284: Staying Dangerous In Spite of Age. UDT SEAL Team, Vietnam, Iraq-Frogman, Warrant Officer Bill Pozzi

0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:42 - Bill Pozzi 2:30:42 - Final thoughts 2:36:29 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:08:56 - 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 284 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. Anybody home? Right from the very threshold of our bungalow reached us a hoarse voice of an elderly gentleman.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  The voice woke us up at high noon of our first day amid the date palms of the settlement outside Saddam's palace somewhere at the outskirts of Baghdad.

• 0:28Jocko Willink?

  Hi guys, this greeting that followed sounded a bit warmer. Our shared English proved to be good enough, so we were able to freely exchange greetings with our visitor and learn what he wanted from us, or rather, as it turned out, what that older feller could do for us in our Iraqi reality.

• 0:50Jocko Willink?

  My name is Posey, Bill Posey, and I am the boss here. He introduced himself to us clad in an American uniform, pants, and a brown t-shirt. In case you need anything lads, just bring me the list and I'll take care of it.

• 1:06Jocko Willink?

  That was how Bill Posey greeted us. At one time, he might have been a strapping lad indeed, but in spite of age, he lost nothing of his military appearance and his advanced age only dignified him. He brought us a box full of batteries. In this climate, they run out in no time, guys, and you'll generally operate at night. Each of you must have a large supply of them, he explained, putting the box on the table. That is how I remember my first encounter with Bill Posey. Our visitor turned out to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Navy SEALs to serve in combat in that legendary US Navy unit. His vast experience and involvement impressed people and he used his age to his advantage.

• 1:49Jocko Willink?

  Bill Posey's knowledge on military bases, how they work, like ours in Baghdad, seemed unlimited.

• 1:57Jocko Willink?

  Bill Posey volunteered with the US Navy at a time when most young American males did their best to steer clear of military service. Some of his civilian friends even faked injuries or feigned joint problems fearing "fit-for-duty" opinion of the draft board, which would have meant an unwanted conscription. But no wonder. In the late 1960s, Indochina was the scene of the brutal Vietnam War, and after all, not every young guy had a warrior's soul. During his service in the UDT underwater demolition teams in Vietnam, Posey, with other UDT men

• 2:39Jocko Willink?

  and SEALs, took part in many combat missions and patrols. In later time, he also secured the landing of Apollo 12. But when he volunteered to the first Gulf War in 1990, the medical board rejected him, saying he was "too old for further duty." However, in 2003, he deployed to Baghdad. He built the camp infrastructure from scratch, took care of our supplies, and he was also an expert on our vehicles. And he was a very generous man. He raised money on the base for a Catholic orphanage in Baghdad, but he also remained a warrior until the last days of his service, including taking part in combat operations.

• 3:24Jocko Willink?

  The guy was devoted to the fight and to his teammates throughout his entire career. No wonder, then, that our base in Baghdad was named after him: Camp Posey. Camp Jenny Posey, to be exact. Bill Posey had a daughter, who was also in the service but in the Army. He said that since the commanding officer desired to name the base Camp Posey after him, he humbly let it be named in honor not of him, but of his daughter. Hence, the full name of our base was Camp Jenny Posey.

• 4:01Jocko Willink?

  And that right there was an excerpt from a book which is actually called Camp Posey, written by Polish special operations soldier from the Grom named Naval Polska. And this part of the book about the Polish Special Operations Unit, working with SEALs in Iraq, this is the book that I talked about when I had my brother Tom Drago Ziran on here for Podcast 276. And that book by Naval Polska is called Camp Posey. And as you heard, Camp Jenny Posey was named after the daughter of the Vietnam era Frogman Warrant Officer,

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  Bill Posey, who fought in Vietnam, recovered the Apollo 12 space capsule and who ultimately built Camp Jenny Posey in Baghdad and did combat operations with the SEALs and the Grom in Iraq. And we are lucky enough to have this legend here with us tonight. UDT SEAL Team Vietnam, Iraq Frogman and legend, Warrant Officer Bill Posey. He's here. Warrant, Bill, thanks for coming on.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Commander, it's always great being here.

• 5:17Jocko Willink?

  I thought you weren't going to call me Jaco and now you're calling me Commander. I guess I wasn't supposed to call you Warrant.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  You know, old habits die very slowly. And at Group One, where I was at, a lot of the time, we really respected you and your ability to lead and your ability to push things through. So you were a legend at Group One, not Bill Posey. I was only a legend in my own mind.

• 5:46Jocko Willink?

  Well, sometimes I got in trouble for pushing things through, but it was okay. So, let's start at the beginning. I mean, this is a pretty awesome story for you to spend so much time in the teams and so much time just keeping the brotherhood on the path. But it started, you grew up in California, right? Lindwood, California?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 6:05Jocko Willink?

  And what was the situation there?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  You know, when I grew up, it was after World War II. We were the first part of the baby boom. So it was really nothing but optimism, especially in Southern California, because there was nothing here. There was hardly any people, especially in the Los Angeles area. So everything just blew out of the ground. And it was an amazing place to be there. You know, we could surf, the freeways went in. So some days we could surf in the morning and then get an afternoon lift ticket up at Big Bear and ski in the afternoon. How can you beat that?

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  Living the dream.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could surf, you could ski. They had beautiful women. I mean, what more does a man want? I mean, it's the place.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  My kid, my son, as soon as he got his driver's license, he was on that mission. And it's a lot easier now. Even though the traffic's worse, guess what? They got night skiing up there.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  So he's like, oh, surfing in the morning? Going night skiing at night on the same plan. So you, you mentioned the baby boomers. So was, what about your, your dad? Was your dad in, in the military?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, my dad was in the Navy. He came from Victoria, Texas to Long Beach. And he was on a ship called the USS Cummings. And he was stationed out of Long Beach and then did the South Pacific. He met my mother in Southern California. He took my mother after he married her to Victoria, Texas and said, this is where I want to go. And she says, no, we're not going to Victoria, Texas. We're staying in Southern California. No air conditioning at that time. So it was rough.

• 7:37Jocko Willink?

  Totally game changer.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 7:38Jocko Willink?

  So when, what, what was your dad's war experience like on the USS Cummings?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  He, he was a gunner on the deck of the ships and he was a bosun's mate. So that's what he did. And he was in a couple of big battles there and they didn't sink him. So that's good. So he, he had a very positive, and my mother also, who worked for the Navy, had a very positive idea of the Navy and that kind of bled over to me. So.

• 8:06Jocko Willink?

  And then what, what did your dad do after the Navy? Did, did, did he get out after the war?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. Got out after the war and immediately went to work for the telephone company for 40 years.

• 8:16Jocko Willink?

  Was a lineman or what was he doing there?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Guy that climbs the poles.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  Just getting it his whole life.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  So, he was a very good guy and a very hard worker. Really a hard working guy. So, I tried to be as much like him as possible. The week before he died, he was eighty-two years old and he was climbing a ladder on a second story painting the eaves of my, his daughter's house. So, I'm in eighty-two, that's pretty good.

• 8:45Jocko Willink?

  No, no so or doubt, I guess we know where you got your genetics from. So then, you're growing up and this is like just prime, kind of prime America. You're in Southern California, you got surfing. Where are you going surfing at?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  You know, we did it all up and down the coast from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Because it was easy to do and gas was like twenty-nine cents a gallon, so we could do whatever we wanted, just leave early in the morning. And there was hardly any crowds, especially, what really changed surfing was the type of material they used in surfboards. So, originally they used an epoxy, well, originally it was balsa wood, but that was before my time. But when foam came out, they had the foam, but it was a polyester foam. And if you wanted to resin it, you would have to either put tar or paper over the surfboard blank.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  So, it was very difficult to do and you always had voids where the resin went down into the surfboard material and you had a void. So, when the polyurethane came out, that revolutionized the sport.

• 9:57Jocko Willink?

  Game changer.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was easy to do, much stronger, much lighter. It was, it changed the sport of surfing.

• 10:05Jocko Willink?

  So, what years were you in high school? What year did you graduate from high school?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Sixty-five, sixty-one through sixty-five.

• 10:10Jocko Willink?

  And so, you're going to high school and, I mean, Vietnam hadn't started yet until, just barely, probably just started to hear about it in sixty-five?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it was going okay then and everybody thought, well, we can kind of tiptoe around it and do other things to avoid the work, because nobody wanted to go, because, you know, the draft was on and it was a different type of military. So, typically, if you were drafted, you were drafted in the army, very few people into the Marine Corps, none in the Navy or the Air Force. So you would go into the army, you would go to Vietnam, you would come back in a plastic bag. So it wasn't a good deal. You know, they just didn't think it through and it wasn't a good deal for giraffe dees.

• 10:54Jocko Willink?

  So when you're going to high school, were you thinking about the military as you were going to high school?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  No, not at all. We're thinking about how we can avoid the military. It was a negative sense rather than positive.

• 11:07Jocko Willink?

  And you were kind of like a motorhead, right?

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I always turned to wrench from the time I was a little kid. I was always building cars or building different things, so I was really happy in that world.

• 11:18Jocko Willink?

  So give us, I mean, give us the highlights. What was the, what was the prize, what were the beauties?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Well, I had a low budget, low ditch car. I had a fifty-five Chevy with a thirty-one Ford front end on it, the axle and everything, with a three forty-eight and a Muncie four-speed. So I thought I was a cat's meow on Tweedy Boulevard. We had this street called Tweedy Boulevard where everybody cruised, right? And it was the longest dead-end street in the world and everybody would cruise on it and, you know, you'd see all your girlfriends and, you know, it was really good. I mean, it was like, I don't know what that movie was with Ron Howard, but I mean, it was much more fun.

• 12:05Jocko Willink?

  Was it diner?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  No, uh, God, I can't remember that movie with Ron Howard.

• 12:10Jocko Willink?

  I know the one you're talking about.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  And it was in the fifties and it really looked good in the movies, but the fifties were really better than that because that was the optimism of the forties and the fifties, that America can do it all. We can do it scientifically and our lives will be forever better and there'll never be a downtime. Cause my father was a depression era kid, right? And they had completely different values than we had in the fifties because we thought there was no end. I mean, we could do whatever we wanted. Nobody in my family, extended family in Texas and in California, had ever been to college. Nobody. So I tell my father when I graduate from high school, he says, well, I want you to go to work for the telephone company. It's a great job and you can work the job for forty years, right?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  I said, Dad. I'm I'm not gonna be hanging from some telephone pole in South Central Los Angeles. That was a specialty because you could get so much overtime. And I said, I'm not doing that. He says, you know, you're really not very bright. I don't think you're gonna make it to college. Well, he was right there, but, you know, what can you say?

• 13:15Jocko Willink?

  Did you play any sports or anything in high school?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did the good SEAL Team sports. I played water polo, swam, and did cross country and track. So it was real good. It was really kinda prophetic, uh, doing those sports and be able to do, you know, SEAL Team or UDT at the time.

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  Uh, were, what kinda music were you listening to?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  You know, typical Southern California Beach Boy, Jan and Dean. Uh, I, I, you know, I tell, I'm a school teacher now. And the kids have a lot of problems now. I mean, they have a lot of interpersonal problems, right? And I tell them about my experience and they look at me and wow. I mean, it was the greatest, in my opinion, the greatest time ever to be alive.

• 14:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, did we, since you work with kids now, like, what's the difference? I mean, I was thinking from, from, you're talking about cars, right?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 14:14Jocko Willink?

  And when you have cars, like a 1955 car, that's a car that any, well, most people can look at and fully understand what's happening.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 14:24Jocko Willink?

  There's no magic to it.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 14:25Jocko Willink?

  And now you open up the hood of a new car.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Just like your point in the book. I- i- if you make it simple, everybody understands, right?

• 14:34Jocko Willink?

  And it seems like the cars back then, if there was a problem with it, you could pretty easily identify what the problem was and be like, oh, it's a carburetor or whatever, and we just get that thing fixed. But now it's hard to even tell, there's so many complications inside of a car, that it seems like kids these days also are faced with all these different complications as opposed to, hey, um, you know, this is what, we're gonna go surfing and then we go to Big Bear, we go skiing. That sounds like a kinda things you wanna deal with as a kid.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:02Jocko Willink?

  Now they're dealing with social media, peer pressure, and all this other crap.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a much harder life. It's much more difficult. And I see a lot of these kids in my line of work being really stressed out by other kids, especially the girl-on-girl situation where one's chiding or bullying the others, you know? And, and the beauty of it is, and I don't know if you experienced this in your high school, but the beauty of it is... If we were mad at somebody, we'd go out in the parking lot and duke it out. Not that I was a big fighter, because I was as big as round as a pencil, you know? But I mean, but that taught, you know, that fight, that fistfight in the parking lot, and I don't want my kids at school fist fighting, because I'd get fired, but that little

• 15:45Speaker 01

  fight in the parking lot really earned respect from your peers, and it taught you, hey, I can't be badmouthing these guys, because he's gonna sucker punch me and straighten me out. So, but they don't have that now, you know, and I'd been at my high school for eight years, and I've never seen one fight.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm, wow.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  It's just a different mindset. I'm sure at your high school, was there a fight or two?

• 16:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, there's fights, and not to mention, you get into a SEAL platoon, and there's like a fight every fourteen minutes.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  If you need it or not.

• 16:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, someone's getting hit, someone's getting choked, someone's getting pummeled. That's just the way it is.

• 16:26Jocko Willink?

  So, you, you, you grow up there in Southern California, kinda just straight up living the dream.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 16:33Jocko Willink?

  Sounds outstanding.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  And I got a job when I was fifteen and a half in a grocery store, and it was, everything was unionized then, so I started at ninety cents an hour, which was big money for a fifteen-year-old kid, so I was able, some weeks, when I was a senior in high school, I made more than my father, who had been at his job for twenty years, right? And so, I could buy so many car parts, it was unbelievable. Never saved a dime. Was I, was I smart? If I'd have saved ten percent of that, I'd have been living in San Diego right now.

• 17:09Jocko Willink?

  So, you, so you, as you're getting ready to graduate, you know you're not going to college?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  No, I went to college for two years.

• 17:15Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you did?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  I went to college, and college was very difficult then, because everybody was trying to cheat the draft. So, classes didn't have twenty-five people in it, they had fifty, you know, and you would beg the instructor to take you into the class, because if not, if you went below twelve units, then you're open fodder for the draft. So, I always tried to take fifteen or eighteen units, just in case I had to back out. So, I went to college, because I wanted to be twenty-one when I went to service, so I could drink legally, right? So, that was my goal, to be twenty-one and to be in the service.

• 17:52Jocko Willink?

  I thought the drinking age was 18 back then.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  No, not in California.

• 17:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Not in California. In Texas it was, but not in California.

• 17:58Jocko Willink?

  When I joined the Navy, the drinking age was 21, but at the E-Club on NAB Coronado, you could drink at 18.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  But you couldn't drink at the Trade Winds, the team bar. You couldn't go to the team bar, right? If you couldn't go, a CLT guy not at a team bar?

• 18:15Jocko Willink?

  You were thinking way more strategic than I was. Strategic thinker.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  I mean, come on.

• 18:21Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with, so now you graduate high school in 1965, you go to two-year, what college did you go to?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Compton.

• 18:28Jocko Willink?

  And, and you're studying what? Are you studying anything?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Auto mechanics.

• 18:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you're just getting into it?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm trying to perfect my, uh, my ability to fix things.

• 18:38Jocko Willink?

  Are you racing cars?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, just street racing. Illegal street racing.

• 18:47Jocko Willink?

  And, and what car are you driving now? Did you graduate from the 55?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no. The 55 Chevy took a lot of different engines and different drivetrain setups and stuff like that. So it was good for me.

• 18:58Jocko Willink?

  And then at what point did you start thinking, all right, I'm not going to be able to, was it, did you make it to 21 before you got, before you joined the Navy? So you made it to 21?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  No, in 1966, I joined the Navy because the draft was closing in. As they needed more men, uh, you had different steps. So if you had, if you were married, then you avoided the draft. If, even if you were going to school.

• 19:21Jocko Willink?

  But you weren't willing to make that kind of commitment? You weren't that desperate yet?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Let's get nuts, right? I mean, that.

• 19:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You weren't willing to go that distance.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  You know, when the women in Southern California at that time were incredible. And you grew up where the women always took the pill. Well, that's not true because the pill came out in the early 60s, but nobody took it for a while. So when the pill came about, it was a whole new, different social scene. And, you know, everybody got their jihad on, if you know what I mean. And so it was very fruitful to be a young man and a young woman in Southern California in 1965.

• 20:05Jocko Willink?

  And so you're getting your jihad on?

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:09Jocko Willink?

  And then, so at what point are you, did you say you joined the Navy?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we joined in 1966, the draft was closing in. And everybody had tried to get into a National Guard unit or a reserve unit. So, there was nothing left because everybody of draft eligibility did that. So, I went into the submarine reserves, which was the least desirable of any reserves, right? Because you had to go into submarine. And so I did that. And that proved my gateway to go into SEAL Team. I'm going to tell you the little story if you wouldn't mind, Commander. So, I'm on this ship and I'm turning a wrench, right? I wanted to be in the engine room because I wanted to see how those, you know, diesel motor was probably 15 feet long.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  And it was a real good learning experience because I learned a lot of things about diesel. But the problem is, you couldn't take a shower in the submarine because there was no, in the showers, they had potatoes. Because there was no room, we had about 85 people on the submarine, there was no room for anything, including the shower. So you were out to sea for two weeks at a time. And as an engine man, you were really greasy. And you could wash yourself, but you couldn't really get yourself clean. So, you get in your rack and you put your face on your pillow. And, you know, you wake up in four hours for your next gig. And your face is so greasy that your face slid off the pillow, right?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  And I didn't like to be greasy. I didn't mind muddy or dirty, but greasy, it's not good, you know? And you had pimples on your face, and this is the worst part. So we used to go to a bar down here in San Diego, I can't even remember the name of the boat bar. And you'd walk in and people would smell you before they would see you because...

• 22:03Speaker 01

  It was a snorkel submarine where the boat snorkelled to recharge the batteries and it permeated everything with diesel fuel. So you smell like diesel fuel. So people would, you walk in the bar, people would sniff and say, "Oh my God, where did this guy come from?" And you're perfectly clean. I mean, your skin's clean, but you just stink like diesel fuel, right? So after, you know, a little while on that submarine, I went to the Cobb, the chief of the boat, and I said, "Cobb, you know, I'm really not a quitter. This is a volunteer service in the submarine. I want to go to the Army. The Army's good because I can sit in the mud and the mud you wash off and you don't stink, right?"

• 22:46Jocko Willink?

  So you're in the Navy reserves at this point?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Right, but I'm activated.

• 22:52Jocko Willink?

  But you're active after duty?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 22:54Jocko Willink?

  So you joined the reserves, you go through boot camp?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:57Jocko Willink?

  But you're active duty?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Submarine boot camp.

• 22:59Jocko Willink?

  But you're active duty, so you don't have any break? You're straight up, when you joined, you joined?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  No, you had as long as you wanted to kind of fake it in the reserves, but usually it's a two-year gig. So that's why I joined. And then when I was 21, it worked out my time schedule perfectly, right? So then you were activated.

• 23:17Jocko Willink?

  Got it. And then you went, was submarine boot camp actually different than regular Navy boot camp?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  No, it was up at Hunter's Point in San Francisco, and the Marines would drill you and they tried to instill discipline and it was like a nine-week school. It's because you went to boot camp, but you only learned about submarines. Because you're a detriment when you go on that diesel submarine, you know, submarines from World War II, not nukes, but diesel boats. And if you don't, if you turn the wrong valve, it could be the wrong, you know, it could be all over for the entire submarine. You gotta know what you're doing when you're on that submarine. So we went to that boot camp and then the next summer...

• 23:56Jocko Willink?

  Did you not, did you not put two and two together on one end to be on a submarine? Because I wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but I knew there's one thing. I didn't want to, God bless the guys that are on submarines.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 24:08Jocko Willink?

  Because it's a job. Look, I've spent probably my whole Navy career, probably spent a month on a submarine, total, maybe a month and a half. And it doesn't take much to figure out that it's a special, it's a different breed of human being that goes on there and can deal with it. Because you're in a confined space, you know, there's someone that sleeps in your bed when you're not sleeping in your bed.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Hot racking.

• 24:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's called hot racking, Echo Charles. So this is the deal, Echo, they only have so many beds, they have more people than they have beds. So when it's your turn to go to sleep, someone, you share a bed with someone, or maybe two people. So you get to sleep for six hours, and then when you get out of bed, someone else is getting into your bed. It's warm. Right? So this is just, it's not normal. It's not normal, it's not.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  And they're just as greasy as you. Oh, man. If not greasier.

• 24:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and, and everything is confined, you know, and you literally don't see the sun. And so it's a, so I'm just wondering, you didn't, you didn't think to myself, you didn't think to yourself, oh, well, I'm gonna be on a freaking aluminum can underneath the ocean for months at a time, maybe that's not the right deal.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that was just, you know, all my friends, most of my friends joined the submarine reserves. And so then they went on the submarines. So that, that's just the way it was. Anything to avoid the army.

