327: Attack on The USS Liberty w/ Phil Tourney, Larry Bowen, Joe Meadors.

0:00:00 - Opening. 0:04:01 - Attack on the USS Liberty. 2:18:49 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:38:47 - 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 327 with me Jocko Willink. The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Bronze Star Medal to Petty Officer 3rd Class Philip Francis Tourney, United States Navy for service as set forth in the following citation. For heroic achievements in connection with the unprovoked and unexpected armed attack on USS Liberty AGTR 5 in the Eastern Mediterranean on 8 June 1967. During the early afternoon hours USS Liberty while engaged in peaceful operations in

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  international waters was attacked without any warning by jet fighter aircraft and three motor torpedo boats. The Liberty was subjected to intense incendiary, machine gun, and rocket fire and was placed in extreme jeopardy by a torpedo hit below the waterline on the starboard side in the vicinity of the research compartment. Severe structural damage and extensive personnel casualties were incurred. Petty Officer Tourney, serving as Assistant On-Scene Leader in the Forward Repair Party, first assisted in organizing the evacuation of wounded personnel from the exposed weather decks.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  With complete disregard for his own personal safety, he continued to fearlessly expose himself to intense rocket and machine gun fire to move a firefighting team to the bridge. He then returned to the forward weather decks to ensure that no more wounded were still exposed before going below to maintain damage control conditions of compartments below the waterline. He remained below decks during the torpedo attack and immediately afterward assisted and directed emergency repairs to minimize further flooding and damage. His aggressiveness and coolness under fire was exceptionally inspirational leadership in an hour of awesome peril.

• 2:12Jocko Willink?

  Petty Officer Tourney's initiative and courageous actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. Petty Officer Tourney is authorized to wear the Combat V distinguishing device. And that citation reflects an obviously intense and dire situation for a US naval ship, the USS Liberty, during a vicious and determined attack. What the citation does not mention is the state or the enemy force that is conducting the attack.

• 2:56Jocko Willink?

  And that is because the attack was conducted by our ally, by the state of Israel. And this incident, the attack on the USS Liberty, has been wrought with controversy as to how and why it happened. But there can be no controversy or no doubt about the courage and bravery of the sailors on the ship that day, who suffered significant casualties, but who fought to save their shipmates and their ship.

• 3:34Jocko Willink?

  And it is an honor to have three of those sailors with us here to share their experiences and their lessons learned. Phil Tourney, Larry Bowen, and Joe Metters. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. It's an honor to have you all out here. I appreciate you traveling and getting out here.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Thank you, sir. That's about as good as it gets from...

• 4:05Speaker 01

  An American hero is yourself, a sailor, SEAL, been through it, understands what battle's all about. When you have nothing to fight back with but only your will and your guts to stay alive is inspirational for all the crew. It was all hands on deck, regrettably, many of our shipmates lost their lives or were so severely wounded they had to be evacuated the next day. And we didn't get any help from our government during the attack, after the attack, 18 hours later, we say a cruiser, a destroyer, Maddox, not the Maddox, but the...

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Massey. Yeah, Massey, come alongside in the US as Davis, and that was it. And those guys come aboard our ship on whaleboats and they were actually crying to see the devastation of what they did to us. Shocking, there was over 850 cannon rocket holes in our ship, over 5,000 armor piercing bullets in our ship. They dropped napalm on the bridge of the ship, trying to burn us to pieces. They shot our life rafts off, out, we only had three left, they shot them out of the water to ensure no more survivors.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  They sent troop carrying helicopters to finish us off, and for some reason they didn't do it. I guess they got the word that, hey, the gig's up, and so we're just calling it a mistaken identity, and that's what everybody says, it was mistaken, oh, we're so sorry. We say no to that. And it was a deliberate, premeditated attack, premeditated attack by the people of the Johnson administration and...

• 6:02Speaker 01

  The Esco, I believe his name was Ambassador, I mean the Premier or President of Israel at that time, a small cabal of people did so much damage not only to us and our dead shipmates, but to America. This is just not our problem, it's America's problem. And Americans like you, this good gentleman over here and your whole staff are bringing it to light. And God bless you for that, and it means the world to me, and I know it does my shipmates. It's very respectful and very honorable of you, sir. Thank you.

• 6:34Jocko Willink?

  Man, it's just, the story is harrowing to hear, and you know, one of the things I want to go over today is the account that you've written of what you went through. Before we get to that, just to get a little background on, on all of you, just if maybe you could introduce yourselves, where you came from, maybe a quick note on how you ended up in the Navy. I mean, this is 1967, how you ended up in the Navy, and really what your job was when you were on the Liberty. Let's, let's start with you, Joe.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, no, Larry.

• 7:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, sorry. Let's start with you, Larry.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Hi. I'm Larry Bowen. I'm the current Liberty Veterans Association President. In 1965, during the height of the Vietnam War, I got drafted. And I didn't want to be boots on the ground over in Vietnam, so I went and talked with a Navy recruiter. And he says, "Go take the Army physical, and then we'll put you in the Navy." I was 19 years old. I didn't know if I could trust him or not, but, you know, I went, I took the physical, I passed. And by the end of March, I was an active-duty Navy, going to Great Lakes Naval Training Center for boot camp.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  I became a cryptologic technician or communications technician shortly thereafter boot camp, went to a school down in Pensacola, Florida and got my first assignment to Bermer Haven, Germany. And I thought this was a great tour. I just, you know, can't beat this. And four months later, I get orders to the USS Liberty. So this was my, my third cruise that I was on when, when we were reassigned to the Mediterranean for the six day war.

• 8:37Jocko Willink?

  And, and the, the mission of the Liberty, it's an interesting mission. It was really just collection of radio traffic from all over, all over whoever you were near.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  And am I correct in saying that there was literally no weapons on the Liberty? Did they have any weapons at all?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  We had four 50 caliber machine guns, two forward, two aft. And then we had small arms, which Phil and Rick Amati were, were trying to get into when we thought we were going to have to repel borders. But the, the gun locker was, was secure and they were using, they didn't have a key. So they were trying to break, break the lock with a sledgehammer so that they could get in and get small arms out in case we, you know, in case those helicopters

• 9:36Speaker 02

  with the troops on board tried to board us. And like Phil said, they, for whatever reason, they, they stopped and, you know, asked whether or not we had any casualties and whether or not they could help us. And a skipper told them, basically, we don't need your help. Not in, not in those terms, but, you know, he made it very clear that we didn't want them.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Phil, how'd you end up in the Navy? Uh, that's a good question. I, I wasn't, I wasn't good in school. Uh, I dropped out of school in the seventh grade. Went to work for, for my dad. Where, where'd you grow up? I grew up in Denver, Colorado. Now I live on the western slope of Colorado. I got a forty acre ranch there. Me and my bride and Lisa sitting over there. Wonderful lady. Love her a lot.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  We've raised our kids, but getting back to the Navy, I, I went to boot camp and I was the, the most thrilled person you could ever imagine. Cause I was seventeen years old. I just turned seventeen and joined and luckily I passed the test, but uh, I mean, really, I was not very smart, book wise. And all of a sudden I get awarded to be, uh, uh, educational petty officer.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  I says, how did I get this? And, uh, my peers took it good. They, we, we got along and I'll be darned if I wasn't voted outstanding recruit of my, of my troop. And, uh, that was something about my peers. I'll never forget that. A bunch of good guys and they're as old as I am now, forty.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  What year was that? What year'd you join? Sixty-four, nineteen sixty-four. Okay. And what was your job? Uh, my, my first job was, uh, being a, uh, boilerman and machinist mate. I was on different ships, the USS Monarchia, USS Holly, Holly Oclah, that I went overseas with to Vietnam. We had a load ammo to Constellation and other ships and we would also pick up, uh, bodies uh, that were flown, uh, to one part or the other. We'd take them back to Subic Bay cause we had coolers for the ammo and stuff. And that's what was basically our, our deal for a couple of years. And then I got transferred to Liberty.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  I said, oh God, this has gotta be great. And what a good ship though. Beautiful ship, good people, uh, enjoyable, uh, good skippers. Uh, I can't say enough about the, about the USS Liberty. And you're right, it was a Abbot Moore said it was like a giant lobster out in the sea. Nobody could misidentify that ship. So that's pretty much my naval career up to the attack.

• 12:47Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Then I got transferred to USS Maddox, Tofa Tonkin. So it's been an interesting ride.

• 12:56Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Joe, how'd you end up in the Navy?

• 12:59Speaker 03

  In 1966, I was in my second year of college. Didn't know what I wanted to do in my life. You know, didn't, wasn't ready for graduation or anything like that. And I didn't want to be in the army and go to Vietnam, live in a foxhole for my four years. So I decided to join the Navy instead. So I went and joined and then I went home and told my mom what I did.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  And she about had a fit. But in hindsight, she told me that was probably the best idea that I had, the best thing I ever did. Went to boot camp in Great Lakes and got assigned to a, to the drill team, which was fortunate for me. It was number nine twelve. Fortunate for me and the rest of the guys because I don't think I did more than a hundred pushups during my time in, in, in boot camp.

• 13:57Jocko Willink?

  And what was your, what'd your rate?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  I was a signalman. I went from boot camp to a class A, uh, signalman school in Newport, Rhode Island. And then graduated from that and went to the Liberty. And I never could figure out why, since the Liberty steamed independently. And my rate, I had flashing light and semaphore between ships. What was I doing there?

• 14:23Jocko Willink?

  Who were you gonna talk to?

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:24Jocko Willink?

  That's an interesting thing about the Liberty. Because of its mission, it would just go out by itself. Like the normal Navy ships, they go out in a, in a group, in a, in a carrier battle group or amphibious ready group where there's multiple ships. But you guys on the Liberty, you would just kind of sail around by yourselves.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Exactly, and that's because of the mission with uh if we were in a group their communications would interfere with our ability to collect communications that we were trying to collect. So it was by design that we would go independently typically off the west coast of Africa. In fact, our first port on that last cruise was we pulled into Abidjan and it was in May of 1967 when we got orders to go to Rota, Spain to pick up supplies and some additional people and we were going to the eastern Med.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Couldn't tell our folks or anything, you know, they said, hey, this is all hush, hush. And at that time, I don't know that any of us knew what was going on in the Middle East.

• 15:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a good point. I know when I first got in the Navy and I did a couple deployments as a SEAL on a ship. I mean, there was no internet, so you really were isolated in terms of what was going on in the world. So what was going on in the world at that time was that the Israeli six-day war was happening. This is a war that took place from the 5th of June to the 10th of June. It was Israeli, it was Israel versus a bunch of Arab countries, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, little elements of Lebanon in there.

• 16:20Jocko Willink?

  And the Israel, Israel had initiated, and there was a bunch of things that led up to this, but Israel had initiated the war with airstrikes on Egyptian and Syrian airfields. They'd pretty much wiped out the Egyptian air force. On the 6th of June, there was ground fighting that was taking place as the Israeli military pushed into the Sinai Peninsula.

• 16:47Jocko Willink?

  On the 7th of June, they pushed even further into the Sinai. The Israeli Navy was kind of probing the Egyptian Navy.

• 16:57Jocko Willink?

  There was Israeli missile boats, missile ships that were out there that engaged Egyptian shore batteries. So this is a, even though it's a short war, there's a lot happening in a pretty small area as well.

• 17:12Jocko Willink?

  The Jordanians attacked and sent a lot of artillery into Jerusalem.

• 17:20Jocko Willink?

  By the 7th though, I mean Israeli, and this was just a couple of days into it, Israel had gotten control over much of the West Bank.

• 17:31Jocko Willink?

  8th of June, these things are continuing to happen. So I just wanted to kind of give some background as to what was happening when this event took place for you guys. So I was just talking about June 8th. You know, this is when these attacks are just continuing. This is in the midst of this war. And even though, like I said, it's short, but there's a lot of, a lot of fighting going on. There's 20,000 Arab troops were killed in this short period of time. Israel lost under a thousand, but that's, you know, still significant. So in the midst of all of that, this attack on your ship happens. And Phil, you've got some personal accounts that you've written out and these are just, to me,

• 18:15Jocko Willink?

  a great way of tracing how this, how this went down from your perspective, Phil. And then, you know, Larry and Joe, you guys could give some input as well, but I just want to read some of these accounts because, you know, I always think when I write things down, they come across a little bit clearer. It solidifies my memories. So here's what you said about the first day and how this whole thing kicked off, Phil. You say this, "My job on the morning of June 8th was sound and security. I would make the rounds to ensure that everything on my checklist was in good condition, that the ship was watertight and ship shape, as I reported hourly to the bridge. I did not see the first overflights by Israeli aircraft, but the other guys told me about them.

• 18:57Jocko Willink?

  We assumed that they were our friends and knowing that they were merely confirming that we were an American ship, caused our moods to further lighten." After lunch, a general quarters drill was conducted. Right after that, I had to accompany another engineer to the starboard gun mount on the forecastle on the forecastle. Did I just say that?

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 19:17Jocko Willink?

  You just busted a damn Navy guy, totally messing that one up.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  You can edit that out.

• 19:21Jocko Willink?

  Uh, to fix the phone located there. David Skolak, am I saying that right?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:26Jocko Willink?

  David Skolak was the other sailor I went with, and after I explained to him what needed to be done, his response was, "No, no problem, turner. I'll get working on her." This was about five minutes before the attack at 2 o'clock PM. As we stood there, we discussed the fact that this would be the worst possible place to be in the event of a, an attack on the ship, because the gun tub and the guy manning it would be taking out, taken out as the first priority. I said goodbye to Skolak and the gunner and made my way down the ladder to the main deck and my workstation in the ship fitters shop. As I opened the hatch to go inside, I heard an order over the PA to test the motor whale boat. Just moments later, I heard

• 20:07Jocko Willink?

  a huge explosion right next to the hatch I had just closed. My immediate thought was that the test had gone wrong and the motor whale boat had blown up. So that's how this thing kicks off. I mean, it was, it was a normal day. Were you guys, were you guys able to, were you guys tracking the war as it was happening? Were you guys, could you hear explosions? Could you, were you guys seeing fighting taking place? Were you seeing tracers in the sky at night and that kind of thing?

• 20:36Speaker 03

  No, we, uh, we saw, uh, smoke from the, uh, El Arish area where they were, uh, attacking the Egyptian forces, but we didn't hear anything.

• 20:47Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  And no tracers.

• 20:50Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys feel safe and secure out there?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  I did. Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, really.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, who was gonna, who was gonna attack a flagged American ship? Uh, we thought if anybody was gonna get it, it should be, uh, the Arabs.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Besides, we were told that we'd have air cover in 30 minutes if we were ever attacked.

• 21:10Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:13Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, anything else that you remember about the day before it kicked off?

