36: Photographer, Kieran Doherty. Images & Experience of Belfast, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Liberia, The Sudan

0:00:00 - Opening 0:14:17 - Belfast 0:38:58 - Iraq War 1:04:30 - Tsunami in Sri Lanka 1:29:04 - Liberia 1:48:08 - Starvation and War in the Sudan 2:02:04 - Wimbledon 2:13:36 - Wooton Bassett 2:33:55 - Closing 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 36 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:13Jocko Willink?

  Behold.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  The world is a sight to behold.

• 0:22Jocko Willink?

  I'm just back from a trip to the wilderness in the Sierra Mountains of California and every time you open your eyes, there's a sight to behold.

• 0:36Jocko Willink?

  An image of beauty.

• 0:39Jocko Willink?

  From a distance, a mountain of solid granite, almost a hundred million years old, juts up from the valley floor.

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  Up close, the roots of a newborn tree, trying to find purchase, maneuvering around and over and through rock until it finds soil.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  And in doing so, draws an infinitely complex picture of life.

• 1:14Jocko Willink?

  Yes, the world is a beautiful place.

• 1:21Jocko Willink?

  But we also know.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  That the world can be a horrible place, a wretched place.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  And in the military, I was usually sent to the bad places.

• 1:40Jocko Willink?

  And in a way, I was sent to those bad places to deal with them.

• 1:48Jocko Willink?

  To keep them away from us. Those of us lucky enough to be born in the right country, with the right form of government, and the right supply of water and food and energy.

• 2:03Jocko Willink?

  And it was our job.

• 2:07Jocko Willink?

  As the lucky ones.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  To keep the horror away.

• 2:16Jocko Willink?

  To shield the eyes of the blessed.

• 2:24Jocko Willink?

  But there are other people

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  whose job it is to open eyes.

• 2:31Jocko Willink?

  To show the world, not just the light, but also the darkness.

• 2:40Jocko Willink?

  And that's the life of a photographer. And like the soldier, he must travel. And like the soldier, he must take risk. And like the soldier, he must face the darkness and live with it.

• 2:57Jocko Willink?

  And like the soldier, to an even greater degree, he must detach from what is happening. He must observe from the outside, be a part of what is happening in front of him, without being a part of what is happening in front of him.

• 3:18Jocko Willink?

  We have a guest on the podcast tonight.

• 3:22Jocko Willink?

  A friend of mine, who's spent his life with a camera in his hand. Capturing light.

• 3:32Jocko Willink?

  And capturing darkness.

• 3:37Jocko Willink?

  Welcome to the podcast, Mr. Kieran Doherty, who in addition to being a friend, an outstanding drummer, a husband, a dad, and last but not least, an award-winning photographer. Welcome to the podcast, Kieran.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  Good to have you on. Detecting a little accent there, you're from...

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Uh, it's an English accent you can detect, yeah. Just a little on that.

• 4:08Jocko Willink?

  So, you're from England. And how did this whole business start? How did you end up start taking pictures?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  How did I start taking pictures? Um... My dad was a good photographer. Always had a camera. And... I think I got to my seventeenth birthday and he gave his cameras to my sister. Now, I had no interest in the cameras at the time, but I suddenly had an interest when I found he gave them to my sister. So I demanded that I have them. I had to do some sort of swap, but I got the cameras. Um, but I didn't really use them.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  I really wanted to be an artist. I wanted to paint, but I wasn't good enough in my own eyes. I was okay, but not good enough. So the camera became a tool for me to create and express myself. And I ended up, I did a degree course after school in sports science. And then I went on to do. Oops. Yeah.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Hey, listen, it was a great course. I had three years playing tennis and football. I mean, come on, it was a great course. So, um, I wasn't, I, I wasn't really good enough to get onto an art foundation course. So I did the sports course and then I wanted to concentrate on doing a course in photography. So my mum found a course for me and there was only one course in the country and it only took twelve people.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  And normally you had to apply five or six times to get on. And so I applied for the course. I went for an interview and I showed a portfolio of appalling black and white pictures that I'd shot. I mean, really appalling. I'd gone to a couple of music festivals and I had pictures of dribbling babies in prams. I mean, this is what I took to my interview. But they put me on the reserve list, so I was number thirteen. And it meant that I wasn't going to get on the course because they were only taking twelve. So my mum, every day for about six months, rang the head tutor and said, "Come on, put him on the course."

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Come on, put him on the course. And after six months, he just thought, I have to stop this woman calling me every day. Okay, okay. And he put me on his number thirteen. Nice. On the course. And I did the course, um, and I ended up spending most of my weekends traveling at home, down to an agency at home where I, you were really working. So the course was teaching you how to do stuff and, but the job that I wanted to do, you can't learn it in a classroom, really. It's a bit of common sense and just reacting to the environment around you. So I used to spend my weekends traveling home and working for a real agency and they

• 7:06Speaker 02

  would just send me out on stuff and I would be shooting pictures, developing transparencies, black and whites, printing, putting it on wire drums, sending it into the papers, you know, in the real world, and that's what I do in my weekends and then I go back to the course. And I just felt the course was really dragging for me. Um, but I finished it and the route is you join a regional newspaper and then you sort of cut your teeth in the industry, then you go to maybe a big provincial paper and then you head down to maybe London for a work on a national. And then maybe after the national, you might consider working on an agency. Well, I didn't have time for any of that, so I just went straight down to London out of college.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Um, and tried to, try, yeah, tried to get a job, but I ended up, what you end up doing is you go around and you just spec pictures into newspapers. So you find a job, you shoot it. You ring them up and you say, I have this great picture and you need to, you really should have it. And they would say, okay, bring it in and you would take it in and they go, thanks, but we had our own photographer there and blah, blah. So I did this for two or three years, not really getting anywhere and, uh, I ended up. I learnt a few tricks of the trade, which is you turn up to a news event that's happening and you shoot the pictures and then you ring the desk, the wire desk, wherever it is you

• 8:35Speaker 02

  wanna sell the picture to and you say, listen, very few people were here and this is a big story and really you can't afford not to take this from me because your opposition was here. And I think you really should see this picture. So they'd say, come in. And I went in once and I'd shot this picture of this tank that appeared outside the High Court in London. And coming out of this tank was a twenty foot Marlin. It was just the most ridiculous thing. And it was some guy protesting about a divorce he was going through. So he just loaded up the tank? Yeah, just headed out the court. Sludjet. Yep. And I drove, I was driving past with a friend and I thought I'd better shoot

• 9:18Speaker 02

  that picture. And I shot that picture and I rang up and I said, listen, Associated Press were here, Reuters, you really should take this picture of me. And I went in and it was such a ridiculous looking image that they said, great, we'll take it. And so they just snip the negatives, because it was film in those days. They take three negatives, the one in the middle they wanna piss, the one they scan. And that was seventy five pounds in my pocket. And I just thought, right, I need to keep doing this. And I said, so if I come in here with a picture, is it, do you give me seventy five pounds every time I come in? They said, well, every picture we take, we'll pay you seventy five pounds. So of course I just kept ringing them and kept ringing them and kept ringing them. And eventually they cottoned on to the amount of seventy five pounds they were giving me

• 10:01Speaker 02

  in a day. And they said, okay, listen, we'll put you on shift. So we will pay you a hundred pounds and you will work five shifts. We will stop paying you five times seventy five every time you come in. And that's how it started. And so it's a bit of luck and a bit of determination. And yeah, that's how, that's how I got into it. And if I'm totally honest, I really didn't know that that sort of job existed.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  I'd seen magazines by photographers like Don McCullon, who used to shoot the troubles in Northern Ireland in the early days, and I used to see his spreads on the Sunday Times, but it never dawned on, I used to look at the images, was mesmerized by these black and white images, but never put two and two together and worked out, well, sorry, so this is obviously a job and somebody does this and he's paid to do this. And so, yeah, it sort of dawned on me, this is an existence that I really quite like because I don't have to wear a suit, I can wear jeans and a T-shirt and I can just shoot and create and I can earn a living. And that's really how it started.

• 11:10Jocko Willink?

  And then you ended up staying at Reuters for, what, ten years?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Uh, no, from nineteen ninety-three to two thousand and eight. So I was freelance until two thousand and then in two thousand, um, when, which was really fortuitous because my first daughter was born, they made me staff, so there was the security of the job there. And then I resigned in two thousand and eight, so I'd sort of done my stint as staff and I decided that I wanted to move on to other things. Um, but yeah, it was a bumpy road, but it was, and I couldn't have asked for a better grounding into photojournalism than working for a wire agency like Reuters, because you just got to cover everything, from spot news, from something that was happening in Downing

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Street, to covering Wimbledon, to covering World Cups, Olympic Games, war zones, um, you name it, there was nothing a wire agency photographer didn't cover. And so, you know, literally, you could, you could come off from shooting a Champions League football match and the next day you could be in Afghanistan, shooting a, shooting a news story, that's, that's how it worked. And that's incredibly intoxicating, especially when you're a young guy, you know. I mean, I didn't get to travel immediately, obviously I had to cut my teeth and they had to trust that they could send me away, and I must admit it took...

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Took a couple of, couple of years. Um, and in fact, my first assignment by my line manager, he just said to me one Friday night, I need to go to Belfast for July the 12th for the troubles. And I said, oh yeah, I can't. And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, I'm, I've got a gig tonight. I'm playing in London and there are 13 other people in the band. And if I get on a plane, they're not going to have a drummer. Wrong answer. So.

• 13:07Jocko Willink?

  So you went to Belfast?

• 13:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you didn't? You held the gig?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  I took the gig.

• 13:12Jocko Willink?

  Bros before.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Because I didn't realize, I was too naive to realize the implications of why, why you, you know, I, sorry, this guy wants to work for Reuters and I'm going to send him to Belfast to cover the, the troubles and he wants to play drums in a club.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  So I learnt that lesson pretty quick.

• 13:33Jocko Willink?

  How long did it take to get another offer to travel like that?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Um, I think the Belfast offer was 95 and then I ended up travelling, literally 98.

• 13:43Jocko Willink?

  So they put you on the bench for three years?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, totally. But when I did get to go, he waited till I'd been married a month and then said to me, I need you to go away for four months. And I, I'm just, I'm just married, you know, I've been married for a month and you want me to go. And it was the Caribbean, believe it or not, to photograph cricket, England against the West Indies. So it wasn't that tough a gig. And I ended up being able to take my wife with me as well. So, um.

• 14:13Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, you can't complain about that at all?

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 14:16Jocko Willink?

  At all?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  At all. We had a great time. Yeah.

• 14:19Jocko Willink?

  So tell me about like, a little bit about the, the times where you went to Belfast and what that was like for the first time where you're going, okay. Do you feel that tension for the first time? You feel kind of the presence of violence around you?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  I, I was a nervous wreck. And bearing in mind that I had lived in Belfast. So, um, I had lived in there during the, at the start of the troubles and, uh, for maybe five or six years of my life, I was there, although I never experienced any of the troubles. It was very protected from. But um yeah, I mean, you know, I went back and I was petrified. I thought, what, where do I go? What, where, where can I not go? And I was very conscious of my name, very Catholic name. And there are certain areas of Belfast.

• 15:02Jocko Willink?

  For those of you don't know, Kieran's name is, is the same name as one of the, the heroes of the IRA.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  IRA, yeah.

• 15:10Jocko Willink?

  And who actually died in prison from a, from a hunger strike. So that, that's your name. So there's no.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  That's my name.

• 15:17Jocko Willink?

  There's no hiding that one.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And, and of course, just to clarify, I was not named after him, but uh just coincidence. But there are murals all over Belfast with Kieran Doherty. So there are certain areas of Belfast I could walk into very easily. Um, and there are certain areas of Belfast that I didn't really want to be caught with my press card in my pocket. So um, so yeah, it was, yeah, I was, I was petrified, you know? There's no, there's no other way to describe it.

• 15:47Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and did you start thinking to yourself, well, maybe this isn't the job for me? Or did you, were you thinking to yourself, I'm scared, but this is awesome?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 15:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's kind of what I figured. Cause yeah, that's, that's sort of the typical, you know, when I talk to obviously all, all my friends in the military. That's everyone's feeling, you know? Hey, I was scared, but that was awesome. That's what everybody wants to do. And I mean, as a photographer, when you're in there and there's the potential to have those shots, those moments um of, of human existence that only happened at that place at that time. You've got that opportunity that.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you're waiting. The, the worst thing is you get over there and there's nothing happening. Because that's what happens that, that, you know, leading up to July the 12th and then maybe the pockets of violence and that you, that happened usually in the evenings after the pubs closed.

• 16:40Jocko Willink?

  Imagine that.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, yeah, it, it, and the, and the one thing it did, it made the flames really stand out when they did throw those petrol bombs, you know? But what you were doing was you, you'd be doing a lot of driving around and there would be nothing. And you'd go back to your hotel, you think, okay. What am I gonna file today? You know, I'm over here, I'm being paid to be here, I need to be filing some imagery just to sort of justify the air flight out here and whatnot. So. And and and it would be really tough. And so those were the toughest moments because you were having to find images that sort of told the story. But they weren't really the reason why you were there. You were sent there because they were expecting trouble.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  And then you'd be sitting in the bar at night and somebody would say, right, this is happening on the Falls Road. And you'd go, great. And we'd just go straight out there. And if you had something physical happening in front of you, it's almost as if you needed to get one under your belt to calm down. Cause then you were able to say, okay, I've produced something from here that's noteworthy and newsworthy.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  And sometimes you could go on those trips and there'd be nothing for a week and you'd be sitting in your hotel and there'd be absolutely nothing in your hotel and there'd be nothing for a week. And that that was the worst. But as soon as something did happen, it was then a catalyst for maybe something else to happen. And if there was something happening that night, there was always the clear up the next morning. So that was then the catalyst for actually what would maybe happen during the week. And one thing would lead to another. And you'd end up beginning to feel a little bit more confident. And, you know, I was just watching the guys that were a lot older than me and far more experienced. And I just sort of hung around with those guys, sort of, you know, just trying to work out, what do you do?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  And that's how you learn. You just watch how these other photographers are doing it. And you just think, okay, well, I'll remember that next time. And because these guys came in and they just looked immensely cool and, you know, they sort of knew what they were doing. And also to just.

• 18:48Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever have a time period where you thought you were more badass than you were? Or were you always pretty humble about, hey, you know what, these guys, they they know more than me. I'm just gonna watch them and learn?

• 18:59Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you obviously thought you were pretty badass when you're like, you know what? I'm not going for the regional paper. I'm going straight to London.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:04Jocko Willink?

  Give me a job.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're right, but I honestly, I don't know where that came from. I just thought I'd lost enough time. I think I can't hang around doing, you know, I mean, no, and there were no jobs going anyway at the end of the course. So I just thought, well, you know, so yeah, badass me, probably not. I mean, I'm still, if I'm, I'm not really want to work with other photographers now, but when you're working in Fleet Street and you're working for a news agency, you can't help but be in a pack and you're always working with other photographers. And there are, as time goes by, there are sort of fewer photographers that you begin to sort of look to. You can sort of work out which are the ones that are doing something similar to the way you want to be doing it.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  And there are others that do their own thing because all photographers are completely different. You can have 10 photographers standing next to each other and they can all shoot the same picture, but every single image will be completely different because each photographer's decided there's a different part of what's happening in front of him that he wants to concentrate on. So, and that's what I found, you know, was happening a lot, especially if you're sent down to Downing Street to do the Prime Minister. I mean, the Prime Minister would just walk, the door would open and the Prime Minister would walk out of the door and get into the car and drive off.

• 20:15Jocko Willink?

  You'd take 47 pictures.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the guy next to you could be a, could be a, a trainee. And he will stand there and he'll shoot the same imagery with the same cameras and the same lens. And that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a guy who's been doing it 20 years and a trainee. Because that's a very sort of orchestrated theatrical moment, you know, and that's, I didn't, I wasn't really interested in that sort of stuff. I was interested in the stuff that was really spontaneous, sporadic, and it happened and you had to be ready for it. And you had to react to it. And that's what I like to do, react to what was happening.

• 20:49Jocko Willink?

  Did, did you feel like going to Ireland?

• 20:54Jocko Willink?

  In the, in the late nineties and, and early two thousand, did you feel that that prepared you at all for, for going to Iraq, for going to the other places that you went to in the world? Was it a good preparatory step?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And you know what? To be totally honest, I've never even thought about that. That thought has never crossed my mind until you just said it. Did you think that prepared me? And I thought, actually, do you know what? Yeah, of course it did. But it's funny, when you're working, you don't, you don't think about things like that. You, you don't, I mean, if I'd kept a diary, which I'd never done. In fact, I did when I was in Sri Lanka, but if I was, if I'd kept a diary, I maybe would have had a little bit more self-awareness of my progression through my career. But when you're, you know, your priorities are on earning money, you know, and, and being able to pay the rent, and am I gonna get work next week?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Or is that other guy who's come in, who looks quite good, is he gonna start getting my shifts? You know, and so you're constantly on your toes and you're not thinking. And you think, if I get the Northern Ireland gig, I got that and he didn't. That's enough. You know, and that's how you were thinking. You weren't really, I had no structure to my career whatsoever. And I think maybe because the whole thing was so new to me and I just couldn't get my head around the fact that I was actually making a living as a photographer.

• 22:20Jocko Willink?

  And that's really actually pretty similar to what I experienced on my first deployment to Iraq, where never mind, never mind anything, we were happy to be out doing operations. Like, we were gonna go do real operations? Man, we were, what, the strategy, the, the danger, the, the whatever. It was like, hey, we are here, we are doing operations to catch bad guys. Awesome. That was our focus. So it sounds like you and the mindset, that similar mindset. And it didn't, you know, it took me, you know, a couple of months of being in Iraq and getting that out of my system before I was like, okay, so let's, let's take a look at what we're actually doing.

• 23:03Jocko Willink?

  Here and how we're trying to affect the battle space because I was just too young and inexperienced. And I just need to get some experience under my belt. So, sounds like, and really, sounds like Ireland kind of prepares you for that, but I also look at. Okay, so, so let's just go straight then, do you get the call, did you know you were gonna get the call to go to Iraq? Was that, was it a lottery? How do they, did they just say, hey, we want to get you down there? How did that work?

• 23:31Speaker 02

  The, the way it works at Reuters was they, um, no photographer was ever forced to go to a hostile environment. So it wasn't part of your remit that if you work for Reuters, you must go to a hostile environment. They were never like that. Um, they, you know, and, and you can see why what they.

• 23:48Jocko Willink?

  Is it wrong for me to picture every photographer? Because I, I put my, I put my personality over a guy with a camera. And so I think like every guy with a camera is going, I want to go to the war zone tomorrow. Is that not true?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  No, that's, yeah, that's not true.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  There are a lot of guys that don't want to go anywhere near a hostile environment.

• 24:08Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:09Jocko Willink?

  See, that's, that's important for me to know these things because I would, in my mind, everyone's just thinking, I'm gonna go get after it. Oh, I got a camera, there's a war going on, let's go make it happen.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that was then, that was, yeah, 2003. I, I would say maybe it's slightly changed now. There are a lot more photographers, young photographers going to war zones. But then, no, it was, I, I think if I remember rightly, they, they, because the buildup to the war was so, you know.

• 24:37Jocko Willink?

  Prolonged.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we knew it was gonna happen. And immediately there were those guys that wanted to, there was one that embedded with the artillery in Kuwait. So he had a month wait in Kuwait and then just went with the artillery. There were the, Reuters had very seasoned photographers, very experienced in those sort of environments that would then embed with Americans or Brits. And those were the guys that were being shot at on a daily basis. But extremely hard to produce imagery from those situations. Um, and I remember I had a very good friend of mine. Said to me who did a lot of that stuff, he said, Kieran, the thing about going and embedding

• 25:18Speaker 02

  with a soldier is that um you can get in the way and the last thing you want is to compromise a unit, but they set these units up and they said, yep, the media has to come in and, you know, show us what's happening. But most of the time, he said, you you have your head down and your hand in the air and you're just blindly shooting and hoping. And he said invariably you get nothing. You know, I mean, that's not always the case, but he said majority of the time and you have to do it a lot before your sort of hit rate, you know, gets um gets moved up. And and if you're embedded, I think you struggle. If you go unilaterally, which is the really unsafe way to do it. So you're on your own. You're on your own. Yeah. You're just gonna show up there and take pictures.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  There you've got the chance of getting something. And again, it's being in the right place at the right time. So they'd said they had certain guys in place that stuck their hands up straight away. Yep, I'm doing that. That's me. I'll be embedded there. Um, and I'll do this and I'll do that. And we spent a month looking at the stuff that was coming out. And it was invariably pictures of soldiers within sandstorms and stuff like that. You there was there was no action, you know, it was, I wouldn't say that was true from all of them, but the majority of the case, it was very difficult to produce imagery when you're embedded. Um, I certainly wasn't interested in being a unilateral that time um at all. But I was really interested in going and doing what happens after the war.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  So what interests me is the people afterwards. I always tend to think that people go in and shoot what's happening and that moves on and then the photographers move on with them. And I wanted to just sort of go in in that backdraft and photograph what was happening life wise after, you know, soldiers had been in there. And and that's exactly what I said. I said, I'd be happy to go to Baghdad, you know, pretty much almost once it's secure. It didn't quite work out that way. I think we went a little, we went a little bit earlier. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. And it never is as secure as you think. And I remember, I think I got the the day after the um, the statue of Saddam was pulled down. Right. Um, and it was um.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  It was a just, it was a moment of euphoria for Baghdad and I just thought, hey, you know what, this isn't, I mean, my first trip to Belfast was worse than this. This is okay, but we'd had, but we turned up and had the, faced with the problem of one of our cameramen had just been killed under friendly fire. And that had taken a huge hit on Reuters and that really hit home that actually this is really not a safe place, you know, because there's still an awful lot going on and there's still an awful lot of misunderstanding and, and so that was a real leveler when we got out there.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  And, and staying in the Palestine Hotel was incredibly exciting because it was just, there were just photographers and journalists and just buzzing around everywhere and, you know, you would think, okay, I'm here now, so what am I gonna do? And it was almost as if I had to get out there and start shooting and I didn't care what it was that I started shooting, I just, I'm here, now I need to start shooting something.

• 28:41Jocko Willink?

  So that is the feeling that I had in my first trip to Iraq, like, let's go, new mission.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so, and, and I said to them, I said to my, the, the chief photographer there, I said, Jack, what do you want me to do? He said, I don't know, walk out into the square and see what's happening. So I did and I walked out into the square and there were kids playing around in the, in the, in the main square, in the fountain.

• 29:02Jocko Willink?

  Because you kind of, we were talking about this earlier today, but you, and you just said the word euphoric, right? And a lot of people, because the, the war in Iraq actually is still going on right now, but it's really easy to forget the initial, I don't know, four or five weeks after it started when we had crushed, you know, Saddam's regime and now the people were waving American flags. The Iraqi people were waving American flags, they were hugging, they were, they were happy and, and it's really easy to forget that because things turned so bad.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Really?

• 29:37Jocko Willink?

  You know, within, within a couple of months, they had turned bad and then they went down from there. But you were just like, oh, you know what, I'm gonna go out in the outside the Palestine Hotel, which is, which is by the way, across the river from the green zone. But it still was a very well protected, you know, fairly well protected hotel that a lot of Westerners stayed in. And you just said, oh, I'm gonna walk outside and check it out. No security?

• 30:02Speaker 02

  No security.

• 30:03Jocko Willink?

  Just getting after it.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, just what can I shoot? And yeah, and I, and I, I found this picture of this kid and I, I still have that picture on my website. But it's a little kid and he just pulls his head out of the water and he's swimming in this fountain and you wouldn't believe what was in the fountain. I couldn't believe these kids were swimming in it, but he just sort of popped his head out and stood there and flexed his muscles. And it was just a young nine, 10 year old guy just flexing his muscles and the light was fantastic. And it just made such a beautiful image. I mean, it really did. And, and I thought, okay. I've just got here and I've shot a really nice picture and I felt really proud of myself. And I thought, okay, and I just walked that back in. And of course, there was mayhem happening.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  And what Reuters were actually doing was in there, in the process of moving out of the Palestine Hotel to a house that they'd rented because we were then becoming quite a big outfit. And the Palestine Hotel was never gonna house it. Uh, the amount of staff that we had, so we were moving out to a big house, just a couple of blocks away. But again, it was like Belfast. I had got something under my belt and I felt pretty good about it. And I thought, okay, right, let's bring it on. Let's see how many places I can get to, how many stories I can shoot, um, every day. And I was, I, I didn't wanna stop shooting. I just, I wanted to get up at seven in the morning and go and work with the light.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  And then, middle of the day was never really a good time to shoot because the light was dreadful. Um, and then I'd wait for the sort of late afternoon in the golden hour. Uh, which became tricky because we were never really allowed to be out at dark. Um, so I just wanted to shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. And of course, it didn't quite work out that way because... There are certain responsibilities on a photographer whose first language is English. When you go into a place like Baghdad where the the captioning on images is extremely important. And it's extremely important that the captioning is correct, the information is correct, it's valid, verified, and it has no spelling mistakes.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  And of course, being the only photographer in there that first language is English, I ended up.

• 32:20Jocko Willink?

  Where are most of the photographers from?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Well, we had, I mean, all over Europe. We had different, you know, and there was maybe only four, four of us in there at a time, three or four of us in there at a time.

• 32:32Jocko Willink?

  So you got a French guy, a German guy.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, Croatian, yeah, absolutely, you know, and we were all looking for, you know, we're all. We're all looking for those great pictures. So, you know, you began to wonder, okay, how's this going to be divided up every day? Who's going to get what, you know, am I going to?

• 32:50Jocko Willink?

  Are you looking for pictures at this point that are good pictures that you want to see? Or are you looking for pictures that are going to be news, are going to be front page newspaper? Which one of those two, or is it both?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Primarily, if I'm completely honest.

• 33:03Jocko Willink?

  Because, because a picture of, like, when you describe that picture of a kid pulling his hat out of this dirty water. He's 10 years old and he's flexing. That's just an awesome image, right? And I'm sure that's a great picture. That picture is not going on the front page of newspapers, though, is it?

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely not.

• 33:18Jocko Willink?

  But you don't, but that's your focus is I want to get good pictures that are capturing the images of what you're seeing around you. As opposed to, hey, I just want this front page picture.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I was never really one for looking for publications. I was always shooting for me. I mean, somebody once asked me in an interview, who's your biggest audience? I said, well, me, because that's who I'm shooting for.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  So I'm not looking to please. Editors or whatever. Obviously, it helps if they're pleased with what you've done, yeah. But I was primarily looking to satisfy myself and I've never, that's never changed with me. And so, yeah, I totally understand that, you know, when you're in a situation, I say that, but obviously we'll get on to something later that showed I completely didn't understand. But I, I, I understand when there's the front page and I understand the impacts. I understand what they mean to the company totally. And don't get me wrong. When I was getting front pages, it was a great feeling, you know, it sort of verified your, justified the fact that you were out there and you were doing it.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  But, you know, there are so many other agencies out there and so many other photographers out there. You have to get really lucky. You just have to get that one image that separates it from everyone else. And I knew how, you know how difficult that is. So I, I never concerned myself with looking for that image. I sort of began to think, listen, if I think the image is strong,

• 34:46Speaker 02

  you have a bit of confidence in your own ability to judge whether or not an image is strong or not and whether or not it has a good chance of making. So if you're not, if, if, you know, if, if it say, listen, it's features today, just go out and find something that, you know, every picture you shoot is not going to tell the story of what's happening in Iraq. But for me, that picture of that boy, that day, three days after whatever Baghdad had been liberated. I showed a kid playing in the water and looking, feeling happy. And I thought, yeah, do you know what? That's what's happening. That whatever's happening in Baghdad now is being, that child is a conduit for it at the moment. Yeah.

• 35:25Jocko Willink?

  Captures the emotion and the spirit of what's going on around you.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  And that's, that's, that's a good overall, I think, attitude to have with everyone. And you hear this all the time, right? People say, oh, you know, do what you're, go with your heart. It's basically what you're saying.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 35:40Jocko Willink?

  And, and I'm in agreement with you. I mean, and again, we've talked about this before, even just with what we're doing here. This is based on what we want to do. And, and our toughest audience or our most important audience is like, yeah. Us, you know, what do we want to do? What can we? How do we feel about making this? And how does it feel to record it? And how does it feel when I put the headphones on and listen to it? Is it what I want to hear? Cause that's, you know, that's, so I'm, I'm doing it and we're doing it more for the value of itself rather than, I mean, there's no doubt that we're not saying, hey, everybody listen to this, you know, cause we, we know that this isn't for everybody.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:18Jocko Willink?

  And we're okay with that. And I think that's a good attitude to have.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  That's usually how it turns out the best anyway, because

• 36:28Speaker 01

  you know what you like and you know what's gonna make what you like good or look good in your case. If you try to estimate what everyone else likes, all you have is this like

• 36:39Jocko Willink?

  Gray, brownish, water blush.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're, you're not talking about just one other individual that you know really good. You're talking about a bunch of people. So a lot of times people, and it turns out real obvious when they're trying to please other people with what they're doing. And, and it goes for so many things, just like how you're saying.

• 36:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  So, you know, they're trying to basically play for the cheap seats. They're trying, you know, they're trying to, we talk about this where the goal should be doing a good job, doing the best that you can do. And we talk about it with jujitsu, with everything, that the belt isn't the goal, the front page. That's not the goal. The goal is to do the best that you can do for, for your work, you know?

• 37:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  And like I said, if, if you, if you don't do it that way, man, it just, you can smell it from a mile, uh, from a mile away, man.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know that there are any, apart from, e- e- even, even the image that did make all the fronts while I was in Iraq. Um, I don't think in my career, there's one image that's made a front page that I would keep and put in a portfolio of images. So that just shows you that the stuff that I really like isn't, is really the stuff that most people don't see. And it's, you know, people will say, oh, you shot that picture? Yeah. And I really like that picture. Um, and I have really weird reasons for really liking that picture, but that, and that's the stuff that I really enjoy doing is most people never see that stuff, you know, and they're surprised when they do see it.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  But I, there's, I don't think there is a picture that I would take from a front page that I've had, um, that I would want to keep and show.

• 38:11Jocko Willink?

  And that's one thing I know from knowing you and things you've told me, there's times where you're looking at a picture and you're saying, there's a tragedy here. This is a person's life being destroyed. I'm not going to sell this picture, I'm not going to publish this picture, I'm gonna, I'm gonna delete this picture. You know, you, you have your own personal standards, which I have the utmost respect for, that you're not gonna, I mean, there's so many people, and especially now with social media and everyone's, everyone's a photographer now, because everyone has an iPhone, and people will just shoot, I mean, there's whole websites that are dedicated to debasing people, right? You know, and, and the fact that you're a professional, you, you've drawn, you drew

• 38:53Jocko Willink?

  that line a long time ago, is very respectable.

• 39:00Jocko Willink?

  So you've got some kids and you've got some nice things about the euphoria of Iraq as it kicks off, they're liberated and there's also some, some horror mixed in there as well.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, just, and, and it always comes when you least expect it. Um, and we, we just moved into this new house in Baghdad and everything was set up and all the comms were set up and, um, I don't know, it was about five o'clock in the afternoon and a call came in and the call just said, a photographer and a, uh, TV guy need to get to this address in Baghdad. And I was sitting there and Jack said, Kieran, you know, off you go, um, and take, um, take it, obviously take a vest and a hat, we always had to travel with those, and we traveled

• 40:00Speaker 02

  in armored vehicles everywhere. So, um, we, we went to this address and I sort of, I, I got out onto the pavement and I was looking around and I, I, we had no idea, we had no idea why we'd been called. And somebody came running up to me as soon as they saw the cameras and they said, are you the photographer from Reuters? And I said, yeah. And they said, okay, um, wait here. And they went to get a, a, a gentleman and he came out and he was, um, I couldn't understand what he was saying and there was somebody there sort of translating. And it soon came to pass that his son had just been killed from, he'd found an I A D and he'd just been,

• 40:42Speaker 02

  um, it had just blown up while he was, he and his friends were playing with it. And it was the young, it was a kid that was killed, his son. And, um, the father just had said something to the interpreter and the interpreter said, listen, can you wait? He'll be back. And he came back with a, um, a plastic bag and I wasn't, uh, even up, up until that moment, I just wasn't aware of what was, what was going on. Um, but I think the TV cameraman had sort of, uh, grasped the situation a little bit quicker than me. And he started to, uh, produce body parts from the bag.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  That was, and you know, um, uh, they were unrecognizable as body parts, but they were coming out of this bag and, and the interpreter saying, he needs you to photograph this because he wants you to show the rest of the world that his son was killed playing with an I A D and he doesn't want his son's death to be in vain and he can't start grieving until you take these pictures.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  And so I think I took six or seven pictures. Um, and he ended up putting the plastic bag back down on the floor. And he just said, thank you. And it was just shukran and he just, and he walked in and the interpreter said, now he can start to grieve. And it was then that I noticed that the, um, the, the, the TV, uh, journalist, the cameraman was, he was Iraqi and he just completely, um, collapsed. Um, I remember having to get him back into the car because what had he just witnessed was just so shocking. And I was just numb going all the way back to.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  The the office. Because, you know, I I I just hadn't anticipated anything like that happening. And it had just come out of the blue. And I understood why. I could understand the father's sentiments. I totally got what he was trying to do. But at the same time, I totally understood that this, you know, those images weren't couldn't go on the wire. They were just so utterly horrific and graphic. And I remember as I was shooting it, I just I wasn't even looking. So I had my I remember my eye was to the camera, but I wasn't even looking at what was, you know.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  So if you were to apart from the first moment, if you were to say to me, you know, what I couldn't tell you. I just knew that it was just coming out and being held up and being put back. I couldn't even bring myself to look. And then I sort of got back and I the first thing I did was just delete. And I never actually said to my bosses there that I'd deleted those images. I just thought I am not putting those images on the wire. I sort of took an executive decision there and there at that time. I didn't mention anything to anyone else there. And the only thing I had was a that I kept was just a portrait of the father. So we could move the portrait of the father and talk about the story.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Um, and I think I then spoke to my dad that night. And I sort of, you know, took the big answer phone and just rang him. And I just told him what had just happened. And we were sitting in the garden and then that um that night. Um Reuters wanted to give the staff a break. And so they'd organized a barbecue and there was, um, you know, there was going to be some, there was, I think, a belly dancer turned up. And it was an amazing night because all the Iraqis that had not been able to party in forty years were all sitting on the roofs of their houses surrounding the house that we were on.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  And they were just listening to the music and it was an incredible thing to see. But you'd gone from something that happened like that at five o'clock to something, a barbecue that was happening at seven P M. And those moments were incredibly difficult to sort of disseminate and work out what was going on because. And of course, it was something I kept to myself apart from the, I think maybe they found out, maybe the T V journalist had said something, but I just didn't want to speak to anyone. Remotely connected to the office about what had just happened, you know.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  And I don't, and I think to be honest, they would have completely agreed that this is not imagery that we can put out, you know, it serves no purpose and it's just, you know. Just not imagery that that they would move. So, um, so yeah, there was. There was plenty of that in Iraq and you sort of had to just. Take it in your stride because the next day. You'd be up and there'd be the next story and you'd sort of move on to that, but that would still be in the back of your mind, you know, and then, you know, quite honestly, soon enough, you know. If if you're busy and you're doing a lot of stuff, when you're sitting around and not doing anything, that's when you really begin to think about stuff.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  But if you're busy and you're out and you're traveling, so a week after that, I would, I was taking anything and he was, even if I was being, you know. Sent out and stuff that I thought, oh, why, why am I being sent to do this, you know, um. I didn't mind, I just thought I'll take it.

• 46:21Jocko Willink?

  It's better than sitting around and.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, just.

• 46:23Jocko Willink?

  With your own thoughts.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, you know.

• 46:27Jocko Willink?

  And, um, and it's also weird and it's hard for people that haven't been in a war zone before to understand how things like what you're talking about this. Obviously, everyone anticipates or expects that there's the horror of war, but they don't understand the barbecue part. Like, like, that's a hard thing for people to understand that.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 46:45Jocko Willink?

  You can be, what, just three months into this war and we've got the Reuters staff having a staff party. I mean, okay, people in America know what a little staff office party is. Hey, guys, we're gonna go, we're gonna order some pizzas. They do that. They do that in these war zones and, and the military does it. The, the, I mean, I, I've talked about it a bunch. I mean, these big bases that we had eventually built had Subway sandwiches. The, the company Subway and the company Burger King and the company Starbucks were on these bases. So if you wanted to have a little Subway party for your boys, you could do that. Fire up the grill, have, you know? So it's really a hard dichotomy for people to understand that inside the, the protected areas,

• 47:28Jocko Willink?

  we carve out little chunks of America, little chunks of freedom. Did you take any pictures of the Iraqis looking at the party?

• 47:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did.

• 47:36Jocko Willink?

  That must be pretty, that must have been awesome.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  But you know what? They weren't great pictures because, um, it was so dark. Um, and it was, I, I took a few and I saw, and, and of course there are other photographers there that were taking stuff as well, you know? Um, so, yeah, I did. And I, I've always thought about that. I remember those pictures, but they didn't, we didn't, they weren't good enough. I just, I just didn't shoot it well enough, you know? I just didn't have the right lens and I just, yeah. And, uh, and I think that was the sort of a, you know, um, that might've been as a result of what had happened earlier, but, um, yeah, and I have thought about that. I have thought about those and, and,

• 48:18Speaker 02

  and that, that it remains with me as a memory that I saw, cause I think, you know, it's like any of you concentrate so hard on taking pictures of stuff, you never actually take anything in. But that was a moment that I really wanted to take in because it was just incredible to see these people out on their roofs just enjoying the music and not being afraid. And, you know, somebody said to me, this has not happened in 40 years. And I just thought that was just incredible.

• 48:46Jocko Willink?

  And those are the people that I, I talk about. You know, I was, I always end up trying to explain to people that there's, that the, the normal citizen in Iraq is a normal person that wants to have a job and raise their kids and have a house. And that's what they want to do. And it's really hard. I mean, America does a terrible job of showing that. I mean, American media does a terrible job of showing. What that is, you know, all you see is the crazies, all you see is the extremists. But that's a great example of people going, hey, you know what, we've been oppressed for forty years, they're listening to music, this is awesome, let's, let's watch them and, and and those are the people that wanted to take Iraq in the right direction.

• 49:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you did end up getting some pretty important, maybe not important, well, maybe important, but you ended up with some, some pictures that did end up on the, on the front pages of.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. It was, um, coming off the back of another amazing story where I'd been to Najaf to follow, follow a cleric who was coming back, who'd been exiled forty years before, uh, by Saddam, and, uh, he was coming back to Najaf and I'd spent two or three days down there waiting for him and, uh, that whole scenario of him turning up with thousands of followers and being pushed into the mosque as I'm trying to photograph him and, you know, finding myself in the middle of a mosque as a Westerner, just thinking, you know, how did I get in here, it was just, you know, and, and, and that's what happens when you stand in front

• 50:24Speaker 02

  of the door and wait for the guy to turn up, you're just gonna get taken in with him. So, um, and I'd done that and I'd really enjoyed that job and, and the sort of anticipation of waiting for this guy to turn up and it was an incredible moment, um, and we would, I'd left and, and of course, in those days when I'd walked from the mosque in Najaf back to the hotel, which was probably a mile, you know, and I, and you didn't think twice, I had all my camera gear around me, you just didn't think twice about walking down that street. And we got back into our armored vehicle and we traveled back to Baghdad. And.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  About three quarters of the way there, we got a call and it said, you need to turn off to, there's a mass grave has been found at Hillah and you're on route, well, you're gonna pass it on the way back into Baghdad. So can you stop off and have a look? And my first reaction was I was so shattered from the four days in Najaf that

• 51:24Speaker 02

  I was sort of slightly resigned about having to, you know, you know, really, because we have to be back in Baghdad before it's dark and, you know,

• 51:35Speaker 02

  I just, I had a really sort of ambivalent attitude to it. So we, we found this place and we pulled up and everyone said, right, hey, guys, you've got literally forty minutes because, but we gotta be out of here before the sun's down. So we got out and I just sort of walked over this mound and as I walked over the mound that was here, there was just hundreds of bodies just laid out in front of me and they'd been there.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  I think it was probably about four or five days. I think it was obvious how long they'd been there because you could see how many bodies that they'd pulled out of the pit that they dug there and it was obviously an execution spot where Saddam had taken them. I don't know how many years before and they'd all been executed, just a bullet to the back of the head, all men and they were, they dug them up and pulled the bodies out. And I imagine the relatives had obviously had an idea of where they were, but they were never able to do anything until, you know, they were in a position Baghdad had been liberated and they felt it was safe enough now to go and try and, I think they knew Saddam was on the run.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  So they were excavating this area and they'd found all these bodies and they put these bodies into plastic bags and they had a name tag on each body. And that's when I realized, okay, that this is, this is probably quite, well, this is bigger than any other mass grave that I'd shot during my time there. So I started shooting and I knew the light was going down and the light was incredible. It was just incredible, the light on the sand. And and everything and I just started shooting and I started shooting the women that were sitting around the edge behind the barbed wire so they'd obviously made the women sit around and then when they'd finished digging the women were able to walk through

• 53:20Speaker 02

  the bodies and try and identify family members and they were just picking up um ID cards and you know trying to sort of figure out who was who and I I remember there was one really um bizarre moment where somebody had taken a body all was remains of the skeleton and the corpse and they laid it out in the shape of somebody just lying on the ground it wasn't a case of the remains were put into a plastic bag they had actually almost constructed this person as they were and so they were laid out and it looked like a person lying on the ground with their arms out and their legs in the correct position

• 54:01Speaker 02

  and their head to one side and I just remember a young kid just walking past holding his dad's hand just staring at this and I thought that must be an unbelievable thing for a kid that age to be staring at and I remember taking that picture and it's um I remember thinking that is I I I've never seen anything like that and I thought somebody has actually gone to the trouble of trying to do this and I couldn't work out why and I thought why have they done this you know I I I was pretty sure that it didn't help with the identification of that person but somebody had gone to the trouble of laying this this corpse out so I shot that picture and and I started moving around and shooting the

• 54:43Speaker 02

  women and the women were crying um and I found I subsequently found out they were only they were crying because I had turned up with a camera so I had altered that situation and when they realized that I was no longer interested in shooting them because they were they were crying because they thought this is what this photographer needs to see um yeah I just I I they went back to playing with their dice and so I sort of moved away I thought well I won't be taking any more pictures of that um yeah and just shot and saw and they had and I know this isn't the right word but remind me Jocko what's the American version of a J C B?

• 55:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh a backhoe.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  A backhoe so they had a backhoe in this pit pulling out the bodies and they had a couple of kids underneath collecting the the remains and just put them to one side um and these kids were doing it as if it was just Another day, you know, it was no... It was impossible to see the... If there was any shock or any, you know, they were just getting on with it. They, it was as if they knew this job has to be done, so we're gonna do it. Um, and they were just, you know, I remember seeing a skull roll off the, uh, the claw of this backhoe, you know, and this kid caught it. Just caught it like a goalkeeper would catch a football and then just put it into a bag.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  And, uh, yeah, I watched that one. I didn't actually shoot that one. And, um, so it was a case of, um, getting the job done as quickly as possible, getting back in the van and getting back to Baghdad. And I got back to Baghdad. And I moved, I think, four or five images because I was never really a person to move a lot of imagery. I thought if I had some really good stuff, I didn't want to dilute it with stuff that I thought was inferior. So I just put the four or five best images out. And was just hanging around when the, uh, the chief came in and he said, listen, um, how many pictures did you move of that story? And I said, maybe four or five. And he said, right, okay, you better, you better move some more because it's become the number one story in the world.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  And I think there was over 2,000 bodies they discovered at this place. And of course, I then thought, geez, okay, right. And then I just sort of slightly panicked because I thought, well, I've just edited my stuff and I've moved five pictures. What am I now gonna find in there that's going to improve the file?

• 57:12Speaker 02

  So I went through my, you know, on my, on my computer screen, just going through the pictures and thinking, do you know what? I really wish that I'd spent a little bit more time shooting that moment. Because I shot it and thought, actually, do you know what? I'm gonna get something a bit stronger than that in a minute. So, and I just, and I saw, and then I'd see another image and I'd work it through and I think, okay, I think the fourth image in this sequence is gonna be the one. And then I realized there wasn't the fourth image. And I just kept saying to myself, what were you doing? And of course, at the time, I had no idea that this was going to be the number one story in the world. And so I ended up moving, I think I ended up moving maybe fifteen pictures, maybe more

• 57:56Speaker 02

  from this, and every time I put a picture out, I thought, you know what, and it just so annoyed me that I hadn't maybe approached the job as in the right manner. I just had seen the light and I'd shot what I thought would be really strong. And like I say, you know, in my career, I miss as many pictures as I get. In fact, I miss more than I get. And I can tell you about all the great pictures I didn't take, and that would make a great book. But, so I was just really angry with myself and angry that I'd had this opportunity and I'd maybe blown it, you know, and I thought, well, this is why I'm here. I'm here to shoot

• 58:37Speaker 02

  this. I'm here to show the world that this is why, this is what's happening. And, you know, and how could I have been so stupid as to not have concentrated a little bit harder while I was there. And I know we only had half an hour to forty minutes, but still, I could have shot five times as much in that time, but I didn't. I just chose to meticulously walk through, pick my moments and shoot them. So we moved these pictures and fortunately the next day, I think one of the, it was an image of a woman in a, walking past a skull that was just, and I chotted from really low down on the ground. And it was really, it was an upright, and that's what suited most of the papers as an upright image, a

• 59:17Speaker 02

  vertical. And that was what got used on all the New York Times, everywhere, just the Washington Post, all the British newspapers, everywhere around the world had run with this story. And although we were the first guy there, there were a couple of other photographers that were there at the time with me, but they didn't work for an international wire agency. And that's the beauty about working for an international wire agency is that their reach and their clout is just phenomenal. It doesn't matter whether you're working for a newspaper, but as soon as you work for an international wire agency, particularly one as good as Reuters, you, you then realize, actually, when I've got this picture, it's really gonna get out there.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Everybody is gonna see it, you know, and that's a huge buzz. And it did, and it made, and it made, the play was incredible. And then my chief said to me, okay, Ken, well, you know, we were going back to tomorrow. And again, I thought, yeah, but you know what, I've just, I've just been there. And I had pretty much the place to myself. And I knew going down the next day, when I drove there, it was a zoo. There was just every photographer and every cameraman in Iraq was at Hiller. And you couldn't shoot anything without getting another photographer or a cameraman or a sound boom.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  Because of the, and, and there were, I think I did take a couple of pictures that day, some very strong, a couple of strong pictures of a woman that had just discovered her husband and she was surrounded by her family. And the bane of every photographer's life is the sound man's boom. And this woman was making this, um, she was, it was this dreadful wailing. I mean, I still remember it now. It was awful, the noise she was making. It was really guttural. And it really went right through you. And I remember being really down low and in close and trying to photograph this. And the next thing, this furry boom just comes over microphone.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  And, and, and he's trying to record the sound. And that's what it was like. And you're getting annoyed at a sound man who's just stepped in and trying to do something when you were trying to, and you think, and I'm getting annoyed with a guy who's trying to record a woman who's plumbing the depth of grief. And I'm annoyed at him and I'm not thinking, well, listen, what about her? You know, and in those situations, you're not thinking about that. You're just, I need to, I need to shoot this picture. So, yep, um, the next day it was a zoo and, uh, but I was able to stand back and think, you know, um, I got lucky that, yesterday. And I learned a really valuable lesson, which is, um,

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Go into every situation like that as if you're never gonna see a situation like that again.

• 1:02:15Jocko Willink?

  And actually even further back, there was a chance that you could have said, I know we can't make it, we won't be home before dark, so we're just gonna head back to Baghdad.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  And and and of course, but that's right. And but ultimately in that car, that wasn't, that probably wasn't gonna be my call. So the somebody in the car, and I think I was with three or four others, somebody, maybe the journalist might have been the most senior. In the in the in the armored vehicle at the time, and she would have made that call, and she would have just said, listen, if this is what they want, we need to go and do it, you know? So, um, yep, it came out okay at the end, but it was, that was close.