• 25:26Jocko Willink?

  How long did you spend on, in the submarine service then?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Month and a half. Not long at all. Not long at all.

• 25:33Jocko Willink?

  So after a month and a half of smelling like diesel and being stuck underwater, you went to the chief of the boat.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:40Jocko Willink?

  And that's where I cut you off, where you, where you went to him and said, said, all right, I'm done.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  You know, I, I just, I just don't like it, and I'm not the right guy to be this, you know. And he says, Posey, do I have a deal for you? He says, you go down and take this test this afternoon at 12 o'clock, and you can be a SEAL team guy. And I said, well, nobody knew, because this is 1967, nobody knew what it meant, right? What SEAL team was. And I thought, well, SEAL team, well, they have SEALs. I thought, what, right, SEALs? And I said, well, does that mean that you train SEALs and to do tricks for recruiting? And he says, they'll explain it to you.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  So I go over to a part of the base, and they put a hard hat outfit on me, and the first test was to drop you over the side of the ship in the bay, and you walk around on the bottom of the, of the bay for a half hour, to see if you're claustrophobic. And so they dropped me over at the side and they, you know, I walk around for a half hour in the mud. You walk through the mud.

• 26:51Jocko Willink?

  And this is in the old school, like, what is it, the Mark VIII dive helmet thing?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you know.

• 26:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  You know, it was real old school.

• 26:59Jocko Willink?

  It's real old school.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  And so he did that.

• 27:02Jocko Willink?

  And that was part of the examination.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:06Jocko Willink?

  With, did you have the big ass lead, like, boots on, the whole nine yards?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And you, and you could, you had to shuffle the boots, not walk in them. So all of the sediment that's been there for 150 years, I mean, you took one step and you couldn't see for the next five minutes, you know? So they had me walking around.

• 27:26Jocko Willink?

  And what else did they do with you?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Oh, then, then they pull you up and they, I said, "Hey, I passed the test. What do I, where do I go? What do I do?" And they said, "Well, you have to take the other test." And I said, "Oh, okay." And nobody knew what SEAL Team was, right? So I, I talked to the guy there, and he was a dive guy, and I said, "Well, what's SEAL Team?" And he says, "Man, it's the greatest. You go down to San Diego, you lay on the beach, you are a lifeguard for Marines who make marine landings at, at Camp Pendleton, right? And you have a girl under each arm, and in each hand, you have a beer. And the Navy buys you beer."

• 28:10Speaker 01

  I said, "Really? The Navy buys you beer?" "Yeah. And these girls are gorgeous. They're, they're wonderful down in San Diego." I said, "Man, that's the life for me. That's what I want to be, right?" So you didn't know because there's no internet, there's no books. I think Men with Green Faces was his first book, if I'm not mistaken, from World War II. And I checked that out of the library, and that didn't, you know, you didn't know what you got there. So you just didn't know, which was, I think, a plus.

• 28:43Jocko Willink?

  Where were, where were you stationed when all this was happening?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Long Beach.

• 28:46Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  So then they transfer me to San Diego, and I go to the team area the Friday before training starts. And I go there and Olivera, I don't know if you've ever heard of him, he's my proctor, and I show up at like 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and he says, "Where you been?" I said, "Well, they just brought me in the bus here. I, I don't know what to do." And he says, I said, what do I do? What do you want me to do? Do I need a book bag? Cause I thought it was a school. I didn't know. And he says, no, no, no, you don't need a book bag. You just show up Monday morning. We're gonna take care of you. I said, really? Yeah. So I go over, at that time, we had three Quonset huts at the end of Coronado, at the end of the base.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  And I go there and he gets me a rack. And so I'm sitting there the weekend. And these guys come in and they tell me what's happened and I say, oh, okay. It is what it is, right? I'm not in the army, so I'm pretty happy. So that's how it just all started. Then it started going downhill Monday morning.

• 29:51Jocko Willink?

  So what was the wake up call like Monday morning? So you had no idea?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Not a clue.

• 29:55Jocko Willink?

  You didn't know it was gonna be physical? You didn't know nothing about Hell Week? Nothing? You just thought you were going to a Navy school where you're gonna learn about whatever?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:03Jocko Willink?

  Some random.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Demolition and that type of thing, diving. And it would be nothing where you ran or swam or whatever.

• 30:10Jocko Willink?

  So what in your mind, as you start getting physically and mentally abused at a high level on Monday morning? What made you say, okay, well, I'll just stick with it?

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Hey, you know, I'd been in that, see, the motivation is I'd been in that submarine. And there was no way in God's green earth that I was gonna go back to that submarine. They're gonna have to kill me. I was not going back to that submarine. No way.

• 30:37Jocko Willink?

  So how did the training kickoff?

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Um, you know, it was just physical training and evaluation and they gave us the test, the SEAL Team test. And everybody passed it. And then back then, we had eight count burpees in with the, you know, run, floor exercise and the swim. So, but it was, you know, I was half the man I am now. So it was a lot easier to pass.

• 31:04Jocko Willink?

  What class were you in?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Originally 44, then 45, and then 46.

• 31:09Jocko Willink?

  So you got rolled a few times?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got mumps the first time.

• 31:13Jocko Willink?

  What the hell? What's, what's that?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Mumps, it's a disease, a childhood disease from the 50s that they have inoculation. Your kids got the shot.

• 31:21Jocko Willink?

  Right. So you didn't get the shot and you randomly got it?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  There was no shot then.

• 31:24Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  And then the second time I got encephalitis from the bay, from the dirty water. And then they gave me some drugs and I got over that in about four weeks. And the third time I was ready to go. Then I knew what was going on, you know? So.

• 31:39Jocko Willink?

  How far did you make it on each of those previous occasions?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Two weeks and then three weeks and then away, you know, forty-six I was good.

• 31:51Jocko Willink?

  And did you, did you start to understand what the mission was that you were getting yourself into?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, because people explained it, you know, we had extensive training at the trade winds of, of what was happening and how things went down. So then you got it. You got, you understood what's going on. You know, in that time, it was much different than it is now because the Navy controlled everything. You were a Navy asset. All funding came from the Navy as from, not from SOCOM or being a national asset like in SEAL Team Six. So it's always where the money comes from, what, you know, how they dictate your life. And so we were like the dog in the manger, UDT, even SEAL Team, because the Navy, you know, we were poisoned to the Navy.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  If you wanted to make any headway, you had to be a surface naval officer to make any headway. Because there was, we never had an admiral. We never had anybody, I believe. Well, I think we had a captain. So it was very difficult for people with a career to do that if you weren't a listed person.

• 32:58Jocko Willink?

  So the guys that were your instructors at this time, were these guys that had already done tours over in Vietnam? Because this is, what year is this now, nineteen sixty?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Sixty-eight, early sixty-eight.

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you're definitely getting guys that were coming back from Vietnam.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:09Jocko Willink?

  And they're telling you what's going on.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And a big crowd of World War II folks. They were still in because the Korean, I mean, the Korean War was over in fifty-three, right? And World War II was over in forty-five. So they still had time in their career to instruct at, at BUDs. At that time, it was UDT RA.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  So it was a different world.

• 33:33Jocko Willink?

  What do you remember was, did you have any trouble in training in any of the evolutions?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Uh, none, not really. Uh, I had trouble on the last swim, that four and a half mile swim uh, at San Clemente and we just barely made it within a minute. But you know, the current was running really hard and I mean, we were really kicking just to make that and a couple of guys didn't make it, had to do it again the next day. So I was really thankful for that big swim, you know, on that evolution to make it. But that's the only time I had any trouble.

• 34:08Jocko Willink?

  How big was your class when you started?

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Oh man, I don't remember. Probably forty-three or forty-four, forty-five, maybe fifty people. And then we, I think we whittled it down to seventeen. So we didn't have that bad of an attrition rate.

• 34:23Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  We had some really great guys in forty-four. Bill, I don't know if you remember Bill Wildrick, great officer. I mean, he was really an inspirational guy. He could have been the poster boy for your book. Really a great guy. So he was really good to me for whatever reason.

• 34:48Jocko Willink?

  So, um, one last question about BUDS. When, when you're showing up, you don't know anything that's about to take place. It seems like guys now, they know kind of the minute by minute schedule. I was a little bit in between. I, I, we didn't know a lot when I showed up to BUDS. Like I'd never heard of pool competency, which ends up being a huge thing. I knew that there was a hell week thing somewhere in there where you stayed awake a bunch. But you just didn't know what was happening. What do you think? You think that's better? Or you think that's?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Oh, that's ten times better. Like, uh, one of my goals in life is, the Navy has been very kind to me, just like the Marine Corps has been kind. You know, thank God for the Navy in my life. I'm sure I'd have been in prison otherwise. Right? By the grace of God. And so, I try to tell people, especially in small-town Texas, about the advantages of getting out of Texas, and getting out of our small-town and going seeing the world. So, but a lot of them overthink it and they just psych themselves out. It's just too bad that they publish as much as they do, because it's, in my opinion, it's much better when you stand up, and you just, what are we gonna do next? Okay, let's do it.

• 36:04Jocko Willink?

  Let's do it.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Let's get it on. You know, let's go. And so, because I don't want to overthink things. Let's just do it.

• 36:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Did you, um, was going through Hell Week? Do you remember anything special about that? For me, I was kinda, I was kinda happy about Hell Week, because I wasn't the best athlete. So, a swim and a run, where you had to time it, it was gonna be, it was, all those were hard for me to pass. I had to go, basically, the way I passed all my evolutions, was by going as hard as I possibly could. But I was always nervous, you know, sometimes I'd be, like you were talking about, like, within a minute of the drop dead time. And I'd, you know, be going-

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Coon squat.

• 36:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and we wouldn't, you were not allowed to wear a watch.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:46Jocko Willink?

  So, there's no, so for me, I failed one run in BUDS, and because I tried to pace myself. I tried to pace myself. This is kinda how I look at life now. I tried to pace myself on one run and I failed. And I was like, okay. And from then on, I just ran as hard as I freaking possibly could. And, and that's how I passed. But the, the thought of like, actually knowing each little detailed thing that's gonna come to you, when, when it came to Hell Week, I thought, there's no time limit? I'll, they can't stop me. I'll keep going no matter what. So, I was kinda happy about Hell Week. It was one of the easier evolutions because there was no time limit. You just had to keep going, which I was, look, I might not have been the fastest runner, or the fastest swimmer, the best at the obstacle course, but I was good at keeping going. I could just keep going no matter what.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:31Jocko Willink?

  Was Hell Week for you, any, any, uh, big eureka moment that you discovered anything?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  No, just everybody was very nervous and we had magic things that one class would give the other. Like we would have a magic shirt that I got down from a guy by the name of Gary Cronin. He says, "This has been passed down five times. It was a wool shirt, long sleeve wool shirt that you wore under your jumper." And he says, "If you wear this shirt, you're gonna pass hell week." Man, give that shirt. I don't care if it costs a hundred dollars. I want that shirt, right? And then the other thing that saved me is I had illusions, or I was delusional on Wednesday night when we had the big paddle from the area down to Ib or whatever it was. And Bill

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Wildrick, our crew chief, our crew officer, was kind enough to let me sleep for 15 minutes in the belly of the boat, because I was having, I mean, I was freaking out, right? I was seeing monsters and all kinds of different stuff. He says, "Posey, you lay down on this boat and arrest the guys paddling. Nobody complained."

• 38:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  So you try to return the favor however you possibly can to arrest those guys. You know, be the first one out there, get the boat ready, you know, pay them back for the nice thing they did for you to allow you to go through hell week.

• 38:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I had some guys that I saw completely hallucinating things. I had one small hallucination, but I don't know if it really counts because I knew it was a hallucination. While it was happening, I was like, "Oh, this is, we're out there on that thing." I think they call it around the world. We're doing around the world.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:15Jocko Willink?

  And we're paddling, and we're in the middle of the ocean, and all of a sudden I start seeing traffic lights, like stop signs and traffic lights, and it's going to red, green. And I'm looking, I'm like, "Oh, I'm just hallucinating. That's not real." So I don't know, does that count? What do you think, Echo Charles? Does that count? If you know it's fake, but it looks real?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:33Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that was the only hallucinations I had. No monsters, thankfully.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:38Jocko Willink?

  I had one guy that started swearing, like, language-wise. And he started swearing, and he didn't stop for about 20. Just every word, freaking swear to everybody, hey, is everything okay? Fuck you, you fuck around, man. And we're like, okay, bro. Hey, dude, whatever it takes, man. Just, just stay in the boat, man. It's all good.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  But what are you gonna do in the ocean when that happens? You have no recourse. You can't lay them on the deck, on the sand. I mean, what are you gonna do?

• 40:04Jocko Willink?

  Keep paddling.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Paddle a little faster.

• 40:09Jocko Willink?

  So at this time, so it's 1968. At this time, and I was talking to Roger Hayden about this. He said, he said-

• 40:19Speaker 01

  That's a hero of mine. I love that Roger Hayden.

• 40:21Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 40:22Jocko Willink?

  He, he said, most guys went to UDT when they graduated.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Well, there was three UDTs and one SEAL Team.

• 40:29Jocko Willink?

  He said occasionally a guy would go straight to SEAL Team, but it was very rare.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:33Jocko Willink?

  Most guys were going to UDT. A lot of people might not know about the UDT at that time. What was going on with the underwater demolition teams at that time?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Well, on the west coast, there was UDT 11, 12, and 13. 13 was a new team. They started, I believe, in 67 and disbanded. I think it was 70, 71, 72. And so, the Navy was, again, our main driver for funding and for manning, for everything. And so, they wanted to keep UDT because if, in case of an amphibious landing or other sort of things, UDT was useful to them. Other than that, they had no time for you. And there was no funding. So, like in our, in our team, we had three pickup trucks and we had to go once a day to 32nd Street to to give them the SURF

• 41:27Speaker 01

  report. So we would drive one pickup truck in the morning, at eight o'clock, go to 32nd Street and come home. And that's the only time we'd use that truck. Cause the other two pickup trucks we had were in the team area, but they were up on cement blocks because we robbed those for parts to keep this one going. So there was just no, no money. And so we just kind of made things happen. And, but I think we were better for that because we had, I mean, when we went to Vietnam, we had a para bag, half full, because we had no gear. There was no reason to have a lot of gear because we didn't have any money. So-

• 42:06Speaker 01

  It really worked out well for me in my naval career because I was able to learn how to trade things with other services and make things happen. And that really worked out to be very good training for me to support my sailors. My, my goal was always to support my fellow sailors because the Navy wasn't doing it well, nobody else was. So that was important.

• 42:31Jocko Willink?

  So you got ordered, what, what UDT team did you end up?

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Thirteen.

• 42:35Jocko Willink?

  So it's now, is it's 1969 now, or is it still 68?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Still 68.

• 42:39Jocko Willink?

  So it's 1968, you get your orders to UDT Team 13?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 42:45Jocko Willink?

  You walk down the grinder a little bit, knock on a Quonson hut, is that basically what happened?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  There was four, in, in the old cement, people who don't know about SEAL Team don't know about that old, uh, cement building that was there. I don't know if they've tore that down or not.

• 43:01Jocko Willink?

  They tore everything down.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Okay, they tore that down. So it was probably a hundred yards long and probably, you know, a hundred feet, uh, wide. And they, we had four teams in that building, you know, SEAL Team One, and then 11, 12, and 13 UDT. So everybody had a very limited space and it was kinda difficult, but one team was always, or, you know, one and a half teams, because SEAL Team was always there, uh, were always in Vietnam. So we had very limited space, no resources at all, and it was, it was difficult because of that, because there was just no room.

• 43:41Jocko Willink?

  So when you got to UDT 13, you checked in, what'd they do with you? Did you go right into a platoon?

• 43:48Speaker 01

  No, no, they immediately sent you to school because they were, we were deploying, and you had to go to SERE school, you had to go, in my case, I went to outboarder motor school, uh, to jump school. And then it was just timed, so the day you graduated from SERE school, you got on an airplane and went to Vietnam.

• 44:12Jocko Willink?

  Did you get, did you wear that old insignia, like the, the UDT insignia with no eagle on it?

• 44:19Speaker 01

  No, no, that, that wasn't, there was no insignia in 68, that came later. And the insignia you had is you had like a diver's helmet on this, on your uniform right here. And that was the only insignia you had. And then of course, UDT 13 on that name badge.

• 44:38Jocko Willink?

  Right, right.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  And that, there was no team badge. There was nothing. I'm going to tell you a little story. You've probably heard this many times. So, we get, um, the pirate, I don't know if you remember who Pete the Pirate was?

• 44:51Jocko Willink?

  I, I know his name, but I don't know.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, he supposedly designed the insignia for SEAL Team, right? Cause he was drinking Budweiser one day and he submitted like 20 designs because they asked for guys in the teams to, to do design. Now, there's a lot of controversy about that. So about three months later, uh, they walk into the Quonset hut and they said, okay, everybody's got their insignia, uh, you know, and they gave us the, they just dropped this bag on the table. And they said, okay, everybody's got one of these. If you're an officer, you have a gold one. If you're enlisted, you have a silver one. We're going to have an inspection tomorrow morning. So, uh, everybody's, ah, inspection. So, we're out there standing on the grinder.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Some guys got it on the right side. Some guys got it on the left side. They have it here. They have it here. They're, they're thinking about putting it on their Dixie cup, right? But, I mean, nobody knew what to do with it, right?

• 45:49Jocko Willink?

  And so, this was the original Trident?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Original UDT insignia that was different from the SEAL Trident.

• 45:55Jocko Willink?

  So, the, the UDT insignia, this is the one that basically that looks the same, but there's no eagle?

• 45:59Speaker 01

  That's correct. And so, nobody, I mean, SEAL Team had their thing going the same morning. Everybody did the same thing. We just didn't know what to do. And we didn't know what it meant. And so, that was it.

• 46:15Jocko Willink?

  What year did that happen? Was that after you got back from Vietnam?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, after we got back from Vietnam.

• 46:21Jocko Willink?

  So, so you show up to, to UDT 13. Do you, you don't get put in a platoon, you just get sent to SER school, you get sent to outboard motor school, you get sent to jump school, there's no one tracking you, there's no one saying like, hey, this is what we're getting ready to do?

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Oh, they're tracking you because as soon as you get back, you go to another school. So they knew when you were coming back and then they would immediately go to another school. Then you just jump on the airplane. But I knew what platoon I was in. I knew who my OIC was and all that.

• 46:47Jocko Willink?

  And were those guys already overseas?

• 46:48Speaker 01

  No, no, they were, they were in the States.

• 46:50Jocko Willink?

  So they're, they're shuffling you through all these schools?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:52Jocko Willink?

  When you got done with schooling, did you go through any kind of pre-deployment workup? Like, you know, like I did my whole career was like, oh, you're getting ready to deploy, you get put into platoon, you, you know, you, you, uh, first you do some schooling, like you're talking about the pro dev, they call it professional development. So you go to a bunch of schools, then it's six months of ULT. And then it's six months of the advanced post that, and then you go on to platoon. For you, there's none of that.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  It was a weekend at Danny's doing ULT. That's how, that for people who know what Danny's is, is an old time team bar on, uh, uh, in Coronado and that's, that was it. So it was really OJT. And we had, we relied on the guys coming from SEAL team to UDT. Because there were so many new people and so many, I mean, everybody was an E3, right? Because they expanded the teams and same with the boat guys. And there was no time for training and they just wanted to get you into the war because there was 500,000 Americans in Vietnam at the time. So you had to go over there and take the next team's, you know, place. I mean.

• 47:59Jocko Willink?

  How long was it from when you graduated UDT replacement training to getting to the team? How long did you spend there before you went to Vietnam? And did you go to Vietnam as a platoon?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  No, as a team.

• 48:13Jocko Willink?

  As a whole team?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a whole team.

• 48:16Jocko Willink?

  So UDT 13, how many guys were there?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  A total of about ninety, ninety to a hundred.

• 48:25Jocko Willink?

  And you're broken up into platoons inside the team, just like a-

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Yes, of course. Same basic.

• 48:31Jocko Willink?

  So you all got on a plane?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  We got on two planes. We got on two DC sixes and we hedge hopped Hawaii, Johnson Island, you know, going over. It's a three day airplane ride.

• 48:44Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  And because we just went from island to island and finally made it to PI, which was our main mustering base. And then we were dispatched to where we were going to go and from Vietnam from there.

• 48:57Jocko Willink?

  But prior to, prior to going on that, getting on that plane with the rest of the team, did you go to desert warfare training? Did you go to, did you guys train over the beach? Did you guys just do hydro recon, hydro recon's up at Camp Pendleton? Like, what did you do to get ready?

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we did some of that, but it was like, for, for me, it was like a month long. Other guys who had been in the team for a long time got that training because they were there. I wasn't there and we were short manned, you know, because they just built that team. So they were drawing, and the beauty of Team thirteen, God rest their souls of some of the people who've been in it, but a lot of times if you wanted to get rid of somebody that was causing a problem, you'd send them to thirteen, right?

• 49:43Jocko Willink?

