220: Seeing Death From Close up. What We Learn from Mortuary Affairs. With Chris Bussler

0:00:00 - Opening 0:10:16 - Chris Bussler, Mortuary Affairs. No Tougher Duty. No Greater Honor. 3:36:27 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 3:42:31 - How to stay on the PATH. 4:03:53 - 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 220 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:11Jocko Willink?

  Three hours passed by slowly and the terrible news had been heralded by the few frustrated medical staff members walking out of the tent stressed out.

• 0:23Jocko Willink?

  Three of the wounded did not make it. And the word was passed that it was time for us to perform our job.

• 0:33Jocko Willink?

  And the sinking feeling in the pit of my belly fell into the sea.

• 0:40Jocko Willink?

  We tripped over ourselves trying to get up. Several of our Marines volunteered as litter bearers and several of us quickly cleared our sleeping area to make room for the processing.

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  Our sleeping area was out in the open and people who were passing by could see in through the camo netting. So a couple of our Marines were assigned to each end to ensure that discretion was maintained.

• 1:09Jocko Willink?

  The only sounds that could be heard were the not so distant generator and the swaying of the camo netting in the light breeze.

• 1:19Jocko Willink?

  We stood in earnest under incandescent lights, watching our fellow MA Marines carrying the remains of our fallen brothers in.

• 1:30Jocko Willink?

  And lowered them on to the sandy floor of our sleeping area.

• 1:37Jocko Willink?

  It was out of reverence that no one spoke.

• 1:42Jocko Willink?

  We each intently watched the actions of our MA Marines as they began their work.

• 1:52Jocko Willink?

  The slow sound of a heavy zipper being opened on each bag was deafening.

• 1:59Jocko Willink?

  And the confused emotions began to whirl inside my soul.

• 2:06Jocko Willink?

  The female chaplain assigned to the STP followed the procession in and watched our Marines begin the processing.

• 2:16Jocko Willink?

  And she leaned over to whisper to one of our teammates. "You guys have a very tough job." "Very tough."

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  The first was a Hispanic Staff Sergeant who was assigned to a tank battalion and had succumbed to his wounds sustained in a firefight outside of Baghdad.

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  The second was a Caucasian Lance Corporal, the same one who, three hours prior, I had helped carry off the helicopter.

• 2:48Jocko Willink?

  His fingers were still wrenched together, just as he had done earlier, as he writhed in pain. And the tracks of his tears were still visible.

• 3:01Jocko Willink?

  When the zipper of the third bag was undone,

• 3:06Jocko Willink?

  it revealed an individual whose whole head had been bandaged in thick, bloody gauze.

• 3:14Jocko Willink?

  I thought to myself, "How can that guy breathe through all that gauze?"

• 3:20Jocko Willink?

  Then it dawned on me, and I felt stupid.

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  He was dead. And the medical staff had bandaged his head to keep all the pieces in.

• 3:36Jocko Willink?

  One by one, the paperwork was filled out. The personal effects were catalogued, and the transportation was arranged to take our fallen south to Kuwait.

• 3:50Jocko Willink?

  We had completed our work, but there was still something missing. We wanted to do more for these guys.

• 3:58Jocko Willink?

  Someone had asked the chaplain to lead us in prayer, and she did.

• 4:04Jocko Willink?

  So under the glow of the incandescent lights and swaying camo netting, all twenty-three of us stood in a circle around our brothers and bowed our heads in solemn prayer.

• 4:18Jocko Willink?

  I felt bad to know that a world away from here, the families of these men were praying that those who lay before us were safe that night.

• 4:30Jocko Willink?

  And it ripped out my heart to know the truth.

• 4:37Jocko Willink?

  I hope that God could provide them comfort and strength when the terrible news traveled to meet them unaware.

• 4:47Jocko Willink?

  The chaplain quietly knelt in front of each stretcher and performed a last rites prayer according to each of their individual denominations. And she put the sign of the cross on their foreheads with ash, and it meant the world to me to witness it.

• 5:03Jocko Willink?

  Our volunteers transported their remains to the flight line to be evacuated out of Iraq and to Kuwait by C-130 Hercules cargo plane.

• 5:16Jocko Willink?

  From there, they would be placed inside an aluminum mobile coffin called a transfer case. And an American flag would be placed onto it before they would chase the sun across the globe and land in the United States.

• 5:34Jocko Willink?

  It was a tough night, the first time I had ever seen deceased servicemen. And as much as I had prepared myself mentally and physically for the job, I had never prepared myself emotionally.

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  I kept thinking about those guys. The scenes kept playing over and over in my head.

• 5:54Jocko Willink?

  I felt terrible for them and for their families.

• 6:00Jocko Willink?

  What a huge loss.

• 6:06Jocko Willink?

  I couldn't sleep, so I sat on a broken piece of concrete, stared off into nothing, and smoked my cigarettes down to the filter, all alone.

• 6:27Jocko Willink?

  And that is

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  an excerpt from a book.

• 6:33Jocko Willink?

  A book called "No Tougher Duty, No Greater Honor" by Gunnery Sergeant L. Christian Bussler.

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  And you've heard me say before

• 6:51Jocko Willink?

  that the nature of war is death.

• 6:55Jocko Willink?

  It's one of the things I said when I retired from the Navy.

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  And I get it that there are an infinite number of other dynamics in war. There's

• 7:07Jocko Willink?

  there's strategy and tactics, there's manpower and logistics, there's hearts and minds, there's technology and weapons, there's leadership, there's human nature, and the list goes on and on.

• 7:24Jocko Willink?

  But one thing is always present in war.

• 7:31Jocko Willink?

  And that is death.

• 7:36Jocko Willink?

  But death does not end

• 7:40Jocko Willink?

  on the battlefield.

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  And in fact, the finality of one life in combat unleashes a chain of events that profoundly and forever impacts countless other lives.

• 7:58Jocko Willink?

  It impacts the members of a unit, the unit who lost their comrades in arms, who still must carry on with their mission.

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  And that's an incredibly heavy impact.

• 8:19Jocko Willink?

  But on top of that, and even heavier, it impacts the mothers and fathers,

• 8:26Jocko Willink?

  and the husbands and wives,

• 8:30Jocko Willink?

  and the sons and daughters.

• 8:37Jocko Willink?

  The families and friends of the fallen, death has a monumental impact.

• 8:48Jocko Willink?

  And in war, those of us who are in it experience death more than normal civilians do.

• 8:59Jocko Willink?

  Most of us from the military have been to more funerals and memorial services than we care to remember.

• 9:09Jocko Willink?

  And depending on your specific job inside the military, you may experience death more or less often.

• 9:19Jocko Willink?

  If you're an infantry soldier, then you're going to experience more death than a supply clerk.

• 9:29Jocko Willink?

  But there's one military job that deals with death more than any other.

• 9:40Jocko Willink?

  And that is mortuary affairs.

• 9:45Jocko Willink?

  Those military members who are charged with handling our fallen service members.

• 9:55Jocko Willink?

  And that was gunnery sergeant Bussler's duty. And as the title of the book indicates,

• 10:05Jocko Willink?

  there is no tougher duty.

• 10:08Jocko Willink?

  And there is no greater honor than ensuring our heroic service members who have given their last full measure

• 10:20Jocko Willink?

  are sent home with as much care and respect and honor as they deserve.

• 10:33Jocko Willink?

  And it is an honor to have Gunny Bussler here with us now to share some of his experiences, what he saw, what he went through, and what he learned.

• 10:53Jocko Willink?

  Gunny?

• 10:57Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for coming on, man.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. It is a deep and profound honor to be able to sit here at this table with you guys.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  And bring to light an MOS that's very not well-known. And to bring to light the different sacrifices of the guys who did this job.

• 11:23Jocko Willink?

  You know, as I was writing the part, I was thinking about the fact that who deals the most with death? And obviously, you think of an infantry soldier.

• 11:34Jocko Willink?

  You know, you're gonna see a lot of it. And then I thought about medical, you know? Obviously, the medics, the corpsmen, the doctors, the surgeons that are out there, they're gonna see a ton of it too. But the big difference is they get to see the other side of the spectrum. They're saving people's lives, you know? They're someone that they can pull through. And I would only think that that would counteract the difference between being in mortuary affairs where you don't see any of that.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  There's nothing motivating to do with our job. Because if you work in the medical field, you do your best to ensure that guy will get home and have a normal life. With the grunts, you know, you train, train, train, try to prepare yourself. But for us, we never know where we're gonna get until, you know, we open the bag. And then we have to wear so many different hats. You know, between processing the remains and then we're dealing with and working with their their unit members and taking, you know, their statements.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  So you have to play the role of like a funeral director and a...

• 13:00Speaker 01

  And it's so hard to remove yourself from that because you may recognize that person you're working on from the chow hall. Or you know that guy, you know, and that had to happen to us several times and that's where it really, really sucks.

• 13:18Jocko Willink?

  So let's, let's start off and figure out how you got there.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:23Jocko Willink?

  So you were born where, in Ohio?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay, and your dad was a vet?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  He was air force.

• 13:33Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  I grew up in the air force, traveled all over the world, spent seven years in Japan. When we left there, we went and visited some friends over in, in Clark Air Force Base over in, in Philippines, Subic Bay, went back to Thailand.

• 13:49Jocko Willink?

  So how old are you, how old are you at these times?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 13:52Jocko Willink?

  So your dad was in the air force, you were a kid, you were going, you were stationed in Japan.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:58Jocko Willink?

  You were, you were traveling around, you were a military brat, as they call it.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  I thought everybody was that, you know, I thought everybody, to be an American, you had to be in the military, you know? And I had no idea that there was a civilian world until I came back when we were 10 years old. And we moved straight into South Carolina and I'm like, wow, there's actually people who don't, you know, run and work out and...

• 14:20Jocko Willink?

  What was your jobs, what was your dad's job in the air force?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  He worked P O L, so he refueled airplanes. He spent three tours in, in the Vietnam War, where he met and married my mom, but back then he was making, you know, he said he used to make napalm and stuff like that.

• 14:36Jocko Willink?

  And your mom's Thai?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. They met and married and she immigrated here, had, had me and my two brothers and, yep.

• 14:45Jocko Willink?

  And so where'd you do your growing up? So when you moved back to the States, where'd you move to?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  We moved, uh, South Carolina for like three or four years, then we moved to Illinois for a year, and then we moved to Ohio. Uh, my dad found a job as a contractor at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. He was there for a few years, uh, they lost the contract during the Clinton years and then he got a job as a mailman. And I went to high school out there, graduated. And, and that's what led me to joining the, the reserves, the marine reserves, because I traveled as a kid. And I never had friends beyond three years, four years. And I didn't want that. I finally had a place where I had low, you know, I loved my, hanging out with my friends. And so after I joined the, the reserves, they were like, hey.

• 15:33Jocko Willink?

  So how'd you pick the Marine Corps?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Because I grew up in the air force.

• 15:36Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  And.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yes, um, we would always watch the war movies, platoon and, you know, and Full Metal Jacket. And we're like, oh man, that's awesome. How cool to be out, to go shoot a 50 cal. How cool it would be to, you know, to shoot them 16s all day long and, you know, and, and.

• 15:55Jocko Willink?

  What'd your dad think when you joined the Marine Corps?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Uh, he didn't like it.

• 15:59Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm. Was he, didn't like the Marine Corps? Did he not like anything? Or was it just, hey, I did this so you don't have to?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  No, it was, he knew that it was something I wanted to do, but he was very cautious about it. He said, I, when I was a kid, when I was over in, in Vietnam and, and Thailand, I remember seeing a lot of those body bags getting loaded up on the helicopters and the planes. And I don't want you becoming one of them. And I told him, I was like, dad, if I died doing something that I wanted to do, I'd die doing something I wanted to do. And so he signed for me. I signed when I was 17 years old. And I knew I wanted to go in and I never thought we would ever go to war. I just wanted to go.

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  What year was it?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  1992.

• 16:46Jocko Willink?

  1992.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:48Jocko Willink?

  You, did you just graduate from high school? Or did you go in between your junior and your senior year to boot camp?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  I, I, uh, signed when I was still in my senior year. And then I was in a debt program and I went in November of 1992. And graduated February of 93.

• 17:04Jocko Willink?

  And you enlisted in the reserves?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 17:06Jocko Willink?

  And so when you enlisted in the reserves, you go to boot camp?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 17:09Jocko Willink?

  And then you go to AI or what, what school of infantry?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, school of infantry. Uh, there, back then we did a marine combat training, which is a four week condensed course of, you know, we're gonna do. Humps and we're gonna go out and shoot things and then after that that's when we separate. The people who were doing like admin jobs, they would go away, you know, and they would go to their other school, but we would do the sea bag drag from one side of Geiger to the other side of Geiger. And then, you know, from there we'd start our infantry. So I joined up as an O311 rifleman. I didn't really understand what it was when I was in high school, you know, I was like, oh, I get to go shoot

• 17:51Speaker 01

  things. I didn't really know about all the running and all the, you know, 100 pound packs and, you know, going out for 27 miles and stuff like that. But I was like, I want to shoot a 50 cal. Alright, cool. Alright, now you gotta clean it.

• 18:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they never, they never put that in the advertisements, do they? Cleaning weapons. Fun to shoot, a pain to clean. Did you play any sports that got you ready for this?

• 18:14Speaker 01

  I didn't. We traveled so much as a kid and I never really stayed in one spot for too long. And growing up and having a mother that's Thai, I felt more trying to find of my connection to my roots. And I grew up knowing about my uncle who fought in Muay Thai. And so by the time we settled down in Ohio, met some people in the Thai Air Force, this is before Muay Thai was anything. And I started going in the backyard. He started training me on some stuff that I had no idea. It was so cool. And then from there, I just went straight into Marine Corps. The only thing that I would really say that would

• 18:58Speaker 01

  prepared me for it was baling hay, you know, picking up, you know, bales of hay, throwing it from sun up to sundown. And the guy who was driving the tractor was a former Marine. He was like, you gotta work faster than this.

• 19:13Jocko Willink?

  And then, so you get done with, with boot camp and SOI, and what does that take? Like six months, something like that?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 19:21Jocko Willink?

  And then you're done with your Marine Corps indoctrination, right? And now it's back to the

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Now it's back to civilian sector. I checked into my unit, which was MP company. They had a small detachment of reinforced, which was, you know, basically most of us were grunts. And at the time, they were like, hey, you're, you're something, it's called Graves platoon. I'm like, okay, what does that mean? You're supposed to handle remains in war. I'm like, well, I didn't join up for that. I wanted to be a grunt. And I was like, well, I might as well stay here because we're not going to go to war. You know, I had a beater car anyway. And if I was to drive anywhere else, it would, you know, it was good luck getting there. So, yeah, I stayed with that unit. It Graves

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Platoon eventually turned into mortuary affairs. And that's, that's how I ended up being in that unit.

• 20:13Jocko Willink?

  And then what were you doing for a civilian job?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  I bounced around from being like mall security, and then I worked for a couple of department stores. I ended up working, you know, Lowe's security. And then I applied for every police job that I could. So Dayton PD, Englewood, and Beaver Creek. And next thing I know, my dad said, hey, the post office is going to be hiring. Like, oh, sure, I'll go ahead and take that test. And I got a call back from them. I'm like, awesome, I get to work with my dad. Because me and my dad, when we were growing up, you know, he was always yelling at me. I was the knucklehead, you know, not listening to him. I'd sneak

• 20:55Speaker 01

  out of my window, go hang out with my friends kind of thing at night. And here, I got to work with my dad, and I got to know him in a totally different light. You know, more of a man to man, and not as a father and son. And we became really good friends. And I really, really loved hanging out with him and, and, and going to work with him in the morning and waiting on him at night and stuff. He'd always have a cup of coffee waiting for me in the morning. And my mom would fix me a, you know, a little breakfast sandwich in aluminum foil. And so it was really cool. And yeah, I really look fondly upon those days.

• 21:36Jocko Willink?

  And then you're doing, you missed the first Gulf War. And so what's your drill consist of? One weekend a month, two weeks in the summertime?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  One weekend a month.

• 21:45Jocko Willink?

  Just as advertised?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Right. And every once in a while, they might have another school pop up. And by the time I picked up corporal sergeant, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna do two of these a year. One, do get my official like sergeant's course out of the way. But then I want to go out to Bridgeport at California and, you know, snow ski and climb. I love that stuff. Go to Norway and go out there and see the aurora borealis and all that. I was like, man, this is so awesome. I love this stuff.

• 22:17Jocko Willink?

  Did they train you in any of the Graves platoon stuff at this time?

• 22:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  This is funny. Nobody updated it. Nobody updated the manuals from World War II. So we were practicing stuff that were World War II techniques. All the, all the stuff, the diagrams on the inside was like an old airplane, like a bomber or something. If they would crash, you would have these big pieces and stuff. And, you know, and they'll talk about if you clean out a tank, which back then Sherman tanks, all steel. They blow up and stuff. Everything's usually contained on there, but. You know, and that's how we thought it was gonna be. But it was mostly focusing on infantry skills. So we would do a lot of patrolling and we would patrol into an area.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  That's when we set up a perimeter and then we would do a quick cleanup. Somebody's like, alright, you three guys, you're dead. Get on the litters. We're gonna carry you back now. That kind of thing. We really didn't know how to prepare for war and do our jobs. Nobody had seen anything like this since Vietnam, but nobody wrote it down either.

• 23:28Jocko Willink?

  That was the 90s, man.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  That was the 90s. You were just trying to look cool, you know?

• 23:34Jocko Willink?

  So, let's get to where things start to change. I'm going to the book here. Your postal supervisor, you know, you're out walking your route. And your postal supervisor drives up. And he says, hey, Chris, your marine unit just called the office and they need you to call them back as soon as possible. I took the call and they sounded pretty serious, buddy. Get in. We need to get you to the nearest phone as soon as we can. He said with genuine concern on his face.

• 24:08Jocko Willink?

  Then you say here, "The Marine Corps had never called the post office looking for me before, and the latest and greatest from the airwaves had not been good. This had to be serious business. The United States and Iraq had been playing a silly game of posturing for years now. With the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York City a little over a year ago, and the Afghan war raging on, all this just might have been coming to a head in another region of the world." So you must have been hearing about other units getting called up.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:37Jocko Willink?

  And had to know what was going down.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  We had the 26th MUSOC Marine Expeditionary Unit come over to Dayton, Ohio, and they were staying at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and they were flying the 53s and 46s all around, and they were practicing clearing out buildings and stuff, and the newspapers said, "We're preparing for Baghdad. We're preparing to go into Iraq." And I thought, "Well, if anything was to happen, I'll be getting called up to that." You know, but that was kind of after they left, nobody started, you know, nobody was talking about it anymore. So, "Hey, go back to delivering mail until I get my phone call."

• 25:20Speaker 01

  And I always dreamt about it and how it could happen and stuff, but how many times have they said, "Oh, prepare for this. Oh, no, stand down." You know, like, "Hey, we're gonna go up to Vietnam and help clean..." No, we're not. "Oh, we're gonna go to Kosovo and help..." No, no, we're not. You know, and then finally we're doing this, we're not gonna get called up. They're not gonna need us.

• 25:40Jocko Willink?

  So the call comes, you find out that you're actually getting it activated, and you say here, "I was excited, sad, overwhelmed, unsure, motivated, and proud all at the same time." That's a pretty good combination of emotions. "I knew that this day was the first baby step in a wild odyssey that would take my life for a whirl, and in the end, leave me a very different man than I was before that phone call. I wasn't stupid or blind to the prospect that in the very near future, a father might lose a son, a wife might lose a husband, a daughter might lose a father, and a daydream of better days may never be fulfilled." Because at this point, you're married, and you have a daughter. And how long had you been married for at this point?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Over two years.

• 26:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Young dad.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Young dad, you know, uh, first real job. Just got a house, you know, and, and just loving life, you know? I didn't think, you know, anything was ever gonna happen. I was gonna spend my 20 plus years at the post office and that was it. And, and be happily married and white picket fences and dogs and, you know, mom's apple pie kinda thing, you know?

• 26:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, you signed that dotted line.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  I know.

• 27:00Jocko Willink?

  You signed that dotted line. You say here, "In the grand structure of the Marine Corps, our reserve unit was like no other. We were a hodgepodge, hodgepodge collection of different mission occupational specialties, MOSs. Most of us came straight out of infantry school, holding such titles as rifleman, machine gunners, and assault men. Others were administrative Marines, motor transport, map makers, and aircraft repairmen. There were a healthy mix of Marines who had prior service and those like me who did not. College students made up a good portion of the platoon, working on medical, political science, and criminal justice degrees. There were many of us blue collar guys in the mix, having jobs anywhere from a train conductor and plumber to law enforcement officers. Within our ranks, we were 33 strong. Outside of the remote chance of participating in the recovery of lost remains in Vietnam

• 27:44Jocko Willink?

  or some sunny tropical island in the South Pacific, none of us ever wanted to be activated to do the mission in a wartime capability. We were proud to be the only mortuary affairs platoon in the entire Marine Corps, even though in reality, we really didn't know what that duty would demand of us or what kind of toll it would take. You guys were the only mortuary affairs platoon in the entire Marine Corps. So it was a guarantee you guys were getting called up?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, and then, and back in the nineties, they were talking about, uh, you know, getting rid of us. Um, all of, up until, uh, our lieutenant colonel decided to change the name and try to make it sexier now, you know? Um, and he was able to save that, convince enough people over at headquarters Marine Corps that we should save this little, uh, this little group.

• 28:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know what he knew? That apparently other people didn't know is that the nature of war is death.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:35Jocko Willink?

  And you're gonna have to deal with this. Cause if you think about what would be going on if you didn't have this platoon and what knowledge would be lost and who's gonna handle these? Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:44Jocko Willink?

  That's what happens in peacetime.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. People forget that, you know, even preparing for, for something like this, we would always come like out here to Camp Pendleton and we were getting ready to get trained and, and they were like, "Oh, what do you guys do?" "Mortuary affairs." "So, what do you guys do?" "Uh, we handle deceased..." "No, you guys are gonna be working at the kitchen. You guys are gonna be KP. You guys are gonna do mess duty for two weeks." "No, we're not." "So, we'll go out and get lost." "We go out and take our stuff out to, you know, out to the beach, get lost, hook up with, uh, with a recon unit that was doing night inserts on Zodiacs and that's what we did for two weeks, man."

• 29:26Speaker 01

  "But, uh, yeah, everybody back then was, 'Oh, you, nobody's gonna die. We won't even need you.'" "I mean, look at the Gulf War." "No, no." "That's how it actually started when we actually got deployed too." "That was the attitude."

• 29:42Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, you go through some stuff about what you guys did when you guys got called up, um, and I have to say, I always have to say this, I'm not reading the whole book and so this might jump around a little bit or you might think, "Oh, what was that?" Well, it's because I'm not reading the whole book. You gotta buy the book yourself. That's what you need to do to get these, to get this entire story. And this is, this is a big book and, and there's all kinds of details I don't go, go into. So, I'm just covering some of it. So, if it jumps a little bit, that's why. Uh, and I'm gonna make a jump right now to this. "As we circled about in a holding pattern high above the sands of Kuwait, curious Marines gazed out upon our new reality. This was to be our new home away from home and the

• 30:25Jocko Willink?

  lives that we knew were now over. Sweat, toil and hard work were the only promises that the Marine Corps afforded us and we reveled at the very thought of it. We are the Marines of MA. We were from Dayton, Ohio and we were eager for the chance to prove ourselves on active duty. We were eager to prove ourselves in war."

• 30:47Jocko Willink?

  That's

• 30:49Jocko Willink?

  that's the attitude and there's you go through some great stuff in here just talking about

• 30:55Jocko Willink?

  and you know talking about what you got what your guys attitude was like and it's exactly what you think everyone's attitude would be like in the Marine Corps in the Army in special operations like we we've been training this stuff for our whole lives and we're ready to go and actually I was gonna say that there was probably no one in your platoon that had ever been in any kind of combat but you actually had a few guys that had been in the first Gulf War.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Thank God we had them.

• 31:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because my first deployment to Iraq there was zero experience like zero combat experience which was which was pretty normal for for the SEAL teams because well we hadn't been in a war in whatever 20 years and so there was a couple guys that had the action in Somalia a couple guys that had action in Panama that weren't in my platoon but most guys were just fresh and then you think about it even guys that were in the first Gulf War the the chances that they were in some of those scenarios that had like legitimate combat A the chances of that were very small and B even if they were in that it was like like isolated incidents you know even guys in the SEAL team

• 32:00Jocko Willink?

  that were in the Gulf War that got in firefights it was isolated like they got into a firefight.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:06Jocko Willink?

