what, what means we want?

• 2:47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:28Jocko Willink?

  What means we want? If you don't even know what means you want, how are you gonna, you know, if you, if you went on a football field and you didn't know what, how, if you didn't know how to score a goal, what would you do?

• 2:47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:39Jocko Willink?

  What would you do? You wouldn't be able to do anything. But as long as you know, hey, here's where you're trying to get to. Okay, got it. Give me that ball, move it a foot down the field, I'll move it a yard down the field, I'll move it an inch down the field. You at least know which direction you're moving it. If you get told, hey, go out on that field, no one tells you where the end zone is.

• 2:47:57Jocko Willink?

  Right? No, no one tells you.

• 2:48:00Jocko Willink?

  So what are you gonna do? So as a leader, you gotta take that into account. You gotta make sure people know what the mission is. You gotta know what the strategy is.

• 2:48:13Jocko Willink?

  And you better know why you're going to war. And you better make that perfectly clear when you're going.

• 2:48:21Jocko Willink?

  Check. Empty feeling. Sorry.

• 2:48:27Jocko Willink?

  Don't like it.

• 2:48:31Jocko Willink?

  Alright, so. What else can we do? This is just a freaking.

• 2:48:36Speaker 01

  Well, speaking of empty feelings, I have. One, two, three cans of empty. Two and a half cans of empty discipline go.

• 2:48:46Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna take this opportunity to tell. Our people what discipline go is.

• 2:48:51Jocko Willink?

  I'm glad because I'm just, I had some too, but I still feel empty.

• 2:48:56Speaker 01

  It's all good. Uh, well, okay, I won't start with discipline go. How about that? We'll just talk about Jaco fuel in general. Okay, look, we're on the path. We're learning stuff. Lessons hard and easy, by the way. Obviously.

• 2:49:08Jocko Willink?

  We're hoping, man.

• 2:49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know how they say like.

• 2:49:14Speaker 01

  There's hard lesson, like the hard lessons are the ones that are learned like the best.

• 2:49:18Jocko Willink?

  Yes, true. He who suffers remembers.

• 2:49:22Speaker 01

  There you go. Yeah, so. Boom. So we're on the path, right? We're looking for lessons. We're learning from lessons, learning from lessons from others. That's one of those efficiency things.

• 2:49:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's some great leadership lessons in the both these books. That's for sure. Like some real, like that thing about planning. If you, if you let your team come up with a plan, they're invested. They have a material interest in seeing the plan succeed. That right there is gold. Read those books. Look, you come away feeling empty like I did. Let me fill in that hole a little bit there. I just did. I just filled in my own. Hole in my heart from getting to the end of this book by saying, hey, if you let your team come up with a plan, they have a material interest in making the plan succeed. There you go. I feel better already.

• 2:50:05Speaker 01

  Me too. So yes, nonetheless, we're on the path. And through. That path. A lot of people know about the path. They don't walk the path.

• 2:50:16Speaker 01

  I saw that meme today and stuck in my head. But when we, when we do walk the path. We may need assistance. Assistance through. Whether it be mentorship, guidance, or supplementation. As far as supplementation goes. We have Jaco fuel. So we got stuff for our joints. We got stuff for protein. We got stuff for our brain.

• 2:50:39Speaker 01

  And we've got stuff for immunity. That's it, right?

• 2:50:42Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:50:43Speaker 01

  More or less.

• 2:50:44Jocko Willink?

  What about just getting stronger with some Molk?

• 2:50:46Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the protein, that's the additional protein. Oh yeah, so, and here's the thing.

• 2:50:50Jocko Willink?

  I was thinking about something else.

• 2:50:51Speaker 01

  I understand fully. Well, here's the thing, here's the formula for getting strong.

• 2:50:56Jocko Willink?

  Could you tell I was like not with you?

• 2:50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay, I'm just making sure.

• 2:51:00Speaker 01

  I'm very used to that. Dynamic.

• 2:51:03Jocko Willink?

  No, usually I'm paying attention to what you're saying.

• 2:51:05Speaker 01

  Well, depends on what you mean by usually, but.

• 2:51:08Jocko Willink?

  True.

• 2:51:08Speaker 01

  You know, anyway. The formula for getting strong.

• 2:51:12Jocko Willink?

  If you sense that from me, it should be a non-verbal cue to talk fast and kind of rap.

• 2:51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought that in the beginning, but.

• 2:51:20Jocko Willink?

  Now you don't care.

• 2:51:21Speaker 01

  After a while, yeah, it's just whatever.

• 2:51:23Jocko Willink?

  You don't care.

• 2:51:23Speaker 01

  I'm very, I'm very used to it.

• 2:51:24Jocko Willink?

  You have no material interest in moving this conversation along, which is fine.

