500: We Choose To Live.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe (Live in Chicago) Jocko Podcast 500 marks a major milestone—nearly 10 years of leadership, war stories, personal growth, and hard truths. In this powerful live episode recorded at the Vic Theatre in Chicago, Jocko Deeply personal reflection on the realities of war, the weight of leadership, and the power of choice. From recounting the harrowing cost of combat to the enduring bonds between team mates, Stories of fallen teammates, personal battles with grief, and the lessons learned through pain. Exploring the path of mental resilience, the difference between despair and strength, and why choosing to live—and to lead—is a conscious decision we must make every day. 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 500 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  That's right. We are at Podcast 500. It has been almost 10 years, almost one decade with you.

• 0:20Jocko Willink?

  And I thought that it would be cool for this episode to share a live event that we did. So for Podcast 500, this is an event that we recorded live in Chicago, Illinois, at the Vic Theater in front of an awesome group of

• 0:42Jocko Willink?

  in front of an awesome group of you all who were there. And I hope you enjoy it. I hope you get something out of it. I know I always get to learn a lot from these podcasts. But before we roll that live event, I just wanted to take a moment,

• 1:00Jocko Willink?

  let's take a moment to say thank you. This has been a pretty amazing experience. I've met many amazing people and met some incredible heroes in this podcast studio. And it's been an honor to have the opportunity to share their stories. And I've also met many of you over the past decade.

• 1:29Jocko Willink?

  Moms and dads and grandparents and sons and daughters and veterans and first responders

• 1:37Jocko Willink?

  and bankers and bricklayers and everybody in between.

• 1:43Jocko Willink?

  And all of us together, learning, sharing and doing our best

• 1:53Jocko Willink?

  to find the path and stay on the path. And you've gotten to know me and I've gotten to know you.

• 2:02Jocko Willink?

  And I think it becomes pretty clear that we are all a lot more alike than we are different.

• 2:10Jocko Willink?

  Everyone has struggles.

• 2:13Jocko Willink?

  Everyone has triumphs. Everyone has challenges.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  And life is not easy.

• 2:20Jocko Willink?

  But it's what we get.

• 2:23Jocko Willink?

  One. One of them. One shot. One journey. And it's been amazing to share this journey with all of you. And I'm not sure what we're gonna do next. Maybe there'll be some more podcasting. Maybe some different forms of it, maybe some of the same. But I feel like we've put out a pretty solid archive to draw from.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  And maybe we'll just adjust what we're doing or how we're doing it. Maybe we'll adjust the tempo or the topics or the timing. But rest assured that in some form or another, we will be getting after it, just like you. So thanks for listening for all these years.

• 3:12Jocko Willink?

  Here is Podcast 500. We put the full video up on YouTube as well as it was filmed live in the Vic Theater in Chicago, Illinois. Podcast 500, titled, "We Choose to Live."

• 4:46Jocko Willink?

  What did the war do to me?

• 4:52Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes, I tear up when I hear the National Anthem.

• 5:00Jocko Willink?

  Is there something wrong with me?

• 5:06Jocko Willink?

  I don't let anyone see. I'm good at that.

• 5:10Jocko Willink?

  Sunglasses, looking away. I can camouflage it pretty easy.

• 5:18Jocko Willink?

  Is there something wrong with me?

• 5:22Jocko Willink?

  I didn't used to be like this.

• 5:27Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes when I'm reading a book, a book about war, a soldier or a Marine is shot, or blown up, or badly wounded, or he slowly bleeds out.

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes that makes me emotional.

• 5:48Jocko Willink?

  Lump in my throat.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  I have to take a break, take a breath.

• 6:00Jocko Willink?

  Luckily, I'm almost always alone when I read, so no one knows.

• 6:07Jocko Willink?

  Is there something wrong with me?

• 6:11Jocko Willink?

  I didn't used to be like this.

• 6:21Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes I think of them.

• 6:26Jocko Willink?

  My men.

• 6:31Jocko Willink?

  My friends.

• 6:34Jocko Willink?

  Mark, or Mikey, or Ryan, or Chris, or Seth.

• 6:43Jocko Willink?

  And so many more.

• 6:50Jocko Willink?

  I'll think about them sometimes.

• 6:54Jocko Willink?

  And sometimes I'll bow my head.

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  And cry.

• 7:02Jocko Willink?

  Like a child.

• 7:08Jocko Willink?

  Is there something wrong with me?

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  The war was hard.

• 7:18Jocko Willink?

  Seth Stone. Stoner, my faithful friend and lieutenant. He wrote this about the war.

• 7:30Jocko Willink?

  Quote.

• 7:33Jocko Willink?

  "The guys with whom I served with in the platoon were stellar.

• 7:39Jocko Willink?

  They were quirky, personable, intelligent, courageous, athletic. And overall, they were the kind of guys you always wanted to be your friends."

• 7:53Jocko Willink?

  From Mike Monsoor to Andrew Paul, JP Denell. And the rest, who must remain unnamed.

• 8:04Jocko Willink?

  They would do anything.

• 8:09Jocko Willink?

  Anything for our country.

• 8:12Jocko Willink?

  Anything for each other, and anything to win.

• 8:20Jocko Willink?

  In many ways, I felt inadequate to be their leader.

• 8:25Jocko Willink?

  But I had to push that feeling aside and do my best work. Because I wanted to bring them all home. To their moms and dads.

• 8:38Jocko Willink?

  It was hard work. Draining.

• 8:43Jocko Willink?

  While we were on a sniper operation in Ramadi. I went to where my lead sniper, JP Denell, had set up his sniper hide.

• 8:54Jocko Willink?

  I wanted to get some feedback from him on what he had been seeing. And the atmospherics of the area from his point of view. Especially to see if he believed that an attack was imminent.

• 9:09Jocko Willink?

  When I found JP, he was on a break from the gun. And another one of the guys was looking through his scope down the dusty street.

• 9:21Jocko Willink?

  And JP, our lead sniper, point man, sometimes breacher and wielder of the hooligan tool, he was on the hard floor asleep, getting in a quick nap before the dusk attacks, which typically came immediately after the evening call to prayer and when the accompanying calls to fight the Americans from several of the minarets in town.

• 9:53Jocko Willink?

  I remember looking at JP and seeing how dirty he was. Covered in grime, his combat uniform was greasy, blood and tar stained, caked with the dirt and fine sand of the streets and buildings. His hands were claw-like, as if he was grabbing something in a dream. But he was completely still and motionless.

• 10:25Jocko Willink?

  At that time, I realized the great toll these operations were taking on these men.

• 10:34Jocko Willink?

  So I was glad to find JP sleeping a bit in between his watches on the gun.

• 10:42Jocko Willink?

  He was my most capable sniper, and I needed him to have a clear mind.

• 10:49Jocko Willink?

  It was a hard job, physically, mentally, spiritually.

• 10:58Jocko Willink?

  While life should be love and laughter and light,

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  we were the prophets of doom and destruction.

• 11:11Jocko Willink?

  End quote.

• 11:18Jocko Willink?

  I think about that.

• 11:23Jocko Willink?

  We were the prophets of doom and destruction.

• 11:30Jocko Willink?

  And Seth was light and life and laughter. I promise you that.

• 11:41Jocko Willink?

  What did the war do to us?

• 11:45Jocko Willink?

  Is there something wrong with us? Is there something wrong with me?

• 11:52Jocko Willink?

  I think that depends on which perspective we choose to take. It is a choice that we make. What we decide to think.

• 12:05Jocko Willink?

  There's options.

• 12:10Jocko Willink?

  And yes, we can choose to take the negative perspective.

