290: Sea Stories and Tales of Terror, with Admiral William McRaven

0:00:00 - Opening 0:04:53 - Admiral William McRaven 3:52:21 - Final thoughts. 3:55:09 - How to stay on THE PATH. 4:16:01 - 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 290 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  Within 24 hours, I had ordered the special operations units to assemble in North Carolina. On the SEAL side, all were senior enlisted from the same SEAL squadron. All were handpicked by the SEAL commander. All had extensive combat experience. The aviation crews were equally experienced and also handpicked. But none of them knew why they were being asked to come to North Carolina on such short notice. The following day, as we ushered the members of the raid team into the conference room at our North Carolina location, I could see a look of annoyance on their faces. By this time, I had briefed my boss Admiral Eric Olson on the Bin Laden mission.

• 0:55Jocko Willink?

  Olson, along with the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Mike Vickers, and several CIA senior officers were also present in the conference room. The operators' body language was unmistakable. Clearly, they thought they had been dragged out of Virginia Beach and Fort Campbell to participate in some kind of no-notice exercise just to impress the brass. I offered some short welcoming remarks and then turned over the briefing to a CIA officer. He began by handing out non-disclosure forms. I watched with some amusement as the body language began to change.

• 1:35Jocko Willink?

  Rarely were non-disclosure forms required for exercises, even sensitive ones. It took a few minutes before the forms were signed and collected. Then another CIA official stepped up on the small stage and began to brief the target. The operators shifted in their chairs, sitting up to focus on the slides on the screen. The CIA officer began, "Gentlemen, for the past several months, the CIA has been tracking an individual we call 'The Pacer.'" Embedded in the slide was a link. The CIA officer clicked on the link and a video played on the screen. Everyone watched as "The Pacer" moved around the compound at AC1.

• 2:24Jocko Willink?

  We have reason to believe that the Pacer is Osama bin Laden.

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  At the sound of bin Laden's name, there was silence in the room. I could see a number of the SEALs glancing around at each other as if to ask, are they screwing with us? Or is this for real? The briefing went on for another 30 minutes. After the CIA analyst finished, I pushed away from my table, stood up, and made sure everyone was clear on why we were here. "Gentlemen," I told them, "the President has asked us to develop a raid option to capture or kill bin Laden."

• 3:06Jocko Willink?

  For the past several weeks, a small team has been planning the mission, but now we have to find out whether the plan is executable. We have less than three weeks to test and rehearse the plan. At the end of that time, I have to report back to the President on the viability of the mission.

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  There was no emotion from the operators, no smiles, no acknowledgement of the magnitude of the operation.

• 3:32Jocko Willink?

  Now, it was all business. I continued, "The Agency has built a mock-up of the compound just a mile from here. You have two days to work through the movements on target.

• 3:45Jocko Willink?

  After that, we will move to another location out west to do the full dress rehearsals."

• 3:51Jocko Willink?

  I offered the other senior officers an opportunity to say a few words, but they recognized that this was about the operators, not a time to wax philosophically about the importance of the mission.

• 4:04Jocko Willink?

  "I will turn you over to your boss, and you guys can work out the details." "Any questions?"

• 4:12Jocko Willink?

  There were none.

• 4:14Jocko Willink?

  "All right," I said.

• 4:17Jocko Willink?

  "Let's get to work."

• 4:22Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt of the book Sea Stories, which was written by Admiral William McRaven. Admiral McRaven served thirty-seven years in the Navy and held just about every position of leadership there is, from SEAL platoon commander all the way up to four-star commander of all United States Special Operations Forces. He oversaw thousands and thousands of combat operations around the globe during his time in service, including some of the most important operations and perhaps the most important operation in the history of

• 5:05Jocko Willink?

  US Special Operations, the killing of Osama bin Laden. And all the while, even with that incredible burden of command, Admiral McRaven was always connected with the troops. As an example, he stopped by my little base in Baghdad and said hi to this common platoon commander as we geared up for a mission and asked earnest questions about what we were doing and how we were doing it, and then listened intently as I explained my little part of the war. He was always present, thoughtful, respected, balanced, and as good

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  of a representative of the SEAL community as we could have hoped for. And we have the honor of having him with us here tonight to share his vast experiences and lessons learned. Admiral, thank you for joining us.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Jack, great to be with you.

• 6:04Jocko Willink?

  That's, um, that's from the book Sea Stories. Now, you've written four books thus far. Sea Stories, Make Your Bed, your latest one, which was called The Hero Code, and then Spec Ops, Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare and Practice. I'll probably spend some time, well, I'm going a little bit, I'll go into, we'll go the array of books that you've written at some point, and...

• 6:35Jocko Willink?

  See Stories is sort of, well, you were saying that's about as close of a memoir as we're gonna get from you?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  That's about it.

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  I guess this podcast's gonna have to do that.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  This'll do it.

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna dive into See Stories first and, cause it relays some of your early experiences. Here's the deal, I'm gonna just read little tiny chunks of this book because you read your own audiobooks, which is awesome. So, people can go out and buy those, but in order to maybe trigger us into some other conversations and some stuff that's not in the books, I'll set it up. And I always like to start at the beginning and, and find out, you know, who these people are, where they came from, how they ended up the way they did, and, and you got a pretty good, pretty good, interesting background. And with that, I'm gonna go to the book here. Talking to your dad, when I asked him years later why he joined the military, he said that as a boy, he watched soldiers march through the streets of his hometown of Marston,

• 7:27Jocko Willink?

  Missouri, and board a train bound for the trenches of France. His father, an army surgeon, was one of those men. He knew then that he wanted to be a soldier. After graduating from aviation officer school at Brookfield in San Antonio, Texas, he received orders to the 309th Fighter Squadron, 8th Air Force. The 309th was part of the first American contingent to be posted in the United Kingdom. At the time, the Americans were still working to build a fighter aircraft that could compete in aerial combat against the German Messerschmitt. So, when Dad arrived in England, he and the other pilots of the 309th were given British Spitfires. The Spits, equipped with a powerful Rolls-Royce engines, new guns, and sleek aerodynamics,

• 8:12Jocko Willink?

  were good enough to go toe-to-toe with the Germans. Dad flew the Spitfire throughout the war, going on to fight in the campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, and eventually at the Normandy Invasion. He registered two confirmed kills during the war, but would himself be shot down over France in 1943. The saga of his escape and evasion from France back to England was told many times during our posting in France, but not by Dad, who rarely talked about his wartime service, but by the French Resistance Fighter who helped him back to freedom and now lived near us on the outskirts of Paris.

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  So your dad's a freaking war hero coming out of the gate.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I think they were all heroes back then. I mean, you think about this greatest generation, and I was fortunate growing up as a kid in San Antonio, Texas, that, you know, all of my dad's friends even back then had served in the Air Force or the Army, Air Corps of the Army, and they'd all fought in World War II. So, you know, you experience these kind of remarkable stories from these guys. But of course, that generation, both my, both my parents, my father and my mother, you know, they grow up during the Depression. They grow up as children of World War I. As I mentioned, my dad watched his father go off to serve in World War I, and my grandfather also. He was young enough that he came back

• 9:33Speaker 02

  and served in World War II. So as a combat surgeon. And then, of course, all the men go off to World War II. So, yeah, they, they had these stories, and I think the stories helped them. One of the reasons that I wrote the book See Stories was because the stories that my father told I know helped him and that group deal with the challenges that they had in life. Stories help you do that, as you well know. And frankly, writing the stories in the book See Stories kind of helped me. It was cathartic. You know, you put these stories down on paper, you remember them, you remember the people, you remember your emotions, and it's frankly helpful to get those stories out sometimes.

• 10:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So did your dad stay in the Army? Was he a career Army guy?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  He joined the Army Air Corps, which became the Air Force. So, yeah, he spent 26 years in the Air Force, retired as a Colonel, and flew until he had a heart attack, something about whiskey and cigarettes, and had a heart attack while we were over in France. And so that took him off flying status. They sent him back to Fort Sam Houston, actually, to Brook Air Force Base, or to Lackland Air Force Base, to Brook Medical Center there, recovered, and then retired out of Lackland.

• 10:49Jocko Willink?

  And you were growing up, you were, what was your behavior like? I know you got a pretty good story in there that's, you know, you obviously had a mischievous side, which I guess is just what we're born with. But you were also a really good athlete.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was, mischievous is a good way to describe it. And to your point, I think that was the nature of a lot of kids back then. You know, I grew up, born in 1955, but kind of grew up in the 60s. And this was a time when, you know, the, the movies were about spies. You know, I mean, James Bond came out, the, there was I Spy on TV and the man from Uncle. And, and even though, you know, I grew up in Texas and it was about cowboys and Indians sort of thing, the spy culture back then really kind of, I think, grabbed the young kids, certainly grabbed me. So yeah, you know, we were always looking at missions to go on. And, you know, when I was, when I was pre-teen, of course, a couple of those got me in some, some serious trouble. And yeah, I was a good athlete,

• 11:43Speaker 02

  but I was small. I didn't really start growing until late in high school. So my, my dad happened to have been a professional athlete. He played football for the Cleveland Rams, running back for the Cleveland Rams.

• 11:53Jocko Willink?

  And that's where he made all of his money?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think he told me they paid him $120 a week, which was good money back then. And then he would get $10 for doing Wheaties commercials. So, so he seemed like he was making pretty good money back then. But he and a bunch of buddies saw that, you know, in the, in the late 30s, early 40s, that war was brewing. And they, I think he told me one time, he and four of his, of his friends on the football team just got up, drove to California and signed up for the Army Air Corps.

• 12:22Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you're, what about grades? Were you interested in school? Did you care about?

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course I cared about school. I'm not sure school cared that much about me. You know, I was, I was an average student. I was an average student in elementary school, in junior high school, in high school, and in college. But, but I worked hard, you know, I mean, I worked hard to get the grades. I didn't have a lot of skills in math and science. And, and of course, when I look back on my college career, I mean, I changed majors four times. It wasn't until I got into journalism, which is what I ended up graduating in, that I found out I, I had a little bit of a talent for writing. So, I mean, I couldn't do, I started off in pre-med in college, that didn't work out so well. I went to accounting,

• 13:09Speaker 02

  that worked out even worse. And then I went into news reporting, and then finally in the broader arena of journalism.

• 13:17Jocko Willink?

  And so, uh, when you're going to college, did you, did you have a military career in mind at that point?

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did. Uh, yeah, again, I had watched my, my dad and his friends, and the one thing I loved about the military, uh, was just the camaraderie. Uh, yeah, even, even after my dad retired, we lived in a, a residential area in San Antonio called Windcrest, and Windcrest is where a lot of the retired military and a lot of the active duty military lived. So it was almost like living on base housing. And so all the kids, uh, you know, had some sort of connection to the military. Um, and it was just a great environment to grow up in. And I, I remember at a young age, I decided I kind of, my dad didn't push me. This wasn't the, the great Santini sort of thing, but I just, uh, I enjoyed, uh, you know, watching how my parents, uh, interacted with their friends. And I said, yeah, that, that's kind of what I want to do.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  And my dad wanted me to be a pilot and, uh, my, my mom wanted me, uh, uh, to be a doctor. Uh, the doctor was not going to work out, as she quickly found out. Uh, but she did get me an ROTC scholarship. She had to do all the work, you know, again, back then, uh, I don't think I had the discipline to do all the paperwork. My mom worked all the paperwork and said, you know, go to this interview, sign this, do this. Um, and I got an ROTC scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, and, uh, and that kind of put me on the path.

• 14:33Jocko Willink?

  How, how had you heard about the SEAL teams at this point?

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Uh, so interestingly enough, my sister, uh, was dating an Army Green Beret, and this was probably 1971, 72. And of course, the movie, The Green Beret with John Wayne had come out, and I, I loved the movie. Never heard of SEALs at that point in time. And so this, uh, Army officer comes, a young captain comes to pick her up. And this was at a time when it was very unusual because the Vietnam War was still going on. You weren't supposed to wear your class age, you know, your, your uniform out in, uh, in public back then. Um, but he comes to pick her up and he's in his uniform and he's a Green Beret. And, uh, so my sister notoriously late, so I'm kind of entertaining the guy. I'm about, you know, 16, 17 years old, I guess. And, uh, and he says, well, what are you going to do? And I said, well, you know, I'm looking at, at going into the Navy and ROTC.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  And he says, well, then you need to be a Navy SEAL. I'd never heard of Navy SEALs. And he had just come back from a tour in Vietnam. He goes, let me tell you, SEALs are the best guys in the Navy. If you want to do something special, you go be a Navy SEAL. I'm thinking, this is an Army Green Beret telling me to go be a Navy SEAL. And that really is kind of what spurred me. And then there was one article, you know, back then, not like it is today, of course. Back then, you couldn't find out about SEALs. But I got on Microfish in the library. I found one article called, Men With Green Faces. Kind of, it's a classic, but it was, it was in some old men's magazine, you know? Back then, they used to have these men's magazines and adventure magazines, sort of thing. And I must have read that article, you know, a hundred times, trying to find out what it was like. Of course, there was nothing on BUDs.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  It was all about the teams. Interestingly enough, about probably 10 years, 15 years later, I found that article, the Microfish, you know, photocopy of it. And of course, I knew all the guys in the article. It was Ed Bowen, and it was Bob Mabry, and it was, it was Bob Gormly. I mean, guys that now I was kind of serving with, that were actually in the article. So it was, it was interesting.

• 16:26Jocko Willink?

  Now, you made, you, you talk about this in, in Make Your Bed. You, you go to visit BUDs. Was this like your junior year in college?

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was between my junior and senior year. And, you know, we, we had some time off in the summer. And so I, I wanted to go see what, what BUDs was all about. So I, I took a flight to San Diego. And I show up at the compound, which is, I guess they're demolishing it now. But, so this was 1976. And I show up and I, and I go to the quarter deck kind of unannounced. And I, I, I tell them I'd like to see somebody talk about going through BUDs training. So the lieutenant who was running at the time, this guy named Doug Huth, Vietnam vet, very distinguished, great, great officer. And so I'm waiting outside and I, I look down the hallway. And I remember this very vividly. And I, I see this guy down the hallway. And of course, you remember how it's set up, you know? The offices are off to one side.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  And we, back then, there was always these posters. And they were, you know, Vietnam era posters, you know? Manly men doing manly things, I mean, guys with bandoliers on, guys in the mud with a stoner. And, and this guy is kind of looking up at these posters, you know, kind of. You know, longingly and looking up, I'm thinking to myself, you have got to be kidding me. I mean, this guy, you know, he was thin, kind of frail, and had a little bit of a mop of long hair, and I thought he was a dependent, you know. But he's kind of looking up and I'm thinking, man, does this guy really think he could be a Navy SEAL? Doesn't he know? I mean, Navy SEALs are supposed to look like me, you know, six foot two, eyes are blue, big brawny guys. And so as I'm watching this guy, you know, I'm waiting and thinking,

• 18:03Speaker 02

  I feel sorry for this guy if he really thinks that he could make it through SEAL training. So a few minutes later, I get called into Hugh's office, and I'm sitting there talking to Doug Hugh, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see this guy kind of walking across in front of the doorway. And finally, Doug Hugh stops me and he goes, hey, Bill, hold on a second, I want to introduce you to somebody. He said, Tommy, Tommy, come in here. He says, Bill, this is Tommy Norris. He's the last SEAL Medal of Honor recipient from Vietnam. And of course, as you well know, Jaco, Tommy, one of the toughest guys that ever went through SEAL training. And it just reinforced the fact, and of course, when you get in SEAL training, you realize this, it ain't about how big you are, it ain't about how fast you are. I mean, Tommy Norris, one of the toughest guys, because, you know, he had the, he had the heart big enough to make it through, the toughness, the determination,

• 18:45Speaker 02

  everything that we're looking for in SEALs. And so a lot of guys that go through that think it's all about, you know, how fast you can run and how much you can bench press, and they're missing the point. The Tommy Norris's of this world are the ones that, that rule the teams.

• 18:57Jocko Willink?

  Crazy how many guys with a big bench or a great runtime quit.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:03Jocko Willink?

  It's nuts.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Right. Saw it early on. We had this, we had two guys that looked like weightlifters. I don't think they made it through the first week. That's, that's not, not what you're looking for, as you know.

• 19:12Jocko Willink?

  And Lieutenant Hugh, who checked you in the first phase, he was the, he was the CO of all of BUDs when I went through.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Oh, was there?

• 19:18Jocko Willink?

  Yep. He was the captain in charge of the second one I went through. So, so you, you end up going back, finishing your senior year, and then you got, you got orders. But was it hard to get to go to BUDs then?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  It wasn't. Again, back then, BUDs was actually a course at the Naval Amphibia School. So it was not its own command, it was just a, a course that was run at the Naval Amphibia School. And when I got orders, I was at the University of Texas, I remember my orders came in, and it didn't say basic underwater demolition SEAL training, it had a course number on it. And it said something about explosives training, but that was about it. And so I didn't even know whether these were the right orders to go to BUDS. So I'm calling around, but again, back then, nobody knew about SEAL training. So, you know, the, one of the officers had to call the detailer who, back then, our detailers, and for your audience, the detailers are the guys that, that send you, give you the orders where to go. We didn't have a SEAL detailer back then.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  It was an EOD, an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Officer, that managed the SEAL community. So, yeah, he said, I don't know, it's, it's the course number. So of course I show up, turned out it, it was the right place to go.

• 20:23Jocko Willink?

  Well, we just had Bill Posey on.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:27Jocko Willink?

  And he showed up to BUDS, whatever course number it was, same thing. And he thought it was a course, he, he asked like, hey, do I need a backpack for the books? And they're like, what do you think you need books for? He says, for the course. I had no idea what he was doing. He thought I was gonna go, he's got, thought he was going to some kind of advanced dive, like hard hat dive school or something like that. And I was also thinking about Dick Thompson. We had a guy named Dick Thompson on who was a Green Beret in Vietnam. So he, he joined the army voluntarily, then he volunteered for special forces, then he volunteered for OCS, went, became an officer. And I said, hey, was it hard to, you know, when you, was it hard to get those billets? And he goes, no, because it was Vietnam. They're like, oh, you want to be an officer? Cool, go ahead. You want to be in special forces?

• 21:12Jocko Willink?

  Cool, go ahead. Or you want to join the army? Everything was easy.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Well, and I don't, I said, all you had to do was pass the PT test. And of course, as you know, the PT test is not all that hard. You pass the PT test, you get orders to, to BUDS. I mean, I think it was that easy back then. And now again, I can't, I can't talk to the Naval Academy guys, but for those of us in ROTC, hey, if you raised your hand and you wanted to go, you were probably going to get a billet.

• 21:35Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any idea what you were getting into?

• 21:37Speaker 02

  None, none whatsoever. Again, there, there were no books, there were no movies, there was nothing on SEAL training. I knew nothing about what we were going to do. I just knew that I wasn't going to quit. They were, they were going to have to kill me if they were going to stop me from getting through.

• 21:50Jocko Willink?

  How was your water competency?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, good. I mean, I was a good swimmer.

• 21:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  And I'd, I'd been scuba diving since I was 13, so I learned to dive young. So the water, I mean, I thought we'd actually spend more time, of course, we did spend a lot of time swimming, but I was always a good swimmer, so that was not an issue.

• 22:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think that's a big.

• 22:07Jocko Willink?

  That's a big problem for guys that show up from Iowa that didn't, you know, they grew up wrestling and weightlifting or whatever, but they didn't swim and that's a problem.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Or particularly swimming in the surf. Yeah, I mean, there's differences, you know, I mean, you can get in the pool and make pretty good laps, but there were a lot of kids that came in with me that all of a sudden, you know, you see the surf, particularly in the winter time off Coronado and you know, you get 10, 12 foot breakers and they're like, whoa, never seen that before. So that was a bit of a shock for them.

• 22:32Jocko Willink?

  And then your class leader was, was Daniel Stewart.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Daniel Stewart, yeah. One of the finest officers I ever served with. And Daniel had been rolled back. He had, as you recall, and towards the end of the first phase of training, or maybe it was right before Hell Week, we did cast and recovery. So you take an inflatable boat, small, and you tie it up along what we had was called a PL, which is a little small boat back then. And then you hook the old classic frogman in World War II, you hook your arm through the sling. Well, in the course of hooking his arm through the sling, the guy caught the arm too low, ripped out his bicep. And so Daniel had to get rolled back. Fortunately for us, he ends up being a class leader. And he was Lieutenant JG. The other officers in the class, we were all ensigns. And Daniel had been in the fleet,

• 23:17Speaker 02

  so he was already a surface warfare officer, Naval Academy graduate, exactly the guy we needed to frankly, get through training. Again, I knew nothing about what I was stepping into and neither did the other two officers that were with us. We were all, you know, kind of bright eyed and bushy tailed, but, but Daniel had already been through it and had some great, great ideas on how we were going to make it through. And he's the one that got us through frankly.

• 23:39Jocko Willink?

  He was my first commanding officer at SEAL Team One. And he was, I guess in the modern term that we would say, we would say he was jacked. He was like

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Still is.

• 23:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, cause he was a gymnast. Wasn't he a gymnast?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  He was.

• 23:52Jocko Willink?

  So he was the first human being, cause I didn't know anything about gymnastics, but he was out on the old pull up bar behind SEAL Team One, and he was doing muscle ups on the pull up bar. I didn't, I didn't even know what that was. And I remember thinking, damn, I got some work to do over here as a new guy.

• 24:09Jocko Willink?

  The instructors, so you've got, I mean, this is, first of all, they're basically unchained. There's no supervision. There was no adult supervision, right?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Well, I think there was, but of course, as, as trainees, you don't think there is. And you think they have the latitude to do anything to you. So I think that was part of the psychological advantage they had, was if there was, in fact, adult supervision, which I think there was, and I think they had certain criteria, we didn't know it. So I think today, again, the students going through, because they have such a good understanding, they know the instructors aren't going to kill them. I can be honest with you, I'm not sure we knew that back then. And some of them seemed mean enough to do that. But they were all Vietnam vets, you know, these salty old crusty old guys. And of course, as a young kid, I mean, you look up to these Vietnam vets, as we should. Great combat experience, great stories, and you wanted to be like these guys. And of course, they wanted you

• 25:04Speaker 02

  to be tough enough, mentally tough enough, physically tough enough, to join them in the teams. And you knew that was the standard you were fighting for. So it was great to have those guys be your instructors, because, you know, we looked up to them so much, and we just wanted to do the best by them.

• 25:22Jocko Willink?

  What was, was it like, just the normal kind of 80, 75 or 80% attrition rate?

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, same thing. We started with, I went back and had to check the numbers. We started with 110 guys, at least that's what the roster shows. We ended up with 33. So right about the same attrition. And yet, 33, back then, was a large class. The class before us, I think, had finished with 18 or 20, which was about normal back then. Again, I attribute a lot of our success to Daniel Stewart, who managed to keep the class together during the tough times. And they were, they were actually very impressed. Remember, the instructors watched us very closely, because we got a lot of guys through Hell Week. I think we ended up getting almost 55 guys through Hell Week, and we lost a lot of guys after that. But still, ending up with 33 guys was a large class. And the instructors were trying to figure out, how did you guys do that? Because we need to get more guys

• 26:14Speaker 02

  through. Well, the answer was, you had great leadership, and that always helps when you're in challenging situations.

• 26:21Jocko Willink?

  Did, I know you, you talk a little bit about, in the, in one of the books, about Instructor Facetti, who ended up being my first Master Chief at SEAL Team One. And he's a guy that really instilled...

• 26:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, the professionalism, because in the SEAL teams, especially, I would say more so back then, but there was like a professional side, and there was an equally strong sort of Hell's Angels sort of, sort of spirit that you could jump into, and, and like, great guys on both sides. Um, I think that Master Chief faculty, for me, sort of leaned me and kind of my group, at least put some level of, hey, you gotta be squared away, you gotta present yourself, you, you know, this is the military, we're in the Navy, like, all those little things, which, you go to some other, some other deeper, darker AOs in the SEAL teams, there was none of that going on, and, and I, I just appreciated that fact, and it, like I said, it had a, it

• 27:19Jocko Willink?

  had a, a good influence on me, because when you're young and impressionable, I just wanted to be a good SEAL.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:25Jocko Willink?

  And if you told me a good SEAL was having a good haircut and wearing a squared away uniform, okay, that's what I'm doing. Luckily, people like that were around.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and I think he nailed it, Jaco. I mean, that was consistent with what I saw with faculty throughout his career, and as we talked before the podcast, you know, Mike and I became very good friends, we were neighbors in, in Chula Vista, uh, and he and Daniel Stewart stayed very, very good friends. So, Mike was actually our proctor, again, for your listeners, so the proctor was the, the senior enlisted that really was in charge of your phase, so he was our first phase proctor, and, and that was really important, because it kind of sets the tone for the rest of the three phases. But faculty as the proctor and Daniel Stewart as the class leader, uh, you know, they, they worked well together, and faculty would, you know, give us little tips on, you know, how to get through certain evolutions and events, kind of pass through Daniel Stewart. Uh, so that team, that teamwork between faculty

• 28:19Speaker 02

  as the proctor and Stewart as the, as the class leader was helpful, but Mike was always professional. I mean, he was, and as you know, the instructors love to harass you. Uh, and, you know, some of them harass you with a little bit of a mean spirit, some of them have a good sense of humor, and of course, faculty could always do it with a little bit of a twinkle in his eye. Uh, I mean, let's not say you, you weren't suffering the pain, you were suffering the pain, uh, but there was always a little smile, a little bit of a twinkle in his eye, and you knew that he was gonna, you know, get you through this evolution, even though he was gonna, you know, harass you to the max.

• 28:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, you know, the thing I think I learned, well, again, never really broke it down like this, but this sort of professional side versus this kind of Hells Angels side. I think what I, what, what I learned from faculty was that what we were there to do was, was do the, do the mission of the country, right? And if you wanted to do that, if that's what you were there to do, to kill bad guys, to go out and execute operations, which look, this is the nineties when I showed up. There was, I missed the first Gulf War, but as far as I could tell, if you wanted to do that, if you wanted to actually do the missions for the country, then you had to be professional.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:30Jocko Willink?

  And that was the connection that I kind of made. And, and, and by the way, you know, the idea of being a, a frogman, what could, what can possibly trump doing, being a good operator for being a frogman? There's nothing that trumps that. It's not any of that other stuff that you can, that there's plenty of in the SEAL teams, but there's, there's nothing that trumps, hey, I'm a good, I want to be a good operator. I want to be able to do my job well. I want to go out and execute missions. And that professionalism, I think is a, I mean, it was a key component for me and my career. And something that I think people like Master Chief faculty embedded in enough people that it, it carries on.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  No, you know, you're exactly right. The fact of the matter is, uh, there was a little bit of the, the duality of, if you will, of the kind of the Hells Angels and the professionals. But even the Hells Angels understood that if you were going to do a complex SEAL mission, boy, you better have the highest standards possible. You better know your business. You better rehearse it to the nth degree. You are not going to come in and be cavalier about people's lives or about making sure that we're going to be successful on a mission. So, uh, I mean, again, I was fortunate. I had a guy named Lieutenant John Wright. And John was a young, uh, you know, probably Ensign or Lieutenant JG in Vietnam. But when I got to underwater demolition team 11, John kind of took me under his wing. And it was all about the professionalism.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  And at first was, okay, Ensign McRaven, you need to learn the basics. You need to know everything you can find out about demolition, about parachuting, about weapons. You better be able to break apart every single weapon because John Wright could do that. Now, you know, you, you had that expectation if you're one of these senior enlisted guys, but his expectation was you can't lead the men under you if you don't know the skill set equally as well. At the end of the day, you, you never know it quite as good as the enlisted guys do, but you want to make sure you've put in the effort. And so John instilled in me, hey, you gotta work hard every single day. You've gotta earn their respect every single day. The day you think you don't have to earn their respect, that you've become so senior, or you've become so entitled, then you're the wrong person

• 31:38Speaker 02

  to be leading. And that was instilled in me at a very young age. Fortunately, Mike Facken and I ended up working together a number of times, and later he became my command master chief. And to your point, Jaco, I mean, he was a guy that set the standards high, and expected everybody to meet the standards, or exceed the standards. And the standards were the standards. And I don't care whether you were his friend, or somebody he didn't like. If you could meet the standards, then you were gonna be a good teammate.

• 32:09Jocko Willink?

