204: Don't Volunteer for SOG. With Dick Thompson

0:00:00 – Opening 0:05:44 – Dick Thompson, SOG Warrior 2:38:26 – Final thoughts and take-aways. 2:46:45 – How to stay on THE PATH. 3:11:12 – Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 204 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States and as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, I have today awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for extraordinary heroism to the Studies and Observations Group Military Assistance Command. The Studies and Observation Group is cited for extraordinary heroism, great combat achievement, and unwavering fidelity while executing unheralded, top-secret missions deep behind enemy lines across Southeast Asia.

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  Incorporating volunteers from all branches of the Armed Forces and especially US Army Special Forces, SOG's ground, air, and sea units fought officially denied actions, which contributed immeasurably to the American war effort in Vietnam. MACV SOG reconnaissance teams, composed of Special Forces soldiers and indigenous personnel, penetrated the enemy's most dangerous redoubts in the jungled Laotian wilderness and the sanctuaries of eastern Cambodia. Pursued by human trackers and even bloodhounds, these small teams outmaneuvered, outfought,

• 1:28Jocko Willink?

  and outran their numerically superior foe to uncover key enemy facilities, rescue down pilots, plant wire traps, mines, and electronic sensors, capture valuable enemy prisoners, ambush convoys, discover and assess targets for B-52 strikes, and inflict casualties, all out of proportion to their own losses.

• 1:52Jocko Willink?

  When enemy countermeasures became dangerously effective, SOG operators innovated their own counters, from high-altitude parachuting and unusual explosive devices to tactics as old as the French and Indian War.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  Fighting alongside their Montignyard, Chinese Nung, Cambodian and Vietnamese Allies, Special Forces-led Hatchet Forces companies and platoons staged daring raids against key enemy facilities in Laos and Cambodia, overran major munitions and supply stockpiles, and blocked enemy highways to choke off the flow of supplies to South Vietnam. SOG's cross-border operations proved an effective economy of force, compelling the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese Army to divert 50,000 soldiers to rear air security details far from the battlefields of South Vietnam.

• 2:52Jocko Willink?

  Supporting these hazardous missions were SOG's own US and South Vietnamese Air Force Transport and Helicopter Squadrons, along with US Air Force Forward Air Controllers and helicopter units of the US Army and US Marine Corps. These courageous aviators often flew through heavy fire to extract SOG operators from seemingly hopeless situations, saving lives by selflessly risking their own. SOG's Vietnamese Naval Surface Forces instructed and advised by US Navy SEALs boldly raided North Vietnam's coast and won surface victories against the North Vietnamese Navy while indigenous

• 3:33Jocko Willink?

  agent teams penetrated the very heartland of North Vietnam. Despite casualties that sometimes became universal, SOG's operators never wavered, but fought throughout the war with the same flair, fidelity, and intrepidity that distinguished SOG from its beginning. The studies and observation groups, combat prowess, martial skills, and unacknowledged sacrifices saved many American lives and provide a paragon for America's future Special Operations Forces.

• 4:18Jocko Willink?

  Signed, President of the United States, George Walker Bush.

• 4:26Jocko Willink?

  And that is the Presidential Unit Citation, presented for those that served in MACV SOG, the Studies and Observation Group in Vietnam. And for those of you that don't know what the Presidential Unit Citation is, it's an award that is given to whole units. Who, and this is, this is the way they describe it, I quote, "display gallantry, determination, and esprit de corps that sets them apart from other units." And you have heard about SOG on this podcast before.

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  First from John Stryker Meyer, otherwise known as Tilt. And he was on Podcast 180, 181, and 182. And then from his comrade in arms, the late, great hero Doug "The Frenchman" Laterno. And it is an honor for us tonight to have another SOG warrior here. Henry Dick Thompson, code named Dynamite, and later known as The Terminator, who served

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  as a SOG 1-1 and as a 1-0, and then continued on with 21 years in the Army, eventually retiring and having a whole nother career as a leadership consultant, author, and speaker. Mr. Thompson. And I know I should probably say Dr. Thompson, because I know you got your PhD as well. If the, in case everything else wasn't enough, sir, welcome to the program. Thank you for coming on.

• 6:14Jocko Willink?

  Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  So, let's start at the beginning. Where'd you grow up?

• 6:20Jocko Willink?

  I'm South Carolina, a little town called Walhalla, not far from Clemson University.

• 6:27Jocko Willink?

  And, and what, what years, what, what year were you born?

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  1947.

• 6:32Jocko Willink?

  1947. So you kind of grew up in the 50s.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  And, and then, were you, were you in a military family or anything like that?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Uh, my father, yeah, my father was, uh, World War II in Korea. Um, my mother had five brothers, all World War II, one was, uh, killed. So, I was around it, you know, like from the start, because I, yeah, our family was together a lot, so had a lot of discussion, you know, about the war and things that were going on. And I was always asking questions, and how do you do this, and how do you do that? And how do you organize? So, I was interested, you know, right from the beginning.

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  And your, your dad was in World War II and Korea? What was his job in the military? What branch was he in?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Infantry. So, and he did work, uh, with the Rangers for a while, in World War II.

• 7:27Jocko Willink?

  And so, would you hear him, would he debrief you on the types of operations that he did in World War II and Korea?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Some of it. Um, he didn't talk a whole lot about exactly what he did, but he would talk in general about what was going on, uh, about the kinds of operations and things, so.

• 7:45Jocko Willink?

  What theater did you fight in?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Uh, he was in, in, uh, Germany, most of the time, in that area, so.

• 7:54Jocko Willink?

  And how, how long was he in the Army for?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Uh, Army was about four years, and then he got out. And then when Korea came along, then, uh, they called him back in. And that's really where I started to hear about it, because I was old enough by then to, um, hear people talk about Korea and about the war. And, um, I would, you know, he would write letters home, and he'd talk about how deep the mud was, or how cold it was, and things like that. So, uh, I was hearing about the war, you know, firsthand, then, so.

• 8:32Jocko Willink?

  And were you thinking, "I'm going in the military"?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  I was probably four or five when I started thinking about that. And interestingly enough, I did find my old logbook. Because I also got interested in the Rangers. I wanted to be a Ranger when I went in. So I found a logbook that I created when, you know, I was about nine or so when I created it. I had all the members of our Ranger company listed, which was primarily my cousins. But, you know, we had some other people we had recruited in. And we had the journal of things that we did. People who got promoted, people who I court martial.

• 9:22Jocko Willink?

  So were you guys doing night raids and stuff?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  We spent a lot of time in the woods. I grew up in the woods. You know, when I was five years old, when I get a chance, I'd go off in the woods by myself. I'd go play, I'd track animals, I'd listen to the sounds, I'd learn how to move. By the time I was six, I had an army pup tent and I would take up on top of a hill in the woods. Put it up, sleep up there by myself that night, take some eggs and stuff with me. I'd build a little fire, you know, cook. As I got a little older, I had my BB gun, take out some birds, roast them over the fire. So doing things like that, that I thought Rangers did, so.

• 10:06Jocko Willink?

  You were the six-year-old Ranger.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:08Jocko Willink?

  Company commander, getting after it.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Well, the logbook said General Thompson.

• 10:14Jocko Willink?

  Hey, that works. And then, what about high school? Did you play sports?

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Football and track.

• 10:21Jocko Willink?

  What was your athletic capability?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  I was better than average on the team. I wasn't, you know, college material. But, you know, because I was relatively small, but I could hit really hard. My senior year, they even moved me from running back to defensive end, which I was on a line that weighed over 200 pounds and I was 140. You didn't want to come around my end.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  My other skill was, you know, I was very fast. So when the quarterback had dropped back, he'd see me in his face because I could get there really quickly.

• 11:00Jocko Willink?

  And then, so when you graduated high school, did you, did you know you were going to college or what was your plan?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I started college and after about a year and a half, you know, Vietnam was going hot and heavy. You saw it on the news every night.

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  What year did you graduate high school?

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Uh, sixty-five.

• 11:20Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so yeah, I, I, from what I can tell, because I wasn't alive then, but from what I can tell, the, the Battle of the Idrang Valley was in nineteen sixty-five and that was kind of where the real, hey, we're, we're in combat all the time now. It seems to, that seems to be the pivot point that's noticeable when you look at it historically.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that was when I think we discovered the North Vietnamese had a real army and they were very good, much better than anybody thought at the time. And over the next few years, I mean, you, you could place them probably in the top four in the world in terms of armies. Plus, we were fighting in their backyard. They knew the terrain. They knew how to operate there. They didn't stop. They just keep coming. Their biggest disadvantage was they didn't have the technology that we did. They didn't, they didn't have air superiority. Just a lot of things they didn't have that held them back or it would

• 12:24Speaker 02

  have been much worse than it was.

• 12:26Jocko Willink?

  So it's nineteen sixty-five is, that's when you said you graduated high school?

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:30Jocko Willink?

  And when you graduated high school, you go to college. Where'd you go to college?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Uh, University of South Carolina.

• 12:35Jocko Willink?

  And then you said it was like a year and a half. Did you, what'd you end up doing?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Well, I, I made a decision that what I wanted to do is take a break from school because Vietnam was going on. I felt an obligation, you know, to go do something, do my part. And actually was on my way to the Marine recruiter.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Because that's who you saw on TV every night.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  But stopped by the army recruiter who was next door just to see what they had to offer. So I went with the army and I knew that would give me a chance to do the Rangers if I decided that's what I wanted to do. By then I was also a chemist. About thirteen, I developed a passion for chemistry. So in addition to all the outdoor stuff, you know, I was, I set up my own laboratory in the barn at home. I spent all my money on chemicals and I know you like this, but back in the day,

• 13:42Speaker 02

  back in the day, you could, you could go into a pharmacy and buy all kinds of things. I mean, you could buy, you know, nitric acid and all, I mean, just unbelievable chemicals, you know, you could buy, particularly if you got your mother to sign for you and say, yeah, it's okay to let him have that stuff. And I would stock my, my lab with it and do all kinds of experiments. I, I was getting close maybe to a successful brain exchange between birds and frogs. I could get it in there, I just couldn't get them, you know, to start breathing again afterwards, so I had a lot of.

• 14:22Jocko Willink?

  That sounds close.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, anyway.

• 14:25Jocko Willink?

  So were you studying chemistry in college?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, I went to school on a chemistry scholarship. The intent was to be, you know, get a doctorate in chemistry and be a researcher. But then I decided to take the break, do three years in the army and then come back and finish the degree.

• 14:44Jocko Willink?

  So, so is it nineteen sixty-seven now?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  One in sixty-seven.

• 14:48Jocko Willink?

  So it's nineteen sixty-seven. How strong were, were the sentiments in America against the war?

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Very strong.

• 14:54Jocko Willink?

  In sixty-seven?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Very strong.

• 14:55Jocko Willink?

  So that was already there?

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:58Jocko Willink?

  What about in South Carolina?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Not as much as some of the other parts of the of the country, you know, but it was still there. It wasn't something that everyone thought we should be doing.

• 15:12Jocko Willink?

  And what about your dad, who had seen combat in World War II and in Korea? How did he feel about you going in?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  He supported it. My mother didn't. You know, she wanted me to finish school. I said, you know, I'm just taking a three-year break. I'll come back, finish the doctorate, and everything will be fine. She said, no, you won't. I said, yes, I will. I'll be back.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, when I got in, they started talking about, man, you got to go to airborne school. You need to be airborne. And they said, you need to go to OCS. You need to be an officer.

• 15:53Jocko Willink?

  So at what point, so you go to boot camp?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:56Jocko Willink?

  And is it boot camp where they're like, looking at you going, hey, we need airborne soldiers?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:01Jocko Willink?

  And was that a pretty easy pathway to get to?

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, they they ask you day one when you go into the induction center, you want to volunteer to be airborne? My response was, no. That's not what I'm here for. But then, once I got into, you know, boot camp, I ate that stuff up.

• 16:24Jocko Willink?

  Did you still, so when you were, when you, when you went in, what was the predominant part of your brain that was functioning? Was it the, hey, I'm going to do three years, serve my country, and look for a job that'll be similar to being a chemist? Or was the primary part of your brain that was functioning was the, I want to be a ranger and and go get after it?

• 16:44Speaker 02

  It was, when I first entered, first couple of days, it was, you know, three years, I'm out, go back to school, be a chemist. I guess it was maybe the first morning, we were in the barracks, and, you know, about 3:30, 4 o'clock, the lights come on, somebody starts yelling and screaming and hollering to get out of the, out of bed, fall in, you know, get in formation in front of the box. And then I hear. You know, we're in double box. I hear him start crashing onto the floor. And I jump out and I look and here's this guy smaller than me. And he has a big, you know, Smokey the Bear hat on, a ranger tab.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  And I said, wow.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  And everybody there jumped when that guy said to do something. And I said, okay. I need to start rethinking here.

• 17:41Jocko Willink?

  There's gotta be something innate in men to, to, that's just, that's just what happens. You see that and you go, yes, I'm in for that.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this guy was impressive and, and, you know, that brought back all the ranger stuff. And it started to override the chemistry, you know, so then we get out, we're on the firing range, you know, and

• 18:06Speaker 02

  I was an expert marksman before I ever, you know, went in. So, you know, I'd max out the marksmanship. I was in, you know, good physical condition. So, every, everything they were doing, I could do. And I, I learned it really fast. Uh, one night I was on, um, uh, CQ duty. I had to work in the orderly room with the person who was there all night. And I saw this book laying on the table. Uh, it was FM twenty-two dash one hundred, drill and ceremonies. And I picked it up and I started looking at it and I thought,

• 18:44Speaker 02

  this tells you everything about, you know, right face, left face, when to call to command, all this. I said, it's all written out right here. I mean, if I'd had this book for the last couple of weeks. So I read the book that night, you know, I read pretty fast. The next day, I could see the mistakes that the drill sergeants are making. And I don't, I made the mistake one time of pointing it out. So, you know, I get to work on my triceps and pecs a little bit as I pushed.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Pushed Fort Gordon a little bit close to the China, but um I found it, this stuff is all written down. You can give me access to it, I'll learn it. And so I was the, put in charge of my platoon as a platoon guide because, you know, physically, mentally, everything, I was doing great. Um, so I, I had a good time.

• 19:34Jocko Willink?

  And then you volunteered, was it, did you have a job designated when you went in? Were you, were you gonna be infantry when you went in?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  There, I was going into the chemical corps.

• 19:43Jocko Willink?

  So, oh, so the chemistry brain was legitimately winning when you went in?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  It was, for a few days.

• 19:49Jocko Willink?

  And then, and then did you change your, your specialty to infantry?

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:54Jocko Willink?

  You walked in and said, yeah, hey, I know I showed up to be a chemist, but I want to carry a machine gun.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:00Jocko Willink?

  Maybe, how hard was it to do that?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Not hard at all, because I, I was so fired up. I, I loved the things that we were doing. And I figured, I can do this for three years. I can still go back and do, be a chemist if I want to.

• 20:13Jocko Willink?

  But they let you change? They let you, they said, okay, cool?

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Hey, if you want to change to infantry?

• 20:18Jocko Willink?

  During Vietnam, it was no problem?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  No problem. Anybody that would volunteer for that, I mean, you got it right away.

• 20:24Jocko Willink?

  And then next up, how did you volunteer for airborne school? Same thing?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I mean, I just, I had an opportunity to, to volunteer. Uh, well, after boot camp, you go to, uh, in my case, I went to advanced infantry training.

• 20:39Jocko Willink?

  A I T.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you, you know, and there you're volunteering for different things. So I volunteered, um, you know, for O C S, I volunteered to go to airborne school. So I went to O C S first.

• 20:51Jocko Willink?

  And they sent you to O C S even though you hadn't completed college?

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:56Jocko Willink?

  And they didn't care?

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Neither at that time.

• 20:59Jocko Willink?

  They're like, hey, you're smart.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Lieutenants were getting killed so fast. I mean, they, they couldn't produce lieutenants fast enough. Uh, you know, lieutenant had a life expectancy of about a day and a half in Vietnam. So, you know, that was easy to get in. And, you know, I did that. I did, you know, really well in O C S. So it was easy when I said, okay, I want to go to airborne school and I want to go to special forces.

• 21:28Jocko Willink?

  So you made that decision as well?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:31Jocko Willink?

  Now, what about being going from officers to special forces? Was there any challenge in making that happen? Or was it still just open, wide open?

• 21:39Speaker 02

  They took me right in. Yeah, you know, I had done well. I I got accepted to that, you know, so I had to.

• 21:46Jocko Willink?

  How old were you at this point?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Nineteen, twenty.

• 21:52Jocko Willink?

  So you're nineteen years old. You have a year and a half of college. You're an officer in the army going to special forces airborne. And this is all just tracking you to go to Vietnam?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you're on that track, but go ahead.

• 22:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, I was gonna say, when you so airborne school, you know, is airborne school. I went to airborne school. I was lucky lucky enough to have been in the Navy when we still went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and did airborne school. But what about special forces school? As you were going through that, what was your impression of what was going on? What was the instruction like? How well was that preparing you from your perspective for what you were going to be doing in Vietnam?

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Um, I think it did a it didn't prepare me for SOG necessarily. It gave me a lot of the basics. Special forces is not just about going in and conducting a raid or something like that. It's really about going in and working with the people. We did a lot of training on insurgencies, how governments are overthrown, different things like that. So particularly since I was an officer, I was on the officer track. So we were doing a lot of the bigger picture stuff. Plus, officers get trained in all of the primary skill sets of special forces.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Whereas if you're enlisted, coming coming out of the qualification training, you go to be a weapons specialist or to be a medic or whatever. You you go into a specialty area. Officers have to be trained in all of them so that you understand what the people are talking about if you're gonna lead them. So, um, I enjoyed that, did well in it, volunteered for Ranger School.

• 23:36Jocko Willink?

  And then you went to Ranger School after?

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Went to Ranger School after, so, a lot of harassment. Uh, my Ranger buddy and I, you know, we'd been together forever, so we'd go there.

• 23:51Jocko Willink?

  And was that Bob?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was Bob. And we have to, you have to go knock on the door to get in, to report into Ranger School, and you can't knock on the door hard enough. So Bob and I got back and ran into it and just knocked it off the hinges almost, and then reported in and, you know, the instructor that's there, he looked at us, he looked down at the paper, and he told the other guy that was with him, he said, "We've got two snake eaters here. We're gonna have to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't crap in the street out there or something." And, you know, it went downhill from there. Because then it became, uh, Ranger

• 24:33Speaker 02

  School kinda became a tug of war between SF and, and the Rangers. So, every time you did something, if they dropped you for push-ups or something, then you had to do one more for the big Ranger in the sky. So Bob and I would do, for the big Ranger in the sky, and two for the big SF trooper that looks over the big Ranger, you know, then they'd put us back down again. So, you know, it, we tried to have as much fun in Ranger School as we could, you know, because it was tough, and being able to put a little humor in it as you went along.

• 25:07Jocko Willink?

  Now, was Ranger School, in terms of preparation for what you're gonna be doing in SOG, a little bit closer?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:13Jocko Willink?

  Because now you're doing light infantry?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Well, it's, it's really infantry, but it's, uh, patrolling operations, um, raid, ambushes, uh, you know, those kinds of things that we're doing in SOG. In fact, you know, when I first got to SOG, when I went in with, with my group, uh, everybody that I arrived with went to what they called the one zero school, the SOG team leader school. And I'm standing there and everybody else is walking away, and I was, "What about me?" And, "You don't need to go to one zero school, you're a Ranger, you're going to a team. So, tomorrow you'll be on a team."

• 25:51Jocko Willink?

  So what point did you hear about SOG?

