518: Six Days in Hell, And Why That Was Just Normal. With Army Ranger Crazy Joe Claburn

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Joe Clayburn is a U. S. Army infantry officer who rose from a turbulent childhood to command Charlie Company, 1st and 506th — the “Gunfighters” — during the brutal Ramadi 2005–2006 fight. He led his unit through daily firefights, IED strikes, and ambushes, while building the company into a highly effective combat force. After Ramadi, he was selected to lead the 101st Pathfinder Company and later served with the British Parachute Regiment. His career reflects intense frontline experience, high-stakes leadership, and a deep commitment to developing soldiers. 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 518 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:07Jocko Willink?

  I don't think that they could even fathom what it's like to be mortared for three days straight on camp. I don't think they can realize the scope and the magnitude of operations that go on on a daily basis here in Ramadi. We get seven IEDs that go off here in one day, or we kill 40 insurgents in one day and it doesn't even make the news. We lost five soldiers to IEDs on this road that we're on right now. 20% of my company right now is eligible for the Purple Heart, which means that I've had 20% of my company wounded in combat.

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  Anything the locals do to supporting democracy is supporting the coalition and for that you get your head cut off.

• 0:53Jocko Willink?

  We get mortared about four to five times a week. We've had more enemy attacks here in a day on this base than most units in half in two weeks. I'll get shot at by a sniper. Two hours later, I'll get mortared. Two hours later, I'll get RPGed. Four hours later, I'll get mortared again. Welcome to war. Welcome to combat. I'm in the wild, wild west. Welcome to Ramadi bitch.

• 1:24Jocko Willink?

  And those are some quotes right there from then Captain Joe Claiborne, Charlie Company Commander, first of the 506. Some of those quotes are from NPR News from an article of June 19th, 2006, or others are from an old YouTube video called A Little Slice of Ramadi.

• 1:43Jocko Willink?

  And Joe Claiborne, call sign Gunfighter Six, nicknamed Crazy Joe, is one of the most proficient and battle-tested combat leaders that I saw during my entire career. I remember him leading his company in prayer prior to going in to the field with him. And that. made it crystal clear to me how dangerous this city was and how much he cared about his troops.

• 2:12Jocko Willink?

  And after that first operation with him, I had complete confidence that he would take care of my SEALs, just as he took care of his own troops. And Joe Claiborne ended up conducting countless operations with Seth Stone's attachment of SEALs out at Camp Corregidor in Eastern Ramadi. Seth and his boys spent almost the entire deployment in support of the legendary First of the 506 Band of Brothers, under the incredible leadership of then Colonel, now General, Ronald Clark. And the SEALs from Task Unit Bruiser, integrated to the point where they wore Army ACUs.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  As they conducted clearance operations together, as they set up mutually supporting overwatches. And when needed, Charlie Company and the First of the 506 provided quick reaction forces and casualty evacuations for Seth on too many occasions to count. They fought and bled together as one team, and we will never forget that bond, that brotherhood that was formed on that battlefield. And it is an absolute honor to have retired Major Joe Claiborne, Crazy Joe, Gunfighter Six, here with us tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Joe, thanks for joining us, man. Freaking outstanding to have you here.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  What an intro. Thanks, Jocko.

• 3:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, uh, we, we've been trying, you and I first connected in 2016. We started going back and forth on LinkedIn, trying to make this happen, but you know, you have life going on. I have life going on. Finally, I think with, with a, a little nudge from the Ramadi reunion that's happening in January of 2026, we kind of got connected. I got a, I lit a fire under my ass to get you on here. Uh, I apologize that it took so long, but man, you and I just talked for, I don't know, 40 minutes before we even started the. Incredible, you know, bond that you had with my guys was, was it just, it's, it's gonna

• 4:18Jocko Willink?

  take a long time for us to get through this. So, and not to mention, you have this stack of journals with you. One, two, three, what's that, four, five?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Four of these.

• 4:28Jocko Willink?

  Four journals, and you were showing them to me. Highly detailed notes, pictures, photographs, terrain sketches that you drew out after operations. So, I know how much I've forgotten, and the fact that you have these notes written down is incredible. I'm sure that they will be turned into a book at some point in the near future. So, let's get into it, man. Let's get into it.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's rock.

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so just give us some background of where you're growing up and what that was like for you.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I was born in Maryland and was one of three kids from a single mom. So, you know, being raised in that sort of condition, I think you, you learn early on that you, you gotta kind of take care of yourself a little bit. We were probably not financially well off. You know, we, we bounced around a little bit. And, you know, there were times where, you know, when you're that young, you really don't know what poor is. But, you know, hindsight being 2020, you, you just kind of realize that, you know, oh my God, like sleeping in the back of a car was probably not normal for most people, you

• 5:42Speaker 01

  know, borrowing a couch at a cousin's house, or, you know, doing what you could. And, and I just remember, you know, she worked really hard to, to try to raise us. And I can only imagine how difficult it was for her to be able to do that. And I wasn't an easy kid, you know?

• 6:00Jocko Willink?

  Why does that not surprise me?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Um, I was probably a pretty, uh, you know, I really had no interest in school. I just kind of wanted to go and do my thing. But I can tell you that from a young age, I was fascinated with all things military. I just, you know, it just- Gravitated in nature and you know, I grew up in the eighties when you know, all those great war movies came out and you just wanted to be like all of that, you know? And right around the time that I was 13, I just remember jumping on a Greyhound bus and leaving and I had an uncle that lived down in Georgia and he was stationed at Fort Stewart and you know, and I'd always looked up to him. So I was like, you know what, I'm gonna go down

• 6:45Speaker 01

  and visit him and I never went back home. I ended up staying with him. We moved to Alabama after that and you know, when people ask me where you're from, I always say Alabama because I feel like that's when I became me, you know, and the definitive point of who I wanted to be was that time, you know, in Alabama.

• 7:06Jocko Willink?

  So was your uncle raising you then?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he took me in. I had to become a ward of the court at that point in order for that to happen because obviously I did have a mother. I did not know who my father was. There was nothing on my birth certificate to even hint. So that has been, you know, an interesting journey of, you know, trying to piece that together.

• 7:28Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever piece it together?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  I did. I did.

• 7:30Jocko Willink?

  Did you find out where he is or?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, unfortunately, he passed away by the time I found him. An incredible story about how I did it. You know, my wife got me an ancestry DNA kit and it took me a year after that to kind of find some people that I was related to that I couldn't figure out how and slowly but surely I kind of linked some things together and ended up finding an uncle who agreed to do the test and he came out like 97% my uncle. So my dad unfortunately passed away, but I found a half brother that I didn't even know existed. You know, my grandfather and my grandmother were both Marines in World War II. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living female

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Marine in the country. You know, it was, and I kind of, you know, kind of swelled up with pride a little bit thinking like, maybe this is where I got it, you know, maybe this this deep desire to want to serve and. And do that, but. You had a little bit of genetic Marine Corps. I think so. And I remember, you know, this is right around the same time. I remember I need to go talk to the recruiters, right? I just need to get the hell out of here and go live my own life. And I'm 17 years old and I really wanted to enlist at 17. I wanted to just get it going. And I remember calling them all, took the ASVAB and scored really high on the mechanical,

• 8:52Speaker 01

  you know, conceptual, detailed stuff. And I go to the army and they go, ah, yeah, we think we, uh, we think we're gonna make you a helicopter mechanic. And I was like, cool. I go to the Air Force. Yeah, we think we're gonna let you work on like F-16s. What do you think about that? I was like, all right, cool. And I go to the Marines and I'm like, what jobs he got? He looked at me and said infantry.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  I was like, that's it? He goes, every Marines and infantryman, let's start there. And I was like, that's pretty cool. So he almost had me. Almost had. What, what, what made you decide army then finally? I think the fact that I had been around it, you know, the uncle influence. Um, I clearly knew that I was really creating my own path. I wasn't following anybody else. Um, but really in the end, what, what got me was this, uh, advance of college money that they threw in front of my face and said, listen, if you go and do this, we'll pay for your college to get you through basically like an OCS program that'll last, you know, two years.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  You'll get an associate's degree out of this thing, but the best thing you'll be able to do is basically join a local National Guard unit. Until you finish your four year degree and that'll be all on you. You're gonna have to do that on your own. And I was like, well, you know what? I, I, I knew officers paid more. So it was like a no brainer to me. So, uh, you know, I, I. So did you get commissioned after two years or after? I did. I had two years. Two years, huh? So I, I enlisted in the army as a 67 Fox, which was a helicopter mechanic, never spent a day in MOS, never went AIT. Went straight to, uh, this officer program that I spent two years in, uh, and at 20 years old, before I could even buy a beer.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  I was commissioned as a second lieutenant and um and with the National Guard, you know, it's not, you've got to go find a unit to be in and there in Alabama, I found an infantry unit. And you know, they're called the Fourth Alabama. They never surrendered their colors at the end of the Civil War, so they're still called the Fourth Alabama still to this day. And and I joined those guys and I'm going to tell you that, you know, my my three years, because I had to finish my degree, I, you know, go to Infantry Officer Basic Course during that time. I actually turned 21 years old on an IMT course, an individual movement course.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  My birthday is in February. I'm in Fort Benning, Georgia. It is freezing cold and I am low crawling

• 11:23Speaker 01

  through basically ice water. And I remember thinking to myself like, this is really what I wanted to do on my 21st birthday? Is, you know, be low crawling through muddy iced water? And but I get back to my unit, you know, I spent three years with those guys and

• 11:42Speaker 01

  let me tell you, I those were formative years for me as a young officer because not only was I super young, I mean, my first sergeant was in Vietnam, for God's sake, you know, and I'm looking at the guy, he was in Hamburger Hill. And I remember listening to stories from him and he was like, oh yeah, when the shit went down, man, he's like, I threw off my rucksack and we just, he goes, I left everything behind because of, you know, the firefight that had gone on. So I was around very seasoned, very old veterans of, you know, a lot of different experience. And I will tell you that they treated me as a young officer that really needed to understand the NCO Corps.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  They really wanted me to understand what it was like to be a soldier and I, I don't know that they'd realize that they were doing it at the time. Again, looking back on it now, you know, I always did and was always encouraged by that unit to do what the men were doing. If the men were sleeping, you know, underneath the Bradley because weather was bad, then I got under the Bradley too. I didn't get to sleep in the Bradley. You get out of the Bradley and you spend it with the, the men. If you go on patrol, uh, you, you're asking the men to do it, then you need to go out there and do it too. And I think that those formative years in the one, six, seven infantry, fourth Alabama and the NCOs that I had, every single soldier that I was

• 13:11Speaker 01

  in charge of after that needs to go back and thank all those guys because they really, really did instill in me the obligation that I had as an officer to do the right thing and set the example at all times.

• 13:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's incredible how much the, how much you're form, you're formed by your first experiences when you get in the military. And what would happen to me is when I was like running training for the SEAL teams, I'd have some guy that was like not doing good or he wasn't, you know, his leadership was off and I'd be like, who, who was your first platoon chief? And then he'd tell me, I go, okay, tracking. And then I have some total stud and I'd be like, who is your, who is your first platoon chief? They'd tell me and I'd be like, total stud. Yeah, got it. So it tracks. You get, you definitely get a lot of your DNA develops in your first early experiences in the military and that can be awesome. Like it was in your case can also be unfortunately terrible.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Well, you know, transition, I got my four year degree. I go on active duty. I asked for the hundred and first airborne division. I got my first choice.

• 14:10Jocko Willink?

  And this is the year 2000, right?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  This is 2000.

• 14:12Jocko Willink?

  And you, you get to select the hundred and first?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  I get to select. Yeah. I think I, you know, I think I did good enough in school where they were, you know, they were like, okay, you're definitely stay at infantry. Uh, and we're, we'll give you the hundred first. And I remember showing up to the hundred and first and I, I was made a platoon leader again, even though I was a first lieutenant by this time. And I get to my unit and my, my, my very first platoon sergeant was basically like, hey, sir, um, over there in the, uh, the CP, there's an office there. Um,

• 14:43Speaker 01

  You need to be in it and we'll let you know if you need anything. And I was like, okay, like this doesn't really seem. It didn't feel normal to me like I just wanted to be with the guys and I didn't want to be a sit in the office in color until we need you to show up kind of guy. And that right there let me know that it was probably not going to be a good fit for he and I. So, you know, he ended up leaving the unit and I got some other NCOs in. And they really, I mean, at that point, again, it was if you're, if you're asking the men to do something, you need to do it.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, a lot of that early years in the 101st, you know, we were still doing, you know, knock out a bunker drills. We were react to contact drills and ambush and dismounting patrols and, you know, we were still almost fighting the old Russian doctrine style fighting. And, you know, and I go into this in some of my books, I call it, you know, really the maturation of military thought of what happened after September 11th. You know, because I'm at PT and I'm on my way home and I heard on the, you know, radio that, you know, America was under attack. And I remember thinking like, oh my God, like, is this, is this really for real?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Like, you gotta be kidding me. As the world would have it, my unit was the division readiness brigade for the entire United States Army. So we were the unit that at any moment, anywhere in the world, if something were to happen, we could be wheels up in 36 hours. Now that rotates unit to unit in the Army. And, and when you start off, you've got to load everything. You got to load your con axes, your vehicles are all loaded up. Like you, you go through painstakingly to make sure that everything is ready. So that if you do get the call, you're gone. And And there hadn't been a call in a long

• 16:52Speaker 01

  There hadn't been a call in a very long time. And I remember going back and taking a shower and watching it on the news. And I was like, oh shit, like tag, you're it like, we're gonna get the call, man. And and we did. We got the call. And then you guys, what you guys go straight to Pakistan? You guys started in Pakistan? Where'd you guys start? We did. So the 187 infantry out of Fort Campbell, known as the Rakaasan's, they got the call. And we were actually due to give up our DRB responsibilities. Um, within a week and the division said, no, you guys are already packed. You're staying until we get to call. So right just before Thanksgiving is when we went on lockdown,

• 17:35Speaker 01

  told our families goodbye, we loaded up and they flew us into Pakistan and really remote base that used to, they built it because they thought we were going to give them some aircraft that we did not end up giving them. So they had this huge air force base that was not being used. And so they put us there. And yeah, we did the initial invasion into Afghanistan. So when you talk about, you know, the old places, Kandahar Airfield, Bagram, um, those were places that like we went in and we took. So you did, what are those like airfield seizure type operations? They were, yeah, they were like full blown air assaults from Pakistan, hundreds of miles.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And you were still a platoon commander at this point? No, at this point I was the air operations officer. So my job. God, you wish you would have been a platoon commander. A bunch of freaking air assaults. I mean, it was, it was a lot of work. Um, you know, I mean, you're, you know, down to like, what guy is getting on what helicopter? And down to the minute, you know, everything is scheduled down to really seconds for pilots. Uh, waypoints in, out, and it's kind of interesting that, you know, here you are, you're fighting Russian doctrine, one minute where you're expecting an advance guard and the mechanized unit to come in. And now all of a sudden you're doing a 300 mile air assault with nothing more than what you can carry on your back.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Into the mountains of Afghanistan at thirteen, fourteen thousand feet. And you're thinking to yourself like, we're totally unprepared for this. Like, this is not anything about what we trained for. And, you know, seeing how we dealt with that, and you know, we talk a lot about operational risk.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And I wondered today, just because it was so fresh, you know, September 11th. Operation Anaconda happened in March of 2002. Big operation, Special Forces, Navy SEALs, Army, 10th Mountain Division, 101st. Big operation up into the mountains to really put a stranglehold on the Al Qaeda and Taliban encampments that were up there. And when we did that air assault, it was so far, we actually had to stop and refuel the helicopters before we were able to get there. And the mountains were so high and the air was so thin that the helicopters had a hard time getting up to altitude to get us where we needed to be.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  And it's, it's freezing cold up there. And, you know, battalion commander had, you know, the thought of a travel light, freeze at night. I remember him saying that. And every other guy took what we called a fart sack, a sleeping bag with him. The rest of the guys just took ammo. Mortar, you know, mortar guys were traveling in with 60 minute mortar plates. And getting dropped off in the wrong location in the mountains was significant, right? So my job was really important. It was to get the guys in, get the guys in the right place because even 800 yards off could turn into literally a 1,400 foot climb.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  With full kit.

• 21:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  To get where you're going.

• 21:05Jocko Willink?

  When you're in a helicopter is like 20 seconds, 15 seconds, it goes by. It's just like you, you know, the pilot's like, oh, oh, oh, that's the LZ. Okay, cool. I'll set it down here. And you're now 800 yards off.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  And guess who's getting the blame?

• 21:17Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  I'm looking at the boss going, sir, I wasn't flying the helicopter. I just told him where to go. So I go out on a couple of these missions, you know, um, right as Operation Anicon is going. We've got a couple casualties that are up there on the mountain. Um, I remember Sergeant Major Grippy was up there and he was with the Tin Mountain at the time and he got shot. Um, so we, I flew on a medevac to, to get them out and the same helicopter I was on actually had a sling load full of ammo and food and some other things that we're going to do. And same thing, helicopters hovering there. Um, and as you know, RPGs flying through that mountain, just like in Red Wings, man, I mean, they can pop out of anywhere.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  And, uh, he cut sling load on this cargo net and it hits just like right on the side of an embankment of a hill. And all this supply, all this ammo, mortar rounds, literally slides like 800 yards down this cliff face. And then he hovers forward and lands and I'm in the back and, um, they're supposed to bring the casualties to me. There's a cargo net that we were supposed to take back from them so we could, you know, replenish supplies. And like all of a sudden, as I'm looking out of the back of the CH47, everybody in front of me like drops to the ground.

• 22:33Jocko Willink?

  Not a good sign.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  And I'm literally like, what the fuck? Like, you know, so I'm yelling like, come on. And nobody's moving. So I run out of the back of the helicopter. I just got my vest on, a helmet, no weapon or anything. And, um, I, I reached down and I grabbed this kid by the back of, you know, there's a handle on the back of the body armor, you know? And I grab him and he looks up at me and I was like, let's go. And he jumps up and literally outruns me back to the back of the helicopter. And while I'm trying to grab this cargo net, which is a hundred plus pounds, you know, and the other casualties are moving now. Well, little did I know.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  We were in contact and these guys were sitting up on top of the mountain with AKs and they were shooting down at us, but I couldn't hear a single thing. The rotor wash of the helicopter was completely washing out any sound of bullets that I could hear. When I finally get to the back of the helicopter, the tail gunner on the back of the Chinook is obviously on the radio, tells the pilots, hey, we got the last guy and they punch it. And I mean, that helicopter lifted off to like almost the nose pointing to the ground, the ass pointing ahead and I'm in the back not wearing a seatbelt and I rolled all the

• 24:00Speaker 01

  way to the front and landed in the jump seat of the two pilots, like looking to my left and my right and, and you know, and there we go. And the, the tail gunner then rips and, and just goes hot. And I, I remember getting back to the, to Bagram and as we were, you know, about to do mission debrief and stuff and the tail gunner goes, sir, I cannot believe that you made it out of there. And I was like, well, you know, what did you see from your perspective? He goes, they were shooting at you. And he said, all I could see was the ground around you exploding and you were so focused

• 24:44Speaker 01

  on getting this cargo net that they're all yelling at me to get on the back of the helicopter. And so when I ran, we were, they were shooting at the helicopter. And so hence the reason why the extreme takeoff and the roll forward and, and that sort of became the beginning of the Crazy Joe.

• 25:07Jocko Willink?

  The lore, the lore of Crazy Joe.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Um, I remember, uh, same thing at Balgram really, really early on and we, we had to clear that, you know, the Russians laid landmines all over that base. And, uh, and I remember I had to get, you know, shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And I'm on one of those little six wheel gator things, you know, rolling around the airfield. And I just looked across and was like, oh, uh, that's where I need to go. And off I went. Uh, same thing. I start hearing people yelling over on the side and I turn around and look and they're, you know, come back. Well, I had driven through the minefield.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  And then because they were waving me back instead of keeping going.

• 25:52Jocko Willink?

  This borderline going from Crazy Joe to dumb Joe at this point.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  So I turned around and I drove back.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  And they go, sir, none of that, but none of it was marked. And you know, I didn't have anything to go off of, you know, and, uh, so that those moments right there, that, that was the first time I'd ever been shot at in my entire life. You know, I'm only 20 something years old. Um, wasn't on the ground to do combat operations. I was in support of, and again, going back to the, as the S3 guy, I could have very easily just said, take the stuff out there. But those were my guys out there and I needed to make sure that the stuff was dropped off in the right location. I wanted to make sure that our casualties were picked up. So I put myself in that. And I remember going back to bed that night and laying down

• 26:42Speaker 01

  on my cot and thinking to myself like, man, I almost died today, you know, like coming out of the back of the helicopter, ground is exploding around me. And the fact that you're oblivious to it, uh, the afterwards, it sort of seeps in a little bit and you're like, man, I didn't do anything to that guy. Why was he trying to kill me? Like what, you know, sort of offended by the, the whole thing, you know? And, uh, so, you know, we, we conducted a ton of operations in Afghanistan and, um, you know, very proud of my time with the, the 101st during that time. But, you know, like all things, it, it was time for me to move on. And so I ended up getting orders to go to the captain's course and

• 27:25Speaker 01

  learn how to be a company commander. And, uh, and I'm on leave and I'm all by myself down in Costa Rica and I'm having a beer at a bar. It is, I don't know, February, March, somewhere around in there, and I see on the news, CNN, 101st Airborne Gets Deployment Orders To Iraq. This is 2003. And I was like, oh my God, they're gonna go without me. And I went back to my hotel, and I called my boss, Lieutenant Colonel.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  I said, sir, any chance you can call the Army and say, this guy is so vitally important to the mission's success of our unit that we have to cancel his orders, and he's gotta come back. And he did. He called and said, cancel his orders. He's not going to go learn how to be a company commander. I'm bringing him back. And I participated in the, again, initial invasion into Afghanistan, not like, what, six months later? So you postponed Company Command and Company Commander's course, so you could go and be, what was your job during that? So- During the initial invasion? Went back in as an Assistant III, but because of all my experience planning and organizing air assault missions, I had a dual duty to do that. So I was basically like a battle captain,

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Assistant S3, helping draft orders and really getting a good idea of like what missions should look like and the supportive missions. And then on top of that, you know, because it was the initial invasion, you weren't staying behind. So I did the long road trip from the border of Kuwait all the way up to southern Baghdad. But by vehicle? By vehicle. So I'd launched air assaults forward, but all the support stuff had to come behind. And you followed them up? And we followed them up. And so we would, we would bound them, right? We were that unit that very famously, Gerardo Rivera was attached to us, and he's in the middle of the desert.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  And he's like, you know, drawing the picture. And he's like, here's Baghdad right here. We're located in the middle of the desert right about here. And I remember thinking like, they're not supposed to know that. Like, you're not supposed to tell them this. But you know, the, you know, the very famous sandstorm that blew through during the invasion and basically shut the whole thing down. You know, we were in chemical suits. We crossed the border in chemical mop suits. And I remember sleeping in the Humvee, and I would use my chemical mask as a pillow. And inside the chemical mask is also your atropine injector. In case you do get slimed,

• 30:04Speaker 01

  you can take this thing and stab it in your leg and you know, hopefully survive. And I remember thinking to myself like one wrong rollover in the middle of the night. I set this thing off and I get an atropine injection to the temple or something like this. So, um, so yeah, it was, you know, covered in dust and dirt and not showering for weeks and just reeking because you've worn the same chemical mop suit. And, um, again, you know, we're just south of Baghdad. We're at a, uh, fuel arming resupply point for helicopters. And, uh, this helicopter is, I don't know, maybe,

• 30:47Speaker 01

  um, maybe a click away from where I'm located. And I'm, uh, I had just taken off my boots to give myself a, uh, baby white bath. Yeah. And I'm watching the helicopter come in and you know, as soon as the rotor wash hits that moon dust, which is basically what it was, it just completely browned out the helicopter. And he ends up having a rotor strike, uh, right there and, and crashes the helicopter. And I threw on my boots, no socks, didn't even lace them up. And I'm running across the desert and I'm just in my chemical mop suit pants, my brown t-shirt, no body armor,

• 31:31Speaker 01

  no helmet, no nothing. And we get over there just in time for me to see the crew chief pulling a guy out. So then I get over to the pilot's door. We're trying to get the pilots pulled out. Helicopter's on fire now and it starts cooking off ammo.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And I'm sitting there thinking, you know, like, here we go again, you know, no good deed goes unpunished. I'm gonna end up getting shot in the ass. You know, trying to get these guys out of the helicopter while, uh, you know, this ammo's cooking off. Like, how do you explain that one later on in life? Like, oh, enemy contact? No.

• 32:07Jocko Willink?

  Not so much.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Pulling a guy out, so.

• 32:11Jocko Willink?

  How did the, how did the invasion go from your perspective, from what you thought it was gonna be like and what it was like?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I was, great question. I think that,

• 32:24Speaker 01

  you know, I, I remember going to bed and realizing like it, it was going to be go time in the morning. It was real, you know, early in the morning that we were gonna launch. Engineered, had cleared the obstacles. I knew the guys were already at the airfield ready to do the assault, uh, north. And I laid down for one last little sleep. And as I'm laying there, literally tomahawk missiles, they felt like they were so close, I could reach up and touch them. As I laid on the back of the Humvee, we're just screaming over top of my head, just one after the other. And I was like, oh shit, like, this is on. And so much different than Afghanistan, you know, like, we flew into Pakistan, we had

• 33:08Speaker 01

  some time to like, really understand what we were doing. We had time to like, understand that we were doing these deep air assaults in the mountainous territory. This one was a little different. I mean, we had mechanized unit, we had Marines, we had, I mean, it was, this was a full-blown.

• 33:25Jocko Willink?

  Invasion.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Invasion. Uh, this wasn't what we did in Afghanistan. It was like a battalion. We just, you know, rolled up in there. And, uh, so this was a little bit different. And the, the slowness of everything just sort of crawled for me.

• 33:42Jocko Willink?

  Which is interesting, because it was like the fastest invasion in history, you know, but to you.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  It, it was slow.

• 33:48Jocko Willink?

  Seems slow.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, and I think a, a large majority of it is, is just like. You know, if you look at a map and realize the border of Kuwait to Baghdad is, you know, when you're in a combat zone and things have to be cleared out in front of you. And you're you're basically doing a movement to contact. Like you're just rolling down the road and hoping that you don't get hit. And what was really weird is rolling into some of these villages and watching the kids come out and wave at you or, you know, try to give you flowers. And I remember pulling into one village just south of Baghdad. And the father came out with the kids and was trying to like, give us food and stuff. And I remember thinking like, man, like, this isn't gonna be so bad.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  You know, these people like us, like we're liberating them like, you know, you know, Sodom is bad. Right? Like he needs to go out. And boy, did things change?

• 34:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, we could talk probably all day about what we did to screw that up.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:50Jocko Willink?

  You know, because we did, and by we, I mean, America, you know, disbanding the Ba'ath party, taking all those military people, kicking them out of the military. Now they don't have jobs anymore. What are you gonna do now? Well, I'll tell you, I know how to fight, so I guess I'm gonna fight these people that just showed up here that I just gave candy to, you know? But it's it is interesting that you got to see that, that kind of positive welcome that they showed on TV and everyone thought, yep, the whole world was watching going, me, myself included going, well, I was watching going, damn it, I'm gonna miss this thing. You know, it's gonna be over. It's gonna be over quick. It's gonna change out and put a new government in place and Iraq will be happily ever after.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Well, you you gotta think about that. When they did the Iran Iraq war in the late eighties, Iraq at the time had something like the third largest military. Now, most of it was forced. Most of those guys didn't want to be there. But when we crossed the border, you know, you still had the Republican Guard. You had all these guys that like, we really thought were gonna put up a little bit more of a fight. And the question is, is like, where'd they all go? When we rolled into Baghdad, like we, you know, my battalion, we took over a military academy for engineering and something else. And we rolled in and their offices were still intact.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  There were calendars on the wall, training manuals, like everything was there, but it was a ghost town.

• 36:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, we open up these doors and there's just AK-47s wrapped around this room, like hundreds and hundreds of guns, millions of rounds of ammunition, artillery rounds, AK-47 rounds, like, I mean, just so much that you're just thinking to yourself like, what, where, where'd they all go? They literally just blended in.

• 36:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  And that was one of those ones where you're like, you know what, 48 hours ago, you were probably a tanker and a T-62. And today you're trying to feed me dates on the side of the road just to, you know, kind of figure out and, and I guarantee you, a lot of those guys just use the opportunity to wait.

• 37:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  And reassemble and.

• 37:09Jocko Willink?

  And see who, see what was gonna happen.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:11Jocko Willink?

  You know, the, the, that's, that's part of their culture over there. You know, what's that? What's the metaphor they use of like betting on the winning horse? Like they want to see who's gonna, they don't bet before the race. They wait till the race is going and they go, oh, it looks like this, this horse looks pretty strong. I'm gonna get on with that horse. And so they were probably doing some of that too. Like, okay, America's here. If America's cool, then it looks like I'll be working for America. Oh, wait, what's happening? Oh, there's a little disruption. Hmm. Okay. America just fired me and all my friends from our old job. Okay. Who's this Al Qaeda people? What are they doing? You want us to launch mortars and shoot RPGs? I can do that. I've been doing that.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. How many guys did we meet during our time over there? You know, military age males where you're like, hey, man, what do you do for a living? I'm a taxi driver. And you're like, it's like five million taxi drivers in this country. Like, where's everyone going?

• 38:06Jocko Willink?

  Where you going?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  And who are you taking if everybody else is a taxi driver too? Like, that just seemed to be the thing. Oh, I've just, I'm a taxi driver. Yeah. What did you used to do? Oh, yeah. Chemical and biological professor at the. Yeah, so you know, I leave my unit again, that was tough. But at that time, you know, Baghdad had fallen. My unit was on its way up to Mosul to the far north.

• 38:32Jocko Willink?

  Like I thought that the war was going to be over pretty quick.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  I did, you know.

• 38:36Jocko Willink?

  What, what, what month did you leave?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Uh, May.

• 38:39Jocko Willink?

  May of two thousand four?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Uh, two thousand.

• 38:42Jocko Willink?

  Two thousand three.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Three.

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you were just there right for the kickoff?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yup, I was there for the invasion and my boss looked at me and he said, I'll never forget what you did coming back, but you need to go on and, and do better things.

• 38:58Jocko Willink?

  Normal army stuff.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  So he sent me back to, you know, Fort Benning and I, I went through the captain's course and, you know, I, I remember sitting there at the end of it and they go, yeah, you, you've got orders to go to third ID, which is a mechanized unit. And I was like, great, man, I'm gonna be a Bradley Fighting Vehicle Commander and, you know, I'm gonna be in the back of a mechanized unit. And after being light for as long as I was, I was really kind of enjoying it and, uh, I ended up graduating Ranger School.

• 39:36Jocko Willink?

  So what, you did Officer Infantry Course, then Ranger School?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 39:39Jocko Willink?

  How'd you like Ranger School?

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, it was, uh, it was the best suck that you could probably experience in your life.

• 39:47Jocko Willink?

  How old were you when you went to Ranger School then?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Oh, twenty, probably twenty seven.

• 39:51Jocko Willink?

  And you are at this point, for a US military guy in two thousand, what is it, two thousand four?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:58Jocko Willink?

  You got a pretty good amount of combat, you know, combat experience, real world combat experience, but going to Ranger School, you'd done Afghanistan and Iraq. You're rolling through Ranger School and did you, did you have any trouble with anything or just eat it up?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  I ate it up. What was really cool and probably again, a compliment back to.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Coming into a unit that taught me the value of the NCO Corps. My guys in my Ranger platoon did not know I was an officer until the end of Mountain Face. And they were shocked. And the reason they found out was because one of our Ranger instructors was actually in my unit back in the 101st. And he recognized me and called me sir during one of our ops. And I remember, cause you know, you go through with a lot of Ranger Battalion guys, you know, try guys that are trying to like really earn their, their keep. And they were like, we had no idea that you were an officer. And I said, good. You know, like I, I like that, but what that ended up changing into is I had just finished the captain's course.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  My op order sequence was like on point. And so what I would do, you'll love this. I volunteered to be the RTO for every mission that I wasn't in charge of. And you know why?

• 41:18Jocko Willink?

  Cause they're gonna have to carry that radio and all have all that complexities of being on the radio.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  And the leader would always be next to me. And I could just whisper to this young E5. And be like, don't forget to do a head count before you, you know, cause the RIs are standing right there, you know? And, uh, and the reason why they found out that I was an officer in, in Mountain Face is because the RIs figured out that I kept volunteering to be the RTO. So then I would create note cards. And I would just hand the note cards over to whoever the patrol leader was and say, stick to the note cards, just read the note card. And they'd be like, all right, guys, situation. Enemy in the area, blah, blah, blah, mission and, and make them read, you know, the five W's of the paragraph.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  And the RIs were like, how the hell is this E5 got a patrol order down so well? So, uh, the RI, and I'll never forget his name, but I won't mention him here. He, he pulled me out of the, you know, patrol base that we were on and he said, uh, You can't be RTO anymore. I was like, really? He goes, no, these guys need to earn, you know, this. And as much as you are, you know, you think you're helping. Yeah. You, these guys really need to do it. Fair point, fair point. So he says to me, he goes, I want you to, I want you to walk 200 yards out of the patrol base in the middle of the woods. He goes, and I just want you to find a tree. He goes, I don't care if you sleep. I don't care if you eat. He goes, I need you to stay out of

• 42:52Speaker 01

  the patrol base while these guys do their thing. So needless to say, you know, at the end of each phase, you have, you know, Fort Benning phase, you go to mountain phase, and then you go into the swamps for Florida phase. At every single phase, my OML peer eval was like, one out of one. Like, all my guys were like, if we're going forward, we're taking this guy with us. That's awesome. So my peer evals were like, off the chart. And, uh, and it, yeah, it was, it sucked. And like, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, your SEAL training and Ranger training. There were plenty of opportunities that I got it in my head. Like, do I quit? Like,

• 43:34Speaker 01

  you know, and you're looking around and you're like, like, I could just go home and just not do this anymore. And you wake up and you're in pain, right? And our eyes would say, you know, are you in pain or are you hurt? And I go, oh, yeah. And you've heard that one before, right? Are you in pain or are you hurt? Right? And, uh, and I remember in mountain phase, uh, like I was struggling to get, you know, 125 pound pack. And they made me the, you know, MT240 gunner. And, you know, and you're trying to climb these mountains and, and, you know, the suck level is so high. And you get up there and it's freezing cold and you're all like spooning one another. And you're like, it's okay, man.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  I won't mention this if you don't, you know, and it's bringing back memories for you, isn't it? I mean, it's the only way you could stay warm. Do what you gotta do. I mean, you know, you just stay warm and, uh, Just don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  And yeah, man, I, you know, what probably to this day, I would say that one of the greatest accomplishments that I feel in my life was understanding what real adversity was, understanding what your mental ability as a human being was capable of to just say, I'm not going to quit. I just, just one more step or it's one more day. You know, so many guys focused on, you know, oh man, we graduate in two weeks. And I was like, no, I'm focused on tomorrow. Like, I just want to get through tomorrow and then I can focus on the next day, you know, and, um, you know, you get to the end and the, the commander calls me in and he goes, uh, hey, listen, um,

• 45:16Speaker 01

  you are going to graduate Ranger School as the top officer graduate in your class.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  And you're going to graduate as the distinguished honor graduate of your Ranger course. And the top NCO

• 45:34Speaker 01

  of Rangers class was my battle buddy, who was in Ranger Regiment and, uh, is working out of CAG, uh, now. So, you know, he's gone off to do great things as well, but he and I stood next to each other at graduation. And, uh, and I got my Ranger tab pinned on by none other than now Medal of Honor recipient, Ralph Puckett, Colonel Ralph Puckett, who was in charge of the Rangers, you know, uh, during that time. And I remember the Sergeant Major standing in front of me and I'm holding this plaque with this, you know, Special Forces dagger on it. And he's, you know, we're posing for pictures and I looked over at the Sergeant Major and said, hey, Sergeant Major, y'all, y'all got about like 12 hours to realize you made a mistake or I'm taking this thing

• 46:15Speaker 01

  home and actually putting it on the wall, you know? And, uh, I get out of Ranger School and, uh, lo and behold, my battalion commander, who said, I'll never forget what you did, called me and he said, uh, hey, we're standing up this new unit in the 101st, never, like, we're starting from scratch. All we know right now is it's going to be called 4th Brigade. And, uh, I want you to come and be one of our battalion, uh, company commanders. I said, sir, that is because it's very, very rare. You usually as a, you know, captain, you show up to a unit and you have to pay your dues a little bit on the staff before. Got to be on the battalion staff.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. But because I got named specifically, again, he called infantry branch, said he's not going to mech, he's not going to third ID, he's coming back to the hundred first. So I went back to the hundred first. I walked into my company and there was nothing there. I had a folding chair, a plastic table. They gave me a laptop. I had a hundred and 10 rifles, had a couple NCOs. And all we were called was fourth brigade. And I was like, all right, cool. Like that's how I took command. I literally took command, standing something brand new up. So there was no battalion commander? Battalion commander was, was coming in. Okay.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  That would have been Colonel Clark. Okay. And so he came in as our initial battalion commander and. But there was no existing unit before that. None. Like when we say created a fourth brigade, the army just said, you're it. And they gave us some buildings. We had some, you know, things. And what was interesting about this, and again, another test of leadership, that I think served me very, very well was,

• 48:12Speaker 01

  where do you get the people from? Right? And I think that that was the question that the division, 101st Airborne Division had when they realized that they had to stand up this unit. So what they did is they blasted out a message to all of the other brigades. And they said, we need you guys to slim down each of your units by 10%. And that manpower is going to be reported to G1. Those soldiers are then going to get renamed over to this other unit. Now, Jocko, you're a commander of a unit.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  And you get a memo that says, I need you to lose 10% of your unit. Who are you going to give up?

• 48:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's always an issue when they form up new units because that, that's what they do. They say, hey, you need to send people and everyone takes the bottom of the barrel and sends them to the new.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  And that's what I got. That's what I got. I got a bunch of, um, real characters. Can we just say, you know, characters be polite?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  But my NCOs, uh, were great. My NCOs, uh, were, that did come into the 101st and they got assigned to us. So they weren't, a, a couple of them came from other units. Um, but for the most part, I think it was probably maybe 60, 40. I got brand new guys as opposed to some of those, but my Lojos. Those, those were a problem and I remember, um, I mean, now you're talking about getting to a unit, you have to man them. Equip them, train them, and we all knew there was a deployment coming up. So I literally had like nine months to turn this rag bag bunch of, and like, and the weapons, by the way.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  The weapons were the same thing. Hey, armory's across Fort Campbell. We need you to give up your guns. I got an M240 Bravo that looked like it had been stored in the mud. And that's what they gave to me. And I was like, oh my God, this is not, this is not going to be good. And, uh, we got to a point where I would do random drug screenings. And every single month I would have a guy test positive for drugs. And I was like, oh my God, like, how am I going to take these guys overseas and then, you know, and, and be able to trust that they're going to do the right thing? So I, I had to clean house a little bit. I, I had a NCO that, uh, was stealing medicine.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  From soldiers while he was doing barracks inspections and then turning around and selling them on the street. He got busted by a CID agent. So that came out of my unit. You know, I've got an NCO who, uh, you know, during our JRTC rotation down at Fort Polk, uh, ends up in a GSA vehicle. With a loaded firearm and gets pulled over for a DUI.

• 51:01Jocko Willink?

  Three, three, three for three.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Three for, yeah, like the trifecta, right? So, um, you know, he's gone. So. The first I would say, you know, when you talk about form, storm, norm, perform, like we went through. A freaking hurricane like it was just.

• 51:16Jocko Willink?

  I've actually never heard form storm norm perform. I've never heard that before.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you know, you, you form them together. No matter what, you're going to go through the storm period and, and we, we did, we went through it. And I remember being in my CP and my first sergeant and I were extremely close, fast, steady. And, uh, and I, we had all the leaders inside my company CP. And I said, guys,

• 51:41Speaker 01

  if we can go an entire three months without somebody getting pulled over for a DUI, without somebody beating his wife with a two quart canteen strap,

• 51:54Speaker 01

  without somebody testing positive for drugs. I said, I will go down to the class six. I will buy the most expensive bottle of booze that they have on the counter. And we will celebrate. It took me nine months.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Before we got there and sure as shit, I rolled down and I bought myself an 18 year old bottle of McCallum's.

• 52:16Jocko Willink?

  How much does that cost?

• 52:17Speaker 01

  It was at the time, probably about 500 bucks.

• 52:19Jocko Willink?

  Damn. Okay.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was about five, you know.

• 52:21Jocko Willink?

  Captain's, captain's, a man of his word.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I was a single captain.

• 52:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Good to go.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  So I get, uh, I go back to the CP and you know, we have all the little plastic cups around the table. And, uh, you know, I got all my leadership there. I got most of my squad leaders, my platoon sergeants, my platoon leaders, everybody's in there. And I said, guys, we did it. I said, I, I think, I think we have our team now. I, I think this is it. This is who we're going to war with. And I reached in the bag and pulled out that bottle. And we drank the entire bottle right there in the CP and every one of those guys sitting in that room took a black Sharpie and wrote their name on that bottle, which I still have at home,

• 53:05Speaker 01

  sitting on my liquor cabinet. So all my other filled bottles of bourbon there and the one sitting in the front is an empty bottle of McCallum's with everybody's signature on it.

• 53:14Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding. Outstanding. How, did you guys know where you were going on deployment? You knew you were going to Iraq. Did you guys know? When did you start hearing rumors about Ramadi going to Ramadi?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  So, um, we did not. Ramadi was never mentioned to us. Every bit of our training had to do with Sotter City.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  We I we learned everything about that damn Mok Tatar al Sadr. We knew where the mosque were. We knew, um, you know, the, the demographics of the city. We knew the religions and what time people moved. I mean, we knew everything about Sadr City. We trained off those maps. We knew everything that was going on. And, um, we spent a lot of time, like, really getting ready for the fact that we were gonna go in there and, and be able to keep peace in this place. And, um, we did not hear about Ramadi until we got to Kuwait. And, and I actually write about it in my journal. And, uh, you know, in good old captain fashion, sort of bitched and complained about like,

• 54:16Speaker 01

  where the hell is Ramadi, right? You know, like, why are you guys pulling this on us now? Right? Like, we have studied for months, these, everything there was to know about Sadr City. And we are in Kuwait. And Colonel Clark comes in, he goes, um, we gotta change of mission, boys. We're going to Ramadi. And, uh, and, you know, I went back and of course the NCOs, you know, they, they are expert complainers. Yeah, absolutely. Black belt. You know, and, and, uh, their verbal judo, as I call it, like, they just, they, they find the holes and everything. Well, needless to say, they were pretty pissed.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  And I remember looking at them and saying, boys, it doesn't matter where we do the mission. Like, we're ready. Like, you know, the prep up to this, like, I trained those boys hard. We spent a lot of time in the field, a lot of time in shoot houses, a lot of time doing mounted patrols. We, I mean, we spent a lot of time training. And I can say, not only did we have to go through that growth of getting rid of some of the people that we, we didn't want, which was nice, because then you knew that the guy you were next to was really the guy that you wanted to be with. But the training and the realistic training, right? Like, thinking outside the box, training.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Which is, I think, what, you know, two combat deployments did for me is it made me think through contingencies. It made me think through the what if. So, you know, you, you know, in the famous movie with Mel Gibson about the Idrang Valley and the guys are getting off the helicopter and he goes, boom, you're dead. Boom, you're dead. Who's in charge? And then, you know, watching the next guy step up and understand that he knew the mission, he knew his job. And it was one of those things like, don't tell a soldier what to do.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  You know, or how to do it. Let him really surprise you with his ingenuity a little bit, you know, and, and, you know, at my level, we talk about, you know, Napoleon's corporal, you know, the, the old story on Napoleon would pull in a corporal at every one of his op orders or mission briefs. And he would always turn to the corporal and say, you see any flaws in this plan? And the corporal would be like, yeah, sir. Like, you're making me march 12 miles. I haven't eaten. It's Russia and winter.

• 56:40Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you should have listened to corporal on that one.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  You know, and so, um, so, yeah, we, we just knew that we were going to go there and, and then we started to get the briefs about Ramadi. We started to hear about the IEDs. We started to hear about the troops in contact. We started to, you know, like, all of a sudden, the briefings were immediately replaced with, oh, my God, like, this place is kinetic. And not just that, but like, my battalion was being pulled out of my brigade. And everybody that we had trained with for the last 18 months, we were leaving behind. And my one infantry battalion was going out into a sector where we basically were going to know, no one.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  You got your Marines out there. You got Pennsylvania National Guard. Like, none of us had ever. Been together or trained together or even did an op order briefed with one another.

• 57:37Jocko Willink?

  Never met them, never seen them.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  That's it. And you know, you're sitting there and you're, you're getting the S2 briefs about Ramadi and you're in Kuwait and, and you know, I think it quickly dawned on the NCOs like this isn't you know, because Sadr City was rather neutral. Like they were behaving, you know, Maktar al-Sadr wanted to have sort of some input in how the government was going to be run. Ramadi had just lost its damn mind. Like they just, you know, Sunni stronghold, the field artillery school was out there as you well know.

• 58:13Jocko Willink?

  Meaning the old enemy field artillery.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. All those guys who put their uniforms down, they just went to retire, you know, out there to Ramadi and all of a sudden they started to share pictures of the combat outpost and OP hotel.

• 58:30Jocko Willink?

  And they happened to be really good at knowing what those ranges were.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  You know, like exactly all the places that we stayed and it was crazy to say the least and.

• 58:40Jocko Willink?

  And then how long was it from the time you got the word you were going to Ramadi until you were wheels up heading there?

• 58:45Speaker 01

  I would say less than 30 days, less than a month.

• 58:48Jocko Willink?

  So you started looking at maps, you're doing studies, you're trying to figure out what's going on. There's really not too much to adjust in terms of gear and things like that. I mean, it's going to be the same no matter where you're going. So it's just doing a, doing a study of the atmospherics that are going on there. I know for me, I was tracking Ramadi as, as like the, the hotspot. Cause I was supposed to go to Baghdad. I was, I went on a, a pre-deployment site survey to Baghdad just before deployment to take my troop and we're going to go over and work with the ICTF. There was a SEAL element there and a special forces element there and we're going to go take the SEAL's place. And I went over there, did some ops with those guys up, high five, all good. See you guys in a few weeks. Went back to America and they're like,

• 59:30Jocko Willink?

  and they changed. They wanted to consolidate the, the west coast SEAL team into western Iraq. And so that's what they did. And I was the one west coast SEAL team that was going to be in central Iraq in Baghdad. So they said, whoop, we're going to consolidate the whole west coast out in Al-Lanbar. Cool. And my skipper called me in and said, hey, and he, you know, he was like. You know, thought that I would be very disappointed that I wasn't going to Baghdad to work with the ICTF because that was kind of seen as the the best deal in Iraq at the time for SEALs. But I knew what was going on in Ramadi. And I said, you know, I used a little bit of leverage and I said, well, I'm not sure, sir. I'm going to need some more guys. I'm going to need some more support. I'm going to need.

• 1:00:12Jocko Willink?

  There was some kind of, there was some kind of satcom system that I wanted that that it was some kind of a, some kind of a, like a base station satellite communication thing where you get internet and sipernet. And I said, I think I'm going to need one of those. I forget what it was called. And then he rogered up to it all. And I said, yeah, sure, we can pull it off. And then I walked out of his office and I called like Seth and Leif and I was like, hey, boys, it's on. We're going to freaking Ramadi.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  So question, because you know, you mentioned this in Extreme Ownership about how you got to pick those guys.

• 1:00:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well,

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:45Jocko Willink?

  Pick Seth and Leif, they kind of got assigned to me.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Oh, did they?

• 1:00:49Jocko Willink?

  They kind of got assigned to me. The the way that there was, there was a couple of things that happened. One thing that happened was, remember before we hit record, I was telling you about the fair fairy that shows up sometime in the SEAL teams? Where instead of going merit based, like, oh, Joe and Jocko, you guys are platoon commanders. Jocko, you went to Baghdad last time. Uh, Joe, it's your turn. You get to go.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Jocko Willink?

  Instead of being like, hey, you Jocko, you went to Baghdad last time. Joe, you didn't get to go. Whoever does better is going this time. In in training. Sometimes the fair fairy shows up and sometimes it's merit based. So there was an opportunity that our that our CO gave us to do the fair fairy instead of merit based before we started to work up. And he came and said, the the skipper and the master chief, which is our senior NCO for the SEAL team, came and said, hey, listen, here here's what we can do, guys. There's one troop that's definitely going to Baghdad or definitely going to Iraq. There's two more troops. It was my troop task unit Bruiser and the other troop task unit Charlie. They said, we're not sure which one of you is going to go. But what we can do is we can, if you want, we can split you guys up and you can kind of put together a team that

• 1:01:53Jocko Willink?

  that everybody wants to go to Baghdad or guys that haven't been to Baghdad.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  They had not mentioned Ramadi at this point.

• 1:01:59Jocko Willink?

  They just said Iraq.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Jocko Willink?

  We can split you guys up and it'll just be kind of the fair fairy. Whoever hasn't really been, you can go. And the guys that have already been to Iraq, you'll go to PACOM. And I was like, I'll first of all, I was one of the guys that had been to Iraq. So that kind of put me in a situation that I didn't want to be in. But more important, way more important was.

• 1:02:22Jocko Willink?

  I had already met the guys in my task unit, including Seth and Leif. And so, and I knew the platoon chiefs. Like I, I didn't know a lot of the guys, but I knew Tony Affrati, who was one of the platoon chiefs. I knew Dale, another guy Dale, who was one of the platoon chiefs. So I kind of knew those guys. I had met Seth and Leif and I liked those guys. So anyways, long story short, um, I went to those guys and I said, hey, here's the options they're giving us. I say we play the game and see who's better and whoever's best goes.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  That's what you talked about.

• 1:02:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's probably what I talked about in the book. And then, then of course, you know, all of my head shed guys, they were all like, hell yeah. We're, we're, let's go. And so that's what we did. There, there was some other little things that happened along the line where they wanted to swap. They wanted to give me a different platoon and, and like that kind of thing has happened that, that happened. Where they wanted to give me a different platoon. They actually wanted to take Seth's platoon and move him somewhere else. And I was like, uh, says something to me along the lines of like, hey, we can give you this other platoon commander who's more experienced. There was another platoon commander that was more experienced than Seth. That's what it was. And I said something along the lines of, uh, Seth and Leif, they're like, you know, they're inexperienced. And I said, hey,

• 1:03:33Jocko Willink?

  they're tough, they listen, and that's all I need. I don't need anybody with the experience. I need people that are, will listen and that are tough. And these guys, they're tough and they listen. And that's who I'm staying with. And they tried to convince me otherwise, but they couldn't.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Do you feel like when they told you you were going to Ramadi and now you're able to like actually look at your team? Did you feel like this is it? Like these are the guys that were specifically made for this mission? We're ready. Yeah.

• 1:04:03Jocko Willink?

  We, we busted our ass in workup. Um, you know, we, we kicked ass in all the training, you know, and I, I was at huge advantage, right? I was an enlisted guy. I was enlisted guy for eight years. I worked at training cell. I had, I had already been to Baghdad. I had done a bunch of, I was experienced from going to Baghdad. When I got to Baghdad, I was the only platoon in Iraq, only SEAL platoon in Iraq. We did all kinds of operations now. They were not as extreme as what was going to happen in Ramadi, but I had a lot of experience. And so going through workup, the same thing that you talked about, for me, it was like, oh, Hey, I'm dead now. Hey, platoon commander's dead. Hey, platoon chief is dead. Uh, hey, junior guy in the platoon, you run this operation. We had done all that stuff.

• 1:04:46Jocko Willink?

  So I was totally confident. We had, we had only, we had fired two guys. We'd fired one officer and one enlisted guy. Uh, the enlisted guy, great guy, um, you know, patriotic guy, hardworking guy, but just couldn't quite get it, couldn't quite make it happen in, in, in, in pressure situations. And it was a bummer, but you just can't. Luckily, we do have the luxury in the SEAL teams of, you know, send in somebody for a recycle. And then the officer, you know, same thing, a little bit wasn't listening to, you know, his enlisted guys, thought he knew more than he did and ended up having some safety issues. And so he was gone. But the other guys, like we busted our ass and trained super hard and I,

• 1:05:28Jocko Willink?

  a hundred percent, every guy was, every guy was locked on and we were ready to rock. So when we got the Ramadi mission, I knew, I knew what was going on in Ramadi. I had been reading about Ramadi. I knew what the casualties were in Ramadi. I knew that it was a, the most target centric area in Iraq at the time. Will I be lying to you if I looked at it like, well, there's, you know, there's a lot of casualties, you know, you, you better, you better be concerned about that. I didn't really think that way. You know, it was like, oh, there's casualties. That means there's bad guys and we can go kill those bad guys. And that's what we're going to go do. It was also for us, it was out away from our flagpole. You know, when you're in Baghdad,

• 1:06:09Jocko Willink?

  you're right next to everybody. And so this was more decentralized, gonna be out there. And I've always liked the army and the Marine Corps. And so I was like, oh yeah, I'll go work for the Marine Corps there. The army's there. Let's go. So that was kind of my attitude and the boys, the boys were totally on board. There was a little bit, the same thing I said about the ICTF being like the sexiest mission at the time for SEALs, because it's what you see in the movies, right? Hey, we're gonna go do a direct action mission tonight. We're gonna put our freaking cool, you know, uniforms on and we, we have, uh, night vision on and we're gonna go and hit a house and we'll be back in, by the way, we'll be back in 45 minutes and we'll high five each other like we're badass. And it is, I mean, those, those guys at ICTF crushed.

• 1:06:53Jocko Willink?

  They did a great job. That's what everybody in the SEAL teams wants to do. So. When it was like, oh, well, we're gonna go to Ramadi. They weren't really doing a lot of, well, they were doing no unilateral missions, meaning just SEALs. They weren't really doing that in Baghdad either, but.

• 1:07:11Jocko Willink?

  So I wasn't a hundred percent sure what our, what our mission profile was going to be. But I did know I'd figure some shit out.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, and it, it, it did make me wonder like, what exactly were you told to do? You know, because it was so out, it was, it was so out of the norm. Like you said, of what you guys would do and. I remember when you guys showed up to the base and. You know, the first thing that goes through my head is like, aren't these guys supposed to exist without me knowing about them? Like, you know, I'm having chow with them, you know, like they're walking across the fob and I'm like, this is kind of interesting, you know, like. It, the, the mindset was, you know, and I, I believe they were task force one, four, five, or maybe it was task force four or five.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  I remember who they were, but they were the Rangers that, and, and they would come into Ramadi and do those sort of point raids on houses. In my AO.

• 1:08:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, which is not cool.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  And then I'd have to go there and just be like, I'm so sorry that they blew up your Volvo in the driveway. Here's $300. So, you know, you, you felt like you were having to fix. A lot of what you just heard was going on in your AO a little bit, but you know, it's again, you know, playing fair, but I would have thought, you know. SF wise, very.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Very skilled at being able to train other units. To be able to go out on missions and, and, and be advisors to that kind of thing. But that's not what you guys came for. Like it was almost like. I looked at you and your team as a combat multiplier. And, and more than that, it was, there was a little bit of a psychological impact that. Also came with you and my guys where I'd be like, all right, guys, like, check it out. The SEALs are going out with us.

• 1:09:08Jocko Willink?

  The thing that triggered it all, and we'll rewind to get back to you when you showed up there because we showed up, I don't know, maybe six months after you did. Yeah. But when we showed up there, I immediately, I had done like the smallest or number of sniper operations. I can't even call it that. It's, I, when, when I was on my, on my first deployment to Baghdad, a couple of times, we went out and set up sniper positions. And we did it like from bases, like on bases, and we were not successful. We didn't kill anybody. But I kind of had this like, oh, well, it's something we kind of have, we, we could do that. It seems like it might do, and we might be able to do something with that. And the guys in

• 1:09:52Jocko Willink?

  the SEAL snipers in Fallujah did good work. There were some SEAL snipers in, in Missoula that had done some work. So I knew that it was something and we happened to have, we happened to have, normal SEAL task unit might have maybe four to six snipers. And for some reason, we had 13. We had 13 legit snipers. So we had this old, really, really high level or high number of snipers. So we got there, we're looking what's going on, and almost immediately we got there, BTF Tony Affrati took an element into Firecracker, the Marine Corps, it was, they lost, they, they hit a big IED 38, they hit a big IED. And we heard

• 1:10:34Jocko Willink?

  about it and we're like, okay, and we were, we were already working with the 38 a little bit. And we put a sniper overwatch out up in Firecracker. And this is within probably like three, four, five days of me showing up there. The reason I have to tell you all that is because I go to meet Colonel Gronski for the first time. And as I'm walking, you know how his office was like towards the back of his tactical operations center, as I'm walking to go meet with him, it comes over the radio, hey, SEAL snipers just killed two IED play, in placers up at Firecracker. And I walk in, he goes, are those your guys? And I go, yes, sir. And he says, I need you in Eastern Ramadi. And because you guys were getting hammered with IEDs. And so that's where the conversation, and that's how we

• 1:11:18Jocko Willink?

  immediately ended up going out there to try and support you guys. But we'll, we'll get into all that. So, so you guys then.

• 1:11:29Jocko Willink?

  You find out 30 days, you have 30 days to prepare. How did you guys transit up to Ramadi?

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Uh, you, you had a small grouping of soldiers who had to come down MSR Michigan. Uh, then the rest of us flew in.

• 1:11:44Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Um, I got there in the dead of night.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Places, of course, totally blocked out.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  You know, Captain Cinti, who you recall, you know, my, my battle buddy. Love that dude.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  You know, he has this remark about how like, if you were to make a, a movie about, you know, war, it, it would look like this. I mean, it was so austere. It was so remote. There was just literally nothing there. There was no PX. There was, I mean, we didn't even have shower units. Um, you know, I put my, uh, second platoon in a place that the men had nicknamed the chicken coop. Because if you recall where Carrigador was, it was an agricultural school. And it could have actually been a chicken coop, uh, that we set bunk beds up in.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  And I put a platoon in there and, and you know, we went to sleep and, you know, it, it was pitch black, dark. You get off the helicopter and, um, you know, you, you land over there in the, in the combat outpost. That was where the LZ was. Then you walked, came across the street to Camp Carrigador. And you go inside the top, uh, the talk and, you know, all the windows are boarded up. There's sandbags everywhere. There's sandbags on the roof. There's Sam, I mean, just the amount of force protection literally let you know that, you know, that this wasn't,

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  um, gonna be something that, you know, you were just gonna get to hang out on. Uh, 24 hours a day, if you walked outside the door, you had to have body armor on. You had to have your helmet. You had to be fit to fight at any moment when you walked out the door. And we get there and we get the brief and the guys that are on the ground. That we replaced, um, man, they, they had really been through it. I mean, you know, uh, the huge, um, dump truck IED on OP Hotel. Uh, I mean, the only thing that probably saved those guys' life is that the, that, that dump truck hit a, had it hit a barrier and pushed

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  the dump truck sideways so that when the blast went off, it actually went away from most of OP Hotel. But you were out there, you saw the condition of that place like that. It probably would have brought OP Hotel down had they had a direct strike on that. But we're talking kinetic, like full blown, they did not want us there. And, you know, it, it was, if there was a definition of an insurgency, you know, being able to infill within the population and just as a fish swims through the sea, so does the insurgent within the population. It was, you, you just didn't know

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  who the enemy was. Um, they didn't wear a uniform. Um, they could have been waving at you one minute on the side of MSR Michigan, and as soon as you drive by, they're in place in a 155, you know, artillery round on the side of the road. And, um, so we get there and, and, um, some of the guys came by truck, some of us came by air.

• 1:15:04Jocko Willink?

  And this is November, late November?

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Late November going into December. That's right. Um, so I remember, um, I specifically remember Christmas Day and we had towers up around all of, uh, Corregidor. And as soon as my guys got in, they were like, you're on tower guard. And I remember me and my first sergeant, going from tower to tower to wish the boys Merry Christmas, you know, and like in the middle of Ramadi, you know?

• 1:15:33Jocko Willink?

  Merry Christmas and happy hunting.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys do turnover operations with the people you relieved?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  We did.

• 1:15:40Jocko Willink?

  And how long did that last for?

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Just a couple of weeks. Um, you know, they, they immediately took us out on patrol. We wanted to familiarize ourselves with the city as best as we could. Um, you know, trying to understand like where they were in placing these IEDs, um,

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  There was like a habit of them kind of putting them in the same place or maybe using an old hole that they had already detonated one in thinking like nothing's in there and, you know, drive by. We started to do some operations with them and I even wrote in my journal at one point, like the company commander that I was with, like, didn't even get out of the truck. And I was like, no, I'm, I'm, I'm doing this. We're gonna go in and, and I just would be like the number three guy in a stack outside of a door, you know, M4 in hand and, you know, clearing a house with a, you know, pistol kind of thing. And, um, and that's when you kind of started to realize a little bit more. But was, what was really

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  interesting about the handover was those guys told us like, this road right here, we don't go down that road. We don't go down that road. You see this road right here that intersects with that? He goes, that's as far south as we've ever been. And if we go down even near it, we have to take a significant amount of combat power to where when they look out, the insurgent just goes, okay, I'm, I'm gonna live another day and not get involved in this. But, um, as you know about me, I go, well, we're going down that goddamn street.

• 1:17:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Similar thing that they told us, you know, the guys that we took over for, they're like, hey, you can't, you, they just say, oh, you can't go in here. And we're like, what do you, what do you mean you can't go in there? Like, oh, no QRF will come for you. Like, like, it's just, it's off limits. And, you know, we had to take that into account and then figure out how are we gonna get in there? Because that's where the bad guys are. Uh, as, what was some of your first operations? Were you guys immediately just pressing out, trying to, were you clearing sectors? What did you guys start doing?

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  The first couple right seat rides that we did, we, we ended up going and doing what we called source meets. People who lived inside the Malab who wanted to give us information about what the insurgents were doing inside the city, maybe where they knew a cache was, or maybe an IED that was hidden. So the first couple missions I went on was to introduce me to those people so that I would have a little bit of a rapport with them starting off. There was a guy that we called the general. He was an old general in the Iraqi army, retired, moved out to Ramadi to, for the peacefulness of Ramadi, I guess, I don't know. You know,

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  we had a couple of different sources that, that we were going to meet. And then we start talking about like route clearance and you know, what do you do? And these, the, the unit that we took over for, they were armored guys. And they were, they were completely tied to their vehicles. And I just knew, like, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to do dismounted patrols through here. We're gonna have to, you know, but it was one of those, like, we own the night. Like, why would you, you know, let's not do this during the day. We're gonna sneak around this place at night. And, and just start going into people's houses and looking for bad guys and setting up, you know, OPs and overwatches and stuff. And, you know, you, you talk a little bit about

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  the, just the sections of Ramadi alone, right? I mean, because it was a big city. And when people talked about the Malab, there was always sort of like a, a boogeyman sense, you know, like, oh, you guys are down in the Malab. And, you know, and I'll have to go back and tell this, this part of the story.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  I told you, we just started off as fourth brigade. And when Colonel Clark came down and gave us all the word that we were becoming the Currie's. We were going to be first, the 506. So my, my guide on banner had cross rifles and just a letter C on it for the longest time. And when we found out that, oh my God, we are becoming the Band of Brothers, Currie's, they're bringing them back to the 101st Airborne. Like, we got so pumped up. And First Sergeant in Edwards and I, great company commander, First Sergeant relationship, just absolutely love the guy, you know? We were sitting in my office, knowing that we were about to, you know, take on this history.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  And we were trying to come up with company names, you know, and what are we going to be? And I didn't want to do something boring, like, you know, Charlie, you know, whatever that rhymes with it. So we thought through with it and I said, you know what? I go, I want to be Chaos Company. Like, wouldn't that be awesome? Like, we just go into Iraq and we're like the Chaos Company. So of course I go to Colonel Clark. I said, hey, sir, I got it. You're going to love it. You're going to love it. What do you got, Joe? Chaos Company. He looked at me and said, no.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Not going to happen. He said, go back, go back and do it again.

• 1:21:19Jocko Willink?

  Like, that's, that's the thing. Chaos can be cool. It can also not be cool.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  You know, it's sort of like, I remember watching a TV episode about that dog trainer guy who, and the dog's name was Diablo. You know, and the dog like lashed out at everybody. And the dog trainer goes, well, you know, the first mistake is that you called this dog Diablo. Cause so he says, no, you're not going to do it. So I remember my First Sergeant and I sitting in my office and he and I would just banter and talk all kinds of stuff. And, and at that moment, we were talking about how we grew up on those old. War movies that just kind of like made us want to do this. And then that transitioned into the old westerns and the spaghetti westerns and the,

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  you know, we just started to think about like those guys back in the day, just rolling into town on a horse with nothing more than like your sidearm on you. And just being like, yeah, like I'm the real deal. I'm a gunfighter. Boom. He looked right at me and I was like, first sergeant, that's it. He's like, but sir, don't start with a C. I said, first sergeant, nothing I have done in my military career has followed the rules. And so I went to Colonel Clark and I was like, we got it. And I told him the story about how he came up with the name. Mm hmm. Said, first sergeant and I, we just like the, the, the idea of just being able to roll into town.

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  And just own it because of what you possessed and the attitude that you had like, you know, chaos was one. But when you go in there thinking to yourself like, I'm, I'm a real gunfighter. And if things go down, I'm ready for it. Approved. Damn. We became gunfighter company, Charlie company, first of the 506. So here we are, fast forward. Major Womack is our S3. And we start doing the site analysis of all the city. And the boogeyman down in the Malab. And I said, sounds like a really good job for the gunfighters. Damn, check. And he said, you got it.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  And my company got the Malab. And I think it was perfect, you know? I mean, just hindsight being 2020, you know, you had, you know, Able Company and they had, you know, the cop and they had a couple of ECPs up in the north. We had, you know, Delta Company, who was basically like my QRF on every mission. Like Cinty and I were just, we were linked at the hip because I knew that if we ever got in trouble, the gun trucks would come screaming in at any moment. And so every op that I did, I always visited Cinty and, and, and he knew that he and I sort of played by the same rule, which was.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  We don't just go and get in a fight like we have to dominate through firepower and because we had to win the IO against the enemy to the information operation. We needed to make sure that they knew that when we rolled in, it was almost like I wanted them to see the hundred, excuse me, I wanted them to see the hundred and first airborne patch on my shoulder when we walked the street. I wanted them to know that a new unit was in town. And I remember telling my, the story to my soldiers before we went out and like our first mission. And I said, guys, I go, have you ever noticed that the porcupine actually doesn't have a

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  natural predator in the, in the wilderness? And of course, they're all looking at me like, what the hell is he talking about? You know? And I was like, well, think about it like the porcupine walks through the woods all day long and nobody messes with him. I said, you ever think about that? And they go, no, sir, we've never thought about that. Where are you going with this? I said, I want us to be like the porcupine. I said, every time we roll out of COP, FOB Corregidor, I want the enemy to look at us and say, I don't know that I want to mess with that today. Not today. Not today. And I was like, we have to give the, the perception and we have to give

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  the attitude that we want to fight. And if we roll out looking like guns pointed in every direction, you're not lazy, you're not, you know, arms up on the side of the gun turret like this, like you're on and you're scanning and you're doing what you need to do. We wanted to give the impression that if you mess with us, you're probably going to get a spike to the face. Right? Like that, that's what we wanted to do. So every so often you could hear me, you know, yell over the radio or out loud like, you know, porcupine, porcupine. And then that would trigger the guys like, oh yeah, yeah. Get, get in the ready position. Get that posture. That's right. And, and you know, a lot of it, and you got to admit, a lot of what

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  I visited the Navy SEAL Museum yesterday. Freaking awesome. If you're in San Diego, go visit.

• 1:26:34Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Some really, really cool stuff in there.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm walking around the museum and I see a little episode about the SWCC guys. You know, the boat, special boat guys. And I'm looking at the boat and I mean, there's just freaking guns all over this thing and I'm watching the video and this thing is tearing into the, you know, the waters and cutting through and you're watching some of the training missions and he's got like this freaking Gatling gun on the front. It's blowing out 3,000 rounds a minute. And I'm thinking to myself like, who in their right mind saw that and decided like, you know what? I'm just going to take a shot at that thing. Like there's just guns everywhere on that. And I think it's about that. The, you know, the, the psychological impact.

• 1:27:20Jocko Willink?

  Psychological warfare.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:27:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a real thing. That's a real thing. You know, in my first deployment to Iraq before we had armored Humvees. We took the seats in the Humvees, except for the drivers, and we turned them so they were outboard facing. So we would be sitting presenting our, not only presenting our plate, which is like the most armor we had, because you have armor. But you're also, everyone's just sitting there like your guns up, you're ready to roll. And, and then we had guys in the back, we, we fabricated these like articulating arms for our, for our saws. So we, it just looked like a total psychotic like vehicle. And now that was awesome. And, you know, just a quick, I don't know if you've ever heard this or seen this, but I rolled over, I came over to check on Seth and his guys and I show up, you know, at Craig door and

• 1:28:05Jocko Willink?

  uh, they're like, you know, I come in and talking to guys in space where someone's like, did you see Mikey's video? And I was like, no, they're like, go see Mikey's video. So I go back and Mikey Monster's got his little, his little room in, in Full Metal Jacket there. And I go in there and I go, you know, he's a new guy, dude. So he's like all nervous. And I go, what's up, dude? And he goes, what's up, sir? And I go, let me see the video. And he goes, alrighty. It's like kind of his little semi-smile on his face. So he shows me this video and it's, it's, you know, it's like, uh, on a rooftop, like the, the camera, like you can tell it's being held, like it's, it sticks up above the, the roof wall. It's scanning around, there's gunfire everywhere and it comes back down. He flips around on his face and he goes, it's the moolah.

• 1:28:48Jocko Willink?

  And he he pressed, you know, and he shows it to me. And, you know, it's there's more gunfighting, but it's it's cool. And so, you know, me, I'm the I'm the freaking task unit commander. And I'm like, hey, dude, like, what are you doing out there with a with a camera? Why are you videoing during a gunfight? And he's like, oh, sir, I was Winchester. So he had already burned through 800 rounds.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:29:08Jocko Willink?

  And he was out of ammo. And he was like, well, I guess I might as well video some shit. So that's a little indicator of what the moolab was like.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  So I remember that mission. That was one of my missions. And I think we took over completely by New Year's. So January, it was ours, the we were reinforced and and up and running. By the time you guys got to us in late March, somewhere in there.

• 1:29:36Jocko Willink?

  You know, it was early April.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Early April. We

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  we had a handful of KIA's already.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  Lots of IEDs that went off on us. Small arms fire.

• 1:29:52Speaker 01

  I had probably by that time, just in the four months, probably done close to about 50 to 75 targeted raids on houses.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  And we made this huge map of the Malab. And we literally labeled every house from number one all the way down to, you know, 800 and whatever. And then we zoned them all, zone one, zone two, created ourselves a little operational chart where we went back historically, we labeled things where we knew IEDs IEDs were, where we thought small arms fire came from. And we weren't there probably, you know, a couple of weeks, we're on a dismounted patrol in the middle of the day. We want to do a presence patrol down Market Street, which, you know, that's where all the stores and everything were. And that was that moment where I said to myself, you know,

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  I'm I'm beginning to understand the atmospherics because as we rolled in and dismounted off the trucks, the shops were open. And within like 15 minutes of being out on Market Street, like you couldn't engage with anybody because they would just close the shop. And then like all of a sudden you look around and you're like, it was like the old Western, like the tumbleweed goes across the thing. And you're like, we're the only dudes out here. And I'm on the patrol and I'm walking and I hear a single shot. And it comes across the radio that we've got somebody that that was hit. And I'm a block away. And I start making my way to where

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  the casualty is. And then over the radio, it comes across that it's actually my first sergeant. You know, my best friend in my unit, the one who he and I were, we started this thing. It was him and I at the very beginning when we walked in together, we came up with a name, we trained the men. He was a gunfighter. And I found out he was shot. And I was like, oh, man, like this sucks. We got over to him and we had to evac him out. He got shot in the shoulder. Did did quite a bit of damage to his shoulder that he needed some reconstructive work. And I knew the men were pissed. Like the

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  men were like, really, really angry. And you you want to use it, but you don't want to use it to a point where it becomes dangerous. And so, I was obviously sad to see my right hand man go. We got over to the cop, we got him on a thing, and I literally carried his litter onto the helicopter and said goodbye to him and immediately went over to the talk and called his wife, who his wife would call me son, you know, like, we were that close. And I had to tell her, I said, Angela, I, you know, he's been hit, but I think he's gonna be okay. And I went back to my room, and I must have stayed awake

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  for 18 straight hours, just staring at the map and trying to figure this out and talking to the guys that were on the ground. I knew the corner he was shot on. I knew, like, basically where they took him to exfil him and the whole nine yards. And so I start doing this, like, reverse triangulation, you know,

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  Math thing where I go, okay, so if he was hit here, he was hitting the shoulder, he was rounding the corner, then that means that basically it's one of these 18 buildings are the only buildings that that shot could have come from. And then I start looking at the satellite imagery and I realize like, actually, you can't see because these buildings are taller. So then I narrow it down to like four. And I said, I think the shot came from one of these four buildings. I didn't tell anybody. Just sitting in my room, breaking this down. And I called one of my platoon leaders in, Lieutenant Wagner, great guy. And I said, I don't want you to tell anybody about

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  what we're doing. I definitely don't want you to tell the men. I said, but I think that shot came from one of these three buildings right here. I said, I'm gonna send you out on a patrol tomorrow. And while you're driving around in the city and you get close to this little area right here, I want you to come across the radio. And I want you to report that you saw some suspicious activity on this rooftop. At which point I'm going to go ahead and give you clearance to do a hard knock on the house. And I want you guys to go inside the house. I want you to search it. I want you to tear the place apart looking for everything. But I don't want you to tell the guys. So just like clockwork, he goes out, hits the street. And the plan was,

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  he would drive for five minutes at to a release point. He would sit and wait for about five or 10 minutes to see if we could get engaged. Then he'd drive to the next intersection. And when he got to that fourth intersection is when he was gonna come across the radio and say, ah, say something suspicious. So he does. And I go, cleared. And he gets out of the truck.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  Six guys with them, they do a hard entry onto this house. They clear the whole thing. Four males inside the house. Start tossing over blankets and stuff. We find AK-47s, multiple cell phones, stacks of cash, multiple IDs. Get up on the roof and at the roof of the house, they had those concrete blocks that, you know, had the holes in them. Well, they quick accreted over them so that you could not see through the holes. There was a piece of plywood over top of the corner with rugs that were coming down. And they call me and I go out there and I go to the roof and I look through the block that they had not quick accreted through. And I'm looking right at the intersection where my first sergeant was shot.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  And I go back downstairs and I'm looking at the four of them going, I don't know which one of you pulled the trigger, so you're all coming with me. And so we zip tied them, you know, took them back to the base. I get back to the talk. I call my first sergeant's wife and I said, uh, hey, listen, he's, you know, Lon Stole, he's going through surgery, sounds like he's going to be fine. I was like, but I need you to do me a favor. I need you to tell him we got him.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  And she goes, I will. And, um, I remember when we were, you know, putting the guys into the back of the truck. I had this young PFC kid, you know, good intentions, but he grabbed a hold of one of the, you know, guys that we had captured and pushed him and he like literally banged into the back of the, uh, deuce and a half or whatever truck LM TV that we were using to exfil. And I remember grabbing a hold of him and pulling him in close and I said, we don't do that. We don't do that. And that was like one of those moments where I like, I knew the guys were pissed. I knew they were angry, but I had numerous case studies that I could have showed you

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  where those kinds of things got out of control in theater. And now guys are setting buildings on fire and killing innocent people and throwing them off of bridges into the euphrates and I'm like. And going to jail. That's right. And I was like, we're not doing it. We're, we're gonna, you know, and, and I think that my. Style of command was we will prove how good we are through our, our actions on the battlefield. These guys lost, they already lost. Like, let's just get them back and let's focus on, you know, the next one. And so the Malab was sort of crazy. Then you guys showed up.

• 1:37:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, before we get to us showing up, so to tell me about Operation Great White, because I know that was a big impact.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was before, that was right before you guys came.

• 1:37:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so that was March 13th and we didn't show up. We probably didn't get over to your side of Ramadi until April, I don't know, first couple of weeks of April is when we got to you guys.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, by this time, we had a couple of strikes on Delta Company, lost Sergeant First Class Rogers, clearing Easy Street, which, you know, there was a reason why we called it Easy Street because it was anything but that. In the midst of trying to get him out,

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  we ended up having a strike on a Abrams tank. And it ruptured the fuel cell of the tank and that tank burned for eighteen hours. I mean, it was, you know, it just was on fire. And if you know anything about, you know, how the insurgents build their IO campaign is like they whip out the camera and they go out and they go, look, here's an American tank burning. And if they could have, if we would have X filled and just let the tank burn, there would have been on Al Jazeera, pictures of them jumping up and down on a tank, just like we saw in Somalia with the Rangers and, you know, it just would have been bad. So Colonel Clark was like, we are securing that tank.

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  We're going to let it burn. I mean, it was cooking off ammo, 120 millimeter rounds, cooking off on the inside. Luckily, nobody was hurt. We did lose Rogers. And it was at that point that like we pushed out into blocking positions. I had already been out on mission all night long. So when I came in, I just told, you know, Major Womack, hey, I'm ready. Like, we just came back in. I can go back out if we, if we need be. And he's like, great, go out there and set up blocking positions. We need to protect that tank. And we go out there and all my trucks and I'm, I'm rolling up and down Canal Street. I'm rolling up and down. I'm checking on my guys. Like, we, we are tired. It is hot.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  And all we had to do was sit there and wait to see and every so often a guy would come around the corner and launch an RPG at us and you know we'd get small arms fire then this white van pulled up and they had mounted a freaking dishka in the back of this white van and the back opens up and he opens up on my guys and so we got a couple of guys that are you know shrapnel in the front of their vehicle and um it was a that was a long day for us and I finally said hey sir like we need to come back in um we at least need to refit because we are getting to the point where we're not going to be any good um going on 24 hours of no sleep and he said okay

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  I'm gonna send the mortars out they're gonna replace you in a M113 and some gun trucks and stuff and I'm sitting there in a blocking position on Canal Street a road that I had walked up and down all day long

• 1:40:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah which by the way Canal Street like behind you is when you're facing the city behind you is Camp Corregidor it's not a far transit away

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  You could probably see me

• 1:40:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah yeah yeah and yet Canal Street you know there was like all kinds of badness going on

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  I don't know how there's still this day I don't know how they did it like I mean but um here comes the 113 and the mortar guys coming down the street and I'm out of my truck and I remember I was in the back of my truck and uh just as the Humvee passes me I'm waving the Sergeant First Class Lamborghini Platoon Sergeant for the mortar platoon and he does the old you know handshake thing and they get about 75 yards away from where I'm standing and a very large IED goes off I mean it slams me into the back of my truck um and I I look up just in time to see Collins hit the

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  ground he was the turret gunner and the blast had gone off underneath the truck and launched him out of the turret of the top and he landed and I immediately just like slung my M4 off to the side and went running the 50 75 yards and by the time I put my hands on him he literally was taking his last breaths and at about that point my gun truck chases after me because you know great there goes Crazy Joe again running through the streets all by himself uh jump in the truck and we roll down to the uh the Humvee Lamberson's inside. He's severely wounded.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  I see Sergeant Copeland, one of my guys, and he's trying to get the door of the Humvee open. But they had the combat locks on, which could be a good thing, could be a bad thing. But when you have an explosion like that, it it keeps the the doors closed. Because, you know, the the old doors would just blow off and then you'd have casualties laying all over the place. Well, it would we'd confine it a little bit more. But unfortunately, the driver had broken both of his arms. He had had him up on the steering wheel when it went off, broke his arms, his wrist. And and he was basically sitting there unable to open the door. And I've got Sergeant Copeland, who is this like really big black guy like yanking on this door.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  And I thought like we had the tow straps on the front of our Humvees. So I grabbed the tow strap off my Humvee and I slid it into the door and just told my driver to punch it in reverse. And we popped the door open. I grabbed the casualty. The 113 has picked up Collins off the road and is loading Lamberson now into the back of the the 113. I put the driver in my vehicle and we rolled to the cop. I leave my guys in the blocking positions. And in the meantime, there's still more fighting going on over at the the tank. Like they are throwing duffel bags of IEDs over walls on top of our guys just to just to get us to drive us away from the tank. And I remember getting over to the the cop.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  And I got the driver out of my vehicle. I I walked him over to the aid station just as the 113 was pulling in. And the ramp comes down and and they they they have Lamberson on a back brace. And they pull him out. And just as they're grabbing a hold of Collins, I remember this day, and I don't know why I said it, but I said the words, be careful. He's dead.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  And it seemed like such a odd expression or words to use in the moment, but like because I saw him take his last breath and because, I mean, you know, he, he was, he was dead, but it was almost like, don't drag him out of here. Reverence, yeah. Like he, he's one of our guys and, and, and he is dead. And then I immediately went into the cop and man, the docs are working on Lambertson and, and his leg is just completely splayed open and, and you got five docs over there trying to get on that look over and the, the driver is laying up on a, on a bed and you know, he's got his broken arms and

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  stuff, but because Lambertson is so bad, everyone's really focused on him. So I stay it out of the way of the docs and I walk over to this guy and, and you know, I start talking to him, man, you know, you're going to be all right, you know, and I'm, I'm working on his hands and he's got, you know, the combat gloves on and, uh, and they're a little charred and burned and you know, it's bloody and, and I go to like, try to get the glove off so I can like, just kind of assess how bad it is. And I, as I begin to pull the glove, I'm pulling his finger right off the bone. And I stopped and I said, like I tapped on it. I go, we're just gonna put that right back where it goes. And, uh, and, and we got him out and I remember walking over to Lambertson who just had this, you know, thousand

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  yard stare. He was clearly in shock. And I remember rubbing his forehead and talking to him and just being like, hey buddy, you know, you're, you're going to be all right. We're going to get you out of here. And just like I had done with my other casualties, I carried him on the helicopter, um, and said goodbye to him. And just like we all do, right? I'd, I'd said, I'll see you again. Like you get your ass back here. We got more fighting to do, right? Like the expectation that we're not done. And, uh, and I got word like two days later that he had succumbed to his wounds and, um, that was a, that was a difficult thing to go through. Um, so I went back to my CP and I wrote the order for Operation Great White. And I said, all the places that they said, don't go, all

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  the things they said not to do, I'm going to figure out a way to do it and pulled it off and I'm going to try to bait these guys. Like we, we just got so frustrated, you know, as a soldier, I hated being reactionary.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  I wanted to be proactive. I didn't want to be reactive. Right? If I went out, I wanted to make it so that like we had intention. That there was something specific that I knew we were gonna do. And we were gonna stick to that plan. So Great White was it. And all of my missions were all named after animals. So that's if you looked at the mission board, every mission that had an animal name, well, that was Charlie Company. So Great White, Fox Hunt. You know, Crazy Possum, you could make them up, whatever you wanted to do, all those animal names. So you could look at the ops board and you could be like, oh, my God, Charlie Company did 25 operations in the last 14 days. Like, you know, just by looking at it.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  So I designed Great White and I said, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do a dismounted infill with one platoon. We're gonna do a route clearance with the IED task force that would come in and try to find these subterranean buried IEDs along the route. And we're gonna hide another platoon in with those vehicles. Sound familiar? Yeah. And when we get to where we think a good location is, I'm gonna dismount those guys. We're gonna seize the building, whatever building is there. We're gonna make sure that we have good visual down major avenues of approach.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  And we're gonna go in in the dark at night and as the ID clearance team continues and moves on, we're gonna be hiding in these buildings and we're gonna wait for them. And we're gonna wait for them to try to come back and like reseed these IEDs. And then we are going to kill them. And I have multiple positions and all of my my fire positions were named after girls' names. So I had, you know, Katrina and Sabrina and, you know, Alexis and all these different, you know, girl name

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Overwatch positions all over the city. We had stayed there all day long, all day long. We'd seen a lot of movement. We had felt like one of our positions may have been compromised and the the plan all along was if we thought something was compromised, we get the QRF, we roll in, we get them out. And we just don't mess with it. But that happened early in the morning.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  And my guys in that that Overwatch position, it's about eight o'clock at night. And I said, well, let's wait another hour because we know they they tend to like to move when it gets a little bit cooler. So we're going to wait a little bit. And when you guys feel like you're good and the city is quiet, I want I want us all to exfil. So slowly but surely, we did a bounding exfil dismounted. We did not call in the QRF. We we didn't, I didn't want to show my hand that that's what our mission was. I wanted to see if we could get out and not even let them know that we were there so that we could always catch them. So dismounted exfil, we got rid of the first Overwatch position while the other two stayed.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  Very much like a bounding, you know, attack that you do with one another. While the one moves, you pull security. And the last unit, the last squad in their house had pulled out. And they had a our battalion snipers with them, Marco Silva. And as they came out of the house and were working their way down to Faruk Way, which is the most southern road in the Malab. They came under a significantly big ambush. And I had wrote in my journal that I was disappointed because this was the position that had been compromised earlier in the day.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  But it was like, when we say compromise, like it was kids. Like, we think the kids had seen us, but there was nothing to give away that there was any movement at all. Within seconds of the first round being shot, Marco Silva is KIA and laying dead on the street. Multiple RPGs are coming in. I got guys hiding behind. You know, steel trashcans. I got Specialist Alvarez, who's literally laying on top of Silva's body to protect him because they're shooting directly and these rounds are, you know, hitting

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  past him. I've got, you know, my Sergeant Erby immediately wounded in the leg, the guy who's in charge on the ground. We did have air support guys with us, the Anglico support guys. But, you know, in that moment, what you saw was like a true react to contact, right? Like, you think about it in the drills that you do, but a real react to contact is probably going to result in multiple wounded, if not some seriously injured or killed in that style of ambush and RPGs, machine gun fire, like everything. And I was just outside my talk

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  as we were coming back in from the other positions when literally all hell broke loose. And in the dead of night, in the cool air, that sound will travel and it was significant. And I went, oh shit. Just as the one squad was coming back into Corrigador is when this thing kicked off. Immediately called Cinty, who was out with doing the Buffalo ID placement. I said, Cinty, I need you, I need you to get trucks down there immediately. And he launched

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  a set of trucks down there. They turn right on the Farouk and as soon as they turn right, IED strike kills, you know, the guys inside that vehicle. Now we've got a burning Humvee. I've got multiple KIA. I got four or five wounded.

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  I've got guys on top of buildings, literally firing AT4s back into the house across the street that we had been ambushed from. I've got, I'm coordinating with the Air Force Tac that's on top of the building. We've got F-18s coming on the station. We're doing gun runs on the building. I'm dropping bombs on this thing. We've got now tanks involved and everybody was coming into the fight in order, like for each other, you know, and that's why I like, when I say like me and Cinty were like close, like all I had to say was I need you and, and it just was reaction.

• 1:53:35Jocko Willink?

  And this was Canal Street and Farouk Way?

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:37Jocko Willink?

  God.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  Right there.

• 1:53:39Jocko Willink?

  That's just like echo Charles, that is just like, uh, literally 200 yards from, not, not even from the, from the fence, from the wire. It's probably 150 yards maybe. But yeah, you're going to have massive combat power there almost immediately.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  Immediately. I mean, within minutes, you've got, you know, I got freaking Abrams tanks launching rounds into this thing. And, um, you know, I'm, I'm out trying to like exfil casualties. I got my first sergeant, um, my new first sergeant coming in. Yeah. And he's, he's, you know, grabbing casualties. And I mean, it was just like every single person that went out south in that area came back either dead or wounded. Um, and, and that was hard. That was, that was really hard for me to look at that platoon. I mean, you know, the, the platoon sergeant was like emotionally wrecked because, you know, and,

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  and the fact of the matter is, is like every single one of us wanted to be out there like with them, you know? So there was a, there was a deep regret that you, like you weren't there to help out. Um, but there's another part of you that's like, we did everything that we possibly could to ensure that like it didn't get worse than it already did. And so Operation Great White would obviously be one that at least my company would talk about quite a bit. Um, it wasn't, you know, one of those times where, um,

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  I will say as a company commander, I did come back and have some inward moments where I said, you know, did I do the right thing, you know, and I had enough combat experience at that time to realize that, you know, you can't pick that magic bullet. You can't say who's gonna, I mean, we're just in the business of very dangerous things. And at any moment, something can happen. And I can sit and do the Monday morning quarterback all day long. But what I know for a fact is now that we've done the assessment, we actually stumbled upon

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  an IED emplacement cell. And they thought, when they saw my squad coming down the alley, they thought we were doing a raid on their house that they were in. And seeing my guys who were doing nothing more than exfil-ing, just happened to bump in to this three man cell. The fourth man is who emplaced the IED that ended up killing Corey Dan on the Delta Company Humvee. But it was just circumstantial. It just was one of those things where it's like, had we waited maybe another hour, we might have been able to see them, but we wouldn't

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  have had PID to be able to engage them. Because we would have just seen them basically leaving. But they were strong pointed in that building in Overwatch while the IED guy was emplacing the IED. And when they saw my squad coming down the road, they, you know, they were a boxed rabid rat. And they said, we either fight or we die. And that's what they did. And it really caught our guys off. Um, which is what turning in. So by the time you guys got there.

• 1:57:09Jocko Willink?

  And that's kind of why I wanted to talk about that a little or wanted you to talk about it a little bit because when we showed up, I kind of already gave the backstory of why we ended up going over to Corregidor and we ended up taking a pretty big chunk of guys over to Corregidor because Colonel Gronski had said, hey, we like, I need your guys. You can kill ID people like we need you over there. So we ended up going over there, but we knew that this had happened and you know, meeting your guys, meeting you, knowing that you guys had just suffered these, over the past few weeks, had suffered massive casualties.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  Let's say five KIA, about 18 wounded.

• 1:57:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's literally like, I think, you know, this is days before, this is days before we show up with you guys. So it also, I think, I, I would assume, at least it seemed to be that your minds were very open to having some more guys show up to help you out as much as we could. Uh, which is always good as well. You know, the military can be very rice bowlish like, oh, this is my A O. This is my stuff. You can't come over here. But, and I always tell people this about Ramadi was like, oh, you can help me in some way. Come have a seat at the table. And that's the feeling that I got from you guys when, when we showed up.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I, you know, the, the connection that I had with Seth

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  was, you know, we always talk about the famous, you know, the man who sheds his blood with me will always be my brother. And, you know, you and I talked before this podcast about how I felt like he and I were so similar and I mean, he was such a surfer, bro, you know, he was like just a good looking, you know, fit California dude that I was just like, oh, great. Like this is what we're going to deal with, right? Like we got, you know, Hollywood version of literally the Navy SEALs are here. And then he, um, he showed up days after that. And, uh, we were going to do a patrol out in the area and we had just gotten the Iraqi army.

• 1:59:15Speaker 01

  And Seth comes to me and he goes, hey, uh, can we go out with you? And I go, yeah, let's, let's go. And so he gets in the vehicle with us and you know, Mikey Montsor is there, uh, 249 Gunner. And, uh, yeah. And I don't remember who was carrying the M79.

• 1:59:35Jocko Willink?

  I think, I think it was Bobby Holland who's been on this podcast.

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:39Jocko Willink?

  Broadcast. I think it was Bobby Holland.

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  Uh, so I'm with that unit and I'm walking dismounting with them. And as we're going down the street, you know, it's so funny. Cause you know, this is one of those veteran combat guys to like new in the area, right? You remember the movie where like the mortar round comes in and everybody dives to the ground except for the one E7 and he's like, what's wrong with you little bitches? You know, like, so we're, we're walking through the street and I'm literally, you know, like I've got my M4 and I'm carrying it like a pistol at this point, you know, and I'm just walking down the street and, and I look back and Stoner's there and he's, you know, on the corner and now somebody's got him and he's running across the street and, and I'm standing in the middle of the thing. And I go, yeah, you see that car right there that just passed us? I go, he's, he's spotting

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  us. He's, he's trying to figure out like what we're doing. At that point I hear him click his gun back onto safety because he's on the corner. So he, you know, he gets to the corner, clicks it off the safety. And then I hear the click and he turns and he, he looks over at, you know, Montsor and the other guys and he goes, they're starting to probe us.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  And I go, yeah, like this is gonna be fun, right? So I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna see what we can do. So we end up forcing the Iraqi army into, uh, into zone. Their tactics suck. They're literally, uh, they're walking as if they're, you know, this is their city and, uh, they have a, not a care in the world. What I would call an easy target. And so this was one of those like, I'm just gonna put the cheese out.

• 2:01:11Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna see if we get any bites. And so we start walking down these alleyways and we're trying to find some overwatch positions. And just then, a group of probably about four or five insurgents come in the zone. And we're talking black ski mask AK-47s. And they're in like this little bongo truck and they're all in the back of it and stuff. And they see the Iraqi army. I'm not sure that they knew that they were there. I think again, we just kind of stumbled upon them. But they come around a corner and like boom, you've got AK-47 dudes looking at AK-47 dudes. And the only difference is is one is wearing a ski mask and the other ones wearing

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  the chocolate chips, chocolate chip uniform. So they engage each other and I'm literally standing next to Seth and all of a sudden the rounds come zinging like right over top of our head. And you can hear them. And for the audience, if no, if you've never been on the receiving end of gunfire, you typically hear the snap over top of your head. It's the bullet, you know, breaking basically the sound barrier as it's going past you. It doesn't sound like a gun. It's like, it doesn't sound boom. It's literally a snap or a crack that goes over your head. And

• 2:02:32Speaker 01

  we got about 18 of these things crack, crack, crack, crack, right over top of our head. And this, you know, all the seals are up against the wall. And I must have had a reporter with me because I do believe he reported on it. And I turned and I looked at Seth and I go, that'll make your Peter hard. And I go, let's go up to the roof. So we kick in this house to this, kick the door into the house. We race up to the top of this house. And you guys take an overwatch position like right on this main road that looks like straight down. And again, I don't know if it was happenstance or what, but as we got up to the roof, like no sooner than like three minutes, that bongo truck comes around the corner.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  And I hear three guys on the end, not sure who shot first, but I hear three guys on the end let out a snap, snap. And those guys dismounted and I thought they were going to maneuver on us. Next thing I know, Mikey Montsor opens up with that two, four, nine into that bongo truck. And I am like ducked behind the wall. So then I look over just in time to watch the three guys go around the corner. And I jump up, I let out like basically a magazine. So I've got 30 rounds in my magazine. So I let off 30 rounds of my stuff. And then the guy with the M79 grenade launcher, he jumps off and then launches one right into the front cab of this, of this truck.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Let's just say we didn't see those guys anymore, that mission. But I remember like coming back and Seth and I looked at each other and, and you know, as you tell the video about Mikey doing the thing, I remember looking at Seth and saying, welcome to the Malab.

• 2:04:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What's cool, there's a couple, I think that was actually Mark Lee on the, on the Mark 48 laying down fire. Cause you're right, there was a, there was a reporter slash photographer there.

• 2:04:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:30Jocko Willink?

  And so there's pictures of this.

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm the only guy in ACU on top of the building and then all you guys.

• 2:04:37Jocko Willink?

  So I was in the talk when this was going down. I was sitting with, sitting with Colonel Clark. And also I can hear, or I don't know if we were on your frequency or if we were on the battalion frequency, but they start giving the frogman on the roof, which is a thing that we do in the SEAL teams. If we're going to go to the rooftop, we want to let everyone know on the rooftop, don't shoot me, I'm going on the roof. So you know, frogman on the roof. So, and I think this is going to happen again, you know, my memory is not perfect, but you know, we start hearing these in the talk frogman on the roof and, and you could see like it brought a smile to Colonel Clark's face. You know, like, okay, like we got frogman, we're in the middle of the desert. We got frogman on the roof. Got it. Check. And then as you guys, so I'm sitting there like listening

• 2:05:21Jocko Willink?

  to all go down, vehicles, whatever, destroyed, enemy runs away. You kind of report that. You, you say we're patrolling back. So I go down to meet, meet you guys, you know, at the gate. And we roll in and there was a mid team guy there.

• 2:05:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:38Jocko Willink?

  And he looks at Stoner.

• 2:05:41Jocko Willink?

  And he goes, because the mid team guy was in charge, this guy was in charge of the Iraqi soldiers. And he goes, you, he goes, hey, good job out there. You must have been in a lot of urban combat. And Stoner looks at him and goes, that was my first firefight. And then you and me go up to Colonel Clark's office. We walk in there and you go, I want these guys with me on every mission. And that to me, that was the best, that, that, I think that is the best compliment I've ever gotten in my life. To have somebody that's a, a guy that's been in the streets, been fighting for five or six months. I knew you had, you know, taken significant casualties. And you, you and me walk up to see the battalion commander and you tell the battalion commander, I want these guys with me on every mission.

• 2:06:26Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, that's the best compliment I've ever, to this day, the best compliment I've ever got in my life. And from then on out, and then, so that happens. So now I'm getting to know you a little bit and you take, you know, we go down, we're planning, we're starting to plan a really big mission. Like a, like a, like a battalion sized operation.

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  Was that Market Garden?

• 2:06:46Jocko Willink?

  I forget what it was called.

• 2:06:47Speaker 01

  It was a big one. It was in the south.

• 2:06:48Jocko Willink?

  It was in the south, but it was gonna be, it was gonna be a battalion sized operation that got canceled by like the MEF. Because they didn't want any battalion sized operations. So it became a two company plus operation.

• 2:07:00Jocko Willink?