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Um, that morning, I was sitting in a position down in Radio Research One. I was an intercept operator. And I had picked up some traffic that was actually part of the, the ground forces communicating back on, uh, Tel Aviv. And, um, my buddy Bob Eisenberg, who was working in the Processing and Reporting Center, we, we went to chow together at lunchtime. And he told me that they were planning a big attack. And, and that, you know, it was a prolonged, prolonged kind of thing where they had, you

• 22:01Speaker 02

  know, three different, uh, prongs to this attack. Um, the jet strafing, the napalm, and the torpedo boats. But what Bob didn't tell me was who the target was. Apparently, they didn't spell that out in their communications. Um, but that was before we had our, our practice general quarters drill. So I don't know if, if maybe Commander Lewis had sent word up to the skipper that, uh, hey, there's, things are gonna intensify here, maybe we oughta do a drill.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Um, but there were certainly indications in the comms that, uh, something big was gonna happen. And unfortunately, you know, we didn't know that it was us that they were targeting. Um, because during the morning, these overflights that, that occurred, and they started early in the morning, I bet we had at least four or five overflights by Israeli aircraft. And we would send our photo recon team up to the bridge to take photographs. And, and we knew, I mean, we could see the Star of David on the, on the aircraft.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  So, in my mind, I felt pretty secure that, uh, our ally was gonna cover us and, and not, not be the ones that was gonna do the attacking.

• 23:34Jocko Willink?

  And Joe, anything else on that?

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was a signalman, I was up on the top deck, that was, it was an open deck. Just has rails around it, not, not the steel plyo, steel sightings around the, around the deck. And I could see all of the reconnaissance aircraft come and circle us in the morning. And I served quartermaster watches, which I didn't like, but what's a guy to do? And so I was down in the pilot house and Larry, Lloyd Painter was the officer of the deck, and he was, or a junior officer of the deck, I believe. And he was watching the radar, surface search radar.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  And he spotted the aircraft coming up our starboard side, very low to the deck, because, you know, we didn't have any air search, it was just surface search. So they got slowly or quickly up our starboard side, turned immediately left, and then left again when they got straight ahead of us, and then started the attack. And the Israelis claimed that they, they conducted a series of low and slow identification runs, and I don't think anybody would believe that screaming jet would, nobody could see it, nobody could hear it on those, those identification runs. So they've, they've lied about it since the outset.

• 25:05Jocko Willink?

  All right. Let's pick up Phil with your account after you hear this explosion. So you say, "Not realizing that a rocket had just exploded directly outside the hatch, I grabbed the handle and opened it once more to go out and investigate the trouble. I just barely put one foot outside when I felt myself grabbed by the shirt collar and violently jerked back inside. I turned and saw it was first-class petty officer Dale Nice, who ordered me to get back. We're under attack." The general quarters alarm was then sounded and I made my way to my duty station, which was, which as one deck, which was one deck above the mess decks. After going down the ladder, I slipped and fell and found myself under trampling feet of sailors as they made their way to their stations.

• 25:49Jocko Willink?

  I rolled over to my right side to get out of the way and got on my feet and joined the stampede to get to my station as well. I got into battle dress and got my gear ready. Chief Thompson was the on-scene leader. As soon as I arrived, he said he'd been hit and I was leaving, and he was leaving to get medical care. Since I was assistant on-scene leader, this meant I was in charge. "It's all yours now, attorney," he said as he made his way down the passage. I responded back, "Hey, thanks a lot, chief," although I was not that thrilled about this ad hoc promotion. So it's, just for people that haven't been in the Navy, tell us about general quarters, what's going on?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Right, uh, general quarters is, uh, something we did aboard that ship constantly. Even, uh, I got on, I got aboard the livery when it, uh, it was just commissioned and it made one cruise and I stayed on it for, for the rest, um, till the last one, but every captain I served under, and there was only two, uh, McGonagall was, uh, very strict about, uh, damage control, cleanliness, uh, he evaluated everything you did and, uh, I think that really, really set us up to be, at least to try to be able to, to save our

• 27:07Speaker 01

  ship and save our shipmates, but the training we received, uh, with the good graces of, uh, God, uh, we were able to, uh, to keep the ship afloat and it just wasn't us, you know, it was, uh, a higher power that, that saved us. Nobody else came to help us but the good Lord. And I believe that now and I always will, I believed it then. You know, interesting, Jaco, you know, I thought when the, uh, attack started and we didn't get any help.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  I thought, well, okay, this is World War III and these guys got better things to do than screw with us, the American government, you know, because they're doing their own thing. That's what I really thought, because they wouldn't leave us out there alone, that we were promised help. And I'll be darn, uh, yeah, uh, no help came. We were out there alone, by ourselves, no armament, our ship is burning up, people all over the deck, uh, on, on, uh, sleeping, uh, trying to get into racks or whatever they could just to stay alive. It was, uh, it was, uh, I can't say it was real chaos, it was organized chaos, just do your job and don't do anything else but do your job.

• 28:22Jocko Willink?

  What was your job during general quarters?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Damage control firefighting.

• 28:26Jocko Willink?

  So did you take over for, you were the damage control senior guy at this point?

• 28:29Speaker 01

  At that report part, yes.

• 28:31Jocko Willink?

  Was it for that specific part of the ship or was it for the, okay?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  For that part of the ship. The other damage control was, uh, James Smith and he was fighting fires and, and doing all I could. In fact, that's when Spicer got killed. He was the postal clerk, he was manning a hose, that was his general quarters drills and his station to, uh, fight fires and Smitty had just got through the hatch and then Spicer was hit. I might also add that Smitty and I made third class together, E4s and, uh, he stayed in for 27 years and he come out a lieutenant commander. Yeah, he was on a lot of different ships.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Smitty's a great guy, he's a great hero, all these guys are heroes, they're my, uh, my alter ego. I respect these guys because they helped save everybody's lives, including mine. Without these people, I wouldn't be alive today.

• 29:28Jocko Willink?

  Joe, what did you have to do during general quarters?

• 29:32Speaker 03

  General quarters, uh, as a signalman, my job was look out and look for ships to communicate with, haha.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  And so when, when the attack started, um, Momma didn't raise no fools and that signal bridge was totally, totally open. So I stayed down in the pilot house where that was my, uh, my workstation, basically is in the, in the pilot house. And occasionally I would look out on the port wing of the bridge and look up and make sure the flag was flying. Did that a couple of times and then I noticed it wasn't flying. So Frank Brown and I, Frank was, uh, killed while he was on the helm. Frank Brown and I took holiday colors and rented up on number four port higher and I was up flying during the complete torpedo attack.

• 30:21Jocko Willink?

  And holiday colors is an even bigger flag than normal?

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Biggest flag we have.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Seven by thirteen. That crack you up?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  That's something like that, yeah. Seven by thirteen feet.

• 30:34Jocko Willink?

  What about you Larry? Where, where'd you go once general quarters kicked off?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  The, uh, like I said, I had a day watch that day. So I was down on radio research one. When they sounded general quarters, I move up one deck to another position doing the same job with a cadre of other CTs. One of, like I was an R brancher. There was a T brancher in there. Um, we had an O brancher.

• 31:02Jocko Willink?

  What's, what's the R branch, T branch, O branch?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Okay. R brancher was a radioman.

• 31:06Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  T brancher were, were the, the technical electronics guys. Um, we had a maintenance guy in there. We also had a, a, an I brancher, which is a linguist.

• 31:18Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Um, and so we, we took positions one deck above where the torpedo hit. Um, and when, when the torpedo entered, we all got blown to the overhead, got concussions. That's probably when I got my shrapnel wounds. Um, and...

• 31:41Speaker 02

  You know, it wasn't until right after that that we were able to go out and start opening up the hatch and getting people out from the flooded compartment below. But when Phil mentioned that we had this, you know, 29 by 39 foot of hole on the starboard side, that killed 25 of our crew members that were down in the research spaces. And, you know, one of our primary concerns was getting anyone who was still alive, getting them out of there and getting them up to safety. So, as soon as we got the hatch open and people started coming out of the flooded compartment,

• 32:25Speaker 02

  I had a secondary job of going to the front door to our compartmented spaces and handing out life jackets to everybody so that if we had to abandon ship, at least everybody would have a life preserver. And that was before we ended up at the end, after everybody got out of there, or if we thought everybody had gotten out of there, we dogged down the hatch and had to close up the area, secure it.

• 33:02Jocko Willink?

  Going back to this account from Phil once again. "I started my new duties by determining whether all damage control personnel were accounted for, but found that several were still missing, which was not surprising considering the circumstances. The torrent of explosions I was hearing above and all around me had something to do with that, and the holes that began appearing everywhere around us from the rocket and cannon fire were further evidence of the intensity of the attack. In the middle of this onslaught, I caught a piece of shrapnel four inches long in my right arm just above the elbow. I pulled it out, threw it on the deck, and moved everyone in my department to the main deck."

• 33:42Jocko Willink?

  Once there, I went to the same gun tub that I had visited earlier, but only saw a pile of human remains, blood, hunks of human flesh, body parts and fragments of bone. Rick Ameddy, am I saying that right? Mm-hmm. Rick Ameddy was there with me, and we knew there was no life to be saved, so we moved on. Throughout this time, machine gun bullets and rocket fire were raining down on us as we crouched down behind various structures, leaping from one position to another.

• 34:19Jocko Willink?

  So this is, I mean, there's just, this, this entire ship is just getting raked with machine gun fire, with rockets, with, with bullets. Um, these bullets you're talking about, they're, they're penetrating the skin of the ship and just going through, creating holes immediately.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Armor-piercing bullets, you're exactly right, Jaco, and it was, uh, it was an attack that, uh, there was no mercy.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  There was no, uh, explanation in our mind, because we didn't know really who was doing it. They were doing it with unmarked jet aircraft until we saw the torpedo boats. And they had the Star of David. I says, "Oh, God, they're here to help us." A little bit, you know, they fired five torpedoes at us. Five torpedoes, and only one of them hit, and it happened to hit an I-beam, where we didn't take the full explosion, it was more of an outward deal. But as Larry was saying, twenty-five of America's most intelligent, secret personnel in the world, all of them top secret, were instantly blown to bits, and, uh,

• 35:31Speaker 01

  it's, it's just something you can't describe, to see your own shipmates like that. And you know they're down there. The ones that got killed on deck, we already put them in body bags. And the ones that were clinging to life... Doc Kiefer took care of them. I helped in operations. All these other guys did what they could to help people. It was a unified ship and it was two different crews aboard that ship, the Spooks and us. So, we were the idiots and these were the smart guys. And it was too bad. I mean that with all due respect, believe me, all due respect. But these guys here took the brunt of the damage. And you know what, Jaco, they didn't leave the duty stations. They could

• 36:16Speaker 01

  have run out of there. But they stayed there doing their duty and gave their lives for it. And it was inspirational. It just, you think about that and then when the torpedo hit, the torpedo gunboats would come up alongside of us and fire at our firefighters, firefighters, stretcher bears, anybody on deck. They were that close, shooting us, you know what I mean, out of us. And it never occurred to me, as I've said many times, how another country

• 36:55Speaker 01

  or human being could do that to their own supposedly friends and get by with it and then come back and say, have you casualties? Have you had any casualties? Flood all over the decks. Commander Castle was in one of the Israeli helicopters. He was at the shea there in Israel. And he dropped a card with his name on it. And on the back it says, have you casualties? And I thought to myself, my God, how could this, I mean, the guys got to be able to see. And it just, everybody was astounded by that. The captain told the, get the helicopter, hell away from my ship, get it out of here now. And they did. And

• 37:39Speaker 01

  we were all alone. Our country promised us help.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  We expected help. The jet aircraft were called back by Washington, McNamara, and LBJ and all his cronies, including Admiral McCain. He was the commanding officer of European forces, Europe, and he was a huge part of the cover-up. The port of inquiry only went seven days. Seven days it was wrapped up. It was all predetermined what the outcome was going to be. Mistaken identity. They say they paid six million dollars, or ten million, or whatever, and the crew was compensated. They compensated

• 38:22Speaker 01

  most of the crew two hundred bucks for their clothes, or maybe their whatever. But the average was two hundred bucks. The most seriously guys that got wounded, they deserved every penny they got. But it wasn't nothing like they said it was. And it was our money they were given right back to us. So Israel never put out a dime. The United States paid for it all. And they sold our ship for a measly couple hundred thousand dollars. They cut up razor blades to make sure the evidence was gone. But they didn't count on us for fifty-five years telling you guys, hey, you're lying to the American public, and you're

• 39:06Speaker 01

  not going to get by with it. That's why we're here now. America's too great. Too great of a country. It's a service nation, as you well know. You've been there. You know what it's all about. And you didn't get... Nobody turned their back on you, because you had backup, your own men. And you know, to the last man, it's not over till it's over. But it was like that way with us. It's not over till it's over. We're still alive. The ship didn't roll over. And...

• 39:39Speaker 01

  The next day, they got there, and like I say, Massey and the Davis, these guys who were on the ship, just in tears. It was, uh, they hated to see their own shipmates get torn apart like that with no help. Coming to find out, you know, I think the Navy did try to help us, but the government, the higher-ups, wouldn't come to our aid. And it's pretty sad. This one pilot, he's in this film, by the way, I wanted to give you this, Jaco. I think you've seen this, haven't you? I have not seen that, no. Okay, this is Sacrificing Liberty. Go to sacrificingliberty.com. Sacrificingliberty.com.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  This is a four-part series. It is one of the best series that's ever been done, and truthful. It's all about many survivors in this film telling the truth. And it's my great honor and pleasure to give this to you, and I hope you watch it and spread the word, Jaco. Thank you. Thank you.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  One thing that should be noted about the 25 men killed by the torpedo is that they probably would have survived the attack if LBJ hadn't recalled the aircraft. The aircraft were already in flight, probably halfway to the Liberty, and would have driven off the torpedo attack if they had been allowed to continue.

• 41:04Jocko Willink?

  Um, just to give people some more, some more context as to what was actually happening for you guys, your account, Phil, as this is taking place, you say this, "Dead bodies were littered everywhere, but there were also wounded bodies that we knew had to be found and saved if possible. Between volleys of bullets and rockets, we darted out from safe cover, grabbed the wounded men one at a time, dragged them across the deck, and assisted them down the hatch. Others from down below took them from there and moved them to the mess halls where they could be treated. It took us at least 15 minutes to

• 41:44Jocko Willink?

  clear the decks of those who were still alive and could be saved, about 25 men altogether." One of the worst cases I saw was Tom Riley, a boatswain's mate, who was on his back and bleeding from multiple wounds and was covered with gray paint, which might have saved his life since it became a giant bandage.

• 42:05Jocko Willink?

  So that's the, that's kind of the situation that took place where you, that's what you received the Bronze Star for was that action going out into, into the, into the fire to try and recover wounded guys. You continue here, "After all the wounded had been recovered, I went to the log room, the location of Damage Control Central. I saw Ensign John D. Scott there, my superior officer, who is burning documents, the standard procedure in US military. After briefing him and discussing the situation for a few minutes, he ordered me to return to the deck to further assess the damages and put out any fires that were still burning. On the way back, I saw many wounded men, bloody and moaning, begging me for help. But as I had no medical training, there was not much I could do to help relieve their

• 42:48Jocko Willink?

  pain. I got to the bridge and saw Commander McNoggin was badly wounded in the leg, but still in command. Rocket and cannon holes were everywhere and burning napalm was dripping through the holes into the bridge compartment. There were CO2 canisters that were not effective in fighting that kind of fire and I requested a team with water hoses, but that didn't work either since the fire hoses had been shot up just like everything else. I told the captain that I would return with some better equipment to fight the fires and he calmly replied, 'Do what you can sailor.' He was always very professional and stoic, even under these incredibly violent surreal circumstances."

