289: When The Call Comes, It's Time To GO. Seawolf Pilots, John Farr and Carl Nelson

0:00:00 - Opening 0:10:34 - Seawolf Pilots, John Farr and Carl Nelson. 2:27:12 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:52:08 - 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 289. As the SEALs from Zulu Platoon inserted into a rice paddy near where they had taken fire, Nelson's Huey, a UH-1 Bravo gunship commenced a right turn at 80 feet above the ground to cover them. Lieutenant Junior Grade Carl Nelson, a fire team leader at HAL 3 Detachment 1, commanded two Sea Wolf gunships during Zulu's last mission. He already had flown more than 600 combat missions. His copilot, Lieutenant Junior Grade Earl Shout, controlled the M134 miniguns while

• 0:41Jocko Willink?

  Petty Officers Michael Dobson and Tom Clavon fired the left and right, respectively, M60 machine guns from the doors. Lieutenant Junior Grade Edward Dyer would pilot the Huey UH-1 Lima Sea Lord transport that would insert and later extract Zulu from a very hot landing zone. Shout worked the LZ's edge with his miniguns while Dobson and Clavon fired their M60s. The SEALs patrolled northeast and then east on a dike separating two rice paddies and then moved north to one perpendicular to the first. As they advanced, the enemy began firing from well concealed and dug in positions on

• 1:26Jocko Willink?

  a dike covered with heavy vegetation. The SEALs and Nelson's gunship immediately returned fire. As the patrol continued closer toward the tree line, the SEALs took accurate withering fire from both sides of the dike. Pointman Roland fell, shot through the groin. He was hit again as he crawled for cover. Seconds later, Telfer was shot in both legs. Both SEALs managed to return fire despite their wounds, but the severity of their injuries and the immediate necessity to extract them soon took them out of action.

• 2:06Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant JG Richards immediately radioed Nelson for fire support as he and Lawrence advanced under fire to assist the two seriously wounded SEALs. Christened the Hulk by his fellow SEALs, Lieutenant JG Tom Richards was well liked and respected, and he enjoyed a reputation as a highly capable operator.

• 2:29Jocko Willink?

  He was a native of Bright Waters, New York and a graduate of Bay Shore High School, where he wrestled and played football. Following graduation, he attended Villanova University on a Navy ROTC scholarship. There, he lifted weights and routinely benched press 400 pounds. He was commissioned an ensign in the Naval Reserve in 1969. As Lieutenant J.G. Richards dragged Roland to cover, one round passed through Richards' right hand, hating the Stoner machine gun's pistol grip. Nevertheless, Lawrence, Hedge, and Futrell returned fire. Richards continued to expose himself to enemy fire to drag the wounded to cover.

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  When the automatic weapons man Futrell was shot in the chest, he cried out, "I'm hit, I'm hit." Lieutenant J.G. Richards, sensing the rising panic in Futrell's voice, suspected the man was going into shock. To distract him, Richards ordered Futrell to "shut up and return fire." Futrell briefly did so with his M60 and did not go into shock. As Futrell became semi-conscious, Richards pulled him back as well. When Lawrence and Hedge ran out of ammunition minutes later, Richards passed them the linked .556 ammo for his now inoperable Stoner machine gun.

• 3:56Jocko Willink?

  The squad regrouped behind a dyke, and Richards urged the SEALs to keep pouring fire into the enemy as he radioed for emergency extraction. As the battle raged, extraction became imperative. Including himself, Richards had four wounded men, three of them critical. For Lieutenant J.G. Nelson and the Sea Wolves, there was no hesitation. He said, quote, "My crew knew that leaving anyone behind was not an option."

• 4:31Jocko Willink?

  When Nelson saw Richards dragging the wounded SEALs to cover, he alerted Dyer to get ready for extraction and descended to cover it from an altitude of about 50 to 70 feet.

• 4:43Jocko Willink?

  From the ground, Lawrence and Hedge provided covering fire with their Stoners. Nelson's gunship hit the enemy with devastating rocket and minigun fire, while Dyer urgently searched for the SEALs' exact location.

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  On his second pass, Dyer spotted them huddled next to a dike and came in hot, bleeding off airspeed during his approach. As the slick hovered, skids wet in the rice paddy, Richards dragged each of the three wounded SEALs in turn over the dike, then through the rice paddy to the helicopter, lifting each aboard with his one good hand.

• 5:18Jocko Willink?

  Richards later wrote, "With one hand, it was probably my heaviest lift I ever made." Best one, too.

• 5:28Jocko Willink?

  Enemy fire intensified during the loading. Lawrence, still providing covering fire, was about to climb aboard when Dyer began to pull pitch for liftoff as enemy rounds hit the fuselage. Lawrence grabbed the slick's skid and held on for dear life, until the Hulk reached down with his uninjured hand and hauled Lawrence aboard.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  Having flown more than 600 combat missions, with scores of those flights in direct support of two SEAL teams, Nelson vividly remembers the scene unfolding below his gunship as the platoon struggled to survive.

• 6:07Jocko Willink?

  Nelson recalls, quote, "Watching a wounded Tom Richards, under intense enemy fire, drag each of his wounded SEALs to safety across a series of rice paddy dikes and load them into the SEAL Lord kilo. It was the most heroic act that I have ever witnessed."

• 6:26Jocko Willink?

  Tom Richards' heroism rates a Navy cross at a minimum. He directly saved the lives of his platoon.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  And that's an article from the Naval Institute. You can find it online. And if you fast forward from that event, which took place in 1971, fast forward about 20 years to 1991.

• 6:57Jocko Willink?

  And I was a new guy at SEAL Team One, and it was a Saturday morning. And I was in the gym at SEAL Team One alone, cranking some Metallica on the stereo system. And when I say cranking, I mean it was ear damaging levels of noise because I was young and stupid.

• 7:16Jocko Willink?

  And then the Hulk. The Hulk walked in. And he was wearing his gym clothes, and he was there to get a workout.

• 7:24Jocko Willink?

  The same guy, this now, who was Lieutenant JG, this is now Captain Richards, legendary SEAL that you just heard about. It's now 20 years later. And of course, I knew who he was. We all knew who he was. He was the Hulk. And he walked into the gym to get his workout on. And so I respectfully walked over to the stereo and turned it down, turned the dial about halfway back to bring it to a normal listening level. And as I did that, the Hulk shouted, "Hey." And I looked over at him, and he said, "Turn that back up." And I said, "Yes, sir." And I did.

• 8:07Jocko Willink?

  And you fast forward another six or seven years on top of that, and I was walking in to the Admiral's office. Now Admiral Tom Richards, the Admiral in charge of all the SEALs. And I was going to interview you with him, hoping to get a letter of recommendation for selection, so I could get my commission and become a SEAL officer.

• 8:30Jocko Willink?

  And he gave me that recommendation, and I did end up getting selected. And I'm certainly thankful to Admiral Richards for that, but more important, I'm thankful for what he did for America and for the teams and for me in the end.

• 8:47Jocko Willink?

  And therefore, I am also thankful for those helicopter pilots and crews for getting him and his platoon out of there. And these are the same helicopter crews that risked their lives time and time again to get the SEALs out of the worst possible situations. These were the legendary Sea Wolves, the US Navy Helicopter Attack Squadron Three. And this is a unit. It's the most highly decorated naval aviation unit. Collectively awarded in Vietnam, five Navy Crosses, 31 Silver Stars, two Legions of

• 9:30Jocko Willink?

  Merit, 219 distinguished flying crosses, 156 Purple Hearts, 101 Bronze Stars, 142 Gallantry Crosses, over 16,000 Air Medals, 439 Navy Commendation Medals, 228 Navy Achievement Medals, six Presidential Unit Citations, and two Meritorious Unit Commendations. And we have had the honor of having a Sea Wolf pilot on this podcast once before, Dennis Rowley, Podcast 153. If you haven't listened to that, go and check it out.

• 10:08Jocko Willink?

  But tonight, it is an honor to have two more Sea Wolf pilots with us, John Farr and Carl Nelson, the same Carl Nelson you just heard me read about, who provided cover fire while Zulu platoon extracted from a serious gunfight. Our relationship in the SEAL Teams with the Sea Wolves in Vietnam will never be forgotten, and therefore, it is an honor to have you two gentlemen with me here tonight. Thank you. Thank you for coming.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Happy to be here.

• 10:45Jocko Willink?

  So I know, well, I know I could sit here and just listen to you guys tell stories about Vietnam for the entire time, which is, which we will get to, but to start off a little bit, let's start a little bit about where you guys came from and, and how you grew up, just so we have some background. What do you think? John, you want to start?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 11:03Jocko Willink?

  And John, you're the reason, was your son connected us, right?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yes, Eric, my son, he was one that's a Marine and he's big into Jitsu, so he would love this place. So he does quite a bit of that. But yeah, he's the one that's, was in the military.

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks to him, thanks to Eric for, for linking us up and, and it's outstanding to have you here. So where'd you guys grow up, John?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I grew up in the Chicago area, north of Chicago, went to high school there and I went to a small college in Indiana, St. Joseph's College, which is in Rensselaer, about halfway between Notre Dame and Purdue.

• 11:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  And my senior year, there was a Navy recruiter came down looking for, recruiting for the Navy Flight Program.

• 11:46Jocko Willink?

  So what year is this?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  This would have been 1968.

• 11:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So Vietnam is full on.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And, and that was the year they had the lottery for the draft.

• 11:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  And I got the paper, I started at 365, looking for my number. And I said, geez, I missed it. So I started at the top, went through it again. I says, they don't have my number in here. And I flipped the paper over. The first number picked, I believe, was May 8th. The second number picked was April 24th, which was my birthday. So there's no doubt where I was going. And at the same time, I was looking for a job, you know, graduating from college and everything. And one of the first questions they asked is, well, what's your draft status? And I said, well, it's A1. And most people say, well, why don't you come back after your service? And then I interviewed with Burroughs Corporation. They never asked the question and I never provided the information and I got hired.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  So I got hired by Burrows, graduated, started working with them. In the meantime, I passed this flight exam down in college and he said, "Well, now you need to go up to Glenview for an interview and a physical." And I lived probably twenty minutes from Glenview in north of Chicago. So I said, "This is great." So I went up to Glenview. My mean, real reason for going up there was on Saturday night, I'd go down to Rush Street for the night and this, I was back home. So I did that, went through the physical and everything went fine. And I didn't hear anything for a while, you got to take something, go through the process. And then I started working at Burrows.

• 13:20Jocko Willink?

  What kind of company was Burrows?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Burrows was a computer company, sold calculators, adding machines at the time. And so I started working with them.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, computer company in nineteen sixty-eight, it's a little bit of a stretch, right?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Well, well, the calculators, adding machines, things like, but they did become one of the larger computer companies, competing against IBM. In fact, later in my career, I had sold the largest computer that Burrows made at the time to the University of Chicago Medical Centers, just before they merged with Spirit.

• 13:49Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  But that's, we're off the track of that. So anyway, I started working, then I got a notice from the Army to come in for my Army induction physical. About a week after that, I got a call from the Navy saying, "Congratulations, you've been selected for the Navy's flight program." And I says, "Well, I just started a job. I can't do this." And the guy says, "Son, you're in the Navy. When would you like to report?" And I says, "Well, what's the latest date you could give me?" And it was October, I think October eighteenth. I says, "Okay, I'll take that." So now I gotta go in and tell my boss, "I'm gonna go in the Navy." So I went in early one morning, cause he was always in early, and sat down, talked to him, says, "Joe, I went through this program

• 14:34Speaker 01

  and I've been selected for the Navy's flight program." As it turned out, he was a Marine fighter pilot during World War II. And he says, "Hey, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. You can't pass it up. Burrows will always be here." So I worked the summer with them and at the end, they had a little party for me, had this big cake, they had a bunch of little airplanes on and, and gave me a kind of a nail clipper kit that I have to this day. And so that's how I ended up in the Navy.

• 15:04Jocko Willink?

  When you were, when you were growing up, so you were going to high school in like the early nineteen sixties?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yes, I graduated sixty-three from the high.

• 15:12Jocko Willink?

  And it sounds like you were pretty, uh, you, you had a plan, you know, you wanted a job, you kinda had a, you, you knew what you, you knew that you were gonna move forward in a positive way.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yes, very much so, yes. Well, and my, my father was, was in a corporate world in business, and as a side story, he was actually Eisenhower's personal mess sergeant all during World War Two. He went over as Patton's mess sergeant, Eisenhower found out about him, brought him on his staff. And so he was with him for four years, and I might as well tell this story.

• 15:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. No, no wonder, you know, I, there was some conflict between Eisenhower and Patton. He took his best freaking cook.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  And so, uh, and finally, before my dad passed away, we got him to write his memoirs, uh, just for the family. And Carl, many of our friends have read it. And, uh, in there, uh, at one point, he was coming back to the States. And so he asked people on his staff, would you like to come back to the States? And of course, all his-

• 16:15Jocko Willink?

  So this was Eisenhower was coming back to the States?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, to meet with Roosevelt, for just like a week or so. Of course, all his moves are top secret, so he wrote a letter to my mother and says, "Meet me at DC at this hotel," and it's all coded. So he came back and of course, nine months later, I'm around. And of course, my mother lived in Elmira, New York, that's where I was born. And, uh, of course, nobody knew my dad had been home.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Talk in the neighborhood.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, talk in the neighborhood.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Over the bed fits.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  So anyway, Eisenhower bought me a war bond. And at some point, they'd cashed that in. I wish it had kept, it'd have been really worth something today. But I do have the letter, signed by Eisenhower, authorizing the purchase of that war bond when I was born.

• 16:58Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  But my dad served on his staff for about four and a half years. I was probably a year old before I ever saw my father. But he thinks the world of Eisenhower and says he's never saw Eisenhower do anything that would challenge his integrity, his honesty, or his reputation.

• 17:17Jocko Willink?

  It's impressive. You don't hear that very much anymore these days.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  No, you don't. We could use Eisenhower now.

• 17:22Jocko Willink?

  Be nice.

• 17:25Jocko Willink?

  All right, Carl.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:27Jocko Willink?

  Where the heck did you come from?

• 17:29Speaker 02

  I was born a poor black child. I actually, uh, uh, believe it or not, I was born and reared in the Panhandle of Texas between Memphis and Turkey, Texas and Hall County. There was a little spot of dirt and that's where I was born. And Maggie and Doo's number three child and, um, I was the first Nelson male to graduate from high school. So I went to college, they thought I was a flipping genius. I mean, that kid must know everything, right? So, um.

• 18:02Jocko Willink?

  What did your parents do for work?

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Uh, they were children of sharecroppers and sharecroppers themselves. We didn't own anything but, um, raised cattle and get a cash crop, which I always got a kick of the term cash because we never made any money on it. And that was cotton. And, uh, aren't many people that you know, I'm sure that drug a cotton sack at five, six, seven and eight and nine years old every fall. Our school started early, like in August, let out for a month in September, October, whenever the cotton was ready to harvest. And of course, we needed all the family to pick the cotton because there just wasn't enough labor. And,

• 18:48Speaker 02

  uh, so dragging a cotton sack was, uh, and of course the rate going wages those days was when you paid somebody and that wasn't often was a, what, dollar a hundred, a penny a pound for picking cotton. And, uh, my dad picked a thousand pounds one day, a long day. Most I ever got was like 200, but I was a little guy. So that's my roots. And, uh, we moved to Oregon when I was in grade school and, and, uh, it was a great relief getting away from that damn cotton. But the downside was, uh, I'm chopping and cutting wood, you know, the old story goes, I was 15 before I knew my name wasn't Get Wood.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  I had to get wood all the time. And of course, being a very wealthy family, I carried water too. We didn't have a well. Uh, we had to get water from a couple of miles away. So I'm carrying water and, um.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Sounds like a lot of ratio alder stories. My kids yawn and roll their eyes. They've heard them. But I'm really proud of my roots and it's interesting. I, my goal was to be a high school football coach. First of all, I thought I was gonna be a professional athlete. I was sure I was gonna be in NFL as a middle linebacker. Well, I did get drafted, but the real world was, there was a war going on. I had just gotten married and I thought, you know, I had a younger brother in the army in Vietnam. And this is 1966 when I graduated. And you were after John. I'm surprised by the way to hear. I was very surprised to hear

• 20:30Speaker 02

  that Tom Richards finished high school and, and John Farr. That's breaking news on the same program. You did it, Chaco. But I got a dream job. I, I thought if I don't, if I don't, I'll do the tryout in San Diego. I would do the tryout if, if I don't get a real job that I really, first-class job. I wanted a first assistant job in a high school, in a large high school in, in Oregon. And I, and I got that job. So I, I didn't go to camp. And, but then I had the guilt setting in all year long. And my brother's still serving. He's going for another tour in Vietnam. So I resigned my, I was to be

• 21:15Speaker 02

  the head football coach of Springfield High School the following fall. And it was like April, May, and I just, I couldn't do that. I resigned that job. I went, my department head, I taught boys PE and chemistry in high school. My chemistry department head was a guy named John Vogt, and John was a naval aviator. He says, what are you gonna do? And I says, I think I'll probably join the Marine Corps. I don't know. He said, no, don't do that. Go fly. So Sandpoint Naval Air Station was open in those days, up in Seattle, Washington. He says, come with me to Reserve Weekend in.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  And I went flying with him and then we hung out in the old club and I was on the stage dancing with some Polynesian ladies and I thought, I could do this. (laughing) I could do this job. So, I, I took the test and did the interview and, and I, I was in class thirty-two sixty-eight in the fall of sixty-eight in Pensacola, AOC class. And John, you were thirty-eight. Thirty-eight, sixty-eight. He was six weeks later.

• 22:19Jocko Willink?

  Okay, okay.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  So, there you go.

• 22:22Jocko Willink?

  So, did you guys meet each other after that, when you got into the actual aviation training program?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, we met in Vietnam.

• 22:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got to be friends there. He was always enough, far enough behind me that I didn't really get to know him. Only three months, but, you know, as you go through, it's pretty intensive training.