• 2:51:28Speaker 01

  Let's just say, I have a material interest, but it's very small. Nonetheless, the material formula for being strong is three things.

• 2:51:40Speaker 01

  The correct exercise, the correct rest and recovery, and the correct.

• 2:51:45Jocko Willink?

  Fuel.

• 2:51:46Speaker 01

  Nutrition slash fuel slash food.

• 2:51:49Jocko Willink?

  Fuel.

• 2:51:49Speaker 01

  Whatever, yeah. Molk is part of that last part, the fuel for getting strong, see what I'm saying? So yeah, Molk will make you strong as long as those other two things are in place as well.

• 2:52:00Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:52:00Speaker 01

  Anyway, go to jockofuel.com for all these things. Score, score some supplementation for this path that we are walking, not just knowing about.

• 2:52:09Jocko Willink?

  You can also get it at Vitamin Shoppe. You can also get it at Wawa, where you can get the, you can get the Discipline Go Drinks at Wawa. If you need some energy.

• 2:52:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:52:20Jocko Willink?

  Then you can go to Wawa and get some. And also, all these things, which is kind of cool. You're, you're, you're gonna want to get. You're gonna want to get them and have them there when you need them. So you want to subscribe, and if you subscribe, you get free shipping.

• 2:52:38Jocko Willink?

  And shipping can be expensive.

• 2:52:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's yeah, the I think the the main benefit aside from the discount for sure. Um, is you not having to think about it. You can think about other stuff now.

• 2:52:51Jocko Willink?

  That is a that is a definite benefit. So you're getting paid basically to do something that's already good for you. It's a double dip.

• 2:53:01Speaker 01

  You're right. You're right.

• 2:53:02Jocko Willink?

  Rotation of justice.

• 2:53:03Speaker 01

  So getting paid, you know how they say a penny saved is a penny earned? That's it, right?

• 2:53:08Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:53:08Speaker 01

  It's kind of thing. It's more of a framing thing.

• 2:53:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:53:11Speaker 01

  Not to go too deep on framing.

• 2:53:12Jocko Willink?

  Please don't.

• 2:53:13Speaker 01

  But if you just said, you just said you're getting paid to do something healthy.

• 2:53:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:18Speaker 01

  In a way, right? You are.

• 2:53:20Jocko Willink?

  So if you subscribe, you're getting paid to do something that's good for you.

• 2:53:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:53:24Jocko Willink?

  Which is awesome.

• 2:53:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:26Jocko Willink?

  Check that out.

• 2:53:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:53:27Jocko Willink?

  Jaco Fuel dot com. Also, we got a bunch of jujitsu stuff. If you are into jujitsu, which you should be. By all accounts, you should be into jujitsu. Go to originusa.com. You can get jujitsu stuff. But if you're, let's say you haven't gotten into jujitsu yet, you're going to, but you still need clothing for your body. You need jeans, you need boots, you need t-shirts, you need hoodies.

• 2:53:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:53:55Jocko Willink?

  You need hats.

• 2:53:56Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:53:58Speaker 01

  There's a lot of benefits to hats.

• 2:54:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you don't wear a hat ever.

• 2:54:03Speaker 01

  Pretty much.

• 2:54:04Jocko Willink?

  Anyways, you can get all that stuff. American made, made in America.

• 2:54:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:54:09Jocko Willink?

  Made in America.

• 2:54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:12Jocko Willink?

  Originusa.com. Check it out.

• 2:54:16Speaker 01

  Also. Jaco has a store as well. Four more of those shirts and hats. Hoodies.

• 2:54:25Jocko Willink?

  Shorts, by the way.

• 2:54:26Speaker 01

  Shorts, yes.

• 2:54:26Jocko Willink?

  Which I'm wearing right now.

• 2:54:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:54:28Jocko Willink?

  Def core shorts.

• 2:54:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:54:30Jocko Willink?

  Flying the flag. Hardcore Ricondo shirt. That's what I'm wearing today.

• 2:54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:34Jocko Willink?

  In honor of Colonel David Hackworth.

• 2:54:37Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:54:37Jocko Willink?

  Chuck.

• 2:54:38Speaker 01

  Yep, that's a good one. Uh, yeah, a lot of stuff on there. Um.

• 2:54:45Speaker 01

  I say it's to represent while we're on the path.

• 2:54:48Jocko Willink?

  That's what you say.

• 2:54:48Speaker 01

  And that is true.

• 2:54:49Jocko Willink?

  Every time.

• 2:54:52Speaker 01

  But there's a little bit more to it. You gotta find out for yourself. Also, we have a subscription situation on there too, for a little bit different types of designs, a little bit more creative. We enlisted John Bozak, who just happens to be, maybe not happens to be, this is all for a reason, but he is the illustrator for the Way the Warrior Kid series.

• 2:55:12Jocko Willink?

  And Mike and the Dragons.