  Before we jump into UDT 11, it sounded like you almost had a damn helo crash at the end of BUDS.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  We did. Yeah, so it was the very last day of BUDS training. And this was, the next day, we were gonna graduate back at the time, you know, when you finished BUDS training, that's when you had the big graduation. You didn't get your Trident in, but all the parents would come out. So this was the day before the graduation. And the last evolution was helicopter cast and recovery. And so the parents that had come out for the graduation the following day, all showed up on Turner Field, and Turner Field is an area here in Coronado where the helicopters would land. They put some bleachers out there for all the parents to sit in. And of course, the instructor, who at the time was Lieutenant Mokie Martin, you know, makes the parents think that, you know, your sons are about

• 32:57Speaker 02

  to be Navy frogmen, you know? And this is a really tough evolution. It's a dangerous evolution. And so he kind of built up the hype a little bit for all the parents, when in fact, as you know, helicopter cast and recovery is a pretty straightforward operation. So myself and Daniel Stewart, actually, were the first two sticks. So we boarded the 46, the Navy 46. And so we go out, picked up off Turner Field, we fly out over the bay, and the idea is, you know, they drop each stick off, and the stick, I think we had seven or eight guys on the stick. And so Daniel's the first stick out, and I'm the first guy on the second stick. So I get dropped off. While the helo comes back around... Picks up Danil's guys, picks up me, I'm the first guy on the stick, and as I get into the helicopter, I sit down on the bench seat, I'm thinking, yeah, this doesn't look quite

• 33:41Speaker 02

  right. I'm up to my waist in water, and I'm thinking, I don't think the helo's supposed to be doing it. Of course, as I look in the cockpit, here are the pilots, they are fighting the helo. The crew chief, we had actually landed, we lost power in one of the engines, so the helicopter had settled hard into the water, and one of the guys who was about to be picked up through the hellhole gets landed on. And so now the crew chief, he's running back trying to make sure this guy didn't get knocked out. But now, as the helicopter is slowly starting to sink, we were following instructions. And back then, the instructions were, okay, gentlemen, if the helicopter lands in the water, everybody stay seated, the helicopter will sink, it will roll over, and you just swim out after that. And of course, we're not smart enough to realize that's a really bad idea. But, you know,

• 34:23Speaker 02

  it was about 30 feet deep where we were doing this, so he thought, eh, no big deal. If it sinks down, we'll swim out. Well, so finally, as the helo's kind of slowly starting to sink, the crew chief realizes, got to get the weight out of the back. Well, we're looking out the side door, and of course, that blade is like, almost clipping the water, and it's like, I don't know about this, but he's giving us the go sign, so we all dive out. Well, the pilot's got no control of the helicopter. So now, as we're all out trying to swim towards the safety boat, who is away, is going, I don't think I'm coming. The helo starts to kind of follow us. And finally, you know, we all get out of harm's way, and the pilot, good pilot, I mean, after about an hour and a half, he manages literally

• 35:05Speaker 02

  to drive the helo off to Point Golf, you know, that point over there, and beach the helo. So he saves the helicopter, and nobody got injured. But the funny part about it was, as I got told later, so the parents are all in the bleachers, and Lieutenant Martin is telling the story about, oh, helicopter crash, he says, and then all of a sudden, all the parents got up and they ran past me. I was like, what's going on? And of course, the helicopter landed in the water. And I remember, Facetti, as we got back to the beach, he said something to the effect of, boy, I hope this isn't an indication of how the rest of your career is going to go. And of course, it was an indication of how the rest of the career would go.

• 35:44Jocko Willink?

  That's uh, that's good times. Yeah. Um, so now you go to UDT 11 and uh, check into UDT 11 and look, like I said, I didn't want to read, I don't want to read a ton of stuff from the books today because you did this stuff on audiobook, but you captured the check-in process at a SEAL team and this was a UDT team, which later became SEAL teams. But I just, I just had to go, this is, this is going to the book, The Hero Code, your latest book. And this is what it like checking into a team. So you're the new guy. One of my officers remarked, yes, sir, I responded. It's my first day in the teams. First day in the teams. Well, you're gonna love it here, he said. The guys will welcome you with open arms. The old Vietnam vets are really nice.

• 36:27Jocko Willink?

  They love officers, particularly new officers. They'll treat you really well. Great, I'm looking forward to it. So there we go, out of the gate, it's uh, you can see where this is going. A sly grin came across the officer's face, dressed in khaki, swim trunks, blue and gold t-shirts, jungle boots, we headed out of the building and onto the grinder. After a short daily briefing from the executive officer, we broke ranks and formed up into a circle, the PT circle. And then it began. So Ensign, and you are an Ensign at this time, that's the lowest officer rank in the Navy. So Ensign, I understand you went to Texas A&M. No, Chief, the University of Texas, not Texas A&M. So you couldn't get into a real school, huh? Before I could answer, someone else offered a response. He's from Texas, there aren't any real schools in Texas. Ah, so you weren't smart enough to get into the academy?

• 37:12Jocko Willink?

  We frogmen expect our officers to be smart. What did you major in? I hesitated. Journalism, Chief. Journalism, you're a damn reporter. Hey XO, we don't need no damn reporter in our ranks. The executive officer smiled but said nothing. What SEAL training class were you in? A man at the far end of the circle shouted. Class 95, I yelled back. You gotta be kidding me, an older officer said, spitting out a wad of tobacco. I heard class 95 was the easiest class ever. They had a summer hell week. Over the next 15 minutes, all 50 men in the circle had something to say about my shortfalls. In between repetitions of pushups, flutter kicks, situps, and burpees, they questioned my parentage, my athleticism, my intellect, my state of origin, the quality of my SEAL

• 37:56Jocko Willink?

  training class, and of course, my love life. "You got a girlfriend?" one of the salty old chiefs asked. "I do, Chief." "What's she look like?" "Oh, she's pretty. Very petite, brown hair, hazel eyes, about five foot four." The chief smiled. "Do you think she'd like a swarthy Italian with a mustache?" he said, twirling the ends of his long handlebar. I saw an opening. "No, Chief," I said, looking around the grinder. "She likes men that are taller than she is." The circle went quiet. The chief, who stood no taller than five foot four, got up off the grinder and walked up to where I was standing. Inches from my face, he sneered at me and said, "Are you calling me short?" The men in the circle

• 38:41Jocko Willink?

  were shaking their heads. One mouthed, "Don't go there, Ensign," another said softly, "He's very sensitive about his height." "Well, Chief, you are looking up at me," I told him. Everyone in the grinder stopped exercising and turned my way. "What? Do you think that's funny, Ensign? Do you think insulting a chief petty officer in the United States Navy is funny? I am very, very sensitive about my height, and that hurts me." I paused, wondering whether I had taken my joke too far. Suddenly, the chief burst out laughing, and the rest of the men in the circle joined in. "Welcome to the team, Zenson." When the physical training ended, the chief and all the other members of the team came by to shake my hand and welcome me to UDT 11. I had passed the test. I had a sense of humor.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Good way to check in. You've been there before. You know the deal.

• 39:30Jocko Willink?

  So I did the SEALman Admiral Program, and I went straight from SEAL Team 1 as an E5, went to Officer Kennedy School for 13 weeks, went to SEAL Team 2 as an Ensign. So I hadn't been to college. It was a ridiculous program. I feel like maybe I can get arrested for it or something, because it was such a good deal. And then I did two deployments at SEAL Team 2, and then I went to college. So I was an officer in college, but I'd been in the SEAL Teams my whole adult life. And so now I'm going to college, and I'm coming home. And you know, I don't have anyone to banter with, so it ends up being my wife. And, and after about

• 40:11Speaker 02

  That could be dangerous.

• 40:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, after about two or three months, finally, you know, I said something about the meal she had made, or what she had prepared, or something like this. And she looked at me and she goes, hey, I'm not a team guy.

• 40:22Jocko Willink?

  And I was, and I kind of chuckled, but then I realized she was 100% right, you know? The, the, the lifestyle of being in a platoon where it's just constant attacks from everybody. It's, it's, it's a, it's an environment that you get so used to, you don't realize that that's just the way it is.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  And, and that may actually be the best part, as you know, about being in the teams. And, and for your listeners, I mean, every morning, back then, kind of pre 9 11, we had the PT circle. And come hell or high water, you know, you were gonna break out and you were gonna do PT for probably an hour, hour and a half. And the PT circle was where, boy, if, if you were not on your toes, you know, somebody was gonna rip you apart. And, and back to the point, it was this sense of humor, this camaraderie that was built in the PT circle and in the locker room, that then, of course, transitioned on to the, to the missions. And you would see guys in, in, you know, very tough situations, all of a sudden, crack a joke. And that is, I think, the power of being in the team sometimes is you, you build this, uh,

• 41:28Speaker 02

  this, this level of teamwork with your, uh, with your swim buddies that is hard to replicate anywhere. And, and if there's one thing I miss, um, after retiring, many things, but that's the thing I miss the most is being around team guys, being harassed, harassing people back, and realizing that, hey, no harm, no foul, you know, just let's move on. It's fun.

• 41:50Jocko Willink?

  When you checked into UDT 11, what, what did you think you were gonna be doing? So just as a little backdrop. When I checked into SEAL Team One in 1991, I thought I was going to Nam. Like in my mind, I was like, oh yeah, look, man, I know we don't know about this stuff. There's top secret stuff going on. I know I'm probably going to Nam or whatever Cambodia. I'm going to be doing SOG missions. That's what I was thinking because I was really young and really dumb. When you checked into UDT 11, what was it, 1977?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  1978, early 1978.

• 42:22Jocko Willink?

  What did you think you were going to be doing?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Same thing. I mean, I mean, well, back then, of course, we thought we were going to go back and rescue POWs out of Vietnam. Or this was the Cold War, kind of the height of the Cold War. So we thought we were going to be doing missions against the Soviet Union. And I don't think I mentioned the story in any of the books, but when I, when I first got there, I was out doing a dive, training dive one day. And, and one of the chiefs comes grabs me and says, hey, sir, a commanding officer wants to see you. I mean, I'm an ensign, commanding officer. I mean, he's an important guy. And I thought, all right, this is it. I mean, the commanding officer, I mean, it's something important. So I, I get up and he, and I said, well, let me go back and change. He goes, no, CO said just come, come as you are. I was in my shorty wetsuit. So I go up, go and wait outside the CO's office. And the CO's assistant says, yeah, go in and see him. And I had met the CO, but yeah, I mean, I was an ensign.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  He was the commanding officer. So I come in and he says, Ensign McRaven, you know, good to see you again. Yes, sir. He says, I've been hearing good things about you. And I'm thinking, yeah, okay. This is it. He says, he says, look, we got something important coming up and, and yeah, I need one of my best ensigns to kind of run this thing. Like, yeah, this is, this is what I've been waiting for, you know, this is, this is, here it comes. And he says, you know, the 4th of July is coming up and we need somebody to be the frog float officer. And of course I'm like, I'm sorry, sir. What? He goes, yeah, you know, every 4th of July, we build a frog float to be in the Coronado Parade. And I want you to be the frog float officer. And I was like, you have got to be kidding me.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  But I remember when I came out, I kind of had this kind of hound dog look on my face and there was a, I don't even remember Herschel Davis. Yeah. So Herschel Davis was the command master chief over at SEAL Team, or over at underwater demolition team 12. And he sees me walk and die and I'm a little, you know, like shoulders down. He goes, what's wrong, Ensign? I said, master chief, I said, oh, I thought it was going to be something important. I'm going to be the frog float officer. And Herschel said something, he said, well, then be the best damn frog float officer you can be. And I thought, no, that's it right there. Whatever it is, whether you're the frog float officer or planting the eel grass, which was another one we had to do. Do it the best you can.

• 44:24Jocko Willink?

  Plant eel grass.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  Plant eel grass. So the reason Coronado San Diego Bay looks as good as it does and as clean as it is, is because back in 1978, UDT 12, UDT 11, and SEAL Team 1, we all got out and planted eel grass underwater so that eel grass would grow to bring in the little fishies to clean out San Diego Bay. And it worked. But that was hours of diving at three feet under the water planting eel grass. Yeah, I never did do those missions to get the Soviet Union or to go back into Vietnam.

• 44:57Jocko Willink?

  I was on my first deployment. So I get to, we deployed to Guam, and we show up there, and they immediately have us do like a double duck insert. We go in, we hit a target, live fire. We come over the beach, hit a target, live fire, we get done. We're all, you know, pretty, it's pretty cool. And then we go out the next day, we clean our weapons, we go out, they say, hey, you know, get your weapons sighted in. Okay. You know, and of course, same thing. In my mind, I'm thinking, we're getting ready for the big mesh. So we go out, we sight in our weapons, clean them, sight them in, get back. And then a couple of days goes by, and they give us pagers too, right? Which back in the day, you know, you might as well just be, you know, it was, it was just as crazy as it gets.

• 45:41Jocko Willink?

  So I got the pager. Well, a couple of days go by, three days, four days go by, and we're not getting the big recall. You know, I don't know if they're trying to negotiate with whoever the terrorists were that were needed to die, or whatever the case was. But also, there was good waves. So I said, you know what? I told my, told my roommate, like, a couple of us are gonna go surfing. So we went down the Spanish Steps, and we were surfing. And all of a sudden, I'm looking up on the cliffs, and there's, the guy that we told is up there waving his arms frantically. And holy shit, right? We're getting recalled. This is it. So run in, run up the Spanish Steps, you know, hey, what's going on? He's like, we got recalled. Shows me his pager, he's got the 911 page. Damn, it's on. We get back,

• 46:22Jocko Willink?

  we get down to the platoon space. And, you know, the freaking senior chief comes in, and he says, hey, you guys, you didn't clean up your brass on the ridge after you sighted your weapons. You guys gotta go clean up your brass. So that was when I realized that maybe wasn't gonna quite, I wasn't going to NOM after all.

• 46:42Jocko Willink?

  How long were you, how long did you do UDT 11 then?

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Uh, two years.

• 46:46Jocko Willink?

  And did you, did you do a platoon there? Were you like an assistant platoon commander?

• 46:50Speaker 02

  I was, I was an assistant platoon commander. Uh, Dave Tash, Lieutenant Dave Tash was a platoon commander. I was in an SDV platoon. So, you know, when I first got there, of course, uh, thinking I was going to do real frogman stuff, uh, and being a, a regular underwater demolition team platoon, which was, as you know, this was about kind of clearing beaches and that sort of thing. And then I find out there are these things called back then swimmer delivery vehicles, now SEAL delivery vehicles. And, uh, and at first I was, uh, I wasn't happy about being assigned to an SDV platoon. Turned out to be one of the, one of the best platoons I was ever in. It was just, it was, it was real frogman stuff because we were doing, you know, six hour dives and our, so for the, again, the listener, an SDV is a, uh, you know, think about a manned torpedo with a bit, bit of a cowling on it. So you had a, uh,

• 47:31Speaker 02

  we started off with what was called the Mark VII. So you had a pilot in the front and a navigator in the back. And you could squeeze two more guys in if you had to, and you could put some demolition in there and then, and then they would launch off the bigger submarines. Uh, and then later we got the Mark VIII, which was a, a bigger, uh, SEAL delivery vehicle. Uh, but it was all about diving. I mean, you spent, uh, you know, four days a week, uh, underwater.

• 47:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And an important thing to note about this, when you say mini submarine, there's a key component that is not what you're thinking if you're listening to this. And that is it's, it's a, called a wet submersible. So you're not in this thing dry. You're diving while you're in a, you're basically on a motorcycle.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Right. Underwater.

• 48:11Jocko Willink?

  Underwater.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, so I was one of the primary pilots and, uh, and I, I loved driving the SDV. And of course, uh, you know, as I'm back here in Coronado, California, and I had a chance to go back. I mean, you, you relived those days where you were going under the bridge and back then you had what was called an obstacle avoidance sonar. And the OAS, uh, as we refer to it, yeah, the underwater obstacles were not real clear. You really had to have a good eye to be able to read the obstacle avoidance sonar. So the navigator would read the OAS and it was just kind of green glow and you'd have to pick out the pylons and the, and the ships coming at you underwater in this green glow. They've gotten much better today, but back then the technology just wasn't very good. So we tended to run into things every once in a while.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  You know, ships, uh, the Coronado Bay Bridge, uh, you know, um, and then you just, uh, it was fiberglass. So you bring it back in and the Master Chief, who was our fiberglass guru, would, you know, give you that look like, I can't believe you ran into something again. He'd fix up a fiberglass and get back in the water.

• 49:11Jocko Willink?

  Did you go on a deployment?

• 49:13Speaker 02

  I did, yeah, did a first west back, so I went over to Subic Bay. That's where Naval Special Warfare Unit One was in Subic Bay at the time. And the USS Grayback, which was our special operations submarine. So the Grayback had these two big chambers on it that used to launch Regulus missiles. And they had converted these chambers to be able to launch the SEAL delivery vehicles. So we went out there and again, spent a lot of time underway onboard the USS Grayback, conducting training operations, once again, thinking we were going to go, you know, run against Vladivostok or something like that. So there was always, and you remember the time, you know, when, when you were training, one of the things that always motivated you was, this could become a real world mission sometime. You know, if you ever got to the point where you were training and you didn't think that

• 49:57Speaker 02

  you were going to be able to take that training and apply it in wartime, then I think it demotivated you. But the fact of the matter is, every time we went out on a training op, there was always this idea that, oh, we're going against the Soviets. Or, you know, we're going to go back in Vietnam and get the POWs that might still be there. Or, we're going to go do some, you know, some of the nation's bidding somewhere. And that always pushed you to do absolutely your very best on every single training mission. No matter how hard it was, even though it was a training op, you wanted to push it to the limits because you wanted to be ready for the real world op.

• 50:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and there was also this, I don't know if it's a specter, but this belief that this real world mission, whatever it was going to be, since it was a little bit unknown, you, you didn't, you didn't know it. You didn't know what it was going to be. So it was always like, I need to prepare even more.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Even more.

• 50:45Jocko Willink?

  Because we just don't even know how crazy it's going to be.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:49Jocko Willink?

  Then how long, so, so you did one deployment to this, to Subic Bay, and then you got done with that? And then you got, did you get stationed at Subic Bay right after that?

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I had, my first set of orders to the Naval Postgraduate School. And I ended up having five sets of orders, of which I didn't execute the first four of them because I got pulled out to go do something else. But yeah, as soon as I got back, I guess I had made an impression, a good impression on the commanding officer out there in Subic. So I got back thinking I was gonna go to a wonderful tour in Monterey, California. And as soon as I got back, the commanding officer says, hey, good news. The commanding officer of Naval Special Warfare Unit One has asked for you by name. And you get to go to the Philippines for two years. And I thought, oh, this is gonna be tough. And once again, it turned out to be an absolutely fabulous tour. My wife and I went out there. My first child was all of a couple of months old at that time.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  And, you know, we worked hard in the Philippines, supporting the platoons that would deploy over. So back then, Unit One in the Philippines, the platoons from San Diego would deploy out there. That was kind of our home base. And then they would go from there to other places. But Unit One had the responsibility of supporting them. So I got there, I started off as the intelligence officer. And then since it kind of became the utility infielder, the training officer and a lot of other things. But it was a great group of guys out there, good mission. And life in the Philippines back then was a good time.

• 52:13Jocko Willink?

  You relay one of these training operations in the book Sea Stories that I would say left a mark on you. You were basically running a training mission. You had a Marine Colonel that was playing the role of a hostage. So he was being held out in a jungle camp somewhere. And he's out there for a few days. And then, you know, the SEAL team, the SEAL platoon gets the tasking to go out and rescue this guy. And it, well, it doesn't go well, you know, they get compromised and it sort of falls on its face. But the Marine Colonel, you know, Colonel Brousse, is that how you say his name? Colonel Brousse, he was like, hey, listen, we already, we already did this much. Let's continue to execute the rest of the plan, even though it wasn't great. Let's just continue doing it.

• 52:58Jocko Willink?

  So they, to finish the exercise, they had to move the Colonel to an extraction point where he was gonna get picked up by C-130s. And then the C-130s were gonna take him on a low-level flight. And, you know, you're in, what are you, Lieutenant JG at this point?

• 53:15Speaker 02

  I'm a JG, right.

• 53:16Jocko Willink?

  You've had this, this Colonel out in the field for three, four days. And you say, hey, sir, you know, you don't, we can get you back to base. And he's like, no, let's just get it done. Let's, let's do the, let's do the whole thing.

• 53:28Jocko Willink?

  And a little more time goes by and you say, hey, sir, you know, you don't really need to get in this plane. It's not going to be any training value for you. And he says, no, you know, we'll, we'll just do it. And it's, that's what a good leader does. Like they don't just, you know, bust out when, when things are going to get boring. But then there's another delay. The, the C-130s that are supposed to pick them up are, they, they're late, they're delayed. And finally delayed multiple times and, and, and finally you say, you know, hey, sir, like, we don't know when this is going to happen. Why don't you just, you know, you and I, we'll, we'll get out of here. You can go, and of course he's a Colonel. He's got stuff to do. He's got work to do. So you, he knows that too. So finally he says, look, you know what? You're right. I gotta get back to work. And so he doesn't get on the C-130. You don't get on the C-130.

• 54:15Jocko Willink?

  C-130 takes off with, with a bunch of Americans, Australians, New Zealand, some, some Filipinos on there. And I'm just going to go to the book here. Brows, that's the Colonel. Brows and I returned to a waiting Jeep. I shook his hand, thanked him for helping out with the exercise and watched a young petty officer escort him back to Subic. Exhausted, I jumped in another Jeep and drove home. It had been a long couple of days. Half an hour later aboard the MC-130, callsign Stray 59, the pilot checked his instruments. Like the rest of us, the preceding days for him and his crew had been long and tiring. Adjusting his night vision goggles, he could see the water just a few, a few feet below him.

• 54:58Jocko Willink?

  The water was closer than expected, too close to recover. The tip of the left wing caught the top of a small wave and in an instant, the plane tumbled forward, exploding in a fuel injected ball of flame as it violently ripped apart from the impact of the aircraft and the sea. Of the 24 men aboard, eight crew members and 16 passengers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, all but one Air Force First Lieutenant Jeffrey A. Blome died in the crash.

• 55:29Jocko Willink?

  Life in the SEAL teams always seems to revolve around fate, or destiny, or the hand of God. Why do some men live and others die? Why were some men saved that day? Did God have a different plan for us? What about the crew and passengers of Stray 59? Surely their families would have wanted them longer in their lives. They were all brave and honorable men, all worthy of a full and prosperous life. I think about them often. Twenty years later, as I rose to the rank of Admiral and combat in Iraq and Afghanistan became a daily activity, I thought a lot about Stray 59. The role of the MC-130s and their sister

• 56:11Jocko Willink?

  aircraft, the AC-130s, became more and more important to our special operations missions. With every plan I reviewed and every plan I approved, I asked myself silently whether the risk to the crew and the aircraft was worth the reward. I can only hope that the sacrifice of the men aboard Stray 59 saved lives, lives of men and women who have no idea that their destiny rested with a plane that took off from QB Airfield in 1981 and never return. May God rest their souls.

• 56:56Jocko Willink?

  Real-world missions and regular missions in the military, there's always some level of risk.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and as you well know, there are times when you go left instead of right, and it makes the difference between life and death. You make one decision, and it changes the lives of, you know, dozens of men and women. And this is the nature of life in the teams. And I think back over those 37 years, and I've written about a few of them in the book, but there were more of them. And you've been there, where all of a sudden, you know, you have this near-death experience. You know, the parachute doesn't work, you know, you almost get blown up by one of your colleagues. A hundred things, but it doesn't happen. You know, you manage to get through it. Or it happens, and it's over, and you've survived, and you go.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  And you don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. You're like, okay, well, the reserve opened, that's good. Or the guy fired an inch from me, instead of hit me, that's good. And that's, that becomes almost a daily, weekly, monthly occurrence, and you just learn to compartmentalize, you learn to live with it. But there was something about Stray 59, it was obviously the magnitude of the crash, and, and just the fact that, as you read it so beautifully there, you know, I had asked the Colonel three times, because again, he was an important guy, he was in charge of the Office of the Provost, and, and he was a senior Marine there at Seabook, he was a great guy. And, and I had kind of encouraged him to be this, this hostage. And so in the course of the, the day-

• 58:33Jocko Willink?

  Which was relationship building.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Which was a relationship.

• 58:35Jocko Willink?

  Because you wanted to see, hey, you know-

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Wanted to see how, how good we were, and then things didn't go so well. But we were actually on the ramp of the C-130, as we were getting ready the third time, and, and I knew, you know, you've been on these flights, you know, the, the C-130, you know, the low level terrain following is, I mean, it's, it's a vomit rocket, I mean, you're just up and down, and, and some guys don't handle it very well. And I thought, you know, we're gonna do that for three and a half hours, does he really need to do that? And it wasn't until we were actually standing on the ramp, and he says, yeah, okay, let's go. And then, of course, I got the call about an hour or so later, we had to remuster in the, in the compound there at Naval Special Warfare Unit 1, didn't know why. And of course, they were trying to get a head count to find out who was still alive. And you have a lot of those in the course of your career, and you hope you learn from them. And as I pointed

• 59:22Speaker 02

  out in the book, then when I was in a position of command, you know, from the time I was the commander of SEAL Team 3, or the Commodore, or certainly my time after 9/11, you're reviewing these missions, and particularly with the MC-130s and the, and the AC-130s, because, you know, in combat, the guy, they want to push the envelope. It's okay to push the envelope. But only if the reward is worth the risk. Um, because, you know, I wanted to make sure, and it wasn't just the, the C-130s. I mean, I, the helicopter pilots, I remember at one point in time, after not my unit, but another unit had lost a helo and a couple of SEALs had been on board and they, uh, but, but the mission they were running, I, I thought was a little too high risk. I pulled all the warrant officers in that were flying for me and I said, we're not going to do that. Here's the deal.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  If I find out that you take off on a mission that is red, uh, I'm going to fire your ass and send you back to the States. Um, you ought to start off every mission in the green. In other words, you ought to have planned it to reduce the risk as much as possible. If it's a really important mission, maybe I'll let you start off in the amber, but we're going to have that conversation. But we are not going to start off a mission in the red. It ain't worth it. If you think the shadow governor of pickup province is worth it, he's not. We'll come back and get him tomorrow. And, uh, and I didn't know how that would be received by the pilots because, you know, I mean, I was, uh, you know, when you, when you start losing guys and losing helicopters, uh, you know, you, you, you really want to make sure you're doing things the right way because you don't want to lose any more men if you don't have to. And, uh, and afterwards I had a couple of the old salty, you know, warrants come up

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  to me and, and they were appreciative of the fact that, hey, here's the line. We, we are not going to do this. Now again, missions may go in the red, I got it. But, but let's not start off in the red. Let's not build, you know, risk into the mission. Uh, and I think a lot of that goes back to Stray 59, to realizing that, uh, you know, lives are on the line, particularly in these, uh, these aircraft, both the aircraft and the helos and everything else we fly around in. Um, but the interesting thing, so when I, when I wrote this, I had no idea where Colonel Brous was, didn't, uh, I assumed he had passed away long since and, and frankly, the last time I saw him was probably a few years after, uh, so it was probably in the, in the mid eighties. Well, I get an email from his son who had read the, the book and he says, hey, sir,

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  my father's still alive and, and I'd like to send him a copy of this book. So, uh, I reach out to talk to Colonel Brous. He and his wife are, I mean, he's in his nineties, sharp as he can be and, uh, and he remembered the story and again, you're always pleased, he remembered the story exactly as I, as I presented in, in the book. And, uh, but, uh, but he also remembered the fact that, uh, his life changed that day and, and that had a, had a big impact on him as well.

• 1:02:04Jocko Willink?

  And he was a combat veteran from Vietnam.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, heavily decorated. Um, yeah, I mean, he was a, a hard charge and this was, and this was not an admin marine. This was a, a hell of a combat vet, yeah.

• 1:02:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, note, if you're out there listening, um, Colonel Brous, open invite. If you want to come on here and, and talk about your experiences. Um, I'm, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. Uh, going, I'm gonna go to the book, Make Your Bed, again. Going to July 1983. Here we go. July 1983 was one of those tough moments. As I stood before the commanding officer, I thought my career as a Navy SEAL was over. I'd just been relieved of my SEAL squadron, fired for trying to change the way my squadron was organized, trained, and conducted missions. There were some magnificent officers and enlisted men in the organization, some of

• 1:03:01Jocko Willink?

  the most professional warriors I had ever been around. However, much of the culture was still rooted in the Vietnam era, and I thought that it was time for a change. As I was to find out, change is never easy, particularly for the person in charge. Fortunately, even though I was fired, my commanding officer allowed me to transfer to another SEAL team, but my reputation as a SEAL officer was severely damaged. Everywhere I went, other officers and enlisted men knew I had failed, and every day there were whispers and subtle reminders that maybe I wasn't up to the task of being a SEAL. At that point in my career, I had two options, quit and move on to civilian life, which seemed like the logical choice in the light of my recent officer fitness report, or weather

• 1:03:46Jocko Willink?

  the storm and prove to others and myself that I was a good SEAL officer. I chose the latter.