• 22:39Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  And, um, not a big socializer, nor was John, I don't think, and we worked pretty hard and so, I really got to know John in Vietnam. Matter of fact, I think, we looked in the logbook today, my logbook's somewhere in the bottom of storage in Sanger, California, but I think, we flew together probably a couple dozen times. Oh, yeah. And he was my, as we called it today, we called it a Clarence Pumpkin. Co-pilot, CP. Got it. He was my Clarence Pumpkin, so, and a damn Goodman, by the way. It's a, I don't want to make him feel too good about himself today, but he, you know, it's critical, every job in a cockpit's a critical thing, combat or not, but, uh, getting

• 23:22Speaker 02

  where you're going and all systems being, switches in the right position, and when you roll in and put me hot, that means, we know what we're gonna do with the intervalometer, whether we're gonna fly a pair, fire a pair or two pair, and keeping an eye on things as a co-pilot, besides operating the miniguns or whatever else he does. So, John was excellent and then, and having a co-pilot knows what he's doing, more than once, you have to fly with guys, and you probably have too, John. Sure have. You look over and say, "Don't touch a dang thing." (laughing) Just don't touch anything. I'll let you know when I want you to do something. But John wasn't that kind of guy. He was a, he was a... He was in the mode. He was a good guy.

• 24:04Jocko Willink?

  So, when did you guys figure out or get assigned helicopters as opposed to whatever else the Navy has to offer? Is that happening at flight school, at the end of flight school?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Well, you go through flight school and you go through primary training, which is flying the T-34, the advanced training, which is flying the T-28. It's after that, after you've done your carrier landings and your instrument flying, your formation flying, and stuff like that, you either go multi-engine jets or helos. In my situation, my class, they were needing helo pilots from Vietnam. So, they took my whole class and said, "You guys are going helos." And for me, it didn't, it wasn't burning desire for one or the other. There were some people that wanted multi-engine because they wanted to go with the airlines, or people that wanted to go jets because they wanted to go jets. And I told the guy, I says, "Well, I like to fly the big transports." And he said, "Well, then you should have

• 24:53Speaker 01

  joined the Air Force." So, going with helos was fine with me and got through the program. I'm glad I did. And I think flying in HAL 3 was probably the last of the World War II type flying. As long as you brought the plane back in one piece, they really didn't care, you know, what you did. There was not a, there were, there were rules and flight rules, but, you know, the job was to get the mission done. And that was the main thing. And whatever it took to get the mission done, that's what you needed to do.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  I, I was in flight school and my, I had my flight instruct, my primary flight instructor was a guy named, I'll say his name, Johnny Henkel. Johnny's retired in Florida. I just called him another day to thank him. I haven't talked to him since 1969. And so, I, on the Seawolf mail list that you get, comes in with addresses, numbers, I said, "There's Henkel. That's the same guy, I bet." I called him up. A lady answers the phone, "Uh, who may I say is calling?" I said, "Tell him Carl Nelson's calling, like he knows, like he remembers 42 years ago." And so, more than that, 52 years ago, I'm sorry. So, he comes on the phone cautiously like, "I'm not buying anything" type of voice. "Hello?" I said,

• 26:05Speaker 02

  "Johnny Henkel." And he says, "Who's calling?" He didn't admit to anything. Well, I got, I said, "Hey, I'm a flight student of yours from February of 1969, Softly Field, T-34." And he says, "Jesus Christ, really?" And I said, "I'm sure you remember me." And he said, "Actually, I don't." I said, "I know you don't." But here's what he did. I was getting ready to solo and I thought I was gonna fly jets because I joined, I left my teaching and coaching job, I went in the military because I wanted to serve in Vietnam, where my brother was serving. And he was serving, actually, back up the clock. When

• 26:45Speaker 02

  I got into Officer Candidate School, he was serving. Sadly, he was killed in action in November 23rd, 1968. So, 22-year-old young man, second tour, infantry, 25th Infantry. And, so, anyway, I was in a hurry to get there. I wasn't trying to get even, that wasn't my goal. I just wanted to serve and I wanted to get to Vietnam and I thought jets was the only way to get there. I knew I couldn't do it in the transport. I didn't want to fly mail to Saigon. Oh, God bless the mail guys, but... And so, I read about, there was a pool in advanced training in Mississippi. I thought, "Oh, my God." And then Nixon's

• 27:29Speaker 02

  trying to stop the war. Good Lord, that guy's trying to ruin my plan. So, I got, I was pretty depressed. What was the pool? What do you mean there was a pool? Well, in flight training, they try to keep them moving through quickly, that they're on a schedule to get students through with a syllabus, every flight from primary to advanced. And after advanced, I mean, after primary, you go to Meridian, Mississippi to advanced jet training, or you go to the... Ellison. Yeah, the T-28 flying, where they're preparing you for fixed wing or helicopter, or for multi-engine helicopter. And so, that's where the decision was made, after you finish

• 28:13Speaker 02

  primary and softly field VT-1, they called it, the T-34 Mentor. So...

• 28:21Speaker 02

  I was, you know, I'm getting down to about three or four more flights to go and I and and a pool would be where there was a weather hold up or a maintenance hold up or whatever and the students were backed up. Got it. And so instead of getting through Meridian, which was kind of intermediate training, instead of getting through Meridian in six weeks, it might be three, four, or five months. And I thought, good lord, I will never get out of here because after Meridian you got to go to Kingsville and Beville and then you get your wings and then you go to Arag and it, you know, it's a long time. I didn't have much time. From the time I started flight school until I got my wings, it was 11 months and nine days. I was in a hurry. It was an

• 29:04Speaker 02

  18-month program. John went through pretty quickly, too. I was in a hurry. Well, that day, Hankel says, what's, what's wrong? You seem a little down. So then I'm way down. Here's the deal. They got a pool and Meridian, I'll never get out of this damn place and the president's going to stop the war. What am I going to do? This is awful. And I gave up my great coaching job and he says, what are you doing tonight? I said, I'm studying, sir. I wasn't studying. He says, come to my house. Gave me the address. I go to his house. My wife and I, and this is, you know, he's a JG, pretty important guy when you're an ensign. Yeah. And he's got his wings and everything. And I thought, wow, you know, I'm going

• 29:44Speaker 02

  to an officer's house and he's a senior officer. I got there and we have, I don't know what we had for dinner. I don't remember. I was just nervous, you know, and what do I do? How do I act? Trying to remember all the charm school stuff they told us. Well, he brings out eight-millimeter movies. Hal 3 movies. Hmm. And I went, oh, my God, where, what is that? And he told me and I went, man, I would, I, I flew out of his house and I flew all the way through to get my wings at Ellison. And then I sweated Ellison because it, my week to get my wings, they only have two slots for Hal 3. Can you believe that? Two slots.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Buzzy Bazell and I, Buzzy passed, great guy, great friend, but Dick Buzzell and I got the orders.

• 30:34Jocko Willink?

  So was that the first time you heard of HAL 3?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  First time I heard of HAL 3 was from Henkel at VT1 when he showed me the home movies. And I didn't tell anybody about it, like my secret. I wanted, I wanted to make sure I got the job. I'm not giving any leads to anybody. So it was a blessing and I'll tell you, I'm talking too much and I'm getting this book for John here, but greatest thing that probably not, outside of the birth of my two daughters, the greatest thing that happened to me because of the mission was incredible, incredible guys to fly with. And working with SEAL teams and with the boats, really a mission, we were needed and there's not a better

• 31:21Speaker 02

  mission on earth than that, I thought. It was.

• 31:26Jocko Willink?

  When you get assigned to HAL 3 out of flight school, where do you go?

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing we had to do is we had to go to Fort Rucker for three weeks for gunnery training. Cause the Navy didn't have any gunnery training for the helos or anything. The Army had that. So we spent three weeks in Fort Rucker, which is in Alabama, went through gunnery training. Then we had to go through SERE school for escape and evasion and that. So we went through that. And that was interesting. And I did mine in Little Creek and actually was out in the field in Coronado. And I can remember after that in your, out there for about three or four days and coming back, they were on a bus bringing us back to the base after this. Then they stopped at this hamburger place.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  And I hadn't had anything to eat, you know, for three days. So went in, got a cheeseburger and I can taste that cheeseburger till today. The best cheeseburger I've ever had. And, but then we got back and then you got orders. It was actually about six months from the time we finished flight school before I got to Vietnam, which was the first of August. And I got my wings in February. It was two of us that got our wings. The other was a marine pilot and he was flying Cobras and he was actually killed in Vietnam.

• 32:46Jocko Willink?

  Did Hal III have any presence in America? Like was there a headquarters here or anything? So you didn't even, you was, that's it? You're just kinda on your own, working through the system?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Actually, the squadron was commissioned and decommissioned in Vietnam.

• 33:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, it's like the only one that's commissioned, recommissioned in a combat zone. So there's, but there's no presence, no headquarters back here, nothing.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:11Jocko Willink?

  So you don't even meet your team until you get to Vietnam?

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got there.

• 33:16Jocko Willink?

  To Ben Tui, right.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  I just had the pleasure, by the way, I go back to Louisiana annually because, and I'll say it here, one of my, not named to be unnamed, but one of my door gunners, unfortunately, is in prison in Angola, not a good place to be, Louisiana, life. And while on this trip, I got to meet a guy, 92-year-old Robert Spencer, retired Navy captain, the first commanding officer of Hal III. He stood the squadron up.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yes, he did.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  And he's, if you saw the scramble, the Sea Wolves, he's in there. And quite a character. And you go to his house, and he'll smoke 25, 30 cigarettes in an hour, and I was there, and drank eight or 10 bottles of beer, right there, in a little cooler, right next to his chair, right next to his chair. Great guy, great guy.

• 34:11Jocko Willink?

  How, what's the, oh, go ahead.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Well, I was gonna say he's 92, he's probably doing pretty well. But, so my, my first, when I got to Hal III, then we got to Ben Tui, and then you had the, first part of it, you have these fam flights, just to get familiar with the area. And one of my first flights, I was just telling Carl about this today, that one of my first flights was to hoist a three-hauler down to that six.

• 34:39Jocko Willink?

  Expand on that.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  So, so then Carl says, "Well, we built our three-holder." So, the three-holder was the outhouse.

• 34:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  And they didn't have one down at Det 6, because Det 6 was just kind of forming up. And so, went there and dropped it off and it was a...

• 34:55Jocko Willink?

  That was your first combat mission?

• 34:57Speaker 01

  I guess one of my first missions, yes.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Was it a combat zone? He was hauling the crap up, slinging it.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  But then, so one of my later flights was about a month later, was when we had one of our Hilo's get shot down. And this was at BC Lake, which was down, down near where Det 6 was, down by Sun and Dock. And I was flying with a guy that was in his last couple of weeks in Hell 3. And most of the time, they're just doing easy stuff. We got this call, the Hilo was down. We went in to get the people out. Everybody was killed. It was in a kind of a swamp area. We were able to get one of the bodies out. And we're at the hall, this time, we're taking fire. And I was shooting an N16 out of the... And I was a copilot, I'm shooting it outside. We finally get to one body, we get out, some Cobras came and able to get us out. Then they brought in some Val 4, the black ponies.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  And they kind of cleared the area. And then they were able to secure it and get them out the next day. But when we get back and landed, probably a foot behind where I was sitting, there was a round of, five rounds, right behind where I was sitting. So, that was my very first combat.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  That, you'll hear about BC Lake. What was that date, John?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  That was September... September 15th.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Big, major, major, major operation. We lost four Sea Wolves that day.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  All from Det 6.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  So, then, two weeks later, I was assigned to Det 6 as one of the replacement pilots. So, it was funny, I, first I take the three-holder down there, then they got this mission where they lost some of the pilots, and then I'm, I am assigned to Det 6. So, I was like destined to be there.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  And you said to them?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  I was the guy that brought you your first three-hoeler.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  I showed up and I said, "I brought your three-hoeler. I'm John Farren." "Oh, okay, come on."

• 36:50Speaker 01

  And so, we were there, and actually, Son and Doc got blown up, so we want to go into that story, on the 20th of October. I got there the 8th of October, and we got mortared, and the Son and Doc was on the river, and we had, we didn't have any perimeter around where the helo pad was, but they had all the barges and that for the swift boats. So, all the swift boats were down there, big barges with fuel and everything. It was about, you know, 20, 30, you know, a couple hundred feet from where the helo pad was. And one night, you can, it's very distinct sound when you've got the incoming. So, we heard the incoming, ran to the bunkers, and it was late, early evening, and I was actually reading Catch 22. I was about halfway through it. I still, I haven't, still haven't finished the book.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Well, that's ironic.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Isn't it?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  So, there was a little lull in the action. We ran to the, and I was on flight status, and I ran to the helos, and we got airborne, and we flew the rest of the night. And we caught, then health, we scrambled that one, they were just down.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  I was there.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  And Earl and Carl, we flew all night long, just putting in strike after strike, going back, rearm, refuel. Finally, in the morning, we kind of got it secured, we went back and landed on the pad, and they had come in and ramsacked their shacks and everything. We wanted to make sure, get the, see if the people were still in the bunker. They actually had got into the barges and got on swift boats and got out to sea. So, everybody, I think there was only one person that was killed that was on one of the barges. But halfway through the night, they finally hit the fuel barge, and see this huge fireball come up. And you could see it from down where that one was, which was, you know, probably 50 clicks away or so.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  And, uh... Easy to navigate there, look at a big barge flight, yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And then, the next day, we found out there was five rockets pointed at the helos, because you're most vulnerable just as you're starting to lift off. And for some reason, he messed up, they didn't work, but they didn't go off. And we found out afterwards, we were first detachment to ever take off during a mortar attack and make it.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Another record. Yep.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  And so then, so now, now-

• 39:00Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever start to feel like you had some kind of black cloud over your head? Cause right now, we got rounds hitting behind you, replacement of guys that were killed. You got the first person to take off during a mortar attack.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  This is only in the first two months, three months, and uh-

• 39:14Jocko Willink?

  No wonder you didn't finish reading Catch 22, cause you realized you were freaking crazy.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. But the thing is, and we, Carl and I were talking about this the other day, he says, you know, we were there to do a job and do a mission. So you never thought about those things. You never thought about the negative, you know, what could happen? You maybe years later, you think, boy, I had some close calls, and we did. But not when it was happening. When you were, it's like the air, you know, when they say the pilots are always so calm, you're always flying the airplane, and that's all you're focused on, is to fly the airplane. When the engines go out or that, he says, well, why aren't they screaming or anything? Cause they're focused on doing their job, which is to fly the plane safely and land it.

• 39:51Jocko Willink?

  How well did you guys feel you were trained when you showed up there?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Highly trained. I, I think we were some of the better pilots. And uh, cause we were very trained and we'd done this a million times. And flying in combat, it was a little more intense. And we were, you were focused on your job. I, I think the Navy does a great job of training their pilots. You know, just doing the carrier landings was a piece of cake. I says, what's so hard about this? Of course, we did it on a, a beautiful day, calm seas. But we had shot, you know, probably a thousand approaches simulated at land. So you get out to sea and it wasn't, it was nothing hard about it at all. Of course, at night, in rough seas, that's a different story, but uh-

• 40:34Speaker 02

  The, the HAL 3 had nine detachments in, throughout the Mekong Delta. Strategically placed, all the way from Cambodian border down to where I was.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Down in the lower Kamal Peninsula. And if you were flying, if you got in trouble at night, needed a matter of back at night, or an advanced tactical support base, an ATSB, kind of a triangle shape, and they got Constantine all around it, and they got hit all the time at night, they scrambled the Sea Wolves. And we would fly, we were all weather pilots. Uh, in those days, most of the Army guys were not all weather pilots, they were VFR daylight pilots, not all of them, most of them.

• 41:16Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, by all weather, that includes nighttime?

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Nighttime and rain, there would be monsoon season, you could barely see in front of your face. We're flying instruments in an old UH-1B, but we were all instrument trained. And we were heavily instrument trained. After we got our, through our primary training in T-28, we had instrument training there, we went through another squadron, VT-6, nothing but instrument training. So, we got all, we got transition to the aircraft, precision and acrobatics, and then we got over to do instruments, and then did instruments again, and then went to do FCLPs, field landing carrier practice, a lot of them, before you go hit the boat. In those days, every naval aviator had wings on, was carrier qualified.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Not anymore. We're saving money now. So, not anymore.

• 42:08Jocko Willink?

  And, and obviously, the Army's just not even landing on carriers at all, and, and you don't, I mean, just in the regular Navy, you gotta fly a helicopter to do a re, to do a resupply at sea, and there's, that deck's moving, and you gotta do all weather anyways, and there's no Horizon half the time and everything else, whereas, you don't necessarily have to contend with that in some of the other services.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  It was always interesting to me, when an air cav package would come down to where I was, Solid Anchor Seafloat, but Solid Anchor wouldn't have the runway, they would come and get there by nine, and they usually leave by five, gotta get back. And, and when it, when it gets dark, you know, okay. Uh, uh, but to be fair, when you mentioned Song and Doc, I had a memory, as I was a copilot in those days, and, um, I was copilot for, to go unnamed, an ONC. And, we usually flew at 800 feet.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  And he had to be 1,200 feet that night. I said, "Sir, we're getting nosebleeds up here. Our rockets are burning out before they hit the ground." But, anyway, that's what Son and Dock reminds me of.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  So after that, they brought in an LST and we did, we flew off an LST the rest of the time that we're down there at Son and Dock.

• 43:31Jocko Willink?

  After that, so that that base got kind of overrun then?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they, they got it secure and they, they still kept the, the shipboats there and everything.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  But they did overrun that night, didn't they?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Yes, they did, they did.

• 43:43Jocko Willink?

  And then they left? I'm assuming they left?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Well, we secured the area. We got the, the area secured again and we went back in. But then they moved the helopads. Well, we didn't keep the helipad. They brought in an LST and we flew off the LST the rest of the time.

• 43:59Jocko Willink?

  So, so going back to showing up, you show up there, you feel like you're, you're, you're saying you were well-trained and then what was the kind of on-the-job training procedure to get you guys where, you know, you start, do you start off as a copilot every time? Every new guy starting off as a copilot?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Yes. We didn't have enough time. Your minimum time for aircraft commander was 500 total flight hours. Most of us showed up out of training command with 250, 260, 270. So you transition in any squadron in the Navy, when you get there new, you have to transition to the type. You go through what's called a RAG, replacement, a lot of acronyms as you know, replacement air group. And so you go to the RAG, set you up on all the systems, fly the airplane, and you're a copilot. When you have enough time and you qualify, you become aircraft commander. And with HAL 3, uh, once you show the capability to, to manage and control two aircraft and

• 44:56Speaker 02

  tactically be knowledgeable, you become a fire team leader, FTL, another acronym. So John was an FTL.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, most of us were.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:07Jocko Willink?

