230: Push The Envelope and Test Yourself. The Founding of TOP GUN. With Dan Pederson

0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:54 - Dan Pederson. The founding of Top Gun. USN. 3:48:29 - Final Thoughts and take-aways. 3:54:22 - Hot to stay on The PATH. 4:07:06 - 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 230 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  Operation Rolling Thunder began in 1968.

• 0:13Jocko Willink?

  As we flew combat missions, striking Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's hand-selected targets, we lost planes and men almost every day.

• 0:24Jocko Willink?

  Flying from Yankee Station, the area of the Gulf of Tonkin where the aircraft carriers operated, we learned what it was like to sit in a wardrobe, in a wardrobe table, surrounded by empty chairs.

• 0:39Jocko Willink?

  Half the time, we never knew what happened to them.

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  Maybe another pilot noticed an enemy surface-to-air missile launch, or caught a fleeting glimpse of a burning American plane heading toward the jungle below.

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes we'd hear the aircrew requesting help on the ground, dodging enemy patrols, and calling for rescue.

• 1:02Jocko Willink?

  When helicopters went in, the North Vietnamese were often waiting.

• 1:07Jocko Willink?

  They shot up the helicopters and their escorting planes.

• 1:12Jocko Willink?

  We sometimes got our man and lost three more in the process.

• 1:19Jocko Willink?

  We were flying not just for each other.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  We were flying for each other's families.

• 1:28Jocko Willink?

  The man on your wing usually had a wife, maybe some children.

• 1:34Jocko Willink?

  You took care of him to take care of them.

• 1:39Jocko Willink?

  We all faced moments where we risked our lives for each other to ensure the contact teams did not knock on our brother's door back in San Diego, Lemoore, or Whidby Island.

• 1:51Jocko Willink?

  When the enemy scored, the families were devastated.

• 1:57Jocko Willink?

  You seldom see that written about. But we've all come home to tell widows and fatherless kids how sorry we were.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  We gave them what peace we could.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  The truth is, that loss never goes away.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  It warps the rest of their lives as they wrestle with the pain.

• 2:23Jocko Willink?

  That old adage, "Time heals all wounds"?

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:29Jocko Willink?

  Fifty years on, I've seen those families still break down in tears as they talk of their fallen aviator.

• 2:38Jocko Willink?

  You don't get over that kind of pain. You just learn to live around it.

• 2:45Jocko Willink?

  It becomes part of who you are. And for us, out on Yankee Station, that grief motivated us to sacrifice for each other.

• 2:55Jocko Willink?

  Not everyone could hack it. There were days on Yankee Station where I watched air crews lose their nerve.

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  All of a sudden, some mechanical, mysterious issue came up, and the flight had to be scrubbed. Sometimes it happened when the same plane was on the catapult, ready to launch.

• 3:17Jocko Willink?

  They just couldn't bring themselves to face it again. The most fearsome air defense network in the world, erected by the North Vietnamese with Russian help around Hanoi.

• 3:30Jocko Willink?

  On rare occasions, some men turned in their wings and went home, rather than face that crucible again.

• 3:38Jocko Willink?

  It was easier to fly for an airline.

• 3:43Jocko Willink?

  In three years, the Navy lost 532 aircraft in combat.

• 3:50Jocko Willink?

  Including other operational losses associated with that war, the Navy had 644 aviators killed, missing, or taken prisoner of war.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  The total fixed-wing aircraft losses of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force together exceeded 2,400.

• 4:09Jocko Willink?

  Of course, it was intensely personal. Daryl Gary lived with nine guys in two houses on the beach in La Jolla when he went through training.

• 4:18Jocko Willink?

  After their first trip to Yankee Station, six came home.

• 4:25Jocko Willink?

  Worse, we were losing the larger war.

• 4:30Jocko Willink?

  Destroying the targets given to us by the Pentagon seemed to make no difference in the war to the South. The losses mounted, and the MiGs started seeking us out.

• 4:42Jocko Willink?

  The North Vietnamese possessed a small but well-trained air force, proxied by their Chinese and Soviet allies. As good as it was, they were not in the same league as the Soviet air force, so it sent shockwaves through the Navy when North Vietnamese pilots started shooting us down.

• 5:02Jocko Willink?

  During the Korean War, the North Korean Air Force was virtually wiped out in the opening months.

• 5:08Jocko Willink?

  A decade later, the Vietnamese MiGs gave us a real fight.

• 5:14Jocko Willink?

  They shot down one of ours for every two MiGs that we claimed.

• 5:20Jocko Willink?

  We considered that loss rate intolerable, given our long history of deeply one-sided kill ratios. In World War II, US naval aviators crushed the Japanese in the Central Pacific on the way to Tokyo with Hellcat pilots, who scored three-fourths of the Navy's air-to-air victories, posting a kill ratio on the order of nineteen to one.

• 5:45Jocko Willink?

  In Vietnam, we were simply not allowed to win. So the Navy bureaucracy did what bureaucracies do best. It continued on course. Micromanaged from Washington DC, we made the same mistakes month after month. It nearly crippled US naval aviation.

• 6:07Jocko Willink?

  In January 1969, a plain-spooken carrier skipper named Frank Alt wrote a report to the Chief of Naval Operations detailing deadly flaws in our fighter tactics and weapon systems. His list of complaints was a long one, and the Navy decided to act.

• 6:28Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, many in senior commands worried more about their careers than about fixing the problem.

• 6:35Jocko Willink?

  By approving the creation of an air combat postgraduate school, which we quickly named Top Gun, they gave the appearance of doing something to change things.

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  Under President Johnson's and Secretary McNair McNair's leadership, the Navy bureaucracy seemed more interested in appearing to solve problems than risking failure by actually trying to solve them. They gave the leadership of Top Gun to a relatively junior officer.

• 7:08Jocko Willink?

  Me.

• 7:14Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from the opening of a book called Top Gun, An American Story, by a man named Dan Pederson, a retired Navy captain, fighter pilot, Vietnam air combat veteran, and the first officer in charge of the story storied Top Gun, the Navy Fighter Weapons School.

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  And it is an honor to have Dan with us here tonight to talk about his experiences and share some of his lessons learned. Sir, thank you so much for coming on.

• 7:59Jocko Willink?

  Thank you, Jaco. And because it's Top Gun, I and I'm woefully unqualified to speak with any experience on air combat. Also joining us is my friend from Ramadi and my colleague from Echelon Front, Dave Berke, who's been on this podcast more times than anyone, who served as a fighter pilot in the United States Marine Corps, Top Gun instructor, Top Gun senior instructor, forward air controller, with us in Ramadi on the ground. And pilot of the F-18, the F-16, the F-22, and the F-35. So I figured I'd bring someone you could actually talk to, sir.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Uh huh. That's great.

• 8:38Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, you go through some of this stuff in the book, but I wanna, I wanna just kinda lay the groundwork of where you grew up. I know you were born in Illinois. What was your childhood like? And I wanna take you, take, take us through childhood up through where you enlisted in the Navy and then we'll get back into the book.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  It's, uh, earliest real memories are the end of Second World War. My dad had been in Europe fighting for four years and came home and the job was already filled, moved on to California, came to Riverside, California. And, uh, he worked as a putting pipeline in Palm Springs during that period of time. I was going to school and working a couple of jobs and making, making ends meet, guys. And, uh, that's where I grew up. And then I went to Whittier. And the draft came, reading on everybody, the follow-on draft for Korea. And, uh,

• 9:45Speaker 01

  I, uh, joined the Navy Reserve, enlisted guy.

• 9:49Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when you joined the Navy Reserves?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  I don't know, probably seventeen. Just, just right there.

• 9:57Jocko Willink?

  And did you, did you associate the Navy with aviation?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:03Jocko Willink?

  So you kinda knew?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  You know, you know, Jocko, how I, how I got started, really? I was an enlisted guy and I mess cooked there at NAS Los Alamos. It was a pretty busy base in those days. A lot of World War II, uh, props, corsairs. And I was a mech. That's what I trained to be. It was a mech. And I was mentored by a chief named Brown during that time, learned to mess cook. It saved my life, brought me out of the galley. And I got out on the flight line, started carrying, carrying the man's toolbox and, and getting his coffee when he wanted. And he, uh, he taught me a great deal about it. And, uh,

• 10:48Speaker 01

  What really turned me on, got me going, is two things quickly. There was the lieutenant doing a test flying in that squadron. And we were the first squadron to get jets. And we had some two-seaters, TV twos, empty backseat every time I'd work on an engine airplane, go through flight test. And pretty soon that lieutenant says, you know, empty backseat is a waste. Come on, go with me. And I flew with him in the backseat, maybe five, six, seven, eight times. And I was hooked. You know that feeling, David? Yes, you know.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  And so I started flying with him. And he quickly said, you're a natural, you know? You're pretty good at what? He said, I'll arrange for the exams and we'll do a physical on you. Will you go to Pensacola? I said, right on. And I was working two jobs and sleeping in my car, going to college at the time. So it was a perfect time for it. And come the one of the last weekends I spent with those guys, in comes Zeke Cormier and the Blue Angels at ANAS Los Alamos.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  So I watched the Blue Angels fly. And there was a Cutlass, David, put on a, I can't remember, Billy Phillips, who may have been flying, a famous Billy Phillips, flying in the Cutlass. But he did, he did an airshow on Sunday afternoon. And Monday, I packed my bags, I'm ready to go to Pensacola.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  That's the beginning.

• 12:40Jocko Willink?

  So how old were you at this point? It sounds like this happened pretty quickly.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:45Jocko Willink?

  And is this because, were they opening up to the flight school to enlisted guys because of the Korean War?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Nav cad, Naval Aviation Cadet Program. You know, and I'll tell you more about when we talk about the squadron, First Fighter Squadron.

• 13:02Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  With the five aces.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  The old guys from Second World War were getting out. Young guys like me were where the future was.

• 13:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the other thing I always like to think about when we, when we talk about, um, you know, the past wars. You getting into a jet, what jet, what kind of jet was it that the young lieutenant?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  TV two.

• 13:25Jocko Willink?

  So you getting into a TV two. This is like science fiction. I mean, the state of technology and you're whatever 18 or 19 years old. And you're going into the most modern, high-speed aircraft ever created.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. And there was a, there weren't any passenger jets in those days. Probably a DC8s were being invented here in, in San Diego. And it was the first jet I had ever been in. That was an E-ticket ride that first time.

• 14:00Jocko Willink?

  So I'm going to go back to the book here. You get down to Pensacola and you say this, "At Pensacola, we flew the SNJ Texan and the T-28. On my first morning there, our drill sergeant woke us up in the barracks with the rattle of his nightstick along the SEAL frames of our bunks. Then double timed us out to an aging hangar beside the seaplane ramp. In the very same building where some of Naval Aviation's pioneers established our tradition, the drill sergeant smoked us with 40 minutes of PT. Each morning started with the same ritual. We worked out in the hangar amongst the ghosts of those who had paved the way for us. Thanks to them, Naval Aviation became the rebel branch of the service.

• 14:40Jocko Willink?

  Always striving to develop new ideas, new technology and new ways of fighting that would send the age of the battleship into history." From the battles of the Coral Sea in Midway to the great Marianas Turkey Shoot, they transformed the US Navy into the most effective naval fighting force on the planet. Everywhere we went in Pensacola, we felt that tradition and it was an honor to be invited to be a part of it. Would my generation contribute to perpetuate in the years ahead? One thing for sure, I was not going to be the one who washed out and went home to be just another college kid with duck tail hair, working odd jobs to cover tuition. Where other cadets bought cars and spent time in town, drinking at Trader John's and other

• 15:22Jocko Willink?

  local aviator watering holes, I made a point of staying on base. My dad's ethic became mine, and you talked a lot about your dad's work ethic in here. I studied and worked hard. I was determined to be among the top cadets upon graduation, who would be handed the keys to the latest and greatest fighter jets our country produced. After basic school at Pensacola, we were required to take a cross-country instrument flight to California, the final stage before we advanced to school in Beeville, Texas. The fringe benefit of this last evolution was a chance to visit home. Now, here's a caveat that I always need to make when I read these things, I'm just skipping giant parts of this book. The amount of detail, the stories that you're telling, the characters that you're bringing

• 16:05Jocko Willink?

  out in this book, throughout the book, are just awesome. It's, it's a, it's, it's a historical gem, just to be able to read it. But, I'm not going to read the whole thing on the podcast and people need to buy the book if they want to get all that out of it. And it was an audiobook as well, so, either way, you need to read the whole book in order to get this. But, you know, this, this, you felt that, and I went to, I went to Officer Candidate School down in Pensacola, and that, you know, they have the amazing Naval Aviation Museum there, which is one of the best, in fact, I think it may be the best museum I've ever been to. I've heard the World War II Museum in New Orleans is equally awesome, but I haven't

• 16:49Jocko Willink?

  been there yet. But you just felt that, that heritage as a guy going through OCS. You know.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Just to be selected for something like that, I've been gone, I've done reasonably well in school academically and to be allowed to go down there and you know, you guys are all pros at working out every day. They marine DI taught us a new discipline every day in that old hangar. He worked us and then we'd run and then we go to the, what do you call it? The uh, courts, you know?

• 17:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the obstacle course.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Obstacle courts and all the things I've seen it in the SEAL videos and movies and it was a total new life. But when you make a commitment to go and it didn't take long in Pensacola to find out how you got to go to the first team and the first team be a great fleet squadron on a carrier. You got to have the grades. So the motivation was there and it was fun.

• 18:09Jocko Willink?

  Now, did everybody in your flight school want to be, want to get jets? Was it just a hundred percent competition?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Nah, I had a roommate named Al Clay's marine, marine pilot. I pinned his wings on, he pinned my wings on the day we finished and he was a great football player, Orange County High School. But man, we went in together, we were roommates all the way through and he decides to go Marine Corps at the last minute. But it, we both vowed we are going to go and score well and we knew we'd get fleet squadron. You know, a real piece of

• 18:54Speaker 01

  the history out of that and it's in my logbooks. They hadn't sent anybody to a fleet squadron out of Beville in about a year. I got the first set of orders.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Ken, it was worth it.

• 19:12Jocko Willink?

  Uh, I was just talking about from the book when you were, you, you had to do a cross-country instrument flight to California. This gave you a chance to go home. And you, you, you mentioned this in the book. Mary Beth stood on the tarmac, looking up at me with my parents at her side. She was a vision in an Angora sweater and a below the knee skirt, wearing flat-heeled shoes and with her hair down, she had a smile on her face, maybe just a hint of awe as well. I could hope. I unstrapped and climbed out, dressed in a khaki flight suit, a matching jacket, a Navy issued chucka boots. I barely made it down the ladder when

• 19:55Jocko Willink?

  she wrapped her arms around me. In an instant, the year of separation seemed like an eye blink. I knew beyond a doubt, this was the woman I wanted to marry. And you fast forward a little bit. All too soon, the beautiful interlude ended. My instructor met me at El Toro a few days after Christmas. I wore the ring on my right hand as I kissed Mary Beth goodbye on the ramp. She had given you a ring. Soon I would be an officer and a gentleman. I, I'd ask her father for, for permission to propose. We'd start a life together in the Navy. A final hug, no tears, and I scrambled up the ladder and into the cockpit. As Bill Pearson and I taxied out to the runway, I saw her waving goodbye to

• 20:37Jocko Willink?

  her Naval Aviation Cadet. When I landed at Beville, my first jet fighter waited me on the flight line. She was a Grumman F-9F Panther, a well-traveled aircraft whose dark blue aluminum skin was dotted with patched over bullet holes. Like my instructor, she was a veteran of Korea. Her paint dulled by years of service. With her straight wing and sub Mach 1 top speed, the Panther had been relegated to stateside pastures where she helped train the next generation of naval aviators.

• 21:12Jocko Willink?

  Was Korea over at this point? Or was there a chance that you were still? So what year was this?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Um, 1955 and 50, uh, 56.

• 21:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  56, so it would have been at Beville flying.

• 21:27Jocko Willink?

  So Korea's well over at this point.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:29Jocko Willink?

  But you've still got these pilots. Your, your instructors are straight up combat vets from Korea.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they were good, very, very good.

• 21:39Jocko Willink?

  They were the best.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, this section that, that you talk about flight school. And again, there's so much in this book to cover, you know? It was a, it was a challenge for me to figure out where I wanted to spend time. You talk about flight school. You have a great section in there about when you make mistakes. And you have failures and what your attitude was. And your attitude was, okay. I messed this up. What do I need to do to fix it? And you know, you had that attitude of taking ownership of things. And then doing the hard work to get it done.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  I've read your books and looked at some of your programs. And when you play in the league as a possible naval aviator and you make a commitment to finish is the same as a program you guys went through. And, and I'm talking about the training, okay? And you're dealing in human life, each other's everyday flying. Failure is unacceptable. You do, you make a mistake and this, this mistake that's in the book had to do with a very old uh, navigation system. But we were required to be proficient at it.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  And, uh, and, uh, I got confused in the weather one day and made the mistake, went back and flew that checkride again. And, uh, out of 18 months of training, that's the only time it happened to me. But it was unacceptable to fail, guys. That's what I'm telling you. And, uh, I wanted, I wanted to be a naval aviator so bad. And, uh, so.

• 23:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, uh, on March 1st, 1957, I got my wings.

• 23:41Jocko Willink?

  When my orders arrived, I tore open the envelope, running through my worst-case scenarios. The first of which was blimps. Yes, the 1950s Navy still flew airships. We called them poopy bags. Nobody wanted to go from flying Panthers and T-birds to puttering around at 70 knots with a gigantic bag of gas over your head. No, thank you. Then there was ASW, anti-submarine warfare. This meant multi-engine flying and in terminably long patrols over open ocean where everybody aboard tried not to fall asleep. I took a breath, looked down at my orders, and read the official verbiage directing me

• 24:23Jocko Willink?

  to report in 30 days to San Diego. I read it twice, then a third time just to be sure I wasn't dreaming. I was going to a squadron known as VFAW3. V stood for heavier-than-air. No blimps for me. F stood for fighters. AW stood for all-weather. I'd done it. I was going to be a jet fighter pilot. I was on the road to Top Gun. How many guys from your group ended up making it to jets, to fighter jets?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Two. Al Clayton and I. My roommate.

• 25:05Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  He went to Maka, oh, down in, he flew FJ Furies at, down on Miami Beach. Opa Laca was the name of that base, down in the Marine Bay. And I went to, I went home to Miramar in San Diego, in the same state as my Mary Beth, which was, I got to be honest about it, was, was part of my motivation. I wanted to be back. I miss her a lot. Incidentally, in the middle of the book, there's 16 photos. Some of the airplanes that you described, Jocko, and a couple of great pictures of Beth and I.

• 25:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Particularly her.

• 25:48Jocko Willink?

  And what's nice is they put together, um, they use color, full color photographs. I can tell you had a lot more clout rolling into your book publishing. You can look at the first edition of my first book has a bunch of crappy, black and white photos on bad paper. You've got the full glossy scenario going on.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Thanks to the first Top Gun movie.

• 26:12Jocko Willink?

  So we're going back to the book here. My first act as an ensign in the US Navy was to buy a car. My gang of new officers at lunch for the first time at the officers' club in Corpus Christi, Texas, decided at least one of us needed to have a set of wheels. We rolled the dice to see who would go down to the dealership and I lost. I picked out a brand new 1957 Ford Fairlane, raven black with black and colonial white matching interior. Side walls straight out of American graffiti. I drove home from Texas to in my new ride eager to see Mary Beth make amends and take her for a spin. I had 30 days of leave before I needed to report and I intended to use every minute of it counting my girl.

• 26:53Jocko Willink?

  The morning after I got home, I went to meet with Mary Beth. You didn't write, she said. I didn't get any letters for a while.

• 27:02Jocko Willink?

  I was about to explain when she said, Dan, I'm seeing someone. When you didn't write, well, he was persistent and I gave in. I didn't know what to say. He was a football player at college. They'd been seeing each other for a few weeks. And you know, I, I, I talked about, well, you, you talk about it in the book when, when the training was really hard. Obviously you had to prioritize what you were going to focus on. And even though you wrote Mary Beth every night, when the training got to a point where you had to focus more on the training, you didn't write for some time. Or sometimes you didn't write. And that was the little break in the, um, an opportunity for this football player.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  It was when I had the, uh, I had that one navigation flight failure and, uh, it rocked my, it rocked my foundation. And I missed a couple of weeks of writing to her. Otherwise for 18 months, we had written back and forth every day. Except for that period of time. And a beautiful young girl going to college and she was a pretty popular girl.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Damn football player.

• 28:13Jocko Willink?

  You're up against some tough competition.

• 28:17Jocko Willink?

  Uh, but you have to drive on. You go to North Island. At North Island, the guard at the front gate gave me directions to VFAW3. Uh, the squadron's executive commander was a guy named Commander Eugene Valencia. Round-faced and solidly built with thinning hair, my new XO happened to be the third highest US Navy ace of World War II, one of the great legends of our community. In one engagement over the Japanese home islands in 1945, he shot down six enemy planes. He finished the war with 23 flags on the side of his F-6F Hellcat.

• 29:00Jocko Willink?

  The man introducing himself to me held the Navy Cross and six distinguished flying crosses. I was in awe. Yet Commander Valencia was anything but arrogant. He greeted me and set me at ease with his relaxed, unassuming nature. It was hard to believe that a man with so many accomplishments could be so grounded and approachable.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  He was exactly that, you know?

• 29:26Jocko Willink?

  And did you, did you know this going into the room?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Oh, no. I hadn't. I had no background on the, on the fighter squadron. And he was one, the skipper of the squadron was Howard Deity, who flew and found the Japanese fleet to Battle of Midway. He was a commanding officer. And there were four other aces. The famous Tex O'Neal was in that fighter squadron. You talk about, you walk in the ready room, man, you knew your pecking order. And these guys were bigger than life.

• 30:02Jocko Willink?

  What does it take to become an ace?

• 30:05Speaker 01

  You gotta get five.

• 30:06Jocko Willink?

  You gotta get five.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Five victories.

• 30:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And he became an ace and he shot down six planes.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  In one day.

• 30:16Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take you to start putting this together? I mean, are these guys wearing their dress uniforms? Are you looking at this guy's rack of ribbons seeing that he's a Navy cross?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  You know, most of it, most of it's done at the bar. And quiet, there's a bar in North Island called the I Bar. Which these aces, they were, they controlled the place and they had their own bartender. And once in a while you get invited to go with them. And a good, good valentious story. I, I hit it off with the old man. I flew with him. His eyesight wasn't the best, but I got enough. I got enough verbally to pick up on, on his MO. How he operated during combat. A lot about tactics. He and Texon, he, all these guys.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  They were, they were mentoring us. There were five ensigns eventually in that year in that squadron. And we had all the, they had fifty, sixty airplanes, I think, four different kinds. All the flight time. David, did you ever, ever find yourself where you had all the flight time you could physically handle?

• 31:35Jocko Willink?

  I don't ever remember flying too much.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, just. And we, we, they all mentored us. I started, I went to first tailhook, first tailhook convention. And what I did was I carried this briefcase full of scotch. And uh.

• 31:57Jocko Willink?

  That's the Ensign's mission?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Ensign's, Ensign's all went down there with Valencia, Alex Varishu, the another living ace, 25 victories. These guys are bigger in life, you know? And uh, your, your teams have the same reputations.

• 32:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, when I checked into SEAL Team One, the executive officer was a prior enlisted guy that was a Vietnam legend.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:23Jocko Willink?