• 1:03:56Jocko Willink?

  So here you are wanting to be a good SEAL and you tried to implement some changes. You, I guess, swam against the stream. When you look back at that, you know, this is, this is a, a subject that I've talked about a lot because, well, um, there's a book called About Face by Colonel David Hackworth and, and, you know, at the end of the Vietnam War, he went on a TV program called Issues and Answers and, and said, "We're gonna lose this war if we don't change the way we're fighting it." And he was drummed out of the Army in another couple of months. And, and my debate is always, you know, he was a golden child in the Army at that point and would have absolutely been up for Brigade Command and Division Command,

• 1:04:39Jocko Willink?

  and he would have been in charge of tens of thousands, if not more, and could have really influenced the way the war was fought. But he spoke up and, you know, that was it. Made, made some enemies. And because people, you know, and I work with a lot of businesses and people, this happens in business where people, they want to speak up. They see something that maybe could be done better, different. And of course, there's always a, a particular line that I make. Look, if someone's doing something that's illegal, immoral, or unethical, okay, we're not doing that. We got it. But a lot of times, and I wrote about this in, in Leadership Strategy and Tactics, I called it conformed to influence because when I was in my first SEAL platoon, I was, I wanted to be all hardcore. And so it was me and

• 1:05:23Jocko Willink?

  I was wearing a rucksack on the O course and wearing a rucksack out on the runs. And, and I was a new guy and I thought I was being cool and, and, and hard and getting ready for war. But my platoon was kind of looking at me like, you know, who do you think you are? You're truly trying to prove, hey, Rambo? And I realized, oh, I need to be a part of this team if I'm gonna have influence over them. Do I want them to train harder? Yeah, I do. Absolutely. But if they don't like me, if I'm not part of the team, they're not gonna listen to anything I say. As a matter of fact, I'm ostracizing myself. So I know this is a, it seems like you went through this situation where, you know, you held up your hand and made a call, "I'm gonna go in this direction, or I think we should

• 1:06:07Jocko Willink?

  go in this direction," and didn't work out. The other part of this is I always say if you're doing the right things for the right reasons, you'll win in the end, but it sometimes can take a long time before you you quote win and you might take some tactical losses along the way, but if you're doing the right things for the right reasons, eventually things should go your way. When you reflect on on whatever went down at that command and the way it turned out, what did you learn from it?

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I learned a lot from it, actually, and it all, I think, positively influenced me over the years. First, I didn't make all the right calls. I mean, there's no question about it. I could have been a better officer. And, you know, at the end of the day, the commanding officer has the right to decide who he thinks is going to be, you know, leading his platoons, his squadrons. And I've never really faulted the CO for making that decision. I realize I could have done things better. The command could have done things better. But to your point, I part of what I learned was I didn't conform, I think, the way that they had hoped I would conform. And part of it was, it just wasn't me. It wasn't a

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  good cultural fit for me at the time. But but I think you nailed it when you said, you know, there are times if you're going to influence the people that work with you, better to do it from inside the wire than outside the wire, sort of thing. Now, again, back to the it's got to be more legal and ethical. But but what I also learned was, you know, you're going to have these rough times in the teams or anywhere you go. But but that day I went home and I remember thinking, and I said, I don't know if I got a career left here. And I don't know how long my wife and I had been married at that point in time, you know, five, six years, something like that. And I came home and I said, hey, I'm not sure what I should do. And she said, Look, you've never quit at anything in your

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  life. Don't start now. And best advice I could have had. And of course, you got to weather the storm because fortunately, the commanding officer, I mean, my paper wasn't good, but it wasn't bad. I mean, he didn't he didn't crush me in my fitness report. I was picked up by another team right after that, who the commanding officer kind of gave me a second chance. I made the best of that second chance. But You know, I go to a new team and of course, the guys know, you know.

• 1:08:30Jocko Willink?

  The rep- the reputation thing, if you don't know, in the SEAL teams and in life, but in SEAL teams, it's like multiplied and intensified. Your reputation is so powerful.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:41Jocko Willink?

  And when, I mean, there's guys that make a mistake when they show up as a new guy and 25 years later, they retire and their nickname is still based on the fact that they did something stupid as a new guy. And everybody knows it. That's when you meet them, that's their name is whatever dumb thing they did when they were a new guy, when they were 18 or 19 years old.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  Well, and this was, you know, so there was kind of this CRISPR campaign when I got to the new team and, and you understand that and you realize, hey, I gotta prove them wrong. I've got to prove that I'm a good officer and, and so fortunately, soon after I got to the command, I went on a deployment. It was a good deployment. I did well at the command. I went on to another command and then, you know, you, you begin to rebuild your reputation and frankly, never looked back after that. But what it also helped me do was when I got into command and, and all of my command tours thereafter, when I saw somebody that made a mistake, when I saw somebody that screwed up, you want to find an opportunity, if they're a good officer, a good enlisted,

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  to give them that second chance so that they aren't branded with, you know, a bad reputation. You put them in a position to be successful, to get over whatever that fault or that failure might have been. And I was fortunate to have a, an officer named John Sandoz who, who picked me up at SEAL Team Four, you know, took me under his wing and said, hey, I remember you from my time at the West Coast and, and let's get back to work. And again, that, that kind of quickly got me over the hump and then, you know, you never look back. So, you know, when you have the opportunity in a leadership position to help somebody out, to give them that second chance, to put them on the path to, to be better than what they were, you take that opportunity.

• 1:10:20Jocko Willink?

  How freaking crazy obsessive were you to do a good job when you got the team for? I mean, I can't even imagine if I was in that situation, the, I was already crazy on trying to do a good job, you know? I, you must have been just full bore, like, your wife must have said after another three months, she must have said, "Maybe you should quit."

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  There was a lot of that, but you also realized you can't overreact. And, and I think when I got in there at first, I would see things, people, you know, that I thought were sliding me, and initially I'd kind of overreact to it because I was overly sensitive to it when it was just team guys being team guys. You know, back to the PT circle, you know, you're thinking, was there, was there something hidden in that? And there wasn't.

• 1:11:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  And so, you gotta kind of get over that and, and find that balance that goes, okay, look, you know, you're gonna get harassed, that, you know, that's, that's part of being in the teams. Enjoy the good natured harassment, and, and don't take it so personal every time, and, but, to your point, eh, it probably took me a while to get over that. I think I had to get past the deployment, and then my next job was, was the Ops Officer at, at SEAL Deliver Vehicle Team Two, and I had a great bunch of guys there, and again, everything went well, never looked back.

• 1:11:32Jocko Willink?

  What, what'd you do for a deployment at Team Four?

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  So I went down to South America, did a unitas.

• 1:11:37Jocko Willink?

  Unitas?

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  And had a, a great platoon, and the thing about it was, I mean, we just, you know, you kind of lived off the land back then. We weren't as sophisticated, we didn't kind of have the money, so we parachuted into Colombia, spent three weeks in some, you know, back part of Colombia, where most of the day, we were foraging for food, literally. So, you know, we were looking for drinkable water, I had to send, you know, a couple of guys to go to the market to get food because we didn't, back then, yes, you could have brought sea rats, as we refer to them, the MREs of today, but those were heavy, you know, those were in big boxes, and we didn't want to be carrying that around, so, you know, a couple of guys would be assigned chow duty, while the rest of the platoon went out and, and worked with the buzo tacticos of the, of the Colombians, and then we went

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  from there to Ecuador, to Peru, to Chile, to, you know, Brazil, I mean, it was a great deployment.

• 1:12:26Jocko Willink?

  So then you did Ops Officer at SDV Team Two.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:31Jocko Willink?

  And then from there, 1989, you're the XO at SEAL Team One.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so from SDV Team Two, I went to the Pentagon for two and a half years.

• 1:12:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  And, you know, every operator goes kicking the screen into an admin job. But this one actually probably set me up for success, much more so than I would have thought, because you get into the Pentagon, and this was at a time when, again, the SEALs, we worked for the surface warfare guys, the ship drivers. And we worked in what was called OPo 3 in the Pentagon. But it was there where all the money that the SEALs got for beans, bullets, bodies, buildings, you name it, came through the Pentagon. So I learned, I was a lieutenant, made lieutenant commander there, I learned how to work the system, how to get manpower in a SEAL team, how to get buildings built, how to get money for more ammunition. None of my contemporaries had that experience.

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  So when I left the Pentagon and then went off to be the executive officer at SEAL Team One in 1988, I mean, as the XO, nobody could keep up because the SEAL was saying, hey, can we get some more bodies here? Yes, sir, I know how to do that. Can we get more money to the team? Yes, sir, I know how to do that, you know? And so, understanding the resourcing end of it, you know, made you a good staff officer. Now, no SEAL wants to have that moniker on them, you're a good staff officer. But at the end of the day, the good staff officers are what allow the team guys, the operators, to have the equipment they need and the money to go do the training and that sort of thing. Now, by that time, as the 80s and the Reagan years and the Reagan buildup starts, the money started to come.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  But before that, we in the SEAL team, we were living on a shoestring after Vietnam. I mean, you know, you would go out to Nidaleen, California, which was our desert, our desert training area, it's our only training area. And I think they paid you like eight dollars a day. And you were like, woo-hoo, eight dollars a day, that's great. Because a lot of other places you went, you went on permissive TDY, meaning they didn't pay anything, you just went. We always had a lot of ammunition and demolition, but not much else.

• 1:14:41Jocko Willink?

  What was the billet that you were in up at the Pentagon?

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  So I was the assistant to the director of what they called OP-37. So 337 was the designator for the Naval Special Warfare. Actually, I'm not even sure we called it Naval Special Warfare back then. That didn't come along until a little bit later. But yeah, it was a SEAL component in the Pentagon that did all the resourcing.

• 1:15:01Jocko Willink?

  I know when I came in the military, I thought, like, the whole idea that you had to pay for stuff just didn't even make sense to me. I thought everything was just free, right? Hey, you need gas, you go to the gas thing at the Navy base and they'll give you the gas you need. Didn't even make sense to me that you had to pay for ammo and that human beings like, oh, you're going to assign people to a SEAL team. They're just people that show up there. So that, the idea, that was real foreign to me when people started talking about how much this trip is going to cost. I would be like, well, we're in the military. What are you talking about? So that gave you, yeah, for sure, that's some insight you must have had. You were like a black belt compared to the rest of these guys running around.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and nobody wanted to go to the Pentagon, of course, and nor had I wanted to go initially. But again, it turned out to be a great two and a half years because you learned the system well. And frankly, that served me throughout as I became a commanding officer in a Commodore. I understood how to walk the halls of the Pentagon and how to leverage those resources we needed to get the job done.

• 1:16:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you mentioned so far, a bunch of different relationships that you have had and built. And I mean, they shine throughout everything that you write about. It's all about who you're working with and oh, I've worked with this guy in the past and knew this individual and we spent time together, the relationships that you build. But not only in the SEAL teams, but then you start talking about relationships that you have in the Pentagon and who you work with there and who you know. It's, you can't, there's no possible way to overestimate the amount of ROI you get on having good relationships with people and treating them good.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  It's all about relationships. You're right. It's all about relationships. And particularly after 9/11, you realized even more so because your relationships with the CIA, with the National Security Agency, with the National Geospatial Agency, with the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, with the service chiefs when I became the SOCOM commander. I mean, you have to build these relationships with the combatant commanders with, you know, up and down the chain of command, because it's the relationships that are going to allow you to get the mission done. And if you have built good relationships, if you haven't burned the bridges because you got hacked off about something, those relationships really pay dividends in combat.

• 1:17:11Jocko Willink?

  I had my, uh, when I was a task unit commander, my two platoon commanders come into me and we're out at, we're out at an island and we've got a bunch of paperwork due to the commanding officer, you know, the serialized inventory and the qualifications, the various guys and all this. And they, the guys come, we shouldn't have to do all this paperwork right now. This is bullshit. Come on. We need, we're, we're training for war. And, you know, they tried to, they tried to capitalize on my warlike nature by telling me, you know, we're training for war. And I said, hey, guys, we're going to do all this paperwork. We need it turned in perfectly and we're going to do it before anyone else does because we got to have a good relationship with the boss. And if the boss doesn't think I can get paperwork turned in on time, why is he going to trust me to go out and run operations?

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  Exactly right.

• 1:17:52Jocko Willink?

  From there you, now you go to XO SEAL Team One.

• 1:17:58Jocko Willink?

  Who's the, who was the CO when you were there?

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  Commander Tim Holden.

• 1:18:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  Phenomenal officer, Naval Academy graduate, MIT, hard, a lot, lot like Daniel Stewart. I mean, hard as nails. Um, Tim would PT everybody into the ground. Uh, just a remarkable officer. Unfortunately, he was killed in a bicycle accident several years ago, uh, but just a terrific, terrific guy.

• 1:18:19Jocko Willink?

  And you did one, um, you did one operation there, which was the, the, the recovery of a Navy aircraft that had crashed in 1948.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a P2V. So I think of the P3 variant back then. And, uh, yeah, Commander Holden, Tim Holden had been sent out, as you recall, this was during the kind of the tanker wars and been sent out to the wind brown. So I was the acting CO, uh, as the executive officer. And, uh, George Bush, who had been, I think initially the vice president, then of course became president, had, had been petitioned by the families of the, uh, the naval aviators that have been killed in this crash. The, the plane had never been found. And, uh, and they had been asking for, uh, the Navy to put on kind of a full court press, try to find the aircraft. There had been some speculation where it went down. Um, and this had gone on for years. Eventually somebody found the remains,

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  but because it was in such kind of a treacherous condition, they, they couldn't, or found the, what they thought was the remains of the airplane, but couldn't, couldn't get to it. So eventually we get the letter, you know, the, the president wants us to, to go recover the aircraft because it's at about 10,000 feet. That's where they thought it was. Uh, and they figured we could do some high altitude diving. Uh, so as the executive officer, I get tagged to be the kind of mission commander. And it was a unique experience. I took a guy named George Parkhill, who was, I think George was probably a chief or senior chief at the time.

• 1:19:41Jocko Willink?

  He ran the dive locker when I got to SEAL Team One.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  He was the dive master, and that's why I picked George and a couple of other great guys to go up there. And so we get up to this place called First Tofino, and then we have to take a Hilo out to the kind of the middle of nowhere on the outback. And the place where we think the plane has crashed is in what I believe to have been kind of an old volcanic, you know, area. I mean, it looks like the inside of what you think of as a volcano, almost like Diamond Head. And there's a lake in the middle of it where the snow has melted off. And you could only get into this place like for a month out of the year because it would it would freeze over. And so this was, I think, September timeframe. So we get on the ground and there's, I mean, the Hilo can't even land. So we had to kind of jump off

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  the Hilo and kind of get set up. But we're looking around and there's clearly no airplane in this in this bowl we're in. But there is off to the area where the sun doesn't hit. So the sun would kind of make its way around, but never kind of quite got to this area. And as you look, there's this kind of, the only thing I can think of to describe it's like a snow tunnel. And it goes up about 1,000 plus feet. And it is, you know, I mean, it's just a an area that's just completely covered with ice. And but we're looking around thinking that the plane is probably in the water. That's where why we were sent up to get it. Well, the next day after we get in there, Parkhill goes over and and starts chipping into this this kind of ice cave and goes in and I'll be damned, there the plane

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  is. It's it is hidden under this ice cave and has been there for, you know, 40, 50 years at that point in time. Of course, it is because the ice would melt and it would just crush the plane. So there's nothing left but, you know, tiny pieces, although actually, the 50 cows survived. But so now we have found the remains of the plane. And again, there were some, we eventually bring some of the family out that was fit enough to be there. We did manage to find some bone fragments and we buried those at the site. But in the in the book, I tell the story and I said, you can believe it or not, but it is true. And I'm not the only one to have seen it as we are kind of burying the.

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  The remains of this thing and we, I say a little prayer over this, this cross we put up there and as I get through saying it, all of a sudden, one of the guys turns to me goes, "Hey, sir, take a look up there." And again, if you can imagine, we're in this bowl and I think it goes up to about 8,000 feet or something like that and, and right above the ridge line, I see what looks like a parachute flare. I'm thinking, is somebody shooting parachute flares? You know, and I'm looking around thinking, well, maybe one of our guys is, you know, shooting parachute flares and I, um, nobody's shooting parachute flares and there's one

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  and there's two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and they're kind of hovering up there and looking around thinking, what in the world? And the guy says, "Hey, sir, how many of those do you see?" And again, it's just this kind of glowing orb and it's just kind of floating up there and there were nine of them and there were nine victims on the plane. And, and it was up there for 10 or 15 minutes, they all kind of hovered up and then one by one, they just kind of went up. So I said, "Look, uh, you can believe the story or not, but I'm not the only one that saw it and I've often thought, well, if somebody was firing parachute flares, please let me know because it was kind of one of those surreal moments, uh, because you are out in the outback where there is nothing out there."

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  But, but interestingly enough, another kind of story like the, like the Barney Brown story in that, um, I get a call from, uh, you know, a good, a good friend who you would know, Jeremy Williams and JW says, "Hey, sir, um, got an army buddy, uh, we were just having dinner and I was telling him about your book and, uh, I, he's going to call you when he gets to San Francisco." I said, "Okay." So he was flying back to Hawaii and I got a call from this guy. And he says, "Hey, sir, uh, JW was telling me about your story in your book. And so I got a copy of it. That was my grandfather that died on that crash. And, oh, by the way, my grandmother is still alive.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  So I got ahold of the grandmother and it was just a great conversation, wonderful lady. And I told her, I said, "Ma'am, I don't know what to tell you. The story I'm telling you in the book is exactly true. You know, my, my hope is, you know, that your husband is in the right place." And this, and, and her husband had been a young petty officer in the Navy during World War II, gets out of the Navy after World War II. And then missed the Navy so much, comes back in, gets assigned up to Whidby Island as a back ender on this P-2V and unfortunately, you know, crashes in the P-2V. And I think he was 23 years old or something like that. But it was just the connections have been interesting.

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  I mean, the book gets out there and then somebody reads it and then makes a connection, you know, six degrees removed sort of thing.

• 1:24:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that, that whole story is, sounds, it's almost supernatural, that story. There's some other things that you talk about in the book worth reading. So you get done with that and you do, is that when you rolled into being a task unit commander?

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  Right. So, so then, this was right before Desert Storm. So when I left the XO back then, the executive officers a lot of times would go do and be the task unit commander for a deployed, you know, SEAL platoon on an amphibious ready group. So it was, again, this was 1990, summer of 1990, and I'm with ComFibron 5. And so I go off as an O4 as the task unit commander. And no sooner, you know, we left in June, I guess, and then Saddam invades Iraq in August, I think. So we were already on deployment and we were a full-up amphibious ready group. So we became kind of the go-to guys as the rest of the Navy was kind of building the rest of the amphibious ready groups.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  But we'd already been through the whole workup. So we kind of immediately got tasked to head out to the Gulf. Had a chance to interdict, do some maritime interdiction operations, which were a lot of fun, considering those were kind of the first of their kind back then.

• 1:26:06Jocko Willink?

  That was the big mish back then.

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:26:09Jocko Willink?

  The MEO, the Maritime Interdiction Operations, those were, I did those in, what was it, 99? Well, I guess I did some in the mid 90s. But yeah, those were real world. I got to lock and load my weapon.

• 1:26:28Jocko Willink?

  What else did you guys do on that? Didn't you guys do some, hit some islands or something as well?

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  Yep, so we went out there first time in, I want to say November, December, and then we didn't know whether or not we were actually going to, you know, come into Kuwait, so they sent us back to Subic Bay for about three weeks, not knowing, well, are we going to, you know, we're going to send a large force into Kuwait to kick Saddam out, and so that was all still up in the air. So they said, "Look, you guys are the most experienced, go back and wait." So I think we spent Christmas in Subic, and then we got the word, "No, we think this thing's going to go." So they sailed us back out, and we went through the Straits of Malacca and the Straits of Hormuz

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  about half a dozen times. So we got out there into the Gulf, and yeah, so first, back in the November timeframe, we did the Maritime Interdiction Operations on some Iraqi tankers. And then, our job was going to be to prep for the amphibious landing. And so, in addition to the FIBRAN-5, they brought what then later became the largest amphibious force, I think since Korea, 33 ships, looking at doing an amphibious landing in, I think, a place called Ashawiba in Kuwait, with the idea that we would land the force and then, you know, begin to engage with the ground force and then push Saddam out of Kuwait. Well, it, of course, became one of the feints. The idea was, we want to hold down Saddam's forces.

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  So, it kind of became known, I think, to the Iraqi army that we were going to land a large force at Ashawiba. So of course, two divisions came, set down in Kuwait to stop us from landing. Well, that allowed the ground forces to kind of sweep around, and so, we didn't do the amphibious landing. We did take a couple of islands, we took... Falaka Island, which was actually very interesting, again, a good lesson for me. So Falaka had been bombed for like 100 straight days. There were 1,200 Iraqi officers or officers enlisted on Falaka Island because it was a kind of a key position before you got up into the into the waterway. And Navy fighters, when they would come back, they'd have to dump their

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  bombs. So for, again, like 90 days or something, they were dropping bombs, ordnance, on Falaka Island. Falaka Island was only about two inches above the sea level, and it's just flat as it could be. So the Iraqis at night would, you know, they they dig trenches and they'd hide in the trenches as we're dropping bombs on them. So finally, when the time came, the Iraqis surrendered in Falaka, and we go, we go pick up these guys, 1,200 of them, and moved them from Falaka to the Anphib's before we sent them back to Saudi Arabia and then back to Kuwait. But interestingly enough, with all that bombing, I think the bombs only killed about five Iraqis. So it showed, you know, we wonder, you know, how how did the Germans withstand the naval bombardment on Normandy? And how did the Japanese survive

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  it? Well, the answer is, if you dig deep enough, even, you know, 1,000 pound bombs, you know, unless they land right on your head, which is apparently what happened to a couple of these guys, you can survive this stuff. But also, the Iraqis, it was interesting to see, as I was, the Colonel who accepted their surrender, you know, separated the officers from the enlisted. But now I'm now I'm on the island for several hours, and I started flying back with some of the Iraqis. And they were, hey, man, I'm from Detroit. I came back to Iraq to see my parents. Like, you know, I thought there were a lot of these guys that were American Iraqis that had come back and kind of gotten seconded into the Iraqi army, and were like, yeah, I really didn't want to be here. And do you have a cigarette, by the way? No, don't smoke.

• 1:30:07Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's a pretty awesome experience, though, for you. And I know that I was a rare guy that volunteered to do ARG platoons, because there was actually missions that happened. You know, the guys that were... The, the guys that were in the SEAL teams that were in Somalia, a bunch of them came off Arg platoons. And I was like, okay, if they're, if that's where I gotta go. And so I volunteered for Arg platoons, but where it really helped me out was then I was working with, I was working with the Marine Corps. And we were, you know, building relationships with the Marine Corps, but just understanding, look, when you're in a SEAL platoon, in the nineties, you didn't understand anything about the rest of the military. It was like, hey, I got a 16 man platoon, we'll take on the world. Then I learned, oh, this is a battalion, this is how this is gonna work, this is, this is

• 1:30:50Jocko Willink?

  the way we can work together with them, this is the support that we can give them. So it was very useful and very helpful for me. I was very, I was a comm guy, so I, I made all the comms plan and learned how to, how to communicate with all the different forces. It was very, very helpful for me to, to do those. I did two Arg deployments and learned a lot about the conventional forces, which was real lucky. You get done with that and then now you finally get your, your time in, in Monterey.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, finally, I think the fifth set of orders, I finally got to Monterey, so I went up there for two years and set up the special operations, low intensity conflict, the SOLOC curriculum. And then ended up graduating from that curriculum, but also took the time, that's when I had an opportunity to write my thesis on, on the, the principles of special operations or the theory of special operations. And Monterey was a great time, because one, I'd, I'd been deployed for 10 months on the amphibious ready group and frankly been running hard for several years. And my wife, while I was deployed, my wife had a, had our third child. So I came back, we had, my oldest boy had been born when I was going on my first deployment. He was born and a week later I go on a deployment.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  Number two son was born in the Philippines in jungle general, literally, that's what we called it, jungle general. And in fact, a couple of years ago, when I was the SOCOM commander, we went back out to Philippines and I went down to Zamboanga and my wife got a driver from Manila to go back to the Subic Bay. She hadn't been there in 30 some odd years. So I'm down in, in Zamboanga for a couple of days. I finally come back up to Manila to, to pick her up and I get into the hotel room and she goes, do you know that John was born in a Quonset hut? I said, yeah. She goes, I mean, it was a Quonset hut. Yeah, I know. That's all we had was a Quonset. And so, I mean Jungle General was a series of Quonset.

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  And so, like I said, number two son was born there. And then we waited quite a while. And finally, for our third child, we thought, hey, we got this all figured out. My wife got pregnant. I'm going to go on a six month deployment. I'll come back, you know, have time to, you know, get ready for the baby to be born. Of course, my six month deployment turns into 10 months and I come back and my daughter's a month old. It's like, hey, I think that worked out okay.

• 1:33:10Jocko Willink?

  But worked out okay for one of you.

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. But then we did get up to Monterey and that was a good time.

• 1:33:16Jocko Willink?

  So out there is where you, your thesis became a book.

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:33:20Jocko Willink?

  And the book is called Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare Theory and Practice. I'm going to jump into this a little bit. Carl von Clausewitz, in his book on war, noted, "The defensive form of warfare is intrinsically stronger than the offense. It contributes resisting power, the ability to preserve and protect oneself. Thus, the defense generally has a negative aim, that of resisting the enemy's will. If we are to mount an offensive to impose our will, we must develop enough force to overcome the inherent superiority of the enemy's defense." Clausewitz's Theory of War states that to, quote, "Defeat stronger, the stronger form of warfare, an army's best weapon is superior numbers.

• 1:34:04Jocko Willink?

  In this sense, superiority of numbers admittedly is the most important factor in the outcome of an engagement, so long as it is not, so long as it is great enough to counterbalance all other contributing circumstances. It thus follows that as many troops as possible should be brought into the engagement at the decisive point." So you start off with that, which people always ask me. I've covered just about every, well, I've covered a lot of war theory and I never cover Clausewitz. And one of the reasons I never cover Clausewitz or haven't yet, I've covered a little bit, but is because I like Liddell Hart better.

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:34:39Jocko Willink?

  And, and so apparently you feel the same way.

• 1:34:45Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on with your book, no soldier would argue the benefit of superior numbers, but if they were the most important factor, how could 69 German commandos have defeated a Belgian force of 650 soldiers protected by the largest, most extensive fortress of its time, the fort at Ypres, which is a special operations paratroopers landed with gliders on this. And, and as you just said, 69 German paratroopers took on this massive Belgian force and won. How can special operations force that has inferior numbers and the disadvantage of attacking the stronger form of warfare gain superiority over the enemy? To understand this paradoxes, to understand special operations.

• 1:35:30Jocko Willink?

  Relative superiority. Relative superiority is a concept crucial to the theory of special operations. Simply stated, relative superiority is a condition that exists when an attacking force generally smaller gains a decisive advantage over a larger or well defended enemy. The value of which the concept of relative superiority lies in its ability to illustrate which positive forces influence the success of a mission and to show how the frictions of war affect the achievement of the goal. This section will define the three basic properties of relative superiority and describe how those properties are revealed in combat. And then you talk, you talk about relative superiority is achieved at a pivotal moment

• 1:36:15Jocko Willink?

  in the engagement. Once relative superiority is achieved, it must be sustained in order to guarantee victory. And if relative superiority is lost, it is difficult to regain again. And then you go on to explain what you already mentioned, the six principles of special operations, simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose. And the book, what this book consists of is, is case studies that, that describe and show how all these things come into play. So that's, you made pretty good time of your, of your, of your session up there in Monterey.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it was, to your point, you know, you take advantage of the opportunities you get. I found studying at the postgraduate school was, you know, I'd been an operator for 15 years. It was, it was great, actually, now to kind of get an opportunity to, to get intellectually engaged, and there were some phenomenal faculty and professors up there. But when I decided to write a thesis, I'd read a lot of Clausewitz, and, you know, Clausewitz kind of talks about the principles of war, and, you know, that everybody has these ideas of various principles of war. And Clausewitz's point there is, look, the defense is always going to be stronger than the offense, because the defense just has to preserve and protect, while the offense has to impose its will upon the enemy. So that was the, but, but then if that's true, then why does soft work? And so, I went in

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  there initially looking for the principles of special operations. So, I, I went and visited all these places and talked to all these commandos, and, and the, but, but I was visiting, I was in, in Germany, meeting with Lieutenant Witzig, who was the, the, at the time, he was the lieutenant that led the raid on Ben Amel. And Colin Kilrain, who was a young lieutenant at the time, who is now a vice admiral, Colin Kilrain was stationed up in Eckendorf with the Komstvemers. So Colin was going to be my, my translator. And so, we linked up and went all over Europe interviewing these guys, it was great. But we get down to talk to Lieutenant Witzig. And it was hard to find these guys, Colin,

• 1:38:22Speaker 02

  because, again, this had the, there, there was some sense that because they had been in the German military, was there some Nazi overtones, etc., etc. Didn't, not the case with Lieutenant Witzig, because he had gone on to work in the West German Army and retired as a colonel. But nonetheless, I think there was always some concern about, you know, some of the wartime efforts. But finally Colin tracks him down. So we go to visit him. And, and I'm sitting there for three hours, and I have created this list of questions for him. And, and he's a very stern fellow, and, and was very cautious early on. And so as we're talking, and I'm, I'm asking him these questions, Colin is translating them, and, and he's answering them, short.

