462: Leadership and Social Connections in Modern Warfare. With John Spencer

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe John Spencer is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies w the Madison Policy Forum. 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 462 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. I received a text from Lieutenant Shockley. Have you heard what happened at ER? You better call the talk. After calling the battalion to see what was going on with Alpha Company, I was given orders to get on the first convoy I could find and get to battalion headquarters. I got on a resupply convoy that was leaving at 2,300 hours. On arriving at battalion headquarters, I went directly to the battalion commander's office. He informed me that I would be taking command of Alpha Company immediately, only a few days after starting inventories. Normally, a few weeks were allowed for a command transition to take care of all the administrative accountability.

• 0:42Jocko Willink?

  The IRAM attack had been the last straw of many blatant deficiencies in the company commander's competency as an officer, let alone the commander of a unit in combat. The battalion commander's only real instructions to me were to fix it. Fix it, all of it? He said Alpha Company needed a strict hand. He also gave me the ability to fire or remove every person in the company, except the first sergeant. Dismantle entire platoons if you need to, he told me. The first sergeant was one of the problems that I wished I could remove, but I was stuck with him. Maybe I could bring him in line and get him to understand my leadership style.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  Near midnight on July 8th, I was dropped off at the JSS by a logistical convoy, and as my boots hit the ground, I immediately took command. The old commander was long gone. I unceremoniously assumed wartime command of a mechanized infantry company, just what I had wanted, but not in this way or under these circumstances. When in command, take command.

• 1:55Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is a little excerpt from a book called Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern Warfare. It's written by a gentleman by the name of John Spencer. John Spencer served as an active duty soldier for over 25 years, went up through the ranks from private to major, and he served in combat as both a platoon commander and a company commander. He's currently the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and also serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Madison Policy Forum, and is a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare. He's written dozens of professional articles,

• 2:36Jocko Willink?

  journal articles, case studies, contributed to multiple books, and he has written three books of his own, Understanding Urban Warfare, which is adopted from his podcast, which is called The Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He also wrote this book that I read from Connected Soldiers, and finally, The Mini Manual for the Urban Defender, which went viral when Ukraine kicked off, and it's now viral throughout the world. And it's an honor to have him here with us tonight to pass on his knowledge and lessons learned. John, thanks for joining us.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Thanks, Jocko. The honor is mine.

• 3:13Jocko Willink?

  You know, when you're going into a working group in subterranean warfare, that's when you know you're dialed in. That's when you're in the mix, for sure. Um, let's get right into this, uh, really quick before we get into the book. So what, when were you born? What year?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  1993. No, that's when I joined the Army.

• 3:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you were probably born in what?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Seventy-five.

• 3:35Jocko Willink?

  Seventy-five? And where'd you grow up?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Richmond, Indiana.

• 3:39Jocko Willink?

  And what were your parents doing when you were growing up?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  So, struggling, surviving. My mom, my dad left when I was about seven, left us, three kids, under eight. So my mom struggled, three, three jobs, three kids, didn't see her most of the time. I went to school, came home, until I was able to enter the delayed entry program. Mom signed me away. Um, there was nothing after high school anyways.

• 4:05Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you play sports or anything? Did you, were you doing good in school?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  I did. I wouldn't say A's, but I was passing.

• 4:12Jocko Willink?

  You passed. Yep. Sometimes that's all it takes. Any veterans at all that were around the family? Where'd you get the idea from that the army might be a good call?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my grandmother, who was a figure in my life, um, had a few ex-husbands that had served in World War II. So she was a frequent at the VFW and American Legion in town. So we would go visit her. And I wrote that into the book, Connected Soldiers, that there was something different to all the old guys sitting around with their unit logos and, you know, bonding with each other, which was a big part of, you know, coming back from World War II is that they're always in your community. So I got to experience that as a, as a kid. Nobody in my family actually that I knew of, although my grandfather served in World War II, I learned that later. Um, but he wasn't around me, but I think that was the start of the influence. And then I just fell in love with the, with the recruiter was selling.

• 5:02Jocko Willink?

  And those recruiters do sell, don't they? Uh, going to the book here, you say, "I would like to say I joined the army for some heroic reason, but honestly I just had no plans after high school. I was fascinated by adventure outside of small town Indiana and our local arm, the local army recruiters promised." And so you were thinking Ranger, right?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I was.

• 5:22Jocko Willink?

  Out of the gate?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:23Jocko Willink?

  But of course he told you, "Hey, don't worry. Just, we don't have any slots for that. Just take, uh, 11X, which is unspecified infantry airborne." And he said basically the same thing. That's, that's a quote from the book. It's basically the same thing. Uh, how much, so did you join the delayed entry program when you were 17?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  I did.

• 5:41Jocko Willink?

  Did you, then did you have to complete your senior year before you could leave?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  I was actually, I was younger. So I, I was in basic training by 17.

• 5:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, nice.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, I used to say I was, I signed at 16, but that might not be possible, but I was, I signed early in that senior year, but I, I, I turned 18 in Panama. My first unit. So yeah, I was, which gets you into like other people's ideals of what is a child soldier. I mean, I was,

• 6:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  I, I, I had graduated at 17 because of my birthday and everything, but yeah, it was off.

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  Sweet. Uh, boot camp, what you expected? An AIT, an airborne school? Were you just kind of, when you're 17 years old, man, it's like.

• 6:20Jocko Willink?

  Tell me what to do and I'll do it.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  That's right. I was the gray man. I, I didn't know about the gray man philosophy at the time, but I was definitely trying to be the gray man. Just don't bring attention, just survive, just get through the gates, um, nothing special. And that's what I did and, and it worked.

• 6:35Jocko Willink?

  And your first unit was the, the 508th down in Panama?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  It was.

• 6:39Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  That was 1990, late 1993 through 1994.

• 6:45Jocko Willink?

  We were, I was at SEAL Team One at the time and we would go do jungle training down there in Panama.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  And we'd go out and stay on the river for like 30 days. It was awesome. Living in the jungle, living in jungle hammocks. It was good times.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  For a 17 year old kid out of Indiana, it was not a good time.

• 7:02Jocko Willink?

  What was not a good time about?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I mean, you, you spend like two weeks of learning about everything that will kill you in the jungle. And then we were, because of the 508th was the only, one of the few active duty, so outside of the J O T C, the Jungle Operations Training Center. So we were one of the few that did operations at night. So we were out there patrolling at night through the jungle where everything will kill you to include the stuff on the trees.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  Just finding black palm.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Black palm, yeah. Uh, vampire bats, you know, gorilla, um, the monkeys that will howl or monkeys. Like it was, talk about culture shock of going from suburbia Indiana into Panama. It was in, so, um, I got attacked by African killer bees within like two weeks of being there. Um, it, it was, I was trying to be the gray man, but everything was trying to kill me to include my, you know, my NCOs and officers. Like, why can't you run faster? Like, uh, it was, it was a, in a pivotal awakening to the military world for sure.

• 8:04Jocko Willink?

  And how long were you down there for?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Only nine months before they closed it down.

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  And, and is that how you got to go to, uh, the 75th Ranger Regiment?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Not yet. I had, I went from there to the 509th, uh, Geronimo in Fort Polk, Louisiana, which the Joint Readiness Training Center, you couldn't ask for a, a better job as a soldier. I mean, to play the war game, I know you've had other people on the podcast to talk about it, but the US Army only has two, one in the, Almost the swamps of Louisiana, one in the desert out, not, not too far from us. But I got to be the op four. So I was the opposing force for over a year and a half, learning, really, really learning the field craft of hunting men and doing ambushes and everything, although it's a laser tag game. It was another pivotal moment that set the seeds that would keep me in for 25 plus years. You couldn't ask for, like to go to war, but not really go to war.

• 8:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  And we would do it once a month. It was the best job, just in the worst location in the world.

• 9:01Jocko Willink?

  What, what kind of role were you playing? Were you guys guerrillas? Were you guys insurgents? Were you guys a near peer competitor? What were you guys doing?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were, we were a near peer, but with also insurgent capabilities. So the, the op four, and we, we wore the OG 107s of Vietnam. But we also would, would dial in that, that laser tag stuff like nobody's business. But I was actually a mortar man as well. So we would insert into the box like a week before the blue four, the army unit would get there. And then we would also do attacks on like aviation assembly areas and things like that. So we got the, the unit itself is, is supposed to be a competitive, you know, because it can't be anybody's army, Chinese, Russian or anything. So it usually depending on what unit's coming, like if it's the 82nd Airborne, then, then it's a

• 9:47Speaker 01

  very light infantry, you know, band that you have to hunt down into the woods. So it, it will, it also has tanks, it has hindees, it had everything. It'll ratchet it up on-

• 9:58Jocko Willink?

  How big is the unit there of op four?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  The brigade.

• 10:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So we, we, unlike other militaries, um, two brigades. So we have the, the black horse here in California, and then we have the 509th. So it's a huge commitment. Like, I mean, a full brigade of soldiers.

• 10:16Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:17Jocko Willink?

  I, I ran the training for the West Coast SEAL teams and we, you know, it's just the SEALs that were in the training detachment would become the op four. And you learn so much when you're doing that, you know, just, we had, we moved from the, we, we got our own laser tag system. I don't know if you've ever tried this sob stuff, DITs? It was freaking awesome. It was like epic. It's very accurate. There's a little speaker by your, by your, on your shoulder. So it would- Near misses would make near miss sounds and you could mortar guys and explosions were going off. It was really good. It had GPS in all of them. So, and it would, it knew where you shot. So you could go back and watch the whole thing like a video game on Google Earth. You'd see every little maneuver element going. It was awesome, but both sides learned a lot from

• 11:01Jocko Willink?

  that. And the OPFOR for sure, you start, you know, for lack of a better way of saying it, a very, uh, uh, what's that word? Very dilapidated way of saying this. It was like, you learn to think like the, the enemy, you know what I mean? And you did, and it's helpful.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. You get to think unconventionally, actually, because you, you get unburdened by the, the way to do things. So then you get that asymmetric, which I think all war pairs asymmetric. And if it's not, then you're doing something wrong. You're not trying to fight up to their strengths. So as the OPFOR, I learned that as a young soldier, but it was really the field craft too, that I was getting that would be really hard to get anywhere else.

• 11:40Jocko Willink?

  And then from there, it's to the 75th. And how was that? How was that transition?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  And it was tough. I had to go to, you know, I had to go to Fort Benning, Georgia to do the indoctrination or the, the

• 11:52Jocko Willink?

  It used to be called RIP, right?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, RIP. Okay. I went to RIP, which actually one of my, um, one of my cadre was the devil, uh, Sergeant Strucker, who was from Black Hawk Down. If you know the, the convoy leader. That was one of my RIP instructors. So, uh, it was a, it was only three weeks, but you say only back then. Now it's longer. Uh, but it was, I, I played the gray man, survived, and then went to 275 in Fort Lewis, Washington. It was like a dream come true. It's what I had joined the army, which I'm glad I didn't get it though. Had I gotten that in the beginning at 17, I wouldn't have survived to get it to it. So all that that I had before helped. Uh, and then it was everything I thought it would be. The, the op tempo, the, the equipment, the training, the leadership. I

• 12:38Speaker 01

  mean, Stanley McChrystal was my battalion commander.

• 12:40Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Right on. Oh, so that's when we were talking before we hit record, you were talking about, we were talking about combatives. And he kind of brought the, the jujitsu in.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. He brought, he identified the guy, which I know you've talked about, um, the godfather of US Army military combatives, uh, Staff Sergeant Larson at the time. So he assigned him to go look at all, everybody else's. They brought Actually, it was after UFC one, so they brought the Gracies in. He actually went to, so Larson went to the Gracie Academy. As McChrystal gave him this task, like, look, we're doing band ant fighting, like, we can do better than this. Like, in the throws and things like that. Um, he went to the Gracie Academy, but he went to a bunch of other places and he brought the Gracies. So I was there when the, the Gracies first came to 275 and gave like a, like a little training thing. And, and took a lot of pictures, of course.

• 13:24Jocko Willink?

  Hell, yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And that's where I learned about it. And we would just do like a circle death of just on the, you know, a wide open field and a circle. And then just rotate and we knew nothing of what we were doing.

• 13:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Uh, but we were learning the basics of mount, you know, in rear naked choke and all, all this stuff that would later become the foundation of what we do for soldiers now. Which Larson and I, and I agree with this now, and I actually got to live it, as you know, quickly is it wasn't really about the jujitsu. It was about giving you a chance to put your courage to the test. So we have a, this giant circle and we'd call people out into the middle. And then you call somebody else, like, this is why they still box at West Point. It has nothing to do with boxing. It has to do with, you're getting punched, you know, entering a ring, getting in fighting takes a little bit of courage. It puts that to the test.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  And we're doing that, but then, then within a month of that training that I was doing is when I get in a street fight and I get my ear bit off.

• 14:21Jocko Willink?

  How'd the street fights start? Number one, you're 19. Is that part of it?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I am. Yeah, I'm a 19. So not, not even, so some people think alcohol was involved. It wasn't. Uh, there was a, there's a club in Kent, Washington, you know, like soldiers do. They go, they're on the hunt. Um, so there was a, a non-alcoholic dance club called Cowboys that we, Rangers would go to together. We'd go there and after those, there would be usually a civilian like bonfire party. At one of those, I was at a bonfire party with my Ranger buddy, cause you don't, never travel alone. And I woke up like 30 minutes later, I got knocked out by a baseball bat.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  And my buddy looked really bad. Like I, I, I just took a little nap.

• 15:04Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember anything leading up to it?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:06Jocko Willink?

  No smack talking or anything like that?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  I was actually had my back to the fire. I was talking to two girls and then I woke up. So I had a nice little nap. My buddy who saw it happen ran over and then he got beat down.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And was awful. Woke up and they put us in cars. I said, you probably need to leave. And all we, all I asked was who did this? And they gave me a name. So young dumb, you know, went to the hospital, got stitches in the back of my head, went back to my unit, told my unit, you know, my, the barracks, you know, what had happened. And they're like, well, you're going, we're going back, right? So that evening, we, we, we put like two truckloads of Rangers, went back to that club where, you know, the party had come from. Walk into the club looking for this guy. His name was Pepper. That's all I remember. So we, we, we entered the club and the people come up to us. Are you looking for Pepper?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Like, yes. Like, well, he's outside in the alley. Don't bring your friends or we'll bring ours. This is such like now as an adult, like this is so stupid. Like, what are you doing? Like, as you have talked about, like, that's a choice. You could have, uh, but the whole honor, like, I mean, the cities, the white people go to war. Honor is one of those things. So I walked down the alley with like 12 Rangers. And inside it was a guy standing in the middle of it in a ring of civilians in a dark alley. And I entered that ring, took my shirt off and just started swinging. I had learned, I had never been in a fight before.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  I had, of course, people think that.

• 16:42Jocko Willink?

  Do you have any, do you know what this beef was about? Was it about one of the girls?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. He, I guess he had thought that I was talking to his girls.

• 16:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  He, he was, he had some mental issues, clearly. Uh, just immediately started swinging. I had learned enough about close the distance and take them down. So I closed the distance, took him down easily. We're actually in the gully of the alley at this point, but he's going crazy, like sticking his fingers in my eyes, scratching, like, like a real street fight. Um, I achieved mount easily. Uh, I've, not that I felt comfortable. Most of this is a blur because my, all my adrenaline and everything is like off the charts. And at one point I, I was, my head was next to his and I felt him bit, bite into my ear.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  I thought he just bit into it. Um, I put him in almost like a crucifix upside down choking and he passes out. And then they, everybody's like, he's done, he's done. The fight's over. I get up. I take the shirt I wasn't wearing, like, yeah, your ear looks pretty bad. I put the, put the shirt on my ear and now the cops are showing up and we high tailed out of there. And as we're driving back to the same hospital I was at the night before, I put the mirror down and my ear was gone. He had bit, he not, I did, I barely felt it, uh, but he had bit into it and.

• 18:04Jocko Willink?

  Did it rip your ear off or did it bite, like take a bite out of a piece of hamburger, like a bite of hamburger or did he bite it and it ripped off?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Um, he bit in and it, it cut right through it.

• 18:14Jocko Willink?

  Cause your ear looks normal now. I mean, for the most part, um, yeah.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  I mean, most, some people don't think.

• 18:19Jocko Willink?

  So there was something left.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  There was something left, although I, you know, this is where like Trump, actually, uh, you, you, you, how much it bleeds. And how, how hard it is to, it's, it's to heal. It's not like it's, it's cartilage. So they had to keep cutting away at it to get the skin, the clothes over top of it. And it's been a struggle and I didn't stop doing combatives. There's actually, I had to wear the headgear because you can actually see like cartilage poking through the seam of it now. Uh, where to get that to heal was really hard. The, the kind of, the part of the book that matters is that I, because I was on profile, I was non, I didn't have a ranger tab at the time. I was, I was just a regular soldier, a non-tab. If you can't be on a medical, anything in Ranger Regiment for more than sixty to ninety days,

• 19:05Speaker 01

  so they're like, well, you gotta leave.

• 19:06Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Cause I couldn't wear a helmet for like, a long time. And that, so I, I got kicked out because of that.

• 19:13Jocko Willink?

  And then where'd you go?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  I went, I went next door, which, so this is the really awful thing, um, you know, if you get, because Ranger Regiment's the only one that has this release authority, which is one of the reasons why, again, why it's so strong is that if, if you are, if you've done something wrong, there is no like, well, we're gonna rehabilitate you, like, well, there's somebody else waiting for your slide. And so there's a, a regular army infantry unit on the other side of Ranger Regiment's gate, the twenty-fifth infantry division, which psychologically really sucks because you just go over there and you're looking back at the gate across where you want to be. So I went to twenty-fifth ID, right across the street. I went to Ranger School, uh, which,

• 19:56Speaker 01

  which I had an awesome joke about, I can't feel my ear during like the health and welfare checks of, it's cold.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  I went to Ranger School and then I rehabilitated for Italy, yeah.

• 20:08Jocko Willink?

  How was Ranger School?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Um, it was what, what the myth and lore said about it.

• 20:14Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  It was the greatest test of who you are. Uh, I went on later, you know, as you know, to be a Ranger instructor. I, I loved the course. Not, you know, you don't, what I see when somebody wears a Ranger tab isn't necessarily their skills, but the fact that they, they survived it.

• 20:29Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  And they had the option to quit, many options to quit, and they didn't.

• 20:34Jocko Willink?

  Did you have any major challenges when you were in Ranger School?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Every, every ding day was a challenge. I was a sleepy Ranger, so if I laid down, I fell asleep.

• 20:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Which doesn't work well if you're in Ranger School.

• 20:44Jocko Willink?

  I had a guy like that in the platoon and he, if you, if we stopped like on a patrol, we'd stop just staying in the line of patrol for a ten-minute break, you know, after fifty minutes of humping. And in thirty seconds, you'd hear like.

• 21:00Jocko Willink?

  And he was rare security too. It's totally ridiculous, but it was an issue.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And some people you just don't know until you've been, till you go through sleep deprivation, food deprivation. You don't know what your weaknesses are. I was a sleeper ranger. I was, but I wasn't trying to be distinguished undergrad. I was the gray man. I mean, I was like a specialist who didn't go through pre ranger because if you, you know, in some units you go through this other phase where they make sure you're ready. Because I had gone across the gate. I didn't have to do that. I went straight in and just by sheer chance, because ranger school can be 60 days or it can be six months. Because you can recycle.

• 21:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, depending on how many times you get rolled back.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  And, and having worked there, only 30, about 38% of people go straight through. And somehow, which I didn't deserve to, I went straight through.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  But it was extremely, it was what they say it is. It's like the hardest test. I mean, there's this quote by Tex Turner of like, I woke up in a, in a sweat of night thinking that I was back in ranger school. Luckily, I was just in Vietnam. But it's true because and, and I even say in the book, I had guys in, in, in ER, like, eh, it's not as bad as ranger school.

• 22:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Jocko Willink?

  There is something weird too, because when you're going through some kind of a training course, it's a different kind of stress because the stress is that you won't make it. And that stress in a lot of ways is less than the stress of either A, I'm going to get blown up and killed, or B, I'm not going to do a good job with my troops. And I would say either one of those, I would, I would, those are just a different kind of stress. But the stress of like, I'm going to get tested on this thing today and it might just derail my whole career idea that I have. And that doesn't feel good.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  No. I mean, there's, and I've written a little bit about this. I mean, the beauty of ranger school is that it, it induces, I mean, I know BUDS does, that's a lot of stress, but with the sleep deprivation, the food deprivation, the leadership grade that they just rotate every day. You never know when you're going to get called. The peer stress of if you're a dick, I mean, or an a-hole, then you're not going through. Like there's so many elements of this stress to put you to test your character. That's why I really think it does. Like, and I know that other courses put you in their streams to test your leadership and even in your book about changing out the leader and the boat crew and everything. All that gets done, but that duration and that longevity really tests it. Do you want this?

• 23:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. And that, you know, ranger school is. They it's a leadership school. So you know, there's, there's people that are going through SEAL training. They were never a boat crew leader. I wasn't a boat crew leader in BUDS. You know, I was a freaking 18 year old kid that was like, hey, I'm gonna carry the boat. You want me to carry the boat? I'll carry the boat. But there's a bunch of people that go through BUDS. They're not put into a leadership position. You're gonna get tested as an individual human member of a team. But Ranger School, like you said, you're gonna, you're gonna lead this patrol and tomorrow night Echo is gonna lead the patrol. The next night I'll lead the patrol and we're all gonna get graded. It's all gonna be stressful. The other thing that's just totally different is the food, food deprivation. Cause in SEAL training,

• 24:04Jocko Willink?

  you, you're gonna get to eat and you kinda get to eat whatever you want regularly. You know, occasionally you're, this doesn't even sound like nothing, but occasionally you'll be down at the demo pits during hell week and they'll throw like a box lunch at you and it sucks. That's one meal. Like you, you make it six more hours and you're gonna be at mid rats with a face full of spaghetti. Like, you know what I mean? And so that's a, that's just a different thing to be in Ranger School where, I mean, guys lose like 20, 30 pounds during Ranger School. I gained, I went from 174 to 185. Wow. In BUDS. And that's exercising whatever it is, eight hours a day of exercise, but I ate so much food. So yeah, those are totally,

• 24:50Jocko Willink?

  I mean, there's, there's stress to both of them, but I think the Ranger School is a different type of stress. The food deprivation is a huge thing and then the leadership stuff. Now, the other thing that's cool in Ranger School is you can peer people out and you can do it. You used to be able to do it unofficially in BUDS and, and now they do do peer reviews. But like we had a guy in our class that was just kind of not, not, not good. And we brought it to the instructor's attention and they got rid of him. But also the instructors, back when I went through, they could just get rid of someone because they didn't like him and. That's kind of good. It's also kind of bad because like, who is this instructor? What, what's his attitude? You know, what kind of problems does this dude have?