  Lucky thirteen?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was a very esoteric bunch of folks and thirteen and a lot of characters, you know what I'm saying?

• 49:52Jocko Willink?

  So what platoon were you in at UDT thirteen?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  I think I was in Bravo. And so it worked out good. Paul Plumb's my OAC.

• 50:01Jocko Willink?

  So you get on the plane, now you're flying over there. Do you know what your missions are going to be?

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Don't have any idea. Don't have a clue.

• 50:12Jocko Willink?

  No idea what you're gonna be doing.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Don't know, don't care. Just give me the gun, let's go.

• 50:17Jocko Willink?

  Are you, have you, you know, at one point you were trying to avoid the draft, but now it seems like you're kinda all in, let's go get some?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  No, but the reason people were avoiding the draft because this army was so pitiful because they were wasting those bodies. Why go, I mean, I don't mind dying, right? Because I never, I never thought I'd last past 29. I mean, I thought if I made it to 30, I'd be an old man. I just had that feeling all my life. And so, but why waste your life, have somebody pour all that money to bring you up and just kill you for no reason? I mean, why do that? But you're in the teams, you know, the first day I got to the teams, we, the first muster in the morning at money, I looked to my right and I looked to my left and it was all a bunch

• 51:04Speaker 01

  of weirdos like me. I never fit into society. I wasn't a popular guy or an outgoing guy or a well spoken guy. I was kinda, you know, nobody really wanted me type of guy, you know what I'm saying? And so, I get there and I see in my class of 43 or whatever it was, people, they're all like me. I said, man, I found a home. This is my, this is my people, huh? I mean, all a bunch of other weirdos.

• 51:35Jocko Willink?

  And so now you're go, now you get to Vietnam, you have no idea what kind of mission you're gonna be doing.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Well, we knew more or less because we practiced it, you know, especially in training. Training was built around the mission in Vietnam. So, we did a lot of hydrographic reconnaissance. We did a lot of patrolling. We did a lot of that so we could pick up those skills, you know, but we were the last class to go into 13, so we didn't have the training that they had before that when they built the team. And some of those guys, I mean, they had been to Vietnam like, I don't know, you wouldn't know, Tobacco Lou, uh, this guy was fabulous and he was my mentor and he was just as crazy as a day long, but whenever he said something, you listened to him because he'd been to Vietnam a number of times and he knew what

• 52:24Speaker 01

  he was talking about. So, you listen to the voice of authority. So, that's what we all did. Lou said it, we did it.

• 52:32Jocko Willink?

  So, you're training for hydrographic reconnaissance?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 52:36Jocko Willink?

  You're training for patrolling?

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:39Jocko Willink?

  And you're thinking that-

• 52:40Speaker 01

  TA, patrolling.

• 52:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for, for direct action too?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 52:45Jocko Willink?

  So there's, there's a decent amount of crossover with what the SEAL platoons were doing.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. We, we were the poor man's SEALs. So when they didn't have a mission they didn't like, you know, give it to UDT.

• 52:58Jocko Willink?

  So you show up in Vietnam, where, where'd you initially go?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Tonsonook, then we got on the, um, oh, I can't remember the name of the ship. It was a destroyer escort and we did a couple of months of hydrographic reconnaissance. And that was, that was really a good thing for us because, uh, we got to gel as a platoon and everybody learned their place and we saw who the real warriors were and who to talk to and who to listen. And so that was very good. And so like after the mission, you know, in a debrief, Lou would say things, you know, Posey, what the hell's wrong with you? What, you're standing at the beach party and you're lollygagging and not looking around and not at the ready position. If the VC come over that berm, what are you gonna do?

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Uh, you're right. I, I was, you know, and so he would straighten us out. He was a great mentor to us because he'd been in SEAL team and a stone alcoholic, but you know, he would, you, you listened to what he said.

• 54:01Jocko Willink?

  Was he your platoon chief?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:04Jocko Willink?

  And you guys are doing hydrographic reconnaissance, are you lead line and slate, a whole nine yards?

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Right. Lead line and, so I'll just explain, cause nobody knows what a hydrographic reconnaissance is. So you have a beach party of four people. And so you have two, uh, ends of it and in the center, and you have a line that could be at least a thousand yards long and you have it on a big spool. And so you take the spool and then every, depending on the gradient of the beach, every 50 feet or a hundred feet, you would have somebody swimming this line down the beach and you might go a thousand yards, you might go, you know, a click and- You would take the lead line, see how deep it went and write it on your slate.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  You know, position number one, 50 feet. Well, you never went over 18 feet. You know, that was 18 to zero was what you're looking at in hydrographic reconnaissance. Then you would take all the slates, once you got done with your beach and you'd go back to the ship and you'd make a map of that, that beach. So the gradient was at a thousand yards out, it was 17 feet. So if they have to bring the LSTs in or a landing craft, they knew what was going on. So it was very interesting and really kind of a lot of fun because you would just be, I mean, you would have your face in the water all day, you know, just kicking and you'd usually do two a day.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  You'd do a thousand yards in the morning, maybe a thousand yards in the afternoon. So it was a lot of fun. Vietnam's really a beautiful place. I mean breathtakingly beautiful and some of the water is just incredibly clear. You know, especially Cameron Bay, just it's a delight to be in. I mean, it's like being in a resort and getting paid to be at the resort, right?

• 55:59Jocko Willink?

  This was the promise you got.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:03Jocko Willink?

  Were you guys doing mostly daytime or nighttime?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Daytime because you had to see where you sat in the line and keep the line straight. So everybody's slate would be correct.

• 56:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I did two ARG platoons.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 56:18Jocko Willink?

  Back in the day and we did hydrographic reconnaissance, lead line and slate. I remember we did a ORE, operational readiness exercise before we deployed to Iraq. And my platoon drew the straw to get put on the ship for the pre-deployment training exercise. And you know, this is, we know, we know, like this is when you're in Iraq, I'm getting ready to deploy to Iraq. We know that we're going to take those guys' place.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:43Jocko Willink?

  And we get put on a ship and we get, we get this tasky comes down. And I remember I walked down the platoon space where all the guys are. I'm like, all right, boys, get the lead line and slates out, it's on. And one guy by the name of Johnny, I won't say his full name. But he goes, are you kidding me? What are we doing? We're gonna do a hydro. I said, yep, we're doing a hydro. I said, he said, you gotta be kidding me. We're going to Iraq. There are no freaking hydros in Iraq.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Four hundred and seventy-one miles from the ocean.

• 57:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he was going totally nuts. And you know what we did? We got our lead line and slate out and we went out and did a hydrographic reconnaissance with a flutterboard at Red Beach or wherever it was and took that stuff down. That's that the Navy still needed that information for whatever reason. I think now they're kind of past. I think now they have.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Electronically.

• 57:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they can do it with digital imagery and stuff like that. But that's only what fifteen or twenty years ago that we were still out there with a lead line and a slate.

• 57:42Jocko Willink?

  So that's your first couple of months of deployment. You're just getting your hydrographic reconnaissance on.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:48Jocko Willink?

  Were you, what was, what position? Were you the flutterboard man because you were a good swimmer?

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I wasn't a good swimmer. I mean, I, I can swim okay, but I wasn't the best. My position, a lot of times we learned then how to adapt and we had an IBS on board the ship. And we put the nine point nine horsepower motor on the back of that IBS. And we pulled the seaside of it. So the, the ocean, I mean, the land side, we could pull that line so much quicker by doing that and so much more accurately. And that's what we did. And I was constantly trying to keep that outboard motor running. So that worked out well for our whole platoon.

• 58:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a hell of a lot easier than trying to swim that flutterboard.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:31Jocko Willink?

  How, so you did that for a couple of months. You're out there doing these hydrographic reconnaissance. And what came after that?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Uh, then we went into, uh, the delta and we, uh, were off of Antoy and we'd take swift boats, uh, off of an LST, off of an island in the south of Vietnam and go in and do patrolling. And that was basically the next four months. We did a lot of patrolling and, you know, tried to do some DA and stuff like that, you know?

• 58:59Jocko Willink?

  So what, what are these operations like?

• 59:02Speaker 01

  You go in, you get dropped off by the swift boat. Well, first of all, you go in, it's a lot of very narrow canals, a lot of times, if you weren't in a river. So you would always engage at the beginning. So you knew exactly where they were gonna hit you. So you say, "Okay, point X-ray's coming up. Everybody get behind, we had a railing and we had armor, body armor on the railing, you know? And so we would all get behind the body armor on the railing and they would open up with an RPG or a claymore or something like that. And we would go a mile past and said, "Oh, that wasn't that bad today."

• 59:38Jocko Willink?

  So you, is it because you were going through channelized areas and you'd look at the map and be like, "Oh yeah, here's the channelized area, here's where they're gonna get us."

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, I mean, it was very ineffective, but you just kept your head down. No swift boat guys. I mean, they were always being hit. Those guys were really brave guys because they had so many casualties and they were right there, you know, with the 50s and the 60s and stuff and letting them have it. Where we'd be hiding behind it with our M16 pointed out from the side. "Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna get those VC today. We never saw them." I'm sure they were on the other canal, you know, with a command detonated claymore or something, you know?

• 1:00:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What was the goal of these missions?

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  I think just to go make sure that they didn't take a big foothold in whatever sector you were in. And we would go to their camp and we would burn the camp down. And we'd get some C4 and light it and put it in the hooches and it would burn down their hooches. And we'd go run their pigs off and stuff like that. And then we would patrol through the jungle. They'd drop us off in the jungle. And we'd patrol through the jungle because they weren't expecting us. You know, at that time. That was right after Tet. So Tet in the United States was very demoralizing because the Army always said, you know,

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  "We have this. We have this sector. We have this country. We're doing better every day." And then Tet happens, this massive battle, and we beat them back, of course, but a lot, especially the Marines up north, really took a beating. And after that, as far as the people here in America, I think, were that that was the end of Vietnam. We knew we were coming back out of Vietnam because they did Tet. And then you go overseas in Vietnam, and the Army didn't want to go, they would tell us all the time, they would say, "Okay, you guys can go outside the wire and do your

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  mission or whatever you want to do, but don't expect us to come and, you know, be a QRF because we're probably not coming out to get you, or if we do, it might be the night, next day." Right? Because the war, everybody wanted to stay behind the wire because they knew the war was going to be over, and they didn't want to be the last man standing. So it was a different attitude, but we were gung ho. We went, "Hey, let's rock and roll, baby. Let's do it, you know, let's go. This is our big chance." And so we would go out, and our officers were very aggressive, the men were aggressive, and we just could do whatever we wanted to do. Of course, we ran it up the pole, so the command knew what we were doing, but it was

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  really good for us because we could catch the VC. They'd be sitting lollygagging, and we'd be walking up to them, and they're over there lollygagging, and they wouldn't have any idea that we were coming on them, you know? Nobody was out there.

• 1:02:43Jocko Willink?

  What position did you walk in patrol?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  I was rear security. So I liked that position because a lot of, in my estimation, and I'm probably wrong here, but I was, you know, I was always cognizant, if somebody comes up on you, they're going to usually see you before you see them. So you got to do a good job because it could be devastating, them coming right up, you know, right up on you.

• 1:03:10Jocko Willink?

  Would most of your patrol, how many guys would you take out on a standard patrol?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Usually eight to 10.

• 1:03:17Jocko Willink?

  Would you guys, how many M60s would you carry? And would you guys, did you guys have stoners like they had over on the SEAL Team?

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  No, no. We were the poor man's SEAL. So, no stoners. I'm just going to talk about the M16 if you don't mind Commander.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  You know, we got to Vietnam and we used a variety of different weapons here in training in San Diego. And none, I don't remember any M16s that we used here. So, we get there and they gave us the M16. See, man, this is so much different from those woodstock, very, very heavy weapons we had. You know, and they, they really worked good. And they're brand new, right out of Cosmoline, right? And so, we go on our first, first mission and we get everything, we're soaked, we're everything, because we're trooping through the jungle and it's raining and we have to go through these different low spots or full of water. And we get the gun wet and we get in a firefight and you'd have to constantly recharge the

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  weapon because it wouldn't, it wouldn't work, you know? And so, we then, they had this real thick lubricant that came from the manufacturer of the weapon and they said, "This is the lubricant to use to keep your rifle." But it kind of gummed everything up. And so, you know, after about three of these where the thing didn't work, I went to the armor and I said, "Dude, you gotta give me something that works. I don't care what it is. You can give me a six gun because it's better than an M16. I can, I can make it work, right?" And so, they gave me an M3A1, a grease gun, you know, little tank, people in tanks in World War II used.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  It's cost, General Motors made these guns for $12.87 each during World War II, right? And they gave me that gun. The only thing you had to do was shake it one time, the water out, and then that thing would work flawlessly. You could come right out of the water, bring it up, give it a little dip, bang, bang, bang, bang. It was a wonderful weapon. I carried that a lot because it worked every time. So, I really liked that weapon. And it was very negatively buoyant, but it really worked good.

• 1:05:30Jocko Willink?

  What was your op tempo like? I mean, how often were you guys going out on these patrols?

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  You know, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, depending on what was going on and what we had coming down the pipe. Uh, you know, what the Navy would task us. We were really some, a lot of times depended on the Navy to do something with assets, swift boats or whatever. So sometimes we'd work five days a week, sometimes six, sometimes two. So that's going to lead me to my next point, if you don't mind. So I like to operate, right? You know, and I, I like to be busy because I don't like to sit around. So I would volunteer. I'd go to Mr. Plum and say, Mr. Plum, you gotta give me a job, man. I can't sit here in this LST or where on seafloat.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  You know, we're on seafloat, it's nasty. And so he said, Posey, I got a deal for you. You're gonna go with the Army today. Fine. So what we would do, I would hook up with a second lieutenant. I was 21 at the time. And he was like 20, right? Never been in combat. And they'd given him a platoon of Arvin, right? We had a platoon of 30 Arvin, which was the Vietnamese National Guard. 30 Vietnamese who had little battle experience, if any, and we would go out with them and we would patrol with these guys. And we never let them, let them get behind us. Never, ever let them get behind us because you don't know who's the VC and who's not, and you'd get shot in the back.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  So I would carry the radio. They never let non-English speaking people carry the radio because you had to have somebody, you know, that people could, one, understand, two, knew that they weren't getting suckered in with some Viet Cong on the radio. So I would carry the radio and the lieutenant would be in front of me and we would be in back of the platoon. And so I really, I like that because, uh... I mean, these guys were slow and they had no ability to engage the enemy. I mean, we had thirty guys and if there were six guys engaging us, you know, they were freaking out, you know? And so, we would kinda round them up and, you know, "Well, you're gonna go here and you're gonna go here" and, you know, it was kinda fun.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  And, um, one day, we were out there with these guys and they all gave them, you know, they knew there was no VC in the vicinity. So, that's the missions that they would give us because these guys were so terrible. And so, we went out today and we saw like these thirty guys giving us the evil eye about, uh, you know, half a click off over the other side of this rice. I said, "LT, we gotta make it back to the boats because these guys got that evil look on us and they're gonna come and get us." And he said, "Yeah." So, anyhow, we're getting these, you know, we're telling these VC, I mean, these Arvin guys, "We gotta move, we gotta get back."

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Well, they're kinda lollygagging along and these VCs are coming right up on us, right? And I say to LT, "We better, you know, you know, we better do something." And he said, "Oh yeah." Now, he was good. I can't find fault with him at all. So, we had this, this battle line there in the, in the Hedge Grove area type and things got real bad for us. And so, I got on the radio and I called, uh, Annette there and I said, you know, to the army guys, "Is there anybody else that can come and help us? Do you have any helos or anything out there that can help us?" And they said, "We got no helos, but we do have a fast mover coming in on you guys. Uh, will that help you?" And I said, "Does he have anything on board that can light these guys up?"

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  He said, "Oh yeah, he's equipped with napalm." I said, "Really?" And so... Through that radio relay, you know, we talked to that guy and they talked to him, I talked to them and I said, "Okay, we're gonna pop the smoke and on the south side of the smoke, don't let that napalm go on us, you know, let it go on those dudes." And they did and I'd never been around napalm close before because you could always see it in the distance, but never close. And man, that, it was incredible, the power of the napalm, just absolutely incredible. We were probably a hundred feet away, you know, honkered down, we could see him off,

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  flying that Phantom coming in and he dropped that napalm and it was just like a blast furnace. And he lit those guys up and the VC, it lit them up and they were still running, completely engulfed in flames and liquefied their jelly gasoline and it was really incredible to see that, the power of that weapon. And so, then we, obviously, as soon as he lit them up, we all ran away and went back to the extraction point. And so, I'm happy that guy was there because, I don't know, it'd probably be me and the LT and the Arvins, at that point, we'd let the Arvins been behind us because we'd have

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  been running full speed ahead through that jungle, right? I mean, it was getting real bad, real fast.

• 1:10:43Jocko Willink?

  How often would you say you came into enemy contact on these operations? You know, I've got some Vietnam friends that were in the SEAL teams, sometimes they'd say they'd barely gotten any contacts with the enemy, other guys, different deployments, they got in contact, even Roger Hayden, from one deployment to the next, one time he's out there, it's like, "Not too bad." The next time, it's crazy. What was it like for you?

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't, we weren't SEALs and we knew we weren't SEALs and we would just go do the missions that the Navy told us to do. So it wasn't like Ramadi. I mean, it was, we'd have contact as far as claymores and stuff like that, going on in swift boats, but, I mean, it wasn't at all like what you experienced in your battles.

• 1:11:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, I don't know, I didn't, it wasn't getting chased out by VC and having to drop napalm a hundred and fifty feet away, but-

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  But we were lucky on that, though, you know? We were very lucky.

• 1:11:35Jocko Willink?

  How were you, how was your luck with taking casualties?

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Uh, for the Arvin?

• 1:11:41Jocko Willink?

  No, for, for your SEAL, for your UDT platoon.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Well, in my platoon, I don't think we had one casualty. And we had a real good OIC, Paul Plum, I don't know if you know him, uh, he was really a good officer and he really looked out for the sailors. So, we were really good with that. And he did, you know, he would see the mission and he would, uh, explain the mission and very, you know, most of the guys, we were called knuckle draggers, right? And so-

• 1:12:12Jocko Willink?

  Still are.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you had to be simple because, you know, we just didn't have the experience of all the stuff that they have now. And so, he was really good and, and we got it and so, it just wasn't the op tempo of SEAL Team One for UDT in most places.

• 1:12:32Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. And then how long were you do, yeah, this was all taking place, all those missions were taking place, those patrolling missions were taking place out of the, the barge?

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Some of the barge, some of the swift boat, depending if you were in Antoy. Antoy was an island and you'd go in and the barge was in the middle of the, the river, you know, and so we would deploy off of that.

• 1:12:54Jocko Willink?

  And so you did operations off both those?

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:12:57Jocko Willink?

  And then how long were you doing those types of operations? So you did a couple of months' worth of hydrographic reconnaissance off of the USS, whatever that ship was?

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:06Jocko Willink?

  And then, and that, now you're doing-

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Cook, USS Cook.

• 1:13:08Jocko Willink?

  USS Cook, and now you're doing these type of patrolling operations and, you know, swift boat operations? How many months were you doing that for?

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  I think around four. But you had, every two months you'd have a break and sometimes you'd go back to the PI and regroup and get new guys or do whatever.

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  And then how long was the total deployment?

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Uh, six months.

• 1:13:28Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so that was, that was pretty much your deployment?

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  So you come home from that deployment, what year is it?

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Sixty-nine? Yeah, I think sixty-nine.

• 1:13:39Jocko Willink?

  And then what was the? What was the?

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  Apollo.

• 1:13:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. So at what point did you hear about Apollo?

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Well, when we were getting... You know, nobody wanted to come home. At least, most of the guys didn't want to come home because people didn't like you if you were in the armed services. If you had a haircut, like the most of us in this room, they perceived you to be a soldier or a sailor and they didn't like you. So, I didn't want to come home. I volunteered to stay. And then they said, "Well, you can go on Apollo." I said, "Oh, man." I was a history major also in school. And I said, "Man, this is a time to..." You know, "If I can be on Apollo, even though it's such a pain, it was a pain in the ass, uh, that I should do this." So they, one day they announced, "Okay, we're gonna do Apollo, uh, twelve and thirteen,

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  and whoever wants to do it, come and see the XO." So, nobody saw them the first day. And so, the second day, they make, at quarters, they said, "Whoever wants to be on Apollo, go see the XO." Because we knew the next day, you would be voluntold, right?

• 1:14:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And so for Apollo eleven, the first one, you were in Vietnam when that all happened, right?

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  We didn't even know what happened because we were out and there was no TV or radio. But that was the big one. Everybody wanted to go on that one. I knew a couple of guys on that, and that was really Wolf Ham. Uh, I can't remember his first name. But he did a really good job on that. They had the good guys on that.

• 1:15:08Jocko Willink?

  But then, once it was over, people were like, "Ah, everyone hears what the story is, and sitting around in the ocean for a while, looking up at the sky, waiting for these guys to touchdown, being on a ship, wherever you are." So, it turned from a good deal to, like, "Hey, maybe we don't want to do that."