• 12:18Jocko Willink?

  That's one way to go. Pessimistic and dark.

• 12:27Jocko Willink?

  Arkady Babchenko,

• 12:31Jocko Willink?

  who was conscripted into the Russian Army and served as a Russian soldier and fought the First and Second Chechen Wars in the 90s. He wrote a book called One Soldier's War.

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  It hit me hard when I read it.

• 12:53Jocko Willink?

  This is what he wrote in that book about coming home

• 13:00Jocko Willink?

  and what war did to him.

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  No one returns from the war, ever.

• 13:14Jocko Willink?

  Mothers get back a sad semblance of their sons. Embittered, aggressive beasts. Hardened against the whole world and believing in nothing except death.

• 13:28Jocko Willink?

  Yesterday's soldiers

• 13:32Jocko Willink?

  no longer belong to their parents.

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  They belong to war.

• 13:40Jocko Willink?

  Only their body returns from war.

• 13:44Jocko Willink?

  Their soul stays there.

• 13:49Jocko Willink?

  But the body still comes home.

• 13:53Jocko Willink?

  And the war within it dies gradually, shedding itself in layers, scale by scale. Slowly, very slowly. Yesterday's soldier, sergeant, or captain transforms from a soulless dummy with empty eyes and a burned-out soul

• 14:15Jocko Willink?

  into something like a human being.

• 14:19Jocko Willink?

  The unbearable nervous tension ebbs away.

• 14:25Jocko Willink?

  The aggression simmers down.

• 14:29Jocko Willink?

  The hatred passes. The loneliness abates.

• 14:36Jocko Willink?

  But it is the fear that lingers longest of all, an animal fear of death.

• 14:45Jocko Willink?

  But that too passes with time.

• 14:50Jocko Willink?

  And you start to learn to live in this life again.

• 14:55Jocko Willink?

  You learn to walk without checking the ground beneath your feet for mines and tripwires. And step on manhole covers on the road without fear and stand at your full height in open ground.

• 15:14Jocko Willink?

  And you go shopping, talk on the phone, and sleep on a bed.

• 15:21Jocko Willink?

  You learn to take for granted the hot water in the taps, the electricity, and the central heating.

• 15:32Jocko Willink?

  You no longer jump at loud noises.

• 15:38Jocko Willink?

  You start to live.

• 15:42Jocko Willink?

  At first, because that's how it's worked out, and you have stayed alive, you do it without gaining much joy from life. You look at everything as a windfall that came your way through some whim of fate.

• 15:58Jocko Willink?

  You lived your life from cover to cover in those 180 days you were there, and the remaining 50-odd years can't add anything to that time or detract from it.

• 16:13Jocko Willink?

  Then you start to get drawn into life. You get interested in this game, which isn't for real.

• 16:24Jocko Willink?

  You pass yourself off as a fully-fledged member of society, and the mask of a normal person grows onto you, no longer rejected by your body.

• 16:39Jocko Willink?

  And those around you think you are just the same as everyone else.

• 16:48Jocko Willink?

  But no one knows your real face. And no one knows that you are no longer a person.

• 17:00Jocko Willink?

  Happy, laughing people walk around you, accepting you as one of their own.

• 17:08Jocko Willink?

  And no one knows where you have been.

• 17:12Jocko Willink?

  But that doesn't bother you anymore.

• 17:16Jocko Willink?

  You now remember the war as some cartoon horror movie you saw once, but you no longer recognize yourself as one of its characters.

• 17:27Jocko Willink?

  You don't tell anyone the truth anymore.

• 17:32Jocko Willink?

  You can't explain what war really is to someone who has never been there. Just as you can't explain green to a blind person. Or a man can't know what it's like to give birth. They simply don't have the necessary sensory organs.

• 17:52Jocko Willink?

  You can't explain or understand war. All you can do is experience it.

• 18:02Jocko Willink?

  You're still waiting for something.

• 18:05Jocko Willink?

  All these years. God knows what though. You simply can't believe that it ends just like that without any consequences. You're probably waiting for someone to shed some light on it all. For someone to come up to you and say, "Brother,

• 18:25Jocko Willink?

  I know where you've been. I know what war is. I know what you've been fighting for."

• 18:33Jocko Willink?

  That is very important. To know why and what for.

• 18:43Jocko Willink?

  Why did the brothers the war gave me have to die?

• 18:51Jocko Willink?

  Why were people killed? Why did they fire on goodwill, justice, faith and love, crushed children and bombed women?

• 19:03Jocko Willink?

  Why did the world need to lose that girl I saw back on the runway? With her smashed head and a little bit of her brain lying in an ammo box next to her? Why?

• 19:19Jocko Willink?

  Why?

• 19:24Jocko Willink?

  But no one tells you.

• 19:29Jocko Willink?

  And then you, yesterday's soldier, sergeant, or captain, you start to explain it to yourself.

• 19:41Jocko Willink?

  You take a pen and paper and produce the first phrase as you start to write. You still don't know what it will be: a short story, a poem, or a song.

• 19:54Jocko Willink?

  The lines come with difficulty. Each letter tearing your body like a shard being pulled from a wound.

• 20:05Jocko Willink?

  You feel this pain physically as the war comes out of you and onto paper, shaking you so bad that you can't see the letters.

• 20:19Jocko Willink?

  You are back there again. And death once more rules everything. The room fills with moaning and fear. And once again, you hear the big guns, the screams of the wounded, and people being burned alive, and the whistle of mortar shells falling toward your prone back.

• 20:45Jocko Willink?

  The dead rise up from their graves and form up a great number of them. Everyone who is dear to you and was killed. And you can already spot familiar faces. They lean toward you, and their whispering fills the room.

• 21:05Jocko Willink?

  They tell you, "Go on, brother." Tell them.

• 21:12Jocko Willink?

  Tell them how we burned in the carriers. Tell them how we cried and surrounded checkpoints. Tell them how we whimpered and begged them not to kill us as they pinned us to their ground with their feet and slit our throats.

• 21:29Jocko Willink?

  Tell them how boys' bodies twitch when bullets hit them.

• 21:37Jocko Willink?

  You survived only because we died there. Go on, they should know all this.

• 21:45Jocko Willink?

  No one should die before they know what war is.

• 21:52Jocko Willink?

  And tinged with blood, the words appear one after the other. Vodka is downed by the pint while death and madness sit beside you nudging you and correcting your pen.

• 22:15Jocko Willink?

  And there you are.

• 22:18Jocko Willink?

  Yesterday's soldier, sergeant, or captain.

• 22:24Jocko Willink?

  Concussed a hundred times, shot to pieces, patched up and reassembled. Half crazed and stupefied and you write and write and write with helplessness and sorrow and tears pour down your face and stick in your stubble.

• 22:47Jocko Willink?

  And you realize

• 22:51Jocko Willink?

  that you should not have returned from the war.

• 23:01Jocko Willink?

  End quote.

• 23:11Jocko Willink?

  Is that what the war did to me?

• 23:17Jocko Willink?

  Is that what we become? Half crazed and stupefied? Concussed and ripped apart and reassembled? Helpless and filled with sorrow?

• 23:33Jocko Willink?

  Is that what we become?

• 23:40Jocko Willink?

  In some cases, yes, but is that what we have to become?

• 23:49Jocko Willink?

  I don't think so.

• 23:54Jocko Willink?

  I don't think so.

• 23:58Jocko Willink?

  I think we actually have a choice. Like many things in life, we get to decide.

• 24:10Jocko Willink?