• 25:35Jocko Willink?

  So they've gotten better at it over the years, but uh, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna put people through some serious stress in these schools and Ranger School certainly freaking get some awesome uh, training in there. Uh, so then what, what came after that? After you're done with Ranger School?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  So after Ranger School, I went back to the unit. I re-enlisted for Italy. I was in Italy as an enlisted soldier. Amazing time from like 97 to 99.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  I come back to the States. I'm teaching at the infantry school, actually at the infantry mortar leader course, doing like our competitive boards and everything and somebody rec- I'm doing night uh, colleges because it's for promotion for even enlisted into more college you have, the better chance of getting promoted and somebody recommended that. Like you should be an officer. And one of the boards, this great master said like, I don't know if you've considered it, but you should be an officer. So I applied to go to the officer candidate school. And this is around 2000, late 2000.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:32Jocko Willink?

  Good timing.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, good timing, huh? Uh, so I'd made it to start in first class, actually, in that, in eight years, which was just amazing because I had right leaders, you know, telling me what to do. Applied for the officer candidate school, went uh, nine 11 actually happened before I started uh, because we were waiting for, I had actually a friend in my house who was waiting and I was, we were there together. Finished that, finished officer candidate school, finished infantry officer basic course, but I had already had all the training. I was already jump master, air assault, like I had all this training Ranger School, everything. So normally you graduate that and all the lieutenants have to go to Ranger School. Like this is the thing I think people don't know either, like as an infantry officer, you either have a Ranger tab or you have a story.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Because the literally the entire class of the infantry officer basic course will be marched to Ranger School and that's one of the big reasons it's a leadership call, right? But for whatever reasons they don't make it and they can still do great things, but they had their, they went. I didn't have to do any of that, so I went straight to my, so from graduating infantry officer basic course, I went straight to return to Italy now as an officer. And that was around December 2002.

• 27:53Jocko Willink?

  You have a story in here, you show up there and you're gonna kinda, you know, make sure everyone knows you're the officer in charge type scenario here. And you decide to take the guys on a run and you're gonna wear gas masks and you say this, "Unit runs are the tropes of military movies, they're symbolic of discipline, regimentation, and esprit de corps. The unit moves like a single organism and the body calls out cadence in one voice as the footfalls in a steady rhythm. Unfortunately, when such a run goes disastrously wrong, it starts to resemble a crowd of protesters running from tear gas, which ironically might be why a person would want to wear a gas mask. It's symbolic of a breakdown in discipline and esprit. The formation, because you had your guys out there in gas masks, the formation became

• 28:35Jocko Willink?

  chaotic as individuals dropped out, gasping or vomiting and trying to catch their breath. Rather than hearing a proud cadence being sung, I heard coughing, complaining, frustration, and even anger. My own feelings were of disappointment, not in my soldiers, but in myself. How could I have not expected this when the outcome was so obvious in hindsight? I was momentarily gripped by indecision for how to handle this growing melee. I did not know whether to continue on the run or stop, admit my mistake and have everyone remove the now heated gas masks, or keep going. Neither seemed optimal. There was no right answer, no school solution. My recent training had not addressed what to do when you've made a glaring mistake.

• 29:17Jocko Willink?

  I decided to continue the run and not show any visible signs of my internal struggle and anguish. I had made a decision and I felt I had to stick with it and accept the consequences. If I had fostered any unit cohesion, it was by unifying the platoon in their distrust of my judgment. I was not off to a great start, but I was determined to repair the damage I had done. Chalk it up is one of the first many lessons learned." So, there you go.

• 29:42Jocko Willink?

  And just if you're a young, if you're a leader out there, you see, you know, you say here, John, that my recent training had not addressed what to do. You've made a glaring mistake. I can tell you what to do when you make a glaring mistake. You say, hey, everyone, stop what you're doing. This was my idea and it was not a good idea. Put your gas mask away. We're going to walk back and I'm going to buy everyone some pizza. That's what you do. When you make a mistake, you own it. Good times, huh?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And the mistake of mistakes. And luckily I was given many quick, because we were jumping into combat two months later, many other opportunities to repair that damage. But man, was that a lesson to myself. It's not like I had not seen people running in gas masks before, but you're trying to create that shared hardship and all that together. It was, it went horrible. I mean, it's like the nightmare scenario as people are vomiting in their mask.

• 30:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You mentioned that you'd showed up, like the platoon had already kind of done most of their workup, most of their training. You mentioned that in the book. You did get to take them to the kill house and you, I, you probably gained some respect back in the, in the kill house?

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I, and that was a huge, you know, you have, you fall down, you get back up, as you know, and doing that and demonstrating a proficiency, because there's many forms of power, right? Reverent power being one of the most powerful, like respect, not just positional power. And I was trying that, but you know, because I had been a list of guy, they knew that I had been a list of guy, but there, and then you'll also have to show up and, and demonstrate you have that knowledge and that, and to get that. And in that, which is interesting, I became the urban warfare guy. Like I knew the kill house, the, the battle drills and everything. And I was able to give feedback to even to the senior NCOs, like, okay, you think about doing

• 31:33Speaker 01

  it like this, or, and you know, that there's no replacement to that level of live fire training. And there are those scenarios, as I, I know you know, that gave me that opportunity. And there were other quick ones. To include putting them in a circle and rolling half of them up.

• 31:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, because you had a little bit of jujitsu.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  I did.

• 31:50Jocko Willink?

  And a little bit of jujitsu goes a long, long way.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  You got a 200 pound squad leader that comes in and wants to wrestle you.

• 31:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And you choke them out.

• 31:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  It was not like a part of the plan. It was just something they were doing and that that helped a little bit.

• 32:02Jocko Willink?

  There is, there's a little pecking order in these, in these groups of people. They're echo trolls.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 32:08Jocko Willink?

  And being able to fight is a good thing. I mean, that's what we're supposed to be doing, right?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:13Jocko Willink?

  Supposed to be some kind of warrior allegedly.

• 32:17Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward, again, I'm obviously not reading the whole book. Get the book, everybody. It's an awesome book. So much detail in here. Great lessons learned across the board. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. In March of 2003, it was no secret to anyone that the United States was about to go to war with Iraq. It was all over the news. In Italy, we had heard and watched reports of units moving into position in places like Kuwait. We only waited for the word to go. During, fast forward a little bit. During the waiting period, Brigade Command allowed us more time with our families than usual. So I was at home when the call finally came in the middle of the day. Sir, it's time. I told my wife Sarah that the time had come and I had to go despite knowing this would happen and anticipating it for months. It still came as a surprise. Maybe we had secretly not believed we really have to face this moment. Unlike every subsequent deployment, we were given almost no notice this first time. We had

• 33:02Jocko Willink?

  loaded all of our vehicles and things to go to war, but that was weeks earlier. We did not know the day, week, month, or even if we would be one of the units to actually be sent. Then suddenly, the moment we had been waiting for had arrived. Boom.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and actually we weren't supposed to go. Like, thanks to Turkey. It's the only reason that I, we were able to go because Turkey decided to reneg on this access to its land. The 4th Infantry Division had sailed boats and was going to land in Turkey and drive through Turkey into northern Iraq. And last minute, the Turkey government said, no, you're not. So then they put us in because we could airdrop and Turkey gave us permission to overflight, but we weren't even supposed to go. So it was interesting that my unit was doing all that planning. We'd actually, we actually moved vehicles even by train somewhere and moved them back. You know, this is what people do when they just, I'm ready. Like it's like, put me in coach, I'm ready. But it was the last, it was, so we didn't know because nobody knew.

• 33:58Jocko Willink?

  Nobody knew, huh?

• 34:01Jocko Willink?

  You know, you're talking here and again, the, the, one of the underlying themes in this book, obviously it's called Connected Soldiers and if you talk about whether it's letters in the old days and you know, you guys were writing letters and then it came to, you know, email and then it came to internet and then it's FaceTime and you kind of go through that. But one of the things you talk about here is just like carrying photos and you know, you talked about how people learned that from watching the movies. Like in the movie, you know, you got the photo of your fiance in your helmet and stuff like that. Um, so I thought that was a, a good assessment. And then you say by 2008, I saw no photos and helmets and few in living quarters, no one printed photos anymore. Uh, this is interesting. For the invasion in 2003, we also did not know how long we'd be deployed. Would it be

• 34:43Jocko Willink?

  like Desert Storm, which was really the last major war we had as a reference, being that it was also fought against the Iraqi army? Desert Storm fighting lasted 43 days, including the aerial campaign. So you guys must've had that in your mind. Like, we're gonna be home in a few months.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  We had it, so, you know, lessons learned, and this is not for me, but for generals, we had the two-star general get on our plane and in Italy, as we're rigging out, getting ready to fly in Iraq, promised the entire unit, this would be a 90-day or less deployment. We'll see you back soon. And that, of course, you know, through the, what we call the Joe Network, that spread across the entire brigade rapidly. Like, this is only 90 days. Matter of fact, I was in Iraq, like 60 days into it, and I told my battalion commander, like, sir, there's a rumor here that we'll be here for a long time. And he, and he laughed at me, laughed in my face. And actually, it was CNN that released. While we were in theater, that we would be there for 12 months.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  So not through the FRG, the Family Redness, not through the unit, CNN, our families knew that we would be there for a year before we did.

• 35:46Jocko Willink?

  While we're giving lessons to generals and I'll add politicians to this, because these politicians and generals, for some reason, they haven't picked up on the fact that when you go to war, the enemy gets a vote and things aren't going to go how they plan and how you plan. The enemy's not at the planning table, like telling what he's going to do, as we heard the other day from a SAG combat warrior. He's like, hey, you know, Dick Thompson, he's like, the the north, the NVA wasn't at our planning table. So when we'd show up, we'd know what the hell they were going to do. But these generals and politicians think, oh, well, you know, here's our plan. We'll go and execute this plan and it'll go according to plan. And there won't be any, you know, we won't lose any soldiers. We won't have any civilian casualties. There won't be any collateral damage. Everything's going to go good and we'll be home in three months.

• 36:31Jocko Willink?

  That's what they think. That's the plan. Echo Charles, the enemy doesn't give a shit.

• 36:37Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. The combat jump, the army was organizing would be the largest since the jump into Panama in 1989. Actually, the US Army has only been using paratroopers in combat since 1942. Of course, World War II images of paratroopers being dropped over Belgium and France are etched in the minds of most Americans. But since then, there have only been a handful of combat jumps where you're about to make history. You guys had to be fired up.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  We were fired up. And it was every, I mean, the, the airfield, imagine a thousand paratroopers with like ACDC, blaring and like, we were, we were doing, which goes to the movies and everything. We're, that lineage and the ideal of it and dropping and being able to wear the the little mustard gold stain that you wear for the rest of your career for doing a combat jump.

• 37:22Jocko Willink?

  Explain that to Echo Charles, please. It's kind of a big deal.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  So in the airborne community, within all the militaries, you have wings that determine whether you're a basic, so a senior or master rated. If you have a combat jump, you get a gold star in it. And that's called a mustard stain. Within the airborne ranger, everybody's community, like that's a big deal to be, because there's been so few of them. And if you have two, it's called a spotlight. Actually, when I was in Ranger Regiment, there was a first sergeant who had two, Grenada and Panama. Which is also unheard of, but it's like this huge, you know, from within the culture, the sign of very significance. And I paid, we call ours the mud stain, as you know from reading the book. We paid the price for that star, but to wear that for the rest of my, you know, 18 years or whatever was, was really important.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Why do they call it mustard?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Ah, it's got like a yellow, a yellow color.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Like a casual slang term.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  It's just a mustard stain.

• 38:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but there's so few people, like there's, there's tens of thousands of airborne soldiers in the army. Probably hundreds of, how many do you think, hundreds of thousands?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  We have a whole division just dedicated to it.

• 38:29Jocko Willink?

  There's, but in everyone of all those people, there'll be like a few thousand at any time. And this was the first jump since, since Panama, which was in 1989. So somebody would have had to be like pretty old and senior to have jumped there.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And it was only, and that was only, you know, a couple of battalions of Rangers.

• 38:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, like 500 or 1,000 guys jumped in. Out of the whole army of 400,000 people. So that's a very rare thing.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Which makes the term mustard stain kind of like stand out a little bit because my, because really the, the purpose or, you know, kind of the reason people do that will be like almost like making it no big deal, you know, right? It's like the opposite. Like it's a big deal, but the slang term is something that's not a big deal. You know, it's just a mustard stain kind of a thing, but it's like such a big deal.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  And it came with hate because you can imagine, you know, we were a small, I mean, it's only a really two battalions in Northern Ireland did this jump about a thousand soldiers. When you have a division of airborne. There was a lot of hate for years. Like, well, you jumped into a secure airfield. Like it doesn't, it's not real. Despite the history of the combat jumps, even in World War II, on which ones were contested or not, but the hate was, was massive.

• 39:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. The military, the military jealousy and hate is strong.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Competitive.

• 39:51Jocko Willink?

  Yes. Uh, fast forward a little bit. The time finally arrived on March 26, 2003, at approximately 1945 hours, Sulu time, 12:45 a.m. local time. The green light came on, the jump master yelled, go and hit me on my backside. My training kicked in, no hesitation is authorized. And I instinctively stepped out the door. My feet landed briefly on the ledge outside the door and then my body hitting the gusty wind sucked out into the air. Fast forward a little bit, it took less than a minute for 954 soldiers of the first battalion, 508th Infantry, second battalion, 503rd Infantry, and the 173rd Headquarters staff to exit the 15 C-17s in another minute or so to hit the ground. We did not have time to ponder the historical significance of the event. We were American soldiers, just dropped into a combat zone and had things that needed to be done.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And we had a division of Iraqi army.

• 40:40Jocko Willink?

  Enemy.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Reading on us.

• 40:42Jocko Willink?

  And you mentioned this, you land in freaking mud, like deep, treacherous mud.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  So you know, it's like, you know, doing the, the preparation for, you know, combat or something like that, or the op orders and the, and the S2 gives the briefings and you get the weather and all that stuff like, nobody mentioned the mud. Nobody said, oh, it's been raining for a week. It might be a little muddy on the drop zone. But when I say mud, I mean like tilled fields, at some points knee deep mud, uh, with everybody and they weighed everybody. This is, I talked about in the book too, like we don't train under combat load for army guys. Um, it would just break you, like it would break people. So over a hundred pounds on our backs, dropped into knee deep mud in the middle of the night. Uh, it was, I earned that mud stain.

• 41:34Jocko Willink?

  You actually were a little worried when you got on the ground because you're like trying to slog through the mud and you figure you may not even be able to lead your platoon. Luckily you run into one of your other guys, you get everything going. Um, fast forward a little bit, once we got everything in motion, we executed our first mission of establishing one of the blocking positions that formed a perimeter around Besher Airfield, which was adjacent to the DZ. American Special Forces and Kurdish allies had already been operating in the area before our jump. So we encountered no Iraqi opposition. We accomplished our first mission without firing a shot. Pretty straightforward.

• 42:06Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward, on April 8th, we received orders to attack an Iraqi divisional headquarters about 15 miles outside of Urbeel. So this is, now you're getting tasked to do something. You go through kind of the planning and the preparation and talk through it. And then you say, once, once we were at our destination, I had the platoon spread out in a line facing the enemy position, finding whatever natural cover was available. My vehicle was in middle of the formation, right in the middle of the road, actually. As the vehicles arrived in response, the squad members dismounted and either manned the crew-served weapons or took up individual fighting positions. Again, this is where the training was paying off. I'd already given the orders to the Mark 19 gunners that they could open fire with grenades as soon as we got into position. That's legit.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  It was legit.

• 42:52Jocko Willink?

  You had, you had some pretty good decentralized command. If you're like, hey, once we get in position, you know where you're shooting, cleared hot.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  It was, it was literally, you know, Andy Stumps, cleared hot. Uh, as, and we knew exactly where the enemy was. They had, um, forward, forward observers at a high ground, uh, to just the sounds of that. As soon as we hit, you hear a Mark 19 grenade launcher start launching. Uh, and then you start seeing the enemy respond. So they started firing like ZS, you know, there's these, they're big, in a circle because they didn't know what was happening. They just knew that, because we, the whole point was to bring the artillery closer to destroy them, which was behind us and we're the front line of that. But we, we're within eyesight of this divisional position. And the, and the guys immediately, and it was, I mean, like a symphony. And I'm just sitting in the middle of it and you see two Mark, you know, Mark 19s on

• 43:43Speaker 01

  both sides of me, 50 cows, engaging positions. It was, it was, yeah, I've never, it's never been replicated. So it was an amazing moment, but the, the feeling was intense.

• 43:58Jocko Willink?

  After about 10 minutes in the intersection, we started to receive enemy mortar fire mortar rounds make a very loud explosion and boom on impact. How'd you like that?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  I didn't like it at all. Actually, and I and in hindsight, again, lessons learned is like pulling into a four-way intersection probably wasn't the best idea because Echo, if you like, if for like mortars and artillery, there's things called like known locations, like you dial into those and that's a good point to shift from. We were sitting in an enemy basically known location. So they didn't have to know where we were and they started shooting. So we started receiving mortar fire.

• 44:34Jocko Willink?

  Some Iraqi mortar man on the other side was like, hey, these dipshits are right in the intersection. You know, point seven two on the grid reference. Boom, hit it.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then that's when the direct fire started to come in as well. And I don't know, I think I put it in there where the, you know, the sergeant major who had come up to the front line and wanted to see their troops and this, and then the fire starts whizzing, the mortar rounds start landing. He's like, what is that? And like, Sergeant Major, that's enemy fire. He's, hey, nice to see you guys. And he starts, he goes away. But it was such a comical, you know, relief moment where he's like, hey, how you doing? Doing good things. It's good. What is that? I'll see you guys later.

• 45:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And just for anyone that's listening, you do have those stories in here. You talk about the lessons that you learned. So if certainly if you're in the military, if you're in the army, if you're the Marine Corps, get those books, you can get those lessons learned. It's better to read the lessons than learn them while you're sitting on an intersection awaiting enemy mortar fire.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  I don't mind the, where we were. I, I mind it that somebody at higher headquarters says, I'm sure you can relate, thought it would be a good idea that we put out road signs in front of our battle positions attacking against concerns of civilians. So I, on the top of my vehicle, because I wouldn't let anybody else do this, I had road signs in Arabic saying, Combat area, turn around, go away. I don't, I don't know who it was and then I had five string concertina wire that I was supposed to put in front of this road just in case a civilian, between us and the division that we're attacking somehow came down this road, but some higher headquarters guy thought that that would be needed. So I, as the mark 19s and everybody's opening up, I run out with my RTO and throw it into the street.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  And then get back on my vehicle to command my unit. So that's the lesson that I hope other people get like, you'll be asked to do some stupid things.

• 46:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. Some, somebody that's sitting in an air conditioned planning space, coming up with some idea about all this stuff. Yeah. They, they come up with some real winners right there. And you, you do go through like a great dialogue between your, your, the, the forward, the forward controllers, the forward observation team and your guys like 50 meters more adjust, right? 25 meters. And the, these guys, your boys dumped like 500 mark 19 rounds.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Almost to a point where they almost go black on the mark 19 ammo, which was concerning.

• 46:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Because they were dialing them in and they got some of the first confirmed kills of our entire brigade. Um, by being dialed in because motors, they can, you know, they had this arc and they're, they're at the maximum range of, of it, which is like 2,000 meters. And they're arcing them and trying to hit these positions and then somebody else is dialing. It's beautiful.

• 47:13Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  But then they started going like, oh, we're almost black. I'm like, that's not, if we're, we're still sitting there.

• 47:19Jocko Willink?

  And we gotta be here for however long.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you don't know when the call is coming.

• 47:25Jocko Willink?

  Here's, here's just some of your commentary. Fast forward a little bit. The tough combat jump and first firefight showed me how, how the process of combat creates moments of shared hardships among soldiers. At this point of the war, few of us knew, few of us in the platoon knew each other very well. Maybe I knew them least of all. Surviving those stressful situations bonded us to a moment in time. We survived the life threatening combat episode due to the collective action of the group, not individuals. Each soldier played a role in the group's survival. Shared survival in battle will always be a unique valuable bonding experience. As I found when things went well, like they had today, and even more so when things did not go well, as I knew would eventually happen. So you're.

• 48:08Jocko Willink?

  Seeing that bond form with your troops before your very eyes.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is, as you know, the book was a kind of a trying to go through that, both with what I had learned about even the academic study of cohesion. That I call it the Band of Brothers phenomena, because that's a great series that teaches you how these become, why we say brothers and sisters so much, because it's, it goes, it creates this bond that goes beyond, you know, just serving together and surviving together. It creates a lifelong bond. And I was watching that in real time because we were given those experiences, but also the processing of it.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  So after the patrol was always, which is again, why I wrote the book, after the patrol, I felt all that you'd ever thought that war would be, sitting around the Humvee top, talking about somebody who fell out of the vehicle, who made a mistake, you know, laughing at them. I didn't realize at the moment that that's also part of the living with the war, is that you, you process it together. So you experience it together, but you process it together. And that's what I saw later wasn't happening, but in these moments, the jump even, like that, that hell that we paid going through that mud was an experience that only those that did it will have and will bond them for the rest of their lives. You just have to mention mud. And it creates like a togetherness.

• 49:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Because war isn't about individuals, it's about groups.

• 49:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I've always made this kind of assessment, like you go through boot camp and everyone in the Army or Navy or the Marine Corps that goes through boot camp, goes through certain level of shared stresses together and you start to bond. Even Echo Charles going through two days with football, like you have a certain level of bond with those people. Well, in the military, you go, so you go to boot camp. Well, then you go to AIT. So now you're doing some more stressful stuff. You go to airborne school, like, okay, now we're all jumping out of airplanes. Oh, now you're going to go to Ranger School and you just keep getting tighter and tighter. And then the, the highest form of this is we go into combat together and we take the ultimate risk.

• 50:12Jocko Willink?

  We go through the ultimate hardships and this is why you have friends that you went through combat with, that they're just, you know, your friends for life. It doesn't matter what happens.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  The interesting part of that, Jocko, is that, like, if you watch the Band of Brothers, like, when they go through Korean, you know, they, they train together and then they deploy together. The US military is such a beast now that that's not, it doesn't happen. So those that you bonded with in basic training or Ranger School, whatever, you may never see them again. And in the, in the World War II, when they came in as a group, then they went through basic airborne, everything together and then fought together. So it created a bond that we don't replicate anymore.

• 50:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Which, which is again, what I try to get into is that togetherness aspect of it used to be like programmed. Now we have other ideals of the way to do it.

