31: Book Review, “Four Hours in My Lai” by Michael Bilton

0:00:00 - Book Review. Four Hours in My Lai, by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim 2:22:22 - Cool Online / Onnit stuff - Onnit.com/Jocko 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.

• 0:01Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast, number 31, with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink.

• 0:11Jocko Willink?

  Varnado Simpson watched three men, including Hutto and Hudson, go into a hut with a girl aged about seventeen. Her trousers were forcibly removed, the girl was held down while she was violated. Simpson observed this from the door. Fagan was also part of the girl's ordeal. When they were finished, the helpless captive was shot dead.

• 0:41Jocko Willink?

  Her face completely blown away.

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  Torres stabbed several people with a Bowie knife and was seen by Hutto raping a girl. She was crying, fighting, and resisting him.

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  Another soldier held her down.

• 1:00Jocko Willink?

  For Simpson, the crucial moment was when he shot the woman and baby soon after entering the village.

• 1:09Jocko Willink?

  "I went to turn her over, and there was a little baby with her that I had also killed. The baby's face was half gone.

• 1:18Jocko Willink?

  My mind just went. The training came to me and I just started killing. Old men, women, children, water buffaloes, everything.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  We were told to leave nothing standing. We did what we were told, regardless of whether they were civilians. They was the enemy, period. Kill. If you don't follow a direct order, you can be shot yourself. Now what am I supposed to do? You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. You didn't have to look for people to kill, they were just there."

• 1:59Jocko Willink?

  I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongue, their hair, scalped them. I did it.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  A lot of people were doing it and I just followed. I just lost all sense of direction.

• 2:13Jocko Willink?

  I just started killing any kind of way I can kill. It just came. I didn't know I had it in me. After I killed the child, my whole mind just went. It just went. And after you start, it's very easy to keep on. The hardest is to kill the first time, but once you kill, then it becomes easier to kill the next person and the next one and the next one. Because I had no feelings, no emotion, nothing. I just killed. I wasn't the only one that did it. A lot of people in the company did it. Hung them up all types of ways. Any type of way that you could kill someone, that's what they did.

• 2:54Jocko Willink?

  That day in Meili, I was personally responsible for killing about twenty-five people, personally.

• 3:02Jocko Willink?

  I don't think beforehand, anyone thought we would kill so many people. I mean, we're talking about four to five hundred people. We almost wiped out the whole village, a whole community. I can't forget the magnitude of the number of people that we killed and how they were killed, killed in lots of ways. Do you realize what it's like killing five hundred people in a matter of four or five hours? It's just like the gas chambers, what Hitler did. You line up fifty people, women, old men, children, and just mow them down.

• 3:38Jocko Willink?

  And that's the way it was. From twenty-five to fifty to one hundred, just killed. We rounded them up, me and a couple of guys, just put the M16 on automatic and just mowed them down.

• 3:59Jocko Willink?

  Good evening, Echo.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 4:04Jocko Willink?

  Well,

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  that was an excerpt from a book called "Four Hours in Me Li" by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim.

• 4:20Jocko Willink?

  And when I was prepping for this,

• 4:24Jocko Willink?

  I mentioned to a couple people that I was gonna do Me Li on the podcast next. And surprisingly, a lot of people didn't know what it was. And I thought everybody knew about Me Li. Me Li is a war crime. It's an atrocity.

• 4:48Jocko Willink?

  And what makes it so hard to talk about is that it was an atrocity and a war crime that was committed by American soldiers.

• 5:00Jocko Willink?

  Now, of course, there's people out there that like to claim that, you know, that America is this evil imperialistic empire, which I am telling you it is not. Not by any stretch.

• 5:16Jocko Willink?

  America is an incredibly benevolent nation with a conscience and a soul that, as a whole,

• 5:26Jocko Willink?

  is good. And have we done some things in the past that don't reflect that? We absolutely have. But for the most part, we have stood up for the weak. We have liberated the oppressed. We defeated the Nazis. We defeated the Imperial Japanese Army. We give aid and military assistance and education and money to less fortunate people all over the world all the time.

• 5:51Jocko Willink?

  We are a good nation

• 5:56Jocko Willink?

  filled with, for the most part, good people.

• 6:02Jocko Willink?

  But not all good people.

• 6:07Jocko Willink?

  And people.

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  Inside of people, inside of humans, there can be something very dark.

• 6:19Jocko Willink?

  And sometimes, that darkness can override the light.

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  And that is exactly what happened in a small village in Vietnam called Mela on March 16th, 1968, at 07:15 in the morning.

• 6:47Jocko Willink?

  A massacre.

• 6:51Jocko Willink?

  An atrocity.

• 6:55Jocko Willink?

  The murder of hundreds and hundreds of old men, women, and children unarmed, begging for mercy.

• 7:06Jocko Willink?

  Shot, stabbed, blown up, raped, tortured, killed, murdered.

• 7:21Jocko Willink?

  And no, I don't like talking about this. Especially when it's Americans that are committing the sin.

• 7:34Jocko Willink?

  When we talk about the Nazis in Germany, and we talk about the Chechens in Grozny, and we talk about the Japanese in the Malaysian jungle, and the Hutus in Rwanda.

• 7:46Jocko Willink?

  I don't like that, but this is us.

• 7:55Jocko Willink?

  And so the question comes, it came into my mind. Do I do this? Do I talk about this? Can I talk about this? And the bottom line is, not can I. But we have to. We have to cover this, we have to talk about it. We can't ignore it, and we can't deny it, we have to take ownership of it.

• 8:21Jocko Willink?

  To admit it.

• 8:24Jocko Willink?

  To air it out. And to keep it in the front of our minds to ensure that we do everything we can.

• 8:35Jocko Willink?

  To make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

• 8:44Jocko Willink?

  War is hell.

• 8:48Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 8:50Jocko Willink?

  Milai is the ninth circle of hell. The worst part.

• 8:59Jocko Willink?

  And let's go there. To make sure we remember. And start by looking at the path that led there.

• 9:13Jocko Willink?

  And in order to look at the path that led there, we're gonna start just by a little bit of broad strategy. Because. There's plenty of blame to go around. And when you look at the broad strategy and the way it was laid out.

• 9:29Jocko Willink?

  Here's a little piece on General Westmoreland who was running, running the strategy in Vietnam. General Westmoreland's strategy of attrition also had an important effect on our behavior. Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill. To kill communists and kill as many of them as possible. Stack them up like cordwood. Victory was a high body count. Defeat, a low kill ratio. War, a matter of arithmetic.

• 10:02Jocko Willink?

  The pressure on unit commanders to produce as many corpses was intense, and they in turn communicated it to their troops. It's not surprising therefore that some men acquired a contempt for human life. And a predilection for taking it.

• 10:19Jocko Willink?

  So that, that's, that's the, that's the environment that you're in. The environment that you're in, that's being encouraged to kill. Kill as many as possible. That's coming from the top. That's the broad strategy. Not to win this hill, it's to kill.

• 10:39Jocko Willink?

  And who are you talking to and who's receiving this? Here's a little, a little piece on Charlie Company, which is the army unit that this is based on and that, that committed this atrocity. "We were kids, eighteen, nineteen years old." I was twenty-one years old at the time. I was one of the oldest people around there, among the common grunts. Most of them had never been away from home before they went into service, and they end up in Vietnam, many of them because they thought they were gonna do something courageous on behalf of their country.

• 11:12Jocko Willink?

  So, young kids.

• 11:15Jocko Willink?

  And, and nowadays, if you're a young kid, you're thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, you know, guess what? You might not have traveled around the world, but you've seen the world. Because you have television, you have the internet. You can see all these parts of the world, you can see all different cultures and people. Well, when you're from Iowa in nineteen sixty-seven, you, you, you, you don't know anything about this. So you're getting, next thing you know, six months later, you're in Vietnam.

• 11:43Jocko Willink?

  And here's a little bit of where you're gonna get your attitude from. Back to the book. "To the troops of Charlie Company, to American troops in general, all Vietnamese were gooks, dinks, dopes, and slopes. Soldiers who could not find the Vietnamese, who were their enemy, soon struck out wildly at the Vietnamese who were supposed to be their friends. 'How can you tell the enemy?' Varnado Simpson said. 'They all looked the same.' To which another Mi Lai veteran added, 'In the end, everyone in that country was the enemy.'

• 12:21Jocko Willink?

  In all wars, it is common for the enemy to be dehumanized. But in Vietnam, American soldiers also dehumanized their allies. Charlie Company had not been in Vietnam long before the pattern of brutality leading to Mi Lai began. Their own losses and injuries hastened the process. Hatred, fear, racism, and revenge turned to beatings, torture, rape, murder. All these offenses were committed with impunity by individuals and groups from Charlie Company in the weeks before the massacre." Finally, at Me Lai, they discovered that having dehumanized the Vietnamese,

• 13:03Jocko Willink?

  they had also dehumanized themselves.

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  So you're gonna see this escalation. And it's just like we talked about with the Russian soldiers in Chechnya. And how it starts when they don't shave.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:20Jocko Willink?

  And then they don't clean their weapon, and then they don't stand watch, and then the next thing you know, they're not doing their duty and they're being overrun. You're gonna see a similar escalation here around lack of discipline, but it's in the way that they treat the local populace.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  And you know, I had, one of my high school teachers was a Vietnam veteran. And when I was going to high school, the movie Platoon came out.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:49Jocko Willink?

  And you can tell, actually, you can tell that the movie Platoon, the book we did, Platoon Leader by Jim McDonough, there's so many scenes in that book that you can tell Oliver North read that book and put some of those scenes in the movie, there's no doubt about it. There's even a character named Barnes in the book and in the movie.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:08Jocko Willink?

  Well, Platoon also showed, you know, a very... It portrayed the Americans in a very rough light in many of the situations. And when I talked to one of my teachers in high school that was a Vietnam vet, and he just said, you know, the thing that they didn't show very well, because they showed the guys coming in and really beating people, killing people, burning villages. And what he said was, you know, Jaco, we would walk around a village, and one of our guys would hit a booby trap every day, every other day. And the villagers are out there walking on the same trails. But they're not getting blown up.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Mm.

• 14:50Jocko Willink?

  And so, after weeks and then months of this happening, of me losing two guys, three guys, six guys, getting blown up, getting killed, losing their legs, losing their arms, losing their lives, and the Vietnamese villagers, they're not hitting anything? Eventually, in our minds, they become guilty.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:13Jocko Willink?

  Now, when you have leadership, that can explain and restrain and control, you can keep that stuff controlled. But when you have leadership that buys into that attitude, you end up in a very bad situation, which is where we're heading here in My Lai.

• 15:36Jocko Willink?

  Now, back to the strategy. The aim of American strategy was simple, to kill Viet Cong in such large numbers that they would not be replaced, or could not be replaced. But how is this to be achieved without, at the same time, killing large numbers of civilians? This was a problem to which no one on the American side ever discovered a satisfactory answer. It was the biggest failure of the war. It was a failure magnified enormously by American strategic thinking. For Westmoreland, Vietnam was a war of attrition, a meat grinder, as they called it in the Pentagon. The object, he explained, was to bleed the North, to waken in the communist mind the notion that they were draining their population,

• 16:19Jocko Willink?

  to the point of national disaster for generations to come. To achieve this goal and to win in a war of attrition, Americans had to kill Viet Cong fighters faster than the communists could replace them. As befits a great industrial power, the war was to be fought on an industrial scale. Westmoreland, like Patton before him, intended to construct a killing machine so formidable as to be irresistible. Its sheer size and power would pulverize the enemy into submission.

• 16:53Jocko Willink?

  So, there you go. Once again, it's very clear what the goal was from a strategic level. Kill as many as you can.

• 17:04Jocko Willink?

  And this, this kinda spells out how determined they were to do that. Back to the book. "From the beginning of American involvement, it had become common practice for patrols to call for artillery or an airstrike if they received even sniper fire from a village, irrespective of whether civilians also sheltered there." By the end of 1966, fighter bombers were making up to 400 such sorties a day. Added to B-52 raids in the country, this meant that around 825 tons of bombs were delivered every day. A figure that doubled by the tonnage of high explosive fired by, fired off by artillery.

• 17:46Jocko Willink?

  The solution in Vietnam, General DePuy told a visiting emissary from the Pentagon, is "More bombs, more shells, more napalm, till the other side cracks and gives up." And that's what they got. In 1967, an article in Life magazine claimed that the cost of killing a single Vietcong guerrilla was $400,000, which included the cost of 75 bombs and 150 artillery shells. No nation in history had waged a war with such little regard to expense. Only days before My Lai, Robert McNamara, the retiring Secretary of Defense, would remind an audience gathered to record his farewell from the Pentagon that more bombs

• 18:29Jocko Willink?

  had been dropped on Vietnam than on the whole of Europe during the whole of World War II. So that's just, that's crazy. Especially for me, from my perspective, having, having been in the war in Iraq and having known guys that fought in Afghanistan, the, this idea that they take sniper fire from a village and then call in airstrikes on the village is just something that would not happen. And you know, that's why when people, when people frame America as being this, this... Power that just goes and crushes and kills all these civilians, I know for a fact it's not true. Yes, obviously it happened in Vietnam, but we go through great lengths.

• 19:14Jocko Willink?

  Almost sometimes, I'm telling you, almost sometimes absurd lengths to protect the civilian populace. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, I could bring, I could bring so many people on here, on this program. Just, just SEALs, but I could bring any, anybody from all kinds of, every branch of the military to come here and say, "Oh yeah, here's, here's a situation, my guys were pinned down under fire, we tried to get bombs dropped on this building, no one would do it. We couldn't do it, we weren't allowed to do it." And, and that's, that's the reality today. And, you know, part of that is, we've matured as a nation, obviously we see that, that that's a problem. I mean, I'm not, this is the way we should fight. You know, sometimes we go too far in one direction, this was obviously too far in the other direction.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  In I, in Iraq, I remember you mentioned something about the, the, um, the enemy in Iraq would use the civilian populace.

• 20:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, there's no doubt about it.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  For like shields and.

• 20:12Jocko Willink?

  They literally used, used kids as shields. They knew our rules of engagement, they knew that if they stayed in buildings that were close to a mosque or were close to a hospital that we wouldn't bomb it, that we wouldn't hit it with, with armor. So, they were very smart about how they took advantage of our rules of engagement. And then we had to adjust our tactics. So, there, there's no doubt, the enemy figures out what your rules of engagement are, and then they start to press you in the seams of that rules of engagement to try and take advantage of it to the best of their ability.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Do you think that, that, that's kind of an indicator that they cared about their civilians less than you cared about their civilians?

• 20:53Jocko Willink?

  That, that is 100% accurate, of course. I mean, the, the Al Qaeda insurgents and now the ISIS in, in Iraq, they don't care about civilian casualties at all, they don't care. They literally don't care.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Their own civilians.