  And then what, at what point did you realize who, who you were supporting? When you saw that, when you saw the 8mm home movies where he's saying, "Hey, we're supporting the SEAL teams over there and let me tell you what the SEAL teams are?"

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, he did and I never heard of a SEAL. I had no idea what a SEAL was and I forgot what it was and I had to ask him the next day. What did you say they were? And he said, well, they're like, like frogmen. I said, yeah, I know what movies in World War II. I knew what frogmen were. And he said, well, they've evolved from that, from UDT. They're still a UDT, but they're, and, and then that was 1968. The SEALs hadn't been around a long time as SEALs. And, uh, yeah, and I, uh, remember going to, first of all, Sea Float was a bunch of barges tied together and, and they're, and the, and the, uh, the Bot, the Bode River, I think it was, in the Grand Canyon Peninsula.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  And, uh, it was great because they had two SEAL platoons there. We lived on these barges. You, the, the Johns were, you, the river was rushing down below this way at morning and this way in the afternoon. And, and all night long, you couldn't sleep at first when you're a new guy because they're setting off concussion grenades all night. And the next morning, many mornings, there'd be a sapper that was trying to get there to blow the place up, laying over on the bank, bloated up in the sun, you know? And, uh, and a couple of times they got sappers on the boat, but they got them. The SEALs got them before they did any damage. But it's amazing, uh, the perseverance of some of those characters.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  I think the, the primary mission was we were, we were the close air support for the swift boats going up and down the canals. And if you ever go, I've gone to places and talked to somebody and he was on the swift boats and he found out I was in hull three and he's buying me beers the rest of the night. So they, the swift boat guys really, and the SEALs as well, supported the Sea Wolves.

• 47:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, the, the, it's, it's, uh, legendary to, to make sure you give nothing but full respect to the Sea Wolves when you're in the SEAL teams, for sure. Uh, so what's the, what's a normal mission look like? How are you getting the tasking? What do you, are you, are you meeting with guys beforehand? Are you meeting with the SEAL platoons and going over, hey, here's where we want to get dropped off? Well, how's that, what's that look like?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Well, Carl can speak to that because he had, he was with the SEALs. On Death Six, we didn't have any SEALs with us. We just had the swift boats. And there wasn't a lot of coordination with the swift boats, except when they got in trouble, they call us up and scramble us for, for close air support when they got in trouble. But the SEALs, those missions were coordinated, and I'll let Carl speak to that.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  They had. Many types of missions, as you know, Jaco, they, and many times, they would just be advising us, "Look, we're gonna go in at night, we're gonna go by boat, you know, they've got a kit Carson scout that's gonna lead them in, intelligence says XYZ is here," and they would let us know where they're gonna be, and then coordinate where they're gonna be, and, and, and I'll tell a story here about John Sandos, I'll use your name, John, and outstanding officer, and the good news on him is he operated often and heavy, and nightly it seemed like, I don't think he got it, there was one Purple Heart in his group, but he was a heavy operator,

• 48:34Speaker 02

  and hats off to him on that one, so, but he did a night operation, one night, he'd just know where he was gonna be, and I was, we were on ready five, just scramble aircraft, all, our gears all in, we've done all the checks, we've cranked it once, it's ready to go, and you literally hop in there and you're airborne, and like, you know, I've heard the term "three minutes," we made, we got off a lot quicker in three minutes lots of times, and we got airborne, and it was black, literally black, well, we'd pre-brief John, we gave John, uh, what, the strobe, what was the strobe called that we had, John, that we carried, the little strobes that, it had a guard around it, and it was-

• 49:15Jocko Willink?

  Oh, a directional strobe?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, and he had one, and he had a Prick 90 radio, mine, that I gave him, 'cause it was small, and it was easy to operate, and so, John himself, tough seal, he's out there, and the enemy's over here, and freedom's over here, and John is between both of them, and he's gonna defend, and he's out there, uh, Sea Wolf 13, uh, "Put some fire in, uh, northeast, about 3, about, uh, uh, 030, and just walk it in, and I'll tell you," they wanted to stop, okay, so, we, we, I rolled in, and started laying rockets

• 49:56Speaker 02

  in, and it was hilarious, 'cause he goes, "Okay, a little closer, a little closer," uh, and his voice starts raising, "A little bit closer, that's close enough!"

• 50:09Speaker 02

  And I could hear, I could hear rockets going off in the background and I was, here I am safe and sounded eight hundred feet or whatever it was, six hundred feet and it was hilarious. And I never let him forget that, ever.

• 50:23Jocko Willink?

  So when you're flying at, I mean, it's really, uh, how black it can be at night, like, it can be so dark outside. So when it's that dark, you're just flying pure instruments? You're just looking at yours, you're not even looking out, outside, cause there's nothing to see.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Unless you're looking at fire coming up at you.

• 50:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  That, and some, sometimes.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Then it's real bright.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Sometimes you get lucky and there's a moon out. If there's a moon out, then you get flashes of light off the squigglies and rivers and streams and, and, but yeah, there's nights out there when you're like this and that's when you have to have a co-pilot who knows what he's doing, who can navigate, cause you're busy as hell keeping that thing on altitude, on heading and realize you've got a wingman who's gotta have discipline too. He's gotta know the heading you're on and the altitude. You've got anti-collision light, top and bottom, so you can keep track of each other. But it's, uh, it can get hairy out there at night and it's, uh, you know, some guys, you look over one time, I mentioned Earl Schott's name, Earl was co-pilot of mine many times, good guy, but he was over

• 51:30Speaker 02

  there like this. He got the leans pretty bad because the semicircle canal is kinda getting messed up and you think you're level, but you're not when you start, when you start getting vertical. He's over there like this, I said, okay Earl, it was just a, we weren't in combat or anything, we were just flying and he's over there leaning sideways. I said, okay Earl, you got it. He said, oh, that's okay. I said, no Earl, you got it. And I'm over there laughing, the crew's laughing, but, uh, Earl, excellent pilot, but once in a while you can get them like that. But, uh, no, it is dark and it's like, um, how do you say, the inside of somebody's rectum? How do you say that nicely? It's dark.

• 52:08Jocko Willink?

  I think you just did it.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  But, but, but once again, if you do it enough, you, you know how to do it and you're, you're comfortable doing it.

• 52:17Jocko Willink?

  So what were the Swift, let's talk about the Swift boat operations, because those guys were pushing up and pushing the envelope into enemy territory. What, what was that op tempo like?

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Well, there's scrambling on you to go to where their coordinates were, then you were just putting in fire. And then, and once again, you were, they would say, shoot right over our heads and say, well, why don't you move, pull back a little bit, just to make sure. But those, those would get intense and I think, I think you saw quite a bit of that when you did the, the documentary on scramble of Seawolves. And that's what it was like. We were out there supporting them, putting in close fire to them, just so they could get back out of that situation.

• 52:53Jocko Willink?

  And you mentioned, John, you mentioned the, the World War II attitude when it comes to flying and fighting and, I mean, I, I get that, but can you, can you talk a little bit more about, I, I know that you, the way you all felt about, A, your gunners, the guys that were on your birds, but also your maintenance crews that were keeping your birds up and running and using beer cans to patch them up and whatever else. So that's, that, that's sort of the World War II mentality that you're talking about where you said there were rules, but?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  But you had to do the mission. Right. And I think that's was part of it. Every, it was a team effort. So you talk about the, the gunners and the maintenance people, we all worked very well together. We all had our part to do and it was all coordinated and it all came together. And we had to get, make the gunners do their job, the maintenance people. And it just, it was a team effort. And, and everybody supported the team and all had the, the same mission to do, even though it was a different part. It's like a football team, you know, you got your job to do and it doesn't work unless you're doing your part of the job. And, uh, that's what we did. It just, uh, worked.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, and you ought to know Jaco, is that... A fire team in most attachment would come on for 24 on, 24 off. For 24 on, you're on for scrambles. You get your meals and you get your rest when you can. But you're on duty from noon to noon, usually we did it. But wherever, but, and when you're, and anything that happened during that time, uh, your, your crews at the ready, you're, you're all briefed and by briefed, you go down to, to what we call TOC with the Army, the, the Operations Center. We know where are their, where their artillery's at. We know where the units, all the units are. We know what their radio frequencies are. We know what the planned operations are.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  We have a general idea where the bad guys are. But most of the time, when we weren't actually involved in a combat operation, we'd be patrolling and basically looking for trouble. That's what we always did. And we'd usually find it. And, uh, sometimes people get, it never, I can't, I have a hard time thinking about a flight that I was on that we didn't get shot at. I, I'm sure there were some, but it's, it was rare that we didn't get shot at. And we wanted them to shoot at us because we could shoot back. We could know where they were.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Didn't have to call for a clearance if they shot at you, you could just return fire.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  In my AO, our AO down at Det 1 before I went to Det 6 was John. And the AO we had was literally a free fire zone. We could shoot any eligible age male. Now, we didn't. We were, and that's not how we operated. You don't go, we didn't go blowing up hooches and shooting randomly and shoot it. We didn't shoot it, we didn't do that, honestly, ever. I mean, you do that on somebody's crew and you're gonna get your butt kicked off and back to, back to home guard in a heartbeat. We were professional, but.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Elsible age male, could be that we just, we might just take his champound out under him, you know, because he's in the wrong area. We don't kill the guy, but he's swimming. And if it's a guy who gets stupid and starts shooting back, well, then we erase that guy. But again, we were pre-briefed, we knew where everything was, what was going on. And more often than not, we could brief TOC as well as they could brief, we could get the frequencies from them, but the intel, we could feed to them. We knew what was going on everywhere.

• 56:38Jocko Willink?

  So in a 24-hour period where you're on, so you said you do 24-hour on and then 24-hour off? In the 24-hour period that you're on, how much time are you in the air?

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Depends on what kind of operation you have, but I honestly, I flew a lot because I was at the opinion, the more airborne I was, the better pilot I was, the better my crew was, because everybody's doing their job. They loved it. I loved it. And the better we knew our area of operations. I have many times flown, if you say every other day is 15 days, I've flown many months for 100 to 130 hours a month. And during the day, maybe eight to 10 hours, it wasn't unusual. We, you're looking at your logbook today, and we flew together that first month at depth six.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  All day long, yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  All day long.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  That was our, that was our job is to fly. Sitting in the hooch, we're not doing our job. So we were out flying, just, even if it was just training, looking for action or looking for something, so.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  When you're day off, what are you doing? You're doing your job, whether it's ops, or admin, or maintenance, or whatever your job is, or sleeping, because you know the next day, you may not get any sleep. So you, you sleep. And, no, it was...

• 58:04Speaker 02

  We were JGs. And I remember, I was getting a fitness report debrief from my ONC, very nice man. I didn't know what a fitness report, I didn't know what it was, I saw it in class sometime. But, but I barely know what a fitness report wasn't. And he was stroking me and I didn't know it, but he, he says, "Now Carl, I know you really like this mission, you're really enjoying it." "Oh yes, sir, I mean, I was just..." He says, "But the real Navy's not like this. You're not gonna go to a squadron and have this much authority and responsibility." "I mean, we're out there deciding who lives and who dies every day." "And we're trying to make the right decision every day, I think we did." "And he was right, we got to Lake Hurst and what was it like?"

• 58:48Speaker 01

  I know, it was, so we were JGs and you're a fire team leader, you're responsible for that whole flight. You're in charge of it. Even if you got a lieutenant commander sitting next to you, you're the one that's calling the shots as a JG. Cause you're in charge of it. And that was important, I think, and I look at, people say, "What's the best period of your life?" Some say, "Oh, it was high school or college." I can honestly say, the best period of my life was the six years I spent on active duty in the Navy. The rent, the friendships you make during that period, especially in combat, are so close, closer than any other friendships I have. So like Carl and Earl and Tim Zimer, you know, we're all there, we've done the same thing together.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  And we had a reunion, what, ten years ago now, it was 2009 at my house up...

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Twelve years ago.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Twelve years ago, up in Chicago.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  He's not good at math.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  And, and Carl, well, first of all, I invited Earl and his wife up to Chicago, cause his wife had never been to Chicago, so I'll come up, we'll show you the, this big city and the bright lights and everything. And then an hour later, I get a call from Carl, says, "Well, thanks for inviting me", cause I, Earl had talked to him in the meantime. And I says, "Well Carl, you've been here before, you're always welcome." The next thing I know, I had my house full of people coming up for a reunion.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  We had fourteen guys showed up.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this was on the 4th of July.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Forrest got free food and booze, oh yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  So we got a big tent, put it up in the backyard and everything, and we had this little reunion. And John Santos, we always had a seal that every one of our unions, very small, it was just a small group of people that were together. What I found interesting about it, the first time that we did it, some of these people I hadn't seen in forty years. And so where you started was the common denominator was Vietnam. Remember this mission, remember that guy, remember that incident? By the end of the evening, it was like we'd just seen him last weekend. I was amazed at how fast you could catch up with somebody. You should do a study on that.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Well, it's like your family, you know? These guys know all your crap and they still like you. And you, they know you on bad days and good days, and I'm gonna tell a story. It's, it's one of those, this is, this ain't no, no, but it's true. He talked about being, when you're in charge of a fire team, you're in charge and, and rank matters, but rank in the cockpit goes away. You may say, "Sir, but you're in charge of the airplane." Your co-pilot's the captain, "Okay, captain, sit there, don't touch anything." That, you're in charge. And, and it's Navy regs that you, your aircraft cannot be commandeered by some guy on the ground saying, "Fly over here and do this." No.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  The only person that can doma, can doma, your, commandeer your aircraft, your aircraft commander is a flag officer, a line officer. In your back, sitting in a seat, is the only guy that can override an aircraft commander. Flag officer. So, that and mine, one night at Dead One, Captain Martin Twight, great guy, he's passed on now, he was our SEAL. He came to flag Dead One. And you know, you start flying and, and you don't mean it in a bad way, but you get your chin out and your chest out, and you're aggressive and, and no BS, you can laugh and have fun, but the mission's serious. It's no screwing around.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  So Captain Twight wanted to go on a combat flight, so he came down and, and he was my co-pilot. Of course, I sat in the left seat and respectfully let him have the right, which aircraft commander and the helicopter. My wingman was two other guys, I won't use their names, but lieutenant commander and a lieutenant. And I'm a JG, very, very, very green JG.

• 1:02:31Jocko Willink?

  So you're the junior guy in rank, but you're the, but you're the flight commander?

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  I'm the flight team leader. And we're down there at TOC and there was this army guy who I didn't like anyway. He was the captain, he didn't like me. He was just, he was just too goody goody two shoes and didn't know squat what he was talking about. So he's up there and he's briefing those eagles on Captain Dwight. He kept, you know, kissing up and I just said, stop, stop. Brief me. This is not the army. This is the Navy. The Navy, it has nothing to do with rank. It's who's the smartest guy here? And on this mission, I'm the smartest guy here. Brief me. Captain Dwight shook his head, looked down, said, Carl. He was so nice to me.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  He should have slapped me, but he didn't do that. And that army guy was mad, but he had nothing he could do about it. But that's kind of how it is. The aircraft commander is the ultimate. It's like the captain of a ship. You, what you say goes and your job is to do the right thing.

• 1:03:39Jocko Willink?

  I want to, I want to try and get a little bit better feel for the, some of the operations. And I, I mean, just the, the first operation that you were talking about going to VC Lake and you're going to recover a helicopter. Like talk us through from you get the call to you, you're leaving the scene and you got the body recovered. Was it, you know, you're sitting in your, you're sitting in the, in the, in the ready room and all of a sudden the call comes in? What does that look like?

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  No, I was on a FAM flight. So we were out flying just in the general area. And we get this call that a helo was down. We got the coordinates and we were close to the coordinates. So we were there fairly quickly.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  So we got in.

• 1:04:20Jocko Willink?

  And you have, are you always, you're always flying with a section of birds of two birds? You're always flying together?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  No, this, this was a single bird.

• 1:04:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Cause it was a, it was a.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Well, you, John was new in country and you were flying an admin flight, right?

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  You were flying a slick, flying slick.

• 1:04:35Jocko Willink?

  So flying a slick, you might.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Well, we still had, you still had door gunners. You still had the crew in the back.

• 1:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. But you might fly alone if you're doing an admin mission. You might fly with just one bird.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Like when you hoisted the three holeer down, it was just a single flight.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Cause you weren't, you weren't looking to be in, you know, a mission or combat mission per se. You were just trying to get familiar with the air. But if something happens, you gotta respond to it. And we didn't. It's Bill Belts was, it was his last week in country and he flew in and tried to get these guys out as best we could. And the.

• 1:05:05Jocko Willink?

  So Bill Belts was your, was your?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  He was the, the helicopter commander pilot.

• 1:05:11Jocko Willink?

  The one that went down or the one that you were in?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  The one I was in.

• 1:05:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So the one that you're in, it's his last week in country?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Last week in country. He's getting ready to go home and everything. But he was showing me around the area, stuff as, as a new pilot. And then we get this call that helo's down, respond to it. And the crewman in the back, once we got down low, they got, they jumped out, went over.

• 1:05:31Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you to get to, to find them, to find the down helo?

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  It was minutes.

• 1:05:36Jocko Willink?

  You have coordinates?

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Jocko Willink?

  You can see smoke. It's.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Well, we couldn't, there wasn't any smoke or anything, but it was down. It was a kind of swampy area. So there wasn't any fire. But we were close to the area. They gave us the coordinates. We were kind of right there. So we were there within, I want to say we were, you know, five, 10 minutes after, within five minutes, easy. And so we just flew in and, you know, then we, there wasn't any fire at times. So we're down there. The crew jumps out to try and get the bodies out, but they were kind of, the helo was turned and they were kind of pinned under it. They were only get, able to get one body out. We got that in the helo. In the meantime, we started taking fire. From the tree line, and that's when I was shooting the M16 at the tree line. And then we got nothing, we got the body in and then we just, then some Cobras came

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  because they had heard about the coordinates. And then they covered us as we came out.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Let me ask you, John, we're on the fly here. Two guys from DEP one, we were down to one bird because every hundred hours we had to get a new aircraft from maintenance, the major maintenance done in Bantui. So, we would do the oil changes and filter changes and so forth, but they did all the heavy stuff. But, two guys from DEP one were, Mike Legault and Rich Lambert, they came up and they got shot down that day too. Were they already shot down when you got there, or you got there first probably, didn't you?