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  It wasn't a team deal, right? I mean, it wasn't a good deal for the team guys. So, they say... So I go to the XO and I said, "Okay, I want to go on Apollo, but I want to choose my position on the team." And he says, "Well, what position do you want to be?" And I said, "I want to be the first man out the door." And he says, "You got it, Posey." So, he was lying to me, and I know he was lying to me, but...

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  I thought I had a shot, right? Because the first man out the team had his name announced. It was literally a billion people looking at TV, even on the second one, because they thought the second one was going to blow up because it got struck by lightning on the pad, right? And so, so I said, okay, I'm going to be the first guy out the door. And he says, yeah. And so then other people volunteered and we did it. So the reason why it was a pain in the butt is because we did it three times a day, morning, noon, and night, cover of darkness, is because we never knew when the capsule was going to come down for sure or not, right? And you'd go out and in the first supposed two hours, you'd be on scuba on the surface

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  of the water, because they thought there were moon bugs. We didn't know if there was decontamination from the moon. And so you'd suck that thing, I mean, I probably sucked that tank dry in 15 minutes, but you had to keep it in your mouth on the side to breathe because, you know, that was the procedure. That's what NASA required. And so we would be out there and doing this thing and for the first two hours, being on the surface like that, with that thing in your mouth, it would make you seasick and so you'd throw up. So every, all the time before the mission, I would go eat a bunch of saltine crackers because I didn't like dry heaving.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  I'd rather heave something that was solid rather than just dry heaving. And so you'd be seasick for maybe a half hour, then you'd get over it and, you know, away you went. And the process for every minute they had, you were supposed to do minute A, minute B, minute, all the way to XXXX. NASA knew what you were supposed to be doing over that four hours and 45 minutes. And you had to abide by that schedule to do because if you fell behind, they were really mad for whatever reason. And our team was really good. And I think we, at one time, we held the recovery rector on Apollo 10 for doing the fastest one. And

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  The problem with it is the guys land in the ocean, these three astronauts in this capsule that's 12 feet across and probably 10 feet, oh, not even 10 feet, 9 feet high, right? And they're bobbing there for like an hour on the thing, inside of this capsule on their back. And they come out and there is green, I mean, I don't see anything green on this table. They're this color green when they get out of the capsule because they're so sick, because they've been in this capsule with bad air and I'm sure all their sewage problems and all this stuff and they're green when they come out of it and you want to get them out of that as soon as possible, so, you know, to give them some relief.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  So, it was a very interesting thing. We had a mock-up and we practiced on that off of the Hornet, that was the aircraft carrier. We did that three times a day. One time, we couldn't stop the capsule and the capsule would catch the wind and it would run, if you got in front of the capsule, it would run you over, just like a lawnmower, right? And go over you about two knots and you know, you can't swim two knots, it's impossible. You know, with all the stuff we had to wear, it's impossible at two knots. And so, we couldn't stop this, so we, in our morning exercise, we couldn't stop it. So, we went back in the afternoon and I said, you know, if I get, if you drop me right on

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  the capsule, I think, because what would, the first man out the door, there was a D-ring on the side of the capsule and you would hook this hook into the D-ring and deploy a parachute to stop the forward progress of this capsule from running over you and running away. Couldn't stop it. So, I said, drop me right on the capsule and I can stop this thing, because we had the other team doing it. And I was lucky enough to be able to do it. I'm sure the wind wasn't as great as it was in the morning or whatever, you know? And they said, because they were thinking about firing a 50 caliber into it to sink it, because it's a navigation hazard. I mean, it's a big piece of iron, right?

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  And we stopped that and then on the mission day, the seas from trough to crest of the wave were probably 12 to 15 feet. Yeah. And it was really brutal and it was slapping that capsule around like there was no end. They said, what are those guys going through inside of that capsule? So I jump out of the helicopter that day and they they put me right next to it, right? And I go and I can't find the D-ring. I can't find, I'm panicked, you know, what, what, to my mind, Commander, what's worse? Being somewhere where you're supposed to be competent and you're totally incompetent? And you make a fool of yourself? What's worse than that?

• 1:20:45Jocko Willink?

  Nothing.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Nothing, nothing. You know, it's like, you know.

• 1:20:49Jocko Willink?

  Especially with a billion people watching.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:51Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's the one thing that's worse, is have a billion people watch you be incompetent when you're supposed to be competent.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  It's like the bridegroom on the wedding night. I mean, you want to be competent, right? You know what I'm saying?

• 1:21:02Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  Yes, you want to be competent. And so I couldn't find it and I was panicked. And I didn't know they put a piece of foil over, because the outer layer of the capsule has foil, this gold foil, it's very bright and it shined in your mask. And it was very difficult to see. So I'm going around tapping the sides of the capsule, looking for it. And I finally found it and I was able to hook it up and then we went from there. And so it went really good for having such high seas. So the rest of the process, and they said, whatever you do, whatever you do, you do not go and strip the foil off the capsule. Because they want to analyze it.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  Capsules like a fiberglass aircraft aluminum, right? And all over the, they have this gold foil, this plastic gold foil. Do not take any of the foil because we have to analyze the situation. When it comes out of the spa, out of the, out of the air, we need to know what's going on. So, oh no, we would never do that, right? We would never do that. So we knew at what point the aircraft carrier, the aircraft carrier takes four miles to turn around, right? And otherwise they're right on you and they got the big, you know, the giant binoculars about that big and they're looking at you, you know, ah, you know, one of those. Because the NASA guys always hated us, you know? Just like everybody else.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  And so as soon as the aircraft carrier starts making its turn, we go on the other side of the capsule and we're stripping this foil off and we're sticking it in our wetsuits, you know.

• 1:22:39Jocko Willink?

  Maybe we can sell it back to them.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, one for mom, one for the girl. I had a girlfriend that played the cello and I could never get anywhere with that girlfriend. I said, man, this is, this is going to bode me well with this girlfriend. This thing's been to the moon, man. She's getting something. I gave, what is this?

• 1:23:00Jocko Willink?

  How big was the area that you knew that the capsule was going to touch down in?

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  Well, we anticipated being within four miles.

• 1:23:10Jocko Willink?

  So, so it was pretty accurate?

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Pretty accurate, but you never know because they had the aircraft, I mean, excuse me, the air force guys in C-130s with the para guys being able to jump out if it wasn't within, uh, cause they knew once it started decelerating, uh, coming out of space, cause it had to go from 24,500 miles down to, you know, five miles an hour. Uh, they knew upon a deceleration where it's going to be, so we would steam to that thing. And it, I mean, that, that carrier was right there. I mean, we saw it come right out of the sky. So that was really that, that, those mathematicians and the sailors really did, did well on that.

• 1:23:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that seems like a, that seems like a big challenge, knowing where that thing's going to be within four miles, free, going from 25,000 miles an hour.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Jocko Willink?

  Through the, through the atmosphere. And then did, did, so were you the first guy out? You were the first guy out, did, did they say your name on?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:24:07Jocko Willink?

  There we go.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  And, and so this is kind of a funny, funny thing here. So my mother was really proud of me, you know, my son, he's going to be on a, mom, nobody wanted to do it. I volunteered first. I, you know, she said, don't tell the neighbors that.

• 1:24:25Jocko Willink?

  You were selected.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Jocko Willink?

  As far as mom was concerned, you went through a rigorous selection program to figure out who had, who had what, who had the right stuff.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  That's right. No, we, we drew straws and the low man got to go on Apollo because nobody else wanted to go.

• 1:24:40Jocko Willink?

  Do you still have any of the foil?

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:24:43Jocko Willink?

  Dang it.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  So, my mother knew I was gonna be on Apollo and she knew that my name was gonna be announced, right, and my city. So, we didn't have color TV. My father didn't like color TV. So, she says, "I'm buying a color TV. I'm gonna see my son." So, they had all the neighbors in and all the... We had a group of kids that I went to school and college with. And they all came over to my house. And my wife didn't know me, but she came to my mother's house just for that thing. And she says, "The first time I saw my husband was a half inch tall."

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  So, that was a big deal.

• 1:25:26Jocko Willink?

  So, what happens when you get done with that? What's your next thing?

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Then, I wanted to go on 13. Because I just, I was, you know, my team was really good at this, okay? We had some great officers, great chiefs, great people doing it. And I wanted to go. And I said, "Okay, I wanna go." They said, "Well, you're just about done." And I said, "What do you mean, I'm done?" And he says, "Well, you gotta sign up for another four years to go on this." And I said, "Four years to go on Apollo? Uh, 'cause they had the Vietnamization." This was a terrible thing, and this is what I see going on in Iraq. They had the Vietnamization of Vietnam. So, we turned over all of our assets to the Vietnamese, especially in the very hot sectors.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  And we would only go as backup or support if they were having a problem, you know? And so, you could see the end of the war coming. Even in 69, the end of the war was coming because these guys were taken over. They were completely incompetent. And so, I said, "Man, is Team 13 gonna make another deployment? Probably, you know, but what's it gonna be like? Are we just gonna be sitting, you know, watching victory at sea movies somewhere and not really going out and doing a lot?" And so, I just got out. I didn't up for that other four years. So.

• 1:26:51Jocko Willink?

  Did you stay in the reserves? Was there a reserves at the time?

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Uh, the Navy, the real Navy reserves.

• 1:26:57Jocko Willink?

  So just big Navy reserves?

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, big Navy reserve and you went to a diving unit or something. And then.

• 1:27:02Jocko Willink?

  Is that, and is that what you did? You stayed in the reserves?

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  And then they, Admiral Bonnelli was instrumental in getting the other, the, the UDT re- UDT SEAL reserves going. So then when they did that, I joined that, but then I got real busy and I dropped out of that for a while.

• 1:27:21Jocko Willink?

  What did you do when you, when, when you were in the reserves and now you're re-entering the civilian world? What did you do?

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Uh, school.

• 1:27:28Jocko Willink?

  What'd you go to school for?

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Um, anything I could get as quick as possible. Cause I was 24 years old and I wanted to get out of school because my contemporaries were very young and I just wanted to get out. So I went, I tried to jam through that as quick as I could.

• 1:27:44Jocko Willink?

  And what'd you get a degree in?

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  History and then a minor in business.

• 1:27:48Jocko Willink?

  And, and then what'd you do?

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  Um, well, one of the, uh, actually before school started, I hitchhiked around the world. So at that time you could hitchhike around the world and I wanted to see the world and see what was going on, you know? And so we started in, uh, LA and we got, in those days you could get a car and if you drove it to New York, they would pay for the gas. So it was free cause we had, only had $1,200 to go around the world. Uh, it was a service. Instead of transporting it, they let people drive it across. So.

• 1:28:26Jocko Willink?

  It's like an early form of Uber.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It was you drive Uber, right? So we got in this car and this car was a brand new, um, God, what was it? Something British, right? And it could go.

• 1:28:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh, like an MG or something?

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  No, no, it was better than MG.

• 1:28:41Jocko Willink?

  Really?

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  I can't remember what it was, but it was small, but it was really fast.

• 1:28:47Jocko Willink?

  Maybe a Triumph?

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  So, no, it was. It was something pretty nice.

• 1:28:52Jocko Willink?

  I can't imagine a worse decision than someone giving Bill Posey straight out of Nam a freaking fast British car to drive across countries.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  And gas money, free gas money.

• 1:29:02Jocko Willink?

  This is bad decision, no wonder this kind of Uber didn't work out. Dude, you ruined it.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  So, we get this car on a, like a Friday afternoon, and you have to call the guy and say, "Okay, we're leaving Los Angeles right now, and we'll be there maybe Tuesday or Wednesday", right? So, forty-nine hours later, we get to New York City, and we call the guy and he said, "Hey, we're here." He said, "You're here." Forty-nine hours to go three thousand miles? Well, we left, we really left earlier than Friday, right? And we were literally going a lot, a hundred miles an hour across the nation. And at that time, you could really go, right? And so, then we just got on the airplane. At that time, the cheapest airline was Icelandic airline, but you had to spend three days in Iceland. So, that was cool, right?

• 1:29:52Jocko Willink?

  Who are you with?

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  Oh, my travel friend, a guy that I'd known for ten years. He was really a great guy.

• 1:30:00Jocko Willink?

  Just another guy from Linwood that you grew up with?

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was really, he's a big dude, and that worked out well for us because hitchhiking could be a little iffy at times. And then, we got to, uh, where we pulled, wherever we pulled in Europe, but they had a real late winter, and we didn't have any winter clothes, so we only stayed in Europe for like a month. And then, we went down to, uh, we went down to, uh, Israel. And if you wanted to work in Israel, so, we went and got a job at a kibbutz in Israel for three months. So, that was really good.

• 1:30:34Jocko Willink?

  And what were you doing there?

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  Uh, just working on this, uh, kibbutz, and I was a beekeeper. And so, they made me a beekeeper, and then a painter. And so, we were doing that, and they paid us five dollars a month and free room and board. But that was cool, because then we could see all the sights in Israel, because I always wanted to go to Israel, right? And pay, and at that time, you could hitchhike all over Israel. Anybody would pick you up. And let's say you're going from Haifa, where we were, down south to, you know, the Dead Sea or whatever, you could do that. It was really good. And we left there and just started hitchhiking across the world.

• 1:31:10Jocko Willink?

  Was this like nineteen seventy or so?

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Uh, seventy-one. Yeah, seventy-one, I think.

• 1:31:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and what's the, when you're, when you're home from Vietnam and you know, you're talking about earlier, you know, people are, they think you're a soldier, they're looking down at you. Did you feel that once you got back?

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I really had regret that I didn't stay in the military because, uh, you know, the people wouldn't have anything to do with you. Of course, as soon as you got out, you let your hair grow a little longer, you know, and so that, you fit in more rather than, you know, not having any hair. So that kind of masked what was going on. But I mean, the, you know, the hippies were just plain, you know, nasty. I mean, they, the thing I hated about it, they had dirty knees and dirty elbows. They didn't take shower all the time and they stunk and they smelled like marijuana. I mean, it was really nasty, you know, and the women were, I mean, they didn't keep themselves up. It

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  was, it was bad. So I had no inkling there that I wanted to be a hippie. I just didn't.

• 1:32:18Jocko Willink?

  I don't get any inkling that you were much of a hippie either.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Nobody wanted to be a, well, none of my ilk wanted to be a hippie, right?

• 1:32:27Jocko Willink?

  So, so how long did this, uh, did this hitchhiking scenario last?

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  About 10 months. Took us 10 months to go around the world.

• 1:32:34Jocko Willink?

  Did you keep going, did you keep heading east after you got to Israel?

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. We hitchhiked across, well, that time you couldn't go to an Arab country after Israel. So you had to go to Cyprus, then from Cyprus to Turkey, then we just started hitchhiking to Turkey and made it across Afghanistan. And then through India, you know, and we could make it to Bangladesh. Well, Bangladesh was east Pakistan at the time. They didn't have Bangladesh because a lot of countries changed, you know, since then. And we made it there. Then we had to get on an aircraft because we couldn't go across Burma. And, you know, go, we, we did go to Burma, spent a couple of days there, then to Japan and back to the States. Sometimes you either had to fly or be on a ship because you can't hitchhike in the water, right?

• 1:33:23Jocko Willink?

  And did you feel like at the end, at the end of that, that you had sort of gotten your fill of and seen what you wanted to see?

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and for that sector, yeah. But, you know, I really, I always, we did a Westpac, you know, with uh UDT, so we saw, you know, China, which is Hong Kong at the time, and Japan and stuff, so, you know, but then the next year, I went to school and then we took the summer off. We got student loans to travel in the summer, not to go through school because we had the GI Bill, right? And so, got student loans and we hitchhiked to Chile and came back within a three-month period. So that was good.

• 1:34:02Jocko Willink?

  What are you doing on the, when you're in Chile? What are you doing, for instance?

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  We're just hitchhiking and seeing what's going on with the people, you know, and because then you travel with the people and you really see what's going on. You really see, rather than being on an airplane, you see their mode of transportation, what they eat and, you know, we never had a problem. Never had a problem.

• 1:34:25Jocko Willink?

  You said you did a Westpac with UDT. When was the Westpac with UDT?

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  No, that was during Vietnam. I mean, that was called a Westpac.

• 1:34:32Jocko Willink?

  Got it, got it, yeah.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  And being on board ship for that two months, we did sailing too.

• 1:34:38Jocko Willink?

  So then you do this trip, now, now you get back to California?

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43Jocko Willink?

  And now you gotta like grow up, kind of?

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Well, no, then it was, then I had a very serious major in college. It was beer and women. And so, I was, I, I excelled.

• 1:34:58Jocko Willink?

  Where'd you go to college when you got back?

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  Uh, Orange Coast College in, uh, Orange County.

• 1:35:02Jocko Willink?

  And you continued to study history? Is that what you studied?

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it was the quickest way of getting out of college.

• 1:35:08Jocko Willink?

  And you just wanted to get out and get some kind of a job?

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  Just wanted to rock and roll, that's right. Just go get some kind of work so I could make money.

• 1:35:14Jocko Willink?

  Then, what, was it two years that you finished college?

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  No, it was actually, well, I had to start over because I took a lot of stuff that wouldn't transfer to an academic major because I took a practical art with auto mechanics. But then it took me like a year and a half to get out of junior college and another year and a half to get out of, you know, big boy college.

• 1:35:37Jocko Willink?

  And then what, what?

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Then I went to work. I went to work for machinery manufacturer, then I got back into the reserves.

• 1:35:44Jocko Willink?

  What year did you get back into the reserves?

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Oh geez.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Maybe seventy-five, I think they, you know, I told you earlier that I had covid real bad and I lost part of my memory. So I have hard time with dates and names. I just can't remember what it was.

• 1:36:01Jocko Willink?

  I mean, that's, might not have anything to do with covid. It might do the fact that it's forty something years ago and you didn't really care at the time. You're like, I'm going back in the reserves, whatever. Yeah, it's funny. I find myself, I can't remember sometimes what platoons I was in. Cause people are like, I did this platoon, this platoon. I'm like, what platoon was that? I kind of forget sometimes when it's like your whole life for a year and a half is your platoon. And I'm like, what kind of idiot am I that I don't remember what platoon I was in? I can usually back, deconstruct what it was and figure it out. So you go back in the reserves and, but you, when you're back in the reserves, are you part of the UDT reserves?

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  Yes. They started it then, whenever that was.

• 1:36:41Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then what are you doing? One weekend a month?

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Jocko Willink?

  And you're going down and drinking beer and doing future connoissements?

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  No, no. I mean, it actually looked, UDT really cleaned up because then they saw what SEAL Team did. That cut the way for us. So we would do more SEAL Team things than we would do UDT. Cause UDT was a thing of the past. So that was really good. And so we did that. I did that. And then, you know, I don't know how many years I did that. Then I got out for a while. Then I came back in like eighty-six and came back in the reserves. And then, you know, it was, you know, that was really good.

• 1:37:29Jocko Willink?

  And then the, I know in that book, Naval mentioned that in the first, when the first Gulf War kicked off.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37Jocko Willink?

  You rogered up and said, hey, send me. What happened with that?

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Well. I got, um, I wasn't fully qualified on a couple of things and so they wouldn't send me. And so, you know, that was cool and that just made me work harder to get up to speed on everything. So, it just didn't work out. But, you know, what can you do? I mean, if you're not, if you don't have those calls, you don't have those calls.

• 1:38:03Jocko Willink?

  What calls didn't you have? Like dive soup or something?

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:05Jocko Willink?

  Or whatever, just like the standard kind of SEAL leader calls?

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, just stuff like that, because I got in a year before, but I, I kind of evolved. I was forty years old, I think, at the time. I can't remember how old I was. And you know you're not going to run and gun like these studly dudes right here, right? You're not going to do it because you can't do it.

• 1:38:27Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  Right? No matter how much you work out or, you know. And so, I said, you know, I really have to find my place and see where I'm an asset. And so, the training department was really good for me because there was a big paper push there and I got to work in training. And then I got to go to a lot of places. I could volunteer, I would volunteer for thirty to sixty days a year to go to exercises to support the teams. So that was really good for me, you know?

• 1:38:59Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  And so, I learned a lot because of that.

• 1:39:03Jocko Willink?

  What do you remember about when, you know, UDT thirteen got decommissioned and then UDT eleven and twelve sunsetted and became SEAL Team Three?

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  In eighty-three.

• 1:39:16Jocko Willink?

  SEAL Team Five in eighty-three. So you were, were you still in the reserves at that time?

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't in. And so that I did, I missed that process. And then, of course, the funding, and I don't know because I wasn't there, but that's what I think happened. The funding process and the leadership process went from the Navy, from big Navy, to SOCOM. And so, I'm sure people listening to this that live that will find fault with me on my facts, but it was a different world. The Navy, you know this. Team guys wear thin very quickly, right? Very quickly.

• 1:39:52Jocko Willink?

  Wear out are welcoming?

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Wear it out and you have to really protect yourself against that because then the other units won't work with you. And if they won't work with you, you can't do it by yourself.

• 1:40:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:40:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, we definitely learned that lesson over time of

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:40:07Jocko Willink?