• 21:07Jocko Willink?

  Their own, well, yeah, and the civilians, again, this is something that never gets portrayed correctly. The civilians don't want ISIS in charge, the civilians didn't want Al Qaeda in charge, they knew what that would lead to.

• 21:21Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, Al Qaeda would use their children as shields. I mean, I literally had snipers of mine that shot Al Qaeda guys carrying machine guns in one hand and a baby in the other hand. And luckily, we had really good snipers. Yeah, dang. So,

• 21:44Jocko Willink?

  back to the book here, we get to talk a little bit about the company, the company that this is about Charlie Company. And a company is, a company of soldiers, generally around 150 people. And you'll have three, generally you'll have three platoons in there. So your platoons are gonna be 40, 50, maybe 60 people. Sometimes it's, it's actually a lot more flexible than people realize. Sometimes in an army company, you'll have five platoons. But generally, three platoons is what they'll have. So you know, we're talking here probably about 150 guys in Charlie Company. And their guys, they lay out, they kind of go into a quick background of the different guys. And really what it ends up showing you is a, is a cross-section of America.

• 22:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh, some, some highlights, you know, they got a guy named Fred, Fred Widmer from just north of Pittsburgh. You got a guy named Kenneth Hodges from Dublin, Georgia, um, a farmer's boy. You got a guy from Portland, Oregon named Greg Olson, who's, who's a Mormon, a devout Mormon. And, and you know, from a good family. You got another guy named Harry Stanley from Gulfport, Mississippi, who was brought up by his mom who believed in hard work, school and church on Sundays. So you're looking at a fairly normal cross-section. Michael Bernhardt came from a middle-class Catholic family from Long Island.

• 23:09Jocko Willink?

  So you got just, the troops are just a cross-section. And then you get to

• 23:17Jocko Willink?

  one of the leaders in Charlie Company, in charge of second platoon. And his name was William Laws Calley, Lieutenant Calley.

• 23:30Jocko Willink?

  And he's gonna end up being our, the monster here.

• 23:36Jocko Willink?

  So, back to the book. Who was Cali? In the early 70s, a small industry grew up trying to find the answer. Toilers at this trade looked for a monster, but all they found was a non-entity. A bland young man, burdened it seemed, with as much ordinariness as any single individual could bear. And almost too much of a conventional and commonplace to retain what is necessary for human identity.

• 24:04Jocko Willink?

  To press Cali, to the press, Cali was just about as average an American as ever came out of the nondescript, middle-class streets of Miami. He could be any young American. He was the quiet American. It was noted with astonishment that he emerged from a background which most would regard as coming close to the American ideal. Elsewhere, it was said that his life could have been lifted from the cover drawing of the old Saturday Evening Post. His averageness had made him so invisible, at one college he attended, that all anyone could remember about him was that he paid his rent regularly.

• 24:45Jocko Willink?

  The many who combed through his life found no shred of deviance, nor even a single distinctive feature, other than his height, 5'4", 5 feet 4 inches. He'd come from a stable family, he'd been neither particularly popular or unpopular, he had no particular talents, and few, if any, enthusiasms. Water skiing was the closest he ever got to violence. Throughout a long education, he'd shown no aptitude for learning, his college career simply fizzled out.

• 25:21Jocko Willink?

  And that's one of the things, I mean you can see this guy just is a white, you know, blank white bread, just plain, just plain. And that's what they find about him.

• 25:33Jocko Willink?

  Now, the company itself, they say, back to the book, Charlie Company was very average. So, so Charlie Company actually reflects Callie in the fact that Charlie Company as a whole is pretty normal for a company of Army soldiers in Vietnam. An investigation ordered by the Army Chief of Staff in 1970 re- revealed that eighty-seven percent of Charlie Company's NCOs were high school graduates, nearly twenty percent above the Army's norm. Most of the men in Charlie Company were between eighteen and twenty-two years old. Nearly half the company was black. The peers' report concluded that there was little to distinguish Charlie Company from other rifle companies. The men were generally representative of the typical cross-section of American youth assigned to most combat units throughout the Army. They brought with them the diverse traits, prejudices,

• 26:18Jocko Willink?

  and attitudes typical of the various regions of the country and segments of society from whence they came.

• 26:27Jocko Willink?

  Normal people. And why it's important to remember that as we dive into this and as this story develops, you're gonna see these normal people do completely demonic things.

• 26:47Jocko Willink?

  And now we talk a little bit here about they're in Hawaii and they're going through some training to prepare them for Vietnam.

• 26:59Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, what most Charlie Company veterans remember about the training was its unreality and how little it prepared them for what they had to face in Vietnam. For Fred Widmer, it seemed they had been preparing for World War II or Korea. Callie thought they could go to Vietnam and be Audie Murphy's, kick in the door, run in the hooch, give it a good burst, kill. Bernardo Simpson said, "You can't have no type of training can compare with what war's like, none. There's no such thing as preparedness for war. We trained and we were so psyched up and they program you to kill and to go to Vietnam, you know, but once you get there, it's a different situation."

• 27:48Jocko Willink?

  Now, I spent my last three years in the military, training guys for war and I'll tell you right now, we trained guys really well for war. And the training that I received preparing for war, did a great job and we improved upon that. The more combat experience we got, the better we got at training and preparing guys for war. But you can see how, you know how important the training is. And the training has gotta be realistic to the situations you're gonna be put in. And clearly, you know, them saying that this was like World War II or Korea, well, in World War II and Korea, there's vast differences between what you're dealing with in Vietnam. I mean, in World War II or Korea, you're fighting against enemy-uniformed troops that are on the other side of a line

• 28:33Jocko Willink?

  that are attacking you, right? That's what World War II in Korea was very much like, for the most part. Another person in a different uniform that you are gonna fight and kill. And here, we just have something totally different. People that are mixed in with the villages, there's no frontline anywhere, they're dressing the same, sometimes they have a gun, sometimes they don't. It's an infinitely challenging, more challenging situation. Now, here we go back to the book. According to Cali, the only lesson every GI learned was not to trust anybody. It was drummed into us, be sharp, on guard. As soon as you

• 29:13Jocko Willink?

  think these people won't kill you, zap. In combat, you haven't friends, you have enemies. Over and over again, at OCS, we heard this. And I told myself, I'll act as if I'm never secure. As if everyone in Vietnam would do me in. As if everyone is bad. Michael Bernhardt was also concerned. Charlie Company did not match up to the high standards of order and discipline he had learned at the LaSalle Military Academy. So this is one of the soldiers, he had gone to a military-type high school, where they had good discipline and they learned about the military. And then when he got in, he went to airborne school, so he was more the higher-end soldier.

• 29:58Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. Trained as a parachutist, he was disappointed to have been transferred to a run-of-the-mill infantry company. Bernhardt was unusual for an enlisted man. He was a military animal, a stickler for authority, and was happiest when things were being done by the book.

• 30:17Jocko Willink?

  But it was not this system that bothered Bernhardt. He believed that good soldiers not only needed discipline, but liked it. It was the lax discipline in Charlie Company and the fact that officers did not always insist on their orders being carried out that worried him. In an argument with Cali, shortly after arriving in Hawaii, he found the young Lieutenant callow and lacking in leadership qualities.

• 30:45Jocko Willink?

  So right now, we're already seeing some chinks in the armor of Lieutenant Cali. And if you remember what Hackworth said about Milai, he talked about Cali. And he said that Cali had been

• 31:03Jocko Willink?

  kicked out or failed. He'd failed Officer Candidate School three times. And they just wanted, "Hey, we need more guys. We need to have better numbers getting through. Go ahead and pass the guy." So you've got a guy that lacks leadership. And it is, I mean, it's interesting to talk about how bland this guy is. I mean, somebody that's that bland, that they literally have nothing, no characteristics. Obviously, the guy lacks some leadership characteristics as well, because he has no characteristics. And now you've got the young soldiers looking at the guy and thinking he doesn't have, he doesn't have any leadership. And this is a, uh, this is a part that I highlighted because I think it's, it's an interesting perspective of what it was like to go to Vietnam. Back to the book.

• 31:46Jocko Willink?

  We flew over on a Continental Airlines plane. Fred Widmer recalls, "It was a weird situation. A civilian plane with a civilian stewardess and crew. They were flying both ways. They were flying people out as well as in, so they got to see both ends. I remember getting off the plane and the stewardess just stood there crying as we unloaded. They were more attuned to what we were getting into than we were."

• 32:17Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty surreal. Now...

• 32:26Jocko Willink?

  They start talking about what it's like there and what they're doing. And there's a, there's a province there that they... They're starting to concentrate on a province in Vietnam and some of the problems that they have there. "In a province deemed correctly to be overwhelmingly sympathetic to Viet Cong, this meant eliminating the countryside. The villages were bombed, burned down, and pulverized. Sometimes villagers would be warned in advance that their homes were about to be wiped off the face of the earth. Sometimes not. It was common practice to shell or bomb any village from which the US soldiers had taken any fire, even small arms, without any warning at all.

• 33:11Jocko Willink?

  The destruction was on an almost unimaginable scale." So again, this is something that in the wars that I fought in, that we would, this is on, we would never do that. It wasn't just like, "Oh, we took rifle fire from a village, bombed the whole thing." That was not happening.

• 33:29Jocko Willink?

  "This was the reality behind Wes Moreland's prediction in 1965 that the war will bring about a moment of decision for the peasant farmer. He will have to choose if he stays alive. American officials frequently referred to this choice. 'The choice is yours,' one leaflet dropped on villages proclaimed. If you refuse to let Viet Cong use your villages and hamlets as their battlefield, your homes and lives will be spared."

• 33:57Jocko Willink?

  A million leaflet, leaflets a day were being dropped on Quang Ngai Province. Quang Ngai Province at this time. The whole exercise assumed that the largely illiterate peasants could actually read them. From 1965 to 1972, 50 billion leaflets were dropped over Vietnam. 1,500 each for every member of the population.

• 34:24Jocko Willink?

  So...

• 34:26Jocko Willink?

  That's just, when you think about we're dropping these leaflets to tell people what to do and, and most of the popular, or a lot of the population is illiterate. "Hey, get out of your village." "Well, there's a piece of paper flying from the sky and I don't know what it says."

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:41Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, "To stay and be killed, or to go join thousands of other refugees in the squalor of refugee camps, or the mushrooming shanty towns around the towns and cities", what kind of a choice was this?

• 34:54Jocko Willink?

  But for the Americans, the whole point of clearing an area of countryside of its people was so that anyone who remained must be Viet Cong. These areas became free fire zones. Anything that happened to someone who chose to remain in or return to a free fire zone was their own fault. They could expect the worst. The belief that people had been given a chance to get out had made their choice, made the strategy morally workable. In a free fire zone, the pursuit of a high body count could proceed unencumbered by the need to discriminate between combatants and civilians at all.

• 35:35Jocko Willink?

  Nowhere was this breathtaking carelessness of human life greater than in Quang Nai.

• 35:43Jocko Willink?

  No one was actually saying, "Kill civilians", but no one strived to keep them alive. Because the killing of civilians came to be seen as unavoidable, less and less time was spent on seeing how it could be avoided. To American spokesmen, the death or injury of non-combatants was always accidental, an inevitable tragedy of war, and therefore somehow uncorrectable.

• 36:14Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure this out. When the Americans are bombing your village, and they're killing your son, your husband, your wife, whatever, I mean, whose side are you gonna be on? You know? And we know, we know that the VC were brutal. Look at the end of Platoon Commander, when the VC come in and murder the half the village, or three-quarters of the village, and burn down their huts and blow up all their hooches. We know that the VC were capable, and evil, but when our strategy is, "Hey, give them a quick warning, drop some leaflets, tell them if they stay there, they're VC, and if not, hey, we gave them a chance, so if they're staying there, they must be VC."

• 37:03Jocko Willink?

  Charlie Company spent December guarding bridges and practicing in the deserted village of Duoc Pho. The Army called it "in-country orientation." An Australian advisor was brought in to instruct the Company on how to distinguish between non-combatants, Viet Cong regulars, suspects, and sympathizers. He said it was very difficult. So did other instructors from the South Vietnamese Army. They got the same story from former Viet Cong. The Australian emphasized that "you should be extremely leery of children," Medina testified later. Medina is the Company commander, so the Company has three platoons in it. The overall in charge of the Company is a guy named Medina.

• 37:47Jocko Willink?

  Now, think about this. Not only are you just distinguishing between good and bad, you've got non-combatants, which are friendly civilians, Viet Cong regulars, suspects, and sympathizers. And now you've got the Vietnamese soldiers, who are from Vietnam, obviously, they're saying how hard it is to distinguish who's who. And then the Viet Cong, the captured Viet Cong themselves are saying that it's very difficult to know who's who. So how is a kid from Iowa gonna be able to tell the difference? "We were exposed to something that went far beyond the world as we knew it," said Fred

• 38:32Jocko Willink?

  Widmer. "We had just left Hawaii with all its hotels, and nightclubs, and bars, and we wound up in Vietnam, where people went right out and shit in the rice paddy in the morning, dropped their drawers right along the trail at any time. It was hard to consider people in the modern day and age living like they did. I think it went against our value of what human life is."

• 38:57Jocko Willink?

  Calley was always frustrated in his attempts to keep the children away from his men when they were guarding bridges at Duckfoe. "All the men loved them, gave the kids candies, cookies, chewing gum, everything," he said later. "Not me. I hated them. I was afraid of the Vietnamese kids." So, you know, you got the Australian guy saying, "Hey, look, be leery of the kids." You got the kid from Iowa, the normal American grunt, he loves the kids, and he's giving them gum, he's giving them food, playing with them, it's all good. Meanwhile, Calley, again, you start seeing the indicators of what's about to take place. You got a guy that's saying, "I hated them. I hated them."

• 39:41Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to develop hatred for a kid, for a five-year-old. Now, they become part of a unit that's called Task Force Barker, which is, uh, multiple companies, of which Charlie Company is one of them, and this Lieutenant Colonel, like Battalion Commander, he is the commander of this task force, and they actually, his name is Colonel Frank Barker, so they named the task force after him. And they send them up to this province.

• 40:21Jocko Willink?

  Now, inside their, back to the book, inside their firebases, men of the task force enjoyed as much of the American world as could be flown in by helicopter. They received their mail, American newspapers, cold beers, steaks, ice cream, Coca-Cola, and Playboy magazine. But all around them was the world of the Vietcong.

• 40:45Jocko Willink?