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  I think we got there first.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  You got there first. They came in scrambled up, went in, and they had a gunship. And, uh, the bad guys, I think, had a 51 caliber.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  And they were knocking them out of the air.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  It was like a setup, it was like an ambush. Because once the first one come down, they know we're gonna try and come and get people out, so they kinda...

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  You were lucky you guys weren't shut down.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, very lucky.

• 1:07:20Jocko Willink?

  When, uh, when, when you were flying and, and Carl, you mentioned that you can't even remember operations where you didn't take fire. How often is your aircraft getting hit?

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  You know, it's, you post-flight really heavily when you get back and you can, you know, it, when you're, when you're a new guy, you can hear certain things, but when you're got experience, you can hear gunfire. You can hear it from, from 800 feet, you can hear it. You can dang sure hear it when you're breaking off target at 200 feet, but, uh, uh, back on, but anyway, the bottom line is, is that, uh, uh, we would get back on post-flight and, uh, more often than not... Um, we, by the way, we've found, we found, uh, we would find, uh, the SEALs would bring in intel stuff and it would be a drawing of a helicopter and in Vietnamese telling the bad guys where

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  to aim so they could hit the aircraft because most of the time they'd shoot at us and hit the tail section. Most, all of my hits, not all of them, but most of them were aft of the cabin. There were some in the cabin and they were uncomfortable. And sometimes, I know John got a Purple Heart and he can tell that story. And I got one, Earl got one, but I mean, it's no big deal. I mean, you get it because you got shot and it's not, nothing necessarily heroic. People think a big, a Purple Heart's a big deal. It's not a big deal. Uh, I'd give mine to anybody who wants it if I can have the hole back. Period.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  So since you brought the topic up, uh, this is something-

• 1:08:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, let's, let's, let's talk about-

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Carl and I talk about this all the time. And, uh, so we, Carl was on Det Six at that point and we were out and Det One only had one of their birds. They had one in maintenance. So we went down to Det One and we formed a three plane formation. And so I was the pilot of one, Carl was a pilot of one, this Earl shot was a pilot of the third. So we went out, took some fire, found a target. And I'm not sure who was first one in. I think-

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  Me. He forgot to add, there was a heavy fire team and I was a fire team leader.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  So Carl's-

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Those two guys were doing everything I asked them to do. Most of the time.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  So Carl's the first-

• 1:09:34Jocko Willink?

  So heavy fire team means you got three birds?

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Three birds.

• 1:09:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  So Carl's the first one in.

• 1:09:38Jocko Willink?

  And you're going in to do what? What are you going in to do?

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  We're putting a strike in.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Putting a strike in. So if I was-

• 1:09:43Jocko Willink?

  When you say putting a strike in, meaning you're going to lay fire down onto-

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Shooting rockets.

• 1:09:48Jocko Willink?

  Is it, is it close air support necessarily or is it some-

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  Wasn't a SEAL team. We were just taking some ground fire and we're going to put it out. Basically.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  And so you're, you're rolling in and then Carl was the first one in, Earl was the second one in. So Carl peels off and Earl's putting down fire. So as he's peeling off, that's when the plane's supposed to be putting, the second plane's supposed to put down on the fire. So Earl put down the fire. By that time Carl's supposed to come around. Then when Earl comes off to target, I'm putting fire down. I came off the target and that's when I got hit.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  Hey, oh.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  And so, so we argued today. I says, Carl, you didn't cover me coming off target. And he says, well, you were out of position. I said, I wasn't out of position, you were out of position.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  Ideally.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  So I got hit.

• 1:10:32Jocko Willink?

  So where'd you get hit?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  I got hit in the foot. So the round came up and knocked the tips of my two toes, toes off, tips of my toes off on my right foot. And then you saw the scramble of sea wolves? My gunner that day was.

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  He got hit the same time?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Kid.

• 1:10:49Jocko Willink?

  He was what?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Kid. Uh, and the scramble of sea wolves at the end, where the round came up, cut his mic cord, came out, dotted his helmet and dotted the I on kid written on the back of his helmet.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  It was in the movie.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  It was in the movie.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  And it cut the back of his neck like he cut it with a knife.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  How's that?

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  So he gets hit, I look back and I'm trying to call him and he's not responding. I look back and all I see is blood. I go, oh geez. He gives me a thumbs up, a big smile and starts shooting again. And the round just, you cut the mic cord, just grazed the back of his neck. And of course, when you cut your neck or head, it just bleeds like crazy. And then, uh, so then we go back, land, Carl comes over, picks me up and carries me into the infirmary.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  The real story, should we hear the real story?

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's, so to this day, we argue who's out of position, but we're the best of friends.

• 1:11:45Jocko Willink?

  It's interesting, that's like in a SEAL platoon, that's, that's one of the basic maneuvers we do. Like one person shooting, as that person rolls out, there's someone that's picking up fire right behind him. As that person rolls out, there's someone picking up fire right here. That's the way it's supposed to be, Carl. That's the way it's supposed to be.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  In a racetrack.

• 1:12:02Jocko Willink?

  Thank you, Jaco.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  In a racetrack pattern, this veteran at that time, I probably had. Eight hundred missions and Farrar barely knows how to pre-flight, yet he's in position and I'm not. But what's funny is, we got back and, and I didn't know that Purington was wounded. And we got back and landed and, uh, John was, "Oh, oh," I thought, "My God, he's, probably has a body shot. Check his body, check the blood." And I couldn't find any blood anywhere. I'm looking, nothing, not, he's dry. I'm thinking, I'm patting him down. And I picked him up and gently carried him six hundred yards down the infirmary, the length of the base. He's moaning the whole way. Meantime, Purington's bleeding and he's walking, chatting the whole time.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  But John's, John's moaning, not that, he must have a brain wound I can't see or something.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  It's the symbol I put up all the time.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  And we get down there, he takes his boot off and, "Ah, ah," and he shot in the big toe. So Earl calls you, Earl calls you, Earl calls him Nine Toes, that's his name.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  So then I get medevac'd up to Ventui to the third surge, which is the army hospital up there. And I, I obviously wasn't that badly wounded. And they put me in the back room. And, uh, that night, everybody came over to see me. I had a little nightstand table. I must've had thirty, uh, scotch and waters on that little table. Cause everybody brought me a drink. Did you save your boots, the boots? I do, I do. And I was very lucky. The doctor said, cause it came, it was, we had steel toe boots, but it came up through the bottom and he said, "Just missed a steel toe." If it had hit the steel toe, that would've ricocheted around and, uh, taken all your toes out.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  John has the boot on a nice little stand in his living room, his enter, where there's this sprinkler around it and music and so forth. He's got a plaque there.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  But I do, and I have, actually I have the round that came up. Okay, where'd you recover the round from?

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  He's got the round.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  So, it came up, went through my foot and then hit me on the side of the leg. And I didn't, you know, you can only feel one pain at a time. It hit me on the side leg and when I was getting out of the helo, I saw this round down by the collective. So I picked it up and put it in my pocket. It was about two days later, I was getting out of bed and I bumped my knee and I go, geez, that really hurts. And I had a big welt about this big round on the inside of my thigh there. And so you can only feel one pain. I was just feeling my toes at the time. A couple of days later, I was feeling the other one. But that was the round.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Who was the CO then?

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Oh, also the change of command. That day I got shot was a change of command. And Captain Berkstrom was taking over from Captain Dwight. And the tradition was that the first guy that got shot, the CO had to buy him a bottle of scotch.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  So he did it for a bottle of scotch?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  So we had an officers meeting a month later or something like that. And sure enough, he gave me a bottle of scotch. Bought it back to that and shared it with the, with the team.

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Was it cheap? I can't remember.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  I know, it was a jewelers or something like that.

• 1:15:10Jocko Willink?

  So what about you, Carl? When did you get shot? What happened to you?

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  Oh, Earl and I were together and we just, we just, it was minor. It was minor stuff, but I bled a lot. I was, we took a round through the cockpit.

• 1:15:22Jocko Willink?

  What was, what was the operation?

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  You know, actually, we were just on a patrol. We weren't actually even put in a strike. You could take a round randomly. And it happened.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  One time when we were taking a, a platoon to insert them, the radioman got shot on the way in. With one of Richard's guys, Tom Richard's guys. But we just took a random round, as I recall, and, and Earl and I took, both took flak in the face where it bounced off of the center divider and the windscreen. So we got glass in our face and metal in our face. And it looked pretty bad until we shaved the beard and it actually wasn't bad at all. It was minor. So I didn't limp anywhere. I didn't have to be carried down to third, to third search. Nobody bought me booze at all. Nobody cared, you know, and I didn't care.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  But when they treat you and you're wounded and they treat you and they stitch you or whatever, you get a Purple Heart. That's what the Honorable John Kerry figured out.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  It hurt more getting sewn up than it did getting shot. They had to pull the skin around my toes and stuff. And I had to soak my foot for about a week to make sure there's no infection.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  We gave him tons of grief over that and we love Johnny, he's a great guy, one of the best guys I know and a gentleman. I don't have many guys I can call gentlemen that I know, at least not Seawolves, anyway.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  But I was back flying in two weeks.

• 1:16:49Jocko Willink?

  And at what point, so at what point did you guys link up and start, were you at the same debt? Was that debt six you said?

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:56Jocko Willink?

  And what caused that, what caused you two to be, to start working together? What had happened?

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  Well, I, I was a very experienced fire team leader and what they do is a, when you first get to HAL 3 in those days, you had a month or two in the home guard and you kind of transitioned, you already transitioned to the H1 because you flew the H1 in flight school. But you transition to the mission and build your time, get to know the area of operations, you fly to every debt, taking mail and parts and people. And that month or two you do that. And then your detachment, you make aircraft commander and then you make fire team leader. And after a period of time, before you go home, they bring you back in, you fly at home guard again for a couple of months as the aircraft commander like Bill Belch did for you.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  And when you were, when you went to V C Lake. And so, the executive officer was wanting to bring me back to do that. And I said, it was March, and I said, hey, I got two months, March and April. I, I don't want to go back. I, I'm just getting good at this, leave me alone. And so, I whined and whined and whined and finally he demoted me, he took me to, took me to death six. Pardon me. So, they didn't have a fire team leader, one had got killed and one had reached the end of his tour. And so, they had some

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  really, really good aircraft commanders and you, you were a co-pilot, I first got there, I think, and you became, maybe you weren't an aircraft commander?

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  I was an aircraft commander.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, okay. Well, there were, there were three or four or five good guys and I'll name them, John Farr, John Barnes, Mac Himmon, Paul Waters. Who did I miss?

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  Mac Himmon, did I miss any Mac?

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  No, you said Mac.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  And, uh, super guys. And the XO said, go get those, those guys are all just, they need a little leadership, they need a little experience and, uh, go do it. If you got any, go and see.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  Not so much. He had a bad case of Lieutenant Commander, which is do nothing. I tried to figure around it when I went to the Navy. I tried to avoid Lieutenant Commander. If I could go from Lieutenant to Commander, I'd have been very happy. But, anyway, so I sort of had to be me and a little put my chin out and chest out and had these, these great guys that took about thirty minutes to fire up and get going and all of a sudden, we were flying all day, every day, like we're supposed to. Not sitting back at the boat waiting for meals. And then, what's on at the movie? We don't give a damn what's on in a movie, we're gonna fly it, period. That's what you do. That's how you know you're A.O. That's how you support the people out there in the boats.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  And that's how it happens. If somebody gets shot down, you're right there on the spot. That's what we do.

• 1:19:55Jocko Willink?

  Are you guys flying the same helicopter all the time? Do you have a particular one? Or are you just, whichever one's ready?

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  Well, whichever is one's ready and able to fly. And so you got them on deck, the two you have on deck, you're flying those, obviously. And then you have to take up, you know, once a month or so many hours to do the annual maintenance on it, then get another one back.

• 1:20:18Jocko Willink?

  How much difference is there between, you know, this one and that one?

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  None. You know, physically flying, they're all the same, just like driving a car. You know what to do, they're all.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  You know, I was in a training squadron with Earl and BT3 after our helicopter. We went back fixed wing for a while. And I remember guys fighting over a aircraft that was smoother and it was a Bravo model instead of a Charlie model and it's faster and, I mean, who gives a crap? Just go fly, you know? And that's what we did. We didn't, we didn't have our name on the aircraft. That's Top Gun crap, you know? We didn't put, I, you know, I, I'll tell a joke. When I became Maintenance Officer BT3, I was a boot Lieutenant Commander, unfortunately. And, and we had four hundred airplanes and we were starting to downsize, taking these old Charlie models that were made for carrier landings and they were all beat up from hard landings. And they were towing them over and scrapping them.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  Well, my assistant Maintenance Officer's a guy named Russ Combs, great guy, and he's, he's, "Boss, you won't, you're my new boss, you're gonna put your name on one of these airplanes?" I said, "You put my name on those airplanes, Combs, and I will break every bone in your body, don't you do it." So, one day I get, I come back from a flight and he says, "I got your plane parked up in front, sir, did you see it?" And I says, "Why?" I go out and all the line guys around laughing. He took one of those old Charlie models, scraped off the exhaust, painted Lieutenant Commander C.D. Nelson rotor head on it, and old Charlie model right there in front, and it was a big ha-ha. And so they're gonna take it to main side and just scrap it anyway, so who cares?

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  Well, pretty soon I get a phone call from the guy, said, "Hey, I was just in the Navy Leaf Museum and your airplane's in there." They took that plane just at random and reworked that Charlie model and put it in the museum, and they left my name on it.

• 1:22:12Jocko Willink?

  The museum down in Pensacola?

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, but I think it's gone, I couldn't find it last time, and thank God for that. But, uh, anyway, no, we didn't want, we didn't care what we flew, we were going flying. Let Tom Cruise get his name on something. We did have nicknames for each other, and I can't tell you John's real name, because his family's gonna see this.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  I was Seawolf Six Eight.

• 1:22:34Jocko Willink?

  There you go, that sounds like the Fiji version.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  So you're talking about the last weeks in the squadron, and people would just come up and kinda chill out the last two weeks before they left, and I actually flew the last two weeks that I was in the squadron. The CIA had sold something on the black market, and they, this was down in Yuman Forest, it was some kinda communication center in Yuman Forest, and they couldn't quite figure out was, what it was, or where it was. And so they sold something on the black market, they wouldn't tell us what it was, but they knew where it would end up to this headquarters area. And so they had, they picked a signal or a frequency that wasn't being used by any other friendlies in the area, put that

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  in a homeing device, and we wished to follow it. And we did this for ten days, and then this, it went on a side, and it'd just go slow, go a couple hundred miles, and spend the night, go a little further, spend the night, and they finally got to an area, oh, we were getting a stray signal, we never got a real strong signal. So we talked, and this is one night, we just followed the signal back, and it flew over this church, and the needle just did a one-eighty. So we went back, told the SEALs about this, and they went and raided that church, and they found a huge communication center in the basement of the church. So, once they knocked that out, we had this real strong signal, so we flew it. And we're just, I hope this guy gets the place before I have to leave country.

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  So, the last day, I was in country, we finally decided, well, this is, it hadn't moved for three or four days, and it must be the place. It wasn't exactly where they thought it was, but it must be the place. So, we were to fly in, throw out smokes, and they had a couple of flights of F-4s off the coast. So, we went in a hundred feet, throw the smokes out, pull back, and that was the best air show I ever seen in my life. And then the F-4s came in and just bombed, bombed the place. And so, then I flew back to Bantui, literally jumped out of one helo, they had my bag packed in another helo, jumped in another helo, flew to Saigon, and next day, flew home. So, I flew on mission my last day in country.

• 1:24:45Jocko Willink?

  When you guys were there, you know, like, when we, like, my generation looks, looks at the Vietnam War and the late 60s, early 70s, you know, it's all this protestors and hippies and, and controversy about being in Vietnam, how much of that stuff did you guys actually experience or think about when you were over there?

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  I didn't think about it at all, not at all. I was, we're doing our job, doing our mission. We didn't think about what's going on back in the States, to be honest with you, at least for my part.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  I remember going to R and R, and I didn't go to R and R until, like, in my 11th month. I didn't want to miss out on the flying, that's terrible. I'm awful, Fly Dog, that's what they used to call me. That was a nice name they called me, but, we got, I remember, we're flying over to Honolulu, gonna meet my wife, my then-wife then, she liked me then, and see girls on mission, your mom, and so, uh...

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  Guys were all chatty and all excited and we get on this old bus and we're going, they're taking us to Fort DeRusi there on Waikiki. And all the women are all lined up and as we drive through Alamoano Drive, past the park and everything as we're going to Fort DeRusi, you could hear a pin drop on that bus. All that chatter all of a sudden died and guys were all agape because women weren't wearing bras. We'd never seen that. And men had ponytail longer than mine. And they looked funny, they had beards and they wore funny tie-dyed tie stuff I'd never seen.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  So in 10 months, I didn't recognize where I, honestly, I was in shock. And I also remember, I don't know what the hell I was doing, but we went to a movie in Honolulu one of the times and it was the movie version of MASH.

• 1:26:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  And I was so offended by the disrespect for officers in the military, I got up and walked out in about 10 minutes, wouldn't stay. It's funny, huh? You know, so offended and then when you mentioned up, I remember going in, and this is 1970, going in, leaving and saying goodbye to people and they're all gung ho rah rah. But when I came back, same guys were, was it really bad? No. Oh gee, kill babies over there? No. But some of that stuff. And even 50 years later in my living room, one of my relatives asked, told me, gee Carl, I didn't know you were Vietnam.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  I said, yeah. Oh, well, were you, what's your used term? What term did she use?

• 1:27:40Speaker 02

  Made a derogatory term, she said, and whatever it was, were you disappointed or were you ashamed or whatever she said. I said, no, matter of fact, I wasn't. My son-in-law's giving me the cut side because it's his stepmom and he doesn't want me to blow her away with with my fire and fury, but I didn't, I restrained. And I said, matter of fact, I don't know anybody that I served with who feels that way. Matter of fact, and this is interesting, guy, friends of mine that didn't serve and didn't go to Vietnam, I've yet to meet one and talk to one who's not sorry they didn't, and I've

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  yet to meet one who served that was sorry they did. So that's my little world, I guess. That's the people I hang around. I hang around mostly good people, so.

• 1:28:36Jocko Willink?

  Did you see anything like that, John?

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  No, no, when I came home, I was welcomed home because, you know, from a family perspective, I got to the house and, you know, my parents picked me up at the airport and I was in uniform. Got back to the house and they had a sign, it was an eight by four board, particle board, they had written on it, welcome home, and they had, my sister had painted, and she was an artist, the Seawolf Signia on this, uh, was an eight by, eight by four foot board. And so I was, it was sit up in the front yard, had it in the front yard, up, welcome home, John. So, and my, of course, my dad being in the army and his history was very supportive of that.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  But I did have one incident where they had me go on some recruit, recruiting duty when I first came back for about two months and I had to go down to the University of Illinois. And we were down there for a couple of days doing some recruiting duty, not that we got a lot of people signed up or anything, but I went to put my pants on one morning, the legs on my pants just fell off. So when I was there, apparently somebody had thrown some acid or something on my uniform. That, that was the only incident I, I had with that, but other than not recruiting very well or getting a lot of people into the Navy.

• 1:29:59Jocko Willink?

  What about, you know, it's a question that comes up a lot and I'm working with draftees and from what I've, when I've talked to Vietnam vets and when I read about them, the the common thread is that people that were, people that were good leaders and took care of their men, they would either not know who the draftees were because they just, they just were good, or they liked the draftees and could tell who they were, but they had no issues with them because the draftees would say, they kind of had to step up and, and the draftees say, I don't like that we were doing this, to say, well, how do you want to do it? And they would kind of engage them into the, into the planning and then

• 1:30:41Jocko Willink?

  get, listen to their input. And then you, you can read some negative opinions of the draftees when you get someone that's, you know, it's almost like an excuse, well, the draftees didn't want to do what they needed to do. What did you guys, did you guys notice any difference between draftees and, and, and guys that were, I guess for lack of a better term, lifers?

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  I don't think I did. That, I think if you were drafted in, it was, maybe it's specific for the Navy. I think it may be, maybe a different situation because most people that are drafted went into the Army. They were, then I think the people that ended up in the Navy were more volunteers and wanted to be in Navy. They're going to pick a service, I want to be in the Navy or the Air Force. I don't want to necessarily be in the Army.

• 1:31:25Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  If they're Sea Wolves, they volunteer, and they volunteered to be Sea Wolves.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  I read a book one time, I had to give a speech. I was asked to reluctantly, of course I did, to give a speech on Memorial Day.

• 1:31:36Jocko Willink?

  Did it come out of your shell for that?

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did for that. And so, uh, uh, there's a cemetery in a little town in Gridley, California, up north of Sacramento, about an hour. And they've got a, really a mini Arlington in the back. And I was really overcome. It was neat. Didn't know this, but I don't know how they know, but supposedly the first sailor killed in the Pearl Harbor attack was from...

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  Gridley, California. Now, I don't know how they decided who got killed first. That was the congregation, but they did. And so, they built it around that. And they have a celebration every year. Well, I met the manager because a friend of mine was on the board of directors. I thought, the board of directors of a cemetery? What do you do? Fight over spots or, I mean, what do you need a board for that for? A lottery for a plotter? Anyway, and I met her, a nice lady, engaging. She says, you know, you served, not the way I did. And she says, we need a speaker. This was like, November, and I said, when? She says, oh, in May, Memorial Day. I'm like, yeah, I mean, I'm busy. I was farming in those days. I was raising olives for olive oil.

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  500 acres, that's how to stick your toe in the water. Your good toe. And so, so, I got this, I got this thing, oh, God, how long do we need to talk? She said, whatever you want. I said, realistically. She said, 20 minutes. I said, okay. And I said, uh, do you want to read this piece before I give it? Because, you know, I don't want to be cut. No, she says, whatever you want. So, I started reading books and kind of going through stuff. And I read a book that was pretty neat and well, it was well documented and well referenced at all the pages. And it was written by a guy named B.G. Burkett. And the book is called, uh, Stolen Valor.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  And about guys who pretend to be a rank or not, or pretend they served and they didn't. And it mentioned our friend, uh, former Senator and Secretary of State, John Kerry, and other people like that. And it was really interesting book because I learned a lot. And what I learned was that if I ask you, what percentage of men volunteered for Vietnam, what would you say? John?

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  About ten percent?

• 1:33:59Speaker 02

  Seventy-six percent, according to this research, okay?

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, a big number. And a big number, not only volunteered, but, you know, it was a lot of shocking things and about drugs and, you know, people say, gee, you're in Vietnam, you must have had a problem with drugs. I didn't smell marijuana until I was at a John Denver concert in nineteen seventy-five. I had no, I mean, if somebody did drugs and that, I swear I would have known. We were close. We lived side by side, we were like a family. We'd have known.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  I'll agree with that. I had no, none of the enlisted, nobody did drugs. I never saw any of that in Vietnam.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Might have been some of those guys chasing women with bindimts and Saigon, I don't know, but we didn't have any women to chase where I was and just a bunch of butt-ugly guys, so there you go.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  And I think they may be part of that is because of the squadron reen, you know, it's a different level. You're in the Navy, the training and, and people who were selected to go, you know, who were just quality people and they weren't into those things.

• 1:35:03Speaker 02

  The country changed, Jaco, because that day, I remember my opening line of my speech and, and by the way, I walked, I went to, thank God I put a suit on, but I went to give that speech on Memorial Day in Gridley, two thousand and five, I think was the year. I, my daughters dropped me off and I said, I gotta walk and do this thing, you don't have to stay and, and I walked past this big hedge and this big mini Arlington, they had five hundred people in there. And they had every Miss whatever county singing a song and they had a flyover from, from the airbase in Sacramento and they had even had a guy from World War One who could barely

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  walk in his uniform and, I mean, and they had an honor guard there and she called it a firing squad, but it is an honor guard. So, and I remember my opening line, and I'll end with that, was the last battle of the Vietnam War was fought and won by the Swift Boat Veterans against John Kerry. And people got on their feet and clapped. That's what kind of crowd I had. How's that for change in the country? Amazing. So, that's coming a long way from nineteen seventy.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:21Jocko Willink?

  That is, that is definitely heading back in the other direction for sure. You know, before we, uh, I, I know I opened talking about that operation where you were, where Carl, you were, you were supporting, uh, Zulu platoon. What other, what, what do you remember about that day? I mean, that had to be sort of, it sounds like that had to be one of the more, um, you know, more, I guess, dramatic operations that you supported.

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  We had some, we had with the SEAL teams, we had some exciting ones. Most of them were at night, but that was a broad daylight one. And when, uh, the ONC of Zulu came to me the night before and we sat down, and you mentioned about communication, we, we lived, we lived within 50, 75 yards of those guys. And so, yeah, we'd pre-brief the night before and talk about, you know, where they're going. And most of the time, you know, they didn't, it wasn't daylight, it was a night op and we would stand ready to scramble if they got in trouble and, but this was going to be a daylight op and he had intelligence about some supplies or equipment or ammo or something

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  that was north of our, of our base, probably, you know, maybe 50 clicks, I'm not sure, 20 clicks. And, uh, we briefed it and what he was going to do and he had a, had a Sea Lord slick coming. Ed Dyer was flying that, as you mentioned, and, uh, Ed was a former fire team leader up at Det 9, well experienced, understood fire team tactics and so forth. And, uh, so, um, we briefed it and so forth and we took off and, uh, and, uh, my co-pilot, my, my, uh, co-pilot was Earl and he was well experienced, ready, Earl was ready to be, I think he was about this far from aircraft commander and obviously was a very successful fire team leader, retired as a Navy captain, hell of a guy.

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  And, uh, but our, but my wingman, um, to go unnamed was questionable, um, but we put him with a new, with a newer co-pilot who was a pretty solid guy. So we always tried to put a solid co-pilot with a pilot, maybe not all pilots are ace of the bases like John, but some guys, there are some guys who are good guys, but they, you know, God didn't give them those skills. So that's a fact, so.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  So I knew my wingman was questionable, but we briefed out the op and what we're gonna do, we're gonna escort the slick in and, and, and I would, I would lead the, we'd lead it into the LZ, into the landing zone, I'd lead it in, and I decided it was gonna be a, it was gonna be a break left, because I wanted the right door, it was Mike Dobson, gunner to be the outside of the circle. We would go down to about a hundred feet or less, encircle low orbit while the SEALs exit the slick and cover him. We literally lay cover fire down, not wait for any fire. And, and then, once they're all out and clear and in position,

• 1:39:26Speaker 02

  and the slick wanted to pull pitch, and he would call and warn me, we would escort him out. I'd lead him out, the wingman would follow him out. Well, as I made my turn, and I'm looking across, Earl, I made a, I made a left-hand turn, so I'm looking across my copilot, and I'm saying, "Earl, do you see, see Wolf, whatever his number was?" I know his number, but I'm not saying it. "No." "Call him. Stay on the radio, find him." Meantime, I got a SEAL team on the ground, I gotta escort a slick out, and my wingman's missing. So, he had to be shot down, or had a mechanical failure, or something, but I,

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  and I'm trying to raise him. Earl's trying to raise him. I'm communicating with Dyer. We get Dyer out, we get him preposi-, we get him over to a safety area at altitude where he could orbit, and wait until we need him, because they gotta come out sometime. So, meantime, we're calling for my wingman. He's not answering. No answer. Can't find him. Well, then I get a call from Tom Richards, and Tom's on the ground, and he said,

• 1:40:40Speaker 02

  When you're flying over here, did you, did you see, you know, after you put your strike in, you want to put a strike in, I put a strike in, single ship, which is against squadron policy, do single ship, single ship strikes because, you know, but I had no choice, obviously, that guy's on the ground, and they were taking fire, we were taking fire on the way in and on the way out. So it was pretty, they were, they were not happy folks on the ground there, the bad guys. So, um, Tom asked, you know, do you see anybody? I said, after I put the strike in, I said, yeah, I got a, I got ten, twelve guys dead there, and we, and, uh, what else you see? And I says, there was a big dike, they were on, they were on, the dikes were kind of running,

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  uh, east-west, and they were flooded, and they were little dikes, and there was a great big dike, and beyond that, a tree line, and that's where the fire was coming from, was from behind the big dike and the tree line. Well, we knocked out that big dike pretty quickly, but the tree line, we had a hard time stopping the fire, and we, we laced it pretty good. I mean, Earl lost many gun up and down there many times. Uh, but I'm, I'm starting to get concerned about conserving my ammo, and making sure, making sure it counts, and we got to find my, but I couldn't worry about those four guys that were my trail ship, and I lost them, but I had six SEALs on the ground, my own

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  four guys, and four guys on the other airplane of dieers, so, you know, we got fourteen guys I got to worry about of my own, before I worry about four more. And all of a sudden, uh, and Tom and I were talking, and all of a sudden, uh, they started taking heavy fire, and, and I, uh, I didn't know who it was, but it was Grant Telford that went down. He took a round in one leg, and it went up and missed, it missed the family jewels and went down the other leg. I mean, you may have heard about that, and he, and, and he survived it, no, no femoral artery puncture. I mean, he could have been gone, and, and those wounds, there was a guy shot in the chest, I'm not sure which guy, there was a guy shot in the lower abdomen, uh, Tom was

• 1:42:46Speaker 02

  hitting the hand, and this, this, it disabled his weapon, and, uh, and I'm talking to Tom, and it was obvious to me, I'm, I'm sitting there at low level. I'm doing pedal turns, literally the aircraft and you know what happens when you're going slow, you get retreating blade stall it's called and the aircraft starts kind of bucking. But I did that because I wanted to have a flat profile on the aircraft so that my right door and my left door and Earl could shoot, because we needed every weapon firing. Meantime, it looks like, you know, and before Tom even asked for extraction, I could see that they were in extremis, absolutely, more than I'd ever seen on any mission.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Guys in trouble, you know.

• 1:43:33Jocko Willink?

  How many guys total did they have on the ground?

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  That's six.

• 1:43:36Jocko Willink?

  And so that was the slick carried in all others, all the six SEALs in one bird?

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, and I, in my haste, I mentioned there, I forgot the first part of the story. On the way in, I'm in front, Ed's in the middle and my trail shift behind, and we're transitioning up and about 10 clicks short of the LZ, the kid sitting on the, I think it was the right side of the aircraft, got hit in the shoulder, radioman, got hit in the right shoulder. So, and that happens when you're flying in a hostile area. So we turn around and flew back. We went back, landed, got the kids some medical help, and Tom wasn't even, Tom Richards wasn't even part of the operation. And Telfer said, "Let's go back."

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  I said, "Okay, I'll cover you." And he says, and Richard says, "I'll go." And, and I know that a couple of guys, and I'm not sure, I won't use their names, but a couple of other SEALs said, "Don't," but they wanted to go. So, Tom hops in and off we went. But the story got kind of muffled over 50 years because...

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  We never got to debrief the op. The guys got wounded, went to third surge, went home, they were at the end of their tour. Most of them had already packed up all their stuff, except for their favorite weapon. So, we never debriefed it, ever. So, come back to the, a mission here. We got loaded, got Tom on board, and off we went back again. Now, the story over the years, I remember hearing from other SEALs, "Well, you guys went to the LZ and then, then you went back, back to the same LZ. That's why they got hit." That's not true. It didn't happen that way. We did not even get to the E's LZ the first time. We didn't even make an approach to it. Because, again, we just got hit transiting the area.

• 1:45:34Speaker 02

  So, we went back, inserted, they got in place. I could see, I'm coming back to the extremist part. And, uh, and I called Ed in, and Ed was already on his way in. And thank God that Ed was a former fire team leader. He knew the story, he knew, he knew how to fly, he had a slick with a lot of power. And, uh, because I was about a quarter of an inch from landing and picking them up myself. Now, that would have been the last possible situation, because, as you all know, John, on a hot day, a SEAL will have loaded with armament, the probability you're putting six people in and taking off is 1%, if that. If you could even get airborne at all.

• 1:46:15Speaker 02

  And, uh, you have to understand that these UH-1 Braavos were eight, nine thousand pound airplanes, and we had them loaded with fuel, loaded with armament, and four people in it, and on a hot day, we could, sometimes, we couldn't even hover. We had to take off, skip along, before we got translational lift. We had to be into the wind, and very careful, and be smooth. We would say, I'd say to my co-pilot, "You want to hold this collective and this stick." Like it's a beautiful woman. You don't want to offend her. You don't want to be rough. You want to be gentle and just ease this. Think it off the ground is what I would say. Don't pull the pitch. Think it up and it'll get up. Okay. And then we did.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  And sometimes you, you, you hear the RPM start going down at 6,000, red light comes on. And you get an oral, and then you've got to be kicking out boxes of ammo in the river, throwing out your rocket pods and hoping you don't crash. I never did. Did you?

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 1:47:18Speaker 02

  You had some close calls?

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  Well, on the LSTs, you know, the same thing. You could barely hover. We'd get it over the edge and then you would dive for the water to get airspeed. Hope you got the airspeed before you got to the water.

• 1:47:29Speaker 02

  And use the water to push off the air to get translational lift. And so we were that heavy. So I thought crap, you know, and I, my guys knew we may be dumping rockets to the bad guys and a lot of, we may need to get these people. We'll wait and say, well, Ed came in. He got them all. Uh, I didn't see the kid hanging on to the skid, basically. I was busy. We were putting fire in, but uh, thank God for Tom Richards on that flight. But I did see Tom dragging guys across several levees under fire. And the two guys that weren't wounded did a heck of a job laying down fire. And Tom will tell you to cover the extraction of those wounded guys.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  Uh, uh, Grant Telfer is lucky to be here in this world. And whenever I see Tom Richards, uh, it never fails. He hugs me, which is not all that nice, but he thanks me for him being on the green side of grass. Did the same thing at your house last year.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Sure did.

• 1:48:33Speaker 02

  And, and that's a, that's a, and, and my, my, one of my crewmen, Mike Dobson, he was, who is a heck of a guy, a stellar, one of the best, and we had some good ones, gunners ever. And he, he says, why didn't we get more awards on that? And I said, well, our reward is that there are six guys that got wounded and they survived and they got families and most of them, I think all of them got back on active duty.

• 1:49:07Speaker 02

  That's a big award. So, my wingman, what happened to my wingman? Didn't answer, wouldn't answer. So, we're escorting the slick back to the base with wounded people. And that's on my mind. I'm calling to get the ambulance down and to get the guys ready and so forth. And Earl's still calling him on the radio, no response. And all of a sudden, Dobson says, "Sir, Sea Wolf blank blank just joined up on us." He joined up on us. Well, my temperature went to, I don't know, a thousand. And we landed. And first of all, we had to get the SEALs taken care of, and they were.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  And, you know, and you're kind of coming down from a high after that much adrenaline's going. And I talked to the aircraft commander, and he says, "I don't know what happened. We just got stuck on the ground."

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  And that's, that's all I'll say. But supposedly, they just went, when we were going in low, he just lost it and flew into the ground and got stuck in the mud and couldn't get out. That's the story I get from the copilot, now dead. He passed away. And from the crewman. It is a sad day for Sea Wolves because,

• 1:50:33Speaker 02

  and I reported that happening to my XO, not the SEAL with the XO, who I knew pretty well. And nothing was done. Pretty embarrassing. If, if, if one of those, I promised the aircraft commander, that was my trail ship, that if one of those SEALs didn't make it, he, he wasn't gonna make it either. And I meant it. But they all made it. So, that's kind of a story that hasn't been told. And when they, when Mike Slattery wrote the, wrote the award recommendation, and I was talking to Gordy Peterson, who was also a Sea Wolf for a while, one and debt two.

• 1:51:16Speaker 02

  And Gordy says, "You mean, he abandoned you and the face of the enemy?" And I said, "Damn sure did."

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  Now, again, the guy was suspect. We certainly didn't think he would do that.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  So I'm conflicted by that. One, I want to kill the guy still. On the other hand, everybody made it out. Everybody did their job. My four guys, Tom Clavon's passed on. Mike Dobson, I just saw last week, earl shot. I just talked to him a few days ago. He's close to us. A really good guy. On 100% oxygen, by the way. COPD problem, but what a guy. He's probably gonna outlive us both, John.

• 1:52:04Jocko Willink?

  And you and I talked, and I know you're still connected to Tom Richards, who, you know, as I mentioned, played a role in changing my life for me. And hopefully, we can talk to him and I can get him out here to sit down in this room. And that would be just an honor to be able to do that.