• 43:34Jocko Willink?

  So you have napalm dripping through the holes onto the bridge. I mean, that's just crazy to think about.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  It is crazy. Napalm is, is a war crime, dropping it on, dropping it on us. They weren't, they, they weren't, they couldn't shoot us up, so they tried to burn us up. And the fire is just basically burned out because we couldn't put them out. We didn't have the equipment. COT, CO2 was all gone. Everything was, had been utilized. So it was, we could have gotten water from the engine room. They, they could have pumped us water, but there was nothing we could do with it because the hoses, 99% of them were all, are shot up. They're all gone.

• 44:27Jocko Willink?

  And you have that in, interaction with the cap, Captain McGonigal.

• 44:32Jocko Willink?

  He sounds like a stoic guy.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  One thing I remember about Captain McGonigal and I remember distinctly is when I was in the pilot house, that's where I stayed during 99% of the attack. And bullets were flying and napalm and smoke and all that stuff. He was very calmly walking back and forth, asking for a cup of coffee.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  He says, "Can I have a cup of coffee, please?"

• 44:56Jocko Willink?

  Jeez.

• 45:04Jocko Willink?

  This is, this is just chaos. It's chaos.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  But on our part, it's organized chaos because we were so well-trained, we knew what we were supposed to do, and we did it without thinking.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  That's what all the training was for.

• 45:21Jocko Willink?

  He say this, "On my way to the bridge, I looked at my good friend Francis Brown, a third-class quartermaster who was helping steer the ship. He was one of my best friends on the ship and we hung out together in better times, playing cards, drinking a few beers and joking together. We just locked eyes and communicated silently that we might not make it through this one. I went off to find more CO2 canisters and I ran back towards the bridge, falling in the process, which caused the CO2 canister to fly out of my hands and crash down the deck with a bang.

• 45:53Jocko Willink?

  As soon as I got up, I saw that, I saw what had caused me to slip and fall. It was blood on the deck that hadn't been there moments before when I left the bridge. It was my friend Francis Brown's blood, who had caught a machine gun bullet or a piece of shrapnel in the back of his head and his blood was everywhere.

• 46:11Jocko Willink?

  His eyes were closed, but his face was swelled up like a balloon. It was something that no human being should ever have to see, especially when it's a good friend of yours.

• 46:22Jocko Willink?

  In a little while after going below deck and seeing more scenes like that, I looked, that looked like a slaughterhouse with a cacophony of wailing and desperation in the background. The wounded men kept begging me to help them, and it was frustrating for me not to be able to do that because I had to move them from the passageways and into the mess hall so they could get the medical attention they needed. Finally, the jet attack was over, and I went back to the top deck.

• 46:48Jocko Willink?

  And then saw torpedo boats coming at us at a high rate of speed. And now I saw who it was. The star of David Flags flying above these boats was quite a surprise. And at first I assumed they were coming to our rescue. The delusion only lasted a minute. Because I then saw the splash of several torpedoes that they dropped into the water as they headed towards us.

• 47:15Jocko Willink?

  Did you know they were torpedoes? I mean, did you identify? It seems like that's such a, if I would have seen Israeli boats, I would have thought, oh, they're friendly. Oh, something just went in the water. What could that be? Did you actually know they were torpedoes at that point?

• 47:27Speaker 01

  I, I did, Jaco, because I could see the, uh, uh, trail in the water. I saw the two go aft. I don't know where the other, they're fired, they're say anywhere from five to six torpedoes. The general rule is five, but I mean, five or six, what difference does it make now? But, uh, the two that went aft, I saw those, I didn't, I don't know where the other ones, they could have been aft or forward. But I do know that one, that one did hit and, uh, that's, that's when the ship started listing badly to the starboard side and it just went like this. Well, first the ship was picked up.

• 48:07Jocko Willink?

  This is where, so, so before the torpedo hit, you say the four torpedoes launched almost simultaneously, they had, had they hit us, the Liberty would have sunk immediately and the rest of the world history would have been written quite differently. Those four had miraculously all missed. The fifth one was fired and it was immediately obvious that it could not be outmaneuvered. The countdown began. We were warned to prepare for a torpedo hit and we hunkered down in torpedo attack mode. This meant bending your knees and elbows, putting your hands against the bulkhead and relaxing your neck. And all of that is made nearly impossible as your thoughts of imminent death take over your mind. So there was a time period where the, the fourth torpedo launched, or sorry, the fourth or fifth or whatever it was, there's one that you could tell that it was going to hit you.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:51Jocko Willink?

  Could you see, you could see it in the water coming your way?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  No, I, I couldn't see it. I was below decks, one deck below the main deck.

• 48:58Jocko Willink?

  Were they counting it off on the one MC or something?

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yes, the captain said, uh, uh, prepare for torpedo hit starboard side and.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Then we knew it's just a matter of time and it hit and I was thinking to myself, if, if this ship goes down, I'm gonna go down with it because I'm not gonna get in the water and try to stay alive and let them guys shoot me in the water. I'd better go down with the ship and that was my intention. I was going down, but the ship just, it just miraculously stopped listing.

• 49:36Jocko Willink?

  How, what are you thinking? Larry, as this, as you're hearing the countdown come, starboard side, that's gotta be absolutely horrifying.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  It was and we were internal to the ship. So, I mean, we had no place to run. We were, had been sitting in our, our general quarters positions, doing our job when he said, "Prepare for torpedo attack." And we got off our position, got ourselves up against the bulkhead and squatted down and, and just braced yourself. But, you know, you're not, you're never really prepared for something like that. Um, you just, you don't know whether or not it's gonna hit right where you're at or somewhere else. We were above the water

• 50:25Speaker 02

  line, but, um, we were right against the bulkhead that separated our comm spaces and our P and R spaces, which is the area that the torpedo came into. So, the explosion itself was deafening for us and, um, and like I said, we got blown to the overhead, got concussions and probably the shrapnel wounds that we received after that. Um, but you immediately scramble to your feet to, to try and help your fellow shipmates that are down below. We didn't know how badly the, the torpedo damaged that area, but when

• 51:10Speaker 02

  we opened up the hatch, we could tell, you know, I mean, the water was rising and, and people were scrambling to try and get up the ladder so that they could get out.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  But, um, yeah, it's, it was nerve wracking, absolutely nerve wracking. To say that we weren't scared to death, I think would be an understatement.

• 51:34Jocko Willink?

  Joe, when you heard brace for torpedo impact, where were you, what were you thinking?

• 51:40Speaker 03

  I was on the port wing of the bridge, looking up, make sure the flag was flying. And when I heard that brace for torpedo attack, I just hit the deck. And, you know, not knowing what a torpedo would do, I just felt it hit and I was lifted off the deck just an instant.

• 52:04Jocko Willink?

  Phil, you say in the account, "When the explosion came, it was literally deafening. I'd been directly above the point where it hit, only about eight feet away, and the explosive percussion blew out my eardrums, an injury that never completely heals." We were all instantly airborne because the ship itself was picked up out of the water and then it came back down and bounced back up and down a few more times, nearly capsizing in the process.

• 52:31Jocko Willink?

  The new moaning and groaning was not coming from the wounded men, but was now coming from the wounded ship, as the rush of seawater flooded into the ship.

• 52:41Jocko Willink?

  Since the ship itself did not blow up, that meant the torpedo did not hit the engine room because that cold seawater hitting the boilers would have caused the ship to be cut in half, and both halves would have gone to the bottom within minutes.

• 52:58Jocko Willink?

  And since Scott instructed me to determine where the torpedo had hit, so with Rick Amedy at my side, we went down to the communication spaces where the spooks worked. I banged on the steel door with my fire axe, since I did not have a code to open it, and a voice told me that I was not authorized to enter the spaces. Rick and I told whoever was on the other side to go to hell, saying that we were authorized to go wherever we had to, to keep the ship afloat. I told the person on the other side that if they did not open the door, I would beat it off its hinges with my axe. That's a crazy story. So these guys freaking the ship got hit with a torpedo and you go open up this damn door and they go, hey, you're not authorized.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was crazy. It was really crazy. And when we got down there, we went through the hatch that he closed to make sure everything was watertight and everything. And I grabbed the hatch. It had two different hatches, a big one and then a small scuttle hatch. I opened it up very slowly and I could hear air coming out. So I knew it wasn't water. And I'll be darned if two or three other guys were out there banging, trying to get out. And they, they came out. And what a beautiful sight to see them alive.

• 54:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you say suddenly the door opened. I went to scuttle hatch, to the scuttle hatch and turned it, then opened it very slowly. I heard air escaping in our direction, which meant that the compartment was not completely filled already, but was filling. Just as I opened it, I heard frantic banging on the other side. So I turned the wheel as fast as I could. And Sergeant Bruce Lockwood, United States Marine Corps, came scrambling out while pulling another sailor to safety as well. Ahmeti and I grabbed the two and yanked them out of the hole. Ensign Scott came up carrying a battle lantern and ordered me to give him my belt. I did as he asked, and then he used it to lower the lantern into the water to look and check for any more signs of life. After a few moments, we looked

• 55:00Jocko Willink?

  at each other. And he asked, what I thought. Sir, I said, I think we had better seal her up.

• 55:17Jocko Willink?

  So that's one of those moments where, you know, as a leader.

• 55:23Jocko Willink?

  You gotta make the hardest decision that a person could have to make, which is, we don't know who else is down below. We know that this is filling up with water. And when we seal this hatch, we're sealing their fate. But in order to save the ship, that's the decision that you have to make.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely, it was a very difficult decision, but it was pretty instantaneous. As soon as that decision was made, I mean, it was done. But we would periodically go back and check, listen. But it was all over. Those guys didn't have a chance. It was, well, lucky enough, he got out and many more. But it was just, I mean, to think about 25 of your shipmates down there, and I didn't know how many got killed at that time down there. But to think that they went through that and, what we went through above deck,

• 56:24Speaker 01

  they didn't know what was going on below deck. They didn't have a clue. But like I said earlier, these guys, they didn't abandon their duty stations. And what kind of courage does that take to stay below decks in the CT spaces on the starboard side? And take what they're gonna get? And they did. Brave, brave, wonderful men. And that's why we're here. They're our dead shipmates. They can't speak. But we can speak for them. And we've been doing that forever, trying to get the truth out. But our government wants it sealed to stay sealed, and so does Israel.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Now, again, it's not against the Jews. It's not against Americans. They just got fed lies. And we're here to say, hey, we're eyewitnesses. Are you gonna believe the Israeli version? The Board of Enquirer version, which is a total BS? Or are you gonna believe eyewitnesses like us? Now, I think the American public is smart enough, especially with what's going on in the world now, to see that, how powerful a government can be if they want to silence you.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  It's gotten so bad that the US Navy curator and US Navy historian wrote the official government version of the attack and he based it entirely on the Israeli version.

• 57:55Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 57:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, more people are gonna hear this version than that version. How do you like that?

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Amen.

• 58:09Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the account now, the torpedo boats began firing at us with machine guns, shooting anything that moved, including firefighters and stretcher bearers. One of the guys I was pulling to safety got hit right above the knee with a 50 caliber slug, causing an explosion of blood and bone. I took off my shirt and tied the sleeves around the top of his leg as tight as I could to stop the bleeding. We got him down to the mess decks and untied the tourniquet for just a few seconds, so that they wouldn't be forced to amputate the leg later. Then we retied it before leaving the area. Amedy and I went back up to the main deck and saw that the gunners on the torpedo boats were now shooting at the ship on the waterline, aiming in the direction of the boilers, and from merely 35 yards away. Clearly, they were trying now to blow up the ship by hitting

• 58:52Jocko Willink?

  the boilers and causing a huge explosion that their last torpedo had failed to accomplish. Throughout the course of the torpedo boat attack, they circled the ship like vultures at as close as 100 feet. To suggest that they might have missed the huge lettering on both sides of the bow in 10-foot-high letters, as well as the USS Liberty lettering on the stern, seems impossible.

• 59:22Jocko Willink?

  And you're sitting there seeing these guys just lay into you with 50 caliber machine guns from 100 yards away?

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Yes, sir. And nothing to fight back with. But our will and wits and the pleasure of taking another breath is what kept us all going.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Pretty fortunate to be here, Jaco.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  I saw one of the torpedo boats a lot closer than 100 yards. One of them, I was on the port wing of the bridges. I spent a lot of time out there making sure the flag was flying. And I saw one of the torpedo boats sail very slowly up our port side. I didn't see them fire anything. But I did notice the, uh, crew on the, uh, on the torpedo boat motion up to the signal bridge, up to that area. So they could see the flag. And then they just sail off and continue to attack.

• 1:00:19Jocko Willink?

  How much time had passed between the initial strafing runs from the aircraft to the torpedo attack? And is this an hour's gone by, two hours?

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Two hours, approximately two hours. Some people save more, some people save less. But to do that type of damage and, uh, in, in a few moments, like the Israelis said, it just took a little while. They only, said they had only three aircraft that attacked us. And there was probably 20 aircraft that attacked us to do that kind of damage in that short a time. It's just, uh,

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  when, when you think back, three airplanes can't carry the munitions it would take to put over 850 cannon rocket holes in the ship, drop napalm on us. And it just, it doesn't make sense.

• 1:01:16Jocko Willink?

  So as all this is going on, you say all of the sounds of these machine guns and the sheer hell taking place might have been the reason why there was some controversy of whether Commander McConaugall ordered all crew prepare to abandon ship. But I heard that order probably because he felt that there was no possibility at that point we could save the ship.

• 1:01:42Jocko Willink?

  He was probably not aware yet that nearly all the lifeboats were either destroyed by rockets, gunfire, napalm, that there were only three left and I personally put one of them into the water as I watched all three inflate, only to see them immediately shot up. Two sank, but one of them was taken aboard one of the boats as a trophy. That capped the series of horrors I witnessed that day and told me as clearly as anything else that the purpose of the attack was not just to cripple the ship and take it out of commission so that it could not eavesdrop on communications, but to actually sink our ship. The act of destroying our lifeboats was an unmistakable sign that they wanted no survivors left to tell anyone what had happened.

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  Lloyd Painter testified about that. He witnessed the machine gunning of the liferafts and he testified about that during the US Navy Court of Inquiry. But if you get a copy of the Court of Inquiry, his testimony has been removed, not redacted, removed from the record.

• 1:02:40Jocko Willink?

  What are you thinking when you hear "abandon ship"? What are you thinking about, Larry? Did you hear that call?