• 51:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and they, they did improve upon it because like in Vietnam, those units, you were just getting single individual replacements in your units. And so you just had a bunch of freaking random dudes. And of course you'd bond with, you know, if the three of us were there for four or five months together, we happen to be, but then Echo is gone and someone takes his place. And they did change that for the wars that you and I fought. And it's like, this unit is going on deployment. Now they still would have occasional replacements, but they would at least try and time them properly. Uh, where it's not the full unit, which you still have the preponderance of the unit together.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:37Jocko Willink?

  But you ended up replacing, um, company commander as I led off this whole story with you, you know, that was in the middle of combat situation. We'll get to that.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Interesting on that though is this is again, the beauty of me working later in the Pentagon, understanding how the military works. You have the individual at the, but at that large scale where the trade offs are. So we changed that individual replacement to unit replacement. So then you get the, you know, not fighting a war, but you're only fighting it one year at a time. So in Vietnam, the headquarters would stay and then they do individual replacements. So you think that with the institutional performance would change as well as in you're not fighting the war. Every unit is coming into Ramadi. It's a different, completely different unit. It's going to have a completely different approach than, but the next guy is going to undo everything you just did. So there's, there's cost benefits there.

• 52:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we um, we had a guy named Dean Ladd on the podcast. He was a Marine and he was in World War II. And he was gut shot off the beach in Tarawa. He was a young lieutenant. And they had been told like, hey, if someone gets shot, uh, you know, in the water, just leave them. Cause we have to, and a couple of his Marines disobeyed that order and grabbed him and threw him back into a boat. And so he's gut shot, almost dies, etc. And then you're like, oh, so what happened after that? Oh, then he went and recovered and then was on the next island. Like, so the big point in me saying that is in World War II, you went on deployment until we won.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:05Jocko Willink?

  And that's just the way, if you really need to win a war, that's how you gotta do it. And this one year stuff, cause everybody ends up, you, you can't, it's very difficult to not have some psychological part of your mind saying, listen, I got four more months. I got three more months. I got two more months. By the way, Echo, you're my guys. Echo and John, we got two more weeks. Hmm. You know what? Maybe we don't need to do this. And that can be a real thing that will come into play if you're not careful.

• 53:38Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book here, you talk about home away from home, shared living hardships. This is chapter four. Once in Iraq, we followed the traditions of war such as writing letters home. And you, you do a cool job. You bring up a bunch of um, different letters from different people. Not only people that were with you, but you know, you give some examples of the way they communicated in World War II. And World War One, just like, just Western Union, like, uh, there's this one guy, guy has a child.

• 54:12Jocko Willink?

  Message on the fourth at twenty-two thirty-five, not Berga was born. She is both healthy and sends greeting to her father. Like, that's it. And he got this like two months after it happened. So, uh, you say, I wrote desperately to maintain a connection to my wife of only two years, despite my attempts, there was a clear divide between what I was experiencing, what she was encountering at home. She endured a life without me there in Italy, far from her support network in a foreign land that felt unfamiliar and sometimes unwelcoming. I was experiencing a whole new life, one that I had anticipated for a decade and was relishing. So there's gonna be a little gap. And you'd, what, you'd gotten married in Italy?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  No, right before I

• 54:52Jocko Willink?

  Right before you went there?

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yep. In between all that training.

• 54:56Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you talk about and you talk about just the bonding around the traditional kind of mail calls and how that was a thing. And actually, the we didn't do that. The only time I ever did that was it when I was in the in the Navy and we'd be deployed on a ship. This was back in the 90s where there was no email or anything. So you got legit mail call and someone would walk out into your birthing space and he'd be like, all right, you have the orange mailbag and sit there and read off all the guys that had mail. I wasn't one of them. No one was writing my dumb ass.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  I tried to incorporate because I think it yeah, these are of course, like, long history of that in the military and even like if you watch the Vietnam movies, they get like a video or the guy gets a cassette and he plays the Dear John. But the interesting part of the research as we moved to electronic communication that even when the soldier writes, it's like there's something in the process of even writing and trying to explain to a loved one what they're experiencing and what they get back. Once we moved to electronic communication, the the research actually shows that you you actually are communicating different things. If communication is every day and I can just text you like, hey, how you doing? Love you. Like, the, the, the way you process what you're experiencing is actually changing. And there's some fascinating research going back and looking

• 56:11Speaker 01

  at all of that to see what are the soldiers telling their loved ones and what are they getting? And how is that impacting the actual war experience or later how to cope with it? When we think that more communication means that we'll communicate more. No, actually, it changes the way we communicate. If I can just, I can send you a quick text or whatever, it becomes less substance.

• 56:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you put a little less time and effort into it because yours all text you later or whatever. And those things are less cherished when they arrive because like, whatever. It's no big deal. It's just a text. It is cra- it is crazy, though, like, getting a text from one of your friends that's in a legit combat zone. Like, it's actually, this is kind of crazy. You know what I mean? Because that's relatively new.

• 56:58Jocko Willink?

  You also say this during my first call with Sarah, I was angered that after the first few minutes she asked, why have some of the other guys been able to call their wives every day for the last month? And, um, holding my tongue as best I could, I explained, because I'm out, living outside the base, usually staying in spots for only a couple of days or weeks. I'm not like the people stationed at these big support installations who can mosey over to the phones on their lunch breaks. So there you go. That's, that's a tough one though.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  That's legit. And it was, it, I mean, most people, even within the military, don't understand that. A new, new wife won't explain, understand that. Like there are thousands of jobs in the military and they'll be living in different conditions, even in war.

• 57:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And most of them, most of those jobs are on the big base with a phone and a pool and everything else. Uh, you guys are kind of squatting in various abandoned schools and government buildings and you, you talk about that. You didn't, guys didn't take a shower for a month, but the cool thing is once you got, you say this about, once you move into a building, the very first thing we did after ensuring we had security at a new site was to set things up to make our lives more tolerable. So this meant dipping into, tapping into power lines, setting up air conditioners, uh, finding wood to make bathrooms, even, uh, hanging water bags that you could, you could heat up and get showers. But then you say this, and this is really important. The important fact is that the improvements soldiers made were always, always oriented

• 58:20Jocko Willink?

  toward the group, not individual conveniences. We developed innovative ways to make us all more comfortable. It would break social norms to focus energy on establishing comforts such as personal air conditioning that was not first provided to the larger group. As a leader, watching this mutual cooperation and collaboration was gratifying. It was a clear indicated, indicator of unit cohesion and therefore signaled the presence of one of the most important elements of effective combat performance.

• 58:50Jocko Willink?

  Guys are looking out for each other.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that direct tie, as you look through that through history and through the history of war, again, because I try to, you know, attempted to incorporate the research on all of this. I mean, going back to like the 1800s where if you didn't, if you were a coward on the battlefield, then when you came back, you didn't eat because your group had a small bit of food together. And that was the translation. But also in the shared austere environments, this is again, this is 2003, this is, there is nothing established. You're, we're living together, moving together, you're setting up community and that. Not just, you know, the leader, you know, the leader eats last, all that stuff, but the fact that

• 59:31Speaker 01

  this is a, a group experience, every aspect of it really translated to combat performance. There is no individuality. And when we deployed and became like this, you know, other force, that started to incorporate in there. Like, well, we'll just form up right before the patrol, we'll go out patrol together, come back, and now we're, we're separate.

• 59:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, you can talk about in the book about like you're, you're eating together. You're like on the hood of the Humvee, you're circled up and put some people on security and like, that's what we're going to eat. But we're all together and we're talking about what we saw and we're, we're bonding. That's what it is.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  And I think that, that translates beyond military too, but you know, breaking bread together. Even at West Point, like there's one meal, which is fascinating to see, and I didn't go to West Point, it's hot there, where they have to eat lunch together and they feed, you know, 4,000 cadets in about 15 minutes. But they sit at a family setting and everything because, I mean, it's cool, it's like the traditional West Point, but there's also cohesive properties into eating together. Like, you know, no, no device is nothing, like talking together. And the military knows that, but the military also sometimes does away with things that they don't know really why they were there. Like we do PT together, right? It's PT is and and people say this and I know you do it obnoxiously early.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  But the more hap- you're more, there's more done in that time than the rest of the day. And some of that's through cohesion, building together, like forming a family.

• 1:01:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt about it.

• 1:01:08Jocko Willink?

  Had to, I had to read, I have to read this part. We rarely visit Kirkuk for, from our more remote, remote locations. Much like the frontline soldiers of World War I, World War II, Vietnam and other wars, resentment of the comfort, safety and luxuries of soldiers stationed in the rear is real. These soldiers are given colorful names like rear echelon motherfuckers, rems and fobbits from FOB. Despite the desires of frontline troops for the very comforts they mock. It is a point of extreme pride for the group to view themselves as tougher, harder and more real than those who live in comfort in the rear. The suffering due to the living conditions was in fact another point of bind bonding.

• 1:01:51Jocko Willink?

  Ironically, to any, to us anyway, its inhabitants named the base FOB Warrior. They probably did not find that as amusing as we did.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  I forgot I put that in there.

• 1:02:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So FOB Warrior, meanwhile, on FOB Warrior, guess what they had Echo Charles? Pizza Hut, Burger King. Air conditioned offices, the whole nine yards.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Disco night.

• 1:02:15Jocko Willink?

  Disco night. It's kind of crazy. We had our, we had a CB, you know what a CB is? A CB, a construction battalion. So I had a little contingent of CBs with me in Ramadi. And we were trying to get, we were trying to get them the supplies that they needed to build us bunkers outside of our tents, right? And because we were receiving, like we had hits in our compound. And so my, my chief, my CB chief went to Fallujah, which is where the headquarters was. To like try and wrangle up some supplies and whatnot. And he came back.

• 1:02:52Jocko Willink?

  He was like, you know what they're building out there? And I was like, no, what? He goes, theater. And I was like, what? He's like, yeah, they're building a theater. And I said, wow, that's interesting. He goes, I told them we needed bunkers and they're building a theater. So. There you go.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Jocko Willink?

  It's always the same, I guess.

• 1:03:11Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, it seems like at this point, again, read the book, there's so much good information, but you start to get into phase four operations, post-conflict stability phase, quote unquote, nation building. Initially, we mostly drove around Kirkuk, attempting to stop looters and respond to people in the neighborhoods about violence in particular, even finding decapitated bodies. We did not even have interpreters during this time. This is not to say we drove around aimlessly. The military would never allow us to say that. We use colorful language like presence patrols, or later, intelligence gathering patrols. In reality, we just drove around. It was during one of these presence patrols that an ambush occurred, it was a complex trap from a concealed position on both sides of the road, directed at the rear of the convoy.

• 1:03:57Jocko Willink?

  So this is, you guys get contacted, but you know, at this time, you're, I was, when I saw that you're driving around, and you don't have interpreters, and you're trying to, like, just think about that. It's freaking ridiculous.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  It is. And it was hard to convince your soldiers that it wasn't.

• 1:04:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  But, I mean, that night, again, taught us that there was an enemy.

• 1:04:20Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  And that was RPGs from both sides, heavy machine guns. We went right into the trap. Which is this real paradox of that time period. This is still 2003, when, you know, as you, I know you've had many guests about, you know, getting rid of the Baath Party, getting rid of the Army. There's a couple of months there that nobody knows what's going on. It's just, it's anarchy, it's chaos, there's no police, there's nothing, and we're just driving around, driving around. You know, we're trying to find, you know, we do a lot of battlefield collection, which I didn't put in the book, like, we just, you know, the sheer amount of military equipment left in Iraq. I'm writing a new book, talking about some incidents with that. That was a big part of our job, too, was just, we'd walk up and find a SCUD missile.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Like, well, we gotta call that in. We were just doing battlefield cleanup everywhere, so it's like, we're doing things, but nobody knows what we're doing. Eventually, we started, like, standing up police to do things like that and everything, but yeah, there was a lot of driving around. But the leadership was really important, like, no, no, you can't, you're not just driving around, you're collecting intelligence. On what?

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  On what?

• 1:05:29Jocko Willink?

  Uh, well, on ambush sites, because you guys got ambushed. You say the engagement was over this one after you got ambushed. You say that engagement was over very quickly. Only a few RPGs had been shot, followed by a little machine gun fire. My soldiers returned fire and attack and the attackers slinked away. When I got to the back, many of the soldiers had dismounted from the vehicles and started moving into the woods in the direction of the enemy. All firing had stopped, so I said to one of the 50 cal gunners, return fire, damn it.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Where?

• 1:05:55Jocko Willink?

  Anywhere.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, um, that was, you know, known or suspected enemy locations. Like, how about where you just received fire?

• 1:06:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Please return fire to where they were shooting at us from. And you guys eventually went out there and found that they went, they had more RPGs, um, that they were going to hit you with.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Which I don't know if I put in there, but so that became new home. So we were just driving around and like, well, that's a bad place. So then they was like, well, how about your company just stay there? And then they had, I know, I don't think I put in there. So, you know, soldiers get frustrated when they're what they're told to do. So we get told to live there and to set up ambushes on the street that we were ambushed. So we would put an infantry platoon in, in like a ranger school linear ambush, waiting for them to return. And we, every platoon to include mine, like this is the dumbest thing we could ever ask, be asked to do like, like that resentment. How hard is a leader to say, you follow orders, we do design mission.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  And then dang, if about a week and a half later, three dudes, like they're in ranger school, come walking down the road with RPGs on their back and walk into our lineary ambush and to get smoked. But it was almost like, I'm glad I didn't say what I was thinking that. I agree with you. This is stupid. No. You, sometimes you get ordered and, and it was crazy that they came walking down the road, just like ranger school, which we will do in ranger school. You know, you have to send the out for athletic people so they can go through their rehearsal and do the mission. But three dudes came walking down the road with RPGs up and down their backs to do another ambush at the same location.

• 1:07:33Jocko Willink?

  How'd that work out for them?

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they were left in pieces.

• 1:07:42Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Again, get the book. There's so much you give so much good detail and such good leadership lessons in here. In this early part of the war, we established baseline of 2003 systems, communication, connection between soldiers in a unit. Between the combat zone and the home front, I observed my own soldiers' connections with families, friends in the outside world. We found ways individually and as a group to be somewhat comfortable in the midst of combat. Everything from eating, sleeping, hygiene and recreation was done with the group in mind, or at least originally designed with that thought. And that contributed to our unit cohesion. Looking back, this time provided a picture of an ideal situation of bonding in combat without connection to the outside world.

• 1:08:23Jocko Willink?

  We as soldiers got to know each other and became friends due to reliance on each other as companions and as a support network. Getting to know one another in this way is important part of the bond that is needed in social cohesion. So you're feeling good. Yeah. We moved from Urbil to Kirkuk in arriving April 11th, 2003.

• 1:08:47Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little. Our initial mission after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime was to prevent mass civil chaos. We patrolled the streets of Kirkuk on President's patrols. It was like we were saying the US military is here. We were there for sure, driving around without interpreters, unable to talk to anyone and having no clue what to look for. Other than if we saw someone doing something bad, that was our attempt to maintain order. You go on to say looting was rampant. Our task was pretty futile. So you've got these, you've got these.

• 1:09:19Jocko Willink?

  Looters are out there, they're causing problems and you're out there trying to stop these looters. I'm going to get into one of these operations right here. On one of the visits, when the looters started running, the squad of nine men gave chase on foot. The Iraqis were not burdened down with gear, so they were getting away. Out of nowhere, one of the soldiers giving chase. Specialist Yul took a knee, trained his rifle at one of the looters and shot the looter in the back. The looter fell to the ground screaming. The squad stood motionless in shock over what had just happened.

• 1:09:51Jocko Willink?

  They just stood there staring at Yule in disbelief. The dead silence is broken only by the scream of medic as the sergeants and the squad jumped into action and began administering first aid to the now wounded civilian. Luckily, Doc McCarthy was there. He applied pressure dressing to the gunshot. He also let his emotions fly. Why the fuck did you do that, motherfucker? Get in the vehicle now, you stupid shit. This dude is dying. The civilian was put in one of our vehicles and raced back to the main airfield where our main aid station was set up. Yule's action was completely uncalled for, unjustified, and irrational. His squad members were not only shocked by what he did, but they were also pissed. Yule initially protested that he was fed up with looters getting away with every day, but that was not the point.

• 1:10:36Jocko Willink?

  This is not what we as Americans do. We are the good guys. We do not shoot unarmed civilians, especially those fleeing, who pose us no threat. Not only was it against the laws of armed conflict, this was against the values, norms, and ethics of being an American soldier, of being part of our unit. His squad leader brought Yule to me and reported what had happened. By the time Yule got to me, his story had changed. Now he said he was just firing a warning shot, something we were also not allowed to do. Then he said he thought he saw a weapon in the looters' hands and invoked the right of self-protection that we give all soldiers. I said, "Which is it, Yule? Were you firing a warning shot, or did you see a weapon?" He settled on believing he saw a weapon.

• 1:11:20Jocko Willink?

  You go on to say, "You might think, given everything I said about unit cohesion and being willing to die for one's fellow soldiers, that the other soldiers present, Yule's friends and squadmates, would circle the wagons in defense of him regardless of his guilt or innocence. That is how these situations are portrayed in movies and TV shows. The few historical examples I know pointed towards soldiers standing behind their fellow team member who had committed the crime. Based on these limited data points, I expected the soldiers to cover for Yule. To my surprise, from my first question to the soldiers, I was relieved that they showed no thought of concocting a story to protect their battle buddy or a following Yule story that they viewed as preposterous. They made me proud with their integrity and values.

• 1:12:02Jocko Willink?

  During the official investigation of the event, I saw the shooter's entire squad turn their backs on him. They reported..." His action as something that was not accepted in their squad. Each of his fellow squad members told the investigating officer how abnormal Yule's actions were to the group and how upset they were with him for his decision. They valued their primary group, their squad, as a whole over blind loyalty to an individual.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a very vivid example of what we, you know, you learn a lot. And as an officer, I went through all the training of ethics and law of war. The Mead Line massacre, I learned about it hundreds of times now at this point. Uh, that was a real vivid example of when you say cohesion, it comes with that norms and rules of what we do and don't do that are reinforced by the ethical code of the profession, which self polices. So, and this is before, especially now when I studied other militaries of, they can say they have, they follow the laws, they do this or that, but what is their kind of internal who we are, what we do and don't do.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  And that was a great example without me of his squad saying, no, that, that was not what we do. Uh, soldiers make mistakes. We've had, you know, even in the, you know, in Iraq and Afghanistan, bad soldiers who have done really bad things. And part of their profession is that they're investigated, all that stuff. So this is even before what I later become in studying other militaries and other wars. Such a vivid example for me, and that's why I wanted to include it, that, um, that there is that cohesion doesn't, can lead to bad norms. Like we have kill squads where people, where a single leaders can influence small units, what they think is okay or not, even if it's an internal dilemma within themselves.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  It's again, we try to use these examples to teach new soldiers that that's like you, you do have a code, whether it's the constitution or our societal values, or we don't harm civilians. You target enemies and that dehumanization or whatever it is on, it's really hard to do. And that was an amazing example of, you know, the soldiers truly showing who they are.

• 1:14:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, something I used to teach the junior officers is, um, like, hey, you're going to have your guys back no matter what, right? And they'd nod their head and say, yeah, yeah. And I'd say, no. Actually, you need to make it specifically clear that if they do something that's illegal, immoral, or unethical, you will not have their back. They need to know that from the beginning, that that's how you're gonna operate. Because otherwise, if you keep them in some gray area, they're gonna assume, well, you know, he didn't, you know, he covered for me when I showed up late to work, and he covered for me when I didn't have enough money for this thing, and I had to take a little from the platoon fund to pay for it, or you see, you covered for him, you covered for him, you covered for him, and now you're in a situation.

• 1:15:09Jocko Willink?

  So, you gotta make that really clear. If you do something immoral, illegal, unethical, you're done. And what's interesting about this, and I'm gonna read through the, kind of the outcome here, you say, "Our chain of command wasted no time in responding to Yule's actions, and investigation started the same day. Every soldier who witnessed the event was interviewed. Even I was questioned. I was not there, but it didn't matter. I was responsible. Had I allowed warning shots to happen on other patrols? Had I allowed a climate of not following the laws of war, or other rules, to be disobeyed? In the end, Yule was not punished. We were all shocked, as we expected him to be taken away, thrown in prison, and never heard from again. I did not get to see the findings of the investigation,

• 1:15:53Jocko Willink?

  or the investigating officer's recommendation to the chain of command, but with Yule's final defense settling on his belief that he had saw a weapon, and for other reasons, the battalion commander had weighed the risk of what punishing a soldier for shooting someone he thought was armed, against punishing the soldier for unlawful actions. Punishing a soldier for shooting at someone he thought was armed, could send a message to other soldiers, who would then possibly be too scared to shoot when faced with an armed enemy. On the other hand, any blatant violation of our rules of engagement, had to be rapidly punished to deter others from doing wrong. It was clearly not an easy decision. It did

• 1:16:34Jocko Willink?

  not matter from then on, Yule's every move was scrutinized. He had demonstrated that under stress, he could not be trusted."

• 1:16:44Jocko Willink?

  And that's, that's your kind of assessment because you didn't get to read the findings. You didn't talk to the battalion commander and say, hey, boss, wait, what, why, why did you make this decision?

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:54Jocko Willink?

  You're kind of making assumptions of what you thought Heath was thinking.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Yep. And, and in the investigation, because you know, like when this happens, as you know, you know, there's a independent, non-biased investigating officer assigned who does all the interviews, looks at all the evidence, then makes his recommendation and the commander can still, the recommendation could have been punishment, but the commander then can override depending on what the severity of it is. Uh, and I did not get to see that final report, no. But I had to live with that soldier.

• 1:17:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that had to be interesting.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  And it could be like a huge mistake, but it, it, it is now something that you had to watch for. Uh, because you had me giving his weapon back and full member of the patrol that other people are relying on for their safety as well. And we, and I think you probably talk about this as well, but once you lose trust

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  in a combat scenario or in a wartime, it's near impossible to gain that trust back fully.

• 1:17:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. No, that's, that's a major problem.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:00Jocko Willink?

  And it, you know, we obviously I was, did multiple combat deployments and had investigations on shootings and like the amount of scrutiny that comes down on the platoon and on the, the unit is like significant. And I think you said you listened to when I had, um, General McFarland on the podcast.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Oh yeah.

• 1:18:23Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it was like if a civilian got killed in Ramadi was like such a huge situation because everyone was so interconnected. The civilians were interconnected with the sheiks, were interconnected with the police, were interconnected with the military, who were interconnected with the US military. So it was like everybody was gonna know that this thing happened and they, we had to be able to explain why these things happened. We as coalition forces had to say, hey, here's what happened. Here's why it happened. But it was, was, was definitely one of the hardest things. And those investigations, if you, you, you have to carry out those investigations and like you said, it's like some other person outside your unit that's going to come in, they're going to find out what happened.

• 1:19:07Jocko Willink?