• 1:02:53Jocko Willink?

  I had a, when I first, when I was in my first SEAL platoon, my leading petty officer, who is the the senior, well, not even the senior, but the second senior of the enlisted guys. Anyways, he had this, this mantra, and the mantra was always go out. Now, when he said always go out, what he meant was always go out to the bar. Always go out, you know, you could you pull in somewhere for a night, go out, you know, that's always go out. There's always some fun to be had. And I actually, my mind, I always twisted that mantra from his always go out to go to the bar or go to the the club. I changed it to just always go out, period.

• 1:03:37Jocko Willink?

  So if there's an opportunity, there's an operation coming up, go out. If there's a, if you, if there's a bar to go to, go out. If there's something to do, go and do it. It's just a little, you know, little something to think about. And it remind when you're sitting there thinking, you know, maybe, maybe it wouldn't have been your call. But if it was your call, maybe you would have sloughed it off. And if you had the attitude of, you know what, always go out. Okay.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:58Jocko Willink?

  Then you would have been there hundred percent.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:04:03Jocko Willink?

  Um, and and.

• 1:04:07Jocko Willink?

  You get, I don't want to cut Iraq short, but at the same time, there's so much stuff I want to talk to you about and hear other people talk about, but you get home from Iraq and

• 1:04:24Jocko Willink?

  you go back to your kind of normal day to day. You said you were, you know, you saw some stuff, but it wasn't like a major psychological effect that you noticed out of the gate. You came home, hey, that was my job. I did my job.

• 1:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Next call you get, big call, is to go to Sri Lanka, which you mentioned briefly there. And in Sri Lanka, you were going because of the horrible tsunami that hit on Boxing Day. And Americans don't know what Boxing Day is. It's a day after Christmas in England. Hit on Boxing Day, and you get the call to go out to Sri Lanka and shoot.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, um, I remember the, um, the desk working on Boxing Day called me, and I was around at my parents with my kids, and we were all just about to start opening Christmas presents. And, um, she said, Kieran, you need to get on a plane, and you need to go to Colombo, literally, um, straight away. And I said, uh, why? And she said, well, have you not heard? And I said, heard what? And she said, turn on the TV. So I turned on the TV. And, uh, yeah, it was like a 9/11 moment, you know, when you're sitting and you're looking,

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  you just think, I had no idea.

• 1:05:55Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, just to, just to kind of give some basic facts on this, the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean had the approximate energy of 23,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. It was a magnitude 9.0. The rupture was 600 miles long. It displaced the sea floor by 10 yards.

• 1:06:22Jocko Willink?

  Six hundred miles, ten yards. So, uh, trillions of, trillions of tons of rocks moved. It's the largest earthquake in forty years. And within hours, the, the killer wave started arriving. And unfortunately, because of lack of communication and no warning systems in place, people were just not, they weren't prepared for it throughout Asia. And they just got crushed, absolutely crushed. And, uh, you know, you, you said a nine eleven moment, which I, I understand where you're coming from, from a psychological standpoint of, hey, I know what I was doing at this point on September eleventh.

• 1:07:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, September eleventh was four thousand, maybe five thousand Americans killed. The tsunami resulted in almost a quarter million dead. I mean, just a massive destruction. And you got the call.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:07:21Jocko Willink?

  So you got the call.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  And it just happened to be because I was the guy on call.

• 1:07:26Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  For Boxing Day. So it could have gone to any photographer in London.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  So, and they, Reuters had sort of, there were, there were photographers that had gone to Panda Atche and, and other places, and they needed somebody to go to Sri Lanka because they, they had an idea that Sri Lanka had been pretty badly hit. And because it was my name on the sked for Boxing Day, that's why I got the call. And I ended up going out the following, I think it was the twenty seventh. I flew out and, uh, yeah, just one of those stories where you have to hit the ground running. So you're off the plane, you get through customs and you're straight into a car and you're into the office and you're speaking to the, the bureau chief there. And you say, right, I'm here. So where am I going? And they are still trying to figure out what's happened and where the, you know, the, the

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  most severe damages. And pretty much, you know, most of the coastlines of Sri Lanka had been hit. So it didn't really matter where you went. You were always going to find something. So they were. We're trying to, I I said I really wanna get over to the other coast. I don't wanna get over to this, stay here where where all the tourists come. I wanna get over to the other side. So we were literally trying to find a helicopter that would get me straight over there. But in the meantime, while they were trying to work that out, I just got in the car and I just drove down from Columbia, just straight down through Gaul to just see what was going on and again, to get something under my belt and I just started shooting.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  And then came back to the office.

• 1:08:58Jocko Willink?

  Had you ever been to Sri Lanka before?

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  I'd never been to Sri Lanka, no. So, uh, got back to the office and I said, listen, um, what's happening with the chopper? And they said, well, you know, it's not really happening, but there might be a government minister that's gonna go across. So myself and a journalist got in the car. We went to the government minister's office and um, he was gonna get in a chopper and get over to the other side, the other coastline. But before he did that, we were going to sit down and have lunch.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  And I was just thinking, okay, listen, do you know what? I really don't wanna sit here and have lunch. Um, why don't we just get in that chopper and get going? But we had this, had to go through this whole ring and roll and um, and then eventually we got to the chopper and we got up for about three minutes and a storm front came in. Chopper came back down. So that was that avenue of getting across and we would have been there in an hour. So we had to work out another way. So we uh, we drove to Candy, um, in one of those, uh, we, we, we found a car, a guy who drove us from Columbia, drove us all the way through the center of Sri Lanka to Candy. And we got to Candy and I remember that was New Year's Eve.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  When we got there, myself and the journalist and the coincidentally, the journalist that was with me, she was flying back from a holiday. And she'd heard about the tsunami and she stopped off in Sri Lanka. She was a lobby journalist that worked for Reuters. But um, so she was used to dealing with the the politicians and um, she just said, listen, I'm a journalist and I need to, this is a story that I need to cover. Um, so she came in and she said, Listen, you know, and I knew her and I and I said, wow, what are you doing here? And she said, well, I, I, you know, can I be of help? So I said, let's go, you know, and we got in this car and we went um. And she had such an amazingly fresh take on a story like that,

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  purely because she was used to covering lobby in and uh back in the UK. And because she wasn't a seasoned sort of, I don't know, hostile environment journalist, the way she would write stories and find stories was just like, you you just wouldn't have got it from her. You know, she just had a completely different angle on it. So it was so refreshing to work with someone who just saw everything from a completely different viewpoint. Everything was new to her, but that meant that her writing and everything was really fresh and vibrant, you know? So she was an absolute pleasure to work with and we sort of just teamed up and we got to the other side. And as soon as we got to the other coast, it the it flooded.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  The whole uh area flooded, which meant no one could get in to that side of Sri Lanka. And we had that place to ourselves for over a week. And we were staying in a hotel where the floors were just two feet high in water. I mean, but they still managed to get us rice every night. I mean, it was just incredible how these people just manage. And of course, you get out there and you're you you you okay, right? Where do we go? So let's just walk down to the coastline and and let's just see what the situation is. And of course, you go down as a um as a Westerner and and these people just think that you're you can help them. So they're coming up and they're showing the documentation and their passports. And can you take this to the American Embassy?

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  And can we get off the country? And I have I have relatives that live in the UK and relatives that live in America and I can leave and I and. And you you I've never felt so helpless in my life, never felt so helpless.

• 1:12:39Jocko Willink?

  And and I've spent a fair amount of time in Sri Lanka back in back in the day and. The Sri Lankan people are just the nicest.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:12:50Jocko Willink?

  Kindest, but hardworking. I mean, it's just a beautiful, and the countryside itself is absolutely stunningly beautiful. And so I can imagine them doing, going, jumping through hoops and doing whatever they had to do to get you a bowl of rice when you came home at night.

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just incredible. And then you would meet the people that were living on the beach, their homes were on the beach, and they'd been hit by the wave. And they were just immediately, immediately rebuilding. It was just, okay, listen, this is what we've got to do. And they start rebuilding. And I'll never forget wandering around at that point on the, on the tip, on the eastern tip, and I found just there was a wall, just a wall left of a house. So I imagine it was the wall where there was the door, and everything else had gone. It was one brick wall just standing on its own.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  And if you sort of walked through this door, you just saw golden sand and palm tree. And there was a dresser, just a one wooden dresser against this back wall. And this young guy came up to me and he'd said, he said, hey, photographer, and where are you from? And, you know, the usual. And I sort of got chatting to him. And he said, can I get you a drink? And I said, and then listen, I'm, I'm fine. Seriously, don't worry about it. I'm, I'm absolutely fine, but thank you. He said, no, no, no, listen, I can run to the store, which was about a mile inland. Yeah. And I can get you a Diet Coke or a Coke, whatever it is. I said, please, listen, I'm, I'm, seriously, I'm absolutely fine. He said, okay, well, please sit.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  And he pulled up a crate and we just sat it down. And I'm sitting in what used to be his main room of his house. And he puts, gets the crate and lets me sit on it. And then he just shimmies up the coconut tree and he just pulls a coconut off the top of the tree, shimmies back down. And I'm thinking, and I really don't like coconut milk. I mean, I, I, but, because it really, it doesn't agree with me, so I just thought, oh, okay. But, you know, he's gone to this effort, so he cut down this and he took the top off. And then he went to the dresser. And he opened the drawer and he pulled out a tiny silver platter. And he put the coconut on the platter. And then he handed it to me.

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  Um, and he'd even got a straw. And he put a straw in it and he said, please. You know, you're in my home. And I'm looking at the one wall that's left of his home with his dresser. And so I take a sip of this drink and I said. So, tell me, what, I mean, if this is your home, the devil, I mean, you know, the, the water was twenty-five feet away. There's the golden sand, I said, what happened? And he said, oh, the wave came in and, um, destroyed my house. And it took away my parents, my wife. My brothers and sisters and my six kids, they're gone.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  And. All I can think of is that he has tried to find somewhere for me to sit. He's gone up a tree to get me a coconut and put it on a silver platter. The only thing that's left in his house is this chest of drawers or this dresser with a silver platter in it. And he's more concerned about my welfare at that moment. And this is what had happened to him about five days earlier. And I remember thinking. When I got back from Sri Lanka, I couldn't stop thinking about that conversation. And I think that was the time when it really hit me. It really hit me about what had happened. And.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  I can't even begin to describe. I, I think I had a numbness similar to the sort of numbness that I'd had in Iraq. But this was a different kind of numbness because. The, the thing about the tsunami was you were dealing with the living. And it was the living that affected you. It wasn't the death and it wasn't the, the bodies that. Have been swept a mile inland and ended up in people's houses and stuff like that. It was, it wasn't the, the way, you know, you would cover the funerals of all the different religious types there. You just, it's when you're speaking to the people that survived that you, it's, it was a real, a real level, you know? And, um.

• 1:17:24Jocko Willink?

  Well, that just about sums up my, uh, you know, that story about that guy. I mean, first of all, anybody that hears that story has to think to themselves, you know, am I really doing the best I can to number one, have a positive attitude? Number two, put other people before me? I mean, what a, what a, what a saint. I mean, that's just unbelievable. And I remember actually, as you were telling that story, I remember that when, when I was in Sri Lanka, there was guys that, you know, they'd been fighting a war against the Tamil Tigers for many years. And so we, that's who we were working with, these guys. And they would, they would be telling these war stories with, and it'd be showing you, you know, there's a guy that couldn't move his arm, right? He got shot in the arm with an AK-47.

• 1:18:07Jocko Willink?

  So now he was working as, as like a secretary in the, in the army. And he's just got this big smile on his face and he's telling me, yeah, you know, and, and I, I got shot and, and now my arm doesn't work. But, um, you know, being a secretary is a pretty, a pretty good job too. And, and it's just good to still be in the army and you just have this, this, uh, this feeling, probably the similar feeling that you have where you're just looking at these people and you're saying, how can you be so happy?

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Jocko Willink?

  And why can't I be that? I want to be that happy. But this is, it's just so impressive and it puts everything in so much perspective. When you hear about somebody that's lost that much, that's going to climb that tree. That's going to climb that tree for somebody else, even though they've lost everything themselves.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  Is humbling. So, so.

• 1:18:58Jocko Willink?

  Incredible.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Jocko Willink?

  So did you, when you, when you came home and you, you know, you tell me about this earlier.

• 1:19:07Jocko Willink?

  And you were just kind of getting into it. I mean, you felt like after Sri Lanka, you know, you go to Iraq and you see the war. And that's, that's one thing. And like you said, you're dealing with the dead and you're seeing people that were killed. But now you're dealing with the, what's left behind. And you said that that really had more of an impact on you than, than Iraq did. Or than Northern Ireland did.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:33Jocko Willink?

  Did you?

• 1:19:36Jocko Willink?

  How did you, how did you deal with that?

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  The Reuters policy is that when, when you arrive back from a situation like that, your line manager hands you a number. You know, quite discreetly and says, there's a number there if you need to call it.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  And it's a sort of a helpline, you know, it's sort of, you've talked to a professional about what you've been through. And it's sort of a way of, I imagine in the art would be a debrief. It's sort of a thing that just sort of, you get that you start to talk about what it is you. And I don't know, I've never been in a situation like that. So I don't know what happens, but I remember thinking, I'm fine. I don't need that at all.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  Again, I couldn't have been more wrong. And I ended up, I had nightmares for, I mean, maybe a couple of years. Afterwards, really, really bizarre nightmares that involved cameras and involved tidal waves. I mean, the, the sort of, the mix that was going on, I mean, if, I suppose if I was to sit down and talk to a professional about it, they, they, they might find it really interesting what was going on in my head. But. I had to, I came back really angry. I remember coming back really angry. For. The main reason being that I was coming back to my comfortable home. And.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  I thought about those millionaires living on the riverbank in London and I thought, well, what if it happened if the Thames suddenly went, it just completely flooded, the barriers broke and just water just, how would they, I thought, you wouldn't, you wouldn't know what, where to start, you just wouldn't know what to do and you sit and these people, you know, we have lots of floods in England now, and what people go through, I can understand is completely and utterly miserable, but they're, the carpets are being ruined and, and all this sort of stuff and, yep, I wouldn't want to go through that, but, you know, when you, when you compare that to what happens during a tsunami, it's just, you know, night and day, it really is, and so I got angry about coming back

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  to live in a comfortable house and I used to get angry that my cellar flooded in Streatham, where I lived, I had a big cellar where I had my drum kit and it flooded once and my wife, Tia, she was down there with my daughter and she was, ended up pulling my drum kit out of three or four inches of sewage water that had come into, and, and I'm responsible for her hurting her back because she should never have done it, but she was trying to get my, all my equipment off the floor, and I remember being so angry that my cellar had flooded and then you go to somewhere like Sri Lanka and you think, actually, come

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  on, let's put this in perspective, so yeah, the anger, I, and I think it took a while to, maybe if I'd taken my line manager's advice and rung that phone number, I might have been in a different place and it might have, you know, I might have got to a different place a lot quicker, but I didn't and I thought, I can handle this and, and even while I wasn't handling it, I didn't know I wasn't handling it, you know, I just thought, this is normal that you come back from these events and just yak yak yak yak yak yak yak yak, at your wife who is dealing with three really small kids and there's you in one ear, as, you know, given all this about your dreams and...