  It wasn't sustained combat operations that that obviously we were about to move into as a nation.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  We had a very good healthy mix of of guys who served back then during the Gulf War they were BFCs and and Lance Corporals and they were all infantry guys so you know we got guys would be in mortar men to machine gunners and and you know we got guys who were supply guys so we kind of got the idea of you know more of a bigger picture of what to expect as far as how the living conditions were there what was the mindset you know of being because most of us were just hey we're finally on active duty this is so freaking cool you know and and hey let's go ahead and fill sandbags I love filling sandbags you know because at home we don't fill sandbags but you know we were very lucky very very lucky to have the people that we did and thank God we had them just because

• 32:59Speaker 01

  yes they had that leadership experience but also they prepared us very well to handle the pressures that were about to come.

• 33:12Jocko Willink?

  Jumping ahead a little bit, only 22 miles from the Iraqi border,

• 33:17Jocko Willink?

  Camp Coyote was a gigantic US military installation of open desert terrain populated by small encampments named after different Marine Corps battles which dotted the vast open Kuwaiti landscape. From California to Ireland to Cyprus to Kuwait International Airport to Highway 80, to Camp Coyote, and now finally, our long trip of 30-plus hours ended on Camp Tarwa. We were exhausted but still excited enough to check out our new digs. We quickly unloaded our gear off the truck and we were directed to our assigned white tent, just like the ones at the airport. It was hard to believe that we were actually in Kuwait, standing on the line against a despotic dictator.

• 34:02Jocko Willink?

  Somewhere across these desert sands, he was waiting for us, and by all accounts, with weapons of mass destruction. It was only going to be a matter of time before something big happened that would change the whole world. Only time would tell what would happen next. Now, of course, people like to talk now about the weapons of mass destruction,

• 34:24Jocko Willink?

  which, you know, there was, there was isolated things that were found, but you know, there wasn't, he never attacked US forces or coalition forces with weapons of mass destruction, but you guys had to think that was coming.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Oh, we knew it was coming. And we already resigned ourselves off. If it was coming, that most of us wouldn't make it. You know, shoot, when the shooting started, they pushed us up there. Each of our trucks, out of the three units, I mean, the three teams that we had, each of us had 1,200 remains pouches, or body bags. They're expecting us to fight and keep on fighting until we died. And the other two units that we trained before we left the US, those guys were supposed to come up and clean us up with another 1,200 remains, body bags after them. So, they were expecting hellfire.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  And we're, the first time that we were honestly looking at combat resembling World War I stuff, but with worse stuff on the menu. You know, VX nerve gas.

• 35:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  I mean, all the prospects was just...

• 35:35Speaker 01

  It was dire. It was bad.

• 35:39Jocko Willink?

  You say here, "We moved from Camp Tarawa to Camp Iwo Jima within our first week, and soon after we arrived, we were notified that every unit on Iwo Jima had to build at least one bunker as a defense against Saddam Hussein's ballistic missile inventory." "Within our first week of being on Iwo Jima, we were assigned to our area to build one SCUD bunker. Our days consisted of filling, throwing, and neatly stacking 35 to 40-pound sandbags from first light until late evening, all by hand. We were reservists. It was a brand-new thing for us to do, and we turned everything into a game and had fun with it. We would laugh, joke, and sing songs as we accomplished our task, and the senior leadership of the active-duty platoons watching us would stand in awe of how well we worked together

• 36:21Jocko Willink?

  as we performed our menial tasks such as sandbag duty. On occasion, I heard a few of them ask our leaders what their secret was to get all of us troops to be so motivated. Gunnery Sergeant Ballantyne..." I say that right? Ballantyne. "Ballantyne would only shrug and smile." And I had to put that in there, and there's so many things, you know, again, I gotta select what I'm gonna read out of here, but just that attitude of "we're gonna have a good time." Absolutely. Is the best attitude. Turn everything into a game and just roll with it. You get your kind of first, kind of your first taste of what's to come when a Blackhawk

• 37:03Jocko Willink?

  crash occurred, and you say here, "It was quite a trek while riding across the desert in our Humvees, but we finally arrived and set eyes upon the crash scene. It was nothing short of shocking. The Hilo was spread across the distance of a football field in literally thousands of twisted, burnt, and melted pieces. From our vantage point, the scene looked so much more complex than anything our World War II-era manuals had explained recovery scenes to be. There was no way that all that classroom work and infield training could have ever replicated the amount of destruction that lay upon the field." Now, this is interesting, but since this was considered a peacetime accident, the National

• 37:45Jocko Willink?

  Transportation Safety Board had the lead on the investigation, not the military, and they dictated who was allowed on the scene and who wasn't.

• 37:55Jocko Willink?

  And so you guys show up and they they kind of let you guys do like help them, help them out.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. We're with their manpower.

• 38:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So you say, "We found several portions of human remains scattered throughout, as well as a few personal items such as fragments of a watch. We kept finding a hard glass-like substance resembling thick burned sugar or melted glass in the sand. This substance was found in large pools and spread spread throughout the crash site. And we had to chip away at it so we can continue to search for pieces of human remain fragments and pertinent identification media. Once asked, the NTSB agent informed us that the glass-like substance was actually pools of blood that had been exposed to high heat and then crystallized. It was something that we never had been taught,

• 38:45Jocko Willink?

  and all the literature did not mention how bodily fluids such as blood could caramelize and resemble burned sugar or melted glass. It also didn't mention that when sections of the helo burned or melted, they can resemble bone or burned flesh. The most valuable lesson that I learned that day was how to use an everyday item such as a screwdriver to tell if questionable items were indeed human remains versus burned metal, insulating foam, or melted plastics and silicon. Just tap the item with a screwdriver and one can feel the difference. This was definitely something that was not taught or even mentioned. And one day in the future, this new technique would prove to be very handy." So what is that? What is that? What's the difference?

• 39:30Jocko Willink?

  So you you you come across some fragment and you want to know if it's human remains or if it's part of the aircraft.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Vehicles, helicopters, there's so many components that are made with all these different composite materials and plastics and rubbers and and, you know, metals that they all look the same. They all look like human remains that are burned up and mangled. And it's very, very hard to tell the difference. I never knew that until we worked with these gentlemen. They they pulled out a screwdriver and they showed us how to do it. And yeah, just like I said in there, you can feel how if you tap it and how because if it's like a can, you know, you could feel that, all right, that's a solid piece. But if you tap it, something that's burnt flesh, it has its own kind of...

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Makeup to it and you could tell um cuz I mean when these catastrophic scenes are like this you literally looking at millions and millions of pieces and to to narrow things down that was just a trick they showed us and that I I've never seen anything like that before and we were very, very fortunate to work with those guys.

• 40:43Jocko Willink?

  So you guys are in Kuwait and obviously this whole time there's the tension we're waiting you're waiting um not knowing what's gonna happen and one night you're asleep and I'm going back to the book I heard the shuffle of boots scraping the loose sand against the plywood floor and it caught my attention but I kept my eyes closed just in case it wasn't for me I heard a flick of a flashlight being turned on a normally a normal nightly occurrence in the of the fire watch waking up his relief for duty I heard a cot squeak as the fire watch was trying to wake someone Sergeant Bussler the whisper seemed too loud

• 41:25Jocko Willink?

  against the quieter of the dark tent I opened my eyes and found the beam of flashlight shining in my face and another MA marine three cots down over here Webster what's up man we are going to war bus President Bush just told Saddam that him and his sons have forty eight hours to get out of his country or we will forcefully remove him he excitedly whispered those words but it seemed as if he had yelled it out for everyone to hear because he said all the key words that made everyone's ears perk up out of a deep sleep. So there you go and a little while later you know the the announcement comes in the

• 42:08Jocko Willink?

  loud announcement come in you know hey somebody turn on the fucking lights wake up wake the fuck up I don't care what you you belong to this shit applies to you the President of the United States has just spoken and he's given Saddam Hussein and his sons forty eight hour deadline to pack their shit and get out of the fucking country if they do not comply the President has given us the green light to evict their asses.

• 42:31Jocko Willink?

  So, that's it. Now you guys know. Continuing on our unit divided up into three official teams. We received the final gear check, the ammo, the extra ammo had been disseminated. But there was a giant deficiency that was blatant and everyone saw it. We had no vehicles to transport us north. We had no night vision goggles to see in the dark and we had no crew served weapons to set up proper defensive positions. The entire Marine Corps was going to war and no one had thought to give us body baggers the needed assets to support them. So no night vision?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 43:05Jocko Willink?

  No vehicles?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  We were literally begging people. As people were gearing up, they're loading up their vehicles. They're, you know, everybody's loading up, you know, ammo, water, chow and everything, high fiving each other, you know, hugging and here we are staring at everybody, you know, sitting on the bench, you know, waiting for, hey, can we please go? Hey, guys, we like to play too.

• 43:34Jocko Willink?

  Luckily, there was some maneuvering going on. Going back to the major in the gunny, the major in gunny Ballentine finagled a deal with the camp commandant back at Iwo Jima. So Colonel Higgins is giving us three five tons with trailers. It took a while, but our three vehicles rolled up and each of our teams strapped our packs onto the outside and hurriedly prepared our areas in the bed of the trucks. And again, jumping forward, the convoy headed north on the highway, past the Toyota trucks with large machine guns mounted in the back of their, of the Kuwaiti police. We made our way into the desert, past Kuwaiti T-72 tanks patrolling their side of the Iraqi border. And after several miles, we arrived at our destination. The sun was beginning its trek

• 44:15Jocko Willink?

  toward the far horizon. And as my, as far as my eyes could see, there were military trucks and Humvees all spread out with hundreds of, with hundreds of yards in between them. Ballentine's team, three truck sat about 200 yards away and I could see them digging in. Alright guys, Sergeant Davis spoke up. We are now well within, well inside Iraqi artillery range. We need to immediately dig skirmish holes to sleep in and change over into our mop suits.

• 44:45Jocko Willink?

  Make sure that you keep your gas mask on you at all times because we don't know when the Iraqi army will start hitting us with gas. Orient your holes. North is that way. And remember where everybody is. Do not get out of your holes unless you absolutely have to. And there's 100% light discipline because light travels out here and we don't want to give the Iraqi something to shoot out. Good to go? Good. Let's get it done. So you're putting your mop suits on, which is your chemical, biological, radiological protection, allegedly, suits. I always thought to myself, how is this thing gonna stop anything from going from? I mean, you don't, it's, it's just a, like a jacket with some charcoal in it. Yep. Some activated charcoal, some pants with activated charcoal. You're wearing your regular boots.

• 45:30Jocko Willink?

  I guess we had boot covers too. I did one op where we did it. We were hitting a suspected weapons of mass destruction site. And so we went in mop level four, gas masks on. Wow. Boots, the whole nine yards, gloves. We were not as effective as we should be, I can tell you that. And I was putting that thing going, you know, how is, because just, it's just, you're putting on a pair of pants and a shirt, not like some airtight thing. No, not at all. It doesn't make any sense when you're putting it on. So I don't have a lot of confidence on those things. But like I said, it's interesting that, you know, the quote that you give from Sergeant

• 46:10Jocko Willink?

  Davis is, uh, is, "We don't know when the Iraqi army will start to hit us with gas." It wasn't like if they will, it's like when. Yep. We fully expected it. Jumping forward, under the pitch black sky of a Kuwaiti night, I finally surrendered my conscience to slumber. I no longer feared the unknown. I was willing to accept my fate as it came. It was time to prove ourselves and rid the world of a monster.

• 46:43Jocko Willink?

  Next chapter is called Into the Breach.

• 46:49Jocko Willink?

  Holy shit, look at all the impacts up there. Corporal Kayler, am I saying that right? Corporal Kayler said, "I almost fell asleep until I heard the jets flying over. Goddamn, brother, we are at war now. This shit is for real. We are at fucking war."

• 47:04Jocko Willink?

  The morning crept in. And then it comes, gas, gas, gas. "Oh my god, fuck." The other trucks 100 yards from us screamed out. "I closed my eyes, held my breath, instantly reached down for my gas mask. My adrenaline shot through the freaking roof. Did the bastards actually drop gas on us? What we thought was a fast time to put a gas mask on back in Iwo Jima now had just been beat. We rushed putting on our mop suits, cinching down the Velcro straps around the rubber boots and around the wrists. The black rubber gloves came on last and suddenly I could feel the warmth of the sun soaking through the rubber suits infused with charcoal lining." That's, that gives it away right there. The Velcro straps around the, like, that's supposed to help you?

• 47:50Jocko Willink?

  You know, it just doesn't, doesn't seem to make sense. Uh, going forward, it was a false alarm, one among many that day. As soon as all clear was sounded and we could hear the rest of the Marines down from us carry out the order, gas, gas, gas would be sounded again. It repeated itself and became an all-day game. As soon as we opened an MRE for Chow, the alarm would be sounded and we had to suit up. When the all-clear came, it was sounded once more. I started to think that maybe I shouldn't have been eating my opened MRE.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Literally, as soon as one side would be saying "all clear", the other side would be saying "gas, gas, gas", and it was just chasing each other all day long. And it, it got stupid, you know? But what we found out, uh, later on was... They were monitoring the Iraqi uh scud missiles. And whenever they flipped their radar on so they can get prepared to launch, they would call a gas attack.

• 48:49Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  And so it was literally somebody up there was flipping off and flipping on, flipping on, you know? And as far as I know, from my position, you know, they didn't send any. But it was very, very annoying all day long.

• 49:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the reason they have to flip those things on and off is they flip them on so they can kind of see where they're shooting them.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:09Jocko Willink?

  And prep them. And so I'm sure, and then as soon as you do that, you know, Americans are gonna bomb.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 49:15Jocko Willink?

  Bomb you big time. So that's, I'm guessing what that's what it was. Although I guess scuds just surface air. You could have it pre-dialed in and maybe you don't need to give a signal. Who knows? But that's the kind of thing that happens in the military. You don't know. You know, there's just things that are going on that you don't fully, you don't fully know.

• 49:34Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, everything that we had trained for and been in preparation for was this exact moment. We had honed our skills, sharpened our minds, strengthened our bodies and prepared our spirits for this fight. We had committed our lives to the winds of fate. Our futures were now uncertain, but our determination and resolve would see us through whatever hardships and challenges lay upon that horizon ahead. Contact with the enemy had already been initiated and we were moving northward toward the sound of guns. We were heading straight into the breach. And the end of Sodom's rule begins tonight.

• 50:05Jocko Willink?

  It was bumper to bumper traffic creeping along Highway 80, making our way to the fluorescent lights of the UN border checkpoint. We slowly made our way into the pitch black of an abandoned village. The only sounds that could be heard were the idling of our engines and the nervous complaints of a lone dog barking in the night.

• 50:22Jocko Willink?

  It was the very first time I'd ever witnessed a regimental artillery fire mission in action. And it was truly a beautiful sight to behold. Yeah, these are, these are the perspective that you have when you're going into this stuff for the first time.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just, it was just incredible. You know, and I really could look at these rounds being shot out. And it looked like shooting stars going up in the sky. And then you see them crashing down to earth on top of Saffewan Hill, just doop, doop, doop. And I could look at that scene playing out right in before us and and mirroring it to, you know, Iwo Jima or Okinawa, your D-Day. It's like, wow, that's just incredible. And it just felt so connected to this brotherhood of a long line of people fighting for freedom and, you know, it's just, it was just awe inspiring.

• 51:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, we, when you, like you said, you grew up watching this stuff, you know, I grew up watching this stuff. And so when you see it for real happening and you know you're a part of it.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:28Jocko Willink?

  Man.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's very.

• 51:30Jocko Willink?

  Am I allowed to say that's a good feeling? Cause it's a good feeling. I'm sorry. I'm, I'm sorry, everyone. That's a good feeling. When you know you're a part of something that's, and you know, you do, you do a great job in here discussing why we were going there.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 51:44Jocko Willink?

  What, what type of person Saddam was and I, it's a great section. And it's one of the reasons that makes the book powerful, cause you, you go, you give some historical background about the whole situation. You explain who this guy was, what kind of, I will, I can't even say what kind of person. He was an animal, you know, he was an animal. His sons were just savages and they were horrible, evil people. And so when I say it feels good, well, you, you gotta have that historical context about who the enemy is. And then you realize, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna liberate these people that have been living under this oppressive regime for decades and we're here, we can make this happen.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:24Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, you know what? That does feel good.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  That feels really good, especially when we crossed the border and we started seeing people. They're welcoming us in. Kids, I literally, you would have these kids, no shoes on their feet and you would not see a structure as far as the eye could see. You would not see a car or a donkey or motorcycle or nothing. And they would walk all the way from wherever they came from, all the way to meet us at the road and welcome us in. And whenever we stopped, because over there, the convoys were all mashed together and all jammed together. So we'd sit there and they would, even though we tried to keep them off our vehicles, they climbed up and they were so excited. They came up and was kissing our hands and, you

• 53:10Speaker 01

  know, kids were waving at us and stuff. And in one in particular, I wish I could find this picture. It was a little girl that they had dressed up in the best clothes that she had. She had a pink dress, white frilly laces on it, and white patent leather shoes. And her dad was crouched down behind her and she was just waving at us. And I realized what that American flag means to them. Because these people back in 1992 revolted against Saddam Hussein. And he crushed that rebellion and diverted the Euphrates and Tigris rivers away from their homeland. So they didn't have any farm fields anymore. They didn't have anything.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  He was trying to snuff out a 5,000-year-old culture. And that's what he was doing. So those people will welcome us in because we were their only hope at their survival of their culture. And then at that moment, it just struck me like, wow. We are here for them. And we are, that American flag means something. So something that, that people take for granted every day. You go down the street, you know, you see it over there outside of a building or people's front yards. And you don't realize how impactful, how powerful that symbol is

• 54:37Speaker 01

  until you see somebody who is literally, their culture is withering away. And we were their only hope. And it was just incredible.

• 54:50Jocko Willink?

  And as I said, that feels good.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  It feels damn.

• 54:54Jocko Willink?

  And you have to know that context, but, but that feels good to be a part of that. No doubt about it.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:01Jocko Willink?

  I guess I'm not apologetic for that.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  (laughing)

• 55:08Jocko Willink?

  You guys are, you guys are moving forward now. Our ground pounders up front were putting a world of hurt on those Iraqi combatants who decided to stay and fight. We passed Iraqi tanks and armored troop carriers that seemed to be knocked out effortlessly by the Marines ahead of us. Some were still on fire with rounds popping and snapping inside them. Some had their turrets slapped off their chassis with a steam of curling smoke rising from their mechanical guts. Shot up pickup trucks with mounted machine guns were leaking engine fluid, mixing with blood of their former occupants. It had seemed like the large black flies knew that Task Force Ripper was in town. They had been waiting patiently for the enemy dead, and by the time we had passed their remains, a small black, a small cloud of black flies had already begun their feast.

• 55:51Jocko Willink?

  The sight of the enemy dead was so routine that they no longer captured our attention. They became as common as roadkill back home and regarded the same way, inconsequential. It was truly a sight to see, because no matter what direction one was to look along that road, all one saw was the finest, the world's finest fighting force moving north toward Baghdad, removing all Saddam's Ba'athist henchmen and waving all, at all the friendly people rejoicing in the streets.

• 56:22Jocko Willink?

  And now you, you get into this, and I remember when this happened, uh, from stateside. A tempest wind started to blow gradually, increasing with strength as time progressed and whipped up loose sand and rocks into the air, painting the scorching hot gusts of wind into an ever darker shade of orange and red. It was a storm unlike anything that I had ever seen, and I would consider it as close to what I had imagined a windstorm of biblical proportions to be. The order was passed to halt in place after a rumor that an M1 Abrams tank was lost crossing the Euphrates River. Visibility beyond 10 feet became impossible, and it was hard to tell if a dark shade of red was a vehicle cruising by or dust in the wind. Some of the speeding trucks almost rammed into us as we stopped, coming less than 10

• 57:07Jocko Willink?

  feet from our trailer before they swerved.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  So you guys are in that massive storm. I remember watching the news as everyone's pushing up. All of a sudden it was all stop. Yeah. And everybody was, everybody was on top of everybody. We had no idea whoever was next to us. Um, literally a vehicle would pass by and would not see you until it was almost too late. Um, we couldn't go out beyond an arm's distance because it was that bad. I had never seen anything. It was just a gigantic wall of orange dirt. Did it come in one wall like that? No, no, it, it, it started off slow. The wind started picking up and it was like, now, okay, now it's starting to get that, you know, where you, you know, you, you put your arms up like this and you can, it's starting to pick up your suit and start doing this stuff here and, oh, I'm sorry.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  And then it just got brown and then darker than orange and then red and then so thick you couldn't see anything. Um, and it literally felt like it was piercing my mop suit. It was that strong and it was miserable, miserable. And how long were you guys laid up for? For two days, three days? Um, we moved the very next day. Oh, okay. So it was just till the next day? Right. We moved, but it, it had that sandstorm that whole night. And then after that,

• 58:31Speaker 01

  our tent had, our tent, but our, our canvas for our, our five ton ripped and it was blowing in the wind. And we had no place to hide. Then all of a sudden it started raining on us, cold rain. And we just sat there and just took it. And, and it was miserable. All of our weapons were jammed up full of, full of, it looked like wet concrete coming out of those things. And then we realized that we were still surrounded by bad guys with AKs and RPKs and, you know, RPGs and, you know, we knew that their weapons work in this stuff and ours has a little bit of a problem with wet concrete inside of it. So,

• 59:12Speaker 01

  but yeah, it, it's, it freaking sucked. But we moved, we moved the very next day and it was all, all a gigantic wall of fog.

• 59:24Jocko Willink?

  Weather does not cooperate, Murphy's Law. So you say it didn't take too long, but the kinks of the overlapping convoys were slowly worked out and we were off this time swirling curtains of a delicate mist. It was impossible to figure out exactly where everybody was in relation to us. The fog was way too thick. Our units were strewn out and visibility was at a minimum. The only way that we could make it through this area expeditiously was to provide our own security as our convoys leapfrog each other. That meant that our convoy would halt and punch out Marines to provide security and then the convoy behind us would leapfrog through us and stop once through our lines and provide security for us. It was an all day affair of getting out our vehicles, quickly setting up and to provide security within a reasonable distance to allow communications, but to be dispersed enough

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  that one mortar RPG round couldn't take out multiple Marines. Once signaled, we would mount back up, take accountability to ensure that no one was left behind and roll out. So this is just classic cover move. Right. I always have to highlight a little cover move. And then at one point, it was once again our turn to provide security. The Marines got down, taking up their normal positions, just as they had done dozens of times thus day that far.

• 1:00:36Jocko Willink?

  The first sergeant screamed, "Contact rear, contact rear, 100%. Get off the fucking trucks." Contact rear, what the hell is he talking? Oh shit, I was in denial that we were actually being shot at. I grabbed my helmet and rifle and then quickly jumped down onto the asphalt and looked for any micro terrain that I hoped would serve to shield me against incoming gunfire. The reports increased slowly and built up tempo like popcorn popping in a microwave. The order was given to form a straight line 90 degrees off the highway so that we could trap the enemy in L shape, otherwise known as a crossfire. They say that you never know how you will react in combat until it happens to you. I could hear others nervously cracking jokes. One guy to my left by the road was vomiting and one guy further down the line from me

• 1:01:20Jocko Willink?

  said that he had shit his pants. I've never found out if that was true or if he was just joking, but who would want to find out? It sounds silly now, but all the training that those drill instructors at Paris Island had pounded in my head 10 years earlier had kicked in and I was in calm and as focused as I could be. I just sang a little country song to myself, the same one that the troops were singing just a short bit before Travis Tritt's, "It's a Great Day to Be Alive."

• 1:01:49Jocko Willink?

  I quickly checked, rechecked, and triple-checked my fundamentals of marksmanship. Proper body alignment, proper breath control. Found my natural point of aim and ensured that my magazines were readily available. This was my one time, my one opportunity to get some. So don't fail, don't fuck up, and don't die. A marine from the convoy further down from me was in a full-on hyperventilating panic. She was in the prone position, her weapon laid immodently in the sand before her. Her hands cupped her face as she tried to hold back uncontrollable tears. We tried desperately to calm her down, shouting words of encouragement. Now we were down one gun for this fight and peering into a fog that held actively, that held an actively engaging force. The, an urge to walk over to her and put that M16 into her arms had only been stopped

• 1:02:34Jocko Willink?

  by the increasing tempo of the incoming rounds. The 7.62x39 rounds had formed into black streaks against the white background of the fog. When the rounds got close, they sounded like angry hornets just overhead. When they got too close, they snapped as loud as black cat firecrackers, which left a high-pitched whine in my ears. Rocket-propelled grenades flew between us and exploded off in the opaque mist behind our formation. If we were to meet the enemy, let them come. Marines on the line started congratulating each other, prematurely yelling out, "Hell yeah, Marines, combat action ribbons." Silhouettes faded in and out of the mist as the fog shifted. It was very confusing, and my conserve over, concern over a friendly fire situation grew. I knew we were, I knew where we were.