  And I got another interesting thing from this book, just to show the extent that they did this. There was forty ice cream plants built in Vietnam to supply the troops with ice cream. And each, another figure that I read was that each person, each soldier in Vietnam used a hundred pounds of supplies a day. Crazy.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  Now, the guys, they move into this new province, Quang Nai, and they start to encounter some combat. And I'm very careful to say, they're not encountering, they're not really encountering VC, they're not getting in a bunch of firefights, but they are getting in some.

• 41:43Jocko Willink?

  And this is their, they're in their first firefight, and here we go. Back to the book, "The men in their first firefight were discovering things about each other and about themselves." Greg Olson recalled, "We were pinned down in a trench taking a lot of fire. Sergeant Cowan was on one side, one side of me, putting up his helmet to get some bullet holes in it, almost like it was amusing. On the other side, there was this other guy just sobbing. He'd come unglued, crawling around like a dog, just lost it.

• 42:14Jocko Willink?

  The first platoon withdrew under cover of massive artillery bombardment. According to some of the men, Callie was totally lost.

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  He led them back towards the river. As they broke cover, the snipers started up again. Ron Weber, Callie's radio operator, took a shot which shattered his radio set and tore his kidney out.

• 42:36Jocko Willink?

  He died a few moments later. Charlie Company's first killed in action. His horrified companions lifted him onto the hovering medevac helicopter. A GI in shock blubbered and howled. No one had known much about shock before. "If we got hit much harder, we would all go into shock," Callie told his court martial nearly three years later. "It was terrifying, a terrifying experience." In later years, Callie admitted that he'd been careless. He'd led his men into an exposed position. So they're in a firefight, and they're trying to break contact, and Callie leads them out into an open area and gets one of his guys killed.

• 43:17Jocko Willink?

  And then he has to report back. He got in a firefight. Okay, how'd it go? Let's report back. What's the body count? Cause that, remember, this is all about killing, this is all about killing. And so he passes up the, the body count, and here's how he comes up with his body count.

• 43:36Jocko Willink?

  Asked later, how he arrived at a body count. Kelly had replied, "You just make an estimate off the top of your head." "There is no way to really figure out exact body count. As long as it was high, that's all they wanted." "I generally knew that if I lost a troop, I'd better come back with a body count of ten." "Say I shot at least ten of the enemy, which was pretty hard when you're only fighting one sniper." So you got these guys out in the field, and they're reporting, they're just making up the body count. Now think about what, how, what the effect this has on the war effort. Because General Wes, Wes Mullen's up there saying, "Hey, we're gonna kill them until they can't take it anymore." Well, guess how many people they killed right there? Zero. They didn't kill that sniper.

• 44:20Jocko Willink?

  And yet they're reporting that they killed ten. Well, you multiply that over the whole country and every unit that's out there that's making up these body count numbers. And guess what? Eventually, Wes Mullen thinks we're doing a good job in killing a lot of bad guys, but we're not killing any.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that can jam you up when you have that, like, even in a different type of scenario where, where you're, you're getting reports on a certain level of progress, and therefore, a lot of times the decisions, the next decisions to be made are based on that.

• 44:50Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent. Any, any situation that you're in, if you've got your troopers and your subordinate leadership with a mindset that they would rather lie to you than tell you the truth about what's happening, you're not, you're never gonna be able to make good decisions, because you're making your decisions based on lies.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:13Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. Frustration and anger ate away at the company's esprit de corps. The men stopped believing that Charlie Kong, meaning the Vietcong, was afraid of Charlie Company. Faith in Medina, the company commander, was still high although some GIs felt he pushed the company too hard. Cali was another matter. Opinion on him was universally hostile. According to one GI in his platoon, Cali was a glory-hungry person, the kind of person who would have sacrificed all of us for his own personal advancement. John Smale, a squad leader in 3rd Platoon, called him a nervous, excitable type who yelled a lot.

• 45:53Jocko Willink?

  "I think it's important for you to know," Smale told Army CID, "that Cali was so disliked by members of the unit that they put a bounty on his head." None of the men had any respect for him as a military leader. Greg Olson thought he was incompetent. "I remember instances that we were lost. One time at night, everyone knew we were lost, but Cali wouldn't admit it." So there you go. You got a guy... We talk about this all the time. You say, "Oh, what do you do if you make a mistake?" You own the mistake. If you need help, you say, "Hey, you know what? I'm not sure we're on the map right now. Let me get someone up here to do a map study. Help me out. Let's figure out where we are." But instead, he just lies. He doesn't admit it. He doesn't own it.

• 46:37Jocko Willink?

  And no one is gonna have respect for him. Back to the book. Someone else thought Cali acted like a small guy who had been pushed around a lot by bigger people before he joined the Army. Now that he had authority, he didn't know how to use it, and he didn't listen to suggestions. We... I talk about this all the time. If you're in a leadership position, you need to listen to your people, up and down the chain of command. That's one of the main things that he's getting called out on. Doesn't admit when he's wrong and doesn't listen to suggestions. Many commented that there was something about him that rubbed people the wrong way. Medina, the company commander, gave his junior lieutenant a tough time and ridiculed him in front of his men.

• 47:20Jocko Willink?

  The captain called him Lieutenant Shithead regularly, one G.I. remembered. That tended to minimize your opinion of him. Others recalled that Calley's attempt to win flavor with Medina were frequently rebuffed with a sarcastic "Listen sweetheart." So, now we have another situation, where you have a subordinate leader that's not doing a good job, he's not being a good leader, people don't respect him, and what is his superior doing? Undermining him in front of his troops, instead of counseling him, instead of helping him, instead of pulling him aside and saying, "Hey, it's okay to admit when you're wrong." "Hey, you need to take suggestions from your guys." Instead, he's calling him a shithead, Lieutenant Shithead, undermining him all the time. So now you get put in Calley in an even worse position.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 48:05Jocko Willink?

  Now, they continue to patrol, they're starting to take some casualties, and they start to go down the spiral. Back to the book, Charlie Company's drift toward brutality took very little time. It began with beating up suspects in villages and quickly became more serious. Bernhardt stayed aloof from the process, Fred Widmer did not. They had explained the Geneva Convention to us during our training, and in the beginning we did what we thought was right and just turned the prisoners over. But it was kinda hard after you'd been there awhile and you started seeing, learning, finding

• 48:48Jocko Willink?

  out what real experience is all about. Here you are, fighting an enemy who doesn't follow the Geneva Convention, but you have to abide by it. It's like being in a football team, where you have to follow the rules to the letter and the other team can do whatever the hell they like. The voices of authority in the Company, the platoon sergeants and officers acknowledged that this, executing prisoners, was a proper way to behave. Who were the grunts to disagree with it? We supported it. So...

• 49:23Jocko Willink?

  They've started to execute prisoners. Which is obviously against the Geneva Convention, but the way they're looking at it, they're seeing that the sergeants and the platoon commanders are like, okay with it. So the grunts will, okay, I guess that's the way it's gonna be.

• 49:39Jocko Willink?

  And Widmer goes on to say, "The first time I saw something really bad was the point at which we stopped taking prisoners. We'd been there about a month and a half, or maybe two months. There was one guy Medina had shoot the prisoners. Instead of having everyone around and shoot them, we would walk them down towards the, they would walk them down towards the beach or behind some sand dunes and shoot them. A couple of shots and they were done. As time went by, things were done. Ears cut off, mutilation. One prisoner had his arms tied straight out on a stick. One woman was, one was a woman and one was a man. There was no question that these two were Viet Cong.

• 50:22Jocko Willink?

  The woman was working as a nurse and we found them in a tunnel with all the medical supplies and we knew they were the enemy. Lit cigarettes were put inside the elastic of the guy's pants and we watched him dance around because they were burning his ass. I think it was a bit of making him talk and a bit of venting our frustrations, a bit of both. I don't remember what happened to them, whether they were turned over or shot. The more it went on, the more you didn't trust anyone. You didn't believe anybody because you didn't know who was who, you didn't know who the enemy was. As we went on, more and more prisoners, prisoners would be executed. I would say it was a regular occurrence.

• 51:06Jocko Willink?

  I did abuse someone, a prisoner, a papasan. I found myself doing the same things that had been going on all along. I found myself caught up in it. We cut his beard off, that was an insult. A papasan with a beard is considered as the wise man and to cut off their beard was a real sign of disrespect to them. You found yourself punching them around, beating them up, trying to get them to talk. I never did hit anyone with a rifle." I've taken a knife to them. I never tortured anyone to death. I think I probably saw people tortured to death. So you hear this guy using this verbiage, "You find yourself punching them around." It's almost as if it's not, it's not him. He's deta- he's like detached.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:49Jocko Willink?

  Right? We talk about being detached. Well, he's detached from doing something that he knows he shouldn't be doing.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems like he comes back and kinda checks back in every once in a while. It's like, dang, I kinda woke up and found myself doing this thing.

• 52:01Jocko Willink?

  Bernhardt, an outsider as usual, watched the downward spiral. It started with just plain prisoners, prisoners you thought were the enemy. Then you'd go on to prisoners who weren't the enemy, and then the civilians because there was no difference between the enemy and civilians. It came to a point where a guy could kill anybody.

• 52:24Jocko Willink?

  During an interrogation in one ver- village, Harry Stanley was standing only ten feet away while Cali and another G.I., Herbert Carter, interrogated an old farmer. Lieutenant Cali asked him questions and then Carter hit the old man in the mouth twice with his fist. Then Carter pushed the old man into a well, but the old man spread his legs and arms and held on and didn't fall into the well. Then Carter hit the old man in the stomach with his rifle stock. The old man fell, the old man's feet fell into the well, but he was holding on with his hands. Carter hit the man's fingers, trying to make him fall into the well. Then Lieutenant Cali shot the man with his M-16.

• 53:07Jocko Willink?

  For some G.I.'s, incidents like these showed that the official attitude to brutality was permissive. What resulted was a moral vacuum, a moratorium on restraint and self-control. Common decency became optional, a matter of personal inclination. Even those who refused to be drawn in were le- left morally thrown off balance. Greg Olson was in the village when Cali and Carter threw the old man down the well. I was in the village. I remember seeing people butted in the head with rifles, but you start losing your sense of what's normal. You don't give up your morals, but you become a lot more tolerant.

• 53:47Jocko Willink?

  We believed this behavior was pretty commonplace. I didn't think we were doing anything different from any other unit. You really do lose your sense, not of right and wrong, but your degree of right, right and wrong.

• 54:02Jocko Willink?

  And Michael Bernhardt, who watched what was happening from the sidelines, was already viewed with some mistrust by Medina, Callie, and others in the company. When I saw American soldiers committing acts that could be called atrocities if someone else had done them, I began to think that maybe I'd just been too naive all my life, that this is the way things really were. Little by little, I began to see that this group of men was getting out of control. Discipline was beginning to wear off. Without military discipline, they were alone in the country with no point of reference. The things they had brought from their families and schools were far away and beginning to disappear.

• 54:45Jocko Willink?

  Fred Widmer too, felt things going from bad to worse, and felt himself drawn along with the tide. If it ever occurred to me that things were getting out of hand, or that I was questioning what I myself might be capable of doing, I suppressed it. It did creep up in my mind, because you still have those values of what is right and what is wrong, that you've been taught all your life. I think the frustration got to me, but I also think I began to enjoy it. That's what's scary, because at the time, you find yourself enjoying it. I guess you could term it the superiority we had over them. It's a strange feeling. In retrospect, you look back on it and wonder how you yourself could have done it.

• 55:29Jocko Willink?

  Twenty years later, when you look back at things that happened, things that transpired, things you did, you say, "Why? Why did I do that? That is not me. Something happened to me." You reach a point over there where you snap. That's the easiest way to put it. You finally snap. Somebody flicks a switch, and you are a completely different person. There's a culture of violence, of brutality, with people all around you doing the same thing.

• 56:06Jocko Willink?

  Continuing down the spiral. Leonard Gonzalez, a member of Second Platoon, saw rapes committed every time the company went through a village.

• 56:19Jocko Willink?

  One squad got one girl, one lady. Then they told me, "Go in there", and I said, "No, I won't." So what I did is, I went inside and she looked real bad. The only thing I can do for the lady is like, I got the canteen and I wiped her. She was awful for spiraling. I wiped her forehead. I tried to help her. She got scared of me. I was part of them. I tried to tell her I don't have nothing to do with it. I helped her to her feet. I took her to the well. I got some water from the well. Then another squad heard about thirteen guys who did their thing with this woman. And were going to try her out, and I told them to leave her alone.

• 57:01Jocko Willink?

  And then, at that time, I just walked off. I said, "Forget it. I don't want to kill my own men." I tried to tell her, "Get out of here. Go." She was going to run, but after thirteen guys got to her, it's hard to walk.

• 57:28Jocko Willink?

  They're losing it. There's no leadership. They're losing it.

• 57:39Jocko Willink?

  Now, they get into a... They get, they get in a minefield. And they take some casualties in a minefield. And here's Medina's account of what happened in this minefield. "We started sweeping the area as best we could with mine detectors, taking pieces of toilet paper and marking the mines that we found."

• 58:02Jocko Willink?

  We had one individual that we could not evacuate that was dead. I took the medic that was with me, the platoon medic from first platoon, and he and I moved through the minefield to where an individual was lying. He was split as if somebody had taken a cleaver, and right up from his crotch all the way up to his chest cavity. I had never seen anything like it, that looked so unreal in my entire life. The intestines, the liver, and the stomach and the blood just looked like plastic. We took a poncho and we spread it out, and started, and the medic started to pick him up by the legs. I reached underneath his arms to place him under the poncho and we set him on top of another mine. The concussion blew me back.

• 58:43Jocko Willink?

  I fell backward. As I got up, the medic was starting to go to pieces. I looked at him as if he had stood behind the screen and somebody had taken a paintbrush with red paint and splattered it through the screen. He had blood all over him. I grabbed him as he started to pass me and I shook him and I said, "My God, don't go to pieces on me. You're the only medic I've got. I have these people that are hurt." I hit him. I slapped him. I knocked him to the ground and I helped him to get back up. And I saw on his religious medal, a piece of liver.

• 59:20Jocko Willink?

  And I tried to get it off the individual before he seen it. The individual was very shook up.

• 59:28Jocko Willink?

  Everybody was shaken. Three men were dead, another 12 suffered ghastly injuries. Few could forget their own fear, or the screams of the wounded, or the gruesome task of loading the medevac helicopters. When you've been through a minefield and put the remains of your friends in body bags, nothing shocks you anymore.

• 59:51Jocko Willink?

  So that minefield

• 59:54Jocko Willink?

  caused some, three dead and 12 severely wounded. And we talk about IEDs a lot in here. We talked about them with Jody. Jody Medick, who got blown up by an IED.

• 1:00:08Jocko Willink?