• 2:55:14Speaker 01

  And Mike and the Dragons. And some posters as well. Anyway, this is a good artist. We enlisted him for some of the designs on this subscription shirt situation called The Shirt Locker.

• 2:55:25Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:55:26Speaker 01

  Anyway, look into that. If you like that, hey man, get that.

• 2:55:29Jocko Willink?

  JacoStore.com is where that's at. We got, you can, you can subscribe to this podcast or the other podcast. We got Jaco Unraveling, got a few new episodes of that out. They're savage, grounded podcast, which we haven't done in a while, but Warrior Kid Podcast, we got some new of those, new of those out. If you want to, you can check all those out. You can subscribe. You can also join us on the underground, the UG, Jaco UG, JacoUnderground.com. Little alternative podcast. We've been doing some Q and A on there from people that are on Jaco Underground. If you want to subscribe to that, go to JacoUnderground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. If you can't afford that, it's okay. We don't want to exclude you because

• 2:56:13Jocko Willink?

  you're having a financial rough spot. If you want to hear what we're talking about, you can go to, you can email [email protected].

• 2:56:24Speaker 01

  Yep. Also, we have a YouTube channel, video version of this podcast. Also, we have excerpts on there. So you can be enlightened in the event of you missing a certain concept or whatever, you know, we try to post those regularly. So, um, so yeah, you can, you can check those out. We're verified too, by the way, on YouTube.

• 2:56:43Jocko Willink?

  Proud of that, always. Did you ever get that thing? Weren't you supposed to get some thing?

• 2:56:48Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know.

• 2:56:50Jocko Willink?

  Like a plaque or something?

• 2:56:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. The play button or something. I think that's when you get to a certain amount of subscribers. I did not get it. No.

• 2:56:56Jocko Willink?

  How many subscribers do you have to have?

• 2:56:58Speaker 01

  Uh, I there's different plaques. So I think you get one. I don't, I could be wrong. Like after 10,000 or 100,000 and then after a million, if I'm not mistaken, and then after 10 million subscribers.

• 2:57:10Jocko Willink?

  How many do we have?

• 2:57:12Speaker 01

  Uh, we were, we broke the threshold of 1 million. So technically we should have two play buttons somewhere. Somewhere around here. I don't know. I gotta double check my.

• 2:57:19Jocko Willink?

  Play what?

• 2:57:20Speaker 01

  Play button.

• 2:57:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, buttons.

• 2:57:21Speaker 01

  Icon trophies. Anyway, yeah, we have a YouTube channel. How about that?

• 2:57:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay, accepted. Uh, psychological warfare. We got an album with tracks where I talk about overcoming a moment of weakness. We have flipsidecanvas.com Dakota Meyer. Putting out things that you can hang on your wall that look cool. Books, a bunch of books.

• 2:57:43Jocko Willink?

  Soldier, which is the book we covered today, the making of a soldier, the book we covered last podcast are both by Anthony Herbert.

• 2:57:53Jocko Willink?

  Final Spin, it's a story that I wrote, might be a poem. I'm not sure. You're gonna have to check it out yourself. It's available for preorder right now. I'm sure the publisher is like, well, there's probably only gonna be, you know, we'll probably only sell 50 of these, so we'll print 50.

• 2:58:09Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:58:10Jocko Willink?

  If you don't preorder, don't be mad. Preorder so you can get that first, that dish. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, the code, the evaluations of protocols, Discipline vs. Freedom Field Manual, all the Warrior Kid books, Mike and the Dragon, About Face, Extreme Ownership and the Academy of Leadership. I have a leadership consultancy. It's called Echelon Front. You can go to echelonfront.com for details if you want us to help inside your organization. We have online training, efonline.com. We've got a bunch of live events, including the muster 2021. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to come to one of those. We've got EF Battlefield. We've got FTX. If you want to help service members.

• 2:58:54Jocko Willink?

  Active and retired service members, their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And if you want more of my

• 2:59:10Jocko Willink?

  drawn out orations, or you'll need more of Echo's questionable queries, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on TheGram, and on Facebook, Echo's @EchoCharles. I am at Jaco Willink. And thanks to all the people out there in the service of our nation around the world.

• 2:59:30Jocko Willink?

  And just try and remember that the enemy's outside the wire, and try and keep the egos in check and support each other. And to our police and law enforcement, firefighters and paramedics, and EMTs, and dispatchers, and correctional officers, and Border Patrol, and Secret Service, and all first responders out there every single day, thank you for doing what you do, so that we can do what we do. And to everyone else,

• 2:59:59Jocko Willink?

  listen, antagonistic relationships do not help you in life. They don't help your mission, they don't help your team. If you don't agree with somebody on something, find something that you do agree on. Build bonds instead of breaking them. There is enough in the world trying to rip us apart. Fight that. It's how we all win in the end. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco.