69: The Real Top Gun. Battlefield, Work, and Life are Identical. With Elite Marine Fighter Pilot, David Berke.

0:00:00 - Opening. 0:09:45 - Intro to Dave Berke. 0:21:11 - Officer Candidate School. 0:27:39 - Southern Watch. 0:31:01 - Top Gun selection. 0:38:49 - September 11th 0:45:08 - Afghanistan: Operation Anaconda. 0:47:33 - Training Officer at Top Gun. 1:08:27 - Forward Air Controller (FAC) Tour. 1:26:43 - Ramadi. 2:14:41 - Home Coming. Relationship. Pentagon. F-22 and F-35. 2:40:56 - Echelon Front transition. 2:52:54 - Green M&Ms, Support, Cool Onnit http://www.onnit.com/jocko, Amazon https://www.amazon.com/?&tag=jocko20-20&camp=216797&creative=498533&linkCode=ur1&adid=1DKYGWXQBV0KNEZ3MZZX&, JockoStore http://www.jockostore.com stuff, with Jocko White Tea http://www.jockotea.com and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes) https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/psychological-warfare/id1183222322. Extreme Ownership (book) http://amzn.to/2jonHTx, (Jocko's Kids' Book) Way of the Warrior Kid http://amzn.to/2n9k6I9, and The Muster002 http://www.extremeownership.com 3:09:28 - Closing Thoughts and Gratitude. 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 69 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:14Jocko Willink?

  The President of the United States takes pride in presenting the Medal of Honor posthumously to Captain Henry T. Elrod, United States Marine Corps for service as set forth in the following citation.

• 0:32Jocko Willink?

  For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while attached to Marine Fighting Squadron 211 during action against the Japanese land, surface, and aerial units at Wake Island from 8 to 23 December 1941.

• 0:58Jocko Willink?

  Engaging vastly superior forces of enemy bombers and warships on 9 and 12 December, Captain Elrod shot down two of a flight of 22 hostile planes and executing repeated bombing and strafing runs at extremely low altitude and close range succeeded in inflicting deadly damage upon a large Japanese vessel thereby sinking the first major warship to be destroyed by small caliber bombs delivered from a fighter type aircraft.

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  When his plane was disabled by hostile fire and no other ships were operative, Captain Elrod assumed command of one flank of the line, set up in defiance of the enemy landing and conducting a brilliant defense, enabled his men to hold their positions and repulse determined enemy attacks repeatedly proceeding through intense hostile fusils to provide covering fire for unarmed ammunition carriers. Capturing an automatic weapon during one enemy rush in force, he gave his own firearm to one of his men and fought on vigorously against the Japanese.

• 2:16Jocko Willink?

  Responsible in a large measure of the strength of his sector's gallant resistance. On 23 December, Captain Elrod led his men with bold aggressiveness until he fell mortally wounded. His superb skill as a pilot, daring leadership, and unswerving devotion to duty distinguished him among the defenders of Wake Island. And his valiant conduct reflects the highest credit upon himself and the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.

• 3:01Jocko Willink?

  Signed, Harry S Truman. And that is the Medal of Honor Citation for Henry Talmage Elrod, the first aviator in World War II to be awarded the Medal of Honor, and the first man to sink a warship from a fighter plane during the Battle of Wake Island. And if you don't know anything about the Battle of Wake Island, it began simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor when that started, and it ended on 23 December 1941 when American forces were forced to surrender.

• 3:42Jocko Willink?

  And that was with around 500 American servicemen. And they had a handful of coastal artillery pieces and a handful of anti-aircraft guns, and they had 12 aircraft. And what they were facing was 2,500 Japanese infantry, supported by three light cruisers, eight destroyers, two patrol boats, two troop transports, two aircraft carriers with all their planes, and two heavy cruisers.

• 4:18Jocko Willink?

  They were completely outnumbered and completely and utterly outgunned. But they held out for 15 days.

• 4:28Jocko Willink?

  And while they were under that siege.

• 4:32Jocko Willink?

  On the 20th of December, while the Japanese were preparing for their final attack.

• 4:39Jocko Willink?

  Major Elrod got out one last letter.

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  To his wife.

• 4:48Jocko Willink?

  And I'm gonna read that to you.

• 4:53Jocko Willink?

  Saturday, 20 December 1941, my dearest darling sweetheart.

• 5:01Jocko Willink?

  I never suspected this afternoon when I wrote my other short note. That I would be sitting down writing another tonight. But here we are. I just got in a few minutes ago and have just learned that Walt Baylor is returning and he has kindly consented to deliver this personally. So I am very thankful for the moment.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  Of course, there isn't a lot of news that I can write about. And you probably know more real news than I do anyhow.

• 5:34Jocko Willink?

  I am missing you terribly and I am undergoing a few new experiences. But also is everyone else.

• 5:44Jocko Willink?

  We've had considerable rain today and it is still cloudy. The wind has been very low, however. The weather on the whole is nothing to complain about.

• 5:57Jocko Willink?

  But I would like to see a good old fashioned typhoon sweep this entire area.

• 6:04Jocko Willink?

  I imagine there's an awful lot of whitewashing going on now in high places. It certainly will be a criminal shame if they succeed in covering over everything.

• 6:17Jocko Willink?

  I am writing this in something of a hurry and under somewhat difficult circumstances.

• 6:24Jocko Willink?

  I'll think of a million things that I should have said after I had gone to bed tonight.

• 6:31Jocko Willink?

  But now I am going to say that I love you and you alone, always and always and repeated a million times or so.

• 6:42Jocko Willink?

  Give my love to Mary also. Between the two of you, you have it all.

• 6:51Jocko Willink?

  There isn't any for anyone else.

• 6:56Jocko Willink?

  I know that you are praying for me and I have nothing more to ask than that your prayers be answered.

• 7:05Jocko Willink?

  Yours devotedly and loving,

• 7:10Jocko Willink?

  Talmage.

• 7:24Jocko Willink?

  And so I think it's important

• 7:27Jocko Willink?

  that

• 7:29Jocko Willink?

  when you hear that letter, you recognize the fact that this is a

• 7:35Jocko Willink?

  this is a man. And of course, we always remember that

• 7:43Jocko Willink?

  these men, we call them, we call them heroes. Deservedly so. We do that to honor them. But I think it's important to always remember

• 7:59Jocko Willink?

  that these heroes,

• 8:02Jocko Willink?

  they're people.

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  Their people.

• 8:11Jocko Willink?

  And these men, these heroes, these Marines, these people that held the line.

• 8:21Jocko Willink?

  They held the line for 15 days before they were forced to surrender after losing 49 Marines killed, two missing in action, three Navy personnel killed, 70 US civilians killed. And by the way, the Japanese losses were recorded at about 820 killed with over 300 wounded. Two destroyers lost.

• 8:46Jocko Willink?

  And almost 30 Japanese aircraft shot down or damaged.

• 8:55Jocko Willink?

  But the odds and the

• 9:01Jocko Willink?

  ratio of force was just stacked against

• 9:07Jocko Willink?

  the US forces on Wake Island. And when you get into a situation like that, a dire situation, a violent situation, a situation where you are facing a determined enemy.

• 9:21Jocko Willink?

  There is

• 9:24Jocko Willink?

  a bond that forms between people regardless of where they're from or what their background is, or what their socioeconomic class is, or what service they were in. None of that matters.

• 9:44Jocko Willink?

  There's a bond that forms that cannot be broken.

• 9:52Jocko Willink?

  And we certainly had that in the Battle of Ramadi. US Army soldiers,

• 10:01Jocko Willink?

  United States Marines, Seabees,

• 10:07Jocko Willink?

  our SEALs of Task Unit Bruiser.

• 10:12Jocko Willink?

  All of us that were in that fight had that bond.

• 10:22Jocko Willink?

  We were brothers.

• 10:27Jocko Willink?

  And

• 10:29Jocko Willink?

  tonight, I am honored to have one of those brothers here with me.

• 10:38Jocko Willink?

  And he's a Marine Corps aviator, fighter pilot,

• 10:44Jocko Willink?

  who also did time as a forward air controller on the ground. And we've talked about that in many of the books that we've reviewed on the podcast, where you have a Marine Corps pilot who's now on the ground with the troops. Usually in one of the most forward positions because they have to know where the troops are.

• 11:06Jocko Willink?

  Out of that air-conditioned cockpit and into the sweat and mud on the ground. And this

• 11:18Jocko Willink?

  this pilot as an ANGLOCO team leader, who with his team conducted dozens and dozens of missions with Task Unit Bruiser in Ramadi. And I've talked about bringing him on the show. And so here he is tonight.

• 11:32Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Colonel, almost retired,

• 11:37Jocko Willink?

  David Berke. Dave,

• 11:41Jocko Willink?

  welcome to the podcast and thank you for coming on.

• 11:46Dave Berke?

  Thanks for having me, man. It's good to be here.

• 11:50Jocko Willink?

  So we have to, before we talk about what we went through together, we have to learn a little bit about you, where you came from, what you did, and how you went from being, from being a, you know, a pilot, but not just a pilot, a Top Gun pilot, but not just a Top Gun pilot, but a, but a Top Gun instructor.

• 12:14Jocko Willink?

  Which is just incredibly selective. That's gotta be one of the most selective things in the whole world, right? How many Top Gun pilots are there?

• 12:25Dave Berke?

  See about 25 at a time every three years. They kind of rotate through. Small group.

• 12:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So that's ridiculous. And, and, but then, you know, you thought maybe you need to get after it a little bit more. So you're gonna go do an airshow. So we'll get into that. But let's start off with, with where you came from, just a little bit about your background and how you ended up saying, you know what I think I want to do? Be in the Marine Corps?

• 12:48Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  Go.

• 12:49Dave Berke?

  Right on. So I actually grew up around here. My parents moved out here, San Diego, and I was probably a year and a half years old, one and a half years old. And between here and Orange County, I grew up Southern California kid. Not all that exciting with childhood. I don't have, you know, a ton of crazy memories. I was a pretty quiet kid, I was a good kid in school, got along with most folks. Moved up to Orange County, my parents got divorced. It was basically just me and my mom and my sister for a while. And I lived in a town called El Toro. And what happened to be very close to where I grew up was a Marine base. It was a fighter base. And so as a kid, I probably was there in late 70s and early 80s. They had F4 Phantoms and A4s and A6s and just the cool jets at

• 13:34Dave Berke?

  the time. And so I went to the airshow every year, grew up out there. And I think it was, no joke, it was overhead. I could see it, you know, every day. And I think that just got in my blood a little bit. Went to El Toro High School, went to the airshow probably every year from I was six years old till the time the base closed down. No joke. I mean, it was just part of my life. And, you know, I met some people along the way, too. You know, there's a lot of Marines living there. So I had some real powerful influences that kind of guided me towards that. I'm sure we're gonna get into this because it's come up already in the pre-conversation. But at around 14, I'd say, watched this obscure movie called Top Gun.

• 14:10Jocko Willink?

  Straight up Top Gun.

• 14:11Dave Berke?

  Straight up, man. Watched the movie as a kid, saw dudes flying airplanes off carriers, shooting down MiGs. And I'm like, I want to do that. And Probably by 14, I had a pretty good idea. That's what I wanted to do.

• 14:27Jocko Willink?

  Did you make the connection between school and grades and all that stuff? Because a lot of people saw that movie and said, "Oh, I want to be a Top Gun pilot, but I'm still gonna slack off and do whatever I want and not, you know, play hooky and all that." Somehow you made that connection. It's not shown in the movie, right? They didn't show people studying hard in school because that would have not sold a lot of tickets.

• 14:48Dave Berke?

  I did eventually. I mean, when I watched that movie, I think there was just something... I'd always been interested in aviation. It's kind of captivating when you see planes flying around and get to see the airshow, see the Blue Angels, that kind of stuff. You can't help but look up and watch that stuff. It's cool.

• 15:01Dave Berke?

  I would say that my performance in the academic arena was slightly less than stellar. I was... I did fine, but I had no real motivation to do anything. I wasn't a real driven kid to work really hard. I kind of discovered that if I put in very little effort, I was okay. And if I wanted to do really well, I had to put in a lot of effort and I hadn't made much of a connection. But, so as I got a little older, you know, I watched the movie. You know, I think that was a part of a lot of different things. But about the time I was 16, so kind of junior year in high school, as I got some other influences in my life, the biggest one was a guy named Aaron Irvin. I started working at Target around the corner from my house and there was a Marine there. And like I said, my parents got divorced. I had a stepdad that was there and kind of come and gone.

• 15:44Dave Berke?

  He ended up being a really big father figure in my life and a real positive influence and a Marine, which was great. And he explained some more things about what it's like to be a Marine. He's the one that made the connection for me that all that stuff you saw in the movies, you can actually do that for real. The Marine Corps, you can do that as a Marine. You know, it's not just a movie. That's a real life. Somebody's living that life right now and you can do that. And I remember coming home and kind of telling my mom like, "Hey, I'm 16. I'm in junior high school. I'm thinking about being a Marine Corps fighter pilot." Which I had no military in my backyard and nobody had ever done anything like that. And her answer was, "That sounds awesome. You should do that." I mean, just 100%. And she had a very similar approach. You know, everything, every idea I ever had in my life that I run by my mom, she's like, "Well, somebody's gonna do it. Might as well be you."

• 16:29Dave Berke?

  That was kind of her approach to everything. "I want to be a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps. Somebody's gonna be it. Might as well be you." And that's about the time I kind of started to get my, my stuff together. I wasn't a mess by, by any stretch, but I, I was a little bit just kinda running through life, doing my thing, being a kid. And um, I certainly think I was lucky because I knew with great detail at about 16 and change, what I wanted to do. I mean, I knew I wanted to be a Marine Corps F-18 pilot based in Southern California, and to have carriers. And that's exactly what I ended up doing. So at that time, everything I started to do from there was with that kind of singular focus of, of circling back to do that. I even knew I wanted to be stationed at El Toro. I mean, I, I had a real specific

• 17:12Dave Berke?

  plan. And so all the things I started doing from there, school, you know, into college as well, uh, going to the Marine recruiter to say I wanted to join the Marine Corps, be an officer in the Marine Corps, all those things were geared very specifically towards that goal. Now, there's a ton of hurdles between the time you're 16 and the time I got my commission at 21. But everything else that I did in my life was either a distraction that I just got rid of, or it was a means to that end. Uh, I worked full-time, uh, while I was in school, put myself through the nearest college, uh, you know, the, the local state school that I lived uh, no, close to, I just drove up to school, didn't have like a real big, exciting college life, wasn't in a fraternity, didn't go away to school.

• 17:51Dave Berke?

  Uh, I paid my way through a school, I got a good education. I, I worked really hard to, to, to do well, but it was all specifically designed to you want to be in the Marine Corps and be an officer, you need a college graduate, you need to be a college graduate. Right on, I can do that, I can do that here.

• 18:04Jocko Willink?

  Where's the closest college?

• 18:05Dave Berke?

  Okay. Yeah, where's the closest college? Uh, how much does it cost? How much do I need to work? Did the math. It was, uh, my life from about that time, I started working at, like I said, I worked at Target as a kid. I worked at Target from the time I was 15 and a half and got a work permit from school to the time that I got my commission in the Marine Corps. And I went to school in Cal State Fullerton, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. My mom was a guidance counselor and a teacher, so she helped me build a schedule that I could graduate as fast as possible, which is exactly in four years. It was all day Monday, all day Wednesday, and half a day Friday. And I worked Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The money I paid, I got paid, went to my tuition. My tuition went to my education, my education got me a commission in Marine Corps. I mean, that was kinda it. I mean, in some ways you look back, I probably could have diversified a little bit.

• 18:49Dave Berke?

  But at the time, I wasn't unhappy. I was, I was stoked, man. That's exactly what I wanted to be doing. There was no like, man, I wish I could be doing this. It wasn't a chore by any stretch. Like I said, in retrospect, you know, I probably could have done things a little bit differently, but seventeen year old Dave Berke, eighteen year old Dave Berke, knew exactly what he wanted to do. And I had sort of talked myself into it, like, hey, any detour, it's gonna throw you off your path, man. And you're gonna look back with regret and go, you know why you didn't end up being what you wanted to be? It's because of this or that. And I wasn't gonna let that happen, so I kinda just got a little intense about being a pilot in the Marine Corps. And sure enough.

• 19:21Jocko Willink?

  And there's still luck involved, because when you go to, when you go to TBS, which is the basic school, which all Marine officers go through, you, you have to still win or, or get that billet that you wanted. And you got that, but I mean, that could have gone

• 19:37Dave Berke?

  Totally, man.

• 19:38Jocko Willink?

  Sideways.

• 19:38Dave Berke?

  There's a lot of luck involved. Um, I think everybody in the military, and everybody that's been successful in the military knows, you're looking back on your career, you know, it's a confluence of a lot of different things, but timing, circumstance, and luck are, they're a part of it, without a doubt. Nobody can take credit for everything they've done. And if, I went back to do it again, the odds of it working out the way that it did are pretty slim. There's just a lot of things that worked out in my favor. Um, but you know, I went to OCS, you know, I went to the Marine Corps recruiter. I started my freshman year at Cal State Fullerton. I was seventeen when I started college. Went right to the recruiter on day one, or they called it an OSO, an Officer Selection Officer. So it's basically a recruiter for officers. Hey, I wanna be a Marine. It's like, right on. Start filling out this paperwork. Filled out the paperwork. I said, I wanna be a pilot. He's like, piece of cake, no problem. We can, we can make that happen.

• 20:21Dave Berke?

  Uh, sign this ground contract and we'll just make you a pilot at some point in the future.

• 20:25Jocko Willink?

  So for those of you that don't know, um, that's a big lie. It ain't that easy. And so when he says ground truck contract, of course, the Marine Corps needs pilots and guys to infantry. And so, but they need more infantry than they need pilots. And so they say, hey, don't worry about it. You just sign up for ground right now. We'll take care of that other pilot. You wanna be a pilot? Yeah, yeah, of course, we'll take care of that later.

• 20:45Dave Berke?

  Yeah, we'll just transition over. Shouldn't be a big deal.

• 20:46Jocko Willink?

  No factor.

• 20:47Dave Berke?

  And at seventeen, I mean, I was signing paperwork to be a Marine officer. That was, that was a big step for me. And I, and I probably would have signed anything. Uh, happily signed that. Um, after my freshman year in college, I went to Officer Candidate School. And to be honest with you, and I had all these big grand ideas for the last, you know, two, three years, I knew what I wanted to do, but When I went to OCS, that was the first real hurdle. I mean, everything else was either an idea, a plan, some paperwork. I get to the officer candidate school and it's like, okay, there's a real marine drill instructor screaming at you, you know, you're really doing the deed there. Getting through OCS was a big thing for me because it was the first real test of did I, you know, I knew what I wanted to do, but I had no real sense if I had what was required to be a marine.

• 21:30Dave Berke?

  And I think as a kid, you build up what that is in your mind as a larger than life thing. How could anybody possibly do this? You turn it into something more than it is.

• 21:39Jocko Willink?

  When I went to boot camp, there was a, there was a Navy SEAL there, right? And I swear, when I saw him, I was like, God, look at that. He was huge. I mean, huge, big, giant forearms and big, just a big, massive guy. It just looked like a destroyer of human life. I was, oh my God. So, fast forward four years, I'm in the teams and I meet this guy. And he's not at all, man. It was completely in my head. It was completely in my head that this guy was such a destroyer. But I just thought, hey, he's a SEAL. He must be a destroyer. And I actually saw it that way.

• 22:18Dave Berke?

  Yeah. You can't help it. It's certainly at that age. I mean, those, those things are real powerful influences. When you get out to OCS and all of a sudden you're like, oh man, I need to, I didn't make this happen. That was a big, big achievement in my life. They say, hey, I can do this. Okay. I started to realize,

• 22:34Dave Berke?

  I'm not the biggest guy in the Marine Corps. Nobody's going to mistake me for a destroyer. But what I discovered as I got there is I, I knew mentally what I wanted to do. It wasn't a real question mark about my intentions or my desires. And I was surrounded by tough, strong kids, you know, young kids my age that are trying to be marine officers. And that's, that's a physical and a mental challenge. There's no doubt about it. And I was seeing guys kind of left and right of me that looked at least bigger, faster, stronger, tougher, and more capable than they, they looked like that, that same image you have in your mind. And I'm watching these dudes kind of fall out of stuff, or not finish stuff fast enough, or just straight up quit.

• 23:10Dave Berke?

  You know, guys would DOR, drop on request at OCS. And I was kind of looking around thinking, What's, you know, what's going on? You know, why are you here if your plan wasn't to get through it? So that was a good, a really good thing for me psychologically to realize that it wasn't just a kind of a fantasy or a dream. I had, I had the potential being able to do this. So I got through OCS. Um, you know, that's kind of a painful process. As you know, it's 84 days. It can be, it can be slog and you lose a lot of folks doing it for all those different reasons. Some people get hurt. Some people quit. Some people just can't do it. Uh, and when you get on the backside of that, like I can, I can make this happen. Let's get that air contract. Well, we'll get you that air contract at the basic school. So, which is when you get your commission, you, you finish

• 23:54Dave Berke?

  school, you get your degree, finish officer candidate school. So basically it's a, hey, you've done everything that you need. You're a commissioned officer, became a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps in June of 1994. And the first thing you do on active duty as a Marine is you go to something called the basic school. I know you've talked about it a few times. It's basically a school for the Marine Corps teaches officers a little bit of everything. Doesn't teach you everything of anything, but you get a little exposure to infantry, exposure to tanks, artillery, call for fire, a little bit of exposure to aviation, patrolling, defense offense. So you kind of get a whole way in the land and the whole point of that for the Marine Corps is you go there with 250 people and they got to give each one of those people an assignment, you know, a particular

• 24:31Dave Berke?

  job, an MOS, a specialty. Um, and they rank you. I mean, you are ranked from one to 250. And for aviation, when I got there, I remember getting in the first week, they kind of announced what bullets are going to be available. Oh, we're going to have, you know, 40 infantry slots and 20, they just tell you kind of what we expect to have breakdown. And from there, you're supposed to go back and think about what you want to do. They had two pilot slots. I'm like, man, that is some rough math, you know, 250 folks. Now, not all 250 wanted to be a pilot, obviously, and not, not all 250 people were qualified with, you know, their eyes and whatnot. So it wasn't competing with 250 people, but there's a lot of people that wanted to be a pilot. So the math was certainly

• 25:13Dave Berke?

  not in my favor. And that was another challenge of, yeah, you got to do well. I mean, you get ranked and graded on everything. Physical fitness, your leadership ability, your academics, you get peer reviewed, you know, your peers rate you and, you know, anonymously and what they think of you. So you got basically six months to get after it. And at the end, they line you up, 250 people in a line, not, this is a real line. And you walk into a room and on the room, there's a board and whatever job is available. You can pick. Now, Marine Corps does this thing called quality spread where they basically cut the class in thirds. So out of 250 folks, you know, 80, 80, 80, or something around there. The number one guy picks, then the number 81 guy picks, and then the number 161 guy picks,

• 25:55Dave Berke?

  or whatever it is. And then the number two guy picks. The only job in the Marine Corps that they did not quality spread was at the basic school was pilot. So it was going to be the first two guys out of the gate that wanted it, that were qualified, we're going to get it. And I got the number two spot. So, again, it was one of those things that I'm, I was starting to, in my mind, realize like, whoa, this, I can do this. You know, I built this thing up, what I wanted to do. You know, I'm 21 now, you know, 22, I think, actually. So, it's six years of my life that I've been sort of singularly dedicated to doing this. And so that day where they, my platoon commander, guy named John Marion, I'll never forget it, he was an F-18 pilot, brings me into his office, he's like, Dave, you're going to be a pilot? And he goes, I think you're going to fly America's airplane,

• 26:40Dave Berke?

  you're going to fly the F-18 Hornet. It was an awesome day, man. And I won't, I won't ever forget it. And that was it. You know, I got my, my ticket. I, when I, when I was selected for pilot, I was ranked, I think, like, number eight out of 250 in my company. And by the time I graduated, like, three weeks later, I was, like, 25 out of 250. So, my performance might have declined a little bit after I had achieved that.