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  Almost bluntly, doesn't seem particularly happy that I'm there, but he's trying to be gracious. And finally, about three hours into it, I turned to Colin, I said, "Ask the Colonel if he's the one that actually developed the plan for how the demolition was going to be used on the surface of a bin of mail." And in perfect English, he says, "Yes, I was." And we continue on in English for the next hour or so. He'd been vetting me. He wanted to find out whether or not this was a serious... But it was the Colonel, so he says, at one point in time, I'm kind of talking about this, he says, "So, you are trying to develop a theory here." And at the time, I was not. I was just trying to identify principles. And I thought, huh.

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  He says, "I think you are working on a theory. You need to flesh out the theory." And so I went back and spent the next year thinking, "Okay, how do you take not just the principles, but what is the theory of special op... Why do special operations work when they shouldn't work, based on kind of Clausewitz and a lot of others?" And then again, the case studies kind of bore out why they work in certain areas and why they don't. But the study of that paid dividends for me after 9/11, because every single time, I reviewed a mission. And I figured at one point in time that I had touched about 10,000 missions over the course of my time as the deputy commander of JSOC and the JSOC commander, where, you

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  know, you're either commanding them, you're overseeing them, or you're reviewing them, because you know, every concept of operation, early on, had to come to a general officer. So I would review every concept of operation as well. And I always asked myself, "Okay, we're making this too hard. Is it a simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose?" And that was the essence of this, recognizing that the frictions of war, chance and uncertainty, shit happens, is going to try to knock your plan off this kind of apex that it's on. And the only thing that's going to keep it upright is the courage and the boldness and the perseverance of the men that are fighting to keep this plan upright.

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  And as I would think through all of these concepts, when I'd see a con op, I'd say, "We're making this too complicated, guys. Make it easier, make it simpler." I mean, I was always trying to get to the simplest approach. You couldn't always get there, but you wanted to do that because you realized the simpler it was, the less chance, the less risk you were going to have, the less chance that things could go wrong. And that was just always, you know, in the back of my mind. Then, of course, the bin Laden raid comes along, and we adhered to the thesis, the theory, as closely as we could. I said, "Look, we're going to flesh all of this out. We're going to keep this plan and so we're going to go from point A to point B in a helicopter.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  Get on the ground, just like we do, you know, we've done thousands of times before. We're not going to make it complicated. We'll get the bad guy, we'll put him on a helicopter and take him home. That's it. Oh, by the way, now, we're going to repeat this thing. We're going to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. We're going to keep it confidential, so nobody else knows about it. And then, when the day comes, do the mission. We will have surprise, speed, and God knows we had purpose." So, you know, that was just the way I tended after my time in Monterey, tended to look at every single mission we did.

• 1:42:28Jocko Willink?

  You get done with Monterey, and then what's next?

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  So, after Monterey, I went back down to Naval Special Warfare Command for about a year, waiting to take command. And I was a training officer down there for a year, just in admin position, holding position, if you will, until I took command of SEAL Team 3.

• 1:42:47Jocko Willink?

  Is that when you did the project, where you were kind of looking at the next generation of warfare?

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  So, in between that, it was really when I was the Chief of Staff. So, I left SEAL Team 3, and then became the Chief of Staff at Group 1, which, for your listeners, oversees all the SEAL teams on the West Coast. And that's when we really began to develop this idea of thinking, back to Liddell Hart. I mean, it really was, why do we have to do things the way we have always done them? Because even up till, you know, 1998, we were still doing the way, things the way we had done in Vietnam. Even, even the guys on the elite East Coast SEAL teams hadn't developed too much beyond kind of the standard SEAL platoon size. And oh, by the way, nobody else gets in the platoon but a platoon guy. You gotta have gone through BUDs.

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  And it was like, what if you're gonna tap into some wire or something? Where is the pencil neck geek guy that you're gonna bring along? Well, sorry, we can't bring him along because he doesn't know how to ride in the Zodiac. Put two, put two life jackets on him, stick him in the Zodiac, because you're bringing this guy along. And then, of course, Admiral Olson had, had taken over Warcom when I became the Commodore, and he'd seen things work on the East Coast. And so he really wanted to take a look at Naval Special Warfare even more broadly. So how do we have sniper elements? Well, back in the day, when I came in, the sniper was in your platoon. You know, the radioman was in your platoon. Everything was inside the platoon organization. Well, then we began to say, hey, yeah, but you're breachers. Well, that, that's what, one of the guys in the platoon was a designated breacher. One of the guys in the platoon was the automatic weapons guy.

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  One of the guys in the platoon was the, was the sniper. Well, why don't we take guys that do a lot of sniper work and make them the world-class snipers and then world-class breachers? That, that evolved, and then all of a sudden 9/11 hits and, and it went on steroids.

• 1:44:32Jocko Willink?

  Before, I, I jumped over a part when you were CO of SEAL Team 3. One thing I used to tell guys all the time was, if we were doing a, if we were doing a, a water op, I'd say, hey, if you're in the water, it's a real-world op. Because if you're in the water, you, you can die, period. And you bout died.

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  Bout died.

• 1:44:52Jocko Willink?

  At SEAL Team 3 as the, as the commanding officer up in, what was it, Morro Bay?

• 1:44:57Speaker 02

  Morro Bay.

• 1:44:58Jocko Willink?

  Capsized in a rib?

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that was not a good day. Except I came out of it alive, so maybe it was a good day. Yeah, we went up there, it was one of the platoon, was doing their final exercise before deploying. And as you know, the commanding officer generally comes up for the FTX, the final training exercise. So we'd gone up to Morro Bay, myself and the command master chief. And the platoon was still doing some training, they were gonna do the FTX, I think, the following day. And there had been a storm off the coast, so Morro Bay's got this thing that looks a little bit like the Rock of Gibraltar, kinda right in the middle of Morro Bay. But what it does is it funnels the waves. So the storm surge off the coast had created these huge waves breaking coming into Morro Bay. Well, there was a place inside Morro Bay where the SEALs were training, so they were

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  kind of in their Zodiacs doing their regular training. But I noticed, as I was getting out to go with the platoon, that I saw two ribs out there. They didn't belong to me, they belonged to the Special Boat Unit. But I'm kinda looking, thinking, WTF, what are these guys planning on doing? Because I'm looking at 20-foot waves breaking here. And so I'm with one of the SEALs, I said, "Run me out to that boat out there." So they zip me out there, and I get on the rib, and I'm talking to a young Lieutenant, Surface Warfare Officer. I said, "So what's the plan here, son?" And he says, "We're gonna go out through the waves." I said, "You're gonna go out through those waves?" "Sir, we've got a plan. I've got my senior chief, he's on the jetty, he's timing the waves. We're actually not gonna go straight out through him, we're gonna kinda cut around

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  near the jetty just as it's breaking. And by the way, all my guys are trained in Kodiak, you know, we can do this." "Okay, well, give me a life jacket, I'll go with you." And, of course, there are two SEALs in the back of the boat, Tom Rainville and Gino Paluso. And so Gino, you may know, he's got quite the sense of humor, he's like, "Hey, sir, come on, let's go." And he said, "You know, I didn't have a dry suit on, the water temperature was in the 50s." And he said, "Yeah, if we tip, you know, you're gonna get awful cold." I said, "Well, then, then don't capsize the boat." So we're in the back, the three of us are, three SEALs are kind of in the back of the boat in the bolster seats back there. And, you know, we're all kinda timing the waves as team guys seem to do. And frankly, the waves are getting kinda bigger and bigger.

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden, the coxswain guns it. Whoa, and he heads straight for the wave. And I mean, we hit this first wave. We go straight at the first wave at about 30 knots. And I literally am counting like you do when you jump out on a static line. I go 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000. Bam! We hit in between the first and the second wave. Well, the bowman, he goes flying off. He's lost one of the engines. Now he does the right thing. The coxswain swings the boat around because we've got no choice now. So he guns it to try to beat the second wave. Well, the second wave, you know, those waves tend to get bigger and bigger. Second wave is probably 30 some odd feet. And he hits it again.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  And we hit it full speed and we go up in the air. And this time, I literally count to 5,000. 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000. We hit, and it's like, holy shit. Hit, the boat cracks. Guys are thrown out. And now all of a sudden, the wave of the day comes, you know? So the boat is facing the sun, but now we've got no power. And that third wave just lifts that boat up. And I can remember seeing it as the boat's getting lifted up. And, you know, there's water coming over. It's a 33 foot boat. And there's another, you know, eight foot of water coming over the top of the thing. And it just, bang, throws us right on the back. Well, I'm underneath the boat and I'm tangled up in shot line. And you know, shot line is this kind of very thin nylon line.

• 1:48:42Speaker 02

  It's wrapped around my neck. I've got somebody's weapon is wrapped around me and I am, I mean, I am completely tangled underneath this rib. And again, much like, you know, times that you have in the teams, most of the times you can get your way out of these things. And so I'm under the boat and I'm trying to extricate myself from this thing, but it's choking me and I'm losing air. And I remember thinking to myself, so this is how it's going to end. I mean, all this time, I'm going to die under this damn boat. And I remember saying to myself, well, I'm never going to see George Ann, Bill, John, or Kelly again, my wife and the three kids.

• 1:49:24Speaker 02

  And as I am struggling, again, to this day, and I actually, I use the word in the book, miraculously, I'm untangled.

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  That should never have happened. I mean, I was so wrapped up in shot line, in somebody's sling, in the bolster seat things, and all of a sudden I'm loose, and I shoot to the surface, and, well now, I'm in the second set of waves coming again, and I'm thinking, "Oh, I'm not gonna make this." And there's two SEALs who had seen this, seen the boat flip over, they're in a Zodiac in their UDT swim trunks, and they come hauling ass out of nowhere, and they're yelling at me, "Skipper, skipper!" And I can hear them, and I'm thinking, "You better get here fast, because I'm not gonna survive this next wave." And they come, I don't even get in the boat. They, the guy does a literal U-turn, you know, a slide

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  and turn. I grab the side of the sponson there, hang on, and I can remember the prop is hitting my jungle boots that I've got on. Yeah. And they pull me out of the wave just before it crashes over the top of me, and they had pulled Tom Rain, another group had pulled Tom Rainville out. Those four guys ended up receiving the Navy Marine Corps Life Saving Medal for saving my ass, and Tom's as well. But, back to the second chances. I mean, it was once again, that could have been the end of my career, and, you know, there were people that thought highly enough, and they went back, I mean, they did the investigation, you know, we talked through everything, and the teams, to their credit, when they did the investigation, said, "You

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  know, this is what we expect of our operators." The lieutenant, who was the surface warfare officer, I mean, we expect them to push the envelope, you know, this is, and a lot of times, you're gonna have these expectations, guy's gonna push the envelope, and it's not always gonna work out well. So, to the credit of, you know, the Admiral and the Commodore, we all, from a career standpoint, survived it. Fast forward again, about, I don't know, 20 some odd years, after the book comes out, I get an email. And, uh, and the guy says, uh, sir, you know, this is so-and-so Lieutenant Jones. Of course, I didn't name the, name the young lieutenant. Uh, he said that I won't go into too much details, but he said, I love the story.

• 1:51:44Speaker 02

  It's exactly how I remembered it and just wanted to reconnect with you and say, thanks for everything. And, uh, and, and he had, uh, again, cause he, he had been the boat OIC and you know, by, by Navy regs, the boat OIC actually is the, the guy responsible, but I, the thing that I admired about this young man is, so he loses the boat and you know, uh, he's got to see, I mean, one, he, he does the right thing. He makes sure he's got a head count on guys. He gets guys out, he gets them medevac to the hospital, um, and he takes immediate charge of the situation. Uh, gets the boat off the bottom, does everything right after the disaster. And you've seen it before, sometimes guys have a disaster like that and they just, they're crushed by it. And, uh, and they can't think and they can't operate and they can't take command. This young lieutenant did exactly what he was supposed to do.

• 1:52:29Speaker 02

  I mean, sometimes bad things happen, uh, and then you gotta kind of, you know, you gotta man up and get the job done. And he did, and, uh, and I think the investigation board saw that and gave him another opportunity.

• 1:52:42Jocko Willink?

  You're a, you know, like I look at your life and I think, yeah, he's, you know, really had some good luck in his life. But also reading your book, I think, damn. Cause the, one of the next stories in your career was you basically got drawn and quartered by your parachutes. Which I, I, you had a parachute, so you take over the, you take over the, what's called Naval Special Warfare Group One, which is the person that's in charge of all the SEAL teams on the West Coast. And all their training, manning and equipping and, and overseeing and giving them guidance. And you go out on a parachute jump for whatever reason, cause that's what we do. And you, you.

• 1:53:23Jocko Willink?

  You about got drawn and quartered from the story. It sounds like you about got ripped in half.

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  That's about right. Yeah, so this was a routine parachute jump and, and I'm not a good jumper. I'm not a good free faller, but you know, it's something you gotta do. So we go out, launched out of North Island on a C-130 and get up to about 13,000 feet and it's gonna be again a routine jump. Ramp comes down and it's, I mean, it's one of these kind of Chamber of Commerce days here in, you know, Southern California, not a cloud in the sky. I remember, I mean, you can see Mexico, you can see the Pacific Ocean, you see the strand. It's like, ah, that's a beautiful day. And I'm, I don't know, fourth in the line of March, so to speak. So the guys go out and jump master gives me the call. I go out behind these guys and, and I'm falling flat and stable. I'm looking good. And there's two guys off to my left and one guy off to my right.

• 1:54:11Speaker 02

  And I'm watching this guy off to my right and he's starting to kind of drift underneath me and I'm, I'm kind of watching, but then he stabilized. Next thing I know, the guy to my left is right underneath me and I checked my altimeter and it's too late. It's about 500 feet. He pulls his parachute and, and in relative terms, of course, I'm moving at about 120 miles an hour and he stopped. I can't get out of the way and I hit his parachute. It's kind of like hitting an airbag, I would assume. And so it dazes me and now I'm spinning out of control. As you know, what I should have done is gotten stable again, looked, checked my altimeter, pulled my ripcord. But, you know, things being what they were, I'm spinning, I'm dazed, I'm like, hey, I just know I gotta reach for my ripcord or this isn't gonna end well. So I reach for my ripcord, pull it while I'm in a head down attitude, spinning.

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  Pilot chute comes out, wraps around one leg. The riser comes out, wraps around another leg. Now I'm completely tangled up in the parachute. I remember thinking to myself, yeah, this doesn't look so good. So, you know, you're, I'm sitting here trying to get my way out of the parachute or at least get, get the damn thing to open. Well, the good news is it opens. The bad news is when a parachute opens, you know, it blossoms. So one riser went one way, one went the other way and it snapped my pelvis in two, broke it by about four or five inches, fractured my back, ripped the muscles out of my stomach that's attached to the, the bony part of your pelvis and ripped the muscles out of the legs and I end up about. About two miles from the drop zone. Now, I'm always quick to point out like this kind

• 1:55:37Speaker 02

  of injury pales in comparison to what we saw in Iraq and what we saw in Afghanistan. And the lessons, you know, from the jump were not so much about the accident, but it was really more about the fact that, you know, at the time, as you point out, I'm the Commodore. I mean, I'm one of the senior guys in the West Coast. I'd been in the business for 20 some odd years. I'd had a lot of near-death experiences. I was pretty savvy. I thought I was invincible, sort of thing. And the next thing you know, you're in the ER in the hospital and you're laid up and you realize it takes a whole lot of people to get you back up going again. My wife became my nurse because once I got out of the hospital, you know, you gotta get shots to make sure you don't, your blood doesn't clot. Admiral Eric Olson made sure I was able to stay in the Navy. And back then, that was touch and go

• 1:56:21Speaker 02

  because, you know, you're a pretty serious accident. Oh, by the way, you're a Navy SEAL. What good are you gonna do if you can't walk and you can't run? And team guys, being team guys, they came by, gave me the right amount of harassment, the right amount of encouragement. And it really did take a lot of people to kind of get me up and going again. And it really was about just this remarkable, you know, group of folks that we are honored to be part of and how they took care of me right about the time I needed it.

• 1:56:49Jocko Willink?

  And of course, that was what, July 2001?

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  It was. Yeah, so I was, I was laid up about, and then, of course, 9/11 happens. And I'm actually kind of recuperating in my house. And we'd wheel the hospital bed into my house there in Coronado, at the naval base, when 9/11 was happening. And about a month or so later, I got called to go to the White House. And Wayne Downing, for our listeners, he was a retired four-star general who had run US Special Operations Command. He got asked by President Bush to be in charge of the Office of Combating Terrorism, which had been newly established after 9/11. And Downing gets ahold of me and says, hey, I'd like you to come work for me. And he knew I'd been in the accident. And of course,

• 1:57:36Speaker 02

  at that point in time, I mean, I can't go back to an operational team as much as I wanted to. And I thought, well, you know, this'll maybe give me a chance to heal and... Well, I got off the White House, didn't have any time to do any rehab, you know, you just went right to work. But I had to park on what was called the ellipse, which was outside the White House. And it was about, you know, 600, half, half a mile maybe into, into the White House every day. And that became my PT was getting out of the car and going, man, that's a long way to walk, you know.

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  But little by little, your body heals and get back to work.

• 1:58:07Jocko Willink?

  So now you're, and this is a, you said something that reminded me, so I've worked for Admiral McGuire, where I was his aide. Not, not at this time, but one thing that he had gotten, when, when September 11th happened, he was working acquisitions at the Pentagon or something like that. And I, he, he told me, you know, his attitude was, okay, not hell, I want to go to a team, I want to deploy, which is what every team guy thinks. But he just said, you know, okay, well, this is my foxhole acquisitions. I'm going to get money for the teams, that's what I'm going to do. And that was sort of the same attitude that it looked like you had. It was like, okay, this is what I'm going to do, going to do it to the best of my ability. You, you, you do talk about, um, there's, there's a hostage situation, was it Martin and Gro...

• 1:58:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, Martin and Gracia Burnham.

• 1:58:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, what was interesting, and you know, get the book, it's, it's, it's fascinating how you put that together. But one thing that I found interesting about it, it's a good lesson learned for people is it was something that was kind of on the, you know, on the back burner. And people weren't focused on it. And here you had two Americans that were being held hostage. And like I said, it was on the back burner and you sort of became a champion for, hey, we need to do something about this. And that had a huge impact and eventually, you know, a rescue mission was undertaken. Unfortunately, the husband was, was killed, but the wife survived and, but one person can make a huge difference.

• 1:59:32Jocko Willink?

  And, and you can be, you, you can be a champion for a cause and have a real impact, which is, and you know, it's not like you were the senior guy there or anything like that. But you, you grabbed onto this cause, you knew it was the right thing to do and let it. I thought that was a, that's a powerful thing to think about.

• 1:59:48Speaker 02

  Well, particularly, you know, I was in the White House, so you're, you are close to the, uh, you know, the decision makers on these things. And I realized I did have an opportunity. Now, I'm a Navy captain, so I'm fairly senior at the time. But when the Burnhams had been held hostage for six or seven months before I even arrived there, and I was stunned frankly that we, the United States, it's not that we weren't doing anything, but I didn't think we were doing enough. And, you know, having been in the kind of hostage rescue business, I knew what was the art of the possible. And so there was a thing called the Hostage Subcommittee, which by virtue of my position, I was in charge of it. And it was an interagency committee. But to your point, Jaco, yeah, you have an opportunity. No matter where you are in the chain of command, you can make a difference. And I was fortunate enough to be able to get in and brief President

• 2:00:33Speaker 02

  Bush and have the ear of Dr. Condoleezza Rice, who was the National Security Advisor and ambassadors from that perch in the White House, to be able to try to orchestrate something on behalf of the Burnhams. And so it was pretty fulfilling to, again, we were sorry we couldn't, you know, get Martin rescued. But I remember I'd never met Gracia, but several months after she had been rescued, I was just sitting in my cubicle there in the White House, and the phone rang. And she was on the other end, and, you know, thanking me. And it's like, you don't need to thank me. I mean, this is, you know, I'm

• 2:01:16Speaker 02

  sorry we couldn't rescue your husband. She was just, she's a remarkable woman, you know, just, her faith sustained her through, you know, that year and a half in the jungle. But, yeah, the best thing about working in the White House was almost like the issue with the Pentagon. And this really did serve me well, because two years in the White House, now I knew how the White House worked. And so when I became Deputy JSOC Commander and then the JSOC Commander, now you know how to get decisions made. You know what the interagency process works, it looks like. You know who all the players are. And in fact, most of the players, a lot of the players that I had served with on the National Security Council staff, then a couple of years later, they're somebody else important. And so you

• 2:01:59Speaker 02

  can, back to those relationships, you can leverage those relationships in a positive fashion. So understanding how the White House worked, and also the great relationships I had built, served me well in a number of my commands.

• 2:02:12Jocko Willink?

  When you, in between being the deputy JSOC commander and leaving the White House, is that, did you go to SACU for?

• 2:02:18Speaker 02

  I did.

• 2:02:19Jocko Willink?

  So you did a tour at SACU, was that like your standard two-year tour?

• 2:02:21Speaker 02

  It was a two-year tour, but I was fortunate at the time, I had a great Army Colonel that worked for me named Stu Braden, and Stu came to me with this idea that we needed to stand up a NATO Special Operations Force. Well, the folks in NATO, the bureaucrats, did not want to do that. But Stu understood how to make this happen. And once again, I was fortunate, General Jim Jones was the UCOM commander, the SACU commander at the time. We pitched the, uh, the, the plan to him and he supported it. And, and as a result, we were able to stand up in 2006, the NATO Special Operations Force that today has got 22, 24 countries that are part of NATO SOF.

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  And of course, they deployed with us overseas in Afghanistan and continue to be a great partner. And a lot of that credit goes right back to Stu Braden and the great work he did.

• 2:03:14Jocko Willink?

  From there, you do, you go to JSOC, you take over as the deputy commander, and I think, uh, you, you, you throw out, in Sea Stories, you give an example, which I think is a, well, it's, it's a pretty important story. There's a mission going on, you're in the, you're in the TAC, the Tac Cooperation Center, and here we go, I'm going to go to the book. This is from Sea Stories. Unbeknownst to me, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Coltrip, the Sea Squadron Commander, and Colonel Jim Hickey from 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, had maneuvered farther up the dirt road from Wolverine 1, which was one target, to another small house designated Wolverine 2.

• 2:03:58Jocko Willink?

  As I watched the ISR feed from the West Cam and listened to the radios, the visual and verbal didn't match up. Wolverine 1 appeared reasonably quiet, but the radio calls from Coltrip sounded like they were moving rapidly on a target. It sounds like they're on target, Lee. I don't see any movement outside the house. I motioned to the Jock non-commissioned officer who sat at the end of the long wooden table that made a horseshoe around the ISR screen. So you're sitting there watching this thing unfold, ISR is what's, what's the feed that's coming from the aircraft overhead. He was also on the headset seeing what I was seeing, which was nothing. I raised my hands in the universal sign of WTF and he shrugged and called back, ISR is on the target. I don't know where the squadron is, sir.

• 2:04:44Jocko Willink?

  I hated to call the squadron in the middle of an operation. And that's an important point. You know, from a, from, from my perspective, you know, I was a platoon commander and assault force commander in a platoon and then a tasking commander. And the fact that you weren't jumping on there, hey, where are you at? What's going on? What's going on? Is, is, I'd say if you've got a boss, you've got at least a 50% chance of a boss that wants to know exactly where you are at all time. And it's not fun and it doesn't help. And so here you are, you say, I hated to call the squadron in the middle of an operation. It's the last thing any tactical guy on the ground wants, a call from his boss, sitting warm and comfortable in a jock 50 miles away from the action. Still, it was our responsibility to manage the quick reaction

• 2:05:26Jocko Willink?

  force and the medical evacuation if something went wrong on target. That was hard to do if you didn't have good situational awareness of the mission. And the truth was, I was curious as to whether this new lead was panning out. So they were tracking a lead. Somewhat, somewhat reluctantly, I pushed the talk, I pushed the talk button and reached out to Coltrip. Bill, are you on target? Yes, sir, Coltrip responded somewhat excitedly. We don't see you on ISR. There was a pause on Coltrip's end. Sir, we are on Wolverine two, just down the road from the original target. And we have jackpot. Jackpot, jackpot, jackpot was the code word, meaning they had captured the objective.

• 2:06:06Jocko Willink?

  At first I assumed Coltrip meant case, is that who you were looking for? But suddenly it occurred to me that the tone of Coltrip's voice indicated something more significant. Jackpot? Do you mean little jackpot or big jackpot? Big jackpot, Coltrip answered. And going, as this goes forward, big jackpot was Saddam. Right. So these guys had just captured Saddam. And I was actually, I was in Iraq at the time. And, and so we had found out. I think we had found out, we found out really quickly, one of the guys that we were working, one of the OGA guys we were working out with was one of the early interrogators on him and come

• 2:06:49Jocko Willink?

  down, ah, we got him. So as much as I know you were trying to keep it secret, there was, uh, it didn't stay secret very well. It didn't stay secret long, no. That one didn't stay, uh, stay secret very long. I know there's a, there's a, before we jump in a little bit about Saddam. So when you, when you were running that earlier, I mentioned you were running this project of like, looking at the future of warfare and what we could do. And I was part of that. So I was, and there was like five of us and you were basically taking us and sending us to all these, uh, very cool, probably some of the best schools I ever went to. I went to lockpicking and car stealing and just all these really cool stool, uh, uh, schools to get us prepared to do, like you said, operations from a totally different perspective. And I remember I,

• 2:07:33Jocko Willink?

  I sat through your brief a couple of times and you would brief, you know, some senior officers and you'd say, hey, listen, in the SEAL teams, we do direct action, but we have TLAMs now. And so do we really need to do direct shot? Or are we really going to have to do direct action missions when we've got TLAMs? And we've got, another thing we do is special reconnaissance. Well, are we really going to do, need to do special reconnaissance when we've got satellites? And, and we've got, you know, UAV capabilities that are coming on board. And, and you know, I remember, like I said, I was a young guy and thinking, okay, well, I need to, I need to transfer to this new format. We're not going to do direct action anymore. I think the next time I saw you,

• 2:08:13Jocko Willink?

  I was in Baghdad, you came down to Camp Jenny Posey where we were, we were, I was jocked up, literally about to go out on my whatever 50th or whatever, direct action mission. And, and I thought it was funny. I kind of smiled to myself, said, well, looks like We're still doing it. Looks like we're still doing it, sir. Um, but, but this, this mission got Saddam and then, man, you, you do a, it's a very interesting perspective. I mean, how, how, how crazy is it to sit here and talk to you? You were interacting with Saddam when he got captured. And you detailed in the book, but I mean, just some, some high level thoughts. What was that like detailing with this freaking horrible, horrible sadistic person?

• 2:08:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was very interesting because the, um, you know, when we first captured him, I mean, he was pompous. He was arrogant. Uh, when, uh, when, when Bill called back, when Bill Coltrum called back and said, hey, we got big jackpot. To your point, you had asked about Case. So Case was the guy we were, the facilitator. So we were trying to get the facilitator who we thought was going to lead us to Saddam. Well, they had gotten Case and then Case had, had kind of pointed them towards Saddam and they opened the spider hole. You've seen the picture. Saddam's in there. So they bring Saddam back to, to Crit and, and I'm, I'm down in Baghdad and, um, and so now we had a plan. Okay. What do you do if you get Saddam? Well, I had to call General Abizadeh, who was the CENTCOM commander. I called General McChrystal, who was my boss back in Tampa, and I had to make

• 2:09:37Speaker 02

  plans to, well, we want to, we want to verify that Saddam. So I needed to get DNA sent to, you know, the lab, the FBI lab and all that sort of thing. But, uh, but as all this is happening, um, uh, the, uh, the JTF commander, um, General Rick Sanchez, I get the word General Sanchez is outside the jock. I was like, what? I mean, he, he was the big guy in Iraq at the time, three star at the time. And, uh, so bring him on in. So Sanchez comes in, sits down beside me and says, uh, Bill, I understand you got Saddam. I said, hey, sir, I do not know that yet. Uh, yeah, I'm not going to call jackpot until I can see it, till we can verify it. You know how this goes. You know, there are a lot of times

• 2:10:20Speaker 02

  we had captured guys who we thought had the right name. The Cunha's were different. The people were different. You call jackpot, then you're embarrassed, you know, 24 hours later when it's not the right guy. And he says, hey, no, I mean, I, I heard through, uh, you know, through OGA that, that you got him. I said, well, sir, he'll be down here in 30 minutes. You can see for yourself.