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  I did. I was, um, had a secondary duty station at that point. Our, uh, our fantail phone talker had taken a rocket hit, was seriously wounded and he was down in the dispensary. I was back on the fantail as, uh, as phone talker. I had a first-class petty officer, Jeff Carpenter, saw me getting some fresh air while huddled behind a winch and, uh, he said, "Bowen, go back and be the phone talker." And I saw the torpedo boats and

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  when I heard this skipper say, you know, "Prepare to abandon ship," I was, I was thinking to myself, you know, I mean, this, this is it. You know, I mean, they're, they're right there. They can shoot every one of us in the water. Um, you're trying to decide whether or not you, you've got a chance of jumping overboard and, and, uh, swimming for it or going down with the ship like Phil talked about. And of course, I stood my ground and waited. Um, but that was about the same time that I saw unidentified aircrafts approaching from the starboard side and it was... A helicopter.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  And they were coming out at that point to find out whether or not we had any casualties, whether or not they could provide any kind of assistance.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  And so, obviously, we didn't have to abandon ship. But, you know, you're scared to death again. You don't know, you've got nowhere to run. I mean, we were like ducks in a barrel. And they just opened fire and, you know, we had no way to defend ourselves.

• 1:04:49Jocko Willink?

  And you guys mentioned this already, but just to reiterate, there was some heroic activity took place for people, for some of your shipmates to get onto the deck of the ship and string up a long-wired antenna and send out an SOS message. And that actually made it to Sixth Fleet, which was, you know, like I talked earlier about big groups of ships, and you guys traveled solo, but normally the US Navy travels in big groups of ships. So that was, the Sixth Fleet is one of these big groups of ships, had an aircraft carrier and whatnot, and they actually received the SOS that you guys were in trouble, under attack. And talk me through about what you know about how that, how the response, the rescue response,

• 1:05:35Jocko Willink?

  got shut down.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  A very good question.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  We didn't learn for quite a while exactly why and what for. But it just seemed like nobody really cared about us, you know?

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  Nobody, including the President. He's the one that got us into this mess. LBJ, snake LBJ.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  And his minions, but I never thought, I never thought that the greatest fighting force in the world would leave us behind, but they didn't. They wanted to come help us. That's why Captain Tully got fired. They took his command away because he immediately launched aircraft out once but twice.

• 1:06:26Jocko Willink?

  So Captain Tully was someone on

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  USS Saratoga.

• 1:06:31Jocko Willink?

  On the USS Saratoga, they received the signal that you all were in trouble and he said, okay, we got sailors in trouble. We got US Navy ship in trouble. We're going to go help them. And he launches aircraft to go help.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Yes. Before they even, before they even left the horizon of the ship, they were recalled back. Thanks to LBJ and McNabara. And I believe that we were set up from the get go. I don't know if it was a year before, six months before, or whatever. But Frontline 615 was all about 6/5, 6th of June, 15th of, I mean, yeah, 6th of June on the 15th day the war was supposed to start, but they started early. That's why they rushed us out of, out of Abidjan to get to the area just as fast as we could. I mean, that old ship was, was

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  doing as fast. It was shaking. We got, they took the governors off the engines and we were on our way flying. But everybody was apprehensive. We, hell, we didn't even know from the radio signals, I mean, what was going on in the Middle East. But there was a war going on and here we go and we look out and here we are and sailing up and down the coast like we usually did in Africa. That was our only position in Africa was just sail up and down the coast and collect intelligence like everybody else does. But when we got on scene and, and you could see, as Joe mentioned before, the black smoke coming up from, from the attacking forces, Israel's going into the Sinai. It was

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  I thought, well, Jesus, man, I'd hate to be over there. I never knew it was coming to us. And we were the intended target to sink. And in my view, and I think a lot of other guys do, is sink it, blame it on Nassar, and World War III were broken out because the Russian subs were there, ready to, ready to nuke Israel. And they, our government sent bombers to bomb the Arab states, and they were recalled within seconds of a catastrophe, of a nuclear war.

• 1:08:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so I read that as well, that we had launched nuclear weapon armed aircraft as a response to what was happening, and then those got recalled as well.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. Exactly right.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  If you, if you look at the, this tactics used by the Israelis during the attack, they started with unmarked aircraft, or they jammed our radios on both US Navy tactical and international maritime distress frequencies. They used unmarked aircraft, they used napalm to drive the ships crew down below decks, brought in torpedo boats to, with six torpedoes total, luckily only one hit, and then helo-born assault troops. It was obvious to me and most people that their intention was to sink the ship and kill all, any survivors.

• 1:09:50Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of that, the, the helo-born assault troops, here we go. Shortly after the boats left the scene, from far off in the distance but closing in fast, came the unmistakable womp, womp, womp, sound of a very large troop carrying helicopter approaching the ship on the starboard side. Now the 1MC system blared, "All ship's personnel, prepare to rebel, repel borders."

• 1:10:20Jocko Willink?

  So now, after all other weapons were brought to bear on our ship and failed to sinker, we were about to be boarded by Marines armed with submachine guns after the only machine guns on the ship had been destroyed in the wave of first attacks. Even if we could get to them in time, the only other guns that we had on the ship were small arms, pistols and a couple of shotguns that we might use to set up a last line of defense. Amedy and I tried to open the locker with our fire axes, since our master at arms, who was the only one with the key, was not to be found. Even after beating that lock nearly to pieces, we could not break it. The commandos onboard the helicopter above appeared to be ready to rappel onto our ship,

• 1:11:03Jocko Willink?

  ready for close quarters combat with a bunch of defenseless, draggled sailors worn out from two hours of sustained attacks. It would have been a turkey shoot, but we were not about to go down without a fight for our lives. Had they proceeded, they could have murdered the entire crew and then proceeded to use whatever explosives they had to guarantee the ship's destruction. As the helicopter hovered overhead, no more than 75 feet away, I locked eyes with one of the Marines, these are Israeli Marines, who was sitting on the floor of the helicopter. His legs were hanging out. He had one foot on the skid below as he waited for an order to rappel down to the ship's deck and finish us off. As I stood on the deck of my bloody and battered ship, I thought about everything that had

• 1:11:47Jocko Willink?

  happened over the course of that afternoon, about my good friends, Francis Brown and David Skolak, and all the other men whose remains were strewn all over the ship. The only tool I had left was my middle finger, and I used it to let him know what I thought of him and the rest of his team. He simply gave me a smile and returned the gesture.

• 1:12:17Jocko Willink?

  And then they they backed off, right? That's they they they didn't land. They they flew away.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  They just took they just took off, Jaco, and it was

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  it was a a victory for us. Our first victory of the whole mess was them not coming aboard because they they could have easily. In fact, they could have come back that night and got us. And for some reason, they didn't do it because they could have gotten by with it very easily. Oh, okay, the ship broke apart. The Israelis said that Darabs did it. And I think we better go get their Arabs. I think we better just go get them. That's that was the whole is a land grab for Israel and in a power grab for LBJ to keep his war machine going in Vietnam.

• 1:13:09Jocko Willink?

  And it's not like you guys got help quickly. You say this, it's eighteen hours of hell. To call it a long night is a big understatement. None of us slept for two reasons. First, we were afraid of the dark, not like little kids, but rather because we knew that criminals prefer the cover of darkness when doing their dirty work. Those responsible for the previous day's attack might return to the scene of the crime to finish what they had failed to do earlier. Second, we didn't know if the ship would even stay together, although we were not sure of the exact size of the hole in the starboard side. We knew that it was big, very big. There was a lot of work that would be needed just to keep the ship afloat and moving away from the danger zone.

• 1:13:50Jocko Willink?

  And with all the men killed or wounded, only a skeleton crew remained to do this. Those of us who did survive were glad of that, of course, but we all felt an enormous amount of survivor's guilt. Why me? Why us? We asked ourselves silently, why had we been spared while others had not?

• 1:14:10Jocko Willink?

  The dead included two of my good friends, Francis Brown, who was shot in the head with a fifty caliber machine gun round and his brain splattered all over the bridge, and David Scolock, who had who had been with just minutes before the attack. He was also caught in the machine gun fire and had been blown to pieces. Too many to count. I went to the mess deck to see if I could help with the severely wounded men.

• 1:14:32Jocko Willink?

  As soon as I entered, the sheer mass of human suffering moved me so much to emotion that my knees got weak, but I dared not let it show as I went from broken man to broken man, asking what I could do to help him feel more comfortable. What was the total ship's crew?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Two hundred and ninety-four. Two thirds of the crew was either wounded or dead.

• 1:14:57Jocko Willink?

  What were you doing throughout the night, Larry?

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  A little bit of the same that Phil was just talking about, went to the mess decks to, to help relieve the corpsmen. We only had one ship's, uh, officer, you know, or skip, or, uh...

• 1:15:14Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the doctor, the ship's doctor?

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, Dr. Kiefer. And, uh, and then two corpsmen, a second class and a third class petty officer. So, I'm an Eagle Scout, I had some first aid background, uh, not that it was gonna do much for some of the maimed bodies that, that were laying there in the mess decks, but like Phil said, you're, you're there to try and comfort them and, you know, just, just talk to them.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  I was actually, you know, providing some kind of an ointment to their wounds, um, you know, the corpsmen would give me something and say, "Go, go, you know, wipe this wound here," or whatever, um, and, and so I was doing that.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  Didn't get any sleep that night. I think, uh, the main reason was I, I wanted to stay awake in case something happened and that, that bulkhead gave way because we would've had to abandon ship as quickly as we could. I still had my, my life vest on, uh, I wasn't gonna give that up.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  But, um...

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  I was, I was not alone. I mean, there were a lot of us walking wounded. I was, I was wounded, but I didn't realize that I had the shrapnel wounds in my thigh. Um, because your adrenaline is pumping so, so fast that, and you're, you're taking care of others. So I had blood from trying to take care of John Spicer and, uh, you know, working with some of the other wounded that my, my dungarees were just kind of blood soaked. Um, and I didn't find out until, I don't know, I guess a day or two later, when one of the, uh, doctors from

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  one of the other ships was up in the dispensary and they were, you know, evaluating us to determine whether or not we had sustained any injuries. And of course, I had a drop trial and he said, "How'd you get those, you know, scars on your leg there?" I had shrapnel wounds. I said, "I don't know. Must have been during the torpedo attack." Um, but as far as working through the night, we did whatever we could to try and, you know, keep, keep everyone calm. It wasn't chaotic. I mean, they weren't, you know, there might've been some moaning here and there, but it wasn't a lot of screaming and yelling

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  or anything like that. Everybody realized that, hey, that they're, they're still alive and, um, we're gonna get out of this. We kept thinking that we were gonna get some support, but, uh, nothing ever came.

• 1:18:10Jocko Willink?

  What about you, Joe? What were you doing throughout that night?

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  Throughout that night, there's a signalman, I was up on the signal bridge, looking for, uh, ships and, uh-

• 1:18:19Jocko Willink?

  Thinking someone might be coming to help you?

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  Either way.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  And if I saw a light moving along in the sky, I don't care how high up it was, I always had my little Aldis flashing lamp and I tried to signal it. I knew it was futile, but I had to try it. Cause all the other signal lights are destroyed.

• 1:18:45Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the account here from you Phil, as I was doing this Commander Philip Armstrong, the ship's executive officer called my name. I thought that his condition was critical, but he was active and alert and seemingly in little pain. He asked me for a cigarette, so I lit one and put one in his mouth for him. He asked me many questions about the number of dead and wounded and the captain's condition, while I heard the agony of the men all around us. I left him for a few minutes to try and find anything to help comfort the men, and by the time I returned to check on Commander Armstrong, to my great shock and sadness, I found that he had just died. Then I went to the wardroom, the mess hall for the officers. There I saw another one of my friends, Gary Blanchard, enlisted

• 1:19:30Jocko Willink?

  seaman, whose front showed no signs of wound, but he was lying in a puddle of his own blood that seemed to be getting bigger by the second. He asked me to remove his socks because his feet were on fire. I did as he asked. Then he asked if he was going to make it. I could do no more than shake my head no. I always hated myself for not lying to him, or at least ignoring the question and changing the subject. But I did hope that my response allowed him the chance to make peace with his maker before the final curtain. These four men were among the nearly three dozen killed that day, many of whom I'd never gotten

• 1:20:13Jocko Willink?

  a chance to know. I'd met the ship's doctor, I'd met the ship's only doctor there in the wardroom, Dr. Richard Kiefer, am I saying that right? Kiefer. Kiefer. He came over and began to operate on Gary, however it quickly became clear that it was too late. As soon as he opened him up, he then had to put stitches in him to hold him together before Doc moved on to his other numerous patients, all of whom desperately needed his attention. If anyone aboard that ship deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor, it was Doc Kiefer.

• 1:20:55Jocko Willink?

  As time went on, we went about our regular duties now modified because of the precarious condition of the ship. We were still unsure why we had been attacked and by whom. Israeli flags had been seen on at least one boat and the helicopters, but the thought that our friend and ally would do something so treacherous was unthinkable. But nothing was normal anymore, and that thought was the only possible explanation. The brutality, intensity, and long duration of the attack, and the obvious fact that they wanted to kill us all and sink the ship, had become quite clear to all of us. Why else would they destroy our only means of escape by shooting up our lifeboats?

• 1:21:37Jocko Willink?

  As I began to resume my regular duty sounding security and damage control, I realized that my heroic shipmates had saved the ship that day by remaining at their posts while under the attack. I started making my usual rounds, which now included both bulkheads encompassing the CT spaces where the torpedo had hit. The walls, made from plate steel, no more than an inch thick if that, were sweaty from the cool ocean water on the other side. I could even hear the water sloshing around, knowing that if the bulkheads ever gave way, we would all be goners. There were cracks in the steel walls caused by the enormous pressure being exerted against

• 1:22:18Jocko Willink?

  them by the Mediterranean Sea. They were ballooning outward from that pressure, and I feared that the cracks would get larger and larger until they finally would give way. They looked like they were alive and breathing as they heaved in and out with the movement of the ship and the pressure of the water. I got shivers standing in such close proximity to them, knowing that the only thing standing between me and my own death was a plate of steel that was ready to come crashing into the boiler room at any second. That thin steel wall was the only thing keeping the sea water from flooding into the interior of the ship, and if that happened, the ship would have immediately sunk from a huge explosion when the cold water hit the hot boilers.

• 1:23:07Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you're looking at the wall of the ship. You know, on the other side of this wall, and these are like interior walls that aren't meant for the pressure of the external sea.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  No, sir.

• 1:23:18Jocko Willink?

  And you can see them bowing from the pressure.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  They were like balloons, just bowed out, little cracks in the bottom, on the sides. And water was coming through, not a lot, I mean, just sweating, more or less sweating. But we, we got help finally from the US's Davis and Massey, and the Davis crew coming aboard and gave us great assistance and great help in securing the bulkheads with, with wood and plywood. It was a knee wall pressed up against the bulkhead. And you had to, to check it out to every, every half hour, 45 minutes.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  If, if I went on, watched my other shipmates would go through there and get under there like I did and with a battle lantern and look, I mean, I thought to myself, boy, this is pretty stupid. What am I gonna do if it, if it busts open now and I'm here looking for little cracks? Didn't make sense to me, but I had to do it.

• 1:24:24Jocko Willink?

  And your boilers are still running this whole time?