• 25:55Speaker 02

  You heard rumors, you know, when you're at SF at Fort Bragg, every once in a while, somebody would mention the term SOG, and you'd, what is that? What do they do? Oh, man, it's top secret. Nobody can tell you what it is, but they really do some really cool missions. I mean, that's the elite, but nobody can tell you, you know, what they really do.

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  So, so you, you, how much, this, all the schooling must've taken, what, two years for you to get through all this schooling?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Um, it's a year and a half at this point, probably.

• 26:29Jocko Willink?

  Year and a half, and when you get done with Ranger School, do you finally check into a, a, a special forces group?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  No, I'd already, we were in, there was a little interim in there before Ranger School. So, we were already assigned to an A team, to a B team. I was already targeted toward Africa and actually in mission preparation to deploy to Africa for a mission that we're going on there. But I had volunteered to, I had put in the paperwork to go to Vietnam. So, right after Ranger School, that came through.

• 27:07Jocko Willink?

  And you went to all these schools with your friend Bob?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:10Jocko Willink?

  How did you know him? Where did you guys meet?

• 27:12Speaker 02

  We, we met in advanced infantry training, right off the bat. So, I mean, it was, it was unreal. We just, every school, we had the same interests. So, I mean, we went to every school together, you know, the whole time.

• 27:26Jocko Willink?

  Where was he from?

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Um, California.

• 27:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay. But you guys just hit it off?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:33Jocko Willink?

  You guys were both had the same motivation?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Had that same mindset. We were gonna do it.

• 27:36Jocko Willink?

  So, then at what, so, so you get your orders changed, and was that hard to do? Again, I mean.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  If there's, if there's a choice, in the military, if there's a choice between sending someone to Africa or sending them to Vietnam, at that time, Vietnam was gonna win. It always won out.

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  So, as long as you wanted to take the hardest jobs and do the toughest things, it was pretty easy to get that path opened up for yourself? The Army will accommodate you.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:07Jocko Willink?

  So, all right, let's get, let's head over to Vietnam.

• 28:11Jocko Willink?

  When you show up there, I remember Tilt saying, they kind of showed up in Vietnam and they said, hey, who wants to volunteer now for SOG? Is that what happened to you or did you already volunteer and knew where you were going?

• 28:22Speaker 02

  I knew I was going to Special Forces. I knew I'd get a Special Forces assignment. And then when we got there, there was a guy who was already there working at a MiG force, but he was there in the train. And so we linked up with him. We went to a bar that night and, you know, he kind of updated us on things that were going on. And one of the things he said was, tomorrow, toward the end of the day, one of the last things they're going to do is they're going to ask you if you want to volunteer for SOG. And he said, whatever you do, don't do it. Just tell them no. They'll say thank you. And,

• 29:05Speaker 02

  you know, you move on to your Special Forces assignment. So, the next day, toward the end of the day, where Bob and I are sitting in the office waiting to go in to see Colonel, you know, Jones or whatever, and he said, what are you going to do? And I said, I'll make my decision. You have to make yours. You know, this is not a joint decision on this thing. You know, so I went in and he asked me about SOG, told me just a little bit, and then said, you know, if you want to do that, you have to sign a bunch of papers

• 29:44Speaker 02

  here. You volunteer in for six months, basically go anywhere, do anything. And he said, you've got to understand I'm saying anything. I said, okay. And then, you know, you have to sign this other thing. You can't tell anybody for 20 years, you know, what you do, stuff like that. So I volunteered. He sent me out the back door and brought Bob in the other door. I went back over to the little bar to meet up with our friend. And I came walking in and he said, You did it. I can see it on your face. That you are a dead man walking. I told you not to do that. And, you know, when Bob showed up, it was the same way. He could say, I knew he was gonna do it, but, yeah.

• 30:29Jocko Willink?

  So now you two, so, so that, that was the attitude was the casualty rate was so high in SOG that when someone volunteered for it, it was like they were a dead man walking.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the chances of survival, i- if you ended up on a team, if you went to, you know, a staff position, it's a little different, but if you were on a team, uh, you knew a minimum of you're gonna get wounded.

• 30:53Jocko Willink?

  Did you, and did you, you knew that? Obviously, somebody, is this what the guy that was telling you, don't, don't go to SOG? He said, don't go to SOG cuz you're gonna get wounded or you're gonna get killed. That's guaranteed.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  And most likely, you're gonna get killed.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  He said, the, the highest casualty rate in Vietnam is there. Those guys don't survive. I'm not sure exactly what they do, but they don't survive.

• 31:18Jocko Willink?

  You got something, you got one note in the note you gave me, it says, it says, blackbirds.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  So, uh, we had to fly from Nha Trang up to Da Nang uh, the next day, cuz if you're going to SOG, you had, you had to go to Da Nang.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  So when we go to the airfield, they take us to a restricted area of the airfield. And the, the C-130s and 123s that came into that part of the airfield were black. And he said, wow, that's, that's a little different than everything else. And, um, you get on, on the aircraft, you know, there are no seats. There are seat belts on the floor. So the plane is gutted, except for the front end, and there's a line up there that says, do not go beyond this line, classified area. So something was happening in the front of those planes that we were not allowed to, to go see. So we sat on the floor. And, you know, we fly up there and we get off.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Escort picks us up and he says,

• 32:26Speaker 02

  um, there'll be a bus here to pick you up in a few minutes to take you over to CCN.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  And so this school bus like thing shows up that's black. The windows are shot out. There must have been two hundred bullet holes in the bus. And, you know, we're looking at the bus thinking, oh geez, what have we gotten into? The guy driving the bus, he said, we'll leave in a few minutes. We're picking up a team here today too. And I, what happened to the bus? And he said, well, there's a pass that we have to go through. And we get ambushed there sometimes, so. The main thing for you, you two to remember is if, you know, the stuff starts, you get on the floor of the bus and do whatever the team tells you.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  They'll take care of everything. You just do what they tell you if you want to live. And we think, man, this is not looking good. We might not even get there, so. But we did, and we got there. What was the, did you guys pick up a team? Uh, no. When we first got there, um, you know, it was late afternoon, so. They assigned us to a bunk and told us that we would get briefed the next morning on what we were gonna do and told us just, you know, get something, eat in the mess hall, relax. There'd be a movie showing that night. And we're thinking, a movie? So, they had constructed some kind of like bleachers, had this little open area,

• 34:03Speaker 02

  nailed up a few sheets of plywood and had a movie projector. And they would get movies from somewhere and they would show a movie out there. So, we went, let's go watch the movie. And behind that screen was Marble Mountain, which juts up out of the sand, four hundred and fifty feet, just out of nowhere. This thing is jutting up there. And there's two peaks. Each peak up there has a combat outpost on it. Because if the bad guys, you know, got up there, they could shoot right down into the compound. So we're watching the movie and all of a sudden red and green tracers are going everywhere. I mean, it's just crisscrossing, Bob and I are starting to hit the ground and everybody else is just watching the movie.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  And I asked one guy, "What's going on?" And he said, "Don't worry about it. That happens every night." And he said, "Every night, they've got to get the guys off to combat outpost and, you know, they put on a little light show up there. It'll be fine. They don't shoot down here because they're getting shot at and they shoot back at those people." Wow, well, that's interesting.

• 35:08Jocko Willink?

  So then what happens, when everyone else got sent to 1-0 school, did Bob get sent to 1-0 school or is he the same as you?

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Well, before that, the next morning, we got our briefing. We went into the headquarters, into the briefing room and, you know, the Colonel came in and said, "Okay, let me tell you what SOG is about. Let me tell you what you're going to be doing." And he uncovered some maps on the wall and started talking about the kinds of missions that we would be going on and that, you know, we would be put on teams and we'd be leading those missions. And he kind of explained that, you know, we had three major areas. You had the northern area, which was CCN there, but the Forward Operational Base was up in Phu

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Bi. And so he explained where the different camps were. And then after that, you know, he told me I'd be going to FOB-1 up north. Bob would be going down to Central, down around Kon Tum, you know, so we went our different ways at that point.

• 36:16Jocko Willink?

  Did, when he started briefing you on what the missions consisted of, did you have any, was your guess anywhere close to that? Did you have any idea and say, "Yeah, that's probably what I thought we would be doing"? Was it close?

• 36:31Speaker 02

  I had heard rumors that maybe they operated outside of Vietnam, you know, so it didn't surprise me that much when he started talking about the countries we were going to actually go into. The kinds of missions didn't surprise me too much. I mean, a few of them did, but for the most part, it was, "Wow, this is pretty cool." It's crazy, but it's pretty cool.

• 36:58Jocko Willink?

  Did he talk to you at all about casualty rates or anything?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 37:04Jocko Willink?

  All right, so, so then what happens? Do you get assigned?

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I went to FOB1 at FUBI with a group of other people. And when we got there, they grabbed everybody but me and said, you know, you guys are going to 1-0 school, so a week-long course to, to teach them how to be a leader, small team in the jungle. There were a few things that they probably got that I hadn't done already, but not much. So I was assigned, or told I'd be assigned to the, a team the next morning, told me to go report over to the supply room. They had a mission for me first that I needed to do.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  So when I got there, they told me that we had had some casualties and that their personal effects had to be inventoried, you know, by an officer before they could be sent home. So, he said, you know, their duffel bags are in there, you know, if you just dump them out, go through them, look for anything that might be classified, a map or anything like that. If there's any correspondence in there, read it, make sure it doesn't say anything about any of the missions. If there are pictures, you know, get all the pictures out. So, pretty well, you know, sterilize their, their gear.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  So, the first bag I picked up, when I read the name, I thought, wow, you know, I know him. So, this was a guy that, you know, we had run around with some at BRAG, so I already knew him. And he came over, you know, about a month before me, and now I'm inventorying his stuff. So, kinda got my attention, so, wow. That casualty rate, you know, probably is pretty high here. But then the next day, I was, you know, assigned to the team. As the one one, the assistant team leader. And, you know, we started mission prep to get ready to go out.

• 39:10Jocko Willink?

  And who was the team leader?

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Sergeant Deck.

• 39:13Jocko Willink?

  So it's, it's very cool that even though you were an officer, you were going to be second in command.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  No one, no one was going to walk into a team regardless of your rank and just, you know, say, I'm here and I'm, I'm the team leader. You had to, regardless of your rank, you had to go out as an assistant or, or, or lower and learn how to lead a team, learn what's going on out there and eventually get checked off by the team leader. He would, you know, like Sergeant Deck had to say, okay, Thompson can lead a team now. You know, and that put me, put me on the list to take over the next team, you know, that was available.

• 39:55Jocko Willink?

  So what did the team consist of?

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Uh, myself, um, and, you know, Sergeant Deck, myself and another American. And then, you know, we had probably nine indigenous members on the team.

• 40:09Jocko Willink?

  And who were the first indig? What kind of indig crews, the first crew, were they Vietnamese?

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Vietnamese.

• 40:15Jocko Willink?

  Okay. And then did you, did you go through any training protocol to be ready for your first mission or what?

• 40:21Speaker 02

  With the team. I mean, we just, we started training right away. Once I was assigned, you know, Deck grabbed me up and started talking to me, this is what you've got to do. Here's what I'm looking for. Here's where we're going, what we're going to do. We took the team out, we started doing immediate action drills and, and preparation for what we were going to do on the mission.

• 40:41Jocko Willink?

  How long did you guys have to train before you guys rolled out on your first mission?

• 40:46Speaker 02

  I, it was, it was probably eight to 10 days before we actually went out. So, so I had a little time to get to know the team better, to learn all the, the drills and the way they did things.

• 41:02Jocko Willink?

  What was the level of English speaking for your indig troops?

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Uh, very good for the interpreter and the others, they understood some words, you know, the common words that you would use, get down, stop, you know, things like that that you used all the time, but I mean, you couldn't carry on a conversation.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  And what was your?

• 41:23Jocko Willink?

  How good was your level of focus during this time? I imagine you must have been just as focused as a human being could get.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is real. I saw totally focused. There was nothing else on my mind.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  In fact, we had a, we had a, a little theater there at FUBI. Had a little top on it, so if it rained, we didn't get wet, but some old benches we were sitting on, a piece of plywood, the movie was on. And so I went to a movie after a couple of days. They had one, I, I went to the movie that evening, and I'm sitting there, and I hear this loud pow! And the guy next to me falls off on the ground. And I'm thinking, you know, because we're, we're sitting outside. We just have a little top on. And he falls over on the ground, hit in the shoulder.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Wow. Didn't matter where you are.

• 42:16Jocko Willink?

  That, that, that puts a downer on movie night.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I wasn't that much into movie night.

• 42:24Jocko Willink?

  All right, so now, what's the first mission that you guys get assigned?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  They were doing some testing, among other things, in addition to just sending us on a mission. They were trying to figure out, what was the best time to put a team on the ground? Should you put them in right at first light, so when you get off the aircraft, you can move out? And, and head to wherever you're, you're going to go. You, you're getting away from LZ quickly, you know, because they, the bad guys had figured out that you had been inserted, and they'd come out and start looking for you. Or was the best way to do it, go in at last light, so it's dark? You get off the LZ, you set up, and you remain overnight position.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  And then head out at first light. So if the NVA or tractors are coming after you, then they were having to do it in the dark. So our team had been selected to, to be a last light insertion, to see how that worked.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  So, you know, and I had already been briefed on some things, like, we go in high. We go in 3,000 feet or so when we're flying to, to the LZ, to avoid the small orange fire coming up at us. And then, when you get out there to the, to the LZ. He's gonna bank the aircraft on the side. Uh, and he's gonna put it in auto-rotate. And it's just gonna fall out of the sky in a spiral until he gets to where he wants to make his short final coming into LZ. And then he'll put the power back on and slow it down and we'll come in. I was not quite prepared for that.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I understood the concept and what he was saying, but I didn't realize that when he put that thing in auto-rotate, I wasn't gonna be sitting on anything. And then I was on the side that it was turned toward. So I'm just hanging out there in the air, holding on to the side of the aircraft, looking down 3,000 feet and saying, "This is not good." You know, my stomach's up in my throat and it's like a thrill ride at the fair or something. And this thing is falling. And I'm, I'm just trying to hang on and stay in there. So we spiraled in, we come around and we're coming in on a short final.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  It's on a ridgeline, uh, and they had dropped, um, uh, what was called a Daisy Cutter 2,000-pound bomb, um, to blow a hole in the canopy big enough that we could set the helicopter down in. And we're coming in, we're flying over a little pond on the ridgeline and I'm, you know, climbing out on the skid of the helicopter myself and, um, the other American, the team leaders on the other side. So we're climbing out on the skid and I'm thinking, "Man." I mean, we're going really slow and I'm just a setting target. I mean, they could just knock me off of this thing anytime.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  This is not, not good. Um, so we come up and we had to literally go straight down into the bomb crater. So the pilot's trying not to clip trees as we're setting down. It's just getting dark.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  And we're going in and myself and the other guy are on the skid. And we're close enough and he slowed down enough. I said, okay, this is it. We're gonna have to jump on, you know, down into the bomb crater. I bent my knees to jump and just as I did, I saw this guy pop up on my right about 10 feet, you know, kind of off to the side with an AK-47. And just instantly, instead of jumping, I pushed back, jumped back up on the edge of the helicopter. Just as I jump up, you know, he opens up with the AK. And then the bullets come right across where my legs were, but now I moved and they hit,

• 46:33Speaker 02

  you know, the other American on the other side of me, hit him in the legs. So he starts to fall. So I'm grabbing the back of his harness with my left hand and I put a half a magazine in the guy, you know, that's right there. I hosed him down. And I managed to jerk, you know, the other guy up onto the floor of the helicopter and then I could turn and put a, you know, I could just see muzzle flashes right in front of me. So I put the other half of the magazine there. So now I'm empty, you know. And when we go in, when you'd go in, you would have gunships who would come in alongside

• 47:13Speaker 02

  you. So in case something happened. So we're in a full-fledged ambush now, all the way around us. Two Cobra gunships open up with their miniguns, 4,000 rounds a minute coming in, looking like two hose pipes just spraying red water all around us. And what, you know, a lot of people don't realize is bullets don't just hit the ground and go into ground. They ricochet. They bounce all over the place. And if there are trees there, they're hitting trees. They're going around. So I'm trying to pull him, I'm trying to pull him back up inside the helicopter. I've got the door gunner on my side, full blast. The Cobras coming in and they're also shooting 40 millimeter grenades at 250 a minute. So we've got that going on.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  I got two team members behind me using me for cover. So I've got a muzzle on each side of my head right here. I'm getting powder burns, you know, from the muzzle flashes coming out of that. I got hot brass coming from them, coming from the door gunner going all over me. The floor is now covered with blood, blood squirting out of his legs. And my magazine is empty. So I'm trying to get the magazine out of my pouch that I've got it in. And, you know, one of the things I talk about in, you know, the stress book is that when your stress level gets really high, you lose your fine motor coordination. Things that you can do very easily when you're not stressed,

• 48:41Speaker 02

  just don't work for you anymore. So I'm trying, I'm having trouble getting the magazine out of the pouch to start with. I finally get it out, and then I can't get it in the weapon. And I'm, I'm sitting there, and I'm just seeing hundreds and hundreds of bullets and tracers coming, green tracers crisscrossing inside the aircraft.

• 48:59Jocko Willink?

  So green tracers crisscrossing inside the aircraft?

• 49:05Speaker 02

  That's their shooting.

• 49:05Jocko Willink?

  Let me just explain to everybody that doesn't know what that means. That's insane. That means that enemy bullets, in Vietnam, the, the Americans used red tracers, and the enemy used green tracers. And unfortunately, it's not really like that anymore. Everybody uses red tracers. And, and I, that was what it was like for us in, in Iraq. And then I had some guys hit me up and said the same thing in Afghanistan. Very rarely would they see green tracers. But for enemy tracers to be crisscrossing inside of your helicopter, and this was a Huey, right?

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:36Jocko Willink?

  This is not a small, this is, this is not a big aircraft. This is a tiny aircraft. You're packed in there. So for rounds to be crisscrossing inside that thing, green tracers, that is completely insane.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  I was thinking that myself. You know, this is a little voice in the back of my head is saying, you know, this is crazy. Not only that, but I am not happy. I mean, this is my first mission, and I'm gonna die on my first, I mean... You know, what kind of deal is this? I came over here to do something. So that little voice is going on back there and the other one saying-

• 50:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is, this is like fifteen seconds into your first mission.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's right there. Ricochets are going all over the place from, you know, from the Cobras and things and, you know, uh, the other guy's rolling around screaming, holding his leg and, you know, the blood's squirting around. Uh, and you're also hearing this metallic clang, just clang clang with the bullets hitting the helicopter. And, you know, you're thinking to, this thing's gonna go down. We're gonna end up in this bomb crater right there. Um, so all of that's going on. I finally managed to get the other magazine, you know, in, so then I can start to shoot at, uh, you know, the muzzle flashes that I'm seeing. And, you know, the second time I go to reload, I was a little better, uh, with that one.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Got it in there a little faster. The aircraft's starting to really vibrate now because he's trying to lift up, you know, out of that little hole in the canopy. So I'm thinking, at least we're trying to start up. But this stuff is still coming, it's still hitting us. You've got the, you know, Cobras making more raids. And now what's also happening, I can't really see it, but the A1E Skyraiders that are out there on station with us, they give us some protection. They're starting to drop 500-pound bombs just a little ways from us because those little thatched roof huts that I saw out there as we were spiraling in, turned out to have tanks underneath them.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  So they had just put that thatched stuff around and make them look like a, you know, a little huts, but really it was tanks. So when the tanks started moving, you know, the Skyraiders went after them. And so you got all the bombing and strafing of those guys going on. Uh, you got the gunships hitting all, you know, shooting all around us. We're trying to come out. And eventually we managed to get up out of that hole. The fire just shifted and now the tracer's going up. But as we pulled away from it, then, you know, that fire stopped because now the Cobra was really opened up, you know, on the ambush site. And I, I look across at Sergeant Deck sitting over on the other side,

• 52:25Speaker 02

  and he looks at me with a big grin on his face and giving me a thumbs up. And I'm thinking, oh, what is wrong with this guy? So, I mean, he was so excited. I mean, he thought that was the coolest thing and I'm thinking, man, I almost died. This was my, my first time.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  I experienced a, a level of fear that I didn't know existed. I mean, I had tried to imagine a lot about, you know, what's it like, you know, when people start shooting at you? You know, of course, you're gonna be a little anxious. So, what is it gonna be? I had no clue. I couldn't even imagine a level of fear like that. But, you know, fortunately, I was able to control that part of the fear. I could still shoot.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  It didn't stop me from returning fire and doing what I needed to do, but man, it scared me. Having those two weapons right next to my head, I mean, my high frequency hearing was steadily going away, permanently, getting burned, you know, with, with the muzzle flashes coming out of there.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Killed my first two people for sure. The, the guy down below and the first guy I shot at in the tree, because I saw him come out. I know I took those two out and I hit several others. Saved the first American's life, because if he had fallen in the crater, he'd have been gone. A second later, we'd have both jumped in that crater and we'd have both been gone.

• 53:56Jocko Willink?

  That's bad tactics on their part, right? They should have held for another two seconds and they would have had you on the ground and they would have still been able to possibly damage the helicopter and, yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, earned my combat infantryman's badge.

• 54:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you did.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  I had a, I had a whole series of, of firsts that occurred right there.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  And, you know, survived that and, you know, a couple of minutes later, I'm thinking, man, we got out of that. And I looked down and here comes a stream of tracers coming up out of a 51 caliber or something. They were trying to hit the helicopter. They were, you know, way as far as, but I think it's not over yet. I mean, we gotta get out of here and get back. And I told, I told the door gunner, I said, you know, we gotta go straight to the hospital. You know, we gotta drop this guy off.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  He's gotta have medical attention right away. You know, so we did that. We dropped him off. Then we went back to the launch site to drop the team off, but.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  And I, I asked Sergeant Deck, I said, um, I'm just curious. How many magazines did you fire? When we were back there? And he said, um, I emptied five, I had, I had the six put in. I was getting ready to start on that. I threw two fragmentation grenades and a smoke grenade. And, and then he said, Lieutenant, you need to practice so you get faster reloading when people are shooting at you or you're gonna die. I said, okay, I'll, I'll practice.

• 55:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cause when you talk about the fine motor skills disappearing, but if you practice them all the time, you'll be able to maintain them.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  To some degree.

• 55:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they won't be as good, but they'll be better.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause it's, you know, and that's part of the problem with training. Uh, you, you train, you train to get a good sight picture, sight alignment and all that, and you squeeze the, the trigger and, uh, hit your, your target that's not shooting back at you. And then, you know, you get in a firefight like that and your stress level skyrockets and when it does, you can't see the sights on the weapon. I mean, you trained to use those sights and now all of a sudden you, your vision changes as the stress goes up, you can't focus on the sights. So you can't, you can't do it the way you trained. Uh, you can't reload the way you trained.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  You trained to turn sideways and shoot and all of a sudden when all the stuff is coming at you, your body, your brain takes over and says, face the enemy. And then it's got, your body's gonna turn you toward the enemy. So you gotta train to shoot at the enemy, you gotta train to shoot, uh, without aiming, so to speak. Now, I had been through, um, pretty extensive course on something that we call quick kill, where we trained to shoot from the hip. And we started with BB guns and shot at little miniature silhouettes on a two by four, shooting from the hip with a BB gun until you could knock them all down. And then we started throwing, uh, disc up in, you know, three inch disc up in the air and you shoot with a BB gun till you could hit that moving disc.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  And then the disc would get smaller and smaller and then we would go on to a course where the targets popped up and it was live fire in terms of, you know, you're using your weapon, uh, and shoot from the hip and, you know, get so you could hit all the targets. So we practiced. A lot and with the teams that I had, I just drilled it in their head. You've got to be able to shoot without aiming. You don't have time to bring up and try to look through a sight. It's happening too fast, you'll be dead before you can get it up there. So there are a lot of techniques that I had brought in that I had learned before I got there. And then, you know, kind of developed across time.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  And always train the teams, do this, do it like this, it's quick. One of the NCOs had told me one night at FUBI, he said, you can't hesitate. There's no hesitation. You've got to understand, Lieutenant, where you're going, everybody is the enemy. You don't have to worry about shooting a friendly by mistake. They're all enemy. And the person that shoots first has the highest probability of surviving. Pull the trigger and never, ever shoot anybody less than three or four times. And if he still moves, you shoot him three or four more times. There's no one shot and move to the next guy. You make sure they go down.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  You know, so that was kind of the strategy I adopted and practiced to be able to do that. And I can, I can go from the safety position on the selector switch to fully automatic faster than most people can pull the trigger with, with the safety already off. I used to practice that. I used to practice it going down. I also discovered that with an AK-47, as soon as they start to shoot at you, the barrel rises. If they don't hit you with that first or second round, if you can get down, you've got a chance to survive. And I used to practice shooting on the way down. And put silhouettes out, hit them all before I hit the ground as I'm going down. I'd empty that magazine.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  So anyway, that's kind of getting off track here.

• 59:26Jocko Willink?

  No, that's, that's actually right on track. The, so, so you come back from this first mission.

• 59:33Jocko Willink?

  What was your, what are you thinking now? You gotta be thinking to yourself, there's no possible way I'm living through this.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Well, actually, the way my mind works, I was critiquing. What should we have done? What should we have trained on beforehand? What did we do there? Were we prepared for an ambush like that? Was there anything else we could have done? So I was playing, you know, through our preparation, playing in my mind through what we actually did. What could we do differently next time? So in my mind, you gotta get better every time. Every time you do something, you need to be better than the last time that you did it. You need to understand it's gonna, you're gonna always have to adapt.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Whatever you plan, you're gonna have to adapt. You know, war is just, it's not predictable. It's predictability is that it's gonna change.

• 1:00:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  You know, and you've gotta be able to do that and do it on the fly.

• 1:00:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I had, I was telling you, I had, just had a guy on the podcast, hasn't come out yet, but I had a guy that was, he went into, he was a Marine, he went into Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian, got wounded in Tarawa, got shot while he was still 500 meters from the beach, trying to get across that, that hell that they were walking through. But, you know, we had that discussion around, you know, always thinking it's like, nothing will happen to me. And I always use the example of like, I always think if, if I'm on a commercial airplane and it crashes, I'm gonna live. Like, I'm gonna figure out a way and I'll, I'll go to a good free fall position and I'll look, scan, and find a pool somewhere or whatever. Was there, was there any of that? Because it seems to me like that kind of operation right there,

• 1:01:16Jocko Willink?

  you gotta look at that and say, even if, even if you have the attitude of it'll happen to someone else, when you've got green tracer coming through your aircraft, that might change even my mind and start thinking, okay, probably not gonna, probably not gonna make it through this.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, you think that, and I've had, I've used up more lives than a, than a cat, just during that time period.

• 1:01:40Jocko Willink?

  You used up nine lives that night.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  I, I never thought that I would.

• 1:01:45Jocko Willink?

  In those two minutes.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I never thought I'd see my 21st or 22nd birthday. Thought, no way. You just can't get there from here.

• 1:01:53Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so there you go. You, you got to a point where you said, okay, I'm probably not gonna make it.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a good chance. But my attitude is.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  I'm gonna take as many of you with me as I can. You might get me, but you're gonna pay for it. I'll be really upset if you knock me off with the first round and I don't get a chance to get some of you. But you better, you better do it quick, cuz I'm gonna take as many as I can with me. Cuz I'm, I'm coming. So.

• 1:02:22Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you guys get back from the, from that mission. You guys do a good debrief, you're going through all the points of what you thought you could do better. You're wondering who is, who is the person that came up with the idea of doing these night inserts and maybe last light inserts aren't the best? I don't know. Cuz that's another thing, you don't really know.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't.

• 1:02:42Jocko Willink?

  It seems to me like if you drop a daisy cutter, and the enemy at least goes, says themselves, well, they dropped the daisy cutter, they must have done that for a reason. Let's go surround it.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  I mean, why would you drop a 2,000 pound, one 2,000 pound bomb out here on a ridgeline?

• 1:02:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  And not do anything else? Unless you're coming.

• 1:03:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Unless you're gonna come in.

• 1:03:02Jocko Willink?

  At least drop 15 of them.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Jocko Willink?

  To give, to make the enemy have to spread out a little bit. Not put their entire force surrounded this, the one crater.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, uh, there were a lot of things like that I thought about, you know, once I got back. I, you know, I was making a list. Um, unfortunately, uh, I shared some of my lists with the commander of, of the camp. Cuz he was excited and telling me, uh, I told you we could get you out. You know, we put you out there, we're gonna get you out. You saw how it worked, right? And I said, I saw how it worked.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Let me share some thoughts with you. Unfortunately, um, I probably had, um, talked to Mr. Jack Daniels two months before I had that conversation. And I shared a little too much of my thoughts. Um, he wasn't exactly, you know, happy with some of the things I had to say because it reflected on him too. But, I, I still think they were right, you know? You put one, like you said, you put one daisy cutter out there. You know, why don't we put up a flag for everybody to say, hey, they're coming here soon, you know?

• 1:04:16Jocko Willink?

  Uh, all right, sir, then what's the next mission looking like?

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Uh, let's see, then, I think the next one, the next one, we actually had to spend the night. So, we did a lot, a lot of planning, and at this point, you know, Sergeant Dex starting to listen, you know, I've got more credibility now, I've been shot at, and, you know, we did okay. So, we, we put a lot more planning into it, a lot more rehearsal into it. And went in, got on the ground, uneventful. And, and when you would get on the ground, you would, you would move a hundred meters or so into the jungle.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  You would stop, set up a security perimeter, and then you adapt. You listen, do you hear any bad guys, what do you hear? You gotta adapt to the sounds of the jungle for, because the last forty-five minutes, an hour, all you've heard is this whoop, whoop, whoop of the helicopter. And, you know, so you've had a temporary threshold shift, and you hear, and you can't hear as good. You can't smell as good, because you've been smelling the JP-4 in the helicopter all the way out there. So, you, you have that security halt, and you adapt to the sounds, what's out there. What do you hear, what do you see?

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  In my case, I was very fortunate that I had spider senses, so to speak. You know, I didn't quite have spider hearing after that first little episode, but I still, I still had the rest of it. I mean, I, I could smell ya, in more than one case, I sniffed out an ambush, I could smell them. I could smell their body odor, I could smell what they had had to eat, I knew they were up in, in front of us. I, yeah, I could just feel things like that, so, uh, we had that. We sent in Team Okay, we had a code word that we just transmit that meant... One of them, Team OK, moving north, moving whatever direction.

• 1:06:26Jocko Willink?

  Was this a daytime, early, first light insertion?

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  It was late afternoon, but yeah, it wasn't the last light thing again. You know, so we had time to move for a ways and then, you know, eventually stop, you know, for the night. And typically what we would do is do like, we called it a fish hook. You'd move along a little ways and then you would make a turn and you would come back down fifty meters or so. So if someone was tracking you, you'd hear them go by because they're following your trail.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  And I would put, very quickly, I learned to put out what we call toe poppers. It was a little, small, anti-personnel mine, plastic. And, you know, I had C4 in it. It would take your leg off, or most of your leg if you stepped on it. And I had a lot of experience in the woods. I know how people are gonna track you. I know where they're gonna walk. I know where they're gonna step. And particularly, if there's a log for someone to have to go across, they'll always step right on the other side of it. And that's where I'd put it. You know, I'd put it right where they're gonna step and I'd cover it back up.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  And sometimes I'd put my foot, just a light footprint on top of it. And then if they came, you'd hear that thing go off and you knew you got one. And he was probably gonna die. He'd bleed to death because they didn't have a hospital or anything out there. So you had him. And if he was just leading a larger group, typically they would open fire. They didn't know where you were. They'd just start spraying the woods. But, you know, you're way back here. They're up in front of you now. So that gives you a chance to decide if you're gonna move out or not. So anyway, we set up and the jungle, the jungle just swallows you as it starts to get dark.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  It just closes in all around you. And if you're under, you know, double canopy jungle, it gets dark fast. If you're under triple, it's pretty dark during the daytime. But at night, you can't see anything. It's just totally dark. And I was thinking, as it was getting dark.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  You know, at first I thought, I'm a little nervous, because I can't see. Even though I had just, you know, I had tremendous night vision, like an owl. But I couldn't see. And then I thought, if they can't see either. And the difference is, between us and them is, we're not moving. They have to move without making any noise. And if they make any noise, we know where they are. We know they're out there. So, and what I did was, I created, for me, a 4D bubble around me. So, I would, I would just start with whatever direction I was facing, and then, what's out there?

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  What sounds do I hear? What bugs do I hear? What noises do I hear? And I'd take a next quadrant, the next quadrant, until I'd gone all the way around. So I knew the sounds in all four quadrants. And then I would raise it up, because up above you, I mean, you got birds, you got monkeys, you got different things that are happening in the trees, different sounds up there. And you, you incorporate all this together. And now you're used to a particular level of noise in each one of these quadrants. And then, the sound of silence was the trigger. I, I developed, you know, to where I could actually wake up. If any quadrant went quiet, it would wake me up.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  If anybody moves in one of those quadrants, the bugs in that area will stop chirping. They'll just get quiet all of a sudden. And if they get quiet, something's out there. And that, that alerts you to, you know, where they're coming from. And it might be a tiger, you know, it might be, you know, some other large animal, but something just stopped them, scared them. So I decided, you know, the dark's my friend. They can't see me. And I've got area weapons out there, claymores. I can set off the claymore. They seal a big ball of fire, and I take out a bunch of people. But they don't know where I am. And then, you know, the next level of the frag grenades, you throw a grenade.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  Big ball of fire, a lot of fragments, but they don't know where it came from. So they still don't see you. As long as you don't pull the trigger on the weapon, they don't know where you are. So I decided, this is, this is pretty cool when it gets dark. You know, I said, I'll, I'll find you if you're out there.

• 1:11:25Jocko Willink?

  How long would it take, when you guys would settle into a perimeter, how long would it take for the noise, the silence that you had created, to, to escalate again to normal jungle levels?

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  Within thirty minutes. So, so, once everybody's down, and, and the rule was, once you're down, you're down. You do not move again until morning.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Because anybody moving is a bad guy. And we would, we would all position ourselves so that, you know, I could reach Echo over here, um, or the guy on the next side of me, to wake him up, or alert him something was happening. And Echo's arm's so big, I can't really do this, but if, if I could have your arm, if you want to wake somebody up without terrifying them, grab them right there and just slowly squeeze.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  And if you just slowly squeeze like that, what you'll see is their eyes start to open up, and they just come to. And, you know, and we trained to do that, so people knew, if you get squeezed, you open your eyes, that's the only thing you move, start listening. What do you hear?

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  And it might be your turn, uh, to be on guard, or it might be there's an enemy out there.

• 1:12:45Jocko Willink?

  Bro, that's crazy, I just got chicken skin from that. Bro, I can only imagine, like, you feel that, you're like, ugh, that's crazy, man.

• 1:12:53Jocko Willink?

  How long, would, would you guys do fifty percent security and fifty percent sleeping? Or would you guys do less than that, because you didn't really need it?

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes we, we drop down to thirty percent. But, I mean, I know teams that everybody goes to sleep, but I, not, not with me.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  I'm not going there. Somebody's gonna be awake. I would hear. And you know, sometimes you had to sleep. You would, you wouldn't sleep on top of the ridge. You had to get off on the side. And you try to get into a thicket. You try to get into a steep area. So you learn to sleep straddle trees. So you straddle it so you won't slide on down the hill at night. It's a little uncomfortable at first. You gotta get set up right. But once you do, you know, you can sleep like that. Keep your arms through your rucksack because you wanted your rucksack to go with you if you had to leave in a hurry. Your load bearing equipment never came off. The weapon was always fastened to you with a cord

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  that went through a snap link on the shoulder of your load bearing gear. You'd have it laying across your lap. So, you know, you could put your hands on it real easy and turn it and shoot it if you had to. You had your knife where you could access that, you know, easily, quietly, in case you needed it. So, and then nobody moved.

• 1:14:19Jocko Willink?

  And then that first overnight mission that you did, what was, what was the purpose of the operation?

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  We were going to find this relatively small, Italian-sized element.

• 1:14:36Jocko Willink?

  And there's how many of you guys?

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  This mission is probably seven.

• 1:14:40Jocko Willink?

  So there's seven of you looking for 500 enemy North Vietnamese regulars?

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  One of the things, I think, I know, it sounds a little crazy. One of the things you have to-

• 1:14:51Jocko Willink?

  It sounds a lot crazy.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  One of the things you have to understand about a SOG team is SOG teams were small.

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  But they carried a really big stick. Given the stick might be thirty minutes away before you could use it. And sometimes an hour, but man, you had a big stick because if you engaged the enemy, as soon as you transmitted the word prairie fire over the radio, everything flying within range of that team was diverted, everything. Any aircraft that had ordinance on it, any mission that was going on was set aside. It all came to you. It was unbelievable. I mean, I had a, I had a mission one time where I had fourteen Cobras in orbit, waiting on their turn to come in because I had to bring them in,

• 1:15:46Speaker 02

  in between the L fours that were coming in and the Sky Riders that would come. They were all, I mean, it was just unreal. You know, what would show up once you got in trouble?

• 1:15:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess that, that is the security blanket. Although, bad weather.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Then you're in trouble.

• 1:16:02Jocko Willink?

  Nighttime?

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Um, you could do, do some at nighttime. But, you know, we didn't have the night vision. The aircraft didn't have the technology that they have today, so nighttime was a problem for them.

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  You could do something called combat sky spots where the L fours could come in and, and, and drop five hundred pound bombs, but they were doing it based on radar. So you had to start them like twenty-five hundred, three thousand meters away and bring them in because you didn't know where they were going to land. They would be somewhere, you know, in, in that circle, but you had to let something hit and then start to work it. So, yeah. The nighttime, you know, could be a problem.

• 1:16:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you got, you got a book here. You mentioned it really quickly. It's called The Stress Effect. And it's, it's about leadership and decision-making, but you have some, some stories in it that are, that are worth talking about. I want, I want to read one of them right now.

• 1:17:10Jocko Willink?

  So it says, "For almost two years, I'd been training to lead a special operations team into combat. During those two years, I successfully completed US Army Ranger School, Special Forces Training, become a member of the most elite military force in the world. When I got to base camp in Vietnam, 1968, I erected a six-foot-tall two-by-four board in the dirt and wrapped hemp rope around the top eight inches of the board to provide a striking surface. Every day in camp, I pounded the striking pad with my fists and my feet, continuing to improve my accuracy and power. I'd been trained in Ranger and Special Forces hand-to-hand combat, and had earned a black belt in the Korean martial art of Taekwondo. I'd become an expert with all special operations weapons as well."

• 1:17:51Jocko Willink?

  I quickly found myself. So you guys, you had some introduction to, to martial arts. And they were teaching you guys some striking capability. Did you guys learn any grappling at all?

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you did that in Special Forces and in Ranger School. You did, you know, the military version of a hand-to-hand. But I had trained in, you know, Taekwondo when I was in college. I broke my hand one night in a little pub, and I thought, there's gotta be a better...

• 1:18:24Jocko Willink?

  You broke your hand on a pub, or you broke your hand on a, on a pub attendee?

• 1:18:31Speaker 02

  There was an attendee that ran into, ran into my hand and, and broke it. And I, I was thinking, there's gotta be a better way than this. You know, I've seen these guys jumping around doing Kung Fu or whatever on movies. So I, you know, I found this Taekwondo place, you know, right off campus there. And I went in and I said, you know, I need to toughen up a little bit. I'm tired of, you know, getting hurt, so.

• 1:18:59Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Back to the book. I quickly found myself deep inside enemy territory, leading my elite team of three Americans and four mercenaries on a classified mission. Every human within a hundred miles was the enemy. The temperature was 110 degrees, the humidity was 100%. The salt from our own perspiration constantly burned our eyes. Mosquitoes swarmed. Each of us carried 35 to 40 pounds of ammunition, grenades, and water on our load-bearing harness and a 75-pound rucksack on our back. No one wore an armored vest or a helmet because these would add too much extra weight and would be too hot. We were operating under triple-canopy jungle that allowed very little light to come through and no air movement. It rained every day, everything was wet. The bushes in the ground were covered with small leeches that began to move up and down

• 1:19:44Jocko Willink?

  frantically when they sensed our body heat, thinking they would have a meal soon. They attached themselves to us without our noticing them. The next day we would find them on our faces, chests, arms, and legs, filled with blood and the size of our, and being the size of our thumbs. The physical and mental stress was very high. This type of mission required complete silence, no talking for days, just hand-and-arm signals or notes. There could be absolutely no noise while moving. We were traveling along at a snail's pace of 100 yards an hour. Every step and every foot placement were pre-planned, toe down first, then slowly the heel. This technique was designed to muffle the noise of any small branches that might be broken if we accidentally placed our weight on them.

• 1:20:28Jocko Willink?

  Each team member had an area of responsibility for maintaining vigilance as we moved. We were always looking for booby traps, ambushes, enemy personnel, poisonous snakes, and tigers. We couldn't forget the 500-pound, hungry tigers. We knew a North Vietnamese army force was very close to us, we just didn't know exactly where. We spent most of the day moving up to the top of a ridge, one step at a time, without making a sound. Just as we neared the top, the point man signaled to us to halt and get down. He could hear a large group of enemy soldiers just over the ridge. Our hearts began to race and adrenaline spiked. Our seven man team was about to come face to face with over a hundred and eighty trained North Vietnamese Army soldiers. Our stress levels soared and our attention became focused.

• 1:21:11Jocko Willink?

  We knew everything, we, we knew everything could literally explode at any second. The closest help was an hour away. We could make no mistakes and we could not be discovered. I moved forward into a position to observe the enemy soldiers who were less than forty yards down the other side of the ridge from our location. They appeared to have finished eating and were getting ready to move up the ridge towards our location. I signaled to the team that we needed to move quickly. Although the ground was muddy, slippery and steep, we tried to move as quickly and quietly as possible. It was going to be very difficult to avoid contact with them and contact would be deadly. I was about twenty feet behind the point man, moving deliberately, tightly gripping the handle of my Car fifteen machine gun with my right hand while using my left hand

• 1:21:54Jocko Willink?

  to steady myself by grabbing bushes as I moved. It started to rain hard, making it even more difficult to get us help if we were discovered. We could hear the enemy talking on the other side of the ridge. Then, out of nowhere, I was hit so hard from the high side of the ridge that my weapon was knocked out of my hand and my feet left the ground and I was falling backward down the side of the steep ridge. Instinctively, I grabbed my attacker as I fell and took him with me. My stress level was so high that all my hand-to-hand combat training automatically kicked in. As I tumbled down the incline in the rain and mud, I literally ripped my attacker limb from limb, biting, pulling and breaking any part I could get my hands on.

• 1:22:37Jocko Willink?

  I used every deadly move I knew and actually heard the sounds of bones breaking. Although the entire event lasted only a few seconds, it appeared to pass in slow motion. A stream of thoughts and questions went through my mind. Where did this guy come from? How did I miss seeing him? Does he have a knife? How can I get my knife? Is he alone? Will he call his comrades before I can silence him? Then it was over as quickly as it began. We were wedged hard against a large tree that stopped our tumble down the ridge. The impact momentarily knocked the breath out of me. The attacker was not moving. Apparently, I was the winner. All my hand-to-hand combat training had paid off.

• 1:23:18Jocko Willink?

  Looking up the ridge, I saw some of my team members looking down at me with sheer horror and shock on their faces. It must have been almost as terrifying for them as it was for me, I thought. Everyone's life hung in the balance, but I had won the fight. Mano a mano. I had saved the team. As I began to untangle myself from my attacker, the world suddenly came back into focus. Now I had the same horror and shock on my face as my team members did. I had just used all my expert hand-to-hand combat techniques on a banana tree. In that part of the world, worms eat around the bottom of the banana trees, which weakens them and causes them to fall without warning.

• 1:24:02Jocko Willink?

  I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and be blindsided by a falling banana tree. Fortunately, two components to this event ultimately saved us. First, I was hit so hard and unexpectedly that my weapon was knocked out of my hand, preventing me from firing at the tree and giving away our position. Second, it was raining so hard that the enemy soldiers did not notice the commotion. We completed our mission and returned to Vietnam unharmed, except for my ego. I have heard, however, that banana trees in that part of the world still tremble at the mention of my name.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Good times. A little embarrassing, but, uh, yeah. You know, the stress level was so, so high. It just, you know, you're locked, loaded, you're ready to go, and something triggers you and you go for it, you know? You react. It's just, just the, the instinct. Somebody had me and it was me or him. And, you know, I just unleashed everything I still had. Until I killed a banana tree. Um, yeah, I can walk by one today, even in other countries than he tremble.

• 1:25:15Jocko Willink?

  They know, they know.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  They know.

• 1:25:17Jocko Willink?

  The legend is real.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can see the little limbs turn and watch me to make sure I go on by.

• 1:25:23Jocko Willink?

  It is amazing, you know, the point of you telling that story, talking about stress and, and, you know, I, I, one thing that I noticed about it is when we are anticipating something, oftentimes we will, we will see what we are anticipating. So when we are predicting enemy combat, then that's what we're gonna see. And you have another great vignette in here about a shooting that took place in New York. And it was, you know, a guy that was standing in the stoop of a doorway and the police officer see him and he looked kind of suspicious.

• 1:26:01Jocko Willink?

  And eventually, well, when he moved, they said, oh, he's trying to run from us. So now they draw their weapons and the next thing he does is reach into his pocket. They start shooting and once one person starts shooting, they all start shooting and they end up putting 40 plus rounds in and into the guy and into this guy, you know, because they didn't, they didn't shoot very accurately. But, you know, it turns out that the guy was just a normal citizen that fit the description of, you know, fit the description of a person that had conducted some crimes in the area. But, you know, it wasn't like he was, it wasn't like a specific description. I think it was like, oh, it was a black guy in this neighborhood.

• 1:26:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, looks pretty close. But what they anticipated seeing and what they got kind of mentally ready for. And then he makes a move to get away from them. In their mind, he's making a move to get away from them. In his mind, he's just trying to get out of the way. Who knows what these cops are doing, but they, they can't be after me. And then the next thing is they're yelling at him, "Oh, I better get them some ID." So he reaches into his pocket. What do they think he's reaching for? They're anticipating he's reaching for a weapon, so they kill him. So that's a great lesson learned. And you know, you talk a lot in the book, The Stress Effect, about, you call it awareness, being aware of what's going on.

• 1:27:22Jocko Willink?

  I always use the word detachment, being detached from all the chaos and emotion. And how, what a great power it is to have that, you know, it's the same word, or different word, same meaning, the awareness that you talk about. But that example right there, what you're anticipating, there's a good chance that what you're anticipating you're gonna see, you're gonna see regardless of what reality is.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not a banana tree.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  North Vietnamese soldier, highly trained and skilled, and he's trying to take me out. And doing a good job, because I'm falling backwards. I can't shoot him. And yeah, I mean, in the story you're talking about, as they approach him and start shooting, you know, the two, first two guys that get there, one starts shooting and

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  what happens is some of the bullets are hitting on, you know, different parts of the stoop there and start to ricochet back.

• 1:28:18Jocko Willink?

  That's right.

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  In their mind, he's shooting at him. I mean, the bullets are coming back at him. They think he's shooting. The other guy with him trips on the steps and falls. So his partner thinks, man, they hit him, he's down. The other two were up there, they think he's down. And, you know, they all just continue to shoot. And an innocent guy. So we see what we're expecting. We have to be careful with that. And it happens, you know, it happens all the time. Now, when the adrenaline starts flowing, you're gonna do a lot of things that you need to keep it under control. And there was part of it,

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  probably getting off track here, but some of it is practice, practice, practice. You know, go through the immediate action drills. You keep doing it and doing it and doing it. Now, one of the things I used to make my guys practice that they really didn't like was when we were going on a mission, because you're gonna be out there for so long, you, the one zero carried a medical kit, so I'd have a medical kit with me. Everyone there carried, it came in a can, back then, just a little can about that big around. You had it taped on the back of your web gear and had a bag of wringer solution in it, a blood

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  expander. You know, because when you, when you get hit, most of the time, what you die of from a gunshot wound is you bleed to death. You can't get the blood, you know, stopped in time. So, we all carried a bag of wringer solution, so, you know, you could get an IV right there on the spot. Now, my thinking was, especially after that first incident, when I had trouble getting the magazine and the weapon, I don't want one of my guys trying to put that needle in my arm in that condition, and he's jabbing all over my arm, and I'm laying there bleeding to death, and I need the blood. So, I said, "Okay, guys, here's

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  what we're gonna do. We're gonna have a little practice." So, I had been over to the dispensary, and I had gotten some needles, and I brought them over, and I said, "We're gonna practice putting the needle in each other." So, that, you know, we're getting shot at, you've done it before. It won't be the first time that you've tried to put a needle in the vein. They did not like that. Like, guys, "Okay, now, swap partners. Let's do it again. Let's do it again." And every so often, we would go through that drill. "Let's practice. Let's practice opening a can." You know, you don't want to have never tried to open that can before. When somebody's shooting at you, and your buddy's bleeding to death, you have to have been through the whole process. Let's do it.

• 1:31:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, these lessons that you learned or that you passed on, I mean, everything from, you know, getting on the ground and, and patrolling a hundred meters and then waiting, that's, that's what we were trying. Now, I will say that once you got night vision, things are different because you didn't need to wait a half an hour to lay your night vision adjust. You could, you could go, but you know, we used to, we used to do the same thing. We used to get, give each other IVs with red lens flashlines at night underneath the poncho. Cause that's what you're gonna have to do. And, and so those are the kind of things that you have to train, you have to train. And people that think that, that, that horrible thought that creeps into your mind that, well, when the time rises, when the time arises, I'll, I'll know what to do. That is not the truth right there.

• 1:31:46Jocko Willink?

  I got a quick question for you. How did you get the name Dynamite? Was that your nickname? Did they assign that to you? Because I'm surprised at this point, your nickname wasn't Banana Tree.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  Fortunately, you got your code name on day one. So after we got the briefing, the name, then, you know, we had to select a code name. I wanted Ranger. Ranger was already taken.

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  So they said, here are some others. And I, I saw Dynamite and I said,

• 1:32:20Speaker 02

  you know, I, I really do like to blow things up. So I'm, I'm small and, you know, Dynamite probably works for me. I mean, I blew my neighbor's windows out when I was a teenager one time with a rocket that exploded on the, on my launch pad. I didn't intend for that to happen, but you know, I was always blowing things up. So, and then when I was there in Southeast Asia, yeah, I blew things up all the time. I blew bridges up. I blew up all kinds of things. And I always carried a lot of demo with me. So.

• 1:32:55Jocko Willink?

  Good, good nickname. And that was your call sign too. Was that your call sign when you're in the field?

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  No, no. Well, it, it would be my call sign if I was wounded or something like that.

• 1:33:05Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  But call signs that we use are always three letter groups.

• 1:33:11Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Got it. All right. You, you mentioned in your notes here that you gave me a, an op where you guys hit with, you guys got hit with gas.

• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. That was a.

• 1:33:23Jocko Willink?

  That had to be unexpected.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  That was still with Dex's team. Yeah. We, we had planned and rehearsed for everything.

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  And we went in, it wasn't a hot LZ or didn't appear to be, we didn't throw any fire going in. We got off the aircraft, the aircraft, you know, took off. We're on the ground and all of a sudden, you know, we couldn't see, you couldn't breathe. This stuff is coming across the LZ and, you know, we're coughing and gagging because we didn't have masks with us. Masks, we're like helmets and flak jackets, that's extra weight you gotta carry.

• 1:34:05Speaker 02

  And unless we were intending to use gas, we didn't carry it because it was just very, very rare that the NVA would use gas.

• 1:34:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Speaker 02

  And in this case, we're on LZ, here comes the gas. We're not prepared for it, we had to call, you know, for the aircraft to come back and get us out. It creates a real problem for pilots. If they, if they don't have masks and now all of a sudden they're getting all of the, the gas coming in, you know, it's hard for them to see the instrument panel to be able to fly. You know, but they came back in and, and they got us out. It was, it wasn't a pleasant experience and it was one of those things, we didn't plan for it. You know, because it was, it was such a rarity and we just didn't do it.

• 1:34:52Jocko Willink?

  I was surprised, we went through a gear list with Tilt and they always carried a gas mask. And of course, because they always carried a gas mask, you know how many times they came across it? I think the number was zero. Murphy's Law.

• 1:35:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, a lot of times we would carry

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  gas canisters, we'd, we'd carry a regular, you know, like a

• 1:35:12Jocko Willink?

  CS grenade?

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  CS grenade, but we'd also carry the, the CS rounds for the M49, the 40 millimeter. So we could shoot those, but if we carried CS or, or the grenades, then, you know, we carried the mask too. But it was, the masks were because we were gonna use them. And, and, you know, if you use gas, you better have a mask or you're gonna be as bad off as the other guys goes. Without fail, the wind's gonna change and it's gonna come right back on you and you're in trouble.

• 1:35:44Jocko Willink?

  Murphy's Law. You got a, you got another note in here about a mission, it says tree roots.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  This was, I think, this was my last mission with RT Alabama with, with Duck. And we had gone up, we made the little fish hook, we came back, it was early afternoon and we're gonna take a break for a little while. So, we had put out the claymores, I had put a tow popper out, and there were some strange trees in that area, I'm still not sure what they're called, but they almost looked like rockets with fins. The roots kinda came out, I mean, they kinda, you know, they'd grow up the tree, maybe two feet or so, and they'd come out like fins, all the way around.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  So, we were taking a break, so I thought, you know, I'll just lay down between, you know, these, these roots, and, you know, you won't be able to see me, because I'm kinda down in there, and that's where I'll take my break. And then we hear the tow popper go off, I hear that loud scream, and as soon as the tow popper went off, it just, this barrage of AK-47 fire coming, some of it, you know, in our direction, some of it in other directions, they didn't know exactly where we were. But, in that first barrage coming through, I had three AK rounds come through the root

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  on my left side, right across my shirt, I had just exhaled, and through the root on the other side, if I had, had just inhaled, it would've taken the top of my chest off when it came by. So, it just grazed me, you know, coming across, and I said, hmm, I probably should get out of here. So, because the roots are not providing any, you know, actual cover for me, just a little concealment, so I jumped around behind the tree, and, you know, we set off the claymores, had a full-fledged, you know, firefight going on, eventually had to work gunships and things, and get extracted.

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  But, one of the things that I also did was, got another taste of the impact of adrenaline, because when I came out from behind the tree, I had taken my arms out of the straps on the rucksack.

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  So I had to grab it with my hand. I grabbed it with my left hand, you know, and it weighed probably seventy-five pounds. But I'm not a big guy, but I'm tossing that seventy-five pound rucksack around like it's a pillow. Uh, and you know, it's gonna go with me as we fight our way, you know, down the ridge and toward the LZ. Um, but I paid for it, you know, later on, you know, after we got extracted, realized I had pulled muscles in my shoulders because, you know, my muscles weren't designed to handle that much weight, but I had so much adrenaline pumping, pumping through my system then. And that, yeah.

• 1:38:52Jocko Willink?

  So as soon as you guys get contacted, as soon as that, those rounds start coming, you're calling prairie fire emergency?

• 1:38:59Speaker 02

  Prairie fire.

• 1:39:00Jocko Willink?

  And then how long has it taken before aircraft show up on station?

• 1:39:05Speaker 02

  Usually you'll have something within thirty minutes that you might be able to work, a gunship or something like that. But for the extraction ships, it might be an hour depending, you know, on how far in there you are. And it might be longer than that. Uh, but if you had bad weather, nobody's coming. Because they, you know, they can't find you.

• 1:39:27Jocko Willink?

  How good was the weather prediction at that time? You know, if you guys, were you guys able to look out in a day and say like, hey, there's, there's gonna be storms moving through here tomorrow?

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  We, at, at the different CNCs, we had our own air force meteorologist that tracked the weather, gave weather, weather briefings, you know, two or three times a day, you know, to the command group. Um, the teams would get them. We would get them before we would go out, uh, so that we would know kind of what to expect. Um, and, you know, we didn't launch unless the weather looked like it was gonna be good, you know, for the insertion, because you didn't want to get out there and all of a sudden you couldn't use the, the assets that you had with you. So, um, but still, it's kind of like today. The best weather predictions that are made are the ones the day after. You know, we can tell

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  you what probably happened yesterday, or at least with a high probability of what happened yesterday. But the weather changed, you know, it's where we were up north most of the time is a rainforest. I mean, it's gonna rain every day.

• 1:40:35Jocko Willink?

  So it's gonna rain.

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  Every day it's gonna rain. And the clouds would roll right down on top of the the mountain. And just totally conceal it, conceal the ridge lines. So not only are you under triple canopy jungle a lot, now you got a cloud cover over. I mean, up above that, they can see fine, but they can't see where you are. They can't, you know, you can fire the flyers out, they won't see them because they're in the clouds.

• 1:41:04Jocko Willink?

  Is uh, is it always the one zero that's carrying the radio and talking to the aircraft? Or who who usually was doing that for you? I know that Tilt said he did it. He would be like, yep, I'm gonna talk to the aircraft.

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  Most of the time I carried the radio. I mean, you had, you had a guy, you know, one of the three Americans was supposed to be carrying the radio.

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  Usually the the one two, if you had a one two.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  But I carried mine almost all the time. But even if I didn't carry it, I wanted to talk, so bring it, bring it over here. I want to tell them, you know, what I need to have done. So, you know, that gave me another 25 pounds plus, depending on how many batteries I carried. More weight to go in my rucksack. And that's if we used, you know, the PRC 25 or 77. But I think Tilt mentioned that one point.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  We had a commander take over CCN who said, you're gonna carry the KY 38. A secure radio.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  Which, you know, the PRC 77 was about 25 pounds. And then it had to connect into the KY 38, which was the the same square. But but thicker. You know, and they had to fasten together. So some people would stack them on a rucksack, one under the other. Most people were wearing the 77 in the back and and the 38 in the front. To help you balance, you know, going up and down the hills and the mud.

• 1:42:47Jocko Willink?

  It's a good theory.

• 1:42:47Speaker 02

  But, you know, I, to me, and my experience said.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  The more you can look like an empty pair of fatigues laying on the ground, the greater your chances of survival when somebody's shooting at you. So the more stuff you put on your chest or around your waist that raises you up in the air, makes you more, I mean, I get my rucksack shot up all the time. I mean, I'd be laying there in bullets and just zinging through the rucksack because it was sticking up, you know, above me. But when you put that KY-38 on your chest, that pushes your body up another six inches in the air. So now the chances of you getting hit instead of the rucksack go up. So I didn't like to carry it. I only used it a few times.