• 2:10:38Jocko Willink?

  I think we both just spotted the leak, huh?

• 2:10:40Speaker 02

  Well, so, uh, so the, uh, about 30 minutes later, the Hilo arrives. Well, uh, I mean, I'm busy making phone calls. So I turned to my, uh, chief of staff, who I called him, I think Captain Lee at his request. Um, and I said, hey, go over there. You've got to come back and, and I'm trusting you. Tell me whether you think it's Saddam or not. So he and, uh, General Sanchez go over there and he comes back a few minutes later and goes, sir, it's Saddam. I said, okay. So now I'm calling Abizadeh and doing my sort of thing. Well, about, uh, you know, half an hour later, I, I go back over there and, uh, I, I remember talking to Sanchez. It was kind of one of those funny moments. So Saddam has this big beard. And, uh, and I realized we gotta get him cleaned up because we're gonna have this kind of press release and everything and frankly, it looked like Saddam even with a

• 2:11:24Speaker 02

  big beard. I mean, he's got this bulbous nose and everything. But I figured, well, let's get him cleaned up so no Iraqis can say it's not Saddam. So I turned to one of the guys and said, okay, let's get him shaved and, uh, and get him cleaned up and then we'll take a picture and then we'll be able to compare the, you know. So as I'm saying, Sanchez turns to me and says, I don't know, Bill. Do we have the authority to shave him? I said, sir, we have the authority to kill him if he was, you know, if he was trying to get us. I think we got the authority to shave him. We both kinda laughed. I really liked Rick Sanchez. He was a good guy. Um, so we, so I go off, make some more phone calls. I come back, assuming that what had happened was some ranger or somebody had, had gotten the shears and was kinda cleaning Saddam. But why come back? Saddam's got a pair of scissors in his hand

• 2:12:07Speaker 02

  and he's clipping his own beard. I'm like, no, let me have those scissors. Yeah, just, yeah, pull those away. And he's like, I was told to get cleaned up. But, uh, but the next, the next day was the day when you, uh, you recall the press conference, uh, where the ambassador and, and Joe Sanchez say, we got him. Well, they hadn't seen him yet. Uh, Sanchez had seen him, but the ambassador hadn't seen him yet. So they fly out to, uh, to our, our place there in Baghdad and go to, to see Saddam and they brought some of the Iraqi leaders with them. And again, Saddam, I've, you know, I've got him now in a jumpsuit and he's sitting on a cot. But when they, when the Iraqi leaders came into the room, small room, about this size actually. I mean, they are yelling at him, they're spitting at him and he's got this look on his face like, boys, I'm still in charge here. Sit

• 2:12:51Speaker 02

  down. And he kinda motions to him, guys, just sit down. Don't you know who I am? And I'm looking and thinking, wow. He, he is, he still thinks he's in charge. He's about to find out he's no longer in charge, you know. So, uh, I didn't really wanna bring those guys in because I knew this would happen. It would just bolster his ego. So after, uh, after they left, I talked to Sanchez and talked to the ambassador. I said, sir, that's it. I don't want anybody else visiting him. I am responsible for him now. I mean, call General Labzade, he will tell you, I'm responsible for him, so here's what I'm telling you, nobody else visits him. We will, you know, I will take good care of him, but I don't want him, you know, feeling like he's somebody important. So for the next thirty days, I held on to him. And in the room, I had a,

• 2:13:35Speaker 02

  an officer and a, a security guy and a, and a medic or a doctor at all times with him. Because he was six, seven years old, and he had all sorts of health problems. But it was interesting to watch. As, as the days and weeks went on, and he no longer had his, you know, palaces, and he no longer had his generals, and he no longer had his handmaidens, he really just became a pathetic old man. And, and every time I'd come in, every, I'd go check on him every day, he'd always stand up to want to talk to me. And I would say, "No." And I wouldn't talk to him, and it made him mad. And he would talk to the Rangers and the, and the doc, and I told him, I said, "I don't want anybody saying a word to him." And he would always ask about Al Jefe. "Yeah, you know, Al Jefe." And of course, I came

• 2:14:19Speaker 02

  in, I, I made sure my stars weren't on, and my name tag wasn't on. But he knew who I was. I mean, just by, you know, you come in. So thirty days into it, it was time to move him. And I was really hoping that, by, by this time, you know, the insurgency had really, had kind of blossomed. He didn't know that, of course. And I thought, "Well, let's see if I can get him to tell the insurgents to stand down." So we had a plan, brought my translator in, and of course, I knew what his answers would be, but I figured, I got nothing to lose here. So I sat down with him, and I said, "Look, you know, the, the kind of, the war's over here. The Americans have come in, we've..." And he just kind of nodded, and I said, "But your people are still dying. And, you know, you can do one

• 2:15:02Speaker 02

  of two things. You can become Benito Mussolini, and be the petty dictator, or you can do right by your country. Now, it's not going to end well for you, you, you got to know that. But tell them to lay down their arms, so, so we're not killing any more Iraqis." And I knew he'd asked me the question that I thought he would ask. He said, If it was you, would you do it? And I said, look, you know, if it was for the best part of my country, I'd do what it took to save my country. And he looks at me and goes, I don't think so. In Arabic, but it was, I knew what he meant. And then I said to him, I said, okay, you're not going to see me again. We're moving you. And he was like, because we'd been taking pretty good care of him.

• 2:15:46Speaker 02

  And he was like, oh, this is not a good idea. And so then he starts to get a little talkative. I said, time's done. And so that night, we, undercover darkness, we moved him to some military police and they held on to him until the trial. But watching his, again, watching him and his behavior and how it changed when he no longer felt he was in a position of power was, I think, important to realize, you know, that's what you do, you're booked back on bullies. You know, at the end of the day, you stand up to the bullies. And if all they had was the trappings around them, they're not the kind of people that are going to be able to stand up to you for very long. And, you know, he was a function of the generals that supported him and all of the trappings.

• 2:16:28Speaker 02

  And when you took that away, he was just a bully. A sadistic, maniacal.

• 2:16:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:37Speaker 02

  Evil.

• 2:16:38Jocko Willink?

  Just evil.

• 2:16:39Speaker 02

  Pure evil.

• 2:16:41Jocko Willink?

  So you get Saddam and did you think the war was going to be over at that point?

• 2:16:49Speaker 02

  No, because by that point, we'd seen the insurgency begin to build. As you recall, you know, I got there in October of 03. And it was interesting, when I got there, the guy I was relieving, it was an Air Force One star, who was a deputy at JSOC at the time. I'm getting there thinking, hot dang, you know, I finally got to get in, get in the war. And he says, hey, look, you know, there's some great, there's some great restaurants in downtown Baghdad. You know, if you, you get a break, go down, there's this place to get some shawarma. I'm like, I'm sorry, what? He goes, oh, yeah, I said, man, the war's over. And we just got to get Saddam, but I mean, everything's kind of over now. I was like, damn. And then, a couple of weeks later, Route Irish blows up and, as you know, Route Irish

• 2:17:34Speaker 02

  never changed after that. Then, we started getting guys ambushed. And again, this was the transition period of the war. So by the time we got Saddam in December, the insurgency was kind of, you know, it was moving pretty strong by then. So we knew that it wasn't going to be over anytime soon.

• 2:17:51Jocko Willink?

  So I was there too at that time. The last op that I did, well, we did a couple more, but the last big op that I did was going after Yakubi, which was Sodder's, one of Sodder's lieutenants. And that, that really made things bad really quickly. So, you're the deputy at JSOC, and how, are you just doing like a port and starboard in Iraq?

• 2:18:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Afghanistan. So, of course, at this point in time, so this is 2003 for me. You know, we had gone into Afghanistan, kicked the Taliban out, put Karzai in. And then Afghanistan was kind of, for a long time there, it was the other theater that, we didn't have much presence there. The only soft presence was a, kind of a half a SEAL squadron at the time. And probably some reserve green berets from the 20th and 19th group. Everybody else was in Iraq. And so, we go to Iraq, but then, in late 2003, General Abbesaid says, hey, look, we need to, we need to pick up the pace in Afghanistan. A

• 2:19:03Speaker 02

  little concerned about the Taliban resurgence, etc. So, what we would do is, I would go kind of over to theater, and, you know, four, five, six month sort of pumping, and I'd spend a couple of months in Iraq, and then I'd go to Afghanistan. Then I'd come back to Iraq, then I'd go to Afghanistan. So I would bounce back and forth on the plane, you know, fly through IUD, stop there, and then go to Afghanistan, spend a couple of weeks there, kind of managing that, pop back to Iraq. And so, it was just kind of back and forth. And it was supposed to be generally, three months on, three months off. Rarely ended up being that when I was the deputy. It'd be, you know, four or five months, back for a couple of months, back out. And so, we just kind of flip-flop back and forth. And at some point in time...

• 2:19:48Speaker 02

  Joe McChrystal kinda came over and really began to focus on Iraq and then moved me to Afghanistan. And so myself and the other deputy then kinda began to rotate more and more in Afghanistan. But that took a while.

• 2:20:02Jocko Willink?

  When did you take over as Commander JSOC?

• 2:20:06Speaker 02

  2008.

• 2:20:07Jocko Willink?

  Then did you start spending more time in Iraq?

• 2:20:12Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. So, yeah, I remember at the time, we had developed the capability to really be able to kinda command and control remotely at that point in time. We built up the JOC in Fort Bragg to be in a position where the ISR was good enough and you could have stayed, as the Commander, you could have stayed in Fort Bragg, you know, let the Colonels and maybe the One Stars kinda run things, but you know, there's no way that was gonna happen. I mean, you gotta be forward if you're gonna command. So yeah, I mean, a week or so after I took command, I went out to Iraq and then settled down there for six months, seven months, I don't remember what it was. And then periodically I'd bounce over to Afghanistan just to kinda keep things moving over there.

• 2:20:55Speaker 02

  And then in 2009, by this time Joe Petraeus had taken over CENTCOM, and he said, hey, look, you know, we really need to have you, the JSOC Commander, shift your flag to Afghanistan. So then I would say prior to that, it was probably three quarters of my time in Iraq, a quarter in Afghanistan. 2009 comes, it just reversed. Then I, you know, three quarters of my time in Afghanistan, about a quarter of my time in Iraq.

• 2:21:21Jocko Willink?

  You got a section in C stories that I think, I'm not gonna say there's a typical mission, but I mean, there's a little bit of a typical mission. It's what you mentioned already, you know, you do something over and over again repetitively. And I thought this was a, this one, pretty concise little, quote, "typical mission."

• 2:21:40Jocko Willink?

  Going to the book, "In a cloud of dust, the helos lifted off from an airfield in western Iraq and within minutes were in a tight formation screaming across the desert just 50 feet off the ground. Two minutes later, the next, the next call came. Crossing the border, a drone flying high overhead captured, captured the scene as the four helos crested a large berm, separating Iraq from Syria. It was broad daylight and there was no hiding from view. If the Syrian air defense detected helos either visually or on radar, they would immediately open fire with surface-to-air missiles or anti-aircraft guns. The Syrians were our allies, but not our friends. One minute's touchdown. From above, the two Blackhawk gunships took the lead and immediately began to separate, one taking the north side of Gadiya's compound, the other the south. They would

• 2:22:25Jocko Willink?

  provide gunfire support for the assaulters. The view from the drone shifted away from the approaching helos and on to the compound. In the large courtyard, seven men, hearing the noise of the inbound helos, began to run excitingly, looking for cover, grabbing their guns, ready to fight. On screen, Roger Votel responded, watching as the helos came into view. Barely missing the outside wall, the lead helo flared, its nose arching upward, tail rotor down as it stopped in midair and landed hard on the ground inside the courtyard. Shots fired, shots fired, came the familiar refrain. The operators poured out of the first helo and immediately were engaged by Gadiya and his men. The next helo was seconds behind executing the same aerial maneuver, landing just feet from the

• 2:23:07Jocko Willink?

  first aircraft. Outside the wall, the last two helos set down, the soldiers rushing off the aircraft and taking up security positions to ensure that none of Gadiya's men escaped the assault. Shots fired, shots fired. The operators inside the courtyard spread out, sweeping forward toward Gadiya. The rounds flying both ways. There was no way out. One by one, Gadiya's men fell and within minutes, the fight was over. Cowering unarmed in the small tent in the middle of the compound were several young children and a woman. The drone overhead watched as the operators went from dead man to dead man, looking for their target. Minutes later came the call. Jackpot. I say again, jackpot. Roger Votel answered, a smile coming across his face. This mission had been a

• 2:23:50Jocko Willink?

  long time coming. On target, the chaos was subsiding, the gunfire had stopped, but the clock was ticking. By now, the Syrians were aware the Americans had crossed the border. It was time to go. Picking up the body of Abu Ghadiya, the assaulters exited the compound, boarded the helos, and within three minutes were back in Iraq. The total time of the mission, 17 minutes.

• 2:24:12Speaker 02

  But you're right. Typical mission, as you well know, this was, at one point in time, I think we were doing between 20 and 25 missions a night in Iraq with the whole force, not one entity, but the entire force. And they all followed pretty much the same sort of method of operation, that you either went in by helo, or you went in by ground assault. And of course, the great thing about Iraq from a tactical standpoint, from a commander's standpoint, is you drive to the objective. You know, if you're in Baghdad, or Mosul, or pick a place, you drive 500 feet from the objective, the guys get out, you know, the guys put up blocking positions, the assault force comes in, breaches the door, and away they go.

• 2:24:55Speaker 02

  And, you know, I would go out with the guys periodically, and we'd hit four or five targets a night, you know, just, oop, not there, oop, not there, oop, not there, you know? And eventually, you get the bad guy. And then, of course, the helo ops, we used mainly for getting out into, you know, Ramadi area and a little further out, but that particular mission, Abu Ghadiya was probably one of the, one of the most notorious facilitators, and we just could never get to him. And he was the guy that was bringing in all the fighters, foreign fighters from outside Iraq, and he would funnel them in through, across the border and into Al Qaeda in Iraq, as we called them at the time. But he was elusive.

• 2:25:37Speaker 02

  And finally, when we finally got an opportunity to get him, you know, I was briefing President Bush on the video, and it was interesting to see, you know? It was great, because the president was very decisive, and I was fortunate in the course of my time as both the commander and the deputy, I had both President Bush and President Obama, and I will, I will offer, as different as they may have been, from a personality standpoint, they were both very decisive when it came to giving you authority to go get, go get the bad guys. And this one, you know, I remember President Bush going around the table with, you know, the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and they all said, thumbs up, and away we went.

• 2:26:18Speaker 02

  And, again, from the, so I gave Votel, hey, you, at your timeline, you go. And he was in Iraq at the time, and... Next thing I know, you know, 17 minutes, I mean 17 minutes from the time they launched, time across the border, get the objective and back. That was, I remember when I, when I reported back to the White House, they're like, I'm sorry, what? It's done. It's done?

• 2:26:40Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking out.

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  It's done.

• 2:26:42Jocko Willink?

  That's building a good reputation for the troops, huh? Holy mackerel. Uh, in the midst of all this stuff you got going on, you get, you get hit with the, uh, the Maersk Alabama and Captain Phillips. And what's interesting, I, I remember I used to tell these young junior officers and platoon commanders and task unit commanders.

• 2:27:01Jocko Willink?

  If you think these operations are just going to show up on your door and like, okay, cool, then we'll just go execute it. Every one of them is a, is, is like a soap opera to try and get it to put together. And you have to kind of force these operations to happen. And, and so you've got all that going on. And then here comes this, um, the Maersk Alabama. And it, it's great. You got to read the book. There's all these different assets. You've got people, guys moving from different theaters and guys from the states coming out. You've got air assets, you've got Navy assets, ships and logistics for all those pieces. This is, this is a massive operation. And again, I, I love your tone of voice when you, when you read it in the audio book.

• 2:27:44Jocko Willink?

  You keep, you keep saying it's a lifeboat. Like it's almost comical. And I just went to the UDT SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, where they have the lifeboat.

• 2:27:52Speaker 02

  Oh, do they really?

• 2:27:53Jocko Willink?

  They've got it there.

• 2:27:53Speaker 02

  I haven't seen it. I'll have to go take a look.

• 2:27:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's great. And of course we've got some connections there. So you're not allowed to walk inside, but we got to walk inside and check it all out. You can see all the bullet holes are there and everything. But what, what I noticed about that, um, a couple of things. Number one, the authority and trust that you had with the guys on the ground, which is the mark of a, of the leader that you want to work for. The one that's not micromanaging, the one that trusts the, the guys on the ground, the general Patton said the, what'd he say? The, the commander on the ground is always right. And that seemed to be your attitude all the time. The trust that you had with the guys on the ground, um, and what was phenomenal.

• 2:28:36Jocko Willink?

  Also, as even when that op happened, I remember thinking to myself, man, if that happened in 1994, how much different, do you think it would have been a lot different?

• 2:28:47Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the interesting thing about it, and you characterize it correctly, and the operators don't even understand this, and nor do they need to know this, but I talked about my time working in the White House, for two years in the White House. So, when I became the JSOC commander, I was in a position to be able to understand how decisions were made in the White House, and also in the Pentagon. And I had a great relationship with the Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, and Admiral Mike Mullin, who was the Chairman, and of course, we'd done a number of things for the White House at that point in time. But one of the things I used to always do, and I think it infuriated some folks in the White House and the Pentagon, was I would always say, let me preposition the guys. You don't

• 2:29:32Speaker 02

  have to make the decision, you don't have to give me the authority to do the assault, but what I don't want to do is for you to give me the authority and then not be in the window to do it. So, let me go ahead and put the guys off the coast of Somalia for whatever we were gonna do, and then if you decide to go, go. And finally, of course, somebody said, you do this every time, and you know that there is this kind of predisposition that if the guys are already out there, why not just let them do it? I was like, really? No, I didn't know that. But that was always a little bit of the game, if you will, I played, in terms of making sure that I wanted the guys always to be in a position that

• 2:30:13Speaker 02

  if we got the approval to go, that they weren't, we weren't now having to move and then miss the opportunity. Because I'd seen it happen before where we waited and waited, and the decision was hard, and finally people would say, okay, we're gonna give you permission to go, and you go, I'm sorry, man.

• 2:30:28Jocko Willink?

  Cool, it's gonna take me three days to get there.

• 2:30:29Speaker 02

  It's gonna take me three days to get there. And that's what they didn't understand a lot of. It's three days by the time, not just the guys from the States, but you gotta move ships down, and ships don't move very fast, you know? So, you know, 99% of the time, I think the White House and the Pentagon was happy that I pushed them to be in a position, but not always. But in the case with the Mares, Alabama, I mean, I get the call from the Joint Staff that this lifeboat's been taken, we got a captain in there, and... And you may get called to do this mission. Of course, I kept thinking it's a lifeboat. But, but very quickly, I mean, it happened to be over Easter and it's not that things

• 2:31:12Speaker 02

  changed much over Easter, as you know, but I just remember it happened to be that weekend. But, you know, immediately, hey, I know what to do. I'm going to get on the, on the video with Avril Mullen and I'm going to get on the video of the White House and we're going to begin to lay out a plan and I'm going to make sure that the guys on the West Coast are ready to move because we got to get boats. I've got to get the fleet moving. Interestingly enough for this, my one time that I was proud, I was a fleet commander for a couple of days because General Petraeus chopped the change of operational control, chopped the fleet assets to me, even though I was actually in Afghanistan. And of course, what people I think have trouble understanding is my situational awareness, by the time this was

• 2:31:52Speaker 02

  going, my situational awareness in Afghanistan was almost as good in terms of the bigger picture of the guys who were on the ground because I'm looking at it from the closed circuit TV that the, that's onboard the ship. We've got a drone overhead. We've got a lot of these assets. So you can kind of see what's happening. Of course, at the end of the day, Captain Scott Moore, who was the commander of the SEAL unit there, he's the guy that's running the show on the ground. But Scott and I are talking, you know, a couple of times a day. But yeah, you can't be in a position as the three star to be telling, okay, look, I want the snipers in these positions and I only want the snipers to do that. No, no, you, you got to rely on the guys that have been doing this again for years at this point in time. You know, they're going to make the best decision possible. That was

• 2:32:34Speaker 02

  one of the things that always gave me comfort as a commander was I knew the guys would make as good a decision as I would make. I needed to put them in a position to be successful. My job was to get them to the point where now they could take action if they needed to and then let them figure out how to take the best action. Whether that was Bin Laden raid, whether that was the Mares, Alabama, whether it was a thousand other missions. Hey, you're the commander. I'm not going on the op. I'm not going to be the guy that's in the line of march. I'm not going to be breaching the door. I want to put you in a position to be successful. I want to make sure you got the right ISR. I want to make sure you got the right, you know, cap overhead. I want to make sure you got the right artillery. I want to make sure you got the right medevac. I want to make sure we're monitoring in a way that's going to make you successful. At the end of the day, hey, young sergeant,

• 2:33:18Speaker 02

  young petty officer, young captain, young lieutenant, whoever you happen to be. You take, you take the tackle into this and, and you'll do just fine. Yeah, you'll screw it up every once in a while. Guess what we all do. And when that does, we'll take a hard look at why we made the mistake. And we'll make the corrections. And if somebody screwed it up because they really did something bad, we're gonna hold you accountable. Um, but other than that, get out and do the very best you can. We weren't always successful. We had some, some ops that went south on us. Um, but I wouldn't change anything about the way we had set up the organization to empower the guys, you know, at that level to make the decisions and take the actions.

• 2:33:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, I call that the iterative decision-making process. That was one thing that I, as I was in charge of things and some kind of an operation would come up, or even if it was like a totally tactical thing of what should we do right now? I would always make really small decisions really quickly.

• 2:34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:15Jocko Willink?

  And it made people think I was very decisive because I would make decisions very quickly. They wouldn't recognize how small decisions I've made. And then I would just adapt and adjust them as needed as we move forward. But I like the fact that you use the iterative decision-making process, taking small steps to actually put some, to make it easier for the boss to make a final decision. Cause look, we're all ready. Just, all you need to do is pull the trigger. The weapon's there, the site is on, the, we're ready to do this. Just say go and we'll go. Um, similar, similar one with Salah Ali Salah Nabon? Am I saying that right?

• 2:34:50Speaker 02

  Salih Nabon, right?

• 2:34:51Jocko Willink?

  Salih Nabahon. So you talk about, you know, again, these, there's relationships. And here you had Van Hoosier on the ground, who's,

• 2:35:01Jocko Willink?

  who's like the epic SEAL officer, right? He was a, he was in Vietnam as a Marine and, um, you know, lost his leg due to a parachute accident and is just a badass.

• 2:35:13Speaker 02

  Nothing stops Pete.

• 2:35:14Jocko Willink?

  That's right. And here you are, you have, so you've got him below you in the chain of command, where you've got this awesome trust, and then up the chain of command, you've got Mullen and the Chairman of the, I mean, Mullen, Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he trusts you. So, this is how you run this thing, is through these relationships.

• 2:35:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it went, fortunately, by that time, by the time we were going to Sally Nabhan, so Sally Nabhan was a guy in Somalia, but he had been responsible for two embassy bombings, and he was, at one point in time, he was like the number one guy on the FBI's top 10 list, and then after 9/11 happens, he kind of falls a little lower down the list, but, but nobody could find him. And again, a very elusive guy, hiding in Somalia, and then again, our focus had shifted to Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, all of a sudden, we get this lead on Nabhan, and, but we didn't know whether or not it was him for certain. Again, we had an OGA source who said, hey, we think this is him, and if it is him, he's going to be in a blue sedan, he's going to move up and down the beach. So, back to that

• 2:36:19Speaker 02

  process again, it was, okay, I'm going to put the guys in a position. So, we moved a couple of small boys, a couple of destroyers out there, put some little bird helicopters on them, and set the conditions, so that if in fact, we had a bead on Nabhan, then we were in a position to react. And to your point about Pete Van Hoosier, so again, interestingly enough, you talk about the distributed command, so I'm in Afghanistan, Pete is back in, on the, in the States, we are both looking at the same feed, so we had a Predator overhead, a ISR platform. And, now, I had briefed this, because there had been a lot of concern in the White House, that they didn't want to put helos anywhere in Somalia because

• 2:37:02Speaker 02

  of the Black Hawk Down incident. And no matter how much I tried to convince them that really it would be okay, we've, we know how to do this, we've been doing this a lot, there was still a lot of sensitivity to that, and I understood that. But, we had developed this kind of special bomb at the time, that we could drop from a small airplane, but it was experimental, to say the least. And so, I had been given approval to, okay, you can bring the helos in, but only to confirm that you've killed the bad guy, don't let the helos in until the bomb has been dropped, and you've gotten the bad guy, and then bring the helos in, get the remains, bring it back. Yes, sir, got it. Well, you know, not always that simple. So as the sedan starts to move, and we believe that to be Salihn Abhan, we've got, I mean,

• 2:37:47Speaker 02

  it's a long road, but there's only a small window of opportunity where that vehicle is not going to be in a crowded area, not a little village or something, because we didn't obviously want to hit any civilians. So the plane gets overhead, we're in the window, but the plane can't get a bead on the weather comes in, nothing's looking right, we can't get the targeting right, and now I'm losing my target. So Pete Van Hoosier's on the other end going, "Sir, come on, you know, we need to send the helos in." And I'm like, you know, I was really told kind of not to do that, but now my target is getting away, and you know, you roll the dice and hope that this is the bad guy that you thought it was. So finally, I said, "Okay, Pete, you got it."

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  And you know, the helos went in, and of course, as soon as the bad guys saw the helos, they open up on us. Helos open up on them. That obviously doesn't go too well for them, these little bird gunships, which you're familiar with. SEALs get off the helos, do a quick cord on, I mean, this was right before they were getting to a little village, pull the bodies out, and all four of them turned out to be bad guys, and Salihn Abhan was one of them. And I remember the next day, or maybe later that day, Admiral Mullin comes on the video, and, you know, he's very gracious, he goes, "Well, you know, Bill, congratulations, please pass on my congratulations to Captain Van Hoosier and the guys, really good job." I said, "Thank you, sir." And he goes, "Now, William?"

• 2:39:15Speaker 02

  And I knew I was in trouble when he called me William. He says, "Now, William, I recall you briefing the President of the United States, that you were going to drop a bomb on this guy, and there were, you know, no helos were going to come in." Yes, sir. Well, you know, every once in a while, you've got to give the commander a little discretion. And the Admiral kind of smiled and again, he said, "Okay, William, I'll let you get away with it this time." And all's well that ends well, sort of thing. But the President never questioned it. And I think Admiral Mullen appreciated the Commander's decision.

• 2:39:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the amount of leadership capital, I made sure that one might have cost you a little bit of leadership capital. But the amount of leadership, I mean, we used to talk about the other op that we discussed there with Abu Ghadiya, you know, 17 minutes. And how many, as you said, thousands of operations were conducted that, you know, look, we all know some of them go bad and sideways, and that's awful. But the, I mean, the batting average of success was overwhelmingly, is actually incredible when you think about it. And so this op tempo and this kind of being successful on a regular basis and building that leadership capital.

• 2:40:32Jocko Willink?

  And kind of, I mean, I guess in my opinion, or the way it looks, the final operation that you cover and see stories is the first one that I started off with, which, like I said, is, I guess it's...

• 2:40:47Speaker 02

  Been 10 years.

• 2:40:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's been 10 years. And I mean, if that's not the most famous US Special Operations mission, I'm not sure what is, but it's Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Bin Laden. And I mean, you've got to, you know, the perspective that you give, the intelligence gathered, the preparation, the secrecy, I mean, you've got one part where you're talking about, I forget who it is, you're talking about, maybe it's your XO or your deputy, or maybe your Ops Officer, but you're not even telling your Ops Officer. It's complete secrecy about what's going on, the professionalism in every department. You go through and kind of talk about the decision-making process and the discussion to get to these decision points.

• 2:41:32Jocko Willink?

  And the conversations and the relationships between you and Admiral Mullen, Secretary Gates, and the CIA officials. And then the president who's who who has to understand and be comfortable with this. And the, I mean, this is a tough, this is a freaking hard choice to make.

• 2:41:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:50Jocko Willink?