• 1:52:20Speaker 02

  Tom's changed a lot of lives. One time, he was speaking at a Seawolf convention in 2004.

• 1:52:28Speaker 02

  And somebody, is the camera on me now?

• 1:52:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  Oh, and so somebody says,

• 1:52:34Jocko Willink?

  It's been on you for two hours.

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  Admiral, show me your wound. He goes, his finger, he got shot in the finger. But good, makes it clever like this, you know. Tom changed a lot. He's one of the, again, one of the bravest, nicest guys I know. And it's all because of Jackie, I'm sure, not my, not Tom. And just a good guy. And happy he's a friend of mine and happy he's here.

• 1:53:02Jocko Willink?

  Any other, John, any operations that stick out in your mind as sort of the pinnacle of your tour over there?

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  I think the one when Ben Tuohy got hit, or Son and Doc. That one, that was the big one. Flew all night long, you know, for like 12 hours, just putting strike after strike after strike.

• 1:53:24Jocko Willink?

  So you're, so you're sitting there and the base starts to get attacked? And is it, is it the first call? Is that a contingency plan that you all have? Hey, if we start getting attacked, we're gonna get these birds out of here?

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  Well, the first reaction was to get to the bunker, just so it, you know, then assess the situation. And then there was that lull and I said, now's the time to go. And we, we just ran out to the helos and hopped in and took off.

• 1:53:51Jocko Willink?

  And how many guys were on base defending the base? Or did everyone get in either helicopters or swift boats and get out of there?

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Well, the base was, was an open area. There was no perimeter around Det 6. And, and I'm not sure there was a perimeter around the, the barges that were on the river. They just had a whole string of barges right there down the river. And it wasn't a big village or anything. But we didn't have any perimeter guards around where we were. And we were just a couple hundred yards off from where the, the barges were. So we just got in the bunker and after we took off and then we went back because we weren't sure about the rest of the people that were there, the crew, the other pilots. And so, but we found out they had gotten to the boats and, and got out.

• 1:54:35Jocko Willink?

  How much fuel, how long can you guys fly for in the Huey? When you're loaded out to bear?

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  Couple hours.

• 1:54:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hour and a half. Most flights are pretty short, but an hour and a half is a long flight.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  And the 20 minute fuel light is very accurate. I had one mission where we came back and we literally, the 20 minute fuel light came on, we went back up to Kamau, which was where Det 3 was. And as we, as we touched down, the engine shut itself down. We ran out of fuel as we were touching down.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  Were you flying with me when we had to land and send out for fuel because we ran out?

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  No, I heard about that.

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  We literally got ammo can of fuel.

• 1:55:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, this is, this is in Scramble the Sea Wolves, right? This story. Yeah. Tell us about that one.

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  Mike Dobson was my crewman again. And we didn't run out of fuel, but I, but I landed at Hattie Inn because...

• 1:55:35Speaker 02

  I was at the end of the 20 minutes and that light gets bigger and bigger and at nighttime it's huge, just like the sun. At daytime it's still pretty damn big.

• 1:55:45Jocko Willink?

  What was the mission that you were doing?

• 1:55:48Speaker 02

  We were covering SEALs that day and I don't remember what the Pacific operation was. The missions all come together. I remember Mike Slattery asked me on the phone, telling me, "How about blah, blah, blah?" And I said, "You know, they all kind of blend together. It's hard to separate them out." I remember the Zulu one in detail. I'd dream about that one and, and, uh, and thank God about it every night. Not every night, but most nights. Um, but we were, we were covering SEALs and, and Mike Dobson could give you more detail, but, uh, it, uh, we had to make a call about whether we, we ended up with less fuel than

• 1:56:31Speaker 02

  my wingman and we ended up swapping stations and refueling one time to cover back and forth. But we got, I got so low I couldn't go back. At the time the SEALs were already in, we were safe, but...

• 1:56:43Jocko Willink?

  So you stayed on station to support them?

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:56:46Jocko Willink?

  Even though you were low on fuel and you, you had enough fuel just to get them and then make it to a rice paddy somewhere?

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  Basically, well, there was a little place called Hotian. It was even, there wasn't no fuel there and there wasn't really a landing pad. There was a rice paddy near a little town, yes. And so we set a perimeter up and we sent out for fuel.

• 1:57:04Jocko Willink?

  And by sending out, sending out for fuel, you, you grabbed ammo cans?

• 1:57:07Speaker 02

  Ammo cans.

• 1:57:09Jocko Willink?

  And, and pulled fuel from the other bird?

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah. And, and, uh, it's pretty embarrassing. You think about, how can you let yourself run out of fuel? Well, sometimes you don't have, and you know, the big thing is contamination. You worry about getting fuel contaminated and, but it worked out okay. We made it. But that was, uh, it takes Mike Dobson to tell the story. He can tell it without any alcohol. He's a better storyteller than I am. Mission focused, for sure.

• 1:57:37Jocko Willink?

  So then when you guys get home from Vietnam, what, what happens with your careers at this point? Cause whichever, whoever was counseling you, Carl, that told you, "The rest of the Navy ain't like this." He was definitely right. I know I had some new guys that were on their first deployment when I was in the Battle of Ramadi and... It's kind of a corrupting thing to be in this situation where there's very limited bureaucracy. We have total control over what's happening. You're doing the job you always dreamed about. And I remember some of the older, more experienced guys saying, it's not going to get any better than this. This is the best deployment you're ever going to do, so enjoy it. And it sounds like you guys got some of that advice, but what was the reality when you got back?

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  How many of us went, we went from Hal 3, how many went to Lakehurst?

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  Well, I, what I did is that I wanted to go to Lakehurst, but I had orders to Quantza Point.

• 1:58:33Jocko Willink?

  What was Lakehurst?

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  Uh, Lakehurst, New Jersey. Uh, it was a naval air station. And that's where, uh, the LAMS program started.

• 1:58:42Jocko Willink?

  And what was the LAMS program all about?

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  Light airborne, multi-purpose systems. And we were, they, we had helos, the H2s, could track submarines.

• 1:58:52Speaker 02

  Anti-submarine warfare.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  ASW.

• 1:58:56Speaker 02

  As Denny says, and so what?

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  So the detailer was actually in Vietnam. And, uh, and Earl and Carl had already left and they were going to Lakehurst. And I had orders to Quantza Point. And so the detailer wanted to go out on a mission, so I put him in the co-pilot seat. And we went out and found some targets and let him shoot the, the minigun and everything. And I told the crew, if you ran the, the miniguns dry, you had to buy the crew a case of beer. Cause it was so hard to restring and everything. It was easy to just cut the next one around and go. So I told the crew, let them shoot as much as he wants. I'll buy a case of beer if he runs it dry. Well, he ran the miniguns dry. Get back and he says, you know, I'd really like to go to Lakehurst.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  And he says, I can't promise anything, but I'll see what I can do. And about, uh, four weeks later, I get my orders and they're to Lakehurst.

• 1:59:49Jocko Willink?

  Beautiful.

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  And then I'm in Lakehurst.

• 1:59:51Jocko Willink?

  That minigun solves a lot of problems on both ends.

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  But I'm in Lakehurst now and I'm walking through the hangar. And I see this commander coming the other way and I salute him. And I'm still a JG at the time and he sees my name tag, he says, Far. And he calls me over and says, I think you were supposed to be in my squadron. And I said, "I don't know. They gave me orders to come here and I'm just following orders."

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  But that's how I ended up in Lakers. And then that's, you know, and the three of us were still real close and became closer even then.

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  We got to Lakers, a bunch of HAL 3 guys.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:00:25Speaker 02

  What was almost embarrassing was most of us had three, four rows of ribbons. We didn't know what most of them meant. We just, we got them.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  We've given us all these medals.

• 2:00:37Speaker 02

  You know, somebody asked me, "Well, where are your write-ups?" And I said, "I don't know." "Where were your ribbons?" "I don't know." "Where's your log? I know it's in a storage somewhere." But we're at this base and there's a bunch of guys that either dodged the Vietnam or let's give them the benefit of the doubt, they just didn't get a chance to go. But they're on the East Coast. And they were resentful. They were resentful, you know.

• 2:01:05Speaker 02

  And they were awards someone, as awards were following us. There was always quarters and you're always getting another award. And I was like, "Oh crap, maybe I should take leave." "I don't want to get the..." And, you know, sour grapes and, you know, I show up there and I got 11, 1200 hours or whatever and most of those guys got, haven't even made aircraft commander yet. Because we've been flying our butts off and they've been on a, and most, well...

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  Well, I think the guys from HAL that came back to the squadron like that, from HAL 3, we'd been in combat, we'd seen a lot. And you mentioned in the book that you've written about, you know, tactics and strategy, about filling the void and just taking charge. If you see something's not getting done, you got to step in and take command. And I think the guys from HAL 3 stepped up and they did their jobs better than anybody else. We just stepped up and started getting stuff done. And I can remember at one point I was a night maintenance officer in the squadron. And one, and the bird, there was always birds down. But I was night maintenance officer and one night we got every single aircraft

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  in the squadron was up and ready for flight the next day. And I went in the wardroom and put on the board, it says, "All aircraft are ready for flight today." And I think that was a nice accomplishment to have all the birds up.

• 2:02:31Speaker 02

  You have to understand.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  But I think taking charge and working with the chief and the maintenance people and we worked late hours. We, they, actually, we worked past midnight one time just to get this last bird up so we could have them all up on that next day.

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  That is, when I got to Licorice, they had ten birds and one up forever. And our CO was a guy, and a nice guy. The first one that had them I was there, Mr. Peanut, I told you about him. He looked like the guy on the Planters Peanut chart. And I was a line division officer. I mean, I, I was in charge of nothing but a bunch of guys that were yelling at women and doing, I tried to keep them all under control. High school guys, well, I really worked on them. We trained and we got pretty damn good. And they looked, they looked almost like a troop. Well, there was one bird up and I had them all trained up and I'm watching them from

• 2:03:25Speaker 02

  the line shack on the end, which is on the end, the big blimp hangar. And the commander comes out, our CO, and he pre-flights the aircraft and it passed the pre-flight. All right. He climbs in, go up out, climbs in, it got through the checklist, okay. They plug the power in, start one, start two. All right. Sounds perfect. Everything is good. They had the guy out here, the plane captain in front, he had the ones and he's holding the guy short here and so forth. We had a guy who was on the APU there, auxiliary power, you know, it's like a, like a, like a four-wheeler.

• 2:04:04Speaker 02

  And he turns, you know, the, and, and the CO salutes him, he salutes him, hops back on and drives off, yanks the plug out of the side of the airplane, instant down. And I ran and hid.

• 2:04:21Speaker 01

  So when we were flying the H2s, we were assigned to a destroyer. So that, we were landing on the back of destroyers. And we were, you were like the third dead, I was on sixth dead. I went over, we had lost a bird in the Med. And I, they put an H2 and a HC, or C5. We flew it over and there were just, the replacement crew, so it was two pilots and a crewman. And so we got to sit in the cockpit of the C5, flying across the Atlantic. We flew over and I was sitting in the cockpit and they got a, a warning fuel light on one of the engines and had to shut it down. If I hadn't been sitting in the thing, I would have never

• 2:05:01Speaker 01

  known they'd shut an engine down. We had to land in Madrid, wait for, wait, waited a week for a part to finally come. Then we finally got over to Naples and that's where they unloaded the, the Hilo. Then that flew on the, the Boeing. And then that flew, you know, flew in the Med, doing ASW work.

• 2:05:21Speaker 02

  Well, John didn't tell you, yeah. Tell him what happened. What you, what you didn't tell him was the crew that you replaced what?

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  They...

• 2:05:31Speaker 02

  The guys you replaced, the aircraft?

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they had crashed in the Med.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  Lost the entire crew.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  Lost a, a bird and a crew in the Med.

• 2:05:38Speaker 02

  We had, we were, our planes were starting to drop like flies at that time. And he's going over there with another bird. Gotta be on your mind, John.

• 2:05:48Speaker 01

  No, I wouldn't. I didn't, you know, you don't think about that. You know, you got a job doing, that you're thinking about doing there. And I was happy to be in the Med. And we were flying, you know, working the Med. And the only place we really wanted to go to was Greece. And so we were pulling into Greece, dropped anchor, and we were gonna go on Liberty. All of a sudden, there was some Russian subs coming out of the Adriatic. We had to pick up anchor and go chase them. So we were chasing them across and we were, actually at one point, they surfaced all their subs. And we think they were trying to sneak some nuclear subs in, to the Med. So they had all the surface ones, the diesels up on. And we were like in just perfect formation, the 10 Russian ships, 10 US ships in formation going across the Med. All of a sudden, they...

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  All their subs went under. Aircraft are flying every which way because we're trying to keep track of them. And so we're flying to get, but you could never get a confirmation of where they were because there was just so much noise in the water with all the ships and everything. But they're flying around in their helicopters, taking a picture of us on our hangars. We're flying around, taking a picture of them on their hangars and stuff like that. We go all the way across the Med and the Admiral from the Russian ship calls up our Admiral and says, thanks for the escort across the Med. And they peeled off and went into Alexandria. And that's, of course, where we didn't have good relations with Egypt. So, but it was an interesting tour across the Med with the Russian ships, to say the least.

• 2:07:17Jocko Willink?

  And then how long did you guys end up staying in the Navy for?

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  I stayed on, well, I did a tour at Lakehurst. And then that's when I met my wife at the end of my tour. And I got out of the Navy, went back and worked for Burrows. So that job was still waiting for me.

• 2:07:33Jocko Willink?

  Job was still there, like you were told. Hey, Burrows will always be here.

• 2:07:36Speaker 01

  It was, so I went back and worked for Burrows. And then I joined the reserves. So I spent 24 years in the reserves. So I actually got 30 years in and retired as a captain.

• 2:07:46Jocko Willink?

  And I know that you were in Guam for a chunk of time. When were you in Guam? When did you, when were you last in Guam?

• 2:07:54Speaker 01

  Oh, man. I was probably last in Guam in the 80s. I went over there as a maintenance officer and we did our two weeks. We considered a good planning to leave Chicago in February and go to the South Pacific in Guam and do our two weeks active duty.

• 2:08:10Jocko Willink?

  Good plan.

• 2:08:10Speaker 01

  So we did that. And the unit I was in was the Iguana Guam unit. And Iguana was where the Naval Air Station was there. And we won the Bartol Trophy one year, which was the best reserve unit in all the Navy. And we won that one year. I think when I was a training officer, we got that. And then I became, I was CO of the Midway unit. Actually got to fly out to Midway on a P3. Landed on Midway Island. Not many people can say they've been on Midway Island. Then I was the CO of the Comnav Air Land, which was down in Norfolk.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  And that was a nice tour for me. And then the the Agana Guam unit ran into some tough times and they fired the CO and they brought me back in and we turned that around.

• 2:09:03Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  And I found this this marine poster, you know, it was a couple A fours and it said on top. And so I took this poster and I I redid it a little bit and I says, put this poster up, we're getting back on top. And we took the the Agana Guam unit back up. And then I went out there as a CO with the unit to Agana Guam. And and Captain Butterfield was a CO out there and he was involved in that debacle when they tried to get the hostages out of Iran. He says, we could have used some good Hilo pilots on that that mission.

• 2:09:45Jocko Willink?

  For sure.

• 2:09:46Speaker 01

  And but so that was like the late 80s I was in Guam.

• 2:09:53Jocko Willink?

  I just know I was in Guam in like 1990, late 1992 or early 1993 is when I got there. I was thinking maybe you and I were in the Navy at the same time and.

• 2:10:03Speaker 02

  You're a baby.

• 2:10:04Jocko Willink?

  I was just by a few years.

• 2:10:07Speaker 02

  You're looking at two 75 year old guys. I'm 70. We're 76.

• 2:10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 2:10:12Jocko Willink?

  It's a what the oh, go ahead.

• 2:10:14Speaker 01

  But I I love Guam was a great place. I like that's and I had a nice tour with with the reserves. In my last four years, I was on the Admiral's staff as a deputy for training and readiness up at Great Lakes because they closed Glenview at the time. I thought I had actually talked them into keeping Glenview open. But I think because we met with some of the senators and that was when BRAC was going on and everything. I had to give a speech about why we should keep Glenview open to these people. And then I had lunch with them at a table and I thought I felt I had talked them into keeping Glenview open. But I think they went behind doors and says, well, you can have Glenview or you can have Great Lakes. And you so the Navy had to make a pick and they took Great

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  Lakes, which now today is the sole training center. If you go in the Navy as enlisted, you're going through Great Lakes.

• 2:11:04Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  Yep. But I was on the Admiral's staff up there for about four years. And then I retired out of there.

• 2:11:10Jocko Willink?

  And how long did you stay at Burrows for for?

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  I was at Burroughs until it merged with Sperry. And I actually got my picture in the last Burroughs annual report. Cause I had just sold the largest computer that Burroughs had to the University of Chicago Medical Center, which was the A-15. And it was a big deal. Then it merged with Sperry. Then I went to digital. And I ended up working for SAIC.

• 2:11:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  Which is this up here in La Jolla. And I was in telecommunications, I worked in telecommunications and we did all the software development for the R-Box. And I had Ameritech, then SBC bought Ameritech and bought PacBell. So I had offices in Chicago, down in San Antonio, I actually had an apartment, cause that's where the main executives were. And then out in San Ramon where PacBell was. And I can remember I was with our president one day and I says, you know, if I put all my offices together, they'd be bigger than your office. And he looked at me and says, you know, I could fix that. So I was, had responsibility for all the R-Box, you know, kinda, those software operations for their backend systems and stuff.

• 2:12:21Jocko Willink?

  Got it. And so what about you, Carl? How long did you make it in the Navy after you got home from Alpha?

• 2:12:27Speaker 02

  You know, John admitted the part about Glenview that's really important. And that was, I grabbed a T-28, I was in a squadron, for training squadron for a while. And we'd take off, Earl and I, several times. And come one time, Earl shot and I, another time, got him Tim Zimmer and Zip, as he's referred to by some. Zip and I would fly up and we'd go up and just stay and get John and eat and sleep for free and give him a hard time. But, yeah, I, I, I was in Lakers there and I, I wasn't sure what I was gonna do. I was still a USNR, I hadn't augmented, but I was thinking about it. And, uh,

• 2:13:13Speaker 02

  And Steve Schroeder and I were both on track to going to, believe it or not, going to the FBI. Steve actually went in. I didn't. I was, my interviewee, I'll never forget his name, was Jay Wallace-Laprod. He ended up running the New York office. One of my questions in my interview, I thought it was being funny, I said, "Well, we got, you got, you know, J. Edgar Hoover and you got Jay Wallace-Laprod and would I be Carl Dean Nelson or C. Dean Nelson?" He didn't laugh.

