512: Into the Delta. Charlie Platoon, SEAL Missions in Vietnam. With Hal Kuykendal and Tom Boyhan

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe From boat insertions under monsoon rains to surprise assaults on hidden VC camps, this episode takes you deep into the Mekong Delta with SEAL veterans Tom Boylan and Hal McNulty. They reveal the challenges of intelligence, leadership, and survival—plus the hard lessons carried into life, family, and business long after the war. 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 512 with me Jocko Willink. One of the few daytime operations we went on took place on Dung Island. We got information that the VC were operating a factory that built junks. We went there to blow the thing up. Mike Thornton was driving the Boston Whaler and as usual, we wanted to get in there quietly. We were in this little bitty canal that went right down alongside the junk factory. We were running on a single engine to make less noise, but it was really hard to drive the Whaler when you didn't have enough speed. They just didn't go where you wanted them to. We kept running into the brush and finally, since we were making so much racket, we decided to gas it.

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  And get on down there. We gassed it and we were just going balls to the walls. I saw the VC at the junk factory and they were not running for cover. They were just looking up the canal like they heard something and they were thinking, what in the hell is that? They were shocked when they saw us and started running everywhere. But before we got out of there, we ended up in a big gunfight. We detonated the explosives.

• 1:13Jocko Willink?

  We had and just blew the hell out of everything there.

• 1:20Jocko Willink?

  So that right there is an excerpt from a book called The Men Behind The Trident, which is a compilation of stories from SEALs in the Vietnam War. That particular section was written by a man by the name of Hal Kuykendal, who was a member of SEAL Team One, Charlie Platoon in Vietnam, which is a legendary platoon, including a legendary group of SEALs that greatly contributed to the proud history and the feared reputation of the SEAL Teams. These are the stories that I grew up on. This is when I was asked a little while during an interview, if I could go back in any time in history

• 2:02Jocko Willink?

  and do anything in, in history, where would I go? And I said, without hesitation, I'd be a frogman SEAL in Vietnam.

• 2:13Jocko Willink?

  Well, that legendary history was written by guys like the guys in Charlie Platoon SEAL Team One, and it's an honor to have two of those SEALs here with us tonight. Hal Kuykendal and Tom Boyan, the, and Hal wrote the section that I opened with, and they're here tonight to share their experiences and lessons learned from combat. So gentlemen, it's an honor to have you guys here. I've been reading about you guys for, I guess, maybe 35 years. So it's awesome to sit down with you guys and talk to you.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  It's an honor to be here. Thank you for having us.

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  And we're here, just a little side note, we're here because there's the UDT SEAL Museum is opening in San Diego, California. And so you're in town, Tom, you're in town for that?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:08Jocko Willink?

  Hal, you live here in San Diego. So we did a little event last night and went and checked out the amazing UDT SEAL Museum here in San Diego. It's opening up October 4th. It's, there's already a UDT SEAL Museum down in Fort Pierce, Florida. If you haven't been there, you should absolutely go there. It's amazing. It's also in Fort Pierce, Florida, which is a little hard to get to. This one is right in downtown San Diego, and it's awesome. So they've got it here. They did an incredible job. It's incredible tribute to the history of the SEAL Teams and the underwater demolition teams and the Scouts and Raiders and the NCDU.

• 3:47Jocko Willink?

  So everybody go check out the Navy SEAL Museum in San Diego, California. So you guys are, like I said, this is, you guys are why I joined the SEAL Teams. You know, you guys are the people that did the things that made me want to join the SEAL Teams. So I guess let's get into a little information about you all and kind of where you grew up and where you're from. So Tom, I guess you're a little older, right?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm 81.

• 4:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay, how old are you?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  76.

• 4:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so that's why you got a head start on them going, well, you ended up at the Naval Academy.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 4:24Jocko Willink?

  So how'd you end up at the Naval Academy?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  So my dad was in the Merchant Marine prior to World War II, and then he was in the Army during World War II. And I

• 4:36Speaker 02

  In high school, I was looking at the military academy, the naval academy and the coast guard academy. I said, what, what do you think, uh, which one? And he says, go in the Navy, he says, you'll always have a clean bunk and good chow.

• 4:53Jocko Willink?

  That didn't work out so well.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Didn't work out with Charlie.

• 4:57Jocko Willink?

  How's that clean bunk on Dung Island?

• 5:03Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, so you end up, you end up going to the naval academy?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  And, and what year, what year was it that you got there? 1963?

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Sixty-two.

• 5:11Jocko Willink?

  Sixty-two? So Vietnam's not really going yet.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  I didn't know, I didn't know anything about it.

• 5:19Jocko Willink?

  I've had guys that were at the naval academy in 1965 and they didn't know anything about Vietnam. You know, so.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  By, by sixty-five, I knew about it. And the, the Bridget Thanh Wah, which the, uh, Air Force and the naval aviation was trying to knock out. That was, uh, that was in the horizon.

• 5:41Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you were definitely hearing it while you, about it while you were there? And did you try for the jet pipeline? Is that right?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:49Jocko Willink?

  You wanted to be a fighter pilot?

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  And then what happened with that? We have to, we have to go warts and all right now.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Okay. So I, I went down and, uh, went, went through basic training, was selected for the jet pipeline, did my carrier quals in the T-2B, went to Kingsville, did my carrier quals in the TF-9. And I was two hops away from getting my wings when I, uh, I had an accident. I, I brought a plane in with one main gear hung up and I broke the squadron's safety record, which very much pissed off the CO of the squadron and so I got kicked out.

• 6:37Jocko Willink?

  And you had no, so what did you know about the SEAL teams? Cause SEAL teams got started in 1962. You started at the Naval Academy in 1962. But Draper Kaufman was what? The superintendent at the Naval Academy?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  He was the superintendent, uh, my last year or two at the academy. And, and I knew about his involvement with, uh, NCDU and the, and UDT. And I knew he had, I knew he had a Navy Cross. I didn't realize he had two Navy Crosses. And, um, you said Wartson. I had a company officer at the Naval Academy who had been enlisted in the Navy and then gone through the Naval Academy. And he had told us he had been in UDT. Now it subsequently turned out, and I checked this out with DJ Shipley. He was not telling truth.

• 7:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  And, but we thought he was a cool guy because he gave us seniors unlimited liberty.

• 7:36Jocko Willink?

  Ah.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Which was against the school rules at the time. But my, my primary, uh, reason for going to the team though, was just double hazardous duty pay. I mean, after getting flight pay and training.

• 7:54Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. And that used to be a huge difference. Like, I remember, I, I know I've talked to guys where their base pay was like a hundred and fifty bucks a month and airborne pay was like another hundred bucks a month. So it was like doubling your pay. So you saw that as another thing to do.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  And I, and I also didn't like shipboard duty.

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  Check. Yeah. Um, you were telling, you, you wrote some notes about going to talk to the detailer in DC.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 8:22Jocko Willink?

  Sounded like that was a positive experience too.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  So they kicked me out and, uh, I knew I was gonna go to a ship. So I flew up to DC on my own dime and got in front of the detailer and he said, oh, I got a great deal for you. I got, I got a destroyer out of Pearl Harbor. Great duty. You'll love it. I said, no, I want to go to the training unit. And he says, you, he says, you'll wash out. You won't make it. It took me about two hours to convince the guy. He'd get a phone call, he'd do his business. I'd get right back at him. And I just kept working on him and he finally, finally, his parting words was, "When you wash out,

• 9:10Speaker 02

  you won't be going to Hawaii. You'll be going to someplace like Alaska."

• 9:16Jocko Willink?

  And what, what class were you in then?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  So I was in class forty-five.

• 9:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  And we were augment class. We started training right after class forty-four finished Hell Week.

• 9:28Jocko Willink?

  Okay, and why, why, need more seals or something?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Zumwalt was in Vietnam and had said, "We need more seals on these rivers." So they had ramped up.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  And that's why they started putting more classes through. I talked to some old timer who said the first time that they decided they wanted to put more than one or two classes a year, they said, "Well, it can't be done." And he said, "What?" They figured out real soon that it could be done. And the only thing was the personnel pipeline hadn't caught up with the ramp up. So we only started with like forty-some guys. I think we had maybe started out with maybe six, maybe seven boat crews. And then we pared down real quick.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  We started Hell Week with twelve guys.

• 10:25Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 10:28Jocko Willink?

  What, did you even have two boats? Yeah, you must've had two boats for a little while.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had two boats. We had two boats for the whole thing. But we finished Hell Week with eight guys. Two guys got rolled back for medical reasons. And then we got a roll back from class forty-four. So we graduated nine.

• 10:48Jocko Willink?

  So what year is this now? Is it like?

• 10:50Speaker 02

  It was just sixty-eight.

• 10:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's all the way up to sixty-eight. Oh, that's right. Cause you started Naval Academy in sixty-two, graduated in sixty-six, couple of years in the flight pipeline. So now it's sixty-eight. So now the Vietnam War is going on.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:02Jocko Willink?

  And you guys all know.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Tet of sixty-eight was going on while we were going through training.

• 11:05Jocko Willink?

  So you guys all know where you're going.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:07Jocko Willink?

  And it's a riverine, really like coastal environment. There's no doubt.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:13Jocko Willink?

  Now, at that time...

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  They, I know it, I know that certain times they didn't take guys from BUDS to SEAL Team. You had to go to UDT first.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Well, they, I'm thinking it was probably in the late 30s classes. They started taking guys right from BUDS into SEAL Team.

• 11:37Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Cause I know Bob Carey went directly from BUDS to SEAL Team. And my classmate at the Naval Academy, Gary Gray, he was in class 44. He went directly to SEAL Team from BUDS. But they had just commissioned UDT 13.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  In June or July of 68. So when our class graduated, all nine of us went to UDT 13.

• 12:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. And when you get to UDT 13, what is your, are you immediately just put into a UDT platoon? And you're getting ready to go to Vietnam? How'd that work out?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had to, we had to train up, do the operational readiness inspection.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  In order to deploy. And I got, I got tasked with the Sub Ops Platoon.

• 12:33Jocko Willink?

  And what, what did that consist of?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Well, we, at that time, the Grayback was the operational submarine. I don't remember the sub we trained on here off San Diego, but you know, we did your lockouts and through the forward escape trunk. And popped up IBSs and then practiced being snagged by the periscope and all that stuff. And then.

• 13:01Jocko Willink?

  Were you sitting in the boats banging pipes together so the sonar could find you? I know I had to do that because I was a communicator and that's how you communicate with the subs. Hanging over the side of your Zodiac banging pipes together.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Well, or banging on the tanks. Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  But then when we deployed, we were in Subic and we were literally on the pier. Look, getting ready to load stuff into the submarine to go out. And Chief of the Boat came up to me and he says, we just discovered about a 12 inch crack in the pressure hull.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  We're not going out. And so we were, it was like all dressed up, no place to go. I was chafing at the bit and when Bob Peterson, who was the XO, Team 13, we had a morning muster. He says, we're look, they're looking for volunteers for SEAL Team. And I was the first one to step forward and say, send me.

• 14:09Jocko Willink?

  Nice. So now Hal, let's get a little background on you. You grew up, what, Texas?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:17Jocko Willink?

  And then how did you end up joining the Navy?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  It was kind of an embarrassing story that.

• 14:24Jocko Willink?

  Like I said, we're doing warts and all.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I was in the first semester of college and a longtime girlfriend broke up with me. And so I decided to punish her. So I drove over 30 miles away to Palestine, Texas, to the recruiter's office, and I wanted to be a Marine. And the Marine was out to lunch. So the Navy recruiter said, why don't you join the Navy? So I did. I was very impulsive. And so I went home.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  My mother and my sisters and siblings were crying. My dad tells my mother, he says, oh, hail Alice. And this war, the safest place to be is in the Navy.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Well, so then I went to, you know, boot camp.

• 15:23Jocko Willink?

  Did you know anything about the SEAL Teams?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  I didn't know. No, I'd heard something about frogmen, but I didn't know anything about SEAL Teams. But my dad knew about frogmen because he was a commanding officer of a little sub chaser. And so he was around Saipan and all those areas. And so he saw all these frogmen clearing the beaches for Marines coming in. And he basically, you know, I'm going to A school now, radio and school and all that other stuff. And what happened is the SEALs sent over two.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Two instructors that did a film showed it and and again, I'm impulsive. I'd never thought about joining a SEAL team. In fact, I can remember sitting there wondering, I wonder why in the hell anybody does that? But anyway, they asked if anybody wanted to, you know, try a screening test. And so the guy next to me said, well, let's do it. And I said, oh, okay. Well, I did it. And so what happened is I passed the screening test.

• 16:31Jocko Willink?

  Did the other guy?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  He did.

• 16:33Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Rob Wagsland, he passed it. And so, but what happened is, so they told me I needed to, you know, there was a class starting up in Coronado and I needed to, you know, get, get over there. Well, I could, the Navy told me, well, I'm sorry, you know, we've already got, you're going to Yucuska. So I get on a telephone, like a payphone. And I call, I thought that the training unit was at North Island. So I called North Island Information, asked them to connect me. They gave me the number of the AMPI base. So I get on the phone. I went through about three, I think, trainees who are answering the phone.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  And basically, finally, a lieutenant named Dan Spurk, he was in charge of the training unit at the time. He says, well, I could get you over here. I could get you a speed letter, but he said, it's not worth it. I said, why not? He said, well, didn't you say you're a radio man? I said, yes. They all quit.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  He's, you know, sitting the hook. And I said, I'll guarantee you, I won't quit. I mean, I don't know if I can swim, you know, I grew up in Texas, there weren't any polo, water polo teams or swim teams. So I said, I don't, and I told him, I said, and I'm not sure I'll jump out of an airplane, but I will never, ever quit. And he said, well, I will promise you this. If you get through training, you'll damn sure jump out of an airplane. So he, I, I would love to find him, you know, and thank him for writing that speed letter and getting me over there. Otherwise, I'd have been out on, you know, gray monsters floating around in the ocean.

• 18:27Jocko Willink?

  How was Bud's?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Well, we, it was tough. You know, uh, Olivera and Moy.

• 18:35Jocko Willink?

  We've heard some, we've heard some good stories about them.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  So, by the way, I was raised, uh, you know, a church going Catholic and, uh, this guy comes out, walks out, uh, he's, it's Olivera and on his name tag, it says God.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I remember thinking, what have I got myself into here? But, uh, but anyway, uh, and then mostly Moy stayed on, uh, but you know, those were two very interesting people. And of course it's great to still see Moy come to reunions and, and, uh, he's got it. He was tough, but he had a great sense of humor and I, I really liked him.

• 19:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Apparently he's the one that invented the bell or made the bell a thing.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 19:21Jocko Willink?

  So did you have the bell in your class, Tom?

• 19:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 19:24Jocko Willink?

  No bell?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 19:25Jocko Willink?

  And you quit?

• 19:26Speaker 02

  You had, you had to go, that was when it was still on the amphib base.

• 19:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  And you, you went to the back door of the little hut where the instructors were and you pounded on the back door.

• 19:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and apparently Moy thought that if it was made more public, you would, would, less people would quit out of the shame of having to ring the bell.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:49Jocko Willink?

  And that's why he brought it on, made it, made it into a thing.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  It wasn't a big enough speed bump. Cause the rate's still the same.

• 19:57Jocko Willink?

  People still ring that bell. And your class, did I get this right? That your class was like the last class that was the UDT replacement class? As opposed to called BUDS? Or was yours the first?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  We were the first BUDS class. And I, I got the pictures to prove it.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  I sho- I showed it to, uh, Crowdad Crawford.

• 20:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Cause he said, I heard this. Is this true? And I sent it down to him and he says, yeah, you're right.

• 20:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. He was my first XO at Team One.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  You know, uh, you, by the way, you asked how the training was, but the short answer to that is we started with a hundred and twenty-nine gung ho people who were very, very fit and we graduated with nineteen. So it was pretty tough.

• 20:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's weird when you think that every single one of those, what'd you say, a hundred and forty?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  A hundred and twenty-nine.

• 20:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, every one of those a hundred and twenty-nine, every single one of them thinks they're gonna make it a hundred percent.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  They did.

• 20:57Jocko Willink?

  And they sign up for the Navy and they show up at that thing and they tell their girlfriend they're gonna be a frogman and it gets cold and miserable and they ring that bell. Uh, so you get done with training and you, but you got, you went straight to SEAL Team One?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yes. So, um, there were a number. So my, I went to SEAL Team One, Mike LaCausse went to SEAL Team One, uh, Mike Thornton went to SEAL Team One, Wayne Hampton went to SEAL Team One and Kenny Meyer. Kenny Meyer.

• 21:32Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. So you had a pretty good crew of guys.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did.

• 21:35Jocko Willink?

  And, and this is when you guys link up there. Are, do you have to go to SBI?

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Did, were you guys going, did you guys go to SBI together?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 21:45Jocko Willink?

  So you, you were ahead of them?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  So, yeah, we went to, you know, after training, we went to what's now called SBI, called Cadre then. And, um, so we did that, but I mean, you know, obviously we went to jump school and secret school and all that kind of stuff.

• 22:02Jocko Willink?

  So you did a jump out of an airplane?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did.

• 22:05Jocko Willink?

  Uh, okay. So then you go to SBI, what was called Cadre then?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:12Jocko Willink?

  So Cadre, then it became SBI, then it became STT, and now it's called SQT. But it's, it's, it was run by SEALs at the SEAL Team.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 22:20Jocko Willink?

  And who, do you guys remember any, uh, important lessons you learned when you were at SBI?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Um, well, that's actually, that was the first live fire with other guys around.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Out on just a range.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Uh, and, uh,

• 22:43Speaker 02

  and learning how to drink beer out at an island.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  But we also, um, I remember, um, you know, we had all those canals out there.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  So they'd get us in boats, you know, just IBSs and go down at night and just get a feel for what it was like to be in Vietnam.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  They also, uh, they, they had a situation, they had these helicopters come in. And so they would talk like a man's down. And of course they picked Mike Thornton to be down because he was big. And so they, the helicopter doesn't stop. It's like moving. And we're, myself and a couple of other people, carrying supposedly dead or wounded Mike Thornton, we're running and trying to chase down the helicopter anyway. So we did a lot of things like that. But it was a great place because you could, as Tom said, you know, you could call in, you know, you know, helicopters, jets, whatever. And so it was a really good place.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  But the one thing that I remember thinking when I was there, they would show us all these type of operations that we're gonna do. And they would say that, you know, we're gonna be going in these hooches at night and finding some province chief or district chief or whoever, and we're gonna like, you know, take him with us. And I remember thinking, I don't actually believe we're gonna be doing that. Well, but it wasn't too long before that's what we were doing. But I just remembered, these things that they were telling us we're gonna do, I'm thinking, damn, it's gonna be hard to live through this, I think.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  So anyway, the great news is, about being a SEAL, is that we were really, really well trained, you know? I, I started boot camp in March of two, of sixty-eight, and I finished in somewhere around, you know, summer, you know, June or something. And then, you know, I went to, uh... I went over to the, to the teams. And so then we just trained and trained and trained and trained. And so, anyway. I was always very appreciative of being well-trained.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  When I read some books, like, uh, the class of sixty-six. These guys from, from West Point, when they, some of the officers had written a book. And when I read that book about how they had a whole bunch of people that had been drafted, maybe gone through six weeks of training or something. I mean, I, when I read the book, I'm turning a page and I'm thinking, I, I might have, I might have just walked off and said, I'm getting out of here. I mean, I, I've never been a quitter, but I was thinking, this would be awful. So I, I, it was a wonderful thing about SEAL Team. We did dangerous operations, but we were so well-trained.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  It really made a difference.

• 25:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and also you had guys that were doing the same job that you were about to do.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:00Jocko Willink?

  From Vietnam, coming right back, running the training.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:04Jocko Willink?

  And setting it up. You know, we would do that when I was running training, you know, we'd be getting reports of what was happening three days ago on the battlefield. And when the enemy would make a tactical adjustment, we would add that into training so that the guys were as ready as they could possibly be. And I think that's something that's always been, always been part of the, kind of the core ethos of the SEAL Teams is to train as hard as you possibly can. And obviously it starts in BUDs, but it's the same thing when you get out to an island or any of these, any of these training sites, you are gonna train excruciatingly hard to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios. Then that's the way it's gotta be.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:46Jocko Willink?

  So now, Tom, you end up getting assigned platoon commander.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:51Jocko Willink?

  And how did you feel about that? You must have been pretty, pretty excited about that.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You know, from the time that I was in. Team thirteen and then to come over to SEAL Team. Yeah, I was chomping at the bit and.

• 27:06Jocko Willink?

  Cause you basically had like you went on, you did an entire workup, sub lock in lock out. You go all the way on deployment. You're getting ready to go do your missions. Sub breaks down and you and they say, hey, you're not doing anything.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:20Jocko Willink?

  So you're freaking crushed.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, after getting kicked out of aviation. The sub breakdown, it's like.

• 27:29Jocko Willink?

  Your naval career is not what you wanted.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  I was definitely chomping at the bit. And back in those days, in there was, you had in Team One area, you had the, at the end of the hallway, you had the captain's office, the XO's office, Ops office, and then there was a big office that was called the training office. And they had like these almost floor to ceiling whiteboards that they wrote on. Okay, here's the guys going to the different training schools. Here's the platoons that are being formed up. And I can remember going in there and see, oh, there's my name, Charlie Platoon. And yeah, let, I want

• 28:16Speaker 02

  to get after it. And I, I, because I was, my academy classmate, Gary Gray, who was in the class ahead of me, I, I plumbed his knowledge. There was a couple of other junior officers who I was friends with. Yeah. What do we do? Who should I go after? And so I don't, I don't remember how Enoch got into platoon, whether that was a Captain Shibley thing, or, but he got in there. And, and then I know I did go after like our point man Solano and, and a few other guys that they said, yeah, these would be good guys to have.

• 29:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a very similar thing in the SEAL teams now. They have something called we all I don't know what they really call it, but everyone calls it the Ouija board. And it's it's basically a big whiteboard, but it's a magnetic board. And everybody in the team has a magnet with their name on it, a little picture of them. And it's usually in the command master chief's office. And so they'll he'll organize those platoons. So there's been times I've heard that people have gone in there and moved magnets on that board to get people they wanted. It sounds like you were doing some of that activity a little bit. So, okay, so you mentioned Barry Enoch and am I correct in do I understand this correctly that he was not a platoon? He was not a chief yet?

• 29:40Speaker 02

  No, he was not. He was first class.

• 29:42Jocko Willink?

  But he was going to serve as your chief? Or did you have another guy that was your platoon chief?

• 29:46Speaker 02

  No, we did not have a platoon chief for that for that platoon.

• 29:50Jocko Willink?

  So he's your senior enlisted guy?

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:53Jocko Willink?

  And he's coming from he was a plank owner at SEAL Team One.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Plank owner.

• 29:57Jocko Willink?

  He'd he'd been to Vietnam already. He's a

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Couple of times.

• 30:02Jocko Willink?

  Silver Star recipient, a Bronze Star recipient. So he's a he's an experienced guy with an awesome reputation.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  And and he'd been an instructor. So he'd put a bunch of guys through. So yeah, he was well known throughout the teams and very respected.

• 30:19Jocko Willink?

  You end up with a guy named Doc Brown. He's your corpsman.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:23Jocko Willink?

  Now, is Doc Brown? I know that there was some corpsman that didn't go to BUDS, but were that integrated with SEAL teams and they're considered SEALs and no one questions it?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, most of the corpsman had not gone through training. There were

• 30:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  There were only like a handful of guys corpsman that had gone through training.

• 30:43Jocko Willink?

  So was he? Had he been through training?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  He no, he had not been through training. He'd done a tour with the Marines in Vietnam. And then he'd done a tour with a platoon in Vietnam.

• 30:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yep. And just to make it clear, I know talking to many people like you considered those guys just as much as frogmen as anybody else.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 31:04Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so you have this guy Doc Brown, and then you get your new guys, which you went through some of the new guys, but you get Hal, you get Mike Lacaze. Am I saying that right?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Lacaze.

• 31:13Jocko Willink?

  Lacaze, Wayne Hampton, and Mikey Thornton.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 31:20Jocko Willink?

  So, so there's your new guys. Um, you get a couple of guys from UDT 13.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Mike Sands and Joe, how do you say his name?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Twiddick.

• 31:28Jocko Willink?

  Twiddick. Oh, I never would have guessed that one.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Well, it's also pronounced Tverdick.

• 31:33Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that's what I would have guessed.

• 31:37Jocko Willink?

  Lou Lacrosse, Lacrosse?

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Lou DeCrosse.

• 31:39Jocko Willink?

  DeCrosse.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Who was, he'd made several tours.

• 31:44Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Rich Solano and Rich Doyle. These guys are all your experienced.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:49Jocko Willink?

  Seals. Your kind of experience. Well, we, we'd call these guys the, kind of the, the E5 Mafia or the, the shooters. You know, these are kind of guys that are going to get the work done.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:00Jocko Willink?

  Uh, your AOIC, your assistant platoon commander is John Dugger?

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Dugger.

• 32:06Jocko Willink?

  Dugger. And he's a guy that went to Cornell.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, smart guy.

• 32:11Jocko Willink?

  So he's smart, but he already did a tour with UDT 11.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:15Jocko Willink?

  And, um, another good guy that you knew and you, you picked out.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:20Jocko Willink?

  So this is your crew. And, you know, reading in, reading in the books, um, that you guys like clicked, which is, which is awesome. It doesn't always happen.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  That's true. Um, I had three platoons. I, I got to say Charlie Platoon was the pick of the litter.

• 32:41Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes, you know, there's something that happens called a stacked platoon where, you know, they'll take and pick and they want this platoon and, you know, whatever. The platoon chief's a guy that knows, has good connections. He'll pull all these, all the best, you know, heavy hitters into a platoon. And sometimes it's a great platoon and sometimes it's a total disaster. Cause when he pulls into the platoon is a bunch of people with big Ecos and they can't get along. Um, now, so you guys got a great crew. You start working together. Now, Tom, you had been doing some assessments and we started, we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording. But the, the records of what the platoons were doing in Vietnam and the operations that they were conducting, they were all recorded on what? Little index cards?

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Little three by five cards. Uh, every after action report.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Was referenced as a barn dance number. I don't know, that went back to the very beginning. So a barn dance was an operation and you had a number and you preceded the number with the, uh, the letter of the platoon.

• 33:42Jocko Willink?

  Drop.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  You know, the west coast guys had lettered platoons, east coast guy had numbered, numbered platoons. And, uh, in the intel was kind of a side thing. So in the electronics shop, there was a file cabinet that had these three by five cards of all the operations that have been run since 1966.

• 34:07Jocko Willink?

  How much detail did they have on these cards?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Very little detail. It was basically, uh, you know, date, uh, insertion, extraction grid, uh, results and a barn dance number. And I think that was about.

• 34:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  You can't get much on a three by five.

• 34:27Jocko Willink?

  No. And you, but you started going through those.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  I, I took the time. I went in there with a yellow legal pad and there were, it was over like 3,000 ops. And I just went through and I had a little grid and check off. Did they make contact? No contact. Uh, and it, it statistically it turned out that 30% of the time they made contact and 70% of the time they didn't.

• 34:59Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  It's called, negative intel is still intel, right?

• 35:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  You know, there's no bad guys here.

• 35:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, but I'm thinking maybe you didn't like the sound of doing 30% only getting contact 30% of the time?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  It just set me up in terms of context of how, how things were going.

• 35:19Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Because, you know, over a beer, if you listen to the stories, it sounded like every time you went out, you got in this giant gun battle.

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  And obviously that was not the case.

• 35:31Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. Um, now Barry Enoch wrote a book, um, and the book is called teammates, seals at war. And it's a, it's a fantastic book. It's, you know, I've got three books sitting here today. The men behind the trident teammate sales at war and UDT seal operations at Vietnam. These are books that I had for a long time and you can look at them and see how old they are.

• 35:55Jocko Willink?

  But he goes into some pretty good detail about what your workup was like. And, you know, we kind of already talked about the fact that SEALs train as hard as we possibly can. And one thing that's interesting is it's, it's, you know, the, the platoon has to push themselves. And, you know, at, at 10 o'clock at night, you can either say, hey, do we do this again? And do another iteration or do we, you know, go, go have some beers and go eat dinner? And it's real easy to say, let's, you know, have some beers and go eat dinner as opposed to, let's do this a couple more times and make sure we get it, get it right. And that's really the difference between what, what'll end up being a good platoon and what will end up being an average platoon. And it sounds like you guys would do the extra iterations, push yourselves really hard.

• 36:40Jocko Willink?

  And, and Barry Enoch goes into some significant detail about your workup and some of the, again, just taking things that were happening in Vietnam, things that he'd experienced in Vietnam, and applying those to your training. Is there a cadre that's running your training for you guys?

• 36:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 36:58Jocko Willink?

  So it's just you guys running it yourselves?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:01Jocko Willink?

  That's one thing that changed over the years is eventually they put a training cell in the SEAL team. And then I guess that's what cadre was, right? The cadre was that.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  It was, it was.

• 37:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. But eventually they put a training cell in the SEAL teams and then eventually all the SEAL team training cells got.

• 37:23Jocko Willink?

  Confirmed together or put together in one big group called Trade at and there's a Trade at West Coast and there's a Trade at East Coast and the Trade at would then train the SEAL teams. And I think at that point you kind of needed it because you had more platoons, more teams, you needed to run some more centralized training. There's, you know, you needed to get control of ranges, ordering ammunition. There's just a bunch of logistics that we could scale when we brought it all together. And plus it made, it allowed us to, you know, unify some of our, some of our tactics, techniques and procedures and, and make standard operating procedures that didn't matter what platoon you were in or what troop you were in, or even what team you were in. You know, you could still basically

• 38:07Jocko Willink?

  count on a guy to know what you were doing. But for you guys, it was you guys kind of training yourselves.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:15Jocko Willink?

  And I'm guessing that Barry Enoch as the senior enlisted guy was the guy pushing the gas pedal on that.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, really, I had have been stupid not to listen to that experience. Unfortunately, I had not been imprinted too heavily from the Naval Academy on relationships with enlisted.

• 38:38Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Meaning that in the regular military, there's a definite, clear and oftentimes fairly wide separation between the officers and the enlisted guys. And in the SEAL teams, that isn't very prevalent. It sounds like you and Barry were, and, you know, he talks about it in the book, you know, he talks about the fact that you guys were so close, but he also says, you always called him chief and he always called you, you know, LT or, or, or, you know, mister, which is kind of the traditional thing.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Well, you know, what I said to the guys, especially when we were in Ben Luck and Dung Island was, look,

• 39:22Speaker 02

  We're here in our hooch talking, planning. I'm Tom.

• 39:27Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  But if somebody from the Navy or the Army or anybody, military courtesy, because otherwise that makes me less effective in dealing with them. So.

• 39:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a great rule to have. And I know, like even for, for me, I would have guys, you know, when we were in camp, on our camp, I didn't care what you wore. You wore flip flops and a pair of surf shorts and no shirt. I didn't care at all. When we rolled out to go meet with a battalion, meet with a brigade, everyone was in a squared away, a squared away as if, as a teen guy can get with his uniform. But, you know, no, because guys would get wild, you know, they'd want to wear their dumbest, you know, Metallica tee shirt, a pair of jeans to, you know, battalion meeting. It's not happening. It's not happening. Um, so you got you, it's, it's important. And we were talking about that yesterday at the museum, you know, some of the, some of the guys were talking about just the reputation of the SEAL teams. You have to build

• 40:26Jocko Willink?

  that reputation. You have to maintain that reputation. And if a Marine sees guys that look like slobs, they don't have basic military bearing, you can't unsee that. A Marine cannot unsee that. An Army guy cannot unsee that. And so that's something that you knew, you understood, and that's the way you, the way you ran things. Any, any significant things that you guys remember from, uh, from the workup and as you're getting ready to go on deployment?

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Well, one big thing was, Barry and I had talked about, uh, because he was, he was in the armory. Uh, we went up to China Lake and, uh, we did that for a couple of reasons. Barry had heard about, oh, they're, they're working on this 50 caliber sniper rifle. And, uh, and they had all these whiz bang gadgets that you could booby trap things with, which scared the hell out of me. Cause, oh, here's a Kodak camera. Click, boom, click, bang. Or here's,

• 41:30Speaker 02

  here's an AK magazine. You fire three rounds and then it blows up. Um, but the other one they had was they had developed this, uh, siloom grenade. It looked like a smoke grenade. It looked like a standard smoke grenade. And you could clip on it. Bullet trap that you could then launch with regular standard five, five, six ammo off the end of an M 16 and that that device wound up saving our butts one night.

• 42:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Uh, so, and a great group of guys. I mean, they were like the, who's that called? The Q section in the Jane Bonds film that come up with all the whiz bangs? These guys, you know, they had their pocket protectors and their crew cuts and and they just were having a blast figuring out things. Toys for boys.

• 42:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. How are you feeling as you're getting ready to go to Vietnam? I mean, there's, you know, obviously there's people getting wounded and killed every day there. SEALs are taking casualties. How are you guys feeling about it? How, what's going through your mind? You're getting ready to go to Vietnam?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  I wanted to go. Yeah. I was eager to go and I was eager to go because, especially because of the platoon that I was in. I trusted every single platoon mate, especially Tom and Enoch and, you know, and others. So I was, you know, we'd been training for a very, very long time. It's like training for football and now you finally get to go play the game.

• 43:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  So I, I, I was very excited to be in the platoon and to go to Vietnam.

• 43:13Jocko Willink?

  I had a Marine from World War II on Dean Ladd and he was, he'd already, I forget what island, he went into one island, fought and, and then he was getting ready to go into Tarawa and, you know, as I said, you know, they were telling him, hey, there's going to be a bunch of casualties. You keep going no matter what, you know, leave Marines behind until the assault's done because we're expecting significant casualties. And I said, hey, you know, were you nervous? And he said, no, that always happens to the other guy.

• 43:42Jocko Willink?

  Of course, he ended up getting gut shot 500 yards off the beach and his Marines disobeyed orders and swam him back to a boat and he saved him and he was able to heal up on Hawaii for six months and then guess what he did? The next island.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:58Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, so I think the young testosterone-filled men, we never think anything's bad's gonna happen to us.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 44:06Jocko Willink?

  Uh, how do you guys get to Vietnam? You guys on chartered aircraft?

• 44:09Speaker 02

  No.

• 44:10Jocko Willink?

  How'd you guys get over there?

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Well, there was a squadron called VR21 and they, they were basically like a ferry squadron. They fought, uh, and they were based in Hawaii. And, uh, so we, it was, uh, I forget the date. It was a four-engine turboprop plane and my recollection is that plane flew at a speed that it took about, I, my recollection is somewhere's around 40 to 48 hours of flight time to get from San Diego to Vietnam with obvious stops in between for refueling.

• 44:50Jocko Willink?

  Hawaii, Midway.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Guam.

• 44:52Jocko Willink?

  Guam.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Wait.

• 44:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Philippines. But the planes always seemed to break down in Hawaii for some reason.

• 44:59Jocko Willink?

  Oddly enough, huh? Uh, how's it when you show up in Vietnam? What's the, what, what are you guys thinking about when you get on the ground there?

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Well, we wound up, uh, going to a, a Navy support base in Ben Luek, which was at the confluence of two rivers, the Vamco Dong and the Vamco Thai rivers form this giant kind of slingshot.

• 45:24Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  If you looked at a map, uh, and from the US perspective, it looked like a slingshot. From the, uh, North Vietnamese perspective, it looked like a funnel, I think, because it was right at this, they called it the Parrot's Beak in the boundary between Cambodia and Vietnam. And that was one of the, one of the main exits off the Ho Chi Minh Trail was into the Parrot's Beak area and they funneled men and material down in there, which of course is why. Admiral Zumwalt had said, "We need to concentrate on this area. It's a reverine environment and we need more SEALs."

• 46:07Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  And fortunately, they also had the Sea Wolves and the, and Black Ponies, the OV10s.

• 46:16Jocko Willink?

  You guys deployed December of 1969, and I'm gonna go to the book here. Uh, this, this is the book, "Teammates: SEALs at War." It's written by Barry Enoch, legendary SEAL who passed away, I think in 2012?

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Twelve.

• 46:31Jocko Willink?

  2012. Uh, but it's a, it's a fantastic book. It's out of print. If you're looking for it on eBay right now, it's gonna be a lot. Um, so, here we go. This is from Barry Enoch's book, "Teammates: SEALs at War." It says, "Working on our own intelligence network, the second squad ran an operation on January 13th, 1970. It gave us our first contact. The squad inserted after dark by LSSC," and that's the, that's the Light SEAL Support Craft, which I have another book here called UDT SEAL Operations in Vietnam. And the picture on the cover of the book shows an LSSC, and that is actually a picture

• 47:11Jocko Willink?

  of you guys in Charlestown, in Vietnam, in an LSSC. So, uh, "The squad inserted after dark by the LSSC," and this is just like a small, it's a very small boat, and it's got a pretty low profile.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:26Jocko Willink?

  And I noticed it's got little sloping metal around the, around where you sit. So hopefully that'll deflect some of the bullets, maybe. I don't know if that was the plan, but...

• 47:37Speaker 02

  Had a little bit of ceramic armor on it.

• 47:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:43Jocko Willink?

  "They patrolled 1,500 meters through rice paddies and tree lines. They came upon five large bunkers and soon they heard voices. They were approximately 30, there were approximately 30 VC in front of our teammates. The squad moved forward and observed nine armed Vietcong coming out of a hooch. The VC began using a bullhorn, telling those who could hear them that they were going to be operating that night. It was pretty clear. They felt totally secure in their own backyard." So here's a, you come up on this Vietcong camp, and they're actually putting out word on a bullhorn, like, "Hey, guys, we're gonna do some operations tonight, so everyone can start getting your gear ready."

• 48:19Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant JG Dugger, am I saying that right?

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Dugger.

• 48:21Jocko Willink?

  Dugger. Lieutenant JG Dugger called for the Sea Wolves and then initiated small arms fire on the enemy soldiers and their bullhorn. With the gunships overhead, Hal Kirknull directed an airstrike on the main body of VC. The Sea Wolves were also used cover, used to cover the squad's extraction by LSSC. Charlie Platoon had drawn its first blood that night with five VC KIA and at least five more accounted for in the same straits. Now, this was the way it was supposed to be. So there you go. Hal, that's your first, your, your first operation, your first contact, and you're calling for fire?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  I don't remember it was the first or not.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  We, we went out on two, uh, orientation ops.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Uh, which were basically cakewalks that the, the, the guy who, we weren't relieving him. We were filling in.

• 49:17Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  We were an augment platoon, so we didn't relieve a platoon, but there was a platoon there that said, okay, we'll take you out and just get your feet wet and muddy. And, uh, so we did two of those. And then this was really the first op.

• 49:30Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Solo, on our own.

• 49:32Jocko Willink?

  Yep. How'd you feel calling for fire for the first time?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Good.

• 49:37Jocko Willink?

  You done it a bunch in Nile and you done it a bunch of China Lake, like that's what we do.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  It's all about training. So I felt very comfortable calling for it. So, and I was glad for them to come.

• 49:50Jocko Willink?

  Uh, continuing on the book here, two days later, the first squad drew more blood from intelligence provided by Chu Hoi. We inserted by LSSC and the Chu Hoi led us up a VC communications trail. Lieutenant, am I saying your name right?

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, Boyan.

• 50:04Jocko Willink?

  Boyan. Lieutenant Boyan set a guard post at the fork in the trail and we settled in. Soon afterward, we heard voices and saw two VC with weapons in their hands, walking along the trail. The lieutenant opened fire with the rest of us joining in when the enemy soldiers were within four meters of the SEAL guard post. So this is you initiating an ambush.

• 50:27Jocko Willink?

  You can see these guys. What are you, what's your, what are you guys doing? You guys sitting in ambush? Are you camouflaged? How far off the trail are you?

• 50:34Speaker 02

  We were about, uh, three to four meters off the trail.

• 50:39Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  I mean, this was, if you were gonna write a textbook about small unit tactics, this was a classic ambush. There was this trail dike line, and we were in these tall reed grass type thing. And you could have been three feet from the trail in this stuff, and nobody would see you. I mean, it was just...

• 51:06Jocko Willink?

  How long were you guys sitting on ambush for?

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Um, my recollection was it was probably less than an hour.

• 51:15Jocko Willink?

  And you guys had inserted, you patrolled a little bit, you get to this position, and, and you set up off the trail. Did you set up claymores?

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, we set up, we set up claymores. We had our seven man squad. We had some LDNNs with us. I mean, we had overkill on this thing. The, uh, the intel had said there's, there's usually two or three guys that come through here. And, uh, this is kind of a side note. So, we, Barry had got this information, actually, from his SEAL buddy, Al Huey.