• 1:03:19Jocko Willink?

  I knew where the road was, so that was the base of fire. But I had no idea what the other convoy was doing. Were they setting out an L-shaped on their side? Were they locating, closing with, and destroying the enemy by fire maneuver? Were they going to do squad rushes into the Iraqi positions, therefore crossing into our fields of fire? At that point, I had no idea. I was absolutely positive that I did not want to shoot at a silhouette and have it turn out to be one of our Marines hooking and jabbing with a bad guy. Okay, somebody figure this shit out so we can pop these dudes. Then out of nowhere, there was a boom that shook the ground, followed by a quick rocket sound. I screamed out, "What the fuck was that?" I was afraid an RPG would hit an ammunition-laden

• 1:04:01Jocko Willink?

  truck on the road and have all those 155mm artillery rounds explode just dozens of yards away. A voice called out from the road and said, "It's okay. We are hitting them with tow missiles." Apparently, anti-tank missiles on top of the gun trucks had thermal vision capability, which the gunner just happened to exploit. The tow gunner was pointing out to which area to shoot, and some of the Marines on the line started to fire a few rounds in that general direction. I could see shadows in the shifting mist, but I still didn't want to shoot one of our Marines by mistake.

• 1:04:35Jocko Willink?

  The sergeant, the first sergeant yelled out, "You first five Marines, shift fire to the left. Get up and move toward the road. They're gonna try and cut us off." We repeated the command, "Shift, fire, left." "Aye, aye." Wait a minute, stop. I looked to my left, I looked to my right. The incoming machine-gun fire made a roaring past my head and made me feel like a gigantic target. I just wished I could crawl up inside my helmet. I had to do a gut check and remember saying to myself, "Well, Chris, you've lived a good life. Fuck it." And I resigned myself to the winds of fate and the hands of God. I just got up and ran as hard as I could. But it was one of those little moments in time when life flashes before your eyes and time seems to slow the fuck down. The angry, black, streaking hornets seemed to get a little closer, and the mud seemed

• 1:05:18Jocko Willink?

  to get thicker, and my boots seemed as if I had a heavy cast iron weights tied to my legs. I could now see the first four Marines starting to hit the deck and low crawl to cover with splashes of impacts dancing around them. For a moment, I had cursed myself and started to wish that I hadn't been so motivated when all this started and ran so far out. I looked over to my right, toward the enemy, and snap, a round almost hit me in the helmet. "God damn," I yelled to myself, and automatically, my body went to the ground. But before my left hand could reach the ground, snap, another round almost hit me in the face. Fuck! A couple more rounds snapped around me as I high-crawled, like I never high-crawled before. I got to my destination behind a pile of mud, and I just lay there looking at the four Marines who were watching me. PFC Ramos said, "Holy shit, Sergeant. I saw those rounds coming out of the fog, and

• 1:06:03Jocko Willink?

  I thought I was gonna watch you get shot in the face." Yeah, holy shit. So did I, Ramos.

• 1:06:12Jocko Willink?

  And that's a detailed description and I actually, I actually skipped the point. I mean, you give some great details in there. You end up talking to another kid from, uh, where's he from? Was he from Thai?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  He was from Cambodia.

• 1:06:25Jocko Willink?

  He was from Cambodia.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, him and his family escaped Cambodia and they lived in a refugee camp on the Thai border. He comes up, you know, I run down there and he looks at me and goes, "Hey, you look like you, you were like, uh, Southeast Asian." "Yeah, my mom's from Thailand. My dad's white and ta-da, here I am." So, we were just catching up and seeing how you're doing, you know, and meeting in my Ramos is like, "Hey, how the hell can you guys talk about that shit right now? Can't you see what's going on?" And I was like, "Well, shit, if I'm gonna fight and die, might as well know the guy next to me."

• 1:06:56Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 1:07:01Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, at that point, the ground started to rumble and shake and down the road came a couple of M1 Abrams tank and a couple of amphibious assault vehicles, which split off the road into the fog. The tank commander on the lead tank was firing his Maude's 50 caliber machine gun and the main gun shot off a round into the fog, illuminating his tank in the mist. Our convoy, the passing convoy in these tanks and tracks had become intertwined and they were dispersing a lethal mixture of chaos and hellfire. On the receiving end of this was an enemy that had clearly picked the wrong Marines to shoot at. An enthusiastically given base of fire and crushing armored counterattack from the nation's finest had been something to behold in person and I wanted to witness more. You

• 1:07:45Jocko Willink?

  know, I always try and profess my love for the tankers and that's the type of situation.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:53Jocko Willink?

  When you hear tanks coming, it is glorious.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. I can say from my own experiences that I love tankers. I love tankers.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  There's a few times that they definitely was very welcomed onto the battlefield.

• 1:08:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a that's a classic. You're in a gunfight.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14Jocko Willink?

  And you get you get your brothers to bring a tank to a gunfight. That's a beautiful thing.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Because, you know, at that point, it was all foggy. Nobody knew where everybody was. We're still kind of,

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  separate ourselves and all the grunts and all the, you know, the tanks were way ahead of us. So when we started getting hit, they're like, oh, there's a unit out there we forgot. So they rerouted them and thank God they got there right at the right time. And yeah, took took them out. And we ended up being dug in on the side of the road a couple of days. And the guy who the tank commander came up, jumped in my hole and thanked me for pointing out the bad guys. Yeah, that makes 80 for us now. All right.

• 1:08:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, you were you were also, I got to give you a lot of credit because you were very cognizant of the confusion, right? And I've said this before, in Ramadi, there was times where there was blue on blues with Humvee versus Humvee. Which is which just should, I mean, there's no more recognizable vehicle in the world than a Humvee. And the enemy does not have Humvees. So can you imagine the mindset of a soldier to shoot at another Humvee? Like, that's what can happen when things start getting crazy. And you so you were really aware of the fact that, hey, look, I don't know where everyone is.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:33Jocko Willink?

  And I need to keep myself in check.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  I stayed calm. And that's one thing that I I I just thank my drill instructors for. Because they pounded in our heads that all this chaos, war is that. War is chaos. It is confusion. And they're trying to make you panic. As long as you don't panic, and keep your head above the water and not sink and keep on fighting. Stay in there, you know, get into that mood, slow your heartbeat down, make good decisions. And you know, I learned that from, from my senior instructor, from who now I stay in contact with,

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  which is pretty crazy. And yeah, I took that onto the battlefield and when everybody else was panicking around me, I was just singing Travis Tritt to myself and okay, here's my ammo. All right. You know, okay, my point of aim, shift it, I'm good to go. Anybody pops up there, I got them.

• 1:10:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's that ability to take a step back, detach from all that craziness and mayhem. That's the difference between having a blue on blue fratricide and not. That's, that's the difference right there. You, especially being all excited, being your first time in combat, that's the kind of thing that leads to that excitement. You get wrapped up around that emotion and all of a sudden you go, oh, cool. I got a target for the first time in my life. I'm going to take this shot. And then you, you realize it's a bad shot. It's the most horrible thing that could happen.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  And no matter what, you do not ever want to put yourself in that situation. It's better to make sure that what you're shooting at is a legitimate target than make the wrong decision. It costs somebody their lives.

• 1:11:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, you did, the people that trained you did good and you did good. That's what the Marine Corps does.

• 1:11:28Jocko Willink?

  Moving forward a little bit, they instructed us to take fighting positions and called our new phase of war an operational halt. This meant that all forward progress had stopped and the latest, greatest, from the powers that be said that rations were to be cut to only two MREs a day and our fresh water had been depleted. Out of fresh water, huh?

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Everything they were giving us tasted like bleach. They were, they were pumping it straight out of the water that was around us. And they dumped all the bleach in there and it was basically drinking laundry water. It was nasty. But you know, that one thing, when, one thing, when you get in fights, for me, I, I stopped becoming hungry. I didn't care about eating. I was just, I just needed water.

• 1:12:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Thirst is not, you can't go without water. That's all the, you can go a long time without food. You can't go a long time without water. I'm gonna fast forward a little bit here, but I thought this was a important section. You get into an area, and I think it was by Naziriyah. And you are kind of pushing through an area where there was a bunch of dead Iraqi soldiers. By the time you guys got showed up, by the time you showed up there. And you are talking to one of the Marines that's there, and you said, do you know if these were Republican Guard or Fedayeen Saddam? And so at this time, those were kind of the, the Republican Guard was kind of this allegedly elite unit of Iraqis.

• 1:12:57Jocko Willink?

  And the Fedayeen Saddam was this other group of, and you know, you heard that they were criminals and they were thugs and they were murderers. And they were completely loyal to Saddam. And so I know when I got over there, it was all about, hey, are these guys Fedayeen Saddam? It was this big kind of deal. And so you're asking the guy who these dead, who these dead enemy were, was it Republican Guard or Fedayeen Saddam? And he says, fucking conscripts, brother. The grunts over there captured a Fedayeen officer the other night after their attack, and he spilled the beans. He said that all these dead guys were forced to fight us. The Fedayeen Saddam had gone through the local town back there and recruited these guys by gunpoint.

• 1:13:41Jocko Willink?

  If they had refused, they would shoot their children. So there was a ton of suitcases on the other side of the berm. They brought them because they didn't know how long they were going to be away from home. And there are some briefcases over there, too. Some of these guys were recruited right off their bus on the way to work. These poor guys were just given uniforms and weapons and forced to attack us. If they were to turn around, that captured officer was supposed to execute them. But the dumbass was too chicken shit to go down with his troops. So again, you know, I just had to call that out because that's the kind of evil regime that was in Iraq. Just forcing people, you can come fight or we're going to kill your children. And that's why a lot of them surrendered as well.

• 1:14:25Jocko Willink?

  I mean, there's a ton of, a ton of Iraqis that surrendered at the beginning of war because they were in those situations.

• 1:14:32Jocko Willink?

  Continue on the fighting in Baghdad was prevalent on everybody's mind and every single one of us knew that it was going to be a hell of a fight. It was sad to know that several of those Marines would not survive that battle and I mentally prepared myself for the worst case scenario. So you guys are thinking Baghdad is gonna be-

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, it's the big ballgame there, you know. Right at that moment, we were fighting in Naziriyah. So we had, uh, we had a whole, uh, task force that was bogged down, down there and we knew that Baghdad was gonna be one hell of a fight. It's the biggest city in the entire country.

• 1:15:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, it was gonna be street to street fighting, house to house fighting.

• 1:15:09Jocko Willink?

  And there was a little taste of that in Naziriyah.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:13Jocko Willink?

  And I remember, you know, reading the reports and it was like bogged down and Naziriyah was the like legitimate mount, you know, military operations, urban terrain, fighting. And you get a little taste of that and you realize what that's gonna be like and then you look at Baghdad with whatever, six million people, you gotta think, you're thinking this is gonna be a bloodbath.

• 1:15:38Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Our time with Task Force Tarwood come to an end and we, and we were to detach ourselves from their convoy once we hit LSA Chesty, an old Iraqi Air Force base a few miles southeast of Al Quds. And again, I fast forward to this point. By the standards of what we've been used to, this base was absolutely huge. The Seabees had done a great job building the hard pack, earthen runway for our C-130 Hercules cargo planes. We could hear their engines roar across the base and it was a wonderful sound because it meant supplies were coming in. Staff Sergeant Anderson's team was already there and it was a great surprise to see them again. Dude, they've got showers here. Everybody instantly got excited. We had spent the past

• 1:16:18Jocko Willink?

  23 days living in dirt and filth, sweating profusely under our thick mop suits. My hair had been matted down by wearing my Kevlar helmet and there was a thick greasy layer of sand stuck to my scalp. I think that I had sand in every orifice of my body and as I looked upon that beautiful shower tent, she beckoned me to enter. I was happy to oblige. I felt human again. This is after you get out of the shower. I felt human again. I smelled civilized. I felt like a brand new man. There was also going to be hot chow served that night. The first time that we'd received any since we left Bougainville. And I absolutely couldn't wait.

• 1:17:00Jocko Willink?

  So you get to LSA Chesty and you kind of settle in. And then this happens, I was awoken by a serious hushed conversation just out outside the STP, which is the Shock Trauma Platoon surgical tent door. And I heard someone lifting up the camo netting to make her way into our sleeping area. Staff Sergeant Anderson, a whisper rang out among the sound of crickets and generators not so far away. After a short whispered discussion, Staff Sergeant Anderson said, absolutely, ma'am, we can help. MA, get on your feet. We hurriedly walked down into an open field to pre-stage ourselves in the darkness. And in a few minutes, the unmistakable sound of an incoming helicopter grew louder.

• 1:17:42Jocko Willink?

  Out of the dark Iraqi night, flickering lights were flipped on as a CH-53 Sea Stallion, Sea Stallion descended into a churning cloud of dusk. With the lowering of the ramp, the crew chief signaled for us to advance. We charged forward into the hot turbine exhaust and deafening noise into one huddled mass, taking the beating sand against our skin to quickly move up the tail ramp. A green light illuminated the back of the helicopter as we ran up. The helicopter crew in the back pointed to several occupied litters that held the severely wounded, clad in bloody bandages, and it was a very sobering scene. Each of us grabbed an end of the litter very carefully and carried them down the ramp

• 1:18:24Jocko Willink?

  and away from the helo as their ponchos on top of them violently snapped back and forth against the gusts of the still spinning blades. We made our way up to the small incline toward the open tent door of the STP. And inside a fluorescent world, doctors were preparing their hands with red iodine streaks running down their arms. I heard the marine who we were carrying mumble something, and I couldn't make it out. Stay strong, marine. We have you at STP, buddy. You're gonna be alright. I gave him words of encouragement, though I had no idea what his prognosis was. But the more I looked at his bloody bandages, the more I was getting a sinking feeling in the pit of my belly that he might not survive the night. We crashed through the doorway to put our wounded guys onto the litter stands,

• 1:19:06Jocko Willink?

  but the rear doors were sealed and the only way to get out was the way we came in. So we stood there, trapped, as the other wounded servicemen were still being carried in, and we got a small glimpse into the world of another kind of hero. The nurses and doctors of the STP immediately assumed their duties and started to cut the uniforms off the casualties and throw them into a bloody pile on the floor, start intervenus lines and start to speak loudly to the patients trying to get their attention.

• 1:19:41Jocko Willink?

  And of those four that you brought in, three of those did not survive and that was where I started the podcast today was reading that excerpt of you and your team seeing dead American servicemen for the first time.

• 1:20:05Jocko Willink?

  And again, you know, this is just um, that opening of you seeing this for the first time and you closing out by saying it was a tough night for the first time I'd ever seen to see servicemen as much I had prepared myself mentally and physically for the job, I'd never prepared myself emotionally. I kept thinking about those guys. The scenes kept playing over and over again in my head.

• 1:20:35Jocko Willink?

  And that's 23 days into it, something like that. So in all those firefights, you know, you'd seen a bunch of dead Iraqis on the way up there, hundreds of them, maybe thousands of them.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  It wasn't thousands, you know, maybe, maybe a hundred, a hundred plus on the sides of the road, but, but, you know, not as thousands, but, you know, death, you know, when we passed, first started passing by, I'm like, oh, look at that, look at that guy there, oh, wow, look at this, this burning tank over here. But when we got to finally the 23, 24 days when we had those three guys in there, it became real.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Even though it was real, but this whole time you prepare yourself and you don't want to do our job. We never want to be the ones that were busy. And it was the first time that we had went through and had to face that realization that we were needed. And, and the guys that we were bringing in, it was instantly you can connect to these people because they're wearing the same uniform as you. They just have the same, the same wants. They want to go and do the best job they can and go home to their families, you know?

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden, what made me start to feel guilty is that I knew that they were dead and, and I could see the pictures of their family members that they carried with them. And I see all that their, their family members don't know that this guy now is gone. You know, especially when you see pictures of their children and it really kicks you square in the teeth, you know? So, um, yeah, that night, it, it, it just made us realize that we were in a job that was really important, but it, you had to

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  be tough in a totally different way. A way that we hadn't prepared ourselves before. So, yeah.

• 1:22:50Jocko Willink?

  And it's, it's an interesting turn of events or, or the way that it kind of washes out because that happens and then pretty shortly thereafter, you guys get told

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:07Jocko Willink?

  That you're going home.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:09Jocko Willink?

  So you cover that here. We were notified that MA Team Two was to rotate back to Kuwait because the other companies that we trained back in Georgia and Washington DC in January needed to get some experience before the war was to end. And that left us a little raw. We started this war four weeks prior, watching the very first rounds impact by both air and ground campaigns. We transversed back and forth across this country, supporting whichever unit was expecting enemy contact. And now we were being pulled out of the conflict before we could get across the goal line in Baghdad. And this is another just interesting perspective of war at the time. Here's someone, you know, some, some senior person back there is going, you know what? This war is going to be over

• 1:23:53Jocko Willink?

  pretty quick. We better get some other people experience. Yeah. And, and by the way, this is April 13th, 2003. This war had another decade. Yeah. Almost. I guess another, what is it? Another seven years of fighting. Thousands of American casualties. But that just shows you, you know, we looked at the first Gulf War. It's over in 72 hours. You know, we're the strongest military in the world. We need to get some other people some experience. These guys have had some. Cool. We'll rotate them out.

• 1:24:32Jocko Willink?

  You say now we were climbing aboard a C-130 on a one-way ticket out of combat and we felt as if, and I felt as if we had been cheated. And then this aircraft that you get aboard, for whatever reason, it takes you to Oman, which is, which is like the straight up rear echelon. Yeah. And as you guys pull into this rear echelon command and get off, you, you say this, airmen who were lifting weights just stopped. Females in t-shirts and shorts who were playing volleyball just stopped. And people who looked as if they were heading somewhere in a hurry just stopped and whispered among themselves as we passed. I guess they were not used to seeing Marines straight from the front lines in all our filthy glory. Even though we had taken showers just a couple of days before, our weird suntans from wearing

• 1:25:15Jocko Willink?

  our helmets, our dirty raccoon faces, our sweat infused camis, and four weeks without fresh haircuts made us really stand out. But to us, I guess they stood out too. After four weeks of combat where death was so common that it no longer passed in conversation.

• 1:25:33Jocko Willink?

  We changed enough to know that the normal world would never be normal again. It was as if this trip to Oman was a lucky windfall. Or we had a rare opportunity to look through the looking glass of a magical mirror. And in the reflection, we could see ourselves when we were so innocent and naive. Not so long ago by days, but forever ago by our experiences.

• 1:25:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a serious contrast.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, uh, we were there at Camp Chesty. And, uh, the guy sitting at the white table, he's supposed to be the air traffic controller, said, "That's the bird you need. Here's your number. Get on." We got on, started taking off, supposed to be 45 minute flight. About two hours into it, we're like, "Where the hell are we going?" You know, and we weren't the only ones. We had a CBS News crew and a Navy Chief Master Sergeant, or a Navy, you know, so, yeah, E9. So we got on there, spent about six or eight hours on the ground over there. And this is another funny story. So it was the first time I was able to call home. And I called my dad. So, it was in a, in a phone trailer.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  And I'm sitting back, and I was like, "Dad, man, this was so crazy out there. I saw this, I saw that. I was here when this happened." And, yeah, I watched the very first bombs happen and stuff. And my dad was always glued to the TV, especially with anything was going on, you know? And I knew he was, he had been watching. And so I'm telling all these stories, and I sit back in the chair and stretch, and I look down and this, nobody was talking on their phones. Everybody was glued to what I was saying. So he had these 20 people watching me, and they're like, "Oh, my God, look at this. Wow, that's crazy." But, yeah, huge contrast between our services and their position, their role as, as for us.

• 1:27:28Jocko Willink?

  You end up, you get back to Kuwait eventually and then we finally left Kuwait in late May. We returned home to a hero's welcome back in Dayton, Ohio in early June. I returned to my job at the post office to find that my fellow carriers were excited to shake my hand and welcome me back. And I genuinely felt appreciated. That's it. As my buddy Johnny once said when we were in my first deployment, he goes, dude. We were getting ready to go home. He said, dude, you know, tomorrow we're going to get on an aluminum tube and we're going to wake up and be back in San Diego, dude.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 1:28:12Jocko Willink?

  You say in November, and again, jumping ahead a little bit, in November, the unit called looking for any non military police volunteers to help fill holes on the roster for the military police deployment. Several of us MA Marines quickly volunteered since we were pretty much non school trained MPs anyways.

• 1:28:30Jocko Willink?

  And again, they say, well, no, maybe we don't need you. And then you of course volunteer again. And, and then finally, um, you get, they say, yep, we're going to take you.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 1:28:43Jocko Willink?

  We're going to take you for a, for a MTT.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  Yep, mobile training.

• 1:28:47Jocko Willink?

  Mobile training.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  Mobile training team. Our role was supposed to be to impart Western style policing to the Iraqi police. Who were, who rumored not to do too much beyond sitting there and collecting the bribes, drinking tea.

• 1:29:01Jocko Willink?

  Accurate rumors.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. So.

• 1:29:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, and let's just say also, if you were in the Iraqi police, there was also a decent chance that you were going to get murdered and your whole family was too. So it wasn't, the only people that were doing it were, well, it was, it was a hard job in that respect. And then there wasn't a lot of positive reasons to go out on patrol. That's the other thing is don't think of Iraqi police as a crime stopper. These guys were, these guys were supposed to fight the insurgency inside their own country. So.

• 1:29:29Jocko Willink?

  It's what, it's what we needed to do is build their security in their country. And one of the ways to do that was by strengthening the Iraqi police. So they were doing these, these mobile training teams to get these guys up to speed, but it was a tough job.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but you get the call to go and then ever since I got the phone call on Monday, I had a really bad feeling about this whole deployment. Something just wasn't right. I couldn't tell what it was.

• 1:29:57Jocko Willink?

  And then March 1st, 2004. It had been 19 days shy of a year since I first crossed into the breach. In the many months of my absence, the constant conflict had changed these highways into vast expanses of nervous tension and the balance of favor into the hands of the lawless. So again, Americans, most Americans, myself included, we thought the war was going to be over quick and now all of a sudden we're a year into it and it's not getting better. It's starting to get worse. When was this, May of 2004 or March of 2004?

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So I was in Baghdad when you, when you were going, um, and you were heading up to Haditha.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, Haditha Dam.

• 1:30:38Jocko Willink?

  Matter of fact, I might've done an op too up in Haditha.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  That was a nasty town, man.

• 1:30:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We came up to Haditha one time. We drove up there from Baghdad and did an op. And I'm trying to think of when it was, if you guys were there or not. But regardless, as you guys are driving up there, it's, uh, the same roads that last year were chock full of smiling and waving civilians were now filled with IED blast craters and splintered shrapnel. Gunny Sergeant Ballantyne, Corporal Freischler?

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Freisteller.

• 1:31:13Jocko Willink?

  Freisteller. Lance Corporal Mazursak? Mazur?

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, his name is, uh, Major Sak.

• 1:31:22Jocko Willink?

  Major Sak.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's spelt like major Cack, but it's Major Sak.

• 1:31:27Jocko Willink?

  You gotta give these guys nicknames for me. Sergeant Upham.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:31:30Jocko Willink?

  And I were designated to be Military Police Mobile Training Team. Now, what's weird about this is this is, this is zero to do with MA, zero to do with mortuary affairs. You're going on a, a combat deployment now.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:44Jocko Willink?

  To be, and by the way, when you do these mobile training teams, you're not just training them. What you have to do is you have to go out and patrol. You have to show them how it's done. This is a dangerous, dangerous job. Uh, continuing on, it was going to take us three days to drive up from the Udari Range in Kuwait to the Haditha Dam. You drove that?

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:05Jocko Willink?

  Located in West, where'd you stop? Did you stop?

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  We stopped in Baghdad. That was our first stop and that was like a little refueling place with huge gigantic concrete barriers. They're probably four, five stories tall in a really small area. And we stayed the night there and different story, but I met a corporal who was with a with a with a LEV unit. And I was like, man, I've never seen these things up close. I want to check it out and stuff. I got called to go to a meeting and later on, you know, he was already racked out. So I missed my opportunity.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  But it turns out that I found out later on, just recently that he passed away within like a month or two. And in one of my talks that I gave for my book presentation down in Kentucky, his wife was there. Showed me a picture and I didn't have the heart to tell her that I I met him there at that. But we stayed there at that refueling area. And then we drove all the way out to Al Assad, spent the night at Al Assad. And then from there we went out.