  But you and I, but this is when I, this is when we walked down there and you were in your little tactical operations center, or maybe it's just your, your company, uh, CP. But you start showing me the videos. And I go, so you're showing me videos, like you're telling me the corners, you're like, hey, this is this corner. Hey, this is this street over here. You gotta watch this over here. And I go, hey man, where are you getting these videos from? And you said, I record. I have a, you know, a vehicle mounted camera and a chest mounted camera, or something like that. You said, I record every time we go out, so I can come back here, review it. And I know the streets better. And that's when I knew that you were just like, you were a guy that was gonna, that you were professional, that you were professional.

• 2:07:39Jocko Willink?

  The other funny story about happened here is when we got there, I'd, I'd taken my snipers and put them up in all the different towers, right?

• 2:07:48Jocko Willink?

  And so you and I are sitting there and now we're maybe it was the same day, maybe it was a day later. I don't know, but we're sitting there, we're talking, we're kind of reviewing, you know, what you need, how I can help you. And all of a sudden we hear like, like some machine gun fire. And you know how you talked about the guy like in the street when he's acting cool, like a big explosion happens, he acts like it's no big deal. So I don't know if this was going through your head, but in my head, I'm like, I'm not, you know, I gotta be, I gotta be a professional, be cool. So this massive machine gun fire and you and I are acting like it's no big deal. We're kind of just like, whatever, you know, like no factor, you know, we're just hard war dogs. So this big machine gun firing, we're sitting there and then all of a sudden, whoa, whoa, big.

• 2:08:30Jocko Willink?

  And I knew they were RPGs. And so now both of us, we drop all of our cool, we get up, we go running outside. And there's a, we, right, right outside your CP, there's one of the towers.

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:42Jocko Willink?

  And there's smoke coming out of it. And, and you said something like, hey, oh, that we're getting attacked from the Malab. And I go, don't worry, I got snipers up in the towers. And right as those words finish coming out of my mouth, spilling out of the bottom of that tower is Matt Hasby, one of my snipers. His weapon's been blown in half.

• 2:09:08Jocko Willink?

  And I had to eat my words. I was like, maybe we do gotta worry.

• 2:09:11Speaker 01

  Was that Fox Tower? I think it was. It's a Fox Tower. I remember when that happened and I think I made some comment about like, he's going to need a new gun or something like that. You know, yeah, that was one of those ones. Yeah, it was, uh, yeah, it was a lot of fun having, uh, you know, you guys with us to plan. And then, like I said, it got to a point where because I wanted you to be a part of it so much and, you know, Seth and I were basically the same rank, right? So we, we would have dinner together and we would, uh, war game or we would talk about like, how can we get them to react to us, right?

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  Like, we wanted to be purposeful about everything that we were doing. I, I just did not like the, like, presence patrol. Was like the worst combination of words that you could use around me. And I, I would look at someone from the battalion S3 shop and I'd just be like, Don't ever use those words around me again. I, I, we're not doing presence patrols, right? Like, you know, and that was the sort of part of me that was like, well, no wonder this freaking war is taking as long as it is to accomplish because we're not going into it with the sense of like, what are we really trying to accomplish here?

• 2:10:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's one of the mentalities that I brought back from my first deployment was, and I used to, when I used to teach the junior officer course, I would say I'd give them a, like an overview of a mission. I'd say, okay, we're, we're in Baghdad. We leave our compound. We drive for 40 minutes to a target. We unask the vehicles. We hit the target. Takes us, I don't know, three minutes to clear the target. It takes us another 15 minutes to search the target. We get back in the vehicles. We drive back 40 minutes. How long were we on offense for? And the guys, you know, some guys will, uh, you know, when you, when you hit the building or when you this, and it's like, no, actually you're on

• 2:11:05Jocko Willink?

  defense. So much of that time that it's, it's terrible. You, you, you look, you can have an offensive mindset. I get it. And we're like a porcupine going down the road and we're scanning for threats, but you are on defense. And that is a, not a good feeling to have. And that's why when I got to Ramadi and I saw an opportunity to go on offense, which means we're going to be in buildings and the enemy's not going to know we're there. And then like a, an Iraqi patrol or a clearance operation is going to be happening. When they do that, the enemy's going to attack, we're going to kill them. So yeah, that, that mentality of like, hey, we're just now, we did some presence patrols to get out familiar, familiarize ourselves with the battlefield. But most of the times even on our presence

• 2:11:49Jocko Willink?

  patrol, it'd be like, we'd be doing a bounding overwatch. We'd put guys up in a, in a, in a building somewhere where we could at least keep track of it. But yeah, that attitude of not wanting to be reactive, not wanting to be defensive is what it, it is a different mindset to have. And it's really easy to convince yourself that you're on offense. When you're, you know, oh, uh, we're going to go out into this neighborhood and well, what's the objective? Like, what are we going to do? How are we going to set it up so that we are, we maintain at, as much of an offensive footing as we can?

• 2:12:18Speaker 01

  You know, we got to a point, and I don't remember if you guys were on the ground with us or not. It was a, It was a mission that I had coordinated and you talk about company strength. Let me just clarify. I would normally have about two platoons to be able to do anything with max. Because we rotated guard at OP Hotel. We had tower guard of Camp Kurgodor. And so at any one time, I'm rotating platoon by platoon on who's on force pro. Who's going to the hotel and who I have to do a mission with. So a lot of my missions were at platoon level.

• 2:12:59Speaker 01

  And you know, Lieutenant Helms, Lieutenant Wagner, Lieutenant Gaskin. We had platoon leaders really doing the mission every day. So when I got the opportunity, when Major Womack, my S3 would come down and say, okay, man, we're going to relieve you on on the towers. We're going to put Alpha Company in the hotel. I'm giving you your whole company. And I was like, yes, okay, now it's time to play. And I remember at some point, we went down south again where we shouldn't have been. And I said, we're going to be, we're going to do targeted raids on four houses. And we're going to do them all at the same time. I want flashbangs going off.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  I want C4 making gates, doing cheetah flips off the hinges. Like I want, like, I want to be able to stand there to my watch and literally give a countdown. And that was a level of professionalism about the job that we were doing. That I started to begin to think like, we're actually really good at what we're doing. And we planned the op. I had the whole company out there. We infilled 03 in the morning by foot. Walking into the Malab, bounding corner to corner. Standing in a stack outside of a house, putting a block of C4.

• 2:14:26Speaker 01

  And I would count down on the radio. Three, two, one, and again, in the cool night air, the explosions of the C4. And then you could hear the flashbangs go off and then you could like, and then all of a sudden you're like 30 minutes into it and you're getting target one, clear, target three, clear, target two, clear, target four, clear. Now we're going to exploitation. All right, guys, tear the house apart. I need you to find anything that you can, you know, and we had interpreters with us so we could interview, you know, guys and, you know, I would say about, I don't know, 25% of the time we would find somebody good.

• 2:15:07Speaker 01

  A 75% of the time you would go into an open house, uh, you know, with nobody there. And you'd be like, that's weird because all of our intel said that this was an occupied house being used and they just slipped away every single time. And, you know, that version of combat, it wasn't like we, we were, we weren't going against a battalion of Viet Cong and the, like, these guys, it was, it was hard. It was hard to go out every single day and not know exactly what they were doing.

• 2:15:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, uh, that's the, that's it, right? That's it.

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  It's whack a mole.

• 2:15:44Jocko Willink?

  That's why, whatever it was 10 years later, when I saw an ISIS, uh, uh, column of vehicles painted black with ISIS black flags, they're wearing, I'm like, oh, this is.

• 2:15:55Speaker 01

  This is gonna be easy.

• 2:15:56Jocko Willink?

  Like, thank God, thank you, you know, and they did, they slaughtered ISIS. I mean, just slaughtered them, but that was the complete other end of the spectrum is Ramadi, like, you cannot tell. And luckily the locals could tell a little bit better, you know, if you could, if you, you know, they could gather the intel, if you could question people and you could tell sometimes just by the way people were behaving, but also, uh, you know, some guys sweating really bad and you're like, hmm, this guy seems a little suspect, but yeah, no, it's a, it's as challenging of an environment as I can imagine when you've got an enemy that blends in that well with the locals. Um, let's talk a little bit about the blue on blue.

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:16:37Jocko Willink?

  Cause.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  You and I were together.

• 2:16:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we were standing right next to each other. We were indeed. And, uh, yeah, I mean, it's a kind of, you know, the opening of the book that I wrote is this, this blue on blue and here's, you know, the, I don't, I should have read it again last night to see how I describe you, but I, but, you know, company commander that I'm sitting with. Out there while this is happening is Crazy Joe and and there we were. We had multiple elements out. We had a big element doing clearance. I had a two or three Overwatch positions set up. You had your company out there. There's people standing by on QRF. My guys start getting, we start getting, everyone's kind of getting contacted. Everyone's kind of

• 2:17:21Jocko Willink?

  starting to shoot. And at some point, my guys call, one of my elements calls in the QRF. And, okay, you know, fair enough. You know, you and I, we were, we were a few streets over from Farouk.

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  We were, we were, the good news is.

• 2:17:39Jocko Willink?

  You have your book.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  I got the book.

• 2:17:41Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  And.

• 2:17:42Jocko Willink?

  Did you review your notes on this?

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:17:45Jocko Willink?

  You'll remember it better than I.

• 2:17:47Speaker 01

  So I, I have the details of that op in, in my journal here and your team infilled, just like we did, using the Buffalo clearance team as the guys. And in the op order, they were supposed to enter building 32. 32 was down in the south and this was a joint operation with the Iraqi army. You know, the mid team commander was there and they were going to literally clear. Now their definition of clear and yours and I, it's not the same. I mean, they basically just walked down the street and then clear, but they were

• 2:18:28Speaker 01

  only supposed to go to a certain phase line. And the house that you guys were to take in house 34 or whatever it was, was like right on the edge of that zone. Well, your chief, I think was in.

• 2:18:44Jocko Willink?

  So, hold on, a couple of things. We had another element that was in Overwatch by the soccer stadium.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  That's right. You had two.

• 2:18:51Jocko Willink?

  So the soccer stadium and then we had guys that were. The the building that they were in, it was it was Tony, it was BTF Tony, he was the platoon chief. It was it was his element. They were probably three houses outside the limit of advance.

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:19:09Jocko Willink?

  Was where they were planning, where they were planning.

• 2:19:12Speaker 01

  Planning to go. But when they got to the house, they realized that it was shit for Overwatch.

• 2:19:18Jocko Willink?

  Was they couldn't see, and again, these are things that I do remember, and I do know because I've had these conversations with Tony, but they couldn't see Farouk Way, which is what they were supposed to be watching because as the clearance team moved down the pie, the pizza pot, the pizza slice, that's where they were going to be reseating IEDs. So he got to that position and was like, oh, this is, I can't see. And, you know, just like decentralized command, commander's intent, and the reason why he was there was to watch Farouk Way and make sure IEDs don't get reseated. He gets in there, sees that he can't see the road and says, we've got to move. And so he did.

• 2:19:56Jocko Willink?

  Where he moved to was one, it was, it was on the same street that was the limit of advance for the, the, what was being cleared. And so, and everything was just, uh, what's it, Murphy's Law, right?

• 2:20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:12Jocko Willink?

  So it's really late in the morning. And, but the sun's kind of coming up, so your nods aren't really working that well. And so he decided, hey, really quickly, we got to move to another building like, and that's what he decided to do. So that's, those were a couple of other things that were happening.

• 2:20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and so you want to talk about the complexity of this thing, right? And I was hoping that we would talk about it at some point because I, I,

• 2:20:38Speaker 01

  as I look back on my time there and you go, you know, how was it being a company commander? And I go, oh my God, it was awesome. But not everybody had the experience that I did. I went full operational. At any one time, I would have F-18s above me, 30,000 feet. I would have helicopter gunships.

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  Down in the south, I always drew a line on my map and I called it phase line Mexico. And I'd always tell the helicopters, stay south of phase line Mexico. Because if you come above that, they're gonna hear you. And any chance I get to get engaged with them is gonna go away. Like, I wanted, I wanted them to not be around until I needed them. Then I had tanks, I had gun trucks, I had an Iraqi army element. I had a platoon of Navy SEALs. So like, all of a sudden, as a company commander, you are managing a ton of information. Not only on the radio, but you're looking at a map.

• 2:21:43Speaker 01

  You're trying to decide where everybody is, you're trying to de-conflict. You've got multiple elements moving at the same time. You had a map, I had a map, we went up to a roof. I remember we were standing on top of the roof, or maybe it was, we were on the street, actually. I think there's a photo of us. Just the, I'll, I'll share it with you. It's, we're standing back to back and someone got the back of our heads looking down at the map. And that was during this time. And we heard the, the rounds go off. Well, no one relayed the change of position to the Iraqi army unit, the mid-team. And they had gone beyond where they were supposed to go.

• 2:22:19Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  So you've got this random four-man Iraqi army element that's not being monitored by anybody. Beyond a phase line that they were supposed to be at. Going into a courtyard of a house. And so, my understanding is the chief looks up and sees a guy walking into the courtyard. He sees a silhouette of an AK-47 and launches two rounds through the front door. At which time, Gunny Gibson is on the ground. He's our, uh, Anglico.

• 2:22:50Jocko Willink?

  And Gunny Gibson, so those, you know, when, when you, when we did the forensic on it. Forensic on it. The Iraqis, for some reason, they thought, hey, wouldn't it be smart if we cordon off this, this area that we're clearing? And without telling anyone, they had come up with that plan. And so they, when the clearance started, they didn't, they didn't understand or they didn't know that, that we had overwatch positions. They didn't understand that we had had it cordoned off. The enemy wasn't going to be able to attack. So they sent this small element of Iraqis down, like go, you know, someone in, some, someone in the Iraqi army said, hey, go, go put an overwatch position in this building.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  It just happened to be.

• 2:23:34Jocko Willink?

  And it happened to be the same buildings that, that my guys had happened to go into, which my guys' failure was they didn't tell their, their intent of where they were going.

• 2:23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:42Jocko Willink?

  So they, so those Iraqis take off. Gunny Gibson was like, what? You know, he kind of like, where, where are they going? And he just chased after him like to try and, because his job as an Anglico guy is to maintain frontline trace. He's got to know where the frontline of troops are. So he sees them running off. He goes with them to just try and like maintain some level of awareness of where the hell they're going. He thinks they might go one or two buildings. No, they go all the way down the pizza pie. And then what you said happened is one of, you know, one of my guys, uh, the, the door opens up and a guy walks in and we had seen, you know, we're looking at your intel. Guess what

• 2:24:22Jocko Willink?

  you're, guess what the pictures you're showing us of what you're capturing? You're capturing AK-47s. You're capturing chocolate chip camis. Like the enemy had these things at least accessible body armor. And so.

• 2:24:35Speaker 01

  And this was not a huge tactical unit. This was four.

• 2:24:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:24:40Speaker 01

  Guys. And so it didn't make sense that this was the team. It, it was, it was, oh, I mean, again, hindsight's 2020. You look back on it now and you're just like, holy shit. But what I will say is when that, when, when he fired those first two rounds and that Iraqi soldier dropped, uh, to the ground and the others fled and Gunny Gibson went with them, he got back to a gun truck and basically was like that building right there. And then all of a sudden 50 cal, M4, I mean, they unloaded into that building. Just it went.

• 2:25:19Speaker 01

  Full effects, full fire effects where it and Gunny was actually calling for F 18 to drop the house. And I remember you and I were standing there and we're trying to figure it out and we're like, what, what house? Like, what, what's going on? So Gunny, um, and I believe my platoon leader, Lieutenant Wagner, and I think one other soldier, they ran into the house, full guns blazing, grabbed the body, the body and drug it back out because we wanted to, to drop the house. So here we are like, doing valorous things.

• 2:25:54Jocko Willink?

  Freaking horrible.

• 2:25:55Speaker 01

  Against our own friends, you know?

• 2:25:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, it's so, it's so horrible.

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  And I cannot believe your guys walked out of that building.

• 2:26:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So they, so they get him out, right? And you and I kiboshed the, the F, the, the airstrike.

• 2:26:11Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, we did.

• 2:26:12Jocko Willink?

  I was like, dude, I, there was something in the back of my, you know, my spider senses were not feeling good. Like my SCA was the same way. Uh, my SCA was like, hey, like, what, where, we, we don't know exactly where our guys are yet. We, so we kiboshed the drop, which must've sounded crazy to Gibson. He must've been like, what are you kidding me? We just freaking took, we do, we have a casualty. We have guys wound because we, my guys wounded other friendly Iraqi soldiers. So they get out. So now you're, uh, I think Gunny Gibson or someone called that QRF in. So the QRF shows up, they start dumping, they dump like a hundred and fifty, fifty cal rounds into the house.

• 2:26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:54Jocko Willink?

  M4 and by the way, 40 mic, mic as well. And my guys are freaking just like, oh my God. And by the way, interestingly, the day before, it was the day before when we, when I just told that sniper tower story.

• 2:27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:10Jocko Willink?

  That was a dishka that had been unleashed on the sniper tower before they fired an RPG. So talking to Matt Hasby, who was the, one of the guys on the roof that couldn't get off the roof that's pinned down now by 50 cal.

• 2:27:22Speaker 01

  This poor guy.

• 2:27:23Jocko Willink?

  In his mind, he, he literally is thinking, I can't believe that this dishka found me again. Like, I can't believe that I'm here. And he was like, accepting death at this point. So my radio man calls the heavy QRF.

• 2:27:39Jocko Willink?

  Cause they're thinking they're going to be overrun. When now I'm looking at you, I hear they have you QRF get called. I'm like, hey, let those are my guys. Let's follow them. You go Roger that because you're a stud. We head a little further down Canal Street. We see the tank making a left turn because they came from the south.

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  We were right there.

• 2:27:58Jocko Willink?

  We were right behind them. We roll in and now we're sitting there and I see now as soon as we get down in that area. I see a red smoke and I'm like, okay. And I see the turret of the tank turning towards the building.

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:13Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, hey, hold what you got.

• 2:28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:16Jocko Willink?

  Hold what you got.

• 2:28:16Speaker 01

  And I, I wrote in my journal that I said, break, break, break. I said, I need frontline trace of every element south of, you know, market. I had, you know, the guys up at stadium, they checked in. Nope. Nothing, nothing's going on up here. All clear. And we start working our way down and before we get down to your unit, you walked up to me and your words were blue on blue.

• 2:28:43Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:28:44Speaker 01

  And I said, no way. And you were like, yeah.

• 2:28:46Jocko Willink?

  I said, so we get out and I have this weird like, you know, I go, I'm looking around like this is not right. This is, this is wrong. Something is wrong. And I, I Gunny Gibson from like the corner of the across the street house, he points at that house. And he goes that there's moose in that house. They killed one of my guys.

• 2:29:04Speaker 01

  He came running up to us.

• 2:29:05Jocko Willink?

  Yep. He's like, there's moose in that house right there. And I looked at him and I looked at the house and I looked at, oh, I, cause I kind of knew where my guys were supposed to be. And I was like, that's very close. And I looked at my, um, my SEA, you know, like my senior enlisted guy. And I'm like on me and he's like, cool. So I'm like, going to go clear this house. I'm going to go find out what's going on. And I walk across the street. You were, you went to the roof of the building. The, the building that Gunny was standing by. I walk over and this was, as I get to the building. I see on the ground that there's a zip tie, a broken zip tie. And I was like, The now, I mean, it's, it's very, this is all happening within seconds, but that was an indication to me. I'm like, my guys were supposed to be right over there.

• 2:29:50Jocko Willink?

  Now this building and now I see a zip tie, which in a standard operating procedure for us to zip tie. Houses shut. So I can see the doors had cracked open a little bit. I see a zip tie there. So someone broke a zip tie to get in there. And I kicked the door open, you know, and there's my, my double team chief and he's looking at me and he looks at me and his big eyes. And he goes, uh, he's like, what'd he say? He goes, I shot one of their guys. I remember exactly what he said. He goes, I shot a guy and they brought it. And I looked at him and I said, it was a blue on blue and he, Tony is the best guy ever. And the look on his face was like horror, but also like a level of disbelief of like, how did that just happen?

• 2:30:35Jocko Willink?

  And I, I walked over to you and I go, I walked into that building, you and I walked up the rooftop and you looked at me and I don't know. I forget what you asked me, but I just was like, it was a blue on blue. And you were like, also very surprised and like, God damn, like it's just, it's just, it's just horrible.

• 2:30:53Speaker 01

  You know, Stoner and I went to, uh, that memorial service for that, that Iraqi soldier and it was very, um, it was very interesting because they, they have a ceremony very much like we do, you know, it was almost like trying to mimic a little bit. And I remember and I wrote in my book, he and I were the only two Americans that went to that memorial service. And, and, and again, I think that we gained more respect, you know, for, for showing up to that, but, um, you know, just think again, what you just said, Marine Corps gunny Gibson, Anglican, Iraqi army on the ground. Mid team guys, Navy SEALs, my guys, right? Like,

• 2:31:39Speaker 01

  it was a perfect scenario for something to go wrong.

• 2:31:43Jocko Willink?

  By the way, the crypto changed at three o'clock in the morning. It's right. The crypto changed. And so there was like people that couldn't, didn't have comms with other people, which was a freaking disaster. I remember asking, I remember saying, hey, can we postpone this crypto change? And they were like, nope. I was like, damn it, you know, it's, it's, but that's the way it happens, you know, you change crypto. That's what happens and guys gotta, reload their radios out in the field and like that causes issues, but. So then we get, we have to go back. And if you remember the way we set this up to make this a company plus sized operation instead of a battalion sized operation, we were taking iterative breaks between clearances. So we get done with that one. And you know, like

• 2:32:25Jocko Willink?

  that portion of clearance ends, we go back to base and you and I went right to Colonel Clark's office and he was like, because you had told him, you'd said over the radio, this was a blue and blue, which like everyone goes, oh, you know, this is the

• 2:32:40Speaker 01

  Fifteen six investigations.

• 2:32:42Jocko Willink?

  This is the mortal sin of of combat operations. This is the most horrible thing that you can have happen is a freaking friendly fire. And we go in there and he looked at us and said, what happened? And I remember I had pieced together what happened. I knew and I just got up the battle map and I kind of said, this is what happened, sir. Here's where my guys were supposed to be. Here's where they were. Here's where the Iraqis were supposed to be. Here's where they were. This is the, this is the mistakes that that I made. And here's what happened. And he, he looked at it and was like, he, you could tell that he understood everything that you just said, which was all these different. Yeah. And by the way, you talked about Marine Corps, you talked about the MIT team, you talked about the Iraqis, you talked about the SEALs, and you talked about your team. And then there's actual enemy, because by the way,

• 2:33:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:33:28Jocko Willink?

  We're getting shot at. My other element that was on the soccer stadium was dropping dudes and getting shot at. So there was also this other group involved in the whole situation, which was bad guys, which is the other thing, you know, if there was no fire happening and all of a sudden this happens, you may, maybe you're a little bit more suspect of it. But when there's already gunfights that are breaking out, you're like, oh, well, it's on. But

• 2:33:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. We did three iterations that day, I think. And they were all about two hours apiece. And I, I remember reading that I left the talk.

• 2:34:02Speaker 01

  Immediately went down to my CP, grabbed two more bottles of water, got back in my truck and went right back out for another op. You know, the level of operational tempo also surprises me as I go back and I I reread some of this stuff. You know, like I'm, I'm, you know, writing in my journal at three thirty in the morning and I'm, you know, just one after the another after another. It was just constant, you know, uh, constant operations.

• 2:34:31Jocko Willink?

  Did you listen when I had Colonel McFarlane or General McFarlane?

• 2:34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a good one.

• 2:34:34Jocko Willink?

  I I hadn't written down or looked at the timeline of putting in these combat outposts. In my mind, they were like two, three weeks apart.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:34:45Jocko Willink?

  They were three days, you know, and it was like, we're, we're, we're just, it was go, go, go, go. But every one of those was like such a big deal, such a huge operation and so much stuff would happen on it. That it seemed like they were weeks in my mind. And, you know, if I would have really thought about it, I'm just saying like my, my, my memory impression was that, you know, cop iron was this date and then two or three weeks later, it was cop eagles nest. And then two or three weeks later, it was cop falcon and then two or three weeks later, it's cop. No, it was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It was insane.

• 2:35:20Speaker 01

  When you look at the, the calendar that I have of the ops, it was very clear to me that I did not want to not have a presence in the Malab. And when I look at my battle rhythm, I actually only had one day that I had designated as maintenance day. The day we cleaned the guns, the gate, you know, if we needed to re-zero. I mean, you know, the gun trucks, like, I don't know if you know this, but I went through two gun trucks. Gunfighter six truck was blown up a couple of times and.