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. The boilers were never taken offline. One was taken offline, but we always had steam to the boilers, always, at least one boiler.

• 1:24:33Jocko Willink?

  What, what direction were you sailing in? Do you even know? Where were you trying to go?

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  North, I think.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Pardon me?

• 1:24:38Jocko Willink?

  Were you trying to get to the fleet? What were you trying to do?

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think once the attack started, I, I think we, we took a northerly course trying to get out of there. Uh, might've even been a northwesterly course, um, trying to get away from those.

• 1:24:55Jocko Willink?

  Just get away from that whole area?

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  But obviously, we couldn't move fast enough to get away from, you know, screaming jets and motor torpedo boats. I mean, flank speed for us was what, seventeen knots or eighteen knots?

• 1:25:12Speaker 03

  I think we did twenty-one knots during the speed trial during, from Abidjan to Rota.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:25:20Jocko Willink?

  And so it was the USS Davis and the USS Massey that eventually showed up. Were you there on this, looking for them when they showed up?

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I saw them come out of the morning mist, sixteen hours later.

• 1:25:33Jocko Willink?

  How'd that feel?

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  Uh, pissed. Like, where were you?

• 1:25:43Jocko Willink?

  And what was the, what was the look on the faces of the guys when they, would they just pull alongside you guys?

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. One of them, well, initially, they sent boats, but I think the Davis actually tied up alongside us for a while.

• 1:25:55Jocko Willink?

  And what were those, what were those sailors, what were they saying?

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  They were, uh, in damage control, and they had more equipment than we did. And to be quite honest, they had more expertise. And they, they were in shock, but they, they knew what they were doing. And God bless them for that. They helped us out a lot. But they, believe me, these guys were so good to us. And it wasn't the Navy's fault. It was the higher-ups, like I said before, because these guys, I mean, they felt bad. They could have been there. They could have helped us. The captain asked for escort, a DE or a destroyer,

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  anything. But you're not a warship. You're an auxiliary ship. Nobody's going to mess with you. And so they denied us even that, just to have an escort. Going into a war zone with an unarmed ship. I mean, it's, it's pretty incredible. That's, that's why I know that, in my heart, and I think my shipmates probably agree too, that

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  We were set up to have this exact thing happen. The only thing is, they couldn't sink us. They sure tried, but they couldn't do it. And that, by the grace of God, we're here right now to be on your great show and to have your listeners take a look at this, because we're not a cabal, we're not a conspiracy, we're not anything. We're just American citizens that served our country honorably to tell the truth. And we'll go that, we'll go down that way till the last man standing. We're not gonna take this. We haven't taken it for so many years. Joe was the first president of the LVA. He was in Saudi Arabia. He worked for Ramco. And he was the president long distance. Remember that, Joe?

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:50Speaker 01

  And it was, it was pretty amazing, but I just give all the credit to the great crew, these wonderful men here. And I love them all. And I'm proud to be an American. But I gotta say one thing. At this point in my life, Jaco, I'm not, I've always been proud of my country. Now, I'm not right now, because I'm ashamed of what's going on, the leadership. And it reminds me of back in 67, the same type of leadership. Counsel Closely just didn't start with these people. It started a long time ago, in 67. They tried to cancel us

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  out, but they couldn't do it. And I've had threats in my life, you know? I've had, a lot of things happen. Me and my wife were in San Diego, visiting. And I was in the lounge, having a drink with my wife, getting ready to go get something to eat. And this guy sat beside me, and he says, "You're aboard the Liberty Gun?" And I said, "Hmm? How'd you know that?" And he began to tell me the whole story. And the best thing for me to do is just shut up. I said, "What?"

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  He says, "Listen, I work for the Mossad. I'm a Mossad agent. And you better shut up." My wife was there too. And boy, did she give him hell. They had to get security to get us up to our room. But I asked the bartender, I said, "Who is this guy?" "Well, he's been coming here the last couple of days." And he said he was a doctor. That's what he told me too. He had a great big watch on. I told him, "Get the watch out of my face. Are you taking pictures of me or whatever you're doing?" And he says, "Probably." But I gave you another warning, and that's when my wife chimed in. And I think she gave me more heck than I did. Because she's a fighter too. But it was amazing.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  And how did they find out who we were in San Diego? Either by my credit cards, or phone, or something. I don't know. But they found us. And gave me a stern warning. And that was 13 years ago when that happened.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  One thing should be said about the sixth fleet personnel. Their radio men didn't come out of this unscathed. Because they listened to our calls for help after the aircraft were recalled, knowing that those aircraft were recalled. And it had to affect them. Because we were still calling for help.

• 1:30:35Jocko Willink?

  I mean, just in case anyone doesn't have the impression of what happened on this ship, let me go back to the account here as this sort of wraps up one of your final duties, Phil. You say, "Rick Amedy and I found some undamaged fire hoses and began hosing off the deck with a suicide nozzle that sprayed water in very concentrated, high-pressure stream. It took both of us to handle this hose because it was like a giant python, and one man could not do it alone. It was the most gruesome, heartbreaking task either of us had ever done. Because every piece of flesh was the remains of our fellow sailors, many of whom were friends.

• 1:31:18Jocko Willink?

  As Amedy and I went about this ungodly task, tears streamed down our faces. And I prayed to God for forgiveness for how we were forced to treat the remains of these men."

• 1:31:32Jocko Willink?

  In the gun tubs, we found a shoe with a foot still in it, which we put aside for collection. Many of the blood stains would not come off, even with that special hose, because of the previous day's intense heat. Not just baking under the sun's heat, but from the rockets and napalm that had been dropped on the ship by the attacking aircraft. We found out the hard way, how hot this brutal weapon can burn. As hot as 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 1:32:25Jocko Willink?

  So, um, the Davis, they also start taking some of your wounded off, right? Is that correct?

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Um, I'm not very clear on that, Jaco, for sure, but I, I do know that the most seriously wounded, uh, were airlifted off the ship from the USS America, uh, and, uh, the, the, the Davis and the Massey were, I guess, more or less there to, to, uh, to help us out. And, but I don't think there's any evacuees that went to the Davis. You don't, it's a US?

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  No, I went to the Little Rock.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  Motorboat.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  That's what I thought.

• 1:33:09Jocko Willink?

  So they, but they did start pulling the wounded guys off? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then you guys end up, um, sailing to Malta. That's the, that's the next thing that you do. I mean, you get to the ship, stays underway, you're, and again, you've got some good stuff in your account. I mean, just that, just that trip is no easy trip, because the walls are, could collapse at any moment. And it's not the closest. Oh, it's not the closest spot? No. Where would have been the closest spot? What would, uh?

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Crete.

• 1:33:43Jocko Willink?

  Crete. Why'd they pick Malta? Hoping we'd sink.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  Further away doing about four knots, five knots tops.

• 1:33:54Jocko Willink?

  How many days did it take you to get there?

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  Seven, I think. Six or seven days, yeah.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  Seven days.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, and then I guess probably, you probably already know this, but Admiral Kidd, I think that's another reason they sent us to Malta, because he wanted to brief us all and get our account of what went on.

• 1:34:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've got, I've got your account of how that goes down. That's, that's very interesting. And actually, I got another account from Ron Kukal. Am I saying that right?

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:22Jocko Willink?

  Ron Kukal. And he's one of the survivors. He's actually the guy that helped put this interview together.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  He did.

• 1:34:28Jocko Willink?

  Um, he's got a book that's called Remember the Liberty that he wrote. Um, and he had this to say about the events once you guys arrived in Malta. He said, "On arriving in Malta, we were headed straight to dry dock, and once we were in, it was up to the great crew at Malta to get us set up for repairs and whatever else needed to be done. What never occurred to me was the grisly duties that we were, that were about to be laid squarely on our shoulders. In my case, as a senior enlisted man on the crew, I was put in charge of recovery and identification. I will admit I tried to talk my way out of this one, but I was told those were my orders and I followed them. That hour arrived sooner than I wanted, as we made our way down to the dark hole below. No one knew what to

• 1:35:12Jocko Willink?

  expect, and I was extremely apprehensive about what we could see. For forty-eight years, I have said little about what I saw because I wanted to spare the loved ones of these men that cruelty if I could. With the writing of this book and in the distance in years, I think I can at least say that the scene could compare to a wrecking yard of autos. But these were human body parts strewn everywhere, carnage that escapes description with mere words. And there were more bodies that were down below which were brought to me to try and identify. Those bodies were wedged between steam pipes and in places that a body wouldn't

• 1:35:53Jocko Willink?

  fit. If it's any consolation to the loved ones of those men, know that they never knew what had hit them. They couldn't have. It had to have been instantaneous."

• 1:36:13Jocko Willink?

  And then, as you mentioned, Phil, once you're in Malta, it's time for this investigation. This investigation is being run by Admiral Isaac Kidd. Actually Admiral Isaac Kidd Jr.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:36:25Jocko Willink?

  The, the, the senior Isaac Kidd, Admiral Isaac Kidd, was killed in Pearl Harbor.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:36:34Jocko Willink?

  And his son, Junior, was commissioned 12 days after his father was killed and he served in Europe in the Pacific Theaters in World War II. And he was the guy in charge of this Liberty Incident Inquiry. And as you already mentioned, I mean, you'd think on an incident like this, just to gather the proper information would take months and then to go through it all would take months, you know, if not years to get through it all. Uh, they get this whole thing done in seven days.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. And you know, Dr. Kiefer

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  very eloquently said, why would the United States government take on faith what the Israelis said? When they muzzled us eyewitnesses, never to say a word about it. Or consequences could be very, very, very severe. Prison or worse. We all know what worse meant. I was told that directly by Admiral Kidd.

• 1:37:33Jocko Willink?

  That, that's the strange thing. So Admiral Kidd shows up, tanks off his rank.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:37:38Jocko Willink?

  And what's he, a two-star at this point?

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, he was a rear, was he a? Rear Admiral. Yeah.

• 1:37:43Jocko Willink?

  So, so he's a two-star Admiral, takes off his rank and sits, sits you guys down, asks you all a bunch of questions. Hey, did you see any markings on the recon aircraft? Did you, did you see any markings on the other aircraft? Did you see the torpedo boats? Were there any markings on the torpedo boats? Did you see the, the, did you see the torpedo boats, machine gunning the life rafts? Are you sure the US flag was flying over the ship? So he's asking you all these questions. And, and at the end of asking all these questions, he puts his stars back on. And he says, okay, fellas, now I'm an admiral again, and I want each and every one of you to understand something. We are talking about national security here, not your personal feelings, not what you did or did not do.

• 1:38:27Jocko Willink?

  I could really give a shit about any of that. You listen to me once, because this is the only time you're ever gonna hear it. You are never to repeat what you just told me to anyone. Not your mother, your father, your wife, anyone, including your shipmates. You are not to discuss this with anyone, and especially, especially not with the media, or you will end up in prison, or worse.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  You know, I, I took that to heart. When I first met Lisa,

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  it'd be thirty-nine years we got married ago, got married in June. And I never told her I was in the military at all, until I read an article by Stan White. Uh, he was a master chief aboard the ship. And it was like a, a ocean of relief came out to me. I, I said, wow, somebody else is saying something. Now I can start talking. And little did I know, these guys here had just set up the USS Liberty Veterans Association, which I became a part of as soon as I found out you guys were, were, uh, you know, getting together. And, uh, it's been a constant battle ever since. We, we were in the Rose Garden, uh, W H Bush was the president.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  And, uh, we were out there for hours in scorching heat. You know how it is in DC.

• 1:39:51Jocko Willink?

  What were you doing there? Were you invited to be there as, as vets of the Liberty?

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  To meet the president of the United States, and he stiffed us.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  He wouldn't talk to us. So, he sent out Brezko, Croft, and, uh, uh, Sununu. Yeah, Sununu.

• 1:40:09Jocko Willink?

  What, what year was it that, that article came out that you said, or what year did you guys start, start talking about what had actually happened?

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  When Jim Anis's book came out, Assault on the Liberty.

• 1:40:20Jocko Willink?

  And what year was that?

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  Seventy-nine. Yeah.

• 1:40:24Jocko Willink?

  So you guys just kept it to yourself for whatever 12 or 13 years not saying anything?

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, who would we talk to? I mean, everybody was spread out all over the country. We didn't know where any of the survivors were.

• 1:40:40Jocko Willink?

  Did you make any sense of it in your own minds? Did you think yourself, well, I could see why they're trying to do this? They don't want to have, you know, bad relations with Israel. They're trying to cover up the the fact that the American government was somehow involved with this. I mean, what were you thinking in your own minds?

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  I was thinking that they'd already held an investigation and and everything was copacetic, but come to find out they have never investigated. As a matter of fact, the Court of Inquiry was ordered by LBJ to have a finding of fact, the very first one, that the attack was a case of mistaken identity.

• 1:41:13Jocko Willink?

  That's what LBJ said?

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what Ward Boston said. He was ordered, he was a legal advisor.

• 1:41:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I got a quote here from Ward Boston, who's the chief legal counsel for the US Navy Court of Inquiry. And he says, quote, "I know from personal conversations I had with Admiral Kidd, President of the Court of Inquiry, that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of mistaken identity, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary," end quote.

• 1:41:48Jocko Willink?

  And that's the chief legal counsel to the Navy Court of Inquiry, to the Liberty Incident. This isn't somebody that's jumping in from some other, you know, some other realm to try and give his opinion.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Well, you know, Ward Boston was a a good man, a very brave man for coming out and setting the record straight. But

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  There were, there were people before him trying to help us, you know, all, all around, but when A.J. Krystal wrote a book called The Liberty Incident, that set him on fire because it was a book of lies and he, he couldn't take it anymore. He says, "I'm gonna stick up for these guys and tell the truth."

• 1:42:33Jocko Willink?

  What did the bu- what did the book The Liberty Incident say?

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  It said that, uh, it was an Israeli talking point and an American talking point. It was a mistaken identity. We're nothing but a, a bunch of disheartened fools that, uh, have, have got an axe to grind. Our only axe to grind is to, to, to tell the truth. That's why we're here. We're not here to, to lie or, uh, fabricate or anything like that. We lived through it and we don't want anybody else to go through that ever again. It has our government abandoned them, you know. Same thing in Afghanistan. They, they left everybody there and all those, there's thirteen people that got, thirteen American heroes that got slaughtered. For what? Forgotten. And, uh, that was us. We were forgotten. It's, it's done. It's too late.

• 1:43:18Jocko Willink?

  Larry, when did you start hearing that people were starting to tell the truth about the situation?

• 1:43:24Speaker 02

  Uh, again, it was the Jim Ennis book Assault on the Liberty. Um, I read the book, but I was still on active duty and I still had my top secret clearance. And so I wasn't saying anything to anybody. And as it turns out, after I retired from the Navy in 1986, I, I went to work as a defense contractor, still supporting the National Security Agency. So I still needed my clearances. So I never said anything. I never really started talking

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  about the liberty to my family or, or anyone else until I started going through PTSD psychiatric, you know, treatments. Um...

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  So I knew that there were other books out. I know that Phil had two or three books that he wrote. Um, the one that you referenced earlier about, uh, Ron Kukel. Um, Phil's also a contributor to that book and Ernie Gallo is, is another member of the crew that helped, uh, you know, with that.

• 1:44:40Jocko Willink?

  How long, how long were you in the Navy for?

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  Twenty-one years.

• 1:44:43Jocko Willink?

  Did you get a Purple Heart for being wounded on the?

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:44:46Jocko Willink?

  And what would you tell people when some other, you know, you're out, you're in your dress whites for whatever reason and you know, 1975, there's, the guys were in Vietnam, sure, some, you know, guys, there's some corpsmen, some medics, some pilots, some aviators might've got Purple Hearts, some, some guys from the Sea Wolves or something, but there's not a lot of Navy guys running around in 1975, 1980, 1985 that had Purple Hearts. What did you say to somebody when they said, hey, where'd you get that Purple Heart from?

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  I was on the USS Liberty in 1967 when we were attacked and, um, you know, I got it for shrapnel wounds. Um, and that was about it.

• 1:45:24Jocko Willink?

  And no one would ever pry and say, you know, what the hell happened, what was going on, how, how'd that occur?

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I, I think a couple of times, you know, people would try and pry more out of me and, um, I just wouldn't say anything. I said, I just can't talk about it. Um, and again, it was because of the threat of fines and imprisonment if we ever spoke about it. Um, being, being a communications technician, all of my work that I did was secret. So trying to keep a secret wasn't, wasn't something that was new to me.

• 1:46:04Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  Um, I just suppressed it to the point that, um, it was building up inside me and finally I had to go to counseling.

• 1:46:14Jocko Willink?

  Did you, how, do you still have your clearance?

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  No. When I, when I retired in 2008, I relinquished my, my clearance.

• 1:46:25Jocko Willink?

  They didn't take it away? They just, you didn't relinquish?

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  Uh, I just, I just decided I was 62 years old. It's, it's time to, uh, pull the plug and, uh...

• 1:46:35Jocko Willink?

  As you were serving in the Navy, now it's 1975, now it's 1979, now it's 1982, and you know that...

• 1:46:46Jocko Willink?

  You know, you know, you got ordered to not say anything, which, look, I mean, there's things that I've done, which I'm not allowed to talk about. And you realize, okay, I might not know everything about the situation, but I know I'm not allowed to talk about it, but I'm sure that there's a reason for that, that makes sense, and I get it. You know, was part of you thinking, you know, we, this is not, this, this, this didn't happen the way they say it happened, this seems like they're covering it up, not for any reasons of national security, but for other reasons?

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, I, because I worked for the National Security Agency, they actually did a report in 1980, that was classified top secret, and it was their recap of what happened to the USS Liberty. I had a copy of that report on my desk, until I retired from the Navy in 1986, and then I had to turn it back in, because it was, you know.

• 1:47:48Jocko Willink?

  Was that report accurate?

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  No, no, and, I mean, there was information that I knew should have been in there, that had to deal with communications, that, that didn't reflect those communications. And, the thing that they were trying to report, more than anything else, was a lack of communications that occurred, resulting from this hundred mile, um, free zone, I guess, that Israel had declared, no, no ship should enter into that hundred mile zone, off, off the coast

• 1:48:29Speaker 02

  of Sinai, um, and, apparently, our naval attaché in, um, in Israel, had told them that, we don't have any Navy ships there. Sixth Fleet confirmed that they didn't have any, any naval ships there, and that's, you know, a problem with us traveling by ourselves, that they, um, they didn't recognize that we were over there, or they conveniently...

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  Forgot that we were there.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:49:04Speaker 02

  But there was communications that were supposed to have been sent to us telling us to move back off the coast and we never received those communications. And so that's more about what this report from NSA said. And it didn't talk about the other intercepts that had, you know, the aircraft talking to ground controller, talking about the target, talking about seeing the American flag. And, um, you know, I don't know why that didn't come out until later, but we kept doing Freedom of Information Act requests, trying to get a lot of this documentation back out in public so the truth could be told.

• 1:49:48Jocko Willink?

  So Joe, what did you do after the incident took place? How much longer were you in the Navy for? Did you stay and what did you do?

• 1:49:55Speaker 03

  I got out, uh, I was transferred off the Liberty onto the USS Silvania. So it is AFS II, Fast Combat Storeship, and homeported in Naples, Italy. And it was a very active signal bridge, one of the most active in the Sixth Fleet at the time. And so I go from signalman school to a ship that doesn't need signalmen, to a ship that has a very, very intense signalman. But after that, I went, I got out Halloween on 69.

• 1:50:36Jocko Willink?

  And same question to you. I mean, were you thinking to yourself, was one of the reasons you got out because you're thinking, hey, this crazy thing just happened to me. I lost so many of my friends and now I'm told I can never talk about it again? Did that impact the way you thought about your career?

• 1:50:53Speaker 03

  Interesting thing about that, um, on the Silvania, there was a, uh, a career counselor. And every time you were getting short, he would call you into his office and give you a long spiel about why you should ship over and stay in the Navy. So he didn't know, he didn't know me personally and didn't know my history. So he called me into his office and sat down and he says, well, Metters, you're getting short. You're thinking about shipping over? And I said, no. And he, and he said, why? He says, because I was on the Liberty. And he said, goodbye.

• 1:51:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Roger, that. So what was the rest of your career like?

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  Well, I, I joined February the 6th and got out December the, uh, 64. And I got out December the 12th, 1967.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  I stayed out for a couple of years and I wasn't going to ship over either because I was done.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  But then, uh, you know, here I'm, I'm 22 then or 23 and I say, man, I'm not, my life's not going anywhere. I'm not doing anything. So I re-enlist and went back to the Navy and I got stationed aboard the USS Maddox, DD, uh, 731. That was in the Tonkin, Gulf of Tonkin. That's how the Vietnam War started. And some of the original crewmates were still on there. They said, hey, Tourney, that, that never happened. That's all BS. It was a pretext for war that Johnson dreamed up. And it, it turned right back around to, uh, the USS Liberty. Uh, another pretext, phony

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  outcome to, to, to keep his war machine going in Vietnam. And it's a land grab for Israel and a, a, a, a permanent foothold in the, in the area for the United States.

• 1:52:47Jocko Willink?

  So you, when you got to the Maddox and, and they're talking about those attacks, those, you know, uh, supposed attacks and the guys would say, yeah, it didn't happen.

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, that didn't happen. That's the way it worked. And, uh, I, I told a couple of guys aboard there, you know, my situation and my, uh,

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  uh, division officer, he, he read my file. And this is when I was getting out and he says, hey, man, uh, maybe you should get out because I was, uh, I wasn't, uh, I wasn't really into it. But I thought, well, maybe I could tough it out. You know, made a few bucks, uh, while I was in the service, but, uh, that's how I was feeding my family.

• 1:53:34Speaker 03

  With your luck, you'd be transferred to the Stark and then Nicole.

• 1:53:40Jocko Willink?

  The, um, as this, as this cover up continues, I got another statement here. This is from

• 1:53:49Jocko Willink?

  This is from Lieutenant General Marshall S. Carter, Director of the NSA, under whose authority the Liberty was operating. He said, "Couldn't be anything else but deliberate. There's just no way you could have a series of circumstances that would justify this being an accident." You know, and as my friend Daryl Cooper pointed out, when this attack happened, once in international law, Geneva Convention, when a naval vessel gets disabled, you're then, as the attacker, responsible for trying to help lend aid to that ship, and certainly the sailors that are in the water, if they're in the water.

• 1:54:30Jocko Willink?

  You're not supposed to be gunning up their lifeboats and strafing the decks of their ship as they're already a disabled vessel. So this is just wrong in every circumstance. You know, I was talking before we started recording this, you know, I've been in friendly fire incidents before. In pretty bad ones, where people died. And I totally understand that there's the fog of war, that these things happen, that you make mistakes and someone sees something that they didn't think they saw, or someone saw something that they didn't think they see. There's all things that, there's a lot of chaos that happens.

• 1:55:10Jocko Willink?

  But to have that happen for hours upon hours, when there's an American flag flying, you know, and, you know, Joe, that was, again, this is something else we were joking about when we were off air. You know, since you were a signalman with no other ships to signal to, you really had one job, and that was to know what was flying, what the ship was flying. And you know 100% that the American flag was clearly visible, and that you actually ended up raising an even bigger American flag.

• 1:55:40Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:55:43Speaker 01

  You know, I might add to that, Jaco. The Israeli war room had us plotted on their map as American and friendly. They said they changed the watch and inadvertently forgot we were there and took us off their war table. I mean, come on, man. You know, when you change watches, you inform everybody of what's going on and they just took it all away and that's, that's still irritates me. I know it does these guys too.

• 1:56:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and by the way, there's no more important piece of information on the battlefield than where your friendly forces are.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:56:22Jocko Willink?

  So this isn't like, we, oh, well, whatever, you know, we're just gonna pull some people off the board. No, that's, that's a sin.

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  And people focus on the flying of the flag. Was it flying? Was it not flying? But that's really, that's not, that's just one of the ways of identifying a ship. You know, there's the color, the structure, how the deck is laid out, you know, the masts and all that stuff. And they claim that they approached within a thousand yards and misidentified us as a forty-year-old black hull, rusted-out Egyptian tramp steamer half our size.

• 1:56:58Jocko Willink?

  JQ Tony Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a US Navy relay station in Morocco that handled communications between Washington and the Sixth Fleet, remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in Washington, ordered Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, commander of the America's Carrier Battle Group, to bring the jets home. When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said McNamara retorted that President Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.

• 1:57:43Jocko Willink?

  End quote.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  That's a violation of Article 99 of the UCMJ.

• 1:57:51Jocko Willink?

  It is indeed. It is indeed. Yes. Article 99 of the UCMJ. You have to go out and attack the enemy and you have to go out and support your other troops. That's Article 99.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:58:10Jocko Willink?

  Statement by CIA Director at the time of the attack, Richard Helms, in a 1984 interview. He said, "Everything possible was done to keep from the American public really the enormity of this attack on an American naval vessel. Since this is, for the agency's record, I don't think there can be any doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing. Any statement to the effect that they didn't know it was an American ship is nonsense." I mean, that's, that's pretty freaking clear.

• 1:58:52Jocko Willink?

  You guys got a bunch of awards for, you know, for what took place, including the Medal of Honor. Captain McConaughey received the Medal of Honor for his actions. Which is strange to take the story of someone receiving the Medal of Honor and not explain what happened.

• 1:59:15Speaker 01

  That was covered up in a naval shipyard. That's where he received his Medal of Honor, was in a shipyard, not at the White House, where he can be recognized for being the skipper of our ship and getting the Medal of Honor, because it brings too much heat on. Unfortunately, I think that the captain was between a real rock and a hard place. On one hand, he can be treated like a hero. On the other hand, he can be treated like a zero. And he went with hero. I'm not saying he didn't deserve it, I'm just saying that he clammed up, and it was years and years later, a hundred years later, he finally said, "Well, yeah, I think it was a, it was a planned attack."

• 2:00:00Jocko Willink?

  That was, I think, there's a copy of his retirement speech, you can watch it online, I've watched it. And I think it was his retirement speech, where he says, "Hey, we need to find out the tru- we need to tell the truth about what actually happened."

• 2:00:12Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. He wouldn't even join the LVA. I tried for years to get him to join, but he says it's too political for him to get involved. And finally, he did join the association after years and years. Wish we were glad to see.

• 2:00:31Jocko Willink?

  Dean Rusk, who was Secretary of State at the time, said, "I was never, quote, 'I was never satisfied with Israeli explanation.' Their sustained attack to disable and sink liberty precluded an assault by an accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels, we refuse to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them now." The attack was outrageous.

• 2:01:00Jocko Willink?

  You know, some of the things that you already talked about, there's a BBC documentary called Dead in the Water. It's, you know, one of the things that it said is what you said earlier, Phil, which is, "Hey, if the Israelis could get the Americans into this war in a big way, you know, that can really help us out against these Arabs," is what Israeli was thinking. And these kind of things happen.

• 2:01:30Jocko Willink?

  What is, what do you guys do with the LVA now? What's, what's the purpose? How can people help?

• 2:01:37Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things that we're still trying to do is get recognition for our 34 fallen shipmates. We've tried over the years to get Congress to conduct a full and impartial investigation, and it's fallen on deaf ears. Right now, we've got a resolution going forward to, to ask for June 8th to be declared as USS Liberty Remembrance Day. It should be a fairly simple thing for Congress to do. I mean, we have National Hot Dog Day,

• 2:02:20Speaker 02

  and National, you know, Ice Cream Day. Let's have a National USS Liberty Remembrance Day.

• 2:02:31Speaker 02

  Not just one year, but every year, June 8th.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  So, we're working on that. I've got a resolution in the state of New York, going through the American Legion up there, to have that presented through their channels. I'm in the process of doing it in the state of Maryland. I'm working with a former Senator Pete McCluskey to get a petition out, to get signatures for people that will support the establishment of June 8th as USS Liberty Remembrance Day, and then present that to various legislators to show them that, hey, the American public wants to know. They need

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  to know, and, you know, if nothing else, you're honoring the 34 men that gave the ultimate sacrifice back on June 8th, 1967. When you talk about some of the awards that were received, most every one of us that received any kind of an award, Purple Heart, or Bronze Star, you know, the Congressional Medal of Honor, it was all done in private. There were no big ceremonies like you would normally expect for, you know, someone with, that just came off the most decorated ship in the United States Navy since World War

• 2:04:04Speaker 02

  II, and, you know, 95% of the American public's not even aware of it.

• 2:04:11Speaker 01

  You know, Jaco, excuse me, but he said something very interesting about the American Legion, which fires me up, because...

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  About four or five years ago, Glenn Oliphant and Ernie Gallo, our former president, were at the convention in the American Legion and they wanted to get a booth and things like this, and they wouldn't allow it for us to get a booth. So Glenn Oliphant, he was so disappointed and upset, he tore up his American Legion card right there and he didn't throw it at anybody, he just sprinkled it right there and the girl said, one of the organizers, "He assaulted me and they threw his ass in jail." Why wouldn't they let you have a booth?

• 2:05:06Speaker 01

  Because they said, "The US has liberty is not essential, we don't recognize you guys and don't ever come back because you're banned from the American Legion for life."

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  This is from their national convention, it's still in effect today, that we can't have a booth. When he's talking about Ernie and Glenn going to that national convention, they went there with the understanding that we had already paid our thousand dollar entry fee and they got there and were told that they hadn't received the check and they hadn't received the check. So Ernie pulled out his credit card and said, "I'll pay for it right now, we're here, we want a booth" and they said, "No, you can't do that" and then I

• 2:06:01Speaker 02

  think it got to be somewhat confrontational and that's when, you know, Glenn got upset, tore up his, you know, his membership card and...