• 1:33:18Jocko Willink?

  How many vehicles did you have with you?

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Wow. I can't even tell.

• 1:33:22Jocko Willink?

  So it was a bunch.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  It was a bunch. I was with third battalion, fourth Marines Weapons Company.

• 1:33:26Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  So we were all moving in.

• 1:33:28Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  And we're taking over for the the third ACR for the army.

• 1:33:32Jocko Willink?

  You go here from overpass to overpass and everything in between. My two forty Gulf spun in circles. My anxiety anxiety was thick trying to anticipate the enemy's move before it happened. I don't know what the, well, the the fact was the enemy would use bridges to like set up IEDs to ambush you. And so every bridge was like a like a threat. And actually, I just talked about Johnny talking about the aluminum tube. Well, that was another thing. Every time, because he would ride my vehicle and every time we'd be coming up to a bridge. Johnny be in the back going, here it comes, Jaco, you ready for here it comes, bro? This is it. And he could make this weird noise, like with his mouth, like a loud clicking noise, like.

• 1:34:16Jocko Willink?

  But it was really loud and you gotta be loud to be able to hear it in Humvee and with one headphone on, because I'm listening to the radio, I got a radio going. And he'd be, you know, and then we'd get through it and he'd go, got lucky on that one. And then, you know, four minutes later, you're going under another bridge and Johnny's going, oh, this one doesn't look good, bro. Jaco, you ready to get some? Here it comes, bro. And then, and we drive through.

• 1:34:41Jocko Willink?

  So because they use it, man, the, the bridge, going under bridges gave you definite.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:47Jocko Willink?

  A definite. Especially when you have. Did you guys have armored, um, bridges, armored Humvees?

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  We did not.

• 1:34:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we didn't either.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  Everybody else, when they, they, they, basically the day that we were all stacked up, ready to go, they just came over with a pallet and said, have at it. And they, all these guys started grabbing everything, bolting them onto their weapons, onto their vehicles. And I was just cleaning my weapon and then they were like, hey, we've got a couple of pieces left over here. You want it? And I was like, might as well not even take it. It's just like a, maybe a half a door or something. So basically we just sat there, unarmored vehicle and I was on the up gun. I was on the two forty, almost the entire trip. I tell you, going under those bridges, I was always looking up. You know, expecting to see a, an IED sitting right there to blow down. And when you get people, you got people up top or cars parked off in the distance somewhere. Oh, man, bad feeling, bad feeling.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Just sit there and just grit your teeth out. Hopefully you just, hopefully you don't, they're, you don't, they're not accurate.

• 1:35:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Were you guys traveling in the day or night?

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Uh, day.

• 1:35:48Jocko Willink?

  See, we, we would, during that first one, we'd only travel, well, pretty much as much as we could travel at night. We traveled super fast, totally blacked out on nods. So when we got ambushed a couple of times, they always catch the tail end of us because it wouldn't be effective because we would be through it. You know, but, uh, having that many vehicles during the daytime.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. We actually broke down in Fallujah.

• 1:36:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Right there on the highway. No shit, man. Cause I'd never heard of, uh, of Haditha. You know, we were down in Kuwait and, and where everybody was talking about Fallujah. They're, Fallujah's the nasty town, man. You know, that's where the big ball games at. You know, so I only knew Baghdad and Fallujah. So we finally get there to Fallujah, right there on the highway and one of the Humvees break. And I'm on the up gun and we punch out of security. I got the radio up in my chin strap and I'm circling around. I'm seeing people run around us on the buildings setting up on us. And I'm calling up, I was like, sit rep over, sit rep over, you know, nobody's saying anything. I'm like, what the hell is going on?

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  And we finally, after it seemed like forever, and the lieutenant gets on and he goes, it's okay. Uh, when we punched out of security, before we hooked up the tow bars, somebody punched and tripped over a wire. He leached over and, and cut it and it was an IED that was five feet from this damn door. Yeah, that was very, very, very lucky. But we hooked up tow bars and we finally got back on the road. Scary situation, but narrowly averted because nobody at that time, every convoy was getting hit. And we were one of the very few that didn't get hit.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  We were expecting death and destruction on that, you know, freaking road warrior shit.

• 1:37:44Jocko Willink?

  You say here, the geography of the western province of Al Anbar was very different from the scenery that I had already known in Iraq from my last trip. No longer do we see the vast, flat emptiness of the sand seas that held sporadic tolls of green life in small ancient communities. Here were rolling hills that contained the bustling population centers of Fallujah, Habenia, Hit and Aramati. All extremely dangerous cities in the spring of 2004. Intelligence reports indicated that Al Qaeda fighters were being funneled in through the Syrian border, town of Al Kaim, and followed down the ancient spice trade routes now paved into a highway that US forces designated as MSR Michigan.

• 1:38:25Jocko Willink?

  Kidnappings, executions, assassinations and torture were commonplace in the back alleyways of most any towns along the route. Resembling the layers of, of an onion, it was several wars encased within a larger conflict. We now found ourselves struggling to keep the peace and order among sworn enemies from factions that held no loyalties but to themselves. Their only common enemy was us, which they fervently attacked whenever given the appropriate opportunity.

• 1:38:52Jocko Willink?

  So this is, yeah, this is, this is Al-Lambar.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:38:55Jocko Willink?

  Lovely Al-Lambar province.

• 1:38:59Jocko Willink?

  You finally get up there. We had driven to the base of the dam and I was taken aback by the enormity of this megastructure. Yeah, that dam is freaking huge.

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  It looks like something out of a James Bond flick.

• 1:39:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  It's crazy how awesome it looks. You could, you know, imagine there's a rocket in there or something, you know, some evil guy carrying a ball, you know, a little cat and stuff.

• 1:39:21Jocko Willink?

  Mr. Bigglesware.

• 1:39:26Jocko Willink?

  You go, go forward a little bit here. I, I took in this surrounding landscape, enjoyed a cool, light wind and looked at the two towns of Dam Village and Haditha in the distance. That was where the enemy was hiding and that was where he felt comfortable. Cause we had control over the dam and the dam was such a prominent structure. And you're looking down at everything. It's got a great, you know, high visibility.

• 1:39:50Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. A high pitched whistling sound coming from the outside caught my attention. What's that? I asked myself. Get inside, get inside, screamed the weapons company Marines that I had just hung out with on the patio. Twenty guys piled on top of one another, pushing each other to get out of the way through a double set of doors. Kaboom, kaboom, splash, splash. The lights flickered, dust shook off the ceiling and the concussion resonated within my chest. Enemy mortar rounds fell out of the sky and impacted the compound area, some being overshot and impacting the lake behind us. We, we were inside the biggest bunker on this side of Iraq, so I felt safe hanging out inside my room. Naturally, our attention was focused on all those Marines that ran in. Is everybody okay? Someone asked. The consensus was equal across the board. No one was hurt.

• 1:40:37Jocko Willink?

  It took just a few minutes until the word was spread that we were going to get up in a few hours earlier than what we'd expected in the morning. The bad guys had just sent the challenge of red rover, red rover, send the Marines over. We are going out in force before first light and the Marines of Weapons Company, Third Battalion, Fourth Marines were chomping at the bit to answer the call and I was happy to go out with them. So you're going out on your first patrol. How, so how many days have you been at the dam? Before your first patrol? Is it just like a couple of days?

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  It was just a couple of days.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  There with Colonel McCoy. He had a very aggressive policy, you know, he wanted to make everybody known in the area that we were in town. So that we were doing that.

• 1:41:24Jocko Willink?

  Here we come. First patrol with a hand signal, our darkened figures emerged from the mist like ghosts upon the land to move as one, changing the pattern of the formation to have every weapon barrel cover every angle around us. Trust in no one or no thing outside this circle of men. Question every step, every loose piece of trash, every bump in the sand, or anything that looked like it didn't belong. We were heading directly into harm's way and every inch of our trek could be paved with bad intentions. IEDs could take any shape and be left out here waiting patiently to take life or limb.

• 1:42:00Jocko Willink?

  That was, you know, you guys, you guys do your first patrol and, you know, again, buy the book because you give really good detail. You explain what it feels like in a, you know, in a way that I was reading it going, yep, yep, that's it right there. So you do a great job with that. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. And I think this is your next patrol.

• 1:42:23Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Dan raised his arm as to signal the patrol to advance forward. It was time to step off and do this thing. I clipped my radio handset into the trin strap of my helmet so I could free both hands and still monitor the radio tucked the antenna into the straps that lined the front of my flak vest to keep my radio low profile. Stuck the butt of my rifle into my pocket of my shoulder and put my game face on because it was time to do work. Like the gears of a finely tuned machine, each command was quickly followed by precise movements. All the while, each individual expertly adjusted his own tactics to fit his own threats. If a window or street corner posed to endanger the team, it was quickly recognized, communicated, and then covered by one or more rifle barrels. Three, four

• 1:43:06Jocko Willink?

  had a proud history from the earliest days of the Pacific campaign in World War II, throughout the Vietnam War, and to the fall of Baghdad almost one year ago.

• 1:43:17Jocko Willink?

  And you talk about Lieutenant McCoy, three, four strive to be the hardest infantry battalion in the Marine Corps. Just no easy feat.

• 1:43:30Jocko Willink?

  You guys are continuing on this patrol. There was a small gray car that turned down our street and started to drive toward us. No one attempted to stop it and have it turn around away from our formation. It just kept coming closer and closer and closer until it broke the integrity of our patrol. What the fuck? What if this was a car bomb? It would most definitely wipe out most of us, I said to myself. The car drove down to the road until it was close enough for me to touch, literally. The man had a gray and purple long-sleeved shirt that had stripes that went across the arm, similar to a rugby shirt. I looked quickly inside to see if I could spot any weapons and waved at him with my left hand. He waved at me with his left, never turning his head to look at me.

• 1:44:13Jocko Willink?

  I turned to step away and he extended his first finger to touch the dashboard.

• 1:44:21Jocko Willink?

  Kaboom.

• 1:44:23Jocko Willink?

  Within a fraction of a nanosecond, I felt a sudden and massive overpressure that made my eyeballs want to pop inside the sockets. The air in my lungs sucked out and a torrent of dirt rushed past my head and then blackness. I never heard a blast, I just felt it.

• 1:44:39Jocko Willink?

  What the? I lay there, my body numb and tingling, slow to accept my senses and cognition. I opened my eyes and at first the light seemed to hurt and then the focus waved in. Through the high-pitched whining in my ears, indecipherable shouts were coming from my left behind me. Then I noticed a taste in my mouth of blood and I had a burning inside my chest as if I'd been the quarterback with a shitty offensive line and had the ever-loving shit stomped out of me. Sluggishly, my head started to release the dazed fog and my thoughts were starting to once again form and regain clarity. I looked around and noticed that I wasn't where I was just a second before. "Where the hell am I?", asked.

• 1:45:21Jocko Willink?

  I had found myself face down in a ditch a dozen yards away from the road. And my heavy pack, which contained the radio and extra gear, had slid up my back, now rested on the base of my head, driving my skull into the mud. What the fuck happened? What was that explosion? Did the car blow up? Why am I not dead, or am I? I spit out the dirt in my mouth and looked up to my right and saw that I was at the bottom of a hill. At the top of the hill was an outdoor goat market with a bunch of merchants who were grabbing goats and throwing them into their cars to get out of the ensuing crossfire. Oh shit, where the fuck is my rifle? Marines had been taught from the very first days of boot camp that you never lose your fucking weapon, ever.

• 1:46:01Jocko Willink?

  For a second, I acted like that awkward first battalion recruit on Paris Island that I was, that I was even 11 years before. I almost shit myself in panic. Okay, there it is, thank God. Then like a flash of lightning, the sudden realization hit me and fear gripped my heart. I was at the bottom of a ditch with no place to hide and no cover. They were gonna start shooting any second. If I wanted to live, I had to get out of here and I needed to get out of here fast. I started to crawl up the hill toward the elevated road, burying my feet into the loose dirt to gain traction. It seemed like the harder I tried to call out, the further I slid back into my hole. My muscles ached, my lungs still burned, and I was already exhausted before the fight had even begun. Suck it the fuck up, Chris, suck it up and push on, get out. I had to stay low, I wanted to stay low.

• 1:46:46Jocko Willink?

  If they were going to start shooting, I needed to not be a target. I crawled up to the crest and found that there was no other place to hide up here either. But I rejoined my fellow Marines and that gave me comfort. I totally expected to see the burning wreckage of an exploded car, but when I surfaced out of the ditch, there was none. It must have blown up and threw itself off the road, I said to myself. It was pure chaos. Marines were running around trying to regain control of the situation and the civilians were desperately trying to get out of the way. Where the fuck is it? Where the fuck is it? I screamed while prone on the side of the road. Where is what? Someone yelled back. The fucking car, I said. What fucking car? The fucking car that blew up. I retorted. I don't know, it was the fucking telephone that blew up. It was an IED.

• 1:47:30Jocko Willink?

  I heard someone to my right screaming in the middle of the formation. I saw a marine who was lying on his back and kind of circling in a circle, kicking in a circle and grabbing at his arm. "I'm hit, I'm hit, ah fuck." A tall marine was quickly walking over to him with his arms outstretched to grab him and hold him down. I could hear a couple more people to my left yell out that they were also hit. There were people all around screaming a blood curling yell. "Cormin up, cormin up." I lay there watching the tumult surround me as if I were the access point of a fucked up war movie and everything just kept revolving around me. I was still dazed, but everything still imprinted upon my mind in high definition. Like the turning gears of that finely tuned machine that I had mentioned earlier,

• 1:48:14Jocko Willink?

  each marine or small group of marines moved at their own quick pace for finding cover, helping the wounded, running up the road to pass orders, setting up fields of fire and preparing themselves for a fight. They moved without orders and it was automatic. These guys were so rehearsed that their default went straight to kill mode. I was highly impressed. The shock of the blast alone should have jangled some nerves and delivered a hiccup into their plans, but these men were true professionals.

• 1:48:43Jocko Willink?

  I then felt something hot pouring down the inside of my left calf. I reached down to touch it and my hand brought back a large amount of blood. I had no idea where it was coming from. My whole body was numb from the blast, but it just kept pouring out from somewhere. An overwhelming feeling of dread hit me and the thought of my mortality stirred within me for a quick second. Then the fear for my fellow wounded marine's survival of this situation set in and I hope that no one was critically injured. I thought if there was more marines hit like this, then we are fucked. The bad guys should have been shooting by now. How in the hell are we gonna get out of here? I shouted, "Oh shit, I'm hit too." Lance Corporal Naomi?

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Naomi.

• 1:49:26Jocko Willink?

  Lance Corporal Naomi, a 3-4 marine who was qualified as a combat lifesaver, came running over and he yelled out, "I got him, I got him." He proceeded to pat me down, looking for wounds. He asked, "Where are you hit?" I replied, "I think it's my leg. How bad is it?" He cut my pant leg from the boot, all the way up to my belt line, looking for the wound. "You're okay, Sergeant. It's really not that bad, but don't look at it." He looked over his shoulder, "Corman up." Then he looked back at me, "You have a huge hole in your leg, but you'll live."

• 1:50:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, 3-4 Marines, salute.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Some badasses. I was very lucky to have been assigned to them. Those guys are definitely professionals.

• 1:50:17Jocko Willink?

  How much interoperability training had you done with them prior to going on this deployment?

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 1:50:23Jocko Willink?

  So you showed up and went on deployment?

• 1:50:24Speaker 01

  Literally. I showed, I got the phone call that night, on Monday, when I was delivering mail. I said to them, "All right, I'm going. All right, they're right, pick up your orders on Tuesday. We're leaving on Wednesday. Pick up your gear Thursday." And early, early, early in the night, like 2, 3 o'clock in the morning on Fridays, when we're picking up our weapons and we're getting on the plane. It was that 1, 2, 3, go. And so, the whole time, when we got stuck with 3-4, it was language classes, meeting some critical guys who was gonna be in our team,

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  you know, rehearsing, and then, then we're punching north. And it was literally 1, 2, 3. We're now in Haditha. You know, from going from Springfield, Ohio, to delivering junk mail, you know, in, you know, February of 2004, to walking the streets of Haditha and getting blown up.

• 1:51:32Jocko Willink?

  And just to...

• 1:51:35Jocko Willink?

  Great, you know, again, the book is great in this section here.

• 1:51:40Jocko Willink?

  When you're talking about, like, you anticipate, once you get blown up, you're waiting to get the gunfight, because that's what the enemy, that's kind of standard operating procedure for the enemy. They hit you with an IED, while there's that chaos and confusion, they hit you with small arms fire with some kind of an ambush, and that's what you were waiting for. And, and fortunately, it didn't happen.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  Right. Because we were on an elevated dirt road, surrounded, no one's saying surrounded, but we were in a horseshoe of all these buildings around us. There's no reason why they shouldn't have been lighting us up. They would have had us, you know, but they, they didn't shoot. And, and thank God they didn't, because, you know, we had our QRF that was out, out in the desert, and two Humvees, three Humvees maybe, but it was a light patrol. And the closest help was hours away.

• 1:52:38Jocko Willink?

  So what was it that, it was an IED on the phone?

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  It was an IED, yeah, on a, in a phone pole, it was the base of the phone pole, a telephone pole. They, I remember walking up and seeing this trash, this looked like it was put there purposely, you know, and, because we're walking, this area was nothing but like a dump, and with the road, but everything in the whole area had sand that was on it, dust, and it looked like it's been there for a while, except for the base of this phone pole. But, I'm the new guy to this unit, I'm thinking, what are they doing? That doesn't look right. But, I'm like, okay, well, these guys know what they're doing, I'm gonna keep on rolling, you know, and then, what caught my attention was them letting that car come in, and I'm

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  thinking, there's only 18 guys in my patrol. If that thing's a car bomb, we're all dead. So, I'm saying, all right, roll with it. Go up, check out the vehicle, and then when I waved at the guy, boom, it goes, and I thought it went off. You know, and um, and when I got blown up, my entire body went numb. I didn't feel anything. Um, and when I was, when I said that, um, I didn't know if I was dead. I was looking at my arms and legs, seeing if they were still attached. I had no idea what was going on.

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  So, the guy who came in, he, you said he touched the dashboard or something?

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  He touched the dashboard.

• 1:54:02Speaker 02

  Like, what was that to activate it or?

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:54:04Jocko Willink?

  My guess, my guess is totally unrelated.

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  I'm thinking it was, because, um, you know, he was just, he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. And when I, when I yelled out at, hey, you know, where's he at? And everybody's like, what are you talking about? The freaking car that just passed us. You know, um, my entire team, minus one, who was still back at the, at the dam, um, all of us were hit. Uh, the only person that wasn't hit was, uh, at the time, Gunny Ballantyne. He, he ended retiring as Sergeant Major Ballantyne. But he was about to walk over to my side of the road. He was waiting for that car to pass by. And, and that IED, uh, that car stopped all of the, that frag from hitting him.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  But years later, and I, the book is already out. I'm giving these presentations. He sends me a picture of, of a part of a radio. And he goes, hey, boss, you know what this is? I'm like, no, what's going on? What, what, what is that? And he goes, it's part of your freaking radio that got blown off of your back and then embedded in my flak jacket across the street from you, man. So, yeah, he's got that little trophy. But yeah, my, my handset was cut up, cut in two. My, my antenna was gone.

• 1:55:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you, you, you go into that here, you go, uh, a hu- and again, uh, skipping a little bit, but a hulking figure dragging his leg, definitely resembling the movements of a zombie, was making his way up the road. It was the friendly Ukrainian-born Navy corpsman that I had spoken to a few times. We had planned to get together. He was going to teach me how to speak Russian in our downtime. And I was looking forward to it. But now the back of his uniform was a solid, dirty plum from all the blood lost because he had received very painful shrapnel wounds to the back of both arms, both legs, neck and buttocks.

• 1:56:00Jocko Willink?

  And he was still dragging himself down the street to get to me as if he had just stepped out of a John Wayne movie. The lieutenant yelled, "Doc, hey Doc, don't worry about him, we'll get him." He just raised his hand and dismissed the notion as if he had turned down a drink at the bar. In his cool ass Ukrainian accent, he just said, "No, no, I can get him." He reached into his bag and pulled out a thick field dressing and began to read the directions and you do a pretty funny, uh, little section in there about him reading the directions that he's supposed to be treating you.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  I was like, "What the fuck, Doc? Just put the damn thing on, I'm bleeding all over the place." He's like, "No, no, no, I'm gonna make sure I get this right."

• 1:56:40Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Major Petrusi, is that right?

• 1:56:43Speaker 01

  Petrucci.

• 1:56:44Jocko Willink?

  Major Petrucci slowly approached me and asked, "Hey, hey Marine, are you okay? Yes, sir, I'm just really fucking pissed off right now, they blew us up, ripped my trousers, I'm bleeding all over the fucking place, and I've been trying to raise Kilo Company, my radio doesn't seem to work." I think, I think that I, I think that I got it shut off when I tumbled down into the ditch, "Can you check it for me, sir?" He agreed and I turned around so he could open my pack and check out the radio. He didn't even have to open the pack. He said, "Well, Marine, here's your problem." He grabbed the cord to my handset that was in my chin strap, which was now frayed and cut away from the radio by the blast, threw it over my shoulder and said, "Your antenna is gone too, and you have a bunch of large metal debris embedded and sticking out of your pack. You're awful lucky, Marine."

• 1:57:28Jocko Willink?

  It was the understatement of the year, the major was right, I was lucky as hell. I should have been decapitated because my antenna and handset were gone and they just, and they rested just mere fractions of an inch away from my head on both sides of my neck. If I didn't have the radio, I might have been gored by the large metal debris sticking out of my pack. And if I had not moved at that exact second that I did, that I did, and my leg was one more fraction of an inch over to the left, I would have had it blown off or the pieces of shrapnel, shrapnel could have hit me in the femoral artery possibly causing me to bleed out. I think at that exact moment, I was among the luckiest people on the planet.

• 1:58:09Jocko Willink?

  I had possessed the winning golden lottery ticket for the rest of my life.

• 1:58:16Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, the major was right. I was lucky, I guess. Yeah.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. I ended up, um, looked like an ice cream scoop was pulled out of my calf, um, outside of my calf. I still have a piece of shrapnel right next to my femoral artery on the, on the same leg. From there, which was super lucky, didn't go any deeper. But as big as that blast was, um, uh, very, very fortunate to be here. Uh, the guys in the ass end of the patrol said that it blew up more than out. So, um, the differences was is that they buried it too deep. Uh, if it was 2005, I wouldn't be here. But 2004, you know, they were still trying to figure out how to use these against us.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 1:59:04Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, it took, it probably took just a few minutes, but it really felt like hours had passed. The QRF Humvees quickly rolled down the road and the brakes squealed to a stop.

• 1:59:18Jocko Willink?

  They get you to like the battlefield treatments. And the medical staff was highly rehearsed at taming the confusion and staying focused. They darted around each other, grabbing medical supplies, filling out paperwork and rendering first aid to each of us wounded guys. Like a dance of highly choreographed medical professionals, their battle was to ease the suffering of the maimed and sustain the heartbeats of those who needed critical care. They were honorable and gallant guardians of life, slapping away the hands of death daily. They won most battles, but lost some. For those who tirelessly heal the wounds of broken warriors and for those who selflessly dedicate themselves in pursuit of easing pain of suffering, I will always be honored to be in the presence of such nobility.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  I gained a whole new respect for medical, um, you know, being on those deployments and seeing what these guys actually do in war. You know, in peacetime, you're like, oh, okay, we'll get to hang out at Doc's place and, you know, who needs more IVs and that kind of stuff. But these guys, and you see them and doing their, their jobs there. It's just, it's awe inspiring to, to, to see how they can be as calm and level headed when chaos is just right there on their table.

• 2:00:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and as I said, opening this thing up, I mean, they're facing death all the time and they can't save everybody. And so there, and there's gotta be some level of guilt every time you can't save someone. It's like that's gotta chip away at you. Yeah, totally heroic, totally heroic, our military medical personnel. And luckily they're there. They get you guys extracted and you say, we floated away, we floated on high among the angels inside a rotary winged workhorse known as the UH-60 Blackhawk medevac helicopter. My war was over and I was regretfully delighted.

• 2:01:18Jocko Willink?