  Just getting to working with your counterparts and giving them the support that you can give.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:40:13Jocko Willink?

  Cause then they'll support you back.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:16Jocko Willink?

  So after the first Gulf War where you got denied. But then you realized, all right, I gotta figure out how I can help, what I can do. And you stay in the reserves for the next 10 years. And then September 11th happens.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:31Jocko Willink?

  Where, where were you at September, in September 11th?

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Uh, September, I was actually gonna go to work for the boats and help promote their recruiting. Okay? And so, uh, that was on the 10th of December. I mean, 10th of September. And so I was gonna go work with them like at a DOD job to help promote that or be in an active reservist. They hadn't worked it out. So then they said on the 10th, they said, don't come down because we're not using it. We'll give you a call the next week and tell you because we don't have your funding appropriated yet. And so then the 11th, uh, my friend calls me and he says, have you watched the TV? And I'd worked all night because I was doing, I was flipping houses, right?

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  And I worked out all night on this one property and I went home and he calls me at eight o'clock in the morning. He says, you seen the TV? And I said, no. He says, get down and watch a TV. So then that's where the towers, he said. So I called the unit and I said, hey, I'm available. What, what's, what's going on? Don't come because the base was, were you in at that time commander?

• 1:41:39Jocko Willink?

  I was, I was actually going to college.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:41:41Jocko Willink?

  The Navy had me in college at that time and I was doing the same thing. I was calling my detailer and saying, hey, sir, I'll quit college right now. I'll finish this stuff later. I don't care. And you know, I had this conversation with him. It was, it was Admiral Pivas and he, I had worked for him before and he was an awesome boss.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  He's a great guy.

• 1:42:00Jocko Willink?

  And when September 11th happened, I called him and said, hey, I'll do anything. You know, send me back to SEAL Team. I don't need my degree. I'll do my degree online, whatever. And what's cool is, you know, I think I'm, you know, being all default aggressive and stuff. But I talked to him a couple of years ago, actually I talked to him and his wife. And guess what? Every guy that wasn't at a team was calling up saying, hey, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. That's, that's the community. It's everyone wanted to get to go fight. That's what we do.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  World War II guys are caught.

• 1:42:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yep. So you call up and you said, and what'd they tell you?

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  They said-

• 1:42:40Jocko Willink?

  Don't come to base?

• 1:42:41Speaker 01

  Don't come to base, it's lockdown, but come because they could activate me on reservist orders. And, cause I knew it was gonna happen because we had some of those same problems in Vietnam air. And so, I'm good at making little things happen. And so, they, I went down there, I think on a Friday, I think nine eleven was on a Tuesday, I just can't remember. And so then I went down there that Friday and then went to Group One and started working some issues that they had. Especially activating reservists.

• 1:43:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cause all of a sudden we need to man up all kinds of positions.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  Lot of positions. And the teams guys, team positions that team guys didn't wanna do. And rightfully so, but it was good to get the reservists back in to that line of fire. So that they could, you know, cause you, you know, you gotta get it on, you know, I mean. It takes a while to get up to speed.

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  So the war kicks off in Afghanistan, at what point did you, did you get on the, on the freaking launchpad to go to Iraq?

• 1:43:48Jocko Willink?

  How old were you at that point?

• 1:43:52Jocko Willink?

  Two thousand and three is when you went?

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  No, uh, I think I went in.

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  Either two thousand and two or two thousand and three, I can't remember. But before the war, just before the war started. So what happened is I'm there working for Group and I would, um, a great guy that I really, really love. Jim, Jimmy Baron, Master Chief Baron, I don't know if you can remember him, sir. Master Chief Baron was working on the DPVs, they actually pulled them out of storage. A DPV is a dune buggy looking thing with a, is it a fifty or a sixty on the top? I can't remember, right?

• 1:44:29Jocko Willink?

  I think it could be either or.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could, you could go either way on that, like being, no, I shouldn't say that. Little joke, but I would, I'll refrain there.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  And so, uh, he pulled those out of storage and he was really good, Rinch Turner. I mean, he was fabulous, he was a guru. And so, I, I asked him, I said, you know, I'm here at Group, can I support you guys? And he says, well, you can't do it during the day, but you can come at night. And so I went there a bit to help them because they were trying to push that stuff out the door before Christmas, right? And so I go down there and I'm turning a wrench in there at like 3 o'clock in the morning saying, "Well, it's about, we have to be back here at 6:00. It's about time we went home," you know, that type of thing.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Baron is a great guy in this whole, I think there was nine guys involved with Baron on those three or four DPVs, maybe it was more. And so I got to work with them because I wanted to go forward, right? So my boss at Group One, I said, they had, as soon as we come on board, they have a thing in the conference room, and they said, "Okay, who wants to go forward? Who wants to go to the war?" Everybody raises their hand. Mm-hmm. And my civilian boss, he looks at me and he says, "Posey." He says, "You're too old, you're too fat, and you're too stupid. You're the last guy we're gonna send. We're gonna send the cleaning lady before we're gonna send you." I said, "No, you're not. You're gonna send me."

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  He says, "No way in hell, okay?" And I said, "Yeah, you're gonna send me." So he was, why was I arguing with my boss, right, to do, have him do me a favor and send me overseas, right? Who would do that? I was stupid. And so... So he was right. Yeah. So he says, "No, we got a lot of work for you to do. We gotta push all these guys out because, you know, the reserves at that time weren't really, we had kind of a looser type of reserve unit and they weren't deployed that often." So some of them had ID cards that weren't current.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  I mean, there was, you know, and their wills were from three wives back in 1972, you know, and you had to bring all of that, a mountain of paperwork that usually took four or five days. And we were trying to facilitate these guys through the system to get them out the door, you know, and to get them, you know, just basic training, because we didn't do a lot of chemical training, basic chemical training and all that kind of thing. So I was doing that and I was working DPVs at night and finally Master Chief Barron leaves the 20, I think it was the 26th of December. And, uh, and so I said, man, I was really hoping I could go with those guys.

• 1:47:26Speaker 01

  So anyhow, they have like a couple of weeks later, they said, we need somebody to go over uh, to um, there to help service vehicles, Humvees, because we never had a lot of Humvees. We never had a lot of vehicles in CLT, especially there was no up armor, no armor. And they were putting these Humvees out of, out of the surplus storage from the Army. I mean, they were just thrashed, right? So I said, you know, I'm really good mechanic. I didn't never, I never opened a hood of a Humvee, right? Didn't have a clue. I said, I'm really a good mechanic and I think you should send me. They look at me, I was 56 years old, right?

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  So eventually because they couldn't find anybody better than me, which was the first rung of the ladder, I mean, they said, okay, you're, you're going, you're going, you're going over and you're going to work on these Humvees, da, da, da, da, da. I said, well, what are we going to do about tools? And they said, well, Barron has all the tools and he has all the stuff. But everybody knows in any given wartime situation that you don't, whatever you need the most, you never get. I mean, if you need that special gun or whatever it is, it never shows up, right? So I go to Harbor Freight and I buy this gigantic box of tools because I know that those, you know, those assets aren't going to be there.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  And so I took my box of tools and they, they hadn't got their tools, all their tools and they're coming over to borrow. They had all snap-on stuff, you know, with a snap-on shirt and, you know, the $10,000 box, just the box alone was $10,000. I got my Harbor Freight 298 crescent wrench, right? And so, Posey, can we, we really need a, a number 11 metric end wrench you got? Of course I got it.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  So they send me over and they had these uh these uh Hilux Toyotas that they were gonna use on the initial invasion and they put winches and all kinds of different stuff on them but the Hilux shows up but all the other stuff's not put on so that was my I think the first couple of weeks that I was putting on all this stuff to the Hiluxes to get them out and then uh we had a lot of servicing of Humvees and all that and a lot of reorg stuff and so then they were looking for people to go forward who's gonna go in this position? Me? God, come on, come on, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Jeez Louise.

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  And so uh so I'm stuck back at the base and I'm doing different stuff that I really don't like to do and I'm listening you know to see when a chance of me going forward what's what's the need what kind of talent that I have because I think most of us Marine Corps in different facets of society we have a place in society like I'm not a leader at all I'm a follower but I'm a real good follower the command you know commander's intent I wanna hear the commander's intent then I wanna explore with the commander what that intent is I wanna know what it really means because sometimes the words don't convey

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  what that person really thinks I wanna know how I can support that person any way possible you know what's his real meaning what's those words coming out of his mouth how can I help? If I can make my sailors have whatever they need and they're happy and then secondary that if I can make my boss look good and then the Navy look good then it's cool right? Yeah. It's cool. I mean everybody's cool. Because that's, they want you around. Then if you get, they say, "Well, who did this?" And they say, "Posey did it." And so, it was a good thing, right? I mean, you know, you did this right, or whatever. And I say, "No, no, no.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't me. It was my two subordinates, Smucatelli and Giradelli here." So I always try to defer that, or push it back to my boss, because that's what makes you valuable. And if you need a favor sometime, those people will come forward. And I learned that in Vietnam. When we would go to these different places,

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  they would leave like, flags and pictures of different things, and china and pottery. Then we were able to take those assets to the guys that were on the Navy bases. And if we needed, you know, cases of sea rats at the time, or, "Would you guys mind, you're unloading all this beer out of the ship, and would you guys mind pushing a pallet of this beer off the dock and let it fall into the water? And then we'll retrieve it, and I'll trade you this Viet Cong flag with genuine Vietnam blood." They didn't know it was pig's blood. With a couple bullet holes that we shot in a parking lot.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  We would really appreciate that, you know? So we could barter our way in Vietnam, because we had no money, we had no assets. We could barter our way into different things. And then I knew, because so many people hadn't been to the war since Vietnam, well, they did, of course, they did the 96-hour war, and they did other little wars, but they didn't have a supply trade. I knew that I could be valuable there, securing assets for my team. We only had 44 guys originally in Baghdad.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  So before I went, I went on the internet and I buy out, I should have bought 12. I bought six Iraqi flags and I took them with me and then I took $550 of cash as small bills and another $500 in large bills because I knew that as soon as we won that the currency would be no longer valid and that you could buy that currency at a bargain rate and be able to do something with that currency, right? And so when the war started, I mean, when the war ended, as far as George Bush calling it off, nobody knew what to do with the currency.

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  So before it was like a 16 to 1 ratio with Iraqi currency for the American dollar and then by the time Bush called the war off, it was in limbo and you could do 1,000 to 1. You could literally buy, I turned my $550 into Iraqi dinar and I could buy a box of money, a box of money, okay? And so, but there was nothing to buy. There's nothing to buy. The sanctions really worked in Iraq. There was nothing to buy. And so I had all this money and I had the, I brought the flags and I was trading because

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  we don't have in SEAL team when I got to Iraq, we don't have a logistics tail, right? At that time. Now we have a logistics tail. They got so much smarter. But we didn't, I was the logistics tail. And as soon as we get, we went.

• 1:54:42Jocko Willink?

  Real quick, so you were in Kuwait?

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54:46Jocko Willink?

  When you were preparing to go?

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54:48Jocko Willink?

  They're saying, hey, we need someone to, so the troops push up into Baghdad. You're still in Kuwait. Finally they go, look, we need someone to help us up there. We got vehicles to maintain. We gotta build a base. They're looking around, they keep looking past you and finally they freaking got no choice but to send the old man up there to go get some.

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  I'm the last fish in the barrel, right?

• 1:55:07Jocko Willink?

  So what do you do? Did you jump on a helo and fly up to Baghdad International Airport? Or did you drive up?

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  No, no, no. So they tell me, they tell me, I was at the team area in Kuwait. Now as a team, you could hitchhike real easy though and it was really quick. I love hitchhiking because you meet a lot of interesting people. But anyhow, I have my own vehicle because I'm the, like the...

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  The go-to guy to get things done for whatever, you know, little things, you know, somebody's got this or they need that or whatever. So, they tell me at five minutes after one, in Kuwait, they said, "You have to be at, uh, help me with the name of the airbase."

• 1:55:45Jocko Willink?

  Biop.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  Al Asad. Al Asad. Uh, "You have to be at the Al Asad, uh, by two o'clock, and you're getting on an airplane, and you're going to Baghdad, and they're going to drop you off there at Baghdad, you and Baron." I said, "Dude, it's five minutes after one, and it's like seventy miles. How, in Iraq, I mean, in Kuwait, how the hell am I gonna..." He says, "You gotta be there. Get in your car and go, shut up." So, I get in my car, and I got this rental car, and I'm going literally a hundred miles an hour down the Iraqi, I mean, the Kuwait freeway. Luckily, they didn't stop me. And I get there at ten minutes, no, it's twelve minutes to two, and I tell Baron, "Baron,

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  get your stuff, and we're going to Iraq." He said, "Posey, what have you got me into?" I said, "I got things going here, I can't..." I said, "This is..." I showed him the orders. I had a set of orders for him. He said, "Oh, my God, you dumbass." And so, we, we throw all the stu... I get my toolbox and throw it in there, and, I mean, we're just jamming stuff in this rental vehicle, and we get there. We get to the C-130 at one minute to two, okay? One minute to two. And the guy's looking at me, the crew chief's looking at me, he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "We got orders, here's our orders." He said, "Yeah, you got orders, we know who you are."

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  I said, "What's going on, let's go." He says, "Zero two hundred." Zero two hundred.

• 1:57:20Jocko Willink?

  Too much time in the civilian world for you, huh?

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  No, but they told me two o'clock. No, they said, "You got..." I mean, "Oh, my God." So, we go back, and we pack our stuff, and we actually put underwear in our, in our C-bag and the whole thing, right? And so, we're there, and so, we thought we're gonna go to Biop, right? To Baghdad International, Saddam Hussein International Airport, right?

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  And so, these guys get us in there and they go on the red light in the aircraft. They said, "Well, what's going on? Where are we going?" He said, "Well, we're going to a road about forty miles outside of Baghdad to meet your guys." I said, "Really?" And they have this pallet of stuff in the aircraft. And I said, "Okay, sounds good. We're going in, no lights, no nothing. We're gonna be on this highway outside of Baghdad, right?" Me and Jimmy Barron, "Posey, I'm gonna kick your ass."

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  Because the guy's been to, you know, a ton of stuff. He's, it's like talking to Michael Jordan. That's Master Chief Barron, right? I mean, he's the man, right? The man. And dumbass Warnoffs or Posey is telling him what to do. So, so we get there and he says, "Okay, we're going down, we're going to go into this highway, we're gonna turn around and we're gonna do a five and five on you." And I said, "Really?" I said, "You got this, you know..." I said, "Okay, well, you're gonna ride the pallet out, right?" I said, "Okay, good." So we jump on this pallet. Well, it wasn't a five and five. They were actually on the deck, right? And they let us out of this aircraft and we're going about twenty miles an hour,

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  but we just rode the pallet out and our guys, and we have all this ammunition and all this stuff that they needed. And so, uh, uh, we immediately head over to this hedge and just sit there for about a half hour. And our guys eventually, uh, they knew we were there, but they were afraid that some, you know, the Iraqis were gonna get on us. And so, then we go, the next day, we go in on these six-bys, uh, to Baghdad. And we go along the road and people are clapping. "We love George Bush! We love George Bush!"

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  Really? They loved George Bush. I mean, all along the highway. They're telling us that. I said, "My God." I should have took a picture of that because they didn't love us after a couple of weeks, right? So, we go to buy up. There's nobody there. So, we go to Al-Lindi Palace. No, the first, no, I'm sorry. We go to the CIA headquarters, the Iraqi CIA headquarters. And we're mustering there for a day or two. So, we get in there and what they did is they used a J dam and they collapsed the six-story Iraqi CIA headquarters down. They pancaked it down to two, two sections of the building that survived.

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  And so, there was cordite and concrete dust everywhere. It was very hard to breathe. And so, we go in there and I said, "You know, we ought to go, we ought to go to these offices. The top offices should be a head dude in the Iraqi CIA, right? The head guy has the top office. We ought to go see what we can see." So, we make our way through all this construction stuff, destruction stuff. And we go to the top office and it's Uday's office, right? And so, I open the desk drawer of Uday's office and he's got these chrome sunglasses that like Elvis wore, right?

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  I said, "And the guy I was with, the chief that I was with, he grabs his glasses and then he had on his desk a picture of him in these glasses." And so, he grabs that and he says, "Okay, which one do you want?" I said, "I'll take the glasses." And he says, "Okay." So, he takes the picture and I take the glasses. So, I got Uday's glasses. So, we stay there a couple of days. And then, I go out that morning that we're supposed to leave because I wanted to make sure the vehicle was serviced and ready to go. Because we had gasoline, we had ammunition, we had mortars, we had all kinds of stuff on this six-by truck, and I think we had three or four vehicles.

• 2:01:45Speaker 01

  So I'm up in the cab of this truck, making sure everything's up, and I have my bayonet that I had in Vietnam, and I'm sitting in the seat like this, and my bayonet gets stuck in this MTVR truck there, and then they start shooting at me. You know, and it's just, I mean, it's five o'clock in the morning, the sun just come up, and they're shooting at me, right? I say, "Man, I gotta get out of this truck, because it could go, you know, if they hit the gasoline, God knows what's going on." So I'm trying to get out of this truck, and I'm trying to push this stupid bayonet over to the side, and I'm pulling, I'm pulling, and I go out the side of the truck, and I didn't see this covert right here, and I go, I do the big crash, I got my weapon across

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  my chest and my battle rattle, and man, it's killing me, it's killing me. And so, I get out of there, and I walk back to there, and you know, whatever, and we go, then we go to Al Burundi Palace, and we said, "Well, the army's gonna come in here to buy up, and they're gonna run things, because they're the 800-pound gorilla, right? They're always the 800-pound gorilla, no matter where we go. We shouldn't, the commander's making this decision, we should go find another place, because we don't want to get kicked out once we start improving it." So we go down to the servants' quarters, and they have some nice little buildings there, but they burn off, out some of the buildings, and they stole all the air conditioning, and

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  the wiring, and the walls, and everything. And so, we go in there, and that's, that's our, that's our Camp Jenny Posey, right? It wasn't Jenny Posey at the time. And so, we go there, it's Neptune, Trident, you know, every SEAL team name it, known to man. So we start improving that camp, because we know we're gonna have a lot of people laid on in that camp, you know, just not the 18 that we originally started with. So, we go to this camp and we start improving it and I don't know if you know Ranger, I don't want to say his last name.

• 2:03:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll call him Ranger, right? And this guy's a master. I mean, so, we're in Biop and we're the only, the only people in Biop and there's some little, you know, skirmishes and stuff out of town, but there's not a whole lot going in. So, we're going to Biop and we're going to the Army and it's like being with a rock star. People are saying, I mean, he's driving this Humvee, right? John, John, we haven't seen you since Grenada. John, we haven't seen you since Panama. How you doing? I mean, the guy's a rock star there in the Army, right? I said, man, I'm happy that I know this guy. And so, we do that, then people start coming in and we had a real good op tempo to begin with.

• 2:04:29Speaker 01

  SEAL team was really kicking ass, okay? We had great commanders, great platoon chiefs. I mean, everybody, I mean, because we thought the war might be a 96-hour war, like it was the first Gulf War, so we want to get as much experience as possible, right? Little did we know, we'd be there 22 years later, 21 years later. So, so, we're there improving the camp and this and then, we're there one day and we have a morning meeting at 8 o'clock with everybody in the camp. And John comes in and he says, he's swearing, and he never swore, he never swore, and he

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  swore, he says, "I'm so sick of this," tells the commander right there, "I'm so sick of this, we're changing the name of this camp." Nobody knows where this camp, we changed the name of this camp 15 times since we had been there, the Army doesn't know where, they changed the name, you know, "We're naming this camp Camp Bill Posey." And I look at him, I said, "Are you out of your mind? Are you out of your mind? Only dead people, or very courageous people, have a SEAL, a SEAL Team camp named after him. Are you crazy?" He says, "No, we're doing that, we're announcing it at the mayor, the meeting tonight." I said, "John, don't, don't do that, just, just let me have time to think about it."

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  So as soon as the Army came in, they cut us off, our op tempo. We had no operations going because they were afraid of us, right? They wanted to homogenize everything and make everything happen the way they want it to happen. And rightfully so, because they're gonna swing, it probably won't be us, right? So I go to the morning meeting, the mayor's meeting, and I said, "Hey, I got some great news. We're going to rename our camp after an Army person because SEAL Team has the greatest respect ever for the Army, and we love what you guys are doing here at BiOP, and we think we want to honor you." And people say, "Posey, what are you talking about?

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  Sit down, you dumbass." I said, "No, no, we want to do this." And they said, "Okay, no problem." So I go back to my guys and I say, "Okay, let's name the camp, I had to name it after an Army person, right? And it was either Audie Murphy, or my daughter, who was a JROTC cadet at UCLA, UCLA?" Uh, yeah, so, "We're gonna name the camp either Audie Murphy, or my daughter, who's a ROTC cadet, I think." So he said, "Okay, we're gonna name it after your daughter." So we named the camp Camp Jenny Posey, right? So, that was very, and I can't believe, I mean, John coming in there and saying that,

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  and people going along with it, why would he do that? I just, I never figured that out, but it worked and, and it was really nice of him and nice of the command to allow that to happen. Because I did not deserve it, I'm not Mike Monsour, or any of those other very courageous dudes, and I wasn't dead yet. So I thought that might be some bad juju, you know what I'm saying?