• 2:06:15Speaker 02

  We've tried in vain since then to get senior management in the American Legion National Organization to reinstate us so that we can have a booth there. That's how we tell our story. That's how we get other patriots to, you know, go back to their home states and say, "Hey, let's try and do something in support of the USS Liberty." I wrote up a couple of years ago, resolutions for every state in the Union. This was done at the VFW National Convention, and I had a representative from each state take one of these resolutions

• 2:06:56Speaker 02

  back for their legislators to consider and introduce in their state legislature. And I don't know that anything ever came of it. And that's the problem with a lot of this, trying to get people to stand up and say, "Hey, if you want our support, we'll support you," just like your audience today. If there's people out there that are willing to, you know, pick up the torch and run with it, I'll be more than happy to write up a resolution for any organization that they have and ask them to support the establishment

• 2:07:40Speaker 02

  of the June 8th USS Liberty Remembrance Day.

• 2:07:45Jocko Willink?

  Do you guys have a website?

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:07:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:07:47Jocko Willink?

  And what's that?

• 2:07:49Speaker 03

  USSLibertyVeterans.org.

• 2:07:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think you take care of that, don't you, Joe?

• 2:07:54Speaker 03

  Actually, it's, we have a webmaster for it.

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 2:07:58Speaker 03

  The one I take care of is USSLibertyVeterans.blog.

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. To donate, anybody out there that wants to help the Liberty Veterans continue on doing what we're doing, we're a small organization now. A lot of the guys have already passed on, you know, one of those older guys. We just lost Commander Lewis. He was 92, I think.

• 2:08:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:21Speaker 01

  And he just died this year. And a good man, a brave man. He's also in sacrificing liberty, and I think you're really gonna get a good insight of what went on, Jaco, because it is, sacrificing liberty to me is probably the most interesting.

• 2:08:40Speaker 01

  Truthful documentary that's ever been done, in my view. And I think you would probably agree.

• 2:08:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would. It's, um, you've got eyewitness accounts being taken into account through, uh, through the four different, you know, one-hour disc. Um, so it's, it's not a quick read. You gotta, you gotta devote some time to it. But, uh, it's certainly well worth going through it and, uh, and hearing from probably what, a half a dozen or so of us survivors. Um, and, um, True News did an excellent job on that. I just, uh, I can't say enough about how they, uh, did their research, not just with, with us, but

• 2:09:29Speaker 02

  with other, uh, authors and, uh, I guess, senior politicians. So that, uh, that's, that's the most factual account that I, I'm aware of.

• 2:09:47Speaker 03

  U.S. Liberty survivors are in a unique position in American history and U.S. Navy history. We're the only crew in U.S. Navy history that has the task of lobbying the DOD and Congress to investigate a hack on our ship. And we, we don't have any experience at that. We don't know anybody who does. But we need help from people who do. We'd love to have a, uh, a professional approach us and, and offer his services. We can't pay him. We don't have any money. But we need, we need professional help in, uh, lobbying

• 2:10:28Speaker 03

  and in, uh, in the legal, legal arena. I don't know if, uh, I don't know if, uh, if there's any legal steps we can take. We were in military. We were, and it was our job to, uh, to, uh, go where we're supposed to go and do what we're supposed to do. But there were civilians on the ship too.

• 2:10:47Jocko Willink?

  Do you guys feel like there's been progress towards getting the truth out there? Because to me, I mean, when I hear about the USS Liberty now, I immediately kind of, most people know sort of the underlying story, that it was an attack, it was from Israel, that, you know, the US Navy lost a bunch of sailors, they don't necessarily know how many, but do you guys feel like there's progress been made in this story getting out there and the truth getting out there?

• 2:11:16Speaker 03

  There's progress being made, but not to the extent that people who can do something about it, do something about it.

• 2:11:25Jocko Willink?

  So what is it that, what would be the, the win? What would be victory for you all?

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm sitting in the winner's winner's circle right now with you doing this. I feel like a winner and I think these two gentlemen feel the same way. And I, I want to mention my shipmates, they all know about this and I'm sure they're going to download this and watch it, but a special thanks, you know, to Mo Schaefer and his wife, Donna, he's the money man, he takes care of the money, little we have, and they have a ship store you can buy things from, and it's just our way of trying to give, give back the real story. And in the last three or four years, Jaco, we've made more progress than we have in

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  the last 55 because of sacrificing liberty, and now here we are with you, and possibly Joe Rogan is going to get a call from you and say, hey, you better get these boys on.

• 2:12:22Jocko Willink?

  I could try. That's a long list of people trying to go on, on, on Mr. Rogan's podcast, I can guarantee you that.

• 2:12:33Speaker 03

  Well, a win for me is a congressional investigation.

• 2:12:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  Complete and comprehensive, redundant to be sure, but it needs to be said, congressional investigation, but that's a two edged sword because members of Congress have refused to investigate the attack on our ship.

• 2:12:55Speaker 03

  War crimes is a US statute. Accessory after the fact is a US statute.

• 2:13:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:13:03Speaker 03

  So, members of Congress who were in a position to conduct an investigation refuse to, despite being lobbied by victims of those war crimes, might stand accused of being accessories after the fact. And I don't think accessories after the fact is covered under congressional immunity.

• 2:13:22Jocko Willink?

  So, there's some scared

• 2:13:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:25Jocko Willink?

  Congress people out there.

• 2:13:27Speaker 01

  There's some statute of limitations on murder. None. And that's what happened. They murdered these men and tried to murder us. I mean, you know, I called the FBI and CIA and I tell them, hey, I'm an eyewitness to murder, and they get all excited. Till I tell them what it's all about, and they say, well, that's, that's, no, never mind, that's already been investigated. We've never had an investigation, except the phony Board of Inquiry, and we got letters back from Congress, some over in the earth, that I brought to show you. There's been multiple investigations, there's never been none. They're lying to us, we're eyewitnesses to what happened, and they're telling us, we've been, it's been a congressional investigation at least three or four times, or it's never

• 2:14:12Speaker 01

  been a congressional investigation. They lie to us, what do you think they're telling the American people?

• 2:14:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Probably a good place to wrap it up. I mean, that sounds like we know what we want to do to move this thing forward with the congressional investigation, get the word out there. Let's make June 8th, you know, National Day of Remembrance for the USS Liberty. Larry, just any closing thoughts from you?

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  No, I just encourage your listeners to, um...

• 2:14:45Speaker 02

  You know, take what we've said today, and if they have any interest at all in trying to support the liberty, go to our website, contact us, you know, our contact information is on the website, and like I said, I'm willing to draft resolutions, or petitions, whatever they want, for their organization to get signatures to take before their legislators, and try and get support for this recognition for our fallen shipmates that should have happened 55 years ago.

• 2:15:29Speaker 03

  Indeed. On our blog, there's a USSLibertyVeterans.blog, there's a tab that says, I think it's Help Us Out, and in that tab are a series, I think, four letters that you can write to, you can just fill in the blank and submit. One is calling for a, have a member of Congress send you a copy of the Congressional Investigations, and they can't do it. One is asking them to contact the Congressional Research Service and ask them to, has the US government investigated the attack, and we got a response from one, I've been trying for years, and one finally actually asked the Congressional Research Service, and he said, "No."

• 2:16:13Speaker 03

  Another one asks for Congress to allow their boilerplate responses to members, to constituents who write asking about the attack, "Stop using Israeli talking points, use USS Liberty survivors' talking points," and, you know, it's an easy way to, for them to get involved. And then when they get the responses, send them to us, and we can draft a response for them to send.

• 2:16:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep, that's the old, the old letter writing campaign.

• 2:16:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:50Jocko Willink?

  Let's get, let's get them that way. Anything else, Joe?

• 2:16:53Speaker 03

  I think that's it.

• 2:16:55Jocko Willink?

  Phil, any closing thoughts?

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  Yes, in closing, I encourage your listeners and watchers, it'll download this, share it with everybody, pass the word around. Write your senators and congressmen and let them know that the real deal is that you've, you've been lying about this all the time and we know it. But they don't want to come back and tell them, tell everybody that they're liars anyway. I mean, it's gonna be hard. I mean, the Congress and everything, it's gonna take the people, people, your listeners to help us out. People that, that watch Sacrifice of Liberty, go to sacrificeofliberty.com. And God bless you for having us on. You're, you're a good man and all of you, I appreciate it so much. God bless you.

• 2:17:36Speaker 03

  And one thing I forgot to mention, since your blog is posted on your YouTube site, there's a comment section. And we'd, we'd be happy to enter into a dialogue with anybody on that, on that comment section, whether they're pro-Israeli, think they're pro-Israeli, or on the US side.

• 2:17:57Jocko Willink?

  The comments will definitely be there.

• 2:18:00Speaker 03

  Okay. Good. We look forward to it.

• 2:18:02Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks for coming. You know, that these, these, the conjecture and the mystery around all these events, they're, they've been around for a while, but I think there's one thing that there's absolutely no mystery about and one thing that cannot be disputed, and that's the courage and the valor and the sacrifice of the brave sailors of the USS Liberty. So, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you all personally for your service and your sacrifice, and we won't forget what you did for the country and nor will we ever forget the memory of your 34 shipmates who

• 2:18:41Jocko Willink?

  gave their lives and who embodied the Navy ethos of honor, courage, and commitment. We commit to not forgetting their sacrifice.

• 2:18:54Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:18:55Speaker 01

  Thank you, yes.

• 2:18:56Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for coming, guys.

• 2:18:57Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 2:18:58Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Joe and Larry and Phil have left the building. Echo, did you know anything about the USS Liberty prior to today?

• 2:19:07Speaker 04

  Oh, I have heard things. I'm not...

• 2:19:12Speaker 04

  At the end of the day, no. Let's say there's level five knowledge. I was at level point five.

• 2:19:17Jocko Willink?

  So you knew it existed, but you didn't know too much about it?

• 2:19:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, like when you, I, when you said that they were coming on and you said the USS Liberty, I was like, I was like, okay, it wasn't like just in the dark. It wasn't a shot in the dark for me, no.

• 2:19:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so it's too bad more people don't know about it. And I'm glad that they were able to come on and, and share the story. And it just, you know, just really, it is kind of crazy. And I think we've done, I've done some, you know, obviously, we've done some podcasts about, well, about McNamara for sure. And I'm not a, I don't like McNamara. I don't like the way he led. I don't like the way he did things. And so this is just like another nail in the coffin for McNamara, from my perspective, to, to know that, you know, he was one of the people that allowed this stuff to happen.

• 2:20:14Jocko Willink?

  And LBJ, the same thing. President Johnson, same thing, you know, President Johnson. It just shows you the level of kind of corruption and ineptitude that the leadership had. And, and what's, I don't really, what really bothers me about it is, you know, if someone's not capable and they end up in a position, you're like, you know, if, if Echo, if you're supposed to be doing something and you don't have the capability of doing it,

• 2:20:44Jocko Willink?

  I'm probably not, I'm not gonna be mad at you, you know, I'm not gonna get mad at you. But if you're capable, but you're doing things a certain way for, because you think you're smarter than everybody else, or you think you can outsmart the, the American people, or you think you can outsmart, you know, your, your boss or whatever, and you, you, you're trying to maneuver, I'm gonna have a problem with that. So I'm gonna have more of a problem with, I actually have a lot more of a problem with someone that's just, hey, Echo had this idea, this is what he thought was gonna happen. It didn't go that way.

• 2:21:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay, you know, got it. He's not capable of doing it. He didn't understand the situation. Like, he can't get mad at someone's lack of ability to do something. But if Echo was smart, and you were in there, and you made decisions that actually made things go a certain way.

• 2:21:35Jocko Willink?

  That's gonna make me mad and that's how I feel about McNamara and Johnson and so there you go.

• 2:21:40Speaker 04

  So what, okay, so governments claiming mistaken identity, they're claiming what like what exactly, what's the explanation?

• 2:21:52Jocko Willink?

  There are several explanations, the main thing that what the, what the government says, I shouldn't say it's all the government, because not all the government says this, this cover up at the time was, hey, it was mistaken identity, it was a, you know, unfortunate incident, the Israelis said, sorry, we're carrying on with our mission. There's two, there's two real explanations, one of them is that, hey, the Israelis didn't want Americans listening, so they attacked the ship. And there's one that is, the Israelis wanted, they wanted America to enter the war and

• 2:22:33Jocko Willink?

  they knew that America would enter the war if one of the American ships was attacked by these Arab forces. And so they tried to do it in such a way that, because you wouldn't think the Israelis would do that, I mean, that's like crazy, right? Those are our actual allies, so how could this happen? It must have been the, you know, it was obviously the Arabs, there's no survivors, the ship is sunk and gone. We better go pay the Arab nations back for sinking our ship. So is it out of the question that people do that kind of thing? Not at all, not at all, false flag attacks, like that's a literal false flag attack, so.

• 2:23:16Jocko Willink?

  And look, I don't really even know how debatable it even is. You know, like this is, the Israelis have admitted that they attacked the ship, they've said, hey, it was a mistake.

• 2:23:31Jocko Willink?

  We're sorry, it wasn't that long, it wasn't that bad, we didn't shoot up, there's, there's some where they directly conflict with, no, we didn't shoot up the lifeboats, the lifeboats, they say they didn't do that. So, they're, they, they kind of claim it, they kind of downplay it and claim it as a mistake. That's sort of the cover up. The cover up is downplay it, it was a mistake. The reality is, at least, at least admit the full extent of what happened. And then on top of that, was it intentional? Did you actually want to do this to drag Americans into this war? And then, if you wanted to do that, and the people that called off the support to the vessel are Americans, you knew about it.

• 2:24:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:24:16Jocko Willink?

  So, that's why these guys are calling for a full congressional investigation. A congressional inquiry to figure out exactly what happened. So people can be held accountable. And not only so people can be held accountable, but so you can look back and say, hey, here's the mistakes that we made. We put too much power in this position, we, we allowed our allies to do too much, we didn't run through the chain of command, like, there's a bunch of things that you can learn from it. And to not break it down with a inquiry like that and find out what actually happened, I mean, a seven day inquiry, I mean, Phil brought in a stack of papers, he's got all kinds of information about this. You couldn't even cover that information in seven day inquiry. So.

• 2:25:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's it. You kind of, in a way, draw the line in the sand when you start like lying and then telling people to be like, hey, you're not allowed to talk about this or whatever, then it's like, okay, no.

• 2:25:12Jocko Willink?

  And even that, I, you know, as I said on the podcast,

• 2:25:16Jocko Willink?

  there are some things for national security where this is what happened and you can't talk about it anymore. Hey, all the SOG guys weren't allowed to talk about the secret war for 20 years. That's what actually happened. They signed a paper and said they couldn't talk about it. Those are, that's classified information, you're not allowed to talk about it.

• 2:25:34Jocko Willink?

  What's what makes it disturbing in this one is it doesn't seem like the national security in a straightforward manner was in jeopardy. What was in jeopardy was the relationship with Israel, the political standing of, because if, let's face it, if the America would have found out that somehow our own government was involved in attack on one of our own ships, like that's game over for the entire administration.

• 2:25:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:25:57Jocko Willink?

  So what are they gonna do? Hey, don't say anything to anybody. To protect their own ass. And this is not beyond a guy like Johnson and not beyond a guy like McNamara.