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  I mean, it had a pretty high malfunction rate and then...

• 1:43:41Jocko Willink?

  Because it's not just on you. You've got to make sure that the aircraft that you're trying to talk to is running their encryption device.

• 1:43:47Speaker 02

  Everybody has to have that same encryption, which is an interesting story. We may get to a little later about that. But yeah, it was a pain. But I wanted to talk on the radio.

• 1:44:01Jocko Willink?

  And you guys didn't, I know Tilt, they didn't carry like a belt-fed machine gun in their elements. I think he said they never did, which to me was surprising. Because like you talk to Vietnam SEAL platoons and even like my SEAL platoons in Iraq, we carried as many belt-fed machine guns as we could. Like, we wanted to have massive firepower. But I guess for you guys, the jungle, the weight, it was too much.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  My, my team carried one, an M60 machine gun. M60s are heavy.

• 1:44:38Jocko Willink?

  They are heavy, indeed.

• 1:44:40Speaker 02

  My team carried one, one time because I thought it would be cool. I carried the machine gun because I thought, man, the firepower I'll have with this thing, I can show those guys on the other side here what war is all about. And we made contact and I opened up with that baby. And I learned a lesson really quickly.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  And it made sense, you know, when it happened because we always teach you've got to take the machine gun out. Ship's your fire to wherever that machine gun is, take that joker out. And that's what they did. And all of a sudden, everybody's shooting at me.

• 1:45:23Jocko Willink?

  All of a sudden, you were the most popular target out there.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this stuff is just coming in on me and it's just eating everything up. And I'm getting behind a tree and keeping my head around, I'm shooting the machine gun around the side of the tree, but I can't really see what I'm doing. But I couldn't take my head around there, they'd take it all. And so after that mission, I said, that's enough of that. I mean, I'm not carrying one again. Now, when you know, when we put team, if we put two teams together to make what we call a spike team, you know, where we were going in with, with the intent of engaging the enemy and not running, then we would carry, you know, two M60s at least. And then, you know, when you're carrying an M60, everybody on the team has to carry M60 ammo.

• 1:46:10Speaker 02

  I mean, everybody's got at least one hundred round belt with them, you know, plus the machine gun is carrying all that extra weight. So, I mean, it's, it doesn't just weight down the machine gun, it's everybody on the team now is still going to carry all those 40 millimeter, you know, grenades with them for the M79. You still got to carry that. You still got to carry your extra claymores. You've got to carry all your mission equipment. And now I'm giving you another 15, 20 pounds of machine gun ammo to carry along with you. You know, there's only five or six of you. The weight just goes up so fast that we didn't do it.

• 1:46:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I guess another, now that I'm sitting here thinking about it, the fact that you guys were in, generally in closed terrain, pretty tight, it wasn't like you needed massive cover fire to cover ground to put, to, you know, you could, you didn't have to fire and maneuver because you take three steps and all of a sudden the enemy can't see you anymore. So that, that makes a little bit of sense, too. What was your optimal like, you know, we're talking about these missions, how often were you guys going out?

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  That's an interesting story in that it varied by team. And like, well, in the 12 months that I was there, I went out 18 times. Which was way beyond, way beyond what an officer-led team would do. I don't know that the other teams were going out that frequently, you know, in that short a period. The paper that you signed when you joined SOG said, you know, I volunteer to go anywhere, do anything for six months or six missions, whichever comes first.

• 1:47:51Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:47:52Speaker 02

  At the end of the six missions or the six months, I've got to say, I volunteer to do it some more. So you had this, you know, little safety valve in there to give you a chance to kind of wake up and say, this is not a smart thing to do. And here's my ticket to do something different.

• 1:48:12Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:48:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's like, sort of like the bombers in, in World War II that had to do 25 missions over Europe, and if they did 25, then they, then they could go and do something else. Go home.

• 1:48:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:48:26Jocko Willink?

  Most of them didn't make it. But yeah, that's pretty telling when they say that you only have to complete six missions. That doesn't sound like a big deal. You must be thinking to yourself, if they only want me to do six of these things, they gotta be pretty hairy.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  If I only have to go out six times in six months, I mean, I've got a good deal, you know. The grunts are going out there every day and fighting, you know, or doing something or being exposed and, you know. So you had that. And remember that SOG missions, a SOG mission really is an out-of-country mission. You know, as Tilt says, across the fence, you're going to another country. When you see the casualties, you know, the KIA's of SOG.

• 1:49:17Speaker 02

  At least in the beginning, they all said South Vietnam. That's not where they were killed.

• 1:49:24Speaker 02

  So you were going out, but in between those missions, you might do something in-country.

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  Like Lynn, Lynn Black, one of Tilt's big buddies, they were on the same team and stuff for a while. Lynn was a, you know, just an unbelievable 1-0. And he and I, you know, kind of became friends and in-between missions, we would do things like, "Why don't we take some of our guys tonight and let's go over to Marble Mountain, set up an ambush? I guarantee you we'll catch somebody here." And let's go do that. "What about tomorrow afternoon? You want to take some of our guys? Let's go search some of the caves in Marble Mountain. Those jokers are in there. We just have to find them." You know, so we would, we would do a lot of things like that, just for fun, so to speak.

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  You know, because, you know, compared to a regular mission, I mean, this is a no-brainer. You just go over there and you shoot some people. You know, you catch them in the cave and hose them down.

• 1:50:22Jocko Willink?

  Compared to 40 miles deep into Cambodia alone.

• 1:50:25Speaker 02

  And when we, you know, we can be back in time for lunch. I mean, let's just go do this. So, and then you had Marble Mountain, the two combat outposts. Teams would rotate up there. You had to keep, you know, two teams up there all the time. So in-between missions, you know, you might go up there for a week or two weeks at a time and then come back down and start mission prep, you know, for another mission and to go back out. So it wasn't like you were just sitting around in-between missions. You were always doing something. Plus you've done a lot of training and preparation for the next mission that you had coming up. So you stayed, stayed pretty busy.

• 1:51:07Jocko Willink?

  How long would it take you to brief a mission when you were going on?

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  We might start with an initial briefing as a day. Briefing, this is what we're gonna go to do, is where we're gonna go do it. And depending on what the mission was, I might say, okay, so we're going to go over

• 1:51:27Speaker 02

  to a place that was called Monkey Mountain. We're going over to Monkey Mountain because it's a good place over there for us to rehearse the actual mission, the raid, the ambush, whatever it was we were gonna do. We can go over there and get in some, you know, realistic rehearsals. So we might go spend a few days over there, just doing that. And while we're there, we rehearse our ROON procedures, putting in the claymores, where did we put them? I would put the team in a different place every night so that you had to, okay, let's look at the terrain we're in now. What's the most likely approach is, why do we need to defend the claymores? Where do we put the tow hoppers? What's our avenue of egress? How do we get out of here?

• 1:52:12Speaker 02

  If they come at us from this direction or this direction, where do we go? And where's, where are the closest LZs that we're gonna go to? And how do we get there? Everybody needs to know that. You know, whether you're American or Indig, you gotta know where it is, you gotta know how to get there. And so we would, we would do the, the training like that, but particularly mission specific for what we're coming up on. And then as you got closer, you get much more specific. And then when you got to the launch site, you would have the mission briefing where your air assets would be there. So the pilots who were gonna fly your insertion, the gunship pilots, an air force representative

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

  for the A1Es that were gonna be there, the L4s that were going to be there. You know, so you would have the big briefing there and everybody would agree on everything and make sure you had all the call signs and everything down and contingency actions.

• 1:53:08Speaker 02

  The covey, I haven't said anything about him, we'd always have a covey out there with the forward air controller that we could talk to and could look down and tell us what, you know, he was seeing. Might be able to see the bad guys coming to us or whatever. He could get more assets for us. So it was a, it was a big deal. I mean, because... You, you might have four gunships, uh, two to four A1E Skyraiders, two to four L4s. Uh, you've got Cubby, you've got the insertion ships that you're going in with, you've got

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  trailing ships in case those get shot down that are flying empty so they can drop down and, and pick you up. Sometimes you might have a ship with the medics in it because you're expecting casualties, you know, so it was a, it could be a big air shell sometimes going in, put in, if you were going, if you're going to North Vietnam, you had to have the L4s. You all, I mean, it was just required for the mission.

• 1:54:15Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  Um, some of the others, Laos, Cambodia, you could go without the L4s and you just use the A1E Skyraiders. But if you're going North Vietnam, you better have the L4s with you because they could send a MiG down there after you, if they wanted to. So you had to worry about, you know, air cover, uh, as well as hitting, you know, big targets. And an L4, you know, it can get your attention real fast. And the, the Skyraiders, you know, do too because they, they're, they fly low, slow, and they're carrying their own weight and ordnance.

• 1:54:50Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:54:51Speaker 02

  And they can put it right next to you. If you tell them where you want it, that 20 millimeters hitting 10 feet over there and right along beside you, or whatever the ordnance they're carrying, um, they can get your attention. I mean, those, those chokers are good.

• 1:55:08Jocko Willink?

  All right. So you, so how many missions did you do with RT Alabama?

• 1:55:13Speaker 02

  Uh, four.

• 1:55:15Jocko Willink?

  And then after that, did you get the up check from DEC to, to, uh, become a 1-0?

• 1:55:21Speaker 02

  Yes. So I had gotten that, I mean, already, I had it before we did the four, but we knew, uh, that FOB-1 was gonna close down. And when it closed down, the teams were gonna get scattered around. Um, so I knew I, I would get a team, but I would get one somewhere else. Uh, so we just stayed together, you know, for those four missions. And then, uh, when we moved, when I moved, uh, to Da Nang, uh, to CCN, then I took over RT Michigan. And RT Michigan was the one that had, um...

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  I don't remember who the one zero had been on that one.

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  But Eldon Bargewell was the one one on that one. So I I took over over that.

• 1:56:19Speaker 02

  And, you know, you know, the guy's.

• 1:56:21Jocko Willink?

  He was a listening guy at the time.

• 1:56:23Speaker 02

  He was back four, I think.

• 1:56:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And he was already a legend.

• 1:56:27Speaker 02

  Well, he he already had.

• 1:56:29Jocko Willink?

  A good reputation.

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  Good reputation.

• 1:56:34Speaker 02

  You know, so we got along well because I had to ask about him because I didn't.

• 1:56:39Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:56:39Speaker 02

  You know, he was a different camp. I didn't know about him. So I had to ask about him and everybody I talked to said, man, you know, this guy is good.

• 1:56:49Speaker 02

  He had.

• 1:56:49Jocko Willink?

  He was asking everyone else about you too.

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  He was asking about me and he told me. And I said, what'd they tell you? And he said, well, I I talked to, you know, Sergeant Johns. And, you know, it was impressive because he said, and, you know, I had total faith in him. He said, Thompson is the only lieutenant I've ever met. That you could give a map and compass to and he could tell you where he was. And he could navigate you to any place you wanted to go. And he said, you just don't find lieutenants like that. So, you know, Bargewell said, that was good enough for him if I knew where we were.

• 1:57:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:31Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:57:31Jocko Willink?

  Isn't it surprising that that that would be a skill that's so needed? And and that people didn't actually have it sometimes. It's crazy. And these days, well, you know, kids, kids are relying on the GPS.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:46Jocko Willink?

  And they forget about some of those land nav skills. And it always cracked me up because they're now they're to a point where they really rely on the GPS. I don't know their pace count. And, you know, I'd be walking on a training operation, you know, and say, okay, you know, just not even thinking about looking at a GPS because I did a map study and know where we're at. And those younger guys, you know, they just they just don't have this. Not all of them, of course. You know, we still get some guys that are great at it, but it's just a different time. So you take over this, you take over this new team. You got Barzwell, which I'm sure you heard me talking about it with Tilt, but, but you know, he was, when I was a young officer, I just got picked up for a commission and I went to Germany and he was the guy

• 1:58:31Jocko Willink?

  in charge over there. And so, and my boss, who was an outstanding guy, who was a great mentor to me, but he, he would kind of tell me, you know, about, about the old man. He'd say, Barzwell said this and Barzwell said that, you know, so that was pretty neat for me to make this connection. And here you are sitting here that, uh, actually he was your, he was your 1-1.

• 1:58:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he, I mean, he was very knowledgeable, very good. And I, you know, I was impressed with him right from the beginning. I, I thought, I mean, this, this guy is good. And, you know, when, when we went out on an operation, he was cool and calm. Um, you know, when the shooting started, I mean, he was good. But, I mean, he had, he had experience. I mean, he was at Qaisan with, with the team there, the siege of Qaisan. I mean, he was, he was there. I mean, where they just got hammered for, you know, several weeks there.

• 1:59:31Speaker 02

  He was, you know, there with that, um, special forces detachment. He had recruited, actually had recruited some of the team members that we had, and this was the yard team. Um, you know, they all liked him. They all had a lot of respect for him. Um, and he, you know, he, he was a smart guy. I just never thought then, you know, where he would end up. I, I figured, you know, he's, if he doesn't get killed, uh, he, he's probably going to be somebody at some point. But I didn't expect to see him, I don't know, I guess it was

• 2:00:11Speaker 02

  in the, in the late seventies, I saw him at Fort Bragg. No, I guess it was in the eighties. I saw him at Fort Bragg.

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  And he was a captain. And I'm thinking, you know, how can you be a captain? I'm, you know, I'm a major.

• 2:00:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:32Speaker 02

  You were a spec four the last time I saw you, but now you're a captain. And, and I, you know, I thought that was great. So we hung out a little bit. He was in Delta.

• 2:00:44Speaker 02

  So we chatted about, you know, Delta Force and all that kind of stuff. And, um, you know, I had some good times all day together at Bragg. And then I guess, you know, the next time I actually saw him, uh, he was a major. And he was that command, going through the Commander General Staff College. And I'm thinking, I'm about to get promoted, but I'm still a major too. How's this, how's this guy doing this? And, you know, then the next thing, he's a lieutenant colonel, and then he's a full colonel. And, you know, ends up a major general. And he just, he's just constantly going and everybody kept telling me, um, get out of special forces.

• 2:01:27Speaker 02

  Special forces is a kiss of death for an officer. You stay in special forces, uh, you're not going anywhere. Well, he did.

• 2:01:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  I mean, not only did he did great on, uh, that tour with SOG. He did a second tour. Uh, he ended up, uh, command, not just being in Delta. He came back and commanded Delta Force. And then over all special operations and all this kind of stuff. I mean, just unbelievable.

• 2:01:58Jocko Willink?

  Did you notice any qualities? I mean, I, you, you said you looked at him and you were like, oh yeah, this, this guy will do well. If he lives. Was there any qualities that stand out? You know, if you're, if you're, if you're a young enlisted guy in the army right now, or in any branch and, and you say to yourself, you know, I want to be a good soldier. Is there anything that you noticed about him that you would give as like guidance to young, young trooper out there?

• 2:02:21Speaker 02

  He was mission focused. You tell him this is what you need to do or where you need to go. I mean, he's gonna make it happen. Cool, calm. He was a smart guy. I mean, he didn't brag about it. When you talk to him,

• 2:02:40Speaker 02

  just very humble. And, but you could tell, I mean, he's smart. I mean, he's thinking about what you're saying and what he comes out with. And when he makes recommendations and talks about things, you need to be listening because he's thought this stuff through.

• 2:02:58Speaker 02

  No, but no fear from a combat perspective. I mean, if the bad guys are coming, he's gonna take them out. And, you know, demonstrated that, you know, on several occasions with me. He demonstrated it later on.

• 2:03:14Speaker 02

  I think he got, I think he got hit the next mission after he was with me.

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  But he, he had put on AK-47 vest, you know, so. Got shot in the chest. In the magazine or something. Yeah, it went in the magazine. You know, he poked through enough to make a little hole in him, but it didn't go all the way through, you know.

• 2:03:37Speaker 02

  But, and then he, you know, on another mission, he got shot a couple more times. And another mission, he, B-40 rocket hit the team. Everybody was wounded. He had a piece of shrapnel go in through his cheek and kind of lodged by, over behind his eye. You know, so he's bleeding like a stuck pig. And, you know, the bad guys are coming and, you know, he takes out 20 of them. Because he's got a, an RPD, you know, the Soviet kind of a light machine gun.

• 2:04:10Speaker 02

  And he, he just taking people out right and left, you know, the whole, everybody wounded, including him. But that's, that's what he did. The only general on record that for a personal firearm carried an AK-47.

• 2:04:28Speaker 02

  An AK-47, I mean, he's walking around as a general officer instead of having that little pop gun on his hip, he's got an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and he's, he's telling, you know, his aides and bodyguards, "Hey, if we get in trouble, you don't worry about me." He said, "You guys take care of yourself, I'll take care of me." And, you know, just down real, so. Outstanding. But, you know, we, uh, we spent a lot of time up on a marble mountain together. Um, just with the rotation and stuff, so we, we spent time there. Um, you know, so we'd have those little fights most nights, uh, the bad guys trying to come up and get

• 2:05:10Speaker 02

  us, the snipers would shoot at us just before dark. There was one, uh, cave opening that was almost on our level, um, I don't know, 50 meters away from us, that if they worked their way up to that opening, they could shoot just about into us at night. Um, I've got videos of that cave and you can see how the marble is just chipped off all around the opening of that cave where we were shooting at them at night, you know, when they're up in there and stuff, so, um, we, we did a lot of stuff together and it was a, a good relationship.

• 2:05:50Jocko Willink?

  So, one of the, one of the things you got in here in your notes is, um, you guys did a mission, RT Michigan, and you guys inserted into the, into the Laotian, uh, border with 101st Airborne. It sounded like a pretty good, uh, trick, you know, kind of a...

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  It was kind of a, when, when they told us what they wanted us to do, I thought, "This sounds like Ranger School." This is exactly a scenario in Ranger School.

• 2:06:20Jocko Willink?

  What'd they tell you they wanted you to do?

• 2:06:22Speaker 02

  Uh, we, this was gonna be a walk-in mission, so we would start on the Vietnam side of the border and we would walk over into Laos to, to the area they wanted us to go to. And they wanted us to do that from a position where the Hundred and First was currently located, so there was a battalion from the Hundred and First that was set up right on the border. And so they coordinated to have us, have our team, put on steel pots and all that kind of stuff, get on the resupply helicopters. We came in with a resupply like we were, you know, new troops coming to be there.

• 2:07:04Speaker 02

  And we jumped off and, and then they, they put us in a, inside the perimeter but, but in a section and said, you need to dig in. You know, and all the little guys were looking around saying, what? You need to dig a hole, foxhole, to get in, fighting position. And you know, the response, we don't dig. So I told them, you need to dig. I mean, we're out here with people at the end of the, you know, bullets going everywhere. You need to dig in. So it was a good thing we did, because it got a little hairy, you know, that night. And it was nice to be able to get down in a hole. And, and then I met with, with the company commander and platoon leaders and their forward observer.

• 2:07:49Speaker 02

  And I gave them our plan, you know, here's what we're gonna do. But what shocked them was, I said, okay, these coordinates, I want you to pre-plan that as an artillery target, and here's the name of it. And I want one here and here and here, and these are the names. All I'm gonna do is call that name out, you know. Target Roger. I'm not gonna give you coordinates and you, you gotta have that already planned. And when I say Roger, I expect the artillery. I, I'd never had artillery before. So this was great. We were never in range of artillery and all of a sudden I got it.

• 2:08:33Speaker 02

  I planned, I planned that stuff all over the place. And so the, what we did the next morning was, at first light, we went down to the stream with the water resupply team. They'd go down and fill all the canteens and things up and bring them up. So we went down with them, dressed like the Hundred and First, and when we got down there...