• 2:07:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was it was awesome. I ended up spending six months at Jenny Posey in 2003, 2004. And what was cool was, and there's a classic picture of this, and I'll find it and get it posted somewhere. But the, you know, we'd go out, do our operations, and we'd go out for however many hours or days we'd be out for. And when you get back to camp, there was a big sign on the camp door. And it was it was a pretty good selection for the space because we could we could shut this big giant gate. And it would just be no, there'd be no one on there but us. But you guys made this big giant sign that said, "Welcome home to Camp Jenny Posey." And it was just an awesome sight. When you'd come back, no matter what happened out there,

• 2:08:33Jocko Willink?

  you'd come back, you'd see that big sign and be like, "All right, we're good to go." So that was, that was, that was the way it should be. And it's a pretty freaking legendary situation to have.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  It was different.

• 2:08:46Jocko Willink?

  So how long did you end up staying there in Iraq? Because you ended up, did you end up getting hurt? Something happened to you?

• 2:08:53Speaker 01

  Well, when I jumped out of the truck, I didn't know it at the time, but I broke my back. But, you know, I went to the army that day when we pulled into Biop. And I said, "Man, you guys got to give me something because my back is killing me." And the guy says, "Okay, let me examine you." And so he says, "You don't have a medical record." So I got an MRE box and put "medical record, Bill Posey. Here it is. Here's my medical record," right? And he says, "Well, I'm going to send you back to Germany." And I said, "No, you're not. You're not." He says, "Yeah, you got your medical record here, and I'm going to send you back." I took that medical record and I walked out of there. And he was lucky. I got some pills, some pain pills before that. So that knocked it down.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  It wasn't, you know, it wasn't terribly debilitating. So it worked out. So.

• 2:09:45Jocko Willink?

  Did you roll out on any ops with the boys?

• 2:09:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I got to do 30, I think. But you know, being 56 years old, of course, you know, well, grandpa's here and he's gonna, you know, he doesn't have all of his teeth, but you know, but you know, it's always in the C2 unit, you know, the backup. So if something happened, at least we could get the squirters, you know, and all that and at least take care of them. Or if we had to, you know, go help those guys in a QRF situation, we were always available, you know? So that was good, you know? I really enjoyed that. I really appreciate them allowing me to do that. I don't know if I'd have been an asset or a deficit, you know? So.

• 2:10:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, I could tell you the, you know, the having the vehicles out there, you never know when something's gonna go wrong with a vehicle.

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:10:34Jocko Willink?

  And to not have a good mechanic there to ready to get those things up and running. And like you said, those, those Humvees that we had, because we got those Humvees turned over up, us, we showed up a couple of months after you left, same, those things were beat down, hand me downs, you know, scavenged.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  Marine Corps hand me dance. I believe they came out of the.

• 2:10:54Jocko Willink?

  Some of them were Marine Corps, some of them were, we got some from some CB somewhere. We got some somewhere reservist somewhere, canvas doors. I mean, they were a total disaster, but you guys got them up and running and we kept, you know, we kept working on them. And we know what was awesome was it didn't take very long. Like you said, the SEAL teams, not only did we not have vehicles, but prior to this, we didn't have any vehicle procedures either. We didn't, we didn't know anything. We just, we would, we actually thought that vehicles, it was kind of a joke in the SEAL teams. If you got inserted by a vehicle, we'd call it a helo truck.

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:11:28Jocko Willink?

  Meaning, hey, we're just pretending this is a helicopter, but we don't really have one. We didn't realize like, this is gonna be our primary mode of transportation is gonna be the Humvee, not even the DPVs or any of these high speed vehicles for a solid three years there in the middle. It was a Humvee and that was it. That's what you were getting.

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  And not up armored.

• 2:11:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Not up armored.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  At least not in the beginning.

• 2:11:47Jocko Willink?

  No, not in the beginning. And we ended up doing Mad Max kind of things. We'd end up with finding the bulletproof steel. Eventually we'd put that on various parts of the Humvee to try and protect you as much as you could. Yeah, the first few months we were there, we, we had turned the seats in the Humvees to face outboard so that our, our, our body armor would be faced outward and we could sit there and scan. But, I mean, it was because we took the canvas door, what the good canvas gonna do, not gonna do you any good at all. So we, we did what we could, but we, but what was really impressive, not only do we get the vehicles up to speed, and then we were doing all like the NASCAR drills of figuring out how to change tires really quick and rigging for tow,

• 2:12:26Jocko Willink?

  all those things. We rigged all that stuff up, all the navigation systems, which we got from this, the civilian sector of, of, you know, just taking a GPS and coupling it with a, with a portable computer. And so we have the live feed GPS going in there. It's all stuff that we just figured out. And then all the actual immediate action drills, we did all that within a very short period of time. Because, and it's one of the, one of the strong points of the SEAL teams and one of the weak points of the SEAL teams. One of the weak points of the SEAL teams is we didn't really have any standard operating procedures for a lot of things. There's no manual. Like in the army, you can pick up a manual and it will show you how to conduct a raid. You can pick up a manual, can show you how to conduct a reconnaissance.

• 2:13:07Jocko Willink?

  It can show you how to conduct an immediate action drill in the city, in the urban environment, in the rural environment. You can pick up a manual to find all those things. And in the SEAL teams, we didn't have that. It was all passed down word of mouth over years. And so you couldn't just pick up a manual and say, oh, refer to the manual on this. That's a disadvantage because it's nice to have somewhere to start from. But it's an advantage because our minds are very flexible and very good at problem solving. And that turns out to be advantageous when you get tasked with a mission that there is no manual for. And that's what we're able to do with working out of vehicles. And we ended up being extremely proficient in vehicle operations very shortly after we started doing them for the first time.

• 2:13:50Jocko Willink?

  Pretty, that's one of the best things about the SEAL teams, open minds and flexibility.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  You know, and I, from my perspective, it's more than that. That the guys that go into SEAL team and it's, it's got its good points and its bad points, just like you said, Commander. But they're a different breed of people. And I, I really believe that, that they can make things happen. I mean, guys just come out of the blue and say, yeah, we're going to do this and we have this process. And it's a legitimate process and it works. I mean, what a gift from God, you know? It's a gift from God, the way a lot of SEAL teams socially, they're weird, but you put them in the battle situation. Am I not right?

• 2:14:37Jocko Willink?

  You're right.

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  Socially, they're as weird as the day is long.

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, he's coming. I'll give an example of that. We had a Medal of Honor winner, well, before he was Medal of Honor, the team bar was the Trade Wins. And he'd go to the Trade Wins at 4:30, getting off work, and you'd see, you'd walk in the door, and they had this screen in front of the door. You'd walk in the door, see this one guy sitting at the bar, you would immediately go down, around the screen, go out, because you knew there was gonna be a fight in like 15 minutes, right? And the guy turned out to be a Medal of Honor winner. But I mean, that's the beauty of the teams, that we allow people like that to go in and prosper and contribute to the, to the effort. I mean, that's the beauty. What a wonderful thing. A gift from God.

• 2:15:26Jocko Willink?

  So you, when you got back home from that deployment, what came next?

• 2:15:33Speaker 01

  Well, can I just go a little bit?

• 2:15:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  I'm gonna talk about the charity, if you wouldn't mind.

• 2:15:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, that's right. The charity you ran in Baghdad.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  I wanna talk about that. So, I always like to support the chaplains, because they did a lot of good things for a lot of peoples, right? And so I would go talk to the chaplain, he happened to be a Catholic chaplain, and I said, "Father, what, what can we, what can we do for you? How can we help you?" He said, "Man, we got this, we got this orphanage, this Christian orphanage, run by German nuns, they had three German nuns, in Baghdad, and they're constantly being harangued by the locals, especially since the war started. And we could use a little help on that." And I said, "Well, what do you need?" And he says, "Well, they really need money." And I said, "Really? They need money?" And so,

• 2:16:22Speaker 01

  I went to, I went to the morning mayor's meeting. We had a morning mayor's meeting at 10 o'clock, and it was every unit on Biop sent a representative, and we would all help each other. The most help they ever gave me is, when the Grom needed gasoline, because everything else didn't need gasoline, I got gasoline for the Grom. I was able to trade to the Grom. And then, I needed a pair of quadruple E, size nine boots. Now, who, in God's name, takes a brand-new pair of triple or quadruple E, size nine boots? Some guy

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  defoliated his boot, right? And I was able to do that, to get that, but I was really happy about that. But that cost me some big... Big things to do that. So, I say, okay, I go to the mayor's morning meeting and I said, "Okay, after the meeting, anybody can talk," right after the mayor. I said, "Okay, there's forty-four SEALs here in Biop and we want to challenge the Army in a contest." Everybody's looking at me. "Posey, sit down, you dumbass. Okay, you're stupid." I said, "Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna kick your ass, okay?" I said, "We're raising money

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

  for this Catholic charity downtown Biop and we will, us forty-four guys," I think there was twelve thousand guys at the base there, "is gonna out-raise the United States Army, few Marine guys, okay? We're gonna, we're gonna out-raise you because these people need money." And they said, "You dumbass." And I said, "We're gonna call it," and I don't, I'm gonna just say the guy's first name, "John T.," and I wanna say his last name, "and I had this jar in my hand, this big cookie jar like this, clear cookie jar, and I had his picture on the front of it with this big lettering, "The John T. Blank Orphans Fund."

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  And so, and I had a hole in it where they could stick money, right? So, people after the meeting says, "You know, my father was in the Navy. Don't let anybody see me put money in this jar, but I'm gonna put money in this jar and we're gonna get more money for you." And I said, "Fine." So, I go back and I tell our guys, I said, "We're in this, we're doing this charity thing and we named it after our Army Ranger, John T., and he comes up and he says, "Posey, are you out of your mind?" He says, "I don't, I don't help orphans. I make orphans." I said, "You just, you just relax, big boy. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take care of this, right?"

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  So, we did this for, I think, forty-five days and I would taunt them. Every morning, mayor's morning meeting, I would taunt them. "Oh, SEAL team now has ten thousand Iraqi Dinar. What are you guys doing? You know, where's the Army at?" And the Army rep, "Well, we got three hundred." And so, I would taunt them every morning and the people just, I mean... They would, I would drive my Humvee down Biop and they'd wave at me and come and give me a handful of money, American dollars but mainly Iraqi dinar.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  And so finally, we ended up with six boxes of money, six medium, or small boxes of money. And then we went to the nunnery and delivered this money. So we were afraid that by doing that, that we would draw the attention of the Iraqis, that they would come and raid these poor nuns and kill them and do whatever for this money. Because it was, I mean, I don't know how much money we had, but we had a ton of money. And so, the commander there, SEAL team says, "Okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do a raid on this nunnery and we're gonna be very ugly to them when we go in and we go out, so that we can protect them.

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  You know, we're gonna act like we're gonna hook them and the kids up." And so, we did that. And so, I go knock on the door and I talked to this kid and I said, "I wanna deliver something to the nuns." And so, he let me in and I go talk to them and I said, "Sister, we have this..." She barely spoke English. "We have money for you, where would you like it?" And she says, "Oh, you can just put it on this little card table they had right there." So, I mentioned to my guys in the Humvee to come in and we were doing TOT because we were really worried about spending too much time there, that it was a social call and not, you know, some kind of a bad call. And so, my guys come in and they're banging on the door with their gun butts and just

• 2:21:11Speaker 01

  being ugly when they go, "We're gonna get you what you did." You know, and they were really good. And he's break these six boxes of money. And I said, "At that time, it was very difficult to find cardboard boxes at Biop. It was impossible." And I wanted my boxes back. And I said, "Where do you want?" She says, "Right there." So, we start dumping these boxes of money out and it was a stack about two feet tall and it's going all over the floor. She looks at me and said, "Who are you guys?" I said, "Well, I don't know. We're the Army, right?"

• 2:21:44Speaker 01

  So I said, we have, we're doing this. She said, well, why don't you sit down and have lunch with us? We're gonna have lunch and we have Pepsi-Cola. And I said, sister, we're gonna be out of here in 30 seconds. We just have to make this look ugly because we don't want them to come and give you a bad time and steal this money from you. She says, we understand. So we're banging our way out, you know, they're pointing the guns at the nunnery and this whole thing. And so we just exfilled. And so that I heard later on that that was really good for them because they were really having a hard time financially, you know, of feeding, I think they had 60 kids there. So it was really good. And it was really good because the army really supported us.

• 2:22:29Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  That's where the bulk of the money came from, obviously. And it was really wonderful that they did that. So more power to them, huh?

• 2:22:37Jocko Willink?

  And it's also wonderful that the press didn't pick up any pictures of a young SEAL holding his weapon aimed at some nun. I'm surprised that didn't happen. We don't do too great with the press.

• 2:22:47Speaker 01

  No, I made her stay in the house and the kid walked me out.

• 2:22:50Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:22:51Speaker 01

  We were trying to be very cognizant of that, you know, but we didn't want to leave a trail that they would have problems after that.

• 2:22:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for sure. If it looked like they were helping coalition forces, that's a death sentence.

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  Right, right. So

• 2:23:03Jocko Willink?

  Good tactic.

• 2:23:04Speaker 01

  That worked out. So.

• 2:23:05Jocko Willink?

  So eventually you though, you end up in as you did 30 combat operations, you saved a bunch of orphans. I mean, this is just Bill Posey on the rampage. You've supplied the whole SEAL teams with everything they needed, repaired a thousand Humvees. But, but you got to a point where you were too banged up and, and you-

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  No, my funding ran out. So I was on reserve funding on non-active duty. My funding, I was on active duty, but the funding from the reserves was paying me. And so then they told me to come back out. And so-

• 2:23:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I thought you got injured. You came home because you were hurt.

• 2:23:43Speaker 01

  No, but I was hurt, but it didn't bother me. I mean, at the bottom, I don't know, for whatever reason, the bottoms of my feet were killing me. But that, you know, what can you do? You know?

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  You gotta do what you gotta do.

• 2:23:55Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:23:56Speaker 01

  So, you know, that was really a good thing. And then they sent me.

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  This is really funny. Well, maybe it's not funny. The, I come back and I, this Admiral calls me and he says, Posey, no, it wasn't, it was an Army, I mean, a Navy captain. Your fundings ran out. You have to go home. And I said, what do you mean, I have to go home? I'm, I'm hurt. I gotta get fixed. You gotta fix me. He says, no, no, I'm giving you a direct order. You have to, you have to disengage yourself. And so.

• 2:24:34Jocko Willink?

  Was this, was this when you got back to the States?

• 2:24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, just got back to the States.

• 2:24:38Jocko Willink?

  You got back to the States, you're dinged up. Now you're dinged up and you're like, hey, I need to get some medical treatment before I.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  So I look like Chester, right? I'm, I'm going, giving one of these, right? And I said, you guys gotta fix me. And so he says, no, I'm giving you a direct order. You have to report into the X-Phil tomorrow and get out. I said, okay. So I go, of course, a warrant officer, I mean, not that we're brilliant, but we know how the Navy works. We know how the whole thing works. And there's chapter and verse on any given situation. So I go to the instruction, you know, 100331, and I look at it and I pull the instruction out

• 2:25:24Speaker 01

  and I, uh, talked to the, the captain the next day. And I said, Captain, do you know about uh, instruction 10031? And he says, no, I don't, but I don't care what it is. You will report tonight, this afternoon at 12. I said, no, I won't. I'm not being disrespectful, sir. I talked to my command. Uh, they stand behind me and that you guys have to fix me and you can't send me home. And he says, well, well, we'll see about that. So I immediately, I left there and I went to talk to my congressman, who I knew because I was doing things. And I said, you know, I'm not being disrespectful. I love the Navy. I'm not disrespectful. I'm not that kind of guy. I'm not a, you know, C board lawyer.

• 2:26:10Speaker 01

  But you have to fix me. And I was at the clinic every day and I knew all these kids that they were mustering out. I mean, an E3. Marine Corps guy mustering out, they're sending him home and he can't even walk. I mean, he can't do anything, right? And they sent, I think, sixty of those people home. And so, I go to my congressman, I said, "Sir, you gotta help me. I mean, this is not right, what they're doing to all these kids. I can get along, I can make it happen, right? Cause I can go to the VA or whatever. But it's not right what you're doing to these kids." So he calls the admiral and they straightened it out. So I'm in six months of rehab and I went to the clinic there that we have at SEAL Team and they really helped me.

• 2:26:53Speaker 01

  So I was really happy about what was going on there and, you know, then my time was up and I went home. So it was good.

• 2:27:01Jocko Willink?

  What'd you do when you went home?

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  Um, I started flipping houses again. So, I'm good at carpentry and that kinda stuff and flipping houses. And then, I moved to Texas and I worked for the, uh, was working in an oil field for a while as a service component of the oil field. And then I got the job, uh, teaching school.

• 2:27:30Jocko Willink?

  How'd you end up in the job teaching school? What made you decide to do that?

• 2:27:33Speaker 01

  Uh, because I couldn't do the oil field job. My back, I didn't know my back was broken, right? I didn't know, I was just having all these back problems and feet problems. And I thought it was just old age. Course, we all get old, right? I mean, you, you guys are even feeling it at twenty-five? Yeah, twenty-six. Twenty-six, okay. But, you know, and so, I had to quit that oil field job and, uh, and I found this teaching job through this, part of our church has this high school. And so, the guy calls me in and he says, "You know, you never taught before and you only have a college degree, but you don't have a teacher credential, you know, but, uh, you know, maybe we can help you."

• 2:28:17Speaker 01

  So they hired me, I was lucky enough that they hired me. And so, that was really, for the last eight years, been a really good gig for me. My, my objective there is to have those kids not make the same mistakes that I've made. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. You know, and I, I did a lot of stupid things, so...

• 2:28:38Jocko Willink?

  What subject do you teach?

• 2:28:39Speaker 01

  Uh, history, government, economics, and art. And Bible.

• 2:28:45Jocko Willink?

  It's a wide range.

• 2:28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's a, it's a, you know, it's a, a small school, so you do everything. You know, we only have like a hundred and seventy-five kids enrolled in the high school.

• 2:28:56Jocko Willink?

  Are you seeing, are you getting feedback from kids that graduated four years ago, six years ago, eight years ago, that, that you had an impact on?

• 2:29:03Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, um, yeah, I, I think so. I mean, they tell me, you know, we really loved your class, whatever. Because I tell, you know, the problem, at least my perception, I'm, I'm probably speaking out of turn, but the problem is, they treat the kids like kids. You know, how many in World War II, even in Vietnam, you had these guys that were sixteen and seventeen years old, you know, going to the war, I mean, in World War II, full jihad, going on to the war, right? Going to the war, you know, against the German superpower, and we say these kids are kids when they're eighteen years old. They're not kids, they're adults. Don't baby them.

• 2:29:47Speaker 01

  So I try not to baby, you know, I just give it to them straight. You know, this is, this is what's really happening. You know, think, you know? My objective, read, write, be able to present yourself, uh, think and then act. I mean, if you can think, you're dangerous, right? You're dangerous, you're full-on dangerous. Because I, I don't think a lot of the schools now want you to think. It's not a good thing.

• 2:30:18Jocko Willink?

  And then what, you also, apparently now you're, you have your own radio show?

• 2:30:22Speaker 01

  I do.

• 2:30:23Jocko Willink?

  So what's that all about? How can we listen to that?

• 2:30:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't think you want to, Commander. Uh, I, I just have this little, we do, we talk politics every morning from six-thirty to seven on ninety-five point nine, Tahoe Radio, Victoria, Texas, and, uh, we talk about things that are going on, and especially things that are going on in the Republican Party, and, uh, how we can, you know, fight back from what we think has not been well for us in the, in the past here, especially the past couple of years.

• 2:30:57Jocko Willink?

  And how old are you right now?

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be seventy-five in six months.

• 2:31:01Jocko Willink?

  Is there any part of your brain that thinks maybe you're gonna, you know, retire and sit on the front porch and drink coffee in the morning and watch the grass grow?

• 2:31:10Speaker 01

  You know, the problem is, I really hate old people. I hate old people. And I don't want to be associated with them. I don't want to talk to them. I don't want to do anything with old people. So I really find it, you know, when you're a kid and you have every possibility in the world out there. Every possibility that you can do anything you want, right? You can do whatever you want. What a wonderful time in life, right? Instead of some seventy, oh, my back, my side, oh, I mean, they all want to talk about their operations. I don't give a rat's ass about their operations, right? I don't care.

• 2:31:47Speaker 01

  So I like dealing with interfacing with the kids and, you know, trying to give it, you know, I don't think it's a not indoctrination, well, maybe it is indoctrination, but I'm really big on the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, of the things that your grandfather, my father, your great grandfather did for America. I mean, let's honor those people. I mean, especially like Memorial Day today, let's honor those folks and thank them for all the wonderful things and allowing us to have the wonderful things that we have in this nation, you know? So that's my objective, you know, teaching school.