  There's no, there's no one to fight. The bomb goes off and that's it. Who did this? Who do you blame? Well, let me answer that question for these guys. Most of all, they blamed the Vietnamese. Not the Vietcong who they could not see or find, but the Vietnamese in the villages who did not warn them of the minefields and of the booby traps. Same thing my schoolteacher told me. They're starting to apply the blame to these, to these Vietnamese villagers.

• 1:00:44Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Calley noticed the change in the mood of the men. He had been on leave at the time of the incident, so he wasn't around when this happened.

• 1:00:56Jocko Willink?

  He'd been on leave at the time of the incident and had returned to the LZ uptight in time to meet the helicopters ferrying the dead and injured. From now on, the men in his platoon no longer gave candy to the Vietnamese children they came across while on patrol in the villages. Instead, Calley noticed with some satisfaction, they kicked everybody aside, even the nice, sweet kids. He could hardly refrain from telling them, "Well, I told you so."

• 1:01:32Jocko Willink?

  Now, they are starting to, after that incident, they're starting to now assemble information and intelligence for this raid that they're planning in My Lai.

• 1:01:48Jocko Willink?

  So, and I think it's really important to take a look at the where this intelligence is coming from and how this, because it paints a very important part of the picture of what these guys are being told. Back to the book, an intelligence roundup from March 1968 prepared respectively, summed up the state of knowledge was this. Although Son Tin district remained relatively quiet during this period, elements of the 48th and existing local force units probably roamed, roamed the district countryside. The hills north and northwest of My Lai area were probable base camps for elements of the 48th Battalion. And it probably received supplies.

• 1:02:35Jocko Willink?

  From the peninsula. So, the forty-eighth is an enemy unit, an enemy battalion. And you, you can hear the word probable being used. Okay, they're probably in the area, the villagers probably support them. So, th- there isn't a claim being made from higher, from above the chain of command. But, you're gonna hear that change. So, above the chain of command, there's, there's higher intelligence that's making these claims. That there's probable VC there, that they're probably working this area, that they're probably getting support from the village as well. As this filters down, it turns from probable to like definite.

• 1:03:19Jocko Willink?

  There is a strange discrepancy between what the army thought it knew about the Viet Cong and what the task force thought it knew. Army intelligence made only tentative claims. By contrast, Ramsdale, and for that matter, Kootak, were almost pontifical. So, these are the two intelligence guys at the task force level. So, does that make sense? So, you've got the, the higher army above them is telling them, "Hey, there's probable this, probable that." And these guys are, are basically starting to say, "No, no, this is VC. This is what the, what this is what's happening, factually."

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Is that kinda like, like the game of telephone, one of those deals?

• 1:03:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is. And it's also, you're gonna find as I go into this, that both these guys aren't experienced. So, I'll get to it. There was a kind of perverse destiny that brought the two overweight and middle-aged American captains, Ramsdale and Kootak, together in Tet Kwong Nai City. Both were new boys to the real world of intelligence assessment in a battle zone. Both were inexperienced, both desperately eager to establish a reputation.

• 1:04:29Jocko Willink?

  Ramsdale had provided to intelligence to Kootak prior to Milai operation and the curious convergence of their views irresistibly suggests that it was indeed Ramsdale who had provided intelligence for the attack on Milai itself. Suggestions that the 48th Local Force Battalion was up to 400 strong, that everyone in the village was Vietcong or Vietcong sympathizer, and that at 7 on Saturday morning, all bona fide civilians would have left the village for the market. All these views were shared by Ramsdale and Kootak and accepted uncritically by Task Force Barker. So, think about that.

• 1:05:07Jocko Willink?

  You got these guys saying there's 400, up to 400 enemy in the area, that the village is all Vietcong sympathizers, and that on a Saturday, everyone that's an actual civilian will have left at 7 o'clock in the morning for the market. Now, you can't make that claim about any group of civilians in the world, that everyone's gonna do something at the same time.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Jocko Willink?

  Impossible that you could, you could make that claim.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:38Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. Asked later about intelligence indicating that no civilians would be left in the village at the time of the attack, Ramsdale replied that the civilians went to market early in the morning because of the heat. They testified it appears in a similar vein, in the civilian market, in a civilian population area, there were several markets, large markets, where all the people would gather each day because they had no refrigeration or anything like it.

• 1:06:04Jocko Willink?

  With hindsight, it appears naive, even simple-minded. Yet in 1968, this nugget of anthropological insight, along with the corollary that everyone who was not at the market was Vietcong, was deemed unchallengeable by Ramsdale, considered impeccable by Kootak, and passed on unamended to the bitter men of Charlie Company seeking revenge for their losses. The, this is just, this is horrible. It's a horrible situation. And I had, I had situations like that. Occur with me where it was early my first deployment to Iraq where we got

• 1:06:43Jocko Willink?

  almost like a movie we would get maps of of a city area and there'd be a red X on the target building hey you're bad guys in this building and I remember one time we went out we hit the building with the red X on it and we didn't find anything or it was we or the people that we got out of there turned out to be not the person we were looking for and as we did further analysis we realized that the building was the wrong building and and after that I got very critical about okay who who put the red X on this building tell me who did that and why they did it I want to know I'm not just going off of you put a red X on a building doesn't mean anything to me I want to know who did that and I had another situation where

• 1:07:27Jocko Willink?

  we went in and hit a building you know where there was suspected bad guy we had intelligence on this guy was a financier and had money and was giving it to the insurgents and so we went and captured him and searched his house and you know blew blew his door off so we we we caused impact to his house and then when we got him back we after we talked to him we figured out this guy was not bad and as I pulled the string on what where this intelligence came from that eventually led somebody to put a red X on his house and described the guy and who he was I found out that it was actually he the guy owned a business and he had fired one of his employees and when he fired one of his employees well

• 1:08:11Jocko Willink?

  his employee went and told the Americans hey this guy's a bad guy this guy's funding you know insurgents

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Got a little disgruntled

• 1:08:19Jocko Willink?

  So all you had to do is dig in and find a little bit more about the information and you figured out it was a disgruntled employee so guys out there in the field right now when you're always question your intelligence nothing against the intelligence folks they're gonna do the best they can but they're not the ones that are gonna get the blood on their hands so question the intelligence find out what the sources are find out where the information came from ask who drew that red X ask who said there's not gonna be any villagers in the in the no civilians in the village after seven o'clock in the morning ask those questions

• 1:08:53Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, the losses, these guys are continuing to take casualties. So they took, what was it, three killed and 12 wounded? And now they got Sergeant Cox killed by a booby trap. They got Dyson lost both legs. Hendricks was blinded, suffered groin injuries, and lost an arm and a leg. So they're continuing to take casualties and on top of the casualties that they're taking, you're starting to get an escalation of behavior, of negative behavior. And here's an example of that. Back to the book. A villager passing on a bicycle was beaten up but managed to escape. A woman working in the fields was shot when somebody shouted that she was carrying a weapon. When the squad came closer, they discovered she was unarmed and still alive.

• 1:09:37Jocko Willink?

  They shot her again and kicked her body to a pulp. Somebody stole her ring. They were now close to their base and angry villagers stormed the camp in protest against the murder. Medina managed to hush it up. No one was charged with any offense. Medina said later that the woman had been discovered with a detonator still in her hand. Callie commented that Medina wasn't about to lose men just because they kicked a Vietnamese kid or killed a damn innocent woman. He had to keep a combat effective unit. So now you've got clear cover up going on by the chain of command. Hey, she had a detonator, she didn't have a detonator.

• 1:10:21Jocko Willink?

  And it's very visible to see this downward spiral from a letter from Greg Olson, who, like I said, he was the faithful Mormon kid. And he writes a letter to his dad back in the States. Dear Dad, how's everything with you? I'm still here on the bridge. We leave Saturday. One of our platoons went out on a routine patrol today and came across 155mm artillery round that was booby trapped. It killed one man, blew the legs off two others, and injured two more. And it all turned out, a bad day made even worse. On their way back to Dottie, which is the name of their camp, they saw a woman working in the fields.

• 1:11:07Jocko Willink?

  They shot and wounded her. Then they kicked her to death and emptied their magazines in her head. They slugged every little kid they came across. Why in God's name does this have to happen? These are all seemingly normal guys. Some were friends of mine. For a while,

• 1:11:25Jocko Willink?

  they were wild like animals. It was murder and I'm ashamed of myself for not trying to do anything about it. This isn't the first time dad. I've seen it many times before. I don't know why I'm telling you this. I guess I just want to get it all off my chest. My faith and fellow man is all shot to hell. I just want my time to pass and I just want to come home. I really believe, as you do dad, there's a cause behind all this. And if it is God's will for me to go, I would rather do it here than home on a freeway.

• 1:11:58Jocko Willink?

  Saturday, we're gonna be dropped by air in an NVA stronghold. I'm hoping I'll be able to get out of here for a few days to go to a conference. Don't expect any letters from me for a while, but please keep writing them. I love and miss you and mom so much.

• 1:12:17Jocko Willink?

  Your son, Greg.

• 1:12:21Jocko Willink?

  So again, highlighted in there, the normalcy of the guys and how they're starting to slide. The clear, it's obvious to Greg Olson that what's happening is wrong.

• 1:12:33Jocko Willink?

  And unfortunately, he's not stepping up and saying anything. He's not bringing it to the attention of anyone. He's letting it happen.

• 1:12:42Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, with these most recent losses, Charlie Company was down to 105 men. Since arriving in Vietnam, three months before, they had suffered 28 casualties, including five killed, three of them in action. All the casualties, all the casualties had come from mines, booby traps, and snipers. They had never seen or encountered the enemy in any strength. There had been no heavy contact. They were battle scarred without being battle hardened.

• 1:13:17Jocko Willink?

  So you can imagine, again, it's what my, it's what my high school teacher told me. They're viewing, they're taking these casualties, and it's very similar to Iraq and Afghanistan, where I think in Iraq, it was 75% of the casualties are from IEDs. So there's no one to shoot at. After an IED blows up, oftentimes, there's nothing to shoot at.

• 1:13:40Jocko Willink?

  Now, with those casualties, with that viewpoint, they're starting to prepare, as I said, for this assault on Myli. And, back to the book, although no written record of the briefing survives, witnesses all agree on the general thrust of Kutaq's contribution. This is the intelligence officer. "The 48th LF Battalion was dispersed throughout the area. But the latest intelligence the assembled officers were told suggested that VC Headquarters and two companies totaling over 200 fighting men were located in Myli 4.

• 1:14:22Jocko Willink?

  The civilian population were all active sympathizers with the VC. By 7:00 in the morning, most non-combatants would have left the village for the market." So, just to make that clear, what we're expecting, they're expecting to go in to Myli and find over 200 fighting men. And all active sympathizers with the VC. Now, they start to ask some questions, like, okay, what, at the task force level. Back to the book, "What was to happen to the village itself? Task force officers left the meeting with the clear impression that Barker had ordered

• 1:15:03Jocko Willink?

  the destruction of all houses, dwellings, and livestock in the Myli area, although there is some doubt as to whether this was a direct order or something that had been assumed. Kutaq recalled Barker saying that the village was to be destroyed. He wanted the area cleaned out, he wanted it neutralized, and he wanted the buildings knocked down. He wanted the hooches burned, he wanted the tunnels filled, and he wanted the livestock and chickens run off, killed or destroyed. He wanted to neutralize the area. For Medina, also, those were Barker's clear instructions."

• 1:15:38Jocko Willink?

  And what was to happen to the civilians? There is nothing to suggest that Barker explicitly ordered the murder of ordinary people of My Lai. But the previous failures of the task force and the demand for more aggression, the intelligence picture of a community entirely controlled by the Vietcong, the bland assumption that civilians would be gone to the market, the totally unjustified belief that innocent people had been warned to get out of the area. In other words, the entire scorched earth concept of the operation planned to neutralize the area drove irresistibly to the conclusion that here was a free fire zone in which even the people were to be eliminated.

• 1:16:25Jocko Willink?

  Now, that's... So that's the company commanders getting the brief from the battalion commander, from the task force commander. That's the impression that they get. Now we start to get into your Chinese telephone game. Because now, how does that get translated down the chain of command? And even with the battalion commander talking to the company commanders, there's... It's not super solid what the actual orders were. It's not a... It's not super solid. No one said, "Hey, they said kill a woman and children." It's kind of implied, "Well, maybe he said he wanted everyone destroyed." What does destroyed mean? So now we get to where Medina is talking to his troops and his subordinate leadership, the company commander.

• 1:17:07Jocko Willink?

  Medina grabbed a shovel from a quarter ton trailer and drew a map of My Lai 4 in the dirt at his feet as he described the coming engagement. "Tomorrow," he told them, "was Charlie Company's chance to get even." Medina relayed what he had learned at Barker's briefing earlier in the afternoon. The Vietcong, the 48th Vietcong Battalion were in My Lai with a strength of between 250 and 280. So actually, he just increased that number because the report that he was given was 200. Now he's saying between 250 and 280. This meant that Charlie Company would be outnumbered more than 2 to 1. But they were not to worry because helicopter gunships would be on the American side.

• 1:17:50Jocko Willink?

  He told them to expect a hell of a good fight. He told them that all innocent civilians would have gone to the market.

• 1:18:00Jocko Willink?

  He's just amplifying what he was told. But what was going to happen to the village? I told them we had permission. Colonel Barker had received permission that the village could be destroyed since it was a VC stronghold. To burn down the houses, to kill all the livestock, to cut any of the crops that might feed the VC, to cave the wells and destroy the village.

• 1:18:25Jocko Willink?

  And what was going to happen to the innocent civilians? Somebody at the briefing asked him, "Do we kill women and children?" It was an astounding question that speaks volumes about the temper of the men, but the fact that such a question was indeed asked is not disputed. Where testimony is divided is what Medina replied. My reply to that question was, "No, you do not kill women and children. You must use common sense. If they have a weapon and are trying to engage you, then you can shoot back, but you must use common sense." But many of the men got a different message. This is Sergeant Hodges' recollection of the briefing. "This was a time for us to get even. A time for us to settle the score, a time for revenge.

• 1:19:12Jocko Willink?

  When we can get revenge for our fallen comrades. The order we were given was to kill and destroy everything that was in the village. It was to kill the pigs, drop them in the wells, pollute the water supply, kill, cut down the banana trees, burn the village, burn the hooches as we went through it. It was clearly explained that we were, that there were to be no prisoners. That order was given, the order that was given was to kill everyone in the village. Someone asked if that meant the women and children, and the order was everyone in the village. Because those people in that village, the women, the kids, the old men, were VC. They were Viet Cong themselves, or they were sympathetic to the Viet Cong.

• 1:19:55Jocko Willink?

  They were not sympathetic to the American, Americans. It was quite clear that no one was to be spared in that village."

• 1:20:05Jocko Willink?

  So, pretty clear what Sergeant Hodges thought.