  There's a famous picture of the SEALs in Vietnam of this, it's, the picture always says the Dirty Dozen on it, even though there's more than 12 of them, but it says the Dirty Dozen and they're holding up a Viet Cong flag. And uh, he's, he's one of the guys in that picture. You know, he's the guy that, he's one of the guys that the SEAL team's reputation is built upon. And I, I remember looking, you know, look, I, at that time, I didn't know the difference between a marksmanship ribbon and a Medal of Honor when you're looking at the uniform. And I'm, I just looked and said, that's a lot. This guy's got a lot of decorations on his uniform and, you know, the ones that I did know, the Purple Heart, the Silver Star, I'm looking at it going, okay.

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  This is, this is, this is a, this is everything you dream of, right? Is to be sitting across my table, I'm 19 years old, and this guy's telling me, welcome aboard SEAL Team One.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 33:19Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't get any better than that.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And the living example of where they've been and what they've done. And their willingness, like Valencia and that holds five or six of the guys who had really done it all. They, they made no bones about it. They were there to mentor us. They went home at night with their families and their grown kids and their glass of Scotch. And they let them fly into us. I flew two to three times a day, just as much as I could stand. And that's why, when I showed you the logbook today.

• 33:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  That's pretty good for fighter pilot at uh at my age and I ended up that first squadron fifteen hundred hours ahead of my contemporaries.

• 34:10Jocko Willink?

  Dave, how many hours did you fly at your first squadron?

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Uh, I left my first squadron after four years with twelve hundred hours. So the numbers you're talking about, when I said I don't ever remember flying too much is because I didn't get to fly like that. That is, that's, uh, that's impressive.

• 34:25Jocko Willink?

  So you did fourteen hundred hours after four years, Dan. You're saying you had fifteen hundred hours more than your contemporaries?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I thoroughly liked it. While I was there, I got to fly the F six F Hellcat. Gino, they had a bunch of them at the repair facility at North Island. And uh, Gino kept talking about, you know, the guns and how he worked everything in that airplane. That's where he got his victories. So he says, you wanna fly it? So I picked the phone up and he calls the chief over at the naval repair facility. And he says, I got six of them. I can't get anybody to fly them. So I went over and I flew the F six F Hellcat.

• 35:12Jocko Willink?

  When you're transferring from one helicopter, from one aircraft to another aircraft, how mu- how hard is it to, to make those adaptations?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  It's easy. If you love it, Jaco, it's easy. Um, later on in the book, I'm sure, uh, we were up at Dreamland.

• 35:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Area fifty-one.

• 35:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  And uh, in thirty minutes, I came in in a transport, didn't even know where I was. They took us in a hangar, unopened the hangar doors, because they didn't want the satellites to see what they had. And guy walks in with me and says, come on, climb up. So I climbed the cockpit of a MiG. Thirty minutes later, I was in the air in that same airplane. You know, it's like driving your, it's like driving your Porsche.

• 36:06Jocko Willink?

  Right, right.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Once you can handle a Porsche.

• 36:08Jocko Willink?

  Or my Dodge Caravan in my case, but it's all good.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Anyhow, long winded answer, but it's easy. Once you're you're either a part of it and you can do it.

• 36:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  And new airplanes are exciting.

• 36:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you go on a little bit more about your checking in and you say this, the officer of the day said, why don't you go get your flight gear and put it into your new locker? He pointed out a bank of them in the main hangar. When I found my assigned locker, I opened it up to find it was full of somebody else's stuff. I think there's been a mistake, I said. The officer of the day looked stricken. Sorry about that. We forgot to clear it out. Clear it out? That locker belonged to the Lieutenant J G replacing. He was killed a little while back. Accident. Go ahead and throw everything away. The rest of his effects already went to his family. I walked back to the locker and stared at the items inside with a new perspective. A ratty old T-shirt hung on one hook. A few other knickknacks and toiletries sat on the shelf.

• 37:09Jocko Willink?

  Then I noticed something unusual. A pair of eyes were staring back at me. I reached in and pulled off the top shelf a tiny stuffed mouse. It was about two inches tall with big eyes, soft gray fur and a tail. The toy seemed out of place in a fighter pilot's locker.

• 37:27Jocko Willink?

  Was it a gift to his child never delivered because of that last fatal flight? Was it a gift from his child to him? If it was a lucky talisman that served as a reminder of who waited for him back home, I hated to think it had failed him. Suddenly I didn't want to know. Talk about an attitude adjustment. My problem seemed trivial, selfish compared to the death of the mouse's owner. I trashed the shirt and toiletries, but as the mouse hovered over the can, I held it there and regarded it again. Who am I to throw away another man's mouse? I took the little guy back to my flight bag and made him a nest deep inside.

• 38:09Jocko Willink?

  And you, well, that that mouth is part of the whole story.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  He's, he, he lives right now on about the fourth bookshelf in our library at home. In, in Palm Desert. He's there.

• 38:24Jocko Willink?

  You continue on, and this is what you were starting to talk about a little earlier, but in my squadron, the senior leadership came of age in World War II and Korean, and the Korean War. They told us how during the Pacific War, they learned to avoid getting into a turning dogfight with more maneuverable Japanese fighters. Trying to turn with more agile Japanese planes would get your tail shot off. So they took their shot and flew away. One pass, haul ass was the axiom. They learned to work together in pairs, cooperating to make sure that an enemy couldn't latch on to a pilot's tail. The other American pilot was always ready to turn toward his partner and stick his guns in the enemy's face. My flight leader, Bill Armstrong, explained to me that in Korea, the opposite was the

• 39:09Jocko Willink?

  case. The tactics of World War II would get a pilot killed going up against a communist MiG-15. Those jets were faster and flew higher than anything the Navy had, including the hot F-9F Panther I had flown in training. Given the MiG's speed and advantage, given the MiG's speed advantage, the horizontal plane became the Panther's playground. It could outturn the MiG-15. So in just six years, we changed tactics altogether. One pass, haul ass went away, and US fighter pilots found their advantage in sharp turning dogfights. In the missile age, it was all changing again. At least, that's what the Navy believed.

• 39:52Jocko Willink?

  We would simply be directed by ground control to a point in the sky, lock our little circle on the dot, and let loose with a missile. No more seat of the pants flying and maneuvering in sharply turning fights. Technology promised a revolution. So during my time at FVAW-3, the old ways were outlawed. Dogfighting, officially known as air combat maneuvering, or ACM, was forbidden. In 1960, the year before I left for my next assignment, the Navy shuttered the last of the old schools that trained fighter pilots to dogfight. The Fleet Air Gunner Unit at El Centro. From then on, air combat maneuvering was banned.

• 40:35Jocko Willink?

  If you were caught hassling, as we call dogfighting, your career could end. The edict against dogfighting divided our squadron into three factions. Our senior leadership, whose experience ran counter to everything the Navy was doing now, had fought two wars and had seen friends die. Having spent years away from their families on fleet deployments, they focused on being dads and husbands. At the end of their careers, they were content to mentor us nuggets on the ground, share experiences, and teach us how to be leaders. They left the bulk of the flying to the younger guys. In the second camp were junior officers who bought into the new way. They never hassled, never pushed their sky rays to the edge of the flight envelope.

• 41:19Jocko Willink?

  The third group, a quiet group of young tigers, thought otherwise. I was one of them, and we decided to do something about it.

• 41:29Jocko Willink?

  So a little, uh, little, little division, little groups, little cliques of people. The old retired guys, look, they're doing their jobs, but they're not too concerned. The guys that are listening to the way the Navy's saying it's going to be done, and they're okay with that. And then you guys that wanted to scrap.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  It's a matter of your personal, uh, courage. It's in one of your books, you know, depending on how good you want to be in the airplane. A lot of guys were getting ready to go with the airlines, just booking flight time, go with the airlines.

• 42:08Jocko Willink?

  At this time, airline pilots made a ton of money, right?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Then and on for about 10, 20 years.

• 42:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I never, I never even considered that. I couldn't give up going to 50,000 feet at 60-degree climb angle. Right, Dave?

• 42:30Jocko Willink?

  Dave, you didn't get tempted by Delta or American? I'm squarely in his camp, squarely. So this is what happens. This next chapter is called Fight Club.

• 42:42Jocko Willink?

  You say here, "Off the California coast, about 80 miles west of San Diego, there's a sector of restricted airspace that encompasses San Clemente Island. It's a military reservation. Air controllers call it Whiskey 291. The US Navy squadrons in Southern California use it for training exercises." "That was our playground. I first heard about the West Coast illicit dogfighting scene one night after hours in a San Diego bar. It might have been the Hotel Del Coronado or a Mexican restaurant where we knocked back tequila. It was certainly not at the North Island Officers Club or in the ready room. There were too many ears that could make things difficult. We were free to fly almost anywhere we wanted. Our squadron had

• 43:24Jocko Willink?

  plenty of aircraft and our chain of command encouraged us to get stick time. Almost always we could find a valid reason to fly." "Here's the thing, you learn by doing. Those of us who lived to fly, learned our craft by flying a lot. One Friday afternoon after a long week on standing alert, I went to the maintenance shop and signed out a Ford. I had heard that at the bar on Friday afternoons, before cocktail hour was the best time to find our version of a street race. I took off from North Island and headed west for Whiskey 291. The unwritten rules in my mind. One of them established a hard deck at 5,000 feet. This meant that the fight was over the moment you dipped below that altitude. It was a nod to safety. If you ran into trouble

• 44:08Jocko Willink?

  and entered a spin, you needed that altitude to recover." "By joining this Fight Club, we were keeping the flame alive for a certain way of being a fighter pilot. It was also serious. We were preserving our birthright as naval aviators. The first time I went out there south of San Clemente, I was amazed at what I found. Marine A4 Skyhawks, Air National Guard F-86L Interceptors, Air Force F-100 Super Savers, and lots of Navy guys flying F-8 Crusaders. There were even a few other Fords from North Island. The word had spread far beyond the Navy community and the services mixed it up with fierce relish because they all were going through the same institutional evolution

• 44:50Jocko Willink?

  away from air combat that we in naval aviation were experiencing."

• 44:57Jocko Willink?

  This is classic. I learned the ropes that first time out. Pick your opponent, roll up alongside and give the signal. The signal being the bird. So you flip the guy off. That's how you kick this thing off. That's how you initiate it. A smile and a wave and a 45 degree bank and opposite break in opposite directions. A break means we rolled the wings and turned one way. The guy to the left broke 45 degrees left. The guy on the right broke 45 degrees right. We'd extend our way. We'd extend out away from each other for several seconds until we were a few miles distant. Then we began the fight. We turned into each other pushing throttles forward in what to the uninitiated looked like an aerial game of chicken in Mach

• 45:39Jocko Willink?

  1 fighters. Approaching head to head or close to it, two fighters inevitably passed each other close aboard. We called this the merge. Closing somewhere north of a combined 1,000 miles an hour meant the merge is over in mere three seconds. Before a collision, we'd break away, showing our first best move. That was when the hassle began. There was no script for what happened after the merge. We reacted to each other, flying our aircraft as best we could. We learned that power is king. Power gives you the ability to climb above a fight, to re-enter it with even more energy in a diving attack. Power means you can push your bird in a tighter and tighter turn and maintain the airspeed longer. When we had enough and were ready to

• 46:21Jocko Willink?

  admit defeat, maybe our opponent gained position at 6 o'clock and never let go. We wagged our wings, pulled up alongside our opponent and flew wing to wing. Sometimes we smiled unseen behind our oxygen masks and waved. Nice flight, brother. Sometimes we just eyeballed each other, pissed off that somebody had gotten the better of us. Invariably, out there, there was someone a little better than I was. But each time I went out, win or lose, I improved.

• 46:52Jocko Willink?

  How fun was that?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  And they pay you to go too, you know?

• 46:57Jocko Willink?

  And, and it sounds like at this time you had unlimited fuel, unlimited, you do this as much as you possibly wanted to.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The Navy had bought some Douglas Skyraise bat wing airplane, took the guns out, which was a shame. But getting ready for missile stuff, so.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  It wasn't a great carrier airplane because of lateral stability, it was pretty dangerous. Killed a lot of guys on the, on the aircraft carrier during the initial phase of trials with the airplane. So they sent them all to VFAW three and it would climb like nothing you've ever seen. Just cram it and burn her and hang on. The stick was about six inches high, just lock her arm and break them down 30 degrees. Go to 60 degrees, they go to 50,000 feet.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  You know, that's a, that's a neat ticket ride in anybody's book.

• 47:58Jocko Willink?

  Dave, did you have any experience where you, where the, where the Marine Corps didn't know what you were doing? But you were out with a bunch of your friends in the Navy and the Air Force scrapping. And I don't know what the, uh, I don't know what the statute of limitations is on this. And if you can still get in trouble at this time.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  No, I'm safe now. It's not like what, what Yank is talking about, there isn't an illicit thing. What there would be is four guys in a squadron going on the road together.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Squadron, everybody knew where we're going and we would do things very similar to what he talked about is we would, we would do things that patently we weren't supposed to be doing and we're doing with other guys. Now there was a degree of safety in the organizations, the communities had come a long way because of what they learned. But man, we would, I have done a lot of things in an airplane that if I had came back and told my boss I did it, it would have a real problem. And, and more than anything, it's the culture that that generation created. We were smart about safety. We do a lot of things that to keep, you know, to keep the airplanes and us safe. But man, that spirit and that culture, I'm just, I mean, I'm grinning ear to ear listening to this because that's where this all came from, was pushing against the organization. These are things we have to do and look.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  There's a lot of things I wouldn't tell anybody about, you know, while I was doing it, looking back on it now, it's actually kind of fun to think about it, but man, we did some, going on the road, four ship out of Miramar, man, you had a license to steal. It was awesome.

• 49:24Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's, I, you, you mentioned this earlier, which I read, you talked about the naval, naval aviation being the rebel branch of the Navy. And, you know, that attitude right there, if you don't have that rebel attitude, this, these thoughts don't even enter your mind to push the envelope like this.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  You know, you're dealing in human life. You all understand that fully. I know. When you're, every day, it's not just fun flying. It's serious business. It's professional excellence. And you keep building it. You gotta remember, we're talking about the, the Fight Club being illegal in the 58, 59, and 60, 61. And then for the next four years, it was still semi-illegal.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  And then along came A4, which we'll get to in a minute, I'm sure. And, and it became, it was, it was the menu of the day. Hassling was, God, I wish everybody could hassle. You're getting your butt kicked out there in Vietnam. And all the stuff we learned back in the 58, 59, 60, it was easy to sell it.

• 50:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You, you talk about here, you say, I learned the basics of air combat in those hassles. Never lose sight of your opponent. Lose sight, lose the fight. Never go vertical unless you can own it. Meaning you have to have enough pure engine power to blast skyward and leave your opponent unable to follow. Follow you and hammer you from behind. Turning fights are like back alley brawls. When similar aircraft engage like that, the difference is pilot skill and aggressiveness. The winner usually is the one with the most guts to push his aircraft to its aerodynamic limit. In this way, we preserved our perishable skills, our perishable skill sets and kept alive the fading art of the dogfight. The rest of the Navy was letting it slip away

• 51:36Jocko Willink?

  in the early 1960s. I flew whenever I could. Holidays were a great time to hassle because the married guys were at home with their families and the pace of the active and the pace of activity on base relaxed. I was still trying to get over Mary Beth, so I'd climb in a Ford and go look for a good fight. Fight. This is also important. Fighting against different types of planes was useful. It taught me more than fighting against the same type of plane I was piloting. In years, in later years at Top Gun, we would call it dissimilar air combat training, but back in the late 1950s, we didn't have a name for it. We just, we just intuited it based on experience. Each fight with a different type of aircraft, each with its own advantages and weaknesses, taught us how to exploit

• 52:20Jocko Willink?

  our edge and minimize theirs. How did we learn? By losing. Failure is a teacher. Be honest with yourself. Extract the lessons and you'll never make that error again. I spent many long flights back to North Island repaying what I did wrong so that on my next bout in the inter-service Fight Club, I'd bring the heat and win and win. When we founded Top Gun, this part of the experience in Whiskey 291 became a very important component of our culture.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's what my point was. All of a sudden, it wasn't illegal. It's, we need something like this. Can you teach us how? And it worked.

• 53:03Jocko Willink?

  Um, you end up going on deployment.

• 53:09Jocko Willink?

  I'm skipping ahead a little bit. My very first cruise gave me a front row seat to the US Navy Power Projection in Action. Deployed to Westpac, we guarded the sea lanes, trained off the coast of Japan, and flew the flag at various ports of call. Our F-3H Demons intercepted Soviet bombers that periodically dropped down to snoop on us. We chased them as soon as our radars caught them. When the TU-95 Bears took their photos of us, we wanted a demon in the frame. Proving up our ability to destroy them at will was a game we played with the Russians for the entire Cold War. More than once, I watched a Russian gunner wave at me as I snapped pictures through the canopy. Such moments were rare and fleeting, just

• 53:50Jocko Willink?

  two aircrew at the tip of the spear, making momentary personal contact at altitude over the world's largest ocean.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And they usually showed Playboy magazine, which was newer than we had on the carrier. It was a game. You know, the news media now makes it sound so serious. It was a game. They're just competitive. What could you do? One time, I was out, pull up alongside a bear, later on, flying a fowl, and my call sign for my backseater was wart, little guy. And I look in the mirror, and we're sitting right next to this bear, and in the backseat

• 54:38Speaker 01

  is a plastic, pink rabbit. He's inflated rabbit. And the only thing the bear guys can see, and they're all in the back turret back there trying to look over and laughing because he's put a pink rabbit up and he's scrunched down. A little humor, but it was no work.

• 55:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  You've never done anything like that in Marine Corps, did you?

• 55:11Speaker 02

  I was, I was lucky enough to intercept a bear on my first cruise. I have a good, just a legendary shot of me and a hornet up against a bear. Uh, got to intercept an Iranian, I think it was a, kind of their version of the C-130 right on the line there in the Gulf, pull up alongside and, and reliving, or living for the first time, these stories that I'd heard about for, for literally decades, looking out the window of my fighter, at a, at a Iranian, you know, cargo plane, flying, he's on his side of the line, I'm on my side, there's probably, you know, a hundred feet, 200 feet between us, waving, maybe some other hand signals along the way, but tho- those are things that, that, those are pictures I'm in your mind, you'll, I'll never forget those things. The first time I intercepted a bear on an alert seven launch off a carrier,

• 55:53Speaker 02

  just sitting in the cockpit, launch dive, I go 20, you know, 12 minutes later, I'm, I'm, I'm in parade off, off a bear, just thinking, how many times has happened for me, uh, for anybody else before?

• 56:03Speaker 01

  And the bears, they love to come down and go, go fast and ride along the deck of the carrier. They'll make a little pass on the carrier. So you gotta be, you gotta be in the picture.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  You gotta let them know that you have been there the whole time, and only because of you are they getting to do that. So it's, it's a, it's a cool history to, to say I've gotten to do that.

• 56:29Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of always, oh, all business, you say here, "We broke out above the cloud layer at 15,000 feet," and I'm fast forwarding, "No moon, no visible horizon. My demon suffered electrical failure and the lights went out in the cockpit. A wind-powered auxiliary unit was supposed to deploy in such a situation, but that failed as well. There I was, surrounded by absolute darkness, using a 90-degree angled flashlight to periodically check my instruments. I was flying that mission with our squadron executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Joe Polk, who realized my predicament and came to my rescue. Joe seg- signaled to me with his flashlight, "Follow me," and pointed to the Hancock's latest position. It was an eerie sensation flying on his wing in the dark en route to the Hancock's

• 57:11Jocko Willink?

  waiting deck. I forced myself to keep my wings level relative to his wing and belly navigation lights. I used small, precise control inputs made easier by Joe's smooth flying. We broke out of the cloud layer about a mile and a half astern of the ship. We could see the white strobes beckoning us. I continued flying Joe's wing until his lights went out and he turned away to give me a clear shot at the deck. The electrical failure had knocked out my radio, which meant I could not talk to the landing signal officer. All I could do was watch his lights. A green one meant keep coming, flashing reds would be the dreaded wave off, go around and try again. I didn't have enough fuel for that.

• 57:52Jocko Willink?

  So if I missed, I'd have to eject, trusting that someone would find me in the stormy sea. I made it down and felt the tail hook catch one of the deck wires. The demon lurched to a halt. A close call for sure, but it wasn't over. The next night, while flying the same demon, the same thing happened again. I was on Joe's wing and he brought me back to the Hancock for an encore performance. I landed safely after another gut check approach. Perhaps we joked about him saving me twice.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  The interesting point on that, Jaco.

• 58:26Jocko Willink?

  You mean beyond the fact that we landed in the complete darkness?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  You're, you're reading a lot of the book, okay? And, and the next paragraph says, can't figure out, two nights in a row it happened to me. And the airplane flew during the daylight hours successfully with no electrical failure in between the two events. So I started to get spooked a little bit, you know, what, somebody send me a message?

• 58:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and the reason I brought that, or the reason I wanted to read that is, look, it's peacetime, doesn't matter. When you're flying and landing on an aircraft carrier and the weather and mechanical failures, you know, I used to say this about, uh, you know, I would tell the young SEALs, when you go out and do water operations, everything you do is a real world mission. Cause that, the ocean can kill you. If you make a mistake, you die. And I used to say that pre-war, you know, when in the 90s, when I would try to be get guys to make sure they're taking stuff seriously and not gaffing off procedures. And it's the same thing here. I mean, I can't, you know, just this idea.

• 59:33Jocko Willink?

  And I'm pretty sure I know the angled flashlight that you're talking about. It's probably the same, yeah, that piece of crap. You're lucky that thing didn't fail.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  A green one?

• 59:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Put it on the harness. Yeah.

• 59:46Jocko Willink?

  And then the other thought thing I thought was awesome about this was Joe knowing. All right, I'm gonna guide him right in and then I'm gonna black myself out. I'm gonna get out of his way and it's on you and you just, you guys can't even talk, but you know what to do. He knows what to do. The guy that's landing you knows what to do.

• 1:00:05Jocko Willink?

  It's awesome.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  That's naval aviation training.

• 1:00:08Jocko Willink?

  There it is.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Right, Dave?

• 1:00:09Jocko Willink?

  Amen.

• 1:00:13Jocko Willink?

  Go on here. You say Mary Beth had gotten married to her football player. I never tried to win her back. And that was on the, you talk about this, this was on the advice of your mom who said, nope, nope, you let her go. Her marriage was the final nail in the coffin of my wishful thinking. I had let her go. Eventually I met a wonderful girl.

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  Wonderful young woman in Coronado, Maddie, and married her in 1959. A year later, our daughter Dana arrived. My wife and I began a 17-year journey in Navy life with far too much of it spent apart. Flying is a dangerous game of risk and reward. Push too far and you pay the price. Before I joined the Black Lions, I only had to look out for myself and my squadron mates. Different game now. I live for two others who depended on me. Becoming a family man coincided with my first fleet assignment onboard the Hancock. My 1962 deployment lasted from February to November. We got back to the West Coast and started training for the next one, running simulated intercepts in our demons three or four nights a week. On that schedule, even when we were home, we were really not home.

• 1:01:15Jocko Willink?

  Our 1963 deployment began in the spring and be being home, after being home for less than six months. Hugs, goodbyes, tears on cheeks. Dana's little hand pressed into mine. Then back to the ship to manage a long-distance relationship through handwritten letters, voice messages on cassette tapes and an occasional phone call. The second parting for my family was worse than the first. I didn't want to be a stranger to my own daughter, but what choice did I have? The Navy wanted me to go, the Navy needed me to go to the other side of the Pacific. It was my sworn duty to go.

• 1:01:55Jocko Willink?

  After 10 years of flying fighters, now you're on deployment, after 10 years, and I'm fast forwarding. After 10 years of flying fighters, I felt ready and confident. I'd aced the F-4 training at VF-121, the West Coast Replacement Air Group, RAG, for the Phantom community. The squadron prepared all new F-4 crews for their Vietnam deployments. We flew constantly, training hard at our beyond visual range missile intercepts. We even got to shoot at a drone with a sparrow, one of the only times I'd actually fired one of these high-tech weapons. So you guys get the, you're flying an F-4 Phantom now. I think that's my favorite American aircraft. I don't know. Well, matter of fact, I'm, I'm actually sure it is my favorite American aircraft.

• 1:02:39Jocko Willink?

  I guess the second maybe be the Corsair, the World War II Corsair. I mean, obviously, but then you got the P-50, oh, okay. We won't go down, we won't go down that, but you're flying the F-4 Phantom. And that's, once again, this is the, this is like a spacecraft almost.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was beautiful.

• 1:02:59Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's the bird that they have at Pensacola. Did you go to Pensacola, Dave?

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:03:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the bird that they have in like the premier spot at Pensacola. The big giant one sitting where you march by every day. So that's what you're flying, and now you're on deployment. You go to Pearl Harbor for a little while. After a few days in Pearl, we were on our way west to Sasebo, Japan. Our arrival was met by massive protests. Student and radicals opposed to the Vietnam War. When the carrier Orisconny, how do you say that?

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Orisconny.

• 1:03:37Jocko Willink?

  When the carrier Orisconny called at Sasebo around the same time we did, we learned that its air wing had lost half its aircraft over North Vietnam.

• 1:03:48Jocko Willink?

  And it suffered a third of its air crews either killed, wounded, or missing in action. Their casualty list eventually included Lieutenant J.G. John McCain, future Senator from Arizona who was captured in October 1967. Only a few weeks before our ships crossed path, one of the F-8 pilots, Lieutenant Commander Dick Shafer, fought an epic duel against six North Vietnamese MiG-17s and MiG-21s. He had been escorting an A-4 Skyhawk strike when they were attacked. Shafer fired all three of his Sidewinder missiles, but each malfunctioned or missed. When he switched to his 20mm cannon, the high G maneuvering jammed the pneumatic feed system, leaving him defenseless.

• 1:04:33Jocko Willink?

  Nevertheless, he stalemated the MiGs with an exceptional display of flying before slipping away on the dregs of his remaining fuel. Other fighters showed up a moment later and downed one of the MiGs. They fired seven missiles in that fight. Only one hit.

• 1:04:52Jocko Willink?

  So this is where, and you go into, the history in this is awesome. Talking about the weapon systems, talking about the failures. You're talking about, you know, it's not only are the pilots not getting trained the way they should be, but the weapon systems aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. And this idea of intercept fighting was, hey, we're going to stay 12 miles away. I lock on my missile system, I shoot it, and then I run away. And the missile does the job.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Jocko Willink?

  That was the, that was the, that was what the plan was from the Pentagon and from the brass.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  That's, you know, industry designs them and they build them and we fly them what we're given. And each subject that you've read about here is leading up to why Top Gun was formed. In other words, the missiles never worked. They're big, they're expensive.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  How you handle them on the aircraft carrier is another problem. They're all problems. You know, somebody paid for them. They were paid for it and they send them to fleet and they don't work. But in peacetime, you never, you never use them in anger. So you don't know that. And the Phantom was designed one way. Mac built a beautiful airplane. But it was designed as an interceptor. We had never had it in combat. And all these situations that you're talking about led to Top Gun failure. Make it better right now, you know?

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  The timeframe they gave us was two months. Put the graduate school together. We've been doing this for five years of war and it ain't working. So you give you a couple of months, put it graduate school. Initially, the original nine guys or eight guys that were with me. We were trying to figure out whether we were getting sandbagged, you know, whether somebody was setting us up. You blame it on the young guys. They couldn't, they couldn't cut it. Well, it didn't turn out quite that way. So anyhow, go ahead. All I want to make point is a lot of what you're reading is how and why.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Top Gun ended up anywhere about there, so.

• 1:07:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's the way you lay the pieces out of how it comes to fruition is, is, is history that I don't think a lot of people know about.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  No, they only know about the movie, Top Gun's original movie.

• 1:07:37Jocko Willink?

  Uh, there's a little situation, a little scenario that unfolds.

• 1:07:42Jocko Willink?

  In Korea, there's a little, a problem and you end up having to go up there and you arrive on station, going back to the, we arrive on station to face terrible winter weather. We sailed through blizzards and snow squalls that left us unable to see the end of the flight deck from the ship's island. The flight deck turned out to be covered in ice. The crew had to assist us to our F4 Phantom so we didn't slip and fall. Once in the cockpits, we were towed to the catapults so we didn't slide around on the ice. A night cat shot is always an experience. Add snow flurries and heavy seas and you've got a real adventure. We climbed it, once you launch it, we climbed above 20,000 feet but never broke free of the storm. It was so thick that Skank

• 1:08:26Jocko Willink?

  and I couldn't even see each other. My backseater Dennis Duffy tracked him on radar and we followed a few miles behind. Snow and ice lashed our Phantoms. The windscreen was a kaleidoscope of snowflakes. It was like flying through a snow globe. The Enterprise finally vectored us to a holding pattern before we returned to the ship. As our approach time grew near, I thought it's strange that they never gave us a weather report. We started our descents individually through the heart of the blizzard. Visibility was almost nil. Skank went into land first guided by radar from the ship. He saw nothing on that first approach. He saw nothing on that first approach. No lights, no carrier, just blizzard and blackness. The landing signal officer said,

• 1:09:09Jocko Willink?

  "You sounded good when you went by us." When he finally landed, Skank and the landing signal officer talked to me as I swung around the ship again. "Stay low, follow the ship's wake."

• 1:09:22Jocko Willink?

  I got down close to the water as I dared, 40 feet maybe. The flight deck sits at 65 feet off the swells. A red light began flashing in my cockpit, low fuel. This was it. Either land or eject into the frigid seas and see how good our survival suits really were. Our life expectancy in the freezing water was five minutes. No thanks. In the darkness, I found the carrier's white wake and followed it until I spotted the drop lights on the ship's stern ahead. They were above me. The landing signal officer told me to climb. I pulled the nose up as the Phantom's nose topped the ramp. I pushed the stick forward and an instant later, pulled back up. This was an old trick a World War II ace named Zeke Cormier taught me. It saved my mind and Dennis's

• 1:10:05Jocko Willink?

  life that night. The Phantom touched the deck, the tailhook caught in the resting wire, and we jerked to a stop. As we waited for the deck crew to clear us, my knees trembled and my feet shook on the brake pedals. Of all the flying I'd done to this date, this was the most demanding. Why somebody in Washington wanted us in the air that night is anyone's guess. I can't think of what we accomplished in our 90-minute sortie, other than perhaps impress the North Korean radar operators who undoubtedly tracked our progress through the weather. We had risked our lives for nothing. Who are these politicians to play games with our lives?

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  That, that, that sort of mandated operation is, happens far too frequently, even today. You know, they've never been there, they couldn't do it, but they've got the power. And that's a problem I have emotionally. I've tried to think about a book of how to, how to, the military historically has always been subservient to the politicians in Washington. If you look at the entire Vietnam situation, LBJ and McNamara, and the way they, they dictated

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  what we did every day. And it would never, ever, ever convince me that what they were doing was, the end result was to win. We weren't allowed to win.

• 1:11:47Jocko Willink?

  And I kind of breezed through the section in the opening of this, when you're talking about the fact that you guys are hitting targets that you're getting from the White House, from the Pentagon. That's, that's who's doing your target selection. Totally crazy.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  They're coming from McNamara's office. We'd find out, they'd come in on the wire about midnight. The ships, people would put out an airplane for the next day. But the targets were being dictated from Washington. And even since then, it come out that there's been testimony that that same target list was sent to the Swiss Embassy. And the Swiss Embassy had related to the North Vietnamese. The logic in DC was if they know where we're coming,

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  we won't be so much collateral damage done. And there's a pretty good case that that actually happened. Can you imagine? Imagine risking your life every day.

• 1:13:03Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, the North Vietnamese, they don't care about civilians getting killed. They care about their MiGs.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Well, that's right.

• 1:13:10Jocko Willink?

  And they actually want civilians to get killed because then they can use that as propaganda against America.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  We could never, Jaco, we could never understand how the next day we'd go into targets and they'd have moved the mobile SAM sites and AAA that were all on wheels. And they'd move them into the targets that we were going to hit. And that's why I think you'll hear from most of the veterans of flu out there. It's probably the toughest air defenses someone they've ever gone against.

• 1:13:45Jocko Willink?

  You know, you go into it a little bit here. I gotta read this part. It says, conceived in Washington by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and approved by President Johnson, our bombing campaign was meant not to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war. It wasn't designed to demolish their air defense network so we could operate over North Vietnam with impunity. It had nothing to do with tangible results or victory. It had everything to do with sending gradual messages to Hanoi. Where I had expected to be the tip of the spear, we were instead the thumb and forefinger of Lyndon Johnson's gradual escalation of pressure on the North Vietnamese. We weren't allowed to apply pressure anywhere that it might hurt. We were only allowed just to pinch their metaphorical shoulder as a warning that if they didn't behave, we would pinch harder.

• 1:14:31Jocko Willink?

  What Rolling Thunder Campaign was, the Rolling Thunder Campaign was LBJ's personal billy club. He would send us to smack the North Vietnamese for sending supplies and troops to the insurgents, then order unilateral stand downs, known as bombing pauses, to give the North Vietnamese time to internalize the punishment and heed its lesson. But the pauses just gave them time to rearm. The American response seemed only to embolden Hanoi and convince its leadership that we were more worried about the widening war and possibly fighting China or the Soviet Union than we were about defeating them. They used the bombing pauses to resupply and prepare for the next onslaught. A lot of Americans died as a result. Some were friends of mine.

• 1:15:15Jocko Willink?

  On Yankee Station, the Enterprise air wing learned that this, what this meant to individual air crews, Johnson and McNamara, micromanaged the losing air war from Washington DC, going so far as to pick our targets. There were perhaps 150 worthwhile things to bomb in North Vietnam. Airfields, military bases, supply facilities, power plants, bridges, rail centers, oil and lubricant facilities, a few steel mills, and of course, Haiphong's port facilities. Am I saying that right? Haiphong? As both China and Russia wanted to be Hanoi's primary alley, they each tried to one up each other with military support. Large convoys of weapons and war materiel flowed across the Chinese border to Vietnam.

• 1:15:57Jocko Willink?

  While the Russians heavy hauled tanks and surface-to-air missiles, systems via ships, into the Haiphong Harbor. The enemy thus had sanctuary to bring in whatever was needed for years. Afraid of escalating the war, the Johnson administration refused to sanction attacks on Haiphong Harbor or the shipping there. As we started to fly missions up north, we would pass those cargo ships as they waited their turn to offload at the docks. We could see their decks crammed with weatherized MiGs and surface-to-air missiles that would be shortly used against us, but we couldn't hit them.

• 1:16:37Jocko Willink?

  And we couldn't mine the harbor either. What a tragedy. The simple execution of an off-the-shelf aerial mining plan, long before perfected during World War II and carried out in three days, could have shut down that big port, the only one of its kind in North Vietnam. But the word from the White House was no. Those big surface-to-air missiles, as large as telephone poles, would spear up into the sky after our airport, homing on their radar signatures. They took a heavy toll. We could seldom bomb the missile sites for fear we might kill their Russian advisors. When the North Vietnamese began flying Russian and Chinese-built MiG fighters, the Navy and Air Force asked Washington for permission to bomb their airfields. The request was

• 1:17:20Jocko Willink?

  denied. Categories of targets that could not be struck under any circumstances included dams, hydroelectric plants, fishing boats, sam pans, and houseboats. They also included significantly populated areas. Seeing the military value of these restrictions, the North Vietnamese placed most of their SAM support facilities and other valuable cargo near Hanoi and Haiphong, places where we were forbidden to strike.

• 1:17:47Jocko Willink?

  The airfields around Hanoi became sanctuaries for MiGs. The Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, who had overall responsibility for the air war, urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to lift the crippling restrictions. Meanwhile, the enemy fighter pilots could sit on their runways in their planes without fear of attack, waiting to scramble when our bombers showed up.

• 1:18:13Jocko Willink?

  Eventually, Johnson and McNamara caved to the pressure and allowed strikes on the airfields. Yet they micromanaged even this, picking specific airfields and leaving others out of bounds. It was always necessary to virtually beg target authorization out of Washington. "Bit by piece," Admiral Sharp wrote. Instead of letting the Navy launch a blitz that might break the back of the North Vietnamese Air Force, "we hit a few airbases at a time while leaving the rest unscathed."

• 1:18:50Jocko Willink?

  And I gotta read this too. It was a setup for failure, you say, and it got a lot worse. Those rules of engagement negated the way we had trained to fight in the air. The value of our F-4 Phantoms was their ability to destroy airplanes, enemy planes from beyond visual range. The AIM-7 Sparrow was the ultimate expression of that new way of fighting. Track and lock with the radar system, loose the missile from 10 miles out and say goodbye to the MiG. This is how the Navy trained us to fight. We abandoned dogfight training because of the Navy's faith in missile technology. Most of our air crews didn't know how to fight any other way. Yet our own rules of engagement kept us from using what we were taught.

• 1:19:32Jocko Willink?

  The rules of engagement specifically prohibited firing from beyond visual range. To shoot a missile at an aircraft, a fighter pilot needed to first visually confirm it was a MiG and not a friendly plane. The thought of an inadvertent or accidental shoot down of our brothers was of course intolerable. It did happen sadly in the heat of combat. Yet, three years along, the training squadron in California was still teaching long-range intercept tactics to the exclusion of everything else. Our training was not applicable to the air war in Vietnam. This played directly into the kind of the fight the MiG pilots wanted. The MiG-17 was a nimble fighter, armed with cannons, but no missiles. It was an old school derived from the Soviet lessons learned in the Korean War.

• 1:20:17Jocko Willink?

  With such a plane, the North Vietnamese needed to get in close and track our planes with their gun sights. They would sometimes wait to open fire until they were within 600 feet. Here we were, trained to knock planes down at 10 miles. The F-4 carried only missiles. It did not have an internal gun because contractors in the Pentagon believed the age of the dogfight was over. We brought our expensive, high-tech into this knife fight in a phone booth. The result, the MiG pilots scored a lot more heavily than they should have.

• 1:20:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  It's a good read.

• 1:20:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and again, I'm even when I'm reading chunks like that, I'm skipping over sections, you know, just to but the the history and you know, from a leadership perspective, this is a nightmare. It's a nightmare that that there's no connection from the people that are making decisions to the folks that are on the front line fighting. They're not listening to feedback. It's a disaster.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Their motives are their motives are different.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  You know, I really have thought about a book. I'm not good enough to write it, I don't think. But you've got the you've got industry building weapons, whatever they are airplanes, fire control systems, everything, the industries building them. What's their motive? Profit. And the good of American weapons. Okay, I'll give them that. But mainly profit motive. Then you can keep coming down. The politicians, we know what their motives are like.

• 1:21:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  And you come down to the the poor guy who's wanting a machine. If it doesn't do the job that's required in the operational scenario you're involved in, you're gonna lose. And losing is second best in tactics.

• 1:22:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and losing is dying.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  That's right. Exactly.

• 1:22:20Jocko Willink?

  You know, the other thing, and I've I I go after Robert McNamara a lot. You say this Robert McNamara was a numbers numbers guy. And this is the thing, there's there's there's secondary effects, there's tertiary effects that happen when people are motivated by certain, certain, certain metrics.

• 1:22:43Jocko Willink?

  So here's what happens. Uh, Robert McNamara was a numbers guy. Under him, the Pentagon measured success in the ground war by the body count.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Can you believe that?

• 1:22:51Jocko Willink?

  In the air, the metric was, in the air, the metric was the number of sorties flown over North Vietnam. One sortie equals one plane flying one mission. A 10-plane raid resulted in 10 sorties. This became a delusional world. A sortie counted in the total, even if our bombers were forced to dump their payloads, payloads short of the target, which often happened when MiGs appeared. Facing pressure to generate sorties, the carriers were worn and ragged. Aircraft handling crews worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off, spotting and respoting the decks, launching strikes, recovering aircraft, arming and refueling, refueling the birds, racing to meet the sortie rate required of them. Each pilot flew twice a

• 1:23:35Jocko Willink?

  day, with each mission taking several hours to brief and debrief. We flew to the edge of fatigue and beyond. Aviators who were shot down and recovered were back in action in a few short days.

• 1:23:50Jocko Willink?

  While the tempo took a heavy toll, it also led to the needless tragedies, including major fires aboard our carriers, the results of exhausted crews making mistakes. Scores of sailors and aviators died in those accidents, and the fires on two carriers were serious enough to risk the loss of the ship. We were losing good men needlessly in the push to maintain the sortie rate. Why competition between services? With the Air Force and Navy battling furiously for appropriations, both were determined to outdo the sorties the other flew.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, to put it in perspective for your audience, I want to tell you a story. The skank that's in there in the story was up during the rescue of the Pueblo, and skank Remsen is, was the squadron commander. It's a front row guy, never took a mission.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  That he wouldn't lean, and if they were tough, he was always there. It's why we were out together. And on that particular. Now, we're back down in Vietnam during that same cruise. And he's, I wasn't with him this day, but this tells you the quality of the guy in the naval aviation. He's in over the beach in North Vietnam, and he's at low altitude, and a rifle shot goes through the cockpit and gets a fleshy part of his legs, both legs, went through, come out the other side, lodged in the console on the left side.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  So, he's shot up in two legs. He reaches down, pulls the garters up. The garters hold for the ejection seat. There's straps that go around your calves. He brings them up. He tourniquets both legs above his wounds, flies 140 miles back to the Enterprise, and lands aboard. Okay? This is T.S. Remsen, Skank Remsen, the squadron commander. He lands aboard, the medics get him out of the cockpit, take him down, the docs sew him up. Two weeks later, Jaco, he was back in combat flying with his squadron.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  He refused to be medevaced. And there are plenty of them out there like him. And I know in your world, both of you, that you come out of, there are plenty of guys like that. The great Americans, but they are poorly officiated up above them in many instances. And when you get into, when you hit the part about how Top Gun was put together, we were exposed to guys like this. We knew what the answers needed to be. Some of them intuitively we knew, but some of them came from Geno Valencia, Alex Ver

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Eshu, Tex O'Neill, Skank Remsen, mentoring. You know, we knew what the goddamn answers were, and they sure weren't sitting in the E-ring in the Pentagon or in Congress.

• 1:27:15Jocko Willink?

  You know, in this, in this section here, you kind of detail that the, the, the chapter title is Yankee Station Education. And it gives a good overview. And again, I'm jumping ahead of some of the information you cover, but you say, "Day after day, we flew missions from Yankee Station to hammer targets of questionable value. We bombed truck convoys when we could find them on search and destroy mission. They moved mostly at night in total darkness. We bombed supply depots and occasionally went after power plants as well as military barracks, long flattened by the squadrons who have deployed before us. We went after bridges and SAM sites. Very occasionally, we received permission from Washington to hit MiG airfields around Hanoi. The F-4 was designed from the ground up to be a Mach Plus interceptor.

• 1:27:58Jocko Willink?

  It was supposed to be the bane of all Soviet-built strategic bombers. Over Vietnam, the Phantom became perhaps the most versatile, multi-role aircraft America has ever produced. Still, with its interceptor heart, it functioned as an escort fighter, a utility strike bomber, and, south of the demilitarized zone, a close air support aircraft. We were doing it all, learning on the job how to best carry out our missions. They were never the same. But it, but the two-a-days over the north, usually one at night, left us worn out. The lack of quality sleep also put our nerves on edge at times. We grew easily frustrated. Some people started to withdraw under the pressure. The exhaustion, the grief over losing so many friends. This didn't happen in my squadron.

• 1:28:43Jocko Willink?

  Skank and the other senior pilots set the example by flying almost all the difficult missions with the junior crews while never griping about the targets or the rules of engagement. They were great pilots as well as tremendous inspirations to all of us. Skank kept us focused and working as a team, taking care of each of us as we flew daily into harm's way. In our air wing, all the squadrons were led by example. It wasn't always that way as some other outfits experienced. We were losing guys to SAMs, FLAC, and even MiGs, whose pilots, well-directed by radar, would launch slashing attacks into our formations. At the end of January, the North Vietnamese Army launched a major attack against a series

• 1:29:23Jocko Willink?

  of special forces outposts and the marine fire base at Khe Son, which sat up on top of a flat-topped hill with all sides exposed. We launched late that afternoon and flew 200 miles to our marshalling station above Khe Son. With the battle filling the surrounding valleys with gray-black smoke, we had only glimpses of what was happening below. The airfield was a scene of carnage. Burnt-out aircraft laid, pushed to a side of the runway, victims of mortar barrages. The base itself looked like a lunar landscape, with thousands of shell craters overlapping in the reddish, soft soil. I checked in with the marine forward air controller, whose job it was to guide us onto target.

• 1:30:05Jocko Willink?

  He was down there, right amongst those young American kids, enduring the artillery barrages and night assaults alongside them. With his radios and expertise, he was their fist of God. He was probably a marine aviator as well, so he spoke our language and understood our perspective. The forward air controller heard my check-in radio call and responded immediately. The situation sounded dire from his description. North Vietnamese troops were massing just beyond the wire for another night assault, and he wanted me to hit thing with everything under my wings before darkness gave them the opportunity to attack again. The late day offered a rare cloudless sky. The blue stretching above me contrasted with the ugly coils of smoke and flame filling the valley under my Phantom's nose.

• 1:30:47Jocko Willink?

  After receiving my instructions, I started down to begin my run. "Keep your speed up, 500 knots, 400 feet, they'll be shooting at you," called the forward air controller. "Drop all your snakes on my signal. Remember, there are Marines on the wire, just off your left wing." I leveled off at 400 feet, going 500 knots. The Phantom sped through the clouds of smoke. From the hills to our right, small arms fire erupted. In my backseater, Dennis Duffy and I could see the muzzle flashes. Moments later, red-orange tracers laced the sky ahead of us and leveled with us. With my high speed, I wasn't so concerned with taking hits from the North Vietnamese troops on the right of us, whose tracers were horizontal.

• 1:31:28Jocko Willink?

  But I was terrified of blowing the run and dropping my snakes on the Marines near the wire by accident. Earlier, an inexperienced Navy pilot did just that by accident and wounded some of our men. The idea of killing Americans with a misplaced bomb, well, I knew I would never get over that if it happened. I listened carefully to every word the forward air controller said. If I wasn't exactly level, the bombs might fall right or left of the target area, depending on where my wings were to the horizon. Holding steady while every bad guy with an AK-47 seemed to be shooting at me was no easy feat. In fact, it was the toughest flying I'd ever done. I checked my heading. Wings level. A second later, the forward air controller called, "Drop, drop, drop."

• 1:32:13Jocko Willink?

  I pickled the Mk-82s. The F4 lurched upward as 6,000 pounds of bombs came off our hard points and began falling toward the ground. Simultaneously, I pushed the throttle further and lit the burner. The Phantom's twin J-79 engines responded, and we pulled with 5Gs back to where we belonged, far above the fray. Duff, my backseater, said, "Let's haul ass, Kimosabe." As we climbed, my throat constricted, heart filled with dread, while we waited to hear from the forward air controller. Toughest part of the mission is waiting for the results from the big grunt fac. Oh shit, did I just kill a bunch of Marines? No word from the air controller. The altimeter needle spun as we seared through 3,000 feet. The seconds ticked off.

• 1:32:58Jocko Willink?

  No word. Behind me, Dennis was twisted in his ejection seat, trying to see where our bombs landed. Oh shit. The radio filled with static. Then, the forward air controller's voice shouted, "Great run, great run, right on target." The Marines held and as a joint army navy or as a joint army marine and South Vietnamese rescue force battled up its way, its way up highway nine to break the siege, the Enterprise air wing returned to its regularly scheduled programming over North Vietnam. We flew that day and night, we flew day and night in any kind of weather. We flew Alpha strikes, which were large unwieldy raids of thirty or more planes. We F4s provided escort against the MiG threat or went to suppress air defenses while A4

• 1:33:43Jocko Willink?

  Skyhawk attack planes struck targets. We flew two and four plane armed recy missions, searching for anything worthwhile Washington allowed us to bomb. Yeah, I mean, there's not a person that knows anything about the military that hasn't heard about K-Song, the siege at K-Song. And wow, that's a, that's a, that's a crazy story from your perspective, hearing it from your end.

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was so desperate. The siege was so bad by that time. They actually brought us in, you know, the Marines at Tulane to name were, were flying close air support to them and we didn't do that much of it, Navy guys. But it was, I had seen pictures of it, the recy pictures and so forth, reconnaissance and, but to see it up close and then hear some guys down there on the wire with the guys who had endured a night, major night advance by the North Vietnamese a couple of days before.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a serious business.

• 1:34:55Jocko Willink?

  Dave, you got the, you got to, you got to experience that. The, how good does it feel when you're on the ground and you're talking to somebody and you know, you know what to say, you speak their language and then when you're in the air and you hear that person's voice and you go, all right, I got, I got you.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  I mean, listening to this is just, I mean, I'm kind of choked up just hearing you tell the story. I got, I was, I was so lucky in my career to spend so much great time flying, but that I got to live with Jaco's guys for about six months.

• 1:35:32Jocko Willink?

  In Ramadi.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  In Ramadi on the other side. And, and I remember being told, Yank, that we would, that type one cast was dead. I remember being told, you'll never do it. In some, in some of the same institutional things you dealt with and to be down there, talking to my old squadron mates, doing type one gun runs in, in situations that I never thought I'd be in, but how good it felt to do something that, to be honest with you, I didn't really want to be doing, but to be down there and have guys that I knew from my old squadrons coming in doing gun runs. And when those missions were over and to go back and think, man, like you said, I mean, the serious business, the, the, the fact that the Marine Corps let me do that, there was a lot of me that didn't really want to, but that was the most powerful thing I

• 1:36:17Speaker 02

  ever did in my 23 year career, was use aircraft as a fact to keep soldiers, Marines and SEALs alive, which to this day.

• 1:36:25Jocko Willink?

  How long were you on the ground during?

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  I didn't, I was a fact for one year. I did seven months in Ramadi, about six of it was with Jaco's team.

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  Hey, listen, Yank, don't take for one second that I want you to think that what that story I just told was my life. Please don't.

• 1:36:42Jocko Willink?

  And don't think that anything we did was remotely comparable to, you know, what the guys in Kason and what the guys in Vietnam, you know, we, we, you know, just not comparable. It's just not comparable.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  It's not.

• 1:36:55Jocko Willink?

  Dave and I and the rest of the guys at Echelon Front spend a lot of time talking about the fact that our combat experience is, it's a real stretch to use the word combat experience when you compare it to a lot of the guys I've had on this podcast and a lot of, you know, and, and obviously hundreds of thousands of, of service men and women that have done things infinitely harder and, and more dangerous and with what much more sacrifice than anything that we did. And that's why we just try and, you know, capture some of the lessons. I understand, but I also believe the most humble.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Most humble, whether you're flying, whether you're a SEAL or a grunt in the Corps, the most humble are usually the best warriors. I really find that in naval aviation. You know, Remsen never would ever, you'd never, even in the bar at night, you'd never hear Remsen tell that story about himself. They're humble guys, but they're great Americans.

• 1:38:04Jocko Willink?

  Indeed.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  And that's the same way, you know, you get down, I listened and I looked at a lot of your podcasts. A single event in your life, you're Jaco or you're David, a single event can get you killed. Every event that you were involved in in your time in the service is important. You made it through that single event, you go on to the next one. And that's why, well, we'll get into it, but that's how the brotherhoods, you know why we Top Gun guys all called each other bro? There were original nine bros, and we're coming to that.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  But out of that grew 600 bros. And he's one of them. And that's because they deal in each other's life, day after day after year after year, if they're good.

• 1:39:05Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  Now you've heard my lecture.

• 1:39:09Jocko Willink?

  Well, that was, you know, and I just kind of rattled off all the different types of missions that you guys were doing, and I'm gonna fast forward a little bit here. It says, "The missions continued as did the losses. There were nights I got back to my bunk struggling with despair. Seeing friends die is never an easy thing. At times you think you grow hard to it. Other times their deaths open wounds that the heart simply cannot heal. On those nights I would crawl under the covers and lay there unable to sleep despite my exhaustion, mind racing."

• 1:39:47Jocko Willink?

  Could we have done anything different? Could he have gotten out and we just didn't see the shoot? Fortunately, none of them were from my squadron. I tried not to think about their families back, back home, but the faces of wives and kids would sometimes elude those efforts and they would come back to me in a rush. I found through my Navy career that some men revel in the challenge and rush of combat. That pace of off Vietnam, it was their hunting ground. Me, I never got to that point. Combat was a responsibility, even a sacred duty. I took it very seriously, of course, but I never liked it. Those men I would never see again, those families I would see too soon again. They were the cost of all that adrenaline rush others craved.

• 1:40:30Jocko Willink?

  That was a burden I couldn't carry and love at the same time. The enemy always had a say. And that was the wild card in combat. You could do everything right. Your division could do everything right. Your chain of command could make every decision and lead from the front like Skank did. Yet we faced cunning, devoted, and frankly courageous enemy who found ways to surprise us with new tricks. On those sleepless nights, my brain refusing to shut off, I would think of those empty wardroom chairs. We lost some excellent pilots. All the talent in the world was not enough when fate called your number.

• 1:41:11Jocko Willink?

  You close this section out saying, "In those sleepless nights, which most of us out on Yankee Station had, we did our best not to think of home." It could make you cautious, hesitant in the air, get you killed. If you were wise, you never looked past the next dawn. Some combat vets would tell the new guys, "Assume you're never coming back. Truly believe it and you will make it home." It was a psychological paradox of battle.

• 1:41:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's a weird, there's a weird challenge, right? For a grunt, you're there. You're there. You're sleeping in the dirt. You're in danger. You're just, you just, you get a use to it. You get numb to it. It's the reality. For you guys, to be back safe on an aircraft carrier, and then load into your aircraft and launch, that's a different psych- and frankly, thinking about the guys that you lose, you have less time to do that on the ground. You know, you're not, you're actively engaged. And even we come back to base, we're planning for the next mission and you know you're going out.

• 1:42:30Jocko Willink?

  But for you guys, like, you know, even if you do two missions, even if it takes you 12 hours, you got 12 more hours in that day you gotta deal with. And that's a different, it's a different psychological challenge, I think. And the way you described it, it sounded like a different psychological challenge. And I will say, for me, the hardest part of

• 1:42:53Jocko Willink?

  doing a mission is waiting to go. You know, that's the only time where I'd be like, alright, what, you know, what? That's when my mind would start to race of did I think of everything? What could go wrong? That's, once you're on the mission, you're in the zone, you know? You're, I'm not, I'm not thinking about anything but getting the job done. But the hours before, four hours before, and you guys were in the perpetual cycle of waiting to go and not knowing if it was gonna be your time or not.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  Well, that's the profession in naval aviation. Nightcare landings always are exciting.

• 1:43:35Jocko Willink?

  And you had an opportunity to get a MiG, but it didn't work out. What happened with that one?

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  Oh, Remsen and I and two other guys were vectored in hot, ready to shoot. And I follow my leader at 12 miles. We're all locked up. I got good ready lights, ready to fire. And it was very rare that we didn't, we weren't bound by the rules of engagement. We were cleared to fire 12 miles. Remsen decides, I'm going to sweeten the pot. So we go to 10 miles, 8 miles. And about 10 miles, we're going pretty fast, you know what I mean?

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  We get the call, salvo, salvo, salvo, from a Red Crown, which was the offshore air controller. And salvo means get out of there. And they don't specify why. So Remsen, we cross, turned, turned away and let, let these MiG-21s, which were coming down the pipe at us, we had to, we had to not fire. Now, two things could have happened. They could have been friendly. Red Crown's made mistakes on occasion. It's radar interpretation at some distance. So that was the immediate reaction.

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  And then we hear, honest to God, they heard it, the thunder go over the top. There's a rolling thunder going over the top. And the Long Beach had fired Talos missiles. And it shot them right over the top of us. You talk about being angry. We got back to the boat and landed and found out what it was. And they shot down one and got a probable on a second MiG-21, which belonged to Remsen and Peterson.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  You know, it's a, it's a crap shoot.

• 1:45:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  You know, on a given day, do you get a chance that you train in years for? And that wasn't our day, so you go on, get ready for the next day, like you say.

• 1:46:02Jocko Willink?

  Eventually, you get to this point, and again, I'm fast forwarding through stories and details and personnel, just awesome history.

• 1:46:15Jocko Willink?

  You get to this point, we were worn out, beat up, and bitter. Between the end of February and the end of June, our 100-man air wing had lost 13, killed or captured, 10 bombers, an F-4, and a vigilante reconnaissance plane. Something was very, very wrong. If we were going to regain the dominance that was Naval Aviation's birthright, we would need to make changes. My orders were cut. I had been assigned to the Phantom Fleet Replacement Squadron at Naval Air Station Miramar. As luck would have it, there, in the bustling enclave of Fighter Squadron 121, I would have the chance to help solve our costly, tragic problem.

• 1:47:01Jocko Willink?

  So you get to Miramar.

• 1:47:04Jocko Willink?

  Fall 1968. Fighter Town, USA. That's the longstanding nickname of the Naval Air Station, whose Spanish name, Miramar, doesn't even seem to suit the place. There's no view of the sea from its location 15 miles north of San Diego, 5 miles in from the coast. At least not until you've gone wheels up and you're flying west on that air controller's, what the air controllers call a "seawolf departure." No, the unofficial nickname painted on Hangar 1 is a much better fit. On the runways, ramps, and taxiways of the sprawling complex, the shriek of jet engines and the smell of aviation fuel is constant. If my love of flight had been tested by war, I still never shook the habit of lifting my eyes to the sky whenever a jet roared overhead. Who was it? How was he doing? What's going on?

• 1:47:48Jocko Willink?

  As an instructor, it was my job to keep track of my nuggets. When I parked my Seabag at Miramar again, this time to serve as a tactics instructor at Fighter Squadron 121, I found the pace of daily life clipping along at a fast wartime tempo. The whole west coast naval shore establishment had ramped up to support the war in Vietnam, and VF-121 was hauling a heavy load. I was an instructor in the advanced tactics phase of the squadron. A good man, Lieutenant Commander Sam Leeds was the head of tactics.

• 1:48:21Jocko Willink?

  What kept, and again, I'm jumping through some stuff here. What kept us from pushing the aerodynamic limits? Cause you talk about what you guys were doing to train and then you kind of have a caveat that you weren't pushing as hard as you wanted to. What kept us from pushing the aerodynamic limits was the risk aversion that commonly afflicts training. The worst thing we could do as far as our higher headquarters was concerned was lose a plane. So twice, so twice a day, I took, when I took new Phantom pilots and their back seaters up to fly, we played it safe. We did air combat maneuvering or ACM, but always within strict safety parameters. As a result, the program lacked combat realism. The first time rag pilots saw the radical maneuvers that modern jets were capable of,

• 1:49:06Jocko Willink?

  or sorry, the first time a rag pilots saw the radical maneuvers that modern jets were capable of, tracers were flying. Their eyes had not been opened. That's not how you want to send a young man after, off to war. So you guys are training within some pretty strict confines. And it's crazy to think that the first time a guy's really going to be able to test his, to, to maximize the maneuverability and the, and the capability of the aircraft is going to be in combat. It's ridiculous.

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  Been doing it for five years.

• 1:49:41Jocko Willink?

  Luckily, not long after my arrival in late December, Sam Leeds called me into his office and showed me a thick document bound in a blue cover. It was a study issued by the Naval Air Systems Command. Its title, "Report of the Air-to-Air Missile System Capability Review", hardly sounded like a blockbuster. But this study, produced by Captain Frank Alt, the captain of the Coral Sea, was an impressive consequential piece of work. About 200 pages long, it was a top to bottom exploration of the reasons for our failure in air-to-air combat over North Vietnam. Captain Alt's project had been a long time coming. It began in the summer of 1968 when he led a team that tackled the problem of the Sparrow missile.

• 1:50:21Jocko Willink?

  Building on that and other studies, he pulled in more than 200 people to a symposium at the Naval Air Missile Test Center at Point Mugu, north of Los Angeles. There were pilots, commanders and managers and technicians from Raytheon, Westinghouse, McDonnell Douglas, all the mater fighter weapons contractors. No one had put together the entire picture of the problem like Alt had. It was the first time the whole air combat system, our fighters, their missiles, and fire control systems had been studied holistically, from design and acquisition to operations and logistics. Alt wanted to understand weapon systems from the womb to the tomb, as he liked to say. His conclusions were far-reaching. Sam Leeds called my attention

• 1:51:06Jocko Willink?

  to one particular recommendation in the report. He flipped to page thirty-seven and pointed to the eleventh of the fifteenth items listed in paragraph six, aircrew training. It was there that Alt advised the chief of naval operations and the commander of Naval Air Forces Pacific to establish as early as possible an advanced fighter weapons school at NAS Miramar for both the F-8 and the F-4. These were the words that gave birth to Top Gun.

• 1:51:40Jocko Willink?

  Sam and I knew that any Miramar-based tactics training program would run through us. He looked at me and said, "Dan, why don't you take it?" I suppose this was generous of him. He had both experience and seniority over me. He could have led the effort himself, but he had already had a great job waiting for him. He was in the final running to command the first fighter squadron that would fly the new F-14 Tomcat. Sam could have easily taken the assignment to start a new schoolhouse, to start the new schoolhouse, and then he handed it off to me when his time came to fly the F-14s. But he felt the school should have the same leadership from the beginning for continuity's sake, he said as much and strongly. It was settled then and there. I made a quick, fateful decision. I'd do it. And you're what, a lieutenant commander right now, at this point?

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  Thirty-one years old, lieutenant commander. I was probably going, I'm about fifty years old, tired, fatigued, but that's a great opportunity. I mean, that is, that is the best gift in your career somebody give you. Yeah. Frank Alt, the Alt Report, Marvel's document, unsolicited. He did that on his own. It wasn't asked for. He told us what was wrong in detail, but he never taught them. God bless him. He never mandated what to do about it. He just said, "I want to graduate school."

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  "It's a get well program in the shortest amount of time." Somebody in endorsing it when it was approved and sent to 121, they put, "Yeah, and do it in two months." "And we don't have any, we don't have any space for you. We don't have a building. We don't have any airplanes. I don't have any support people. But you got two months to make the school and teach the first class." "Now, this is a graduate school, Taco." "This is not what we've been teaching for five years."

• 1:53:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:50Speaker 01

  Can you, can you imagine the confrontation you're gonna get from the existing squadron commanders out in the fleet?

• 1:53:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and this, these are oh five, the squadron commanders at this time, were they oh five commanders?

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:02Jocko Willink?

  So you're junior to all these guys.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:54:04Jocko Willink?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  We, we all know what that's like.

• 1:54:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You say, "Soon we started calling the school Top Gun." We weren't the first to use this nickname. There was an annual weapons competition that used the same name until about 1958. The aircraft carrier Ranger, which I would later command, called itself the Top Gun of the Pacific Fleet.

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  You can't, you can't write everyday Navy fighter weapon school. You gotta have a nickname. And Top Gun just seemed to work.

• 1:54:37Jocko Willink?

  That's it.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  And they liked it.

• 1:54:44Jocko Willink?

  You had to, you know, you, the goal of Top Gun wasn't just to teach pilots. But to make those pilots kind of into teachers themselves.

• 1:54:54Speaker 01

  Oh, that's the, that's the answer. It's like a, like a teacher's college. In other words, you gotta teach people that are going out to the fleet. In the solicitation we did, in the initial solicitation to bring in students, said, send your two best, the two best nuggets, or lieutenants or below, from your squadron. And of course, some of the, some of the reaction, we don't want to put it on tape here. But, but the idea was those two guys would come back, we'd form a cat.

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  In about six weeks, we'd teach in graduate school, and they'd go back out, and they'd teach their entire squadron the new tactics. So, it was colorful.

• 1:55:50Jocko Willink?

  You, uh, the lore behind this is awesome. You, you, you go into selecting the first, original eight, you call them. And I, I, I have to at least just kind of run through some of the highlights. The stories you got behind these guys are awesome. Uh, Mel Holmes, the first round pick by anybody's book. One time Mel was golfing at base, and of course in Marimar, he hit a drive into the weeds. That was bad news for the nest of rattlesnakes he walked into while looking for his ball. When his buddies saw him hacking away with his seven irons, slaughtering those serpents in the grass, Holmes had his nickname, Rattler.

• 1:56:28Jocko Willink?

  He had one trait in spades that I strongly doubt is teachable, a bone-deep, hardwired, electric fire sense of aggression. I chose John "Smash" Nash for the way his heart and mind worked together. Any suggestion that a mismatch was at hand triggered his competitive, his competitive fire. His motto, "I'd rather die than lose, bore it out." Most combat pilots were, are wired that way. What made, what made Nash special was the way he combined that fire with hyper attention to detail. Jim Rollefsen, is my saying that right? Jim Rollefsen probably put out more intellectual wattage than any of us. Jerry Sawatsky, or Ski Bird as I called him,

• 1:57:11Jocko Willink?

  had played linebacker for Bear Bryant at Alabama. We appreciated it, appreciated him for being as reliable as gravity. And then, so there's your pilots and then without a good backseater, you get into the, the, uh, the Rios. At the head of the pack was J.C. Smith, who I invited right away. He might've been the finest Rio there ever was. You also had Jim Hawkeye, Hawkeye Lang, is that right?

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Jimmy Lang, San Diego.

• 1:57:38Jocko Willink?

  A youngster, just 23 years old, so quiet in person, you'd never know he was a tiger in the rear seat. During his two combat tours in Vietnam, flying from the Kitty Hawk, he and his pilot named, flamed a MiG 17 in a wild fight near Haifeng Harbor. Lang survived two ejections in barely a month.

• 1:58:01Jocko Willink?

  Uh, our other, I can't, I don't even know what to say about surviving two ejections in a month. That's just crazy.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  You'd like to meet him. It'd be a good interview.

• 1:58:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, he's obviously open invite. Whenever he wants, I'll be standing by.

• 1:58:17Jocko Willink?

  Our other Smith, Steve, had all the ascensions of a top-grade Rio that stood apart from everybody for his skills as a salesman, organizer, and grifter for all seasons. Our junior Rio, Lieutenant, junior grade, Daryl Gary, was the youngest man in our cadre of founders. He had every attribute I wanted instructor, mature beyond his years, confident beneath his years, and very hardworking. Last find was Chuck Hildebrandt, and he was an intel guy.

• 1:58:44Jocko Willink?

  So you brought him to help you guys with the intel side of figuring out what other aircraft consisted of, what they're capable of, the whole nine yards.

• 1:58:52Speaker 01

  Wanted to become the, a central repository of tactical aviation within Navy. Navy had none of that. They were classified at all. It's over at CIA, CIA headquarters up to that point. So I wanted to build it and it, it works that way now.

• 1:59:11Jocko Willink?

  And you guys, basically, did you basically steal a trailer for this organization?

• 1:59:16Speaker 01

  That's a great story. You'll love it. You know, we're, we're just busting our hump to get, get ready in, in two months and, and you know, there's no op order for this. There's no plan. It's winging it, you know, whatever, whatever is fair, just do it and get it done.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  The individual guys had, and I've been flying with the Israelis off and on, and I learned from the Israelis, when you got a lot done on a tight schedule, you have to do things. Get people that are intellectually or professionally excellent in given technical areas. So these guys, all of them have their, they have their expertise to start with. And Steve Smith, who, eh, he probably should be a felon, he's a wealthy one at that now, but at the time, you know, he'd make a list of things to do every day.

• 2:00:21Speaker 01

  And by, he and I'd work together in the early morning, and by evening time, and the list got it all done, is that kind of guy. Get it done. Personality, great. And one Friday, early in the morning, I said, damn. I said, we're really moving forward paperwork-wise, and plan-wise, and tactically, really looking good. But I said, we don't even have a place to start holding, formalize this thing. And I said, but I got an idea. So I sent him down by Hind Bay, he's ops at Miramar. And he comes back on Saturday morning with a

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  big forty-foot crane. Hanging below it is a twenty-by-forty building, which is a picture that are in the book of the original, he had stolen this thing. He had bribed, he had bribed the crane operator with a case of scotch, which I ended up buying. And, but they bring it down, and, you know, the pace of things was such that...

• 2:01:34Speaker 01

  I said, you got what? And the guys were all laughing. Whole place was laughing. Go out and here's the CO's parking spots all along the street. And here's this crane with this big building suspended below it. And he said, where do you want to put it?

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  I said, you put it right here by the steps leading up to fighter down hangar. Put it right here, right above the CO's parking spot. One twenty-one. And we got away with it. So Sunday, he says, I got a bunch of flooring. We're going to put new flooring in the building today. So everybody came in and we hammered, nailed and glued down new flooring in there. And he brings in red paint and we painted the trim on the building all red. I said, what in the hell did you do it in red for? He said, who would believe you'd steal a building and paint it red? This is the mentality that you're dealing with.

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  And, uh, and by God, Monday morning, in comes some vans. They had Nevada license plates. And I think he had been up to Nellis and stole a bunch of salvage furniture from the air force. But he brought in desks and chairs and, and safes. He got a couple safes. This was the kind of guy, he whipped it out. Three days.

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  We started, we started the classroom then.

• 2:03:14Jocko Willink?

  That's, uh, it's epic. Uh, you say here, before we could teach the material, we had to study it and learn it cold ourselves. We created, collated and corrected the curriculum at a fever pace, working all hours to refine it. Hunting and pecking with two fingers on manual typewriters, redlining each other's drafts, rehearsing lectures to each other. This last part was key as we took turns on the podium in the trailer. We faced. We faced withering scrutiny from our fellow instructors in the military. This is known as a murder board. No hiccup in presentation style, no slip of the tongue, no glitch in dress or personal appearance was too small to be seized upon and corrected on the spot. We knew we would be ineffective lecturing our top notch students if we were anything

• 2:03:58Jocko Willink?

  less than bulletproof. How would they believe us at Top Gun if we couldn't deliver graduate level lessons well? In the meantime, we began reaching out to the fleet squadrons to recruit their students. It's interesting to me, I found that part interesting that you guys went hyper professional. You, you went, hey, we are gonna be over the top professional. We're, because, because you could see the attitude, hey, we're doing this, we're kind of flying by the seat of our pants, I will teach it kind of haphazard. You guys went hyper professional. That was an awesome move.

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  And in the forward to the book, the eight elements, and then murder boarding has the ninth element. It took us a while to analyze. Yeah, we, we winged it to get it going, but once we got it up and it was successful, you had to set the standards high because nobody believe you. You know, it was the same type of thing that we had been doing for five years. It wasn't gonna fly.

• 2:05:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  But you just make it special and it stuck. It's still that way, is it not, Dave?

• 2:05:08Speaker 02

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. That legacy has sustained from the beginning.

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  And the elements are in the forward to that book.

• 2:05:15Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  And they're applicable to commercial enterprise. You'd be amazed who I've lectured on those.

• 2:05:22Jocko Willink?

  I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be surprised at all. I know the, I know that the principles that we learned in the military are extremely applicable to any leadership situation.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  Great.

• 2:05:35Jocko Willink?

  Uh.

• 2:05:38Jocko Willink?

  You're just about to start the first class and you say this, "I was cooking along in full afterburner about 100 miles off the California coast approaching San Clemente Island when I felt a thump. My warning panel lit up. There was a fire in my right engine. As I shut it down, my backseater Lieutenant J.G. Gil Slaney ran through the emergency checklist while Mel eased in close for a visual inspection, trying to see through all the smoke. We were about 30 miles from Miramar off La Jolla when the 7-liter liquid oxygen canister mounted in the tail of my Phantom exploded. It tore the tail section clean off my bird. End over end, we tumbled. Time slowed down, we plummeted.

• 2:06:21Jocko Willink?

  In my headset, I think I heard Mel's voice, 'Dan, you guys eject, eject.' Gil pulled the handle and we rocketed out of the doomed jet. We fell toward the ocean strapped into our ejection seats at 21,000 feet. It's odd how time passes in a crisis. Inspired by the flood of adrenaline into my system, I had time to look down over La Jolla and noticed the scenic cove. My helmet visor was gone, but somehow my Ray-Ban sunglasses were still hanging on. I've got to save them, I thought. Those sunglasses had been with me since my Pensacola training days. No way did I want to lose them now. I reached up, shook them off my face and stuffed them into a zippered pocket on my flight suit. It was then that I realized as I fell through space that I was still attached to my ejection seat.

• 2:07:06Jocko Willink?

  This was a problem. The heavy apparatus was supposed to separate automatically by action of a powerful spring activated by baristat at 12,000 feet. Falling toward the sea, I looked around for Gil's chute and was relieved to see him drifting down behind and above me. Disengaged myself, disengaging myself manually from the ejection seat and falling clear, I pulled the D-ring to pop, pop my chute. Nothing happened. I yanked it again harder and the cable broke off in my gloved hand. I was falling at terminal velocity 14 feet per second like a rock. Somehow I had to get my hands on the chute pack. Short on time and altitude, I pulled myself up the risers and reached my chute pack.

• 2:07:48Jocko Willink?

  I thought of my wife and kids and home and it was God who gave me the strength, I'm sure. Reaching the parachute pack, I opened it with my hands and the chute flew free. The beautiful white blossom swelled above me jerking me upright into a lazy but short descent. Thank you, my dear Lord.

• 2:08:10Jocko Willink?

  Was that your first ejection?

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, only.

• 2:08:12Jocko Willink?

  Only ejection? And you had to climb up the risers of your parachute and yank that thing out?

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  That's very different. They were up here.

• 2:08:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  It bring you.

• 2:08:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so it wasn't that big of a deal to have a malfunctioning parachute after you ejected out of your F4 Phantom with your engine exploded?

• 2:08:31Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna be impressed, sir.

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  The next line gets even better.

• 2:08:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Looking down at the cold water, I saw the dark sleek shadows swimming just below the surface.

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  And there were a lot of them.

• 2:08:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, people don't, I mean, you're off the coast of Southern California.

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:48Jocko Willink?

  There's sharks.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:49Jocko Willink?

  There are, and actually, people know this now, because you know, we have drones flying around? And now that they fly drones all over the place, people are all shocked that there's a bunch of sharks out there, like I'm a surfer? And people are now realizing, oh, there's sharks right off the coast of where we surf. And, and, and, you know, I, I said, sharks have always been there. That's, that's their home, you know? So you caught a visual on some sharks as you were inbound?

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  Well, I looked down, I saw the silhouettes in the dark, and this is about 15 minutes before dark. And the water's cold, 13th of February. And so I hit the water. And man, my, my little raft is inflated. So I climb in it as quick as I can. It's cold, man. And I, I think I was motivated by the thought it was probably sharks. Turns out it was dolphin. Because where my big boots were sitting on the end of the raft, pretty soon, boom, boom. Two snouts turn up, and these squeaky little devils are sitting there looking at me.

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  You guys have probably swam with those before.

• 2:10:05Jocko Willink?

  I have, yeah.

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  And they're talking, they're charlatan, they're excited to have somebody new in the world.

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  I got rescued by a helo that night.

• 2:10:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:17Jocko Willink?

  On March 3rd, 1969, in our stolen trailer at Fighter Town USA, Top Guns Class 1 convened. I had to throw this in there. I issued a heartfelt welcome aboard and said we'd been charged with an important purpose. This is you talking to your students for the first time. I introduced my instructor team and told them who we all were. I explained that we would all learn together along the way. The main thing for any skipper to bear in mind is this: The troops know, the troops need to know, he's interested in their welfare. This is true regardless of the leader's personal communication style. Hard asses can care too. Some leaders give lip service to caring, but what a leader does to show it is far

• 2:11:01Jocko Willink?

  more important. I wanted my instructors to challenge them, but always constructively. We would aspire to build their confidence, not destroy it. They were professionals and future mentors in training, so we were going to show them how it was done. I closed by saying, "There is an urgency here beyond anything we've ever done. We hold lives in our hands." These words still fill me with conviction today. So, this was a, like you said, a graduate-level school, and you're treating these people more as peers than as, you know, people that weren't worthy of being there and that needed to bow down to you guys.

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, none of that. This is a brotherhood. Dealing, you guys know that. Dealing in human life, every single day. Yours, theirs. They knew why they were there. They were there to get better so they wouldn't go out and get themselves backed. And their biggest responsibility, Jaco, I think, is we made it known right from the first time they got there, or the day they arrived, that they were there to become proficient

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  teacher and squadron mates. And, boy, that stuck. Their pride, pride in being a Top Gun instructor, right, David? It's not an easy way to get there.

• 2:12:31Jocko Willink?

  Sir.

• 2:12:37Jocko Willink?

  The pace of the program accelerated once we began flying a lot. After the first week or so, we ran two or three training sorties every day with the instructors playing the role of aggressors. We would put the students in different scenarios, flying all the basic permutations. One versus one, two versus one, one versus two, two versus two, four versus two, four versus four, and two versus four. A dogfight is a true physical ordeal. When a fighter aircraft is flown hard, it shakes you like a plummeting roller coaster on the verge of collapse. You're buffeted from side to side, helmet hammering the plexiglass canopy, harness digging into your shoulders and hips. G-forces cause blood to surge and drain from your extremities, including your head. Our program tested not only a student's body, but his mind.

• 2:13:19Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. There were a couple of names for the MiG-killing new tactics we developed in the F-4 community. It basically involved flying a Phantom like a Saturn V rocket, straight up. Sometimes we called it using the vertical envelope. It was also known as the high yo-yo, but the name we settled on was inspired by the shape of the airspace we used while flying it. J.C. Smith called it the egg, and the moniker stuck. That was the shape our Phantoms track rocketing up and coming back down. So you guys are starting to come up with with new tactics, new methods?

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  The F-4, its greatest attribute, two magnificent engines, and it would go up, and no MiGs ever stay with you. And we learned to fly it. I've flown zero airspeed on the back up here. Just, and to a pilot, free fighter, engaged fighter, one guy's down pushing the MiGs, the other guy comes in and goes right to sweet spot to shoot. And we got very good at it. And we flew the airplane way beyond what McDonnell Douglas sold them for.

• 2:14:38Jocko Willink?

  So you're putting, are you putting this thing into a stall when you reach the apex of the of the vertical? Are you getting close to it, but you have to back off?

• 2:14:47Speaker 01

  She behaves. Take her up to where you're comfortable and what you see down below. Sometimes you had to get really slow up here. Sometimes you go to zero and the airplane would behave so well. Use rudders, not a lot of aileron, but rudders and

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  I've flown the airplane straight into pure vertical to zero airspeed, full afterburner, leave it there and come back down. And we did it to make sure what the airplane would do in case you got up here and some nugget didn't get it over on its backside. Just fly it straight up, afterburner's going and she chugs and she didn't like it very much, but she comes down just like this, falls through on her belly and goes out the bottom. And ain't a MiG driver in the world gonna stay with you through that. And we did that. And I made the guys, each one of them, I went up and demoed it, put the student in

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  the backseat and made him get in the front seat and I climbed the back. No flight controls in the backseat of that airplane. And I ride through that in the backseat.

• 2:16:06Speaker 01

  And when that was over, his confidence was way out. It worked great.

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  That's a basic tactic, flying the vertical.

• 2:16:20Jocko Willink?

  You say flying every day. We worked on all this and we worked hard. We developed the egg in a way that made excellent use of our two plane loose deuce formation.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:16:30Jocko Willink?

  Which basically with loose deuce, talk us through the loose deuce formation a little bit.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  That's just two airplanes, mutual support. That's a key, okay? You gotta be able to, when you're cruising through Indian country, you gotta be able to keep him off your six. You don't want him to get shot and he don't want you to get shot. And from this position, they can cross turn, they can clear each other. Learned that in World War II from reading. And, and so you get in the Indian country and you got MiGs and you come through the merge, maybe you're offset a little bit, but come through the merge and MiGs come down, maybe past you. And one of them becomes a free fighter. He goes into vertical. The other one comes around,

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  tries to push the makes. And you try and push them into predictability. Make drivers are like everybody. They want to stay alive. And some of them are various degrees of expertise. Some of them aren't too good. Some of them are excellent. You know, the top make driver in North Vietnam got nine, nine victories in serious business. So in a free fighter, this guy up here would always try and come down. It's a, I'm in, two's off. Or, you know, that's where we, that's how we ended up with the call signs that we have. Because you can't, can't relate numbers to each other. You gotta have, you know, rattlers in, yanks off.

• 2:18:03Jocko Willink?

  Right. Uh, when, when the second aircraft goes, starts to go up, when, when the first aircraft comes down is in, is the other one now taking the up position?

• 2:18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. You keep track of the makes. Makes, remember, don't have the power to get up with the Phantom. And that, therein lies the strength. So you keep pushing them down there. Don't let them get fast. Just push them down. And eventually, one of you, one potato, two potato, one of you will get a valid shot with a Sidewinder. And oh, God, if I ever wanted anything in my flying career, I wanted a gun and a Phantom. Never had a gun. I know I could have won every fight with a gun. Gatling gun.

• 2:18:51Jocko Willink?

  This, uh, this concept of, of the loose deuce formation, you know, even when you said mutually supporting, you know, in, in ground tactics, right? We have the principle of cover and move, which means we're going to work together. And when one person's moving, the other person's shooting or, you know, keeping the enemy distracted, allows the other person to move to a better position, a superior position, and they're going to follow up. The other interesting thing you said about how you couldn't use ones and twos. Uh, my first deployment to Iraq, you know, we had the Humvees were numbered, one, two, three, four, five, six. So you go out on target and everyone's assigned what vehicle you're going to get into, one, two, three, four, five, six. Well, because of the arrangement,

• 2:19:35Jocko Willink?

  so you go assault the target and the, the vehicles would rearrange. To, so when you got back in and we could leave immediately, well, they wouldn't always rearrange in the right order. And so what you'd end up with, a guy that came in vehicle two, he'd come out of an assault, he'd look and he'd see vehicle number two and he'd go jump in it because he thought it was, you know, he'd count down, there's number one, there's number two, I came in vehicle two. Well, that, that wasn't accurate and you'd have guys going to the wrong vehicles. And so we ended up, I said, we're going to name the vehicles and you're going to know what vehicle you're in by name. Because that way, hey, if I came in big urn or whatever, you know, big urn was the Humvee I came in, cool. I get out, I'm look, I'm not looking for a number, I'm looking for big urn. And that way, my team

• 2:20:17Jocko Willink?

  is going to be together, we can get a quick head count. Same, same idea.

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:24Jocko Willink?

  Loose deuce, is that what you guys did too, Dave?

• 2:20:27Speaker 02

  It's almost exactly the same. I mean, the terminology is the same, all the things he's talking about, everything that, that they are talking about has sustained to this day, almost the exact same verbiage.

• 2:20:35Speaker 01

  Only anything changes is the opposition's airplanes, your own airplane, the weapon system that they're giving you to fly. And that's therein lies the complexity of being a Top Gun instructor. Because it's a constant dynamic, they have got to work to stay ahead of the potential enemies. If it be China, if it be Russia, everybody in the free world is working to keep their intelligence and their tactics revised, if you will. It's

• 2:21:16Speaker 01

  a full-time dynamic business. Hard work.

• 2:21:22Jocko Willink?

  You say this about the loose deuce, the loose deuce tactic reflected Top Gun's culture. And this is why I called this out, because it's not just the tactic that you're using in the air, which empowered junior officers to act and speak freely. There was no leader wingman hierarchy in our tactics, which left either fighter free to attack, depending on who staged, or depending on who sighted a bogey first. Loose deuce was versatile and aggressive. Certainly was a far cry from the air force's tactic, the fluid four, which in spite of its adjective, was quite rigid, giving the initiative and most opportunities to the flight leaders.

• 2:22:02Jocko Willink?

  Life at Top Gun was Fight Club every day. As the instructors flew against the students, it was natural for the students to want to take a scalp now and then. If one of them beat Rattler, Smash, Swatzy, Cobra, or me, it could help his service reputation. They seldom did it, but by the end of the syllabus and its 26 flights, it did happen. There was plenty of pride to be taken in that. I tried to keep them grounded. Everybody gets beaten now. And then I told them, if you managed to beat Mel and were smart, you understood it was dangerous to pump your ego. The lesson there was that if Mel could get beat, anyone could. I considered this attitude the

• 2:22:45Jocko Willink?

  heart of professionalism. And why? And as for my instructors, from time to time, I had to warn them, no egos, fella. Fellas, we're here to teach. That lesson right there of when you beat the best guy and you go, yeah, I just beat the best guy. What the real lesson is, you can get beat too. That's a powerful thing to think about. That's turning your ego right on its head.

• 2:23:11Speaker 01

  But you got to train to take on the best there is every time. Your whole goal in training is to beat the very best. If he comes, comes out someday, you better be ready.

• 2:23:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And when I was in charge of training SEALs for deployment, the people that they fought against in training for deployment was other SEALs that knew their tactics, that had the same conditioning, that had the same weapons, that actually knew what their plan was. They, they, there's no one that would ever face a tougher enemy than you're going to face going through SEAL pre-deployment training. That tougher enemy does not exist.

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  That's really interesting.

• 2:23:56Jocko Willink?

  It's the same exact attitude that you guys had, you know, and I, I talked to Dave on the phone yesterday. I said, this is the exact same attitude that we had in the SEAL teams is how do we push ourselves against the hardest possible situation we can be in. So when we go into combat, it seems easy. That's our goal. Make combat seem easy.

• 2:24:18Speaker 01

  Well, you can't lead. You can't lead in good conscience if you don't train that way.

• 2:24:24Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely not.

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  You can't be the leader.

• 2:24:27Jocko Willink?

  No. Um, there's a, the next section you start talking about, you kind of mentioned it earlier, was, was Paradise Ranch, Groom Lake, Dreamland, all the same names for something that probably most people have heard, the name Area 51. And out there, well, you talked about it. You, you fly out there and these guys had a couple captured MiGs.

• 2:24:56Speaker 01

  My first, well, there's a lot of things going on out there and we won't go into it, but I went out there and flew. I went out and flew a couple tests. I flew five, six times. I flew the MiGs because I wanted the experience. Mel Holmes and I did that. And that was the first trip out. And then later on, when the first class graduated, I surprised them. I briefed the mission and we put them in. I, I think I led and probably Mel led. And we took them to Dreamland Unknown.

• 2:25:37Speaker 01

  And we go smoking into Dreamland, a nice easy 500 knots into Dreamland. Where are we going? What are we going to do, you know? And radio silence, right? Here comes the MiGs. The guys got to fight the MiGs for a graduation present. And Unknown, and it surprised the hell out of them. And you know, they did. They really got it on and they were good. And they flew the tactics we had taught them. And they, and they held their own.

• 2:26:16Speaker 01

  And man, what a party we had at Miramar that night.

• 2:26:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, that's that's completely epic. I didn't I didn't catch that or I didn't recall it or I did. Yeah, I probably just didn't catch it that that the first time you did that there was a surprise to them and they're just looking all of a sudden they positively identify a MiG.

• 2:26:36Speaker 01

  I just reached them in those days and said, you get we're going, we get off in section, section takeoff and I had three of them with me, I think. I said, just, just follow me. And I said, be ready, we're going to Indian country. That's all I told them. And so they speculate all the way out there, speculate where the hell, what's a crazy man doing now? So it was fun.

• 2:27:05Jocko Willink?

  We get into this, and there's a lot of connections here. Top Gun couldn't avoid a rivalry with the US Air Force. It wasn't about politics to us. It was about flying and ideas. Sure, it bothered us to hear the Air Force claim it had created the first fighter weapons school. It's bad ideas that lose wars and get people killed. The most vocal advocate of the Air Force thinking at that time was Major John Boyd. In 1969, he was making a lot of speeches promoting his energy maneuverability theory of air-to-air warfare. Simply put, it's a mathematical formula that tries to reduce fighter aircraft performance to a single value based on the plane's speed, thrust, aerodynamic drag,

• 2:27:48Jocko Willink?

  and weight. First put forward in 1964, it had reportedly been used by the Air Force to design new fighters such as the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon, outstanding planes, as we all know. In 1969, Mel and Ski gave a talk at Tyndale Air Force Base in Florida. John Boyd followed them pitching his theory. There was some good debate, and Mel remembers Air Force officers starting to challenge their catechism. In the Q and A, Major Boyd made an infamous remark. He said that no US pilot should ever dogfight a MiG because his theory proved mathematically that since the enemy plane performed better throughout the flight envelope than the F4,

• 2:28:33Jocko Willink?

  taking on a MiG was a good way to end up hanging from a parachute or a whole lot worse. The problem with any theory is the baggage of its assumptions. We thought Major Boyd was making some rather large ones and considered his analysis suspect as a result. In the base auditorium at Tyndale that day, Ski poked Mel in the ribs. Why don't you say something, Rattler? Mel stood up and proposed to the Air Force officer that he was underrating a few things, namely, people. Mel said that while weapons might have parameters and airplanes theoretical values, no algorithm

• 2:29:12Jocko Willink?

  could predict much if it excluded the most important factor of all: the skill, heart, and drive of the pilot in the cockpit. The moment of truth was the merge. It was then that you had your chance to take the measure of a man. "Sir," Mel said, "I just don't think you know anything, you can know anything about another pilot before the first turn. And if you don't know that, then you can't say that a MiG-17 will win every time." That needed saying. The best I can recall, Major Boyd didn't really engage. He replied by restating his claim, "Thank you for that view, Lieutenant, but you can't fight a MiG and an F4. We'll lose wars that way."

• 2:29:57Jocko Willink?

  We would see about that. John Boyd was an intelligent, patriotic, and good at a great many things. From this exchange, we concluded that one of them was deriving big ideas that aspired to universality but did not reckon with the human heart. In aerial combat, technical factors were important. Some of them could be modeled, but no model could tell the whole story. Major Boyd was not wrong. His theory was simply incomplete. He also completely misjudged the F4. There were no slouches at science either. We were no slouches at science either. With Cobra, Ruffelson's technical acuity...

• 2:30:35Jocko Willink?

  And hard work, we had fused hard data with equally hard experience. It ended up showing exactly how a phantom could smoke a MiG almost every time. The energy maneuverability theory had little to say about tactics or the people who made them work. The pilot is a key part of the equation, though it as a, though as a variable, it cannot be quantified. Out at Miramar, as students and instructors bent the jet and flew beyond the limits, we were trying to turn the man in the cockpit into a weapon. As adversary pilots, Mel, Ski, Cobra, Nash, and I were enjoying the role of flying, debriefing, and adjusting from the enemy point of view. Day after day, flight after flight, we were helping our students meet the challenge.

• 2:31:19Jocko Willink?

  We were making them part of the equation.

• 2:31:25Jocko Willink?

  And I gotta say one last thing. Adherence to strict rules and restrictions meant almost certain defeat against well-trained pilots fighting under no such restrictions. And this is why we at Top Gun never existed before. We, we at Top Gun, we say Top Gun never existed before the Navy set it up at Miramar. No schoolhouse that required adherence to fixed ideas, reduced airplanes to numbers, or considered its instructors as priests could ever be Top Gun in our book. From the final tallies over in Vietnam, we would eventually learn to tell the tale.

• 2:32:01Speaker 01

  You know what we ended up? From the day Top Gun was started and the first class graduated, to the end of the Vietnam War, kill ratio went from two to one to 24 to one. It works. There's the key elements. Youth, age is no criteria for knowledge. The young ones are as good, if not better, because of the energy level they possess. If they're willing to study and learn, the young ones are the reason. You know, I look at this youngster here.

• 2:32:43Speaker 01

  It's hard to believe you bend that, that root, but, and look as young as you do. And, but.

• 2:32:54Speaker 01

  We broke with tradition. The only reason the Air Force,

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  until after Top Gun got up and going, they had had Air Force Fighter Weapons School at Nellis for years, gunnering a few things, but, but never anything like Top Gun. Now, they have a red flag, and the reason was the three star that they had running things during Vietnam, retired. One guy held, held them back. He mandated the flying wing thing. Spent time with Robin Oles, you know, the great general. There's a guy, I, there's a guy, I lies.

• 2:33:39Speaker 01

  Talked at length with Robin Oles, been to football games with him and, and brought him down to fly with us at Miramar on a Friday. Had a super happy hour that night with him and, and I watched his career end because of the mandated things the Air Force wouldn't change. We didn't, we never criticized him. We didn't do anything. They had a, well, I learned a lot about him at Dreamland. When we were flying at Dreamland with the Air Force guys, there were four or five guys up there that were as good as anybody I had.

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

  But they were under the restriction of, of an old timer, old timer, probably out of Washington, who had come out and when he retired, the Air Force jumped on red flag and they are good now, let me tell you. They're as good as anybody.

• 2:34:41Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, as you were just kind of alluding to, we get into what you title in the book, Proof of Concept, which is, the guys are going to war and.

• 2:34:56Jocko Willink?

  You say here, "Top Gun students became crisp, smart, quick, deadly, and confident." "They knew the performance envelopes of their airplanes and missiles, maneuvered quickly to exploit them, and handled all the switch interfaces in the cockpit efficiently." "They demonstrated their ability to fly the egg tactics to perfection and use the high yo-yo out of a two-plane loose-deuce formation to fillet and fry aggressor pilots almost every time out." "Their final exam was a special treat, an unrestricted sparrow and sidewinder shoot against live maneuvering targets."

• 2:35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. That was Steve Smith. We took him up to Pacific Missile Range and took a BQM-34, which, you know, the good old American way, would straighten leveled like shooting down an airliner. And we found out that this damn BQM would out-G the airplanes, particularly when it's controlled on the ground. So I put Steve Smith, one of my originals, put him down on the ground controlling it, and that damn missile would come at him and dogfight him.

• 2:36:11Speaker 01

  And Jerry Bouvier, the first student grad, shot it down first time out.

• 2:36:21Jocko Willink?

  Give us a little history on the patch, the Top Gun patch.

• 2:36:25Speaker 01

  I don't, you know, we critiqued every night before and after we started working students at the club. We'd just go and sometimes have a beer or two and critique today's effort. So the patch was designed at the old club.

• 2:36:52Speaker 01

  By two of the guys, Steve Smith could do anything. I mean, these guys are, you should see where they are today in business. But Steve and Mel Holmes signed the patch and we submitted it. Incidentally, I never asked for permission, ever, in the front end of what we were doing. No permission, no letters of approval. Everything is, you know, if we, if they don't like it, they'll tell us. Never had to get anything asked about me. And it was, it wasn't me, it was nine of us. The key elements, what I talked about.

• 2:37:37Speaker 01

  Each guy bringing something special to the table. There would not, she don't like this, but I do. There would not have been a Top Gun had any of the nine guys not been available. Now, maybe, I don't know what your, what your religion is, or what you believe, but Mel and I and a few of the guys sat down, tried to analyze this, and how we all got it together, how all nine of us ended up in a group, pretty much has to do with some higher power help.

• 2:38:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, higher ranking.

• 2:38:14Speaker 01

  And it worked. And being young, you know, you could always say, mea culpa, man. I don't know. I don't know. He did it. Nobody ever got us. Go ahead.

• 2:38:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's, that, the fact that the Top Gun patch is a MiG in the sights is kind of offensive, right? To, if you're, if you're, if you're a Russian.

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  It was, to make 21. And somebody in Washington said, when we submitted it, the guys were wearing it on their flights. Steve had them made somewhere in the PI. They made them for us quick. So we're all wearing these patches, you know, Top Gun, man. Mood, look at that. And somebody in Washington called out and said, we're gonna have some problems with the State Department. And...

• 2:39:10Speaker 01

  I called my, I called my bulletproof jacket. It was a three-star Admiral at Air Pac. Bush Pringle.

• 2:39:18Jocko Willink?

  Nice to have.

• 2:39:19Speaker 01

  Lights Admiral Bush Pringle. And when I took the job, and this is kind of off the record, I took the job, I talked to him because I'd worked for him and, and I liked him and he liked me. And I just said, God damn it, you talk about loading the thing up in a hurry. And he said, I'll make it bulletproof. I had a great career. I got promoted commander early, made captain two years early. And you know how it ended, but shit, you know, the only reason I didn't get torpedoed along the way was Pringle.

• 2:39:59Speaker 01

  Pringle was tough, boy. General quiet old man, but he protected me. In the patch, he made one phone call and, oh, we like your patch. So there's your answer.

• 2:40:15Jocko Willink?

  You know, one thing I want to jump to real quick, because you've mentioned it a couple of times, the fault, the traits that you guys were, you know, putting forward as what a good pilot consists of. You say, a passion for the mission necessary to sustain the individual in an extreme environment. Leadership by personal example, a compassionate inspirational person willing to take responsibility. Extraordinary airmanship required to operate in so unforgiving an environment. Humility derived from a sense of being part of something much greater than oneself. Subject matter expertise that is beyond reproach.

• 2:40:57Jocko Willink?

  A work ethic that will drive the person to do whatever it takes for however long it takes to ensure success. Personal discipline to endure the rigorous training and attention to detail required to constantly perform at an optimum level. Integrity, adaptability, innovation, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. And last, credibility established through demonstrated performance sustained over time.

• 2:41:30Jocko Willink?

  Now, the only thing I don't like about those is it took me, I think, four or five books that I've written that are thousands of word each to, to explain what you just did in a few, in a few sentences.

• 2:41:40Speaker 01

  It took me, it took me three years with the help of two other guys to define. And we were, we were, um, and then a long time ago, those were written, but we never put them in a legacy book document like this for the 50th anniversary. But it took us three years to find. And the reason being is Top Gun was so successful. After the first half dozen classes, we weren't going to get torpedoed anywhere. There were guys begging to get in. And we had to have selection criteria.

• 2:42:24Speaker 01

  And you got one of them.

• 2:42:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:26Speaker 01

  And they still use those criteria in the selection of the instructors. I'm not sure the guys know what they're getting into because the workload is, is crazy how hard they work them now.

• 2:42:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, obviously it's a high standard and there's a reason for it. Like you said earlier, you got people's lives in your hands.

• 2:42:49Speaker 01

  That's right. And, uh, yeah, you're right. And besides that, right now, and I don't know how you feel, David, but they're still, even in the beginning, they were the best of the best. And they kept that alive for 50 years. That's why the book was written. It's celebrating the legacy and putting it in writing and nothing like this. 50 years of trying to live by those criteria in the selection of guys like this. And it's worked and they're proud of it. Forty-two COs and about 600 instructors.

• 2:43:38Jocko Willink?

  Small group.

• 2:43:40Speaker 01

  At time, 50 years. Go ahead, please.

• 2:43:47Jocko Willink?

  You, again, this, we're getting into a section now that's, that's talking about the proof of concept. Cause now the guys are at war, as I was saying, and we get to here on Saturday, March 28th, Jerry and his Rio Steve Barkley were idling their F4Js standing on the catapult, catapult in alert five status, ready for quick launch. When the radar control ship reported four bandits inbound toward the carrier that afternoon. Bullier and his air wing commander Paul Spear were launched off the Constellation's deck. As the radar calls kept coming and the range closed, they saw no sign of the MiGs. The Phantom pair pressed ahead. It was Bullier who first sighted the enemy fighters ahead and above

• 2:44:28Jocko Willink?

  him at about 25,000 feet. Following the loose deuce doctrine, Jerry alerted Spear and took lead, stoking his afterburners and accelerating into a climbing, climbing turn to intercept. The two MiGs spotted the Americans and separated, the leader climbing and his wingman Blake breaking into a right turn. Bullier took the enemy wingman while Spear went after the leader. As he closed with the number two MiG, Bullier realized, I suspect in the space of those first 20 seconds that his excitement had led him to stray from the proper technique. He was fighting in the horizontal and climbing to engage his enemy directly. He had lost too much airspeed to attack effectively. He dove again to regain

• 2:45:10Jocko Willink?

  it, pulling seven Gs at the bottom. He found the MiG descending with him. Looking to avoid a turning fight, he returned to what we had taught him. He pulled up sharply, sharply to initiate the egg maneuver, rocketing vertically. The MiG had no chance to keep up. Meanwhile, down below, Commander Spear had seemed to unnerve his own MiG. Its pilot turned wide and left the fight. Spear was turning back toward Bullier to clear Jerry's tail when Jerry, when Jerry's MiG saw Spear. The North Vietnamese pilot fired a heat seeking a toll missile at the approach. Phantom. The headshot, the head-on shot missed. Up and up Bullier's Phantom went.

• 2:45:53Jocko Willink?

  With Rio Barclay keeping him oriented, telling him that the MiG shooting at Spear was no threat, Jerry focused on setting up his shot. Arcing over the top, he saw that their opponent was vulnerable. The MiG had lost sight of him. The enemy pilot banked right and then reversed sharply left, as if looking for his pursuer. This last maneuver was a fatal mistake. It gave Jerry a clean shot up the enemy's tailpipe. With the tone of a Sidewinder lock buzzing in his helmet earphones, he pressed the trigger and his missile left the rail. It tracked true and exploded underneath the MiG. A shower of steel fragments sliced into the enemy plane and set it on fire. Trailing flames like a torch, the MiG sailed along, rocking its wings.

• 2:46:37Jocko Willink?

  Bullier pulled up sharply to avoid running past him, slid in behind him again and fired another missile. This one finished him, just like he had done in the drone shoot at Top Gun. Back on the deck of the Constellation, the celebration started immediately. Paul Spear, a large man, gave diminutive Jerry a bear hug and lifted him off the top of his feet. Champagne, strictly forbidden, flowed. Later that day, a Hanoi radio broadcast from the MiG confirmed the MiG loss. In Washington, the politics of peace talks forced the Pentagon to make smoke. Other than a brief announcement of a MiG being downed, the kill was said to have been scored by Phantoms that were escorting a photo reconnaissance aircraft.

• 2:47:21Jocko Willink?

  The Navy kept a lid on the story. Back at Miramar, we wondered who the MiG killer was. When it was finally confirmed that the MiG killers were Bullier and Barclay, we were ecstatic. It validated not only what we talk, not only what we taught, but our schools' very existence.

• 2:47:42Jocko Willink?

  Pretty awesome.

• 2:47:46Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys have any beverages when you found out that?

• 2:47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:47:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:57Speaker 01

  There's a lot of work getting to that point. And there are a lot of people, you have no idea, Jaco, what the opposition was like. But it was the same. We're young, we're doing the best we can. Let's wait and see. And man, when the, when the kills started happening, the words started. We went from having to work hard to get people to come to the school. Like we did before we initiated. To where Steve Smith had loved, same guys.

• 2:48:37Speaker 01

  He'd say, I'm sorry, we're full up for six months, but I'll put you in the waiting list for next year. East Coast.

• 2:48:47Speaker 01

  East Coast guys, you know, they're too close to Washington to, they gave us a fit in the beginning.

• 2:48:56Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward, in January 1972, Captain Smith cut the order. Top Gun became a permanent detachment, appearing in the rag organizational chart with a solid line instead of a dotted line, connecting it to Chick Smith's headquarters. That little tweak to the org chart made all the difference. Suddenly, we were assured of adequate staffing, equipment, fuel, and operating funds. Our program is free of its former parent organization.

• 2:49:23Jocko Willink?

  And

• 2:49:28Jocko Willink?

  then it goes, Top Gun goes to war.

• 2:49:31Jocko Willink?

  Yankee Station, 1972, on March 30th, 30,000 North Vietnamese Army soldiers, supported by 100 tanks, acquired from Red China, invaded South Vietnam. A few days later, another 20,000 troops, also supported by tanks, struck South Vietnam from Laos. They were the vanguard of a communist army that would ultimately field 300,000 troops and 600 armored vehicles. On May 10th, President Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor and other Japanese or not and other North Vietnamese ports, putting a stop to Soviet deliveries of MiGs and surface air missiles. Meanwhile, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy planes hammered North Vietnamese supply lines. Bridges collapsed under a barrage of first-generation smart weapons, including

• 2:50:15Jocko Willink?

  laser-guided bombs, delivered by Navy Grumman A6 Intruders and A7 Corsair 2s. Air Force B-52s stratofortresses struck MiG airfields around Hanoi. The enemy tried to defend these important targets. Flying MiG-21 and MiG-19 interceptors, the North Vietnamese pilots found themselves in wild dogfights with US Air Force Phantoms. On May 10, three MiG-19s went down to air-to-air missiles, but the North Vietnamese pilots scored two kills. The Air Force continued to use old-style World War II-era tactics that we found so limiting. The Navy was on a different path. The North Vietnamese MiGs encountered a new

• 2:50:57Jocko Willink?

  Navy. The Alpha Strikes included electronic countermeasure aircraft that jammed the radio frequencies of the North Vietnamese pilots. They ran into Top Gun-trained pilots. The tactics we developed at Miramar changed the game altogether.

• 2:51:14Jocko Willink?

  And, look, this, there's a section in the book that I'm not going to read right now because people just need to get the book and read it, but you go into some of these incredible dogfights, the tactics are being used, they're being executed, and victory after victory is being chalked up. And you get to hear, "By mid-June, the Navy's kill ratio during Linebacker stood at almost 12 to 1, a 600% increase over what we had managed during Rolling Thunder." The Navy's High Command was ecstatic. The North Vietnamese Air Force was clearly demoralized. That spring, a MiG-17 pilot encountered a Navy F-4 and ejected on the spot before he even came under fire.

• 2:51:57Jocko Willink?

  They had no answer for our new tactics and teamwork. By the summer of 1972, the MiGs focused on attacking the Air Force while avoiding US flights originating from Yankee Station. Our MiG-hungry Top Gun grads didn't like it, but the tactical switch provided stark testimony to which service they thought they could score against. Sadly, the Air Force fought the 1972 Air Campaign essentially as it had Rolling Thunder. Adherence to the fluid four formation cost them air crews. Of the 51 aircraft that the Air Force lost during Operation Linebacker, 22 went down to guns and missiles of North Vietnamese MiGs. During the same time, the Navy lost just four birds to MiGs.

• 2:52:40Jocko Willink?

  The Marines lost an F-4 Phantom to a MiG and scored one in return. From the start date of the Top Gun program to the end of the war, the Navy's overall kill ratio was 24 to 1.

• 2:52:57Jocko Willink?

  I mean, that's just transformational, transformational efforts on your part, the rest of the Top Gun team, the Navy, Captain Holt for putting that report together, the chain of command for actually listening and enacting these things. It's incredible history.

• 2:53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a good start and the big thing is, the book represents 50 years. We wanted in writing, never been written before, wanted in writing the legacy of how it got started. And what really is powerful, it's probably are other volumes that could be written from this goes out into the 70s, 85, probably is the last.

• 2:53:54Speaker 01

  In this book, you guys, Dick's, Red Butler, all these guys, over 50 years, they run into, they run into opposition and they fought their way through it. We gave all the airplanes, Muggs McEwen, who was the CO number four.

• 2:54:19Speaker 01

  He ended up giving the Israelis all the adversary airplanes during one of their one of their fiascos over in Israel. All the airplanes were given away and they they they stole some new airplanes. They got their hands on some. It's never been. Uh, and the only downside was the mood to fall in at the time wasn't very well received. I mean, you imagine owning your home in beautiful San Diego, having your kids go to school here, taking your college graduate wives and say, let's unload it all. We're going up to the moon to live.

• 2:55:02Speaker 01

  And honest to God, it's really a sad story. They get up there and they found some some uh, some bad things up there and uh, and then the other thing was the opposition within the Navy, and I'm speaking personally now, was has always been apparent by the used to be fighter pilots and attack pilots and attack pilots after the movie came out, after Tom Cruise's first movie, shit, boy, they were all over it. They didn't like that one bit and the guys, guys fought their way through it.

• 2:55:45Speaker 01

  Forty-two COs in order. Anyhow, that's another.

• 2:55:52Jocko Willink?

  Well, obviously you got more books in you. Got to read some more books.

• 2:55:56Speaker 01

  I got one.

• 2:55:57Jocko Willink?

  Good.

• 2:55:58Speaker 01

  Got one working.

• 2:55:59Jocko Willink?

  Uh, meanwhile, this isn't over yet. You know, um, you you you say here, home with my family for a rear Friday night. This is 1973. I was barbecuing steaks, thinking about taking an after dinner swim with the kids when the phone rang. I went to pick it up sensing something was wrong as it turned out I was right. The executive officer of fighter squadron one forty-three, the puking dogs, was missing in action in South Vietnam. That pilot Harley Hall was a friend of mine. The squadron was in a state of shock. It also needed a new XO, which accounted for my emergency orders to pack up within 20 hours and begin the long journey out to the Enterprise.

• 2:56:42Speaker 01

  You've been there. You guys have seen that, I'm sure.

• 2:56:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the, it's what we sign up for, but it doesn't make it easy.

• 2:56:53Speaker 01

  It's harder on the family than anybody.

• 2:57:00Jocko Willink?

  You know, you show up. Twenty-four hours later, a Navy C-2 took me aboard at QB Point, flew me out to the carrier. The squadron CO Gordon Cornell met me on the flight deck. Gordo was a warrior's warrior, a man who'd flown everything from F-9 F Panthers to F-8 Crusaders and F-4 Phantoms. Wounded in action over North Vietnam in 1966, he went on to earn two distinguished flying crosses and 17 air medals. "Really glad to see you, Yank. Sorry it had to be under such terrible circumstances." I shook his hand and asked how the dogs were doing. "They're dogs, Dan. They'll always be okay. They're a tough bunch, bonded as Harley would have wanted."

• 2:57:40Jocko Willink?

  Still clutching my hand, he seemed to reconsider this. He added, "They're hurting badly. Some of the guys can't wait to get home and help out Mary Lou and the kids." There was sadness in his eyes. The shooting war was over, but we all had wounds to heal.

• 2:57:57Speaker 01

  It was 20 minutes before the armaments became effective of the whole Vietnam War.

• 2:58:12Jocko Willink?

  Every fighter pilot wants a command of his own squadron. I learned I was to become the skipper of the puking dogs, and again, I'm fast-boarding. At this point, I'm going to jump to a part where you're heading to Las Vegas. At the end of August, for an enormous reunion of American aviators of all services who had flown in Vietnam, we would unofficially welcome back the 166 men taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese. Some 3,000 of us and our wives gathered at the Hilton. There were many spontaneous mini-reunions that night as old friends saw each other for the first time in years. The happiness touched everyone. The war over, the years of hardship in rearview mirror, at last, our former POWs were ready to pick up their lives and careers. What an enormous

• 2:58:55Jocko Willink?

  challenge. Some came home knowing nothing of the Summer of Love, the Watts riots, the Kent State shootings, or the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Their last experience of America predated acid rock and Woodstock. Fitting into the here and now and getting to know their families again tested the former POWs all over again. And you and I were talking about Charlie Plum.

• 2:59:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:20Jocko Willink?

  Who's been on this a few times and just an unbelievable guy in every possible way.

• 2:59:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:59:29Jocko Willink?

  And Colonel William Reader, who's been on here too as well, also, you know, an Army pilot. But, you know, both those guys captured, suffered immeasurably and came home and carried on with their lives.

• 2:59:45Jocko Willink?

  You end up doing a deployment to the Med on the America Battle Group and, you know, it was...

• 2:59:52Speaker 01

  Turning around, turn that fighter squadron, you know, Harley Hall was killed, ex-leader of the Blue Angels. And on the way home, we had just left Pearl. On the way home, we're stopping Pearl. I get a message. "We need both of your fighter squadrons on Enterprise. We want to turn you around 20 or 51 days. We're going to turn you around, send you to the East Coast and deploy you on the America for seven months." Now, there's a leadership problem, Jac.

• 3:00:26Jocko Willink?

  Indeed.

• 3:00:28Speaker 01

  Jesus, these guys had just lost the best leader, ex-blue angel leader. And he could have been, I'm telling you personally, I knew him well. He could have been chief of naval operations had he lived. He was that kind of... And he was a great airtail. I don't know whether you knew him. But, and turned around in 51 days, but I got even with him. And I'll tell you about it when you get to it.

• 3:01:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, go ahead.

• 3:01:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:01:04Speaker 01

  A guy named Vice Admiral Bob Baldwin was coming over at North Island when we got home. And he had sent the message, came out of Washington, of course, and he'd sent me the message. So when I got home, I went and saw him. And I said, "We can turn them around, but I want to keep all the airplanes that I have on Enterprise. I don't want to have to do acceptance tests on a whole bunch of new airplanes." My maintenance guys were good. We just smoked the, uh, the, uh, home arrival inspection, you know, for corrosion. The airplanes were beautiful, paint job on them.

• 3:01:48Speaker 01

  I said, "We're going to keep the same airplanes." He said, "You can do that. That's fine with me." And I said, you know, I said, "This is tough on the family." The current, the current thing that was being pushed in, in, uh, Washington was retention. I said, "You want to keep the people? You want us to keep all these pilots after the end of the war and the way it ended?" I said, "Halfway through the cruise," and Tommy Raplago was CO of America, I knew him. So I made a call and got approval. And I said, "Halfway through the cruise, can you get us into Athens for two weeks?" At anchor. He said, "Yeah."

• 3:02:33Speaker 01

  I said, "Admiral," I said, "Charter a 747 and bring over our wives and kids and families for that two weeks while the carriers import, right in the middle of the cruise." And he went, "Oh." And being the man he is, or was, he's dead now, but he did. So halfway through that American cruise, in comes a 747 United 747, and it's got all these kids and it's the greatest homecoming you can imagine. Here they are in, in Europe for two weeks, a holiday, all paid for.

• 3:03:15Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 3:03:16Speaker 01

  That's leadership.

• 3:03:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:19Speaker 01

  That's leadership on the Vice Admiral's part.

• 3:03:21Jocko Willink?

  Indeed, yeah, that's awesome. I was laughing. This is a laughable comment, but I gotta say it. You know, we have, back in the, back in the day in the SEAL teams, we would deploy with our maritime equipment. Some of that maritime equipment is 55 horsepower engines. And we were an ARG platoon, so we were deploying on a ship. And when I was reading what you were writing about the aircraft, you're like, they got their own personalities and you, you what? And the exact same thing happened. We came home from one deployment and they said, hey, we're gonna take in your old ones, we're gonna take your old engines, we're gonna send them in for maintenance, we're giving you guys some

• 3:04:03Jocko Willink?

  new ones. And my, my first lieutenant rep, who was in charge of the engines, a guy named Z, the Zulu Cat, we used to call him. He says, well, I'm not giving them up. And he had names for all the engines. He had one called Frankenstein and one called Big Cat. They, they all had names and he knew them. He knew them. And rather than get brand new engines, he said, no, I want these engines. I want the same engines. The commanding officer's like, okay, you want these old engines? He's like, yes, I do. These are the ones that work. These are the ones that I know.

• 3:04:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:36Jocko Willink?

  The devil's, the devil you know is better than the one you don't know, right?

• 3:04:39Speaker 01

  Same with the airplane.

• 3:04:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Tell us a little bit about Gunner King.

• 3:04:45Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Bob, Bob King, Warner Osler Gunner, had been with, I first heard about him with SEALs, the SEALs, many years ago. And they said, the fighter squadron, they said, we're gonna send you a, we're gonna send you a Warner Osler SEAL. He's gonna be your air gunner. And I said, what?

• 3:05:19Jocko Willink?

  What does that mean? What does an air gunner do?

• 3:05:21Speaker 01

  Everything to do with ordnance and missiles on the, on the airplane. And, uh, and he, hell, he knew it all standing on his head. He was that good. But big, tall, good-looking guy, personality. Christy, everybody in the squadron loved him. And one night in Cubey, Cubey Point at the old club, I got him. The only time I ever got him, tell me any SEAL stories. You know, we, Air Dale's all wonder about you guys. You know, we read the press and everything. And I got Gunner talking to me. And I said, Gunner, how did you end up here?

• 3:06:03Speaker 01

  And he said, I was inserted in North Vietnam. And, uh, I think the guy with him was killed. And there were two of them in there and they were gonna put a, I think, uh, they had a mission to take care of something in there. Nicely said, okay. And, uh, he said, I lost my partner. And, uh, I got in a river and I'm floating out, floating out. The river ran to the ocean. And he said, I was floating down this river with him, looking for him along the banks and here and there.

• 3:06:47Speaker 01

  People yelling. And he said, the only thing I'm gonna tell you is, he says, I felt this warm thing wrap around me. You know what it was. Some goddamn big sea snake wrapped around him. You guys, you know what that's like. I read about him. And, uh, he said he took out, he took out his knife. And, uh, he cut the, cut the snake's head off. And he said, I floated out. And he said, he said, when I, when I got out and they picked me up, he said, I never could quit dreaming about that damn snake.

• 3:07:33Speaker 01

  And so anyhow, I said, he said, well, he said, they didn't want me back in Vietnam anymore. They want to give me a rest, I think.

• 3:07:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:44Speaker 01

  He'd done a lot of things.

• 3:07:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, after Vietnam, there's a whole group of SEALs. When they downside, downsized the SEAL teams, there was a whole group of SEALs that they sent to the fleet. And also, it might have been because he was a warrant officer, because I don't know if they knew what to do with warrant officers back then. In the, inside the SEAL teams, and they might have said, oh, you made warrant officer? Congratulations, you're going to go be a warrant officer in the fleet. Could have been either one of those things.

• 3:08:10Speaker 01

  If any, if any of your listeners should know the whereabouts of warrant officer Bob King.

• 3:08:16Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:08:17Speaker 01

  Call him Bobby and he was remarkable in his capacity as my gunner for two cruises. And I wrote to him for a couple of years and lost track of him. I think he may, maybe still alive, but I'd love it if somebody could hold him and let you know so you could tell me.

• 3:08:40Jocko Willink?

  Certainly if somebody knows, and there's a lot of guys that listen to this, so they'll get the word out. And try and find a warrant officer Bobby King, find out where he's at.

• 3:08:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the, um, you, you go into a great kind of detailed account of, of the Israeli war. And how, you know, you, you already mentioned how, uh, how we were able to help out, how Top Gun specifically was able to help out.

• 3:09:19Jocko Willink?