• 2:35:53Jocko Willink?

  So you're saying you're, just so everyone knows, gunfighter six is the call sign of the actual commander of the gunfighters. So your actual Humvee got blown out.

• 2:36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. By the time I left, I had five IEDs go off. Either, you know, just like I just explained, I was 50 yards. I'd walked over that IED multiple times, but five in total went through two trucks. I think Lieutenant Goshen was in one of the trucks during, uh, and I ended up, uh, one of my soldiers, Max Ramsey, great, great guy was a. 9/11 enlistee was working in an investment bank and he was older than all the other privates. So I made him my RTO. Yep, good move. And he begged me to go down to the platoon to be with the guys and I let him go.

• 2:36:44Speaker 01

  And he actually traded out to be a gunner with somebody who was supposed to go on the mission. And he gets blown up and unfortunately loses his right leg during that time. So he was another one of our casualties. But you know, it was, when you look at the frequency of ops, how much you did. And the go-go-go nature of it all.

• 2:37:14Speaker 01

  I'm actually quite surprised, looking back through my journals 20 years later, 19 years later, and thinking to myself like, oh my gosh, like we did so much. And it just reminds me, you know, of the Marine Corps Memorial up in DC where it says, you know, uncommon valor was a common trait on the island of Iwo Jima. And I, I think about that so much about Ramadi. I think about like other units and other places of Iraq. I'm sure it was dangerous, but when we're talking about, and we didn't know it was going to be called the Battle of Ramadi, by the way, when we were doing it, we were just showing up to work and doing the business of what infantry guys do, you know.

• 2:38:00Speaker 01

  But hindsight being 2020, my God, the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, everybody who went into that city during that 2005 and 06 timeframe, literally accomplished something that I don't think was seen operationally in a very, very long time. With the number of operations that were conducted in such a violent. You know, area of town against an enemy that could literally disappear like a ghost.

• 2:38:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's from a strategic level. And then you look at it just even below, below the tactical level to a 18, 19, 20, 21 year old soldier, sailor, airman or marine. That's gonna get in that gun truck again for the 28th night, 50th night, 75th night, whatever it is, gonna go out into the city, daytime, nighttime. Drive past the, the vehicles that are destroyed and roll out there and, and go risk death again. That can come, you know, I was having an interesting conversation with a young, a young special operations guy and they're, you know, they're talking about the drones right now, right? Everyone's horrified of drones.

• 2:39:18Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, he was out doing some training and you get into your hide site on a recon. And you're in your hide site and then all of a sudden you hear

• 2:39:28Jocko Willink?

  and here comes a drone. And I was like, God, that sound, that's horrifying, horrifying, right? But for us, there was no preamble. There was no, no, you're just walking or driving and then all of a sudden your vehicle's destroyed and you've lost guys or you, you, you're dead. And so there's like another different level of horror of just, this could be the, the next step that I take could be the one. Okay, it wasn't. What about the next step that I, okay, it wasn't. And, you know, again, you over, you gotta overcome that. You gotta just accept the fact that if it's, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen and there's, you, you do your best, use things you can control. You can control the routes that you can take.

• 2:40:09Jocko Willink?

  You control, you know, scanning and looking, but there's an amount, an amount of fate that you're not gonna have control over. And if you focus on that, it, it'd drive you crazy as far as I'm concerned.

• 2:40:20Speaker 01

  I mean, you, you have to admit that from a human psychology perspective of it all, it takes a very special person.

• 2:40:31Speaker 01

  To go out on a mission. Um, you know, I, I still had blood on my legs from evac and a casualty, but because I knew the fight was still going on, I literally loaded my truck back up with ammo and went right back into the fight. And you're talking, you know, it, the, the ability to be able to do that, you know, and, and just say, putting others before yourself, you know, I, I'm doing this not because of me, I'm doing this because I got guys that are out there relying on me to do the business. Because I think that if you, you tend to, if you, if you spend too much time inwardly trying to protect yourself, then you can come up with reasons to not go out on the patrol.

• 2:41:14Speaker 01

  You can come up with reasons to not do something. And that just was not the business that we were in. And it is not surprising to me, um, the level of post-traumatic stress that came out of that time with guys that, that we served with. And I think a lot of it is, is because you can swallow that fear. You can motivate yourself to get back in the mission again after evacing your best friend. You can, you know, but something's got to give. Something's got to give at some point. You can't do that forever. You've got to come to terms with

• 2:41:54Speaker 01

  it in some way. Um, but I just found it remarkable that these 18, 19, 20 year old kids would just be like, oh, we're going back out again. Okay. And, and, and to know that the free, you know, I, we had something on there like, and I'm going to make this number up because most statistics are made up, but I know it was a very, very high number. There was something like 75% of the time we left, my company left the walls of our compound and went into the mulab. We were, we were, we got in contact.

• 2:42:34Jocko Willink?

  I've got, uh, so I was briefing Colonel Tovo, who's the CGSOF commander, came down, probably, this is, so, blue on blue happens, and again, Colonel Clark's reaction to it, you could see that he understood, he understood the complexity of combat, he understood that we had a grip on what had happened, and he trusted us that we were gonna prevent it from happening again, and said, I remember him saying, Roger, don't let it happen again, go get your, go, go, go execute the next mission, and you and I were like, cool, Roger that, we went, got our gear back on, went out, and did it again and again, but, so we'd gone through that, and then I had, you know, we got put on stand down from my chain of command, because you have a blue on blue, that's freaking terrible, let's find out what happened, investigating officer, the

• 2:43:18Jocko Willink?

  whole nine yards, that happens, now at this point, uh, this is where I say to Seth, like, okay, um, you, you know, these guys, we had a blue on blue, that sucks, but these guys still need us out there, uh, you're, you're gonna take an element out there, and he says, okay, let me tell you who I wanna pick, and I said, um, well, you need, you need volunteers, like, it's a shithole, like, the, the living conditions in Full Metal Jacket were shitty, um, I said, it's casualties, like, everyone just saw what happened, you need volunteers, and he says, well, why can't I just pick guys, and I said, because I don't want you taking guys that don't wanna go, and he said, Roger that, so I, I got the task unit together, and

• 2:43:59Jocko Willink?

  I said, alright, guys, here's what's going on, I'm sending Seth out to Corregidor with, whatever it was, six guys or seven guys, um, here's the whiteboard, if you wanna go, put your name on the whiteboard, and I walked out, and 20 minutes later, I came back, and every single guy, every single guy's name was on it, so then Seth did get to assemble, you know, the right qualifications, the right guys that he wanted, um, so that's, that's what, that's how he ended up with that element over there, and, you know, and he took, you know, uh, guys that were, guys that were, that he trusted, guys from his platoon, it was epic, um, so.

• 2:44:39Jocko Willink?

  That's how he ended up being back over there with those guys. And, oh, that's what I was gonna say, like, you also saw, you know, these young guys out there, but you'd also see battalion commanders out there. I mean, well, all, you know, you'd be walking down the street, there's a battalion commander. Oh, walking down the street, there's the brigade commander.

• 2:44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:00Jocko Willink?

  Brigade commander, like, just unbelievable that they were just out there, just doing the job, checking on the troops, making sure things were good. Whether it was Colonel Gronski, whether it was Colonel McFarland or General McFarland, General Gronski now, both those guys. But they were out there and the battalion commander, same, same way. You're seeing these guys and you go, man, everybody is, everybody is carrying their weight here. And, and that's, that's awesome. As a matter of fact, you had Gronski out doing like a site visit with you.

• 2:45:32Jocko Willink?

  And you had to go and pull one of my guy, one of my wounded guys out. Explain that.

• 2:45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I remember, um, we had just established the, um, OPs on Canal Street. So we had just built them. There was one down in the south that we put Iraqi army in. And then we had one halfway up the street at Canal, uh, looking down Stadium Way. And, uh, I think your team was with a group of my, my guys, uh, as, uh, a sniper element. And they had gone in and taken a house, um, in, in the area. And, uh, right around the time I'm on the street, I get the call battalion needs to see me. So I roll up there and, uh, Colonel Clark says, uh, hey, Colonel Gronski would like a site visit

• 2:46:19Speaker 01

  to the two OPs that we just built. And he kind of wants to get a good layout. And I was like, uh, you know, sir, like, uh, I'm probably gonna get in a fight while I'm out there with them, you know? And it was, I was joking at first, you know? And, uh, so he gets in our vehicle and, and we roll out there and we stopped at the, the one that was on Stadium Way. And we, we parked our trucks and we got out and we, we went into the OP and he was sort of. Checking it out and right about that time we had planned in Xville of you guys to come out of the house and start making your way back to the OP that we had in Overwatch and I am in

• 2:47:03Speaker 01

  the OP with Colonel Gronski and all of a sudden we hear the snap, snap, snap over top of our head as the OP is is under fire. It is, you know, we're getting engaged. At the same exact time, your guys were coming out of the house and moving across the street right when this fire opened up and immediately saw people hit the ground and and were injured. So I just remember turning and looking at him and his PSD that was with him at the time and I said, I'll be right back. And I ran around the corner of the OP into the wide open and started to run down the

• 2:47:43Speaker 01

  street toward where you guys were all by myself. And by that time, my truck pulled up right next to me. My guys had a good way of just following me.

• 2:47:54Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say your drivers, your driver operates well decentralized command. Follow Crazy Joe.

• 2:47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sorry to my drivers for getting him in that situation. But we ended up pulling up and I used my gun truck as cover. So it was a single truck. I just pulled right up on Stadium Way. I popped open my door and one of your guys was laying there on the ground, returning fire back. They had just thrown smoke. So the the rest are coming across the street and I basically helped pull him in to the side of the building. And then once we got there, I basically said, look, you know, stabilize him, get him ready to move. I've got another truck coming up. And about that time, one of my other gun trucks came up behind me. And I said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna block and I'm gonna cover for you. I need you to get the casualty in this other truck and

• 2:48:44Speaker 01

  we're gonna get him back to the CP. And again, couple hundred, you know, meters. So like the point of injury to a doctor putting his hands on you was minutes, minutes.

• 2:48:57Speaker 01

  And I ran back to my truck and opened the door of my truck and um the the smoke is starting to go down and um you you the guys are standing in the doorway watching me as my my gunner is scanning for targets, looking for something. And about that time, the machine gun fire comes back down and um it hits the street in front of us and literally peppers up, goes into the door that I'm using as a shield. Again, couple of rounds go zinging in between my legs and underneath the Humvee. And I'm using the door open as a shield and I'm shooting in between

• 2:49:41Speaker 01

  the door frame of the truck and the door itself back toward the stadium. And just as I'm shooting down the stadium, another insurgent a block away, looking down the alley right toward me, has me in his sights. And he lets off one single round aimed at my head. And the round goes right by my head, hits the door of my Humvee, breaks in half, what we call spall. And the spall came back and hit me square in the face, right on my lower lip and cracked my tooth and but it was almost like getting punched in the face. It like it still had enough kinetic energy on it that it

• 2:50:23Speaker 01

  like my head snapped back. And I just remember looking over at my M240 gunner or 50 cal gunner. And I was like, right fucking there, you know, and he just, I mean, he hits the button before he even begins to traverse. So it's like all the way up to, you know, where this guy just tried to take off my head. And that was like, I mean, three inches, he missed my head by three inches. So we get your guys um in the vehicle and they go. But it was like Mogadishu mile. The other guys on the patrol, we didn't have a vehicle for because it happened so quickly that we didn't initiate the QRF. They're literally running down stadium way while me and my truck are literally in reverse, laying down gunfire. And then I realize.

• 2:51:10Speaker 01

  I left the Colonel. I left the Colonel back at the OP. So I roll back and get the Colonel and I go, sir, I was really just kidding about this, but I'm really sorry for getting you at a gunfight. And he said something like, I've heard you're kind of a bullet magnet. And, uh, and then I, we get back to the talk and of course Colonel.

• 2:51:34Speaker 01

  Colonel Clark looks at me and he's like, you know, going out on patrol with you is going to be a hazardous to anybody's health at this point. Uh, and I was like, yes, sir. I'm, I'm real sorry, but you know, I don't remember you. Who was that?

• 2:51:46Jocko Willink?

  That was, so that was Cowie, Cowie Merrill that got shot, got wounded, um, really bad. The doctors again.

• 2:51:53Speaker 01

  I thought he lost his leg.

• 2:51:54Jocko Willink?

  They, they saved his leg. I mean, it was bad. I mean, the doctor, when I walked in.

• 2:51:57Speaker 01

  Like right at the knee, right?

• 2:51:58Jocko Willink?

  When I worked in Charlie Med, it was above the knee and it exited like up by the groin. And, but yeah, when I walked in, the doc was kind of like, mm, you know?

• 2:52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:10Jocko Willink?

  He's gonna live, you know, but I don't know about his leg. And he kind of gave me that rundown. And then of course, you know, I grabbed, you know, Cowie's hand and he's like, let me stay, you know, that's of course, you know, it's just let me stay. Don't, don't send me home. And, and I was like, hey, man, you gotta just go heal up, just go heal up. But, and that was actually Mikey Montsor that dragged him out of the street.

• 2:52:31Speaker 01

  No way.

• 2:52:32Jocko Willink?

  Going back and I, I, I lost, uh, didn't wrap this up. So you said, hey, you know, I, something like 75% of the time we went out. So I was telling you, I was talking to Colonel, so after, after my guys, now Stoner was back over with you for a little while. And we're getting a lot of visibility. Within, you know, the Siege of Sodif, because we're killing a lot of bad guys. And Colonel Tovo comes down and does like a site visit. And when he gets down there, you know, he's, he was great. He was, you know, being very supportive, but coming down, you know, like, do we have what we need type attitude? And so I'm giving him a brief on the AO and what's happened in the missions that we're doing. And I, I, I did not plan this. I did not plan this.

• 2:53:16Jocko Willink?

  But I said, hey, sir, just to give you an idea of the amount of enemy activity we have, I said, my element that's in Eastern Ramadi, Det Corregidor. I said, they've been in contact. Twenty-three straight missions, twenty-three straight missions. They've been in contact with the enemy. And as I get done saying that, my talk chief, my tactical operations center chief opens the door to the briefing room and says, hey, sir, just giving you a heads up, Det Corregidor is in troops in contact right now.

• 2:53:46Speaker 01

  Catfish.

• 2:53:47Jocko Willink?

  I looked at, I looked at the, I looked at Colonel Tov and I said, make that twenty-four straight.

• 2:53:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:52Jocko Willink?

  And it was actually interesting, like the twenty-fifth one, I forget what the mission was, but it was in vicinity of a mosque, right close to the, right close to base and no contact. And that was, it broke the streak. But yes, seventy-five percent is probably a very conservative number.

• 2:54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:12Jocko Willink?

  For the amount of enemy contacts that you guys got it. Twenty-three straight, twenty-four straight days of, and hey, if you're a civilian and you watch war movies, maybe you see that in World War Two, but that's not normal. You know, even when I got back and talked to the SEAL, the Vietnam era SEALs, like, most of them did not have enemy contact on a regular basis, you know? They certainly didn't have machine gunners that went Winchester on countless occasions, you know? And it's a little different, you know, in a jungle warfare, you're gonna break contact pretty quickly. But yeah, the, the fighting in Ramadi was for real.

• 2:54:50Speaker 01

  I just.

• 2:54:51Jocko Willink?

  And you guys were in the thick of it.

• 2:54:52Speaker 01

  It, uh, my god, the, I remember going Winchester with my guns on a mission and, and I was having stomach problems at the time. And, but I just knew I, I wanted to be out there, right? So, um, I'm, funniest story ever, we're in contact and I'm getting the bubble gut feeling. And I hear one of my trucks down to the south go like, we're, we're damn near like we're Winchester, we need more ammo. So I was like, I'm on it. So I rolled back to Corregidor, rolled into the CP and told my gunner and my driver like,

• 2:55:36Speaker 01

  "Hey, go get as much ammo as you can, 240, 50 cal ammo." And I ran over to a Portageon real quick and just unloaded myself and then got back in the truck and just, you know, went back out on mission. So I unloaded and reloaded in the same exact mission. But yeah, I guess we won't put that one in if we don't want to.

• 2:55:56Jocko Willink?

  No, it's all good, Ben. That's the reality of combat.

• 2:55:59Speaker 01

  You know, speaking of Gunny Gibson, you know, we were on that, uh, we were on a mission with him and, um, you know, so many missions with him, huge respect for, for the Gunny and-

• 2:56:11Jocko Willink?

  And the whole Anglico crew, which were just awesome.

• 2:56:14Speaker 01

  You know, and you talk about Anglico, um, and you know, the Naval Gunfire Liaison Coordination Officer, um, Anglico is what they were called. They, they had not been used in years. Like that, that was a concept that came back because of what we were doing in Ramadi. They realized like, you know, you, you said the number of, you know, troops in contact that we had over there and that we were being briefed at like a, a very high level. And I want to tell you that a part of that is because of the amount of firepower that we were also dropping on the city. I mean, those, those bombs cost money. And you will recall that when Cindy

• 2:56:54Speaker 01

  and I took over the train station, we probably launched the entire war's worth of effort in GPS guided MLRS rockets.

• 2:57:05Jocko Willink?

  What were you guys hitting?

• 2:57:06Speaker 01

  It was the train station.

• 2:57:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Cause it was, it was like, so just for those of you listening, south of Ramadi, there was a train track. And there was a train station, which was definitely, it was a moose train station.

• 2:57:19Speaker 01

  Huge resupply area.

• 2:57:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And so, because it was, it was a lot harder to get drops in the city itself. We did it from time to time, but it was hard. But the train station was far enough outside the city. You wanted to get that thing, you got it.

• 2:57:33Speaker 01

  So interestingly enough, I found out, you know, these GPS MLRS rockets, you know, 2,000 pound war- Heads are, you know, very, very accurate. So again, we talked about how I went back to my room a lot to try to figure out how to do things better and how to do some risk mitigation and what could do. And I really, I never really liked my bosses telling me no. I always wanted to know why the no was there. And then for me to be able to figure out how I could still do it. And get the exception. So I found out that when we first went into Ramadi, we were dropping JDAMs. We were dropping JDAMs right onto targets.

• 2:58:16Speaker 01

  And it finally came down. And I think this was, this might have been the time that Colonel McFarland showed up. And it was basically like, guys, like the collateral damage is significant with these JDAMs. Like you're not just destroying the building and your target, but you're, I mean, you're damaging other things. So I remember talking to the Anglico guys who happened to be pilots. So a lot of these guys that would go out on mission with me, they were captains and majors and they were just carrying radios and talking to the F-18. And they had this really cool device that helped us a lot. We called it the sparkle. Remember the sparkle thing? So every one of the aircraft had pods underneath. And when we were doing those missions up in Jaleba where the fish hook was,

• 2:59:00Speaker 01

  it was wide open country up there. It was, it wasn't city fighting. It was country fighting up there. But I remember we got to a point and I'm standing in the middle of the field and I'm like, I don't know what building it is. And the, the Anglico guy would say, hey, I need you to sparkle the target. And they would shine an IR beacon down and you would just look through your night vision and your target would just be a burst of light and you'd be like, all right, there it is. So then I'm talking to the captain and I was like, man, I'm really pissed off that they're not letting me drop JDAMs anymore. And it was such a huge asset for me. And you know, it was sort of part of my mentality. You shoot at me with a gun, I'm going to shoot a rocket at you. You shoot a rocket at me, I'm going to drop a bomb on you, right? Like I always wanted there to be escalation as far as I was concerned.

• 2:59:45Speaker 01

  So he says to me, he goes, you know what we do have? He goes, we have LMavs. I said, what the hell is an LMav? And he goes, well, you know what a Maverick missile is, right? And I said, yeah, it's air to air. Like you use them to shoot down other planes. He goes, yeah, they've modified them. The L now stands for land. And he goes, they're a 500 pound shaped warhead. So the collateral damage on these things is like really, really minimal. So if you fire it, it's not only deadly accurate with a laser, but the collateral damage is like 15 feet. Well, light bulb.

• 3:00:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 3:00:23Speaker 01

  And I was like, I need every single aircraft that I have on station now to carry LMavs. And we started dropping LMavs. So when you talk about being briefed at the higher level, I think the amount of money that we were spending dropping ordinance on watching guys in place IEDs and just and there being just a pile of dust and afterwards, I mean, the LMavs were a game changer for me because I could get ROE to fire them inside the city. I could not get that for a JDAM because of the, the low risk of collateral damage. So from that point on, it was, I was LMav heavy.

• 3:01:05Jocko Willink?

  LMav, Captain LMav over here. And, uh, yeah, and Gunny Gibson ended up getting, getting wounded.

• 3:01:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. He had his leg lost.

• 3:01:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he lost his leg. He was, he was just a stud and, uh, he was with JP, JP Denell, grabbed him, pulled him out of the street. Corporal Chris Leon was the first Angloco Marine killed in Iraq. Yep. And that was June 20th down at, uh, Cop Iron. So yeah, it was, you know, that's, that kind of tells you, you know, um, the, the type of fighting that was going on.

• 3:01:40Speaker 01

  You know, I, I, I wondered. I feel like there's a little bit of regret. I know it's really weird to say, especially everything that, you know, we've talked about just today. But for years, I carried with me a little bit of regret about my time there, that I wasn't more decisive. Like, I went home, and I just kept thinking to myself, like, did I really give it all? Did I really, like, you know, I just felt like I had more to give, and that there was a, maybe just, you can call it being risk averse, or just the way the operations played out. I do have to admit,

• 3:02:21Speaker 01

  when I, after it was all done, and I was away from that place, I began to really second guess, like, how decisive I was. Did you, did you feel?

• 3:02:32Jocko Willink?

  What do you mean by the word decisive?

• 3:02:34Speaker 01

  I mean, like, really going after the enemy. Like, when someone said, "Don't go down this road," or, you know, like, I, there was a part of me that wanted to see us do, like, the old World War II style, Karen Tan, sort of invasion in the city, where you're literally, like, "We're gonna go from this street over, and we are gonna clear everything until it's ours." And maybe the feeling I had of, by the time I left, um, we didn't own the city. You know, I mean, eventually, we would get there with the Sunni uprising, but that was the only

• 3:03:15Speaker 01

  thing that saved us operationally, was the seize, hold, and build mindset that came in, um, with the general. But, you know, when I left, I just kept thinking to myself, like, you'd go in, you'd clear a house, and you'd come right back out, and I'd sleep in my hooch, and then the next day, we'd do another mission. I mean, it just felt like, you know, going in and out every single day, that maybe I could have changed things a little bit more. But, I don't know, maybe that's just me being hard on myself.

• 3:03:46Jocko Willink?

  You might be, you're definitely being hard on yourself, because you guys were... You know, you guys pushed it. You guys pushed it freaking hard. And I think, you know, from my perspective, since we worked with different battalions, we would kind of get, what's a good way of saying this? It's almost like we would, we would just get to kind of show up and go to the prom. You know what I mean? Like, we didn't have to, we'd show up, like, put in a combat outpost. And we'd, we'd, you know, we'd be there for the initial push, putting in the combat outpost. We, in several cases, we seized the combat outpost, you know, a lot, and in fact, a decent amount of cases, we were the ones that went in and seized the combat outpost, turned it over to conventionals, pushed it out to an overwatch position, stay in the overwatch position for a couple of days,

• 3:04:28Jocko Willink?

  come back, refit, re- reload, go back out again, spend enough time around that combat outpost as it's being built, but then it'd be like, go, go to the next one. But we, we did get to see, and also, for, for me, you know, I was going to the brigade meeting, you know, once a week, maybe twice a week. So I'm seeing what, I, I got to see a little bit bigger of a picture than a normal, you know, oh, four is gonna see, you know, because I'm sitting there in these briefings and I see the progress that's being made. And so I think for me, it was, I saw progress, you know? Sometimes you'd see, you'd see two steps forward, one step back, but I would see enough progress to go,

• 3:05:11Jocko Willink?

  I, this is making sense. I can see operational progress being made in the city. And so that's where I was at. Now, and also, do I wish we could have killed more bad guys? A hundred percent, of course, you know, there's no doubt about that. There was also missions that we didn't do. You know, there was, Yeah, we had a lot of canceled missions. You remember, you remember Sea Lake up north of Ramadi? So up north of Ramadi is a thing, something called Sea Lake. It looked like a sea, it was shaped like a sea. So obviously, we're Americans, we called it Sea Lake, because it looked like a sea. Did we call that the fish hook? It, or was that a different one? I think the fish hook was actually different.

• 3:05:51Speaker 01

  Cause on a map that look literally like a body of water that looked like a fish hook.

• 3:05:56Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 3:05:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, Sea Lake was up there too.