• 1:20:08Jocko Willink?

  So Medina says, "No, I didn't tell them. I told them they had to use their common sense. If they're shooting at you, then you kill them." Hodges didn't hear that. And back to the book, Sergeant Hodges was not alone in his interpretation of Medina's briefing. Many senior NCOs left the meeting convinced that the order was to kill everyone. Staff Sergeant Bacon, "We were to kill all Viet Cong and all Viet Cong sympathizers in the village." Sergeant West, "It was a search and destroy mission. We were to kill everything." Staff Sergeant Fagan, "Kill everyone." Sergeant Cowan, "To kill everything that was in the village." Enlisted men too. Glimpse, La Martina, Gonzalez, Lloyd, Parsh, Moss later testified that this is what they heard. Flynn even remembered the question.

• 1:20:53Jocko Willink?

  "Someone asked, 'Are we supposed to kill women and children?' And Medina replied, 'Kill everything that moves.'" Harry Stanley said, "Captain Medina told us that the intelligence had established that Milai Four was completely enemy-controlled." He described the formations we were to use following day and told us to carry extra ammunition. "He ordered us to kill everything in the village. The men in my squad talked about amongst ourselves that night because the order to kill everything in the village was so unusual. We all agreed that Captain Medina meant for us to kill every man, woman, and child in the village."

• 1:21:33Jocko Willink?

  But not everyone agreed that Medina had ordered everyone in the village to be killed. Greg Olson, whose foreboding letter to his father had been posted only two days before, has a completely different recollection of the briefing. "There clearly, absolutely wasn't an order to go in and slaughter everybody in that village, and anybody that says so is a liar." Medina said that any villagers were to be rounded up and airlifted to refugee camps. That was specifically addressed in the meeting. "If I thought I was gonna get on a helicopter that morning with clear orders that I was going to slaughter every living, breathing, human being in that village, I'm sure to God it would have been so appalling and unthinkable." I mean, I'm not that stupid. I know they couldn't have forced me to do something like that.

• 1:22:18Jocko Willink?

  Others too denied there was any explicit order. "It was like Medina's benediction," Michael Bernhard said. "He didn't actually say to kill every man, woman, and child in Meleih." He stopped just short of saying that. He gave every other indication that that's what he expected. Whatever Medina actually said, there can be no doubt about the impression he made to get the most to the men. To her pride, he offered satisfaction. To grieving soldiers, he offered a chance to strike back. To bitter and resentful men, he offered an end to the frustration.

• 1:23:00Jocko Willink?

  Medina let slip the dogs of war. Meleih IV was thrown in the path of their vindictiveness and fury. Charlie Company was going to get its revenge. The task force would get its body count. This time, there would be no mistake.

• 1:23:28Jocko Willink?

  So, that's where... That's the attitude that these guys roll into the operation with. And it is not the right attitude to have going into the situation. Because, in case you haven't figured this out yet, the village that they're going into, there's no battalion of Vietcong fighters. There's no fighters at all. And here they start their attack. March 16th, 1968, 7:15 in the morning.

• 1:24:13Jocko Willink?

  "Out in the fields, a farmer frantically raised his hands by way of both greeting and to show he had no weapon. He was immediately felled by a burst from a machine gun."

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  Along with the gunships, almost everyone in first and second platoons was firing their weapons, and now third platoon was joining in. The moment a Vietnamese was spotted, volleys of fire were loosed off, and the enemy fell, wounded or dying. It was apparent to Bernhardt, as it was to virtually everyone gathered there on the ground, that they were receiving no return fire at all. There was no incoming.

• 1:25:00Jocko Willink?

  Berghold came across a hut which had been raked with bullets. Inside, Berghold discovered three children, a woman with a flesh wound in her side, and an old man squatting down, hardly able to move. He'd been seriously wounded in both legs. From six feet, Berghold aimed his forty-five caliber pistol and pulled the trigger, causing the top of the man's head to fly off. It was a sight that would forever be etched in Maples' memory. Berghold claimed to have shot the old man as an act of mercy.

• 1:25:40Jocko Willink?

  Harry Stanley saw that the fleeing villagers were offering no resistance. His friend Alan Boyce, who lived in New Jersey, only a couple of miles from Maples, came up behind him with a Vietnamese farmer aged between forty and fifty years in custody. He wore black pajamas, and his shirt hung open so that Stanley could see his chest. Boyce pushed the man forward to where Stanley was standing beside the trail. Suddenly, and for no reason, Boyce stabbed the man with the bayonet attached to the end of his rifle. He fell to the ground, grasping for breath. Boyce killed him, and then grabbed another man, being detained, shot him in the neck, and threw him into a well, lobbing an M26 grenade after him.

• 1:26:24Jocko Willink?

  "That's the way you gotta do it," he told Simpson.

• 1:26:31Jocko Willink?

  Robert Lee, the platoon medic, joined in the frenzy but confined his efforts to slaughtering animals. He killed a cow that had been injured. Lee was from a farming community and didn't want to see the beast suffer. Up front, he and the platoon sergeant, Isaiah Cowan, could see women and children being slain. They were stunned by what was happening all around them. The further they went into the village, the more bodies they found. To Conti, and he's another guy, Conti, the men appeared all psyched up when they landed. The shooting, once it began, created almost a chain reaction. He joined in without killing anyone. Inside the village, his comrades appeared out of control.

• 1:27:12Jocko Willink?

  Families huddled together for safety in houses, in yards and in bunkers only to be mown down with automatic weapon fire or blown apart by fragmentation grenades. Women and children were pushed into bunkers and grenades thrown after them. At one point, wandering off on his own, Conti found a woman aged about twenty with a four-year-old child. He forced her to perform oral sex on him while he held a gun at the child's head, threatening to kill it. Half a dozen people from both platoons then witnessed a stocky blond-haired second platoon soldier from Kansas City called Gary Rashavitz become hysterical when troops from first platoon

• 1:27:57Jocko Willink?

  were walking a small group of villagers back for screening. Rashavitz, aged twenty-five, was older than most of the grunts in the company. Standing almost six feet tall and weighing close to two-hundred-and-thirty pounds, he made a surprise grab for Roy Wood's M16 and demanded the weapon as a trade for his M79, but Wood wasn't having any. "Don't turn them over to the company," Rashavitz appealed to those gathered there. "Kill them." Wood, who was physically by far the smaller of the two men, held tightly onto his rifle. Rashavitz then snatched a hold of Vermont O'Simpson's M16, turned and shot a Vietnamese farmer in the head. Wood began feeling sick at the sight of the man's brain spilling on the ground as he turned away.

• 1:28:39Jocko Willink?

  Rashavitz shot two more peasants in the head before handing the gun back to Simpson.

• 1:28:47Jocko Willink?

  In the northern position of the village, second platoon had also run berserk. Employing the routine combat assault technique used by Calley, Stephen Brooks' men also approached line abreast in three squads. Firing as they moved, they came to dwellings and yelled out "Lai Day" in Vietnamese for "Come here." The villagers at the villagers' sheltering inside homemade shelters or bunkers. Fragmentation grenades were tossed inside. Homes were sprayed with automatic fire. Children aged six or seven came toward them with their hands outstretched, saying "Chop, chop." They asked for food and candy they had received from other American soldiers on the two previous visits to the village.

• 1:29:32Jocko Willink?

  The soldiers skythed them down. After one group of Vietnamese were killed in front of a hut, the first squad leader, Sergeant Kenneth Sheel, began telling his men that he didn't like what they were doing, but that they had to obey orders. The villagers had huddled together for safety, but the Americans poured fire into them, tearing their bodies apart, one man firing a machine gun at random, other using M16s on automatic. Brooks' radio operator Dean Fields witnessed Renato Simpson shoot a woman with a baby from a distance of about 25 meters. Her arm was shot almost completely off at the wrist.

• 1:30:15Jocko Willink?

  All that held it on was a fragile piece of flesh. She ran into a hooch and someone yelled an order for her and the baby to be killed. Max Hudson, the weapons squad leader, formed a machine gun team with Floyd Wright. As soon as they passed the tree line, they were confronted less than 30 feet away by a middle-aged woman climbing out of a tunnel using both hands. She was unarmed, but they opened fire and she fell back into the tunnel. Hudson and Wright took turns on the machine gun. Whenever they came across any Vietnamese, they opened fire, killing them. Hudson could see people firing all around him. The whole scene was one of chaos and confusion, with people moving, yelling, and shouting.

• 1:30:58Jocko Willink?

  Some of the troops were afraid they would be shot by their own men.

• 1:31:08Jocko Willink?

  In the clearing, in a clearing near a small hooch, a group of fifteen Vietnamese had been gathered, four women in their thirties, three in their fifties, three girls in their late teens, and five children ages between three and fourteen. Standing around were seven or eight soldiers from different squads, including Huto, Torres, and Rashovets. Gonzalez heard someone yell that if anyone was behind the Vietnamese to take cover because they were gonna open fire. A shot rang out and a bullet penetrated the head of a young child being carried by its mother, blowing out the back of its skull. Others began firing until the entire group was dead. Gonzalez could stand no more, he turned away and vomited.

• 1:31:52Jocko Willink?

  Few words were spoken until someone said, "Let's move out." A soldier stooping over a tunnel yelled for the occupants to come out. Gonzalez moved closer and could hear people responding as if they were about to comply, whereupon the soldier threw in a grenade and yelled "Fire in the hole", telling everyone to stand clear. Cali had been called twice that morning on the radio by an anxious Medina. "What is happening over there?", Medina demanded to know, challenging the slow progress of the first platoon. He wanted Cali to get his men back on line and keep moving. This made the young platoon commander nervous. Throughout his time with the company,

• 1:32:37Jocko Willink?

  he had frequently been made the butt of Medina's jokes. Medina knew Cali couldn't command the respect of his men. Now, under pressure, Cali replied that large groups of civilians had gathered and were slowing the platoon down. Never one to accept excuses, Medina told Cali, simply to get rid of them. So when Cali came across Miedlo and Conti in the clearing and said "Take care of them", his intention was clear. It was his way of getting Medina off his back. Conti thought nothing of the implications of Cali's request when he simply replied, "Okay." Like many in the company, he regarded the man as a joke and resented the way Cali tried

• 1:33:19Jocko Willink?

  to suck up to the men one minute by calling them by their first names and then shouted and balled at them the next. Conti felt his platoon commander had absolutely no leadership ability. Among the squatting Vietnamese were ten to fifteen men with beards and ten women, as well as a handful of very elderly gray-haired women who could hardly walk. The rest were children of all ages, from babies up to early teens. Cali, who was carrying a bandolier of ammunition on one shoulder, said, "I thought I told you to take care of them." Miedlo responded somewhat naively, "We are, we're watching over them."

• 1:34:01Jocko Willink?

  "No," reposted Cali, "I want them killed." He moved over to where Conti was standing beside Miedlo. "We'll get online and fire into them."

• 1:34:13Jocko Willink?

  Conti and Miedlo looked at each other and backed off, neither of them wanting a part in what was about to happen. Cali, losing his temper, beckoned them toward him, "Come here, come here, come on, we'll line them up, we'll kill them." Conti, searching for an excuse, pointed out that he was carrying a grenade launcher and he didn't want to waste ammunition. "Perhaps he could keep guard over by the tree line in case anyone tried to get away," he suggested. Cali turned to Miedlo. "Fire when I say, fire." Conti stood behind them as Cali and Miedlo, standing side by side, blazed away. They stood only ten feet from their hapless victims, changing magazines from time to time. The Vietnamese screamed, yelled, and tried to get up.

• 1:35:00Jocko Willink?

  It was pure carnage, as heads were shot off along with limbs, the fleshier body parts were ripped to shreds.

• 1:35:08Jocko Willink?

  Miedlo had taken twenty-three fully loaded magazines for his M16 in his pack when they had left Dadi. He fired in a spraying motion. He noticed one man, dressed in red, fall dead as he fired the rifle on automatic until the magazine was exhausted. Then he reloaded. He switched to semi-automatic fire and loaded the third magazine. After a minute or so, Miedlo couldn't continue.

• 1:35:35Jocko Willink?

  Tears flooded down his cheeks.

• 1:35:39Jocko Willink?

  He turned, stuck his rifle in Conti's hand, and said, "You shoot them. Conti pushed the weapon back." "If they are going to be killed, I'm not gonna do it. Let him do it." He said, pointing at Callie. By this time, Conti could see only a few children were left standing. Mothers had thrown themselves on top of the young ones in the last desperate bid to protect them from bullets raining down on them. The children were trying to stand up. Callie opened fire again, killing them one by one. Conti swore at him. Finally, when it appeared to be all over, Callie calmly turned and said, "Okay, let's go."

• 1:36:22Jocko Willink?

  Suddenly, someone yelled out that more Vietnamese, five women and six children, some distance away, were making a break for the tree line. Callie burst out, "Get them! Get them! Kill them!"

• 1:36:36Jocko Willink?

  Miedlo's face was flushed. His eyes were still full of tears when he arrived with Griesik at the ditch site and found Callie sitting down. "We've got another job to do," he said, looking up at them. About ten members of the platoon were guarding forty to fifty Vietnamese. Babies were crying and crawling around. James Dursy, a heavy-set Irish-Italian from Brooklyn, was looking at a man in white robes with a goatee beard whom he took to be a Buddhist monk praying over an elderly woman. She was seriously ill and had been carried through the village on a narrow wooden platform which the Vietnamese used as a bed. Callie was now on his feet.

• 1:37:19Jocko Willink?

  Harry Stanley appeared on the scene and tried to question the monk who was crying and bowing as he tried to make himself understood. Callie couldn't understand him. Griesik,

• 1:37:30Jocko Willink?

  who had attended Vietnamese language classes in Hawaii, tried more questions and got nowhere. Callie was getting more and more impatient. Where had the Vietcong gone? Where were the weapons? Where were the NVA? When the man shook his head, Callie struck him in the mouth with his rifle butt. Just then, a child aged about two years and parted from its mother managed to crawl up to the top of the ditch. Dursy watched horrified as Callie picked up the child, shoved it back down the slope and shot it before returning to question the monk. The villagers pleaded for the holy man's life. Stanley asked the bearded man the same questions in Vietnamese that Callie was asking in English in an effort to defuse the situation.

• 1:38:12Jocko Willink?

  But the monk vainly replied that there were no North Vietnamese soldiers in the village. There were no weapons.

• 1:38:21Jocko Willink?

  Stanley translated these replies. Immediately, Callie grabbed the monk, pulled him round, hurled him into the paddy, and opened fire with Milo's M16. As the elderly Mama San lying prostrate tried to get up.

• 1:38:38Jocko Willink?