• 2:08:54Speaker 02

  You know, we changed into our Batman suits and gave them the hell once in flak jackets and all that stuff. And they threw them in bags and carried them back up and we just, you know, went on across the river and into the jungle there on our mission. So, hoping that the bad guys thought, you know, nobody had come in that way. So, went out on our mission. There was a, there was a hatchet force platoon that had been inserted, you know, much further out in the valley. But we, we went in and, I mean, it was, it was just, you know, different and a cool way to do something. And then, you know, when we got in contact, I mean, when I, I call for those targets, they put it right on them.

• 2:09:39Speaker 02

  So, that was a cool thing. It was interesting that we had Bargewell and the one, two that was on the team with us. We had a little disagreement about our exact location.

• 2:09:59Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:10:00Speaker 02

  And I'm telling those two, "No, I'm telling you, we are right here." And I said, "No, you're 200 meters off." I said, "There's no way." So, anyway, we, we ended in contact and I told them, I said, "You know, if we're where I am, or where I'm saying we are, there's a fork in the stream and there's a little footbridge going across one, right out there, about 150 meters in front of us, is a road and there's a stream out there." I said, "I'll take you down there." But then we made contact and we had to come out on strings. So, when they're lifting-

• 2:10:37Jocko Willink?

  Was that your first time coming out on strings?

• 2:10:39Speaker 02

  Uh, no. I'd been out before.

• 2:10:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:10:43Speaker 02

  They're picking us up and they couldn't see me because they're in front of me, but I'm pouring down.

• 2:10:49Jocko Willink?

  There it is.

• 2:10:50Speaker 02

  We're right there.

• 2:10:51Jocko Willink?

  You're getting ready to get shot, but you're like, "Hey, I was right."

• 2:10:55Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. Yeah. Those are, you know, 10-digit grid coordinates and they were right on, you know.

• 2:11:03Jocko Willink?

  So were you, were you, were you just using pace count?

• 2:11:06Speaker 02

  I could use the pace count and use terrain.

• 2:11:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:10Speaker 02

  You know, I'd spent a lot of time in the woods growing up, so I, and, and particularly in the dark. And I love the dark. I can, I can feel the change in the terrain. I know if I'm going uphill, downhill, if I'm on a little side, whatever. So I would take the section of the map that I thought we were gonna operate in. And I just memorize it.

• 2:11:32Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys have one to 50,000 maps? Or they one to 24?

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were, well, we had both, but what we, depending on the distance that we were gonna go. But I could just, I mean, usually we didn't go very far, you know, so you can memorize, if you're used to doing that, the section of the map. I could see it in my mind, you know, when we were moving. I knew where we were, I knew what the pace counts were, I knew what the terrain should look like, you know, where we were. And I had checkpoints set up that, that, you know, if we're here, we'll see this. If we're here, we'll see this. You know, so I could track it, plus I used the pace count.

• 2:12:14Speaker 02

  So I, I knew where I was out there. And that was one thing that I, I thought was critical, because eventually you're gonna have to call for help, and you need to be able to tell them where you are. And under triple canopy jungle, you're not shooting asthmus to hilltops and things like that. I mean, you gotta know where you are on the ground, because you know the topology, what it feels like, what it looks like, and how far you've gone. And, you know, that was just the skill set that I had.

• 2:12:42Jocko Willink?

  No, no more important piece of information on the battlefield than where you are. If you don't know where you are, it doesn't matter where the enemy is, because you can't call for fire, you can't maneuver on them, because you don't know where you are. When you guys were, were you guys just getting overwhelmed? Is that why you guys had to come out on strings on that one?

• 2:13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:02Jocko Willink?

  How big was the enemy force, do you think, that you rolled into? In your notes here, you said lots. It says lots of NVA.

• 2:13:10Speaker 02

  I, I typically use the term lots, meaning, you know, a hundred or more.

• 2:13:17Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:13:18Jocko Willink?

  How did you guys stumble across them?

• 2:13:20Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm sorry.

• 2:13:21Jocko Willink?

  Where'd the contact come from? Like, what did that contact start like?

• 2:13:26Speaker 02

  It really started because...

• 2:13:31Speaker 02

  Headquarters decided they needed to resupply us because they wanted us to stay longer. And I was saying, "No. Don't bring a helicopter out here and hover over our position. Don't do that. You gotta get resupplied." And they did it anyway. And so, you know, once you have a chopper hovering above the canopy there, dropping stuff down through it. The bad guys, I mean, they're all over the place anyway. They thought, "Oh, there must be somebody down there. If nothing else, they're gonna go get whatever fell out of that helicopter." And they did, they came down there and there we were.

• 2:14:11Speaker 02

  So, it kinda messed up the afternoon in terms of what we'd planned to do. But we got out.

• 2:14:20Speaker 02

  But it's, an extraction on strings through, you know, double canopy jungle is rough. Because you, you're being dragged through the limbs of the trees, through the treetops. The aircraft will always start to, to go forward. And then you're being dragged through them and... Well, they wanna get the hell out of the line of fire, right? Yeah, because they're getting shot at. They don't wanna stay there long. You're getting shot at and it's hard for you to shoot because you're twisting and turning and hitting leaves and, you know, now they're behind you. And it's hard to shoot that way. And, you know, they're only gonna take, um, maybe four people at a time out anyway.

• 2:15:05Speaker 02

  So that means you've got another chopper coming in. The bad guys know you're going out on strings now. And you've got another aircraft coming in to pick up the rest of the team. You know, I'm the team leader. I'm always first off, first one on the ground, the last one on the ground. You know, so I'm coming out with that last aircraft. I'm the last one, you know, to come up off the ground. And, you know. They've got you pretty well zeroed in by then, even though you know you're starting to work some gunships and stuff. But, um, yeah, the pilots don't like staying near. And then, uh, then they get over the, uh, in this case, they get over the anti-aircraft fire.

• 2:15:50Speaker 02

  I mean, all of a sudden we're seven thousand feet.

• 2:15:52Jocko Willink?

  Freezing.

• 2:15:53Speaker 02

  AGL.

• 2:15:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:54Speaker 02

  Not sea level, AGL, hanging on the end of a rope.

• 2:15:58Jocko Willink?

  Covered in sweat.

• 2:15:59Speaker 02

  And, uh, and freezing to death and I'm looking up, you know, and I was, I'm swinging back and forth. So my rope is rubbing back and forth on the edge of the floor of the helicopter. And I'm thinking, we got a long ways to go and it's starting to fray the rope up there. And, you know, are we going to get to a place they can set us down before that thing breaks or, or not? So that runs your arousal level up a little bit. And, you know, places you're shivering and then, you know, after about 30 minutes, your legs are asleep. You can't walk because it's cut the circulation off. So even when you get to wherever they're going to set you down, you can't stand up. They have to come out and get you and pick you up and put you in the helicopter. So.

• 2:16:43Jocko Willink?

  It's another day at SOG, huh?

• 2:16:44Speaker 02

  Another day at SOG.

• 2:16:48Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you did a snatch mission, you mentioned in, in these notes. You did a, a little, a little, uh, you set up and set up the ambush, tried to capture someone. It doesn't seem like you, you mentioned a couple of times, you weren't very successful at capturing people.

• 2:17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, to get a.

• 2:17:10Jocko Willink?

  Is this how you got your second nickname, Terminator?

• 2:17:16Speaker 02

  You know, if they don't cooperate, you know, sometimes they get terminated. So, um, so, you know, in this one, I mean, we, we had rehearsed, we had practiced. Uh, and one of the techniques of the prisoner snatch is if you have a trail that's, people are going to move up and down in small groups. Um, you practice setting up an ambush that has a, a dead spot in it. So in the, in the middle of the ambush usually, um, no one's going to fire into that zone. The claymores are angled out so that it creates a, a dead space there.

• 2:17:57Speaker 02

  You put a big block of C4 there.

• 2:18:02Speaker 02

  That you're gonna designate or detonate at the same, you know, same time you set off the clay, everything's gonna go off at the same time. And everybody's firing and, you know, the, what happens is whoever's lucky enough to be standing in that dead spot, um, they didn't get hit with a bullet, but the concussion from that C4 stuns them.

• 2:18:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:25Speaker 02

  And, you know, we practiced, so it stuns them and then I've got a guy with me that's designated as thumper. Alright, so his, he and I going, we're coming out of the bushes as soon as that stuff goes off and thumper's job is to see this guy standing there kind of dazed and just take him down. You're gonna thump him in the head and when he hits the ground, I'm gonna hit him in the thigh with the morphine cigarette. So I'm gonna pump him full of morphine and then he'll do whatever we say.

• 2:18:55Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:56Speaker 02

  You know, he's just, you know, he's just calm and, um, but in this case, we ended up killing that guy.

• 2:19:06Jocko Willink?

  How, how many, at this point, you've done however many missions, had you guys taken any casualties in your teams yet?

• 2:19:13Speaker 02

  Um, yes, but I took most, I mean, a lot of people got hit. Um, I didn't have anybody killed on one of my teams until I got to ROT Virginia. And, you know, the portman was killed, a lot of people were wounded, uh, right after I left Virginia. Um, on their next mission, they just got hammered and lost some people, Americans got, um, uh, shot up really bad, both critical, so they were through with SOG.

• 2:19:49Jocko Willink?

  But at this point, you've been, you're being, continuing to be pretty lucky?

• 2:19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it is. I, I, people ask me all the time, well, you know.

• 2:20:03Speaker 02

  How do you survive that stuff? So you gotta be lucky. I mean, and you can call it luck, you can call it God, you can call it whatever you want. Uh, but there's some kind of intervention that prevents you from getting hit. You can't sit in a helicopter like that first one with that many bullets crisscrossing in the air and not get hit. You know, and I like a fraction of a second between me being hit and, uh, you know, the other American being hit on those skids. I mean, I had just pushed back when that guy pulled the trigger, missed me, hit the other guy. And that happened on a regular basis where, you know, I.

• 2:20:45Speaker 02

  When I go speak, a lot of times people, if it has a, this kind of flavor to it. Uh, if they say something about, you know, being in special forces or something. Uh, it's not unusual for people to come up to me and say, I really thought you'd be taller. And I say, if I'd been taller, I'd be dead.

• 2:21:07Speaker 02

  I'm alive because I'm not taller. My head has been creased so many times, um, that I just wouldn't be here.

• 2:21:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:15Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:21:17Jocko Willink?

  So then did you, did Bargewell took over for, for RT Michigan?

• 2:21:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, eventually we got to the point where, um, I mean, Bargewell was ready. He could have taken over before me. But, um, so we got to the point where I had to leave to go do something different. And, um, I told him, he's ready. He can do this.

• 2:21:40Jocko Willink?

  He's a spec four.

• 2:21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:42Jocko Willink?

  With all those assets, all that responsibility.

• 2:21:45Speaker 02

  And somewhere in there, you got E5, I think, but yeah. But if you, if you were to go back and look at SOG 1.0s across the board, you would be shocked at the age. They're so young.

• 2:22:04Speaker 02

  Um, but, and.

• 2:22:07Speaker 02

  As I've looked at, why would people do that? And it used to be that neurologists thought that your prefrontal cortex over here, where you make decisions, but it's also the part that controls risk-taking. They used to say, yeah, it fully matures somewhere around eighteen to twenty years old. And now we know, most people don't mature until about twenty-eight to thirty years old. So what's happening-

• 2:22:46Jocko Willink?

  Is that primarily men? That don't, don't men reach that level of maturity a little later?

• 2:22:51Speaker 02

  A little bit. The women are a little behind, but in, in terms of the SOG leaders, most of them had not, definitely had not matured.

• 2:23:02Speaker 02

  And I don't mean that they, the person was immature. I mean, they're talking that part of the brain-

• 2:23:06Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:23:06Speaker 02

  -that controls risk-taking.

• 2:23:09Speaker 02

  So, you're young, you think you're bulletproof, you think you can do anything, you think you're gonna live forever, man, this is a cool thing to do, this is a SOG mission. So, I think there's something there, I just haven't had time to explore it.

• 2:23:23Jocko Willink?

  Well, there's something there. It might be that the guys that are thirty years old are like, I'm not doing it. Like the guy that told you, don't volunteer for SOG.

• 2:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23:30Jocko Willink?

  Cause they're saying, yeah, the survivability's not high, I've gotta, gonna, I'm not gonna do it. But the young kids are all in.

• 2:23:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23:41Jocko Willink?

  How old was Bargewell? How old were you at this point?

• 2:23:44Speaker 02

  Bargewell, Bargewell, I was about four or five months older than Bargewell.

• 2:23:50Jocko Willink?

  And how old were you?

• 2:23:52Speaker 02

  Hmm, when Bargewell came along-

• 2:23:55Jocko Willink?

  This is nineteen sixty-nine.

• 2:23:58Jocko Willink?

  So you're twenty-two, you were born in forty-seven.

• 2:23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I had just become twenty-two, which I didn't think I would make, and I thought for sure I won't see twenty, twenty-three.

• 2:24:10Speaker 02

  Because, I mean, we obviously skipped over a lot of-

• 2:24:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:14Speaker 02

  -stuff here, where I used a lot of cat lives up, so.

• 2:24:20Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, we were just a few months apart in terms of age.

• 2:24:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, every single one of these operations, just about, you're gonna use a certain number of cat lives.

• 2:24:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:24:33Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever go on an operation where you didn't get contacted by the enemy?

• 2:24:38Speaker 02

  No, if you, if you count the gas. Then, no, we made contact.

• 2:24:44Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent, you're gonna get into contact with the enemy.

• 2:24:49Jocko Willink?

  All right, what was Operation Shiloh all about?

• 2:24:54Jocko Willink?

  And is this where, is this why you left RT Michigan?

• 2:24:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:57Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you get called away from RT Michigan, they need somebody to do Operation Shiloh, what was that all about?

• 2:25:02Speaker 02

  They, Mac V Sog and somebody higher up,

• 2:25:08Speaker 02

  decided that they needed to stop the influx of supplies and, and troops

• 2:25:16Speaker 02

  coming down from the north, and it was a place called the Mu Gia Pass.

• 2:25:24Speaker 02

  Big, deep valley, but there was a point where it really narrowed up, and the banks were really steep and high. And, you know, so they had to funnel through that pass with their trucks and people and whatever to come on down into the south. And, you know, you send a forward air controller out there, I mean, they see it. So they, they pull off and they hide, because they know that forward air controller has a bunch of L fours over here in orbit, just waiting on him to find a target, and they're gonna come in. So, they, somebody came up with the idea of, what if we put a team out there, up on the ridge, up on the crest of that valley looking down?

• 2:26:08Speaker 02

  And, and they'll be able to see far enough that when they're coming, they can call and say, okay, they're on their way, scramble, you know, get the L four out here. And the L four can be on them like a chicken on a gene bird, and just eat them up, you know.

• 2:26:25Speaker 02

  So they decided, let's do this mission. We'll sneak people, sneak a team out there, put them on the ridge, let them set up there and just interdict this place like crazy. But it has to be a super team, has to be officer-led, has to, all Americans have to be approved by, by name, by the President to do this because of where it is and what they're gonna do. So they, they needed somebody, a 1-0 officer, who could take over a team that we had there and, you know, lead it. And they put me on it.

• 2:27:07Speaker 02

  And I wasn't happy about leaving Michigan, but I thought, well, this sounds cool, until I learned more about what they were gonna do. And I went on a visual recon, I went out and rode with a forward air controller while he was putting in airstrikes with L4s, and I'm looking at this place and I'm thinking, there's gotta be somebody up there. Yeah, it's the high ground. They're not leaving this place undefended. Yeah. And when I brought that up, they said, no. There's nobody there. We never receive any fire from that area. And I said, if you don't want people to know you're there, you don't shoot at them.

• 2:27:51Speaker 02

  So there's some, I'm sure there's somebody there. And anyway, so I, I had some disagreements with the people down in Saigon about that. I had to go back and forth on a lot of briefings about the mission. And we took the other team, or I took the team, and we trained, and we'd go to Monkey Mountain, and we'd practice all this stuff and our surveillance techniques, and we had starlight scopes, we had long-range lenses on our cameras and all the state-of-the-art binoculars. We had a plan that said, and I thought it was funny that, we're gonna drop parachutes out in an area over, away from there.

• 2:28:32Speaker 02

  With blocks of ice in them. So the parachutes will open, descend, hang in the trees, ice will melt. So when the, when the NVA go over there, you know, they'll think we parachuted some people in and they moved out.

• 2:28:47Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:28:48Speaker 02

  Because they won't see anybody. I'm saying, they're not stupid. Anyway.

• 2:28:56Speaker 02

  So for four weeks, we get ready to go do this thing and then finally somebody listened and said, no. Call it off. We're not gonna do it. And Tilt talked to you in one of your podcasts about where he had this special mission.

• 2:29:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:13Speaker 02

  That he had to have an officer with him.

• 2:29:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:16Speaker 02

  Later on, after I left, it came back up again. They decided to do it and they put an officer with his team and said, you guys are gonna do it. And they were out on the helipad with the rotors turning. And when the mission got called off because they discovered there were a bunch of people there. And if they had put either one of those teams in, we would've lost right off the bat.

• 2:29:39Jocko Willink?

  How about, uh, Dick Meadows?

• 2:29:43Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 2:29:44Jocko Willink?

  Now, now.

• 2:29:45Speaker 02

  Legend.

• 2:29:45Jocko Willink?

  Now, this is, he's a legend at this time.

• 2:29:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:29:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:48Speaker 02

  I mean, everybody already knew Dick Meadows.

• 2:29:54Speaker 02

  Meadows had been, he got to the point where, um, he'd done all this super secretive stuff and they said, okay. We're gonna give you a choice. You can, we can promote you to sergeant major.

• 2:30:09Speaker 02

  Or we can promote you to captain. Which one do you want?

• 2:30:14Speaker 02

  And he, he worked out a deal that said, if you promote me to captain. Then I get to stay, you can't, you can't force me out. I get to stay in until I can retire, you know, as an officer, whatever rank I, I get to.

• 2:30:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:29Speaker 02

  So anyway, so he shows.

• 2:30:32Jocko Willink?

  The, this is, I don't know if this is the Army or if it's just Vietnam. I think it's a little bit of both. That kind of thing just doesn't happen anymore. Where they take a guy like that and go, hey, we're gonna either promote you to the senior enlisted side or make you a captain. Which one do you want?

• 2:30:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:50Jocko Willink?

  That's epic.

• 2:30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And Meadows was an epic guy.

• 2:30:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:55Speaker 02

  I mean, so, you know, I, I came back, uh, from a mission.

• 2:31:01Speaker 02

  And I was told that we got a new company commander. And he wants to see you as soon as you get cleaned up. So I I got in to see him that night. It was probably twenty two hundred. And actually, he was.

• 2:31:17Speaker 02

  The quarters were, it was a Quonset hut with a wall. I was on one side of it. He was on the other side. So I go over and report to him and, you know, he told me, good job and all this stuff. I've been looking at your records. And he said, effective right now, you're the recon company XO.

• 2:31:37Speaker 02

  But I don't want to give up a team. And he said, you can keep a team. I don't care about that. But you're the XO and you're going to help me. And he said, to start with, tomorrow morning. We're going to have a meeting with all the Americans in recon company. One at a time. Because I've been going through the records. And I think the, some of them's beret has gotten a little too heavy for them.

• 2:32:07Speaker 02

  And we're going to send them back to the train tomorrow. They don't need to be in SOG. They can go play with special forces, but they're not going to be in SOG.