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  You know, flooding and this and that and I'm really annoyed and I should have stayed out there longer and why did they bring me back so early? I had so many other stories lined up. And and of course, you know, it then dawned on me, you know, that actually, um, my wife was my psychiatrist. And to be fair, she wasn't actually having to say anything. She was just listening. And it was a case of me needing to just get all this stuff off my chest. And I would just pick the bizarraest moments to do it, you know. But something would pop into my head and and and then, you know, I'd have friends around and something would set me off and I'd do another thing, you know, and it was a bit like that.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  So, yes, I would say if maybe I'd been sort of clinically diagnosed, they would have said, you're suffering from some post-traumatic stress. And I didn't experience that after Iraq, and I don't know why. I I think maybe it was because I thought of war as completely different to what you would maybe categorize as an act of God. So, um, that in a way I found quite interesting. Or was what happened when I got back from the tsunami a culmination of what happened in Iraq? But I'd been to Iraq and at the end, in between Iraq and the tsunami, I had spent nine weeks

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  in Australia photographing the Rugby World Cup. And that was a pretty good gig and I'd had a great time. So, there there was that sort of huge job in between these other two huge jobs and I'm wondering maybe the the Distraction? Yeah, had had had helped, you know, maybe I I was too busy thinking about something else. I was nine weeks on a tour in Australia, an amazing country, having a great time shooting the Rugby World Cup, which England then went on to win. So, uh, yeah, it was, um, I don't know, I really, and to this day, I'll never know. But, um, yeah, dealing with that.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  And it was interesting because I was working for, um, the BBC in Dubai, uh, in two thousand and ten. And I was working with a producer, um, and there was a series called Human Planet and I was out there shooting stills for the book that was going to come out with the series. And We were out with this falconer in Dubai, a South African guy who trained falcons. And it was the end of the shoot and we were out and we were having a meal. And the producer asked me, he said, oh, Kieran, you've got some, you know, incredible stories. Why don't you tell him the story about the tsunami? I thought, wow, that's a really bizarre thing to start talking about at the end of a meal

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  where we're celebrating finishing a shoot. But I obliged and I can't even remember, I started talking and just the whole table just went utter silence. I mean, they were enthralled, but in the end, the producer came up to me afterwards and he said, I'm really sorry that I asked you to talk about that because he said, I can see that every time that you must talk about it, you lose a piece of yourself. You know, it's so entrenched in you that when you talk about it, you know, you're giving a part of yourself away. And he said, and I really apologize for putting you in that position. And that had never occurred to me that that was happening, but he could tell that by

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  watching how I was talking about it, you know? I don't know if that's the case now, but I don't tend to talk about it purely because it was 2004 and, you know, a lot has happened between then and now. And so it's not something that I sit down with on a regular basis and talk to people about. But I can imagine that even now, probably at some point, it's probably just a tiny bit maybe similar, but not like it was closer. But that was 2010, that was six years afterwards. And he still spotted that it was, you know, still very high in my sort of psyche.

• 1:27:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think it's, I think it's somewhat therapeutic to talk about these things.

• 1:27:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I totally agree.

• 1:27:36Jocko Willink?

  And I think the more you talk, if that guy asked you the same question once a week and you told that story once a week and you got more in depth with it and got your hands wrapped around it, I think that's good for you. And, you know, they talk about that too, the veterans in World War II. When you, when you came home from World War II, first of all, you'd been at war for three or four years and when you came home, you got onto a ship. With a bunch of other guys that just did what you did, and what did you do? You talked, you talked through stuff, you told stories, you cried, you let it out. And by the time they got home, two weeks later, they just had this therapeutic session, right? And that's why they said that these guys recovered a lot better. Well, in Vietnam, you're in the middle of the war.

• 1:28:17Jocko Willink?

  And then, one day, your tour is up of 365 days. You get on a plane, and 24 hours later, you're sitting in Main Street, USA. You didn't debrief anybody, you didn't talk to anybody on the way home. You just went from that environment to, to, to the normal environment. And as my, one of my SEAL buddies used to say one time, "I can't believe in 24 hours, we're gonna get inside of an aluminum tube, and then we're gonna be back home." And, and that's true. So, uh, I think if you can find your friends or, or people that you can talk about these things with, it helps you. And, and that's what you said too. When you told Tia, your lovely wife, what was going on, that's how, and all she did was listen.

• 1:28:58Jocko Willink?

  She didn't have to, she didn't have, all she, all she had to do was listen and let you explain those thoughts. Yep.

• 1:29:08Jocko Willink?

  Rough. And then, the next big assignment, and I, you know, we've talked about a bunch of different things that you've done, but one of the things, and I always get drawn to things that I know a little bit about, or something that I've seen, um, and, and I know that you ended up going to Liberia as well. And I did, I was on standby, I was actually off the coast of Liberia in the late 90s, when things were just going completely sideways. And I, I pulled up a little article that captures some of the madness that was going on in Liberia. This is an article from The Guardian by Chris McGreal. The Guardian's a UK site.

• 1:29:56Jocko Willink?

  A commander in Charles Taylor's, Charles Taylor's militia, so Charles Taylor was this psychotic dictator of Liberia.

• 1:30:07Jocko Willink?

  Militia has told a war crimes trial that the former Liberian president ordered his fighters to eat their enemies. Including UN peacekeepers as a means of terrorizing the population. Joseph Zigzag Marza, chief of operations for Taylor, who is on trial at The Hague, also testified that he oversaw horrific crimes.

• 1:30:32Jocko Willink?

  Such as cutting the babies out of pregnant women. And that the former president told his men that their enemies are no longer human beings. Taylor, 59, has pled not guilty to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. At a special international court over his collaboration with anti-government rebels in Sierra Leone, which borders Liberia. Marza, this is his chief of operations, who led the death squad of group of killers. Said many of the victims of cannibalism were members of the Kran people. Of the then Liberian president Samuel Doe, who Taylor was attempting to overthrow.

• 1:31:15Jocko Willink?

  But those eaten also included soldiers from UN and West African Echomog peacekeeping forces. He said, "We should eat them. Even the UN white people, he said, "We could use them as pork to eat." Marza told the court. "We ate a few Echomog soldiers, but not many. But many were executed, about 68." He said, "Taylor said, "Eating people set an example for the people to be afraid." Taylor's defense lawyer asked Marza how the fighters would prepare a human being for the pot.

• 1:31:54Jocko Willink?

  The former commander described decapitating, carving up, cleaning and cooking corpses seasoned with salt and pepper.

• 1:32:02Jocko Willink?

  "We slit your throat, butcher you, throw away the head, take the flesh and put it in a pot. Charles Taylor knows that," said Marza.

• 1:32:12Jocko Willink?

  He told the court how rebel leaders who fell out with Taylor met a terrible end. The former commander described dismembering the body of another rebel leader known as Superman and then taking his hand to Taylor who gave him cigarette money in return.

• 1:32:28Jocko Willink?

  Marza said the pair then cooked up and ate Superman's liver.

• 1:32:33Jocko Willink?

  Marza said that he'd killed so many men, women and children, he had lost count. He described drowning and bludgeoning babies to death and murdering women with pen knives. He said when he was serving Taylor's Rebel National Patriotic Front of Liberia, he'd established checkpoints on roads using human intestines and severed heads mounted on sticks. Asked whether Taylor knew about this, Marza replied, "He was aware. He made us understand that you have to play with human blood so that enemies would be afraid."

• 1:33:07Jocko Willink?

  Asked how he felt about these actions now, Marza said, "I regret nothing."

• 1:33:22Jocko Willink?

  Sorry. I apologize. That is...

• 1:33:29Jocko Willink?

  That is our lifetime. That is me, this is me sitting off the coast of Liberia while this was happening.

• 1:33:40Jocko Willink?

  Heinous. It's just... It's just sick.

• 1:33:47Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and I think,

• 1:33:51Jocko Willink?

  you know, Taylor was overthrown in 2003, obviously the country still bears the scars of that kind of...

• 1:34:00Jocko Willink?

  Darkness and evil and that's something you talked about earlier was the fact that your perspective and this is what I think I find very interesting about your perspective is that I'm always talking and exploring and studying the point of war where it's happening and you end up in these places maybe you're a day behind maybe you're a week behind maybe you're a foot behind maybe you're a mile behind but you're seeing what the after effects of war is and I think that that perspective for all of us to know is

• 1:34:40Jocko Willink?

  very important so and I know you were there while you were there again you were there in what year 2012 Yeah so this is I mean it was never it's never exactly a gonna be the most peaceful place in the world but it was relatively stable compared to when it was under Taylor Yeah And I'll tell you this is one thing that when I when we were off the coast of Liberia and you're looking at the coast and you can see the custom we were literally maybe a couple miles offshore looking at the coast and I can see that there's waves breaking so I'm kind of thinking you know I'm a surfer I'm thinking hey you know those look like

• 1:35:25Jocko Willink?

  good waves and then you can see there's buildings nice big kind of hotel you can see this beautiful white beach you can see it looks like a just beautiful place I'm thinking to myself I need to go here on a surf trip and then eventually you know I'm looking at this for a few hours we get a little bit closer I'm starting to make out a little bit more what I'm looking at and eventually I get out the big giant optics to to study where we might be landing and what's going on there and when I look through these optics the whole picture changed because now you see all these buildings that look like they literally look like big beautiful you know beach what's what's what's a big beach hotel called Moana Surf Rider

• 1:36:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah something like the Moana Surf Rider these big resorts they look like these big giant resorts and as I put the big optics on them and sort of looking all the they're just completely gutted they're destroyed it's just a nightmare and

• 1:36:26Jocko Willink?

  It's so horrible to see such a beautiful place just completely destroyed by us, by humans, by fellow human beings who have just completely destroyed it.

• 1:36:41Jocko Willink?

  What did you notice? Or what did you, what did you, what was it like when you were there? Give us a debrief on 2012.

• 1:36:49Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, I, I just, when you're mentioning those hotels, I remember taking a trip out to the beaches and just walking along the beaches for a couple of hours and just looking at these places thinking, what's going on here? I mean, my overriding, it is, it's just that the country was just eviscerated. I mean, and it's still, um, I mean, I was there working for an NGO and there were certain areas and certain things that they wanted covered. Um, and I had the opportunity on a, on a couple of days to basically just go unilateral and just take a fixer and just go and do my own stuff. And, um, on that particular trip, that's when I actually shot the pictures that I thought were really quite interesting, um, from that.

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  But that was, that was looking at, um, sort of Liberia as a whole, but I was only in Monrovia, but I had this picture of, I mean, we traveled down to the river G county and Grand Gede. I mean, just stunningly, stunningly beautiful parts of the country. I mean, just ridiculously beautiful. Um, and the sort of, the difference between living in the country and maybe living in Monrovia was, was, was so tangible. I mean, Monrovia was, it's the, the infrastructure has just completely disappeared and I, I can't

• 1:38:19Speaker 02

  remember the figures, but I just remember being blown away by the fact that the town was built for, say hypothetically, a million and there's something like five million living in it. I mean, those figures aren't correct, but it's, it's that sort of scale. That was just mind blowing. Um, and it was such a shame because it's such a, it's such a beautiful country. The Liberians are such beautiful people. And yet you, you, you had this overriding sense that are they ever going to escape this? Is this the legacy? Is it going to stay with Liberia? Are they, are they ever going to be able to pull themselves out? They are such a poor country.

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  Um, and I remember looking at areas where money was being spent and, and I was asking myself, why, why are you spending money here? Why are you making the roads outside the mayor's office look pristine? When the, the, the, the inside of Monrovia is the state that it is. There's the West Point slum, I think, which is one of the biggest slums there. And, um, and I remember walking through that and I never once felt intimidated. Um, these were just incredibly vibrant places, but the conditions that the people were living in, their version of normality was, um,

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  a, a, a camera really couldn't tell that picture. You just couldn't, you just couldn't shoot those images to tell that story properly. I think, you know, it's one of those rare times where I've had a camera in my hand. I think I, I, I, I can't tell this story with, with a camera. I don't know what I can tell it with, but I can't tell it with a camera.

• 1:40:07Jocko Willink?

  And this is because the, the, the conditions were so dreadful.

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  So dreadful. And I mean, the way Monrovia is, is built, it's sort of slightly on a hill and, and, and it rains a lot in Liberia. And what happens is the rain falls off the concrete. And when it rains, excuse me, it really rains. And it creates just torrents and these torrents just drop. Off the roads of Monrovia and they go down into the slums and they hit the slums before they hit the sea. And the slums are, I mean, they flood at certain times of the year and yet the people are, they expect it, they know it's gonna happen.

• 1:40:53Speaker 02

  So I'm spending some time in West Point Slum with a young man and his family and he is a health advisor and he has two daughters and they both want to be doctors. And he is describing the conditions that they're living in and what they have to go through every day. And I mean, you can, especially if you're walking through Monrovia, you can see the sanitary conditions and the lavatories, it's just, it's beyond belief, it really is. And you know, there are latrines that go straight into the river and they're just corrugated

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  latrines with a door and you just go in and the sewage goes straight into the river and three feet away the kids are just playing around in that river, the way our kids would play around in a swimming pool. No idea of what is going through their systems. And of course, when you catch something like distant tree or typhoid, they're one of the biggest killers of kids in Africa. And you look at it and you think, how, this is such a vicious circle, how are they ever gonna come out of this? How are they ever gonna find a way to lift themselves up because it's such a poor country?

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  But they sort of make do with the situation that they're in and then the slum floods and they say, oh yeah, it's gonna flood. And although we're four feet off the ground and we've got steps coming up to our, you know, it's gonna flood and it's gonna come in. So we have to just put what we sleep on, on little stilts, you know, but they're getting up in the morning and stepping into it and coming out and then, you know, they don't have wellings, they just wade their way through it. And this goes on for, and he said, I was there in August and he said, well, you should be here in September. This is nothing.

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  And so I was... Away from, I sort of detached myself from the NGO at the time and I just went sort of in that and I just wanted to photograph, I, I just wanted to try in some way to explain what it was I was looking at and I wasn't shooting it for anyone in mind, I mean, the NGO take all my images, they, they have, they have access to all my imagery that I shoot, whether I'm shooting it for them or whether I've just gone off piece, so to speak, to shoot, so they get absolutely everything. And I was trying to find a way to document what it was that you could see and I was really struggling until there was one moment when I was wandering through the slum, the

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  flooded slum, and I was up to my knees in sewage as we were walking through between the corrugated huts and there was a little flash of pink in front of me and I saw this young girl sort of just go between two buildings and she was carrying a pink umbrella and I remember thinking, oh, there's another picture I've missed. So I asked the young doctor who was accompanying me through the slum, I said, you know, what's the deal and he said, oh, she's probably off to church or something, you know, it's because she's in her Sunday best effectively with her perfect little shoes and her skirt and her pink umbrella. So I thought nothing of it, carried on, shot some more pictures and I thought, actually,

• 1:44:17Speaker 02

  I've got, I've got quite a lot of stuff here, none of it, I was really thinking, this is really strong, you know, and then on the way back to the car, I saw the little flash of pink again in front of me and it disappeared and I thought, wow, well, this time I'm not, I'm not giving up, so I just started to run through this, you know, and you can imagine if you're running through two foot of sewage, well, it's not the greatest sight in the world and you're trying to stop your cameras from going in and you're trying to, and there's a couple of times that I nearly went headfirst in, but I was so desperate to try and, and take a picture of this and my, the image I had in my head was when, when she comes back through that corridor and comes back into this main corridor that I'm in of water, I'm gonna just.

• 1:45:01Speaker 02

  Shoot her from behind, like a Mary Poppins type of picture. And the contrast for me was this beautiful little girl in this situation, in this, with her pink umbrella, in this horrendous slum situation. And there she was, and by the time she disappeared again, I just thought, this is just really not my day. And then she'd obviously heard me running and she sort of popped out again and just turned around. And it was almost like a little bank of sand that she was standing on between two huts. And there was about a foot and a half of water in front of her and she just turned around and looked at me as if, yes, wha- what do you want?

• 1:45:47Speaker 02

  And I just took one picture and click. And that was it. And, and, and the second I took the picture, she just turned on her heels and just walked off and tiptoeing her way. There was me in the middle of this, you know. So, but she was finding the delicate way around, just like Mary Poppins would, you know. And, and I didn't really, and so I thought, okay, I hope that's sharp because I'm shooting on manual focus lenses and, you know, when you've got one shot at it,

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  you just really hope that you got it sharp, you know. Um, uh, because I, I have been in that situation where I've had one shot at it before and not got it sharp. Um, and those images haunt me. So, um, I got back to the hotel. Uh, the NGO was still working on their TV film that they were doing. And I put it into laptop and scanned it up and I looked at it and I just thought, wow, yeah. That is how I want to remember Liberia. I don't want to remember it as this place that has been eviscerated. Um, I want to remember it for the beauty that it has within its, you know, the hu- the beauty of the humanity there. That's what I want to show.