  Massive amount of risk and some other much lower risk in terms of US troops and,

• 2:41:59Jocko Willink?

  you know, like to to say, oh, yeah, of all these options, we're going to take the one that puts the US troops in the in the biggest risk.

• 2:42:08Jocko Willink?

  Just doing incredible job of of spelling that out in the book.

• 2:42:14Jocko Willink?

  The pilots, their skills, and then, of course, you know, you got the SEALs on the ground, the best guys in the world, the best of the best.

• 2:42:21Jocko Willink?

  What a, what a, what a, what an incredible story.

• 2:42:25Speaker 02

  Well, but there are so many people that had to had to, you know, make this happen. And and to your point, you know, great trust from, you know, the president on down. But I look back and I'm always quick to point out about this, and you can certainly appreciate this. You know, we were, we were honored to be the guys that got Bin Laden. And and I think what the reason we were honored was because we were representing, you know, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, you know, and thousands that were killed in combat and training for combat that had died as a result of nine 11.

• 2:43:05Speaker 02

  So, you know, this was a, I mean, this was the brass ring for us, but it was also an opportunity to represent everybody that had had sacrificed so much from Iraq and Afghanistan. But on this particular mission, you know, back to my earlier discussion, my job, I knew my job was to put the the operators in a position where they were going to be successful. Unfortunately, early on, because we referred to it as the bigot list, which is a World War Two term that says, you know, only those people that are authorized to know the intelligence. So when I was brought into this in late January. It was me. And of course, the White House is looking for a plan. And fortunately,

• 2:43:47Speaker 02

  you know, I had been in the teams of 34 years or something at that point in time, and thousands and thousands of missions. And frankly, I did go back to my thesis at the postgraduate school. And I figured, okay, I'll present a shell of a plan to the President. And then we'll take it from there. But the plan was going to be pretty simply, we're going to get on a helicopter, we're going to go from point A to point B, we're going to get the bad guy, put him back on a helicopter and come home. That's it. I had looked at a lot of other alternatives, you know, could we parachute in? Could we come in by vehicle? Could we, you know, was there other ways to get to the target? But every time I looked at that, I kind of came back to my thesis, which was this idea of the point of vulnerability. At what point in time would you get tripped up? So if we parachute in, you walk into

• 2:44:30Speaker 02

  an LZ, and the next thing you know, there's kids on the LZ, and now you're still 15, 16 kilometers from the target, you just ain't going to make it. Same thing on if we come in by vehicles, what happens if, you know, we get stopped at a checkpoint and everything gets busted? So I decided early on that it was just going to be, you know, helos from point A to point B. And that's what I briefed the President on. And early on, it was just me, and I had another captain who was in DC that was kind of covering for me. But to your point, I couldn't tell anybody. I couldn't tell my Command Sergeant Major, I couldn't tell my XO. I mean, it was, that was it. So my executive officer, a guy named Colonel Art Sellers, who was just magnificent throughout this, and I always say he's kind of the unsung hero. Early on, I had to tell Art, because in my world, I'm a three-star

• 2:45:11Speaker 02

  Admiral, and your executive officer is the guy that, I mean, he's kind of like an aide de camp, but more so. He's the guy that makes sure that every paperwork, piece of paperwork comes in, that you've got to take care of, you take care of. Anything that's happening, the XO is orchestrating all this. And he becomes your kind of closest buddy, along with your aide de camp. So I told Art early on, I said, Art, Something's brewing. I don't want you to ask any questions about it. You just need to do what I tell you and, and, you know, and we'll be fine. He was like former Ranger. Sir, I got it. And, and Art kind of helped me through all this. And we'd move from point A to point B, and the staff would call up and go, where's the Admiral going? I would say, you just get him there. You will worry about where he's going. Now, the interesting

• 2:45:54Speaker 02

  thing was, I had been diagnosed with cancer in 2010. And so with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. So the staff was always a little reluctant to ask me where I was going. And when I kept going back and forth to Washington DC, they assumed I was going to Bethesda or Walter Reed for, for treatment. I didn't, again, I didn't want to necessarily play on my cancer diagnosis, but I also didn't want to disabuse them that idea because it gave me a little bit of cover for action. I could move, and the staff would just say, he's in Washington. And people would say, what's he doing? And they would kind of go, we don't know. But they felt comfortable thinking it was kind of my part of my cancer treatment. Finally, you know, the president at one point in time said, well, okay, you

• 2:46:36Speaker 02

  briefed me on this. Can we do it? Sir, I don't know. I mean, I got to bring in air planners. I got to bring in the SEALs. I got to bring in, you know, more people before I can really tell you whether or not we can do this. So the president gave me about three weeks, and that's when I brought the guys in to that undisclosed location in, in North Carolina where you read the excerpt at the beginning, and it was pretty funny. Because as, as you can appreciate, you know, these guys have just come back from a deployment. I'm often asked, you know, why did you pick, pick the SEALs over the Delta Force guys? And, and they think it was because I was a SEAL. It was like, are you kidding me? You think I would risk this mission based on, you know, some parochial nature of, of who I thought was going to be wearing a trident or not? So there were two commanders I trusted implicitly

• 2:47:20Speaker 02

  on the Army side and the Navy side. Unfortunately, for the Army guys, they had literally just deployed to Afghanistan, and the SEAL squadron had just come back. So they were all on leave. So that provided my kind of cover for action, because the team just assumed they were out, you know, skiing in Tahoe or doing something. So I called the squadron commander and I said, okay, and then of course Pete Van Hoosier, the CO, and we move them all down to this undisclosed location. And as you know, we did these kind of sensitive training exercises every once in a while. And you could see when they walked into the room, they were like, you SOB, you called me off leave with my girlfriend to be, you know, kind of showcase something to the brass. And then all of a sudden, when

• 2:48:01Speaker 02

  the CIA guy said, and we're going after Bin Laden, it was like, as you read, it's like, are they serious? You know, and I could see the guys looking at each other like, are they serious? And then, of course, after that, it all kind of unfolded. But, but again, my job was really to, not to push it. One of the things I was careful about doing, because as we would meet with the president, we had a number of options. We had a kind of a massive bombing option. Can we take out this thing we called AC1, the Abbottabad Compound 1? It was a big compound. You've probably seen pictures of it, kind of trapezoid shaped, three store building, a couple of other outer buildings. But that was going to take a massive amount of ordinance to level the place. Did I, did I hear, was it something like 30? Yeah, I think it was more than that. It was 50, 2,000 pound bombs in order to level the place. And of course, the, the CDE, the collateral damage assessment was going

• 2:48:46Speaker 02

  to actually hit some of the, the outer line houses. And, and we knew there were women and children on the target. So I knew from the get go, the president was, well, we didn't know it was Bin Laden. So the president was not going to, you know, kill innocent women and children at all. Then we had a second option, which was a more surgical bombing option to get the Pacer, as you pointed out, the guy that would come out every day around noon and walk around the compound. Once again, even with the surgical bombing option, we were probably going to kill a couple of kids. And, and I think the president just, I know that was just not what he wanted to do. And oh, by the way, we weren't going to be sure if we did either one of those bombing options, how would we know whether it was Bin Laden?

• 2:49:26Speaker 02

  The Al Qaeda could have said, wasn't him, unless we had physical evidence it was. And of course, we weren't going to rely on the Pakistanis because we didn't know whether they had been compromised. So it didn't take long, I think, for the, the group, the president's small team to begin to focus in on the raid. And Admiral Mullin was always supportive of the raid. And Leon Panetta, who was director of the CIA, was always supportive. Interestingly enough, and I've told this story before, Secretary Gates did not support the raid. And he didn't support the raid because he had been in the White House during Desert One, when the helicopters crashed. And at one point in time after One of the meetings with the president, every time the president at the end of the

• 2:50:05Speaker 02

  meeting would kind of go around the room, "Okay, where are we now?" And they would say, "Well, I'm for it, I'm against it." And he would turn to Secretary Gates and say, "Mr. President, I don't support the raid." And so after the briefing was over, I came up to Secretary, I said, "Sir, I work for you. If you don't support the raid and you don't want me to do this, just say the word. I mean, you know, this is your call." And he said something I thought was just, you know, again, fabulous leadership. He said, "Bill, I don't agree with the raid, but we've got to give the president every option available. And if the raid is an option, then I want him to, I want you to do the best you can to plan for it, prepare for it, and give him that option. At the end of the day, the president will make the decision. But just because I don't support it, doesn't mean we're not going to put that option in front of the president."

• 2:50:49Speaker 02

  And again, I thought that was very classy of him and the kind of leader that you would hope to have in that chain of command. But I remember the second-to-last meeting we had, the president, again, because we were struggling with determining whether it was Bin Laden, he turned to Mike Leidner, who was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, which had been stood up after 9/11. And he asked Leidner to kind of red-team CIA's intelligence to kind of check their homework. So the next meeting we were at, which was a couple of weeks later, meeting starts, end of April, meeting starts off and the president turns to Leidner and he says, "Well, Mike, you know, what did you find?" I could tell Leidner was a little uncomfortable. He goes, "Well, Mr. President, we've reviewed CIA's intelligence, and we think the chance that

• 2:51:33Speaker 02

  it's Bin Laden is anywhere between 60% and 40%." And when he said 40%, I'm thinking, "Ah, well, I mean, this mission's over. Who in the hell is going to authorize a bunch of SEALs to fly 162 miles into Pakistan to a compound that is about three miles from their west point, three miles from a major infantry battalion, you know, a mile from a police station, and oh, by the way, the Pakistanis have nuclear weapons. I mean, who would authorize that on a 40% chance that it's Bin Laden?" So I told the president, I said, "Sir, I've got to head to Afghanistan. I'm going to command it from there. If you decide to go, great, I'll have the boys ready to go. If you decide not to go, not a problem. I've got bad guys in Afghanistan. We'll just kind of get back to work."

• 2:52:14Speaker 02

  So that was on a Wednesday. I fly out to Afghanistan, got there sometime on Friday, and I get a call from Leon Panetta, the director of CIA, and he says, "President's made the decision to go." And I thought, "Wow." That is a gutsy decision. I mean, in light of the fact that we just didn't know it was Bin Laden, but this is back to the kind of discussion we've been having all throughout this, the podcast, is the president had seen, I think, over the time that, you know, we'd been conducting missions, that we were mostly successful. He had faith and confidence in us in a way that, you know, every commander would hope that their bosses had confidence in them. And we hadn't gotten them all right. I mean, again, when I was JSOC commander,

• 2:52:58Speaker 02

  we had a couple of notable disasters, frankly. And, but even at that, the president recognized that, you know, the failures we had were understandable in light of some of the circumstances around it, and things don't always go perfect. But he had confidence that we could do this. And so the next day, Saturday, the president calls me, and he says, he called to really tell the guys, you know, good luck. And it was interesting, because, you know, man to man, you can tell, you know, even though he's the president of the United States, he had this empathy. You could tell he understood these guys are about to get on this helicopter and fly into Pakistan, didn't know whether they would come back. Because, of course,

• 2:53:40Speaker 02

  we didn't know whether or not was the compound rigged, because as you saw in Iraq quite a few times, you know, these guys would rig the entire compounds. Was Bin Laden going to be wearing a suicide vest? You know, what were they going to be facing? And so as the president of the United States, he understood those risks. And, and I could tell, you know, when he asked me to pass on, you know, his best to the guys, I mean, he seriously meant that. He understood the risks they were taking. And, you know, as a commander, that means a lot to you. And I did take the opportunity to pass that on. But then I remember he said, "Well, Bill, what do you think?" I said, "Well, Mr. President, I mean, if he's there, we'll get him." If not, we'll come home. The problem with the if not, we'll come home scenario, which I had briefed the president on, I said, look, if the SEALs get on target and somebody

• 2:54:24Speaker 02

  comes out with a gun, it is not going to go too well for them. And as they begin to sweep through the target, which they will, and more people come out with guns, and you know, Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, people have guns, it's not going to go well. And as they go from the first floor to the second floor, to the third floor, looking for bin Laden, and if they get to the third floor, and the guy we thought was bin Laden, turns out to be nothing but a tall Pakistani, this is going to be a disaster of epic proportions. I didn't tell the president that, but he understood that, because we had talked about the fact that, I told him early on, I told everybody there, if the SEALs get on target, somebody's going to die. You just need to understand that right now. Nobody is going to walk away from this unscathed. So, understand those risks to the president and the other

• 2:55:07Speaker 02

  team. So, I understood that. And again, back to the fact that he had faith and confidence in us, we kept it secret, we kept it simple, and then, of course, the day of the operations, the guys executed it exactly as you would hope they would.

• 2:55:24Jocko Willink?

  You got a story in, I think it's in the hero code, no, actually, it's in C-Stories. It's the story about where you get in trouble, you get kind of caught by your dad, well, not caught by your dad, but you get caught, you tried to infiltrate a military, what was it, an ammo storage thing, you know, you think you're James Bond, or whoever, and you infiltrate, you got a cap gun on your, you know, you have a six shooter cap gun with you, and you infiltrate a freaking military compound with your buddy, and then they chase you out of there, they're coming, they've got dogs looking for you, and it's like a

• 2:56:02Jocko Willink?

  serious operation, and at some point, you drop your pistol, you get back, and, you know, you get away with it.

• 2:56:12Speaker 02

  Get away with it.

• 2:56:13Jocko Willink?

  Your dad says, hey, your dad, you know, next day or whatever it is, you know, dad says, hey, there was, someone tried to infiltrate, you know anything about that?

• 2:56:22Jocko Willink?

  And you lied to him.

• 2:56:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:56:25Jocko Willink?

  And it seems like you could tell by the look on his face that he knew that you lied to him. You suspected, you went to bed that night, you pulled down your covers to get in bed and there's your, there's your gun. So he knew.

• 2:56:40Jocko Willink?

  You talk a lot about integrity and, you know, telling the truth. And I, and I think, you know, when you're, when you're talking about discussing these things up the chain of command and it's, you know, I, I would, you've got to tell the truth about what's happening. But you develop that kind of trust with your whole chain of command from the Secretary of Defense to the President, so that when you say something, they actually believe what you're saying. And that might, that might seem really like a, like a, like an insignificant thing. But if you think about what's riding on this operation for America, for the world, if they don't have that like legitimate, pure trust in what you're telling them, I,

• 2:57:24Jocko Willink?

  I can't imagine, I can't imagine making the decision, giving the go ahead to someone that I don't deeply and truly trust 100%.

• 2:57:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, you asked earlier on about, about my dad, and I think, you know, we're, we're all kind of products of our experience. And I was, I was fortunate to be raised by two great parents. But my mom stressed it a lot about, you know, the importance of, of truth and honesty. And, and she expected me to grow up to be a certain type of man, a man that would open doors for, for ladies, that would, you know, take care of women and children. I mean, she had this, this vision of me, I was going to be a stand-up guy and honest and true and all those sorts of things. And you, you always want to make your parents proud. And this particular day, and you're right, I was 11 years old and we, we tried to get into this ammo storage point near Lackland Air Force Base. We got busted and

• 2:58:16Speaker 02

  I dropped the cap gun. And when I, and it was a day or so later, my dad was the head of operations. So he was the number three guy at Lackland Air Force Base. So the security guys had reported to him that, and they knew some kids, they didn't know who it was, but they knew some kids had tried to break in. And, and when my dad confronted me, as I said in the book, it's the first and last time I ever lied to my father. And he never, until he died in 2007, he never raised the issue again. And the reason I thought that was interesting parodying is because I carried that burden until he died in 2007. But there was another one. I mentioned my time in the Pentagon. And again, we all, to your point, Chuck, I mean, we all are raised with this idea that it is, of course

• 2:59:00Speaker 02

  you're going to be honest. You know, of course, you're not going to lie to people. And you find, you know, that as you go through life, sometimes that's harder to do than it is to say. But when I was in the Pentagon, I worked for a guy named Captain Ted Grabowski. And Grabowski, Vietnam era SEAL, was a little quirky for a SEAL. Didn't look like a SEAL. He was kind of short in stature, bespectacled, had more glasses. He'd been in a glider accident, and he had a little bit of a limp, and so did not look like your typical SEAL. But I found him to be brilliant, hardworking, incredibly insightful, and he knew the Pentagon. But it was on like day one, or the first week I was there, and at one point in time,

• 2:59:39Speaker 02

  we're talking about our budget with the three-star Admiral. And I thought Grabowski had this opportunity. We were going to get a whole bunch of money for our ammunition and our SEAL delivery vehicles. And the Admiral questioned Grabowski, and he said, "Do you really need all of this money? I mean, can't you take a little slice off the ammunition? Do you really need that many SDVs?" And I thought, "Grabowski's going to stand up. He's going to say, "Absolutely, I need that." And much to my surprise, he goes, "You know what, Admiral? You're right. We can cut our ammunition allowance by this. We can reduce the number of SDVs from six to three." And I thought, "What the hell just happened? Why'd he do that?" And afterwards, I'm talking to him, and he says, "Look, Bill," he says,

• 3:00:22Speaker 02

  "I've got one rule when you're here in the Pentagon." He says, "Never lie." Or misrepresent the truth. Because if you lie or misrepresent the truth, somebody will find out and they will no longer trust you. And if they don't trust you, you are of no value to me. And it was a little bit of this kind of philosophical linkage between, it wasn't just about the moral application of being honest. There was a practical application as well, which is if you are honest, if you are trustworthy, people will trust you with their money, they will trust you with their relationships, they will trust you with their lives. They will trust you with the big missions. And it isn't just about saying, well, you know, I'm just not going to lie.

• 3:01:07Speaker 02

  Sometimes people misrepresent the truth. They embellish things in a way that is, you know, to their benefit or in a way that will get them the mission. I mean, I knew on the bin Laden raid, there was no way I was going to mislead the president of the United States. And I hope in my time in the military, I didn't mislead anybody. At least not willingly and not intentionally. So it is important, not just because we know it's important to be honest, but because if you're not honest and you're not trustworthy, you can't build those relationships. If you can't build the relationships, you can't get the job done.

• 3:01:48Jocko Willink?

  How many times had you guys or you seen various units get spun up to go get bin Laden?

• 3:01:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of times. And that was, you know, part of it when I first was approached by Admiral Mullin in Afghanistan. He said, hey, CIA has got a lead on bin Laden. I mean, I was respectful to Admiral Mullin, of course, but I'm thinking, I've seen this picture before. I mean, we'd had him in the Hindu Kush, we'd had him in Tora Bora again. You know, we'd had him in Pakistan a number of times. I mean, you know, he was, it was like trying to find Waldo. I mean, it seemed like bin Laden was ever, I remember one point in time, we had a lead on him up in the Hindu Kush. It was something like, you know, 12, 14,000 feet or something like that, up in the middle of nowhere. And somebody said, "He's hiding in a cave up there." So because the altitude was so high, I could only put two guys on the 47.

• 3:02:38Speaker 02

  I put an Air Force STS guy and one other guy. And so the helicopter can barely make it up to altitude. And of course, I'm thinking, "This is just a wild goose chase." But they came back and so the young, I think it was a captain or a major comes to brief me and he says, also obviously Bin Laden, he says, "But there were footsteps up there in the snow." And I'm like, "Really?" He said, "Out in the middle of nowhere, we followed these footsteps into this kind of little cave area?" I'm thinking, "Really?" Of course, it was not Bin Laden, it was something, but it was... So yeah, we had a lot of leads like that. We had some leads in Pakistan that, I mean, I remember seeing, I'll be a little careful about this, but I remember seeing intel. And I looked at it and said, "Well, that's him." There is no question in my mind. But it wasn't him.

• 3:03:23Speaker 02

  Because in fact, he was in that compound in Abbottabad for probably five years. And never left that compound. So yeah, a lot of leads out there, but this was the only one that panned out.

• 3:03:34Jocko Willink?

  What was the timeline from the first time you talked to Admiral Mullins? And he said he had a lead and execute?

• 3:03:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he approached me in December of 2010. I didn't, I wasn't asked to come back to the States until January or February of 2011. So in the February timeframe, I spent a lot of time over at CIA, kind of looking at the intel. And then I think I had my first meeting with the President sometime in March. And then we had a bunch of meetings between March and the end of April. And so April 30th or somewhere around there is when I left for Afghanistan. Maybe April 29th. And then got into Afghanistan and then we launched two days later.

• 3:04:12Jocko Willink?

  And how, what was the timeline for the boys? From that meeting, from that meeting when they signed the non-disclosures?

• 3:04:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that was probably five weeks.

• 3:04:22Speaker 02

  Four or five weeks? So that was, so we spent three weeks, you know, briefing up, doing all the rehearsals. And then at the end of that three weeks, when I went back and met with the president and said, "We can do this." Uh, yeah, I think that was towards the end of April. So I had General Tony Thomas, who was my number two guy there at JSOC. I had to stay in Washington and I said, "Okay, Tony, let's, let's get the guys from the states. Let's get them moved out there now." So Tony along with Pete Van Hoosier and of course, we had CIA and National Security Agency and National Space Agency and a whole kind of inter-agency group that went with us. But Tony's got us set up in this little TAC, Tactical Operations Center there in JABAD in Zalalabad.

• 3:05:07Speaker 02

  And so when I came out, I mean, it was, the guys were set, everything was ready to go. I ended up rolling at about, we were going to, we were going to launch on Saturday, but there was some, some fog in the, in the area and the temperatures were a little high at the time. So I rolled it 24 hours and then we pressed forward on Sunday.

• 3:05:24Jocko Willink?

  Like I said, you got to get the book for the details and all leading up to this, but there's one little part I wanted to cover. The mission's be actually being executed. So you're in this, in the, in the operation center. And here we go. "Inside the jock, I was getting updates from Van Hoosier and Thompson. The SEALs were clearing, were still clearing the three-story house and the helos were holding their position outside Abadabad. I looked up at the clock, 15 minutes had passed since the assault began. "Sir, the squadron commander is on the radio," Van Hoosier alerted me. The voice was unmistakable, deep, calm, in control. This is Romeo 66.

• 3:06:09Jocko Willink?

  He paused and you could hear a small shudder in his voice. "For God and country, Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo."

• 3:06:19Jocko Willink?

  The hunt for the most wanted man in the world was over. We had gotten Bin Laden. The jock erupted in cheers, immediately followed by Van Hoosier's booming voice, "Shut the fuck up", he yelled. "We still have to get these guys home." The jock immediately quieted down. Van Hoosier was right. We still had a long way to go. I had no sense of relief, no internal exhilaration, no feeling of victory. The mission was not over.

• 3:06:49Jocko Willink?

  And when I read that, I just thought to myself, I mean, what a freaking professional Van Hoosier. And you could see, I mean, here it is, you know, the ultimate mission, capturing the ultimate bad guy, or killing the ultimate bad guy, and everyone's all excited and Van Hoosier's just on point. Just, just no deviation.

• 3:07:11Speaker 02

  Which he always was.

• 3:07:12Jocko Willink?

  Freaking outstanding. And it's interesting too, because you call back and say, "Yep, we got Geronimo. We got it done." And then you realize, wait, is he dead or alive?

• 3:07:22Speaker 02

  Well, I had to report back to Panetta, you know, I think he'd heard the Geronimo and I just said, you know, "Grono", and then I thought, "Oh shit", because, you know, much, everybody thinks that this was a kill-only mission. It was not. We had a plan to capture him if, in fact, he gave up and there was, he was clearly not a threat. And then I realized, I don't know whether he's dead or alive. So I had to call back down to the squadron commander and say, "Geronimo, EKIA?", question mark, EKIA. So there was a few second pause, and I think the guys in the White House, and they were like, "I thought he already reported Geronimo." I said, "No, he's dead. So let's make sure we understand that."

• 3:07:59Jocko Willink?

  I mean, like I said, you go into what happened after, after that. It's just an incredible story. I mean, obviously, it's incredible story. Get the book to check that stuff out. Before, before I close out the book, See Stories, there's one, one, one other little section I wanted to cover. It's from a, it's from a chapter called "The Greatest, The Next Greatest Generation", and this, this takes, this section takes place in 2007. We mentioned that you were in Europe for a time. You were in charge of all special operations forces in Europe and Africa, but that means you're actually over in Germany most of the time. And in this part, you're visiting wounded soldiers on their way home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 3:08:40Jocko Willink?

  So on the way home from Iraq and Afghanistan, oftentimes the soldiers, the wounded would be, would stop in Germany at Landstuhl. And you would go there to visit these wounded guys. And you talk about one of these, one of these cases here. So you're going in to visit.

• 3:09:00Jocko Willink?

  Going to the book. "The doctor nodded and I pushed the door open and entered. Lying on the bed, completely naked, was a young soldier, not more than 25 years old. His body was swollen from the impact of the blast. Burns covered the upper half of his torso and below his waist, he had lost half of one leg and much of the other. His face was so badly damaged that his eyes were almost sealed shut and his lips burned clean off. Life-saving tubes extended from just about every orifice in his body and monitors around the room beeped continuously.

• 3:09:35Jocko Willink?

  "Sir, he can't talk, but he can hear you and he likes to engage people," the doctor said. I slowly walked up beside the bed. "Hey, partner, my name's Admiral McRaven." I could see him acknowledge my presence. "You look like shit." He managed to smile and reached out his hand toward the nightstand. The doctor grabbed a clipboard and handed it to the soldier. "He likes to write out his responses," the doctor said. Pulling the attached pen from its holder, he scribbled on the notepad.

• 3:10:07Jocko Willink?

  "You should see the other guy." I laughed and he chuckled with me. "Looks like they're taking good care of you. Is there anything you need?" Once again, he grabbed the clipboard and wrote, "A beer."

• 3:10:22Jocko Willink?

  The doctor looked at me and reluctantly shook his head. "Well, I'll tell you what. When you get back to the States, get well and the beer's on me." He just nodded. I was struggling with what to say. I had been in these situations hundreds of times before and all he could do is make small talk. Normally, I knew the soldier or his unit and I had something more significant to offer. I walked around to the doctor's side of the bed. "Is he a Marine or a soldier?" I whispered to the doctor. "Sir, I don't know. I'm just the attending physician. I can find out for you, though." "No, not necessarily. Not necessary." Walking back around to my side of the bed, I leaned over to the young man and asked, "Are you a Marine or a soldier?" He seemed agitated by the question. He pointed to a tattoo that was etched on his thigh. He must have assumed that the tattoo is fully visible, but the blast had burned the leg so badly

• 3:11:07Jocko Willink?

  that only a smudged outline appeared. I looked closely and could see the image of a big red one, the 1st Infantry Division. "You're a soldier," I commented. He grabbed the clipboard. "Infantry," he wrote. Infantry, the toughest occupation in the Army, I thought. The soldiers are always marching, always carrying a rucksack, always in the line of fire. You have to be strong and fit to last in any infantry unit, particularly during war.

• 3:11:37Jocko Willink?

  As I glanced at the young man's battered body, I wondered if he fully understood the degree of his injuries. He noticed me assessing his physical condition, and suddenly, a look of defiance came across his swollen face. He rolled in my direction and then wrote slowly in capital letters, "I will be infantry again."

• 3:12:01Jocko Willink?

  So that's, you know, like you said, it's something that you witnessed hundreds of times, and one thing that you write in the books, and I've heard you talk about it as well, is with all these wounded soldiers that you've, you know, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines that you've gone and talked to, every single one of them, every single one of them, has just wanted to get back to their unit and get back in the fight.

• 3:12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you've been there, you know that, and it is remarkable to me. And I think of the, to your point, you know, hundreds of these guys that I've met, never once did I hear anybody complain. I mean, guys that had lost arms and legs and blast victims, and they didn't complain. It's just amazing to me. I don't know if I tell the story in that book, but I've told the story before. When I was SOCOM commander, I went up to Walter Reed, and I used to do it periodically, same thing when the guys would get back. And...

• 3:13:12Jocko Willink?

  I know I had, um, before you jump into that, I had one of my guys, Ryan Jobe, who, uh, was shot in the face. He was blinded. Um, and I'm talking to him, you know, he's back. He's at, I think he's at Bethesda and I'm talking to him from Ramadi and, you know, he's begging me to come back. And he says, you know, "Sir, I'll get my pig." You know, he's a pig gunner, he's a 60 gunner. He goes, "Sir, give me my pig. Don't worry, I might not be able to see him, but I can smell him. I'll get him." And, and you know, there's just the, the attitude and, and same thing with the first guy that I had

• 3:13:52Jocko Willink?

  that got badly wounded. Guy named Cowie, Cowie. And Cowie was, you know, we didn't know if he's gonna keep his leg, but he was shot up bad. He's on morphine or whatever he's on. And we, we'd have been in Ramadi for a very short period of time at this point. And I get to the, to the, to the, uh, Charlie Med, the field medical area. And I roll in there and he's, you know, he, he holds out his hand and, and I grab his hand and he like pulls me in close. And he just whispers, he's, you know, "Sir, let me stay. I'll sweep up. Just please let me stay. Don't send me home." And, and you know, here's a guy that's a freaking incredible athlete, incredible guy.