• 51:53Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Uh, and Al Huey was a PRU advisor down in Mito. And, and we were out hustling intel wherever we could, but Barry had actually, uh, uh, got that from Al Huey.

• 52:09Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  And, uh, it was dead on. It wasn't three guys, it was two guys. But, man, they just, we hit them so bad that the, the weapons they were carrying were destroyed.

• 52:26Jocko Willink?

  Al Huey, another legendary SEAL. And I think, I want to say it was Admiral Richards when he was on the podcast. And he was saying that Al Huey, he never raised his voice, but everyone just did what he said because it was Al Huey.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. He was definitely Barry Eno caliber guy.

• 52:48Jocko Willink?

  Check. Um, continuing on with this, the count was two dead VC with two recovered AK-47 rifles and 90 rounds of ammunition. The dead men's backpacks contained letters from North Vietnam to NVA in the field. Also, NVA money was found on both bodies. Recovered documents would lead us to other operations. It was a good hit. On January 25th, a platoon ran an operation meant to target a VC squad leader. Inserted by LSSC after darkness had fallen, Charlie patrolled only 600 meters before sighting 10 armed Viet Cong. The VC appeared to have entered a hooch and Mike LaCaz?

• 53:29Speaker 02

  LaCaz.

• 53:29Jocko Willink?

  Mike LaCaz scrambled gunships overhead as we moved on the hooch. Only one VC was spotted about 15 meters from the large hut. And he was taken out of the picture with two stoners. We found a blood trail indicating a second man had been wounded and dragged or crawled away. A search showed the VC had been moving to a weapons cache. Where the VC had fallen, we uncovered three AK-47s, two M26 grenades and one kilo of documents, all of these wrapped in plastic. During the search, another VC was discovered lying dead, adding to our body count. We wrapped everything we could carry up and moved back to the river.

• 54:08Jocko Willink?

  An airstrike was called in on the area. We'd spotted the 10 VC and the Sea Wolves covered our extraction by LSSC. Ty, who's one of your Vietnamese counterparts, Ty told me the two VC were killed on the commo trail. Were actually NVA because the mail and money they had on them. So this is like, that is two, that is a page and a half from this book. And you can already see what kind of an environment you guys in. And I thought that gave a pretty cool picture of, you know, kind of what those operations look like for you guys at this time, what you guys were doing and, and, and how it looked.

• 54:50Jocko Willink?

  You guys, what was the op tempo like when you first got there? So how often would you guys be going out on these operations?

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Well, so the setup here was, again, we were an augment platoon. Now, there had been a platoon there at Benlock. That platoon had not done a lot. The platoon that had been before them had had some fantastic success. Again, my classmate Gary Gray from the academy, he had run that platoon and they had, they'd actually taken out a Cosvin, Central Office, South Vietnam level VC. And for some reason, the platoon that followed them,

• 55:40Speaker 02

  I think part of the issue was Gary's platoon had basically caused the Vietnamese to lose face. You know, you had this Vietnamization program starting up. You had a pacification program. The numbers that people were putting in were saying, oh, this province is, it got up to like 85% pacified, which was, you know, I'm going to make this look good because it's going to make my fitness report look good. But in actual fact, again, it was a giant funnel coming from Cambodia into this province.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  And so when we showed up, we were having a hard time getting area clearances.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  And I actually wound up working a deal with the Army Rangers in Tan An. So you guys put in for an AO clearance and we'll use it. And then we'll, if you need some extra guns when you go out on an op, we'll send a couple of, three guys with stoners to boost your firepower. And so they would put in for AOs for us because every time we put in for an AO, we'd get denied. Dang. Because it was the Army that was clearing the AOs. Yeah, they could get them and we couldn't a lot of times. And

• 57:12Speaker 02

  So that was the context of where we were at there.

• 57:17Jocko Willink?

  How many stoners would you guys carry with a squad?

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Thanks to Enoch, because he had been in the armor. We had at least, we had at least three stoners in a squad.

• 57:31Jocko Willink?

  Dang. And then how many 60s? One 60 or two 60s?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Two.

• 57:36Jocko Willink?

  Good lord.

• 57:39Jocko Willink?

  No wonder, no wonder those enemy weapons were damaged.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  And, and one of those M60s was carried by Mike Thornton, who typically carried 800, 1,000 or more rounds.

• 57:54Jocko Willink?

  God. That's 70 pounds just ammo.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I know on one op he had 1,500, 15, 1,600 rounds.

• 58:04Jocko Willink?

  What a beast.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  He was.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  But you like having that beast in your squad.

• 58:12Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent. Yeah. Those, uh, that's, that's so much firepower. You know, we carried, we carried a significant amount of firepower and we, we eventually switched from the M60 to the Mark 48 and then the Mark 46 was kind of our equivalent of a stoner. It's a 556 belt fed. So, and we'd have, you know, a couple 60s and a couple saws. We call them saws. But, um, yeah, for, to have a seven guys to have two 60s and two or three stoners, that is, that is, that is beast right there.

• 58:47Jocko Willink?

  So you, you, you end up, you're in there, any other significant things happen when you were down at Ben Luck?

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Uh, the, the other one was, uh, the op where we ran into the mortar company.

• 59:00Jocko Willink?

  And how'd that go?

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Well, it went well from our side. Fortunately, we had planned an op to go into this. There was a village that was cut by a stream. And we had intel that there were Vietcong leaders on both sides of the stream. So we wanted to hit them simultaneously. We decided we'll, both squads will go in. Second squad will go into the north side. First squad will go into the south side of the stream.

• 59:34Jocko Willink?

  Which, by the way, Barry talks about this and he even mentions in the book. It was so dangerous for us to split squads.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:40Jocko Willink?

  And I've been telling guys forever, if you can avoid it at all, never split your forces. And I had a guy who's a SOG guy in Vietnam, John Stryker Meyer. And he was telling, he was telling a story and he said, yeah, so we ended up having to split forces. And I said, you know, hey, I always tell guys, don't, don't split forces. He goes, oh, you're going to find out why that's, you should never split forces. And he told the story and it's always bad. So just to point that out, if you can avoid, you young, young soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines out there. Splitting forces is something you occasionally have to do, but if you can avoid it, avoid it. Try not to split your forces. All right, but you guys have to, it's two, two villages at the same time.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Jocko Willink?

  Or on the two villages or two parts of the same village.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Jocko Willink?

  Split by a river. So you end up splitting forces.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And obvious, we never even got there. So first squad inserted, we started patrolling. And then second squad got ready to insert and they got ambushed. I mean, Hal can talk about this. Uh, they, we figure it must've been like the point element or something for this company that we accidentally ran into and, uh. Well, I, I think they knew we were coming. I do. Yeah. I mean.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  We're in this LLC, um, and we're being real, real quiet. And, uh, all of a sudden, the bank of the river lit up. I mean, lit up. So I don't know, we had probably seven or eight of us, uh, in the, the boat. And I think, I don't know how many there was, more to your, it was a huge number of them. And they shot so many holes in our boat, you can't believe it. If you see the boat, and we have pictures of it somewhere, I, I went down and looked at it the next morning. And I'm going, how in the hell did we live through this?

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  I mean, you couldn't put your hand anyplace on that boat that didn't have a bullet hole.

• 1:01:49Jocko Willink?

  And you got to get wounded?

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  We had one guy that, uh, got some shrapnel from, metal from the boat in his hand.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  That was rich oil.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and.

• 1:02:02Jocko Willink?

  And how'd you guys respond to the ambush? Lay, lay down fire? Did you?

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  We laid down fire, but also we weren't that far from bin luck where there were Sea Wolf pilots. And so we had a code, you know, code three, I guess was, you know, or one, let's call it one. You know, we're good, we may, we're getting near, you know, our operation, you know, be ready. Code two is like, you know, go ahead and warm it up. Code three is, we're in a world of trouble. Don't even warm it up. Just get over here. So they did. They came over and I will tell you, I, I don't, I'm, I don't think that we would, I don't think I would be alive if it hadn't been for Sea Wolf pilots. And the reason is,

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  while all of this is going on, we had a problem with our, our boat basically broke down. And so, anyway, the Sea Wolf pilots came in and of course, you know, we're in the water, but they laid it down.

• 1:03:07Jocko Willink?

  Like how many minutes would it take them? Did it take them to show up, you think?

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  They were on a scramble status that night. And so I, I believe, I never did check this out, but I believe they were literally sitting in the birds. And all they had to do was press the button and. Thirty seconds later, they were airborne. Cause they probably were overhead. Our distance was not that far. And I would guess with probably within two minutes.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  They got there in a hurry. And we were really, really, really glad to see them. They, we were getting the crap shot out of us. I mean, when you, you, when I came down at the next morning and the boat was there. I mean, you basically couldn't put your hand anywhere that there wasn't a bullet hole. I mean, it was just, we were just getting shit pounded out of us, you know? And they came over and they ended all that. And so, anyway.

• 1:04:13Jocko Willink?

  And then, but you guys were on the ground. Squad one's on the ground.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  We were on the ground and we hear this big gunfight going on. And we start receiving what I'd call probing fire. And I need to set up. So on this operation, before we deployed, Captain Shibley had pulled me aside.

• 1:04:38Jocko Willink?

  And he's the CO of SEAL Team One?

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  CO of SEAL Team One. He said, Boyan, so you go over there. I want you to make sure that Enoch gets a meritorious promotion to chief. Yes, sir. And so this operation, because it was complex and because we were splitting up.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Barry, I said, Barry, I want you to run squad one. I'll switch positions with you in the patrol. I'll run rear security. You run patrol. We planned this op. You're, this is your op. Now, on the way into this op, we had gone down the river and then we'd come back up. And like we were, I don't know, two, three.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Four kilometers away from the op, we actually encountered a sampan and took him under fire. He had weapons. And it was like, okay, do we go or do we not go? And Barry and I talked about it and he's, we're far enough away, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on in this province. Let's proceed. So we went in.

• 1:05:50Jocko Willink?

  Pretty cool. He talks about that in the book and he says, you know, you had told him he could run the op and that happened. You get this enemy contact. It's four clicks away. And, you know, you guys are having that talk and you looked at him as like, you're up. What do you want to do? And he said, we go. So there you go.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  And that was music to my ears because I like, I like being aggressive. And so we started, I don't know, we'd gone in maybe a half a click or so. And we were in this old abandoned rice paddy with clumps of weeds. And we started getting this probing fire. And right away, word comes back the line, hold your fire. Don't let anybody fire. And to me, that was a pivotal decision because they didn't know exactly where we were. And

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  if we had shot back at them, which would be your natural reaction when someone shoots at you, we'd have revealed our position. And subsequently with the sea wolves coming overhead and bailing out the first, the second squad, we, the fire started picking up on us, like really picking up. And we started, some B40s started whizzing over there. And this is some mortar rounds started dropping in. And again, Barry, hold your fire. And this is where. When we were at China Lake and we got that, they called it a Tiara grenade,

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  which sounds a little too princess for me, but that siyaloom, that glow in the dark stuff. And Michael Koz was a radioman with that squad. So he's up there with Barry and Barry says, "Okay, mark their position." And by this time, we were receiving what I would call pretty heavy fire. I don't know how the heck Mike wriggled around and got himself, and he popped that Tiara grenade and marked where the center of the fire was coming from. So when the wolves came over, they made one run. On their second, on their second run, they fired rockets. They

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  got a gigantic secondary, which allowed us to get up and get the hell out of there. And they covered us going out. But Barry's decision to hold fire, we didn't shoot back until we were running out and we had the Sea Wolves' coverage. Then we did fire back. But that alone to me exemplified the leadership and I wrote him up for meritorious advancement to chief.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  And he got his advancement and had his chief's initiation while we were in Vietnam. And he well deserved it.

• 1:09:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's to have that kind of experience and patience and tactical prowess to be taken and, you know, a little bit, you know, little recon by fire, maybe you can hold off, but when it starts picking up and then to think, you know, because it's difficult to identify where, you know, where one shot comes from, an aloom comes from, like where's that, you know, for the enemy to pinpoint where you are. But to be able to do that and mark the target, so now the Sea Wolves can take them out, that's, you know, that's epic battlefield leadership right there.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Well, and speaking of battleship, of battle leadership, one of the reasons that Barry had made chief is, you know...

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  He, he, I don't say anything today. He could, he wasn't a good reader.

• 1:09:56Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  And therefore he had a hard time making, you know, passing tests. He knew everything there was to know about guns, but he couldn't pass the test. And so he absolutely deserved, you know, the meritorious chief and that's the kind of guy Tom has that put him in the position and plus, anyway. That's why we all loved him.

• 1:10:22Jocko Willink?

  The CEO of SEAL Team One, he's still back stateside. You guys, he didn't deploy, did he?

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:10:26Jocko Willink?

  Yep. So you, he had told you, get this guy meritoriously promoted. That's awesome.

• 1:10:34Jocko Willink?

  Eventually, so February 1970, you guys are directed to move from Benlock to another place, which is Coastal Navy Base 36 in Long Fue.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Jocko Willink?

  What was driving that decision there?

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  I, you know, looking back at the time, it's like, we're, we're good going here in Benlock. Things are happening. We're making good, good operations.

• 1:11:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The numbers in the book said you guys had done 17 operations at that point. And, you know, you'd racked up a bunch of good intel, killed a bunch of bad guys. So it's been a good run so far.

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Jocko Willink?

  Feeling comfortable.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15Jocko Willink?

  Know the neighborhood.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Jocko Willink?

  That's a good feeling.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  So now this is hindsight supposition. I believe that the people on the staff, they knew about this naval intelligence liaison officer in Saktrang, who had an interpreter who would go to the Chu Hoi Center where the VC would turn themselves in to come over to the government side. He would go there every day. He'd bring them cigarettes and treats and he'd drink tea with them, chat them up. And he had compiled this, a bunch of folders on VCI, the Vietcong infrastructure and.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  The, there was a lieutenant commander who was a naval intelligence officer on the staff in Saigon, and he probably saw all this and said, "This is what SEALs really need." Mm-hmm. And somebody said, "Okay, well, again, I'm biased, I'm thinking, hey, these guys in Charlotte Platoon, they know how to get after it, let's send them down there." I don't know if that's the case or not, but that's my story. Yeah, we'll stick with it. Yeah. It's the case now.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  And so, they, they sent us down there, and it was true, the, the, the Nilo, the naval intelligence officer, and his, I really give the credit to the interpreter, Mr. Locke, he, he was just with the people in that Chuhui Center every day. He knew how to elicit information, and, and make friends, and, you know, a good agent handler. And, so when we got down there, they not only, they, they also sent, the first time I know

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  that it happened, they actually sent a photo interpreter guy from the Navy, down there to help us with the intelligence stuff. When we were up in Ben Lakh, John Duggar and I, we'd spend, we could spend eight hours a day, sometimes 10 hours a day, just chasing around trying to get intel, in order to start to run ops. And we got down there, and here's this big folder of targets, and they'd, they'd done photo runs of the area, we had 3D photos. Damn. This was high-tech stuff for us back then.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  You know, you'd put these little platform of classes, so you could see 3D, what was down there on the island. You didn't have to, you didn't have to get on the horn and try and coerce the Army into, "Hey, can you give me a visual reconnaissance of this area?"

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  And so that was, that was great. I mean, we, we spent a lot more time planning operations rather than trying to get the intel to plan an operation.

• 1:14:39Jocko Willink?

  No, you know, fast forward how many years it was when I was in Iraq, you know, we had like in time, you guys would be pissed because you'd see the freaking intel support that we had, you know, we had like whole, they gave it a name. It was like the fusion cell. They'd have people that were doing interrogations and people that were running sources and people that were looking at images and people that were correlating all the data. Like we had really good systems in place. So we didn't, you know, we, we, we definitely, I'd say we were like people that were shopping in a store, you know, we'd kind of get to look at all the intel and say, like, we like this one, develop this one more. But they were just great, great people and that's their job. You know, it's really nice too, because man, when you're going in the

• 1:15:23Jocko Willink?

  field, you have to be thinking about what you're going to be doing in the field.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:26Jocko Willink?

  And it's hard to come back from being in the field and go put your intel hat back on. And for the same for the guys that are doing intel. And I had in Ramadi, we had, we had a group of both SEALs and intel people that were working together and they were freaking great. They, they were just, because the SEALs knew exactly what we needed. And we, those guys would come in the field with us sometimes, you know, like, okay, dude, like, you know, this target better than we do. Hey, come, you know, they just load up and come with us. So, yeah, we, we had a very luxurious, luxurious life compared to you guys.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  Well, so, so Tom, I want you, before you get too off, make sure you talk about our living quarters that we were in and that you, that we got sent down there with no food, no, anyway.

• 1:16:16Jocko Willink?

  No, I got some pretty good, by the way, just you guys, you guys both sent me like long emails of notes. So some of this stuff is coming from notes when I refer back to it. But yeah, you have some pretty significant notes about nowhere to live, no food. Like it was terrible, terrible living conditions.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  And, and my biggest blunder, we're getting ready to leave Ben Luck, loading up trucks so we can drive up to load the stuff on a plane, to fly down to Ben Tuohy, to take it on a boat down to.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  And the steak truck is loaded and I look on the back and here's a couple of pallets of sea rations, which I know they've stolen. And I'm thinking, ah, there's gonna be another SEAL platoon here on this base and if we steal this stuff, that'll leave a bad taste in the chow hall's mind about SEALs and I think, you need to take that stuff back, guys. And they did. They were good sailors, they did what I told them. I was a stupid officer for saying that. Because when we got to... Now, we had an entire Army field kitchen.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  We had pots, pans, silverware. We had these big pots that were like two, three feet across. You could, you could feed a 150-man company with this stuff. But somebody in logistics forgot the food to go in it. So I, well, it was like five weeks. We were, uh, whatever we could steal, beg, go out on the local economy, cough up our own money and buy baguettes. And I'd send the guys up the river, three guys up the river to Bentui, one guy to distract

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  the guy in the chow hall and the other two guys to steal number 10 cans of mayonnaise, tuna, peanut butter and jelly.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  So that's what we basically lived off for about five weeks until the Seabees showed up.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  And, and by the way, so I think I weighed, I don't know, 180, 85 when I went over there. Um, when I left, I got dysentery. Uh, when I got left, I weighed like 148. Mike Lacazette's inch taller than me or so, and he got down to 138.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  And we're still going out on operations. I mean... We're in a peeled up you camp.

• 1:19:08Jocko Willink?

  So it took five weeks to get food before you got started getting food down there?

• 1:19:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, when the CBs showed up. I love CBs.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that's the best thing that ever happened to us.

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  They started building barracks and all kinds of stuff.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  We were living in these, they call them porta campers. Basically, it was, you had this big wooden box that you opened up and that became the floor. You had these little Masonite sides and then a tent top. And, and they said, this was a Vietnamese Navy base. And they said, you guys are on the perimeter. And we were literally, there was this little dike line and then here was scrub jungle. We were on that dike line. And, uh, I, they loved it because it's, they'll get those brown dyes first if they come and attack the base.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Uh, and we had a Conex, a small Conex box that we had all the ammo in, which we spent, I don't know, we spent a few days filling sandbags. Barry said, we gotta get that thing covered up or.

• 1:20:17Jocko Willink?

  This is where you gave him his nickname, right? Was that you?

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Jocko Willink?

  You got the nickname, uh, what Mama Knock Knock?

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

  Mama Knock Knock.

• 1:20:24Jocko Willink?

  You felt he was, he was scared for you guys to get hurt. That's why I had you build this, this bunker for your ammo?

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  I also called him my sea daddy, you know, he, he was, uh, very important. As long as he lived, uh, we stayed very close.

• 1:20:41Jocko Willink?

  You guys also had no boats to operate from when you got there?

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, when we got there, the US advi-, there was, uh, two US advisors to this Vietnamese Navy base. One was a lieutenant who was scared to death. And then, uh, the bosun mate, a first-class bosun mate, he was a Panamanian guy. He was squared away. The lieutenant was worthless. But we, because we, okay, you guys are on the perimeter of the base. I went over to them and I said, hey, you've got this little skimmer. It was like a 16-foot fiberglass, kinda looked like a Boston Whaler. Had two 40 horse outboards. Said, I'd like to borrow it so we could operate.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  Because otherwise, we were, we could get swift boats, which really had a hard time going into the small canals. Pretty big, right? And we, in that area, we couldn't, we couldn't get PBRs, which were designed for the smaller waterways. And so, right away, we saw, yeah, we'll, we'll borrow your skimmer for operation. Just one boat? Just one boat. Jeez. And Solano outfitted it. It had these little aluminum rails above the gunwales. And I don't know where he got them, but he, he put flak jackets on those aluminum rails.