• 1:47:02Speaker 02

  Because I don't want to come away from places and shoot images of people at their expense. I'm just, that's not me. I'm, I think the Human race is a majestic species and if I'm out there and I wanna shoot this, I wanna show it cuz it's there, it's everywhere and you just have to see it, you just see it and you go, that's what a human should look like and, and even in the worst, the worst conditions imaginable, it's there and that picture was it for me from Liberia and that's, I have pictures from Liberia that I keep but that's the one that I'm really proud of because it was sharp, thank god, but it just, her beauty in that mess was what I

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  wanted to remember and it just shows you if it's there, you look for it, it's, it's everywhere, you just have to, you have to want to find it, it's easy to just go in there and shoot what's obvious, you know, it's like, sometimes you go in a situation like that, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, it's there, point your camera, shoot, but you just gotta, you know, if you're looking for it, you'll find it, you know, keep your eyes peeled.

• 1:48:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And you, from there, you ended up also going to South Sudan and again, just, just a, a place of complete evil and darkness, um, for those of you that don't know anything about Sudan, pulled a little clip from The Independent, a guy named, this is 2014, C. Obam Fenton wrote this, "More than a hundred children have been killed in South Sudan whilst many others have been raped and castrated," according to UNICEF. UNICEF says that a hundred

• 1:48:57Jocko Willink?

  and twenty-nine children have been murdered in the last three weeks alone while surviving boys were castrated and girls were raped.

• 1:49:05Jocko Willink?

  They say that some children were even thrown into burning buildings.

• 1:49:12Jocko Willink?

  The executive director of UNICEF, Anthony Lake, said, "The violence against children in South Sudan has reached a new level of brutality.

• 1:49:22Jocko Willink?

  The details of the worsening violence against children are unspeakable, but we must speak of them."

• 1:49:31Jocko Willink?

  Survivors report that boys have been castrated and left to bleed to death. Girls as young as eight have been gang raped and murdered. Children have been tied together before their attackers slit their throats. Others have been thrown into burning buildings.

• 1:49:56Jocko Willink?

  Just a nightmare scenario.

• 1:50:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:01Jocko Willink?

  And you, and I want to clarify one thing, you're working for an NGO. For those of you that don't know what that is, it's a non-government organization. Generally, you're talking about some kind of a benevolent organization that is trying to do good in the world, such as the Red Cross is probably the premier example. I know you weren't specifically working for the Red Cross, but you were working for another benevolent organization when they called you up and brought you down to South Sudan. And again, you're not, for the most part, going to the front lines and capturing the action of the war. What you're capturing is the results of the war.

• 1:50:44Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:50:45Jocko Willink?

  And what did you see when you got to Sudan?

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  Um, well, we flew into Dube, um, and what we were looking at were UN camps. So, the situation in South Sudan was that the two tribes, the Dinka tribe and the Nua tribe, were, um, at war with each other. And, um, there was a lot of fighting and killing going on. And what the UN was trying to do, um...

• 1:51:18Speaker 02

  Was segregate the tribes from each other in certain areas so that they just stop killing each other.

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  Because until the killing stopped, then really they politically, they were never going to come to. And you had the president and the vice president, one was Adinka and one was Anua. And whatever was happening between them was being mirrored, you know, on the street, so to speak. So, and there was never any trust between those two men. They have a lot of history and there was never too much trust, so.

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  It was, you know, when they got their independence, I think Sudan, it was only three years, it had been independent for three years. Something like that. Yeah, so we were visiting camps that were, you know, had segregated the tribes. And Dube was probably the most aggressive camp in that.

• 1:52:12Speaker 02

  The only time we ever had any trouble was maybe if some, a couple of guys had got hold of some alcohol and they wanted to know. Hey, what are you doing here, you know, in this place? Why are you here? Why are you taking, and what you have to remember is, these people don't want to be photographed in this situation. This is not a good situation for them and it's very easy as a journalist to go into a situation. Say, yes, I have to document this and I have to show what's going on, but you have to understand that the dignity of these people needs to be taken into consideration. And, you know, some people are fine, they're fine to let you photograph them.

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

  They go, yeah, well, this is where I am at the moment and so, yeah, I'm quite happy for you to photograph me. And others quite plainly aren't. So, apart from the sort of criteria that the NGO was looking for. And the NGO was effectively providing water for these camps. Because, and they worked out some sort of desalination process and they were able to produce water on a regular basis for the camps. But the situation in the camps was incredible. They were just so overcrowded. And again, you know, back to that sort of scenario of people being cramped on top of

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  each other and then, you know, that's how diseases spread and, you know, so on. So, um, we then, I, there were obviously certain parts of South Sudan that I wanted to travel to because I knew that the situation in, up in those parts of the country was, was even worse than, uh, you know, Juba was relatively stable compared to other parts of Sudan. There was a, there was a place called Bentia that I wanted to get to. And there's a lot of oil up there and both tribes are trying to, they're trying to control the oil. That's what they need to get hold of. And, um, and as we were sort of, I'd say, listen, let's go there. And the NGO security would say, you can't because there's fighting and we

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  don't, we're not allowing staff to fly in. And the only, the only time aid is getting to these places is there, is helicopter drops, but no one's touching the ground. And, you know, and, and the NGO are very hot on security. Uh, I mean, it's Oxfam, the NGO is Oxfam, and they're incredibly a professional organization and they're very hot on security. Um, and anywhere you go, if you go to any country working for Oxfam, the first thing you get is a security briefing and they tell you what the situation is, what you can and can't do, where they advise that we don't go. And these are the regulations and the stipulations that they make. And you have to adhere to them because you're there as a member of

• 1:55:01Speaker 02

  staff with, even though I'm a freelancer and I can technically do what I like, you have to really sort of bear in mind that you are out there working with Oxfam staff and Oxfam staff have traveled out from the UK with you. So you really can't just go off piece and start doing what you like because you could put other people's lives, you know, in jeopardy. So everywhere, um, we wanted to go, I particularly wanted to go, we couldn't. And it was just always the case. I wanted to go here. No, you can't go there, but you can go here. So we ended up traveling to areas that weren't where they, the risk. The security risk was pretty low.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  And these were camps, UN camps, UN mission camps that were created to where the fighting was at its worst and they were trying to stop the tribes from killing each other. And one of the places we went to, which I will never forget, is a place called Baur. And we sort of flew in

• 1:56:04Speaker 02

  in a small plane and we got, I think it was a helicopter, then a small plane. Unfortunately, we didn't have to drive.

• 1:56:12Speaker 02

  Because I've been on a few journeys through Africa, you know, maybe ten, fourteen hours in a car where there's no road. So we were grateful to be able to fly in and you couldn't always fly in, we'd always get in a maybe a UN helicopter that was dropping something and we'd just get in there and fly out with them. And we got to this place and Oxfam were working there and they were providing water and they had this situation where where the camp was, the camp was being run by the South Koreans and they were sort of, they were physically building the camp. And they were in charge of it at the time. And they had created this space, maybe the size of two British football pitches or maybe a couple of American football pitches, similar sort of thing.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  For the, for, for people to live on. And in this you had South Sudanese, they were the newer tribe living in here and

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  you had, you had wealthy. You had middle class and you had very poor living alongside each other in the camp. So there was a real mix of people in the camp. And Oxfam were providing water and there was a huge reservoir, but it wasn't a reservoir, it was just a huge pit of water that had gone stagnant. And every time it rained, it would flood and flood into the camp. So they were having to control that and keep making sure that that never got flooded. And at the same time, they were producing water with this filtration system and providing pumps that people could, you know, and then basically saying to them, listen, if you want to come to the pump and take water, you've got to learn how to clean your bucket. So they wouldn't, so they were installing discipline into them.

• 1:57:49Speaker 02

  So, you know. We support that. Absolutely. And so.

• 1:57:55Speaker 02

  But it wasn't as simple as us turning up with, I was there with a filmmaker, a journalist, and myself, there were three of us, and it wasn't as simple as just marching into the camp and saying, hey, we're Oxfam and we're here to take some pictures and shoot some film. Even though Oxfam were working there in that capacity, so we had to go through the route of talking to the elder, and the elder was a doctor who worked in Canada, who'd come all the way back from Canada, and he described his journey to me of how he got to Bore in South Sudan from Canada. And I thought it was bad enough me coming from London Heathrow to get to South Sudan. It was just, I think it took him 11 days of pure travel to get from, yeah, it was unbelievable.

• 1:58:37Jocko Willink?

  Quit complaining about that traffic on the 405.

• 1:58:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally, it was, it was just, it was humbling. And he was there to rescue his mother and get her safe. And this was a camp, so we had to talk to him, and he wanted to know a little bit about us, and he said, you're fine, you can come in, we don't let any journalists in here. The journalists just come here and they do their story and they leave at our expense, and we don't have that, but you, you're providing water, you guys can come in. And so we had carte blanche to wander through the camp and do what you like, and everybody knew the elder has granted, these guys are cool, they're fine, do what you like.

• 1:59:14Speaker 02

  So this was a camp that had been attacked by the Dinka tribe a month earlier, and in order to try and build you a picture, if you can imagine the two football pitches, you had the, you had the UN camp, and then within the UN camp, there was this other camp that they were living in, and it had a perimeter around it. It was just barbed wire and a perimeter, and it was about the size of two football pitches. And they were wanting, the Koreans were meant to be building another space because their latrines had collapsed because of the rain, and they, you know, it was just, it was, it was, the conditions were abominable.

• 1:59:55Speaker 02

  But this perimeter was, on the outside of this perimeter was Dinka land, and the Dinkas had come in and they had attacked one night, they had just stood on the on the outside over the fence and with machine guns just shot away and they killed a hundred of the tribe. Women, children, kids, I mean, we were talking to kids where bullets were coming through. I mean, they just live in it's a it's literally a couple of bamboo poles and and some just white material. That's what these people were living in. But if you went into these homes that they created, they were just spotless inside. And then you realize again the dignity that, you know, you have to be, you just have to be so careful as you just don't wander around gung ho, just, you know, that these they're

• 2:00:39Speaker 02

  very, they these are very proud people and they're in this situation, they don't want to get and what's more, they can't get out. Because if they try and leave this camp, they'll just, they'll just be shot dead, you know, um, by the opposing tribe. And it was like that throughout Sudan. So it didn't, it wasn't necessarily just one tribe being protected. It was the Dinka in one camp, it was Noor in the other, and they're being protected from the others. And they were, I I I remember you saying earlier, Jocko, did you ever notice the, the state of their lives or their fear ever being etched on their faces, wherever you've traveled? And if this was one place that I saw it, it was in this camp, and they were petrified

• 2:01:22Speaker 02

  that this was going to happen again. Because the the UN hadn't reacted in time when the first attack happened. And so they just thought this is just going to happen again and who's going to protect us? And that is again a situation where you're thinking, when I leave this place, I'm getting on my plane and I'm going to fly home. And yet, they are still going to be in that camp and they're still not going to be able to leave. And in this camp, you're talking to young guys that were professionals working in Juba and you know, you you it's, yeah, that was the closest I had as an experience to Sri

• 2:02:07Speaker 02

  Lanka was Sansudan.

• 2:02:09Jocko Willink?

  And you brought that attitude home. And your next

• 2:02:15Speaker 02

  As usual, yeah.

• 2:02:16Jocko Willink?

  Your next assignment that you shot oddly enough was something that you had scheduled. Six months prior, you said, you know what? I'm gonna go and just take a breather. I'm gonna go and shoot Wimbledon, the tennis tournament in England on the grass courts. You'd scheduled that. In the meantime, you you go to Sudan. You experience this when you get home, and this was just on your own. You just schedule it for yourself to go and shoot Wimbledon.

• 2:02:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, non-commissioned.

• 2:02:41Jocko Willink?

  And you brought this back with you. And what did that do to your your Wimbledon shoot?

• 2:02:49Speaker 02

  Uh, well, originally, I, um, I think it was a couple of weeks before Wimbledon started. And, um, I was not in the slightest bit interested in going to shoot the story. And I'd gone to all this trouble to get this accreditation and the the the photographer that runs, uh, Wimbledon is also a very, very highly respected sports photographer who also runs the photography of the Olympics. And he'd said, Kieran, listen, um, I'd be happy for you to come in and shoot whatever it is you want to shoot. And I'd gone to all that trouble to get that and he'd given it his blessing. And I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna turn and say to Bob, Joe, I don't really don't fancy this.

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  Because I've just been in South Sudan, living in with with these people in these camps. And the idea of going to Wimbledon, shooting people eating, drinking champagne and eating strawberries and cream. It really, that's, I'm just

• 2:03:46Jocko Willink?

  That's what Echo and I like to call a rough transition.

• 2:03:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, and and on top of that, it was a self-commissioned, so, you know, as a freelancer, self-commissioning and not earning any money, it's not really the greatest idea in the world, but, um, but over time, as we got closer, I just thought, hey, do you know what? Hey, why? Yeah, okay. Maybe I'll I'll go and do this. So I went for the first couple of days and, uh, I just

• 2:04:15Speaker 02

  I'd had an idea, I wanted to see if Wimbledon still had any charm. Because I went with my dad when I was 10 years old. And I never forgot it, I got to see John McEnroe and Peter Fleming. Uh, yeah, Peter Fleming, not Ian Fleming, played doubles. Um, I bumped into John Lloyd, a British tennis player at the time. Uh, just, and I just remember thinking, that was a magical afternoon I had with my dad for my birthday when I was 10 years old. Um, let's see if Wimbledon still has that magic. And bearing in mind that I had shot 15 Wimbledons previously in my career as a professional, sitting on court, shooting the tennis. You know, I was there when Venus won her first.

• 2:04:58Speaker 02

  I was there when Roger Federer beat Sampras, you know, seminal moments in sport. So, I just wanted to see if it had any charm. Now, that was my original intention when I got the press accreditation six months earlier. That completely went out the window. I wasn't interested if Wimbledon had any charm or not. Uh, I just thought, I'm gonna go up and I'm gonna photograph those people that can't, that just get, can get the cheapest ticket and get in and just wander around the outside courts. I don't wanna see a tennis player. I don't wanna go anywhere near the show courts. Um, I just wanna see what it's like to be a punter. Because when I came up when I was 10 years old, that's all I was with my dad.

• 2:05:38Speaker 02

  We were just two punters that managed to sneak two tickets to get into the show court to see McEnroe and Fleming play doubles. So, uh, in a way, I was I maybe trying to see if it did have a bit of charm, I think so. But that had really gone out of my head. So I, I turned up and I just started walking around. And, uh, the, my attitude was, well, do you know what? It doesn't matter if I don't get a picture because who's gonna shout at me? Who's gonna say, Kieran, what have you got today? No one, only me. So I just, my mindset changed dramatically and I just started wandering around.

• 2:06:15Speaker 02

  And I remember I used to hang around in the, I had it because I press pass, I'd just go into the media hall with, where my, all my mates were working. You know, slogging their guts out, covering the tennis, because it sounds really glamorous, uh, but it's, it's full on. Shooting tennis at Wimbledon, it really is full on. And, um, they just used to say, hey, can you hang around in the cafe a lot? I was like, yeah, I know, because I'm just waiting for the light and just go out and see what there is, you know. And then, oh God, I've got to go and sit on Centre Court for another four hours. And then Andy Murray's gonna come on a plane, the roof's gonna come over, and I'm not gonna get out of here till 10 o'clock. Oh, like, really? Yeah, I'll be gone by six, you know, because the light will have gone then.

• 2:06:58Speaker 02

  And there'll be no need for me to be here and then I'd have another cup of coffee and wander out and just wander around. And I just had one camera and one lens, just a small Leica and a 35mm. And, um, I'd wander and wander and wander and first couple of days, didn't get anything. I thought, hmm, okay. So I decided, okay, let's go on day three, and I went on day three. And I remember walking around and what had happened at this Wimbledon is they occasionally they build a new court. And when they build a new court, it means the dynamics of that area since last year have changed. So, um, walls have gone up and, and in Wimbledon, they're not walls, they put sort of green sheeting, very thick, heavy sheeting across to sort of delineate, this is a new court.

• 2:07:42Speaker 02

  Well, what that means is that the security guards who are employed, who are just young guys looking for a summer job, you know, they're employed. They haven't got a clue what the dynamics are of this court, because this court only existed this year. And all these new things have been put in place. And so I remember just coming around the corner and I saw this guy standing with his face right up to the green bays like this.