• 3:14:32Jocko Willink?

  And we don't know if he's gonna keep his leg. And the only thing he cares about is, you know, "Can I stay?"

• 3:14:39Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. And this, again, it seemed like, and it was of course just the soft guys. You saw it again and again with all the guys that we encountered. But this one particular visit I had up to Walter Reed, I'd, I'd come up to see some of our kind of soft guys, Rangers and, and others who'd been wounded and a couple of, and of course Walter Reed was where we sent the, frankly, the most seriously injured, certainly the, the blast victims and the, uh, and the amputees. The burn victims generally went to, uh, down to Fort Sam. But I'm up there visiting a couple of guys and, uh, talking to them, them and their wives and everything. And, and you know, you know how to talk to these guys. I mean, they're, they're guys that, uh, that are, are Rangers or Delta operators or, or SEALs. And, and, and that particular day, I- There were three or four of them there and then afterwards a sergeant major who's escorting me around says, "Sir, there's somebody else I'd like you to meet." He's not a soft guy.

• 3:15:24Speaker 02

  He's with the 25th Infantry Division and he was in Iraq in a vehicle. Vehicle got hit by an explosive form projectile. He is a quadruple amputee. And I said, "Absolutely, I'd love to go meet him." So I go up to the, to the second floor of the rehab center there. I see the young man standing off to the side and he's kind of leaning up against the rail. And of course, he's only about yay big because he's got no legs. And so I come over to, to talk to him and I kneel down so I can kind of get eye to eye with him. And I just, I didn't know what to say. I mean, what do you tell a young kid who's lost both his legs, all of one arm and most of the other arm? And so as I'm, I'm trying to make some small talk, I mean, he obviously saw something in my eyes, you know, the pity or remorse

• 3:16:05Speaker 02

  or something. And he turns to me and he says, "Sir, I'm 24 years old. I'm gonna be just fine." I never forgot that. "I'm 24 years old and I'm gonna be just fine." And all he wanted to do was, his unit was still in Iraq, and he said, "Can you get me back to Hawaii so I can be there when the 25th Infantry Division comes back?" So I, I think we can manage that. And we did. And he was able to get there and, and meet his unit when they came back.

• 3:16:33Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding. It's, and that's, you know, again, a lot of the book is obviously focuses around special operations and, and as you point out, and as we both know, the, the sacrifices made by the entire, the entirety of the, the US military is just, it's, it's incredible. It's incredible. And the bravery, the bravery doesn't, the bravery doesn't stay in one unit. It's in all these units. And incredible to see.

• 3:17:10Jocko Willink?

  You end up as the bullfrog in the SEAL teams, which is, which means that you at however many, maybe you had it for a year or two, I'm not sure, but that means you had more time in the SEAL teams than anybody else in the SEAL teams at that time on active duty.

• 3:17:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:17:28Jocko Willink?

  How long did you, how long were you the bullfrog for?

• 3:17:29Speaker 02

  So a bullfrog for, for three years. So I, I share, so I, I was made the bullfrog at 34 years into the teams and I shared it with a guy named Brian Seamanhaller, who was probably a captain at the time, but Brian and I had gone through training together. So, and Brian was a young enlisted trooper and we went through training and then of course he went to, I think he made senior chief and then went OCS and, and has a long career as an officer, absolutely fabulous officer, great friend, hope to run into him while I'm here. So Brian and I, because we had been in the same class, we, we shared the, the bullfrog for a couple of years and Brian retired and I, I think I ended up flying solo for about the last year of my time as the SOCOM commander, but yeah, for the last three years, um, you

• 3:18:10Speaker 02

  know, I mean, part of this is just longevity, you know, you just, you keep swinging away and yeah, 37 years, but it goes by fast, you know, I was, I had a chance to talk to one of the SEAL classes yesterday and I said, I said, let me, let me tell you a little story. I said, you know, when I retired in 2014 and I, I had a chance to be the chancellor of the University of Texas system, so 230,000 kids, 100,000 employees, great, great opportunity. But I would meet these, you know, these, these very successful captains of industry that were billionaires, you know, and everywhere you went and they were, they were great, they were actually very, very good people.

• 3:18:51Speaker 02

  I really enjoyed the folks that I had a chance to meet, but they were all envious of me. And all the money in the world could not get them the opportunity to lock out of a submarine or fast rope out of a helo or, you know, jump out of a plane from 30,000 feet at night on O2. And as successful as they had been, they didn't have the experiences. They didn't have 37 years of being in a locker room, being with the guys, getting harassed every day in a good natured manner and, and, and being with guys that were sacrificing their families that were sacrificed. They didn't have that experience. So I told these young students going through BUDs, I said, guys, let me tell you something. You still got there in second phase, so they've still got a long ways to go. I said, you know,

• 3:19:35Speaker 02

  you're gonna have those days still left in training where you're gonna wanna quit. Don't do it. Don't do it because once you pin that trident on, your life changes forever. And you'll have hard days in the teams. You're absolutely gonna have hard days. And like I said, I was fired. I had missions that didn't go well. But when you look back over your time in the teams, whether you spent four years or 40 years, you'll never regret a moment of it because you're gonna have friends and stories and adventures that your, you know, your friends from high school and college will never have had. And when you're old and gray like I am, and you're sitting in your rocking chair, and you'll be able to look back on that and say, you know what? That was a pretty good run. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

• 3:20:20Jocko Willink?

  The person that you shared the bullfrog with?

• 3:20:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:20:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he was my platoon commander.

• 3:20:27Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 3:20:30Jocko Willink?

  You mentioned, you know, earlier today we were talking, and you mentioned something else about the trident. And who owns that trident?

• 3:20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, same thing. Talking to the guys going through training, I said, look, you know, if you get your trident, you need to understand it's not your trident. It's not Joe's trident. It's not John's trident. It's all of our tridents. You represent everybody that ever wore a trident, and everybody that's ever going to wear a trident. So you have a responsibility as a member of this community to wear that trident with honor, with dignity, every single day. And I also told them another story about, you mentioned the parachute accident. And after my parachute accident, about a year, year and a half afterwards, I'm still in the White House, and I go down to Naval Special Warfare Group Two.

• 3:21:26Speaker 02

  And the Commodore was having a commander's conference, so all the officers had kind of assembled there. And I'm still, I'm barely walking well by now, but you know, we're gonna do what team guys do, we're gonna have a PT in the morning, then we're gonna do a 10-mile run. So, we kind of break out in the PT circle, and of course, it's push-ups, sit-ups, all that sort of stuff. And I'm, I'm struggling to get through the basics, because I've got, my abs are not back, the pelvis is still hurting. But, I faked my way through the PT. Now, we're gonna go for the run. And, I think we went out to whatever the Salt Point State Park, not Salt Point, whatever. The State Park. The State Park, yeah, yeah. But, we're gonna do two 5-mile loops, or something like that. So, we start off on the run, and I hang for all about 100 yards, and then everybody just leaves me. So, but, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do what I can. So, I'm, I'm kinda

• 3:22:08Speaker 02

  walking, jogging, trying to finish the run. Well, a few minutes later, the guy that's the lead runner, you know, he comes around on the first loop of the 2-mile run, and he sees me. And of course, at this time, I'm a Navy captain, I've been in for 20 some odd years. And, he kind of pulls up beside me, and he says, "Sir, what are you doing?" I said, "What do you mean?" He goes, "What are you, what are you doing? I mean, you're coming off a bad parachute accident?" He said, "You got nothing left to prove." And I remember, I thought about that for a long time, and he was absolutely wrong. And I told these young guys, I said, "Every single day that you wake up, and you wear that trident, you've got something to prove. And if the time comes, that you think you're

• 3:22:53Speaker 02

  too senior, or too entitled, or that you've done it long enough, that you don't have anything left to prove, you're the wrong guy for the job, and you need to leave. Because, I don't care whether you're an ensign, or a seaman, or a four-star admiral, every single day, you wake up, you got something to prove. And, if you don't take that attitude, then you're probably not the right person for the job."

• 3:23:19Jocko Willink?

  Something I wanted to ask you about because you you mentioned it real quick. You know, you were talking about, hey, we we had a lot of success and we sat here and you know, you and I nodded our head talking about how great, you know, we had been and the the special operations community and I talked about I talked about this incredible batting average, right, and all that. And and then, you know, you you were saying, um, things always didn't go well. When things went bad, you know, and I I've I've had things go horribly, horribly wrong. And, um, you know, it's it's one of those things that really stings. What do you have any, um, advice or any stories where you remember where something went wrong

• 3:24:02Jocko Willink?

  and you had to own it?

• 3:24:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, unfortunately, probably way too many stories. But the the one consistent part of when things go wrong is you got to own it. I I mean, you have to. You're the person responsible. And what you don't want to do is you don't want to say, well, look, I know I'm in charge, but but it was really the, you know, the young captain, the major, or the SEAL lieutenant commander. I mean, it's real. No, no, I'm sorry. You're the guy in charge. You're responsible. Now, that doesn't mean you got to get fired every time, but that means that you have got to take ownership of the problem. You've got to figure out how to make sure that problem doesn't happen again. You have to hold the people accountable if the mistakes they made were were mistakes

• 3:24:46Speaker 02

  of laziness or of not being morally legal and ethical, then you have to hold them accountable. And even when they did everything right and they screw up, you still have to hold them accountable. Doesn't mean you have to fire them, but you have to hold them accountable so that everybody understands, look, we got a standard. This is the standard we have to maintain. And and if you don't live up to the standard, you are going to be held accountable because lives are at risk. But the first person you have to hold accountable is yourself. And so, you know, most of the time, certainly over in combat, when things would go wrong, uh, I had to go see the four star and say, this is on me. Because, you know, and again, this gets back to the Navy mentality, as you all know.

• 3:25:27Speaker 02

  I mean, in the Navy, because the Navy has always had this kind of shipboard mentality. And and for your listeners, you know, when you are the commanding officer of a ship, You are responsible for everything that happens on that ship. And when you pull away from the pier, the commanding officer is king. I mean, he is, he or she now is responsible for everything that happens. And the Navy understands that, look, if you were the commanding officer and your ship runs aground, and you were asleep in your stateroom, and the young junior officer who was on the helm, or was the officer of the deck, failed to wake you up, even though you had told them to wake you up, I'm sorry, that's still on you. Because you created an atmosphere of fear or something where that junior officer didn't feel

• 3:26:12Speaker 02

  like he had the latitude to wake you up in the middle of a crisis. So you see it happen a lot, and people say, well, why would you hold the commanding officer responsible when he left orders for that junior officer to wake him up before things got bad? And the point of the Navy is, of this idea, this tradition in the Navy that the commanding officer is responsible is because then you didn't train them well, then you didn't create the culture for them to do the right thing. Something was wrong when you were the commanding officer. So frankly, throughout my time in the Navy, and certainly in the Special Operations community, at the end of the day, it's about me. Now, you know, fortunately, you know, your bosses know that, hey, when things go south,

• 3:26:54Speaker 02

  your job is also to correct the problem. Sometimes the problem is with you. I mean, I think back on a hostage rescue that we had, and I'm always careful about telling the story, but we had a hostage rescue that did not go well. And the hostage ended up getting killed. And unfortunately, the guys didn't tell me the truth about the situation. But I also look back on this and realize that some of this was on me. Because at the time, as I mentioned, I was kind of bouncing back and forth between Iraq and Afghanistan, and this mission had come up. And normally in a hostage rescue situation, I mean, we treat it, you know, like it is a no kidding national mission, and we are going to do everything possible. But because we were running so many missions sometimes in Afghanistan, it's not that

• 3:27:39Speaker 02

  the guys didn't take it seriously, but we probably didn't follow all the steps that we normally would have taken if this had have been a national mission. And I think some of that played into why we didn't do the detailed planning that would have helped. Again, would it have changed the outcome? I don't know. But I remember thinking afterwards, yeah, the guys on the ground kind of failed to do what they probably should have done, and we held them accountable. I personally held them accountable, but I also kind of had to look myself in the mirror and say, hey, you know, at the end of the day, maybe you should have provided better oversight and asked harder questions rather than deferring to somebody else to do it. But here's one other thing I would offer to you.

• 3:28:23Speaker 02

  You know, you're gonna make mistakes. And the one thing I tell folks that are learning to be leaders is, particularly in combat, you're gonna make mistakes, but you've got to be ready to make the next tough decision. Because if you are afraid to make the next tough decision, when the last mission went bad, then you're not the leader we need you to be. Particularly in combat. Again, every once in a while, I would have a mission that would go south, and I knew we could have done things better. And I realized, now the next mission comes along and you say, ah shit, I mean, I don't know, should I do this, should I not do this? And if you start to doubt yourself, if you start to question too much, if you're afraid to make the tough decisions, then you're putting guys' lives at greater risk.

• 3:29:04Speaker 02

  So, again, you gotta learn from those mistakes, you gotta do the best you can, but as the leader, you gotta be prepared to make the next tough decision. And if you're not, for fear of failing again, it's time to move on. And I always found that when things went south, invariably, another opportunity, particularly in combat, another opportunity is not far around the corner. Okay, now, now let's put our A-game on, and you know, you talked about when I got fired. Same thing, when a mission goes south, and now you have another opportunity, man, you double down on everything. You want to make sure you are, you're doing everything you can to be successful and get beyond that bad mission.

• 3:29:48Speaker 02

  And that's how people regress. But yeah, unfortunately, you know, too many times that things didn't go well.

• 3:29:57Speaker 02

  But I'd like to think that the ledger shows we had more successes than we had others. But I do remember one time, on a particular target in a country, not Iraq and Afghanistan, that I needed permission to take a strike. The intelligence said, hey, I had a matter of minutes before the bad guy moved off target. So, without stating too many names, I get to the four-star and I said, I need permission from the president to take this strike. In two minutes, I get permission back from President Obama to take the strike. So I take the strike, and it's not the right guy. Now, the good news is, it was a bad guy. The bad news is, it was not the guy I thought it was.

• 3:30:39Speaker 02

  And so now, the White House comes back and says, hey, you know, the president made this decision and it didn't pan out the way you'd hoped. I got it it was a bad guy, but you know, you were getting the president's permission because you said it was this guy. So I said, yeah, me a couple. And let me explain to you how I came to that decision. A long story between, you know, certain, as you know, handheld radios don't have the same fidelity, etc., etc. But it forced me to go back and say, okay, I just put the chain of command in a difficult position. They trusted me. And I let them down. I let them down because maybe I rushed it too much, trying to get a win, and you have

• 3:31:24Speaker 02

  to go back and reassess. But the last thing you want to do is put your boss in a situation where they trusted you and you let them down. I mean, I had one mission that went south, and I remember my boss, you know, you don't mind getting wire brushed? You know, when you're, so, you know, wire brush, you know, when somebody calls you up and just rips you apart? You know, I got used to that. I mean, combat, that happens. But I remember one point in time, I had a mission kind of go south, and the four-star, when I had him on the phone, I was explaining things, he goes, Bill, I am really disappointed in you and your men. And man, yeah, that's a knife in the heart sort of thing.

• 3:32:05Speaker 02

  And he had a right to be, but we cleaned it up, got back to business. And then I remember a couple of years later, he and I were having lunch and he said, do you remember that incident? Oh, yes, sir. I do remember that incident. He goes, you recovered really, you recovered very well and you did a great job. And then, you know, again, that's, that's what you want your bosses to say, you know, that they appreciate the work you do.

• 3:32:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, at the Bullfrog for three years and, and in, what was it? You actually did the commencement speech at the University of Texas before you retired.

• 3:32:43Speaker 02

  I did, yeah.

• 3:32:44Jocko Willink?

  I was about to say, you're a, you're a shining example of the, of the fact that the zero defect attitude is wrong, right? You know, you have that, that zero defect attitude of, hey, if, if someone fails one time, get rid of them, or if someone makes a mistake, or if they're not perfect, get rid of them. With all due respect, sir, you are an outstanding example of, you know, someone that, someone that's, you know, I don't want to say you had plenty of defects along the way.

• 3:33:12Speaker 02

  A few mistakes.

• 3:33:14Jocko Willink?

  But there certainly are. I mean, just so people understand, you know, when you get fired from a position as a naval officer, that can be, that, that oftentimes the end of your career. You can hang on for a couple more years, but that can be the end of your career.

• 3:33:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I was blessed with, again, great people who gave me a second chance. And, you know, as I said earlier, I think, you know, every once in a while, we all need second chances. And again, I was fortunate in my career a number of times. I remember we had one, one particular mission where I went across the border into Pakistan. It was my first mission actually as a JSOC commander. And without going into too much detail, bad guys, we'd been looking at this target for a long time. And my first mission as the commander, and I have, I mean, I've rolled the dice, I've always been a bit of a risk taker. So we wanted to go get this target. So we go in and guys kind of get compromised just as they're coming onto the target.

• 3:34:11Speaker 02

  Gun battle ensues. Bad guys get killed, but we wanted to capture them because we knew they had intel. And anyway, the mission does not go well. So I come back and so now I've got to report back to my boss, who was General Marty Dempsey, who was the CENTCOM commander at the time. So I called him up. And I said, "Hey, sir, you know, here's, here's what happened." And obviously, I'm not too happy about it, kind of went through it. And he says, "Okay, Bill. Okay, fine." So I hang up, hang up the phone. A few minutes later, phone rings. There's General Dempsey on the phone. He says, "Hey, Bill, you sounded a little down." I said, "Yes, sir." "So, you know, the mission didn't go as planned." He goes, "It's okay, man. I mean, missions are not always going to go as planned.

• 3:34:54Speaker 02

  And, you know, you made all the right decisions, but as we all know, the enemy gets a vote sometimes." He said, "Don't, don't let this shake you. You know, you just keep doing what you're doing." And I tell you, that, my first mission as a JSOC commander, and when the CENTCOM commander has your back, like General Dempsey did, man, I mean, that's when you, like I said, you need people up, up the chain of command that believe in you even when things don't go well. And I always hoped that when I was in command and, and officers below me struggled sometimes, I would take the officers and a list, and I'd take the time to go down and say, "It's okay, you know, things, things don't always go well. Get back up on the horse and let's keep moving." I mean, if you've got confidence in these guys. Now, again, there's some guys you've just got to say, "You know what? You weren't meant to be in this position."

• 3:35:38Speaker 02

  And I had, you know, you got, I had to fire a few people, too. And some of them, you know, as, as good as they might have been in training, when it came time for combat, it just, it wasn't, they weren't right for it. And, and you had to move them on as graciously as you could if they, if they weren't the right guy for the job. But again, I, I was blessed throughout my career to have people that had confidence in me and, and continued to give me second chances and, and, and put me in a position to be successful.

• 3:36:05Jocko Willink?

  Early on in my last deployment to Ramadi, I had a, had a blue on blue, had a fratricide take place. And, you know, it's a freaking complete and utter nightmare. And a friendly Iraqi soldier got killed, one of my guys got wounded, several other friendly Iraqis got wounded. And the army, the army working in Ramadi was kind of like, hey, you know, like it happens almost, but that's not a very special operations attitude, um, you know, at all. Uh, Van Hoosier happened to be coming through country at the time and, uh, he happened to stop by

• 3:36:45Jocko Willink?

  Shark Base at the time, which was my little base and, and you know, he was a Marine in Vietnam. And he said, hey, Jaco, I was in Way City and he goes, and I wasn't, he goes, I didn't fight in Way City, but I was there afterwards and it's urban combat and this shit is hard and I forget the percentage, but it was a massive third of the casualties in Way City were friendly fire. You know, it's going to happen. Square your shit away. Fix what you can and you move on. Um, that was to me, okay, okay, this is, uh, I'm not the worst loser in the world, which I absolutely

• 3:37:24Jocko Willink?

  felt like. I mean, it's freaking horrible. And then, you know, uh, a few months later, Mark Lee's a first seal killed in Iraq and you know, I'm again, just heartbroken and, and crushed. And Admiral McGuire, who I, you know, was his aide for 13 months and called me up, you know, and said, Hey, you gotta get back out there. You're doing the right thing. And, and that kind of support from these senior leaders at that time, you know, it's a very similar situation for me, but, um, you know, it's real easy to, real easy to pile on, right? To say, oh, you

• 3:38:06Jocko Willink?

  had a blue on blue. What the hell's wrong with you? Real easy to do that. It's really easy. Oh, you lost a guy. What are you guys doing? Real easy to take that approach and both those guys, you know, just, just took the approach of actually understanding what we were going through. Hey, man, there's, we're, we're, we're getting in firefights every single day here. You think we're going to make it through a six month deployment and not take any casualties? Like that's, I don't even know, I don't even know why I would think that. Like it's a crazy thought, but, uh, another good leadership lesson. And it's just, you know, hey, people are going to have things happen. People are going to make mistakes. Things are going to go wrong.

• 3:38:41Jocko Willink?

  What are you gonna do? You're gonna, you're gonna pile on? Especially somebody that's already freaking tearing themselves up, you're gonna pile on and, and I had to do the same thing, you know, with, uh, with platoon commanders, you know, Leif Babin, I mean, he's, he's calling me up, you know, it's another, he's calling me up, "Hey, we just, you know, guy got shot, Ryan Jobe shot, he's hit bad, I don't know if he's gonna live." "The army's in a gunfight right now, Jaco. We need to go help him." And I'm like, "Execute," you know, don't, didn't run it up the chain. The armies, we're side by side with these guys, and he ends up losing mark. You know, it's like, "Are we gonna pile on these guys? Are we gonna support?" They're making a freaking hard decision, they're making the best possible decision they can make at the time. And, and that's what we have to do.

• 3:39:23Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah, and, and your point about decision-making is a good one, because the nature of combat, and, and to some degree, the nature even prior to combat and training, you see it, but more so in combat, because to your point, you're having to make hard decisions all day long. You're just not gonna get all those decisions right. When I, when I became the chancellor of the University of Texas system, uh, I'm in charge of 14 institutions, very large institution, University of Texas at Austin, MD Anderson Cancer Clinic. And, and I've often said, you know, in the states today, some of the hardest jobs in the world are being the presidents of institutions like that, because they've got students, they've got faculty, they've got donors, they've got, you know, all these sorts of things. But every once in a while, there were people outside the system that,

• 3:40:06Speaker 02

  "Well, why did the president make that decision? Why would he do something like that? Why would she do that?" And I'd have to say, "You know, they make a thousand decisions a day. 999 of them, you don't see because they were good decisions. And now you're gonna get on them because they made one bad decision?" Uh, I, I, I got this. You, you, thank you very much for your input, but, you know, and I would tell the presidents, "Look, I've got it, I haven't been the president of university before, but I've been in charge of things. It's okay. Do the best you can, you're gonna make mistakes, I got your back." And, but, you know, if you make a serious mistake, I'm also gonna hold you accountable.

• 3:40:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and if you, if you're a repeat offender,

• 3:40:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:40:45Jocko Willink?

  that means you're probably not capable of doing the job, and we're gonna fire you, and, and that's the way it works. So you, you, you end up retiring after 37 years. Um, uh, I guess there was nowhere really else for you to go.

• 3:40:58Speaker 02

  The career worked out okay.

• 3:41:01Jocko Willink?

  And, and then you, you'd given that commencement speech, which is, I guess it's, I have to check with Echo Charles, my, my kinda, uh, what is it, pop culture guy? Was it, is it safe to say that's a, a viral speech? Viral. Okay. Might be even iconic. Oh, iconic. You give the iconic make your bed speech. Did you know, at what point did you figure out you're gonna be the chancellor there?

• 3:41:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they had approached me in April about the job. And, and frankly, initially, I said I wasn't interested. I mean, I was coming off, you know, 37 years. I was really kinda ready for a break and, and I knew being the chancellor was another, you know, stepping into a, you know, 365 to a year sort of job.

• 3:41:45Speaker 02

  But, I mean, my wife and I would talk about it and she said, okay, look, if you could do anything else, because I got asked to be CEOs of this and that, if you could do anything else, what would you rather do? And I thought, I don't know, this actually sounds like a pretty good gig. So I'm, I've gotta have a, you know, I'm gonna have great students that kinda like my troops. I'm gonna have a football team and a baseball team and a basketball team and, and I'll get to travel around. I mean, it was essentially the same sort of leadership dynamics of being the SOCOM commander, the JSOC commander. I mean, again, you, you had faculty and students and issues you had to deal with and I had subordinate commanders. And so it turned out to be a great job, but that was in April. And then I give the speech in May.

• 3:42:29Speaker 02

  But it wasn't until, so the speech, to your point, I mean, it, it gets a lot of traction. And then I think it was about June, I, I decided, you know, I think this is gonna be a good, good job for me. So we agreed to do it and I think sometime in July, they kind of anointed me and then I took over in January.

• 3:42:46Jocko Willink?

  You, uh, you like brushed over the fact earlier that you got diagnosed with cancer and, you know, and, and in the book, you talk about kinda what that, or one of the books, you talk about what that experience was like. And, and it, it seemed like it was something that you could kinda suppress for a while, but it ended up, what, in 2017, kinda catching up with you a bit?

• 3:43:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it did. So chronic lymphocytic leukemia, leukemia, I mean, the good news is it's a chronic cancer, so it is manageable to a degree. But, uh, you know, for years prior to 2010, every time I'd get a physical, the doctors would say, well, you know, you're anemic. I would say, yeah, well, I'm sorry about that. And, you know, I got a job to do. What do I do? And they say, well, take, eat more protein, take these iron tablets or something. And, and then in 2010, doctor diagnosed, they did a bone marrow biopsy and they came back and told me I had CLL. And, but I remember the doctors were more concerned about the anemia. They said, how do you get up in the morning?

• 3:43:48Speaker 02

  I get up, I drink a couple of Ripits, you know, energy drinks, I go to work. And, because what was happening was my body was storing the iron in the bone marrow, but it wasn't moving the iron. So, long runs, you know, you just weren't getting the oxygen into the system. But, hey, sorry, you got a job to do, you know, you get up and do. And so, and then when I became chancellor, I could tell that it was, it was starting to get more problematic. I was just fine in days. I had trouble getting up off the couch, you know, and, but again, you had a job to do. So, you get up and you go do it and you power through it. Finally, in 2017, it just kind of perfect storm. I'd had a little bit of a virus.

• 3:44:31Speaker 02

  The anemia was at its peak. And, and my doctor, who had diagnosed me in 2010, great guy named Michael Keating, who really kind of, I talk about it in the hero code, you know, you go in there, you're scared, you know, thinking that, you know, my career is over, maybe my life's over in the not-too-distant future. And he said, hey, don't you worry about it. We got this. You're gonna be fine. And of course, first question I asked is, can I go back to Afghanistan? My wife was like, really? That's your first question? But, so, you know, I was able to kind of continue on. But finally, in 2017, it caught up. I got some, some therapy at MD Anderson.

• 3:45:09Speaker 02

  They pumped me full of chemicals and, and I mean, a month later, all my numbers were good. And I've been, knock on wood, been feeling good ever since then, so.

• 3:45:18Jocko Willink?

  When'd you retire from the chancellor job?

• 3:45:20Speaker 02

  2018, summer of 2018.

• 3:45:22Jocko Willink?

  And when did sea stories come out?

• 3:45:27Jocko Willink?

  All right, I'll check.

• 3:45:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, better check. I'm not sure, 2019, maybe? So.

• 3:45:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so it's after you retired?

• 3:45:34Speaker 02

  After I retired, yeah.

• 3:45:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay, that's all right.

• 3:45:35Speaker 02

  So, yeah, Make Your Bed was the first one, and that was, I think, when I was still the chancellor. Yeah, See Stories was maybe 2019, and then Hero Code just came out.

• 3:45:44Jocko Willink?

  And so Hero Code, the latest one, before we close out, what brought about the Hero Code?

• 3:45:51Speaker 02

  You know, I think it really kind of came back to make your bed. I mean, I'm always, just like you are, Jaco, you know, people are always asking me, you know, you know, kind of give us more lessons, that sort of thing. But, but people were asking me, okay, tell me who your heroes are. And, and the Hero Code, it's not about me, I mean, it's through my eyes, but it's about people that I met or encountered along the way, and it is about the qualities that they had. And I actually, when I first started it, I thought, you know, what is a hero? I mean, we, we kind of intuitively know what a hero is, but I pulled up the textbook definition, and it was actually pretty good. The textbook definition says a hero is someone we admire for their noble qualities.