• 2:32:17Speaker 02

  What do you mean? He said, there are people here. Who are not going out on missions very often. And going out on missions and every time they get shot off the LZ, they never actually complete a mission. So, you know, those people need to go somewhere else and we need to replace them. And Metta's is a hard dude. I'm hard. And you can tell when he's talking to you, he is as serious of a heart attack. So he said, here, take this stack of files with you. Go through them tonight. Tomorrow morning at oh seven hundred.

• 2:32:58Speaker 02

  You know, they're going to start coming in, you know, the recon orderly room and I'm going to have a talk. You and I are going to have a talk with them. So you tell me which ones you think need to go home.

• 2:33:10Speaker 02

  So we met in there the next morning and, and, you know, I'm looking at the list that he's, the stack he's got there to eat plans to send back. I said, we're not going to have anybody left.

• 2:33:21Speaker 02

  And he said, "I don't care. If we have to, you and I will lead all the missions." You know, and my heart's not beating at this point, because I'm hearing how serious he is in his voice. And he said, "We'll do them all." "Yes, sir." "We're gonna be kinda busy." But anyway, he, he, he wasn't gonna send them all home, but he, he sent a lot of people back to the train that day. But he, he just told them, "You, helicopter's leaving this afternoon, be on it." And he started shuttling people back down there. You know, if you had been, you know, dragging your feet, finding ways not to go on missions,

• 2:34:06Speaker 02

  you were sick, you were, you were whatever, and you get shot off to LZ. I mean, he looked at, you know, over the period of time you had been there, how many missions had you been on? How many times have you been in contact? How many days have you been on the ground? And all this kinda stuff. And, you know, he had his own little equation, and, you know, these people needed to find something else to do. And, I mean, he was hard. Big time Ranger, Special Ops mindset. And he started looking around right away, "There's some things here we gotta clean up. We should have an isolation area. When a team gets a mission, you go into isolation. That's the way it's done in Special Forces.

• 2:34:50Speaker 02

  That's the doctrine, and we're not doing it. Why would we not do that here?" A lot of things like that. Training. In fact, you know, he told me, "Listen," the next morning, he said, "You meet me down on the beach the next, you know, tomorrow morning." The beach was just right outside of Constantine. So I met him down there, and he said, "We're gonna go for a little run." And, you know, considerably older than me at that point, so we take off down the beach at about a seven-minute pace, and I'm thinking, "Holy cow, I haven't been running." I mean, I'm starting to, you know, suck a little wind here, and this joker's not slowing down.

• 2:35:31Speaker 02

  So, when we get about the two-mile point, you know, I told him, I said, "Sir, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and turn around here and go back and take care of some things. You do that, Lieutenant, I'm gonna keep running." And he kept going, and I'd look back at him once in a while till he disappeared out of sight down the beach, and he's by himself, and he's unarmed. And, you know, later on, he came back. I mean, physical fitness was a big thing for him. You keep your body sharp, you'll keep your mind sharp. And, you know, we started to have in PT in the mornings for the teams that were not out in the field, things like that. So, he made a lot of changes.

• 2:36:15Jocko Willink?

  How did that affect the attitude around the camp?

• 2:36:18Speaker 02

  Well, after, after his housecleaning at the, at the beginning, everybody else was, "Yes, sir, whatever you want." I mean, "We need to do this stuff, and we need to do it right." And, you know, he was out there, I mean, and everybody knew. I mean, he's a guy that would say, "You've been out twice to get a prisoner. I'm going with you this time and show you how to get one." And he'd go out and get one, and bring it back. I mean, whatever the mission was, he'd go do it. And, and then say, "Now, I want the rest of you to do it that way." And, oh, okay.

• 2:36:57Jocko Willink?

  Roger that.

• 2:36:58Speaker 02

  Whatever you say. So, he said, "You can keep a team, but here's how we're gonna start. We've got a group coming over." The first group in Okinawa, we're sending people over, temporary duty. They'd send four teams of Americans over.

• 2:37:16Speaker 02

  And he said, I want you to train them. So when they get here, you get with them and their teams and you put them through some training on how to run these operations and what to do. And then I want you to go out with them with each team. You take them out, you walk right alongside, you know, the one zero.

• 2:37:34Jocko Willink?

  I guess we call that skin in the game.

• 2:37:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:37Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna trade them and then you're gonna go with them.

• 2:37:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, when you get a team that you think is ready to go, you tell me, we'll sign a mission to them and you take the next team out.

• 2:37:48Jocko Willink?

  Are these the snake bite teams? Is that what these are called?

• 2:37:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:51Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:37:52Speaker 02

  So, you know, I was going out on a regular basis with these guys, you know, particularly once I got them trained. And, you know, we were going into the Marine Force Recon's area of operations. You know, they would put their teams out there and within two or three days, you know, they'd get run out. We were going out and the objective was to stay seven days. And, excuse me, we, you know, we'd eventually make contact. Sometimes we'd make contact before that, but it was a live fire, you know, shoot back target kind of certification.

• 2:38:33Speaker 02

  So can you lead a team out against real bad guys and get shot at and do it right? And then I give them the check mark. Then they get a SOG mission.

• 2:38:45Jocko Willink?

  So those are the Elephant Valley operations?

• 2:38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:48Jocko Willink?

  Is that what those are? So you had an AO that was a little bit calmer, it was a little bit closer. You still had some real bad guys. This is just like the ultimate in training operations.

• 2:38:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:57Jocko Willink?

  Because it's actually real.

• 2:38:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because the target shoot back. I mean, and we had several of them wounded, you know, from going out on those missions. But, you know, they always did a great job. I mean, when they were there, they did a great job. So he kept me busy with that. So I was technically still going out with teams. I wasn't happy, but I said, I want real SOG missions. I don't want to, you know.

• 2:39:24Jocko Willink?

  And those, did those even count as your SOG missions?

• 2:39:27Speaker 02

  No, no. They was just

• 2:39:28Jocko Willink?

  Those are just

• 2:39:29Speaker 02

  day to day stuff. You need to go do it. And, you know, try not to get killed while you're doing it. But, yeah, you just got to do that. And, you know, ironically enough, That was very similar to what it was like, you know, when I came home and went to the Ranger Department and became a Ranger instructor. That's what I did. I was walking along, you know, with a team of Ranger students grading and evaluating the patrol leaders. So, except the targets didn't shoot back.

• 2:40:02Jocko Willink?

  That's a little bit of a difference. And then, when did you take over RT Virginia? Was that your next, was that your next one zero?

• 2:40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. We finished with the snake bites and he said, okay, I got one more mission for you before you get your real team back again. And he said, we've got a team that we want to convert over to a Vietnamese-led team. So, it's gonna be a team that's gonna operate with no Americans on it. We've got a Vietnamese Army captain that's coming in here, so he'll be the team leader. And we've got RT Virginia, who has nobody right now.

• 2:40:53Speaker 02

  So, I want you to train them with him, and then you can, you know, take them out on a mission and make sure he does okay. And if he does okay, then, you know, he will take over the team and he'll, they'll start getting, you know, SOG missions. So, as soon as I got with the team, they were saying, no, no. We don't want a Vietnamese captain. And, I don't know, there was just something about them. We blinded very quickly, and then they started saying, we want you. I said, it can't be me. It's gotta be this guy. So, we're gonna go train. And, and they were good.

• 2:41:36Speaker 02

  And I liked them, we got along well. But they did not like the captain. So, in the end, Emato said, okay, you take the team. You know, you spend all this time with them, you take them and go with them.

• 2:41:54Jocko Willink?

  And then what were those missions? Then you started doing

• 2:41:57Speaker 02

  Sog missions.

• 2:41:57Jocko Willink?

  Sog missions, yeah, because they were good. And how many times did you go out with, uh, with, uh, RT Virginia?

• 2:42:03Speaker 02

  Uh, a bunch. I, I don't, I'd have to go back and count them now, but yeah. I mean, that was the last team, you know, that I was one zero on.

• 2:42:13Jocko Willink?

  And so these missions are the same, you know, you're going deep in enemy territory, across the fence, as Tilt says, inserting and trying to do recon, trying to find intelligence, trying to plant sensors and trying to avoid hundreds, if not thousands of

• 2:42:31Speaker 02

  And

• 2:42:32Jocko Willink?

  NVA.

• 2:42:33Speaker 02

  And sometimes, sometimes you went out looking for a large unit. I mean, that was the mission. You'd go find them and once you find them, now you've got them located.

• 2:42:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:42:43Speaker 02

  You bring the world, I mean, you introduce them to, you know, what we call later chalk and all. I mean, you bring all this stuff on because they can't get away once you know where they are.

• 2:42:53Jocko Willink?

  So those, some of those were just straight up patrol to contact. You're going to go in there and you're going to patrol until you find some enemy and then you're going to call the

• 2:43:00Speaker 02

  You go do that. Um, and I think we, I had an in-country mission with Virginia, but I think the first out of country was what we sometimes call a suicide mission.

• 2:43:14Speaker 02

  We'd put in two teams. Once we got on the ground, we'd separate.

• 2:43:18Jocko Willink?

  For you to be calling them the suicide mission is a real statement about things.

• 2:43:23Speaker 02

  So, so we would separate.

• 2:43:25Jocko Willink?

  This should be called the guaranteed death mission, but okay, we'll go with it. Suicide mission.

• 2:43:29Speaker 02

  And, and one team would be the, the real team that was going to stay out there. The suicide team, uh, would be the one that was going to go make contact as soon as possible. Go find them, pounce on them, you know, do as much damage as you could, bring in the world, get extracted and go away.

• 2:43:50Speaker 02

  But the other team's still out there. And nobody knows that they're out there now. They think, you know, that was who got extracted. So, you know, it was go get. So we went out and, you know, sure enough, it didn't take us long to find, you know, a platoon or so of people. And, you know, so we're online and we opened fire on them. I mean, we would normally just start out like that, but I could see them and, you know, I started shooting at them. You know, and they started shooting back. And it was funny that what happened, we were online and as soon as all the bullets started coming back, it was zoom. They were all right

• 2:44:32Speaker 02

  here with me. And I'm, what are you doing? And I said, spread out. You can't be here with me. I mean, you know, one B-40 take us all out. And, you know, so I had to smoke them a little bit until spread back out.

• 2:44:47Jocko Willink?

  Dispersion is what we call that. And we'd also say, don't bunch up.

• 2:44:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:52Jocko Willink?

  And I would think about the psychology of what makes people bunch up like that. And part of it, I think, is just fear. And like, you want to be next to someone else. You want to have your buddy. And so as soon as bullets start flying, it's like, I'm gonna go get next to you because we'll be together and I feel better when we're together. And the other thing I think is just communication. People want to hear what's happening. People want to know what's happening. And so they figure, well, the boss is right there. I'll go get with the boss, then I'll know what's happening. And then that's what everyone else on the team thinks. And next thing you know, you're too close.

• 2:45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. You can't do that. They knew I had the radio.

• 2:45:22Jocko Willink?

  So were you the suicide team? Were you the assault team and then someone else was gonna stay out there longer?

• 2:45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, we were the suicide team. You know, so we hammered that group, which grew once we started hitting them. You know, and then we just kept bringing in enough air power to eventually we suppressed it enough that, you know, we could get extracted. But so that was, but we'd already, we had been in contact once before the in-country mission.

• 2:45:51Speaker 02

  But, yeah, I mean, that was a little issue, but we got that resolved, you know, maintaining the dispersion and following whatever the immediate action drill was. But they were a good team. I mean...

• 2:46:06Speaker 03

  They reacted normally very well under fire.

• 2:46:10Jocko Willink?

  And were those, were those, uh?

• 2:46:11Speaker 03

  Vietnamese.

• 2:46:12Jocko Willink?

  Those were Vietnamese?

• 2:46:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:14Jocko Willink?

  So with that, you wrap up with RT, Virginia, and you get some R and R, and you actually have a document that you gave me about, about this R and R. And R and R, if you don't know, is Rest and Recuperation. And we're actually gonna cover that on the next podcast. So, thanks for coming on, and we'll, we'll fill these people in on this insane operation that is titled Rest and Recuperation. So, thanks for coming out.

• 2:46:50Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:46:52Jocko Willink?

  And we'll talk to you on the next one.

• 2:46:53Speaker 03

  Okay, thank you.

• 2:46:55Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Mr. Dick Thompson has left the building. And, once again, it is an honor to be able to sit down with such incredible men. And to have the opportunity to hear and to preserve their stories and their lessons. And it's actually crazy for me to be sitting here and, and to have this opportunity. And to be able to share it with anybody that wants to hear it, anybody that wants to learn.

• 2:47:37Jocko Willink?

  So, I am very thankful for this opportunity. And one of the things that allows us to do what we're doing here is you. Because by listening, you can take these lessons and apply them to your life and make yourself better. And if you wanna help us while you make yourself better, it seems like it would be a good thing to me.

• 2:48:13Speaker 03

  Agree.

• 2:48:13Jocko Willink?

  We could, you can help us help you.

• 2:48:16Speaker 03

  Help us help you. Do you know what movie that's from?

• 2:48:19Jocko Willink?

  Yes, I do.

• 2:48:20Speaker 03

  What?

• 2:48:23Speaker 03

  So you feel like you know where it's from?

• 2:48:25Jocko Willink?

  I do, I just recalled it.

• 2:48:26Speaker 03

  Alright, lay it on me.

• 2:48:27Jocko Willink?

  Jerry Maguire.

• 2:48:28Speaker 03

  Mm, interesting. Doesn't seem like the type of movie that you'd watch.

• 2:48:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I guess it doesn't really seem, but maybe it was just a movie that was so popular that at some point I watched it.

• 2:48:41Speaker 03

  Got in the on the grid. Gotcha. Cool. Well, help me help you help me help you. That's how he said it. A little bit more dramatic. Nonetheless, yes. Help yourself. That's kind of the real deal, right? So what are we doing to help ourselves? Jiu Jitsu anti-stress activity. I was in the locker room.

• 2:49:03Jocko Willink?

  Good point.

• 2:49:04Speaker 03

  Not necessarily changing in the locker room, but I was talking to one of my many friends in the locker room. And when you think about it, Jiu Jitsu is like the most efficient, well, I don't know if efficient is the word, but it's like it's exercise, competition friendly and how should I say, what do you call?

• 2:49:23Jocko Willink?

  Aggressive.

• 2:49:23Speaker 03

  Aggressive, but like what's like beneficial competition? You know how there's like unhealthy, we'll just say healthy competition, exercise, healthy competition. Um, uh, so there's social element to it. These are all things that you get out of it. Um, therapy, physical and mental, by the way. Uh, and.

• 2:49:45Jocko Willink?

  Stress relief.

• 2:49:46Speaker 03

  Stress relief.

• 2:49:46Jocko Willink?

  Which we didn't really hit it on this initial podcast, but uh, Dr. Henry Thompson, also known as Dick Thompson, who we just spent time with. His book is called The Stress Effect and it talks about stress and I concur that Jiu Jitsu is a stress reliever, big time.

• 2:50:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's kind of like, um, like you get small levels of stress in Jiu Jitsu to the point where it doesn't feel like stress, but technically it's stress, just like exercise, you know, like there's stress in your muscle. Yeah, exactly right. So yeah, so that's, I think that's sort of how it works mentally, physically, you know, a little bit of stress on there and then boom, the result of that stress is no stress.

• 2:50:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:33Speaker 03

  The way it goes. Anyway, when we're doing Jiu Jitsu, what do we need? Gis and rash guards. That's the uniform for lack of better term. What kind of gis we getting?

• 2:50:40Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:50:41Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. Origin gis, hundred percent.

• 2:50:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, making the best gees in the world.

• 2:50:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, factually made in America.

• 2:50:49Jocko Willink?

  In America.

• 2:50:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50:50Jocko Willink?

  From American, from American ingredients.

• 2:50:54Speaker 03

  Ingredients, the masterpiece that is the gi.

• 2:50:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, everything else too. Also, you know, shirts and jackets and joggers.

• 2:51:05Jocko Willink?

  Jeans. I saw you in jeans for the first time, I think, ever.

• 2:51:09Speaker 03

  When?

• 2:51:09Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. It was like, we were going somewhere. Oh, yeah, Washington. We were both representing.

• 2:51:15Speaker 03

  Representing big time. Yeah, I look good. I felt like I look good.

• 2:51:19Jocko Willink?

  I wasn't judging you on that.

• 2:51:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not gonna ask you your opinion on that matter. Nonetheless, yes, I was representing big time with my American gees, American denim.

• 2:51:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:32Speaker 03

  From dirt to the shirt, as they say. Nonetheless, jeans, joggers, supplements, joint warfare, I'm back on, discipline. Passed like two weeks already, like.

• 2:51:42Jocko Willink?

  You know, you know how you, sometimes you slip off, for whatever reason, you run out, whatever?

• 2:51:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:51:47Jocko Willink?

  Subscription.

• 2:51:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not.

• 2:51:48Jocko Willink?

  You can get a subscription.

• 2:51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:51:50Jocko Willink?

  So you can get a subscription, that way you don't run out. You can go on to originmaine.com and you can subscribe. So that every, whatever, monthly, you get your, you get your resupply.

• 2:52:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:52:05Jocko Willink?

  And that way you don't fall off the train.

• 2:52:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:52:09Jocko Willink?

  And you save money too. It's cheaper.

• 2:52:10Speaker 03

  Oh, dang, okay.

• 2:52:12Jocko Willink?

  A little discount.

• 2:52:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's like, there's certain things in life that are like that, where like you eat them or use them or whatever, like every day. And to go on, especially if they save money, to go on those little subscription, it's just, it's a, that'll improve your efficiency in your life.

• 2:52:31Jocko Willink?

  One less thing you have to think about.

• 2:52:32Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And it just comes.

• 2:52:34Jocko Willink?

  And you don't get that disparaging, no, it's just not disparaging, it's just despair.

• 2:52:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that despair, that moment. Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 2:52:41Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna be three days.

• 2:52:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:52:43Jocko Willink?

  Even if I fed X it, they gotta get the order.

• 2:52:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:52:46Jocko Willink?

  No, subscribe.

• 2:52:47Speaker 03

  Exactly, right. So what supplements, joint warfare, krill oil, these are for your joints and general health, really. Kirkumin, that's general health right there.

• 2:52:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:57Speaker 03

  Also, discipline and discipline go. Finally, I got the.

• 2:53:02Speaker 03

  Dak. Doc.

• 2:53:03Jocko Willink?

  Dak Savage.

• 2:53:04Speaker 03

  Dak Savage.

• 2:53:05Jocko Willink?

  That's Dakota Meyer's signature.

• 2:53:10Jocko Willink?

  Signature.

• 2:53:11Speaker 03

  Drink.

• 2:53:12Jocko Willink?

  Signature drink.

• 2:53:13Speaker 03

  Uh, I like it. It's I haven't done a side by side comparison, you know, as far as like which one I prefer, but it I won't be surprised if that is my favorite one.

• 2:53:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, your new favorite?

• 2:53:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:53:23Jocko Willink?

  Cause your old favorite was Tropic Thunder?

• 2:53:25Speaker 03

  Tropic Thunder, yes. The lemon lime was kinda too basic to be my favorite. Still fine, still great.

• 2:53:32Jocko Willink?

  That's weird because the basic one that you're over there disparaging.

• 2:53:35Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 2:53:36Jocko Willink?

  Lemon lime is my favorite at this time.

• 2:53:39Speaker 03

  Well, you're a simple person, you know, I get it in a good way.

• 2:53:42Jocko Willink?

  My wife kinda curiously asked me, she was like, how many of these can I drink a day? Cause it turns out my wife is really into the discipline go.

• 2:53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:53:54Jocko Willink?

  So she's drink, yeah. So anyways, I'm thinking four cans is around the limit per day.