  What did the war do to me?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  It made me better.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  What did the war do to most of my friends? It made them better.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  When we choose to look at it

• 24:33Speaker 01

  from a positive perspective.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Now, does war

• 24:43Speaker 01

  leave a mark?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Of course it does. It does leave a mark.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  That

• 25:05Speaker 01

  section of that book in One Soldier's War,

• 25:09Speaker 01

  where he's talking about people being burned alive in carriers, armored personnel carriers.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  We were probably a few weeks into deployment in Ramadi.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  And I was in my Tactical Operations Center, and a radio call came across that there was a mass casualty out in the city. And when there were mass casualties out in the city, if we had spare people on our little SEAL compound, what we would do is send a bunch of guys up to go give blood in the medical center. Because we knew that they would be short on blood during a mass casualty.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  So that's exactly what I did. The mass casualty call comes in.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  We don't really know what it is yet. We don't know what had happened.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  But I send a bunch of guys up to go give blood.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Some time goes by. I start getting reports of what had happened.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  I heard a report that it was a big roadside bomb had hit a Humvee.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Didn't get much more information than that.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Another hour goes by.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And the guys that had gone up to give blood come back to our little SEAL base.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  And when they get back, I learned what had happened. They didn't give any blood.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  No blood was needed. What had happened was the Humvee hit a roadside bomb.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  It blew the Humvee over.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  The turret gunner, who was in the top of the Humvee, was thrown out of the vehicle. The vehicle landed upside down.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Because of the blast, it deformed all the doors, and none of the doors could be opened.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  No one could get out of the Humvee.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  The Humvee burned. With the men inside it.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  And so the SEALs that I sent up there to give blood,

• 27:31Speaker 01

  all they did was help transfer

• 27:37Speaker 01

  the bodies, the charred bodies,

• 27:41Speaker 01

  into the morgue.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Does that leave a mark? Yeah, it does. I could see it on the looks of my guys when they came back from that duty.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  It's a nightmare

• 28:02Speaker 01

  to see what you're up against and see what can happen to you.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Those roadside bombs were horrific.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  They were horrific. They destroyed these vehicles. Tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Humvees would get decimated by these giant roadside bombs. And I don't know why they did this.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  But when they would recover those vehicles from the city of Ramadi, when they would drag these twisted vehicles, burned-out vehicles back to Camp Ramadi, they would put them in this area that was called the "vehicle graveyard." This vehicle graveyard was just a big parking lot, basically, a dirt parking lot, where all these vehicles, probably 75 or 100 vehicles, destroyed, twisted, wreckage of vehicles.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And when you drive past that, you know that every single one of those vehicles represents one, or two, or three, or four American casualties.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  And for some unknown reason, they put that vehicle graveyard right on the main road that you would drive past as you were getting ready to leave Camp Ramadi.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  You would know what the possibilities were, crystal clear.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Now, that turret gunner position that I talked about? This is the guy, when you see a picture of a Humvee, there's a bunch of guys that are inside the Humvee. They're sitting in behind the ballistic protection of the Humvee. And then there's the guy that's the turret gunner, that's sitting up outside the Humvee, that's exposed.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  And this guy is the first person that's gonna be wounded. Especially if they're in the lead vehicle. If they're in the front vehicle in the convoy, it's that lead vehicle, lead turret gunner, that's standing up, exposed to the enemy.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  He's running the biggest risk. If they hit a roadside bomb, he's the one that's gonna take it. If they get ambushed by machine gun fire, he's the one that's gonna get hit. RPG, he's the one that's gonna take it.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  It's kinda like in Vietnam War. In the Vietnam War, they were doing a lot of foot patrol. So it was the point man that was out in front of the patrol. And if they walked into an ambush, it was him that was gonna get hit in the ambush. If there was a booby trap to trip over and detonate, it was that point man that was gonna get wounded or killed.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Well, for us, the most exposed person was that lead turret gunner. And in Vietnam, what they would do was, "Well, if I was point man for a little while, they'd give me like an hour." And the fear was so strong that they would rotate me out, let me go to the back, and they'd put someone else up on point. And then that person would walk point for an hour and be exposed to that danger. And then they'd rotate him back, and another guy would step up to that point man position.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  It's overwhelming fear.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  It's overwhelming stress.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  So you'd think that when you have the lead turret gunner that's gonna be highly exposed, you're gonna wanna rotate him out. In fact, you might think that he would demand to be rotated out.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Our lead turret gunner

• 32:05Speaker 01

  was a guy named Mark Lee.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  And night after night, he would get up into that lead turret position. Night after night, he would drive by those destroyed vehicles and know what the possibilities were when we left the wire.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  And day after day, and night after night, he would go into that position.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  And Mark Lee never asked to be rotated out.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Never asked for someone to take his place. Never asked for someone else to share his burden of risk.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  He chose to be brave. He knew that there were some things he could control and some things he couldn't control. And he chose not to be afraid.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  That's the decision he made.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  And what an example.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  What an example for all of us.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  The amount of control we have over the way we interact with what happens to us or what we're facing in the world.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  We can choose, we can decide.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  And I actually saw this lesson and learned this lesson with exquisite clarity.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Exquisite clarity. Later on. It was later on, it was years later. While I was recording some podcasts.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  I did a, I did a podcast about Chesty Puller.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Chesty Puller, the most iconic Marine of all time. Hey, do we have any Marines here?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  I figured we might have a few Marines here.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Chesty Puller is the most iconic Marine of all time. No, no one even questions this. Received five Navy Crosses, Distinguished Service Cross. Just incredible leader, respected without question. Held in the highest regard inside the Marine Corps. As a matter of fact, the Marine Corps has a mascot. It's a dog, it's a bulldog. Yeah. The dog's name is Chesty. It's been called Chesty since they had the mascot. I think they're on Chesty number 17 right now.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  When you're in Marine Corps boot camp at night, you sing "Goodnight Chesty." So Chesty Puller is the most iconic Marine of all time. And I did a podcast about Chesty Puller and talked about him and his leadership and his heroism.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  And it was an honor to be able to do that.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  That was podcast number 121.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Podcast number 122

• 35:30Speaker 01

  was about his son. Chesty Puller had a son, Louis Puller Jr. And Louis Puller Jr. the son of Chesty Puller was...

• 35:44Speaker 01

  well, he was kind of cut from a different cloth. Right? He wasn't quite the same as his old man.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  And this happens, you know, I don't know how the genetic mixing happens. When that formula gets made, some, sometimes you end up like your dad. Sometimes you end up like your mom. Sometimes you end up a little bit of both.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Well, Chesty wasn't quite the image of his dad. He was a kind of a slight guy. His eyesight wasn't very good. In fact, his eyesight was bad, so he, he wore thick glasses. And he was a little bit more of a cerebral guy. And he went, you know, grew up and he, he loved his dad and his dad loved him. But he kind of took a different path in the beginning and went to college. Went to college and studied English and had the goal of becoming an English teacher.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  But at some juncture, he decided, hey, I'm Chesty Puller's son. I'm gonna go in the Marine Corps. And that's what he did. After he got done with college, he went down to the recruiters. He had to get a waiver for his eyesight because his eyesight wasn't that good. Luckily, seems like he knew some people.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  And they got him into the Marine Corps.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  So Chesty Puller goes in the Marine Corps. He goes to Officer Candidate School. He goes to the basic school and then he reports for duty.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  As a platoon commander.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  It's 1968.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  He goes to Vietnam.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Before he goes to Vietnam, he gets married. He's got a kid coming.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Three months into his deployment, he is on a big operation.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  There's an enemy encounter. He engages the enemy. He turns around, he starts to run to a different location to inform people of what's happening.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  And he trips a booby trap.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  With a giant explosive.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  He sees a big flash.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  And a pink mist around him.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  And those were his legs. He ended up being gravely wounded. He lost one leg at the hip, the other leg just below the hip. His hand was mangled, just about the only part of him that wasn't messed up was his face. But everything else was a disaster.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  And by some miracle, they got him off the battlefield. They were able to get that bleeding under control enough, they got him into a casualty evacuation.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  And he was able to make it back to America.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Now, when he makes it back to America,

• 39:06Speaker 01

  this was not what he anticipated.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  This was not what his father anticipated. He later wrote a book. And in the book, he describes waking up from a coma for the first time. And next to him, next to his bed is his father, Chesty Puller. The most badass Marine of all time. And his dad

• 39:34Speaker 01

  can't say anything to him because he's sobbing.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  And so Louis tries to make this work.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  And it's a problem. He's got his new kid. He's got his wife.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  He's in this terrible situation and you look at like the old prosthetics that they would build for guys back then. They looked archaic compared to what guys get now. And because of his wounds and because they were so severe, they didn't really even have, they could do barely anything for him. He was confined to a wheelchair almost immediately.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Started drinking, started taking painkillers, really went on a bad downward spiral. A terrible downward spiral.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Addicted to alcohol. He eventually is able to pull out of that. He eventually is able to pull out of that. And he's able to get off the painkillers and he's able to put the bottle down.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  And what really helped him do this was he started to write about it. He started to write about what he'd been through.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  He poured his emotions out on the page.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  And he ended up writing this incredible book, which is the book that I covered on the podcast. It's called Fortunate Son.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  And it's, it's really uplifting as you get through this book and he makes it through these struggles.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  And eventually kind of the climax of the book is he helps with the selection and the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  And he's there when they dedicate that memorial wall.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  And it's an amazing scene that he writes about. They go to the dedication. It's so powerful being at that wall and seeing it dedicated. He's surrounded by other Marines that were in Vietnam. And when they get done with the ceremony, they go back to a little party that they're having, or it's actually a pretty big party. And there's a bunch of Marines there. And for the first time in years, when he goes in there on his wheelchair, people aren't asking, "Oh, what happened to you?" Because everybody knew.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  And instead of asking him what happened,

• 42:19Speaker 01

  what they said to him was, "Welcome home, brother."

• 42:28Speaker 01

  And that book came out.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  And the book won a Pulitzer Prize. And it was a bestseller. And it's like I said, such an uplifting story in that book. But the story doesn't end with that book.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Because after that book was published,

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Louis Puller actually fell down out of his wheelchair. He got injured. He went to the hospital. When he went to the hospital, they didn't really check in on his record and see that he had been addicted to alcohol and painkillers. And they gave him a bunch of painkillers.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  And it started that downward spiral.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  And after all that,

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Louis Puller

• 43:29Speaker 01

  killed himself.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  So, what does this have to do with making a choice?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Well, after I recorded that podcast, a year later, maybe two years later, I had another individual on my podcast, a guy named Jim Searlsley. And he was also in Vietnam.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  And he was also severely wounded in Vietnam.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  The same thing happened. He stepped on a landmine.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  He lost both of his legs, below the hip, just below the hip. And he also lost one of his arms.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  But when he came home,

• 44:31Speaker 01

  what he did was went to the hospital, went to the rehab facility.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  And he's telling this story on his podcast. He went to the rehab, went to his, he said, "Okay, how long do I have to be here?" They're like, "Well, you gotta be here a minimum of six months." He says, "Okay, that's fine. I'll be here for six months then. Six months and one day. I'm ready to go." He learned how to work his wheelchair. He figured out how to get upstairs, figured out how to do stuff with one hand.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  And then he left the rehab facility and he carried on with his life. He started a roofing company. That was the first thing he did. Here's a guy with one arm, goes out, "I'm gonna start a roofing company." Started doing real estate stuff.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Ends up having a family, multiple kids, a dozen grandkids.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  An incredible story.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  And he told this story on the podcast. It was incredible.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  And we got done recording.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  And when we got done recording, we were just sitting around talking.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  And when we were talking, I said,

• 45:41Speaker 01

  "How? How did you do this?"

• 45:46Speaker 01

  And he looked at me and he said,

• 45:50Speaker 01

  "Have you ever heard of a guy named Lewis Puller?"

• 45:56Speaker 01

  And I said, "Yes, sir. I have. Absolutely." I said, "I did a podcast about his father, and I did a podcast where I covered his whole book, and talked about it."

• 46:08Speaker 01

  And he said, "I was in rehab with Lewis Puller.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  We were friends."

• 46:18Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you, there was a difference between his attitude and my attitude.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  My attitude was that what had happened, had happened. There was nothing I could do to change it. There was no woe is me. There was no taking it back. It wasn't gonna go away. This is the cards I've been dealt, and I'm gonna do something with them.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  I 100% accepted what was happening. And I chose to do something positive with it.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  And when he talked about Lewis Puller's attitude, he said, "Look, Lewis Puller tried.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  He tried.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  And yet, there was always a but."

• 47:13Speaker 01

  He said he accepted his fate 98%. He accepted what had happened 98%. That other 2% was always there, saying, "Why me? Why did this happen? Couldn't this have happened to someone else?"

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Woe is me.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  And that was the difference. That's the difference between someone that went downward and ended up taking their own life, killing themselves, and someone who lived an absolutely incredible life.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Because he chose to do so.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  He made that decision. That he was gonna make this as good as he possibly could.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  And that reminds me of another lesson that I learned. Early in the SEAL teams, early in the SEAL teams.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I was a new guy in the SEAL teams, you don't know anything. But in order to educate us. They would sometimes let us go into. Platoon briefings where a platoon was getting ready to go out on a training mission. And they would let us listen to the briefing. So we could hear. What mission they were gonna do and how they were gonna execute that mission.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  And so I'm sitting in this room, listening to this brief, I don't know anything. And I'm just listening and paying attention. And they get done with the brief. And it was some kind of a. Taking boats in from the ocean, going across the beach and then going and hitting a target and coming back to the boats and leaving. Pretty basic SEAL mission, training mission. So the. Platoon gets done with the brief. And now the young lieutenant platoon commander stands up and says to the commanding officer, sir, do you have any questions? And the commanding officer.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Says, yeah, I got a question for you.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  What if one of your boats breaks down while you're driving towards the beach? What are you gonna do?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  And the young SEAL officer. Says, well, you know, sir, situation dictates.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  If that happens, we'll look at the situation and we'll make a decision. Commanding officer said, okay, what happens if when you get to the beach? The enemy compromises you and sees you, what are you gonna do? And the young officer says, well, if that happens, sir. Situation dictates, we'll look at the situation and we'll figure out what we're gonna do next. He says, what about as you're patrolling to the target, what if you get compromised as you're patrolling to the target, what are you gonna do? And the young officer says, well, sir, what we're gonna do is situation dictates. And this happened four, five, six times and finally. One of the times the young officer says, you know, sir, situation dictates, there was a Vietnam Master Chief in the back of the room. And he said, hold on, son.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  And of course, all of our ears perked up.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  And he said, "Listen to me, Lieutenant. This is the SEAL Teams.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  The situation does not dictate to us. We dictate the situation. That's what we do.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  That's how we operate. We put ourselves in a scenarios where we are in control."