  She too was killed. More Vietnamese shepherded by soldiers were arriving on the scene and Callie indicated in Miloan voice he wanted everyone killed. He began pushing peasants into the irrigation channel. Others joined in, using their rifle butts to shove wailing Vietnamese down the steep slope.

• 1:38:59Jocko Willink?

  Some jumped in by themselves, others sat down on the edge, moaning and crying, clearly aware that disaster was imminent. It was a pitiful sight. Until the time all the firing started, Herbert Carter had been kneeling beside Dursy, quietly playing with a couple of children.

• 1:39:20Jocko Willink?

  Dursy said incredulously, "I think Callie wants them all killed." Carter said, "Oh, no."

• 1:39:28Jocko Willink?

  "He can send me to jail, but I'm not gonna kill anybody," said Dursy, beginning to move away and wondering what would happen to him for refusing to fire. Dursy was another one who liked to play with the children. Earlier in the day, he'd been devastated after he opened fire and killed someone running from the village. It turned out to be a woman carrying a baby and Dursy was horrified and ashamed by what he had done. Olson had seen he was really cut up about it. A woman standing next to Robert Maples showed him a bullet wound in her left arm. He felt helpless, there was nothing he could do for her. Callie shoved her in the ditch and told Maples, "Load your machine gun and shoot these people."

• 1:40:07Jocko Willink?

  Maples shook his head and replied, "I'm not gonna do that." Callie turned his M16 on Maples as if to shoot him then and there. Maples was surprised and relieved when some of the other soldiers interposed to protect him. Callie backed off. Seconds later, he and Meedlow began firing.

• 1:40:27Jocko Willink?

  A machine gun opened up and one of the squad leaders tried to usher the men into line so they could all fire simultaneously. Dursi stood completely frozen, watching unbelievingly as the Vietnamese tried frantically to hide under one another, mothers protecting babies. Screaming at Dursi above the sounds of the M16 on full automatic, Meedlow continued pouring shells into the ditch.

• 1:40:53Jocko Willink?

  Crying hysterically once more, he stopped for a second, "Why aren't you firing?" he pleaded with Dursi. "Fire, why don't you fire?" The onlookers saw remnants of shredded human beings, hundreds of pieces of flesh and bone, flying up in the air as the shallow ravine was repeatedly sprayed with bullets. Magazine after magazine was reloaded during the mass execution.

• 1:41:25Jocko Willink?

  And as all this

• 1:41:31Jocko Willink?

  horrendous scene is unfolding, there is actually a photographer there, a military photographer in Haberlay.

• 1:41:45Jocko Willink?

  And he's taking pictures.

• 1:41:50Jocko Willink?

  And he, it was almost like he was just instinctively shooting. He, he kind of detached himself.

• 1:41:59Jocko Willink?

  And here's what he said. "I knew it was something that shouldn't be happening, but yet I was part of it. I think I was in a kind of a daze from seeing all these shootings and not seeing any returned fire, yet the killing kept going on. The Americans were rounding up the people and shooting them, not taking any prisoners. It was completely different to my concept of what war is all about. I kept taking pictures. That was my job as a photographer to take pictures, a normal reaction I have with a camera, just picking up and keep on shooting, trying to capture what is happening around me. I feel sometimes that the camera did take over during the operation. I put it up to my eye, took a shot, put it down. Nothing was composed, nothing was pre-thought, just the normal reaction of a photographer.

• 1:42:45Jocko Willink?

  I was part of it. Everyone who was there was part of it, and that includes the general and the colonel flying above in their helicopters. They're all part of it.

• 1:42:56Jocko Willink?

  We all were. Just one big group.

• 1:43:02Jocko Willink?

  Now, as all this is, is happening, you've got Medina, who's the, again, the company commander, he's sort of coming up from the rear. And he's starting to assess what he's seeing. Back to the book. "While Medina might not have seen mass executions taking place, the evidence of his own eyes told him what everyone else could see, that some kind of massacre had occurred.

• 1:43:28Jocko Willink?

  In fact, it was worse than a massacre. Too many of Medina's men were taking sword pleasure in sadistic behavior.

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  Several became double veterans. G.I. slang for the dubious honor of raping a woman and then murdering her.

• 1:43:47Jocko Willink?

  Many women were raped and sodomized, mutilated, and had their vaginas ripped open with knives or bayonets.

• 1:43:56Jocko Willink?

  One woman was killed when the muzzle of a rifle barrel was inserted into her vagina and the trigger was pulled. Soldiers repeatedly stabbed their victims, cut off limbs, sometimes beheaded them."

• 1:44:11Jocko Willink?

  Some were scalped, others had their tongues cut out, or their throats slit, or both.

• 1:44:18Jocko Willink?

  Tommy Lee Moss saw Vietnamese place their hands together and bowed to greet Americans, only to be beaten with fists, and tortured, clubbed with rifles, and stabbed in the back with bayonets. Martin Fagan saw bodies which had been shot in the head at point-blank range. He could tell because the penetration of an M16 round created a shockwave inside the skull, forcing the brain completely out.

• 1:44:43Jocko Willink?

  Other victims were mutilated with the signature "C" company, or the shape of an ace of spades carved into the chest. Fagan figured this had been done as a warning to the superstitious Vietnamese, and was widely believed that they regarded the ace of spades as a sign of bad luck. Troops from all three platoons carried out wanton and mindless acts of brutality.

• 1:45:07Jocko Willink?

  The second platoon were already amongst the most notorious rapists in Charlie Company. Even the platoon commander joined in on occasions.

• 1:45:18Jocko Willink?

  Rashavitz forced the women to undress with the intention of having sex with all of them.

• 1:45:26Jocko Willink?

  If they didn't strip, he said he was going to shoot them. He singled out one woman, telling her to boom-boom him. She became hysterical, and the other women panicked, yelling and screaming and begging for mercy. Rashavitz decided to let them have it. He fired several rounds, and killed them all.

• 1:45:45Jocko Willink?

  And now we got Haberlay again, he's the photographer, and this is what he's witnessing. "Just as soon as I turned away, I heard firing, I saw people drop. They started falling on top of each other, one on top of another. I just kept walking, I did not pay attention to who did it. By that time, I knew what the score was, it was an atrocity. I felt I wanted to do something to stop this, as though..." As we were going through the village, I asked some soldiers, "Why?" They more or less shrugged their soldiers, and kept on with the killing. It was like they were fixed on one thing, search and destroy, and that meant killing civilians.

• 1:46:23Jocko Willink?

  I noticed this one small boy had been shot in the foot. Part of the foot was torn off, he was walking towards a group of bodies looking for his mother. I put my camera up to my eye, I was going to take a photograph. I didn't notice a G.I. down beside me with his M16 rifle pointed at the child.

• 1:46:43Jocko Willink?

  Then suddenly I heard the crack, and through the viewfinder I saw this child flip over on top of the pile of bodies.

• 1:46:51Jocko Willink?

  The G.I. just stood up and walked away. No remorse, nothing. The other soldiers had a cold reaction, they were staring off into space like it was an everyday thing. They felt they had to do it, and they did it. That was their job. It was weird, just a shrug of the shoulder. No emotional reaction.

• 1:47:17Jocko Willink?

  Now, above this, you had...

• 1:47:21Jocko Willink?

  Above this horror, you had helicopters that were flying around, they were... Some of them were gunships, some of them were there to pick people up, drop people off, some of them were command and control helicopters where some senior leadership was flying around trying to observe the battles that took place. And we do end up with a, uh... With a real hero here. A hero, that's a helicopter pilot.

• 1:47:49Jocko Willink?

  And...

• 1:47:53Jocko Willink?

  His name is Hugh "Clowers" Thompson, Jr. And he's flying around, and... I'll go to the book. Thompson marked several wounded people on the ground with green smoke, a signal that they needed help.

• 1:48:10Jocko Willink?

  Returning to the Mele area about 9:00 a.m. After the first refueling, Thompson immediately noticed that people who were previously injured were now dead. There were groups of bodies as well as many dead water buffalo. Over the radio, he warned the gunships to fire only when they could positively identify enemy target. They had good visibility, as they hovered sometimes only four feet, five feet off the ground. Gunner Lawrence Colburn, in the doorway, didn't want to look at the corpses.

• 1:48:42Jocko Willink?

  Out in the paddy field beside a dike, two hundred meters south of the village, they watched a small group of soldiers approach an injured woman of age twenty. Thompson had marked her with smoke. They were flying close enough for Colburn to look at her face as she lay half in and half out of the dike. She made a feeble gesture with her hand and was obviously in need of help. Thompson put the aircraft into a standstill hover only a few feet off the ground. The high-gun ship told the ground forces on the radio, "You have a wounded over where the bubble is hovering." Thompson and his crew watched as an infantry offer, officer, wearing captain's bars on his helmet, came up to the woman, prodded her with his foot, and then killed her.

• 1:49:25Jocko Willink?

  Those in the helicopter could hardly believe what they were seeing. Minutes later, over on the eastern side of the village, they saw dozens of bodies in the irrigation ditch. Movements from the ditch convinced them there were people still alive. Not far away, a group of infantrymen taking a cigarette break, sat around on the ground and relaxed, taking off their steel pots. It was obvious there was no firefight taking place.

• 1:49:53Jocko Willink?

  So now what happens is, is Thompson, he's starting to get, he's starting to be totally disturbed by what he's seen down there, so he lands the helicopter and gets out of the helicopter, and he goes over and, and talks to a young infantry officer. A young infantry officer came, came up, and Thompson questioned him about what was happening on the ground. The officer said it was none of his business because he was in charge of the ground troops. Several members of Callie's platoon observed Thompson's intervention. Callie had gone to speak with the bubble helicopter pilot. Stanley overheard Callie telling Sledge forward, Sledge afterward, that the pilot hadn't liked what he'd, what was taking place. "He don't like the way I'm running the show, but I'm the boss here."

• 1:50:38Jocko Willink?

  Olson, who wanted no part in the executions at the irrigation ditch, had moved a hundred and fifty meters out to the paddy field to set up a perimeter of defense. He saw the pilot angrily shaking his arms and gesticulating. Frustrated, Thompson lifted off again and circled the area for a few minutes. Almost as soon as he took off, his worst fears were confirmed. Andrade reported the sergeant was now shooting the people in the ditch. Thompson began thinking about what the Nazis had done in the last war, marching people to a ditch and blowing them away. Furious with himself and everybody else, he finally snapped. He flew over the northeast corner of the village and spotted a group of about ten civilians,

• 1:51:20Jocko Willink?

  including children, running towards a homemade bomb shelter. Pursuing them were a group from Second Platoon, returning to the village from their murderous expedition. Based on all he had seen in the village that morning, it was obvious to Thompson what would happen when the troops got to the fleeing civilians. He landed his aircraft between the villagers and the soldiers and radioed the gunships he needed help. Screaming to his crew that he had to get the people out of the bunker, he issued an instruction that be- bewildered Colburn. If the Americans began shooting on the villagers, Thompson said, Colburn would turn his machine gun on the Americans. "Open up on 'em, blow 'em away," Thompson urged him. Colburn turned his gun around to face the GIs, though he was unsure whether he would

• 1:52:03Jocko Willink?

  be able to open fire on his own men. Concerned for their own safety, Colburn wasn't sure it was a good idea to land in the middle of a combat zone. The pilot confronted the lieutenant in charge, Stephen Brooks. He said he wanted to help get the peasants out of the bunker. Brooks told him the only way to do that was with hand grenades. Thompson shouted that he would personally get them out, and told the lieutenant to stay put. With that, he went across the bunk- bunker and gingerly coaxed the civilians to come out. Crew members in the gunships overhead heard Thompson announce over the radio that an old man was sitting in the path of the troops near the door of a small bomb shelter. Thompson's voice was choking with emotion.

• 1:52:46Jocko Willink?

  He swore obscenities, cursed, and pleaded with the aero crew to come down and help rescue civilians. One pilot initially queried at the request, and Thompson threatened that if the infantry opened fire on the civilians, his machine gunner would turn his guns on the Americans. Danny Millions, a warrant officer on the low gunship, realized the delicate nature of the drama unfolding below and, knowing that Thompson couldn't talk directly with the ground troops, radioed the high gunship to tell the infantry to stop killing. Millions and Bryan Livingston, another pilot, landed their ships and flew the Vietnamese, two men, two women, and five or six children, four miles away, to the safety of the road which ran west.

• 1:53:30Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it's a, you can't get any more drama than that. And eventually, Thompson gets back to base. And, I'll go to the book. They arrived back at Dotty at about 11 a.m. Thompson got out of the aircraft and threw his helmet on the ground. He told his section leader what had happened, and when Millions and Livingston landed, they confirmed it. A group of them sought out their company commander, Major Fred Watky, in the aviation section's operation van. They told him everything they had seen. Watky walked up the hill to the low-ceiling ten of the tactical operations center and passed the information on to Barker.

• 1:54:15Jocko Willink?

  He, in turn, quickly got on the radio to his executive officer, Major Charles Calhoun, who was flying in a helicopter over the battle zone. Calhoun was instructed to find out what was happening and get it stopped. There had been allegations that civilians had been shot. Barker wanted assurance from Medina that nothing of this kind was happening. The order went out to Charlie Company to cease fire. And they did. And, almost as quickly as it started, it stopped.

• 1:54:59Jocko Willink?

  And, it, it shows you that this whole time, when all this horror was taking place...

• 1:55:11Jocko Willink?

  Anybody could have stopped it had they stepped up and said something and spoke. Now, it might have been hard for someone that's a junior enlisted guy that's 18 years old that thinks he's carrying out the mission, but any of those people in the leadership position,

• 1:55:29Jocko Willink?

  and even some of the folks that weren't in leadership position, if you're there and you start to say, "No, this isn't going to be happening." I mean, and you did. There were some guys on the ground that resisted, but no one was able to actually stop it. And it's one of those bizarre things when I hear that, that all it took was that order to cease firing. "Okay, we'll stop shooting then."

• 1:55:54Jocko Willink?

  It shows you the power of leadership.

• 1:56:00Jocko Willink?

  And the responsibility of leadership. Now, as this story goes forward, the first thing that happens is a big cover-up. And they talk about this operation like it was just a great victory over the VC. And in fact, a message, I'm going to the book here, a message of congratulations for the Pinkville operation, that's what the operation is called, Pinkville, was received from General Wes Moreland himself.

• 1:56:35Jocko Willink?

  In a postscript, the brigade commander described the Milai operation as having been an outstanding success. "The praise-worthy role of units in the 11th Infantry Brigade directly reflects your expert guidance, leadership, and devotion to duty," he wrote to Medina, copying the memo to Barker. "The quick response and professionalism displayed during this action has enhanced the brigade's image in the eyes of higher commands."

• 1:57:05Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Within a few hours, the army's PR machine was pumping out a colorful image of daring do by the American troops.