• 2:32:26Speaker 01

  I am slowing down. COVID was really mentally hard on me. And so I hope I don't lose my mind here in the next three years because I hope to teach for the next three years.

• 2:32:40Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'll tell you what, that's a freaking about as good of a closing as we could ever hope for here. Echo, you got anything? Usually if you haven't listened, well, you've listened to the podcast, so Echo, you know, speaking, you were talking about some weird social things. Sometimes Echo throws out some weird social questions right now. We don't know what's coming.

• 2:32:57Speaker 02

  Actually, more for clarity than anything, back to Apollo 12, what was your job there? Like, what was your?

• 2:33:03Speaker 01

  I was the first man out the door, so I would hook the slowdown parachute to the side. And then we would put the capsule, the collar around the capsule. Then our decontamination, because we thought there was moon bugs. The decontamination rafts would be inflated, put it on the side. We'd, the decontamination man would open the door and

• 2:33:27Speaker 01

  Put the astronauts in the rafts and then they'd go up in the helicopter.

• 2:33:32Jocko Willink?

  Just to go a little bit further, I think Echo, I gotta take it back one step. So you remember, you've seen the capsule splashing down into the ocean.

• 2:33:40Speaker 01

  The capsule from the

• 2:33:41Jocko Willink?

  From the rocket. Rocket, yeah. Like it goes to the moon or whatever. It goes up into space and then to get back, it just splashes down in the middle of the ocean.

• 2:33:49Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 2:33:50Jocko Willink?

  So somebody's gotta go recover that capsule and get those astronauts out.

• 2:33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:54Jocko Willink?

  That's someone, UDT. That's someone, Bill Posey, coming in hot. First guy out the door of the helicopter.

• 2:34:01Speaker 01

  Of the helicopter.

• 2:34:01Jocko Willink?

  Of the helicopter. So the helicopter, and actually if you go to the USS Midway, they have one of those helicopters.

• 2:34:07Speaker 01

  The helicopter.

• 2:34:08Jocko Willink?

  That's the helicopter.

• 2:34:09Speaker 01

  Sixty-six.

• 2:34:09Jocko Willink?

  Wait, that's your helicopter that you were on?

• 2:34:11Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:34:12Jocko Willink?

  For the twelve?

• 2:34:12Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:34:12Jocko Willink?

  And they've got a little Freddie the Frog on there, ready to get some.

• 2:34:16Speaker 01

  Compliments of Pete Carroll and he painted that on.

• 2:34:20Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go.

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:22Jocko Willink?

  Does that make sense now?

• 2:34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started to gather that, but yeah, I wanted to make sure that that was the See, people who lived through Apollo just think everybody knows about it. I apologize for not being clear on that. No, no, all good. Seemed pretty exciting though.

• 2:34:35Jocko Willink?

  A billion people watching it.

• 2:34:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:34:38Jocko Willink?

  And there he is.

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 2:34:39Jocko Willink?

  And out the door first, Bill Posey from Lynwood, California, in full color for Mom, who was highly selected, highly selected through a rigorous program to get there.

• 2:34:52Speaker 01

  Making a fool of myself because I can't find a D-ring. Where is that?

• 2:34:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, sir, awesome. I really can't thank you enough for coming on and obviously for your service to the country, to the Navy, to the teams. You know, it was you guys that formed our, you formed who we are in the SEAL teams, in the UDTs, coming up through Vietnam. And then you kept that thread going and you brought it all the way to Iraq to Camp Jenny Posey for us. Thanks for everything. Thanks for, thanks for helping our legacy exist.

• 2:35:28Speaker 01

  Now, now, let's not, let's, let's put the credit where credit's due. Um, I worked at Group One that oversees all the West Coast SEAL teams. And I would deal with SEAL Team Three all the time. And I would work with, uh, you Lieutenant Commander. And it was really great working with Three. I really enjoyed working with Three because we could really get things done. And thanks for the leadership and everything that you did over there. You were an inspiration to us all. And even though you've written these books, and I don't know if you remember this or not. You wrote something, uh, just before I got out. And it was really inspiring what you wrote.

• 2:36:10Speaker 01

  And I wrote you back and I said, "Man, this is a great piece. You ought to be an author." So, you know, give credit where credit's due. Guys like you that grind it right down to the fine dust. And that you can make things happen. Thank you for your service.

• 2:36:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, we wouldn't have been able to do anything without the, the legacy that you guys put forth for us. So teamwork and the teams.

• 2:36:34Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 2:36:34Jocko Willink?

  Until the end.

• 2:36:35Speaker 01

  Airborne.

• 2:36:36Jocko Willink?

  Thank you, sir.

• 2:36:37Speaker 01

  Aye aye.

• 2:36:39Jocko Willink?

  And with that, warrant officer Bill Posey has left the building.

• 2:36:47Jocko Willink?

  Some good stuff, man, about how to be a good frogman and how to be a good human.

• 2:36:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:36:59Jocko Willink?

  A guy that's been in the game and stayed in the game, right? Stayed in the game, 56 years old, rolling out on Ops, getting out of it.

• 2:37:08Speaker 02

  It's, it's funny to hear like everyone else or everyone's take on things. You know, you have various guests and their different takes on things. And like his take on it was kinda like...

• 2:37:20Speaker 02

  For lack of a better way of putting it, like it was just, just kinda easy. Like it was just one big ride that he was on kinda thing. He was like, oh.

• 2:37:28Jocko Willink?

  Can you imagine showing up to Bud's, which used to be called UDD, UDT Tra- Replacement? Training Replacement? Can you imagine you show up and you think, you'd go, do I need a book bag? Cause you think you're going to a freaking educational maybe school? And you're actually entering what's allegedly the toughest military training. You're like, whatever.

• 2:37:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:49Jocko Willink?

  What? Like I surfed and I played water polo. Bring it. What do you got? What are we doing? You want me to get wet, be cold? Cool. Watch this. I'm gonna sleep for 15 minutes in the front of the boat. I'll be good when I'm done. Right? Roger that. Or what are we going to NOM? Cool. What are we doing? Beach recons? Ro- Roger that. Oh, we're going on patrols, getting in a swift boat, getting shot up, hiding behind a piece of freaking body armor? Cool. I'm down. What? Apollo? Okay, cool. What do I gotta do? Hook the beaner in? Like, he's just getting it, dude, the whole time.

• 2:38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:21Jocko Willink?

  I think, well, there's a lot of my favorite points of that, but when I asked him about retiring, he's like, I don't like old people. What a freaking epic answer. Seventy-five years old. Whatever. He's like, what? No, I got stuff I'm gonna do. I'm out here making stuff happen.

• 2:38:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:40Jocko Willink?

  I started a radio program, by the way.

• 2:38:43Speaker 02

  It's kinda true when he talks about, um, like old people talk about their operations.

• 2:38:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. He's not talking about his operations. He's talking about going to Iraq.

• 2:38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. He said one, one little thing that he said that stood out to me when he was like, oh yeah, they throw you over the, over the deck or whatever in the water and to see if you're claustrophobic. The casual way that he said that, I was like, oh, they just go, cause they just wanna see if they're claustrophobic or whatever.

• 2:39:09Jocko Willink?

  Suit that he's talking about?

• 2:39:10Speaker 02

  I'm assuming it's the old school with the big helmet.

• 2:39:13Jocko Willink?

  Like 20,000 leagues under the sea scenario.

• 2:39:16Speaker 02

  I know, man.

• 2:39:17Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 2:39:18Speaker 02

  A claustrophobic, uh, in the bottom of the bay. Yeah, that seems like a way bigger deal than his tone was when he said it.

• 2:39:27Jocko Willink?

  Seems like not a lot of stuff was a big deal.

• 2:39:29Speaker 02

  It didn't seem like a big deal.

• 2:39:30Jocko Willink?

  He was just jumping out of helicopters, hooking in Apollo 12, going on patrol with with thirty. Oh, by the way, dropping danger close napalm.

• 2:39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, napalm.

• 2:39:39Jocko Willink?

  That luckily happened to be there as you were about to get overrun. Whatever.

• 2:39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:45Jocko Willink?

  Watching the guys. Rolling up to Baghdad, landing, jumping out of a freaking C-130 that's going down a highway. What are we talking about? There's no factor. He was like, oh, yeah, then this happened. Whatever.

• 2:39:54Speaker 02

  It's just part of the ride he was on, really, you know?

• 2:39:57Jocko Willink?

  Man, freaking awesome. Camp Jenny Posey. I can't, I don't know if I can relay that enough. What that, what that name had to be to. It was this moment in time, right? That can never be recaptured. Camp Jenny Posey.

• 2:40:15Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 2:40:16Jocko Willink?

  Like everyone that was at Camp Jenny Posey. Oh, yeah. Oh, you were at Posey? Like, it's a little thing.

• 2:40:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  You know, bro, I mean, I'm not trying to get crazy. We weren't freaking, you know, it wasn't the Battle of the Bulge. But for the SEALs at that moment in time, it's pretty freaking awesome. Pretty freaking awesome. Camp Jenny Posey, welcome home. Welcome home is what it said on that sign. Welcome home.

• 2:40:38Speaker 02

  And that was Jenny Posey.

• 2:40:39Jocko Willink?

  That was Jenny. Yeah, by the way, for those of you that are just listening, Jenny Posey was in the room. You know, because she had, did end up graduating from Army ROTC and she was here laughing because I could see her. She was laughing at stories and and also, you know, she told me afterwards, she's never heard all these stories.

• 2:40:54Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 2:40:55Jocko Willink?

  You know, she's never heard all these stories about NOM, about getting thrown over the side into the into the damn bay to walk around for half an hour. By the way, that's an ignorant test. That's like the witch test. That's like the witch test. We'll throw you in the water and if you drown, then that means you're not a witch. But if you survive, means you were a witch and we're going to kill you. Check this out. We want to see if you're claustrophobic or if you like the water. So we're going to throw you in the water. What happens if you're not comfortable? What are we doing then?

• 2:41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:29Jocko Willink?

  Like you, you just freaking get all wrapped up in your, in your, in your lines to the surface and next thing you know, you got them lead boots up and we got problems.

• 2:41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seemed problematic.

• 2:41:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's not like the safest test we got for our.

• 2:41:44Speaker 02

  Do they still do that?

• 2:41:45Jocko Willink?

  No, no, there'd be dead people all over the bay. Can't be throwing people in the water.

• 2:41:52Jocko Willink?

  That's only the Bill Posey freaking test.

• 2:41:54Speaker 02

  It's brutal.

• 2:41:55Jocko Willink?

  All right, well, so speaking of staying in the game long term, which is what we're looking to do.

• 2:42:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:42:01Jocko Willink?

  How can we stay in the game longer? Bill Posey style.

• 2:42:04Speaker 02

  Okay, we want to keep ourselves capable, capable in every way, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social.

• 2:42:14Jocko Willink?

  When do we start throwing social into this?

• 2:42:16Speaker 02

  It's part of life.

• 2:42:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay, keep that one.

• 2:42:18Speaker 02

  For real, you need like, you need robust relationships.

• 2:42:22Jocko Willink?

  You do.

• 2:42:23Speaker 02

  I'm not robust, we'll just say healthy relationships, how about that? Either way, we're gonna talk about the physical and mental, so you, you want to be exercising, we want to be exercising, we want to be doing jiu jitsu. We want to be eating well. Here's the thing with eating well.

• 2:42:39Speaker 02

  It's really hard to get all the nutrients that you need.

• 2:42:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:42:45Speaker 02

  It's hard for real.

• 2:42:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 2:42:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, even if you have a perfect diet in real life.

• 2:42:52Jocko Willink?

  We, which no one does.

• 2:42:53Speaker 02

  There's no such thing.

• 2:42:54Jocko Willink?

  Well, maybe there's some freaking, like Hollywood, whatever that's up there that has like the personal chef and has the person coming in with the, you know, plucking the kale from, plucking the kale from, you know, northern Bulgaria where it's grown without any interference from man.

• 2:43:15Speaker 02

  Right, and then steamed for like, you know, like thirty eight point one, yeah.

• 2:43:22Jocko Willink?

  At seventeen degrees Celsius.

• 2:43:25Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:43:26Jocko Willink?

  So that person might have a perfect diet.

• 2:43:28Speaker 02

  No, but and even then.

• 2:43:30Jocko Willink?

  But even then.

• 2:43:30Speaker 02

  Unless they don't have a job.

• 2:43:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's what I'm saying, those people up in Hollywood, they don't have a job.

• 2:43:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they just sit there.

• 2:43:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:36Speaker 02

  And don't do anything.

• 2:43:37Jocko Willink?

  No offense to my people in Hollywood, but come on, let's get real. What about though, you know, it's it's really hard being on the set all day. Shut up. Bill Posey was getting thrown over a boat with a freaking hard hat helmet on to wander around in the muck. I've been there for 150 years.

• 2:43:53Speaker 02

  That was hard.

• 2:43:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was hard.

• 2:43:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:43:55Jocko Willink?

  Being on set, no, you get zero credit.

• 2:43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard to compare the.

• 2:43:59Jocko Willink?

  You get zero credit. Did Bill Posey get a fresh Bulgarian kale salad when he got out of the water?

• 2:44:05Speaker 02

  No, he didn't.

• 2:44:07Speaker 02

  So even if you.

• 2:44:08Jocko Willink?

  Where we going with this?

• 2:44:09Speaker 02

  Even if you do have a fresh Bulgarian kale salad and everything else, perfect balanced meals. In whatever way you're balancing them, because we're all different in a lot of ways. Very hard to get these, the all the nutrients that we need and want.

• 2:44:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:44:26Speaker 02

  Good news. Choco is supplements. Supplementation for us.

• 2:44:32Jocko Willink?

  That was the longest freaking hype.

• 2:44:34Speaker 02

  With the perfect diet, a perfect diet or not so perfect diet supplementation is going to get you way ahead of the game. Keep you in the game. That's what it's going to do. So what do we got? And what do we have them for? We got them for your joints, for your mind, for your body and for your muscles directly.

• 2:44:50Jocko Willink?

  Joint warfare.

• 2:44:51Speaker 02

  Joint warfare.

• 2:44:52Jocko Willink?

  Crill oil.

• 2:44:52Speaker 02

  Super Crill oil. These are for your joints. Like, okay, and this is going to be a big deal. Because if your joints fail you, you can be strong. You can be strong. You can be capable. You can run every day. Your joints start failing you, start bothering you or whatever.

• 2:45:06Jocko Willink?

  What good is it having a 454 big block or you got a flat tire over here?

• 2:45:11Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:45:11Jocko Willink?

  Right rear. You know what I'm saying? You're not going anywhere.

• 2:45:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:45:14Jocko Willink?

  Or you can rev your engine a little bit, just like you can stand there and flex in the mirror, but you're not going to be able to take anybody in a jujitsu match. That's for sure. You got a bad wheel.

• 2:45:23Speaker 02

  It's true. It's absolutely true.

• 2:45:24Jocko Willink?

  So we need to have the the the joints up to speed, let's say.

• 2:45:28Speaker 02

  And trust me, I know I've I've experienced both.

• 2:45:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, what what a true testament is joint warfare, there's subscrib- people that subscribe. Subscribe to joint warfare all the time.

• 2:45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45:40Jocko Willink?

  And the feedback is awesome because people realize they go, oh, maybe I don't need anymore. Then they go a week and a half and they're they're like crackheads running back. Saying subscribe hit. They want to have it and they don't want to miss it. All kinds of good stuff in that.

• 2:45:54Speaker 02

  Also vitamin D three.

• 2:45:56Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:45:56Speaker 02

  Okay, so look, maybe some of us work outside and we get enough sun. And then even then, I think you still might be lacking in vitamin D three.

• 2:46:06Jocko Willink?

  Why roll the dice?

• 2:46:07Speaker 02

  Why roll the dice?

• 2:46:08Jocko Willink?

  Why roll the dice? Don't roll the dice on your vitamin D.

• 2:46:10Speaker 02

  Nope. Get some easy and they're teeny tiny ones. You know, some people, they don't like swallowing those big. Remember the old school, uh, what is it? Frickin amino acids or whatever. Remember that? Those big ass horse pills?

• 2:46:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not like that. Teeny tiny, easy money.

• 2:46:26Jocko Willink?

  You're good to go.

• 2:46:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:46:28Jocko Willink?

  You're good to go.

• 2:46:29Speaker 02

  Also for immunity, along with the vitamin D three is Cold War.

• 2:46:34Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:46:35Speaker 02

  In these times, we're not, sometimes our immune system, sometimes it needs a little attention, extra attention.

• 2:46:43Jocko Willink?

  I'd say that's a good call.

• 2:46:44Speaker 02

  It's true. We just got back from a trip. And that's sometimes that's the time where your immune system is going to need a little little spot sometimes.

• 2:46:51Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:46:52Speaker 02

  So, yeah, you got the you got the Cold War.

• 2:46:56Speaker 02

  From Jocko Hu. Also, uh, protein in the form of dessert. It's called milk. Yes. Is there a new flavor?

• 2:47:03Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so good. So ridiculous. We we just got to the we just got done with the muster. And I I don't know why I asked Jamie this. I got paranoid. But I was like, I was about to fly out and she was out there before getting everything set up. And I text her, I was like, hey, do we have milk out there? And she's like, are you serious? Of course. She's like, of course, we have more. We have pretty more. Dude, I was out there just just taking because they bought so beautiful. I showed up. They got refrigerator in my room. There's milk in the refrigerator.

• 2:47:32Speaker 02

  Hollywood guy over here.

• 2:47:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Hollywood guy. I was on set all day. Back off.

• 2:47:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no kale salad.

• 2:47:37Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, so I get there and there's milk and then there's milk and I was just, well, this is what I was doing. I was taking like the opening up the milk bottle and just drinking a little bit of milk and pouring milk in there and shaking it. It was so freaking good to go. It's such a game changer. You're on the road and you're you're just eating clean. So legit. Get yourself some milk.

• 2:47:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:58Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, right now, I've been on peanut butter, the chocolate peanut butter cup for like probably a month right now. And I got everything. I started, I'm looking at my cupboard and I'm like thinking, could it be mint? Could it be mint? Could it be strawberry? Maybe a little vanilla, and I just keep for the past month, I've been grabbing that, grabbing that chocolate peanut butter. It's a Reese's peanut butter milkshake. It's that freaking good.

• 2:48:20Speaker 02

  Yep, same boat, same boat.

• 2:48:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you're there.

• 2:48:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:48:23Jocko Willink?

  All right.

• 2:48:24Speaker 02

  Uh, so one of the, one of our people at the muster was thanking me for whatever reason, for the uh, milk, the raw milk or the one, the non-flavored one. He's thanking me for that. I told him, hey, man, you're welcome. There's no problem for me. To get that out. No, you know, so Brian, Pete, all you guys, cool, cool, but you know, you're welcome. So that's a good, that's an interesting one though. So if like, yeah, if you don't prefer like a flavor necessarily, I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine, but hey, man, everybody's different. So man, got that option. Is there a banana thing flavor coming out?

• 2:49:06Jocko Willink?

  Banana, banana is coming, a banana milk. I've obviously, have you had it? Have you had the new?

• 2:49:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:49:11Jocko Willink?

  No, you're not.

• 2:49:12Speaker 02

  What's the name?

• 2:49:12Jocko Willink?

  You're not on the inside circle. Freaking good. Name not confirmed yet, but we're getting there and it should be out. It's good, man. It's like a banana cream scenario.

• 2:49:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, see, and that's.

• 2:49:24Jocko Willink?

  So freaking good.

• 2:49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:26Jocko Willink?

  It's kind of ridiculous. Again, you feel like you, you feel like you're having a dessert straight up. Like that lately with that peanut, now yesterday I did actually, yesterday I had a mint. Yesterday I had mint, which was good to go.

• 2:49:39Speaker 02

  So it's kind of like, it's essentially a cheat code. It's one of those cheat codes.

• 2:49:44Jocko Willink?

  All right. We need to move on. I, I started to feel like we're in this weird tangent world where like you and I are getting super hyped on it.

• 2:49:50Speaker 02

  You know why? Cause you're imagining drinking milk right now and I understand. But so yeah, so get it for yourself. How about that? Get it at jockofuel.com. You can get all this stuff.

• 2:49:59Jocko Willink?

  You can get, you can get, um, we have a drink too, by the way, a beverage. When I was in Florida, we, at the muster, we, we supplied, we'll say our people with the Dismango and man.

• 2:50:14Jocko Willink?

  So good to go. So good to go. And then went to Wawa down there in Florida, which is pretty freaking cool. Going into Wawa, walk to the fridge. There you go. You can just, there you go. Looks like a hidden Wawa. What's up with that? Cool. Here's the thing. Right now, there's people like, oh, we're making a healthy energy drink. Bullshit. You're actually lying. There's only one person that's making a, a, a healthy energy drink right now. Us, we are. I guess there's only one team that's making a healthy energy drink right now. There's only one team that said, you know what? We're not going to put a bunch of freaking chemicals in here to preserve this that are going to go in your body and preserve your body in some weird way. That's what you do when you die. You go to a mortician and they preserve your body.