• 50:42Speaker 01

  And that always stuck with me. How often we, in life, have the ability to dictate the situation, instead of allowing it to dictate to us what we're gonna do?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Now, look, do some things come up in life that hit you out of nowhere? Yes, and then guess what you do? You decide how you're going to respond to it.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  That's what we're doing.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  And this applies to everything. I was just out in Washington DC, and I was talking to some senior military leadership.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  And I was actually talking to them about leadership. It was an outstanding day. It was great to be out there. And we got done with me briefing them about leadership and the principles of leadership that I learned on the battlefield.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  And then we had a little Q&amp;A session. And during that Q&amp;A session, one of these senior Navy leaders

• 51:56Speaker 01

  raised his hand and said,

• 52:00Speaker 01

  "Hey, Jocko. What about mental health?

• 52:06Speaker 01

  What about suicide? What should we be talking to our service members about when it comes to mental health and suicide?"

• 52:21Speaker 01

  And when he asked me that question,

• 52:25Speaker 01

  it, a thought crystallized in my head that had been gelling for a long time. It brought me back to a moment, once again, during one of my podcasts. I had a guy on my podcast named Colonel Tom Fife.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Colonel Tom Fife had been in World War II. He'd been in Korea, and he'd been in Vietnam.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  And he was awarded a Purple Heart in World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  And so, I'm sitting down, talking with him, and we talked about what he did during World War II, and the actions that he took, and the lessons that he learned. And we talked about Vietnam, where he was now like a tank platoon commander, and the lessons that he learned, and the actions that he took, and the missions that they conducted.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  And then we started talking about Vietnam, where he was a battalion commander. He's in charge of five, or six, or seven hundred soldiers.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  And we're, once again, talking about the missions that they conducted, and the leadership lessons that he had learned.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  And then I asked him

• 53:43Speaker 01

  about the casualties.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  The casualties that he had taken as a battalion commander. I said, "Sir,

• 53:53Speaker 01

  how many casualties did you take when you were battalion commander?" And when I asked him that question,

• 54:03Speaker 01

  he started to get choked up.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  He started to get choked up, thinking about the men he had lost fifty-plus years ago.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Fifty-plus years ago, he had taken casualties as a battalion commander, and he was getting choked up thinking about it.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  And what I realized at that moment

• 54:34Speaker 01

  was that was okay.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  That's normal.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  I think about my guys that I lost, I get choked up. And here's this guy after 50 years and he's still getting choked up. Guess what? That's okay.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  That's okay. That's normal. That's what happens. You lose your friends, you lose your men, you go through hard times. It's okay.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Do I tear up sometimes when I hear the National Anthem? Yes. Yes.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  That's okay.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  And so, as these Navy leaders or these military leaders started asking me about mental health,

• 55:30Speaker 01

  what I wanted to talk to them about is the message that we send.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  And the message that we send, the vast majority of people, the vast majority of people that are going through hard times, that are struggling, that are sad, that are depressed about something, the vast majority of people, you know what they need?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  They need to get told, "Yeah, that's a hard time. You're gonna be okay."

• 56:03Speaker 01

  "Oh, oh, you feel sad about something? Yep, that makes sense. You're a human being. That's okay. You're gonna be alright." That's the vast majority of people. And you know what? Listen, there is a small percentage of people out there. A small percentage of people that there's something that overwhelms them. They get caught in some loop, some negative feedback loop, and things go bad. And when that happens, we gotta get them other kinds of help. We gotta get them inpatient care or outpatient care. They gotta see and talk to somebody that can counsel them back to health.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  But a lot of people, what they actually need to be told is, "You're gonna be alright. It's okay."

• 56:52Speaker 01

  And then, a few weeks later, a few weeks later,

• 56:59Speaker 01

  I was at a restaurant with my family. I got done eating.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  And when I got done eating, I was standing up and going to get the car and a couple guys approached me. And, and one of them, I could see by the look on his face

• 57:18Speaker 01

  that there was some issues, that there was something wrong. I could see that sadness. I could see that that kind of dejected look in his face.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  And he said to me, "I need your help."

• 57:33Speaker 01

  "Okay, man, what's going on?"

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Well, it turns out this individual is a police officer. It turns out that he had been in an incident a couple months prior.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  It was an incident where there was a hostage taken, actually two hostages taken.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  One hostage was killed, one hostage was wounded, the police officer was wounded, and the perpetrator was wounded and captured.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  And he's telling me this story and he looks, he looks horrified about it.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  And he said, "You know, they, they took my badge and they took my gun and they put me on one year administrative leave."

• 58:24Speaker 01

  "That's what I'm going through right now and I need you to help me. Like, I need to be better."

• 58:35Speaker 01

  And I looked at him and I said,

• 58:38Speaker 01

  "Okay, so, let me ask you this. Are you having some bad dreams?" He's like, "Yeah." "You having some nightmares?" He said, "Yeah."

• 58:48Speaker 01

  "Are you having some considerations about what you woulda, shoulda, and coulda done?" He said, "Yep, yep, absolutely."

• 58:58Speaker 01

  I said, "Do you have some guilt?"

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Knowing that there's an innocent person that's dead and you're still here? And he said, "Yeah." "That's what's going on, man."

• 59:09Speaker 01

  And I said, "Hey buddy,

• 59:12Speaker 01

  that's all normal.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  You're gonna be okay."

• 59:17Speaker 01

  And when I told him that, when I told him it was normal, his face changed in front of my eyes. I said, "Yeah, that's normal. You were in a chaotic situation. You got shot! A hostage died! This is a nightmare! Of course you're gonna have bad dreams about it! That's normal!

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Of course you're gonna look back and wish you would've done things different! That's normal!" And as soon as I said that to him, his face changed. And five minutes later, he was smiling. And I was telling him, "Hey dude, sounds like you got a year of paid leave! That sounds pretty cool! Let's take advantage of it!" And you know, he's like, "Yeah, actually, that's kinda true." I said, "Listen, don't go wild, get on a pattern, you know? Make sure you get up at the same time every day, make sure you work out every day, start training jiu-jitsu, start playing guitar, start getting after it! Yeah, get on a schedule!" He's like, "Yeah." And I said, "You know what? In thirty days, you call your department and say, 'Hey, can you screen me again? Because I feel good.'" "Yeah, I got some regrets. Yeah, I got a little bit of survivor's guilt.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  But I feel okay. Those are normal things to feel. Those are normal things to feel."

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  So...

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  This is what we have to help each other with. And this is what we, as leaders,

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  need to pay attention to. We, as leaders, need to pay attention

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  to the currents of the world and which way they are flowing. We need to pay attention, as leaders, to the mob that we're in charge of.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  That's what we need to do, we need to pay attention to the mob that we're in charge of because...