  My guilt was that I was leaving my fellow Marines behind to continue the fighting as I was going home. I knew it wasn't the case, but I had an unbearable feeling that I was abandoning them in the middle of a fight against insurmountable odds. I wanted to be there alongside them. I wanted to bear their burdens. I wanted to fight in their fight and I wanted to share in their misery because they were my Marine brothers and they were in harm's way. I wasn't eager to die. I was just eager to serve alongside my brethren when the chips were down and it was time to prove our metal.

• 2:01:57Jocko Willink?

  You make it to, uh, welcome to the Baghdad Combat Support Hospital. What we all called the cache. You can relax now, Marine. You're safe. We're gonna take good care of you. So you get a nice, smooth, relatively smooth extraction. And then a little bit, fast forward a little bit. Sitting in the spotlight of a humming fluorescent bulb, I dialed the phone and the connection led to failure. I dialed the phone again. It again failed. On the third try, she answered.

• 2:02:32Jocko Willink?

  We both had been accustomed to carrying out our phone conversations at an accelerated pace. We'd always been limited to just a few minutes and now, without missing a beat, she continued our dialogue from the past several days. I just let her speak. It was good to hear her submit the woes of life a million miles away. That life seemed so foreign to my reality and I longed for it once again. I reluctantly informed her of the events of the day. Life seemed to stop and the phone nearly hit the ground.

• 2:03:02Jocko Willink?

  My words caught the midnight breeze evaporated into the night sky and a world away, they manifested and struck like daggers in her heart. For me, this day was done. For her, I imagined a day filled with anxiety and angst. The father of her child, her husband, was wounded and unsure of his days ahead. I promised myself, from this day on, I would never take life for granted. And from that day forward, I never did.

• 2:03:42Jocko Willink?

  Calling home.

• 2:03:53Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take to heal up?

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  Wasn't that long. I stayed over at Twenty-Nine Palms for maybe five, six months. It wasn't that long. Got my skin grafts done. I spent most of my time just sitting there, hanging out with the guys. Because there was not even a Wounded Warrior Regiment at that time. They just basically said, "Oh, you're wounded. Well, here's your barracks and here's a bag full of toiletries." And that's it. Just report in every Thursday, keep your room clean. And so the rest of the time, we were just sitting around and drinking and... And I didn't know anybody at Twenty-Nine Palms. Everybody was deployed then.

• 2:04:37Jocko Willink?

  Where was your wife?

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  My wife was at home.

• 2:04:39Jocko Willink?

  In Ohio?

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  In Ohio.

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  So I was there with a can of Comet, cleaning my floors, making them white, drinking a six-pack.

• 2:04:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm glad we have the wounded warrior.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  No, but things, but after I came back from my convalescent leave, as soon as I came back, the barracks was over flooded with guys. Cause I came, when I was on my convalescent leave, that's when Vigilance Resolve happened. Uh, the first push into Fallujah. And, uh, the guys that I was with, 3-4 was, was with them, uh, too. Along with, um, uh, 3-7 and 2-7, I believe. And that's when, and when I heard, came back, that's when we heard about Jason Dunham. Everybody was talking about Jason Dunham.

• 2:05:32Jocko Willink?

  Once you were healed up, was it back to your reserve status?

• 2:05:37Speaker 01

  I went back to my reserve status, uh, went back to delivering mail. And then that's when they were saying, um, hey, we're thinking about going back over, uh, this time back to Mortuary Fairs. And, uh, I put my hand up, said absolutely, if my guys are going, I'm gonna be there next to them. You know, um, at that point, I was one of the most combat experienced guys for the Mortuary Fairs. So, uh, I mean, shoot, I was just right there. So I knew more of the lay of the land and how they're fighting. And so I figured if we gotta go outside the wire, I can impart some things that I know that might help them. Even though that I, I had a bad feeling about this whole deployment as well.

• 2:06:19Jocko Willink?

  Did they,

• 2:06:23Jocko Willink?

  did they give you any kind of choice? Were they like, hey, look, man, you just got wounded, you're, you're back, or was it?

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  It's a mission critical MOS. They are happy to take anybody who puts their hand up. So, um, you got guys who, I was one of the most, um, senior guys in this MOS. I was in it since 1993, when I first came in the unit. So, um, for years of not being utilized and trained, you know, properly, to all of a sudden, we're at the forefront at recovering guys. And we were handling remains almost every day.

• 2:07:02Speaker 01

  Going and, and making stuff up on the fly because there was no, there was no, no, there was nothing to guide us.

• 2:07:12Jocko Willink?

  When you raised your hand to volunteer, what was your wife's reaction at this point?

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  She wasn't happy, but she understood that she married a Marine. And my heart is with them. My heart will, you know, if she was to give me an ultimatum, that I would take that. I would say, "I'm going. Goodbye." Because I needed to be with my guys. I needed to be in that fight. So she understood that from the very onset of our relationship.

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  And not to say I didn't love my, my family, but my heart was over there. And if, if I didn't go and something was to happen, and then she knew that, even though I wouldn't have, but she didn't want to be put in a place where I, I would have blamed her. So she, it was easier to let me go over. And plus, I, I didn't like delivering mail, to tell you the truth. I, I loved being in and making a difference somewhere. Because anybody can deliver mail. Because when we show up to the next day, you're still gonna have a mountain of mail to deliver. But over there, I felt like we were making a difference. That we were doing things that were important.

• 2:08:35Speaker 01

  And my lessons that I was given to the troops and, and showing them how to patrol, how to, you know, how we do things in certain situations, it, it mattered. And I was, I was grooming and mentoring leaders to take my role. Because I knew I wasn't gonna be in this forever. And I, and now under the mission, it was still gonna continue. So I said, "Yep, send me back over."

• 2:09:05Jocko Willink?

  It's America, right there. And, and your wife being supportive. Yeah. That's America. Yeah.

• 2:09:14Jocko Willink?

  So you guys end up going to, uh, TQ, what we all call TQ, Altacatum Air Base. And, um, you say here, "I was crazy to volunteer for this again, this being my third trip in there in three years." "I knew that I was putting a lot of strain upon my family back home, but the real world no longer made sense to me anymore. Here in combat, I felt alive. Here in this ugly world filled with all its lethalities and bloody ends, all this made sense to me. The rules were very simple. Do your best at your job and do your best to stay alive."

• 2:09:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a, there is absolutely a simplicity in combat where no- nothing else matters. Right.

• 2:09:59Jocko Willink?

  "Now I was back to be the platoon commander for our mortuary affairs detachment in TQ."

• 2:10:11Jocko Willink?

  "You check in and here we go. This is you kind of getting your first, uh, visual on what you guys are going to be doing. The double doors were held open and suddenly it became a very sobering moment to watch the four Marines carrying a litter with a large, black, vinyl bag on top. There was no mistaking what it was. All of us were here for the explicit purpose of taking care of those who were inside of them the best way we possibly could. Not a whisper was uttered, not a sound was made before the remains were lowered to the litter stands and the processing team was ready to begin their work. We stood out of their way, paying particular attention to the reactions of our Marines, shadowing their team to see if they could stomach this kind of work. This was the second day of our changeover.

• 2:10:56Jocko Willink?

  We were just there to observe their Marines and ensure that our Marines were asking all the pertinent questions to assure a smooth transition for the transfer of authority. So far, they were doing just fine.

• 2:11:09Jocko Willink?

  Just fine. I noticed it immediately and after contemplation, I liked the reasoning behind the idea. Their major explained that remains were no longer called remains. Rather, they called them angels."

• 2:11:25Jocko Willink?

  That simple change in the lingo encompassed how we felt about the fallen, and altered how others outside our tight circle viewed them as well. Now, the official reporting and radio traffic had changed, and instead of calling out that we had KIA's inbound over the radio, it was changed to angel flights, or three inbound angels on the next helo. It was respectful to those who lost their lives, and those units who lost that member of their team. And I think that it truly helped those of us who did this kind of work to cope with the after-effects.

• 2:12:13Jocko Willink?

  A US Army Staff Sergeant stood in the back of our small crowd of staff and officers, kept to himself and watched the Marines on the processing room floor work. It was easy to see that the realization had not fully settled in yet. And through his glassy expression of exhaustion, he thanked us for taking care of his major, to which we replied, "We are so very sorry for your loss." They had both belonged to the same US Army Reserve Unit in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and had both been out here, out there for a few months shy of a year. They both were out together on the desert roads this morning, inspecting the many IED craters for repairs, trying to earn the trust of the Iraqi people and deny al-Qaeda insurgents places to hide their bombs.

• 2:12:59Jocko Willink?

  Everyone in their unit knew that their job in Iraq was extremely dangerous, but they still did it without complaint. Just like the hundreds of times before, they'd walked up to the crater to inspect it for repair before they could commit any of their vehicles, and this morning, all seemed normal. But within a clap of thunder, he watched his major disappear into a cloud of dust and sand. Now, at the end of a long and terrible day, he was tasked with escorting the remains of his brother-in-law home to his sister's family, who, at this moment, didn't know what had happened yet.

• 2:13:39Jocko Willink?

  We all felt terribly sorry for their loss and sacrifice.

• 2:13:45Jocko Willink?

  It was time for us to pay our respects to a fallen brother. We all gathered around the angels, flag draped, transfer case, both units and the staff sergeant. The chaplain stood at the field of blue and white stars and begin with the Bible verse, John 15:13. "There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends." It is within these holy words that our minds were left to wander, to try and make sense out of the terrible tragedy that lay before us. The chaplain continued, and I reflected upon the words that he chose. This major was a courageous man in service to our country,

• 2:14:26Jocko Willink?

  a man who loved our country so much that he was willing to risk death to protect it. This morning, his dedication had been realized by giving his life for those he loved.

• 2:14:46Jocko Willink?

  And that's, what, 24 or 48 hours after you guys get on the ground?

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 2:14:52Jocko Willink?

  And this is 2005, August, summertime, 2005.

• 2:14:59Speaker 01

  It was, uh, yeah, right outside of Ramadi, it was really, really nasty area. Little did I know when I got assigned to that place that that was the busiest area. And, uh, yeah, that was just one among many, many stories that was like that almost every day.

• 2:15:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, you were in the reserves and here you are, you'd gone on three deployments, you'd already been wounded. The, it was the 228 Iron Soldiers out of Pennsylvania, that was the brigade that was there in their National Guard unit. And, and, you know, they suffered massive casualties because they were in Ramadi when I arrived there. And they were just doing incredible, incredible job taking the fight to the enemy. And they were, you know, they, they paid the price.

• 2:15:53Jocko Willink?

  You say this, "We were only three days deep into this deployment and I already could see the contrast between this deployment and OIF 1. This time around, we were to learn much more about the angels than what was comfortable. Each was to have his or her own distinct story explained by the personal effects that he or she carried. The brother in arms, the brothers in arms who wept for them as they dropped them off, and the stories of valor in which the angel met his fate. It was within these events that the paradox of Mortuary affairs marine in theater rests. Do we keep the angel disassociated as much as possible to minimize the after-effects of such work? Or do we embrace the angel's

• 2:16:35Jocko Willink?

  stories, honoring their sacrifice, and revealing our true feelings of empathy to those unit members present? No matter which path we were to take, it wasn't hard to see that this deployment was going to be an extremely long and difficult one. With how dangerous Alonbar Province was, it looked as if we were going to be extremely busy for this deployment." You guys take over, you have a conversation with your gunny, gunny ski, you said, "Did you happen to see all those wrinkles and creases on the angels' flags from a couple

• 2:17:18Jocko Willink?

  weeks back?" He nodded his head, "Yeah, well, I may mean to change that." So you noticed that the flags that were being put on the caskets were...

• 2:17:27Speaker 01

  They were taking them straight out of a cardboard box and placing them on to the transfer cases and tied a white cord around it. And it was not anybody's fault, it was just the way it's always been done. And I...

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  When I was with 34, I had found out that a bunch of guys that I had met had gotten killed in Fallujah. One in particular was First Lieutenant Oscar Jimenez. And I didn't really know him, besides him chewing me out once. I had no idea he was a lieutenant. He was walking around without his blouse on, and we got called to a meeting. And I was trying to get in, he was trying to get out. He told me to gangway, and I'm like, "Who the hell are you?" And I found out who he was. But when I was on convalescent leave, the day I left to come back to 29 Palms, I noticed

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  that the USA Today had a mural of everybody who got killed. And his picture was pretty much dead center on that. And I noticed a lot of faces of the people I knew, and particularly it was him, because he was wearing his dress blues in that picture. And it was a pretty much a big kick to the stomach to know so many people that was on that page. So, going forward, now I was in charge of the very building that their remains went through. And I had a connection to that sacrifice, because I knew several guys that went through. And it kind of hurt to think that if that is the flag that gets handed to the families,

• 2:19:10Speaker 01

  it needs to be treated with the utmost respect. It needs to be treated as something that is befitting of a hero, because they sacrificed their lives for us, the rest of us. Not only that sacrifice, but I wanted to honor the sacrifice that their families were soon to make. Because it's them that continue to live without that family member, you know? These flags is not just another piece of cloth. It's something that is handed down from generation to generation to generation. It's something that people put up on their mantles.

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  It needs to be treated with the utmost respect. So... After I saw what had happened, you know, with, with that US Army Major, I started going down to the PX and I bought one can of starch and I bought their only iron and only ironing board. You're not supposed to use starch in combat, you know. So, you know, we was trying to look good for the enemy. So, I took it back. Next day, there's two cans. Next day, there's four cans, you know, and it's kept on doubling up. And one day, the lady said, "Hey, what are you doing with all the starch you're hitting here at the same time, almost every day?" I said, "Ma'am, I'm ironing and starching every American flag before we put them on the transfer cases."

• 2:20:40Speaker 01

  We even came up with our own fold, because before, the flag was in danger of touching the ground. And I wanted to treat them with the utmost respect, so we tied the white cord first, tucked it in on the sides, and then it was out of the way for the, for the honor guard. And it stood, it stayed, and eventually got adopted by all the branches.

• 2:21:06Jocko Willink?

  That became, that became the

• 2:21:08Speaker 01

  The standard.

• 2:21:08Jocko Willink?

  The standard operating procedure.

• 2:21:12Speaker 01

  We would iron it so much that when you walked around it, it would gleam in the light. And so, back in 2009, I'm back in Ohio, and I get a phone call from Staff Sergeant Kinley. And he's there in DC and he goes, "Hey, boss, Brigadier General so-and-so was there at Ramstein, and he's watching a ramp ceremony, and him and his entourage, and the first one comes off and it's done the old style. The second one comes off and it's done the old style. And he goes, "The third one comes off and it's done your style." And he goes, "Damn it, I know Marines did that. I'm gonna find out who, and I'm gonna find out, and let them know, let them know what it means to me and my entourage."

• 2:21:56Speaker 01

  So, he called up Chief Warfar, Itis, in DC, and she said, "Yes, sir, we call it the Bussler method. Bussler started that back in 2005. We adopted it. We now made it that everybody that we In the Marines' handle, we do it this way. He goes, "From now on, until the end of the Marine Corps, when the country no longer needs a Marine Corps, we are gonna do it this way. Anybody gets killed in combat, or dies overseas, they're gonna come home this way." So it was adopted. First, it was the Army, then the Navy, and now the Air Force. So if you watch the guys getting unloaded from Benghazi, that's my ceremony, that's my flag. The guys have ramp ceremonies nowadays. It's done that way.

• 2:22:40Speaker 01

  The guys coming home from North Korea, being repatriated from Tarawa, it's done that way. So it was my little fifteen minutes of fame, you know, my little, you know, my little thing that I did. I never got a "Attaboy" at it or anything like, but I didn't do it for that. I did it because that needed to be done. It needed to be... These guys needed to be honored the best way we could bestow upon them because they're heroes. If you see sacrifice every day, as we did, the ultimate sacrifice every day, and it really sticks with you.

• 2:23:25Speaker 01

  And so, I'm glad that I had my little hand at that, that now this will live on with those guys.

• 2:23:39Jocko Willink?

  So, as you, you know, mentioned earlier, talking about going out and setting up security and recovering from on-scene, this is not a job where you're always in a safe and secure area to do, to conduct your procedures. At one point, you get called out to Ramadi to help recover remains from a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. And...

• 2:24:11Jocko Willink?

  You arrive on scene there, and I'm gonna go to the book. On scene, there lay a sickening black smudge of charred butchery of a burned-out M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It stole my breath, it broke my heart, and my soul earned another shade of hate to know that there were five men trapped in there when it was blown up by an IED inside the city. Out of those five, there were still three soldiers unaccounted for, buried among that twisted, burned mess of steel and wire. This was the reason why we were flown out here to Camp Ramadi, to recover the remains of these three fallen heroes and return them home with honor. The Bradley was placed upon a low, flatbed trailer

• 2:24:53Jocko Willink?

  and transported there to the Pennsylvania National Guard's compound.

• 2:25:04Jocko Willink?

  And again, you do a really good job detailing how this unfolded. But to get into some of it, you say there is a process to such complicated manners and approach to methodically separate the angels from ruin and to make sense out of such a horrific carnage. One section, one bucket, and one shovelful of debris at a time. This was painstaking work requiring us to dig by hand, sort through the debris with a homemade sifter, and capture and document each tiny piece of human remains or personal effects found. It was going to take a little time, the right tools, and a whole bunch of luck to find the right pieces of these guys that still had enough DNA material that was usable to positively identify them. Our approach had to be rooted in science,

• 2:25:49Jocko Willink?

  and we had to treat this as a crime scene because, in the end, it was. Our job was to capture every article of personal effects and every particle of human tissue that was humanly possible. We were to create a topographical map of the recovery site to document their locations inside the burned-out Bradley so that anyone who read my report, even years later, could see the exact layout of how we found it.

• 2:26:15Jocko Willink?

  The difficult thing was that there was nothing recognizable left to document. The Bradley had been literally blown apart from the floor up, and when the lightweight aluminum composite armor melted in on top of itself.

• 2:26:32Jocko Willink?

  You described that here a little bit fueled by magmatic temperatures, the fire melted metal like wax in the interior thousands of metal teardrop shaped pools lined the wreckage their sharp pointed ends greeted us like hungry daggers the Bradley fighting vehicles mortal wound a blast opening several feet wide crossed the left side undercarriage just behind the driver's seat molten metal escaped through the wide crevasse and quickly cooled into a very thick layered puddle of shiny alloy metal beneath the Bradley springs ejected from magazines splintered metal components and mangled weapon barrels protruded from the slag as if a river of wreckage were frozen in time brass casings from a multitude of

• 2:27:16Jocko Willink?

  calibers littered the floor covering the back of the troop compartment from a few inches to greater the ammunition boxes or magazines that once held them had burst open and were punctured from the inside out fire ravaged junction boxes had been ripped from their homes and now lay in the tangle their conduit and wires hanging limp and frayed the smell was an overpowering bouquet of burned electronics mixed with a slight ashy smell of an all-consuming inferno this fire was so intense that it turned everything into a light wispy dust

• 2:27:52Jocko Willink?

  in the troop compartment the thick conduit and wires that stretched throughout the scene were pulled back and cut the metal junction boxes were inspected and stacked among the refuse pile the thick blanket made of twisted debris and top grayish ash was slowly pulled back one bucket at a time only to reveal the grim story of the two warriors that were found in the rear of this Bradley these two angels were documented on the site sketch as R1 and R2

• 2:28:28Jocko Willink?

  So this, and this is, um, I talk about this many times. This vehicle graveyard that existed in Ramadi of, I, I, it was probably seventy-five to a hundred vehicles.

• 2:28:41Speaker 01

  Easy.

• 2:28:42Jocko Willink?

  And just every one of them in various states of destruction. And when you bypass that, and for whatever reason,

• 2:28:52Jocko Willink?

  they put that vehicle graveyard on the road. I mean, I guess they did it because it's the simplest place. You get back in the compound, you take a left and there's, there's the vehicle graveyard. But just kind of FYI, every time anyone rolled out the gate, the last thing they saw was that vehicle graveyard. And there's no possible way you could be sitting in a Humvee or a Bradley or an Abrams and go by that vehicle graveyard with a hundred destroyed, burned out vehicles in there and not think to yourself, okay. Could be the day.

• 2:29:28Jocko Willink?

  You guys are doing a ton of work to rip this thing apart.

• 2:29:32Speaker 01

  All by hand.

• 2:29:35Speaker 01

  With sledgehammers. We had never seen anything like this, ever. As far as I knew,

• 2:29:42Speaker 01

  nobody had ever seen anything like it before. Nobody's ever shared that with us. So we're looking at this stuff, a melted vehicle. World War II manuals, you're talking about all steel vehicles. If it blows up, it's in pieces. But this is melted, totally casing things, people, you know? And we literally were swinging and breaking things with a sledgehammer and they made, they fabricated tools for us to, to, to go out there and, and try to pry the layers apart. And we literally took what was left and made them into, you know, separated them into piles. And there had to have been millions of pieces, millions of pieces that we went through.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  Nobody ever prepared us for that.

• 2:30:31Jocko Willink?

  And it's taking you days.

• 2:30:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:30:34Jocko Willink?

  And this hard labor, prying this thing apart. And then you you go to this point here, slowly the layers of melted metal and debris gave way and revealed its secrets. The heavily damaged remains of one US Army soldier. Inside the tight confines of where the turret turret would normally have been was a charred torso lying on his back, semi embedded into the once viscous metal floor. His right shoulder and right upper arm reached out toward the hole where we were able to recover his forearm up to the elbow the prior day. Just inches above the torso, buried deep in the emagamation, was the back half of a human skull minus any fragments or facial or lower mandible bones.

• 2:31:16Jocko Willink?

  Only the interior fossa down to the posterior cranial fossa were present. Just a few inches away from that, also deeply buried were the remnants of one burned Kevlar helmet. The atmosphere was electric, but then quickly turned into a somber tone. We had found R3.

• 2:31:42Jocko Willink?

  So this was a just kind of a different kind of mission for you guys because you it was your was this your first time picking apart a scene like that other than the helicopter?

• 2:31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, this we had never seen anything else like it before. Um, most of the recoveries um are are going to be were similar situations, but most of the remains that we would handle were coming to us. Um, only if the unit was engaged and couldn't break away or the scene was too catastrophic, um, they would send us out. And this was a scene that they had no idea how to determine what was what. And that's and I was expecting, okay, well, why can't you guys recover? You know, when you're telling us over the phone. And then when we showed up, it was you totally understood from what a gigantic armored personnel

• 2:32:37Speaker 01

  carrier to all of a sudden being, you know, maybe chest high. Only thing that is is as high as its its tracks. Everything else was gone.

• 2:32:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, you guys, and there was the gunner and the driver, or the gunner and the VC had been thrown from the vehicle and recovered.

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  Right, it was the driver and, and the VC, and then he had two guys in the back. We were still looking, the driver, the VC, two guys in the back, we're still looking for the gunner. And we had no idea, because when we first got the word that we were looking for three, we're looking for three remains. So we fly out there, we find three remains. What you're looking for, and which counts you as an angel, is not your head or your arms, it's your torso. So, we find the remnants of three torsos.

• 2:33:37Speaker 01

  And we go back, and two weeks later, we get a phone call that none of the DNA is matching up to their gunner. And we're like, that's impossible. Out of all those millions of remains, pieces, fragments, there's nothing coming back for your gunner? So we go out there again, and there's, look again, break it apart further, nothing. And we go out there, maybe a total of four, five times. And five weeks later, they ended up finding a person.

• 2:34:17Speaker 01

  And at the very end of this long mystery, it turned out that what we thought was our three was actually a part of a guy that recovered on the scene when the initial explosion. They said that his front half blew up, but his back half fell back in, and got encased in metal. So we were both right, that they treated the one out there as a torso, as an angel, and we did too. And what had happened to the gunner was, the ID breached right behind where he sat,

• 2:34:59Speaker 01

  and when the vehicle melted, it carried the bones out underneath the vehicle, and it got encased under 12 inches of slag metal underneath the vehicle. And it's the first time we've ever, ever seen anything like that. You know, we hit that piece.

• 2:35:19Speaker 01

  Sledgehammers trying to break it and stuff. Um, and it wouldn't come apart, but you know, all with logic looking square in the face that said, hey, we found three, we were breaking, you know, we can't find any more remains. And so what had happened was they decided that they were going to send this, uh, the rest of this vehicle back to the States and look through it by a mass spectrometer and try to find any, any voids. And when they were lifting it up, the bottom piece, uh, that, all the runoff, when they lifted that up, it broke in pieces and all the bones were falling out.

