346: Flying and Fighting w/ Legendary WW2 Fighter Pilot & Triple Ace, "Bud" Anderson

Flying and fighting with WW2 Fighter Pilot and Triple Ace, Bud Anderson. Author, "To Fly and Fight". Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 346 with Dave Berke and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Dave. Good evening.

• 0:09Jocko Willink?

  In an airplane, the guy was a mongoose.

• 0:14Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to believe if the only Bud Anderson you ever knew was the one on the ground. Calm, gentlemanly, a grandfather, funny, and all around nice guy. But once you get him in an airplane, he's vicious. Shot down 17. Best fighter pilot I've ever seen. He's also the best friend I have in the world. We go back 47 years, Andy and I. Andy and I developed a rapport flying Mustangs in England, particularly after I was shot down, made my way back, and finally got the okay to finish my tour. We were both small-town boys who liked hunting and fishing.

• 0:57Jocko Willink?

  We kept finding things in common and developed a tremendous mutual respect. By the time we finished up and went home, we were pretty damn close, although making friends wasn't something either of us went out of our way to do. It was risky in wartime. We lost an awful lot of guys over there.

• 1:18Jocko Willink?

  We had the same kind of eyes, 2010. We saw everything that went on in the sky before anyone else in the squadron or even the group.

• 1:29Jocko Willink?

  What made Andy unique was that he flew so many missions, logged so many combat hours, and never had a battled damage or aborted mission. An incredible record. It shows what a meticulous professional he is, especially in combat. The same attention to detail is what made him a hell of a test pilot. He had those eyes too, and he developed the combat skills to take advantage of the opportunities his eyes brought him.

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  But luck was also a part of it. Luck plays a big part in anything you do in combat. Some guy you don't see can always sneak up and shoot your ass off. No question, Andy is a very, very lucky guy. Anyone who got through the war was.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  Generally speaking, getting killed was the least of our worries. When it happens, you don't know anything about it anyway. So what the hell? That's the attitude I think that most of us had. Duty was paramount. Damn it, it's your job. The fact that you might get killed doesn't enter your mind after the first couple of times.

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  And so those right there are words written by Chuck Yeager. Probably the most famous and legendary fighter pilot of all time. And the words are written in the foreword of a book called To Fight, To Fly and Fight. By Colonel Clarence Bud Anderson, who Chuck Yeager refers to as Andy. Now Bud Anderson was a fighter pilot pilot in World War II and in Vietnam. He was a triple ace. Which means he shot down more than 15 enemy aircraft. He was a test pilot. When being a test pilot meant you were the best of the best.

• 3:27Jocko Willink?

  He ended up serving over 30 years in uniform.

• 3:31Jocko Willink?

  And it is an honor to have him with us here tonight to discuss his experiences and lessons learned. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. It's an honor to have you here. Well, it's my pleasure, Jocko. That's quite the praise from General Yeager you got there. He wrote it.

• 3:55Jocko Willink?

  So I guess we can jump into this. I know, I know you were born January 13th, 1922. And right now the date is August 3rd, 2022. Which means you got the, you got the triple digits in your age up there at 100.

• 4:16Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty impressive. What's the keys to your health? No minor vices. There you go. That'll do it. Um, you've got some, kind of just to get to know you a little bit, uh, I want to read a little section from the book here. And it says, "I was the third of my father's four children, born January 13th, 1922 in Oakland, where my mom's parents lived. Friday the 13th it was. If it's an unlucky day, you couldn't prove it by me. I've been pretty lucky. I never was superstitious." It says Clarence Emil, is that right? Emil Anderson Jr. on my birth certificate. But few call me Clarence or Junior, and none call me Emil.

• 5:01Jocko Willink?

  When I was young, my family nicknamed me Buddy, which in time became Bud. The men I flew with used Andy because all Andersons are automatically Andy. I can attest to that.

• 5:16Jocko Willink?

  "The first thing I remember is Lindbergh making it across the Atlantic when he, when I was just five. I have no idea why somebody flying from one place to another should have made such a lasting impression, but it kindled an interest in airplanes that would last a lifetime. When I was seven, my father took me to Sacramento to a little dirt airfield with one little hangar where a fellow named Ingvald Fagerskod made or supplemented his living by taking people up for rides in a Stearman biplane. The airfield was on Auburn Boulevard near Watt Avenue. I can remember being excited and a little bit frightened, the incredible intoxicating smell of the gasoline oil and airplane dope like a new car smell, and the throaty sound of the engine.

• 6:01Jocko Willink?

  Most of all, I remember flying over our house and circling tightly, the pilot standing the plane on its side." It's a pretty awesome introduction to aviation.

• 6:15Jocko Willink?

  The, the, a biplane was the first thing you flew in, huh?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:19Jocko Willink?

  And so that's just a big, giant, open cockpit? Was your dad with you or is only a two?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a three seater.

• 6:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, the pilot in the back and then side by side seats.

• 6:32Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, okay.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  In the front.

• 6:34Jocko Willink?

  And he buzzed your house?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  So you could say your dad is partially to blame for your fascination with flying?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  He supported my, my, uh, likes.

• 6:48Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. So what did, what did your mom and dad do when you were growing up?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I grew up on a farm and that's what we did. We farmed.

• 7:00Jocko Willink?

  And that means you were probably working more than most people work in their lives.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had, uh, yeah, pretty heavy chores. And then later on, as the depression, um, hit,

• 7:18Speaker 01

  my mom had to go, go to, go back to work. And she went and found a job in the governor's office. And she was just a typist and everything and then worked her way up to office manager.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And then it was, it was in the old days, a spoiled system. So when a new governor came in, they fired everybody. And then they kept her to, to, um, you know, tie in.

• 7:53Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And then pretty soon they, they dropped her salary and everything. But soonly, soon they, um, said, why don't you stay, brought her salary back up? And then she went through about four governors like that. Pretty, pretty awesome.

• 8:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, it, for the depression and being in a farmer during the depression.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:24Jocko Willink?

  How rough was that for, for the family?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Well, at least we, we didn't suffer too bad from food because we manufactured food.

• 8:37Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  We raised chickens and grew lots of vegetables and fruit, of course. So, a lot of canning and, so as a kid, I don't remember being hungry at any time.

• 8:57Jocko Willink?

  Wow. Well, that's definitely a good, uh, family business to have during depression, being a farmer. And so, but you still had to go to school, right?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:07Jocko Willink?

  And I know you played, you played sports in school?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  I was, I liked basketball, but I was kinda small, so I could only play on the C and the D, uh, B teams.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  I could never go to the varsity.

• 9:28Jocko Willink?

  But it sounds like, you know, in the book, you talk about, it sounds like your dad not only encouraged you with flying, but he put a lot of, he put a lot of, it seemed like he put a lot of trust in you, even as a young kid, a lot of responsibility. I know you, and, you know, I get asked a lot of questions about parenting, and at one point, you crashed your car.

• 9:51Jocko Willink?

  How'd that happen?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Oh, young and, young and scared.

• 10:00Jocko Willink?

  Hit the wrong pedal?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yeah, well, as you came up, uh, you can't see that here, but there, there's a double road at the front door. And I always went on the inner, inner road, you know? And, uh, so I came around the corner, he's, uh, he's behind the wheel, and I'm over here staring and, and, you know, with the foot pedal too. And so I come up to go down the road and, oop, it's blocked by a car.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  So I said, oh, I gotta, I gotta get over here on the left and get on my bypass. And a big tree was coming up. And I went to the middle and pushed down on the accelerator and ducked my head under the dash, I think. And Dad was, he was trying to get me to get out of there, you know, but I was, I don't know. It was just a bad, bad thing.

• 11:11Jocko Willink?

  But the interesting thing is how he kinda handled that, you know? He kinda got you right back on the horse, as they say.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you know, if you go through a terrifying experience, it's best to get them back on, back online.

• 11:30Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. Now, speaking of terrifying experiences, for someone that has aspirations of being a pilot, I know there was a plane crash that took place in your hometown. How did that impact you and how did that steer you away from wanting to be a pilot?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Well, I had a buddy down there in Loomis, nearby town. And he and I were just kinda nuts about anything aviation.

• 11:59Jocko Willink?

  Is this Jack?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jack Sacker. And so, uh, this was something we had to investigate personally. And it was an old Boeing biplane, three-engine biplane. He crashed in the, on the side of a hill, not too heavy down, well, you know, it was the whole fuselage was there. And the other parts of it kinda were in the area. And, uh, so we just had to, we just had to see what it was like.

• 12:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I guess in those days, there's no black box. There's no real way to tell what had even gone wrong.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  But you looked at that and said, still seems like a good, seems like a good job I want.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Well, maybe we want to fly fighters.

• 13:02Jocko Willink?

  So I'm gonna, and by the way, I'm, I'm gonna read some chunks of the book. The book is fantastic. Get, just order the book right now. It's just an incredible book with so many details in it. I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. You say, right after graduation, I was working out in the yard when a car came chattering into the drive. A fellow climbed out, extended his hand, showed me his teeth, and started telling me in a practiced salesman's pitch about this trade school and down, down in Los Angeles or someplace. He said they could teach me all about refrigeration, a good, solid career, and he pulled a bunch of brochures from his bag. I'm thinking how college would have been nice, but I've got to do something. And then dad came around the corner. We hadn't talked much about the future. We talked more

• 13:47Jocko Willink?

  about Arthur J. Lewis, the several months previous than we'd ever talked about my future. But there and then, in the yard, I learned that my dad was pretty shrewd and supportive. "Go on, get out of here," he told the salesman gruffly. "My boy's going to college, and then he's going into the Army Air Corps." So he, you, you, he was convinced that this is what you were gonna do.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:12Jocko Willink?

  And he was fully supportive.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  I think it was the other way around.

• 14:19Jocko Willink?

  Uh, fast forward a little bit. You say, there were three requirements for enlisting in the Army Air Corps, beyond passing the physical. You needed two years of college. I figured to complete the course in June 1941. You had to be at least 20 years old, which I would be on January 13th, 1942, and you had to be single, which seemed simple enough since I had no good prospects. This course of study would qualify me, and if it turned out I couldn't fly for some reason, then at least I could fix or build airplanes. So that's what you're thinking. You're focused on getting into the Army Air Corps. There's some pretty minimal requirements really to go and enlist.

• 15:03Jocko Willink?

  I mean, not being married. Sounds like you were trying the field, but hadn't turned anything out yet. So you were all right there.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Well, your physical was something, you, you know, your eyes.

• 15:19Jocko Willink?

  Did you know when they gave you the physical that your eyes were awesome?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I can't remember. I think maybe we did go get a air doc to give me a flight physical. I don't really, I don't really remember.

• 15:39Jocko Willink?

  You end up taking flying lessons. So you're learning how to fly. And you, you say this, "My instructor Dale Hunter was an old guy, 24 maybe. I don't remember that learning was terribly difficult. On the daily rating sheets, there were 36 descriptive words or phrases, some positive, some otherwise, all or none of which the instructor could check after each lesson. The four he marked after my first flight, March 4th, 1941, were cooperative, rough on controls, careful, poor coordination. On March 27th, the day that I soloed, he put a mark by erratic.

• 16:21Jocko Willink?

  By the end of May, after 37 hours in the Cub, he would check only eager to learn and consistent. I don't remember a lot of compliments, but I soloed after the standard eight hours of instruction, did everything pretty much by the numbers, got my license, no problem." So there you go. You're learning how to fly pretty, pretty quick, it seems like.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, what, I guess 17 or 18.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  It was a government program. A civilian pilot training program. And with no commitment, no financial, I think it was a insurance policy for my parents, nine dollars and fifty cents. And it was a pretty good deal, so I globbed on to it while I was going to junior college.

• 17:23Jocko Willink?

  So what year was that, that you soloed for the first time?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Forty-one.

• 17:28Jocko Willink?

  So that was nineteen forty-one?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, spring.

• 17:32Jocko Willink?

  So when did Pearl Harbor happen? So it happened December seventh?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:37Jocko Willink?

  So you were already flying, but you weren't old enough to enlist yet?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Correct. And we were, I went to work. My college training qualified me to be an aircraft mechanic. It was technical school, part of a two-year thing. And the Sacramento Air Depot was building up as a depot. And they were hiring anybody that said they could turn a wrench, I think. They hired our whole class. And...

• 18:19Jocko Willink?

  This was after Pearl Harbor, they hired your whole class?

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Right at graduation.

• 18:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, at graduation, okay.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Right at graduation, six months before.

• 18:27Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Pearl Harbor. And I can remember to this day, well, every guy, World War II guy, knows where he was December seventh. And we were working twenty-four seven. And being the kids, young guys, they put us on the graveyard shift. And I'd just gotten on days. And I remember Sunday came around later in the day.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  And said, "Hey, you, you, you, go home and come back at midnight. The Japs have just attacked us at Pearl Harbor." God, I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was, but I knew the impact of that was, "Uh-oh, we're at war." And I was still nineteen, and so I had to wait one month. I went down on my birthday, and a few days later, I raised my right hand and I was on my way.

• 19:40Jocko Willink?

  You say in the book, "On the thirteenth of January, my twentieth birthday, I went in to sign up." They had a recruiting office right there on base. They gave me a physical, and I was so keyed up with anticipation that they gave me the Schneider test, a blood pressure and pulse check. The doctor said I was borderline, there might be a problem. My heart was pounding away like a jackhammer. I was told to come back in a couple of days and they'd test me again. After I was accepted, I couldn't wait to tell Lloyd Geraldson, an older guy who'd been a pilot and done some barnstorming. He worked at the depot, and we often carpool together. I looked up to him, liked to listen to him talk about flying. I told him the moment he got in the car, and he leaned back against the passenger's

• 20:25Jocko Willink?

  door and stared at me silently. "Son," he said after a while, "let me tell you something. You've just signed your own death warrant." That's a heavy statement.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Years later, we talked about it years later, and he said he doesn't remember saying that.

• 20:55Jocko Willink?

  He was just throwing it out there.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  It it had a little impact on me, but not much.

• 21:03Jocko Willink?

  So then you start flight training.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:06Jocko Willink?

  And was all the flight training down in San Diego?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Just my primary.

• 21:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you go down there and from the book, it sounds like you you already knew how to fly.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got a private pilot's license.

• 21:18Jocko Willink?

  Did that make it just a lot easier than the other people were having?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  I don't remember having any trouble going through the military flight training schools.

• 21:31Jocko Willink?

  Just easy. Dave, was that you too?

• 21:34Speaker 03

  I did not have a license going to flight school, so I had a slightly different experience. But I know the the folks that had some flight experience getting to flight school. It could actually be a double edged sword if you brought some bad habits, but most of those kids showed up, understood things that I didn't understand, so I definitely had to catch up to the ones that had experience.

• 21:51Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 21:56Jocko Willink?

  Was it a big deal like being a fighter pilot? I remember my dad telling me when, you know, when he was a kid that even like an airline pilot, people treated airline pilots like they were superstars, like they were rock stars. And now, obviously, that like the Dave Berke here, he grew up in the Top Gun era where everybody knew what a fighter pilot was. What was the kind of what was the the aura around fighter pilots back then?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  I don't think there was too much of that, to tell you the truth. Probably just pilot, maybe, you know.

• 22:34Jocko Willink?

  So you guys were busy creating the aura that guys like Dave Berke would get to live off of.

• 22:43Jocko Willink?

  So you get your wings. Do you get your wings at the end of primary?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  No, you got to go through three flight schools. Primary, basic, and advanced, about three months long.

• 22:55Jocko Willink?

  And do you know that you're going to be a fighter pilot? I mean, because you could be a transport pilot.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:01Jocko Willink?

  How do you how do they figure out who's going to get to be a fighter pilot?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Especially at that time when I went in. If you

• 23:11Speaker 01

  knew what you wanted to do.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  And could convince your instructor that you'd be a good fighter pilot. Your chances were pretty good of getting what you wanted. Uh, we needed, uh, they were trying to build up from, you know, few, few hundreds of pilots to 225,000 pilots. And don't let safety get in the way of progress. And I'd like to, I don't think this is in my book, but a sad,

• 23:56Speaker 01

  statistic of World War II is we killed more of our own pilots in training than we did in combat.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Wow. Wow. That's a, that's definitely a crazy statistic, especially like the new generation like Dave. Safety was number one, 100%, right? Yeah. I mean, safety is a huge thing. You did say something I wanted to ask about though. Didn't everybody want to be a fighter pilot? Or are there guys that actually wanted to fly other airplanes?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Uh, I think there was an equal number of wanted to fly multi-engine.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Um, and I don't know where my fighter pilot thing came from, actually. I think it was watching the, um, Battle of Britain, uh, newsreels. You know, wow. And then I thought, you know.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  If I'm a fighter pilot and a single place fighter, I'm responsible for keeping me alive. And I'd be the pilot, the navigator, the radio man, the gunner, the bomber, bombardier, all of those things. And then I would not have to depend on 10 more, 10 crews of 10.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  And besides that, I thought the fighters were a little bit cooler.