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  That was our, that was our armor. Yeah. And, but we ran some, we ran some pretty good ops, just using that one boat. And then finally, the, my take was, I love the boat support people. There was a guy in Bentui who was the officer in charge of all the boat people in Vietnam. And I know for a fact that his, part of his evaluation as an officer, how many boats are up, how many boats are down, you know? And he was afraid if he sent a boat down to Podunk,

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  that it was gonna be down and that would reflect poorly and he wouldn't get it. So, I finally sent Mike Thornton and Mike Sands up there and I said, I want you to go up to this guy's desk. I don't want you to stand in front of him. I want you to sit on his desk. And don't.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  Don't let up until he says he's gonna send the boat down to us. And, and so he finally sent a skimmer down. And then, uh, a few weeks later, we got an LSSC. And that, man, we thought we were hot gotten, yeah.

• 1:23:38Jocko Willink?

  And you also, when did the, the platoon of LDNN, which is the Vietnamese SEALs, they showed up? Were they, were they living in the same compound as you guys?

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  No, they, they came down.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. Uh, that was probably,

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  probably right around the time we got the, the boat, I think.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  And, and they had a, they had a advisor from SEAL Team Two with them, Ron Rogers, good man.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  And, and it was the same SEAL platoon that we had operated with up in Ben Luck.

• 1:24:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  So, we knew them.

• 1:24:15Jocko Willink?

  So you already knew them?

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  We knew them.

• 1:24:18Jocko Willink?

  So you, but so it took you a few weeks before you finally felt like you could start running stuff, but you had a fat target package or a bunch of target packages and it was kind of go time.

• 1:24:30Jocko Willink?

  Hey, did you get, did you guys, did you get liberty anywhere? Did you go, you know, you see like people in Saigon and Vietnam or whatever and you're like, they're out drinking and there's, you know, girls in the whole nine yards?

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:24:43Jocko Willink?

  No girls on Doug Island?

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  I think what happened though is, you know, we, we would go up to get paid in Ben Toei, right? So we'd take the boat up there and it was a much bigger base and so, you know, we'd go out and have a few drinks, but we didn't, it wasn't really liberty.

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  Long foo was the end of the line, really.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  In a very literal sense, actually.

• 1:25:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:18Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys wear jeans?

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:21Jocko Willink?

  How come you wore jeans?

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  Well, that was jeans, the pants, the BDU pants.

• 1:25:34Jocko Willink?

  Just didn't hold up.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  They were noisy. Yeah, if you bloused them to keep the leeches out, then you had these little weep holes. So you'd get in the water, you'd get out, now you got a pant leg full of water sloshing around. So if you didn't blouse them, the leeches could come up your legs and jeans just work better.

• 1:25:53Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  And you're working at night, so.

• 1:25:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  You don't really need camouflage on your legs.

• 1:26:03Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  Um, jeans were, they were the way to go. I, I don't, maybe one or two guys.

• 1:26:13Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Wore cami pants, but most everybody was wearing jeans.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  Another thing about that is, is that a lot of times when we were on patrols to try and avoid booby crap, booby traps, we would get down in the streams and walk in there.

• 1:26:31Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  And get lots of leeches on our legs. But anyway, we, we, you know, I don't know how much time we spent in canals versus, you know, trails, but yeah, quite a bit.

• 1:26:44Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Well, we are frogmen.

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:26:49Jocko Willink?

  All right, let's get into some of these operations. Once you get down there, one, one that you guys mentioned in some of these notes is a, a boat facility on Dung Island that you guys had intel about. And they were building, they had like a little boat factory and they're building ocean going side, sampanes and a junk boat. And these are obviously being used to infiltrate, um, you know, supplies and people. And so you guys decided to go and, go and handle that. And this is kind of the one that I opened up with, with your little, uh, I'm pretty sure it's the same operation.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:27:21Jocko Willink?

  That you wrote about how where you guys, this is, these are the, you know, if you haven't heard this, uh, Beautiful name for the SEALs in Vietnam is like devils with green faces. And these are the operations that get those, to get that nickname, like the one that you talked about where you're three meters or four meters off the trail and out of nowhere, you slay these VC. And this is the same one where, you know, they just have no idea that you're going to be there. And sure enough, you show up. So what was, what was the overall on that op?

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  Well, like Hal was talking about, we're going down this, we had two skimmers on that out. The one that we'd borrowed and the one that had come down and was our SEAL skimmer. And

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  I ha- I have this vivid picture in my memory of this one guy just, he was working on something and he looked up and his jaw literally hit the deck. It was like, who and where the hell did these guys come from? And before-

• 1:28:28Jocko Willink?

  And this was a daytime op?

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Jocko Willink?

  And what made you guys do it in the day?

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  It's because of the tides.

• 1:28:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, got it.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, we couldn't, it wasn't going to work out.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  Because of the timeliness of the information versus what the, the tide schedule was. This was the only time we were going to be able to get in there. And

• 1:28:53Speaker 02

  it was, it's,

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  so we hit them. I took a group out to a secondary area. So I, I wasn't with Barry when he was loading up the junk and the sampanes.

• 1:29:15Jocko Willink?

  With explosives?

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I,

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  I remember taking my little group out and we were, we cleared this hooch and when I went into this hooch, I, I was the point man and-

• 1:29:36Speaker 02

  There was probably a 400 pound sow in a little pen inside this thing that scared the Jesus out of me. I didn't shoot it, but scared the hell out of me because it it woke up out of sound sleep and gave a big woofing.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  That was about the most chaotic entrance that I ever remember. I mean, we're coming down, you know, fast. And I remember, I can see one guy looking like, who the hell are these guys? And pretty soon they found out who we were. But it was very, very chaotic. And it was a good op, you know, we destroyed the thing. And but anyway, it was, it was really.

• 1:30:26Jocko Willink?

  So we would do operations that we would call the roll up, meaning we would drive our vehicles right to the target. And it sounds like, and we would do it fast. It would be like a fast, hard approach and just take over before they could react. Sometimes we would stop, you know, blocks away, get out, dismount quietly, slowly and approach target. So since this one was a daytime for you guys, you just said balls to the wall, let's go.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:54Jocko Willink?

  And then you're taking fire as you're leaving, but you had the, there's a quick reaction force, like the whole nine yards. This is, this is mayhem.

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, the VC owned this island complex area. It was like an R and R area for them because they had access from the sea. They were still, even though they had Navy boats patrolling those coastlines, these guys were still getting stuff down via water, seawater, not river water.

• 1:31:27Jocko Willink?

  There was a quick reaction force that came after you guys. And you guys know the time fuses are burning, which is

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:31:33Jocko Willink?

  gotta be a good field.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  And but also when we're going out, you know, people are, you know, they hear us, they're shooting at us as we're leaving.

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  So when we turned to get out on the big waterway, the planes, the boats up on step and it's.

• 1:31:55Speaker 02

  And we we took a round right through the bottom of the boat. We heard it hit, but we didn't know where it hit. It wasn't until we got back to the base and pulled up to the dock, started unloading, and the boat's starting to fill up with water. And it was the borrowed boat.

• 1:32:11Jocko Willink?

  Thank you.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  So, so real quick, Solano said, I'll take care of that, boss. Don't worry about it. So we pulled the boat out and he put fiberglass patches on it.

• 1:32:23Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, and then you guys called for airstrikes and I think you gave me notes that it took them like an hour to get the airstrikes because the Vietnamese were at lunch or something?

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. That was, that was.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  Because the OV10s were overhead and we couldn't get clearance. It was like, hit them while it's hot, man.

• 1:32:43Jocko Willink?

  Ridiculous. Um, as far as the daytime operations, am I wrong in saying that, like, you know, we, we would hear about Vietnam, that the Vietnamese owned the night, like the VC owned the night, they would travel at night and most of the most normal conventional units would not do work at night because the VC were more adept at night. That's correct, right?

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 1:33:08Jocko Willink?

  And then that's what made SEALs different was, oh, the, the enemy owns the night, we're going to go out at nighttime. And, and that's a huge, you know, it's, it's, there's more risk in some ways, but there's less risk in other ways.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:33:26Jocko Willink?

  Uh, it's interesting. So when, when the last deployment I did to Iraq, the, we owned the night. Americans own the night because we have night vision, we have lasers, like, the enemy knew that it was just useless to go out at night. So guess what? Didn't go out at night. They went out in the daytime and, and they used the local populace to mix in with.

• 1:33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Jocko Willink?

  So we ended up, we went out in the daytime. So it was sort of the role reversal. And I think you can even go back to World War II where The, they did all the early beach clearances at night, but they realized they couldn't really clear the beaches at night because they couldn't see anything. And so they ended up having to go during the day. So, you know, those people, when you're in these situations, you might have to do stuff that's, you know, to, to use a word that gets used a lot, but this is truly like, you're going to do stuff that's unconventional. You know, you guys going out in the nighttime is unconventional. For us going out in the daytime was unconventional. And, you know, we, it's easier to go out at night. I mean, it's immensely easier to go at night. We probably only killed,

• 1:34:34Jocko Willink?

  we probably only killed a handful of people at night. And we killed a lot of people in the day, you know, because that's when the enemy would come out. So that's a little interesting historical dynamic that happens. Um, March 12th, Hal, what's special about that day?

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  It's my birthday.

• 1:34:54Jocko Willink?

  It's your birthday. So there's a cool, you didn't tell me about this. It wasn't in your notes, but it's in the book, Teammate Seals of War, where you had, like, the day before your birthday, you had a bad dream.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  It's actually, yeah, the day before my birthday, but it's at night. And there, there was a, a Marine from my hometown who had been killed in Vietnam. And it was on the headlines of the Jacksonville Daily Progress that Lon Turn had been killed. Not on his birthday, but he'd been killed. Well, this night, I'm sleeping, you know, we did our patrol order. We were ready to go, but I'm, I'm asleep and it looked like a pretty hairy, crazy operation. So I dreamed, dreamt

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  that last night, that the headline of Jacksonville Daily Progress said, Hal Kuykendal killed in Vietnam on his birthday.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  And so then, I'm like, you know, I figured if I missed this one, then I'd be a coward and never go. Anyway, then Mike Thornton, who still called me cuz for cousin, he said, cuz, I don't think you ought to go on this operation. I had a bad dream.

• 1:36:16Speaker 02

  I went on it. But anyway, it was a bit unsettling.

• 1:36:25Jocko Willink?

  Oh, check. Now we get this, this operation, April 9, 1970. This is operation where Barry Enoch earns the Navy Cross. This is four SEALs and 10 Vietnamese SEALs targeting leaders on Ong Chau Island. Am I saying that right?

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:48Jocko Willink?

  And it's part of the Dung Island group. And you gave me a great map. It shows what this area is like. And you know, it's what you think Vietnam is going to be like rivers, islands everywhere, jungle. What do you remember about this operation as you're planning for it and whatnot?

• 1:37:06Speaker 02

  Well, because it was when the Vietnamese SEALs came down to Dung Island, they integrated with us. We'd go out on ops with them that they had planned. They would come out on ops with us that we had planned. So Ron Rogers, who was the advisor, he said, hey, we got this op going. And Barry and a couple of other guys went with him on that. And when they patrolled in and engaged and

• 1:37:47Speaker 02

  We're listening back at the base, back at Longfue.

• 1:37:52Jocko Willink?

  What are these, are you, are they like two or three clicks away from you guys?

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  Uh, probably farther away than that, but not more than maybe 10 clicks at the back.

• 1:38:02Jocko Willink?

  You can hear on, you can hear the radios?

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:04Jocko Willink?

  Easy, okay.

• 1:38:05Speaker 02

  We can hear, and so we hear, okay, things are, oh, good, they made a hit. And, and then, oh, it's not going so good. And then, and then they were calling for medevac when, when Tick got killed. And at that time, my recollection is they, they tried to get some gunfire support from a couple of swift boats, but they were too far away. And I got on the radio and said, you get those swift boats over here to Longfue. Rallyed up everybody in the platoon. Load up, we're going to do whatever we can to help.

• 1:38:47Jocko Willink?

  Now, did you guys, were you, would one squad always be on standby when the other squad was out for, to go reinforce them?

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  Not in a formal sense.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  And it broke down. How were we going to get there? Because we didn't have the boats or, we had no air support, like helos or anything. So it was like.

• 1:39:12Jocko Willink?

  There wasn't much you could do.

• 1:39:14Speaker 02

  So the only, fortunately, in this case, I could summon those swift boats over to pick us up. And as, as the fight wore on and they were trying to get a helo extraction, I directed the two swift boats, okay, we're going to go over to this one section of the island and clear a, an emergency LZ so they can hop out of the target area, drop off, go back and pick up, because it was going to probably take two, two loads to get them out.

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  But the whole fight is unfolding.

• 1:39:55Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  And and we're hearing, we're hearing a lot of it, not all of it, but definitely with the overhead planes. We can hear their transmissions and uh it was a it was a heck of a fight.

• 1:40:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean Barry Enoch got shot in the radio that was on his back, three rounds to the battery pack.

• 1:40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:15Jocko Willink?

  And one round to the antenna and somehow miraculously the radio was still working. They don't make radios like that anymore, but the radio was still working. You know, he had to mess with it a little bit. Uh, another really interesting thing that I've read in the book and and in your notes was that

• 1:40:34Jocko Willink?

  Barry said, don't come to us right now. And this was very interesting because he knew that it would be a potential blue on blue, like a potential friendly fire situation. Because he was surrounded, they ended up surrounded. And, you know, you guys are wanting to go help him, but at the same time he goes, hey, don't come here right now because if you're shooting at them, you will be shooting at us.

• 1:40:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:57Jocko Willink?

  Again, so his his tactical prowess on the battlefield was was just all time.

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  Yes. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:41:04Jocko Willink?

  Um, so Tick is the the guy who was killed and he was, was he the leader of the LDNN?

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  He was the LDNN platoon leader.

• 1:41:15Jocko Willink?

  Um, and he, you know, Barry was close with him. I guess he had worked with him before in the past.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, on his other tour with Alpha.

• 1:41:23Jocko Willink?

  And um, this was interesting. He wrote in the book is they tied Tick's hands together and then Barry was able to Barry carried him like a backpack, put his arms around his neck and he's on his back. He's got his radio, he's got Tick and he's surrounded by enemy. And eventually what he gets the aircraft to do is. He sees that the, the area that's going to be the only way he's going to be able to get out of this is, I think it was to the east, there was some like marsh and bad ground, but it's where there was the least concentration of enemy. And so we had called in the air

• 1:42:01Jocko Willink?

  support and they came in and just strafed and crushed that area. And then he buried, actually he didn't lead the guys out. He said the guys, told the guys go that way and he did rear security and picked up the rear as he's heading. And I guess he's heading toward the LZ that you guys had said at this point?

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  No, this was, uh, they had one bird that got in and pulled out.

• 1:42:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So he already had him out?

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  And then it was, they were starting to close in. They're starting to run low on ammo. And the black ponies had got there. At first we were working with the medevac helo and army gunships out of Saktrang. When they, when they ran low and they refused to cover another slick that could have come in and potentially pulled them out, but they said it was too hot. We're not going to do it. Um, we, we had set up that hasty LZ. We hear

• 1:43:14Speaker 02

  all this stuff going on. So we said, okay, we need to proceed up this little waterway, which the swift boats didn't want to do. But after spirited discussion, we convinced them to do it. Um, but that, that was when Barry said, don't come up, don't come up too quick because we're surrounded.

• 1:43:38Speaker 02

  And then the OV10s got there and that was, the OV10s were just absolutely amazing. I mean, they were like crop duster.

• 1:43:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:49Speaker 02

  Coming in. And so, a high school classmate, academy classmate of mine flew OV10s in Vietnam. And I was telling him about this story and I said, "Yeah, they called them in 20 meters of their business." He said, "Tom, no way. We, we were never supposed to go that close." I said, "Well, they did there." And I sent them the damn op and showed it written right out in the, in the post-op report that they'd come in within 20 meters of the friendly position, the OV10s.

• 1:44:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:26Speaker 02

  And it was accurate.

• 1:44:27Jocko Willink?

  It's incredible.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and this is another point that gets, you know, goes back to training is they had worked out in training how to mark position on the ground with this silk T.

• 1:44:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:44:39Jocko Willink?

  And sure enough, Barry has to get out that silk T and put it on the ground and call for fire, you know, like you said, within 20 meters of his position so that the VC could not continue to close.

• 1:44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55Jocko Willink?

  Um, eventually, like you said, uh, or how does it eventually come to an end?

• 1:45:02Speaker 02

  So, the OV10s cleared a pathway and then they went in and they blew the heck out of that area. And Barry and the LDNNs, they pushed through that area. We moved up with the, with the Swift Boats and the LSSC and, uh, I, as we moved up, I, "Okay."

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  Starboard side, which was to the

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  west, no, east, to the east, said, "Everybody shoots in that direction because this side is our guys, but I want to sound like the entire freaking army is coming." And that, so we came up, just making noise is all we were doing. We weren't, we weren't preventing anything. It was the OV10s that were clearing the way for them. And, uh, and they came out and we picked them up and got them back.

• 1:46:08Jocko Willink?

  Barry Enoch, um, Navy Cross. "The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Chief Gunner's Mate Barry W. Enoch, United States Navy for extraordinary heroism on 9 April 1970 in connection with operations against enemy forces in the Republic of Vietnam. While serving with a detachment of SEAL Team One, Chief Petty Officer Enoch was the senior advisor and radio man grenadier to a combined US and Vietnamese SEAL Combat Patrol against Viet Cong infrastructure leaders. After insertion and patrolling to the target area, Chief Petty Officer Enoch observed six armed Viet Cong attempting to evade. Rushing forward and exposing himself to hostile fire, he succeeded in accounting for three enemy casualties.

• 1:46:53Jocko Willink?

  The SEALs then came under intense B-40 rocket and automatic weapon fire, realizing that his small force was surrounded. Chief Petty Officer Enoch deployed his men to defensive perimeter and although under intense fire, continually shifted position to more effectively employ his weapons, relocate his men and survey the enemy locations and tactics. Although his radio was damaged by enemy fire, Chief Petty Officer Enoch directed fixed wing and helicopter airstrikes on the enemy's positions, some strikes as close as 20 meters to his position. With his men running low on ammunition and still encircled, Chief Petty Officer Enoch directed airstrikes on the shortest route between his position and the river,

• 1:47:35Jocko Willink?

  and then led the patrol through the enemy encirclement before the latter could close the gap caused by the airstrikes. By his heroic and decisive efforts in the face of almost overwhelming odds, Chief Petty Officer Enoch was directly responsible for the safe extraction of the patrol members and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service."

• 1:47:59Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding, outstanding.

• 1:48:04Jocko Willink?

  So I guess Lieutenant Commander Shablie was happy with that, too.

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:10Jocko Willink?

  Got this guy promoted and he's awarded the Navy Cross.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  Yes, which he absolutely deserved.

• 1:48:16Jocko Willink?

  There's no doubt about it.

• 1:48:20Jocko Willink?

  Bright light.

• 1:48:22Jocko Willink?

  Tell us about this bright light operation and for those of you that don't know, bright light is either down pilot or POWs that need to be rescued right now.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:48:33Speaker 02

  Here we are down at this coastal Vietnamese coastal Navy base. I get this flash message.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  Get up to Saigon to the staff ASAP. That's it. So I go up.

• 1:48:50Speaker 02

  These guys stay back there, they're still running ops. I go up there and I did not dress in my Class A uniform either.

• 1:49:02Jocko Willink?

  Probably had camo on your face.

• 1:49:04Speaker 02

  Well, I had a pair of jungle boots that had been polished by the Delta Mud. And instead of black, they look like suede tan desert boots. Anyway, got up there. Staff said, you're gonna go see the Admiral. Comnav four V, one oh three.

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. And so they had information from the US Army. It was a US Army intelligence asset had said, there's this POW camp. It was to the north of us, not in the Dung Island area at all. And this guy says there's some American prisoners in this camp. And I'll brief this down a little bit. Anyway, the bottom line was.

• 1:50:09Speaker 02

  Here I am talking to an admiral who's talking to a general who's getting the information from his army intelligence. And ultimately, I hear all this information. I said, Admiral, I really would like to take this agent with us on the operation. And so he talks to the general, and the general says, no way. And I said, Admiral, it's so much more effective, and we've got a much higher chance of success.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  If I, please go back and talk to him again. And to the admiral's credit, he went back to that general and asked him again, but the guy said, no way.