• 2:35:58Speaker 01

  But I remember, um, you know, right before I was called the end of the initial recovery and I didn't feel right about it. Um, and I kept on feeling like I needed to be drawn to this blast hole. Even though logically they looked for three, I found three, that kind of thing, but I felt like it wasn't finished. And after the five weeks of recovery, you know, I, I think back at maybe it was his spirit letting me know that here, this is where I am. Don't quit, um, don't quit, you know, now.

• 2:36:37Speaker 01

  But, um, I know it's not my fault or anything, but I still blame myself, uh, you know, for putting his family through, you know, five weeks of hell. Just, just because, you know, I should have listened to my, my gut feeling. But, you know, that's, there's things that we take away from it, but.

• 2:37:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know, I, I didn't go into too much detail, but he actually got reported as missing in action at some point.

• 2:37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:10Jocko Willink?

  Which was like the second missing in action.

• 2:37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:13Jocko Willink?

  So it was a, like you said, it's a nightmare.

• 2:37:15Speaker 01

  It is a nightmare being on my end. Um, and I'm thinking all of the things that could have happened. Like, um, did his remains get ejected? Or were you waiting for a, a video to show up with a captured set of remains? Were they going to booby trap his remains and for us to go out there and find them? And try to get more of us? Are they going to ransom it? Um, you know, what are they going to do? And, and this, all these different scenarios are popping up. And, and all of them were viable.

• 2:37:52Speaker 01

  But we had no idea. It's like he just disappeared. You know, nobody ever thought that a person could literally melt through a vehicle. And what we were looking at it.

• 2:38:06Speaker 01

  Crazy, crazy.

• 2:38:09Jocko Willink?

  You guys, and again, this just kind of goes to the nature of the war that was happening in Alomar Province and in Ramadi. You guys go back to Ramadi again to get another.

• 2:38:23Jocko Willink?

  Blown up Bradley. And you say here, and this one, you actually go on scene, right?

• 2:38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:31Jocko Willink?

  You say here, "Fuel laden earth and oily ash made dark smudges upon my uniform as the distinct pungent smell of the still smoldering M2A2 Bradley fighting vehicle lingered heavy in the air. Its complexities of varying distinctive stenches ranged from burned wires, burned diesel fuel, burned ammunition, and the heavy greasy smell of burned people.

• 2:38:59Jocko Willink?

  My team and I had been now been up for nearly 30 hours straight and I was miles beyond exhaustion from the nearly continuous pumping of adrenaline through my system." And this is because you're on scene, you're in, you're in the field in Ramadi.

• 2:39:12Speaker 01

  What had happened was is that we've, we got word that an incident happened. So they were playing this, all right, we're gonna bring it, the vehicle back to, to TQ. We're not. You know, they kept on going back and forth and, and so my team is ready to do a, you know, for, just like how we did in Ramadi, the other one. Uh, for them to bring the vehicle to us on a low boy and for us to work. So we were up the whole night prior, working on other remains. And, you know, getting those guys going home. Then all of a sudden, we're standing a team up. We're gonna go out. And then we're like, okay, we are going out after many, many hours of this back and forth. So we were exhausted, you know, 30 plus hours of being awake.

• 2:39:53Speaker 01

  And we show up to the scene and we show up to this, you know, another incident that claimed seven.

• 2:39:59Jocko Willink?

  Why did they send you guys into the field to do the recovery?

• 2:40:03Speaker 01

  Because.

• 2:40:03Jocko Willink?

  Instead of putting it on, like having an eighty-eight bring it back?

• 2:40:06Speaker 01

  They tried, they were putting it on an eighty-eight, but they had seven guys and the scene was too catastrophic. They got hit right next to a, um, a big open field that had, uh, like wheat or something growing on it. So they were afraid that remains were out there or they didn't know if remains were under it. And plus when they have that much fire in this vehicle and the tail missiles are going off in the back of it and it's melting, that regular, you know, people can't tell what is what. So what they think is a piece of plastic silicon could actually be bone. And so they wanted people who were experienced to know what, what is what? And be able to capture everything that we could.

• 2:40:50Speaker 01

  And, uh, but that scene was literally catastrophic. It was the biggest IED crater I've ever seen.

• 2:41:00Jocko Willink?

  You say here, "I was shaking from the cold, shaking from the declining adrenaline, shaking from the overconsumption of coffee, and shaking from the terrible fear of my impending death. My stomach turned a nervous caffeine-laden reflux up my digestive tract that only pride kept down. I had taken too many chances in my tours over here. I had overplayed too many hands and this was my last of nine lives. This was Ramadi, the devil's playground. Luck has a shelf life and mine was set to expire. My only two hopes were that when the end came, it would come fast and my body would be viewable so my family at home could have the luxury of closure.

• 2:41:41Jocko Willink?

  Each breath I took felt borrowed and every check of my watch brought disbelief that we had lived a few more minutes longer."

• 2:41:56Jocko Willink?

  You get a little briefing from the Army Captain. "We came from that direction and we were heading in that direction toward those buildings early last night," the US Army Captain Vehicle Commander of the Bradley that transported us here said, gesturing with a knife in hand. "This was a joint US Iraqi Security Force patrol, so there were five Americans and two ISFs in there. The Vehicle Commander was ejected when it happened, so we already have him recovered. He was a good man. What a fucking shame." He pointed down the road that led off into the indistinguishable unknown of the delicate mist. "Be careful. The security team walked in that area a couple hours ago and the insurgents tried to get them by blowing up another big IED down that way. Those guys got lucky and nobody got hurt.

• 2:42:40Jocko Willink?

  So don't have any of your guys go down there and stay off the sides of the road. We don't know what's in that area." "The IED crater was the biggest I had ever seen taking up the entire road. And it was just as deep as it was wide. The Bradley had suffered such a catastrophic blow that it was in several pieces. The heavy diesel engine was ejected, its turret now lying forty yards away and upside down. And there was a hole several feet wide in the center of the chassis. The vehicle was held together only by half of the frame." The EOD professionals slowly yet cautiously worked their way towards the smoldering mechanical carcass, deliberately picking up the unexploded rounds along the way.

• 2:43:22Jocko Willink?

  The rounds were meticulously collected and set into a pile a short distance in front of the Bradley. My S and R team readied the body bags as I began to wonder if we'd brought enough of them for all the pieces of these poor guys.

• 2:43:35Speaker 01

  The vehicle was actually going this way and the IED went off and it ended up going that way. It was pointed in the total opposite direction of the way it was traveling. The turret was popped off of it and it was open. I mean, literally, you can walk in from one end to the other end with your arms straight out and not touch a thing. It was totally wide open, just like the other one was. And, you know, and there was remains, you know, pretty much everywhere. It was just a bad scene.

• 2:44:10Jocko Willink?

  It might have taken maybe thirty minutes before EOD was done. We had to start counting the remains so that we had all seven accounted for. Sergeant Kinley, Corporal Thomas, and I began to search the incident site while each of us counted out loud cautiously crawling into the Bradley, barely able to distinguish human remains from the charred remains of the tangled mess of burned wires and jagged metal. The vehicle commander is already recovered, so that makes one. There's the driver, he makes two. A few seconds went by, there's three, four, and five. A few more moments went by, and six, I think. Yeah, that makes six. We walked around looking for number seven and he was nowhere to be found.

• 2:44:54Jocko Willink?

  Again, you, I'm fast forwarding a bit. You guys continue to search and then finally, I think I see a heel of a boot under those wires there. "Hey Kinley, come here and check it out, can you see what I'm pointing at?" I said. He leaned over and pulled some wires out of the way. Bingo, I think we've got him. We found number seven. "Hey Thomas, help me out here." Shit, he's stuck. Twenty minutes passed slowly, twenty long minutes of watching the exhausted ebbs and flows of tattered emotions of the faces of those present, trapped in a riptide of fatigue, uncertainty, and disgust. I knew him. He was my friend. The M88 tank wrecker operator confided in me as the boom of the colossal machine easily

• 2:45:37Jocko Willink?

  lifted the turd into the air, freeing the trapped angel. My guys quickly freed him from the wires and began to carry him away. He didn't deserve to die this way. This is fucking terrible.

• 2:45:51Jocko Willink?

  I took my eyes off the scene and looked at him.

• 2:45:55Jocko Willink?

  The tank wrecker operator tears, had tears streaming down his face and he looked over to me and shook my hand.

• 2:46:04Jocko Willink?

  "Thank you. Thank you for everything that you and you guys, you and your guys are doing to bring him home. Really, thank you for everything you're doing for all of these guys. You guys come all the way out here and risk your lives to get my buddies out. I cannot thank you enough for doing this, it really means a lot."

• 2:46:28Jocko Willink?

  And then kaboom.

• 2:46:32Jocko Willink?

  The ground shook, my heart stopped, the ripples of concussive shockwave went through my innards uncomfortably tickling my stomach and my anxiety shot through the roof. Everyone got down and took cover behind anything that could serve as protection. The tank wrecker operator still kept walking on the open road back towards the record, not at all influenced by the explosion, his mind was struck by grief.

• 2:46:55Jocko Willink?

  The blast might as well have been a cool breeze. And he looked as if he didn't care.

• 2:47:04Jocko Willink?

  There was another IED that blew up on the tail end of the perimeter. No one got hurt, just a little shaken.

• 2:47:12Jocko Willink?

  No one could relax, but how could we? Every inch of this road could be wired to blow.

• 2:47:31Jocko Willink?

  So you guys wrap up that. You guys finally have everyone and now, well, there's a situation that unfolds. Here's the problem staff sergeant, "We only brought enough vehicles to transport my security team out of here. We were already out here at the scene last night and nobody at higher headquarters told us that they were going to fly you guys all the way out here to join us. Hell, we didn't even know that you guys, what, that you guys were even going to be here until you showed up at Camp Corregidor. We just do not have enough room to take the remains and all of you back to base. We need to figure out a way to do that and we can't make two trips."

• 2:48:07Jocko Willink?

  So basically, you're all out there, you got the remains now, and there's not enough room in the vehicles to get everyone in the vehicles back to Camp Corregidor, right? And eventually you guys come up with a plan.

• 2:48:24Speaker 01

  They wanted to put the remains on top of the vehicles. And I shot that down. And I wasn't gonna give the satisfaction to the bad guys to let them use that as a recruiting tool. That, you know, they just messed up these guys and I didn't want them to know how bad they hurt these guys. So I said, "No, no, we're not doing it. You know, we'll find another way." So, we chose another way.

• 2:48:50Jocko Willink?

  And that "another way"? Well, you explain it to your guys. There is no other choice, brother. Kinley and I are going to ride in this Bradley here. We're just gonna have to stack all the body bags and gear on top of us. This here is the shit that nightmares are made of. And I would never ask you guys to do anything that I wouldn't do myself. The team just looked at me with wide eyes, standing there and looking perplexed for a second. It was a cardinal rule to never stack the remains and always treat the fallen with the utmost respect, but the reality of the situation demanded that we do it this way. There clearly wasn't any other choice in the matter. We had to get them and us home. Kinley and I climbed in. Come on, let's start getting these guys in here and get this shit over with. The angels were stacked on top of us from floor to ceiling.

• 2:49:35Jocko Willink?

  And their uncomfortable weight crushed my legs, causing my feet to fall asleep. Little rips had formed in the corners of the black vinyl body bags from the difficulty of maneuvering inside the first and now the second Bradley, allowing some of the viscosity to escape. We were ready to go. And I couldn't wait to get out of here.

• 2:50:05Jocko Willink?

  As you guys are driving back, you describe this. We passed a couple of M1 Abrams tanks at an intersection. They were blocking traffic for us. The entire way back to Combat Outpost Corregidor was guarded by one of the most beautiful sights that I'd ever seen. A US Army platoon of heavy armor taking over this side of the city and sharing our way home.

• 2:50:26Jocko Willink?

  Holy shit, we just might make it. I looked over at Sergeant Kinley to tell him, but he was passed out sleeping. I just shook my head in disbelief. Yeah, there's some times that when, when there was a wounded guy or whatever, the, well, I know the 228 would do it and I know that the, the Ready First Brigade, they would do the same thing. Like they would lock whatever section of the city down to ensure safety. I mean, you can only do it for so long, but that's what they do when there was something like this going on.

• 2:50:56Speaker 01

  It was a very welcome sight to see because we had lost three Bradleys in three weeks and, and, you know, and now we're taking care of those, those guys and getting them home. And the whole time I'm thinking, we're getting get lit up too. And, uh, yeah, when we saw, I could look at a little periscope thing, you know, the bulletproof glass and see, oh, wow, they're locking the city down. That's awesome. You know, from being all the way to, you know, on, on, on the bottom to all of a sudden like, wow, we just might make it. We just might not have to be blowing up inside this vehicle.

• 2:51:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, uh, people might think that you have a feeling of safety and security inside of a tank or Bradley. I had never felt secure inside of a Bradley.

• 2:51:45Speaker 01

  You're just a big target.

• 2:51:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And those, you know, and I very seldom would ride in a Bradley, but the Army soldiers were riding in there every single day.

• 2:51:53Speaker 01

  I gotta hand it to those guys.

• 2:51:54Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, every single time they rolled out, they're rolling past that vehicle graveyard.

• 2:51:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:59Jocko Willink?

  You, you, you know, you're not invincible.

• 2:52:03Jocko Willink?

  So I'm going to jump forward a bit here and, and again, you give great detail. I think you called it a mystery a second ago of, of unrattling that first or unraveling that first Bradley, the missing guy, the MIA, and, and you do a great job of going into those details. It's, it's a powerful story.

• 2:52:24Jocko Willink?

  That you cover.

• 2:52:26Speaker 01

  I wanted, I knew I was, maybe their family members, or the members of that unit, would pick this up and would read it. And I wanted to know, let them to know that what, how we saw it from our end, that we weren't trying to not do our jobs, that we were doing everything humanly possible to get him home. And we just were exhausted, all of our means to do it. We had no idea. Until that very last day, then, five weeks later, we found him.

• 2:53:03Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna fast forward a bit.

• 2:53:07Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. "The door swung open and the Major promptly stood before us. He'd clearly been upset about something and the stress showed in his eyes and his tense stance. Everyone sit down. He was folding his hands into one another and his eyes never made contact with any of us. I've just gotten some bad news."

• 2:53:27Jocko Willink?

  My mind immediately drew up a mental checklist. I had to figure out exactly what equipment and personnel we needed if we had to go on another recovery mission outside the wire. But this really had to have been something truly special. I'd never seen the Major so visibly shaken.

• 2:53:42Jocko Willink?

  "Today, this morning, Master Sergeant Angus got killed."

• 2:53:50Jocko Willink?

  "What?" I mumbled under my breath. "He was out on a mission," he said, as he continued looking at the ground. "And they set up a trap for him and his EOD team."

• 2:54:04Jocko Willink?

  My worst nightmare had come true. I was about to process a friend, and I was ill-prepared. In the hundreds of times that I had rehearsed in my mind, I had never thought that it would come to this, but it did.

• 2:54:20Jocko Willink?

  Just a day or two before, Master Sergeant Angus' whole EOD unit was here to celebrate Thanksgiving with us. And he had stood where Gatewood was now standing, chatting with me about trading some of my Motown music from my computer.

• 2:54:36Jocko Willink?

  Now the very thought of him being dead seemed surreal.

• 2:54:44Jocko Willink?

  Sergeant Clinton Kinley and Sergeant Shawn Johnson show up and I told them what to expect as per the information that I had at hand. Sergeant Kinley prepared the S and R packs and ensured that the recovery team member and weapon systems were ready to go at a moment's notice. Sergeant Johnson readied the processing room floor and assigned a couple Marines to iron starch and IP the flag in preparations for Angus's transfer case.

• 2:55:08Jocko Willink?

  I called the main armory to set aside an appropriate amount of ammunition required for a recovery team heading into harm's way and then I prepared myself for whichever scenario came first.

• 2:55:21Jocko Willink?

  Seconds turned into minutes, minutes into hours and each clock movement thundered as if it was a heavy wooden door being slammed in a vast chamber.

• 2:55:33Jocko Willink?

  The Major informed us that the EOD team had recovered his remains and was en route to our mortuary affairs collection point.

• 2:55:45Jocko Willink?

  He advised us to prepare ourselves, this one was going to be especially messy.

• 2:55:53Jocko Willink?

  I went back up to my loft area which overlooked the processing room floor, changed into my camis and sat down at the computer. I still had work to do, reports to write, I didn't want to seem impacted by this. I wanted to be the pillar of strength for the others to look upon and be encouraged for the situation ahead. But I'm sure that my false facade was easily crumbling in front of the onlookers as I sat high in the loft for everyone to see.

• 2:56:22Jocko Willink?

  I was tired of this shit. I took his death personally and the knowledge just burned me up from within.

• 2:56:31Jocko Willink?

  I just stared blankly at the computer screen, the world continued to spin and darkness crept into TQ.

• 2:56:52Jocko Willink?

  The EOD team arrives and by teams of two, the MA Marines quickly grabbed each end of the body bags, placed them onto litters and hurriedly moved his remains into the processing room floor. I helped grab the last bag out of the Humvee and noticed that it sloshed around the bottom of the compartment, which held about two inches of blood.

• 2:57:17Jocko Willink?

  The bag was very heavy and sagged in the middle. Jagged bones, sharpened by the blast, protruded through the bottom and a trail of blood was left in the dusty driveway. My heart sank.

• 2:57:31Jocko Willink?

  We placed him onto the litter stands, which each had a thick mound of sawdust below to catch any bodily fluids, and locked the doors behind us, cutting off his unit members and gathering onlookers.

• 2:57:46Jocko Willink?

  They did not need to see what we had to see every day.

• 2:57:51Jocko Willink?

  It was our burden to bear, not theirs.

• 2:58:03Jocko Willink?

  So your team gets started with the processing.

• 2:58:09Jocko Willink?

  And you go in to check in with the Major. You knock on the door and he says, "Come in, Bussler."

• 2:58:16Jocko Willink?

  I opened his door and entered.

• 2:58:20Jocko Willink?

  The air changed from the cool openness to a sweat-laden cordite smell. A very familiar female EOD Sergeant, still wearing her ballistics vest and clearly in shock from the sudden and devastating loss, was sitting in the chair against the wall with her shoulders hung and a heavy brow.

• 2:58:38Jocko Willink?

  The Major sat in front of her, leaning over with elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together, trying awkwardly to console her.

• 2:58:50Jocko Willink?

  But his attempts were futile. I had known her as the Marine martial arts instructor who led all the martial arts classes for the EOD team and for the 372nd helicopter squadron. Often, they had invited our unit to train, and those of us who accepted found that she was a true professional and confident leader of Marines. She was pure entertainment to watch in martial arts class because of her thin, short frame, yet she took warriors many times her size and introduced such searing pain that was simply best described as shutting off all brain function or a neural override. But here she was, wearing the expression of absolute horror beyond any that I'd ever seen before.

• 2:59:36Jocko Willink?

  The major and I had to get a statement of recognition from her to aid in the tentative identification of the master sergeant. And doing this made me feel beyond terrible.

• 2:59:50Jocko Willink?

  But she had to tell us the story of what had happened out there.

• 2:59:56Jocko Willink?

  Between sobs, she began to relive it all over again, her eyes flickering as if she were watching a movie that only she could see.

• 3:00:07Jocko Willink?

  Then she began speaking.

• 3:00:11Jocko Willink?

  "We were out there and found the first IED. It looked like a trap from the beginning. They blew up the robot. There was an abandoned car, and the master sergeant volunteered to check it out.

• 3:00:25Jocko Willink?

  He walked over to where I couldn't see."

• 3:00:30Jocko Willink?

  She started crying, which subsided into a whimper.

• 3:00:37Jocko Willink?

  She continued, "He walked right up, and..."

• 3:00:45Jocko Willink?

  And...

• 3:00:49Jocko Willink?

  "It's okay Sergeant." "What happened?" I asked. "That's..."

• 3:00:54Jocko Willink?

  "That's when, oh god." She started uncontrollably sobbing for a minute. Then, through her tears, she conjured up enough strength to continue. They called Corman up, "Corman up." And then Doc ran all the way over there from the backside of the perimeter. He ran up thinking that he could save his life. That he was hurt, that he was still alive. We all did. We didn't know how bad it was. We ran up asking, "Where is he? Where is he?" They just pointed at all the pieces on the ground.

• 3:01:28Jocko Willink?

  She fell back into shock.

• 3:01:31Jocko Willink?

  And that was all we could get.

• 3:01:34Jocko Willink?

  But that was enough information for the statement. And then after a few minutes, when she asked to leave, she did by the front doors, by the duty hut.

• 3:01:46Jocko Willink?

  The Major and I walked out to the processing floor and witnessed something that to this day I would never forget. Something that has haunted and will always haunt me to the end of my days. Black vinyl bags of nothing but a friend's body parts.

• 3:02:03Jocko Willink?

  Burnt, torn bits of camouflage clothing and destroyed gear.

• 3:02:10Jocko Willink?

  Out of all the deaths that I had been surrounded by in all my time over here and in all my tours,

• 3:02:16Jocko Willink?

  never had I seen anyone in such shape, so catastrophically shattered.

• 3:02:23Jocko Willink?

  I really think that in that long stare across the floor, which took maybe only a minute or two, I instantly felt myself age.

• 3:02:32Jocko Willink?

  In a flash, I felt as if all my youth and vigor for life had been sapped from me by one horrific scene.

• 3:02:41Jocko Willink?

  In those 120 seconds, I knew that I never wanted to devote myself to such ugly work ever again. In those 120 seconds, I knew that I was sick of death in all of its forms.

• 3:02:56Jocko Willink?

  And in those 120 seconds, I knew I would never, ever be the same.

• 3:03:28Jocko Willink?

  And you know, war doesn't stop.

• 3:03:40Jocko Willink?

  And four days after Master Sergeant Angus died.

• 3:03:54Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, "The rear door slammed as they entered, interrupting the unusual quiet and gaining the attention of all of us who called the CP home." Just as they did over 100 times, the team on duty carried in one litter with a large, zipped up, black body bag on top, and then gently lowered him onto the litter stands.

• 3:04:23Jocko Willink?

  The processing was moving along. I checked the penmanship, line by line, to see if it was all legible, if everything was spelled correctly, and if they had used capital lettering for each entry as the regs mandated.

• 3:04:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay, his name was William D. Richardson.

• 3:04:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay, he was a Marine Staff Sergeant. Okay.

• 3:04:48Jocko Willink?

  Wait a minute. What? Oh my God. Did you see what unit he was from?

• 3:04:56Jocko Willink?

  A sense of dismay hit me.

• 3:04:59Jocko Willink?

  What's up, boss? Something wrong?

• 3:05:04Speaker 01

  Gunny Gatewood asked, leaning over my shoulder to see the paperwork that I still had in my hands. I handed him the paperwork. "This is not good, Gunny. This is Sergeant Kinley's buddy, who he was hanging out with just yesterday. He was in charge on the security detail from the S and R a couple of days ago."

• 3:05:34Jocko Willink?

  In the book, describe, you know, how you kind of connect the dots. And then you realize that Kinley's not there at this time and somebody's got to go tell Kinley what had happened.

• 3:05:54Speaker 01

  He was up the whole night before with Richardson going through their after-action reports. And they were catching up on old days, you know? It was his old platoon sergeant. And, uh, yeah, Kinley knew Doug's wife.

• 3:06:13Speaker 01

  You know, he knew, you know, they would spend all this whole time together and didn't even know that each other, the two of them were on the same base. And then we were already associated with the EOD guys. They were our buddies. They would come over and hang out with us. We'd go to their place.

• 3:06:31Speaker 01

  And until, you know, after Angus got killed and they hooked up and then, um, yeah, and once I realized who it was, you know, I had to, I had to be the one to tell them because if any, if any of my buddies got killed over there, I would want a friend to come and tell me and not just anybody, you know? "Hey, you know, your buddy's dead," you know? I wanted to be there for him and to be there to support him and, um, because I knew it was going to be a huge deal. Our job isn't a, an easy one.

• 3:07:13Speaker 01

  And when you realize that your buddies are there and you're being worked on, that takes it to a whole new level. Yeah.

• 3:07:30Jocko Willink?

  So you, you go and find him.

• 3:07:35Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 3:07:38Speaker 01

  He was supposed to have duty. He was supposed to be there on that team.

• 3:07:43Speaker 01

  That morning. And since he stayed up the whole night before, they just let him sleep.

• 3:07:56Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, I didn't, I didn't know why, but I could barely get the words out.

• 3:08:03Jocko Willink?

  I'm sorry, brother. I hate to be the one to tell you.

