The Unravelling 4: War Party

After the fall of Saddam’s regime, US forces struggle to provide security as an insurgency takes shape. Jocko’s first tour is action-packed, but ends as Iraq spirals out of control. 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 the Jocko Unravelling Podcast, Episode 4, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. And we are about to pick up the thread of Jocko going to war.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  I want to read something from Tom Rick's book, Fiasco, in the early part, from the earliest part of the invasion, because I want to give people an idea of the fire you were jumping into in September, October 2003. So the war started in March, and the conventional forces, the Iraqis and the resistance in the cities, is precisely the match for the US military that you think it is, and we burned through them. And the 3rd Infantry Division gets up into Baghdad quick, they take the airport, they make their thunder runs through the city, and the regime collapses very rapidly.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  That's in March, in early April. And this passage is referring to a period now, April into May. Quote, "Baghdad was falling apart in front of the eyes of the US military, with buildings being looted and parents afraid to let their children outside, but no one had orders to do anything about it. Looking back several years later, Colonel Allen King, the head of Civil Affairs for 3ID, spoke of April 2003 with a slow, chilled tone of horror in his voice.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  "I got to Baghdad and was told, 'You've got 24 hours to come up with a Phase 4 plan.' On the night of April 8th, Colonel John Sterling, Chief of Staff of 3ID, came to me and said, 'I just got off the phone with the Corps Chief of Staff, and I asked him for the reconstruction plan, and he said there isn't one, so you've got 24 hours to come up with one.' King was stunned. He had been asking for months for just such a plan, and had been told that when the time came, he would be given it." Lacking clear orders about what to do once in Baghdad, the 3rd Infantry Division more or less stayed in place in the capital. You didn't find many dismounted patrols with 3ID, recalled Jay Garner, a retired Army general and not one to lightly criticize his old peers.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  They kind of stayed with their platforms, that is, their tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. On April 6th, Lieutenant Douglas Hoyt, a platoon leader with 3ID, saw looters for the first time. "I remembered looking through the sights on my tank at people and trying to determine if they were hostile or not," he recalled later. He didn't stop them. It was not our mission at the time. The Division's official after-action review states that it had no orders to do anything else. "3rd Infantry Division transitioned into Phase IV SASSO, that's Security and Stability Ops, with no plan from higher HQ," it reported. There was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees,

• 3:05Speaker 01

  and ensuring that the judicial system was operational. The result was a power and authority vacuum created by our failure to immediately replace key government institutions. The President announced that our national goal was regime change. This is still reading from the 3ID report. "That our national goal was regime change, yet there was no timely plan prepared for the obvious consequences of regime change. As a matter of law and fact, the United States is an occupying power in Iraq, even if we characterize ourselves as liberators. Because of the refusal to acknowledge our occupier status, commanders did not initially take measures available to occupying powers, such as imposing curfews, directing civilians to return to work,

• 3:49Speaker 01

  and controlling the local government and populace. The failure to act after we displaced the regime created a power vacuum which others immediately tried to fill."

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Now, I know that war is a very confusing thing. And nobody has a plan after the first punch gets thrown in the fight. But there were some decisions made in the earliest days of this war that I find pretty inexplicable. Specifically because they went against the advice of the military and the intelligence establishment. And they were made seemingly for ideological and political reasons. El-Paul Bremer, he was the civilian who was sent over to head the Coalition Provisional Authority, the CPA, the civilian authority structure in Iraq.

• 4:46Jocko Willink?

  Let's just talk about what you just read before we even jump into the rest of this. So, this is, you know, clearly massively short sighted. And there's a couple of reasons why I think that that can unfold the way it did. And I'm guessing when you get, when you execute this thing that you think could take a long time, and all of a sudden you've, you know, you're, you're, you got to the top of the mountain, right? You achieved your goal, and yet you did it so quickly that you don't know what to do next.

• 5:28Jocko Willink?

  And that is absolutely, I mean, when you read that, it's, there's no excuse for it. Like, there's no excuse to think that even, even if you thought, even if you thought, like, let's, let's say your thought is going into this thing, hey, you know what? The, the people have been waiting for this, we'll get Saddam out of there, and the people will be ready to jump for joy, even if that's your assessment.

• 5:58Jocko Willink?

  You have to understand human nature well enough to recognize that what that looks like, if you don't control it, will not be a pretty thing. That's you to not be able to recognize that is a massive shortfall and it is very short sighted. So, and again, when you, when you look at a, you know, a division commander, or

• 6:35Jocko Willink?

  a brigade commander, division commander, like, yeah, they're thinking about it. But believe me, they're thinking about like how we're going to get up there and what's going to happen to my troops? And what am I doing with my dead and wounded and that they got some pretty heavy thoughts.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:46Jocko Willink?

  There has to be a commander, you know, the next, the next echelon of command is should be saying, okay, cool. I got these guys out there on the front lines that are going to win this thing for me. Here's what we're going to do next. You know, I used to tell the way I used to break down roles and responsibilities for a SEAL platoon. I'd say, look, the, the enlisted leadership is handling the tactical problem that we got going on right now. The officer is looking to figure out what the next move is going to be. So what we have in this, you know, you expand that out several levels of the chain of command. And what you get is you got, you know, division commanders, brigade commanders, battalion commanders that are pushing up, that are there in this tactical situation to win. The next echelon up the chain of command should be going, okay, what's our next move going to be?

• 7:31Jocko Willink?

  And that's what, that's the way things are supposed to work. And clearly there, this is a, this is a disaster and you can see it start to unfold.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  The, uh, the civilians, civilian leadership structure, the DOD and, um, in the administration, they didn't really expect there to be a reconstruction problem. They did expect the Iraqis to throw flowers at our feet and thank us for liberating them. And then we can look around and say, okay, now that Saddam's out of power, you know, who are some of the good guys that we've got in here? You, you can run this ministry now, right?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And so they didn't push anybody to create a phase four plan for what to do after we defeated the Iraqi regime. Right? In the military, At least at the time, you know, they want to go in there and kick some ass. They're not, they don't want to have to deal with the phase four plan if they don't have to. And if the civilians are not pushing them on it, they're happy, they were happy unfortunately to, to assume that the civilians were taking care of that, that they were going to send in a guy like Bremer. And he was working with Chalabi and the other people, the provisional government that we had in place. And that, that they had a plan for that.

• 8:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And let me say something else here. When you're, when you're in that moment, right? If you take, if you take this, if you take early on in my combat career, going to Iraq, what we were worried about out of the gate was how are we going to do an assault? That's what we're worried about. Hey, look, after the assault, we do something called sensitive site exploitation, where we search and we, you know, we search everything and we look for everything. We didn't rehearse that because you know what? Once we get the targets secure, it doesn't really matter, right? Everything's going to be fine. Like, we'll figure it out. We want, you want us to look around, you want us to look for computers? You want us to look for any intel that we might find? Cool. We'll figure it out. What we're worried about is taking down the target. That's what we're worried about.

• 9:27Jocko Willink?

  This is the exact same story, right? What the divisional commanders, what the guys on the ground are worried about is, look, we need to get this target secure. And once they, they figure, once we get the targets secure, cool. We'll have some time, we'll be able to breathe, we'll be able to, hey, it looks like people get a little crazy. Okay, let's, let's, let's get a grip on this thing, let's settle this thing down. And we, you know, let's get this sorted out. So even to say, if I'm going to make another excuse, or if I'm going to make an excuse, my excuse would be, hey, look, we were focused on getting the targets secure. And that's okay. Like, I get it. And yeah, my upper echelon should have been like, okay, you know what? Hey, once you get the targets here, don't worry, we got, we got another group over here.

• 10:11Jocko Willink?

  We're going to come in and these are the important things that we're going to follow. And this is the structure we're going to set up. And here's how we're going to keep civilians from doing bad things. And here's why we're going to get civilians to do good things. And here's the money we're going to pump into the economy. And here's how we're going to transition, you know, businesses that we set up into businesses that the civilian sector is leading. I mean, this is all stuff that you could kind of map out.

• 10:33Jocko Willink?

  But then you get to a point where you've got targets secure and it's not the way you want it to be. It's not really secure. And so then what you have to do is you have to take action, right? So, so this is a good lesson learned. And look, it's easy. Sit here hindsight 2020. I would have done this. I would have done that. No, I'm not going to sit here and say that. What I am saying is, as a leader, as a leader listening to this, you should be thinking, okay, I accomplished my mission. The mission I was focused on, I accomplished. Immediately, you have to say, what is my next mission? Where is this going? What has changed since I got done? Because if you think the battlefield doesn't change, and this goes

• 11:16Jocko Willink?

  for business, this goes for life, this goes for everything. If you think that things aren't gonna change, you're wrong. And part of the whole Oodle Loop, right? The Oodle Loop is, you know, you, you observe, orient, decide, and act. So you have to do that. This isn't just a cool thing to say, like you have to do it. And when you look around and you see things starting to deteriorate rapidly.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Rapidly too.

• 11:38Jocko Willink?