• 1:51:02Jocko Willink?

  So you wanted to take, you wanted to take the source of the information?

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you, there's someone saying that they know where there's a POW camp? Okay, great, we will take him with us.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:12Jocko Willink?

  Which is infinitely better.

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:51:14Jocko Willink?

  I mean, first of all, if the person doesn't want to go, that's a red flag, you know? That's, that's a big red flag when the person that's telling you where there's bad guys doesn't want to go on the end. It can happen where he's just scared and he doesn't want to do it, and that's, that's need to be taken into consideration.

• 1:51:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:51:30Jocko Willink?

  But also, it's also a little bit of a red flag because what are you getting walked into?

• 1:51:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:36Jocko Willink?

  So you're weighing all that, and the admiral goes to the army general twice and says, let us take the guy with us, and both times he says no.

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

  Yep. So ultimately, though, it's like, okay, if there's a possibility of a US POW, we want to, we want to go. And I do remember the admiral saying, so what's your chance of taking casualties going in on something like this? And they said, this, this camp is ringed with concentric circles of booby traps to protect it, to protect the camp and to keep guys from breaking out. And I...

• 1:52:24Speaker 02

  I said, yeah, with that scenario, there's 50% chance somebody's gonna get hurt going in on this. But I said, we'll go. Everybody that goes will be a volunteer. And everybody volunteered. There was no question about it. Fast forward, we planned this big op, and this was, again, my first SEAL tour. This is the most assets I ever saw involved in an operation.

• 1:53:03Speaker 02

  We tagged along with a joint Army, Vietnamese Army, operation that was gonna go somewheres near that area, and they were gonna go way away from that area and do a sweep. And they were going in by boat.

• 1:53:23Jocko Willink?

  And was that operation set up as a decoy for you guys? Or was it just something that was already taking place in the general area?

• 1:53:29Speaker 02

  I think it was something that had already been planned. And it just happened, oh, okay, we could tag along with these guys, we could peel off at the appropriate time and then patrol in, which was away from where they were going, and try and hit this target. And they said, okay, well, you'll have airborne assets all the time, you're on the ground in the water. And it's like, wow. You know, here we were down at Dung Island where we, it was a hard time to get a Hilo

• 1:54:08Speaker 02

  gunship to support us, and now you can have anything you want, lad. So I get, left Saigon, came back down, got together with the guys, Barry, Salano, Decros, and, okay, let's plan this thing out. And so the plan was, we're gonna peel off from this big operation.

• 1:54:35Speaker 02

  As they're motoring up this waterway, we're gonna do a slow motion cast off this boat and, and go up this waterway in the water, not swimming, but you could touch bottom most of the time and get up to an area where we could

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  logger and then wait and then go in the next morning. And

• 1:55:06Speaker 02

  and again, they said, you know, we'll have air assets all night long till you go in. And

• 1:55:17Speaker 02

  they had, they had already run photo reconnaissance of this thing and they, they, I had pictures of, okay, somebody, some photo interpreter someplace had said, yeah, here's this down nip a palm frond and, and there's probably a sampan hidden underneath that thing. And here's this.

• 1:55:40Jocko Willink?

  Did you see any people in the pictures?

• 1:55:42Speaker 02

  No, no. And they, there was, there was no kind of infrared imaging or anything like that. It was all based on this agent.

• 1:55:54Jocko Willink?

  The source.

• 1:55:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  And we did the patrol. We, we waited, rained like crazy. It was, it was a miserable.

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  It was the most cold, it was the coldest night I ever spent in Vietnam.

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  It was. By far.

• 1:56:11Jocko Willink?

  And the rain was like.

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  The rain was like.

• 1:56:14Jocko Willink?

  Biblical.

• 1:56:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  Biblical.

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:56:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, Barry talks about it in the book. He's just insane rain.

• 1:56:24Speaker 02

  Mike, Mike said at one point goes over to Doc Brown. He says, my hands, look at my hands. They're all shriveled up. They're all white. Doc Brown says, God damn it sands. My hands are white and I'm a black man.

• 1:56:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you guys had two black guys in the platoon, huh?

• 1:56:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, that was, uh, to my knowledge, we were the only platoon that had two African Americans.

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  And they were both good.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  Oh, top notch. Yeah.

• 1:56:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

  So we get in.

• 1:56:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, cuz that's, that's the story that, that's why, that's why I brought that up because the story that Barry tells is like, they're la, like, everyone's, it's raining so hard that when, uh, who was it, when Doc Brown says, you know, "Look, look at my hands and I'm black." And everyone was laughing out loud because it was raining so hard, no one could hear.

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  The noise would not have carried ten feet.

• 1:57:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay, the rain lets up.

• 1:57:23Speaker 02

  The rain lets up.

• 1:57:26Speaker 02

  It's, it's getting close to daybreak. We're moving out to hit the camp area. And by God, here's that nip of palm frond, just like we saw in the picture. We got, nobody had been in this area for fifty years, I don't think. That agent, I am sure, it, it was known that if you were an agent and you just said the word "American prisoner," you were gonna get extra pay. And I don't know why the Army didn't vet this guy more strongly. Uh, but it was a complete dry hole. Which was unfortunate.

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  Another thing I remember about that night is, you know, we, we were in the cold canals a lot, trying to avoid booby traps. And you'd get a lot of leeches. But that night, right under my jean, right in here. When I got out, I had a leech about, about a little bit longer than my index finger.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  I remember it as being bigger, actually.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it was huge.

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  You know what a banana slug is?

• 1:58:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  Specific, it looked like a freaking banana slug.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  It was huge.

• 1:58:45Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys ever wear the pantyhose? Some guys would wear pantyhose to keep the leeches off them.

• 1:58:50Speaker 02

  No, I, I, I heard about it, but I didn't. I guess my male ego was too fragile.

• 1:58:59Jocko Willink?

  I got a company, we make blue jeans. Do you know that?

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:59:02Jocko Willink?

  I got a company, we, it's called Origin. And we make, American made, a hundred percent American made jeans.

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:59:09Jocko Willink?

  With a hundred percent American made materials. And we have the jeans, one, one set of the jeans, our most popular jeans are called, called the Delta 68 jeans. And the reason I named them Delta 68 was for you guys being in the Mekong Delta in 68. That was just, I thought it was the best name for a pair of jeans.

• 1:59:31Speaker 01

  I'll have to order some.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  I guess I gotta get some.

• 1:59:34Jocko Willink?

  I think I can get you guys some Delta 68 jeans, since they're named for you guys.

• 1:59:41Jocko Willink?

  So, in a dry hole, how's morale after that? Just another dry hole? I mean, it's not that big of a deal, but it's a pretty big deal for you American's.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  Well, there's a letdown because of that.

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  It was a big letdown. And the reason is, we were so excited that we were gonna be able to get an American or two or three or whatever it was. We were really gung ho thinking that this was really gonna be great for those guys.

• 2:00:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I mean, we kinda skimmed over it, but when the boss is telling the team, hey, listen, we're gonna take at least 50% casualties. You know, this is volunteer only, and everyone volunteers. You know, that's, that's what frogmen do.

• 2:00:29Jocko Willink?

  Another one that you talk, gave me notes on was the frogman, I have frogman boat, boat insertion. This was like a, a willing guide that was gonna take you guys to a VC camp.

• 2:00:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Jocko Willink?

  How'd this one go down?

• 2:00:43Speaker 02

  I'm sure there was some skepticism in the ranks on this one. So we, we started out in, uh, what was it? We, I think we started out in a Coast Guard boat and then transferred to a Vietnamese junk.

• 2:01:00Speaker 02

  And then the skimmer, the, the problem with the skimmers was they didn't have enough range to get all around the Dung Island complex area. And so you had to tow them or they'd run out of gas to get to someplace. So you'd get a tow boat to get you someplace so you could start the engines up to get you in and get you back out and then tow back. Anyway, this one was the final little waterway that led in towards this target area was deeply constricted with vegetation. And we figured the only way we're ever going to get in there was the classic old IBS, the rubber boat.

• 2:01:44Jocko Willink?

  Get your boat crew together.

• 2:01:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:47Jocko Willink?

  And this is what you're picking up from imagery? Is this how you're, do you're planning the operation? Do you have overhead? Did you guys do flyovers, flyovers of the year and take your own photographs?

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  No. We, we, it was so hard.

• 2:01:59Jocko Willink?

  So hard to get a helo?

• 2:02:00Speaker 02

  To get a helo because you'd have to drive into Saktrang, which recollection served me, that was like an hour and a half, two hour ride to get to Saktrang, which is where the army had assets. So it was either the photo runs that they'd done with the 3D stuff. But this was, this was so heavily canopied that there was no way you could see. So we were relying on what the

• 2:02:32Jocko Willink?

  Oh, what the source is saying.

• 2:02:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:34Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:02:35Speaker 02

  And, and he was right. And we had a hard time finding this little waterway. We actually started up one and then, oh, no, this isn't the right one. Went back out and reinserted and it was.

• 2:02:50Jocko Willink?

  What are you guys using for nav?

• 2:02:53Speaker 02

  Oh, just the

• 2:02:54Jocko Willink?

  Just the map and compass?

• 2:02:55Speaker 02

  Map and compass and uh, that was, that was it. Because the LSSC didn't have anything. And it wasn't until right at the end of the tour, we got a medium. Uh, which did have

• 2:03:10Jocko Willink?

  Some kind of

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  Uh, some radar.

• 2:03:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you're out there at night, this is a night?

• 2:03:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:17Jocko Willink?

  Nighttime operation? And you got it, you're on a waterway, are you just, is a point man looking at his map the entire time? Are you looking at the map?

• 2:03:26Speaker 02

  We're relying, we were relying on the guide.

• 2:03:28Jocko Willink?

  Okay, got it, got it.

• 2:03:31Speaker 02

  Cause it's like this black wall here.

• 2:03:35Jocko Willink?

  Totally dark.

• 2:03:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, you couldn't, I don't know how the guy found it.

• 2:03:40Speaker 02

  Just because he lived there all his life.

• 2:03:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's, that's what I was trying to figure out, like, how would you be able to navigate? Like, I've been navigating jungle rivers with a GPS and it's easy to get lost. So just being out there with a map and compass at night, there's nothing to shoot bearings off. Like, that's, that's, that's rough. You know, you can get a little terrain nav, you know, when you go around the bend, you're like, oh, I know where we are right now. But that's tricky. Uh, and so then you, you guys get up this small little river and then what happens?

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  So I actually had to get out of the IBS and tow it. And I had Solano up there at DeBow with his stoner. And uh, I actually felt safe in the water. It's like if anybody opens up on us, I'm in the water. That's good. Most guys are in the river.

• 2:04:35Speaker 02

  So we got up there, we found this camp, it was a deserted base camp. Uh, nobody was home. Which was good in a way. Um, but it was like, I couldn't believe, here we are. It's like triple canopy jungle. And there's no way you'd see this from overhead. And there was sleeping areas, cooking area. It was like, we just stumbled into a mini camp.

• 2:05:05Jocko Willink?

  Was it freshly used or was it? Like hadn't, hadn't anyone been there recently?

• 2:05:09Speaker 02

  Not freshly used in the sense that there wasn't any warm cooking fires or anything, but, but it had been in use, obviously. And, and the guides, the guide said, well, uh, I know that there's some leaders that are over. So we just kept on patrolling until we, we came down this little tree line and, uh, there was a target who, just, just luck, just luck. They'd been holding a meeting and we showed up.

• 2:05:43Jocko Willink?

  Beautiful.

• 2:05:44Speaker 02

  And it was just a mad sprint. Solano and I and the guys following behind and, uh, broke up this meeting and.

• 2:05:55Jocko Willink?

  So they got a campfire going? Is it night?

• 2:05:58Speaker 02

  No, by now, we'd gotten through the night. It was early morning.

• 2:06:03Jocko Willink?

  So now it's early morning.

• 2:06:04Speaker 02

  Early morning.

• 2:06:05Jocko Willink?

  And these guys are, they're awake? Or did you wake them up?

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  They're awake. They were actually literally having a meeting in this hooch.

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  You know, it was like, here's, here's the county council.

• 2:06:18Speaker 02

  The VC county council is having a meeting.

• 2:06:20Jocko Willink?

  And you guys, you know, this is like when I, so when I got to team one, you know, they would teach us, you know, try and teach us to patrol through the jungle, right? Quiet. But I never feel like we really got that skill down, you know, because we were, we just didn't get enough time doing it. But for you guys to be quiet enough to get close to an enemy hooch. And they must had no suspicion whatsoever that anybody would be in their AO.

• 2:06:48Speaker 02

  Because this lit, this area that we had come through was dense jungle, triple canopy jungle.

• 2:06:59Speaker 02

  I don't know, no normal US force could have ever come through that. And so they actually had.

• 2:07:07Jocko Willink?

  This is devils with green faces activity right here.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  They actually had the security force for the meeting. But it was positioned around the areas where they thought conventional forces would have come from. So it was like, they were guarding the front door and we came in the back door.

• 2:07:27Jocko Willink?

  So as they're, how far away are you when you see this hooch?

• 2:07:32Speaker 02

  We're probably.

• 2:07:36Speaker 02

  I would say probably fifty yards.

• 2:07:39Jocko Willink?

  Fifty yards? Do you get closer? Do you get online? What's your call as a platoon commander?

• 2:07:44Speaker 02

  My call was, there were, there were some kids.

• 2:07:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:07:50Speaker 02

  And these kids were playing.

• 2:07:53Speaker 02

  And they looked up and they saw us and it was kind of like that junk op where it's like, where the hell did these guys come from? And literally, Solano and I took off at a dead sprint to the hooch. And the, the squads followed us.

• 2:08:12Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:08:13Speaker 02

  And

• 2:08:15Speaker 02

  Solano, Solano carried a stoner with a drum feed. So he could have a hundred and fifty rounds. And he typically, like the first twenty-five rounds, he, he, uh, made every other round a tracer. So when he opened up, it was kind of like a laser beam.

• 2:08:36Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:08:38Speaker 02

  Anyway, we, we just hit that thing full bore. Guys were spilling out and we just took them under fire. And started policing things up. And then of course, as we started policing things up.

• 2:08:56Speaker 02

  The security force woke up and started reacting. I do remember one guy where this hooch was located. There was a small irrigation ditch. I remember he had a felt hat on and he was making his way down the irrigation ditch. I don't know why he wasn't using the dike line, but he was making his way down the irrigation ditch. And I could clearly sight him and I didn't hit him with the first round, but I hit him with the second round. And then they said, hey, come on, there's all kinds of documents and stuff here. And I believe there was a radio.

• 2:09:41Speaker 02

  There was a pistol that was the exact replica of a forty-five nine eleven, but it had been made in some jungle gun shop. And the two halves had been braised together, but it was a functioning forty-five. That was the weirdest weapon I ever saw. It was a dead replica of a nineteen eleven forty-five.

• 2:10:15Jocko Willink?

  Was the reaction from the guards, did you guys just kill them too?

• 2:10:20Speaker 02

  No, they were covered enough. They were shooting at us and it was like, there's a bunch of these guys. We need to get the heck out of here.

• 2:10:35Jocko Willink?

  So then you started your break contact drill?

• 2:10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So we did, yeah, we did the classic, broke up into two elements and cover, move. Now we cover, you move. And fortunately, we had the, again, OV tens. We did get some gunships from Sakdrang Army Gunships. They came in and they helped us out to get out.

• 2:11:05Speaker 02

  And they covered us all the way out. We got back in those rubber boats. And of course, now it's broad daylight. And we even got a picture of the guys in the rubber boat and a gunship about fifty meters above the water.

• 2:11:23Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  I think that I remember trying to get an army helicopter call in. And I can't remember if it was this operation. It was definitely one operation where they said, no, you know, it's too hot. And OV tens, who we didn't even know they were in the air, they could hear us. My call sign was Threadbear. I says, Threadbear, Threadbear, Black Pony. We can't come pick you up, but we'll blow a hole out of there for you. And they come in like these crop dusters. I mean, it was the most wonderful, glorious thing I've ever seen. I don't know if it was that up or different up.

• 2:12:06Jocko Willink?

  What would the, what would those guys shoot? Did they have, what would they shoot?

• 2:12:10Speaker 02

  Oh, the OV tens, they had a combination of rockets and guns. So they, you know, the, the Sea Wolves had two point seven five rockets. And the OV tens had five inch rockets. And they also had, uh,

• 2:12:32Speaker 02

  they had a twenty millimeter.

• 2:12:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh dang.

• 2:12:34Speaker 02

  Cannon pod.

• 2:12:36Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 2:12:36Speaker 02

  And they also had a seven six two.

• 2:12:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so they're getting it done.

• 2:12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:43Speaker 02

  And I, I, I actually got a ride with an OV ten in Vietnam that supported a SEAL platoon on an.

• 2:12:53Jocko Willink?

  While you were in, while you were with them?

• 2:12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:58Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's epic.

• 2:12:59Speaker 02

  It was. I mean.

• 2:13:02Speaker 02

  Because of my aviation.

• 2:13:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right. I forgot your.

• 2:13:05Speaker 02

  Background.

• 2:13:07Jocko Willink?

  Your storied aviation career as a naval, almost aviator.

• 2:13:10Speaker 02

  And the connection we had with the guys in Ventou, I'd gone up there and said, yeah, you think I could get a backseat ride? And they took me up and it just happened that there was a platoon hitting a, hitting a target. And I got to watch these guys work out and it was just awesome. Awesome.

• 2:13:32Jocko Willink?

  And they got to go home and sleep in a regular bed. They're not covered in leeches.

• 2:13:38Speaker 02

  And good chow.

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  So talking about, uh, Black Ponies. I remember being on an operation. Barry was there.

• 2:13:50Speaker 01

  We were in a bad situation. I don't remember what the operation was. You prob, I hope you do. And so, um,

• 2:13:59Speaker 01

  they, you know, came in and they were gonna help us and they asked us to, you know, pop a, you know, flare and then also to tell them how far from that. Anyway, they were, so they said, how far do you want it? And I gave them some number. And Barry Enoch said, no, make that, I don't know. One, some very short distance from us. And I can't remember the operation. But they blew the hell out of everything and then we got out of there and, uh,

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  anyway, I don't remember. I'd have to look through spot reports, I guess.

• 2:14:42Jocko Willink?

  Did he, uh, cut your number in half?

• 2:14:45Speaker 01

  He did. I mean, it was like crazy. It, I, I thought, sure, they were gonna kill us.

• 2:14:53Jocko Willink?

  How hard was it for you when you were up with the, uh, Black Ponies? How hard was it for you to see where friendlies were versus where the enemy was?

• 2:15:01Speaker 02

  It was, it was crystal clear. It was a daylight hour.

• 2:15:05Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:15:06Speaker 02

  The pl, the platoon had gone in on a VC.

• 2:15:13Speaker 02

  Radio listening station where they monitored all the US frequencies. And it was interesting, the stuff they pulled out of there was, they knew, you know, back, back in those days, the prehistoric days, guys, yeah, I'm on the little blue. Well, they knew the little blue meant that was a little waterway. And they had a whole glossary of terms that US troops would use to try and code things. They knew what it all meant. It was like, oh, my God, we better, we better clean up our act here.

• 2:15:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. I remember reading about, I think they called them parakeet ops. When the, when the SEALs would go in on helicopters and just hit targets and usually daytime and hit them, you know, land basically right on the target, which is something, again, I never did any helicopter operations, but I know like guys in Afghanistan and Iraq, they would do that where they'd fly in, like hit, land on the target, land right next to the target, land on top of the target. So that tradition carried on. So that's where you were supporting one of those parakeet type operations?

• 2:16:30Speaker 02

  Well, no, these guys had patrolled.

• 2:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh, they patrolled them.

• 2:16:32Speaker 02

  They had patrolled into this target and the parakeet ops kinda, I, we had a hard time getting Hilo support once we moved away from Ben-Lu.

• 2:16:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, it's just your location wasn't optimal, right? And you guys were just full frogmen in boats and water.

• 2:16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:54Jocko Willink?

  Do you guys ever do an op where you were dry?

• 2:16:58Speaker 02

  No, because you had, you had to get, you had to go on water to get to wherever you were gonna get and you were gonna get wet. And certain.

• 2:17:06Jocko Willink?

  Full on.

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  What'd you wear for, for footwear?

• 2:17:11Speaker 02

  Jungle boots.

• 2:17:11Jocko Willink?

  Both jungle boots.