• 1:57:17Jocko Willink?

  The MACV communique issued later the same day from Saigon gave brief details of the operation announcing that American Division forces had killed 128 enemy 6 miles northeast of Quining City. US troops surrounded reds, kill 128. And there's another headline that went out that said TF Barker crushes enemy stronghold. That attitude continues. Now Barker, the battalion commander, ends up being killed. Before he's killed, his, he releases his assessment of the operation, and this is where you start to see cover up written all over this.

• 1:58:02Jocko Willink?

  Here's, here's Barker's official report.

• 1:58:07Jocko Willink?

  This operation was well planned, well executed and successful. Friendly casualties were light and the enemy suffered heavily. On this operation, the civilian population supporting the VC in the area numbered approximately 200. This created a problem in population control and medical care of those civilians caught in the fire of opposing forces. However, the infantry unit on the ground and helicopters were able to assist civilians in leaving the area and in caring for and/or evacuating the wounded. Just lies. Just lies.

• 1:58:40Jocko Willink?

  Another, another, uh, piece. Barker was genuinely concerned, genuinely concerned that civilians be protected in future operations, and there's no way he could have known the dreadful atrocity being committed by Charlie Company at the time it was happening. But it's clear he quickly became part of the cover up. He knew civilians had died, and a lot of them.

• 1:59:03Jocko Willink?

  Now, so, so this starts to gain a little bit of traction. People are starting to talk about, there's rumors. So even though these big, nice headlines come out and the official report comes out, but people start to know about it. And so they start sending Charlie Company on all kinds of crazy, long-term operations out in the field. And they start to feel like, well, I'll go to the book. GIs felt they were being sent out in the hopes that they all might be killed. "They tried to bury us out there," Widmer bitterly remembered. "After Meli, we went out in the field for three months straight. We never came back into the villages. Our trips to the base camps

• 1:59:43Jocko Willink?

  were few and far between. They had a problem and dealt with us by trying to hide us out in the jungle, hoping we'd all get killed. But we didn't."

• 1:59:59Jocko Willink?

  So, a guy, like I said, people are talking about it, there's rumors about it, and there's a guy named Reidenhauer, who checks in to Charlie Company, and he starts hearing stories. He starts hearing stories, they start telling him, they start talking. And this is why you can't ever cover anything up. This is why cover-ups never work. Never try and cover anything up because it's gonna come, it's gonna come out. It's gonna come out. If you try and cover something up, it's gonna come out. That's the way it works. So, this guy, Reidenhauer, after he hears enough, and he talks to all these different people that were involved, and they tell him what they did and what went down, and he kind of gathers

• 2:00:42Jocko Willink?

  all that information. And, here we go, back to the book. Reidenhauer, he writes a letter. He writes a letter that explains what he had learned, what he'd found out. And here we go. Reidenhauer posted the letter on April 2nd, 1969, "To you, Dahl, and thirty prominent men in Washington DC, including President Nixon, the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Edward Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Eugene McCarthy, and William Fulbright. He sent the letters registered mail, thinking that staff opening them would be bound to take the contents more seriously." And here's a little excerpt from the, from the letter. "Gentlemen, it was in late April

• 2:01:26Jocko Willink?

  1968 that I first heard of Pinkville and what allegedly happened there."

• 2:01:32Jocko Willink?

  I received that first report with some skepticism, but in the following months I was to hear similar stories from such a wide variety of people that it became impossible for me to disbelieve that something rather dark and bloody did indeed occur sometime in March 1968 in a village called Pinkville in the Republic of Vietnam.

• 2:01:59Jocko Willink?

  So that's how the story breaks. They start to investigate it. Within the Pentagon, they start to investigate. This book is great. It goes into a ton of detail on what that's like, how that takes place. The people that are running it, and there's good, honest, solid, you know, army leadership that says, "Oh no, we're gonna, we're gonna find out what happened and we're gonna, we're gonna do something about it." So the cover-up isn't throughout the chain of command. There's people that, that try and put a stop to it. Now, the other thing that turns very

• 2:02:34Jocko Willink?

  interesting on this is obviously when it hits the public. And one of the most shocking impacts to the public took place on television. And, and if you remember at this time, and I don't know if this was like for, for you, because you're a little bit younger than me, but when I was a kid, we, we had three TV channels. You know, there was no 57 or 147 or 1,000 TV channels. There was no internet. We didn't really, there wasn't really radio shows anymore. So if the family was gonna do something at night at 6 o'clock at night or 7 o'clock at night together after dinner, there was a good chance they were gonna sit down and watch TV. And now you go back, this is 1969, so it's even more focused on television.

• 2:03:18Jocko Willink?

  And so what happens is this story breaks on TV with an interview, and I'll go to the book with Milo's confession.

• 2:03:29Jocko Willink?

  Television was for most Americans quintessentially a medium of entertainment. Medlo's confession was truly an extraordinary departure from the vapid diet of soap operas, comedy programs, and quiz shows. News however, was important to American audiences. Walter Cronkite was a national institution. Medlo's interview was delivered virtually without warning to an audience of millions of parents and children waiting excitedly for news of Apollo 12's astronauts' return from the moon and the splashdown into the Pacific Ocean. So that's what they're... Everyone thinks that's what they're gonna do. "Oh, let's get the kids to watch the news. And we'll fi-find out about... Yay, yay, America." Back to the book.

• 2:04:11Jocko Willink?

  Instead, their living rooms appeared the gawkous figure of a young man from Indiana. Medlo brought to the audience a raw truth about Vietnam they would prefer not to have known. He chillingly described lining up first, the first group of villagers and shooting them down, expending four clips of ammunition in the killing. There were seventeen bullets to a clip, which meant Wallace deducted, deduced sixty-eight shots. At the ditch execution site, Medlo said he was ordered to fire single shots to conserve ammunition. Wallace wanted to know why he did it.

• 2:04:53Jocko Willink?

  And here's the interview. "Why did I do it? Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like that at the time. I felt like I was doing the right thing because I lost buddies. I lost a damn good buddy, Bobby Wilson, and it was on my conscience. So after I'd done it, I felt good, but later on that day, it was getting to me."

• 2:05:20Jocko Willink?

  You're married, right? Children? Two. How old? The boy is two and a half and the little girl is a year and a half. Well, obviously, the question comes to mind. The father of two little kids like that, how can he shoot babies?

• 2:05:39Jocko Willink?

  I didn't have the little girl, I just had the little boy at the time. How do you shoot babies? I don't know, it's just one of them things. How many people would you imagine were killed that day? I would say three seventy? What did these civilians, these particularly the women and children, the old men, what did they do? What did they say to you? Were, they weren't begging or anything? No, no, or? Right. They were begging and saying no, no, and their mothers were hugging their children, but they kept on firing. Well, we kept on firing. They was waving their arms and begging.

• 2:06:21Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever dream about all this that went on in Pinkville? Yes, I did. And I still dream about it. What kind of dreams? I see the women and children in my sleep. Some days, some nights, I can't sleep. I just lay there thinking about it.

• 2:06:44Jocko Willink?

  So, that's not exactly the friendly news that you're expecting to see about the Apollo mission.

• 2:06:53Jocko Willink?

  Now,

• 2:06:55Jocko Willink?

  this thing goes to trial, and again, you gotta get into the book to see how all this breaks down. But a couple highlights. Here's Lieutenant Calley during the trial and how he testified on what he did.

• 2:07:13Jocko Willink?

  And it's a good insight into his mindset. Here we go, Lieutenant Calley. "I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day, that was my mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers. I felt then, and I still do, that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so."

• 2:07:44Jocko Willink?

  And...

• 2:07:47Jocko Willink?

  We get very used to the media. I mean, we're in a media circus nowadays because there's so much media, there's social media, there's cable media, there's internet media. I mean, we get, there's a circus of media now. And you get a lot, I would say, you can get a lot more distracted. I mean, news stories here don't last that long, but this was, this was a big news story, and it was really dividing the country in a way, even more so than the country was already being divided by the Vietnam War. But, and I'll go to the book here, "To many Americans, Calley was a hero. And they believed that with the guilty verdict, he was found guilty, a great injustice had been perpetrated upon

• 2:08:28Jocko Willink?

  the Army. And in Vietnam, they gave an example here in Vietnam, that soldiers at Khao Sanh had hastily raised a defiant sign that said, "A troop, first Cav, salutes William Calley." So you've got people that are saying, hey, what, you know, Calley was, Calley did the right thing out there. On top of that, this was a good example of what the attitude of some Americans were, was. "A World War II veteran went into an Army recruiting office in Mobile, Alabama, to make an extraordinary request. He had flown bombing missions over Germany which

• 2:09:11Jocko Willink?

  had killed innocent civilians and wanted to be arrested for war crimes." Despite, and another good example that somebody sent a goat, a billy goat, a living billy goat, and sent it to the White House, and it had a jacket on, and the jacket said scapegoat on it. And this, this is, this is pretty cool, the response that the Army and the government had to this. "Calley is not a scapegoat, nor a poor lieutenant singled out to bear the entire burden of a difficult war," declared a high-level Army memorandum circling amongst senior staff at the White House. "His acts stand alone in infamy among

• 2:09:53Jocko Willink?

  known atrocities for the US forces in the war. If Calley is let go or let off with a slap on the wrist, the message to all soldiers must read 'Anything Goes.' The implications for the Army, let alone the nation, are incalculable, but clearly intolerable."

• 2:10:15Jocko Willink?

  So they did hold the line and recognize that, that

• 2:10:22Jocko Willink?

  that this was not good. And at the same time, you still got these people that were saying

• 2:10:29Jocko Willink?

  that, "Look, this is, this is war." And here's a, here's a quote from the book. "Take by way of example the following: The American soldier in an officially sanctioned wrath is a thing so ugly and dangerous that it would take a Kipling to describe him." "Not a description of me lie, but the observation of James H. Blunt, a young lieutenant later to come, later to become a judge, on the behavior of troops in the Philippines sixty years before Vietnam."

• 2:11:02Jocko Willink?

  Here's another comment about what that war was like, the war in the Philippines. "Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino was little better than a dog." And another comparison here from the book. "In the Dakotas,

• 2:11:30Jocko Willink?

  General William Tecumseh Sherman had written to General Ulysses S. Grant, 'We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to the extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else will reach the root of the case.'" This is talking about the Indian wars there. And then, another one. Just a description that sort of explains how horrible war is.

• 2:12:00Jocko Willink?

  And this one was from World War II. "What kind of a war do civilians suppose we fought anyways? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."

• 2:12:26Jocko Willink?

  That was written by an American war correspondent, Edward L. Jones.

• 2:12:35Jocko Willink?

  Now, where, where those, where those ideas become so disturbing and, and again, war is hell, war is dark, war is evil, horrible things happen. And again, when you have a lack of leadership,

• 2:12:58Jocko Willink?

  things get even worse. And it can happen even to these apparently normal guys. And here's Michael Bernhardt, talking about what it was like and what he thought of people after he got home. "I had seen people who looked like everybody else, normal people, doing atrocious things. And I really wasn't sure how anyone would have acted in the same situation. I thought I knew human nature. I thought that people were basically good and that they couldn't do this. I thought most of the values people held were pretty solid. That when we defined things as good or bad,

• 2:13:39Jocko Willink?

  that they were good or bad, and that we would know when something was really bad. But I had seen that this was not the case. I wasn't sure I could trust anyone again. I wasn't sure I could ever get close to anyone or confide in anyone very closely because of what I'd seen over there."

• 2:14:00Jocko Willink?

  And going back to the leadership piece, and this is from the book, "What steps were taken to halt the run of beatings, thefts, rapes, tortures, and murder, which prodded Charlie Company down the road to Meli? None. Who, among the chain of command that found on its bottom rung Lieutenant William Callie and Rose through Medina, Barker, Henderson, and Coster, gave any kind of moral lead or example that might have prevented the moral destruction of the Company?

• 2:14:33Jocko Willink?

  No one."

• 2:14:36Jocko Willink?

  In place of clear leadership, there was paper leadership. The rules of engagement, numerous codes of conduct, and all other directives, all of which contained the loftiest intentions. There was nothing wrong with these regulations, in spirit they were a recognizable expression of the American ideal at war, a blueprint for order in the midst of hell. They simply never became part of the soldier's reality because they weren't, never, seriously enforced. And without emphatic enforcement, they corresponded as much to the world of the common grunt

• 2:15:17Jocko Willink?

  as roadmaps of Mars. That total lack of leadership. That lack of moral courage. And as we close this out, it goes in the book here and says, "Once again, the darker side of war has gone underground. Milai is no longer a public burden or concern. The burden of guilt and the burden of responsibility have fallen onto the soldiers themselves."

• 2:16:01Jocko Willink?

  Shit, the men of Charlie Company used to tell each other, rolls downhill. And we'll close out with the words from Varnado Simpson. Who's in his own little private hell with his memories of this, as he sits shaking from side to side in his chair, alone in his house in Jackson, Mississippi.

• 2:16:32Jocko Willink?

  How can you forgive?

• 2:16:35Jocko Willink?

  I can't forgive myself for the things. Even though I know that it was something that I was told to do, but how can I forget that? Or forgive? It's easy for you to say, "Well, go ahead with your life." But how can you go ahead with your life when this is holding you back? I can't put my mind to anything. Yes, I'm ashamed, I'm sorry, I'm guilty. But I did it.

• 2:17:05Jocko Willink?

  You know. What else can I tell you?

• 2:17:11Jocko Willink?

  It happened.

• 2:17:15Jocko Willink?

  It happened.

• 2:17:22Jocko Willink?

  And as we

• 2:17:27Jocko Willink?

  think about this book. And you should go and get this book, and you should read this book, and you should experience this level of darkness in the world. So that we can all remember to be vigilant

• 2:17:45Jocko Willink?

  against this power of darkness, which

• 2:17:52Jocko Willink?

  I suppose we have to admit

• 2:17:57Jocko Willink?

  that that darkness is in every man's soul.

• 2:18:03Jocko Willink?

  Lurking.

• 2:18:06Jocko Willink?

  And waiting, waiting for a moment to strike out.

• 2:18:14Jocko Willink?

  But we

• 2:18:18Jocko Willink?

  we need to counter that.

• 2:18:22Jocko Willink?

  We need to counter that, that evil.

• 2:18:29Jocko Willink?

  With good. And we need to do that with the power of leadership. And you can see in these situations where leaders led men to do things that they knew were wrong. They knew they were wrong.

• 2:18:47Jocko Willink?

  Things that they didn't want to do.

• 2:18:51Jocko Willink?

  Killing children as tears are streaming down their faces. And if you can lead men to do things that they know are wrong, imagine the power and the influence you have as a leader to lead people to do things that are right. And that people know are right and that are good.

• 2:19:14Jocko Willink?