• 25:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, I mean, you want to talk about the building the aura of pilots. I mean, the Battle of Britain, if you're watching that thing happen and you're seeing those Spitfires and the Spitfires going out there and doing their work, that had to at least start the momentum going for fighter pilots becoming what we now know as fighter pilots.

• 25:59Jocko Willink?

  So, once you do get trained, you go, you get sent to San Francisco and you start flying a P-39 for the 328th Fighter Group.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 26:09Jocko Willink?

  And you're flying coastal defense.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's just because we were there and we were flying military airplanes and they, we didn't have any coastal defense. And so, you know, you grabbed what you had and said, okay, you're part of it.

• 26:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it sounds like a job that, it sounds like a job they kind of need something for you to do.

• 26:38Jocko Willink?

  And they're not sure what, although Dave, you threw, you flew combat air patrols over LA after September 11th, right?

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, our squadron right at, right, starting on 9/11, we had a mission starting that morning where we were flying missions up and down the coast.

• 26:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so that's kind of similar, right?

• 26:56Speaker 03

  My imagination, it came from, from not knowing what was going to happen next.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we didn't have a clue.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  And we, we stayed up all night one time because there was a report of a Japanese fleet, you know, coming toward the coast. And it was, it was ours.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  I just didn't tell anybody.

• 27:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's not a good sign. You ended up losing your wingman in that timeframe. Is that right?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I had a wingman. We were doing the, you know, he was brand new and so he was just getting checked out. And I had him on my wing and I'm flying along. Here come a couple of Navy planes. And that wasn't uncommon. You know, we had a lot of Navy there in the Bay Area, too. And so it wasn't unusual that we would attack each other and have a little dogfight.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  And these two Navy planes came by and came across us and, and started heading down towards, towards us. And I wagged my wings like, hey, wait a minute, don't bother me now. But that man may be waving my wings, but hey, let's have a dogfight, you know? Who knows? And so I made a pretty steep turn into him.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  And my, my new wingman, just, just maybe his second ride in a fighter, got in here and stalled the thing. And I watched him go into the bay.

• 29:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Reflecting on that, in the book, you say, dying was easy, a piece of cake. Lots of people would die. And I so, and so I suppose I began putting up walls. I knew I had to concentrate on what I was doing and block out the rest. Jaeger wrote about that in his book, how he stayed away from people, didn't want to get close. I don't know that I consciously carried it to that extreme, but it came out the same. If you fly airplanes, drive race cars, do stunts for movies, or maybe walk a high wire with the flying lendas, anything truly hazardous than losing friends goes with the territory.

• 29:46Jocko Willink?

  We're talking serious stress here, and you either cope or you don't. Death is a thing that you have to get used to, as cruel and hard as it sounds. From that point on, from that point on, I resolved to control my emotions, no matter how hard that might be. And you got some other, um, some other things that you talk about, just about being a good fighter pilot. Uh, you, cause you're, you know, you're mentioning that you gotta control your emotions. You also say a fighter pilot mentality was taking firm root now. Living close to the edge, sort of went with the job.

• 30:25Jocko Willink?

  Daring, audacity, creativity, flair, these things were as much a part of being a good fighter pilot's makeup as skill and sound judgment, and were encouraged within certain parameters. Sometimes, of course, we stretch those a little. The rest of the time, more than a little. You measured a pilot by his formation flying as much as by dog fighting. Some guys would weave in and out, just couldn't hold it there. And some, the talented ones, could stick to your wing like paint. You'd bank and go down, and the good ones would stay right there, no closer, no farther away. This was wartime, however, and there was the other kind too.

• 31:06Jocko Willink?

  We needed pilots so there was reluctance to wash people out, and even more so, once they'd gotten their wings. Marginal pilots slipped through, not many, and almost no truly bad ones, at least not in fighters. But there were pilots that made you uncomfortable wingtip to wingtip. Chuck Yeager was in the first group of pilots that joined us at Tonopah. We had only six months more experience than the guys straight out of flying school, but that was a lot. We knew how to fly P-39s. The new guys hadn't seen one. Some found the transition tricky at first, but not Yeager. Chuck became the first, the yardstick by

• 31:46Jocko Willink?

  which we would measure the rest as they joined us, several each month. Yeager could fly. Right from the start, he was pretty impressive. Yeager and Chuck McGee had been flying sergeants, graduates of a program for non-commissioned officers. Then someone decided pilots had to be officers, so they made up a rank: Flight Officer, equivalent to a warrant officer, one grade below Second Lieutenant. So these guys were unusual, what we called "blue bars", after the color of their insignia, the two lowest ranking pilots in the squadron. He was from West Virginia and had a terrible drawl. Over the years, I got the impression that he loved to use it, never tried to hide it, practiced it for all I knew. He had such

• 32:29Jocko Willink?

  a distinctive voice, you had no trouble picking him out on the radio. And he had those eyes, hunter's eyes. Most of the aces could pick up far-off airplanes a little quicker than the rest of the men. But as often as not, it was Yeager spotting the enemy first and announcing it over the radio, making it sound like the Grand Old Opry. When it wasn't him calling them out, it was usually me.

• 32:54Jocko Willink?

  So that's a big deal to have the eagle eyes that you guys had.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really was. When you think about it, we didn't have any kind of a ground control, you know, toward, you know, many bandits at 12 o'clock. You had to see them.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  It was incredibly important in combat.

• 33:24Jocko Willink?

  Dave, you got good eyes, don't you?

• 33:26Speaker 03

  I was, I was given the gift of really good vision and so.

• 33:30Jocko Willink?

  But it's not as important now.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 33:32Jocko Willink?

  Cause you just get basically in a modern, you just gotta be able to see the screens in front of your face, right?

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Thanks. It's, I would not draw a comparison of what, what Colonel Anderson needed in terms of the vision, but having good eyesight even today is a huge advantage because at some point, all the computers, all the information, you were talking about even someone on the ground telling you where to go and where to look. Eventually you have to see him yourself and the sooner you see him, the better and the better your eyes are, the sooner you see him. So for me, 50 years later, listening to you describe a fighter pilot, daring, creative, stretching limits. It's the exact same way we think about it 50 years later. So your explanation is, is timeless for what a good fighter pilot makes. So it was really cool to read that and hear that from you.

• 34:25Jocko Willink?

  Now you get trained up and eventually you get orders to Europe. You get orders to Europe and again, to fast forward a little bit through the story here and people gotta get the book to, to get to all the details. But you guys ride over to England on, on the Queen Elizabeth.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:42Jocko Willink?

  So, but I, it's not exactly the luxury liner that you wanted it to be, right? They pack you in there with what 17,000 guys?

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was something like that. A division, military division. Plus the fighter group and yeah, it's something like that.

• 35:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a big number. The air conditioning, I assume wasn't great on that, on that ride over?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Well, it was for our GIs. They had to ride. Twenty-four hours on the open deck. They had plenty of air conditioning. And then twenty-five, twenty-four hours in the hole.

• 35:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  But I was a captain, so I got a honeymoon suite on the

• 35:32Speaker 01

  fourth floor.

• 35:33Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  With seventeen other guys.

• 35:39Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and you had to be, were you thinking all about like U-boats, like getting sunk?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. We had not won the battle of the Atlantic yet, and we were taking pretty good losses.

• 35:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And I figured that Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth had to be primary targets. You know, that there must be a ring of them out there off of New York. And which we'd have to go through. But, you know, they did that the whole war. And, uh, as far as I know, were never damaged or anything. They were fast.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  And they'd change course, you know. Every so often.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  They would take alternative routes instead of going directly across. I remember we went down by the Azores on our trip to, uh, England.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  And so, uh, uh, yeah, thinking, thinking about U-boats was, was very high on my list.

• 36:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's gotta be scary. And you know, they didn't have enough lifeboats for ten or fifteen thousand people on that.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  God, I don't know whether they did or not, but we had lifeboat drills all the time.

• 37:10Jocko Willink?

  Wow. Uh, you end up arriving in England, December 4th, 1943. And I, I'm gonna get into a little section here.

• 37:25Jocko Willink?

  You say, "I don't remember when or how I learned about Jack."

• 37:30Jocko Willink?

  He'd been shot down over Germany on November 13th and was listed as missing. But I don't remember how I found out. It seems clear, I had a note from my sister, but I have no memory of it. I don't recall what my emotions were, though in thinking this book through, I've tried. I'm certain I wrote a letter about it to Eleanor, saying how terribly sorry I was. But I have no memory of what the letter contained exactly.

• 37:57Jocko Willink?

  And Eleanor was Jack's wife. Like most men who've known combat, I can remember the finest detail, the nuances, what airplanes looked like in my gun sights, what I felt in the swirl of battle, what I said to people and what they said to me on certain days forty odd years ago. I can remember silly things, the words to some Glenn Miller tunes, the first points I ever scored in a basketball game. These things are burned into me. I can summon them up in an instant. But as for things in my heart, on the day I found out my best friend had been shot down and possibly killed, no clue remains. All of that is blocked out. The screen is blank.

• 38:40Jocko Willink?

  Before anyone thought up computers or knew what delete buttons were, I had one and I punched it.

• 38:48Jocko Willink?

  That was how we all managed.

• 38:51Jocko Willink?

  On December 12th, I wrote my parents. I received June's letter. Although it had been bad news about Jack, it still was swell to get my first mail here. I can imagine how, you can imagine how I feel about it. But as long as he is just reported missing, I won't worry about him.

• 39:11Jocko Willink?

  Much later, we would learn, he'd survived the bailout from his P-38, but had died in a hospital. Jack Stacker is buried in Belgium, in one of those sprawling, white-on-green military cemeteries that we Americans maintain so meticulously, the crosses all in row. He was married two weeks before he went off to war and then never came home, like 291,130 other American boys in that war. It was just his fourth mission.

• 39:49Jocko Willink?

  So this, I mean, this is Jack, the boy that you grew up with, the boy that you were obsessed with airplanes with, the kid that you both wanted to go and fly. And here you are, basically, almost as soon as you arrive in England, you find out that that he's been shot down.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Yep, yes. Um, I don't know what else I can say, other than what you just read. It was a blow to me. But then it, we knew he was in the hospital, we learned that. And so, he had to been alive. So there was some hope, you know, and it drags on and on and on, and then you find out he's killed. It's, uh, maybe a easy way to break you in on it, but, uh, it's still a blow, no matter

• 40:52Speaker 01

  how you slice it.

• 40:54Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, you guys get issued the first P-51s that are gonna enter the war. And, tell me about that P-51, the first time you got to fire that thing up.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Well, I'm gonna go back further than that. When we got the word, I don't think any of us had even seen a Mustang, let alone fly one. And then after we got to fly them, uh, it was kind of a do-it-yourself checkout, uh...

• 41:40Speaker 01

  We would send a guy up to the port where they were assembled. Find a crew chief, learn how to start it, and bring it back and check out the next guy. And here, again, I'm one of these lucky guys. About this time, a group commander came by and says, "Hey bud, we're gonna..." They call me Andy, actually. "You're gonna go to the Royal Air Force Central Flight Instructor School, Gunnery Instructor,

• 42:25Speaker 01

  and take a P-51 and fly the Cors with a P-51 instead of a Spitfire." Which is what the Cors was taught in. So, that gave me 35 hours in a Mustang before combat, where other guys were lucky to get two or three flights. And I make that sound, you know, really bad, but it was so much better than a P-39, and

• 43:07Speaker 01

  we knew it, and, boy, we weren't gonna bitch. But the bad thing about it was, the handbooks didn't even come with the airplane. And so, we're making it up. And it didn't have to be that way, because the pioneer Mustang group was already in the theater, checked out.

• 43:32Jocko Willink?

  But they just didn't have a way of passing the word to you guys?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know why, though.

• 43:41Jocko Willink?

  Dave, what do you want to know about the P-51 Mustang?

• 43:46Speaker 03

  I'm trying to imagine that feeling of, and I think you described it, they didn't, quote, "tell you where you were gonna go," but you knew where you were going.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  But you left your P-39s behind.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  So, did you know, did you have a thought that there were gonna be P-51s there? Or was that a surprise when you found out?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Well...

• 44:07Speaker 02

  When I, looking back at it,

• 44:19Speaker 02

  we wondered where we'd go, you know, with P-39s. And be in North Africa or South Pacific where they were being used. And so, we heard at the same time, we're gonna go to England and we're getting a brand-new P-51 Bravo.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  So, that wasn't a surprise. But, when we got there, not having airplanes there waiting for us was a little bit of a surprise. And so, then we learned that, oh, we're gonna go to the port and bring your own airplane home. Oh, Jesus.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  And we just, we thought, so once we flew the airplane, boy, we didn't bitch about a thing. It was so much better than the P-39.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  You know, we didn't wanna get bitch-bitched too much. Said, "Okay, guys, you can go to Africa and fly your old P-39." We loved that Mustang. It was a great airplane. And it was, it was a perfect airplane for the European theater. It had such long range and endurance, highly maneuverable,

• 46:00Speaker 02

  and just no negative things. People said, "Oh, well, it was liquid cool and one bullet hole in there would ruin your whole day." Well, we didn't have many of those, believe it or not. And so, even that didn't turn out to be, you know, a big negative factor. And I gotta say a thing or two here that might not come out clear in my book.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  They arrived with a Mustang in Europe.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  And Jimmy Doolittle, taking over the 8th Air Force, made a significant impact on the air war in Europe and the eventual downfall of Germany.

• 46:55Jocko Willink?

  What was the, what was, what was the correlation there?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Okay, let's see.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  In late 43, the 8th Air Force, with their B-17s, B-24s,

• 47:13Speaker 01

  had a bombing halt. They stopped doing what they were doing.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  And their, you know, they were supposed to kill the Luftwaffe so we could have the invasion of, of Europe. And you can't go without it. You got to kill the enemy's air. And the way they were trying to do it was, they thought they could do it alone. They thought they could go without fighter escort or anybody.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  And they forgot to tell the Luftwaffe about it and they were having tremendous losses. So they had a bombing halt and said, okay, we gotta have escort.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  And they said, oh, by the way, the Pioneer Mustang group is over here in Europe in the 9th Air Force, which was the tactical air force that was gonna go with the invasion.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  And they put the Pioneer Mustang was assigned to at the 9th Air Force.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Said, "We understand they have pretty good range and everything, why don't we try them?" So they loaned the 354th Fighter Group, the Pioneer Group, to the 8th Air Force. And they were so wildly successful that the 8th Air Force demanded that they get P-51s. "Where are the next one coming?" So we go almost directly to the 8th Air Force. We were assigned to the 9th for a short time.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  And when we got our airplanes, well then, tactics. The 8th Air Force was in charge, and the 8th Fighter Command told us how to escort. They said, "We want to see you, we want you close. When the enemy comes in, we want just to drive it away and, uh... When, just drive them away and then come back." You know, is this being videoed?

• 49:44Jocko Willink?

  Yes, it is. People will be able to watch your hands.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Fighter pilots can't tell their story without using their hands. It's impossible. If I had to put my hands down here, I couldn't tell you.

• 49:57Jocko Willink?

  We would just stop recording. The end. No, we can see you. They can see you.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  And so, uh...

• 50:05Jocko Willink?

  So their tactic was just...

• 50:06Speaker 01

  We actually had an altitude limit. We could take them to 18,000 feet. If you hadn't shot them down, break it off, come back up. It wasn't the way to do it, as it turned out, but we do what we're told.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  And further, they were, um, their ideas of, um, oh, they had all the strategic air command was, you know, was their basic thinking that the bombers could go in, didn't need help, could destroy the enemy's war-making capability, and the troops could just walk in. Well, like I said, they didn't tell the Luftwaffe about it. So, um, they were even so upset, oh, they were bombing factories, oil,

• 51:10Speaker 01

  anything to do with the production of fighters, or just fighters on the ground, you know, inventory. So, uh, the Chief of Staff was so upset about it, he, uh, had given them several written instructions. He got to kill the Luftwaffe. And they just weren't doing it. So they fired the Eighth Air Force commander and brought in Jimmy Doolittle, who had a personal talk with the Chief of Staff.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  And he said, Jimmy Doolittle, the mission is to destroy the Luftwaffe. I don't care how you do it. And so, he was, well, you guys all know who he is and what things he'd done. The Doolittle raid shortly after Pearl Harbor, you know, incredible stuff, blind flying. And, uh, so he was more pragmatic and, uh, he, um...