• 2:17:13Speaker 02

  We, Barry on a previous tour had gone barefoot on a number of operations and

• 2:17:24Speaker 02

  I don't know. I never tried it. I my feet are too tender.

• 2:17:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's that's the American thing, you know, is that we got soft feet. But I did hear about guys going barefoot.

• 2:17:40Jocko Willink?

  I know like getting told like, hey, when you run on the beach, run barefoot so your feet are tough. So you can so the VC won't they'll take your boots if they catch you. And of course, this is 1990. But, you know, like you guys thought you were going to Vietnam when you went into 1960, whatever. I thought I was going to Vietnam in 1990. I read those books. I'm like, this is gonna be gonna be going on somewhere.

• 2:18:05Jocko Willink?

  So now, as we're as we're getting good op tempo, you're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel of deployment. You know?

• 2:18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:15Jocko Willink?

  Any did how what did the op tempo do? Did you do you stay steady? Did it pick up? Did it? Did it start to taper off as you guys get towards the end of deployment?

• 2:18:24Speaker 02

  I would say it stayed steady. We ran some more ops after that bright light, not a lot, though. I think that was really towards the end, the bright light.

• 2:18:36Speaker 02

  And then

• 2:18:39Speaker 02

  I that's kind of fuzzy. I I remember things, the bright light, the letdown, but we still ran some. And

• 2:18:52Speaker 02

  I don't know where it fell in that thing, the time that Lacaz got when we were doing the insertion in that.

• 2:18:59Jocko Willink?

  Oh, bit by a

• 2:19:00Speaker 02

  Catfish.

• 2:19:03Speaker 02

  He didn't get bit. He got stung.

• 2:19:05Jocko Willink?

  Stung.

• 2:19:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I I will never ever forget that. That operation, but I don't remember what the timing was on that. But I just remember, you know, we were on an LLC. We go in.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  And anyway, we're now extracting and oh, I know what it is. We'd been in now. I, I think it was a, it was, I don't know if it was an LLC or something bigger.

• 2:19:33Speaker 02

  It was an MSSC.

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  It was an MSSC and it was coming in to pick us up. And so all of a sudden, Mike LaCobbs goes completely great. He is screaming, ble- blue bloody murder.

• 2:19:49Jocko Willink?

  And are you guys, are you guys like quiet at this point?

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 2:19:52Jocko Willink?

  Or had you just been in a big gunfight where now, or are you guys like, we're, the boat's coming to pick us up. Everyone keep quiet.

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  I think we were being quiet. I think we, I think I was in about waist deep water when this happened. All of a sudden, Michael God started screaming, blue bloody murder. And what had happened is he had, was wearing jeans and a little catfish had come up in his jean pants and it had a little prong on it. And so he went, he didn't know it was a catfish. He hit it, that damn thing hit.

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  I mean, and it scared our, uh, it scared our interpreter. Our, he got so scared because there's a lot of, you know, poisonous snakes. He climbed a tree.

• 2:20:40Speaker 02

  I don't think he climbed it. I think he shot up out of the water.

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  So it, so anyway, uh, Mike, he gets up on the bow of the boat and he's flopping around and then Doc Brown had to give him, uh,

• 2:20:55Speaker 02

  Hit him with morphine.

• 2:20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh gosh.

• 2:20:58Speaker 02

  And that still didn't make it, I think it must, maybe the darn spike hit a nerve or something and he was in serious pain.

• 2:21:06Speaker 01

  Well, and he thought he was gonna die. He told me when I got up there that his, uh, first wife's name was Jill. He said, tell Jill I loved her.

• 2:21:16Speaker 01

  He doesn't like it when I tell that story.

• 2:21:21Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so now it's packing up and time to go home.

• 2:21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so, uh,

• 2:21:30Speaker 02

  Because, so, uh, my AOC, AIOC, uh, John Duggar had left the platoon early. He, he was getting out of the Navy. I don't know how this happened, but, uh, he had a plan, time to get out of the Navy, and it was before we completed our tour. So, I think we were, uh, I don't know, that thing was like, it was over a month, six, six, seven weeks before he took off. And, uh, again, Captain Shively, CO of SEAL Team One, he sends

• 2:22:10Speaker 02

  me a message, he says, uh, "Well, I'll, I'll send somebody over to act as your, uh, assistant." And, uh, I sent him a message back, and I said, "Captain, I really don't think that's, uh, feasible, because I'd have to break the guy in. Is, we got only six or seven weeks to go." Said, "Barry Enoch is a chief now. He's totally capable of being my assistant." And Shively came back and said, "Okay." So Barry actually wound up being the Assistant

• 2:22:50Speaker 02

  Officer in Charge of Charlie Platoon for the last six, seven weeks. And, uh, so when it came time for the platoon to head back to the States, I said, "Barry, you take the platoon back. I'll stay back and break in the next platoon." And, uh, and Rich Solano, my point man, he, he volunteered to, uh, stay back with me to be this second person to break in the new platoon. And, uh, so, I'll take off, go to Saigon. Solano, typical, he, he was not a drinker, and he said, "I got, I got buddies that I went through training

• 2:23:35Speaker 02

  with and that I deployed with on my first trip. I want to go down and see them at Sea Float, which was down at the tip of the, uh, delta, down in the, what they call the Nam Can." And, uh,

• 2:23:50Speaker 02

  He had been stationed down there during his first tour before they built that Sea Float base, so he wanted to go down and see that. He went down there, he guest operated with a couple of the platoons down there and then he was gonna catch a Hilo back up and that was when the Hilo went down and there was five SEALs on that Hilo and they lost everybody onboard.

• 2:24:18Speaker 01

  It was so heartbreaking and shocking that he had been on a point man on all these damn operations and the op is over, it landed on the, you know, Sea Float and now they take off. I mean, we were still in Vietnam when this happened.

• 2:24:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were up in Saigon and

• 2:24:45Speaker 01

  We got the word.

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  We got the word and they asked us to go to the morgue to identify and I took Cal and Barry and maybe one other guy. Did Mike LaCosse go with us?

• 2:25:00Speaker 01

  I think, I thought it was Mike Thornton, but I don't know.

• 2:25:03Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah, maybe it was. Anyway, we went and ID'd the guys and that was really a, you know, bitter end to a successful tour to lose, especially that way. I mean, I know, I know it's a bit of false pride, but the VC never would have got him. He was that good.

• 2:25:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Toby Thomas, James Gore, John Derlin and John Donnelly.

• 2:25:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:49Jocko Willink?

  The other guys that were killed on that helicopter crash.

• 2:25:52Speaker 01

  So we knew all of them.

• 2:25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:55Jocko Willink?

  Cause there's only what 150 guys a team won or something like that?

• 2:25:58Speaker 02

  Um, actually at that point because we'd gone through that augmentation thing. So there was probably, my recall was there was, it was probably like 250 guys in the teams. It's SEAL Team One.

• 2:26:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Which is still, I mean, compared to what I lived when I, you know, we had SEAL Team One, SEAL Team Three, SEAL Team Five, SEAL Team Seven, SEAL Team Two, SEAL Team Four, SEAL Team Eight. So there were SEAL Team Ten. So there was eventually, you know, you wouldn't really know everybody on the West Coast. You'd know a bunch of them, but you wouldn't, you wouldn't really know them. Uh, so for, you know, that small group of people, that's just a huge, huge loss.

• 2:26:48Jocko Willink?

  And then you, so you stayed Tom to do some turnover operations with the platoon that came in?

• 2:26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:56Jocko Willink?

  And didn't you do a bright light in one of those?

• 2:26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I, so the typical thing was you, you, the new platoon would come in and the old platoon would take them out, take each squad out on one op and

• 2:27:14Speaker 02

  my mindset was

• 2:27:18Speaker 02

  I wasn't ready to go home. So I broke them in, I took them out on two ops and then I went to other platoons and started guest operating with them. And I, I actually

• 2:27:38Speaker 02

  I think I went out on three or four ops with three or four platoons. And then I came back to Longfue, to Dung Island. And they said, "Oh, we got this, we got this prison camp op." And here was the one where it was like Mr. Locke, the interpreter for the Nilo, had made friends with somebody at the Chu Hoi Center. And this guy is willing to take us in. And not only that, but Mr. Locke had built a model Wow. of the prison camp. Jeez. And it was like, oh, my God.

• 2:28:21Speaker 02

  This is, this is what we needed back when we had the Bright Light op. And the, the new platoon, one, one of the guys was sick, so, and he carried the 60. So they said, "Tom, you carry the 60." And we went in on the op. And it was, it was ringed with concentric circles of booby traps. There was a, there was a hooch that was built over this irrigation ditch. And the hooch was built over the irrigation ditch and extended out.

• 2:29:02Speaker 02

  And they kept these guys at night in leg irons. They had these, basically a shackle. And they'd run an iron rod through the shackle to keep their legs secure. And so we thought, well, if we come up the irrigation ditch with the, which they can't booby trap because of the tidal influence. And we hit them in the dark. The guards supposedly slept over the irrigation ditch and the prisoners were off here that we could hit the guard section.

• 2:29:45Speaker 02

  And we kinda, I gave my input and said, you know, let's get in there, log her over. Cause it's a long enough slog to get in there that you can't get in there and still be sure you're gonna hit them while it's dark. So log her over for a day. Well, the plan changed and we wound up going straight in. And the ditch was so muddy that they got up and started using the dike line. We found the first couple of booby trap tripwires,

• 2:30:23Speaker 02

  but the third one, they missed. Fortunately, the thing went low order. So, the point man and the interpreter got peppered with some shrapnel. But of course, the guards initiated their emergency procedures. So, and they, and they sent a guy towards us in this little irrigation ditch. He's coming down in this little bitty sandpan. We smoked him. And then I moved up with a 60 and we hosed the place down. We had air assets overhead. The fortunate

• 2:31:07Speaker 02

  thing was that there was, I forget whether it was three, four, six people in the chaos of the evacuation. These guys escaped from the guards and made their way to friendly. So, we got some debriefing about, there were no US POWs at the camp.

• 2:31:29Jocko Willink?

  So, those POWs were Vietnamese?

• 2:31:31Speaker 02

  They were all Vietnamese. Mostly Arvins or local Ford's guys.

• 2:31:36Jocko Willink?

  That's so incredible.

• 2:31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And at least some of them got away. And what amazed me again though was Mr. Locke's model was just spot on. I mean, it was, it's the kind of intelligence that you dream of and hope for.

• 2:31:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's pretty impressive.

• 2:31:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:32:00Jocko Willink?

  And then you end up going home sometime after that operation?

• 2:32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was shortly after that operation, actually Captain Shibley showed up for a tour of Vietnam and

• 2:32:15Speaker 02

  He shows up and I was there and he said, "Boyan, what the hell are you doing here?"

• 2:32:22Speaker 02

  "You better beat me back to the strand or you're in trouble."

• 2:32:27Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 2:32:29Speaker 01

  What a great, great commanding officer.

• 2:32:32Speaker 02

  He was. He was a Mustang. He was, he was, he was revered.

• 2:32:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, speaking of your commanding officer, you guys get back and he, he wrote this in your fit rep. He said, "As a SEAL Team One platoon commander, he established the most impressive combat record of any SEAL platoon ever deployed to the Republic of Vietnam." Lieutenant Boyan deployed with his platoon to the Republic of Vietnam in December of 1969 and has established a most impressive record of aggressive, determined action against the enemy. Completely isolated from supporting arms normally available to US units in the field, Lieutenant Boyan and his platoon nevertheless regularly conducted clandestine night operations deep into the surrounding enemy base area, returning with valuable intelligence material

• 2:33:27Jocko Willink?

  that has resulted in inflicting heavy losses of men and materiel upon the enemy."

• 2:33:35Jocko Willink?

  End quote.

• 2:33:39Speaker 02

  I, I just would inject that, that was Charlie Platoon.

• 2:33:43Jocko Willink?

  What I said.

• 2:33:44Speaker 02

  No, no, no. I mean, I know what the words say, but it was Charlie Platoon. It was not Tom Boyan. It was Charlie Platoon and it was the mix of people in that platoon that, that made those results possible.

• 2:33:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's why we call it the SEAL Teams.

• 2:34:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:34:02Speaker 01

  I agree with what he just said, but, uh, sitting here doing this interview, you can understand why I wanted him here. And, you know, he was, he was just, uh, he was the best OIC you could ever imagine for a SEAL platoon. You know, we all loved him. We all loved Enoch. We just had a, we just were, I guess we weren't just lucky because you kind of handpicked most of the people that were going to be in there, but we were pretty darn lucky.

• 2:34:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, um, hard work makes things makes makes good luck. That's for sure. Uh, you, you had your success rate from 1966 to 1969. You talked about those cards, the barn dance cards. The success rate had been for enemy contact was about 30%. Charlotte platoons was 46%. With SEAL intel and with the guides, it was 77%. With good intel and no guide, with good SEAL intel and no guide, it was 54%. General intel, no guide, 26%. So there's the, uh, there's the lesson learned there. Make your intel, get your intel.

• 2:35:16Speaker 02

  What I, what I did my end of tour report, uh, it's not like I discovered that this was the formula, but I didn't feel like anybody had said, hey, here's metrics that bear this out, that people should be focusing on. Uh, in, in guiding the development of the teams that you need this intel package to go along with the, with the men you got in the, the direct action platoons to, to really make it work. And obviously, not just me, lots of, I mean, Bob Peterson from SEAL Team Two was a great example of

• 2:36:02Speaker 02

  yes, the, the importance of the intel and the operations.

• 2:36:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we, we had the same type of thing going on where occasionally we would get intel from like up the chain of command, like here's this target, hit this target. And I didn't never did the percentages of it, quite frankly, because we didn't get too many of those. Most of the time we would not get, hey, here's a target, you guys go hit it. That happened to me probably a handful of times. Most of the time it was our intel seals and the intel shop that were working, human intelligence.

• 2:36:43Jocko Willink?

  Other forms of intelligence that would then, like I said, it was like going to a store, but they'd always have a sale. Like, you know, they'd come in and go, hey, we got this one right here. This is a source we've used five times before. He's been on every time. He'll go with us. Same exact thing. And if they were going with us, we felt really good about it. It's the same exact thing. So what's nice is, I would have liked to have known this before I went on my first deployment to Iraq. It would have been very helpful for me to hear this. Because there were some times where we hit tar, we hit try holes. Or we hit target buildings. We later, like one, I remember one, we found out later that the, we hit this target. I walked into the target and was like, this is a really pretty nice house. And, you know, we end up finding out the guy's a doctor, and we're going, what

• 2:37:24Jocko Willink?

  the heck's going on here? And it turns out that his, uh, he had fired like some housekeeper or someone. She was pissed at him. Well, she was pissed enough to tell the US military that he was a bad guy.

• 2:37:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:37Jocko Willink?

  And so, you know, we had to, you know, repair that situation that we did. But again, it was one of those times where I started saying, okay, let's figure out where this intel actually came from. And that's what you figured out is, you know, if you can have that guide, a trustworthy guide that's been proven out, that's going to be, um, much, much more effective. And the SEAL Team One Detachment Golf Administrative Superior, Lieutenant Bruce Dyer, he said this. "The analysis of intelligence support versus operational results was well thought out and takes into consideration most of the important parameters that influence the situation. One factor, however, was modestly overlooked." This is

• 2:38:18Jocko Willink?

  an important one, too. "Given the same outstanding intelligence support, a less aggressive platoon would not have realized the same results."

• 2:38:30Jocko Willink?

  This is another thing that seems i- i- in, in the, in the SEAL teams, in special operations.

• 2:38:38Jocko Willink?

  The leadership has to make things happen. Like, you're not getting told, hey, go do this operation, go do this mission. You know, working with the Army Company commanders and platoon commanders, they're getting a mission tasking. This is what you are going to do tomorrow. You are going to go out, you're going to patrol this area, you're going to clear these buildings. And of course, you know, they're not being told exactly how to do it. And those guys are incredible, the way they, the way they execute on their missions. But for us, it's like, we can kind of, at least for me, and it sounds like for you too, you can kind of pick and choose what you want to do. And it's a different type of pressure, because the Army guy's going, the Marine Corps guy's going, because he's been told to go. And that is a type of pressure,

• 2:39:22Jocko Willink?

  because you've got to accept the risk of what you're being told to do. For us, we say yes to a mission, and we approve a mission, and we go on a mission, it's 100% on us. I mean, most, 99% of the time, it was my call that we were gonna go and execute a mission.

• 2:39:38Jocko Willink?

  But it also could have been my call not to go and execute a mission. It'd also be my call to say, well, you know, uh, my buddy had a dream about me last night, maybe I won't go on this mission right now. And, you know, that stuff adds up. And I also had, and I, I wonder if you had this as well, there would be times, you know, we would joke, half joking, half real, you know, you hear the term no-go criteria. So if this happens, we're not going. If this happens, we're not going. And I would jokingly, half jokingly say, we have go-go criteria, because we're going. And that being said, sometimes it'd be like, oh, we lost this support asset. Okay, well, we're still going. We just got intel that

• 2:40:20Jocko Willink?

  there might be more bad guys on target. Well, we're still going. Oh, it looks like the aircraft that was gonna be able to cover us from this time to this time is not gonna be able to be there.

• 2:40:32Jocko Willink?

  Someone's telling me I shouldn't be really doing this op right now. Maybe it wasn't Mike Thornton having a dream, a bad dream about me, but you start getting the multiple, multiple no-gos and you start saying, okay, this, this, this is a, you know, the big frogman in the sky trying to tell me this is not a good mission for you to send your boys on or for you to go on. So you might want to rethink this one. So, did you experience that as well?

• 2:40:55Speaker 02

  Yes. Um, my last tour, uh, I had a, actually the platoon had finished up and we boxed our weapons up and we, they're getting ready to fly back and I had a, I had a SEAL contact me on an unsecure line and say, I want you to get your boys ready because we've got this operation that we want to go on. And I, first thing I said was, uh, can we talk about this some other way?

• 2:41:34Jocko Willink?

  So you ended, but you ended up going back to Vietnam?

• 2:41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:36Jocko Willink?

  You're a platoon commander again?

• 2:41:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:41:40Jocko Willink?

  Tribal platoon again?

• 2:41:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:41:41Jocko Willink?

  What platoon was it?

• 2:41:42Speaker 02

  Romeo platoon.

• 2:41:43Jocko Willink?

  Romeo platoon.

• 2:41:44Speaker 02

  Okay. Anyway, in this case, I've got, he's not my operational commander, but he's telling me they've got this SEAL up and it actually, I've, I saw it written up in a magazine. Here was the premise, and as soon as I tell you the premise, you're going to start laughing. They had captured a VC carrier pigeon.

• 2:42:16Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:42:17Speaker 02

  And the plan was, we're going to go up in a Hilo and we're going to release the carrier pigeon and follow it in.

• 2:42:26Speaker 02

  To where it goes.

• 2:42:27Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 2:42:29Speaker 02

  And I'm thinking, I'm sorry. I'm, uh, I know a little bit about poultry. And there's no way you're gonna release a pigeon out of a helo and follow it anywhere. If it doesn't get sucked into the intake of the engine. There's no way you're gonna follow it. There's not, there's no aircraft maneuverable enough to follow a pigeon. And I wound up, I wound up telling this guy, there was no way I would do that.

• 2:43:05Speaker 02

  And he called me a cowardly boy scout and questioned my heredity. But I said, no, sir, not gonna do it. And, and there was no, that never hurt me in any way. And, and that's the way it should be. And I was given, I've talked to Army vets, I've talked to Marine vets. And the, the autonomy and latitude that we had as SEAL platoon commanders in Vietnam was just incredible. I mean, basically whoever was operationally in charge of us said,

• 2:43:50Speaker 02

  you know, I really don't know what you do, just go do it and stay out of my hair.

• 2:43:58Speaker 02

  Except for Ben Luck. And then on my second tour, which was over on the west side of Vietnam,

• 2:44:09Speaker 02

  I even, didn't even have any kind of physical or even message contact with my superior, my operational superior.

• 2:44:18Jocko Willink?

  That was on your second tour?

• 2:44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:20Jocko Willink?

  Where were you on your second tour?

• 2:44:21Speaker 02

  Uh, was in, uh, over in Roksoi, Rokja, which is on the Gulf of Thailand coast, up near the Cambodian border.

• 2:44:33Jocko Willink?

  And what year is this?

• 2:44:34Speaker 02

  That would have been, uh, 71.

• 2:44:38Jocko Willink?

  Did you get home and do a complete workup?