  And that's the way it has to be. That's the way you, you have to maintain the upper hand. From a moral perspective, that's the other thing is, you know, I think I forget the words you used, but you were talking about how it was against the, against what the, what the unit, what the platoon or the squad, what, what they were like as a unit. It's also such a devastating impact to the war effort. Like civilian casualties are such a horrible impact to the war effort that, I mean, even Abu Ghraib, like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, like those people were, were basically hazed really badly.

• 1:19:51Jocko Willink?

  And that was horrific setback for our strategic efforts in that country. And no, it was like they were being abused. They weren't being killed. So when you start talking about, oh, civilian deaths, they have such a huge negative impact on the strategic goals, you simply cannot allow these things to be taking place.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Right, and I think there's a lot that I learned, and now in having teaching, you know, taught strategy at West Point, I think I, I failed in communicating that to my soldiers, being able to connect those tactics to the strategy. And you could argue, you know, when did we understand what the strategy was? And when were we actually implementing it? As you know, you know, even post Ramadi, before we, counter insurgency strategy was there, but being able to translate that to the soldiers, even in 2008, when I go back, when the height of the sectarian vice, a lot of my time, even at that lower company level, was trying to get them to understand, soldiers who had watched those movies, had thought war is going to be something that it isn't what they were doing.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Connecting that to the national interest, to the strategy, to the how do we get out of here? Aspect was really hard, and I think this is the part of being a warrior scholar that I think, you know, some professionals, some militaries get it right or not, like you can't only know what you're doing, you have to know everything, the things that came before and what, how to connect those dots for the soldiers. Cause if not, they're going to be very unhappy with handing out soccer balls and building schools. Um, especially you're like an infantryman, like, uh, you trained me to close with and destroy the enemy. How does this achieve the goal? And that was a big part of my job, especially in 2008, was to communicate that to the soldiers.

• 1:21:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, we had all those different lines of operations going and you're, you know, literally sending guys out in an overwatch position where you know they're gonna kill enemy fighters and at the same day, you've got another element that's going out and helping to put a roof on this thing that we're hoping to turn into a school. Like, that's all happening at the same time, which is wild.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Which is, you know, I know you read, you read the counter insurgency manual when it came out.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  In order to convince somebody that the center of gravity is the support of the population, it takes like a master's level, it took the military, like, you know, multiple PhDs to be able to articulate it, that that is, the center of gravity is the support of the population and then all these things can ripple to that, to counteract that. Now, as a student of war, is that, General McMaster wrote about fallacies of war, like the ideals that special forces can always get the, you know, can achieve the strategic goal or thing. I think one of the fallacies that we have is that all war, the center of gravity will be the support of the enemy's population.

• 1:22:44Jocko Willink?

  Wait, you think that's a fallacy?

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Jocko Willink?

  So what do you think it is?

• 1:22:49Jocko Willink?

  It's just gonna be different, it's gonna be variable.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  It depends on, yeah, it depends on the war. In a counter insurgency, without doubt, and it took us six years to figure that out.

• 1:22:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  That the, the small insurgency's ability to, to live amongst the people and gain their support and you can separate them and all that, will achieve the strategic goals. In a war, like against the Nazi regime, against the Ja- Japanese, whatever, the goal is to remove the enemy's will to continue to fight. Take away his means or his, the ideal that he thinks he can win, we can apply that to, you know, even a Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Gaza, other aspects is that, of course, you don't wanna do counterproductive, but the center of gravity, as Clausewitz defined it, is the main source of the enemy's power.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  If he's in a, what we call in a, not a total war, that's something else, an unlimited war. Like if you're, like when we moved in, I did, and this is really the just a potion of this, this book is that I did two types of war. I did a war in 2003 where the goal is to remove the Saddam regime from power. That's the goal. And the center of gravity of that is his military's ability to resist that. So you take down the military. Then we transition to this other phase where the goals are different. And depending on what the objectives of the war is, the center of gravity in a revolution, in an insurgency, whatever is, is that's the correct identification. As Claus was said, the first problem is to identify what type of war you're in.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  I believe now, just based on heuristics of the primacy, that most people, not, I know, not you, but believe that all war, that support of the population is the center of gravity.

• 1:24:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it certainly depends on the entire situation that's happening. The, uh, the interesting thing about that story with me reading the counter insurgency manual, which was an online draft of it. Because this was in April. If you look at the publication date of that, it's not until that summer, I think. So I had an early draft that I found online on like, I forget what the global security, there was some website that just had some early version of it. Well, what triggered me to go and look at that was my first deployment to Iraq. So 2003, 2004, we had built this wall with like our link diagram of our enemy that we were going after. And there was like hundreds of people on it, hundreds of, you know, quote unquote, enemy fighters.

• 1:25:21Jocko Willink?

  And we would, you know, get to go out and capture, kill some of those people and so was everyone else. But we, I, I had, I actually jokingly would call this the beautiful mind wall. Did you ever see the movie A Beautiful Mind?

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  I did, yeah.

• 1:25:33Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, he connects all these weird conspiracy things. So I had built this with my intel officer was like, hey, we need to be able to see everyone, see how they're connected. And it seemed like a really smart idea. So we built this big wall, like literally the wall of our talk was a, was all these different individual people that we were gonna target, capture, kill. So fast forward three years or two and a half years. Now I'm back in Iraq and it just so happens that that same intel officer is working down the street from me. And so I knew her commander. And so I'm talking to her commander, is a friend of mine. And he was, you know, come back to my intel shop, let me tell you what's going on. And I walk into her office and on the wall is the same, it's a chart.

• 1:26:19Jocko Willink?

  With hundreds of people on this link diagram. And I looked at that and I said to myself, just in my own head, I'm like, we're losing because we've been doing this. Everyone's been doing this, going out and capture, kill a bad guy for three years. And enemy attacks are up 300%. And this city that I'm sitting on the outskirts of is almost completely run by the enemy. Something's wrong. And I went back. And, you know, I of course, you know, I was hearing the word insurgency. And I, I had, I got, I probably had heard about something about the manual that Petraeus and the team was working on. And I Googled it, found it and I read that thing. And then I presented my commanding officer. Hey, we've got to, we've got to go out there and we got to get into the city. And, and then, well, when McFarland showed up,

• 1:27:04Jocko Willink?

  you know, he brought that same idea that Quikmaster had used up in Talafar. So everything lined up very lucky for me, but my mindset was a lot different than it would have been otherwise. It was also different because my first deployment to Iraq. Guess what I did? I lived the, the Navy SEAL dream. Do a, do a direct action mission, kick in a door, breach a door, grab a bad guy, come back, high five. Yeah, we're awesome. Like I, I did so much of that, that my mind was, I guess, like satisfied in the fact that, okay, I know how to do that. So now when I'm looking at, go wait, wait, what did that do from a strategic perspective? What did all those operations do? And it's not just me, it's hundreds of other units across Iraq. So when I read that and I saw the, secure the populace, I was like, oh,

• 1:27:50Jocko Willink?

  if we don't get to do this, we don't do this, we're going to be here forever. We need to get the level of violence down to a point that the Iraqi soldiers can handle. We need to get them trained up to the best of our ability and they were terrible. But we need to, because they were so bad, we need to mitigate the violence as much as we can. How are we going to mitigate the violence? We're going to kill a lot of bad guys, number one. And number two, thankfully with General McFarland, he came in with the seas clear, hold and build. And that's what we ended up doing.

• 1:28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Have you read General Petraeus and Andrew Roberts' new book called Conflicts? I haven't read it. It's pretty good because it, you know, General Petraeus being the mastermind, and actually, if you talk to him, you should have him on the podcast, about the pushback he got from everybody on the creation of the counterinsurgency strategy and what he had to do when he was in charge of that command that was responsible for the learning of the military and how much institutional pushback he got. In the book, Conflicts, a lot shorter, it actually walks you through the genesis of everything from where did the hearts and minds first get mentioned, which is like the tiger of Malaya in the Malayan, where he was viciously seeking the enemy but also protecting the population. So it's not that you can, and

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  he walks you through like wars from Israel's war of independence to Ukraine. And when does, when is there an insurgency? When does counterinsurgency work in combination to, you know, attacking whatever it is? And it's an amazing, fast, like really quick review of a bunch of wars where each war has its own language, its own goals. I mean, it's just like, you mentioned about ISIS coming back. And General Petraeus, who has rightfully said, like ISIS started the day we left, because the Iraqi government that we had been backing for 11 years, and creating all these shared power structures, which I've

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  really gotten into now with the urban warfares, who hones the power? And that's really an element of, you know, you have to secure the population, but there has to be a power and it can be good or bad. As soon as we left Iraq, the government immediately implemented sectarian policies, right? So through the vice president in jail, like, you know, that's what created ISIS, was the gap in shared powers. So one group, the Sunnis, thought that they were now being written out of the power structures, and they were. And then they created this- We're gonna fight to get it back. They're gonna fight to get it back. And they took cities, and they took military equipment, and they took everything. And they built something that was allowed to build for two years before we have the biggest urban battle since World War II, because

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  of the fact that, that what these sectarian policies were there.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  So the problem with the fallacies that I love, and John McMaster had some, and I've added some recent ones, is that people want a framework to understand a war. They're just like, just tell me how to understand this. When war is human, it's political, it's uncertain. As you know, like Ramadi is different than Fallujah. Fallujah is different than Kukuk, which had like everybody in it. Having that ability to understand the war you're fighting, what is the goals, and then what is, what are you working with here? What are the different power structures? And this is why Afghanistan, we're backing an illegitimate, one of the most corrupt governments on the corruption index of the world, and we're backing them for 20 years. And then it just falls apart. And it's really hard to fight an insurgency,

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Vietnam, Afghanistan, for an illegitimate government that the people don't accept.

• 1:31:29Jocko Willink?

  It's not a good idea.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:31:32Jocko Willink?

  When you talked about Petraeus getting pushed back, there's the book, The Strategy or The Indirect Approach by B. H. Liddell Hart. And he's got this great section where he explains that each progression in naval ships was met with just atrocious pushback. So when, you know, when someone said, hey, we should use, instead of using sails for these ships, we should use steam. That'll never work. How are you gonna have enough fuel? What's gonna happen when the steam runs out? You're gonna have these ships are out there, can't go in. Okay, then finally, you know, it gets to a point where this is the obvious answer. You can't rely on wind when you're in combat. And then it's, you know, oh, we need to make the ships out of steel. Well, how are you gonna repair those

• 1:32:13Jocko Willink?

  things? Wood is so much better. Wood floats, steel doesn't. And every level, each time, even going all the way to like aircraft carriers versus regular, you know, battleships, each person, each, each level that you try and change, it takes a significant amount of pushback. You're gonna get a bunch of pushback from the institution which has done things, and they wanna keep doing the same things, and the inertia of what they're doing is not gonna change. Unless it is forced. And then the really interesting thing is that he says, you know, the first person that steps up and makes the extreme case and doesn't back down, that person's going to be a martyr and they're going to get drummed out of the military.

• 1:32:53Jocko Willink?

  You know, perhaps we could even say that David Hackworth was that guy who at the end of the Vietnam War was saying, hey, listen, if we keep fighting the war like this, we're going to lose. And what did they do? He's a martyr. You're out of here. And it wasn't until 20 years later, they went, hey, you know, that guy was kind of right about a lot of what he was saying. So.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is the beauty of at the end of my career, being able to teach at West Point, to teach strategies and to get these light bulbs after it all, from all these military theories, from Sun Tzu to Jominy, Clausewitz, Boyd, to understand that you have military theory, but then you have culture. Like, we resisted the airplane. We resisted the tank. We resisted, like, all of it as a military, because that's what militaries do. Like, no, no, this is what we do. Like, and there could be like a complete revolution in military affairs. We would take tanks and or and bring them by horse up to the battle. Like, when you actually get the

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  chance to step back from it and study it, the light bulbs, even, you know, and why Clausewitz, even, you know, this is this dead Prussian guy that everybody in the military quotes, like, why is he, it's almost like the Bible, too. Like, nobody reads it, but they quote it, because it gives you maxims like Sun Tzu did, like, and Sun Tzu is used by businesses and you probably use them, because people need ways to understand complexity. And for us military people, all these military theories are there. But then, once you start to actually put it in application of going like, why did we do it like that? Why did we keep doing something that wasn't working? Well, it's cultural and there's these reasons, there's these organizational reasons, where like the guy who brought the airplane to the military was literally was,

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  was a court martial, and the president had to save him. And he had to, he blew up ships in this, you know, in the demonstration. And if not, and, you know, we would have lost tens of thousands of more soldiers. Like, all these, and this is the gift that I was given as having to learn it and then teach it. As you know, you can read a book, but when you have to teach somebody else military theory that doesn't know anything about it. And it's come back in droves for me now as a researcher going, you know, whatever it is like, yeah, but what's, what's the political goal? I don't care what the military is doing. What is the goal that they're? And are they actually doing it like? Cause I experienced where there was a political goal, but that's not what we were doing. So now I get to explain to other people like, yeah, I can tell you about the, what's happening on the battlefield.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  But what do you think the goal is here? And whoever it is I'm talking to, they think it's another goal based on what they know. Like, of course it's, you gotta protect the populations and they have to, you have to win their support. Okay, like, well, how much support do you think the Japanese population had for the emperor during World War II? A hundred percent. Did that factor into our approach to remove their will to continue to fight to the death of a hundred percent of them? Not. So understanding those links has been a gift that I was given after this book, of course. And at some levels, you don't need to know that, but it's, it's a window that I was given and I really appreciate it.

• 1:36:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so it's all, it's all good. And speaking of the evolution of war. Going back to the book on August 11th, 2003, we struck our first improvised explosive device. There were many more to come, but this one was the first and you, you guys took a hit. Doc McCarthy, one of the, the one soldier especially don't want to lose in battle. Shrapnel had sheared the forward assist charging handle of most buttstock from his weapon. More significantly, a large piece of shrapnel had cut off his thumb, which hung by a sliver of skin. Blood was spewing steadily from his hand. His calm tone was almost even more startling. Doc looked at me calmly and said, I have arterial bleeding. You need to get me out of here immediately. From his medical experience, he knew he's in danger of losing blood too fast.

• 1:36:48Jocko Willink?

  He could die if he did not get medical attention very soon. You guys call for the, uh, the medevac. And get him out of there, but you guys actually, what, you guys had a, like, wasn't there a low order? Charge that went off and put a flat tire in one of the other vehicles because you guys had to drive through where you hit the first ID to get back to the helicopter landing zone.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  The chaos. Yeah, so we it was a 155 artillery round, which is was the typical ID back in the day that had exploded, but had lowered dead. It's just like banana split open. We drove through the ambush because we didn't know if it was followed by an ambush and then realized that we had to drive back through it to get him to the where the ambulance would be. And the commander's, the vehicle in front of me blows up like it looked like it blew up, but it hit this banana peel of an artillery round sitting in the road. They didn't see and we thought we got hit again. So then we're shooting at, you know, what we think is getting hit by and we keep on driving. But that's the yeah, the chaos of the the introduction of the IEDs, which started rapidly in 2003. It

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  wasn't like it was a slow build. It was like quickly.

• 1:37:58Jocko Willink?

  They came quick.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Quick.

• 1:38:01Jocko Willink?

  You also you guys end up getting T boned by a civilian van. You guys are near up armor up armored Humvee Sergeant Wood, my Ford Observer and and another guy named May on the driver's side were really messed up metal from the vehicle went through their legs. And you know, you have to take care of them. But and there's five dead Iraqis in this van and a bunch of more wounded. Just a nightmare out there.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, my I have a new book that I'm writing. It's like 20 times I almost died. And that's one of them. Just as you know, there is chance and and just sheer bad luck in war. And we were turning around in the middle of night under night vision goggles and out of nowhere in the vehicle that we just talked about the ID. And most people don't realize, I mean, this is we're driving around in open air pickup trucks during this time. So if you get hit by an ID, it's taking out everybody. I just happened to have one, the one armed up armored Humvee, which is like an M114 of the entire platoon. But we were turning around in the middle of night on a on a highway and the lights out for me. I get I actually got knocked out in the hit. But with this vehicle, because Iraqis actually would drive without lights.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  So the guy on the gunner at the top didn't see it and it just T-boned us at like 50 miles per hour. They weren't wearing seat belts. So most of them, it's just carnage. Just the randomness of of of war and it caved in that side, but had it not been that up armored Humvee, we would have all it actually threw the gunner out of the out of the truck and sheared the grenade, the Mark 19 off the top of it. It was horrific. And I I woke up to like, like just all the stuff on top of me and like my helmet's gone, like it was rough.

• 1:39:43Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. On October 18th, we heard a call in the battalion command net of troops in contact. One of the platoons in the battalion was being ambushed and needed help badly. The radio traffic really picked up. The contact was easily 20 miles from us, but our company command out of our company sector. But just like almost everyone in the battalion, we were listening in. After a few minutes, I was told by my company commander to move to the ambush site and be prepared to fight. My platoon was being tasked to support the battalion in any way we could. Just get there. We rushed to the site. By the time we got there, the massive firefight was over. Fast forward a little bit. I talked to the lieutenant who was with them. He told me that it was First Lieutenant Bernstein and his convoy that had been surprised. He then recounted the story, some of some more of which I learned

• 1:40:25Jocko Willink?

  later. Bernstein, who was the Charlie Company Executive Officer, was traveling in the last of a three-vehicle convoy returning to his post when the site came under rocket attack. His convoy was closest to the location from where the unit believed the rocket had originated. He was directed to intercept the attackers. As they approached the location of the rocket launchers, they were attacked by machine gun RPG fire. The driver Bernstein's Humvee lost control and crashed into a berm, becoming separated from the other two vehicles. The gunner, PFC John Hart, was killed by enemy fire. The driver specialist Joshua Sams was thrown out of the vehicle and became trapped under the wheel when the vehicle stopped on top of him. Bernstein jumped out of the jumped out and returned fire on the attackers. He

• 1:41:06Jocko Willink?

  was hit in the upper thigh by a bullet severing his femoral artery. He continued to crawl around to the driver's side of the vehicle and attempted five times to get the vehicle's steering wheel and gas pedal to get the vehicle off of Sams. He was finally able to move the vehicle off Sams and then Bernstein pulled him out from underneath. With this final selfless act, Bernstein collapsed from loss of blood.

• 1:41:31Jocko Willink?

  By then, the two other vehicles were able to return and the enemy retreated. The other soldiers did what they could to stop the bleeding. A medevac helicopter was called in, but Lieutenant Bernstein never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at the hospital. Bernstein received a posthumous Silver Star and was buried at West Point with full military honors.

• 1:41:53Jocko Willink?

  And we didn't cover it in the book, but this was the guy that like, kinda gave you a heads up and taught you how to use vehicles and he was a real brother of a fellow officer.

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that one hit, I mean, and actually it's 21 years ago last week, so it's, the anniversary of his death was just recently, so it's, it was hard for me, you know, of course, all, you know, any loss of life and it's really hard to help, but this is a guy who, even though I'd had all, you know, enlisted time and everything, I didn't know anything about vehicles, matter of fact, the vehicles were new to the airborne unit, and he took me under his wing and, um, just seeing him made me feel better. You see, you know, you run into, uh, as a platoon leader, you know, there's a separation between you and, and the soldiers and there's a relationship with you and your platoon sergeant, but the fellow platoon leaders, of course, have a special understanding of each other's hardships and this guy, so if I saw him, it just made me feel better on, on the battlefield,

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  even during that year. So, once I, I knew it was him, it really hit me hard and to know that we didn't get there in time.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  And this is also before, you know, turnip kits and everything, so the guys were trying to use a belt to-

• 1:43:06Jocko Willink?

  Which is freaking just horrible.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10Jocko Willink?

  You say we lost a few people on that deployment. There were fortunately no KIA's in my platoon, although we had a lot of wounded soldiers, the three evacuated after the first IED, those injured in the car wreck and another IED later, which was smaller so that no evacuation was needed. It was a painful time for all of us. I lost a good friend and everyone in the platoon was emotionally impacted by the event.

• 1:43:31Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 1:43:34Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. I mean, you, you, you returned to Italy in February of 2004. Um. How was the, how was the return home?

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  It was good is what, what, what? You know. Again, the, the dichotomy of, of the differences now where there was, you know, there was a cool and all period in Kuwait. Get back. There's all the hugs and all the welcome. I actually, because I had entered in this delayed entry program. I talked to Andy about this, but I, I didn't have a college degree, but the army had a program where they let you go be a platoon commander or platoon leader and then send you back to college. So as soon as we got back, I went into college. I, I stayed on base and, and tried to finish my bachelor's degree on post. So I was immediately separated from my guys, but there is this almost scattering of it and you'd see them in passing. So it was a little, for me personally, it was, it was kind of hard.

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  And then they got the word that with in 11 months after we returned, they would, they would be going into Afghanistan.

• 1:44:35Jocko Willink?

  And you weren't going with them?

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  And I wasn't going with them. And I actually tried and I went to the command and everything and they tried really hard, but I was in like big army system in school and he tried to pull me forward. And actually I had started a combatants program where I was teaching soldiers, even you're trying to stay connected to the unit, combatives on the, on the, on the football field. One of those soldiers that I, that came to my flyer of learning, I was just teaching you like white belt stuff. Um.

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  Ryan Pitts would, he, he was awarded the Medal of Honor in that deployment because that's a one not in a bunch of bad situations that the one, my unit, the 173rd went through during that tour.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  So yeah, it was hard for me personally is like, you want to go back with the same people that you'd formed all these bonds with. And at one point they were trying to make it happen and it just didn't. So they all went off and I had to stay there.

• 1:45:29Jocko Willink?

  The big green machine.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:45:32Jocko Willink?

  And I think in the army, you guys call it the big green machine and the Navy, we say needs of the Navy. Like the Navy needs is what it needs and that's what it's gonna get.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:45:43Jocko Willink?

  Um, after you get done with college, uh, you do the captain's career course.

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:45:49Jocko Willink?

  What is that? How long is that?

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  It's like thirteen weeks or something. It's considerable.

• 1:45:55Jocko Willink?

  Um. Are you paying attention to what's happening over in Iraq? Are you now looking at Afghanistan?

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  I was, I stayed focused on Iraq. I mean, just by sheer numbers of the scale, we had more soldiers, of course, going there. Um, but I was also disconnected in some ways, which.

• 1:46:12Jocko Willink?

  I came home from Iraq and thought, we, I left in April of two thousand and four. And we did, like, it was, it was really bad when we left because of, well, quite frankly, it's because my platoon went and captured one of Muqaddar Al-Sadr's top lieutenants. A guy named Yakubi, and that caused total chaos to break out. Like, no one expected it. It was, no one was prepared for it. And so we started to see things really spiral bad. But then we left and it was like, oh, well, you know, the spiral would be, because we'd seen other little spikes in, in, uh, enemy activities in two thousand and three, two thousand and four.

• 1:46:56Jocko Willink?