• 3:46:35Speaker 02

  And I like this idea of their noble qualities. Doesn't mean they're perfect, but they have noble qualities certainly at a, at a point in time when, when they need them. So the first story is about courage, and Winston Churchill said something like, you know, courage is the most important of all qualities because it guarantees all the rest. So, you know, you're not going to have anything else unless you first have courage. And, and the first story is about Ashley White, who was unfortunately killed in Afghanistan, and, and her remarkable courage. But I go through the book with these, these stories of these people that I think had the right qualities, the courage and humility and sacrifice and perseverance and, and this sense of duty. And you read a little bit on the sense of humor. I mean, frankly, and I, I tell the story about being at UDT 11, but of course, I saw

• 3:47:20Speaker 02

  that sense of humor in the hospitals, and this is when it really resonated with me. Back to the, the infantryman who said, you know, you should have seen the other guy. I mean, how many times did I, did I give some guy, you know, a kind of good natured ban, and you say, man, you look like shit? That was always the standard comeback. You should see the other guy. And of course, that was their way of saying, hey, I may have lost an arm or a leg, but they haven't beaten me. I can still laugh about this. And so, you know, and then the last one is on forgiveness. And you talk about, you know, what missions went south. Well, this is one that went really south on us. And it was a... We were going after a bad guy in Gardes. Had some soldiers on target. We thought the bad guy was in the compound.

• 3:48:01Speaker 02

  Guys got up on the, on the walls, sniper's looking down in. Somebody comes out with an AK-47, he gets shot. Another guy in a doorway picks up an AK-47. The, the soldier, automatic weapon shoots him, but in shooting him, rounds go through him and unbeknownst killed a number of women on the other side. And so when the action dies down, they get on target, they can't figure out why the, the women, by the time we get in there, they are bound. And, and so frankly, initially, we thought maybe it was honor killing. But of course, we didn't, it sounds crazy, but we just didn't understand at the time that, you know, they bound them up so that they, the jaws didn't open and other things. And so it took us a while to really understand what was going on, but then what we realized

• 3:48:45Speaker 02

  as we did the investigation was, one, the two guys with the AK-47s turned out to be Afghan policemen and the women were innocent bystanders that we had unfortunately killed. I mean, it was, it was the worst, of all my time, it was the worst, you know, kind of civilian casualty incident that I'd seen. And we'd had some bad ones, but none quite as bad as that. And I realized, hey, at the end of the day, I mean, it's back on me. So I went down to apologize to the father. And I remember I linked up with some Afghan soldiers and one other Army guy. And we went into this town in Gardes, and of course, there are hundreds of angry Afghans.

• 3:49:28Speaker 02

  But you got an obligation, you know, so I, I sat down in this kind of city hall, for lack of a better term, with about 200 Afghans seated there, and, and I apologized to the father. And I remember before I did it, I had talked to my Afghan counterpart, General Saleem. And I said, "What do I say to this guy? I mean, we killed his sons and a daughter. What do you say to a guy like that?" And Saleem looked at me, and he kinda cocked his head, and he said, "Oh, he will forgive you." I said, "So, I don't know." He goes, "Oh, no, he will forgive you." And I said, "Well, with all due respect, Saleem." And he said, "He's a good Muslim. He will forgive you."

• 3:50:07Speaker 02

  And he said, "Look," he said, "the thing about forgiveness is it not only relieves your burden, it will relieve his burden as well. It will take away his anger, and it will, if he forgives you." And I thought, "Man, that's a stretch." But I got there and sat down with the father, and I apologized to him, and I could see the look in his eye, and they forgave me. And this idea of forgiveness, particularly today, you know, it seems like everybody today gets easily offended. You know, everybody gets slighted, and they wanna hold on to that anger. They don't wanna forgive people for whatever that slight was, because the anger empowers them to be mad.

• 3:50:52Speaker 02

  It empowers them to fight back. And they feel like if they let that anger go, if they forgive that individual, then they don't get to be the person that holds the power. And I think that's just absolutely the wrong way to approach it. You know, I mean, the whole thing about forgiveness, and I tell the story about there, about the white supremacist, Dylann Roof, that killed all the people at the Baptist church, and the families went up, one by one, and said, "I forgive you. I forgive you." And the point was, they were not gonna, they were not gonna hold on to that anger. They were not gonna kinda bear that burden. So today, as we look at society, and we wonder why everybody gets so offended, I mean, I would offer, take the opportunity to try to forgive the people that offend you.

• 3:51:36Speaker 02

  I mean, some of them are big offenses, some of them are little ones, but I think as a society, we can do a little better than every single slight, every single, you know, misstep somebody takes. You don't have to hold on to that anger. You don't have to fight back. You can forgive people.

• 3:51:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, it takes a lot more strength to forgive someone than it does to hold a grudge.

• 3:51:55Speaker 02

  It absolutely does.

• 3:51:58Jocko Willink?

  I often worry, worry, um, because you know, sometimes we have whole sections of society or countries or peoples that, that have a grudge. And you know, I, I look at it as two parts, like you need, one, one side needs to say, I'm sorry. And the other side needs to forgive.

• 3:52:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:52:18Jocko Willink?

  And it's very difficult to get two human beings, just, just two human beings to do that. And when you have, you know, a collective lot of grievances from two different opposing sides. We have a hard time making that progress. Um, that's the latest book, The Hero Code. And, and as you were, as you and I were talking, as we, as we started off, I, I've written these kids books. And, uh, the kids books have a code, the warrior kid code. And I mean, it's just the, the similarities are, are awesome. It's awesome to see, uh, I know you didn't read this, but, but you know, uh, you know, it talks about humility and staying calm and treating people with respect and trying to help and protect people.

• 3:53:03Jocko Willink?

  And it's just, these are the things that, that we need to do. And, um, yeah, I appreciate the fact that you, you put this, this latest book out to, to give people a little guidance, a little something to strive for. Uh, with that, it's only been about four hours. Um,

• 3:53:29Jocko Willink?

  Echo, you got anything?

• 3:53:31Speaker 01

  Oddly, no, I don't. I think we covered it.

• 3:53:34Jocko Willink?

  He's usually throws a curve ball question at the end, so you're getting off easy. Anything else before we close out?

• 3:53:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, I want to thank you, Jaco. Um, you know, you have represented the community.

• 3:53:48Speaker 02

  With such dignity, such honor. I love what you're doing. I love what you're doing with the podcast. I love what you're doing with your life. I love how you are engaging with the community around you. You know, it is important for us, particularly at this time. You know, the, the community has had its ups and downs. We're, we're in a little bit of a trough now, but we need great folks like you to continue to be the sort of representatives that people can look up to. And so frankly, I want to take time to, to thank you for the great work you've done, the great example you have set for, you know, not just the, the new young kids that are going to be SEALs someday, but frankly, for everybody you come in contact with. That's, that's incredibly valuable nowadays. So, thanks.

• 3:54:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, I certainly appreciate that. I can, I can guarantee you that, um, there's, there's, the only reason I'm here is because of what the community gave to me and then the people that I was able to follow and emulate. And it's just, um, it's an honor to be sitting here talking to you and thanks for coming on today.

• 3:54:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 3:54:55Jocko Willink?

  And, and more important, thank you for your service to, to the Navy, to special operations and first and foremost to our, to our great nation. And then somewhat selfishly, thank you for what you did to the, for the teams. Thank you for leading me and, and my fellow frogmen and, and for setting an example that will forever guide our conduct, our character and our ethos.

• 3:55:21Speaker 02

  It was my honor. Thanks.

• 3:55:22Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Admiral McRaven has left the building. So, Echo?

• 3:55:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:55:32Jocko Willink?

  You were, you had no questions, which is kind of surprising.

• 3:55:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was crazy.

• 3:55:37Jocko Willink?

  Did you start connecting the dots on who was in the room?

• 3:55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, more so. The thing is, I already knew and, well, well, it depends on what you mean, but knew, right? But yeah, I knew and I heard and you know, I am familiar, familiar with Admiral McRaven.

• 3:55:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you had, you had connected the dots?

• 3:55:57Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, but not all of them though.

• 3:55:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:55:59Speaker 01

  And it's crazy to just hear them all, like the Saddam Hussein one. I didn't connect those dots before. Um, the Captain Phillips one, I did not know either, but, but.

• 3:56:09Jocko Willink?

  So you'd connected one out of?

• 3:56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, one dot.

• 3:56:11Jocko Willink?

  For, as far as, as far as, you know, some of the, some of the most important.

• 3:56:17Jocko Willink?

  Special operations. So awesome to have him on here and to be able to hear some of those stories and thoughts. So Admiral Craven, thank you so much for coming on. And what does this mean for us? Well, it means we can do a little bit more. Means we can certainly, we have work to do. The work that we have to do starts with us in order to get better, in order to move in the right direction. Echo Charles?

• 3:56:50Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. He said some, he said something that I feel like I'm going to kind of take this with a lot of things, obviously, but one that really stood out is, and he said it twice, maybe three times, where he's like, my job is to put you, set you up for success, right? Put you in a position where you can succeed, right? That was his deal. It's like, man, that's a good way to put it right there. Because you know how you always talk about, hey, don't micromanage, don't, you know, you want to let your team lead, you know, how you put it. And it's like, yeah, if you, because you can apply that to yourself as well. Like, bro, set yourself up for some success, man.

• 3:57:25Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like a good plan.

• 3:57:26Speaker 01

  You know, go learn some stuff.

• 3:57:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, 100%. That's a great analogy. And I thought you were going to say, when he was talking about, the guy's like, hey, sir, you got nothing to prove?

• 3:57:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:57:38Jocko Willink?

  He says, no, you're wrong, actually. You've got something to prove every day. And it's interesting, something I used to talk about to the young SEAL officers, is I would say, you have nothing to prove, but everything to prove. Because sometimes they think they got to prove that they're in charge. So they start barking orders at people and, you know, we're going to use my plan and all that other stuff. And you don't have to prove that you're in charge. We know you're in charge. You're the officer. You're literally called the officer in charge. You don't need to prove that. But you do need to prove.

• 3:58:08Jocko Willink?

  You did, you, you got a lot to prove.

• 3:58:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like that always struck me as a, um, like, don't like beware of complacency or resting on your laurels. You know how like, you know, someone who has the overstated attitude of, I don't have anything to prove. When it's like too much of that, right? Little off balance of the dichotomy kind of thing. It's kind of like they did something awesome and then they sort of ride it out. And then they still think they should get kind of the cred for it, like a hundred years later or whatever. And it's like, hey, like, that's cool that you did that, but recently you've been kind of doing nothing. Kind of an, you know, so that, that's what that always struck me as where it's like, you always have something to prove. Like, don't be like, oh yeah, you should like, keep respecting me this much for like one thing I did yesterday.

• 3:58:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, you know, thirty seven years for him in the SEAL teams, in the, in the military. And again, what's I think is important is, as he said, look, there's so many people that did so much, have done so much work, so much work to, to protect America. And everybody from, you know, obviously the SEAL teams, but just, you know, we talked about the infantrymen. We talk about everybody. There's so much people that work so hard to protect freedom. So I feel like, you know, you have a guy that's a four star admiral on.

• 3:59:34Jocko Willink?

  And of course you're going to talk about what his experiences were. And, you know, he's going to give you his perspective, but, you know, I tried to point out in the beginning, he, you know, Admiral Craven was always connected to the guys on the front lines and the people that are out there making it happen. So, awesome.

• 3:59:57Jocko Willink?

  So we need to set ourselves up for success is what you were saying before I went on a little.

• 4:00:01Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, sir.

• 4:00:03Jocko Willink?

  What do we got? How can we set ourselves up for success?

• 4:00:06Speaker 01

  Well, big things and small things. And a lot of us, you know, we're not going to be admirals, straight up. I'm not going to be admiral.

• 4:00:15Speaker 01

  It's very unlikely, we'll just say that.

• 4:00:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 4:00:18Speaker 01

  So, I'm gonna do maybe my small little part. To set myself up for success.

• 4:00:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 4:00:26Speaker 01

  Just my small little part.

• 4:00:28Jocko Willink?

  In your world.

• 4:00:29Speaker 01

  In my world, exactly right. So what does that look like for me? And I think others too. So this is the good news about this this kind of stuff is that it's achievable by anyone. Just take a few little steps, set yourself up for success. So what are we doing? Reading more. We're working out more, keeping ourselves physically and mentally capable. That's what it is. An opportunity presents itself. You want to be physically and mentally capable, or you want to be physically and mentally incapable? That's the question.

• 4:00:58Jocko Willink?

  Is this a question for me? We want to be capable.

• 4:01:01Speaker 01

  Kind of rhetorical, right? Kind of, kind of, kind of obvious question. So we do that through working out, we do that through reading, paying attention and listening. That's a big one. A lot of, a lot of us don't do that that much anymore. Pay attention and listen. Trust me. Kind of like you're not really listening to me right now.

• 4:01:17Jocko Willink?

  Barely.

• 4:01:18Speaker 01

  You see what I'm saying? So you see what I'm saying. Anyway. On this path that we're doing all this, we do need supplementation. So, good news. We're gonna start with energy drinks. I'm calling it energy drinks. It's a new wave of energy drinks.

• 4:01:31Jocko Willink?

  Do you think that these energy drinks that we have created are going to make all other energy drinks obsolete?

• 4:01:38Speaker 01

  It, we, it, it has the potential to do that. As of right now, hey, this is kind of a new thing technically, you know?

• 4:01:44Jocko Willink?

  And, but it seems like, it seems like that's a pretty obvious course.

• 4:01:49Speaker 01

  That seems like the

• 4:01:50Jocko Willink?

  People are looking at one, at the old, the dinosaurs, we'll say. And thinking, oh, this dinosaur, it, it tastes okay and it gives me energy for an hour. But then I ruined my health and I feel like crap.

• 4:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:02:04Jocko Willink?

  And then they look over at this, can't discipline go and they go, oh, this makes me feel a little good. And it's, it's actually good for me.

• 4:02:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:02:10Jocko Willink?

  This is, this is how, uh, this is how the old energy drink dinosaurs are gonna go extinct.

• 4:02:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:02:16Jocko Willink?

  They're going extinct.

• 4:02:17Speaker 01

  That looks

• 4:02:17Jocko Willink?

  That's my prediction.

• 4:02:18Speaker 01

  Like the current

• 4:02:19Jocko Willink?

  The freaking big comet just hit, or whatever it was that would kill the dinosaurs. Was it a volcano?

• 4:02:23Speaker 01

  No, I think it was asteroid. Oh, you know, that's the current thing.

• 4:02:27Jocko Willink?

  The asteroid, the asteroid just hit the other energy drinks in the form of Jaco Discipline Go.

• 4:02:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So

• 4:02:33Jocko Willink?

  They're going down.

• 4:02:34Speaker 01

  Just anticipating fallout on that one.

• 4:02:35Jocko Willink?

  Fallout. They're starving, they're dying.

• 4:02:37Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so that's what's going on. Boom, new energy drink. No stigma on this one.

• 4:02:41Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 4:02:42Speaker 01

  No sugar, sweetened with monk fruit, no unhealthy preservatives, no toxic chemicals. No, no preservatives whatsoever. Yeah. Why we it's it's pasteurized. Yep. Boom, boom, and it tastes good. So boom, this thing is good for you straight out, all upside, no downside. Short term and long term benefits. Boom. Strategic and tactical. Discipline, go. There's there's also discipline going powder and capsule format. Don't forget about that one. Also, we got stuff for your joints to keep your joints in the game. Don't have to worry about that anymore. Yesterday I did squats. You did squats when Monday, right? Or something like this?

• 4:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was. So I always think about this where I'm older than I was before.

• 4:03:26Speaker 01

  And so I incorporated the deep squats, right? Yeah. From your influence and I thank you for it. And you think with a deep squat, especially when you go hard, it's like, okay, you know, my knees, because that's a lot of times that's the that's what you get like, it's like, oh, yeah, dude. So if you suggest deep squats to someone, they'll be, oh, my knees or, you know, and I get it. It's true. So every time I think about this, like this joint stuff, like my joints, I think about the squats. Got it. By the way, yes, yesterday I started warming up doing squats. My brother came over, Jade. We start to talk, you know, you get into conversations, whatever. And then not when you're squatting. So I'm well, you know, in my, I'm doing the warmups. Okay. First one, we get in this conversation while I'm warming up.

• 4:04:09Speaker 01

  I do one preset I was explaining to Kerry. I do one preset. K dog. K dog, hell yeah, all day. And it's basically one set, one, it's like a half working set. It's like the with the weight that I'm going to use for my first working set. I do that, but not as many reps as someone. So, you know, it's like a priming kind of thing. So I do that, right? Boom. Right at that point, the conversation goes deep.

• 4:04:33Speaker 01

  So like, we're just talking two hours, two and a half almost hours before my first set.

• 4:04:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so now you so you're saying there's a two hour lag time.

• 4:04:43Speaker 01

  Lag time between my.

• 4:04:47Jocko Willink?

  You need to prioritize next.

• 4:04:48Speaker 01

  So in my normal course of action, that kind of stuff happens. This happened before where it's like, hey, my conversation came and hey, sorry, I skipped the workout. You know, the sun went down straight up. It's dark nighttime already. I don't know, eight thirty maybe. And it's like, well, you know, I'm all cold. I've been sitting down, talking for two and a half hours. I'm not warm anymore. And let's face it, but it's almost bedtime.

• 4:05:10Jocko Willink?

  Why are people kind of coming around your gym to talk to you like that?

• 4:05:12Speaker 01

  Cause my gym is on the side of my house outside. Yeah. And you know, I, hey, that's, that's a conversation for another time for sure, but it's significant. Nonetheless, so I go inside. I'm like, okay, cool. I'll do the squats tomorrow, whatever. All good. So I go inside, I take off my shoes and I'm like, drink some water, whatever. And Jade's leaving and they're like, I'm like, I was like, no, man, no. It's not going to get me this time. Conversation? No conversation. I go back out, finish the whole squat. Actually, I added one more set too.

• 4:05:40Jocko Willink?

  Like it.

• 4:05:41Speaker 01

  By the way.

• 4:05:41Jocko Willink?

  There you go. The world right now collectively is celebrating your personal victory.

• 4:05:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. So might I add?

• 4:05:49Jocko Willink?

  Joint warfare.

• 4:05:50Speaker 01

  Joint warfare. I was not worried about my joints any, at any moment. My knee joints in this particular case.

• 4:05:58Speaker 01

  I know where I gotta curb that little bit.

• 4:06:00Jocko Willink?

  You got joint warfare on your jawbone.

• 4:06:05Speaker 01

  Anyway, success all around. Joint warfare, super krill oil all day. Also, we got some immunity stuff. This is important as well. You don't get sleep. You know, you were kind of talking about not getting that much sleep.

• 4:06:18Jocko Willink?

  A couple, I had a messed up sleep schedule passed. Not last night, two nights before that.

• 4:06:22Speaker 01

  I had one last night. Anyway, lack of sleep, lack of this, lack of that can kind of jam up your immune system. Don't worry about that kind of stuff too. We've got supplements for that.

• 4:06:33Speaker 01

  Cold War. Vitamin D3, boom. Don't worry about your immune system either. Joints, immune system, no factor. Right there. Um, also. Molk. Supplemental protein in the form of dessert. That's uh, that's some good stuff as well. Whole nother story, but good stuff nonetheless.

• 4:06:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you don't, you want, let's face it, you want ice cream. Ice cream has a lot of downside to it.

• 4:06:58Speaker 01

  Yes, it does.

• 4:06:59Jocko Willink?

  You can have milk, all upside. No downside.

• 4:07:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:07:03Jocko Willink?

  Upside, legit upside.

• 4:07:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So to put that into perspective, and I just heard this, I didn't even know where I was listening to something, but and it reminded me, some people eat like a thing of ice cream every single day. It's like a thing, you know, like, oh, at night after dinner.

• 4:07:18Jocko Willink?

  For a while.

• 4:07:19Speaker 01

  Every single day.

• 4:07:20Jocko Willink?

  Every single day. I remember I was running so much. I was running so much. I think it was, I was out, I was out at team two. And every day was like. Okay, Monday PT was like PT and a run. Tuesday PT was, oh, of course, and a run. Wednesday was swim and a run. Thursday was PT and a run again, and then Friday was a run.

• 4:07:45Speaker 01

  What kind of run?

• 4:07:46Jocko Willink?

  The Friday run, which Admiral talked about, was like a 10 miler, 12 miler.

• 4:07:51Speaker 01

  Sorry. Can't do 10 miles, bro.

• 4:07:53Jocko Willink?

  I would come back from that, I would do, do my 20 rep squat routine too. So I was eating ice cream with a total abandon.

• 4:08:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:08:00Jocko Willink?

  Just getting it.

• 4:08:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the, the, the, the situation I was hearing about reminded that remind, it reminded me of the concept that some people don't do these crazy runs or workouts or whatever. It's just part of their normal everyday routine. Like, hey, let me just eat some ice cream every single day.

• 4:08:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:08:18Speaker 01

  Some obvious detriment when you do that kind of stuff. You drink the, you, you replace the ice cream with the milk.

• 4:08:24Jocko Willink?

  You gotta hope.

• 4:08:25Speaker 01

  You got the same front side.

• 4:08:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:08:27Speaker 01

  Or front end payoff.

• 4:08:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:08:29Speaker 01

  But a way different back end payoff. Actually, you get a back end payoff, unlike the back end of price cost.

• 4:08:37Jocko Willink?

  Hey, you can get this stuff JacoFuel.com. If you, if you subscribe to it, it's free shipping, which is a legit thing because right now there's, let's face it, there's large, rather large, extremely large companies that are trying to lure you into their little realm. By giving you free shipping. And we understand that, we gotta compete with them. So if you subscribe, free shipping, you can do double support. Much appreciated. Also, we got OriginUSA.com. If you need a jiu-jitsu gi, if you need jeans, if you need boots, if you need a t-shirt. If you need a belt.

• 4:09:13Jocko Willink?

  You can get it all. OriginUSA.com. The USA part is not some sort of thrown on branding. No, because the stuff is freaking made in America, 100%. Without compromise. Think about that. We're talking about fighting for America. Cool. That's awesome. We love it. Guess what else we gotta do? We gotta support the economy here. Cause without the American economy, nothing else matters. You don't have a military unless you have a good economy. So support the American economy. Stuff that's made in America with raw materials that were made or grown or produced in America. That's what we're doing. OriginUSA.com. Get it?

• 4:09:54Speaker 01

  It's true. Also, Jaco Store, called Jaco Store. This is where you can get your discipline equals freedom. Good. Get after it. All this, all the, all the representative ideas of the path on your apparel is where you can get it. Also, we have a subscription as well. Free shipping on this one, only in the USA though, as of right now. But we're working on the international scenario, but only in the USA. It's called Shirt Locker. This is where you can get shirts with a little bit different, more creative. Say more fun designs, for lack of a better way of maybe putting it. Anyway, they're more interesting. You get one every month. It's kinda cool.

• 4:10:33Jocko Willink?

  Cause once I get a hold of a couple of designs, it's gonna be not fun. It's gonna be dark.

• 4:10:39Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna be more cool.

• 4:10:41Speaker 01

  Well, there you go.

• 4:10:42Jocko Willink?

  They're not, they're cool right now, but they're lighthearted, some of them.

• 4:10:45Speaker 01

  Yes. People seem to be enjoying them. Um, yeah. So yeah, free shipping on that one. And yeah, every month is a good one. Check it out. If you like it, hey, get that.

• 4:10:53Jocko Willink?

  Subscribe to this podcast too. Wherever you listen to podcasts. Don't forget, we also have Jaco Unraveling Podcast with my man DC Daryl Cooper. Putting out word. Grounded Podcast. We have the Warrior Kid Podcast. We also have Jaco Underground.com. If you want to get a little additional podcast scenario, you can check that out. Uh, you have to subscribe to it. It costs eight dollars and 18 cents a month. What are we doing with that? We're creating a platform of our own. That if things go sideways, we got a contingency plan. We'll meet you in the underground, underground, Jaco Underground.com. Come and check that out. We have a YouTube channel, by the way. And, uh, we make videos. We make videos.

• 4:11:34Speaker 01

  We, we do.

• 4:11:34Jocko Willink?

  We have, obviously, you all know Echo's got some technical skills that he can put to use. He can do the editing and some of that other sort of, sort of, they're just technical skills. And then obviously I come in with the assistant director and I kind of,

• 4:11:49Speaker 01

  Creative.

• 4:11:50Jocko Willink?

  And the creative side, the creative element, the vision.

• 4:11:53Speaker 01

  And the talent, by the way. You're the talent, you know?

• 4:11:56Jocko Willink?

  But I do appreciate your being able to edit properly. So if you want to see Echo's edits and my vision.

• 4:12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:12:05Jocko Willink?

  Check out.

• 4:12:07Speaker 01

  Speaking of Jaco's vision and my lack of vision from time to time. Psychological Warfare is an album with tracks of Jaco telling you how to skip, not skip, not skip, not skip.

• 4:12:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 4:12:21Speaker 01

  Workouts, if you're in the mood to skip a workout. Like basically to achieve what I achieved last night.

• 4:12:29Speaker 01

  Let's say you don't have that fortitude that day. Don't worry, Jaco got you on this one. This goes for a lot of other weaknesses as well. So check that one out. Psychological.

• 4:12:37Jocko Willink?

  Warf. If you want a little spot, psychological spot, getting over the hesitation, check out flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, my brother, he's making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Also made in America. We got some books. You heard about some of them today. Spec Ops. These are from, these are from Admiral William H. McRaven. We got Spec Ops. We got Make Your Bed. We got C Stories and we've got the latest, The Hero Code. Those are available on our website. If you go to JacoPodcast.com and you click on Books from the Podcast, they'll all be there. That's also a way to support too, by the way. We've got Final Spin. This is my book that's coming

• 4:13:18Jocko Willink?

  out and you're going to want that first edition. You're going to want the first edition. So order that. The, right now, the publisher is like, you're not really a fiction writer and we don't know, people are probably not going to appreciate your work. They're more looking for, you know, that's what they're saying. So like, okay, we'll print, you know, a limited number of copies.

• 4:13:42Speaker 01

  Technically, aren't you a fictional writer?

• 4:13:45Jocko Willink?

  Yes, because I've written a bunch of fiction kids books. You are correct. I made that point as well. And then they said, that's different. Right?

• 4:13:52Speaker 01

  Got it, got it.

• 4:13:53Jocko Willink?

  So, look, book comes out. They're, we, we gotta let them know at least to print enough. So if you want to preorder that one and get that first edition, go ahead and make that happen. So that's Final Spin. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. The Code, the Evaluation of Protocol, which also, yeah, that's another code. I forgot to mention that one today. The Code, the Evaluation of Protocol. Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. Way of the Warrior Kid 1, 2, 3, and 4. Mike and the Dragons. About Face by Hackworth. Extreme Ownership. And the Dichotomy of Leadership, which I wrote with my brother Leif Babin. Leif Babin and I also have a leadership consultancy and we solve problems through leadership. Go to ashlandfront.com

• 4:14:33Jocko Willink?

  if you need us to come and help you in your organization. We have, we have Extreme Ownership Academy, online leadership training. Get to the leadership gym. Get to the, hey, you don't go to a gym one time, work out, and then you're good. No, you gotta stay healthy. You gotta maintain that strength. So go to extremeownership.com.

• 4:14:56Jocko Willink?

  Join our online, we're doing, by the way, you got questions, come and ask me the question. I will be on a Zoom call, literally ask, answering your question.

• 4:15:06Jocko Willink?

  Come and check it out. We have a live event called The Muster. Next one up is Phoenix.

• 4:15:14Jocko Willink?

  August 17th and 18th, and then Las Vegas, October 28th and 29th. Check extremeownership.com for that as well. All those are sold out, by the way. And this one will too, these will too. We have a couple of other events you can check out. Battlefield, we go Battlefield Walks, we have FTX.

• 4:15:33Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization. Helps out our warriors. If you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. And if you want,

• 4:15:54Jocko Willink?

  look, if you want more of my over elaborated estimations, or you need more of Echo's disoriented discourse,

• 4:16:03Jocko Willink?

  you can find us on the interwebs.

• 4:16:06Jocko Willink?

  On Twitter, on Instagram, which Echo only refers to as the Gram, and on Facebook, Echo's at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Admiral McRaven for,

• 4:16:21Jocko Willink?

  for everything.

• 4:16:24Jocko Willink?

  Too much to sum up.

• 4:16:27Jocko Willink?

  But thanks to all the soldiers, sailors, admiral and marines, who have been on the battlefield.

• 4:16:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, for hundreds of years, and who allow America and freedom and democracy to exist. And the same goes to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for your protection here at home.

• 4:16:57Jocko Willink?

  And everyone else out there, you know, I didn't quite get into it, to this book, The Hero Code.

• 4:17:04Jocko Willink?

  And Admiral McRaven gives some guidance on how a hero should live. But another thing that he indicates

• 4:17:16Jocko Willink?

  is that you

• 4:17:19Jocko Willink?

  are the hero we need. It's you.

• 4:17:24Jocko Willink?

  So go out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.