• 2:08:10Speaker 02

  It's as if he'd been sent to the naughty step. What is, you know, face the wall, son. I thought, what is going on here? So I was sort of watching and I took a few pictures and I thought, okay, I need to get a little bit closer here. And as I did that, somebody else walked past me and just went straight up to the wall and put their, like this. And I thought, God, there must be a pinpricks in the material that allows them to put their eye right up to it and they can see the whole court. And, you know, I thought that's what they're doing. Okay, right, I get it now. So I thought, well, all I need is for ten people to just do this and I've got a picture.

• 2:08:51Speaker 02

  So as I'm doing this, as I'm waiting for this moment to evolve, um, thinking, I haven't got a picture yet at Wimbledon and this could be my first, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna let this one mature and see what happens. And as I did that, this guy turns up, young guy turns up with a pram and he takes his kid out of the pram and his kid has this shock of red hair and he's maybe eight months old. No, maybe a year old, a bit older than that, yeah, about a year old, still a really tiny baby. And his wife walks past and his wife goes to join the three other people that are peering through like this. And I thought, okay, right, I've got to, there's four people there like this. And then I don't know what this guy's doing with this baby.

• 2:09:35Speaker 02

  I mean, what, you know, but this baby's got such an amazing shock of red hair. It looked fantastic against the green. So I've got to, this, what's gonna happen? And this guy just picked the baby up and shoved the baby's head over the top of the bays. And before I took a picture, I thought, why are you doing that? Because the baby can't see anything and you certainly, and I think in his mind, he thought, if I shove the baby's head over the top, I'll be able to see something as if it was like a periscope. Do you know what I mean? And it was so bizarre and he kept it there and I thought, right, time to take a picture. So I took this picture and as I took the picture, there was an old boy standing behind me selling programmes and he went.

• 2:10:19Speaker 02

  That's a hell of a picture you've got there. And I thought, yeah, it is. And let's, I'm just gonna see if something else happens with the baby, you know, I don't know what's going on. But it didn't. And I had my picture. But what I really wanted was to have been on the other side of that court and just seen that baby's head appear over the top. So that was my first picture. And I thought, okay, this has, and that's how I normally work, get one under your belt and build on it. And I thought, that's a very funny picture. That is how I am going to look at this story. I'm going to find the humorous elements of being a punter in Wimbledon. And I want to shoot it as if you, so when

• 2:11:04Speaker 02

  you look at the pictures, you think, why has he shot that picture with those two heads in the way? And I can only just see that tennis player. And my, my point is, well, if you're a punter at Wimbledon, that's exactly how you see it. You're in the cheap seats. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, and, and most of these seats are, you, you just walk around and stand. So you're always crouching and, and trying to see. And I just thought, and, and of course, I, I have very rarely looked through the camera. I'd see a situation and just go, and go, because I didn't care. I actually didn't care whether I got anything that was any good. I just thought, you know, this is a nice feeling to just wander around

• 2:11:45Speaker 02

  and just click away. And I wasn't framing anything. I was framing, but framing in a way for a purpose. But I didn't care. And if somebody said to me, is that the result of two weeks at Wimbledon? I would have said, yeah, you know, I don't care. And I, I, I really, really don't care. So that was, that was the attitude with which I shot it. And yeah, so to finish the story. So come, that was June twenty fourteen.

• 2:12:21Speaker 02

  And come January 2015 are the big in the world of photojournalism, the World Press Photo Awards. And I

• 2:12:29Jocko Willink?

  The world, and those are like the, uh, the Oscars.

• 2:12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, for photojournalism, yeah, they're the big ones. And, um, and I remember when I was a young kid, I always used to print my stuff up, you know, when I was starting and send it in and then look at the stuff and go, why didn't I win anything? Well, that's because, you know, my stuff was just crap. Uh, and that's why I didn't win anything. So I sort of stopped entering competitions when I resigned from Reuters in 2008. It just didn't really interest me anymore. But a friend of mine rang me up and he said, you have entered those Wimbledon pictures into WordPress photo. I said, no. And he said, oh, Kieran, you've got to, you've got to, they're amazing pictures. And I thought, well, you're the only one that thinks that they're amazing pictures. I was happy with them, but, you know, and he said, no, no, no, do it.

• 2:13:16Speaker 02

  So I did, and I had to submit 10 pictures and I found 14 images that were potential. And I got down to seven and then I called Tia in and I said to Tia, listen, you've got to find another three pictures out of this, these five or six. Which three do you think should go into the set? And, and Tia said, that one, that one, and that one. I said, great, that was it. And in it went. And lo and behold, it won.

• 2:13:40Jocko Willink?

  Tia won an Oscar.

• 2:13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah. Uh, and, and the irony of the story was, uh, self-commission yourself and earn no money and you win a big award.

• 2:13:54Jocko Willink?

  I want to cover one more thing before we wrap this up. And one more series of, of images that you took. And I'm going to start this off with a poem.

• 2:14:03Jocko Willink?

  The poem is called Repatriation and I'm just going to do an excerpt from it.

• 2:14:09Jocko Willink?

  The coffin draped in Union Jack is slowly carried out the back, out of the dark and into the light, slowly down the ramp into the right. The six approach the hearse all black and place the hero gently in the back. The six then turn and march away. Their duty has been done this day.

• 2:14:36Jocko Willink?

  Politicians usually have much to say. No sign of them near here this day. They hide away and out of danger. Much easier if the hero is a stranger. The hearse with its precious load moves slowly out onto the road. The floral tributes line the route while comrades snap a smart salute. At the edge of Wiltshire Town, the cortage slows its pace right down. The streets are packed many deep, some throw flowers, most just weep.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  The crowd have come to say farewell. The church bell rings a low death knell. Regimental standards are lowered down as the hero passed through the town. The cortage stops and silence reigns. The townsfolk feel the family's pain. The nation's flag lowered to half mast. Our brave hero is home at last.

• 2:15:57Jocko Willink?

  And that was written by Sergeant Andrew McFarlane in 2009 about a place in England called Wooton Bassett, which is where all British soldiers and servicemembers that were killed in action were brought back home to England. And you shot some amazing photographs of that. And this was actually when I first got to know you, this was the first thing I found out was that you'd shot these photos.

• 2:16:39Jocko Willink?

  And they're just incredible and they represent, really to me, just an incredible view of England and what England is in the world.

• 2:17:04Jocko Willink?

  And how did you

• 2:17:07Jocko Willink?

  end up there once again with your camera in your hand?

• 2:17:14Speaker 02

  I was assigned, the first time I ever went to Witten Bassett, it was on an assignment. And I turned up and I was told, the only information I was given was, "Bring a really tall ladder, because you'll need it." And I didn't understand the dynamics

• 2:17:35Speaker 02

  of what was happening on the streets. So it was my first time and I, you know, I got there and the traffic was awful. And I literally arrived maybe twenty minutes before the quartage came through. So I was running down the street with my ladder, trying to, and I thought, okay, here with the other photographers, this is what we do, we put a ladder up here. And the ladder became clear because you need to go to the top of the ladder. So when the hearse has come down the street and stop and the family members put their roses on the hearse, you need to be able to see over the top of the hearse to be able to see the grieving widows and relatives. And, you know, you're standing on top of a six-step ladder, you know, you're probably about fifteen or sixteen feet in the air and you're really quite conspicuous with a long lens.

• 2:18:22Speaker 02

  And it wasn't something that I was really comfortable doing because the click of a camera in that silence was deafening.

• 2:18:33Speaker 02

  And it was one of those things that that wouldn't, the repetitions had been happening before, for a while, I think, before I got there. And I mean years, maybe 2008, 2007, but before I, you know, had actually turned up to shoot my first one. So there had been a pattern that had developed over time. And the pattern was photographers turn up, they stand up a ladder, they shoot the pictures, the event finishes and everybody goes home and the pictures are wired. And my first time I was there, I ended up, the best image I shot was from the floor of a young girl holding red roses, looking down the street, waiting for the quartage to pass. And I was really aware of the ladders and the noise of the cameras and I thought I can't.

• 2:19:18Speaker 02

  I stopped myself from shooting because it was so loud and I thought I can't be the one and you would see something happening. And you would see a moment when maybe a wife came out and she touched the back of the hearse with her hand. You know, and put her head against the glass and you, your instinct, instinct is to shoot that and shoot as many frames as that as possible. But I had my camera on single shot, so I was click, click, but all you could hear, it was like machine guns. Of, of cameras and it was, and it was so invasive and I thought, but this is, this is how the photographers got their pictures. This is what they had to do. There was no way around it. And I decided, that's fine. I understand that. That's what, that's what we have to do to get the pictures, but I'm not going to do that anymore.

• 2:20:03Speaker 02

  I don't, I really don't want to get involved in this anymore. I found it too stressful. And what I ended up doing was not shooting when I should have shot, stopping myself because I didn't want my click to be the click that everybody heard. Um, and even though everybody had accepted that this is what happens, I thought, well, I'm just not comfortable with this. So. I decided then that this was an amazing event and that I needed to look at this properly and, and bearing in mind that I had been late. For relatively, um, I hadn't seen what had happened before the hearse's came. I had no idea what, what happened. So the next time. I went down, I got down there really early and I, there was no one on the street and I watched the buildup.

• 2:20:47Speaker 02

  And for those of that don't know that, uh, what the whole story about Wooden Bassit was, it, the bodies of, um. Service personnel, uh, killed in action in Afghanistan, uh, were being repatriated to an airbase. And the only route out of the airbase was through this tiny village market town. Called Wooden Bassit. Called Wooden Bassit, uh, as the, uh, the bodies were taken to the coroner's office in Oxford. And it was the first time this happened, the, the, the hearse's came through and then, and I think the town mayor spotted it. And he just stopped and doffed his cap as they went past.

• 2:21:26Speaker 02

  And then that just exponentially grew into you'd have thousands on the street over the years, it just grew into thousands. And then the families changed their routine, the families would just go to the base and line them and pay their final respects, and then they would leave. But what happened was that the families would then pay their final respects, and then everybody would wait for the families to come to the street and stand on the street. And so that you could see how the whole thing was evolving into this sort of incredible ten minutes. And it started with, people would turn up on the street and you'd find people that hadn't seen each other for years, and they would just, hey, how's it going?

• 2:22:09Speaker 02

  Do you fancy going to the pub for a pint? And they'd go and they'd have a drink. And there would be this, it was almost like a party atmosphere. People were really pleased to see each other. And there was this lively, bubbly noise going on, and people were laughing and joking. Then the families would turn up, and everything would sort of calm down

• 2:22:31Speaker 02

  just a little bit. And then the bells would toll in the church, and there was complete silence. And then the quartet would come through, and it would stop, and it would be led by a lead sort of pallbearer, and it would stop, and it would give five minutes with the families. And then, sometimes it was just one hearse, sometimes it was, I did one occasion, there were six, six heuses that came in. And then it would leave, and then everybody would disperse, and then it would happen again, and then again. And it could be twice a week, it might be once a month. But I'd said, every time it happens, I'm gonna go down and shoot the story in a linear fashion, because I just wanted to

• 2:23:12Speaker 02

  show everything from start to finish. So when you look at the essay of fifty pictures, it starts at the beginning with the street empty, and then it works up to the last thing you see on the street are the roses, as the heuses have driven off, and the roses have fallen off the heuses. But I couldn't do it as a press photographer. Would do it. I had to find a way of doing it. And because I just wanted to get those moments. I was looking for something completely different to what maybe the newspapers and the wire agencies were looking for. So I decided to shoot on film and I have two Leica M sixes and I had a twenty eight mil and a fifty mil and I put film in. Because I could operate and you just can't hear those cameras. It's just a.

• 2:23:55Speaker 02

  Um, as opposed to the digital, which was really loud. Um, and I started shooting it on film and it was really hit and miss. I'd get stuff and I'd go down there. On some occasions and I'd get nothing. Uh, but every time I went down, as I was building the story, I knew, okay. I'll look at the situation and work out what I'm going to get from this today and concentrate. On one thing and invariably you would concentrate on one thing, but what you would get was something that would happen somewhere else. Um, and so it meant getting into positions. That the press were not supposed to be getting into. So I would want to go onto the other side of the street, which was reserved for family.

• 2:24:38Speaker 02

  I mean, anyone could stand there, but the unwritten rule was this is for family. And I didn't want to intrude on the family. And their grief and I wasn't there to photograph their grief from my position. Up close. I just wanted to see the reaction of people around there that I couldn't see from the other side of the road. So I was taking pictures. And I felt so conspicuous and I was there with these two tiny cameras, but I felt so conspicuous, but no one was looking at me. And I was able to just turn the camera around and just pre-focus and shoot. Don't put it to my eye. Just turn around, click, shoot. Um, so everything was sort of one, one frame. Um, and yeah, I sort of gradually sort of built the story up.

• 2:25:21Speaker 02

  And I knew that it had an ending because it.

• 2:25:26Speaker 02

  The airbase that they were coming into originally before it came to Wooden Bassett had been rebuilt. And all the bodies were going to be repatriated back to that other airbase. So I knew at some point, uh, in August two thousand and eleven, there would be the last repatriation. So, um, the, the, the fight you have with yourself, when you're looking at the story and you're sitting there thinking, okay, I think I need these, this, I need an image here to fill this gap, is that you're waiting for a soldier to die in order for you to finish your story.

• 2:26:05Speaker 02

  And it's not that you're waiting for a soldier to die, but a soldier dies and you, or, you know, in order for you to finish it, yeah, there's not, I'm not even articulate enough to explain what I mean by that, but the idea that you hear on the news, two soldiers have been killed, um, and you think, okay, that's me going back down to Wooden Bassett to finish this story. So the idea that I had a purpose of going down to a place like that was really hard to deal with because people, everyone else down there was there because they were involved in, or directly involved with the soldier, or they were people that just went to pay their respects.

• 2:26:50Speaker 02

  And so you could say in a way, if I wanted to justify it to myself, you are paying your respects in a way because I wanted to, I wanted this story to be shot from start to finish because I think it deserved that. It wasn't just about grieving family members on the other side of a hearse, you know, weeping. It, there was so much more to that story than that. And so gradually this story began to sort of fill itself out and, um, and then in the end, the, uh, I, I was there for the final repatriation and, um, the town was then awarded royal status, which is the first time that happened in, I, I don't know, I think over a hundred years, because it was the way, I think.

• 2:27:35Speaker 02

  The town, the way that it conducted itself was recognised, you know, by the royal family and they just sort of said, listen, what you've done, you've not just put Wooton Bassett on the map, but you've shown how much dignity the British show when, you know, those that are fighting for their country are coming back and the way the whole thing. And Wooton Bassett, they didn't want the adulation, they didn't want to be known as this place, they just thought we need to do this. And yeah, it's from the heart, like we were saying earlier. There was no ulterior motive for that town to do

• 2:28:16Speaker 02

  what they did, it just happened, it was organic, and I wanted to show that story. And so, yeah, that was it. It took, I think it was nineteen months of going down and photographing it in every, you know, from every conceivable angle. And I was really proud of the finished set of pictures. I thought that tells the story from how I saw it, from start to finish.

• 2:28:47Speaker 02

  And yeah, it was, and when it finished, I didn't know how I felt, because I thought, you know, when you get so used to doing something, and you know, I don't want soldiers to die so that I can go down and finish a story. But you try and work out, how do I mentally get my head around what's happening here, you know? But the thing that's come out of it is that on the final repatriation, I wanted the pictures to be exhibited down

• 2:29:27Speaker 02

  there. I wanted to show Wooton Bassett what I spent eighteen months doing. But I didn't want to stick prints in a room, and I didn't want, you know, I just thought, these pictures, I shot this on the street, these pictures need to be on the street.

• 2:29:45Speaker 02

  So I went down and I found a bank that said to me, "You can have both double-fronted windows of our bank, and you can put your images up during the final repatriation, because they thought we would love people to see this imagery." And the reaction it got, I was really quite nervous, because there were fifty images going up printed on A1 size in a bank's shop, you know, in the glass in the window. And I was really quite nervous as to how people would look at it. And I thought, "Would people appreciate this?"