  And I thought it would settle down. And I kind of thought to myself like, well, you know, I'm thankful that I got, you know, I got to do what I wanted to do in the military. I got to go into combat. Cool. And it took a couple of months of watching it get worse and worse and worse and worse. Before I was like, oh, this thing's gonna be going on for a long time. Um.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  I don't think I ever got that. And actually, this is.

• 1:47:19Jocko Willink?

  Which part?

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  That this would keep going.

• 1:47:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't think I was. As a matter of fact, because I remember the first Battle of Fallujah 2004, when the four Americans are hung up. I remember that vividly because it was aired across the United States everywhere. But I didn't connect the dudus to that. That was a massive sign of years to come. Or that we would continue to try the same thing and get no results. Or I do remember the MRAP conversation that we were like, the IEDs were losing soldiers with the military. There was a battle within the industrial, the Congress and the military, like, do something about this. Do something about the IEDs. And it's another example, which again, in the research of when the military is like, I don't, I don't need mine resistant vehicles. I don't want them and I won't take them.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  And it was McCain who, and, and others who forced the military to deploy mine resistant vehicles just for the ground troops. So they stopped dying every day.

• 1:48:15Jocko Willink?

  Because the military is going, well, they weigh too much and there are too much fuel and blah, blah, blah. They have a bunch of excuses.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  The military, this is a thing that I've learned, especially working in the Pentagon for the four-star general. The military fights not the, the war it wants to fight.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  So it didn't want to accept a new equipment set because this, this isn't the war that we want. This is not the, this will be over soon. We don't, we need our tanks and everything to fight on the field of battle. They, they thought it would change the organizational chart of the military. So they didn't want it. Like it doesn't fit our narrative with the real war that we're about to fight. And we have to be ready to fight, which is something that's very unique to the US military. Like we're, because we're an expedition to marry with, with peer competitors. We envision what the future of war is, even if we're dying now. And that, that it took outside influence, just like with these, the airplane to say like, to force the military and it usually, and we were losing soldiers every day and we're just like, we don't need that.

• 1:49:18Jocko Willink?

  This is when you become a Ranger instructor for a few years?

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:49:21Jocko Willink?

  You had a good time doing that?

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  Oh, one of the best jobs I've ever had. I mean...

• 1:49:25Jocko Willink?

  What did you like about it so much?

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  One, I loved, so in order to be a Ranger instructor, you have to, you have to go through certification. So, this is probably one of the, again, another point where I learned that you can know a lot. You can know how to do ambushes and raids and all that stuff, but when you have to teach others how to do it. So, the Ranger Certification Program, or the Ranger Instructor Certification Program was legit. Like, verbatim, you had to get up and teach every block of instruction that you would be teaching to the students. I love that. What I would later understand is, in order to achieve mastery, and I know Jiu-Jitsu does the same thing, like, you have to be able to teach other people. You don't have to just be good at it. And Ranger instructors, having officers as Ranger instructors was something new, actually,

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  after they had lost a bunch of their soldiers in training from hypothermia that they incorporated as like a safety mechanism. But then, you are also, you're walking lanes and everything. I love that aspect of it. I love the, what was going on behind the scenes in Ranger School to create these moments that are testing individuals and the whole business of it. But I also got to compete in the Best Ranger competition.

• 1:50:31Jocko Willink?

  How'd you do?

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:50:32Jocko Willink?

  How'd you do?

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  I finished it.

• 1:50:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh, right on.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  Echo, that means I did really well.

• 1:50:37Jocko Willink?

  Yes, sir.

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  In my mind, because it's like the Olympics for the, at least the Army guys. The three-day competition, sixty-plus days of straight competition. And fifty percent of the people die out on the first day, because your bodies just quit. So, to even finish it was huge. I only got one shot at it. But what's so funny is that the guy who won it in spades, like, he made everybody else look ridiculous. Colonel Liam Collins. Later becomes my boss and it is my, he is my partner into these war zones now. And he loves to show me his pistols. He actually puts them up behind him in the Zoom calls. You win pistols if you win the best Ranger competition and he puts them up behind him.

• 1:51:20Jocko Willink?

  Just to let you know, remind you.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  I got 12th place.

• 1:51:24Jocko Willink?

  That's freaking outstanding.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:26Jocko Willink?

  Did you get to see, one thing that I, so I was never an instructor at Buzz. And like even talking to Andy Stumpf about it and he's like, he was in second phase. And you know, he could just see the stress on people's faces and he talks about how he'd be watching them underwater and he could tell by like when their hands started to do certain things though, he's like, oh, this guy's coming to the surface. And then working hell weeks, of course, like checking and seeing what is it, when can someone keep going? When do they not, when are they going to break? What does that look like? Because the only, you know, hell week I ever saw was mine. You know, like that's it.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:02Jocko Willink?

  I never got to see it from the outside and I know there's a lot to be learned from that. Did you pick up some of that stuff as a Ranger instructor?

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that was again, another honor to do it. Every aspect. There's one job that they actually do too is what they'll assign. I don't know if Buzz does this with the, in Ranger school, like a class will come, it's like 400.

• 1:52:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Proctor type thing?

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  We call it an LNO, like a liaison officer. It's like the, like the nice guy.

• 1:52:26Jocko Willink?

  Yep, that's what a proctor is.

• 1:52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, they can go to if they have like, they, like their, their boots burned up in the fire or something like that. They can go to him if they're having any troubles. So being able to travel with one group of individuals through all the phases, because ours is in three different phases. So even though I was in the, the first phase, so I got to see the, the first week where we lose a lot of people as well and actually see people that I didn't know get sent there that don't want to go. They get sent there because they're like the, like some of the lieutenants, because they, it's part of the process, but then they sabotage themselves. I didn't know that part about it. But being the LNO and sitting in the boards. Which I think was a really important part of the process. Each phase has a board of all the commander and everybody. So somebody who's failed like a patrol, he's been peered or whatever.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  There's a command team that then, but still gets to make his fate on whether he redoes that phase or moves forward or whatever. In the last phase, which is the Florida phase, I saw, you know, this was all grown men cry. Uh, because they'll be in a, you know, they just survived, you know, like six months of it. And they didn't pass something like a patrol, just based on the, like you said, the ranger instructor, whatever, the roll of the dice or whatever. Now they're, they'll be given the option of, well, you, you want to go back to day zero? Or do you want to quit? And that aspect of

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  being able to quit, which is a real big part of my, the, the book I'm writing now is if you have that ability to quit, like we were talking about in Ranger School, they'll, they'll just, I think I've seen some of Bud's, they'll do this too. Like, you know, you don't have to do this. You can quit at any moment.

• 1:54:02Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. That's all of Bud's.

• 1:54:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, Ranger School isn't that rigorous. It has the moments, uh, and that board is a really big one. Where, you know, you don't have to do this. I mean, why are you doing this? And they really would test somebody. I, I never got to see that. And I was really interesting to see the character of some people and why they were doing it. Like, why do you want this? Like, are you, do you want to go back to day? Sometimes the commander would give them a day zero option to go back to the very beginning. Just to see if they, how much they wanted it. And then if they took it, then maybe he'd say they'd restart that phase or whatever. I, I, I, you know, getting into understanding

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  motivation and will for something like that and of this, our course was a unique aspect as an instructor. Like no, very few people get to see behind that level of the scenes.

• 1:54:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's gotta be a strange thing. Like I would say in SEAL training, most of the people when they're quitting, it's under duress, right? They're like, hit the surf again, or pick up the log or whatever. And so they're just in that moment, just being like, you know, I've had enough of this shit and they quit. Whereas if you're before a board and they're like, here, it's, you're warm, everything's cool, you're not being stressed. Do you want to quit? That's interesting. I don't know. I don't know if you ever get that option in BUDs. I don't know if you, I don't know if there's something like that where you're getting told. I'm sure, yeah, it must happen where they're like, alright dude. You gotta start again. They definitely do that. And it's actually very squared away because. If you get, if you make it to hell week and you make it to the first, I think you have to make it through Thursday.

• 1:55:40Jocko Willink?

  If you. Get rolled on Wednesday. You go back to the first day of training. Not to the first day of hell week, you go back to the first day of training and if those first few weeks of training suck. But you keep what they don't, what they want to avoid is like this guy's gonna rest and be totally good to go. And have a big leg up on all of his peers because he's been rested. No, you gotta do all this shit again and you're gonna be broken down like everybody else is. And then you're gonna start out week. So. Yeah.

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  I also got to see that. You know, if you get to. And you're an instructor too, and you see, if you get to see, you get to see patterns. So like who you think is going to be the leader. Isn't who you think it's going to be. When you, because we rip all rank and all badges and everything off. So somebody could be, you know, a special forces. Non-commissioned officer for like 18 years and be, and they're in the course. But none of that's there. So it's, you like you strip away. And you actually get to the true sense of leadership, teamwork, all that. And you get to learn even. Although I'd been in the military for a long time and gone through Ranger School of like. Really learn those lessons of it's not who you think it is. And, and the one that you think it is may not be, and I know you, you know, that's what you do. And explaining some of that, but as an instructor, I got to see it and learn it.

• 1:56:54Jocko Willink?

  Yep. It's funny. When I took over trade at, I was, I was like, okay, I just need the platoon chief and the OIC to be good leaders. By the time I was done with trade, I was like, hey, in this platoon, I just need like. Some, a couple of good leaders. They can be anywhere in the chain of command, truly. They can be like a guy that's got two or three platoons under his belt. They can be the leading pair of stuff. And then that platoon can be successful unless. The platoon chief or the OIC has some big ego and they don't want to listen to that guy and they'd rather just fail. Than listen to somebody that's stepping up. So. Yeah. Leadership is definitely an interesting.

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  I actually, that's in the book, actually, where if I had the, the difference between a. A well, no, a poorly led cohesive team.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Versus a well-led, non-cohesive team. Which one would function better? And I firmly believe that it's a cohesive team that can over, it will overcome poor leadership.

• 1:57:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  So this is the aspect of which is more important and militaries really struggle with this. It's always about leadership, leadership, leadership, training. Where cohesion, in my book, I take like, no, no. Like, we know from historical analysis of all militaries, like, that's one of the foundations is cohesion between the groups.

• 1:58:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. That being said, in my opinion, you have a bad platoon commander. But there's, but the reason that the team is tight because there's leaders in there. They might not have the rank, they might not have the authority, but they are freaking leaders. And when they go back and they, hey, boss just said this, it's a dumb idea. Here's what we're gonna do. And everyone goes, cool, got it. And they make it happen. So even in that subgroup, there's going to be leaders in that subgroup and there always are. There always are some pipe hitting guys that are like, oh, I got this. Hey, don't worry about this. I got it. And they make things happen. And then you'll be all right. Because you can have, I've also seen a squared away group get destroyed, or at least not perform well, because they have a bad leader. Especially if the bad leader has a big ego. That's what destroys it all.

• 1:58:51Jocko Willink?

  Because he's not going to listen to anybody else. Hey, we're doing it my way. And then you start to get the conflict inside the platoon and things just fall apart.

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  This is the, and I agree with you, and the informal leader can have more impact than the formal leader.

• 1:59:04Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  This is also, again, why a Ranger regiment is able to like, well, he's gone.

• 1:59:10Speaker 01

  What happens if you're, the leadership challenge is if you have that informal, which is what I experienced in 2008. Like, I had like a, like this massive guy who had immense amounts of informal leadership that was negative and I could tell that. Like, I had to cut that out.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  And, and that's really hard in an organization to, you can't fire anybody in the military, in the regular military. Like, there's no firing, like.

• 1:59:32Jocko Willink?

  And there's very limited firing in the SEAL teams. Like, it's hard. It's, it's not easy, I should say. It's, it's funny, when I started working with civilian companies, you know, I was like, oh, well, just, you've got someone that's like. Not doing what they're supposed to do. You just fire them and they're like, well, no, you can't do that. Blah, blah, blah. And then they'd ask me the same question. I'd be like, well, I had this badly. And they go, why don't you just fire him? Well, you can't just fire someone in the military. You know, they gotta write them up and you gotta get his commanding officer to approve it. And he's gotta get find replacement Manny to go in there. It's like not easy thing to do in any case. It's much easier if they do their freaking job and you can get them squared away. Uh, speaking of the unit that you took over, you served as a ranger instructor almost two years. Two thousand seven, you get a call. Uh, do you want company command in combat?

• 2:00:15Jocko Willink?

  And of course you respond, yes, sir. Uh, you were going to join Alpha Company, First Battalion, sixty eighth Armor. They, they arrived in Iraq in December, two thousand seven.

• 2:00:25Jocko Willink?

  They were sent to FOB Prosperity. They were poor performers. Based on their reputation from the NTC, the National Training Center.

• 2:00:34Jocko Willink?

  But luckily for them, they were stationed at FOB Prosperity. And again, Evan, get this book so you can hear these details. There's so much good stuff and so much, uh, leadership information in here and just information about what this war was like. By two thousand seven, FOB Prosperity had a green beans coffee store, a mega gym, tennis courts, a stocked fishing pond. That's a new one. Yeah. Stocked fishing pond, swimming pool, um, dining facility that rotated cuisines on a daily basis and offered 24 hour short order, fast food line.

• 2:01:08Jocko Willink?

  That's what these guys were doing. Most of the soldiers had their own rooms. Most of them had fiber optic internet access 24 hours a day. Uh, so that's where these guys were at. And, and this company was run basically like they were stateside. They had like, oh, you gotta stand duty from this time to this time. Other than that, go do whatever you're gonna do. That led to, you know, problems with complacency and drinking and missing formation, et cetera. Fast forward a little bit to March, two thousand eight, just forces loyal to the Iraqi Shia cleric Muktada Al-Sadr. Known as Jaish Al Mahdi, which is JAM, J A M began a series of violent attacks against US and Iraqi forces in Baghdad and other Shia dominated areas. These attacks were

• 2:01:52Jocko Willink?

  believed to be a response to the Iraqi government operations in the Shia holy city of Basra. Sadr City was a two, two mile by two mile square, about eight miles northeast of FOB Prosperity, in the northeast corner of Baghdad, an estimated population of 2 million exclusively Shiite residents. The attacks also included a great number of RPGs, IEDs, machine gun attacks against US forces around Sadr City. And this is just kind of setting the stage for what was going on when you showed up there. Alpha Company gets called out of FOB Prosperity. So they're in the, they're in there at the, at the dining facility eating beautiful cuisine, and they get sent out to this place called the Joint Security Station Er. Am I saying

• 2:02:37Jocko Willink?

  that right, Er? Yeah. JSS Er. It's less than a mile from Sadr City. And the primary purpose of this is they have these balloons that go up overhead, and, and they have cameras on them. So it's like a little blimp, looks like a little blimp. And they put them up in the sky. And the primary purpose of JSS Er was to secure this aerostat balloon to make sure that it was safe. So people could track what's happening in and around the area of Sadr City. So, they're getting attacked. Meanwhile, you show up there, you're assigned as a Battalion Staff Assistant Operations Officer. Additional duty of serving is the Iraqi Security Force liaison officer.

• 2:03:18Jocko Willink?

  At this point, you run into EOD, female, who you end up connecting with. Again, I'm just trying to set the stage for your, what else, what else do I need to tell you about? Or what else do we need to tell the crowd about when you show up there?

• 2:03:37Speaker 01

  What's happening? I mean, it's in the midst of the height of the sectarian violence strategically. So the Shia and Sunnis are killing each other. So they're still targeting Americans, but it's basically at a point where people start talking about civil war back here in the States. And where General Petraeus is getting called back, where they're doing surges. So that my unit was a part of the surge of Baghdad, trying to bring order as the entire strategy. I mean, beyond counterinsurgency seemed to be failing and violence was way up. As an urban warfare guy now, I've gone back to study, this is the Battle of Sotter City. So it's a, it's in the midst of me showing up. It's also where the Battle of Sotter City starts, where you have a city of 2 million that you're not allowed to go into.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  But they're launching rockets out of it, hitting the green zone. And this little base that I take over, it's right on the outskirts of that city. You can't go into, so you can see into it to facilitate other people's operations. So the army is stretched. So that I, I think that's in there as well as in, we had started stop loss. Stop losses happening, which means you're not allowed to get out anymore. You gotta stay. Right. It was like a backdoor draft, like a guy signs up and says, I want to do four to six years. And at the end of that, they're like, yeah, but you're not going anywhere. We're going back to combat. So I had like 40 to, I think it was like 50% of this company was stop losses. So you talk about, you know, in Vietnam, you know, the, the dealing with draftees. Yeah, this is basically a backdoor draft.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  The army is severely stretched to keep the number of people we need over 160,000 in Afghanistan, 40,000 plus in Afghanistan. So we start this stop loss and nobody can leave. So now I have a unit who's already think they're the black sheeps. Most of them are people who aren't even supposed to still be in the military. Most, many of them have profiles, what we call like, you know, profiles, like that they're not supposed to be in war, but they took them all anyways. So it's, the army is like, all the red lights are flashing as the army is trying to fight this war.

• 2:05:35Jocko Willink?

  You did a good podcast with on your podcast with one of the battalion, I think he's a battalion commander. That was with that was in the solder city building the wall on gold. So just for reference, if anyone's really interested in getting a little bit more specific about that. You got a great podcast about it.

• 2:05:55Jocko Willink?

  July 1st, 2008, Major John Gossett, the battalion executive officer walked up to my desk at Cop Callahan. And said, you want, you want command, you'll get Alpha at the beginning of August, get over there and start your inventories. And it turns out that this company commander there, Captain Niddle was not doing a good job. And you go out and you start to do your inventories because there's all kinds of equipment that's got to be turned over. You're signing for everything when you're a company commander, your every piece of radio, every night vision, every weapon, every vehicle. Everything is yours. And so you got to go and like, make sure that it's there and that it's in good working order. You show up there and you can already tell this, this whole thing is just not, not good.

• 2:06:42Jocko Willink?

  You show up and the guys are like, take me to the, take me to your skipper and they're like, he's asleep. We don't wake him until such and such a time. It's just bad out of the gate. You start inventorying.

• 2:06:55Jocko Willink?

  Immediately upon observing the observing and interacting with the soldiers in Alpha Company, I felt something was wrong. There were clear signs of lack of leadership, no standards, discipline issues. These are easily remedied factors, but these soldiers interact with each other differently, or at least in a manner I'd never seen in my 15 years in the army.

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure you would, you would have gotten the same spidey sense of like, holy crap. This is Lord of the Flies. It was literally Lord of the Flies on this base. There is no, there's just informal groups of people who are like, well, let's go outside for a little while. So the way, you know, the, the officers and non-commissioned officers and the soldiers all interacted with each other, the, the discipline in their equipment, their, their procedures, like it was all gone. Like it was all gone. And in the book I put in there, most people don't understand a military organization is made up of many systems. And you can have disbalance or you know, some, some systems can be failing, but in this. The, all of them were failing from leadership to standards to training to you name it.

• 2:07:54Speaker 01

  It was, my eyes were just like, and I had served, I, I had also never served in a mechanized infantry unit. So I was airborne ranger for all those years. And they're like, oh, you're going to go take a, a company of Bradleys and tanks. Like, shouldn't I go to some school or something, know something about them? You'll pick it up when you get there.

• 2:08:12Jocko Willink?

  You'll figure it out.

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  Uh, but this was, yeah, when I was going through those inventories, it was, I, I started making a list of all the, okay, we need to, we need to change this, this, and I had this giant list of things that we would have to work on. Cause you know, leadership is also about just assessing. So we, we get taught that, like, you don't, you don't immediately make changes, assess. So I'm just assessing, like making, my list keeps getting bigger and bigger. They don't do operations orders. They don't, you know, clear their, you know, they don't wear their equipment. They don't take care of their equipment.

• 2:08:40Jocko Willink?

  Had you ever read the book about face when you rolled into this situation?

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:08:43Jocko Willink?

  Did you read it before reading, before going into the situation?

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:08:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a bummer.

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  I, I didn't really get into the, the, the, kind of the study of military till later.

• 2:08:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh,

• 2:08:56Jocko Willink?

  I would read that book, like, if I was not doing some immediate work, I would just, I had it on, like, next to my cot and would just pick it up and read it. And you could read anywhere in that book. And I'd be like, all right, I'm a little bit better now. Um, that was when I was in Ramadi. And you, this is a classic kind of representation. These guys got a, got the shit burning detail, which Echo Charles is when they have basically half of a 50 gallon drum underneath of a little plywood shitter. And then every couple of days, you gotta put diesel fuel on that thing and burn it. It's just freaking disgusting. And so John here runs into this guy and you know, the guy says, good morning, sir. And he says, soldier, what did you do wrong? He looked puzzled, asking, what do you mean, sir? I rephrased my question. How did you get

• 2:09:40Jocko Willink?

  this detail? He replied with a laugh. Oh no, sir. I asked for this job. I love it. People leave me alone. It's easy work and I don't have to go out there. He paused and pointed to the concrete walls of the JSS, you know, out there. So if you got guys that would rather. Burn shit with diesel fuel, then go and do your job as a soldier. That's not a good sign.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  I've actually been surprised when I tell that story, how many people don't know that the military does that. They, you know, like one of the few movies it's in is like Platoon. Where the guys are, get put on that detail that they, we build these boxes, people piss and shit in a, in a, in a can. And you gotta burn that with a certain type of gas and make it go away. Uh, and everybody's like, what do you mean you do that? Like, yeah, that's what militaries do. Like, we don't, this is austere environments. You have to build, where you dig a hole in the ground and you fill the hole back up. But like, what do you mean you burn shit? Yeah, he was burning shit and he had a giant, you have to stir it too. Cause you, you have to stir it. You have to slowly stir it. So it all burns evenly with this diesel that you put in it.

• 2:10:46Speaker 01

  Um, and this guy's just smiling like, it was the craziest thing. Like, you know, you can make a movie out of like the, like usually like that person's not happy, but he was ecstatic. That was his job. Like a Gomer pile, like you know, figure like.

• 2:11:03Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you obviously you've run into some negative leaders and you kind of talk, again, you gotta get the book to get all this. This is such a perfect, uh, example, and you're so many good leadership examples, but you end up saying this, this was the bad news bears of an army unit. The way to fixing this company started to set in deeply. My list was getting huge.

• 2:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit on July 6th, 2008, I left the soldiers at JSS Er to go inspect the platoon of Alpha Company that had been sent to Delta Company to guard a smaller site. So there's basically, this is another thing that people don't understand about the military in general. You have your company of platoons, what, three platoons? And they go, hey, we need one of the four platoons. We need one of your platoons over here. Oh, okay. And those guys are going to work for someone else. They're still kind of your responsibility. So you have to take care of them. So that's what you're doing in this situation. One of your platoons had been sent to Delta Company. And you get out there, JSS shop was a short distance from JSS Er. So you guys are pretty co-located or, or close located on the northwest side of Sodder.

• 2:12:06Jocko Willink?