• 52:33Speaker 02

  He came down to, I didn't know this, I read it in his book later. He came down to visit the Eighth Fighter Command headquarters. You know, first time. And they walked through and they had this thing over the door. "The mission of the Eighth Fighter Command is to bring the bombers home safely." Something like that. He said, "Who put that, who put that up there?" And General Kepner said, "I don't know, it was here when I got here." And he says, "Well, tear it down."

• 53:16Speaker 02

  "The mission of the Eighth Fighter Command is to destroy the Luftwaffe." "No more than eighteen thousand feet." Now it was pursue and destroy. That was official. Our orders were now, "You fighters, you're turned loose." And, you know, we had felt like, my first month, I guess I was over there, was under those restrictions. And we did have the feeling that you were tied, you know, you had your hands tied. We wanted to get into the fight.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  We just were all so eager. It was incredible. And what that happened, he turned that energy loose. And that's actually how we defeated the Luftwaffe. We shot down their experienced test pilots, one by one. And by spring, oh, no, that's the spring of forty-one. Forty-one, yep. And the invasion was planned for sixth June. And...

• 54:44Speaker 02

  So by the, you know, by May, the Germans could not put up a mass against us. Well, we were putting up thousand bombers and eight, nine hundred fighters, maybe. You know, that would be the maximum. We'd get those kind of missions. And when we were trying to do it at the beginning, uh, the Germans would put up a big, a big fuss about it. I mean, hundreds of airplanes.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  And by the, by May, they could not do that anymore. And that allowed the uh, invasion to start and led to the eventual downfall of, uh, of Germany. And I credit General Doolittle turning the fighter pilots loose, his policies, and the arrival of the Mustang of having a significant impact on the war in Europe.

• 56:05Jocko Willink?

  When you guys took the Mustang out, when you're flying it, how much intel did you have about the enemy fighters? Did you know, when you got that Mustang up going as fast as it could go, did you think to yourself, or did you know, hey, the Messerschmitt can only go this fast? The Junker can only go that fast? Did you, did you, you know, nowadays, we kind of analyze, maybe even overanalyze the enemy, but we have pretty good intelligence about what their capabilities are. When you got in that Mustang, did you pretty quickly realize you were gonna have the upper hand?

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Pretty, pretty soon. I felt, I felt like I learned it real quick. Uh, especially at altitude. I learned later that, um, a Messerschmitt in the hands of a good pilot down low could give a Mustang a hard time. But I never experienced that.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Fortunately, I guess. I'd like to say a little bit about the Pacific and the European theater. The airplanes in the European war were all very close in performance. 109, 190, not the twin-engine ones, you could just forget them.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  First guy there got the most.

• 57:54Jocko Willink?

  Compared to the Zero?

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, where you had to, we had, we had it, were faster and could climb higher than they were, but don't turn with a Zero, you know, is what I get. I never had to, but I, that's when I heard intelligence reports. Therefore, I'd say in Europe, the pilots made a lot of difference, whereas not so much in the Japanese theater. You, you, you had to use tactics, you know, don't dogfight.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  So, I think that, that, that was a factor in the, in the European war. Where was I?

• 58:52Jocko Willink?

  No, that's it. You were just wanting to point out the differences. And we, it's, we have to bring up your bird, you, your bird was named Old Crow. After the whiskey.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Well, I tell my Baptist friends, it's named after the most intelligent bird that flies in the sky. But my drinking buddies all know it is named after that bourbon. And I wouldn't call it Good Old anymore because it's, it, it's down on the bottom shelf. It was the cheapest stuff we could find.

• 59:32Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, it's great. These pictures of your, of your bird, uh, you know, you could see very prominently. It's painted old crow is on there. Everybody knew who you were. You know, just talking about these bomber escort missions a little bit, you go over some of the stuff in the book, but the bomber crew tour was 25 missions. That's something that a lot of people talk about that, that, that if you were in a bomber crew, you had to go and execute 25 missions. If you got through 25 missions, you were done. You could go home. Now, what's interesting is as you pull, as you pull the, the thread on that number,

• 1:00:10Jocko Willink?

  well, they expected and anticipated that on each one of these big bombing missions, there was going to be 4% losses. So what does that mean? You take somebody with a 4% chance of getting shot down. You multiply that times 25 and you get 100% chance of getting shot down is what they had these bomber guys doing. And what's, what's even scarier than that was that the actual life expectancy, the actual number that you would get shot down on was between 12 and 14 missions. So the 4% was a low number. Now, interestingly, my great uncle, who I'm named after, his name was George Greton. My middle name is Greton.

• 1:00:51Jocko Willink?

  He was a bombardier in the 306 bomb group and he, he was, uh, he flew in a B-17, which was known as Tarheel Peggy. And Tarheel Peggy was shot down on April 24th, 1944. And this was right when you were flying in that area. I don't know if you flew on that day, but he was shot down April 24th, 1944. There was 10 crew members on board as you were talking about. Five were killed and five were killed. Five were made it out, parachuted down, became POWs. That actually includes my, my great uncle, George Greton. He was a POW and he survived prison camp and eventually came home.

• 1:01:34Jocko Willink?

  But that job that you guys had, to go and protect these bombers that were going in, and you, you, you mentioned a little bit of the scale. Uh, here's the scale of some of these missions that you all were doing. There was, there was this operation, which was called Operation Argument, which you refer to in the book as the big week. That started it. So the big week. On one of these, one, one mission, this is one mission happening. Four hundred and seventeen B-17s hit one set of targets. Three hundred and fourteen B-17s hit another set of targets. Two hundred and seventy-two B-24s hit another set of targets.

• 1:02:17Jocko Willink?

  So, so right there, you've got what's almost a thousand bombers heading in. And they were escorted by ninety-four P-38s, six hundred and sixty-eight P-47s, and seventy-three P-51 Mustangs. This, this like level and scale of combat is something we can't, my generation, Dave's generation, we can't even comprehend what it means to have a thousand aircraft. Dave, what was the most number of aircraft you had in the sky over Iraq or Afghanistan?

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  The missions that it was probably a big one was in the twenties. Twenty-four airplanes, I was a mission commander for twenty-four airplanes, and that was a handful.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Jocko Willink?

  So what does it look like when you're in the air with close to fifteen hundred or two thousand aircraft?

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Well, the beasts, the bombers would go in, they'd take off real early in the morning, assemble, and then get, get lined up and all start climbing at the same time. And especially in the winter or cold temperatures up there, we'd leave, uh, intense. What the hell am I trying to?

• 1:03:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, like trails?

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Contrails. And they would last, you know, they were long. And sometimes we made our own overcast with all these things. Uh, then the fighters joined them later, you know.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  We could see them. We could see them for a hundred miles, you know, to get up on top of the last overcast.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  And so we would head, we had a heading and you'd arrive up there, hopefully at the proper time. But if it wasn't, you remember on the tails of the B-17s, they put these big letters, square D, A, big, big letters. We would join, see what the letters were and then fly up and down and find ours. It was, it sounds, it sounds hard, but actually when you're doing it every day, it wasn't so bad.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  You know, just kind of routine, go up here, okay, oops, that's not ours. You know, go up here and there, go back.

• 1:05:06Jocko Willink?

  And would you, would you be assigned to one bomber or like a group of?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no.

• 1:05:11Jocko Willink?

  How many, how many would you, would you and your team be covering?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Well, that's a good question. They flew in little three-shoot Bs and there'd be about 60 of those, 60 more, 60 more, 60 more. And we would, God, I don't know.

• 1:05:43Jocko Willink?

  You'd cover just as, how many, how many different radio frequencies would you have?

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Four.

• 1:05:50Jocko Willink?

  Four different radio frequencies? And you'd just flip from channel to channel? Was there a common frequency? How can you have a common frequency with a thousand or 2,000 aircraft?

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Well, that was the emergency channel.

• 1:06:05Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Everybody needs brother was on it.

• 1:06:10Jocko Willink?

  That must've just been like filled with chatter the whole time.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was really, and then you had a bomber, fighter, then we had our, our own channel.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  And we use that sometimes to come home, we'd get a steer. We'd uh, we'd get a practice steer, you know.

• 1:06:40Jocko Willink?

  What's it, what do you mean by that? What's a practice steer?

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Just terminology.

• 1:06:46Jocko Willink?

  But what does it mean? I don't know what it means. Dave, you know what it means?

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  I think he's talking about giving you a vector so, so you knew which way to go to get back to where you needed to be.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you wouldn't want to say it.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  You didn't, yeah.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  You wouldn't want to say, "I really need this now," you know, it was a practice.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  You don't want to admit you're, you need a heading, so you go, "Give me a practice steer," and they go, "Why don't you go 180?" And, and that was them telling you how to get home without having to admit it?

• 1:07:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  You probably uh, used somebody else's voice when you're asking for those practice steers, so you didn't sound like yourself.

• 1:07:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's just hard for us to even imagine a 2000 aircraft in the sky. What do you, when you're, when you're flying in, what's your first indication? How do you know it's, how do you know the enemy's coming? Is it the first, the anti-aircraft that starts to come up? The ATAC?

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  No, you got that all the time.

• 1:07:43Jocko Willink?

  It's just happening.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Whenever they felt, flew over uh, for the wrong place.

• 1:07:52Jocko Willink?

  And is that just a matter of chance, whether it hits you or not?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Some, the fighters, we didn't, we didn't worry too much about the flak. That was, that really was after the bombers, but they would shoot at us, uh, too.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  You were talking one time about looking off in the distance and, and it looked like little gray puffs of smoke. You'd see hundreds of airplanes and you and, I guess, probably Chuck Yeager more than anybody, but you could see the enemy aircraft coming. But it didn't look like airplanes at first. I think your description was almost it looked like little clouds.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it used to be that was a little hunter chip cloud.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  No, that's another thing that, you know, that we had to get used to.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  In practice, we were lucky to, to um...

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Sometimes get four ships up to practice formation. That was a big deal, a four ship. We did a lot of two for formation training. And every day in England when we flew, we flew with sixteen ship formation per squadron. Three squadrons lead, one over here and one over here. And two spares.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  They flew across the channel, turn around if they weren't needed. And fly through two or three layers of overcast, probably more likely than not. And we had never, never flew. I don't, I think I can remember flying in a group formation one time in training.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  Were there mishaps with fighters hitting each other and American fighters and bombers just on the way over to the target? Did that happen or was it pretty well coordinated? Guys figured it out really fast?

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  It was pretty good considering. But my own flight, I lost a wingman. Two flights here and climbing through. And somehow these two guys drift together. One of the worst ones I ever saw was B-17s. You know how you can have days when you can look down and see pretty good, but you can't see forward? Well, there was a lot of those. And we see these two columns of B-17s. We're sitting up here.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  And they're going along at the same rate.

• 1:11:03Jocko Willink?

  So you can see it looking down?

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're same altitude and they're going. And they got a mission recall, canceled the mission. And these guys went like this. Oh, my God, you could see it coming, you know? Nothing you can do. You know, they lost about four airplanes right there.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  That was a hell of a sight to see a bomber go down. I mean, to us.

• 1:11:43Jocko Willink?

  You, you, um, going to the book here a little bit. And when you're, you're now flying, you say, we were fighter pilots. Flying the damnedest, fastest, most lethal airplanes anyone ever dreamed up. The forward line in defense of the entire free world. We were 22 years old, give or take two years and carrying the entire war on our shoulders. And doing a pretty good job of it, too, to judge by what the newspapers told us. We were winning the fight and developing egos that would make Mussolini look humble.

• 1:12:21Jocko Willink?

  We weren't like other people, at least not in our own minds. We were bolder, braver, smarter, more spirited, better. Our eyesight was keener, our reflexes quicker. We were risk takers too, who worked and played hard. We were confident, self reliant, able to stand on our own and proud of it. Most of all, we were motivated, aggressive. Only the fittest and most competitive survived the training and then the deadly winnowing out imposed by our last and best teacher, the German air force. I was no fighter by nature, at least not with my fists. I can count the fights of my youth on one hand.

• 1:13:03Jocko Willink?

  But I enjoyed competing and racing cars or dueling with airplanes was a way of compensating for my slender build and testing myself against anyone. I enjoyed combat, which is not quite the same thing as saying that I enjoyed killing. Combat was exciting, addictive, a test of our mettle and manhood, a crucible in which men became a cut above the ordinary.

• 1:13:27Jocko Willink?

  We thought that we, we thought we were that and we were encouraged to think it all through our training because we couldn't have done what we did without thinking it. Why else would they have let us fly under bridges and buzz people's houses? It took a big ego to fly to Berlin with anything resembling enthusiasm. We were never afraid, most of us anyway. I truly believe that scared sometimes you'd have to be stupid not to be concerned, respectful, but never afraid the way a little kid is afraid of the dark or the way you might fear some dark alley, knowing something is there waiting for you. We were so young, I suppose we just didn't know any better.

• 1:14:09Jocko Willink?

  Combat is like a near miss in an automobile. It happens and you react instinctively to it. And later on, you might say, phew, that was close and your fingers might tremble a little. But while it's happening, you don't pause to assess it and say, my God, I'm going to die here. There simply isn't time. You just do what you have to do. I never saw a man crack, not in our group. I don't remember anyone standing down because he was what we called flak happy. There was a guy who lost a brother and wept openly every so often about it, but he flew, he did his job. Nobody had to be lifted out of his cockpit, frozen up staring.

• 1:14:51Jocko Willink?

  Stress, at least in our corner of England, wasn't what Hollywood might have you believe, although it was there, no denying it. So there's the attitude. You know, you point something else, you point something else out in here.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  I had a my left, right?

• 1:15:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, sir. This is like, I have to deal with Dave all the time on this stuff.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  The description couldn't be better. It's written perfectly.

• 1:15:18Jocko Willink?

  You also mentioned in the book, and I don't think I have it marked out to read, but you talk about how when you look at the films that they made after the war, all the pilots are thirty, thirty, thirty years old or thirty-five years old, you know, in the, in the famous World War Two fighter pilots. And you say, it was a bunch of kids that were twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two years old.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's right.

• 1:15:46Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna go to a little combat here. Flying skill, I've always felt, meant more in Europe than it did in other theaters, where the airplanes had differing strong points. The P-38 was successful in the Pacific, although it couldn't turn with the Zero, because it was much faster when diving. Its pilot could attack from above and then keep going, and the Zero had no chance of catching it. Same with the P-40 earlier on. The Focke-Wulf's and Messerschmitt's had more speed. The Pacific tactics wouldn't work on these aircraft, and the P-38's was much less effective against them. To beat them, you had to turn with them. Like I'm turning with this 109, right now, northwest of Hanover. We're flying in interlocking circles, but on differing planes.

• 1:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Descending, we pass one another, once, twice, three times, at ridiculous angles, with neither of us in a position to fire. I feel like I'm gaining, but not very much, and I'm excited and impatient, and getting terribly frustrated that I can't get a shot. I've worked the angle down to where our paths are crossing at 40 to 60 degrees. What you want ideally is 0 to 10, with the enemy either moving almost directly away, or coming almost straight at you. Anything over 30 degrees, it's almost pointless to shoot with a fixed sight. Of course, these same numbers, this same geometry problem, are probably running through the mind of the Messerschmitt pilot.

• 1:17:15Jocko Willink?

  I've been considered a rather good marksman in the P-39 and T-6 at both our gunnery school, and later at the RAF's. Now I've flown nine missions, triggered my guns only once, and still have no kills, but I'm cocky enough to try something bizarre. I decide to pull my sights through the German, keep pulling my nose up until I can't see him, then fire, hose him, and hope against all odds that he flies through the stream. What the hell, worth a try. I pull up and fire off a quick stream of tracer, as he disappears underneath me. And another for luck. I ease the stick back, and he flies back into my view, hot damn! He's spilling coolant back into his slipstream. I got him!

• 1:18:01Jocko Willink?