  And and also the efforts of of the guys in the Israeli, you know, air force. Is that what it is, the Israeli air force?

• 3:09:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Those two gentlemen that I speak of in the book, both went on to be commanding generals of the Israeli air force. One of them went on to be the secretary of defense in Israel. And I can't tell you everything I've done with them, but they are remarkable. And, you know, for years, I think we'd started out maybe living in their shadow a little bit, whether tactically we were as good. Once Stop Gun came out, then we're equal. And but when they'd come to the United States on business, I'd get a phone call, totally

• 3:10:10Speaker 01

  illegally, get a phone call and say, Daniel, yeah, Eitan. He said, I'm in Washington. If I come out, can I fly with you? Ah, come on. So I fly with him. And the good story is I got my squadron or air wing, I can't remember. But he calls me and he flies into Yuma. How he got to Yuma, I don't know. But he ends up in Yuma. And he said, you put me on the flight schedule tomorrow? Yeah, yeah. So daylight, we roll down the runway. Two, a wingman, I got a wingman with me and he's got the second section.

• 3:10:53Speaker 01

  We break the ground, do the left turn out to go over to the range. And he's, you gotta hear this guy in the air, he's so cool. He said, Daniel, I said, yeah, three. He said, I got a fire. And I said, is it bad? No, it's not bad. He said, I just shut the engine down. He unloads fuel out over the range, makes one perfect turn around, lands, rolls out on the runway and.

• 3:11:32Speaker 01

  By the time the fire trucks got to him, he jumped on the first little tractor that was there. Nobody ever knew who the pilot was of that airplane. That's just a smooth mother. And boy, could he fly. They're pretty good. Pretty good. And we did give Top Gun at one time with Muggs McEwen, gave them all our airplanes in order for their survival during that war. I promise to take Beth to Israel here as soon as we get rid of this lovely nightmare we're in right now, guys.

• 3:12:15Jocko Willink?

  Hopefully it won't be too long. Going back to the book, Forty Miles Off South Vietnam, April 29, 1975. For naval aviation, the problem of Vietnam never seemed to go away. Lieutenant Daryl Condor Gary stood before the assembled pilots and Rios of VF-51. In Daryl's short career, he'd been thrown into the air war over North Vietnam before completing his RAG training back in the late 1960s as an F-4 backseater. Two tours there and he came home in time for me to pull him into Top Gun as one of our instructors. He subsequently went back to flight school, became an F-4 pilot, and went through Top Gun as a student

• 3:12:57Jocko Willink?

  before heading out to the carrier USS Coral Sea and his first overseas deployment as a fighter pilot. In 1975, he was a young lieutenant tasked with delivering one of the most painful briefs the squadron would ever receive. It fell to Condor to bring them the news that we were abandoning our allies once and for all.

• 3:13:19Speaker 01

  That's the only time I've ever seen him sad. I went to CAG, the Air Wing Commander, about that. God, what a... He actually went in, flew cover over the helicopters and helicopters and watch the exodus, people going out, boatloads of people trying to get on the carriers. And he came back and he just, he couldn't, he just, so upset him. He's a principled man.

• 3:13:57Jocko Willink?

  You know, a lot of times I read books, well, in fact, I only read books from people's first person's account of war. Because, you know, I want people to understand what it's like to be there. And one thing that you do in this book that you do very well is the way you connect the guys that are there with the overall picture. And that's exactly what you did right here. So you've got Condor briefing the guys that were leaving.

• 3:14:29Jocko Willink?

  And then you go into this, "With the last flight to the midway from the embassy grounds, 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese were helicoptered to the naval task force. Another 65,000 fled by boat later to be picked up by one of the 40 ships offshore. The fixed-wing airlift from Tanson Nut pulled out another 50,493, including almost 2,700 orphans. They were the lucky ones. In the immediate aftermath of South Vietnam's collapse, more than 150,000 civilians vanished, most either executed outright or thrown into concentration camps.

• 3:15:13Jocko Willink?

  Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, a memorial to the unknown masses of dead. Somewhere between 1 and 4 million Vietnamese perished from 1955 to 1975. In Cambodia, another 300,000 were killed. Laos lost between 20 and 60,000. In the years ahead, the killing would continue as communist insurgents toppled the governments of Laos and Cambodia. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge, a regime that swept to power in the wake of America's exit from the region, murdered or starved to death about 2.5 million people out of a population of 8 million, more than 30% of the entire nation. When Americans look back at Vietnam, we remember the domestic unrest.

• 3:15:59Jocko Willink?

  We think too of the 58,000 names memorialized on that long black marble wall in Washington. Those are important to remember, but few want to discuss the other consequences of America's lost war.

• 3:16:22Jocko Willink?

  You know, there's a lot of connections with a lot of different things and I've been recently talking to a guy who's connected to some people that were on this operation when the ship named the May Gez, how do you say it? May Gez. The May Gez was captured by the Cambodians. And I'm looking to get one of these Marines on the podcast to kind of recount what happened. So it was very interesting to me when I read that you were involved in this. So the Cambodians had seized an American flagged and owned cargo container ship.

• 3:17:05Jocko Willink?

  Now the ship was in Khmer Rouge hands and I'm jumping through just to hit some of these highlights. On the afternoon of the 14th, President Gerald Ford ordered the 7th Air Force to execute a helicopter assault on Cotang Island and the May Gez. The forces landing on the island were to find the crew, if there were any, while another team helicoptered onto the May Gez and steamed it out in the international waters. Just before the rescue went in, Admiral Coogan received a direct call from President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. "I was with him in the Coral Seas Flag Headquarters and listened with great interest. President Ford ordered the carrier to strike targets on Cambodian mainland, including port facilities and a nearby naval base.

• 3:17:49Jocko Willink?

  Admiral, the President said, 'Go get our ship and crew back. It's your show. Use all available means, but no nukes.'" I wondered how many times our commanders on Yankee Station had heard such a command. Not even Nixon ever expressed such a clear and explicit willingness to let us fight.

• 3:18:11Jocko Willink?

  And so you, you know, I skipped through this part, but you were actually there to take over this, this squadron?

• 3:18:18Speaker 01

  No, air wing.

• 3:18:20Jocko Willink?

  Air wing. And the guy that was running it said, you're gonna have to wait a little bit till this is over.

• 3:18:25Speaker 01

  Nobody passes up good combat. Excuse me, that's a poor choice of words.

• 3:18:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:33Speaker 01

  Leadership.

• 3:18:33Jocko Willink?

  Right, right. The CIA believed that Khatang, Kothang was lightly defended, if at all. In fact, more than a hundred Khmer Rouge troops held the island to deter their communist brothers from North Vietnam who had laid claim to these patches off the Indo-Chinese coast. Our Marines rolled into hot landing zones laced with machine gun and rocket propelled grenade fire. From the ship, Daryl watched as several CH-53 heavy transport helicopters took hits. One crashed offshore after receiving two RPG hits. The survivors were in the water for hours until a gig from one of our escorts pulled them to safety. Included in those survivors was the Marine Forward Air Controller who somehow found

• 3:19:17Jocko Willink?

  an Air Force Survival Radio that he used to call targets for the A-7 Corsairs overhead. Clinging to wreckage, the radio's batteries slowly failing, he gave everything he had to try and secure help for the embattled Marines pinned down in the landing zone. Three CH-53 Jolly Green Giants went down during the rescue operation. Fifteen Marines were killed on Kothang and fifty more wounded during the fighting that raged throughout the day. Meanwhile, our attack aircraft saturated the Mayu Ghez with tear gas and American warship raced into the anchorage with a company of Marines aboard. An hour later, the assault, after, an hour after the assault in the island began, the Marines, clad in gas masks, swarmed the cargo of the ship and found it abandoned. We had our ship back, but where was the crew?

• 3:20:00Jocko Willink?

  The Khmer had released them, sending them back out to see where a Navy patrol plane spotted them. Another American warship steamed to the vessel and pulled the crew aboard just before the lunch hour. The final act played out through the afternoon as the Air Force tried to extract the Marines from the landing zones. Heavy fire repeatedly drove them off and one battle damaged Jolly Green Giant force landed on the Coral Seas deck. Our maintainers swiftly patched it up a few hours later, went back into action. The fighting raged and our frustration level grew. The birds kept taking hits and the Marines were reporting heavy casualties. By dinner in air, the Air Force brought an AC-130 gunship and five C-130s carrying 15,000-pound bombs

• 3:20:43Jocko Willink?

  known as Blue 82s nicknamed Daisy Cutters. They were the biggest, most destructive conventional weapons in the American arsenal. The first one detonated as Daryl and others watched from our deck. Daryl saw the enormous explosion, followed by a shockwave. The blast unleashed. It was obscured by the island. It obscured the island and swept right across the Coral Sea, causing the huge carrier to shudder from its impact. As darkness fell, another jolly green staggered out of the moonless night. The massive helicopter carried a crew of five and managed to pull aboard 34 Marines before suffering engine trouble. The crew set down on the carrier's deck and when its ramp dropped, almost three dozen wounded Marines tumbled out onto the flight deck.

• 3:21:27Jocko Willink?

  The 15 Marines killed on Cotang Island became the final men whose names were etched into the wall in Washington a decade later. Three more Marines declared missing in action on the island were captured by the Khmer Rouge and later beaten to death.

• 3:21:46Jocko Willink?

  After we took our wounded Marines to Subic Bay, we steamed south to Perth for a 10-day port call. The Aussies welcomed us with great hospitality. We were treated like family everywhere we went. The crew drank and laughed with our friends from Down Under and put the scars of the war in our rearview mirrors. By the end of it, I was so exhausted from all the free drinks and parties that I crawled into my bunk and slept the sleep of a free man. The world was at peace for the first time in 10 years.

• 3:22:24Jocko Willink?

  Rough way to close it out, a rough way to close out the war.

• 3:22:27Speaker 01

  Never, never let them insert Marines unless they're in Marine helicopters. That's the number one lesson we learned during that. Those were Air Force, Jolly Green, SAR airplanes, but they never inserted and they weren't, they weren't ready. And we hurried that Air Force general, he hurried that operation.

• 3:22:55Speaker 01

  No, I, you know, I got to fly. I took, I think 12 or maybe 16, I can't remember. But I went downtown, the capital city.

• 3:23:13Speaker 01

  I went downtown to 500 knots at 500 feet, right through town, shock and awe, looking for, see if any MiGs came out or whether there were MiGs there. But when it was over, we were just glad. The corpsmen and the doctors on the carrier did surgery on those 30 Marines and every one of them lived.

• 3:23:39Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 3:23:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:23:45Speaker 01

  But the big, big lesson in that is we had a president who said, Admiral, it's your show, don't use nukes, but anything else goes.

• 3:23:56Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:23:57Speaker 01

  And he did.

• 3:23:58Jocko Willink?

  That's decentralized command.

• 3:23:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:24:00Jocko Willink?

  Let the frontline leaders make the decisions to, to win.

• 3:24:05Speaker 01

  That's the key, decision to win and tell your people, let them do it.

• 3:24:13Speaker 01

  They know how.

• 3:24:18Jocko Willink?

  This section here is about the Tomcat. The F-14 Tomcat almost never made it into the world. Thanks to Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, who loved to think he knew people's business better than they did. In 1968, he tried to force the Navy to adopt the hulking F-111 fighter bomber for use on aircraft carriers. Imagine SecDef's chagrin when a mere three-star Admiral, the head of Naval Aviation at the Pentagon, decided to stand in his way. That truth-telling sailor, Tom Connolly, testified to Congress, quote, "There isn't enough thrust in Christendom to make that airplane into a fighter," end quote. And he won.

• 3:25:03Jocko Willink?

  The Navy avoided being saddled with the Flying Etzel, so named by its unhappy Air Force pilots because of its because its chief advocate, Secretary McNamara, had been president of Ford Motor Company. McNamara took his revenge, denying Vice Admiral Connolly a deserved promotion to a fourth star. But the last word belonged to the Navy. It paid tribute to the great man by naming its new world-beating fighter aircraft after him. The legendary Tomcat was born. Though it fell right in line with other grummin' felines in history, Wildcat, Hellcat, Bearcat, and Tigercat, the name was the artful final act in a Pentagon dogfight.

• 3:25:46Jocko Willink?

  That is totally legit. The crazy thing is, you know, this is McNamara again, you know, with the with the giant ego, thinking he knows more than people that are actually that are actually doing little things like landing the aircraft on aircraft carriers in the middle of the night.

• 3:26:09Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit. Through the post-war years, I was at sea more often than not, commanding an air wing that included four F-4 Phantom squadrons, as well as attack aircraft bombers, tankers, early warning planes and helicopters. Was one of the most challenging and fun jobs I ever had. In some ways, it is also a naval aviator's last hurrah with the fleet. Once you get promoted out of air wing command, your flying days are limited. Until that day comes, however, air wing commanders are expected to fly every type of plane in their inventory. It was a hair-on-fire experience. In the space of a few days, I might fly an F-4 Phantom, an A-6 Intruder and a helicopter. In battle, I would have been leading strikes and coordinating the attacks of my individual squadrons. The job is a culmination of everything I had learned

• 3:26:51Jocko Willink?

  in naval, in a naval aviator's career. All the lessons, all the mentoring by other officers, comes in the way an air wing commander chooses to lead his men. Creating a culture of excellence, of openness, and of self-evaluation, so that your crews can improve and grow, is an essential element to success. That's something every leader should just get out their notebook and write down. Creating a culture of excellence, of openness, and of self-evaluation, so that your crews can improve and grow, is an essential element to success. Aboard the Coral Sea, I used the leadership techniques we developed at Top Gun to set that framework. And I let

• 3:27:36Jocko Willink?

  my squadron commanders run their own shows without micromanaging them. So, that is your, your life's work of leadership, building into that attitude and keeping that attitude, you know, that you use the Top Gun to lead in this other situation, still works.

• 3:27:57Speaker 01

  If it works, why change it?

• 3:28:02Jocko Willink?

  1976, I stepped out of the cockpit for one last time as a full-time aviator and said farewell to my air wing. The Navy promoted me to captain and now was a senior officer at last. While I'd still get to fly from time to time, the truth was that my days as a combat aviator were over. I suppose it would have been harder to take had there been nothing but desk jobs on the horizon for me. Thank God that was not the case. Ronald Wilson Reagan was my commander in chief. The prestige of naval aviation and the military generally was set for resurgence after many years in the doldrums following the withdrawal from Vietnam. It was a fine time for a newly minted captain to take command. I was going to be, I was going to see as the skipper of my own ship.

• 3:28:47Jocko Willink?

  Talk about a wake-up call from flying fighters at Mach 2. I found myself navigating the Pacific at 12 knots on the bridge of a 40,000-ton, 660-foot-long behemoth, crewed by 22 officers and 400 men. While we had two Boeing H46 Sea Night helicopters to help run vertical replenishment missions between our ship and those we serviced, for the first time in my career, I had virtually no connection to flying fixed-wing aircraft. It was a big transition for me personally. So you took over a ship, and this ship is a resupply ship. I was onboard a ship, a Navy ship. So I had probably been in the Navy for four years before

• 3:29:30Jocko Willink?

  I actually went on a ship for any length of time. I was onboard a, I was onboard an LPD, an amphib. And we were out and we were doing, for the first time, it was a, it was an un-rep with a vert-rep. What do they call them when they combine them together? What's it called? Is there a name for it?

• 3:29:47Speaker 01

  Same.

• 3:29:48Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So it's a, it's an underway replenishment and a vertical replenishment. And then there's, they were doing two ships at the same time.

• 3:29:56Speaker 01

  One on each side.

• 3:29:58Jocko Willink?

  When I saw this, and like I said, I'd been in the SEAL teams for four years, or, or three years in the SEAL teams, and plus, you know, going through SEAL training. I could not believe what I was watching. This is an insane operation. There's a ship, which is the one that you drove, is the ship in the middle.

• 3:30:18Jocko Willink?

  And it's got fuel on it and it's got food on it. And they pull these things alongside each other. They're probably fifteen yards apart, something like that.

• 3:30:30Speaker 01

  Little more.

• 3:30:31Jocko Willink?

  Little more than that?

• 3:30:32Speaker 01

  Hundred, hundred and twenty, hundred and forty feet.

• 3:30:35Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so I'm, maybe I'm a little bit, you know, I'm maybe not remembering. I'll tell you what it looked like to my young eyes. It looked like we were about to crash. That's what it looked like. And these, we're going whatever, seven or eight, ten knots, what's the twelve knots? You're steaming through the sea. These ships are within, so what is it? We're talking thirty yards apart. They're thirty yards apart from each other, massive vessels. They're connected by, by giant hoses that are, that are pumping oil and gas onboard. So there's flammable liquid, you know, flowing through these hoses. And then on top of that, you have helicopters that are landing and taking off, bringing gear and food from one ship to another. It's insane.

• 3:31:18Speaker 01

  That's a vergrum, man. Some really good heli pilots.

• 3:31:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. We always, you know, you were talking about the, you know, Air Force helicopter pilots or, or, um, for me, the Navy pilots were the best pilots we could get. When I, when I first got in the Navy, because those guys hovered over, they hovered over these ships all the time. That's what they did for a living. So they'd come in to drop us on a fast rope. They would hold station like it was a joke. They'd be like, no problem. We're sitting here. We'll stay here as, right where you want us as long as we can. Uh, but the purpose of you being in command of this ship is so that you can understand the logistics of the Navy and how to

• 3:31:57Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 3:31:58Jocko Willink?

  How to drive a ship in the hopes that you can do a good enough job that they go, okay, this guy can, this guy can manage an aircraft carrier.

• 3:32:07Jocko Willink?

  And, and that's what they did.

• 3:32:10Speaker 01

  It's a prerequisite.

• 3:32:11Jocko Willink?

  Prerequisite to get you what you wanted, or I guess maybe the ultimate goal of someone in your shoes was to be in command of an aircraft carrier.

• 3:32:22Jocko Willink?

  And you got it. You got, you say this, the Ranger, which was your aircraft carrier, was my ship now, perched on the bridge, seated in a barber chair with skipper stenciled on its back. I watched the bustle of the flight deck from the best seat in the house. I was forty-six years old, still wearing the Ray-Bans I bought in Pensacola and the Star of David chain around my neck that was given to you by your Israeli friends. My little mouse from North Island was tucked away in the captain's cabin a few yards aft of my chair. These three Towelsmen served every day as a reminder of who I was and where I came from since I first climbed in the cockpit in Pensacola.

• 3:33:05Jocko Willink?

  As you start talking about, so what year is this? Is this, this is like eighty-one, eighty-two?

• 3:33:10Speaker 01

  On the carrier, eighty, eighty, eighty-one, eighty-two.

• 3:33:15Jocko Willink?

  You start talking about the fact that there's, there's like drug problem in the Navy.

• 3:33:20Speaker 01

  That's the number one problem in my entire time on ships was the drugs.

• 3:33:29Jocko Willink?

  And you're dealing with this, you have guys getting in trouble, you have guys trying to kill themselves. I mean, you detail this again, from a leadership perspective, this is a great part of the book. And then there's something else that happens, and I'm going to go into it here. My ship's company suffered a terrible tragedy. A young airman named Paul, how do you say his last name?

• 3:33:51Speaker 01

  Charis.

• 3:33:51Jocko Willink?

  Charis.

• 3:33:52Speaker 01

  Charis, yes.

• 3:33:53Jocko Willink?

  Charis collapsed and died while we were at Subic Bay about three weeks after we rescued some refugees, which you go into. Charis was a sad story. A twenty-year-old from Michigan, whose time in uniform was a case study in the devastation wrought by drugs in our Navy. Having served for three years, he had never been promoted. In fact, he was in frequent trouble and tried to desert twice. His squadron commander disciplined him repeatedly. He was no stranger to our Correctional Custody Training Unit, or CCU. Nothing seemed to work. He remained an often belligerent, hard case who frustrated his squadron commander. I never met this sailor, but his death changed my life forever. The ship had just returned from a five-day visit to Hong Kong, where he was an unauthorized absentee.

• 3:34:39Jocko Willink?

  He was next in the CCU that April of 1981. My understanding from the Navy investigation that followed his death is that combative as always, he fought with a couple of our senior petty officers who then took him up on the flight deck and ordered him to start jogging. It was routine exercise in the sweltering, sweltering Subic Bay heat. Charice had previously been restricted to bread and water as a result of his combativeness. As he was running, he collapsed, taken below. He began to have seizures. Thirty minutes later, medical personnel arrived to treat him, but sadly, he died soon after. The Navy determined he had gone into cardiac arrest as a result of heat exhaustion.

• 3:35:26Jocko Willink?

  So, this is, you know, just, just a horrible situation. And, um, you know, there's an investigation. They, they get done with the investigation. You get, what, a, a punitive letter or non-punitive letter? So you get a letter that says, hey, this shouldn't have happened because as we know, a commanding officer is responsible for everything that happens?

• 3:35:57Speaker 01

  That's key right there.

• 3:36:02Speaker 01

  Five thousand four hundred guys and one of them happens to be on drugs. My guys, the medical department, made a couple of mistakes. Number one, their response time was unacceptable. That young fellow, his discipline on the carrier, I let the squadron commanders, uh, run their own discipline cases. And they work a long time to become a commander of a squadron.

• 3:36:31Jocko Willink?

  No doubt.

• 3:36:32Speaker 01

  So I let them do it. And, uh, his squadron commander, that young man was, uh, he was a patsy. He was too easy. That guy had been to mass about four or five times. He should have thrown his ass out of the military. But he just kept going back to his drugs and ultimately died and, uh...

• 3:37:02Speaker 01

  His parents were very successful people in Michigan. And through the Washington bureaucracy sued me for eight million dollars. Navy went through grand jury in Washington. They found, you know, I wasn't liable for anything, except that you become a political liability in Washington as a senior naval officer. And that's what happened. And I don't think we need to put any of this in. I'm gonna, I've addressed it in the new book.

• 3:37:43Speaker 01

  But what happened was I went, I got a great job out of the carrier tour. They sent me to, to, um, Sing Pack Fleet. And I got the current opposite job. Big job.

• 3:37:56Jocko Willink?

  Which you, you do cover that in this book.

• 3:37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. And I'll let you, I'll let you.

• 3:38:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, no, it's all right.

• 3:38:01Speaker 01

  I'll let you, but I got a phone call from CNO. Is that in there? Yeah, that's in there. Go ahead then.

• 3:38:07Jocko Willink?

  Well.

• 3:38:08Speaker 01

  If you're gonna cover. I just wanna make sure that the three of you understand that. I got a call from CNO, invited me to back to Washington. I flew back, spent a whole morning with Admiral Jim Watkins, a nuke submariner I'd worked for before. He knew me well. And he says, and he says, I just spent the whole morning drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with him. And he said, I did everything I could do. And I know it's true, cause I got corber, corber, corberation from him. It's what he said. And he said, but politically, it's, it's just, he said, stay in the Navy.

• 3:38:52Speaker 01

  And I'll see you're selected. I'd been selected for flag. And I looked at the who the opposition was, a senator from Michigan.

• 3:39:05Speaker 01

  And you can tell it's a tough thing to talk about. And he was gonna be chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

• 3:39:15Jocko Willink?

  This Senator from Michigan was gonna be chairman.

• 3:39:18Speaker 01

  Carl Levin.

• 3:39:19Jocko Willink?

  And, and.

• 3:39:20Speaker 01

  And so, so I was never, he's the one that sponsored the lawsuit on the eye of the family. He controls five federal judges. And I thought, shit, it's over. So I went back and talked to, talked to home and talked to my wife and got out of the Navy two weeks later.

• 3:39:45Speaker 01

  And I've just had a great.

• 3:39:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a strange thing for civilians may not realize this when you become, when you get selected for Admiral, it has to be approved by Congress.