  Then, you, you have to decide to do something else and then you need to act. I will also say this, and you, you, the way you say this, the way you say these things, you know, you make it very clear, very rapidly. Like you just said that, you just said rapidly deteriorating. And you asked me in between, before we recorded, you're like, did you know what was going on? And like, yeah, I knew. It did not appear, the trajectory, the downward trajectory wasn't as clear as it is right now.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:13Jocko Willink?

  As we're reading through it. I'm telling you.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I meant specifically the explosion of looting when it happened. I mean, it, it, that happened at a, at a wide scale in Baghdad, almost immediately after we took that city. So that people were tearing pipes out of the walls of the ministries and things. It happened so rapidly that it would have been unreasonable to expect our forces to know how to deal with that. I mean, Bremer, Paul Bremer, the civilian who was in charge by that time in May, he told the military to start shooting the looters. And the military told him, we're not shooting looters. What are you talking about? And somebody leaked it to the press. And you know, that caused the effect that you, you would think. But the military wasn't, we weren't equipped to deal with it yet. I think we had two light brigades

• 13:02Speaker 01

  in Baghdad at the time when the looting started. And so these guys are in a city of five or six million people, two brigades, basically, at the time. And we don't know what's gonna be happening, you know, at that moment.

• 13:15Jocko Willink?

  There's another thing that comes into play here, and it's...

• 13:21Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes I talk about, hey, if you're a leader, and you can, and you can patrol, you know, five kilometers an hour with a 100-pound rucksack on, and so you then set up your, your plan, so that the whole platoon's gonna do five kilometers an hour with a 100-pound rucksack, you get out in the field, they can't do it. So it's a little bit of a blind spot for you to think that other people can do what you're gonna do. There's a similar, a similar blind side. I just was talking to a client the other day, where

• 13:55Jocko Willink?

  the blind spot is, you're looking at something from a benevolent position, where you think, oh, my leaders, they're not gonna worry about, you know, their paycheck. They're gonna take care of their people. That's a blind spot. Because just because you're not worried about your paycheck, and you've got a good amount of money saved, and you're gonna do okay, doesn't mean some of your frontline leaders aren't gonna be like, wait a second, I would rather fire every single one of my people and still get a paycheck. So there becomes a blind spot, because you don't have the same values that your leaders do. You don't have the same, the first example is, hey, I don't have the same physical capabilities, that, or my team doesn't have the same physical capabilities as I do, so that's a little

• 14:38Jocko Willink?

  blind spot. The second one is, my subordinates don't have the same value structure, so they might make these decisions different than I would. And if I don't know that, then I just expect everyone to do the right thing. Well, guess what? We have here, here's the culture. These Americans are going, hey, once we've liberated them, they're gonna be excited to start their entrepreneurial venture that they've been thinking about.

• 15:02Jocko Willink?

  And they are, it's a blind spot.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:06Jocko Willink?

  The blind spot is when you, when you get rid of the government, the first people that are going to take action are the people that are looking to steal, rob, you know, murder, rape, to exude their power over the situation. And the friendly benevolent person that would have been excited to open a shop isn't going to even make, you know, is going to make a half a step in that direction and then lock their doors and say, I'm not going outside, it's mayhem.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  The military agreed to go in with fewer troops than they wanted to go in with at the beginning because they were under the impression that they were going to be reinforced by First Cavalry relatively rapidly. In April, I want to say April 21st, it's at the last moment, it's a week or two before First Cav is supposed to deploy. Brumsfeld makes a call, decides that they're not needed. And so they don't go. And rather than having First Armored Division come in and overlap with the 3rd Infantry Division for a while as primary Baghdad force, they decide that once 3AD gets there, or 1AD gets there, 3AD is just going home.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And so that amounts to no reinforcements at all.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  And then the military believed that we were going to have access to a good portion of the Iraq.

• 16:30Jocko Willink?

  Which, by the way, just, just throwing it out there, right? Like, you know, the difference between the, the, the, the bad general and the good general is the, the good general knows how and when to employ his reinforcements and he holds it till the last minute, like he doesn't commit those reinforcements. When you go, I don't need reinforcements, that's not good.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  And, and to give, that's, I think, First Cav is 17,000, 18,000 men. I mean, that's a serious force to get pulled, especially when the military at this point is deployed in Iraq with the expectation that it's going to be showing up. They're also deployed with the expectation that they're going to have access to some of the Iraqi security forces and police, that they're already actively getting together. Major General Mattis at the time is working with a bunch of generals, you know, he's got that famous quote to the Iraqi generals that if any of you mess with me, I'll kill you all. You know, we have a bunch of military guys and civilian staff at CENTCOM who are working with these Iraqi generals who are like, yeah, look, I got a bunch of people

• 17:36Speaker 01

  that are loyal to me, who will do what I say, they're good boys, they're not crazy, let's, let's get this thing together and we can provide security in the areas that, you know, we're used to. And Bremer does a few things, again, Bremer's the civilian authority that's sent over by the Bush administration. The Defense Department, the Bush administration at this point are not getting along well with the military. The military feels like they're not being listened to at the high levels.

• 18:05Jocko Willink?

  Relationships are the most important thing, you know, relationships are more important than the chain of command. And when you have two organizations that need to work, that need to work together and you don't have relationships, this is a disaster.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  And it gets worse. So, they, they're having trouble, the, the guy who's in charge as civilian authority at first is a retired general, Jay Garner, right? And he's got a pretty decent rapport with the generals, but they feel like he isn't pursuing debaptification, some other things, some of the administration's priorities that he's not pursuing aggressively enough. So after a month, they call him, tell him he's coming home, this new guy, Bremer's coming in. I kid you not, this sounds like something out of, out of an Onion article, Paul Bremer had to get a two-week crash course in Middle Eastern politics before they sent him over to be the head civilian in charge of the Iraqi occupation. Okay? And so he shows up with a list of things that he's gonna do. On day one...

• 18:59Speaker 01

  He tells everybody that he is going to institute a radical debathification process, right? Anybody who was rank of Colonel and above in the military, or any equivalent of that in the civilian sector, in a country like Iraq where a lot of the industries are state-owned, a lot of the, you know, the corporations are state-owned, anybody who was in the top three or four layers of management of any of those industries, any of the government ministries, the military, all this, they're not only fired, their pensions are cut, and they're not allowed to work in public life, in the public sector ever again.

• 19:35Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so let me jump in. Here's what is awful about this, the way this is unfolding. It happens all the time in the military, and it happens in civilian sector too, that someone with not a lot of experience in a certain arena, for whatever reason, gets put in charge of that arena. This is, this is a, this happens. Is it, is an ideal case? No, it's not an ideal case. It happens all the time. You know, the US military is set up in such a way that an officer who got commissioned

• 20:16Jocko Willink?

  after 13 weeks of officer candidate school is gonna show up on a ship and be, you know, in a department, he's gonna be a platoon commander in the Marine Corps or the Army, I mean, he is going to be in charge of people that have vastly more experience than he does. It happens in the civilian sector as well. A kid goes to school for civil engineering and then reports to a job site on a big construction project and he's, he's quote, "in charge of" these construction guys, these foremen that have been working for 27 years. It's okay.

• 20:56Jocko Willink?

  These things work as long as the leader that's stepping in is humble enough to say, "I don't know everything. Let me sit back. Please educate me. Please give me your advice on what you think we should do. Please, let's formulate a plan together that makes sense to everyone in this room. I'm here to support what you guys need."

• 21:20Jocko Willink?

  Somebody that comes into a situation, and I don't care if it's something as big than a platoon, but it's something as big as this situation. I'm telling you right now, if you put a good leader in that situation without, with no experience and with no two-week course. If you put the right person in there, they would have, they would have squared this away. I'm telling you that right now. I know this to be, I know this to be true. Like the times when I was telling you on another podcast, like if I tell you something's 100%, I'm telling you, you put a good leader with a good humble leader into very challenging situations, it'll be okay.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I don't think there's any question that good leadership could have changed the whole, at this point, could have changed the whole trajectory of the war.

• 22:07Jocko Willink?

  So you get a guy rolling in there who is not humble.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Here's what actually happened, by the way. He comes in with this debatification order, a radical one. Jay Garner, the retired Army General who had been, who he's replacing says, "Oh, you, you can't do this. This is, this is going to put 30,000 to 50,000 highly influential people, the people who know how to run the industries, the ministries, all the managers, doctors, professors, you're going to put them all out on the street and tell them they can never work in public life again." And Bremer says, "I'm not here to get your advice on this. This is what I'm doing." He says, "Okay, well, I need backup." He goes and gets the CIA station chief. He says, "Come talk to this guy with me." They go in and say, "Oh, you definitely can't do this." He said, "I'm not having a discussion about it. This is what I'm doing." Okay? That's what happened.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  A week later, he decides that he's going to disband the entire Iraqi military, the entire Interior Ministry, which is, you know, the entire police force, internal security forces. You're talking about, you know, 385,000 armed men.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  From the Iraqi military.

• 23:16Jocko Willink?