• 3:08:08Jocko Willink?

  But we have your friend, Staff Sergeant Richardson, at the CP.

• 3:08:15Jocko Willink?

  There was a Humvee accident out in town this morning. And I am so very sorry, brother.

• 3:08:23Jocko Willink?

  But he didn't make it.

• 3:08:29Jocko Willink?

  I knew that he had heard me, but it was as if his mind refused to accept it. You could see the thought roll back in his mind, and a look of emptiness slowly replaced his sleepy expression.

• 3:08:44Jocko Willink?

  He squinted as if he was concentrating on a deep thought. Then looked down to put a pinch of dip into his lips, stood up and said,

• 3:08:54Jocko Willink?

  "Okay, Staff Sergeant."

• 3:08:58Jocko Willink?

  And he walked straight out the door on the far end of the building with a blank look.

• 3:09:04Jocko Willink?

  I wasn't sure how to take his reaction. I looked at the gunny and he just shrugged. We waited several minutes to see if he would come back, but he never did.

• 3:09:13Jocko Willink?

  So we turned out the light and closed the door when we left.

• 3:09:22Jocko Willink?

  The wind still blows.

• 3:09:25Jocko Willink?

  The sand still shifts. The stars still fill the sky.

• 3:09:31Jocko Willink?

  And the world continues to spin, even though it may feel as if it has been shattered for your friend.

• 3:09:48Jocko Willink?

  You um

• 3:09:52Jocko Willink?

  You go into a great section here, you know, about Kinley. And, and what that did to him. And

• 3:10:05Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's, it's something that everybody should read and it's, it's um

• 3:10:14Jocko Willink?

  You know, he had reached his limits.

• 3:10:17Speaker 01

  For that deployment.

• 3:10:18Jocko Willink?

  For that deployment.

• 3:10:19Speaker 01

  He went back two or three other times afterwards.

• 3:10:27Jocko Willink?

  And you guys had to take care of him, which is what you did.

• 3:10:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:10:30Jocko Willink?

  You took care of him and you did it the right way. Got him the brake that he needed and this is something I talk about all the time. Is just like a car. If you, the check engine light comes on, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta get it off the highway.

• 3:10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:10:47Jocko Willink?

  You gotta get it serviced and if you get it serviced, it'll be okay. Check light engine goes off, you can take that thing back out on the road again. If you keep driving it.

• 3:10:59Jocko Willink?

  When that check engine light comes on and then the temperature gauge comes on and then the oil pressure gauge comes on and you keep driving that thing, you're going to destroy that vehicle.

• 3:11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:11:09Jocko Willink?

  And so you guys did the right thing and as you could see. He was able to get that check engine light fixed, get the refit.

• 3:11:18Jocko Willink?

  And go back and continue on. Once again, that's America.

• 3:11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a hell of a guy. He was in Fallujah, Phantom Fury. And he worked at the potato factory there where all the remains were coming in. He did all the, uh, the search recoveries going in there, uh, pulling out all the, uh, all the dead insurgents. You know, and, and this is when EOD could not, uh, you know, fulfill all their commitments and stuff. So they were out there with, uh, hairpins and putting them in grenades on these, on, you know, on their suicide vests to, to, you know, make them where they won't blow up and then. Take care of him and stuff and then you know this here's his second tour is with us.

• 3:12:08Speaker 01

  I mean, the guy is one of the best and I that's that chapter is the strongest man among us and he definitely was.

• 3:12:21Jocko Willink?

  Like I said, it's worth reading so that people can understand how all that unfolded and and what you guys did, how it affected him, how you guys took care of him. And and obviously, the the outcome is positive. I guess there's no other way to say it because I know it's not a positive situation, but the outcome is positive. You know, he was able to continue on, go on more deployments, continue to do his job.

• 3:12:57Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the book, seventeen weeks had passed since our arrival here to TQ and over that course of time, I had watched our mission here take a toll upon each and every one of us in the platoon. Our mission of processing angels had slowly bled the color out of our lives until the one day when we woke up to find the whole world gray. There was nothing to look forward to but the slow grind of our work and the end of our date, the end date of our deployment, which still seemed so far away. Our day to day reality here was filled with an ever increasing level of gruesomeness with the opening of each bag. Just when you thought you had seen it all, there would be one more unimaginable horror that would take your breath away.

• 3:13:42Jocko Willink?

  It was said that there was no tougher duty than this mission and that there was no greater honor than mortuary affairs duty. But there was nothing about this mission that would be motivating to any of us because no matter how you looked at it, at the end of the day, you are putting the broken pieces of yet another American hero into another black vinyl bag to be sent home to another family who would soon have their world shattered.

• 3:14:13Jocko Willink?

  And with each set of remains that we sent home, a little piece of ourselves went with them.

• 3:14:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, just a brutal deployment. And when it, again, jumping ahead, when it finally comes time for you guys to go home, you call this chapter "More Than Ready."

• 3:14:53Jocko Willink?

  It felt as if all of this had been a dream, that this day truly wasn't here, and I would soon wake up to find that we were still back in September, and we would have to redo this whole deployment all over again. I was miles beyond exhausted, both mentally and physically. The experiences of the past six months had left me battered and defeated. And when I looked deep inside myself, it felt as if my soul had withered and turned gray from being exposed to so many gruesome deaths. This had been, hands down, the toughest of all my deployments.

• 3:15:39Jocko Willink?

  And now you're getting, you're getting ready to actually leave, and you say, "I threw my sea bags down onto the gym floor that the Major had bestowed the name 'House of Pain' back in September. And I had thought that his bravado was misplaced. To me, this whole place was one big house of pain."

• 3:15:57Jocko Willink?

  From up here in the loft, I had watched the Marines open the black vinyl bags of so many fallen heroes. The floor of the gym had been our overflow area for a mass casualty situation in December. The front desk was where I had first met Master Sergeant Angus, and the processing room floor was where we saw him off.

• 3:16:17Jocko Willink?

  Our storage area behind the floor was where I witnessed the immense weight of our job crush the strongest man among us.

• 3:16:26Jocko Willink?

  And out in the reefer was where I touched the blue field and white stars and said a quiet prayer for all 150 angels who left my custody.

• 3:16:39Jocko Willink?

  This building held so many memories that had now been seared into the cerebral pathways of my brain, and I was a flurry of tangled emotions.

• 3:16:52Speaker 01

  I quietly closed the door behind me as I made my way out, shutting out the world that would forever haunt me before I climbed aboard the Humvee.

• 3:17:03Speaker 01

  "Are you ready to go, Staff Sergeant?" the driver asked me. I replied, "More than ready, brother."

• 3:17:13Jocko Willink?

  "I heard that," he said, and just like that, we were off to chase the sun across the sky and to wake up in another world.

• 3:17:36Jocko Willink?

  And soon thereafter, you were getting on an aluminum tube

• 3:17:41Jocko Willink?

  and you were back in the States. Any, did they have any decompression for you guys? What did you, what was your process coming home?

• 3:17:49Speaker 01

  Get off of active duty, go back to your regular lives. There was, there was nothing, no gradual time, you know? Um, I let them know that, uh, our first sergeant, that I wasn't ready yet, you know? And he goes, "I don't care. By the end of the day, you're off my books."

• 3:18:06Speaker 01

  So, I went back to delivering mail.

• 3:18:10Speaker 01

  And then I started having all these, uh, problems with PTSD. Felt like I was always on patrol. My mind would click off. I would still walk for blocks.

• 3:18:22Speaker 01

  I wasn't sleeping. Everything that, that I repressed over there in combat, all the remains, um, that we had taken care of. Uh, I'd, I'd still dream about it and stuff and,

• 3:18:37Speaker 01

  and it took over my life. I ended up, uh, leaving the, the post office. Got raided at a hundred percent permanent total with the VA and, uh, went to a big, deep depression.

• 3:18:52Speaker 01

  I ended up, uh, coping with everything by drinking seven days a week because that was the only way I knew how to get some sleep. And I got lucky because I met the, I met people who actually cared and roped me in. Um, one of them was my PTSD therapist, Bill. He was over at, uh, at the VA, just retired out of the air force and he was there in Iraq with the mental health assessment teams. So now I finally met somebody that I didn't have to explain what IED was, cause he, he traveled the same roads. So he helped me through, um, you know, it could be three o'clock in the morning and I can call him, it didn't matter.

• 3:19:35Speaker 01

  But what really also helped me is a, uh, was a corpsman from Vietnam, did two tours over in Vietnam. And over at the VFW, one night, we're sitting there and we're drinking and stuff and we used to have all these big philosoph-, you know, philo- uh, philosophical conversations. And, and he goes, you know what? I know what you need. I'm like, what? And he goes, you need to start writing. I'm like, nah, bullshit. I'm good, man. I'm not a writer. I barely passed high school English. So he goes, no, that's what helped me when I was, when I came back from Vietnam. So, period of time goes by and I ended up, um, picking it up and said, why not? I woke up from a nightmare and said, I am not doing anything else, why not?

• 3:20:20Speaker 01

  So what I did is I started writing down the stories and my very first one was Angus. Um, I did what he said, I would write it out, I would say my goodbyes, I would have my little toast to them and at the very end I would burn it in a bonfire. And, and symbolically I gained power over that. But was an immense weight upon my shoulders now had an numerical value. And that experience now was worth 20,000 words. And I could change things around and change the perspectives and stuff, but it gave me a chance to pull out that trauma and pull it out.

• 3:21:02Speaker 01

  And, and instead of it being a big jumble, I pulled it out and been able to, to diagnose it. And I started writing and I would take those, uh, the stories into my therapist and years later, uh, my wife suggested.

• 3:21:17Speaker 01

  Why not try to publish it? And so that's what became the book. It was, started off as just me trying to get a handle of all the stuff that we had went through, never, never, ever expecting to, to publish it. And now, um, it is what, what it is now. It's, um, the second book to have ever been written about this subject, uh, about mortuary affairs, uh, but the first one that ever dives into, you know, the emotional side and how it hits us. And, um, it connects, it connects generation kill to taking chance, that whole blank area in there.

• 3:21:58Speaker 01

  And, um, it has opened, uh, a lot of doors for myself as far as being able to overcome what I thought was my weakness and I found it is actually my strength. My, um, I, I have the answers that a lot of families, Gold Star families want to know. They want to know if, how was their son or daughter taken care of when they lost their lives? And, and my book tells that, that they were surrounded by the ones that they loved and who loved them.

• 3:22:41Speaker 01

  And I wanted them to know that the very last hands to touch them in Iraq were carrying hands. We, we're the ones willing to die to make sure that they got home. So, yeah, this book is, has become a lot more than just a collection of stories. It's now, you know, providing, um, by example, a way for other guys to, to find peace. If I was able to sit there and write, maybe somebody else can sit, figure out that they can get their, uh, sit there and write and, and be able to find peace after all of this

• 3:23:25Speaker 01

  war and multiple deployments and stuff, so.

• 3:23:30Speaker 01

  I'm hoping, you know, everything will, other people will pick up on it.

• 3:23:36Jocko Willink?

  When you, when you go to a, the therapist that help you, what, what's that process like? What are they asking you? What are you telling them? What are they telling you?

• 3:23:48Speaker 01

  He, we would sit down and we would just say, how you're doing? And I would say, hey, I'm having a really rough time. I haven't slept in three days.

• 3:23:59Speaker 01

  You know, every time I closed my eyes, I would think about this situation, that kind of thing. And fighting with the wife again, and I can't connect with my kids, and I feel like that, you know, my kids are afraid of me, I think. And then we'd just go off into,

• 3:24:13Speaker 01

  from there, he would talk about whatever situations that would have happened. He had a really good way of easing into over there and how they connected.

• 3:24:27Speaker 01

  I'd have, I still do have a food aversions, just because I don't, sometimes, sometimes the food reminds me of the stuff that would have happened over there.

• 3:24:38Speaker 01

  And, and, and so we would talk about that situation.

• 3:24:45Speaker 01

  And work through those. And, and when I first started going there, it was seven days a week. Eventually, now it's led to one day, whenever I need to talk to him. But I, I know that if I was to give him a call three in the morning, he's always gonna be there. And I think that's what really is, is the key behind other people.

• 3:25:08Speaker 01

  They need to have that family around them of support. That, you know, they had a wife that she never gave up on me. She always was there.

• 3:25:21Speaker 01

  To make sure I was taking my meds and make sure that I had somebody to talk to. If I needed to talk to one of the, she would call up one of the Marines, Bedlak. He would come over and, and I needed somebody to talk to right there who was there. And so I think it takes more than one person to help people get back in their minds, you know?

• 3:25:46Jocko Willink?

  And so the combination of talking about it with therapists and friends and then writing about it, getting it out and seeing it and seeing it as, what'd you say it was a product? Like a, something you could calculate it was 20,000 words. Like you, you took this pain and transferred it into something that had value that you could look at. And then you could understand better, you articulate it right. You start seeing it from a different perspective because when you read something that you've written, you see it from a different perspective. Now you can understand it better and the better you understand it, the more power you have over it.

• 3:26:24Speaker 01

  Right. It is no longer a weight holding me down and something that I would try to avoid thinking about. Now it's something that I was focused on, something that, it wasn't that weight. It was something that means something because of this moment, I, I was talking about Angus. And now I'm bringing in this chapter into, to Bill and he would say, okay, let's go over what had happened. And we would work on that. And then I would burn that after I was done with that story and I would rewrite it all over again. And it was just that going over and over and over and over that same stuff.

• 3:27:06Speaker 01

  But I think also what really helped me is going on some of these veteran trips to let me know and to connect with other people who, who may have different experiences than I did, different kind of traumas, but we built a little, little network of, of people. And I finally realized I wasn't alone, you know? At the, at the very beginning, I felt that I was alone.

• 3:27:34Speaker 01

  That everybody else is still deploying and here I was and I was the broken one.

• 3:27:42Speaker 01

  And I was ashamed of that. And, and then after all of these years, now I don't look at it as I was broken. I looked at it that I was, I just, I was injured. I, you know, I can be put back together. I can heal. But you have to be patient. It's not just flipping the lights and everything will be okay like I expected it in the very beginning. It's something you have to work on. And so after all these years of, after I published it now, I'm, I'm back in school. Becoming a electrical lineman. Something when I thought my life was over. And I'll never be,

• 3:28:27Speaker 01

  you know, that husband, that father, that man. And now I am reinventing myself. And it's through, you know, people who love me and, you know, and people that I've met. And they've always been there for me and, and going through the book. And pulling out that jumble of, of experiences and pulling it out like a thread and, and being able to work on that. And it has really opened up my future.

• 3:28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very, very, very fortunate.

• 3:29:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the idea of having a new mission is again, something that I talk about a lot. And as soon as you said, you would, how did you terminate at the, at the postal service? Did you quit? So as soon as I heard that, I'm like,

• 3:29:21Jocko Willink?

  because well, A, you know, it's like, okay, at least you have to do something. But if it's not something you care about, then it's not any help anyways. But you know, as soon as you said, I'm going back to school to become a lineman. I'm like, yes. And, uh, yeah. You know, um.

• 3:29:38Speaker 01

  I needed that break. I needed to focus on me. I looked at going to therapy as my job, my full-time job. And I needed to do it because I want to be the best father I can be for my kids. How to be the best husband I can be for my, for my wife, you know? And I wanted it not be a sad story. I wanted to be able to get back into living again, not just being trapped inside my own four walls. So, through the book and through therapy and I, the end of the book, I'm thanking all the people

• 3:30:17Speaker 01

  that really, you know, sacrificed their time because they thought I was worth it, you know? When did you lose your dad? Twenty eleven, February of twenty eleven.

• 3:30:37Speaker 01

  We would, we would go into work just like how we did before the war started.

• 3:30:47Speaker 01

  We would, you know, I would pick him up and we would go in. One of those days I would drive over to his place and then he would drive. And he had always catch me staring off into nothing. We would meet for lunch and I wouldn't say a thing. My mind was still over there. And, and he, he was always, hey, you know? I, I could talk, you know, if you want to talk about it. You know, I didn't see anything that you like you saw, but I'm, I'm always here. And so, when I started writing was after he passed, about a year after he passed. And I think that you need to have somebody that you're writing to.

• 3:31:31Speaker 01

  And that's what helped me get out of my shell about writing was I, I was writing it as if I was writing it, telling him about all the things that he wanted to know. So.

• 3:31:50Jocko Willink?

  You, you, you talk about that and

• 3:31:55Jocko Willink?

  well, it's worth closing out here.

• 3:31:59Jocko Willink?

  You say in the end of the book, "For years and years, I have struggled hard with post-traumatic stress. And I've been through the gamut of self-medication, contemplation of suicide, survivor's guilt, sleepless nights, hypervigilance, flashbacks, and night terrors. But it was the open hearts and kindness of the strangers and friends that helped my mind return from the battlefield, long after my body had found home.

• 3:32:27Jocko Willink?

  It was the friendly faces of Bill, Janine, and Bonnie at the VA. It was the open ear of my neighbor, Chris. It was Derek and the Richie Boys in Mobile, Alabama. And also Ray, Bobby, and Tom in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Chris, Brenda, and Josh up in Delta, Wisconsin. Lisa with the Semper Five Fund. Bill and Dave with Operation Healing Waters. Don and Diane in Cambridge, Maryland. Mo, Mike, Luke, Ashley with Three Gun Four Vets.

• 3:33:03Jocko Willink?

  Larry Drawn, am I saying that right?

• 3:33:05Speaker 01

  Larry Drawn Jr.

• 3:33:06Jocko Willink?

  Larry Drawn Jr. for teaching me

• 3:33:10Jocko Willink?

  that there is no such thing as giving up, even if you had lost your legs in Afghanistan.

• 3:33:17Jocko Willink?

  My wife Wendy for always believing in me, even when I gave up on myself. And last but not least, my dad, Larry Bussler.

• 3:33:29Jocko Willink?

  I wish you were still here to see this day, Dad. I still remember you asking me what I was thinking about all those times that you caught me staring off into Never Neverland.

• 3:33:41Jocko Willink?

  I told you nothing, because I didn't want to talk about it. And you would laugh and tell me, "When you are ready to tell me,

• 3:33:50Jocko Willink?

  I'll be here."

• 3:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Well, Dad, I wrote down all the stories that you wanted to know.

• 3:34:01Jocko Willink?

  I just wish you were still here to read them.

• 3:34:18Jocko Willink?

  And I also wanna just...

• 3:34:24Jocko Willink?

  You know, you have the book dedication here.

• 3:34:28Jocko Willink?

  It says this book is dedicated to those who had shed their life's blood in defense of our nation.

• 3:34:38Jocko Willink?

  To those loved ones who wept for them.

• 3:34:42Jocko Willink?

  And to those who ensured

• 3:34:46Jocko Willink?

  that they were returned home

• 3:34:49Jocko Willink?

  with honor.

• 3:35:03Jocko Willink?

  So...

• 3:35:05Jocko Willink?

  You know, as much as I...

• 3:35:11Jocko Willink?

  As much as I talk about the immense cost of war,

• 3:35:17Jocko Willink?

  there's really just no way

• 3:35:21Jocko Willink?

  to capture and describe and properly communicate the impact that war has.

• 3:35:34Jocko Willink?

  And I think one thing that...

• 3:35:39Jocko Willink?

  One thing that we have to do is we have to make sure that it's not only a negative impact.

• 3:35:52Jocko Willink?

  It's up to us.

• 3:35:56Jocko Willink?

  It's up to us to ensure that those sacrifices, those incalculable sacrifices

• 3:36:08Jocko Willink?

  by the fallen, by their families.

• 3:36:16Jocko Willink?

  We gotta make sure that those sacrifices were not made in vain and we do that by living our lives to the fullest.

• 3:36:29Jocko Willink?

  Every second, every minute, every day for those heroes.

• 3:36:41Jocko Willink?

  Make your life count.

• 3:36:56Jocko Willink?

  This book will absolutely give you an appreciation.

• 3:37:02Jocko Willink?

  It give you a glimpse

• 3:37:06Jocko Willink?

  into these

• 3:37:09Jocko Willink?

  I mean, give you a glimpse into war. Give you a glimpse into these sacrifices and as I said at the beginning of this, the sacrifices aren't, they don't end on the battlefield. In many ways, they start on the battlefield. Because the families have to carry on.

• 3:37:26Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, this book

• 3:37:33Jocko Willink?

  will remind you of what, what you got.

• 3:37:44Jocko Willink?

  You've got a website called No Tougher Duty. Notougherduty.com. You're on Twitter.

• 3:37:54Jocko Willink?

  Facebook, Twitter's No Tougher Duty. Facebook is No Tougher Duty. No Greater Honor. Instagram is no underscore tougher underscore duty. I'm sure people are going to want to reach out to you.

• 3:38:10Jocko Willink?

  And, and communicate with you and talk to you.

• 3:38:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 3:38:14Jocko Willink?

  You've been through some, um, you know, you've been up close and personal with a nightmare.

• 3:38:23Jocko Willink?

  With a nightmare.

• 3:38:24Speaker 01

  And it's not just me. It's a whole bunch of other people who sacrificed their lives to, to ensure this. They dedicated their lives to this, um, to this mission. And, and I'm, I'm thank you for, for allowing me to, to be that voice for them as well. Because it's, throughout history, it's always been an unsung hero. That they dedicate their lives to, to make sure these guys get home. You know, and, um,

• 3:38:56Speaker 01

  thank you.

• 3:38:59Jocko Willink?

  Any other closing thoughts?

• 3:39:02Speaker 01

  I would like to thank the 0445 Club, Ms. Elzarka, my brother Sean Bussler, Paul Slade out there in South Africa, you know, thank you for all the support that, and reaching out and getting me out here and keeping up with me at home. And I'd just like to let everybody know that you can get this book, No Tougher Duty, No Greater Honor, on Amazon, on Kindle, and also on Audible as well.

• 3:39:39Jocko Willink?

  And we'll link it through. And yeah, the fact that a bunch of people on Twitter, a group, Trooper Group, I guess is what we're calling it. Guys got together, girls got together, and kind of FYI, you, that Trooper Group, put together the money for you to get out here. You didn't need to do that, but you did. So what we're gonna do here is donate that same amount to the Semper Five Fund, to try and help out, you know, Marines around the world. And thanks to the Trooper Group for putting that together. And I know it took a while to get out, to get you finally out here. Everybody probably thinks I'm the

• 3:40:22Jocko Willink?

  worst human being in the world when they're trying to get on the podcast, or because it just, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of, there's a lot of people. And so it's, and, you know, I'm sure it doesn't seem like a, what, a big deal to coordinate it all, but when it's just me and Echo, and when there's a lot of people on the list, and we only do it once a week. So I'm sorry that it took so long to get you out here.

• 3:40:48Speaker 01

  I thank you for having me. It means a lot to me to be able to sit here at this table, knowing the people who sat here before me. Kyle Carpenter, and General Mokiyama, and, I mean, people that I've always idolized, and just find inspiration behind their stories. And I'm very, I'm humbly honored to sit here. I also wanted to thank my wife Wendy. There's no way I could even be at this point in my life without her, and my wife, and my kids, Lauren and Ava. I keep on striving to be a better person because of them.

• 3:41:31Speaker 01

  Come a very, very long way from who I was when I came home and if it wasn't for their support, who knows? But I want to be a better father and a better husband for them and I thank you very much for being a part of my life and sharing their love with me.

• 3:41:56Jocko Willink?

  Well, awesome, you know. Got to have that family support and it's awesome that your family's there for you and, you know, we've been here for three and a half hours. I just want to say thank you for coming on. Thank you for writing this book that tells the story of, you know, it's not just your story. And you just pointed out, it's not just your story. It's a story that so many people have gone through. It's a story that if you don't know it, you don't know it and that's a problem. So many incredible sacrifices.

• 3:42:30Jocko Willink?

  So, thank you for coming. Thank you for writing the book and, and most of all, thanks for your service and your sacrifice and to close this out, of course,

• 3:42:42Jocko Willink?

  Semper Fidelis, brother.

• 3:42:43Speaker 01

  Semper Fi.

• 3:42:47Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Gunny L. Christian Bussler. Chris Bussler has left the building.

• 3:42:57Jocko Willink?

  And, heavy.

• 3:43:01Speaker 01

  Very.

• 3:43:05Jocko Willink?

  Heavy subject. Time for a little decompression, which you're in charge of, Echo Charles.

• 3:43:11Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 3:43:12Jocko Willink?

  Proceed down the path of.

• 3:43:17Jocko Willink?

  Decompression.