• 2:50:59Jocko Willink?

  They put those chemicals into the drink and say, oh, it's cool. It's good. Drink it. No, we didn't do that. We pasteurize it. We pasteurize it. We don't have to add any of those chemicals. Look at, you know, I almost, I almost got sucked in. Almost got sucked. Some guy commented on some social media thing. He was like, oh, this, uh, you know, just a standard. He's trying to, they're he, me, trying to pitch, you know, some, uh, you know, some supplement. It's the same as everything else. It's actually literally not the same as everything else. All you have to do is look at the ingredients and you realize, oh, it's actually not, it's not even close to everything else. Not even close. It's a totally different ballgame. So if you're thinking that, you're wrong.

• 2:51:42Speaker 02

  You kinda, I mean, and you know, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and you can kinda understand because when you think about it, try to exclude you, exclude yourself in what, what this whole, you know, discipline go thing. Exclude that.

• 2:51:56Jocko Willink?

  What? So I'm not a part of it?

• 2:51:57Speaker 02

  Pretend it doesn't exist. How about that?

• 2:51:59Jocko Willink?

  The drink doesn't exist?

• 2:52:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And let's say even you don't exist. Um, he, he has a point. That guy saying, oh, like everything, you know, it's like everyone, everything else or whatever, you know, like, oh yeah, just some peddling some, you know, whatever.

• 2:52:14Jocko Willink?

  He has no idea.

• 2:52:14Speaker 02

  He's, the thing is, he's right, except now he's not right because you're not, but everyone else kinda does that, you see what I'm saying?

• 2:52:22Jocko Willink?

  So if I didn't exist as a human.

• 2:52:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:52:24Jocko Willink?

  This guy would be correct.

• 2:52:25Speaker 02

  Would be correct, yes. So you kinda, like, if he don't know, he just decayed you, you know what decayed means?

• 2:52:30Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:52:31Speaker 02

  Didn't know.

• 2:52:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, check.

• 2:52:33Speaker 02

  So if he did, you know how you don't, you know, you did, you got, you get decayed a lot, actually.

• 2:52:37Jocko Willink?

  People don't know me.

• 2:52:38Speaker 02

  They just don't know.

• 2:52:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, and they're just like, oh, look at that.

• 2:52:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, they just assume, yeah, yeah, they just assume like everyone else. Like, remember that time about the Warrior Kid book? It was like on Twitter back in the day.

• 2:52:47Jocko Willink?

  Some guy chimed in.

• 2:52:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, so, I forget who posted it, but someone posted something saying, oh, yeah, like, um, you know, uh, where the warrior kid from Wimpy to Warrior, the name's you win, whatever, and some professor or something was like, oh, just another guy peddling toxic masculinity or something like this, I'm paraphrasing totally.

• 2:53:08Jocko Willink?

  Awesome comment.

• 2:53:08Speaker 02

  And he goes, uh, um, sorry, I'll pass, right? Like, didn't read it.

• 2:53:12Jocko Willink?

  Look at you pulling the quote, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:53:14Speaker 02

  You know, didn't look into the whole thing and everyone just piled up on him saying, hey, essentially, bro, you're decaying this guy. It's not that. It's like, whatever, my daughters read it like that kind, and he was like, oh, he was backpedaling whatever, but totally decayed you. So, you know, it's just another decayed situation.

• 2:53:30Jocko Willink?

  Weird, though, that someone would make that move. Like, like, let's face it, what's a good lesson to learn when you're a kid that almost everybody learns, don't judge a book by its cover? Almost everybody does, learns that lesson. And here's a guy that double violated that. Number one, looking at me and judging the book by its cover, and then number two, straight up judging the book by its cover, straight up, literally doing that. And this guy's a professor who's, you know, a liberal guy, because I, you know, who is this guy? He's some super liberal guy. Look, I got all kinds of liberal people that read the books. No factor. They're like, oh, yeah, this guy has an open mind, cool. Just decayed me.

• 2:54:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:54:09Jocko Willink?

  Twice, but even worse, broke the act, broke the, broke the metaphorical rule and broke the straight up real literal rule.

• 2:54:17Speaker 02

  Broke it right there for.

• 2:54:18Jocko Willink?

  He should have got two L's in his column, right? Loser, loser, double up.

• 2:54:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, fully and yeah, being liberal or not liberal, that wasn't in this case, the violation.

• 2:54:29Jocko Willink?

  It was. No, who cares?

• 2:54:30Speaker 02

  That ignorant, that was the violation.

• 2:54:32Jocko Willink?

  If he was a super liberal guy that read the book and was like, hey, I think that the way you portray X, Y, Z, I'd be like, okay, cool. Yeah, that's good, good feedback. I need to pay attention to that.

• 2:54:40Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:54:42Speaker 02

  Well, you know, so yeah, so yeah, hey, look, so for future reference, you will get decayed in the future as well. And this energy drink situation, he just decayed you, so it's all good, bro.

• 2:54:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, look at the, the ingredients are filtered carbonated water, natural flavor, citric acid, monk fruit extract. That's the, that's the ingredients. Now, look, are there, there are other ingredients that are like the supplement part, vitamin B12, vitamin B6, like caffeine, alpha GPC, like those are real ingredients that are in there, but they're supplemental, they're good for you.

• 2:55:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55:21Jocko Willink?

  The bad, where's the bad for you ingredients on here? There are none.

• 2:55:24Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:55:25Jocko Willink?

  That's the way they should do like, that should be the new labeling system, right?

• 2:55:28Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:55:29Jocko Willink?

  There should be two columns, good for you, bad for you.

• 2:55:32Speaker 02

  That might be too much, too much reality.

• 2:55:34Jocko Willink?

  It's too much reality, but that's the way it should be, because people don't know.

• 2:55:37Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:55:38Jocko Willink?

  People don't know that that, that all those chemicals that are getting put in there, they should be in the bad for you column.

• 2:55:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55:42Jocko Willink?

  By the way.

• 2:55:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of like cigarettes.

• 2:55:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:45Speaker 02

  Those cigarettes, they say, hey, you can get cancer from this.

• 2:55:49Jocko Willink?

  They, they should just have one column that says this left side makes you strong, right side makes you weak.

• 2:55:53Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly right.

• 2:55:54Jocko Willink?

  Kills you, poisons you. Check.

• 2:55:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So yes.

• 2:56:00Jocko Willink?

  All right, uh, so Wawa, you can get the drinks at Wawa, you can get all the stuff at Vitamin Shop, you can get all the stuff at Jacofuel.com and also kind of important, if you subscribe, if you subscribe to whatever it is you want, the shipping is free, because we don't want you to have to pay for shipping. So if you subscribe, shipping is free, because we know that there's other organizations out there that offer free shipping.

• 2:56:29Jocko Willink?

  We wanna make sure you have the option. If you don't wanna go through those big organizations, but you still wanna get free shipping, we got you covered. We got you covered. No factor.

• 2:56:39Speaker 02

  It's a big deal, man. Free shipping seems small. It's a big deal.

• 2:56:42Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:56:43Speaker 02

  And you don't forget to take your stuff to, or you don't run out, you don't run the risk of running out. That's a big deal too. By the way, take it from me, I've been there. Also, you can get it at, or, uh, originusa.com. And also, originusa.com. You can get American-made stuff. Jiu-jitsu gees.

• 2:57:02Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 2:57:03Speaker 02

  Jeans, American-made denim, boots. I have your boots, by the way, still.

• 2:57:08Jocko Willink?

  They're not my boots, they're your boots.

• 2:57:09Speaker 02

  They're mine now.

• 2:57:10Jocko Willink?

  Our boots.

• 2:57:11Speaker 02

  But here's the thing, I have some-

• 2:57:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the boots that you brought home. So those are my boots?

• 2:57:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:57:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:15Speaker 02

  Literally yours.

• 2:57:16Jocko Willink?

  Apparently you didn't bring them today.

• 2:57:17Speaker 02

  Well, my son was trying to wear them.

• 2:57:19Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 2:57:19Speaker 02

  And I was like, okay, cool. He wanted to walk a mile in your shoes, literally.

• 2:57:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:24Speaker 02

  American-made shoes. Um, also, yeah, denim, boots, uh, belts. Uh, wait, wait, are they doing belts or are they doing wallets?

• 2:57:30Jocko Willink?

  Yes, belts, wallets, boots.

• 2:57:32Speaker 02

  All made in America.

• 2:57:33Jocko Willink?

  All made in America, a hundred percent.

• 2:57:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57:35Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent without compromise. Do you know how hard it is when you say without compromise on the end of something? Especially something like making stuff in America? That's a big, bold statement.

• 2:57:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57:45Jocko Willink?

  Cause there's like a rivet for a pair of jeans.

• 2:57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57:48Jocko Willink?

  And everybody's like, cool, yeah, we get rivets from China. Oh, good to go. Yeah, cool.

• 2:57:52Speaker 02

  That's negligible.

• 2:57:53Jocko Willink?

  No big deal. No big deal. We're not worried about those particular slave labor elements that are working in a sweatshop. We're not worried about them, cause it's rivets and we need them.

• 2:58:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:58:02Jocko Willink?

  That's the easy thing to do. But we have most of the jeans made in America. We, look, most of our stuff is made by Americans that are actually, actually enjoying their job. We got most of our parts not made by slave labor. That's kinda cool, right? No, it's actually not cool.

• 2:58:21Speaker 02

  That's actually a good point. Like how you're like, the rivets, they seem small.

• 2:58:25Jocko Willink?

  They seem small.

• 2:58:26Speaker 02

  Oh, it's small, so it's, it kinda makes it-

• 2:58:28Jocko Willink?

  Until you're a twelve-year-old kid getting freaking beaten, yeah, in a factory eighteen hours a day.

• 2:58:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:58:34Jocko Willink?

  That's cool. Yeah, go ahead. Get yourself those other, get yourself those other jeans.

• 2:58:40Speaker 02

  Savages, man. So, yes, if, if, hey, look, if this kind of stuff interests you, you want this kind of stuff? OriginUSA.com. Also, Jaco's store. It's called Jaco's store. So, go to JacoStore.com. This is where you can get your Discipline Equals Freedom shirts, hats, hoodies. This is also, this is higher quality stuff. This is not ballpark giveaway, free quality stuff. It's high quality stuff. Trust me. I know that too. Also, we have a subscription situation we call the Shirt Locker. You get a new shirt every month. Free shipping on that one as well. The designs are more creative, more fun. You gotta trust me on that one.

• 2:59:22Speaker 02

  Cause like, if you're, if you're like, hey, prove it. And then like, you look at it and you're like, oh, you're right. But it's too later, Eddie. You don't get that shirt anymore.

• 2:59:29Jocko Willink?

  I will say, at the muster, when I saw our people with some Shirt Locker shirts on, I felt, I felt a little extra like connection.

• 2:59:38Speaker 02

  I felt the same way. Exactly right.

• 2:59:40Jocko Willink?

  Kind of a little extra connection. We know they're like, look, we get, we get there in the game. But then when you see that, you're like, oh, they're in the game.

• 2:59:46Speaker 02

  In the game.

• 2:59:46Jocko Willink?

  In the game.

• 2:59:47Speaker 02

  And looking good too.

• 2:59:48Jocko Willink?

  Full support.

• 2:59:49Speaker 02

  Yep. So, yes, check it out. JacoStore.com. If you like something, get something.

• 2:59:53Jocko Willink?

  Subscribe to the podcast. Don't forget about other podcasts that we have. Jaco Unraveling with Daryl Cooper. Daryl Cooper just dropped the new Martyr Made podcast.

• 3:00:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I noticed that.

• 3:00:03Jocko Willink?

  So, you can, you can go check that out. I think we, he and I had prepped to do a podcast. And then we ended up not doing that particular one for the unraveling. And then I think he just kind of took some of that and went, went deep on it, which as you know, DC can go deep on some stuff. So, so check out Jaco Unraveling. Check out Martyr Made. Check out the Grounded Podcast, which Dean List, we gotta do some recording with him. And then Warrior Kid Podcast. We also have the, the JacoUnderground.com. So,

• 3:00:38Jocko Willink?

  Look, we don't know what's gonna happen with any of these platforms is the bottom line. We, we could get cut off for whatever reason. We could get ads imposed on us from other things that we don't necessarily want to be doing advertisements for. There's all kinds of things that can happen. We realize this. We need to have a contingency plan. We, we built the structure for a, our own platform if we need to do it. So if people, if all of a sudden things get crazy, we will be standing by. We'll be on the jockounderground.com. If you want to help us out with that so that we never have to rely on anyone else and we don't have to have,

• 3:01:22Jocko Willink?

  we have to do ad reads in the middle of a freaking podcast. Right? Hey, worn off your posing. You're telling us about what was like in Vietnam. Hold on a second. I'm gonna talk about a new whatever.

• 3:01:34Speaker 02

  Right after these messages.

• 3:01:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, right after these messages, you can tell us what it was like. No, we're not doing that. So if you want to help out, eight dollars and 18 cents a month. If you can't afford it, that doesn't mean we don't want you in the game. We want you in the game. You can go to, you can email assistance at jockounderground.com. And so we're releasing one podcast a week where we kind of do a little topics that are, we'll say related to, but not quite the normal topic for Jocko podcast. It's more of like an expansion, more in-depth. So you can check out that and we also have a YouTube channel that you can subscribe to if you want to see some of the stuff. A lot of these things I'm the assistant director on.

• 3:02:16Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:02:17Jocko Willink?

  Most of the good ones, I'm the assistant director on.

• 3:02:19Speaker 02

  They're all good.

• 3:02:21Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:02:23Jocko Willink?

  Maybe some people.

• 3:02:24Speaker 02

  They're not all good? Okay.

• 3:02:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Subscribe to that YouTube channel. Also, Origin USA has a YouTube channel. You can check that out as well.

• 3:02:29Speaker 02

  Yep. Also, Psychological Warfare. You didn't know what that is. It's not on the YouTube channel. But it is an album, a Jaco album with tracks. And each track helps you get through an individual moment of weakness that you might have. And we all have them from time to time. Bro, I had one the other day. Not yesterday, day before. Wait, was it yesterday? Yeah, day before yesterday.

• 3:02:56Speaker 02

  Yep, but you know how like, yeah, you're the one who did this where if you have a moment of weakness and you get past it, you gotta punish yourself for having the moment of weakness. You gotta add on, what do you add, like a set? Or a 10%?

• 3:03:09Jocko Willink?

  Could be 10%, could be some burpees, could be starve yourself for 14 hours. I don't know.

• 3:03:14Speaker 02

  But somebody gotta pay for that.

• 3:03:16Jocko Willink?

  Hey, man, those chocolate chip, chocolate chip cookies were good to go. Then I'm fasting tomorrow. What?

• 3:03:21Speaker 02

  You gotta pay for that. And yeah, so man, that happened to me.

• 3:03:25Jocko Willink?

  What was the moment?

• 3:03:26Speaker 02

  I wanted to skip the workout. Actually, I didn't want to skip it. I was into it. I warmed up. You know the kind where it's like, hey, if I just start warming up, I'm gonna be in the workout.

• 3:03:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:35Speaker 02

  It was harder than that. The moment of weakness was bigger and more robust than that. I warmed up. I did like two good sets and I was like, kinda like, hey, I did those two solid sets right there. So if I don't do the second half of this workout.

• 3:03:50Jocko Willink?

  We gotta go.

• 3:03:50Speaker 02

  I can just finish these set and be done, you know? So I was like, oh, man. So I got through it. I said, eh, no, I didn't. I did the whole workout. And then as a punishment, I had to do a Metcon.

• 3:04:00Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 3:04:01Speaker 02

  And I doubled up on the Metcon too.

• 3:04:02Jocko Willink?

  Thing. Yeah, check. Right on. You can get that from anywhere you get MP3s. Also, if you want to hang something up on your wall, you can go to flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, my brother is making all kinds of cool stuff to hang on your wall. Also, I got a bunch of books. We have Final Spin coming. Final Spin coming. I wrote a, I wrote a book. Could be novel, could be, could be some other format of reading, of writing. Could be poetry with a mixture of prose, with a mixture of, of transcripts of human beings talking. That basically I made my own form up.

• 3:04:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:04:41Jocko Willink?

  Am I allowed to do that?

• 3:04:42Speaker 02

  At this point, I think so.

• 3:04:43Jocko Willink?

  But I guess I did. Story, it's available now for preorder if you want to get that first.

• 3:04:50Speaker 02

  When does it come out?

• 3:04:51Jocko Willink?

  November 16th is when it comes out. Here's the thing. You know what the publisher's saying? The publisher's like, well, you know, you're kind of a guy that writes about leader camps and we don't know.

• 3:05:01Speaker 02

  Right. Big question mark.

• 3:05:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, big question mark. We're not sure if your, people that listen to you, your podcast will actually want to read some kind of a weird novel from you. It's like, okay, cool. So they're not going to print enough and then people are going to order it when you know in on on November 14th they'll be like, oh, cool. I want to get a copy. They're going to end up with a second edition and there's no, this is not a redeemable situation. You know, you make some decisions in life you can never go back from. Like you get a tattoo on your forehead. Seemed like a good idea, right? But you can't go back from that, right? You can't go back from that. It's there. Now you could go get it removed. Then you got a scar on your forehead. Either way, we're not thinking that that's the, the, the move that we can go back from. We can't return.

• 3:05:45Jocko Willink?

  Hey, you go out drinking and you decide you're going to go for a drive afterwards. You get a DUI. There's no, you don't go like, hey, hey, officer, you know what? Let's hit rewind. You can't do that. You show up, um, you know, you come to the muster, you come to Jocko Live, you roll up, you got that, you got, you got that copy of final spin and you're like, I'd really like to get this signed. I open it up. I'm gonna sign it. I'm gonna sign it. Like, cool, man, I appreciate it. But then I see that second edition down there and I'm sort of knowing, I'm sort of seeing where you're at, you know? I'm sort of seeing where we're at, you know? I'm sort of seeing where we're at. I know that at the moment of truth, you were kind of like, well, and now you can't, you can't

• 3:06:29Jocko Willink?

  walk back that decision again. You can work through it, right? You're still going to go out, you can wear a hat if you got the tattoo on your forehead. You got the DUI, you're going to go through the classes till you can recover and get your license back. You're going to do the best you can, but you still got that scarlet letter. Second edition. Don't let it happen to you. Don't let it happen to you. All right. We got Leadership Strategy Tactics. We got the code, the evaluation, the protocol, Discipline vs. Freedom Field Manual, brand new versions, been out for a little bit now. Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, and four, Mikey and the Dragons, often called the best children's book ever written. That's what a lot of people call it. At least quite a few of

• 3:07:09Jocko Willink?

  them. About Face by Hackworth, and then the OG, Extreme Ownership and the Decade of Leadership, we got Echelon Front, which is my leadership consulting company. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com. We have efonline.com on there. We have courses on there. We have leadership courses on there. We're doing live Q and A all the time. If you want to improve, look, leadership is not an inoculation. You'll get a shot. You don't read Extreme Ownership one time, be like, oh, cool, I'm good to go. Doesn't happen. Doesn't happen to anybody.

• 3:07:42Jocko Willink?

  You need to reinforce those learnings. You need to expand your knowledge. How do you do that? efonline.com. Go get it. muster. We just got done with Orlando. Freaking awesome. We got Phoenix, August 17th and 18th, Las Vegas, 28th and 29th. Check extremeownership.com. If you want to come to that, do it quick. They're selling out. EF Battlefield, we go walk the battlefields and go through leadership lessons learned. I'll let you know when the next one of those is coming up. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She has a charity organization. She

• 3:08:23Jocko Willink?

  does all kinds of things to help veterans. One of the major things that she does is she gets them medical treatments that might not be covered by the VA or by the military medical system. One of the big ones is hyperbaric chamber. Sending guys out for 30 days to get multiple iterations of that type of treatment and it's extremely helpful for people. A bunch of my friends have gotten it. It's been awesome. If you want to help, you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. And if you want more of my nagging narratives, or you need more of Echo's vexing vocals, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the Gram, and on the

• 3:09:07Jocko Willink?

  Facebook. Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jaco and Willink. And thanks once again to Bill Posey. What an awesome opportunity to sit down. Thank you for everything you did for America and everything you did for the teams. Hoo ya, warrant officer Posey. And to the rest of our uniformed personnel out there, thank you for what you do to keep us free. And to our veterans, thank you for your service and sacrifice. And also to our police and law enforcement, our firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all the first responders. You all work hard every day, every single day to keep us

• 3:09:50Jocko Willink?

  safe. Thank you for what you do day in and day out for us.

• 3:09:57Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else out there,

• 3:10:00Jocko Willink?

  remember what Bill Posey had to say. Remember, he said, "If you can think, if you can think, you're dangerous." If you can think, you're dangerous. Stay dangerous.

• 3:10:14Jocko Willink?

  Stay dangerous. Age, apparently, age is a number. And you can go hard, and you can keep going. And we all have more to give. So I say, we step up and give it.

• 3:10:32Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.