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Because when you're in a leadership position, you're in charge of a mob. You're in charge of a gang of people and they act like a mob sometimes. That's what happens. And that's actually a positive thing. If you bring a team together, they start acting like a gang, they start acting like a mob, they're gonna stick together, they start to have group think.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  But we as leaders cannot participate in that mob. We have to take a step back from it. We have to detach and assess

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  if the mob is going in the right direction.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it's literally like a mob during a riot. People start doing the same things. One person like, oh, maybe we should start flipping over cars and setting them on fire. And then everyone starts flipping over cars and setting them on fire. That's what mobs do.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  When you're in a leadership position, if you're part of that mob, you'll be flipping over cars.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  So what you have to do is detach and stay back from that mob a little bit.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  So you can make sure they're going in the right direction.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  You can spot what's happening. You can see what's happening.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  You can see if the mob starts going in a arrogant direction. Right? You're in charge of a business, you're in charge of a team, and you have some big wins. You execute some good projects. You do some missions and you're successful and you crush it. And now what happens to the mob? The mob starts thinking they're awesome. And maybe we don't need to train and maybe we don't need to prepare.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  And you as a leader need to be outside that mob going,

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  "Hey guys, yep, we did do a good job.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  But here's some things that we could have done better.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Here's some adjustments we can make, don't you think?" So you as a leader gotta pull those reins in a little bit.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Same thing when the gang, or the team, or the mob

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  is making some mistakes, or maybe they fail a mission, or maybe they don't score a new client that they thought they would.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  And maybe they're starting to go down with their morale. And that's when you, as a leader, need to be outside that mob and say, "Hey, team, guess what? We didn't get that client we wanted, but guess what we learned? And now we can make sure that doesn't happen again. Or, "Oh, we made a mistake on this mission, we didn't execute it properly. Guess what? Here's a new standard operating procedure we're gonna implement so it doesn't happen again. And we're gonna go knock the next one out of the park." So you, as the leader, have to sometimes pull in the reins. Sometimes you gotta push them forward. But you gotta detach, and you can't be part of that mob.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  And this is, this is actually counterintuitive. It's counterintuitive to step away from the mob. We, human animals, when we see a mob doing something, we wanna join the mob. It's counterintuitive to step back. And actually, a lot of the leadership principles that I talk about are, they're actually counterintuitive. They're against your natural instincts.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Even the, the idea of extreme ownership.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  The first book that we wrote about leadership. Take ownership of anything, of everything that happens. Don't make any excuses, don't blame anyone else. That's counterintuitive, that's against our natural instincts. Even as kids, little kids, they have the instinct to blame other people or blame other things. Like when you walk into the kitchen and the milk is spilled, and you look at your kid and you say, "What happened?" And your kid says, "The milk spilled."

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  The inanimate object on its own fell over. So we start making excuses and blaming other people and blaming other things at birth. So what I'm asking you to do is actually counterintuitive.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Even the four laws of combat leadership that I started teaching when I was in the SEAL teams, they're all counterintuitive. The first one is cover move, which means it's teamwork. We support each other.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  We look out for our teammate. That's counterintuitive. We are born as human beings with the instinct to take care of ourselves.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  So it's counterintuitive to put our teammate first.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  But that's what good leaders do. They put the team first. They put each other, they put the other people on their team first. That's what good leaders do. Keeping things simple. Obviously, you have to keep things simple, but that's counterintuitive. There's a reason that we have to teach people to keep things simple because their natural instinct is to make it crazy and complicated.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  The third law of combat leadership, prioritize and execute. Don't try and do 30 different things at the same time. You won't be able to do any of them.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  And yet, that's our instinct is to try and handle all of our problems at once. It's counterintuitive to prioritize what's the biggest problem and execute on that one.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  It's counterintuitive. Decentralized command, the idea of letting your subordinate leaders lead, that's absolutely counterintuitive. What we all want to do as human beings is we want to control everything ourselves.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  I'm glad you have to. He's like, yo, that's me. Yeah, that's what we want to do. We want to control everything.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  It's counterintuitive to say, "Hey, you know what? Why don't you take lead on this and run?" That's counterintuitive. It's counterintuitive

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  to keep your ego in check and be humble.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  It's counterintuitive to open up your mind instead of close it.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  It's counterintuitive. It's much easier and much more natural to say, "Oh, I don't like your ideas. I don't like you." That's much more natural for us. "I don't want to deal with your ideas. I don't want to hear what you have to say." It's counterintuitive to actually open up your mind. It's counterintuitive to focus and try and understand other people's perspectives instead of trying to ram your perspective down their throat. Which is what we all seem to do. It's counterintuitive to say, "Oh, no, wait. First, I want to understand what you're thinking."

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  That's counterintuitive. And yes, as I mentioned, it is counterintuitive to detach, to take a step back from your emotions, to take a step back from chaos and mayhem, and to look around and see what's actually happening.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  I had a funny situation with Seth, once again. When

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  we got back from deployment in Task Unit Bruiser, I took over the training for the West Coast SEALs, and Seth took over as a Task Unit Commander.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  And when he took over as Task Unit Commander, now he was going through training to prepare to go on deployment. And in one of the blocks of training, ship boarding, he was climbing up a ladder, and a guy above him on this ladder, who was trying, they were trying to climb onto a ship from a little, small boat. As Seth was about to start climbing this ladder, the guy at the top of the ladder fell

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  and landed square on the top of Seth's head.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  And broke his neck.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  It broke his vertebrae. His spinal cord was okay.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  But he was injured for sure. He had numbness in his arm. He had to put on one of those big neck braces, which was pretty funny.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Especially because I choked him so much. And now all of a sudden, I wasn't allowed to for a few months. So he's in this big neck brace. But his, his task unit was still going through their training box, but he wasn't allowed to bear any weight and he had to kind of take it easy a little bit. But when his task unit went out to the desert to go through their desert warfare training, I said, "Hey, listen, man, you gotta at least go out there and watch what they're doing and see how they're doing and see what their leadership is doing and see how they're executing. So let's go out there." So we drove out to the desert where his task unit was going through their training.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  And the first training mission that we went on with his task unit, about halfway through this training mission, everything was completely falling apart. And what happened was there was a big ravine. And in this big ravine, his guys had been trying to leave and they got ambushed by some opposing forces, which are actually other SEALs, but some bad guys up on the high ground. And they're shooting them with, with this high-speed laser tag that we have. And so these guys are, the bad guys are in the high ground and Seth's platoon is down in this ravine. And we're actually down in the ravine with his platoons. He's got two platoons there. We're down there in the ravine with him. And we're looking around and his, no one is, no one in his task unit is making any decisions.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  They're all just frozen. They're shooting. They're yelling, "I need you guys. I'm hit. Help me." They're just yelling and screaming. Nothing's happening. And Seth looks at me and he goes, "Can I tell them what to do?" And I was like, "No, not yet. Let's see if they figure it out." So another 30 seconds go by. No one's making any decisions. No one's doing anything positive. It's just chaos. And as this is happening, Seth looks at me and goes, "Let me tell them what to do." And I said, "Give them another 30 seconds."

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  So another 30 seconds go by, still, there's no calls being made. He says, "Can I tell him what to do?" I said, "Yeah, go ahead." And he gets down next to one of the guys and he says, "Hey, peel right." Which is just a basic tactical call, which means we're gonna move down this ravine and we're gonna get out of the line of fire of these enemy soldiers. And as soon as he told that young SEAL to do it, that young SEAL said, "Peel right," and they all passed the word and they grabbed their wounded and they peeled to the right and they were out of there.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  And Seth looked at me

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  and he goes, "Man, it's so easy when you're way up here."

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Now, mind you, we were literally in the ravine where his guys were and we were maybe standing or kneeling one foot above them.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  And yet, from that detached position of one foot, he was able to see clearly what to do.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  And I said to him, "Hey Seth, you remember when you and I went through this training? Two years ago?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "This is what it was like for me all the time. I never got wrapped up in my gun, never got wrapped up in shooting. I would always step back and look around and that's how I was able to make calls. It was easy. It's easy if you take a step back and detach.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  That's what you need to do."

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  So,

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  I tried to help him see that.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  And when you're in a leadership position, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to lead people to see things. You're not trying to force things onto people. You can't impose things on people. As a matter of fact, Seth wrote something about this as well.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  So this is Seth Stone writing.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  He said, "When I met Jocko for the first time, I was sure he hated me on a deep and personal level."