• 2:44:41Speaker 02

  I, I got home in, uh...

• 2:44:46Speaker 02

  It was early August of seventy and deployed in December of seventy.

• 2:44:56Jocko Willink?

  Shock.

• 2:44:58Speaker 02

  And I had to lobby hard to get that platoon. I actually, I actually lobbied Captain Shively to go over with X-Ray Platoon.

• 2:45:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:45:09Speaker 02

  As the assistant officer in charge. Fortunately, he, he didn't do that.

• 2:45:19Jocko Willink?

  So how was the second tour in Vietnam?

• 2:45:22Speaker 02

  So the second tour was, uh, because that was the point where things were really winding down. And so, uh, having air support was a lot more sketchier.

• 2:45:37Speaker 02

  The army was turning everything over to the Vietnamese. The Navy was turning everything over to the Vietnamese. So all the PBR boats were being run by Vietnamese. Fortunately, we had a good boat support group there. And, uh, it was, it was harder to get AO clearances again. Uh, after being down at Dung Island where that was not a problem whatsoever. And, uh, again, it was that they had the, uh, pacification program.

• 2:46:19Speaker 02

  The army colonel, who was the province senior advisor, I still remember that guy.

• 2:46:29Speaker 02

  He was a white-haired, staunch gentleman. My, uh, my province is eighty-five percent pacified and I can drive from the west side over by Cambodia to the east side. I don't even need to take a weapon.

• 2:46:49Speaker 02

  And then he took a boat down to the southern part of the province, which was into the Yumen Forest, and he got blown away.

• 2:47:00Speaker 02

  He and a couple of other guys got, I mean, they were living in a fantasy world in that respect. And so we did have some decent hits, but we didn't have the same. And I had, I had great intel support within the platoon. I had two guys that had been PRU advisors. And, and they were heavily into intel, but the lack of support was, was a big problem.

• 2:47:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So like, what, what did your op tempo get down to? Like, were you doing?

• 2:47:43Speaker 02

  We probably did two thirds of the ops that we did with Charlie Platoon. It was like, we'd go sometimes three, four days without an op.

• 2:47:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Cause what Barry says in the book about Charlie Platoon, we'd conducted 70 combat operations, netting 91 VC NVA KIA. By accurate body count, there were 11 VC NVA KIA is probable, 30 VC NVA wounded in action confirmed by intelligence report, 15 captured, and then numerous documents, weapons, supplies taken. And he also credits you. All of this was the result of Lieutenant Tom Boyan's aggressive and imaginative operational planning. He was above all else, a professional warrior and the finest officer I ever served with in my 20 years of naval service. Some high praise right there.

• 2:48:41Speaker 02

  High praise from a very important.

• 2:48:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. High praise from, from a true warrior.

• 2:48:51Speaker 01

  But you did not mention on that last op, what happened?

• 2:48:56Speaker 02

  Oh, so.

• 2:48:58Jocko Willink?

  Is this the bright light op?

• 2:48:59Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:49:00Jocko Willink?

  This is the last op you did on your second tour?

• 2:49:01Speaker 02

  No, well, it wasn't the last op, but it was, uh...

• 2:49:06Speaker 02

  So the, uh, Lester Mo was a point man. And we went on this op down in the, to the Yummin Forest. And, uh, we, we hit the target. And he moved out to a secondary area. We had come in from the Gulf of Thailand through jungle. And first of all, to come in from the Gulf of Thailand, there was about a quarter mile mud flat just to get to the shore. And we'd previously done an op in that area where we had some SAS guys with us.

• 2:49:51Speaker 02

  By the time we got to shoreline, those guys were puking their guts out and saying, "You guys are crazy." Anyway, we moved in on, so we got into the target area and hit the target area. The tax collector wasn't home, but all his tax receipts were there. And Les had moved out to a secondary area. And unfortunately, that area was booby trapped. And he was killed on that op. So he was, he was the last seal killed in the jungles of Vietnam. Uh, you know, later, seventy-two, Spence Dry was killed on that

• 2:50:31Speaker 02

  op out on the water where they were going in. They were gonna use an SDV or something to go into a...

• 2:50:37Speaker 01

  Mokie Martin was on that.

• 2:50:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, Mokie Martin was on that.

• 2:50:40Jocko Willink?

  And there was like a problem with the SDV, something went sideways with the SDV.

• 2:50:42Speaker 02

  Well, they were jumping out of a helo at night. And, uh, Spence broke his neck on the jump. Uh, but, so, yeah, that was the... We ran some more ops after that, but, uh...

• 2:51:00Speaker 02

  That was the, that was my last tour and then we were not relieved. Oh. There was, they were cutting down this, I had, Charlie had, platoon had been an augment platoon that did not relieve a platoon. My recollection was SEAL Team Two had two platoons in country and SEAL Team One had four and they jacked it up to six or seven. And then by seventy-one, that was all winding down. And then seventy-two, they were just down to guys going over as advisors.

• 2:51:49Jocko Willink?

  So when you got home, Hal, was, was that the, your time in the Navy was done?

• 2:51:55Speaker 01

  No, uh, when we got back from Charlie Platoon, you know, Barry Enoch, my sea daddy, he went out to something called SAT, SEAL Advanced Training, in Kwamaka and he got me to go along with him. And then after that, um, he was made a cadre instructor. And so he told Captain Shively, he thought, I should go be a cadre instructor. And so I, that's what I did for the last two years, uh, was be a cadre instructor out at, uh, mostly out at Nylund.

• 2:52:34Jocko Willink?

  And what made you decide you wanted to get out?

• 2:52:37Speaker 01

  Oh, it's kind of a long story, but, uh,

• 2:52:40Jocko Willink?

  Another girl broke your heart?

• 2:52:45Speaker 01

  Kind.

• 2:52:47Speaker 01

  I'm very lucky that I ended up with who I did. But my dad, well, first of all, about that time, I just remember, as a cadre instructor, somebody told me that I was supposed to tell the guys that we were training that we weren't supposed to shoot at the enemy unless they shot at us first.

• 2:53:07Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:53:08Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:53:10Speaker 01

  Seriously, I'm not kidding you. This actually happened. You know, so, but the other thing is, is my dad, I was the first of six kids. He was a huge influence in my life. And, and he, you know, he just said, hey, I really think that you are meant to be, you know, a family man. And, and basically, he said, you know, I just, I don't think this is a great career for a guy with a family man. But something else that also happened, and that is, at that time, I think they now call it a sailor to admiral or something like that program.

• 2:53:53Speaker 01

  At that time, they had a program called a NSEP program, Navy Science Engineering Program. And so I passed the test for that. And then this guy comes and has a talk with other people that had passed it, not in SEAL teams or anything. And at the end, he, he says, anybody got a question? And I said, I have a question. I want to make sure that after I go, you know, back east to college and get my degree, I just want to make sure I'm coming back to SEAL Team. He said, well, I can guarantee you, you're not going to go back to SEAL Team.

• 2:54:36Speaker 01

  You're going to have to go be riding a ship or somewhere in the Navy for two years, which, you know, for the whole social ostracization between me being an enlisted guy and coming back as an officer, which, so, anyway, that and my dad's advice, I left.

• 2:54:59Speaker 01

  But I will tell you that, and I think I've already told you and Tom already knows this, you know,

• 2:55:06Speaker 01

  Being in SEAL Team, it was a short period of time, you know, four years, and I was out. But it was a really, really, really huge part of my life, and it continues. The things, the lessons that I learned, and you know, I'm seventy-six years old. I still feel like, you know, I have a lot of lessons learned. And, you know, somehow or another, I ended up after I got out of the Navy with several crash and burns. Remember that old ABC Sports thing that said, "The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat"? Well, I experienced those.

• 2:55:51Speaker 01

  But, you know, I recovered from that, and I just don't think, you know. So after all of that, I eventually, the last many years of my career, I had a very successful career, and I just don't think it would have happened if it hadn't have been my SEAL Team training and all of that, and so.

• 2:56:13Jocko Willink?

  And you were, you actually, you were like several million dollars in debt after you. What was it, the, the crisis of the, of the interest rates in the seventies?

• 2:56:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wasn't several million dollars in debt. What had happened is, so yeah, in nineteen, in this, I guess it was, I had to think about this for a minute, about nineteen seventy-seven, myself and a couple of other guys, we thought we knew something about home building, and so we started building homes, and San Diego Federal gave us lots of construction loans, and everything was just hunky-dory there for a while. And then, all of a sudden, about nineteen seventy-nine-ish, somewhere in that range area of time, interest rates just skyrocketed.

• 2:57:09Jocko Willink?

  Ah, yeah.

• 2:57:10Speaker 01

  So they, prime rate, you know, prime rate, like that's the good rate, they give to good borrowers, went to twenty-one percent. Well, I had, San Diego Fed was our lender. And we had a whole bunch of, we had millions of dollars of construction loans. So those construction loans were at prime plus one, twenty-two. Yes. But you can't pay off the construction loan till you sell the house. Mm-hmm. Mortgage rates were at fifteen percent. Oof. Can't sell a house when it's fifteen percent. So, anyway, it was just a disaster. Uh, we lost everything. I mean, we sold our home. We, you know, here I was, a home builder and veteran in the real estate business.

• 2:57:54Speaker 01

  Denise and I had to sell our home and we had to go live in the house with another guy who was a bachelor, uh, you know. It, it, Denise didn't like living in somebody else's house. But, anyway, uh, it was a terrible, terrible mess. Uh, you can't even believe how bad it was. But, anyway, somehow or another, I did recover from that. And, uh, so, a few years later, uh, so we were at a very much of a negative net worth. We didn't have a home. We, uh, it was terrible.

• 2:58:34Speaker 01

  Oh, and, and, oh, by the way, I, the only job I could finally get was I was making twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars a year there for a while. Uh, but at least, uh, it was regular and, uh, we had health care. That's what Denise cared about. But, anyway, um, so, yeah, so I eventually was able to pay off. I bet I had about nine hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars that I owed. Not quite a million. That was, you know, uh, at a very high interest rate. So, anyway, I got...

• 2:59:11Speaker 01

  I got lucky, actually, but I also had some skills to go with it. And so, anyway, in a few years, I started a business on, in May of 1984. And in 1987, I was back to a zero net worth. Hallelujah.

• 2:59:38Speaker 02

  He paid everybody off.

• 2:59:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:41Speaker 02

  Nobody, he doesn't know anybody. He paid them off. That, to me, that's the measure of a man.

• 2:59:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, indeed. And you don't live in a, someone else's apartment anymore.

• 2:59:52Speaker 01

  No, I don't. We own our own home. We own our own home now for quite a while. So, anyway.

• 3:00:03Jocko Willink?

  And how many kids you got?

• 3:00:05Speaker 01

  I have four kids, and I have ten grandkids, and I have one great grandson and one great granddaughter. And so Denise and I have been married for fifty-one years.

• 3:00:16Jocko Willink?

  That's amazing, amazing. So, what, and what about you, Tom? So you get done with your tour to, your second tour to Vietnam? And what comes after that?

• 3:00:27Speaker 02

  So, when I came back from that second tour, I was, I became the Ops Officer, SEAL Team One. I also had the collateral duty of Nuclear Safety Officer. That's back in the days when we had the hand-delivered nuke.

• 3:00:43Jocko Willink?

  The tactical, man-carried nuke.

• 3:00:48Speaker 02

  Mark fifty-four SADAM, small atomic demolition munition.

• 3:00:54Speaker 02

  And there's change of command, new commanding officer. We were undergoing an admin inspection and a nuclear safety inspection. And they were...

• 3:01:12Speaker 02

  Downsizing the teams. I remember at one point the Master at Arms, old Claude Willis, literally had, I don't know where he found, all these push brooms, but he had the guys out in the parking lot, line abreast with push brooms, sweeping the parking lot, simply to keep them busy.

• 3:01:32Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:01:34Speaker 02

  And that was-

• 3:01:35Jocko Willink?

  They sent guys to the fleet, too.

• 3:01:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, there was the Dirty Thirty, I think was called, where they sent guys-

• 3:01:43Jocko Willink?

  Yep, to a ship.

• 3:01:43Speaker 02

  Went through training, and you're going to a ship. And anybody that had any kind of infraction, it was like, you're out of here.

• 3:01:53Jocko Willink?

  Jeez.

• 3:01:54Speaker 02

  It was some difficult time, so I, and, and I knew that I was not going to be, I was either going to a staff or a ship.

• 3:02:10Speaker 01

  You told me you did not want to be a desk jockey.

• 3:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I, I just couldn't see that. So I got out and I got, initially, I, I got on my motorcycle, it was February, and I was, decided I was gonna do a cross-country trip-

• 3:02:30Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:02:30Speaker 02

  On a motorcycle in February.

• 3:02:32Jocko Willink?

  Starts good in California.

• 3:02:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. When I got to Texas, I hit an ice storm.

• 3:02:39Speaker 02

  I spent three or four weeks there. When I got to Atlanta, they had a freak snowstorm. So I finally got smart, rented a van, took the motorcycle back up to New York. And then I got ready to go on a backpack trip on what was then the Pacific Crest Trail that was mostly a dream.

• 3:03:05Speaker 02

  I did, I did eight hundred miles of that. And then went back to school. I was gonna be, instead of a veteran, I was gonna become a veterinarian. And went back to school to pick up all the chemistry and biology, microbiology credits I needed. And when I went to Cornell, the admissions officer said, you're too old. How old were you? I was thirty-one. [laughing] And if, if I had been persistent, I, I could've got in, I'm sure. But it was

• 3:03:44Speaker 02

  like, well, I just spent a year and a half in Buffalo, New York, living in a basement apartment through a winter. I think I've had enough school. And I wound up going into farming. And I wound up managing the largest commercial hog operation, New York State. Did that for about fifteen years. And then wanted to change careers and gears. And got in contact with an old SEAL buddy who was living in Seattle. Because I was thinking

• 3:04:24Speaker 02

  about going to New Zealand. And he said, hey, come on out, stay with me. I'm going on a backpack trip up in the Cascades. And when I went on that backpack trip is when I met my wife. Nice. And we met in eighty-six, got married in eighty-eight. Been together for thirty-seven years. Done a lot of backpacking. And we, we got into llamas. We had llamas that we packed in the mountains with. Yeah. Did another eight-hundred mile trip in the Sierras one time, for three months.

• 3:05:06Speaker 02

  And then, because I was on the west coast now, I wound up going to work at this little company that made Stoneheart pizza ovens. And so that's, so my tagline is, I was a frog man, a hog man, and a pizza man.

• 3:05:26Speaker 01

  He's humble.

• 3:05:29Jocko Willink?

  And I know you're humble too, Hal, because you know, you've been very, very successful in your world with what you've done, and I know you're being humble and you know, you tell your story, but you're extremely successful businessman.

• 3:05:44Speaker 02

  And generous, I would say.

• 3:05:48Jocko Willink?

  You know, when I talk to you guys, and I kind of talked about this a little bit before we hit record today, but you know, a lot of times veterans have the image or the reputation, and I will say, you know, I said this before the podcast, I said especially Vietnam veterans, but I think it's actually my generation of veterans has an equally, an equally, an equal reputation of really having problems adapting back to the world when their time in the military is done. What was it like, I mean, both of you guys kind of carried on and, you know, carried

• 3:06:29Jocko Willink?

  on with your lives and had businesses and families and jobs and did normal stuff.

• 3:06:35Speaker 01

  You know what I think is that, again, so a lot of Vietnam veterans never had a welcome home. When we came home, well, see, we came back to Coronado, and team guys gave us a welcome home.

• 3:06:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:53Speaker 01

  Seriously. And, and so I just think that we were very, very lucky that we had that kind of support when we came home. I, for the, for a long time after I got out, I really didn't have anything to do with the military. Finally, I went to a reunion, it was down in... Naval Reserve or something in Pearl Beach. That was the first one that I'd been to. And I go in there and John Ware and Lee Pittman are in there and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

• 3:07:27Speaker 01

  And so I, you know, I started going to reunions and then actually Frank Tombs used to host a Vietnam UDT SEAL reunion at his house out in kind of Pine Valley. And then his wife had ALS and then he sent out an email to all of us that he couldn't do it anymore. And I took the email in to Denise and I said, read this.

• 3:08:01Speaker 01

  She read it. She looked up at me. She said, are you wanting to move this reunion to our house? I said, well, can we? So we lived in Bonita. We had a great big yard and everything. And so we had it there for, in fact, Tom came down and helped us set everything up.

• 3:08:20Jocko Willink?

  What years are these?

• 3:08:22Speaker 01

  I guess this is, uh, helped me out.

• 3:08:25Speaker 02

  Early eighties, wasn't it?

• 3:08:27Speaker 01

  No, no, it was past early eighties. It was somewhere around eighty-six, eighty-seven, I would think.

• 3:08:32Jocko Willink?

  Well, you had a house, a big house with Bonita, so we were at least out of the.

• 3:08:36Speaker 01

  We had a small house in Bonita, but we had a great big yard.

• 3:08:39Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 3:08:40Speaker 01

  And so, so anyway, we hosted it there for a few years. And then what happened is my daughter and her husband moved from the Bay Area down to Carlsbad and they had twins that just graduated from high school and now they're both in college. But then I was working and I was having to commute to New York City at that time. And because now we had sold our business to Citibank and now I'm having to go back there like every week. And so Denise was in Bonita. They were in Carlsbad, forty-one miles apart.

• 3:09:20Speaker 01

  And Denise can't drive at night. So when they needed help, you know, they had some childcare, but they always needed Denise to come do something. So she just couldn't do it anymore. So she said, I think we need to need closer to them. So. We sold that house and we moved to Bonita. And, I mean.

• 3:09:43Jocko Willink?

  Solana Beach.

• 3:09:44Speaker 01

  Solana Beach, excuse me. And so then, we didn't have a place to have it. So then I'm running all over the place, trying to figure out where we can have this party now. And so, I was talking to Paul Plum. And he gave, he said, you know what? The Commodore, the Cornada Yacht Club's my neighbor. Maybe he can help. So we started hosting it there. And we did for many years. And then, what happened is, is, you know, I talked to Bob Schultz, the Old Frogs and Seals, and saying, how about you take this thing over? And, and so he did. And, so, and he's done a great job.

• 3:10:28Jocko Willink?

  So you're the origin of the Old Frogs and Seals Club?

• 3:10:31Speaker 01

  No, I'm the, no, I, I was in Old Frogs and Seals with him.

• 3:10:38Speaker 01

  And I went there all the time. But no, I got him to take over the, it was called the Vietnam era.

• 3:10:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:46Speaker 01

  Seal Party.

• 3:10:47Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 3:10:48Speaker 01

  At the Cornada Yacht Club. And we did that for a number of years. But then, you know, I just couldn't do it anymore. And so, I was just too busy. So I asked Bob to take it over. And he, he said, well, I'll take it over if you get on my board of Old Frogs and Seals. So that was a good trade. And then he changed it, because, you know, the Old Frogs and Seals used to have a party in April called The Spouses Dinner. And so, he now calls it The Spouses Dinner, because he moved it around. A lot of the Old Seals do not like it being called The Spouses Dinner. But I'm thrilled that he took it over, because he does a great job, and it's good.

• 3:11:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and then there's the UDT Seal Reunion, which when I was a young SEAL. I would go to and it would be no young SEALs there. I would be like me and my, my, my running mate and roommate at the time, Chris, who is another SEAL. And we would go and we would sit around and like little flies on the wall. This is, this was when I had even deployed yet, but I heard that we could go. And so I was like, let's go. And there's going to be a bunch of old Vietnam guys there. Of course, old Vietnam guys at the time were like 40.

• 3:12:02Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, but we'd sit there and listen to you guys talk and, and ask you guys questions about, you know, whatever we fantasized about, because that's what it was for us, you know? Sit around and talk to you guys. And, and now we've got this, uh, the museum, the museum. Again, we were all there last night and walking through. Man, they did a terrific job with, with the UDT SEAL Museum in San Diego, California.

• 3:12:29Jocko Willink?

  Walking through there, what, what was your, what'd you guys, what was your impression of it?

• 3:12:35Speaker 02

  Well, I was blown away.

• 3:12:38Speaker 02

  That I've never been to Fort Pierce.

• 3:12:43Speaker 02

  It's on the other side of the country and it's not a convenient place to get to for me. So I'm super glad that they, they've done this because number one, it's going to be accessed by a lot of people outside the community. And the, the message about the history of SEALs, the origins, Vietnam, on through to global war on terror. I mean, just the, the exhibitory is, is really great. And it's going to impact a lot of people, I think, as a result.