• 2:26:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so these politicians that think they're smart.

• 2:26:18Jocko Willink?

  Um, horrible stuff, so if you want to support them, you can go to USS Liberty Vets, Liberty Veterans, USSLibertyVeterans.org or USSLibertyVeterans.blog. That's where you can go to support them. If you want to get a bunch of more information about it, there's a movie that Phil pointed out, Sacrificing Liberty. So check out that movie. Also, Phil's written a couple of books, one of them called Holocaust on the High Seas by Phil Tourney. The other one is called Erasing the Liberty. The Battle to Keep Alive, the Memory of Israel's Massacre on the USS Liberty.

• 2:27:00Jocko Willink?

  So there's two books you can pick up that were were written by Phil Tourney, who you heard talking today. As far as the podcast goes, as far as you go, really?

• 2:27:12Jocko Willink?

  If you want to support the podcast, you want to support yourself, check out, check out some JacoFuel.com.

• 2:27:18Speaker 04

  It's true. Finally, you have some healthy supplements, not with the uh.

• 2:27:24Jocko Willink?

  Negative side effects.

• 2:27:25Speaker 04

  Negative side effects, yep. Finally, oh, what was, what's the contest we got going? We've got some contests, it'll probably be over by now, but.

• 2:27:32Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, it's like the battle of.

• 2:27:34Speaker 04

  Battle of the flavors.

• 2:27:35Jocko Willink?

  Battle of the flavors. We're giving someone a year's worth a go. What is that, one go a day? You think?

• 2:27:41Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:27:41Jocko Willink?

  That's a lot of go, man.

• 2:27:43Speaker 04

  Yes, that's a lot of go.

• 2:27:45Jocko Willink?

  That's a lot of go.

• 2:27:46Speaker 04

  Yes, sir. Uh, yes. Also, yeah, some good tasting protein. This is all stuff that is gonna keep us really on the path. Really. I've been on the path. We had a birthday party this past weekend.

• 2:27:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. I didn't make it.

• 2:27:56Speaker 04

  Slipped off the path a little bit.

• 2:27:57Jocko Willink?

  What'd you, what'd you do?

• 2:27:58Speaker 04

  Some cupcakes.

• 2:27:59Jocko Willink?

  Cupcakes. I don't like cupcakes. Matter of fact, I don't really even like cake.

• 2:28:02Speaker 04

  No cake, huh? Okay.

• 2:28:03Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:28:04Speaker 04

  What's the jam?

• 2:28:05Jocko Willink?

  Dry. Tastes dry to me.

• 2:28:07Speaker 04

  So what's your jammer? Actually, I already know this. I know the pigs in a blanket situation. I know you like that.

• 2:28:13Jocko Willink?

  That's a good one.

• 2:28:14Speaker 04

  But what about dessert? Oh, uh, chocolate, uh, mint chocolate chip ice cream.

• 2:28:18Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:28:18Speaker 04

  We did have that too, by the way.

• 2:28:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Did you buy that case I showed up? Was that a little, trying to tempt me? Trying to bring me down?

• 2:28:25Speaker 04

  No, my kids like that one.

• 2:28:26Jocko Willink?

  Trying to negatively impact my life? That's what you're doing?

• 2:28:28Speaker 04

  You know?

• 2:28:29Jocko Willink?

  I would've just had a mulk, a mint mulk.

• 2:28:31Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:28:31Jocko Willink?

  Which is equivalent.

• 2:28:33Speaker 04

  No, but you do a good slash bad job of eating, uh, these cakes and whatnot if the kids are around and they wanna have something with you.

• 2:28:42Jocko Willink?

  What do you mean I do a good bet slash bad job?

• 2:28:44Speaker 04

  Because you do a good job bonding with the kids, but meanwhile you're slipping on the path. It's like, what do you call it? Tactical.

• 2:28:50Jocko Willink?

  Little catch 22, little tactical sacrifice for a strategic win?

• 2:28:54Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:28:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and then you're teaching your kids how to eat cake.

• 2:28:56Speaker 04

  I know.

• 2:28:58Jocko Willink?

  There's a, there's a, there's a saying in the, in the, I don't know, it might be the whole Navy, but it might be the whole military, but we'd say like, let them eat cake. You know, so that, so we call the officers cake eaters.

• 2:29:09Speaker 04

  Oh, damn. Okay.

• 2:29:11Jocko Willink?

  So you're a freaking cake eater. So I wouldn't eat cake. It was like a thing. Like I wouldn't eat cake. Kinda like now I don't eat donuts.

• 2:29:18Speaker 04

  Right, right. Like out of the principle.

• 2:29:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just out of principle. I'd probably never be able to have a donut again for the rest of my life. Cause there's gonna be someone with a 600 millimeter telephoto lens and I'll be on the cover of the freaking National Enquirer. Jocko's a liar.

• 2:29:31Speaker 04

  Yep. It's true. Very possible.

• 2:29:32Jocko Willink?

  So no donuts over here, but we will have some mulk. We will have some joint warfare, some super krill. JockoFuel.com. You can get the stuff at the vitamin shop. You can get the drinks at Wawa. We got some, um. We got ready to drink protein shakes coming.

• 2:29:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:29:48Jocko Willink?

  Which is a kind of a game changer, right? When you just roll into a store, you're hungry.

• 2:29:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:29:52Jocko Willink?

  You need that, you're, you're starting to go catabolic.

• 2:29:55Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:29:56Jocko Willink?

  And you need that little hitter.

• 2:29:57Speaker 04

  Yep. Plus it's a perfect mix, you know?

• 2:29:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:59Speaker 04

  It's insured, the perfect mix.

• 2:30:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's just good to go. So we got those coming shortly, so. Yep, jockofuel.com, check it out if you want to check it out.

• 2:30:07Speaker 04

  Some good stuff on there. Also, American-made stuff, American-made denim, some hunting stuff coming.

• 2:30:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:14Speaker 04

  Face it, the hype around that is significant. Yes, sir.

• 2:30:18Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's a big deal to make stuff in America. I actually saw somebody commented on one of the YouTube videos and said, yeah, but what do you do when stuff's made in America, but the components are from overseas? Our components are not from overseas.

• 2:30:32Speaker 04

  No, sir.

• 2:30:32Jocko Willink?

  Our components are from America.

• 2:30:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:30:34Jocko Willink?

  The, the materials made in America, grown, the cotton.

• 2:30:38Speaker 04

  Cotton, the components for the components is made in America.

• 2:30:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what we're saying. So, yeah, when you go to Origin USA, you are supporting, not just Origin USA, you're supporting the entire, the entire supply chain that runs down to the fields in Texas, the fields in South Carolina, the factories in South Carolina, the mills in South Carolina, it's, it, you're feeding the entire system by supporting Origin USA. So check out originusa.com.

• 2:31:08Speaker 04

  And you're not supporting uniquely affordable labor.

• 2:31:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, slave labor. Wait, was that, is that the new euphemism? Uniquely supportable?

• 2:31:17Speaker 04

  Uh, I think that's what they called it on the thing that I watched.

• 2:31:21Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:31:22Speaker 04

  Uniquely affordable labor.

• 2:31:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we call that slave labor.

• 2:31:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:31:26Jocko Willink?

  That's what that's called.

• 2:31:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:31:27Jocko Willink?

  And we don't do it.

• 2:31:28Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:31:28Jocko Willink?

  We have awesome workers, American workers, that are doing a great job and get, and have skill.

• 2:31:36Jocko Willink?

  And bring it to the table every day and work their ass off to make these products. So there you go. OriginUSA.com. Check that out.

• 2:31:42Speaker 04

  Also, you want to represent, you want to wear, we got some good shirts. We have, we have a new shirt. We have all new stuff coming.

• 2:31:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 2:31:48Speaker 04

  Very soon. Just when it goes freedom shirts.

• 2:31:52Jocko Willink?

  New designs?

• 2:31:53Speaker 04

  New designs.

• 2:31:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really? You went ham, huh?

• 2:31:56Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I figure that we all kind of wanted a little bit of an update, you know, still, still, uh, consistent, I would say, but a good one. Anyway, jocko store.com. That's where you can get your shirts and hats and hoodies and merch. If you want to represent, it's a good spot.

• 2:32:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, look at that guy with the merch.

• 2:32:12Speaker 04

  It's true.

• 2:32:13Jocko Willink?

  What's the, has the, has the latest shirt locker shirt that I designed on the market yet? Is it out there?

• 2:32:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:32:21Jocko Willink?

  So people had it, have had it delivered?

• 2:32:23Speaker 04

  March, yeah.

• 2:32:24Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of, that's kind of cool that they have no idea what's coming and it just shows up.

• 2:32:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:29Jocko Willink?

  And it might be super dope.

• 2:32:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:32:31Jocko Willink?

  In this case it is.

• 2:32:32Speaker 04

  Recently, apparently, according to the field, so every once in a while, those who have my phone number or on Twitter or the gram, they, um, they'll send me a picture of them with the shirt on and they, they will say, you nailed it with this one or whatever. And I've been getting a lot of those recently for the past three months.

• 2:32:53Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 2:32:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:32:54Jocko Willink?

  Three months of consistent goodness.

• 2:32:56Speaker 04

  Consistent goodness.

• 2:32:57Jocko Willink?

  From EC.

• 2:32:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:32:58Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so yeah, check out the shirt locker there. Uh, subscribe to this podcast. Don't, don't forget about Jock Underground. Jockunderground.com. We've been doing, we've been doing a lot of Q and A on there only because we have a place where people that are members of jockunderground.com can email. So we've been going through all those questions. And yes, at some point we backed off doing Q and A on this podcast, probably because the questions were overwhelming in numbers. So now we kind of narrowed that down. That's one of the things that we're doing on jockunderground.com. If you've got a question, you can email it there. It costs eight dollars and 18 cents a month.

• 2:33:34Jocko Willink?

  That's how we keep it up and running. That's also our escape hatch if we get banned or censored or deplatformed for whatever reason. And if you can't afford that, we still want you in the game. You can just email assistance@underground@jock [email protected]. So check that out.

• 2:33:53Speaker 04

  Also YouTube, we do have a YouTube channel, video version of podcasts. Yeah, check that one. Also, Origin USA, Origin HD.

• 2:34:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:02Speaker 04

  That's a good YouTube channel as well.

• 2:34:03Jocko Willink?

  That is a good YouTube channel.

• 2:34:05Speaker 04

  How an American company from top to bottom is run. Very interesting now.

• 2:34:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Psychological Warfare, you can check out Flipside Canvas. We got, we got Dakota just, just out there getting after it in 74 different directions, which is awesome. He doing all kinds of stuff. He's got a gym. He's a firefighter. He's a pilot, a helicopter pilot. So Dakota Meyer, he's got another business, which is called flipsidecanvas.com. And you can get cool stuff to hang on your wall there. And for books, look, the books I just mentioned, Erasing Liberty by Phil Tourney. We got his other book Holocaust on the High Seas. There's also a book called Remember the Liberty by Philip Nelson and Ron Kukal, which I, Ron put this podcast together

• 2:34:55Jocko Willink?

  today. I mentioned him. So you can check out his book. Also, speaking of doing a bunch of different things, we got Jocko Publishing and Jocko Publishing has published some books, published Mikey and the Dragons, published Way of the Warrior Kid, three and four. Also, Holly McKay, she wrote a book called Only Cry for the Living. And right now, so she's been in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. She's a war reporter. Right now, she's on the ground in Ukraine. She was in Kiev today. So check out Holly McKay. And if you want to support her, get her book, Only Cry for the Living. You can get that at jockopublishing.com. Or you can get it on

• 2:35:40Jocko Willink?

  Amazon or whatever. So then you got all the books that I've written. I think there's some kind of a special coming out on Final Spin. Some kind of special on this Amazon. Leadership Strategy and Tactics. You know all my books. Check those out if you want to.

• 2:35:56Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate it. Echelon Front, that's my leadership consulting company where we solve problems through leadership. Leadership is the solution. We just sold out the Texas muster.

• 2:36:07Jocko Willink?

  So if you want to come to a muster, if you want to go to any of our events, just go to echelonfront.com and check out the details of what we do, how you can utilize us to help your company. We also have Extreme Ownership Academy, extremeownership.com. Speaking of asking me questions, come on there and literally ask me a question. I'll be on a Zoom call on Monday and you can ask me whatever you want. I'll be on there the next Monday. I'll be there on Wednesday. I'll be there on Friday. Come and check it out. There's a bunch of courses you can take. It's just, it's a really powerful platform. Check out extremeownership.com if you want to help in your life. Look, it's not like, oh, you're a leader and you're in charge of 1,400 people, or you're a leader, you're in charge of seven people. You don't have to be in charge

• 2:36:49Jocko Willink?

  of it. You're in charge of your own life. And if you want to learn about how to better lead your own life, go to extremeownership.com.

• 2:36:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like, and this might be just me, could be everybody, but I feel like when you hear the word leader, it kind of comes from when you're a kid and it's like, follow the leader, like me, the boss, everyone follow me, kind of a thing, physically, like actually, literally follow me, whatever. But as it turns out, it's like essentially the ability to make the right calls and the right decision in every situation, even if you're by yourself, by the way. So yeah, it's like, it's almost like leader might not even be the most best word to say it that'll land on your brain the way the reality is.

• 2:37:36Jocko Willink?

  Almost like learn how to live your life in the best possible way.

• 2:37:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:37:43Jocko Willink?

  Check. If you want to live your life in the best possible way, you want to learn how to make decisions, what decisions to make, because that's where your life is, a series of decisions. How are you doing that? How are you mitigating risk? How are you figuring out where to take chances? How are you figuring out where you need to reinforce certain parts of your life? How are you figuring out how you're going to interact with this person that has a huge part in your life, whether you want them to or not? All kinds of things to learn. That's allextremeworship.com. If you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, Gold Star families, everybody that has served, if you want to help them, go to Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also,

• 2:38:24Jocko Willink?

  don't forget about horses and heroes. No, heroes and horses. I always get that one backwards. The horses come first in my mind. The heroes should come first. Heroesandhorses.com. Micah Fink doing awesome stuff with his charity organization. Echo and I, if you want to hear more from us, then you can go on the social media. Of course, Surgeon General Warning, watch out for the algorithm, because it's getting ready to grab you by the troat and try and drag you in there. Echo's at Echo Charles. I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Joe, Larry, and Phil for your service and sacrifice. And thanks to all the

• 2:39:04Jocko Willink?

  sailors of the USS Liberty, especially those 34 brave souls who sacrificed their lives for their shipmates. And thanks to all the rest of the sailors out there from the world's finest navy that are on the high seas 365 days a year, protecting the cause of freedom around the world. And thanks to the rest of our military that fights on the land and in the air to protect our way of life. And also to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all

• 2:39:45Jocko Willink?

  first responders who protect us here at home. Thank you for what you do. And to everyone else, you never know what you're going to run into. You never know what's going to happen. You never know who is going to attack you. And these guys talked about it today. They were prepared. They were ready. They were vigilant. So when something unfolds, you are prepared like they were to behave like they did, the brave sailors of the USS Liberty. And don't ever give up. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.