  This platoon, second platoon, was different from what I had seen so far at the rest of the company. The platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Patrick Donovan ran a tight ship. His squad leaders were demanding of the soldiers, Donovan and his squad and team leaders had made sure all their equipment was laid out correctly and the soldiers spoke to the NCOs with respect and discipline. I heard soldiers joking with each other on the side as friends. This was a tight team. It felt like the army I'd known my entire career up to that point. So, again, it's just like sort of a representation of different leadership and this group is a little bit isolated from these other knuckleheads and they're squared away.

• 2:12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like pattern recognition. Like, I couldn't, I tried to write the book, one of the reasons was to articulate, like, what do you mean you could feel that there was something wrong? Because you have all these thing, indicators, that if you're a new, if you're a new platoon leader, unfortunately, you might not, like, oh, this is just normal, right? You might, you might believe that that's normal. I had been in a lot of squared away units or really good units. So when I saw good, I could feel it. And when I saw bad, I could really feel it. And with this one, every element of the systems that I talk about in the book were there. And it wasn't even in performance, but you can tell the way that people talk to each other, the way they take care of their equipment, everything.

• 2:13:20Jocko Willink?

  It's just a bad culture. This is crazy. July 7th, two Alpha Company soldiers who were believed to have been getting high by huffing compressed air were in their living quarters at JSS Ir playing a game of trust with a 9mm handgun. Specialist B placed his Beretta 9mm handgun to the neck of PFC R, thinking if he pressed the muzzle hard enough into his buddy, the weapon could not discharge. This may seem like a crazy thought, but it's a function of the weapon. While cleaning the handgun, many soldiers discovered that when you press the barrel of the weapon into something firm like the palm of your hand, the slide is pressed to the rear and the hammer will not fall when you pull the trigger. So this is a true statement. The insanity of this is that these two soldiers were attempting the feat with a fully loaded

• 2:14:05Jocko Willink?

  weapon. So of course, the weapon fired when they pressed the barrel into a non-solid surface, in this case, the neck of the other soldier, causing a gaping wound and immense damage as the bullet passed through R's neck and out his chest, paralyzing him below the waist for the rest, for the rest of his life. Clearly, there were many known and unknown factors that led to the trigger being pulled, but I felt strongly that it was a direct result of poor leadership and lack of discipline in a unit with just average military discipline. The chance of something like this happening is close to zero.

• 2:14:40Jocko Willink?

  Less than 24 hours later, the unit hit rock bottom at around 1,300 hours on July 8th. The large semi truck topped by aluminum soda cans to give the appearance of those cans being in the cargo, pulled up outside the walls of the JSS, the driver pressed a sophisticated detonator and unleashed hell on earth. The truck had been rigged as an improvised rocket-assisted munition, IRAM. This IRAM consists of nine large metal canister bombs, empty propane tanks that were each filled with 150 to 200 pounds of explosives, scrap metal and ball bearings. They were loaded onto a semi tractor trailer modified with rails that allowed the bombs to be lobbed over the outpost's high concrete walls. Seven of the rockets landed inside the walls of the JSS.

• 2:15:28Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Once the rockets stopped exploding, many people started to come out of hiding because that's pretty much what they did is they took cover, hoping to receive orders to attack or something, but the lull in the explosions was short-lived. The IRAM truck caught fire after five rockets had left the truck. Then the fire ignited the two remaining rockets that had failed to launch, causing them to explode. The soldiers were in shock. The explosives were more powerful than anything they'd ever experienced. Miraculously, there were no fatalities, but the physical carnage and psychological trauma of this attack ran deep. Damage to the buildings, vehicles and equipment was extensive. Generators were hit and spewed dense black smoke. Some ammunition could be heard cooking off from the fires. Trucks were destroyed, leaving only charred skeletons. The bombs that hit

• 2:16:11Jocko Willink?

  the ground left craters 10 feet across and a few feet deep. The T walls, which were six-ton steel reinforced concrete blast walls around the JSS, had holes the size of basketballs, and many were thrown to their sides like they were dominoes, simply tipped over. The explosions knocked out the electricity and with it, any hope of air conditioning showers and the internet. Air conditioning was crucial with high temperatures. A hundred degrees and spiking higher. Now there was no escape from the heat. Even the Iraqi people had swamp coolers in their houses and minimized moving around during the peak heat of the day. The number of soldiers who suffered concussions from the bombs was widespread and harrowing. Weeks after the attack, one of the sergeants who suffered a concussion went to the medic complaining of headaches.

• 2:16:52Jocko Willink?

  It was determined that he had hundreds of fractures in his jaw. He was evacuated back to the States and within weeks, lost all of his teeth. So this is a freaking devastating attack that hit them and

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  shortly thereafter, the decision to relieve Captain Niddle of his command had probably been made after the Huffing shooting incident. After the Iram, the brigade commander of Full Bird Colonel had driven to JSS Er told Niddle to get in his vehicle and drove him away. His command has had ended as shamefully as it had been performed. I was the guy who would have to clean up his mess.

• 2:17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, they call it the FOB destroyer, that Iram.

• 2:17:35Jocko Willink?

  The Iram.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  It's a Khatib Hezbollah device that was being deployed. You know, lots of high speed guys like you were trying to intercept them from where they were coming from. Cause it's just a very advanced weapon. Um, and it, there's, there's a couple of videos, although they took the video down, they actually, they had recorded Khatib Hezbollah had recorded, put it to music. The actual attack on JSS Er, I can't find it anymore. They took it off and you see the balloon fall into the sky, but um, the carnage that it caused, I mean, it was insane.

• 2:18:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And the carnage that it caused was your, the company commander, you're getting fired immediately. That's freaking badass at the

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:14Jocko Willink?

  The brigade commander just drove out there and was like, hey, jump in there.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  I don't think there was a conversation. It's kind of like that. We talk about, we call it the black Chinook, like, like that, like it was like a fictional thing. No, this dude made up patrol, went to get him, put him in the car and drove him away. And even the platoon, like, or the company didn't like, where'd he go? And then I'm, I get put in with that fix it. And in the middle, like two or three hours later, everything's still on fire. I get dropped.

• 2:18:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you say when I stepped off the vehicle, it was pitch black and deadly silence. I told the radio operator to assemble all the NCOs in the company so I could talk to them. Really, I ended up talking at them. I wanted to first give them a clear message and we could have a conversation later. I told them we would start with a clean slate, that this was, that the past was the past, and I would not incorporate it into anything that Alpha Company would become. They needed to lose and stamp out any negative attitudes about squads, platoons, and company. Today was day one, like 0100 hours in the morning. I also said there wouldn't be no gray areas regarding standards. I was not making new standards, but we would follow military standards, customs, and courtesies. We would do things the way we all knew they were supposed to be done. It would be black and white, right or wrong, not gray.

• 2:19:27Jocko Willink?

  Who knows if I said the right things that night, I guess we would find out in the very near future.

• 2:19:34Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a little bit, that was hard. I wanted to create that environment of this was, we would rebuild that company.

• 2:19:43Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  But there was a little bit of, but you weren't here.

• 2:19:47Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:19:47Speaker 01

  So that's what, that's the actual, I think I tell you later, the first sergeant, who's the only person that actually said it to me, to my face, the first sergeant, the next day said, "You weren't here. You can't understand what they went through."

• 2:19:59Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:19:59Speaker 01

  And then he left to go on his mid-tour leave.

• 2:20:03Speaker 01

  Uh, which said a lot about him.

• 2:20:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:06Speaker 01

  But I, I, and I, you had to reiterate, it wasn't one night, but that's just, it wasn't me coming in, it was, we were going to rebuild this company.

• 2:20:14Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, as we say later, we moved, which was a huge help later to, and got a new mission. Because even to have any mission, like when you put soldiers somewhere, whether it's like we were talking about in strategy, like they don't understand why they're there. I mean, they knew, there was a company of people on a piece of sand protecting a balloon. It's really hard to motivate them towards, you know, what they're, what we call tasks, because there's social cohesion or task cohesion. It's really hard to get task cohesion if the mission is to protect a balloon while you're getting attacked.

• 2:20:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, if you even know, like, why is that balloon up there? What is it doing? What purposes does it serve? Maybe if you knew that it was protecting other Americans and it was critical for what we're trying to do here on an operational level, like all those things.

• 2:20:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:20:56Jocko Willink?

  But if you don't know what any of those things are, it ain't gonna be good. So, after you show up there, you say this, the brigade commander. visited me shortly after the IRAM attack. He was not condescending or overbearing about solving all the company's problems overnight. He only made two direct commands. One, make sure the soldiers were wearing gloves and eye protection. Like either one of those would shield them from a bombing. The second order was to quote, get the internet back up, end quote.

• 2:21:28Jocko Willink?

  The internet? That was the farthest thing from my mind, but it showed me what our current leadership felt soldiers needed. The ability to talk with their family and friends. How odd. I was more interested in preventing another IRAM attack, more injuries, or even deaths. Protecting my soldiers while increasing our combat effectiveness was higher on my list of priorities than email capability. Motivating the company so more soldiers could find, could not find excuses to leave the combat zone was more important than Facebook. Adequately dealing with the very real mental and physical injuries from the IRAM attack was more crucial than allowing my soldiers to play video games. Addressing the long list I had compiled of what was wrong with this unit was more vital than posting selfies. Still, I had to follow orders like all soldiers. I would learn to work within this new

• 2:22:11Jocko Willink?

  combat environment, even with what I felt was the misplaced prioritization of getting the internet back up. I would have to find the right balance. So that is definitely an interesting statement. From, and who is that? Your brigade commander?

• 2:22:24Speaker 01

  Brigade commander, yeah. And I, I don't, he's a great leader, actually, and I don't fault him for that. It just seemed to be, there's, with this forever war, there was this ideal that creating home away from home and connecting them to home was the most important thing. And it, the research shows that that's not true. I mean, they had just gone through a severe traumatic event as a group, and they needed to deal with that as a group, not, and this is what, as you know, later, They're seeing it from now as an academic or a researcher, like, why did he do that?

• 2:23:03Speaker 01

  Because culturally, it was an ideal that that was the solution to morale and making the soldiers deployments is giving them that feeling of staying connected to their social support networks at home. Not understanding it actually counterproductive to their performance. And this is why I wrote the book and the way I wanted to write it with those two different episodes, not just my experience, but that was two different militaries. Two different nations at war.

• 2:23:30Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:23:30Speaker 01

  So it really rippled down to, well, if you can talk to your, your, your wife or whatever, that'll make it all better.

• 2:23:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What's interesting, if you throw my experience into here, so 2003, 2004, very similar to what you had 2003, 2004. But then I had this 2006, when you were Ranger instructor, I was 2006, which meant there was like the beginnings of it. Definitely not, it was, it might've been kind of an ideal level. Like you could call your, you could call, but there was someone waiting and you couldn't spend all day and you couldn't do it every day. And you could get on Facebook, but it was going to be slow and there was two people waiting by the computer ahead of you. And so it was, it was probably a pretty good combination, a pretty good, yeah, balance between like you could connect with home if you had to. But it was kind of a bit much to try and do it every day.

• 2:24:21Jocko Willink?

  Like I would talk to my wife, once a week, maybe, maybe once every two weeks. Like, hey, how's it going? And she'd say, everything's great. And I'd say, thank you, you know? Pretty, I think it was pretty ideal. So by the time we get to your experience in 2008, it's like internet in your, in your bed.

• 2:24:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:24:42Jocko Willink?

  Which is, yeah, which is totally different.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:45Jocko Willink?

  Um, did you have something there or?

• 2:24:48Speaker 01

  No, it's.

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  Not all time is the same, just like, you know, what are you spending the time for? And this is what, when I've done lectures since this is people were like, what's the solution in our ever-connected world? In this moment, connection with the outside world wasn't what they needed. I understand, like, we think that, that of course you need to talk to your families and you need to keep those bonds. In that trauma, the solutions, because they brought in like psychologists and behavioral health and all this stuff after the fact and thought that was the solution. Is that not all time is the same, so can, who you're connecting for, what is that time being used for is what I've tried to help people since who want answers, whether in

• 2:25:34Speaker 01

  business or in the military of like, okay, what's the solution if we're all connected to this virtual world? And some people apply meaning to it, like, well, you still have to find the time and then use the time you have together for those purposes, like this whole mandatory fund, like, just call everybody into the office, they're gonna spend time together. That's a real example of, in that moment, they did not need connections to the outside world. They needed to come together as a group, process what had just happened, dust themselves off. But it, it's both a micro and a macro sense of this idea of how we're going to spend time, which world are we living in? You have to be present in the moment. As I wrote this book and now people are like, well, what's your solution? Like, am I gonna turn, you know, some people thought that the solution here should have

• 2:26:19Speaker 01

  been turn the internet off. That wasn't the solution, you're never gonna do that. In, I can tell you in Ukraine and Gaza, like, you're not turning anything off. You have to know when to come together and the time being used for a very specific purpose. That was a point when they needed to heal and get back to the job. Wasn't tell the family what happened.

• 2:26:39Jocko Willink?

  Yep. It's, you gotta find the balance and figure out what you're doing. You know, it's interesting, because you and I were talking before we hit record, and I was saying that I would read about Face in Ramadi. I would read it, and I would just open it up, and I would read it, and I would read it, and read it. And after...

• 2:26:56Jocko Willink?

  It was shortly after Mark, one of my guys got killed. And I like picked up, it was like 24 hours in my mind of combat, combat, combat, combat, combat. That's what we're doing. And I just, I didn't want to read it and I ended up picking, there was somebody had left a copy of the book.

• 2:27:14Jocko Willink?

  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is like about hippies and doing drugs. And I read that, but I, as I looked back, I was like, oh, you were kind of like, you needed a mental break from just thinking about war 24 hours a day. And that's what you, you did, you read this other book. And then when I got done with that book, I was like, okay, cool. And I went back to About Face. But knowing that, hey, you might need a little breather sometimes, because there's times where, like you said, you go through something traumatic as a group.

• 2:27:44Jocko Willink?

  And you need to deal with that as a group, but there's also going to be times to, to that, communicating with your family back home is going to help you overcome things. So, but just like anything else, if you take it to an extreme and now you're calling home every single day. You know, this is another, you, you mentioned in the book that you, you didn't see people with printed out pictures of their families. And I had this, this thing where my wife sent me a, an email. And said, the kids want to see a picture of where you sleep. I got that, yeah. Yeah. And so I took, opened up like a bag and pulled out some pictures of my wife and kids and hung them up. Took a picture. Sent it to my wife and took those pictures back down because I didn't want to every day.

• 2:28:29Jocko Willink?

  When, when I'm waking up in the morning, when I'm going to bed at night, I didn't.

• 2:28:35Jocko Willink?

  I know this doesn't sound like the best thing in the world. I didn't want to be thinking about my wife and kids. When I woke up in the morning, went to bed at night, I, I had a job to do and that was a distraction that needed to wait until later. And I think that was actually healthy. And there, were there times where it was like, oh, I really want to talk to my wife or we'll see if I can catch the kids and see if they're awake. Yeah, of course. But most of the time, like I got a bunch of guys relying on me to make the right decisions at the right time. I gotta do the right thing and I'm, I, I don't even want to think about anything else. So there, there has to be some kind of balance. And certainly shutting it off isn't the answer, but also piping internet into your room 24 hours a day is not the answer either. So, gotta find some balance.

• 2:29:23Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of leadership, you say here, the ultimate crime of Alpha Company's former leadership pair was not that they were poor leaders, although they were, but that they were absent leaders. They erected a barrier between themselves and the troops and stayed firmly, firmly behind that barrier. You say, "I had to replace that new form of power with traditional present military leadership. I had to bring us back to proven, effective military systems for the good of the troops under my command." Most of the soldiers, this is where I really wanted to highlight this part, "Most of the soldiers welcomed the re-establishment of the military systems they remembered from their training and former assignments. When they had enlisted, it was with the expectations of those systems. As much as some of them may have outwardly enjoyed the lax Wild West environment under the former leaders, even

• 2:30:03Jocko Willink?

  the more rogue-mannered among the soldiers embraced the return of structure. There's no reason to be a dictator, but I followed regulations and expected Alpha Company soldiers to do the same. Almost all of them were happy to do so. The discipline, standards, tactics, operations, traditions, and administration were all elements of effective teams I had been a member of in my military upbringing." I just thought this is important to point out that people want to work hard. They want to be respected. They want to be disciplined. And if they're living in, uh, you know, the Bad News Bears, or, no, what, what example did you just say it was like when you showed up there?

• 2:30:42Speaker 01

  Lord of the Flies.

• 2:30:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. With people, there's like one person out of the group of 100 people, there's one person that likes being, that likes it being like Lord of the Flies, because he's the Lord of the Flies. Everyone else, it sucks.

• 2:30:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:30:54Jocko Willink?

  And so for, for normal people to say, "Man, I, I really wish we had some discipline and some order around here," makes total sense. And you could, you, you felt that.

• 2:31:02Speaker 01

  Yep, absolutely. And, and the aspect of the absent leadership too is like, I get contrary to everything they'd ever heard. Like, you don't ask your soldiers to do anything. You won't, you, you don't sit in the ivory tower and then they're living like that. Like they, they will suss that out really quickly, that you aren't their leader. You're the guy who shows up and says some stuff. You're not the leader. Uh, so I had to do all that, but a hundred percent with the, they re, we train as we fight is what we say. And they were living in a foreign world that wasn't even com, you're like, that chaos wasn't ideal for them. They, people want order. The kids too, soldiers.

• 2:31:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Uh, you had to make some leadership changes. And one of the ways that you did that was you brought, uh, you switched the entire third platoon.

• 2:31:52Jocko Willink?

  With first class Donovan's second platoon and brought them to your location. Delta Company put up a fight, but the battalion leadership supported you. So that's a good move.

• 2:32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a hard one.

• 2:32:03Jocko Willink?

  Delta was not happy?

• 2:32:04Speaker 01

  Delta was not.

• 2:32:05Jocko Willink?

  Delta Company commander.

• 2:32:06Speaker 01

  Delta fought it. Matter of fact, I asked very few, like the battalion commander, fix it. I asked very few things to him and I didn't think they would give me that. And, and he's like, okay. And, and the Delta guy had to pound sand. Uh, but to give him that and a lower risk, but it was really interesting what that injection, I knew it was good. I knew it was so like I, there's a couple of other examples of like, that injection of good, the, the exponential qualities it gives you for examples for the other platoon. Um, you, all that bled, it bled over so immediately. Um, that had they not supported me on that decision to switch those out, I don't know what would have happened.

• 2:32:44Jocko Willink?

  And you brought Staff Sergeant Fincher?

• 2:32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:46Jocko Willink?

  Brought him out of FOB Prosperity?

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  Yep. And he became, so I had to form my own patrol because this guy was absent and you, at the time, as you know, whether you're doing just stability operations or, or just commanding, you had to be able to move around the battlefield. And that commander wasn't doing that. He literally was like on that night shift, watching movies between like 3am to 7am before he switched out.

• 2:33:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we, I didn't go into it, but yeah, these guys had set up their, their leadership team was working eight hour shifts.

• 2:33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:14Jocko Willink?

  And like, hey dude, you got it. I'm going to sleep and now you got it and I'm going to eat. Now I've got it and I'm going to watch movies. So that's what they were doing, which is freaking pathetic.

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  So I had, Fincher was like, again, an amazing Nakamish officer who made a platoon, kept that platoon in order, became my, you know, element to move around the battlefield to go do the key leader engagements and visit, go with the other platoons on raids and things like that. But he was another, I couldn't have done it without him.

• 2:33:41Jocko Willink?

  You mentioned this earlier that you guys ended up getting sent to a new, uh, battle space, place called Otamia.

• 2:33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  You know it?

• 2:33:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I do indeed, actually. There was a, there was a, a special forces group up there in oh, three. And I want to say it was five, two, three. Anyways, they were up there and like, we went out there and, uh, hung out with them for a while and got mortared and got hit with RPGs and had good times out there in Otamia. It's right on the river.

• 2:34:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:34:08Jocko Willink?

  Were you guys in that base that's right on the river?

• 2:34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, Cop Apache, yeah.

• 2:34:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you guys end up at Cop Apache.

• 2:34:16Jocko Willink?

  The cop Apache had space for only one company. The battalion made the decision to send two companies there. And what this meant was, uh, buildings or choose these little container housing units. Like they're basically like a little trailer you live in. Instead of having two people, you, you guys were going to put eight in there. So it's gonna get some.

• 2:34:37Speaker 01

  Which made some interesting aromas. Of, uh, but yeah, it, it was a, you know, again, with the research in there, that, that element of proximity. When these guys live, go back to their own spaces. It was again, separating from the group. If you live as a group, you are a group. So, uh.

• 2:34:59Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you guys get a new mission too. Obviously you're not watching out for the balloon anymore. Now you're given some major areas of Adamea, some districts that you're going to patrol. And this meant you had to create another platoon, which you were not too happy about. You left some good interpreters, which interpreters are huge. You know, we, we were kind of laughing earlier about the fact that you didn't even have interpreters. So you're just wandering around in a country that not be able to speak the language. When you have good Terps, it's a game changer.

• 2:35:27Speaker 01

  It's a tool, especially if your role is this, all these different functions, um, they become, uh, the interpreters I had became vital to me accomplishing the mission period. Whether it was the, the, the raid or the key leader engagement. He became a tool and you had to learn how to use that. And again, very little training, but yeah, absolutely. If that's you're communicating a foreign, all the nuances. And I went through interpreters too, because some were right for some missions, not right for other missions. I had an old guy who was really like immediately garnered respect because age in the culture means a lot. So if I was going to a lot, high level meeting, he was the one coming with me. Uh, and they would give him tea and everything. It created a new dynamic.

• 2:36:11Jocko Willink?

  Was that Ahmed or Brad?

• 2:36:13Speaker 01

  Ahmed.

• 2:36:13Jocko Willink?

  Ahmed.

• 2:36:14Speaker 01

  Who died.

• 2:36:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And he died.

• 2:36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:15Jocko Willink?

  Like just died of natural causes.

• 2:36:17Speaker 01

  Of, of, he, that guy lived, uh, uh, he smoked like a chimney. He ate like horribly, uh, had a giant, you know, the giant pot belly. Uh, but yeah, just had a heart attack and died on.

• 2:36:32Jocko Willink?

  Terrible. Um, you had another crazy thing take place with third platoon who is attached to Delta Company, but as I mentioned earlier, these guys are still your responsibility. And what happened is there's a guy, PFC Black, who's a 220 pound dude and Staff Sergeant Artes, who's a smaller dude, 160 pounds. And basically, Black is in there without his shoes on. He's in the gym working out with no shoes on. Artes sees him and says, hey, man, you know, what are you doing? You gotta wear shoes. And this dude, Black, just freaks out and attacks him. And, um, like a rabid animal, Black lunged at Artes, driving him into the full tackle from across the weight bench. The sergeant slammed to the ground.