  Military age fighting males.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Military age fighting males who are now out of work. Who, our military guys, Mattis talks about this, some of the other generals talk about this. We were working with them. We had, we had a list of names of Iraqi soldiers, 125,000 names of people who were ready to fall right back into ranks and assist in reconstruction, assist in security operations in different parts of the country. And we didn't have enough soldiers to do that on our own. Right? So we sent.

• 23:44Jocko Willink?

  Not to mention the little things like, we don't speak the language. We don't know the country. We don't know the culture, like all those things.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  He put half a million men, influential people, all Sunni by the way, for the most part, because that's just how it played out. That's what the previous regime was, on the street and made them pariahs in society overnight. A lot of these are armed, fighting age men. He's ignoring everybody's advice when he does these things. And he's doing it for, you know, the people who are kind of pushing to do this. Douglas Feig back in, back in Washington, Paul Wolfowitz. These are guys who's, they lost ancestors in the Holocaust. And they're looking at this as Saddam Hussein is Hitler. This is denazification. You're not going to let Nazis continue to work in the government of, but if they'd done a little more history, they would find out that we tried that in Germany.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And by 1949, 1950, we were like, you know, we're going to have to moderate this a little bit because these are the only people that have worked in government for the last 10 years, 12 years. And so it got to a point where even then, we were like, all right, you're a member of the Nazi party? What were you, just a junior member? You were a teacher? Okay, fine, you can have your teaching job back. Even then, we had to moderate. But they were coming at this from an ideological perspective. They had an idea in mind of how they were going to run this thing and they were taking advice from nobody. And overnight, you know, we've got hundreds of thousands of young, fighting age men who, in, in, in an honor culture, right? In a culture where a man's ability to take care of his family and be the man, the provider is, it's important everywhere. It's a whole different ballgame over there.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  And the Sunni population now feels that we're coming in there to attack and assault them.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  And we're losing, all of this while we're losing control of the country. While we're starting to see killings and robberies and reprisals and looting on a wide scale. And, uh, and, and those are the conditions under which, against all advice, he's making these decisions. And I mean, a lot of Iraqis and a lot of American soldiers paid for those, for that arrogance. I, I, I believe that. Um, and again, this is a guy of all people that if he should have been listening to the advice of the people on the ground, it should be a guy who had to get a two-week crash course on Middle Eastern. He, he came out of the, you know, he was, he was, uh, he was an ambassador, he was a diplomat for a while, and he was a private sector consultant guy. You know, he worked in just, he was just a business consultant.

• 26:08Jocko Willink?

  Once again, this is why of all traits that a leader needs to have, humility is the most important one, over and over and, and over again. And this is the situation, you can see, it sickens me to revisit this. And you think, um, yeah, you, you, you think all it takes is a little bit of humility and this, this problem would not have happened. And there's another quote, uh, I think it's from Patton, where he says, "The general on the ground is always right." Meaning, look, when you're in the rear, the general on the front is always right, whatever the, whatever the quote is. It's like, yeah, when I show up somewhere and I just think I know better than everybody

• 26:53Jocko Willink?

  else?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  General Franks, who's the commander of all our forces at the time, he, by a lot of reports, can, can hardly be in the same room as this guy. He wants to wring his neck. So the, you got the commanding general of our forces over there and the civilian authority over there, who can hardly be in the same room. And then, another thing that is, is kind of inexplicable happens. Over the course of about a month and a half, the commanding general, General Franks, he retires. And by, I don't wanna, you know, I don't wanna say this, cause I don't know what it, but there are several other officers and civilians who were there at the time, who say that he checked out kinda early, um, mentally.

• 27:33Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Um, and, uh...

• 27:37Speaker 01

  General McKeonan, he was the ground forces commander in charge of Siflick at the time. He gets bounced in June. So after just a couple of months. Several other officers, the head of the army, the chief of staff of the army at the time, he leaves. And to give you an idea of the, their, his relationship to the civilians, the chief of staff of the army retires in June or July and neither Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, nor his deputy Wolfowitz show up to his retirement ceremony. Okay, we're in the middle of the start of a war and that's the relationship that they had. Rumsfeld needs to replace him. He passes over all the three and four star generals in the army and he calls up a guy

• 28:21Speaker 01

  who had retired three years earlier and puts him in charge, which, you know, is fine. He's a, he's a good man by all accounts. He did a fine job, but it gives you an idea of the relationship that civilians have to the military at this point.

• 28:33Jocko Willink?

  And one thing that really is a problem with this is when you have a guy now, so now, so now, when these new military commanders roll in, now the guy that quote, "has the experience on the ground" is Bremer.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:50Jocko Willink?

  And since the new guys coming in, you hope that they have these kind of humble, "hey, what are we doing? Tell me what we need to get done. How can I support the mission here?" And now all that does is exacerbate the problem, the ego problem, because you have humble people that want to help, but you have an ego, an ego-driven person that is just driving this agenda and now doing it with more authority because they have the air quotes, they have the experience on the ground.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  There's a story I remember from this period. It was from May, June in that period. There was an army intelligence officer who had developed some sources and he was working on trying to figure out what the, what the AMOMs were saying in the mosques on Fridays. He wanted to know what, what were they telling the people in the mosques? And so he gets a whole bunch of information. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, some of it's neutral, whatever, and he brings this to the civilian authorities. And they look at it, they're not interested. They say, "That's tactical. Bring it to the army." And so he says, "Okay." So he brings it to the army, and he brings it to a Colonel who's an intelligence officer for, I guess this would be three IED at the time, or rather, one AED at the time. And he looks at it, and he just, you know, in the whole stack

• 30:07Speaker 01

  of intel reports, he finds a couple of the preachers who were kind of making anti-American statements, and he says, "Well, we have to arrest these people." And the guy's like, "Well, look, all of the imams have to talk like that. We need to tell the difference between the ones who are serious and the ones who aren't, right?" And it got to the point where he couldn't get anywhere with the military, and he couldn't get anywhere with the civilian side. So he just stopped bringing these reports in because he figured he was putting his own sources in danger, and he wasn't getting anywhere with the people he was bringing them to. And so he just stopped. And he told all his sources, "Just cut loose. Just forget you knew me. I don't want to get you in trouble," or anything like that. So there's just no good communication going on.

• 30:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And again, if you take a step back, when somebody brings you intel like that, and your first reaction is, "You've got to attack them," when your actual first reaction is, "How can we build a relationship with these people who have influence over the civilian populace?" That's what you ask yourself.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Summer of 2003, we've got hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men on the street. They were cops. They were, you know, they were Iraqi servicemen. They're out of work. A lot of them are already armed. And meanwhile, there is a budding insurgency that's starting to crop up. We don't really know it yet, but by the summer of 2003, they're already paying $500 in operation with a bonus for providing video of killing American soldiers. And these are people who don't have, they don't have income anymore. And a lot of them are pretty angry about it, and they don't need, you know, they don't need a strong Islamist reason to want to go set an IED somewhere at this point. And a lot of them start doing

• 31:44Speaker 01

  it. And they start to pick up over the course of the summer. And you're not there yet.

• 31:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And really, at this point, they were doing a lot of mortar attacks, a lot of potshots, a lot of RPG attacks. The IED thing wasn't, it wasn't quite getting, it was getting started, but it was very, very young in its technological advancements that they were going to make.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And there didn't seem to be any coordination to it. It seemed to be individuals who were kind of...

• 32:17Jocko Willink?

  And I will say that at, you know, now looking back, we see this downward spiral.

• 32:27Jocko Willink?

  We see the beginning, you know, you know, you see really, I wouldn't even say we see the downward spiral looking back. That's, that's, that's, that's giving ourselves, we're giving ourselves too much credit. What you see is, okay, uh, you know, when you see a,

• 32:45Jocko Willink?

  you know, when you look at a, uh, uh, what's it called, a whirlpool. You know what I'm saying? You see like a little bit of movement on the surface. And maybe you notice that it's all moving in the same direction. Maybe you notice there's a little vector point in the middle of that whirlpool. As a little dip, just a little dip. But you can't see like the downward spiral. You don't see the vortex yet. I would say somebody that was really, really paying attention, might've been able to see a little tiny dip. I think to everyone else, to me, to my guys, uh, it was, these things, we weren't connecting them yet. We could barely tell that there was a move, that there was a,

• 33:28Jocko Willink?

  that everyone's moving in the same direction or that there was a movement in the same direction. So it's still not clear. It's very clear looking back. I mean, it's very clear. You know, when you're looking back, you're like, oh yeah. And I remember, I remember when they, um, when they, when they did the dissolution of the, of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police. It was, it was kind of like a, a little bit of a surprise more than it was, what did you, are you kidding me? You know, you think, you know, naively think, okay, well, I guess, you know, makes sense, right? Makes sense.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  CENTCOM literally got informed by a written note.

• 34:07Jocko Willink?

  So again, from my position, platoon commander, looking out going, that seems weird. But you're thinking, okay, well.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  It's kind of outside your purview.

• 34:22Jocko Willink?

  Not only outside my purview, but.

• 34:27Jocko Willink?

  You know, I wasn't on the ground yet, right? I was, I definitely wasn't, you know, the, the station chief up there that's monitoring all this stuff. You're looking at it going, okay. What I, what I don't want to do is sit here and come across like, oh, I, I told you so? No, that would be a lie.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:48Jocko Willink?

  For me, it was like, oh, they disbanded the Iraqi army. It's, I bet, you know, in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, they, well, they're probably going to rebuild it from the ground up. Okay, got it. Whatever.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Did you start to get an idea in August that things were changing? So August 2nd, or rather, I believe it was the 7th. Al Qaeda in Iraq announces itself by hitting the Jordanian embassy. Just blows the hell out of it, 17 dead, 40 wounded. August 19th, just two weeks later, they hit the UN building. I think they were in a hotel and they hit that, that side of the hotel, killed 22, wounded over 100. And the UN special envoy for Iraq was apparently this very well-loved, I don't know a lot about him, but a very well-loved Brazilian guy, very well-respected. And he got trapped in the rubble and died while people listened to him scream. And the UN bugged out. They had like 800 people in Iraq before that. They were down to 15 within like a month.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  They were out of there. And then the end of August, the 29th, Al Qaeda in Iraq starts hitting Shia shrines in the south. They hit one in, I think there was a celebration, a Shia celebration going on in Najaf, and they hit the Imam Ali shrine down there and killed 95 people, wounded over 500 people. And so they're at a point now where they're not hitting US targets. They're just hitting, they're causing, they're starting to cause some chaos. And we didn't know who was doing this yet. At least as far as I know, I don't think US intelligence was putting this all together. You know, we didn't have the Zarqawi letter yet. We didn't have any of the videos. We didn't, we didn't quite know what was going on, but we were starting to get an idea that something was changing in August.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  As you were getting ready to get on that plane, I mean, were you starting to realize you were going over there to get into a real fight?

• 36:41Jocko Willink?

  We knew that things were bad. No, I shouldn't even say bad. We knew that it was unstable.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:51Jocko Willink?

  We knew that it was unstable. We knew that our guys, the SEALs that were there, were out hitting targets. Their work was fairly consistent. Uh, as I remember, I could be wrong, but from what I remember, you know, they were like hitting targets and it was pretty consistent the whole time. And, you know, they were getting bad guys. And so, you know, here's a, here's a, something that I talk about a decent amount. Which is our, our impression, my impression, and America's impression, was we're hitting targets, we're catching bad guys. There's a finite number of bad guys. And once we catch them.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  The dead enders, yeah.

• 37:33Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Once we, once we catch them, okay, well, then we'll be done. I hope they don't catch them all before I get there, so I can get some of these bad guys. I mean, you remember they had the deck of cards. Here's the guys we need to get. And, okay, so from my perspective, uh, it seemed to be getting, it seemed to be,

• 37:56Jocko Willink?

  there was, I would say the clear, um, the clear

• 38:01Jocko Willink?

  separation was you had the American flags, the kids with the American flags welcoming. And seemingly very quickly, that was over. And we were,

• 38:21Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if I want to use the word the enemy, but we were no longer, we did not appear to be any longer welcome, but.

• 38:32Jocko Willink?

  The feel, the feeling that I had, what I, which I think most people would agree with, was that the people that were waving the American flags were there.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:45Jocko Willink?

  And they were ready to wave those flags. We saw them wave flags. They've hidden those flags. There are some bad actors that have moved in. We need to get rid of them and then, then we'll be okay again. Right? It was, it seemed like a finite problem that, you know, we had a glimpse of like where the Iraqi people's attitude could be. And clearly, some, something was going on and we still had work to do. Because there's, there's people that are attacking groups within Iraq and we gotta go help the, the people that were waving those American flags.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  It almost seems like there was a mentality, I get this from a lot of civilian leadership too, that, similar to what you're saying, there's a, there's a finite number of bad guys in there. We have to go eliminate them and then things will be all right. It's, it's almost like saying that we're thinking of, of, of eliminating bad guys rather than an overarching mission of providing security. It's like saying, once we get rid of all the gangsters in this town, we can disband the police.

• 39:54Jocko Willink?

  Yes. And, you know, one, one thing I was gonna say, as you opened up with, or whenever you, you're reading that, um, piece, the immediate thing, the immediate thing you gotta do is security for the populace. That's like the, that's the, that's the overarching, or one of the overarching goals of, of in counterinsurgency.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  First priority.

• 40:13Jocko Willink?

  Is, we've got to get, get security for the populace. And so the minute that you see the security for the populace going away, you're like, okay, this is bad. This is bad. But, but to answer your question, or to take that thread a little bit further, yes, it seemed like there was a finite number of, of now, now of bad actors. It didn't seem logical that people, and this is again, this is where you get a cultural difference. The cultural differences in America.

• 40:47Jocko Willink?

  If you tell me, you know, that you got my back, hmm, we, we, that, that carries some weight. That means you're gonna stick with me. In Iraq, especially for people that, you know, that, what's the expression? They're looking for the winning horse, right? They're, they're gonna bet on the way, they're, they're, they're gonna look, when they see the horse that's gonna win, that's where they're gonna put, put their, put their bets. They see America rolling in, and who, that's a, isn't that like an Osama bin Laden quote? Have you heard that quote?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  No, tell me.

• 41:19Jocko Willink?

  It's something along the lines of, you know, we, we will bet on the winning horse. Like, when we see a horse that's winning, that's the one we're gonna get behind.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  I mean, they, they live in a country where they know the consequences of betting on the wrong horse.

• 41:33Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. I don't think we knew that.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:37Jocko Willink?

  And so, if you think to yourself, well, there was people that were pro-America slash pro-freedom, let's just call it pro-democracy, meaning people that, from our perception, were on board. We, I mean, look, we saw them pulling down the sta, what, what, when did the statue come down?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  May.

• 41:55Jocko Willink?

  We, we see them pulling down the statue of Saddam, hitting it with their shoe, which, you know, hey, we know about their culture, we know that hitting them with the sole of your shoe is the worst insult you can give. They're, they're on board, they're on our team.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  There's a little bit of an omen with that thing, though, is, uh, the Iraqis were trying to pull that thing down, and they couldn't do it themselves. We had to go help them out.

• 42:14Jocko Willink?

  That's very foretelling.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  And, um, you know, I, I don't think that those people who were waving the American flags and then put them away necessarily just changed their mind. There were a lot of people that were angry that we did come in there and knock off the state without a plan to provide security afterwards. And they blamed us when things would happen to them, and, and, and that's fine. But those people could be won back. Um, what they can't be won back from is when flying an American flag is gonna get you skinned alive and you're home the next day, and we're not doing anything about it. Um, and so, generally, I would say...

• 42:50Jocko Willink?

  Well, that goes back to, that goes back to something we already talked about, which is, if you have to pick a side, if you have to pick, if, if you have, if you have, if Daryl has to pick a side, side one is, I'm gonna help you build a shop. And side two is if you don't do what I want you to do, I'm going to murder your entire family.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  You help build that shop.

• 43:11Jocko Willink?

  Whose side are you picking?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  I'll help build the shop if you can protect me.

• 43:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that's if you don't see that protection and that's what took us another three years to establish, which I'm sure we'll get to. But the choice that we gave them was like, hey, we're going to help you. We're here to help you. We're here to try and protect you. And also what we have to remember is, man, the Americans, we're, we're, we don't, we can't, we can't discriminate very well yet.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:40Jocko Willink?

  And that's a problem. And where I thought you were going to go with that is when you, I'll wave the American flag, but then when all of a sudden you put a main gun around through my, you know, through my mosque or my, you know, the grocery store on the corner, or you run through, run over my house, I'm not happy. So you add that into the mix along with all the military age males that now are out of a job and are worried that, that they're going to now be the minority in this country. I mean, there's, we're brewing up some bad, bad stuff. But to answer your question, going in, the way it looked to me at the time was, look, we had people waving American flags.

• 44:23Jocko Willink?

  Now there's, now there seems to be some people that are stepping up to try and stop that. We can, we need to go and, and get rid of those people and help.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  The people with the American.

• 44:33Jocko Willink?

  Help the people with the American flags.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Get their country together. So as the violence starting to pick up over the course of the summer, one of the things that we realized we don't have and that we need is information. And so I got to imagine when you started to show, there's a big push for getting us actionable intelligence, right? There was General Abazade's big, big word.

• 44:49Jocko Willink?

  And right, again, what does that actually mean? What that means is a very short sighted business plan, which is that, because that, what that there, right there tells you is General Abazade is seeing the same thing I was seeing, which is there's bad guys, we need to go get them. What does actionable intelligence mean?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  You can take action.

• 45:09Jocko Willink?

  Actional intelligence mean there's a bad guy, you go get him.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:13Jocko Willink?

  A person that says, hey, what we need to do is protect the civilian populace? That's a totally different mindset. It's a totally different mindset. And actionable intelligence means something completely different.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Do you think there was also a bias in? We did not have the resources to protect, protect the civilians across that country. We did have the resources available to go take out some bad guys. And so maybe we just got tunnel vision on the thing that, you know, that we did have the capacity to actually to do.

• 45:46Jocko Willink?

  It is also a, it's a battle of short-term gratification versus long-term gratification. And when I go out and get a bad guy, I feel good. I feel like I did a good job. I high five my platoon mates and we say, let's go do it again.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  And so you show up in September, October, somewhere in there and what, so what are you told when you get there? What's your mission?

• 46:08Jocko Willink?

  Hey, our mission is to go capture, kill bad guys.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  So somebody's going to deliver you a piece of intelligence, says, there's a guy here.

• 46:15Jocko Willink?

  Yep. We're going to develop the intelligence. We're going to get intelligence. We're going to marry up intelligence. We're going to collaborate intelligence. We're going to get intelligence through myriad of different sources.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Including some of the people that you're capturing as you go along.

• 46:27Jocko Willink?

  Including some of the people that we're capturing, including sources, including, you know, the whole nine yards. Sig and human, the whole nine yards.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:34Jocko Willink?

  We had a, we had an epic at the time. Just it was everything I could have hoped for. You know, here's a target, like it's like almost what you picture in the movies, right? Here's a target package. You guys come up with a plan. We literally get a, a, a piece of overhead imagery. There's a red X on the building. Go get, go take down this building, bring us back the, bring us back the military age males.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  And you've got a lot of autonomy to plan this out yourselves.

• 47:04Jocko Willink?

  Total and unmitigated autonomy.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  And what's your op tempo going in?

• 47:09Jocko Willink?

  All the time. The most we ever did was, I think we did four ops in 24 hours.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Sleeping during the day and hitting it up at night.

• 47:16Jocko Willink?

  No, not even sleeping, just going from target to target, like come back, interrogate, figure out the next guy, go get them. So really, really.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  And this is mostly around Baghdad?

• 47:28Jocko Willink?

  Ninety-five percent Baghdad. We did do some operations in other areas.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  What parts of Baghdad are you talking about?

• 47:34Jocko Willink?

  Everywhere in Baghdad.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  So has, uh? Have we gotten to the point yet where I know in spring, by spring of 2004, Haifa Street starts to be a pretty ugly place. So for everybody out there, Haifa Street is, I don't know, a couple of miles, three or four mile long boulevard that runs along the Tigris River in Baghdad. And on the other side of the river is Sadr City, which is a Shiite area. And on the other side-

• 47:57Jocko Willink?

  It's a Shiite area. It's also like a ghetto.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And on the other side of Haifa Street is also a heavily Shiite area, but Haifa Street itself is primarily a Sunni area, I think. And so it kind of became like a fault line. Had that become, I mean, I've seen, I've seen video from spring of 2004 where people are driving down, undercover reporters driving down that road, and there's just Al Qaeda flags off the trees in the median.

• 48:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. This is one thing that was, one thing that was not good about this deployment for me. Oh, it was good, it was not good, it was whatever. It was the way it was. The way it was for me was we were going to hit targets. Like, my next deployment in Ramadi, I never left Ramadi. Ramadi's a little tiny city. It's three miles across. In Baghdad, I would rarely go to, I probably, I probably went to, I went different places all the time. So, we were in and out. We would go in, we'd be, we'd be in and out of a target in 20 minutes, half an hour, maybe 45 minutes.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  The way most people think it seals operating.

• 49:04Jocko Willink?

  The way, that's why I'm saying it was like, so, it was, it was awesome. You know, it was awesome. And we would, we knew, like, well, we knew Sadr City was bad. We knew, we knew certain areas. We knew about Haifa Street, but it hadn't become Haifa Street yet. Like, we didn't think of it that way. Also because we were staying at the Baghdad International Airport. Where, so, for us, it was a transit to get into Baghdad. We weren't living there. The green zone was massive, too. The green zone was this massive area. And we'd go to the green zone, and when you're in the green zone, it's pretty- You're detached, right? It's not like being out, you know, we'd, we'd, sometimes we'd go to do an op somewhere in Baghdad. We'd pull into some army, you know, little checkpoint and there was guys hanging it out there.

• 49:48Jocko Willink?

  Lot of, lot of special forces guys, a lot of the SF Green Berets hanging it out there, a little tiny, you know, they'd, they'd be in a house somewhere with a perimeter around it that they'd kind of haphazardly set up. You know, not haphazardly, but they, they'd put together. So those guys, if you asked them, they'd be like, oh, this street, that street, kind of like, I'll talk about Ramadi. Like, oh, here's this street, here's this neighborhood, here's what was bad over here, here's what this building was, like, we knew it to that level. And the guys in the platoon knew it to even more detail. And then you break down the platoon, you know, you had one platoon on one part of the city and the other platoon, they, they knew everything.

• 50:24Jocko Willink?

  So for me, like, oh, no, Haifa Street, yeah, I, Haifa Street probably heard about it, you know, but it hadn't become a thing yet.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  You don't have any territory that's like yours. Like, it sounds like you're getting, you're some, there's a high value target that's out there somewhere. And, okay, call up the SEALs, send them over there. And there's not a lot of structure to, you know, you're doing this mission and then that builds on it and goes to this mission and next and next and next.

• 50:51Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's always the ideal, is that, hey, we grab one guy, we figure out where his friend is, we go to his friend, and that did happen.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:58Jocko Willink?

  But a lot of times, there's also, when you look at the network, the network is not organized. It's a network, it's a, it's almost like a randomized network and you got one guy that's got four or five people in a cell and maybe he's part of one other guy's who, who, who's running another cell. So it's not like a chain of command with, you know, 500 insurgents on the bottom and then one at the top. No, it's just splattered bad, little groups, little cells of five, six, seven bad guys. And, you know, like you said earlier, it's, hey, I just got fired, I lost my job, I, I, you know, I was a platoon sergeant. I still am in contact with my machine gunner, my RPG gunner and my, uh, and my point man.

• 51:41Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna call up, you know, Ahmed and Mohammed and, and whatever, and we're gonna put together a little hit and I know I can get paid and I'll give them a little bit of money and we're, now we're in business.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:52Jocko Willink?

  So there's a lot of that going on.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  And at this early point, you've got, uh, Former Iraqi military who were just kind of nationalist insurgents. You got people who were just doing it for the money. You haven't gotten to that point that we get to in oh five where Al Qaeda in Iraq kind of forces everybody onto the same, onto the same page.

• 52:10Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  So you got all sorts of different groups and people with varying levels of commitment, I imagine. So you're doing this all fall through the winter and into the spring.

• 52:19Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Just, um, I mean, you just, you're, so JACO's at war. I mean, you're, you're probably, how are you feeling?

• 52:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, we, we are, we are just, I mean, I,

• 52:33Jocko Willink?

  and this is interesting and this can kind of give you some insight into, you know, you're, you're reading this as if this was so obvious to see.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:43Jocko Willink?

  Right? I'm there, I'm in it and in my mind, I'm thinking, I'm happy I'm here. I'm happy I'm getting to do this right now. This will probably be over. This will probably be the only combat deployment I ever get. And thank God it's this, it's this good and the op tempo is this high and we're doing this many operations and we're doing our part. Right? I felt very good about it.

• 53:06Jocko Willink?

  That was my feeling right through the beginning of April was, was hey, it seemed finite. Even, even to the actual point that we had a, a giant target board. And, and I, I told my commanding officer, uh, you've seen the movie The Beautiful Mind, A Beautiful Mind? So, you know, he had this crazy looking target thing. I said, hey, sir, in order to, cause I, I had a hard time. And when you look back, you can realize why I had a hard time putting this picture together in my head of what all these groups like, I'm like, wait a second. Is this guy connected to someone else or we grab this guy? Where, where does this lead to?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  You weren't the only one at that time.

• 53:49Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. So I say, I gotta put this thing up and we put up this physical board to be able to visualize everyone we're going after. And it took up a, like a big wall, probably a, probably a 20, maybe even a 25 foot wall in a, in a, in a GP 10. And then, you know, whatever, seven feet tall and it was covered with pictures and it was covered with strings and it was covered with, you know, we put this beautiful mind thing together so we could actually, I wanted to be able to see the progress that we were making.

• 54:23Jocko Willink?

  And so, and we did, and we'd put a, a, a green, you know, the Ghostbusters symbol? Like the thing with the slash through it? If we caught them, we'd put a green with a slash through it. If we killed them, we'd put it with a red. And we'd get intel from other units and other units were captured. And so we started picking away at this board. And it seemed like it was a finite thing. It seemed like, hey, we're here.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  We're making progress.

• 54:52Jocko Willink?

  We're here, we're make, we're get, you know, look, hey, in the last week, we've rolled up seven bad guys. And I know we're not the only unit that's doing this. So we got units all over this country and they're all rolling up bad guys. This ain't gonna last forever.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  I'm glad to hear you say that because part of the impression it's gotten back to a lot of us who have followed the war at like a New York Times, Wall Street Journal kind of level. Is that the military knew that things were not going well and that we were not getting anywhere. And that the civilian leadership back home didn't want to hear it. And so that that just, although the military was on, who was on the ground, they knew the reality of the situation. It was just, that wasn't getting fed back because the civilians didn't want to hear it. But it sounds like things were not that clear.

• 55:35Jocko Willink?

  Well, we'll get to it in this story. You're gonna see that everything that I just told you.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:43Jocko Willink?

  I am going to have a moment of clarity when I get to Ramadi. And it's very obvious and it's directly related to what I just said. So, so I will tell you this. No, that is not accurate. And people on the ground, myself included, all the way up through April. We were thinking, this is a finite problem. There are still Iraqis out there. And by the way, you know, the Iraqis that were waving the American flags, they didn't disappear. And we would get the, we would get the smile and we would get the, the high five offer and we would get the, like we did, we did one up in downtown Baghdad in the middle of the day.

• 56:24Jocko Willink?

  It was awesome. I mean, because Baghdad was kind of like, um, it's a very western looking city. And at this time, there was commerce, there was things going on, right? So there was, there was activity. And so we went into a crowded, there was cars everywhere. I mean, it was like, it was like a city. It was like San Diego.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  I think people lose that. They forget that these are just cities.

• 56:45Jocko Willink?

  So we, because at night, there was a curfew. So we did a lot of our operations, 95% of our operations at night. And there was a curfew. So what that curfew meant was that people had to get their work, get everything done during the day. So when we rolled out into Baghdad in the daytime for this one daytime hit we did in downtown Baghdad, it was a zoo. It was a zoo. There was cars everywhere. There was pedestrians everywhere. There was people everywhere. And, and we were driving, by the way, in unarmored Humvees, window, you know, no doors, we had taken the doors off, we'd turn our seats outboard, so we'd be facing outboard, so we could address threats if they came up. And we had pre-staged in, in the green zone.

• 57:30Jocko Willink?

  And we confirmed our intel that the bad guy we were looking for was in where we thought he was going to be, which was like in an office building above a shop. So we, we rolled down there, and this is like, you know, it's, it's like going into a crowded city, and here we come, you know, and, and we looked different, right? We were, we were SEALs, we had, uh, you know, our, our Humvees were, we had big, like, we'd built like, um, kind of like, they looked like Mad Max vehicles. So when we rolled out, it was obvious that we were a little bit different. And then we, since we had all of our seats facing outboard, and we had guys in the back,

• 58:11Jocko Willink?

  we carried guys in the back, open, open back vehicles. They looked like pickup trucks, basically those. And we had articulating arms with weapons on them. And so our vehicles look like porcupines with guns sticking everywhere. Very well coordinated. We drove, even though, you know, I told you that we hadn't had much experience in driving. As soon as we, as soon as we got a hold of it, like I also told you, seals adapt and seals figure stuff out and then we want to do it really well. So we did that. And like my platoon chief, he was a, like an off-road guy. And so he was the one that was kind of spearheading, making those things into Mad Max vehicles and putting like bumper plates on them. And so we could push people out of the way.

• 58:54Jocko Willink?

  And when we rolled into Baghdad for that, for this, one of these daytime hits that we did, and we did, we did more than one daytime hit. But this one was just awesome. And you know, you just see the civilians are getting out of our way and we come in, we scream in, you know, scream into the, the, right in front of the building that we're going into. But everyone dismounts in a matter of seconds, storming in there. I mean, it was very dynamic. And then, you know, we, we, we do our mission. And that's what we were doing. And so it seemed like a finite thing. It seemed like with us and with everyone else that was doing this, we were going to be able to get ahead of this.

• 59:39Jocko Willink?

  And my point on telling that about the daytime was,

• 59:45Jocko Willink?

  people weren't looking at us like invaders. They weren't looking at us like we were doing something wrong. You, they were kind of fired up, man. Like they were kind of, they were kind of, you know, it wasn't, you didn't get the negative feeling, right? And I remember the first time I saw like a legitimate, just straight up jihadist. The first time that I was face to face with a jihadist was in Fallujah. And we did a hit in downtown Fallujah. And we pulled a bunch of guys off target because it was like a hotel situation and we didn't, know how to figure out which guy was the bad guy we're looking for. So I was like, take everyone. So we took like 13 military age males off target.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  When is this?

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  This is like, uh, probably December, November, December 03.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:38Jocko Willink?

  And we get the guys, we get back to the, the, we get back to drop these guys off. And it was actually just an army unit. I was gonna say it was Marine Corps, it was an army unit. And

• 1:00:51Jocko Willink?

  the, you know, so now we're turning these guys over to the, to the tactical holding facility, the TIF. And when we're, you know, so we have them all bagged up. We got bags over their heads and we got them zip tied. And so now we're going off like taking pictures of them all. And, you know, I'm like, oh, the guy looks like a kind of a normal guy, whatever. This guy looks like kind of a normal guy, whatever. And then like pulled the bag off of one guy's head and this guy's looking at me and I was like, oh, this motherfucker wants to kill me. That's what's happening right now. And I was like, this guy's a straight up jihadist. And, you know, they ran, of course, and it was like, right, you know? So even though I say, hey, you know, it's hard to tell who's bad and who's good.

• 1:01:36Jocko Willink?

  And when you run into, uh, there was a lot of times where I'd look at someone and be like, that person wants me to die. And but most of the time it was that person's, you know, smiling or, and then you, look, it was, it was a bell curve, right? Some people stoked that you were there. Some people filled with hatred. A bunch of people kind of in the middle, not wanting to take one side or the other because they want to bet on the winning horse. And that's what we were dealing with. But because you'd see those people out in the middle of the day, and, and not only that, like I said, in the daytime, guess what they're doing? Like when we're driving down the highway, there's cars on the highway. There's like cars, there's people, there's gas, there's, there's, there's people doing things. There's markets are open.

• 1:02:19Jocko Willink?

  So you're not thinking that this is, this is desperado, right? You're thinking like, okay, cool. We got some people we got to clean up. Those were the things that indicated to me, we have a finite, like that we can win. We can, we, we're gonna, this will be over. This will be over.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  All that commerce going away.

• 1:02:37Jocko Willink?

  All that, yeah, yeah. But at the time, commerce, people, um, you know, little shop setup. And I'm not talking about like one or two shops. I'm talking. Massive, like a freaking farmer's market, like a farmer's market. Like, that's what's happening. So, I'm not sitting there thinking, oh, this is gonna fall apart. I'm thinking, cool, we'll get rid of these bad guys. And then, these, these normal people that are happy to see us, will be able to, will be able to, uh, continue to grow and everything we find. And there's no, probably zero chance that I'm gonna come, be coming back here on deployment. Because this'll be over, and we'll be done.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  It was just a few months after you went in on that Fallujah operation, that the four Blackwater guys got lynched in that city. Mutilated, tortured, killed, burned, and hung up as a crowd of people cheered on, cheered for it. And after that, we didn't go into that city with less than 6,000 Marines.

• 1:03:33Jocko Willink?

  So, when that happened, um, it was, like, we, like, when I went into Fallujah, and I think I know, I mean, I did, I don't know how many ops we did in Fallujah, but it wasn't a lot.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  What is that, it's about 20 miles west of Baghdad? There about, yeah, another 20 or 30 is Ramadi?

• 1:03:51Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:52Jocko Willink?

  Um, when we went in there, we knew it was bad, like, Fallujah was bad. Like, Fallujah was bad. We, there was no, Fallujah was, going into Fallujah was, was higher risk, in our minds, than going into Baghdad. Baghdad was, you, you, it was a very neighborhood-centric, like, oh, yeah, when you're going over there, be careful. Kinda like what you said with Haifa Street, like, hey, we knew, we'd get intel, we, oh, yeah, this area's bad. There was this many attacks. We had, like, the board up with the amount of attacks that were coming from the enemy. So, um, when we knew we were going to Fallujah, it was, it was not good. And you could feel it, too, cuz you could feel it, because you roll in there,

• 1:04:34Jocko Willink?

  and there's, it's, there's not people out on the streets, it's quiet. Um, not quiet in, like, a peaceful way, but quiet in an eerie way. And when you do see someone, they're looking at you, maybe not with the full-born, "I wanna kill you," but not friendly. And you can feel that, and you know that.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:04:59Jocko Willink?

  So, going in there, um...

• 1:05:04Jocko Willink?

  You definitely could feel that there was, maybe it was gonna take a little longer there, or whatever, but hey, even when we rolled up those 13 guys in Fallujah, like, most of the guys that I looked in their eyes, I was like, oh, you know, he'll be out tomorrow, he'll understand, we just got a bad guy out of his, you know, out of this area, cool.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  The lading in Fallujah was just a couple of days before, you were involved in a pretty important op. That was 31st of March, I think, and around April 2nd, April 3rd, just getting near to the end of your deployment. Bremer orders Sodder's house surrounded while, you want to tell the story?

• 1:05:47Jocko Willink?

  Well, there's a couple of things. So first of all, on the Fallujah thing, when the Blackwater guys, you know, I was, you know, telling my task unit commander, hey, we can go. And he's like, I, you know, I know. And he ran up to our headquarters, his boss, and was like, hey, you know, Jocko's guys, they can go, we can go, we can go get those guys down. And they told us no.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  To go retrieve them.

• 1:06:13Jocko Willink?

  I was like, we will go. And, you know, this is, this is hard to understand. I don't know if you'll understand, but, you know, to plan a military operation, you know, people, I was raised, let me put it this way, I was raised on a 96-hour planning cycle for how long it takes to plan and prepare for an operation. My boss, at some point during my deployment, said, hey, Jocko, if we have like a time-sensitive target, how much time do you need to prepare and launch? And my response, after I assessed it, was 15 minutes.

• 1:06:55Jocko Willink?

  So that's where, when you're on an op tempo like that, like, and that was a no shit, you, if we got, if you wanted us to roll, 15 minutes, we'd be in vehicles and we'd be rolling. And we did that on multiple occasions, where it was, hey, we got the call. I have, I have, we did one where I had guys that were lounging around and they were in.

• 1:07:16Jocko Willink?

  They were in turrets of of our Hummers and like civilian clothes with their kid on and you know like just we did operations where we in civilian clothes intentionally that's different in in this particular case like guys had gone to the exchange or something and put on civvies and all of a sudden the call came and boom it's like hey load up so to to think about that 15 minutes will roll and we did it on multiple occasions so when that happened with those guys in Fallujah you know I'm like you know we're seeing it on the news we're hearing about it and I'm saying hey boss you know to my boss get us get us permission to go let's go and he did his best and they were like no and the the Marines ended up going to take care of that situation but you could now

• 1:08:00Jocko Willink?

  things are starting you know that that was with all the other things that you mentioned with the UN being attacked with the embassies being attacked

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  earlier that March earlier in the March before then I think there was a couple Shia celebrations in Baghdad and Karbala that got blown the hell out of by AQI

• 1:08:19Jocko Willink?

  and each one of those were they weren't they didn't hit me like they hit like that did when the when the when it happened when that happened when the guys got killed at Fallujah it was okay they they want to kill us and you know you felt that before but they want to kill us and they ambushed us and you know they shot RPGs at us and you know but that was that was a another level right that was another level that was a hate that was a hatred that wasn't a you know

• 1:08:57Jocko Willink?

  this is the difference between whatever the guy that murders his you know his his neighbor in a fight and and you know stabs him and goes oh God I'm sorry and you go and the guy that you know cuts off his wife's head and and and mutilates her body that's the difference that's to me that was the wake up call of oh okay this is this is this is gonna get ugly

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  couple days after that happened though you got a different mission

• 1:09:27Jocko Willink?

  yeah so you mentioned solder so Muktada al solder you know a very influential and I use that word It's not the right word. Influential, you know, you, when you think of influential America, you think of somebody that's, you know, let's use words like sane and has, you know, smart and has, wields, wields, you know, a lot of sway with people in a positive way. So this guy was influential, but in a very negative way.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Shiite Muslim.

• 1:09:58Jocko Willink?

  Shiite Muslim and he, he, he, he was a real problem and was causing problems. And he was a good leader, charismatic, you know, when you see pictures of him, you go, I can see where, you know, when you and I talk about what draws people into a cult-like situation, and a lot of it has to do with being that leader. This guy's that kind of leader, you know, a fiery guy, a charismatic guy. He looks, he looks kind of crazy, you know? And he looks like he could instill fear in people. And so he was causing problems.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  One of those guys whose eyes come through in pictures.

• 1:10:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so he was one of those people. And we had been targeting him. And when I say we, yes, me and my platoon, but everybody was targeting him, meaning tracking him. What's he doing? He's a bad guy. Can we go get him? Should we go get him? Will you go get him? And, and now the, the big thing about, the big difference with him was he was a guy that was a national presence. And really an international.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  There was an active murder warrant on him at this time, I believe.

• 1:11:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so he is, but, but he's, he's a recognizable, true.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  He's a political.

• 1:11:13Jocko Willink?

  Political leader and a, and a real presence. Whereas all these other little cell guys that I've talked about, these guys were not. These guys were nickel and dime, you know, criminals, thugs. Sure, they were running a cell of four guys, six guys, whatever. Maybe we got some guys that were more senior, I don't even remember. But this guy was a totally different story. This, this guy is a totally different story. Um, you know, this would be like, I, I, I guess if you wanted, this would be like a, you know, a demo, you know, Trump is president right now. This would almost be like the Democratic challenger.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Jocko Willink?

  Or, or maybe of two or three Democratic challengers that are running to be, you know, get the nod from, from the DMC. He's one of those guys.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  At this, at this point in the story, some of the intelligence estimates that I've seen had his militia up to 10,000 people.

• 1:12:00Jocko Willink?

  He's a powerful guy. And the question was.

• 1:12:05Jocko Willink?

  Can we go get this guy? And what will happen if we do? And this idea was getting batted around the whole time that I was there. You know, and there was times we spun up the target package. I don't know if we, well, I know we never loaded up to go do it. But we definitely had, you know, oh, all right. Hey, let's, let's do some planning on it. Oh, it might pop. Oh, we might get approval. And now you're starting, starting to talk about, and almost every operation that I did was approved at, you know, the, the, the, you know, oh, five, maybe oh, six level. So this guy was now getting approved. This was like a much, much higher approval.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a political decision.

• 1:12:44Jocko Willink?

  It's a political decision. So we're going back and forth the whole time. And I never even thought twice about it. You know, like, okay, we'll go get him. Not whatever. You tell me what to do, man. I'll go, I'll go do it. You know, like we said on an earlier episode, man. That you put a target, you put a red, red X on a house in Denmark? Sign me up.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Put me in, coach.

• 1:13:04Jocko Willink?

  So we get this. What we get is they, the, the powers that be decide. We don't really want to get solder. Out of the gate because we don't know what's going to happen. He's got 10,000 militia. He's got all this influence. This could cause a real freaking problem. A real problem.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  When we've already got a problem over here in Fallujah.

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  We already got Sunni problems and, and my, you know, assessment, had I been in charge of everything would have been like, hey, well, do we want to rip? How about we just rip the Band-Aid off? You know, that could be one way to look at it. Could also be.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Especially given what happened.

• 1:13:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So what we finally end up doing is we get the, we get the go ahead to go and hit, do a hit and capture one of his senior lieutenants.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  That's down in Najaf, right?

• 1:14:02Jocko Willink?

  That's down in Najaf, which is the, you know, the.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Freaking Shiite holy city, south of Baghdad.

• 1:14:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you can't, it's, it's the spot. And we get the, we get the order that we get cleared to do this operation. And it's a pretty straightforward operation. It's kind of what we've been doing the whole time we've been there. It's a little further away and we'd done some operations, as I said, outside of Baghdad. And we'd driven, you know, sometimes we drove four or five hours to get to do a hit somewhere occasionally. But Najaf was kind of like that. So it was a long transit to get down there.

• 1:14:38Jocko Willink?

  But pretty standard hit, you know, we rolled in.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Did it feel that way? Like, did you have an idea that this is a little bit, you know, this is a little bit different?

• 1:14:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, we knew it. I knew, you know, this was, this was probably the first target. That was a true HVT for us. So people will throw HVT on any, anybody, you know, high value target. We got a lot of targets, you know?

• 1:15:09Jocko Willink?

  Some of them more important than others. And now that I'm thinking back, we got some pretty big targets and pretty, we got some guys that ran some pretty big cells. In fact, that daytime hit that we did in downtown Baghdad, that was a, that guy was running a pretty decent amount of, of bad guys. So we did some good, some good ops.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Well, Sodder himself, after this op goes down, lets you know how high value this guy was.

• 1:15:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so we go in, middle of the night, very quiet. We set up and I, you know, I always remember this is that, you know, we're very quiet. We would always, you know, put our, stop our vehicles some distance away from the actual target. And then we would foot patrol, you know, very quietly. So no one was going to know we were coming. And, and you know, plus we'd get there at, you know, two o'clock in the morning, whatever, blacked out.

• 1:16:01Jocko Willink?

  And whenever you would do this correctly and you had a little bit of luck on your side. Cause bad luck is dogs barking, bad luck is, you know, some drunk guy on a rooftop yelling at you. There's like, there's like things happen. This wasn't one of those nights, very lucky. Silence, just, just quiet. And it's quiet.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  How many are you?

• 1:16:25Jocko Willink?

  There's probably, I don't know what the total number is, but you know, we're running an assault package. So there's probably 20 assaulters going in the house. And then there's, and then there's, you know, a bunch of guys driving the vehicles, manning the vehicles and external security. It's a pretty decent sized package. And so it's all just dead silent until that breach goes. And then the breach goes, you know, everyone wakes up. But it was again, we're in and out of there in a matter of minutes. We were, we were good at this point. We were good. So we're in and out of there in a matter of minutes. And

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Back on the road?

• 1:17:02Jocko Willink?

  Back on the road. And as a matter of fact, you know, this is the first time we did this. As soon as we got on the road, we, we linked up with helicopters that came and landed and took him. So that's, that's when you know, that's how I knew like, as we were planning, I'm like, oh, they're, they're really concerned about this guy. If they're going to land helicopters and get this guy into the confinement, because they don't want him with us. They want him, they want him. So that's how I knew it was going to be a, you know, that's, that's one of the ways I knew how important this was. And of course, look, we knew, we know, you know, we knew this was one of Sodder's guys. We knew that he was one of his top guys.

• 1:17:42Jocko Willink?

  Maybe not as much of a top guy. Maybe it wasn't a great test case.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Jocko Willink?

  Because Sodder went nuts.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Jocko Willink?

  And the whole country went nuts. And

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  He took his mighty army from Sodder City, went and installed himself in the Jaffa. And the Shiites just blew up.

• 1:18:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it was very bad planning with regards to putting everyone else in the country in a posture to be ready for that. Because the army, the Marine Corps, actually, yeah, mostly the army around Sodder City, they hadn't been given, at least they didn't appear to have been given a heads up. And even if they were given a heads up, they weren't quite,

• 1:18:36Jocko Willink?

  didn't quite know.

• 1:18:39Jocko Willink?

  What posture they needed to get into because the Shias, they, they, they started to get after it hardcore.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  The, we had most of our forces around focusing on Baghdad, Mosul and out west around Fallujah because Fallujah one's coming up right now. And we had a lot of our allies, um, you know, the Poles and the Bulgarians, some of our other allies down in a lot of the southern Shiite cities. And they just start getting hammered, right?

• 1:19:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. The, um, well, there's a couple of things that happened. The CPA in, in Najaf. Started to get overrun.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:17Jocko Willink?

  And as that started to happen, so we, so we did the hit and then drove back and it's like a five hour drive. And yeah, it's something like a five hour drive. So we'd come back and by the time we come back, almost, and I, I don't remember the dates great on this, but almost as quickly as we got back, it was, hey, Jocko, the CPA in Najaf is getting overrun.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  It's on already.

• 1:19:41Jocko Willink?

  And they, you know, we're sending you down there as QRF, which to me, QRF, five hours. This is not a QRF. Well, they didn't have helicopters where they said, you know, hey, we want you to drive down there. And I'm like, Roger that.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  10 hours of driving.

• 1:19:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And I'm like, Roger that, you know, like you, you want me to do something, I'm going to do it, you know? Unless it just makes no sense whatsoever. So I did, I did push back a little bit. I'm like, wait a second. You mean of all the units that are between Baghdad and Najaf, there's not, you're, you're the, I'm the best option you've got with no armor. And the answer was like, yep. And I said, cool. Roger that. And I remember this. My task unit, my task unit senior enlisted advisor, who was a, who I mentioned earlier, who was a good friend of mine.

• 1:20:32Jocko Willink?

  Who at this point on the deployment was like, you know, uh, we, we joke about it and we joke about it, the fact that his wife would call me his, uh, he says, he says, we're soulmates, right? So we're like total bros. And for whatever reason.

• 1:20:51Jocko Willink?

  He was not going with us like they didn't send the task unit commander or the because when he did the hit, the task unit commander came with us and you know, he's the he's the ground force commander. I'm just the assault force commander. Well, for this one, for whatever reason, probably because he could, those guys could provide us better support. If they weren't with us, if they were kind of like monitoring what was happening, if we needed it, they stayed. So as I'm, I'm leaving, uh, I'm getting ready to, you know, like load up my home V and, and my SEA, my senior enlisted advisor, who's my pro like hugs me. And I was like, oh damn. And, and the reason is because the CPA was getting overrun and

• 1:21:33Jocko Willink?

  we were going down there to do an Alamo and like my direction to the guys was get all the ammo that we have. Everyone get a machine gun, a heavy machine gun, as many as we have, you know, the rockets, the whole nine yards, like we're, this is what's happening. And that's what we did. We loaded up and gave my, gave my senior listed advisor a hug, loaded up the vehicles. We rolled down there and by the time we got down there was over. Uh, you know, it took us five hours to get down there. We got down there. We hung out for a night. Nothing, zero happened. And then we drove back. Uh, and that was right around.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  It would have been probably about the day you were driving back is when first Fallujah started, probably April 4th.

• 1:22:22Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  The, uh, like the, the articles I've seen had your operation on April 2nd, but maybe that's not right.

• 1:22:33Jocko Willink?

  Wait, I don't, no, I don't think Fallujah one went down right then.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  It was just a few days after, um, 31st was when the Blackwater guys got taken.

• 1:22:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  It was in the week after.

• 1:22:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay. You're just, you're just referring to that, that initial kind of push into Fallujah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  The initial one that got called off after three days.

• 1:22:50Jocko Willink?

  Got it. Okay. Yes. Yes. So that was happening, um, as we're doing what we were doing. Yep. And, and so now.

• 1:23:00Jocko Willink?

  Now, I mean, I'm within a few days of, I don't know when I came home, but I'm within like, we're, we're, we're starting to know that we're going home. I may have even sent a couple of guys home at this point. Like, guys, we're starting to, to, to head back home. Um, and I remember we got, they were starting, we started getting attacked on our base fairly regularly. We got some mortar attacks, we got some rocket attacks. Uh, we had the main, like, one of the gates right by us get assaulted, you know, where myself and that senior enlisted advisor, like, we drove out there with our guns and there's, you know, tracer fire coming over the road and we're like, okay, so it's on. And there was a burning vehicle that had been stopped. There

• 1:23:41Jocko Willink?

  was a vehicle borne ID, suspected vehicle borne ID. And then, actually, so this is where I was gonna, that all happened, that's this thing where the gate got attacked. Prior to that, myself and my senior enlisted advisor, we were in a tower and we were just looking out and there was, there was, um, like, you could see one of the major routes, one of the major highways out there, and there was like, five or six smoking vehicles. And this was, they, they were probably five miles away, but like, you could see distinctly, there was multiple vehicles that had been attacked. And then our gates getting attacked and you,

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  You got the Shia blowing up in the south, you've got the Sunnis starting to really get wild in Fallujah. And, um, and it's time for you to go home. And are you, I mean, how, how is there, are you locked into like your missions enough that your blinders run? Are you kind of aware that like you're leaving at a time when this country's starting to fall apart?

• 1:24:48Jocko Willink?

  Well, this is the first time when I start thinking to myself, I may be back here.

• 1:24:54Jocko Willink?

  You know, if you asked me on,

• 1:24:59Jocko Willink?

  In March, if you asked me March if I was gonna come back, so one month prior, you know, if you asked me March 1st, if I would be coming back to Iraq, I'd be like, no, this thing will be over. This thing will be over. If you asked me April, whatever, April 5th, April 7th, if I was coming back, I'd be like, yeah, there's probably a good chance I'm coming back here. Cause you could see things, I mean, literally, see things before my very eyes that indicated this was gonna get, this was gonna get Western real quick.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Came back in mid-April sometime around then. Here's maybe indication is, where were you when Abu Ghraib hit the news?

• 1:25:41Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, you'd have to tell me when Abu Ghraib hit the news.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  April 28th. To the end of the month. So you, it wasn't like something where it hit you, you remember where you were when it hit, that kinda thing.

• 1:25:52Jocko Willink?

  You know, I think that we were home. I think that we were home. And by the way, Abu Ghraib was one of those areas, that was a bad, bad area.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  It was midway between.

• 1:26:02Jocko Willink?

  So when I, I remember when I first heard about Abu Ghraib, I thought a little bit about the prison, because we used to send our prisoners there sometimes. But it was a bad area. Abu Ghraib was a bad area. They took a lot of casualties up there. And so when I first heard of the news, I heard about Abu Ghraib, I thought, well, you know, what's going on up there in terms of like, has there been attacks? And so the thing that spun out from that.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  We'll talk about that next episode, but.

• 1:26:26Jocko Willink?

  Is where I would say what you had was, what you had between Fallujah, Yakubi, which was Sodder's lieutenant, between those two things, the, the, the attack on the contractors and Yakubi, what you had with those two things was a massive spark. Like a big, massive spark. That actually was a little bit more than a spark. That was like a, like a, um, it was a spark and it started some kindling, was on fire and it was burning pretty bright, but it was, still, you could step on it. You could step on it and you might've been able to put it out, maybe. Maybe not.

• 1:27:08Jocko Willink?

  But what Abu Ghraib ended up, I think being, was a massive amount of fuel on the fire.

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Jocko Willink?

  And I suppose we can talk about that one.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a, that's a topic in itself.

• 1:27:22Jocko Willink?

  Next time, um, if you want to check out our other podcasts, I have a podcast called Jocko Podcast. I have a podcast for kids called The Warrior Kid Podcast and I have a podcast called Grounded, which is about, well, it's about jujitsu in life. And then Daryl has a podcast, which is called Martyr Made. And you can also support this podcast by getting some gear

• 1:27:50Jocko Willink?

  from JacoStore.com or getting gear from a little place called OriginMaine.com. That, if you help those companies, you'll be helping us so we can keep doing this and all of our other podcasts. With that, thanks for listening as things unravel. This is Jocko and Daryl. Out.