• 2:54:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:54:00Jocko Willink?

  Be drinking.

• 2:54:01Speaker 03

  I've done three and I'm great.

• 2:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:03Speaker 03

  No, you know how like, cause like if you drink even like a coffee scenario where you you get to a point where you drink too many coffees and you're like, I don't feel good anymore. I feel weird or off or what it fidgety, you know, all these little symptoms.

• 2:54:16Jocko Willink?

  You know, I've never actually taken a complete sip of coffee in my whole life.

• 2:54:19Speaker 03

  No kidding.

• 2:54:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I don't like the smell of it, which means I don't like, I don't even have, people go, well, haven't you ever tasted it? I'm like, well, I'm, I suppose at some point, I'm guessing I put a little sip into my mouth, but even the smell alone, I smelled it, I was like, I don't like this.

• 2:54:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. What about um, coffee like flavored stuff?

• 2:54:37Jocko Willink?

  Don't like it. Don't like coffee ice cream.

• 2:54:39Speaker 03

  But have you tried it though?

• 2:54:40Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:54:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:54:41Jocko Willink?

  But even then, you know, sometimes there'll be some kind of special treat. You're like some kind of a, I wait, does tiramisu, you know what tiramisu is? Doesn't that have some coffee flavor in it?

• 2:54:51Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:54:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Well, it seems to to me, but.

• 2:54:55Speaker 03

  And you don't like it?

• 2:54:56Jocko Willink?

  No, no, that's the only one. Tiramisu.

• 2:54:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:54:58Jocko Willink?

  That's that's one dessert that's, it's sort of like, takes some skill to make. And if it's on the menu at a really nice restaurant, sometimes I'll have a little scenario happen where I get my tiramisu on. Partially, and this is sort of rationalization, partially. Because, well, what I tell myself is like, well, you know, I, I kinda need to see what it tastes like. Because there's, there's some tiramisu. One of the best things I've ever tasted in my life was tiramisu. It was in Canada at this little, Jeremy Stevens just got done cutting weight. We went to this, um, we went to, yeah, we weighed in. And we went to this Italian place, homemade Italian place. And the guy, he fed us so much food, it was just, I was sick how much food we ate.

• 2:55:41Jocko Willink?

  And then he goes, I'm making you my tiramisu. And I said, I don't know, man. He goes, I'm making it for you. You know, I'm just, I'm gonna do it. You just be quiet. So it took like forty minutes. He like made it.

• 2:55:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55:52Jocko Willink?

  He brings it out. You know, you know, once you've eaten a lot, you still think you can eat more, but then after like fifteen minutes, you're like, no, I cannot eat anymore. So it was like forty minutes. So now I'm just thinking to myself, I cannot eat anymore.

• 2:56:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:56:05Jocko Willink?

  He brings out this tiramisu and he's like, hmm. And yeah, I forget what kind of accent he had, but he had an accent. It was either French or Italian. I think it was French. But, you know, he just put it in front of me.

• 2:56:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:56:14Jocko Willink?

  And I, I took a bite. And it was the, it was definitely one of the best things I've ever had.

• 2:56:20Speaker 03

  Dang, that's saying a lot. Because it's one thing if like you're hungry and the first time you had it, it kinda has that impression and it imprinted in your brain. But you're like, basically the worst conditions to have that experience.

• 2:56:32Jocko Willink?

  Be so good.

• 2:56:32Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Dang.

• 2:56:33Jocko Willink?

  Cause everything else was good too. So anyways, maybe I need to make a tiramisu mulk, if that's, if that's even a thing.

• 2:56:41Speaker 03

  But wait, what is, is there a tiramisu, like a flavor to it?

• 2:56:44Jocko Willink?

  I gotta do research. I know, I gotta do research.

• 2:56:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:48Jocko Willink?

  So you know what that means? Gotta eat some more tiramisu.

• 2:56:52Speaker 03

  Gotta do some market.

• 2:56:53Jocko Willink?

  So speaking of mulk, you can get mulk, that's protein. It's another dessert, which is as good as tiramisu.

• 2:56:59Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:56:59Jocko Willink?

  It's as good as ninety-four percent of tiramisus. Cause there's only six percent of tiramisus that are mind blowing. The rest of them, you know, they're okay.

• 2:57:07Speaker 03

  Is it because of the coffee?

• 2:57:09Jocko Willink?

  I have no idea. I don't even, I have any idea what's in tiramisu. I don't even know what it is, but it tastes good in six percent situations. Mulk, hundred percent tastes good.

• 2:57:18Speaker 03

  How's this? Last night, speaking of mulk, I ran out of milk. So do I just be a savage and put water in it? Cause it wasn't that serious. Keep in mind, and this is literally true. I had, I was eating steak, rice, broccoli, and that was sort of it.

• 2:57:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:33Speaker 03

  What to drink or whatever. Yeah, I need a little something, right? So figure this, but here's the thing, when you're eating steak, rice, broccoli, you don't need additional protein necessarily. Unless the steak is small, I get it. But at that moment, you don't necessarily need it. I just wanted it. But I'm out of milk. So you see my conundrum, right? Is it kind of not worth it kind of situation? But I found some, you know, the one in the can evaporated milk. You know that thing? You ever tasted that before?

• 2:58:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:58:01Speaker 03

  Bro, it doesn't taste good.

• 2:58:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:03Speaker 03

  Tastes pretty whack, actually. But you put it in the milk, it makes it like more creamy. Oh, it was good. It was surprisingly good. Yeah. So it was like a, it was like the same deal, the dessert. A little bit extra creamy. I put some peanut butter in it too. It was a dark chocolate one. So yes, milk, you are correct. 100%.

• 2:58:23Jocko Willink?

  Be Little, I was talking to Be Little the other day. And I said, you know, I've only actually had the darkness milk a couple of times.

• 2:58:31Speaker 03

  You have?

• 2:58:31Jocko Willink?

  Yes. And he said, you gotta try it again. It's really good. And so I went home and I was like, okay, I'm gonna have, I'm gonna have the dark, the darkness. It's good.

• 2:58:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. That's my main, that's my main jam right now.

• 2:58:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 2:58:44Speaker 03

  The darkness, you know?

• 2:58:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So all, I've kind of disparaged that flavor a bit of milk. I've been like, well, you know, everything else is so great. And then there's chocolate, the darkness. Now I'm sort of thinking I underestimated the quality and the taste of the darkness. Okay. So you get milk, you can also get strawberry milk and chocolate milk for your kids or your kid milk. So that they're healthy.

• 2:59:11Speaker 03

  For the strawberry one, I'm not saying do this, but do this. Just try it. How about this? Just try it. Add a half a banana in it. Just do that. Report back.

• 2:59:22Jocko Willink?

  Did I tell you my daughter the other day? She sent me, she's in college and she sent me a Snapchat.

• 2:59:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:29Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah, you're on Snapchat. All good, dude.

• 2:59:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's that's closed scenario with the fam.

• 2:59:36Speaker 03

  Oh, closed circle. I got you.

• 2:59:37Jocko Willink?

  And anyways, cuz she's a eighteen year old girl. She sent me a snap of her.

• 2:59:46Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:59:47Jocko Willink?

  Of her shake and it said, it said, you could, you could just know exactly what it said. It said, literally a peanut butter chocolate milkshake. That was the, the, the text written on it. And then she called me cuz I don't really check Snap that often.

• 3:00:05Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Of course not.

• 3:00:05Jocko Willink?

  Think I've got it live for notifications. But then she said, you know, she sent me a text. Check your Snap. And I said, why? What is everything okay? You know? She's like, I literally just made the best. It's literally a, so anyways.

• 3:00:21Speaker 03

  I think it's complete hilarity, not ninety nine percent, hundred percent hilarity. How witnessing secondhand, by the way, you navigate your way through the current trends of eighteen year old Snapchat lingo scenarios.

• 3:00:40Speaker 03

  It's very funny to me. And I'm sure I'm not the only one, by the way.

• 3:00:46Speaker 03

  Also, Jocko White Tea.

• 3:00:47Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:00:48Speaker 03

  Not forget about the Jocko White Tea.

• 3:00:49Jocko Willink?

  So good.

• 3:00:50Speaker 03

  You know, you, once you kind of deadlift all that weight or whatever, we tend to forget where, you know, how you got there. So let's just not forget that.

• 3:00:56Jocko Willink?

  And plus, winter is here, kind of.

• 3:00:59Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:01:00Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 3:01:00Speaker 03

  Kind of fallish.

• 3:01:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, fallish, but what that means is warm drinks. There's one, well, there's two drinks to drink warm. Molk warm.

• 3:01:10Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:01:11Jocko Willink?

  Like chocolate molk warm.

• 3:01:12Speaker 03

  Where your kid in molk is better warm.

• 3:01:15Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 3:01:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I did that experiment. It was a while ago, right when the work kid came out. It's better warm.

• 3:01:21Jocko Willink?

  Or you can drink Jocko White Tea. Warm. It's good.

• 3:01:26Speaker 03

  If you haven't been already.

• 3:01:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:28Speaker 03

  Yes, you can get all these amazing. I shouldn't say amazing. Amazing is one of those words that it like it started off as a joke because people would say, oh my gosh, amazing. But Brad, you're not amazed by this. Just say good or whatever. Nonetheless, that was a joke. So I'd say it as a joke, mocking everyone. Yeah, you know how it rolls into your normal lingo after all?

• 3:01:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01:49Speaker 03

  It did that. Anyway. These items to keep you on the path, help yourself, help others, all that. Originme.com is where you get them. Also, Jaco's store. It's called Jaco's store. So you go to Jaco's store.com. What can you get there?

• 3:02:06Jocko Willink?

  Rash guards.

• 3:02:07Speaker 03

  Rash guards. This is like representative of the path. You're on the path. You're representing on the path. The kind like, if people know, if you listen and you know, you see somebody representing in the wild, Brad, you know they're on the path 100%.

• 3:02:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Even at the gym, I'll see people wearing the rash guard.

• 3:02:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, there's a lot of people wearing the rash guard here at our gym.

• 3:02:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:02:30Jocko Willink?

  Victory MMA and Fitness.

• 3:02:32Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And to me, that tells me 100% like that person's on the path.

• 3:02:36Jocko Willink?

  You know, when I, when I see somebody that's wearing, you know, that's representing. I just give them like a little head nod.

• 3:02:43Speaker 03

  A little something. Yes, sir. Me too. Yeah.

• 3:02:45Jocko Willink?

  Because it's not, it's not acknowledgement. It's unification, right?

• 3:02:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:02:51Jocko Willink?

  I'm with you.

• 3:02:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:02:52Jocko Willink?

  We're together.

• 3:02:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:02:53Jocko Willink?

  We're in this fight.

• 3:02:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I feel it too, man. And I think that's a common thing, you know? Like, I'm sure Pete could tell you too, like if he was at the post office or wherever and he sees like somebody with the, you know, there's some origin boots on or something like this, he'd just kind of look at him, look at the boots and be like.

• 3:03:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, man. 100%.

• 3:03:12Jocko Willink?

  If you listen, you know, t-shirts, truckers hats, beanies, hoodies.

• 3:03:19Jocko Willink?

  What else?

• 3:03:20Speaker 03

  Good stuff. Decals on there. We replaced some stuff. Yeah, it's just go to choco store.com if you like something. Hey man, get something. Represent. Good spot.

• 3:03:30Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget about this podcast if you wanna listen to it and when you wanna know when it comes out, then you can subscribe to this podcast wherever you subscribe to podcasts, which is a good call because Echo doesn't think you've subscribed to it yet.

• 3:03:46Speaker 03

  I factually don't think that.

• 3:03:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:03:50Speaker 03

  There you go. I think, I agree with you.

• 3:03:51Jocko Willink?

  So we don't need to say it anymore?

• 3:03:52Speaker 03

  Nah, uh, well, you know.

• 3:03:54Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Cause you don't think people subscribe.

• 3:03:56Speaker 03

  No, it's a cool reminder.

• 3:03:58Jocko Willink?

  You just got trapped.

• 3:03:58Speaker 03

  It's a cool reminder, for sure. Yes, wherever you listen to podcasts, yes, subscribe if you would, if you want, fully. Also, speaking of subscribing, there's another podcast that people seem to like called Grounded. Keeps you grounded, kinda jujitsu, uh, uh, theme. It's not, it's not really a jujitsu thing, it kinda is. It's just more, what, exploring certain elements of life in a little bit more.

• 3:04:28Jocko Willink?

  Loose.

• 3:04:30Speaker 03

  Way.

• 3:04:31Jocko Willink?

  I guess, yeah, that's a good way of talking about it.

• 3:04:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:04:34Jocko Willink?

  It's just kind of a little bit more mellow version of the Choco Podcast. They just gotta talk about stuff.

• 3:04:41Speaker 03

  But when you listen to it, like, um, you, you, it kinda feels like the feeling, right? Cause you have a certain experience when you listen to podcast. The feeling you get, cause I, I listen to it.

• 3:04:53Jocko Willink?

  I don't get feelings, but go ahead.

• 3:04:55Speaker 03

  We get feelings. It's kinda like, okay, a conversation's going on about a certain thing and you kinda wanna chime in more. Like, that's how I feel, you know, like, like when I listen to it. It's like a conversation's going on kinda with you is what it feels like. I don't know. That's, that was my, one of my prelim experiences with it. And the last called Grounded Podcast. Same deal on, uh, you know, iTunes, Google Play, all that stuff. Also the Warrior Kid Podcast. Don't forget about that one for the young ones.

• 3:05:23Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget about that one. And we have two in the bank. I got one more to prep and we'll get another three Warrior Kid podcasts out there. So, working it. And then don't forget about the Warrior Kid Soap from IrishOaksRanch.com. If you're gonna support a Warrior Kid, it's a good way to do it. He's running a business at age 13. No big deal.

• 3:05:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, with legitimate products, by the way. Cause it's one thing, again, I said this before, like, you know how your friend or your neighbor, whoever, they give you the soap wrapped in the little decorative plastics and ribbons? You know that soap?

• 3:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Not really, but continue.

• 3:06:04Speaker 03

  Well, they'll do it from time to time and they're like, hey, here's your gift item, you know? Soap. It's like, cool.

• 3:06:10Jocko Willink?

  That's a hint.

• 3:06:11Speaker 03

  But you would think, but it's not real soap. It's real soap technically, but like you use it and you're like, brother, this isn't for use. This is like a decorative piece.

• 3:06:21Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 3:06:22Speaker 03

  You put on the sink, on the side or something like that. It's like, that's what it is. But this one.

• 3:06:27Jocko Willink?

  Shaped like a claymore mine or something.

• 3:06:30Speaker 03

  Should be. Usually it's shaped like a turtle shell or like a, you know, raindrop. I don't know.

• 3:06:38Jocko Willink?

  Abrams tank.

• 3:06:39Speaker 03

  Typically, no. Nonetheless, Jaco, Jaco soap, the one that Aiden makes is like, good. You, it's soap, soap. Like you use it. You're supposed to use it.

• 3:06:50Jocko Willink?

  It's not a wall hanger.

• 3:06:51Speaker 03

  It's not a wall hanger. It's not a decorative piece.

• 3:06:53Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 3:06:54Speaker 03

  It's functional, as you said.

• 3:06:55Jocko Willink?

  It'll help you stay clean.

• 3:06:59Speaker 03

  Also YouTube channel, if you're interested in the video version of this podcast, you want to, if you have a smart TV, like hanging in your wall, in your gym, or in your house, whatever, your office, whatever, you want to play this podcast, boom, put on the YouTube version. I say that because I hear that people are doing that.

• 3:07:17Jocko Willink?

  I've seen videos of people doing that.

• 3:07:18Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 3:07:19Jocko Willink?

  Which is pretty cool. Plus you can see Echo's videos that he, well, it's up for debate whether he goes overboard or not. I think some that's clearly that it has gone overboard.

• 3:07:28Speaker 03

  I, I think they're like, like, what do you call?

• 3:07:30Jocko Willink?

  Borderline, pushing the envelope?

• 3:07:34Speaker 03

  Oh man. I see the perfect amount of modulation with fire explosions, sound effects.

• 3:07:42Jocko Willink?

  And cello.

• 3:07:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, check that out. We also got psychological warfare. If you need a little mental support, that's me giving it to you through your MP3 platform. Then there's flipsidecanvas.com. This is visual support run by my brother Dakota Meyer, who's making graphic art.

• 3:08:06Jocko Willink?

  Representation of the path, cool stuff. Check that out, flipsidecanvas.com. Okay, we got some books. Number one, The Stress Effect. Look, we got two more podcasts with Dick Thompson. He wrote a book, we'll cover it in the third podcast, but it's called The Stress Effect. If you want to get ahead, you can order it now. We've got it listed on the website. Why Smart Leaders Make Dumb Decisions and What to Do About It. The Stress Effect. So, check that out. Of course, we also have Leadership Strategy and Tactics, which is my new book coming out January 14th. I was flipping through the index. It's a heavily indexed book so that you can quickly find what you're looking for.

• 3:08:48Jocko Willink?

  But, it's pretty cool when you, when you are looking through the index. Here's some, here's some things. Communication with bosses, forms of complaints, complex problems, compromise, con- con- con- con- condescension, confidence, construction sites,

• 3:09:10Jocko Willink?

  contingency planning, counseling, countenance. It's got some, it's got some very interesting topics, all about leadership. Check that one out. Then, of course, there are the Warrior Kid Books, one, two, and three, to get kids on the path. We got Mikey and the Dragons for the littler kid. Teach that kid to overcome fear.

• 3:09:32Jocko Willink?

  We have the Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, the first field manual, about how to be on the path. If you want to know about workouts, there's a bunch of workouts in there for you. If you want to know about martial arts, there's a bunch about martial arts in there. If you want to know about food, it's in there. Sleep, it's in there. All that stuff's in there.

• 3:09:52Jocko Willink?

  And then there is the thoughts.

• 3:09:57Jocko Willink?

  From me and and then there's Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. These are the two leadership books that I wrote with my brother Leif Babin. And if you need help with your leadership, you can check those out. There's also Echelon Front. This is our leadership consultancy and what we do is solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for that. If you want to get some of that training online, check out EF Online. You don't need someone from Echelon Front to show up at your business to give you the instruction. You can get it from EF Online, online training, interactive online training. Then we have the muster. The next muster is in Sydney, Australia, which is happening now.

• 3:10:41Jocko Willink?

  This is probably already done. So, look at extremeownership.com for details of the forthcoming musters in 2020. And then we have EF Overwatch and EF Legion. This is where we are taking folks from the military and placing them into civilian companies that need leadership. And if you want to continue to hear from us, then you can interact with us on the interwebs. Dick Thompson is on Twitter, by the way. He is at HPS underscore CEO.

• 3:11:22Jocko Willink?

  And he also has a website, HPSYS.com. That's High Performance Systems. That's his company. So if you want to check out, or you want to interact with Dick Thompson, incredible human being, check him out. And then also, we are on Twitter as well. We are on Instagram. And we are on ye old Fesenbarck. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks once again to Dr.

• 3:11:53Jocko Willink?

  Henry Dick Thompson for sharing his wisdom on this program today and more important, thanks to Colonel Thompson for his service and sacrifice to protect freedom and democracy around the world for his whole career and thanks to the rest of our military men and women that are out there today doing the same for us now and to all the police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol, Secret Service and all first responders, thank you for protecting us here on the home front and to everyone else out there.

• 3:12:37Jocko Willink?

  We all want to do better. Everybody wants to be better. Everyone talks about becoming better, but I'll tell you right now, it doesn't just happen. In fact, it will not happen on its own. It will not happen on its own. You have to make it happen. You have to lead yourself. You have to make yourself better by attacking every day in spite of whatever challenges you face. Every day, go out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.