• 2:37:14Jocko Willink?

  And before he realized what was, what had happened, Black was on top of him, beating his face in with a 10 pound weight. Black proceeded to savagely beat Artes, unconscious. It was pure luck. And what clearly saved his life was other soldiers heard the slamming weights, ran into the gym and jumped on Black. Took five soldiers to contain this monster. But the damage was done. A medevac was called. And Artes was evacuated all the way back to the United States. He never fully recovered because the brain damage he incurred, he would suffer from seizures and have a stutter for the rest of his life. He was medically discharged from the army a year later. Black claimed PTSD as his defense, knowing that the chain of command or army would walk on eggshells with soldiers and disciplining anything that might be PTSD related. He received minimal punishment after psychological testing validated

• 2:37:59Jocko Willink?

  he had mental issues. No surprise there. And he was later medically discharged from the army. I was stunned. It's freaking terrible.

• 2:38:07Speaker 01

  It's terrible. And that dude was like, I don't know if the guy in full metal jacket, although this guy was bigger, um, and had medical issues or mental issues before he came in, which is a little bit of the, you know, we also dropped all the waivers, the stop losses. We dropped felony waivers. We dropped drug waivers. The army was stretched, but this, that I had to have that guy around my formation for a while before they got him out of country too. And like two guys on guard of him at all times. It was like every time I thought I was on a lead, then something would knock you back down. Like the challenges weren't stopping. It was like I was recreating. It's not like I was building the plane in flight. Like the challenges were continuing. Uh, and that was, that was horrible.

• 2:38:48Jocko Willink?

  It is the stress where people, people do stuff in the combat situation that is, it's amplified compared to regular life, you know, like this might've been a shoving match in the States, but all of a sudden dudes get his head pounded in with a 10-pound weight belt and he's disabled for life. That's just freaking terrible. Uh, fast forward a little bit. An additional blessing in disguise was that unlike the plush living facilities on the bigger bases, Cop Apache did not have a 24-hour cafeteria. The army soldier cooks, served military-style meals set when, during set windows for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Patrols, actually lunch was MREs, patrols would come off missions and eat together.

• 2:39:30Jocko Willink?

  At a minimum, squads were eating together in accordance with their patrol schedule and the priorities of work. Breaking bread as a group provides another natural bonding time. So, beneficial.

• 2:39:42Speaker 01

  Huge, and I think it applies to even our families, you know, I do with my kids. If you're not having disconnected time together, transformational conversation, the military had always done that, but had gotten away with it, you've gone away with it. Those daily practices that are reinforced cultural aspects, people don't realize what they're doing and it, the benefits were measurable, what it does.

• 2:40:09Jocko Willink?

  Alpha Company was beginning to evolve from a bunch of disparate, detached, separate individuals into one congruous, connected, and cohesive unit. Within a short time after moving to Apache, Alpha Company was starting to function. Soldiers were living and eating together, doing purpose-driven missions where they understood why and what they would be doing when they went outside the wire every day. As a result, they were viewing themselves differently. They no longer felt like black sheep of the battalion. And I don't know if I mentioned that. Oh yeah, I did, because they hadn't done well in some of the training and so they were, they were like the black sheep. And now they're starting to do well.

• 2:40:41Speaker 01

  And I had to get that out of them. That was that first talk, that first night. Like, I knew that that was there. Like it was, and I knew that that was a huge issue. How you view yourself is how you're going to perform. So that, you know, of course they're going to perform, nobody expects anything of you. So I, I tried to immediately stamp that out, immediately. Like you're not the, we, day zero, that you had to beat that black sheep.

• 2:41:04Speaker 01

  mentality out of them where there's no expectations they could do wrong they can out of them

• 2:41:11Jocko Willink?

  that reminds me of Hackworth you know they the he took over the 439th in Vietnam and they were called like the the hard luck battalion and they were the black sheep and they had a bad reputation and he changed into the hardcore what's up Echo Charles

• 2:41:27Jocko Willink?

  the internet cafe at Camp Apache was small room in the main building and every time I walked past it was filled it did not matter if it was two o'clock in the morning or two o'clock in the afternoon it was a hotspot for the cop

• 2:41:38Jocko Willink?

  so then you talk about some of the personal issues that people face and how those you know came to fruition whether it's a you know girl getting pregnant and she's threatening this and you know the Dear John letters the whole nine yards now become Dear John emails

• 2:41:52Jocko Willink?

  fast forward a little bit soon I discovered that there was just not enough time in the day under the supervision of Staff Sergeant Fincher and me our patrol left early in the morning and made rounds of meeting with one of the three police chiefs Iraqi army leaders local governing bodies local tribal or neighborhood bosses the power trash company local shop owners are stopping in to see one of my platoons on their missions we returned anywhere from 10 to 12 hours later thanks to the new digital nature of warfare I returned to find that I had somewhere between 20 and 100 work emails I dropped my no one thinks about that no one thinks you're over in freaking Cop Apache getting emails but you are I dropped my gear in my room and immediately got back to work I

• 2:42:32Jocko Willink?

  one of our former handyman in the company build my room right next to the company command post with the door literally leading from it to my bedroom where all the radios and computers that tracked everything were located where soldiers in my company rotated shifts to the patrols that were out or to higher command when they called unlike previous company leadership I felt I had to be readily available to everyone in the company even when I was getting a few much needed hours of sleep I was only a loud voice and two steps away from being back on the job

• 2:43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's, you know, I was young, you know, relatively, I mean, I had wake up criteria. So that's the thing we have within like, okay, if this blows up, if this happens, wake up criteria. If so and so calls, wake up criteria. But I was also running myself into the ground. Uh, I was interested in drinking Jocko. I was drinking the, the army, I don't know if the Navy does.

• 2:43:26Jocko Willink?

  We had them too.

• 2:43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Ripits.

• 2:43:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was surviving on five or six Ripits a day. The tea that I was getting out there, I had to order Nyquil, which there is Amazon at this time. So I was ordering Nyquil to be able to, just to power down. It's horrible. I like took 10 years away from my life. I had a few mentors, um, that were there, like, like my S3, the head of my podcast who, you know, of the hundred emails, he would make sure I, he would call and say like, look, I know you've got a lot going on, this one, you've got to answer this one now. Um, so I, he was like the overarching like father figure of this time, but you know, in looking back, I was making some mistakes, even running myself into the ground.

• 2:44:06Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, you start, you definitely go and talk about these, uh, Ripits and what they had in them. And they were just terrible for you. And it's like, they were kind of addictive because they had sugar in them. So you get the, you get the caffeine rush, but then the sugar kicks in. So it crashes you down. And that's like, well, that's one of the reasons I made these was because to make something that's actually cleaning good for you. And we've been doing a good job of that.

• 2:44:30Speaker 01

  Um, but we were issuing these to.

• 2:44:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for sure.

• 2:44:32Speaker 01

  In crates.

• 2:44:33Jocko Willink?

  In crates, in pallets, just big pallets of this crap.

• 2:44:36Speaker 01

  And, and it's like, it's, it's really, like I had a battalion commander almost die because he had like a kidney failure because he was surviving off monsters and Ripits.

• 2:44:44Jocko Willink?

  God.

• 2:44:45Speaker 01

  And he literally almost died, but we were issuing these out and it was.

• 2:44:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I had the same thing. I mean, I had, I had guys when I was at Trade at, you know, guys, because guys would come back from their deployment and now they're going to work in Trade at. I had guys that would drink five, six, seven, or eight.

• 2:45:03Jocko Willink?

  Monsters a day.

• 2:45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:06Jocko Willink?

  And just you, they, they would end up in the freaking hospital.

• 2:45:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:45:09Jocko Willink?

  Is absolutely terrible. So, um.

• 2:45:13Speaker 01

  You can see in some of my photos around this time, I have like, I have, my bags have bags.

• 2:45:19Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:45:20Speaker 01

  It's, it's crazy that what I was doing to myself.

• 2:45:23Jocko Willink?

  Check. Um, you, you talk about this one incident where, um, your guys were hit by a, like this, this anti-tank grenade, but it ends up killing this, this kid who one of your soldiers, Martinez had, you know, had, um, taken picture of and kind of felt connected to, because the kid was always out there on the street corner. That's what happens. You drive down the same street every day. Eventually you get to know the local populace. You get to see that kid and you probably give him some MRE candy and then he comes back again and you probably say hi to him and now he knows your name. And so you develop these little relationships and that's what happened, except for as, after he formed this little relationship, this kid gets killed, um, in a very bloody, brutal way by this

• 2:46:08Jocko Willink?

  grenade that happened to bounce off the Humvee before it detonated. So, again, this is just some of the, some of the trauma that you're talking about. And, and again, you know, you're looking to see how he's doing. You're looking, you kind of go look for him and you say, I did not see Martinez. He was one of the few soldiers who had paid for an internet cable to be run directly into his chew, which is his housing thing. I later learned after the patrol that he had lain on his bed, trying to process what had happened that night. One of the things that hit him hard was wondering if that had been Twinkie Boy, this kid that he had taken a picture of. Could it have been? The images continued to flash in his mind. He was having trouble sorting it all out, trying to compartmentalize that it was just part of the job. This time though, he could not do it alone.

• 2:46:50Jocko Willink?

  He needed to talk about it. The other guys in the chew were out, probably at the internet cafe. So he reached out for his laptop and checked to see if his wife was online. Facebook said she was, fortunately. Although he really needed to talk, there's only so much he could tell his wife. He did not want to worry her, nor did he want to look weak in her eyes. He kept it concise. So this happened tonight. We had a rough patrol. Don't worry, I'm fine. But I saw an Iraqi kid get killed. It's pretty fucked up. There was not much more she could say to help him, especially because he had just told her he was fine.

• 2:47:22Jocko Willink?

  When it came to telling his wife about his experiences in the war, his view was no news is good news. So he did not share a lot of daily war events with his family. Maybe when he got home, he would, maybe. Did this senior soldier get the emotional and psychological support he needed from the conversation with his wife? Although I hoped he did, I seriously doubted it.

• 2:47:40Speaker 01

  And I learned later in interviewing him for the book that he didn't. And he's still, he's still traumatized by that event, which is that this is the story that was the New York Times op-ed that led to the book, was this story of that, one that all soldiers hate to see children harmed. Like, it's something very unique. If you look back in Vietnam, First Battle of Fallujah, everything like, an image of a child that's been harmed, innocence really has the, the cut through to your heart and moral injury. And it messed him and others up. And after that, I knew that when I visited him on the spite, that they were not okay. And they went back to the cop. I thought I would find them talking about it and they

• 2:48:24Speaker 01

  weren't, they, they had barely talked to each other about it all. They were talking to their wives and whoever else would listen, rather than processing the event together to see who was having the most problems with it. It was real, that story is the genesis of the book.

• 2:48:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's also all kinds of things with perspective too, because if you, if, you know, the 10 of us do something, do an operation and we see a kid get killed, well, there's one guy that's over here thinking it was his fault because he, you know, maneuvered the vehicle this way and the kid, well, someone else says, no, dude, that kid was already there. Like, there's all these different perspectives. When you come back and you do a good debrief, where people find out a more accurate assessment of what happened and go, oh, okay. And at least you get to kind of share that burden between your, the different people on the team. Whereas if something like this happens, you feel like, hey, if I wouldn't have moved my Humvee, the grenade would have hit a different way. And so I'm

• 2:49:22Jocko Willink?

  the one that killed this kid, is, you know, what can go on in people's heads? If they're not sitting around and saying, hey, well, here's what I think happened. Oh, no, that didn't have anything to do with where you put the Humvee. These, this, you know, that, that kid was already over there. I saw him over there. So that debrief that you can do amongst is very important.

• 2:49:41Speaker 01

  Yep. And I, in reflection, we were- We weren't doing those. We weren't doing, we were doing post patrol intel briefs. So like the platoon guy would go out and say, what did you see? I mean, this is also a 15 month deployment. So the keeping it, I, one of the solutions after writing this book is that, but the, the idea of incorporating somehow the campfire discussion in a debrief. I don't know how, when you guys do your debrief, but ours are very intel focused, like what they saw. It even the, what we call an after actions review, which is not combat, it's training. You know, the sustains, improves, all that stuff where the debrief after a patrol is very intel driven.

• 2:50:23Speaker 01

  If we don't have these campfires anymore, which is 2003, we'd sit around the Humvee eating in whatever you, a philosophical campfire. This is a great example of if, since you don't have it, there are severe repercussions of not having that moment. Because yeah, you can go send them to talk to somebody later who doesn't know what he experienced. That debrief has to incorporate that, that emotional, psychological element to it somehow.

• 2:50:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, I, we didn't, we were not successful in doing that either. Our debriefs, your guys' priority was the, you know, the intel. That was our, our primary thing is like, how did we perform? What did we do wrong? What could we do right? What can we do better? That's the main thing that we focus on in our debriefs. And the intel thing is almost like it's another thing that we're about to do. Cause we, we take SSE offsite. So now we're going to sit around, we're going to tell where we found it. But a lot of times our guys are going to turn it over to our intel people and they're going to do all the processing. And so we're not even that hyper focused on the intel. We're going to give them what we took off target. If there's anything that stood out, we'll tell them, but it's not some big, we're not trying to collaborate all the information.

• 2:51:32Jocko Willink?

  And then as far as the emotional content, no, like we're going to get. We get ready for the next operation. Like, that's what we're doing. And so, we did not do a good job of that. Other than the fact that guys were, you know, we were, we, like I said, we had kind of limited internet. We had, uh, we did eat meals together because there's like, you, there was a, there was, if we were going to eat on our little base, it was going to be mermite and we were going to sit there and eat. And, you know, you, it was chow from this time to this time. So you wouldn't see everyone. And our main area of congregation was like Platoon Hut. So that's where everyone's doing, that's where the brief, whether you're, uh, writing a letter home, or you're cleaning your weapon, or you're laminating maps, you're all in this one same spot.

• 2:52:18Jocko Willink?

  And we're doing a brief every day, basically. Like, we're always getting ready to do something, so.

• 2:52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it became, I, I, as I wrote it, I tried to think through, one, we had a concept back then called every soldier is a sensor. Because you're, you're, you're, you're in the environment all the times. You, that, that object is not supposed to be there, but that guy saw it. And you try to debrief through that. Every soldier was basically a collection, rather than just a leadership. But it is, like, you would, and if you wanted to do this, like, and create this moment where you could determine whether people needed more help, right? So, you know, trying to believe that soldiers are going to self-select for help, which is a cultural thing of what is strength. Like, mental, having mental issues is viewed as not strength in many elements within the military.

• 2:53:02Speaker 01

  You would have to train it into the process, which is cultural. Like, this debrief isn't a moment that we all do. Some of us do it differently. If you had the awareness of how to even facilitate a conversation about a traumatic event. And then facilitate, okay, this is beyond my level of training. That soldier is showing issues with what he just saw. Because one of the biggest predictors, which I didn't know until after research, is the biggest predictor of trauma, like PTS, is previous trauma.

• 2:53:34Speaker 01

  So you don't even know that the soldier is trauma prone. But he will, depending on how the debrief goes, somebody will tell you that like, no, I'm, I'm messed up. I'm having problems with this. Uh, and so you'd have to force it into the actual day, the practice that may have a different purpose. Kind of like eating the chow together. Like the purpose is to feed you, fuel you, but no, actually that's, this goes back to the start of militaries. The Valley Forge, like we're bonding in this time.

• 2:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely something for leaders out there right now. Uh, you're saying you could have done a better job in 2008. I definitely could have done a better job in 2006. I know, you know, talking years later with guys that there was things that they thought had happened, things that they perceived that they did wrong, this mistake happened that they carried on their shoulder like it was their fault that this thing happened the way it did. I was like, well, no, actually here's what's going on. Here's what, here's why this happened. Here's what, here's the call that got made. Here's why we did this thing. So, or here's what the other nine perspectives were. And so, yeah, it'd be very helpful to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to say, hey, here's what I saw. What did you see? Here's how I feel. How do you feel? And you know what? I had some guys be like, yeah, yeah, no factor. Like, okay, cool.

• 2:54:48Jocko Willink?

  And that's cool. That's fine. But a couple of people are going to be, you know, whether it's just their, like you said, past trauma, or it's something that they specifically saw or specifically did. They don't clear it up and get it off the chef. They're carrying a weight that they shouldn't be carrying.

• 2:55:06Jocko Willink?

  You gave another situation of a moral dilemma. And names have been changed, but Second Lieutenant Healy had a negligent discharge of his weapon into the clearing barrel at the front gate of Cop Apache. And again, you go through some details here, but there'd been a bunch of these ADs, accidental discharges at the brigade level. So it's been causing problems. And after this rash of, and you go into the details between what's the difference between a negligent discharge and an accidental discharge? And it's now called a negligent discharge in most cases, an accidental discharge. Discharges like maybe a cook off where your weapon's hot and it actually fires around, which can happen. It's not, it is truly an accident.

• 2:55:50Jocko Willink?

  Negligent discharge is like you made a mistake. So there's been a bunch of those and you say after the rash of negligent discharge, the chain of command dictated that every ND incident would be reported to the division commander, who was a two-star general at the organizational level, one tier above brigade. Ours was Major General Jeffrey Hammond, infamous across the division for crushing soldiers' souls. The soldier who was responsible for the incident had to be taken in front of the brigade commander, if not the division commander, and typically received some sort of public punishment. So when our second lieutenant, Healy, had this accident, the word spread like wildfire throughout the company. Guess who had an ND?

• 2:56:31Jocko Willink?

  My dilemma was this, everything in my value system as a commander and soldier, as well as a strong ethical code deep in my gut, said to follow orders and report the incident. If orders were not followed, it showed other soldiers that some orders can be followed while others can be disobeyed. Do as I say, not as I do. But reporting this incident so soon after the incident of the soldier shooting his fellow soldier in the neck and the IRAM attack episode would result in yet another kick to Alpha Company while we were down. The black sheet, fuck up again, or typical Alpha and likely, what a bunch of losers. These remarks would be made throughout the battalion and also within Alpha Company.

• 2:57:13Jocko Willink?

  Morale had not yet improved enough to make the men immune to this self-flagellation. They had heard this condemnation and set it for themselves for too long, the habit to be so quickly erased. The company would most likely be visited by battalion and higher commands and told how they continued to screw up and disgrace the greater organization, which is exactly what happened after the IRAM attack. This would be proof that nothing had changed, nor would it ever. The company's identity and self-esteem were especially important to me at this specific moment. After more than an hour of struggling with the decision, I decided not to report the ND to battalion headquarters. I called green platoon together and explained my decision to them.

• 2:57:56Jocko Willink?

  I insisted that Healy was not above the rules, that this was about Alpha and our team. Healy would be punished at my level. We would keep the matter internal and deal it within the company. I would not be swept, it would not be swept under the rug and he would not be treated differently for being an officer as happens all too often. He'd be, would be required to meet every incoming patrol at the gate, no matter the time and oversee their clearing of their weapons. To this day, I still struggle with whether I made the right decision, but at that moment, I felt team building and self-respect of the soldiers were at a tipping point. Positive action, not negative, was what we needed. We did not have to air our dirty laundry for the entire battalion and brigade to see.

• 2:58:39Jocko Willink?

  They would not be given more reason to criticize Alpha Company. Interesting, how do you feel about that decision now?

• 2:58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's still, you know, in hindsight, I wanted to write that as the way I felt it when it happened. In hindsight, you're like, oh, John, that's come on, you're over dramatizing, like, no, that was a severe moral dilemma for me. In, you know, with all that you know from what happened in the event, to include their, many leaders visited Alpha right after the Adram attack, instead of saying like, we're going to dust ourselves off, they literally said, this is your fault, you guys are awful, this, you're non-commissioned officers, it's your fault this happened. All that and that full picture, this was that new platoon leader who had just been given a platoon, an engineer who had been given an infantry platoon. There are so many factors, but it tore me up as the soldier that I was to follow orders,

• 2:59:29Speaker 01

  like, it is straightforward, like, in all that I, the way I described it there. But like you were talking about earlier, is I had to explain to them, I couldn't just make the decision, I had to, I, I wanted to make sure I explained to every one of them why I was doing it, that this is we, like, so I was laying my, my, not my career, but I was definitely risking my neck for this, this element of this is us, this isn't me telling you what to do, and he's not above the law, but we're going to deal with it within, so, I agree with the decision I made, but it's still, like, when you just read

• 3:00:09Speaker 01

  that, it still bugs my, you know, career soldier in me. I, I think it was the right decision, but I, it's still like...

• 3:00:20Speaker 01

  And Hammond was, uh, don't get me started on that guy. He would crush people's souls.

• 3:00:26Speaker 01

  Not even in a positive leadership way. But my battalion commander read the book later.

• 3:00:33Jocko Willink?

  What'd he say?

• 3:00:34Speaker 01

  He said, no, he said, John, you made a right decision.

• 3:00:37Jocko Willink?

  I would think so. I was, you know, I would always think of things from like my boss's position. If I had to say, hey, boss, this is what was going on. This is why I made the decision.

• 3:00:47Jocko Willink?

  And if I was gonna be humiliated or embarrassed by that, then I'm like, okay, this is not the right thing to do. But if I know if my boss, uh, we had this saying, or I at least had this saying, like being the senior guy with a secret. And meaning there's something going on and I'm gonna keep it. And that way, if it leaks out, I'm gonna be the one that's gonna pay for it. So there's a certain comfort level of like, well, if this leaks out, which it very well could. Will I be able to look at my boss and say, hey, boss, this is what I was doing. This is why I was doing it? Or am I gonna be like, uh, I'm busted and I'm an idiot. So, um, you know. I think you made the right call.

• 3:01:27Speaker 01

  Thanks. There is actually a concept that General Milley came out later, like disciplined disobedience.

• 3:01:33Jocko Willink?

  Discipline disobedience. Explain this concept to me.

• 3:01:36Speaker 01

  It was, he was talking at the macro level of like the complexity of the battlefield.

• 3:01:40Jocko Willink?

  Disciplined disobedience. Got it. I missed the D. Yeah. Disciplined disobedience. Yep.

• 3:01:45Speaker 01

  So you're given a mission, you're a whole mission command, commander's intent, whatever. You can be given a mission and not, of course, we disobey unlawful orders like that's ingrained in us, but he was talking more of the the complexity of the battlefield will require you to do what you know, within the intent may require you to disobey an order that would either get people uselessly killed or whatever, but um, he didn't really flush it out well, but I think for some reason I, I look back into somewhat of a disciplined disobedience.

• 3:02:15Jocko Willink?

  And that's really, really important. What he said there is just if, as long as, and this is the same way, I didn't articulate it this way, but this is exactly the, the the way to articulate it is, am I supporting the intent? Of my commander. My commander wants us to not be jackasses and have A Ds or N Ds. And if we have one, we want them to be made an example of. Okay, cool. You did all that.