  And you are a leader. I am a leader. No matter what your station in life, or your position, or your rank, you are a leader. When you step up and lead, you are a leader.

• 2:19:32Jocko Willink?

  And you can make a difference and you can have an impact. And you can affect the outcomes of so many things in the world.

• 2:19:44Jocko Willink?

  By stepping up and leading.

• 2:19:50Jocko Willink?

  Away from the evil and away from the darkness.

• 2:19:59Jocko Willink?

  And toward the light.

• 2:20:09Jocko Willink?

  And I know that was a...

• 2:20:14Jocko Willink?

  That's a rough book. And this is a rough podcast.

• 2:20:20Jocko Willink?

  And, and like I said, I was, I was questioning whether to actually do this or not.

• 2:20:28Jocko Willink?

  And, and at certain points when I was reading this, I mean, this is my fourth time reading it, I think. And even when I was reading it just now on the podcast

• 2:20:41Jocko Willink?

  for this recording, I could, I could hear a numbness in my voice. I could hear it as I'm talking about the killing and the gunning down and the, it's so much.

• 2:20:57Jocko Willink?

  And I know it's gonna be brutal. I know people are going to be impacted by this. And maybe not everyone's gonna make it through this, and I understand that.

• 2:21:08Jocko Willink?

  But we owe it to ourselves to know history and to know and understand evil and to understand how quickly it can come about. And to see these indicators. And to know that if you're in a leadership position, you start to see things going sideways, you gotta put a stop to them. Before they get out of hand. Before they turn into this.

• 2:21:40Jocko Willink?

  Maybe at some point, we'll look for some topics that are a little bit more.

• 2:21:49Jocko Willink?

  I guess. Light-hearted. Light-hearted. And but I'll tell you, my only issue with that is, you want a topic that's light-hearted? You can find them anywhere. You can go get them anywhere. There's a, there's a whole, actually, there's a whole section for a podcast that's called comedy. Right? It's called comedy. That that exists. There's no section that says the darkness. I guess there is one. It's called Jocko Podcast. You want to hear about the darkness? You want to hear about things that are going on in the world that aren't good? This is it. And we're the people that are dealing with reality. And you know, I know this, this is not for everybody. And that's okay. That's okay. You know, we're talking about heavy topics here. And the reason we're talking about

• 2:22:35Jocko Willink?

  the dark is because we want to be enlightened. We want to know about these things.

• 2:22:45Jocko Willink?

  I don't think we're gonna have time for Q and A because I just talked about that book for a really long time.

• 2:22:54Jocko Willink?

  So what we'll do is do a Q and A for the next podcast. And for this one, we'll let it stand on its own.

• 2:23:07Jocko Willink?

  And I know it might be a rough podcast to think about wanting to hear more of them. But if you do want to hear more of these podcasts.

• 2:23:17Jocko Willink?

  Echo. What can these folks do to support the podcasts?

• 2:23:21Speaker 01

  Well. As I always recommend, sure, support the podcast, but you can also support yourself. With supplementation.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  Um, Onnit, Onnit has the best supplements, uh, the actual supplements that I take, Jaco takes. Onnit.com slash Jaco, you can get 10% off, so support yourself physically and, uh, financially in that way. Um, I would recommend, what do you think? Well, what's the number one you think? Krill oil?

• 2:23:56Jocko Willink?

  I think it depends on who you are. I think if you're, me, me, it's krill oil.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  All you, uh, uh, alphabet, I like. Yeah, and they're just, anyway, so Alpha Brain, good for your brain, makes you think quicker, makes you like.

• 2:24:10Jocko Willink?

  Did you just say Alpha Brain? Cause I got something right here for you.

• 2:24:12Speaker 01

  As Jaco drinks Alpha Brain Instant, by the way. Um, makes you think, you know, like when you search for words, like in your, you know, when you're trying to think of a word? Sometimes?

• 2:24:23Jocko Willink?

  Yes, yes, you, you feel like the pathways to the, the words are a little bit closer.

• 2:24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. If you want to get it, actually you can read all about it. It's called a neutropic Alpha Brain.

• 2:24:33Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  Good for your brain. Anyway. Uh, krill oil, good for your joints, that's one Jaco takes, that's why he's so functional, I would say, for lack of a better term, functional.

• 2:24:44Jocko Willink?

  I like that word.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Um, and Warrior Bars. That's a new one right there, the Warrior Bars. That, that's not like some, you know, they, they've been having, well, actually Neutrop is pretty new too, but you know how you have protein powder? That's been around, but Warrior Bar, that's a, that's a new twist on things.

• 2:25:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, what's good about, what's good about, like you talk about protein powder? That's like a powder, right? Or you get a protein bar, that's a thing that's been manufactured?

• 2:25:07Speaker 01

  Right, like a power, a power bar or something.

• 2:25:09Jocko Willink?

  The Warrior Bar is like food.

• 2:25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:12Jocko Willink?

  So that makes it a little bit better in my mind.

• 2:25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's.

• 2:25:15Jocko Willink?

  Cause I want to eat food.

• 2:25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so it's come, kind of like in the direction of a beef jerky situation, but. Even more so. Anyway, look, look at it.

• 2:25:24Jocko Willink?

  The thing is, well, there's two, there's two major differences between beef jerky and warrior bar. And that is beef jerky, dry. Warrior bar, not dry. Yeah, delish.

• 2:25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, uh, shroom tech, good for like high intensity, kind of prolonged stuff. Jiu Jitsu, if you're into it, wrestling, Metcon.

• 2:25:42Jocko Willink?

  Metcon.

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  You're in a CrossFit. Oh, there you go. Shroom tech. Boom.

• 2:25:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  Improve your output, your performance, utilize oxygen better. Anyways, really good. It's like really good. Um, also another way to support the podcast, if you're in the mood to, before you do your Amazon shopping, go to jockopodcast.com and click on the Amazon link.

• 2:26:02Jocko Willink?

  What does that cost you?

• 2:26:04Speaker 01

  That doesn't cost you anything except for literally, literally three seconds of your time.

• 2:26:09Jocko Willink?

  Three seconds and you support the podcast?

• 2:26:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:26:11Jocko Willink?

  I like that.

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  And one like click, maybe like a one tenth of a calorie, maybe finger click.

• 2:26:17Jocko Willink?

  I like that.

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  But yeah, super easy.

• 2:26:19Jocko Willink?

  Wait, are we asking people to donate money there?

• 2:26:21Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 2:26:22Jocko Willink?

  We just, Amazon's gonna donate the money.

• 2:26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're gonna, they're gonna support the podcast like collectively. Yeah, it's good. Um, so boom, there you go. The, I guess the main thing is to, to remember to do it. You know, when you, you're trying to get that duct tape real quick. Oh, I gotta make that time so he can ship that same day. You know, then you gotta, you just want, maybe take some AlphaBrain, that'll help you remember.

• 2:26:44Jocko Willink?

  I like that.

• 2:26:45Speaker 01

  Anyway, or, or if you want, uh, some Jaco stuff, like some cool shirts, JacoStore.com.

• 2:26:50Jocko Willink?

  Now, this, I'm seeing a new shirt. Is that correct here?

• 2:26:53Speaker 01

  Yes, we have a new shirt, the Trooper shirt.

• 2:26:56Jocko Willink?

  That's, it's got a name? Are we naming shirts now? Is it got, is, are we there?

• 2:27:00Speaker 01

  You can.

• 2:27:01Jocko Willink?

  We have to name it. So, uh, this is something people don't echo, Charles. He is an artist, right? He's an artist. And so that's why he has to name the T-shirt.

• 2:27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:13Jocko Willink?

  You know, you, you just have to name it because that makes you feel like it's a piece of art.

• 2:27:18Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a piece.

• 2:27:21Jocko Willink?

  Cause you just said the trooper shirt as if that's the thing.

• 2:27:23Speaker 01

  But here's the thing though with with this shirt and with like with all the shirts. It's not just like, oh, I'm gonna call it the trooper shirt. Cause I think that sounds cool. It's like there's different lays, not just a shirt with a saying on it like discipline equals.

• 2:27:34Jocko Willink?

  So you're saying it's not just called the trooper T-shirt. It actually is.

• 2:27:39Speaker 01

  The trooper shirt, yeah.

• 2:27:40Jocko Willink?

  I like where you're coming and you're wearing it right now. If you're on YouTube, you can check it out.

• 2:27:44Speaker 01

  Boom, three colors. Ooh, that's a unique one. Usually I have two colors.

• 2:27:48Jocko Willink?

  Normally I would protest something like that.

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  No, but you can protest it and this is why. So the people who signed up on on the the insiders group, the email list, uh, I.

• 2:27:59Jocko Willink?

  People that are enlisted troopers of Jocko podcast.

• 2:28:02Speaker 01

  Exactly, right.

• 2:28:03Jocko Willink?

  That's all well, how how how do they do that?

• 2:28:06Speaker 01

  Well, well, Jaco on Jaco store.com right in the front. You just put your email address and I don't spam. That's not what it's for. This is what it's for. This is one of the things that it was for. And the people who are on the list know this where. Hey, I got a new shirt design idea, you know, uh. I don't know what colors really did. What are the best colors, right? I know what colors I I like. Yeah, I'll do a black one. I'll do, but so what I did was I I sent an email to everybody and said, what are here's what? Here's the design. Here's what it kind of will look like. What color shirts are we doing? What color shirts you guys like?

• 2:28:40Jocko Willink?

  So there's a there was a vote. There was input received.

• 2:28:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, like, yeah. And the consensus was these three colors. It's like a dark red.

• 2:28:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:28:50Speaker 01

  Which actually turned out even better than I thought. And I wasn't enthusiastic about the red and the OD green.

• 2:28:57Jocko Willink?

  I support OD green. That way, if you have to, you never know when you might have to go tactical.

• 2:29:02Speaker 01

  It is tactical.

• 2:29:03Jocko Willink?

  I'm into dual purpose things.

• 2:29:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:05Jocko Willink?

  Things that can be good for normal situations or tactical situations. That's why I like OD green T-shirts.

• 2:29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, just in case you get a spring into getting after it spontaneously. And then, of course, we got the black, but that was the consensus overall. The green, there was a charcoal, had a strong, strong, um, you know. But, uh, the eyes, the green, the red and the black. But anyway, yeah, it's a cool one. Check it out if you want to look at the details of it. They're, um, yeah, they're good. Anyway, if you want to support the podcast that way, get a shirt. This trooper shirt isn't the only one, but man, I I. I'm pretty, I'm pretty fired up about it. It looks good, I think. Anyway, there's other ones on there too that are cool. And, uh, coffee mugs and stickers if you're down.

• 2:29:51Jocko Willink?

  I like that.

• 2:29:52Speaker 01

  That's the way. Those are the ways and, uh, for the people who have been and do, dang.

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  To say thank you would be like not even doing it halfway justice.

• 2:30:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, definitely. Thanks everybody for, for doing that. And you know, uh, you know what's weird? You always talk about like how, oh, you gotta see the, you gotta see the dark to, to.

• 2:30:12Speaker 01

  Appreciate.

• 2:30:13Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate the light, right? I actually, just because we just got done with that dark, dark darkness of a book. In just having a conversation right now, I'm so happy.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:30:24Jocko Willink?

  Just to be like here and talking and we're, we're selling some cool T-shirts and drinking some, just to be, just. In this situation and know that we have this goodness around us is, uh, is really good. So I think it is worth. Venturing into the dark so that you can appreciate the light. If you wanna hear more of this kind of things. Obviously you got the podcast. You can also pick up a book written by. Myself and my brother Leif Babin. It's called Extreme Ownership. You can buy the book or you can buy the audiobook, which is actually Leif and I reading it. So you'll get some more information in there and it's.

• 2:31:07Jocko Willink?

  Everything I talk about is, is in that book. I mean, that's, that's, it's the basic principles of combat leadership that we put in there.

• 2:31:14Speaker 01

  Let me add one thing about extreme, that book, Extreme Ownership.

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  It's good. It's like dang, this is, you feel, oh, I don't know. Everyone's different, but me, I felt like more of an adult after like kinda incorporating these. Like, but here's the thing that you do take away is the people around you will notice that you're a like better person to be around. And I, I thought I was like pretty nice anyway, but you'll feel people like gravitating towards you more. Because like any abrasive and everyone has varying levels of abrasiveness in them, even if it's just a teeny tiny little bit. Everyone has some. But what that does, it, it, it makes you. Work with people. In a way less abrasive way. So people wanna be around you when things go down.

• 2:32:03Jocko Willink?

  I would say that's, that's a very good assessment and I'll tell you that I always felt e- especially when I was in the, when I was in the military, in the SEAL teams. When, when I was doing something, people wanted to come with me, you know? Like it was all good. We all wanted to get after it together. So that's probably an indicator of the principles in the book at work in my life.

• 2:32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know how some people, um, I mean, I don't know, maybe us, whatever, where, you know, you'll have a little, small, little conflict or a little something, little friction with somebody.

• 2:32:40Jocko Willink?

  Conflict?

• 2:32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it will, maybe at work or even at home or whatever. I would say it's, it's pretty rare, like I'm not, like if there was some friction that came up between me and anyone, even my friend, my wife or something, it would stand out so much nowadays. Like it would stick out a lot.

• 2:32:56Jocko Willink?

  Become a better person.

• 2:32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:58Jocko Willink?

  You become better person.

• 2:33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, and that's at the end, you know? But like I said, it's like if you, if you follow it, if you're like, dang, I, you know, I, I value this and I'm gonna, you actually incorporate it. As time goes on, that's how it is where if you get friction or some adversarial situation, even if it's not yours. You're like, dang, I see that from a mile away. You know, and it sticks out. So it's not, I mean, I mean, some people, it's part of their everyday thing. You know, just road rage or I don't know anything. But it's, yeah, it's good, man. It's good like that.

• 2:33:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, thanks. Appreciate it. Check it out. You can get it on Amazon after you click through the website.

• 2:33:40Jocko Willink?

  You know, uh, closing it up. Everybody, if you wanna talk to us more beyond that, you can get us on the interwebs. Echoes at Echo Charles. I am. At Jocko Willink. That's on Twitter, the Facebooky, and even have a little bit of the Instagram going on. I actually, I actually answer most of the, well, actually every single thing that comes on Twitter, I'll, I'll respond to. I'm gonna see how long I can keep that up for. I don't know how long it's gonna last. It's getting pretty hardcore right now. But I'm definitely reading everything that's coming in. And we appreciate all the feedback that we get from you guys and, and you guys bringing a little light to our world. It's much appreciated. And thanks for bringing that light to us.

• 2:34:27Jocko Willink?

  And most of all, thanks for going out there and getting after it.

• 2:34:35Jocko Willink?

  And so, until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.