• 3:43:18Speaker 02

  For that though, so one of the many parts that stood out that kind of made me think about even more was the, you know, when, when he talked about, okay, he called it the Butler method, right, of putting the flag and you know, so he would iron them, right, iron the flag, so there's none of those wrinkles, like the new shirt wrinkles, you know, that, right? And that makes sense, because you know when like, let's say you see someone like with a new T-shirt on and they have those wrinkles, it's kind of like you can almost see like the product, it's a product on him, you know, a product that gets packaged and shipped and it's this product, it's not like part of the, I don't know, whatever the other, in a T-shirt scenario, I don't know what the other feeling would be, but it seems more like,

• 3:44:03Jocko Willink?

  it's deliberate and custom. It's foreign. If it's, if it's brand new with creases, it kind of looks foreign.

• 3:44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, foreign.

• 3:44:10Jocko Willink?

  To the, to the human that's wearing it. Like if you see me wearing a brand new T-shirt with creases in it, you're kind of like, oh, this is not really part of him.

• 3:44:18Speaker 02

  Right, right, not part of him, exactly right, it doesn't mesh, exactly, exactly right, that's what I'm saying, so the, so the creased or folded creases in the flags that, that have been packaged, how he said, of, out of a box or something like that, that feeling is really prevalent when you see the creases in something. It's kind of like, oh yeah, it's just this packaged product now that you're throwing on this, you know, this very heavy and intense and special scenario, see what I'm saying? So that made sense, I mean, a lot of sense, actually, and then you can kind of imagine the difference, you know, especially when he was talking about, um, the guy who saw that, he saw one and he saw another one, then he saw the, the real one, the real deal, and he was like, man, I need them all to be like that, that makes sense to me.

• 3:45:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 3:45:01Speaker 02

  That he would, he would think that that's a huge deal, he would feel it that way.

• 3:45:05Jocko Willink?

  No, it's, um, it's important, for sure, for sure, heavy.

• 3:45:10Speaker 02

  Very much so. Also, yeah, okay, so, what are we doing? Improving ourselves.

• 3:45:16Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:45:18Speaker 02

  Fitness, jujitsu, work, family, those are four things, I think, you know, that maybe.

• 3:45:25Speaker 02

  It would take a lot to disagree.

• 3:45:27Jocko Willink?

  Didn't you have another one in there too?

• 3:45:29Speaker 02

  No, no, no. You're thinking of the eight pillars. I had seven and you added one, eight. That's different.

• 3:45:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. Have we discussed those?

• 3:45:36Speaker 02

  Yes. No, not on here.

• 3:45:37Jocko Willink?

  Not on here?

• 3:45:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:45:39Jocko Willink?

  What one did I add?

• 3:45:40Speaker 02

  Um, it was essentially, I forget what name we arrived at, but it was like the, basically the spirituality element of it.

• 3:45:50Jocko Willink?

  Wow. I gave you that?

• 3:45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:45:53Jocko Willink?

  What did that mean? What did that mean?

• 3:45:56Speaker 02

  Um, like, so they're all in pairs. I don't think we should go too deep into it, but they're all in pairs. So there's...

• 3:46:04Jocko Willink?

  You know what? Let's do a grounded podcast on it.

• 3:46:07Speaker 02

  Okay. So, we'll do a grounded podcast.

• 3:46:10Jocko Willink?

  Cause I'm real curious how I got to spirituality. That's not...

• 3:46:13Speaker 02

  But it fits perfect. Maybe that's not even the right word for it, but it fits.

• 3:46:17Jocko Willink?

  What was, what did the spirituality part mean? Just explain that.

• 3:46:22Speaker 02

  It meant...

• 3:46:26Jocko Willink?

  Did it mean doing good for other people?

• 3:46:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was along those lines.

• 3:46:29Jocko Willink?

  Okay, cause that I could see me saying, because I believe you, you get more when you give more, right? Like, that's kind of my, uh, not a secret, but that's just something that I know is true for me. If I help someone, it makes me, I get more out of that than if I help myself.

• 3:46:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was, it's more about the, the getting more, like to, to basically improve the quality of your own being kind of thing with, whether it be giving others more or being in touch with like your temper and like, it's basically like who you are on the inside kind of thing.

• 3:47:03Jocko Willink?

  Like, wow, these are really weird coming from me.

• 3:47:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:47:06Jocko Willink?

  It's very strange. We'll have to, we'll have to cover this on grounded.

• 3:47:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it goes deep. Anyway, the, which is different, that was the eight pillars. This is just the four.

• 3:47:15Jocko Willink?

  Areas of functionality?

• 3:47:17Speaker 02

  That I was focused on at one point and may or may not be still. Anyway.

• 3:47:22Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so they are?

• 3:47:23Speaker 02

  There was one time someone was asking me something and I said, well, it's, it's easy to simplify your life when you only care about four things.

• 3:47:28Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 3:47:28Speaker 02

  And it was those four things.

• 3:47:29Jocko Willink?

  And they are?

• 3:47:30Speaker 02

  Fitness.

• 3:47:31Jocko Willink?

  Fitness?

• 3:47:31Speaker 02

  It's health, fitness, that kind of functionality, capability, blah, blah, blah.

• 3:47:36Jocko Willink?

  It's one.

• 3:47:36Speaker 02

  Jiu-jitsu.

• 3:47:37Jocko Willink?

  Jiu-jitsu? Jiu-jitsu is one of its own.

• 3:47:39Speaker 02

  Yes, it's different.

• 3:47:39Jocko Willink?

  Okay, cool.

• 3:47:40Speaker 02

  Work and family.

• 3:47:41Jocko Willink?

  Work and family.

• 3:47:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:47:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay. That's legit.

• 3:47:44Speaker 02

  Anyway, that was my answer. There's a lot more to it. Nonetheless...

• 3:47:47Jocko Willink?

  What's cool is jiu-jitsu will help you with all of them, right? Even though jiu-jitsu is its own... Category?

• 3:47:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:47:54Jocko Willink?

  It will also help your fitness.

• 3:47:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:47:56Jocko Willink?

  It will help your family.

• 3:47:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:47:58Jocko Willink?

  And it will help your work.

• 3:47:59Speaker 02

  Yes, and technically, kind of, again, we could go deep into it if we allow ourselves to, but they all improve the other one or the other.

• 3:48:07Jocko Willink?

  Right, true, also true.

• 3:48:08Speaker 02

  Kind of like my whole.

• 3:48:09Jocko Willink?

  What's the base of the, of the, of the, I can't say pyramid because it's got four, but what's the base of the square? Jiu Jitsu?

• 3:48:17Speaker 02

  I think they rotate, you know, because they're flexible. They're all flexible to create this one unit, if you will. Nonetheless, you did mention I said Jiu Jitsu. So, when we're doing Jiu Jitsu, what do we need? A gi, if you're doing gi. If you're doing no gi, you need a rash guard.

• 3:48:31Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:48:32Speaker 02

  You should need a rash guard.

• 3:48:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:34Speaker 02

  I think they're good. Rash guards are good. Where are we going to get that? We're going to get them from Origin, because Origin factually has the best skis, and they happen to be made in America, from the fabric all the way up to the end.

• 3:48:48Jocko Willink?

  Product.

• 3:48:49Speaker 02

  Well, it's not even a product, yep. It's a, um, end.

• 3:48:54Jocko Willink?

  Don't look at me, bro.

• 3:48:55Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 3:48:55Jocko Willink?

  You can't look at me for support here. You walked down this alley, man.

• 3:48:59Speaker 02

  The end situation, how about that? You know? It's a catch-all.

• 3:49:03Jocko Willink?

  That is a catch-all. I use it a lot.

• 3:49:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:49:05Jocko Willink?

  It, it, not only can you get gees and rash guards, which are factually, according to Echo Charles, and many other people, many, many other people.

• 3:49:14Speaker 02

  I think everybody, to be honest with you.

• 3:49:16Jocko Willink?

  Is the best, are the best. You can also get other clothes there. You can get t-shirts. You can get a heavyweight sweatshirt that is legitimately heavyweight for Montana, for Michigan, for Maine. Do you need it in Southern California? Hmm, probably not. Uh, you can also get jeans for your legs. And you can get, there's two different kinds of jeans. Heavyweight, called the factory jeans, and then there's a lightweight jeans, which are called the Delta 68 jeans.

• 3:49:53Jocko Willink?

  So if you, you, you, you know, you have genes, you need genes, you might as well get the best genes. Genes that are comfortable, functional, durable.

• 3:50:07Speaker 02

  And they happen to look

• 3:50:10Speaker 02

  how about that? That's, that's acceptable.

• 3:50:12Jocko Willink?

  So if you're gonna put something on your legs, put those on your legs.

• 3:50:14Speaker 02

  Yes, agree. Also, through our workouts, fitness, jujitsu as well, we can use, we can utilize supplementation, gotta be good supplementation. Hard work, clean fuel, clean.

• 3:50:28Jocko Willink?

  I was thinking about supplements and how much of a part of my life supplements are. Specifically, every single day I take joint warfare. Every single day I take krill oil. Every single day I have discipline.

• 3:50:45Jocko Willink?

  And I drink milk every day. That's a lot, that's a lot of daily. The one, a discipline, I don't necessarily drink discipline every day. I gotta take that back. Cause there's some days where I don't drink discipline or take discipline go, but

• 3:50:59Jocko Willink?

  even I don't do that. I usually have some Jaco White Tea. I get that little hitter.

• 3:51:03Speaker 02

  Is Jaco White Tea a supplement? Technically, no, right? It's a food item.

• 3:51:07Jocko Willink?

  Okay, well.

• 3:51:08Speaker 02

  Certified organic by the.

• 3:51:09Jocko Willink?

  We got some, we got some stuff that you can put in your body on a daily basis that will make you better in jujitsu, make you better in health and fitness, make you better with your family. Cause I'll tell you what, you give your kids some Warrior Kid Milk, you're a better father.

• 3:51:25Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, you're in good with them too.

• 3:51:26Jocko Willink?

  And what, what am I, and work, of course. You get that focus from the discipline. Your whole life is improving.

• 3:51:33Speaker 02

  That is true.

• 3:51:34Jocko Willink?

  Which is factual. Uh, you can get them at Vitamin Shop. By the way, we just kinda

• 3:51:41Jocko Willink?

  partnered with the Vitamin Shop so that you can get cans of Discipline Go without having to pay a bunch of what's it, shipping?

• 3:51:48Speaker 02

  Sure, shipping, yeah.

• 3:51:50Jocko Willink?

  So you can check that out. And all that stuff's available at OriginMaine.com.

• 3:51:56Speaker 02

  Also Jaco White Tea, as you mentioned, that's a good one. Certified organic in the can and available for brew. What do you call them? Dry.

• 3:52:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, dry, I guess.

• 3:52:06Speaker 02

  Whatever. You know, the, the tea bags, you see what I'm saying? Anyway, that's a good one. Um, also, if you want to get this book.

• 3:52:16Speaker 02

  No tougher duty, no greater honor. Don't worry, I got you. Go to jocko podcast.com on the top tab menu. Says books from the episodes. Boom. We got all the books, including but not limited to this one on that page. Boom. Click through there. It'll take you to Amazon. You can get it.

• 3:52:32Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever had anybody lie to you on the internet?

• 3:52:36Speaker 02

  No, never, ever.

• 3:52:37Jocko Willink?

  Okay. There's some people that like, I think they're meaning to be cool. But they'll ask me a question after telling me something like, hey, I listen to you all the time. Is there a list somewhere where you have your books? And I'm always like, yep. It's at jocko podcast.com. Go to books. And I'm always thinking, you had to really not be paying attention for a long time. If you're in the game and you don't know that, I mean, people just ask me some, just, just questions that I get asked thousands of times.

• 3:53:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:53:07Jocko Willink?

  And they, and they'll ask it and be like, which I don't mind, but if they try and front load it with the fact that they're like, hey, really love your podcast. Okay. If you love the podcast, then you know that I've written kids books, right? Yeah. You know, you don't say, hey, really love your podcast. It'd be great if you could do something for a kids book.

• 3:53:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:53:33Jocko Willink?

  And I'm like, yeah, I've written, I mean, I just, it just happens. I don't know. I guess that's not lying. Maybe they're just trying to be nice.

• 3:53:40Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what it is. I would imagine it's a spectrum. I would imagine. I don't know, but it seems like it is. Where you got some people who are just blatantly like, kinda lying, you know? Like, hey, I love your podcast, or maybe they do love it, but when they say, I listen to all your podcasts. And love and love it, you know, like maybe that kind of thing. That technically is not true because you didn't listen to all the podcasts. Even if you did listen to all the podcasts, you're kind of misleading if you did listen to all the podcasts, but you didn't listen to the whole thing of all the podcasts. Because if you did.

• 3:54:11Jocko Willink?

  Somebody hears the, the supports kick in and they're shutting it down. They're not listening. They don't even hear this right now. They don't even know they're violating.

• 3:54:18Speaker 02

  And that makes sense, you know, because they're like, hey, podcast's over. When's this support mode is listed on the thing? So it's like, boom, next episode. I get it. I get it. It makes sense, even though there's a lot of value. Yeah. So you technically miss like.

• 3:54:30Jocko Willink?

  What percentage of people do you think, uh, they're done after they hear Echo tell us about whatever? And then you're, then they're like, click.

• 3:54:39Speaker 02

  I don't know, Brad. It might be, I suspect that it's possible, as far as possibilities go, that it's pretty high.

• 3:54:48Jocko Willink?

  I actually beg to differ.

• 3:54:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:54:51Jocko Willink?

  Because there's so many people that say, first of all, there's people that have straight up said, I listen to the podcast for the support. Now, of course, they're being a little bit sarcastic, but that's still a statement, right? It's not, it's not nothing, right? And then there's plenty of people that say, the only advertisements that I listen to are, you know, when you and Echo are doing it. And well, first of all, I say, well, it's not really, is it, is this considered an advertisement?

• 3:55:18Speaker 02

  You know, I, I mean, as far as definitions go, yeah, sure, maybe, I don't know, I don't know.

• 3:55:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:55:24Speaker 02

  But, okay, that makes sense, because I have heard that.

• 3:55:26Jocko Willink?

  So I'm thinking that more people than you think, I think people are listening right now.

• 3:55:34Speaker 02

  About to click. Anyway, so yes, we do, we got the book on Jaco Podcasts, for those who may not have known before. Got them all listed by episode. Also, Jaco is a store, it's called Jaco Store, and this is where you can get t-shirts, rash cards, hoodies, hats, tank tops, merch, as it were, that's representative of the path. Discipline equals freedom, good.

• 3:56:04Speaker 02

  Stand by to get some, get out, you know, all these.

• 3:56:06Jocko Willink?

  Victory MMA and Fitness.

• 3:56:07Speaker 02

  Victory MMA and Fitness.

• 3:56:08Jocko Willink?

  If you use one of the old school.

• 3:56:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, big time.

• 3:56:11Jocko Willink?

  There's people that roll out deep with Victory MMA and Fitness t-shirts on.

• 3:56:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:56:15Jocko Willink?

  I see them in Ohio. I'm like, yeah.

• 3:56:18Speaker 02

  You know, representing.

• 3:56:19Jocko Willink?

  Just straight up in the game.

• 3:56:21Speaker 02

  Good, but yeah, JacoStore.com.

• 3:56:24Jocko Willink?

  What about that Jaco White Tea t-shirt?

• 3:56:27Speaker 02

  What about it?

• 3:56:27Jocko Willink?

  Is that on there?

• 3:56:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:56:29Jocko Willink?

  Because you said, that's, that is a dope t-shirt.

• 3:56:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's like one layer deep in the game.

• 3:56:33Jocko Willink?

  Old school, you know, when you, when you were a kid and you'd see like a cereal box?

• 3:56:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:56:38Jocko Willink?

  And it just has the thing on it.

• 3:56:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:56:40Jocko Willink?

  And you're like, dude, no creativity whatsoever? That's the Jaco White Tea t-shirt.

• 3:56:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:56:45Jocko Willink?

  It's just the can.

• 3:56:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:56:47Jocko Willink?

  It's legit.

• 3:56:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but those, those kinds of shirts are legit, like, you remember the old school, like Pepsi?

• 3:56:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because otherwise, basically, you're trying really hard, right? Like, if we made a Jaco White Tea t-shirt design?

• 3:57:00Speaker 02

  Right, it'll have like a tea.

• 3:57:02Jocko Willink?

  We'll leave that to Pete Roberts.

• 3:57:05Speaker 02

  The creative, he's a creative, that's what it is.

• 3:57:09Jocko Willink?

  We don't know what that is, but we know that we're not it.

• 3:57:14Jocko Willink?

  Alright.

• 3:57:14Speaker 02

  Yes, so yes, jocko store.com, that's where you get this.

• 3:57:17Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget to, speaking of this podcast, which you may or may not be listening to, we're leaning towards not, you're probably not listening to it anymore, which is fine. If you are still listening to it, you probably have subscribed to the 1% of people that aren't, that are listening right now, that still haven't subscribed, you could do that because for some reason, that's on this piece of paper that I wrote.

• 3:57:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:57:38Jocko Willink?

  Leave a review, which is funny.

• 3:57:42Jocko Willink?

  You can leave a review that's serious or whatever, but why, that's not a good interaction with me. If you say, hey, it's a good podcast, I like the information that they put out. This will, this will do nothing for me, for Echo, for anyone that reads it. If you say, this podcast is the only podcast that has support advertisements that are of more value than the entire podcast itself. If you say, see, Echo just laughed, I laughed a little bit. Whoever reads that will be like, oh, what are the, what's that, what that's all about. So subscribe to the podcast and then leave a review.

• 3:58:23Jocko Willink?

  That will entertain us. And by us, I mean everyone, not just, not just us two idiots sitting here talking, but everyone else that's listening.

• 3:58:33Speaker 02

  True, I agree with that notion. Also, grounded podcast, speaking of podcasts, grounded podcast.

• 3:58:38Jocko Willink?

  And apparently now we owe a grounded podcast about the four focuses of life and then the eight pillars of justice.

• 3:58:45Speaker 02

  Yes, well, they're pillars of life. Yeah, justice, sure. Yes, okay, yes. So that one will, that would be what, if, there's seven out now.

• 3:58:53Jocko Willink?

  Number one, cruising. Number two, cruising.

• 3:58:56Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Brother, they make sense. Anyway, grounded podcast, got a new episode out. We will focus on making them more consistently.

• 3:59:06Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:59:07Speaker 02

  With no promises.

• 3:59:08Jocko Willink?

  We will. Don't forget about the Warrior Kid podcast.

• 3:59:12Jocko Willink?

  We'll try making some more of those as well.

• 3:59:15Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:59:16Jocko Willink?

  And then with a Warrior Kid podcast, don't forget about the Warrior Kid himself, Aiden, who's making.

• 3:59:23Jocko Willink?

  Killer soap.

• 3:59:25Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 3:59:25Jocko Willink?

  That's actually what it's called.

• 3:59:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:59:27Jocko Willink?

  Have you used it?

• 3:59:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:59:28Jocko Willink?

  It's legit.

• 3:59:29Speaker 02

  It's like, it's funny, cause every time I get like, you know, one from them. Part of me doesn't want to use it, cause it's kinda like artistic.

• 3:59:37Jocko Willink?

  One bar, and now I'm gonna open it and use it.

• 3:59:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Once you use it, then it's.

• 3:59:41Jocko Willink?

  And we've got, have we got that on the website yet?

• 3:59:43Speaker 02

  Not yet, that's what we're finalizing.

• 3:59:45Jocko Willink?

  Where are we?

• 3:59:46Speaker 02

  We're finalizing it.

• 3:59:47Jocko Willink?

  Will we be finalized by next week?

• 3:59:49Speaker 02

  Oh, as far as deadlines, you know.

• 3:59:52Jocko Willink?

  I know you're not really, you don't really appreciate things called deadlines.

• 3:59:56Speaker 02

  Finalizing that one. How about this? Soon.

• 3:59:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:59:59Speaker 02

  Very soon.

• 4:00:01Jocko Willink?

  You really boxed yourself in on that one?

• 4:00:04Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm gonna put it on jocko's store.

• 4:00:07Jocko Willink?

  Until then, irishoaksranch.com. Get some soap and stay clean.

• 4:00:14Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Also, we have a YouTube channel for the video version of this podcast and excerpts. Excerpts if you wanna listen to three, four, or five hours of a podcast at a, you know, specific time or whatever. Listen to the excerpt lesson, take the lesson with you, share it with somebody. Boom. That is YouTube. Also, enhance videos. Put some music on there.

• 4:00:32Jocko Willink?

  Green screen.

• 4:00:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh. CGI.

• 4:00:39Speaker 02

  Did you just learn that green screen thing? Cause it kinda seems like you just learned it.

• 4:00:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, kind of. Alright, psychological warfare. If you need a psychological

• 4:00:51Jocko Willink?

  hitter to propel you over a obstacle, a mental obstacle.

• 4:00:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:00:57Jocko Willink?

  Even a physical obstacle. Hit psychological warfare. Put that donut down.

• 4:01:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:01:03Jocko Willink?

  And then we also have flip side canvas, which is a visual representation of discipline.

• 4:01:12Jocko Willink?

  That's run by Dakota Meyer. So, check that out if you wanna hang something up on your wall. For books, we got No Tougher Duty, which we just went through. Go get it. Chris Bussler, you just heard him. I mean, you can see that book is literally written from the heart.

• 4:01:31Jocko Willink?

  All kinds of stuff in there to learn. I read a tiny fraction of it today. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. Apparently, the number one book of some kind. Appreciate everyone getting that book. And what I really like is the feedback that I'm getting from people, that you're taking what you can read in there, what you read in there, and immediately implementing it, and it's helping. So that's great to hear. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, The Warrior Kid Series, one, two, and three. Get your kid on the path, Mikey and the Dragons, get your little kid on the path, Discipline Goes Freedom Field Manual, get yourself and your relatives and the people around you on the path. Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy

• 4:02:11Jocko Willink?

  of Leadership. Learn to lead. Foundationally. Written by myself and my brother Leif Babin. We also have a consulting company called Echelon Front, where what we do is go into companies, teams, and organizations and solve problems, any problems. I know that sounds crazy. Any problems that you have at your team, in your organization, in your business, they are leadership problems. And the way you solve them is by fixing, aligning, and educating you and your other leaders. So check out echelonfront.com. If you want some online interactive training,

• 4:02:52Jocko Willink?

  then go to efonline.com, and you can learn the principles in an interactive way on the interwebs. Don't forget about the muster. We have the muster coming to Orlando, Florida, Phoenix, Arizona, and Dallas, Texas. Every single event that we've done is sold out. So if you want to come, go to extremeownership.com and register as quick as you can. And of course, we also have

• 4:03:23Jocko Willink?

  EF Overwatch and EF Legion where we are taking military leaders

• 4:03:29Jocko Willink?

  and putting them into civilian organizations to help civilian companies, businesses win. So check that out. Again, if you want to connect with Chris Bussler, you can find him online. He's got a website, notougherduty.com. He's got Twitter, no tougher duty, Facebook, no tougher duty, no greater honor, Instagram, no underscore tougher underscore duty. And for Echo and I, we are also on Twitter, on Instagram and on el fish book. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And once again, thanks to Gunnery Sergeant Chris Bussler for coming on.

• 4:04:15Jocko Willink?

  And of course, Chris, thanks for your service to our great nation. And also thanks to you and your comrades in mortuary affairs for taking care of our fallen heroes.

• 4:04:33Jocko Willink?

  And a salute to all our servicemen and women

• 4:04:38Jocko Willink?

  who pay such a heavy price in so many different ways to protect our freedom.

• 4:04:45Jocko Willink?

  And to those that protect our freedom here at home, the police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and Border Patrol and Secret Service. Thank you for what you do every single day.

• 4:05:02Jocko Willink?

  And

• 4:05:04Jocko Willink?

  to everyone else out there.

• 4:05:09Jocko Willink?

  Life is short.

• 4:05:12Jocko Willink?

  It is a finite thing.

• 4:05:18Jocko Willink?

  And the clock is ticking.

• 4:05:22Jocko Willink?

  So what are you going to do about that?

• 4:05:26Jocko Willink?

  Where are you going to go? Who are you going to impact? What legacy are you going to leave?

• 4:05:36Jocko Willink?

  Ask yourself those questions and don't forget what those of us who have seen death closely.

• 4:05:47Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget what we learned from that.

• 4:05:52Jocko Willink?

  Our time is short.

• 4:05:56Jocko Willink?

  So make it count.

• 4:06:02Jocko Willink?

  And until next time. This is Echo and Jaco.

• 4:06:07Jocko Willink?

  Out.