• 3:02:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:02:43Jocko Willink?

  You just didn't air out dirty laundry in front of everybody. So I think that's a huge good way to think about leadership is, you know, am I complying with the commander's intent? Maybe not to the letter, but the overall intent is there.

• 3:02:57Speaker 01

  The problem is Jocko is when the, like we talked about in my first tour is when that commander isn't necessarily commanding.

• 3:03:03Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:03:04Speaker 01

  So it's almost like beyond even the commander's intent. Like, is it the right thing to do based on the values of whatever, you know, the mission, the values of.

• 3:03:12Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:03:13Speaker 01

  So I a hundred percent agree, but I've also been faced with like having to make decisions because that person's not commanding.

• 3:03:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:20Speaker 01

  Which is.

• 3:03:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then it comes down to, like you said, it's like, what are, you know, what is the next higher?

• 3:03:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:03:26Jocko Willink?

  Chain. Are we doing the right thing for the right reasons? And, and ultimately is like, is this, and I even went further. It's like, we have to make sure what we're doing is not just the right thing to do that we think is the right thing to do, but is it the legal thing to do?

• 3:03:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:03:38Jocko Willink?

  Because there's times where you think, oh, it makes sense to me right now at this moment to, to do this thing. It's like, no, you can't, you know, you have to do what is legal. And if you're not doing what is legal, you're going to have problems.

• 3:03:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:03:55Jocko Willink?

  So, um, you actually had another one that you mentioned in here. A guy offered you, basically tried to bribe you with twenty, twenty thousand dollars and you said, nope, I'm not going to take that bribe. So that was pretty good to see. Fast forward a little bit. Operations in Iraq at the time were mainly focused on stability, working with the local Iraqi people and leaders to assist them in establishing legitimate democratic governance and providing essential services such as water, power, sewage and education to the population, probably in that order. We were not digging wells and teaching classes, but we were facilitating the establishment of systems that would enable the Iraqi to do so for themselves when there were no more, no more Americans around, maybe with the assistance of international aid organizations.

• 3:04:38Jocko Willink?

  So that's you're doing that kind of humanitarian, I guess, nation building type work, but you're still doing patrols. You're still doing coordinated knocks. You're still doing raids. You had another one where a guy stole some money off target. Yeah. And you busted that guy and you and I think the other platoon commander or someone took that money back to the individual. Yep. And said, you know, hey, this is not represent or reflect the way Americans work. Here's your money. It was stolen by a soldier. The soldier was being punished. So that's the right way to handle things.

• 3:05:14Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. On December 29th, 2008, we received another call for an immediate raid to capture a high value target who is believed to be in the local area, a man linked to numerous IED attacks against American and Iraqi security, security forces. I received the call from the battalion operations officer, Major McMillan. John, I'm emailing you the target packet now. We do not have much time. Your team needs to move immediately. I said, sir, I can get them moving in 30 minutes. Major Millen said, we don't have time. I need you moving in 15. I replied, sir, 15? Yes. Brigade wants you rolling now. I bought you 10 minutes and I'll stall you for five more. I know you can do it. Hell, yeah. Yeah. Mac was amazing. He's, he actually lives in Colorado Springs. Such a good friend. Uh, he's amazing.

• 3:05:58Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's a, that's a great answer right there. So you guys get tasked with this mission. Obviously it's a time sensitive target. First platoon moved through the secure gate of cop Apache, head to the target site. You find out if the target site's under construction. Kane reacted quickly. Lock it down. One, one, take the northwest edge. One, two, northeast. I'll take southeast. One, four, take the rear southwest block. And you go through a lot of the details here, which are awesome to read about and are very educational. In two, just two minutes, the platoon had control of the site. Of course, once you have control of site, there's a couple of Iraqis that start running away. Some of your guys pursue the Iraqis that are running away. They catch them. They bring them back within the perimeter. Fast forward. It was no surprise to anyone that one of the two runners was in fact Abu Omar jackpot.

• 3:06:43Jocko Willink?

  First platoon had done it. They placed a plastic flex cuffs around his wrist. What we called zip tying him up and took Omar Abu Omar back to Cop Apache where he was handed off to the battalion intelligence team. We later found out that Abu Omar was not just any high value target. He was HVT number five on the divisions list. A major leader and part of a bomb making chain of Al Qaeda in Iraq. In fact, several special task forces made up of the most elite soldiers had conducted raids to capture him and failed. That made Alpha Company's win even sweeter.

• 3:07:19Speaker 01

  You gotta give them wins. Whether it's the football movies or whatever, that was, that was the tipping point. That was a, a win that forever left the black sheep mentality behind.

• 3:07:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that, just like everything else, when you capture someone that's like a high level of value target. And you say this in the book, like it's spread. Everyone's, you know, guys are saying, damn John, you're making us look bad. This is from Captain Jensen in Bravo Company. So the word spreads.

• 3:07:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07:46Jocko Willink?

  Uh, just a month after Abu Omar's capture in January 2009, we began a treasonous in our responsibilities to another unit. This happened across Iraq, more or less yearly basis. It's not true to say American forces fought in Iraq for eight years. They fought one year over and over again for eight years. That was a good point.

• 3:08:07Jocko Willink?

  February 2009, you're done.

• 3:08:10Jocko Willink?

  You get to Fort Carson, Colorado. You have to fill out your questionnaires. Do you, did you see any dead bodies? Did you engage in firefight? Did any of this bother you? Do you have trouble sleeping at night? Do you self-medicate? And of course, your answer to all these questions, like everyone else's was, no, no, no, no, no, I'm fine. Right? And you write about that in there. Uh, I, my, my friend, BTF Tony. We had to fill out these things. We were still on deployment. They made us fill these things out and I was reviewing them. And in big block letters at the top of his, he wrote, this is a cry for help.

• 3:08:46Jocko Willink?

  So I at least knew he still had a sense of humor. You say my own mental state was questionable. It was not so much that I was traumatized by the horrors of combat. It was I had overwhelmed myself with the stresses of command, doing things to my body and mind with self-medication and sleep deprivation. And again, the self-medication that you're talking about is like freaking caffeine and NyQuil.

• 3:09:06Jocko Willink?

  They didn't have Ambien?

• 3:09:08Speaker 01

  I can't take Ambien. I had a bad.

• 3:09:10Jocko Willink?

  Bad experience?

• 3:09:11Speaker 01

  Bad experience.

• 3:09:12Jocko Willink?

  I've never taken it before.

• 3:09:13Speaker 01

  There were lots of my soldiers on it, though. So I actually got a list, which was technically a violation too, but like a list from the dock of what all my soldiers were on.

• 3:09:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we went through like six months of Ambien in like a couple of weeks. I should have known that that was not good. I was like, no, that's weird because I've but I've never taken it. But yeah.

• 3:09:33Speaker 01

  I can't even do a half a pill.

• 3:09:34Jocko Willink?

  What does it do?

• 3:09:35Speaker 01

  For me, I like it's it's like roofies.

• 3:09:39Jocko Willink?

  Like I don't. KOs you?

• 3:09:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, KOs me and I don't have memory of it. Like I was actually on a transatlantic flight to Australia, took a half of one. Woke up and my friends are all pissed at me like the other military officers because I had gotten up to go to the bathroom was like stumbling all over everybody to where the stewardess was going to like land the plane because this guy. I like I cannot take Ambien, not even have a pill.

• 3:10:02Jocko Willink?

  Damn. I've heard, I think I read, this might be why I didn't take it, but I think I've read that like that sleep is not equivalent to actual sleep.

• 3:10:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:10:11Jocko Willink?

  Or to natural. It's just like not the same thing.

• 3:10:17Jocko Willink?

  You get home. It's sort of your typical stuff.

• 3:10:24Jocko Willink?

  You end up hanging out more with the EOD officer that you had met overseas. So that's that's happening and in the meantime.

• 3:10:36Jocko Willink?

  The platoon leaders in your company is broken up.

• 3:10:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:10:38Jocko Willink?

  You're all sent to a bunch of different directions.

• 3:10:44Speaker 01

  Every one of them immediately, 150 people. That's the way the rotation in the military at the time was all reassignment.

• 3:10:51Jocko Willink?

  Going, getting stationed in new places, getting moved around.

• 3:10:55Speaker 01

  Either released from their stop losses. So you remember that's 40 or 50%. So some, they were now allowed to leave, which caused a lot of issues with the guys that are finally free. Then you had reassignments, you had schools because you know, the military wasn't doing schools. So you had NCOs who were getting promoted like two, two positions without the, the primary schools for it. Uh, or reassignments to other units who were then probably getting in the deployment cycle to go. In this time you'd have, I had NCOs and I wrote one where they do 12 months home. 12 months deployed, 12 months home, 15 months deployed for eight years.

• 3:11:36Speaker 01

  And so they're reassignment to another unit who was probably in their pre-deployment and then getting ready to go back in.

• 3:11:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that was a long time. That was always crazy for us in the SEAL teams, you know, we, we do six month deployments, maybe seven when you tack on the pre-deployment. Uh, site survey and like the wrapping it up at the end of deployment. And we'd be over there with army guys that were there for 15 months, 14 months. And by the way, this was their second or third deployment.

• 3:12:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:12:03Jocko Willink?

  Of that length. And we would, you know, and the Marine Corps actually does it the same way we do most of the time, which is like a six month deployment.

• 3:12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, good old army thought 15 months was just about right.

• 3:12:15Jocko Willink?

  I would think at the time, again, this is 2006, like in my mind, well, you know, the army guys, once they're done with this war. They don't deploy because that's one thing that in the SEAL teams you're deploying like regardless of war, no war, you're still going on deployment. Army doesn't really do that, like you can be just going through your normal life and you don't go on a deployment. But when that war ended up dragging out for 20 years, it's like, oh yeah, this plan is, needs some looking at. And maybe the six month deployment is better, however.

• 3:12:50Jocko Willink?

  You know, it takes you a month and a month and a half to figure out the terrain. It takes you, now you get in the groove and now you're getting ready to go home.

• 3:12:57Speaker 01

  Have you ever seen the, the movie War Machine with Brad Pitt?

• 3:13:00Jocko Willink?

  I saw part of it. Yeah, I saw part of it.

• 3:13:02Speaker 01

  It's a real funny example of that rotating like whoever is receiving you is like, I face this as a commander, like whatever I wanted, like the guy's like, yeah, whatever, he'll be gone two months. Uh, so it, it, it ripples across not just the formations, but even in the, where you are, the, that they know that you're, you're just the guy that's here for the next four months.

• 3:13:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. And the SEAL teams, we used to be able to say that the officers only rented their lockers. You know, like, cause we have a locker, like a drying cage and like, oh, the officers, they just rent theirs. Like if you're an enlisted guy at the SEAL team, you, you can live there. Like you're there for eight. I was at SEAL Team One for eight years. You know what I mean? Just an enlisted guy just getting after it. And that's awesome. And you're, you're totally right. Like, oh, your officer come and take over. Hey, he'll be gone in a few months. We'll take, it'll take him a few months just to figure out what's happening. And then he'll run his mouth for a few months, then he'll be gone. No factor.

• 3:14:04Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward quite a bit in the book and in life, on February 18th, 2018, less than a month after Martinez reached out, Sergeant Ryan Shetter committed suicide. He died in his mother's home at the age of 31. No one knows which demons plagued Ryan. There's no way to know if it's what he saw in 2008, where he was the driver of the third truck and green platoon convoy, the night they were attacked by a grenade and the Iraqi child was hit by the blast, or if it was another, any other event during his 26 months of deployment.

• 3:14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, and he had, so it factors into the book and also the work I would do later in the Pentagon with, you know, 22 veterans a day committing suicide. And this ideal that the virtual, we learned this in COVID, but he was actually reaching out virtually and people, Martinez was reaching out to Shetter virtually, like, and say, hey, you okay? And then any of the answers, yeah, I'm fine.

• 3:15:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'm fine.

• 3:15:10Speaker 01

  Uh, so Martinez actually took that really hard because he was reaching out to Shetter on social media, trying to see how he was doing because people knew he'd lost his job. He was struggling and everything. Uh, but we're more connected as a society than we've ever been in human history, but in many aspects, we're more alone. The virtual world does not replace the physical. Shetter felt like he was alone. Even though all his buddies were all around the world, virtually, it didn't bring him comfort and that's really sad.

• 3:15:45Jocko Willink?

  Um, you also talk about in the book, soldiers from Alpha Company that did well, you know, that got out and flourished and got after it. Um, so it's, you know, again, I don't want to paint the, the veteran as always being, you know, having problems. A lot of guys just, they, they move on, they find their new mission and they get after it.

• 3:16:07Speaker 01

  Have you ever heard the, the saying, so this is a Jim Mattis saying that I, I, I say to myself a lot now is that, don't let your military service be the greatest thing you ever do.

• 3:16:16Jocko Willink?

  Sounds like a good idea. For sure.

• 3:16:20Speaker 01

  I know you embody that, but I, I find a lot of people that, even old soldiers I'm with is, that's a, that's gotta be your philosophy. You can't live in, you can still excel in life.

• 3:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. And it is, you know, the, the thing that, one of the things I think that makes it hard is. Well, it's what you talk about this in this book, right? When you're in the military, you're surrounded by a bunch of people and you have the the social cohesion of being surrounded by those people. And this is stuff that you talk about in the book. And you have the task cohesion, which means we're all hey, and look, even if we don't agree on what the mission is, we know what we're doing tonight. We know that we're going to get in these Humvees. We know that we're going to drive to this location like where we're at least we have task cohesion for what we're doing as humans today. And sometimes in a nice world, that turns into like, hey, we're, we're trying to do this as a,

• 3:17:15Jocko Willink?

  as a nation, we're trying to do the right thing. So again, you use those terms, task cohesion and social cohesion in the book. And they're so strong when you're in the military. And then what happens to a lot of guys, unfortunately, is they get out and they lose immediately the social cohesion gone because now they don't have their buddies anymore. And then really quickly after that, this task cohesion is gone because we don't have a, a mission anymore. That's why like, when I talk to vets, I always say, find a new mission, find a new mission, find a mission. You want to be an awesome dad? Cool, be an awesome dad. You want to start a company? You want to go be a construction worker? You want to run triathlons? You want to get good at jujitsu? I don't care what it is, but you got to find something else to do. You got to find a task.

• 3:17:58Jocko Willink?

  And then once you find that task, you'll find task cohesion with some other people that are going to be on that same road. Cause there are going to be other people that are training jujitsu, running marathons, being dads, starting companies, working at companies. Like you're going to find a group of people. But, and, and then you can kind of start to rebuild some of the social cohesion as well. But I think those two points that you bring up in the book are things that really get lost when people get out of the military.

• 3:18:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. They feel like they, they never, they feel like they've lost rather than gained. They've, they've lost community, brotherhood. Nobody understands them and they don't build it again. It's, it's not a one time and one place. That human need for community, like you said, you can find it in the jujitsu community. You can find it in the CrossFit community if you do that. But it's just a human need. And that's why COVID, this was released really before, right before COVID. It teaches you like, it's a human need. You've got to find it and you got to pursue it. But if you just want to waller and you'll never have it again, then it's going to lead to really negative outcomes.

• 3:19:03Jocko Willink?

  You cover a lot of this stuff in the book. I'm gonna fast forward a bit here. Kind of get to some of the conclusions here. Soldiers like all people are social beings. They need physical, human interaction on a daily basis. They need social support from others to cope with stressful situations. And again, I'm just gonna point out, this is not just people, this is not just soldiers, this is just human beings in general. Constant contact with social support outside the primary group or inside the military tribe presents further complications. It slams war and home lives together. It adds new levels of stress to the experience of the soldiers and their families, stresses that had never been a part of war in this way. It requires the soldier to split mental ability and resources between war and home unlike never before, or unlike ever

• 3:19:46Jocko Willink?

  before. I have no, I have no way of knowing the pluses, if the pluses outweigh the minuses. This is the new reality and we have to better study, understand and adjust this to this connected warfare. What has been done in the past to create cohesive, effective combat teams still works and is extremely important. Despite the rapidly changing external environment in which the military exists, many tried and true tested practices of team and organization building still apply.

• 3:20:20Speaker 01

  I mean, why do you do muster? There's some things that apply to life, team building, shared hardship, quality time together. Like you can design it, you can do it and get the outcomes. It isn't natural. You have to, you have to create it and that's in the military, who I'd give examples of where we had lost our way in some elements of it, not adapting to the external environment. But it's definitely a vital need.

• 3:20:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt about that. And like you said, you, in this day and age, if I really want to, I can do all my communications via email or text and not never interact with another human again. If you're not careful, you can do that with your business. If you're not careful, you can do that with your life. If you're not careful, you can do that with your family.

• 3:21:07Speaker 01

  Yep, 100%.

• 3:21:08Jocko Willink?

  Which is disturbing.

• 3:21:11Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to close out the book with this section here. You just say, "The ways to improve battlefield cohesion, methods of infusing social media and other technological advancements in a manner that makes our military stronger, and finding techniques to make soldiers better on and off the battlefield still matter. War does require and produced bands of brothers, but now they are connected soldiers."

• 3:21:42Jocko Willink?

  So,

• 3:21:44Jocko Willink?

  that wraps this book. We've been going for three and a half hours. And, uh, you, this was, you know, you just mentioned that it's good to, when you get out of the military, find a new mission and, and don't let being in the military be the best thing that you ever did. Well, you have followed your own advice on that one and you've done a lot since you left the military. And we will, we will pick that up on the next podcast. So, with that, I guess, thanks to everyone for joining us. If people want to follow you, you're on the interwebs. You are, johnspenceronline.com. You're on Twitter X and Instagram at Spencer Guard. Why do you say Spencer Guard? National Guard?

• 3:22:28Speaker 01

  So I've gotten that a lot because I actually did, I served in the California State Guard, worked for the National Guard. It had nothing to do with it. It was just, well, it was available.

• 3:22:35Jocko Willink?

  Spencer Guard. Okay. At Spencer Guard on Instagram and Twitter X. You've got a YouTube channel, at Spencer, at johnspencer328. Sometimes I say people's YouTube channel. They don't know what it is because they haven't posted in a while, but I looked, you are posting on there. You're on LinkedIn, at johnspencer. You're on Facebook, at johnspencer. And so that's where people can find you. Obviously, the books that I went over, Connected Soldiers today. You've got your podcast.

• 3:23:04Jocko Willink?

  Uh, which is called the Urban Warfare Podcast. Concrete Hell, you cover this book on there with Lieutenant Colonel Louis DiMarco. You cover the Battle of Ramadi, which I listened to with Colonel Lieutenant Colonel, uh, DiMarco. Some, some good ones that I've listened to, Operational Approach to Cities, Urban Strong Points. Again, these are all things that I might be a little bit niche interested in because I'm a little bit niche interested in urban combat. And yeah, Roger that. Defeating the urban, the urban enemy with General Petraeus, obviously that was an interesting listen. And then also you got one about studying the October 7 terrorist attacks. And you actually make the case, were they even terrorist attacks? This was more like a division assault where they were looking at taking hold of ground.

• 3:23:46Jocko Willink?

  So a bunch of things that you, you, you're doing, and we're going to get into those. And most important, you, you actually travel to war zones currently. And that's what we'll talk about on the next podcast, your various voyages to find out what's happening on the ground. Again, uh, I know a lot of people like to talk about various conflicts around the world. But it's very, very difficult to understanding, to understand what's happening in a conflict. If you have not been on the ground or you're not talking to someone that has been on the ground directly. So I appreciate that. And that's why I want to talk to you about that on the next podcast.

• 3:24:31Jocko Willink?

  In the meantime, if people need fuel, I recommend they go to jockofuel.com. If they need clothing, you do gi jiu jitsu?

• 3:24:39Speaker 01

  I, yes, of course.

• 3:24:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:24:42Speaker 01

  It's been a while.

• 3:24:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Well, you said, do you, do you do no gi or do you not train?

• 3:24:46Speaker 01

  I did, I, I had not trained right now because I've been working in Ukraine and Gaza. I was training in Colorado Springs, both gi and no gi.

• 3:24:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay. For the gi, originusa.com. For the no gi, originusa.com. For the jeans, originusa.com. For the boots, originusa.com. For, for what you need to wear on your body, go to originusa.com. A hundred percent made in America, not made by a slave.

• 3:25:14Jocko Willink?

  Who is being treated miserably? We also have jocko store.com.

• 3:25:18Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:25:19Jocko Willink?

  Is that where you got this hoodie that you're wearing? This lightweight hoodie?

• 3:25:21Speaker 02

  Yep, but we don't offer this one anymore. It's a, what do you call, um, it was like a limited edition. Limited edition, not available anymore. Maybe we'll bring it back, maybe we won't. But yes, if you want, if you want to represent discipline equals freedom apparel. That's where you can find it. Jocko store, also the shirt locker, by the way. It's a subscription scenario. You get a new design every, every month on your shirt. New shirt every month, new design. And the subscription, so yeah, people seem to like that all on jocko store.

• 3:25:49Jocko Willink?

  Primalbeef.com, coloradocraftbeef.com. I'll have to link you up with coloradocraftbeef.com since you live in Colorado. You're a little bit further away from Colorado craft beef, but we'll, we'll make something happen there. Cause you need steak.

• 3:26:03Jocko Willink?

  For life. Uh, subscribe to the podcast, check out John's podcast. Again, it's the, what is the urban warfare project podcast? All kinds of cool guests and discussions on there. Also, we have the Jocko Underground podcast. Subscribe to the YouTube channels that we've talked about. Written a bunch of books. Um, again, these books are connected soldiers. And understanding urban warfare by John Spencer. He's also written, what is the mini book of? Mini manual for the urban defender. Yeah. And that you can just go to your website and download it. In 17 different languages. Yep. Yeah. Cause that thing is a good, like just manual of how to get things done in urban combat. I of course have leadership consultancy.

• 3:26:48Jocko Willink?

  Echelon front, go to echelonfront.com and check that out. If you need leadership training, if you need leadership training, you can come to one of our events. You can call us and we can help you out or you can go to extremeownership.com. We have online training for leadership. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help. Gold star families, check out Mark Lee's mom. Mama Lee, she's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to americasmightywarriors.org. Also check out heroesandhorses.org. That's Mike Affink, he's taking our veterans that maybe are having a hard time finding their new mission. Maybe they're having a hard time.

• 3:27:28Jocko Willink?

  Resolving some of the things that are in their minds after war. And he does a great job of supporting them and showing them the path. And also Jimmy May has got an organization beyond the brotherhood.org. So check that out as well. And thanks to John Spencer for joining us. Thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks to all of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines out there on the front lines. Keeping us safe, keeping freedom available to us. Thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, and all other first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe here at home.

• 3:28:10Jocko Willink?

  And we will join you once again next week for some on the ground reports. From John Spencer. That's all we've got for tonight. Until next time, this is John, Echo and Jocko out.