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  "Jocko approached me with aggression and looked me in the eyes. He came up to about half my face, because I am a few inches taller than him, but he stood there indifferent to my life or death, to me at all, but seemingly only assessing to himself if I should stay or go based on this first encounter. And I felt it.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  And in those few seconds, it seemed like he was leaning toward deciding that I should go, that I should not be part of his team.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  And I felt nervous and scared because I did not want to be fired. I had worked for other SEAL officers, but I could sense this man Jocko was not like them.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  I was not his kind of naval officer. I was a surfer with longer hair.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  I was too lax with my men, too jovial, too unprofessional."

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  The thing is, all those things were both true, yet at the same time untrue.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  The existence of opposing truths working themselves out in me as I tried to find myself and establish who I was. I wanted to be liked, to fit in, but I needed to lead.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  So, the things that Jocko did not like were things that needed to die anyways.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Some of my men told me after the wars, "You are just not the same as you used to be. You are different now."

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  And they were right.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  I lost myself, but in doing so, I found myself.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Jocko helped me on that path, but I had to figure it out because it is a path. It is a struggle. You have to work it out on your own.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  It was actually Leif who reassured me about Jocko, saying, "Jocko is good to go, man. Give him a chance." "If you want to keep your spot as platoon commander, come train jujitsu in the mornings." That's what Leif told me, and so I did.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Jocko had us lined up religiously in the mornings to fight each other.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  It was his way of determining platoon fault lines and strengths and leadership qualities, and who had a will to win.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  He pitted us against one another, and he did not care who won. What he wanted to see was fighting.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  And we fought him too. And that was most horrible.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Because most of us, because most of us never heard of jujitsu, and we didn't know any of the tactics or techniques from this grappling art, but we wanted to learn.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Leif and I fought often, our necks so strained from chokeholds that we could not even look to the left or to the right. And everybody in the morning officers' meeting knew we had been fighting from the way we held our heads. We had bruises and scuffs and scrapes on our skin. We wore the right uniforms, and we had shaved heads.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  I shaved my head after Jocko set in my mind that discipline is not worth risking over long hair or trying to look cool.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  And having a shaved head was the stormtrooper way.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Months later.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  In the evenings, in Ramadi,

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  when I plucked off the helmet from my head wearily in the thickness of the night air and felt the stickiness of the dust-filled mud mixed with my sweat, I was glad I had no hair.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Jocko had been right.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Through those types of lessons, he had molded us into stormtroopers and soldiers.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  But it is important to note that I did not shave my head right away, and Jocko never required it. He just put it out there as a good idea.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  As a mentor, he did not seek to immediately and totally change the mentee.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Even the best protege required patience as thousands of lessons, both big and small, were processed in the complex human mind.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  So,

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  when we are leading, we are not imposing things on people. That is not what's happening.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  At least it shouldn't be happening. When we're leading,

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  what we're doing is caring about people.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  When I used to

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  debrief a SEAL platoon after a training evolution,

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  and I would point out all the things that they did wrong. I would point out all the mistakes that they made. I would point out all the idiotic things that they had done.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  And I was as harsh as you could possibly imagine.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  I'd look at that young platoon commander and be like, "What were you even thinking? Bringing your platoon into that exposed position? You're gonna get everyone killed, what's wrong with you?"

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  I was as harsh as I could possibly be. And as I thought about that, and I thought about this the other day, I used to debrief platoons,

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  and guys would record it, audio record what I was saying, so they could play it back later.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  Well, a while ago, one of my friends sent me a bunch of recordings of me debriefing a bunch of different SEAL platoons.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  And they are harsh.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  And yet, I'm sitting here telling you that what a leadership position is, is you care about people. So, how can I possibly go out and be so harsh in my debriefs? And how does the team not reject me and think I'm imposing things on them? And the answer is, the answer is that those guys and those platoons knew that more than anything else in the world, I did care about them.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  And my harshness was not out of disgust or anger. My harshness was out of love, because I wanted them to be able to do their job and I wanted them to be able to bring their guys home.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  That's what leadership is, caring about your people.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  And when you care about your people...

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Your people will care about you. We have a saying in the SEAL teams, very similar to that. We have a saying in the SEAL teams.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  If you take care of your gear, your gear will take care of you. So if you're gonna jump a parachute, you maintain that parachute. You pack it correctly, so when you pull the ripcord, it takes care of you. If you have a dive rig, you take care of that dive rig. You do the proper maintenance, you set it up correctly, so when you're underwater, you can breathe. You take care of your weapons, so when you pull the trigger, they shoot. If you take care of your gear, your gear will take care of you.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  But this applies absolutely, it applies absolutely with people.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  And if you take care of your people, they will take care of you. They will absolutely take care of you.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  The first guy to get wounded badly in tasking at Bruiser, a guy named Cowie. Awesome guy. Terrific guy, very early in deployment.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  He gets lit up by a machine gun and he catches a round just above his knee. It exits his leg up by his groin. His leg is wrecked, it's an armor piercing round, it's wrecked. And he gets pulled off the battlefield and taken to the medical center, the field medical center that we have. And that's when I get there to go and see him and check on him, how he's doing. And by now, the mission is over and the platoon's back there and guys are checking on him.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  And I walk in to the room where he is. And this is after the doc looked at me and I asked him about his leg and he kinda gave me the "we're not sure" look.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  So I'm thinking that this young athletic stud of a human being, he may never walk again, he may lose his leg, I don't know what's gonna happen.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  And I walk into the room and I look at Cowie.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  And he sees me and you know, he's on morphine, so he's a little messed up, but he sees me and he locks eyes with me. And I walk over to him, he puts his hand up.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  And I put my hand in his hand and he pulls me in close to him.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  And he says, "Sir, let me stay."

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  "Let me stay. I'll sweep up, it doesn't matter. Just please, don't send me home. Let me stay."

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  Same thing happened with Ryan Jobe. Ryan Jobe

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  shot in the face. It's the same day that Mark Lee got killed. Ryan Jobe got shot in the face and luckily, because he was a disciplined machine gunner, he had his weapon up in his cheek well where it's supposed to be. And so the round that was aimed at his head actually hit his weapon first. And it slowed down the round enough, but it blew a bunch of frag into Ryan's face and to his head.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  But luckily, he made it out of there. And he was evacuated, casualty evacuated. He was put into a medically induced coma.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  And when he woke up from that coma,

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  he couldn't see anymore. He's blind.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  And the first time I talked to him on the phone, the first thing he said to me was "Let me come back, sir."

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  Mikey Mansour, same thing. Mikey Mansour, one time Seth called me, he called on the radio and said "We've had a casualty evacuation." "Mikey's being casualty evacuated." And I wasn't there to receive the message. I go down there, "The Tac Cooperation Center hands me this message, says, "Michael Mansour's been evacuated, casualty evacuation." "What happened? What happened?" "I don't know how bad he is, I don't know what kind of wound he got." I call up Seth on the field radio, "Hey, what happened?" "Well, how bad is Mikey wounded?" And Seth goes, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." "Mikey's okay, he has an ear infection." "It's a bad one." "He's going to Balad to get some medicine."

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  "Okay."

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  "I might want to clarify that next time."

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  So Mikey goes and gets some medicine, he comes back, and now he's on my camp, and Seth's over on the other side of Mermadi. And Mikey gets there, and as soon as he comes back from getting his treatment on his ear and his medicine for his ear, he comes back to my camp, he says, "What are the guys doing tonight?" I said, "Well, they're going on a mission." "You're not going to be able to make it."

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  And Mikey just looked at me and said, "Sir, please, get me back before they leave."