• 3:05:58Jocko Willink?

  The fish, the fish hook was different, but long story short, you know, there was a point of origin up there by Sea Lake. And General McFarlane came to me and said like, Hey, we got this, you know, we're getting mortar from up here. Point of origin is up here around Sea Lake. Can you guys go kill that guy? And I'm like, yep. Or I, you know, let me, let me go talk to the boys. So I bring it back to Leif and Leif brings it to his guys and they look at it and they, they, you know, pull the intel. And the point of origins were actually in like a several kilometer square. Which is a lot different than, you know, um, an intersection or even a city block where you're going to be able to see someone move in and out of that area.

• 3:06:40Jocko Willink?

  And on top of that, the roads going into Sea Lake were just IED disasters. The with actually IEDs had destroyed American vehicles on multiple occasions. And so getting in there, getting out of there. And so, you know, I kind of went back to the Colonel and just said, Hey, sir, like this is not a, the ROI on this for us. We're going to go up there looking for a needle in a haystack. We're going to be at huge risk when we go up there. It's a lot easier to get compromised up there because you're either in the field, field, like rural hide site, which dogs, people walking around, farmers, the whole nine yards. Or we're in a building where it's, it's, it's a singular used building.

• 3:07:21Jocko Willink?

  It's one family. So when that family's not there or they don't come out, everybody sees it compromised. So, and we said, you know, he goes, okay. When he found another way to solve it, which was, I think it was persistent air overhead and eventually got him. But, you know, do you look at that and you go, man, I wish we would have done that extra mission or, you know, done more. I think you're always gonna, you're always gonna wanna, you're always gonna wanna have done more. So I think that's natural, but as far as. You guys, pretty much everybody, like everyone was running, you know, the RPMs were on in the red for everybody there. And I, and I don't think there's anybody that would hang their head or, or, or I don't think there's one person there, especially from a leadership position that would look in the mirror

• 3:08:06Jocko Willink?

  and, and not, and feel some kind of, hey, I wish I could have pushed it harder. I mean, think about what you just said, 75% of it, look at the casualties that you took, you know, you went through two vehicles, you know, like you're, you're, you're operating at such a, such a rapid pace and with such a high risk all the time. No, I, I, I don't think you could have done anything else, dude. Don't think you could have done anything else. And, and did you see Warfare, the movie?

• 3:08:32Speaker 01

  I did, just recently.

• 3:08:34Jocko Willink?

  And what, what I was gonna say, like, here we are, we've told, well, we talked about the blue on blue, we talked about, uh, Cowie getting shot, we talked about your guys, you know, your, these ambush that you suffered, IEDs that you suffered, these are like, we've, we've just talked about five or six days. We just talked about five or six days. And what's, what's heavy about Warfare, that's one day. And that's one day that they selected that they were gonna show as a bad day for them, but that's one day. And every single day was like this. Was there some, some times that was lighter? Yup. Was there some times that was heavier? Yup. But every single day, this was a very high

• 3:09:16Jocko Willink?

  possibility of something going completely sideways, guys wounded, guys killed. It, every single day was like that. And that's what Warfare showed you. It showed you, whatever it was, five hours.

• 3:09:28Speaker 01

  Packed in to

• 3:09:29Jocko Willink?

  Into one

• 3:09:30Speaker 01

  Two hour movie, not even. Yeah, no, I, I watched it and, um, it, it was almost like taking a bunch of things and putting them all into one, you know, movie, because it,

• 3:09:44Speaker 01

  It's relatable.

• 3:09:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:46Speaker 01

  It was extremely relatable from, you know, what I saw and what I experienced. It was probably as close as you can possibly get. I loved the, the brotherhood and the camaraderie that obviously comes out of everything that we do. Um, and, and I think that's really important is, you know, the here I'm 19 years removed from that and I still have guys reach out to me and talk about those days. Like, I mean, we literally went through something that I think was pretty significant for, for anybody. Um, you know, and, and as my time, as I realized my time

• 3:10:29Speaker 01

  was coming up, um, you know, I had been in command for coming up 20 months from the time that we, and, you know, I had a folding chair and a plastic table and a bunch of-

• 3:10:42Jocko Willink?

  Not even a name for your battalion?

• 3:10:44Speaker 01

  Not even a name. 20 months later, to be doing combat operations in the most, I didn't name it, this, the most volatile city in all of Iraq in oh five and oh six, um, was something that I am still to this day unbelievably proud of what I had to go through in order to really get to the point where I was ready to let, you know, when, when Colonel Clark came and said, it's, your time is coming to an end. It's time for you to go and do something else. And I, I just remember like I conducted missions all the way up until like my last day. And, uh, there's a, a story that I, I remember reading. We, this was

• 3:11:29Speaker 01

  when we did the combat outpost down south by Haji Dohar mosque, right there at the intersection of Farouk and Easy Street. I think it was OP Falcon.

• 3:11:37Jocko Willink?

  Eagles.

• 3:11:39Speaker 01

  Eagle, Eagle Nest.

• 3:11:40Jocko Willink?

  Yep, Eagles Nest.

• 3:11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, Eagles Nest. And, uh, and my company cleared the entire street and for the first time ever, I got to cross Easy Street and go into the Marines sector. They allowed me to go there and I was like, I'm not missing this. Like, you know, we're finally going to get to go to the one place that we had never been before. So I went out on the mission and again, late at night and we had decided to use the AC 130. And we were gonna pound the intersection with gunship rounds to try to detonate all these IEDs that were supposedly hidden, just specifically in the street. There were supposedly IEDs all

• 3:12:20Speaker 01

  over the damn place. And as we're clearing, I mean, we literally are jumping from roof to roof, trying to, you know, do a normal entry. And usually when you do these kind of things, you want to start up top. You want to have cord on unit at the bottom so that as you're clearing from top to bottom, you can have the squirters that pop out and, you know, killer capture the guys as they come out of the building. We go all the way into that area. And I remember taking a house and they had to come over the radio and they had to tell me like, that's it. Like, that's as far as we want you to go. Primarily because like, you were extending the ability

• 3:12:59Speaker 01

  for maybe a QRF to even get to you. Because of the amount of IEDs that were in there. And I remember being in this house we took and it was an old man, super, super nice guy, you know, he made us chai and, you know, we're sitting around just waiting for the hours to pass as the engineers are bringing their stuff in. And it's probably 2:30, 3 o'clock in the morning, and we're talking to the old man with my interpreter. My interpreter Sam, by the way, who spent his entire time with me, I ended up doing his paperwork. He actually got blown up in a gunfighter six vehicle. And I gave him a Purple Heart, even though he wasn't an American soldier. I had a ceremony and I was like, Sam, you earned this buddy. And

• 3:13:44Speaker 01

  Was he an American guy? No, he was a northern Iraqi, Christian. And I helped him do his paperwork to come over as an American citizen with the State Department. That's awesome. Did they make it? He did. And guess what he did as soon as he got here? What? Joined the army. Heck, yeah. Isn't that awesome? That's awesome. He lives up in Michigan and still talks to me to this day. Anyways, we're in the house. Sam tells me, hey, man, the old guy says, there's literally an ID, IED out his back gate, like, right there on Farouk Way. And I go, can he show me? And he goes, yeah. So we get up, it's, you know, Somewhat dark in the morning. I've got my night vision goggles on. We walk out there.

• 3:14:25Speaker 01

  He opens up the gate and he's standing there with Sam, my interpreter, and he says it's it's right out there, right next to the side of the road. And so I I walk out there by myself, you know, um, and I'm looking with my night vision and I I don't see anything. You know, I'm looking for a trash or a bag or something that's on there and I'm looking and I'm looking and I look back at Sam and I go, tell him I don't see anything out here. And Sam turns and says something to him in Iraqi and then Sam turns and looks at me and he doesn't say anything. And I go, what? And he goes, he says, you're standing right on top of it. And I happen to

• 3:15:09Speaker 01

  look down and I noticed that the dirt pattern where I was standing was a different sort of color. And it wasn't until he pointed it out. And then I saw the line come out of the ground and off to the right. And I literally did one of these backup moments. You've got to be kidding me. Can you imagine? And I'm like, a week away from changing over command, my last mission.

• 3:15:31Jocko Willink?

  When did you change over command?

• 3:15:32Speaker 01

  Uh, July. Yeah. And it was, uh, you know, God, man, I would have loved to have finished out. I would have loved to have brought my company back home, you know, after that. Um, and it it's tough leaving guys. I mean, you've been in units and

• 3:15:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, even even, you know, it's kind of similar, but when the guys from SEAL Team Five showed up to relieve us, these are the guys that are in the movie Warfare. And we know all these guys, like, we know, not, don't take me literally, but, you know, there's certainly everybody in that platoon, in the in that task unit knows someone in our task unit, no doubt about it. They're our friends. And you're there and you're just like, trying to convey to them as much knowledge as you possibly can. And you still just, you're you're, you know, the turnover ops, you're just like, oh, man, like, you just have a pit in your stomach because you can't, you can't convey all the information. It doesn't work. It's like, uh,

• 3:16:34Jocko Willink?

  you know, when you're trying to trace something, when you're drawing something, you're trying to trace it, like, you can get it close, but you're not going to get it all. And that's what it feels like. And so you have to leave them. And you're gonna go home and it's up to them. And you know, when that movie was made, that was November 19th is when that happened. I left October 21st. So it was only three weeks on the ground.

• 3:16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:16:53Jocko Willink?

  That that happened.

• 3:16:54Speaker 01

  And they are in a full blown fight for their life.

• 3:16:56Jocko Willink?

  Full blown fight for their life. So it was just freaking hard and terrible. But for you, having to actually get plucked from your leadership position in your company, that had to be even worse because these are not just your friends. These are your guys.

• 3:17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially, you know, um, you know, you talk about Operation Great White. I had several Silver Stars that came out of that, several Bronze Stars with valor, several Archons with valours. I mean, um, you have to write each one of those commendations. You have to interview your guys. You have to truly understand and, and when you write those awards, being a guy who got in gunfights, had rounds go off around me, got hit, you know, by several IEDs, you're able to hear their words and it all makes sense, right? You, you, you almost can put yourself in that position to just realize, you know, as

• 3:17:52Speaker 01

  I was recommending these guys for their awards, I was thinking to myself like, this is, this is valor. But then you have so many of those stories, you know, like I remember, uh, Major Walid was a Iraqi commander that was with us and he was batshit crazy. He was one of those like, uh, hey, man, you gonna wear your body armor today? And he'd just be like, if it's God's will that I'm gone, then it's God's will. And I go, well, I love God and I can't wait to meet him, but I'm not taking my chances.

• 3:18:28Jocko Willink?

  Don't wanna do it today.

• 3:18:29Speaker 01

  I'm gonna wear my body armor. So we're out on a mission and I'm not kidding you. Like, we received fire. It was me, Major Walid and Gunny, here's Gunny again, and, uh, Major Walid just starts running down the street. So then I look at Gunny and I'm like, let's go. So all of a sudden, we're like 300 yards further down the road and I turn and I look and it's literally like there's three of us. I got Major Waleed pointing a gun this way. I'm covering the hill, the tops of the buildings. I got Gunny Gibson right on my six covering my thing, covering my

• 3:19:07Speaker 01

  ass. And, and I just remember thinking to myself like, this is like exactly what, you know, we're supposed to be doing. And then to come back and be able to recommend guys for awards, it's, it's, it's pretty incredible. I mean, to be honest with you, I don't know how we didn't come out of there with like a higher unit award because of what went on. But I think that there comes a certain point where you can almost become a non-believer about what happened out there. If you were in a different place in Iraq, you could just be like, really? Is it, is it really going down like that?

• 3:19:48Jocko Willink?

  I had that conversation with Colonel McFarland on the podcast where I was like, because you know, my chain of command and the special operations chain of command is like, what do you mean you guys killed 22 enemy, you know, in the past three days? What do you mean you killed another 14? What do you mean you killed another seven? That's not normal in the rest of Iraq. The rest of Iraq is like, oh, we killed three this month.

• 3:20:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:20:10Jocko Willink?

  You know? And look, there's different areas, different situations happen. But this, they were, Colonel McFarland was getting asked the exact same question, like, wait a second, how many enemy attacks did you guys suffer today? Wait, wait, wait, what? Well, what are you counting as an enemy attack? It's like, oh, it was a vehicle borne IED that was preceded by, yeah, it was preceded by machine gun fires, RPGs and mortars. Does that count as an enemy attack? Okay. Yeah. Thanks. So everyone, it was, it was very hard outside the Ramadi bubble. It was kind of hard to understand what was going on, like what that looked like. And, and that's why those reports are coming up. And it's like, bro, like, there's a lot, a lot of stuff going on here.

• 3:20:51Speaker 01

  You remember the, my 45 minute?

• 3:20:55Speaker 01

  Troops in Contact Theory, which it became, it became an AFN story. I actually think you told me 42. So that's what it ended up becoming. Okay. Yeah. So the, the, the news reporter guy came out with us and, um, and he's following me around and, and I said, listen, I, I, as I'm keeping track and I would go back to the logs, Jocko, in my CP and I would look at the timing of when we SP'd, I would look at when we turned left on whatever, when we hurt, hit, and I, I started to like deduce that there, there, there's gotta be like a decision cycle for the enemy, right? Like they're not stupid and none of those guys really wanted to die.

• 3:21:40Speaker 01

  I think they had guys that would like blow themselves up that they just convinced that that was the right thing to do for the cause. Some of them they forced to, yeah. But most of the fighters were smart enough to just, you know, be able to think through the process of, of warfare a little bit. And so that's when I realized, when I was out with Seth, Seth, when we saw the probing, I was like, well, there it is. I go, we've been on the street for like 15 minutes and they're driving around and they're trying to figure out where, where we are. Like what are they doing? Where are they going? What part of this city are they in? And then they would communicate that info, their recon, they would communicate that to whatever fighters were going to be involved that

• 3:22:21Speaker 01

  day. It would take a little bit because most of these guys did not have huge caches of weapons in their house. They hid them throughout the city. So they would have to get to the cache and it would basically what I would call the moog starter kit, right? It was the black ski mask, the AK-47, a couple RPG rounds, right? And it was just, you know, you'd open it up and you'd just be like, oh, look, these are all the things that I need to just join the, the resistance. Join the jihad. So it would take them about 30 minutes to get those guys and then they would usually be transported, motorcycle, car, they'd get into the city somehow and most of the time they would take pop shots at us

• 3:23:06Speaker 01

  in order to either change the dynamics within the city, scare the civilians, you know, because their message was about as good as ours and, you know, especially when you take the Iraqi soldiers out there and they do what's called the death blossom, right? One single round comes in and the Iraqi army returns fire in 360 degrees. We call that the death blossom. That's what they would do and so when you destroy collateral damage, obviously they would come in behind you and change the narrative. See, they don't actually care about you. And there was a lot of that sort of analysis that I put into like, what, what are they doing? What is their real intent? And when I came up with that 45 minute rule, I was like, you know what?

• 3:23:48Speaker 01

  Within 45 minutes after being on the ground, you can pretty much guarantee that you're going to get shot at somehow. And so evidently by the watch, it went to 42 minutes exactly. And those first snaps went, you know, over top of your head. And a lot of it, I think, was a lot of probing reactionary, like how do we get them? Looking for targets of opportunity. That's why we called them snipers.

• 3:24:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:14Speaker 01

  Those guys weren't snipers. No, they just, they were taking well aimed shots. Um, but they weren't engaging targets like we were at the hospital, you know, where that guy shot like a mile and a half. Now that's a sniper shot. These guys were just looking and saying, okay, there's.

• 3:24:31Jocko Willink?

  There's a shot.

• 3:24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm going to take it.

• 3:24:33Jocko Willink?

  And, and how many of those times did they, you know, if they were snipers, there would have been a lot more dead Americans there. How many times did you hear, whoa, could be? Uh, which may have been a sniper round had it hit you, but you, it was like one round you go, oh, fuck guys, you know, thankfully he doesn't have that good of aim.

• 3:24:52Speaker 01

  You, uh, I, I don't know if you've ever mentioned this in your book, but you know, we hunted the famous Ramadi sniper, who evidently trained in the, for the Olympics.

• 3:25:02Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah.

• 3:25:03Speaker 01

  He was part of Zarqawi's.

• 3:25:05Jocko Willink?

  I, I don't, um, there was a female sniper I heard about. There was a Chechen sniper I heard about. There was a midget sniper that I heard about, um.

• 3:25:15Speaker 01

  The Chechen I did hear about, redheaded, redheaded Chechen.

• 3:25:17Jocko Willink?

  Chechen, you know, I kind of forget right now which ones were, uh, what, uh, urban legend and which ones were accurate. There was another one that was a guy that was purposely shooting in the groin. And he had moved from Fallujah to Ramadi. Cause Ramadi was, you know, cause we were doing good in Ramadi. So he came to, and they had like casualty reports. They're like, oh yeah, there was whatever. Two people in Fallujah that were wounded in the groin and now three in Ramadi, you know, they hype things up.

• 3:25:48Speaker 01

  Well, just below the body armor.

• 3:25:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. So what, I'm not a hundred percent sure. I remember exactly what you're talking about. I know that in the movie, American Sniper.

• 3:25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:25:58Jocko Willink?

  They made a very Hollywood-ish character characterization or caricature of a bad guy. You know, who is a Syrian Olympian and.

• 3:26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:26:09Jocko Willink?

  Drilled, you know, some kids, you know, they, they, they formulated a character for that movie. But I, but there was definitely, you know, rumors and, and there was, you know, there was, you know, like I just talked about Corporal Chris Leon. He was killed by a single shot.

• 3:26:27Jocko Willink?

  Ryan Jobe was shot by a single shot. So there was, but again.

• 3:26:32Speaker 01

  Staff Sergeant Dixon, uh, Dickinson was our civil affairs guy. He got shot in the, and bled out.

• 3:26:39Jocko Willink?

  So it is like, there was people that you could get, you could definitely get shot by a single round. Now I, I know I had rounds go over my head, single shot rounds where I was like, oh.

• 3:26:52Jocko Willink?

  Cool. You know, and I think what, you know, didn't think much of it. Matter of fact, I haven't really even thought about it until right now. Like, how many times did you hear a single round go over your head?

• 3:27:02Speaker 01

  Lots of times.

• 3:27:02Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's like they were, they were taking their pot shots and sometimes they'd get lucky. So I think our point in saying this is that these guys weren't trained snipers. But you, you know, you take enough shots at guys, you're going to hit some of them.

• 3:27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 3:27:16Jocko Willink?

  That's what would happen.

• 3:27:17Speaker 01

  It is the law of repetition that over a long enough time, you know, and I always felt like that about my military career. I don't know how, you know, this would have been my third combat tour, um, not the first time I'd ever been shot at and,

• 3:27:35Speaker 01

  you know, you, you begin to question like, how much longer can I do this before, you know, something, something happens to me, you know, and, um, I think that you, you can get into that mindset, but it's also sort of toxic. Um, you just got to concentrate on the job and how well you can, and do that job. But, um, you know, to, to be around, you know, you know, to get hit by two ricochet bullets, five IEDs, the mortar rounds every single day, which you weren't there, but when we were doing, we were doing a rehearsal outside, we set up a sand table and everything. And, uh, uh, we had, uh, you remember the piss tubes? Cause we didn't have, yeah, it was just the tube that went down in the ground.

• 3:28:21Speaker 01

  And if you had to go urinate, you just peed in the PVC pipe and it went down into the ground. And, uh, we were out there doing a rehearsal and right smack dab in the middle of my rehearsal, 15 feet away from me, a 60 millimeter mortar, pow, takes out our, our pee tube and, uh, and we all ran up against the building. We sat there for a minute. And I was like, okay, let's get back at it. And then, and then rehearsal back on. It was like Wayne's world, you know, game off. And then, you know, you wait for the mortars to come in and you're like, game on. And then you go back out there and, you know, you know, what the hell? But that's the environment that you were in. It was so common

• 3:29:02Speaker 01

  to hear rounds going off over your head, explosions, RPG flying right past my vehicle. You know, and just being like, wow, that.

• 3:29:12Jocko Willink?

  Did you, were any of your soldiers from Gunfighter killed after you left?

• 3:29:22Speaker 01

  No, they had an Alpha Company, Samson was killed, Dickinson was killed, he was the civil affairs guy.

• 3:29:33Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:29:35Speaker 01

  Right around the time that I was leaving anyways, the Iraqi army was really taking more of a presence inside the Malab. Obviously with McFarlane's group coming in, those guys were very decisive. I mean, you know, we hadn't had Bradley's up until that point. Now, all of a sudden, we had like a mech brigade, you know, in there and we were rolling around in like Tonka toys for the last nine months and now these guys are in air-conditioned Abram tanks and we're like, you know, man, that must be nice. But yeah, once they came in, it was pretty deliberate. And, you know, I stayed in touch with the guys and, you know, after my chain of command and

• 3:30:17Speaker 01

  ops were still going, but they were nowhere near the extent of the first really five, seven months that we were there. So, you know, again, you get to see a little bit of that transition as well. You know, the sad thing is, is and I'm sure we talk about this all day long, but, you know, I lost guys back home because of their inability to cope with what we went through. You know, guys that just, for whatever reason, mixed medicine with alcohol.

• 3:30:51Speaker 01

  Lot of high-risk behaviors that come with, I think, trying to adjust to that. And I, I admit that I actually found myself in my journal, writing about my inability to go to sleep and being given Ambien. And then realizing that the Ambien ended up becoming the only way that I could go to sleep. And then I started to think about like, there was a certain point where I was using it to cope. With things that went on and it's just really a shame that I've lost gunfighters back here in the US.

• 3:31:30Speaker 01

  That you've gone through something like we went through and you come back home and we're losing veterans to suicide and, you know, and, and making bad decisions and it just really, really sucks.

• 3:31:44Speaker 01

  Because you, you do realize that what we went through was not normal. That was not normal. I mean, again, the movie Warfare, imagine doing that.

• 3:31:56Speaker 01

  For eight months straight.

• 3:31:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and um, the, just, just can't give enough credit and um, respect to the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines that were there, you know, that there were just day after day, like you said, I mean, just going into these things which are, which are not, not normal, not just not normal, but so far at the extreme, um, that it's, it's, it has an impact on guys even when they leave, as you just pointed out.

• 3:32:32Jocko Willink?

  Where were you when you heard that, that Mikey was killed?

• 3:32:36Speaker 01

  Um, September, right?

• 3:32:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, September 29.

• 3:32:39Speaker 01

  So I had already, um, so I left the gunfighters and uh, was

• 3:32:48Speaker 01

  very lucky to get a second command. Um, you know, I had to interview for it. I had a lot of recommendations from, you know, Major Womack, Colonel Clark. The proof was really in the pudding at that point that like I was, uh, I, I was an operational guy and I needed to be with an operational team. I was deathly afraid of having to like, close my door of being gunfighter six and move over to the staff like, that would have killed me, you know, like I would have just been like, please no.

• 3:33:22Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you, Colonel, Colonel Clark and Major Womack, and it's now General Clark and General Womack, but. Oh, man, they were just, it's like they were just, they were just, uh, common sense. You know, when, when, when, when I talked to Major Womack, you know, and he would just like comment, just, just common sense. Hey, listen, here's what's happening. Here's what we're going to do to solve it. It was always like these guys, and if you had a different idea to present, they'd be like, hmm, that makes sense. Or here's why it doesn't make sense. Just such common sense for, for those, for officers, you know, just wow, these guys are just, that's, I'm saying it like it's a, like it's a, a rare thing.

• 3:34:06Jocko Willink?

  Cause it kinda is, you know, to be under that much pressure, to have that much responsibility. I mean, I think the, the 506 was like 900 people at that point, owning some of the worst battle space in the world. And yet, common sense, calm, cool. Did you ever see, uh, like those guys in the, in the battalion? Talk during like a major gunfight or something? Just very calm, very cool, very professional, as good as it gets. So it's no surprise to me that they looked at you and said, we better get this guy another, uh, another operational job.

• 3:34:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I spent so much time in Major Womack's office and, and he was a big supporter of me. Um, really thinking through what my future in the military was going to look like.

• 3:34:57Speaker 01

  You know, very encouraging and then, but he was also a sounding board for me. Like when I wanted to bitch and complain about something, he actually spent the time to help me see the bigger picture, you know, and I, I, you know, mentioned to you earlier that after reading my journals again, I sent General Clark an email and said, man, I need to apologize because I was unhinged, you know, during that time. And, and, you know, he sent me back a message and said, you know, it's a time honored tradition of, of company command that, you know, that you get to do and you get to have those hindsight. But, you know, those guys clearly, um, supported me. Could he have kept me to be a battle captain?