• 3:39:56Speaker 01

  By the Senate.

• 3:39:58Jocko Willink?

  And, or yeah, a- a- and it's like you said, it's a very political thing. And I've seen it, I've seen some guys get ripped apart by it. Something will come up and people will protest and it's a political thing. And as you say here, that's just how Washington worked. I resigned my staff position and retired two weeks later on March 1st, 1983, after 29 years, one month. And one day in uniform.

• 3:40:25Jocko Willink?

  That's a, it's a, it's a.

• 3:40:30Jocko Willink?

  You know, you talked earlier about how in combat, you can make the right decisions, you can do the right thing, you can have the right plan and you can still.

• 3:40:41Jocko Willink?

  Some, something can still go wrong.

• 3:40:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:40:43Jocko Willink?

  And it's a very risky thing when you get to those high ranks in the Navy. You can do the right thing, you can know the right people and you can still get tripped up at the last, the last hurdle.

• 3:40:58Speaker 01

  By, by the smallest.

• 3:41:00Jocko Willink?

  By something that's.

• 3:41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:41:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:03Speaker 01

  And so.

• 3:41:09Jocko Willink?

  Transition. When I returned to California that spring, I felt like a refugee in my own hometown. I was almost 50 years old, starting over from scratch. I needed to find a new sense of normal. For me, normal was waking up in my cabin to the smell of salt air coming through a brass porthole. It was the heavy jolt of a catapult launch, the euphoria of breaking Mach 1 in a vertical climb. It was long, beautiful nights, night flights across our country. And the sense of purpose I felt when we saved lives at sea. It was the fear of flying strikes into North Vietnam. The honor of leading Top Gun alongside some of the finest young men America had ever produced. It was welcoming old friends back from the Hanoi Hilton and holding membership in a brotherhood

• 3:41:54Jocko Willink?

  that defined my entire adult life. In civilian life, it was no normal for me. I struggled. My first marriage did not survive the many deployments of the 1970s. Being gone so much finally drove a wedge between us that could not be removed. I married a second time while serving in surface ships. Ever the optimist, I guess, it wasn't meant to be. I could have gone on into the defense industry like so many other retired military offers do. Great salaries, great benefits. I refused to do that. Instead, I went into business for myself in Southern California. The leadership principles I learned in the Navy played a large role in my success. What business did you get into?

• 3:42:34Speaker 01

  Um, I worked in the entertainment industry for a while and then I built, I can build anything. She can, she visualized it, I can build it. We did a lot of beautiful homes and stuff like that.

• 3:42:50Jocko Willink?

  You know, uh, you, you detail the,

• 3:42:57Jocko Willink?

  I guess I'm going to use the word, I don't know if this word's been used on this podcast before. Brace yourself. You detail the romantic aspect of this, uh, the way this folds, unfolds in the book. And it's just a beautiful story about, you know, Mary Beth. You guys, you know, connect again during all this turmoil and, and you end up with a girl that you originally fell in love with.

• 3:43:25Jocko Willink?

  So, again, that's another aspect that you gotta, you gotta, you gotta read the book to,

• 3:43:34Jocko Willink?

  to understand.

• 3:43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:43:36Jocko Willink?

  You also go into the F-35 and, and what that program consists of and what the shortfalls are. And, and what the shortfalls of the training program can be and what they have to watch out for. And like you talked about earlier, the struggles of the Top Gun program.

• 3:43:55Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, when you, when you get to a, we got to a point in the end of the book here, where you start talking about what a winning team, if you were gonna build a winning team, what it would look like, and I'm just gonna surmise some of the things you say. You say, "Because the basic truth of fighter combat remains the same. It is not the aircraft that wins a fight, it's the man in the cockpit. Flying is a perishable skill. It has to be practiced constantly and maintained on a consistent basis. My boys will all be dogfighters. With enough planes in inventory, we can return to the days when any pilot who's, who's in good with the senior chief in maintenance control can check out a bird and go find a Fight Club somewhere off the coast. That's how we'll sharpen our edge in dog fighting again.

• 3:44:39Jocko Willink?

  I run through this mental exercise often. I always come back to this, our Top Gun maxim. What matters is the man, not the machine. So let's talk about what a good fighter pilot candidate looks like. Over the years and thousands of aviators I've known, I've noticed the best share some common traits. A good pilot would have a patriotic mindset and a self-starting work ethic. He should believe in something greater than himself while remaining self-reliant and confident without being overbearing. Some ego is necessary. I wouldn't want a soul filled with doubt flying in my wing. An athletic background helps because when properly coached at the right age,

• 3:45:22Jocko Willink?

  youngsters learn trust, teamwork, and goal-setting. They'll need all those things in the air. I'll pass on anybody who displays his participation trophies. Self-esteem without real accomplishment will make anyone crash and burn. Give me a committed B student with a boiling will to win over an A-plus scholar with a careerist agenda, and we'll be on our way." Finally, it's important to have a sincere interest in the history and lore of your calling. Good pilots strive constantly for self-improvement. In my first years in the Navy, I had the opportunity to meet the World War II generation and hear their stories and lessons.

• 3:46:02Jocko Willink?

  I read every combat memoir I could, could, and gleaned a lot of a little, of little things from them that helped me in my journey. We lived on the edge of life and death, and the margin between them was narrow. I think Jimmy Doolittle bought me a scotch, and that's a story you tell earlier, because he saw that we had shared residency there. History is a wellspring of life-saving lessons. No one really invents anything. Successful leaders recognize those traits and encourage them, even at the risk of bending a rule or a jet once in a while.

• 3:46:45Jocko Willink?

  And you close out the book with this. "Well, that's what naval aviation would look like if I were king of everything. Since I'm not, I think I ought to call it a night. Come on inside. I have one last thing to show you. I kept my 1950's Ray-Bans until just a few years ago, when I replaced the lenses and gave them to my granddaughter at her request as a Christmas gift. At 50 years, I figured it was time for a new pair. My youngest daughter Candace ended up with my Star of David and gold chain. But I still have my little mouse. After all the sea duty he endured, he enjoys a cushy retirement on my bookshelf.

• 3:47:29Jocko Willink?

  From time to time, I look at him and say, 'It was a hell of a ride, wasn't it, little fella?' He is surrounded by books and other treasured items from my career. But what I value most was my time at Miramar with the bros. Their enduring friendship are my real treasures, not any physical things in my library. Top Gun will always be the centerpiece of my career and my life's most important accomplishment. None of it would have happened without the bros or the ever-present hands of God."

• 3:48:08Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:48:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:17Speaker 03

  He's a good writer and you won't do it justice.

• 3:48:20Speaker 01

  You know, you do. You're really. My compliments. And, uh, uh, you know, it didn't end well. I didn't stay on in the Navy, but I got out. Come over to the desert. Let me host you. Come on over and I'll show you how to live. Come up to Lake Hurrah. I got a home up there, an apartment adjacent to it. It's full of our son, the doctor, and his girlfriend, who's a oncologist. So they're every weekend with us. Life is good. And had I stayed in the Navy, had you stayed in the Navy,

• 3:49:04Speaker 01

  who'd have told what you'd have done? You know what I found right afterwards? It's in there. Her. After thirty-two years, I found total happiness. And between us, we've, we've done it all. We've been all over the world. We've got a home. Everything we've done has just been so enjoyable.

• 3:49:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, sir, I, as I, as I read this book and just think about the incredible life that you've lived. And, you know, even when you talk about, you know, what you've done since you left the Navy. And, and it sounds awesome, but no doubt, I mean, without question, the legacy that you left and your bros left in the Navy, in the aviation community, in the military, to have an attitude, to push the envelope, to take risks, to push back when things don't make sense. That is a, that is a legacy that will never die.

• 3:50:16Speaker 01

  I know that now. It's been a remarkable day. I've done a lot of interviews, maybe a hundred, but I've never done anything I enjoyed more than today.

• 3:50:31Speaker 01

  You keep in touch with me.

• 3:50:33Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:50:35Speaker 01

  I admire what you're doing. And you know, the

• 3:50:40Speaker 01

  the philosophy and what you're building, the followers.

• 3:50:47Speaker 01

  You can make a lot of money on the outside. I know that. We've done, we've done fine. But you will never, I've got a lot of friends. But you'll never have the quality of friendship you have with the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, SEALs, UDT guys, the history. Shit, you won't find those out there. The guy quoting there, the Godfather, that when I got out, he kept me going. Not financially, but advice and mentoring. He's a brilliant, brilliant man. Daryl Gary, if you, if you really want to interview some people, interview Daryl Gary. Condor.

• 3:51:32Speaker 01

  I, I won't get into his personal wealth, at his business. But he, he lives up in Rancho Santa Fe, and that tells you something.

• 3:51:42Speaker 02

  I gotta be honest with you, Skipper, with you being here, this is not, I kinda had a sense of what this would be like, and I was, I was off a lot. This is really, um, is really special for me to listen to the conversation between you and Jaco. I know Jaco, and, and I, I know you, having never known you, I think the way you describe it is everybody knows Yank. And, look, I was just a bro for three years, and I spent most of my time.

• 3:52:08Speaker 02

  I've done so much less than I've been given. It's kinda crazy to sit here and listen to you tell all these stories about all these places, and I've been to every one of them. I was a Marine at Miramar because you guys left in Hangar Two South, took over Top Gun Spaces as a Marine. I was a training, I was the training officer at Top Gun. You could probably count on your hands the number of Marines that have ever gotten to do that. Because I went to an airshow at El Toro when I was five. And so now I'm sitting here listening and talking about all the things you did and it just adds more to the the pile of things that have happened to me beyond my control that let me do all these other cool things that by myself I could have never, ever done.

• 3:52:52Speaker 02

  And to have a shred of connection to the legacy, to read a book and give it to Jaco, "Hey, man, we might want to do this. I could probably set this thing up." And then from the outside, watch the conversation between two other people. And for the first time in my, my career, start to recognize how much bigger this thing really is than I ever understood. Because I lived inside of it. And I was just working. I don't, I didn't know what I was doing. I was just working. I just showed up at Top Gun and I was just working. And then I left and I want to do other things. And now I'm sitting here, learning more about what I did than I ever knew while I was doing it.

• 3:53:31Speaker 02

  And it just, another reminder of just how much more I, I have, there's so much, how much more I need to learn, how much less I know than I should. This has been the best four hours, man, to, to sit here and watch this. The legacy you built and to let someone like me get a little touch of what that's like. To be a part of that has been, this has been an awesome, awesome time.

• 3:53:52Speaker 01

  You made it happen, you and Jaco. You, sir.

• 3:53:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, sir, I've had you locked up in here for four hours. When you finish the next book, A, at Mary Beth's recommendation, I volunteer to read it. I'll do the audiobook and I'll do this one if you want me to. I'm here. And when, when you want, anytime you want to come back, anytime that any one that you know that you want to have come on and share their stories, this, this door is open. It's an honor to talk to you. Thank you for your service and thanks for coming on today.

• 3:54:28Speaker 01

  Thank you for the, thank you for the time and thank you on behalf of the boroughs.

• 3:54:37Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Dan Pederson has left the building. Awesome to have him on. Dave, thanks for coming by.

• 3:54:46Jocko Willink?

  I was suspecting that perhaps that podcast, we would touch on a bunch of things, but wouldn't dive too deep on certain subjects that got raised in my head. So we're gonna actually have to follow up. We'll do another podcast. Well, actually, the next podcast, Dave, if you don't mind,

• 3:55:09Jocko Willink?

  I want to drill down on some of this stuff because Dan just opens up a whole new world that, you know, you know. And so we'll do some deep dive on that on the next one.

• 3:55:21Speaker 03

  Right on, man.

• 3:55:22Jocko Willink?

  Awesome to have, awesome to have a guy like that on here. Just an honor to be able to talk to guys like that.

• 3:55:30Jocko Willink?

  Who spent their life trying to get better. Something we should all probably be doing. Trying to get better.

• 3:55:42Speaker 03

  Agree.

• 3:55:43Jocko Willink?

  Echo, since you agree, how about you give us some recommendations?

• 3:55:49Speaker 03

  How to get better, how to stay on the path, how to improve on the path. Alright, well, Jaco Fuel is one way to stay on the path. Alright, sometimes we need help. We need help on the path. So we will turn to Jaco Fuel. Okay, what is this? Supplements? Joint Warfarin, these for your joints. Joint Warfarin, Super Krill Oil, Discipline and Discipline Go.

• 3:56:13Speaker 03

  Also Molk for additional protein in the form of a dessert, by the way. Worry Kid Molk as well for the, for the younger ones. Formulated a little bit different, more towards, you know, the younger ones. Also Jaco White Tea. This is less of a supplement, by the way. More of an everyday, you know, beverage scenario.

• 3:56:32Jocko Willink?

  When it gets warm out.

• 3:56:33Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 3:56:35Jocko Willink?

  The cold Jaco White Tea is totally legit and it, it gives you, gives you a little, little psychological boost and a little physiological boost. Take them both, utilize them both. That's what I'm thinking.

• 3:56:49Speaker 03

  I'll, I'll agree with that one.

• 3:56:51Jocko Willink?

  I know, I know, I know Dave Berke.

• 3:56:53Speaker 03

  Good deal, Dave.

• 3:56:54Jocko Willink?

  Yes, has been pounding Cold War.

• 3:56:59Speaker 03

  Every day.

• 3:57:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:00Speaker 03

  It's part of my regimen.

• 3:57:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:03Speaker 03

  You can smell the garlic. It's preemptive.

• 3:57:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:57:06Speaker 03

  I don't want to react to the war. I want to get out in front of that war. I'm going to wage war in advance.

• 3:57:10Jocko Willink?

  Like Cold War.

• 3:57:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 3:57:12Jocko Willink?

  So I was, my daughter, a couple of months ago was getting sick. And I was like, hey, you know what? You take these, you know, take some Cold War. And she says, I don't like taking, she doesn't like taking pills. And I go, no problem. You know what? I'll put some and I'll break them open, put it in the glass, stir it up. You can just drink it.

• 3:57:34Jocko Willink?

  Bro, you cannot do that with Cold War. You cannot do that with Cold War. It is, it was so, it smelled so bad. It was so offensive to drink because I drank it. But it was everything in my power to get it down. My daughter said, I'm, my daughter, this is my 10 year old daughter. You know, she just said, I'm not drinking that. I said, cool. I go, and I've, you know, tried to keep the normal face after I drank it. It was like I just did a shot of tequila. I was like,

• 3:58:04Jocko Willink?

  no problem.

• 3:58:05Speaker 03

  You should have just said that it snaps. See? So you, you know, it could have conveyed a more, you know, inspiring message as far as the taste.

• 3:58:13Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:58:14Speaker 03

  You know, actually, I don't think it's, it snaps, by the way.

• 3:58:17Jocko Willink?

  There's two things I confirmed with my daughters. You can say either it snapped or it slaps.

• 3:58:23Speaker 03

  Slaps.

• 3:58:23Jocko Willink?

  Either way. I, I don't try and get on me. I have the, the, the individuals that are in the game, in that game.

• 3:58:31Speaker 03

  Well, I was, someone, you know, educated me on it, said it was probably it slaps. And I kind of recalled a little bit. I heard someone say it slaps before. It was about a song though, if I'm not mistaken. So I'm like, okay, it slaps. Jaco heard it wrong. It snaps. I've never heard it snaps.

• 3:58:48Jocko Willink?

  I, now to put myself on report. My kids also say, she snapped.

• 3:58:55Jocko Willink?

  So maybe I did confuse them. Like if you did a good job on the jujitsu mats, did a good arm lock.

• 3:59:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:59:02Jocko Willink?

  And be like, oh, he snapped.

• 3:59:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:59:04Jocko Willink?

  So maybe I mixed it up. I don't know, man. I'm 48 years old, right?

• 3:59:08Speaker 03

  Hey, you're doing good.

• 3:59:09Jocko Willink?

  I'm 48 years old. I'm not just going to the clubs.

• 3:59:13Speaker 03

  No, you're not. No. Yeah.

• 3:59:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You can get this stuff at the vitamin shop. You can get this stuff at originmaine.com.

• 3:59:20Speaker 03

  Yes. Very much so. Also at originmaine.com. Jeans.

• 3:59:27Speaker 03

  We didn't talk about the jeans. That's important to be on the path with American-made denim. Hundred percent made in America denim. Delta 68 and the, what's the name of the regular one?

• 3:59:40Jocko Willink?

  Factory.

• 3:59:41Speaker 03

  Factory. Boom. Yes. All at originmaine.com. Also,

• 3:59:49Speaker 03

  gis, rash guards,

• 3:59:53Speaker 03

  stuff for jujitsu. Cause we're doing jujitsu. You know, people are starting to do jujitsu more, you know.

• 3:59:59Jocko Willink?

  I hope so.

• 4:00:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a good thing, you know. No jujitsu is way worse than jujitsu.

• 4:00:06Jocko Willink?

  That is affirmative.

• 4:00:07Speaker 03

  Yes. So anyway, get a gi from Origin as well because they're American-made like we kinda, sorta mentioned. Um, but that is a big deal. And also rash guards, joggers, jeans, like I mentioned, and boots.

• 4:00:23Speaker 03

  American-made boots. Boom. Also, we have our own store. It's called Jaco Store. And the, this is where you can get more rash guards, shirts, you know, hats and beanies, merchandise. Discipline equals freedom, you know, representative directly of the past. So if you want to represent while you're on the path, that's where you go. Jacostore.com. Also,

• 4:00:49Speaker 03

  subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. Stitcher, iTunes, Google Play, you know, wherever, wherever you listen to podcasts, go and subscribe, you know, to end the game. Keep the info flowing.

• 4:01:00Jocko Willink?

  And this is not the only podcast that we have. Now, we have another podcast, first and foremost, that was out for a little while. It was called The Thread. It turns out I just was a little too default aggressive, just made the podcast, got it out there. Turns out there was another podcast named The Thread. It's not mine. They didn't like that very much. So it has been revoked, but I'm going to rename it and we're going to put it back out there. I apologize for the pause in that podcast with Daryl Cooper. So we'll get it back up as soon as we can. I gotta think of what we're going to call it.

• 4:01:37Jocko Willink?

  And then get it up and out there. We also have Grounded Podcast, which is about jujitsu and the way jujitsu relates to everything that you do in the world. We also have the Warrior Kid Podcast for your warrior kids and.

• 4:01:52Jocko Willink?

  While you're thinking of Warrior Kids, you can support a Warrior Kid by going to irishoaksranch.com and getting some soap made from goat milk here in California by a young Warrior Kid making you products so that you can stay clean.

• 4:02:11Speaker 03

  Staying clean, that's good too. Also YouTube, if you're interested in watching this podcast as well as listening, we have an official YouTube channel. Also, there's excerpts on there and enhanced excerpts.

• 4:02:28Jocko Willink?

  Basically echoes weird experimental explosion.

• 4:02:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:02:34Jocko Willink?

  Videos.

• 4:02:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:02:38Jocko Willink?

  Psychological Warfare. If you need a little help getting through a mental moment, mental weakness, go to iTunes, Google Play, MP3 platforms, you can get Psychological Warfare. You can also get visual representations of that from flipsidecanvas.com, Dakota Meyer, his company, Keeping It Awesome. Some books, obviously, first and foremost, we got Dan Pederson's book, Top Gun. It will be available through jockopodcast.com. It'll take you to the Amazon link. We've got the code, the evaluation of the protocols. Dave Berke, how was your first experience being in the top charts of Amazon?

• 4:03:18Speaker 02

  Dude, it was awesome, man. It was crazy.

• 4:03:21Jocko Willink?

  And the feedback that's coming in, how do you feel about it?

• 4:03:24Speaker 02

  I feel good about it. The feedback's been really good and people are using it the way we hoped they would. And it's helping a ton of people stay in the game, which is awesome.

• 4:03:34Jocko Willink?

  When you read through it, do you just nod your head and say, hmm, that feels pretty good?

• 4:03:42Speaker 02

  Well, yes and no. So yes, when I read through the evaluation, I think about how am I doing? I think I need to get a lot better. So it's a little dichotomy going there because I'm, I'm stoked on what we did. I'm so glad it's gotten out there and I'm so glad people are using this, but it is a reminder for me, and I think for a lot of folks is how much more there is to do.

• 4:04:04Jocko Willink?

  It is so rough. It is so rough on the ego and so helpful for you as a human being. Get the code, the evaluation is the protocol. We got leadership strategy and tactics field manual. We got way the warrior kid, one, two, and three. We got Mikey and the dragons. Discipline equals freedom field manual, extreme ownership and the dichotomy leadership. I guess we're over here writing some books. That's what it seems like to me. Right on. If you want to get a little bit of reading done, check out some of those books. We also have Echelon Front, which is our leadership consultancy where we solve problems through leadership. Whatever problems you're having in your organization, they are leadership problems. And you know what? You might be thinking, well, how are you getting things done right now? We got EF online, EF online.com. It is interactive.

• 4:04:49Jocko Willink?

  And you know what? I used to use the word interactive to describe EF online. It wasn't even close to what compared to what we have now. Because interactive before meant, oh, you were interacting with a video. And there was, there was responses that you could give that would elicit another video. It was like a choose your own adventure. Right now, your responses are going to me, to Dave Berke, to Leif Babin, to anyone on the Echelon Front team.

• 4:05:15Speaker 02

  In real time.

• 4:05:16Jocko Willink?

  In real time. We're talking to you.

• 4:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:05:18Jocko Willink?

  So if you have questions, if you have problems, if you want to, if you're moving into a leadership position, if you're in a leadership position, if you are dealing with a bad boss, with a good boss, if you have great support, it's bad support, if you want to help, if you want to focus your mission, any of those things, go to EF online.com. We are there to help you lead.

• 4:05:40Jocko Willink?

  We also have the muster. There's gonna be one in Phoenix, Arizona, September 16th and 17th, and Dallas, Texas, December 3rd and 4th. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to come. We also have EF Overwatch and EF Legion. Listen, if you're a vet, if you're a veteran, go to EF Legion right now and go sign up so that we can get you work. We can put you in companies that need work right now. And if you're looking for an executive position, if you are a senior individual that retired from the military, go to EF Overwatch, EFOverwatch.com, and on either side, companies looking for

• 4:06:21Jocko Willink?

  frontline leaders or senior leaders, go to EFOverwatch.com or EFLegion.com. If you want to support, if you want to support a charity organization, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Mama Lee, Mark Lee's mom, helping service members, helping their families, and helping Gold Star families around the world. You can donate or you can get involved. And if you want to hear more of my draconian soliloquies, or you want to hear, you just can't get enough of Echo Charles's fragmented diatribes, or you just want to get a little

• 4:07:04Jocko Willink?

  bit more of Good Deal Dave Berke's puritanical paragraphs, you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on Instagram, and on Facebook. Dave is at David R Burke, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks to all our service members out there who defend our freedom around the world. With a special nod today towards our aviation communities, pilots, crews, maintenance personnel, anyone else, Dave, that I missed, that's it. That's who keeps the birds in the fly, keeps, keeps the birds flying, keeps America dominating

• 4:07:48Jocko Willink?

  the air around the world. Obviously, it was an honor to talk to Dan today. We thank all of you for your efforts to preserve our air power and the same to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service. Thank you all for defending us here at home. And also thanks to the doctors, nurses, and medical personnel who care for us when we need it most, and to everyone out there. Remember what Dan Peterson learned in his life. Stay humble. Test yourself. Take care of your people. Work together.

• 4:08:32Jocko Willink?

  Work together with your wingman. And don't be afraid to bend the rules, to push the envelope, to take risks in order to be the best, in order to be the top gun. And until next time, this is Dave Berke, and Echo, and Jaco. Out.