• 2:13:42Speaker 02

  But he's a good guy. Afterwards, he said that was funny. So it came down to go back to school or teach or whatever. So, but I, I went down, was flight instructor, went to the West Coast, did HSL 35.

• 2:13:58Speaker 02

  Got picked up early for Lieutenant Commander. Commander did my last tour on Op. 5. I got offered a job by a guy on a ship, my last cruise, and my wife, who at that time, and rest her soul, she's passed on, but she was not a fan of the Navy and didn't like being a naval officer's wife. As you know, that's some work. It's not easy. And, and, so, but we ended up getting divorced later, but I always kid and say that my, I got out because my wife didn't like the Navy, but it turned out she didn't like me. I can't imagine that, but, so, I did 10 years, 11 months and nine days. Navy was great to me. I can't imagine anybody was treated better than I was treated by the Navy, just a kid from Coos Bay, Oregon,

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  and literally, and John was saying today, "The Navy's got a great system of evaluating and promoting the right people." With some exception, he was looking at me, but other than that.

• 2:14:53Speaker 01

  But I met my wife when I was stationed at Lakehurst.

• 2:14:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 2:14:58Speaker 01

  So I was just getting, I was just getting ready to get out of the active duty Navy. And I met my wife, we dated, and then they, the CO wanted me to be the O and C of it, to take a detachment out.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  And it was the North Atlantic Cruise Detachment on the Bowen. And I says, I went to him, I says, you know, there's people that are more qualified to take this detachment out than me. And he says, he looked at me, he says, you're the most qualified and you're going. And he knew I was dating Gene at the time. So I had just met Gene, so we dated for a couple of months and I was gone for two months on this North Atlantic cruise on the Bowen. And Carl was on with ONC with that prior to me. And so we both know this, knew the CO of the ship, which was just a great guy. And we were pretty close to him.

• 2:15:58Speaker 01

  And came back and got other, got out of the Navy in December, got married in January, and started back at Burrows in February. And somebody says, you know, you shouldn't do three life-changing situations like that in succession. You should put some time between them. But, so we dated for eight months, I was gone for two of those months and we got, eight months later, we got married. And we just had our 47th wedding anniversary last January.

• 2:16:30Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding.

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  Great.

• 2:16:32Jocko Willink?

  What did you end up doing, Carl, in the rest of your, once you got out of the Navy?

• 2:16:36Speaker 02

  Uh, I got recruited to a train corporation. I ran a office there and then, uh, lived in Huntington Beach, California, and then Newport Beach and, uh, then got recruited to Boise Cascade Corporation Office, Products Division. Uh, I was general sales manager and I never sold anything in my life. I bought some stuff, but I didn't sell anything. So then, then I ended up getting recruited to, uh, to the Hershey Organization, 11 western states of a snack and beverage, and then I did a tour of craft, matter of fact, a couple of times in Chicago.

• 2:17:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:13Speaker 02

  John and I had dinner there with his dad, he was a great man. Uh, John F. Farr Senior was, uh... Uh, no reason, no wonder that he and Ike stayed close and communicated through the fifties when Ike was president, he still had time to communicate with your dad to make a couple of phone calls for your aunt, was it? For Helen Riss. Yeah, and just a good guy, and his dad was absolutely a class act. I always sat by him at John's wedding and other times. I always was trying to pick that man's brain because there's a lot there. And just, uh, he was a senior executive at Canteen Corporation, which was a contract

• 2:17:57Speaker 02

  feeder for, um, auto companies and so forth. Vending machines. Yeah, and vending machines and so forth, just a good guy. Uh, but anyway, I did craft and then I, um, got recruited and met a guy on an airplane and he had my seat. And I had a lot of frequent flyer points and so I had one A, uh, first class in those days, United, and I could roll in after a long week and I commuted from California, worked in Chicago, how about that? Oof. And, uh, beat myself up and, uh, he had my seat and we got chatting and he hired me to be my first CEO job and so running, instead of running a, uh, a three, a three hundred million dollar section of craft and on, uh, healthcare food service, I had a

• 2:18:39Speaker 02

  three million dollar, uh, muffin company I ran, but it took more work and I paid less money. And that's how smart I am, so, uh, took a, got to be part of a company going public after that, uh, we sold that company. Uh, Garden Burger was a vegetarian Garden Burger, I had a six hundred acre ranch, they thought I was a cattle ranch, they thought I was an ideal candidate with my food background to run a, run a, uh, veggie burger company and, uh, all my employees had air rings and, uh, and, uh,

• 2:19:12Speaker 02

  Flip flops and what do they wear, what do they call those shoes, those leather shoes? Birkenstocks. Birkenstocks. They all had Birkenstocks. I know who you're talking about. And so here I'm sitting there in a three-piece starch shirt, almost as much starch as John's got. And anyway, it was a great deal. It was a lot of fun. And I ended up last year, it was starting my own company, made olive oil up to 300,000 gallons a year. We were the second largest in the US. When I sold, I got lucky. Some, some guys came along and made me an offer I didn't understand and they came back and doubled the offer and then I understood. So I sold. I've been the luckiest guy on the planet. I got two grown daughters, three grandkids.

• 2:19:57Speaker 02

  And they were, the grandkids helped me in the, in the plant. They were always, Cubby was born when I, when I poured concrete. They think they own that plant, but great kids, great life, luckiest guy on the planet. I live on a houseboat on Pine Flat Lake, six miles from Sequoia. How do you beat that? Tough to beat. I was talking to, to Dick Couch. Okay. And we were talking and I was, and I hadn't gotten back to him for a couple of weeks. He says, what happened? I said, I'm sorry, Dick, I dropped my phone in the lake at Pine Flat. He said, you know what? If you drop your phone in a lake, something's going right. Sounds like a good plan.

• 2:20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's it. That's, it's been great. And great to be connected with John and his family, all of them. Gene didn't get much ink, but Gene is the real brains of the outfit. And the reason he was nervous about going cruising, the real story, behind the backstory.

• 2:20:56Speaker 02

  The Manasquan Inn is where, is where Gene worked. And she was a schoolteacher working the Manasquan Inn in the summertime. Good looking woman and she still got it. And she, and she had lots of suitors and John did not want to leave her unattended.

• 2:21:13Speaker 01

  I left my car with her when they went on the cruise because I didn't want to leave it with my other roommate.

• 2:21:17Jocko Willink?

  Great, great. John's got a great family.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  When I first went to got orders to Lakers, I says, well, New Jersey. I just want to get in and out of New Jersey without meeting a Jersey girl. She changed my whole perspective of Jersey girls. We have three lovely boys and eight grandchildren and so now I'm tired and we're just traveling the country because one lives in the Chicago area that we're spending some time with. One lives in Boulder and his family. We just spent a week with them. We're out here in California because my oldest son and his family are out here. So we're out there, out here visiting them. So, great family.

• 2:21:54Speaker 02

  If I can add about Jean, if I add one little trivia thing, she's sort of a celebrity. Other than the fact that on her ID card, her military ID, it says Commander Jean Farr. I don't know how she got that, but other than that, you ever go to Jersey Mike's?

• 2:22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:10Speaker 02

  Subs?

• 2:22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:12Speaker 02

  There's a picture in there of the original. He's laughing. The original Jersey Mike's, it was on, in Point Pleasant, wasn't it?

• 2:22:18Speaker 01

  Right, yes.

• 2:22:19Speaker 02

  And it's the first Jersey, first sub I ever had in 1970. And there's a picture of the original Jersey Mike's and the guy owns it now, worked there and bought it out. But there's a picture there of the beach at Point Pleasant. And there's a girl, is it yellow or red, the bathing suit?

• 2:22:37Speaker 01

  I think it's red.

• 2:22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, anyway, it's a girl in a two-piece bathing suit. That's his wife.

• 2:22:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's outside. That's gonna be the most Googled picture after this, after this podcast comes out.

• 2:22:49Speaker 02

  You're welcome, Jean.

• 2:22:50Jocko Willink?

  Well, look, we've been going for a little over two hours now, probably a good, probably, I mean, this is just a good place to wrap it up. Barn, you got anything else, John?

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  I'd just like to say that I think my time in the Navy, it was the best part of my life, especially that six years on as an active duty. And it's been a privilege and an honor to have served and supported the United States. And I think more people should, should feel that way. And, and to go through, do that, and the people we had that we led, hopefully we made a positive impact on other people's lives and made it better. But it's been a privilege and an honor to, to serve our country.

• 2:23:38Jocko Willink?

  Carl.

• 2:23:39Speaker 02

  Ditto. I remember, as you talked about the question about people's attitudes and we came back and so forth, my brother was killed in action in 1968. I was in my last week off for candidate school. I hadn't, we were getting ready to put on the bar and be for real. And then they extended us four weeks and we went sixteen instead. But I met his body in San Francisco and escorted the body from San Francisco to Coos Bay, Oregon. And in spite of what was going on in the country then, it was the most moving experience you can

• 2:24:23Speaker 02

  imagine. The way the airlines handled his body with respect, how they put him on, they put him on first, took him, I'm sorry, put his body on last and took it off first when we landed. How the captain held all the people in their seats until my brother was off, until I was exited the aircraft. And since I've been retired, I've done a lot of traveling. John sees more of Eddie and Earl and Tim more than they like, but I see a lot of good in America in spite of what the news programs may put out even today. The 24-hour news

• 2:25:03Speaker 02

  cycle is our problem. I see good people out there that are, and I don't see racism at all. I see good people doing good things, being kind to each other, and particularly to an old man who they have got no reason to be kind to. And that's me. And I see it in every state I've been. I have no bad experiences. And I've driven probably 200,000 miles the last five years around our country. I've even been to Honduras. Still met a lot of good people.

• 2:25:36Speaker 01

  I'd just like to say I've enjoyed this and I'd like to thank my son Eric. He's the one that talked me into doing this. I'm not big on going out and touting what I've done and things like that. So he, I'm glad he took the, you know, took charge of it and came through and, you know, talked to Helen and got this arranged and I've enjoyed the two hours that we've spent here with you. And I've listened to some of your broadcasts and enjoyed them as well. So I want to thank you for having us and I want to thank Eric for helping arrange it for me.

• 2:26:10Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely. Thanks to Eric and, and thanks to both of you. Obviously, thanks for coming on and sharing your story and sharing the story of what you all did. More important, thanks for what, thanks for what you guys did for America and, um, and for going out and holding the line. And on top of all that, um,

• 2:26:49Jocko Willink?

  a profound thank you and a solemn salute to the 44 members of the Sea Wolves, pilots and gunners, that were killed in action in Vietnam and who gave their lives for us and to take care of my forefathers in the Sea Wolf teams. We will not forget their sacrifice. Thanks for coming on.

• 2:27:18Speaker 01

  Thank you, John. Thank you.

• 2:27:21Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Carl Nelson and John Farr. Sea Wolves have left the building.

• 2:27:30Jocko Willink?

  Always good to hear those stories, man.

• 2:27:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:27:34Jocko Willink?

  I'm glad we're able to capture them. This is a unit that was founded and commissioned in Vietnam and then decommissioned in Vietnam. This, the whole life of the Sea Wolves was in Vietnam. That's it. I'm pretty sure most highly decorated naval air squadron in history. Which is also kinda crazy. So.

• 2:28:01Jocko Willink?

  Good to be able to pass on these, uh, capture these stories. Appreciate them coming on here and.

• 2:28:10Jocko Willink?

  Well.

• 2:28:12Jocko Willink?

  These guys were always ready to go. Echo Charles?

• 2:28:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm thinking that we should probably do our best. So we are also always ready to go. What do you think?

• 2:28:23Speaker 03

  To go, yes, I agree. We've got to stay capable. That's kind of the deal. That's the gig.

• 2:28:28Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:28:30Speaker 03

  So what do we do? We're working out, we're reading, obviously. We're doing jujitsu. Thankfully.

• 2:28:36Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:28:37Speaker 03

  Come on, you gotta be thankful for that.

• 2:28:38Jocko Willink?

  Always thankful.

• 2:28:39Speaker 03

  There was a time where we were doing a lot less jujitsu.

• 2:28:42Jocko Willink?

  We don't like that at all.

• 2:28:43Speaker 03

  Capability hit some challenges. All good though, we're back, we're doing jujitsu, we're reading, we're working out. We're maintaining relationships as well. Don't forget about that kind of stuff. So through this path that we're all on. You run into some pain.

• 2:29:00Jocko Willink?

  Yep, unfortunately, it's the truth, it's reality.

• 2:29:03Speaker 03

  Pain is part of it. We'll say pain and suffering. Okay, I'm overstating that because it isn't a level of suffering. Because you're gonna suffer regardless. If you're not on the path, you're gonna suffer those consequences of not being on the path. If you're on the path, you're gonna suffer what the path gives you to suffer. So you're gonna need some help.

• 2:29:24Speaker 03

  We got help. Jaco Fuel Supplementation for your body and for your brain. So first thing we have is Jaco Discipline Go. In a can, in a powder and in a capsule. So speaking of the cans, these are your energy drinks of today. The real energy drinks.

• 2:29:45Speaker 03

  Updated.

• 2:29:45Jocko Willink?

  Updated, upgraded.

• 2:29:47Speaker 03

  Upgraded.

• 2:29:48Jocko Willink?

  Beneficial, benevolent.

• 2:29:52Jocko Willink?

  Benevolent, that's what they are, they're good.

• 2:29:54Speaker 03

  They are, they're good for you. Energy drink that you get all the front end benefits of an energy drink and then you get back end benefits rather than back end detriments, as it were, back in the day.

• 2:30:05Jocko Willink?

  Like where you're going with this.

• 2:30:06Speaker 03

  Not like that. So yes, Discipline Go. Uh, you can get them at Wawa, you can get them at Vitamin Shoppe, you can get them on Jaco Fuel dot com. Also with Jaco has the stuff for your immunity, stuff for your joints, stuff for your additional protein that you might need. Keep in mind, this additional protein, Molk, it's called Molk.

• 2:30:26Speaker 03

  Is the best tasting protein that there is.

• 2:30:32Jocko Willink?

  In fact, even if you were to start ranking just straight up desserts, like if you just started ranking desserts, straight up. It's on, it's in the game. I mean, it's beating, there's a lot of desserts, in my opinion, it's straight up beating, right?

• 2:30:46Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:30:46Jocko Willink?

  And legit desserts too.

• 2:30:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:48Jocko Willink?

  That it's beating.

• 2:30:51Jocko Willink?

  Let's see, there's a whole, a whole genre of cakes. In fact, most cakes are getting beat by Molk, in my opinion. I usually think cakes are dry.

• 2:30:58Speaker 03

  Okay, so you, you're correct, actually. And usually a little case study. So my mother-in-law is in town.

• 2:31:04Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:31:05Speaker 03

  Cool. And she likes these things, like, uh, they're almost like shortbread cakes.

• 2:31:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:31:11Speaker 03

  And they come in this lavish like container.

• 2:31:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:31:14Speaker 03

  And like, half of them are like coated with, I don't know what you call icing, or whatever you call that. You know, the one that at some point it was soft and now it hardened and now it's a shell, but it's like, anyway, I forget. I forget what they're called, but they're whatever. So I'm like, okay, cool. Yeah, she's, and so my.

• 2:31:30Jocko Willink?

  Did you get that hitter?

• 2:31:31Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, I got into them.

• 2:31:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:31:33Speaker 03

  Just to see what up, you know?

• 2:31:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:35Speaker 03

  They look good.

• 2:31:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:36Speaker 03

  So I was like, cool. And I eat one, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. It's like, of course, good. Keep in mind, I wasn't evaluating it like this at the time, but I'm like, cool, good. Thinking back on those things, whatever they were called.

• 2:31:49Jocko Willink?

  Molk is better.

• 2:31:50Speaker 03

  Molk is straight up better.

• 2:31:51Jocko Willink?

  Molk is better.

• 2:31:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And I'm talking about this front end taste.

• 2:31:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:31:54Speaker 03

  Straight up. Oh, yeah. Just the sheer pleasure of drinking milk is better than those cakes. The thing is, the cakes weren't like, oh, these are like surprisingly junk.

• 2:32:05Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no.

• 2:32:05Speaker 03

  They're legit. They came through for what they were doing. Yeah.

• 2:32:09Jocko Willink?

  This is what I'm saying. If you start graphing all desserts.

• 2:32:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:13Jocko Willink?

  Like, milk is, is in the upper percentage.

• 2:32:17Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 2:32:18Jocko Willink?

  And there's, and it's absolutely good for you.

• 2:32:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:32:22Jocko Willink?

  So there you go.

• 2:32:23Speaker 03

  That's the good news right there.

• 2:32:24Jocko Willink?

  I think, uh, the, you know, Be Little for the, for the design is gonna get a Nobel Eat Prize.

• 2:32:34Speaker 03

  Nobel Eat Prize, hell, yeah.

• 2:32:35Jocko Willink?

  Right? Hey, man, you gotta put that stuff together. It's hard to make that stuff taste so good. It's not easy.

• 2:32:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would think it's like.

• 2:32:43Jocko Willink?

  We go through iteration after iteration after iteration to make it taste that good. It's not like, oh, cool, here's, you know, the ingredients, put them in there, now it tastes good. No, it's hard.

• 2:32:52Speaker 03

  What's weird is like, I didn't think about that. And one Be Little was kinda explaining it. I was like, oh, that makes sense. And then I realized, oh shit, that applies to a lot of stuff then, because, okay, so we're doing like flavor testing.

• 2:33:05Jocko Willink?

  This is for, is this for your drink?

• 2:33:08Speaker 03

  You know.

• 2:33:08Jocko Willink?

  Mango Mayhem?

• 2:33:09Speaker 03

  We're, we're doing some, uh, tasting and stuff. So he's like, hey, what do you think about this is before when we're doing grape or whatever? He's like, what do you think about this? I was like, yeah, I want it to be like more, more. Like, I need more of this particular flavor, whatever. He's like, okay, cool.