• 3:35:38Speaker 01

  Or an assistant S3 writing orders for the rest of the time that we were in Iraq? He could have, he could have been selfish enough to say with the amount of experience that this guy has operating in this area, he is going to help this battalion be successful. I think he could have done that and he had every right to do that. But they did. They recommended me to take a second command with the Ranger Pathfinder Company, which is the old Lurfs Company and the 101st Airborne Division. Its origins come from Lima Company, 75th Ranger Regiment from Vietnam. These guys are, you know, long-range reconnaissance, surveillance, sniper operations, very much like lone survivor. We operate in

• 3:36:18Speaker 01

  four to five-man teams. And I could not believe that I got it. Couldn't believe. But when I took command of that unit, they were at, they were up at Spiker, Camp Spiker. And, and I just remember walking around that base, and nobody was in body armor. They were walking around in PTs with their reflective belts on. There was a pool.

• 3:36:45Jocko Willink?

  I was, I was okay until you said reflective belt. I was okay. I was like, you know, it's good. It's like, no, no, no. Okay.

• 3:36:51Speaker 01

  There was a pool. They had a movie theater. They had a PX that looked like a PX from the US. And I remember just thinking to myself, like, that this isn't the war that I just came from. Like, I mean, do you guys even realize what's going on, like, 450 miles from where we're standing, right? Like, it was so abstract and removed that I had a really difficult time not being bitter a little bit, where everyone's just like, yeah, we ate at Pizza Hut today, and now we're gonna go see a movie. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding. Like, our AFN antenna got blown up by a mortar round, and we haven't had TV in three weeks. You

• 3:37:35Speaker 01

  know, we, we, I think we went three months without getting our clothes washed, you know? And so that was a little bit different. But I was, I took command immediately. So, July, I transferred over the gunfighters to the new company commander. Literally the night of my change of command ceremony, the bird lands 30 minutes after my ceremony.

• 3:38:00Jocko Willink?

  You're out.

• 3:38:00Speaker 01

  I'm out. I'm on a bird. I'm heading to the north. I get up there and meet the aviation company, or the battalion that the, the Pathfinders are attached to, interview for the job, go on leave, come back, and take the Pathfinder Company. So I am up in Spiker when I.

• 3:38:21Speaker 01

  Get the word about Samson and Dickinson and when I read the report about Mikey Mansour. And I tried so hard to get a hold of Seth, you know, because we were just really close. And I remember having dinner with Mikey and his um dry sense of humor, like he tried to be funny, but he wasn't like really funny.

• 3:38:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, dry is what it is.

• 3:38:47Speaker 01

  You know, and just sitting around and having chow with those guys and um and you know, again, I I looked up. I looked up to you guys because of the trident that you wear. But I respected you for the men that you were, right? Like the expectation is like you can very much like in the military, you you wear your resume really on your uniform. And when you walk in with that, you can have certain expectations in your mind. And I think that happened at the very beginning where I was like, great, you know, we got the Beach Boys coming in, you know, with the hair and the cool gear and, you know, it must be nice, like just total jealousy.

• 3:39:33Speaker 01

  But what I left was with a tremendous amount of respect for sharing the battlefield with those guys and realizing really at the end of the day, like we all put our pants on the same way. We all had loved ones at home that were hoping that we would make it back. We all had a deep desire to accomplish a mission that was greater than ourselves. And we all put in as much as we could in blood, sweat, and in some cases, tears for those that we lost and those that we put on a helicopter hoping would make it.

• 3:40:13Speaker 01

  That was hugely impactful to me to the it it actually changed my mindset a little bit. When I went over to the Pathfinder Company, I realized that like these guys were like, they were all kitted out. They had all the cool stuff, sniper guys in my unit and had my own medics. I mean, it was basically a little bit of a pre-special forces team, if you will. And I just remember thinking to myself, and I get asked a lot, you know, hey, sir, what's the difference really between Navy SEALs and the Army or special forces and like your regular infantrymen? And I always deduce it to this very basic fact. Money.

• 3:40:56Speaker 01

  Because I, as an infantry company commander, only had 250,000 rounds to go to the shoot house with. And once I was done with that amount, that I had to go do other training. I had to be creative about what I did. When you have an unlimited budget and you have more time in the shooting rooms and you have more times to do those ops and you have the support system that you need in order to pull those things off. I could have told you today that I believe that my gunfighters could have been as good as any of those guys doing raids on

• 3:41:35Speaker 01

  any number of buildings.

• 3:41:36Jocko Willink?

  Bro, by the, by not even the end of deployment, probably, probably two, three months into deployment, when we get intel, I guess it was the timeline, when, when we started to establish the cops in downtown Ramadi, when we'd get intel about a bad guy in a building, we would call up the conventional unit in that area and say, hey, there's a bad guy in building, you know, Fox 23. And they'd say, cool, we'll be there in 15 minutes. And then they'd call us back 20 minutes. They didn't say, hey, we got your guy. What do you want to do with him? Like, there was, you're right, like, and the whole, like, the, the idea of close quarters combat being this, this kind of,

• 3:42:17Jocko Willink?

  Like magical thing. It's like, dude, we're gonna kick in the door. We're gonna clear this building. Uh, you know, you talk to some of these guys. It's like, do you know how many buildings? Do you have many room clearances? I've done, you've done, like, how many room clearances have you done? Like, real, real world room clearances? You don't know. It's like thousands and thousands of room clearances. It's not that big of a deal. And so you're right, like

• 3:42:41Speaker 01

  Over and over and over again. You know, I, we, I mentioned in my CP, I had that huge map.

• 3:42:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:42:48Speaker 01

  Of the Malab, where we numbered all of the buildings. I had a goal that by the time I left in July, I wanted every building to have an X on it. I wanted to personally have one of the guys from my unit go in and clear every, like, I wanted that. And so we just started looking up. It was sort of like, um, Jenga at this point, right? You're just reaching for the block and you're kind of pulling it out to make sure that, you know, nothing comes falling down. But we would look at the map and just be like, we we haven't hit thirty four yet. Let's go do a soft knock on thirty four. There's no, there's no intel pointing us to any bad guy. So literally, we would walk to the front door.

• 3:43:29Speaker 01

  You know, and they'd come to the front door and I'd be like, Salaam alaikum. You know, can we come in? You know, and, and we would deliberately go through, and man, and what better way to know your AO than to be like, you know?

• 3:43:42Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely.

• 3:43:43Speaker 01

  I mean, can you imagine going back there today?

• 3:43:45Jocko Willink?

  No. I know. You know, I, I've had Vietnam vets on here and they like go back to Vietnam and stuff. And they're like, you even wanna go back? I'm like, nope. Don't wanna go. I have, that's not, I'm not there yet. I have little ways to go.

• 3:43:58Speaker 01

  The, uh, the people and the children that I interacted with, I am curious of how things turned out. I mean, cause ultimately you, you know?

• 3:44:11Speaker 01

  I didn't get into this business to kill people. That's not why I wanted to be an infantryman. That is secondary to the job that we were supposed to do, which is really deterrence, you know, and, and protection of this company or this country.

• 3:44:31Speaker 01

  By the time we left Ramadi, what my BDA must have been 400 uh enemy killed in the Malab, you know, I have no clue. I have no clue. I don't know how many people we probably ended the lives of during that time. Um, do I wish that we could have come in and it would have been a little bit more peaceful and I would have created an environment where kids were able to go out on the street and play and do all this? Yes, but part of me today, um, like I, I think if you go to Google Earth and you go to Ramadi.

• 3:45:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, I do that.

• 3:45:08Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 3:45:09Jocko Willink?

  So, so maybe I'm a little bit there.

• 3:45:10Speaker 01

  I go, oh, oh my God, you know, and, and to be able to say like, this is where Sergeant Lambert said died. This is where so and so got blown up, or this is where I got shot by that sniper that missed my head by, you know, four inches. Um, that's pretty cool, but there is a small part of me that's like, I wonder, wonder what it would be like to go back. It's clearly, I don't think anybody would probably still be there today. That I would know, but um.

• 3:45:37Jocko Willink?

  Nah, maybe there might be a couple stragglers. I heard um through intel sources that when ISIS went in there in 2014, there was about 500 families that they murdered.

• 3:45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:45:48Jocko Willink?

  Cause there was people that had worked that had been rumored to had or had worked with coalition forces. So that's a big number.

• 3:45:54Speaker 01

  That's a big number.

• 3:45:55Jocko Willink?

  You know, so.

• 3:45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, really a shame uh to think about, but you know, you did the job, you know?

• 3:46:05Jocko Willink?

  So you're now, you're now doing this Ranger Pathfinder company and how's that operationally?

• 3:46:13Speaker 01

  So a little different. I um, I think in theater, um, we could have probably used this company in Ramadi, especially given the. Snipers that are specifically trained to be, I mean, they get sniper school slots. They are very good at infill, exfil, multiple means because they're attached to the aviation brigade. And they're still considered a division asset. So Lurs back in the day was the eyes of the division. So you would send these guys behind enemy lines. We would operate for days at a time with nothing more than what we had.

• 3:46:55Speaker 01

  You'd only turn on your radio to do radio checks, that kind of thing, you know? Very much lone survivor kind of concept. We could have very much used those guys in a kinetic environment. I was very surprised that when I got up to take over the company, that you have this highly trained, very capable unit. And a Pathfinder company is a half the size of a regular infantry company. So I went from 140 man company to like 60. But they're very specialized. Every one of the NCOs are, you know, Ranger qualified. They're all managed by Ranger branch. A lot of these guys will go to Ranger instructors and then they'll come back to a unit.

• 3:47:39Speaker 01

  Some of my lower enlisted guys had been in the unit for a very long time. So we're talking about fries and spies insertion, fast rope insertion, parachuting. They're the only unit in the 101st at the time that was still parachute qualified. So I go back on jump status and, you know, so you, you have a very wide range of missions that you can do. And on top of that, we had a fourth mission of downed aircraft recovery. So pilots that were downed. We had a mission to be able to go in and extract if we needed to. A part of the asset of the aviation brigade is that they had us to be able to do that. And so when I got up there, I thought, man, this is going to be a blast.

• 3:48:21Speaker 01

  Like, we're going to have a great time with this until I realized that they were using them as personal security detail for the entire division staff. So they were basically bodyguards everywhere the division. Commander, the Sergeant Major, the ADCO, General Oates, great friend of mine today still. We provided bodyguards for them. So of course, they looked the part. You know, they had the top of the line body armor. They had top of the line, sand painted M4s with suppressors and, you know, M4s, like everybody, everybody, even the privates walked around with full operational kits, like they were about to

• 3:49:04Speaker 01

  do a raid on the house and, and all they did was provide personal security. So that was a little tough for me and when I got up there,

• 3:49:15Speaker 01

  imagine with the op tempo that you just came from, going to a huge fob where there's literally like anything, Pizza Hut, Burger King, you know, everything is there. You could take a shower every single night. You had laundry service. I mean, everything was just given to you. That was really hard for me to like turn the volume down on a little bit. And I remember being at the pool and,

• 3:49:45Jocko Willink?

  I cannot believe you went from Ramadi to that.

• 3:49:48Speaker 01

  And, and I'm, I'm walking past the pool and the, just like at Ramadi, the counter mortar radar system, the siren would go off indicating an incoming round. And I'm literally standing there with like all my kit on. And I'm watching people reach over and grab their towel and put it over their shoulder and they're walking gingerly over to the, you know, concrete bunker that's over there. And this place was so big that that mortar round landed. A mile away, but still inside.

• 3:50:27Jocko Willink?

  Still inside the wire.

• 3:50:28Speaker 01

  And you could hear the boom, you know, and then here they come right back out, flop my tile down. Yeah. And it was just, where am I, you know, and I, I do think of the Vietnam guys like coming out of the bush and they're like, you're going on leave to Japan or, you know, and they get there and they're just kind of like, your brain cannot adjust to the fact that like, this is, this is, this is supposed to be normal. This is what normal is supposed to look like.

• 3:50:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a weird thing too, because like if you got, if you went to a peace, place of peace, like even going to Japan or going to the Philippines or going back to America, you're like, okay, this isn't supposed to be war anymore. And it clearly is not, okay, I get it. But now you got this kind of halfway war, like people, there's mortars going off, but I'm not supposed to be like reacting to them. That's a weird spot to, to roll into. I cannot believe you, you left Ramadi for that. That's, that's nuts.

• 3:51:28Speaker 01

  It was an out of body experience.

• 3:51:30Jocko Willink?

  And how long were you there for?

• 3:51:31Speaker 01

  Just a couple of months. We redeployed my guys right after I had got the word that, Mikey had dove on the hand grenade. And so it was right around September, we were, you know, my, my whole job was really to take command, do the inventory, hand over to the incoming security detail that was going to take our place. And then we were gone. So by the time I got there, I want to say 25% of my company had already left the country and was, my first sergeant wasn't even in country when I got up there to do the guide on, I had to exchange the guide on with the, another one of the NCOs, because my first sergeant wasn't there. He had already gone back

• 3:52:11Speaker 01

  home. And so my, my whole job was to get them out and get them back to the United States, go on leave and then start the, the, the training cycle, which for me, was immediately like, we are going to go stratospheric on our training. Like I came up with some of the most complex, real, and I turned the company into, and I notified all the NCOs when I took over, I said, you're, you're all on notice. There, there's going to be Pathfinder tryouts.

• 3:52:48Speaker 01

  And you guys are gonna have to earn your slots now in the company. Because if you're gonna walk around, you know, Fort Campbell being one of the few guys that gets to wear maroon beret, be on jump status, have unlimited amount of ammo that you can train with, like, we are going to be good. And strangely enough, a lot of my lower enlisted guys all joined the army on 18x-ray contracts. These guys joined the army to be special forces soldiers, but in, or Ranger Battalion guys. And what happened was, they either rang the bell and they quit, or they got injured.

• 3:53:29Speaker 01

  And they could not complete whatever phase of the contract that they needed to continue to go special forces or Ranger. So I got to my company, a lot of guys who are washouts from 18x-ray or Ranger Battalion. And I remember, we had mock weapons, AK-47s, RPGs and shit like that, inside of our training room so that we could, you know, do weapons identification, whatever we need to do. Train on RPGs is what I, I felt, especially in the gunfighters, I felt everybody needed to know how to pick up an RPG and fire. And I know that's weird for some people to hear, but I'm like, no, I need you to know how to work an AK-47.

• 3:54:12Speaker 01

  I need you to know how to fire an RPG, because if there comes a time where we're in the shit and that's the only thing that's laying there, I need you to know how to work it.

• 3:54:23Jocko Willink?

  Dude, it freaked me out the first time I saw an Iraqi soldier running around the corner with an RPG. I was like, well, I'm like, oh, God.

• 3:54:31Speaker 01

  It throws you a little bit, for sure.

• 3:54:33Jocko Willink?

  Cause your whole, since you were a child, since I was a child, I've looked at anyone with an RPG as enemy. Whether they were Russian, whether they were Chinese, whether they were Islamic extremists, that was a bad guy. And then here you go, my first day in Ramadi, I see like Iraqi soldier with a freaking RPG, I'm like, oh.

• 3:54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a PRK.

• 3:54:55Jocko Willink?

  And a PRK. And I remember also seeing the A-gunner, like the RPG A-gunner with the rounds sticking up out of the backpacks. I was like, yo.

• 3:55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, those guys were, those guys were insane. But yeah, I ended up training my guys and we would have a... We would assemble the new guys at like three o'clock in the morning. I'd have formation at three o'clock in the morning. I'd walk outside with like an RPG slung over my shoulder. Here comes crazy Joe, right? And I'd go out there to formation and I'd be like, all right, Sergeant, and we're going to give these guys a PT test today. And you need, and you're all on 18-year-old standards. You need to max the PT test and then we're going to decide whether or not, and we're going to start making some cuts. You don't make the company. I send you to the Sergeant Major and he gives you to the needs of the Army. You're going to end up, you're going to end up wherever and whatever

• 3:55:44Speaker 01

  unit you're going to be in. So try hard, guys. And oh, by the way, I only have six slots. So it's, it's cutthroat, right? So they go and do the PT test, you know, running, push-ups, sit-ups, two-mile run, pull-ups, all this other stuff. And I go out there and, and my NCO comes in and goes, say, sir, they're done. I said, cool. I get a couple of my NCOs together and I said, while I'm speaking, I need you to be watching them. And I need you to be watching their reaction to the words that I'm going to say. And I walked back out there, AK-47 slung over my shoulder this time, and the platoon sergeant hands me the clipboard and I take a look at the scores. I don't really look at the scores. I really don't care, you know?

• 3:56:28Speaker 01

  And I go, not good enough. Do it again. And I hand them the clipboard. And the NCO turns around and goes, all right, boys, first exercise is going to be the push-ups. And anyone who reacted, anyone who just put their shoulders down, anyone who let out a sigh, anyone who clenched their fist and just looked like pissed off, I knew why they didn't make it through the program with the 18x-ray or the Rangers. I, because you know, it, it's, you are already defeated. Right then and there, all I said was, not good enough, do it again. And you reacted. And so very, very quickly, we would start making cuts, you know, because we didn't want

• 3:57:12Speaker 01

  to be in a lone survivor scenario where I have to look and be like, is Murphy my guy? I don't know if Murphy's my guy. I know that Murphy can't make it through a run, you know? How about Latrell? Latrell looks good on paper, but is he really going to function? You didn't want to have that question at all, that the guys that you were going out with were truly the guys that you wanted to be with because as a LURST detachment, you were four or five man. And you were out there and you were all alone behind enemy lines or, you know, doing whatever you need to do. I wanted there to be, you know, and, and just like the old days, I made them wear different helmets. They all had to earn their berets. They all had to, you know, they all

• 3:57:57Speaker 01

  had to go on jump status and make, you know, cause go through jump school, you just do your five jumps. And then, you know, you go and you get your cherry and then, you know, everyone wears the red helmet to let you know, like, this is the guy that just made his five jumps in airborne school or whatever. And so the idea for me was it was more important for me to build the team and have the right people in the right place for the right reason than to just take someone because they felt like they were entitled to be there. Or I had a spot open. Like you had to earn it.

• 3:58:39Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys, did you go on deployment with these guys?

• 3:58:42Speaker 01

  Just the end of the.

• 3:58:44Jocko Willink?

  So you took them off of deployment?

• 3:58:46Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 3:58:46Jocko Willink?

  Came back, started training them up, trained them up. And then what happened?

• 3:58:53Speaker 01

  So I stayed with them for a year.

• 3:58:55Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:58:55Speaker 01

  And I got told that I had been recommended for below the zone promotion to major.

• 3:59:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:59:05Speaker 01

  So I'm, I'm being notified that like I'm being bumped up for an early promotion, potentially to major, which is a year sooner than all my peer groups. And if you don't know how it works, everything is usually based on timeline. So you hit that magic timeline, you're now eligible for motion. Well, there are certain people who automatically get selected because of what they've done to go before a below the zone board. And if you get selected, then you get promoted at the bottom of the list, but in the, in the prior year's year group. Well, I came out on that list. So my battalion commander calls me in and, and basically says, hey, look, man, like you just came out on the list for major. Congratulations. Huge

• 3:59:49Speaker 01

  deal. What I don't want to do is I don't want to screw you out of being possibly a major in a captain's billet. Right? Like, so I'm coming up to my year of, you know, commanding the Lurs company and he goes, I, I, we're going to recommend you for, ready for this? A third command. And we're going to send you down to Fort Benning and you are going to interview to be a company commander at Ranger Training Brigade. You are going to help us train the new Rangers that are coming through the program. And I was like, awesome. Like, I could totally do that.

• 4:00:31Speaker 01

  Right. And again, my whole intent was to always stay operational. Like, just whatever you do, don't put me behind a desk. You know, like, I wanted to, I just wanted to be out and I wanted to know that I was really making a difference. And, you know, a lot of my friends, they, you know, a lot of my friends went Special Forces. A lot of my guys did that stuff. And they would always say, like, how come you didn't follow us? How come you didn't do it? And I said, you know what? I love the 18-year-old kid. I love that 19-year-old. I love seeing the light bulb come in. I love me, like, literally putting my boot in his ass because he just flagged three of his guys while doing a room clearing with live ammo, but then watching him the next day come in there and just kill it.

• 4:01:14Speaker 01

  And I go, that's awesome. Like, I didn't want to show up to an SF team where I was the least junior person out of everybody on the team. I wanted to be somewhere where I could take what I learned and experience up until that point and use my knowledge to develop. So I fly down to Fort Benning. I interview for the job. I think Colonel Mingus, now again, another general, is, is down there and I get told I'm, I'm taking command of an RTB company and I'm going to be training Rangers in less than three months. I fly back to Fort Campbell. I've got the job. I'm looking forward to, you know, moving to Fort Benning and doing that.

• 4:01:55Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden I get a phone call from Infantry Branch and they say, hey, listen, we, we have a problem. You don't have a problem, but you're going to be our solution.

• 4:02:06Jocko Willink?

  That's not a good opening, is it?

• 4:02:08Speaker 01

  And I go, okay, so how do I, for some reason, I feel like I'm gonna get screwed in this, right? I'm a team player. What do you need? He said, well, we have this international exchange officer program. And the major who has been selected to go on this international exchange, we just found out has an EFMP member, an exceptional family member program. So in other words, the member had a child that required certain medical oversight that you could not send them to a foreign country and expect that foreign country to take care of the kid.

• 4:02:48Speaker 01

  Bottom line. So they said, the easiest solution is to just swap your slots. He is gonna go take your R2B company. And you, sir, are gonna be on an all expense paid trip to England, where you are gonna spend two years with the British parachute regiment as an exchange officer. And I thought to myself, Fort Benning, England, Fort Benning, England. I mean, I do have to admit, like a third command sounded really cool. And I knew for a fact I would love being in RI. I would just love it, especially with the professionalism of RI's in general.

• 4:03:31Jocko Willink?

  And with the experience that you had.

• 4:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. To bring real wartime training. You know, how you look at the movies and you're like, man, that would never happen, right? You have to have, and by the way, Hollywood, if you're listening, I'm available for consulting. But you look at movies sometimes and you just go, that's not, that wouldn't happen that way. And for me, I realized that like, I had already done it with the Pathfinders. I had created a training program that like, we were, we were ready to fast rope in the middle of the impact area for artillery rounds, because I wanted my guys to know what it was like to call an artillery strike around your position. Why do it from three miles away?

• 4:04:16Speaker 01

  From some bunker where you're trying to hit a tank like I wanted my guys to be there and know what it felt like to call in. You know, that like, that's the stuff that.

• 4:04:27Jocko Willink?

  Did you do that? Did they let you do?

• 4:04:30Speaker 01

  General Oates gave me permission to fast rope them into an area and be able to call airstrikes in. But then we got called up and we did a, we did the jump mission over in Egypt where we jumped in. So we'd C seventeen all the way over into Egypt and we did an airborne insertion for the big. Sitcom operation, I think it was Bright Star.

• 4:04:54Jocko Willink?

  Bright Star, yeah.

• 4:04:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we didn't end up doing that. We went on Bright Star instead, and that was right when I changed command. So. Hopefully they did at some point, but you know, General Oates was a one star. He was the ADCO of the 101st Airborne Division. And, and I remember going in and telling him like, this is what I want to do. And he loved it because he was also like, don't tell me what you can't do. Tell me what you can do with, with the limitations that are currently there. And I just, I love that about him, you know? That I was able to just be like, I got an idea.

• 4:05:31Jocko Willink?

  So you're England bound. And I'll tell you what, we've been going for four hours.

• 4:05:38Jocko Willink?

  Let's go ahead and take a little breather and we'll pick this up with the next podcast. So we'll do a little hold here and. We'll pick it up on episode 517.

• 4:05:54Jocko Willink?

  If you're listening right now, we're going to bring Joe back for the next episode where we're going to talk about some really amazing things and really terrible things. You know, obviously we'll talk about your service with, with the Brits, deployment to Afghanistan with the Brits. We'll talk about a catastrophic parachute accident that you had, what happened.

• 4:06:16Jocko Willink?

  What happened with your army career after that? What happened with your physical health after that? What you did and what you've been doing since then? So a lot of things to talk about and we'll also close the loop on some of the things with Task Unit Bruiser and with particularly with with our brother Seth Stone. We'll talk through that as well. But if you want to hear the rest of this story, tune into podcast number 517. In the meantime, if you need fuel, get Jocko fuel. If you need clothes, get Origin USA clothes. If you need to represent on the path, go to Jacostore.com. If you need leadership training,

• 4:06:50Jocko Willink?

  go to ashlanfront.com and that's what we got. So tune in next time and until then, this is Joe, crazy Joe and Echo and Jocko out.