  Got a goddamn golden BB on him. Punctured his radiator or severed a coolant line. Got my first kill. And while I'm whooping like I just scored the touchdown that won the Rolls Bow, Rolls Bowl, he throws the canopy off and bails out. His 109 goes straight in, exploding. That's your first kill, right there. Still putting a smile on your face.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  You haven't read the rest of it there.

• 1:18:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, after this, a guy sneaks up on you, but luckily it's another P-51, right?

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, what happened afterwards? I felt, ooh, you know what? Oh, golly, here's a guy, he's flying close formation with me right now. He pulled right up there. Pretty quick after the kill. He's down low, he had his mask off and he was grinning and he gave me something like that, you know, or, I don't know, I didn't. And I thought, wait a minute. Did he shoot that thing down out from under me? You know? And I thought, my shot had to be the luckiest shot in the world, you know?

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  To be able to blindly get that lead and then see him come through. So, all the way home, I convinced myself I probably did not shoot that airplane down. That he got it. And it was Johnny England, England Air Force Base. That was the guy that the base was named for. And so, I get home, he's in a different squadron. And I, uh, get home, I make a claim to the intelligence officer briefing.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  And then I said, but just hold it, I gotta go get confirmation from a guy that's obviously saw what was going on.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  So now I'm riding, uh, going in the Jeep or the officer's club.

• 1:20:25Jocko Willink?

  Can you tell who the other pilot is, or you just know what squadron he is?

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  No, I knew who he was.

• 1:20:30Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you could see him. You're that close to him. You look at him.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:33Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it's Johnny England. Yeah, what's up?

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, he had his mask and I could see his, the name on his airplane. He already had two kills.

• 1:20:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  And so I think, how am I gonna bring this up? You know, am I gonna say, hey, you asshole? Did, oh, you could, you could bleep this out.

• 1:20:55Jocko Willink?

  You're good. You're good. We're amongst friends.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Hey asshole, did you shoot that thing down out from under me?

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Or, you know, just how am I gonna put it to him? So I go in the officer's club and he's over here. He sees me and he comes running over to me. And he says, Andy, he says, that was the best shot I've ever seen. You got that guy out there about 60 degrees angle off. I said, oh, Johnny, you know, lucky shot.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  And as soon as we were through, I rushed to my phone and I got my first kill.

• 1:21:40Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 1:21:43Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys put the, did you guys put the swastika on your plane, the little mini swastika for a kill?

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Very quickly.

• 1:21:49Jocko Willink?

  Very quickly. Hell, yeah.

• 1:21:53Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's awesome. You got a section in here.

• 1:22:01Jocko Willink?

  That it's about another dogfight and I believe it's probably the one you remember the best. You, you, um, it's called the straight up encounter.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:10Jocko Willink?

  And I've got to read this. This is just a incredible situation here. And I'm going to go to the book. I am in this steep climb, pulling the stick into my navel, making it steeper, steeper. And I'm looking back down over my shoulder at this classic gray ME109 with black crosses that is pulling up too, steeper, steeper. The pilot trying to get his nose up just a little bit more and bring me into his sights. There's nothing distinctive about the aircraft. No fancy markings, nothing to identify. It is the plane of an ace as, as one of the dreaded yellow noses like you see in the movie.

• 1:22:53Jocko Willink?

  Some of them did that, I know, but I never saw one. And in any event, all of their aces weren't flamboyant types who splash paint on their, paint on their airplanes to show who they were. He was someone who was trying to kill me is all. So I'm looking back almost straight down now and I can see this 20 millimeter cannon sticking through the middle of the fighter's propeller hub. In the theater of memory, it was enormous. An elephant gun. And that isn't far wrong. It is a gun designed to bring down a bomber, one that fires shells as long as your hand, shells that explode and tear big holes in metal.

• 1:23:36Jocko Willink?

  Is the single most frightening thing I have seen in my life then and now. But I'm too busy to be frightened. And I am extremely busy up here, hanging by my propeller, going almost straight up, full emergency power, which a Mustang could do for only so long before losing speed, shuddering, stalling and falling back down. And I am thinking that if the Mustang stalls before the Messerschmitt stalls, I have had it.

• 1:24:09Jocko Willink?

  I look back and I can see that he's shuddering on the verge of a stall. He hasn't been able to get his nose up enough, hasn't been able to bring that big gun to bear. Almost, but not quite. I'm a fallen down dead man, almost, but not quite. His nose begins dropping just as my airplane too begins shuddering. He stalls a second or two before I stall, drops away before I do. Good old Mustang. He is falling away now and I flop the nose over and go after him hard. We are very high by this time, six miles and then some, and falling very, very fast.

• 1:24:52Jocko Willink?

  The Messerschmitt had a head start plummeting out of my range, but I'm closing up quickly. Then he flattens out and comes around hard to the left and starts climbing again as if he wants to come at me head on. Suddenly, we are right back where we started. A lot of this is just instinct now. Things are happening too fast to think everything out. You steer with your right hand and feet. The right hand also triggers the guns. With your left, you work the throttle and keep the airplane in trim, which is easier to do than to than to describe. Any airplane with a single propeller produces torque. The more horsepower you have, the more prop will pull you off to one side.

• 1:25:33Jocko Willink?

  The Mustang I flew used a 12-cylinder Packard Merlin engine that displaced 1,649 cubic inches. That's 10 times the size of the engine that powers an Indy car. It developed power enough that you never applied full power sitting still on the ground because it would pull the plane's tail up off the runway and the propeller would chew up the concrete. With so much power, you are continually making minor adjustments on the controls to keep the Mustang and its wing-mounted guns pointed straight.

• 1:26:08Jocko Willink?

  It's a little unnerving to think about how many things you have to deal with all at once to fly combat. So the Messerschmitt is coming around again, climbing hard to his left, and I've had about enough of this. My angle is a little bit better this time, so I roll the dice. Instead of cobbing it like before and sailing on by him, I decide to turn hard left inside him, knowing that if I lose speed and don't make it, I probably won't get home. I pull back on the throttle slightly, put down 10 degrees of flaps, and haul back on the stick just as hard as I can.

• 1:26:49Jocko Willink?

  The nose begins coming around, slowly, slowly. Hot damn, I'm going to make it. I'm inside him, pulling my sights up to him. And the German pilot can see this. This time, it's the Messerschmitt that breaks away and goes zooming straight up, engine at maximum power, without much alternative. I come in with full power and follow him up, and the gap narrows swiftly. He is hanging by his prop, not quite vertically, and I am right there behind him, and it is terribly clear, having tested this theory less than a minute ago, that he is going to stall and fall away before I do. I have him.

• 1:27:33Jocko Willink?

  He must know that I have him. I bring my nose up, he comes into my sights, and from less than 300 yards, I trigger a long, merciless burst from my Browning's. Every fifth bullet or so is a tracer, leaving a trail of thin smoke, marking the path of the bullet stream. The tracers race upward and find him. The bullets chew at the wing root, the cockpit, the engine, making bright little flashes. I hose the Messerschmitt down, the way you'd hose down a campfire, methodically, from one end to the other, not wanting to make a mistake. The 109 shakes like a retriever coming out of the water, throwing off pieces.

• 1:28:17Jocko Willink?

  He slows, almost stops, as if parked in the sky, his propeller just windmilling. And he begins smoking heavily. My momentum carries me to him. I throttle back to ease my plane alongside, just off his right wing. Have I killed him? I do not particularly want to fight this man again. I'm coming up even with the cockpit. And although I figure less I know about him, the better. I find myself looking in spite of myself. There's smoke in the cockpit. I can see that and nothing more. Another few feet. And then he falls away suddenly, left wing down, right wing rising up, obscuring my view.

• 1:29:02Jocko Willink?

  I am looking at the 109's sky blue belly, the wheel wells, twin radiators, grease marks, streaks from the guns, the black crosses. I am close enough to make out the rivets. The Messerschmitt is right there and then it is gone, just like that, rolling away and dropping its nose, falling almost straight down, leaking coolant and trailing flame and smoke so black and thick, it has to be smoke or oil. It simply plunges, headed straight for the deck. No spin, not even a wobble, no parachute. And now I am wondering. His ship seems a death ship. But is it? Undecided, I peel off and begin chasing him down.

• 1:29:46Jocko Willink?

  Did I squander a chance here? Have I let him escape? He's diving hard through. He is diving hard enough to be shedding his wings, harder than anyone designed those airplanes to dive, 500 miles an hour and more. And if 109's will stall sooner than the Mustang is going straight up, now I am worrying that maybe their wings stay on longer. At 25,000 feet, I begin to grow nervous. I pull back on the throttle, ease out of the dive and watch him go down. I have no more stomach for this kind of thing and right now, not right now, not with this guy. Enough. Let him go and to hell with him.

• 1:30:29Jocko Willink?

  Straight down, he plunges from as high as 35,000 feet through this beautiful, crystal clear May morning toward the green on green checkerboard fields, leaving a wake of black smoke. From four miles straight up, I watch as the Messerschmitt and the shadow it makes on the ground rush toward one another. And then, finally, silently, they merge.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  I think I just found a guy for my, my audio book.

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  I know how you feel.

• 1:31:12Jocko Willink?

  That's just, um, yeah. Dave, what's your breakdown of that?

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  It's.

• 1:31:21Jocko Willink?

  Give us, give us a breakdown.

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  I, I'm actually just, I'm kind of at a loss for words, and I know this sounds, maybe even sounds a little arrogant, I can picture what he's saying. So even when he's talking about, he, you're right here, sir, even when you're, when you're talking about looking down your wing line, seeing his nose come up to you, and you know, if he's got two or three more degrees on you, which is, which is kind of like a matter of inches, really, in an airplane, that he's gonna get, that, that this Messerschmitt's gonna get a shot, and the, the sinking feeling that comes with, seconds later, the elation of watching him shutter, and you know that he can't keep his turn, even the angles and

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  the fall, so, your ability to get another pilot to see through their eyes what you're seeing, is, it is, it is remarkable how well it is written in a way to describe it, so I can feel what you're seeing, not just see it, it, it is just unbelievable to listen to you describe that, and then, the shadows, you know, merging with the airframe, and then at, at your altitude, it's probably a fireball, but you don't hear anything, and everything in between there is just, I have never seen something written well enough to see it with my own eyes as what you wrote in that dogfight. Um, it's, it's really amazing for me to hear, and I'm really grateful that you have the

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  ability to get that on paper and capture that forever.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  We may, uh...

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Blame, um, Joe Hamlin.

• 1:32:56Jocko Willink?

  Joe Hamlin, yeah. Well.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  He.

• 1:32:58Jocko Willink?

  He didn't fly the airplane. I know that.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Well, the stories are all mine. And when it came to, uh, well, we, we first had to get together. And he'd go home and write a couple of chapters. And then we would, uh, come back and review them. And I said, Joe, this word isn't even in my inventory.

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  You know? And, uh, we'd go on and on, not to say, I don't even know what that means.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  And we had that. And then when it came to the flying,

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  he would try it. And I said, Joe, give me a yellow pad over there. And I'd write it all out in longhand. I said, don't change a word.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  And, but after we got together so many times, he really got into my head.

• 1:34:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  He did a marvelous job.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  And, uh, and then even when I said, don't change your word, sometimes he'd try.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  And I might or might not leave it because he was a, he is a good writer. Absolutely.

• 1:34:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  I would have taken my book and say, I was born on January thirteenth, nineteen twenty-two, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. But, you know, the way he mixed, mixed it through the book.

• 1:34:40Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  I think was really good.

• 1:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, that's, so that's the, just for everyone that's listening, that's the, the, the co-author of the book that helped write the book. Um, Joe Hamlin did a great job. We, when you're, so when you're looking over your shoulder at this Messerschmitt and they're start, he's starting to stall. So you can see that, you can see the plane start to kind of shake?

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  I said, I see him shudder.

• 1:35:07Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  But. I don't think you can see it. Shutter, shutter's a feel in the airplane, you know, you feel.

• 1:35:15Jocko Willink?

  But there's some visual thing that's going on that you go.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  He got sloppy, you know, that's the beginning of a stall.

• 1:35:24Jocko Willink?

  And you can probably sense when you're about done going up too. So you knew that you were close.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  We reversed.

• 1:35:36Jocko Willink?

  And then when you're shooting, that, that aircraft, you have to make little micro adjustments with your nose to get, like you're saying, you hose it down like you would a campfire. So you're making little tiny adjustments to kind of sweep up and down on that aircraft with your maneuvering.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, maneuvering was, maneuvering is just a little bit of rudder.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Small amount. You had to keep it in trim. And what I mean in trim, keep the ball centered.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  If you had a ball off,

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  then you're, you know, you're shooting. And the airplane's over here. You can't, you gotta, you can't.

• 1:36:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so this makes, whereas normally you could get away with having trim be off a little bit because you're still just maintaining some kind of a bearing. But in this situation, if your trim is off a little bit, your gun's pointed in the wrong direction.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Might, might be, you know.

• 1:36:37Jocko Willink?

  And you've got, you're making these constant micro adjustments. And I actually,

• 1:36:42Jocko Willink?

  that's a part of the book that I didn't quite go into, the deep level of detail that you have to do to keep that trim. But I failed to understand why that's so important in a gunfight when you have fixed sights. Because like if you're flying an aircraft, I mean, I've taken off in air, small airplanes before where there's a strong crosswind. The, the plane is going. If you look at the heading of the plane, it's like 10 degrees off the direction you're heading, but you're still going in the right direction. So if you do that with your gun, that's going to be a problem. So you've got to keep that thing perfectly trimmed all the time. Dave, you didn't have to do any of that, did you? He had a computer doing all this for him, sir.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Well, we, we, we got the early computers.

• 1:37:23Speaker 03

  You had it harder than I did because in a jet, moving the throttles in a jet doesn't change your trim. Every time you move the throttle on a propeller, you change the torque. Every movement of a throttle, and I have a little bit of propeller time, I learned to fly in a propeller airplane, every time you move the throttle forward or back, you have to adjust the rudder trim. So when he talks about the ball, we called it stepping on the ball, which is a little, literally a little gauge that has a little white background and a little black floating ball. That would tell you if your nose and tail are aligned. It'd be like pointing a gun with your wrist cocked in one direction or another. Every time I move the throttle on the jet, the computer said, "We're okay, don't worry about it." The ball is always centered. Every time in a prop, you have to either use your feet

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  or use the rudder trim. So when he's talking about moving the throttle, what he's not saying is that every single movement of that throttle meant moving with my feet, moving with my thumb, moving my hands. So the intricacy to be able to track an ME-109 that's probably, what, 30 feet long and 30 feet wide, the accuracy to do that is so precise. To be able to do that in a dogfight like that is so hard to do. I got the Colonel, who's like the humblest guy in the world, saying Joe's a good writer, which I know he is, but he didn't track that ME-109 with his P-51 the way that you did. So I still just, it's remarkable that you're able to capture that and I'm trying to do

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  justice to how difficult that is and how intricate that physical movement is in your airplane. Also, the fact that you described this 101 engagement, that's something that I always loved as a fighter pilot, was ultimately at the very end, what it would come down to you and somebody else. But what's hard for me to really truly grasp is that there's a war going on around you. You weren't the only two airplanes in the sky at that time. So your ability to compartmentalize and focus on this one airplane as part of a much larger thing going on is, to me, equally as remarkable.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  And the thing is, is that what we call situational awareness, you have to do that. You have to know. And I've got a real good example of when we were doing a dogfight, I saw a shadow. And...

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  When we were through, I says, "Hey, guys, you see anything, shadow or anything?" "No, no, no." "Okay, come on down and get lined up here." I knew it was going west, generally speaking, and so I go along here. Pretty soon, we come up and I see the shadow again before I can see the airplane. And it was a bright sunny day, and it was a green on green, uh, camo. And if it'd been hazy, I never would have seen him. And so, uh, I come up and it's a Heinkel 111K.

• 1:40:28Jocko Willink?

  The poor guy.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  All obsolete, uh, Battle of Britain bomber.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  And, uh,

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  we had a gunner. We silenced the gunner. And we got both engines smoking. And so, I scored my, I bumped back over here on the, from this side to that side.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  And I'm scoring them as they, as they shoot. So, that's how you get a quarter of a kill. Share the whole thing with them. And my number four guy's a new head, you know, new inexperienced guy and he, he fired every round on one pass. And you could imagine where the bullets were going.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  He burnt the barrels out, you know. And we only had thirty seconds of, of, uh, gunfire.

• 1:41:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's not, not much.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  He come home a couple of times with no ammo.