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  And we found the convoy for Mikey, and he went back so he could roll out with his platoon mates, so he could take care of his friends.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  If you take care of your people,

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  your people will take care of you.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  After Seth died,

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  I was talking to his brother. And his brother was telling me this story.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Seth's neck healed up and he was a task unit commander. He deployed back to Iraq and this was in 2008. And at this time, in early 2008, it didn't look like there was going to be a lot going on during deployment. And Seth talked to me about it, you know, what am I going to do? There's nothing going on. I said, hey, man, go over there, work out, get in good shape, train jiu-jitsu, do what you can, and come back home. I'll see you in a few months. Cool. So Seth goes on deployment with his troop.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  And everyone's expecting kind of a mellow deployment.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  Well, shortly after he got there, it turns out that the army was conducting a significant operation in a part of Baghdad called Sotter City, which had been controlled by the enemy for five years straight. And so the army finally realized they need to go in there and stop this. And they were, they went in there and they were building this giant wall to kind of cut off Sotter City from being able to be resupplied. And they were taking heavy casualties as they built this giant wall.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  And they heard that SEALs were back there and they requested support from the SEALs.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  And the commanding SEAL grabbed Seth and said, alright, you're going to take some troops and you're going to go into Sotter City and help the army build this wall.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  And of course, I was tracking this. There's a classified phone that you can talk on and I knew what Seth was doing. I knew how things were going and I was reading the after-action reports and I could see, and Seth was telling me how horrible it was in Solder City. The enemy was determined. They had a lot of enemy. They had freedom of movement. They were extremely well armed. They developed weapon systems and acquired weapon systems that were very difficult to deal with. I knew all this was happening. Well, I talked to Alex after Seth died. And Alex told me he was tracking it too.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Seth had been sending emails. In the beginning of the deployments, "Oh, deployment's fine, there's nothing going on." And all of a sudden, they took a sharp turn. "We're conducting some very hazardous missions. There's a lot of army casualties. These attacks are incredibly intense." And I got an email that showed me exactly how hard the fighting was there.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  Seth sent me an email that had his last will and testament. That he wanted me to execute if he died. And his brother, Alex, was sensing the same things in the emails. Not quite as clear, but he could tell by Seth's tone when they talked and when he got emails that this was a grave situation. And finally, Alex wrote in an email and said, "Hey, brother, it sounds like it's bad. Is there anything you need from me?

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Is there anything I can do for you? Is there anything that you want me to help with?"

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  And Seth wrote back one sentence.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  He just said,

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  "Pray for my men."

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  He didn't care about himself. He didn't ask for anything for himself. All he cared about was his troops.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  And that's what leadership is.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  You take care of your people.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  That's leadership.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  I want to close this out now. But before I close it out, I want to say thank you to a very special guest that is here tonight.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  Up there in the balcony seat where she belongs,

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  that's Seth Stone's mom, Debbie.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  Thank you for coming, Mom.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  I've been talking tonight

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  about the choices that we make, the way we decide to look at things. And I've got two last things I want to talk about that I think capture that.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  2018, there was a ceremony for the commissioning of the USS Michael Monsour.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  Michael Monsour was in Task Unit Bruiser.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  During one of the last operations that he would be going on,

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  he jumped on a grenade and smothered it in order to save three of our other teammates.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  And he was killed by the wounds that he suffered. And he received the Medal of Honor posthumously for his actions.

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  And they made a ship and named it after him. And in 2018, they had a commissioning ceremony for this ship and

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  many of the members of Task Unit Bruiser were together again for the first time.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Most of us were there.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Not all of them.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  When we were

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  together, we went to SEAL Team 3, the old SEAL Team. There's a new SEAL compound now, but the SEAL Team 3 building that we had been in was still there. And when you go to a military unit, oftentimes they will memorialize the fallen members of that military unit on the walls of their building.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  And what you might not know about SEAL Team 3 is SEAL Team 3 was formed in 1983. It's not that old. And when Task Unit Bruiser was at SEAL Team 3 and I was at SEAL Team 3, it was 2005.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  And those walls were empty.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  Because

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  there had been no

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  members of SEAL Team 3 killed in combat.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  And as I walked through those halls now in 2018,

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  there was pictures on those walls. There were memorials on those walls.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Memorials for Mark. Memorials for Mikey.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Memorials for Ryan.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  For Chris Kyle.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  And for Seth.

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  And as I saw those pictures, I started to get angry.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  I started to get mad. I started to get frustrated. I started to think that maybe

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  maybe we were cursed.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  We were being followed by death. We made it home. And we lost Mark and we lost Mikey, but we made it home.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  And then we lost Ryan,

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  who died of his wounds. And then Chris Kyle.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  And finally Seth. And I'm thinking, what is going wrong? Why is this happening?

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  Maybe we're cursed.

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  And then I thought about it.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  And I realized, and I chose, and I decided that that was absolutely not the case. I saw that that was absolutely not the case. We were not cursed at all. We were blessed. We were blessed. We were blessed to have known these guys. We were blessed to have spent time with them.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  We were blessed to have served alongside them. We were blessed to be able to call them brothers. We were blessed to have their memories.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  We were blessed, not cursed at all.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  And knowing them, and serving with them.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  That wasn't a curse. It was a blessing, and it made us better. War made us better.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  But that's a choice.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  You have to see it that way. You have to decide to see it in the most positive way.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  And that's the correct way. It's the truth.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  So when you're going through hard times, think about that. Think about the choice you're gonna make on how you're gonna look at it, and how you're gonna allow these bad things in your life to impact you.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  You have a choice to make.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Make the right choice. And it's the same thing when it comes to facing challenges. And there's another story that stuck with me. I had John Stryker Meyer Tilt on my podcast many times now. He was a Green Beret, Special Forces during Vietnam. He was a SOG Green Beret.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  And through him, I learned many stories about what those guys went through. And one story that stuck with me was August 23rd, 1968.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  There's a forward operating base, forward operating base four.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  And the enemy spent months preparing

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  and planning.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  And on that day, they executed a horrific attack and a well-coordinated attack to overrun that forward operating base. And they did a very good job in their execution. They made it through the wire. They got inside the compound. They were throwing explosives and grenades and they had trained specifically for this operation for months.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  And they caught the Green Berets off-guard and they kind of started to get the upper hand.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  But the Green Berets were able to get a foothold back. And they held on long enough until the next morning when reinforcements arrived.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  And they were able to take that base back over, but these enemy soldiers, their bodies were laying around.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  And the Green Berets started to go around and try and gather intelligence

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

  from what these enemy soldiers had with them. And they didn't have much. They had some grenades, they had machine guns, they didn't have maps.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  They didn't have any written documents. They had weapons, but they also had something else.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  They were wearing, many of them were wearing headbands.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  And on their headbands, they had the words written, "We came to die."

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  We came to die.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  Think about that. Think about that choice.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Think about fighting against people that made that choice. And when I heard that story,

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  it made me think to myself, wait a second. How do you fight against somebody that's made that choice? That's chosen to die? And then I thought, you know, we've been doing this. We did it against the Japanese, the kamikazes. They chose to die. We fight against the suicidal jihadists, they chose to die. How do you fight an enemy that's choosing to die?

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  And how do we defeat them?

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  And I realized how. I realized how.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  Because we have our own mantra.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  We have our own battle cry, and it's the opposite of theirs. They say, "They came to die." We,

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  we came to live.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  We came to build, we came to help, we came to grow. That's what we're here for. And that's a decision that we can all make. Not a decision of destruction,

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  not a decision of death, but to choose to live and to relish every second of this life and do everything we can with it.

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  And that's what I would ask every single one of you to do.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Go out into the world and build and grow and help

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  and go out

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  and live.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  And that's what I've got, everybody. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you! Thank you! Go live! Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much.