• 2:33:24Jocko Willink?

  Here's the.

• 2:33:24Speaker 03

  But keep in mind, that in turn does this to it. And it's like, oh, man, this is like a balance.

• 2:33:29Jocko Willink?

  It's a balancing act.

• 2:33:30Speaker 03

  So you gotta balance it perfect.

• 2:33:32Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  And sometimes straight up, and this is what happened with that particular flavor. He's like, sometimes it simply won't work, given what you're trying to do.

• 2:33:39Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:33:39Speaker 03

  Just simply won't work. Otherwise, you gotta either add sugar, which that's the main thing. You just gotta add sugar, right?

• 2:33:45Jocko Willink?

  Which we're not doing.

• 2:33:45Speaker 03

  We're not doing. Exactly right. So the same thing for milk, same thing for like those milk bars, like everything. I was like, oh, man, you guys got some, you have a task in front of you.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  It's a hard job.

• 2:33:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:33:56Jocko Willink?

  But I think the Nobel Eats Prize is gonna go to Be Little.

• 2:34:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:34:01Jocko Willink?

  And the Jaco Fuel, uh, what, what are they? The food team. They're making the, they're making it.

• 2:34:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:08Jocko Willink?

  Mixing it up, FedExing it to me. So if you want any of that stuff, go to Jaco Fuel.com. By the way, look, we know that shipping can be expensive. And we know that there's other, let's say, global organizations in the world that offer free shipping. If you're a member of their little club. Okay, cool. And that's good. I'm not taking away from that. That's a good business model. We know that we have to offer something so that we can also give you the equivalent value. So check it out. If you subscribe to any of these things, you don't have to pay for shipping. Shipping is free.

• 2:34:45Speaker 03

  You know what I thought of actually just now about the some global organizations and their free shipping situation? You pay a membership fee for that.

• 2:34:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so we're not. It's not even free.

• 2:34:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not fee free at all. If you buy nothing.

• 2:35:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they scammed you.

• 2:35:03Speaker 03

  You still pay. You're still paying. Guess what? You're still paying. So that's kind of the better. Uh, what do you call it? Like the superior element in this. Hey, if you don't.

• 2:35:14Jocko Willink?

  Isn't that weird? They trick you. Pay us money and it's free.

• 2:35:18Speaker 03

  It's one of those switcheroo's, you know, where it's like, no, no, you got free shipping. Now, just for the ability to have free shipping, just pay us a membership fee.

• 2:35:28Jocko Willink?

  That's very strange. Look at you with the catch. Uh, yep. There you go. Vitamin Shoppe. You can also get it at. You can also get it at Wawa for the drinks. And people are asking a lot about a lot of other retailers across the country. We're working on all of them. We got, uh, the team is out there all the time. There we are. We're getting our, our, our phone rings all day long. Which is awesome. Cause people want the, the distributors, the stores want to have it in there. And we are getting it in there. We're being strategic. We don't want to outdo our supply chain right now. As we build out our logistic capabilities. This is a military operation, right?

• 2:36:09Jocko Willink?

  This doesn't mean we're going to be overly cautious. I mean, we're going to push the envelope and we've been pushing the envelope. You know, there's been some times a little bit thin on the logistics train, but we're still pushing forward. But we don't want to totally overwhelm our logistic train. So we are, we're getting there. It's taking a little longer than we want it to. Understood. But we want a solid base to get there. So if you.

• 2:36:33Jocko Willink?

  We're working on it and we will be worldwide. We'll be nationwide pretty quick.

• 2:36:39Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 2:36:40Jocko Willink?

  We're working on it.

• 2:36:40Speaker 03

  So everyone can have the benefits.

• 2:36:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, I feel kinda bad with all the benefits just in my cupboard.

• 2:36:46Speaker 03

  I know, but also Origin USA, this is where you can get your American-made stuff. Denim for jeans. Yep. Got boots, got wallets and belts and whatnot, jujitsu stuff.

• 2:37:00Jocko Willink?

  Yep. By the way, since we're talking about NOM today, if you don't know this, the SEALs in NOM much of the time wore jeans. Why do they wear jeans? Cause they were more comfortable, more durable, and better. So you can see all kinds of pictures of the SEALs in NOM.

• 2:37:20Jocko Willink?

  You can see them in the Mekong Delta, wearing jeans. And guess what? We have a pair of jeans based on that history and they are called Delta 68. And I'm talking about 1968. Is there anything cooler than Delta 68 jeans?

• 2:37:38Speaker 03

  It's gonna be very hard to find something.

• 2:37:39Jocko Willink?

  They're the most comfortable jeans you will ever put on your body. And by the way, they're also as comfortable as whatever else you could put on your legs as a human. There's nothing more comfortable.

• 2:37:51Speaker 03

  I probably would agree with that if I had some, but.

• 2:37:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's a bummer.

• 2:37:55Speaker 03

  That's completely my fault, by the way.

• 2:37:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's my fault. I should have had the whole world revolve around you more.

• 2:38:03Speaker 03

  Probably right. Well, actually technically all I wear is shark fin shorts, which are from Origin. By the way, I don't know if they, I think they might be sold out of those, so that's a whole nother story. Nonetheless, they do have gis and rash guards for jujitsu as well. All kinds of jujitsu stuff, compression stuff, like all kind of, all made in America too, by the way. I know I said that one time, but the way I said it is indicating that it's not as big of a deal as it really is.

• 2:38:26Jocko Willink?

  Not to get crazy here, but if you need a gi, get an Origin gi for sure. Get a Rift gi, cause it's next level. It's another thing. It's another, it's another.

• 2:38:38Jocko Willink?

  It's a complete elevation from whatever kind of gi you've ever worn in your life. The Rift Gi is a totally new ballgame. It's freaking awesome. So if you, if you need a gi, get yourself a Rift Gi.

• 2:38:48Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. So yeah, again, originusa.com. Check out all their stuff on there because there's a lot of stuff. For me to go down the list right now and say all this stuff is going to take a long time. So go on there, check.

• 2:38:58Jocko Willink?

  I don't have that kind of patience right now.

• 2:39:00Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:39:00Jocko Willink?

  And believe me, I'm patient to be sitting here with you freaking time and time again as you've put me through this, but it's.

• 2:39:05Speaker 03

  All good, bro. I understand fully. Nonetheless, that's, that's what it is. Also, Jaco has a store. It's called Jaco Store. The OG since day one, day five.

• 2:39:19Speaker 03

  Not day one, day five. So you go to jacostore.com. This is where you can get Discipline Equals Freedom shirts and hoodies and hats. Some rash guards on there. Get after it. Shirts, hats, tank tops. Good. If you know what that means, you say good. If you know what that means, you want to represent. That's where you can get your shirts and hats and hoodies. We've got shorts on there as well. So yeah, a lot of good stuff on there. Um, we also have a free shipping subscription situation. And it's not the kind you gotta pay for a membership just to have it. You get a shirt every month. A little bit different designs, free shipping on that one as well. But yeah, it's called the Shirt Locker.

• 2:40:00Speaker 03

  So that's on Jaco Store as well. So yeah, if you want to check out, check out that. If you like that, get that.

• 2:40:05Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, all the stuff that we're talking about, if you want to support. Want to give that support to the podcast, this is how you do it. Otherwise, it's like, oh, we will run, you know, people are out there running advertisements for.

• 2:40:19Speaker 03

  Um.

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  Stuff.

• 2:40:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40:21Jocko Willink?

  Stuff that you actually don't want.

• 2:40:23Speaker 03

  Registry cleaner for your, uh, computer hard drive.

• 2:40:27Jocko Willink?

  Look, nothing against registry cleaners for your computer hard drives, but you don't want to hear about that when we're talking about freaking. Huey gunships. And we don't want to tell you about that, what we're talking about Huey gunships. So all the stuff. Jacofuel.com, jacostore.com, originusa.com. If you want to support, we appreciate it.

• 2:40:48Speaker 03

  You know what's interesting in this? I was talking to Jill.

• 2:40:52Speaker 03

  Our boy Joe.

• 2:40:52Jocko Willink?

  Joe Moss?

• 2:40:53Speaker 03

  And yeah, and he reminded me of this and I know, I know this, I know this. Like it's the back of my hand, is that the expression? Anyway, I know this, but every once in a while, when I'm reminded of it, I'm reminded of the, for lack of a better term, interestingness of it. Where all this stuff, Origin Jeans, Jaco Store stuff, Jaco Fuel stuff, this is all stuff that you, that we actually use now and have before even like these existed.

• 2:41:23Jocko Willink?

  This is it.

• 2:41:23Speaker 03

  This is like just the better version now. Like shirt you're wearing right now, oh, that's from Jaco Store right there.

• 2:41:28Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:41:28Speaker 03

  The hoodie that I wear, Jaco Store, the shorts that I wear, literally like these shorts are so worn out, because I wear them every single day, that like it has the outline from my cellphone, like on the pocket or whatever.

• 2:41:41Jocko Willink?

  Drinks that we're drinking.

• 2:41:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Origin shorts, though, by the way.

• 2:41:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:44Speaker 03

  Like it's all.

• 2:41:45Jocko Willink?

  I have, I have JacoStore.com shorts on right now.

• 2:41:49Speaker 03

  Exactly, right.

• 2:41:49Jocko Willink?

  With the digital pattern.

• 2:41:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So it's not like.

• 2:41:53Jocko Willink?

  Camo.

• 2:41:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. That's one of the options for sure. So it's not like, oh, yeah, support the podcast by buying some keychains that we sort of just made up or whatever, which would be kind of cool, I guess. Keychains are cool because I use keychains, but they're not arbitrary things.

• 2:42:09Jocko Willink?

  That's right. You're running around with your black belt keychain now.

• 2:42:11Speaker 03

  That was a gift.

• 2:42:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I go Charles, if you see him, maybe you forgot he's a black belt. Don't worry. You won't forget for long because he's got it on his keychain. He's like, hey, do you want to, here, let me put these keys on the table where they're visible.

• 2:42:25Speaker 03

  Okay, okay.

• 2:42:26Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 2:42:26Speaker 03

  First off, that was a gift from Mike from Jiu-Jitsu Magazine. I want him to disrespect him by putting it somewhere.

• 2:42:33Jocko Willink?

  All I'm saying is, we know, we will all know you're a black belt when your keys go on the table, which is where they always go in front of everyone.

• 2:42:41Speaker 03

  Anyway, what I was trying to tell our people is that this is stuff that we use.

• 2:42:48Speaker 03

  Anyway, even before it existed. So it's not some arbitrary thing we're saying, hey, support the podcast. By the way, we'll give you this, this moderately valued thing.

• 2:42:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:56Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, these are things that are like when you're in the game on the path. They're legitimately there.

• 2:43:03Jocko Willink?

  Check, hey, subscribe to the podcast. Also check out Jaco Unraveling Podcast. That's me and Daryl Cooper, DC. Talking about all kinds of stuff. Grounded Podcast, we got the Warrior Kid Podcast, we got Jaco Underground.com. That's our own platform, right? We can't just be, we can't just be parasites on these big platforms. Cause guess what? The, the big platform might decide they're gonna scrape you off. And now what are you gonna do? Starve to death? Die? We're not gonna let that happen. We gotta have a contingency plan. If the big platforms decide to scrape off us, cause we're over there.

• 2:43:40Jocko Willink?

  No. We have our own platform. It's called Jaco Underground, Jaco Underground.com. You are helping us build it, just in case these people get squirrely. And they start injecting their behaviors into what we're doing. That's one, see, that's the cool thing about a podcast. The cool thing about a podcast is you can do it, well. If you are doing the podcast.

• 2:44:06Jocko Willink?

  In it, in an old school way, which is, hey, we're just gonna do what we want. Then you can do whatever you want. We can literally do whatever we want on this podcast.

• 2:44:15Jocko Willink?

  But what if? Platforms said, well, actually, we don't want you to do that. Or we want you to do this. Or we're gonna put an advertisement in there, whatever, whatever they're gonna do, they can do, right? So we don't want to allow someone else to control what we are doing. So therefore, if you wanna help us out, you can go to Jaco Underground.com. And we're making, we make another little podcast for that. We're talking about interesting topics, adjacent topics. It costs money. It costs $8.18 a month to keep it rolling. But if, look, if you can't afford that, we get it. We're not trying to exclude you from the team.

• 2:44:52Jocko Willink?

  We're not trying to exclude you from the movement. You can email [email protected] and we'll take care of that. Appreciate the support. We also have a YouTube channel, by the way.

• 2:45:03Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:45:04Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of platforms, we have a YouTube channel. This is where I put in a lot of work creatively as the assistant director to many of these videos, the good ones. And if you want to check out my work, you want to see what the, really the pinnacle of assistant directing? You can check some of these videos out on Jocko Podcast YouTube channel.

• 2:45:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, the epitome, is that what you say? Or the pinnacle?

• 2:45:31Jocko Willink?

  Pinnacle of assistant directing.

• 2:45:32Speaker 03

  So, my daughter, she's eight, by the way, so keep that in mind.

• 2:45:36Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:45:36Speaker 03

  Before you fly off the handle. So she, you know, she's like, "Oh yeah, you and Jaco are YouTubers." And I'm like, "Oh, okay, ah, you know, maybe, maybe not, depends on what you mean, whatever." So she's like, "Hey, what is, like, well, what does Jaco do then?" You know? "Well, he writes books or whatever." He's like, "Yeah, but he already wrote those books." Like, "What does he do?"

• 2:45:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, "What's he doing now?"

• 2:45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, "What does he do?" And, you know, eight years old, you hear, "What do you do?" That's what you think, right? You think, "What do you do? What do you do when you wake up? Like, what does he do?" She knows what I do. I play on the computer all day. She knows that, you know, kind of thing. She understands.

• 2:46:11Jocko Willink?

  Both of us know that, me and her.

• 2:46:14Speaker 03

  So, anyway, so I was like, "Oh, you know, whatever, he does his thing." She goes, "Jaco hardly does anything." She goes, she said straight up, "You do most of, like, you do pretty much everything."

• 2:46:29Speaker 03

  And then, so I kind of laughed. I was like, "Yeah, you're right, Jaco just talks." She's like, "Yeah, he just talks. Like, you're the one who has to film. You're the one who has to come on with this." You're the one, because she sees everything I do, you know?

• 2:46:41Speaker 03

  Yep. So, next time she says something like that, I'll be like, "Well, you know, um, he does, he is the assistant director on some of these videos, so, you know."

• 2:46:49Jocko Willink?

  So now we know I am, I am, I am an employed individual.

• 2:46:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:46:54Jocko Willink?

  My, my work is, is the pinnacle of effort.

• 2:46:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you're doing your part.

• 2:47:02Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:47:03Speaker 03

  So, yes, YouTube channel, we do have one. Also, we have Psychological Warfare. It's an album we made. Jaco made, technically. Of him helping me through moments of weakness that I might have from time to time. Then we extended it to other weaknesses that others might have from time to time. So what you do, pop that in. When you're feeling the more you're gonna skip that workout, you put it in. He's gonna tell you why you should not do that. It's a good one.

• 2:47:29Jocko Willink?

  If you want something to hang on your wall, get something cool to hang on your wall from Dakota Meyer. Flipsidecanvas.com is gonna send you a bunch of cool designs. Check them out. And you're supporting Dakota Meyer. And if you're doing that, like, your whole day is good, in my opinion. Got some books. Final spin. This is not a book about leadership.

• 2:47:52Jocko Willink?

  There may or may not be some leadership lessons in there. It's more a book about life and death and the, and the journey that human beings go through. And the pitfalls that they fall into. And how they rise out of those or don't. You can check that out. It's coming out. If you want to get the first edition, you best order now. Cause you know, the publisher's like, well, you know. We don't want to invest too much in this. It's like, okay, cool. So they're not gonna print enough. You're not gonna get one unless you're in the game. Get in the game. Also, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. The Code of Evaluation Protocol. Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. There's a new version out that has my head on it, but it's bigger than my original head. My head has grown.

• 2:48:39Jocko Willink?

  Way the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, and four. Mikey and the Dragons. About Face by Hackworth, which I was honored to write the foreword for. Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership. The first two books I wrote about leadership with my brother Leif Babin. We have Echelon Front, which is a leadership consultancy. And what we do is solve problems through leadership. We have an online training platform. EFonline.com. On there all the time. Courses on there. Get your team aligned. You don't, I don't need to come out to your location. Good deal, Dave Burke doesn't need to come out to your location. Leif Babin doesn't need to come out to your, we're, we're in your location. Virtually.

• 2:49:23Jocko Willink?

  Check that out. We have some, some live events that we do. One of them is called the muster and is two day leadership seminar. The next one is in Phoenix, August 17th and 18th. And then Las Vegas, October 28th and 29th. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to get in the game there. We have something, I don't even know if this will be out yet. We have the FTX, which is a field training exercise. You learn tactics, you apply the tactics with laser weapons. You apply the leadership tactics that we talk about all the time. And they will be ingrained into your brain when you are done with the field training exercise. Massive lessons learned. And if you want to help service members, active and retired,

• 2:50:07Jocko Willink?

  their families, Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, she has a charity organization. She gets, one of the things that she's doing is getting medical treatment for service members that the government doesn't cover. And she'll cover the whole bill. So if you want to help service members get those medical treatments, you can donate or get involved at Americas MightyWarriors.org. And if you want more of my grueling ruminations, or you need more of Echo's hypnotic hypotheses, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the Gram, and on Facebook, Echo's at Echo Charles. I am at Chalka Willink.

• 2:50:51Jocko Willink?

  And thanks once again to John Farr and Carl Nelson. Thanks to John's son, Marine, for getting us linked up. Thanks for sharing your stories, gentlemen. And thank you for your incredible service to our great nation. And thanks to all the Sea Wolves themselves that flew in Vietnam and risked their lives and sometimes gave their lives for their brothers in arms on the ground. And to all our military personnel and veterans around the world, thank you for what you do and what you have done to protect freedom and our way of life. And the same goes to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service,

• 2:51:36Jocko Willink?

  and all first responders. Thank you for protecting us when we need you. And to everyone else out there.

• 2:51:46Jocko Willink?

  You never know when the call will come and you never know how much time you will have.

• 2:51:54Jocko Willink?

  In fact, you don't know how much time you have. So don't wait, don't hesitate, don't procrastinate. Instead, like the mighty Sea Wolves of Helicopter Attack Squadron 3, go out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.