• 1:41:41Jocko Willink?

  How many seconds did you fire at that Messerschmitt on the, in the straight up encounter?

• 1:41:47Jocko Willink?

  Three, four, five seconds, something? Something like that, yeah. That's still a lot of rounds to receive. I don't want to be the receiving 50 cows.

• 1:41:57Jocko Willink?

  You go on here.

• 1:42:01Jocko Willink?

  Talking about that straight up encounter, you say Eddie Simpson joins up with me. Both wingmen too. Simpson, my old wingman and friend, had gotten the one who'd climbed out. This is another aircraft. We bagged three or four, three of the four. We were very excited. It had been a good day. I had lived and my opponent had died. But it was a near thing. It could have been the other way around just as easily, and what probably made the difference was the airplane I flew. Made in America. I would live to see the day when people would try and tell me that the United States can't make cars like some other folks do. What a laugh. I didn't wonder if I'd just made a new bride a widow, or if he might have kids, any more

• 1:42:46Jocko Willink?

  than I would have wondered about a snake's mate and offspring. I may have given some thought to how many of my friends he had killed, or I might have, or he might have killed in the future, or how many bombers he might have shot down had he lived. But that's as far as it went. From what I could tell, he hadn't been overly concerned about me. People ask about that all the time. People usually ask it hesitantly, as tactfully as they can, but they ask it. Did I wonder and worry about the mothers and childrens and wives of the men I shot down? Did I carry any guilt or regret? No. Not then, and not now. World War II was a total thing.

• 1:43:30Jocko Willink?

  Us against them, when being against them was unquestionably the right thing to be. I flew for my country and was proud I could help in any way that I could. Besides, all of my opponents were trying to kill me. And frankly, I always was elated they hadn't.

• 1:43:52Jocko Willink?

  This one had almost gotten a bead on me. He'd come as close as anyone would. When it was done, 480 hours of combat flying in P-51s and another 25 missions or so in Vietnam, almost all of those in F-105s, I never once suffered a hit in air-to-air combat. The sum total of the damage all my aircraft absorbed amounted to one small arms round that found one of my wings during a strafing run after D-Day. It bored a hole the size of my little finger. It didn't even go all the way through, just punctured the underside skin. Nobody noticed it until the next day, needing a patch the size of a coin.

• 1:44:36Jocko Willink?

  That's exactly what my crew used, a British shilling. People on the ground often shot at me, flak batteries, machine gunners, foot soldiers with rifles and pistols. There may have been some who threw rocks, who can say? But this man on that day was the only opponent who was ever behind me, and he couldn't quite bring me into his sights, and he never did fire. To my knowledge, I was never, I never was fired upon by an airplane in combat. Skill had something to do with that, I suppose. But there was certainly something more to it than skill. Lots of hot pilots never came home. I guess I was lucky. Or blessed.

• 1:45:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that American-made P-51 was just next level in the sky, huh? When you guys were getting that thing, it must have seemed like, you know, a lot of times for me, you know, I grew up, I grew up, the, the P-51 was like an antique, right? It was like an antique thing. But for you guys, this was like a piece of the newest technology imaginable.

• 1:45:48Jocko Willink?

  Just a, just an incredible bird. I, I mean, Dave, that's like you getting into an F-22 or an F-35 for the first time.

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  It is. I, I can't imagine, you know, certainly the, the prominence of that airplane, but it had to feel good to know, and I fully appreciate, and I'm so glad you wrote about it, what it always came down to was the man in the, in the cockpit. That's the ultimate factor. But it had to feel good to know you were getting into an airplane that was gonna level the playing field or give you an advantage over what the Germans had. So you didn't have to mitigate the deficiencies of that P-39 or something else. It had to be a confidence builder to say, if you want to go fight me one to one, any, in up, down, left, right, any environment, this airplane will, will be just fine. So that feeling of getting into

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  that P-51, knowing you're going to war, had to be a lot better than what you might have been flying in anything else. And I felt that when I got in my first flight in an F-22. I felt like, I'll fight anybody, anywhere.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  How did that happen? How did you, being a Marine, how did you do that?

• 1:46:57Speaker 03

  If I can steal a line from your book, I was very lucky. Yeah, a lot of timing, a lot of just good fortune, a lot of things just aligned, the right place, right time, need, requirements, qualifications. And at the end, it's really hard for me to take credit for being the only Marine that's gotten to do it. But I was very lucky.

• 1:47:19Jocko Willink?

  You're the only Marine that got to fly the F-22?

• 1:47:21Speaker 03

  Ever.

• 1:47:24Jocko Willink?

  And the, and the F-35? There's Marines that fly F-35s.

• 1:47:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was the first Marine. Only, only Marine to ever fly the Raptor. First Marine to fly the F-35B, you know, as operational.

• 1:47:33Jocko Willink?

  How'd you get, how'd you get in the Raptor?

• 1:47:36Speaker 03

  Short version of a long story. The Marine Corps was gonna buy F-35s. It's a whole new airplane. They didn't know how challenging it would be to go from old to new. We hadn't done it in 30 years. The Air Force had just introduced a new fighter called the F-22 to replace the F-15. And they basically sent a spy, go live with the Air Force for three years. And learn all the lessons that they've just learned from going from the F-15 to the F-22. We'll take those lessons and apply it as we replace the F-18s with the F-35. So I got lucky to be selected for an exchange with the Air Force to learn all about the F-22, all about this new generation and all about the challenges of replacing a 30, 40-year-old airplane

• 1:48:19Speaker 03

  with a brand-new airplane because the Marine Corps hadn't done it since the early 80s. And I was the guy that got to do it and I went straight from the F-22 to the F-35.

• 1:48:28Jocko Willink?

  Lucky. Yeah, you two need to play the lottery.

• 1:48:33Jocko Willink?

  So, look, I'm not going to read the whole book. You know, you've got a bunch of other encounters in here. Dogfights, incredible detail on the combat experience. You end up with 16 kills. 16 and a quarter. 16 and a quarter. That's right. Don't let me leave off that quarter. What was the quarter for? Was the quarter for that one that you just described? Yeah. So there you go. You got a little bit of that one, too. You end up with 16 kills. You fly your last mission with Jaeger. You guys are out there together. Okay.

• 1:49:13Jocko Willink?

  And again, people get the book. It's incredible. Get those details. But I'm going to go back. I'm going to skip forward a little bit here. And you say, "I hadn't intended to get married. It just kind of happened. I landed in the States on February 1st, 1945 and married my pen pal, the widow Eleanor Cosby Stacker 22 days later. It took me a few days to get from the East Coast to California, and I know I asked her at least a week before we got married. Figure it out. The courtship lasted no more than 10 days to two weeks. Pretty intense. We were married three days before Chuck and Glenys."

• 1:49:57Jocko Willink?

  It didn't sit all that well with our folks. Our moms didn't think it would last, and you can understand why. After we've been married about 20 years with our two kids almost grown, my mother poured it all out to Eleanor. She told her, "I thought you'd run home to mama at the first sign of trouble. I couldn't have been more wrong. You're a wonderful person." They had a good cry. At another time, Elle's own mother told her the same. Ellie had been married to Jack for two weeks and had mourned 15 months. People thought she was vulnerable, but she knew her own heart. After 40-plus years, we're still happily married. No question,

• 1:50:38Jocko Willink?

  she's the best thing that ever happened to me. Over the years, we've seen lots of couples break up. Loving a fighter pilot is like loving a cop. He leaves for work in the morning, and you're never entirely sure he will come home at night. Worse, there are inescapable, agonizing periods of separation, where the woman has to be both father and mother to the children, keep the house together, manage the money, and contend with the loneliness.

• 1:51:07Jocko Willink?

  And there never is much money. But we can look back and laugh now. Surviving the trials is what brings people closer.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  I ended up with 70 years. She passed away. And that's not in the, that's an updated version, isn't it?

• 1:51:35Jocko Willink?

  I'm not sure which version is. I know I have two versions here.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  Let me see the cover.

• 1:51:40Jocko Willink?

  The cover to this one.

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  I think that's the original one.

• 1:51:43Jocko Willink?

  I think this is the original one. I think this is the updated one.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:51:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I have both versions. Well, actually, one of them's Dave's version that he's had for 20 years or something.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  What can I say about that? The storybook romance, right?

• 1:51:58Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:52:01Jocko Willink?

  No, it's um, and then what, what was it like coming home? And you, I didn't mention this, it's in the book. You, you actually came home for a little bit of leave in between and you got treated like the biggest hero in the history of America.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16Jocko Willink?

  Which is awesome.

• 1:52:19Jocko Willink?

  But when you were, now you come home again.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  For good, for.

• 1:52:23Jocko Willink?

  For, for.

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  Good, so to speak.

• 1:52:25Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, what, you didn't know it would be for good, maybe you would be going to Japan or whatever. But Germany surrendered while you were back in America.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:52:33Jocko Willink?

  And so, so how did that feel? You, did you feel like we did it?

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  I've, I was pretty elated.

• 1:52:44Jocko Willink?

  And you, you mentioned this in the book, and I think it's definitely worth talking about. So, the three hundred and fifty-seventh, who you were part of, shot down six hundred and nine enemy aircraft. Thirteen died in training, fifty-seven were killed in combat. And that was from sixteen accidents, and then the others were killed in, shot. And there was seventy-one POWs taken. You had twenty-eight original pilots in your crew, in your group. Nine of whom were killed, seven of whom were shot down and became POWs.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, fifty percent.

• 1:53:29Jocko Willink?

  Ah, you must have felt very lucky to be home.

• 1:53:35Jocko Willink?

  But then it's like, you're, you're looking at Japan, right? You had to be looking at Japan like everybody else.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, was always there, yeah.

• 1:53:43Jocko Willink?

  But, but you ended up going to Texas, and did you become a flight instructor? Was that your job in Texas?

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I led a group, you know.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  I had a group of instructors. And I'm a, I'm a group commander.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  And I ride the, I have to ride the, I go to the.

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  Instructor school, the central instructor school, then come back. And they only let me write, do the wash rides.

• 1:54:20Jocko Willink?

  What's a wa- what's a wash ride?

• 1:54:23Speaker 01

  Tell a guy he's not gonna make it.

• 1:54:25Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you're washing them out. My gosh.

• 1:54:30Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and then it's, next thing happens is, so you're there working as an instructor and the next thing happens is VJ day.

• 1:54:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:39Jocko Willink?

  And now the war's over.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Jocko Willink?

  What was it, what was the, uh, state, what was the mindset of America on VJ day?

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  Uh, just, I don't know how to explain it, but, uh, extreme joy. And I don't think there's any remorse

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  from a serviceman that served in that time about the use of the atomic bomb.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  And I really, Truman and he, he did a good job.

• 1:55:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, no doubt about that. And especially when you hear the stories from the guys that fought in the Pacific on the ground against the Japanese. I mean, it was gonna be absolutely horrendous if we had to go into mainland Japan.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, you know, they were, we know, they were training their kids and the women to fight with sticks and hide in caves. And

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  we would have just wiped them out.

• 1:55:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:00Speaker 01

  We would have killed more Japanese than, than, uh,

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  Americans.

• 1:56:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Jocko Willink?

  So now that the war is over, you go and become a recruiter, go on recruiting duty.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, everybody's getting out.

• 1:56:21Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Jaeger becomes a test pilot and it seems like he eventually recruits, basically recruits you to become a test pilot.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  Well, he allowed me to, he got me an interview with, they have a flight test.

• 1:56:35Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you got a cool section in here during these test pilots year, test pilot years.

• 1:56:44Jocko Willink?

  Scary, scary. And I kinda wanted to bring out the fact of what it was like being a test pilot, cause it was risky business back then. This section here, you say, "On April 24th, 1953, we took off and rendezvous with the B-29 and a couple of chase planes at 25,000 feet. In the chase aircraft were Jake Knight and Bill Ross, the pilots scheduled to join John on the project. I moved in on the B-29, hooked onto its wingtip, and again, the dash panel light remained dark. No power. Damn. Thoroughly frustrated by now, I disconnected, moved away from the mothership, and Davis moved in and hooked up."

• 1:57:27Jocko Willink?

  So this was what you were trying to do, what we were trying to do as a country, was get a way to make the fighters be able to support the bombers longer, and they devised some kind of system where you could actually take two fighter planes and hook into the wings of a big giant bomber that has a bunch of fuel and they're, they, it would kinda pull you along.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  Well, that, that was one, one, um,

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  concept that, um,

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  people latched on to. But the basic program

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  was a theory by this, uh, German engineer that we brought back from World War II.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  Uh, to work, work in right field.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  And he theorized that you take a bomber. If you could put a wing extension out here, just a wing extension, and you had some way of controlling it, you increase the aspect ratio and that gives you longer range. And so they wanted to do it in a wind tunnel, but they didn't have the priority and all that stuff, so. I said, "Well, let's try it with airplanes." Well, that was okay, except we hadn't done that before.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  And so that's why we developed a program with a C-47 and a little Q-14. And with a simple locking mechanism, like back into it. And then the drag would hold us. It was a beveled ring. And then we had a beveled ball with a nut down the bevel with a spike. And you had to go in front of it and back in, which made it about twice as hard. And then it was locked when you pulled the throttle back.

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  And then if you wanted to get out, just add throttle to it.

• 1:59:54Jocko Willink?

  So as you're trying to do this, you try bringing your plane in, you connect, but you're not getting the full connection. And so then, I'm going back to the book, autopilot coming on, he radioed. So this is after Davis moved in and hooked up?

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  This was a completely different project.

• 2:00:10Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So what project is this one?

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  This was using two F-84s, two airplanes, one on each wing. That was going to be the panel.

• 2:00:22Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  And we had gone through the manual flying of it and done enough to give them confidence to go to an automatic pilot.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  And meanwhile, I'd been, I'm sorry. Don't get it. Meanwhile, I'd been, I'd been there about five years, which was way more than normal. And I wanted to stay there and I told him, I say, this project's coming up. The only other guy that can do it is John Davis. He's been flying along, but just flying. I flew the daily ship that got all the data on, you know, angles and speeds.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  And John was flying another airplane manually, just a standard fighter. And so I could never get power. This was something like the fifth, fifth time. And everybody was getting nervous, you know? They wanted progress. And the contractor was a low bidder on autopilot.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  And I'm in the Pentagon now. I got a new boss and he's pissed off at me because I'm going away flying. They ask him to let me go. I should have told him to stick it. They didn't, they didn't see much desire in keeping me there when I was, when I knew this was coming up. But they wanted the most experienced guy to make the first few flights and then turn it over to check out some other guys. And.

• 2:02:35Speaker 02

  Now you're, you're, you're coming up on the bad part.

• 2:02:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so, so basically you had gone in to try and see if you could get it to work. It didn't work. You didn't get the connection. You didn't get the, um, the power that you were supposed to get. When you connected up to the bomber.

• 2:02:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53Jocko Willink?

  And so you break off and then Davis comes in and he hooks up. And, and he, I'll go to the book now. Autopilot coming on, he radioed and I knew he would be trying to set some kind of record for turning a switch on and off. And then his airplane abruptly pitched up and over and smashed upside down onto the wing of the B-29. I saw the explosive bolts of fire. If a certain angle between the wings works, was exceeded. They were to fire automatically, blowing the connection apart, but it didn't matter. It all happened too fast.

• 2:03:35Jocko Willink?

  The spasm reaction of an autopilot far out of phase through the F-84 over onto the bomber like the cover of a book slammed shut.

• 2:03:46Jocko Willink?

  There was no time for anything, not even a call on the radio. The outer panel of the bomber's left wing peeled upward from the wingtip almost to the outboard engine. And then the F-84 fell against the main spar. The impact sheared the jet's nose away cleanly just in front of the cockpit. The fighter bounced off and fell away in a glide. I remember yelling for John to get out, but I got no response.

• 2:04:15Jocko Willink?

  The bomber nosed over and with the most, with most of the wing gone, fell into big power spiral and augured almost straight in.

• 2:04:27Jocko Willink?

  It wouldn't have been the simplest thing in the world to get out of, pointed almost straight down and spiraling tightly and pressurized, which would have made getting a door open even more difficult. Earlier flights had been flown without pressurizing the cabin, guarding against exactly this sort of incident. But everything had gone so well, flight after flight, that somewhere along the line, the B-29 crew had decided such precautions weren't necessary. In the final seconds, just before the bomber crashed into the bay, one of the crew of five struggled free. But he was too low by then, and there wasn't enough time for his parachute to come all the way open.