• 2:30:28Speaker 02

  And they loved it. They loved the fact that this had been done. And when I went back down to collect the images,

• 2:30:37Speaker 02

  I would say half of them I just gave away to the pub, where you have the pictures of the soldiers saluting outside the pub that everybody went to. There was the old lady standing in the glass window. There was the kid wearing the Chelsea shirt. All these pictures just went. And I just said, "Listen, just put some money in the charity box and just take the prints." Because if all of them had gone, I would have thought, "That's fantastic." Because I didn't want to keep them. I just wanted... If somebody wants that and they want it, that's amazing. And a lot of them went. And that, to me, was vindication of having spent that time and done it, you know.

• 2:31:16Speaker 02

  And during that time as a photographer, I grew, because I'd sort of come out of that way of shooting for The Wire, which is all about a single image. Tell a story in the single image, you know. And I suppose ever since the beginning, I've always been a photographer who wanted to tell a story, but with a series of images, not just... And there's a skill to doing what The Wire guys do, and I had that skill. And I did it, but I wanted to just expand my palette as a photographer. And that meant...

• 2:31:52Speaker 02

  Spending time on stories and trying to tell it as you know, as a complete so you could take one picture out of there and go, well, what does that mean, that picture? But if you put it into the set, you go, oh, okay, now I know what it means. So you're not shooting standalone images, you're shooting images that mean something when they're put together as a, as a package. Um, yeah, and that was, yeah, I was very proud of those pictures.

• 2:32:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, like I said, those pictures are, are amazing and, and I think they did exactly what, why Wooton Bassett was, what was it named, a royal town?

• 2:32:30Speaker 02

  Royal Wooton Bassett.

• 2:32:31Jocko Willink?

  Royal Wooton Bassett, I think it reflected exactly what that, what that put forth and that is the, the pride of England, the honor of England, the respect of England. And I think that was all captured, not only in the town, but in the images that you took. And I think we've been going for a long time right now and I think that's about all we've got for tonight. I know I do want to say, obviously, thanks for coming on. I, I know I worked with some photographers overseas, some of them just took incredible risks to get the capture, to capture the moments that they captured, you know, of the book

• 2:33:13Jocko Willink?

  that Leif and I wrote, guy named Todd Pittman, who was there combat, he was, he was a photographer and just took some incredible images and, and we, we were honored to, to be able to take those images and put them in the book. But I know there's many, many, obviously many photographers, journalists around the world that take great risks to report and capture the stories and get them spread around and, and a lot of them are killed. And you mentioned one in the beginning, but a lot, there's a lot of reporters and photographers, journalists that are out there in the world that they take huge risks and sometimes they pay the ultimate price for their job.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  And I know this was, uh, I, I know I said a couple of things on the podcast that were pretty rough. I appreciate everyone for, for sticking through those, those tough moments. Appreciate you traveling to those places and sticking through those tough moments yourself, Kieran, and thanks for everybody for, for listening to the podcast. If you do want to support the podcast. Echo, tell them how to support it, my brother.

• 2:34:23Speaker 01

  Well, we didn't really talk much about working out or anything that would constitute much supplementation, but...

• 2:34:31Jocko Willink?

  What about AlphaBrain?

• 2:34:33Speaker 01

  AlphaBrain, yes, yeah, yeah, that's true, yeah.

• 2:34:36Jocko Willink?

  Cause you gotta be quick with your finger on the trigger of your, of your camera.

• 2:34:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:42Jocko Willink?

  In some cases, you might want to get some of that AlphaBrainy.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was talking to, um, was I just, I was talking to somebody, this was like yesterday or the day before about photography. And you know how people, they'll see like a real good picture and they'll be like, "Hey, that's a good, that's a cool picture. What camera did you use?" Do you ever find that insulting?

• 2:35:04Speaker 02

  Uh, that's a really good question.

• 2:35:08Speaker 01

  I've heard it compared to like, um, this girl I know, Holly, she's an actor and a, and a photographer. And, uh, she said it like this, uh, once, when someone asks her what kind of camera she used, like, "That's a great picture. What kind of camera did you use?" It's like saying, "Hey, that's a great meal. What kind of stove did you use?" You know, something like that.

• 2:35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, I get that.

• 2:35:30Jocko Willink?

  Meaning it wasn't the archer, it was the bow and the arrow that made it a good shot?

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 2:35:34Speaker 02

  I think I've had it the other way around. I've had people say that, "Wow, that's a lovely looking camera. You must have shot some great pictures with that," you know? So, yeah, that's probably like that in reverse. Yeah, you know, um, but, uh...

• 2:35:49Jocko Willink?

  But you keep it traditional too. I mean, I mean, obviously you're doing manual focus

• 2:35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:55Jocko Willink?

  on film a lot of times.

• 2:35:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, and on digital. This is, this is, yeah, manual, manual focus on digital as well, yeah. I've been using them for twenty odd years, so not the like is they're not everybody's cup of tea. I know a lot of professional photographers, they're not, you know, it's not their cup of tea, but and and also, you know, it's a particular type of for the journalist, I think, that uses a camera like this. And when I say particular, I mean, they shoot particular stories in a particular way. It's not that, you know, they're any better than anybody else. They certainly aren't. They just choose to use a camera that doesn't have long lenses. And I like to use a camera that doesn't, my longest lens is a fifty mil.

• 2:36:36Jocko Willink?

  You gotta stalk your target.

• 2:36:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:39Jocko Willink?

  Like a bow hunter.

• 2:36:40Speaker 02

  I like to use these are quiet and you get in close.

• 2:36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you see, like even that, that's a

• 2:36:45Jocko Willink?

  Photographic assassin.

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  So much detail to the art, you know, where of course, equipment is something.

• 2:36:52Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:36:52Speaker 01

  But like the artistic part of it, I think it's, I think photography gets it the most, I think.

• 2:36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:58Speaker 01

  Because it's like, like you said, everyone's a photographer now.

• 2:37:00Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:37:01Speaker 01

  Everyone can, I can take a picture, give me a good camera, mine can look like that.

• 2:37:04Speaker 02

  And everybody can, everybody has it in them to shoot a beautiful picture. I firmly believe everybody can shoot a great picture.

• 2:37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. But yeah, so Alpha Brain, boom, take some Alpha Brain, take better pictures potentially.

• 2:37:16Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:37:17Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, there you go.

• 2:37:19Jocko Willink?

  Plus you gotta lug heavy camera equipment around.

• 2:37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:37:23Jocko Willink?

  You know.

• 2:37:23Speaker 01

  Some shroom tech for that one.

• 2:37:24Jocko Willink?

  Some shroom tech for that one.

• 2:37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, running TV, um, the sewage that could have helped you in the later minute.

• 2:37:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And I've just discovered these tonight as well.

• 2:37:35Speaker 01

  Warrior bars, boom, solid, right? Yeah.

• 2:37:39Jocko Willink?

  I'm not a good host, didn't feed him, my wife, bless her heart. Oh, I did, I did. Once my wife said, what is wrong with you? Why don't you feed, give him some food? And I said, okay, he needs food, warrior bar.

• 2:37:50Speaker 01

  And she was like, wait, wait, wait, not, I don't want that, mine.

• 2:37:53Jocko Willink?

  Them's mine.

• 2:37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, boom, warrior bar. So yeah, i- if you, um, if you want to get ten percent off those, jock, uh, on it dot com slash jocko, boom, ten percent off. So supplement yourself, supplement your, your what, your wallet, if you will. There you go. Or if you want to support before you shop on Amazon, go to our websites, one of them, Jocko Store or jockopodcast dot com. Click through the Amazon link, support passively, passively.

• 2:38:22Speaker 01

  Efficiently.

• 2:38:23Jocko Willink?

  Efficiently, yes. Passively, no. We don't do things passive here at the Jaco Podcast. We aggressively make things efficient. Yes, that's what we do here.

• 2:38:32Speaker 01

  Amazon, alright, well, you want to get more efficient.

• 2:38:34Jocko Willink?

  And also, UK is working.

• 2:38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, UK is up, solid.

• 2:38:38Jocko Willink?

  Germany, working.

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  Germany is.

• 2:38:43Jocko Willink?

  Will be working.

• 2:38:43Speaker 01

  They're all working, yeah.

• 2:38:44Jocko Willink?

  Canada, we know, good to go. So if you're in those countries, appreciate the support. Amazon, click through. Trooper Tool?

• 2:38:51Speaker 01

  Trooper Tool, that's what I'm saying, that if you want to get efficient.

• 2:38:55Jocko Willink?

  Ultra.

• 2:38:55Speaker 01

  Aggressively efficient.

• 2:38:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I like it.

• 2:38:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, with supporting through Amazon, just go, go to the website, instead of the Amazon link, click on the Trooper Tool, Jocko Podcast, Trooper Tool, Chrome extension, boom, adds a little thing on your browser, automatically support every time you, every time you, um, you shop Amazon.

• 2:39:12Jocko Willink?

  That's legit.

• 2:39:14Speaker 01

  Very legit, in my opinion. Thanks again, Brady, for that one. Tech genius, jujitsu student.

• 2:39:21Speaker 01

  And, if you wear t-shirts, go to JacoStore.com, you might like some of those, uh, you know, Discipline equals Freedom, Jaco's head says good backwards. The good is backwards, so when you look in the mirror, it's a message to you.

• 2:39:37Jocko Willink?

  This is not for other people.

• 2:39:38Speaker 01

  It's not for other people.

• 2:39:39Jocko Willink?

  Just like this podcast, it's not for everybody.

• 2:39:41Speaker 01

  It's not for everybody.

• 2:39:42Jocko Willink?

  This podcast is for you.

• 2:39:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:39:45Jocko Willink?

  Stickers.

• 2:39:46Speaker 01

  But yeah, stickers on there and travel mugs.

• 2:39:48Jocko Willink?

  People are posting cool, uh, bumper stickers, but they're not putting them on their bumpers. No, no, they're putting them on their squat rack.

• 2:39:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:39:56Jocko Willink?

  Like that.

• 2:39:57Speaker 01

  You know, I go on my desk and my whiteboard, boom, you know.

• 2:40:01Jocko Willink?

  Awesome.

• 2:40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the stickers are bumper stickers, but they're for everything, for sure. Yeah, so if you like that stuff, um, yeah, man, you can support it that way. That's a cool way. Get one of those, we'll send it to you.

• 2:40:11Jocko Willink?

  Another thing we got coming, little bit of Jaco White Tea, Pomegranate Style. It should be coming out in the next few weeks, just keep checking back to the website. It comes in a, in a cool tin.

• 2:40:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:40:27Jocko Willink?

  And it says Jaco White Tea on it. Pomegranate. Cause that's how I do things. People like, what we need to do is come up with a really cool name for the podcast. And I go, okay, Jocko Podcast, boom. Well, we need to come up with a cool name for the Jaco White Tea. Okay. Jaco White Tea. Boom. Cause we're not, you know, we're just doing, we're just trying to keep things simple. Yeah. One of the laws of combat. Here to win, yeah. So, so check that out. It is pomegranate white tea. It's what, obviously I talked about that on the, the first, my introduction to the world was when Tim Ferriss said, I had mixed up some, some pomegranate white tea. And you know, Tim, he's a, he's an aficionado of tea. Dude, that guy has, yeah, that. That too.

• 2:41:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. He has a special, um, kettle where you press what kind of tea you're drinking and it's going to bring it to the appropriate temperature for that type of tea. Green tea, white tea, black tea. It's, it's going to do it right. He's got that thing. He's got like a little shelf. He's into his tea. But he had the white pomegranate tea before. So when I showed up and I, I said, hey, you want some of this? And so I mixed it up for him and he's drinking it in, in, we were starting the podcast in, you know, like 20 minutes and 12 minutes later, he starts going, yeah, what, what kind of tea was that? He was all kinds of fired up. So then the next thing that happened was on Amazon, I would see people would order Extreme Ownership. And then it would

• 2:41:56Jocko Willink?

  be like, oh, people that bought Extreme Ownership also bought pomegranate white tea. And then finally one of the tea people said, hey, you need to have your own tea. And I said, okay, start, I'll make my own tea, but it's going to be good. Real good. So I went through a, it took a while because I kept saying, no, no, nope, do this. Nope. A little bit more of that. And finally, we got to the tea that not only tastes good, but it gives you the, the white pomegranate tea power. So be looking for that. Uh, speaking of Extreme Ownership, you can buy that book written by myself and my brother Leif Babin. You can get it on hardcover where you can make lots of notes and put little tabs in there and highlight stuff. You can buy it on digital. I think you can make notes, notes on digital too, but it doesn't look as cool.

• 2:42:42Speaker 01

  Kindle?

• 2:42:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you can put notes in Kindle, right?

• 2:42:44Speaker 01

  Well, I use the Kindle app.

• 2:42:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 2:42:47Speaker 01

  Bro, I don't know what I did without, well, I didn't really read before that, but I'm just saying, you can do notes, color code, oh yeah, man, all at your fingertips, really good.

• 2:42:57Jocko Willink?

  That's good, and I'm glad you dig that. Me personally, I need to have physical, you know, note, I got my pens lined up, highlighters lined up, you know how to do things with the physical. Can I really do the podcast from a Kindle? Is that gonna work? No, we would have to shut down the podcast.

• 2:43:13Speaker 01

  Well, you'd have to learn how to use a Kindle first.

• 2:43:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I'd have to free my mind a little bit. Then, also, the Extreme Ownership Muster, which is a little conference we're having out here in San Diego, California. If you wanna talk about all this stuff in depth with some real focus, myself, Leif, running this thing out here in San Diego, California.

• 2:43:40Jocko Willink?

  Leadership conference, but that's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is frontal assault on your brain. So come and get some of that, October 20th and 21st.

• 2:43:54Jocko Willink?

  Check out echelonfront.com for some details on that. And also, if you wanna continue this conversation, you know that we're all up upon the interwebs. Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink, Twitter, Facebooky, Instagram. Kieran is also on those various mediums, and he's...

• 2:44:25Speaker 02

  How do I spell it?

• 2:44:26Jocko Willink?

  Spell it.

• 2:44:27Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:44:27Jocko Willink?

  It's at I M K I E R A N D O H E R T Y.

• 2:44:36Speaker 02

  And it's the same on Instagram.

• 2:44:40Speaker 01

  I'm Kieran Doherty.

• 2:44:42Speaker 02

  I am Kieran Doherty.

• 2:44:43Jocko Willink?

  But it's not "I am."

• 2:44:44Speaker 01

  Right, it's "I'm."

• 2:44:45Speaker 02

  I am.

• 2:44:46Speaker 01

  That's a common one, though, like, people...

• 2:44:47Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:44:48Speaker 01

  It's not like, it's like, "Oh, shoot," you know, like, "What?" Repeat that, because that's a common one. Like, they'll put "the" or "I'm," or, um, like, I don't know, "MMA" at the end or something, you know? So that's a common one. So it's not that hard to remember, is what I'm saying.

• 2:45:00Jocko Willink?

  India, Mike, Kilo, India, Echo, on down the line.

• 2:45:06Speaker 01

  I'll put in the link.

• 2:45:07Jocko Willink?

  Romeo Alpha November.

• 2:45:09Speaker 02

  And I'm new to Twitter, so I really need some friends.

• 2:45:13Speaker 01

  Followers.

• 2:45:14Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry, followers.

• 2:45:15Jocko Willink?

  But, but actually, you, you have, you do Instagram.

• 2:45:19Speaker 02

  I do Instagram, yeah.

• 2:45:19Jocko Willink?

  I guess that one's a little more obvious for you, since you take pictures with that.

• 2:45:22Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah.

• 2:45:23Jocko Willink?

  It is a camera thing.

• 2:45:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, which is awesome.

• 2:45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, since you're a photographer and whatnot. And, uh, so, Kieran, once again, thanks for coming on.

• 2:45:33Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 2:45:34Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for sharing these stories. It was awesome to talk to you and, and good to see you again. And

• 2:45:41Jocko Willink?

  of course, to the troopers out there that'll listen to this podcast, thanks for, for joining us here. Thanks for looking at the world. And even if you're not taking pictures of the world, at least take the time to appreciate it.

• 2:46:01Jocko Willink?

  All of it. The good and the bad, the light and the dark.

• 2:46:07Jocko Willink?

  And while you're out there in the world, go ahead and make sure you get after it, too.

• 2:46:19Jocko Willink?

  So, until next time, this is Kieran, and Echo, and Jaco. Out.