• 27:06Jocko Willink?

  You wasn't following the theory of no slack.

• 27:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah, there was a little slack in that line. That line was pretty tight for a lot of years.

• 27:12Jocko Willink?

  For six years, and five, you got it.

• 27:14Dave Berke?

  So, a little bit of slack there at the end. But I did finish, you know, well enough to get that pilot slot, which is what I always wanted. It was kind of my dream.

• 27:22Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 27:22Dave Berke?

  That was April of 1995. So, I started the basic school in October of 94, right after I got, graduated from college in June. Little delay to get down to Quantico for the basic school. That's six months long. I graduated sometime mid-April. Well, wow, about this time in 1995, so.

• 27:38Jocko Willink?

  And then, you go to flight school.

• 27:41Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Jocko Willink?

  You do the rag, you do all that stuff to get out to a squadron. Then the first kind of work you were doing was, was Southern Watch, right?

• 27:48Dave Berke?

  Yeah. So, I get through flight school, I ended up picking F-18s, I get stationed at El Toro. So, I am literally living the dream. I move back to my hometown. I think I went to, like, my 10-year high school reunion. And, you know, I had told all my buddies, you know, what I wanted to do. Ran into some people I hadn't seen in a while. It was, it was good. Um, and shortly after I got there, I actually flew the last flight out of El Toro. They closed the base and all the Marines moved down to Miramar. So the Navy, where Topkin was, was filmed and all that stuff back in the day, the Navy left San Diego, moved back east and the Marine Corps happily took over that base. And so I moved down to Miramar, ended up in an F-18 squadron stationed at Miramar flying Hornets off carriers.

• 28:28Jocko Willink?

  Straight up living the dream. Your actual dream you are now living at this time.

• 28:33Dave Berke?

  That's, that's, that is exactly right. I'm living in San Diego. Uh, I was living in PB off Anacapa and, um, stationed Miramar flying Hornets and, and the carrier that I was assigned to, uh, my first deployment, we did Operation Southern Watch. So, you know, I watched Desert Storm in 91, uh, on TV. I was a freshman in college. And, you know, we hadn't, we hadn't done much in the military since then, but we had flown every single day since that war ended in, I think it was in March of 91. Every single day since then, we flew patrols over Iraq to make sure that the skies were clear and we were enforcing the no-fly zone. And here it was, you know, 10 years later, 2000, um, on a carrier in

• 29:16Dave Berke?

  the Persian Gulf flying combat operations, uh, over southern Iraq.

• 29:21Jocko Willink?

  Did you guys ever drop any bombs there?

• 29:23Dave Berke?

  I did. Yeah, a few of us did. Not a ton. There wasn't a ton going on, but what we would do, these things called response options. So if the Iraqis would do something, I think in my case, they set up a surface air missile south of a, of a line that they weren't supposed to be. And we had surveillance that told us what was out there. And I launched on a mission and blew up a SAM site with something called a JDAM at the time. It was a, it was a bomb guided by GPS, which at the time was this brand new invention. Yeah, it was crazy technology. I think we were on the only planes in the entire carrier that could do it because we had this thing called a GPS. Super fancy back then. Um, but, but at the time, Jocko, that was combat. That was, that was it. There was no other show in town. And so the night that I dropped a bomb on a SAM site in Iraq off a carrier in an F-18.

• 30:06Jocko Willink?

  You could have, you could have just retired right there.

• 30:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah, we're done.

• 30:09Jocko Willink?

  Good to go.

• 30:09Dave Berke?

  Dude, I, yeah, that was it. I could have come back to that. They could have flown me off the ship and I probably would have died a happy man at that point. I was like, that's it. I, I have, I've reached critical mass. That's all I ever wanted to do. So it was, um, again, a lot of it was just things worked out in my favor, but I did exactly what I wanted to do in that event was, was kind of at the time, sort of the pinnacle. That was what I, I thought I was going to achieve.

• 30:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing in the dry years for the SEAL teams. Like if you did some kind of mission, you were just super stoked. You know, we were over in the Persian Gulf, actually same time, 2000, 99, 2000, I was there. I was in the Persian Gulf and we were doing, you know, MEO operations, stopping smugglers coming out of Iraq. So we were taking down vessels and getting control of them. And again, at the time, super stoked. Yes. The big mission was taking down these vessels and you thought it was pretty cool in a way. It was cool. It was cool. But you just didn't have any, anything to compare it to at all.

• 31:03Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 31:04Jocko Willink?

  So what happened?

• 31:06Dave Berke?

  Uh, so I get back from that deployment. Uh, that's the summer, summer of 2000. And, um, shortly after that, I got selected by my commanding officer to go to Top Gun. So that was my first exposure to kind of advancing inside the squadron. So as a young guy, I'd done almost two years in the squadron. I've been there for a little while and, uh, got some qualifications and grew and developed in the squadron and they pick one or two guys every couple of years for me squadron to go to the school. And, and the whole point of going there is you learn kind of this advanced, you know, it's like a master's degree basically in, in being a fighter pilot with the intent that you're going to bring that back to the squadron and be one of the kind of key trainers, the key leaders in the squadron.

• 31:42Dave Berke?

  So I went to Top Gun, uh, early the next year, uh, summer of, actually about a year later. So summer of 2001, uh, I go to Top Gun and I came back and we were just in a workup cycle.

• 31:53Jocko Willink?

  You show up to Top Gun, just so everybody knows.

• 31:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Jocko Willink?

  You, you feel like, I mean, especially because you were the big combat vet with bombs dropped and you feel like you're pretty much a complete stud.

• 32:05Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 32:05Jocko Willink?

  And then you show up at Top Gun and the instructors just can completely annihilate you. And just for those of you who don't know, it's, it's, you're learning how to dogfight mono, imano against another guy in another plane. Like stock car racing, because the planes are equal and it's you against the other guy. And it was actually cool. You were explaining some of the rules and how you'd set it up and they have, you know how in jujitsu, you know, you. You, you, okay, you know, you, you start standing, you know, you shake hands, bump fists. Okay, now it's on. Well, with the Top Gun, they start at a certain distance. They, they go towards each other at a certain altitude, certain distance away from each other. They go, they pass at a thousand feet, you know, left, left wing to left wing. And then, once they pass, they say, what do you say? Game on?

• 32:47Dave Berke?

  Fights on.

• 32:48Jocko Willink?

  Fights on, fights on, and then boom, now it's go. So that's how they start in their neutral position. And, and of course, when you show up there, it's just like jujitsu in the fact that it's like a guy that did a little bit of training somewhere, and then they show up at a jujitsu place, and they're gonna get totally destroyed. So, he shows up, you show up at this thing.

• 33:06Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  And, and you think you're, again, a big combat vet, you just get annihilated.

• 33:11Dave Berke?

  Totally. So, yeah, I get that. I had dropped a bomb. That's singular. I had dropped a bomb.

• 33:15Jocko Willink?

  Ah, bomb.

• 33:16Dave Berke?

  And I was, I was, yeah, that was a big deal. That dude had dropped a bomb, you know? And so at the time, I was, I, I thought-

• 33:22Jocko Willink?

  Cause some of the instructors had never done that before, right?

• 33:24Dave Berke?

  Most of them. Like you said, there's the dryers, there just wasn't a ton going on. You had a story here and there, but, um, I think more than anything in my own mind, you kind of build up like, I got some game here, man, I'm gonna watch this. You know, I'm gonna do some good work here. Uh, and you know, and I'd done well enough in my squadron, and I was one of the guys that got picked to go to school, so you-

• 33:41Jocko Willink?

  Which is another little confidence boost.

• 33:43Dave Berke?

  Yeah, it is.

• 33:43Jocko Willink?

  So your ego's getting fed. It's getting force fed.

• 33:47Dave Berke?

  Maybe, yeah, a little bit. Um, yeah, you're feeling pretty good about yourself. And so you go up there, and, uh, like, like you said, so you know you're, you're a student, and you know you're not gonna, you know, you're not gonna be as good as the instructors. But what you don't know is that you're not just gonna lose, you're gonna get, you're not just gonna lose or get annihilated, you're not even gonna know what happened. It's gonna be over, and you're gonna kind of be flying back, and before you, you're gonna land, and, and you're not gonna be able to explain what just occurred. I mean, it, it occurs in a way that is so, it, it's hard to explain, it's like you weren't there. Uh, it, it's really, it's humbling. I mean, Jocko, we're talking the very first flight, on the very first day, my very first event, the very first fight of the first flight.

• 34:29Dave Berke?

  It was over in like 20 seconds and instructor was saying, okay, they say knock it off when we're done. We're gonna start and set it up again. And I knew right then I was totally in over my head. The very first one. And it was so, my first flight was, was so bad that when I landed, we're walking back in to, you go to maintenance and you, you basically go back and turn the airplane back in and so they can fix it. And then what you're supposed to do is walk across the street to the squadron hangar and talk about it. And I'm in my gear and you're supposed to get undressed out of your flight gear and go, he's like, hey, don't get undressed. And I'm like, okay, right, right on. He's like, why don't we just go do that again? It was bad enough that we didn't even need to talk about it. We just needed to just, hey, and he's like, hey, why don't you just,

• 35:10Dave Berke?

  just take a deep breath, man. And we went and did that flight without ever, without ever even talking about the first one. Right. So I kinda knew I was, yeah, I had some work to do. So Top Gun is, is really good about, not just humbling you, but obviously it teaches you a ton. It's, it's a, it's a six, at the time it was only six weeks for the Marines. Cause we, we didn't do some of the syllabus that the Navy did. Cause we got it elsewhere. And it's six weeks where you start with literally just you against another guy, one against one. And you end up building up to where it's, you know, six to eight of you on the front, on the blue side, the friendly side, against, you know, 15, 20 simulated adversaries. So it's a, it's a lot in a short period of time.

• 35:52Dave Berke?

  And that idea of being like really bad when you start, happens over and over again in the course. So you get to the one V one phase and at the end you're like, oh, finally I got this one V one thing. I got this thing wired. I can do this. I'm like, alright, cool. And you're not gonna go two against whatever and you just get rolled again. And you're like, ah, back to square one. So it builds you up and breaks you down, builds you up. Standard military, you know, just breaks you down to your pieces. And then the guys there, their instructors are so, they're obviously really good. I mean, that part is, sort of speaks for itself. They're really good on the airplane. But what makes them unique is that they're exceptional teachers. So you learn a ton. So by the time, by the time you finish Top Gun, that, that image in the mirror where you're like, man, that dude is awesome, that gets shattered. It's actually all back together by the time you leave. And so you leave there like,

• 36:35Dave Berke?

  you got that patch on your shoulder. You fly back, you get the patch and the last day you get up in your airplane, F-18 with my name painted on the side with the Top Gun patch and I flew back to Miramar.

• 36:44Jocko Willink?

  See, the dream is getting better.

• 36:45Dave Berke?

  The dream is getting better. But, but there's been enough reminders like, ah, I should probably maybe cool out a little bit. You know, you start to just learn that there's always guys out there that are significantly better than you. And, and you, you keep climbing up the hill, but finishing Top Gun as a student, you feel like you've hit the top of the mountain. But you realize, because the guys you've been working with, there's an awful long way to go.

• 37:06Jocko Willink?

  You at least know what you don't know.

• 37:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah, that's a great way to put it. You know what you don't know, and you know, there's a lot that you don't know. And so it kind of dispels all those feelings. You know, we went through flight school, like, wow. I'm a, I finished flight school and I got F-18s. I've really got this flying thing nailed. And you, you're, you're barely functional in an airplane compared to these other guys. And when you get to a place like Top Gun, it's just such a concentration of talent. You, you, as good as it feels, you actually, the thing you get the most out of it is some humility because you just got crushed for six weeks. Crushed. Uh, and hopefully you learned something out of it and you're supposed to take that back and, and teach the guys in your squadron all those same lessons. And so my expectation was I was going to go back from Top Gun.

• 37:46Dave Berke?

  I was going to spend another two years, 18 months in the squadron as a, kind of the senior instructors. And then go on to something else. And, and I didn't know exactly what that was at the time.

• 37:56Dave Berke?

  But as I'm leaving, no joke, my last day, I remember the guy who asked me, um, it's actually the same guy that's going to do my retirement here in a couple of months. He's like, hey, man, have you thought about coming back to be an instructor at Top Gun? After this tour and your squadron's over. And I tried to play it cool, like, oh, it's, well, let me, let me go home and think about that. But clearly there wasn't a lot to think about there. So I left there with kind of an inclination that I might get asked back and I was pretty stoked about that. They didn't formalize it, but he was a senior IP on the staff, a senior Marine there as well. Um, a real respected guy in marine aviation and he had given me a sit down. So I was hoping that that was going to happen. But I also thought I had time. I thought I was, you know, this is July 2001 and obviously, you know, six weeks later, uh, 9/11, uh, hits.

• 38:40Dave Berke?

  And so all, all that calculus kind of changed and very quickly, my squadron, which was on this regular cycle of preparing to go to what was going to be another Southern Watch deployment. Just like we had did, that whole thing had changed, um, because of, because of September 11th.

• 38:55Jocko Willink?

  So what happens on September 11th for you?

• 38:58Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Jocko Willink?

  You were active in a squadron, getting ready for work in the morning.

• 39:03Dave Berke?

  Totally. Boom. I'm stationed right up the road here, you know, five miles north of here is Marine Corps Station Miramar. I'm, I'm on my second half of my first tour as a pilot in the F-18 squadron. I'd already done that one deployment and I had a routine down, you know, I was getting up, I was probably, I guess it was probably five in the morning, I'm sitting at the foot of my bed, lacing up my boots like I did every day to just get in the car and drive into work and click on the TV and, you know, I see, it's eight o'clock back east or around that time and I see what's going on. And I think, you know, same story for all this, kind of piece it together very quickly, like, hey, this isn't an accident. This is, something's really happening here, you see the second building. And it very quickly kind of clicks in like, this is the real thing. And I knew, I knew something, I knew we were going to go to war.

• 39:45Dave Berke?

  I didn't know what, I obviously didn't know the details, but I knew things were going to change really dramatically. As a matter of fact, you know, my drive to work, which normally would have taken me 10 minutes or whatever, 15 minutes, something, some short drive to get up into, into the base. It was like three hours to get on the base, you know, they're inspecting every vehicle, you know, every car is getting pulled over, dogs are, you know, the, the whole nine yards, just the security. It was pretty chaotic, it was kind of mayhem. And I'm, I drive into my squadron and half of my squadron had already, not half, but a good number of guys had already been up to Fallon, which was where we're going to go for training, the same place that Top Gun is. And it was just part of a normal training cycle. And my squadron commander at the time, an awesome guy, called me because he'd gone up there and I was supposed to bring the, you know, be part of the second half of, that went up there.

• 40:29Dave Berke?

  He's like, hey, man, you need to go brief. You're going to be the lead of a four ship of aircraft. We don't know all the details yet, but we're gonna, they're gonna call you, they're gonna find live ordinance and you're gonna have to fly an, a mission, a, an air patrol, combat air patrol mission called the CAP. Cause there were still a bunch of airliners that were still airborne, coming in from places like Japan and Korea, these long haul, you know, 12, 13, 14, 10 hour flights. There's a whole bunch of airplanes airborne and, and we didn't know if those, there's a potential issue with those airplanes, you know, if they're going to try to do the same thing back east that they did out west. Total chaos and, and I had just recently graduated from Top Gun, so I was, he's like, hey, you're the lead and, and we didn't have a good, we didn't know what the mission was. I mean, it was basically one of those things where. We're supposed to get airborne and somehow between us and some other controller are going

• 41:14Dave Berke?

  to kind of determine if a particular aircraft might have been a threat. And that was happening all over the country. People were in their aircraft, Air Force, Navy, Marine pilots were just launching to do these protection missions of what ended up becoming something called Operation Noble Eagle, which started on September 11th. And it was this aviation overwatch of key cities and key locations. And we were totally clueless on what that was. Now, I ended up not launching, but it didn't happen. You know, but we did the brief, we were getting ready to go. And it was just kind of that moment of chaos of we were on our heels and talking didn't prepare me for that. I didn't have a sense of what I was supposed to do with an airliner, you know, filled with civilians on some route coming from Japan and trying to figure out what I would do

• 41:58Dave Berke?

  if somebody said, hey, that aircraft, we figured out that aircraft is going to try to fly into a building or crash into an airport or something like that. It was just, it was just kind of mayhem and it was, you know, it was tough to start off.

• 42:10Jocko Willink?

  The idea being that if that is suspected of happening or they can somehow confirm that's going to happen, then you or one of your mates is going to have to shoot down a civilian aircraft. That's what you're being, that's what they're thinking.

• 42:24Dave Berke?

  Yeah, exactly. And, and that was something I'd never considered.

• 42:27Jocko Willink?

  I don't think anybody had considered that at that point.

• 42:30Dave Berke?

  And I've read, there's some, you know, there's some pilots that actually ended up launching out, out in the East Coast. I've read a couple of articles of pilots that took off in their F-16s here in DC because obviously it was with the Pentagon up in DC and then New York City that actually did get airborne and they're, they had missions to do exactly that. So in some sense, I was pretty lucky that I didn't have to go through that calculus, but I still can picture where I'm sitting, given that brief with three other pilots, kind of like we're sitting today. And we're even asking ourselves like, well, how do you, I mean, how do you shoot down an airliner? You know, what, what would we actually go through to do it? How would we determine? You know, we were kind of trying to talk through that and, and the idea that an airliner filled with civilians and we knew, you know, at that point that those other airliners

• 43:13Dave Berke?

  that were just regular commercial airplanes that just took off to go on their flight and they had crashed, we knew everybody on, on board, you know, nobody's going to survive that. And so it was just a very strange way to start what ended up being kind of a cycle of war that, you know, we've all been through for years now, on that morning of getting that call from the CEO, hey, this is what you're doing. And, you know, that was the beginning. Shortly, very shortly after that, within a day or two, no, actually, I think probably that late afternoon and certainly by the next day, my squadron.

• 43:41Dave Berke?

  Was one of the several squadrons that was tasked to go back out on the carrier. So we split that squadron in half. That same CO that called me, he took guys from Fallon, flew onto the ship, onto the carrier, right off the coast of LAX. And I still, we talked about this, I can picture to this day, I took off out of San Diego and was flying overhead Los Angeles International Airport and we had guys that taken off from the carrier, they had live missiles. And they were doing a CAP and I'm flying, you know, kind of opposite direction overhead LAX, looking down and, you know, I grew up in Southern California, LAX is like one of the busiest airports in the world. Planes all over the tarmac, on the runways, on the taxiways, because there's, everybody landed, nobody took off, there's no controllers. And they're doing this CAP mission where they're just flying overhead LAX, kind of largely unknown of what's going on and just that moment of surreality of I'm airborne

• 44:26Dave Berke?

  and there's nobody else, nobody else flying. And we're just sort of just waiting for something to happen. And, you know, it was kind of one of those, hey, you'll get your, you'll get more specific instructions as we figure it out. You know, the leadership was scrambling every bit as much as we were and kind of looking down, thinking this is, this is a whole new world. You know, this is not Southern Watch, you know, that mission we've been doing. And within maybe six weeks, we steamed out, we loaded the carrier a couple of months early, put the squadron, the whole air wing, got onboard the carrier and steamed out towards the North Arabian Gulf to go do what we called as Operation Enduring Freedom. So late 2001, I think it was maybe November 2001, we were going to war.

• 45:11Dave Berke?

  And Afghanistan was where the war was, you remember, and at the time, that was it, there was nothing else going on. We went to Afghanistan. So I did a seven-month cruise on a carrier from November of 2001, I think we came back April, May of 2002, and did combat operations over Afghanistan and, you know, a lot more ordinance and a lot busier. We did a mission at the time, it was called Operation Anaconda, I think I might have asked you about that, that was like the largest ground offensive we had supported since Desert Storm. And when we came back in April, April or May of 02. We thought we'd sort of largely won the war. We thought we accomplished most of our mission. We left thinking, hey, this thing is winding down. We're feeling pretty good

• 45:53Dave Berke?

  about it. And when I got back in May of 02, I kind of distinctly remember like, I just had my war experience. You know, I was a pilot in combat. And, you know, I'd done Southern Watch, but obviously, you know, nothing like this. And but I'd done a combat deployment off a carrier, supported troops on the ground in Afghanistan, dropping bombs and flying off carriers. I kind of thought that was it. I think a lot of us did.

• 46:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, a lot of us did. I know I thought that when coming back from my first deployment to Iraq, I was kind of, you know, I'm thankful that I got to do this deployment. And I thought it can't go on that much longer. But I mean, really quickly, after we got back, it spiraled. And I said, oh, this is gonna be a while.

• 46:31Dave Berke?

  Yeah, big time. While I was on that deployment, I had got an email from Top Gun saying, hey, why don't you come up here next summer and be an instructor? So I came back in May of that deployment, knowing that my next step was going to go back up to Fallon. So I was feeling pretty good about that. I was pretty pumped to know what was next. And, you know, in that period of time, we came back, you know, I'm packing up that summer, moving out in the fall, and already the gears are starting to turn for what ended up being Operation Iraqi Freedom. You know, it's the writing is on the wall that this is, we're not done. I mean, we're really just getting started. And it was several months before that all kicked off. I think everybody in the military certainly knew this is which way it's going

• 47:14Dave Berke?

  to happen. And I think there were some things along the way that were supposed to occur, but we all knew this was coming. Certainly, you know, it kicked off in March of the following year. It wasn't a big surprise to any of us. And I was up at Fallon, kind of watching that whole thing roll. And I realized that that deployment that I just finished was not the end of, you know, what we were doing as a country, trying to deal with this problem.

• 47:36Jocko Willink?

  And then you show up at Top Gun to be an instructor, which is, you know, you said the going to Top Gun was like a masters. And so now it's, it's beyond a doctorate, right? I mean, it's.

• 47:46Dave Berke?

  Yeah, we say it's the PhD. I mean, in our business, certainly is for a Marine or a naval aviator, a fighter pilot. That's, that's it. Top Gun kind of represents, it's the schoolhouse. It's, it's the place where you want to be. And as an instructor, you have, you have a huge amount of responsibility. It's a bunch of sort of mid, mid-career guys. It's Navy lieutenants, it's Marine Corps captains, maybe a junior major or junior lieutenant commander. But it's run by relatively young guys, guys that have maybe a full deployment under the belt. And, you know, quickly guys were coming in, having done Afghanistan combat operations, guys coming, having done Iraq combat operations. So in the time that I was there from oh two to oh five, the combat experience on the staff went from basically none

• 48:28Dave Berke?

  to everybody, every single dude had been in combat. It was coming off a long deployment where they had done back-to-back deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Guys that I knew had done 10-month deployments to Iraq on a carrier. I mean, really seasoned guys where just one generation, three years prior, not a single person on the staff had seen any combat like that. So.

• 48:48Jocko Willink?

  The exact same thing in the SEAL teams we experienced. Exact same thing. Went from zero or close to zero combat experience. There's an odd guy that had done a little operation here or there to every single guy except for the new guys, you know? And then, but, but your, your learning curve, when you show back up there, it was just as steep as the first time.

• 49:09Dave Berke?

  Yeah, without a doubt. So when you're there as a student and you don't understand a lot of what's going on as a student, at least on the instructor's side, you know, they're not trying to keep anything from me, but you're just, you were so busy just trying to keep your head above water. You're not spending a lot of time wondering what the instructors are doing in their free time. You know, you're just prepping for every brief. The flight may take an hour, but you've put in 10 hours of work ahead of time and you debrief for six hours. And when you're done, you need to go start the next prep process again. So you are just all day, every day. Thinking about your next flight and getting ready for that and the things going on. So, and your learning curve is steep as a student, when you get there as an instructor, and I didn't know this at the time, you get there, when you're there as an instructor,

• 49:52Dave Berke?

  you have certainly been selected to a pretty elite group of folks. But you don't teach the student at Top Gun when you're an instructor for a year. They spend an entire year with you as an instructor. There's only 25 guys on the staff. And so a third of you, basically, if you kind of do the math, are sequestered for an entire year, just going through what's called, we call it the IUT, the Instructor Under Training. And they're just teaching you how to teach students. And in that year, you're now flying all these different training missions with the instructors that are training you to be an instructor, and you're getting annihilated again. So that whole continuum of, wow, I'm pretty good, you're reminded very quickly. And so it takes an entire year. Now, the good news about that is that by the time you're finishing your initial instructor

• 50:37Dave Berke?

  qualification, you can go teach students. You have been flying more than you've ever flown in your entire career. I mean, I'm flying two, three times a day sometimes for a year. And so you're just getting reps and reps and reps. And you have, God, more reps, I think, than anybody in aviation. So by the time you get your first student, you sit down, your very first student brief, your A-game has been elevated, you know, quite a bit. And you're able to fly with the students and teach them way more effectively. Because heck, when I finished Top Gun, I went to Afghanistan. I didn't do a single air-to-air mission for almost a year. I was dropping bombs, I was doing CAS and all those other type of missions. So when I got there, I was, I was pretty rusty on those skillsets. A year of flying with instructors will resolve that.

• 51:21Jocko Willink?

  It just, the amount of flying that you get, you know, in Jiu-Jitsu, we call it mat time. But for a normal pilot, you're not even getting a fraction of that, right? A fraction.

• 51:33Dave Berke?

  Yeah, not only you're not getting a fraction of it, a lot of the time that you're flying is when you're not at Top Gun is, you know, sometimes you do admin flying, just flying to and from different places. Sometimes you're just prepping for a very particular mission. You know, it takes a skill to, you know, the missions of getting ready to drop bombs or do armor reconnaissance are different types of flying. You don't get to see all of it. You get to see a pretty narrow amount. At Top Gun, you get exposed to everything repeatedly. And so that one against one that we talked about, that we call BFM, Basic Fighter Maneuvers, which is just you and another guy fighting two airplanes. You do that a ton, but you you do all the other things just as much. So you get exposed to the PhD part of it isn't just the reps. I think that's critical, but it's that you

• 52:17Dave Berke?

  get exposed to this nuanced part of aviation that you just didn't even really know existed. So you you get all the science, all the math, all the things that drive us to say this is why we do the things we do, and you just get to practice it over and over. And then you go back to the science and go, hey, I think there's some flaws here, maybe some differences here. And the guys at Top Gun, the one writing the manual, we literally write a manual, it's four inches thick, of all these different chapters of how to fly the airplane, everything from doing a one against one to dropping a bomb to mission planning. Top Gun owns that. And so I was given a chapter in a book and a lecture that I was responsible for. And the thing that was pretty amazing for me is when I got there, the mission set that I was responsible for, my SME area, my subject matter expert area

• 53:00Dave Berke?

  was surface air threat and counter tactics. So I was the guy as a captain in the Marine Corps that was responsible for writing the chapter, teaching the lecture, and establishing our tactics for how to defeat threat surface air missiles in AAA. And this was from September of 2002 to March of 2003, that I was the guy that established the Navy and Marine Corps' procedures and techniques and how we did that and taught that. So, you know, desert, I'm sorry, OIF kicks off, you know, guys that I'm with, had flown with and trained with are out there on deployments or writing me letters, hey, we're seeing this threat. What should we do here? You know, buddies of mine that I've been growing up in aviation, I'm saying, hey, this is what we should do. This is how you should deal with this particular

• 53:41Dave Berke?

  case. And so the responsibility as an IP, I think why it's such a PhD type program is that your level of responsibility grows. You have to be more than just a good pilot. I mean, you can teach anybody to be a good pilot. But if you can't teach and explain to other guys what they're doing and how to get better and how to keep themselves alive, you're kind of useless in combat. So it was a, it was. It was the best three years of my life, man. It was, it was ridiculous. And we just flew every day, two, three times a day. I got qualified in the F-16. I got to fly a totally different airplane. So I was dual qual'd in an F-18 and an F-16 as a marine on a Navy base at a Navy command after having done two deployments on carriers. I mean, you cannot, it'd be like if I said, Jocko, I need you to do jujitsu three days, three times a day, every day for three years.

• 54:27Dave Berke?

  That, and you need, and that's all I need you to do. I don't need you to do anything else.

• 54:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 54:30Dave Berke?

  You know?

• 54:31Jocko Willink?

  It's, I've actually done a backseat ride in an F-18 at Fallon, as a matter of fact, and, and one of the things that I think is important to understand, or at least from my perspective, one of the things that made it really cool was when you get in an F-18, if you've never been in one, most people, you're not going to get the chance to get in an F-18 and fly with it, right? So I'll give you a little description of what I thought was one of the coolest parts about it. Is that if you look at the structure of an, of an F-18, the, the, the pod that you sit in, the cockpit is really far forward and the wings and the engine and our stuff are behind you. And it looks that way when you look at it, but when you get in it, you, those, those wings are so far behind you that you feel like you're in a superhero pod.

• 55:12Jocko Willink?

  You need to turn, you need to turn hard. You can't just look back to see the wings. And it's a glass canopy that surrounds you. So you feel like you're just in a little pod that is moving at whatever, 800 miles an hour. And it's, it's, it's a crazy feeling. It's a crazy feeling and you, because you're, it's deceiving because you just feel like you're in this little space pod. Somehow Star Wars powering through the air. You don't realize that behind you is, you know, tons of metal and machinery that's making this happen. And the G-forces and all that stuff, it's, it's, it's, it's a very cool, very cool thing to experience. For me, I, I thought, oh yeah, that was awesome. I didn't think to myself, man, I should have been a pilot.

• 55:56Jocko Willink?

  I, there's some, there's some, I know you, we were talking about it yesterday. For you, the connection between man and machine is a really cool thing that you enjoy. For me, I don't like it. I don't like to rely on a machine.

• 56:10Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Jocko Willink?

  I don't, even, even getting in Bradleys and stuff and Ramadi, I'd always think, ah, you know, I mean, I always was apprehensive about a big machine that I had to rely on. I wanted to rely on me. And what I could do, and that's why I had that little disconnect, always. I still have it today. You know, that's why I'm waiting for the robot war, because I want, I want to fight those things. So, I just have a little disconnect with the machines, but I can see where people that are, have that type of mindset, it's just, you know, it's just a complete equalizer, as you were telling me last night. You was like, it's a stock car race, it's you in the same plane as me, and who is better is gonna win. Period. That's it. There's really no excuses you can make.

• 56:53Dave Berke?

  Yeah, that's one of my favorite things. It's always been one of my favorite things about flying fighters, is that it's, it's an equalizer. You don't get, you don't bring any advantage to that airplane. Now, if we're gonna train something, you and me, there's guys that are bigger, the guys that are better heart rate, the guy, whatever. There's a whole bunch of ways that maybe you can bring an advantage.

• 57:14Dave Berke?

  You lose all that the minute you strap on that airplane, because you're only gonna go as fast as the airplane goes, you're only gonna pull as many Gs as the airplane pulls. That's what you get. Now, you get a lot of all that stuff. I mean, it's awesome, but your success or your failure is 100% about how well you interact with that machine and compare to that other guy. And if you lose, you know, wow, my engine, no. Well, I didn't have, negative. You lost because you were worse than me today. Period. And, and look, you're gonna, we're gonna find reasons why. You know, we, we record every flight, we record our radars, we record our information, our displays. So, you can go back and dissect, and what you end up being able to do as an instructor is, right there, that's why you lost. This decision you made here, this move you went, you went this direction,

• 57:56Dave Berke?

  or you went up or down, and you decided to go at this speed or whatnot. You can dissect every single flight. And the great instructors are the ones that can tell you, this is why I did this to you in 45 seconds. Because here, you made a decision, and it took me this long to capitalize it, but right now is where I took advantage of a mistake that you made. And you freeze that mistake, and you put on a TV, and they see it, and they look at it, and that burns into their brain, and they make that mistake over and over and over, and until eventually, they don't make that mistake, and then you're starting to make your money as an instructor. But, being in an airplane...

• 58:30Dave Berke?

  I brought every bit of capability that airplane had and I never had it, there's no, you don't start at a disadvantage. And if you beat somebody, they have nobody to look at, no excuse, no, nothing to blame except for their own performance. And I loved that and I will always love that about being a fighter pilot.

• 58:49Dave Berke?

  And then when you're flying an F-16, now you have a different airplane. So, hey, one airplane is faster than the other. One airplane actually turns better. And so now, instead of it just being two totally equal platforms, it's one has particular strengths and weaknesses that are different than the other ones. So you better be really good about avoiding his strengths and getting, you know, and playing to his weaknesses and vice versa. And if you lose, guess what? It's still your fault 100% because instead of you having two similar airplanes, you couldn't identify what he was able to do better than you in his regime that he has, you know, you're stronger than me, fine, then I'm gonna do, I'm gonna try to be more agile than you. Uh, you know, you're quicker than me. Okay, well, I'm gonna maybe try to outpower you, those type of things. And those games that you play kind of back and forth.

• 59:31Dave Berke?

  You, there is no question at the end of a flight at Top Gun, that you're fighting another dude who won. Nobody comes back like, I wonder how I did on that one. It's all very evident. If you're looking over your shoulder and a guy's telling that he's gunning you with his airplane, you don't go back to the deep end and think, I wonder how that, I wonder how this is gonna play out. So it's all right there, laid out, the cards are always on the table. There's a reason for everything, why you succeeded and why you failed. And I just thrived in that environment because you couldn't hide from anything. Everybody saw everything and it was all right there.

• 1:00:00Jocko Willink?

  A good student, a really good, talented student coming up to Top Gun has what percentage chance of winning?

• 1:00:07Dave Berke?

  So if, if the best, let's say that hypothetically, the best student that I ever saw that came to Top Gun as a student from the squadron, the best student that ever came to Top Gun to fight a qualified Top Gun instructor stands at 0% chance of winning. The best student at Top Gun has zero chance.

• 1:00:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Dave Berke?

  I could fall asleep in an airplane as an IP and a student is not gonna beat me. There is just such a huge, and it doesn't even mean that we're better. I don't mean to imply that we are better pilots, but you just, you're at-

• 1:00:38Jocko Willink?

  That time.

• 1:00:38Dave Berke?

  Yep, it's just time. You are just- It's not, and it's, and I don't even mean that critical, it's just not even close. And, and nor would they expect it. You know, I mean, some students, every now and then a student kind of thinks he's gonna do some good work. And I, hey, watch this, I'm awesome. But most guys show up realizing that, that disparity, I, you know, I understood that when I got there as a student. Like, these guys are just in a different world, and that's, you want to get to that world. But, you know, as an IP, you...

• 1:01:04Jocko Willink?

  Which is instructor pilot, by the way.

• 1:01:05Dave Berke?

  Yeah, instructor pilot, yeah. If I flew my best jet on day one against the best student, it would be over so fast that he almost wouldn't even learn as much as he should. So you, you still fly your best airplane, but you make sure that there's a learning process there. If you want to just annihilate somebody at Top Gun, you can do that. The students that come there, even on their last day, aren't, aren't on your, on your same level. They, they just aren't. They've gotten a lot better, the learning curve is steep. But when you're in your third year as an IP at Top Gun, you have just had so many reps, you know, so many laps doing the exact same thing, you've seen everything, that it's almost like, we talked about this yesterday, it's almost like things are happening in slow motion for you.

• 1:01:48Dave Berke?

  Like, you're in the matrix, and that guy's just working as hard as he possibly can and doing his thing, and you're just kind of sitting there, kind of watching it at like one-third speed. So your ability to decide and do something to him, or do something to that airplane, or make a decision, it, you're just operating at a faster pace than him. And that reaction is just impossible to keep up with.

• 1:02:06Jocko Willink?

  I can't wait till you start training jiu-jitsu, because you're just gonna, the, the analogies are just everywhere. And that's one thing I say, in jiu-jitsu, you can see the future. You can actually see the future. When, when you're training jiu-jitsu with some, someone that doesn't know as much as you, you know what is going to happen. You know what they are going to do. Just like when you're in the cockpit, and you, you do something, and you know what that person, you know what they're gonna do. You just know it.

• 1:02:29Dave Berke?

  Totally. And, and don't forget too, as a, as a... As an instructor, you've been on the receiving end of that for years as well. So you understand kind of both sides of that coin. And you know, you fight with someone and you'll think to yourself like, oh, I can't believe you just did that. And then, you know, three turns later is when you get to take advantage of that because you know, some time will have to play out for his mistake to really reveal itself like, man, I can't, can't believe you just did that. This is going to cost you over time. And you can go back on the tape, like I said, and say, hey, you know, you're worried about what happened at the end where I'm behind you. But what really what let me do that was 30 seconds ago, you did this and when this was the environment or the circumstances. And you see that stuff and that's when you talk about seeing the future.

• 1:03:10Dave Berke?

  I mean, if you really want to be a jerk about it, you know, if guys are your buddies, you know, I'll get on the radio like a buddy of mine, I'll, the students that came through, but guys in my squadron, I'm like, oh, that's going to hurt. And they're like, what, what? I'm like, stand by, you know, and 30 seconds later, you'll be gunning the guy. Um, because you see the mistakes that they make and you know how that's going to play out. So you are on your own playing field there as an instructor. And like I said, man, it's not about being better or worse. It's just the time and you get so much of the time there and you get exposed to all the, the why. You get the why at Top Gun.

• 1:03:45Dave Berke?

  We teach the why a lot, but when you're writing the, the manual, when you're doing the, and you're, you have all the testing equipment available and you're running a thousand computer generated reps to see what the results are. The level of what you know about the why is just so much more. So you just, there's a whole world available to you to, and, and the guys at Top Gun 2 want to be there though. The most that the IPs are killing to get to a place like that. So there's not a lot of slackers there. Not a lot of dudes you're trying to motivate or kind of prod along like, hey buddy, let's get going. You know, dudes are getting after it from startup to shutdown every single day. And so you're also getting pulled along because you want to keep up with your peers. You know, you don't want to be the worst Top Gun instructor there, you know?

• 1:04:27Dave Berke?

  Every time you think you've made it, you realize all you did was just getting a more selective pool. And your goal is the same is to be the best that you can be and hopefully the best you can be is one of the best guys there. You know, you don't want to be last at Top Gun because then you're just last and I don't want to be last at anything. Who does? And so that, that's a real kind of a type A, real aggressive group of dudes and um, they pull you and you, you, you gotta keep up. And sometimes, you know, a couple of guys here and there don't, but for the most part. The selection process works pretty well.

• 1:04:52Jocko Willink?

  You know what's cool, just to bring this back for a second to, you know, talking about leadership and interacting with other people. The same exact thing happens when you start to pay attention to the tactics, techniques, procedures of leadership. You start to see the moves that people are making, you know, you start to see the moves that your subordinate is making because his ego is flaring up or because he's getting, taking too much ownership of something that he doesn't want to let go and he's getting emotional about it. You start seeing, you start seeing the same type of things at one third speed. And you know, that, that was great for me when I was running the, the West Coast SEAL Team Training.

• 1:05:33Jocko Willink?

  I saw, we, we take a platoon, we had these scenarios and we'd put a platoon through, we'd put another platoon through, we'd put another platoon through, we'd put another platoon through, we'd just over to the same scenario, you know, guy here, shooter over here, person on this hilltop, hostage in this room. We'd put all these guys through the same scenario. And so as soon as you'd approach, as soon as you'd watch them approach and you say, oh, the platoon commander's too far in the rear, this is what's going to happen. He's not going to see what's coming up front. Oh, yep, there it is. And so you just know what's going to happen. And it's the same thing when you start dealing with their personalities. You get a guy with a big ego that comes in and he wants to run everything his way and he thinks he's going to be able to control everything and you're like, nope, he's not going to be able to do this.

• 1:06:09Jocko Willink?

  So you can end up, and I see that in the business world, obviously now too, where you get the same exact problems of a guy that's too emotional about his plan or has too big of an ego about something, or he's not passing the word well enough, or they're, he's trying to control everyone and not using decentralized command. It's so obvious because you have the reps. We have the reps now in this, in this arena to be, to look at a situation and say, okay, let me watch this. Oh, oh, oh, okay. I see what's about to happen. Here's what's going on. We can break it down. So it's the same thing across the board. You get that level of just experience and repetitions and repetitions. And now you can kind of see the future and you can predict what's going to happen. And then the good thing is in the business world, when you can predict what's going to happen, you can stop it.

• 1:06:55Jocko Willink?

  You can get the people on the right track, pull them back in and get them arranged.

• 1:06:59Dave Berke?

  Well, I think the thing that a lot of people don't realize, because sometimes they think it's just different in the military. The reasons why people are successful in the military and the reasons why people fail are exactly the same as why you succeed in business and why you succeed as a person or why you fail. Now, look, I know, you know, being in an airplane is different. I get that. The environment might be a little bit different, being in combat certainly. So the setting changes and all these things, the setting is different, but the reasons are exactly the same. And so to dispel whatever myth, you know, it's different in the military. It's identical in the military.

• 1:07:30Jocko Willink?

  No doubt.

• 1:07:30Dave Berke?

  It comes out in an airplane or it comes out on a ship or whatever. It comes out in downtown Ramadi. I mean, the setting, yeah, it's different. But what's going on? It's identical. Um, and when you get to, when you get to be in a place where you get to devote a hundred percent of your time to that and you're not distracted by just the distractions of military bureaucracy and, and life of training schedules and did everybody do their, uh, you know, their annual survey? When you're away from that and you're just living in a world of just being tactical and doing nothing but learning about how to be the best pilot you can be and the best teacher, everything, not just being a fighter pilot, everything in the world slows down. Everything slows down. Uh, and I think it just gives you a perspective on life that Top Gun, I will carry those

• 1:08:15Dave Berke?

  lessons. I mean, obviously I carry that with me in everything that I do and I will forever.

• 1:08:20Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:08:20Dave Berke?

  You know, what was honed in a place like that and, and in some ways in the military, it's just a luxury because it's just not that common to for someone to say for three years, you're just going to do nothing but this. I'm like, dude, are you kidding me?

• 1:08:30Jocko Willink?

  So, so speaking of decision making and good and or bad decision making, so you're living the dream.

• 1:08:37Dave Berke?

  Living the dream.

• 1:08:38Jocko Willink?

  You're up in Fallon, you actually have a house and up in the mountains, you're skiing, flying, everything's good. And, and, and then somehow you make a decision that's a little bit off the track a little bit. What was that all about?

• 1:08:51Dave Berke?

  I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about. So, yeah, I am, uh, I'm in my third year at Top Gun, uh, 2005. I was selected to be the training officer, so I am running Top Gun as the senior IP there, which is just, it's awesome. It's, it's, it is literally as a Marine, it's a dream job. You could not ask for anything better. Uh, I had Was dating what ended up becoming my wife. So my wife Whitney, at the time we're dating, so lives out there. We had a place in Tahoe. Drove a Corvette. Life was pretty good, man. And I'm actually coming up on my end of service obligation. I can leave the Marine Corps in 2005 and I, I sort of sold my relationship to Whitney on that idea. Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:33Dave Berke?

  Like, hey, come put up with this living in Tahoe, but I'm gonna get out of the Marine Corps. Yeah, don't worry about this. Don't worry about this. None of this, this is all, it's all, don't even worry about that. Deployments, war, it's over. You don't need to worry about that. And so I think I oversold that to her a little bit, got her to move out to Tahoe. And so there was just a part of me that didn't feel done with the Marine Corps. And ironically, in this, this amazing experience that I had built up in my mind since I was 16 years old, I'm now a Top Gun instructor. I joined the Marine Corps knowing, because as a fortunate, the Top Gun was this big influence. I'm gonna leave the Marine Corps as a Top Gun instructor. But I had

• 1:10:12Dave Berke?

  spent four years flying F-18s off carriers, basically in the, in the Navy for the, for all intensive purposes. I was a Marine in a Marine squadron, but we deployed with Navy carriers and we, and I spent three years in Fallon on a Navy base with the Navy Command as one of three pilots on the staff at Top Gun. And there was just a part of me that I knew I was gonna be done. I was ready to leave the Marine Corps, but I wanted to leave the Marine Corps, having fulfilled, I think, that part of being a Marine. A real Marine is kinda how I felt. And so, again, I had kinda contemplated what I was gonna do. You talk to somebody called your monitor. He's the guy that gives you orders. Hey, this is what's next in your career. This is where you're gonna go, for how long. We think you

• 1:10:57Dave Berke?

  should do this because it's helpful for whatever. He kind of explains it to you as a guy that basically is responsible for your career progression. And I was kinda going back and forth, what do I do? Do I stay in? Do I get out? You know, I kinda was struggling with that decision. And he's like, look, we're gonna, as a Top Gun instructor, you've got a lot of skill, got a lot of experience, and they want you to use that and bring it back to the Marine Corps and go to a squadron and teach these guys. So. He gave me orders. He says, your orders are going to be to go into Japan. You're going to fly F-18s back to a regular fleet squadron and you'll go from there. And I even, I think I even got to the point where I had orders given to me.

• 1:11:32Jocko Willink?

  Would you have been like a squadron commander?

• 1:11:34Dave Berke?

  No, I would have been like an operations officer or maintenance officer. I was two junior. You know, I'd only been in

• 1:11:39Jocko Willink?

  It was like 10 year.

• 1:11:40Dave Berke?

  11 year mark. So I'm kind of what's called, we call it a department head where I'm going to run a major department in the squadron. Operations or maintenance are kind of the two big ones. And

• 1:11:50Dave Berke?

  I, it just, it just didn't, it's not what I wanted to do. I had, like I said, some long-term plans of doing other stuff. I was thinking long-term I was going to get out and go do something else. And so I called the monitor. I said, hey, I want to do a FAC tour. FAC is the Forward Air Controller. It's like you described earlier on the podcast. And we had this little list on the internet that was called a hot fill list. It was basically all the jobs that nobody wanted. And if you called, it was a first come, first served. If you called and volunteered for anything, you were automatically going to get it. And because it was just a list of jobs that they couldn't like force on guys for whatever reason. I'm probably not explaining it all that well, but the bottom line is the hot fill bill, it is you call, you, it's yours for any reason. And I'm like, hey, man, I see there's a hot fill to be a forward air controller in Japan. Cause I was, we're going to go to Japan. We kind of crossed that bridge of, okay, we're going to move overseas. We didn't have any kids.

• 1:12:35Jocko Willink?

  This is with Whitney.

• 1:12:36Dave Berke?

  This is with Whitney. She's a little bit, not super cool with it, but we found, hey, we'll go to Japan. We'll fly. It'll be, it'll be fine. And he's like, you're not, you're not going to be a forward air controller in Japan. You're going to go fly and whatnot. I said, dude, it's right there in black and white, man. It says hot fill. I'm your guy. And he was like, okay. Yeah. I mean, and so he gave me these orders and I wanted, I wanted to be a FAC because I wanted to leave the Marine Corps having fulfilled all the parts about being a Marine. And in my mind, it's funny because it's like we're opposite on that. The real challenge or the thing I didn't really want to do, but I knew I should was getting out of the airplane and doing something really hard on the ground. Like my natural state in the Marine Corps is in an airplane.

• 1:13:18Dave Berke?

  And for some people, they're miserable and don't want to do it. For me, that was, so to do that was to be a forward air controller was. And it's strange to hear myself say it. I didn't want to go be a forward air controller, but I knew I needed to go do that. There's no, I needed to leave the Marine Corps and say, "Yeah, I did that too." And it was just a matter, I think, of fulfillment of kind of an exclamation point on the career that I always kind of fantasized. And as I learned more about the Marine Corps, there was more to it than just being a pilot.

• 1:13:44Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:13:44Dave Berke?

  So I just wanted that.

• 1:13:45Jocko Willink?

  So, so in your mind, were you thinking forward air controller in Japan? Matt, you were gonna go over there, you know, have a little team of Marines, you'd go out to the different training ranges, call for some bombs, all good, you, you know, go home at night, be with your wife, experience some time in Japan.

• 1:14:00Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Jocko Willink?

  Just, just a nice little, sort of like a long vacation, working a little bit of time on the ground.

• 1:14:05Dave Berke?

  I get to go to the field. I'd spend the night in the woods.

• 1:14:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, spend the night in the woods.

• 1:14:08Dave Berke?

  Something like that.

• 1:14:08Jocko Willink?

  You know, yeah.

• 1:14:09Dave Berke?

  Really cool camping. And they pay for it. So, yeah, that's what it was. I was gonna go to Japan. There's a bunch of really cool, it was gonna be in Okinawa, actually. So not mainland Japan. Okinawa's got great scuba diving and it's, it's kind of neat. And, you know, I could bring my wife with me. It was gonna be a lot of fun. And you can, I can train. I was gonna teach guys how to use airplanes to drop bombs. I knew how to do that. I was, it was gonna be a really cool thing. So I get these orders and my wife and I moved out to Japan. We got there and to Okinawa, a place called Camp Pan, it's on a little base up there in the middle of the island. And I'm there probably, dude, I'm probably there a week. And my boss, the brigade platoon to commander's like, "Hey, you're, we're gonna send a brigade platoon," which is probably 50 guys, I'm guessing,

• 1:14:54Dave Berke?

  I'm guessing are the numbers, "to Camp Lejeune," because that Angloco just came back from seven months in Iraq, and they need to go right back and turn, very quick turnaround. They don't have enough qualified guys. And so, I mean, I'm there a week and I'm coming home to tell Whitney, like, "Hey, here's the deal. They need guys to go out to Lejeune to do this deployment to Iraq, and I'm gonna be one of those guys." So, we were there, instead of a year, we were there for maybe...

• 1:15:20Jocko Willink?

  She's like, "Is there snorkeling in Iraq?" Because you were telling me about scuba diving.

• 1:15:27Dave Berke?

  So, we crammed a year's worth of stuff in about six weeks. Uh, because we had, so it was probably, um, maybe early November, uh, when the word kinda came down. And we knew that we had till the end of the calendar year. So, we shoved a year's worth of living in, in Japan in about six weeks. And we did Korea, we did Thailand, we did mainland, did Tokyo, we did, got a dive call. I mean, we did it all. Only December 22nd, or whatever it was, you know, we flew home. And I went straight to Lejeune from there to start training with Second Anglicos, uh, which was the, the team that had just come back from Iraq after their seven-month deployment. On a very quick turn, they were probably four months into their turnaround cycle.

• 1:16:05Jocko Willink?

  So, you get, just real quick, for people that don't know what Anglicos is?

• 1:16:07Dave Berke?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:16:08Jocko Willink?

  Go ahead.

• 1:16:09Dave Berke?

  The Anglicos, um, Anglicos stands for Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company. And really what it is, is it's a group of, it's a, it's a group of small teams, four or five-man teams called firepower control teams. And what those teams were all supposed to be able to do is control airplanes, tell airplanes what to do with their bombs. Uh, we could control artillery, so how to fire artillery ordnance. And even, we didn't do it there in Iraq, but we could use naval gunfire, so guns off ships. We were training all three of those skillsets. And the whole point of an Anglicos in a place like Iraq is, it's, you had different units. You had Navy units, Army units, Marine Corps units. And as an Anglicos, you're a liaison, so that's what the L in Anglicos is. So, I could, I was trained to go to an Army unit and know how Army does,

• 1:16:52Dave Berke?

  people may not know this, all the services actually do the same job differently. So, the Army and the Marine Corps will get the same mission and have a totally different way of doing it because their doctrine and their training is different. Now, it's similar, but there's a bunch of pretty critical differences in there. And so, what we were training to do is we had all Marine airplanes in where we were in Iraq, and all Army land forces. And so, the Army doesn't have any training on how to use Marine Corps airplanes. Marine Corps doesn't have a lot of air, uh, training to use Army ground forces. So, when those two people connect, there's, there's a problem with how they communicate and what they want from each other. Insert Anglico. We're the liaison between the Army ground units and in this case, the Marine Corps air units. So my job was to control Marine airplanes to support the Army on the ground. And that was all over Iraq and what the Anglico team would take this whole group and break it into

• 1:17:37Dave Berke?

  maybe 25 four man teams and went all over the country to go do this same mission with a whole bunch of different units. So that was our mission as a forward air controller. And I was qualified as a forward air controller because I had flown airplanes, dropped bombs in combat, understood how F-18s were supposed to support ground maneuver. And I went to school, Forward Air Controller School. So, let's go to Japan. It'll be fun. We'll pretend to do that for a year. And then we end up in Camp Lejeune, training to go to Iraq.

• 1:18:06Jocko Willink?

  And now it's your first time kinda doing grunt work, right?

• 1:18:10Dave Berke?

  So last time I had held a rifle, shot a rifle, and worn a pair of combat boots was the basic school. So I had, you know, I was, I got my air slot at TBS. That was a big day for me. You know, I'd done six months of that. I had that check in the block. I was feeling pretty good about that. And I had never, I don't think I put on my cami, my camouflage uniform. I think I wore a flight suit. Honestly, I think every day for seven years. I could probably count on one hand, well, even longer than that, I wasn't even counting flight school. I could probably count on one hand, the number of days that I didn't wear a flight suit from the time that I selected to go to flight school to the time that I ended up in Anglico. Days. I mean, so this was a foreign,

• 1:18:54Dave Berke?

  now, I had, I was a Marine. I went to the basic schools. All back there somewhere. But, you know, I think there is this, and I've mentioned this, I think, to you, I think it's just sort of this habit of self sabotage. Like, well, I can't leave the Marine Corps without being a, being a real Marine. So I'm gonna literally sabotage myself by volunteering for a job that I don't know if I really wanna do, but now I'm stuck doing it. So I'm gonna have to do that. So I won't ever have to say, I didn't do that. So this kinda cycle of breaking promises to my wife, volunteering for stuff I didn't really wanna do, but knew that I should. And next thing you know, it all blew up in my face. Cause I was, go to Japan. That, Japan's awesome. Good sushi and, and great experience

• 1:19:36Dave Berke?

  there. And it's gonna be awesome. And I will be a FAK. And I, for the rest of my life, say, oh, I was a real Marine. I was a FAK. And I did all that. And, you know, it's January in Camp Lejeune.

• 1:19:45Jocko Willink?

  Be careful what you wish for.

• 1:19:48Dave Berke?

  So yeah, make no mistake. I mean, I, I did that. I volunteered, but I did not at the time when I was trading in my flying orders for these FAC orders. I didn't expect to be in Ramadi. But as, hey, we need to send a brigade platoon to Camp Lejeune to prep those guys to, of course, yep, I'm going. I mean, I'm not going to not go. That's what we need to do. We're going to go do that. When I got to Camp Lejeune, I ended up being the senior, just by rank, the senior forward air controller in the unit. I was kind of a mid-level major. I, you know, come from Top Gun. I came straight from Top Gun to that. And I was an experienced guy. And the commanding officer, no joke, I can picture the day. He walks in one day and he hands me a piece of paper and it's got like 26 lines on it, one for every team. And on the other sheet

• 1:20:32Dave Berke?

  was all the locations that we were going to go to. And he's like, fill out where all the teams are going because we got to cover these 15 different locations, you know, one to two teams per location and just write the number of the team on there and get this back to me before I close the business. Like, Roger, that's sir. I'd take care of it. And again, my wife loves the story and I didn't tell her at the time, but my best friend, who I grew up with, was in Ramadi at the time. He was in 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, who we replaced when we got out there or did a turnover with. And that's where the war was, man. I mean, in late 2005 and early 2006, the war was in Ramadi. And so I took the pen, I wrote Lightning 6, and so 6-1, 6-2, and 6-3, we're all going to Ramadi. And

• 1:21:15Dave Berke?

  I handed it off to, ever filled it out, gave it to the CO. And so if you're going to go do something you don't necessarily want to do, but you're going to go do it, you might as well do it. And that's where the war was. I could have gone to a whole host of other places where there's not much going on. It would have been relatively chill. I would have gotten that check in the block for sure. I would have said, yeah, I went to here or there. And no, no hit on the guys that were different places. It was just more going on there. And if I wasn't going to go, then somebody else was going to go do that.

• 1:21:44Jocko Willink?

  Or was Neil, Neil was telling you what was up? He said, hey, it's on.

• 1:21:47Dave Berke?

  Big time. No, he and I were tight and we talked as regular as we could, as much as we can say.

• 1:21:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. Wasn't he telling you like, oh, yeah, I was putting rounds, I was shooting yesterday. And you said, well, what were you shooting at? And he's like... People.

• 1:21:58Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I was just, it was such a foreign thing to me as a pilot, certainly coming from Top Gun. This is my best friend, too. In our whole life, we both wanted to be marine pilots and we, we, we never were in the same unit together. We just couldn't get aligned with that. It never occurred to me when we were kids dreaming about being Marine Corps fighter pilots that the only time we'd ever served together was in Ramadi as four air controllers. He'll listen to this podcast, he'll get a good chuckle out of this, but, so he was there for the seven months prior, so I think the some, you know, maybe June or July of, of that year, when I was getting ready to get orders, he was on his fact tour and he was just a battalion fact in three, seven, you know, OP two nine three, OP Hira, OP V, just doing the deed, man. I mean, getting after it big time and struggling, there was a lot going on there.

• 1:22:41Dave Berke?

  And when he would tell me these stories, even someone who had been a marine for that long, he's like, yeah, we're in a firefight. I'm like, are you shooting your rifle? He's like, yeah, man. I get what? It's like, the people that are shooting at me, it just, it, it's, you're disconnected and you have this, you don't have this sense of what that means. And so even as I was processing what he was saying and trying to understand and then saying, this is where the, this is what I'm going to go do and kind of volunteering to go do that. I'll be honest with you, there's still a part in retrospect that just didn't really quite fully grasp what that meant. I don't know how anybody on their first deployment to a place like Ramadi goes into that. You know, I dabbled in aviation, you're, like you said, I'm up in the sky, I mean, it's relatively safe. Uh, and I, I'm sure even the first deployment you did, there's just, there's an element

• 1:23:26Dave Berke?

  of just not being able to fully understand it. And that didn't even become clear to me until right when we're getting ready to leave Ramadi and the new unit's coming in and I was explaining what they're about to get into. That's when it really hit me. And I would just rewind myself a year earlier, I'm like, I'm that dude that really doesn't know what the hell's about to happen to him and what's about to go on. But it was, like I said, man, um, and I don't even want to make it sound like that big of a deal, but I volunteered for a fact tour, they needed guys to go to Lejeune, to go to Iraq, that's where, Ramadi was where the fight was, my best friend was there. I'm going to Ramadi.

• 1:23:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Dave Berke?

  And that was about it. It was just, that's what I thought I should do. So I went to Ramadi.

• 1:24:02Jocko Willink?

  And now you're leading Marines, too.

• 1:24:04Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and.

• 1:24:08Dave Berke?

  Yes, so I explained just a minute ago about those things that make you successful and things that lead to failure are identical. They are. The exact same things in an airplane are the same on the ground, but the environment is different. It is different. There's no way around it. And I also would say too, that, and for good reason, I think the ground marines, you know, I worked with a lot of infantry and artillery. Most of Anglico was made up of artillery and some infantry, not, and you know, obviously there's pilots that are controllers. There's a decent bit of skepticism of pilots coming in to lead these teams. And I think for a good reason, you know, because a lot of these guys, when I talk about combat experience.

• 1:24:48Jocko Willink?

  They're on their third, fourth deployment to Iraq.

• 1:24:50Dave Berke?

  Totally, man.

• 1:24:51Jocko Willink?

  You're coming in.

• 1:24:51Dave Berke?

  Yep. They're on their, they've already done.

• 1:24:54Jocko Willink?

  You're wearing your Top Gun patch on your shoulder of your camis.

• 1:24:57Dave Berke?

  Well, what's worse is I'm not wearing my Top Gun patch. I'm wearing my camis and they're like, have you ever washed those camis? I'm like, as a matter of fact, I haven't. They are fresh, you know, brand new. And they're wearing their camis from, they did the march up to Baghdad. They went home for four months. It's like a wrap back around and did OAF2. Guys that did Fallujah and they're back. And they're on their third deployment in three years and they're legit deployments. And, you know, Dave Berke, Mr. Top Gun shows up and is like, hey, where's this brigade platoon? You know, where's my assault team? You know? And I think that skepticism of, for good reason is who is this guy? And that's a real, that was a real leadership challenge for me, is to apply those things, things that I knew were effective, but in an environment that I'm totally out of my comfort zone, man. I'm

• 1:25:41Dave Berke?

  totally out of my comfort zone. And I have to apply a skillset of things that I just haven't, I haven't shot a rifle since 1994. I got to the basic school in October 94. The first thing you do is go to the rifle range. That's the last time I squeezed a trigger on a rifle was October of 1994. And here it is, is, you know, January of 2006, prepping to go to Ramadi, and I got a site in my M4. So they should be skeptical a little bit. And it was a challenge for me, a real leadership challenge of to be successful in a place that I'm not comfortable with. To be honest with you, if you told me I was going to lead a squadron in combat.

• 1:26:18Dave Berke?

  I'd feel pretty comfortable doing that. I know it'd be a challenge, it'd be hard, but I wouldn't feel like, "Hmm, I don't know about this." I would be all over it. I don't mean to say easy, but right in my wheelhouse. Not, not true for that. So, I worked hard to try to be successful in that. And, you know, you gotta get your Marines to buy off on your, your program, you know, because you're gonna go downtown with those guys, you know, and every relationship with any of those guys was different, as you know, you know, and you gotta build those relationships and demonstrate that, you know, this is gonna work.

• 1:26:49Jocko Willink?

  And then, you know, just talk a little bit about, people have heard about what TU Bruiser was doing over in Ramadi. And we'll get to how we interacted, but overall, what were you guys doing? When you first got there, you just kinda jumped into it with both feet, as they say.

• 1:27:06Dave Berke?

  We did, man. So I get there, I've got Assault Team, that stands for Supporting Arms Liaison Team. Really what it meant was three of those little four-man teams grouped together in a one 13-man team because we had an additional corpsman, a little medic with us. So I had three of those teams that I was responsible for. And I kinda knew what I expected was gonna happen. I got there that I would be in what's called the TAC, the Tactical Operations Center, which was, I'd kinda run things from the desk and farm out my teams and units to support the guys that needed our help. These Army units that were gonna go do missions, they needed someone to help them control the air. I had those teams, I would give them those teams. Well, it took basically no time to get there and realize

• 1:27:50Dave Berke?

  that the demand signal for our support was higher than we could have ever responded to. They needed 20 of our teams, not three. And so that idea that I would kinda be a COC guy, a TAC guy, was over in the first day because as I get there and we're doing the turnover with the other Angloco team getting ready to leave, he's introducing me to all the people he's been working with. And it's like 15 different teams.

• 1:28:15Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:28:15Dave Berke?

  You know, they're not running operations with like three battalions. It's 40 squads, you know, and these guys are going out in 12, 13 man teams and they all need you.

• 1:28:26Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:28:27Dave Berke?

  So.

• 1:28:28Jocko Willink?

  And there's operations, I mean, just so everyone knows, there's 5,600 people in the 118 or you showed up in the 228.

• 1:28:33Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Jocko Willink?

  6,000 people or whatever. And there's operations going on all over Ramadi every single night. There's people patrolling, there's people getting in firefights every single night. There's constant gunfire. And so there's no way with three teams, you're going to cover all that. You can't do it.

• 1:28:47Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And that was sort of the immediate awareness for me is not only was I not going to be able to support everything. I know how to prioritize and tell folks, hey, we can do this and not that. You know, I can help you here or there. And so very quickly it was a matter of how am I going to break down my team and support these guys? Um, I did have an advantage that I was, as an F-18 pilot, that was the primary aircraft. F-18s and Harrows are the primary aircraft that was doing the support. And I knew those airplanes really well. And I was able to very quickly, when I saw what the army, hey, we're doing this patrol today. And we're going to take our Humvees from the Camp Ramadi to go to this location. And it would be really difficult just to get there, just navigating at night in your Humvees on the night vision goggles.

• 1:29:32Dave Berke?

  And the roads can be kind of confusing and you know what it's like down there. And some days you're operating in downtown Ramadi and it's straight up urban combat, like just buildings. And five miles away, you can be in a place, we called it Mike Charlie One, that it looks like Vietnam. I mean, it's, it's, the contrast, if we're being so close together, was so incredible how different those places were. And so every environment was different. I was able to understand how, what airplanes could do well and not well in those environments. And so as they asked for support, I'm like, hey, I can't really do that, but what I can do is this. And maybe this will be more helpful for you. And I could very quickly build a relationship with the army, which is really who you needed to be the best support for. The Marines, they were going to get on board. We were good, we had a relationship.

• 1:30:15Dave Berke?

  I wasn't worried about my Marines and us building our team. What I was worried about was us as a team being effective for the folks we were supporting. And showing that we could do good work for those guys. And we took a very different approach. Uh, I immediately broke our team into three separate teams, 61, 62, and 63. I actually sent the 63 team, a guy named Alan. To another base, uh, Blue Diamond, you remember that base right across the river? Cause there was a company based out of Blue Diamond that were doing operations independently. They never had any Anglico support. So like dude, you gotta go move, they literally moved there and lived with those guys. And then my other team, six, one and six, two, Adam and I just, we took a whiteboard. And all the requests for support, we just started plugging our names in.

• 1:31:00Dave Berke?

  And so it was just, I had five guys, he had four, he had his own Humvee, I had my own Humvee. We had all the weapons, all the radios and just started to just go do operations. Two, two, eight would do everything for just a little vehicle patrol where they would just do a presence patrol. Their two Humvees driving around the city, we would just jump in on that and just bring a third truck, which was a ton of firepower and awareness. Sometimes we're just doing foot patrols and we would just go walk around and do move into contact or do room clearing, stuff like that. Jocko, man, I, I found myself way, way out of my comfort zone very early. I think my second mission there was a raid where I was, ended up like clearing a room.

• 1:31:39Dave Berke?

  I was in a stack of dudes clearing a room while I was trying to talk to airplanes overhead of where, and it was just a basically a manpower shortage. Like, yeah, you would get in, go, you and these two guys go clear the room. Okay, Roger that. You know, um, and I was a senior or mid-grade major. I was, I was always kind of one of the senior guys, but I wasn't in charge of this. So I'd be working for a first lieutenant, which was perfectly fine. It was his platoon, he was doing this mission, he knew what he was doing. I was there to support as best as I could. That image of like, yeah, just get up on the roof and control air, it'll be awesome. Well, do you need me to blow up? Negative. I mean, it was, hey, get in line and, and start getting after it. And I think that, I remember that second mission where with the two, two, eight and, and the lieutenant was, I think he was like a, I think he worked at Home Depot.

• 1:32:25Dave Berke?

  No joke.

• 1:32:25Jocko Willink?

  Cause they were National Guard unit.

• 1:32:26Dave Berke?

  Yeah, National Guard unit, these dudes were awesome. They'd been there for probably 10 or 11 months by the time I got there, maybe even longer. They'd been there almost a year. Hardened dudes that had lost a lot of guys and sacrificed a ton. But I was learning everything I could from them because they were veterans and I was brand new. I was supposed to bring this great capability, but the reality was I was just soaking up from them as much as I could. And I'm, I'm clearing a room with this guy, you know?

• 1:32:52Dave Berke?

  So the phrase, "What am I doing here?" Uh, went through my head a lot, uh, while I was there. And it was just kinda, Ramadi was the type of place that the deal was is when you got there, it was just a bullet train and, and you just jumped on the train. You, or you had to. You weren't, you couldn't slow things down. You certainly couldn't ask those other guys, "Hey, can we, can we dial it back a little bit? We need to get up to speed." They were just doing their thing and if you're gonna be anything other than a hindrance, you need to get on board immediately. And so that's what we did as best we could. Um, and I have a lot to thank for those guys at 228, cause no matter how hard we tried, those first couple of times, we're, we're just getting up to speed. We're, we're not, uh, you know, bringing our A-game yet. We're, we're trying to figure out what's going on around us.

• 1:33:35Dave Berke?

  And there's no doubt that without those guys, their leadership, their willingness to kinda bring us on board and get us up to speed, that played a big part. We got up to speed quickly, but day one, I'm sure, you know, we were struggling to keep up.

• 1:33:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's just like we were talking about with flying and jujitsu and fighting and everything else. You show up there and things are going, they're not slowed down a third. They're going five times faster and you're just seeing, you know, you're getting told to clear a room. That's the only thing in the world you can see is now this room. And you're not aware of all this other stuff that's going on. And it definitely takes some ops to get your, to get your senses about you of what's happening.

• 1:34:09Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and the ops were, there were so many different kinds of operations. Like I said, you know, you'd go from doing just, um, you know, a, a three Humvee presence patrol in downtown Ramadi is not cool. It's not. It's just, you're just waiting for something to go wrong. You know, whether it's getting lit up, you know, in a firefight, RPGs getting shot. I mean, you were literally just driving around, waiting for somebody to do something to you. You know, these presence patrols. And then you go right from that to, you'd get some intelligence that somebody needed to grab was in, uh, you know, a house somewhere in a totally different environment and you'd be off doing a raid. We helped stand up the QRF, you've talked about that in the past, the Quick Reaction Force, where you, you literally just waited right outside the gate of the main base for somebody to call for help. Okay, something's gone wrong. It's here, come help us.

• 1:34:54Dave Berke?

  And so we just started doing all these missions and I, I... Just was on board with all of them and they varied and they were very different from day to day.

• 1:35:03Jocko Willink?

  And you got to call for fire too. Legit.

• 1:35:06Dave Berke?

  We did. We, we, between me, I did a lot and, and my teams, we, I controlled the release of every single piece of ordnance in the Marine Corps inventory, uh, uh, Marine Corps inventory. So every piece of ordnance that the, the air, the Hornets and the Harriers dropped and everything from the Hughes and the Cobras and artillery, we called artillery as well. They had a, you know, a field artillery battalion out there that we did controls from, as Anglico, I did myself. So, you know, that story, you know, when you get to TBS, there's an old saying in the Marine Corps, we all subscribe to it, every Marine's a rifleman. And we're a Top Gun instructor, that could not be further from the truth. Because the last thing you are as a Top Gun, as the training officer at Top Gun, skiing

• 1:35:50Dave Berke?

  in Lake Tahoe on a Saturday afternoon, is a rifleman. But I will, I will say this, uh, for the Marine Corps, yeah, I'm biased, I'm a little parochial to the Marine Corps. Dude, it's all in there. The OCS, TBS, all that exposure, all that doctrine, everything you learn, it's there. Now, it took a while to dig down and find it. And those same things that when I went to OCS and I was the skinniest guy there and I was scared I couldn't get through it, and I'm like, wait a second, bigger, tougher, stronger dudes are doing this, or are not doing this than I am. It's all in there. And so I just had to figure out how to tap that stuff again and bring it back up and just go do it. So, great decision. Here I am in Ramadi getting after it. And you guys showed up.

• 1:36:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it, there was one story you were telling me that you were calling for fire up in MC1 and it was your buddy.

• 1:36:37Dave Berke?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, we are doing, um, we're doing what's called Movement to Contact, my favorite mission as a pilot. Nothing better than Movement to Contact. And a Movement to Contact mission is you literally, you drive your Humvees, take all your, your folks out and you set up a staging area on the north side of this, uh, This big area is big, kinda wooded, dirt, has like little ravines and trees and stuff like that, and we would just, we would walk a patrol. And you know, ten, fifteen guys would just go from north to south. And the mission was called move into contact, so you walked until you got in contact, which meant you got into a firefight. And I remember, not this same day, but my first day going there, I think it was Bravo Company, a two-two-eight, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was, and I met the platoon commander for the first time.

• 1:37:20Dave Berke?

  And I kinda get out of my Humvee, I walk up, I'm looking for the platoon commander, I'm there as a supporting asset, I'm a helpful guy, cause I bring airplanes, it's gonna be good for them. And he walks up and he's got a shotgun hanging on his, on his kit. And you know, I was a brand-new guy, but I, you know, I was, I'm like, "Hey, hey, what's with the shotgun?" You know, "I have a rifle, everybody's got a rifle." He goes, "Hey, to be honest with you, I found that this is the best weapon for these type of missions." And it turns out, he actually was right on that patrol. It's like, dude, what am I doing here, man? You know, I'm gonna go do a foot patrol with a guy with a shotgun.

• 1:37:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:52Dave Berke?

  So, I knew that I was in, there was a lot in store for that. And we would do these patrols, these, these move into contacts, and you'd end up in a building. And my job as a FAC was, "Hey, get out in the building, get up on top of the roof right away." And I would do overwatch, you know, similar, different assets. I had airplanes, I had radios. SEALs would do overwatch all the time, and it was just a matter of cover and move. So I would get up on the roof and go, "Hey, this is what I see? This is what the airplane sees? Okay, you guys jump to that next building." Sometimes the next building would be twenty yards away, sometimes it'd be two-hundred yards away. So you would, you would just do these bounding movements, building to building. And then, when they get to the next building, my other guy would be up on the roof, he'd say, "You're good." And we'd run down and go to the next building.

• 1:38:34Dave Berke?

  And so, we get into this building, and as soon as I get up on top of the roof of the building, so if you can picture it, half of us are on the roof of the building, half of the other guys are trying to move to the other building, so they're out in the open. And from that other building, as I get up on the roof, I look up and the first thing that happens is, like, three RPGs hit the building that I'm in directly underneath me. Probably missed our team by like fifteen feet below us. So above their heads and below us. That's the first thing that happens. And there was a vehicle, like a truck, and that was a car, it was like, just some car in between on a, like, kind of a dirt road behind some trees where this fire came from. And we had airplanes overhead. It was two F-18Ds, I remember it, from an east coast squadron.

• 1:39:17Dave Berke?

  And, you know, at TBS they teach you, "Hey, every Marine's a rifleman," and they tell you these stories. Is that one day, you're gonna be in a position where you're gonna be in a firefight, and there's gonna be an airplane overhead, and it's gonna be a buddy of yours from TBS, gonna be your old buddy, and you're gonna be like, "Hey, Jocko, it's Dave, help me out." And Dave's gonna roll in on his white horse and come in with his hornet and blast these things out of it, and your infantry buddy's gonna thank you one day. I'm like, "Right on." The only problem was that I was on the ground, and the guy flying the airplane was one of my closest friends, a guy named Boo Frieden, was the opso of the squadron. I just left, and, no joke, I'm like, "Hey, we're in a, troops in contact, you know, we're taking fire from wherever."

• 1:40:01Dave Berke?

  And on the radio, he says, "Hey, Chip, it's Boo, what do you need?" And it took me right back to TBS, only the problem was I was supposed to be in an airplane when that happened. And I'm like, I said, "South to north, call wings level." And that's what happened. And I had four passes from these F-18s, did these strafing runs on this car. And I remember looking at the Army guys with us, and the first lieutenant, and I looked at him, I go, "Dude, we're gonna be fine." Like, super cool, like, very chill. "Hey, this just happened, I see what's going on." There's hornets overhead, had, saw everything. "What do you need? I need this, we're in." And the next call was, "Wings level, hey, you're cleared hot." And, you know, the hair and marmot standing up telling the story. Just one of those stories where

• 1:40:44Dave Berke?

  the Marine Corps, for whatever insane reason, will take F-18 pilots and train them, millions of dollars and 10 years of training them, and they'll stick them on the ground. And it's for that exact reason. That, that exact event was, I could bring an asset that the Army would never have, an environment that they would never be able to use, and through two buddies just talking plain English to each other on the radio, make it happen in, like that. And, um...

• 1:41:12Dave Berke?

  I was supposed to be in that airplane, Jocko. That's how it was supposed to work out. But in that particular day, man, it was the roles were reversed. But it was, it was an awesome. It was kind of a culmination of a lot of things like that. The Marine Corps, it's legit. That thing they breed in us, it's a real thing. And it was pretty satisfying to be honest with you. You see that car burn in the ground.

• 1:41:30Jocko Willink?

  And then eventually, I don't know, maybe a month or so goes by and we show up. And who's the first, who'd you meet first? Leif?

• 1:41:38Dave Berke?

  Yep. Leif was the first guy that I met. Actually, Leif and Tony show up together.

• 1:41:47Dave Berke?

  So we had seen you guys, you know, we had turned over and we were just kind of getting up to speed. We'd probably been there maybe a month or so before you guys had. So, you know, quick learning curve. We're just kind of getting comfortable with what's going on. We also know there's a new brigade platoon coming in. I'm sorry, a new armored division coming in. We know that the unit that we're there, the 228, that brigade combat team is leaving. We knew new brigade combat team is coming in. And we were actually in just a relatively short period of time, we're kind of the continuity because all the old guys are leaving. We had, we had the overlap. So we had a kind of a prominent role with the new battalion and the new battalion commander. He's retired now. Awesome dude from 137 Armored, a guy named Tedesco, just an awesome dude.

• 1:42:29Dave Berke?

  Just an awesome dude. He had been there as part of his turnover, had come out a couple of months prior. Maybe a month prior and saw us and we had to.

• 1:42:37Jocko Willink?

  My favorite thing about Tedesco is, like you said, awesome guy. We, we were getting ready to do a big operation with them. I think it was the first time we were pushing into South Central Ramadi and we were in his briefing and he's quoting Patton. But he's quoting Patton the movie. He's just getting after it. I was like, yes, yes, thank you. Thank you for bringing me here this day.

• 1:42:59Dave Berke?

  Yeah, he was awesome. And he had seen me, it just so happened when he was doing his initial turnover, before the battalion came out, I had done, I had controlled a release, I controlled a Hellfire and blew up a car. And he got to see it. And it was kind of a cool thing as he comes like, who, you know, who are these guys? I'm in the middle of doing a real control. I happened to be in the COC that day. Blow up a car, it's all in the video, got this big TV screens that show the whole thing. This car detonates and cool pictures and everything and. He, he comes over to me after we're done. I'm kinda sitting there and he's the Lieutenant Colonel. I'm a major and hey, sir. He's like, can you do that when we get here? I'm like, absolutely, man. He's like, we're gonna get along great. That was my initial interaction with him. So it was awesome. And so we knew when they were coming back.

• 1:43:42Dave Berke?

  We had already, just through virtue of that experience, built some pretty good inroads of them and we were gonna do some good work. He was also the type of guy, like, there's this whole brigade combat team came in, that's 5,000 guys. But his battalion, that group of, you know, several hundred, was really the core group that I initially did most of my work with. And his approach was if you can help us, you're on the team. Yep. They're, um... Same exact attitude he had with us. Yeah. For sure. For all the enablers. So, uh, they were called the Bandits and they had a little Bandit pin, kind of a skull and crossbones kinda thing. You were, if you, you were, I was a Bandit to him. For sure. Just totally on board the team and he treated us like his own guys. And that was awesome. And so, um,

• 1:44:22Dave Berke?

  all the enablers, we had military, we had working dogs, we had explosive ordnance disposal, we had the Anglico folks, we had the SEALs. You know, all these different groups from different places that none of them were assigned to him. But his approach was if you can help my soldiers out, you're, you're a Bandit, you're on the team. And everybody was like, right on, let's do this. Cause that's, you needed to work with them anyway, you might as well make the best of it. We started to do a couple of missions and every one of those missions was your teams and my teams. Uh, and I would say probably in the first week or so, you know, I'm guessing a little bit of dates, but relatively quick in the first couple of missions, we are doing the similar things. We're bringing support and overwatch and helping these guys do their job, which is the exact same thing you guys were doing, you know, totally different ways, but ultimately we're supporting these guys.

• 1:45:06Dave Berke?

  I'm in my, my little building there, one day, whatever, just sitting around prepping for something and in walks Leif and Tony. You know, they drove over from your base, which is kinda, you know, a little bit of a haul around, around there to drive in and goes, hey, man.

• 1:45:22Dave Berke?

  Love to work with you more. We find a way that we can work together on some of these missions. And we got this big mission coming up. You want to come down and, and brief with us? Well, yeah, absolutely. I'd love to go brief with the SEALs and it'd be awesome. I thought it would just be the kind of this cool one time thing. I get to see how SEALs do business.

• 1:45:39Dave Berke?

  And that was it. That was his introduction. Had Leif and Tony, I'll be really candid. I'd like to think I would have done that. I doubt I would have gone to Shark Base and knocked on your door and said, hey, Leif Jocko, let's do some work together. He made that initial contact and him and Tony?

• 1:45:53Jocko Willink?

  We were definitely equal opportunity employers at that point, man. The same thing as, you know, Colonel Tedesco. If we thought someone could do something to help us out, or we could complement each other in any way, man, we were knocking on doors to, to try and make that happen for sure.

• 1:46:05Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And that was his approach. I didn't, I'd never done any work on the ground. I didn't know much about the SEALs. I'll be very blunt. I had my own opinion of what I assumed you guys would be like. And it was probably something out of the movies. I expected like long beards and dudes just running around doing their own thing. And so I was actually a little surprised that, that Leif came and asked to do some work with us. And so I, I went to that first night mission. That first brief, I don't want to say I was skeptical, but I was certainly interested in what, because my fear was that you guys were going to go do your own thing and my guys were kind of just either not be able to keep up, not know what you're doing, and not fit in very well and be able to help out and just kind of put ourselves at risk.

• 1:46:47Dave Berke?

  And, and look, I'll, I'll say this very bluntly. I have a very high bar when you leave Top Gun on what to expect from a mission brief and mission execution and mission debrief, because that's what we're all about. And I was pretty sure that there's no chance that you were going to do anything anywhere near that. And I was shocked and kind of overwhelmed at how professional your, your team was. And that was the biggest thing for me was what are these guys going to be like? I just sort of pictured a kind of a pickup game. Hey, let's go there and just, you know, kill some bad guys and come on back and high five each other. And dude, it was one of the most professional organized mission briefs. I totally understood what your plan was. I knew exactly where I was going to fit in. We went and did it. And then you guys debriefed after. We came back after this. It was a relative unevent.

• 1:47:32Dave Berke?

  Nothing really happened that night in terms of, in the grand scheme of things that we saw, we were there. And then you debriefed it. You guys came back and you mission debriefed. Dudes were there, kind of cleaning weapons and going through and analyzing what happened. And

• 1:47:46Dave Berke?

  That was it, man. I was totally on board. I was, I was, I was sold at that we could work together like pretty effectively. And that was kind of the beginning. It just sort of started out of the blue and you guys came down and asked to do some good work and, and we did.

• 1:47:59Jocko Willink?

  You did a lot of work.

• 1:48:00Dave Berke?

  I did.

• 1:48:01Jocko Willink?

  Your team did a lot of work with us. Cause we, we started to think, cause, cause for our, from our perspective, and I know that, you know, there's one junior officer out there who's now probably a lieutenant commander, or maybe even a commander at this point. But at that time, you know, he was on his first deployment and he was a JTAC. What we call in the SEAL teams, our air controllers are called a JTAC. And so here he is, and some of those missions, instead of being a SEAL, he's being a JTAC. So he's one of those guys that looked over at you guys and said, hey, wait a second, can you take this radio from me and do that thing? So I can go do my frogman stuff over here and that add, and plus, again, to be blunt, you guys could do it a lot better than we could, period. You know, we, we, you know, you were an F-18 pilot for crying out loud.

• 1:48:45Jocko Willink?

  And we had a new guy, junior officer on the radio trying to call for fire. You guys were just imminently better qualified to do it. And so, yeah, we looked at it as if, okay, we, that gives us one more shooter and it gives us a whole new level of expertise. Now, of course, there's JTACs in the SEAL teams that they are a lot more experienced and they're awesome. And of course, but in our group, to bring you guys was just a huge level up for us to get a lot better and give us more people to maneuver as SEALs on assaults or on overwatches or whatever. So it turned out to be a, a real good little, little relationship we got going there.

• 1:49:23Dave Berke?

  It was a classic win-win. When a, when a SEAL says, hey, would you control the air so I can go shoot people? You know, and that means I'm no, I don't have to clear that room and be in a position where I might have to do something like that. I'm all over it. And I, yeah, I know who you're talking about. We had a, he and I had a great relationship, someone that I really loved working with, who wanted to go be a frogman, like you said. I wanted to go control airplanes and we found a way to make that stuff work. Now, it was, it was a big deal for me though, man, to, for my, for me and my guys to work with you guys because you've said this on the podcast and I know, I know how organizations can, we're not necessarily parochial that we don't trust other people, but we get really

• 1:50:08Dave Berke?

  comfortable how we do business and to just bring in another group of dudes, I think this also speaks volumes to Tedeschi and all those guys, you're gonna just, you want to make sure those guys can keep up, you know, and everybody knows that you guys are legit, man, and to keep up, you got, you're gonna have to keep up, you're gonna have to carry your own weight and you're gonna have to make it happen, you're gonna have to provide something because the minute you become a drain on the, on the team, you know, you're gonna get cut loose and we, we couldn't afford to be a drain on you and we couldn't afford to have other people be a drain on us. So I think there was a lot of kinda, at the beginning of, there was a lot of reasons why it wouldn't have worked. There's a whole bunch of reasons why it wouldn't have worked. And the only reason it did work is that everybody was committed to building a relationship to support the battalion. That was it. We all

• 1:50:52Dave Berke?

  had the same end state in mind. It wasn't about what can the SEALs do to be SEALs and be great, what can we do to support those guys?

• 1:50:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, it's the whole thing I was opening up with, that's sort of where that came from. It's just this attitude that everybody there was on the same team, straight up, on the same team. And so then, that turned into big missions, you know, big missions pushing into Ramadi, putting in the combat outpost, you know, night after night, day after day, doing those, those big operations. And that relationship just got, just got stronger and stronger, you know, LaF, obviously with you and, and just turned into something really, not just, not just cool, but man, effective.

• 1:51:35Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:36Jocko Willink?

  Effective.

• 1:51:37Dave Berke?

  It was. I mean, in that deployment, I, I kept a long journal, I took a lot of notes on my experience there and I've gone back and reread it a few times and I've somewhat recently, throughout that whole thing, one of the common themes is how

• 1:51:53Dave Berke?

  Leif and I did this today, we did stuff with you all the time. And it kind of became in that middle, that kind of June, July, August. I mean, that was all we were really doing because we were so busy. And the big op was kicking off and we were starting to get into downtown. But you know, I guess we'd never been, all these clearings, all this stuff. And so the need for us to support the army, the need for you to support the army again. We could have had 10 times as many folks and we probably still could have done more work. Everything in that journal was just about what we were doing together. I think at the time, I just kind of lost track of it because we were just every day get up and go do something. I mean, there was no down days. There was hardly ever any time we weren't doing anything. And it was almost always with you guys.

• 1:52:37Dave Berke?

  And it was a huge highlight for me to be with a group of guys that were so on board with just making things happen. You guys had an incredible knack of, this is in the way or this process keeps it. Yeah, we got that sorted out. Hey, I need to get airplanes. Uh, well, to do this and this, you got, no, no, no, we can get this sorted out. So you guys had, kind of had cornered the market on, what do you need? We'll make, we'll get it. We'll make it happen. And for me, to be able to get that asset sort of delivered that I could, and hey, you did all the work to get it, but I can control the hell out of it? Right on, man. I didn't have to do any of the work to explain why I needed this. Because you guys did all that work and you had a valid reason for it.

• 1:53:21Dave Berke?

  They would have laughed at me if I said I wanted an AC-130 gunship. Like, who are you? I'm Dave Berke, man. I'm like, negative. Leif and Jocko need an AC-130 gunship? Not every time, you know, obviously it was a thin asset, but when that thing showed up overhead and then you get the guy we were talking about, it's like, you want to control this? I'm like, yes, I do. I want to control this thing. So there's a lot of mutual benefit there. And I think what we also proved is, I think for the battalion and the brigade, they figured out that we were really helpful in helping those guys accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. And that was just, I'm not putting very good words to it right now, but it was obviously real rewarding. And it was the highlight of that deployment is our ability to work together. Through, like I said, there's a whole laundry list of reasons why we shouldn't have been able to do this. A bunch. You didn't work for me. I didn't outrank you.

• 1:54:03Dave Berke?

  There's just a whole bunch of institutional roadblocks that we could have just stayed in our own corners, in our own thing. And you and I could have never met. And that wouldn't have really been all that uncommon. It would have just been ops normal.

• 1:54:16Dave Berke?

  It worked out, man.

• 1:54:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, a lot of awesome highlights on that deployment and obviously

• 1:54:24Jocko Willink?

  some of the worst days of our lives were over there.

• 1:54:29Jocko Willink?

  June 20th.

• 1:54:34Jocko Willink?

  Talk to me about that.

• 1:54:38Dave Berke?

  Yeah, man. So obviously I know we're gonna talk about this. So we had been there quite a bit and I remember kind of the shock when I first got there talking to the 228. First day I'm there, I go to Alpha Company and they've got a memorial outside of their compound of all the soldiers that have been killed. I can picture it. It's just kind of like a names are on a little placard and it's kind of a tall little pyramid looking thing with the names on there. And you see it, you understand it. Hey, people have died here. You get it. It's not hard to to understand that those things have happened, but there's just a level of disconnect when you first get there like, oh, people are dying, but you don't, you haven't seen it. And then

• 1:55:20Dave Berke?

  you know, very quickly, I think probably my second mission out there was kind of a QRF from a vehicle IED. So basically

• 1:55:28Dave Berke?

  an insurgent with a bunch of bombs in his vehicles got in between American convoy and blew himself up. So I see my first dead body. You know, I see this real combat. People are dying here. It was an enemy. Wasn't the same. And then you know, March, April, May. We started taking, I mean, not started, we continued to take casualties and I'm starting to go to memorials and we're starting to see guys that we knew and worked with and were friends with and built relations with and they're, they're, they're getting killed or really gravely wounded. And those memorials started to become every couple of days, we're going to a memorial. And that sort of weighs on you. I've thought about this a lot and how it affected me. You know, as a pilot being out of my comfort zone in this environment and, and what that was like.

• 1:56:15Dave Berke?

  But without trying to diminish any of that loss,

• 1:56:21Dave Berke?

  there's a disconnect when it's not your person, when it's not your guy. And on June 20th, so Chris Leon, who was my radio operator, we were in a building that we had been in. Let me back up. I was not there. I had left that building that morning, gone back to the COC. Adam's team with Chris had replaced us. And we were basically just going back and forth operations into this combat outpost because it gave us a really good view of the north part of the city. And we had to be there, basically 24/7. And Chris and Adam's team had gone back out there and they were supposed to go from like 12 to 4, something like that. I don't know what it was. We gave them like a six hour shift or something. And then we were going to kind of figure out if we replace or start over. We had just sort of sent them out there and we're going to come back in a little bit.

• 1:57:06Dave Berke?

  And I got a call on the radio from the battalion saying, "Hey, can you extend your Anglico team out here for four hours? We're going to go do another movement to do some clearing." I'm like, "Yeah, Roger that." "Hey, Adam, can you guys stay out for another couple hours? You know, support, we're going to get you air, whatnot." You know, standard answer, "Yeah, Roger that. No problem."

• 1:57:24Dave Berke?

  And during that time,

• 1:57:27Dave Berke?

  it was not uncommon to take fire in that OP. And there was some sniper fire. And the first shot, there was a younger Marine, a Lance Corporal, who was up there. And Chris ran up from the other side and kind of put him down. He goes, "Hey, why don't you get down, take cover, go over to the other side of the building?" And Chris got up to start to, he was doing his observation to try to figure out what's going on. And Chris was shot by a sniper. And I get a call, kind of very closely after that, from Adam. You know, I'm kind of manning the radios all the time anyway. Even our home little base there, like where we had a radio right there. So I was never really not there. I was just on the radio.

• 1:58:11Dave Berke?

  I'd say, "Hey, Corporal Leon's been hit. We're on our way back." And that was about it. I didn't have any real good sense of anything was going on.

• 1:58:21Dave Berke?

  And a little panic sets in, like, okay, and I don't want to press for too much information. I get a call from Alpha Company who had manned all the observation posts between where he was and where we were that they were clearing, make sure the roads were clear, they're using their tanks and their Bradleys so they could pick them up and bring a straight shot, because that was a pretty busy, dangerous road. He always had to look out for IEDs and stuff like that. And so, everybody's kind of picking up the pace to clear out that road and he's coming back. And I get a call, hey, he's breathing, we're heading straight to Charlie Med. And I'm like, alright, okay. I kind of had this sense of, this is gonna be okay.

• 1:59:03Dave Berke?

  Charlie Med is this medical facility on the camp that we were stationed at there, and it was literally 100 yards from where I slept. And I just ran down to Charlie Med to meet the Humvee I was there, and I'm sorry, it wasn't a Humvee, it was a Bradley, Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Bradley pulls up, myself and my corpsman Doc are there. The Bradley has a door on the back of the Bradley that comes down like a ramp. And the ramp comes down, he's on a stretcher. Doc goes up to get the front piece of the stretcher, I'm at the bottom, and he comes down, carrying the stretcher, and Chris is laying on the stretcher. And I, he went right by me, I looked at him, and I knew immediately that he was gone. I mean, he was gone. It was, I could see the entrance, the whole thing

• 1:59:46Dave Berke?

  was all kind of there. They had stabilized him, they had done their best to kind of manage the wood, but there was no question that the outcome had already played itself out, and Chris was gone. They take him in to the medical facility, which I'd been in, and you've been in a dozen times, for a whole host of different reasons. But it'd always been somebody else. I mean, I may have known that person and been close to that person, but it was always somebody else. And Doc goes in with him, he's carrying the stretcher, and he comes out in probably, Doc goes probably 10 seconds, and he just comes out with his head shaken. And I knew, I wasn't holding my breath, I knew. But he kind of came out and just sort of, I guess confirmed, if that's the word I'm looking for, just sort of, it made it official that Chris had been killed. And...

• 2:00:33Dave Berke?

  It sort of initiated just a very strange kind of very sequence of events. So I knew Adam and the rest of the team are trying to get back and they're going to have a slower road back because they're not going to get the support. It's just going to take a little more time. They're going to get their gear and all the things go along with it. Chris just got loaded in a Humvee and racing back in Bradley. They're kind of loading up their Humvees and it's just going to take some time. And I know like I need to get back to the vehicle. We parked our trucks because I want to meet them there. And I walked back, like I said, it was maybe 100 yards from my hooch to Charlie Med. And I get about halfway there and I had this thought that, that I maybe didn't confirm that Chris was killed. And so I actually walked all the way back to go find, there's a senior medical officer,

• 2:01:17Dave Berke?

  we called him the Smo, really awesome guy that dealt with all the casualties there, who I knew because I'd done control, I had controlled helicopter casovacs on wounded folks. I'd been there a lot. We did, we gave blood. I mean, we were in that facility all the time. And I don't know why I needed to do it, but I was, I just, I had to talk to him, but hey, is Corporal Leon, is he, is he killed? He's like, yeah, I'm sorry, man. You know, it was kind of an odd conversation. I could tell the why, he was looking at me like, why are you asking me this question? Like, it just was one of those things that I was in sort of, I think it's just a stage of disbelief that as I walked back and I was going to deliver the news, I had sort of told myself like, I can't tell them in case, what if I'm wrong?

• 2:02:01Dave Berke?

  Because I never really went through that. I saw him, I saw Doc, but there were no words were exchanged. And I had this very odd, like, walking back and forth a couple of times and kind of sorting it out. And then, you know, my job was, next thing I had to do is Adam, I watched the trucks pull up, they all get out, you know, four guys. And everybody else had heard, you know, all the Anglico teams that were there and we shared a facility with EOD and the working dogs. Everybody, you know, word was passed that something had happened.

• 2:02:31Dave Berke?

  And I, you know, hey, Corporal Leon's dead.

• 2:02:37Dave Berke?

  You know, we do something called, I think it's called a hero flight. Hero flight's gonna be at like sixteen hundred. I got the information in like ten minutes. The process of them bringing in a casualty, that casualty not surviving and then moving, they had that thing wired. And I'd seen it done a bunch of times, but it just, it was Chris, it was my guy, he was a guy that I just knew differently than everybody else and I just saw him differently. When we entered our trucks, he was the back left and I was the front right and our trucks are always parked backed into their spots, so they're always side by side. So the back left of his truck, enter, door, and the right front of my truck door, we always had to fight space for each other. You know, Chris was a standard perfect Marine, like he could be ninety percent the way through

• 2:03:21Dave Berke?

  if he saw me walking up, he'd get out of the way, close the door, let me in. I'm like, ah, come on dude, like just, he was a great Marine, just... I walked past that kid without even really talking to him, you know, a thousand times, just every single day, a couple of times a day and...

• 2:03:38Dave Berke?

  It demystifies as a Marine.

• 2:03:44Dave Berke?

  You just live a slightly bit, for me, I shouldn't say you, how it felt for me as I just felt with all that was going on and all the destruction and the death and the violence and all the things that I'd sort of become accustomed to at that point, there's just an aspect of it that's just a tiny bit insulated in your life. To a really small degree, but it's enough to just keep you sort of preserved. And...

• 2:04:09Dave Berke?

  When Chris was killed, it just sort of exposed that. It broke down one of my last little boundary of, I'm okay here because I can do this. Because I'm gonna get through this, I'm gonna go home and everything's gonna be okay.

• 2:04:25Dave Berke?

  And that hurt a lot. That hurt in ways that I did not understand how it was gonna hurt. I just didn't, I just didn't know what that was gonna be like. And the, the, all those next steps, and I know you know this, because you, you saw it. He's on a helicopter and he's gone, flying away in that forty-six, in what feels like about a minute. It's hours, and I even rehearsed the movement on to the, to carry him on to the heli. But you go from Chris's city, he's on his way in, to watching the helicopter fly away, and it feels like it takes about that long. And then you're just sort of left, and you walk back, you, you literally walk away from the medical facility where the helicopter just takes off,

• 2:05:10Dave Berke?

  and you walk back a hundred yards and you just go back to your room. Only Chris is gone.

• 2:05:16Dave Berke?

  And it's like that whole deployment, kind of, I don't know what the right word is, it's like I had to start the deployment again, because all the things that I was dealing with, and all the things that I was managing and leading as, as a leader, whatever you wanted to say was my job. It always just sort of changed in terms of what I thought really...

• 2:05:36Dave Berke?

  The guys that I was working with, everything was different now, because it was their brother that was gone, not somebody else. And it just sort of changed the calculus, and it really redefined the rest of that deployment, and I'll be really, really blunt. It was hard for me to not fold, and there was a lot of instinct of like, "I do not want to do this anymore, I do not want to be here, this is more than I had bargained for, and this, we can laugh about volunteering and being a marine, you know." It was a little more than I bargained for. And look, man, we had done some crazy stuff at that point, and I'd seen some bad things happen, I was a participant in some bad things.

• 2:06:16Dave Berke?

  And I was okay, I was doing okay, and I was gonna be okay with that, and this one just sort of... I just, I struggled with it a little bit, so it was a tough day, man.

• 2:06:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and obviously, you know, for for us, it was, you know, what, a month and a half later, on August 2nd, when when Mark got killed. And, you know, I think that's one of the things that that we felt, you know, that little bit of insulation that you're talking about. We felt that, we felt, I will say, I would say, actually, more insulated. Because, you know, my guys were out there, taking massive risks, getting in crazy gunfights, getting after it to a degree that no one had ever thought they would. And we were doing all right. We had a couple of guys get wounded here and there, but they were okay.

• 2:07:12Jocko Willink?

  And and honestly, that guy's getting wounded, you know, if it's not a devastating wound. I mean, I had, you know, one of my guys got wounded early on, and he almost lost his leg. But guess what? He didn't. And that that didn't make us feel more vulnerable. In my mind, it made us feel stronger. And like, hey, we might get wounded, but we're going to be good. And so, yeah, when Mark got killed, and especially Mark, who was, you know, such a gregarious, and such a guy so full of life, that you don't think he can be killed. You don't think he can be killed. And same thing, you know, that insulation was just completely shattered.

• 2:07:49Jocko Willink?

  And I think what was also, it was it was recognizable, it was recognizable to me, was that other people outside of Task Unit Bruiser, they thought the same thing. They thought, hey, the SEALs are here. They're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna push through this. They're gonna, they're gonna win. And they're, nothing's gonna happen to them. And we saw it, you know, at the memorial service, you could see in guys' faces that they were, they were also, their insulation about us was was kind of shattered too. And then it turns into, damn, if the SEALs can get killed, where am I at?

• 2:08:32Jocko Willink?

  I think that was another thing that that really, you know, that was another thing that really just made Mark getting killed such a, such an impact to all of us.

• 2:08:41Dave Berke?

  There, dude, there's no doubt that what you just said is exactly how it played out. You were the first guy to talk to me when when Chris's helicopter flies away. It's it's literally dusty, and you know, the helicopter's loud, and it kicks up dust there. And it was dark, it was nighttime. And you came up to me, and I don't remember the exact words, but we were just turning around and walking back. And you said something like, "We're gonna get after this, guys, and we're gonna go find the snipers that are doing this." Something to those words, and it was basically like, "We're gonna take care of this." And I remember feeling really comforted by that, like, "Yeah, man. Yeah, go do that. That's awesome."

• 2:09:20Dave Berke?

  And feeling good about that, that we weren't helpless and we're just gonna suck it up and deal with this just, this terrible loss. That we're gonna get something from this. We're gonna go find some guys and go get after it.

• 2:09:33Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna go kill these guys.

• 2:09:34Dave Berke?

  Yep. And you guys, and you guys were gonna, you guys were gonna make that happen. And I remember feeling, I remember how that felt. And look, June 20th to August 2nd, just like everything else, was a blur, man. It was like, it was like, it might as well have just been the next day, because things happened so fast there. And I was, you know, I wasn't on the patrol on August 2nd, but I was on the radio. I was a guy running the air. I was doing all the same stuff we always did, you know? And I was back in the COC with you, working that mission, all that stuff that happened. And before you know it, we're watching the helicopter fly away.

• 2:10:12Dave Berke?

  You know, or he's gone, you know, and you're seeing the aftermath of that. And I actually went back last night to look at my journal entry for that day, because I ended up running down to Charlie Medigan, because that's where everybody came in, and I remember seeing Leif there. You know, Leif was a guy I worked with a ton, and there he is, he's got a wound. I'm looking at it, I'm over, I'm standing over his right shoulder, they're cutting his shirt off. They're, they're, they're attending to Leif, who was, Leif was a larger-than-life. You know, for a guy like me, who always kind of felt a little bit like, "What the hell am I doing here, man? What the hell am I doing with the SEALs? Like, this is insane." These guys are just, they're just larger-than-life, and to see the exposure of that, it bothered me.

• 2:10:57Dave Berke?

  And I knew I had the feeling of, "Holy cow, if this can happen to these guys..." You know, it can happen to any of us and it's not a good feeling. And when you saw the guys from the team who were, it was just, it was just, everybody was scrambling and it was just that sense of, and I don't want to make it sound like, there wasn't any, nobody was panicking or freaking out. It was not like that, but it was just a tiny bit chaotic, if that makes sense. On a small degree, but enough when you were so used to just being completely not like that, that feeling, like when Chris lost was what I felt was like, oh man, I'm not really in control of any of this. I am not in control. All that stuff that I've told myself, all that comfort and confidence and we're getting better and I'm going to be

• 2:11:41Dave Berke?

  more effective and do more good work until this thing is over. It was like, no, negative. That could be you, that could happen today. And then it, and between Chris and Mark, the army suffered, oh my God bless, we were going to memorials like every couple of days. People were getting killed all the time. And every one of those eroded that, that confidence a little bit. And then when it happened to, to Mark and Leif, that was hard to see that. And it, that was the feeling that I had. It was like, I'm, yeah.

• 2:12:23Dave Berke?

  Maybe I'm just lucky, you know? Maybe I, maybe this whole thing is just luck. Now, look, we, we regrouped, I mean, June 20th was a bad day. You know, we did all the things, we did the memorial, we paid our, our, we honored him the right way. You guys came, we did it the right way and we acknowledged, uh, Chris. Um, but if you kind of think what's going on in Ramadi in the middle of June, man, there was no taking a knee. There was no like, let's hold off for a second, catch your breath. The bullet chain was just running. As a matter of fact, it was just gonna, it was actually just gonna get a ton worse. You remember July and August were just, they were insane. They were insane. So we, we lost Chris really at the big ramp up.

• 2:13:07Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:13:08Dave Berke?

  You know, we had done a big movement in earlier in June and we were really starting to lay into the city, but the real, you know, the crazy J block, you know, that kind of stuff, that stuff was all out in front of us.

• 2:13:20Dave Berke?

  And so for me, it was, you know, my entire career, I've done a whole bunch of really great stuff in my career. Nothing is even, nothing is even, it's not even worth talking about what anything else in my career has meant compared to that deployment and then that day. I mean, it's just light years different. Um, and it was like,

• 2:13:39Dave Berke?

  you gotta get up and go do it the very next day. And I remember going that first patrol, that first mission and trying to, that feeling of, okay, yeah, it's different. And you got, I think you've got one or two ways to go with that. It's either gonna get inside your head and kind of mess with you and break you a little bit and, and I could feel that happening or you just, you just, you just don't. You just shut it down and just go do it.

• 2:14:02Dave Berke?

  And I found how to compartmentalize. You know, I'd come back, I'd have moments when I was back in my hooch up on the roof by myself. I have my moments, man. I don't want anybody to think that I didn't. Uh, I had plenty of those moments. As a matter of fact, I, I still do, to be honest with you. I still have my moments. I go visit Chris at Arlington on his birthday. I go visit Chris on the day he was killed. I go to visit Chris on Memorial Day. His mom comes out, I see Kat, she and I are very close. Um, I have my moments without a doubt. Um, but the rest of the three months in Ramadi, there was just not, there wasn't a ton of time to do that. So I guess I kind of just saved it maybe, uh, for, for when I came back. And it, it was there. I mean, it, it's not good. But, um, yeah, man.

• 2:14:48Jocko Willink?

  So then you, you do come back. And I mean, obviously, like you said, it ramped up. It ramped up all the time and the guys were just, you know, everybody. Like, I'm not just talking about our guys. I'm talking about everybody. It ramped up hardcore. It got hotter outside. The, the, the combat got more intense. The enemy started fighting harder. They got more squared away and.

• 2:15:17Jocko Willink?

  Like you said, you and the rest of the guys there did the mission day after day, night after night, and then one day, you fly home.

• 2:15:31Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:34Jocko Willink?

  And how was that transition for you getting back to the States?

• 2:15:42Dave Berke?

  Uh, interesting. It was an interesting transition. So from the time that I left Ramadi, so we packed up our stuff, we left Ramadi, I think we went to Kuwait for a day or two, went to Lejeune, went to Japan, because I had to check out of both places. Jack, I think it was six days on the calendar from the day I left Ramadi to the day I landed on a plane in San Diego, um, which at the time was all I wanted. I was the, and I've been fairly good about this throughout my career, is when I want things to happen administratively, I can make those things happen. If I catch wind that there's a flight from Japan to San Diego and I can get on that flight, I'm gonna get on that flight. Even if my CO is yelling at me like,

• 2:16:25Dave Berke?

  "How did you get out of here so fast?" Like, I have this thing and the guy and the paper, and I gotta go, and I'm out. Um, I wanted to get out quickly. Uh, so I found myself in San Diego executing my next orders, which the Marine Corps said you go to Ramadi, you do the fact or you're gonna go back to San Diego from there, which will be your next set of orders. So I, I knew while I was in Iraq that San Diego was in my future. My wife had already moved down there. I told you, uh, she was living with my best friend Neil, who was on that fact tour before me. So I go in Ramadi, his battalion comes home, we show up, my wife and my best friend are living together in San Diego, uh, which was really good for her because he was able to kind of keep her aware of what's going on, but knew exactly how to explain it in a way

• 2:17:08Dave Berke?

  that wasn't gonna freak her out. And he also, to be honest with you, he knew how to downplay. I would call, "Hey, we're doing this, no big deal." I mean, I didn't, I wasn't telling him half of what the hell was going on. I can't, you're not gonna share those stories. So he was a really great resource for her. I paid very little time worrying about it, to be honest with you. I was comfortable that, that she had a good support structure, um, which she really didn't. We- We got married, I deployed four months later to Ramadi. She started dating a dude who was driving a Corvette and living in Tahoe as a top contractor. And then four months after we got married, I was in Ramadi. So, there was no easing. So, I knew there was just...

• 2:17:47Dave Berke?

  I didn't know at the time, I didn't think of it, but it was obvious looking back that she was just thrown into an environment that she was totally unprepared for.

• 2:17:56Dave Berke?

  Forget about just me being gone, but just the fact that I was in Ramadi. It's all over the news, everybody knows what's going on. They think one of my Marines is killed, and a lot of crazy stuff going on. And next thing you know, I'm home. September 28th, I'm back in San Diego. Like, 365 days to the day, I'm home. And I checked into an F-18 squadron like the day after I got home. Before October 1st, I was back into an F-18 squadron in San Diego. Which is insane.

• 2:18:23Dave Berke?

  And, to be really blunt, I was... You know, all those guys in Anglico went back to Anglico. And Camp Lejeune and Camp Hanson in Japan. I was like, "Later, bros." You know, like, no long goodbyes, you know, "High five, great deployment." You know, "I'm out." I was just on to other things. And I kinda extricated myself. It's, you know, I followed the rules to do whatever I was supposed to do before I know it, I'm back there. And I honestly, I think, also kinda kidding myself, like, that was to be the best thing for me, let's get home. I knew something was amiss. Because on the drive home from the airport, I fly into San Diego International, just down the road. My wife and my mom, who lives in San Diego, both of them came to pick me up from the airport. You've already met my mom, great lady.

• 2:19:08Dave Berke?

  My wife and my mom picked me up from the airport. I got pictures of them meeting me there, get in the car, drive from San Diego International to our house in Pacific Beach. And, as we're pulling, like, onto Chelsy Sydney, up to the house...

• 2:19:24Dave Berke?

  I like screamed at them and told them to stop talking or something like that. I said something like, I don't even, I don't know what it was, but I, I think I just remember sitting in the passenger seat. And some, the gears would just start, I'm in a truck or a car, like whatever, I don't know what it was, but something's going on and I think just the pressure is building and I'm, and I have no sense of what's going on, no outlet for it. And they're like having a perfectly normal adult conversation. That might've been an octave above what I was willing to accept or tolerate, maybe. And I completely freaked out on my wife and my mom who I hadn't seen in a year. And you know, they were like, oh, sorry. You know, they were super cool, no pushback. And I was, it was an indicator like, yeah.

• 2:20:05Jocko Willink?

  And you, you recognize that?

• 2:20:07Dave Berke?

  Immediately.

• 2:20:08Jocko Willink?

  You're like, oh, God.

• 2:20:08Dave Berke?

  Yep, immediately. And it was that combination recognition of, that's not good. And clearly I have, I have things I need to deal with that I wasn't quite aware of. So I, I knew, no question, right away. And I think, and I think about this a lot with, with other Marines and the things you experience in combat. You've talked about PTSD a lot. Look, that's a subject you could spend hours on. The bottom line is everybody deals with things differently. It doesn't mean you're broken or messed. It just, it just means you have some process you gotta go through and you gotta deal with. And we all deal with it differently. I had maybe talked myself into, I was 33, I was a fairly experienced guy. I was surrounded by very young Marines.

• 2:20:48Dave Berke?

  Who maybe in my mind didn't have maybe the emotional maturity, maybe the life skills to maybe manage some of these same chaotic things. You know, guys that saw Chris get shot. I maybe kind of built myself up a little bit. I was a little better equipped. And I was better equipped in my mind. And I was, I, I, in a matter of 45 minutes from the airport to the house, I'm flying off the handle on something. So, um, it, it, it just, all it was, man, it was, it was those two things. Like, that's not good. And this is gonna probably happen again. I'm gonna need to, I'm gonna need to think about this. I can't pretend like I'm not gonna just have some sort of residual. You can't leave Ramadi, be in San Diego six days later and not bring some baggage home with you.

• 2:21:31Dave Berke?

  And I was bringing some baggage home. And there is some baggage there, a little bit.

• 2:21:40Dave Berke?

  So, that transition was, was, it started.

• 2:21:43Jocko Willink?

  Is there anything that like, anything that helped you?

• 2:21:46Dave Berke?

  Yeah, dude, I'll tell you what helped the most is my best friend, who had been in Ramadi and endured all of that loss. Look, our story, you know, the story, the guys that we replaced, the guys that replaced us, it's a very similar story a lot. They understand that. You know, I think having an outlet, having one other dude, it happened to be my best friend since we were 14, so it was, you want to talk about just hitting the jackpot and being the best equipped to sort of just deal and power through it and, and, and accept what's going on and, and embrace it and all those things that go along with it. I had an outlet, man. I had my best friend who, I mean, he knew every place we were. I mean, it wasn't even like, oh, he was here and I, it was the same place.

• 2:22:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because Ramadi's not that big.

• 2:22:25Dave Berke?

  It's just not that big, man. And so we say, I was on the corner of Sunset in Michigan, he's like, yeah, I've been there about 500 times, yeah. And, and he was struggling a little bit too, you know, again, it's all relative. I mean, we're handled it relatively okay, you know, I'm going back to kind of dealing with a normal life and, but the moments when you get those little spikes and those is what kind of comes up and gets you, those little spikes is an unforeseen kind of reactions. He could see that in me and I could see that in him and we actually been, we're really good for each other. When I see him kind of get a little shaky, a little break, like I'm not, you know, he's not digging his environment a little bit, or he'd see that in me. You have that other person that kind of bring you back to helping you, helping you deal with that, uh, which is good.

• 2:23:07Dave Berke?

  The, the flip side of that, while it was really helpful for him to be there,

• 2:23:13Dave Berke?

  I think it was really tough on Whitney because she was not my outlet for that.

• 2:23:17Jocko Willink?

  She kind of got cut out?

• 2:23:18Dave Berke?

  Totally. And I, and I didn't, certainly not by design, I'm not like doing this calculation of, I don't want my, she's just not, I'm not going to use her as a resource, you know, for that. And to be honest with you too, there's also a little part of me.

• 2:23:29Jocko Willink?

  She doesn't know what the corner of Michigan Sunset is like, so.

• 2:23:31Dave Berke?

  Totally, man. And I'll, I'll be really candid, you know,

• 2:23:37Dave Berke?

  I, I think I would have been almost embarrassed is maybe not the right word, but I, I wasn't.

• 2:23:43Dave Berke?

  I don't know if I wanted her to see that part of it.

• 2:23:45Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:23:45Dave Berke?

  You know what I mean? Like, hey babe, check out this ridiculous vulnerability that I have right now that I'm gonna carry with me for god knows how long. That's gonna come up out of nowhere and you're gonna have to just deal with it. So there was a, uh, I think the thing that bothered me the most and was part of just kind of getting back to day to day life was it, I would get, when things didn't go well, when I had my moments, my reaction was just, I'd just get pissed off. It was that feeling of, so I had this like, some event would happen, something stupid would catch my attention and kind of, height my, you know, my response. And because it happened, I'd be annoyed at myself that I let it, that I let it bother me. And then I'd be pissed off at myself because I let it bother me. You know what I mean? Like this ridiculous cycle of, I told you the story the other day, um,

• 2:24:28Dave Berke?

  my wife and I, I guarantee you she remembers this story, we're walking across the street downtown, no, no, by the beach, I think. And an auto body shop is running the, the air drill to pull some tires off, you know, that, that kind of sound. And as we're walking, I think my left arm is over her, her shoulder, we're walking like this. I hear that sound and my first reaction is I push her down to the ground. And in the time that it takes to do that and catch that it's happening is maybe a third of a second. You know what I mean? So I hear it, I do the, I'm, I'm reacting and pushing her to the ground. I'm kind of getting on top of her to do, look, to, oh, that's the car. It's not a thing. There's no reason for you to do this is about a third of a second. And what bothered me the most about it

• 2:25:14Dave Berke?

  is that I did it. Not that I felt like that, is that I reacted to it and I was like embarrassed, like, what's wrong with me to, to go through that? And she's like, what the, you know? And I'm, I, it sounded like, you know, and kind of going through that whole thing. And I think just the, the, the fact that I had responses pissed me off and I would just kind of honestly have a temper about it. And that was, she got to see me just get pissed off at stuff for no real good reason.

• 2:25:38Jocko Willink?

  Which you never really get pissed off, like, I mean,

• 2:25:42Dave Berke?

  I have tempers about just stuff that just, I would get mad about stuff that just didn't make sense. I mean, I have a temper about things that, like, my computer pisses me off just like it pisses you off, man. That's totally normal, right? I would get, I would have reactions to stuff that just, there was no way for her to say, oh, that makes sense. I understand. It would just be this totally oddball. Somebody would say something wrong, it would just trigger in ways that she would look at me and kind of be like, "Who are you?" She knew all my flaws. She knew what was everything right and wrong with me. And all of a sudden now, I'm doing all this other stuff.

• 2:26:14Jocko Willink?

  We put another little thing in the mix.

• 2:26:15Dave Berke?

  Yeah, add that to the mix. So I got my wife who, we get married, I leave, I go on this deployment, I come back, I'm home for maybe seven months before I deploy again. In that seven months, you know, welcome to marriage to Dave Berke, you know, that involves a year-long deployment, seven months in Iraq, you know. God only knows what the hell I was, you know, I'm back to work, so I'm back at a squadron as the XO. You know, working ridiculous XO hours in a fighter squadron, prepping it to go on a deployment. I voluntarily extend my time to make the deployment, which is exactly what you should do at the beginning of your marriage, is volunteer to extend on a deployment. I got accepted into grad school, I was gonna go to Dartmouth. I was getting out of the Marine Corps, I was gonna go to get my MBA.

• 2:27:00Dave Berke?

  And I remember the conversation of, "Hey, I'm gonna extend," it asked me to extend, and you know, I was explaining why I was gonna do, what I was gonna do, and she was like, "Why, why would you do that?" And I said, "So I can deploy." And you hear those words like, "God, did I just say that to my wife?" Like, which is, "So I cannot be with you, so I can be apart from you, so I can hang out with the boys and go do that," you know what I mean?

• 2:27:24Jocko Willink?

  Not retire from the Marine, or get out of the Marine Corps.

• 2:27:27Dave Berke?

  So I cannot do all these other things that I-

• 2:27:28Jocko Willink?

  Not set up this future that I told you all about and sold you on.

• 2:27:31Dave Berke?

  Totally. So to say that my wife, and, and, everybody's got those stories, the laundry list of reasons why she should have just sort of cut bait and be like, "No, this is not happening", is a lot longer than the list of reasons why she shouldn't have, and-

• 2:27:47Jocko Willink?

  Props.

• 2:27:47Dave Berke?

  We're good. She's here, and my marriage with her, you know, for all the ups and downs that goes along with everybody's marriage, the one thing I don't worry about, even, even when we're at our worst, at our absolute worst, which our worst is, whatever it is, we have our worst moments, at our absolute worst, I don't have a shred, I don't have a brain cell of thought of, "I wonder if our marriage is gonna survive this, you know, this throwdown we're having over God knows what's, you know." So, we kind of went through the fire there, and she-

• 2:28:15Jocko Willink?

  She got forged.

• 2:28:16Dave Berke?

  Yeah, big time. She's a stud. She deserves mad props for going through that because I'm not really sure why she did, to be honest with you.

• 2:28:24Jocko Willink?

  You know what? I can't, I can't come up with any good reasons either.

• 2:28:29Dave Berke?

  She had a lot of options on the table. I'm not sure. Yeah. So it was, that transition was tough, man.

• 2:28:35Jocko Willink?

  So now you're in another squadron, you go on deployment again, which is another, what are you doing on that deployment? Just more.

• 2:28:41Dave Berke?

  So I'm back in an F-18 squadron. I'm the XO and the OPSO. I actually did both jobs on this deployment. We just go to Japan. It's a west pack. So western Pacific, we're back in Iwakuni and Okinawa, just doing.

• 2:28:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exercises.

• 2:28:53Dave Berke?

  Exercise and training, that kind of stuff.

• 2:28:54Jocko Willink?

  Get done with that. And so now maybe it's time to get out of the Marine Corps.

• 2:28:58Dave Berke?

  Before I left on that deployment, I had told my commander, the group commander and the squadron commander, hey, this is it for me. I'm hanging it up. It's been awesome. I happily to extend for this deployment that they needed me to go on. It was a great experience. I got to train a bunch of young guys. Life was good. But they knew before I left that I was going to be out of the Marine Corps at the end of that. I deferred at Dartmouth for a year, paid my non-refundable deposit, which I've never gotten back.

• 2:29:20Jocko Willink?

  That's why they call it non-refundable.

• 2:29:23Dave Berke?

  Absolutely. My point is I wasn't kicking around the idea of getting out. I was in full execution. We had looked at houses, like we were in execution. This was merely a detour to get to that end state. And what I'm due back from that deployment in January, I think it is of the following year. And it turns out that the Marine Corps wants to send a guy to go fly F-22s with the Air Force for three years. And they're accepting applications for the F-22 Raptor exchange, which had never been, happened before and never happened since. It was a one-time thing. And the guy, the guy that they picked, you know, was going to go to non-deploying in Nellis and fly the F-22 Raptor. Should probably apply, I guess.

• 2:30:09Dave Berke?

  Seems like a reasonable thing to do, because if they say no, then

• 2:30:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:12Dave Berke?

  I'll just go to go to my MBA, it's all good. Um, and lo and behold, uh, at the end of December, I get the word that I got picked up for this Raptor exchange. Um, and I, you know, I remember calling Whitney like, hey babe.

• 2:30:29Dave Berke?

  Totally, she knows what's up. And I did the standard Dave Berke oversell. Hey, no deploying. We're gonna go to, you know, it's all, here's all the goodness. There's no downside, you know, and she's like, shut up, you know, she's, and she was good with it, you know, it was, it was,

• 2:30:45Dave Berke?

  it was just another one of those things like, I can't say no to this. This is just something that doesn't happen. And you just don't get to, nobody gets to fly the F-22 in the Marine Corps, because the Marine Corps doesn't fly F-22s. Same thing I said when I flew F-16s and Top Gun and all this sort of stuff. So it was just another thing that I just couldn't believe was happening. And I couldn't leave the Marine Corps saying I walked away from that. I just couldn't. And she was totally on board and came home and didn't get back my non-refundable deposit and, uh, moved to Vegas and started flying the F-22 Raptor.

• 2:31:16Jocko Willink?

  Three years up there and then at some point that rolled into the

• 2:31:19Dave Berke?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:31:21Jocko Willink?

  And that rolls into the F-35 at some point?

• 2:31:23Dave Berke?

  So I, I'm flying F-22s.

• 2:31:26Jocko Willink?

  How many people were flying the F-22 at this point?

• 2:31:29Dave Berke?

  So we probably had, I knew at the time what number I was, I think I might've been

• 2:31:37Dave Berke?

  in the, you know, a hundred something, you know, we had two squadrons that were stood up. And, you know, and it was starting to pick up the pace. It was early 2008. So the, the Raptor was just starting to get its legs underneath it. It started building more and it was starting to become a thing. And the Marine Corps had this idea that they're gonna, they're gonna build this new stealth airplane called the F-35 and they're gonna get it. And they wanted somebody to go to the Air Force to learn all, the airplanes are really similar. They said, go steal all their experience and all the pain that they've gone through to, to stand up this thing. And then you're gonna bring it back to the Marine Corps. So the deal was this F-22 gig was, it was really high probability I was gonna go right from the F-22 to the F-35 and command the first operational squadron. And lo and behold, man, that's exactly what happened. We went to Tyndall, we lived in Tyndall for three months when I went through training.

• 2:32:22Dave Berke?

  And that was awesome. We're living on the beach in Florida for three months. I get trained in the Raptor. We move out to Vegas, lived there for three plus years, started a family. My first two kids were born in Las Vegas. We're, we're killing it, man. I mean, it was awesome. And as I'm getting ready to leave Vegas, I get selected to command the first operational. There was a guy there before. They didn't have airplanes. They had a guy. There was another CO before me, but I was gonna go out there and accept and start flying the first F-35s in the Marine Corps. I show up and this poor guy was selected to do the same thing. You know, two years prior, a great dude, but he, you know, we'd stayed in touch and I, we're always in contact and helping him stand up with everything. And, and I get there, Jocko, I'm there, I think, two days and the first airplane showed up.

• 2:33:07Dave Berke?

  I'm like, what's the, what's the big deal? He spent two years, didn't see a single airplane.

• 2:33:12Jocko Willink?

  Working, setting up all this paperwork, grinding, doing all this administrative stuff to prep. He gets no airplanes. You show up, two days later, boom.

• 2:33:19Dave Berke?

  Dude, the amount of work that him and his guys went through to stand up the squadron. I literally showed up at work and the next day, the first airplane landed.

• 2:33:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's my new nickname for you.

• 2:33:28Dave Berke?

  Like, this really isn't that hard, man. What's the big deal? And, and he, I did a turnover and he left and started flying F-35s.

• 2:33:38Dave Berke?

  And, you know, that's a whole part of my career. We could spend hours on that, but I flew the Raptor, which was an amazing airplane. And I flew the F-35, which was this amazing airplane. And I, and I got to totally be relevant in aviation. I had sort of exhausted. I did all the things I wanted to do in a Hornet. I, I loved that airplane. I did Top Gun. I kinda had reached all the things. And we talked about this too. When, when you leave Top Gun, you're never gonna be that good ever again. So it's just a matter of how slow you can make the process of getting worse. It's just how can you slow it down to be as good as you can, knowing that you will never be as good as you were there. Cause you're just, you're never gonna get the reps again, ever. You're just never gonna get it.

• 2:34:20Dave Berke?

  And so it was just a matter of kinda slowing down that process. And at some point in your mind, like, I don't wanna be in this business if I'm not at the top of my game. When I flew the F-22, I didn't have a job. I didn't, I wasn't, I wasn't the opso of a squadron, which is what I should have been. I just showed up and flew the plane. I had some leadership responsibility in, in the organization.

• 2:34:40Jocko Willink?

  You just showed up, grabbed the keys from someone, take it out on a spin, run it into the ground.

• 2:34:44Dave Berke?

  Write a little report and be like, let's do it again.

• 2:34:46Jocko Willink?

  Bring it back, hand the keys back to the maintenance guys and...

• 2:34:48Dave Berke?

  Yeah. Hey, this thing's broken. Give me another one. It was...

• 2:34:52Jocko Willink?

  Good deal, Dave.

• 2:34:53Dave Berke?

  It was awesome. Yeah. So I did that. Totally great for, for my marriage, my, I was able to combine all these professional interests with great, which you don't get to do in the Marine Corps when there's a war going on. You just don't get to do that. And here I am. And dude, I had, I had no more friends in the Marine Corps, man. Nobody liked me. They're all doing back to back, the back deployments and airplanes are breaking and I'm, I'm living in Vegas, flying the Raptor. All my bros were like, we're done with you, man. We got nothing for you. So, you know, I was just, I almost felt guilty. I did not feel guilty, but I almost did. Yeah. Almost did. And then I go out to, we, we moved to Destin, Florida, you know, or, or Fort Walton Beach. And we lived in Niceville in this awesome house in this great community. And I was the first pilot to ever fly the F-35B operationally

• 2:35:38Dave Berke?

  in the world. Ridiculous. Did that for like two and a half years and it was awesome.

• 2:35:44Jocko Willink?

  And then you, what brought you up to DC?

• 2:35:48Dave Berke?

  Um, so what brought me up to DC? So I was, I was so sure that I was going to leave the Marine Corps after that command tour, the F-35, that I reapplied to Dartmouth, got back in again, got accepted to...

• 2:35:58Jocko Willink?

  Do you have to give them another deposit?

• 2:35:59Dave Berke?

  Um, no. I was, I was smart enough not to pay the deposit because there's a tiny little possibility that wasn't going to work out. Anyway, I did get into Dartmouth again. I was like, babe, I'm going to go to get my MBA. I've always wanted to get my MBA. And, um, I got selected for an academic fellowship where I basically got to go to grad school for a year. I went to, so they sent me to Johns Hopkins University to get my masters. And I basically went to DC and was a civilian for a year. And between those two things, it was another terrible deal. Like, can the Marine Corps like to pay you to go be a full-time student at Johns Hopkins, which, which they did. Um, so we moved up to DC and I went to Johns Hopkins to get my masters.

• 2:36:41Jocko Willink?

  And then the next thing they offered you was to go back and...

• 2:36:45Dave Berke?

  Yeah, so from there, the payback of that good deal was to go to the Pentagon, which was totally a reasonable thing. I had post-command, I'd been to school, I certainly couldn't complain about how tough my life was in the Marine Corps since, you know, the last eight years or whatever it was. And I just went, basically did a desk job in the Pentagon, and worked for, in the Joint Staff, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just working some project. It wasn't all that exciting. It was, I learned a bunch, but it was just kind of a, kind of a mad job. I was, you know, very nine-to-five strict hours, don't take work home, no BlackBerry, no real responsibility, pretty chill life. Life was pretty good. I selected, I picked up Colonel while I was there. The end of 2015,

• 2:37:28Dave Berke?

  I was selected for Colonel, and in the summer of 2016, I selected for Command, again, as a Colonel this time, to Command in F-35 Squadron. But, I didn't want to do that. I don't know how this is going to come across to the people listening, and what a terrible deal it was the Marine Corps asking me to be a Colonel and go fly F-35s again. And I'm not, I'm not, I don't want this to come across that I was complaining, but what I, the one thing that I, in all those great deals, and dude, they were great deals, the thing that I was missing the most, was that I always kind of felt like I had one foot in and one foot

• 2:38:08Dave Berke?

  out. They were these non-deploying jobs, the Air Force Exchange, the F-35 job was kind of standing up a squadron, we weren't prepping for anything, and I loved it, but I could feel, sort of underneath the surface, like a lack of investment. I could tell I just wasn't, I didn't have to be 100% pot committed, because there was no, "We're going to go to deploy, we're going to go to..." There was no thing that was going to happen, and I think one of the healthiest things about being in the Marine Corps, you're always prepping for something. So even the crappy stuff you don't want to do, you know, "Hey, we got to do this because the end state is this." And I was missing that, and it sort of, over time, started to erode a little bit, that I just, I was catching myself...

• 2:38:55Dave Berke?

  I don't know, a little slack in the line, to be honest with you. To be really blunt, I didn't have to bring my A-game every day. I just didn't. I could do the things that I was doing, certainly in an airplane, because there was just an element that there was no outcome to what I was preparing for. And I started to kind of find other interests. Like, school became really interesting to me. I did that year, and so I continued my education at Johns Hopkins and started working towards my MBA, because I needed something or wanted something else. And once you kind of catch in your mind that the Marine Corps and what they're asking you to do, I was going to go back to a training squadron. I wanted to go to be an operational commander with operational units that are preparing to go something. I wasn't going to get to do that. I was going to go back to a training environment. I caught myself

• 2:39:39Dave Berke?

  losing the thing that was the most passionate about the Marine Corps and seeing it's more of like, okay, three years here, this will get me to this retirement and this amount of money. And it was just starting to become a little too professional and not enough of a passion. And I don't mean to say I was going to, needed to feel like a 21-year-old again. You don't need to recreate it like that. But my wife actually sat me down, we were talking, and she just kind of looked at me and was like, dude, you're not going to be happy doing this. It was really clear to her, I think even more clear than it was for me. It's hard to come across as ungrateful, but I

• 2:40:15Dave Berke?

  I could, I was not going to be good at that job, because there was something that was missing. It was something that I didn't, there was nothing that I, about it, that it made me feel passionate about doing it. So, no joke, man, last year, August, I basically told her I declined command, I declined promotion, and I put in for retirement all the same day. And that was a big move, man. It was a big move.

• 2:40:39Jocko Willink?

  That created a little splash out there in the world of the Marine Corps.

• 2:40:43Dave Berke?

  Yeah, maybe. It was, it didn't, it surprised everybody but my wife, obviously. She was totally got it. And I knew it was the right thing. My closest buddies, I mean, I talked to my bros, my tight, my bros, those guys understood. But, yeah, it was a big move. And I was turning down what by a whole, by all rights, was a really good, great deal. Another great deal.

• 2:41:03Jocko Willink?

  No doubt about it. And then at some point, you show up at a different kind of event. In Virginia with Leif and I working with a company for our company, Echelon Front. We're doing a leadership training for a company and you decide you're gonna come down and check it out. Leif said, "Come on down and check this out. See what you think of this."

• 2:41:27Dave Berke?

  Yeah. So Leif had talked to me a couple of years ago when I was leaving that F-35 drop before I went up to DC. And he's like, "Hey, man. Jocko and I are doing this thing. It's gonna be awesome. We'd love to, you know, talk to you about it." I'm like, "Hey, man, I'm all in on this other gig. I'm going to school. I'm going to the Marine Corps." We stayed in touch. I mean, Leif was a buddy. I mean, he was a guy that I appreciated the times that we reconnected here and there. And I certainly appreciated the call, but it just really wasn't in the calculus. I wasn't really, I wasn't there. So when I told him, "Hey, man, I dropped my letter. I'm getting out."

• 2:42:04Dave Berke?

  And like I said, Leif isn't always the easiest guy to get ahold of right away to talk sometimes. He's got a lot on his plate. He's a busy guy. And he texted me back right then. I'm on the bus leaving the Pentagon. He's like, "Hey, do you have time to talk right now?" "Yeah, I do." So he calls me and we talk for, I mean, probably a solid 45 minutes to an hour. And he's like, "Hey, Jocko and I are gonna be up in Vienna here in a couple of weeks. Why don't you come out for the day?" I'm like, "Okay, right on." And he gave me, you know, I was following you guys. I knew what was going on. I was seeing what you're doing. Things were blowing up. I was certainly bragging on my buddies, Leif and Jocko, to anybody that would listen to me about it. And I watched you, you know, you and Leif give this presentation up there in Vienna to this group. And, um, dude.

• 2:42:52Jocko Willink?

  You were, uh...

• 2:42:52Dave Berke?

  It was awesome, man.

• 2:42:53Jocko Willink?

  The smile on your face when we, you know, we got done that first day and we sat down with you, you were in. You're like, "I am in. I wanna do this. This is awesome." You were pumped and I think that was, you know, and then, and then actually we did, I brought you up and we did an event with another company.

• 2:43:14Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:14Jocko Willink?

  And that you're now involved with for a long-term and even then, you know, cause then, cause then for us, you know, I wanted to see what you were gonna do and see how you were gonna do it. And man, I was like... I don't know, you gave your first two paragraphs of talking, you know, your first two minutes of of explaining something. I was like, okay, cool. I'm good. And I was, you know, just everything that we talk about all the time, you know, that's in the book and hearing you describe things from the book, but with your view on it and your angle. And it's, it's, it's refreshing to me. And also I'm just, I mean, I'm even learning, right? So I'm hearing a different angle. And like I talk about with,

• 2:43:55Jocko Willink?

  with everything, like we just talked about with, with flying at Top Gun, or like it isn't jujitsu, or like it is on the battlefield. The more different angles you can see something from, the better you're going to get at it. And so here I am listening to you going, oh, there's another angle. Yep, here we go. So that was awesome. And it was also the first time, you know, with JP, same thing, you know, I, I, I listened to JP. It was like the first time JP came with me and he was just sitting in the back, like what you did the first time he was sitting in the back. And, and I said, hey, man, come, come up, you know, when, when I do this Q and A, answer some questions. And, you know, I'm thinking, hey, if something goes sideways, I'll just be able to cover for him. No big deal. You know, somebody asked a question and JP kind of gives me a look like, hey, I'll answer this.

• 2:44:35Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, okay, you know, go ahead and I'll just cover for you. He just gives an awesome answer. I'm like, okay, I'll sit down now. And it's the same thing with you. I was like, you know, you're thinking, okay, where's he going to go with this? Well, this is a tough question or whatever. And boom, here you go, you know, fire for effect. And, and both those two events happened really close together for me. And for, for me, it was, and I actually called Leif, I think it was the next day, or it might've been that evening. And I said, hey, Leif, you know, we're good to go. Like, we are not going to have to do all of this ourselves. Because Dave and JP can do this. They get it. They can, they can do it. And which was,

• 2:45:15Jocko Willink?

  you know, everybody in their own, I want to think it's arrogance, but it's, it's just, you don't see it. And so you kind of think, how is, and you know what it's like, when you're in command of something, that's one of the really hard things to do is let go, you know? And Leif's talked about this all the time, you know, when I'd be watching him roll out on, out the gate for his first mission. I'd done all kinds of missions like that. Here he's going out on his first one that he's in charge of and you're thinking, man, I should just go, I want to go, I want to go. And then, you know, two hours he comes back and you're like high five and then you go, cool. I don't have to be the guy that goes every time. And so when, when I saw you, when I saw JP and I was like, this is awesome. And I called Leif and said, we are going to be good to go. Other guys, they can do this. They can bring the same message. They can bring the same passion and power and knowledge.

• 2:46:00Jocko Willink?

  And that was very, very, you know, refreshing to me. And bottom line is the experiences are the same. I mean, they're not exactly the same. But the, the experience in Ramadi is the same. And then the experience that we had throughout our military career. And now you get to see what it's like interacting with businesses and you see all those similarities. So that was a, that was a big day. And so in case I haven't made this clear yet, Dave now is with us, part of the Echelon Front team. And doing what we do, helping businesses with their leadership in their companies. So it's awesome. It's awesome having you on.

• 2:46:39Dave Berke?

  It's huge for me. I told you, I left, you know, I left the Marine Corps. I'm like, ah, there's something missing and I can't. I can't stay a Marine because there's something missing. Well, you leave the Marine Corps, like, how in the hell am I going to recreate that thing that I'm looking for? Not in the military. That's all I know is that's the place. And that was my biggest, my biggest fear was I'm just going to go like, go to work, you know? Go do something that I, so I was worried. I got to find something. And that's part of the reason why that first gig with you guys in the back was like, holy cow, man. You've, you've got to be kidding me. It's all those things you just discussed, all those things I spent my whole life living and breathing and learning.

• 2:47:21Dave Berke?

  And then it's with people like Leif and Jocko from, we're going to do this together? Yeah. So good deal, Dave? Are you kidding me? Yeah, dude.

• 2:47:33Dave Berke?

  I, I wasn't on monster.com searching for employment opportunities. Leif called me, he said, come to Vienna. I'm like, okay. My head was a million miles away, man. I'm just working through paperwork to drop my letter out to leave the Marine Corps, like very hastily with no, no plan B. There was no, I'm leaving to do this. You can ask Whitney, like there was zero conversation about what I'm going to do. And I came back from that, I'm like, have a seat. Here's the plan. And it, dude, it was instantaneous for me. It was instantaneous. And then to be able to share that message and believe it and have all those feelings a- a- in a totally different way and to work with you guys.

• 2:48:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's cool too, because you get that kind of, uh, for you, Top Gun, for me, working in the training command, where it's like, like what I already talked about. You, you have this experience and when I was getting out, I was saying, what am I gonna do with this thing? What am I gonna do with that? I got all this knowledge and I thought, okay, well, I guess I'll put it in a cruise box over here, lock it up and it'll, it'll, it'll fade away and turn into dust. But when you realize that you can take what you learned and you can, you can apply it to all these, you know, civilian, civilians and civilian companies, it's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty damn good feeling to, to have. And to be able to go, go out and do it on a regular basis. And one of the best things about it is you get to see the improvement.

• 2:48:55Jocko Willink?

  You get to see teams and again, it's kinda like when you show up and you see the leadership issues you're having, it's like you're seeing, you, you know what the future is. You know how to fix it and you just go, this is gonna be fun. And you get to see these people grow and learn and, and improve and get better. And if they're already good, you get to see them become awesome. If they're not doing great, you get to see them improve their position and then move in that direction. So it's definitely rewarding from that aspect. I know you've already seen that.

• 2:49:23Dave Berke?

  Yeah, without a doubt. And it, you know, that book and, and the lessons and you talked to me, you know, the title of the book is how US Navy SEALs lead and win. You know, I'm top, my life is what I learned mil- it's from Top Gun in the Marine Corps. It just so happens, like we said, it's exactly the same. I have my own long list of my personal experiences with those things, but I was telling you the other day, like the concepts, it's identical. And so there's no like big leap in my mind, like, oh, how am I gonna get there from here? How am I gonna embrace this? It's, oh yeah, oh my God, that's exactly what I've been doing for the last 23 years. Only my story is this, this and this, and this is my view of that. So, uh, again, man, it was just, it was so easy to just see it and go, this is, this is legit. I am, I'm all, I want in, I want in right now.

• 2:50:08Dave Berke?

  Like, hey, slow down, like, no, a hundred percent. I don't want, I don't wanna go look for, like, this is still, still happening, right? Yeah, it's happening. So try not to oversell it a little bit, but it was, I was all in, uh, five minutes into day one.

• 2:50:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's been, been awesome so far. And speaking of Echelon Front.

• 2:50:25Jocko Willink?

  If you want to have us come work with your company or with your team or whatever, you can, you can email [email protected].

• 2:50:36Jocko Willink?

  If you want us to speak for an event, don't contact a speakers bureau. Contact [email protected]. You'll find us there. Um, also, we have the muster coming up. Speaking of Echelon Front, the muster, number 002. It's going to be in New York City, by the way. Dave will be there. He's going to do a little presentation. Cause you know what? He's going to do a presentation. He's going to, you can do about the Oodaloop.

• 2:51:08Dave Berke?

  I can. A lot of questions about the Oodaloop.

• 2:51:11Jocko Willink?

  He's going to do a presentation about the Oodaloop. It's going to be 14 hours.

• 2:51:18Jocko Willink?

  No, he's going to talk, you know, he's going to talk about his,

• 2:51:23Jocko Willink?

  his perspective on a lot of the stuff. And Oodaloop, a lot of times people ask me about the Oodaloop because I do talk about it. And I've, I said a few, you know, a month ago or something, somebody asked me about it. And I said, you know what? I'm going to, I'm going to bring you a professional, a professional with that specific information. So Dave will be talking. Obviously Leif is going to be there. JP is going to be there clearly. As well, JP is going to be doing a little presentation as well, from his perspective on some things. Echo Charles. You know Echo Charles is going to be there. Will he be doing a presentation?

• 2:51:59Jocko Willink?

  I don't know. Time will tell. I don't know what he would present on. Maybe just present on, you know, we can bring all the intensity and he could do a presentation on cruising.

• 2:52:09Dave Berke?

  Balance things out a little bit.

• 2:52:11Jocko Willink?

  Throw a little balance into that dichotomy right there. And yeah, so muster, May 4th and 5th, New York City, Marriott Grand Marquis. It's an event about leadership. It's tools for leadership. It's about understanding.

• 2:52:28Jocko Willink?

  Understanding leadership and getting those reps in and hearing all the different angles. That's what makes you good at it. Of course, it's live. Of course, there's no backstage. There's no diva green room that we'll be hiding in saying, bring me some green M and M's for my next set. No, that's not happening. We won't be hiding. It's going to be all of us together. We'll be learning, becoming better leaders. We will see you there. Now, as far as this podcast goes, Echo Charles, maybe you could present us at this time with some information on if anybody does want to support this podcast, how they could do it.

• 2:53:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, small presentation.

• 2:53:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, small presentation.

• 2:53:12Speaker 02

  Who was that with the green M and M's? That thing you said with the green, that was somebody, right?

• 2:53:16Jocko Willink?

  David Lee Roth. It's David Lee Roth. And I actually know the story behind this. There's a reason why he did that. They would have a, it's called a, I forget what it's called, but when you go to somewhere, oh, it's called a rider, right? So you get a contract and the contract comes with a rider and says, this is the things that we need. So what David Lee Roth from Van Halen would do is he would say, hey, I want, you know, seven bowls of M and M's with no brown M and M's in them or green or whatever. I think it was brown, but he'd say no brown M and M's. And this sounds like a ridiculous request, right? I mean, who would, who would possibly want that? Blah, blah, blah. Well, David Lee Roth did it for a reason. Why do you think he did it? Can you guess?

• 2:53:59Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:54:00Jocko Willink?

  Can you guess? Because check it out. Think of how simple this is. He's doing a concert one night. He's doing a concert two nights later, do concert three nights after that. So he's on the road, hitting these concert venues and there's all this stuff that has to be set up and all the stuff that lights and sound and soundboards and special effects and ramps and all this stuff's got to be set up and it's got to be set up right. When he would show up, if the seven bowls of M and M's were laid out and there's no brown M and M's in them, he wouldn't have to go and inspect everything because he knew that they were paying attention.

• 2:54:32Jocko Willink?

  And if he got there and it wasn't that way, he knew that these people had an issue with attention to detail. And so now he had to be go and scrutinize and make sure everything was in place the way it was supposed to be. Little lesson learned from David Lee Roth.

• 2:54:45Speaker 02

  It was like a little test.

• 2:54:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, little test, little test.

• 2:54:48Speaker 02

  The M and M's test. Interesting.

• 2:54:52Jocko Willink?

  And, and by the way, that story that I just told, that may be a hundred percent urban myth.

• 2:54:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:54:57Jocko Willink?

  But I, I, no, I heard it from somebody.

• 2:55:00Speaker 02

  I thought.

• 2:55:01Jocko Willink?

  I think it's true. I'm sure somebody, I'm sure our listeners will tell us where that can be referenced.

• 2:55:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. For some reason I thought, I thought it was somebody else and that's just how they were. Or their OCD or something like that. I don't know. But either way, um, hey, you're.

• 2:55:17Speaker 02

  So you think about like, um, the reason you were such a important asset, given your skillset as a forward air controller, that's what it's called, is because essentially you have all this expertise while you're in the air and you can bring all that brain and eyes to the ground. Yeah. That's why you're better than your.

• 2:55:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:38Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 2:55:39Jocko Willink?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 2:55:41Speaker 02

  I didn't really pick up on that till kind of later. I was like, dang, that's pretty advanced.

• 2:55:46Jocko Willink?

  If you think about any, any aspect, I mean, it's like if you, that's why in the corner of a mixed martial arts match, oftentimes there'll be a striking coach, there'll be a jujitsu coach, and there'll be a wrestling coach, you know, they'll have those specific guys in there. And sometimes they'll bring a specific guy in to corner, like, like Dean. Dean has been brought in to corner guys that are going against a specific jujitsu person because they want to get a little bit of that expertise. Same fundamental concept here.

• 2:56:18Jocko Willink?

  Hey, when we started this podcast, I needed somebody that knew how to press record.

• 2:56:24Jocko Willink?

  Boom.

• 2:56:25Speaker 02

  See, same thing, identical.

• 2:56:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, identical. All those years of pressing record and then stop and then record again.

• 2:56:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm kind of like good deal echo in a way, you know, same thing, doing the same thing as Dave really. When it comes down to it. Speaking of doing good things.

• 2:56:46Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:56:48Jocko Willink?

  That was a big like breath like you better say something impactful right now.

• 2:56:53Speaker 02

  Actually.

• 2:56:53Jocko Willink?

  You don't have to say a lot, bro.

• 2:56:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, last one, I felt like I really went deep into the krill oil analogy. The nightclub omega threes.

• 2:57:01Jocko Willink?

  Oh, don't do that again.

• 2:57:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know.

• 2:57:03Jocko Willink?

  For the love of God.

• 2:57:03Speaker 02

  I feel like the mess. That was a good, that was a good analogy. That was a perfect analogy.

• 2:57:09Jocko Willink?

  Excellent. In fact, it was so good, I wouldn't touch it again.

• 2:57:12Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying. You know, there's too much of a good thing. Anyway, if you didn't know what krill oil is, it's a little like what shrimp things.

• 2:57:20Jocko Willink?

  Baby shrimp.

• 2:57:21Speaker 02

  You extract the, the oil and it's good for your joints. The omega threes in there, they're good for your joints. Anyway, in regards to supplementation, which I'm down for now, by the way, I'm a supplement person. Not all supplements, just the key ones during maintenance, whatnot. Anyway, get them from Onnit. That's the best ones. Everyone knows that factually. So if you want a 10% discount on that, go to Onnit.com slash doco.

• 2:57:50Speaker 02

  I want to talk about the sodium in the water situation.

• 2:57:54Jocko Willink?

  I got a feeling we're just gonna hear it over here.

• 2:57:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 2:57:59Jocko Willink?

  So while Dave and I are talking through the podcast, are you just over here just dreaming up just where you're going with this?

• 2:58:06Speaker 02

  When you say echo, how can you support? I'm thinking dang, you, Dave's been controlling all this stuff and going to Top Gun. You've been doing your stuff and I'm watching like sodium in the lake videos. You ever, you ever watch those?

• 2:58:19Jocko Willink?

  You're doing what you have to do.

• 2:58:20Speaker 02

  Doing what I'm doing. Yeah, yeah. So.

• 2:58:25Speaker 02

  That's, um, anyway, the more I watch those, the better analogy I realize it is, you know, with the Amazon click through thing. So people who want to support this podcast, an easy way, click through the website, choco podcast.com. There's little support tab. Click on it. Do your Amazon shopping. Some people are smart when they do this. They're clever. They figured out, which I think I mentioned, or I know I mentioned it a long time ago, but what they do is they click on it. Then they save that URL into their bookmarks.

• 2:58:56Jocko Willink?

  Like this says Amazon. So on my, on my bookmarks bar, it just says Amazon and that's what I did. I'm not even smart and I did that.

• 2:59:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hey man, that's a smart thing to do.

• 2:59:09Jocko Willink?

  Good way to support.

• 2:59:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, good way to support. Before you do your Amazon shopping, click through there and uh, you know, that's a really solid, solid way to support. Uh, small action with a click through, big reaction, big support. There it is. Also, subscribe to YouTube if you're into videos, you like the video version of this podcast or little excerpts. That'll put on there if you don't want to watch necessarily the whole podcast at any given moment. Little excerpt, you can take uh, some value from that also.

• 2:59:42Jocko Willink?

  Shareable.

• 2:59:42Speaker 02

  Shareable, yeah.

• 2:59:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You don't want to share with your buddy, "Hey, I heard you got this situation going on. Just watch this two hour and forty-eight minute podcast and it'll make..." No, people don't have that kind of patience.

• 2:59:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:59:54Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately. Or the time, the time, legitimate time.

• 2:59:57Speaker 02

  It's before they're going to work that day, you know, they can listen to four or five minutes, not two hours.

• 3:00:02Jocko Willink?

  I, I got this guy that's really, you know, treating me bad at work. What should I do? Cool.

• 3:00:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:00:09Jocko Willink?

  This is what you do. Ignore and outperform. Next.

• 3:00:13Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. As opposed to, "Hey, listen to this, you know, episode number, you know, whatever it is, two hours."

• 3:00:20Jocko Willink?

  It's nineteen hours long.

• 3:00:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, can't do it. It's not, it's not realistic. Also, Jocko is a store. It's called Jocko Store. Uh, we got a new design. That's all I'm gonna say about it. Um, so yeah, go in there, jockostore.com. Um, that's a, you know.

• 3:00:35Jocko Willink?

  A new, you mean a new shirt, new t-shirt?

• 3:00:37Speaker 02

  New t-shirt, yeah.

• 3:00:38Jocko Willink?

  A new t-shirt is out at this time.

• 3:00:41Speaker 02

  It is currently, yeah.

• 3:00:42Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 3:00:43Speaker 02

  This was kind of like a, a crowd.

• 3:00:46Jocko Willink?

  Get after it.

• 3:00:49Speaker 02

  This was like a crowd, I wouldn't consider it crowdsourced idea, but you know how?

• 3:00:56Jocko Willink?

  Crowd demanded?

• 3:00:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I was like, hey, you put this on the shirt, put this on the shirt, makes sense, makes sense. So I kind of extrapolated all the ideas that I thought were good. Masked them over the ideas that I heard from you, you thought were good. And boom, there it is, new design, currently.

• 3:01:14Jocko Willink?

  Legit.

• 3:01:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, jocko store.com. Anyway, there's some cool stuff good for, uh, there's stuff for women and rash guards.

• 3:01:25Jocko Willink?

  There's stuff for rash guards?

• 3:01:27Speaker 02

  No, that was the interruption of thought, so like, rash guards, we have a new rash guard.

• 3:01:32Jocko Willink?

  After this one.

• 3:01:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know, it's okay, good. You know how you think like five things at once? And they're all like jockeying to see which ones are gonna come through? Yeah, that's what happened right there. The rash guard thought came in, in one. Anyway, I think I'm gonna put a new rash guard one, um, design out as well. But anyway, rash guards, if you want 19% improvement in performance.

• 3:01:57Jocko Willink?

  All aspects of performance?

• 3:01:59Speaker 02

  All, yeah. Mental, physical, emotional as well.

• 3:02:03Jocko Willink?

  Double blind tested, by the way.

• 3:02:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think like quadruple blind.

• 3:02:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:08Speaker 02

  And not blind tested, all that stuff. Psychological warfare, if you're having weakness in maintaining unmitigated daily discipline in all things, listen to psychological warfare.

• 3:02:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I got, I just got interviewed the other day and it was a, the guy, you know, he set me up with this question, you know, hey, what do you do when you're, you're in a situation where you've got, you know, you want to go to the gym? Or you're, you're supposed to do some hard task for work, or you're trying to do something to improve yourself? And you just, you know, the mindset comes in where you just, you just don't want to do it. You know, what should you think people should do then?

• 3:02:51Jocko Willink?

  And I said, do it anyway.

• 3:02:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:02:55Jocko Willink?

  And then it was all quiet because he thinks I'm gonna give this big explanation. But there is no big explanation. The explanation is, oh, this stuff is hard. Yeah. I can't make that thing easier for you. I cannot make 20 rep squats any easier for you. I can't do it. They're gonna be hard. In fact, they're gonna suck. And I can't make nothing I can do is gonna make it easier for you. You know what you have to do? To do it anyways.

• 3:03:19Speaker 02

  It's kinda like, I told this to Jade, that exact situation, or that thing that you just said, where it's, even if you don't feel like doing it, you still wanna do it and all this stuff. So, but your body's like, oh, it's kinda running on auto. Like, okay, compared to like a video camera, right? Where you put the settings on auto, and it'll, it'll adjust with how it's feeling. And that's how it's gonna handle any situation. The light kinda goes down, it kinda adjusts how it feels, you know? That to deal with this situation. So if you're running on auto and you don't feel like dealing head on with this workout, these squats, you're gonna maneuver around it, just kinda automatically. No, you gotta turn it to manual.

• 3:03:58Jocko Willink?

  Manual.

• 3:03:58Speaker 02

  And be like, I don't care if they're hard squats, easy squats, for what I feel.

• 3:04:02Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna do them.

• 3:04:02Speaker 02

  This is what we're doing, yes, exactly. So it's like a manual.

• 3:04:05Jocko Willink?

  Mind control.

• 3:04:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:06Jocko Willink?

  Just control your own mind.

• 3:04:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:08Jocko Willink?

  We've talked about that before.

• 3:04:09Speaker 02

  Don't do it all like the automatic, cuz your body wants to rest. Really, it wants to rest.

• 3:04:13Jocko Willink?

  Weak.

• 3:04:15Speaker 02

  Your body wants to rest every single day, actually. You gotta turn it from auto to manual.

• 3:04:19Jocko Willink?

  And you can get information like this in Psychological Warfare on iTunes. The artist's name.

• 3:04:27Speaker 02

  Jocko.

• 3:04:27Jocko Willink?

  Is Jocko Willink. The artist, I never thought that I would be, I thought you had to paint something or sculpt something to be an artist.

• 3:04:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:35Jocko Willink?

  I thought that.

• 3:04:36Speaker 02

  I think it's more of a.

• 3:04:37Jocko Willink?

  But now, I put something on iTunes, then they just know you're an artist now.

• 3:04:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04:42Jocko Willink?

  I have to deny that. I'm gonna say they're, they're really stretching the words on that.

• 3:04:46Speaker 02

  But yeah, man, if you're, you know, if you're slipping on the diet, waking up in the morning and you wanna hit snooze, maybe postpone the workout.

• 3:04:57Speaker 02

  And you want, how should I say, like a spot to switch the dial from automatic to manual? That's what it is. So search psychological warfare on iTunes, Jocko Willink. Get after it.

• 3:05:09Jocko Willink?

  It's a war on weakness.

• 3:05:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, big time.

• 3:05:12Jocko Willink?

  You know, when you're clicking through Amazon, by the way, you can get Jocko White Tea there. On Amazon and you know, when you get it, I'm just gonna say this, when you get it, you will see. And I'm gonna give you one word just to kind of what, what do you anticipate? Just, just think about this, deadlift. That's what you're gonna, that's what's gonna come to, come to mind with the Jocko White Tea. And it's gonna be going up a lot. So, and that, by the way, again, quadruple blind, double tested, that you're gonna bring your, you know, minimum, what's the lightest, I think the minimum that you're gonna get deadlifting is 8,000, 8,000 pounds. So get on that.

• 3:05:57Jocko Willink?

  You can also preorder Way of the Warrior Kid. It comes out May 2nd. By the way, it just came out on iTunes as one of the most anticipated books of the spring.

• 3:06:10Speaker 02

  Oh dang.

• 3:06:10Jocko Willink?

  It got listed, right? How, how do you imagine that, right? Kid's book, now all of a sudden we're talking most anticipated book of the spring, which means people are waiting for it and they've ordered it. So if you want it, order it now. Now I'm gonna tell you, there's some people that are not looking forward to this book coming out. They are not anticipating, you know who those people are? Bullies.

• 3:06:33Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 3:06:33Jocko Willink?

  Bullies aren't looking forward to it. I'll tell you who else isn't looking forward to this coming out. Doughnut makers, people that make donuts.

• 3:06:41Speaker 02

  They know the gig is up.

• 3:06:43Jocko Willink?

  Weakness. You know, weakness is like a creature, like a weak creature, like a thing, yeah. He's not looking forward to this book coming out, because all those things are going down, all those things are trembling. Make those things tremble harder. Order Way of the Warrior Kid. For your kid, for your neighbor's kid, and for yourself. You will dig it. Also, Discipline Equals Freedom, The Field Manual. It's coming out October 17th. I know it seems like a long time away, but I'm telling you, you should preorder it now. Why? Because when you preorder it, you will then know that it is coming.

• 3:07:26Jocko Willink?

  And when you know it is coming, you will begin to prepare for it mentally and physically for this book to arrive on your doorstep. You want to be ready mentally and physically because when you get this book, you will have to do certain things, namely get after it. Yeah, that one. Extreme Ownership, of course, the book. You can get it right now. You don't have to wait at all. Not just for you, but for your team, your spouse, your boss, your babysitter, your mother-in-law. You know, she needs a copy of that. She needs it. Takes ownership. So grab her a copy. Just be gentle with it. You don't have to

• 3:08:06Jocko Willink?

  throw it at her, but maybe just, you know, place it on her desk so she can read it because the more people you get in the game and start taking ownership of things, the better your life's gonna be straight up. Now, if that isn't enough of us, you can find us active on the interwebs. Twitter, Instagram, and if you're gonna look at that Facebook app, we're gonna be there as well. Dave is at David Berke. Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. Echo Charles, any closing words?

• 3:08:53Speaker 02

  Uh, I feel like we should talk about the movie Top Gun a little bit, right?

• 3:08:56Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 3:08:57Speaker 02

  Actually, one question, one question. You know how like when you watch Top Gun, right? Of course Maverick, that's your guy, or Goose, that's your guy. Did you like Iceman? Cause he was pretty dope. You know what I'm talking about, right? I do, absolutely. Who doesn't like Iceman? Boom. See? Absolutely.

• 3:09:16Speaker 02

  There it is. Yep.

• 3:09:17Jocko Willink?

  Simple as that?

• 3:09:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:18Jocko Willink?

  That's your one question?

• 3:09:19Speaker 02

  Profound question, yeah. Or, "Did you ever buzz the tower?" You know what I'm saying?

• 3:09:23Dave Berke?

  That never happened.

• 3:09:24Speaker 02

  Is that fake? Is that like, you can't really do that, huh?

• 3:09:26Dave Berke?

  You can't really do that.

• 3:09:27Jocko Willink?

  Well, you could do it, you'd be in a ton of trouble.

• 3:09:29Dave Berke?

  As they say, you can do anything once. You can do that once.

• 3:09:32Speaker 02

  And then what, you're out?

• 3:09:33Dave Berke?

  You're out. But not if you're Maverick.

• 3:09:35Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying?

• 3:09:38Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Dave, man, obviously, thanks Ton for coming on. You got any, uh, you got any closing remarks? And I'm sure we'll do this again. And when you listen to this, you'll think of a bunch of stuff that we should have said on this one. But anything else you want to wrap up with for today?

• 3:09:52Dave Berke?

  Yeah, man. First, thanks. This was awesome. Uh, I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks now. We've been talking about it. I was super fired up to be here and this was, this was awesome. Um, you know, we were talking about it just briefly. Uh, and I mentioned it, you know, my, my wife, obviously. Yeah. I talked about the things that they went through.

• 3:10:11Dave Berke?

  So, my wife and my mom, you know, those are my family. Those are folks that endured to whatever degree that when you're removed, I think when you're on deployment and you do this stuff, it's hard. But it's actually in some ways harder for the people that you leave behind because they don't know what's going on. They're just waiting and wondering and, and dealing with it and they're kind of holding their breath. I remember a story that Whitney told me. When I was deployed, I didn't think about any of this stuff. Um, a buddy of Neil's had come to the house. He was gone and, uh, he couldn't get in the house and he, he was knocking on the window, which was by the front of the house and kind of ringing the doorbell. And it was late at night, like not a time that somebody should be at the door. And she didn't want to answer the door. And she was telling me, and this stuff, you don't think about that stuff until you get back and hear the stories

• 3:10:54Dave Berke?

  because you don't really think about what your family's going through because you're busy and you're doing your thing. And she talked about, the thing that she hated the most was people knocking on the door. Because she was always just sort of a tiny bit paranoid that it was going to be somebody coming, uh, to tell her about me.

• 3:11:12Dave Berke?

  You know, Chris's mom, Kathy Leon, who's someone, I don't even have the words to describe how much I love her and admire her. And it's not just about her loss. She, obviously, she had to answer that call. Well, you know, she had to take that call. On June 20th, 2006, she took that phone call. But that woman has endured the loss of a Marine who sacrificed himself on behalf of the entire country. And my relationship, the irony of all of this is that I would not, I would not have a relationship with Kathy if Chris wasn't killed. And I would give anything to take that day back and bring him home. I would trade any of it. But the goodness that comes out of that, there's always, there is always some goodness.

• 3:11:57Dave Berke?

  If you look for it hard enough, that comes out of all this stuff and the loss and the things that you sacrifice. And I know Kathy certainly is listening. And I never anticipated having a relationship with, with someone like that based on those circumstances. But my relationship with her is really important. And what she has done for the country is really important. And if you look hard enough, in the worst situations, you find something that's good. And my relationship with her is really good. And I would really, it would be wrong for me to go through this whole podcast and talking about all those things without acknowledging that goodness with her. So I wanted to mention that.

• 3:12:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, Dave, obviously, thanks for, thanks for coming on. I know we've been talking about this for a while. And it's great to have you on. And thanks for sharing your story with us, the story of you. A Marine, fighter pilot, a forward air controller, but also a son, a brother, a father, a person. And yeah, thanks for sharing the story of

• 3:13:21Jocko Willink?

  Corporal Chris Leon. A Marine, no doubt.

• 3:13:30Jocko Willink?

  A hero without question.

• 3:13:36Jocko Willink?

  But

• 3:13:39Jocko Willink?

  let us remember, let us always remember that these men,

• 3:13:47Jocko Willink?

  these men we call warriors, these men we call soldiers, these men we call Marines, these men we call heroes.

• 3:14:01Jocko Willink?

  Let us never forget

• 3:14:05Jocko Willink?

  that they're people.

• 3:14:10Jocko Willink?

  Sons and daughters, husbands and wives, and brothers and sisters.

• 3:14:19Jocko Willink?

  And let us not forget that they're, they're not only courageous and vigilant and bold and aggressive and inspiring.

• 3:14:32Jocko Willink?

  But they're also funny

• 3:14:36Jocko Willink?

  and outrageous and flawed like any of us.

• 3:14:43Jocko Willink?

  And that they're loving

• 3:14:48Jocko Willink?

  and loved.

• 3:14:53Jocko Willink?

  And that they're people.

• 3:14:56Jocko Willink?

  People who left behind people.

• 3:15:03Jocko Willink?

  And those that are left behind

• 3:15:07Jocko Willink?

  never forget.

• 3:15:11Jocko Willink?

  Like Chris Leon's mom, Kathy Leon,

• 3:15:16Jocko Willink?

  who wrote a note on his memorial page back in 2008.

• 3:15:28Jocko Willink?

  And she said, "Hi, baby.

• 3:15:32Jocko Willink?

  Another difficult day to face without you here.

• 3:15:38Jocko Willink?

  I never thought that Memorial Day would be in memory of you, my dear, sweet, beautiful son."

• 3:15:52Jocko Willink?

  It's been one year, eleven months, and five days.

• 3:15:59Jocko Willink?

  So close to two years

• 3:16:03Jocko Willink?

  that I cannot bear the thought.

• 3:16:09Jocko Willink?

  We honor you by flying the flag every day and we will place your American Heroes Tribute Banner for all to see tomorrow.

• 3:16:24Jocko Willink?

  Of course, we will cry more tears. And maybe find a smile or laugh as we remember your deep voice. Great smile.

• 3:16:38Jocko Willink?

  Joking sense of humor and the love you showed to us.

• 3:16:48Jocko Willink?

  Our hearts are forever empty and broken without you.

• 3:16:57Jocko Willink?

  Miss you so much and love you more.

• 3:17:03Jocko Willink?

  All our love.

• 3:17:07Jocko Willink?

  Mom and Dad.

• 3:17:21Jocko Willink?

  Remember.

• 3:17:26Jocko Willink?

  Remember Major Henry L. Rodd.

• 3:17:33Jocko Willink?

  Remember Corporal Christopher Leon.

• 3:17:39Jocko Willink?

  Remember those like them who have fallen.

• 3:17:47Jocko Willink?

  Remember them as warriors. Remember them as heroes.

• 3:17:57Jocko Willink?

  But always.

• 3:18:01Jocko Willink?

  Always remember them.

• 3:18:06Jocko Willink?

  As people.

• 3:18:14Jocko Willink?

  Remember them.

• 3:18:22Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jocko.

• 3:18:30Jocko Willink?

  Out.