• 2:05:09Jocko Willink?

  Moments later, the fighter burrowed into a forest, throwing up a huge fireball. Six men were dead, one a close friend, because engineers programming the autopilot had erroneously assumed the B-29's wing to be rigid, and because there wasn't an instrument to warn us of, to warn us how out of phase the autopilot might be, and because there were too many people involved in the project, and because everybody was probably in too much of a hurry, and because no one had fought up computers which probably could have worked out the settings, and because of Curtis LeMay had said, "Keep working on it."

• 2:05:50Jocko Willink?

  And of course, because I hadn't said, "It's too damn tough," at a time when saying it was almost certainly would have killed the project. In war, when death is all around, a man can steel himself against it, block out the heartbreak, press on. But this wasn't wartime, and maybe I'd let my guard down. Maybe of all the things that have happened to me in my life, this probably hit me the hardest. I was a long time getting over it. John Davis was dead, and it could have been me, probably should have been me. We never did learn why I couldn't draw power from the B-29's.

• 2:06:38Jocko Willink?

  So horrible incident.

• 2:06:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have to say that in all of my 30 years of service, the hardest thing I had to do was drive back into the housing section and tell a widow that her husband's not coming back tonight.

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  I just, I had to do that so many times. You'd think I would have coped with it, but somehow, rather, it just was very difficult for me to do.

• 2:07:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, there's a, you know, you talk about this in the book. There's a one point where someone comes, there's so many accidents happening. Someone comes to do an assessment of the program. And they say, "There's no evidence of a safety program at Edwards." Like, it didn't even exist.

• 2:07:56Jocko Willink?

  And actually, Dave and I were talking about this. You eventually got tasked with creating the safety program there. And Dave and I were talking about the term "buying the farm", which everybody knows what "buying the farm" is, but I think we found the root of that in your book, was that you guys used to say, "If you die, then your widow's gonna get a $10,000 insurance policy", which is enough to buy the farm or buy whatever you want. So that's where, from what I know, that's where that term comes from.

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:08:25Jocko Willink?

  Buying the farm. But you get tasked with coming up with that safety program.

• 2:08:33Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, you're, you're, you're at, how long were you at that test pilot program for? Forever. It's a long time. You got a, you got a pretty good story about, about, uh, Jaeger in here. I, I kinda gotta read this one. Uh, you, you're going, again, there's some background and I'm skipping through the book. So buy the book to get the details. Chuck was involved in the testing and on one of the flights in late 1963, I was practicing instruments in a T-33, just happened to be in the air, listening on the radio, when Chuck's chase plane had a problem and had to abort. I piped up and said, hey, I'm available.

• 2:09:13Jocko Willink?

  All a chase pilot does is follow as far as he can and then pick the man up, coming back and stand by to help if he's needed. So you're out there just doing a normal flight. Chuck's doing some kind of a test flight and his, the person that's supposed to be observing him, something happens to his plane. Yeah. Yep. So you say, hey, I'm, I'm up here. I got it. As I circled in the general area where the NF-104 would return to my altitude, I listened and watched. Chuck made a level run, then lifted the 104's nose and touched off its rocket, blasting almost straight up, leaving a trail that could easily be seen. At a hundred thousand feet, I learned later, the 104's nose pitched up,

• 2:09:56Jocko Willink?

  which was always a danger in the Starfighter when you ran out of speed and reached a certain critical angle. A device made the stick actually shake in your hand to warn you as you approached this angle of attack. And if you didn't correct, then a stick pusher would move the nose down automatically. Instead of stalling at this angle, the 104 would pitch up, gyrate around, and fall into a spin you could recover from if you had enough altitude. Only this time, the air was too thin for maneuvering and the small thrusters didn't have enough power to force the nose down. Chuck's plane fell into what became a flat spin, belly down, like a frisbee, the kind of spin you can almost forget getting out of.

• 2:10:39Jocko Willink?

  He tried everything to book, in the book, to recover. He even popped the landing drag chute, trying to get the nose down with no luck. I followed him down from 25,000 feet, circling his spinning aircraft. As we reached 10,000, I was yelling for him to get out. He fired the rocket-powered ejection seat, and while I was calling for the chopper to fly out and get him, I watched his parachute billow. I came over low as he landed to see if he was alright. He was lying down, and as I flew by, he waved. The way he was lying seemed awkward, but I wrote that off to the cumbersome space suit. I came by again, and he was standing up, waving.

• 2:11:25Jocko Willink?

  I circled until the chopper arrived, and took him off to the hospital. I was stunned to learn he'd been burned. By the time I got to the hospital, his head was swollen as large as a basketball. As he'd ejected, the seat had become fouled in his parachute lines, and the pull of his chute popping open had slammed the seat into Chuck. The still-hot rocket attached to its underside hit him smack in the face, splitting open his helmet, his helmet's faceplate. The spent rocket was still spitting some flame, and it flashed inside his split helmet fueled by Chuck's oxygen. He managed to get the faceplate open, which shut off the oxygen, or it might have been worse.

• 2:12:08Jocko Willink?

  As it was, his glove caught fire, and his face was badly seared. The doctors had to peel away the skin daily for weeks. It must have hurt like hell. You can still see the scars, though you have to look closely.

• 2:12:23Jocko Willink?

  So that's a day in the life of the dang fighter, uh, test pilots back then.

• 2:12:32Jocko Willink?

  Just kinda crazy stuff you guys were doing.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  Well, the Cold War was still on.

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  But what he was doing was, uh...

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  Trying to set out a new, uh, official...

• 2:12:51Speaker 02

  Speed uh

• 2:12:54Speaker 02

  time to climb uh record and it was a specially modified uh

• 2:13:02Speaker 02

  F one oh four that they were gonna try to use in the test pilot school. He was running the test pilot school at that time, so he was doing some of his own flight testing, but we had already flown the airplane to a hundred and

• 2:13:24Speaker 02

  hundred and twenty something thousand feet and uh

• 2:13:30Jocko Willink?

  What space? Isn't space fifty thousand feet?

• 2:13:33Speaker 02

  The what?

• 2:13:33Jocko Willink?

  How how how high is space?

• 2:13:37Speaker 02

  I forget what there there is an official.

• 2:13:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's probably closer to eighty.

• 2:13:42Jocko Willink?

  Eighty thousand?

• 2:13:43Speaker 03

  It's definitely about fifty. I've been to sixty.

• 2:13:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:13:45Speaker 03

  It's kinda laughable by these standards. It's not space.

• 2:13:48Jocko Willink?

  Is this the scene? Is this the scene that they show in the in the book, the in the movie, The Right Stuff and in the book, The Right Stuff? This this scene right here? Are you familiar with that movie? The Right Stuff?

• 2:13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:59Jocko Willink?

  Is this what they when they portray Jaeger crashing?

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:02Jocko Willink?

  And he comes walking out of the fire? And the guy says, now, what is that? That's a man.

• 2:14:12Speaker 02

  I forgot that.

• 2:14:18Jocko Willink?

  So you spend this time out there. Um, eventually you get signed to the in like nineteen sixty-five, you get assigned to the eighteenth Tactical Fighter Wing. This is in Okinawa. Your son, meanwhile, Jim, goes to the Air Force Academy.

• 2:14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:37Jocko Willink?

  So I guess he was he was following his father's footsteps. How'd you feel about that?

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  I was really proud of him. I am proud of him.

• 2:14:49Speaker 02

  He's a real good guy.

• 2:14:52Jocko Willink?

  That's a that's a pretty amazing story.

• 2:14:56Speaker 02

  I took him for a ride in a

• 2:14:59Speaker 02

  F one oh five. He came to Okinawa.

• 2:15:03Jocko Willink?

  Okay. Wait, how old was he when he went for a ride in a one oh five?

• 2:15:08Speaker 02

  Oh. I forget what the academy.

• 2:15:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so he was at the academy?

• 2:15:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was a cadet.

• 2:15:19Speaker 02

  And then, of course, later on, he took me on a combat mission.

• 2:15:26Jocko Willink?

  Well, go ahead and tell us that story.

• 2:15:28Speaker 02

  I think we already did.

• 2:15:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, we weren't hit, we hadn't hit record yet. And I was only catching pieces of it because I was getting set up. So what happened? How'd you end up doing a combat mission with your son in Vietnam?

• 2:15:39Speaker 02

  Well, he, when he got out of flying school,

• 2:15:45Speaker 02

  he wanted to go to fighters.

• 2:15:49Speaker 02

  So had B-52s, you know, all down. And so he finally decided, well, if I can't get fighters, I might as well go to Vietnam. So he went to a special operations squadron.

• 2:16:07Speaker 02

  This was on the choose list.

• 2:16:12Speaker 02

  And flying an O-2, which is a push puller, a Cessna 337, standard 337 modified for

• 2:16:26Speaker 02

  special operations. And then shortly after he got there, I, I got assigned to Thak Lee in Thailand, 105s in the Southeast Asian war.

• 2:16:45Speaker 02

  And the 7th Air Force was having an all commanders

• 2:16:53Speaker 02

  meeting in, in Saigon.

• 2:16:57Speaker 02

  And so he was at Benoit, so right next door. So I called him and I said, hey, maybe we could get together, you know? And then he, he comes back with,

• 2:17:12Speaker 02

  hey, you want to go on a combat mission with me?

• 2:17:16Speaker 02

  I says, you've got to be kidding. You'll never get that permission to do that.

• 2:17:24Speaker 02

  And I certainly would not have permitted it in my wing. And so he says, "Stand by."

• 2:17:35Speaker 02

  And when he's the new guy.

• 2:17:38Speaker 02

  And he's, "Stand by." And he'd go, "Come back," it seemed like a minute later. He says, "It's all set."

• 2:17:48Speaker 02

  He says,

• 2:17:51Speaker 02

  "You come on down to Saigon. I'll pick you up the next morning. We'll go on a combat mission, land at Benoit, spend the night, and then I'll get you back to your Ba- Saigon meeting." So sure enough,

• 2:18:14Speaker 02

  it happens. But special operations, they do all kinds of stuff.

• 2:18:25Speaker 02

  So he probably picked a minimum-risk kind of a project.

• 2:18:34Speaker 02

  We went out. The

• 2:18:40Speaker 02

  the O2 had a loudspeaker on it.

• 2:18:45Speaker 02

  And they'd go out over communist strongholds and

• 2:18:51Speaker 02

  publish, uh,

• 2:18:55Speaker 02

  speak, um,

• 2:18:58Speaker 02

  all stuff like-

• 2:18:59Jocko Willink?

  Oh, hit 'em with some PSYOPs, some psychological operations?

• 2:19:02Speaker 02

  Yes, that's what I was trying to think of. And then we'd go back over to the area and

• 2:19:11Speaker 02

  drop leaflets, which gave 'em safe passage. They could go and, you know, go up and surrender with it and we would take 'em up as a-

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  Prisoner with no wouldn't kill him.

• 2:19:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm glad that that approval chain didn't go through your wife because she would have not been very happy.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  I I I I carry this story. I'm a little overkill when I do it, you know. Oh, you know, I can't, I don't have the words, I can't describe. What it means to me to be able to fly with my. Son in a combat mission, I certainly wouldn't have let anybody do it in my organization. And.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  Then I go on, I say, but my word, my wife had a few words to say about it. She's damn glad she didn't know about it until it was all over.

• 2:20:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the speaking of like flying with your friends and whatnot. Uh, you had a little reunion. In Vietnam as well. Here's another one. You got Chuck Yeager. Chuck said, well, we flew our last combat mission in World War Two together. We might as well fly our first combat mission in Southeast Asia together. That morning, we served as a crew for one of several bombers on a close support mission. Making one run after another over an endless green jungle. A forward air controller on the ground with a radio gave us targets. And we dive in thirty degrees, pretty steep for a plane of that size, toggle away a single bomb, then fly back around and let go another over and over again, ever so carefully. Trying to put them right where the troops wanted them.

• 2:21:07Jocko Willink?

  Again, we stayed the night and partied with friends. So you got to do ops with with Yeager again in Vietnam.

• 2:21:18Jocko Willink?

  Eventually you end up with um. Eventually you end up with the you become the commander of the three hundred and fifty fifth Tactical Fighter Wing. And you're flying the F one oh five. Uh, Thunder Chief, which Dave told me. Is is called the Thud. And how'd you like that bird?

• 2:21:40Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know what Thud means.

• 2:21:43Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. Dave gave me some bad intelligence. You didn't call it Thud?

• 2:21:51Speaker 01

  No, it got that name from crashes.

• 2:21:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:21:55Speaker 01

  In the development of the airplane.

• 2:21:58Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  And after, after, after it was deployed even the first few years. And I remember when I went to the 18th Wing. They were putting in safety pack 19 and 20 and 21. God. It had a terrible reputation, but I have to say about the 105. Once we got all the bugs worked out on it. It was a very reliable airplane. And it made a good bomber.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  You didn't want to dogfight with it, except with another 105. They called it a FB, you know, a fighter bomber.

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  I flew a tour, or a part of a tour in Southeast Asia with it. After we'd done, quit going north. We were bombing, just bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

• 2:23:14Jocko Willink?

  You talk about that deployment to Vietnam and what that was like. It's, I mean, we had pretty good air superiority compared to, compared to when you were fighting the Luftwaffe over France.

• 2:23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's for sure.

• 2:23:33Jocko Willink?

  And, and eventually your jets get sent home because you had a bad relationship. Something happened with the Thai government because you were in Thailand and something, something went wrong there.

• 2:23:44Speaker 01

  Oh, it wasn't, it was near the end of the war. And so they decided to, to send the strike thuds, you know, the ones making the bombing strikes, send one of the groups home. And unfortunately, it, it was my group.

• 2:24:09Speaker 01

  I got in the Pentagon. When I left Okinawa, I thought, I'm combat-ready in the airplane. Next logical place is to go to Southeast Asia. But I'm a bird colonel. And those assignments are more difficult. Good assignments. They said, "No, you're going to the Pentagon." I didn't want to do that. And I guess my grumblings got down to the colonel's assignment somewhere. And so I got a call. He says, "Hey, we got a need for a colonel who's been a wing commander, who's checked out in the equipment.

• 2:24:55Speaker 01

  And your name flashed up." I said, "Yeah, that's what I wanted to do when I left Okinawa." And I said, "Well, if you want to take it, you can take it." And I said, "I'll take it."

• 2:25:15Speaker 01

  Then he said, "Well, I got to tell you something bad about it. It may close while you're there. Maybe shut down. Going to send the wild weasel airplanes home. No, keep them and send the strike eagles. Strike, not eagles. Thuds. Strike thuds home." So, nobody knew what to do. The State Department said, "Oh, you cannot close that wing at this moment." And we went in there with just a handshake. We didn't...

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  Normally, when you go into a foreign country, you have a Status of Forces Agreement, where they give you example cases, like one of your truck drivers kills a Thai in an accident. What do you do?

• 2:26:20Speaker 02

  And we didn't have any of those. We went in, the Thais wanted us in and we, we wanted in, so we went in. Anyway, uh, we got all these things, the Thais wanted, uh, every, they wanted everything, including the airplane. But, uh, when the time came, we start shutting down. But still, there's no, uh, no, um, no end date, you know? When did we, when did we shut down? Right.

• 2:27:02Speaker 02

  State Department was, was the problem there. And Christ, Thais were still shipping us bombs, you know, driving, truckloads of bombs. They go through the Thai gate and get the kum shau, you know? And they didn't want to turn off the bombs, so they're, they're bringing them to us. We're stacking them in the road, you know, the shelters were all filled. So we're stacking them in the goddamn roads in the, hey, Jesus. Just, you know, violation of regulation after regulation.

• 2:27:44Speaker 02

  And, uh, not having any luck at that. Got a, a Seventh Air Force, Seventh Air Force Assistance Team came to visit us, help us shut down. And so I said, "Well, we only need one thing. Give me a date of shutdown operation." "Well, we can't do that right now." "Well, you could stop the bombs from coming in." The four-star turns to the Colonel and he says, "Take care of that." And we got the bombs shut down.

• 2:28:27Speaker 02

  And, but still no date. And, uh, I learned, I learned a few things during this period of time. It was, I'm going home to mandatory retirement. And, uh...

• 2:28:48Speaker 01

  I won't tell that story. Let's see.

• 2:28:55Jocko Willink?

  They offered you a billet in Saigon and you said, nah, I'm not gonna sit around here. I'm a...

• 2:29:01Speaker 01

  Oh, after, yeah.

• 2:29:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, after they shut it down.

• 2:29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're still closing the base now.

• 2:29:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I can tell you that. Okay, I'll tell it to you.

• 2:29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, another meeting, well, I think it was the same meeting that I went down there to fly with you. And this young Brigadier General there was in operations was, was at this dinner and

• 2:29:36Speaker 01

  something came up about me going to the headquarters. And he pipes up, yeah, I've got chose you. It'll be good for your career. So I said in the loudest voice I could gracefully do, oh, then you know I go home to mandatory retirement.

• 2:29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good for my career.

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  God damn.

• 2:30:03Jocko Willink?

  So you end up going, uh, go ahead.

• 2:30:08Speaker 01

  Uh, on, on closing base, I said, uh, I took, I had seven full colonels. I said, as you, you close, make a plan to close your function.

• 2:30:24Speaker 01

  You know, from day one, if I tell you how many days, weeks, whatever, does it take you to shut down? And so I said, everyone of you do that and then give it to me. I put them all together, added two months and picked the date.

• 2:30:47Speaker 01

  And then I decided to put it into a telegram to all ships at sea and everybody I could think of. State Department, everybody. And title, closure of Tocqueville Plan, something like that. And I set that thing in and sat back. And I had no idea what I was gonna get. And, "Oh, Christ, we got a plan." It worked like magic.

• 2:31:32Jocko Willink?

  Yep. We call that leading up the chain of command. We're gonna make this happen.

• 2:31:37Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ. Yeah, everybody was so happy except the State Department. But I learned a lot of things about waste in government. So, we tried to get rid of everything we had. And what didn't, we couldn't, went into the trash and went to the Thais.

• 2:32:17Speaker 01

  And so... Oh, one morning they came and told me, "Hey, we got a dead Thai officer in such and such building." It was one of the buildings we were cleaning up, but we had not turned it over to the Thais yet. And he was in there tearing out the electric wire, electrocuted himself. They were, you know, selling it.

• 2:32:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:55Speaker 01

  But about to trash. So, steel lockers.

• 2:33:05Speaker 01

  Labor intensive to tear up, tear down, very heavy. If I tore down, tore them down, shipped them home, nobody would have said a word, but it would have cost like hell. But if I put them in the dump, aha, government waste, look at this. But what we did was, uh, the South Vietnam had a crate, they needed them badly. So I said, well, you send somebody over here and dismantle them and get your C-130s.

• 2:33:49Speaker 01

  I got tons of them. And so we got rid of most of them that way. Some of them did make it to the dump, but it was a hell of a lot cheaper than packing them up and sending them home and nobody would complain.

• 2:34:06Jocko Willink?

  There you go, you gotta find those solutions.

• 2:34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:10Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so you end up getting orders back to McClellan Air Force Base, which is, which is about 90 minutes from Auburn, which is where you're from. Uh, this was sort of what we call, I don't know if you call, in the Navy, we call it a twilight tour. This was sort of your twilight tour. You get put in charge of maintenance. You still get to fly T-33s, so you're happy about that. But this is sort of, this is where you, uh, end up your career.

• 2:34:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:34:39Jocko Willink?

  And I'll go to the book here. You say, too soon, it was over. There was talk about a big ceremony, but I asked them to forget about that and just mail me my papers. There was a short, sweet ceremony in the commander's office. Ellie, her folks, and my mother were there, and that was it. Thirty years and 30 days from my day of enlistment at age 50, I was a civilian again, going out in the place where it had all begun. My mother had actually written the epitaph for my career a bit earlier when I'd flown home from Tocqueville. "Well," she said when I walked through the door, "are you satisfied now?"

• 2:35:24Jocko Willink?

  I said, "Sure." File it under white lies.

• 2:35:31Jocko Willink?

  Uh, cause that's, you know, you can never be happy, never be satisfied. Um, and that was the end of your career in the, in the air force. You ended up working for McDonald Douglas?

• 2:35:43Speaker 01

  Well, McDonald Aircraft Company and later McDonald Douglas.

• 2:35:49Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:35:50Speaker 01

  They bought them out.

• 2:35:52Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you took a few years off from flying, but then you started missing it. You started flying again. Uh, you got some great stories in here is when you got a version of old crow back in one of these uh, restored P 51s. You got to fly that. You got to fly with Jaeger again in some of these air shows. Um, just again, the stories as, as the book closes out and, and how it goes and the rest of the stuff you've done, just great, just incredible story, incredible story.

• 2:36:30Jocko Willink?

  Uh, how'd you feel that day when you retired?

• 2:36:35Speaker 01

  Had mixed emotions.

• 2:36:37Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:36:39Jocko Willink?

  I know. So in the SEAL teams, you know, you have, we call it a drying cage, but it's basically a big locker, probably the size of a prison cell. But you have all your gear in there, all your gear in there that you collect for the years that you're in. And I was in for 20 years. But I remember my last day, I got my van downstairs and I, and for me, it's kind of similar in that 18 out of 20 years, I was stationed in Coronado in San Diego, all within a hundred yards. SEAL Team One, SEAL Team Three, SEAL Team Seven, when SEAL Team Seven was, was in an old building right next to SEAL Team One.

• 2:37:19Jocko Willink?

  And then the training command, they were all a hundred or 200 yards apart. That's where I spent my whole adult life. And then one day, my last day, I retired, I went up, cleaned out my locker, my, my gear cage, threw all that stuff in my van and left. And that was a pretty empty feeling when I left because it's your whole life. Uh, so I'm sure you had some of that when you, when you got done.

• 2:37:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Um, actually that comment was made by my mother was made when I was retired.

• 2:37:55Speaker 01

  And after I was retired, she said, well, you satisfied yet now?

• 2:38:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'll tell you what, this is probably a pretty good place to stop. The, the book has so much more detailed information in it. You know, it, it's just an incredible life. Incredible hero. And I, I gotta read one more quote from the book. You said, you said, all those years, they'd actually paid me to fly. What a deal.

• 2:38:28Jocko Willink?

  It's just incredible. Dave, you got anything else? I'm sure you guys could talk for hours. I'm sure you are.

• 2:38:37Speaker 03

  It's, this has been, this has probably been one of the best three hours of honestly of my entire life getting to be here. And, you know, I'm, I'm lucky. I, I get to work with Jaco. I'm on this podcast a bunch and I've gotten to meet so many veterans and then, and then now, you know, this movie Top Gun just came out again and it's so prominent. And, and people ask me all the time, you know, what was the first movie like? And I saw that and I was 13 when the first movie came out. So a, as you know, at that age, when you see something at that young age, you look at it and you think, man, I really want to do that. And a lot of times when people ask me, you know, why'd you become a pilot? I, I think about that movie a lot, but as a little kid, you know, much before 13, 14, I was reading books.

• 2:39:23Speaker 03

  And I remember as a little kid, uh, reading a book on, on Pappy Boynton and, and reading a book on, on the Black Sheep Squadron. There's a TV show, you know?

• 2:39:34Speaker 03

  Long before Top Gun, I was, I was already, I was already enamored, um, already enamored. And it was, it was Jaeger, Anderson, Foss and Boynton. And what I've realized in this podcast, as I'm listening to you talk, when I was a little kid, what I wanted to be was you. I wanted to be you. And I can't express how much gratitude I feel and how much reflection I have now as a very little boy, long before the movie Top Gun ever came out, is what I wanted to be was what you described in this book. And to get to sit across from you and hear you talk about this is just an honor of my lifetime.

• 2:40:16Speaker 03

  And I can look back now and when people ask me why I wanted to be a fighter pilot, I can tell them that I got to meet the reason why. So, thank you very much. This has been awesome.

• 2:40:25Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:40:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I don't have much to say after that, Dave.

• 2:40:30Speaker 01

  I got it, you know. I get asked, you know, what do you, what do you tell kids today? And what I tell kids today is, you know, you really can be what you want to be. And there's a good example of it right there. If you want to be something really, really bad, you can be it. And I say to kids, live your dreams.

• 2:41:10Speaker 01

  And find a, find something you like to do. And if you can, if your job is something you like to do, you can excel in that job. And live your dreams. That's, that's what I say these days.

• 2:41:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, sir, you certainly lived your dreams without any doubt. And, you know, people can find you, you got a website.

• 2:41:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:49Jocko Willink?

  Same name as the book. It's toflyandfight.com. Is it dot com? Yeah, it's toflyandfight.com. So, anybody that's interested in hearing more about you, hearing more of your story, you can go there and... Check that out. I mean, it's just, it's incredible. It's an honor to be sitting here, talking to you and to have Dave here. Just, it's incredible to see. So, thank you so much for joining us and making the effort to come out here. And of course, more importantly, thank you for your service to our great nation. Thank you for what you did in combat to defend

• 2:42:31Jocko Willink?

  the world from tyranny and from darkness and to defend freedom in the world. You fought, you fought machine against machine and you fought man against man in the ultimate test of skill and you won every time. And that's pretty impressive. And we salute you and we thank you for your service, sir. Thank you very much.

• 2:43:01Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Bud Anderson has left the building.

• 2:43:08Jocko Willink?

  Dave, I feel like I should just turn it over to you at this time.

• 2:43:10Speaker 03

  I don't know if that's a good idea, man. I need a little time to decompress and kind of contemplate that. That was, I knew that was going to be a unique experience for me, but that was, I don't have a lot of frame of reference to what to compare that to. That was unreal for me, man.

• 2:43:26Jocko Willink?

  When he just stepped up, you were kind of rattling off some of the thoughts that you had in your head as you were thinking about this. And you're thinking, for instance, a thousand aircraft go out and whatever, six hours later,

• 2:43:45Jocko Willink?

  10% of those are gone. 100 aircraft crews gone.

• 2:43:53Jocko Willink?

  This is what they did day after day after day after day.

• 2:43:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:58Jocko Willink?

  There's like, I don't know, is there anything equivalent for a fighter pilot to being a World War II fighter pilot? Look, the guys in Vietnam, obviously they extremely challenging, you know, horrible situations to go in, going into, you know, having guys like Charlie Plum and William Reader on the podcast to talk about their experiences, you know. Surface to air missiles, MiGs out there. Uh, those encounters were relatively rare. Compared to you're going to bomb Germany, you are 100% gonna get into it.

• 2:44:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:38Jocko Willink?

  This is the next level.

• 2:44:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think from scale, like there's nothing. He's talking about, was it big week? Is that what they called it?

• 2:44:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, big week.

• 2:44:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, first mission, thousand bombers, 800 fighters and 16, 160 Germans come up to fight him. Something like that. So there's 2,000 airplanes in the sky. And 250 bombers don't come home. Uh, I don't think there's anything, certainly in my aviation mind, that's even close to the scale of that. It's just, it's hard, even for me, it's really hard to relate to what that might look like. It's kind of overwhelming.

• 2:45:12Jocko Willink?

  The heavies.

• 2:45:14Speaker 03

  Dude.

• 2:45:15Jocko Willink?

  Hey, by the way, they just mentioned this, if you want to get the book to fly and fight, go to, go to this website I already mentioned, to flyandfight.com. And Bud is signing books, so you can get a signed book from that website. And I would recommend you do it. I mean, this guy's 100 years old right now, just he, the stuff that he's seen in his life, lucky to be here. Um, just awesome. So if you get the chance and the book, by the way, I, I, I read through two dogfights. So there's whatever 14 more. And they all have their own little details. They all have their own little scenarios that are happening. And, and look, the rest of the book, there's all kinds of things in there that we didn't talk about.

• 2:46:00Jocko Willink?

  So if you want to hear that story, go get that book to flyandfight.com. We may have to like, once this comes out, actually, when you listen to this again, take notes and maybe we'll do sort of a, a, a wrap up of this. And you can kind of talk through some of the stuff and maybe even bring in some stuff, different stuff from the book if we didn't cover it. Cause I mean, you're talking about them shooting down German, uh, German pilots that were parachuting. And that was, uh, you just, there's a bunch of other things to talk about that we didn't cover here. So when you listen to this, take notes and maybe we'll do another sort of a recap. Or an after actions on this, even if it's just like, you know, an hour or four or whatever.

• 2:46:42Speaker 03

  Right on.

• 2:46:42Jocko Willink?

  We can go through it. Uh, Echo Charles, you've been here the whole time, but you've been quiet.

• 2:46:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:46:47Jocko Willink?

  Because you've been, uh, you didn't have a mic.

• 2:46:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:46:49Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:46:50Speaker 04

  On purpose, what, you know, let's face it. What am I gonna add to? Well, then again, I did kinda have some there. That first dogfight. You know what?

• 2:47:00Jocko Willink?

  Wait, the first one?

• 2:47:01Speaker 04

  Or the one, the first one that you read. One that he, he said luckiest shot in the world. Yeah, yeah. So I, I was. So a lot of people say like, oh, you should read my audio book or whatever, but that was the first time where I was like, you should read this audio book.

• 2:47:16Jocko Willink?

  You meaning him or you meaning me?

• 2:47:17Speaker 04

  You.

• 2:47:18Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:47:18Speaker 04

  So because, and of course the story is laid out like perfectly.

• 2:47:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:21Speaker 04

  Right? Especially at the end. I don't know why I like the end so much when he was like, oh, I don't even know if that was my shot. It might've been the other guy's shot, you know, and I don't even know how to approach this guy. And then when he found out it was his, that was good.

• 2:47:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, I didn't, I actually didn't read that part. So he could kinda tell the story and it's a weird thing to try and figure like, what do you wanna read and what do you wanna hear from them? And you gotta, I mean, in my mind, I'm always trying to think like, I wanna give them enough that they go, oh yeah. And they get in the zone and then they kinda fill in the deets as they say. But man, you know, it's such an honor to be able to have these guys on and hear their stories, man. It's just, it's crazy. And then, you know, you always have to think to yourself that there's almost 300,000 that didn't come home from this war. And that didn't get to tell their story and didn't get to have kids. Yeah, it's just. So we're so lucky to be able to, to have this opportunity to do this. So

• 2:48:20Jocko Willink?

  appreciate you all listening and, and if you wanna support what we're doing here and you wanna support yourself too, which is a bonus.

• 2:48:26Speaker 04

  It's true.

• 2:48:27Jocko Willink?

  Some people might even prioritize supporting yourself over supporting what we're doing here. Either way, it's a win. Cause if you support yourself, good. We, I want you to be stronger and smarter and faster and better.

• 2:48:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's one of, one of the functions of this, the existence of this whole outfit, I think.

• 2:48:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So if you want that, you can go, if you wanna support, you wanna support yourself, you wanna support America, by the way, you can see I kinda got a little fired up when we started talking about the P51 Mustang.

• 2:48:54Jocko Willink?

  The P51 Mustang was like the, it was a game changer, a game changer. 500 miles an hour, just faster and stronger and better. And it was American made. It was American made and, and obviously it was American made. But just think of like every detail that the engineering, the design, the material, like all that went into that. And that, that, that wasn't even an idea on December 7th, 1941. That wasn't even an idea. They're just like, okay, cool. We have to build the best. You think, well, I actually don't know the history. Wasn't an idea yet.

• 2:49:28Speaker 03

  I don't know exactly the development of it. They knew, we knew we needed better airplanes, but I don't think anybody certainly in 1941 could have predicted what the Mustang was gonna be, other than we needed something.

• 2:49:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, I was so fired up listening to talk about the Mustang that I started talking, thinking about the Ford Mustang. Like I just need to get a Ford Mustang because I can't get a Mustang Mustang. I can't get a P51 Mustang, but I can get a Ford Mustang. That's an American made piece of machinery.

• 2:49:54Speaker 03

  Legit.

• 2:49:54Jocko Willink?

  Legit. That's how fired up I was getting talking about this aircraft and what they did with it. So, America, if you want some American made stuff, well, first, hey, Jaco Fuel, got JacoFuel.com. Go get some stuff. Hey, Jaco Fuel, we got all new flavors. I was pounding mine today. Were you pounding yours today, Dave? How's that new orange? Did you think your orange could be better?

• 2:50:16Speaker 03

  I didn't know that it could be better. Now that I know that it is.

• 2:50:19Jocko Willink?

  It's like the P51 Mustang of freaking drinks.

• 2:50:22Speaker 03

  It's the upgrade. It's like the new version of the Mustang. It's just a little bit better.

• 2:50:25Jocko Willink?

  It's a little bit better. And Echo Charles, how were you over there on the mango?

• 2:50:29Speaker 04

  Outstanding. Actually, I got messages saying that that's their new favorite flavor.

• 2:50:34Jocko Willink?

  So you got people that-

• 2:50:35Speaker 04

  The mango comes through more.

• 2:50:37Speaker 03

  So their old favorite flavor was mango and their new favorite flavor is mango? Is that what you're saying?

• 2:50:42Speaker 04

  Their old favorite flavor apparently was not mango. I'm just guessing what the last one was. Nonetheless, yeah, they're all, they're all a lot better.

• 2:50:50Jocko Willink?

  They're all a lot better. They're different. They're, they're in a different category. So JacoFuel.com, get yourself some milk, get yourself some joint warfare, some krill, super krill. Uh, Origin USA's. Look, made in America is a thing and people like, you know, like Bud Anderson said, people like, oh, we can't make the stuff over here. I laugh at them. That's what Pete Roberts did when they said, hey, you can't make geez in America. He laughed at them. Cause guess what? We can. We have the capability. We have the technology. We have the skillset. We have the will to get it done. And look, you can go buy your, you can go buy your, your jeans, let's say, from a place that is literally has slaves. You can, that's what you can do, or you can buy it from America.

• 2:51:33Jocko Willink?

  Where we're on board with freedom. With freedom. That's what's happening.

• 2:51:40Speaker 03

  And they happen to be the best jeans that I own.

• 2:51:43Jocko Willink?

  They're like the P51 of jeans.

• 2:51:46Speaker 03

  I think the next, the next modification, the next modification or the next version of the jeans, I don't even know what they might, we might do, but

• 2:51:54Jocko Willink?

  there's going to be some P51 things coming out. And look, I get it. P38, love it. Corsair, love it. You probably love the Corsair a lot.

• 2:52:04Speaker 03

  I do.

• 2:52:04Jocko Willink?

  Cause you, cause that's Marine Corps. Wait, what's your, is that your favorite bird? World War II?

• 2:52:08Speaker 03

  When I, growing up, Pappy Boynton, Black Sheep, Marine Corps Corsairs winning the war in the Pacific. Yes. Listen, the P51 is the iconic World War II fighter and everybody knows it. That doesn't mean I don't love the Corsair. All the Marines out there know what's up, but listen, the, the P51, that's the machine that won the war in Europe and everybody knows it.

• 2:52:27Jocko Willink?

  Bro, sometimes the, the P51 flies like in the vicinity of my house because they'll do the coastal runs and I can hear them. And then you look up the, the silhouette. Look, the cool thing that's cool, like it would be a little bit difficult to tell a Corsair from the side profile. You know, when it's out at a little distance, you know, but a P51, you see that bottom air scoop. You're like, there it is. Big daddy's coming home.

• 2:52:53Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so if you want the, if you want the P51 Mustang of American made.

• 2:53:00Jocko Willink?

  Gear. Go to originusa.com. Get some American made stuff that's gonna go out in the world. Kick ass. It's gonna be faster, better, stronger. We got Hunt gear coming. You probably saw, did you see me wearing my Hunt gear? Have you seen the pictures of the camo in the, in the, in the environment as they say?

• 2:53:16Speaker 04

  So of course they did. Made a big deal out of it. Made a thing out of it.

• 2:53:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. You made a predator quote.

• 2:53:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I messed it up after I revisited it, but it was good. It passed. It landed.

• 2:53:28Jocko Willink?

  You got there. All right.

• 2:53:29Speaker 04

  It looked good. It looked good though.

• 2:53:31Jocko Willink?

  It does. It's awesome. Jacofuel.com, originusa.com, JacoStore.com. That's what Echo made.

• 2:53:38Speaker 04

  Well, you know, it was a collaborative effort for sure. But yeah, we got some new stuff on there. What do we got? Standard issue. Discipline equals freedom shirts. Standard issue.

• 2:53:48Jocko Willink?

  There's a layer in there. There's layers in there.

• 2:53:50Speaker 04

  Couple of layers in there and they're optional layers. You don't even have to know the layers to appreciate the garment, as it were. Um, so yes, get that. We didn't, this is like the what second announcement on the podcast. We made, we didn't make the official announcement yet. So.

• 2:54:03Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for the, for the standard issue.

• 2:54:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll probably announce it like next week or whatever. But if you're hearing this, boom, get yours before everybody.

• 2:54:10Jocko Willink?

  You're already in there.

• 2:54:11Speaker 04

  Yep. Also short locker, subscription shirt every, every week. There's a good one coming. Two good ones coming.

• 2:54:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. You sold me the draft of one of them. This is the kind of thing people are gonna want that one.

• 2:54:22Speaker 04

  I, I think you're right about that one. I feel that way.

• 2:54:24Speaker 03

  Please tell me there's gonna be something in the future themed on the P51 or something for the shirt locker. Come on.

• 2:54:32Jocko Willink?

  The P51, look, I, like I said, the P51 has always been up there in my head. But I mean, let's face it, it went next level today. It went next level today. And you know what? Reading the book. I mean, you think about that. You think about you're climbing as hard as you can in the aircraft. And you got a Messerschmitt 109. By the way, Germans world renowned for their engineering and their, their efficiency with their building of their aircraft, the whole nine yards. And you're like, guess what? I'm from America.

• 2:55:05Jocko Willink?

  Sorry, bro. I'm from America. I got a P51 Mustang with what, how many? 1100 horsepower, something crazy. And we're gonna go, you're gonna hang with me? Cool. See what you got. Hanging by the propeller. He used that term a couple of times. Hanging by the propeller. You can imagine that thing just trying to grab air and it's just about to run out and that thing's

• 2:55:30Jocko Willink?

  freaking epic, dude.

• 2:55:33Speaker 04

  It's true. Yeah, so yeah, there it is. Shirt locker. Don't forget that one. Sign up for that one. Sign up for that one. JacoStore.com.

• 2:55:39Jocko Willink?

  Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to JacoUnderground.com. People, look, we don't control these platforms. Look, we talk about freedom a lot. There's some people that are offended by that. They've kicked people off of platforms for what they've said. So we don't want to risk that. Everything's been cool so far. We hope it continues to be cool. But if it doesn't, we have JacoUnderground.com. Eight dollars and 18 cents a month. If you want to help us build that and maintain that, check it out. And look, if you can't afford that, it's okay. We still want you in the game, as they say. If you can't afford the eight dollars and 18 cents a month to support No Factor, email [email protected]. We got a YouTube channel. I'm the assistant director for these YouTube videos. Clearly, that's the difference, bro.

• 2:56:25Speaker 04

  And I thank you. I thank you for that.

• 2:56:27Jocko Willink?

  Praise, praise.

• 2:56:30Jocko Willink?

  Psychological Warfare. We got FlipsideCanvas.com. Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Books, once again, To Fly and Fight by Colonel Clarence E. Bud Anderson with Joseph Hamlin as the co-author.

• 2:56:48Jocko Willink?

  Just go to to FlyAndFight.com, order that book up. Check out some of the other books we got. We got Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. That's Jaco Publishing right there.

• 2:57:00Jocko Willink?

  She she she risked her life to read to write that book. So, and it gives you an insight. It's not too often you get the insight of both sides of a war, right? Not not historical, like, hey, this was a hundred years or thirty years ago. This is like, oh, the war is going on right now and we're hearing both sides. So that's what Holly did. So order up that book. Final spin. I wrote a novel. Look, I've written a bunch of books too. So if you want to get some of the books that I've written, get some of the books that I've written. Get About Face. I didn't even write it. I wrote the foreword on it. I'll tell you what. I don't even know. Sometimes I read that book. And I just think I just, my life, every podcast should just be about another section of About Face.

• 2:57:45Jocko Willink?

  There's so many things in there. It's so filled with goodness. That you miss goodness. Right? It's like you walk into a buffet and maybe over in a corner, there's like some, some, uh, some little wagyu beef, like niblets, right? But there's prime rib over there. There's some, you know, some bacon wrapped hot dogs over. This is like a bunch of stuff. You miss the niblets, bro.

• 2:58:08Speaker 04

  Well, no more room on your plate, kind?

• 2:58:09Jocko Willink?

  Either that or just overwhelmed with goodness. Yeah, just goodness everywhere. Maybe they got some milk like in the containers. You're ready to drink. You know, we got ready to drink milk coming. RTD, as they say. I was worried, not worried. You you you you you want to control your expectations, right? You want to be like, look, it's going to be healthy. There's no sugar, like, eh eh, you know, how can that? It's gonna be, it'll be good, but how good? Dude, it's GTG, as we say. It is good to go. EAE.

• 2:58:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, all day.

• 2:58:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, all day. It's delicious. I was comparing it. I would, I wanted it to taste as good as a certain, um, let's say, known, well-known brand of chocolate flavored drink, we'll say. We're there. We're there. That's good. That's good.

• 2:59:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:59:02Jocko Willink?

  It's outstanding. Imagine drinking something that is completely good for you and it tastes delicious.

• 2:59:07Speaker 04

  I don't even have to imagine anymore. Oh, yeah. And and I said this from the beginning where my kids like the, the, you know, there's work, kid, what, they like the regular one, like the best. They think that's like a treat. And I kind of psychologically like trained them to know that that's like the treat or whatever. But yeah, and so I know I go guilt free, you know?

• 2:59:27Jocko Willink?

  There's something that you can do that tastes so, has so much goodness, so much, so much immediate gratification and no downside.

• 2:59:35Speaker 04

  No downside, short and long-term pain.

• 2:59:39Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of a, I, I guess you could look at Jaco Fuel from a strategic perspective and one of the consistent underlying themes of the products is short-term mega gratification taste-wise and long-term total goodness across the board, health-wise.

• 3:00:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:00:01Jocko Willink?

  That's a thing.

• 3:00:02Speaker 04

  It's an anomaly.

• 3:00:03Jocko Willink?

  People, people don't know what's up with that. It's kind of hard to believe in a lot of ways. Like, wait a second. As, as Dave said earlier today, what I should say is, you're welcome.

• 3:00:14Jocko Willink?

  Dave's like, Jaco, you just need to tell people, oh, here's my drink, you're welcome. Oh, here's Molk, you're welcome.

• 3:00:21Speaker 04

  He was not wrong with that.

• 3:00:22Jocko Willink?

  Here's Joint Warfare, take it and you're going to be able to do things you couldn't do two weeks ago, you're welcome.

• 3:00:28Speaker 04

  Oh, but then again, I don't know, Joint Warfare is pills.

• 3:00:30Jocko Willink?

  I know, but you're welcome.

• 3:00:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 3:00:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:00:34Speaker 04

  The short-term, that's like, what do you call, what do you call when it's like normal? You know, something that you don't love, but it's like the standards or whatever.

• 3:00:42Speaker 03

  Shut it down, Echo. Good work.

• 3:00:44Jocko Willink?

  Thanks, man. You got any other cool things I'm saying that you want to kill?

• 3:00:46Speaker 04

  I'm keeping it, what do you call, uh, uh,

• 3:00:49Jocko Willink?

  Real?

• 3:00:49Speaker 04

  Like down-to-earth, like for, you know.

• 3:00:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:52Speaker 04

  You see what I'm saying?

• 3:00:52Speaker 03

  Nice job.

• 3:00:53Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate it. Okay, let's just end this, freaking Echo screwed it up.

• 3:00:57Speaker 04

  Bro, what are you talking about? It's all true.

• 3:00:59Speaker 03

  We were just riding this huge wave and you're like, yeah, but those are pills.

• 3:01:03Jocko Willink?

  Okay, you know what we're gonna need to do? We're gonna make some chewable.

• 3:01:06Speaker 04

  Obviously.

• 3:01:06Jocko Willink?

  Joint Warfare that have a really good like lemon lime sort of zing to it.

• 3:01:11Speaker 04

  Bro, okay, remember back in the day, old school, or more or less, same gender, remember those vitamin C wafer freaking things? Okay, see, now we're talking.

• 3:01:21Jocko Willink?

  This is, those vitamin C wafers is, is how you end up with thirty-five hundred milligrams of vitamin C in your day.

• 3:01:30Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01:31Jocko Willink?

  Colds are running away from you.

• 3:01:34Speaker 04

  And they, they tasted kind of like, like a special candy.

• 3:01:36Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent.

• 3:01:37Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. See, so that's like the, uh, the, the avenue to pursue. As far as pills go, I don't mind pills.

• 3:01:43Jocko Willink?

  You know what?

• 3:01:44Speaker 04

  But let's face it.

• 3:01:45Jocko Willink?

  Let's look into it. As Eddie Bravo would say, look into it. Hey, we also have Echelon Front, our leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. If you need help inside your organization with anything, it's a leadership issue. So go to echelonfront.com for details on that. We also have some events you can come to. Next thing we have, next big thing we have, we have other things that are sold out in the meantime, but Atlanta, October 12th through the 14th. Then that is the next muster. We're going to Hotlanta. Actually in October, hopefully it won't be too hot in Hotlanta. Should be alright. But that's where we're going to be. So if you want to come, check that out.

• 3:02:26Jocko Willink?

  And also we have an online training academy. It's extremeownership.com. And if, look, leadership is not something you get good at in one day. You don't go to one seminar, just like you don't go to a jujitsu seminar and say, okay, cool. I'm ready to take on Gordon Ryan now.

• 3:02:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:02:44Jocko Willink?

  Right? No, it's not gonna happen.

• 3:02:45Speaker 04

  Not really. But you can grab individual things from time to time and roll them right into your game that day.

• 3:02:52Jocko Willink?

  You can do that. And that's, that's one of the things that happened at the muster, but you better have a game and you better keep training. That's what the academy is for. Extremeownership.com, all kinds of good stuff going on in there.

• 3:03:03Jocko Willink?

  On top of that, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. I just talked to Mama Lee yesterday. Yesterday was August 2nd. Mark, her son was killed on August 2nd in 2006. It's been 16 years since he was killed in action. And that whole time, almost, actually no, not even almost, from the word go, Mama Lee looked to help. She helped the platoons. She helped the task unit. She wanted to make sure we were okay. And she hasn't stopped that in any way, shape or form. She's doing a ton of things to help out veterans, to help out Gold Star families.

• 3:03:46Jocko Willink?

  Americas Mighty Warriors.org is her website. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to that website. Also, Heroes and Horses.org. Micah Fink is up there in the wilderness. And he sent me a message the other day and he's got, I'll, I'll get the complete message. But it was basically a person that he's working with, that's like a counselor, a high level counselor, said that he had never seen changes as significant in human beings as he has, as he had seen the, the guys that went through Micah Fink's program, going in the wilderness for 41 days,

• 3:04:29Jocko Willink?

  riding horses, eating meat, cold baths. He's got all kinds of things going on. I want to go too much into it. But if you want to support that, go to Heroes and Horses.org. And if you want to check us out on social media, we're on there. But look, listen, listen, we're not in the algorithm. Well, they're going to try and put us in the algorithm, but we're, we don't want you to get caught in the algorithm. But if you want to check out what's going on with us. Dave is at David R. Burke, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. Again, watch your six, to use the, the flight term. Watch your six, watch your back so you don't get caught in that algorithm. And finally, to all those uniformed personnel out there.

• 3:05:15Jocko Willink?

  Thank you for fighting for our freedom with a special salute to the airmen. And I don't know if this is right, Dave, is airmen in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, all those, what do you call people that work in the air, airdales?

• 3:05:28Jocko Willink?

  They're still Marines, huh? They're Marines. Well, to all of you that own the skies.

• 3:05:36Jocko Willink?

  You all have your own aviation units inside all the service branches. And as much as I love the ground pounders and the doughboys, and you know I do.

• 3:05:45Jocko Willink?

  It's you all up in the sky that cover for us on the ground. So, thank you for your service and sacrifice. And also, thank you to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, Secret Service, all the first responders. Thank you for your service and sacrifice as well and for protecting us here on the home front. And to everyone else out there, there's a part in this book where Bud is talking to his granddaughter's class, and it's 40 years after the war.

• 3:06:22Jocko Willink?

  And one of the students asks something like, "What is the hardest thing about being a pilot?" And without hesitation, he replies, "Losing friends." And we get to read this book, and we get to hear about the life and experiences of Bud Anderson, but as I said earlier, just remember that there are hundreds of thousands of stories that we never heard. Lives that were cut short in the sky, on the ground, and at sea.

• 3:07:01Jocko Willink?

  Brave souls who sacrificed everything for us. Let us never forget those heroes. And let's make sure we are living lives that honor that sacrifice. We owe them at least that much. And until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jaco. Out.