• 3:13:27Speaker 02

  People outside the community, which is what you want to do is communicate about this history and about the.

• 3:13:36Speaker 02

  I really like the concept about the service to community.

• 3:13:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:41Speaker 02

  If I was running things, we'd reinstitute a draft, but it would be a national service draft. And that would include teachers and healthcare workers and garbage collectors and National Park Service and everything, just to bring people to have a sense of value for the country. And that contributed, contribute to something that's bigger than yourself.

• 3:14:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the theme.

• 3:14:08Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, I spent years and a lot, a lot of time and treasure working on this. And, and early on, we got several seals together and talk about what do we want to have in this museum? What do we want it to show? And, you know, one of the things that we wanted to do is when we were in, we were called the quiet professionals and then along came some people who weren't so quiet. And so, anyway, we just kind of want to reclaim the narrative of what really seals are. And we wanted to be able to explain that this group of people, frogs and seals, have been around for 80 years.

• 3:14:53Speaker 01

  Not many companies have remained for 80 years somehow. But, and then talk about, well, why have they been able to change with the times for 80 years and remain relevant, you know, in doing a very tough job? And so, you know, we think that has a lot to do with selection, training, training, training, training, and teamwork and all that kind of stuff. So, I think, what I believe is going to happen is, I believe that our visitors are going to leave there, and I'm talking about, you know...

• 3:15:37Speaker 01

  People from out of state, from wherever. I think people will leave there with sort of a contagious patriotism, good patriotism about being a good neighbor and serving some way. As you said, you know, there at the end on the call to action, "Sir, everybody can serve. You can do something, you know, help a neighbor," you know, and I really like that message. And I don't think that we in any way acted, I don't think it comes across as, you know, we're a bunch of mean old warriors and blah, blah, blah, blah. I really liked the way it came out.

• 3:16:22Speaker 01

  And so I'm, I'm very, very happy. I think we, we did a really good job of

• 3:16:32Speaker 01

  being able to show through these exhibits, all of the history, all of the, you know, the wet suits that people used long ago and far away and all that kind of stuff.

• 3:16:43Jocko Willink?

  All the dive rigs, all the old weapons.

• 3:16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, and I just think people learn a lot. And, you know, you were there last night, my friend Doug Aldrich was there. I mean, you know, he was in class 22, you know, before there were SEALs. He was just so proud and so blown away. I mean, I'm getting texts from him, you know, this morning. He just, he just loved it. And, I mean, I, so I think, I think everyone in our community will love it. But almost more important, I think,

• 3:17:19Speaker 01

  I think civilians and, you know, people coming in from Iowa or Texas or wherever they are, I think they, I think they'll be motivated by it. And so I'm really excited about it.

• 3:17:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's it's uh it's incredible to go down there. If you're listening to this and you're interested in it, Navy SEAL Museum dot org is the website where you can check it out. It's also on social media, Instagram and Twitter X is at Navy UDT SEAL Museum. And then on Facebook, it's at Navy, National Navy UDT SEAL Museum. And it's it's it's awesome. There's one in Fort Pierce, Florida, the original ones in Fort Pierce, Florida. That's where the original underwater demolition teams and NCDUs trained down there to get ready. And and so that's where they put the first museum, and that's an awesome museum as well. It's incredible. And then we got this one out here on the west coast. It's by the USS Midway, which is

• 3:18:16Jocko Willink?

  so you can go and do a tour of the USS Midway, which is an incredible, you know, living museum, and you walk a couple of blocks and you could be at the UDT SEAL Museum, which you can learn about the history of the SEAL teams, where we came from. And it's really, really a powerful place, so.

• 3:18:33Speaker 01

  And I'd like to give credit to the Midway because they were very helpful to us to decide all kinds of things. You know, ticket pricing, you know, estimates of how many visitors we'd have a year, all those kinds of things. But one of the most important things they did is they, you know, they have docents on the Midway. Every time I go to the Midway, I think the docents are what make the tour. And and they are, and they turned over their whole docent program to us. And we are using their same docent instructions. And so I really, really appreciate all of their help. They've been very, very good.

• 3:19:16Jocko Willink?

  And I was an English major. And when I first heard the term docent, I had no idea what they were talking about. That's a tour guide. And I'll have to figure out what the etymology of the word docent is. Do you know what it is?

• 3:19:27Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 3:19:27Jocko Willink?

  Where it comes from? I never heard anybody say it until I heard Todd Perry say, you know, well, these people are going to be docents. I'm like, okay, well, I have to go look that one up. But that's a tour guide. And if you go to the USS Midway, they have these tour guides that know all this information and they walk you around, they point all these little details out to you. And so they'll have the same thing at the UDT SEAL museums when you're looking at the Stoner 63, which they have there and the M60 with the with the stock sawn off. I mean, it's just, it's it's epic. So that's it. UDT SEAL Museum. Yeah.

• 3:19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, one other thing I want to say, I greatly appreciate you and Leif Babin leading from the front and making very, very generous donations. Thank you very much.

• 3:20:14Jocko Willink?

  Well, as I told you when you said that to me, the SEAL teams, I tell people all the time, the SEAL teams gave me everything and I try and give back what I can. And I know that that you do this exact same thing because you feel the exact same way. So likewise, and back at you.

• 3:20:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:20:31Jocko Willink?

  Does that get us up to speed?

• 3:20:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:20:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:20:35Jocko Willink?

  Hal, you got any final thoughts?

• 3:20:38Speaker 01

  No, except that I hope that everyone understands why, when you've asked me to be on the podcast before, I insisted on having him here. And I'm so glad and I'm sure you're so glad that he's here.

• 3:20:55Jocko Willink?

  No doubt. And I can see we've only touched on the second tour that you did to Vietnam. So I'll have to come back and we'll, we'll, we'll rehash that one. And then maybe come back with you, Hal, and give some of your business lessons learned because again, you were real humble about going from negative 965,000 to where you ended up, which is in a much different spot. So maybe we need to learn some of those lessons as well. How you applied the SEAL, the SEAL leadership and SEAL lessons learned to your business world because it worked.

• 3:21:25Speaker 01

  It did work.

• 3:21:27Jocko Willink?

  Tom, you got anything? Anything else?

• 3:21:29Speaker 02

  Well, just thanks for having me. I'm impressed with your operation here. And I could give a shout out to Echo Charles and, and his biceps that have their own zip code.

• 3:21:45Jocko Willink?

  I'm telling you, you're gonna make him so happy with those comments. Awesome. Well, honestly, it's such an honor for me to sit here with you guys. Like I said, I joined the SEAL Teams because of guys like you. That's, that's what I wanted to do. That's what, when I saw what you guys did, the reputation that you had, that's, that's, that's why I joined the Navy. It's because of guys like you and um.

• 3:22:08Speaker 01

  Well, then you make us all proud, really.

• 3:22:11Jocko Willink?

  Well, we did, you know, my generation, I started off living off of your reputation, you know, got to live off your reputation. And I've told this to some young guys, you get to walk around with that trident and you get to be proud of that trident. You didn't do anything, anything for it. And, um, you know, I lived off your reputation that, you know, at McPhee's, all those years being a badass frogman, I wasn't a badass anything. Uh, then I'm, I'm happy and, and lucky and honored that my generation got to do, you know, we got to do our best to uphold the, the, the reputation that you all built. And, uh, we won't forget that. It's an inspiration, you know, to me, it's an inspira-, it was an inspiration to us. And it's a continuing

• 3:22:53Jocko Willink?

  inspiration for all the guys out there and not just the guys in the SEAL Teams, but just to American servicemen and women and just Americans in general across the board. Thank you for what you did.

• 3:23:06Speaker 01

  I, I did want to add, because you mentioned, one of the things that's very important to us, um, is we want all veterans, all military, all walks of life, no matter where they came, we're not claiming to be better than any other military force. Uh, we just, we want everybody to come and, and everybody to enjoy it.

• 3:23:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know, it's one of the, it's, it's one of the most important things, you know, I had, you know, you guys mentioned, how many times did you mention the Sea Wolves today? How many times did you mention the, the Black Ponies today? You know, I know for me, you know, when, especially in the Battle of Ramadi, we could not have conducted an operation. Without the support of the Marine Corps and of the Army. And not to mention that, you know, it was a Navy, the, the, the, the Charlie Med, our Field Medical Center was run by a Navy doctor. There was Air Force people on the staff. It was a true combined fight. And I, you know, for us, the grunts, the infantry men, they were going out, like, you know, we kind of talked about this from a leadership perspective, but it's not just a leadership perspective. The grunts are going out there.

• 3:24:14Jocko Willink?

  They're going out there every day. They're at massive risk. They suffered massive casualties. They took the fight to the enemy. They were incredibly courageous, incredibly brave. We were humbled and honored to be able to support them. And, um, and, and our roots, our roots are tied to the Marine Corps, tied to the Army Rangers. And when you read Ben Milligan's book, By Water Beneath the Walls, you really learn about all those things. So certainly, you know, this, this museum is not just about us. It's, it's about everybody that served this country and protected freedom. And it's an honor to sit here with two of the legends that did exactly that.

• 3:24:58Jocko Willink?

  Tom, Hal, thanks, thanks for joining us. Really appreciate it.

• 3:25:02Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:25:03Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 3:25:06Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Tom and Hal have left the building. I tried to maintain my composure, talking to those guys as best I could. Sometimes I didn't really pull it off.

• 3:25:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:25:21Jocko Willink?

  Cause I was a little bit giddy.

• 3:25:24Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:25:25Jocko Willink?

  And as they were leaving, you know, I reiterated the fact that I, they, so I joined the SEAL teams because of the, these guys, right? But it's not like I just joined the SEAL teams for these guys. My whole life is steered in a certain direction because of the Vietnam era SEALs.

• 3:25:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:25:46Jocko Willink?

  So some legends.

• 3:25:49Jocko Willink?

  So awesome to have him on here. So awesome to talk to him. And I hadn't met Tom before I've, I've hung out with Hal before, because he's a San Diego guy, and I see him around at stuff occasionally. And he's, he's, he's friends with Leif as well. And, um, but that was my first time meeting Tom. I actually met Tom last night at the museum, at the UDT Seal Museum. And he came up and he said, you know, hey, I'm Tom. And I said, oh, and I, I said, hey, I know more about you than you do right now. Cause I've been reading all of your stuff, you know, going through the, the folders and checking things out. So very cool. Honored to have those guys. Thanks for coming on. And yeah, so appreciate it.

• 3:26:34Jocko Willink?

  Also, physical fitness. You hear about, you hear about Mike Thornton carrying 1,500 rounds? Bro, that's next level. That's next level badass.

• 3:26:47Speaker 03

  Full capability.

• 3:26:48Jocko Willink?

  Full capability. That's beyond capability. That's, that's extra capability. And, you know, you hear like a legendary guy, like Mike Thornton, and, you know, in the, you know, maybe you think to yourself, well, hey, I get it. He's a legend, but what's that really mean? You know? Tell you what it means. It means 1,500 rounds of 762 on your person for operations. And he said he regularly carried an 800 to a thousand. So, hell yeah, get some. Uh, be strong. That's, that's what we learned from that. Be strong.

• 3:27:27Jocko Willink?

  Got to be strong. And if you want to be strong, you got to lift, got to work out, you got to train. And if you're going to lift, you're going to work out, you're going to train, guess what? You need fuel. We recommend Jog fuel. And by the way, today, normally, at this moment in time, when we get done with a podcast like that, I'm immediately going for 30 grams of protein of ready to drink. We don't have any in the office right now, which is very upsetting to me. And I feel like I'm going catabolic. It's an emergency.

• 3:27:55Speaker 03

  I took the last one. Sorry to say.

• 3:27:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's great. So you're over there getting stronger and bigger and faster. And I'm over here just in a catabolic state. This is my muscles are being eaten away. Don't let that happen. Hey, Echo left me hanging. Don't let it happen to you. Get yourself some protein. Have it on standby. Don't leave home without it. You shouldn't do that. You can also get energy drinks.

• 3:28:18Jocko Willink?

  Supplementation.

• 3:28:22Jocko Willink?

  Cold War, if you're on the road, keep you healthy. Time War, every day. I take Time War every day.

• 3:28:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:28:30Jocko Willink?

  Some people, some people don't take it on an empty stomach. My wife, for instance, she doesn't, she takes it like after breakfast.

• 3:28:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:28:37Jocko Willink?

  I don't eat breakfast.

• 3:28:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:28:38Jocko Willink?

  I wake up in the morning, I drink, I eat Time War.

• 3:28:40Speaker 03

  No worries.

• 3:28:41Jocko Willink?

  No factor, no factor. And by the way, I'm working out hard in the morning.

• 3:28:46Jocko Willink?

  Doing sprints, doing lifting, doing pull ups. Working back, bringing, we're recovering, we're in a recovery mode right now. We got situations happening, but we're pushing through. That's what we're doing. So you need help, recovery, you need help, be strong, fast, smart. Check out jockofuel.com, also check out your local store, whatever store you go to. There's a decent chance they have a Jocko Fuel there. If they don't, let them know. Say, we want to get that Jocko Fuel, we want to get it right here. So there you go, jockofuel.com, get some. Also, you heard me today, talk about something, talking about something called the Delta 68. Those are a pair of blue jeans. And you heard these guys say their whole platoon was wearing jeans.

• 3:29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:29:28Jocko Willink?

  Well, they said, maybe there's one, they said, maybe there's one or two guys that didn't wear jeans.

• 3:29:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:29:32Jocko Willink?

  But everyone else is wearing jeans in the Delta.

• 3:29:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:29:35Jocko Willink?

  Damn dude, this is Frogman activity. So, Origin USA, we make our jeans and our hoodies and our boots and our clothing and our t-shirts. All of it 100% made in America. Cause it's real ironic that you might today be like, oh, I'm gonna be patriotic. I'm gonna, I'm gonna think about the guys in the Vietnam Delta and I'm gonna get a pair of jeans and put them on, made in America, and you get a pair of other brand. If you get one of the iconic American brands. Iconic American brands.

• 3:30:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:30:06Jocko Willink?

  If you get one of them, they're not made in America. They're actually made by communists, which is who these men were fighting against. Communists. So you're trying to be cool, trying to mentally get on board with the program, and you're literally giving money to the communists.

• 3:30:24Jocko Willink?

  So don't let that happen. Here's what you do. Go get a pair of Delta sixty eights. You want to get in the mindset of the of the frog man in Vietnam, waist deep in the water. Bro, these guys got wet every single time. Every single time waist deep water, chest deep water, every single time, just miserable, miserable, miserable, sitting on ambush, miserable, sitting in a boat, miserable, walking up on a hooch. V C everywhere, bro, let's go.

• 3:30:57Jocko Willink?

  That was Mike Rittlin. Mike Rittlin was like, if you can go back anytime, in any time, and do do anything in history, what would you do? I was like, seal in Vietnam. He's like, yeah, I go, yeah, hundred percent, hundred percent, all day. That's what we're doing. So if you want to get your little like fantasy like I have of being a seal in Vietnam, at least get yourself a pair of Delta sixty eights. And these are the real deal, made in America. They they they're better than whatever these guys were wearing because they got a little bit of flex to them, right? Or you could get the new hundred percent cotton if you want to go old school. Maybe we should have called those like Delta sixty fours. Just keep it real. Check. All right. There it is. Origin USA, hundred percent made in America, originusa.com. Check it out.

• 3:31:40Speaker 03

  Yep, it's true. Speaking of mindset. So Jock Store, this one equals freedom. That's a mindset. Good. That's a mindset. So when we represent these mindsets, we can represent as far as what we are. Anyway, we have shirts and hats, hoodies, apparel, merch, all this kind of stuff. We've got some new versions of these designs. This one equals freedom. Good.

• 3:31:59Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 3:32:00Speaker 03

  Stand by to get some in the next week or two. Get after it. These, like I said, all mindsets. And so if you want to represent, that's where you go, jockstore.com. Also, something we call Shirt Locker, new design every month.

• 3:32:16Speaker 03

  A little bit outside the realm as far as outside the box as far as creativity, but people seem to like it. Anyway, you want to check it out? Click on the join the short locker. It'll open up. You'll see, you know, kind of examples of what it is, what it's all about. Anyway, it's all on Jocko's store.com.

• 3:32:30Jocko Willink?

  Check. Also, Dave Burke has got a book out. I believe it's out when you hear this. It's called Need to Lead. Order that thing ASAP. Also, Teammates: Seals at War, written by the great legendary Barry Enoch. So get that book. Hard to get.

• 3:32:49Jocko Willink?

  Also a book called The Men Behind the Trident: SEAL Team One in Vietnam by Dennis J. Cummings. And then there's this book here, which is called UDT SEAL Operations in Vietnam, which is a book that's like a big account of AARs. So those are the books that I kind of referenced for this podcast today. If you want to check them out. Also, Echelon Front, we have a leadership consulting company. We talk about the principles that we learned in the military and how they can be applied to your world, whatever that world is.

• 3:33:21Jocko Willink?

  It needs leadership. Doesn't matter if you're in charge of a Girl Scout troop, a Pee Wee soccer team, or a giant Fortune 50 company, or anything in between. You need leadership in those situations. Your family needs leadership. Your band, you're in a rock band, you need leadership inside that thing.

• 3:33:46Jocko Willink?

  Leadership is not a blessing from on high. It's not an inherited trait that you got from your mom or your dad. It is a skill that you learn. Echelonfront.com. We teach those skills and we also have an online training platform that can be found at extremeownership.com. If you want to help service members, active and retired Gold Star families.

• 3:34:10Jocko Willink?

  Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mom Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also, there's an organization called Heroes and Horses.org. And finally, Jimmy May's organization, Beyond the Brotherhood.org. Check all those out. Also, we have the Ramadi Reunion. If you are with the 11AD and you know who you are, in any capacity, if you were there, or you're a Gold Star family of someone that served with the 11AD, check out RamadiReunion20.com, January 16th and 17th, down in Texas. If you want to support the SEAL Museum, check

• 3:34:53Jocko Willink?

  out NavySEALMuseum.org and check out their social media, Instagram and Twitter, X, @NavyUDTSEALMuseum, and then Facebook, @NationalNavyUDTSEALMuseum. And for us, you can check out Jaco.com. And then on social media, I'm at Jocko Wheeling, Echo's at Echo Charles. But you should get pissed. You should get pissed. If you scroll more than four screens, or what's it called? More than four posts on the gram, you should be a little bit pissed, maybe even a lot pissed. By the time you get to eight, you should be like, oh, I'm throwing my life away. So

• 3:35:34Jocko Willink?

  don't get caught by the algorithm. Get in there, get out. Don't even go in there. Don't even go in there if you don't have to. Thanks once again to Tom and Hal. Amazing to sit down with you guys, sharing your stories. Charlie Platoon is a legendary platoon from Vietnam. This is one of the important platoons, one of the platoons that we, that really built the reputation of the SEAL teams. And there's others. We'll try and get the rest of the legendary platoons on here. But thanks to you two for coming on board and talking about that platoon, Charlie Platoon. Thanks for your service to the nation and to the teams. And for, as I said, giving us the reputation that we got to.

• 3:36:21Jocko Willink?

  Give our best shot and carrying on. Also, thanks to all of our service members around the world with a distinct salute to those who served in Vietnam. It was a brutal war with incredibly high costs. And there was very little thanks when you all returned. Unless you were returning to Coronado as a SEAL platoon, then your brothers were going to be there to say thanks and welcome home. But a lot of veterans from that war didn't get that. So from our current generation to yours, thank you for what you did for freedom and for America. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. You also receive very little thanks. So let it be known that we are grateful for your

• 3:37:06Jocko Willink?

  service and sacrifice to keep us safe here on the home front. And everyone else out there, there's something that might not apply to everyone directly, but it's worth considering. It comes from the SEAL ethos. And it's the last paragraph. And it says, brave SEALs have fought and died building the proud tradition and feared reputation that I am bound to uphold. In the worst of conditions, the legacy of my teammates. Resolve steadies my resolve and silently guides my every deed. I will not fail.

• 3:37:50Jocko Willink?

  So you heard tonight from two men that fought to build the reputation of the SEAL teams, but I think this is the connection. There's people in your history. There's people that have fought for you. There's generations of people that have fought for you. They've hunted. They've built. They've worked. They've suffered. For you to be here. So think about them. Think about your ancestors who sacrificed for you. Think about what you can do to pay them back. And there's no better way to pay them back.

• 3:38:33Jocko Willink?

  Than to live a good life. So go live it. And that's all I've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko.